Cf kundalini yoga online resources below.
Last Sunday my daughter Tatiana asked me if I wanted to do some ashtanga yoga with her. My memories of ashtanga yoga are of super athletic and competitive yogis and finding it difficult to keep up with the pace. Last Sunday however I felt mainly joy and pleasure at doing exercises I hadn’t done in years, and this inspired me to try and do a different yoga set every day if possible.
For the past few months I’ve stuck to a 20 mns warm up which I know helps me go through the day with more strength and flexibility (not just physical) and a more open and trusting heart. The warm up consists of 2 mns of stretch pose, 3 msn of spinal flex with my hands facing up, 2 mns of spinal twists, 2 mns of life nerve stretch and 52 frog squats to transform sexual energy into healing and creative energy. Then I do either 11 or 31 mns of meditation for addictions (I’m doing that meditation daily for 120 days), and 11 mns of sodarshan chakra kriya (this meditation is my sacred trusted companion for 1,000 days).
The warm ups serve me well, but it is the meditations I have been stretching out whenever I have extra time. The meditation for addictions I did for the first time a few years ago, for 40 days. It helped lift me out from needing people’s approval, and falling into a funk whenever I did’t get that approval. I had broken down not listening to what I wanted for myself, instead working myself to the bone doing what I thought others wanted me to do for them. It was urgent I changed my programming, and this meditation helped me do just that. It’s not that I had become more selfish, on the contrary. More that I remembered to look after myself, which meant I had more resources within me to give to others.
This time round, I am revisiting the same issue – the journey to knowing oneself is like a spiral where every circle goes a bit deeper-. Bundled with the need for approval there are the food cravings. I got over the craving for sugars a few years ago, that took me at least three months of dramatically cutting down on fruit, with cold sweats and feelings of restlessness as I resisted the urge to eat that banana or apple, that I had thought was so healthy but actually was filling an emotional emptiness rather than true hunger.
I am now testing going without coffee, and its extra mid day kick, and without a glass of wine in the evening, and its soothing effect on end of day weariness. I feel the breathlessness and slight panic that comes with not being able to have an addictive substance, but it is bearable. And some days I sail through without as much as a thought for the coffee or the wine. Success is looming! Once the craving has gone, I’ll be able to enjoy the odd coffee or glass of wine and really savour them as a special treat.
The meditation for addiction is interesting. Even when I do it for 31 mns, I never get bored. Sometimes I find it nearly impossible to keep the mantra in my mind – it’s as if my mind is refusing the re-programming. I find then trying to repeat it very fast helps, as if I was revving up the engine and increasing the speed of the wheels turning. Sometimes I find myself thinking about what we’ll eat for lunch, or an extra item for my to-do list. Sometimes I get caught up in some rumination about people, then remind myself to come back to the mantra. Other times I take off and feel very light, and am rewarded with some insight about Life, or someone, or what I need to do in a certain situation. These insights are gold and in themselves justify the time meditating.
I’ve been looking for online resources for kundalini yoga.
Kundalini yoga is a very precise tool, and though most sets work on many different levels, many focus on one or two particular aspects. You could effectively do a different one every day.
The meditations are good at working on specific issues – if followed daily, even for 3 mns every day, I can say from experience that they make a difference, ie you can be your own therapist-.
For written descriptions of kundalini yoga sets, those are the top ones I found. The advantage of a written description is that you can adapt the times to suit how much time you have.
I only found a few free good online videos.
For meditations and working on specific issues, I’d recommend Catalyst Yogi .
For actual kundalini yoga sets, here a few people I know, they have some videos available for free:
- Georgie Treasure in Herefordshire: https://www.facebook.com/healingspirits.co.uk
- Sara Campbell I met at a writer’s workshop – she’s a world champion free diver, lives in Dahab, Egypt by the Red Sea, and runs kundalini yoga workshops to help people free dive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9pdiuv6S_4. She explains deep breathing better than anyone I know.
- Guru Rattana has written many inspiring books on kundalini yoga and has online videos.
jennydaneels 