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Shakti School

Feminine Form Sacred Technology

self love

Ep. 28 The True Self VS. What-Had-Happened Was: Pra and Vikruti

A look at our True Nature, or Prakritu; and, our Separated-From-Our-True Nature-Self, or Vikruti.

In this episode I discuss:

~Our True Nature or True Self

~Everything begins on the subtle plane

~The Blueprint vs the Overlays (aka Samskaras)

~Yoga at its best is a dissolution

~Why I don’t like online quizzes

~Love as Listening

~Ayurveda as nothing to do with your dosha

~Freedom & Desire

~Authenticity

~Trying vs watching

~I’m in LOVE with Triphala and Shatavari by ApotheKary! They’re an Ayurvedic inspired apothecary that mixes small-batch potions.  Use discount code GHEESPOT10 to get a bottle from ApotheKary.co

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From my heart to your screen,

Katie

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Vitality Like A Goddess

The first days of January are associated with the Nativity of Inanna, Pagan Goddess of Sumer (later she appears as Ishtar in Babylon & Asherah in the Levant)

Inanna is a goddess of love, beauty, fertility and war. Graced with a stream of lovers, including the ill-fated Dumuzi, she is cognate to Venus. The celebration of her nativity is done with good food, good sex, and warmth.

This celebration aligns with the Ayurvedic concept of OJAS, one of the three subtle forces in our body. Think of OJAS as the container that holds your abundant energy. It is the ultimate energy reserve of the body and mind. It is the purest essence of Kapha, and physically, it is related to reproductive, hormonal, and cerebrospinal fluids.

Today, in solitary ritual, pay attention to Inanna’s role as mediator of the changing themes of a woman's life, and how we might revitalize and nourish our OJAS, which can be easily depleted this time of year by running around instead of taking it easy and practicing pratyahara, as nature does.

Cultivate OJAS with a short meditation:

Close your eyes.

Take a few deep breaths. Relax for a minute, allowing your breath to deepen and smooth out.

Now slowly start to draw your attention away from your thoughts, emotions or aches, and drop it down into your belly, holding it there until you feel sensation. Then, slowly, bring your awareness into your heart.

Remember a moment in your life when you felt very deep love. Maybe it was a time when you let yourself be totally vulnerable. When you add love to your point of focus, it builds your OJAS.

Bring that moment fully to mind and notice where you feel the sensation of love in your body. Allow this sensation to move, to expand and permeate every cell of your being. When you grow the feeling of love inside your body, you boost the power that enables you to remain strong and wise in the face of heartache, disease and change.

Relax into this loving container, watching how, over and over again, you will gain and lose the feeling, and how you can refocus and experience your inherent enduring, sustaining power.

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Self-Love? How About We Start With SELF-LIKE

The biggest epidemic we face right now is the sickness of our lack of loving ourselves. I hear about it all the time in my line of work. And as I read the millionth blog post about self-love, I take pause. I think a much better place to start is self-like. You can’t fall in love until you fall in like.

Last week, a gorgeous, talented, 20-something woman asked me if I thought she was beautiful. She felt so ugly. Fat. She asked me if I thought she’d ever make something of herself. If I believed in her…I looked at her, mouth-agape. How is the beauty butterfly not landing on this child’s heart? How is the beyond-obviousness of her beauty escaping her?

But I know why.

Inside all of us lives a tiny little wounded bunny. The proverbial Inner child.

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This stuff is so real. Until we actively begin to engage with this creature….like it, snuggle it, ask it what it needs,

get to know it, can we ever hope to truly love it and integrate it. There is so much talk in the spiritual world on transcending. Just get over it. But you can’t get over it until you’ve gone through it. Felt it. Healed it through an intimacy that combines the Love Witness with the Wounded One. That love session creates the alchemical fuel needed to burn and rise.

Self-love can be defined by how capacious we are at actually liking our funny, quirky, silly little inner child. Self-love happens when we know where she/he got hurt, and we remain SUPER gentle with those places (without letting them run the show).

When I was little I would hide peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in my piano bench. I used to hate that little kid and would get mad as she showed up in me as an adult. Why can’t “hide peanut butter sandwich girl just go away!?” I did not like her. In fact, I hated her.

My first step towards healing was a full-on shamanic love fest with her. I had to SEE her. See her geeky glasses, her braces, her chubby fingers, her broken heart that longed to be comforted and understood. I had to be with the fact that she needed soothing. She was a little girl. And she wasn’t getting that soothing from the people that she wanted it from the most. Ergo, peanut butter.

Today I can honestly share that I like that chubby girl. She has mad piano playing skills. She still eats peanut butter. She’s not perfect. She’s emotional. And I like that about her. I’ve worked hard to keep her alive in a world that so often destroys innocence.

Beloved friend – what parts of yourself have you kicked out of your own heart?

Join us in Ayurveda School. I’ll teach you how to fall in like with these unintegrated spaces. And who knows, maybe even fall in love…

~Katie

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Silence Envelopes the Voices of Insecurity

Our culture supports individual effort and perfection. In fact, I recently read about an experiment done on two groups of people, one from the United States, and another group from Japan. Each group was shown an image that included an individual scuba diver sinking into an ocean full of fish and other marine life. The group was given a few minutes to look over the image, and was later asked to recall what was presented there.

The American group had a marvelous recall on the diver. They could remember what color his tank was, his facial expression, and even the type of gear he was wearing. This same group fared very poorly on their remembrance of the fish, the plants, the water, and the general geography of where the diver was located. In strong contrast to the American group’s ability to recall the diver, the Japanese group remembered much less about the individual, but had dramatic recall of the environment in which the diver was swimming. They described, in ardent detail, the schools of fish, the marine layout and the general situation in which in which the diver found himself. The social scientists concluded that this spoke to our cultural value system. Americans group up in a world that values the individual, and takes pride in the perfection of individual efforts. Eastern cultures, on the other hand, are known for valuing cultural context and group identity.

It’s not to say that one way of seeing the world is better or worse than the other, but it does bring up an interesting question regarding focus. Remember, our prana (energy) follows our focus, and much of our prana (remember, that is our energy) goes to focusing in, honing in, even obsessing over, our own individual situation. This is another way of saying that much of our energy goes into mental processing in a push towards personal perfection, a never-ending process that can lead to a deep sense that we can never be fulfilled, that life is never enough, and a deep insecurity and fear.

Why does this happen? According to the wisdom of Ayurveda and Tantra, it happens because we are confused (or experiencing avidya – mis-knowing). We have forgotten. What have we forgotten? That the continual processing towards perfection, a quest to avoid pain and disappointment and gain things that feel good, leads us a false belief that we are not good enough already. We forget that, deep within, lies an bottomless well of support and freedom, and this bottomless pit of ambrosial nectar in our own light – an eternal bridge to freedom from the duality of good and bad, as well as a gateway into peace. It’s what Buddha was so pumped up about. Jesus said it as well when he encouraged us to “let thine two eyes become one” (i.e. our dual thinking line up with Spirit).

All of this beautiful philosophy and ambrosial nectar-speak may have you rolling your eyes. You may feel like freedom and peace are two states of being really far from your current set point. You may be laughing right now. “Yeah, right, sister. I’m an elementary school teacher with two kids and a beer-guzzling husband. My life is as far as you can get from the peaceful gateway.” I totally get it – but we ALL have the ability to tap into the loving, the invincible…

Ok, so what is this secret doorway into the Divine? Its simple. Its profound. And its not always easy to find. Its just silence.

Try it now.

Stop reading.

And take a few deep breaths into your own belly, your own heart. Keep breathing until you taste a tiny drop of silence, and then tell me if you are not, in some way, great or small, closer to heaven.

Here's a short guided meditation you can do whenever you need a moment.

~Katie

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How to Fall in Love Yogi Style

If you have ever been in love, you know that there is an incredible amount of power, or shakti, behind falling into the wild rapture of delighting in someone else. There is so much power in the experience of love, in fact, that we have created a whole culture and consumer landscape around trying to get more of it.

Yogis understand that where there is power, there is potential fertile ground for connecting deeper into our heart and soul. But the object of love was way less important than the act of loving itself. Yogis fall in love by realizing that what they love, and the part of themselves that is able to love, is actually the same thing.

A yogi also uses the remembrance of love to connect to the release of bliss-bombs in their own heart. Now, this may sound very “dolphins and rainbows,” but science supports the bliss-bomb theory. When we are in love (or feel deeply understood, or cuddle a kitty, or get a massage), there is an increase of the hormone oxytocin in our system. This blissful hormone has been shown to be the polar opposite of our stress hormones, allowing us to feel relaxed, safe, trusting and generous. Studies show that people with high amounts of oxytocin experience less loneliness and physical pain. They were also shown to be better communicators, and to feel more connected to their work and the people around them.

We can learn from the yogic philosophy of love. We don’t necessarily need an external event, or lover, to catalyze our own waterfall of juicy oxytocin and emotional fulfillment. We can use some simple yogic practices to fall in love from within. And the best part? When we fall in love from within, we may actually attract more love from the outside—teddy-bear-shaped hearts and all.

Four Tips on Getting More Yogi Love

1. The power of loving what already is. Take pause to appreciate what surrounds you in the moment. Gain pleasure from what already is, without grasping for what could be. Ask yourself, “What is it about this moment (or this room, person, place) that is absolutely worthy of my love and appreciation?” Feel that love fill you up as you express contentment with exactly what you already have.

2. The power of loving touch. Yoga teaches us how to soften ourselves enough to be touched by life. On a physical level, any kind of appropriate touching has been shown to increase oxytocin and reduce stress hormones in the body. Whether it be a gentle massage, a warm hug, or the intimate touch of a lover, fill your life up with opportunities for skin-rubbing sweetness. If you live with love ones, try giving more touch. If you live alone, surround yourself with friends who don’t mind doling out the tender embraces.

3. The power of loving selflessly. My teacher, Rod Stryker, encourages us to meditate on “love without ownership.” This is a beautiful practice for cultivating non-attachment around the people and things we already have in our lives. The yogis knew that we could love better, and more authentically, when we loved people without trying to own or change them. Practice daily acts of selfless love with no expectation for returns on investment. My fellow yogini, Rachel Meyer, used to make a love-filled cake every Saturday and give it to someone who may have had a hard week. Do you knowanyone who may need an unexpected and heartfelt treat?

4. The power of loving remembrance. There is a powerful Tantric practice for increasing the feeling of love in your life. Begin by allowing yourself to close your eyes and settle into your breath. As you become more and more relaxed, allow yourself to remember a time in your life when you felt very deeply and utterly “in love.” It may have been through the experience of a lover’s embrace, receiving a drawing from your child, or a sunset in your backyard that called your heart to open. Remember this, and feel the remembrance of the love in the body. Then, leave the memory behind and pay close attention to the feeling sensations of the “being in” love. Watch how it grows and expands on its own as you experience the delight of objectless love.

~Katie

This article was originally published in the Yoga Journal Blog on February 10, 2012.

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