It is said that sooner or later on the Yoga path, we will need to come to Ayurveda if we are to deepen and advance our practice. 

Bringing Ayurveda into our lives as a Yoga practitioner supports us to take all the inner alignment that Yoga gives us, and support it to permeate more and more of our waking hours through our diet, lifestyle and in fact all our activities, as well as informing our practice on the mat. 

Essentially Yoga is to take us back to a state of completeness, wholeness. Yoga comes from the root Sanskrit word “yug” meaning to yoke or bind. 

There are various ways to look at precisely what this means – to yoke body, mind and heart, our self with the Divine, or our everyday self with our Essential being. 

Let’s consider Yoga as a pathway to the latter for the purposes of this blog. By default, this also aligns body, mind and heart. Plus it aligns us with the Divine or that which we perceive as is impersonal, and greater than us.

Anjali mudra takes us to the experience of that oneness, completeness. It takes us to a place beyond the various polarities of being we experience in our ordinary everyday lives, to place of union or merging of those polarities. 

The two hands represent the various polarities in the body that pull us outwards and away from our Essential Self, and into the world of duality and conflict or at least division then within our outer and/or inner worlds. 

The two hands represent the various two opposing parts of being. 

Mudra means seal or sign. Here we get to actually align the two hemispheres of the brain, and this mudra in itself actually seems to take us into a state of Yoga at the start or at the end of a class or personal practice. 

Bring the hands together and it is as if we form an energy circuit that merges those two polarities, yoking the one to the other. 

This instantly takes us into a place of oneness and completion within ourselves. 

Please try it for yourself right now! 

Pause a moment and just check in with how you are feeling right now….without trying to change anything. 

And then please bring your hands together in prayer position. 

Already something changes. 

Bring your thumbs to rest at your heart centre, your elbows and wrists aligned to take your forearms parallel to the floor. You move beyond duality through the joining of the hands, and into the chamber of the heart, where the eternal, changeless dimension of Self is said to dwell. 

Perhaps you perceive this sense of dropping deeply into a sense of coming home to yourself?

Perhaps a stillness and ease and peace descend on you? …simply through this placing of your hands. 

In bringing the hands together in Anjali mudra and touching the thumbs to the heart centre, we cease dualistic feeling and thinking within us, and are enabled to readily drop into that inner space beyond thought, beyond change, beyond likes and dislikes, pleasant and unpleasant. 

More than this, each of the fingers on the hands is representative of one of the five elements of Ayurveda. We are pulled out from our centre, from that place of wholeness within us, by the mind and it’s response to the movement of the senses. And each sense is governed by one of the five elements.