Inspiration for your practice:

Sometimes I ask the class if they have any requests, and just the other day 2 people requested this asana (yoga exercise). They said they love it because:
 * of how it encourages proper breathing into the whole of the lungs,
 * the movement through the shoulders and gentle correcting of the posture,
 * the mediative aspect of coordinating the mindful movement of the body with the breath.

What benefits does this asana bring for you?

Yoga is so great because even when we are only thinking about the body, what we are doing and how we do it integrates with the rest of the body, mind and energy systems.  

When we feel stressed or anxious, our breath becomes shallow and we breathe with partial chest breathing. This maintains the state of stress and even increases anxiety, which is a vicious circle that is hard to break.

Practice:

  ✅ Breathing in deeply, raise your arms sideways to the shoulder level. 
  ✅ Exhaling, raise your arms further up and cross them above your head.
  ✅ Inhaling, lower your arms back to the shoulder level. 
  ✅ Exhaling, return the arms beside you and consciously relax. Repeat 10 rounds.

 Observe that after a few rounds you feel calmer and it breaks the vicious circle. 

The exercise helps you to calm down, not only by deepening your breath. Spend some time with this exercise and try to become one with the movement and the breath, as if nothing else existed for this short period of time.

!! Amazingly his exercise also harmonises the two hemispheres of the brain. Each hemisphere has sensory and motor control of the opposite side of the body. Therefore moving both sides of the body at once in a rhythmical fashion will facilitate brain integration. The cooperation between the right and left brain is essential for us to learn better, function more intelligently and become proficient in anything.

Source: Yoga in Daily Life the System