Afleveringen
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This episode is the talk from our Core Strength Clam Mind Guided Meditation Series, which is now also available in our Life Force Meditations Series.
The Life Force Meditation Series has bundled three of our programs, Prana, Core Strength, and Chakras, into one mega program, which is divided into three phases. The first phase covers all you need to know about prana to generate and store prana.
This talk introduces phase two of this mega program. Phase 2 focuses on developing core strength through grounding, alignment, and pulsation practices. These are the keys to self-regulation and building resilience in handling the stresses and challenges of daily life.
You will learn powerful yogic techniques to cultivate a deep sense of inner stability, strength, and connection to your body-mind. You gain essential tools for establishing a solid foundation for your meditation practice and to remain grounded, centered, and stable in daily life.
The meditations in this phase guide you in exploring how to ground yourself, align your physical and energetic bodies, and work with the natural pulsations of life force within you.
To build energy and resilience, you will learn to manipulate two important internal muscles: the respiratory diaphragm and the pelvic floor.
By the end of this phase, you will have developed practical skills for centering yourself, managing your energy, and maintaining a strong, relaxed presence even in challenging situations.
You will better understand the subtle anatomy of the body-mind system and how to work with it for greater stability and awareness in meditation and in daily life.
These practices lay the groundwork for more advanced chakra meditations and ajapa japa in phase 3 of the course.
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This podcast episode focuses on the third eye of intuition, ajna chakra. We have compiled two talks by Jayne and myself.
The first is the introduction to the Awakening The Third Eye of Intuition Course.
The second is from the Light on the Chakras and Kundalinī Course held in 2022 and 2023.
Welcome to the Awaken Your Third Eye of Intuition course.The purpose of this course is to support you in activating and awakening ājnā chakra, your third eye, also called the divine eye. It is the eye that can see into your soul. One of the great byproducts of activating your third eye is the development of a powerful intuition to gain access to the knowledge and wisdom in you.
Intuition is the ability to perceive all the possibilities inherent in the present moment and know which is best for you at that time. A powerful intuition enables you to make good decisions in line with your life purpose. It also helps you support others and form meaningful relationships. Unfortunately, intuition, which is potential in all of us, is usually dormant or functions erratically unless it is developed through regular meditation practice.
This is why Jayne and I have designed this course to give you the knowledge, techniques, support, and inspiration to initiate and develop a stable relationship with your ajna chakra, your third eye.
The meditation techniques in this course activate your ājnā chakra, enabling you to “see” the subtle dimension of your inner being - the part of you that is rich with knowledge, meaning, and purpose, and infinite possibilities.
By turning your attention inward, you connect with yourself and your latent, dormant powers. This connection turns on inner guidance, which is what most people need.
Most people look outside of themselves for guidance, have lost connection with their own inner wisdom, and, therefore, feel lost and confused.
As you develop your third eye, you also have access to your own inner wisdom, which is your intuition. Of course, we all need to learn from the world, but we also need to tune in to our inner sense of what suits us. That is important. Without that inner sense, the outer world can’t make an impression and loses its power and ability to change things for you.
You will learn how to reduce your mental noise so that you can tune into the silence at the core of your being, where great power, knowledge, and wisdom reside. And this is where you will find your intuition.
Excerpt from the Light on the Chakras and Kundalinī Course.This section aims to explore each chakra individually, deconstructing the chakra and kundalini system. It's very important that you spend some time contemplating each chakra, allowing the various elements within it to come alive within you. Some of these elements are easily accessible to you; you have a karmic relationship with them. Some of them are not accessible, you don't have a karmic relationship with them, or you have a negative karmic relationship. Those are the elements that you need to examine.
See the course
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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This episode is the talk from our Prana and Pranic Healing Guided Meditation Series, which is now also available in our Life Force Meditations Series. This series has bundled together three of our programs, Prana, Core Strength, and Chakras, into one mega program.
The first phase of this mega program, the Life Force Series, enables you to gain an authentic experience of prana and the ability to generate and store prana.
In the second phase of the Life Force Series, you learn how to use your prana to create physical and emotional resilience to handle daily life's stresses and challenges.
In the third phase of the series, you learn to use prana to purify, activate, and eventually awaken two important chakras.
The first is the manipura chakra, which is responsible for health, vitality, power, and resilience.
The second chakra in the bundle is ajna chakra, the third eye, which is responsible for intuition, higher intelligence, and access to the highest consciousness.
You need as much prana as you can get to live a healthy life and progress on the spiritual path.
This talk describes prana, why it's crucial for our health and spiritual development, and how we can become more aware of this subtle yet powerful force within us. We'll discuss the different types of prana in the body, how to cultivate and direct this energy, and its role in yoga and meditation practices.
Whether you're a seasoned yogi or new to the concept of subtle energy, this episode will provide valuable insights to help you tap into your inner vitality and enhance your overall well-being.
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Following our episode on self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-mastery, episode 13 of our podcast series, quite a lot of people have written to us asking us which meditation practice they should start with and how to use all the various meditations we have on the website. Which meditations are particularly suited to cultivating self-awareness, which is for self-regulation, and is there a path that can be followed to support successful meditation? These are great questions because we need to understand what techniques are available and how to apply them properly.
We discuss
What is success in meditation?Should we use one technique or many, and if many, how do we use them?The success path is defined.The journey begins with relaxation techniques because self-awareness is difficult if you’re not relaxed. The first is the 3 Easy Steps to Deep Relaxation, which teaches this.The second stage begins once you have attained a degree of relaxation and is when you cultivate self-awareness. The primary practice for this is Inner Silence, Antar Mouna.Being inside the mind is like being inside a washing machine. Inner Silence gets you outside of your mind.The third state of self-awareness and self-regulation is mastering our energy systems, our life force, prāna. Initially, this can be done by learning the breathing technique Ujjayi Pranayama.Once you have developed ujjayi and connected to the breath and prana, you will move to the Pranic Healing Meditations series, which teaches you how to direct prana to specific parts of the body, facilitating healing and revitalization.Once you can charge your body with energy, we teach a very important series of meditations called the Core Strength, Calm Mind. It teaches grounding, the ability to remain grounded and stable in the present moment, and self-awareness while facing stress and life's challenges.Once you can work with your prana and these grounding and energizing practices, you can move into the next stage by developing your connection to your highest self, the source of your intelligence and intuition. Advanced mantras and Ajapa Japa Meditations are taught at this stage.The fifth stage takes self-awareness and self-regulation to self-mastery.📩 Subscribe to our Newsletter
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The following two talks by Jayne on the Shadow were taken from the Light in the Chakras and Kundalinī Course that we ran in 2022. They are taken from Classes 3 and 5.
Understanding what the shadow is and being able to deal with upwellings from the shadow is extremely important in the more advanced practices of the yoga-tantra tradition. This is because they aim to purify the unconscious.
The way they do this is via yoga-tantra rituals in which various mantras and symbols are used to invoke the higher spiritual archetypes from within the psyche. Once the practitioner is established in his or her relationship with these higher forces, then the darker forces can be invoked and brought into a relationship with the light and can be transmuted. This results in a powerful method for self-transformation.
We teach this in our Light on the Chakras and Kundalinī 9-month Course that we teach every few years.
The concept of the shadow originated from Carl Jung's psychoanalytic research into the unconscious. His descriptions of the shadow are invaluable for personal and spiritual growth when combined with Eastern yoga-tantra practices.
Jayne describes the shadow as our unconscious, our psyche, encompassing everything that isn't our ego. She describes how meditation is a powerful tool for encountering the shadow, especially when chakra meditations unite the lower chakras, which contain most of our darker animal instincts, with our higher chakras.
The lower chakras are the energy centers that contain the most active areas of shadow activity that we experience, especially around money, security, sex, and power. They are furthest from the higher chakras associated with empathy, communication, and spirituality.
A key point that she makes is how an unconscious shadow can lead to feelings of isolation and alienation. When dominated by the lower chakras, we may feel disconnected from ourselves and struggle to find meaning in life. This can manifest as narcissism, transactional relationships, and an overemphasis on material pursuits.
Jayne describes how the process of developing self-awareness as part of a process of integrating the shadow with our conscious self. This is a path to becoming more whole, complex, and authentic.
Shadowwork can be a journey toward a more profound understanding of existence that alleviates feelings of isolation and connects us to a sense of life beyond mere material existence.
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Awaken the Third Eye: https://www.bigshakti.com/course/awaken-the-third-eye
Light on the Chakras and Kundalini: https://www.bigshakti.com/course/chakras-and-kundalini
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Here are the main points of this podcast
Self-awareness is the core principle in yoga and meditation. It reflects consciousness and helps us transcend life’s problems by anchoring us in the self.Consciousness is our center. The body and mind are composed of energy, which can be gross, subtle, or causal. Cultivating self-awareness allows us to experience these various forms of energy more deeply.Advanced yogis refine their consciousness to perceive causal energy, the highest form of spiritual energy, through deep self-awareness.Self-regulation involves adjusting our body, mind, and reactions to achieve greater self-control and stability, building on self-awareness.Self-mastery is achieved through a cycle of self-awareness and self-regulation, leading to a profound alignment of thoughts, feelings, and actions with higher aspirations.Yoga philosophy distinguishes between the egoic self and the universal cosmic self, with spiritual practices aiming to integrate and transcend the egoic self towards enlightenment.From a psychological standpoint, self-awareness involves recognizing and understanding our internal experiences and how they influence our behavior.Practices like mindfulness meditation, journaling, and reflection help cultivate self-awareness by observing our thoughts and emotions without judgment.Self-regulation, essential for deliberate and constructive actions, is the ability to manage and modulate our emotional and behavioral responses through self-awareness.The progression from self-awareness to self-regulation to self-mastery is sequential yet cyclical, with each stage enhancing the others and fostering continuous personal growth.Big Shakti offers courses and meditations, such as Inner Silence Meditation, Yoga Nidra, and Ajapa Japa, that focus on self-awareness and self-regulation to support personal and spiritual development.The Find Life Purpose Course helps individuals define clear goals and purpose, facilitating the practice of self-awareness and self-regulation to achieve meaningful and fulfilling lives.📩 Subscribe to our Newsletter
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This episode is based on a talk given by Dr. Swami Shankardev to Yogic Studies students in February 2005 on the keys to heart presence and selfless service.
This talk arose in response to a student who was struggling to practice service, an aspect of Karma Yoga.
In the talk, Swami Shankardev discusses the following:
1. Selfless service is an important path to managing the ego and bringing it into a relationship with the highest Self.
2. How true service illuminates the mind, enabling us to connect to a higher, more conscious state of being.
3. Even in enlightened states, the ego still exists and needs to be managed. (Ego is only eradicated at the very last stage of human evolution.)
4. Selfless service is a path to purifying the chakras, allowing higher consciousness and intuition to flow into our lives. Without this capacity for giving, we remain overly attached to things that block consciousness from moving beyond the constricting influence of the ego.
The main meditation to disentangle from the selfish aspect of the ego and become centered in the highest Self is Inner Silence (Antar Mouna). This practice enables you to observe the mind and the ego, to free yourself from their negative influence, and to come back into a relationship with the highest Self.
One of the best methods for forging a path between our individual self and the universal Self is Ajapa Japa. This wonderful meditation practice charges the mind with energy and links individual consciousness with higher consciousness. We can then act with an awareness of the universal within our individual lives.
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This podcast episode is from an interview with my good friend Ron Ehrlich in 2019 for his podcast Unstress. For many years, Ron was my holistic dentist. However, he has recently found a new life purpose and has retired to focus on health education. You can find out more about Ron and the wonderful work he is doing at his website, Unstress Online: https://www.unstressonline.com.
In this episode, we discuss the vital importance of self-awareness, self-knowledge and how that is the key to Finding Life Purpose. Ron asked me to talk about the admonitions of the great philosophers over the last millennia to know ourselves and to address the question of who we really are. Ron and I both agree that it's never been more important to ask the question “Who am I?" because of the growth of technology and AI and the fact that, if we don’t ask ourselves this question, technology may know us better than we will ourselves. And this is a dangerous thing.
Topics in this podcast include
1. The importance of Self-awareness in knowing who we are and finding purpose.
2. The three types of purpose – common purpose, life purpose, and ultimate purpose.
3. What is the self?
4. What is the difference between the authentic Self and the ego self.
5. How the ego and all our different selves form.
6. How to manage negative ego patterns?
7. How the ego and shadow form.
8. Midlife crisis.
9. Chakras.
10. Different types of meditation practice for health and wellbeing.
Check out Big Shakti's Find Life Purpose Online Course https://bigshakti.com/shop/online-courses/finding-life-purpose/
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In today’s episode, we are providing you with the Introductory lesson from Healing the Mind – Ajapa Japa Stage 1 Course. It is also available as a video on Big Shakti’s YouTube channel.
Ajapa Japa is a wonderful and extremely powerful form of meditation that combines many forms of meditation, including relaxation, mindfulness, breath, prana, life force, and a mantra to heal the body and mind and activate and awaken the chakras and kundalini. It calms an overactive mind, balances emotions, and creates physical and mental resilience, as well as awakening consciousness.
Ajapa Japa is the most powerful and useful of all the meditation practices I use in my medical practice.
Of course, it is one thing to learn the technique, but it is another to understand how to apply it to achieve your desired results. The MP3 series on Ajapa Japa is available on Big Shakti. However, I highly advise you to enroll in the Healing the Mind Ajapa Japa Stage 1 course. It tells you how to use the technique and the methodology, which means applying the technique to achieve your desired results. I can’t recommend this course more highly.
To learn moreTo learn more about how to apply Ajapa Japa meditation for healing and for your spiritual evolution, Big Shakti teaches guided yoga and meditation techniques that systematically take systematically guide you into the practice of Ajapa Japa. This guided training program is called Ajapa Japa, Breath and Mantra. https://bigshakti.com/shop/guided-meditations/ajapa-japa-breath-mantra-consciousness/
If you wish to really understand how to use Ajapa Japa to support the healing of mental illness and to cultivate a strong mind, then we highly recommend that you enroll in the online course, Healing the Mind Meditation Course – Ajapa Japa Stage 1. https://bigshakti.com/shop/online-courses/healing-the-mind-ajapa-japa-meditation-course/
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If you only ever study one yoga meditation technique over your lifetime, you would be wise to choose Ajapa Japa. Ajapa Japa combines many forms of meditation into one powerful practice that heals and transforms your mind.
Ajapa Japa is a potent guided yoga and meditation technique that you can use to improve every part of your life: physical, mental, and spiritual. The practice circulates the light of awareness through the body and mind. The result is that you become more Alive, Aligned, and Enlightened.
Yoga TantraAjapa Japa is the foundation meditation upon which all Yoga-Tantra practice rests. Ajapa Japa is a complete system for healing, self-development, and spiritual awareness.
Of all the techniques in the yoga tantra system, Ajapa Japa, the movement of your breath, prāna, a mantra in a psychic passage, is one of the most powerful. The word japa can be defined as the continuous repetition of a mantra. When the suffix ‘a’ is added, it implies that the process of mantra repetition becomes spontaneous.
While japa requires continuous, conscious effort to repeat the mantra verbally or mentally and to turn the beads, ajapa requires no effort. It is said that japa comes from the mouth, whereas ajapa comes from the breath and from the heart. Japa is the preliminary practice of mantra repetition, and ajapa is the perfection of this practice.
The Ajapa Gāyatrī MantraThe theory behind Ajapa Japa is that there is a mantra called the Ajapa Gāyatrī Mantra, vibrating in you all the time. This is the breath mantra SO HM, which is also called the Ham-sa mantra. Ajapa japa is a technique in which you repeat the mantra of the breath, SO HM, while you tune into the mantra that is always present in you. As such, you do not need any initiation from a guru to give you a mantra, as it is already and always within you.
This core Yoga-Tantra teaching reveals the mantra hidden at the core of your being that is vibrating you into existence. In both human beings and the cosmos, there is a universal sound vibration, a powerful mantra that can be heard in the subtle breath that arises from the spiritual dimensions of your being. In the ancient yogic texts, this mantra is the song of the soul singing you into existence. Ajapa Japa meditation enables you to tune into this most powerful mantra resonating at the very heart of your being. As you tune into the sound, you cognize the intrinsic connection between your individual self, your universal self, and the cosmos as a whole.
Kriya yogaAjapa Japa is a form of kriya yoga and kundalinī yoga. The word kriya means active, and kriya yoga is an active form of yoga, which activates kundalinī, the primal cosmic power that lies dormant in the base chakra, mūlādhāra. The word kriya comes from the same root as the word karma, which also action. So Ajapa Japa is a powerful technique that, once learned, is used in many more powerful forms of meditation to activate the latent powers and abilities that lie hidden in you.
By aligning yourself with this great and powerful mystery, you synchronize your deepest self with the expansive cosmos. Your inner and outer worlds become one, and you experience the bliss of living an authentic, meaningful, and harmonious life.
To learn moreTo learn more about how to apply Ajapa Japa meditation for healing and for your spiritual evolution, Big Shakti teaches guided yoga and meditation techniques that systematically take systematically guide you into the practice of Ajapa Japa. This guided training program is called Ajapa Japa, Breath and Mantra.
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This episode is taken from a series of lectures given by Dr Swami Shankardev to a yoga group in 2005. It focuses on tantra.
He briefly describes the difference between yoga and tantra and how tantra fits into the profound philosophical systems of India.
Out of the myriad systems that arose over the millennia, 6 systems, called the shad darshana, became the most famous. The six systems are Gautama’s Nyāya, Kanāda’s Vaisheshika, Kapila’s Sāmkhya, Patanjali’s yoga sutras, Jaimini’s Pūrva Mīmāmsā, and Bādarāyana’s Uttara Mīmāmsā, which is also called Vedānta.
Tantra lies outside of these six. It is a vast sprawling amorphous system that enables you to liberate energy to expand your consciousness so that you see that everything in existence has consciousness at its center.
The tools of tantra are mantra and yantra, name and form. By vibrating matter with a mantra, a name of the divine, the power within a sacred form or symbol, a yantra, is liberated. The world is seen to shine with divine radiance. You become a seer. Consciousness’ is then experienced as the eternally unchanging reality, all-knowing and full of bliss.
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This episode is taken from Big Shakti’s Light on the Chakras and Kundalinī training master class series. This masterclass is taught once every two years and is conducted over nine months.
In this episode, which comes out of Lesson 1, we discuss the concepts of yoga, meditation, tantra, and yoga-tantra.
The Sanskrit word yoga means connection or union. The English word meditation also means the connection of the meditator (the consciousness of the meditator with the object of meditation via the act of practicing meditation.
Yoga and meditation are, therefore, synonyms. One is Sanskrit. The other is English. However, they point to the same thing, conscious connection. The aim of all systems of yoga is to consciously connect with your body, mind, and consciousness so that you are more in touch with yourself. You can then be more in touch with all of life.
Tantra is a wisdom tradition and an empirical philosophy, like Raja Yoga, that places major emphasis on embodying knowledge and experience rather than intellectual speculation. It is a profound system of self-transformation that teaches liberation of consciousness through the release of energy trapped within the chakras, particularly within the mūlādhāra chakra.
So, while Raja Yoga is a science of consciousness, tantra is a science of energy. It is the science of self-transformation that is most appropriate for us in this day and age.
All of Big Shakti's meditations and courses are based on yoga-tantra and teach you how to cultivate and amplify self-awareness, liberate trapped energy, and awaken higher consciousness.
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This episode is available on YouTube https://youtu.be/ORs0rDsqZBQ
In this episode of Big Shakti’s podcast, I interview Jayne Stevenson, my life partner and co-creator of Big Shakti. We have been together in this life for 22 wonderful years.
We talk about Jayne’s counseling and psychotherapy practice and how she combines spirituality and creativity, the role of intuitive healing, and dreams. While Carl Jung described creativity as a primal instinct, Jayne has developed a way of spiritualizing creativity to bring it to a higher level of expression through the methods taught by Big Shakti.
She talks about how she supports people to connect to the depths of the unconscious mind, which contains vast powers, mythic forces, and all the archetypes, the building blocks of life. Accessing this part enables you to connect to hidden aspects of your deeper nature that support removing old archaic, distorted, and neurotic patterns that keep you stuck in negative and destructive patterns of thinking and behavior.
We also talk about Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist whose amazing body of work has had a major influence on modern psychology and enables you to access the deeper unconscious mind. And his work has also had an amazing influence on Jayne. She describes a series of initiatory dreams that involved the image of Carl Jung, who symbolizes a Christ-like figure, a sage with great wisdom. She had these dreams when she was a young woman following a serious car accident, and these dreams led to an experience of deep healing and set the course for her life’s work.
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This podcast episode is from an interview with my good friend Ron Ehrlich in 2022 for his podcast Unstress. For many years Ron was also my holistic dentist. However, he has recently retired to focus more on health education. You can find out more about Ron and the wonderful work he is doing at his website Unstress Online https://www.unstressonline.com.
In this podcast, we discuss my approach to mind-body medicine and how I incorporate meditation and Eastern and Western methods of mind-body medicine and psychotherapy into my medical and yoga therapy practice.
We discuss the history of mind-body medicine, what it is, and how relaxation is a foundation technique that enables positive changes.
I describe how both Western methods of healing and psychology and Eastern healing, psychology, and various spiritual and wisdom philosophies have defined my journey. The main focus of my approach to medicine and therapy is based on yoga and meditation as methods of connecting more to oneself, developing the power to feel, experience, and what is actually happening within the body and mind so that you can make appropriate changes and optimize your life. Meditation and psychotherapy also support you in understanding the role that illness plays in the world and that it plays in your life.
To achieve these goals, methods to cultivate self-awareness have been the foundation of everything I do.
When you are self-aware, you can strengthen your sense of self, both as an individual and as a universal being. Jungian depth psychology and Eastern approaches to psychotherapy really facilitate your ability to pierce your awareness deep into the psyche, in the dark recesses of your soul, to discover your strengths and your weaknesses, which means your humanity and how wonderful each one of us is despite our flaws.
We also discuss
Polyvagal theory, which is a revolutionary new view of the autonomic nervous systemThe difference between counseling and psychotherapyWhat reparenting means in therapy and how we focus to develop a mature internal adult, which enables you to stand on your own two feet in life, physically, mentally, and spiritually. This means that you no longer depend so much on external sources to make decisions but have access to your own inner strengths and abilitiesAnd how I use yoga and meditation to support patients in connecting with their inner strength and ability to heal themselves.📩 Subscribe to our Newsletter
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A video of this podcast episode is on Big Shakti's youtube channel https://youtu.be/UMQ7yQ2v4Rk
This podcast episode is taken from Big Shakti’s Light on the Chakras and Kundalinī training master class series. This masterclass is taught once every two years and is conducted over nine months. It consists of 20 lessons, and you receive one lesson every two weeks, and after two lessons, there is a live class where you get some extra theory, practice a meditation on the chakras and kundalinī, the serpent power coiled in the base chakra, and have an opportunity to ask questions and review your progress.
In this podcast, which comes out of Lesson 3, we are going to discuss the concept of self-awareness. This is the central concept in all of yoga, yoga tantra, and meditative practice. The core aim of all wisdom traditions is self-knowledge. Know thyself, and unto yourself be true, is the ancient dictum that has been passed down through the ages.
As you direct your attention inwards, the ultimate goal of this process is to touch the core of your being, your true and authentic self. The journey to the self is via the mind and the deep psyche, the unconscious, called the shadow. The authentic self that you are aiming to be aware of is the eternally unchanging principle. It is the ground of being. All life, which includes your body and mind, are eternally changing energy patterns. Birth, life, and death are all under the control of energies that power the world, both the visible and invisible. The best place to be to manage these energies is in the self. We call this the witness position. When you are in the witness, you are in the witness protection program. In this place, you are protected from the dark forces of the mind and psyche, from past undigested emotions and traumas.
When you are identified with the duality of the mind and emotions, you are identified with the eternally changing energies, which can be positive or negative, creative or destructive, pleasant or unpleasant. When you are identified with the self, you are connected to your center, a stable, unchanging, blissful part of you from which you can observe the changes occurring in your mental and emotional energy patterns, for example, and you can do something about them if you need to.
The self is the center. If you are centered in the self, then any perturbations in life can be managed because if you can hold onto your center during the tough times, you are grounded, centered, stable, and not overwhelmed. However, if you are not centered, then any change in the outer world will destabilize you because you don’t have a fixed center. You need the outer world to remain the same to feel safe. Any change is scary if you are not self-aware and you don’t have a center.
The self is the source of all knowledge and who you are. So, the aim of meditation is to know more and more about who you are and expand your sense of self. In meditation, you actively engage in self-reflection, and the result of this is self-discovery. You discover parts of yourself, both your strengths and your weaknesses. As a result, you can begin to do what is required to manage your weaknesses by accessing your hidden strengths.
All of Big Shakti's meditations and courses teach you how to cultivate and amplify self-awareness.
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This podcast episode is all about Yoga Nidra, a wonderful relaxation meditation technique developed by the great yoga adept Swami Satyananda Saraswati of the Bihar School of Yoga in India.
Yoga Nidra, as a meditation technique, enables you to remain awake and alert as you venture into the deep sleep state. Instead of becoming unconscious, you experience an exalted state of consciousness and a deep, blissful connection to the highest Self.
We describe Yoga Nidra:
How it enables you to systematically relax each part of your physical body and move your awareness to your subtle layers, emotions, and deeper mind. As you do this, you relax and rejuvenate your whole self.The three stages of Yoga Nidra, which include recuperation from exhaustion, purification of old tensions and traumas from the unconscious mind, and the attainment of an exalted state of consciousness.The importance of Yoga Nidra for deep rest and how it can be used to overcome the negative effects of sleep disturbance and insomnia.How it removes deep-seated tensionsYoga Nidra in therapy and psychotherapy How to practice Yoga Nidra using a guided MP3.Included in this podcast is the first track from Big Shakti's Introduction to Meditation and Yoga Nidra MP3 series.
To purchase Big Shakti's Introduction to Meditation and Yoga Nidra MP3 series, click here.
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🧘🏻♀️️Jayne Stevenson’s intuitive healing and dream therapy practice
🧘 Dr. Swami Shankardev’s medical and psychotherapy practice
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In this podcast, you will hear the first track of the 3 Easy Steps to Deep Relaxation Meditation MP3 series.
We intend to use these first few podcasts to provide some background information on yoga and meditation. Once we have covered the basics, then we can take a deep dive into the more amazing and wonderful aspects of Indian philosophy and its esoteric traditions.
Probably the most basic and fundamental aspect of yoga and meditation is relaxation. Though it is a foundation practice, that does not mean it is easy. In fact, it is a lot more difficult than most people think. This is because true relaxation means more than just muscular relaxation. It means having a relaxed mind, emotions, and personality.
What happens for most people who start to meditate is that they begin with some basic relaxation technique or use a simple form of meditation aiming to relax their body and mind. That is, they aim to reduce the negative effects of stress and calm an overactive mind. Most people can only relax the more superficial layers of their body and mind. It can be difficult to penetrate relaxation into the deeper layers of the mind and emotions because of a lifetime of stored stresses, traumas, and tensions and the demands of a busy life. To achieve deeper relaxation to remove the negative effects of stress or trauma, you need other practices that help to remove deeper tensions and restore balance.
We have two MP3 series and one course on Relaxation Meditation.
The MP3 series that are available at www.bigshakti.com are:
Introduction to Yoga Nidra and Meditation - Yoga Nidra Meditation is the most popular relaxation meditation in the world today. There are three meditations in this Yoga Nidra package.
3 Easy Steps to Deep Relaxation - This series of yoga and meditation techniques takes you step by step through the process of relaxation and how to handle stress with greater resilience, mental calm, and understanding.
The online course, which you can do in your own time, is:
Relaxation Meditation – Relax, De-Stress, Recuperate - This is our main course on Relaxation Meditation. It is a dive into stress, tension, and relaxation meditation. It guides you toward mastery of relaxation meditation so that you become a more relaxed person with the ability to remain relatively relaxed under difficult and challenging circumstances.
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🎙️ Big Shakti Podcast
🎧 Big Shakti Meditations
🌿️ Big Shakti’s Yoga and Meditation Courses
🧘🏻♀️️Jayne Stevenson’s intuitive healing and dream therapy practice
🧘 Dr. Swami Shankardev’s medical and psychotherapy practice
📹 Big Shakti’s YouTube Channel
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Today's podcast episode describes what yoga and meditation are, how meditation is both a technique and a state of being, and how meditation is a process of self-discovery that unfolds in stages.
The stages of meditation are described in detail, including the stage of relaxation and introversion, the stage of concentration, the true meditative state, and the state of absorption into cosmic consciousness culminating in self-realization.
The benefits of meditation are also described, as well as the types of meditation that Big Shakti offers to support you in moving through the various stages.
📩 Subscribe to our Newsletter
🎙️ Big Shakti Podcast
🎧 Big Shakti Meditations
🌿️ Big Shakti’s Yoga and Meditation Courses
🧘🏻♀️️Jayne Stevenson’s intuitive healing and dream therapy practice
🧘 Dr. Swami Shankardev’s medical and psychotherapy practice
📹 Big Shakti’s YouTube Channel
