Love

So, maybe love is the scary thing? I was thinking about it. Don't we all really just want to love? To be loved? Even sharing love with those we may not know? If our spirits are all one or connected, can we really not know someone?

You see it all over, in stores, walking down the street, runners, sitting in a cubicle, in Whole Foods for gods sakes--people all walking around slouching their shoulders forward all around their heart, protecting that area so as to not be hurt.

I think thats what drew me to Anusara in the first place, the emphasis on the shoulders back and the lift of the chest, or shoulder loop if you're in the know;). It felt scary and unsafe, opening up the front of my chest like that, having a concave chest from slouching as a kid the last thing I'd want to do is open up. But once I embraced the scariness of it and how I love to test myself I fell for it and realized that opening my heart area or heart chakra physically was going to open my heart metaphorically as well. And it has.

The expansion on that came when I began incorporating more and more kundalini into my practice and it opens up and moves the thymus glad which is in essence your heart chakra. That energy was no longer blocked. I had taken the time and effort to open up my three lower energy centers and the link between them, the physical ones, and the three upper ones, the spiritual ones is the heart center. The one area where you feel spiritual and physical together, bringing balance. And that was where I needed to open up and did.

And there is where most people need to open up. I know some who actually are working towards it and I'm glad for it, I'm working on it daily. Now though, the work is how to incorporate that work into my life. To love? To just love freely, with no care for reciprocation? Yes! That is the answer methinks. I am working on it diligently, I hope anyway. I'm trying to observe that I'm being open and free and loving to any that approach me and any that don't.

I did find that when I let go a bit too much with someone I was interested in it seemed to backfire on me, but that friendship seems to be mending itself and I am still just letting myself love him and give him the space he needs to figure out where he wants to go with it, which may end up being nowhere near where I want to go with it, and does that bother me? Maybe, but should it let me stop giving the love freely? I think not. I think it feels good to give love, of course it feels good to receive it as well but is that the point? I don't know, maybe to learn how to receive it is a point in and of itself, but not the point of this message.

I am of the mind that one should take care of oneself first, ones own connection first and foremost, but then move out from there and become loving and giving to oneself and then out to others in your immediate life and then out from there. It starts at home and with a little impetus moves out, ... from your heart.

So lets all work on being more loving and more embracing of one another, even thru what we would view as their faults or their triumphs and create a global community based around acceptance of diversity and love. Sounds nice doesn't it? It does to me and I'm starting at home. With my practice, making it a priority to keep opening me up, unblocking all my barriers and then moving to those I live with, with love, and then to those I love but don't live with, and then out to my students, then out beyond that.

It feels great to be open, scary? yes, but thats okay. Fear is the mindkiller, so let loose of your fears and love them away!

Do something once a day that scares you...

I have seen this lately every day, as a bumper sticker, as a magnet at Borders, on a tshirt on Tuesday. Somewhere, on something it has reared its message to me once a day for at least two weeks.

So, what am I supposed to do about it? I am not scared of much anymore. I fear talking in front of people and yet that is what I do for a living, so daily I confront that. Can't be that. I am not a social person and yet have to live again to make my living in a semi social situation, especially at my market in the park classes where its a big social event, so it can't be that.

I fear commitment I think, maybe not, but I always avoid it but when I realized that and committed myself to my kundalini practice it began changing me and expounding the results almost instantly, it takes that to make kundalini work. Do I fear other types of commitment? Maybe. I'm not sure. I commit to daily trying to live by my best example, but fall short a lot I'm sure, I am human.

Hmmm, what scares me that I can tackle that I don't already tackle daily? I feel I'm being led in this direction to embrace my fears and come out on the other side of them, so let me think about it and see what I can today to make it happen. Start the movement to the other side of a fear. I don't like to be afraid of things, but must say that I am because we all are, and are raised to be scared of everything and I've done a lot of work to let go of the ones I thought were the big ones. The irrelevant ones like my fear of sharks only matter if I'm visiting Maui, so I'm not talking about that.

What scares you? Not a big thing, start small. If you're scared to tell someone in line ahead of you they smell nice, then today make yourself do it. Something along those lines, easy and something that won't really matter in the end. If the person thinks you're crazy does it matter? You may never see him/her again, so who cares, tell 'em!

Magic and other things . . .

Magic has been on my mind a lot lately, and yes because of Harry Potter. I saw the last movie for the second time today with a friend who had been wanting to see it and asked me to go. After I saw it the first time I was finally influenced to read the books which I had been avoiding and swore I would never read, not sure why, but that was where I stood. But after they killed Dumblodore I had to read this stuff that seemed deeper than what I would have expected. Not to mention it was a brilliantly made film, the cinematography and everything. But I digress.

So I've now read the first 3 books and picked up another one called The Magicians by Lev Grossman which is a grown up more gritty Harry Potteresque type story, but not at the same time. I'm only half way through it but love it very much.

As a child I was obsessed with magic, not the magicians and David Copperfield brand, but sorcery. Making things happen by shear will power and intention, it amazed me, along with Sci Fi. Then when 30 and I found hatha yoga, it seemed like alchemy was a real thing at least. Changing my body chemistry and my brain to function more clearly, my eyes to see better, my hearing improved, sense of smell, everything. Became alkaline from a super acidic physicality and improved every area of my life.

At that time I was doing Gurmukh's kundalini tape once a week, but it seemed like super hard repetitive movements, not something esoteric that worked on my energy like kundalini can be, then I discovered a class and deeper teachings, books upon books of meditations and kriyas given to us by Yoga Bhajan and began to feel the magic. These weird little breathing patterns, coupled with a movement and sometimes also a mantra started to move energy into and through my body in ways I hadn't imagined would be a possibility.

Then the real alchemy began, especially this year that I've been studying and practicing kundalini yoga so intensely. My heart began to open up and I voluntarily put it out there and with that energy around me people are more open to coming up and talking to me and asking me questions. My yoga teaching became better and my classes bigger, especially that crazy park class with 90 some odd people showing up weekly! I met someone that I am in love with but who doesn't necessarily feel the same way and I'm okay with that and am just staying out there and seeing what will happen with it or with someone else (no I'm not hopelessly going to wait around for him! LOL). Before I would've been heart broken and sad for months. I can sense energy in my students and others around me and when they are blocking it off, being fearful or reticent, not letting it flow. I can feel the energy of a thing I'm doing, in my body and around my body and can tell whether its the right thing or not necessarily the best for me at that moment based on that.

All kinds of things like that, things that a Baptist upbringing will tell you are crap and things of the devil, not to be messed with. Even though they feel good and intuitively right and like God leading me in the direction I'm supposed to head in, or telling me when I've veered off course from that direction.

Is that not magic? Magic as described by wikipedia is the consciousness manipulation and/or autosuggestion to achieve a desired result, usually by empirical techniques. Sounds like hatha and kundalini yoga to me? The results are layed out more specifically in the kundalini tradition so maybe moreso it that hatha but none the less, sounds like magic right? It makes me happy to believe there are these things in the world, in life. It makes me happy to know that the only way to be is not the way I was raised to understand things to be, but that somewhere deep down even as a child I knew there was more underlying all that stuff.

Some traditions mention Christ consciousness, that is how Jesus got his abilities because he was so connected to the source that he could do them and said even greater than these things that I do shall you do, and I believe we can. I am working toward what some call Christ consciousness and want to be leading my students, friends and whomever else in that same direction. This is what will create the paradigm shift, or rather move the paradigm shift that is already beginning to happen into the critical mass stage where all of us will be there and get it and move into the light that life really has to offer us, I can't wait!

The process started for me years after I'd started hatha yoga with the study of Kabbalah. The first teaching I read that resonated was act, don't react. I was like WTF? Thats what you do, react to things, but no it is a choice to react. You can chose to act once you've given it time to gel and see how you really feel, not let your ego get hold of you with a knee jerk reaction that will affect many and not be coming from your true place. That choice is magic. Really, once you realize you can make a choice or not and learn how to recognize it before you've had the reaction and stop and change it into an action is magic. You've changed yourself on a chemical level the very first time you've done that=alchemy=magic. Love it!

Oh bearded one . . .

As all beings in my life know or have been noticing lately I am not cutting my hair or beard anymore. I have been studying the Sikh Dharma as taught by Yogi Bhajan and his teachings on hair are that if you cut it and blunt the edges it stifles the influx of energy into your physical body, let alone your subtle and pranic bodies, so you grow it out to its natural length and use it as antenae to draw energy into your chakras. And if you notice the places we have the most hair are usually the chakras that we get stuck in, pubic area/second chakra and we're most of us in the midwest anyway very uptight around sex, chest area/heart chakra and we're most of us closed off in our hearts, not letting people into our lives or our deepest selves, on our heads/crown chakras and we most of us get stuck in our heads thinking of scenarios over and over again, driving ourselves insane and living in our heads rather than in our lives and interacting with those in our lives on a human level.

Those are just examples, not completely exclusively counting for all of us, but for a majority maybe. So maybe not cutting our hair is a way to balance out energies in these areas of our life? Who knows!

Another teaching is that in the male the moon center, or feminine energy center is in the chin and to balance that out you grow out the hair and it pulls in the masculine sun energy and creates an energetic balance within. This I do think is true, I have noticed that I feel more balanced lately and am loving that.

Anyhow, all of this aside. I cannot walk anywhere in life, especially through Whole Foods, without getting 10 comments about my beard and how massive it is, or how awesome it is, or how masculine it is. I'm not complaining by any means, I find it fascinating that so many are so drawn to it. Mind you it is very dark, other than the vast amounts of gray sprouting throughout it, and so very noticeable. You cannot not see it. But for it to be such a topic of conversation is amazing to me.

I won't even discuss how my mother and sister feel about it, it irritates me that it so defines me to them that they are completely offended by it, so I won't go there. Its all about what makes me feel good right? They are contrast so I know I want to go in another direction with my thoughts. Abrahamic stuff I know.

So have people forgotten in our not so distant past all the hippies and their beards? How almost every man in the 60's and 70's had one? Or in the not so recent past in ancient Rome it was a sign of wisdom, or in Israel a sign of manhood or even India where its a sign of vanity to cut it off, still to this day even. I think the hippie one is still fresh enough that people think you are one when you have the facial hair, and thats okay with me. Hippies were free thinkers and creating a different reality with their outside the box approach to life, not following the corporate model or that cookie cutter image so many were trying to influence others into. It also seems to me that many of the younger people I'm meeting nowadays fall under the hippie category again, both in their thinking and in the growing of their facial hair.

Yes, the beard, as far as I've noticed, is making a comeback and more and more young people are sporting them and ratty, messy bedhair and bringing their open minds back to the fore. It seems that at this time when change was so needed, as it was back in the 60's, that attitude has started to expand again.

Maybe it is in the energy of the hair? Again, who knows. But if you notice as the paradigms begin to shift, each time, the beard comes back onto our chins and then the free minds start to spread around. Funny huh, but I'll take it. As mine gets bigger and longer I will let my mind free itself from its bindings and expand out into consciousness to create and bring about the paradigm shift I feel is happening. And I will observe how as it gets longer, do I open up even more, keep expanding and growing as a person? keep flowing with the change and not getting stuck in one position? keep helping others flow with the change and not letting themselves get stuck? Hopefully so, we shall see.

Take care. Sat Nam!

wow, has it been over a month since I last made an entry on here? I guess so. I have sooo much floating around in my head these past few weeks and usually wait for it to formulate into something but its not congealing! So maybe I'll just type and see what comes of it.

I've been noticing a lot lately that I keep drawing more and more interesting people into my life. Most recently I have been accosted with people from high school finding me on Facebook and requesting to be my friend. At first this was anethema to me since I hated school and only really had a couple friends whom were already my Facebook friends (yes Stacey and Amy, you are two of them). So one day I took a leap and started a conversation with one of them, this was a few months ago. He ended up being someone that I would actually chose to be my friend in real life now, so I start thinking that maybe since I've evolved and become so different than back then that everyone else might have done the same? And could possibly be very interesting people now? Hmmm, what novel idea!

So it happened again today and has happened in between quite a bit too. Its nice to see that we all had ideas of ourselves and others back then that everyone else didn't have. You thought they were talking about you and making fun of you behind your back and yet they were just thinking the same thing or had so much drama at home that you didn't even register on their radar, or some shit like that. What egotists we are to think we're all so important to everyone else when we're really only important to ourselves, especially as hormone enraged teenagers!

So today a student of mine, whom is also a teacher, told me how important and powerful my classes are to her. She said all these people go out of town to study with these big name yoga teachers and look what we have right here in town! Why not learn what you can from the teachers in your own vicinity? I appreciate that sooo much. It makes me feel like I'm doing something right. I strive to not just teach a physical fitness class and to get across the ideas that we are doing this physical practice for so many more reasons that just what it does for our body but what it does for our mind and spirit and not to mention the connection to the greater source we receive when we are totally present in it. And she was very eager to tell me that I do that and do it very accessibly. Again, thanks so much!

I really do have some amazing students that put so much into their practice, I can never be grateful enough to them for all that they give me in return!

Anyhow, I threw that in there to expound upon the idea that none of us really know what others think of us. We, most of the time, don't know what we think of ourselves for gods sake! So you sitting there feeling sorry for yourself, think about that maybe there is someone out there that just thinks you're the shit. Or they are so painfully attracted to you and unable to say anything because of fear, or maybe even in love with you and think it unwise to express it or anything along those lines. Just saying that what we think of ourselves may not be the opinion of those all around you.

Not saying you should be influenced by what anyone else thinks of you, maybe appreciative of it, but just think of that to make yourself feel better maybe when you're down or maybe when you're up and want to feel even better. There are people out there in your life who may uplift you just by what they think of you.

I myself use yoga to keep myself trained in feeling pretty damn good. Kundalini yoga does it more quickly than hatha, and more fully, but hatha is a good tool for this as well. And so I'm glad I can teach it and have people appreciate the way I present yoga. I can't present it any other way than the way it resonates within me, so I'm glad people find it helpful and fulfilling and have learned how to find their own connection from it.

Okay, off to do a kundalini kriya as a matter of fact. So I'll write some more tomorrow maybe. Got a lot in there right now, so want to see what else can come out. Hav ea great one!!!