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Season 1 - Episode 11

Tune Your Hands

5 min - Practice
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Before touching another, we need to be able to bring our full attention to our hands. This lesson explores one method of reaching the heart into the palms to supercharge our connection to our prana.
What You'll Need: No props needed

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Let's further tune our awareness of the relationship between our heart and our hands as preparation before we move on to touching each other from these three centers. So step one, find a Tadasana stance with your feet about hip distance apart and then practice grounding. It's a big deliberate inhale, exhale, let it happen. Knees soft, soft in the floor of the pelvis. You might even spread the toes a little bit and see if you remember that point from the center of the perineum down through the bubbling spring right between the big and second toe just to really pull.

Feel how the earth gives back as you trust her. And then only as you're ready, press just enough into the feet to feel your heart again so you're finding that balance, that sameness. Tune up through the base of your skull to find the alignment of your head. Perfect. And then from this as you're ready, gently inhale your arms out to the sides of you.

Reach out through the fingers. Now what I find I need to do is bend my elbows a little bit, soften my shoulders and then re-reach just because sometimes it will go up into my neck. And then feel each finger, like feel your ability to reach to the pinky, ring, middle, index, thumb, like. And as you're ready, flex the hands, turn the fingertips back towards you, soften the elbows and re-extend, like really reach, like feel the stretch through the wrists and feel each finger again, pinky, ring, middle, index, thumb, beautiful. Soften the elbows and turn the hands behind you so your fingertips are pointing back behind you, yes, beautiful.

And feel the reach and sometimes what I like to do is bend the knees again and then re-root through the feet, let your heart blossom and reach out through the hands, yes, gorgeous. Now curl the fingertips in, turn your fingertips in towards you so you're stretching through the wrists, little swan head stretch, beautiful. And now release the fingertips again, turn the palms down and flex the hands again, yes, press into the feet, let the heart blossom, so pretty. Now curl the fingertips in again, stretch through the tops of the wrists, yes, gorgeous. Last couple moments.

Now free the fingertips back up towards the sky, soften the elbows, re-extend and now see if you can really start to tune into the center points of the palms, yeah. And with your awareness at the center points of the palms now, let the elbows bend, turn the palms to face towards each other and start to let the hands come towards each other, not rushing, slowly enough so that as you let your hands feel more sensitive, like let your hands endeavor to touch what is not so obvious. Let them feel more sensitive and as they come towards each other sometimes it can help to fluff the hands a little bit, like yeah. And what we're hoping that you might be able to catch, still holding the hands apart but letting them be close enough so that you might start to catch that gentle force between your hands, okay, this gentle force of you. If that's not quite available today then just simply feel a sense of your breath between your hands.

And then from here make your way into what we usually call the offering mudra, so your elbows are near your sides and let your palms turn up towards the sky, it's both offering and receiving really. And then sometimes it helps to almost imagine if you know what a slinky is, almost like really tune your awareness into your one hand and let that hand get heavier so maybe it's your left palm first and just kind of let your left hand get a little heavier. And then notice how you can move your awareness to the other hand, the right hand, maybe your right hand gets a little heavier and just kind of see how your hands respond to your awareness, to where your attention is, beautiful, maintain that awareness in the hands as they come back down along your side, perfect, big deliberate inhale and exhale everything. This is an essential exercise to help be aware of yourself before we endeavor to touch another. Thank you, Alana, thank you.

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