Are you looking to use yoga to increase love in your life? Yoga is a beautiful tool for inspiring and enhancing the love in our hearts. By committing to a regular practice of yoga for love – through meditation, asanas, pranayama, and affirmations – you’ll find yourself having more compassion, empathy, and love, both for yourself and for the world around you.
Follow the steps below to invite more love into your heart.
Take Chyawanprash to Amplify Your Practice
Before beginning your practice, consider taking 1-2 tsp of Chyawanprash with warm water. Chyawanprash is a classic Ayurvedic herbal remedy that enhances health and the yoga experience. From sparking digestion, to cleansing the respiratory system, and enhancing focus, Chyawanprash offers a number of physical and mental benefits for practice. In addition, the action of tasting all six flavors (sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter, and astringent) at once helps move awareness out of the mind and into the body. This helps you become more grounded and mentally prepared for practice.
For a powerfully clean, sustainable, and earth-friendly chyawanprash, discover PIOR Living.
Begin with a Loving Meditation Practice
To begin your practice, try sitting in meditation for 10-15 minutes. The Chyawanprash will help focus your mind while you work on cultivating love in your heart. Sometimes it may seem not very comfortable, but by just choosing to try, you’ve already chosen a loving act.
Practice this exercise when you feel unstable or want to call in more love and strength into yourself.
- Start by finding a comfortable position, sitting or lying down, and close your eyes.
- Take a few deep and long breaths. Allow your body to settle for a couple of minutes and your breath to deepen.
- Now, slowly start to draw your focus away from your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations, and bring your attention to your belly. Hold your focus on your stomach until you feel a feeling there.
- Next, move that sensation up to your heart center. Hold your attention to your heart until you feel a sense there.
- Feeling your heart, begin to remember a time in your life when you felt deep, deep love. It could be the merging of your love partner, the birth of your child, being hugged by your parent as a child, the feeling of pure alignment after helping someone in need, or a moment of complete bliss you’ve experienced. Perhaps it was a time when you allowed yourself to be fully transparent and vulnerable, which made you feel elated. When you add love to your point of focus, it builds ojas, helping you connect to the powerful energy.
- Hold your memory of pure love and notice where in your body you feel the sensation the most. Without judgment, begin to allow the loving energy to move through your body. Feel your love expand into every cell in your being, embracing all the tingles it brings.
- Relax into this container of love that you have just cultivated. If you lose focus, it is ok. Bring your attention back to the experience and begin again. When you continue to grow the feeling of love throughout your entire body, you begin to boost the energy and increase your system’s bliss effect.
Practice a Yoga for Love Asana Sequence
Next, move into an asana sequence that focuses on opening the chest and the heart. As you consciously work towards opening your heart, your love for yourself and others will fill you effortlessly.
Warm-up – gently open the body
- Breath of fire x 3
- Boat
- Cat-cow
- Standing chest opener
- Standing tricep stretch + side body stretch
Flow – create heat and move
- Sun Salutation A x 3
- High lunge
- High lunge + chest opener hands interlaced behind the back
- Low lunge
- Low lunge on forearms
- Crescent low lunge
- Low lunge easy twist
- Low lunge twist + grab back leg
- Downdog
Be sure to switch sides.
Main – deep heart openers
- Camel
- Gate pose
- Seated twist
- Locust
- Locust + hands interlaced
- Downdog
- High plank
- Vinyasa
- Bow
- Windshield washers
Cool-down – relax and restore
- Dandasana
- Reverse table-top
- Supine eagle twist
- Savasana + heart open
Keep in mind that any type of yoga practice will foster love. Simply by committing to yourself, you will begin to fill your heart and find peace. Share the love and practice this yoga sequence with your partner or best friend.
Pranayama for Love
Conscious breath is an integral part of yoga for love because it directly increases our life force energy, or prana! To open your heart further, try this pranayama practice.
- Close your eyes and slowly begin to lengthen your breath, in and out.
- Lengthen your spine long and bring your attention to space in between your shoulder blades.
- Place your tongue on the roof of your mouth.
- Inhale through your nose. Then draw the breath up from the back of your heart to the top of your head.
- Exhale through your nose and release your tongue. Then draw the breath down from the top of your head to the front of your chest.
- Continue this breath loop for a few minutes to open your heart.
For more pranayama exercises, discover these 5 types of pranayama to add to you yoga practice.
Yoga for Love Affirmations
Affirmations are a powerful tool that can help increase love. Furthermore, mantras, which are similar to affirmations, allow you to choose something that resonates best with you. To spark ideas, here are a few affirmations to boost loving kindness in your heart.
- I permit myself to live big.
- I am worthy of love and deserve to receive love in abundance.
- Love fills my entire being effortlessly.
- I trust the universe will take care of me.
- I open my heart to love and know that I deserve it.
- Wherever I go, I find love.
- My love of self and others grows stronger every day.
- Love surrounds me and everyone around me.
- I am attracting my dream future.
- I emit loving kindness.
- Today I will continue to commit to creating the foundation of love, peace, and joy.
Yoga for love can be a personal practice or a shared experience with those closest to you. Perhaps you light a few candles, make some Chyawanprash tea, and then practice this yoga sequence. Afterwards, enjoy a journaling session about your experience and the abundance of love you feel.
Clare Michalik, Ayurvedic Practitioner
