Angelle

Under the right conditions, even ordinary experiences can be infused with a sense of the supernatural. The milky rays of sunlight that beam through a storm cloud, an early morning encounter with a wild animal, or a spiral of dry leaves blown into the air by a gust of autumn wind: such fleeting glimpses of beauty are often interpreted as signs of

Your brain and body don’t know the difference between having an actual experience in your life and just thinking about the experience—neurochemically, it’s the same.

Perhaps most intriguing, REM sleep helps us maintain our emotional awareness. When we are deprived of REM, studies have found, we have a more difficult time reading others’ facial expressions.

When we practice yoga we cultivate the ability to concentrate the mind so that as we move into various physical postures, we begin to notice our habitual patterns of holding within our own body, just as we might observe physical patterns of holding in musicians as they perform.