Avahana Mudra: open with acceptance, expand your heart and your life, and welcome the blessings within every experience.
Open your heart to finding the silver lining.
Avahana Mudra is a gesture of heartfelt acceptance — a shape that helps you soften into optimism, receive life as it comes, and welcome every experience (even the yucky ones) as an opportunity for growth. With your palms open and facing upward, you signal to your body and nervous system that it is safe to receive, safe to hope, and safe to expand.
This mudra gently awakens the bright, forward-moving qualities often connected with Sagittarius energy: finding the silver lining, learning through lived experience, and meeting each moment with curiosity, gratitude, and a willingness to grow. It supports the immune system, nourishes the heart and solar plexus chakras, and helps you digest what no longer serves while staying open to what’s next.
Practice Avahana Mudra anytime you want to reconnect with optimism, expand your inner landscape, or remember that your life is filled with opportunities — even the ones that arrive disguised as challenges.
Check out ways to practice mudras live with our empowering yoga community on our live class schedule!
🫶🏻MUDRA: Avahana
Benefits of Avahana Mudra:
heart-centered acceptance
receiving
optimism
gratitude
expansiveness of being
learning to welcome everything (even challenges) as an opportunity
digest everything else
supports the immune system
connection to heart (anahata) + solar plexus (manipura) chakras
connection to the air and fire elements
Why practice Avahana Mudra:
Practice Avahana Mudra to open your heart to possibility — softening resistance, inviting optimism, and learning to receive every experience (even the hard ones) as an opportunity for growth and expansion.
How to practice Avahana Mudra:
Find any comfortable seat. Hold your hands with your palms facing up in front of your navel. Bring the tip of your thumb to the base of your pinky on each hand. Join the outer edges of the tips of your ring and pinky fingers to their corresponding finger. Let your wrists be comfortably apart as you rest your forearms against your body. Soften your shoulders and align your spine.
🧘🏻♀️MEDITATION: Gratefully Receiving Joy
WHY:
Practice this meditation to gently expand your capacity for gratitude — using movement, breath, and awareness to welcome joy, opportunity, and ease into your body so you can meet life with an open and resilient heart.
PLACE:
Find a comfortable seat. Perhaps sit on a bolster or blanket to get your hips a little higher than your knees.
MUDRA:
Find Avahana Mudra by holding your hands with your palms facing up in front of your navel. Bring the tip of your thumb to the base of your pinky on each hand. Join the outer edges of the tips of your ring and pinky fingers to their corresponding finger. Let your wrists be comfortably apart as you rest your forearms against your body. Soften your shoulders and align your spine.ur shoulders and align your spine.
PRANAYAMA:
Inhale through your nose in three equal pieces. Exhale through your nose in one easeful breath out. Begin to direct the first sip of air into your belly, the second to your ribs, and the third to lift your collarbones.
MOVING MUDRA:
With your first sip of air, reach your mudra forward.
With the second, keep your thumbs connected to your pinkies, but open your mudra out to the sides with your palms still facing up.
With the third sip of air, reach your hands up.
With your exhale, settle your mudra back in front of your body. Continue for 1-5 minutes.
DRISHTI:
If it feels safe, allow your eyelids to feel heavy and close.
TO END:
After an exhale, release control of your breath and settle with Avhana Mudra as you reflect on all your opportunities to be grateful.
✨MANTRA:
With a grateful heart, I see everything as an opportunity.
I hope you find every blessing available to you — even, and especially, the ones that arrive in disguise.
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