YinYoga.com is 20 years old!
In early 2006 yinyoga.com was launched with the intention of “helping the interested student to start their own journey of discovery.” On that very first home page readers were asked to “Keep checking back as we continue to grow yinyoga.com as a resource you can come to over and over again.” Twenty years later, it is still being built.
I remember when the idea came to me. While finding stillness in a yin yoga pose during a class led by Paul Grilley, part of a 10-day retreat hosted by him and Sarah Powers, my mind wandered and I wondered, “Who owns the domain name yinyoga.com?” It was January of 2005 and the internet was not what it is today; some cool domain names were still available. I tucked away the idea to check on this domain name for after the retreat and got back to trying to be a bit more mindful and present. Sure enough, when I got home and checked, no one had yet registered the name, so I spent about $10 with a company called Dezines and acquired the rights to the domain.
I parked the domain on a server run by my son, Ryan, who was designing his own indie online game called Professor Fizzwizzle.1 We pointed the domain to PaulGrilley.com because I really had no idea what else to do with it. I just didn’t want someone else to get it and maybe turn it into something unsavoury. I had offered the name to Paul but he said that he was happy with his current domain name, PaulGrilley.com. A few weeks later I emailed him that “I would like to build it into a yin yoga resource: list teachers/students who have graduated from yours/Sarah’s teacher training courses so students will know where to go to find Yin classes, FAQ, other resources, discussion boards, etc…”
As part of this idea to make yinyoga.com into a resource for students and teachers, I decided to write a book, which became known as YinSights, that would be entirely online. For most of 2005, I spent my time writing the book and preparing for my first week-long yin yoga teacher training, which I gave in October in Shanghai. By December of 2005, with a lot of help from my son and my daughter, Jessica (who designed the original website along with the yin-like green bamboo graphics), I was busy pulling everything together.2 I learned a lot about HTML coding in a very short period.
In January of 2006 the site went live.
In early 2006, YinSights was still a rough draft of a 450-page HTML book that covered the history and philosophy of yoga in the first half and the practice of yin yoga in the second half. The initial Teacher Directory had only a few teachers listed. The Kula Board was my attempt to communicate with anyone and everyone interested in yin yoga, as shown in figure 2.
By the end of 2006, yinyoga.com was receiving over 1,000 hits a day!3 Yin yoga was taking off and growing in popularity, but most people did not really know what it was about. Many people curious about the practice typed “yinyoga.com” into their browser window and magically arrived at our doorstep.
Also by the end of 2006, YinSights was finished, but I started receiving complaints that it was too big to read online. I was asked for a PDF version of it, which took some time but eventually was offered. Then I got the complaint that the PDF was too big to be printed on a home printer. I was asked to offer it in hard copy. By the end of 2007, after fighting for months with Word to format all the pages, it came out as a stand-alone, self-published book. Five years later, in 2012, YinSights was reincarnated into The Complete Guide to Yin Yoga, which in turn was updated in 2019 as a second edition.4
Yinyoga.com is not a replacement for a teacher training program
Within a few years, I was getting gratifying feedback that yinyoga.com was a favourite destination for people wanting to learn all about yin yoga. I also started to hear that many studios were eager to join the growing wave of yin popularity and offer yin yoga classes. They would approach a yoga teacher in their studio and ask them to teach the new class. When the teacher protested that they were not trained in yin yoga, they were simply told to visit yinyoga.com and read what was there. While I was flattered by the recommendations, I was horrified that people thought a website, even if it had an online book, was a suitable replacement for formal training. While the site is meant to be a resource to assist in learning yin yoga, it was never meant to replace being with a teacher. (If you wish to become a yin yoga teacher, certainly use yinyoga.com as an aid, but please do seek out a qualified training program.)
The site kept growing
As hoped, yinyoga.com continued to grow. The Kula Board was renamed the Forum and grew to thousands of threads. In 2010 I started offering quarterly Newsletters (see figure 5). These were ways to delve deeper into specific topics often raised in the Forum. I only committed to an issue every three months because I was sure I would soon run out of ideas to talk about. Currently there are over 130 newsletters in the archive. It is now issued monthly (mostly) and there does not seem to be any lack of topics to write about.
The most popular pages on the site are those describing the asanas, found in the second half of YinSights. By 2012, videos were added to the asana page visually explaining the 12 most used yin yoga poses. The Teacher Directory blossomed to thousands of teachers, although it is a hopeless task to actually keep all the listings current; there are many dead links that are only of historical interest today.
Time to modernize
By 2017, most visits to the site were from smartphones, not desktop computers. In 2018, I had to admit that my HTML skills were not up to the task of modernizing the site. Thus, for the first time, I hired external developers. They migrated the entire site to WordPress and created a responsive design that worked on phones and tablets as well as computers. After several months of teething pains, the conversion was a success, and the current version of yinyoga.com provides a friendlier and simpler interface.
The Forum continued to grow but as it grew it attracted a lot of bots, scammers and spammers. It was taking a lot of time and money paid to the developers to weed out the bad guys. Since its inception, yinyoga.com was free to access, but it was costing me time and money to keep it going. Regardless, I felt the need to keep it alive, so I continued to invest in it. Over the last decade, social media platforms were becoming the chosen tool for yogis to ask questions. As the real yogis stopped using the Forum, it became inevitable that the Forum had to be closed and its years of conversations archived. It is still available as a read-only resource, but I am happy to no longer have to fight the malware that kept creeping in and occasionally crippling the whole site.
Twenty years on, the original intention of yinyoga.com has not really changed. It is still a place for anyone interested in yin yoga to explore the practice more deeply. Today the site includes detailed guides to the yin yoga postures, hundreds of articles, videos and links to podcasts, a worldwide Teacher Directory, information about books and teacher trainings, and live online classes and their recordings. The newsletters continue to share articles, news and announcements. Much has changed since I first started writing YinSights and HTML pages, but I am still trying to fulfill the promise made on that first home page: to keep building yinyoga.com as a resource that students and teachers can come to over and over again.
Bernie Clark
October 1, 2026
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1 Professor Fizzwizzle turned out to be a hit. You can still see it for sale here: https://www.bigfishgames.com/professorfizzwizzl-f635t1l1.html. Ryan went on to develop several indie games that were highly successful. Today his company is called Brace Yourself Games. https://braceyourselfgames.com/ryan-bio/
2 Jessica’s creativity continued to expand over the years. Check out her famous Pies are Awesome website https://www.piesareawesome.com/ or visit her Instagram collections at https://www.instagram.com/thepieous/?hl=en.
3 At its peak around 2015, yinyoga.com was receiving over 4,000 unique visitors daily. But in the arcane world of web pages the words “hits” and “visitors” are not what we normally think they mean. All this really means is that the site got reasonably busier over the years.
4 When I released The Complete Guide to Yin Yoga (TCGYY) in 2012, I took YinSights out of print, thinking that TCGYY was more recent, so who would still want to buy the earlier version? That decision was a mistake for two reasons. Firstly, once a book goes out of print, resellers start to jack up the price of remaining copies to usurious levels. Some people were asking hundreds of dollars for the book. That was upsetting. The second problem was that TCGYY only contained the second half of YinSights. Many people still wanted to read the history and philosophy section. To accommodate those readers, I wrote another book that was published in hard cover under the name From the Gita to the Grail, and later in soft cover as Shiva Dancing at King Arthur’s Court. (For readers who love to learn about the history and philosophy of yoga and meditation, you can still get Shiva Dancing today.) For these two reasons, I started printing YinSights once more and the physical book is still available. To learn more about all my books and how to get them, visit www.yinyoga.com and click on the Books tab.