Be in the moment

A beautiful reminder from lululemon.com

Who are you rootin' for?

Just over two years ago a very inspiring Yoga teacher from Chicago landed in Brisbane with a dream to share Anusara Yoga with the Australian community. I am forever grateful to have crossed paths with Julie and to continue to learn and grow with her.

If you are fortunate enough to have practiced with Julie, you will have heard her talk about 'rootin down'. 'Rooting what?' you say? I thought this was Yoga! Today, Julie's birthday, I'm dedicating my blog to Julie and to rootin' down. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

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I invite you to remove your shoes and socks and find a piece of Earth to plant your feet. A sandy beach, the soft grass in your garden, the damp soil on the forest floor. Close your eyes. Stand tall with your feet hip width apart, toes pointing straight ahead and your knees tracking over your ankles. Your shoulders can melt away from the ears, the tips of the shoulder blades connecting with the back of your heart and your arms can rest by the side of your body.

Create a solid foundation through the feet by lifting and spreading the 10 toes one at a time. Press down through the big toe side of the ball of the foot, the inside of heel...the pinky toe side of the ball of the foot, the outside of the heel.


Each time you breathe in, allow the breath to travel from the centre of the chest out along the core lines. Just as a tree grows up through it's branches and down through its roots, feel the breath lengthen the spine up through the crown of the head and down through the tail bone and feet. Allow each exhalation to bring softness and surrender to the muscles, the skin and the organs.

Bring your awareness back to your feet, remembering that the tree is in constant interaction with the nutrient-giving earth.  Feel the breath as it travels down through the legs and through the four corners of your feet to connect with the Earth. Like the tree, our connection goes beyond the surface of the Earth.
Our inner ear senses down into the Earth's energetic centre, her Hara, to find balance.

Visualise tree roots shooting out from the soles of your feet and reaching deep into the Earth's centre. Where have your roots spread? Where do they get their nourishment? Perhaps your roots travel the 4000 miles into Mother Earth's molten core. What do you find there? Are there more roots searching for nourishment there? Which are yours and which belong to someone else? Using your inhalation to grow your roots, reach out and intertwine with another beautiful human being who is standing, exactly as you are, on the other side of our planet. Notice as your breaths synchronise. Grow your awareness to feel the pulsation of the Earth. Enjoy the synchronicity of breath. Tune in to Earth's deep breathing.

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Trees of a similar kind are found in clusters. They stand together and grow together. Thank you Julie for creating a beautiful forest of Yogis - communicating, chanting and meditating under a gorgeous big tree.
xx Kirsty

Harmful effects of Garlic

My domestic-God partner (aka Michael) cooked us an amazing feast last night - delicious Chicken and Vegetable Tagine with some home made garlic bread on the side. With the sweet aroma of garlic butter filling the house, we jumped in early to devour the bread filled with garlic that was still raw. We could handle the bad breath but the other side effects plagued me all night and day and brought me to look through my old Ayurveda Cooking Class notes to find the article below. It turns out the garlic could be to blame for my restless and sleepless night, my dizziness and... well that's all the symptoms I will share with the public. Check out the article below for more info. on Garlic and it's effect on the body and brain.

Garlic - Toxic And A Brain Synchronization Destroyer  

Reiki Empowerment Seminars

30/4/2007

I have been telling people this for years,  all you need is a ECG of the brain to see the truth .. it totally desynchronizes the brain and cause us to loose our psychic mind ... yes our psychic mind, we are Human not slaves to the race of beings that control us ... this doesn't mean much to most ...

Garlic is not only repulsive to any one that eats it for hours ... but it makes us stupid slow and simple ... this is hard for most people to grasp,  do the ECG and do the experiment yourselves ... read this article on this and you will be amazed it does clean the blood but it also destroys the total  mind synchronization of the two hemispheres .. I was heart broken,  when I heard of this because I love the smell of garlic and onions ... but oh well ... once you find out they are a neuro poison then it makes al the sense in the world when you eat it ... what happens to you ! ... you smell awful and are totally repulsed by others . most are generally being nice not to tell you ... YOU STINK .. stay your distance !

it is also the best organic insect killer, too, is there a reason why no bug will eat garlic or any of the onion family...because it kills them.

The reason garlic is so toxic, the sulphone hydroxyl ion penetrates the blood brain barrier, just like DMSO, and is a specific poison for higher life forms and brain cells. We discovered this much to our horror, when I was the world's largest manufacturer of ethical EEG biofeedback equipment. We'd have people come back from lunch that looked clinically dead on the encephalograph, which we used to calibrate their progress. "Well, what happened?" " Well, I went to an Italian restaurant and there was some garlic in my salad dressing!"

So we had 'em sign things that they won't touch garlic before classes or we were wasting their time, and money and my time. I guess those of you who are pilots or have been in flight tests... I was in flight test engineering in Doc Hallan's group in the 1950's. The flight surgeon would come around every month and remind all of us: "Don't you dare touch any garlic 72 hours before you fly one of our airplanes, because it'll double or triple your reaction time. You're three times slower than you would be if you'd [not] had a few drops of garlic."

Well, we didn't know why for 20 years later, until I owned the Alpha-Metrics Corporation. We were building biofeedback equipment and found out that garlic totally desynchronizes your brain waves. So I funded a study at Stanford and, sure enough, they found that it's a poison. You can rub a clove of garlic on your foot - on the sole of your foot - and you can smell it shortly later on your wrists. So it penetrates the body. This is why DMSO smells a lot like garlic: that sulphone hydroxyl ion penetrates all the barriers including the corpus callosum in the brain. Any of you who are organic gardeners know that if you don't want to use DDT, garlic will kill anything in the way of insects. Now, most people have heard most of their lives that garlic is good for you, and we put those people in the same class of ignorance as the mothers who at the turn of the century would buy morphine sulphate in the drugstore and give it to their babies to put 'em to sleep. If you have any patients who have low-grade headaches or attention deficit [disorder], they can't quite focus on the computer in the afternoon, just do an experiment - you owe it to yourselves. Take those people off garlic and see how much better they get, very,very shortly. And then let them eat a little garlic after about three weeks. They'll say: "My God, I had no idea that this was the cause of our problems." And this includes the de-skunked garlic's, Kyolic, some of the other products. Very unpopular, but I've got to tell you the truth. (Source: From a lecture by Dr Robert [Bob] C. Beck, DSc., given at the Whole Life Expo, Seattle, WA, USA, in March 1996).

Bob Beck also found in his research on human brain function in the 1980's that garlic has a detrimental effect on the brain and researching this further he learned that many yoga groups and philosophical teachings caution against the use of garlic and onions as they are known to interfere with meditation practices. Some aware individuals have actually described themselves as experiencing brain fog after having garlic.

The Harmful Effects of Garlic

Garlic is toxic to humans because its sulphone hydroxyl ions penetrate the blood-brain barrier and are poisonous to brain cells.(1)    For precisely the same reason the garlic family of plants has been widely recognized as being harmful to dogs.(2)   As far back as the 1950s it was known that garlic reduced reaction time by two to three times when consumed by pilots taking flight tests. This is because the toxic effects of garlic desynchronize brain waves.

The Taoists realized thousands of years ago that plants of the alliaceous family were detrimental to humans.(3) They labeled this group of plants - onions, garlic, leeks, chives and spring onions - the 'five spicy-scented plants.' They noticed that onions are harmful to the lungs, garlic to the heart, leeks to the spleen, chives to the liver and spring onions to the kidneys. Hindus also avoid this group, which they have called the 'five pungent plants.'(4) As well as producing offensive breath and body odour, these plants induce aggravation, agitation, anxiety and aggression. Thus they are harmful physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Even when garlic is used as food in Chinese culture it is considered harmful to the stomach, liver and eyes, and a cause of dizziness and scattered energy when consumed in immoderate amounts.(5) Nor is garlic always seen as having entirely beneficial properties in Western cooking and medicine. It is widely accepted among health care professionals that, as well as killing harmful bacteria, garlic also destroys beneficial bacteria,(6) which are essential to the proper functioning of the digestive system. Furthermore, Ken Bergeron, in Professional Vegetarian Cooking, p. 16, writes: "garlic in the raw state can carry harmful (potentially fatal) botulism bacteria." Perhaps it is with an awareness of this that the Roman poet Horace wrote of garlic that it is "more harmful than hemlock."(7)

In the practice of Reiki, we have noticed that garlic and onions are some of the first toxic substances that are expelled from a person's system - along with tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical medications. This makes it apparent that alliaceous plants have a negative effect on the human body and should be avoided for health reasons. Homeopathic medicine comes to the same conclusion when it recognizes that red onion produces a dry cough, watery eyes, sneezing, runny nose and other familiar cold-related symptoms when consumed.(8)