Healing at the Yoga Farm St. Croix with Yoga and Story

Christiansted, St. Croix, USVI by Sydney Solis 2013

I wrote about my natural healing experience at the Yoga Farm St. Croix on the Mythic Yoga: The Queen of Bohemia Lives in St. Croix blog.

Mythic Yoga: Story in the Body Class 1: BODY MEMOIRS Stories of the Feet

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" The real preparation for education is the study of one's self. The training of the teacher is something far more than the learning of ideas. It includes the training of character; it is a preparation of the spirit. " - Maria Montessori

Resting on the 100-headed snake Ananda Sesha, Vishnu grows a lotus from his navel. Lakshmi rubs his feet, activating his conscious power with her Shakti.  This is an image that roots us within to our own eternal depths and divine nature. It's an inner prima materi that anchors us to the divine through the myth intuitively. In Mythic Yoga practice, the image evokes something within us to examine our sense of connection to our bodies and lower chakras.

Our feet root our bodies to the energy of the earth.  Through the padha bandha in the foot and the muladhara banda at the base of the pelvis we energetically connect our bodies to the earth. Movement, dance and yoga asana, such as tadasana, with the feet connects us to this greater image of the earth and its powers and our Selves. What’s in the way? High heels for one thing ladies! But more so, memories, dreams reflections! The ones we hold on to at least!

The first class of Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body series started Saturday and we worked with the image of Vishnu and his dream. The 4-week online class features the myths and personal stories in my book Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream - Ancient Hindu Myth and Personal Story. Reflecting on the spoken myth Vishnu’s Dream from the Vishnu Purana, students are inspired to find their own stories via the body and myth. We examined images from our dream life at night and during the day, as well as the dream images from the myth. After asana, a student shared a particularly powerful story from her memory about her foot.

I practice alongside my students, so in my personal Mythic Yoga practice, I have worked with my feet before. The Body Memoir of my Feet video, recalls early trauma to the foot area. Does that memory have any unknown influence in my life? Can I tell something about it and offer it up as art to express myself and shift the relationship and energetics about what happened to me? For our bodies have stories to tell! How do we connect to the earth? Do we or do we not have a feeling of safety? What is the body say? What needs to be expressed? That is the student's challenge.

Additionally we work with dreams and the body.  In my personal practice, I have been having dreams of switching seats with others lately. In one dream, I am on an airplane and let the “retarded” child move to the window seat on the left so that it can be “better connected.”

The dream image reminds me of early woundings in my foot and confidence from recognizing that I had learning disabilities as a child.  I didn’t speak until I was 4 years old, my mother said. My Oma, Dutch grandmother, got me talking. I had severe leg pains growing up. I could never understand math, and remember a particularly humiliating experience in the first grade over math. I had whole gaps in my learning, and remember the first grade class going off somewhere else while I was left behind with the kids with coke-bottle glasses and open mouths.

 I found I excelled at English, however. I was reading Greek myths and books at a 7^th grade level by second grade growing up in Boulder, Colorado. Additionally I was a year or more younger than everybody else in class because my mother “didn’t know what to do with me” so fudged my birth certificate with white out and a copy machine to get me admitted to school early. That “strong suit” of reading made its way onto my Persona, my mask of the true Self.

I act out with movement my dream of the retarded child. I love my retarded self. And there is no retarded self. Never was. It’s just who I am. Just as my daughter, who has struggled with reading and learning disabilities her whole life, now in sixth grade reads at a 9th grade and higher level. She just did things differently. As do I! My shadow can come out now! I love Truman Capote’s quote. “I am an alcoholic. I am a drug addict. I am a homosexual. I am a genius.”

Looking at my "retarded" child connects me to all of my self. It is part of my shadow. So may we all love our shadows, find out who they are, offer them a cup of tea, make friends with them, tell stories about them and offer them up as art in honor of life. May we befriend and move with all parts of ourselves to get connected in a better seat of life! Tell Your Story in the Body!

Read more Mythic Yoga work and connect with others in League of Yogic Storytellers! Join today!

Join the Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body Online class with Sydney Solis at the Mythic Yoga Studio on PowHow.com.

SUGGESTED READING
Jung and Yoga: The Psyche-Body Connection by Judith Harris 
The Inner Journey: Views from the Hindu Tradition, Edited by Margaret H. Case PARABOLA anthology Series

 Know Thy Self with Mythic Yoga then teach yoga and tell stories to little kids with Storytime Yoga!

Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body Online Classes April 27-May 18

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The Mythic Yoga Studio: The Story in the Body

Know Thy Self! 

Join Storyteller and Yoga Teacher Sydney Solis for 

Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body Online classes April 27-May 18.

Use dreams, myth, the body and personal storytelling for self-discovery and transformation! 

Four Saturdays April 27- May 18. 1 pm EDT. 

Join from anywhere in the world as it's online at the Mythic Yoga Studio on Powhow!

This is the first time Sydney presents the popular e-course Mythic Yoga on Powhow!  Each class features movement, yoga, contemplation and a different Hindu myth that guide you through life's stages to bring your life's story into awareness and to create a Body Myth. Bring a dream you’ve had and would like to work with, a notebook, your body and your listening ears to journey within, bring awareness to issues and discover your personal myth!

Required course for Storytime Yoga Teacher Certification.  Withdraw your projections to empower yourself and also so you don’t put them on the kids or others you work or live with!

Register for all four classes and save 20%!

League of Yogic Storytellers Members receive 50% off all classes!

• Purchase the Mythic Yoga at home course and go deeper to discover your own myth using the body, the word and active imagination.

Mythic Yoga: Telling the Dream Story of the Body

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When Marduk  slays Tiamat and pins half her snake body up as the four-corners of the sky and makes the other half the earth, he is creating order from chaos. In this Babylonian myth, Marduk is conquering his symbiosis with the feminine chaos, mother serpentine, watery realm of the unconscious, and creating a container in which to hold the conscious world. He is asserting himself away from the all-devouring mother, creating his ego and assertion that he exists and has an “I”. To do that he has to slay the Mother, the feminine., as many mythologies, such as the Aztec Huitzilopochtli, seek to do.

Read more about Mythic Yoga: Telling the Dream Story of the Body when you become a member of the League of Yogic Storytellers! (LOYS)

Mythic Yoga: Dream work and the Beginnings of Personal Myth

"The ability to see one’s life as a story is at the heart of identity. In fact, our ability to “narrate” our life’s events may even be the defining mark of consciousness." - Frank Bures

I have been in a dream work group here in St. Croix for the past two months. Led by my friend Nancy Ayer at her home in Estate Mt. Washington on the west side of the island, the group meets every week for two hours deep in the rainforest on beautiful plantation ruins that houses her incredible Chartes-style labryinth.

We sit in a circle, either beneath elderly trees dripping with hard, round avocados, or over by a disintegrating copper cooking vat where sugar cane was once boiled and cooked by slaves to make rum. We tell each other our dreams, and a remarkable alchemy takes place when we make the unconscious images and story lines conscious and bring it out into the world to share with others. They in turn experience the same image in their bodies and psyches, as I experience theirs. Common story lines appear and it's the making of modern myth.

We work with night time dreams, but also real life events, which when retold as story, seem as a dream. Such is life a dream and all the world a stage! Merrily, merrily we go! Paying attention to it all. No wonder the Vishnu Purana has Vishnu dreaming the world into creation, massaged by Lakshmi, who ignites the libido, the spark of divine desire to create!

How we are all creating our world! And through dreams, stories and yoga, we become self aware of this world creation. Get to know the story. Making what is unknown, known. From darkness to light, from untruth to truth. Our soul fishes in the darkness, on the edge of an iceberg, looking to hook something from the great depth below, pull it up to the surface and give it a good look in the daylight of consciousness.

Asato Ma Sad Gamaya
Tamaso Ma Jyotir Gamaya
Mrityor Ma Amritam Gamaya
Om Shanthi Shanthi Shanthi

Lead me: From untruth to truth;
From darkness to light;
From death to immortality
Om peace peace peace

If there is a divine being, I believe it to be true because I have experienced such miracles and uncanny things in my dreams. Truly that is where I experience the divine, if I am ever to believe in god at all! This relationship with the Self. The spoken words, the weaving of consciousness from daytime to night time, all interact and are smeltered in the cauldron of alchemical becoming Self-hood.

I have been doing dream work for years and years, and teach dream work in my Mythic Yoga trainings, which prepares students who want to teach yoga for kids by getting clear of their story, lest they project it on the kids they work with. It's deep work, and I noticed we all started to dream others' dreams, and this is the creation of new myths. In this present dream group on St. Croix I learned to listen to other people's day time events, as if they were dreams. The same images and story lines put us into a listening trance as the dream unfolds, much like at night time. We follow along, and have a memory of that story which took place in a realm suspended of time and space. I begin to become aware of the witness consciousness, as I question as the Chinese sage did with, "Last night I dreamed I was a butterfly. or was I a butterfly dreaming that I was a man?"

 I also learned to look at a series of dreams, not only as a stand alone. I can see patterns and a story arising. Mega growth, the future, and being introduced to a dark man, my animus,  or masculine side of my psyche, who is now taking me on a journey. A mythic journey into my Self as revealed to me by dream images that bubble out of the dream depths.

Life is but a dream, and I can change this dream world I create with conciousness and awareness, working with my dreams to understand myself and guide me thorugh life. To make my unknown known, and bring me into complete liberation. Dream work and storytelling combined with accessing deeper meaning to the symbols through yoga asana as a form of active imagination, help us reveal that story, so that we can ultimately unmask our persona and step into the  point where the projections originate and achieve ultimate liberation of union as object and observer disappear.

So I follow my dreams, work with them as a most sacred aspect of my yoga practice. It can be remarkable, mystical. I have been dreaming about small, furry rodents for a while. This picture popped up instantly as I searched for a picture to use here. He was hanging around every day at the Omega Institute where I was conducting a Storytime Yoga for Kids training one summer.  I adopted him as my symbol, my animal helper and he made it into a Woodchuck Warm-Up. I had one furry rodent, beaver like creature presented as a gift from my my once terrifying animus who now is a business man who looks like my late husband.  And I dreamed of my high school drama teacher, Darlene Beaver, in a recent dream. I read a fairy tale in the Pink Fairy Tale book an interesting tale called The Princess in the Chest about a girl who, because of magic and a difficult father, was part beaver-ish for a while. After this writing dream work session, I will follow where my beaver takes me in the dreams and guides me in my next work of creation. And play with it in yoga asana practice for some Mythic Yoga Magic! We shall see!
 

Mythic Yoga: The Queen of Bohemia Lives in St. Croix

Mythic Yoga

I kept a blog for five years while dealing with the difficulty of surviving my husband's suicide and raising my two young children.

Yoga and The Queen of Bohemia guiding myth, which is backed by Durga and Kali myths gave me the strength, courage and physical vitality of body and mind to move forward for healing and transformation.

The Queen of Bohemia Lives in St. Croix

A new cycle begins as I emerge from my egg and am reborn once again. Mythic Yoga to light and guide. OM SHANTI.

Find your own guiding myth. What is it? Here are a few websites to inspire you.

Timeless Myths
Hindu Myths
The Joseph Campbell Foundation

Upcoming Mythic Yoga classes on Powhow at the Mythic Yoga Studio. Follow me for latest updates!

Mythic Yoga: The Artemis Club

Mythic Yoga enters a new phase. The Queen of Bohemia has taken up her abode in The Little Lotus at the Mythic Yoga Studio on PowHow with Storytime Yoga to entertain, enchant and educate young minds and bodies.

Now that her l'il yogi kids have blossomed into young adults, it's time to return to Mythic Yoga: The Artemis Club - Stories and Yoga for Young Women at Teen Yogini.com.  Nurturing, protecting and empowering the young feminine is needed in this day and age to bring the mother goddess back to the world. Something sorely needed for the earth and our own psyches.

This marks the return of Mythic Yoga, which I started 10 years ago. Nobody could really understand "Mythic Yoga" back then. Storytime Yoga was hot for kids yoga, and my kids were young. So I focused on that and continued Mythic Yoga as the personal practice program for parents and teachers in the Storytime Yoga Teacher Certification. Back then the kids really needed me, I took the time off to be a mother and raise them. 10 years later, my dharma fills me with kama  to move me to artha to achieve moksha! So Mythic Yoga forces its way up to top because it's ready to come up out of the dark!

Artemis commands in her character for us to pay attention to the Young Feminine and protect it  In The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden: Understanding the Wounded Feeling Function in Masculine and Feminine Psychology Robert A. Johnson argues that the feeling function is the most wounded in our society. Attention must be paid to our young adults to nurture their feeling function in order to avoid the destruction that is upon us with mass shootings, eating disorders and general misogyny in the world and the destruction of the Earth.

The Myth of Artemis is powerful to contemplate in the body. A true feminist archetype, Artemis infuses us with the energy of the mother goddess permeating the body, acquiring masculine energy to balance out a badly out of balance world tilted to extreme masculine and mechanical machine, suppressing the feminine and the body, the earth. But the Goddess is back. And the masculine is coming through for women and young women to claim.

 I've been having dreams of the "Dark Man," which terrified me. I read in Once Upon a Midlife: Classic Stories and Mythic Tales to Illuminate the Middle Years by Allan Chinen, M.D. about a woman embracing her  animus in the Chinese story The Wife who Became King.

Although frightening and threatening at first, the male villains ultimately help the wife individuate. The men represent the essential enemy. The same theme appears in other middle ages, and crops up frequently in real life. Many women reclaim their power only when they are forced to leave a neglectful or abusive spouse. Finally abandoning the hope that a man can fulfill their needs, women strike out on their own and discover dormant strengths and talents.

Jung suggested that the animus usually plays the role of a helpful, spiritual guide for women, leading them on a voyage of self-discovery. Dangerous animus figures reflect the realities of patriarchal cultures, where men often attack women….. Because of social pressures, women are also taught to fear being assertive. Since the animus symbolizes assertiveness, he appears threatening at first. Pg. 103.

After recognizing my animus appearing in my dreams, my own masculine energy, I befriended him. He appears regularly now in my dreams, recently taking me into a new house, upstairs to a room with a great view! We can all befriend our inner masculine for union and wholeness!





Visit Mythic Yoga: The Artemis Club invite the young women in your life to join you in the mythic journey to your Self. Learn to use the archetypical energy of Artemis to reclaim your masculine, animus power in your life. Challenge the alienation of mundane life and re-mythologize it. Participate in the myth with Mythic Yoga and do your part in bringing light to the world and bring the Great Mother energy to the world for healing, life and rebirth.

The classic training in Mythic Yoga with Sydney Solis using Dream work, yoga, Hindu myth and other world mythologies, personal mythology, journaling and meditation is coming soon to Powhow.