Posts In: spiritual practice

by Olivia Hughes

Your 3 Best Super Powers: Meditation, Intuition & Imagination

by Sonia Choquette

Summary: Super powers! They’re not just for super heroes. These abilities exist within each of us, just waiting to be awakened.

Sonia Choquette outlines tools and techniques to develop the super powers of Meditation, Intuition, and Imagination. She believes these three practices, especially when taken together, can have a powerful impact on a person’s life.

Choquette explains that as you spend time developing your “super powers,” you will notice a shift. Where your attention goes, new energy flows. As this alignment deepens, you begin to feel more in tune with yourself, your source of energy, and the world around you.

Why I Love It: This book is so accessible! Sometimes spiritual guidebooks can be challenging to understand or to apply to your everyday life. Your 3 Best Super Powers begins with guided meditations so the reader can dive right into their practice honing these skills. Beginning with meditation and allowing everything to blossom from that fertile soil really resonated with me. Through meditation, both intuition and imagination are strengthened. And the mind is filled with space, calm, and clarity.

By strengthening these practices myself, I was able to stop taking things so personally. I began to see life as happening for me, not to me, which released the victim mentality and allowed me to take my power back! To Choquette’s three super powers, I would add Love and Forgiveness.

Recommended For: Everyone who wants to be their best self! You already have within you everything you need to begin the work of transformation. There is no one-size-fits-all in this world. We are all so unique, special, gifted, and beautiful. The world can easily take us away from this truth. Your 3 Best Superpowers: Meditation, Intuition & Imagination is ideal for anyone who needs to remember that they are unique, and that alone is a super power!!!

Olivia Hughes
Contributing Writer

Olivia’s yoga journey began in 2003. She is certified in Vinyasa, Hatha, and Aerial Yoga and holds a Masters degree in Spiritual Psychology. She believes the mind, body, soul connection is sacred and encourages her students explore and expand within their own bodies and consciousnesses.

by Olivia Hughes

Mudras: Yoga in Your Hands 

by Gertrud Hirschi

Summary: Mudra is a symbolic or ritual gesture in Hinduism and Buddhism. While some mudras involve the entire body, most are performed with the hands and fingers. The ancient practice of mudra can be used to relieve stress, practice presence, connect to your higher self, prevent illness, promote spiritual development, and so much more. Additionally, practicing mudra may help you become more open to and better able to focus on other holistic practices, such as breath work, affirmations, visualization, herbs, and nutrition, etc. Combined with intention, mudra creates a shift in your internal world, creating balanced healing from the inside out.

Why I Love It: A teacher once told me, “Teachers are here to share their knowledge and skills with others to help them grow. If you know something, share it. Educating someone is the most powerful thing you can do for them.” When I started teaching, I took this advice to heart and shared things I had found to be true; even if it fell outside of the mainstream.

I love this book because it adds another layer to my own yoga practice and teaching. The mudras help me connect more deeply to myself and my spiritual world. Yoga is so much more than a handstand or a warrior two – yoga is about a shift in your mind, a feeling in your heart. Yoga is kindness. Yoga is love. Yoga is connection. The seemingly small practice of mudra helps me connect with this deep level of yoga, and I feel compelled to share it with my students.

Recommended For: Those who want to deepen their connection to self, others and the present moment. The practice of mudra is so uniquely personal and portable – no yoga mat needed, no time in your schedule to set aside, nothing to see or watch. The back cover states: “This yoga in your hands can be practiced sitting, lying down, standing, or walking, at any time and place!”

I recommend choosing a mudra you connect with (there are hundreds) and trying it out once a day in your daily routine. This book breaks down how to practice each mudra step by step but also dives into using mudra to develop your spirituality.

Sample Practice: The Lotus Mudra (my favorite!) from page 150

Bring your hands together in prayer and then separate and open up the three middle fingers, keeping the base of the palm together along with the pinkie and thumb. This mudra is the symbol of purity.

Visualization: Imagine the bud of a lotus flower in your heart. Every time you inhale the flower opens up a bit more – until it finally is completely open and can receive the full sunlight into itself. The lotus lets itself be filled with light, lightness, warmth, love, desire and joy.

Affirmation: I open myself to nature; I open myself to the good that exists in every human being; and I open myself to the divine so that I can be richly blessed.

Olivia Hughes
Contributing Writer

Olivia’s yoga journey began in 2003. She is certified in Vinyasa, Hatha, and Aerial Yoga and holds a Masters degree in Spiritual Psychology. She believes the mind, body, soul connection is sacred and encourages her students explore and expand within their own bodies and consciousnesses.

by Hannah Faulkner

India is commonly known as the motherland of yoga, but what if I told you that yoga originally began in Egypt and then traveled to India hundreds of years later?

Paintings, engravings, and murals from ancient Egyptian tombs and temples show images of figures in positions that represent some commonly known yoga poses.

According to the book, Egyptian Yoga: Postures of the Gods and Goddesses by Dr. Muata Ashby and Dr. Karen Ashby….

We can find the god Geb (god of the Earth) in plough pose engraved on the ceiling of the Temple of Aset (Isis).

Framing him is the goddess, Nut (goddess of the sky), in a forward fold yoga pose.

Further, we can see Geb in a spinal twist and Ra in the squatting position like Virasana, Hero’s pose.

Dr. Ashby proclaims that yoga was practiced in Egypt earlier than anywhere else in our history, long before the evidence is detected in India (including the Indus Valley Civilization) or any other early civilization (Sumer, Greece, China, etc.). This point of view is supported by illustrative and documented scriptural evidence of physical exercises, meditations, and implementation of wisdom teachings in daily life.

It is commonly believed that the practice of the yoga in India began with the use of the Lotus Pose, which is traced to stone engravings in the Indus Valley culture (1500 BCE). However, the use of the lotus pose here could possibly only symbolize the iconography of meditation. This seated flower position represents a spiritual person who develops detachment and dispassion from the world since it sits in the muddy water but is not touched or affected by the mud. Yoga poses, as we know them in the western world, developed much later in India’s history.

Click here to read more about the fascinating connection between yoga and ancient Egypt on Hannah’s blog, Half Moon Yoga and Art.

The San Diego Museum of Man in accordance with Yoga One San Diego come together twice a month (2nd and 4th Saturdays) at 8:30am-9:30am to hold a special yoga class in the Rotunda.

Hannah Faulkner will be teaching class on February 11th, 2017.

Will you join us for this journey in Ancient Egypt?

Buy Your Ticket Here

and be sure to tell the Museum of Man that Yoga One sent you!