 Good morning everybody. It is Friday morning, June 17th. This video is coming to you guys a little bit later than I had initially planned for you guys. This is going to be our how-to and why inversions are so important video. But in divine timing, this morning I released a video at 10am eastern time with my friend Emmy where we spoke a lot about the yoga practice and using it as a modality for healing the energetic body which is what the yoga practice is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a modality for healing the energetic body through the physical body. And so I guess with divine timing, this video is coming at a perfect time, not the time I had originally planned. Of course, as you guys know, I got really sick with a fever and then after I got over that fever, I was on my cycle and we don't do inversions on our cycles because inversions flip the body upside down and the woman is on her cycle. That's an aponic detox that the body is taking and so a little bit upside down would be too chronic. And so that's why we don't do inversions on our cycles. So here I am off my cycle without a fever. But I talked to you guys about headstands and other types of inversions. All right. Sorry about that. I'm still trying to figure out camera angles for doing stuff outside of filming at the desk. And so again, an inversion would be things like a headstand or a shoulder stand. A headstand in Sanskrit is shashasana. That's the king of asanas. A shoulder stand is salumbasarvangasana or sarvangasana. That's the queen of asanas. And the beauty, there's so many different purposes for flipping your body upside down. If we're looking at the physicality of flipping your body upside down, what's happening is you're draining a lot of your vital organs. You're allowing the organs to flip in a way so that the kidneys can drain, the livers can drain. You're also looking at taking the calves upside down too in a full headstand, which we're going to talk about because some of you guys aren't ready for a full headstand yet. That's okay. But if you are in a full headstand, you're also giving your calves the availability to also drain. And the calves, for most of you guys, you probably know this, the calves are the second heart of the body. That's what pumps your blood from your lower body into your upper body. And blood is one of the most fascinating, fascinating things I find in the human body, because it literally is a physical expression of your energetic prana or your energetic life form. For example, even though my blood type is O-negative and there's a lot of O-negatives out there, well actually there's not a lot of O-negatives out there because Rhesus-negative is a minority of people, but my O-negative is going to show a different DNA spread in someone like Shanti from Aquarius Rising Africa who's also O-negative because our blood is our sacred DNA. And us in this side of truth know a lot more about that than I can say on this video. So with the blood within your own body, within your own sacred shakti or expression of your soul, the blood is the, sorry, you might hear my dog moving around on the sofa early in the morning, so if you hear that, that's what's going on. But your blood is perfectly potent for you, for it to heal you and to clear things within you. And sometimes the blood gets stuck. You know, if you've ever had cupping done and it bruises, it's like a hickey or they cop, it's because they're pulling up old blood in a tight or congested area of the body to allow new blood to come in to cleanse and heal the body. And so on a very basic level, when the legs are flipped upside down, when the calves flip upside down, you're allowing that blood from the calves to come all the way back down into the heart to be cleansed to then go back and further cleanse the body. That's why that's the one purpose of aerobics too is to get the blood pumping through the body, to get the blood moving through the body. And of course, a lot of the yoga practices are those from aerobic to anaerobic, aerobic to anaerobic back and forth. So you keep the sweat coming, you keep the blood moving, but in the anaerobic portions, you're building muscle and burning the bad fat of the body to keep the body healthy as well. So another point of inversions besides draining the organs, flipping the blood upside down from the lower body is also getting the oxygen to move into the headspace more. And on a very basic level, inversions like headstand can be kind of like nature's facelift. Inversions will often trigger the regrowth of hormones and certain things within, especially the face to choose combat wrinkles and all that kind of stuff. And funnily enough, that usually is a selling point. You're trying to get somebody to learn a headstand is that is that it's kind of like nature's Botox. Now, from a very spiritual, from a very spiritual perspective, which to me is the most important is the dripping of the Kundalini down your Shoshuna. Now, we have spoken so much about Shoshuna and Kundalini in other videos. And because the Kundalini because Shoshuna is like this pathway, this tunnel that runs along the spine, it isn't the spine, but it runs along the spine. The spine is the marker for where Shoshuna is. All right. And the Kundalini lives at the, again, at the base of the body for every person, doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman, your Kundalini is down in your pelvic floor. So Kundalini is going to lie in this particular area, right in the pelvic floor. And it's represented by a coiled snake. And as the coiled snake starts to move, especially through physical movement through twisting through all sorts of stuff to get things moving and flushing in the body, it's going to start to unravel itself. And then the next place it's going to travel, it's going to travel up the spine into the upper part of consciousness. So into the top chakra is here. And the sixth chakra is right here between your eyes. So it's going to start to move. And it's going to start to travel up your spine and into the top part of your head. And so when we flip it to an inversion, what we're doing is we're assisting that Kundalini to start to drip down the spine, we're assisting it. Now, the thing we spoke about with Stephanie and Shanti a few weeks ago, which on the Auk episode, which I will include that in the description box, is that we don't want enlightenment. We don't want Kundalini to hit all at once, right? There's tons of books out there about people who experienced it happening at one time. And it can be very traumatic for the nervous system and for the perception of the mind because you have to remember, regardless of how awake you are in this world, our minds have been conditioned and programmed to see life in a certain way. And so that deprogramming, it's kind of like when someone's being deprogrammed from a cult, it takes a while to deprogram, right? And so it takes a while to get all of those held beliefs to kind of dissipate. And so the same thing with Kundalini, because we don't want to trigger the nervous system, we don't want to put us into a place of trauma, it's very important that Kundalini start to arise in a slow, way, okay? And so in these headstands or in these shoulder stands, you're slowly allowing the potency of the Prana to drip slowly down Shashuna and into the human brain. All right, so with that being said, things that I tell my students a lot is that I don't care if your feet ever come up into a headstand. Now, I know I just talked about the calves draining and there are other things you can do to get the calves to drain that don't involve a full headstand. If you can't get your feet up yet into a headstand. One thing I'm going to ask of you guys, do not, do not, do not, do not do two things. Do not get yourself a contraption like a bar or a chair to hang upside down on. Don't do that. That's not, that's not doing any good to you unless you have an actual disorder like cerebral palsy or there's something going on with your body that you're still working through. If you're a healthy person, you need to be doing your headstand without anything supporting you because you have muscles. God gave you all the muscles you need to do this without support. And so doing it with support is going to allow for you to possibly injure yourself, right? So if you're doing a headstand on a chair or on one of those little contraptions, you're probably going to end up hurting yourself because it's allowing you the opportunity to not engage your muscles. And as we spoke about with Emmy, the muscles are responsible for moving the energy along. It's also kind of cheating. Like my teacher would say bad man or bad woman, at least if he saw you cheating on your headstand. Another thing I'm going to ask you not to do is not to use the wall. So do not kick up onto the wall for your headstand or for your handstand, which handstands are not that important. We want to look at headstand first. And this is because if you're using the wall, the wall is going to enable you. Using the wall could result in, and again, you getting injured, okay? Because you're allowing something else to support your body weight besides your own body weight, supporting your body weight, if that makes sense. I know it's in vogue. It's in vogue for the NASA flow classes for them to have you use the wall. But in my opinion, A, that's lazy teaching and B, that's ignorant teaching and C, that's showing the teacher themselves are pretty uneducated when it comes to how the body's actually going to respond to movement on a very practical, practical way. Another thing I'm going to tell you is if you're doing a headstand from the floor, if you kick up into a headstand, you're going to fall over, all right? You kick up, you're going to fall over. That's just inertia. That's just basic science. Your legs are going to come up into a full headstand when they're ready to come up into a full headstand, meaning when you are strong enough in your core to lift your legs up into a full headstand. Before that happens, you're going to be in a headstand with your legs down. The only thing I'm super worried about as a teacher is you getting your spine to flip upside down, okay? So if that means that your legs never come off the floor, then okay, your legs never come up off the floor. The most important thing is that you're getting your spine upside down and allowing a Kundalini to start to drip down at Shoshuna. So let's now talk about breaking the headstand down. Now, to be in a full headstand, your whole body has to be active. So headstands are very, very, very, very active. The hardest thing about a headstand for most people is the fear, is the fear of falling over. But I'm going to tell you guys something that is common sense. Your body knows how to fall. You've fallen a lot in your life. When you were learning how to walk, you fell a lot. When you were learning how to run, you fell a lot. When you were learning how to ride a bike, you fell a lot. Skiing, you fell, fell a lot. So don't be afraid of a fear that's not a fear to be afraid of. And here again, your body knows how to fall. So if you're someone who has a flexible back, for example, and you fall out of a headstand, typically you're going to fall where there's flexibility. So where your body can bend easier. So you'll fall backwards. You're probably, like you're sitting down, you'll probably fall backwards. If your back's tighter, then you'll probably fall forwards or to the side. So your body knows how to fall, right? Your body knows how to do that. So don't be afraid of that. If we lived our whole lives not doing something because we were afraid of falling, nothing would ever get done in this world. Absolutely nothing. So I really want you guys to understand that that falling is not something to be afraid of. Okay? Now, another thing about headstands is that you have to, as I just said, your whole body has to be engaged. So also your shoulders. So even though your head is technically touching the floor, you should not feel any intense pressure on your neck or on your head. You are going to feel your head touching the floor. There is going to be a connection there, but you should not feel anything crushing into the neck. And that is because your shoulders should absolutely be engaged. Okay? The more you can engage your shoulders, that protraction we spoke about in another video, which I'll tag down below, that protraction retraction should also be in these headstands. Now, in my practice in my lineage, we hold Shoshasana, the headstand at the end of our practice for what's supposed to be 15 minutes. I don't hold it for 15 minutes. I hold it between five to 10 minutes because my practice is already like two hours anyway. By the time I get there, I'm so exhausted that literally 10 minutes max, I'll hold it. But that's kind of the duration of endurance you're looking at for a headstand. Now, with that being said, headstands, once you actually get into a headstand, you realize they're actually fairly easy. They're not the most challenging of asanas. There are a lot of asanas or postures that are way more challenging than a headstand. Again, the most challenging for a headstand for people is the fear of falling over. All right. So let's talk about the setup with the arms first because we have to build a headstand like any good house, like any good building. The foundation is where we have to start with the headstand. Okay. I hope you guys can see this. So when we're setting up the arms for your headstand, you want to come into almost like a tripod. All right. So if your elbows, you see that lower the camera a little bit more. So if your elbows are out to here, that's not good. Look what's happening to my back right now when I bring my elbows out to the side like this, right? You want to walk them in like a tripod. Now, some of you will see some people clasping their hands together, putting their head like this. I'm going to ask that you not do that. You need to open up your hands and place your hands right where that seventh chakra is. So like for our Jewish friends out there, they wear the yarmulke right there. That's where your hands are going to be placed. That's the top of your chakra center. Now remember, you also have chakras in the palms of your hands too. So you're placing that head into the palms. Your elbows are not out to here. They're out to here. And the next thing I'm going to have you do is tuck your toes under and start to walk into your headstand. So just like this for a second. Just watch me. I'm pushing you to my shoulders and I'm just going to walk my feet in. All right. For a lot of you, this might be where you stop for a while or you might be out here for a while. That's okay. You're just learning how to engage. So this would be a relaxed and that's crashing into my neck and this would be engaged. So the more you walk your feet in, eventually one day what's going to happen is the legs are just going to lift all the way up into a straight line and boom, you're in your headstand. Now, it's very important that what you're doing, your headstand that your legs come up together at the same time, that they're not coming up separate, they're coming up together. That's connecting to that line of energy in between the legs, which connects to mollabunda. Okay. But until that happens, you're just going to keep your feet on the ground. Okay. Now, if you're on your cycle or if you're just not ready to do that yet, let's say you have some weight to lose or you just don't feel secure with that yet, you can put your legs up the wall. And I'll show you, I have a little Balinese cabinet here. It's very old cabinets. I probably shouldn't be using it as a wall, but I'll show you kind of what that looks like. So basically, you're just going to take your butt, bring it up to a wall or for me this cabinet and then just bring your legs up. Whoa. And you can just hang out right here and just be here for 10, 15 minutes. So if you can't quite get up into a headstand yet or you can't quite, or if you're on your period and you can't flip your uterus upside down, then just put your legs up the wall and let the calves drain into your heart so it can be cleansed. So I hope that's helpful. As always, as I always say, please find a teacher if you can. But I hope that that helps in some way for you guys. Again, inversions are super important. Anyway, I hope you guys are having an awesome Friday and I'll talk to you guys soon.