Where in India can I practice yoga?

I often get asked by yoga students where to go in India to learn and practice yoga; and again and again I disappoint my own students and teachers by saying I have no idea.

Other than a close relationship with Shiva, my Ayurvedic doctor in Vancouver towards whom I have great reverence as well as deep gratitude for always helping me when my body needs guidance, I have no more connection with India. Most of the yoga ashrams in India have to do with worships and religious practices. Through my three decades of yoga and Zen practice I realized that the highest form of spiritual practice – which has to do with a direct experience – must move away from any religious aspects that always deal with a set of beliefs.

There are many levels of learning and experiencing the art and science of yoga. The simplest one and most common is through religions, as this is the easiest for the masses to take in. The highest one is practicing it beyond all concepts and perceptions. In the former you clutter your mind with more and more beliefs; in the latter you strip your mind of all you think you know until you have the space to enter existence with the utmost knowing instead of believing or understanding.

So if you are wandering in India and find a yoga ashram which is free of any spiritual nonsense – which means no religions, no worship, no dogmas (you must be a vegetarian to reach realization), no fanaticism (only by the grace of a guru you can realize), no moral codes (you must always say the truth if you want to reach nirvana) – please let me know and I will pass on the information to all the yogis who truly believe that once they step on the mother land of yoga, bliss will descend from the clear sky of India and unveil their highest conscience which somehow cannot be materialized in any other of the world’s continents ;-)

The other option is to be aware that even though realization is already within you and you can manifest it HERE and NOW, you can still go to India and enjoy a good curry dish.

With love and joy

shakti mhi

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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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This article was written as I receive many emails regarding this topic from spiritual people.

This article is not meant to support meat eaters, but to demonstrate that any one way of looking at life is limited and can be dogmatic.

Not everyone is born to be vegetarian!

I do not believe in one way of living (or in this case, one way of eating) for all human beings as we have all evolved from different tribes that came from different climates with different eating habits according to what each environment provided. Some of us originated from tribes that were wandering from place to place for thousands of years like the Tartars, Inuit, native Indian or the desert people in the Middle East, where growing and harvesting food wasn’t an option. As a result, hunting or fishing was the main source of food for these tribes. As a consequence, due to the different evolutions of eating habits there are a great many populations in the world who, genetically speaking, are customised to eat meat and fish. Who is one to say that these people are not entitled to a spiritual practice simply because they eat meat?

North American native Indians were hunters and meat eaters who were very much connected to nature and had a great respect for the animals they hunted. They conducted a highly spiritual life.

Throughout my years of teaching yoga and meditation, I met many sincere yogis who forced themselves to be vegetarians for spiritual reasons and often ended being physically unwell (low blood pressure, anemia, physical weakness, fatigue, etc.) Their bodies were simply not getting nourishment on a foundational level. One of my closest friends who regularly ate meat went to consult an ayurvedic doctor about shifting to a vegetarian diet (this was after a few futile attempts of his own, that made him feel weak and caused him to lose undesirable weight). The ayurvedic doctor told him blandly that because his roots are from the Tartar tribes (which could be seen easily by his large and strong features) vegetarianism was not the right diet for his body and would weaken him.

The main concern in regards to eating meat while doing any spiritual practice is the act of killing.

Any child can tell you about the cycles of nature wherein animals eat other animals to keep balance between the populations of various species. Since we are a part of this food chain, the question is why have we taken human beings out of the structure of balance? Human were always part of the cycle, controlling the populations of other animals by hunting and, at the same time, being eaten by other animals.

As we evolved more sophisticated methods of protecting ourselves, we became less and less vulnerable of becoming meals for other animals; and yet we are still getting eaten – but mostly from the inside out. We may have become too smart to be easily hunted by carnivores but we still often get “eaten” internally by endless bacteria and viruses that can easily wipe us out in huge numbers.

It is also true that now that our population has grown immensely we need to consume more food than before. This definitely changes the balance in numbers, but it does not mean that eating meat is wrong. It is more a problem of us reproducing without control, taking over the planet by numbers and draining all of the resources – not only animals, but also vegetation, minerals, water, etc.

So there is no one way for all of us. Vegetarianism is often taken as an absolute way of living by the ones who were born to be vegetarian. If this way of living is not suitable for your body and you still choose it as a lifestyle you may find yourself in doubt from time to time as your body demands its natural nutrition.

Often, the conflict over vegetarianism makes people who need to eat meat feel as if they are less on the spiritual path than they should be. We need to know for ourselves. Each of us must tune into the needs of our own body with great awareness – discovering the right way of eating that is suitable for our way of living. Even this may change during different periods of our lives or depending upon activities or non-activities that the body carries during our life. Sometimes our eating patterns may change depending on climate, etc. So there is a place for being vegetarian and there is place for eating meat.

If your body tells you that you need to consume meat:

1. Do it mindfully without greed (this means: do not live for eating but eat for living).
2. Tune into your body and see what kind of meat works best for you: how much and how often you need to consume it without making your body and mind heavy.
3. Make sure that the meat you eat is from hormone-free animals and organic.
4. Make sure the meat you eat comes from animals that are treated with respect and live in a healthy environment.
5. If you consume meat, practice pranayam 4-6 hours after your meal. The best time for a pranayam practice is early morning on an empty stomach.

My point here is to give you another perspective on this issue, as opposed to the conventional one-way yoga approach. At the end of the day, the most important thing is to contemplate this matter and reach your own authentic conclusion. If you hold a fear about practicing pranayam while consuming meat, the practice won’t be effective. So you must make sense for yourself.

For every argument I have presented in this article you can bring one to support vegetarianism, especially if you are one of them. The same works vice versa, and it is not because either of us is right or wrong, but because there is no one way for everyone. Anyone that takes one side on principle is missing the whole picture and risks becoming a fanatic by limiting their point of view.

Namaste,

shakti mhi

If you’d like to discuss this topic, please do so here: Meat and Pranayama

What follows below is an imaginary scenario that is made up of endless scenarios that people experience in their realities of “being in love”.

It is a hand-made painting created from the many layers of fears, pain and desperation in the collective subconscious. None of the figures in the painting are real yet the painting and its frame represent our own individual prison that we create with our perceptions when it comes to love.

My love

… Last night I dreamt that we were in a hotel room. In the dream we were 2 people so entangled together that one’s carbon dioxide becomes the other one’s oxygen. So subconsciously, the idea of separation and losing each other was attached to the feeling of death.

In the dream we had a fight and you were leaving the room, slamming the door behind you, telling me you weren’t coming back. I furiously run to the door to stop you from leaving but I couldn’t open the door from the inside. I was hitting the door with anger and devastation, asking you to open it from the outside but you were long gone. In my dream I couldn’t handle the idea of separating from you. I was flaming with pain and desolation and seeking revenge – to hurt you back.

When I woke up I was feeling the pain from the dream in my lower abdomen. My mind wandered to all the moments of pain and despair we went through in our times together, where only the thought of losing each other was enough to shatter us to pieces.

As an experiment, I lay down in bed and tried to capture the physical pain in my body that I had created with my disturbed emotions. It felt like I knew this pain very intimately inside and out. I searched my memory for the first time in my life when I had met with this incredible emotional pain — the same pain that has brought so many people throughout the history of love to the edge of insanity. A river of live pictures, of moments of pain, fears, emotional breakdowns, despair and the hopelessness of losing the “other one” gushed in front of my eyes. My investigating inner eyes continued their journey further back through the tunnel of my life. Here I am with my parents, me as a child, looking for their love, seeking their approval, asking for their acknowledgment. I say, “me as a child” but surprisingly I am seeing pictures of myself aiming for their recognition at much later stages of my life as a grown-up.

Interestingly enough, my internal eyes shifted from my personal movie to the biblical Garden of Eden. God removes his unconditional love from Eve and Adam and sends them away from his property, saying: “You disappointed me and I do not approve of you anymore.” The biblical story of the Eden exile represents the deepest emotional pain human beings feel in the form of rejection.

When we do not know ourselves as a complete existence, when we do not experience ourselves as an essence, we need external recognition to reflect back to us that we exist. We often choose the one we “fall in love with” by their ability to reflect to us our own existence. Unlike true love, the business of love is all about getting acknowledgement and recognition from “the other one.” Like in Garden of Eden, we turn our love subjects into our creators. We give them the power to create us through their approval of us.

This is why we feel that we disappear when our love subjects take their eyes off our appearance.
This is why we feel that we vanish when they remove their touch from our bodies.
This is why we feel that we evaporate when they take us out of their thoughts.
This is why we feel that we fade away when they take us out of their memories.
This is why we feel that we cease when they leave us…

When you hear the door slam and your heart doesn’t even blink…
Not because you don’t care or because you do not love anymore
But because your love is free of need,
This is when you know you are truly free.

shakti

The pain of being in love

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There is no such thing as an unconditional love, unconditional love as opposed to what? Conditional love? If love is conditional then it is not love, it is business: it is manipulation, it is fear, it is ignorance.

Love by its very nature is unconditional. So saying unconditional love as is like saying wet water. When you experience love there are no conditions to base it on. The experience stands on its own, and depends neither on circumstances nor perceptions nor agendas.

All concepts have their opposites because this is the way the mind perceives reality. Love has no opposite as it happens outside of the mind. Hate is not the opposite of love. If love is the sun, our minds’ perceptions are the clouds. When the clouds block the sun, darkness in the form of hate may disguise reality. The sun never stops shining; it is just blocked by the clouds of our perception. So love cannot have an opposite, as it is never absent.

Love neither ends nor begins.
Love is not born and it does not die.
Namaste shakti

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• Be free of the fear of rejection, be free of all attachments.
• Open yourself to love with no ownership or agenda.
• Be aware you cannot demand more from people than what they want to give you, or are able to give you.
• Dance with people, instead of tying their legs to yours to ensure that they are not going to dance with somebody else.
• Allow others to be who they are and experience what they need to experience. Their experiences will enrich yours instead of taking away from them.
• If you love and enjoy others do not stop others from loving and enjoy them as well.
• Instead of putting a ring on your beloved’s finger that will indicate the limited space you are going to give him/her from now on, place a string of fresh flowers on his/her head to indicate your support to his/her on ongoing blossoming.
• Let go of all rules. Only the moment will dictate what is right and what is wrong.
• Bravely unfold your colourful personality even if it doesn’t fit the frames people put you in.
• Drink wine from time to time and socialize with sharp/brilliant/wild people.
• Bring all of your wisdom, experiences and creativity into action to manifest an incredible, rich and content life.
• Know and accept that it won’t always be easy to find other players who will be willing to take their foot off the brake and celebrate love and life through true freedom.
• Do not settle into the known, the familiar and the safe. Never stop exploring within!
• Remember that love does not have past tense. It may change forms and shapes but it always is.

In-Joy
shakti

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Below is an invitation I received from “Western Canadian Hatha Yoga Championship” along with my reply.

To Shakti Mhi
Prana Yoga Teacher College

I wanted to introduce you to the upcoming Western Canadian Hatha Yoga Championship, taking place this January 18th at Sportsplex, Capilano University. This event is being jointly organized by Bikrams Yoga College of Vancouver, Bikrams Metrotown and Simply Eventful Management.

As a supplier to yogis everywhere, we would be excited to welcome Prana Yoga Teacher College to the event. Though this is not the first Western Canadian Hatha Yoga Championship in Vancouver, it is the first with an exhibit portion – adding additional value to the attendees. We are inviting table-top exhibits to yoga-related, sustainable and health-related organizations – in the Sportsplex concourse. See the attached for many other benefits of sponsorship.

This championship will begin with an early morning yoga class, led by Senior Bikram’s yoga master and octogenarian Emmy Cleaves, which will attract hundreds of hatha yogis from the Lower Mainland. The competition has 4 categories – the winners and runners up of each category will be permitted entry to the International Hatha Yoga Championship in L.A. in February.

Overall, we anticipate over 800 attendees! This is the perfect opportunity to begin a partnership with the Western Canadian Hatha Yoga Championship! The goal is to grow the exhibit portion, include educational components and raise global awareness of the health benefits of yoga and clean living.

Please find more information at www.bikramyogabc.com.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,
Annette McCunn

And my response:

Dear Annette McCunn

When I got your email I had to read it few times to be sure that it is actually not a joke.

How can “hatha yogis” And “championship” be beside each other in one sentence, let alone in one room?

I guess the winner will be the biggest fool that believes the discipline of hatha yoga is for the purpose of showing off.

Hatha yoga competition is the equivalent of organizing a strip show for nuns.

You are asking me to sponsor spreading ignorance to ignorants and leading people astray. That is the easiest thing I ever been asked as a spiritual teacher – but unfortunately that is not my “thing”.

shakti mhi

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Random thoughts by shakti mhi

1. E=mc² means if a unit of mass suddenly turned into energy, we could find out what amount of energy would be conveyed from this quantity of mass. To find out, you multiply the amount of mass (m) by the square of the speed of light* (c²) and you will get the amount of the energy (e). This calculation shows us that any given mass unit holds relatively enormous amounts of energy in comparison to the amount of matter from which it is made. For example, if you converted the mass of a pen into energy, this energy could light a whole city.

   *speed of light-300,000,000 meter per second.

2. Let’s expand our levels of perception and play with some numbers. The reason will become quite apparent.

   The big bang started from the tiniest but yet the densest particle in existence. This particle was in its utmost density because it contained all possibilities. There is no way to measure its mass as it was beyond all capacities, so we will indicate its imaginary mass’s measurelessness as B for big bang. We can theoretically measure the energy that this particle was withholding by multiplying its mass by the speed of light squared: E=Bc². The total, of course, is beyond all concepts, so if you cannot grasp it with your mind, try to feel it…

3. When this tiniest but yet densest particle in existence released its immense infinite energy in the big bang’s explosion, it released all possibilities of existence: from gas to matter to consciousness to us.

4. Once the energy was released, it formed back into matter and into all forms and shapes: from atoms to stars to people and everything around us that you see or don’t see. This implies that everything is made from the same essence. In spirituality we relate to it as oneness.

5. Einstein’s conclusion was that energy can be turned into matter and matter can be turned into energy. Two different forms of the same essence. In yoga we relate to this essence as prana, a life force that makes everything.

6. Not only can energy be turned into matter, different particles can combine and create new forms of matter.

7. During conception, two matters, sperm and egg, each holding a great amount of energy within themselves, combine and create a new form of physicality. In that moment, energy in the form of consciousness transforms into matter and combines with the other 2 matters, creating a physical body with consciousness. This consciousness-matter is in every atom of our physicality. If this infusion doesn’t happen and only the fusion of sperm and egg take place, we end up with a dead embryo.

8. If all units of mass contain such enormous energy within themselves, this includes our physical bodies as well.

9. The mass in the form of a human body holds a tremendous amount of energy, not only the physical matter times the speed of the light squared, but also the consciousness matter within it that holds the total energy of all.

10. If 100% of the mass of a pen converted into energy can light a whole city, imagine the amount of energy our physical body can be converted into.

11. The ancient yogis were aware of this energy which is infinitely larger than the physical body it lies dormant within. They called it Kundalini Shakti and they described it as a dormant serpent coiled in the bottom of the spine. They knew that the one who could transform this infinite energy would hold all possibilities to manifest and be manifested. But they also knew one more thing that hundreds of years later Einstein would define scientifically:

12. Einstein said that the only way for all the energy to be released from its matter is for the mass to be annihilated. This process involves the total destruction of the matter.

13. So the yogi faced dangerous knowledge. The potent energy that he needed to release from the physical matter (the energy that would transform him into a master), if fully released, would destroy the physical body where he dwells.

14. The ancient science of kundalini yoga is all about how to release the enormous energy the physical mass holds within, through different practices such as asana, pranayam, kriyas and meditation without destroying the mass matter of the body.

shakti mhi

The author of the enigma of self realization

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