8 Months of Advanced Yoga Practises

First Update: 8 months of meditation and advanced yoga practices

My experience of using AYP practices: techniques for spiritual transformation

I commenced practice of AYP (http://www.aypsite.org/) in August 2010. AYP contains a series of extremely powerful meditative spiritual practices, that are open to all people regardless of religion, and ultimately lead towards a transcendent, blissful awakened state of consciousness. These are the tools that enable one to become like Jesus, Buddha or any other of the enlightened spiritual masters, to follow in their foot-steps, and live a transformed, loving, compassionate and awakened life. Everyone has this longing in their heart for a transformed existence, and AYP provides the vehicle for transformation.

The length of practice has varied a little, but since August 2010 I have done (twice daily):

· AYP Deep meditation. (http://www.aypsite.org/13.html) – 20 minutes twice daily.

· AYP Spinal Breathing Pranayama. (http://www.aypsite.org/41.html) – 5 minutes twice daily.

After 6 months experience, I have no doubt that AYP is one of the most powerful tools I have ever encountered to facilitate spiritual transformation. I have tried various types of meditation

What does AYP do?

AYP activates kundalini energy. This occurs through the spinal breathing pranayama technique. Kundalini is a powerful, divine energy that lies latent with each of us. The energy storehouse is physically located at the base of the spine. AYP’s spinal breathing pranayama raises kundalini up the spine, up through the nervous system and into the brain. As the energy moves up through the body, in results in spiritual transformation. The expression of this spiritual transformation is multi-faceted and ranges from a rising level of ecstasy and joy, to greatly increased love and compassion for others and heightened intuition and brain functioning.

AYP fosters deep inner silence. The deep meditation practice is like a doorway into an ocean of peace and calm. It leads to us become increasingly stable and centered in the present moment, and frees us from being trapped in a stream of continual emotional reactions of life. It allows us to no longer be controlled by fear, anger or other emotions.

The Benefits I’ve Experienced

I am open minded and I am also a skeptic. I was ready to entertain AYP, however I formed no beliefs about whether it was or wasn’t true. A resonance of truth struck me through Yogani’s words (he is the author of AYP) particularly as he makes it all available for free, and doesn’t try to sell it to you. I also had something inside me which strongly guided me to it, giving me an urge to try it. I decided the best way to approach it was to try it and find out for myself.

Having tried multiple meditation techniques, I have some basis for comparison. The AYP experience was very different.

· Ecstatic experience. Within about 2 months of twice daily practice, I began to have ecstatic experiences whilst meditating, and during the day following meditation. By this I mean a feeling of joyous pleasure running through my entire body. It gives me a feeling like I want to sigh with happiness and satisfaction. This feeling will often last for an entire day. This has been an incredible part of the experience, sometimes I’m overwhelmed with joy and ecstasy from this feeling.

· Remission of depression. For my entire life, I’ve suffered from periods of intense depression. Oftentimes, this could be suicidal. However, typically it would express itself as just having a few hours of the day when I felt a bit low and worn out. It’s odd because overall, I’m a very positive person, my relationships with people are great, I’m successful in my career, I take time to help others, I exercise 5 times a week, I’m very healthy and have an extremely healthy diet. Despite doing all the right things, I’d still get these phases of very intense depression. With AYP, this completely disappeared in the first two months, and was replaced by an ecstatic current of joy. I suddenly felt as though a deep longing had been fulfilled. This hasn’t been completely permanent, the ecstatic experience comes and goes, and sometimes I’ve experienced more depression, but generally my emotions are greatly uplifted by my spiritual practice.

· Energy. Since doing AYP I’ve had much greater levels of physical and mental energy. I used to have a point after lunch (around 2 or 3pm) where I’d become very sleepy and unable to concentrate. After about 3 months of AYP my ability to concentrate has improved, I never get sleepy during the day, and I have a much more balanced energy level from morning to evening.

· Desire to serve and morality. Gradually over the past 6 months of AYP, a strong desire to serve others arose. I started volunteering in the Bronx and around Manhattan in projects to help people who needed it. In addition an increasingly strong sense of morality has arisen. I’m not perfect, but there’s a much stronger desire to do good and be good, and a much stronger internal sense of what is wrong and what I should not do. My morals are now coming from my heart, instead of my social conditioning or by accepting the beliefs that are spoon fed by others. I don’t need anyone to tell me what is right, and what is not, I already know in my heart.

· Loss of fear. There has been a huge decline in the amount of fear that I’ve experience. I feel a lot less concern about the ups and downs of life, I tend to feel “come what may, I can deal with it”.

· Loss of attachment. One of the very enjoyable things that began to occur during AYP practice was a significant decrease in my level of attachment. What do I mean by attachment? It’s the desire for things to be a particular way, that your mind conceives. The desire to have money, and the suffering when you don’t have it. The desire to look good, and the suffering when you have a bad hair day or get a pimple. The desire to be treated with love and respect, and the suffering when people are unkind to you. These are examples. My mind has released, to some extent, it’s controlling grasp on life, constantly trying to impose its concept of how things should be, and suffering when life fails to match that concept. So for example, things can go badly, but I still find I am happy.

· Massive decrease in addictive or compulsive behaviors. A lot of unbalanced behaviors, such as drinking until the point of drunkenness, or other activities which result in only transitory pleasure, have started to fall away. With the ecstatic experience inside me, there was a lot less need for pleasure from external sources.

That’s most of it for now. Have I become enlightened? Not yet. Have I experienced dramatic changes in my life that encourage me to keep going? Yes, certainly.

The Challenges Encountered

The greatest challenge that I’ve met stems from my own desire for escapism and avoidance of pain. I’ve always had a tendency to retreat, to retreat into myself, to retreat into books and reading, to anaesthetize myself with alcohol or worse, and when I was a child, to retreat into my bedroom and not want to go out. To create my own little world, safe from the outside. As very sensitive person I have always found, and in some ways, still find, the world a very painful place, full of suffering and hurt. So when the inner ecstasy arose, and I started to feel so joyous and full of pleasurable energy, it was like a breath of fresh air given to a man who was drowning.

I clung to it. I didn’t want to engage the outside world at all, I’d found a boundless source of ecstasy that came from within, and I quickly lost all desire to do anything. It was good enough just to sit around and experience this intense joy and ecstatic experience inside me. Resting in contemplation of the inner ecstasy was so pleasant, that I’d avoid stressful experiences that might shake me from my peaceful contemplation.

I’d also much prefer to meditate and activate this ecstasy, than to face my emotions. Strangely enough, I found negative emotions could co-exist with the ecstatic experience. I could go from a joyous Samadhi into an anger outburst. Rather than deal with what I was feeling, I’d just escape into meditation.

I knew something was wrong. There was a wounded and hungry part of myself that was desperately needing the ecstasy, fearful that this respite from suffering might only be temporary, and seething with an agonized desire to finally end its suffering. Emotions started to arise, mainly deep depressions and feelings of sadness. I unconsciously started to fall back into addictive pleasure-seeking behaviors, like drinking too much alcohol, seeking ego gratification, eating unhealthy foods like chocolate.

The ecstasy from meditation also started to decline (this began in late December), and the more it declined, the more I found my addictive behaviors coming back. More and more strong negative emotions started to well up, whereas before I’d spent entire weeks or months feeling blissfully free of such feelings.

I felt like my life’s storm clouds had temporarily parted, allowing a brief ray of sunshine from heaven to fall upon me, before closing and leaving me cold, wretched and without illumination. The depression welled up, and peaked with an intense desire for suicide. I contemplated various ways of doing this, but it’s harder than it sounds.

There was no longer a choice, AYP meditation had stopped bringing joy, and only seemed to heighten my despair. I realized that I must sit down and just face my emotions. Over a period of a few days, the internal resolution became immensely strong to face my suffering, and I sat, with my eyes closed, breathing in and out, allowing my attention to rest completely within my despair, and everything taking place within and without, in the present moment. I’d stress, this is not a meditation, it’s a technique, which is extremely grounding. I learned to allow myself to fully experience intense negative emotions like this, through doing The Presence Process, which was written my Michael Brown.

I spent a few days doing this, allowing my resistance to these feelings to become gradually broken down. In this manner, the storm passed, and I became stronger inside than I was before. The ecstasy is now returning to my meditations, but this time I’ve retained my interest in the outside world. I’m still able to motivate myself to work, and I no longer cling to the ecstatic experience by avoiding difficult or stressful activities.

I learned an important lesson, that spiritual practice must be grounded, and should not be used as a means to avoid facing the world.

Dealing with Worry

I can be a bit of a worrier sometimes. I don’t choose to, sometimes a worried feeling just comes, followed by a ton of “worst case scenario” type thoughts. I’ve found a great way of turning it around.

I start imagining myself coping with the worst case scenario in a really strong way. I imagine how negative emotions can often be helpful to shake you from inertia, and get you to take actions in your life. I imagine all the positive actions I would take to improve the situation, and everything that I could learn from dealing with it. I imagine myself coming through the worst of it, and then thriving more than I was before.

Every time this gives the worries in my heart the message that: whatever happens, I will use my creativity, inspiration and intelligence to change and improve the situation. I am not powerless and I have nothing to fear.

Suffering and Spiritual Progress

I have noticed that the experience of suffering makes us kind and indulgent toward others because it is suffering that draws us near to God. - Saint Therese

We all have our own buttons, and if you look closely at your life, you can see patterns in the situations that cause you to react with fear, anger and grief. I've personally always been too sensitive, particularly to unkind words from others, and by the time I reached adolescence, I was living in an inner hell, completely lost and confused in my own grief and anger. This great weight of suffering was the grace that drove me to look inward and observe my mental and emotional processes dispassionately, without identification.

We live in a world that runs from suffering. We run from it into sex, alcohol, drugs, entertainment, work... in some cases suicide. For most people, without periodic escape, whether that be into mindless television or heroin injections, I think it would be hard to retain sanity. There is such tragedy in the world, and in the heart of each person, the only thing most people can do is try to shut down, not feel it, not think about it, forget it.

“You see it, Igby? I feel this great, great pressure coming down on me. It's constantly coming down on me. It's crushing me.” - Jason, Igby’s Father, who is having a psychological breakdown. From the movie “Igby Goes Down”.

When we are forced to suffer, unwillingly, it can beget a cynical attitude to life, or worse - mental breakdown or suicide. However if we look at the lives of many saints, we see people who turned around and embraced suffering, who willingly underwent suffering. People who were filled with love of god and compassion for others, who suffered but were not cynical because of it. Look at Jesus, Saint Therese, Ghandi… I asked myself, what does this mean?

“Suffering cheerfully endured, ceases to be suffering and is transmuted into an ineffable joy.” - Ghandi

A while ago, some years before I discovered AYP, I read and implemented what I learned from a book called The Presence Process. It taught me how to suffer willingly. It was agony. My life became unbearable as I opened the inner floodgates and allowed suffering to consume me. However looking back, the suffering, willingly embraced, transformed me. In many places within my heart, where once there was personal pain, there is now stillness, a stillness that is full of compassion for others due to the knowledge of how it feels to suffer. Compassion seems to me to be like “suffering felt for others joyfully with intent to help”.

Furthermore, it put a kind of strength or determination inside me, which has given me the motivation toward spiritual progress, enlightenment.

So this post is really on a practical note, sorry to bore you with the life story, but I felt like it put things in context. Yogani touches on this in the bhakti lesson (www.aypsite.org), to continue from what he says, I find it really helpful to pray when I suffer, and/or self inquire. For me, it’s my most important spiritual practice outside of meditation and spinal breathing, to use my suffering constructively.

This post is for anyone who might stumble across it, feeling depressed, or hurt, or angry or upset.

Here are a few practical techniques to make a good use of unavoidable suffering:

1 - Just feel. I begin with closing my eyes, breathing in and out, deeply and slowly into my stomach, and just allowing myself to feel the suffering. Notice everything about what is being felt inside. Is there a feeling of suffering AND a feeling of resistance to suffering? A feeling of not wanting to suffer? Allow yourself to easily notice what is taking place, without resistance, give it the full attention of your heart, and allow your mind to be silent. Drop the stories, the accusations, just feel.

Emotional pain, resulting from unkindness from others can be, paradoxically, one of the greatest fuels on the planet for spiritual progress. There’s the Western/Christian concept of humility bringing one closer to God - “The meek shall inherit the earth’, then there’s the Eastern/Hindu/Buddhist concept of no-self and the ego. It seems to me that there’s a link between these two concepts. When we watch our own suffering with our quiet awareness, without retaliating or saying anything at all, we just quietly bear it and take it to a private place so we can willingly experience it fully, the ego is gradually melted away, and we increase in humility. You find where once there was a concept of a Self to defend, a concept of a Self who is being hurt by the other person/or life's misfortunes, there is now just quiet, compassionate awareness. I hope that one day I may reach the point where even if someone says the cruelest thing to me they can imagine, their words just fall on quiet, compassionate, attentive awareness - and cause not a stir of concern for myself.

2 - Prayer. I use something like “Dear Lord, allow me to make use of this suffering. Help me willingly feel it, even though there is desire not to feel it. Allow it to purify me. Allow it to humble me. Let me suffer this for you.” Whatever feels right for you. Often energy will shoot up my spine and I feel joy after this. The suffering continues when I’m still resistant to it, if I’m trying to use prayer as a method to control it, and to shut down. If that’s the case for you, it’s ok. Just gently return to feeling it again, and to feeling your resistance. Don’t struggle with it. If it’s just too much to take, read a book, or go for a run, whatever, come back to it later.

3 - Self Inquiry. Most of our suffering is in the sense of being a separate self. We believe “something is being done to us”. I’ve been reading the AYP Self-Inquiry book and there are some very good guidelines in here for self inquiry. When I feel myself getting angry with or judging others, I like to ask “is this anger rooted in truth?” (i.e. am I really separate from them? Who is judging and who is being judged?).

Every moment as an opportunity for awakening

“We are like dogs chasing their own tails, the only difference is, dogs have more fun.”

Michael Brown (Presence Process author)

I’d like to share some truths that God has helped to realize. I was reading “To Be Victorious” by Paramahansa Yogananda recently, in which he said each desire is followed by the Siamese twins of false happiness and sorrow. Sorrow arises whenever we are denied anything we desire - whether it’s a desire for good health, a particular house/home, new clothes, a partner, (etc). False happiness arises temporarily whenever a desire is fulfilled. I read this during a day in which I was experiencing my desires being frustrated.

I woke up during the early hours of the morning, somewhere around 3am, 4am, with this immense feeling of energy in my solar plexus. It felt like something was being pulled out of me, it was a sense of being purged. After this moment had passed, I saw that I am like the dog chasing its tail, except I am not having as much fun. I saw this infinite string of desires running back into my personal history. I found infinite instances of false happiness soon after the fulfillment of a desire, infinite instances of sorrow when my desire was not fulfilled.

God showed me that not a single one of my fulfilled desires has ever brought me lasting happiness. I can’t remember even a fraction of the numerous desires I’ve experienced! Yet the body-mind unconsciously pursues its unending series of desires.

I feel as though every moment is an opportunity for awakening on some level, particularly those moments in which we suffer. If you make a practices of turning to your suffering and feeling it, willingly suffering, or if you can’t willingly suffer, willingly experience your unwillingness to suffer and your suffering intermingled, something good often happens.

My desire now increasingly becomes for non-duality, for God, for the end of desires, and my prayers are to this effect every time I experience frustrated desire. I don’t really know what those concepts mean and I can’t say what this ‘desire to end desires’ leads to, but certainly I am feeling more peaceful today than I did yesterday!

Haiku

Siren echoes

Cold rain on pavements

Autumn in New York.

- Joshua Anderson

Pain and Desire

The way I've walked home has gradually changed over the past 6 months. When I first arrived in New York, in the midst of the cold winter, from the moment I left the subway I wanted to be home. I live near 86th street subway, and I have to walk 5 blocks north to 91st street and 4 blocks east to York Avenue. During my first few months here, whilst on my walk home, I always had a desired goal in mind: to be home. It caused me to walk hurriedly towards my destination, in the event of a bad mood, I'd find myself resisting the inevitable journey. The journey seemed a painful experience, it felt long and seemed an obstacle to be overcome.

Gradually that has fallen away. Now when I leave the subway, I no longer have a desire to be home. The journey is no longer an obstacle. I simply walk because walking home is the apparent course of action, it's a habitual action. As I'm walking I'm just conscious of walking, no goals or desires, I'm just feeling the energy of whichever moment of my journey I'm in. I feel one leg lift, and set down upon the ground. Then the other leg... My journey home is meditation. It feels timeless, instant. Then when I arrive home, it's almost a pleasant surprise. I was not conscious of a long journey. Sometimes now I do not even go home, I may dawdle in a shop, or go to the park and lie down upon the grass.

The journey is no longer a chore. The process is the same, I walk the same route everyday, but there is simply no desire to be home. I walk home, just because. I feel neutral about the journey, sometimes its really rather pleasant, other times less so, either way - I don't care.

Its a nice metaphor for how desire causes unnecessary suffering. I've never really intuitively believed in the idea that we have "a life purpose" that can be reduced down to a concept, let alone a career or set of activities. Eckhart Tolle says "our primary purpose is to be here, now". Is that true? I don't know, but I feel somehow that resonates with me. In what areas of your life do you fruitlessly desire for things to be other than they are?

What is the ego?

“We exclude the Subject of Cognizance [knowing subject] from the domain of nature that we endeavour to understand. We step with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does not belong to the world, which by this very procedure becomes an objective world. [We are unaware] of the fact that a moderately satisfying picture of the world has only been reached at the high price of taking ourselves out of the picture, stepping back into the role of a non–concerned observer.”
- Erwin Schrödinger, Theoretical Physicist, Nobel Prize Winner.

The Western use of the term ego is often used to mean “an inflated sense of pride in your superiority to others”. We may refer to someone as “having a big ego”, meaning they have a disproportionately high regard for themselves. However, this is a very limited use of the term ‘ego’. It’s a highly worthwhile activity to consider the true meaning of the word.

The concept of ego relates to the perception of subject and object. It is a commonly accepted premise that the world consists of objects (entities) which are perceived by subjects (observers). Most languages accept the subject-object premise as a predicate. For example we may say:

· I [subject] gave him [object] the book.

I define the deeper meaning of the word “ego” as: The perception of a distinction between subject and object. From this structure of language arises all concept of division and separateness: us and them, myself and other, me and what happened to me, myself and my environment.

By this rationale, to judge another as having a big ego, is as equally egoic to being the one who to whom the quality of having a big ego is ascribed! Judge not lest ye be judged!