The art of letting go is a daily practice. You need to let go. Every day. Because the world is moving at such a fast pace, you have two lives to attend to: the life of living in real time showing up for loved ones and friends, and the life of digitally posting advice, events, photos, and preferences. This takes place on hundreds of online platforms.

This multi-level reality demands you develop blazing clarity about who you are and what you need to do. Clarity asks you to let go of things that are irrelevant or undermining. In the body, superfluous, damaged, or unproductive cells have to be recognized and dropped. Unsupportive thoughts need to be weeded out and replaced on a daily basis. Life is a cycle. What allows us to be here is more than even letting go, it’s actual death.

It might seem morbid but in the medical world this process is known as cell death. Periodic cell death is good; random cell death is harder to manage. Apoptosis is programmed (your bones, muscle and organs renew on a regular basis); while necrosis is random (an injury, infection, bacteria, or inflammation). Both types of cell death are normal physiological processes. Some things die and other things are born.

Yet we don’t appear to be very good at it. We don’t let bad experiences go. We don’t die happily. We don’t relax. Cancer is an accumulation, viruses are attachments, bladder infections are repetitive patterns. Cancerous cells refuse to die off and be replaced – DNA-damaged, superfluous and unwanted elements go untouched. The cells just keep growing. Within and without, how can we let go of what no longer supports us?

In yoga, one of the tools for transformation is known as sauca (this is one of the niyamas, or restraints, described in the eight limbs of yoga). Sauca is a boundless enthusiasm for cleaning – cleaning your skin, your thoughts, your orifices. Cleaning your kitchen and bathroom. Cleaning up your diet, cleaning up your relationships, cleaning out your closets. Out with yesterday, in with today.

If throwing away old food from your fridge sounds dreary, imagine an internal world full of residual viruses, antibiotics, supplements, anesthetics, and chemicals. If you want to heal, you have to create space for your healing, to allow a process and give yourself permission to feel everything. Feel, dissolve, breathe, flow. How can you release without inflammation? How can you grieve without tears?

A variety of practices can support the process of letting go effectively. In my own work, I focus on the use of meditation, mantra, and sound to help people improve self-connection and communication. Here are five practices that support the cultivation of the ability to let go.

5 Steps to Letting Go

Slow Down
Practice a breathing exercise, reflect, meditate, go for a walk. Change your pace periodically. If you don’t slow down voluntarily then sometimes an injury, illness, or surgery can help you slow down and find time to sort things out, reprioritize, and reorganize.

Breathe
Take the time to consciously breathe for 5-10 minutes or longer. Singing or reciting mantra is a good way to slow down the breath cycle. Try practicing aerobic exercise such as swimming, jogging, or walking with intentional breathing.

Trust
Trust is a feeling. It is an internal nurturing energy fueled by serenity and feel-good hormones. You feel that you belong, that you matter, that you make a difference in this world. Trust is something you feel innately and it must be summoned forth in order for you to let go of unwanted habits and beliefs. Trust needs to be developed and cultivated, both with yourself and your loved ones.

We practice and cultivate trust in relationships but the feeling itself is an internal cue. When I work with people, if the trust isn’t there it can be a barrier to letting go; without trust it can be challenging to relax.  When trust is established within you, you can create it with others. You must develop trust with your doctor, your practitioner, nutritionist, partner, lover, God. Trust whoever you are in relationship with and believe that the process will be helpful and renewing for you. You can’t move forward without it.

Know
You must know that you will be the same person once you let go of whatever it is. You’ll be the same person without that tumor. You’ll still be you without the new glasses or yoga outfit. Without the new car. You were you before you got your certifications. You will still be you after you lose your cellphone, and you’ll still be the same you after you lose your addictions and abusive relationships.

Exhale
Don’t look back or reconsider. Let go of the old, as you exhale with a sigh, laughter, an internal message, or intention. Start whatever is new enthusiastically. Do it right away, replacing with new activities. Give away what you don’t need, repurpose and welcome your new. And want it. If you think it’s not worth it, it won’t be. If you believe it will be successful, it will be. Exhale and allow the new stream of life to begin. Start now. Exhale.

If you get stuck, it just means you need to go back to the previous step. If you can’t develop trust, take a step back: slow down. If you can’t connect to who you are, take time to develop trust in yourself. Can’t let go? Go back and know for sure, you’ll be fine without it.

Wah! will perform her meditative Healing Concert on Sunday January 29, 2017 at MA Center LA in Redondo Beach to benefit Amma’s charities. For tickets, visit: wahmusic.com.

Wah!

Wah! has been making music for the yoga world for 25 years and published books on yoga and healing. Wah! teaches women’s leadership training, sound healing workshops, yoga teacher training, and performs Healing Concerts in planetariums and theaters across the country.

wahmusic.com

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Yoga is a method of healing.

Beyond the postures, the breathing, meditation, visualization and manipulation of flows of energy through locks (bandha) help people transform their lives, heal injuries, and improve their relationships.

The first ingredient necessary for healing is space. When you go to a chiropractor, he or she creates more space so the joints can move freely. In yoga class, you stretch, rotate, and twist the body so the energy can move freely. When you need to create more space in a structured mass, if you can’t change the matter, you can use rotation to create the spaciousness, to give relief. When you rotate the spine, legs, or arms correctly, it creates space. Micro adjustments in the body allow what was congested to become spacious.

Where is the space in the breath? How can you find more space? By inhaling more? If you’re full already, it can be difficult to add more.  Let’s relate this idea to shopping. Let’s say you need more “breath” –- so you go shopping, look for it, find a store, select the right breath and style for you and purchase it. And then bring it home. That’s the moment when you realize you don’t have any space for this or the stuff you purchased last week. That’s when you need the exhalation. The exhalation is the process of cleaning out your closets, making room for the new. The exhalation and its retention increase your capacity; when you finally inhale, it’s a fuller breath. This is why the exhalation is emphasized in many healing modalities including yoga.

The purpose of yoga as a tool for healing is to create a structure of bones and muscle tissue that allows spaciousness. As you move into a structural correction, look for the spacing. The rotation of the bones, the rotation of your schedule, or even the rotation of your relationship should create a feeling of openness. When a teacher makes a correction to someone’s posture in yoga class, to fulfill this intention, the teacher asks, “How does that feel?” If it feels worse, there is a missing link—the communication about where spaciousness can be found is missing.

Spaciousness needs to be present both in your relationship to self (the body) and your relationships with others. If you are in relationship with someone and you’re not allowing them to be who they are, then there’s no spaciousness. If you are expecting your partner to adhere to the same principles that you hold to be true, then you’re not allowing your partner to find his or her way. There’s no spaciousness. You might say, “I found yoga and it’s working for me, so really darling, you should be doing yoga too.” That’s not spacious. Your partner might prefer jogging or windsurfing.

How can you allow and welcome new energy and new energetic structure? The first place I begin is with the breath. You create a breathing form and then rotate or change the form so there’s more spaciousness in it.

Let’s explore a little bit. To show the contrast, first notice the way you breathe — you may be grabbing breath sporadically to fuel your conversations.  You can put the breath into a structure. Try inhaling four counts, holding four counts, exhaling four counts, and holding four counts. This is a structure. Once you establish it, you can widen it, slow it down, change the rhythm in order to affect a change.

Creating a structure with the breath or in yoga postures will entrain the body to find space. To me the breath feels like water, moving freely throughout the body and tissues. Yogic breathing can bring you to a more relaxed state of mind; it can open you to consciousness itself.  

Create Right Relationships for Space in Healing

This will in turn bring spaciousness in the body, with food, with relationships, and so on. Yoga is about finding and establishing right relationship. If you are doing a lot of yoga and your relationships are not harmonious, then you haven’t yet begun your work. Find right relationship to self (how to care for mind and body), right relationship to others (how to care for friends, family), and right relationship to Source (how to allow partnership with soul or spirit).

Find right relationship with the Earth, including how much you throw away, how much you discard as being unworthy, how much you give back, how much you replenish.  In all this, we’re looking for space because space is the first ingredient for healing.

We all want more space but we don’t give the old outdated energy a way to leave. You can’t hold onto old paradigms and simultaneously invite the new. For example, with the cancer patients I have worked with, as various congested areas start to transform, it is important to give the energy a way to go out.

Once the old goes, there’s a new space. What are you going to fill it with?  Bring in new ideas, paradigms, energy. Coherent energy: Geometric, sacred, symmetrical, beautiful, Fibonacci style algorithms. Spacious, divine things that feel good, things that are inclusive. Flow like nature flows.  

Wah!’s book Healing: a Vibrational Exchange explores ways you can find more space and healing in your life. Purchase Healing: a Vibrational Exchange here. 

Wah!

Wah! has been making music for the yoga world for 25 years and published books on yoga and healing. Wah! teaches women’s leadership training, sound healing workshops, yoga teacher training, and performs Healing Concerts in planetariums and theaters across the country.

wahmusic.com

The post The Power of Space in Healing appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

There is an urgency in the air to fix what’s wrong in our hearts, to correct the imbalances between man and nature, to get it right. The urgency is real – it really is time to clean up the environment, save the bees, and start acting from our hearts – but the solution itself has no urgency in it.

The solution is love– the energy of healing, coherent geometry, rainbows and waterfalls. It is the embrace of the Mother for the child, it is a gentle walk through nature; it is the breeze blowing in your hair, the fragrance of a flower, the motion of a flower blooming.

And so, while it really is necessary for you to get out there and do something, set your intention and help the world, the best thing to start that process is calling in the coherent energy of love. As you bring it into yourself, you are able to move and act with compassion and discretion.

Pranayama is the yogic practice of breath control, used to calm the mind and heal the nervous system. Most well known is probably nadi shodana – the cleansing of the nadis, or alternate nostril breathing. Practice by inhaling through the Left nostril, exhaling through the Right, inhaling through the Right, exhaling through the Left and continuing, with pauses at each transition. The goal is not solely to slow down the breath, but to extend the breath by making it the same intensity throughout. I refer to this as creating a uniform “width” in the breath – allowing the breath to carry the same volume of air in the beginning, middle and end of your exhale and/or inhale. Breath limitations mirror energetic limitations – you can see it in the loose exhale of an exasperated sigh, the quick inhale of an angry comment. Pranayama seeks a uniform width of the breath.

Pranayama also brings the breath into structure, asking the air to flow in certain geometric patterns or rhythms. Recurring patterns which mimic nature and its rhythms are soothing to the nervous system; hence the breathing pattern initiates a peaceful structure for the body and its circulation, organs and tissues.

Now for something a little different: Add an intention to your pranayama practice. This will summon your imagination and psychic senses to heal and clear your body. You can add emotional qualities to the breath – inhale soothing energy (L nostril), exhale agitation (R nostril). Inhale healing (L nostril), exhale distractions (R nostril). Conveniently, the Right and Left nostrils have deities associated with them (Ida and Pingala), and they have qualities you can use in your visualizations. Ida (Left nostril) is the moon – subconscious, tranquil, peaceful. Pingala (Right nostril) is the sun – energetic, enthusiastic, fiery.

In its normal cycle, the breath moves predominantly through one nostril or the other, alternating from Left to Right and back again at 20 minute intervals throughout the day. This accounts for periods of action (Right nostril) and rest (Left nostril) in your activities. If you are reading this article, your Left nostril is probably dominating. The Left nostril rules relaxation, reading, and reflection. Go ahead and check it out: breathe through only the L nostril and feel it moving easily in and out. Then breathe only through the R nostril, it might be slightly more congested, less easy to move the air through. If your L nostril were not dominant, you’d be up and running about doing something.

If the nostrils don’t change in their alternation, you feel a debilitation of that energy. Fire (Right nostril) for too long a duration turns enthusiasm to annoyance, agitation, anger. Peace (Left nostril) for too long a duration turns tranquility into lethargy, depression, inertia.

Add  imagery that enhances your experience. Inhale excitement for the next project (R nostril), exhale depression that it’ll never happen (L nostril). Inhale self-empowerment (R nostril), exhale yesterday’s conclusions and judgments about it all (L nostril).

When you have attuned your emotions to a proper state of heart energy using the imagery, you can graduate to a mantra. Inhale (MAA, the energy of the Mother), exhale (OM, the energy of the whole Universe moving). Inhale (SO), exhale (HUM). Or many infinite number of variations.

Adding melody to the mantra and breath practice is a beautiful way to extend its reach (I can only practice pranayama for 20-30 minutes at a stretch). Chanting can be done for hours at a time and if the melody is beautiful, you won’t even feel like it’s “good for you.” Ideally if you practice the mantra well, it will resound in your world for hours afterwards – the muffler on the car will sound like ‘Om’ to you, the phone ringing will sound like ‘Radhe Radhe Radhe!’ The Universe will breathe its sounds and melodies in an endless display of love. In this way, you can work with the Universe, co-creating a world of peace and harmony, so urgently needed at this time. Jai Ma.

Photo: © Merrick Chase, Telluride Photography, Taken at the 2010 Telluride Yoga Festival

Wah!

Wah! has been making music for the yoga world for 25 years and published books on yoga and healing. Wah! teaches women’s leadership training, sound healing workshops, yoga teacher training, and performs Healing Concerts in planetariums and theaters across the country.

wahmusic.com

The post Pranayama -> Intention -> Mantra -> Love appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

The Spiritual Path Looks Like You

What does the spiritual path look like? It looks like you. Whatever you’re doing – it looks like you doing Bikram Yoga in the evening, or joining a 12-step group, or learning kickboxing. It looks like you taking care of your kids instead of going to the meditation retreat. It looks like you trying something new, falling on your face, and getting up to try again.

Let’s get one thing clear: there is no spiritual path. Whoever is telling you their way is the way to go doesn’t live your life. You are going to have to carve your way, make your own decisions and support yourself. The flower growing has the sun to encourage it and the rain and worms for nourishment. That’s it. Were you expecting the flower to have a guru? What kind of advice do you think the flower needed?

And can we talk about that advice? Every teacher I’ve ever talked to, every scripture and ecstatic poem says, “You will not find enlightenment through austerity, penance, postures or rituals.” Yet every single one of them did it: Buddha, Christ, Amma, Shivabalayogi. You name the spiritual teacher, and I will show you that they went through hardship and austerities and practiced ritual. That is the spiritual path!

Would Buddha have understood his teachings without his eight years of austerity, Yoga and deprivation? Would that bowl of rice pudding given by the village girl have had such a profound effect, if he hadn’t been eating one kernel of rice per day for the last I-don’t-know-how-many months? I can’t say for sure, I only know there was a sequence leading up to his epiphany. And one thing followed the other.

Don’t be mistaken. You are doing it. If you are taking one step and then the next, with the intention of expanding, you are doing it. Can we celebrate you for a moment?

Celebrate Your Spiritual Path

If you are doing deprivation, I embrace you. If you are making your diet non-dairy, non-gluten, non-animal products or whatever, go for it. It will focus your energy. It will fine-tune what you decide to put in your body. If you are practicing silence one morning a week (I think Jayadeva does Friday mornings), make it so. It will show you how much energy you lose in unnecessary chatter. The things you do say after that practice of silence will carry weight and credibility.

If you are doing hard work, I embrace you. If you are obsessed with going to Yoga class every day and mastering the next arm balance, go for it. If you have too much to do, and are still going to volunteer at the soup kitchen, I salute you. If you are over-exercising, running a marathon, passionate about Pilates, creating a business, meeting a deadline or organizing a benefit charity, may it be blessed. Does the world need your perfected arm balance? Do we really need another DVD to watch, CD to listen to, or benefit concert to attend? No, and yes. You absolutely should do it.

What you do is vitally important to who you become. It is not the results (the products, businesses, money, success or failure) that matters, it is who you became while making them. That’s what we need from you! That experience, knowing that you can create something meaningful, knowing your hard work can follow an intention of love and create good for you and your community. Do the arm balance. Make it happen. Your will gets stronger every time you take on the impossible.

If you are practicing endless hours of ritual, I embrace you. If you are meditating each day, or traveling to a Summer Solstice gathering, silent retreat, outward bound, or the annual camping trip, I salute you. If you think meditation is the end-all, your fire ceremony is the sacred sequence, your dogma is superior, your ten commandments or Yoga sutras or four noble truths are the crystalline edge of wisdom, I celebrate your discovery. It will lead to your personal experience of truth.

This morning as I left the meditation hut on the farm, I saw a rainbow. It was raining and sun-shining at the same time: Two diverging roads in a yellow wood; two opposing paths happening at the same moment.

Do we need to decide which is more desirable (rain or shine)? No. They can overlap; it’s all good. The next time you seem to be going in two different directions at once, or putting two traditions together that don’t seem to match, be an energetic rainbow and create a new paradigm. God knows we need a new paradigm.

Love Grows Like a Flower

Love: it grows like a flower through the cracks in the pavement. Nothing can stop the pure source energy of love. Your doubts are no match for pure mantra. Your anger is just a drop in the bucket. There is no way to avoid the cleansing that happens now, no way to hide from the planetary movements which force all of our personal growth.

Everything you are doing right now is an opportunity to come to a different conclusion about how you thought it all was. Your involvement with a person, business or group is all about reworking your beliefs about yourself and the world you live in. Through doing it, you will have the opportunity to come to a different conclusion about who you thought they were and who you thought you were. Every personal victory changes the face of the planet.

What Growth Looks Like

Growth looks like you figuring it out and making changes as you go along. Trying this and that. Experimenting. Evaluating. The path is, and you’re on it. If you’re obsessed with cleaning your basement, I salute you. You will clean out all the subconscious beliefs you’ve been holding. If you are doing too much, overextended and overworked, I salute you. You will accomplish more this year than you ever thought possible. Whatever you are doing, be true to it. Do it and watch what happens to you as a result. Something will happen, I assure you.

Be like the farmer. If you see that doing a certain something makes your plant grow crooked, try something a little different to go the other way. If you are leaning towards the sun, celebrate! I think you’re probably onto something good. Forecast ahead: rain!

May your days be joyous, may the path rise to meet you, may the wind be at your back. May all beings be happy.

Wah!

Wah! has been making music for the yoga world for 25 years and published books on yoga and healing. Wah! teaches women’s leadership training, sound healing workshops, yoga teacher training, and performs Healing Concerts in planetariums and theaters across the country.

wahmusic.com

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