RE-SET

As many of you know if you have been reading my blog posts, I have been practicing yoga for about 12 years. For the first 6 years, I practiced a combination of hatha and vinyasa yoga. About 6 years ago, a friend suggested that I try kundalini yoga. I had never heard of it and didn’t know much about it. Kundalini yoga is a bit under the radar, and combines chanting, meditation and physical poses in a unique way. It’s not for everybody (what is?) but it really resonated with me: that’s basically what I have been doing for the last 6 years.

And last October I extended my interest and practice: I decided to do a daily sadhana class for 60 days straight. Sadhana is the practice of kundalini yoga between the hours of 430am-7am; a time when the earth/animals/ and plants are waking up, and it is arguably the most peaceful time of the day. It was a daunting task outside my comfort zone, because I had previously been a night owl, and I now needed to wake up at 3:30 am to make the class!  I ended up going almost every day, and took a one week holiday in the middle; that’s substantial completion…haha.

Since the class ended around December 15, I have been doing my own version of Sadhana at home, in a more civilized way: I get up around 6am and do a workout for about 45 minutes. I combine my favorite poses and my favorite meditation, and it is terrific!

But back to the title of this article, which is Re-set. With all that is happening in the world today, I’m finding that I need a little refresher later in the day, and I call this my Re-set. I need this when I feel that I am being pulled back into the insanity of the third dimension (a/k/a everyday life). The beautiful thing now is that the re-set can be just five minutes!!!  I find a quiet place to sit, do a short meditation, and whamo………I re-connect to my center.

This re-set is one of the most valuable by-products of my kundalini yoga practice, and I recommend it to all. For those who want to know more about kundalini yoga, I highly recommend the book Meditation as Medicine, by Dharma Singh Khalsa, MD