Continuing with answering questions from my family and friends, with respect to my recent Spiritual Yoga Pilgrimage to India.
This question is my personal favorite as it makes me laugh out-loud every time I think of it. This comes from my Canadian friend, Dr. Noel.
Before I left for India, I designed for myself a periodization schedule as a method of emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual training. For those of you not familiar with a periodization schedule, it is a methodological and systematic program specifically designed to achieve peak performance in sport. I used meditation, weight training, study of spiritual scriptures, martial arts, and of course, yoga asana.
I will detail these later, I promise, but for now, the yoga asana practice I used was a rigorous heart opening sequence I built drawing from Kriya and Raja yoga. This sequence allowed me to “square” with deep emotional healing, and allowed my heart to open completely.
When I arrived in Delhi, India, I was ready. I was at my peak performance at all those levels previously mentioned. With my heart open, I was able to connect with everyone I met. Even the armed guards, of which there were many, as I put my hand to my heart and smiled at them, they immediately smiled back with their hand on their heart, whilst holding a loaded riffle!
India did not ask me to come to her and make judgments, or tell her how to run her affairs. She did not ask me how I thought her people should live. Mother India invited me with a Tourist Visa to come and experience her just she the way she is, beautiful and exotic.
I saw families of 4 riding on motorcycles, people bathing and swimming in the GangJi, grown men helping each other bathe in the streets of Old Delhi, children running to have their pictures taken with me, women in beautiful sarees walking through trash and cow dung, beautiful bridal processions in narrow, crowded streets in a ceaseless cacophony, the sunrise at the Taj Mahal, and more I will share with you later.
No, I did not see anyone lying on a bed of nails.
Namaste –
Kathleen
Copyright © 2016 Kathleen M. Callan
All Rights Reserved
I though this was very entertaining and well written.
Namaste.
Now that life has slowed down just a bit, I would love for you to explain “heart opening” to me. I kind of get it, but just when I think I fully grasp the concept it wiggles away like a fish. Is there a true connection between your heart (your ability to let people get close, to be fully emotionally open) and your ability to do asanas like camel? How does one go about solving (I don’t think that’s quite the right word, but it will suffice for now) this disconnect?