Heal the body, quiet the mind, and find emotional balance with simple practices from Yantra Yoga Modern science and classic spiritual traditions agree: regulating the breath leads to radiance and wellness of body, mind, and spirit. With the simple teachings and cutting-edge research offered in The Tibetan Yoga of Breath, you can start thriving just by integrating breathwork into your daily practice. Basic Yantra Yoga techniques—also called wind energy training—are the key to achieving this kind of vitality, down to the cellular level. Anyen Rinpoche and Allison Choying Zangmo skillfully examine the teachings of Yantra Yoga and Buddhism through the lens of Western medical science. Their wise and accessible instruction reveals practices that are nourishing and transformative, delivering dramatic results—no experience with yoga or Buddhist meditation necessary.

Discover the hidden tradition of Tibetan yoga, a practice of magical movement for wellness of body, breath, and mind. In Tibetan Yoga, discover ancient Tibetan yogic practices that integrate body, breath, and mind on the journey to personal cultivation and enlightenment. Tibetan Yoga offers accessible instructions for performing the ancient yogic techniques of Tibet’s Bön religion. This is Tibetan yoga, or trul khor, a deeply authentic yogic practice. Drawing on thirty years of training with Bön’s most senior masters as well as advanced academic study, Dr. Alejandro Chaoul offers expert guidance on practices that were first developed by Bön masters over a millennium ago, framing them according to the needs of contemporary yoga practitioners and meditators. No matter their level of experience, dedicated practitioners of Tibetan yoga will discover its ability to clear away obstacles and give rise to meditative states of mind. In this book you’ll learn what it means to practice for the benefit of all beings, and to experience your body as a mandala, from center to periphery. These movements help you live in a more interconnected mind-breath-body experience, with benefits including: - better focus, - stress reduction, - the elimination of intrusive thoughts, - better sleep, - and general well-being.

The power of the breath has been recognized for millennia as an integral part of health and well-being. In Awakening the Sacred Body, teacher Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche makes accessible the ancient art of Tibetan breath and movement practices. In clear, easy-to-understand language, he outlines the theory and processes of two powerful meditations—the Nine Breathings of Purification and the Tsa Lung movements—that can help you change your relationship to yourself, to others, and to the world. The simple methods presented in Awakening the Sacred Body and in the accompanying online video focus on clearing and opening your energetic centers to allow the natural human qualities of love, compassion, joy, and equanimity to arise. When sadness releases, joy is able to arise. When anger releases, love becomes available. When prejudice releases, equanimity prevails. And when lack of kindness ceases, compassion is present.These practices, which focus the mind and breath together while performing specific body movements, will help you discover your inner wisdom and express your greatest potential.

Understanding how our actions, words, and thoughts interact enhances our ability to progress in spiritual practice and brings us closer to self-realization. In a warm, informal style Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche opens up Tibetan meditation practice to both beginners and experienced students, placing as much emphasis on practice as on knowledge. Depending on the sources of the problems in our lives, he offers practices that work with the body, speech, or the mind—a collection of Tibetan yoga exercises, visualizations, sacred sound practices, and spacious meditations on the nature of mind. Together, he says, knowledge and regular meditation practice can alter our self-image and lead to a lighter, more joyful sense of being. The stillness of the body, the silence of speech, and the spacious awareness of mind are the true three doors to enlightenment.

A visual presentation of Tibetan yoga, the hidden treasure at the heart of the Tibetan Tantric Buddhist tradition • Explains the core principles and practices of Tibetan yoga with illustrated instructions • Explores esoteric practices less familiar in the West, including sexual yoga, lucid dream yoga, and yoga enhanced by psychoactive substances • Draws on scientific research and contemplative traditions to explain Tibetan yoga from a historical, anthropological, and biological perspective • Includes full-color reproductions of previously unpublished works of Himalayan art Tibetan yoga is the hidden treasure at the heart of the Tibetan Tantric Buddhist tradition: a spiritual and physical practice that seeks an expanded experience of the human body and its energetic and cognitive potential. In this pioneering and highly illustrated overview, Ian A. Baker introduces the core principles and practices of Tibetan yoga alongside historical illustrations of the movements and beautiful, full-color works of Himalayan art, never before published. Drawing on Tibetan cultural history and scientific research, the author explores Tibetan yogic practices from historical, anthropological, and biological perspectives, providing a rich background to enable the reader to understand this ancient tradition with both the head and the heart. He provides complete, illustrated instructions for meditations, visualizations, and sequences of practices for the breath and body, as well as esoteric practices including sexual yoga, lucid dream yoga, and yoga enhanced by psychoactive plants. He explains how, while Tibetan yoga absorbed aspects of Indian hatha yoga and Taoist energy cultivation, this ancient practice largely begins where physically-oriented yoga and chi-gong end, by directing prana, or vital energy, toward the awakening of latent human abilities and cognitive states. He shows how Tibetan yoga techniques facilitate transcendence of the self and suffering and ultimately lead to Buddhist enlightenment through transformative processes of body, breath, and consciousness. Richly illustrated with contemporary ethnographic photography of Tibetan yoga practitioners and rare works of Himalayan art, including Tibetan thangka paintings, murals from the Dalai Lama’s once-secret meditation chamber in Lhasa, and images of yogic practice from historical practice manuals and medical treatises, this groundbreaking book reveals Tibetan yoga’s ultimate expression of the interconnectedness of all existence.

Tibetan Yoga of Movement introduces the method of Yantra Yoga, a traditional Tibetan form that is one of the oldest recorded systems of yoga in the world. Derived from an eighth-century Tibetan Buddhist text, Yantra Yoga includes many positions similar to those of Hatha Yoga in form, but different in the dynamics of the way in which they are practiced, especially in the coordination of movement and breathing. The Yantra Yoga system encompasses 108 sets of movements (yantras) and several types of breathing to be learned at your own pace. Due to its emphasis on uniting breathing and movement, Yantra Yoga can deepen the experience of yoga practitioners from any tradition and profoundly benefit anyone seeking authentic balance, harmony, and the understanding of our true nature. Since the eighth century, this yoga teaching has been passed down from teacher to student in an unbroken lineage. Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, the current lineage holder, began transmitting Yantra Yoga in the West in the 1970s. Presenting detailed instructions accompanied by over 400 instructional photos, the book describes the sequences of movements, methods of breathing, and the concrete health benefits of the practice.

While yoga has become a common practice for health and well-being,the ancient tools of Tibetan yoga remained secret for centuries. Translated as "magical movements," Tibetan yoga can improve physical strength and support positive emotional and mental health, healing the body-energy-mind system with a full sense of awareness and harmony. In Tibetan Yoga for Health & Well-Being, Alejandro Chaoul, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Director of Education at the Integrative Medicine Program at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, focuses on the five principal breath-energies of Tibetan medicine and yoga and how special body movements for each engage the five chakras in our body. Chaoul shares his experiences of daily practice in different settings and cultures, with a focus on simplicity, accessibility, and ease for your real-world lifestyle. He also provides a contextual understanding of the history and lineage of Tibetan yoga so that you will fully be able to remove obstacles from your life and welcome in health and well-being.

In the Tibetan tradition the ability to dream lucidly is not and end in itself rather it provides as additonal context in which one can engage in advanced and effective practices to achieve liberation. Dream yoga is followed by sleep yoga also known as the yoga of clear light. It is a more advanced practice similar to the most secret Tibetan practices. The goal is to remain aware during deep sleep when the gross conceptual mind and the operation of the senses cease.The result of these practicas is greater happiness and freedom in both our waking and dreaming states.

"Over millennia, many Eastern traditions have developed practices that use the powerful healing energy of breath to treat physical, emotional, and mental problems. In Chinese, this energy is called chi; in Indian Sanskrit it is called prana, and in Tibetan it is called lung. Lung is life-giving energy that moves through our bodies. A lack or imbalance of lung can create illnesses of body and mind or cause emotional struggles such as confusion, anger, and depression. In this book, Geshe YongDong Losar, a scholar and monk in the ancient Bön tradition of Tibet, guides us through powerful practices to help balance our lung. His deep knowledge-garnered through years of study and practice-renders the practices simple and achievable, creating a clear path for us toward greater calmness, strength, and clarity. Over and over I have personally witnessed, both in myself and in my students, the breath's clear potential to heal and deeply transform lives. I truly believe that in the future such practices will play an important role as a medicine for preventing and treating physical, emotional, and mental maladies. I am glad that Geshe YongDong is making these practices widely available, and I'm sure that by doing so, he is bringing benefit to countless lives"--

A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020 Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR “A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.