Slim Calm Sexy Yoga: 210 Proven Yoga Moves for Mind/Body Bliss

body. Breath of fire is great to build heat and is often used in non-kundalini yoga classes to warm up the body quickly.
    the
ROUTINE
You can do this on its own to begin or end your meditation, or add it to your physical yoga practice to build heat.
    Sit in a comfortable position. /// Close your eyes, rest your attention on your breath, and begin to take long, deep inhales and exhales. At the end of each exhale, squeeze all the air out. /// Slowly start to increase the rate of your inhales and exhales. You might sound like a steam engine, and you will notice your abdomen contracting each time you exhale. /// Keep increasing the speed until you are comfortable with maintaining a steady fast pace for a minute. Focus on even and sharp inhales and exhales. /// To come out of the breath of fire, gradually slow down your breathing until you’re back to your long, deep breathing.

clear your mind with
meditation
    To practice yoga effectively—and to achieve any of its benefits—you need to clear your mind of clutter. As the Indian mystic Osho once said, “Silence is the space in which one awakens, and the noisy mind is the space in which one remains asleep. If your mind continues chattering, you are asleep.”
    In yoga, meditation is the practice of resting your attention on your breath instead of getting wrapped up in the ongoing drama of your thoughts. Once your thoughts settle, your mind is free from all the clutter that keeps you busy and restless and unable to make good decisions. This isn’t just one of those intuitive things. There’s hard physical evidence that meditation can reprogram your brain to work more effectively.
    In his research on people who meditate regularly, Richard Davidson, PhD, a neurologist at the University of Wisconsin, found that experienced meditators produce more gamma brain waves, the kind that are associated with intense, clear thinking. And the more you meditate, the more benefit you enjoy.
    There’s also reason to believe that meditation slows brain aging. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital did MRI scans on the brains of people who meditated regularly and found that their prefrontal cortices (responsible for attention and sensory perception) didn’t show typical age-related thinning.
    As for shorter-term effects, wouldn’t you like to simply feel more refreshed during the day? You could nap, I suppose, but midday snoozes have nothing on meditation when it comes to keeping you alert. Researchers at the University of Kentucky tested people’s reaction times before and after 40 minutes of sleeping, reading, talking, or meditating. Turns out, meditation was the only activity that led to an immediate improvement in performance.
    You won’t need to om like a Tibetan monk to enjoy the benefits of meditation. You can start slowly, fitting 5 minutes into your day here and there, and eventually work up to longer practices when you have the time.
    You can meditate sitting or lying down, during physical yoga practice or not. You can even practice meditation while you’re waiting in line at the grocery store or making dinner. Just a few minutes of shifting your attention away from your thoughts and to your breath helps calm your mind, refocus your energy, and revitalize your entire system. It doesn’t take much to put you back in touch with you. Some quick practice can make all the difference.
    On the following page is a meditation technique borrowed from kundalini yoga to help you explore the connection between your mind and your body. (You’ll also find additional meditations built into the yoga sequences throughout the book.)
    You’ll be sitting in a comfortable position, holding your arms up in a V shape. Before you start to think this is easy and wonder what the point of holding up your arms is, rest assured that this exercise will prove how much power your mind has. You are strong enough physically to hold your arms up for several minutes. Your mind might try to tell you otherwise, especially as the seconds tick by. This meditation teaches you that you can either pay attention to your breathing, relax, and use the least amount of effort to stay in the pose, or you can allow your thoughts to distract you, hold on to tension, and fight to stay in the pose.
    WHAT IS A MANTRA?
    A mantra is a word or phrase, repeated silently in the mind or spoken, that helps set an intention with the purpose of transformation. Mantras originated in India’s Vedic tradition, an ancient