Anahata Chakra: Week 4

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अनहत छक्र

You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.

 ― John Bunyan

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men. 

― St. Francis of Assisi

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.

— William Shakespeare

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. — Plato

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. — Rainer Maria Rilke

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. 
The way it stops and starts.
— Edgar Allan Poe

 

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
 ― Doris Lessing

Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all — Aristotle

To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer. 

— Mahatma Gandhi

This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me

 ― Emily Dickinson

You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two. 

— Hayao Miyazaki

Countless words
count less
than the silent balance
between yin and yang

 — Lao Tzu

Those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.
― Booker T. Washington

Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings. — Rumi 

 

 

Do you see how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls, the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth an light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale's sounding to the fall of a dry leaf an the gnat's flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole.

But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.
— Ursula K. Le Guin

Readings
 Anahata Chakra
Vibrations-Hazrat Inyat Khan

 Practice
Heart Opening Home Practice
Pranayama for Resting the Heart

Manipura Chakra: Week 3

मनिपुर छक्र

  When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid. 

— Audre Lorde

 

Perhaps I am just a coward who loves to laugh at life better than I do cry with it. But when I do get to crying, boy, I can roll a mean tear. 

― Zora Neale Hurston

 

The earth laughs in flowers. ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.

 ― Langston Hughes

 Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

 — Abraham Lincoln

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

 — Leo Tolstoy

  Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich. 

— Lao Tzu 

It is the heart that is unsure of its God that is afraid to laugh.

 ― George MacDonald

If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.

 ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful. 

— Mary Shelley

This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor...Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

 ― Rumi

            It is cheerful to God when you rejoice or laugh from the bottom of your heart.

 ― Martin Luther King Jr.

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.

 ― William Shakespeare

And still, after all this time, the Sun has never said to the Earth,
"You owe me."
Look what happens with love like that.
It lights up the sky. 

 ― Rumi

  I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
― e.e. cummings

Be like the sun for grace and mercy. Be like the night to cover others' faults. Be like running water for generosity. Be like death for rage and anger. Be like the Earth for modesty. Appear as you are. Be as you appear.

 ― Rumi

Readings

Manipura Chakra

Song of the Spine

Practice

Suryanamaskar

Variations on Suryanamaskar

Bhastrika Breath-Bellows Breathing

Svadhistana Chakra: Week Two

 

स्वधिस्थन छक्र

 

If you can't fight and you can't flee, flow.

 — Robert Elias 

May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children. — Rainer Maria Rilke

 Those who flow as life flows know they need no other force
— Lao Tzu

 

One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. 

— Martin Luther King Jr.

 Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.

—William Shakespeare

 

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. 

 — C.G. Jung

 Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like. 

— Lao Tzu

 A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
— Albert Einstein

 Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.

— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

 We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.
— Hermann Hesse

 A man sometimes devotes his life to a desire which he is not sure will ever be fulfilled. Those who laugh at this folly are, after all, no more than mere spectators of life.
— Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

 

 There is force in the universe, which, if we permit it, will flow through us and produce miraculous results.
 — Mahatma Gandhi

God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites so that you will have two wings to fly, not one.
— Rumi

 

 ...and to every action there is always an equal and opposite or contrary, reaction. 

 — Isaac Newton

Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.
— Wendell Berry

Readings for Chakra 2

Hazrat Inayat Khan
Svadhisthana Chakra 
Excercises from Kundalini Yoga for the West

Asana and Pranayama for Week 2
Evening Practice for Sweetness and Gratitude
 Pranayama/Mudra

Muladhara: Week One

मुलधर चक्र

I want to see you.

Know your voice.

Recognize you when you
first come 'round the corner.

Sense your scent when I come
into a room you've just left.

Know the lift of your heel,
the glide of your foot.

Become familiar with the way
you purse your lips
then let them part,
just the slightest bit,
when I lean in to your space
and kiss you.

I want to know the joy
of how you whisper
"more"
— Rumi

What's the use of a fine house if you don't have tolerable planet to put it on?

—Henry David Thoreau

...the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.

—Wendell Berry

The Roots of Violence: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice, Politics without principles.—

Mahatma Ghandi

 When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact...that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance; We've learned to fly the air like birds, we've learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we haven't learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters...
― Martin Luther King Jr.

 I am rooted, but I flow.

 ― Virginia Woolf

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

 — Søren Kierkegaard




 

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed

—Mahatma Ghandi

I have learned that to be with those I like is enough

 — Walt Whitman

Deeply I go down into myself. My god is Dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.
 ― Rainer Maria Rilke

You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.

 ― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet 

Readings about the Root Chakra-Muladhara 
Kundalini Yoga for the West
The Sevenfold Journey 

Home Practice
 Simple Vinyasa 1
Simple Vinyasa 2

Pranayama with Mantra 
Pranayama Practice: There is Enough for All