TYU

Today I came across new term, *Alamkara* and I wonder what do you think about it?

Alamkara – is an ornament, something you can wear, a piece of jewelry, a pretty broche. Interestingly, it literally means a combination of two roots “Alan” – “just enough” and “kara” (karma)-“doing”. It means “Just enough doing”. So when you are doing just enough it becomes an ornament, a beautiful peace, an art work. It bears an aesthetic value.
Alamkara is a very important concept for the evolvement of modern Yoga. Read the rest of this entry →

Share on Facebook

Personally, I think that Enlightenment is a very difficult state to achieve. However, through hardship and continued efforts any person can reach Enlightenment. Each of us has a Buddha nature which we tend to ignore and cover up with our desires. Enlightenment is then the return to our simplest nature – a return to simplicity, not the gaining of something more. The Buddha himself abandoned the road of privation and hardship as the route to enlightenment. Zen Buddhist stories are full of references to the fact that the harder you try to reach enlightenment, the longer you will take.

Buddha reached the state of nirvana at the time of His enlightenment. After experiencing nirvana himself, he decided to teach others the path to the same. According to Buddha, nirvana should be the ultimate goal of every individual. Forty-five years later, when he died, he passed through pari nirvana, the complete nirvana. Nirvana literally means extinguishing or unbinding. However, in Buddhism, nirvana means freedom from the constant cravings that we experience in life.

It means freedom from everything that leads us to dissatisfaction, like desire, jealousy, greed, ignorance, etc. After a person attains this sense of freedom, he moves into a state of total ecstasy. All karmic debts get settled and he doesn’t need to go through the cycle of birth and death again.

Share on Facebook

Today I’d like to share with you an essay about Yoga written by my friend Anna Shakun
You are welcome to share your thoughts

Yoga philosophy is immense…It encompass a big variety of practices and ideas that evolved in different ways over several thousand years. Some ideas were similar and organically growing on top of one another, some were radically opposite to what was before; and yet they all found their place in a concept of yoga, they were all called “Yoga”. Philosophy, spirituality, religion, cult, social institute, art, medicine, physical therapy and exercise can all be part of yogic experience.

So how one defines such broad matter as Yoga, and do you really need to give it a clear definition? How do you define existence, world…nature? I guess yoga is such an expansive concept that defining it with a single statement would be limiting it to something that it is not…But at the same time as it takes shapes in our world, as we pass it through ourselves we define it- and only this, personal definition is valid, it makes sense- because through it we define who we are.
Read the rest of this entry →

Share on Facebook