Ashtanga Yoga

Wow, I just practiced the primary series of Ashtanga Yoga for the second time this week! What is going on?!? lol

Here I am, I've gotten into Kundalini Yoga so much that I've become a Sikh, a baptised, full Amritdhari Sikh, which isn't even common within the Indian Sikh community I'm told, and I'm being drawn back to my yogic roots, which was a daily Ashtanga practice. I can't imagine I would ever practice it daily again, its too much for my body right now, but I'm enjoying it and approaching it from a different perspective completely.

Before I used it as my morning sadhana, daily discipline and body sculpter. Now that I've explored Kundalini Yoga to the level that I'm starting my teacher training this weekend, I am so in touch with energy movement thats its changed my approach to the practice. I now see it as what it is, opening up the body from the lower chakras to the upper to free up the energy and leave you energized.

I was inspired to practice it again one day after watching Ashtanga, NY with my friend and first student Patrice in Collinsville one day. So I went to class with it in mind and my second student Susan was there and was like, lets do ashtanga primary series today, ok? I said yeah! So I've done it at home once a week since then. This week I did it Monday morning and then again this afternoon, not the whole thing, but enough that I was feeling good, did closing sequence and pranayama and savasana. Now I'm sore, but a good sore and feel open, energetic, am even vibrating almost a little too much lol.

So this book came out a couple months ago to commemorate Guruji's demise, or rather celebrate his teachings, and its all interviews with his first
American students and some of the most prominent Ashtanga teachers around the globe. Its awesome, and my teacher, Nancy Gilgoff, has the best interview in it, just love it. But what I'm coming to discover is that he used to change the sequencing based on you and what you needed at the time, only formalizing it once the classes got too big to do that. He even, while working through his practice, used to hold postures for a long time, to feel their effects and to master them before moving on to the next one. Wow!

This is something that is a big deal, to most ashtangis anyway. Its unheard of to change the sequence of asanas in most cases. So now I have even a different approach to it. I can skip something or work on something differently if I want. I mean, hell, I always could I suppose, no one would've known since I practiced on my own, other than me. But I had found something that tapped into my fundamentalist christian roots and stuck to it, until about 2006 maybe anyway, then I started straying.

Hmmm, approaching an asana practice as a way to open up energy channels? What a novel idea! Thats the point of it anyway. I guess now, being Sikh, not drinking, no meat, not much to clog me up physically anymore and having cleaned out my nadis through Kundalini Yoga, I am actually able to finally see what hatha yoga was originally meant to be.

Hmmm again, much exploring I see in my near future, I do. Kundalini teacher training on one end, learning more in depth about the systematic movement of energy and a renewed interest in hatha yoga, just in time for winter when I'm hibernating anyway and have nothing better do.

What could be more grand?!? Lol, a bit dramatic I know, but for gods sake I am a gay Sikh male living in the midwest, I think drama is meant to be happening in my life, hahahahaha!