Yoga Lessons from Seaweed

Posted on July 8, 2013 by admin

Sthira sukham asanam, the somanaut’s basic mantra, appears in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in II-46 as his first of three sutras on asana or yoga posture. In Patanjali’s time, yoga pose referred to any posture used in sitting meditation. In modern times asana has come to mean any of hundreds if not thousands of possible configurations of the human body, some meditative, some gymnastic, many therapeutic.

But what if we go back to the origins of life and the emergence of multi-cellular beings? What would it feel like to inhabit the newly emerging forms appearing on a watery planet? No bones. No nerves. Just a self-organizing aliveness of fluid, tissue and intelligence that has been carried forward into our emerging moment in our own human cells and tissues. Sthira sukham asanam: embodied living requires a dynamic balance of stability and mobility throughout all cells and structures. The imprinting of sun, of ocean waves and swells, of rocks, shaping minerals and cells into undulating intelligence, surviving the pounding surf by anchoring to rocks and learning to go with the flow. Nature is shtira sukham and one of her oldest and most prolific expressions is seaweed. Can seaweed help us awaken this primal intelligence and bring it into moment to moment awareness?

The Department of Biodiversity and Conservation Biology at The University of the West Cape, South Africa offers: ” The term seaweed refers to the large marine algae that grow almost exclusively in the shallow waters at the edge of the world’s oceans. Seaweeds are plants because they use the sun’s energy to produce carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water (this is called photosynthesis). They are simpler than the land plants mainly because they absorb the nutrients that they require from the surrounding water and have no need for roots or complex conducting tissues. Some large seaweeds such as the kelps (see above) have root-like parts called holdfasts, but these only serve to attach them to the rock. Most seaweeds have to be attached to something in order to survive, and only a few will grow while drifting loose in the sea.

Three groups of seaweeds are recognized, according to their pigments that absorb light of particular wavelengths and give them their characteristic colors of green, brown or red. (Red dulse and brown alaria to left.) Because they need light to survive, seaweeds are found only in the relatively shallow parts of the oceans, which means around the shores. Here they occur in a variety of shapes and sizes, from the large kelps (certain brown seaweeds) that form forests on temperate (cooler) coasts, to the hard “encrusting corallines” that look like pink icing, but are so important in building and cementing coral reefs in the tropics. Some seaweeds, especially many of the larger reds, are showy and attractive, while others may be small and inconspicuous, and grow in a low “turf” on the rocks.

This past weekend, the cosmos, speaking through my dear wife Kate, sent me (along with Kate and Sean) to hang with the “Seaweed Man”, Larch Hanson, his delightful partner Nina, five seaweed harvesting apprentices, and various visitors to seaweed heaven. (Here’s Larch with digitata, a kombu like plant.) Located in Steuben, Maine, north of Bar Harbor, ‘Maine Seaweed’ is action central for anyone wanting to awaken their own seaweed consciousness. If Larch is seaweed incarnate, I want more of what he has! Forty years of living in the sea, on the sea, with the sea, has imprinted into his cells the rhythms of the seasons, the oceans, tides and winds. He is an experienced carpenter, boat builder, structural integrator, poet, practicing Buddhist, and philosopher. He invites visitors and prospective apprentices in the summer to learn about awakening while feeling the depths of oceanic consciousness.

From Larch’s website: “Through seaweeds, the earth’s sea-blood strengthens our own sea-blood that we carry within us. Seaweeds are an excellent source of trace minerals in our diet. As our air and water become more acidified through pollution, minerals are leached and depleted from our land fields, and they wash down to the sea, where the wild seaweeds incorporate them. When we eat seaweeds, we take these minerals back into our bodies, and these minerals help us maintain an alkaline condition in our bloodstream, which is a healthy condition, resistant to fatigue and stress.

Seaweeds have admirable qualities: they are flexible, they are tenacious, they are prolific, and they are the oldest family of plants on earth. These plants link us to the primitive vitality of the sea. They strengthen our own primitive glandular system and nervous system.
An average family of seaweed eaters will consume a Family Pack within six months to a year. That’s 3 pounds dry weight = 30 pounds wet weight = one bushel of wet plants. This is a very concentrated food.

Don’t fear salt. Salt is necessary to life. If you are willing to sweat, you can move salt through you, and in the process, you will be actively creating your life and your dream from the universe-intelligent structures of the complex salts and trace elements that are available in seaweeds. Your body is an antenna, and your body can’t receive and comprehend the whole message from Universe unless it contains all the trace elements of the Universe. Quality counts more than quantity. If you eat the more complex salts of seaweeds, you will have less craving for simple junk food salt, and you will find yourself becoming more whole, satisfied and healthy.”

So, I offer to you, “Pass me the dulse!” (the red seaweed above the alaria in the upper photo). My inner ocean is ready to awaken.

Sacred Geometry: Yoga and the Torus

Posted on July 1, 2013 by admin

The torus is a three dimensional figure created by rotating a circle 360 degrees along a line formed by another circle. This is also known as a donut or bagel shape. The hole is one ‘inside’ and the interior of the donut (like the inside of a tire tube) is another ‘inside’.
These are static structures.

We can also imagine a toroidal shaped electromagnetic field generating a torus shape like this heart-centered one from
Asianhealthsecrets.com.
“The Hearts’ torus electromagnetic field is not the only source that emits this type of electromagnetic field. Every atom emits the same torus field. The Earth is also at the center of a torus, so is the solar system and even our galaxy…and all are holographic. Scientists believe there is a good possibility that there is only one universal torus encompassing an infinite number of interacting, holographic tori within its spectrum.”

Here is a larger torus centered on Jupiter and its moon, Io.

” Io’s volcanoes continually expel an enormous amount of particles into space, and these are swept up by Jupiter’s magnetic field at a rate of 1,000 kg/sec. This material becomes ionized in the magnetic field and forms a doughnut-shaped track around Io’s orbit called the Io Plasma Torus.” (planetaryexploration.net)

Here is one with a vesica pisces! Very cool! The original, by artist and planetary healer Pamela Leigh Richards is quite dynamic. (http://flywithmeproductions.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/torus1.gif.

Another cosmic one appears in the current edition of National Geographic (July 2013) in an article on the origins of the solar system. This side oriented torus represents the Oort Cloud’ a collection of trillions of comets and mini planets toroidally spinning around the solar system, seen here in red.

This reminded me of Itzak Bentov’s torus describing his model of the whole cosmos. This can be found in both “Stalking the Wild Pendulum” and “A Cosmic Book, for those who want to look a bit more deeply into this.

And, for the piece de resistance, I offer the first cell division, where a single cell becomes two cells.
Notice the energy flow and the opening of the toroidal field as the poles (centrioles) separate. For your cosmic homework, as you sit in your favorite pose, Find your heart in the center and visualze the heart’s electro-magnetic field. Find the 1st chakra and open it to the earth’s energy. Find the 7th chakra opening to the heavens. Then allow the heavens to pass through the donut hole into the earth and the earths energies to pass through you to the heavens. Find the balance of stability (sthira) and flow (sukham) as the torus links your atoms to the cosmos and vice versa.

Then explore the energetic shift from one cell to two and then the reverse, from two to one. Develop some flexibility in both directions. Find the torus and the vesica pisces. We will build upon this in upcoming embryology sections.

And most importntly, Smile. Enjoy the show. And, to quote the poet Mary Oliver, ‘Pay attention!, Be astounded! Tell about it!

Proof of Heaven

Posted on January 17, 2013 by admin

There are many fascinating stories arising on the front lines of the awakening process, but Eban Alexander’s has to be one of the wilder ones. Great book! Terrifying to the rationalists!

Eban is a neurosurgeon. He earned his M.D. at Duke University in 1980, continued his residency there as well as at Mass General Hospital and Harvard, went on to explore neuroendocrinology and cerebrovascular surgery and spent fifteen years on the faculty of Harvard Medical school as an associate professor of surgery with a specialization in neurosurgery. As a practicing surgeon, he operated on countless patients, many with serious brain injuries and aliments. He is a scientist par excellence. ” I adored that simplicity-the absolute honesty and cleanness of science. I respected that it left no room for fantasy or for sloppy thinking. If a fact could be established as tangible and trustworthy, it was acceptted. If not, then it was rejected.”

And, in November of 2008, he suddenly came down with a rare brain illness.

If you are familiar with Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My Stroke of Insight” you might guess where this is going. But Eben’s story is even more mind-boggling. He developed a case of bacterial meningitis and was in a coma for seven days. His neocortex shut down totally. His attending physicians eventually told the family that he was never coming back, there had been too much trauma from the infection, which did not seem to respond to the various anti-biotics the medical team administered. But he did eventually awaken, rather suddenly, from the coma. And the story he returned with was shattering; shattering at least to his ‘sceptical-logical’ scientific mind.

In his out-of body travels he discovers the ‘underworld’, the ‘gate way’ and the ‘core’ and the absolute impossibility to describe his experiences in words or relate them to our earth bound ‘ordinary’ reality. “I know my biology, and while I am not a physicist, I’m no slouch at that, either. I know the difference between fantasy and reality, and I know that the experiences I am struggling to give you the vaguest, most completely unsatisfactory of, was the single most real experience of my life.”

“To say that there is still a chasm between our current scientific understanding of the universe and the truth as I saw it is a considerable understatement.” And, “perhaps the best way of conveying that part of that experience is to say I had a foretaste of another, larger kind of knowledge: one I believe human beings will be able to access in ever larger numbers in the future.”

“I saw the abundance of life throughout the countless universes, including some whose intelligence was advanced far beyond humanity. I saw that there are countless higher dimensions, but the only way to know these dimensions is to enter and experience them directly.”

Finally, “It is my belief that we are now facing a crucial time in our existence. We need to recover more of that larger knowledge while living here on earth, while our brains (including its left-side analytical parts) are fully functioning. Science—the science to which I’ve devoted so much of my life—doesn’t contradict what I learned up there. But far too many people believe, because certain members of the scientific community, who are pledged to the materialistic world view, have insisted again and again that science and spirituality cannot coexist.

They are mistaken…. The unconditional love and acceptance that I experienced on my journey is the single most important discovery I have ever made, or will ever make, and as hard as I know it’s going to be to unpack the other lessons I learned while there, I also know in my heart that sharing this basic message—-one so simple that most children readily accept it—is the most important task I have.”