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

                   Yoga of Embodiment:

       Introduction to the Advanced Course

                Developing Causal Awareness:

                      Cultivating Surrender

                      (Ishvara Pranidhana)                        

                         Light Body Yoga

                     Collective Awakening

                Goals, Obstacles and Resources

    In our advanced themes, the foundations of spiritual practice are well established, we have integrated practice into our relationships and the moment to moment unfolding of our daily lives, and we are ready to begin the deeper openings into the realm of light.

   Our goals here is total surrender to the awakening process as we finally learn to drop our need to manipulate or control what is unfolding and just be fully present to it, from as any levels as possible. This is not a passive state, but a highly receptive one. To be channels and vehicles of light requires an amazing balance of perception and action. This is the boddhisattva state where our lives are dedicated to bringing light to the darkness and ignorance that is operating. What we will see is that this is a highly embodied state, where we have discovered how to resolve our own inners conflicts through emotional self regulation and can thus participte more fully in resolving the larger conflicts of our times.

   The number one challenge of our times is the depth of dissociation manifesting in modern culture. Dissociation is a highly disembodied state. It is psychological/ emotional state or trait where large realms of inner sensations, perceptions and memory are strongly, unconsciously repressed and thus disowned. The body is fully operating with the mind totally oblivious to what the body is saying. What is moving (emotions!) the current political and social dialogue is fear and anger, the energy of the hell realms in buddhism. When politicians and talk show hosts use guns and gunsights, shooting and reloading metaphors for advancing ones ideas, and then totally deny that there is any correlation of this to the violent behavior of the citizens, that is serious dissocation. The collective mind has dissociated from the collective body.

    Obstacles at this level include self aggrandizement and despair, or more subtly, suprise appearances of unresolved karma that catch us by surprise.

                               Resources

   We, (that is the whole universe!), are giving birth to a collective awakening, the unfolding of thousands and millions of beings into vehicles of light. It is a mysterious process with no clear end point. Comologist and all around cosmic being Brain Swimme articulates 10 powers of the universe that can be seen to underlie not only the emergence of the universe but also the fact that emergence is a moment to moment phenomenon happening within us and without us. Brians work, which has evolved over the last thirty years emerges out of his collaboration with Thomas Berry and their continuation of the work  of Teillard de Chardin, the French Jesuit anthropologist who first speculated on how the process of evolution continues in the further unfolding of new layers and capacities in the human brain and consciousness.

 Don Beck also studies the evoltion of the collective mind. He has further developed the pioneering work of Clare Graves in mapping out the evolution of values and capacities to respond to changing environments in human societies in a system known as Spiral Dynamics. Anyone interested in the dynamics of social change will find Don's work fascinating and  absolutely essential for making sense of why things are moving the way they are. He has the collective karma process very beautifully articulated, but also realizes that is is a dynamic, ever changing state, not a static one. Both Brian and Don are articulating variations on Sysems Theory, which is the science behind emergence, evolution and dissolution of structures, or forms, at all levels of existence. This is a very powerful tool for making sense of how the transformational process works.

Finally Dan Siegel also recognized the need to understand Systems Theory in order to understand the functioning of the mind, and in his first book, The Developing Mind" articulates how this process works. His later writings take this process further into how two minds come together in relationship to create something new, as energy and information is shared. The collective mind emerges as a much more complex manifestion of this dynamic exchange of energy and information that is modern society and the struggling emergence of planetary mode of consciousness.

    "If you want to experience the body, you must live in the body! That's why the ancient sages and saints didn't know what to do with their body: they left it and they meditated, so the body didn't participate at all. ... It's a monumantal battle against habits going back thousands of years. ... There is such a long way to go between the usual state of the body, this almost total unconsciousness we are used to because "that's the way it is," and the perfect awakening of the consciousness, the response in all of the cells, of all the organs and body functions..... Between the two, there seems to be centuries of work."  Mind of the Cells, pg 68