Listening.

Today we practiced what is defined below in the postcard advertisement that I created on vistaprint.com....

The next time we will practice this will be in the Fall...and the date may change...

Originally, the kriya I put on the schedule for this day was "BALANCE THE MIND IN THE GROUP ENERGY", however we were not able to engage in this one as we did last Fall of 2012, because we needed groups of four to play patty-cake of all things! When children play patty-cake it creates more connections across the corpus callosum between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. While this would have been beautiful to do, last Fall we had exactly 8 participants. This Spring, there were 4 at first, which would have allowed us to do it, as we need groups of 4, but then a 5th person showed up.....sooooo....

Everything I remembered from what I practiced last night for potential alternates if the numbers weren't right to do this kriya fell into place. We did two short kriyas for the thyroid and the parathyroid from GuruRattan Kaur's book "Transition to a Heart-Centered World". I have heard from SatInder Singh in the past, and from students of mine, and experienced myself how tremendously powerful many of the kriyas and meditations are in her book. I don't think she 'changed' what Yogi Bhajan taught so much, as that she was inspired to bring a detail to these kriyas and meditations not present in some  other books of Kundalini Yoga. After all, David Shanahoff-Khalsa, in his books on working with Axis I & II Psychiatric Disorders, says in the preface that the only Kundalini Yoga 'Protocol' in there designed expressly by Yogi Bhajan was the one for Autism-Spectrum Disorders; the rest were divinely inspired by him. Yogi Bhajan told him to do this. His work AND GuruRattan Kaur's is powerful! POWERFUL!!

So we did those short kriyas from her book, and then the kriya "RELIEVE, RELAX AND RECHARGE", and what I saw happening in the room was exactly what needed to happen to get us to the best place for practicing the meditation: "MEDITATION for the SECRET DOOR of the SIX SOUNDS". We worked on our throat chakras, then the heart, then the lower three chakras. We grounded and centered. Then we learned to LISTEN deeply....

I suggested to the students that they try to watch Philip Groning's documentary of the Carthusian monks in The Monastery of The Grand Chartreuse in France...one of the most ascetic monastic traditions...more so than Cistercian monks or Franciscan. Carthusian monks take a deep vow of silence. They are able to speak once a week in a forum for an hour. The rest of time they listen deeply to what yogis and yoginis would call the "anahat", the unstuck sound, the sound beneath the sounds, the hum of the universe...the deep love at the core....

We listening in deep silence as the rain began to drum upon the cathedral ceiling roof of the studio. What a blessing.

Note: this was the last class taught with no other classes going on concurrently. From here on out, there will be a Mommy & Me class going on in the adjoining studio, and it will be loud. Kundalini Yoga is all about going with the flow...and I love it, and I love the babies and their cries, though I will miss the opportunity to rest in this deep silence. Maybe, if need be, in the future, we will try to do meditations requiring silence in the beginning, or maybe the shuni-a, the deep LISTENING will be the ability to hear even babies crying, and still hear the sounds beneath the sounds...