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