Taking this life’s journey as a women in our times presents all kinds of challenges and empowerments.
Practicing as a Yoga Teacher and Yoga Therapist for the past five decades I have met hundreds of women dealing with a vast array of physical, emotional and mental issues that all point to a few central themes that effect most women
Little knowledge of their own monthly bio rhythm
Little knowledge of the important features of women’s life stages
Little knowledge of the factors that strengthen and empower fertility and birthing
The need to embrace forms of yoga practice that support female wholistic wellbeing
An understanding of the significant differences in the ways the female and male bio-neurological functions and predispositions are wired and its reflection in the ways our societies operate
Women’s intrinsic subtle nature
Sense of worth, value and capacity, ability to self resource
The innate spiritual inclination of women, what pathways best suit them and stages of development
Trauma, abuse, issues of safety, support and respect
Gender can be considered a ‘samskara’ (impressions, embedded material -subtle, mental, causal). Yoga views certain features of life as a samskara (impression that generate experiences, reactions, responses and consequences in life). Culture and Gender are two strong samskaras that dictate powerful themes in our lives. WE can grow a gift from a samskara. It is an influencing feature of our life that can be carried intelligently and powerfully through a transformation. The transformation will liberate us from the limiting colourations of the samskara and awaken us toward unique gifts and potentials. This requires we become knowledgeable and skillful at many levels.
Firstly, the vehicle of the human body that enables us to experience life requires our attention and care. Equipped with the physical and subtle knowledge of our female nature empowers movement away from any limiting forces be they personal, societal or cultural. The female form is unique. The monthly biorhythm can be a source of immense creative force when we learn to ride its physical and subtle energies. In this case knowledge IS power. The hormonal peaks, tides and lows reflect in our psyche. With knowledge we can call upon these natural forces to awaken our female power and shakti (essential creative energy). With this knowledge we can better map our cycle, design our lifestyle, support our wellbeing, and evolve our capacities, contribute in meaningful ways within our societies.
Secondly every woman has a natural spiritual predisposition. The knowledge gleaned from our cyclical rhythms will equally guide our spiritual empowerment. Our minds can be trained to serve our opening. If we integrate yoga into our lives, it must be understood and practiced in a way that supports our female biological, psychological and spiritual natures.
Every woman is different and unique, there is no one formula for all. The bio rhythm that influences a great part of a woman’s life is something we all have in common and yet we each express and live it differently.
Yoga and Ayurveda offers tremendous support and knowledge to women in finding their own unique path to wholeness. Yogic texts over the past couple of thousand years have largely instructed men, the forms of practice being applied mostly to the male form. I have spent a few decades having deep discussion with yogic adepts, teachers, yoga therapists, scholars, ayurvedic vaidyas, and exceptional women with cultural knowledge and depth, to source and study the pathways and practical wisdom that applies to a woman’s sadhana (path & practice). It has been challenging due to the sheer oversight of women in general.
What has been gleaned points to the innate power abiding within women relational to their ability to create human life coupled with the unique qualities and attributes that reach beyond the personal and accompany this natural given ability.
When a woman understands her innate power, she expresses a presence that cannot be denied. As well she can bring into every human domain the much-needed softer capacities, inner spiritual and intuitive technologies, a natural far-seeing perspective that is more wholistic and all inclusive, and a vision that ensures our human endeavors and effort are life giving and beneficial to all.
While gender can be viewed as a samskara it can equally be viewed as an inclination toward more fully expressed and lived potency, a vector that engenders a particular quality of realization.
When women sit within their innate strengths and capacities they do not need to fight for their rights and place. It will be evident we must be at the table or within the circle, when it comes to designing our ways of living and functioning at every level of our societies. Family life, education, ways of working and creating, social support organizations, workplaces and corporate settings, leadership, altruistic efforts will all change when the female half of the human population stands more fully in its capacities to serve our human family, our earthly home, and the forms of life she sustains and our wholistic evolution.
An actualized woman will transcend her identity as a gender and awaken to her visionary and creative capacity as a fully endowered human and spiritual being.
The wholistic restoration of quality of life for us all is dependent on each of us standing in our fullness, unfettered in our visions to serve the healing and conscious empowerment of our fullest human potentials. A powerful step is to engage women across the threshold that has held them so far from themselves in significant and life denying ways. Our societies do not need a reset, they cry out for a liberation from unethical, unconscionable behaviours and mindsets. Our societies do not need to be sustainable that is not enough; they need radical revisioning and creativity. We do not need more life denying mind numbing technology, we naturally aspire to fulfill unrealized human potentials. Unfettered woman have a place in this amplification of our qualities as a conscious heart driven species.
Facilitated by Sadhana
Sadhana will be your facilitator and mentor- she is a yogi of almost 50 years. She has taught classes, retreats, seminars, workshops, special needs groups, trained teachers and is a long-term yoga chikitsa (therapy) practitioner. The majority of her training occurred in India over many decades. She has worked closely and studied with Ayurvedic Vaidyas. She and her husband have trained yoga teachers in many countries, including Europe, USA, & India, enjoying the interface with genuine seekers of the traditional forms of practice. They are the founders of Shantarasa Yoga Darshana
Sadhana is also trained in and trained others in transpersonal counselling, medicine and art therapy.
She has also been initiated & instructed in indigenous methods of healing from a few of our human family’s remarkable wisdom cultures including in the Americas, Australia, European and others.
CONTENT
• 4 phases of a woman’s cycle – bio−neurological influences, hormones, effect on all systems and psychology – an empowering biological view, so few woman have this full picture to guide and inform them, it has been understudied and ignored by contemporary science until recently
• The 4 phases according to yoga and ayurveda− body, heart, mind and spirit. Doshas (constitutions) as they effect the female cycle and ayurvedic knowledge on female physical and subtle anatomy giving us a profoundly different and wholistic understanding
• A view of the moon cycle and the 16 aspects (Nityas)
• Women’s life stages− from menarche to women of power and wisdom
• Drawing on the innate power of the female cycle− discussions relevant to a women’s life, roles, work environments and schedule, circles of friendship, relationship and mentorship
• Yoga for women− adapting asana (ecstatic postures), cultivating the pranic body, pranayama and other practices to induce wholistic potency for women through all life stages and the monthly rhythm | moving away from the male orientation in yogic instruction and forceful practice.
• Herbs and food as medicine− herbs and foods speak when we know how to listen, creating wholesome balancing meals together
• Expressing, discovering and empowering through art
• Rituals to clean up unfinished business and step into wholistic womanhood. Calling on the Shaktis. Calling on the ancestors. Uniting the masculine and feminine forces the two intrinsic forces of all nature
• Mantras to empower, protect and cleanse"
• Awakening intuitive nature
• Pranic healing
Interested in joining this subject of study?