Yoga: Exercise for Body and Mind

I often forget how most people consider yoga to be simply physical exercise. More people are discovering yoga in gyms in North America than in the many yoga studios that seem to be on every street corner. Of course, we have to get a bit more creative in rural areas. The way the public thinks about yoga is quite telling. One of the fundamental challenges we face, according to yoga psychology is our over-identification with the body. That means we fail to recognize our psycho-spiritual nature (for the most part). Human beings are like ice-bergs where there is more going on than meets the eye.

Any activity that is intended to re-unite our fragmented experience of reality can be classified as yoga. Even living in an ashram for 10 years there were many people that continued to say, "this is yoga and that is not yoga" Well, unless you could see into the heart and mind of that individual how could you possibly know if they were practicing yoga or not? We go to a class and get on a mat so that we can learn to concentrate the mind, strengthen the body and improve our health but the practice of yoga need never stop. You are continually faced with your perception of reality and the myriad of ways your ego reacts to that perception. Simply being aware of this process is a yoga practice.

To say, "I don't have time for yoga", then is the ultimate misnomer. It is time to deepen our understanding of this ancient practice. One translation of the above statement could be, "I don't have time to remember who I am". I would say it is more a function of space than time. Learn to create space in yourself and time will loosen its grip on you.

Be deep,

Steve

Yogi Jayanta

PRANA...more than meets the eye!

Hello All

I ran into a fact of human perception that I thought was relevant in our on-going exploration of prana. According to neurological research, human beings are "only aware of 2,000 bits of information out of 400 billion bits of information we are processing per second." As a percentage, you are only aware of 0.0000005% of the information your mind-body system is registering...and we thought using only 10% of our brain was dramatic! To implicate a discrepancy this large into our lives is very challenging but let me help to give a small example of how this may work. Look around you, right now... what you see? Now, try to be aware of just how much you are actually seeing in this fresh new moment of now and how much you are simply remembering, based on past conditioning. It is VERY difficult to separate the two but spend some time on this exercise with people you meet and with the places you go and you will notice, if you are willing, just how quickly we default to conditioned responses as opposed to perceiving and experiencing what is right here right now.

Cosmic and solar prana are all around you even now as are radio waves, electromagnetic fields and many other phenomena that we do not see. With training and practice, certain subtle phenomena can become visible through heightened sensory perception that is a bi-product of concentration. These experiences however are only revealing a tiny portion of the full spectrum of reality that surrounds us in any given moment. Perhaps the biggest lesson as we scratch the surface of our perception and begin to deepen our awareness is that of humility.

What you thought may not actually be but rather possibility may be reality...

We will dive into the depth of awareness at Beloved Yoga and Meditation tonight starting at 7 pm....be there or be square ; )

Be out of the box.

Namaste,

Steve

Yogi Jayanta

The Power of Perception

Hello All,

It is amazing how much energy we spend on arguing with what is. This means we experience a particular moment and then proceed to dialogue about that moment inside our minds. We take a stand against this moment in one way or another and sometimes from many different angles, then strong emotions are triggered based on the opinions we are formulating. Those emotions then trigger memories of past emotions of similar quality which triggers the thoughts related to those old emotions. PHEW! It is exhausting just describing the process. This is one explanation for arriving at work in your car with no idea how you got there. I know it's happened to you!

I call this the SPIRAL of INCREASING DRAMA. Consider that while we are spiraling into the rabbit whole of our fantasy world, life continues....the heart beats (faster due to drama), the body functions and the earth spins on its axis causing the sun to appear to move through the sky. The movement of the sun in the sky is a great support in illustrating the power of PERCEPTION. Everywhere in our language we talk about the sun moving across the sky because that is our visual perception. In fact, however, it is us (the earth) that is spinning and not the sun. This is the same in our lives. We are observing reality as though it is "objective" when, in fact, our perception of any given moment is made up entirely of our conditioned response (AKA reaction) to the information filtered by our senses. Still with me?

Consider the last person you saw....did you see them? Really? Or did you experience them as the sum total of your past conditioning (experiences, memories, fantasies). Look again, to look again is to RESPECT someone in the original Latin sense of the word. Look again at how you are perceiving the miracle of life spinning around you. At the end of the day, we are all spinning together on this glorious beach ball called earth. To practice meditation is to step to the center of your consciousness, of your life, at first everything is still moving but with practice and patience and the power of perception you may just discover what you didn't even know you were looking for.

Beloved Yoga & Meditation tonight at the Boathouse, hope to see you there. Then, I hope I re-member to look again and really SEE YOU.

Namaste,

Steve

Yogi Jayanta