Rewind…
Rewinding the tape
A powerful practice for redirectin the energy broadcast of your mind is called the daily rewind exercise. This exercise was given, and is traditionally a nighttime practice, to prepare the subconscious and unconscious mind before we sleep. However, the practice can be done at any time provided you are in a space where you have a couple of minutes of quiet. This is not the kind of practice that you can do on the subway or while driving. It needs your focus and attention.
It is typically done on a daily basis to rewrite any of the trip ups, that you encountered during that day. That you can also rewind the tape as far back as you want to rewind to rewrite all the traumas failures, and misteps you’ve experienced along the way. This practice is tremendously healing for all wounds obtained in any part of your life.
Do it sooner rather than later, so you don’t get stuck in that form for more than just this lifetime. Clear, the trauma, the nervousness, the anxiety, the depression, and the self criticism. Rewrite it through higher intelligence. Then all of a sudden your projection into the future and your projection, for this very second will become intrinsically different.
Daily rewind exercise
With your head on the pillow, mentally scan through your day. It’s called winding the tape, just rewind and watched your day from beginning to end.
When you get to a part of your day that you didn’t act in your highest integrity, you missed a crucial piece of information that led to a mistake, or you encounter a situation that triggered a trauma experience for you, stop the tape and watch that part again
Could have responded differently? What did you miss? How would you rather experience that moment in time?
Again, and this time right over the tape. Rewrite the experience to be one that honors the reality of the circumstances, but also allows you to feel that you acted with upmost, intelligence wherewithal and personal strengths.
Then rewind one last time, and watch the tape with the newly inserted scene in which you are secure, clear and confident. Now that is an empowerment to you even if the real world consequences of it are still the same.
Keep going until you feel complete
Change your perspective
In the current technology age, we are being forced to build a mind that can easily compute the clearing of its own neurosis, subsequent fears and other malfunctions.
Here is what meditation will really do. You’ve got 1000 forms two options for each. You’ve got an overflowing subconscious storage unit partially full from trauma broadcast in this lifetime and others. A meditative mind will give you the ability to change perspectives.
Most of our lives are caught in one perspective, or imprisoned in a limited perspective of whatever’s happening in the short term, the context of our daily lives. We often feel very stuck, because we are caught in one. Maybe two perspectives of life. But mind our mind itself, has 84 facets. What that means is there are 84 perspectives that can be toggle through in any respective moment, that’s very powerful
Yoga these days, there’s a major fixation on these very fancy, physical yoga, poses, and all the competitiveness and injury there of. In the whole canon of practice and teaching, these advanced postures, the whole reason for the pretzel shaped one arm handstands is to give you a physical metaphor for a change in mental and emotional perspective. The handstand is just a physical symbol for how you can put your body into a shape that is going to turn the whole situation upside down, a change in perspective
Our job as advanced humans is to be able to change perspective as needed, to move between varied input, sources, and certain parts of our faculties as modern humans. We need to be able to do that mentally emotionally, and in all sorts of other ways. So thinking that getting your body into some XYZ posture is the be all an end all of, Yoga and Pilates is a total illusion. It’s just a tool to be able to get your mind to see from an XYZ perspective.
And you can get that from asana or a physical experience, but you can also get that from meditation. We are using both physical and mental to create the change in perspective even more rapidly. The physical energy is filtered through the meditative mind, and the sound current.
More and more people are flocking to some sort of meditative practice. These meditation practices are essentially self hypnosis, and give you the ability to not be hypnotized by the external comings and go of life. This also allows you to navigate time and space in a way that does not project suffering or pollution to the people and environment around you. That means you have the power to change the channel, clean up, heal yourself deeply, and have fruitful and positive perspectives of your life.
Being a human means that you are a hue, a light and you are now. You are the light of now. You are not only a collection of bones, organs, ligaments, and muscles or hopes, fear, desires, traumas, and jealousy. You are made up of light, sound prana and energy. This understanding will instantaneously put everything in perspective.
Storage and Subconscious
Storage units, hoarders, and the subconscious mind
Now, when you don’t process the other 1999 thought you had where do you think they go? They unfortunately don’t just fly off into the universe. The one that you have chosen broadcasts and creates reality momentarily. The additional 1999 options get stored in the subconscious mind.
One of the only things that we have in us that is finite, besides the physical form, is the subconscious mind. For the most part, we are infinite creatures. Yes, our bodies are finite, but our souls are infinite.
There are some crazy yogi calculation for how large the subconscious mind is. It said that it some 8,000,000 miles north 8,000,000 miles south 8,000,000 miles east and 8,000,000 miles west, so it’s big. But eventually finite. So it can, and does get full. And any kind of stress, weird behavior, or neurotic thought pattern is always a symptom of an overflowing subconscious mind. But the subconscious mind can be cleaned through the process of meditation and sound technologies.
A good culture reference for the subconscious mind is the TV show Hoarders. There is an episode where this woman, a really sweet woman, has filled up all 15 storage units of a local storage facility year after year she kept buying and filling and buying and filling more and more storage units until there were no more left.
The woman was very sweet and she was pleading for more storage units. The owners were so uncomfortable because there weren’t any more. It was heartbreaking.
And that’s a great metaphor for the subconscious mind. It’s finite. You can only fill it with so much. Once it gets full, you start to get crazy, anxious, depressed, and start to have nightmares, insomnia, and suffer through all kind of epidemics. Then these stress epidemics that you’re suffering under because of your full subconscious mind start to leak out into your unconscious and conscious mind, and as a result become more and more of your waking reality.
It’s a law of being in the human form on this planet that the subconscious mind has to be cleaned. Just like you take a shower to clean your body and you clean your house, anything that is finite must be cleaned. Because when we don’t clean the subconscious we get psychic, emotional, and mental build up. But when we do clean the finite arenas, our homes, our body, our mind they are much more beautiful. They sparkle. And then there is room for something more magical and creative to come in.
So this meditative work is, in my belief, a requirement, but many of us were not really taught any kind of mechanism for clearing the subconscious mind other than possibly some prayer practice and prayer is powerful, especially when it helps us to connect to something more infinite inside of us. But generally we have no secular practice to clean out the subconscious mind.
When you start to bring more energy into the system, say with a pranayam, or any other practice that we’ve talked about, the mind will automatically start to clean itself. You will naturally begin to dump subconscious thoughts. For this reason, don’t be alarmed if you feel negative or something bizarre comes up during or after meditation. This is always a good sign that you are releasing some old garbage from the storage bins.
A lot of people don’t like meditating. As soon as they sit down, the mind starts releasing, which is a healthy thing, but it scares some people off. The only advice I can give is to just keep going. Don’t back off. Living in a house stuffed to the gills with old newspapers is way worse than the kind of courage you have to muster to take out the trash. Don’t identify with the thoughts, just let them filter out. Meditating will become easier with continued practice. And you just have to remember that you always feel better after taking a shower or cleaning your room. Always
Trauma broadcast, and the space Time Machine
When you don’t clean the subconscious mind, you end up with what is called a trauma broadcast, which is kind of like the the Peanuts character, pig pen. You’re carrying around a lot more dirt than you need or want to, but you’ve collected it and now it’s with you and playing a part of how people see you and feel you and concurrently how you see the world.
Your mind is not subject to time and space. But properly trained mind is useful to move through time and space. You can project into the future, to some imagined possibility, or even a real situation that you know is going to happen. You can also take yourself back to when you were four, eating pasta at your grandparents home. Close your eyes and remember a time from earlier. You can take yourself back there can’t you? And you can re-create all the emotional biochemistry from that instance, too. So it actually starts to feel the same. This should show how easily the mind can traverse the space spectrum and direct your experience of reality at any given moment.
Often times we are unconsciously, projecting trauma, or some traumatic event that harm us into the world on a daily basis, long after the event occurred. This then becomes like a satellite broadcast or a Wi-Fi signal. And even more often this trauma broadcast has been with us for many incarnations, in our various lifetimes and familial lineages. The study of epigenetics is finding fascinating things about how these traumas actually passed from generation to generation on a cellular level.
So these traumas or fear broadcast can be heavy and can carry through generations or lifetimes. I’ll never be loved. Success is threatening to my safety. Everything bad happens to me. What happens is that you are projecting this into a wave or beam through time and space. It’s in your now, but it’s also projecting into your past and projecting into your future. Layman’s quantum theory maintains that past present and future exist simultaneously. So, as we subconsciously identify and broadcast into the future from the past, or from now, a trauma pattern starts to accumulate energy and create reality. Then we catch up to it in the future, we say look there it goes again. I knew that would happen. The trauma broadcast becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
What we have the opportunity to do in kundalini and meditation is actually move our mind to different situations in the past and rewrite them go into the past, surround a moment of trauma, pain, or grief, heal it, rewrite it, and re-calibrate it.
Mantra
The meaning of mantra
Mantra, or sound codes, are also a very effective method for re-tracking the mind towards better thoughts. The word mantra tends to scare people off if they’re not interested in any dogmatic belief system. And we understand we have had enough of those. It can seem intimidating, complicated, religious, or spiritual. But mantras are codes and nothing more than vibrations that effect your neurology or your glandular system in a certain way.
Actually, mantra means “wave of mind” or “mind direction”
So a mantra is a mental wave – any kind of mental wave. But a chanted mantra is simply a sound that directs the flow of the thoughts.
And the way we use mantras in this technology is just a specific mental wave that directs the flow of the thought to something higher than the lowest common denominator. “Sat Nam” for example, is a high caliber sound that connects you with your most authentic beingness. We’re trying to train the mind to pick up higher vibrational waves rather than your minds lowest common denominator basically, the same stuff, different day, or your particular version of a negative or habitual thought.
There is an alchemy process that happens from the sound. And we’re just scratching the surface of what the technology of sound is and how it works in western science. MRI’s are a sound technology. A study at McGill University measured the brain chemistry of people before they made a sound, or sang a song as well as afterward. The chemistry of people, singing or chanting was much more serotonin and dopamine rich. So we’re starting to get some research around the same sound science that as yogis we have known for thousands of years, which is exciting and very important.
Jappa, the repetition of highly tuned sounds, has a kind of alchemy process, discovered in yoga science through repetitive practice. The yoga term for this alchemy process is tappa. Mantra is the sound, Jappa is the repetition, and tappa is the alchemy process that takes the mind from negative and self-defeating thoughts to something more positive and clarifying.
For the most part, the repetition of your thoughts is the repetition of a subconscious mantra that is connected to self loathing, self doubt, or self failure mechanisms. And that’s what getting repeated over and over. When we introduced into the system of repetition, Jappa, of a more stable and self-supporting sound current, then everything starts to change.
There may seem to be a lot of spiritual jargon involved in certain mantra, but in reality it is a science. No one is interested in indoctrination. We all want activation into our highest self. You can use the science of the sound to begin to clear the finite storage space of the subconscious mind. When you do this, it creates a space for more creativity and flow of the actual experience in life, as opposed to past and future, yo-yo games, or what are called mental intrigues
Since every thought is a mantra, it’s good to check in regularly with the subconscious mantra that play out in our head. Personally, if I don’t like the direction of my subconscious mantra, I can supplement it with a more uplifting creative one from Yoga. When the going gets tough or whenever it feels a little elevation is needed, chanting out loud is useful. Chanting out loud uses the tip of the tongue to stimulate the 84 meridians on the roof of the mouth in a particular code to activate, healthy brain, chemistry, and emotional balance.
Change the Channel
2000 channels
Your mind needs to be trained to be able to know and recognize the vast spectrum of thoughts and experiences that you can participate in or choose in every moment.
I’ll give you the equation that Yogi Bhajan taught us. In every blink of an eye, your mind releases 1000 thought forms.
1000 thought forms – one blink of the eye
In the thousand thought forms, each thought has a positive and negative ionic pole. So now we have 2000 choices per every blink of the eye.
1000×2 ionic polls – one blink of the eye
We’re only ever really vibrating one thought at a time which means that there are 1999 other thoughts that we leave behind and therefore dump into the subconscious mind, which has a finite storage capacity
So, if you were in a situation, where you feel limited, or you feel lost, you’re suffering, you’re a scared, or fill in the blank with a plethora of human misery, if you’re stuck in some expression that is not your highest quality, your highest vibration, your highest directive of experience, then you actually have 1999 other experiences in every single moment that you could choose from. This is liberating to at least become aware of!
In order to even know that these are choices, you need to have energy, health, and vitality. Most people are so energetically depressed (different but related to emotional psychotherapeutic identified depression) they are stuck in their particular rut of misery and can’t fathom the idea of having the possibility of another channel. So the notion of four or five channels, and especially, 1999 channels is way out of conceptual range because you need to have energy and clarity to even see the rest of the spectrum. And once you can see the possibility, even if it’s just one additional possibilities, then you need to have enough energy, wherewithal, and awareness to change the channel
We normally think of energy in terms of caffeine boost, sugar high, marathons, and other sorts of hyper activities. There is energy, sure, but it’s not the kind of energy needed to toggle between the thousands of options you have. In reality, we know that caffeine and sugar are ultimately depleting. And the energy it takes to kick box, hit the weight room, or run marathons is actually just the very surface of the kind of energy we are referring to.
Energy is a kind of wattage in the system, which again isn’t hyper. A hyper system is one that is fritzing out, so it’s actually using the energy inefficiently. A system with wattage is a clean cool running battery. It’s noiseless. But it can take you from 0 to 320 in .09 seconds if you need and it’s nuanced. It doesn’t have just two speeds. It can drive the vehicle of your human being at 60 mph just as easily as it can drive at 60.5 mph, real energy is powerful, but also very intelligent. This is what you need in order to shift the channels of your mind.
One of the best ways to generate more energy in the system is with the breath, and we’ve been practicing this in many different ways. Prana, is an ancient yogi term for energy, and it exists everywhere in the known universe. Prana even exists in the black vacuum of space. Prana can be taken in through the eyes and through the pores. Eating fresh foods is a great way to get more prana. However, the easiest way for most people to metabolize Pena, and lots of it, is through the breath.
Ancient yogis actually called structured breathing practices pranayama because they knew that breathing was just a way to get more prana into the system. One of our favorite Pranayams is the aerobic capacity and efficiency breath. Here is an example of how to do that. It is a simple, but effective way to amp the wattage of your physiology and energetic bodies.
Aerobic capacity and efficiency breath
Posture: sit and grasp your knees with your hands
Keep your eyes closed, focusing up and at the brow point
Breath: inhale and hold your breath. Flex your spine back-and-forth, using your hands on your knees to create leverage. Flex at a smooth rapid pace. When you can’t hold the breath anymore, bring your spine to neutral and exhale. Inhale here hold the breath, exhale and begin again.
Time 3 to 5 minutes
To finish: sit tall inhale, exhale, and relax
The Mind
Your mind is the greatest gift you have ever been given. It’s Traversed time and goes beyond space. Given the right direction from the heart, it coordinates the rest of your bodiy into action. It has an immensity of thought and allows you to recognize experience. So it is an incredible gift, but it’s also kind of like a toddler.
Sometimes toddlers like to get into places where they’re not supposed to be and make toys of things that are not supposed to be toys. So your toddler is running around with the kitchen knife that’s not so good. We chase after the child with the knife and exchange it for something safer, and then let them begin running around (safely) again. It’s almost exactly the way you need to treat your mind, and meditation becomes a tool to do so. The purpose of meditation in the kundalini technology is not to slow the mind down, particularly, or even to reign in its massive energy and power. Just give it constructive tools and direction, and allow for that to create new pathways of thought and experience.
Just like you wouldn’t give your toddler the steering wheel of the car and go for it, it’s not too wise to let your mind take the steering wheel wheel of your life. Which is what an untrained mind will try to do. The untrained mind is a headstrong kid that’s always trying to take the wheel and derail you into some version of self-destructiveness
We have allowed the collective and personal mind’s untrained destructiveness to take over all our media, politics, economy, and really all of society. And we don’t have the societal training in the West, particularly, to train the mind on a daily basis, whether through nature, meditation, or any contemplative practice.
One of the major problems with an untrained mind is that it will not allow you to command the time and space of this lifetime. When you leave the mind untrained, it will make you feel as if you are barreling out of control, and will give you the corresponding, anxiety and fear responses.
You have only so much time and so much space to live this life, and it is so very precious. Rather than let you waste this life on the teeter totter of a toddlers whim, I want to give you some tools to your mind towards success and satisfaction.
Quinoa Bfast Bowl
Another alternative recipe - instead of oat, try a gluten free, high protien packed morning bowl of flavor topped with your favorite fruits and seeds.
Roast Poblano
This is a semi spicy alternative to a stuffed bell pepper - I’m always a fan of a little heat in my food since there is a lingering cold even when the weather is warm - you could sub for a sweet pepper if your Pitta dosha needs a little less flame…
Twice Baked Sweet Potato
My mom would be so proud! She loved teaching my kids her famous twice baked potato recipe and now I let them do the work when it comes out of the oven. This is a healthy spin on her potatoes but so full of flavor and good for you warming deliciousness.
Self Phychology
The mind as time space machine
For those who have experienced a trauma that triggered the original depression state the mind was given to you as the greatest gift. It is truly a times space machine. If you use it correctly, you can actively traverse time and space back to the moment of trauma, where ever it is in your time continuum and psycho, magnetic field And actually change and heal the memory. Which means in your life you have the instant power to no longer operate from that trauma prison. You are not limited by the bad or challenging things that have happened to you or around you. In fact, you can use them to have victory.
5 Minute Meditation: Ho’oponopono Style
You can practice this meditation from anywhere.
But for your first time, sit quietly (in the morning when you wake up is recommended).
Sitting cross-legged or in a chair, close your eyes.
Straighten and elongate your spine.
Align your head with your spine, tilt your chin slightly down. Loosen your jaw.
From this place, begin taking deep breaths, counting to four on your inhale, sending
the breath deep into your lungs and belly. And exhaling to four counts releasing the breath.
Continuing this detoxifying breathing a few times on your own.
Understanding that with each deep inhale you are sending new oxygen into your blood cells and with each exhale you are detoxifying your lungs and body.
When you feel ready, begin repeating the mantra:
“I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.”
Staying with these repeated words and if your mind detours, bringing it back to this mantra.
See how this feels in your body.
Is there somewhere specific you feel it? Does someone pop into your head?
Send your thoughts and the power of ho’oponopono to that person.
If you are angry or hurt by someone, it may be challenging but just try to think of that person as you repeat:
“I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.”
Stay here for as long as feels natural and comfortable. From here you can either begin
your own practice of breath work, meditation or move into your day.
*As I mentioned, it is not necessary to be seated or in a quiet place for this meditation. If you find yourself in a stressful, tense situation, if you’re feeling sad, angry, depressed, confused; you can practice ho’oponopono by simply repeating the mantra in your head. It works incredibly well during these times.
Self psychology
In this modern age with the acceleration of human evolution, and the pressure of technology, we’re all working with an increased demand of on some level in the body and the brain. Here we have the introduction of self psychology.
On your phone, make a recording of how great talented and amazing you are for at least three minutes. Listen to it once a day for a week and see what happens
Self psychology is a simple modality through which you can bypass years and years of individual therapy and recapitulate recapitulation of the original original trauma and heal yourself with some simple self and intention
When your glands are the right balance, your mind becomes more and more free of looping thoughts, and you begin to reset your brain chemistry, and then your natural ability to self adjust into happiness happens at a moments notice. That’s the power of these practices and the possibility of human potential at this time. Just ask yourself, what would happen if we had a society filled with emotionally stable, courageous, generous, and integrated human beings? Everything, including our economic systems, families, and societal norms, what upgrade in the light of a new human dignity. It’s a profound vision to behold, and your personal day today command of mind and body systems is an integral part of this vision. Plus, it will simply make you feel better so you will do better think better and be better.
Emotional Mind
We’re not wired to be depressed. Everything in our system is wired to be happy. But the first way that wiring goes off is through the habitual thought forms, and the unconscious and subconscious mechanism of thought creation.
Our mind and our moods are our servants, but we think of them as our masters. The whole idea of understanding your infinite capacity for reality is that you have command over your mind, and the thought choices you make. And in turn you will have command over your emotional spectrum
Most people have one just one form that is making it nearly impossible for them to experience, happiness and joy in this life. You might have a lot of negative thoughts. I hate my life. Everyone is out to get me. My world is hopeless, but most of the time your thoughts are just various incarnations of your one primal negative thought which could be something like I am worthless or I am a failure, or I am scared. All neurosis and subconscious thought forms come from the same place or similar places in your psyche. You pull one side of the string and the rest comes tumbling out. It’s the same string, it’s all the same thought.
This is the way you think. It’s throwing your glandular system off. It’s creating the glitch in your electromagnetic field. And it’s disturbing your emotional well-being. It most certainly is affecting all of your intimate relationships and one way or another.
This is especially true about the whole concept of depression. There is biochemistry and neurochemistry to depression. Depression is also a thought form that many modern people have ingrained in the mind. In what seems to be a global crisis of anxiety, depression, and insomnia we must start to educate ourselves on alternative ways to stabilize our emotions and our chemical systems.
The more we talk about our thoughts that are leading to depression and emotional experiences that thought energy gets calcified, and it’s very hard to break out of. In Neuropsychiatry, it’s called rumination, and it’s known to calcify your trait into a state.
Rewiring thoughts and biochemical experience can be done using any of the breath exercises we’ve practiced or the medical meditation for habituation. It’s also a very effective thing to use a mantra for.
The short mantra that we’ve practiced and is great for redirecting thoughts is Sa Ta Na Ma, when you mentally or vocally repeat the mantra, you are sending a sound signal, both to your cognitive brain and to your endocrine system, to bring your form, or finite self into the infinite of the universe. So it’s a great tool for changing the loop pattern of your normal thinking. The word mantra refers to mind plus vibration or wave and is a directive to your complex and amazing mind.
One thing is certain, a human system that has deep breath deep, oxygenation, and glandular balance actually cannot hold lower states of experience, like anxiety and depression, for very long at all. They can pass by for a moment, but they can’t take hold and create a long-term systemic experience and re-experience cycle. Your breath, including the depth of your breath is yours to practice and experience and cost nothing. Breathing deeply, and consciously will only benefit you in ways you can’t imagine at this moment.
Hormones + Emotion
It’s time to understand the spectrum of emotions, and how to command them. Something that yogis and teachers through many lineages have understood is that you can get a powerful hold on your emotional experience through your endocrine system.
There is an actual physiological base to your emotions. There’s a chemistry of the blood, a chemistry of the organ health, and a chemistry of the endocrine secretions that creates your emotional balance, or lack there of. And it’s all very subtle, because these are subtle systems in the physical body. However, your emotional mastery and acuity are not so subtle, they are real and profound.
When the secretions are out of balance, you feel irritable, cranky, and aggressive. But when the endocrine system is secreting properly, it is actually very difficult, if not impossible for you to act obnoxiously or moodily. When the endocrine system is in balance, you are imbalance. You feel good. You have a connection to your infinite reality. You are happy. If your glands are totally in the right balance for you and your body chemistry, there is no way you can be depressed. So it makes real and practical sense to have a baseline understanding of your endocrine system and the tools to balance it at a moments notice.
The endocrine system made easy
Your endocrine system is a collection of glands that secrete hormones. The major glands include the thyroid, parathyroid, hypothalamus, adrenal, pancreas, sex organs, and the pineal gland all up the pituitary gland, also known as the master gland, which controls all other glandular secretions. The job of the endocrine system is to trigger physiological processes, cellular growth, and emotional experiences through specifically coded, hormonal releases
If you experience anger, that’s a distinct hormonal code, running through your body via your circulatory system and bloodstream. If you are feeling depressed, that’s another separate hormonal code. It’s the same with happiness. And the more we refine a name for a feeling, like euphoria, versus sublime or pissed versus worked up, the more specific, the coded or mono mixture.
This is why you can talk to a therapist until you are blue in the face, but if you don’t have techniques to command your endocrine system, you will still end up feeling blue. And often the repetition of trauma and unhappy events or situations through the retelling and reimagining of them create this exact same biochemical reaction and subconscious reality as the original event. And in some weird way the body gets used to, or even addicted to these biochemical experiences!
The new age healer doesn’t get a free pass either. Even if your shaman goes in and removes that energetic block in your third chakra from a past life, if your blood hormone levels don’t get shifted, you end up with a hollow feeling, and most likely a reinforced or reactivated hormonal pattern despite the session . Then the trauma is often relived by talking about it, or by re-creating it in a relationship or experience of reality. There is no difference between a real or imagined event to the subconscious mind, and the bodies subsequent biochemical reaction.
We all want a positive, balanced emotional experience, right? So that means we must balance the glandular system on the regular. There are so many stimuli and patterns that throw it out of balance, so that we do have to make a bit of an effort and luckily, this is pretty easy.
The cold shower practice is the most effective glandular, detox, balancer, and rejuvenator, and if done consistency consistently, it’s a total antidote for depression. But if arctic temperatures at seven in the morning, aren’t your cup of tea (nor mine really), you can also reset your granular system with the four stroke breath for balance…
The 4 stroke breath for balance is a powerful glandular equilibrium because it balances out the pituitary gland. In yoga science, your pituitary gland is called the master gland. All of the other glands in your system take their direction from your pituitary. So your thyroid, parathyroid, pancreas, hypothalamus, adrenal, aqnd sex glands all change based on the secretions of your pituitary gland. This is the seat of the endocrine system power and command. Your glands control the onset of emotional experience moment to moment. So you can completely alter your total experience of life by adjusting and balancing these secretions .
The 4 Stroke breath for balance
Posture sit easy pose. Alternatively, you can do this at your desk in a car or wherever you are.
Keep the eyes closed, gently, focusing up and in at the brow point
Inhale with four strokes through the nose. Exhale and four strokes through the nose.
Do this for 3 to 11 minutes
To end inhale, hold the breath. Exhale and relax.
E Motion
Electricity of emotions
One of the challenges of being skillful about how you are going to use your emotional energy is an ingrained magnetic patterning in your psyche and mind. Your psychomagnetic field is like a weather weather pattern that you have to live in and fortunately or unfortunately, the people closest to you and anyone who spends time with you also have to live in. Your psychomagnetic field goes through all the normal weather fluctuations, but when your psyche is in harmony, you are naturally healthy, mentally, physically, and emotionally, so radiance and intuition begin to form a shield of sorts that protects from negative and external flows.
Now, when you go through a trauma, loss, or even just a mild event that caught you at a sensitive time, it’s really common for a disharmonized, emotional reaction to get lodged at a particular coordinate in your psychic as a glitch. When this glitch starts to calcify and catch more energy around it– I think of a hurricane anytime any kind of emotional trigger in your life hits that storm – you’re going to respond in the same way. Without some consciousness shaped around the habitual response, the glitch will try to complete the same magnetic pattern over and over throughout your life, whether or not the situations hold any similarity to each other, or even to the original event that caused the glitch. Because we are ultimately computerized in our subconscious operating systems, input from a certain way, will always run the same program response.
That pattern is mostly because your conscious awareness and is actually looking for and creating ways, situations, or people to allow it to run through its cycle. So it doesn’t matter if someone gives you a compliment or your spouse does that thing you hate, if the situation hits your glitch, the same response will arise. It could be like a perfect spring day and you’d still be subconsciously preparing for a hurricane storm.
One of the reasons it’s so hard to break out of the emotional pattern is that we have not, as humans been given effective tools to demagnetize these glitches, and therefore see them as such which does make it seem insurmountable or hopeless. You might at least have developed the wherewithal to know that you want to change your emotional responses, but I’ve noticed that once some outside stimuli hits that glitch, it’s very difficult to control your response.
An amazing, amazingly effective kundalini yoga meditation to fix magnetic, subconscious, self-destructive and commotional glitches is the Medical meditation for habituation.
In this meditation, you squeeze your back molars to create a new pattern in the hypothalamic rhythm of the central brain, which will increase the projective wattage of the pineal gland. Say what? Well, your habits and cravings all neurologically originate in the central brain. This meditation begins to reform those. What you will find through practice is that magnetic patterns that were looking for any and every avenue for self-destruction no longer need to complete themselves. And this is true for emotions as well as any other kind of habit situation, such as smoking, drinking, OCD habits or self sabotage
The benefit of demagnetizing habitual tendencies, whether they are emotional or other kind, is that you gain the freedom of choice. Human sovereignty is based on having enough energy to see that you have a choice and how you experienced your own reality. This means you have command of your emotional spectrum and can use it as a tool instead of a weapon. This is so empowering. When you feel empowered as a human being with your infinite capacity for creativity and immense compassion, You can, and will have fulfillment. And when you experience fulfillment, naturally, a wellspring of energy is tapped from which to enjoy your day, your relationships, your work, your family, and overall your life. And that overflow of natural human greatness is the core of yoga, consciousness, and practice .
Sacred Outlook
Illness, even just a 24 hour cold, create stress, because you need more energy to get through the day.
Stress impairs your ability to heal. Subconsciously we tighten when we have trauma. That tightening, on a physical level restricts your circulation. Then your body has a much harder time healing itself. This subconscious contraction happens on all levels of our body
Our body system always wants to come back to a state of healing and equilibrium, but it can’t do it quickly and fully with stress and tightness. If you can relax around trauma or lingering stress in the body, the affected area of disease will begin to get oxygen and circulation, and will eventually heal faster.
The less tension you hold around illness or traumatic events, the more you heal. The less bracing on a physical, mental, energetic, or emotional level, the more progress you can make. This kind of relaxation really requires what the Tibetan Buddhist called a sacred outlook.
A sacred outlook dictates, that if you can see everything as sacred in your life – the most challenging to the most beautiful – your whole experience of life deepens, and becomes more fulfilling. You have a choice to create elegance and self healing out of the muck of your lineal patterns, genetics and neurosis. That act creates in actuality the ground that you walk on as a human being. We all have had experiences, personal experiences, or know someone who has, where a deep illness created the most profound sense of wonder and gratitude for life. That revelation occurs when you don’t isolate the sacred to only what is convenient or positive or looks good.
Sacredness doesn’t happen in some ivory tower of good experience experiences. When only the good is sacred, it can become separate, it becomes materialistic. Sacredness is in the every moment. And every moment isn’t pretty. Sometimes even with the most precise intuition, you don’t know what life is going to throw at you. You could see things coming and still not be able to stave off the possibility of unwanted experience. Life is not always going to be easy or fun, but with a sacred outlook you are training yourself to be a true practitioner of human wisdom, and dignity within every moment of your life.
Sometimes, when doing really deep, spiritual and physical detoxification, you end up going through a healing crisis of some sort. This is indicative of something actually getting cleared through your practices. It’s good news, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Good, bad, up, down, crazy, serene, glorious… a total shit show, all of it is sacred. Cultivating this level of acceptance, appreciation, gratitude, acknowledgment, neutrality, and grace creates the relaxation and strength. You need to allow fundamental and life-changing healing.
One of my favorite meditations for establishing a baseline of sacred appreciation, is the self-care breath that we are doing this chapter in our Sadhana. The bonus is that it heals and strengthen the nervous system. Stress happens even without our conscious participation. When you strengthen and balance, the nervous system you stay tranquil and relaxed, despite the level of speed or stress input.
Connecting to the cosmic healing force
Yogi, Bhajan said this about self healing
“The process of self healing is the privilege of every being. Self healing is not a miracle, nor is self healing, a dramatization of the personality, as though you could do something superior. Self healing is a genuine process of the relationship between the physical and the infinite power of the soul. “
This quote Distills the concept. Self healing isn’t some kind of piece of science fiction. It’s normal and it’s your birthright, and at the same time, it can be completely cosmic.
Healing involves the power of the infinite. And the infinite is one of those mind-boggling realities that can only be experienced and wielded. It cannot be explained, or conceptualized, as that immediately creates a distance between you and your most infinite power. In what is really going to be the biggest victory of this era, that the power of the infinite is more and more recognized as not outside you, but deep within you. We are not completely there yet, but more and more people are turning within to experience the phenomenon of God, previously known only as an external figure that had to be connected with via a human in some power position or religious construct. This shift in how we relate to infinity, the universe, ourselves, societal, power structures, and each other is just at the beginning. And that is a sacred outlook.
Napping and Not sleeping
In our earlier discussion of sleep, we spoke about sleeping for 5 to 6 hours per night. That is versus the typical eight hours suggested in the past. This is according to Yoga. As it is believed, that sleeping longer is actually not restorative because of the subconscious mind dumping into dreamand. Personally I was pretty surprised when I started to dig deeper into this concept, as sleep is like gold to me since starting a family, and my sleep is typically 8 hours. I decided to recently put this to test. I did think that having a longer morning, plenty of time for Sadhana, journaling, and taking things slow sounded like a good trade. I’ve started setting my alarm earlier and noticed very shortly that I was more alert at 5am than at 6:15am… In the past with my strict Kundaline/meditation practice my alarm would go off at 4am (the Amrit Vela time) so I had time for a complete morning ritual. If you are interested, here is a suggestion for the Yoga Nap, which can help us get through the day…and a bit of an earlier bedtime.
It is said that a true yogi can put himself to sleep almost on command. For those of us who haven’t mastered the art of instant shut eye, here are some napping strategies:
Before you nap, splash, a bit of cold water on your face, hands, wrists, forearms, and feet. Cold water hydrotherapy on these PowerPoint, relaxes the nervous system and prepares the body for rest.
Stretch lightly where you feel tight to trigger the body to release
Use a Compass application to orient your body to east to west. The sleep configuration recharges your energy field.
Nap for a total cycle of 11 minutes
A recording of a gong. The sound of the gong purifies the subconscious mind and allows the body to relax more deeply.
If you’re still having trouble unwinding, block your right nostril with your index finger and breed long and deep through the left nostril. Left nostril, breathing triggers cooling in the body. Breathe this way until you feel happily dreaming.
Healing insomnia, naturally
If you are finding it difficult to go to bed at the hour you want to, or wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to bed, there are some tools to alleviate your insomnia. Insomnia is not a myth. 72 million people suffer from insomnia every year, and almost half of the senior population in the United States faces sleepless nights.
So insomnia is a real issue. We’d like to discuss the way to approach the condition and the treatment of it. When you see statistics that high, it speaks deeply to a society that does not have the tools to deal with the every day stressors and pressures they are facing. Not to mention that insomnia is a hugely profitable modern malady.
The pharmaceutical industry has a market share of around $1.6 billion from sleeping pills. They have a vested interest in you not being able to sleep. So let’s just see the whole reality for what it is. Certainly stress is involved, so having a daily meditation practice will start to shift your sleep cycles. But more often than not, it’s not just anxiety but also an actual physiological component that is blocking your sleep.
The pineal gland, a small gland the size of an apple seed that sits in the center of your brain, produces the hormone melatonin, which is in charge of regulating sleep cycles. When the pineal gland is healthy and clean it is very photoreceptive. Though the pineal gland doesn’t pick up light the same way our eyeballs do, it does register illumination, and darkness. And this very simple photo receptivity gives it the sophisticated messaging. It needs to release the luxurious melatonin secretions at the right time, and in the right amounts.
So in a healthy brain, sleeping is happening in a smooth, regulated way. However, most people don’t have soft, receptive, pineal glands. They have calcified pineal glands. And that happens from fluoride and drinking water, and toothpaste, toxic compounds, pesticides, and all other kinds of sources. It is also a byproduct of unhealthy and rapid aging processes. You would do well to cut some of these items from your life. But we live in incredibly toxic world. You just can’t control all the substances that come into your body all the time.
This is another reason why yoga technologies are so essential on the planet right now. We can’t control what’s happening with food, packaging and company dumping. But you can detoxify daily. One of the best yoga meditations for decalcifying the pineal gland and restoring natural melatonin balances is the Shabad Kriya for deep sleep, and radiance.
This meditation creates relaxed, restorative sleep patterns, regenerates nerves, and releases the secretions of the pineal gland. And because melatonin and the pineal gland also regulate tissue growth, the kriya for deep sleep and radiance also grows beautiful hair and skin. After a few days or months of practice the rhythms of your sleep will be regulated, and this new healthier rhythm will actually stay with you throughout the entire day, which is very practical side effect. Stress will slowly leave your system, which allows your body and mind to heal even more
Shabad Crea for deep sleep and radiance
For maximum effectiveness practice this meditation every night before bed. If you wake up in the middle of the night, just start the meditation again and continue until you fall asleep.
Posture: do a little beditation, and find a comfortable position in bed that allows the spine to be straight. Place your hands in your lap palms up with your right hand resting in your left. Touch your thumbs together and point them forward.
Eyes are closed almost all the way with a focus at the tip of the nose
Breath: inhale in four equal parts, mentally enchanting our mantra “Sa Ta Na Ma” . Hold the breath, vibrating the mantra four times for a total of 16 beats. Exhale two equals strokes, projecting mentally “Wahe guru.” This is the sound current of the pineal gland and it means in essence, it’s sublime to get enlightened. It said that Wahe guru is literally the sound that the pineal gand makes as it secretes the way plop plop is the sound of a dripping faucet
Continue until you fall asleep :-)
Breath of Life
One of the best ways to amplify your immunity and activate your self - healing mechanism is with your breath.
It is known that bacterial organisms, fungi, parasites and viruses can’t live in oxygen rich environments, so if you are down and out with the flu, or you have a more severe illness, you need to amp up up your deep, yoga breathing. It’s a simple way to increase the body’s natural healing impulse.
Increasing your conscious breathing doesn’t just saturate your bloodstream with oxygen, thereby expunging diseased material from the body, it also increases the amount of prana in the system. Prana is life force. If you’re sick, you’re depleted in life force. Healing isn’t just about food molecules, and DNA and oxygen, it’s about prana. And this is also why deep breathing and breath work are so effective in healing both the physical and emotional bodies.
We are surrounded by bacteria and viruses everyday and we rely on our immune system to step in and “fight” when necessary. To be effective the body requires is jolts of prana, continuous lifeline to free up infinite energy. And actually, it’s possible to get a lot of prana from fresh organic plant foods. But the easiest fastest and most bio available way to intake more prana is through your breath.
I personally practice some amazing breath pranayama whenever I’m feeling as if my immune system is in jeopardy, or even if it’s simply lagging a bit. Like the practices we’ve learned so far in our Sadhana, you can do each practice for 3 to 11 minutes whenever you’re feeling low on energy or when you feel a bug coming on.
Having sensitivity to the breath is also also a powerful way to know when you are about to get sick or develop an even bigger illness. Developing pranic awareness is actually one of the first habits of a healthy human. Sensing disruptions in the pranic field, the field of life force that permeates the fabric of your personal space and time, will allow you to know something is off before it progresses into more serious illness or disease. The more sensitive and intuitive you become the more specific you can get about how that disruption would manifest if allowed to continue.
Immune system booster the inner sun
This is a breath, exercise for immune therapy
Posture: sit an easy pose. bend, left arm, raising your hand up to shoulder level, face your palm forward and touch the tip of your ring finger to the tip of your thumb. Make a fist with your right hand, but keep your index finger out. Gently block off your right nostril with your index finger.
Keep the eyes closed
Breath of fire
3 to 11 minutes
To end: in how deeply and hold the breath. As the breath is held, interlace your fingers just below your throat and try to pull your fingers apart. Hold the breath for as long as you can then exhale repeat three more times. On the last exhale shoot the breath out through up lips with your tongue curled back on the roof of the mouth.
Dog breath
this exercise brings energy to immune system to fight infection. It is a very healing exercise. When you feel a tingling in your toes, thighs, and lower back, it is an indication that you are doing this exercise correctly.
Posture sit an easy pose, or rock pose
Breath: stick your tongue, all the way out of your mouth and keep it out as you rapidly breathe in and out through the mouth in a panting, diaphragmatic breath
3 to 5 minutes
To end: and hold your breath for 15 seconds, and then press the tongue up against the upper pallet. Excel repeat this two more times.
Farmacy
Eating and immunity
Food is a powerful medicine. What you eat either contributes to your overall vibrancy, well-being, and longevity, or it impairs your natural rejuvenation, accelerates aging, and compromises your immune system. It’s really very simple. Either the food you eat enhances and builds health, or it undermines it. Most people believe it’s what you eat that creates health or disease. It’s true, that certain foods have incredible healing compounds that create immense curative effects on the body. However, what you eat isn’t half as important as how well you digest it.
For instance, dairy is a celebrated part of a yoga diet. Milk, yogurt, cheese, and ghee condition and strengthen the system. In India, for instance, cows are worshiped because of this dietary gift. That said the baseline yogi rule on food is “don’t eat anything that you can’t digest in 18 hours”. So if you know you can’t digest dairy, it won’t help you no matter how many Ayurveda books insist its health and radiance attributes are unparalleled.
Healthy food, it’s preparation, the dues and don’ts, all are pretty hot news in the wellness scene, especially organic vegetables, gluten-free grains, and if you’re going to eat meat, grass fed beef, and other organic options. You can go raw, paleo, macrobiotic, whatever. Everyone is talking about “what’s good for you.” But if what you eat, doesn’t exit your system in 18 hours or less, it’s not working for your digestive metabolism. This and other ethical and energetic reasons are why the yogi food philosophy, including my own, favors vegetarianism and a plant-based diet. However, I am not preaching any dietary dogma in this segment, particularly.
It is important to know that we have choices. But if you can’t digest your food in 18 hours and you are fostering disease in your body. In these conditions, the system experiences a daily depression, because it is overworking to digest the lingering food in your stomach. This accumulated toxicity potentially lead to an of some sort or eventually illness. I need certainly is one of the big culprit of slow digestion, creating digestive buildup, and related issues.
Most men and women in the west, even children, across ethnic and economic backgrounds have digestive issues. This isn’t just a modern problem. Ancient people also experienced digestive difficulty. This is because digestion is one of the first places to experience a breakdown when the body, mind, emotional, energetic system is under stress. As such, Yoga/ Ayurveda as an ancient science of human maintenance and growth, developed many techniques to heal and rejuvenate the digestive process.
Many of these regular practices we’ve already learned, help reboot your digestive system. But if you need a little extra, here is where the fun stuff comes in: our recipes this week will be tonics for health and well being. Healing with food is such a powerful curative and medicinal tool for optimal health, and the results are very real and trackable. Also the process of deciding, shopping, and creating with food is a healing process onto itself. Check out the two elixirs for digestive cleansing that have particular amazing results.
Stomach and intestinal track cleanser
Green chili, anti-poison intestinal remedy
Food base pharmacy
Medicinal foods can be very simple and accessible. This is really one of my favorite areas of the yoga skill sets because it’s very alchemal. Intelligent use of food helps you to stay healthy. In addition to being delicious, the right food can detoxify your internal organs, feed your glandular system, regenerate your creative and sexual energy, stimulate your immune system, and help clean and rebuild brain function, as well as improve your entire nervous system. It’s really a sophisticated approach to medicine and it’s potently effective.
Healing with food and herbs is an elaborate art. Ayurvedic and Chinese medicinal texts are thousands of pages long. But to simplify something very complex, food based healing, works like this: plant and animal food products such as dairy, honey and meat are composed of active molecular, vitamin, mineral, and phytochemical configurations. These active molecules interact with the human body at a cellular DNA level to bolster, heal, and improve it, or the flipside, to destroy it.
The science is complex. It’s not just that vitamin C is good for you, although it’s been shown in test tubes that no virus can withstand a vitamin C, rich environment. It’s not that your nervous system needs sulfur to work, or that celery provides an easily metabolized dose of that sulfur, although both are true. It’s that the molecular, and I dare say energetic configuration of these foods supports the DNA in its integrity and in its improvement. And when the DNA is supported and unique and specific ways, and each food interacts with your DNA in a different way, the body can do all kinds of things, like fight internal fungi, bacteria, and viruses, it can rebuild artery walls in the heart and recondition all of your overtaxed organs. The body is an expert self healing mechanism. It just needs the support.
Seeking command over food-based healing could lead you down the rabbit hole of 11 years of Ayurvedic study like I’ve done, but it doesn’t have to. Being sensitive is really enough, because it is ultimately very intuitive. You know on some level what you need to heal. These foods and practices will help to open up your innate experience of that intuitive healing compass.
Because it’s such a total cure all, yoga, tea is one of our favorite medicinal recipes. It’s like a silver bullet, it is a true tonic to the whole system. Any illness or lingering virus you might be dealing with, Yogi tea in concert with a restorative mono diet will clear it up. The benefits of the tea can fill pages, here is the recipe.
Self Healing
You know how to heal yourself.
In ancient times before modern medicine, there were higher mortality rates from the widespread contraction and rapid spread of different diseases. But there were also people who caught illnesses and lived. These are people who, by either education, intuition, or biological demand, understood that they had the capacity to self heal, and quickly tapped into that flow, these people, for the most part are the ones who passed on their genetics.
So, you know how to heal yourself. It’s coded deep into your ancient intelligence. It needs only to be acknowledged, and turned on to start working. And the biggest problem with modern science today is that it doesn’t acknowledge this very simple human natural skill.
If you don’t allow yourself to believe that you can heal yourself, your self- healing mechanism won’t turn on, or will only work in a limited way. If your mind is against you, if your mind cannot conceive of this ordinary and native capacity, you won’t heal deeply, or at all. This is a simplistic way of describing something that is much more complex, but it’s useful to understand that you can train your mind and body impulses towards deep healing.
These natural techniques we’ll discuss connects you to your self -healing mechanism. It helps to turn it on and increase the wattage. There are so many techniques to jumpstart this intrinsic capacity, and some are practically effortless. And this is exactly what is important in giving you these self healing practices: to know that you have options for self-care and self healing.
Whether current medicine is important to you, or you are more of a naturopathic sort, these practices can be incorporated into your regimen for maximum healing and long, lasting vitality. It’s valuable, no matter what your stance is, to know the powerfully effective ways to take care of yourself, and support your healing on all fronts, and on your own terms.
In this chapter we’re going to do that and re-address any of the lesson content from the previous few weeks learning about Ayurveda. We understand our Dosha, we understand our dominant nature and the elemental resources of our existence. So now we’re going to dive a little bit deeper into food remedy, breath techniques, herbal concoctions, and simple techniques to incorporate Ayurveda, and enhance more modern Kundalini yoga practices for the next few chapters.
Tofu Pad Thai
This could be amped up with even more veggies! You could add bell pepper, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and more…
Energy Bites
No baking required, love that! Yummy treat to snack all week :-) or even breakfast on the go.
