6 THIS PRACTICE IS FOR YOU
You are already that which you want to be, and your refusal to believe this is the only reason you do not see it.
NEVILLE GODDARD
IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS you heard about the keys that unlock our energy and thinking with kundalini yoga. Now we will dive deeper into the practice. In this chapter you will find key elements of kundalini yoga that are especially helpful to know as you continue your practice and start clearing your energy.
TUNING IN
Before we begin a yoga session, we first open an inner space of reverence by bringing our awareness to our breathing, our body, the prana that is flowing through all, and the sacredness in that prana. We use a special mantra to vibrate and connect our inner self with the creative infinite. Yoga opens us to the most sacred aspects of our existence, the essence of our being, and the essence of all there is. As we open, we recognize that our individual consciousness and the divine grace of the universe are intertwined in never-ending and beautiful ways.
The following two practices are done to open the sacred space within our hearts prior to beginning a yoga session.
MINDFUL CENTERING
Instead of just diving into an exercise, it is important to first come back to our connection with our expanded nature. This is the stable platform from which we operate on the soul level. The practice called Nadi Sodhni is a way of tuning in with breath in order to clear our energy channels, be present, and open the inner space to the flow of your own energy. Nadi Sodhni literally means “to clear the energy channels of our body so prana can flow freely.” The practice is simple but creates a dramatic internal change. Nadi Sodhni can be done before your yoga practice, but it is also a gift at any time to uplift your endeavors by bringing your entire being into alignment with the divine flow.
1 Sit up straight, close your eyes, and focus your attention on the third eye point.
2 Feel the aliveness of your spinal column as it aligns and rises up like a lotus stalk from your perineum to the top of your head. Sense the beautiful fragrance of your aura. Slow your breath down and observe the flow of love-infused prana entering your lungs. Visualize the prana the breath carries flowing through your spine, permeating every fiber of your body, and expanding into your aura.
3 Continue to slow your breath down, holding it in after the inhale and out after the exhale. Feel your presence in your body as one with the universe. Repeat for several breaths until you feel ready and aware enough to take on your practice.
ADI MANTRA
Ong
Namo
Guru
Dev
Namo
Repeating the Adi Mantra before we begin our yoga practice aligns our energy field with the creative energy of the universe. Just as the musicians in an orchestra will tune their instruments to a common note, this mantra tunes our being to the same frequency of consciousness as that of the lineage of spiritual teachers who have come before us.
The mantra is “Ong Namo Guru Dev Namo” (pronounced “ong nahm-oh -guh-roo dayv -nahm-oh ”), and our translation is, “I honor the creative force of the universe, which is within me, around me, and beyond.” Ong is the creative force of the infinite. Namo is the greeting of one divine essence honoring another, as light recognizing light. Combined together, “Ong Namo” is a mutual recognition and salutation in the realm of spirit between the finite creation of your own consciousness and the infinite creative force. Guru Dev means “the great enlightener,” which is the force of the universe that brings us from darkness to light.
Repeat this mantra three or more times before any yoga practice. Take a moment after chanting to sit still while immersing yourself in the exquisite reverberation of the sound as pure soundless vibration.
1 Sit up with your spine straight. Close your eyes and press your palms firmly together in front of your heart with your thumbs against your sternum. Observe your breath flowing in and out through your nostrils, filling your lungs and abdomen while bringing light and love to your entire being. Imagine you are going to vibrate the words of the mantra into the totality of all creation and connect with the creative force behind it.
2 Take several deep breaths in and out through the nose.
Ong
Namo
Guru
Dev
Namo
3 When you are ready to chant, with the exhale, slowly form the sacred sound of this mantra: “Ong Namo Guru Dev Namo.” Feel the vibration in your spine and third eye point. Envision the sound as it ripples into the space around and within you, in divine recognition of the creative force of the universe. The sound of the “o” wells up from the timeless depths of your abdomen and reverberates into the light channel of the spine and into the space around your body. The buzzy sound of “ngggg” resonates in the midbrain and at the crown of the head, opening the crown chakra to the wisdom of spirit.
4 Imagine the cord of light from the base of your spine to the crown of your head surrendering in devotion to the infinite creative force.
5 Repeat the mantra three or more times before you begin your yoga session.
CLOSE YOUR EYES
Be still. . . . Stillness reveals the secrets of eternity.
LAO-TZU
One of the most beautiful aspects of practicing kundalini yoga is that we become aware of the subtleties within our body and the ripples of energy through our aura. These treasures of life are right inside us, and we can sense them with our eyes closed. Therefore, we practice most of kundalini yoga with our eyes shut. In life we spend so much time searching outside of ourselves for answers, yet the true wisdom can be discovered in still, inner silence.
At night we can see the stars in the dark sky, but in the day, there is so much ambient light we can’t perceive them. Closing our eyes in yoga is like re-creating that night sky. We are able to become aware of subtleties that simply are impossible to see with the eyes open.
THIRD EYE POINT
The third eye point, the area between the eyebrows, is the natural resting point for our focus when we are not thinking about all sorts of other things. Concentrating on this point generates mental and emotional relaxation. It becomes the platform of repose for the mind, like a sacred altar. In the pages of this book, you will often come upon instructions to concentrate on the third eye point. This kind of attention is never tense. It’s an easy, natural thing to do when we relax.
TIP OF THE NOSE
In many kundalini yoga exercises, we lower the eyelids nearly all the way down and gaze at the tip of the nose. This ancient practice quiets the mind and opens the sensitivity of the third eye. Normally our eyes are very reactive, reflexively looking in the direction of any motion that comes across the retina and also moving in response to our thoughts. For example, if you try to remember something from your childhood, your eyes will move as your mind searches for the memory. Even in our dreams the eyes roam around behind our eyelids in response to the images in our mind.
The optic nerve is a bundle of nerves that runs like a highway through the center of our brain; it has a major branch going to the pineal gland. The pineal gland in turn influences our melatonin production, our sense of calm, and our sensitivity to subtle shifts in the electromagnetic field. By lowering your eyelids, drawing your eyes inward, and looking at the tip of your nose, you will allow the more sensitive impressions reaching the third eye to be discerned and your mind to quiet itself. This is a scientifically based physiological response. By doing this, we stabilize the optic nerve impulses that trigger the motor neurons creating eye movement.
If your mind is racing, try this technique. As you hold your gaze at the tip of your nose, observe your mind beginning to slow down.
STEADY PRACTICE
Steady, patient practice makes for steady progress. Having a rhythm to your routine—whether it is every day, every other day, or three days a week—creates a frequency, and a frequency creates a vibration, and a vibration can move mountains. We have found that if you practice every day, or at least three times per week, you will see amazing progress. Life begins to flow. Doors begin to open. There really are not words to describe the magic. The only way to experience it is to do it.
Ideally, try to practice in the early morning before dawn, the traditional time to do kundalini yoga. The hormonal changes that occur naturally in the quiet predawn hours make our bodies receptive to the deep energy shifts that start developing with kundalini yoga practice.
CREATING SACRED SPACE
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.
CARL JUNG
We have the ability to create a sacred environment so that our homes become a space of safety and comfort, a reminder to be disciplined in our practice and our self-care, and a place to create a routine in our lives that connects us to our higher selves. Our home can reflect back to us our inherent divinity and grace. Set up a space for your practice that is clear of distractions, technology, and clutter of any sort. On a small table, we can make an altar with pictures and objects that connect us to spirit. Anything that speaks to our highest consciousness and helps us feel uplifted can be placed on the altar.
Creating sacred space often requires the removal of other objects that clutter our field of consciousness or that carry a negative emotional charge. Clutter is a huge energetic distraction in our lives. Everything holds energy, and anything that is not loved, needed, or valuable can be given away. When we release objects rather than holding on to them, we open space for new love and energy to enter our lives. This is the concept of prana and apana . Until what we need to eliminate energetically, apana, is released, prana will be restricted. Recycling is a form of giving back, and the universe always returns the favor. Less is more. Let go of what you do not need or love, so more beauty can enter your field.
MOVING THROUGH ENERGETIC BLOCKS
Keep up and you will be kept up.
YOGI BHAJAN
You may find yourself feeling frustrated at times as your newfound energy starts to seem impeded by walls of long-held resistance. As we are doing an exercise, we often find ourselves before an inner wall where our mind will start fabricating all sorts of reasons to stop. The breakthroughs happen when we stay with it—but not to the point of injury. When you feel like giving up, consciously breathe and ask yourself, “Is it my mind, or is it my body?” This is a crucial distinction. We have to discern between our mind’s unhealthy resistance and our body’s healthy warning signs. We have seen people trying to power through their pain, which is a dangerous course to take whether in daily life or in yoga. It is important to cultivate inner sensitivity to our body. Be aware of your intuition, your inner dimension, and your physical condition and forgive yourself if you are not where you want to be. Life is not a race, and you are exactly where you are supposed to be. Kundalini yoga is noncompetitive and noncomparative. Wisdom and sensitivity carry the day. If we always follow our heart wisdom rather than the expectations of the mind, we will find the balance we need to keep steady in the face of challenge.
Once we determine that the blocks of the mind are causing the resistance, we can choose to stay with the exercise and continue breathing deeply. We will often then notice that we have moved past our self-imposed wall and into a beautiful new inner vista. Always and invariably, however, another wall will come up. Whether one is a beginner or a longtime master, the inner work is exactly the same. There are infinite walls and infinite breakthroughs and infinitely more beautiful vistas. The process is one of addressing each new challenge that feels tailor-made to meet us where we are.
By concentrating in a relaxed yet focused way, we can often continue beyond what we thought were our limitations. Moving past our limits is not about creating tension or fighting something. It is about softening, breathing, and filling yourself with so much light that your awareness dissolves into it. With regular practice our body and mind gain the capacity to stay steady, relaxed, still, and centered, even in the face of challenge.
YOUR MIND IS NOT YOU
God and Mind, and Mind and God are not two things. One is the vehicle, and one is the destination.
YOGI BHAJAN
As we clarify our awareness with kundalini yoga, we start to see our own mind more clearly. Our mind is one of the most remarkable machines, constantly sorting, analyzing, inventing solutions, creating categories, making sense. We love our mind. But we are not our mind. The mind is a powerful steam engine, yet it needs an engineer to drive it. The engineer is you—the soul that is coupled to your heart.
A mind without a boss is like a runaway train. It keeps shoveling coal into its own fire and chugging down a track—even when it’s the wrong track. The mind actually isn’t all that smart. It is the locomotive engine whirring away at lightning speed and coming up with ideas every millisecond. But it needs our soul to say when it is right or wrong.
In ancient India they called it the “monkey mind,” because it jumps around like an untrained monkey from thought to thought without focus. One day we feel loved and adored, and the very next day we wonder why we said what we said and if we might have upset someone and whether what we did will cause everything to come crashing down like a line of dominoes. On a Saturday we feel like we have things figured out, and by Wednesday we worry we are making every mistake possible. These are the illusions the machinery of the mind creates.
The lens that the mind tries to see through is often distorted by false perceptions or vibrations from past traumas caught in the subconscious and echoing in the aura. The mind creates false scenarios based on past experiences, and these influence the present moment.
Our work in our yoga practice is to train the mind to sit still, see clearly, and be ready for action when we need it. We develop a volume knob, a tone control, and an on-off switch. Then our mind becomes a fabulously useful gift—a servant rather than a tyrant.
Once we start trusting our heart to direct our path, the mind will follow by figuring out how to implement our soul’s callings on earth. This is when synchronicity begins to unfold.
Did you know that scientists discovered the heart has a brain of its own? The heart of a fetus begins beating before the brain is even developed. The heart has a neuronal complex with billions of synaptic connections. The brain of the heart knows that love rules everything. Trusting the heart over the mind can make us feel frightened and vulnerable. However, learning to trust this inherent wisdom of the heart is one of the greatest powers of the kundalini yoga practice.
When we soften inward, we are melting into the arms of the divine and allowing soul-level direction. Most of us were not brought up to understand that the soul is in the driver’s seat or that the mind can be a tool to serve our soul’s mission. Love, kindness, and upliftment are our soul-level quests, the opposite of overthinking, contracting, and reacting.
THE PROBLEM WITH THINKING
Where there is love, there is nothing impossible.
YOGI BHAJAN
It is practically impossible to alter our thought patterns by thinking. In the self-help world we are sometimes advised to choose good thoughts in order to be healthy and whole, but the reality is that thinking our way out of established patterns is an unattainable goal. Although we feel called by a force in our soul to allow our energetic beauty to shine, it’s like climbing an ice mountain. Our first impulse is to hold on with a white-knuckled grip to an outdated mental map book that actually no longer serves us. We try to do the “right thing,” even though underneath we may feel it isn’t. Often we have practiced patterns of thoughts that undermine our fulfillment all our lives. These patterns become powerfully ingrained vibrations persistently distracting our attention. Think as we may that we would like to change, we easily slide back and find ourselves enmeshed in old patterns, spinning the same thoughts, and going to sleep with the same old fears that we know are not good for us. We can feel powerless to get free of this cycle, and the feeling of powerlessness itself can become an even steeper slope of ice that keeps us sliding and spinning. So what do we do?
What we have found is that by releasing physical tension you can release the thought patterns that hold that tension in place. The physical work of kundalini yoga allows your soul-level energy to clear the whirlpools of energetic vibration that thinking creates. As you practice the exercises on the following pages, you may find that you can perceive your mind with a new perspective. You can start to see the pattern of thinking as different from you. As you feel your kundalini energy become activated, it grows so much brighter than the whirlpools of thoughts. The clear, quiet, persistent voice of our soul keeps becoming stronger. This is a fascinating process, and no one can say for sure how it works. However, when the soul leads through the heart, those old, habitual patterns of thinking seem to dissolve in the brilliance of your own light.
NATURALLY SPIRITUAL
Make friends with the angels, who though invisible are always with you. Often invoke them, constantly praise them, and make good use of their help and assistance in all your temporal and spiritual affairs.
SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES
Human beings are naturally spiritual. The feeling of connection to a force greater than oneself is one of the most compelling drives common to all of humanity and throughout all of history. The impulse to align with what we feel as a mystical, spiritual power calls us to action the same way our drives for food, shelter, and sexuality do. The feeling of spirit is inherently a personal experience.
In kundalini yoga we welcome the experience of spirit. It happens! We do not preach. We allow. We find that when we break through the blockages of our energy and our prana begins to flow, a natural, heightened sense of our own divinity often breaks through as well. When we relate to our spirit, we allow our purest energetic potential to flow through our being. We open the door to the angelic dimension, and this is where divine guidance can come through.
Many emotions well up in kundalini yoga as we meditate and move our energy. People have a profound deepening of awareness and clarifying of vision. Often this leads to tangible and direct spiritual experiences. It is so common to feel deeply in the practice of opening that we almost take the tears flowing in a kundalini class as a normal occurrence. They are tears of release and tears of remembering who we are. It is a natural part of being truly human. It is the washing away of energetic clutter. It is the bliss that comes from a catharsis.
TIMING YOUR PRACTICE
Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.
MOTHER TERESA
Presetting a specific amount of time for each exercise creates an intention that can help you transcend what you thought your limit was. If you are new to kundalini yoga, take it easy on your body and listen to what your intuition is saying about how long to practice. It is fine to practice an exercise for less time than specified in the instructions and often fine to go longer, too, but whatever length of time you choose, we encourage you to set the intention to finish so you receive the sense of fulfillment that comes with completion. As you progress, you can gradually increase the amount of time you practice.
Throughout this book, we have suggested a range of times for the practice of each exercise, designed to address from beginning-to advanced-level practitioners. We leave it to you to determine what works best for you.
ENDING YOUR YOGA SESSION
The final inhalation at the end of a yoga, chanting, or meditation practice is a powerful moment of integration. The cessation of movement doesn’t mean the exercise is over. It means the door has been opened, and now is the moment to step through it. Give yourself time to truly assimilate the shifts in your energy, hormones, and blood flow before you run off to do something else. Stay seated and conscious for at least a minute and preferably longer. It is during this quiet time that we often reach new realizations. We have seen so many people just jump up from the mat as soon as their last position is over and miss out on a crucial part of the process. Please give yourself this gift of time to be aware. It truly is the moment you have waited for. And then carry it with you into your day, your steps, and your words. In a kundalini yoga class, the session is traditionally finished with a sweet song and three repetitions of the mantra Sat Nam to contain the energy that has been generated.
We like to think of this moment when we end the practice as the receiving of a gift. It is similar to the pause between the inhale and the exhale. It is the moment we stop doing and we begin being. This is the space where miracles happen. It is the moment of still perfection that attracts light and love with ease. Hold on to the feeling of this moment and practice coming back to it all day long. In this way the yoga session never really ends.
RELAX
The human expansion from individual self to universal self is through the art of relaxation.
YOGI BHAJAN
When our body relaxes instead of constricts, we open ourselves to the love-infused prana that is always available and coursing through us. Like ocean waves at the beach, waves of energy in the earth’s magnetic field wash away the havoc and hassles of the day, leaving us shiny, bright, pure, and alive. Our entire being integrates—mind, body, breath, soul, aura, and radiance. We reconnect with the most subtle and important aspects of life that otherwise go unnoticed in our whirlwind of daily activities.
Rather than working toward changing anything, we simply allow ourselves the pure delight of surrender. We relax into the arms of the divine. The parasympathetic nervous system takes charge, and our body rebalances internally. True healing occurs, starting in our very core.
DEEP RELAXATION
The most fundamentally important pose in all of yoga is deep, conscious relaxation while lying on the back. A yoga session typically ends with a practice of Deep Relaxation three to thirty minutes long. But you do not have to have done any previous exercise in order to do this one. Simply lying down for eleven minutes at any time during your day and following the instructions below can change your entire outlook. During this period of nondoing, a great deal goes on internally. It is when the most dramatic shifts can occur, if we allow them to.
In Deep Relaxation we can completely let go. We begin to see with new eyes that everything is perfect just as it is. A golden thread of divine order runs through our lives. We see that everything we experience is here to help us grow into our best version of ourselves. We are reminded of the short life we are given, and we are offered an opportunity to awaken into our highest potential by evolving, trusting, and allowing the universe to do its work.
Our circulation can relax as well, so covering yourself with a shawl or blanket will help you keep from getting chilly. Find a firm but comfortable mat or carpet to lie on. Our natural receptivity to visible light affects our hormones, even when light hits anywhere on our skin, so keep the lights switched off or as low as possible, especially those that might shine directly into your third eye point.
1 Lie down onto your back and cover yourself with a light blanket or shawl. Place your arms alongside your body with your palms facing the sky and legs spread at least shoulder width apart.
2 Allow the weight of your legs to surrender to gravity, your feet to let go of the need to move, and your toes to open out toward the sides. Surrender as though you could not even think of moving. Melt your limbs, torso, and head into the ground and feel the loving presence of the earth supporting and encouraging you.
3 Slow down your breathing, feeling the flow of breath through your nose and up past your third eye. Feel your breath as light and love flowing deeply into your body, and feel that light flowing through the electromagnetic field around you.
4 Feel the energy of the universe as interwoven with your own energy field, washing through your aura and clearing away blocks. Feel grace and love washing away tension and cleansing areas of resistance in your energy field. Allow yourself to heal. Receiving is your birthright. This is a magical moment. Trust that you are enough; trust that you are loved.
5 Continue for three to thirty-one minutes.
6 To return from Deep Relaxation, first bring your body back to conscious movement by rotating your wrists and ankles. Then briskly rub the soles of your feet and your palms together, stimulating the nerve endings and reinvigorating your circulation. Hug your knees to your chest and rock forward and backward on your back several times to reset your magnetic field. Then sit up and feel refreshed, brightened, and connected.