CLEANSE AND RENEW

There is an art of depth and frequency to the cleansing fast and you are a fortunate one to have an appointment with the desire to let go of the habit of food for awhile and get the habit better under control. Practice the discipline of the habit of eating consciously, understanding more about how you eat and what you eat even though it is like getting a team of wild horses under reign...

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KUNDALINI MATA SHAKTI
(Kundalini Mother Power)

Kundalini (soul) is the potential energy of consciousness that is you, consciousness that becomes grounded, gravitating into existing, into being, into gathering the experiences by being alive. Within your own body and through lifetimes (or the genetic memory if you prefer) She ignites in the subtlest body of your being, the nervous system, interacting and interrelating within your physical form....

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Some Thoughts on Bad Habits

        Breaking a bad habit is challenging. There are many spiritual perspectives on habits. It has been said you are just perfect as you are, but if you are gluttonous, or haunted by a loud obsessive thought pattern, or perpetually in the pain of an emotional habit, in truth you are in misery. The Buddha did say life is suffering and the epitaph written was carry the cross but this is a new day and we are not settling well with being enslaved by bad habits. Habits are deep, ancestral, historical, customary, traditional, daily, physical, mental and emotional. When you are young a bad habit is just a trifle but if you go forward through time with it, the day will most likely come that you wish you could stop the habit but you can’t. You have dug deep into the trench and it is no longer a groove or groovy. You may notice how a bad habit is a distraction that keeps you from constructive and creative action; how you may feel torn in two, i.e. should I really be_____this again? Don't I know this will not help me feel motivated to ______?  Ok. Why not? Just one more time won't matter. Tomorrow I will______ And then you may notice how you are beating yourself up for what you just did perhaps while  on your way to the medicine cabinet.

To some degree the habit pendulum swings from feasting to fasting; maybe a wide, slow swing or one where you feel you are getting on with your performance on the stage of your life but you constantly get the hook of the habit! Jerked around. It’s habits that have brought the world to a state of squalor instead of splendor. There may come the point of a saturation where you just can’t take it anymore and you just drop the habit. It is said that the paradox of it is that you just need a decision to drop it. But you probably won’t know this until you experience this and drop it. The symptoms of bad habitual tendencies may be those such as anxious shallow breathing, a blood pressure spike; or there may be depression, drowsiness or a flight into lethargy, low energy or sleep. There may be rapid eye movement and a scattered mind. These are all indications that you are not consciously conscious and you are on automatic pilot. If you have not arrived at that saturation point where success is not guaranteed, get proactive with meditation practice. It is proving time and again to be helpful because in and of itself it is a kind of habit that is helpful to your mind and body, the home of your habits. Meditation calms you and positively affects the biochemistry of habitual tendencies. It helps you to be sharper in your choices for positive, self - supportive and self healing action.  It helps you be persevering when you feel you have failed. Become a gold miner meditator of yourself and dig deep within for the freedoms of being you and being more at peace with your circumstances.

Meditation Habit

                                                                    

Go On and Have a Good Kriya

Kriya is known as the experience of the evolutionary mechanism and energy of Divine Light (Kundalini) moving through the obstacles of the nadis. By the idea of "obstacles of the nadis", the idea may be clarified in the expression "you are your own worst enemy." The subtle nadis are channels that correspond with the structure of the nervous system, the mains, ida (-) pingala (+) and Sushumna (core, or spinal cord) of the spine and the branches, or peripheral (nerve) channels through which Kundalini, this essence energy that is you moves.You are always on all levels of your being under the influence of this movement. It is interesting, the english word "cry" is a sound rooted in the sound of the word "kriya". What is crying but one of the greatest releases and reliefs you experience emotionally; when the obstacle is removed or in the process of it? when the dam breaks? when the victory is attained? the defeat suffered?  Not that everyone wants to go around crying all the time, but it happens. You may also throw things, anger, negativity and anxiety may be the norm.  You may experience deep seated and antagonizing emotions without being conscious of their dynamics and this is where you may find yourself caught in their recurring vortex. In this new Kundalini paradigm you are becoming conscious of your emotions and their subsequent actions. You are being prodded by evolutionary force to question your reality, with a growing awareness of how these internal dams and locks of release have only been the undoing of your old spoiled self; shorn like a lamb! chisled like stone, grist for the mill! Growing in this way is good for the fact that you realize you have had a hand in creating the misery of "reality" along with your fellow human beings. You are in cahoots, all in it together as human beings, creating the conditions whereby you must cry and throw things, or be violent subtley or grossly towards yourself and your fellow human beings. Such are the way things are. But as forementioned, Kundalini is the evolutionary mechanism and many have decided it's time to LIGHTEN up and go forward! It is now understood that through the practice of yoga and other spiritual disciplines you can drop the baggage and allow the Light of your being to grow, flow and shine as your ever radiant soul self. 

Kundalini Yoga and Meditation practice is based on kriya. Kriya facilitated ancient yoga and other spiritual disciplines. These revealed an understanding that the existence of the body and the mind and their workings are owed to the agency of a Divine source! In the experience of union with the Divine, the nadis are fully infused with the sublime, very likely eliciting the cry of the ecstacy of union with the Divine! Called "kriyas" sequences of yoga asana exercise, breathing techniques and sacred sound bites were downloaded  via  the enlightened minds of the yogis for working out pain, drama, emotion,and mental/physical health issues, the aspects of the psyche that block the awareness of that Divine Light within. I liken kriyas to homeopathy where you "treat like with like", for instance the "let the liver live" Kundalini kriya. The liver is said to be the organ associated with anger. You don't have to set someones house on fire or verbally berate your spouse or destroy your liver. You don't have to work things out so much on the pain and drama level of your issues or resort to drugs and substances which leave you in a more dire mental/emotional state and deteriorate your mental and physical health. You use the practice of kriyas, tools to work it out.We are not in the same environs as the ancient yogis although it may be necessary to create some time for sanctuary to sit and be with you. A constant retreat is not what most of us do. We have busy lives and roles in life to fulfill. However, you can be whoever you are and  tap into the Source and allow it to infuse your life and create the conditions for happiness in the ways all human beings have hoped for.  

People often gawk at the prospect of Kundalini disciplines or they are fearful of the unknown but I have always experienced kriyas to be user friendly. Yes it is best to find a teacher and guide who can help you move forward and knows the path well enough. Kriyas are challenging but there is something that most anyone can do, and you have the choice to work at the pace that is comfortable for you. A a little goes a long way. It's up to you. The yogic teachings state that discipline, even a little, is your best friend; the known is magnificent but the state of authentic freedom and enlightenment require you to infuse your known with the majesty and infinity of your unknown. This may sound impractical, but the aims of your life path can be expedited with more flexibility, grace and effectiveness.  By which ever way you go and grow, results vary. You may use the same amount of energy through one way (drama and pain) and then compound the amount of energy you need in order to rectify the consequences! Yogic kriya is very direct and expedient. There are a great number of Kundalini Yoga kriyas (sequential kundalini yoga techniques). You can find many of these archived on the Kundalini Research Institute website and within a great number of manuals and books that have been written based on the teachings of Yogi Bhajan. The master of Kundalini Yoga taught hundreds of yoga and meditation kriyas after the foundation techniques he taught.

Some of the kriyas are designed to be practiced  with natural cycles of the environment to regulate and maintenance your mind and body in concert with the natural environs around you.They gift you with the sensory perception to navigate the ups and downs of life. They are each designed for a specific mind/body effect and outcome and offer formulas or prescriptions for the systematic dismantling of your blocks and fears creating the conditions of inner freedom and health. 

What's Next?

                                                                         

The master of Kundalini Yoga taught that we have brought great woes upon ourselves for not being able to think. The way things are in the world is a result of this. Much good has indeed arisen when thinking is actually happening but the majority of minds are out of control so that there is more reacting and misperceiving than acting from understanding. So in order to preserve our species the human mind will have to evolve so that a new sensory perception of awareness commands. This is not a rational faculty of the mind but one that guides the rational and one that can absolve the stale habits of the ages. It is intelligence itself.  He taught that we already have it and we call it intuition. It is hardly tapped, and it is on the horizon for us to begin a deepening journey into. Meditation increases it. Women are thought to have more of it. 

We have heard through many sources and for some time that on December 21 our planet will align with the core of the milkyway.  Many prophesies and predictions of the past point to these times as a springtide of creation and a time of great destruction and dismantling. Even though these changes are hardly noticeable to us, and even though the timeline of change is ever so slow at times in our experience of all things passing, nothing will stop the thrust of this great tide. His/Herstory has been a long haul of very dramatic changes through time and as time marches on more changes lie ahead. Life will go on and great things of imagination and creation will occur as will the resistances to change. Some changes may come like a thief in the night in extreme loss or in quantum shifts of great renewal. Overall though, life goes on and most changes are not noticeable and very incremental. Among these are the changes that occur in the human mind and heart.

All of us are in it together as we as humans are born with the creative impetus and are making and writing the history true and false as we go. If we become wise, (His) story will wax into greater Her story and then, “We story”. Through awareness or by default we are “making it happen” from the inside (our minds and hearts) to the outside the “reality”.

A "Secret" Knowledge of Yoga

                                                                           
Kundalini is the essence of Tantra and Tantra is for time. From this has arisen a body of knowledge that is ever enduring and rooted in the understanding that every individual is a microcosm of the macrocosm.  The mind and body express the universal forces as energy and matter. These forces conduct themselves in the composition and constitution of the systems of the mind and body such as through the nervous system and glandular system. These bodily systems have an affinity for the energies of the moon, sun, other stars and constellations. Through time and development Yoga practices arose in order for the individual to align with these celestial bodies, their orbital positions and cyclic movements in order to draw on their energies; to heal and spiritualize the body and mind. It was taught how to tap these energies as they manifested through the seasons, and through animal and plant life to heal and restore as well. These energies were thought to be of universal and Divine origin through Kriya or the experience of the pathways of movement and flow of these energies within. Yoga practices proceeded from this knowledge including asana, pranayama, bhandas, mantra, concentration and meditation technique. Kundalini was experienced through kriya as  integration, merger and the most refined state of the universal energy within. These experiences were recorded in a poetic and emotional language as a direct experience of the realms experienced in merger through yoga and meditation.

Many of these practices were greatly considered “secret”  only because they were not yet understood nor did many care to understand these so called mysteries. They were often reserved and forwarded by the few who safeguarded the mysteries, sharing them only with those with a thirst and propensity for understanding, or with  those ordained to receive such as a heirarchy or royal lineage. Yet there has always been a deep inborn wonder about the workings and origins regarding the phenomena of life to some degree in everyone. And so the masses extracted from the mysteries observances, rituals, and celebrations. Earlier these arose to honor the tellurian world and the dieties associated with them, to insure resources and protection. They could satisfy the queries of not knowing the unknown or seeing the unseen. They could "explain away" the mysteries of life with attached justifications for the not so endearing actions and behaviors of humanness. From these came the religions we know today. With passing time and in the deepening clefts and crises of religion, the sky gave us the intervention of a new view called Science. With the observances of such as Copernicus, himself a student of the ancients, came a posturing on a new point of origin on the circle of knowledge and understanding and so we are off onto the next round where Science, Religion and ancient knowledge will merge.

it's hopeless

Shambala Sun

One of my favorite teachings was issued by a contemporary of Pema Chodron, Ken Friedman, both students and disciples of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche founder of Shambala path of Buddhist meditation . Ken Friedman lived here in Columbia South Carolina in the sixties and was a professor at USC. On a beautiful day early in the fall of the early eighties, Ken made his way back to Columbia from the Shambala Center in Nova Scotia where he was assigned by Chogyam Rinpoche to teach. Arrangements were made for Ken’s visit here and a lecture on the horseshoe. I anticipated his visit with much excitement for I had been married at his home and I was soaking up Chogyam Rinpoche’s teachings in that day. He arrived to a gathering of about a dozen people and from his seat silently acknowledged the gathering with a scan of his eyes. After a moment of silence he uttered “it’s hopeless”. I guess you could of heard a pin drop and before he went on to elaborate on some basic tenets of Shambala meditation, it was noticeable that most of the few were squirming with discomfort. 


What “I” endures most often while confronting an authentic spiritual teaching or experience is discomfort and I remember one of Rinpoche’s most well known quotes “Enlightenment is the ego’s greatest disappointment”. So when things are unraveling just know that “I” is doing the same. Nudges, great  and small, to drop the “I” have been described in many ways in many traditions but in a nutshell  “let it go” sums it up. Discomfort is good news. I remember this when I am doing a long stretch of Sat Kriya or when challenges show up. Yogi Bhajan Master of Kundalini Yoga spoke also of discomfort as a condition we often associate with discipline. He said the meditative way is uncomfortable but in a much different way. It  is “polite.” He laid out as a part of his training, a path that included mind and body practices for the strength to be open to challenge. He said every time you face a challenge say  the mantra "victory" in your head or aloud. Just keep saying it.  If you are to continue on which you must, you will return back to yourself after ordeal, and  breathe a sigh of relief that you had opportunity to lose some baggage and gain a little more sense of inner freedom.  You might reflect on those inner conditions driving you through heights and depths of stress before. Those were… yep…hopeless.

The Heart of Matters

Into the summer we go! At once and the same time a bustling of energy and relaxing with opportunities and intentions for leisure and play The sky is benevolent with the completion of a rare 5 pointed star transit of Venus and on  June 5 the planet moves between the earth and the sun, astronomically beautiful and astrologically filled with celestial force and energies purported to be very beneficial to us. If you are interested you can access much ado about the topic of "venus conjuncting the sun" or "venus transit" or "venus eclipse".“We are the stuff that stars are made of”. 

Venus is the planet associated with the heart chakra. As you know our society is plagued with heart disease. The ticker is a very resilient organ and will beat several billion times in a lifetime. But the heart suffers because it is deprived of its job and gets an ongoing beating.You can have the heart of a lion. Let your heart be a courageous one..(cour translates to heart in French!) A courageous heart is a compassionate one. A compassionate heart is the strongest of all. There is a large portion of the mind that experiences everything and everyone in concert with the heart. In relationship to “other” the human requirement is to come into your heart and realize that the other and your self are fellow or fellowette human beings. Apart from all that stands between you and makes you different, just by being human you have much more in common. Human beings strive to be happy. Human beings need acceptance and assurance, need nourishment and rest, need confirmation and affirmation, humans need the relatedness of other human beings. If you have all these then you are most likely one who is giving these to others.

 Dharma is the path of cultivating humility without humiliation whatever your role in life may be. When your pride and ego dominate such as when you want to retaliate, that is karma.When humiliation does come on your life path accept this as an opportunity for learning. When others are mean spirited towards you, your challenge is  to not take it so personally and hold the space for peace.This is a true seva. To serve and uplift the other, to make contribution to another's life is a true seva.  If someone has a completely different point of view and is all upset because you disagree just relax. And relax if you disagree. The best is to share views and try to see an issue by standing for at least a moment in that one's shoes, trying to understand how they arrived at the sense or nonsense of it. Consider if you wore those shoes and journeyed under the influence of those same circumstances and environments you might see things and act in the same way.  It is not easy to give happiness to everyone. But you can project this from your mind's eye and heart  for them and then go on your own way. Why tarry long enough to get yourself hot under the collar?  A person has to come into his or her own happiness really. Anything outside of you that you depend on for your personal happiness is limited. Flowers remind me of this. They are so magnificent but only briefly and then there they go! With an investment in perennials hold an attitude of gratitude for them.  Happiness is enjoyable and  perennial in moments or a day that comes back around when you remember how much you like this such and such or this so and so. Lots of things are like that and we call this ephemeral happiness. It is fleeting and sadly so if you have invested too much into what you expect it to do for you. At most you have about 3 months max to be continuously happy about having attained something external. That’s because happiness is inside in the heart.  That is the only place you can abide in an enduring happiness.  Happiness is happiest in the happiness of others.

May 2012

As we approach the summer season things will start to cook. I am hearing from many people regarding the pressures of the times and I will share that there are energies afoot that many are not consciously tapped into and so are at the mercy of the immense changes our planet and collective consciousness is undergoing. You may have heard of these cosmological, energetic forces as they pertain to the celestial. The orbital velocity of our galaxy has increased in speed as we move in the centripetal force towards the core of the greater galactic  system. Our sense of time and space is shifting and as we are each in our own way a micro version of the universal network. As individuals and unit microcosms of the universal system we are consciously in a greater and greater bask of our own core of light. Our collective consciousness is shifting. As a civilization we are awakening from the sleep and darkness of the ages. If you feel like something is rocking your world this is true.  If you are wondering “Am I losing my mind?” The answer is yes in a sense. Yogi Bhajan talked about these changes often in his teachings years ago, and he said that when the pressures of time and space are upon you start and they will be off. What do you start? You start with a focus from your core, which is essentially the point of view of your consciousness.  You work with the creative potential of your mind. This often begins with a change of identity; you as ‘losing it’ to you as ‘finding’ in a broader self discovery.  Challenge the entrenched habits of the light and sound of your mind. Challenge the pictures and projections of your mind, your inner talk, and your dependence on your mind. Habits are acquired and not the real you.  Changing your mind is how all else changes.