Wai Lana’s Thanksgiving Day Special

Get 2 books for the price of 1
Celebrate Thanksgiving with Wai Lana’s Favorite Soups,
and receive Wai Lana’s Favorite Juices ($24.95 value) for FREE!

Wai Lana’s Favorite Soups

Price $26.50, Hardcover

From fabulous French Onion to creamy Potato Leek, this gorgeous cookbook has something for everyone: comforting classics, hearty vegetable soups, silken blends, healing broths, Thai curries, Asian noodle soups, sustaining stews, and more. Mouthwatering recipes for all occasions!

• 140 fool-proof recipes, over 300 pages
• Full-page color photos for each recipe
• Clear, friendly, easy-to-follow instructions
• Special Healing Soups chapter to help you stay healthy

Wai Lana’s Favorite Juices

($24.95 value)
FREE with purchase of
Wai Lana’s Favorite Soups!

If you’re traveling the road to better health, you’ll want to take along Wai Lana’s FAVORITE JUICES. In her beautiful book, Wai Lana shares more than 85 recipes for fresh juices, luscious smoothies, and guilt-free desserts. Each and every juice is beautifully photographed. A wellspring of nutrition and inspiration, Wai Lana’s FAVORITE JUICES makes getting healthy a genuine pleasure.

These mouth-watering juices will help you to:

• Lose weight
• Reduce stress
• Eliminate toxins
• Improve your digestion

Order now: Call 1-800-228-5145
or visit www.wailana.com

From all of us here at Wai Lana, happy Thanksgiving!

This offer good through November 26th, 2009.

Breathing & Yoga

The way you breathe can either help or hinder your asana practice. When you breathe smoothly and evenly, you’ll notice that your breath helps you relax into a pose, gives you more stamina, and eases tension. In fact, it’s because of the relaxing effect of the breath that we’re often told to “take a few deep breaths” when we get angry or upset. It’s also true that full, deep breathing clears the head and improves concentration. Actually, breathing right helps improve the functions of all the systems in the body.

On the other hand, taking short, shallow breaths can be detrimental to our health, decreasing our vitality. When you practice asanas, if your breathing is uneven, too shallow, or if you’re holding your breath when you don’t need to, your body will be tense and probably uncomfortable, you’ll be more likely to strain, and you won’t get the full benefits of the poses.

Asanas are meant to remove blockages and increase the flow of the subtle energy, or prana, in the body—which improves our overall health. Because your breath can really enhance the flow of this energy, become aware of your breathing as you practice asanas. If your breath tends to be shallow, uneven, and fast, try to slow it down a bit and make it a little smoother and deeper. With practice, it will improve quite quickly because you’ll notice how much better it feels!

But don’t get so caught up in your asana or breathing practices that you forget to do your yoga meditation. After all, the purpose of asanas and pranayama is to prepare you for meditation. And it is in meditation that you’ll reap the greatest rewards of yoga—inner peace and true happiness.

Wai Lana Juice of the Week: Youth Juice

Wai Lana’s Asana of the Week: Lying Stretch

Banish tension with this feel-good stretch whenever you need a pick-me-up.

Watch it here: Wai Lana Yoga: Lying Stretch

1. Lie on your back and raise your arms over your head.

2. Inhale as you stretch the right side of your body, keeping the left side relaxed. Your right leg and buttock stretch down, while your right arm and the right side of your torso stretch up. Extend away from the waist in both directions. Hold for 10 to 20 seconds.

3. Exhale and relax, then repeat, stretching the left side of your body.

4. Now inhale and stretch your whole body. Stretch upward from the waist through your chest and arms, downward through your hips, legs, and toes.

5. Exhale and relax completely. Repeat the entire exercise once or twice.

Focus in the Pose…
Stretch through your fingers and point your toes. Lengthen the side of your body that you are stretching.

Benefits…
• Quick tension reliever
• Relieves fatigue
• Stretches the entire body

Three Ways to Prevent Sickness

Wai Lana, host of the long-running PBS series Wai Lana Yoga, shares tips on how to stay healthy naturally.

Getting sick is never fun. It not only makes us feel tired, achy, and sore, but also keeps us from doing the things we love. I have always felt that good habits are the foundation to good health. And, over the years, I’ve noticed that by practicing a yoga diet and lifestyle, I have far more energy and get sick less often.

Here are a few simple, effective ways to help keep yourself and your loved ones from getting sick:

Go to bed early. One of the most important things you can do to curb illness is to get enough rest. Studies show that cells regenerate themselves while we sleep. And although burning the candle at both ends is sometimes unavoidable, it can also weaken the immune system, making you more vulnerable to the latest bug going around school or the office. A busy schedule, heavy exercise, and even changes in the weather can sap our energy. That’s why it’s important to take care of ourselves and monitor how much sleep we’re getting. At the end of a tiring day, I like to get to bed an hour or two earlier. I find that a little extra sleep helps me feel relaxed, recharged, and more prepared for the next day.

Choose snacks wisely. The food we eat is the fuel our bodies need to function properly—down to the very last cell. So if our meals and snacks are nourishing, vital, and health-giving, our immune systems will grow strong and less prone to harmful bacteria, viruses, and disease. So skip the junky snack aisles next time you go grocery shopping. Opt for foods that make your body feel good, like fresh fruits, wholegrain breads, nut butters, and veggies and dip (a vegetarian egg-free mayonnaise mixed with a little mustard, honey, lemon juice, and salt makes a tasty, all-purpose vegetable dip).

Supplement your diet. When you consider that many of the foods sold in grocery stores today are overprocessed, transported for long periods of time, and sprayed with chemicals and pesticides, it’s no surprise that many of them lack the vital nutrients we need to stay strong and resilient to infection. Drinking goji juice is one of my favorite ways to supplement my diet naturally with vitamins B, C, and E as well as beta-carotene. I often recommend drinking the juice from this ancient Chinese berry as a natural way to improve overall health, including eyesight and liver and kidney function. I am delighted to be able to add a pure goji juice to my line of supplements that contains no artificial flavors, colors, or sweeteners. Made from fresh berries—not reconstituted or powdered—goji juice tastes delicious and contains naturally-occurring essential fatty acids such as omega-6 and linoleic acid, which also help to regulate hormones. ickness

Soup of the Week: October Harvest

Juice of the Week: Peach Party

7 Life-Changing Benefits of Becoming Vegetarian

7 Life-Changing Benefits of Becoming Vegetarian

Namaste!

October is Vegetarian Awareness Month so we wanted to provide positive inspiration for you to take some steps—little or big—toward a healthy vegetarian yoga lifestyle. If you’re already a vegetarian, here are some reminders of what a great choice you’ve made!

Occasionally there is some confusion about what it actually means to be a vegetarian. A true vegetarian doesn’t eat meat, fish, or eggs. A healthy vegetarian diet is focused on whole grains, beans, and legumes, fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, healthy fats and oils, and a moderate amount of dairy products.

1. Increase Your Inner Beauty:

Going veggie makes you more beautiful from the inside out. The toxins and stress hormones found in meat cause you to be more tired, stressed, and irritable. Vegetarian food choices have just the opposite effect. They uplift your mood, enhance your feelings of peace and optimism, and give you lots of exuberant energy.

2. Enjoy Radiant Skin and Hair:

Every year people spend literally billions of dollars on cosmetics and personal care products in their quest for youth and beauty. Yet just by choosing vegetarian foods, you’ll enjoy more beautiful skin and hair than you ever could by purchasing expensive beauty products. Vegetarian foods nourish your body from the inside out, providing invigorating antioxidants and nutrients.

3. Reach Your Ideal Weight and Stay There:

The battle of the bulge has become a serious health problem around the world. Being overweight or obese also causes many people a great deal of emotional, mental, and physical discomfort. Yet just one simple choice—choosing the vegetarian lifestyle—makes reaching and maintaining your ideal weight actually easy. There’s no need to struggle to lose weight. Vegetarian foods balance your body so that you’re more in touch with what actually tastes good and makes you feel good at the same time.

4. Reduce Your Risk of Painful and Deadly Diseases:

Have you ever noticed that virtually every single food to hit the headlines for health benefits is a vegetarian food? Whole grains help you lose weight, ward off diabetes, and cut your risk of cancer. Fresh fruits and vegetables help prevent just about every kind of disease in the book. Nuts and seeds promote cardiovascular health and even help you lose weight. Even dairy products are associated with numerous health benefits such as weight loss, reduced blood pressure, and a lower risk of cancer.

5. Promote World Peace:

Becoming a vegetarian is in harmony with the yoga principle of ahimsa, or nonviolence. Raising animals for food causes untold suffering for no real purpose other than to satisfy people’s desire for meat. While some people make the argument that you have to kill living things even to survive as a vegetarian—and there is truth in this statement—the fact is that animals have a much higher consciousness than plants and experience far greater suffering when killed. Eating a plant-based diet is by far the more compassionate choice.

6. Live Green:

Vegetarian food choices make the best use of our world’s precious resources. They use just a small fraction of the amount of water, land, and fuel that it takes to raise animals for meat. Factory farms, where animals are raised for meat, are also one of the biggest polluters of our waterways. Simply becoming a vegetarian is the biggest single step you can make to help protect the environment.

7. Pave the Way to Spiritual Happiness:

Ultimately, the greatest and most perfect happiness you can experience is the internal spiritual happiness that transcends all the ups and downs of the material world. Becoming a vegetarian helps to cultivate qualities conducive to spiritual realization, such as compassion, self-control, and peacefulness.

Wai Lana’s Mousse Royale

Wai Lana’s Soup of the Week: Loatian Curry