Another Boot Camp come and gone April 14
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Well, it’s been a while since I’ve written. There have been days when I had wanted to put something out but sadly I found myself with absolutely no time. It’s actually quite a good thing as what actually happened was an avalanche of abundance for me as I got about a week into the course. In a past life (about four years ago) I had worked as a marketing consultant for a big commercial real estate company in Hollywood. When I left that job, I went completely into Kundalini yoga, finally taking the teacher’s training and ultimately teaching this boot camp as well as other classes. These past few years of teaching have been amazing but it was an interesting study in living. Unless you own your own studio it’s tough to make a living at just teaching yoga. Anyway, the short story is that my old boss recommended me to a property owner downtown who needed my help marketing his buildings. Ultimately he offered me a lot of money to come work for him and I accepted.
So first of all, we now know that the prosperity and abundance and all the gifts that come with dedicated practice also work for the teacher! The elevation and detachment and neutrality that comes with kundalini yoga has allowed me a great ability to do this job without losing my mind. I watch as the people who work around me get very stressed and pulled in by the hectic work. I feel strangely detached, yet each day it seems I am more effective than the next. It’s simply because of this practice. I know when to relax and conserve my energy in between tasks by simply breathing. It’s amazing to go back deeply into the working world and bring back the fruits of over four years of intense practice and teaching.
This is really important to realize because kundalini yoga is a householder’s yoga– meaning it is an intense practice of realization that can be done by everyday people who have lives to look after, jobs, families and big screen tv’s. In a very subtle way Kundalini Yoga by it’s mere existence is proof that spiritual practice isn’t relegated to monks and renunciates.
So this last boot camp was quite interesting. I began the new job on March 17th, the day of my namesake… St. Patrick’s day. So two weeks into the program I shifted into work mode and after teaching each morning I’d rush off to this job which often kept me at work until after 7 pm or later. This gave me an average of 4.5 hours of sleep a night and it was magnificent. There’s a saying… “the more you do, the more you CAN do.” It’s true. Anyway, this boot camp was the biggest ever and perhaps even the best. The miracles of kundalini yoga seemed more clear than I’ve ever experienced before.
One woman told me how she’d been trying to get pregnant despite major problems she’d had with her reproductive system. The problem had put undue pressure on her marriage and she’d come to the boot camp with the intention of removing all the blocks in her life with regards to her marriage and having a family. About ten days into the program, she came up to me after class with tears in her eyes as she related this whole story to me and told me that miraculously, she was pregnant and that her marriage was now better than ever.
Another woman who’d done the bootcamp once before just wrote me after the end of the course and told me how regrettably she’d had to miss the last few classes because of work. She explained that an avalanche of high profile crap at work had her tied up. Despite her inability to make it to class because of time, she made sure to do the meditation at home each day to complete the forty days. She related how ordinarily she would have been completely unraveled by this work situation, but because of the regular practice, especially the early morning practice of the boot camp, she was able to navigate the insanity of this work obstacle course, without getting very dirtied by any of it. In other words, she experienced what we always talk about as one of the benefits of Kundalini Yoga: The elevation and clarity of an expanded radiance literally keeps out the negative situations and somehow, in the clarity of mind that the yoga gives you, the right things just seem to happen at the right time.
For lack of a better way to say it, “my cup runneth over.” I am in awe at how this yoga works for those who practice it with a determination that becomes devotion and reverence. I am humbled by whatever grace led me to teach it and I am extremely grateful to the students who jumped on for this last ride.
To measure how young you are: Get into Frog pose: Put your hands on the ground. Now come up with your butts in the air, keeping knees and legs straight, bending over touching the ground. Grab hold of the heels and press nose into the knees. You will never have trouble with HEADACHES if you can do this. It means you are young and you will survive.
Cat pose is meant for your creative energy and to get rid of HEADACHES.
Basic Position: Sit in any relaxed position with a straight spine. Relax the hands in your lap, palms face up, left under, right on top; or put the hands in giaan mudra (index finger and thumb-tips, touching).
I was musing this morning about how the words ‘medication’ and ‘meditation’ are so very similar. Kind of interesting I think. What do you think?
