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snake
United Kingdom
279 Posts |
 Posted - Nov 19 2024 : 07:52:34 AM
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Hi Christi
Sorry if wrong place to post.please move as appropriate.
Your Bhuddist practice in early years and beyond,what made you come to this practice at the time that you felt you were lacking,if that's the word and please link me to where you discuss your practices in those traditions and your feelings of them looking back after using Ayp etc etc.
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Christi
United Kingdom
4513 Posts |
Posted - Nov 19 2024 : 3:18:47 PM
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Hi Snake,
I can give you a brief outline of what I was taught before discovering the AYP practices, with some links describing those practices, and how discovering the AYP practices changed things for me.
When I left school at the age of 18, I wanted to find a spiritual master who could guide me through the process of enlightenment. I did not know where to start and could not find a teacher in the city I had grown up in, which was Oxford in England. I also could not find a teacher anywhere in the United Kingdom. So, I decided to fly to Nepal and to set off into the Himalayas on foot, to see if I could find a spiritual master there. I was lucky, and found one easily. He was a monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and was the abbot of a small monastery high up in the mountains. I lived with him in his monastery for 6-months in total, over the next two-years.
However, I had a problem, because in that tradition there are things called "preliminary practices". Everyone has to do a certain number of these practices before they can progress to the more advanced practices. They include things like chanting and prostrations. I also had to do karma yoga (service to the community) which involved collecting and chopping firewood, and teaching the young monks in the monastery English. What I wanted was to learn to meditate and to learn the completion stage practices, but this was not an option. As a Westerner, I could only get a visa for three months each year to stay in Nepal, and after the three months was up, I had to stay out of the country for 9-months. So, I spent three months with my teacher that first year, and then went back again the following year for another three months. But, I realised that at that rate, it was going to take many years for me to be able to progress on the path. It could have been possible that I would never have received the higher teachings in this lifetime because of the visa restrictions and the cost of travel.
So, the next year I went to Thailand, as I had heard that the monks there were willing to teach people meditation without them having to complete any preliminary practices first. I found a Thai monk who would teach me, and a cave monastery to practise in for a while. The meditation technique was breathing meditation. What happened to me in the cave monastery is described in detail on this page under Book Preview.
After returning to the U.K. I discovered Buddhist monasteries there and was taught an inquiry practice into the nature of all phenomena and a loving-kindness practice. I was also taught the "Who am I?" Self-Inquiry practice in one of those monasteries in England. Around this time I also taught myself to practise Samyama. I described how that happened in this video.
So, I was gradually building up spiritual practices from different traditions, at this stage mostly from the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, and the Forest Monk tradition from Theravada Buddhism, and adding them to practices that I was discovering by myself without any teacher.
At the age of 26 I went to India and lived in an ashram in Kerala. I was taught Guru Yoga, which is where you sit at the feet of a master, and silence your mind and open your heart. I would practise this for hours every day, for several months at a time. It was a form of bhakti yoga combined with darshan, as the teacher, Amritanandamayi (Amma), radiated spiritual ecstasy. I was also taught mantra meditation there. Karma Yoga (spiritual service) was strongly emphasised again in the ashram, just as it had been in the monastery in Nepal. That was 1995, still before people had mobile phones, and when the internet was relatively new. There were dial-up modems in some people's homes in the U.K. at this time, but it was unbelievably slow and there were not many spiritual websites. Google search did not exist at all. So, learning spiritual practices was still a case of going to spiritual centres and asking to be taught.
So, I now had a number of practices from different traditions, some from Buddhism and some from the classical yoga tradition, and I used all of them in my practice. I knew enough about Buddhism and the Buddha's early life to know that Buddhism was a form of yoga, so as far as I was concerned, I was practising yoga, just as the Buddha had done, and just as thousands of other spiritual practitioners had done and were still doing.
I continued with these practices until I discovered AYP in 2005. When I found the AYP teachings online I then added Spinal Breathing Pranayama to my practice and the mudras and bandhas, and added mantra meditation with the AYAM mantra. I also took on the structured Samyama practice, as my Samyama practice had involved simply using a free-flow of sutras, up until then.
I began by adding the AYP practices to my existing practices, just as I had done with all other spiritual practices I had learned before then. I gradually added the mantra enhancements and the advanced pranayamas and more Self-Inquiry practices. I found that the AYP practices, especially Spinal Breathing Pranayama and the mudras and bandhas, added greatly to my existing practices.
Over time, I started to use Deep Meditation as my only meditation practice, reserving breathing meditation for times when I became too sensitive to the mantra. I realised that Deep Meditation did everything that a meditation practice needs to do, and the AYP mantras were more effective than any of the other mantras I had been taught over the years. I continued with the bhakti practice of Guru Yoga whenever I was with my teacher in India or Europe. And I kept all the Self-Inquiry practices that I had learned in the different traditions.
So, the whole process was a gradual process of adding new spiritual practices, as and when I was taught them, and only dropping practices if they seemed unnecessary or redundant.
There was also a timely aspect to what I was doing. When I left school at the age of 18 I was not looking to learn pranayama. I was interested in becoming enlightened, and as far as I knew, that had nothing to do with altering the breath. So, if someone had taught me Spinal Breathing, or any other pranayama technique, when I had first arrived in the Himalayas, I may have simply ignored them and pressed on. So, people have to be ready to learn a practice and understand why it is relevant. When I did begin to add pranayama to my practice in 2005, it was a very effective and powerful addition.
Looking back, I would say I was very lucky. The practices that I learned were the right ones for me at that time, and I feel that is the most important thing.
I did a blog interview a few years ago where I talked a bit about my spiritual practices from the early days and integrating those with the AYP practices when I found them. That is here
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snake
United Kingdom
279 Posts |
Posted - Nov 20 2024 : 11:56:04 AM
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 Thanks for that Christi,very interesting,I'll go and view the links you've put now. |
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Christi
United Kingdom
4513 Posts |
Posted - Nov 21 2024 : 8:45:47 PM
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Hi Snake,
No worries.
I am writing my autobiography at the moment. Hopefully it will be finished next year. That will have a lot more detail on the things I was taught over the years and the experiences I went through. |
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Christi
