I had to share this shining gem of a practice – Butterfly Kriya – found at the back of the Level 2 Mind And Meditation guide. It’s a fun one to do – only takes 11 minutes (62 if you’re ambitious) – and I felt very relaxed, open, balanced and clear after practicing it.

In kundalini yoga, our hands, specifically our fingers, are linked with the brain. It’s why the different mudras and hand gestures we use in our practice are so transformative and can completely change our state of mind and being. So in Butterfly Kriya, we clap our hands together in a steady hypnotic rhythm to clear out the old dust motes floating – mostly unseen – in our subconscious mind. Try it – it’s a very satisfying movement, and the silent ‘har’ embodied in each clap, that syllable of divine creativity, begins to take precedence over the white noise created by those subconscious motes.

Here’s what Yogi Bhajan had to say about the kriya:

‘This is not something super spiritual, it’s just a purely physical exercise… Move it this way, it will create the sound Har. And in that sound you keep on correlating and correlating and correlating and mentally coordinating the sound with it. Synchronize mind, attention, action and perception. You will reach an experience where you will see all that garbage start floating through the subconscious.