Open your window of tolerance at your navel point.

How your third chakra, the navel area, opens the window of tolerance .

When we wake up ‘on the wrong side of the bed’, perhaps even feel ‘wrong’ in your gut, our day may continue that way too. On these ‘wrong days’ we can open the window of tolerance wide and allow the fresh breeze of Prana, and movement to heal us. Our first brain is located in the gut.  Our gut brain sends messages via our subtle energy bodies (chakras nadis and nerves like the vagus nerve) to our head brain. We can stimulate hormones like Seratonin through navel stimulation postures that sort out how we feel, and fast. We can massage our internal organs, with many yoga postures. Yoga does not actually work in that mysterious a way. We have to remember to do some – off the mat, outside a class when we need help. That is the great challenge for us now.

A personal view on anxiety

A global pandemic has created anxious times for all of us, and the human mind is born with a negativity bias that programmes us to expect the worst, until we take back charge of our mind. I use movement and posture – especially the navel point ones, and of course, navel-pumping Breath of Fire, to keep my stress hormones away. If I wake in the night, I do some cobras on the bed and bow poses to stimulate the navel and stretch open the vagus nerve, remembering to raise my chin and even poke my tongue out at the same time. I’m soon resting again, huge yawns often start, as the alarm systems in the body switch off and my actions tell my nervous system that dinosaurs are extinct. It’s annoying, but fact; our Amygdalia in our human brain is still connected via evolution genetics to the time when we were hunter-gatherers in a much more dangerous world.

I’m like many others, at times (Covid times for sure) a classic ‘worrier instead of warrior’ too.  I’d love to be languishing on a beautiful temperate island sipping yogi tea and nibbling delicious fruits and vegetables brought to me washed and prepared on pretty plates. Yes, in this unreal life, my EVERY need would be met like a Princess.  I would absolutely need  my small dog to be on this white sandy beach beside me.  Did you know that dog = God spelt backward?

But, hey, I am living on a beautiful English isle and have created systems to cope with the ‘worrier syndrome’; a strong core practice helped by Kundalini yoga’s navel kriyas.  After practice, it all fades to shades of green dales scenery . I use normal feelings of worry anger and frustration, as the gateway for achievement of a more feminine and divine warrior-like temperament, like the Hindu goddess Kali and become a Kali wilderness within myself starting with the navel area.

Right now, tolerance is an important word. We are in lockdown with our family at close quarters – we have to accept and allow. That is the only medicine. You might come  ‘know thyself more through your time spent on the mat’,  listen to the kundalini magic stirring within, during rest spaces between postures. Then, you receive the beneficial hormones to eat up your stress hormones. Then, you can open wide, your personal window of tolerance.

You posses all the medicine within your body to create a calmer content you.

In my next blog I will discuss the 3rd chakra, the navel point,  and its greater role in opening your personal window of tolerance and suggest some yoga poses to strengthen the navel point. Join Emma for an (online or studio) Kundalini yoga practice to strengthen your navel point.