<iframe src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/146G0kff9V592bAWVsxA-D00Yxy2p19t0/preview" width="100%" height="80" allow="autoplay"></iframe> Okay. She doesn't want to go first. So you don't get the story of the yogi. first you get his poetry tonight so tonight's featured yogi is Virupa and he's very important for the Tibetan lineages, especially the Sakya lineages, who call him Virwapa so I'll just read his, it's called his Song of the Inner Fire which is like Tumut Doha Koka duntam te drupalat chak chalo you know, every night the yogis have been bowing down to their teacher first so normally we bow down to our teacher first but he bows down to something different I bow down to the attainment of all that everyone needs so he's bowing down to everybody getting what their heart wishes and usually this has two stages first you become someone who can really help other people. You reach the end of yoga and then you achieve the needs of other people. So it's a two-step process. They say a starving person should first feed themselves and then run and get food for the family. Like that. So first we bring our own yoga to success, to its completion, and then we can really help other people. So he bows down to everyone getting what they need, both ourselves and other people. Then he says, Nang ne tumu mem garwe, una duzi babarche rang chung, donbu kepai semurila chinte ne. The blacksmith at the inner forge brings the nectar of deathlessness falling down through the center. And there a tree trunk grows on its own. Climb now to its top and live now on the mountain. This is a reference to something we'll talk about tonight. In Tibetan they call tumo, in Sanskrit chandali, and also kundalini. And it's about the process of raising the inner fire, and then causing nectar to come down the central channel, bringing the wind and the nectars into the central channel, sushumna. So this is a reference to that. The inner blacksmith is your kundalini. And the mountain is the core in the Yoga Sittra. What did they call it? Central channel. Polestar. The Polestar. How do you say that? Dhruva. Dhruva. Yeah. Dhruva means the core. Meaning your central channel after it's filled with prana. Then it says, what's it say? Gunpa Duchi Baba Che. Korwe Dunya Yunring Chon. He brings the nectar of deathlessness falling down and the pain of life from time with no beginning is brought to its final destruction. And then we are beyond all fear of coming to the Lord of death. And then we wear the crystal beads of the qualities of enlightenment. We'll talk tonight, we're going to reach the end of the asanas, the last few poses. We're going to reach Maya Asana, Peacock Pulse. And then he'll be speaking about death and old age. And what can the Asanas really do for that? So we'll wait for that, I think. Deva Champo Gyeva Yi Tam Je Gini Khyabang Yur Korwe Dunya Yuring Chong Shinjir Doi Jig Papang And then the bliss is born and then it spreads to every place. The pain of life destroyed. no fear of coming to the Lord of Death. Naropa's monk's name was Abhaya. Abhaya means no more fear. And if we study yoga well, if we learn yoga well, then you will come to a point, Abhaya. And Abhaya means nothing at all ever to worry about anymore. Never. Anything. Like no fear about anything. death, or getting old, or losing friends, or having things, or being loved. No fear ever again. Never any more worries about anything. And you can, yoga is meant to take you to a place of a bhaya, no more fear. You reach a place where your future is assured, and you see it. You see, it's one thing to believe your future is assured. It's another thing to see your future directly, to see what will happen to you in the next hundred years, or five hundred years, or a million years. If you can get the prana into the central channel through the practice of Hatha Yoga, and then moving on to Raja Yoga, then you reach this beautiful place where, you know, you still have worries about whether the bus is going to come on time. and you still have little problems with people you still have small problems but you have like this Dalai Lama happiness you know you have this grin in your mind all the time because you have seen what is going to come and you don't have any fear anymore it's such a gift if you can if for no other reason we should reach it for other people right? if for no other reason we should take yoga to its final end just so we could give this gift to other people you see? like I could teach you to see your future I could teach you how to assure your future and the future of everyone you love you see? and then what a gift to give people you are all many of you are teaching yoga. And again, please work hard. It's Monday, right? Monday is like an evil day in New York. It's like, I know I did 15 years in the corporate. I was there. I saw my boss last night. We had dinner. He's nervous. He has to go out early on Sunday because tomorrow's Monday. And you have to get up early and go back to work. And it's sort of a it's a pain, right? But if you can reach the end of your yoga, the small things will come, the small problems will come. But imagine what it's like to see the future clearly, and to see what you will become, and to see the day that you will open the channels and become a being of light. Imagine what it's like for a person to go through life having seen that already, like how how is life for them how do they feel everyday how's their level of happiness how how can they serve others right so that's what this verse is about now you get to hear Mahasiddha Virupa's story of his life so the last person in the lineage we had was charpati right and now we're going backwards we're going up from that so we're um before Charupati was someone named Bileshaya, who is also in your list, but we're not going to talk about him. He doesn't have any good stories in the text. But it's an interesting name. It means the one who stays in a hole, and it's the name for a snake. So that's Bileshaya. And then Dombipa comes before that, and he's not in the list in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, lineage in your chapter one. But he comes between Bileshaya and who we're going to talk about now, who's Varepa. And he's well known in the early Tibetan lineages, you know, the Maha cities of ancient India. So Varepa, Varepa, Varepa means what? Do you remember? Form, or body or shape and normally sometimes it means bad so it's like deformed this name actually means deformed one but it's an abbreviation for Virupaksha which means Aksha means eye so it's like the one with the strange eye the one with the eye that's slightly off and it means his third eye and it actually means that Lama Virupa had opened his Ajna Chakra, you know, and he had the power of the cities that are granted to somebody who has a third eye, right? So Virupa grew up in the monastery. He was ordained at a very young age into the Buddhist tradition in ancient India and Bengal in a monastery called Somapur. And he was going into retreat, and he was trying to practice the sadhana of the angel Vajrayogini. So when you go into a retreat trying to practice a certain angel's sadhana, you're trying to reach them in two different ways. First, you're trying to meet them. You're trying to come into contact with them. So you're praying that the angel will come to you. And then the second thing is you're actually trying to become them. So Virupa practiced his sadhana for 12 years. He did Vajrayogini's mantra and nothing happened. You know, the 12 years is supposed to be this magic number. So he goes in for 12 years and nothing happens. And he gets so disgusted that he has this rosary, this mala. And he's been doing the prayers of Vajrayogini on his mala every single day. He throws it in the toilet. He's so disgusted that it's been 12 years and he's seen no sign of the deity. Nothing special has happened to him. No miracles, nothing. So that evening, the deity appears with his mala and says, You forgot something. You know, dear Barupa, please don't give up your practice. Please continue. You've been looking for your angel in the wrong place. The angel you are looking for is self-existent. And she doesn't exist. The angel you're looking for doesn't exist. And so you'd never be able to find her. You have to understand emptiness. You have to understand the emptiness of your deity. You have to understand that the angel comes from inside you. You don't have to look any further for your angel than your own mind. And then she disappears. And then leaves Virufa to practice for another 12 years. Like he starts all over. So he practices for 12 more years And he gains power over death He gains deathlessness He gains the ability to transform his body Into any form that he wants And not have to die We would say in our tradition He gained the light body A light body meaning a body that It looks solid But really it's not made of flesh and blood It's made of light And it can just transform at will So after he gained this light body, he started doing these very strange yogi practices. And he was still living in the monastery, but he started drinking alcohol and eating meat, which is completely forbidden and unheard of in a Buddhist monastery. So he was asking his attendants to go kill the pigeons that flew on the roof of the monastery so that he could have pigeon dinner. And they were doing it for him. And then one of the older monks who used to feed the pigeons started noticing that the pigeons were disappearing. And he called an investigation in the monastery. And they found out someone spied on Barufa like inside his door. And they saw him feasting on this pigeon dinner with this wine. And they busted him, you know. It's a very funny story. So they had an assembly of all the monks. And they decided to expel him from the monastery. So he said, okay, okay, fine, I'll leave the monastery. And he walks out the doors. And there's this great big lake right in front of the monastery. and he just walks right across the lake on the top of the water to the other side. And then the monks are like, oops. He's obviously not the bad monk that we thought that he was. So they go and run and make their prostrations and say, you're a great yogi, but why were you killing the pigeons? And he said, bring the pigeon bones to me. And so they brought the pigeon bones, and he held them in his hand, and then he snaps his finger with the other hand, and they fly away. They come to life and fly away. I don't know, I like to think of this as a story of, well, you can eat meat if you know how to bring it back to life afterwards. And until then, you know, you should keep all of your yamas and niyamas very strictly. But I think one of the morals of this story is that we can never know who another person is. And someone might look like they're doing something very weird or even wrong, and you don't know what's in their mind, and you don't know what kind of person they are. Until you get the ability to read somebody else's mind, you can never for sure know their intentions. You can never know for sure if they're not a great yogi who's somehow trying to teach you something. Virupa has a lot of other stories. Geshe asked me to tell you one more because it's his favorite story. He's on the road because he didn't go back to the monastery after they begged him to stay. He said, no, no, you kicked me out, I'm out. And so he's wandering through India. And he stops at a tavern in the middle of the day. And he orders like a plate of rice and some wine. And he eats it. And then he orders more wine and more wine and more wine. And until the tavern is dry. Right? He finishes off all the alcohol in the tavern. And the hostess, she's like, well, can I get you to pay your bill now? Because she's afraid that he's spending all this money and he doesn't have any money. He looks pretty ragged. He's got a loincloth on. He doesn't look like he has a lot of money in that pocket. So he says, I'll pledge you the son for my bill. And he takes his ritual dagger, and he finds the line between darkness and light. And he stabs it. And he suspends the sun in the sky for days. And he keeps drinking. So he drank 500 elephant loads of alcohol. And in that time, the king of the region, he was getting mighty concerned that the sun had not gone down for five days. He and his ministers, they couldn't figure out why, you know. And finally in a dream, a dakini came and whispered to the king, it's this yogi, Verupa, he's at this tavern, you've got to go pay the bill or he'll keep the sun in the sky. So the king goes into the tavern and pays the bill, and then he releases the sun to pass its course in the sky. It's a difficult... Let's go back to the first part of the story. I think the moral of the first 12 years of Varupa's life is a very important one for us. We need to understand what we are doing when we practice. We need the inner method as well as the outer method. We need to work on understanding emptiness as we go through our sadhanas, as we go through our poses, as we go through everything that has to do with yoga. Nothing works if you don't understand how it's working. Nothing will work for you very well. The moral of the third story is, I don't know. So strange things start to become a practice to you once you become a high yogi. He took the practice of completely overindulging his senses in order to teach the people around him. You know, and again, it's that we can't judge what's going on. You know, we can't judge the people around us. Even if they're drinking 500 elephant cartloads of alcohol in front of us, you never know what they might be teaching us. We're going to continue with reading four from last Thursday. We're going to try to catch up tonight. We'll see. Sort of. Sharon's laughing. Okay. Okay. Matyendra is supposed to... Oh, I need my model. Where's the model? Any runaway? No. Come on. Do we have a mat? Let me get... You don't mind to do it with a bunch of flower petals, do you? You have to get into Matyendra. Matyendra I can do. It's the later ones I can do. But lengthwise, it's probably better. We can lose it if we need to. Achimdhya's pose makes the shining light in the belly burn with intensity. It is a mighty battle hammer that can smash the worst of diseases, even leprosy. Leprosy here has the word mandala in it, because it had little round spots. So mandala used to mean round. Practiced diligently, it helps people awaken the serpent fire, and makes the moon shine steadily. So here, they're describing the benefits of this post. We spoke about it last Friday. It's opening, the important thing is that it's stretching and opening the two side channels, the ida and the pingala channels. It's causing the free flow of air, and in the Tibetan they would say that those channels in their current condition are damaged and incomplete, and that when you take a pose like this, it sort of renews the synapse, it renews the channel, it makes it grow back. Like right now, the channel, you can think of it as ripped and incomplete, and then in the Tibetan they would say, this pose helps restore the channels to their... Because normally you'd think it would be a bad thing if you had more prana flowing through your channels of desire and anger. But what happens is you restore the channels, then the prana moves more freely in order to move into the central channel. So that's what you're doing. In the meantime, the movement of prana in your body helps your... It's called jatara agni. Jatara means belly. Agni means fire. And depending on how it's used, Jatara Agni can mean your powers of digestion on a superficial level, and on a deeper level it means your Kundalini. When you get a list like this, and Kundalini is already there, then you know that Jatara Padibdhim means the digestive powers. So if you have trouble digesting things, if your digestive system is not that strong, then this pose would help your digestion. And I always tell her, although she doesn't believe me, if you're a real yogi and your prana is really moving well, you're just voracious all the time. You know, you get hungry. You get like totally hungry all the time. We'll talk about it tomorrow. Maybe it's just desire for food. I don't know. It also says it's a mighty battle hammer that can smash the worst of diseases. So if your prana begins moving, moving smoothly. And I always think of ojas. It's some sort of spiritual grease in your body. Then also, you don't get sick very often. So if you do, and you know, you can experience this if you just do your yoga every day. You don't have to be able to do all the poses that Anatole can do. It's just that if you, at your current level in your open body, whether you're 60 or 16. And he's going to say this later. It doesn't matter. If you just keep up a modest, regular practice every day, then you just find that, after a few years, you'll find that you won't even notice it, but you don't get sick anymore. Like, you very rarely get sick anymore. You're just not liable to the kinds of sicknesses. You know, the colds and flus and things like that that people get, you just don't get them. And you probably won't notice it. You just get used to being healthy all the time. Practice diligently. It helps people awaken the serpent fire. Now they're talking about Kundalini. And I'll give you the Tibetan... This is how the lineage came into Tibet, the teaching on Kundalini. Because Kundalini is a very beautiful word, very famous. First I'll talk about the meaning. I mean, kunda means... Kundal means coiled. Or like a hose, like a garden hose, or like a spring, would be kundal. And it can also mean a fire pit, which is circular when you do these sacred fires. And it can also mean a bathing pool, sacred bathing pool. Kundal can mean that. Kundal later came to mean an earring, because it was coiled. So oftentimes you'll see it as that. Kundalini means the person who possesses the coiled thing. And Kundalini means the female, the serpent woman. And in Tibetan, in the tradition as it came into Tibet, it's all associated with female power, what you call Shakti in the Shiva Shakti tradition. So female energy. In this interpretation, female energy is the ability to understand ultimate reality. And male energy is the compassion which should be joined with it. So male and female are joined in the sense of love, kindness for other people being the male energy. And then wisdom or knowledge being the female energy. So if you keep doing Matsyendra pose, it particularly affects, we talked about it already, but there's four, four, they call it sora, four-finger widths. chun in Chinese, below your navel. And then back in the back of your, near a half inch, a half inch in from the back, is a thing called sum-do. Say sum-do. Sum-do. Do in Sanskrit is sutra, you see? And one of the old meanings of sutra is a crossroads. And then sum means three. Can you draw a cha? A cha, Luna? And in Tibetan, when a Lama teaches you about Kundalini, they always draw this... I think of it as a plumbing. I always think of like when I was fixing my Lama's sink, I used to have to crawl under the kitchen sink and fix the pipes. And it's a connection where three pipes are joined. So in Tibetan, this is the letter Cha. Can you draw the Sanskrit one? And you can see how the Tibetan letter derived from the Sanskrit one. They just sort of tilted it. And most Tibetan letters are like that. The Tibetan letters were brought from India, from Sanskrit, Devanagari. So when the Tibetan Lama teaches this, they draw a cha letter, and they say your central channel is that vertical line, and then the two, the place where the two circles join is where your ida and pingala are coming down. And right in the center, can you mark it like drawing a circle? where the three meet. Right here is Kundalini. Kundalini would be, in Tibetan they call sometimes Chandali. They just use the Sanskrit word. Chandali means inner fire. Chand means to be burning brightly. And the word incandescent comes from it. And the word Chandra for moon comes from that. And it means burning brightly. So the chandala or the tumal or the base of kundalini is where, I always think of a welder's torch. It's where the, I don't know what kind of gas they use, helium or oxygen, I don't know. Is it oxygen? I don't know. What is it? Acetylene gas. But it's where these powerful prana gases are pouring into the joint, into the cross joint, where the three pipes are joined. And you get a spark of fire there. And the Tibetans, in the Tibetan tradition, which comes from ancient India, which comes from the tradition of Luipa, who we're going to talk about tomorrow, there are two forms of inner heat. One is a superficial inner heat, and they say it stays under the skin, and you might feel warm. And this is where you see Tibetan yogis, they go out and they take a wet sheet, and they wrap it around, they strip, they wrap a sheet around them and then they have contacts to see who can dry it the fastest. And this is called superficial inner heat. And it's a sign that things are going well but it's not the real inner heat. Real inner heat, real kundalini and the real opening of kundalini is a kind of knowledge. The winds are flowing, the prana is starting to flow But as the prana enters the sushumna, then your ability to understand your own reality becomes heightened. And the more prana you can get into the central channel, then the more your knowledge increases. And you have a closed system. There's only a certain amount of prana in your body. As you suck prana out of the two side channels into that joint, and as it's brought into the central channel, then eventually the side channels start to wither. They call them vines, right? They call them like ivy. And then they start to wither and they start to fall apart. And that's going to be, we're going to talk about it later, tomorrow or the next day we'll start into the fourth chapter, which is laya, which is like dissolution. And then the dissolution of the side channels begins. And then kundalini rises, the inner heat, which is not a physical heat. you could think of it as the emotion of honey moving through your backbone combined with knowledge, something like that, combined with understanding. So there is a physical sensation of something of light, which feels like honey going through your backbone, but the important thing is that your knowledge or your understanding of your world transforms completely your old ideas are shattered and then new ideas come and this is the real rising of Kundalini so that's the I think that's the third benefit the last benefit mentioned here is that the moon shines steadily and this is a reference to an element, we call white element, it's called Changseng Karpu in Tibetan. But there is an element which stays at the top of your central channel, just below Brahma's gate, right, Raghmarandra, here. And there's an energy that stays there. And once you start moving the energy from below your navel, once that prana starts to rise, they say it's like holding a wax candle over a pot, which is boiling, and then the wax begins to soften, and then it begins to drip like that. And then so there's an energy here that once the kudalini starts to rise, then an energy that's associated with the white color of the moon begins to drip down the central channel like honey. And again, it's not so much that a physical feeling is important, and in fact, high bodhisattvas are, there's a vow against entering into these practices for their physical enjoyment. You see, like you could just sit there and enjoy this feeling of this honey moving down your spine, but it wouldn't help anybody else, you see. it's just some sort of... David called it one time, I forget what you called it. Like a lot of yoga in the US is sort of indulgence. It becomes indulgence. So to feel... Bhoga. Bhoga, yeah. It's like indulgence. It's just like eating chocolate. Okay, so you're getting some kind of bliss, but it doesn't help other people. And a real yogi is using this experience and riding this experience to try to see deeper into the nature of reality. The result of a final grasp of ultimate reality is that you would come out of your yoga and desperately want to serve other people. You see, if you really get Kundalini moving and you really get the moon melting and then you get up out of that meditation, that kind of person would be sort of obsessed with trying to serve and help other people. Because that's what the experience brings you. So it's not some sort of indulgence in the physical sensation of what Matsyendra Asana can bring you. Okay? All right. And if you don't have that great blissful feeling yet when you're doing Matsyendra, don't. Don't worry about it. Just keep going. So we're going to do the next two verses, verse 28 and 29. Reading 4. Reading 4. Prasarya Padau Bhuvhi Dandarupau Dorbyam Padagradvitayam Gharhitva Janu Parinyastha Lalata Desho Vasedidham Prasthimathanam Mahu stretch your legs out, straight as rods, on the ground. Do you want to turn your mat around? I don't know. Is it comfortable for you? Is it comfortable? Okay. Then with your hands, grasp the tops of your feet and set your forehead down on your extended knees. This pose is known as the back stretch. You could come out whenever you... Oh, I think you should stay. One of the great things about this pose is that you could stay in it for a really long time and that it's really beneficial to stay in this pose for an extended period of time. If you notice the keyword here, it's not Pashtimottanasana, which is how it's normally said. This is another way to say this. asana, it's Pashtimata-nasana, right? Or Pashtimata-nasana, actually. And Pashtima means west or back. The reason it means back is because you're always facing to the east when you do your practice. So the west is always behind you, right? So it became known as back as well as west. And then, um, tan is a root which means to stretch. So, um, uttana, which would be paschima plus uttana, which would be paschimota, right? That, um, that means, that means a stretch, right? And, but tanah has the additional meaning of a progression. So it's like a continuing stretch. It's not just the back stretch. It's continuing to stretch the back as you sit there in your pose for 10 minutes, you know. I don't know how long you want to sit there, but... Don't fall asleep. It's probably very comfortable for Anatole. Some of the guidance that we've gotten from this pose over the years from our holy lamas is you have to bend from the area of the hips. You're not curving your back at all. You're supposed to lengthen your back. Tan, like stretch, like extend. The word, you know, extend. So you're actually leading with your heart towards your toes, right? And, yeah, you want to be able to target the top of your head towards your toenails, right? So you're stretching your body so that usually most people's toenails don't reach the top of their head, but an adult already gets there. But you want to continually stretch that area of your back so that it's flat against your knees, so that there's no curve at all. In order to do this, you have to hollow out your abdomen a little bit And as you're going down, you have Udhyana Bandha Which we talked about before You know, your abdomen is in and up and hollowed out So, if you're doing this pose in the right way it stimulates the muladhara chakra because of the pressure as you lean forward hold on just a second I know this is not your favorite part of the class strip asana yeah So Anatole is leading forward, and so he's getting a little bit of pressure on where we talked about that perennium area in the Muladhara chakra. And since he's bending from the hips and not from this area of the stomach, he's also getting a nice pressure at the Svaristana chakra, where that cha letter is, you know, where the three channels meet. And because he's hollowing out his abdomen and doing a nice Udhyana Bandha, it's also great for the Manipura Chakra. So, then we go to the next verse. Iti paschimathanam asanagriyam pavanam paschimavahinam karoti udayam cataranalasyah puryad udare karsyamarogyatam ca punsam This one called the backstretch is the very best of all poses. It makes the sweeper, the god of wind, ride strong within the back. It sparks the fire in the belly, reawakening it, and makes the abdomen lean again. It frees us too from disease So Because we are triggering All of these points In our lower chakras It stimulates what they call The god of the wind here Which is pavana In the Sanskrit The sweeper And they've got many many names For wind Inner winds In Sanskrit and it's kind of like that thing where the Eskimos have 12 words for snow. You know, you have a lot of different words for something that you're obsessed about and something that you talk about all the time. They've got about 10 different words for body in Sanskrit, you know, because they deal with the body, because the body is their tool. It's the way they're going to get to freedom. So they've got these beautiful epithets for wind. And this one, this one is like, it's like a god, you know, it's, it's associated in the Hindu scriptures with Indra. And he's supposed to be riding on the shining chariot with like a thousand purple horses. And it's, it's like this idea of this very, very powerful God and stimulating him in the body. You know, we talked about kundalini being female, but then we have got this very masculine energy god of wind thing happening. So we've got both metaphors. In Tibetan, they also have this idea of the god of wind. They say it comes from the direction of the northwest. And then the god of fire comes from the southeast. And whenever you do a ritual, if you want to let the god of wind in, You have to let it in, the god of wind in through the northwestern door. Right? Right? So, you use the lower chakras to stimulate this god of winds running all the way up the back. And you should get this energy flowing as you do this pose all the way up the back and then through your arms. And it should be this circuit that you create. It's going up through the legs and then through the back of the spine and out through the head and up through the arms. And you can get this feeling very, very strongly of a circle of prana happening in the body as you do this pose. because the pulling sensation that you get on the muscles of your body, like the backs of your legs are sort of stretched when you do this pose, that is actually triggering prana flowing up your legs and into your back. So anytime you have that sensation of a pulling sensation in your body, it's a trigger for the prana. It's telling you that the prana is moving. So you can no longer think of it as just stretching your muscles. You have to put a different mental picture on what's going on when you do the asanas. You're no longer picturing the flesh and blood body. You're picturing an inner body. You're picturing a body of channels made of light with winds, inner winds that are moving. The stronger you have this picture in your mind, the more effective the pose will be for you. I guess you Michael told me how to go quickly today. So. As long as I didn't move anything up. Yeah. There's a couple. Other things, but... Okay. Now we're going to try another post. Good luck. By the way, there's a mistake in the Sanskrit pronunciation. The first word should be dharma. dharma avashtabhyā karadvayena tatkurdbhāra stāpidana viparshava uchasana dandava utituke mayara metat prahadanti pita plant your two hands firmly on the ground put your elbows at each side of your navel keep yourself lifted up, balanced straight as a rod then you will be in the one they call the peacock pose mayarasana a few practical notes here if you're not used to it, be careful you follow your notes you might already seriously and anyway in India this is a very popular post like when we study in India we go for a couple months every year and everyone wants you to do maya asana oh, one way is to let your feet touch the ground if you can't get all the way up then just do it this way for a while don't hurt your wrists you can hurt your wrists in this pose and we've just discovered personally that it seems to us that women have an easier time of it if they cross going to a lotus first because their center of gravity is in your hips and not in your shoulders so if you're a woman and you're getting frustrated you might do this one and if you've seen a peacock they look like this if you raise your legs up high that's easier for women usually then easier for me and then it's a trick to breathe smoothly and not let your breath chuck off we're checking here I don't hear anything in Tibetan it's called maja I think ma came from you can stop anytime you want Next he lists the benefits of this pose, and I'll go into those. This is the next verse. The peacock poses the eminent among all for removing every disease, quickly making them dwindle away. It makes the power in the belly invincible, and overcomes every imbalance of the humors. It enables your body to break down even large amounts of food, and that which has not been chewed, you know. It kindles the fire in the belly, crushing even old age, and the lord of death as well. Again, if prana moves, you'll be less likely to fall ill. This pose is just really great for your core. So if you're from the West Coast, you want to be doing a lot of these. The humor is, we're not going to talk about tonight, but it's the three doshas. And the dosha means, in Tibetan it's called neche, it means a problem. And it's explained as meaning the three elements of wind, phlegm, and what's that word? Bile. Bile in your body. If they get out of balance, it's a problem. So they call them the problems. And then I translated for, I was fortunate enough to translate for both of His Holinesses' doctors when they were visiting me. And they had this beautiful thing. would say, the natural condition of a human body is that the doshas are out of balance. And for them to be in balance is an accident. So it's an accident to be healthy. A normal human body, it's abnormal for it to be healthy. And the reason they call the three humors the doshas, is that it reflects the truth that the normal condition of a human body is to be sick and to be out of balance. And then the next thing out of the Daya Lama's doctor's mouth would be, therefore, if you have any semblance of health now, use it before you get sick, before you go back to your normal condition. Like, if you have any vitality or health now, then for God's sake, you know, use it for something important. Serve other people. It helps break down food, and that which has not been chewed enough. All yogis should be chewing their food lots of times. You know that. Kindles the digestive fire. But here's the thing. It says, crush us even old age and the lord of death. and it really irritates me I have sort of pet peeves about how things are taught and then whenever a yoga text all yoga texts Shiva Sahitam Gaurakshya Shatakam Geran Samhita Yoga Sutra all of the great yoga texts Hatha Yoga Pidipika and its commentary which we haven't spoken much about there's a great commentary called the Jyotsma by Brahmananda they all say the same thing keep doing these asanas and you will overcome old age and death and then most yoga teachers just skip that part oh yeah, old age and death I read, there's a beautiful book by a British civil servant from the 1800s about Ghoraksha maybe it's called Ghoraksha and the Kanpad yogis or something and he does a study of the yogis he interviews them and then somewhere in there he says oh and I met a yogi yesterday who claimed to have lived for 700 years. And I questioned him quite strictly about the events in this city that I knew about that had taken place hundreds of years ago. And he knew them all perfectly. And then he just goes on. He just doesn't pause to think, well, maybe that's significant. You know, he just goes on. And the same thing with the Heart Citra in Buddhism. If you keep doing this, you will overcome old age and death. If you really understand yoga, you will stop old age and death. And wouldn't that be a gift to give people? We have an opportunity. We don't have a place to stay. We don't own anything. So we stay in our friend's apartment kindly, up on the Upper West Side. But sometimes it's a little depressing. Sometimes we wish we were back on the Lower East Side. Because everyone's very wealthy, but they're all dying. They're all really old. You can't find a coffee shop there, because no one goes to the coffee shop. What a gift if you could give people that. The purpose, death is an accident. Death is an abnormal occurrence. Death wasn't supposed to happen. We live in a broken realm. among all the realms of the universe, because of our past lives and what we did in our past lives, we have had to come to this realm. And this realm is a mistake. This realm is like a boo-boo, you know? This is a boo-boo realm. No, you know, you don't have to be jealous or angry or you don't have to think badly of anyone here because we're all in an airplane which is falling down. You know? We're all in a really bad situation. We might as well be nice to each other. We all screwed up in our past life. Now we're all in this kind of body that's a... This is a... This is a... Dead end. It must end in death. You know, this kind of body... You go to the yoga studio for two hours to look younger, but you're really just two hours closer to dying, you see? And we... are meant to be. And this is not the kind of body that we are meant to have. It was just at the last minute in our last life as we were dying, the mind got distracted and we ended up with this kind of body. Really, seriously. And so we have to fix it. So, you know, we're like, I don't know how to say it. We're like in the retarded class or something. Now we're like people who were born by some bad karma into a realm with bodies like this. and we're so undeveloped that we think that's normal. And we don't think you could do more than that. You see, we're so much believed in the way we were born that we don't really... People skip these lines when they teach yoga. They always skip the part about you don't have to get old, you don't have to die. And the purpose of this class and the purpose of this text and the purpose of asanas is to restore the flow of prana, bring it into the central channel, and make your body the way it was meant to be, which is light. And all those pictures of angels in Europe, you know, we go to Europe sometimes, we go to the cathedrals just to see the stained glass, to see light coming through an angel's body, you know, like in Paris, what's that famous place? I don't know, Notre Dame. I like that. There's a reason. somebody saw them it's not try to understand that when you go to a cathedral and you see a stained glass window of an angel and there's light coming to their body that's because someone once saw them and they made an image of them and then other people might have copied it and not seen them but that's the way we are meant to be so so do it, okay? I can't do it on the way. I do it with my feet down. But now every time you do it, think about that. Think about this line. Take that pose. Make that pose more of a daily pose. And then think about the angels in the cathedrals. Okay, I get to do Geshe Michael's favorite pose. verse 32 Uttanam shavavad bhumau shayanam tach chavasanam shavasanam shrantiharam chitna vishrantikarakam maybe you should demonstrate this pose lie down on your back on the ground, staying still there like a corpse. This is the corpse pose. It removes fatigue and brings repose to the mind. So, Geshe Michael, he jokes about this being his favorite pose, but actually, I want to tell you, he got really busted by Lady Ruth the other day when we were in class because he was trying to short this pose. And just to speak my Holy Lama's words, you can't short Shavasana, you know. It's an important pose. It's a really important pose. What they say in Tibetan is it distributes all the drops in the body. They say Tigle Drenpa. It spreads the prana that you have, I don't know, asana practice, it raises a lot of energy, a lot of the prana in the body. And then you lie there, like, and it's all here. And it just releases it evenly throughout the whole body. One of the most common practices of Shavasana, which we find very helpful, is noticing in your body if there's any tension and then trying to actively get your mind to release that tension that's in your body. And I think anybody who's ever done an Asana practice has experienced this. But a deeper practice, which we were encouraged to do in places like Kavalyadam in India, which we were studying, is just to watch what the prana is doing in the body. You feel a certain amount of energy lying there. And watch what it's doing. Just listen to your inner body. Try and get in touch with something that's not flesh and bone. and blood. Try and get in touch with that inner body that's moving that subtle energy around, and see what it's doing, and listen to it, and feel it spreading throughout the body. But the most important thing that we do with this pose is we dedicate our practice. So it's very great to start off the practice with a very strong intention and then to end the practice with a very strong dedication. We're supposed to be doing every breath for the sake of getting enlightened, reaching that state of deathlessness so that we can help other beings. Every single breath of our asana practice is supposed to be with that thought in mind. But unfortunately, we don't have that concentration in our hearts right now. You know, our mind flies off to other things. So Shavasana is a perfect place to bring the mind back to your original intention. You know, I spent an hour and a half doing asanas. I thought about somebody else once. But now I'm going to think about that whole hour and a half. I'm going to take that whole time period and I'm going to dedicate it to other people. I'm going to dedicate it to reaching my goals of, you know, getting, I feel the prana running through my body. I know that this practice is getting me to a body of light so that I don't have to die, so that I can teach everybody that I love how not to die too. You know, and you have to think like that when you're ending your practice, or else the practice becomes a worldly thing. You know, it's the whole world around us, including our bodies, including all of our pain, including everybody we love who is suffering, is all coming from our minds. Right? It's coming from thoughts that we have in our minds every single instant. We're making our future world. You have to take every opportunity to make sure that your future world is the world that you want to live in. You have to take the opportunity to make sure that the practices you're doing are practices that are going to get you enlightened. The asanas themselves are not going to do it for you. Because raw karma is formed by the mind. It's formed by your intention. you know this could just be a scratch or it could be like a stretch or it could be i'm going to get myself enlightened you see like it could be the very same action it's just like um you know guru drinking like 500 gallons of beer. The action itself has no meaning whatsoever. The asana itself has no self-existent quality to help you or your body. People do asanas and they get hurt. People die during yoga. It's only our intention. So every time we do our practice, in order to make this a practice, in order to make this something that's going to reshape our world into what we want it to be, we must, we must dedicate. We must lie there in deep pose. And think about why we just spent an hour and a half of our lives moving our bodies around and what we hope to gain from this. And it's a perfect opportunity to get clear in our minds our ultimate goal, to remind ourselves. Because then when we get up from our asana practice, we carry it with us. We carry that thought of, I need to get enlightened. I need to create myself body. I'm going to do it. You know, you re-establish your purpose in life. As you lie there, not falling asleep, right? There's one interesting thing about the word Shranti Hara. Shranti it or to remove it. And we get the word discard from that, the C-A-R-D. There's a very interesting word in our lineage that's related to this word. It's called Shramanera. Say Shramanera. It's Getsol in Tibetan. And we have some Getsols over there. No? One Getsol. We have one Geetzel over there. Two. Two. Three. Three, okay. We've got three Geetzels, right? So the meaning of the word Shramanera or Geetzel is exhausting yourself in the service of your Lama, in the service of your teacher. What? Navis. And that's a word for a novice monk or nun, right? so um we should be pushing ourselves in our practice and we should be pushing ourselves for our lamas to the point where we're ready to do shavasana you know like to the point where we've earned it to the point where we just fall down we're like oh my god thank god i can lie down for five minutes you know you should be at the point in your in your life where um you're exhausted in the service of others, and you're exhausted in the service of your practice, and you're exhausted in the service of your lamas, you know, don't hold back. You know, Shamanara. Every night I like to tell you, just before the break, about a project that's going on. Thank you. Let's have a hand. This is a... Sometimes we give people projects. And if you want a project, just talk to us, okay? No, really. It's a joke. If you get within six feet, you get a project. But if you're somebody who wants a project in life, let us know. We'll be happy to give you one. But I know many people here are working on different projects. I'd say 40, 50 people here have these beautiful projects. And each night I'd like to tell you about some of them. Because maybe you want to help them. Maybe you want to. Service of other people, right? Like our Lama always says, Yoga, meditation, study, memorization, and then serve other people. You have to serve other people. So these are different things that different people are doing to serve other people. And I know there are some people here who are school teachers. And I thought you might like to see it. I just met two... I think it's Barbara from Philadelphia. But this is a project that's being undertaken by some yogis who stay out at Diamond Mountain. And they are bringing yoga and yogic principles into the public schools in a non-sectarian way, just in a secular way. Bringing yoga and the principles of yoga into public schools. And it's been very successful in several states. And I thought you might like to see it. And if you're a school teacher, or if you're someone who just likes to work with kids, then feel free to talk to... Where's Eliana? I don't know where she is. She's back there, standing up. So, we're going to show this little video that Eliana and her people put together. Okay? So, we're on reading 4, page 10, verse 33. Sivana katitani ca. Te bhyasca catushka madhyasara. Bhutam bravim yaham. Shiva taught 84 different poses. Here now I shall take those four of them, which are the very essence, and describe them for you. we're going to turn the lights on so you can take notes and see your reading there you go So, we just got through going through a set of asanas that was passed down to us by the great sages and the great yogis of the past. We said yogis and munis, if you remember. And now we are getting the four most important ones that were passed down by the angels, you know, by Lord Shiva himself. And this verse is talking about where the Hatha yoga practice is leading us. So we are being given all sorts of poses, you know. Maybe you know 84, maybe you know 84,000. This 84 is sort of a generic number in ancient times. Sometimes they say 84,000, and it just means a huge amount, thousands, a lot, you know. And so we're getting to the four most important asanas among thousands. And the reason that they're the four most important asanas is because they're asanas for meditation. The asana, originally, you know the word for asana just means seat. And all of the yogic practices are leading us to a point where we can just sit down and go within our own minds and get to a deep state of meditative concentration and see emptiness directly. Every single thing in this book is leading us to the goal of Raja Yoga, right? The king of yogas, the yoga of the profound state, the yoga of ultimate reality. So we need to learn how to meditate. We need to learn how to get our minds in that deep state of single-pointed concentration on a single thing. Why? Because we talked about already the raw karma is thought. Raw karma happens in the mind. Every single word we speak, every single action we do, we do propelled by some sort of thought. But it's propelled mostly by some sort of unconscious thought. We are not aware of the actions that we do during the day. We are not thinking about the consequences of the actions that we do 23 hours and 57 minutes of the day. Maybe I'll give you three seconds, you know, like three minutes maybe we're aware. of what our actions and what our speech and what our thoughts are going to cause us in the future. You can do a test. You can sit down and eat your breakfast and try and remain conscious of every single bite of food that you take. You can do a test. can say a little prayer in your mind as you take your bite of food. I'm eating in order to get a light, you know, strengthen my body so that I can do my practices, so I can get a light body so that I can save every single living being on this planet, right? And that would be a great way to eat. Like that would be the ideal way to eat your cereal in the morning. We eat Cheerios. It would be the best Cheerios you ever ate. Every single bite for somebody else. Every single bite for everybody else, right? But if you try this exercise, you will find, I'm sure, that your mind goes off on the second bite. And that's the reason why people do prayers before they eat. No, I'm totally serious. You can't concentrate. You're supposed to be doing a prayer for every single bite. But our minds are so weak. Our minds are so flabby that there's no way that we can concentrate on every single bite. So we just do this little blah, blah, blah before, and we dedicate it. Okay, I'm going to be totally conscious-less during this entire food, But beforehand, I'm going to say, well, every single bite, I dedicate it, you know. And it's sort of like the cheap way out. And you have to get to the point where your mind is no longer flabby. You have to be as good in your mind as you are in your asana practice, in your body. You have to train the mind. The mind is like a muscle, you know. You train it five minute pieces of concentration at a time. You sit down and you focus on your Cheerios for one bite. And then you try the next day to focus on your Cheerios for two bites. That's... And then... see if you can still focus on your Cheerios. And then you focus on your Cheerios for three bites. And it's a growing process. It's a step-by-step process. And it's the training of deep concentration in meditation. Because we want to get to the point where we know what we're doing with our thoughts and our words and our actions. We want to get to the point where our thoughts and our words and our actions are so powerful that they trigger a transformation in our immediate future. The only way to control your karmic seeds is to get to that point of concentration where you know very consciously what you're doing at every step of the way. Right? So the only time I've ever had that deep a state of concentration is in retreat. To be quite honest with you, even when you go into retreat and you get to a very deep state of concentration and you reach these certain stages and you think they're going to last forever and then you come out into the world and you pop right back out again. It's kind of depressing actually. I mean, my dream is that I would be able to be in the world and be in as deep a state of concentration as I am when I'm in a deep state of retreat in meditation and not seeing anybody. You know, I could interact in the world in that same way and I will figure out how to do it eventually. But that's the reason why people go into meditation retreats. because you can't normally interact in the world in such a, like, it's such a distracting place, this world, you know, this outer world, with all of these people and all of these things and all these places to go. And you can't normally have a deep state of meditative concentration. You have to draw yourself and you have to draw your mind within. And these are the four poses that are going to allow us to do that in the simplest way possible. You know, they will trigger certain chronic effects in our body that will enable our minds to concentrate better. And these have been studied by yogis, all the yogis that we've read about. You know, all the yogis that we heard, the Mahasiddhi stories. All of these yogis are the yogis that sat down and figured out just for you what was the most important pose for you to get the best concentration you can in your tiny five-minute concentration during the day, or 10, or 15, or 20, as you build up, right? Am I doing this? You do this. We're fighting over who's doing the verse. He won. Siddhampadmam Tata Singham Vadram Cheti Chatus Chayam Shrestam Tata Pichasukhe These four consist of the poses we call the Master, the Lotus, the Lion, and the Examen. The best of these in turn, and the one you should always use for sitting without discomfort, is the Master's pose. The key word here, can you guess? I mean, not the real keyword on the page, but the important word here is sitting without discomfort. And we, you know, we did this three-year retreat. We didn't have a chair. We always sat on the floor. And we practiced many, many hours a day. And we really paid a lot of attention to sitting poses, like poses for sitting for long periods of meditation or mantra practice. so a lot of what we're going to say comes from just experience and what we found to be helpful. We'll get to Lotus Pose. The Lotus Pose is coming and it's the king of all asanas. I think Guruji says that. And it's very important. But just from personal experience, I've sat cross-degged my whole adult life. You know, we've been taught yoga from the best. and in retreat you don't have anything else to do I mean you do two, three hours of yoga a day and still I couldn't get into lotus asana more than about an hour we would time it it would be like this torture test and we would set an alarm for an hour and four minutes and then we'd get up to an hour and five minutes but it's very difficult and frankly for most people it would damage your knees it's not appropriate for most people. Now why and what you can do about it and how to perfect it is going to be a big part of the teaching tomorrow. We'll be going through how to do lotus properly. In the meantime, what Master Svatmarama is saying is that Siddhasana is the one for us. And personally, I had not done Siddhasana before the three-year retreat. And then during the three-year retreat, I started experimenting. And because of this text and some other texts, I tried siddhasana. And it just really worked well for me. And so I'm sort of a siddhasana convert. And I think he knew that it would be appropriate for most people. So he goes into a long description about siddhasana called Master's Pose. Siddha means a master. And in Tibetan it's called Tung Tsong. which preserves the feeling of straight. Like sitting up straight and morally straight. Changsong means stay straight. Morally and physically. And Siddha means the same thing. When you're in a rickshaw in India and you don't want to go out of turn, you're yelling what? Siddha. Siddha. Just go straight, you know. And it's still the word. So he goes into a long description of Siddhasana. so we'll just do it from here. We're on verse 35. Yoni sthanakam angri mula gatitam kratpa dodam linyasen angre padam atayakam eva huddaye kratpa hanam sustiram sthanu sanyam itendriyocana dursha pashe bhruvarantaram hyetan moksha kapata peda janakam siddhasanam prachate Press the heel of one of your feet up into where a vagina would be. So these were written mostly for guys, right? And Yoni's Tanakam means the place where the Yoni was. Yoni can mean womb or the lady's organ. So one foot, one heel goes into the Mulabandha area, the perineum, right? For guys, it's below the skodham. So you have to lift things up and put the heel under there. Then take the other foot and place it at your penis. But what it means is, in the next verse, he'll say it's a little bit above. So for a guy, your sexual organs are between the two feet. So it's like that. It's very comfortable for sitting for a long period of time. Bend your chin down firmly towards your heart. Sit as still as the trunk of a tree, restraining your physical senses as well. Look without shifting your gaze at the spot between your eyebrows. This is called, say, bruvor. Antaram. Bruvor. Bruvor. Antaram. Antaram. Bruva came into English as brow. Okay, bruvva came into English as brow, meaning eyebrows. Okay, and those of you who care about Sanskrit, there's a rare dual case. And here you see the dual genitive, right? It's unusual. So between the two, antaram means, antaram came into English as inter. So you focus between the eyebrows. In Tibetan it's called minsam. Say min. Minsam. Minsam. It's a very, very, very powerful place to concentrate. And if you play music, or you like to listen to music, or like that, or read books, I think, it's where you are looking when you're listening to music. It's when you're really deep into music, your eyes are closed, but they're kind of... You know, they'll say, focus between your eyebrows. And it feels in that general area. But when you're really into your music, I call it the slobber point. I used to play music in a band, right? I used to play sitar very seriously. Now I play sitar amateurly. But at a certain point of concentration, you forget to keep your lips up, and there's just drool coming out of your mouth, and you're not noticing it, because you're so into the music. When your eyes go off, like, up there someplace, and you're like looking, you're not really looking up here, right? You're just like, you're just off, you know? Joni Mitchell's Blue Album, on the front. I mean, she's like, and that's what it is. It's a space. It's not that you're going like this, you know? It's a space in your mind, you see? And it feels like you're around here. And the Tibetans will say, if you want to recreate that space, focus here, and then go in an inch or two. So we tend, again, to focus, we feel like there's a decal slapped on the outside of the skin. and the Tibets are always saying, no, no, the chakras are inside, you know, go in. So you do focus here, but then you go in, about an inch or two, and then you just reach a space. It's not like it matters whether you're an inch or two inches in. You just reach a certain space and then you're there. That's where you focus when you're doing master's siddhasana. This is known as the master's pose and it is so amazing. Oh, so amazing. It helps you burst open the doors to vibrate. Yeah. You can do a master's pose sort of like David Life in that calendar where he's got his toes down and the heels are up, right? Pointing towards this guy. And you can do it that way and it's illustrated that way sometimes. And you have both heels above the penis in a man. I tried it. I don't think it was that much amazing and he doesn't say much more about it. so let's just skip it. No, I think it might be good for a stretch, but I tried it for maybe a month and it didn't seem any better for me personally. Again, everyone finds their... When you're working with the body, everyone's body is very much different. And you might... Different people will discover different things in the same text. Different people will find, oh, this one really works for me. So I think it's useful to try all of them and then see what works for you. Okay, verse number 37. This pose, the one we have called the masters, is known by others who are knowledgeable. As the, okay, sorry. It should be as the diamond pose. Some, moreover, speak of it as the freedom pose, and still others call it the secret pose. I just wanted to talk about diamond pose and freedom pose. Say Vajrasana and Muktasana. These are different names for Siddhasana. In Tibet, Vajrasana is a full of this. But in either case, there's an important reason for calling it Vajrasana, right? And this relates to the moment that you will see ultimate reality directly, which is the purpose of all asana practice. The purpose of all yoga, the immediate purpose, is to bring the winds into the central channel so that you can see emptiness directly. If you can reach a state of seeing emptiness directly, then within seven lifetimes your body will turn into diamond into light the light is very similar to a diamond it is ultimate and there are no other ultimate things in our life or in our world so the diamond is the closest example in the real world to something which is ultimate because no object can scratch a diamond except another diamond. So, even if before you had this experience, you had no interest in diamonds, then after you had this experience, you would have a very, a very, I don't know how to say, unavoidable interest in diamonds. And you would, you might even want to work with diamonds, even for very many years, with no interest in diamonds, than to remember the ten minutes that you saw this thing. So, if you could reach this state of mind, then you would always be near diamonds. And the pose, vajrasana, diamond pose, is important for that reason. Then, within a short time, you would reach mukta, and that's the next word in it, muktasana, which has two levels. The first level of muktasana is that because of what you saw during the five minutes, ten minutes, you are empowered within a short time, relatively short, right, for people who live forever, to remove the last of your mental negativities, anger, jealousy, hatred, desire, if you had this diamond experience then within a short time you could remove those and that's Nirvana and that's Mukta in a short time after that the body itself would turn into light and then there's just an incomparable experience it's what it's what all of us dream of. Ever since you were a small kid, every one of us has had the same dream. Deep inside, we've had the same dream. We saw our parents suffer. We saw our family, brothers, sisters suffer. We slowly became aware of the suffering of the outside world. But if you can use these poses, Siddhasana, Muktasana, Vajrasana, Diamond Pose, Freedom Pose. If you could reach the goal of yoga and bring the wind into the middle channel, then there's just this incomparable vision that you would be the one person in the world who could help the entire world. You could help not only this world, but countless worlds of people. And not just humans, but every living creature down to the bottom of each sea on each world. When you use Siddhasana properly, when you reach these levels, you reach a point where you can see each living creature on each world no matter how small they are in a single moment you reach a state because of your yoga practice where you can see directly each one of these creatures and you know you will go and save them and make them like you you see so So there's no greater purpose for our lives than to reach this one experience. Okay? So I think we meditate for five minutes. Just silent. Try Siddhartha. Good luck. Just five minutes. And then we'll make some kind of noise and then we'll dedicate the good karma. So try Siddhasana. And then I'll lead you for the first few moments. So you sit up straight. In Christy's class in Arizona, you can't make any noise. You get in big trouble. Be considerate of other people in the room. Don't make any noise. and then watch it Brad out and in Totally still, don't move. Let's go. The light is colored like water. And it goes out and touches every living creature on every world. And then you can see the face of each one in this moment. And you know you will take care of each one. You yourself will take care of each one. So stay there for a few minutes. Okay. Okay. Delicate the kakarma, yeah? Yeah. Sashivoki Jukshin Mertom Tramri Rabinji Nindegyemwadi Sanghe Shintu Satsang with Mooji Sādhā mīēsē lējumē Dhamphakuni thobhashom Thank you. Good night. Thank you.