Be mindful and healthy - a 12 mins daily practice from Tibetan Tantric Yoga

The essence of TibetanTantric teaching is that the body is the vehicle for the transformation of the mind. In other words, Mindfulness starts with the body (see previous post).

I advise everyone to take a tutorial from Fast2Yoga  (Tibetan Tantric Yoga) - a 12 minutes practice of Lu Jong: the 5 elements (space, earth, wind, fire, water). These 5 exercises (meditation in movement), though very simple, are the cornerstone of Tibetan Tantric Yoga: the fastest path towards lasting happiness.

These exercises also give us vitality and rejuvenation: the 5 elements exercises focus especially on the spine thus allowing us to develop a healthy central nervous system.

There are three very essential prerequisites for vitality and rejuvenation: a healthy central nervous system (brain and spine), healthy glands and healthy internal organs.

Lu Jong, the Tibetan healing yoga improves the health of the body, mind and spirit. This series of movements cultivates our self-healing capacity by releasing physical and mental blockages and harmonizing our flow of energy. Rooted in Tibetan Medicine, the Lu Jong exercises restore the balance of the elements and humors – vital substances – of the body and increase the flexibility of the spine. Through a rhythmic combination of position, movement and breath, this practice cultivates conducive conditions for meditation by calming and focusing the mind.

If you finish this practice with the 5 elements massage from the Kum Nye practice, then the benefits will rise exponentially.

The Kum Nye Massage can regenerate and balance the whole energy system by opening chakras, or blocked points, on the gross, physical level. Various massage techniques are used to release blocks and cramping in order to relax the muscles. This massage has a special benefit for those that do hard physical labor, those who train the body through sports or other body movement practices, as well as for those with a sedentary way of life that suffer from tension. Kum Nye makes us feel more balanced and increases strength and vitality.

The combination of this two practices is the balance of all elements and through that, the balance of body and mind.

Healthy Central Nervous System (Brain and Spine) 

the spine is more critical to our well-being than the brain

Nerves from the brain and spine go to every tissue in the body and therefore the health of every tissue in the body depends upon the health of the brain and spine.

Since the nerves from the spine go to all the organs and glands of the body, a healthy spine obviously plays an important role in vitality and rejuvenation. In fact, the spine is more critical to our well-being than the brain, since the brain is well protected by the cranium or skull bone. Whereas the spinal nerves have no protection.

The ancient Tibetan yogis fully understood the vulnerability of the spine and the importance of keeping it healthy and flexible.

If you do nothing to improve your spine's flexibility as you get older, your spine will deteriorate further and the spinal nerves will be increasingly impinged upon. This will lead to further deterioration of your organs and glands, until eventually their actual structure becomes diseased. We call this organic disease. At this stage, not only is their function impaired, but their cells are actually dying. If the condition is too advanced, it is irreversible. It's at this stage that many people go to doctors and are told that they have, for example, cancer of some particular organ. The cancer has not appeared overnight; in reality it has been developing for many years. source

Mindfulness starts with the body

Practices of Tibetan Tantric Yoga, like Lu Jong and Tog Chöd taught by Fast Yoga, allows us to develop a blissful body in a mindful mind.

Check how neurocientists are researching the use of Mindfulness therapies in reducing chronic pain and depression relapse (link - Frontiers in Human NeuroScience).

In this study, the researchers conclude that " the proposed framework aligns with Buddhist teachings that mindfulness starts with “mindfulness of the body.” 

Translating this theory into neurophysiology, we hypothesize that mindfulness practitioners better detect and regulate when their mind wanders. This enhanced regulation of somatic mind-wandering may be an early stage of mindfulness training, leading to cognitive regulation and metacognition."

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND CONTEMPLATIVE SCIENCES

Developing the mindset for lean business in the XXI century / 28-29 January 2013, Portugal

Soft skills are key in entrepreneurship

Find the key in contemplative sciences

Lean by Doing

Mindfulness practices for daily life

Slideshare

ary 2013          Gaia- Escola Superior de Tecnologias do Porto – IPP

INTRODUCTION- Merging Business and Inner wisdom

ØLean businesses are customer centric and follow an iterative process searching for the right business model ideally supported by (service) design thinking.

 

ØThis approach implies entrepreneurs need to develop soft skills regarding

empathy and creativity.

 

ØThe basis for both is the ability to observe without judgement.

 

ØThis ability is developed with methods from the contemplative sciences, all deriving from mindfulness.

Pre-registration deadline: 10th January 2013 - labmindzero@gmail.com

 

 

 

Feeling connected - inner networking

Loneliness haunts the XXI century. Why?

People have lost their centre, they have lost connection with themselves and nature and as a result their heart has closed.

A closed heart has place for noone, thus the feeling of loneliness.

An open heart embraces everyone, and so you develop a feeling of belonging. You are connected... with life, with the universe.

And a feeling of happiness fills and overcomes you. That is BLISS.

A strong ego may free us or enslave us

Freedom is victory. Victory over ourselves, not others.

Freedom is hard to attain, and the only way is to work at it from the inside-out.
Freedom is an inner quest, not an outer battle.
To win we need  help, from ourselves and from others.

The inside help is our ego. A strong ego can be a wonderful tool if we know how to use it with the correct motivation. A strong ego will give us discipline and self-confidence to overcome our main obstacle to find freedom: laziness.

This inner quest for freedom has two major goals. They are inseparable, intertwined, different but as one, like two sides of the same coin:
1) empty the mind - this way we become free of ourselves: free of the limits, boundaries imposed by our own concepts and negative emotions; they trap us inside our own mind, it is like living in a box;
2) open the heart - this way we become free of others: the only way to become free of others is to love them unconditionally: "I love you" means "I set you free".

These achievements build on each other: as you empty your mind your heart opens, and as you open your heart, your mind expands.

What is a correct motivation?
A very basic one (universal really) is to be happy, without harming others.

Why Conflicts arise?

To put it in a simple way, we have two dimensions: the body (that follows a physical law) and the mind (that follows an emotional law).

These laws work in opposite ways, but we dont realize this. And it is due to this ignorance that we suffer and conflicts arise, at different levels: family, organisations, nations.

Body and mind have needs, but the way we deal with them have to be different.

To feel happy, body and mind need to be fulfilled in opposite ways:

The body needs to receive energy through food, breathing and sleep. The focus is on receiving, if the body is to survive.

But at the mental/emotional dimension it works the opposite way.
We also need energy to fell happy emotionally.And this energy is Love.
The only way to feel love is by giving it.
Giving love is the way to receive the energy we need to nourish ourselves, mentally / emotionally.

To survive we receive: energy - food, breath, sleep (physical law).
To live we give: energy - love (emotional law).

"All we need is love", we know that. The problem is how to get love.

Because we believe body and mind work the same way, we think to feel happy is to be loved by others. In other words, to fell/be happy we need to receive energy from others.  And this ignorance of the emotional laws gives rise to conflicts, power struggles or control dramas as we go about life taking energy from others.

According to Redfield, "this process of psychological domination can be observed everywhere, and it is the underlying source of all irrational conflict in the human world, from the level of individuals and families all the way to cultures and nations".

These "control dramas" fall along a continuum ranging from very passive to very aggressive. All humans tend toward one of the four “control dramas” (or energy struggles):

›   Victims make us feel guilty and responsible for them.
›  Aloof people attract attention (and energy) to themselves by acting reserved or withdrawing.
›  Interrogators steal it by judging and questioning.
›  Intimidators steal energy from others by threat.