Step #8, Asana – Day 3 Proper asana is about free-flow. It’s not necessarily about uprightness… which may come to mind when we think about posture. Proper asana is about the absence of resistance, obstruction, and distortion. Proper asana allows for energy to move freely, insights to be received spontaneously, and expression to … More Truth in Form
Step #8, Asana Meditation – Day 2 Pranayama is the formal practice of controlled breathing. There are many techniques… each one is as accessible and beneficial as the breath itself . Squared breathing is one of those techniques and it has a calming effect. It engages the parasympathetic nervous system, which is often referred … More Calm Breathing with Pranayama
Step #8, Asana – Day 1 What does it take to align with joy? Engagement with your surroundings? Engagement with your emotions? Engagement with your mind, your body, your heartspace? Yes, and more. Energy follows thought; this is factual. As we marry the body, breath, and mind through gentle guidance, we can create altitude … More Aligning with Joy
Step #8, Asana – Day 3 In sitting upright, in straightening and aligning the spine, the breath has every opportunity to become balanced. You are balancing your asana, inside and out. You are balancing your sense of ‘self’ so that your inner posture and your outer posture can harmonize. A sloppy posture usually means … More Altitude and Poise
Step #8, Asana – Day 2 How do you sense your body? How do you sense your body’s alignment? That depends on how you define “your body.” Proper asana is not limited to the alignment of your physical body; it also includes your emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies. Do you experience comfort (physical), equipoise … More How Many Bodies Do You Have?
Step #8, Asana – Day 1 We’re on the second half of this round of meditations, Step #8. Imagine the number 8. Trace it’s shape in your mind. The line moves up and around from the center and circles round back to its point of origin then loops down below and circles back around … More Simply Observing
Step #8, Asana – Day 3 Proper asana is about free-flow. It’s not necessarily about uprightness… which may come to mind when we think about posture. Proper asana is about the absence of resistance, obstruction, and distortion. Proper asana allows for energy to move freely, insights to be received spontaneously, and expression to … More Truth in Form
Step #8, Asana – Day 2 Though we think of ourselves as shaped by our environment, it is largely the other way around. We create our experiences in this life and thus we create the world around us. It is our inner-most, or our most subtle selves, in the form of our emotions, thoughts, … More The Inner Creates the Outer
Step #8, Asana – Day 1 Last week’s break, or interlude, from online meditations signals that we are half way through this round of meditations. You might consider this the center of the practice. Seven specific tools to work with in meditation lie behind us and seven new tools to work with in … More Finding The Center
Asana Meditation – Day 1 As we move into the second half of this round of the Practice of Living Awareness, we’ll spend some time each week considering the ways that the second set of seven steps is a spiraling upward or a conscious extension of the first set of seven steps. For instance, … More The Body
Asana Meditation – Day 2 What are the various parts that have come together to make the whole of you? Certainly these are not limited to your physical apparatus. As we include all of the cooperative components in our awareness, we support the fullness of our being. Proper physical asana allows the body to be … More Cooperative Components
Asana Meditation – Day 3 In early 1960, four young men walked into Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, took a seat at the counter, and asked to be served lunch. They were denied because they were black. Their refusal to leave without service began a civil rights sit-in movement which quickly spread to college … More Taking Your Seat
Human beings are a complex, a collection of energies. We have a physical dimensionality, a robust emotion-mind set of factors, as well as an essence or spiritual, higher nature. Meditation is interested in the integration of these parts along with yoga, tai chi, chi gong, aikido, and other practices that seek to unite our components. … More 8a. the Body-Mind-Spirit
Asana reminds us that our physical body is an aspect of the breadth and scope of human Awareness. Asana also reminds us that with the physical body honored and respected through good posture and alignment, it will assist our meditative stability. A body unacknowledged, not included as an aspect of our meditative practice, is a … More 8c: the body of Awareness
Asana is a whole being process and concept. Though it begins with being about one’s posture, asana opens one to poise, composure, equipoise, and the feeling of integrity. Each of these speaks of balance, but not a type of outer balance – like balancing a book on one’s head – but inner balance, inner coordination … More 8c: Integrity begins inside.
Sitting well for meditation creates immediate benefits in one’s practice. One can sit in a chair, of course, but if it is possible to sit in a cross-legged position, the pyramidal shape of one’s body actually has effect. But since many people cannot sit like that, a couple of things can refined and support one’s … More 8b. Feel it!
There are many reasons why the classical meditation posture is the classical one. A few are: aligning the body and inner chakra system, alignment of the body, energy, mind, and emotional components of oneself, verticality stretches one energetically as high, expanded or refined as one can reach and then sustain. Also, asana provides the downward … More 8a: Asana – from the bottom to the top
The word mudra is often used in conjunction with asana. In that case, mudra is a component of an overall asana in physical yoga. But, in these meditations, mudra is the focal point for actualizing an invoked energy or an invited quality of Presence. Then, Asana is lived as the overall motivation for wanting to … More Intermediate: Mudra: actualizing energy
A human being is a complex whole. Well-being lies in coordinating the various layers of that wholeness. Coordinated, we experience creativity, ease, joy, less friction with life and others, and less pain. Uncoordinated, with one part of us ill at ease or multiple aspects not valued, we are stymied, irritable, impatient, gluttonous, and diseased. Asana … More 8b. Coordinating Vibrations
Asana is usually understood in the particularity of postures and physical yoga. And, though that is correct, asana means more than that. Asana is one’s relation to one’s physical dimensionality: to one’s entire incarnated existence and to the fields into which one’s Being is constantly expressing. When understood as such, asana invokes a spiritual maturity … More Living from Essential Being
It is called a practice for a reason. With diligence, effort, and right motivation, a meditation practice will establish within oneself. If any of these is missing or haphazard, then that which a meditation practice is and that which it will bring forward within a person cannot happen. What can happen within oneself when the … More The stature of one’s practice
The ground gives one a sense of stability and surety. What are other things that do that? concepts and beliefs some forms of relationship a sense of self, who or what we think we are thinking (“I think therefore I am.” one’s environment, or the working of appliances, or the internet, or electricity Most of … More The many grounds of one’s life
Meditation training combines two factors: feminine and masculine. Within The Practice of Living Awareness, feminine energy is within the first several steps: Flow, Soften and Open, Receive-Release as examples. Masculine energy is within the next several steps beginning with Asana. Asana brings an acuity to one’s practice: straighten up, hold the attitude and altitude, command … More Ahhh, Composure!
A balanced life? Yes, it is possible. Asana provides many obvious as well as subtle results in one’s life, meditation practice, and in how to live within a physical dimensional existence. Asana brings us to the moment, in our body, in our state of emotions, in our state of mind. Non-distracted from these, one can … More Integrity: inner balance
We begin two weeks focused on Asana and its value to meditation. Each day of the Entry practice will engage a particular aspect of the classic meditation posture (lotus or half lotus), explain how to accomplish it, and the benefits that result within one’s meditation. Downloadable podcast: may0615entry asana produces results
Composure and all its related states are one’s choice. When a desire arises, we have choice if to act upon it. When an opinion arises, we have choice if to speak it. We have choice a thousand times a day as to how to BE, what to do, to spend money or keep it in … More Choose composure! Step 8
Cause and result are a perfect pair. Each is necessary for the other. Like the components of electromagnetism, cause and result are inseparable. Because of this, putting positive causes in motion will bring positive results. A meditation practice is such, along with each technique within that practice. We have now added sacred posture to our … More The perfect pair
For thousands of years, the primary posture for meditation has been the lotus or half lotus position. One could wonder if that is simply because people sat on the ground indian-style for the most part. But, in fact, there are many good and even important reasons to use the classic meditation posture if one can. … More The Inner Dynamics of Asana and Meditation
