I wanted to share this kundalini meditation with you to help settle nerves, restore emotional balance and release a little stress.  It's super easy to do and the fact that its beginner friendly makes it a definite keeper for your stress less tool kit!

This meditation focuses on posture, breath and chanting. In kundalini, it's really important to focus on the details of the practice.  Each one is specifically designed to have the most impact it can, so try to practice this exactly as it's suggested. 

Start in a sitting position, in lotus or simply with legs crossed.  You can also do this in a chair (nice to keep in mind if you're stressed at the office or on a long flight!) 

Sit up tall with your spine straight and your chin slightly tucked. Rest your hands, palms up, on your knees. Close your eyes and focus your attention to your third eye center (the space between your eyebrows)

Now you can start the practice:

Chant: 
"SA" while touching your thumbs and index fingers together
"TA" while touching your thumbs and middle fingers together
"NA" while touching your thumbs and ring fingers together
"MA" while touching your thumbs and pinky fingers together

Everytime you chant one of those words, you press your thumb and corresponding finger together on each hand at the same time.  

Once you get the hang of touching your fingers and thumbs together with the syllables, you can begin to visualize the sounds moving from the crown of your head through your third eye space.  


Repeat this chant/practice for 2 minutes. Then whisper the chant and continue touching your fingers along with your whisper for another 2 minutes. Then repeat the chant silently while touching your fingers for 3 minutes. Then bring it back to the whisper chant for 2 minutes and finish with the full chant for a final 2 minutes. Complete the chanting at 11 minutes. 

Once completed, take an inhale and raise your arms overhead.  Shake them out!  This is important for moving and releasing your energy. Exhale and relax for a bit.  
If you're going though an especially challenging and stressful time, practice this 11 minute version everyday.  You can work up to 31 minutes if needed.  

a few things to note

This is considered one of the most important meditations in kundalini yoga and if you only do one, this should be it. so take your time and focus on the practice.

always visualize the energy moving from the crown of your head and out through your third eye center with each syllable.  this is important!  you don't want that energy to become stuck. 

practice for a minimum of 11 minutes.  

what do the syllables actually mean?
SA: the beginning, the infinity, the totality of everything that ever was and will be
TA: life, existence and creativity that manifests from infinity
NA: change and transformation of consciousness
MA: rebirth and regeneration

Ready to try it?
Get comfortable. Close your eyes.  And chant along with this music to help you get started! 

start with sitting up comfortably on your mat and press your hands together at your heart center. rest your thumb knuckles into your chest and begin to deepen your breath while meditating on the power of the heart center or chakra. set your intention here to release yourself from the grip of fear. 

roll over onto your hands and knees and move through a few rounds of cat/cow. on the inhale, drop your belly toward the ground and lift up through your head and tailbone. focus on lifting up through your chest. on your exhale, pull your bellybutton up, round your spine towards the sky and tuck your chin and tailbone inward. take as many as you need to warm up your body and spine. 

from hands and knees, walk your hands out past your shoulders and start to sink your chest towards the ground. move slowly, and lower down with your exhales, taking your time and moving into a place where you feel a comfortable sensation. if your body allows, melt your chest down until it comes to the ground. hold here for anywhere from 3-5 breaths. 

after those few breaths, walk your hands further out until your belly rests onto the floor. relaxing your legs, lift yourself up onto your forearms and press your chest forward. move up only as it feels right for your body.  sit here for another 3-5 breaths. 

press back onto your hands and knees and move through a few more rounds of cat/cow.

afterwards, roll onto your back. bend your knees and bring your heels in towards your hips. reach your hands down by your sides. roll your shoulders underneath your chest and lift up your lower back. (placing a block underneath your back is a wonderful variation that feels amazing!) stay here for as many breaths as you comfortably can and focus on keeping your heart open. 

According to Yogi Bhajan we all have 3 minds.  Sometimes it can feel hard enough to find peace with just one, but three?  How do we accomplish that?  And how exactly does each mind effect us?

If "I think, therefore I am" shows us anything, it's that we really attach our identities to our minds.  Our world is not actually a collection of experiences, it's actually the culmination of the thoughts and perceptions we have about said experiences.  

In the Kundalini tradition, each person has 3 minds and each mind works to serve a specific purpose.  We have the Negative Mind, the Positive Mind and the Neutral Mind. 

The negative mind focuses on protecting us.  It assesses danger in a situation.  It's the part of us that signals not to cross the street when cars are coming.  It also gives us a desire to belong, which is great, except if it's underdeveloped this can lead us to engage in destructive relationships or be overly unfluenced by others.  With trying to protect us, the negative mind is what gives us negative and fearful thoughts and worries.  

Then we have the positive mind. This mind is responsible for us seeing possibilities in all situations.  There's a level of trust and faith that comes with these thoughts.  It keeps us playful.  If it's underdeveloped though, it can lead us to almost be too trusting with outcomes and blind us to warning signals or red flags.  

Then we have the neutral mind. This mind is our most powerful tool.  It is intuitive.  It looks at the thoughts and interpretations from both the positive and negative minds and makes a decision after carefully weighing both sides.  When we're fully engaging in the neutral mind, we find a way to step outside of the mentality that we are our thoughts.  We find a place of non-attachment and stability.  This grounding comes from understanding that our identities don't fluctuate with our flowing thoughts.  Fears don't call the shots from this place.  

When it comes to our anxiety, we are living in the negative mind and letting our fears and insecurities dictate our decisions and shape our world.  When you find yourself spinning with negative chatter, try to find your neutral mind.  Take a moment to step away from these thoughts, knowing they aren't you, and look at them from a place of non-attachment.  Be a witness.  And once you start operating from the neutral mind, you'll find that worries don't hang around as much.  The neutral mind creates a balance for us.  Let the neutral mind break down your fears and offer you control over those stressful thoughts!

sat nam, b  

Even though I am now a few weeks into my kundalini teacher training, I can still rememeber one of the strangest, yet most powerful, things my teacher said to us.  She expressed the importance of honoring the energy that we were working with.  As we practiced, we were constantly brought back down to a state of stillness to check in with how our minds and bodies were responding to this energetic practice.  I couldn't understand the importance of it until I began to read more and more about the beginnings of kundalini and my home practice began to develop more deeply.  

It has been noted that if this energy isn't respected and is continually being drawn upward through our bodies that we can almost feel trippy side effects.  As we raise kundalini, we should bring it back down as well.  Balance.  What I found so cool about this, was that it was actually documented!  What that meant to me was that there truly was something powerful within this practice.  There were studies done to show how minds and bodies are effected while practicing kundalini.  Maybe it's my inner geek coming out, but I just thought that was amazing!  I often feel that we speak about the benefits of yoga and meditation and energy work (like EFT and kundalini) but most people kind of gawk at the idea that anything is actually happening inside of us.  

So you can imagine how excited I got when I came across this recent article in the NYT about the proven benefits of meditation.  This study shows that meditation actually makes us more compassionate.  How awesome is that?  

The Morality of Meditation

MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing. A number of “mindfulness” training programs, like that developed by the engineerChade-Meng Tan at Google, and conferences like Wisdom 2.0 for business and tech leaders, promise attendees insight into how meditation can be used to augment individual performance, leadership and productivity.

This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendable) pursuit of these benefits and the purpose for which meditation was originally intended. Gaining competitive advantage on exams and increasing creativity in business weren’t of the utmost concern to Buddha and other early meditation teachers. As Buddha himself said, “I teach one thing and one only: that is, suffering and the end of suffering.” For Buddha, as for many modern spiritual leaders, the goal of meditation was as simple as that. The heightened control of the mind that meditation offers was supposed to help its practitioners see the world in a new and more compassionate way, allowing them to break free from the categorizations (us/them, self/other) that commonly divide people from one another.

But does meditation work as promised? Is its originally intended effect — the reduction of suffering — empirically demonstrable?

To put the question to the test, my lab, led in this work by the psychologist Paul Condon, joined with the neuroscientist Gaëlle Desbordes and the Buddhist lama Willa Miller to conduct an experiment whose publication is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science. We recruited 39 people from the Boston area who were willing to take part in an eight-week course on meditation (and who had never taken any such course before). We then randomly assigned 20 of them to take part in weekly meditation classes, which also required them to practice at home using guided recordings. The remaining 19 were told that they had been placed on a waiting list for a future course.

After the eight-week period of instruction, we invited the participants to the lab for an experiment that purported to examine their memory, attention and related cognitive abilities. But as you might anticipate, what actually interested us was whether those who had been meditating would exhibit greater compassion in the face of suffering. To find out, we staged a situation designed to test the participants’ behavior before they were aware that the experiment had begun.

WHEN a participant entered the waiting area for our lab, he (or she) found three chairs, two of which were already occupied. Naturally, he sat in the remaining chair. As he waited, a fourth person, using crutches and wearing a boot for a broken foot, entered the room and audibly sighed in pain as she leaned uncomfortably against a wall. The other two people in the room — who, like the woman on crutches, secretly worked for us — ignored the woman, thus confronting the participant with a moral quandary. Would he act compassionately, giving up his chair for her, or selfishly ignore her plight?

The results were striking. Although only 16 percent of the nonmeditators gave up their seats — an admittedly disheartening fact — the proportion rose to 50 percent among those who had meditated. This increase is impressive not solely because it occurred after only eight weeks of meditation, but also because it did so within the context of a situation known to inhibit considerate behavior: witnessing others ignoring a person in distress — what psychologists call the bystander effect — reduces the odds that any single individual will help. Nonetheless, the meditation increased the compassionate response threefold.

Although we don’t yet know why meditation has this effect, one of two explanations seems likely. The first rests on meditation’s documented ability to enhance attention, which might in turn increase the odds of noticing someone in pain (as opposed to being lost in one’s own thoughts). My favored explanation, though, derives from a different aspect of meditation: its ability to foster a view that all beings are interconnected. The psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo and I have found that any marker of affiliation between two people, even something as subtle as tapping their hands together in synchrony, causes them to feel more compassion for each other when distressed. The increased compassion of meditators, then, might stem directly from meditation’s ability to dissolve the artificial social distinctions — ethnicity, religion, ideology and the like — that divide us.

Supporting this view, recent findings by the neuroscientists Helen Weng, Richard Davidson and colleagues confirm that even relatively brief training in meditative techniques can alter neural functioning in brain areas associated with empathic understanding of others’ distress — areas whose responsiveness is also modulated by a person’s degree of felt associations with others.

So take heart. The next time you meditate, know that you’re not just benefiting yourself, you’re also benefiting your neighbors, community members and as-yet-unknown strangers by increasing the odds that you’ll feel their pain when the time comes, and act to lessen it as well.

David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Emotions Group. He is the author of the forthcoming book “The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More.”
link to story http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/opinion/sunday/the-morality-of-meditation.html?_r=1& 

Yeah. I'm still geeking out.  If you're not already hitting the meditation cushion regularly, get your butt on that!

meditation makes magic happen! 

xo, b

Last weekend, during my kundalini practice, I was lead through a powerful kriya (kree-ya) that released an immense amount of heaviness from my mind and body. A kriya in Kundalini is a set of poses and meditations and this one focused on releasing anger.  

Our teacher guided us through it.  He encouraged us to really release.  To really get pissed.  To really go for it!  And once I got that permission, I had a flood of emotion come up.  I became so entrenched in that kriya that I almost didn't hear him as he guided us out of it.  I have been dealing with some stressful situations and I never realized how much anger I was storing about it.  It was one thing to get all pissed off in the moment and when having to deal with the frustrations that kept coming up, but when I wasn't directly dealing with that particular stress, I didn't think I had any anger within me.  Turns out.... joke was on me because a sh*t storm came up!  And it was one of the most powerful releases I ever experienced.  My arms shook afterward, my body felt exhausted and my mind felt clear.  It was a beautiful moment of peace.  And since then, I've been practicing this kriya with amazing results!  

It got me thinking back to when I was anxious.  I know there's a lot of fear that clouds our minds and bodies when we're dealing with intense anxiety, but I think it can even go deeper.  Sometimes we're just downright pissed! 
 
"why me?" "why can't I be strong enough to let it go?" "why do I always have to deal with this?"

If any of this sounds familiar, don't be surprised.  I can sometimes forget how much anger I used to have towards my anxiety.  

So I wanted to share this clip from Maya Fiennes on a kundalini practice to release anger. This isn't the exact one I did, but it's very close.  Pay special attention to the mantra and breath. Anxiety creates frustration and frustration creates anger... so it's an important part of our practice to work on letting it go.  Mentally, I believe forgiveness does this too, but sometimes that's a hard thing to offer when your body is riddled with angst.  When you practice this, AND forcus on forgiveness (remember, its for YOU, not them!), miraculous shifts can occur!

xo,b 

I wanted to share a Kundalini meditation with you today that you can literally do anywhere!  I have been practicing this meditation and love the peace it offers to both my mind and my body.  This is a great meditation to incorporate into your daily life and also right before or after a stressful situation. 

KUNDALINI MEDITATION FOR STRESS RELIEF 


-sit upright in a comfortable position and rest your hands on your knees in gyan mudra