If you want to worship something, worship the life within you… (Katha Upanishad week 12) ~ by Adele. For the past 12 weeks we have been on a soul-nurturing journey…exploring the great secrets of moving into the eternal and unconquerable Self within us all. Into that unshakable, unbreakable Self…which can truly never be touched by the hands of Death. After gradually being handed firm teachings by Yama, the Lord of Death, the teachings of the Katha Upanishad draw to a gentle close. “Upanishad”, meaning “to come and sit close to”, was originally used to refer to the typical delivering of wisdom when a student would come and sit near to his teacher. But we get a feeling now with the wisdom…for the Upanishad within  us . For our own internal teacher. For the teaching lies in fact within our own hearts, and even though sometimes prompted by an external – the wisdom comes from an internal knowing deep within ourselves. This means that whenever you’ve nodded

You have to leave the world behind in order to be of some service to it… (Katha Upanishads Week 11) ~ by Adele  - Mahatma Gandhi What’s it been like being you the past week? Would you want to be anyone else? Is here okay? “You’ve really got the best thing going on by being you” , Steve says. There is no one else more suited to you for your own enlightenment. You have absolutely anything you could ever want right now for your own ultimate growth. Of course…for this growth to take place, and for our wish to work with what we’ve got to come forth, we must be our  own  number one cheerleader. We could read all of the scriptures, attend countless Satsang, breathe and backbend ourselves into oblivion…but unless we bring the teachings into ourselves and make them our  own , they won’t truly sink into our hearts. We must connect with the teachings in such a way that we can let the universal message come through in our own unique voice. Otherwise, we are just b

You did not come here just to 'get through it' .... (Katha Upanishads Week 10) ~ by Adele. Throughout the journey of the Katha Upanishads, we’ve been absorbing the teachings of Yama (the Lord of Death) in order to live a  fuller life. We’ve been open to shifting our focus from what’s happening  TO  us from life into what is happening  FROM  us into life, we’ve explored the willingness to die to what we think we know, and we’ve set off on an endeavour to open to the whole of life into oceanic consciousness. We know that our energy (or our Prana), is our life momentum, and we protect and raise this life force by making more Shreya (beneficial) energy choices.  We know that our ticket to heaven is on  this  Earth and is earnt by our journey  through  life rather than an alternative to life. And for this, there is no shortcut! Through this work of managing our energy, we start to become more aware of that which takes our energy from us, and get to see opportun

"Know The One and Know All" -  (Katha Upanishads Week 9) ~ by Adele. Last week we spoke of the beautiful ocean and wave analogy; comparing the physical versions of ourselves as waves, always connected to the vast ocean of life. And even when we start to buy into the belief that we are ‘separate’ from the ocean or the other waves, it doesn’t matter. We are always connected – there is no separating the wave from the ocean. Our process is just one of continuous remembering, and allowing ourselves to relax back into the bigger energies. Ahhh... We do this by getting daring enough to welcome in the whole of life, even the nitty gritty parts of it. As they are all specifically ours to experience. In fact we cannot get to experience that which is beyond life without going THROUGH life first. There’s no other way!  So we continue to deepen in our courage to let go, and start to fall more and more in love with the experience of being unified with life. Of c

So how does 'Living Yoga' sit with the Traditional Paths? Living Yoga is a synthesis of the 5 great paths of Yoga into a single, cohesive way of life for the enlightenment of the whole being. Bhakti Yoga = The cultivation of a DESIRE for freedom Hatha Yoga = The cultivation of LIFE-ENERGY Gyana Yoga = The cultivation of the WITNESS Raja Yoga = The cultivation of CONCENTRATION Karma Yoga = The cultivation of EGOLESS - ACTIVITY A human being is not one dimensional. A human being is multi-dimensional. Each of the five Yogas works on one of the five dimensions of the human being: Bhakti = Emotional dimension Hatha = Physical dimension Gyana = Intellectual dimension Raja = Mental dimension Karma = Ego dimension Honoured and practiced collectively as a 'Living Yoga' these five Yogas give rise to a super-functional, emotionally-intelligent, fully-rounded, supremely-alive, self-realised human-being. The five Yogas support each other, ke

Outrageous Openness.... ( Katha Upanishads - Week 8 ) ~ By Adele. It is okay to feel broken and wounded sometimes. It really is. Your pain, sadness, discomfort, confusion and anger are not signs of your “spiritual weakness”; they are important and precious parts of you that just long to be held. Can we hold these inevitable feelings as unique invitations not to turn our back on our experience? Not to try and ‘think’ ourselves out of feeling something? Our beauty lies in our willingness to keep saying ‘ yes’ to letting all experience flood in; not just the good parts, the “spiritual” parts and the happy, positive feelings, but to all feelings, to feel them all fully, at last. To stop trying to “fix” whatever is happening, or telling someone to “look at the bright side”, but to instead accept that invitation to break away a part of our boundaries, in order to leave us bigger . What a huge relief it is to know that whatever we are feeling, it’s not ‘wrong’. There’s nothing wrong