Headstands, Sirsasana, can be a scary asana at first if you aren't used to being upside down. Me and other students experienced often our brains going crazy and desperately looking for security. And, after all these years practicing, I understood that 70% of inversion work is mind work.

At first your mind will be like "what the hell"; then, you will use the wall behind cause your mind will make you feel "safe"; and at the end, you will feel confident to be in the middle of the room.

But what if instead of following these steps, you try directly to be in the middle of the room? as with all the inversions, at the beginning you will get nervous. But finally, your mind will start to feel more and more comfortable, and inversions will happen easily :) I promised!

Why should we practice headstand?

Headstand can bring to you and your health lot of benefits, being the most important ones:

• Increases your Self-confidence. It gives you a great boost of self-confidence and trust in yourself. It literally reminds you that you are capable of overcoming anything in this life! even your fear to be upside down, balancing in the middle of the room.

• Strengthens your body. Shoulders, core, glutes.. the body will need to hold you and therefore it will start to get stronger. The more you practice inversions, the stronger you become.

• Improves blood circulation. Inversions reverse the blood flow, increasing the blood circulation in the whole body but specially in the brain. As Garima Arora writes in her article for NDTV, "As the blood rushes to your head, it provides the brain with more oxygen and improves cognitive function." So guys, who is in for inversions?!

• Boosts your energies. By stimulating the blood in your entire body, you get also a boost in energies and become more alert in yourself and what is surrounding you.

• Promotes detoxification. By stimulating the Lymphatic system, the balance of fluid between blood and tissues gets improved. Also, the Lympathic system forms part of the body’s immune system and helps defend against bacteria and other intruders.

There are many more benefits that you can easily find around the Internet. However, I found these 5 reasons already good enough to remind us the reason behind the practice of headstands.

Oh, and another reason: it is fun :) and we all need more fun in life, specially in COVID-19 times!

How can I start practicing headstands?

There are different ways to start getting inverted and going into headstand. In my YouTube Headstand Tutorial, I walk you through a couple of conditioning exercises to strengthen shoulders and core; and then through 3 different entry variations.

Warm up with 5 San Salutation A and 5 Sun Salutation B, and jump into the class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty33tvFNJ8A&t=8s

Have fun being inverted in headstand!! and let me know how it goes with your progress, mentally and physically :-)

xx

Zohar