It’s normal to start feeling little sluggish or unlike your usual confident self after a long, rainy winter. It may the perfect time to clear out any energy or feelings that have gone stagnant. We could all use a reboot in our systems to charge our inner fierceness and tap into our ambition.

Known as the “queen” of all yoga postures, Shoulderstand is packed with healing and restorative benefits for your mind, body and spirit.  Shoulderstand is indeed the queen, or mother of asanas. As a mother strives for harmony and balance in the home, this asana strives for harmony and balance in the human system. It can be seen as a panacea for most common ailments. In Sanskrit, Sarva means “all” or “entire” and Anga means “organ” or “body part.” Translated, it means “full body pose” because of all of the many benefits for the entire body.

Tune into your heart and find joy in settling into Camel pose. Camel is a deep heart-opening posture that strengthens your back while freeing your neck, chest, lungs, abdominals, and thighs. Explore how good it feels to open up through the heart by breathing into the space surrounding it. Because Camel pose directly links to the Anahata, or heart chakra, practicing it allows us to tap into our energy center to foster more genuine self-love, trust, compassion and forgiveness.

Reverse Warrior is a powerful standing pose that stretches your hips and groins, while lengthening your spinal and intercostal muscles. The posture also helps blood circulation, reduce stress, mitigate back pain and can be a mood-booster.

Natarajasana, or Dancer's Pose, is a glorious heart-opening posture that challenges balance while lengthening the chest and spinal muscles. Also referred to as Lord of the Dance pose, Natarajasana stimulates the Heart Chakra (Anahata) and the Third Eye Chakra (Ajna), to help the practitioner feel more grateful, forgiving, focused, intuitive, and free. 

As one of the most beautiful flowers in the world, the lotus stands for enlightenment and self-awareness. It has its roots in the mud, at the bottom of streams and ponds, but rises to blossom above the water without becoming wet or tainted by the mire below. It symbolically represents being fully grounded in our truths, yet aspiring past suffering and negativity towards our truest forms.

Practice our Featured Pose of the month, Warrior II, to fuel your flow. Warrior II / Virabhadrasana II symbolizes strength and victory.

One of the most powerful benefits of practicing yoga is that it creates space for you to work through negative emotions and the drama that might be weighing like an anvil on your shoulders. We all have samskaras or karmic tendencies and energy patterns and often we can get stuck in obsessing about the same few thoughts. Over and over again. Usually the thoughts that hold us back—you know those with self-doubt and self-pity? By practicing yoga with an emphasis on flow, vibration, dissolution, you can fire up your tapas and alchemize all that sh*t into positive energy.

When you’re practicing yoga, do you ever wonder why you’re doing a particular asana or pose? Why the teacher emphasizes alignment in a particular way? What the benefits are?