Your Second Chakra-Creative Power and Energy

Creative people have many faces. We all have areas where we are able to be creative. Each of us also has passion; much depends on what we like or are exposed to in our lives.

The powerful, driving force comes from our second Chakra, or Svadisthana. The second Chakra is a powerful one, and the subject of mature discussion, as it also governs sexual energy.




When the second chakra is properly balanced,  we are able to empathize, to initiate and create and to share sincerely with others. This kind of sharing includes willingness to foster connections with others that are mutually beneficial and empowering to all parties.

When the second chakra becomes imbalanced,  the impact is especially apparent.

When it is overcharged, due to a spiritual blockage that prevents energy from flowing upward to the third chakra and beyond, one can become overly self-serving, will act shallow and fail to recognize emotional boundaries with the self and with others. Sexual energy can also build to an unhealthy level.

Cat pose (Majaryasana), Doward Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana) and Cobra (Bhujangasana) all can calm the second chakra down. Also, you can meditate on the color blue-use a a blue light or a piece of blue material to look at. One can modify Cobra into Sphinx pose (Salamba Bhujangasana)

If the second chakra is undercharged due to weak energy flow, one becomes emotionally cold, distrusting and overly sensitive.

Triangle pose (Trikonasana), Revopled Triangle pose (Parivrrta Trikonasana) and King Pigeon (Raja Kapotasana)-1st stage are all effective poses to help awaken the second chakra. You can also meditate on the color orange.

FIND PICTURES AND DESCRIPTIONS OF YOGA POSES IN THE ASANA INDEX AT:

http://yogadancer.com/

I have no affiliation with this site but it is a fabulous resource, so enjoy it and do donate if you can.

SOURCES:

YogaFit 

Yoga Paws

Meditation Explained-Twisted Bliss

There are all kinds of theories on meditation, but despite all these ideas, there are really no rules to meditation except that you should be sincere with whatever thoughts come to mind when you are meditating yourself. 

The truth is, your mind mind not be totally silent or quiet-that's only one type of meditation. If your true needs as a human being mean coming to grips with old or buried thoughts, or just to process all the information that buzzes through our minds as part of our crazy lives, then your mind may be quite noisy during your quiet meditation.

The ancient yogis created the 500 original yoga poses as a means of quieting and calming the mind. 

We contort our bodies into twists, hold different standing and sitting poses in order to draw the mind out of the ruts and familiar paths. Familiar paths aren't always negative-in fact, many of thee paths, or grooves, that the mind settles into are simply carved out during our daily journey through life.

Those paths that the mind is used to traversing, over and over again, become so familiar that the many distractions, repetitious patterns of thoughts and actions don't stand out; instead, they become automatic signals and controls that draw us into an pathetic, unchanging state of being.

When we contort and twist our bodies, we contort and twist our minds. our minds are then jarred back into the moment, into the present tense and are freed from the distractions of the familiar grooves where they were stuck. 

New thoughts, new revivals of old, positive perspectives we may have forgotten, can then begin again. 

the Yoga of Kindness

Kindness is a component of any spiritual practice and is part of living your Yoga practice as well. Of course, in our Yoga practice, we learn to ignore the voices in our head, the ones usually put there by others, that say we're not being kind enough or that we're bound by a rule that defines kindness in a way that "counts", and which denies the presence of the self,

While we are making good karma when we are acting kind, we aren't looking to "score points".

Kindness loosely means giving to someone in need. Need is a loosely-defined word. Think of a time when you were extremely angry at the world and and some random person was nice to you, exactly when you needed it to happen.

Kindness comes in all sizes...

Such acts are powerful due to sincerity, not size. Maybe you were carrying a bunch of stuff through a doorway and you about to drop all of it on the floor, and someone held the door for you so you could get through, preventing an aggravating you certainly wanted to avoid. Maybe someone gave you a ride when you were stranded,

Whatever the act of kindness you witnessed or received, it made you feel alive again and reminded you that you weren't alone...

A gift of a flower, a hug or even just a good compliment can change a whole day and change the whole course of life for a person. To know that you have such power to change is in itself a great gift to you, and makes it easy to give without need of a gift in return.

Shanti Om!

Yamas of Yoga...Ahimsa-Non-harming

Deva Primal chants the mantra of ahimsa

lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu

"may all beings everywhere be happy and free"

Ahimsa is probably the most talked-about of the yamas because it is easier to define it as a concrete concept. Ahimsa literally means "non-harming", but is better understood as non-violence. Of course, this is where a bot of abstract thinking is necessary.

Violence has many forms and faces; the biggest example of violence when it comes to practicing Yoga is violence toward the self. 

We're all familiar with the term "beating yourself up". In our quest to be good, we become very critical of our own moral actions. We als may push ourselves too hard when working out because we don't want to let ourselves be "wimpy" or whatever other term we might use to say we're slacking. These are two ways we hold grudges against ourselves just as we might hold grudges against others.

If you can't forgive someone for something they've done against you, or if you can't forgive yourself for something you've done, this is an act of violence because it pushes love away.

Gia My Yoga

One of the most-popular ways yogis have sought to practice ahimsa in recent decades is to not eat meat. This idea seems simple but can be tough. Not everyone who has tried a vegetarian or vegan diet has managed to avoid health problems. To have a diet that makes you unhealthy means you are harming yourself. 

We can take a simpler view of ahimsa by simply seeking to avoid being unnecessarily hurtful toward ourselves and toward others. This doesn't mean lying as opposed to truth telling, but it may mean waiting until the right time to tell someone something. We can also avoid needless expression, such as reminding someone of a mistake they are already aware that they made and that you know they are already working to correct. 

RETURN to Yamas Index

Sources:

Gia My Yoga

Mind Body Green

Insight State

Yamas of Yoga-Satya

The second Yama of Yoga is Satya which translates in English to "truthfullness"

The famous, former US House Speaker Tip O'Neill is credited with saying:

"Always tell the truth, that way you have a lot less to remember"

Or something very similar. Of course, O'Neill was speaking with reference to politics, not Yoga. But as Yoga means the connection and union of all forces and all things in proper measure, we can contemplate the Speaker's quote quite handily.

Former House SPeaker Tip O'Neill, right, shakes hands with former President Ronald Reagan. While O'Neill was a harsh critic of Reagan, he became famous for working across the political aisle to broker successful and fruitful political compromises.

Being truthful protects us from being roiled in scandal that can come from lying; scandals can range from political issues at work to conflicts with clients in business, and problems with friends and family.

Often, what makes it tough to be truthful is the timing of a specific situation. Sometimes, it is more proper to delay the truth in order to avoid doing harm, especially in a truly grave situation. This tactic can also backfire, say, if we lie to someone and later tell the truth while also saying:

How often has someone told us: "I lied becasue I didn't want to hurt your feelings" ?

It's happened at some point, to each of us. We've either done it to someone or had it done to us, or both.

This tactic will always backfire, because you've already hurt the person's feelings by lying, and by trying to do right by truth telling at a later time, you hurt that person double fold.

It's easy to learn from mistakes involving other people, quite simply, because after making this type of mistake, people react and want to push you away. You get lonely and you feel like a schmuck and don't ever want to feel that way again.

So what does this have to do with your Yoga practice? Without digging deeper into dogmatic moral contexts, let's look inward to ourselves.

Without other people to scrutinize our thoughts and actions, it gets tougher to tell how truth telling can be beneficial or negatively consequential.

The tenet of truth is to be honest with yourself, always. When dealing with your inner self, you need only be able to forgive yourself and love yourself. There's no timing involved with that; there are no political or social situations that are at stake when we are dealing with our own selves only.

Be honest with yourself and you won't create situations of denial that cloud our ability to see who and what we really are. When we see our true selves, and act in honest accordance to that knowledge, then we don't make clouded decisions.

When we don't deny who we really are, we are better to see who we are really talking to and interacting with, and we're far less likely to speak or act in a manner that distorts the truth.

Be truthful to yourself, and you'll have less trouble seeing the appropriate boundaries of truth with respect to to others with whom we share our world.

Namaste

RETURN to Yamas Index

Author and Yoga Instructor Vincent Gerbino 

How to Succeed in Any Balancing Pose

Learn to Fall

This is something I tell every Yoga client in every class, no matter what. I don't mean hold the pose until you fall over. What you need to do do is practice falling out of the pose-properly. Take a pose such as Salamba Sirsasana, or supported headstand.

The obvious, and sage advice, is to practice the pose on a wall. The wall will prevent a major accident; but many students become physically capable of getting into the pose and holding it without needing the wall, but hesitate to move away from it. The issue they have is that they have not intentionally tought themselves how to fall.

What one needs to do is practice repeatedly dropping the feet back to the floor-a.k.a. falling properly. Also, one must talk herself through the whole process of movement.

Talk yourself through the movement

Talking yourself through the process of moving into a balancing pose, and falling properly out of the pose isn't any different than doing so in any other pose. You move slow enough that your conscious mind, and your consious heart have time to "see" the movement by way of feeling it. Before even trying a balancing pose, take a moment in a more-basic pose, such as Virabhadrsana-Warrior pose.

In Warrior pose, we distribute our body weight between our feet by adjusting every muscle from the toes, ankles and legs to the torso, right up through our shoulders and arms.

Go barefoot more often

For you to have good balance, your feet need to be able to assume their natural shape. Wearing shoes conmpresses the feet. The bones are pushed together and the muscles and tendons get squeezed out of shape and can't fully function. The resulting effect is instability in your stance and your walk, which will also lead to problems of the ankles, knees and hips. Even flat sandals such as flip flops can cause some drag on the soles of the feet and result in restricted movement.

The solution: go barefoot when you can. Whenyou get home from work, get out of your shoes and socks. If you have high atrches, you'll have to build a tolorance for being barefoot and you'll feel fatigue more quickly. You might need to put on your Birkenstocks or running shoes after you've been barefoot for a while.

Going barefoot will help most directly with standing balancing poses, but will help with all balancings, including handstands and arm balances. Tight muslces on one end of the body always affect the body elsewhere.