Geshe Michael Roach has spent 4 days teaching the Lady Niguma’s Yoga Series during his last visit to Hong Kong, which reflected the significance of these simple yet powerful asanas. What I love about The Lady Niguma’s Series is that all the poses are simple, accessible yet effective; the difference between this series and other Yoga classes is that it is done in a logical order that unblocks your energy at each chakra from bottom up while moving your energy from the side channel into the Central Channel and you can mostly likely feel a great buzz of energy and deep contentment that sets the tone for the whole day. I have been practising the series for a few months now and I feel incredibly light and happy.
The Lady Niguma’s Yoga Series is the oldest written Yoga asanas ever discovered and the only one designed by a woman. It has recently been discovered through Geshe Michael’s Yoga Classics Input Project that is dedicated to saving ancient sacred Yoga scripts that were written on banana leaves that rot and get eaten by insects in libraries across India and other parts of Asia.
Lady Niguma was born over 1000 years ago and was the spiritual partner of Lord Naropa who was a prince. Lady Niguma founded a special Yoga school for women on Sosa Island in the Ganges River. The Lady Niguma Series takes only about 45 minutes every morning and it is easy and straightforward. It makes your body strong and your mind happy. Since your reality comes from your mind, when your mind shifts, so will your reality. If we practise this Yoga, every aspect of your life will improve.
Have you noticed how happy you feel after Yoga and meditation? That is because the energy has moved from the side channels, Ha (Sun) and Tha (Moon) into the central channel or the sushumna. The Tibetan saying, “lung sem jukpa chikpa” means the thoughts and winds move in tandem like a horse on a rider. Where the prana goes, the thought follow. The prana is like a horse and the thoughts are like a rider. When the prana is in the central channel, you are creative, inspired, happy filled with thoughts of love, wisdom and compassion. When your prana runs in the Moon Channel, you want things or people excessively, you are selfish, greedy, needy; you grasp, crave and cling. When your prana runs in the Sun Channel, you are angry and jealous. All three channels are connected run together at the tri veni the point where all three channels meet, near the back just below the belly button. Because there is not enough prana to stay in all three channel, when you are angry, you cannot find any solution to your problem because there is no prana going through the sushumna nadi which is the only place where inspirations, intelligence or good ideas come from. When all the energy is in the side channels, the sushumna gets choked and we get stupid, feel no love and act out of spite.
Hatha Yoga means the joining of the two side channels (Ha and Tha) into the central channel. When all the prana moves into the central channel, the two side channels disappear resulting in a light body, and we reach our highest evolution of being. So what makes us mortal bodies of flesh, blood and bones instead of bodies of light then? It is because our chakras are actually energy blockages. When there is too much energy going through the side channels, the central channel is choked like a bent fire hose from which no water comes out but the bottom gets fatter and fatter to the point where the energy bursts, it goes sideways and turns into a wheel shape. “Chakras choke and make people get old and die; people feel unhappy because of these choke points and you would feel weak and depressed if you have tight knots at your chakras,” Geshe Michael explained.
The Lady Niguma’a Yoga Series is done in such a logical and systematic way that it physically opens the knots at each chakra. The first asana is to untwist, then stretch, then gather all the energy into the sushumna and finally, distribute. You need to do it from the bottom chakra up and since there are three knots at the heart chakra, there are 8 asanas to open the heart. When you do Yoga right, you feel as happy as a kid because Yoga opens the chakras, and even can reverse the ageing process.
Geshe Michael was asked to start a business eight years after being in the monastery and he did not know anything about business. His teacher simply told him to put prana into his sushumna and great ideas would come. As a result, he recently sold his diamond business for USD 250 million to Warren Buffett 20 years later. “In order to have that wisdom to understand emptiness, to understand that the yelling boss comes from my mind, you need to first put prana into the sushumna,” Geshe Michael explained.
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