Diary of a Yogi-In-Training | Week 6
I've been mulling over the idea of starting this blog series. Hesitant to share my experiences because I wasn't sure of inner work and healing that was going to occur during the next 8 months of my being. Toure, my yoga mentor and teacher, kept it real with us - the next eight months were going to be a whirlwind and places and spaces within were going to unravel and be exposed. This had to happen in order to step into the true power of my healing abilities. If I really wanted to serve the Divine and community, I needed to be clean. Unburdened from past pains and traumas. On the other side of healing.
It's been quite a few weeks now since I first started my 200-hr Yoga Teacher Training (YTT). Its been twelve weeks and two days to be exact. Throughout these weeks, we've dived into each chakra, learning the imbalances and balances, metaphysical tools and such of each chakra to help us to tap in to Self.
A blessed ceremony accompanies each chakra lesson. The Root was explored, tapped into and healed. Then the Sacral. Then the Solar Plexus. We've climbed the Sushumna, learning and tackling each chakra but leaving the Heart for last.
This past weekend was a very special one and the push I needed to finally start this series. Over the weekend, we meet in sacred space, curled up on our yoga mats, with our manuals and sequence books. This weekend was our Inner Voice consults and our Third Eye & Crown Chakra attunements and I'm up first to dive in and meet my inner Self. After quite a bit of deep breathwork and meditation, I sat in my sacred inner space and connected with my Self. She was there. She was nurturing, firm, protective. She wanted to love up on me. But what no one knew was that prior to class, I had entered isituation that altered painbody after painbody kept appearing. A painbody is an old emotional pain living inside of you, accumulated from past traumatic experiences. They stick around because those painful experiences were never fully faced and accepted the moment they arose. My throat and my legs decided to expose some painbodies for me that day.
Painbodies are not to be ignored. At first, I thought my inner voice session was a dud due to my struggle to quiet the mind and let Self speak, but what it did was highlight the necessary work and healing that needed to be done on my part. I was made aware. Self-awareness was the gift from my inner voice that night. That painbody was a manifestation of continually putting others before myself, to the point where I was hindering my own emotional wellbeing and comfort. I knew what I needed to work on next.
Awake and energetically buzzed, I debrief with Nicole and make my way back to the mat. My head is spinning but that's only because I'm wide open. I've just done major work connecting to the Divine Self within me so naturally my third eye and crown chakra would be lit.
I jump into the conversation on back bends, twists and shoulders and for the next 75 minutes, myself and two other peers participate in a Christian-based Chair Yoga class, focusing all of our attention on opening the shoulders and heart center. The entire yoga session is silent, either spent in prayer, meditating over verses or in poses stretching. There's been a lot of emphasis on Christianity and Jesus lately so I'm not shocked Christian yoga was next on the menu. From listening to worship music for the first time in over four years to reading The Bhagavad Gita to watching documentaries on Gaia like The Hidden Story Of Jesus and Jesus & Buddha: Practicing Across Religions, this particular Ascended Master wanted his presence to be know. Thankfully, He and I were already well acquainted.
One of my favorite YTT takeaways thus far has been The Bhagavad Gita. This special book of Indian Spirituality is revered by many, like MLK Jr., Thoreau, Raplh Waldo Emerson and other transcendentalists (no wonder why my nerdy ass LOVED books like Civil Disobedience in high school).
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
As we’re reading The Bhagavad Gita in YTT, I stumble upon so many gems - correlations between the teachings in The Gita and The Bible. For instance, as Christians we're taught that the promise of Eternal Life is ours if we accept God into our life. In Indian Spirituality, we're taught that if we are still holding onto any material desires or wants, if we have not "transcended" and reached full enlightenment, that all those desires and wants will, at the time of our heavenly transition, become our karma in the next lifetime. We continue the cycle of birth and death (reincarnation) until we reach full enlightenment, which at that time, we are gifted with eternal life and no longer have to live down here on Ratchet Planet Earth. We get to stay up in the cosmos with our Great Creator.
“According to this analysis, the ego dies every night. Every morning we pick up our desires where we left off: the same person, yet a little different too. The Upanishads describe dying as a very similar process. Consciousness is withdrawn from the body in to the senses, from the senses into the mind, and finally consolidated in the ego; when the body is finally wrenched away, the ego remains, a potent package of desires and karma. And as our last waking thoughts shape our dreams, the contents of the unconscious at the time of death - the residue of all the the have thought and desired and lived for in the past - determine the context of our next life. We take a body again, the sages say, to come back to just the conditions where our desires and karma can be fulfilled. The Self-realized person, however, has no karma to work out, no personal desires; at the time of death he or she is absorbed into the Lord…” ― Eknath Easwaran, The Bhagavad Gita
Reading The Bhagvagad Gita reinforces that belief. For me, its Divine confirmation that for all these years, I wasn’t crazy, I was Divinely touched. I’ve always battled with spirituality and religion. I was raised Protestant by my West Indian grandparents but would go home to my Mom and be surrounded the rocks and crystals I collected as a hobby, our garden of Sunflowers and art and wall hangings of the Sun, Moon and Stars. So naturally, a Sagittarius ruled by the Jupiterian planet of spirituality and knowledge was going to want to know more about the wonders of the Cosmos. If you grew up Christian, you know where this is leading to. People like me loose the battle before we even enter onto the battlefield. How dare you worship the Sun or the Moon, read your horoscope or call God anything other than that? I’ve had some of the most important people in my life tell me what I believed in was deeply rooted in evil and I was going to pay for it. It wasn’t until I was well into my late 20s that I stopped giving a fuck and was able to finally accept myself for who I was: a Christian Mystic. I was well in my right to believe in God, Jesus, the Archangels and read the Bible all while participating in a monthly Full Moon ritual. Why? Because my Almighty Creator is omniscient and ever-present…. The Divine “determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name.” (Psalm 147:4). The Divine is present in the Sun, Moon and Cosmos, present in the trees in your backyard. Our Divine Mother & Father is up, down, in and around absolutely everything we can see and not see. So the real question, in my eyes is….
Why wouldn’t you pay homage to the Moon at its fullest?
especially if God is the Creator of all and makes all things with purpose….
Just a ramble of thoughts…..
Each month, like I said before, is spent learning and working on a specific chakra; uncovering any emotional imbalances that might be hindering growth or healing. Today we worked on the Third Eye and the Crown chakras. The room’s set up for our chakra attunements, with mats, blankets and bolsters on the ground. The lights are dimmed. There were singing bowls for each chakra, sacred smoke and herbs to use. The sound of OM is playing through speakers in the studio, helping us to get in touch the Divine within yourselves. Om (or Aum) is a sacred syllable and simultaneously helps our consciousness become prepared for meditation.
In Yoga Sutra, the ancient sage Vyasa noted that through chanting om, “the supreme soul is revealed.” Tibetan scholar, Lama Govinda, wrote that OM expresses and leads to the “experience of the infinite within us.”
Right before the ceremony, I took some rapé, which is made by combining tobacco from the Nicotiana rustica plant with a secret combination of Amazonian foliage and then crushing it into a powder. My blend was mixed with the cacao plant and worked in conjunction with the third eye. Rapé is herbal air medicine, and in the act of using rapé, one can receive the blessing of the universal source of energy, cleansing our perception, clearing the mind and opening the Third Eye and Crown channels, connecting with the highest part of our being.
The ceremony itself is an intense experience. Each time we do one of these chakra attunements, I find myself completely consumed in the cosmic healing taken place within me. It can be overwhelming, and there were many times when the imbalances were so heavy in my system that instead of catching that healing, I wanted to run out the room. But I preserved. And this time, all my work and healing is finally coming to fruition.
My mentor assists during the ceremony, giving me Reiki and higher vibrational healing, specifically working on my sacral chakra, that has undergone over 15 years of traumatic experiences. It’s been the one chakra I’ve had to double my work on. When you’re a survivor a several sexual assaults and abusive relationships, the trauma can get jam-packed in the sacral chakra (for womxn, the womb space) and never see the light of day. So the work is necessary. The work is painful and its extremely hard to face those demons but that sweet release of letting shit go is worth every shed tear.
I’m humbled by my experience this weekend and with Yoga overall. I’m excited to meet the woman on the other side of this journey and I’m more humbled at the blessing of new people, relationships and opportunities that will come into my path because of this journey of self discovery and healing.
Until then,
Namaste ♥︎