The life of a yogi is to manifest a beautiful, bountiful and wonderfully blissful tomorrow. That's a yogi.The reason for these specific lengths of time has to do with the numerological significance of each number in the Kundalini Yoga tradition. The greater the amount of time, the greater the benefit. In Kundalini Yoga, we often do movements twenty-six times. Because we have twenty-six vertebrae, twenty-six is an important number to us. For a greater challenge, you can increase the number of repetitions of an exercise to fifty-four or even one hundred and eight if you really want to see faster progress!
--Yogi Bhajan
- It's not what you do, but the courage and commitment that you bring to what you do.
Meditation: Clearinghouse of the Mind
Meditation is not about perfecting or attaining anything. People think they need to go into a trance or be in an altered state to feel they're really meditating. That can and does happen, but meditation is actually the clearinghouse of the mind. Our minds release a thousand thoughts per wink of the eye. Just watch these thoughts as you might watch an ocean wave, not remembering or diagnosing them as they come and go. The real gift is to sit in the middle of all those thoughts, and react to not a one. Keep returning back to your breath, or maybe the sound you're making or the position of your body. Kundalini Meditations usually consist of breath or sound patterns and some specific positions, so you have plenty on which to concentrate.Each thought can become an emotion, and a feeling. And with each emotion and feeling, some of them become desires, and to be completed they take up all of your life energy. But if you use every thought and pass it through the intelligence and test it with your consciousness, you shall be successful, doesn't matter what. That's a simple secret of life.
--Yogi Bhajan
Breathe Freely
When there's an emergency -- for example, if someone is calling from a hospital -- we'll say, "Okay, take a deep breath, and slow down." When you don't allow yourself to breathe, you deny yourself the very gift of life. In yogic terms, we believe that the life force is the "prana," which comes to us through the breath. Allowing yourself to take in enough breath is usually the first thing you need, and it's usually the first thing to go. Breath is free for the taking, but we're often very miserly in the way we dole it out to ourselves. It's not logical, but we all do it.Before I learned this particular technology for meditation, I experienced the frustration of being told to sit and "meditate," having no idea what that meant. I'm so glad that I now have specific tools and techniques that make meditation less mysterious and more practical.
If you want to make a real change and develop the talent in any chakra, I suggest you do a meditation for that power center for forty days, for whatever length of time feels comfortable. You can start with a shorter time and then increase the time during the forty-day period. If you just aren't up to it one day, you can go back to a three-minute period for that day so you don't have to break your forty-day commitment.
Forty days has historically been a significant time period in many world religions. In the Old Testament it rained for forty days and forty nights. In Christianity there are the forty days of Lent. Forty-day cycles are very important in the Sikh religion as well. Perhaps this is because your physical body renews all the cells in your bloodstream every forty days. For whatever reason, forty days has always been a mystical period of time.
So you see, there are many ways to use these tools. I don't want you ever to feel that the one you pick is not good enough. It doesn't matter if you do something for three minutes or for thirty-one minutes -- it's all good. In this work, it is not what you do, but the focus and depth you bring to it.
Of course, it is my deepest prayer that after you do this work even on the smallest level, you will see real improvement in your life, and you will be inspired to devote more time to using these life-changing tools. In a lifetime of teaching, I have seen the technology of Kundalini Yoga and Meditation create miracles of healing. If you want healing on any level of your life and you are willing to do the work, you will see miracles, too.
