Greenbirch

Update: I am doing Kriya yoga again, even Kriya Pranayama. No side effects so far. I think my earlier adverse response to Kriya yoga had to do with two things potentially: A week before starting Kriya yoga I had an intense Kundalini experience: hot energy rose up my spine and cool air come out of my head. I was in some kind of an elevated state for about two weeks after that. When I started to do Kriya, I got insomnia. I suspect starting yoga when something intense is happening energetically is risky and it's better to wait for the experience to come down. (This feels very obvious in hindsight) Before starting again, I started to do asanas and be more active physically. Now I don't do asanas anymore and I still don't have any side effects. Kriya is challenging and also very rewarding. I love the moments when I get a very subtle understanding of how a practice should be done or when I get interesting sensations in my body. You don't have to master the practices 100% to feel effects. I am far away from mastering Khechari Mudra but I can definitely feel sensations in the 6th chakra when I hold my tongue in a raised position. I definitely recommend starting the practice! Just be patient and approach it incrementally while listening to yourself and how you are feeling.

How much phosphatidylserine do you (Leo or anyone who has tried it) take per day? I did not find that info on the video, maybe I missed it although I tried to look for it.

If your illness happens regularly after you have done kriya, I would stop the practice, recover and start doing preparatory practice. In Hatha Yoga Pradipika, for example, it is said that the human energy system should be prepared with asanas and various purification techniques before starting pranayama. The analogy given by the book is that without preparation if your nadis are very blocked and weak, pranayama would be like pouring acid into plastic tubes - the tubes would melt. Based on this, it could be possible that your system is not ready for pranayama yet. The purpose of asanas is not having a nice stretch but to stimulate the nadis and help them clear. Personally, I stopped kriya because I got insomnia. Now I am doing asanas, meditation, and talabya kriya. My goal is to strengthen my system while continuing to stretch my tongue. Later I'll start adding the other practices back while carefully monitoring my wellbeing.

I stopped Kriya after 6 days of practice (Nadi Sodhana, Ujjayi Pranayama, Talabaya Kriya, Om Japa, concentration a little over 5 minutes) due to insomnia and exhaustion. At the same time, my recent Kundalini experience died down (during which I was elevated for several days) - not sure if it is related to the Kriya practice, but it (or exhaustion) seemed to coincide with the experience dying down. It is not placebo. These practices are potent and one needs to be careful. I am not sure if I will pick up the practice again; losing the state of elevated consciousness really hurt and I keep connecting the loss of it to the Kriya practice. If I start again it will be after practicing asanas and thus preparing my body for pranayama.

What kind of (negative) symptoms have you all experienced after you started to practice? I don't have the books yet, but I experienced some Kundalini energy going up my spine and now I have physical symptoms. I wonder if it's because I went into it without proper preparation (kriya yoga). Do you think kriya yoga could help lessen any symptoms that might come up? Or are symptoms, physical and mental, a part of the process as chakras clear up? Any tricks to deal with those? Someone mentioned grounding exercises, could they work for all symptoms?

Does the orange to green transition require achieving self-reliance? Or, in what way is that required? Can stage orange be integrated even without financial success for example?

If you can't relate to the perspective of the other, think what color they are. For example, blue: think of a time in your life when you were blue. Try to see that while the other person may be blue in a different way, the mechanism is still the same. You had to go through that stage, and so does this other person. Also: try Metta meditation (loving-kindness). I haven't been doing it for long, but I am already seeing great results: compassion for myself and others, even people who annoy me, starts to emerge naturally. Great for counteracting judgment

Right! I keep finding these blue-type thinking patterns, even though they are not about the normal blue values. It's like orange values packaged in a blue box or something ("you need to make a ton of money or else there is something profoundly wrong with you"). Not sure if I am overthinking this, or if it's valid to classify a pattern of thought with a color, no matter what the thoughts are actually about. Would it be useful to utilize this model to say that family values can stay in us as these blue-type, very absolute values that our subconscious or even conscious mind uses to guilt us? Like having a "religion" inside your subconscious mind in which your family's values are the word of a very unforgiving god. And as long as these thought patterns are there, a part of us is blue, no matter where we are on the spiral otherwise...

Great, thanks for the encouragement!

I voted blue-orange, although I have to admit my dad had a lot of green. He was raised blue but became a very orange, highly educated entrepreneur who chased money. However, he was surprisingly open-minded. He left a plethora of books, including topics such as "how to heal with your hands", which I really started to notice only after having advanced to more green myself. My mom's open-minded reaction to the book topics has been a nice surprise; it seems she is not as rigid in her beliefs and materialistic as I thought I think I have avoided "color conflict" for most of my life by adopting a kind of a blue right-wrong attitude: what your parents say is right ("you have to go to university"), and it is your duty to adhere to their values.

I commend your efforts; it's not easy to move out of the familiarity of depressed identity patterns. Dedication is a very important thing you can do, and it sounds like that's exactly what you did: you have made a commitment to get better. It is not impossible to leave the stories behind. Yes, the familiar thought patterns are comfortable, even if they are painful and thus, the process of changing in uncomfortable. I recommend starting a Metta (loving-kindness) meditation practice, for 5-10 minutes a day (I use Insight Timer and search for guided Metta meditations). The idea is to learn compassion towards yourself and others over time - and this is important to remember! At first, the practice may feel like nothing or even extremely uncomfortable, but it is an investment. Over time, when difficult emotions arise, there is a more understanding reaction that is meeting them instead of resistance. This is a powerful tool and a strength one can use to face... well, anything that comes up. Somehow, it seems gentleness towards all experiences helps to transform them. The feelings one has may even reveal something underneath. Perhaps certain thought patterns are there to serve a purpose, and when this purpose is identified, it is easier to let go of it. You use the words "depressing" and "suicidal". Do you have support, such as friends or family who are aware of how you are feeling? Have you considered treatment?

Another method: somatic experiencing. I don't know how many practitioners there are and in which parts of the world. My body started doing trauma release shaking when I was finally in a safe relationship/life situation and armed with the following knowledge: 1. All emotions are valid, even if they don't fit the context (some very mundane situations may trigger trauma) 2. When difficult emotions arise, meet them with loving kindness and welcome them into your experience. Dive into them, imagine what color they are, what is their shape, what does their surface look like... 3. Shaking is good, very very good.

@Leo Gura any news on this function?

Did you have tingling sensations with the shaking?

Spiral dynamics and kriya yoga: do you think your spiral dynamics stage matters when starting kriya yoga? For example, can an orange materialist start kriya yoga, or would it be like trying to listen to music before developing the ability to hear?

I am almost starting to consider moving to another country in order to make this matter simpler

Is your spiral dynamics stage mostly orange, or are you perhaps between orange and green, wanting to progress to the green stage? Let's support each other! Please share your frustrations/insights/progress/thoughts/anything related to the subject. What parts of yourself have you identified as orange? How did you succeed in shifting something in yourself from orange to green? What was helpful to you?

Finland! Would definitely like to meet Actualized.org followers. I'm also visiting Prague and Vienna later this month if anyone there wants to meet

What is your spiral dynamics path? How do you think you progressed through different stages throughout your life? Example: "I was raised in a ___ society but I think I had some ___ in me from early on, especially in some areas of my life. In university/as a young adult, I started to move towards ___ but was still very much ___ in aspects A, B and C. Currently, I am between ___ and ___. I am doing this and that to progress towards the next stage." Are there some parts of you that you think were on some stage from early on? I'm actually curious if it's possible to for example have some green from a very young age. Also, I wonder how the lower stages of the spiral manifest in childhood. How do you think it was for you?

Good one! Or: if you get triggered by something, you are in one of the tier 1 stages? Do yellow and turquoise get triggered anymore?

First of all, thank you Leo and everyone here for opening my eyes to these possibilities. Second of all, I just watched this video and did an exercise that the video explains and saw exactly what Cynthia explains: a kind of a mirage and it was blueish green! I freaked out and came here to share Thank goodness (well, Leo) that this forum exists! It's so cool to have a place to share even though this feels stupid and small compared to what many of you have explained here yet at the same time it's completely nuts and no one in my life would think I am sane anymore if I told them! Thirdly, does it sound anything like what an aura should look like in your opinion, maybe my eyes are just playing tricks?

"Discover Your Passion - How to discover your top passion in life and design a career or business around it." This is the description of Leo's "How To Create Your Dream Career - The Ultimate Life Purpose Course" video. The message from this video and many other sources seems to be that people have some passion, such as painting, and they should discover and follow it. What I think this message says is that you should be ready to switch your career completely to match your passion. Please correct me if I have misunderstood this. Anyway, this is one view. The second view is that almost any type of career can be fulfilling as long as you can shape your work to fit your strengths (Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness) and develop your skills to accumulate career capital which you exchange for things that define fulfilling work, such as freedom (Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You). What I think this view boils down to is that unless it's impossible to modify your current work to fit your strengths or to accumulate career capital, you should NOT change your career. Instead, you should just transform your work and then it becomes what Seligman calls a calling: doing the work for the sake of it, because it is meaningul to you. Newport debunks the concept of having some predestined passion and states that fulfilling work is something you buy with career capital. I have a hard time combining these two views and so, my question is: which is it? Should you discover some predestined passion you have had all your life and go after it? Or should you let go of this passion and instead transform your current work even if the field you work in does not match your passion? Is it possible to find passion in any line of work? Should I buy the life purpose course to find out the answer? I am eager to hear your views and experiences on this!

Thank you so much for all the replies! It was very interesting to read your thoughts on the subject. So, science supports the craftsman mindset, but I am also convinced by the arguments here that point out that it's not that simple. Do you believe in your skill, and does your career match your most meaningful values? These were a good point; for example, if someone who loves nature ends up using their skills in service of a company that causes great harm to the environment, that person would most likely not be very fulfilled - on the contrary. But in that example the situation could perhaps be fixed by simply changing companies. Maybe a radical example could be that even if someone became the best in the world at killing people, it would not fulfill them but make them miserable instead. Based on your replies I gather that for both approaches, responsibility is required: You should know yourself and build your passion. So there is no predetermined passion that makes life easy; you need to develop your skill, cultivate your passion and engage in deliberate practice. In fact, the craftsman mindset is needed for both cases. Based on this, a career change and not transforming your current career could be a sensible option if you have a non-work passion in which you already have some skill. So someone has career capital a hobby and are wondering if they should switch careers. In this case, in addition to considering which path fits your values, the determining factor could be estimating what would happen in the long run with each choice. If you estimate that your career capital in your hobby skill will overtake your work skill career capital at some point, change is sensible because you will accumulate more career capital during your lifetime. Of course, as pointed out, not every hobby can be turned into something that people want to give you money for. Or so it seems. On the other hand, today, people seem to create careers out of all kinds of hobbies, as witnessed by successful YouTube channels.