It promises to bring a glow to your face, naturally. But this is no fancy cream or expensive beauty treatment. This is the funny side of yoga, the one that has you making faces and stretching your face muscles in ways you never thought they would.
With an easy-going smile and friendly face, Minal Potnis is a pioneer in spreading the goodness and benefits of facial yoga in the city. And her clear complexion is testimony of her three years of practice paying off.
We are seated at her sprawling apartment at Mahim, Mumbai. From the window, you can see the sea, waves lashing against the rocks, trying to waken couples from their besotted, love-drugged state. It is the perfect setting to relax and do some yoga.
We start with something she calls the ‘fake wedding smile’. She presses her lips together and smiles, pushing her cheekbones back higher. Her face contorts into a smile that looks more like a grimace.
“All the tiny 57 muscles in your facial area [from the neck upwards] are interconnected, like a patchwork quilt. You exercise one and the others also feel it,” says this ‘wellness expert’.
From one smiling exercise, we move on to the next. This one involves opening the mouth, folding in the lips and pushing back the cheekbones. This time, the cheekbones stretch even more.
This is easy, I think. But Potnis appears to just be easing me in. The final smiling exercise is a combination of the ‘fake wedding smile’ and the fish pucker. She smiles by pressing her lips together and then sucks in her cheeks. It sounds easy but in reality sucking in your cheeks without using your lips is quite difficult. Potnis says it usually takes “three days of daily repeats to master most of the exercises”.
Her next exercise is apparently suited for me and my “slightly plump cheeks”. It’s called the balloon exercise- you blow up your cheeks, press three fingers on your lips, and with your fist push the air from one cheek into the other and then smile. A smile is part of most of the exercises “because when you smile, your cheeks automatically go up”. This exercise is all about using pressure to exercise the muscles. “You are doing nothing but weightlifting, using the air inside your cheek to put pressure on the muscles.” A look in the mirror and I see a face that looks like a deformed balloon.
Potnis started learning about face yoga to help her father’s reflux condition (Gastroesophageal reflux, also called ‘spitting up’ is used to describe a condition where food and stomach acid flow back up back into the esophagus). She learned from a Chinese medicine specialist Rose Hong in the US and then started studying and practising on her own.
In the past few months, she has teamed up with some of the city’s leading doctors and therapists to put face yoga to medical use.
“When you move a muscle, you are stimulating a gland. In stress management, my focus is on the upper part of the head, the eyes and the brain. Once those are relaxed, then so are you,” she says. Her exercises vary according to what is needed by the person; she has over 41 tried-and-tested ones to choose from.
Now that my facial muscles have had their ‘rest’, we get back to repeating all the exercises. This time, I do the exercises alone, trying to follow Potnis’ step count and instruction, at the same time holding back on the laughter inside. Because facial yoga will make you look like a fool; you stretch, contort, pull muscles that you never knew existed or that could hurt. It’s a ‘face workout’, with the side effects. Just like the gym, Potnis warns that the facial muscles that are being stretched are bound to be sore the next day.
Caution, these stunts can be practiced at home; just make sure no one is around.
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