A Shamanic Cosmology

Posted on September 29, 2015 by admin

Cultures throughout history have had some sort of cosmology; that is, a story or model, or belief system that defines the origins, structures and functioning of reality as experienced by that culture. The modern era’s cosmology is a quirky cultural stew of scientific rationalism, religious dogma, and enlightened spiritual insight. My vote is for an enlightened spiritual insight which arises from an ongoing, direct and intimate contact with the world as it arises moment to moment. The question here becomes what do we mean by “the world as it arises?” The shamans have a very interesting view on ‘the world’, feeling all of creation is spiritual, and that much of the world is unseen to the human eye.

Reality: An Overview

From a shamanic perspective, reality has two fundamental expressions: the seen, and the unseen. The seen is what the average human would recognize as the physical world. It includes the sky, with clouds, stars and planets, mountains and the rest of the continents, oceans, rivers, lakes and streams, weather, and living beings of all sorts, etc, etc. All of these are experienced through the five senses and we are in constant relationship to this world in our daily activities.

The unseen can also be called the dream or spirit world and and has two primary levels, the lower and upper. The lower realms include the spirits of the earth, including plant and animal spirits as well as spirits associated with rocks, rivers, weather etc. The shamanic animist reality sees all creation is being imbued with a spiritual as well as a physical expression. (Thomas Berry’s ‘Principle 3’ acknowledges these two levels.) The lower realm, or underworld is often the destination of the dead, where human souls go in the afterlife. There are many fascinating tales and teachings about what happens to souls when they get there.

The upper realms include gods, angels, devas, celestial beings, saints, ascended masters, and spiritual guides. In most cases, heaven is the highest reward, and place of eternal beauty, health and happiness and reserved for those departed souls who have passed strict qualification tests, either on the earthly plane or in the underworld. These tests vary across cultures, but they all weed out the unworthy.

This three part reality is almost universal: The heavenly realms, the earth where the action or karma of our lives take place, and the underworld, and the nature of these realms varies tremendously from culture to culture. The modern Western world is currently dominated by the patriarchal monotheistic religions who were terrified of the power of the shamans and thus redefined the lower realms as hell and murdered nearly 100,000 women through the middle ages.

The Shamanic Journey

The modern shaman uses ‘technology’ to enter ‘altered’ states of consciousness, travel to the lower and upper realms, acquire help and helpers in the form of spirit helpers or teachers, and information, to help bring healing to the middle realm of action, in the body, in culture and throughout the planet. The entry point of the journey is through the body, or body soul, aka physical soul, where perception takes place, and the ‘technology’ is to use a drum or rattle to rhythm entrain the brain waves to fire at the Theta or 3 – 8 HZ. “Theta brainwaves occur most often in sleep but are also dominant in the deep meditation. It acts as our gateway to learning and memory. In theta, our senses are withdrawn from the external world and focused on signals originating from within. It is that twilight state which we normally only experience fleetingly as we wake or drift off to sleep. In theta we are in a dream; vivid imagery, intuition and information beyond our normal conscious awareness. It’s where we hold our ‘stuff’, our fears, troubled history, and nightmares.” (from www.brainworksneurotherapy.com). The drumming or rattling have to be accurate and consistent to sustain theta for 20 minutes or so. We will go further into some of the protocols and process of the journey in the future.

Our Practice

In the last post, we began the process of differentiating the felt sense and movement possibilities related to the lower six chakras. Today we will go a little further with this exploration. Imagine a ladder; two parallel lines linked by six horizontal lines. Imagine a circle or sphere in the center of each rung, and these will represent the chakras. Now, lying down in savasana, find the chakras and the two parallel lines running down the right and left sides of your body. Visualize and feel these two lines passing through key places aside the different chakras: inner ears, two sides of the jaws, two lungs, two kidney, two pelvic bones, two legs/feet. these are just a few suggestions. Find what awakens in your own perceptual field.

Now imagine the space between the chakras becoming like a frisbee and let the energy spiral back and forth, ascending and descending around each of the chakras.you may begin to notice something that looks like this. Enjoy the ride. This is the ‘fishbody’ we have been working with for many years now. Smooth out the spaces. You are liable to find places on the sides of one or more chakras where the energy is sticky, or just plain stuck. In that moment, the habit is to ‘contract’ something to force the issue. Inhibit this urge. Contraction vrtti nirodha. Relax. Use imagination and visualization to help open channels.

Now return to the ladder image and find the points where the rungs intersect the vertical. Imagine all twelve points breathing together and feel. Imagine the heart beating simultaneously in all twelve points and feel what arises. This may take some practice and patience. Now take this into your asana practice and discover these points and energetic patterns anew. Let them dance you, reshape you, awaken you from deep within. Now go out into nature and do the same. Feel nature dancing with you. Be open to surprise, awe and wonder.

Further Reading: “A Bowl of Light” by Hank Wesselman, and all material at sharedwisdom.com.

(It was an amazing weekend!)

The Yin and Yang of Spiritual Practice

Posted on June 23, 2015 by admin

Last week we looked at the obstacles that crop up for the more experienced students Patanjali addresses in the Samaadhi Paada, the first of the four chapters that cover the study of yoga. For those of us here, the awakening is proceeding along, but as we quickly realize, awakening is the beginning of yoga, not the end goal. Years of karma and negative psychological and emotional habits do not just disappear, but, with proper understanding and continued practice, they can become food for spiritual growth. Add in the societal and planetary karmic challenges we also face and there is nourishment for all of us for many incarnations to come.

So, how do we develop proper understanding and practice? Patanjali jumps in with both feet to help us right at the beginning of the Samadhi Pada. In sutra I-12, abhyaasa-vairaagyaabhyaam tan-niroddhah ,he introduces the ‘yin and yang of spiritual practice, abhyaasa and vairagyam, as the primary upayas (skillful means) to attenuate these habits and stabilize the samadhi state. “The negative vrittis (described in the previous sutras) are resolved through practice and dispassion.”

Abhyaasa describes how to invest your your embodied energy, be it physical, psychological, emotional, relational, or spiritual (which essentially covers all of these.) Patanjali’s advice; invest your energy in stabilizing your spiritual health. I-13: tatra sthitau yatno’bhyaasah. The Sanskrit root ‘stha’ shows up every where in the spiritual teaching of India and indicates stability, steadiness and stillness. Sthira sukham asanam, II-46, is well known to hatha yogis. In chapter 2 of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna describes ‘sthita prajna, stable wisdom, as the goal of life to Arjuna. (See also PYS: I-35, II-18, II-39, III-31).

Modern neuroscience also has a deep appreciation for the need to stabilize emotionally healthy mind states, and how growth and development requires the capacity to stabilize new learning in the process of integration. (See all writings by Dan Siegel, Rick Hanson etc). From Hebb’s Axiom we know that continuous attention brings stability. “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” In sutras I-33 – I-39, Patanjali gives us our meditation practice many possible neuronal pathways to ‘attend to’ and stabilize the healthy states. An ‘awakened’, i.e., ‘heart centered’ hatha yoga practice is another powerful way to build a healthy form of spiritual stability. As we will see a bit later, our choices off the mat also offer the opportunity to practice ‘abhyaasa’.

Because what we pay attention to over and over ‘sticks’ in the mind field, for better or worse, Patanjali also includes vairagyam, dispassion, with abhyaasa. Here, dispassion means the recognizing of the unhealthy psychological, emotional and spiritual patterns that we are habituated to, and consciously choosing, through mindful awareness, to stop ‘feeding’ those patterns with energy. If we use a river as a metaphor for the flow of energy through the mind field, vairagyam is the intelligence, the buddhi, building dams, barriers or gates to direct the flow of mental energy away from the fields of suffering, while abhyasa creates new channels to send that energy to places that are healing, nurturing and stimulating to growth and further awakening. This takes a lot of ‘self study’ as we have to learn to discriminate between healthy (flowing through our heart) and unhealthy (flowing through our egoic or self centered beliefs) habits and actions. Sometimes, especially on the subtle levels and when it comes to our relationships with family and friends, this is not at all clear .

Therefore, in addition to our personal practice, our relational, cultural and societal choices are also included cultivating stability and dispassion. After a long day at work, we could choose to go to a bar, or a yoga class. We can work to find a collection of friends and mentors that support and nurture our spiritual aspirations. Every time we meet and are relating another human being, a social group, or any living being, we have the chance to practice mindful awareness and choose, as best possible, to channel our energies through the heart field and not our whiny, self defensive egoic structures. Moment to moment, say yes to this, no to that. In this way habits change through conscious choice and the awakening stabilizes creatively and dynamically.

2014 YLT, 11th Weekend Summary

Posted on February 10, 2015 by admin

Working with the Prana Vayus:

This is the eleventh entry in a series of twelve posts summarizing the basic material covered in the year long training which began in January of 2104 and will come to a completion on February 15th. Previous posts can be found on this blog page. A lot has been covered over the past year. If any questions arise, please feel free to contact me.

We are now working with the subtle energies, so some quietness and reflection is needed, even in dynamic postures. Meditation is primary in all poses, and the heart is the place to start. We are cultivating subtle streams of perception in both the fluid body and the etheric or spatial body, so some patience and persistence is required. Developing the skill of resting in stillness will allow the more subtle energies to reveal themselves.

Vayu means air or wind and the term Prana vayus refers to the five fundamental organizing movements of the energetic body. We will be working from the tensegrity/fluid body/pressure cavities perspective to make these movements both tangible and integrated. For anyone living in their body with sensitivity and intelligence, three major pressure cavities can be experienced, the cranial vault, the thoracic region, and the abdominal/pelvic region. Relative to the outside world, the head and abdominal cavities have positive or higher pressure and the thoracic cavity has a lower pressure. To present this in a more dramatic way, if you puncture the head or belly, stuff squirts out, but if you puncture the chest, it collapses inward, as in a collapsed lung. The basic point here is that this pressure gradient of the body is constantly moving energy toward the heart, i.e., pressure draws energy from higher to lower to create an internal equilibrium that is a major player in all of the fluid movements of the body.

This equilibrium can cover a whole spectrum from very dynamic, vital and healthy, to highly restricted and pathological. Our process in yoga physiology is to maximize the dynamic relationships for optimum health. And, it also turns out that in doing so we cultivate a deep inner presence in the heart center that is a place of infinite stillness and wholeness. Tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam. We have to make it stable, of course, through practice and surrender, abhyasa and vairagyam.

We’ll begin with our Hoberman spheres and begin to feel the energies of the two directions: opening the sphere, expanding out from a center, which we can call the yang or centrifugal energy; and closing the sphere, condensing from the perimeter into the center, the yin or centripetal energy. When they are in balance, we can find a dynamically stable state of the sphere at any where along the spectrum from open to closed.

When we come to the body and the Prana vayus, we first come the first, also known as the prana vayu, which governs the process of taking energies into the body/mind. (I’ll use a capital P when refering to the general term including all five, and a small p when referring to the intake. The prana vayu ,or prana, is an expanding field that creates space and invites energy to move into the body. This expansion is centered in the mid chest at the heart and balances the negative pressure usually felt in the chest which causes the outer world to press in upon the chest. If you hadn’t noticed, as people reach middle age and older, the chest has more often than not sunk in a bit from this pressure. Gravity and the aging belly energy also play a part in this sinking. By consciously finding, feeling, creating an expanding field from the heart, the chest opens, the heart lifts, and we are ready to be present to whatever the world offers us in the moment. If your connective tissues have fallen into a collapse of any level, it may take a while to reconfigure them. The intercostals and other chest muscles, as well as the diaphragm and mediastinum are involved. The prana vayu is usually associated with respiration, but on a sublte level governs everything you take in, from emotions to ideas, sensations and images.

As we are open systems, we have to balance taking in with moving out. The second vayu, apana, governs elimination, or what we let go of, at all levels. Apana is a squeezing or condensing energy, complimenting the expanding of the prana vayu. Expand to take in, squeeze to move out. Very simple. Most commentators focus on the downward flow, as solid and liquid wastes are eliminated predominantly out through the pelvic floor, but the apana is more complex than that. Sweating takes place throughout the body. Exhalation of the breath takes place through the nostrils or mouth. Regurgitation, a hopefully infrequent form of expelling unwanted material, moves out the mouth.

Ultimately apana is a radiallly condensing energy. However, it also has an unusual role in that the downwards aspect is also what governs the action of the legs and tail, real or imaginary. So we might say the the abdominal/pelvic cavity also can be expanded to include legs and tail. As we saw with the prana vayu, aging often takes a toll on the connective tissue structures of the body. The apana is a squeezing energy, but the belly has a positive or outgoing pressure. Aging often leads to this positive pressure creating the pot or beer belly, giving many middle agers the look of being slightly pregnant. With this state, the ‘sqeeziness’ is also much weaker, creating all sorts of problems from poor elimination and digestion, to lower back problems. From the perspective of Ayurveda, the medical wisdom of the Vedic tradition, poor elimination is the beginning of the disease process.

The samana vayu, classically associated with digestion, governs absorption. It is the decider or mediator between what comes in and what goes out. When healthy, we retain the ‘good stuff’ and eliminate the ‘bad stuff’. From the perspective of the pressure cavities, samana sits between the expanding center of prana in the chest and the squeezing center of apana in the pelvis. When healthy, the expanding nature of the abdomen is carefully directed away from the abdominal wall and aligned with the spinal axis. Some of the energy lifts up through the diaphragm and into the heart, supporting the prana vayu; some of it extends downward to grow legs and tail, supporting the apana vayu. This action can be felt as a natural, mild uddiyana bandha. Here Krishnamacharya is demonstrating a slightly stronger version as part of pranayama practice.

The vyana vayu circulates the energies throughout the body. First felt as the fluid flow of the blood, vyana also governs the nerve currents circulating information throughout the body and the flow of Prana through the subtle energy channels known as nadis. There are fourteen principal nadis, of which three are most commonly known. Ida is the lunar or cooling nadi associated with the feminine and parasympathetic nervous systems. Pingala, the solar or masculine nadi, works with the sympathetic nervous system. Susumna, the center channel, works with the central nervous system. There are some parallels with the meridian system in Chinese medicine.

The vyana vayu has both expanding and condensing energies and also governs movement. The grace and elegance of the limbs in movement is an indication of healthy vyana.

The udana vayu is a fascinating one. An upward moving energy, udana governs growth and development at all levels of reality. At conception it facilitates embryological development and triggers the urge in the baby to move out of the womb and into the world by extending out through the crown chakra. This same energy takes the soul out of the body through the crown chakra at death. During your life, udana is a sustaining field of intelligence that integrates the other four pranas in an on-going urge to grow physically, emotionally and spiritually. When udana gets stuck, it feels as if our whole life is ‘stuck’. Coming back to the heart center and resting there is always a way to get ‘unstuck’.

In any poses you choose, find these energies. In dynamic postures such as standing poses and back bends, to much muscular energy is a sign of blockage in all the vayus. Start with opening the prana vayu and follow it through the others. In more restorative of meditative poses, find the udana vayu as a field of integration and stillness, where the whole body mind is awake and relaxed simultaneously.