Kundalini: The Ancient Power

“Everybody, whether householder or sannyasin (renunciate) must remember that the awakening of kundalini is the primary purpose of human incarnation.” – Swami Satyananda Saraswati.

Kundalini is the energy which brings alive our subtle body system by way of activating the chakras. It is traditionally said to lie as a serpent coiled three and a half times deep within the depths of our foundational chakra, the muladhara. The aim of the practitioner of kundalini yoga is to blast open the muladhara in order to release this ancient energy. The chakra is located on the perenium right at the base of the spine and it is said to be the secret abode of Lord Ganapati, the Remover of Obstacles. Once the energy has been activated it ascends the subtle yogic channel known as sushumna which runs the length of the spine and into the brain. Its resting place is the brow chakra, ajna, known in meditation as the Place of Command which rests on the pineal gland. From ajna it might then be possible for this kundalini-shakti to ascend higher, to the crown chakra, the sahasrara, otherwise known as the Thousand Petalled Lotus which once opened showers indescribable bliss down through the whole of the body both subtle and physical.

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Bob Dylan Live: London Wembley Arena 6th October 2000

This show is from October 2000 when I went on the road in the UK to attend 5 shows by Colombia recording artist Bob Dylan who by that point was over 10 years into his Never Ending Tour.

Well I got see Bob at Wembley but it was a close run thing, really was a close run thing. I was due to meet Madeleine and Ngawang, a Swedish-Tibetan couple with whom I was going, outside Wembley Park tube station at 7pm in order to give them their tickets for the show on arrival, but massive problems on the tube meant that I didn’t get to Wembley Park until 7.15 because everything was running late. There was no sign of them but I wasn’t too worried about that because it was pretty clear everyone going to the show by tube was in the same boat as far as being delayed was concerned and that it would only be a matter of time before they appeared.

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Bob Dylan Live: Portsmouth Guildhall 25th September 2000

This show is from September 2000 when I went on the road in the UK to attend 5 shows by Colombia recording artist Bob Dylan who by that point was over 10 years into his Never Ending Tour.

It was raining all day on Monday, which was the day I was due to go and see Bob Dylan in Portsmouth. I had to go to work at Wisdom Books in the morning, the small book distribution company I was co-director of, along with my colleagues Duncan “Dunc” Huston and Lee Richards. By two I was out of the office and on the road to get to my fourth Bob Dylan show within a week, after already having seen him at the Birmingham NEC, Sheffield Arena and Cardiff International Arena. I left with plenty of time to spare because I had no idea what to expect in terms of traffic on the way from London down to the south coast of England where Portsmouth was located. The M25 turned out to be pretty clear, a fluke no doubt, and within an hour I had reached the other side of Heathrow to take the junction for the A3 now heading due south. I had decided the A3 was a better way to get to Portsmouth rather than the M3 down to Southampton and then swinging across along the coast road. Dunno why, intuition I guess.

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Bob Dylan Live: Cardiff International Arena 23rd September 2000

This show is from September 2000 when I went on the road in the UK to attend 5 shows by Colombia recording artist Bob Dylan who by that point was over 10 years into his Never Ending Tour.

After Sheffield I had to get down to South Wales the next day to see Bob Dylan at the Cardiff International Arena with my old friend Huw Jones who came from the same place as me, namely Penarth, a pleasant town on the western edge of Cardiff and overlooking the Bristol Channel. Unlike me Huw had never really left, apart from a few years down in Swansea doing an apprenticeship in stained glass window making. In fact it had been in Swansea when I had first got to know him, way back in the early 80s when I was studying at the University of Swansea and from where in 1983 I emerged with a 2:1 BA Hons degree in History, something which at the time I was quite rightly extremely proud of. Huw was not studying at the university of course, but had been doing his stained glass apprenticeship down in Swansea Bay and living in a cold bedsit located in an area of town called Morriston. He used to come to the Students Union coffee lounge and play the pinball machines there night after night, and where I have to say he got to be a bit of a wizard. Due to his almost continuous presence it was not long before I started to hang out with him, along with a guy called Rik Dixon who was from Norwich and a fellow student of mine in the university. Over the course of the next few years the three of us had more than one or two high old times together, when more often than not we were under the influence of weed, hash and other assorted psychedelic drugs. But all that I guess, is a different story!

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Bob Dylan Live: Sheffield Arena 22nd September 2000

This show is from September 2000 when I went on the road in the UK to attend 5 shows by Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan who by that point was over 10 years into his Never Ending Tour.

The second in my series of five Bob concerts for the year 2000 was the Sheffield Arena. Birmingham NEC had been on the Wednesday and Sheffield was now on the Friday. There was a day of work in between at Wisdom Books, the small book distribution company I helped run and was now a co-director of, not that such a thing added up to much, as the number of people employed at Wisdom was precisely six. I took the whole of the Friday off because I intended to drive up to Sheffield to see the show and then head back to London the same night. This time I would not be going solo as I was due to make the trip with Marc Murphy my old friend and colleague who had once also worked at Wisdom back in the early 90s until that is, we had to let him go due to there not being enough business at the time for us to afford to keep him on. Marc was now working in a very different kind of world as for a number of years he had been the assistant of a man called Klaus, a Danish entrepreneur living down in Caterham, Surrey who specialised in the buying of chemicals from countries like China and India and then selling them on to drug companies in the United States for a nice healthy profit.

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Bengaluru Touchdown

So here we are in India again, me and Dawa Dolkar my wife. Time switch on arrival at the Southern Star on Lavell Road in Bengaluru means 6.55 London becomes 10.35 India as we jump ahead 4 and a half hours in consequence. Sense of dislocation rolls over in waves as I’m sitting by the coffee table in our room with an Indian Railways advertisement flyer on the glass top in front of me – Food Journeys / Hubli Rice Bath – or to break that one down, take a train to Hubli and have a dish there called a rice bath and pretty tasty I’m sure it would be too, except of course we were not going to Hubli but later in the day instead to Mysore on the Tippu Express and from there to the Tibetan settlement of Bylakuppe by car. Hubli by the way is an eight or nine train journey north of Bengaluru into the heart of Karnataka and the nearest town of any size to the Tibetan settlement of Mungod which is just up the road from the sunshine state of Goa. Further on up the track from Hubli is a town called Hospet and if you get at Hospet you are then not too far from the magical ancient city of ruins called Hampi which is fast becoming one of the most popular tourist attractions in India. Need to find the time to get up to Hampi again, last visit I made that was back in ’89 in another life.

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Eye of Meditation

The header image for this article is a photograph taken by Johannes Plenio as found on Pexels.

Today the sitting was better, more focused than the last couple of mornings when I have struggled to stay on the button, struggled to keep concentration tight enough so as not be continually losing sight of the meditation object, struggling to place it in the mind’s eye. What is this eye? To keep concentration tight enough so as not be continually losing sight of the view, struggling to place it, can be difficult and requires practice. Again, what is this eye? Well, for me, as I have written before in other places here and there, the mind’s eye is located more or less in the centre of the forehead, between the eyebrows, or at least just above the point which is between the eyebrows.

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Taxi from Chennai to Tiruvannamalai

By the time the taxi rolled up at the entrance to Woodlands in Mylapore it was just past 9.30 in the morning and the reception was relatively empty which ensured I was able to check in quickly after filling out all the usual forms and handing over my passport for it to be photocopied by the hotel staff. I then left my rucksack with the porters in the lobby and went straight to Vrindavan, the excellent vegetarian restaurant within the hotel, where I ordered a pretty good dish of dhal with a couple of fresh baked chapattis just before closing time. Satisfied that I had managed to get some good quality food inside me, more than happy that I had successfully managed get to Chennai on the day I intended, I went straight to my deluxe non-AC double room after I had eaten in order to rest. As luck would have it the room had been recently renovated and was therefore in sparkling condition with a big fan already whirring away in the centre of the ceiling. I was now pretty tired from my trials and tribulations from another day on the road in India, another one of quite a few I had taken over the years, over the decades.

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In the Fields

A poem written whilst walking the fields in the Tibetan settlement of Bylakuppe, Karnataka State, South India. Image is from TDL Dickey Larsoe with the sun setting in the West.

pilgrim hill lines
in the distance
within their shape
terrestrial
magnetism
lies explained

open fields
monks and people
walk the ridges
snakes, soil and
mantra bridges
curl upon the
tractor coils

beneath the stars
life defined
shadows trace
secret signs

Flybus – Kempegowda to Mysore

By the time we got to Bangalore it was indeed just gone 7 and with the baggage claim scenario to go through we could both chill in the knowledge that the 7.15 Flybus was gonna be impossible to catch. We would just have to settle for the one at 9, take our time in gettin’ on through before the last stages of a journey which started early morning in the misty hill city of Gangtok capital of Sikkim. Of course it was barely an inconvenience, the extra wait that is, as we were able to have a little bit to eat an’ drink after sorting out our Flybus tickets by way of buying them at the Flybus kiosk, storing our luggage in the hold of the bus which was on the stand fully parked up, ready an’ waitin’ to take us west. Turned out to be a pleasant hour or two, sittin’ outside the airport enjoying the balmy evening weather, plenty of seats, plenty of tasty lookin’ food and drinks stands busy with people. It was fun to be chillin’ after the thrill of having made it outta the hills, back to the heat, back to the plains of the south. Back to Bangalore, Indian mega city with serious splashes of high tech around its edges, a city which was now an overwhelming experience to drive through in terms of size – highway chaos, endless crowds, a million high rise apartment blocks – as if every time you blink your eyes another ten new vistas of the inexplicable appear on the horizon.

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