52 Weeks of Yoga: A Personal Journey Through Yoga

By Gwen McCarthy and Navina Chhabria

52 Weeks of Yoga is a book that will take you on a wide ranging adventure in yoga that is informative, humorous and heartfelt. You will meet the remarkable people who brought yoga to the West, learn the wisdom of the Buddha that has been honored for over 2500 years, and become reacquainted with the workings of your own amazing body.

Illuminating, enlightening and uplifting, it is a profoundly spiritual declaration for living mindfully and building a better world. This book is ideal for anyone who wishes to find transformation through yoga.

The book is also a touching personal memoir of the author's life experiences that have brought her to a place of mindfulness, acceptance and gratitude.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543940183

Book preview

Chapter 1:

Living in the Age of Aquarius

We are at the very beginning of an era that is predicted to bring about a major shift in human behavior and spirituality. One thing is certain: we’re all on this journey together. Come with me as we learn how the ancient wisdom of yoga can help us transition into a new world of enlightenment and compassion. Welcome to the Age of Aquarius!

The first time most people ever heard of the Age of Aquarius may have been in the late 1960s when the rock musical Hair first became popular. Hair wasn’t just any Broadway show; it was unlike anything that had ever been seen before. Its young actors had long hair, appeared nude on stage and stood together to protest the war in Vietnam. But the most lasting impact of the play may have been its music. One of its songs, The Age of Aquarius, became so famous that it is still number 66 on the list of Billboard’s Greatest Hits of All Time. It described a future that would be entirely different from the world not only then, but at any time in human history.

Harmony and understanding

Sympathy and trust abounding

No more falsehoods or derisions

Golden living dreams of visions

Mystic crystal revelation

And the mind’s true liberation

What you may not have known about this song is that there really is an Age of Aquarius and we are living in it now. There are twelve astrological ages named after the signs of the zodiac and this one is represented by Aquarius, the Water Bearer. Just as the Earth rotates around the sun, these ages are based on the way our planet moves through space. It takes 26,000 years to complete all astrological ages, and each age is more than 2,000 years long. In the past 13,000 years, there have been six Astrological Ages and the newest, the Age of Aquarius, is the seventh one.

To yogis, one of the most important ages in human history was the Age of Taurus. Yoga began during this era in India, almost 5,000 years ago. With posture names like cobra, camel, cat, crow and fish, it seems certain that the yogis recognized the beauty of the movements of animals and knew that replicating them would help to ease and strengthen their own bodies. The early yogis were attuned to the workings of their human bodies too, and they realized that when they slowed down their breath, they also slowed down their minds. The remarkable practice of yoga that began in India’s Indus River Valley before the appearance of the written word is still practiced all over the world today.

About three thousand years later came the Piscean Age, which was when many of us were born and during which history begins to sound more familiar. The Piscean Age began in 1 BC and ended in 1999. The Piscean Age was the time of the Crusades, the Renaissance, and the discovery of the New World. The genius of Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven and Michelangelo changed art and music forever. Jesus and Muhammad were born and today their 3.5 billion followers make up the two most popular religions in the world.

Over time, we have advanced in so many ways, but our knowledge increased more rapidly in the years from 1900 until 1999 than it did during all the years that came before it. People must have always wondered if it would ever be possible to travel into the starry night sky, but in 1969 a handful of men flew far away from our planet and actually walked on the moon.

We humans are wonderfully creative, but we also have a history of being heartless and destructive. In 1945, we developed and detonated a bomb that killed 80,000 people. Man-made pollution has created havoc in the air that we breathe, in outer space and in our oceans. The plastics and chemicals that we carelessly throw into the oceans kill more than 100,000 sea turtles, birds, whales and dolphins every year. The Pacific Ocean now contains an area of trash the size of Europe that is called the world’s largest landfill.

For a few years now, we’ve been living in the beginning stages of the Age of Aquarius. Great things have been predicted for this time, but like the ages before it, it will last more than 2,000 years, and this one still has a long way to go. There are many ways in which the Age of Aquarius is predicted to be different from the Piscean Age that preceded it, and a lot of those changes have already begun.

Given how accustomed we are to instant communication in the world today, you may wonder how people were able to get messages to each other so long ago. The answer is that it was done by direct person to person contact. Written messages could be sent by courier to distant locations and someone with important news for those who were close by could communicate it more effectively by making themselves more noticeable (try standing on a rock!) or by talking louder. Imagine how long it would have taken for any information to get from one continent to another. No one could have dreamed of the concept of up to the minute news on television, email, Facebook or cell phones.

As a student in the middle of the Twentieth Century, I know that when I needed information for a report, I had to look for it in encyclopedias, books, magazines and newspapers. That meant going from one library or center to another, and working with information that was months or even years old. Today, 90 percent of American homes have a computer that can access information from around the world as soon as it occurs.

Spiritual practices have always been of great importance to human beings, but for most of our history, they have been kept under the tight control of a few people. In the last 60 years, we have seen yogis from around the world bringing a new type of spirituality to the United States. All of these yogis studied in person with masters of their particular practice before they came here, and they were fortunate to be able to do so because during the Piscean Age, learning wasn’t available to everybody.

One such person, Yogi Bhajan, came from a royal family in India where he was allowed to learn the practice of Kundalini yoga. He studied for eight years with a Kundalini yoga master before he became one himself. Decades later, he felt he should take the knowledge of this practice to the Western world, but that idea wasn’t well received in India. Kundalini yoga had been carefully guarded by a select group of people for generations and they wanted to keep it that way. It was even widely believed that if you shared the secrets of Kundalini Yoga with outsiders, you wouldn’t live to see your next birthday. Threats were made on Yogi Bhajan’s life when he did just that.

Another famous person from the end of the Piscean Age was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was the spiritual adviser to the Beatles. After completing a Master’s Degree in Physics, he felt that there must be more to life than what he had learned in school. He wasn’t able to go to a local yoga studio to learn about the practices of yoga and meditation, though. Instead, he spent the next fourteen years of his life in the Himalayas before he left to teach the world about Transcendental Meditation.

Indra Devi, the first woman yogi to come to the West, was born in Russia but she traveled to India many times to learn about the culture and establish friendships there before trying to be accepted as a student of yoga. Krishnamacharya, a famous Indian yogi, refused to work with her because she was a woman and a foreigner. It was only because of the influence of one of her friends, the ruler of the kingdom of Mysore, that she was eventually allowed to learn about yoga from Krishnamacharya himself. Because of this, Indra Devi was able to change the lives of countless people around the world by introducing the practice of yoga to the people of China, Mexico, Russia, the United States and Argentina.

For someone today who wants to learn about yoga as either a spiritual or physical study, there are more than 70,000 certified yoga teachers in the United States alone. The ease of learning about this ancient practice would probably have shocked the yogis of 50 years ago.

If you were alive in the Piscean Age and decided you wanted to drop out from society, it was a pretty easy thing to do because it was a much simpler time to disappear and take on a different identity. We’ve all heard stories of soldiers joining the French Foreign Legion and getting a new identity, fishermen going off for months or years at sea, and disgruntled spouses leaving their families and never being heard from again. Until recently, it wasn’t that hard for a person to move away, change their name and begin a new life, but that’s not how the world works today. Social media, vital records and credit cards have made it almost impossible to establish a new identity.

My husband’s father left him, his twin brother and their mother one day in the 1960s. For my husband, there was always a gap in his life wondering what happened to his dad, but he didn’t know of any way to find out if his father was still alive. Using the information that is available in the Aquarian Age, his father’s mysterious disappearance was fairly easily resolved with nothing more to search with than a name, birth date and the city in which his dad was born.

Our actions are almost constantly being recorded as we go about our daily lives. Maybe you’ve seen the megapixel photograph of 100,000 Canucks fans who lined the streets of Vancouver before Game Seven of the Stanley Cup. The crowd is massive, but you can enlarge a single person’s face until it is easily recognizable. And that is only one way that cameras record where we are and what we’re doing. Think of the almost unlimited potential to identify people when we are constantly being monitored by traffic cameras, video photography in public places, police cameras and the cell phones that are in nearly everyone’s pocket or handbag. The Aquarian Age definitely doesn’t allow for many secrets. There is a trail for almost everything and to have any information escape scrutiny is rare.

Our personal issues have changed too. During the Piscean Age, people worried about the threat of contagious diseases like smallpox, tuberculosis, malaria and leprosy. Today, worry itself is one of our biggest problems as we deal with the internal stress that is caused by our fast-paced and pressure-filled lives. According to the Mayo Clinic, in recent years the most commonly prescribed drugs are antibiotics, antidepressants and pain killing opioids. Sixty million Americans aren’t able to sleep and 70 percent of American adults are overweight. Our lifestyle of information overload seems to have become our worst enemy.

The world has definitely changed and its pace continues to quicken. Imagine living in the type of world the Aquarian Age promises us. Almost certainly it will still be a time of ever-increasing technology, but more importantly, it will hopefully mark a true shift in human behavior in which many people choose to live a more caring and loving existence. Yogi Bhajan believed that was possible when he predicted that the slogan of the Aquarian Age will be, I know, let me help take you there.

The stories in this book are about amazing people and practices that have the potential to influence and change your life. Once we are exposed to what the Aquarian Age can offer us, trying to balance a lifestyle of materialism and spirituality may not be very appealing. The decision for all of us may come down to following the materialistic opportunities of life or choosing a different path of concern that centers around the world that we live in and the people with whom we share it. Allow yourself to be open to make that transforming change. I know what it’s like. Let me help take you there.

Yoga Comes to the West

Chapter 2:

Restorative Yoga

Istarted taking yoga classes when I was in my early fifties. I liked telling people that I practiced yoga and almost everyone I spoke to told me they wished they were learning it too. For a reason that is still somewhat mysterious to me, I knew that yoga was my calling for the future, and a few years later I decided to leave a great job to become a yoga teacher myself. That year, my Christmas present from my husband was a gift certificate to a nearby yoga studio. I wasn’t that proficient in yoga, so I thought I would ease my way into becoming a professional yogi by attending a Restorative Yoga class once or twice a week. Looking back, that was a gross underestimation of what I should have been doing.

The teacher was kind and lovely and her classes were a wonderful introduction to what would become a way of life for me, but I was new to this type of yoga and I wanted to be good at it. In all honesty, I am a Pitta Dosha (and a Type A personality) by nature, and I wanted to be very good at it. Looking back, I can see that I brought a lot of ego to those classes.

The teacher offered us directions for each posture she introduced. Then the students who were already familiar with the pose would get into the position and begin to hold it for several minutes. For those of us who obviously needed more help, she would work her way around the room, filling in any open spaces in our postures with blocks, bolsters and blankets to enable our bodies to achieve a better alignment.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know enough about this style of yoga to understand why this was necessary and felt frustrated every time she reinforced my knees or some other body part with props. I was sure I was already doing everything perfectly. In retrospect, I should have recognized that not only is yoga not a competitive sport, but Restorative Yoga most assuredly is not. Propping is what you do in this type of yoga. It’s not intended to be an insult.

Like most other physical practices, there are many different styles of yoga and each of us can choose the one that brings us to our own place of wholeness and balance. Think of the Chinese symbol of yin and yang, which represents a balance of the opposite energies in nature. That same concept of opposing forces can be seen in the active and passive forms of yoga.

You may have heard of some of the more active, or Yang, forms of yoga that include Ashtanga, Bikram, Power Vinyasa or any other type of yoga that has power in its name. But there is also a Yin or passive side of yoga that includes Kripalu Yoga, Restorative Yoga and even one that is called Yin Yoga. Most of us are probably more familiar with the fitness benefits that are touted for the stronger forms of yoga, but we should also be acquainted with the more restful, even spa-like forms of yoga that have so much to offer.

The beginning of Restorative Yoga traces back to B.K.S. Iyengar, who became very well known in America after he came here from India in the 1950s. Iyengar had been a very sickly little boy who wanted to study yoga. Later on, he credited it for restoring his health. That certainly wasn’t an overnight process, though, because due to his illnesses, he didn’t have the strength or the flexibility to do the postures completely on his own, and he didn’t know how he would learn them.

But Iyengar was inventive and he found that he could use everyday items like bricks, ropes, barrels and rocks to help ease his body into yoga poses that would otherwise have been unattainable for him. When he had ideas for other types of supports or props that didn’t exist, he would have them created by a furniture maker. Iyengar realized that his style of yoga would not provide a cure for everyone, but it almost certainly would help increase every person’s potential.

Yoga props, which we know as blocks, straps, blankets and bolsters, are in almost all yoga studios today. They are there as an aid to help you get the most out of yoga. If you’re considering trying a Restorative Yoga class, props are a necessity because they help every student to practice in comfort and without causing strain or pain to their body. The yoga poses themselves will bring you increased flexibility and strength, but don’t think that using props takes away from the value of the postures.

Yoga props are quite inexpensive, but if you don’t want to buy them, you probably have items around your house that you can use instead. Books can be used in place of blocks, a belt or necktie can be used as a strap and a simple washcloth can work nicely as an eye pillow. Couch cushions make nice, firm bolsters.

It would be helpful to get a book about Restorative Yoga or look at pictures of the practice online, so you can understand where to place the props to support different types of postures. Once you’re in a pose, either the props or the position of your body may need to be adjusted until you are totally comfortable. After you find yourself in just the right position, you can stay in that posture for as long as you feel comfortable, which can range from one to five minutes or even longer. During that time, your muscles will begin to relax, open up and ease their way into new positions.

It should be a pleasure to practice Restorative Yoga frequently, and when you do, you will find that your body will become more flexible. Over time, the use of the props will become less and less necessary.

Another important aspect of Restorative Yoga is mindfulness and the breath. As you focus on the breath, you want to breathe slowly and deeply into the lowest part of your lungs. I said earlier that Restorative Yoga is like a trip to the spa. That’s because this style of yoga will make you feel safe and cared for, and once you are supported in a position, you may hardly feel the need to move at all. This type of yoga slows you down, opens up the body and allows you to relax.

The Reiki Master that I studied under told me that the body heals in stillness. That is exactly what Restorative Yoga does for you. As the body gains flexibility and openness, healing is allowed to begin on many levels. In this state of relaxation, your parasympathetic nervous system is in charge. Your muscles relax,