If you're feeling bloated in your face, these tips are for

you. I'm going to take you through my seven step facial yoga

exercises and you can start doing this today. Once

you've done that, you've actually activated your lymphatic system and

you're getting things going. Now the massage is really going

to have somewhere to go. So the toxins are going to be able to flow

out of the skin, out of the extracellular matrix. Remember, our

environment is very toxic. So the foods that we eat, the

pollution in the air, it ends up being trapped in our skin. And

we want to get that flowing out of our skin. Welcome to the Holistic Skin

Guru, where what's on the surface is just as important as

what's underneath. I'm your host, Aamena. Let's dive deep

into the world of holistic skincare. Okay,

so what's trending at the moment is face yoga. And if anyone

has tried it, you would have noticed an amazing difference in

your skin. But with face yoga, you need to be consistent and

you need to practice. It takes about four to five

goes before you feel comfortable with the process, but

I teach a very, very simple technique. There's

only seven steps. It's not a full face yoga, but

it'll get you going. And I like teaching people this because

it's nice and simple. You can start doing it today and it's

completely free. So the reason why face yoga is so great,

it actually helps stimulate our lymphatic system and

it starts to get things flowing. So I want you to think about

your skin as a layer and think about it as a body of

water because within the skin, we have a

gelatinous mass that holds everything together. This is very

simplified terms, but it's in a way to make you understand how

the skin works. And in that gelatinous matter, we have everything

that sits in your skin, like your hair follicles and your pores and everything else

is sitting in there, right? And we also have what's called our extracellular matrix.

So we have a mechanism within that that makes

elastin and makes collagen, which

is called the fibroblast. And we want to stimulate the fibroblast so

that it makes more collagen and more elastin. So

when that body of water becomes stagnant, then

our skin starts to dull and we start to see the

imperfections in our skin and all that sort of stuff. But when that body of

water is flowing, then our skin starts to look healthy. It

starts to brighten up and the skin starts to function like

it was designed to function. So the reason we

love face yoga so much is that we can actually get that

body of water moving and we do that by

exercising it, using our fingers to exercise the

muscles in our face. Remember, our facial muscles, we

have the most muscles in our face than anywhere else in our body. And

our facial muscles are what carries our expressions and

our emotions. And when we have certain expressions and

certain emotions that we carry, certain things are going on

in our lives, we actually store that memory in our muscles.

So when we do things like face yoga, We're helping our

facial muscles to let go of a lot of trauma and

expressions and emotions that have happened in our lives that

have been stored in our skin. We also tend to

get very, very tight masseters when we are stressed

out. The facial massage helps us to loosen

up that area and give us some relief. Make sense?

Okay. I'm going to take you through my seven step facial yoga

exercises, and you can start doing this today. I

do have a video on my salon page

on Instagram, which takes you through the seven steps, but I'm

going to take you through it again today. And I'm going to talk you through it because on

Instagram, it's just me showing the steps with a bit of

music in the background. So this way I'll talk you through it. just

the way I do with my clients in clinic on a

daily basis. Okay, so the first thing is we want to start with

a clean skin. So make sure your skin is thoroughly cleansed

and have a beautiful facial oil on the side to

use on your skin for this massage. clean hands and

apply maybe one or two drops of your facial oil. I recommend

if you're doing this at night you use a vitamin A oil

or even a sea buckthorn oil and you can mix that in with

a little bit of black seed oil and castor oil. These are

all beautiful nourishing oils for your skin and so

while you sleep your skin will just take in all of their goodness and

you'll wake up feeling amazing. Okay so the first thing we need to do

is we need to open up our termini. The termini sits

just above the collarbone. So look for your collarbone here, find

your collarbone and then take your fingers, the little pads on the tips

of your fingers and place them above your collarbone and

just give a few light taps. Okay. So

I would do about maybe six or seven of these taps and

that's waking up your lymphatic system. Okay,

that's the first thing you need to do. Very, very simple. You

don't need to apply too much pressure. Very, very light, just

a little bit of tapping. That's it. Once you've

done that, apply the oil onto your hands and

place your hands on either side of your neck and

just do a very light pumping motion. Now,

this is getting your lymphatic system going. Our lymphatic system sits

around the circumference of our face, down the center of our body, and then

we have lymph nodes around our neck and down even

under our armpits. We have lymph nodes and it

will just help to start draining that. I would do about 10 of

these, very, very lightly and very slowly. As

you can see, I'm not really tugging the skin too

much. Okay, once you've done that, place your

fingers, create a fork in your fingers like that, and place your

fingers on either side of your ears. And the same thing,

just do a very, very light tugging motion, no

pressure, just kind of move the skin up and down. And do

that 10 times. Once you've done that, you've actually

activated your lymphatic system and you're getting things going. Now

the massage is really going to have somewhere to go. So the toxins are

going to be able to flow out of the skin, out of the extracellular matrix. Remember,

our environment is very toxic. So the foods that we eat, the

pollution in the air, it ends up being trapped in our skin. And

we want to get that flowing out of our skin and into our lymphatic system

and then have our lymphatic system filter it down into our

kidneys. and out through our urine and our feces. So we

want that all gone. We want it out of our system completely. And so this is

what's going to help do that. The first movement is just to

create little hooks with your fingers, right?

And start from the center of your chin, work your

way all the way up to your ear. Okay. Can

you see that? Do that

10 times, but do both sides at the same time. All

right. you will start to feel some

activity. So your skin will start to feel like, you know, you're bringing the blood

vessels to the surface of the skin and the skin starts to activate,

for lack of a better word. After that, we wanna take

the same prongs on our fingers. You know, God's given us great tools, they're

called fingers. And what we're gonna do is place one

knuckle just under the eye area and the other knuckle

sits just under your cheekbone, okay? And

we're gonna drain. We're going to drain towards the hairline because

remember our lymphatic system sits around the

circumference of our face and we're going to drain towards the

hairline. Okay. So just think about all of that stagnation,

everything that's sitting there, we're just getting it to flow. All

right, and we're using our knuckles, let the oil allow

the slip happening and we don't need to apply pressure or

anything like that, just very gently. And it will feel really

good if you suffer from sinuses, it'll feel really, really, really good

and you'll get some relief. Okay, once you've done that 10 times, then

I like to come opposite hand, opposite brow, and

just walk your fingers up from your brow, the top of your brow line

up towards your hairline, okay? just

with your oil and you can start

to see. So I'll do a little bit up here and you'll start

to see a change in my eyebrow just in the little few movements that

I'm doing now and then switch over. and

you'll literally see your brow lift. You

can do this as long as you like. I usually do it for about a minute, roughly.

Once you've done that, you get your fingers and

make an L shape like that, both sides, and then put

your hands on either side of your nose, making

sure that there's contact with the skin on both

the forefinger and the thumb. So don't let go of

your skin. Make sure there's no gaps. and then just

drain out from under your eye all the way to

your hairline, making sure that everything is

a sliding motion and you're sliding all of this underneath and

all of this along here. So what you've actively done

is you've allowed for your lymphatic system to

kick in and for the blood to start to flow. You'll see

your skin will feel a little bit red in spots where you've knuckled

or whatever. And that's good because that means that the blood is

flowing and it's kind of a little bit of what we do in treatment

when we're doing facials. So you're giving yourself a mini

facial. There are other things that you can add to this. So

if you have a turkey neck and you've got a lot of skin

or you've got a lot of stagnation here in your neck and you feel

like you've got bulk, you can actually move that by

just using your thumb and doing some movements.

Be careful not to touch your thyroid, so avoid

your thyroid. Your thyroid sits around here, just avoid that. Just

work underneath your chin and start

doing these drainage movements towards your

ear, which is where your lymph nodes sit. And you'll start to

see over time, if you do this regularly, consistently for

weeks, you will start to see within five to

seven days, you'll start to see the reduction in this

area because a lot of stagnation sits in this area

of people's faces, mainly because of our diet and sugar

and also all the pollution in the air. So that

wraps up our face yoga session. Please feel free

to have a look at SkinFit New Farm Instagram page.

I've pinned that video to the top of our Instagram

page, so it's easy for you to find. And in the comments, I've

actually put down the steps, the seven steps, so

you can follow them as well. or you can rewind and watch this video

again, and you can go through all the steps with me. And if

you do this three or four times, I would recommend you do

nighttime with a vitamin A, and you can mix your sea buckthorn, black

seed oil, and castor oil in there. And then in

the morning when you're washing your face, do it with your cleanser on

your face. It's a great way to cleanse your skin, get all that vitamin A

off your skin, but also get you set up for your

day. Thank you for joining me on Holistic Skin Guru. If

this episode has helped you get one step closer to

achieving your skin goals, I'd love your support with

a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

And don't forget to subscribe on your favorite platform too. If

you've got any questions about your skin, I'd love to

hear from you. Connect with me at Holistic Skin Guru on

all platforms. Don't forget, as a listener, you can get 10% off

all treatments at our SkinFit New Farm Clinic in

Brisbane. Simply pop the word podcast in

your booking online or mention it on the phone when