The most traditional and the best way of doing yoga teacher training is in a retreat setting. Living in an isolated space away from the madness of the city immensely enhances the experience of a disciplined yoga practice. Slowing down your pace and calming your mind away from the neurotic frequencies of city life allows you to explore your self in peace. Even if you have to return to the city after training you will have had 28 days to build a strong practice, discipline, and a lifestyle that will merge with your daily life even after the course is over. Experts say it takes 28 days to build a habit!

All of our teacher training retreats are located in beautiful natural settings. Being in nature creates a spontaneous release and cleansing followed by a great recharge and rejuvenation on the physical, mental and energy level. Because there is no need to commute back and forth, the days start with a powerful early morning personal practice (sadhana) that involves cleansing the body, yoga asanas and traditional yogic Pranayam practice (the art of breathing and mastering the energy in the body).

The powerful experience of teacher training in a retreat setting will remain with you for your whole life and will be a seed of inspiration that you can go back to energetically in times when you feel you are slipping away from your spiritual practice.

I encourage all of you that are about to make a decision about yoga training to put in the effort, energy and your powerful manifestation to experience yoga in the traditional yogic environment. This will be one of the greatest gifts you give yourself, and you deserve it.

Our upcoming teacher training retreats are:

• April 26 – May 30, 2010 Bali
• Jan 10-Feb 10, 2011 – Thailand

Namaste,
shakti

Today I took the boat from Totnes to Dartmouth, an hour long ride along the river, in the breathtaking countryside scenery of Devon, England. The boat was filled with senior people aged 60 to 80 years old from different continents and countries. I was the only person below 50 years old (but tightly close to it) and felt like a teenager. Watching so many older people almost put me in a state of shock, realizing the condition of our elderly. They were all (!) overweight and in a terrible physical condition, unfit and barely able to move without their walking aids or without wobbling. Some were sitting in wheelchairs only because they were so overweight they couldn’t carry themselves. They reminded me the people in the spaceship in the movie Wall E. But the worst of all was their level of consciousness. They were nice people with no wisdom in their eyes. When the boat stopped in beautiful but spirit-dull Dartmouth, they all rushed with their wobbly walks to consume the content of the town’s stores, restaurants and pubs. I felt so sad; here I was among old people, the elderly of the tribe! Here were the ones who should be the wisest of all and I felt neither reverence nor gratitude for being in their presence – a feeling that young people often experienced in many cultures, in the old times, when they were in the company of the old and the wise.

As I was walking around the postcard streets of this little, adorable looking town I realized the only things here were pubs, small beautiful old shops with dreadful fashion, and restaurants. If you were not interested in drinking, eating or shopping there was nothing to do in this town and many other towns in this country and in many other countries in this world.

This small old town had completely lost its spirit, culture and depth. Or maybe I should say the only culture it has is one of consumption and nothing else. The elderly wiseless tourists I was watching were, in the end, products of our poorly, shallow culture that most of our youngest are fed from and will probably end up in the same shallow state as their tribal elderly.

We are worried about the holes in the ozone but we should not be less worried about the “holes” in our collective consciousness through which we are rapidly losing our spiritual evolution as we get lost in our dull evolution of consumption.

You people are the alternative for the modern culture that brings the low consciousness most of the world is moving into. Maintain your high consciousness and physical awareness so that as you age, your youth is replaced by infinite wisdom.

Love shakti

Wise Woman

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Our mind perceives reality by filing segments of information in its filing cabinet. Each folder represents a concept and the subfolders represent our perceptions of each concept. For example, to believe or experience God you need to have a file in your mind that is labeled “God”. The subfolders for the file “God” will be your perceptions of this concept. We cannot grasp a life experiences if we have no folders into which we can file them. For example, you wouldn’t be trustful if you didn’t have a file labeled “trust”; you wouldn’t feel confidence if you didn’t have a folder for it. The size and the amount of folders in each mind differ from person to person as well the way the files are classified and labeled. The amount of files, subfolders and their classifications is what make us different or similar to each other. We have files about sex, religions, friendship, death, moral codes, taboos, fears, goals, love, etc.

Rarely do people choose their own labels and folder selections.

At the time of our birth, each of us gets X number of files made by our parents, teachers and other people in our tribe. This is the filing cabinet that we start our lives with. As time goes by we keep adding new folders but often as sub folders to the files we already received in heritage. Seldom do we create new categories or new definitions or new perceptions. This is why it is so common to find family members carrying similar filing cabinets with the same folder classification systems for generations. In other words, the same way of perceiving reality is passed down through the family tribe.

Inheriting filing cabinet from your tribe with esoteric folders will enable you to have esoteric experiences as part of your reality. If you only have files for physical world experiences labeled “what you see is what it is”, in times when you cross an esoteric experience you either will miss it or dismiss it as you have no folder in which to file it, and you are unable to process it.

If, as a child, you received a huge filing cabinet with a large number of files that may consist of art, magic, spirituality, generosity, oneness, etc, you will probably have a large capacity for filing a large variety of life experiences. If you received a small filing cabinet with fewer files that may only have to do with evolutionary routines like marriage, kids, mortgage and retirement, obviously, you will be limited by the amount of experiences you can file. Thus, your reality is much more limited.

Most people are not aware that it is up to them to change and rearrange their filing cabinets, and by doing so change their reality. Actually, the head office of each tribe (in the form of churchs and religious leaders) will try to make sure that all of their members are classifying and filing their concepts and perceptions in the same order and manner so everyone thinks, feels, and believes the same.

Once a while, a unique child, a rebellious teenager or a brave adult will have the desire, the need, the yearning, or the strong drive to rearrange their own filing cabinet by getting rid of old files such as marriage, money, war, degrees etc. and adding new files such as freedom, arts, traveling, realization etc. The tribe, which always tries to keep its members’ filing cabinets in one custom, will find the individuals who have their own unique filing cabinets threatening. Those who take the freedom to be creative with their filing cabinet arrangements will be filed as rebellions, odd, unusual, unconventional, original, eccentric, etc.

We do not only file people and events in our personal filing cabinet, we also get filed in other people’s files and we are very much aware of it. In fact, being filed by others is one of our main concerns. Often when people who are important to us do not have a file that we can be filed into, this forces us to change who we are so we can fit under one of their existing folders.

Family members’ folders are usually all classified and titled in the same way as they pass the filing system from one to other. If you need to be filed in your family’s folders as who you see yourself to be, for example as a gay, as an artist, as a spiritual, as a traveler, as rebel, as a nonconformist, etc. and they have no files for these categories they will either dismiss your existence or will force you to change your definition to be classified into what they already have in their filing cabinet: straight versus gay, intellectual versus artist, conformist versus nonconformist, religious versus non-religious.

On the path of spirituality we may go through process that will consist of:

• Questioning all the files we received in heritage as well the ones we created
• Observing the limitations of a filing cabinet (i.e., the mind) in its ability to hold onto reality as it is.
• Starting to experience our moments outside of our filing system (i.e., oneness)

Namaste
shakti mhi

Large Filing Cabinets

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The train ride from busy London to the tiny town of Totnes was beautiful. The countryside of England hasn’t changed much in the last few hundred years. Castles are lying in the open fields like wedding cakes in a bridal shop window. An hour earlier, I lost the mac I just bought, forgetting it in the black English taxi on the way to the train station in London.”. “So now I am mac-less, still attached my old faithful Dell computer that will hold the first chapters of the new book I am about to start writing in Totnes”.

When the taxi in Totnes dropped me beside the small rusty gate of Hillfield B&B in the back alley of a noisy street, I wanted to run back to the taxi driver and beg him to drive me back to London. But then I decided not to be me and simply go with the flow into the unknown, even if it does not fit my standards.

I entered the rusty gate after a few long and worried efforts to open it. It seemed like no one had opened this gate for hundreds of years. I walked in to a hidden, flowery backyard where I met Nancy, the weird looking owner that suited so well the old house I was about to enter. Endless old doors opened one after the other to allow me into a beautiful stairway that was wrapped up with old carpet, running along a wavy wall decorated with brown photos of people who had long ago turned to dust. I was led by odd-looking Nancy into my suite on the second floor. Stale air was standing still in all the rooms.

As promised on the website, my suite has a living room, a kitchen and a bedroom. In reality, the kitchen and the living room exist as one tiny room, you want call it a kitchen, you want call it a living room. Actually the best room is the bathroom as it has huge windows and 2 old arm chairs with an old rug in-between. You want call it a sitting room, you want call it a bathroom; Odd- Nancy is not attached to room definitions.

The amazing view that was promised on the website was sent in for repairs long ago and will be back in a few hundred years. In the meantime, Odd- Nancy has replaced it with an old back alley view that fits the old windows perfectly.

Nancy kindly handed me an ancient set of keys that allow me to come and go as I wish. When you lock the doors you need to kneel down as all the lock holes are close to the floor; maybe it used to be a dwarf’s castle in the times when fresh air was still flowing along the curved stair hall.

So this is my home for the next 7 days where I will spend most of my days and evenings in writing, and I love it, or at least that is what I think I do.

Namaste shakti

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