 morning, everybody. Happy, happy Monday. This has probably been one of my most requested videos to do when it comes to yoga asana or posture practice in the yoga world or any type of exercise really and that is dealing with your hips. This and back bending. We're going to get to back bending next. I need to do the hips first because the hips have a lot to do with back bending. But before we get into some stuff you can do for your hips, there are a few things that I want to talk about. We are going forward with a four week yoga online course for anybody who wants an intensive when it comes to yoga. As I've said, this will be mostly geared in philosophy just because I'm not there to adjust you or to see you practice. I would feel safer just focusing on the philosophy aspect of the yoga practice. With that being said, there will be a little bit of asana. We are going to go into the sun salutations because the sun salutations are the basis of all asana practice. And I'm actually going to be making some videos to go with the course so that you have kind of a virtual manual to help you go through serename scar a and serename scar b. You hear my dog walking around. He's up this morning too. I call him the sheriff of the neighborhood because he barks a lot. So if he starts barking, I'll have to pause the video for a moment because someone just went down a drive. With that being said, I have gotten a lot of emails from you guys regarding the start date of this online course. And I understand that school is starting back soon for those of you who have children. And I do know the cost of school supplies. I totally get it. And so I am going to pull back the start date for a couple of weeks as you guys requested just to give you some time to financially recover. This course, this yoga course will not be run through my channel. So it's going to have absolutely nothing to do with esoteric Atlanta. It's going to be strictly yoga. And so registration will be run through a shala. I'm working with the shala right now to partner with to run the registration through. So with that being said, for those of you who are taking the course, can you sign on to the zoom, we're not going to be talking about anything having to do with the truth or community or Intel or anything like that. We're going to be strictly focused on yoga, which in my opinion is the crux of the Great Awakening. Anyway, when I teach courses live in person, I usually do six week courses. The workshop portion is usually 90 minutes. However, for this course, I'm going to do four weeks. And I'm going to do two hours for each window of time. I think that would be easier, especially since this is strictly online. I think it would be easier to do a shorter amount of time with just longer classes. And in this time, this four weeks, not only will you get four classes as a group, it'll be about 10 to 12 people in the course. You'll get a zoom link and all 10 to 12 people will be in the course together. But every individual person will also get a one hour private with me where you'll zoom with me privately. And in that private, you can practice for me. I can watch your practice and help you. We can talk about philosophy. You can ask me private questions you want to ask of me regarding the philosophy of yoga and how it's affecting your life, whatever you need that hour to be within this course within the four weeks, you will also receive two reiki sessions with my friend and me who is able to do reiki over zoom. I wanted to incorporate this into the course because we are again going to be talking about philosophy. We're going to be talking about the chakra system. We're going to be talking about the bunda system. Shashuna, all the values of energy. We're also going to be talking about the doshas, the Ayurvedic doshas as well. And so I figured that getting treatment from me would also help you drop deeper into your body so that you can practice the philosophy so it makes more sense to take the theory and bring it into your own body and into your own practice, which is really the hardest thing to do. The theory in theory or the philosophy in theory is easy. But when you start to actually practice it within yourself, that's when there are challenges and they're supposed to be challenges. Just to clarify a few things I've said many times on my channel before that it's very evident to me that many people in this great awakening are very confused about what spirituality actually is. And I don't blame anybody for being confused. The controllers have done a really, really, really good job confusing us. Spirituality is not light and love. It's not spirituality is actually war. War is spirituality. And I've heard people say, oh, if we go into a war, that's not good. No, no, no, no. War is necessary, sometimes even in positive polarity. It's a friction. That's the ultimate friction. And that's what spirituality is. It's inducing friction so that you can get that light, right? You can't strike a match without striking it, right? The light on the match doesn't just appear. You have to actually strike the match, which is that friction. And I would highly suggest that everybody read the Bhagavad Gita. If you're confused about the idea of war and spirituality, you absolutely need to read the Bhagavad Gita, because that's where it is really spoken about. You know, the Bhagavad Gita basically is Arjuna is this warrior in India, and he's standing on this field in India and he's having to go to war over land. And standing on the other side of the battlefield are his friends, his family, his teachers, people that he's loved in his life. And now he's got to go to war against them. And he's having this like, crisis moment, this darkened soul. And the whole Bhagavad Gita is Krishna, who's the avatar of God in this story. He comes down and like, gives Arjuna a pep talk. He walks, he talks him off the ledge. And he basically tells him to toughen up buttock. Like, this is your Dharma. This is what you agreed to do when you came into this world. And I have loved the Bhagavad Gita ever since I really started studying it. It is going to be with the course you are going to be required to get the Yoga Sutras. Sri Swamy said he did not does commentary on the Yoga Sutras, but I will have another list of books that are just recommended that we won't cover in the course, but I recommend that you get to read the Bhagavad Gita is one of them. You know, when we get on our yoga mats every day, and we feel that friction in our bodies that heat, all that kind of stuff, that's you being Arjuna. That's you going to war against yourself against the ego, doing this practice or any type of true spiritual practice takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of bravery because 99% of the time it's not fun. 99% of the time you're being forced to unpack and deal with emotions that you would rather hide. And that's the hips as we're going to talk about soon the hips carry a lot of those emotions. And it's not for the faint of heart. You know, when you first started yoga practice or Tai Chi, or any type of deep spiritual work. And yes, deep spiritual work should involve some sort of exercise, which will cover in the course deeply why that is your your body is your GPS system. They'll hear the first you know, six weeks to three months, you're in the honeymoon phase, you're in love with the practice you're feeling good, you're having revelations and then all of a sudden you hit a wall. And that's when the real practice begins. That's when it's really becomes disciplined because it's hard. And you're picking at this these scaps of emotions and you're having to experience them and let them pass. And you're having to to acknowledge where you are attached to certain things. And that's you being Arjuna. That's you being brave. It takes so much courage to do this. The Ramayana, I've shared the story before my channel, I'm just gonna go ahead and share it again. The Ramayana is part of the Hindu Pantheon, part of the Hindu collection of stories. And I say Pantheon, but Hinduism is actually a monotheistic faith. As one of the one of the uncles at one of the temples said to me once I asked him, what's the biggest difference between Christianity and Hinduism? And he just said, Christians believe God came to earth one time, Hindus believe God came to earth many, many, many times. So I kind of follow that that path God has had to come to earth many, many, many times. And so every time you hear a deity in Hinduism, it is an avatar of the same God. And so in the Ramayana, we're we're we're looking at Ram, who is one of the avatars of God. And Ram, he marries this woman named Sita, his true love Sita, Rahman Sita. And this demon named Ravana, who lives on an island off of India, many people think it's Sri Lanka, and they're speaking about Ravana comes and he kidnaps Sita. He takes Sita to Sri Lanka, and he hides her in a forest. And Ram is just devastated. He can't find his wife. He can't find his true love. And so in searching for Sita, he hires Hanuman. Hanuman is the monkey God, the God of war Tuesday is Hanuman's day. He's also associated with the planet Mars, which is the roaring planet. And he hires Hanuman to help him find Sita. Now the thing about Hanuman is that his father is Bayu. Bayu is the breath, the wind. And Hanuman goes through this bit of this identity crisis, kind of like we all do when we come to planet Earth, where we kind of forget who we are, we go through amnesia. And so Hanuman has his own issues going on where he can't remember who he is. He forgets he has these powers. Well, eventually he does figure it out. He does remember. And Hanuman is able to jump from the shores of India all the way to Sri Lanka to get Sita. He finds Sita in the forest. He finds her. And he has the honorable thing though. He knows that if he just sneaks Sita out of the forest and bring her back to Ram, then Ravana is just going to come get her again. So Hanuman, being of high courage and high integrity, knows that he has to face off with Ravana. He has to actually defeat Ravana to properly bring Sita back to Ram. Well, I'm not going to go into detail. Ravana is known as the demon that can't be slain. He's got 10 heads. You cut one head off and another one just goes right back. Right? So I'm not going to go into detail how Ravana or how Hanuman actually ends up defeating Ravana, but he does. And he returns Sita back to Ram. Well, the story is a metaphor. Ram, again, is the avatar of God. Sita is your soul. And Ravana is your ego, the false sense of self, the ego, the 10 headed demon that can't be slain is always trying to keep the soul from God. Right? That's why in the yoga practice, we work to destroy the ego, to get rid of that false sense of self. Well, then who is Hanuman? Hanuman is your courage. Hanuman is that heart of you that is okay to face scary things. Having courage doesn't have encouraged means doing things even if they're scary. And it takes a lot of courage to have the integrity to drop into a traditional yoga practice, a traditional spiritual practice so that you can defeat yourself, basically, Ravana is your ego. Your internal courage has to be brave enough to go up against the 10 headed demon that can't be slain, your ego, so that your courage can return your soul back to God. That's the Ramayana. And that's the whole purpose of the yoga practice. It's the same as the Bhagavad Gita with Arjuna and Krishna. It's going to war. It's going to war. It's controlled demolition. The opposite of war isn't peace. The opposite of war is creation. Peace should exist within both war and creation if you're doing your spiritual practice. I also want to remind you guys as I remind my students a lot, there's no need. I know this is going to sound weird. There's no need to, if you sign up for this course, there's no need to try to impress me with things that you can do with your body. I've done it all. I've seen it all. There are a lot of psychopathic flexible people out there. What you can do with your body has absolutely nothing to do with the value that you hold as a human being. The asana practice, any type of exercise that you're doing for your spirituality is just a tool. That's all it is. It's just a tool. With that being said, in our strong yoga we have six different series. There's only one person living right now that's completed all six series. That's how hard it is. So you're never going to stop working on things. There's always going to be things to whittle and to work on in this practice. Another reason why we have six different series is because every single person is coming into the practice with a different level of athleticism. I'm just going to say it as it is. For me, I'm a very athletic person. I always have been. I have good eye hand coordination. I'm strong even though I'm skinny. I'm strong. I'm just not competitive. Used to piss my dad off a lot that he had a child that was athletic but not competitive. For me, going through this practice usually takes five to ten years to get the primary series. I went through it really quickly. When I got a second series, all the back bending, that's when things started to fall apart for me. So the reason why we have these six different series is because so every person practicing has struggled. They get somewhere where they have that friction. That's the only reason. And so my original teacher David Greig used to say, the lucky ones, the lucky people, their karma comes up in primary series. They struggle and those are the lucky people. They don't have to get to third series or fourth series or fifth series before they meet that resistance, before they meet that physical resistance in their body. They feel something. They feel sensation. So I just want to put that out there. When we're looking at yoga asana, the posture practice, the tools of the practice in a lot of ways don't matter at all. If they're not used properly. If they're used properly, they're the most important tool you have. Because again, your body is your TPS system. Your body is where you hold information. Okay. For me personally in my own life, I'm sitting here in my kitchen right now, shooting this video and then I'm going to film after I'm done or I'm going to do my practice after I'm done filming this. I prefer practicing by myself. The only time I ever practice with somebody around is when I'm in India and then with my teacher. I don't like practicing in front of people. I know I have a pretty practice. I know my practice is very well put together. I've been doing this for 15 years, but I don't like practicing in front of people because it's very, very private and I need to be in a space where I can solely focus on the sensations that I'm feeling. And so I just want to put that out there to you guys. Please do not judge your values spiritually on what your body can physically do. With that being said, let's talk a little bit about the physicality of the body before we get into the hips. A lot of people confuse the practice of yoga with flexibility. We're now looking for flexibility. In fact, if you go to a class and the teacher is telling you to get more flexible, don't go back to that class. Flexibility is very, very fleeting. Flexibility also on the flip side of that will develop just like strength and endurance develop. So even if you feel like you're someone who is not super flexible, don't worry. It will calm the more you work it, right? That's just science. Practice makes perfect. As my teacher used to say, practice all is kind. If you keep working it. But the thing about flexibility, especially for women, is it's going to ebb and flow, right? There's going to be some days where you feel like you're gumby. And there's going to be some days you feel like a 10-man. That's normal. That's just being a human. Days where maybe you're feeling a little bit depressed or stressed out. You might feel tighter, right? And that's just information for you. Like human brain does a good job of lying to us sometimes. And so when you feel that your body, it's a good way to kind of gauge what's really going on with you emotionally, spiritually, etc. The thing we're really looking for in yoga practice is mobility. And that is the combination of both strength and flexibility with more of a focus on strength. Okay, so what do I mean by this? When you see these shapes that people put themselves into, the only way that they can get the energy to flow through the values, through the pathways in the body, through the shapes, is by having controlled muscles. The muscles in your body are what pull the blood. They are what pull the energy through the fascia. Okay? And so if you're passively stretching, if you're just working on flexibility and you're passively stretching, that energy is probably not going to move. And it's probably going to end up causing you an injury, which is okay. Injury is part of it. There are three teachers in this practice. There's the teacher, the practice, and the injury. You're not hurting yourself in the practice. The posture isn't hurting you. You're hurting yourself in the posture. Okay? And so the injury is there to teach you where you need a course correct. Okay? So with that being said, there's a reason why we focus so much on strength. That is because that strength is what's responsible for moving the energy. And there's also something very psychological that happens in the psyche of a human being, the stronger they get. Right? In a handstand, for example, if you've been working on a handstand, it's not about the handstand. It's about the fact that you can actually hold yourself up and something happens to you emotionally. You develop more confidence. That courage is easier to find when you start to show yourself that you are capable of doing hard things. All right. So when we're talking about the hips, what we're looking at is a ball and a socket. All right? And we're going to talk about this. If you take the course in Serious Namaskar B, Serious Namaskar A is very linear, it's very masculine. Serious Namaskar B is very feminine because we're working into starting to work into the hips. Now again, the hips as well as the arm joint is a ball and a socket. So with that being said, if the joint is working properly and their strength and mobility, that ball and that socket should be able to move pretty freely. Most of the time, it can't. Same with the shoulder, right? But the hips are a big one because the hips are the biggest joint in the body. Now, I don't know about you guys, but I'm a neat freak. I'm very organized. That's my, um, I guess that's my oval. I may as the vaught to enemy, I don't know. But everybody has a junk drawer, right? You have this drawer in your house where you throw stuff in that you don't know what to do with, okay? That's your hips. So when you start working into the hips, you're going to start to trigger yourself. There's going to be stuff that comes up that's uncomfortable. Um, and some yogas, you see people, you know, doing nice little hip openers. We don't do that in Astanga. The hip openers I'm going to show you today are not part of the Astanga practice, okay? They're just little ones that you can do. In Astanga, we just throw like behind your head, which is a massive hip opener. That comes, traditionally, that comes in second series, Ekapatashashasana. Although you are doing a part of it in primary series with supta kamasana. With that being said, Rome wasn't built in a day. Your body wasn't built in a day. Your trauma wasn't built in a day. So we're not going to just yank your leg behind your head on the first day. It's probably going to take years to slowly get it to open so that it can go back there to get it strong enough to hold it back there. And that strength is very important too, especially working with the hips. So if you are doing a posture like Ekapatashashasana, your legs behind your head, you have to have a strong core because your legs heavy. And so if you're next being pushed down by your leg, you have to have that strong core to be able to sit up and push the leg back. And that's also going to activate more into the hip. Alright, so I'm using Ekapatashashasana as an example. We're not going to work on that. Again, that's for you to work with with a teacher in your own mice or room. That's just an example I'm using because we're going to use it to kind of look at the hip when we get into these hip stretches. Okay, so I'm going to back up. I might have to cut my head off for a moment for you guys to see this. But we're going to first look at the flexibility of your hip. And just so you guys, this is just an exercise you can do just so you know where your flexibility lies within your hip. It doesn't matter where your foot goes at all. Again, the value of your value as a human being has nothing to do with how open your hip is. We're just trying to open the hip for your own information so that you can allow those energies to come up. And I'm going to say this, even people who are hyper flexible still have a lot of shit in their hips. Okay? So doesn't that doesn't the flexibility means nothing. And I'm going to tell you guys a little secret too. As a teacher I would rather have a student come in who is super tight than one that is super flexible. The person who is naturally super flexible has a higher propensity of getting hurt than the person who is super tight. So don't judge yourself by how flexible your hip is. This is just something for you to information for you to take in for yourself. I do this with my students and again my head might get cut off a little bit in this filming. That's okay. So we're going to do the telephone. I want you to extend your left leg all the way out. And when you extend your left leg out or any time you extend a leg out, I want you to make sure you're keeping the leg nice and flexed. Okay? Again, that keeps, if we're passive with the leg, there's no action happening in that knee joint and we need that energy to come in through the knee. So I'm going to ask all of you to keep that leg, that extended leg nice and flexed. All right, so you're kind of in, let me put the camera a little bit. You're kind of in a Johnny Ushershawson A position to start with. Okay? But from here what I want you to do is I want you to take your right leg and I want you to start to rock the right leg, just like it's a little baby, you know? So we have, we have two sections of the leg. We have the front of the leg, we have the back of the leg, the thigh, the femur bone. This is where that hip socket is, all right? So what I'm going to ask you to do, just for you, just to see, just information for you, is I'm going to ask you to take your leg, try to pull the hip back, kind of like you're pulling back the bow, right? You're pulling that bow back. Pull it back and I want you to see, without crunching forward, I want you to sit up straight, see if you can get the ball of your foot to your ear, like that. Can you get the ball of your foot to your ear? If it comes to here, that's fine. If it's down here, that's fine too. If you can get the ball of your foot to your ear, that means that your hip is open enough to take your leg behind your head. It doesn't necessarily mean that your core is strong enough though, okay? So that's just information for you to see what's happening with your hip. Now let's change sides. So again flex the foot, the right foot now. Now my left hip, little information about me, my left hip is really wonky, okay? It sits higher than my right hip, my right shoulder also goes down, so it's like a diagonal pull, all right? So I always have a tighter left hip. I know that about myself. It's how it's been since the beginning, but we're going to check anyway. So you're going to take that left leg, try to rock it. Oh, I just had a nice little pop there. It's early in the morning, body's waking up. Try to rock it and then take that foot, see if you can bring it to your ear, okay? If you can bring the foot to your ear, you know your leg can go behind your head. It's just your core that might be a little bit tight. So that's just information for you. All right, now let's get into some simpler stretches. Okay, so now we're going to work on the front body, this right here, okay? This is where we have a lot of, if you're tight right here near hip flexors, you probably have low back pain, all right? So that's what I tell people a lot if they have low back pain, first of all. That's some energetic work. You need to do some chakra work, but you also need to get some blood flow in there and that's going to start to relieve some of your low back pain. So let's start with, I'm going to start with my left, stretching my left hip first, just so you guys can see. So I'm going to bring my right leg forward. Now when I bring my right leg forward, something I want you guys to look out for is your knee and your ankle. So if you find yourself doing this, that's not good. We want to get the knee and the ankle in a perfect alignment, okay? And we want to sink into, we're sinking into that hip, right? So you want to start to drop the hip so you feel a nice sizzle sensation happening right in this area. Mind keeping, you can if you want, pop up to the back of the foot. I'm not going to do that because I feel like when I, this is a warm up for me. So I feel like I have more control over my hip and just breathe into that hip. Now if you want to hold it anywhere between five and 10 breaths, this is also the motion of a back bend which we're going to get to next week. From here, let's go ahead and take a counter. So we're going to take the counter pose with a hamstring stretch. So you're going to pull, this is half hanuman asana, no hanuman, the monkey guy that we just spoke about, this is half hanuman asana. So you're going to flex your foot, I don't want it pointed, I want it flexed. And then walk your hands out again, make sure you're not sitting back, that you're sitting up with the knee and the hip and the left leg are in alignment. Walk your hands out. Now if this is not so challenging for you, if you if you need more friction, you can go ahead and come into a full split. All right, but that's only if you're able to do that. If you're not able to do that, you're just going to stay in a half split. Nope, no worries. Again, your value as a human being has nothing, nothing to do with what you can do with your body. There are a lot of flexible assholes out there. I know some of them. So okay, once you feel like you've gotten a good little counter stretch, come back up to that foot, drop your hips again. Now you're going to bring your hands inside your right foot. Walk that right foot out to the side. Again, make sure the knee and ankle stay in alignment. And then come down to your elbows. Now you can either stay on the back knee or pop your leg up. Just stretching into your hips. All right, let's come back. Let's change sides. So from here, bringing my left leg forward, my knee and my ankle are in one straight line. Again, this isn't happening. Watch this. This is common to do something like this. That's going to blow your knee out. Make sure the ankle and the knee are in a straight line. Drop down, get that nice sizzling sensation. In your right hip flexor, my hip flexors get really tight. So I do this every day before I start my practice, just to get some blood flow back in there. And then counter pose. Again, go ahead and bring the hands to the floor. Pull your head back, flex your foot, and then start your descent. And again, if this is not enough friction for you, if you're strong enough and open up, go ahead and take your full split. Keep it modified for some of you guys who need to modify. I'm just breathing. If you're a runner, this is a really good runner. Get really tight hips. So if that's what you do, I would suggest doing these hip stretches before and after you run, just to get that blood flow through the joint. And then here we go. Walk the foot out to the side. Hands are inside the foot. Again, keep the ankle and the knee in a perfectly straight line. If you can stay on your hands, if you can't come to your elbows. If coming to your elbows is too much for now, stay on your hands. If not, come down to your elbows. You can pop up on the back leg if need be. This one feels really good to me. Okay, let's talk about some other hip stretches you can do. All right, this is another favorite stretch of mine. Again, this is not in the Ashtanga series, but I do when I have students who are working on Ekapata shear salsa. I know you can't see my head, guys. That's okay. Just watch my legs. When I have students who are working into getting into Ekapata, shear salsa and the one leg behind the head posture, I have them do this a lot. Let's start with your right leg. We always want to start action side with the right first, because the right side, the ascending colon is on the right side. That's pushing down. There's always reasons for this. It has to do with energy. So what I want you to do, I want you to stack your legs. Let's take the left leg, since the left leg is going to be on the bottom, and you're going to bring it into a parallel line. If you have your mat, I'm sitting catacord with my mat, but if you have your yoga mat, you can line it up with the top of your yoga mat. Then you're going to take your right leg, and you're going to bring it on top of the left. You see how they're stacked like this? Now some of you might not be able to do this. If your leg is like this, then I want you to bring the right leg in front of the left leg, okay? Only if your leg is like this. If you can get them all the way down to the foot, do as I'm doing. Now here, I want you to sit up straight, really lengthen your spine, and I'm going to move my camera back, because all I want you to do is to then just walk out. You're just going to walk out over the legs. You're going to feel a nice stretch right in the right butt cheek, okay? The butt is part of your hip, too. So you're going to feel a nice little sizzling sensation, that friction, that fire, right back here, okay? So we're going to be here for a few breaths. I think you can always hold it longer than I'm holding it. This is just a demo for you to start incorporating these stretches at home. Now from here, we're going to go deeper into that. Now, if taking this next step is too much for you, just stay where you are like this, all right? But if you can go deeper, you're going to walk your hands to the left, and you're going to keep pressing down into that right hip, right? So you're pressing down. If you want to, you can take your hand and press down on the femur bone. Don't press your knee. Your knee is a joint. Don't press it. The femur bone can be pressed, though. That's a very strong bone. If you don't have to press it down, don't. Just extend your arms out, right? And come back up to center. Let's change sides. So, again, now the right leg is going to be on the bottom. The left leg is going to be on top. You're stacking. You're stacking. If the knee is coming up like this, no problem. Just meet your body, meet your body where you are, okay? Meet yourself where you are. All right, lengthen, and then start to walk out. Again, as I said earlier, my left side is my bad side, not my bad side. I shouldn't say that. That's my, it's my wounded side. So I have to be very careful. I am feeling more of an intense stretch on this side than I am the right. That's just how it's always going to be for me wherever your wounds are. That's probably what they're always are going to be for the rest of your life. Healing yourself, working through this, it's never ending. There's no finish line. That's okay. That's why we came to earth school. And then we're going to walk out to the side. So now we're walking out to the right side to the opposite side of where the intensity is happening. Again, you can use your left hand to press into your femur if you want to, and then coming back to center. So another hip opening posture that a lot of people have asked me about is the posture Padmasana. And Padmasana is lotus posture. It's, it's like the ultimate seat for meditation. Now I do my meditation through my practice. So I, I, I use the Tristanan method in an actual practice. That's how I typically meditate. Sometimes I do seated meditation or mantra meditation. Most of the time it's through my, um, through my actual practice. But, um, if you are looking to do Padmasana for seated meditation, if I do do seated meditation, I don't sit in Padmasana. I typically sit like this, with the left leg in front. And I'll tell you why in a minute. But, um, when I do my Pranayama practices, my breathing practices, I am absolutely in Padmasana because the Padmasana is opening up again different channels of energy. Now the thing about Padmasana, like all the yoga, yoga asanas out there, is that there has to be a buildup, right? You can't just shove yourself into the posture. You have to allow the body to open naturally. And every single human body is created to do these things. So every single human body is created to get the leg behind the head. It is created to do Padmasana. It's just, you have to work through your own obstacles to get there without putting any deadline on yourself, okay? So the reason why I hold Padmasana for Pranayama, again, is because with Pranayama, I'm working with the breath. And I'm working with an intense breath work that's actually, it needs to be moved through the body, through the pattern, through the patterns in my body, through the passageways in my body. And so sitting in Padmasana is the best energetically for me to sit in to do that. But again, when I do do seated meditation, I don't sit in Padmasana. That's just my personal choice. But we're going to talk about Padmasana. So what is lotus posture? What is Padmasana? Well, it's simply this. And I know you're not going to be able to see my head. I'm actually going to be close to the camera. I know you can't see my head. That's okay. You don't need to see my head right now. Right foot comes in, and then the left foot comes in. This is Padmasana position. Now, sometimes you'll see people sitting out wider in Padmasana. If you have a wide Padmasana, you do need to work on getting it in, into a narrower Padmasana. This is because one day you are going to be asked to reach around and catch your foot. Okay. And we also want to really get it in because in these postures, there are pressure points. Yeah. There are pressure points that the feet are pressing into in order to open up different pathways. Okay. So how do we get into Padmasana? So once again, it's right foot first. So the right foot always comes in first. Why is that? It's going to come in right in that crease where your leg hits your stomach because it's going to come right in there. Why does right come in first? Because it's the side we take action on first. It's the ascending colon side. Then the left leg comes on top. This is because your liver, we're also working with the liver in this posture being on the opposite side of this fold, if that makes sense. Now, in rare occasions, people are boring with their organs flip-flopped. If that is you, if your organs are flip-flopped, then you need to do opposite of what I'm telling you. If you're an adult and you're panicked now, like, oh my god, are my organs flip-flopped, you would know by now you usually find that out when the person's a baby. It's a pretty serious condition, so you would know that by now if your organs are flip-flopped. So if you don't know if your organs are flip-flopped, they probably aren't because you would have already found that out. Okay. So this is the Padmasana. Now again, if this is not possible for you yet, we have modifications. You can put the right foot down and bring the left foot on top because you're going to always want that left leg on top or you can simply sit with the left foot in front of the right. Now if you are doing yoga mudra or a seated breathing practice and you need to take yoga mudra, let's talk about this. So this is not guys, this is not a yoga posture. This is upon, this is a hand symbol that the controllers use, not the yoga people. So if your teacher is teaching it to you this way, if your teacher is showing you this, don't go back to that class. Okay. They either are too ignorant to understand this is not what this is or they're an infiltrator. Okay. The proper yoga mudra is this. It's like a duck bill. It's not a circle. It's a duck bill. This is because on the hand, you have all these different energy cycles within the pads of the fingers. And so bringing the pads of the fingers together is going to cause friction. It's going to cause a connection. And so if we're doing yoga mudra, this is what it's supposed to look like. I'm going to go ahead and take Padmasana position. You take your Padmasana position. I tell my students to straighten the arm, spread your fingers apart, and then bring the thumb and the index finger together. At this point, you want to tuck your chin in to hold that Jhalandar bunda, which is a lock in your throat that's going to open up the back of your neck for energy for Shashuna. And this is where you take the mudra for deep breathing. Right. So again, it's this, not this. All right, guys. I hope that made sense. Ask any questions down in the comment section below. Next demo video, I guess, will be over back bending. I don't know when that will come out because I do not suggest anybody doing back bends cold and cold right now. So I will have to make that video post my practice so that I can show you guys everything. I can demonstrate everything without hurting myself. So again, use these as stretches just to move blood. Please, please, please focus on strength though. Focus on your core. You need to get your core really strong. Your inner thighs need to be really strong. Focus on that strength more than that flexibility. Use the tools of flexibility just to flush the blood. That's it. Remember, passive stretching is when we get hurt. Active stretching is when we move energy. So make sure you're constantly staying active. And I will be posting information about the course very, very, very soon for you guys. Keep practicing. As Patabi Joyce used to say, practice all is coming. And we said all is coming. He meant the good, the bad, and the ugly. So just keep practicing guys. That's why we came to earth school, is to work through this, to go to war with our own ego in order to find that soul so that we can have the courage to bring that soul back to God. So love you guys and I'll see you soon. Bye.