Social Workout Yoga Revolution Rocks

Yoga Journal's 21 Day Yoga Challenge Final Results for Yoga Revolution: Cairo's Rockin' Yogis


 Yoga Revolution: team members were from Breathing Room Studio in Maadi
We placed 24 out of 128 teams!

Yoga Revolution in Yoga Journal's 21 Day Yoga Challenge

Rank 15 is my Individual placement out 6397 people participating on Social Workout. I practiced every day. It was actually eye opening to me of how slack I had become in my daily practice. Participating in such an event and recording my daily practice online made me much more aware of my practice. What's this 192 percent? Because many of the days, I would meditate 31 minutes with Kirtan Kriya.

Darla Hueske Yoga Journal's 21 Day Yoga Challenge

This was such an amazing challenge. Yoga Journal provided wonderful videos for each day's practice. Also, a nice vegetarian recipe and words of encouragement.
It was a great way to kick-start 2012.

Related posts:
1) Social Workout Spotlight Features Yoga in Cairo
2) team Yoga Revolution takes on 21 Day Yoga Challenge
3) 21-Day Challenge - Yoga Journal

Practicing Long Deep Breathing

LONG DEEP BREATHING – Either sitting in easy pose or corpse pose, relax your chest and shoulders.

Draw a long deep breath through your nose.
Inhale, filling the abdomen, or even pushing it out. As the muscles of the abdomen draws down the diaphragm, consciously move the air down into the lower area of the chest cavity.

Feel the lungs filling in and through the chest. Imagine a big pitcher slowly filling with water. You are filling your lungs with air, starting at the bottom and slowly reaching the top.

Once the lungs are completely filled in this manner, hold the breath lightly for a moment. Don't lock your neck or tense your body. Just suspend the breath.

Then as you exhale, rather than contracting the chest, slowly allow the abdomen to shrink back, your abdomen will move in towards your spine. Contract the entire length of the diaphragm, from the upper chest to the abdomen, so that all the air is squeezed out.

beauty and radiance

Morning practice on the beach.
Sun salutations to the solstice sun as it rises over the Red Sea at El Ein Soukhna

The most important thing is to bring beauty to your attitude.

navel chakra and medatative states

The navel chakra is extremely important in transforming human energy imbalances. (mind, body, spirit). As the navel chakra develops in balance with the other chakras, the personality traits associated with it change. The power of personal projection becomes enormous.

Without transforming the energy, all the words and suggestions of a guide (such as a spiritual master) are understood in a context of power and gain. No effort will penetrate the consciousness and reality of the person.

A strong balanced nabhi chakra gives the power to maintain a course of action. If an effort is sustains, it becomes a habit. As a habit, it sustains itself. The navel energy is necessary to easily initiate self-sustaining actions.

** Human strength lies in human intuitive experience --Yogi Bhajan **

body aware

If you decide to practice a strenuous yoga set, such as nabhi kriya, then it is important to understand how your body is affected so that you can self balance. As you open to awareness of breath and spirit, you should understand that shifts in body and consciousness of being are going to happen.

1) Observe Your Body, Behavior: Being athletic by nature, I find that I closely observe my body and my behavior. I take care of myself and do my best to adjust to shifts. Practicing these powerful postures every day were strengthening my abdominal muscles, but they were also exhausting them.

2) Rise Up Above Excuses, Relax: When I forgot my timer during my mini vacation, I relaxed with counting the movements within each posture. As I continued to practice my morning sadhana yoga, I found that my ab muscles stretched and better supported other postures. Rather than push hard on the nabhi kriya this week and possibly injure my muscles, I've maintain my newly adopted relaxed attitude.

3) Enjoy Your Power: Everything happens for a reason. I keep reminding myself that I went into this 40 day kriya without any expectations. Again, another discovery is that the refrain to shorter times has completely restored my balance and improved my energy. My stronger abdominal muscles improve my posture with my other yoga sets.


**

Live a life of awareness, and be a witness. Carefully observe your own mind, your worries and emotions. Free yourself from these bondages, intelligently. -- Paramahamsa Hariharananda

**

tangled up and blue

My weekly escape provides an essential get-away from this crazy, horn-loving, urban landscape in which I dwell. However, to maintain a one-hour kriya, plus meditation away from the daily practice spot can be challenging.

Whenever I arrive at a destination, at first opportunity I try to find a quiet place to practice. (and in the case of living in Egypt, a relatively clean spot)

In an oversight while packing for this trip, I left home without my timer.

No excuses. Socializing time, weather, place, and no timer gave me plenty of excuses.

In the early morning hours, I took my spot where I could stretch out completely and not be disturbed in the middle of the kriya. Since I was sans timer, I counted each posture. (what did those ancient yogis do without timers??)

108 is the number I picked for the longer timed postures...and 31 to 54 on the shorter postures.

My competitive mind was flooded with notions that if I don't have full timed postures, the kriya would be less challenging, or I would break the integrity of this 40-day kriya. (please see nabhi kriya entry dated september 2)
Huh? Where do I come up with these ideas?
Definitely not.
My intuition opened awareness that I am practicing at the perfect point of this series. The energy keeps flowing. It's all challenging, maybe not the physical as much, but most definitely the mental.

Having these few days of counting the movements provided physical, mental, and emotional respite. Most importantly, my mental energy was brought into balance as I gave up competitive excesses. The demand of my nature to push forward, to bite down and not give up, and to hold hard against "slacking" was engaged and successfully calmed. Stepping out of my usual environment, tuning into intuition, and just relaxing revealed perspective on this identified "routine" that I created.


**By annihilating the ego, we reach true universality, a fuller life and life eternal. --Yogi Bhajan

write off

Some years ago I used to say, "I don't know what I want, but I know this isn't it.”

I search -- to know what I want. Because, if I don't know what I want, I have no chance of getting it.

The web of duality weaves through my search into my deepest desires. In and out, up and down, thoughts snarl into a tangled mess and my search within becomes an ordeal of frustration. My consciousness finds it a hard task to realize Cosmic Consciousness.

It's day sixteen of nabhi kriya. All physical responses have come to pass and I'm feeling top form...almost. Now my concentration is being challenged. Usually, my pen flows with words. Two days ago, I found my pen is stuck. Writers block? No. Monkey mind? Oh yea.

In a moment of great resolve, I remembered a processing technique that I learned from a lecture I attended in Santa Fe about four years ago. The woman giving the lecture, Leslie Temple-Thurston, developed this technique from her own self realization.



I used it for several months after learning it, and found it to be effective in many ways. The technique, called "Squares" involves writing lists of polarities and then delving into of each word using in a four-level exploration technique:

For example: Desire of control and Fear of control -- and Desire of no control and Fear of no control.

With each square, you explore, with one word or short phrase, the "Desire" or "Fear".

Determined to curb my rowdy mind, I set the technique in motion for my daily journal writing. I won't go into explanation of her technique because I feel that she describes it best. I spent a few hours making a list of polarities and then taking the most "charged" words, I plunged pen first to bring light to my egoic exchanges.

I met Leslie Temple-Thurston a few times and she is very dedicated and genuine being. Her book "The Marriage of Spirit" describes the Squares and other interesting processing techniques as well. You can read more about her at The Marriage of Spirit -- Enlightened Living in Today's World.

++ Day 15 of nabhi kriya. "Keep up and You will be Kept Up" (Yogi Bhajan) ++

day 5 and the unexpected

It's day five of Nabhi Kriya and I am toast! I went into this with no expectations, but I certainly didn't expect this!

In this balance of praana and apaana energies, I've unleashed the elimination force! Home-bound and bed-bound. I can't move.

My heat gauge is topped out. Today, I had to reduce all the postures to 2 to 3 minutes on the longer ones, and then 30 seconds on the shorter ones. I barely make it through the set.

I shall not give up, but I shall not check out either.

** I've had friends tell me that I'm full of shit, but this is ridiculous. **

balancing life

My birthday closes August and since I can remember, I've always considered it to be the start of my new year.

Over the last few days, my journal writings are revealing interesting phrases to describe my being. I find sentences like "It is time to drop anchor." or "I want to stand and deliver." As I write, I free flow and don't stop. Days later, I flip back pages and re-read my stream of consciousness of that moment. As I read last week's entries, my internal ping connected. What the hell am I talking about?

Yesterday, I took my stand to deliver my Self. I started the practice of Nabhi Kriya. (complete kriya set posted yesterday, Sept. 2, 2007)

My intention is 40 days of practice. No attachment to the process or outcome, just a steady daily practice.

Though I have a daily practice of yoga, the sets I have been practicing have been more gentle lately. My navel point has weakened, so to make it through this set with integrity and proper posture, I halved all the given times. Not without struggle, I was able to keep my form, and the set flowed very smoothly. The second posture proved to be very difficult at the end, but I kept up.

During my relaxation, I felt fear in the form of abandonment. My sensations and thoughts kept repeating that I was all alone, on this spinning planet, and death is a breath away. My answer was to keep breathing, long and deep and slow and gently remind that it's only thoughts and mind.

Everything and everyone is connected to everything and everyone.

You can click on the tag "navel" or "nabhi kriya" for other experiences of nabhi kriya. Or find the complete kriya posted here: http://yogaeverywhere.blogspot.com/2007/09/nabhi-kriya.html
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