GARUDA Slovakia

“You must purge yourself before finding faults in others. When you see a mistake in somebody else, try to find if you are making the same mistake. This is the way to take judgment and to turn it into improvement.

Do not look at others' bodies with envy or with superiority. All people are born with different constitutions. Never compare yourself with others.

Each one's capacities are a function of his or her internal strength. Know your capacities and continually improve upon them.”

BKS Iyengar
His Life And Works

We are all caught up in the web of lust, anger, greed, infatuation, pride and jealousy. These are emotional upheavals that come to us in our day-to-day lives. The dancer uses these emotions and transforms them into artistic expression. The yogi works to conquer them…

"Nataraja - The lord of the dance: The yogi believes in nivrtti-marga, the inward path of renunciation; the dancer believes in pravrtti-marga, the outward path of creation. Yoga is jnana-marga, a path of knowledge; dance is bhakti-marga, a path of love. The difference between yoga and dance is that yoga is a perfect art in action, whereas dance is a perfect art in motion. In dance there is external expression through movement, whereas in yoga, though there is an intense inner dynamism, to the observer it may appear static. The movement may be very slight, but the action is tremendous.

We are all caught up in the web of lust, anger, greed, infatuation, pride and jealousy. These are emotional upheavals that come to us in our day-to-day lives. The dancer uses these emotions and transforms them into artistic expression. The yogi works to conquer them as recommended by Patanjali: ‘Maitri karuna mudita upeksanam sukha duhkha punya apunya visayanam bhavanatah chittaprasadanam’ - to cultivate friendliness, compassion, joy, and indifference towards happiness and sorrow, virtue and vice, is conducive to mental peace (Yoga Sutras, I. 33).”

BKS Iyengar, The Tree of Yoga

Less is more. To understand when is a mastery🙏🏻

There's really no correlation between your capacity to do challenging ("advanced") poses and how your body feels.
There are plenty of people who can do hard asanas - but many of them are also in pain. And there are plenty of people who can't do difficult poses but are not in pain.
After years of dysfunctional practice, many people quit because of pain and decide that yoga is not for them.
Then they have to spend years rehabbing from the damage.
Difficult poses are more like performance art, if you can do them without any pain, good for you - but it's actually rare.
While poses like this one are used to suggest that the practitioner is advanced, in good shape, has a strong mind, and feels great, that's not always the case.
There's a dark side.
There are strong correlations between hypermobile joints and pain.
So many practitioners have hurt themselves from continuing to practice despite the body's strong messages of pain.
This may be because westerners have bought into the idea that hard poses are the goal. But this is inaccurate.
Yoga is not an external practice where the form is the goal. and the harder the form the better.
Yoga is a highly internal practice.
Being able to do hard asanas does not mean you are an advanced practitioner...but knowing when you shouldn't do them, and being able to find asanas that make your body feel stable, strong, and healthy, that help you balance your mind, and that help you develop resilience in your nervous system - those are the signs of a truly advanced practice.

Watch this reel by viveforlove on Instagram Hans Zimmer • S.T.A.Y.

The Heart - a fascinating organ of perception ❤️
Sqeezing and soaking, wringing and churning the blood, generating energy on many levels; allowing us to feel and connect with the others and ourselves (and with the universe).
So within as without, so without as within (The Vortex).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbOyozg_GTs

THE HEART IS NOT A PUMP ~
Many of us live under the medical myth that the heart is a pump, an idea borne of an industrialised culture that views the body as a machine.
The heart however is so much more beautiful and fascinating than we ever could have imagined!

“Modern analysis of the heart has shown that in spite of the fact that the most powerful ventricle of the heart can shoot water six feet into the air, the amount of pressure actually needed to force the blood through the entire length of the body’s blood vessels would have to be able to lift a one hundred pound weight one mile high” - Stephen Buhner

So how does the blood move around the labyrinth-like vessels of our body?
It moves of its own accord.
You see, blood flow is not a simple stream like we once thought.
It is in fact composed of two streams, spiralling around each other much like the image of a DNA double helix, at the centre of which is a vacuum.

“Blood flow through living vessels is much more like a tornado than anything else: Such a vacuum is necessary for producing a vortex” - Stephen Buhner

How cool is that?
This spiral dance is not only found in the bloodstream, but also in the blood cell itself!
Blood cell’s in fact spin on their own individual axes of rotation. They are smaller spinning cells in a larger spinning vortex.
If your mind is not blown yet, let’s go back to the heart.

The heart itself has recently been discovered not to be a mass of muscle, but rather a ‘helicoidal myocardial band’ that has spiralled in upon itself, creating its unique shape and its separate chambers.
This is called the Helical Heart, and you can see doctors unravel it by searching ‘Helical Heart’ on Youtube.

Pair this with discoveries that the heart functions as an endocrine gland, has its own nervous system that makes and releases its own neurotransmitters, and emits an electromagnetic field that is far stronger than the brain’s, and we begin to move from the idea that the heart is simply a mechanical pump.
It is a spiralling organ of perception.

If that’s not beautiful, we don’t know what is!

~Nimbin Apothecary
https://m.facebook.com/NimbinApothecary/

art: Gabriel Keleman

Evidence-Based Research:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16373590/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11807730/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24209915/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7712215/
Watch them un-ravel the Heart here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbOyozg_GTs...

Time fore restorative yoga? :)

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CZHIlKahVHM/?utm_medium=copy_link

Watch this reel by winston_britishboy on Instagram aymie91 • Original Audio