Everyday Sacred

North is a Buzz in my Head

What signals the start of Spring to the seed in the ground? How does it unwind from its tight shell, spiral around and find its way up and out of the ground? Something is drawing it upward to the light. Some desire stirs it from sleep and some sense of direction draws it upward toward the increasing light.

Our crown chakras are located in the head in the area of the pineal gland. This gland has vestiges of occular tissue that no longer sees. It does, however, respond to light. It has the latent ability to help us locate True North. It helps us find the verticle axis and it ignites the function of the crown chakra to become the positive pole. Hopefully, your winter practice has opened your hips to give you the negative pole in the perineum. When these poles are functioning, your bioelectric body wakes up from its hibernation and you are ready to move forward feeling inspired and brimming with creative potential.

This is the season of waking up the pineal gland. It happens when the pituitary gland, just beneath it, begins to hum with a new frequency. The pituitary is your third eye or 6th chakra. This is the chakra of creative vision and the organizational will to create the systems to birth that vision. The inspiration that seeds the vision is actually from a combination of chakras 6 and 7. One way to open the third eye is to look at a drishti as if your eyes were located deep your head. This gives your gaze a deeper dimension and is preferable to the inner focus upward to the third eye which can be ungrounding.

When the pituitary gland opens, you will begin to feel your body as larger. You feel more connected to the world around you. You get a palpable sense of your own potential to be powerful. The pituitary will vibrate at a higher frequency and that, in turn, wakes up the pineal gland sitting just above it. You may, at this point, get a sensation that your head is expanding. Think of the crown of the Buddha or the halo of saints. This is the energetic expansion of your 7th chakra which is your connection to your purpose and Divine Mind.

In future posts, we will discuss the structure of consciousness known as the witness. When these upper centers become active, we access the witness as the bridge to integrate the ego with the True Self. It is so much easier to uncover unconscious material and see recurring patterns in yourself when you are observing yourself as an impartial, loving witness. This is the only way we can really forgive and become truly compassionate.

We still have time. Spring will get rolling by the new moon of Aries. You will feel a real thrust building by then. Now is the time to fortify the form so it can hold an increased charge of life force without breaking down. Root deeply. Embody with your full presence. Make space for the uninvited guest. It's time to let things go and to let energy move through you. This week, in class, we will be doing a lot of uktanasanas (chair poses) with many variations (demi point, 1 leg crossed in pigeon, as the wheel of manifestation) so you become strong and formidable. That way you build the ground for your creations to move through you to completion.

One more thing to practice this week are twists. Once you are rooted and aligned, revolve the torso and head around your central axis. Be careful not to whip lash your head sideways. Keep it on the axis. Otherwise, you don't get the energy to flush the pituitary and pineal and you miss the overview. Another caution in the twist is to get the energy to move through the torso. It can get stuck in a toxic liver or a rigid lung. It is easy to miss this because the shoulder girdle is so flexible that you can fool yourself into thinking you are twisting your torso when actually all you are doing is over opening your shoulder.

The remedy for this? Keep your focus in your body's center. Bring your energy into you and then radiate the heart energy through the sternum, 90 degrees directly to your side. Have the point between your blades point directly back from the sternum. Clock your upper arm to the ceiling, your lower arm to the floor. How may points of reference are you able to reference without becoming mental? Stay embodied. Stay with the flow of the pulse, the phrase of the wave of life force.

Now, while you're still turning, lift a line of energy from your heart up into your head. Find the middle of the third eye and open it, forehead to the ceiling etc. You find yourself in space, directionally, but from the inside, from the living intelligence( not from the one who wants to control, not from the little tyrant). If you find the little tyrant taking over the pose, notice what part of your body has become tight. It will probably be your liver and diaphragm. This is the third chakra, seat of your personal will. In the absence of the big picture the witness provides, the third chakra will try to run the show. Congratulations! You are now in the dialogue. Big Mind meets Little Mind meets Big Mind meets Little Mind meets Big Mind until, one day Little Mind is a wave in the sea of Big Mind.

Until then, we need to get our bearings and find our way directionally in space and time but not of space and time. We need to find out how to be eternal beings in linear time. So, pick a point, call it center and go.

"Fred, where is north?"

Fred, where is north?
North? North is there my love.
The brook runs west.
What does it think its doing running west
When all the other country brooks run east
To reach the ocean?
It must be the brook that can trust itself to go by contraries. ( from West Running Brook by Robert Frost)

If life's course runs east, then yoga's course runs west. Yoga interrupts the life path of birth from the central generative point (saatva) through an unfolding pattern of growth (rajas) to maturity and decline (tamas) and finally death and returning to the unmanifest. Yoga's path coaxes you from the alternating current of growth and decline, work and rest, yin and yang back to the center. It temporarily stops the merry-go-round so you can get off and get free for a moment. When you get back on, you're not so dizzy.

It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.
It is from this in nature we are from.
It is most us. ( again from West Running Brook)

Embryos and organs take on form in identical conditions. Energy and fluids, swirled by the heart pump, form currents of clockwise and counterclockwise spirals. Where these complimentary spirals converge, standing waves appear. These standing waves are vesica picses. Out of the vulva of the vesica, from the central generative point, spirals of ears and fetuses emerge.

When we use the techniques of mapping hands, feet and chakras on the torso, the body aligns itself to the energy grid of the pose. When we spin the map, like a pinwheel, around the center, you experience liberation on many levels. Physically you engage your power and vitality. You gain control over your emotional brain as you develop the perspective of the witness. You increase your direct sense perception. You develop high sense perception. You create octave waves of vesicas through out every level of being. Out of the central generative point of the converging, complementary spirals, something new, something miraculous unfolds.

The story of Christ's crucifixion and rebirth is the story of you. That is why transformation doesn't do it. It is just exchanging one form for another. The form may be different but the contents are not. Transfiguration is what it's about. Every cell, molecule and atom vibrate at a new frequency.

But, I get ahead of myself. The miracle is in the unfolding. The transition times between things like winter to spring, dawn and dusk, the new and full moons, births, coming of age, weddings, funerals etc. are all magic times. They are also vesicas. Here and now there is a great opportunity to bring forth something new. After setting deep roots in winter, new forms now arise and flourish.

Working with Archetypes, Part 2: The Ground, The Path and The Fruit

So, to review, archetypes are types of arcs to a wave pattern of energy. We encounter as many as there are forms in creation. There are major ones, minor ones, personal ones (like victim, hero etc.) and impersonal ones (like winter, spring, summer and fall). As we develop witness consciousness, we hold our awareness in the center and experience the wave moving through us without getting swept away.

The ground of a good yoga practice is to yoke or join together the various archetypes of consciousness as the periphery in equal proportion to the center which is known variously as the nondual, Brahmin, universal, God-awareness.

The path of a good yoga practice is to learn how to set up your pose to create a standing wave of energy to move through you. We do this to get insights about the archetypes we harbor in our unconscious, archetypes that shape our drives and make us crazy. At any moment, you are either identifying and resonating with your ego or identifying and resonating with the Divine. Ego identification, in the words of Buddha, brings suffering. Divine identification brings freedom, joy and bliss. It is crazy to continue choosing suffering over freedom. So, the yoga practice shows you where the most dense, habitual part of you (your body) continues to unconsciously create the conditions for the archetypes that bring suffering to move through you.

Practitioners who know how to work with the archetypes of solar and lunar waves know that the transition points (between the seasons and at the new and full moon) are especially potent. At these times, the heavens are setting up standing waves that can be catalysts for our transformation.

Standing waves occur when 2 waves of identical frequency move through a defined medium in opposite directions. When they meet, the old pattern gets disrupted causing a new wave pattern ( the standing wave) to appear. If the boundaries of the form are weak, the increased force of the meeting vortexes just dissipates. This is why we see many stormy days before spring has sprung.

There are several ways we manipulate form and flow to create standing waves in a yoga pose. When building the form, think of your pose as a mandala. Then it will have geometric integrity that carries its own archetypal charge. The ancients did not use mandalas and geometric forms are mere decoration. They knew the deep symbolism inherent in them. Geometry is the universal language. Geometric forms have information encoded in them. They are the matrixes underlying forms in nature, consciousness and thought. The circle is unity; its center is the central generative point. An axis is the meeting of opposites. The vertical axis is the river where personal and transpersonal energy meet. The cross is the intersection where God and man meet. The square is a stable form capable of creating order out of chaos.

The fruit of a good yoga practice comes when you know how to hold the center and charge the form. Then the conversation begins. It is a conversation between your human self and your divine self. This is really the ultimate mindfulness practice because you fix your attention, body and breath on the NOW. Can you be equanimous? Where ever you say NO is where life is stopping you in this moment of NOW. Stay rooted, refine your form, build your charge through your breath. Everytime you want to muscle through, stop and surrender to form and flow so you don't push the wave. You let it roll through. When you feel the forces against you, find your directions and open up. The spaceous center will set you free.