An Open Heart: The Ultimate Valentine’s Day Gift from Yoga Design Lab

This Valentine’s Day, give yourself or a loved one the ultimate gift: An open heart. Whether you’re practicing self-love, or the love language of gift-giving, encouraging the practice of open-heartedness can help transform your Valentine’s Day and how you’ll show up for it.

Yoga Design Lab

Heart-opening yoga is a great way to get yourself or your loved ones ready for romance. Done through the integration of mind, body, and breath, heart-centered yoga practices bring balance back to the heart center, also known as the heart chakra, responsible for our life force energy or “prana.” Heart openers can help soften our heart space, allowing more blood, oxygen, and energy to pour into and through it.

Beginners can start with one posture at a time, breathing into the pose for a few moments, whereas an experienced practitioner may jump right into a heart-opening yoga sequence. Ease into your camel, cobra, wheel, bridge, or fish pose safely, or go for a supported headstand. Not ready for these postures just yet, but still want an open heart on Valentine’s Day? Pranayama breathing is another heart-opening practice in yoga that calms the mind, energizes the body, and expands the chest.

When it comes to matters of the heart, on Valentine’s Day or any day, restoring balance to our bodies may be the ultimate gift. With over 20 designs in four eco-friendly, high-performance materials, Yoga Design Lab (YDL) chooses materials and practices that are kind to the earth, produce less waste, and allow products to be recycled. Showing love to the planet, YDL continually works on new ways to reduce waste and help minimize its environmental footprint.

Named one of the “18 Best Yoga Mats in 2022” by Vogue, YDL’s Combo Mat may be the best gift to get your partner, bestie, or yourself this Valentine’s Day. Available in art-inspired designs and printed with water-based inks, a YDL yoga mat spreads love to our planet with its natural tree rubber and latex-free materials. Printed in subtle pink hues and swirls of romantic colors, the Pearl and Tribeca Sands combo mat designs blend beauty and form to inspire every interaction on your mat.

Dive deeper into your cobra or bridge poses with the help of YDL’s Infinity or Cork yoga wheels. Tap into your heart center by folding, stretching, or rolling over a yoga wheel to deepen difficult postures, such as backbends, more safely. Made with recyclable or biodegradable materials, an earth-friendly yoga wheel can help deepen those heart-opening poses to help you live beautifully this Valentine’s Day.