Anjali Mudra

In Western yoga practice, we tend to end yoga classes with our hands placed palms together over our hearts. But why? It has many reasons, and is as ancient as the practice itself.

✨ Biologically speaking, an enormous area of your brain’s cerebral cortex is dedicated to your fingers and hands. Your hands’ touch receptors give you the ability to physically feel and comprehend what you are sensing, thus stimulating your brain. Your brain’s right hand activating the left, more analytical hemisphere of the brain and your left hand the right side, the creative, intuitive hemisphere. Yoking your hands together, touching palms to each other, switches on both brain hemispheres simultaneously and integrates them so that they function as a whole. This in turn enhances concentration, focuses intention and aids in assimilation – the perfect mind space for sealing a yoga practice.

✨ Prayer positioning of the hands is universally understood as a gesture of peace and good intent. Prayer is a time when we focus inward and commune with our source. This positioning of hands in sanskrit is called Anjali Mudra (pronounced UHN-juh-lee muhd-RAAH). Anjali means “offering,” and mudra meaning “seal” or “sign.” By completing our practice with hands in Anjali Mudra and sealing it with “Namaste” we are bringing an awareness of our centered state from our yoga practice and taking it out into our day.
Anjali mudra is used as a posture of composure, of returning to one's heart, whether you are greeting someone or saying goodbye, initiating or completing an action.

✨ In daily life, this prayerful gesture can be used as a way of bridging inner and outer experience, when saying grace before meals, communicating our truth within a relationship, or as a means of cooling the fires of stress when feeling rushed or reactionary. Anjali mudra is an age-old means of helping human beings to remember the gift of life and to use it wisely.

🙏🏼 Namaste, K.