Art by Ines Honfe.
Some time back at the beginning of the year, I attended a Kundalini Yoga Master Class with one of my teacher trainers' - Guru Dharam Khalsa.
The focus of the Master Class was Self-Mastery.
Synchronistically, I'd already decided that Self-Mastery was to be my personal focus for this year. And I've been doing a Kundalini Yoga meditation practice for Self-Mastery he introduced to us there ever since.
As I turned on the radio this morning and heard news of the bomb strikes against Syria and all the rhetoric around this, my memory of Guru Dharam's words to us from that class was powerfully stirred.
To paraphrase:
The world is becoming ever more polarised. As evidenced, for example, in the appearance and posturing of our political leaders, as well as the increasing extremes apparent in religious views, economic disparities, environmental destruction, war and so on.
This mirrors our inner polarity and separation on an individual level.
The ONLY way to effect change is for each of us to become masters of our inner world. To master our thoughts, emotions, words and actions.
To bring our shadow to the light of awareness.
And, by connecting with the unity and divine alchemy beyond polarity, create a new embodied consciousness that is able to transcend such apparent disparity, division and conflict.
As per Albert Einstein: "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it."
I see with absolute clarity how that polarity and duality has played out in my own life. Last year I enacted the extremes of heaven and hell on a grand scale.
And I also know that the practices I love and teach: Kundalini Yoga, Tantra, Ecstatic Dance and Goddess connection, are super-powerful ways to cultivate my capacity to master my inner world and live as the embodiment of non-duality, where my dark and light are embraced, integrated, elevated and loved into luminous coexistence.
It is here, in the divine union of sex and spirit, masculine and feminine, light and dark, body and mind, that we experience the ecstasy and liberation of knowing and being one-ness.
The key, and the paradox, as I see it, in the effectiveness of these and all other such practices (for there are many paths to the same destination) is a discipline of daily practice.
And this is the driving inspiration behind my Awakening Your Ecstatic Potential online course, which provides a 40-day programme for opening to an awareness of one-self as part of all creation.
More and more I recognise my infinite power as a creator of reality. This is a power we ALL have. Now, as always, I invite us to use that power wisely.
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If you are curious to tap into your inner wisdom and embodied ecstasy, I have both online and in-person offerings, including: online Kundalini Yoga and Ecstatic Awakening courses and weekly Kundalini Yoga and Dancing the Goddess classes in North London. To progress more rapidly and deeply, I also offer one-to-one coaching. Please be in touch to enquire.