Postures to Prayers: Movement As Medicine.. RADIATE LOVE
We at the BLOOM team are very excited to be hosting Get Empowered Yoga Founder Michelle Theoret at the festival again this year. She will be teaching Postures to Prayers at BLOOM on Sunday October 4th accompanied with musician Amy Theissen. Here is a recent post by Michelle from her blog at Empowered Yoga Edmonton.
THERE ARE TWO MOTIVATING FORCES BEHIND EVERYTHING WE DO: FEAR AND LOVE.
It is our fear of looking good that imprisons us, preventing us from harnessing our creative potential. Most of the risks we don’t take if you deduce them back to the source through a series of questions are due to our fear of what others will think, who we will disappoint etc.
Love allows us to be open, sensitive, accepting and receptive.
As a society we are so closed off through the front body, we are constantly forward thinking, accumulating and possessive. We also spend hours in traffic, in chairs, hunched over computers and slouched on couches unconsciously absorbing the medias ideas of what we should eat, how we should live and what we should look like.
As the body shrinks fear expands.
We loose our confidence, trust and our sense of self. This week focuses on opening the front of the body, expanding the chest and shoulders, releasing the Psoas and quadriceps and strengthening the muscles that support our spine.
Physically the backbends ask us to be open through our chest and hip flexors but strong through the core, buttocks and legs. It is from the strength and stability of the core and the legs that allow the body to feel safe and supported. When we no longer feel threatened, we can go back into the unknown guided by our intuition and intelligence, instead of fear and force. Fear and force cause the body to shrink, creating compression and impingement. We get to that place in the pose where we begin to feel uncomfortable and challenged and our initial reaction is to become frustrated or pissed off because it does not look and or feel the way we expected it to. The not “enough-ness” starts to creep in and the body tightens up.
Compassion and sensitivity cause the body to expand.
As we slowly begin to loosen the strings of the tight-laced chest and shoulder musculature as well as the psoas that imprisons the pelvis we begin to soften our armour, creating suppleness and power not only in the backbends but also in our lives.
The Heart (ANAHATA) CHAKRA
The Anahata Chakra is located in around the heart space and lungs and is associated with air element and the colour green. The lung and heart meridians in Chinese medicine also run through this region.
In Chinese Medicine the Lungs are known as the Minister’ as they control breath and energy and assist the ‘King’ heart with the circulation of blood.
The emotions we experience when lung energy is in disharmony are grief, worry or sadness and as the Large intestine meridian is paired with the lung meridian, elimination or letting go of these emotions……..As for the heart, we all know what its’s energetic feeling is…Joy, love or mania and anxiety. In chinese medicine the heart controls the mind and the heart blood anchors the mind, when the heart energy is out of balance we see symptoms such as racing or dull mind, insomnia and the list goes on…….
‘The heart commands all of the organs and viscera, houses the spirit, and controls the emotions.
‘Energy is the commander of blood; when energy moves, blood follows. Blood is the mother of energy; where blood goes, energy follows.’
The yellow Emperors internal medicine classic
The challenge in this chakra is to open up to love, self acceptance and forgiveness so that we may heal and rise above. RADIATE LOVE.
Anahata means “infinite”. In the Anahata Chakra we hear the eternal vibration of the Self: SO HAM – “That I am, I am That”. We also hear the sound of the heart beat, which pumps life sustaining blood, which is filled with oxygen and nutrients taken in from the environment into the individual cells (mitochondria) that create our physical body.
According to Anodea Judith in her book: Eastern Body Western Mind, in the fourth chakra we create our social identity also known as the persona or the personality we create to interact with others. This identity is moulded and shaped based on how we think others perceive us and how we feel of service to others and eventually becomes our basis for self acceptance.
Having the courage to be authentic; to let ourselves be seen allows us to expand the heart chakra. The latin word “cour” actually means heart.
The Tao Te Ching states that courage is derived from love “One of courage, with audacity, will die. One of courage, but gentle, spares death. From these two kinds of courage arise harm and benefit”
Ernest Hemingway famously defined courage as “grace under pressure”
We at BLOOM say, the world was made for love, we say the world was made of stars and as we all join hands, we turn this planet into a star.