Yoga for Better Sleep

Guest teacher, Mia Jokiniva shows how to beat insomnia with some basic yoga postures. Relaxation is the most important aspect. The Yoga body Revolution show claims to double your flexibility in 28 days.



Also, during sleep you are in a passive, relaxed condition and all sorts of unseen influences play around you. One interesting option is to try and enclose yourself in an Astral Shell. Concentrate upon your aura and picture it as extending some 18 inches all around you and forming a shell around you. Now take this affirmation to concentrate your mind.

1. I am charging my aura with my Will-Force.

2. It is strong, strong, strong and can and will resist, repel and drive off all bad influences and admit only pure and holy influence.

3. It will remain around me right along the period of my sleep.

Tibetan Buddhism - Amazing Video Series on Sound Healing

Sometimes life gets so busy and passes you by that you're not sure where the time went. Time to meditate, time to do yoga, time to read, and time to spend with family & friends. I don't know what happened over the last six months but it always seems like by mid January I'm back to grounding myself again. February is my NaYoPraMo month (modeled after NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writers Month) - it is my National Yoga Practice Month. More to come on that.

Anyway I found this wonderful series of videos on Tibetan Sound Healing from the Ligmincha Institute in Virginia. It is given by Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, founder and spiritual director. He is an author as well as a highly respected and beloved teacher to students throughout the United States, Mexico and Europe. He was ordained as a monk at Menri Monastery near Dolanji, India. There he was recognized by head teacher Lopon Sangye Tenzin Rinpoche as a reincarnation of the famous master Khyung Tul Rinpoche, a renowned meditation master, teacher, scholar and healer who died in the mid-20th century.

Fluent in English, Tenzin Rinpoche is renowned for his depth of wisdom; his clear, engaging teaching style - and his ability to make the ancient Tibetan teachings highly accessible and relevant to the lives of Westerners.

Please take some time - each video is about nine minutes and there are seven videos in the series. Enjoy!

Yoga, Meditation in Action

I listened to Speaking of Faith this morning and was extremely inspired to get my yoga fitness back in motion again. If you haven't heard Seane Corn speak on yoga be sure to listen to the podcast.
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Yoga studios are cropping up on street corners across the U.S. Now there are yoga classes at YMCAs, law schools, and corporate headquarters. This 5000-year-old spiritual technology is converging intriguingly with 21st-century medical science and with many religious and philosophical perspectives. Seane Corn takes us inside the practicalities and power of yoga, and describes how it helps her face the darkness in herself and the world.

Speaking of Faith: Yoga, Meditation and Action with Seane Corn

Yoga Block - What Happened?

I imagine that if you are a reader of this blog you've been wondering what happened to me and the results of my Yoga month. I'm very sorry about the delay on this - at the end of Feb. there was a sickness in my family that forced me to travel to Arizona in March.

Good news was that I got through three weeks of my Yoga month but ended up with spotty sessions during the last week. March was overwhelming with the trip combined with an awful work schedule. Suddenly, two months had passed!

By the end of February my flexibility was pretty amazing plus being down three pounds. Unfortunately, as usual with trips - my yoga routines ended.

So now I'm back on track - gearing up for summer with April showing promise to continue my own yoga progression.

My Own 28 Days of Yoga

Alright, I'm a bit depressed after I found that someone else had thought of a National Yoga Practice Month. I woked up last week with the ultimate inspiration that I am going to do yoga every day in February - well, except Feb. 29th since it is a leap year.

I then remembered NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writers Month last November that many budding writers use as inspiration to get their writing skills down. This has become so popular that many have copied this idea for other topics - blogging, filmmaking, etc.

I thought that yoga would be great and that February would be an excellent month to try this. It's cold, cloudy, Christmas is over, all the last obligations are done - generally very uninspiring. So, thinking of doing 28 days of yoga seems like a good cause. I really didn't think I would start a trend with a NaYoPraMo site. Someone thought of it first - check out:

http://woyopracmo.ning.com/
http://nayopracmo.wordpress.com/

Anyway - I'm going to do it! I've started today and will report my progress week by week. Don't worry - you have time to catch up as well. If you start tomorrow you can get 2 yoga sessions in on a Saturday.

Good luck and I hope you join me on this journey!

Bhakti Yoga – The Science Of Devotion

Bhakti means devotion to the Almighty. Bhakti yoga deals with devotion to God and achieving the union with Him. This is the easiest of all yoga types. This branch of yoga teaches the relation between the devotee and the divine. It does not involve any technical or complicated procedures. There is no need of any intellectual capacity to master this yoga. It has appealed to the common man because it gives him a feeling security and develops a kind of reliance and dependence on the object of his devotion.

Bhakti yoga assumes that there is a higher power that has created the universe and is all-powerful. This power has the capacity to confer grace and mercy on him and thus protecting him from all the harms and evils. The devotee or bhakta is expected to make himself fit for receiving this divine grace. For this, he has to practice devotion and virtue. His ultimate goal should be to unite with this divine power and rest eternally in happiness and peace. The devotee surrenders all his motives and acts to the Divine Power. He renounces all responsibilities towards the good or bad consequences of all his actions and ascribes it to the will of the Supreme.

Devotion and faith play a vital role in this branch of yoga. The devotee or bhakta is supposed to be highly religious, should adopt a friendly stance towards all the other living beings including animals, read religious texts, concentrate on the symbol of the Divine, think and wish well for others etc. The beauty of this yoga lies in its simplicity. This has made it one of the most appealing of all the yoga types. Following this yoga develops the peace of mind in an individual. A peaceful individual will always think happy and prosperous thoughts and will thus lead a happy life.

About The Author

Sharon Hopkins is the webmaster of Yogawiz (www.yogawiz.com) that provides loads of information on basics of yoga, the need to do yoga and health benefits. Bhakti yoga is a devotional branch of yoga which teaches a person to ascribe all the events in his life to Divine Will.

Yoga, Meditation and Reincarnation

Recently I have been wondering about how yoga and meditation might tap into reincarnation. Being a spiritual person but not overly religious I've always had a very faint sense of a couple of my past lives. One was as a soldier in WWII and another as a young boy somewhere in the Arabian peninsula - Yemen, I think. I was never really sure if these memories, visions, dreams are really just a fantasy or part of some real threads of past memories.

I first became interested in yoga when my sister gave me a copy of Jess Stern's Yoga, Youth and Reincarnation. As an introduction to Hatha Yoga it really turned me on to the possibility of better health as well as greater mental and spiritual insight. As I started practicing some of the beginning and intermediate exercises I started to notice the physical changes. The benefits of yoga fitness were becoming very visible - however, I wanted to focus on meditation as well.

Now I am reading Many Lives, Many Masters and feeling a sense that using a combination of yoga, meditation and past life research might lead to a highly accelerated state of consciousness and inner peace. Time will tell but I am intrigued.

If any readers have experienced a combination of past life memories and yoga I would love to publish the comments here.

Meditation and Yoga ancient origins - Yogiraj Siddhanath

Yogiraj Gurunath Siddhanath is an illumined living master, seer, and helps sincere practitioners of yogic meditation awaken to higher levels of consciousness through chakra awakening/activation and esoteric practices of Himalayan yoga.

Yogiraj was born on May 10, 1944 in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, India. He has been meditating since the age of 3, and spent his early years in the Himalayas amongst the HamsaNath yogis, in whose presence he was transformed. The divine transformation deepened after his deep and personal experiences in 1961 and 1967 with the yogi-christ Mahavatar Shiv-Goraksha-Babaji, the same spiritual master described in Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi.

He has a wife of over 30 years, Gurumata Shivangani, with whom he built by hand the Hamsa Yoga Sangh Ashram (Spiritual Retreat) outside the city of Pune, near Bombay, India. They have two sons, and two grandchildren. Yogiraj teaches yogic meditation for the evolution of human consciousness.



These practices of yoga meditation and yoga fitness are the most ancient closely guarded sacred practices of the Himalayan yogis and masters from time immemorial. They help the practitioner gradually transform him/herself into the likeness of his/her own divinity. This ancient art and science has been a way of life for rare yogis and ascetics of India and abroad who have sacrificed everything in the search for their own inner Truth, their inner Godessence.

Today, Yogiraj demonstrates in his own life and livingness, that powerful spiritual practice can be integrated with family life and a career. By the blessings of Babaji, Yogiraj teaches these techniques, which he calls "The Alchemy of Total Transformation" to sincere seekers throughout the world, who wish to integrate these practices into their daily life, without the necessity of giving up worldly pursuits.

These techniques are called:
1. Mahavatar Babaji's Kriya Yoga (N.B., the exact same kundalini kriya originally given to Lahiri Mahasaya in the 19th century)
2. Siddhanath Surya Yoga - A dynamic osmosis of solar healing. Pranic healing with solar power.
3. Siddhanath Hamsa Yoga - The Way of the White Swan.

Hamsa Yoga Sangh