Class Video and Text
Chapter 1: Cosmic Osmosis
1A: Rolling Within: Walking the Path of Intrinsic Wisdom
It is rare to consider wisdom as an innate quality— we often think of it as a result of bringing external knowledge into our awareness, yet it seems that the yogic tradition has a slightly different perspective.
“The Self is the source of pure wisdom. This intrinsic wisdom is different from the knowledge gained by ascertaining from somebody else, inference, or through other flawed perceptions. These other methods of understanding are tainted by impressions left by previous experiences (sanskaras). These impressions cause pre-conceived notions about how things are and hinder our ability to function at our highest level. When the practitioner can truly transcend all of the manifestations of the mind, nothing remains an obstacle to enlightenment.”
The Yogic Tradition separates wisdom from knowledge, saying that wisdom is intrinsic and knowledge is something gained from ascertaining, inferring, or generally using our senses to understand. Why is this type of knowledge limited? From the perspective of the Yogic Tradition our perception is inherently limited by our likes and dislikes, our patterns and tendencies. An analogy would be like wearing blue blocker sunglasses and trying to understand color— the lens by which you observe the world is tinted, or as the yogic tradition says here, ‘tainted’, by the pre-conceived notions that we observe our world through.Does this mean the yogic tradition is anti-science? Not in the least— in fact the first recorded texts of the yogic tradition were the Vedas, which literally translated to meaning “The Science”. The holy texts of yoga were literally science books, pretty unique in the world of religions. Which is why yoga is not quite a religion, and not entirely a science— it is both. It believes both in an innate wisdom that lies within us, while simultaneously asserting that we must unveil that wisdom through the work of our day to day practice. In Yoga perfection and imperfection exist side by side, and it is only through practice that we can reveal this understanding and way of being.
Surrendered movement is the path of asana, the yogic practice of using our daily movements as a means of both spiritual growth and physical health. Just like the yogic idea of innate wisdom of the heart being different from learned wisdom of the head, the body too has innate wisdom which is superior than our interpretations of it. This doesn’t mean we should stop trying to understand the body analytically and anatomically, but rather, those studies should be coupled with a genuine movement practice, instead of sitting in isolation on the page of a book.
One way of describing this innate wisdom of the body is through relatively recent discovery of facially connected muscle teams working in unison to enable the miracles of our everyday movement. Over the past 30 years, through peer reviewed dissection based discovery, the unity of our body has been mapped out into 12 fascially connected muscle teams. In this training we focus on 5-7 fundamental teams that serve to repattern not only our experience of asana, but our experience of movement in any context. This research and work should not feel like more information to memorize, or more anatomy to juggle, but rather, it synthesizes in a natural and functional way what you have probably already learned. It unites what you know into an intuitive and functional anatomical methodology. How intuitive is this information? Let’s just say you wrote the book on it before you could even sit up.
As infants, we worked arduously for years to not only develop the individual muscles but to do so in unified teams. These teams of muscles were not picked by our thinking mind, but united through natural everyday motions, like the need to lift one’s head, to turn over, to squat, to stand up, to walk, jump and throw. You could say that we learned how to move before we even knew what moving or learning was. As we lie on our bellies and seek to look up to see our parents, the whole back line of our body begins to engage together. In a yoga class as an adult, though, when someone performs Bhujangasana, it is common to see a student just lift their head and neck, compressing their cervical vertebrae and missing out on the benefits of the posture as a whole. As teachers, we see this and ask the student to relax the neck, to breathe slower, and to feel their back awaken, glutes, hamstrings, calves and even the soles of their feet, as they slowly lengthen the front of their body and lift the back. Through this work the student is not only pulling more of the mind into the present, they are also consciously uniting and repatterining this movement team so that they feel more supportive as they move through their day. The wisdom of how to move was already there, yet we can take the help of anatomy and science like a map, leading us skillfully through a world that formed long ago.When we move with the entire team, we move towards health, when we move in isolation, we can easily slip into doership and eventual injury. There is always a place for isolated work, especially when recovering from an injury. But more often than not, we move or stretch a body part in isolation because of what we think needs to happen, which isn’t always what might need to happen. For example, many of us might feel that to relieve tight hamstrings we need to stretch the hamstring in isolation. For this reason many students do flat back forward folds, contracting the top half of the back line while stretching the bottom half of the back line. The result? Hamstring tendonitis, or yoga butt, occurs as the hamstring attachments begin to tear from the ischial tuborisities. As the erector muscles get tighter and tighter, and the hamstrings longer and longer, the pelvis itself easily slips into an anterior pelvic tilt and forward thrust, resulting in compressed lumbar vertebrae and a lack of tone in the abdominals and front line. And finally, the hamstring tightness tends to recur because the muscle group lacks strength and stability, and therefore tightens as a means of bracing. When we move in isolation we are walking a slippery slope, especially when that isolation occurs on a daily basis as a part of our regular practice.
Through dissection based, peer reviewed studies, which form a foundational aspect to the anatomy of this training, the recognition of these muscle teams has allowed high level athletes as well as everyday movers new insight into how they can not only move better, but move more sustainably, more naturally, and move towards health. Of course, the Yogic tradition has always held the notion of unity at its core, as that is the very definition of the word yoga itself, to ‘unite’, to ‘yoke’ together. But of course, just learning about the muscle teams themself isn’t enough— learning is just a map, walking the path is how you arrive at a new way of moving and being. Uniting the map with the path is the work of this training.As we have said, the pathways of natural movement we wish to reveal in our work during this training are not abstract or complex, in fact, they are so intuitive and fundamental that we learned them without any teacher and without any textbook— in fact, we learned them before we even knew what learning was, just by rolling around on the floor, trying to see our parents, trying to move through our world.
Baby’s don’t seem strong, but they are actually super movers and super workers. Did you know that their heads are 5% heavier in relation to their body’s than our own. This would be like lifting your head in cobra pose with an 8 pound helmet. Add to this that your muscles are literally still forming, which would be like the most intense form of physical therapy an adult might ever undergo, and you’ve got an average day for a baby.
Play VIDEO OF BABY ROLLING OVER.
This baby is literally forming teams of muscles that will go on to be the primary movement families that move us through every moment of every day of our lives. The same movement teams used by an Olympian, an Olive picker, or a server at the Olive Garden.We’ve talked about the back line forming as the baby looks up around its environment. On the front side of the body we have a very different team of muscles forming. When we curl up, we don’t just move our head, but fold across the entire front plane of the body as once. The superficial front line team is a group of Fast twitch muscles, like the rectus abdominus, that protect the viscera of our soft front sides, teaming up with equally fast firing quadriceps to lift our legs and propel us through space.
As we lean onto our sides we toggle between the front and back sides of our body, the great mitigating force of the lateral line, which will go on to be a key player in walking, running and balancing.
And As we reach through multiple dimensions, going from our back to our front and back again, we traverse the spiral line, the most profound and complex team of musculature wrapping us a double helix of support from head to toe. This team utilizes muscles from every other team to accomplish its dynamic and cosmic task. Spiraling may just be the very definition of natural movement itself.
Exercise: Original Rolling Pattern
But as we’ve said, this is an intuitive process, one that we learned before we knew what learning was. And believe it or not, we can repattern and rediscover these teams through the most enjoyable and accessible movement possible, rolling! Let’s try a foundational rolling pattern that will not only replicate your learning process as an infant, but actually reprogram your movement capacity to work more holisitcally.
Front line gently tones when we are on our back
Knees rocking starts to develop the spiral line
Lateral lines pattern when we are resting on our side
Front line and the back line work in the "protozoa pulse”
Backline activates once we make it onto the belly
All of this happening naturally, but not easily. Which brings us back to the union of science and intuition. These natural movement pathways are still the pathways that we move along, except now we don’t move as much, and those pathways have literally become a tangled mess, losing their spring, literally as we’ll see later under the microscope. Our connective tissue is organized in wave like patterns that enable movement to occur with less caloric expense, but a lack of movement in over the course of a few weeks can lose those organizational rows and leave us feeling exhausted, or even injured, by even the simplest movements of our day. In this way you could say that the infinite wilderness of our movement potential has been fenced in due to this or that injury, job description, or simply due to a lack of energy. For a million and one reasons, our movement life seems to contract as we age, instead of expand. This isn’t just the case for our physical kosha, but also the subtler koshas of our heart and mind.
The yogic tradition calls these “Samskaras”. These fences keep us from moving and living at our true potential, but what’s more perplexing is that they also keep us from learning how to move better. As Sri Shambhavananda says, these patterns are like an anchor that keeps us stuck at the bottom of the ocean— we want to rise up and breathe again, but we also like our anchor which we have created over the years. Letting go of that anchor is weirdly difficult, and even if someone shows you how, it still takes work to accomplish. As the Shiva Sutras teach:“The results of your God consciousness (caitanya) being fenced in by the five coverings is that you act in a limited way, know in a limited way, love in a limited way, live in a limited way and possess in a limited way. Being attached to this path with your organs of knowledge and organs of action, you are guided to walk the spiritual path in a limited way. Your attachment to this path is such that even if you meet an elevated soul who desires to show you the correct path, you will not accept their guidance”-Shiva Sutra 3.3
What we see in this quote is that we are fenced in by our likes and dislikes to such an extent that we not only live and move in a limited way, but also have a very hard time learning new ways of living and moving because of those attachments. To transcend this inherent limitation we have to learn how to move without the limitations of our mind and habits, to learn from our hearts instead of our heads. This isn’t a metaphor, but a very practical approach to the learning process that resembles the concept of osmosis, the process of gradual or almost subconscious assimilation of ideas, knowledge, etc.Is it possible to quiet your mind and still listen and learn? The yogic tradition not only says yes, but asserts that this is the only way to listen without the inherent biases of our samskaras. In a scientific experiment this would be called "experimenter bias" or "researcher bias." This acknowledges the potential influence that a test creator's expectations, beliefs, or unintentional cues can have on the participants and consequently affect the outcomes. Being aware of and mitigating such biases is essential for maintaining the validity and reliability of scientific tests and experiments. The way we do that in our practice is simply by trying to surrender while we learn, to allow our intuition to live alongside us as we learn and grow. To feel, breathe and soften while we think, see and speak. It’s not only possible, but essential when considering the big picture of real wisdom.
Visualizing your movement practice as learning through osmosis, or learning through absorption, allows you to explore the possibility of learning from a new space of intuition within yourself, the heart instead of the head. We feel that rolling is a wonderful way to not only explore this, but to also feel first hand the benefits of learning through osmosis. Students in our trainings not only feel better after rolling, they often find that they were able to unravel knots they didn’t even know they had. Rolling is a perfect metaphor for movement osmosis, but essentially this is what is meant by surrender, the ability to interact with your life consciously without the limits of your samskaras.A Student once asked Sri Shambhavananda, “Sometimes when I feel like I'm just getting my fingers around a new understanding, some kind of lurch comes and I wonder if I'm absorbing what it is I was trying to get.”
To Which he responded: “Maybe you want to spend too much time looking at it. These things aren't to be analyzed; they are to be absorbed. Osmosis and absorption are very important principles to understand. I was with Rudi for only a short time before he died and, twenty years later I find that because I absorbed some truth that was coming through him, it just comes up. It is as if I absorbed it, and it took me twenty years to digest it and then it is there. It is a finished product. That's the way it works. But you have to have an open heart and a dedication to spiritual growth. Spiritual growth will bring you everything that you need to do in the world. It doesn't make you want to live in a cave and be a hermit.”
We’ve got to approach learning in a new way if we want to learn and grow. Much of what we need to learn in our movement practice, as well as our meditation practice, can’t be learned from the mind for all the reasons we’ve expounded upon. It must be absorbed and digested from a deeper place. The heart is actually considered the seat of the higher mind, the seat of intuition, and so of course this is a natural focal point for our learning practice. Can you feel the teachings in your heart while you hear them in your head? The beauty of our approach to today’s work is that it will essentially be formless, movement without form, in order to allow you to truly move without too much thinking, as well as to generate as much inner sensation as possible, which needs to computation to be felt.We’ll begin our path towards Cosmic Osmosis by rolling. Rolling is the original path of osmotic learning that we all worked through as infants to unite our movement teams. By rolling we can re-discover these natural movement pathways, as well as re-unite them in order that they become more cohesive teams on and off the mat.
Rolling is also one of the most effective ways to awaken your deep core musculature, your deeper postural musculature. These are the kinds of core muscles that support us in all of the in-between moments of our lives. An awakened deep core make your movement buoyant and graceful, as well as sustainable. These are not the kinds of muscles you can tone with sit ups, but rather are toned in the first degree of sitting up. Rolling is one of the easiest ways to awaken them, and allow them to play a bigger part in your yoga practice.
Rolling also allows your body to flow, and is a fun and simple way to create a larger volume of fluid exchange within the body, as it involves large swaths of tissue moving within a full integrated body, instead of individual parts moving separately, something we will be exploring in detail very soon.So let’s get rolling, and allow our energy to flow. Then, as Babaji teaches, we can allow the wisdom to roll through us. As Sri Shambhavanda teaches, “Open your heart and you let go of your little self, Surrender and allow the Energy to Flow— Then wonderful energy and deep WISDOM can come through.”- Sri ShambhavAnanda
This is how we roll!
Exercise: Leg Press
Exercise: Happy Baby Roll
Exercise: Drag-on Roll
Exercise: Front Body Roll
Exercise: PT Roll
Exercise: incorporating Rolling
You can incorporate rolling in a lot of different ways in your class:
side body rocks
interoception at the beginning of class
they make great transitions!
bridge, slowly press into the foot to roll to side or belly
rainbow roll to seated
roll from belly to seated (from Sunday’s Class)
1B: Fluid Dynamics: Unveiling the Hydration Exchange
Much of the hydration that occurs between our blood vessels, connective tissue and cells happens through a mechanical process that is aided by our time spent rolling. This mechanical process operates like the sponge analogy we have always heard of in our yoga classes. The real sponge in this image, though, is our connective tissue, which is the middle man of the hydration exchange between our blood vessels and our 40 trillion cells in need. As Researcher Robert Schleip describes it:
“Mechanical Pressure and shear motion leads to a liquid exchange in the fascia. Fascia loves pressure, specifically variable pressure. The tissue is literally squeezed like a sponge, transporting metabolites and lymph away, and then partly refills with new and fresh water from the blood plasma in the small capillaries.” -Schleip, Fascial Fitness
The fluids in our body are being exchanged between 3 main compartments:
Your cells (60% of body’s water),
Your Facia, (30% of the body’s water),
and your plasma, the carrier fluid of your blood (10%).
The Exchange at work: Arteries (red) carry oxygen and nutrients away from your heart, to your body's tissues. Capillaries, the smallest and most numerous of the blood vessels, form the connection between the vessels that carry blood away from the heart (arteries) and the vessels that return blood to the heart (veins). The primary function of capillaries is the exchange of materials between the blood and tissue cells.The arteries deliver the oxygen-rich blood to the capillaries, where the actual exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide occurs. The capillaries then deliver the waste-rich blood to the veins for transport back to the lungs and heart. Veins carry the blood back to the heart.Capillaries are the only blood vessels where substances can be exchanged between the blood and body cells. They are so tiny, that blood cells move through them in single file lines!
In this amazing image we see the capillary bed is bringing in fresh plasma with water content, as well as other nutrients and gases, and that plasma is exuded from the capillary due to a difference in pressure. Those plasma cells are further squeezed according to a filtration process, and their water content is released into the fascia and then enters the cells via the same pressure exchange.
This pressurized exchange continues in the opposite direction as the capillary continues across it’s path— cells and fascia exude their waste, as well as CO2, which is absorbed through the capillary wall and taken out via the veins. Whatever water content is not absorbed by fascia or cells is carried out by the lymphatic ducts.
This incredibly efficient pressurized fluid exchange is a type of osmosis, you might remember this from science class if you ever did a celery experiment like this one pictured. The capillary walls of the celery allow the fluid to be exchanged, resulting in a colored piece of celery. This pressurized exchange occurs automatically, but can be supported through specialized movements, like massage and rolling, on our yoga mat.
By Assisting this Fluid Renewal Process we can:
Stimulate our metabolism
Improve our fluid supply to the fascia and associated organs (cells)
Reduce our muscle tightness
Increase our mobility
Invigorate and Regenerate our Fascia
Exercise: Massage with Hands
Neck massage
Trap Massage
Tricep Massage
Foot Massage
Hamstring massage
Belly Massage
Sinus Massage
Exercise: Massage with legs
Knee into Calf Massage
Heel into body massage
Calf Squeeze
Exercise: Massage with Floor
Side Body Massage
Arm Massage
Sacrum Massage
Forehead massage
1C: Osmosis in Spirit: The Metaphor of Growth and Healing
Osmosis isn’t just a biological process to describe cellular functions, its also a spiritual metaphor to describe the process of growth. As we have seen in the previous text, we all have inherent biases, samskaras, that act like walls between ourselves and the truth. These walls are similar to the capillaries, a necessary division required for biological life— as the yogic tradition teaches, if you’re alive you’ve got samskaras. But through osmosis we can move through these cell walls without having to break the walls. We can have a personality, and yet also connect beyond duality. Such a process requires patience and persistence, a gradual process that can only occur a little bit at a time. The experience is a mechanical one, meaning that it requires participation from us on a visceral level— this means to grow we must allow ourselves to be squeezed— we must release to make room to absorb. In so many ways, osmosis is a perfect metaphor for spiritual practice and growth.
The presence of the Medicine Buddha as the presiding deity of this training is a perfect setting to begin to work with and grasp the heart based teachings of osmosis. Essentially, when someone is sick or injured, and we want to help them, we repeat the medicine buddha mantra while we visualize that individual in a blue radiant light. According to the text we become a conduit for healing energy to enter the atmosphere, benefiting all sentient beings, as well as one self, and especially the person we are visualizing. But the healing energy is not coming from us, it is coming through us, its like we are the capillary wall, and through inner surrender, a pressurized exchange is able to take place. The nutrient rich plasma of the medicine buddha squeezes through us and into the cells in need. And lucky for us, the waste products do not have to be squeezed back in, but are simply released and dissolve into the atmosphere. We are not the one’s doing the healing, yet we are the ones enabling it to take place.
As Babaji teaches, “It’s not you doing it. Get out of the idea that you’re healing somebody. You’re being a vehicle for this blue shakti to come through and heal the world…You surrender and allow this to flow through you. Mostly it’s smarter than us, it knows where to go and what to do.”
The Medicine Buddha is a manifestation of the healing energy of all Buddhas. The Medicine Buddha is often depicted sitting in meditation, holding a bowl of medicinal nectar in one hand and a healing plant in the other. Practitioners turn to the Medicine Buddha for physical and mental healing, as well as to overcome the obstacles on the path to enlightenment. The Shambhavananda Tradition was empowered to perform the Medicine Buddha Practice by. The recitation of the Medicine Buddha mantra, "Tadyatha Om Bekhaze Bekhaze Maha Bekhaze Bekhaze Rasa Samungate Svaha," is the living mantra given to the Shambhavananda Tradition to invoke the healing energy of the medicine Buddha.
When done correctly, the practice performs miracles, as we’ve seen in our sangha on numerous occasions. On a practical level, it gives you a way to harness your energy, and funnel it in a powerful direction when your mind would otherwise just spend all its energy on worrying.We all need healing, and we don’t often know how to do it. That’s natural, and that’s why we put our energy into our practice instead of into our patterns. And though the medicine buddha practice we can steadily approach this yogic perspective of healing and wisdom.