On the 17th I wrote about stuck Prana in response to a student question. In that post I wrote mainly about the stuff that gets stuck daily: Stifled emotions, sore muscles from poor posture, the little bothers of the day that slowly add up to stress headaches or insomnia. These are easy to address with massage, good sleep, bubble baths or some form of meditation.
If we don’t address these little bothers, they grow and grow until all that held tension erupts in emotional or nervous breakdowns, fits of rage, prolonged illness or depression. Even with these major events, these are minor issues and resolve fairly easily. The problem is that these minor issues are usually symptoms of something deeper. Some other chunk of frozen Prana is holding us back.
Buried Deep
Deeper blockages—frozen or stuck Prana, energetic blocks, samskara, these are all the same thing under different names—often stem from something we believed as a child
or something we have come to believe as an adult that locks us into a behavior pattern. These are the deep, dark secrets that we hide from even ourselves. Childhood traumas most often are what live locked away in our hearts, quietly influencing everything we experience. Occasionally teenage and adult trauma make their way there too but most often these simply reinforce the dark secrets we already hold.
When we, as adults, think of childhood trauma, abuse often comes to mind. To a child, trauma can be something as simple as a hug not given after a scary happening or an innocent but unwanted nickname used for years. No doubt, abuse leaves its share of deep scars and secrets but, more often, it is the misunderstandings of childhood that create the majority of our deep blockages. In both cases these blocks usually surface as fear of abandonment or a sense of paucity. It may surface as a belief that “I am not good enough” or “I am unlovable.”
In every case, these deeply held blocks influence our everyday experiences to prove that what we believe is true. They are the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecies and, so long as we allow, we are both their prophets and their prey.
Look Into The Dark
Freeing any block is very simple, you just shine the light of your awareness on it. You look at it. Simple, right? Phobias are just energetic blocks. Ask a person who is afraid of spiders how easy it is to look at a spider. These secrets we keep in our hearts are, personally, more frightening than a spider or a snake every could be.
That fear of what we keep hidden does a very good job of preventing us from looking into our own darkness. This is when the Amrit Methods of Yoga and Yoga Nidra become so tremendously beneficial. Amrit Yoga at its very beginning level helps us break reactive patterns; so, when we look into the darkness, we don’t run away. Amrit Yoga moves into the darkness from the outside in. Amrit Yoga Nidra helps us kindle a light in the darkness itself, it lowers our defenses and allows us to move to the center of our being which is where we also hide those dark secrets. There we can purposefully plant seeds of light, intentions or sankalpa, that help illuminate the darkness. Amrit Yoga Nidra moves into the darkness from the inside out.
If you live near Pleasant Grove, Utah, you can experience a taste of this for yourself by attending my classes at the Pleasant Grove Community Center on Tuesday nights with Amrit Yoga at 8pm and Yoga Nidra at 9pm. If you would like to explore this more deeply, you can arrange private Yoga or Yoga Nidra sessions. If neither of these is an option, go to the downloads page to download free Yoga Nidra sessions.
Jai Bhagwan!