Awakening, Yoga and the Living Matrix

                  The Three Bodies

                           and the

     Triangle of Health and Well-Being  

a center for
personal and planetary
awakening

Mystic River Yoga
214 Crosby St.

Arlington, MA 02474

781 643-0117
info@MysticRiverYoga.com

Introduction

12 Principles of Awakening

Spiritual Foundation

Scientific Foundation

Embodying the Practice

Collective Awakening

     Gross body (matter)  (sthula sharira)     

         Explorations in Structure and Weight

  We begin our explorations with the most tangible manifestation of our embodied existence, matter. The term structure refers to the dense material of our muscles, bones, tendons and ligaments. These provide a scaffolding of support to the cells, blood vessels and organs and through leverage, provide the possibility of complex movement to the organism. If we change our languaging slightly, we can refer to the gross body (sthula sharira in Sanskrit) as that aspect of us that experiences weight in gravity and thus add the watery component of the cells and organs. The human body is 70 % water. The element water is unique in that it provides the bulk of our weight, and yet has no gross structure in and of itself. It takes on the shape of the container provided and can flow from one region to another.

 Subtle body (energy)(sukshma sharira)       

                      Explorations in flow

Energy has no weight but can be felt or experienced, usually in the form of movements such as pulsation, undulation and vibration, but also as heat and light. Sound is a form of energy that moves the subtle dimensions of the body.

As Einstein pointed out is his famous equation E  = mc2, matter is actually a very dense form of energy, so in reality they are one and the same. But they manifest differently, like water vapor, water and ice. Our languaging also complicates our experience. In English, body is a noun, an object. Certainly true for the gross body, but body is also energy/energy flow. We need to cultivate the capacity to monitor and modulate the flow of energy and information in the body/mind.

Transitions are where the energy body reveals its inner integrity, its non-dual wholeness as represented by the nested fields of the causal body. Pendualting cyclical movements have two moments of total stillness, where the kinetic energy of that cycle momentarily goes to zero.

     Causal body (fields)(karana sharira)       

           Explorations in fields and vibrancy

Individual units of matter/energy, like the sun, the moon and the earth, are in relationship to each other through the effects of these mysterious aspects of creation known as fields. Gravity is the obvious field dynamic of the macrophase world, the one we see and feel moment to moment, and the one we explore in posture and movement. Electromagnetic fields determine chemical reactions and the mesophase structures of the universe. Quantum fields underlie the microphase dimensions, and possibly all levels of reality. Rupert Sheldrake has very articulately proposed what he calls morphogenic fields, or fields that underlie the emergence of forms. Embryologist Erich Blechschmidt describes metabolic fields, 'metabolic movements that are ordered submicroscopically', that are foundational in embryological development.