By Kara-Leah Grant Let's get one thing straight. You do not create your own reality. Your thoughts do not create your reality either. All the positive thinking and manifesting and vision boarding and dreaming is not going to get you what you want. What you do create is your experience of your reality. Your thoughts about your reality create your experience of that reality. This distinction is critical, and far too often it's glossed over, ignored or pushed aside in favour of the … [Read more...]
Inside the experience of a loving-kindness sadhana to Day 20
This practice was inspired by many things. A conversation with friends after a heart-opening Bhakti practice about the nature of the spiritual path. An understanding that opening the body was all very well, but unless the heart also opened, essentially meaningless. A desire to experience more equinimity, more joy, more bliss, more love. And a book called A Path with Heart. … [Read more...]
What do you see when you look at the world? – The yogic perspective
A month ago I floated this question with my readers because I was curious. I know that what we see when we look at the world says more about us than it says about the world, and I wanted to know; What were my readers seeing? I knew what I was seeing, and as I witness my reactions to the news and current affairs shows, I could gauge whether I was coming from an open-hearted centredness perspective, or a right/wrong ego perspective. More often than not, it was my ego that was engaged. It was … [Read more...]
Day 15 to 21: Forty Day Sadhana of Sodarshan Chakra Kriya
Read the first posts in this series here: Committing to a Forty Day Sadhana of Sodarshan Chakra Kriya Day 1 to 7: Forty Day Sadhana of Sodarshan Chakra Kriya Day 8 to 14: Forty Day Sadhana of Sodarshan Chakra Kriya I'm over halfway through this sadhana, and the results have been incredible. Last week I shared some of the burning away process, whereby the movement of prana in the body releases old samskaras. This can be a painful and at times bewildering process, yet ultimately it … [Read more...]
Day 8 to 14: Forty Day Sadhana of Sodarshan Chakra Kriya
Missed the beginning of this series? Catch up here: Committing to a Forty Day Sadhana of Sodarshan Chakra Kriya Day 1 to 7: Forty Day Sadhana of Sodarshan Chakra Kriya There have been so many "ah-ha!" moments this week, brought about by a combination of this sadhana, but also an amazing book I am reading called Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, by Stephen Cope. Regular practice of yoga transforms us form the inside out - psyche and all. It's a process I've largely done by myself, … [Read more...]
What do you mean ‘We are all One’?
In his book, The Elements of Yoga, Godfrey Devereux uses physics to explain how our perspective can limit our understanding of 'reality' He says: While we perceive a tree as solid, if we change our frame of reference and perceive a tree from the viewpoint of an electron, a neutrino or any of the elusive sub-atomic particles which populate the Universe of quantum physicists, it melts into a vortex of dancing, scintillating energy. ... Material objects, viewed as fields of energy, do not … [Read more...]
How practicing yoga can pierce the veil of Maya
by Kara-Leah, Maya is a Hindu, or Vedic concept - the word refers to the illusion of physical and mental reality that we operate under. Piercing the veil refers to seeing or perceiving past this illusion to glimpse the transcendent truth. It means waking up, becoming enlightened, becoming conscious. So what does this have to do with us in our every day lives and how can we use it? We all live our lives with the expectation that the reality we perceive and experience is True. Yet this reality … [Read more...]
How to choose your own experience of reality
One of the most valuable lessons that yoga can teach us is to observe our reactions to the world. When we practice, we pay attention to our breath, we are aware of physical sensations in the body, we notice our emotions and we watch our thoughts leaping and dancing about in the mind. In the watching, we begin to see space between thought and action. We begin to understand that we can choose our action. This gift of yoga could lead to the single biggest leap in evolution we could next make as … [Read more...]