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! 

Today I wanted to share a mediation with you that I often use to help me clear the mental clutter and keep me focused on what is truly important to me.


I practice this mostly in the mornings because it helps set the tone of my day and keeps me living in alignment with what I want most in my life, but you can practice it anytime you're in need of a little personal inspiration. 


Start sitting up tall in a comfortable position with a straight spine, resting your hands on your thighs


Take a few deep breaths and begin to clear your mind of any worries or anxiety

Once your mind is clear, begin to imagine your ideal self
-this 'ideal self' is the vision you have of your life if every star was aligned, if every relationship in your life fulfilled you, if you were doing a job you love, living your life just the way you'd want if everything was just right!


Don't hold anything back! Envision it all!  If you can see it, you can create it


Now once you have that vision, tune into the feelings that ideal self gives you
-if you envision climbing the corporate ladder, but the feeling it gives you is uneasiness, you may need to focus more on what exactly you're seeking from climbing that ladder and see if you can create it in a place of your life that gives a more passionate feeling!


Once all of that comes together, meditate on that image and those feelings.  Try not to force any thoughts.  Allow the feelings that this meditation gives you to guide you.  Little by little your authentic and true ideal self will emerge within your meditation


MANTRA:
(while you're meditating on that image)


INHALE: I accept this as my ideal self 
EXHALE: I release anything that holds me back from living in this truth


the other reason I practice this in the morning is because i'm more tapped into my subconscious feelings during this time. that's the truly powerful component here- this meditation is guided by your deepest desires.  you may feel that something is right for you on the outside, but internally you don't feel happy or fulfilled.  

Once you come out of the meditation, grab your journal and write about your experience.  Get it all out on paper.  Write what made you feel empowered!  Write about what you felt, saw and desired in that meditation.  Then -and here's the fun part!- jot down some things that you can do NOW to create that ideal self!  

There was a time awhile back that I did this meditation and felt amazingly peaceful and happy with the thought of freedom.  I envisioned heaps of time for self-care, yoga, dinner with friends and time to myself.  At the time however, I was jam packing my schedule with classes and clients.  I thought on the outside that's what I truly needed.  I never took time to create a mental vision of my ideal life and then meditate on the experiene.  Once I did, I realized I was feeling drained and aggrevated at the fact that I had little time for myself.  I was always scheduled to be somewhere at some time.  I immediately took action and freed up my schedule.  It was life-changing for me!  I felt such a difference!  And my classes, clients, friends and family even noticed the difference.  I was much more present, less frazzled and totally tuned in.  Since then, I've made it a priority to include free time in my schedule.  It's a non-negotiable.  

So take some time to meditate on this and discover your true ideal self!  Then get to work creating it! 

sat nam, 
xo 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

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 

-gabrielle bernstein

I love the above quote from gabby bernstein. I think what I love most about it is that I have so much experience with this!  

Many times in my life things happened that caused me to re-evaluate my relationships with those around me. I began to carry the heavy burden of anger, resentment and grudges towards people and situations that I felt I had no control over and were causing me pain. No matter how hard I tried to let these emotions go, something would come up again to make all of these feelings resurface.  Before I knew it, holding onto anger about certain situations was becoming my full-time job. 

Forgiveness is something I used to see as a weakness.  I used to believe that if I forgave someone, I was allowing them to continue to hurt me. I saw it as an external practice.  I thought if I offerered forgiveness, that meant I accepted the way I was being treated and accepted that person or situation. It took me a long time to see the power of forgiveness.  It is the exact opposite of what I used to believe it to be. Forgiveness is one of the most powerful things you can do for YOURSELF. 
This continues to be a daily practice for me and one I do truly for myself. I forgive and let go of resentments because it frees me. I let go of grudges so I can continue to grow into my truest self and not let other people's crap hold me back. And the forgiveness I offer releases much of my anxiety and stresses. It's definitely not an easy practice, but it's one I truly believe in as being key to eliminating anxiety and stress and allowing you to feel the freedom you deserve. 

I wanted to share with you my Forgiveness Meditation


-sit up tall in a comfortable position, rest your hands on your knees with palms down (for grounding energy)
-begin to breathe deeply into your belly through your nose
-after you settle into a deep and calming breath, close your eyes and begin to visualize the person or situation that you're struggling with offering forgivness to
-breathe in and acknowledge the experience, accept the feelings and emotions that come up 
-exhale and release them with intention and purpose


here's a mantra to use during this practice:


-INHALE: i accept you/this situation and i understand the resentments i feel no longer serve me
-EXHALE: i let you/this situation go, and with that i also let go of my anger/frustration/hurt (whichever emotion is most powerful for you and is holding you back)

INHALE: i offer forgiveness to both you/this situation and to myself
EXHALE: i release resentments and replace them with love 

don't worry if you're not a meditation maven, just do what feels naturally!  remember, this is a practice for YOU. we forgive others to set ourselves free. 
xo, b