More notes from teacher training

Well, its early monday morning and I finished my Sadhana somehow by the grace of God without crawling back to bed. Lately I've been so tired and grumpy and even angry to "have" to get up and I go through it and tell myself I am going to go back to bed FOR SURE, but then when I finish I have plenty of energy and am ready for the day whether I like it or not! I wonder if/when I'll ever be a yogi who pops out of bed full of devotion and excitement...I am at the opposite end of that now.
I thought I would go ahead and add to the notes I started to transcribe on here last post...

On Choices: Widen your "arena of awareness" ( I love that) to give yourself more choices. Depression is a choice, it just seems like that is the only choice when you are in it, Open your energy up so you can widen your arena of awareness up and give yourself more choices.

On Relationships, from a Yogi Bhajan video lecture:
Relationship is a" Science of communication to gain the faith"
Key to destiny- What you say, how you say it, why you say it
Re-lay from the heart center- always have victory
Whatever you Re-lay- Relay conciously- Everything you say comes back to you.
If you don't know how to communicate with humor, you don't know how to communicate at all.
Think First, Talk Later
Think how your talk must end up elevating.
Relationship is an extended experience of yourself.

Important points:
You are here to enjoy yourself. Love and compassion go out to come back, and give you a higher experience of yourself, and a connection to higher frequency energy.
Judge everything, accept everything.
Meet everyone at the level they are at, and then do what you can to elevate.
Being a teacher- your presence works.

Level 1 - again!

So I decided last week to re-take level one teacher training with my teachers Tej and Harijiwan in Santa Monica. We had our first weekend of the 9 month course last weekend and it was AMAZING. I took alot of notes and want to share some of them here with you.
Alot of what I wrote down were great ideas and ways to express concepts of Kundalini yoga when you are teaching..

*In a posture, the importance of focus is in this order:
1. Mantra ( we are literally made of sound on an atomic level so guiding the energy of the breath with internal or external mantra (literally meaning mind- vibration) is the most powerful tool.
2. Breath ( the quality of the breath is the quality of fuel for the body and brings the power , the prana , to the posture.)
3. Movement / Form ( I found it interesting that this was last in importance. completely opposite focus of a lot of Hatha Yoga I am familiar with.)

* More Breath- More Prana - More Flexibility ( Have the students increase the power and focus on the breath often)

* If one person's Kundalini rises in the group, everyones aura changes ( It is my understanding that when Yogi Bhajan taught kriyas, he would have the class hold the posture / meditation until the color of the collective aura changed to blue)

*In most forward stretches in Kundalini Yoga, the heart leads and the head follows.

Thats all for now, more soon!

I am relating very much to stage 2 right now

" Everybody has a destiny and everybody has a fate and everybody has to follow the law of the electromagnetic field of the psyche. No human being is above it. No human being is below it. Anytime the magnetic psyche will start glittering, that's the first sign of the Kundalini. It starts glittering. Others feels good about you. The second stage is others feel good about you, but you feel bad about your self. That's the second second stage of Kundalini because you start seeing your weaknesses as clearly as anything else. Others start seeing the shine and glitter in you, but you don't see it. The third stage of the Kundalini is, you start seeing the outside and the inside. You start shining on the outside and cleaning on the inside. And the fourth stage is,everything becomes nothing and nothing becomes everything. These are the four steps of Kundalini Yoga and these are the four experiences which everybody will go through automatically who will practice these kriyas."
Yogi Bhajan
February 5, 1989

i'm back now i swear!

Wellllll, what can i say....i've let this dear yoga blog slip for 2 months....but at least my practice has been consistent. I am still doing the Sat Kriya everyday and back up to 31 minutes again after taking a break and going 11 min after the insanity of 62 minutes.......Its cool, its mellowed out into a nice , fairly painless routine..not much drama coming out anymore...and its definatly still healing my whole digestive system and giving me alot of energy...which is great because i ate my face off this holiday season.
If you happen to have read my other blog, faucetlover, you know that i am working on a big bad ass new blog over at wordpress and so i wanna save my life force for that over there..which i hope to have up soon. i want to blog obsessively and thoroughly for a 40 day experiment starting soon..so the yoga will be included in that i think...unless i decide to just keep this blog as is and link it to the new wordpress experiment./////we'll see!

Happy Birthday Guru Nanak Ji !!!!

A favorite quote from this wise saint born in on this day in 1469:

The throne of God exists in all places;
His treasure house fills up all spaces.
God, being Truth, lights up all faces.

Guru Nanak is the founder of the Sikh religion, but if you study his life, you'll see he never intended to create a religion. He was all about worshipping TRUTH, in all its many forms.

As you may or may not know, Kundalini Yoga came through the lineage of the ten Sikh Guru's of which Nanak is the first. This does NOT make Kundalini Yoga a religion however. My teachers describe the relationship between this school of yoga and Sikhism as the way the sun's light gets colored by the lens it flows through. This beautiful religion (its all about about worshipping the sound current and truth) was simply the vehicle for the ancient technology to arrive in. This practice was developed thousands of years ago and has been passed down in secret from teacher to student until Yogi Bhajan came to the west in 1969. I have read that he came intending to just teach Hatha yoga, but when he came to Los Angeles and saw the the young people demanding a change but getting lost in drugs , he realized the time was now to share this practice openly. I could go on...but basically the point I wanted to make was that Kundalini Yoga is not a religion and is in fact a technology and "spiritual" practice that honors all faiths because it is simply about empowering people to live their own highest truth. And for that I am grateful to the man responsible for opening the doors to these precious keys. Thank you Guru Nanak Ji and HAPPPYY BIIRRTHHDDAAYY!!!!

a quote from the wikipedia page devoted to his life:
" Guru Nanak Dev Ji spoke from direct understanding as an Awoken personality and not as a scholar, utilising the language of [Punjab] at the time as a person of Hindu background living in a highly Islamicised state. He encouraged people to worship within their own traditions, but to keep the focus on God's names rather than egotistic considerations."

Terminal Island Prison

This last friday Patrick and I went and taught a workshop at the Federal Correctional Institution at Terminal Island .
It was a really great experience. I was a little nervous before we went, but as we drove there I did a bunch of Breath of Fire and filled my energy field up with alot of prana, so when we got there I felt great. We were met by an amazing friend who works as a drug counselor at the prison in the lobby, and she helped us though security, which was a similar process to the TSA airport routine...I was suprised by how nice the grounds of the prison was, and the salt air was so fresh compared to our sweet downtown smog...
We taught about 40 guys, for a 3 hour class focusing on new beginnings. It was really amazing to see the transformation of the energy in the room as we went along. By the end of class the whole room was so filled with heart centered energy, it was beautiful.. To be with these guys, and see this technology in action in a setting like that, was very powerfully affirming. And the gratitude that was expressed after class made us feel SO appreciated. In a way those guys were my favorite students to teach... I look forward to having a workshop there again soon.

Press!

This came out last month...not sure why it took me so long to post! We were very excited to see this come out! Thanks LA Yoga!