Yesirree Bob. That’s one helluva ghost-like yogic selfie, eh?
Well, ended up pretty cranky tonight (what else is new?); couldn’t do my yoga before dark like I’d intended to, and then some friends were headed out for late dinner aka fellowship nearly at 10pm, so I headed home instead. I’d had my solstice onion soup, which really isn’t too good when it’s cooked too long; and some more black peppered watermelon. I need to get some more mung beans, but can’t seem to find time when I’m around the places in town that sell them.
I launched into “Firing Up the Metabolism” from Harijot’s “Self Experience” manual. I wanted to exercise my legs before doing the Fingers of Steel Kriya again, because that works the upper body; also needed to cultivate some energy to do the meditations I wanted to do, although it was obviously insane to fire up my metabolism late in the evening after 10pm – might’ve been closer to midnight. As I started it, I got the first two exercises reversed, so I ended up doing one twice as long as you were supposed to. That happened a lot tonight!
I started to do the “Fingers of Steel Kriya” and after nearly completing the first 11 minute tough part, realized it might be a good time to videotape it as well as take images of the postures, which will be added to the last post by the time this post is live. That turned out to be a bit time consuming because the self timer on the camera is easy to forget how to use. Eventually I did it, and am exporting it right now, hopefully in the right format for YouTube. (The last things I uploaded there looked terrible once they’d processed them. Unfortunately I’d already sent the links to the people in them too.)
Fingers of Steel Kriya Video:
Afterwards I reshot the “Har” prosperity kriya video with instructions and decent lighting, here it is, but in the end I wasn’t that happy with the encoding – it looks really grainy.
Then I was able to do the Trikutee Kriya (Masters Touch p. 266-267) because I had Japji 30th pauri ready for the meditation. If you’re doing the meditation and would like to hear how it’s pronounced, here’s an mp3 of it by Hari Dharam Kaur Khalsa, from her reading of Nitnem and Japji: http://yoga.destinymanifestation.com/audio/30_Pauri.mp3
I learned japji from reciting it along with her recording; I’ve later grown to love many other more “melodic” versions, although over the years I’ve come to recognize that there is certainly a musicality in her recitation too. It’s really great for learning it because you can hear how to pronounce everything pretty easily. Like a lot of 3HO recordings, I frequently wonder who these people are, whose recordings have occupied so much of my life. One of the nice things about summer solstice was that I met a lot of these people in person. But I’ve never met Hari Dharam.
There are many recordings of japji, but I don’t know any with the pauris separated like I have done; it took quite a bit of work to cut them up in ProTools and figure out where each one started and ended, referring to the various printed versions.
For some reason a few of the lines were tongue twisters tonight. I thought I knew them, but hadn’t been getting some of the syllables right.
Part 1 for 18-1/2 minutes:
Part 2 for 5-1/2 minutes:
Then I used Wahe Guru Kaur’s “Wahe Guru Wahe Guru Wahe Jio” for the 8-1/2 minute third section:
I can’t say I was really thrilled with this set or meditation tonight. But I didn’t dislike it either. It didn’t feel like it opened my chakras like it claims to, but then I kept looking at the words to the pauri instead of the tip of my nose, which interrupted my concentration and focus.