Why Soul Gazing is Your New Yoga Practice
Communication occurs on many levels, we know that it goes far beyond talking and listening. We’re referring to what happens when you open up the energy lines between people with the exercise known as soul gazing. It’s been known to give participants an altered state of consciousness by staring into another person’s eyes for ten minutes. Psychologists refer to this as a dissociative state brought about by the lack of sensory stimulation.
Tantrik Micro Meditation Practices: Everything is Consciousness
Join Hareesh Wallis for a 20-minute Tantrik micro meditation where you will seek to actualize the realization that everything is consciousness – and that consciousness is everything.
The Yoga of Soul of Gazing
If the word Tantra conjures up scenes of sexuality, you’re not alone. The introduction of Tantric practices in the West has inadvertently become identified with a practice that’s laced with nudity, sexuality, and occasionally, promiscuity.
The truth is, Tantra may enhance your sex life, but only by deepening your connection to your energy and your body first. Although Tantric practices are founded on the principal of intimacy, intimacy is not purely physical. It’s the act of connecting so deeply that you feel as if you are getting a glimpse into your and perhaps another’s soul.
The Tantric practice aims to expand beyond perceived limitations of yogic philosophy and the asanas. When one meditates it is the space between thoughts where one begins to find a glimpse of inner peace. As yogis, we cultivate that space until the thoughts become less and less obtrusive, and the space between them becomes vast.
The exploration of the subtle energies within the body and their connection to the universe provide the opportunity to understand the purpose of life and the principles of union in new dimensions.
Try this exercise with a partner
Come into a loose, cross-legged position (typically the larger person in Sukhasana first). Your partner then sits on your thighs and crosses their ankles behind your back. Touch your third eye centers (space between the eyebrows) as you both lengthen through your spines. Gaze lightly into each other’s eyes as you inhale and exhale through the nose. Take 5 breaths, allowing a natural synchronicity of breath, with your palms resting on the backside of your partner’s heart. Surrender to the intimate experience of both your and your partner’s heartbeat. Try this for 10 minutes.
EXPAND YOUR CAPACITY FOR INTIMACY
If you’re practicing Tantra Yoga on your own or with a partner, you’re expanding your capacity for intimacy and union. With practice, we’re able to get up close and intimate with the beliefs and behaviors that hold us back from the intimacy we desire. In addition, Tantric techniques are provided to evolve beyond these barriers so that each and every one of us may thrive and prosper.
About the Author
Sacred Relationships: Beyond Love and Valentine’s Day
Years ago, I taught a class that ended at 9 PM. One night after class, I stopped by a grocery store to buy a couple of items. It was the night before Valentine’s Day and what I saw startled me, but more than that, it made me sad.
Many grocery stores put the greeting card aisle smack dab in the front. Impulse buying is a big part of modern society and very little is as impulsive as buying a greeting card the night before Valentine’s Day. Entering the card aisle isn’t for the meek. An air of tension and fear immediately becomes evident. I always imagine a herd of gazelles, nervously drinking at a waterhole in the middle of lion country. There may not be lions here, but there’s a very real predator, namely, one’s own insecurities regarding love and romance.
Grown men whimper as they desperately search for the perfect card that proves their love, hopefully without offending the recipient. Generations of insidious marketing tactics have convinced most of us that we have neither the time nor the talent, to express ourselves from our hearts, so we pay someone else to do it for us. On more than one occasion, while standing in front of hundreds of homogenized cards, none of them saying what I actually felt, I swore never to stand there again. I came to loathe Valentine’s Day and everything it stood for. I wasn’t alone.
How did a celebration of romantic love and commitment come to mean despair for so many? Certainly, greeting card companies have had a lot to do with this phenomenon, but it really isn’t that simple. Perhaps it has more to do with our insistence at quantifying, institutionalizing, and monetizing something as indefinable, ephemeral, and sacred as love.
The media bullies us into buying diamonds, flowers, new cars, and boxes of chocolates, or risk being labeled as a bad partner. The irony behind all this is that when love is genuine and certain, no tokens are necessary, because hearts communicate to each other in a language as ancient as humanity itself. This is the basis of a Sacred Relationship. Such connections are pure and without conditions implied.
Our ancestors spoke this language fluently and without hesitation. They found no shame in expressing what was within them. Love wasn’t considered a weakness. Rather, it was looked upon as a blessing, a gift bestowed by the Divine as a sacred duty, rite, and gift.
What would the world be without romantic love? It would be inhuman and horribly dull.
Sacred Relationships are the basis of what we think of when true love is expressed. The connection of two souls, united in purpose, is the Alchemical merging of hearts, minds and incarnations. The fiery furnace of passion is the smelter for those who come together to unite as one Sacred Couple, individuals united by the Divine imperative.
Love is a constant, a thread that connects the human experience throughout the ages, like beads of a Mala. It weaves its way through every aspect of our existence, and links us to our ancestors and to those who will follow us on this lovely planet.
