From the yogic perspective, halos are sexual energy transformed

Yoga improves your sex life!   I guess that’s not surprising news, but it’s pretty funny from my perspective.

A major element of my yoga practice (albeit in an ashram setting) was a committed and sustained practice intimately linked with a vow of celibacy.  

The teachings of yoga in it’s more esoteric form are to move the energy UP and IN rather than DOWN and OUT.  My celibacy vow lasted 6.5 years before I “got off the elevator”.  And it was a ride.

I’m deeply grateful for those years of conscious restraint.  When I moved into the ashram at 25 I was pretty focused on (and addicted to) relationships.  Whenever I met anyone, I could not help but be caught in the basic scan of “do-able and not do-able.”  Celibacy for a 25-year old sounded like cruel and unusual punishment, but I was transformed by the practice.  Women who I would have pursued and been intimate with – but with whom I would not have had the emotional maturity to sustain anything – became best friends.

Over time I realized I had more intimacy in my life than ever. 

In the ashram women and men were segregated.  We did a lot of touch and massage among the brothers.   (I eventually got to understand how challenging, confusing and difficult this was for the gay brothers in the community.)  Massage was a wonderful way to connect, show support and was integrated with our very embodied practice of yoga.

The guru (Yogi Amrit Desai) noticed this and declared a ‘touch fast.’  ”No more touching or massage,” he said.  This struck me as particularly cruel and unusual.  He went on to say, “When you are with someone and find yourself wanting to express your love or affection in a habitual way, try moving it up.  Try to express yourself instead through the tone of your voice or through your eyes.”

I took on this practice and it was deeply transforming.  I realized I could be with anyone and never hold back my heart.

When my vow was up I eventually explored sexuality again from a fresh and renewed place inside.

Georg Feurstein, one of the most respected voices of yoga in the west, talks about the reductionism of yoga.  This incredibly complex and sophisticated system for transformation and awakening has been reduced to tight hamstrings in a YMCA.

And so it turns out a yoga practice enhances one’s performance.  This seems a most logical and natural manifestation, but here it is, courtesy of CNN. (thanks, Don, for the tip!)

Yogis have better sex, study finds

Eastern enlightenment proved to be sexually beneficial for men and women

Leading Yoga on Retreat

My first yoga class changed my life.  I was a freshman in high school when I stumbled into a yoga class offered by one of the teachers.  During the yoga nidra, or guided relaxation, I felt a conscious shift in my perception to a spaciousness and relaxation I hadn’t quite felt before.  Soon after I learned Transcendental Meditation and I was hooked.

Since then yoga and meditation have been an integral part of my life, either practicing regularly, teaching or training others how to teach it.

I’ve practiced most of the flavors of yoga, from intensely challenging postures that cultivate strength and concentration to practices that are a bit more in alignment with how I teach now – cultivating more of the surrendered, open and yet embodied presence.

The following is an article from Psychology Today which corroborates the effect of this practice.

Yoga: The Strongest Stretch

An ancient tradition, yoga gains modern muscle.

By PsychologyToday.com

After the tsunami ripped through Southeast Asia in 2004 came a tidal wave of psychic devastation. The depression and posttraumatic stress that ravaged many residents of coastal villages from India to Indonesia provided a living laboratory for testing the most powerful cures available. What wound up providing the best help to some of the most afflicted refugees? Yoga.

Yoga is an age-old practice with roots in India—bas-reliefs depicting yoga asanas, or poses, have been found on 5,000-year-old archeological artifacts—but yoga as most Americans know it is only part of the picture. The hatha yoga popular here emphasizes the exercise element. There are many forms of yoga and all share an attempt to create a state of blissful enlightenment, called ananda. En route, specific forms of breathing and exercises encourage physical purification.

As a professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College who studies the effects of yoga on posttraumatic stress, Patricia Gerbarg seized the opportunity to test whether it could help tsunami survivors in India. To one group of 60 victims she gave a four-day yoga breathing course. Another group of 60 survivors was given the yoga course along with psychological counseling. A third group served as controls.

All the yoga users experienced a huge drop in scores for posttraumatic stress disorder and depression after just four days. And the effect was so persistent that Gerbarg and her team introduced yoga to those in the control group too. Counseling provided no added benefits over the yoga training alone.

While some forms of yoga have long been shown to reduce hypertension, cholesterol levels, and other signs of physiological stress, the effects of the ancient practice on psychological stress have been less studied. But a slew of research published in peer-reviewed journals in the U.S., Europe, and India is documenting the ability of yoga to decrease mood disturbance, reduce psychic stress and anxiety, and reduce PTSD symptoms. Effects have been seen within days of initiating instruction, and have been documented up to six months after a course of yoga training.

You don’t have to weather a natural disaster or receive a clinical diagnosis to benefit from yoga, says Lorenzo Cohen, director of the Integrative Medicine Program at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Calling it “the quintessential mind-body practice,” Cohen predicts that yoga “can and will be shown to be helpful for managing the stress and mild anxiety we all experience in daily living.”

A group of healthy senior citizens in Oregon embodies Cohen’s claims. They experienced improved energy and a greater sense of well-being after six months of yoga training. The study was particularly valuable because it compared the yoga group with seniors engaging in walking exercise classes. The non-yoga exercisers reported no such benefit.

In her yoga course, Gerbarg trains trauma sufferers in four types of yogic breathing that range from focusing on slow, complete exhalation to taking 30 breaths a minute. She and her husband, psychopharmacologist P.L. Brown of Columbia University, have found that yogic breathing physiologically affects the nervous system to produce profound changes in emotional states.

It acts via the vagus nerve—the “rest and digest,” or calming, pathway of the autonomic nervous system extending from brain stem to abdomen; when activated, it slows down breathing and heart rate and increases intestinal activity. It not only carries signals from brain to body but ferries signals from the body back to the brain. “Your breathing pattern changes with emotional reactions to things,” Gerbarg says. “Well, it goes both ways: If you change your breathing pattern, you can change your emotions.”

Lynn Waelde, a psychologist at Stanford University and a yoga teacher, explains yoga’s mind-body benefits in more metaphorical terms. “When we teach yoga, we teach people to let go of physical tensions,” she says. “When you sit them in a chair in meditation, they get it. It’s an easy step to see how you can breathe and focus on emotional or mental tension and let it go.”

Could yoga save the world? It improves fitness, it doesn’t cost anything, it has minimal side effects, it acts quickly, and the benefits endure. The advantages are especially important when applied on a large scale to impoverished people. Gerbarg and Cohen believe the value of yoga is just beginning to be documented. “We’re in the early phases of something very exciting, and there’s a lot more to learn about it,” Gerbarg says. “This is not something you need to religiously incorporate into your daily life and do for years before you start to feel the benefits.”

By Paul Tullis

Last Reviewed: 29 May 2007

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