EXUBERANT YOGI after practicing Weight Loss Through Yoga, Jewel in the Lotus
I’ve been waiting so long
to be where I’m going to
In the SUNSHINE
OF YOUR LOVE!
I feel so fine… I feel so good
Get Some — Weight Loss Through Yoga, Jewel in the Lotus
Author Archives: DonBothell
LOOKING FOR THE GURU
Guru simply means teacher. The word has gathered baggage in our culture. We’ve all heard stories of teachers who have, to our perception, taken advantage of their followers; cults providing the leader with expensive cars and harems of devotees. Often these seemingly duped followers are made up of the college-educated middle class, with whom we may identify, making these stories more intriguing, mysterious, and perplexing.
Our culture has given us very little meaningful instruction in that most basic of understandings – what is life all about? There are a lot of very unhappy people. When someone comes along who appears to have the answers, it can be very seductive. There are many insights into the human condition in other cultures that may have been overlooked or forgotten by our contemporary society. A charismatic individual, with an admiring group expressing feelings of improvement, can fuel a dynamic.
In the final analysis, if these are capable adults, shouldn’t they be allowed to make their own choses? The question arises though, with materialism and wanton sexuality experientially such a damper on spirituality, what allure do they provide for a supposed spiritual teacher?
II
Historically acolytes would spend years learning in the presence of the guru. Teaching was passed down orally and conduct taught through example. Buddha’s immediate followers grouped around him from his enlightenment to his death over forty years later. Normally the apprentice shadowed their mentor until they were kicked out of the nest or their guru died.
III
With the rebirth in the West of interest in spiritual introspection and efforts toward self-realization, the tendency was to copy the guru/disciple model. With the emerging popularity of yoga it seemed everyone was running around looking for a teacher. Some searchers were able to hookup with a guru and become long-term followers. Most seekers would try a teacher or school, feel disillusioned or a need for more, and move on. A form of sampling developed. Taking what one school would offer, but rather than becoming a lifelong devotee, moving on to another discipline. This is a reflection of our modern world with many sources of information, ideas and concepts coalescing from a wide variety of sources, a synergism. The spiritual transformation going on now is occurring very rapidly. Many old souls need only be reminded of learning that took place in past lives. With the world population so great – how close can we be to having everyone who ever lived incarnate at the same time?
A great shift in consciousness is taking place. We’re just passing a crucial point in human history; a balance so decisive as to decide whether mankind continues or topples. Equilibrium is to be restored through the personal efforts of many individual souls.
IV
As an individual, be with the guru within. Listen to your inner understanding as part of the wisdom directing all creation. Hear the voice of that understanding expressed all around you. When attending a yoga class, don’t hold on to the ways you have performed in the past. Give yourself up to the teacher. You already know what you know. Through trust, dare to be fully alive and try other ways. Listen. Listen to the teacher and the world around you – the words of a child, lyrics of a song, the wind rustling the leaves. The Divine is in everything. Living now in each moment, pay attention to all and learn. This is part of awareness. Be aware.
“Be one with the guru, both inner and outer,” and understand one of many attempts to describe the indescribable – Samadhi.
LEAVE OF ABSENCE FROM BLOG
October 1, I am going to trek the Annapurna Circuit, a circumlocution of one of the major Himalayan peaks. This what is called a ‘teahouse trek’ as I’ll be staying in village huts along the route and eating with the villagers. The trek will take 2 1/2 weeks and will go from semi-tropical lowlands to one pass that is slightly under 18000 ft. and possible zero degree temperatures. Wish me well.
I WILL RESUME BLOGGING ON MY RETURN — November 1
UJAYI
Victorious Breath, Ujayi, can be incorporated into asana practice. You breathe so the breath is purposefully audible. The breath resonates in the back of the throat, nose and mouth in such a way as to resemble the sound of waves and wind at an ocean beach. As well as maintaining attention on the breath, Victorious Breath energizes and strengthens the physical body. WEIGHT LOSS THROUGH YOGA, JEWEL IN THE LOTUS page 114.
FOURTH CHAKRA — HEART CHAKRA
A BEAUTIFUL CHLOROPHYLL GREEN
The fourth, or heart chakra’s, color is a beautiful chlorophyll green and its element is air. The lower three chakras are the material universe and the fourth chakra is the transition point to our divine spiritual manifestation. The heart chakra is the point of transition and the upper three chakras are the higher, or spiritual centers. The ascending line of energy through the Sushumna parallels the evolutionary ascent of humankind from animal to spiritual being. A horizontal line, the point of transition, forms a cross. This is the symbol of the fourth chakra. The teachings of Jesus are fourth chakra teachings. “…And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” The Beatles’ ‘All You Need is Love’ is also an expression of fourth chakra teaching. Astrology, based on observations of earth in relationship to its slowly changing stellar influences, divided earthly time into two thousand year segments, or ages. We are now leaving the segment when the teachings of Jesus were to manifest as the prevailing order. This era, the Piscean Age, shares with Jesus the symbol of the fish. The new age we’re starting to enter is the Aquarian Age, the age of understanding. If we can get our tails over the fence, we will begin to share the promise of the miracles Jesus taught are our birthright.
TRANSITION FROM MATERIAL TO SPIRITUAL IS REPRESENTED BY THE SYMBOL OF THE FOURTH CHAKRA — THE CROSS
FIRST CHAKRA
BEAUTIFUL BRIGHT RED
The first chakra is a beautiful bright red and is representative of the element earth. The first time the meditator may feel fear. The first chakra is associated with the birth process and entering the world for the first time. Everything is new. This experience mirrors the aspirant’s entrance into meditation. Both are natural processes and promise wonder and growth.
This is the part of the body housing the organs of digestion and elimination. The sacrum center is primordial. It has to do with our most animal nature, sexual passion, which brings forth human form to clothe another soul. As the most inherently physical of the chakras its realm is that most physical of pleasures, sexual ecstasy.
SEXUAL
A CHAKRA STUDY (Over the next seven submissions)
COMPLETE INTEGRATED BEING
AWAY
I won’t be posting for a couple days because I’m going on Mt Rainier.
YOGA
Where did it come from, this yoga that is going to answer all my questions, tune me to the universe, transform me, body mind, and soul? The historical answer is still a mystery. However, one explanation based on archaeological discoveries is widely accepted. In the 1920’s, ruins of a civilization were discovered along a no longer existent river system in the region that is now Northern India and Pakistan. Three thousand years before the birth of Christ, this civilization had complex urban centers with running water and underground sewage systems. Their language, Sanskrit, is the root of all the Indo-European languages.
Among the ruins were found many statues depicting what we now associate as being yoga postures. Postures are a part of the yoga tradition that asks the practitioner to look within. This yoga tradition believes the universe is mirrored in each of us. Nature has a working set of solutions that is used on ever greater or lesser scales for everything, as our recent appreciation of fractals demonstrates. To understand something on a scale within our perceptual range allows us to imagine solutions to questions above or below that range. The yoga postures, asanas in Sanskrit, are only a part of yoga. Yoga as practiced in the West has placed most of its emphasis on the practice of asanas. Most Westerners think of yoga as a system of physical exercise, but it is much more.
Yoga asks us to look within, to relax into ourselves, to know ourselves. With complete understanding of the self comes complete understanding. This ‘looking within’ is as old as the human ability to wonder. In that sense, our origin is the beginning of our embrace of yoga.
One broad definition of yoga is the art and science of living. Yoga practice allows understanding to unfold. Other people may help by suggesting techniques for self-exploration, or how and where to look, but all the insights come from your observations. All the answers are your answers. You diligently explore your own direct experience. No faith required.
Weight Loss Through Yoga, Jewel in the Lotus Pages 8 —9.
SECOND CHAKRA — NAVEL CENTER
A VIBRANT ORANGE, AND ITS ELEMENT IS WATER
The second chakra is a vibrant orange and its element is water. Its location is the center of the physical body. The navel is what remains from the umbilical cord that nourished our development in the womb where we are dependent on our host mother for life. Apana energized the erection and fueled the passion, propelled the egg to the fallopian tubes and the sperm to their union. Apana was the life force for the dividing zygote until nadis developed with the development of the umbilical connection to the prana of the mother’s body. As the embryo grew and became more complex, no longer was absorption of the mother’s apana adequate for further growth. Prana from the mother, through the umbilical, gradually replaced it as a source of life force. The mother’s apana provides energy for the birth contractions, forcing the child into the world.
The newborn enters the world separate from the mother. It exhales, and then inhales a first breath. Breathing begins with an exhalation and the last breath at death is an inhalation. With that first breath cycle, the new being draws life force into the body as an individual for the first time. This is the moment of the beginning of life. The spirit enters the body. Before, the now sentient being, was a complex growth within the mothers body. At the moment of life, with that first breath cycle, the circulation of blood in the infant’s body reverses direction. The heart pumps in the opposite direction and the blood that was being pushed through the veins out through the circulatory system is pushed through the arteries and returns to the heart through the veins. A soul has entered the little body, having picked the perfect set of parents, in the perfect set of circumstances, to give it an opportunity to experience what’s necessary for this cycle of spiritual growth. Free will determines how well the opportunity is utilized.
SECOND AND FIRST CHAKRA
