Chakras, Yoga, Emotions & Illness

Happy Turkey Day weekend everyone!!
This is my favourite holiday, so if I sound excited I am.

I just wanted to update everyone that I have a workshop coming up on November the 28th from 10am to 2pm at the Glebe Community Centre, located at 175 Third Avenue in Ottawa. The workshop is called Chakras, Yoga, Emotions & Illness and it’s a nice pre-holiday session with a focus on moving through the challenges of the chakras and learning new tools for working with stress and keeping the energies of the body moving. The workshop is open to anyone and you don’t have to know anything about yoga or chakras to participate. The rest of the information is on the poster above. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions at jayna_moar@hotmail.com

Out of My Senses

I had a chance to get out today and take some autumn inspired pictures. I was trying to find some colour among the browns and grays that sometimes take over this season. If you get a chance stop by my photo album, the new pictures are at the end.

So I’m always looking for new ways to get my brain to be quiet. That’s the main purpose of my meditation, to quiet the mind long enough to feel the peace that emanates out of everything when your brain stops playing the part of sports commentator. But because I haven’t figured out how to meditate and live my life (work, drive, teach, climb) at the same time there are long stretches of the day where my brain gets to chit-chat. For these times when I’m not meditating I’m always looking for new ways to get my brain to be quiet. Sometimes I’m thinking about how my feet feel pressing on the ground, or I try to focus on what the energy in my body feels like, or I’ll try to stop narrowing my view onto things and focus on the space between them. And for a while these methods work but my brain is always evolving and adapting and coming up with new ways to drag me into the drama of everyday life. It’s a good storyteller, it can be very captivating.
So my latest trick to disable the brain-bomb is focusing on the thought that all of our senses are brain impulses interpreted for our understanding, but the brain’s impulses are not actually the object causing the sensation and there’s a lot of room for interpretation. That’s why you can be fooled by optical illusions and why you get a brain-freeze when you eat ice-cream. It’s all how your brain chooses to interpret it. In yoga we call our senses the Indriyas and we do all kinds of things to work on increasing our awareness of them, or focusing our awareness of them. The neat thing is the quieter your brain is the easier it is to interpret your senses, but they’re still just impulses, not the actual thing. Yeah, I know on a thinking level that doesn’t make sense, but that’s the tricky thing about trying to quiet the brain, sometimes you have to find things too big for it to hold so that it just shuts up in amazement.

My partner yoga is coming up in two weekends. It’s free at Lululemon. And you can bring a friend or family member; it doesn’t have to be a spouse.
Have an awesome Monday.
Namaste!

If you were in a hostage situation and my mind was put in charge of talking it out don't worry, you'd be fine...

My first advice for the day is Vitamin D. Ottawa has been receiving cloud spit for the past week solid so if you haven’t had any sunshine lately take a supplement, at least a 1000 IU of vitamin D, because it’s better than nothing. I can always tell when it starts to get darker and people are staying inside more because my clients in the community start to break down. I get more panicked phone calls, more people saying they need help. What help do they need? They don’t know- they just know they need something. And I feel it too. It’s dark when I get up; it’s cold when I go out. Here come the winter blues.
When things get more challenging in life (during times of stress or illness) we’re always told to take better care of ourselves. What I find so interesting is it’s these times that our brain seems to rebel the most. Or at least my mind seems to.
I’ve taken to call my mind the great negotiator. When I was little I was always bargaining at the dinner table. An extra piece of carrot if it got me out of eating my broccoli. Two more mouthfuls of rice if I didn’t have to finish the other parts of my casserole and so on and so on. I always looked forward to the day I was old enough that I didn’t have to negotiate every little thing with my parents.
Well I guess the joke is on me because now I negotiate with myself. I’ve taken to blending my greens in a food processor (yes I still hate eating my vegetables), the recipe is delicious so I’ll include it (there’s sarcasm here I can’t express in writing):

Green Goop
2 cups Swiss Chard, Kale, Collard Greens or any leafy greens as long as they’re not iceberg lettuce, that stuff is useless.
½ cup Green Tea (Without the bag, in case it wasn’t obvious).
½-1cup Seaweed- the dried kind, anything but kelp which acts as a natural thickener.
1 cup fresh cut Wheatgrass- optional.
½ cup unsweetened flaked Coconut.
Enough orange juice to drown that stuff down. Puree, pour a glass, add 8 drops of oil of Oregano because everyone keeps saying it’s good for you. Plug your nose and drink it over the sink because sometimes your gag reflex is stronger than your willpower.

And when people ask me why I drink the stuff the easy reason is my mind truly is an awesome negotiator. If I make myself a salad I’ll just stare at it, take a bite and be finished. If I cook up a veggie casserole it goes bad in the fridge. The whole idea of drinking my vegetables is it gives me less time to talk myself out of it. And the funny part is that by the last gulp my brain still goes “But you just drank the whole glass, do you really need the last bit?”
It’s relentless. That’s why I rock-climb; it’s the only way to trick my mind into letting me workout.
Obviously I could over power my mind and force it to do things it doesn’t want to but I know it’s going to raise a stink and pout through the whole experience.
So today I give my kudos to all people that have their minds doing as they are told.
Hope for some sunshine and have an awesome weekend!

Sacral chakra- Svadhisthana- Emotions are just energy in motion- E-motion

Sexuality, feelings, passion: All words that can make a person uncomfortable in Western society. Carrying a social stigma, the education on these matters is often sparse and incongruent. When we are children questions about sexuality are answered quickly and with little detail, to avoid any discomfort of the adult, and as these children grow up the problem persists as they carry this inherited discomfort on with their own children. Emotions don’t fair much better, while pleasant emotions are encouraged to some degree, even at a young age emotions that cause more of a scene or disruption are often ended quickly for fear of embarrassment. And so the main issues of the second chakra are continually swept under the rug, creating vicious cycles of suppression and outburst with no control. Little can be improved in this area until we are comfortable enough to bring our issues into the light and begin to truly express ourselves.

The Sacral Chakra Summarized:
Moving up from our Root Chakra along the nadis of the energetic body we soon reach the Sacral Chakra located in the pelvic region. Characterized by its orange glow, this chakra is the home of our self expression and it expresses itself in the physical world. Once we’ve created a firm base through our Root Chakra we begin to feel grounded enough to begin moving out from this safe base, and these movements become our self expression. These movements can be anything, the way we walk or talk, pictures we paint or whether we decide to dance or not. What we express has little significance compared to the importance of just being able to express ourselves as these energies come up and move through us. Having a healthy amount of energy flowing through the second chakra allows this energetic expression to happen.

Sacral Chakra Issues:
The issues of the second chakra tend to fall into the extremes. Either a person feels they should not express their emotions and as a result become a mechanical creature, rigid in their own thought control as they suppress any emotion that enters their body, or in the other extreme there is the person with no emotional savvy at all. This person becomes a weeping wound of emotion, leaking their energy at the slightest upset. In either extreme the same problem persists (a problem that is a common human belief), we associate emotions as us. People who suppress their emotions fear the expression of them because they don’t want to be seen as an angry/weepy/exuberant/out of control person. People who express their emotions in abundance also take their emotions to be who they are and sometimes revel in their emotional abundance (although this may be a subconscious enjoyment). One of the most beneficial things a person can do for their second chakra is realize that emotions are like the weather patterns of the body. Some days it rains and some days its beautiful sunshine but whether it shines or pours isn’t a direct representation of what kind of person you are, only what emotion is passing through your body at this time. Some people think that it’s their thoughts causing their emotions and sometimes it is but just as often the emotions occurring create the thoughts as a result. And really which comes first is irrelevant as long as we perceive both thought and emotion as temporary occurrences and don’t get attached to them and try to hold them and make them our own or push them away and deny they exist at all. Sexuality, creativity and passion are all a part of this, energy moving through the body and in order to heal the second chakra we work to perceive these energies correctly and then move them in a healthy way through the body.

Healing our Sacral Chakra- New perspective and allowing movement:
Since a lot of issues in this chakra relate more to our perception than the actual emotions or urges the first thing we work to do is change our perception. Just as we did with the Root Chakra emotions are best handled if broken down into their physical sensations. For sadness we may notice the tightness in the throat, turning of the gut, or burning of the eyes. Looking at emotions through their physical sensations is more manageable then becoming overwhelmed in what the thought of that emotion means. It is the brain that is naturally conditioned to take a list of physical sensations and provide them with a label. And once the brain has labelled you as sad it starts drawing up memories and personal stories to support this label. When working with the second chakra it sometimes helps to take a step back and see the emotion as it’s physical symptoms and just watch them. As we first begin to do this it is not unusual to find it initially challenging, especially for really strong emotions, the mind will keep pulling us back into the story of how the emotions are us. But as we practice stepping back and looking at the energies passing through our body it gives us a little more space and perspective to figure out how to let these energies keep moving. When we exist in the emotions or deny them all together the emotion decides how it will express itself, whether it is through shouting or weeping or whichever. As we learn to sit with the emotion (Which is different than thinking about them, your mind’s talking very rarely helps the process) sometimes the energies just move right through and out of the body on their own. For some emotions all they needed was some conscious attention without judgement. For emotions that are strong some sort of physical release is often needed, but because we begin to practice creating space around our emotions we now have more room to come up with healthy releases. Instead of shouting we may channel our anger into writing something or maybe a sport or training exercise. There is a strong belief that we need to understand our emotions in order to handle them. Sometimes this is true, but a lot of the time an emotion is just an emotion, just as a rain cloud is just a rain cloud. Understanding the weather does not necessarily make us experts at predicting or preventing it. And because energy can be released through physical motion sometimes some simple sun salutations can have the same effect as an hour long psych session. Sometimes. But the only person who can figure out what works is the person experiencing the emotion, which is why we start the process simply by becoming aware of the emotions in the body and letting the space we create lead us from there.
　
　
　
　
OMG, that was a struggle (The sign of blocked energies? Maybe). Emotions are such a touchy subject it’s hard to say what I mean with out feeling like I’m stepping on toes. There was probably a million little more things I could of said but that was the best summary I could come up with.
In the mean time I’m working on arranging a Chakra/Emotions/Illness workshop sometime before Christmas and will update you when I have a little more set up.

"What's that for?" "Don't know, just put it on top of the pile labeled 'useless'."

*Neurons and Glia just chillin'*

Well, I am industriously (replace with the word "slowly") working on my posting on the Sacral Chakra but due to a present case of coming under the weather I'm having trouble flowing big words together so I thought I'd post something in the interim on how some scientific minds seem to have the urge to keep things simple all the time. How hypocritical of me *Wink*.

So I'm lying in bed trying to promote the healing process and finally finding time to look at my much neglected Discover magazines and I'm finding some interesting stuff. I read through this article called The Brain: The Dark Matter of the Human Brain which talked about how for decades scientists have been focusing on the neurons of the brains because when they stuck electrodes in them they could easily observe the electrical synapses. And I think because of the big focus on Neurons a lot of us picture our brains as being full of these synaptic cells, turns out not so much. Ever heard of the glia? Ya, me either, turns out there's about ten times as many of them in our brains as there are neurons but since they don't react to electricity scientists decided they were just the glue holding the brain together. That's a lot of glue. And of course now they're beginning the find out these cells are way more important, which is funny because for years they were considered the junk they had to slice through to get to the good stuff.

Reading that reminded me of so many things yoga and human health. When I took my Yin teacher training we talked about fascia and how if exist throughout the body, in and around all the other tissues, and it has so many purposes and functions, but even a few years ago when I was in university for nursing we never mentioned it. In videos of anatomy it was the stuff we scrapped away to get a better view of the muscle.

Maybe not in all sciences but largely in health sciences we're always looking for the simplest answer. When someone has lung cancer the first thing we ask them is if they smoked, deciding there must only be one culprit to this condition. If someone says they have depression we hand them a pill and say "There you go, that'll fix you." I see a lot of health care professionals become frustrated when it's not that simple, people return with the same issue again and again and instead of considering that life is holistic and things are rarely simple we categorize these people as 'difficult'.

And to tell you the truth I find it all so fascinating, the human condition to look for the simplest answer and throw the other 'stuff' away. So are people going to continue the search for the quick fix or is the fact that scientists are finally taking time to study multipurpose systems like glia and fascia a good sign that maybe we're evolving enough the be ready to handle a life a little more complicated. I hope we are...

As my systems get back up to 100% I'll keep working on the Second Chakra stuff, hopefully for the next post. And in the meantime if you get a chance stop to listen to some Aqualung, its good stuff for addled brains, been working for me anyways.

Facebook- The Death of the Awkward Silence

I finally signed back up for Facebook. When I got back on my account was in the same condition it was when I left it over and year and a half ago. Kind of an interesting snapshot of me in a past time, although not necessarily a 100% flattering one. And even though I’ve decided to go through with getting back on the site for many different reasons I still feel myself conflicted with whether it’s a good idea to support such a site.
I’ve been noticing a lot lately that people are becoming more and more telephonaphobic. On multiple occasions in the past few months I’ve left a voice message on people’s phones only to get an email back. And when I think about it I don’t see people talking on their cell phones half as much as they used to. Now everyone is texting or on the net through their phones. So I guess that’s good news if we’re trying to decrease the number of people with brain cancer but watching the evolution away from really talking to people is a little nerve racking.
I mean, I completely understand it on one level. It’s hard talking to people on the phone, especially if we don’t know them that well. We find ourselves with our minds racing through awkward silences as we try to find a topic to carry on the conversation. We often feel like we could have said things better after the conversation is done. For many of us phone calls are stressful. But I doubt phoning people less often will help the problem. And if we find phone conversations awkward I think the same is true for meeting in person.
I find it interesting that we are willing to be honest over the net and say what we feel there but the minute we’re speaking in person we become afraid to say what we are truly thinking and afraid to be seen as we really are. Afraid of what? Rejection? Anger from the other person? And I know I’m under the influence of this fear too.
So now we’re communicating through ‘status updates’ which creates as little room for conflict as possible and I wonder how much further this can go.
Trying to think of ways to open the lines of communication again… It gets harder the more I realize most people would prefer if I didn’t.

So there I go ranting about the disconnect again. What is new eh? Just have to keep looking for the answer…
Hopefully have my stuff up on the second chakra next week. Still loving Anodea Judith’s book and starting to listen to Eckhart Tolle’s CDs on presence in the car.
Always trying to keep moving forward even if life’s gravity wishes otherwise. Ah, the opposing forces that make us stronger…

Did you know "Junkiness" is not a real word? Oh well, it is now...

It’s strange to think that we’ve known for at least the past century that if we put junky food into our bodies too much and too often that we’ll feel pretty junky ourselves and stranger still to think that we still haven’t figured out that the same is true for the things we let enter our bodies emotionally and mentally.
I’ve been having trouble falling asleep again, which stopped being a problem a few years ago but in unfortunately starting up again. The tricky part about insomnia is that the anxiety of not knowing whether or not you’ll fall asleep is often the same anxiety that keeps you up at night. Practicing the art of self sabotage last night I found myself staying up late watching TV just to avoid finding out if I would or would not actually have trouble falling asleep once the lights were off. And this is where I had the opportunity to remind myself that putting crappy stuff in my body isn’t just an issue with eating. So last night I stayed up watching Criminal Minds (A great show for people who are always worried there’s a psycho around every corner, no I’m joking, you paranoid people should stick to watching something less neuroticism creating like Treehouse, oh wait, maybe not Treehouse...) It was a two hour special about a young guy with a split personality disorder who kidnaps and tortures one of the main characters in the show, in the name of God. Considering the young guy was played by the blond kid from Dawson’s Creek I wasn’t expecting the acting to be so convincing or to feel quite so stirred up by the end of it, but I was up the next two hours tossing and turning following the episode. The funny thing is that most of us are so used to this high adrenaline inducing stuff that we don’t even notice all the junk it’s accumulating in our bodies and minds. I think of all the paranoia in the world today, all the talk of terrorism and perversion, and I wonder if the world is really that much worse than it used to be. Has the world really become populated by dangerous, crazy people who wait to pounce around every corner or are we just focusing on the stories that make our hearts race more and more. Obviously I have no way of knowing but it’s hard for me not to feel that much like we can become addicted to the same foods that make us feel gross and sluggish maybe the same thing has occurred with our choices for mental and emotional stimulus. Sure the rush is awesome when it’s happening but is it worth all the “junkiness” we feel after?