PranaBeing blog: First Things First

I have been a student of daily routine and committed practice for almost 23 years (more than half my life!). Over the course of these years, I’ve experimented, explored, observed, and struggled.

I continue to learn about myself, about life, and about health.

I continue to challenge my beliefs about freedom, agency, control, and what it means to be a conscious creator.

Inputs are among of the most powerful ways we influence ourselves. What we choose to connect with—and when and how we take things in or take action—affects our body, mind, emotions, and perceptions. This in turn affects how we interact and show up in life.

Gurudev often explained to me how unconscious patterns are built into our lifestyle as habits that support and reinforce inhibitions and false self-concepts. When I first heard this from him, I didn’t want to believe it; but after years of exploring, I have realized the truth.

Whenever we are struggling, whether physically, mentally, emotionally, or relationally, we need to look to how we are living to find the levers that will allow us to create change.

I’ve found that the more important something is, the more essential it is to do that thing FIRST in my day. The more the day unfolds, the less likely it is for me to be able to guarantee anything getting done!

Waking up to who I AM and being fully alive is my #1 priority. Consequently, I choose to start my day by cultivating life energy and connecting with my Self through sadhana (practice). The specifics look different on different days, but the core of the practice is experiencing myself as a prana-Being.

Especially if you are struggling with stress or worry, I advise you not to tap in to what causes you stress as soon as you become conscious. Skip scrolling Facebook or the news first thing. Make your work wait until after breakfast. You can be of service in the world after you have fed yourself (unless you are a mom; this requires a whole different level of practice).

Instead, make a point to connect with yourself before you invite anyone or anything from the external world to take up space in your consciousness, or claim a stake on your precious life energy.

If you are wondering what kind of tools you can use to connect with yourself, try one of my guided practices on Insight Timer. Pick one that fits your available time and practice it as one of the first things you do in your day. Try it for a week and see how it influences your quality of life.

Sample morning routine:

1. Wake up

2. Go to the bathroom

3. Brush your teeth and wash your face

4. Drink 8-16oz warm water (squeeze of lemon or lime optional)

5. Connect with yourself through practice

6. Now you’re ready for the day! Let ‘er rip!

I’d love to hear about your journey.

Connect with yourSelf before you connect to anything else.

You are the key to your health, harmony, and happiness.

PranaBeing blog: Yoga Sadhana and the Expansion of Consciousness

Explorers of all kinds fascinate me, especially explorers of consciousness.

I am constantly studying, reading, listening, gathering more tools, adding to my understanding and plumbing the mystery of being human.

In his book LSD and the Mind of the Universe, Christopher Bache offers this gem:

The core of the therapeutic protocol is to powerfully amplify your unconscious, allow its patterns to emerge in your awareness, and surrender completely to whatever presents itself in your experience.

Through the unrestricted engagement of your inner experience, the patterns will build in intensity until they come to a critical threshold. The same patterns will keep showing up in a variety of forms until a climax of expression is reached, some inner gestalt is consciously realized, or some reservoir of pain drained, and then they will spontaneously resolve themselves.

The energy trapped in these patterns is released, and the psyche is then free to flow into more expansive states of awareness for the remainder of the session. If this process is repeated many times, deeper patterns begin to emerge. However inscrutable these patterns may appear at the time, eventually they too can be dissolved by undefended engagement, and once they are, new worlds of experience will continue to open.

This description beautifully articulates the process of deep yogic sadhana.

Bache used LSD to “amplify the unconscious.” There is a far subtler, innate agent, inborn within every human being, which is destined to provide you with the impetus to expand your consciousness. It is prana, your own life energy.

You might be able to imagine how a person could have the types of experiences Bache describes under the influence of a drug, but most people could not fathom how this could be achieved without dramatic chemical intervention. Not only is this possible through the cultivation and awakening of prana, but the process is documented in multiple lineages of practice dating back thousands of years. An example of a person who reached this level of sadhana is my Teacher’s Teacher, Swami Kripalvanandji.

Prana functions subconsciously to sustain life. When fused with consciousness through yogic practices, it accelerates to evolutionary levels and becomes the catalyst for catharsis, release, and transformation. When there is enough energy in the system, obstructions are spontaneously brought forth to be resolved. The laws of energy determine the self-resolving dynamics of unconscious patterns. Healing—the return to wholeness—is the essence of expanding consciousness.

The role and power of prana in the process of yoga, and how to utilize prana to expand consciousness systematically, are secrets not widely known even among yoga practitioners. This was the essence of Gurudev’s discovery in the 1970 awakening experience that totally transformed his consciousness. (You can read about this in his book). The key to unlocking the power of prana is built into the Integrative Amrit Method. All practices in I AM Yoga, Yoga Nidra, and Yoga Therapy / Body Psychology are designed to re-establish our connection with prana.

Although I was gifted with a complete system by my Teachers, a methodology that can take us to the furthest reaches of mystical experience and beyond, most of the practices I teach are providing basic restoration and foundational preparations, because that is what we need.

As you learn how to dismantle your reactivity to what arises in the moment, yoga begins to rebalance your nervous system and simultaneously prepares you for the experience of encountering more deeply embedded and intense unconscious patterns. In this way yoga has immediate and multifaceted benefits: physical, physiological, emotional, mental, behavioral, relational, and spiritual. The discipline of yoga is the discipline of learning “unrestricted and undefended engagement” of both your inner and outer experience, and this is the key to health as well as enlightenment.

As a student and practitioner of yoga at any level, it is important to know that the purpose, power, and potential of yoga is nothing less than full Self realization and total liberation from self-caused suffering. If you don’t know where you are going, how will you ever arrive?

The first step is to begin to recognize who you are (the I AM, the consciousness) as distinct from who you think you are (the mind-made sense of separate self). Yoga provides dependable experiments to verify experientially and progressively deepen your knowing of Self as I AM.

The next step is to gather and amplify the life energy within your bodymind system. It is rare to find individuals who can tolerate elevated energy levels and maintain steadiness of mind. Stress, excessive nervous system stimulation, and toxicity are factors that pose challenges to cultivating and sustaining energy levels sufficient to ignite the deeper process of accelerated growth. Prana is the fuel for expansion of consciousness. If energy is constantly engaged with external stimuli and consumed by conflict-creating thoughts, we cannot reach a baseline threshold of power needed to move from survival-level consciousness toward higher creative and evolutionary functions. Moreover, every living being on Earth is immersed in increasing levels of environmental toxicity. We have yet to fully understand the real impact of this on our evolution (let alone our survival).

Luckily for us, we cannot avoid the process of consciousness expansion, no matter how unconscious or distracted we may become. Life is one energy. Energy moves in a self-balancing process, where degeneration can be seen as a precursor to evolutionary reorganization.

Transformation happens the moment sufficient energy and consciousness are available, and to the exact extent they are available. So even when you are working at the most basic levels, you are evolving. You are preparing the ground from which you will eventually leap.

Life itself appears to be bringing us to a critical threshold that is amplifying our collective unconsciousness. This may ignite transformation in ways we cannot predict.

The seeds of awakening are dormant within you. What will you do to nurture those seeds?

PranaBeing blog: I See You

When we meet for practice,

I look into your eyes.

I see

how you are burdened by sadness that slumps heavy

where you pushed it into an ashen pile

in the shadowy corner just beyond the border

of your waking awareness.

Your beautiful eyes, clouded

by thoughts that swirl with internal struggles

and worries fed by all the disharmony and suffering you see

outside.

Fine lines of tension around the eyes hint

at the hours you spent

solving problems, serving others, trying to help, doing your best,

thinking and doing

at the expense of your Being; (we all do this)

at the battle that rages on inside,

taking so much energy.

Because some part of you knows (some part of us knows)

that thinking and doing

at the expense of Being

takes its toll

and weighs on the spirit. Until we forget how to fly.

People don’t notice

if they don’t know how to see.

But I have learned; I see you.

I know who you are.

I see your caring way, your gentle, loving self.

I know your heart’s desire to laugh and play, to let go. To just be.

I know this about you because—and as—

I have discovered it about me.

So we enter the practice,

which is an opportunity

to attend imperfectly

to this moment’s experience.

Just a few

minutes of simple movement and breath.

Within a short while, attending

to the One dwelling inside,

I see the flash of life

lighting up and wakening within your eyes.

As we emerge from our closing OM,

Your eyes open wider, softened.

The Light that is you shining clearer through,

and the silent joy from deep within

begins to well and flow from your Being

into this world where we walk together,

where we are not separate and where we are

fundamentally alone and all-one.

When I look into your eyes

I see that this change happens so readily,

as if the entire Being had been waiting for you simply to take some time to turn inside,

to pause the struggle and practice harmony.

When I look into these eyes,

and see the joy of life sparkling,

I am filled with gratitude and inspiration.

Thank you for coming to practice today.

Thank you for Being you.

You truly are my Self.

Namaste.

P.S. Let’s practice together. I’m offering two classes per week at The YogaTonic (live in-person and streaming) now through February.