My name is Ranjana Khan.
I live in New York, I'm a jewelry designer, and I moved to New York in 1979 from Bombay,
India.
It's funny and strange that when I lived in India, I just thought yoga was ancient, which
is not a good thing for me, and when I turned 42 a friend introduced me to yoga, in New
York.
Now that's the only exercise I do do, yoga.
For the body and face.
What is face yoga...um, it's exercises for your face, basically.
It happened very organically, actually.
I used to travel a lot to India for 10 years of my life, like 5 or 6 times a year, and
I was jet-lagged a lot.
So I found myself a few good teachers in India, and one of my teachers, when I was in meditation,
you know when you're just sitting like that and she was just making me breathe, your face
completely relaxes.
And when it does, she saw how I was gonna age—really, all your muscles relax, and
your face will actually fall a bit.
And she said, "We're gonna start a new thing today, we're gonna start doing exercises for
the face."
Mudras for the face.
With facial yoga, the easy thing, the good thing about it is you don't need to be in
a gym, or on a mat, or anything.
You can do it anywhere.
And it's not for more than 4 or 5 minutes a day.
The exercise, the facial exercise that actually awakens the whole face once is what I'm gonna
show you now.
You're trying to—you can never swallow your tongue, but you're trying to swallow it.
So, the tip of your tongue you're trying to reach back, like this, as far back as it can
go.
And you're looking at your nostrils.
I'm gonna do it now, together.
And breathe evenly through your nostrils.
Your gaze is at your nostril.
It's not pretty.
This wakes your whole face up—this also gets your heart beating, and it gets your
tongue tired, it gets your eyes worked out.
Um, it wakes up the whole face, all at once.
We are now gonna work the eyelid, which, if it gets too heavy you're working very hard
at opening your eyes.
That's strenuous, again.
And as we get older, the lids do get heavier.
So you would look up, shooting your eyebrows up and leaving them there, and close your
eyelid, feeling the maximum stretch here.
Breathe evenly through your nostrils, and just hold for 4 or 5 or 8 breaths.
And when you let it go, you let them go together.
Lift your eyelid, and open your eyes together.
I can feel that stretch!
And, um, you can repeat it, and every time you can hold it a little bit longer.
After every exercise, you must have 10 or 15 seconds of just relaxing.
This exercise is for the lines around your eyes, and to tighten the skin around here.
You're squinting your eyes, pulling the skin over your cheekbones up while keeping your
eyes wide open, and squinting.
This exercise is for your laugh lines.
What you're doing is you're sucking in, between your teeth, you're sucking in the insides
of your cheeks.
The muscle—the flesh inside of your cheeks.
Like this.
And your eyes stay open until they water—no blinking.
When we blink shallow, we dry our eyes out.
When we have deep blinks, we hydrate our eyes.
That's one very good exercise for your eyes, deep blinks.
There is one exercise I'm gonna show you now for the deep blinks.
You're folding your tongue and pushing it out of your mouth, as you press your mouth,
tighten it around your tongue like this.
And what you're doing with your eyes is you're looking up for deep blinks.
I'm gonna do the whole exercise together.
I'm gonna show you another exercise for your tongue, which is for the laugh lines.
But, what you're doing is, if this is your laugh line, from the inside of your mouth
you're zig-zagging your tongue under it like this.
That was 15 seconds and my tongue...I had to stop.
You rest for a few seconds, and then to the other side.
Close up to the nostril, and all the way down.
Here, and here.
You know where your laugh lines are, that's what it's trying to erase from the inside.
By your tongue doing that for you, your tongue is working out too.
This exercise is for the jowls.
There's a few exercises for the jowls, but this is one of them.
And you put your fingers on your mouth so that air doesn't escape, and you fill your
cheeks with air, like this.
You can feel the stretch from the inside, and everything gets picked up.
For the neck and jowls, the one that I'm gonna show you now, which is the dead giveaway of
your age.
Pucker your mouth, and go...like kissing the sky.
And you'll feel the stretch—you'll feel the stretch all over here and here.
I'm gonna show you an exercise for your head, for your scalp.
People forget how important it is, the health of our scalp.
First of all, we love our hair, want it to be beautiful.
And if you stimulate your scalp and your hair follicles, it's definitely gonna help.
If you can use a good oil, or whatever it is, or even nothing, just your fingers, but
you can put your fingers through your hair like that, and gently pull at the follicles.
It's a good massage, good massage for the hair.
Oh, this feels so good.
There's very few exercises that you do use your fingers on, and this is one of them.
You tap your sinuses, so it's releasing, opening up the blockage.
And then, the bone—your cheekbone, this is what you're following.
You're following your cheekbone, to your temple, and release.
From your nostrils, to your cheekbone, to your temple, and release.
I'm already swallowing—there's something being released.
Then the other one is you start at the front of your ear, and you go to the back.
This is a big release of fluids.
Every time you do it you can feel, you can feel like you're swallowing something.
I'm 57 years old—I've been practicing facial yoga for the past 10 years.
People do ask me what I do for my skin, because they like how it looks.
And I have never had Botox, or Restalyne or fillers, or anything done to my face.
I'm—you know, I'm not a girl who stays home.
We go out a lot, and party, we have a very, very full life.
We communicate with our faces, we care so much about our face, how we look, we makeup,
and we have all these products, and we want to clean our faces right, and make sure the
wrinkles are not there, and all that, but we don't really work at giving it a holistic
approach to your face.
You've created these expressions, you've spent your whole life creating your own individual
signature expression.
And we can save it and keep it that way with these exercises.