January Classes and New Start Time

Dear Students,

Happy new year! We hope you have all had a cozy, relaxing and revitalizing holiday break spent with loved ones and your favorite foods. We spent eight glorious days at the Winter Solstice Sadhana yoga festival in Lake Wales, Florida and had some incredibly powerful experiences during White Tantric yoga–which lasts for three days straight!

This month, we have a packed schedule of classes because there are five Fridays. Plus, in response to many students who found the 6 p.m. time slot too early, we are now starting class at 7 p.m. and finishing at 8:30 p.m.

Note: If you lose your copy of our monthly email, you can always look up our class schedule and themes on our blog: http://yogalifestyle.wordpress.com/

Yoga and Lifestyle Series January Schedule

Each class is held 7-8:30 p.m. Fridays at The Awareness Center in Pasadena. The cost is $15, or one Dharma Tribe credit if you’ve purchased a multi-class pass. For more information, call (626) 796-1567.

Jan. 2:  Becoming Whole Again

Consolidate your mind, body and spirit! Dump emotional habits that pull you in different directions and reintegrate your personality with the Adays Tisay Adays mantra.

Jan. 9:  Love Thyself

Open your heart and merge with the protective aspect of god in a safe, loving environment. Bless yourself with reverse Adi Shakti mudra as we shed negative self-talk and give ourselves the love we’ve been seeking from others.

Jan. 16:  Resistance is Futile

Stop clinging to safe preconceptions about your practice, your body and your habits. When we feel resistant to a new challenge or opportunity, it is simply our Higher Self telling us we’re ready ascend to the next level. Plug into your vastness with Fingers of Steel Kriya as we hold the hands of God together.

Jan. 23:  Be You!

Experience your innocence with a powerful series to recuperate your elementary personality. Dance your worries and inhibitions out! Then sink into a one-minute breath to find your eternal essence.

Jan. 30:  Man and Woman

We head into February–the love month–by expanding our awareness of the basic polarity between male and female energy. Power up with a challenging, active yoga sequence followed by the Grace of God meditation. A must-attend class for yogis and yoginis alike!

Love,

Nimrita & Baba

Trinity

We are a trinity of mind, body, and spirit. The very definition of yoga, which is a sanskrit word for union, describes the intention and purpose of this practice.

We can’t live in any one place for too long. Live in your mind, you become neurotic. Live in the body, you develop physical addictions, and ultimately lay to waste. Live in the spirit, and you lack grounding. Some call it being “checked out” or having your head in the clouds.

The key is to find balance. We must see ourselves and each other as the embodiment of a holy trinity. We are not separate halves of a larger whole. We are not fractured mirrors of each other, nor are we fragments of God. We are whole beings, operating at an individual level. And because we are all whole beings–reflections of a higher consciousness, reflections of the source–no one is better or more whole than the other.

However, we may not see ourselves that way. We allow ourselves to be manipulated by advertising. We are indoctrinated into believing that we must have an $800 Louis Vuitton handbag, or be the last man standing on reality television, or win the approval and adoration of strangers in order to be whole. We seek external validation to make up for a perceived lack within and outside of ourselves.

It’s a vicious cycle. Using maya to distract us from other maya. Using an illusion to cover up another illusion.

The only thing that is real is what we feel in our heart. Feelings are the language of the soul. As long as we ask questions, listen for the answer, and trust what we receive back so that we can manifest our heart’s desire, then we operate as whole beings. That’s all it takes.

Going into the Heart

So it’s December, and it’s… sort of cold… at least, for those who indulge in a cold shower in the early morning, the water is getting really good!

But we didn’t let the cold get to us last night – we hit the mat Jiva Mukti style, with some phat Michael Franti tunes, and kicked up some kundalini cardio. And it was good to sweat, let me tell you.

We dove deep into the heart center because there’s a chaotic, holiday season, winter solstice energy coming, and we need to go inside so that we don’t go crazy. People are going crazy now by trying their best to be normal. They’re killing each other for consumerism and clogging their bodies with sugar and butter and desperately doing everything that people are supposed to do for the holidays. But it’s not working.

It’s not working because being normal is the wrong way to stay steady in changing times. Instead of being normal, yogis just be themselves. We stay steady when everything around us is transforming. And, unlike the common call for “transformation” you hear around the corner of every yoga studio these days, kundalini yogis don’t transform anything about themselves. We’d rather just dump our garbage.

When the garbage is taken out, the house is clean. Your house, your body, mind, spirit, is perfect; but sometimes it gets messy. It gets clogged with television and political promises and opinionated bla bla bla. The subconscious is so full we can’t sleep at night. So we do what normal people do, take pills, so that we can defeat some made up disease called insomnia. But all we’re doing is keeping the garbage inside, and medicating ourselves into being bigger and bigger garbage cans.

The times we are going through call us to dump our bad habits, bad thoughts, bad speech, bad actions. Even Fox News is getting hip to it:

Time is now, now is the time. Whatever you give this holiday, remember to give your self to yourself. Remember that you are god, and feel free to drop all the guilt and depression that make an object out of god. Do your sadhana, clean yourself. Meditate on SA TA NA MA mantra, connecting at the fingertips, for 11 minutes, and just see what happens. Don’t transform anything – just discover how beautiful you already are!

And remember, the water is nice and cold this time of year

December Class Themes

Dear Students,

Holiday cliches abound this time of year. So do the stirring up of old patterns and emotional baggage caused by stress, overindulgence, and it simply being “that time of year.”

But forget about that…let’s have some FUN! If we choose to see it as such, this really is the most wonderful time of the year. All we need to do is laugh a little harder. Say “I love you” to five people. Savor that gingerbread cookie with a little more gusto. And finally, see the prosperity and abundance before you. Every moment is an opportunity to demonstrate the next greatest version of the grandest vision we have ever had for ourselves. The only challenge is choosing what that will be!

Yoga and Lifestyle Series December Schedule

Each class is held 6-7:30 p.m. Fridays at The Awareness Center in Pasadena. The cost is $15, or one Dharma Tribe credit if you’ve purchased a multi-class pass. For more information, call (626) 796-1567.

***NOTE: Class start time is moving to 7 p.m. starting in January 2009.***
Dec. 5:  Winter Cardio

Just when you thought you were going to spend the entire month on the couch or at the mall…think again! Our bodies need to keep moving, even if the cooler weather makes us want to curl up into a tighter ball under the covers. We’ll shrug off the holiday blues with a fun yoga set, followed by the invigorating panj granthi kriya. Pipe some life into your heart and lungs!

Dec. 12:  A New Year, A New You

Yogis don’t make resolutions — we set intentions. Yogic wisdom tells us that in order to change what is, we must first accept what we are seeing and experiencing. What have you resisted in 2008 that you are ready to accept, and then release? Now is the time.

Dec. 19:  Winter Solstice

Join powerful yogini and teacher Nimrita/Marcia Canestrano for a special class about the significance of the Winter Solstice, past and present.

Dec. 26:  No class (studio closed)

Happy holidays, everyone!

Love,

Nimrita & Baba

~ Check out our blog! http://yogalifestyle.wordpress.com

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Let Us Be Your Chew-rus

In honor of our nation’s upcoming holiday of indulgence, we dedicated this week’s class to our body’s magical but oft-forgotten (and abused) digestive system.

We pay little attention to our digestive tract unless it acts up, which sometimes seems like all the time. When we are less mindful of what we put in our bodies, those annoying gurgles and gas pains are telling us something. We usually focus on the food item as the culprit…”too many onions,” “gluten sensitivity,” or “dairy intolerance.” These are all valid reasons, and yoga helps us develop our intuition and awareness to make wiser food choices.

However, regardless of what we eat, we can all benefit from chewing our food more thoroughly. Chewing helps us our digestion in so many ways, and it requires nothing from us but patience and mindfulness.

Digestion Begins In Your Mouth!

If you think about it, we almost never give our digestion a break because we’re constantly consuming food or drinks — for energy, for entertainment, and just because it’s sitting right in front of us. This is why a lot of people do cleanses and go on fasts. But you don’t have to stop eating to lessen the stress on your stomach. Just chew your food.

Chew each mouthful of food at least 50-100 times, especially when eating grains and vegetables, which are complex carbohydrates.

You’ve heard the old saying that there are no teeth in our stomach. When we chew, our mouth secretes an enzyme in our saliva called ptyalin, which must be mixed well with our food. This can only happen in our mouth. Ptyalin breaks down starch into a complex, soluble sugar that our bodies can use for fuel.

Note that thoroughly chewing brown rice releases glucose into your system, which provides longer-lasting fuel for your body without the highs and lows that you get from refined sugars.

Chewing breaks down food so it can be more easily digested.

Chewing crushes food into tiny pieces, breaking down the molecular structure and releasing all the energy, nutrients, vitamins and minerals that your body needs.

Uncrushed food takes longer to digest, and usually causes stomach pain and bloat, burping and farting — not to mention dead weight that your body must expend energy to either store or flush out. So, not only are you not getting the benefits of the food, but you’re sapping your physical strength to deal with it.

Chewing also alkalizes your food because it mixes with your saliva, which is alkaline. We want to keep our blood slightly alkaline, rather than acidic, especially if our diet is heavily tilted toward acidic foods. Alkalizing your food means less work for your stomach.

Chewing prevents you from overeating, and eating too quickly.

It’s very easy and all to common to stuff as much down our gullet as if it were our last meal — especially if we’re really hungry. Chewing 50-100 times forces us to slow down and take the time to appreciate our food, and guess what — we eat less! It takes our bodies roughly 20 minutes to send a signal to our brain that we are full, regardless of how much we’ve actually consumed. Chewing our food means we eat less while getting the maximum benefit of our food during that time.

Chewing can be a meditation.

It’s easier to practice chewing thoroughly when eating alone, otherwise you won’t be a very good dinner conversationalist. Approach mealtimes like they’re meditations.

First, make sure you are in a quiet place and you do not feel rushed to finish eating by a specific time.

Take a good look at your plate of food, noting its color, texture, and smell.

Set an intention to absorb all the wonderful, healthful things your food is offering. Say a small prayer of gratitude, if you wish.

Now, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and then take your first bite. Chew. Chew some more.

Start gradually.

Try chewing every other or every third mouthful about 25-30 times. Eventually increase it to 50 times, and then when you’re feeling cocky, go for the gold standard of 100 per mouthful.

Obviously, some foods will require more chomping, like rice (preferably brown) and vegetables (preferably raw or lightly cooked). After a little practice, you’ll intuitively know when it’s time to keep chewing, and when to stop.

Breaking the Mask

Sometimes we feel like the slave of our thoughts. Our mind never seems to stop thinking at a million miles a minute, and we can’t slow it down enough to meditate. We would love to meditate, but just can’t relax. There’s too much to do, too many obligations. We are way too busy.

Just remember that the quickest way to reflect on the mental habits that hold us back is to question the reasons we give for not meditating.

And it’s not the practical reasons we give – there’s no time, I’m busy – because that’s just a weak cover, a mask we put on over our deeper resistance to meditation. We resist meditation because we have no relationship with our mind. When we sit quietly and turn our senses inward, the clutter of old intentions, memories, defeats, traumas, desires, and other mental projections floods in like a pile of old garbage left leaning against the door. We should have taken out the trash, but it smelled so bad we couldn’t sit with it long enough to burn it away with mudra or mantra; and that’s why we have no relationship. Our minds scare us.

Dropping our masks is a matter of breaking mental habits that keep us acting and reacting in self-demoting ways. You can do a perfect sadhana every day, or you can go to therapy, it’s the same relationship you’re cultivating. And when you have a relationship with your mind you can learn that it is a hierarchical relationship. You must be in control of your mind or it will control you. And how to control the mind? Control the breath.

Tuesday was significant for the planet. This is not a political statement. What happened, psychically, to human beings is that a worldwide mental pattern was broken. Every human on the planet who wishes to be part of the planet has dropped this pattern. There was no choice. The pattern is gone forever, powerless. This is what freedom means. It is not freedom from each other or for each other. Freedom is freedom from the mind; and it is only gained through conquest of the breath. No one who remembers this shall be a slave forever.

Immunity!

Yogi Bhajan once said that a difference between people today and people of ancient times is that back then, folks were scared of getting ill, and took up regular practices to avoid it; today we don’t fear illness, and so we don’t take care of ourselves. Today when we get sick, we enter the Illness Marketplace. Our drug store aisles are filled with so many medications we don’t know what to take. They all compete with each other to be the “best” medication. But how can medication ever be the “best”? Illness is illness, medicine is medicine, right?

Once medicine goes on the market, disease follows. On the television we can watch ads for medications that hail us by our illnesses: Do you have these symptoms? These? These? If we have the illness, we can be a customer. If not, then maybe the next pill will call us by name. This is the point we get to: we shop for medication first, hoping we have the right symptoms to qualify to take it. What really needs to change is our intake of poison: the poison of stress, the poison of dishonesty, the poison of the quick-fix mentality. But some of us love our poisons, and can’t imagine that they could ever harm us. Some of us believe it’s a greater harm to have our diseases taken away than to keep taking the poison.

So we have a million ways to get ill now; but there’s only one way to be healthy, and that’s sadhana. Sadhana is a daily practice of sitting with your soul and making friends. It is the ultimate medication because it treats the whole being, mind, body and soul. And so we sit and meditate, and clear the karmas that would have manifested in illness if allowed to do so. We watch what goes in and out of our bodies. We watch what we say, see, and do. Sadhana is a daily purification.

Recently, a friend of ours who was on the list for a liver transplant, who was on daily morphine for liver pain years ago, incapacitated, near death, got called in to her doctor’s office to review her latest test results. Her doctor was astounded to see that her liver had healed itself by cordoning off the illness in one of its lobes, diverting major organ functions to the remaining lobe. She was, as far as this doctor could see and verify, cured. She didn’t bother telling him that, in the years since getting ill, she had been healing herself daily with kundalini yoga. She didn’t bother telling him that she had healed herself by cultivating forgiveness and combating anger, which is the liver’s main emotion. She didn’t bother to tell him that she never needed a transplant because she had discovered that real healing comes from within, and flows through everything we do in life. She knew this doctor had no ears to hear it; and that telling him or the modern quick-fix medical establishment he represents, the modern human who has no fear of disease, who courts it like a lover, would do no good at all.

Love Now – The new religion of the 21st century

On the surface of the world right now there is war and violence and things
seem dark
But calmly and quietly, at the same time, something
else is happening underground
An inner revolution is taking place and certain individuals
are being called to a higher light
It is a silent revolution
>From the inside out
>From the ground up
 
It is time for me to reveal myself
I am an embedded agent of a secret, undercover
Clandestine Global operation
A spiritual conspiracy
We have sleeper cells in every nation on the planet
 
You won't see us on the T.V.
You won't read about us in the newspaper
You won't hear about us on the radio
 
We don't seek any glory
We don't wear any uniform
We come in all shapes and sizes
Colors and styles
 
Most of us work anonymously
We are quietly working behind the scenes in every country
and culture of the world
Cities big and small, mountains and valleys, in farms and villages,
tribes and remote islands
 
You could pass by one of us on the street and not even notice
We go undercover
We remain behind the scenes
It is of no concern to us who takes the final credit
But simply that the work gets done
 
Occasionally we spot each other in the street
We give a quiet nod and continue on our way so no one will notice
 
During the day many of us pretend we have normal jobs
But behind the false storefront, at night is where the real work takes place
 
Some call us the 'Conscious Army'
We are slowly creating a new world with the power of our minds and hearts
We follow, with passion and joy
Our orders from the Central Command
The Spiritual Intelligence Agency
 
We are dropping soft, secret love bombs when no one is looking
Poems
Hugs
Music
Photography
Movies
Kind words
Smiles
Meditation and prayer
Dance
Social activism
Websites
Blogs
Random acts of kindness
 
We each express ourselves in our own unique ways
with our own unique gifts and talents
 
'Be the change you want to see in the world'
That is the motto that fills our hearts
We know it is the only way real transformation takes place
We know that quietly and humbly we have the power
of all the oceans combined
 
Our work is slow and meticulous
Like the formation of mountains
It is not even visible at first glance
And yet with it entire tectonic plates shall be moved in the centuries to
come
 
Love is the new religion of the 21st century
 
You don't have to be a highly educated person
Or have any exceptional knowledge to understand it
 
It comes from the intelligence of the heart
Embedded in the timeless evolutionary pulse of all human beings
 
Be the change you want to see in the world
Nobody else can do it for you
 
We are now recruiting
Perhaps you will join us
Or already have....
All are welcome...
The door is open
 
-Brian Piergrossi
(From the book 'The Big Glow') 

intention and the navel center

“What’s coming is coming,” Yogi Bhajan said once about this time before the arrival of the Aquarian age. So what is coming? And what do we do about it?

To put it simply, things are catching up with us. And what we need to do is grow, grow, grow! Technology has put everything at the click of a button, but we are overwhelmed with the amount of information out there. Our economy is suffering from greed, but our only response is to ignore good sense and hold on, hold on to the comforts greed promises. But greed is not a comfort, it’s a karma. Everything that we hold on to must go, and our efforts to chase after things only show that we are running from something – the message our soul is sending to us to drop our problems and go inside and meditate. Be still. And breathe.

Prosperity abounds, and yet all we see in it is power. There is enough to go around, but we cannot bring ourselves to let go of our fear. Power and fear are opposites; they make up the same neurosis. It’s not enough for us to be powerful and prosperous, we have to make sure others are powerless so that they won’t take our power away from us. We hold on to our enemies, creating them where they don’t exist, because to live without an enemy is too much for us to handle; it makes us feel powerless.

Our real power lies in our ability to go inside and meditate, because if the inside is not right, the outside will never be right. If we can’t control ourselves, we will never be leaders of any worth. How can we lead others if we can’t even lead ourselves? We have to lead ourselves into silent moments of meditation, where all our garbage comes up to be released. And when the garbage comes up, petitioning our consciousness like a prisoner asking to be freed, we have to release it, to allow it, rather than hold on to our desire for external things to make us feel powerful on the outside. We may look nice, we may dress nice, but on the inside we are prisoners who think we are wardens.

Our power lies in the navel point; and the navel serves our intentions. As we strengthen our navel, our 3rd chakra starts to spin in its correct, clockwise direction. We are self-contained, self-sufficient. We know who we are, we don’t have to pull from others’ navel centers.

And as our 3rd chakra serves us, connects us to who we are, our intentions themselves change. We no longer want to control others. We rejoice in self-control: Man jeetai jag jeet, the one who controls the mind controls the world. That’s what meditation is.

Meditation is impossible without the navel center, just as growth is impossible without intention. When we sit with a straight spine, our navel holds us in place. When we breathe, we sit behind the navel as a pilot sits in a cockpit. When we chant mantra, our navel guides the tongue along the access codes of the upper palate to change our neurology and break habits.

And this sacred science comes to us just as people’s will to hold on to illusions of power is getting out of hand. Scientists chase DNA patterns around like kittens pouncing on moving patterns of light on the wall, while some understanding that our mental projections, our depression, our nutrition, and our sincere efforts at finding inner peace through meditation can alter these patterns just like Plato’s shadows in the cave.

There’s a lot going on outside of us these days, but this is not the time to freak out. There is much, much more going on inside of us. This is NOT the time to be using technology to hold on to illusions of power. It is time to use the technology of yoga to conquer our habits, our weaknesses, and our minds.

meditation for the fifth chakra

Practice this meditation for 11 minutes a day to clear your communication center, your fifth chakra, using the kundalini yoga mantra HUMEE HUM BRUM HUM a capella or on CD:

Sit in easy pose – eyes at the tip of the nose – hands in gyan mudra (1st finger and thumb touching, other fingers straight, hands resting on knees) – PULL NECK LOCK (pull heart toward head and pull chin STRAIGHT BACK, hard!)

PRACTICE FOR 40 DAYS TO BREAK A HABIT 90 DAYS TO INSTALL A NEW HABIT
180 DAYS TO CONFIRM A HABIT

Or practice every day for 11 minutes for 18 MONTHS to master this kriya that will give you clear communication and so that your face “will never age” (-Yogi Bhajan)