 If I ever have tampons at my nose when we hit record, just tell me before we hit record because I know people keep laughing me about this because I was talking about this on Aquarius. It works guys. If you struggle, it's a life hack. If you struggle with a runny nose like I do, just get you some light day tampons and just stick those duckers up your nose and then you can go all day and it just absorbs the snot. You know? It's great. And I told Emmy I almost let her in and I had to quickly blow that up. I was like, oh, shit. So my friends do have to tell me that if that ever happens, then you need to remind me before we actually hit record. All right, you guys, I'm super excited today. Of course, we are missing Stephanie today. She had a busy schedule and so she will not be joining us today. So Emmy and I thought that we would take this time to talk about the yoga course that's coming up since Stephanie is not going to be joining us today and to talk about Emmy's experiences with traditional yoga because I think most of you know, Emmy is incorporated into this yoga course with her Reiki. And for those who don't know Emmy, I'm assuming everybody does at this point. She's a holistic genie. I will put links to her channel down in the description box below as well because she's a lot of great stuff on her channel. And I am incorporating Emmy into this yoga course with two Reiki sessions per student, mainly so that the students themselves can have an experience outside of the philosophy of yoga where they can actually tap into and feel the energy that we're going to be talking about in the course in the yoga philosophy. But before we get into that, let me just give some details about this course, guys. There will be a link to register down in the description box below. Let me just go through a walkthrough. So this course is designed for those new to yoga. Why can't I move this? I'm so...hold on one second, guys. It's not letting me...oh, here we go. Okay. This course is designed for those new to yoga or those who want to branch up. I need to...obviously I need to do some editing on this. Brush out on the ancient philosophy taught by through the practice of yoga. This is a four-week online learning modality designed for all levels. So whether you're a beginner to the yoga experience or you've been doing it for a while and you just realized that you maybe need a deeper understanding in the philosophy of why we do what we do, this course is great for anybody, really. This course will be taught by K.P.J.A.Y. Authorized Teacher of Me and will also include two private sessions with Reiki Practitioner Emi, which is the beautiful lady on my screen with me. So this course is going to start on Sunday, November 20th, 2022 at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. And I've done it at 2 p.m. because I feel like that's a relatively good time for everybody's time zone. So wherever you are, I know England is five hours ahead of us, so that would be like 7 p.m. for you. I felt like that was good for most people to be able to sign in, just know it is Eastern Time. So we are going to be at 2 p.m. our time on the East Coast, not your time where you're living unless you are living on the East Coast. The Sunday class will be for two hours from 2 to 4 each Sunday, ending on Sunday, December 11th. So December 11th will be the last class of this course. During this two-hour class, you will go deep into the Yoga Sutras of Patangeline. We're going to look at the first two padas of the Yoga Sutras of Patangeline as well as review the Chakra system and the Ayurvedic Doshas system. So we're going to do worksheets. So you guys have a better understanding individually of your own Doshas because that is going to inform your practice. Each student will receive an online PDF manual the evening before the start of the course, along with a Zoom link for the day of the course. But before the course starts, you will be required to purchase Shri Swamy, Satishananda's commentary on the Yoga Sutras. That's the commentary we're going to be using for this course. There are a lot of great commentaries out there. I have multiple copies myself. Rom Das has one. Desa Kachar has one. I.E. Guard has one. And so if that's something you want to have a collection of different commentaries, like I do great, do that. But for this specific course, we are going to be using Shri Swamy Satishananda's commentary. And I will once you register for the course, I will send you a welcome that manual or a welcome email with a link to this particular Sutra. The students in this course will also be divided into two or three smaller groups. So we'll have the Sunday Bid class. And then during the week, I'm going to divide you into smaller groups to work on Asana. So work on the postures. And these times will be determined in the bigger group, is that when we do this? We're going to heavily focus on the sun salutations, Surya Namaskar. We're not going to do a lot of intense or advanced posture work. It's going to be basically really just focusing on the sun salutations because those are the basis of all Asana is Surya Namaskar. And Surya Namaskar within its own cell can be its own practice. So if you only have like 15 minutes, you just do some sun salutations. OK, so that's how we're going to work all with that. Each meeting will be recorded on Zoom. So we are going to record each meeting. We're going to ask that each student not share the recording out of privacy for everybody else and respect from everybody else and a copy sent to each student after the class. This is so that you can go back and if you need to make reference to something that was said, you have that in your possession to go back and re listen to the conversation. I will also be sending you all a recording of me doing the sun salutations in a beginner style so that once you start to work with me on Asana, you'll have your own copy to watch at home by yourself to help you establish your home practice. Now, this is a high demand course. There will be homework. You will have homework. So only serious students should apply. There is limited seating due to the private nature. And I want to be able to give individual attention to each student. And so I have to only have private limited seating so that I can give individual attention to every single person and for Emmy as well because she's going to be working with you guys through the Reiki. Because of this, there are no returns or refunds after the 48 hours before the start of the course. So two days before the start of the course, we can't refund a seat just because that seat has been taken and other people have wanted the seat. And so I think you guys understand that. That's pretty much our policy at the shallows where I teach as well. So the price of this course is $500. It will include the two private Reiki's with a sessions with Emmy. So everything's included except for the Yoga Sutra book in this course. But the Yoga Sutra book is pretty cheap. And I think you can probably find a PDF for it as well. The reason why I'm having you guys purchase your own Yoga Sutra PDFs is just because of your own privacy. I don't want to have anybody's addresses just floating out there through a course or anything like that. You know, when we run courses from the shallows from the actual brick and mortar location, we can give people it individually. But I don't want I know what it's like to be doxxed. I know what it's like to be afraid. And so I don't want anybody's private address being leaked any by any slip of technology accidentally through the manual or the books being mailed to you from our system. And so the PDF manual will just come in your email. But I hope that makes sense to you guys. Like I said, the Sutra, the book is it's pretty cheap. I do I do prefer you to have your own hard copy, whether it's PDF or the book so that you can take notes in it and make it your own copy because it will be kind of the bread and butter of your practice for the rest of your practice. And I want to also tell you guys that because this is the study of traditional yoga, this course nor its teachers are affiliated with the Yoga Alliance. I do have a new email here, yogaonlinecourseatgmail.com which I will put down in the description box for people who have questions about this course. Please only send me emails regarding this course to this particular email. I get slammed with emails on my Esoteric Atlanta email for Esoteric Atlanta and I get slammed with emails on my private email. So this is going to be separate just for these online courses so that I can actually get the email sometimes on this email because I get so many of them. So that's why I'm doing this. So please be respectful and only send emails to this email that are regarding this particular course. And it's something you want to talk to Emmy about. I'm sure Emmy can put an email in as well for herself regarding the Reiki. We are going to change the payment because it is going to go through a mind body system which is going to be better for people who are international. Okay, so let me just recap that again with this course. You're going to get four Sunday, two hour courses, two to four p.m. Eastern time where we're going to go through yoga philosophy, discussion, you can ask as many questions as you want. We're going to go through the chakra system, the bunda system, the dosha system. We are all, which is, it's going to be a lot guys. You're also going to be assigned homework. You're going to have different readings to do during the week of the yoga sutras to then journal about so that we can discuss it the next week in further detail. And you will have during the week a couple of private groups, semi-private asana. So posture work practices with me specifically. And you will get a video of me doing the sun salutations to help you the days you're not with me to do your own practice. And I am going to require you to do at least the sun salutations four or five days a week during this course to really get the benefit of the practice. And then of course you're going to have two sessions with Emmy to be booked with Emmy. These two sessions don't have to necessarily fall in line of the four week modality. They will be available, you've paid for them. So they will be available to you with Emmy. But that will be between you and Emmy to work out when you're going to be doing that with her. And of course, Emmy sees people one-on-one, correct? It'll all be one-on-one with these students. Yes. Now, Emmy, do you want to touch a little bit on, like, we were talking off camera about the subtle body and why I decided, because it is not normal to have Reiki incorporated into a yoga course. And the reason why I asked Emmy to join this yoga course is because most of the time, actually all of the time that I've taught, this is the first time I'm going to be teaching online, I teach in studio, in shalom, with you. And so I'm there to physically touch you and physically adjust you, which gives that student the knowledge of subtle body. But because I'm not going to be physically there with you, I wanted to bring Emmy in so that she could utilize her talents and her modality to help the students have a better understanding of that sensation of prana, of apana, of balancing these energies within the body, which is what we're doing in the practice. So do you want to speak a little bit on that Emmy, to subtle body? Sure, absolutely. So you'll have to go around. Yeah. Do you have a home studio? Yeah. We ain't no NBC, we're in our houses. Yes, yes. So with all of the different energies and sensations that we're bombarded with in this world, we get desensitized. And with yoga, I'm really grateful that I was able to have years of Reiki training and be able to feel that energy flow and the subtleties of it. It's subtle, but it's very powerful. And the more that you can disconnect yourself from these frequencies and different things that we're bombarded with, the easier it is that you'll be able to pick up on these subtle energies. So when you have a Reiki session, even though we're not together, it works through quantum physics. Energy doesn't obey time and space. So with intent and belief, we're able to send and receive energies with each other. And when you're laying down and you have no other interruptions or distractions and you're in a completely relaxed state, you're able to feel this flow. And it's really important to understand what it feels like because when you're practicing yoga, if you don't know what that feels like, you'll miss it. You'll miss it. And Ashitanga is so intense and so rigorous that if you aren't aware of the true nature of it and the importance of it that underlies, which is the energy flow, it's just, it would completely remove the spirituality of it and it would just be a physical movement which completely bypasses the importance of it and the sacredness of it. And the changes that can happen with you spiritually. So I've done yoga before in the past, definitely not like this. So I just noticed that in the thick of practicing, because I'm aware of energy and its flow from practicing Reiki for a number of years, I can pick up on that in my practice. And I'll tell you what guys, if you can pick up on this subtlety and continue your practice as difficult as it is and your ego and your mind is gonna get right in there and say, oh, this doesn't feel good or this hurts or I can't do anymore or I feel like I have no more strength or I'm gonna collapse on my mat, if you can get past that and overcome the artful dodger, what Bryce talks about, if you can overcome that, if you can notice it, be aware of it and overcome that and focus on the subtle flow of energies. It is so incredibly profound. Like, I don't think I've been as devoted to something like my yoga practice and I just recommitted less than, no, yeah, less than three weeks ago, I just recommitted myself to this. I don't think I've ever been this committed to something since probably entering my recovery program years ago. I mean, I'm really committed to my recovery program. It has saved my life, saved my life. I'm thinking about putting pictures up of what I looked like before I got into recovery and what I look like now. I left 10, 15 years younger now than when I started my spiritual journey. And it really just goes to show how much, how you can look the way that your internal body is. It presents on the outside. So when you start to heal yourself and you're committed to health and healing, it reflects on the outside. It really, it really does. I'll show some people my pictures and they'll be like, what? I will say, I agree with you. When you go to the Ashangashala in India, the people they're practicing are beautiful people, like physically beautiful, but they've worked on themselves. So what you're seeing is the spirit coming out of them. I totally agree with that, totally. And I always say, I feel like I get younger as time goes on because you're finding that supple body again. And I loved, I wanted, and I brought that up before filming and I was like, we need to talk about the subtle body because she's totally right. And we are, and a lot of times that's why, at the end of the day, the body is just your GPS system. That's all it is, it's the Shakti of the soul. It's your way of, it's your ultimate, it's the ultimate tool that you have for the soul to know itself, is the body. And that's why the body has a nervous system. That's why we actually have the ego is because we wanna have that resistance, right? To create that friction. And Emmy's right, you know, we just did a video recently with Cindy about Halloween and she talked about how our ancestors were always on the precipice of death. Death was all around them. And so they had a different understanding of life. We've lost that connection. And even though this is an ancient practice that has been practiced for thousands of years as human beings in this modern time, we don't understand our subtle body. You know, and first of all, we've been told as women that are, you know, if we're intuitive, that we're crazy. And so we stop listening to our intuition. We stop, we disconnect. We jam our feet into stiletto shoes to make our legs look a certain way. You know, we do all these things that all of a sudden we just start more and more and more and more and more. We disconnect from our own body. And the awesome practice of the posture practice is designed as such because the only sensation we kind of feel when we come into yoga is the gross body. And what do I mean by the gross body? I mean like you feel your hamstrings burning. You feel your biceps sore. You feel, you know, the sweat. That's very much the gross body. It can't be ignored. But the more you lean into the gross body sensation over time, the more you start to recognize the subtle body. And the subtle body is where the information really lies. And no one, that's your special power as a student. No one's gonna understand your subtle body better than you because you're the one experiencing and it's there to give you information and any let's, I wanna talk to you about, you're talking about the profound, it is discipline. It is, this practice is, and I wanna kind of dispel something. We have in the Western world, we think that yoga teachers are sweet and nice and they're just gonna be poetry to us and then the lights and rub our shoulders and we're gonna go to yoga to relax. If you're going to yoga to relax, you're not going to a yoga class. Yoga and relaxation are not the same thing. Are not the same thing. There's no relaxation in yoga. My opinion where this got kind of manipulated is that the more you practice yoga, the more you're able to be calm in situations that are stressful, you're able to relax into the unknown psychologically. It's not though about you going to like lay on a mat with a bolster under your legs and just listen to any music. That might be great to do five minutes before bed, but that's not yoga. Yoga is designed to break you. That's its design, is to break you. The yoga teacher, the traditional, I mean, my friend, Cindy and I, we're talking about this at her mystery school, her chawal on Sunday where I teach. Traditional yoga teachers in India are not nice people. They're not nice people. They're not mean, but they're very blunt. My teacher in India, the Param Guru, he doesn't read me poetry. He just says, why fear? You do, you go. You do now, do. Back then, now. Reach, go back now, do. You do. Why fearing? Do. Why belly coming? You, only one meal a day. You know, like that's kind of how they talk to you. And you, that's what you've signed up for. You signed up to change. You didn't sign up to be coddled. You signed up to heal yourself. And so, and that's for the discipline comes and it's so funny. I actually laughed when I got your text this morning, Emmy, because I've been there so many times. And when you sent me this text, I was like, oh girl, I have been there. I have so been there. The pain is unbelievable that comes up out of your body. It's hard to explain it to people who don't practice yoga. And that's, I was talking this morning to somebody else about this. Like, if you're coming to Ashtanga yoga just for the physical exercise, and that's because it'll give you a good body for sure. It'll give you a good body. But if that's why your only reason why you're coming to Ashtanga, what's the point? There are other workouts that will give you a good body that are not gonna put you through the hell that Ashtanga yoga is gonna put you through. It's very spiritual in that sense. And, you know, it's like, we have to have, we have to have this friction. And that's what you're feeling. That pain is that friction, is that resistance. So what did you text me this morning? I mean, let's talk about this. Cause I was like, this is perfect. I need to talk about this with people because Emmy is like experiencing what we've been talking about in Ashtanga. Okay. Let me find it. But I loved it. I love that she brought it up because I was like, this is perfect. Okay. My shoulders and hamstrings and butt hurt so bad I can hardly touch them. It's not joint pain. It's all muscle ligament and tendon pain. I couldn't get past Surya Namaskar A and B today. I've never been this sore before or been this sore this long before. Is something else going on? I think I was like, what did I respond? I was like, LOL. You're like, that's normal girl. LOL, welcome to yoga. Nothing so hard because I know what she's talking about. I have been there. I have been, there have been times where I've been standing on my mat where my body hurts so much. And I'm like, if you fucking touch me, like if the teacher comes and adjusts me, I'm gonna like, like it would just hurt to even touch my skin. I tell people all the time, I would be in like downward dog. And I would see like my teachers, I know all of my teachers, I could pick their feet out in a lineup. I know what their feet look like by heart. And I would see my teacher's feet coming towards me and I would have the jaws theme song in my head. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Cause I knew these adjustments are not pleasant sometimes. We call them cranking for a reason, which is something I'm not gonna be able to do on Zoom with you guys is these cranks. And they're cranks because the teacher is literally moving a pattern in your body. And the thing about the body is, and I was actually, I talked with Stephanie on the phone about this this morning, what we resist to change will persist. Okay. And sometimes we talked about this last week, so the body is the GPS system of the soul. It's also called the mind field. And the yoga sutras, he's gonna refer to the body as the mind field. What does that mean? We know that our thoughts coming from our brain and our brain is something very different from our consciousness. It's a very different thing. The brain is a muscle. It's an organ that's gonna die with our body. The consciousness is this eternal awareness and understanding. The consciousness within you is totally cool with you being in pain. It's like, yeah, it's fine. This is what this is. The mind, however, is like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Well, why is this? We resist because we don't know when we want it, we want to change, but the pain, the suffering is what we know, what we're comfortable with. And so when we're breaking through that boundary of creating these new patterns of thoughts, which in return create new patterns in our body or you start to correct the patterns in the body, which then in turn correct the patterns of the mind. They work together, they're no different. We freak out because we don't know what the new thing is gonna look like. Even though we want it, we want that unattainable unicorn. We want that, but we understand this. And so we're gonna cling on to this because we know suffering. We know depression. We know anxiety. We understand it. We've snuggled with anxiety. We've snuggled with depression. We've snuggled with addiction. It's our biggest, it's familiar. It's our lover. It's our favorite lover. And humans, we like being the victim because when we become the victim, then we don't have to change, right? And so we're fighting against ourselves. So that pain you're feeling in your practice that Emmy's feeling that I feel that everyone feels is that's the friction I'm talking about. You're fighting yourself. You're fighting yourself. Yeah, let me just, because I'm in so much pain right now, let me just share my experience with you so people don't run away when they feel this, okay? And like Bryce said earlier, serious students only. This is not something to be undertaken just for someone who wants a new exercise routine. This is a healing path, a spiritual healing path. And your mind, like my mind is going to tell you to stop. Oh, you know, I'm gonna, you're gonna end up hurting yourself. You're gonna end up having to take time off of work. You're gonna end up having to go to the doctor. You're gonna break your leg. Like these things will come through your mind. These things will come through your mind. And I'm in so much pain right now. I had to do this with my other arm to put my mascara on today. Yep, yep. Like what Bryce was saying, clothes hurt on me right now when I first put my sweater on. But from what I'm reading, and I encourage you guys to read along with your practice, educate yourself intellectually while you're, because in the beginning, this is an intellectual process. Over time, you're gonna get used to the asanas. You're gonna get used to the flow. You're gonna connect your breath and your gaze with all of that will come in time. But in the beginning, it's all intellectual. You're learning the postures. You're learning about the philosophy. You're learning about the spirituality behind it. You're learning about the energy flow and how important it is to do a pose, an opposing pose and a neutral pose. It's so important. It's so important. This stuff is not taught in yoga classes of teachers who come from a yoga alliance. Like this practice is so deep and so disciplined and so difficult at first. It's like boot camp, you know? And I'm gonna tell you after 16 years, it's still difficult. It's my perception is just, I've been doing this for 16 years. So I'm still sore. I've been sore for 16 years. But we don't wanna scare you off because if you are drawn to this, if you are led to this path, then you need to take it. You're not gonna be led here for no reason. And we don't wanna scare you away either. We wanna be completely and totally honest with you about the pain. It fucking hurts, okay, you guys? It freaking hurts. However, I have already noticed benefits. Stamina, you know? If you can get through something like this, anything else in your life that is thrown at you is not really a big deal. Another thing is an increased focus and the spiritual gifts. I noticed when I'm working with Reiki clients, I am more intuitive. I see, I'm more clairvoyant. I'm starting to get different spiritual gifts and abilities like Claire audience and smelling things. Like I, for the first time I had, I was able to smell things during a Reiki session. I'm like, oh, this is new. And this has all happened since I started my yoga practice. And you guys, I am not very coordinated. I do not have the breath down or the gaze or anything. I'm still in the very, I'm still very much in the intellectual part of learning this stuff. And once you get past the intellectual part, and you can, and this is what I'm reading. Okay, I don't have experience with this personally yet. This is what I'm reading. Once you get past the intellectual part and you get into the flow and you can activate the bundas like Bryce was saying, and you can combine that with the breath and the gaze, it becomes this beautiful meditative flow. And we're gonna talk about that because the Ashtanga practice, so in traditional yoga, we are taught not to do seated meditation. And I'll tell you why. My teacher is very clear on this. You, you're not even, so the second sutra of the yoga sutras is Yoga Chitra Pratina Rodeha. So this basically means that yoga, chitta is the brain, the mind, the muscle, rittiest thoughts, narodha is nothingness. So what is this telling us? It's saying that you're a slave to your thoughts and yoga is you not being a slave to your thoughts anymore. You understanding is really saying, getting rid of them completely, which we can't do. So what we're doing is we're learning how to, as Patabi Joyce is saying, this is mind controlling capacities. You controlling your own mind, not someone else controlling you or not your mind controlling you, but you controlling your own mind, which is why I think the controllers created the Yoga Alliance is because this, this practice is literally the solution to mind control. And I'm not gonna say the M word on YouTube, but you guys don't, we're talking, this is the solution to it because you start to understand the patterns of the brain. Now I think it's like what 99% of the thoughts we have are on a repetitive loop and we don't even notice them. Mm-hmm. I think I don't know if it's nice. Here's a percentage that I'll have to look it up, but this has been studied, that most of the thoughts we have, they're subtle thoughts, we don't notice them and they go in a loop. So what this tells us is these thoughts that come into the body. Now, if you were to do seated meditation, just close your eyes and just sit there. What would happen is those repetitive thoughts you're not aware of would ingrain deeper into your psyche and cause neurosis, psychosis. It would send you in the opposite direction of the point of yoga. Now, there are exceptions to this, like Japa meditation is an exception. What is Japa meditation? It's where you have a mala bead and you have a mantra and you close your eyes and you move the beads and you say the mantra so you're giving your mind stimulation so that it's not clinging to the thoughts. That's what we're doing in the Asana practice. So yes, in the very beginning of this practice, the meditativeness is not gonna come until you've gotten through that beginning part of it. But I'll create a book list for the course for extended reading and I'll also put it on my community tab. There's a great book called Yoga Mala. Yoga Mala was written by Guruji by Patabi Joyce. And what is Mala? Well, that's the mala beads that we see, right? That you use in Japa meditation. Well, what's given to us in this book, the information that's given to us is that I've said before, if you're going to a class where the teacher is choreographing the practice, you're not doing traditional yoga and you run the risk of there being an imbalance of energy. So the practice in traditional yoga comes from the yoga karate, which is a thousand, the very old papyrus that has been passed down through the generations and it has the different series in them. They've been tweaked and changed over time as we tweak and change ourselves. But regardless, these series, these systems have been very heavily studied. So if you're looking at the primary series, for example, I don't choreograph anything for you. I'm taking from the yoga karate and giving you the prescription. So that's what Emmy is talking about when it's pose, counter pose, neutral. Pose, counter pose, neutral. Pose, counter pose, neutral, because it's working it systematically like a prescription. And as you're learning the primary series, you don't learn it all at once. You learn it in chunks and you build up to doing the full thing, which could take about 10 years, right? And you have neutral poses you could stop. Well, if we look at the mala beads, if we look at, let's see, I have a bracelet here I can show you that's kind of like I have malas somewhere. We see these little beads, right? Well, in a mala, there's like a string in between them. We all see the string. So the breath, the vinyasa, the jump back is that string, the asana is the mala. So if you look at your practice, it's like a meditation. It's like you're sitting there moving the malas, going through the meditation, but the malas are your body. And so when you get, we call it the Tristana Method. So that's our method of meditation. That's why we play no music. That's why we were left with our own breath. So in the morning, so I've been doing this again for 16 years. I don't need, I'm way past that intellectual point. I could teach primary and second series without even thinking about it because it's so ingrained in me now. So if I'm practicing, what I'm doing is I'm practicing with the Tristana Method. So I'm coming into like Surinamaskar A, Acom inhales, arms up, that's the vinyasa, that's the posture, looking towards your thumb. So that's the Dristi. So Tristana Method is breath, Dristi and posture. I think I've said again, if you're going to a class where the teacher is telling you to close your eyes in the asana practice, don't go back to that class. When you close your eyes in practice, monkey mind, the mind then starts scrambling. Same when you're looking around the room in a practice, the mind is now scrambling. The mind is now monkey mind. And so when we train ourselves to inhale, looking up towards the, this is the posture, looking at the thumbs on the inhale, exhale, fold. When we train ourselves in this Tristana Method, which will take a while, it will take a while to get to that point. We've now moved into an active meditation. And we're working with the, we don't want it, we want the breath to be like a runner's breath, which we're going to talk about that in the course, Pranayama, what that means, what breathing means. All right, it's not what you think it is when it comes to the asana work because the breath is also in charge of your heat. You need to sweat. If you're not sweating in your yoga practice, you're going too slow. I mean, we have to yell at people all the time in Mysore. Speed up, speed up, speed up. What also happens when you actually work with the breath and the actual speed, which does take a while to get to that point to really move through the practice, I can do primary series in like an hour now for me. The full primary series, I can do it an hour. Most students who are just now completing primary series, it'll take them like 90 minutes to do an hour and a half. I can do it an hour because I've been doing it for so long that my body just moves on that train. We call it getting on the train. So after, if you've ever been a runner, runner's experiences, they get the runners high or all of a sudden they break through this barrier where their mind kind of goes quiet and they're just present with their breath and present with their feet and present with their body, that's meditation. That's what we're looking for in the posture practice. So the posture practice is very much your form of meditation and it's a way you're making these shapes with your body and you're giving yourself these openings so that the mind can't move outside of what's happening. It is being forced because you're controlling it now. You're not allowing your mind to control you by doing this practice. You're now saying, I've got you. We're gonna be present in the now. And if you've ever read any books on spirituality, it's all about being in the now, being in the moment. And nothing psychologically is gonna bring you more in the moment than when your body's in pain, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Which, you know, it makes sense to me now that I'm experiencing this because I tell you what, guys, it's not going to be like what you think. It's not gonna be like what you think. And I understand why they don't use music because you need sense deprivation in order to be completely present in your body. And with the drishti, the gaze where you're looking, when your hands are above your head, you're looking at your thumbs. When you're in forward fold, you're looking at the end of your nose. And it's not like you are looking at something. You're looking through. Yes. It's like a... Correction, it's a top three. Yeah, it's like a lazy gaze. Like you're looking towards the horizon, but you're looking through it. It is... It brings everything back. If you look at, like, remember we were little kids and we'd have to go get the eye exam and they show you how the eye sees thing and then flips it back, the image. Like we see things upside down and then it flips back to us to bring the information back, how that works. So if you're keeping your eyes focused on where you're gazing, yes, and it's not like you're not staring it down. You're not gonna become enlightened by just staring something down. No, it's a gentle gaze at the nose. It's a gentle gaze over the right shoulder. When you're keeping your eyes moving in that trajectory, what's happening is it's forcing the focus from the exterior to the interior. But when you're looking at someone else, when you're looking around the room or closing your eyes, you're not focused on the interior. You're looking at other people in the room. Well, you're focusing on music if they're playing music. Yes. And music will affect you. And I love how you said, since step of action, because that's what we're doing because music will affect your mood. It will affect the way you feel. And right now in the yoga practice, and I love music, I'm a huge music fan, but in my practice, I need to be raw. I don't need anything else. Your practice is already gonna affect your emotions. It's already gonna affect your senses. So you don't need anything else in there that's going to affect you. You're gonna be yelling curse words at the teacher. Trust me. Your yoga teacher is not your friend. They are not there to coddle you. They're there to keep you on the path. And like me, I've been yelled at more by yoga teachers than anybody else in my life. Like, I'm so used to that. And I want that. That's what I want as a... And I want to bring up something too because this is where I always kind of struggle when I talk about this is because I want to show people the practice by giving them videos of people or YouTube's of people watching. I dated myself there, didn't I? VHS's of people practicing yoga of YouTube's, but Ashutanga, but I also... You also are fighting against the ego and the ego has a place. It does have a place with survival, but I really want so many people think that if they don't get the jump back within the first month, they're within the first year, they failed. That is not the point of this practice, guys. First of all, Ashutanga is one of the hardest physical things you will ever do in your life for everybody who's doing it. People who have, and I said this in one of my recent videos, people who I have a clean practice, I'm aware that I better have a clean practice after 16 years. It took me 16 years to be able to have a clean practice every day, six days a week on the mat, face planting. I've face planted so many times in this practice. I have dropped so many F-bombs in my sore room. I have smacked my, I've broke my sacrum. I've done it all. Every sloppy, crazy thing that can happen on your yoga mat, I've done it. And I lived through it and I kept practicing and I eventually ended up understanding my own body, my own body control and mind control. That's why I have a clean practice. Now, what I hear though is that people, and you said this last week when we were working privately on me about if I had done this five years ago or whatever, I would have quit. I want you guys to understand that the majesty of these postures, your value as a human being and as a soul has fuck all to do with how strong you are, how flexible you are, what's your handstand looks like. The practice that we're giving you is literally your prescription. It's your medicine, it's a tool. So when we look at the asanas, when we look at the posture work, if we're using the posture work in its proper way as a tool, as an area of exploration for ourselves, then it's the most important thing you could do. But if you're using the posture work as a way to blow up your ego or show off, it's the least important thing you can do. Does that make sense? Oh yeah, oh my gosh. My ego has tried to come in so many times because I'm grateful that I can recognize it because like Bryce just said, if I would have been into this five years ago before I started my spiritual journey, I would have quit. I would have quit because I'm so sore that I have to bend my knees in a lot of the postures because I just can't, it's just so tight and so sore. So I have to slightly modify in order to do it at all. That's where my ego comes in. It's like, no, I need to do this posture perfectly. And I would have either straightened my legs, hurting myself, or I would have just quit. I'm like, this is too hard. I can't do this. I've done insanity. I've done that stupid workout, and I call it stupid because it is so hard on your joints. I've done that twice for probably two to three months at a time. Ashitanga yoga is more difficult. I don't know if any of you guys have ever tried that workout in sanity, but it, I mean, it's properly named. Well, the difference between, like there's an intelligence in this practice and that's why it takes, you're not gonna learn how to be a teacher in 200 hours and in 200 hour course. It takes, I mean, Patabi Joyce is very strict about this. You're a beginner and Ashitanga yoga for the first 10 years of your practice, for the first 10 years, which I think is incredible because at a beginner's mind, there are multiple possibilities, right? And so it takes the pressure off too. You know? So grateful for that. And so as an authorized teacher, I'm authorized, you don't apply to be authorized. They just, he just grants it to you. It's considered a blessing. And the day I got authorized, I was practicing in the mice room and he came up to my mat. He was like, you come to my office three o'clock. I was like, oh, shit, what do I do? You know, like, what am I in trouble? What do I do? And that was my authorization. You know, it was, it was like, you go teach now. I want you, and so he's watching me practice. He's watching my other, that my other teachers are filling him in on, you know, my Sanskrit, all that kind of stuff. He's seeing my understanding of what I'm doing on my mat and then he's assured that I can now help someone else. I can't do the work for you. So with that being said, if I'm watching a mice or room and I see a student that's too aggressive in their practice, I, my responsibility is to come pull them back and say, you know, in mice or the mice or style we're not led classes, the more advanced class you have to be invited to let. But mice or is where you're working on your own. The teacher comes and works with you and everybody else is on a different place. They come at a different time. And so it's like a private lesson. And you know, I think a teacher said to me once, I can't remember, I was working on a second series where there's a pinch my right of a posture called Karana Vasana. And it's a forearm balance, pinch my Rasana and you're up and you have to kick your feet into a Padmasana and then you lower down and rest your legs on your forearms balancing. And then you have to push yourself back up into that forearm stand. For women, this is extremely difficult for women. And a lot of times women get help, get spotted in this. I had done it like 10 times that day because I was bound and determined to be able to do this by myself without a spot. And the teacher was like, what's the point in doing this 10 times? Move on to the next posture. Why are you, what you're gonna exhaust yourself for this one posture? You're just gonna exhaust yourself? No, try it two or three times, move on to the next posture. You gotta be able to come back and practice tomorrow, don't you? So for someone like me who has the pretence but because I am Vata Pitta, I have that propensity to push too hard in my practice. And that's why we say sometimes that the three teachers are the teacher to practice the injury. Injuries are important in Ashtanga yoga. They're not something to run from or be afraid of. Not one person is gonna have a full life of Ashtanga yoga without hurting something at some time. It's just how it is. We could walk down the street and twist our ankle. We could knock our head on our car. Like that's just being in a body. But what happens to us with the injury, of course we're not gonna be stupid. Of course we're gonna try to avoid that at all times. But as David Greig would say, sometimes there's karma there. Sometimes it has to happen for you to understand, for you to see, to finally say, oh, okay, I see now. Because the posture didn't hurt you. You hurt yourself in the posture. You know, we look at these postures. There's a posture at the back half of, or the front part of primary series right before the Navasana for the middle bit. It's called Marichasana D. And this is technically an advanced posture. And this is one of the postures that people will freaking write blogs about because it's just so intense. It's so intense. You've got your foot in the lotus posture. I have a picture somewhere. It's, I think it was my profile picture for a long time anyway. But, and you bind around your first foot's bound. You're in Padmasana, you're twisting and you're bound. And that bind for a lot of people will take years to get. Because it's an advanced posture. It's supposed to take years. But let me put it to you this way. Marichasana D, it's not an inanimate object. I can't, I can't hold Marichasana D in my hand like I can this pyramid. And so when we're learning these postures, we're learning them at different stages. It doesn't mean you're not doing the posture. So if you're modifying the posture for whatever reason, whether it's a weakness issue or an injury or whatever, you're still doing the posture in a different variation of it. And there's no, and then once you bind, guess what? Then you got to work on catching your wrist. It never ends. There's a niyama called santosha, which means contentment. And you finding that place where you can be content with where you are. We actually see it a lot in Ashtanga. We call it pose, pose chasing. Where people will get in this idea that if I can just bind in Marichasana D, it's going to be amazing. If I could just jump back, jump back, jump through or drop back, stand up. If I could just get to second series, then it'll be awesome. And then what happens, it's like a drug addict. It's chasing the dragon. What happens? You get to second series. You know what happens? You're in second series. Nothing shifts. Because if you work this practice properly, you could shift things in sun salutations. Yes, it's finding the miraculous in the ordinary. And it is a beautiful thing to feel and discover. And this is new for me. Something that I have only felt in the last few weeks. Every other attempt that I've had at changing my body physically has been very much egotistic. And I was exactly the way that you explained. If I can just do this, if I can do this, then it's going to be awesome. Then I'm going to be golden. No, if you can find the beauty in the messed up, sloppy, floppy way that you're doing the asanas in the beginning, if you can be content in that space, it is a spiritual experience. It is awesome. It is so profound and so unlike any other. Like one of the things that I read, and I don't know what book this was in, but it stuck out to me very much. It's yoga, ashtanga yoga, is finding the spiritual through the physical. It's like what Bryce was saying. Your body is the Malavid. You are practicing meditation using your body as the meditation tool. And it's not something that you can get intellectually, I don't think. It's something that you have to experience. The flow, experience, the energy and the spirituality of it to understand what that means and what that feels like. And I guarantee you, well, I'm not you, so I can't guarantee you, but for me, it did not feel or look like anything that I thought it would. Yeah, and that is absolutely, it's an experience. It's a spiritual experience. And there is a great, if I remember, I'll put it down in the description box. There's a great YouTube from Richard Freeman, who is called Yoga Ruins Your Life, and it's this great YouTube and it's in a mice, or Richard Freeman's a senior ashtanga teacher. And he talks about all the things that change in your life when you start practicing yoga, because you start to change. You start to become a better version of yourself. And he says something about the experience. He said, you stop becoming a religious person. You start because you're hitting at the experience of what all the great religions are trying to portray. And you're experiencing that on your yoga mat, because it is a spiritual experience. I've said before, I felt God more on my yoga mat when I have a hot, sweaty mess, and I've got my scare running down my face, and my hair looks like Albert Einstein's hair, and my pants are on backwards, and I'm crying. And God has been more present there than any church I've ever been in, because your body is your temple too. It's your place where that Holy Spirit resides. You just have to find it. And this practice is giving you that opportunity. Every ache and pain you feel is a new pattern that's burning up, because that's an attachment to something that was disconnecting you from the divine. And that's what we're looking for. And I will say too, yes, in the beginning, and as I said, I've been sore for 16 years, but I've been at a very different place than someone like Emmy or Stephanie that are just starting, it's a different sore. It's a different, it evolves. And I am now more, I'm more capable of handling. I know, and listen, I, at this point, I've come to a place where I'm not a post chaser. I've worked pretty deep into the Ashtanga series. I, we're not technically supposed to talk to our students about where we practice too. Like the teacher should never practice in front of you, ever. That's kind of a rule in Ashtanga. There's many reasons for this. One is your teacher is there to support you. If they're authorized, they've made it probably into third series. So they've done, they've been doing it. So you can trust that if they're authorized that they've experienced a lot of shit. And so they can, so you can trust their words of wisdom when they talk to you. Secondly is we don't want the students to pick up our bad habits. Even though I have a clean practice, I still have habits. I watch people like Mark Roberts, who I love, or my friend Mark Garot, who I love, they have very clean practice, but I can point their weaknesses out to you. I see their weaknesses, I'm trained to. But, so for us as teachers, we don't want for you to watch us practice and then mimic us and pick up our bad habits. We need you to be raw and find your own new pathways. I'll tell you a good example. So my teacher, Sharad in India, has lower back issues himself. And he does his upward facing dog on his, he crutches his toes under. So he's on the front of his foot on his toes and that releases, that's specifically for him. Now, traditionally, instead of crunching our toes, we want to be totally on the tops of the foot. That's traditional. Now, when we crunch our toes for a lot of people, that can cause back issues. So Sharad does that specifically for Sharad, for his body, for his patterning. And people have taken pictures of that. Well, what started to happen was people started to mimic that. And all of a sudden they started having these issues and Sharad was like, do not mimic me. My practice is my practice. I'm doing that for my reasons, right? You do, I tell you do for your reasons, okay? And so that's another reason why we don't, I don't like people comparing is cause they'll pick up habits. That's just how we are. That's another reason too, why it's so important to work with a qualified teacher because I stopped doing upward dog. My shoulders are very, very weak. And until I strengthen that area enough so that I don't collapse and overextend my neck in my lower back until I can get the curve in my middle back where it's supposed to be because my shoulders are so incredibly weak. And because I have a lot of stiffness in my chest and in my upper back, I modified. And if I would have just been watching yoga videos and mimicking what I see on my screen, I would eventually have injured myself because I'm not doing it properly. I physically can't get into the proper posture with that particular one until this is addressed. And that's what I, and that's what, so Emmy and I, I watched her practice and I told her to do that. I could see it in her back. I could see what was happening. And so I told her to pull back from up dog and to really focus on strengthening the shoulders so we can get this strong before we start to move into a new pattern. And so yes, and so if somebody were to watch Emmy practice, they wouldn't mimic Emmy instead of maybe they don't, we all have weaknesses in this practice. So what Emmy's weakness is going to be is not gonna be your weakness. What your weakness is is not gonna be Emmy's weakness. It depends on your karma. It depends on what you have to work through. And so that's why it's very important to keep your eyes on your own mat and not mimic people because they're doing things for a specific reason. They've been given this instruction by a teacher to try to rework the patterning. So thank you for saying that, that bringing that story up, Emmy, because yes, that is very true, that is very true. And that's why I've been doing some like drill videos and I thought about, I will film myself doing sun salutations for the course, doing beginner sun salutations for the course. So you guys don't try to do too much, do the floating yet, because that will come later on. But I thought about, should I film myself doing primary series and do a video, put it up, should I? And I always refrain from it. I always refrain from doing it because I do have students here in Atlanta. I have students that don't even know how to have a YouTube channel here in Atlanta. And I don't want them seeing that and then picking up any of my habits. I want them to practice for them and focus on them. And what their issues are, not what my issues are, I have a teacher to help me with my issues. I'm here to help you with yours, right? And I also wanted to bring up something else too, Emmy, the idea of detoxing. And what's also gonna happen physically with the body, which I was, and this is another reason why in the beginning, you've become so incredibly sore, sore like you've never been in your life and that sore will change over time. And it's also because you're detoxing. So what's happening with the way any type of exercise is going to detox you. That's what your sweat is. Your sweat is detox, right? As my teacher says, you're sweating your poisons out, right? Your body's detoxing. But what Ashana specifically does that's different from other exercises in detoxing is that the way the asanas are positioned is it's like a dirt digger, like digging deeper into your body. And so I was telling Emmy, you're gonna find yourself, this has been happening to Stephanie too. I don't think she minds of saying this. You're gonna be pulling up literal toxins that have been stuck in your body for maybe 10 years. And that's gonna be kind of painful. It's gonna feel sore. A lot of people, depending on their disposition, will go through a period where they break out like crazy, like crazy, like they're 14 years old again. It's because all of these toxins are coming up. That is not something I experienced because I am, Vata, my skin is very dry, very dry. So if you're more copper based, you might experience that just to warn you, that's a good thing, just let it happen. It will pass. Once you detox everything out, it will start to pass. And that's why people start to physically change in their looks too, is because they're cleaning their system out. You see this a lot with heavy backbending. Heavy backbending, if you feel nauseated in a backbend, then you're doing the backbend right. Because the backbend is stretching the solar plexus. It's stretching the stomach. And so you're opening up all these toxins in the stomach that have not been dealt with. And they're gonna, a lot of times it's the funniest thing to be teaching a mice or roe. There are these deep backbends in the second series. There are three of them. You go from Ustrasana, like Guvidrasana to Kaputasana. Kaputasana is the one I punched the teacher coming out of. It's so deep. And I see it almost every day when I taught a daily mice or program. People will do those three backbends and they would sit for a moment in their mat and they get up and they have to go to the bathroom. What's happened? Their body's now releasing the colon. Backbends make you poop, basically. Although women don't poop. We don't poop. So. We don't do that. Yeah, the release is pretty intense. I will say that I have gone to the bathroom quite a bit more since recommitting myself to this practice. And the sweating, by the end of the Surya Namaskar A, I'm shiny. Oh, yeah. So you'll get very, very sweaty. That internal fire that gets ignited can be so intense. And it just, I did not have that before. When I would do yoga before, I did not have that fire. That fire was not there. I mean, I would sweat a little bit, but nothing like the amount that I'm sweating by the end of sun salutations. Oh, yeah. And that's so important. And that's why when we have, so when you go to India and I'll talk about this, somebody asked about mats. Let me just tell you guys real quickly. My recommendation for mat is a Manduka. I know it's kind of off topic because Mandukas are created for, they're created for our stanga, basically. And they are expensive. The Manduka mat is about $100 per mat, but they have a lifetime warranty. So I've only ever had two Manduka mats, ever. One is a lighter mat. It's a pro mat that I used to travel with. And then I have my real heavy, but now I just travel with that one because it's the best mat. It's a lifetime warranty. So what's the point in spending $20 every six months for a cheapo mat when you can just go ahead and get a nice one that's gonna last? Now, we also, in India, we cannot come into the Yoga Shala without a carpet to put on our mat and a binding towel, which is just, because it's so sweaty. And so he won't let you in without those tools because the carpet, you're gonna get so sweaty on your mat that it becomes a slip and slide, right? And so you put the carpet down to absorb that so that you can safely sweat. And the binding towel too, even though I don't need, I can bind myself, I don't need a towel. It's for the teacher then, when the teacher comes by, they can pick up your towel and adjust you holding the towel so their hands don't slip off of you, right? And speaking of binds, I wanted to say this too, like when it comes to the elaborate postures of Ashtanga where you're binding, and the one posture in fourth series, I think is really pretty. Legs behind the head with your arm over the leg bound behind you. I think that's the only posture of fourth series that's actually pretty. The rest of them make me wanna vomit because they're so extreme. But with Mauritius and Adi, for example, I have a student that I've been working with for years and she's still struggling with binding Mauritius and Adi because it takes forever and she gets so frustrated. And I said to her one day, I was like, what do you think is gonna happen when you actually catch that bind? Do you think balloons are gonna come out of the wall? Like when you catch the bind, all that happens is you caught the bind. That's it. And with a posture like that, it's a twist. The most important thing is the actual twist. Don't throw your arm at a joint just to catch a bind. Because if that's what you're doing, then you're not, there's a fine line between pushing yourself to the point of friction and change and overdoing it because of aggression. And that's something you have to play with with the Ostanga practice. And yeah, the sweat's crazy. And the fitter you get to, the craziest thing, I was explaining this to Stephanie when I was up there with Stephanie, she would comment on how sweaty I'd get so fast. And I was like, oh, that's because I've been doing this forever. So the fitter you get, the more toned your muscles get, the faster you're gonna start sweating because the body just turns on. And that's another reason why my sore is different from like Emmy or Stephanie's or people watching sore is because my body's like, oh, this should again. We would do, yeah, we know this. Like we've been doing this forever. You know, weight loss. A lot of people in Astana, we have to say this before in Astanga yoga, we'll start to just drastically drop weight. We laugh and say they're Astanga rexic. Oh, they're in that Astanga rexic phase. And then it wears off and your body gets used to it. But, you know, there's so much change. And I will say too though, the thing about Astanga yoga, and I've said this before is the only flexibility I'm interested in is your organ flexibility. Your organs being able to move. As far as your ligaments and your tendons and your joints and all that kind of stuff, I don't give a shit how flexible you are. It's more about strength, but something crazy is gonna happen. I know this has been happening to Stephanie. And I wanna explain this too. You will be practicing, practicing, practicing, making these breakthroughs, going deeper in your forward folds, getting stronger, feeling good. And then one day, all of a sudden, you're gonna hit a wall. And all of a sudden, you're gonna feel tight and you're gonna feel weak. And it's not gonna just be one practice. It's gonna be like a month of you going, you're gonna feel like you've stepped, stepped like 10 steps back in the practice. That's normal. That happens all the time, all the time. And I'm gonna explain this like I explained it with Catherine Edwards. This is what's happening. Before a breakthrough, your body will basically shut down a little bit. It's like a slingshot. In order to propel the rock forward, the slingshot has to be pulled back. So at that time, you're being pulled back, that you feel that heaviness. Like I would guess, Emmy, that right now, even though I'm not physically with you, I think you're about to have a breakthrough from what you text me this morning. That was my original thought, was she's about to have a breakthrough. You're gonna feel like shit, your body's gonna feel heavy, you're gonna feel tight, you're gonna feel extra sensitive and emotional, and it might last for a month, might last for two months. And then all of a sudden, boom, you're gonna break through the glass ceiling. All of a sudden, your body's gonna change. And it's gonna, all of a sudden, you're gonna wake up one morning and you've dropped 10 pounds. Or you've like, you're all of a sudden, your core is strong. All of a sudden, you're getting your leg behind your head. So that is normal. And if we think about that in light, that mimics life, right? Sometimes the greatest transitions in our life that put us on a better path were times when we felt like we were being pulled back, where things were out of control, they were so bad and so dark. And then all of a sudden, bam, it put us on this new trajectory. So that's what's gonna be happening. And so I don't want people, when you hit that moment, because it will happen to every person, it's gonna happen to everyone. It's gonna happen multiple times in your practice. When you hit that stage where you're like, what the fuck is happening? Last month I was folding perfectly and every thing felt great. And now I just feel like shit, my body feels heavy, I feel fat, I feel bloated. I feel like I can't even touch my toes. That's the most exciting place to be. Because something is shifting inside of you. That's why your body's reacting that way. Because something is shifting. It's something's re-renovating, right? I was laughing with Emmy. Guruji used to say, new body is making, new body is making. But what he wouldn't say is old body's gotta break first. Old body is breaking. Old body is breaking. Look at the thing, old body is making. So when you get in that phase, like Emmy is where you feel, and I really believe that's what's happening to Emmy right now, the way she described it to me, I was like, oh, she's about to have a breakthrough. Don't, if you stop, in that moment where you're being pulled back by the slingshots, then the rock's just gonna fall. It's never gonna be shot forward, right? So those are the times to be like, okay. Now that's why I say now it's interesting. Now this is interesting. Because Emmy's body is now re-renovating. She's been working on this for a while and her body's going, oh, okay. We need to change our patterning now. And that patterning will then change the mind or the mind will, it's a tango between the two. It doesn't matter who's leading. And so when she texts me that, I wanna be like, I can't wait to see. Now it's gonna be a surprise. Month, one month, two months, all of a sudden tomorrow, all of a sudden Emmy will get on our mat. She might be able to do up dog all of a sudden. She might be able to catch a jump back that she wasn't catching before. And that's why I say now this is where, this gets interesting. Cause we don't know what's gonna happen when that jack in the box is gonna spring through, but it's going to. And that's exciting. And when that happens, when you go through that evolution, there's also a confidence that starts to happen with you. It's not ego. It's a confidence. You can't feel powerful until you felt powerless. Yeah, we need the contrast. Yes. And nothing is gonna make you feel as powerless than Ashtanga Yoga. I say that laughing like nothing is gonna make you feel like a weak little wet paper towel than Ashtanga Yoga. Nothing is gonna make you feel like a bigger baby than Ashtanga Yoga. But the minute you kind of have your temper tantrum and you get back on your mat and you just pull forward and you have those breakthroughs and you have those breakthroughs and you see your body changing and you look in the mirror one day, that's okay to look in the mirror and be like, damn, I got a six pack now. Or damn, look at my arms, they're toning. It's okay to have that moment of like, that's your body showing you that it's receiving the work. It's okay to be proud of yourself with that. It's not not why we're doing that. Again, if you're trying to find an exercise to look good in a bathing suit, Zumba is way more fun. And they don't do it at four o'clock in the morning either. So if you're trying to pick up boys at a bar, you're not gonna be doing this practice because it's not, it's gonna, I will tell you guys a funny story though. So I practice, usually practice in shorts because the sweat on my legs actually encourages me to get even stronger. That's why I do it now. Before I would have never done that. Like it's strong, but that's the place I am now. I'm gonna use that sweat now is to get even stronger. And I had taken a picture of, do we polish your shorts? So do we polish your shorts? And it is two legs behind the head pose. And I did it as an ostinous shot. You see a lot of your hands in prayer, your legs are behind your head. And I had my shorts on. And I did it as an ostinous shot, like a picture for a marketing purposes. And I texted to one of my best friends who's gay, very, very famously gay. He's an ash long of practitioner too. I was like, what do you think? Should I use this picture? Well, I wasn't thinking because I had little shorts on because I see this, I see crotches in my face all day. So it doesn't even face me anymore. Like I'm not even thinking about your body in a sexual way as your teacher. I'm thinking about your anatomy. I sure am in the same way. Something switches in your brain where all of a sudden you're not even looking at people that way. It's very much atomical. So I wasn't thinking about it. And my friend sent me a text and he was like, if you put, he used the P word. He was like, do not put your P word on the internet. He was like, see is your, he was like, this is not, you're not a madam. Like this is not, you're not in the wrong kind of business if you put this out there. Good point. I will put the lock hands on and then I will take this picture. So that's just a funny story. Like, you know, and like behind the head is easy for me. So it's an easy, and I will say this too with yoga teachers who have strong practices. As a yoga teacher, if I'm taking a picture of an Asana for a poster for any type of networking or marketing for Oshala, I'm not going to take a picture of a posture I'm struggling with for marketing. I'm not going to do that. I'm always going to take a picture of a posture that I'm good with. So when you see these pictures of these Asanas, don't judge yourself by that. Cause there is a posture that teacher is struggling with. I mean, I, I've said, I still mean that I probably have one of the best backbending teachers you'll ever meet because I struggle with backbends. So I've had to learn them really intensely, but I'm not going to, I mean, I put some backbending stuff up, but I'm not traditionally ever going to like go to that as my marketing tool. I'm going to put my leg behind the head, my head because that's what I'm good at. I guess my body naturally just does, right? So I want you guys to see that practically as well, practically as well because, and I will say, I have had men who have come into my yoga shawl that have tried to show off in front of me and I know what they're doing because I can see it. I've done it all. I've seen it all. There's nothing you can do on your mat that's going to impress me. As my teacher Shorat said, I totally agree with him. If you want to impress me, be a kind person. I don't care what your body can do. I don't give it, as long as you're working on yourself, I don't give a shit whether you could do a handstand or not, that means nothing to me. You know how many handstands I've seen in my life? There are a dime a dozen in our shawna yoga. Everyone's doing them, big deal. But can you be a kind person? Can you be the person that gives someone the shirt off your back that listens to a friend when they're upset? That's impressive. Mm-hmm. Who cares? This body is just, our bodies are beautiful and they're here to show us things, but they're only temporary. So don't put your value into that. It's only temporary. But the way you treat other people, the way you make them feel is something that's going to last for an eternity with that person. Yeah. So I want everybody deciding, if you're struggling with that and I understand it can be intimidating to see the physical paralysis of other people. Again, they've been doing it for 20 years, 10 years, 20 years. And secondly, it doesn't fucking matter anyway. Next life, we'll have new bodies. We're gonna have to learn this all over again. Yeah. So that's what's important to me as a teacher, as long as I don't care if you can touch your toes. I don't care if you're overweight. If these are imbalanced things that we need to work on in your practice, as I told Stephanie, when I see people who are overweight, I don't think fat. I merely think wounded. That's a wound. Someone who's underweight, the same thing. They're wounded. It doesn't matter to me if you have a belly or not. That doesn't matter to me. Listen, I think I said this before in India. Culturally there, women are supposed to be bigger. You know, their bellies hang out of their, my mind's gone blank now. They show their bellies off. Women are bigger, right? And so for Ashastanga women who come to India, we're very thin and fit compared to the culture. I can't tell you how many Indian women have told me, oh, you too, skinny. It has been like, thank you so much. Because in our culture, it's different. And so when we look at things culturally, it doesn't matter anyway. We're just trying to find that balance. You know, be a kind. I don't care what you look like. I don't care. There are so many, trust me, there are a lot of flexible assholes out there. I know some of them. You know, so if you wanna be a good person and that's, you can't fail yoga. The only way you can fail yoga is if you are still an asshole after practicing, right? So I don't want anybody to be intimidated by the, Todd says this a lot. I think this is great. I think this is the sixth series in Ashutanga Yoga so that everyone is challenged at some point. So most people only stand primary series or go get a little bit of second series. It's rare to see someone practicing into third. Very rare to see somebody into fourth. And so if you feel that struggle, like for Emmy for Stephanie, their struggles in primary series, that makes them really lucky because they were open enough to allow that struggle to come up early for them. God bless the people who have to get to fourth series before they actually feel something. Could you imagine having to get all the way to fourth series to actually feel friction? And there are very few people like that that are very athletic, very, you know, just grew up dancing, grew up. And so they were able to maneuver through primary, second, third series. They got to fourth series and all of a sudden they hit that wall. That's so unfortunate that they had to get all the way to fourth series to actually feel that resistance. It's like lifting weights. That's resistance training. That's what you're doing with your body. So if you find yourself struggling with sun salutations, amazing, amazing. Your karma came up. Okay. It's working. Working. Yeah, I told you that too, didn't I, I mean. Yes. The more pain you're in, the more you can be like, it's working. And with that being said too, I want to say something else and I we're going a little bit over hour now, but also for people who are beginning, if you're beginning yoga, traditional we do practice six days a week. I always tell my beginner students this, it takes three days a week for the body to change. I would push you when you're starting to just do like four days a week. Not, I would push four days, not three, four. And then build up and then add that fifth day in. And then slowly. So I don't want people to feel like they have to, if they've just never exercised and all of a sudden they just jump in a yoga and they're doing it six days a week, you're going to burn yourself out, especially if you're not used to this. Okay. So that's, you know, as long as you're doing four days a week and the beginning, then over time we'll bump you up when you're able to handle it better. We'll bump you up to six days a week. If you have a fever, don't practice because your body is already creating that heat without the need of oscina. So if you have a fever, don't practice. If you're congested, still practice, you might have to change your breathing a little bit but we can work around that. On your period for women, again, the practice is chronic. So we want to honor the Apana. So like the first two or three days rest, just let yourself detox and then go back to your practice. If you want to practice on your period, don't do twisting, don't do back bends and don't do inversions. Just be very gentle with yourself because we have to allow your body to detox. Okay. So we, chronically, we're pulling up in the practice and your body's trying to pull down during that time. So we want to respect that and allow your body to actually do what it needs to do. You can practice pregnant. Actually, in our strong yoga, we don't see pregnancy as a disability. It's just something. Some of the strongest women I've seen practicing have been practicing at nine months pregnant and handstand, drop back, stand up. So you can't practice pregnant. You'll just have to modify. You'll have to change your twisting. That's it. Because you literally have an obstacle, a literal obstacle on your way. So yeah, is there anything else you want to add any to this before we close out? A couple of tips that I did that helped me. About a month before I really committed myself to this, I started getting up a half hour to 45 minutes earlier than I normally did, just so I could get used to getting up. I didn't do any yoga practice during that time. I was just up. I was just awake. So there's that. Also, if you've had any surgeries or major injuries like to your abdominals or your back and your surgeon or physician has recommended wearing a brace during exercise, I found that I've had major abdominal surgery. I had a six inch wide by eight inch long hernia. Both sets of my abdominal muscles were opened up. The only thing separating my guts from the outside was my skin and fat. So I had the hernia repaired and I had muscle reconstruction. So I'm sewn up like a corset. My surgeon recommended that I always, for the rest of my life, wear a belly brace when I'm exercising so that my muscles have something to push against. I can't wear my belly brace during this practice. It's much too restrictive. I feel like it's suffocating me and it gets in the way. However, I found a solution. I got a bunch of compression tank tops and also fabric belly bands that you can get for wearing when you're pregnant or right after having a pregnancy so that you can wear your normal pants but still have material there. So I wear a compression tank top and one of those fabric belly bands and it gives me the same support as my belly brace but it doesn't get in the way. So- That's a lot of information too. And that's fine guys. You can, I was telling Emmy, like when she asked me about that, you see people with knee braces all the time. If you need a little extra support to hold your body together, that's fine. You see people with the elbow brace on and sometimes those braces or that support can't actually help you in the sense that it's giving you a physical clue to remember to pull in more and to really focus on that area where there's the weakness. Cause the yoga philosophy is like, oh goody, you had surgery. Yay. Now we can explore. Now we can explore. And now we can figure out, you know. Yeah. And I don't know if I ever told you guys cause I had back surgery when I was in high school and this was before yoga was really big and no one really knew much about yoga. And after I had back surgery, the doctor actually, I remember him saying, I was 17, him saying to my mom and me, you should be good now. The only things I would tell you not to do was like golf and yoga. And now how karmic is you? What did you do? Ha ha ha. Female authorized teacher in the state of Georgia. And he told me, but that's also, you know, that's coming from kind of the 90s, the dark ages when they didn't really understand moving the body. But I will tell you because I had back surgery, I know Emmy's gonna be struggling this, wherever you've had surgery, that's a trauma. Okay. You can't ignore it. You can't get by it. That's a trauma. Okay. So we say, all right, karmically, this is an opportunity where things are gonna get interesting and that's where your biggest focus is gonna be. And that's why back bending for me has been a huge issue. And that's why I punched a teacher. And it wasn't the fact that my back really hurt. It was the fact that there had been a trauma there. And when someone sticks a knife into your body and cuts it open, even though you know in your practical mind that it was something to help you, your senses now see that as a literal trauma, as an attack. And so I thank you for bringing that up, Emmy, because that's gonna be a lot of people who've had surgeries that are gonna start to run up against that. And I want you to first of all acknowledge it. We can't ignore it. Yes, you had a trauma there. And he's got, yes, you're gonna need help working through that, but it's still possible. And if the doctor told you never to do yoga, you might end up like me and be the only female authorizer in your state to teach us talking yoga. So not only did I go for yoga, but I went for the hardest yoga. I was like, oh yeah, hold my beer. Yeah, right, watch this. I'm gonna fucking do it. Yeah, right. At that point, I didn't know yoga was like whatever, but I just laugh at that now, because you'd be like, oh, I have this issue. I have that issue. I was like, listen, I was told by a doctor specifically not to do this. And now I'm the only female authorized to do this in the state of Georgia. So that just kind of, you just kind of laugh about that stuff. And I did have a student say this, and I'm so excited. I had a student comment and say that they were trying to jump back, jump through. And she had been practicing for a really long time, but she saw how weak she was by doing the jump back, jump through drill. And she said she laughed about it. And I wanna applaud you for that, because that is the perfect attitude to have. Again, Richard Freeman, the one who has the YouTube Yoga Ruins Your Life, he had, I had his primary series VHS at one point. It was so freaking 90s. And he says at the beginning of it, he says there are two things you need to be able to practice a strong yoga, a sense of humor, and the ability to laugh at yourself. And I tell my students all the time, like, yeah, you're gonna be crying on your mat. Yeah, it's gonna be fucking hard. But the minute something is really hard, if you can just laugh at yourself, if you change your whole vibration, you change your whole, I can't tell you how many times I've laughed at myself. I can't tell you how many times I've been adjusting a student and they've like, I've watched a student like belly flop, or face laugh, or face plant. I've just started laughing myself. And they look up and then you start laughing too. Because it is, it is just like, I remember one time I was assisting Todd, and Todd was watching a student and he just started laughing so hard at the student. And the student looked up, he goes, you make that look so difficult. And she started laughing too, because you know, you have to have that. And there's stories that Patavi Joyce used to kick people out of his shallow if they took it too seriously. Like if they couldn't laugh at themselves, that he would be like, you come back later. Like you need to be able, yes, it is a very serious practice. Yes, if you need to cry, cry. Yes, if you need to like, take a moment in the bathroom to regain your breath, go do it. Yes, if trauma comes up. Yes, if you were touched inappropriately, one point is child, that triggers. Yes, it's going to be very serious. And you're going to take me to that moment to cry through it and work through it, especially with the leg apart stuff that's going to trigger that for women if they've had that and meant to. But you also need to laugh. And so I applaud the subscriber who said that she was laughing at yourself. So by you laughing at yourself in the jump back jump through, you literally just change the trajectory of how you approach this practice and your body is going to respond to that laughter. And you'll probably get the jump back jump through a lot faster by laughing at yourself. One last story I'll tell you before we sign off. I don't know if I've told the story before. You talked about not being able to breathe in your belly. So I have big boobs and me, Steph and I all have big boobs, all of us, right? And my body is very small for my boobs size. That's why Stephanie's husband calls me toast. Tits on a stick. Oh. And my practice where my boobs were like getting in the way I was having to like maneuver them to get into postures. And so I decided, genius that I am, decided I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to go and buy an extra small sports bras and just squeeze my boobs to my chest. So I started doing that. I started like squeezing my boobs to my chest. And a teacher was, it was a male teacher too, was adjusting me one day and he goes, you got two options. You can either bind better or you can breathe. Cause my bra was so tight. And so, and I will say jokingly enough, I, my boobs have been grabbed more in the mysore room than they've ever been grabbed in the bedroom. In a non-sexual way, it's never sexual. It's always like adjustments. I'm like, whatever, whatever. It's just an adjustment. So as long as we can laugh at ourselves as we do this, we're not performers. No one's ever going to pay you to go to Cirque du Soleil. That ship has sailed. You're never going to, we're not gymnasts. We're not trying to get into the Olympics. We're literally yoga students. You're going to a Charlotte to learn. Laugh at yourself, enjoy it, work through it. Enjoy the community too, that community sport, the people you practice with every day. You're going to get to know them. You're going to share that karma with them. You're going to feel their support. And Estonga, New York, a documentary about Estonga, William DeFoe, who is a practitioner of Afshan Yoga, talks about mysore morning. And the morning practice mysore. And he says, you know, you're practicing around with all these other people. And you don't really know their name. You don't know what they do sometimes, but you know them because you practice with them every morning. And you start to feel their energy. And you start to share energy with them. And you see, you know what they're struggling with. They know what you're struggling with. And there comes a moment where this person you've been practicing with for years that you don't really know, but you do know because you're sharing energy. When they all of a sudden nail a posture, they've been working on so long and you feel that happiness for them. You feel that pride in them. And then they feel that for you when all of a sudden you have a breakthrough. And so that community support is so important as well with those shalas. And you don't get that in a yoga studio, like a vinyasa flow studio, because the classes change all the time. But in Estonga Shala, you're literally practicing with the same people every day for years. I mean, AYAs are the same students. So I'm the same students for 20 years now. You go through their births, their deaths, their divorces. You see them cry, you see them laugh. You hear them fart, like it's... I still have a hard time with that as a teacher. I'm 39 years old. I don't fart at all. I actually don't. I actually don't, I'm very, I'm not, yeah. But when that happens in the classroom, I still, it still cracks me up. I'm like a 14 year old boy. I still get... Farts are funny. I don't care how old you are. You're funny. You need to control. More fun to control. No male teachers who are freaked out by queefing too, when that happens. That happens sometimes too with women. I know that no male teachers that will like jump when it happens. April Fool's Day, where I was teaching at AYA, I was assisting. I think it was like a Sunday. It fell on a Sunday because it was one of the busiest Mysores and it was our Sunday Mysores like midday. It's not early morning. And I was, I was gonna go get their toys at Target or you can app on your phone that makes farting sounds. And I had this idea and I talked to Todd about it. I was like, let's go get one of those fart machines and let's just start playing it on Sunday. And let's just see if the students start reacting. Like if they start looking around the room or just like every five minutes, let's just, we didn't do it, but I still want to do that because that, it was April Fool's Day, you know? And like you still have to have that feeling, right? You still have to have, we're still human beings, right? We're still human beings, we still have to laugh. Anyway guys, but I know thanks for sitting throughout this episode with us. Again, if you have any questions about the course or about Reiki, put them in the comment section below for Emmy's channel. And if you get any yoga course questions, just add, just send them to me. If I get any Reiki questions, I'll send them to you on my channel. And the link to register will be in the description box below this video above the comment section. If you have a trouble seeing it, just hit the down arrow or the more button you go ahead and book through that link. And as soon as you book, you will get a welcome email from me specifically and I will send you all of the information you're gonna need for the course. And you're welcome to email me at the email address listed below if you have more questions about the course that you don't want to ask in the comment section that you want to ask privately, if there's something private you want to ask me, totally fine. Same with Emmy as well. Emmy, I'll put your email down there as well too. People have questions for you as well. And I will, so go ahead. I'd like to say my email address is associated with my website. My website is under construction right now. So if you, and YouTube will not highlight the entire email, it'll only highlight the website portion of my email. So if you click on my email address in the description box, it'll take you to a website that is under construction. So unfortunately, because YouTube will not highlight the entire email, you have to manually type it in. So I apologize. I have tried and tried and tried to resolve this and it just, it will only highlight the last part of my email address. So you know what I'll say, Emmy? I will, maybe I can give you the password to the yoga online course email. So you can check them too. Or what I can do too is if you have a question for Emmy regarding Raking, you want to email me, I could just forward it to Emmy as well too. Or I could just give you the password to that email and you can check there as well. If you have private, again, if that's for private, if you have private questions that you don't want to ask publicly, which is totally fine. If there's anything you need to ask us privately, we will keep it private, totally fine. So also I'm going to, I might embarrass Emmy here and Stephanie here, but they have volunteered to allow me, I work with them on Saturdays. And so they've allowed me to film them teaching. So you guys can kind of see what I do when I work with them over Zoom and how I correct them and tell them what to do. And so applaud to Emmy and Stephanie to allow for allowing me to do this. So, so you guys can see. Please don't judge, we're chubby, okay? At least we got boobs, you know? Listen, listen, I'm the only one complaining about my boobs, I haven't met a man yet who has complained about my boobs. So. Oh yeah, same, but you know, we're self-conscious about it. Or at least, I mean, I am sometimes. I think, honestly, I think that's one reason why I hunched my shoulders my whole life is because I'm just- Girl, show them off, show them off. Like, you know what? I will say too, if you're looking for a boob lift, if you're of that age where you need a bit of a picker upper, a shaw yoga will lift them. Oh yeah, right here is so sore. Right, my whole body. There's not a spot on my whole body where it's not. I mean, I was just in the bathroom in the morning looking at my boobs and I'm pushing 40 years old. Now, granted, I haven't had children, but I was like, damn, you're quite parky. Thanks, yoga. Look at that, look at that. Eat your heart out, playboy. With my tampons up my nose, I'm like, eat your heart out. So, you know, you can be proud of your body, right? You work hard. You do our shaw yoga, you're working really hard. And it's all the spiritual stuff, but you can take a moment to be like, damn, my body looks good. Thanks, shaw yoga, you kick my ass, but I look pretty darn good in the baby. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So anyway, guys, we laugh, we laugh, we laugh, but that is another, that's another perk to shaw yoga is to get that boob lift. So, the hard way, you get it the hard way, you've earned the boob lift, you've earned it. Your legs get skinnier too, that's for sure. The inner thigh work gets those legs skinnier. The one thing is our butt goes away. We don't really have butts in our shaw yoga. Many people have commented that like, everything's so great, but there's like no butt. Like the butt just vanishes. I'm like, it's, everyone's got a white lady's butt at the end of it, because it's just, I already had a white lady's butt, and then I started doing yoga, it's just gone. It's just the tops of my list. So anyway, guys, we love you very much, and I'm super excited about this course. This is gonna be really fun, hard work, but fun, and so serious students only. And yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Next time we'll be with Stephanie, we'll get deep, deep back into that shadow work. Bye, guys. Bye.