Dear Readers,
I write today with the intention to educate rather than offend, in regard to "all the flowery stuff." All the flowery stuff is the practices that we as Westerners understand to be yoga. The Flowery stuff is impartial truth and can be regarded as watered down. I earlier said the word "offend" because there are some people who hold asana, stretching, breathing, and meditation to be sacred and would have the Western yoga practicitioner believe that these are the end-all, when in actuality those things are merely skills and means that are gifted to the yogi as a way of finding truth enough to cut through the illusion of life/reality on Earth.
What you may hold to be truth or self-evident is simply a mask above another mask. Asana is untruth and truth because of its mis-association with the physical or maya (the best way describe Maya is in the modern film entitled "The Matrix". Maya is the world that has been put infront of your eyes to blind you from the truth.). Asana is but one fold of the eight paths within Yoga and leads to countless variations upon the one path of Asana.
Many Hindu saints explain to us that all is nothing-ness and all springs from non-existence. One key and paradoxical points of yoga and tantra spirituality is the principle of "one substance" relating to the fact that everything is matter as a secondary existance to vibration as a primary existance.
In light of this situation with so many people practicing types of yoga that just don't allow an individual his or her truth in its fullness, let me define something that my particular style of yoga advocates and would be considered to be shadow yoga or unpopular yoga that is usually left out of Western schools. Kumbhaka (the breathless state) is a process of holding the breath on the fullness of the inhalation or the emptiness of the exhalation. The process of breath locking especially the empty breath-lock, likened to the experience of death and dying as it is an obvious assumption that breathing does not occur (or at least in the same sense as earthly breathing) in death. Breathing is universally associated with life.
Many of the items that would be considered unpopularized in the Western styles of yoga are associated with yoga for the afterlife and destructions of the ego and all worldly habits. Many people have drawn associations between Buddhist teachings and the esoteric yoga teachings and since our Western society pretty much has a hands off approach when dealing with religion (main eastern) it would make sense to me that these types of teachings were dismissed as uneconomical and mildly offensive.
But fear n0t unadept Westerner, I am informed and enthusiastic to say that if one was to follow a singular path to its end it still leads to the same place. For example the Yogi who follows his ego to its wholeness or completion will at that point realize a great reversal and lose his ego in the process of melting self into enlightenment.
Trevahr
Waking Within
760-713-6710
In light of this situation with so many people practicing types of yoga that just don't allow an individual his or her truth in its fullness, let me define something that my particular style of yoga advocates and would be considered to be shadow yoga or unpopular yoga that is usually left out of Western schools. Kumbhaka (the breathless state) is a process of holding the breath on the fullness of the inhalation or the emptiness of the exhalation. The process of breath locking especially the empty breath-lock, likened to the experience of death and dying as it is an obvious assumption that breathing does not occur (or at least in the same sense as earthly breathing) in death. Breathing is universally associated with life.
Many of the items that would be considered unpopularized in the Western styles of yoga are associated with yoga for the afterlife and destructions of the ego and all worldly habits. Many people have drawn associations between Buddhist teachings and the esoteric yoga teachings and since our Western society pretty much has a hands off approach when dealing with religion (main eastern) it would make sense to me that these types of teachings were dismissed as uneconomical and mildly offensive.
But fear n0t unadept Westerner, I am informed and enthusiastic to say that if one was to follow a singular path to its end it still leads to the same place. For example the Yogi who follows his ego to its wholeness or completion will at that point realize a great reversal and lose his ego in the process of melting self into enlightenment.
Trevahr
Waking Within
760-713-6710
Comments