Child's Pose (Balasana)

How You Do It: Kneel on your shins, buttocks resting on your
heels, knees together. With your arms at your sides, palms up,
bend from the hips and extend your upper body over your knees.
Resting on your thighs, bring your forehead to the floor. Breathe
deeply, hold for as long as is comfortable. Then slowly sit up.

If you have trouble kneeling, placing a pillow between your
thighs and calves will help.

What it Does For You: This simple asana floods every cell of the
body with both oxygen and prana (life force energy) helping
eliminate physical and emotional toxins. The constriction on your
legs increases blood supply to the upper body, making respiration
more efficient, and energizing the blood, which in turn begins to
remove waste gases more efficiently. The pressure from the
diaphragm in this posture creates a deep, slow, rhythmic massage
of the vital organs, energizing them. Both the quality and the
quantity of the blood circulation to these vital organs improve
when you are in Child's Pose.

If you hold the pose more than 5 minutes, deeper benefits occur.
The asana has a regulatory effect on the endocrine system. It
gets more blood to the head and to the pituitary gland-the master
gland that regulates hormonal balance. This makes the Child's
Pose an extremely relaxing asana.