Exercise Set for Lungs and Bloodstream; Yoga set for the Kidneys.

Because I'm working through some personal challenges, and chose a very difficult meditation to do every day (that I'll post that another time) to aid me in my quest, I realized I needed to first do a yoga set to prepare myself.

On my shelf of Kundalini Yoga sets and texts, I found an old manual from circa (!) 1983, when Yogi Bhajan was still teaching what I like to call 'Kundalini Boot Camp.' (By the 2000s, the sets were much more subtle and heart-centred.)

These sets are hard work, and yet they work in the ways claimed. I began the manual's sets a few days ago, so am posting what I did today, and will continue as I go.

Today I began with a difficult lung cleansing, holding the breath and pumping the spine back and forth while the arms and hands are locked on the knees. I was sweating by the end of it!

I followed that with the set for the kidneys included below. While I do the meditations and exercises, like the Exercise Set for the Lungs and Bloodstream, for 11 minutes, I only do half time on the yoga set. It would take far too long otherwise! So when it says, lift your torso up and down for 8 minutes, I only do it for four. Balancing in Crow Pose for one minute becomes 30 seconds, and so on. This is permissible, as long as you do half time on every exercise - they are all balanced to work together.

During the years that I actively taught Kundalini Yoga, from 1995-2003, following the sets carefully, and not pushing yourself too much and stopping if it hurts, no-one ever had a 'bad' Kundalini experience. The classes are carefully balanced with meditations, breath work, mantras and yoga sets. Kundalini Yoga is an empowering form of physical and emotional and spiritual exercise that leaves you glowing more brightly than before you began the session. As with any intense work, transformations occur, energies shift, awakenings come about.

While my aim was to post these sets in a closed Google+ circle, and I may figure out how to do that yet, the logistics of posting the scans of the pages without opening the whole album until I've finished the sets, day by day, about 20 perhaps (some are short, like today's exercise, after which the kriya or yoga set is done), is a bit beyond me.

So this will suffice, for the first day of sharing.

There's also a video to show how to tune in with the mantra, Ong Namo Guru Dev Namo, which is Gurmukhī; the English translation is I bow to the Creative Energy of the Universe; I bow to the Divine Teacher Within. Make sure you tune in before trying anything, and do the exercises slowly if you've not tried this yoga before. Better still, take some 3H0 Kundalini Yoga classes, they're offered all over the world (it's originally a Sikh yoga, very powerful), so you can understand the way the exercises are done, and the breath work that accompanies them.

Tuning in before you begin a Kundalini Yoga set is important. I found this short video to explain the way we tune in with a mantra repeated three times.