Practice Report - Alfredo D - Sunday 10/14/2012
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 5 years before Oct 19, 2017
Alfredo 5 years ago
ॐ नमः शिवाय
AM Practice
Woke up during Brahma-Muhurta (5:00 AM). Practice conducted at home was standard overall and lasted 80 minutes. Emphasis was on breath infusion.
Svadhyaya: Continued with Chapter 23 “The Yoga Process” from “Uddhava Gita Explained”.
Dedication: 5-minute mantra session invocation of Lord Shiva. Practice dedicated to Lord Shiva. If I falter during the practice, which happens often, I right away invoke Lord Shiva, Maheshwara, and the strength is restored. It does not fail.
Breath Infusion: 30 minutes of Bhastrika prânâyâma. Half of the time was used in infusing fresh prana into the thighs, and extracting apana from them. Attention was given to the instructions imparted yesterday about concentrating in the thighs while doing the infusion, either pulling out, pushing in, or spreading out energy. I was also careful to infuse enough energy into the trunk of the body before that, using the proper locks. Towards the end, Kundalini was solicited successfully once before going into meditation.
Meditation: Consisted of 45 minutes with concentration on the back of the head. Naad sound was audible all along. There was the usual struggle to keep the concentration on target, and to elongate it patiently towards the state of flowing concentration without effort (Dhyana).
Dream recall: 2 dreams were recalled distinctly. They were of mundane character, but each conveyed a message. Dream 1 consisted of traveling using false documents, a clear warning against the temptations of fraud and cheating, a breach of the Yamas, satya and asteya (absence of falsehood and non-stealing). Dream 2 consisted of arguing with others that almost lead to violence in a university library setting, clearly the result of a lack of patience and temperance, thus anger, a tendency of mine that I am still working on to discard completely.
MiBeloved 5 years ago
Alfredo wrote:
temptations of fraud and cheating, a breach of the Yamas, satya and asteya (absence of falsehood and non-stealing).
MiBeloved's Response:
Satya does mean truth but in the yoga sutras it means realism. Truth or honesty has to do with personal arrogance and has no place in higher yoga where one realizes that circumstantial untruth is a necessity in the material world which no one can get rid of.
Focus on realism, which means first of all to have insight into what is happening and secondly to plan your life in such a way where it is the most consistent with providence. Realism means knowing what will be true by the laws of nature and working as best as one can to suit that. Personal honesty has no meaning in higher yoga, even though in elementary religion it is a great principle to strive for.
Material nature is not concerned with your honesty and it won’t always reward you in a good way for being honest. Just for survival one has to be dishonest, irrespective of if one wants to be.
Yama moral restraints and niyama approved behaviors are the bulwark of fundamentalist religion. If you remove that from any religion, it is finished.
These two systems are the way to keep a religion intact. Still, yoga is not religion. Monitoring external behavior has nothing to do with higher yoga but it is everything in the beginning stages and even in an ashram one is confronted with these social rules and permissions.
So in higher yoga this is tackled from the inside, from the perspective of the urge which drive us to participate, which comes from the kundalini. From fundamentalist religions we get the clue of how to keep things under wrap externally by forcing the psyche to strive for social standing. But then when we get to a higher stage we realize that that external pressure was useless and all it did was to suppress the urges for a time, while in fact they were building up under cover and did, or will in time, take over the psyche and cause it to do the prohibited acts and neglect the recommendations.
It is then that a yogi thinks like this:
Since that is the case that when I monitor external behavior, the internal urges against that build up inside my psychology, then the solution has to be to work with the inside energies directly.
Then the student traces the need for these behaviors to the kundalini. But there arises a problem where it is a question of:
How can I, a little wimp in the psyche, get a grasp on kundalini, what to speak of changing its needs?
Alfredo 5 years ago
Thank you very much!
