<iframe src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M6ycXq0Gz9YS93wDKlf1dubFyrgTsuD4/preview" width="100%" height="80" allow="autoplay"></iframe> We're in verse 23. And thank you for honoring Dushu Bota. For us, that's a big deal. And we're very proud that you did it so nicely. And it means a lot for us, because he's our ilama. So thank you for that. Thank you all for that. Okay. karma-shapka-midim-gopya-gata-sodhana-karakam vichitra-guna-sandhai-puja-te-yogi-pungapaya. The instructions on the six practices are kept private. They are highly honored by the highest yogis, for they purify the body cavities and achieve a balance of the disparate elements within the body. I don't think there's much commentary needed there. High yogis respect these practices because they can make you suitable for practice. In Tibetan, they call them leru. These practices make your body suitable for pranayama practice and for asana practice. So high yogis, the word I like here is pujate. Say pujate. Pujate. The Tibetans, they think puja is a great word. They think it's a big deal. and they talk about it a lot. So I just follow in tradition we should talk about puja. Puja you know it means some kind of, people say we're having a puja today at Jivamukti, you know. And it means some kind of a prayer ceremony or some kind of a ritual. But the root of puja is always explained in Tibet as pleasing someone. Making someone happy. So we tried to pujate our lama, right? We tried to pujate. We did puja. We presented flowers. We bowed. We presented an offering. The scarf is very special now. The scarf is like uranium 22 now or something. Very powerful. It's very good to keep on the head of your bed. Like under the pillows or just on the headboard and it'll help you sleep. It keeps away negative energy. So now it's been blessed, it's been charged. Put it on the headboard. Some people put it over the front door of their house on the inside. On the outside it gets swollen in New York, so you put it on the inside. And every time you pass under it, you get this blessing from this being. And a special use of this scarf, it's called a katha, is that if you know someone who's ill, or someone's in the hospital, then you take and you put it on their headboard, or someone's ill in your family, or like that, and if they can appreciate the thought behind it, then offer it to them, and ask them to keep it somewhere where it would be over their head when they sleep, and like that. It's very good for people in the hospital and like that. So it's a big blessing. and we'd like to thank WSI for raising it and Ani Chizong. They took a lot of effort and there was a lot of money and they offered it to us. So I'd like to thank them for that. So Pujite, so did you Pujya guess in no time? Did you Pujya guess in no time? I hope so. It is yet to be seen. It is yet to be seen. Because what's the highest Pujya? it's to do what they teach you there is no higher puja like you give a lama money or you give them roses or you give them some oranges or you build them a house and they're still waiting to see if you've got a puja and it means you carry out what they ask you to do if my memory serves me correctly it was one month 30 days of treating all your teachers yoga teachers, school teachers parents, our teachers, children, our teachers, treating them all as if they were already enlightened beings. And then he kept saying, check, check. Give it a month. Try for a month. And see if something beautiful... It's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful practice to serve your lama. You don't know how beautiful it is. He spent his whole life. His whole life was a guru yoga. His whole life. And we both served our lama. And we were like Service brothers. You know, I washed the dishes he cooked and like that. For 30 years, 20 years, there's nothing more happy. There's nothing more beautiful. So try it, you know. Just try it. It's wonderful. You all have a yoga teacher. Serve them like that. Honor them like that. See what happens. There's no happier way to spend your life. There's no happier way to spend your life. Thank you. Oral verse 24 Kattra Bhauti Jathuranguli Vistaram Hastapancha Dasayatam Luvarupadhishtam Margenam Siktam Vastram Shinar Vraset Shinar Vraset Punah Pratyahare Chattu Chattay Uditam Daoti Karmatat Here's what we call the practice of cleansing. First get a piece of cloth which is four finger widths wide and fifteen hand legs long. You should make it damp then following your spiritual teacher swallow it slowly and afterwards draw it back up. So this is a practice called doughti, which is, doughti means cleansing. And one of the interesting things about this verse is the use of pratyahara. What does pratyahara normally mean? Yeah, you withdraw your mind from the outside world. you withdraw from the five senses. And it's one of the eight limbs in the Ashtanga. It's one of the eight limbs that's found in the Yoga Sutra, right? It's right before you get into meditation. You have to withdraw your senses from the outside world. But here, this word is used in its literal sense. So you're actually drawing the thread or whatever that you've swallowed back up out of your throat. And it's like that... It's an interesting... You don't often see this word Pratyahara used in its literal sense. So it's an interesting gloss of the word Pratyahara. Do you remember the root of Pratyahara? Well, there's Prati, right? which means yeah it's like Sosor in Tibetan like Prati Moksha Vah it's individual or one by one and then Hara comes from a Rukhur which means to take and it's related to a Rukhur which means to bear or carry and you get the word bear or bring or offer like we offered to Gishin Bokhar tonight So, this is a practice where you are swallowing a sort of string-like thing, and then letting it sit in your stomach, and then pulling it back out. And one of the interesting things about all of these shatkarmas, all of these practices for getting the mucus down, the kapha, dosha, to lower in your body, is that you start to have a different relationship with your body. You start to, like, if you're, like, swallowing strings, you're starting to know, like, where the stomach is. How many of you actually know where your stomach is, and, like, where it stops and where it starts? Like, you put a string down there, and then you pull it out, and then you're like, oh, that's the esophagus. You know, and you start to have this different feeling towards your body, and that makes you able to start to have a different relationship to things like food, which we normally eat because we want the taste of it, or because we're out at dinner with our friends and everybody else is doing it, or, you know, there's all sorts of weird reasons why we eat food, because we're nervous, or because we're depressed, or, you know, But when you start to have this different relationship with your body, you start to eat differently. You start to eat in terms of the body as a machine that needs fuel. You know, you think of the body as something objective, that's something that's not necessarily you. You know, it's like me and my body. You know, and it's not... No, you have an objectivity about it when you start fooling around with the insides of it. Because you don't really relate to yourself in terms of stomachs and spleens. So you start to explore these cavities and then it starts to be... It helps you disassociate yourself from your body. And one of the most important things to do is to be able to disassociate ourselves with this old body. You know, this old body that's going to get old and die, that's rotting as we speak, that's getting wrinkles every second, that is made of this impure substance of flesh and bone. We don't really want to be associated with that body anyway. So it's a really good practice of learning to distance ourselves, learning to distance who we think of as me from this fleshy mortal body. Because then when the time comes, when you go into a deep state of meditation and you have to leave the body, you'll be ready. Because you won't be so attached to it. You won't be so associated with it. You won't be so rooted down into this mortal body. You know, you will have distanced yourself. So, this practice is funny. I used to do this as a kid. Like when I was a little kid, I used to try and swallow strings and stuff and like pull them out. I thought it was like a really fun thing to do. And my mom was like, stop it. I'm sorry, mom. You know, and I, you know, obviously there was a seed there somewhere. There was some past life thing. I was doing these swallowing practices before, you know. But mom didn't like it too much. So I stopped after a while. She was a little worried, because nobody in Southern California does stuff like that. So, you know, not in my neighborhood anyway. And then much, much later in my life, when I was searching on my spiritual path, and I was traveling through India by myself, I went to Rishikesh, and I met this yogi, this crazy yogi guy. And he was swallowing all sorts of stuff, you know, he was trying to teach me these practices of Dauti. And so I experimented a little bit with it, but not much. You know, the yoga teachers that you have here will probably know more than we do about this practice of Dauti. They know a lot more than we do. So one of our suggestions about this course, we're going to give you... Did we... Muzal like that yet? Oh, okay. Well, I can't tell you yet because we're still waiting for a response from certain teachers. But hopefully there will be some sort of, like, retreat program that we could all go and, like, swallow things together in. That is sort of in the making, and as soon as it's set, we'll announce it. But it's a really good practice for cleaning out the kapha dosha. The guy in India, he wanted me to try this other dhauti where you swallow a string that's about the size of from here to that wall. This really, really, really long string. And you just keep swallowing it and you don't bring it up again and it goes all the way through your intestines and then all the way out. And that's another kind of down tea, you know? So, like, there's all sorts of fun things you can do with your body. But the common one is just, you know, swallow a cloth, like, about this big and, you know, like this much longer. And then pull it out again. And like I said, we don't have a lot of expertise in this particular one. So we're going to give you recommendations for it. And it's not something that we can try in a New York City yoga studio at 1130 at night together. You know, like we all get buckets of water with the straps. You know, it's just not going to happen. You know, we have to go somewhere quiet where there's a lot of grass that in case you throw up, you can go over there. Right? So, anyway, that's down to you. we'll be doing it next month at the future cool fun too yeah yeah oh the next verse is just another verse on Dao T which we're going to read really quickly um kasha spasa pliha kushtam kapa rogat Ascha, vinshattah, vinshattit. Delati karma, prabhavina. Prayant yevana, shanshaya. Once the power of the practice of cleansing has done its work, then mucus congestion, problems with breathing, illness of the spleen, leprosy, and all the twenty varieties of disease related to phlegm depart from the body. Of this there is no doubt. So, the only thing interesting here is a couple of key words. Kapha is related to words like cough and choke, which is easy to see, right? The cognates. And do you remember what we did with shvasa? Do you remember the cognates for shvasa? Give you a hint. aqueous or hiss or... And then quarrel comes from schvass. The Latin derivative is query, like schvass, query, something, you know. The SHV goes into the QU and, you know, it comes into quarrel, quarrel in Latin. And it's supposed to be like an irregular. Sometimes schvass, par schvass just means breathing. but a lot of times it means an irregular kind of breathing. Like weaves or hiss or quarreling. Okay, next verse. By the way, if you know Sanskrit, you see at the top of the page, Atabastu, say Atabastu. So as the Tibetan scriptures are interesting, at a certain early point in Tibet, they started to carve blocks to print books. And there were huge, thousands of carvers would do a set of blocks. And they would carve everything in mere image. They couldn't read a book, they read a book in mere image, you know? And they carved day after day. The 10-year took, I think, 60 years of carving. Big armies of carvers. And the last two carvers were in South India. And we interviewed them. And there were these two old brothers, and they were seeing their carving. And Rinpoche sponsored one of the last carvers in India. And then the computer took over. They put all the carvers out of business. But in Tibet, those blocks, for example, the 10-year blocks that John just put on his CV, Those were done about 400 years ago. And the blocks are still there. And we had a new print printed off the Gargir blocks, you know, like a couple years ago. And that's how we input it, you know. So the blocks were wonderful for keeping manuscripts standard. But in Sanskrit, there were no blocks, because they don't keep in India. And so everything was handwritten, even up to the 18th century. things were handwritten copies. And so what you get is the Hati Yodha Padibake has 20 different editions and they're all slightly different. People make mistakes when they copy something by hand. So there's a somebody has inserted in most editions something called Atta. Atta means next we're going to talk about and here it says Basti. We're going to talk about Basti practice. So we chose not to translate that. we believe it's not part of the original text. Because it's inconsistent. The way they say is not consistent. But since it was in most editions, we kept it. So we sort of did a... We didn't translate it, but we kept it in the Sanskrit. Then it says, The practice of lower abdomen treatment is where you sit in a crouched, it says couched by accident. Maybe you'd be couched in America. Position in your pool of water. Your bottom, do I really trust in your bottom? Yes. Your bottom down in the water far enough for it to come up to the nail. I don't know. Contract your anus and pull the water up, afterwards releasing it for a cleansing effect. Romantic grace. this is a practice that we just learned straight from and we wouldn't have better without them no we heard horror stories of people present there who had gone to Indian rivers and tried to suck Indian water up into their intestines so the first rule of thumb is use distilled water, okay? Not even tap water, okay? So what we're going to describe, I'm just going to sit and describe what they taught us, and we did it in tree retreat. We did it in more than, we did it in like three or four months. More than once. And, well, it's kind of a big production, but anyway. Or emission, but anyway. Especially water. We're just going just guide you what we did. And this is the kind of thing, we didn't have much faith in it to begin with, you know. And that's where we were. We didn't know the practice. No lama had told us to do the practice. Our teacher came, teachers came, they said, try this practice. You know, and so we're like, well, okay, they told us to try it, they're the Buddha, we have to try it. And I wasn't quite sure what it would do, you know. I've never done an enema in my life. I didn't even know what the word meant really and so they went into this long thing they got us hot water bottles and then they had a connection for a hose and then that had a soft tip on it and then here's the instructions they gave us and we did it by the book and here's what it did for us so we had a nice they said get into a place where if you have to do a very very sudden and unexpected major bowel movement that you have everything there you know like so we went out in the middle of the desert we went into a wash that had all sand and we dug like four big holes you know and then you know we were like I never thought we'd be teaching about it you know neither did I Yeah, yeah, yeah. Imagine my surprise. Frankly, it's a little easier if you don't have any clothes on, okay? Because it kind of, everything gets dirty, you know? And so frankly, it's easier if you don't have much clothes on. And then you have to hang the water bottle up like, we do it on a tree branch, okay? but it has to be, it's gravity-fed, so it has to be up in the air. The water, this is a personal advice, make sure it's body temperature, because it's a little bit weird if suddenly all this cold water comes in. And then coat the end of the tube, the hose, with some kind of, we use the ghee, but I think if I'm under some kind of, like I would be able to get sued by somebody, I would use a sterile hospital, some kind of a lubricant, which helps insert it into your anus. And I had never stuck anything in my anus before, so I was like, I didn't quite know what to do or how to do it. Make sure you can open the valve and shut the valve quickly. That's very important. That's very important. There's this little touch thing. You've got to learn, practice a little bit before you insert it anywhere. Like cutting it off quick. You don't want air. And you don't want air. You don't want air. So make sure the bottle is... Yeah, you have to fill it properly. Fill it properly. There's no air in you. And then you lay down on your stomach. You have some nice towels and blankets that you don't care about. Side. Side. Sorry? Side. Side. Okay, side. I haven't done it since. But anyway. on your side and then you insert the thing in your rear end and then, you know, slowly by the way, you shouldn't do it without a teacher right? No, you might get some brain teacher I mean, they taught us something when they were teaching us this they said, your relationship to your body will change like, it seems to be this very, I don't know how you say it you don't know your body very well, and you can't treat it very objectively. But once you start sticking things in, or sticking things in your nose, and like that, it becomes an automobile. It's like, you start to think of your body like you think of your car. And you're like, okay, I gotta put oil in the car, and I gotta make sure that the tires are good. And like that, you gain some, our Lama, Geshe-Notar, my Lama, he was very, very objective about his body. If the doctor told him eat 500 grams of this every day, he would have a little scale there. He would measure 500 grams. He wouldn't put anything in his body that he didn't feel was completely necessary for its proper fun. He wasn't attracted to food as a habit or eating as a habit. He just took food as like a laboratory. So then your feeling about your body changes. And they told us, David and Sharon told us, get curious about your body. like see what happens if you do this, and then observe what happens, and get better at it, and make changes, and make adjustments, and see how, so you're on your side, you're putting a set, you release the water, and they didn't really, we weren't speaking, they were just like telling us, and writing notes, and so we didn't know what to expect really, you know, and you let it go, and you're just like waiting, you know, and then, I'm just saying personal experience, which is better than books, right, and it just felt like, felt like water was filling, on your bottom. And then you just sit there for a while and you're wondering, is this enough? Or did I do it long enough? Or they told me something drafting was going to happen. And then suddenly, I don't know, it reaches this nerve ending that says poop. And then you have about ten seconds to get that water out, turn off the thing, and jump over one of the holes. And then you have this big explosion come back. And it's mostly, it's like a really gross water and all this poop, you know. And what they told us, and I believe it because we tried it, is that in the folds of your intestines over the years, fecal matter collects, it sticks there, it starts to harden, and then your digestive power starts to lessen. And if you can clean out all the little folds of the intestines pretty far out by doing this practice busting, then your digestive power gets higher and stronger. And so we repeated this two or three, four times, until the water was almost completely clear like that. And I don't know, it got to be kind of kinky fun after a while. You know, we're like jiggling and we're comparing. what came out, you know, and... I think it can be... It can be fun. These practices, they don't have to be threatening. Like, it is kind of new for you, and it kind of feels weird at first, but after, it's sort of fun. If you have a good group of people who are not so... who are, like, into can have fun with it. It is fun. And then I wanted to tell you about the effect it had on me personally, right? So, I'm to see how does it change me? How does it change my life? And you know, if you fast, I'm not very good at fasting because my blood sugar drops fast and I get headaches, really bizarre headaches. We fasted the first year and a half. Once a week we did fast. I'm not very good at it. My body doesn't work very well to fast, but my mind after a day or two of fasting is much sharper. And a lot of great meditations and a lot of wonderful thoughts coming in. and very, very desirable states of mind coming. So for me, Busty was sort of like an instant way to get the effects of fasting without all the problems of fasting. So it's like you're emptying out the lower half of your stomach instead of the top half. You know what I mean? And so oftentimes we would fast after that. But it was like all this... Poop is toxic. Poop isn't toxic. The longer you keep it in the body, every extra... When you poop, try to poop everything out. And take your time and try to get everything out. And don't go to sleep if you can poop it out. And yogis are very big about trying to poop before your asana practice. And Swami Sivananda was very big on that. His yogi said, at 10, 15, I want your poops, you know. And we start in asanas at 10, 25. And we just, in a retreat environment, and if you're eating well, you can get to where your poops are tied for the same day. And the toxins are eliminated quickly from your body. So try not to, you know, what happens in New York, you're busy, you're working, there's a deadline, there's a board meeting, and you try to hold it, and then it's like poison in your body. It is a poison. And so my own experience was that I felt much lighter, I felt very happy, I felt like, and David was telling us, I remember he said, Americans haven't missed a meal. You know, Americans, many Americans haven't missed a meal for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. And your digestive machine is working without a rest for 20 years. It's pumping, it's squeezing, it's processing the food 10, 20, 30 years without an hour off, without a day off. And what I personally found was that when we did Busty, I don't know anatomically, I'm not very good at all that, but my experience was that probably two days of food was eliminated. The fecal matter or the dross of two days of food was eliminated from my body. And I just felt like I had just done awesomeness. You know how when you just first come out of an awesomeness practice and you feel like all glowing? but I felt like that for like two days after that so it's a really really beautiful practice it's a wonderful practice and I really advise trying it and seeing if it doesn't eliminate things that may be holding you up in your asana and your yoga practice you might find I have a friend in New Jersey Anichini's brother and he took one day Buddhist boughs I don't know, it's like 20 years ago. And in those vows, you don't eat till noon. So he had never not eaten till noon before. And he had a weight problem, and he had an energy problem, and then he started fasting, he started doing these practices. And then he just changed completely. His body changed completely, his mind changed completely, and he just totally transformed him to change this one thing about how much junk you had in his intestines. So you should try it. It's really beautiful. Like if you don't have energy or you feel heavy, this is like free. It doesn't require the discipline of fasting. You don't have to deprive yourself of anything. And you just feel great after that. So that's my own personal... From someone who didn't believe in it, but who tried it because their Buddha told them to. It's a great practice. Afterwards, clean all the equipment thoroughly. We have alcohol, and we cleaned everything, sterilized everything. And then dry it, make sure it's dry. The hot water bottle and all the tubing, and then put it away nicely and stir it nicely, and it'll be ready for the next time. And only use distilled water. What's that? Purifying. Okay. Well, tell our caretakers. It can't be tap water. No. It cannot be tap water. It should be clear at that level. I think this is more vast being than you're supposed to do. Why don't we just read the verses? We'll just read one verse. Two verses. On the benefit and then we'll go. Okay. The power of the lower abdomen treatment destroys every disorder caused by excess activity of any of the humors of wind, vile, form within the liver, spleen, or stomach. Now this is just how we did the verse officially. Verse 28. This water treatment of the lower abdomen will give you a feeling of having purified completely the various bodily elements, powers of sense and the mind within. It makes your body glow and raises the flame of the inner fire. You should practice it until you reach the point where every excess of the humors of the body is vanquished. It makes you shine. Kantin. Say Kantin. It makes your body shine. And Kurshta. Say Kurshta. It helps make you lean. Lean and shiny. You say kanti? Karshtho. And it really does. It's like asana, but it's sort of cheaper and easier. And more fun if you're... I don't know about that. ...tread to do it. All right. I think we'll stop there tonight. And thank you again for everyone who worked so hard to help with Geshe-lo-ta's visit. It means a lot of work, so thank you, Chandra. Ani Chenzong did most of the work, but I'd like to give it a hand. 13th to 15th at Tujo. Ani Chenzong's teaching... Two very, very high Buddhist poems on the whole spiritual path. You need to give my... Catch that, April 13th to 15th. She can be impressed. Satsangyam. Vyam Guru Vatnam One thing about bhakti. If you have some, if you have common stomach problems, constipation, diarrhea, you think you might have picked up worms in India, which is very common among our students. It's child. any kind of stomach problems or even I think menstrual problems you might find it helps so it's free have a lot of tissues and some towels