My Rough Notes- YFT August 23rd 2008

Mark Whitwell- Breath, Asana,  Bandhas 8:15 -11: 15am

Breath, asana and bandha (in that order) integrate as a seamless process. Apply asana and bandha efficiently to produce a powerful practice that is right for you. Introducing breath and bandha as the central feature of your asana.  “Yoga is the means for ordinary folk to absorb the nurturing and healing force of Life.” Asana is hatha yoga “ha tha,” “Strength receiving” which has profound implication to our Life, health and experience. How do we make sure our asana is actually hatha yoga? (Practice and discussion)
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My Rough Notes:

Celebrity and authority are marketing tools and then you sell a lot of stuff and everyone buys your ideas and your stuff. You play the distribution game.

How does an ordinary person practice direct intimacy with life?

Swamism, guruism, celebrityism.  Krishnamacharya, He was sincere. A scholar, he did not want to exploit anyone. He wanted to empower. Yoga is direct intimacy with nurturing source, with our own reality. No longer in conflict with your own experience.

What is proposed in yoga is that the teacher is in an esteemed state. More-less. This has to go, the yoga tradition is a metta of nurturing, caring.

The yoga community deifies the Yoga Sutras. The power of life is in your own spine, not in some text that has special knowledge held by a few special people.

When a text is used as an instrument of power and it creates a hierarchy, it creates suffering, toxic.

The denial of the ordinary life embodiment is reinforced by the idealism of language. Yoga happens in ordinary life, it embraces ordinary.

Samadhi- at one with experience.

Painful differentiation between the ordinary and the spiritual- Samadhi is in with the diapers. No contradiction from ordinary experience.

Scholarly cleverness is a blunt instrument that sometimes exploits the people.

The person in that “social role” of teacher.

God is the appearance of all ordinary things. The LOOKING for GOD creates the idea of absence.

Buddhism was invented after Siddhartha died. Yoga is the participation in given reality. Meditation naturally arises.

Your senior responsibility is in the asanas. Meditation comes, it is a given. The attempt to make meditation happens prevents it from happening. The extreme intelligence of life are appearing right here and now, right here as you and me.

Non-dual practice of direct intimacy with life. God realization is my kids in human form. “You’re appearance to me is as much a wonder as my own embodiment”

Merge with your own natural experience, consciousness merges with its object as non-stop continuity.

To realize the idealism of your beliefs/faith/spirituality, you need to practice the asanas.

The ordinary life is the means of God Realization. Ordinary life is not an obstruction.

You can’t get to truth, truth is here. Present.

Doctrinal mind restricts us. Carry your own authority in your life. The source of reality is appearing as your very breath. Power and intelligence of life is in you. Scientists can’t figure out how the heart beats, why the flowers grow- what the force behind it all is.

Being a non-dual tantric yogi means that you are unattached. You are even unattached to unattachment. It’s a doctrinal point, language is a system, structure that fails us sometimes. What is this attachment business?

Yoga IS attachment. It is attachment to life. It is attachment to the floor boards, to the trees, to mother and father, to everything arising in natural life and celebrating the extreme intelligence in your own existence.

Aware but unattached. Spiritual idealisms are put in us.

Citta Vrtti Nirodhah- Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuation of consciousness

Don’t try to be desirless, unattached, don’t try to be here now, you ARE here now.

Our desire is a function of God. Suppressing it will make you crazy. Illness around sex in our society is a direct consequence of religious suppression of sexuality.

Do a noble yoga practice daily. 7 minutes a day. The secular must support the sacred. Honour your God Given skills manifesting now.

Asana is whole body prayer. Use your god given skills to make a success of your life.

If seeing your grandchild a few moments after being born is not Samadhi, I don’t know what is.

Someone asked a question about depression and Mark responded, “For what society has doled out for us, depression is the appropriate response.”

There needs to be a democratization of yoga.

Motherhood is the basis of reality.  The source of life. Yoga brings us into right relationship with nurturing force.

There was a Lord who wanted to do missionary work, he had three sons and his wife begged him to stay. He started doing a noble yoga practice, he decided to stay home. Priorities became clear. Yoga helps inform you.

Intimate with your life. Yoga is your life force expressed. You need this to be intimate with yourself, before you can really be intimate with someone else.

Exhaling is easy, reacting. It’s in the inhale that we are receptive.

“Left hand meets right hand (in prayer) heaven meets earth”

Abdominal goes in and up on the exhale.

Micheal Stone- Internal Form Bandhas. 1:00-3:30pm

An intelligent and subtle exploration of bandhas in yoga postures. Traditional texts speak at great length about the practice of bandhas (internal bonds) as a means of concentrating the mind and opening internal energy channels (nadis) in the mind and body. Unfortunately, bandha practice has been misunderstood, and as a result, people often squeeze and misuse muscle groups in the body, leading to overexertion and overstimulation in the nervous system. We will use several common poses to look deeply at the role of bandhas and how to feel them and also the how’s and why’s of bandha practice during asana and pranayama.

(another link on Bandhas)

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My Rough Notes

Yoga is not geometry superimposed on the body. It is internal pilgrimage. Kosas mind body process. Pilgrimage up the center access of our bodies.

Release the root of the palette, breath leaves the body, but the prana stays in.

prana i yama- restraining the breath to unrestrain the prana.

inhale- body goes up, diaphragm down.

Like the mala string of beads, the postures are the beads and the breath is the string.

1) Jalandhara Bandha- Hmmm like good wine. Smile to open the palette.

2) Uddiyana Bhanda - Pubic bone and tailbone are both dropping in downward dog. Creates a vaccuum. Nostrils of my groins.

Nadis are all bound up in perceptual bias. Pelvic floor has 4 corners. The coccyx , the pubic bone, and the two sitting bones.

Dristi – There are nine gazing points: They are the nose, between the eyebrows, navel, thumb, hands, feet, up, right side and left side.

Pointing at the moon is not the moon.

The nun Wu Jincang asked the Sixth Patriach Huineng, “I have studied the Mahaparinirvana sutra for many years, yet there are many areas i do not quite understand. Please enlighten me.”

The patriach responded, “I am illiterate. Please read out the characters to me and perhaps I will be able to explain the meaning.”

Said the nun, “You cannot even recognize the characters. How are you able then to understand the meaning?”

“Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words, in this case, can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon’s location. However, the finger is not the moon. To look at the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger, right?”

The form is pointing at the meditation. In yoga, it is precisely because “the practice is not working” that the skandhas come out. The yoga honeymoon is over. Emotion and sensation arrive together, it gives you a story about yourself. So what you do is  you just “hmmmm, interesting,” but you don’t swallow it. You don’t spit it out.  You don’t buy into your old habit energies.

We do this asana practice so we work with some of the negative habit energy patterns so that we will not put harmful, negative seeds into our bodies, into the culture, into the body politic.

The Enlightened Diet, Caroline Dupont 4:30pm-6:00pm

It’s clear that the ideal diet is one that is made up of whole, high quality, natural and living foods, and can significantly assist us along our spiritual path. In this talk we will discuss some of the predominant dietary approaches to nutrition (raw, macrobiotic, Ayurvedic, vegetarian, high protein, etc.) and how to incorporate the best they have to offer in a way that is appropriate to the health of the body and the growth of the soul. We will explore why many of us struggle with making consistent health-supporting food choices – even with the best of intentions – as we look at the deeper causes of poor lifestyle choices.

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My Rough Notes

1) A plant based diet. Our blood needs to be alkaline to be healthy. We need to step up the amount of plants eaten.

National Geographic studies showed that healthier societies are the ones that live on plant based diets.

Light diets, high vibration diet.You might not feel grounded and need to pay attention to more grounding sources, like legumes, chick peas, lentils, split peas, tofu. green root vegetables.

Greens usually grow up. Root vegetables reach down into the earth, help you feel grounded when you eat them.

Greens add minerals, protein, high alkaline (iron calcium)

Lettuce swiss chard, kale, bok choy. Sunflower greens. Salba or chia seeds in smoothies are good.

2) Whole Foods. Eating foods the way the grow. Go to markets and buy from local farmers. Brown rice, quinoia, buckwheat, whole grains. Millet emranth, teff.

1 cup of grains to two cups water.

3) Biodynamic Organic Foods, brings into our bodies minerals

What we support through our dollars on this earth comes back to us.

78 cents of feul per calorie carbon footprint  of that is massive.

Evolving spiritually moves life force through us. Eating life, not death.

4) Living Foods.
Grated beet and carrot salads.
Sauerkrayt, fermented pre-digested.

Raw sauerkraut recolonizes the gut with good bacteria.

Wheat grass powder, spirilina.

Everything is made of energy in the body there are organs, cells, atoms, protons, electrons which are galaxies apart. Spaces in between. Energy holds us together. Energy is constantly in motion.

Some energies are denser than others, higher vibration diet supports spiritual growth.

As you improve your diet in increases the vibration of what you’re taking into your body. Be worried, emotional detox will start. This happens as we get a better diet.

Emotional detox (relates to stench of ocean, shiva story) In a pourus high vibration diet you become more sensitive to what is going on around you. Eating better is about creating more peace in our lives. We have been taught to suppress our emotions through foods.

Physical body holds suppressed emotions, they are blocking life force.

As these blocked emotions are lifted there are these pieces of you that have been hidden. Beautiful pieces of you get revealed.

http://pcrm.org/

The violence created to that animal gets ingested by you. It’s flesh gets imprinted with what that animal has been through,

All plant foods are made up of protein.

Refined sugars make cravings for proteins (meat maybe).

True hunger is felt in the back of the throat. If you are thinking that you are feeling hungry it might be your solar plexus being stirred.

Suggestion to only eat fish two times a week because of mercury.

Cold pressed oils not refined oils.

Cider vinegar and honey helps people digest. Can use it as a salad dressing.

Candita- The body ecology diet.

1) Relax when eating, the nervous system governs digestion, when you are relaxed everything flows.

Chips, crappy sweets, they start tel feel like an assault on your senses.

2) Chew thoroughly
3) Eat when you are hungry, ignore the clock.

Apple, celery, juice, chopped walnuts, currents in a bowl.

4) give the digestion system a break 12 hours it needs time to process and detoxify. some of this time is digestion, some of it detoxifying.

Where are you feeling hunger in your body?

It is interesting what your mind thinks you want – listen to your body. Mind thinks you want chips, cookies. Probably your body doesn’t.

The Roundtable Discussion 6:00pm – 9:30pm:  Present to Future

Again, eight of our beloved mentors in a moderated discussion of visions of Yoga’s future.  How will the numerous new Hatha ‘lineages’ establish their validity?  Through personal anecdote, experiential results, communal/global impact, or mere marketing?  Is Yoga culture uniquely poised to be a vanguard of ethics and compassion in a turbulent world, or will its traditional bias towards personal retreat and sattvic withdrawal remove it from social utility?  When will politicians begin pursuing the “yoga vote”?  Can wisdom be branded and copyrighted? How will we continue to embody wakefulness in an increasingly disembodied world?  How can we (and should we?) prevent Yoga from becoming another corporate-style, trans-national religion that spreads from one urban setting to another with little regard for the uniqueness of local lands?  Did the Rishis foresee global warming and peak oil?  If they didn’t, who will be our Rishis now?  The last 20 minutes will be  open to questions from the floor.

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Ah him sa- non violence.
Slowly over time you allow yourself to be seen with a yoga teacher.
People come to the yoga teacher training saying they want a new career. What is that? Yoga is not a career.
“concrete thinking” knowing the experience of others. Children develop this later.
Pre-egoic phase – psychosis?
“sex spirituality ecology”
“pre trans phallacy”

Practice + Philosophy.
It is the passion that burns in you that enlives the yoga practice + philosophy

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