Adapted from Prana – One Breath, Many Worlds
By Bernie Clark
February 1, 2026
When yin yoga students ask whether and how yin yoga “works with energy,” they may really be asking a deeper question: what kind of energy are we talking about, and how might a physical practice influence it?
For some, the word energy immediately evokes suspicion—too vague, too mystical, or too intangible and undefined. For others, it is self-evident: they feel something shift in the stillness of their yoga practice or meditation that is not easily explained by muscles, joints, or connective tissue alone.
This article is adapted from a much longer exploration of prana and energy in my book Prana—One Breath, Many Worlds. For our purposes right now, we will look at a middle view—one that neither dismisses the language of chi or prana (I will use both terms interchangeably) as mere metaphor nor insists that we already understand it fully. Instead, I want to suggest that chi or prana may be best understood as a form of communication energy (others have called it organizational energy1): not a substance we possess, but a process through which information moves within living systems. This information may take the form of electrical signals, but it can also appear as chemical, mechanical, and perhaps even more elusive forms of signaling.
This is not a claim that yin yoga does manipulate energy in a proven way. Rather, it is a proposition of how yin yoga may influence the body’s internal communication networks—mechanical, neurological, chemical, and electrical—and why traditional energetic maps may have been pointing toward something real, even if they described it in a pre-scientific language.
From Vital Force to Information Flow
In classical Asian medical and philosophical systems, chi (or qi) and prana were not conceived as poetic metaphors. They were experienced realities—observable through sensation, health, illness, vitality, and decline. What modern readers sometimes miss is that these early views were less concerned with what chi consisted of and more concerned with what it did. Chi moved. It connected. It coordinated. It communicated. Seen this way, chi and prana function less like fuel (though they may have some of that quality) and more like a signal.
Modern biology has increasingly moved in a similar direction. Life is no longer understood merely as chemistry in motion, but as systems of information exchange—cells talking to cells, tissues responding to stress, electrical and chemical gradients guiding growth and repair. If this is so, then the question becomes not “Is chi real?” but rather “What forms of communication exist in living tissues, and how might slow, sustained stresses, the kind we create in our yoga practices, influence them?”
One of the earliest modern researchers to seriously investigate this question was Hiroshi Motoyama. Motoyama’s experiments in the 1970s and 1980s measured electrical conductance at classical acupuncture points and along meridian pathways.2 What he found—controversial but intriguing—was that these points often displayed different electrical properties from surrounding tissue, and that patterns of conductivity sometimes aligned with classical meridian maps rather than with nerves or blood vessels. In other words, he identified patterns of electrical conductivity that often corresponded closely to classical meridian lines.
Motoyama did not claim to have “proved” meridians in a Western anatomical sense. Instead, he suggested that meridians might represent functional pathways—routes of altered conductivity or signaling—rather than discrete anatomical structures. This idea would later find unexpected resonance in more mainstream research.
Fascia as a Communication Network
Decades after Motoyama’s work, fascia research began to reshape how we understand the body’s internal networks. One of the most influential contributors to this shift is Helene Langevin. Her team and other researchers demonstrated that fascia is not inert packing material but a responsive, innervated, and communicative tissue. It transmits mechanical forces, responds to endocrine signals and stretch, and interfaces intimately with nerves, blood vessels, muscles, bones and immune cells.
Crucially, Langevin’s imaging and cellular studies showed that fascial planes often follow longitudinal pathways through the body—pathways that bear a striking resemblance to classical meridian trajectories.3 Again, this does not mean that fascia is the meridian system. But it raises a compelling possibility: traditional Chinese medical maps may have been tracking functional corridors of communication rather than physical tubes. The meridians may correspond to the watery, lubricated interfaces between muscle groups and other fascial boundaries that also happen to be electrically conductive.
For Yin yoga practitioners, this matters. Yin postures deliberately load these fascial planes through slow, sustained stress. Unlike dynamic movement, which emphasizes contractile tissues, yin yogis linger in regions where fascia dominates the mechanical response. If fascia participates in signaling, then yin yoga may be influencing not only tissue length or hydration, but also how information travels through the body.
Mechanotransduction and the Generation of Signals
How might physical stress translate into communication? One answer lies in mechanotransduction—the process by which mechanical forces are converted into biochemical or electrical signals. Cells are not passive recipients of force. They sense load, tension, compression, and shear, and respond by altering gene expression, protein synthesis, and cellular behavior.4
Bone researchers recognized this long ago. Wolff’s Law described how bone remodels in response to stress. Researchers following in Julius Wolff’s footsteps demonstrated that electrical potentials arise in stressed bone tissue. When bone bends, tiny electrical gradients appear, stimulating osteoblasts and osteoclasts to action.5
Similar phenomena have been observed in collagen-rich tissues.6 Collagen exhibits piezoelectric properties: when mechanically deformed, it can generate small electrical charges. Fascia, tendons, and ligaments are all collagen-dense structures.
In a yin yoga context, sustained tensile loading (what I refer to as “stress” in my classes) may therefore generate subtle electrical potentials—not enough to light a bulb, but enough to influence cellular signaling in living tissue. Again, may is the operative word. These effects are subtle, context-dependent, and not yet fully quantified. But the underlying mechanisms are no longer speculative in principle.
Bioelectricity and the Body’s “Nanowires”
More recently, developmental biologist Michael Levin has expanded our understanding of bioelectricity far beyond nerves and muscles. Levin’s work shows that cells communicate using electrical gradients across cell membranes, and that these gradients play a crucial role in tissue development, regeneration, and pattern formation.
Remarkably, he has shown that cells can use networks of protein filaments—he calls these “nanowires”—to transmit electrical information across tissues. These bioelectric signals help determine form, orientation, and repair long before the nervous system is involved.7 From this perspective, bioelectricity is not an exotic add-on to biology; it is foundational.
If living tissues are constantly generating, sensing, and responding to electrical and physical information, then practices that alter mechanical stress patterns—such as yoga—may also influence these cellular conversations.
Yin Yoga as a Context for Listening
It is important to be precise about what yin yoga does and does not do. Yin yoga does not open channels through intention or willpower alone, nor does it guarantee specific energetic outcomes. However, it is not accurate to say that yin yoga is energetically inert. Through sustained, low-level stress, yin yoga may actively generate the conditions that allow communication energy to arise and propagate. By hydrating tissues, improving glide between fascial planes, and altering the mechanical and electrical environment of connective tissue, yin yoga may enhance the conductivity of existing pathways. In this sense, the practice can help energy to flow by improving the medium through which communication occurs.
By holding postures for several minutes, we allow tissues to adapt slowly. We reduce the dominance of voluntary muscular effort. We create space for internal feedback loops—mechanical, neurological, and perhaps electrical—to assert themselves. (For example, specialized cells in and around muscles sense local stress within tendons and muscle tissue and respond by modulating muscle activation.8) From this perspective, yin yoga is less about doing energy work and more about allowing communication to occur. This may explain why practitioners often report sensations that feel diffuse, wave-like, or global rather than localized: warmth spreading, tingling, pulsing, or a sense of internal coherence. Listen for these the next time you are in a rebound posture after a yin yoga pose. These are not proof of prana, but they are consistent with shifts in signaling rather than simple mechanical release.
Why Language Still Matters
One of the challenges we face as modern yoga practitioners is language. Traditional terms like chi and prana carry centuries of experiential meaning, but they do not map neatly onto modern scientific categories. At the same time, scientific language can become so precise that it loses the lived dimension of practice. Rather than abandoning one language in favor of the other, we may need both.
When I describe chi or prana as communication energy, I am not redefining ancient terms so much as translating their function. These concepts described how life coordinates itself—how parts relate to wholes, how systems remain coherent under change.
Yin yoga does not require belief in invisible substances. It invites curiosity about how stillness, stress, and time interact within the body’s many layers of communication.
Living with Open Questions
None of this proves that meridians exist as discrete structures, or that yin yoga manipulates energy in a predictable way. But it does suggest that traditional energetic maps were not arbitrary. They may have been careful observations of lived physiology, expressed in the best explanatory language available at the time.
As science continues to explore fascia, bioelectricity, and cellular communication, the gap between ancient insight and modern understanding may continue to narrow. Until then, yin yoga remains a practice of patience and humility—one that works not by imposing explanations, but by creating conditions in which the body can speak, and we can listen.
To learn more about the book Prana—One Breath, Many Worlds, visit www.yinyoga.com/prana
____________________________
Footnotes:
1 Keown, Daniel. The Spark in the Machine: How the Science of Acupuncture Explains the Mysteries of Western Medicine. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2014.
2 Motoyama, Hiroshi, and Rande Brown. Science and the Evolution of Consciousness: Chakras, Ki, and Psi. Brookline, MA: Autumn Press; New York: Random House, 1978). This book reports measurable electrical differences at acupuncture points and along longitudinal pathways resembling classical meridians.
3 Helene M. Langevin et al., “Connective Tissue: A Body-Wide Signaling Network?” Med Hypotheses. 2006;66(6):1074-7. doi: 10.1016/j.mehy.2005.12.032. Epub 2006 Feb 17. PMID: 16483726. This research describes fascia as a mechanosensitive, innervated tissue capable of force and signal transmission. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16483726/
4 Helene M. Langevin, “The Science of Stretch,” The Scientist, October 31, 2018, https://www.the-scientist.com/the-science-of-stretch-39407. You will need a subscription to view it, but it is free to do so.
5 Ingber DE. Cellular mechanotransduction: putting all the pieces together again. FASEB J. 2006 May;20(7):811-27. doi: 10.1096/fj.05-5424rev. PMID: 16675838. This study outlines how sustained mechanical stress is converted into biochemical and electrical cellular responses. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16675838/.
6 Kubo T. Piezoelectricity of bone and electrical callus. J Orthop Sci. 2012 Mar;17(2):105-6. doi: 10.1007/s00776-012-0219-7. PMID: 22422052; PMCID: PMC3314182; see also Julius Wolff, The Law of Bone Remodelling (Berlin, 1892), on stress-generated electrical potentials influencing tissue adaptation.
7 Levin M. Bioelectric signaling: Reprogrammable circuits underlying embryogenesis, regeneration, and cancer. Cell. 2021 Apr 15;184(8):1971-1989. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2021.02.034. Epub 2021 Apr 6. PMID: 33826908. Levin demonstrates that electrical gradients function as a fundamental mode of cellular communication. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33826908/
8 These cellular sensors are called Golgi tendon organs and muscle spindles. They are constantly monitoring the levels of stress within the muscle and tendon and send signals to the nervous system which feedback to the muscles how active they should be. This is a good example of how physical stresses in our tissues are turned into communication between cells.