Reach for the SKY!

Edited on 26-09-2016 : New updated title 'Reach for the SKY' as Sheriff Woody would say & embedded  a YouTube Video that talks about the SKY

Who said that in the yester-years everyone was content and not greedy? In those days lived a man wanting to make a quick buck. He headed out to the woods - sat, meditated and prayed for a long time. Since in those days, it was easy to have wishes fulfilled the 'Giver of all gifts' appeared soon. The man requested the Giver to provide access to a method (a mantra chant) that when invoked would increment his treasury and decrement the Giver's treasury by one unit. Not too thrilled with the idea, the Giver provided the man the method along with a condition. He pointed to a jumping dancing monkey on a tree and instructed him to never remember it when invoking the method and phfft! he vanished. The man was happy, went off home, sat down and thought about using the method. He remembered that he should not remember the dancing monkey!!! Every time he thought he should not think about it he had already thought about it! How do we quieten such a mind?

Imagine the mind as an area in the PC memory that cannot be accessed directly. Do we have pointer access? Yes, and that is the breath. The breath is like the thread that links the body (the gross component, the material, the hardware) with the mind (the subtle component, the non-material, the software). Every emotion in the mind has a particular rhythm in our breath. In happiness the in-breath is long and the out-breath is short, in sadness it's the exact opposite. We sigh when sad and that's a long out-breath. In anger our breath is hot and rapid. So far we have known the mind-breath relationship as a one way street where the emotion followed by the breath pattern happens within us involuntarily. Can it be made into a two way street? Can more focus on the breath help us have control on our emotions and thereby our thinking patterns ?
 

Stress is a condition where we have (or feel) more challenges in our stride than we can handle. Stressful conditions and events accumulate toxins in the human cells leading to health disorders. Two ways to reduce this stress

• Increase the capacity for handling challenges
• Decrease the challenges you want to handle

Stop and wonder - is the life in the fish or in the water? Is the life in us or in the environment we are in? Studies have shown that a significant portion of the toxins in the body is expelled through the breath. The very first act of our life is to breathe in and the last would be to breathe out. In that sense, you could visualize the lungs as an excretory organ expelling toxins 24/7, 365 days a year all your life.

The Sudarshan Kriya Yoga (SKY) taught by the Art of Living Foundation, a non-denominational, educational and humanitarian non-profit organization, is one such breathing practice that helps cleanse ourselves of these accumulated toxins in the body and subtle patterns in the mind. This leaves one feeling energized, fresh, new and enables one to utilize his/her potential to the maximum.