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

down and take time for herself.
    Even sleep gets short shrift. “I’ll get 7 hours, but only on a rare good night. It’s usually a lot less than that. And I’ve never found anything that has helped,” she says.
    In the past, Nami considered trying yoga but “found it challenging to find the right class, teacher, and studio that made me feel at home,” she says. Then, in early 2009, a friend dragged her to Strala, and she never looked back.
    “All of a sudden I could sleep,” Nami says, describing the night of her first yoga class. “I went home and zonked out for 11 hours straight! I actually started worrying that yoga was going to put me into a sleep coma. My schedule won’t allow for that.”
    When you practice yoga, your body begins to learn what it needs. In Nami’s case, it was instant and dramatic. She needed sleep. Fair warning: The needs of your body are sometimes different from the wants of your mind. Yoga practice fuses the two, calming the mind and channeling behavior along the right path for optimal health.
    “After I started practicing yoga more regularly, my sleep schedule started to level off at an acceptable 7 to 8 hours,” Nami says. “I feel more rested and refreshed in the morning now than before I started doing yoga.”
    Nami also discovered a key to heading off work stress: scheduling a class immediately after work to create a boundary between her job and the rest of her life. “It resets my mind,” she says. “I feel calmer when I get home. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to settle down, and my mind would be racing.”
    YOGA TIME = YOU TIME
    Often we create our own stress. We pack our schedules so full that we don’t even have room to breathe. When you practice yoga, not only does it give you that hour on the mat to feel calm and refreshed, it also gives you insight into and perspective on how you’re living your life.

CHAPTER 06
sexy
yoga
Radiate sexiness with routines that take you from mat to bed

    One unmistakable thing you’ll notice after starting to practice yoga is that it puts you in intimate touch with your breath, body, and mind. The natural outcome is a heightened awareness of your feelings—both emotional and physical. Ask anyone who’s into yoga and they can probably describe (at a level of detail bordering on TMI) what’s going on with their body at any given time. You may not want to know every last thing about their bodily functions, but it doesn’t hurt to be aware of yours, if for no other reason than it could make your sex life a whole lot better.
    In an experiment at the University of Texas at Austin, researchers created a situation in which women with low body image were made aware of their bodies by placing electrodes on their own skin while standing nude in front of a mirror. The scientists then asked them to sitand listen to an erotic audiotape, (Meanwhile, they asked another group of women to listen to the tape but skip the body-viewing step.) Afterward, the women who’d done the mirror exercise reported higher levels of arousal than the others, The scientists believe that being consciously aware of your body can enhance how you perceive erotic messages and make them more powerful.
    You don’t have to stand naked in front of a mirror to benefit from the kind of body awareness yoga can give you, All it takes is a committed practice and time on the mat, And body awareness isn’t the only thing you’ll walk away with, Yoga, like any other form of physical exercise, increases bloodflow throughout your entire body, including to your pleasure centers. Major bonus.
    Practicing yoga also teaches you how to be mindful. I talked about mindfulness earlier in the book, but to review: Mindfulness is a term often used to describe a peaceful state of mental clarity in which smart decisions and good choices become crystal clear. Apart from all the fabulous body benefits of yoga, mindfulness is probably the greatest gift yoga will give you, because it spills over into so many parts of your life. You learn to make healthy food choices, for example, or sensible relationship decisions. You feel calmer about those choices, and your confidence and well-being go way up.
    For years, psychologists have used mindfulness techniques with patients who have mental and physical illnesses, and now sex therapists are starting to use them to treat sexual arousal disorders. In a 2008 study published in the
Journal of Sexual Medicine,
a group of female subjects participated