InSan Yoga

💣Deep Practice

Once upon a time, in a castle far away from my inner mind, I assumed that deep practice was predicated on the number of postures I performed and their advancement and aggrandisement.

And sometimes, we need to do all those postures for a realisation to take effect on the inner level.

Then, I realised that deep practice involves going inside oneself and passing through one’s own tensions.

🔨Practice tempers conditioning and deep practice takes us to a place inside us that lies quietly beneath everything, where we can go beyond the perception of separation and experience everything as intricately woven together in a grand latticework of life.

👓You have to enter the body.

Inside!

Here, we enter through the four corners of the trunk, the sockets for the femoral and humeral heads. By drawing the long bones back to the spine, the shoulder and pelvic girdles act as conduits for a sensory continuum. All the joints are continuous and connected through the fascial sheathing, and when we focus on the depth joint, we can feel how it connects us to our pelvic floor.

Discovering deeper roots involves non-material phenomena, such as awareness, attention and consciousness.

Join me, Europe, if you want to discover what lies beneath.

Check out the bio thingy 🔍

https://insanyoga.com/schedule/

Shala

★Your Life follows the river flowing from you and for you.
★The river has no fixed destination.
★Don't push the river.
Your world is arranged so that nothing happens to you, but everything happens from you. Consciously or unconsciously, all that is occurring on the outer is being cast from the inner. If we only had the eyes to see and the ears to hear that, our awakening, growth, inspiration, and exploration - even if we forget that, sometimes cannot see it, or sometimes fall into distraction and despair, that all is the fruit of our inner mind.

★When there is no fixed destination, you can never arrive at the destination or lose your path, so nothing that happens in your Life can ever deviate you from your path. Your path IS what happens, and what happens IS your path. There is no other. If it is happening, it is meant to be happening. The acceptance of what is - is GOD - GOD is.

🫁Everything, and I mean everything, has a hidden meaning wrapped up in symbolism on this unbreakable path that IS your Life. The laughter, the tears, the travails, the experiences of ineffable loss, the pain, the disorder, the times you believe you'll never make it, even the rib-cranking heartbreak of love - even if you forget that sometimes, or cannot see that sometimes, or lose faith absolutely in the entire spectacle. We are occluded and shut down to ourselves.

★Even the loss of faith in the show is part of the show, and even the scene where everything is at sixes and sevens is not indicative of the show going wrong, so you are always precisely where you need to be, believe it or not, even if you are not.

🔭Life can be trusted, and we will see this if we sharpen our vision. Life cannot go wrong, for all is Life, and Life is all. Understand this, know it in your heart, and spirituality is as simple as breathing, as natural as experiencing your rib cage expand. The rest is merely commentary.

🏹Your pain, sorrow, doubts, longings, and fearful thoughts are not mistakes, and they are not asking to be 'healed.' They are asking to be held. Now, lightly, in the loving, healing arms of present awareness. There is so much pressure on us to "feel good" and "high" f**ken “vibes" only. But it's precisely our attempts to feel good that can make us feel so bad! Because you are not feeling, you are circumventing rather than feeling. Conceiving happiness as a destination rather than the all-embracing, non-dual present awareness that we are, we go to war with our unhappiness and feel shame around it. We split ourselves in two and feel far away from Home.

🏹Unconditional acceptance of intolerable feelings is the undoing of the ego, which will be resistant at every turn.
I know—I spent much of my life suicidally depressed. These days accept me exactly as I am; I see the treasures in my imperfections, and some days I am just circumambulating around my s**t. I look around and think people have got their s**t together. And then I realise that the only people who have got their s**t together are standing in it. I invite you—and this sounds like a paradox at first—to stop trying to be happy, stop trying to awaken or even "heal," and instead courageously embrace yourself exactly as you are, including your present unhappiness—your painful feelings, your strange thoughts and longings, even your fear and exhaustion. See them all as perfectly placed pieces of you rather than mistakes, aberrations, or signs of your failure.
This may result in scepticism about the technique, "forgetting" to surrender, a sudden upsurge of escapism, or venting feelings by expressing and acting out. The solution is to keep accepting your feelings about the whole process. Let the resistance be there, but don't resist the resistance.

★You are free. You don't have to let go. Nobody is forcing you. Look at the fear behind the resistance.

🏹What do you need help with regarding this process? Are you willing to let go of that? Keep letting go of every fear as it arises, and the resistance will resolve.

♥️If you feel sad or afraid or feel tension in your body, just for a moment, stop trying to "let go"." Forget about "raising your vibration" too! Instead, be with the discomfort. Get curious about it. Soften around it. Breathe into it.

🩵Give it space, room, some time. Forget about understanding, "releasing," or "fixing" it today and allow it to be here for as long as it needs to be here. Let it stay if it wants to stay. Let it go if it wants to go! Let it come back if it wants to come back. Treat it like a welcome guest in the Home of your being, a beloved child that genuinely belongs.

A student recently asked:

https://insanyoga.com/sydneynovember2023/ ❓Is there any way a person can prepare for his/her mission?"

If you are on a spiritual trajectory, this happens naturally. Trials, demands and training lead you to your mission and facilitate your preparation.

⚔️The severity and magnitude of your trials and training depend on the nature of your mission, as you require certain qualities or soul characteristics and symmetry to realise and execute it. All vexations and training involve compressing self-importance because you cannot prime your spirit if your ego rules you.

🏹What are you being trained for? You need to be aware and understand the symbolic meaning of every event. Analyse, dissect and resolve the difficult situations you are experiencing and determine the weakness that tips you off-balance and edges you into apathy.
Ask yourself what prevents you from being enthusiastic and working your way out of that situation. That is your weakness, the area of the spirit that needs attention. That is the lesson you need to learn. Therefore, that is where you will be wounded and tested. I believe there is one central area in which every human being on Earth is tested. The TEST OF FAITH - your greatest test. Refers to your belief in The Creator. Even though you cannot see God, do you have the humility and courage to believe?
To experience the presence of the Greater. To pass the test of faith, you must choose the subconscious mind (the soul sound) over the physical mind. Your weaknesses will muffle this soul sound. Your weaknesses are your temptations. Keep in mind that your weaknesses will be tested. I am not referring to physical things like s*x, drugs, food, alcohol, money and so on, which, if used negligently, can dilute your spiritual sensations. Here, I am taking about the temptations of the TWISTED HEART: pride, doubt, anger, revenge, jealousy, envy, resentment, self-pity, power, fear, guile, spiritual pride, and wrath. Your damaging soul characteristics, that is, anything that diverts you from the diamond path.

You will continually be marshalled in those areas to make you aware of your psychic fractures.

Constantly look within yourself and, with honesty and courage, and be brave enough to accept your flaws. If you do not know what is erroneous, how will you remedy it?

Shala .shakti.pucon
Photo

Urban Ashtanga Yoga Retreat 🚪🫁 with Santina

Sydney - Urban Retreat
10 – 12, November 2023

Complete details below and links.

https://insanyoga.com/sydneynovember2023/

https://theyogapeoplelink.as.me/SANTINAURBANRETREAT

🩻smoothing the first rib down and out in backbends

❤️‍🩹I am making it a spiritual practice to refrain from swearing when I teach. Unvictorious at this stage)

🩻The first rib starts at the top of the breastbone. If you glide the fingers up the breastbone, you discover a small dent on the upper edge of the breastbone. Moving left or right, we find the joint between the breastbone and the collarbone- just below and behind the collarbone. Behind it is the connection between the breastbone and the first rib.
🩻Now, stroke sideways over the collarbone. While doing this, visualize the nearby rib. Touch the collarbone with the thumb and middle finger of the right hand (lefthanders with the left).
🩻The rib cage makes the thoracic spine the most stable but least flexible portion. The lower ribs are approximately three times as wide as the first rib, creating a conical shape resembling a birdcage.
Since the rib cage has such an intricate relationship to the spine, a misaligned or tense rib cage will influence the whole body. As soon as your rib cage is freely centred and balanced on the spine, you will notice that the joints of the body free up, including the hip joint, knees, and joints of the feet. These relationships are mediated through the spine and sacrum to the pelvic bone rhythms.

🩻The first ribs and the connective tissue between them to the spinal processes interlace to make up the roof of the thorax. The roof of the thorax is directly interconnected through a fascial tubing through the body to the pelvic floor. Unfortunately, the importance of this roof for the pelvic floor is not well known. Many are not even aware that this counterpart to the pelvic floor exists!

You should be aware of the alignment of the first rib since lowering the uppermost rib means more pressure on the pelvic floor.
A comparison may help to understand the situation. Every tin can has an upper and a lower lid, a roof and a floor. The content of most cans, tomato sauce or soup, is incompressible, meaning they cannot be pressed together. If you increase the pressure on the lid of the can, then the pressure on the bottom will also increase. If the lid has a dent, the pressure inside the can increases.
The same is true for the bad posture of the upper body: if the first rib has sunk a bit, then the pressure on the pelvic floor rises, especially during inhalation, when the lungs expand. Suppose we imagine that first rib down then out we can release the intramuscular pressure inside the body down to the pelvic diagram. You will experience an elevation in backbends rather than strangulation.

Wild man
Thanks to for the soul 🍷 wine

Our spinal movements are often described as resembling a double helix - two linked strands that wind around each other to resemble a twisted ladder in a helix-like shape. This structure works as a stabilizer. When we walk, our spines are designed to move in two counter-rotating helical patterns. This pattern is converted into tension within the helical double fascia. It may be beneficial to visualize this coiling, unwinding and escalating movement of the spine in all backbends, remembering that yoga should not be training for body control; on the contrary, it must bring freedom to the body - all the freedom it needs. When we work with the body, there is beauty; where there is beauty, there is harmony.

Most of us carry intra-muscular tensions that stop our spines from being adaptable enough to embody this helical motion. If we are well grounded, attuned and oriented in our surroundings, our spine can decompress, and there is freedom to move. In this way, you allow the helical motion to begin to emerge.

Yielding to the ground and into the field of our experience is foundational in our perception as humans. The treasure of Shalabhasana, placed at the beginning of the intermediate series, allows us to relinquish ourselves into the earth and into our spacial experience before engaging in the deeper spinal spirals of the forthcoming backbends.

Hence, any reaching or turning of our bodies must emerge from this phenomenological experience. Getting so involved in managing your helices will be so tempting that you forget to yield and be held by the surroundings. Keep returning to your first perception repeatedly, grounding, grounding, grounding - freedom comes from containing and expanding.

From here, imagine that from T6 to T1, the double helix wreaths and uncoils in an upward motion - and from T7 to L5, this uncoiling moves downwards. There is an elongated curve at the back of the waist. This is where the spine opens, and the double movement occurs upwards and downwards at the exact moment.

The nexus point of T7 to the solar plexus nerve ganglion, spinal cord and diaphragm is a focal site to initiate this helical spinal movement. Congestion and interruptions in the distribution of nerve force around the solar plexus nerve ganglion create intra-muscular pressure, which can compress and pinch the nerves that pass through the corresponding vertebral cavity, causing pain restriction. We need to recreate the proper space between the vertebrae so that the nerves can be released and health re-established. Visualizing the helical spine can facilitate this demand on the body.

To move nerve force through the solar plexus nerve ganglia, refer to my youtube video.

https://youtu.be/MPt-cVnJ7OU

Wellness is a term that is used a lot in in relation to yoga, but what does this actually mean? We have gathered a group of well-known and respected names in Ashtanga yoga to discuss this live online.

The event is scheduled in a time zone compatible with India, Asia, Australia and Europe. This is a community event, bring your questions and interest.

Our aim is to discuss and attempt to define how wellness is manifest in yoga as a comprehensive package aside from asana and to bring it into our practice where it is often found lacking. For, as strange and contradictory as it may sound, yoga as it has made its way outside India to general popularity, hasn’t always been framed and guided by *wellness*.

Yoga has always been a system of *self-care*. Which is not the same as the popularised term involving a weekend of pampering at the spa, rather the necessary accompaniment to yoga’s ultimate aim of self-inquiry. Because, firstly we have to make friends with ourselves; being willing to embrace ourselves as we are is the necessary step in knowing ourselves.

The event will be recorded and uploaded to our website so if you can’t join live and want to receive notification please sign up and the email will be sent to you.

There is no cost to join the discussion, however we are taking donations to cover the cost of the technical set up and the rest of the funds will benefit Odanadi Seva Trust, women and children’s safe home in Mysore, via Yoga Stops Traffick, our UK Charity.

Specifically I will discuss:

⭕️Guilt, shame and trauma.
⭕️How do they can come up in practice and how can we recognise these qualities so as not to perpetuate them?
⭕️My body is not my friend 😳
⭕️How do we continue to get caught in the endless maze of fixing, changing, managing and controlling?
⭕️How do you bring in yoga philosophy to your life and practice?

Intensive Theme: ⭕️Awakening response to the Inner and Outer spirals of the body.

Here we learn the movement of the Spirit within the body – through understanding the spirals in muscle and bone.

In our language today – and in all ancient writings – the world “spirit” and “spiral” come from the same basic root word.

We will learn the balancing of Inner and Outer Spiral.
The Inner Spiral and Outer Spiral ideally balance each other in every pose.

The Inner spiral – refines alignment by positioning or placing the bones.
The Outer spiral – refines alignment by positioning bones and balancing alignment actions of the inner spiral.

The spirals work primarily on the horizontal axis of the body to promote the health of the joints through proper energetic alignment as we expose and extend in the pose – though the spirals do include the 3rd dimension of expansion. Their actions naturally dovetail at crucial points, whether the hips, pelvis, or neck and shoulders.

For example, in most cases, the buttock muscles are more robust than the action of the inner thighs. So the buttock muscle – particularly at the sides and bottom – tends to compress the hipbones inward against the sacrum, locking and immobilizing the sacrum and lower back. When this happens, the Outer Spiral is overriding the Inner Spiral. The jamming can lead to strain, muscle pulls, and problems in the lower back (particularly in Forward Bends) and contributes to ‘pulls’ in the groins (particularly in ‘hip openers’ – e.g. Baddhakonasana). The balance between the two spirals creates a genuine expansion without injury.

It does so by:
⏺protecting your inner thighs by keeping the groins deep, and
⏺protecting your lower back by keeping the sacrum tipped forward into the body so that it can move more freely and in harmony with the spine, as well as find support from the lower belly drawing in
and up in conjunction with the spiralling of the tailbone.

All spiralling and spiral powers are magically more incredible than those that vibrate forward in a straight line.

We go beyond the straight lines of Asthanga YOGA.

See remaining in COMMENTS 📞

See bio link for registration ⭕️

Art 🖼 work

RePosted • It is with joy, gratitude, reverence and humbleness that I share with you the Ashtanga Fundraiser for Trauma Relief, a month long series of events this December to raise much needed funding for programs and trainings. ANY level donation on the eventbrite link in bio gets you access to all classes!!!!

Three and a Half Acres broadens access to yoga for trauma survivors in five categories: housing/food insecurity, domestic abuse, lgbtq+, recovery, justice and trauma teachers how to provide trauma sensitive yoga.

Live sessions during December:

12/2, 7pm-8:30pm EST with Lara Land ✌🏼📿] : Opening Puja and Comments

12/4 9am EST/2pm GMT : Breathe with Siobhan

12/4 or 12/5 7-8pm EST/1-2am GMT/11-12am AEDT : Meditation and Pranayama.

12/11 7-8.45am EST/noon-1.45pm GMT : Trauma Relief Instructed Primary Series

12/11 9-10.30am EST/2-3.30pm GMT : Breath & Pranayam, w/ Discussion

12/11 11am-1pm EST/4-6pm GMT : The inside Journey - Half primary class followed by meditation and chanting

12/11 2pm EST/7pm GMT : Yoga Meditation (Like Chai Tea).

12/16 or 12/17, 11-11.30pm EST/4-4.30am GMT/8-8.30am DXB : Gayatri Mantra Chanting

12/19 8-10am EST/1-3pm GMT : Guided Led Primary Series Class, followed by a relaxing guided Yoga-Nidra

12/20 8-9.15am EST/1-2.15pm GMT : Chanting

12/21 11am -12.15pm EST/5-6.15pm GMT : Balancing Vata Dosha in the Ashtanga Practice

12/21 7-8.15pm EST/12-1.15pm GMT Chanting

12/23 8-9.15am EST/ 1-2.15pm GMT .lorenzetti : Ashtanga For all

Pre-recorded session:
: Pelvic Power Workroom

BONUSES: One Month Premium Membership to Omstars™] by Kino MacGregor] for anyone who donates over $100

Six Month Premium Membership to Kino MacGregor] Omstars™] + Tarot Card Deck by + by Lara Land ✌🏼📿] for our largest donor!

The Square of Life:

🌀The FEELING IS THE Secret

Creating clarity on the Ideal State of Being, based on the teachings of Florence Scovel Shinn (1871-1940)

"Whatever (one) feels deeply or images clearly, is impressed upon the subconscious mind, and carried out in minutest detail." Florence Scovel Shinn

As conscious creators, we have ultimate dominion and sovereignty over our minds, speech, and inner conversations. It is our birthright; and our divine inheritance. Mental and cognitive faculties work under something that simulates them. This stimulus may come either from without, through the external senses or from within by the consciousness of something not perceptible on the physical plane. Our FEELING sense is the operating power that propels and constructs our level of consciousness, and ultimately our STATE of BEING.

In this WORKROOM, we ask questions of our INNER SELF, embody states of being/feeling and create imaginal pictures to generate further clarity on the person we truly desire to be. Our Divine Design!

Our Divine Design is an expression of LIFE that no one else can convey and that no one else can do, and that which is uniquely destined for each of us. Often we don't know what the Divine Design of our life is, Scovel Shinn suggests we should make this demand by asking questions about what we wish to experience in 4 elementary categories of LIFE:

THE SQUARE OF LIFE : The Divine Design
Health
Wealth
Love; and
Joyful Self-expression.

When we take a magnifying glass to these four categories, we can examine our desires, and we can start building on them and becoming clear on the STATE OF BEING and the EXPERIENCE we want to behold in our world.

See full description in comments and website ✔️

Muchas gracias for this opportunity to share my words!

Register in Bio Links 🤲🏻

YES 💢🩸♾