How deep are you willing to allow Yoga in ?!
Yoga’s question in return would be… are you ready to see the raw basic truth of life and what are you willing to let go of ?
Yoga views the human body instrument very differently from our physically-based sciences, and our human minds very differently from the various expressions of self-development and psychotherapeutic models. Yogic vision and scholarship has observed what begins prior to and through conception, birth, life through all its stages and death, as well as what extends beyond death. It has also managed to illicit penetrating INSIGHT as to the purpose of inhabiting a human form, the potentials for human evolution, and the nature of what is real as well as the means to know and perceive that reality. The only instrument required to observe and gain this knowledge is something each of us is born with and has access to, and that is individual consciousness as part of a larger omnipresent consciousness.
The precise art of posing the essential inquiries that arise naturally as a consequence of our inhabiting a human body in this or any time is something yoga guides.
As Yoga has been adopted into our cultures, we have tried to push the vast potentials of yoga practice through the tiny eye of the external physically-based science needle.
Contemporary practices of Yoga Therapy give due diligence to measurable observable outcomes and benefits that encourage greater acceptance of yoga’s healing benefits within medical science-based parameters of healthcare. This is a worthy and needed application of certain yogic understandings. This however is not our work. Our focus for many reasons is different.
We were schooled back in the 1970s to meet Yoga as a complete path and wholistic set of practices. There was very little need at that time to prove Yoga’s immense benefits to body, breath, mind, psychological balance, and healing, which always included the marrying of the human mind to its greater counterpart- consciousness itself as independent and source of the mind. That focus continued through the decades of teaching received.
Situated now in the latter stage of our lives we are more interested in preserving, sharing, and teaching the unique overarching yogic understandings pertaining to being fully human. In this way, we can share and educate its great benefits through the yogic lens without compressing its knowledge or bending it to fit the accepted paradigms of conventional medical science. This approach causes the parameters of our conceptual frameworks to expand and include the non-physical universe.
Yoga has its own science, complete with its own measures of efficacy and knowability that educate its benefits to the multi-layered human experience. Yoga is less interested in the reduction of symptoms and eradication of physical conditions (although these may well be the beneficial side effects of the wholistic spectrum). It is interested in a larger outcome of the transformation of function and enhanced integration of all systems, organs, and finer components of body organization (for example cellular reproduction and enhancement as well as the energy substratum that generates and sustains regenerative cycles).
Three body systems powerfully impacted by the predominantly physical practices of yoga, such as asana, for example, are the digestive, endocrine, and nervous systems. When we have improved the function of these systems all other systems draw benefit and renewed balance. Yoga works with the whole body rather than its parts. It influences the generators of overall function and health thereby addressing the totality that is the human body including its animating life-giving force. From the yogic perspective if digestion is poor and out of balance all other systems will be in trouble. The transformative ‘fire of yoga’ when empowered ignites the subtle fire or combustible nature of all body functions. The fire element enhances everything including all aspects of digestion, breath, heart function, circulation, elimination of toxins, vital energy, ability to assimilate information and experience, etc.
The Yoga of Breath
The breath is a powerful conditioner of health and wellbeing. If the breath is poor in function, if the respiratory system is challenged or impeded, digestion, heart function, quality of blood, etc. will equally be impeded. Working with breath and digestive function go hand in hand. Certain breathing methods will enhance digestive function. The fire element as already stated is integral to digestive power, yogic practices will fan and balance this essential element. Enhancing and empowering breath, refining it, and making it conscious brings great benefit to health and wellbeing.
If we are congested at the level of the mind then the mind is burdened by undigested experience. This will cause all manner of psychological imbalances commonly experienced as depressive and anxious conditions of mind. Yoga views disturbance as multi layered - as is the mind so is the breath, as is the breath so is the mind, as is the mind so is the body, and on and on revealing the entwined and layered dimensions of our human beingness.
The science of yoga teaches us how to live potently and powerfully. The body becomes our house which we learn to keep in optimal condition. We also come to know when it requires maintenance. The body ‘house’ is governed by the balance of the five elements and their associated qualities of energy and radiance. The energy layer of our being becomes the free energy of life, it can be cultivated and enhanced with focus on breath and subtle breathing practices. We engage through the body and mind via the senses. The mind receives the impressions of the senses and determines in what way our individual nature will receive and value these impressions. The mind inhabits us profoundly in ways we may not be conscious of. The quality of the mind will determine the quality of our life.
Yoga offers many means to cleanse, empower and awaken the potentials of the mind. These are the subtler practices such as the cleansing of the senses, mantra repetition, yoga nidra practices, contemplation, concentration methods, and meditation. A very particular way and form of study called Swadyaya is also engaged to further awaken the ‘higher mind’ capacities while also training us to how to know what is fundamentally real including our essential nature.
Essential nature is what is meant by authentic being, but such authentic purity cannot be constructed or partially adopted it can only be met by a genuine receding of egoic dominance. And so yogic living challenges and changes our experience and perception of everything we interface with.
Yoga however does not stop with individual or even collective mind. It takes us further. Yoga recognizes that all things created have a source and are made of something. That something is referred to as consciousness, an all-pervasive causative intelligence. Yoga reaches into this domain of origins and sustenance. Everything on the artist’s palette can be reduced to pigment. The pallet from which each of us creates a life is Consciousness. We discover the bounds of a single life and its field of time and space hold no real limit or binding. It opens us toward an infinite expanse of beauty, potency, presence, and pure expression untainted by the small things of the egoic habit. This unbounded experience requires a dedicated yogic sadhana (path and practice). This dimension of practice and understanding transforms the human conditioned nature that binds us to fear, insecurity, and separation. In this way, yoga gives the gift of liberation from binding forces and influences. The direct experience of unbounded nature is the greatest of all freedoms to know. This no doubt sounds immense, and it is. And yet even from the very outset of a genuine interface with the practices, knowledge, and skilful teaching of this path the taste and sweetness begin to open and affect us.
Yoga is so vast in both application (practice) and knowledge (practical philosophy). Our physical sciences and externally entrained minds are both limited in their ability to comprehend what Yoga truly has to offer each and every individual willing to penetrate through the external barriers to knowing. There is a vastness wider than the lens of the human eye to be perceived, and a beauty beyond measure resting closer and nearer to each of us than our breath and more present to us than the moment. Yoga awakens the power of the seer.
To study yoga is to study life, its purpose, our place within a cosmos and all its cycles. To know ourselves truly makes all things known.
At this moment in human history, it is imperative that we can access the ‘spiritual’ resource and intelligence that is inherent to us. IQ equips us for the physical universe, EQ (emotional intelligence) equips us for the mental universe, and SQ (spiritual Intelligence) equips us to see and know what is essentially real and of intrinsic lasting value.
“know that by which all things are known”
Yogic training peels back the layers that obstruct wholistic knowledge - that same knowledge is then applied to every corner of life and self
Become first your own guide and then a compassionate guide to others
This superb training will take you further and deeper than you thought possible
The skills gained will apply to your own experience and will then extend further in assisting others.
Learn the physical and the subtle practices guided by the practical philosophy and science of Yoga
Begin with 200 hours of training or couple it with 300 hours to gain the complete package of 500 hours
or add 300 hours to your already existing 200 hour teaching certificate to complete 500 hours
or take the study only option if you wish primarily to learn and have no desire to teach
ENROL NOW !! to commence in May or July
two training options available
also offering online study and re-sit options
