Having your own practise- meditation and yoga

The Tool Box

Over the years I have realised the importance of having my very own practise that connects me to my deepest self, that allows me to drop into my highest self, or my soul, and to be in silence and connect to what my heart really needs and wants.

It is so easy to get lost in what other people are doing and what other people think and stray away from what we really need and give ourselves that which we really need.

The analogy of the cup is really easy to understand. Pretend our channel, our body, our soul is a cup- and after a lot of time interacting with our external world, our cup starts to drain out. We start to rely on those around us to be filling our cup up, when really if we have our own practise we can fill it up ourselves.

Many people I know have a variety of different modalities of tools that they use to fill up their cups and enhance their own lives.

These are just a few that I do as well as people I personally know do.

1. Vipassana

A tool that I have used for the past four years of my life has been Vipassana. It is a technique that you learn over a period of 10 days in silence and they take away your phone. The main practise you learn within those ten days is learning to observe your breath and from your breath you start to observe your sensations on your body. You become heavily connected to your sensations and you start to eradicate and work through your trauma. The main thing I learned from Vipassana was to connect to my sensations and i realised how much all my pain was stored in my body, and by working with my body I could actually transcend all the trauma and feel a lot more lighter. After the ten days of working with your sensations in this environment, I was then able to integrate the experience into my day to day life. This has become a tool that I use all the time, when I am in situations, I am constantly observing my sensations, trying not to react to the sensations but realising everything is just a sensation. When i am feeling angry, instead of being angry, I connect to the sensation and just feel the heat. When I am feeling happy, I am not attached to the happiness, instead I just observe the ecstatic joy that is pulsating through me.

 

2. Breathe Work

 

I have tried this a variety of times but many people I know practise breathe work. This is connecting heavily with the breath and tapping into the areas of the body that we are not present to and from that tapping into the subconscious mind as the two of them are synonymous. This gives us access to heightened states of awareness.

 

3. Vedic meditation

This is another form of meditation however instead of focusing on your sensations, you are focusing on a mantra. This mantra is supposed to vibrate you to a higher state of consciousness, that connects you to a higher vibration, and by focusing on this vibration you connect to your transcendental state of being, and you learn to ground in this state of being. This type of meditation can be practised between 20 to 40 minutes per day and helps enhance your day to day state of consciousness.

4. Yoga/ Asanas'

This is one of the 8 limbs of yoga, Asana refers to postures, and by practising postures on a day to day basis or even a week to week basis - whenever you need this tool, this also creates deeper flow within your body and deeper flow within your life. When you move from asana to asana- for example a simple yoga flow, you are moving your body while breathing, usually whilst this is happening you are accessing your thoughts and instead of getting caught in your thoughts you are moving your body and flowing through the thoughts. This creates a deeper flow between the mind and body as you realise both are interconnected. Each pose according to the origins of yoga is connected to different parts of your mind and subconscious. Through tapping into the poses you are able to access parts of your mind and thoughts that are creating tension within the body. And through accessing the tension within the body you are able to access the tension within the mind, they become one.

5. Kirtan 

Bhakti yoga refers to devotional singing and is one of the eight limbs of yoga. It is devotional singing to the divine and enables the voice to expressively sing to the divine.