Do you want to feel more peaceful? More energized? More focused? Let go of your issues? Yoga teaches us to do these things quickly and easily. It begins by paying attention to what is happening inside you as you lie in meditation at the end of your yoga session.

When you do yoga, the stretching and breathing and physical exertion change the chemistry inside your body. Your focus on breathing out has triggered your parasympathetic nervous system, leaving you feeling more relaxed. The stretching has released tension from your body, giving you access to that same energy for other purposes. Strong breathing has changed the chemical balance in your blood stream, muscles, organs and brain. Your physical exertion has boosted your endorphins, making you feel focused and energized. Basically, as you lie there, you begin to realize that you just feel great!

This is an important moment. At this time you begin to notice how you feel, deep inside. You slip into positive mental-emotional states. The more you lie there and notice these states, the more you're going to be able to tap into them later.

Here's how that works. I'll have to give a bit of background first on conditioned responses.

You may have heard of the scientist Pavlov and his experiments with dogs. He would ring a bell every time he fed them. After a while, the dogs associated the ringing of the bell with dinner. So, after a while, when Pavlov rang the bell, the dogs would automatically begin to drool, even though it wasn't dinner time.

This is called conditioned response. It can be very powerful. Since Pavlov did his experiments, science has explored conditioned responses extensively. For example, we have since learned that the stronger the stimulus, (like Pavolv's bell being louder) and the more often you do the stimulus, (like the more often he rang the bell at dinner time), the stronger the connection you could make between the stimulus, (the bell) and the response, (drooling). But every now and then, you have to stop doing the stimulus-response, in order to make the connection even stronger.

That's a very quick, short course on the subject. There's a lot of information available on it. Pop culture has embraced it. The latest, most intricate use of this associative conditioning is in the NLP movement, Neurolinguistic Programming.

In these kinds of movements, you learn to tap into your past experiences of mental-emotional states and bring those feelings into the present, so that you can have those feelings now.

Yoga has instinctively been tapping into this phenomenon. It's conditioned responses that make your meditation at the end of your practice so important. The more you take time for your post-practice meditation, the more you notice and connect to the experiences you generate during your practice. You start to become more and more aware of how it feels to be happy, relaxed, energized, focused, alert, pro-active. You start to notice the things that you do that bring one feeling up more than another. You start to notice how different breathing encourages different thoughts and feelings. You start to feel like different feelings 'sit' in different places.

By noticing all these things, you start accumulating tools to tap into your feelings whenever you want. Throughout the day, you become more and more able to remember how it feels to have those feelings. You start using breathing or stretches to more easily bring those feelings back. You begin to be able to remember how it feels to lie back after practice and feel so good. Eventually you become able to think about the feeling and have it available to you.

All that from just lying back and simply noticing what's going on inside you. That's a lot of reward for very little effort.