Kia is a devoted Yogini and teacher who imparts her wonderful passion for life and well-being in her teaching. Her style pulls from multiple yogic disciplines, and is both intuitive and steeped in the traditional aspects of yoga. Her classes focus on breath, alignment and the interconnection between mind, body and spirit, allowing students to work at their own pace in a safe and transformational environment
I practice and teach both Hatha and Kundalini yoga. I see my hatha practice as daily maintenance – a great way to work out kinks in my body, get grounded and calm. My Kundalini practice is a place of transformation. The kriyas and meditations are much more specific than your regular flow class; much like an Iyengar practice but rather than focusing on physical alignment the kriyas are a specific set of exercises that generate energy, organize that energy and deliver you to a specific energetic state – particularly one of greater awareness. Within the practice are built in moments of stillness where we sit q speilling uietly and awaken to our Self. The breath-work within the kriyas is so powerful that it starts to strip away the layers that veil our consciousness, and in the sweet moments between poses we can sense the fullness of who we are. The kriyas work on strengthening your nervous system, balancing your glandular system, purifying the body, and calming the mind.
I have practiced kriyas that have left me blissed out, high and filled with a sense of connection and joy and others that have provoked and confronted me to the very core of who I am, both physically and mentally. I have learned to stay present, and accept pleasure and pain as part of 
the same journey to health and balance. Our ego naturally leans towards pleasure and comfort. It takes a disserted effort and discipline to begin to release the ego’s grip on our consciousness. This effort is the work required to begin to access the truth of who we are, to create a strong connection to our Soul and therefore our Soul’s work on this planet. It is where we start to make great strides toward living as an enlightened being.Kundalini yoga is not to be taken lightly, it is like an express train that shakes and wakes you up. I often say to students that you cannot stay the same when you practice Kundalini yoga. The very nature of what we do is to awaken the energy of consciousness, to practice in a way that sheds light on our self-imposed limitations, and invites us to think out of the box, and develop our Intuitive mind. Being able to live from our intuitive mind is one of the main goals of a Kundalni practitioner.
I had done some meditation before practicing Kundalini yoga, but it had always been elusive for me. Meditations within Kundalini yoga are multi-faceted. You can do the simplest forms like breath awareness or simple mantra, or there are more elaborate ones where there is a specific breath, mantra and mudra that all work together to balance different aspects of the mind and body. When practiced for 40 – 120 days the result is pure magic. I sincerely encourage you to have an experience of Kundalini yoga for yourself. It will add depth to your existing practice and to your life.
Author: Kia Miller
The Ten – Lifestyle Choices to Shift the Aging Process
Author: Dr. Jeanette Ryan
In our complex and sometimes sly modern world, ordinary experiences can put us at greater risk for unhealthy aging and disease. Simple lifestyle choices can significantly tilt the odds in your favor for a vibrantly healthy, active journey into the Golden Years. Here’s some of my faves:
1. Forego the convenience of plastic. From take out food to gourmet hot drinks to prepared food in packages, we are constantly exposed to plastic. My favorite? Those K-cups! Pressing boiling water through a plastic cup, and then drinking it in a disposable hot cup is a direct double infusion of BPA or Bis-Phenyl A, a potent endocrine disruptor that contributes to obesity, prostate cancer and feminization in men, estrogen toxicity and estrogen based cancers in women. That goes for Styrofoam too.
2. Go for the small inconvenience of constantly using your own ceramic hot cup (if you hand it over when you order your drink, you usually get a 10 cent discount along with the benefit of lowering your BPA load), glass water bottles (I love these by Life Factory http://www.lifefactory.com), and always take prepared food out of the packaging to heat in in your own non-reactive cookware.
3. Forego the unnecessary radiation of CT scans…for just about every test, there is an MRI version of a similar test. And while a mammogram is not a CT scan, it is still quite a dose of radiation. Other safer breast scans: thermography and SonoCine, an ultrasound scan. There is one low dose radiation CT Scan worth doing: the Virtual Colonoscopy has numerous benefits over the Optical Colonoscopy. And for ambient radiation, optimize your iodine levels to protect the thyroid, the gland most vulnerable to radiation. First confirm you do not have hidden auto-immunity against your thyroid with a simple blood test: ATGA, ATPO.
4. Harness the powerful efficiency of Burst Exercise….
5. Forego the late night munchies. Staying up past your point of tired usually kicks in the craving for sweets and quick energy like chocolate and starches. This in turn fires up your stress hormones and makes it far less likely you’ll sleep restoratively thereby accelerating aging, and contributes to stubborn weight gain.
6. Go for lights out by 10pm…the benefits
7. Forego caffeine abuse and use it smartly instead. So many of us are overstressed and under rested and have coffee the first thing on empty. After fasting all night, this necessarily puts the body into a blood sugar rollercoaster, contributing to weight gain, pre-diabetes, mood swings, and high carb binges at the afternoon slump, also caused in part by AM coffee on empty. Instead, go for smart use of tea or coffee: have it with a meal, preferably lunch. Better yet, use caffeine only when needed, not as a daily habit.
8. Forgo technology damage…MRI studies have shown that holding a cell phone to your head for a 10 minute conversation increases inflammation of the brain. If Alzheimer’s or Dementia are diseases you’d like to forego, make sure you always use an earbud, car Bluetooth (not the ear piece) or speakerphone. Or better yet, talk on your corded landline (cordless also emit EMFs). When reading or gaming on a wifi enabled device, put it on Airplane Mode. Plug your computer into cabled Ethernet.
9. Go for adequate protein at breakfast and lunch. By adequate, I mean 25g at each meal for women and 35g at each meal for men as a rough guideline. (Yes, that’s 50 and 70 total, respectively). The protein must be lean and clean and for those over 35, one of the meals should probably be an organic vegan protein powder in a smoothie, such as rice, pea, hemp or pumpkin seed. Eating protein this way is excellent for stabilizing blood sugar, adding stamina and ditching the afternoon slump (another dangerous time for carb loading), and keeping you lean and energized.
10. Go for body and skincare products labeled with the word “Organic.” Could it be that one of the reasons women have 4x the incidence of cancer over men is linked to the fact that on average, a woman puts 76 chemicals from 7 different beauty products on her skin before she leaves the house each day?
Go for something that nurtures your spirit on a daily basis…meditation, prayer, journaling, dance, exercise, making….art. Live all of your life as if it is Sacred…because it IS.
Peace and Blessings, Dr. Ryan
Gaia House is a Silent Meditation Retreat Centre – a sanctuary of contemplative calm set amongst the gentle hills and quiet woodlands of South Devon.
Buddhist Meditation Retreats are an opportunity to explore and develop serenity, wisdom and compassion through meditation and mindfulness practice in a supportive environment.
We offer an extensive Group Retreat Programme with meditation instruction and teachings drawn from a variety of Buddhist traditions, with emphasis on Vipassana or Insight Meditation.
Group Retreats are led by experienced Dharma teachers from around the world. Beginners are very welcome, as are more experienced meditation practitioners wishing to deepen your practice.
We also offer Personal and Work Retreats, which are suitable if you have previous experience of silent retreats and an established meditation practice.
All retreats are held in silence, with the exception of the annual Family Retreat.
A registered (non-profit) charity founded in 1983, Gaia House is run by a Board of Trustees who are committed to preserving, protecting and enhancing emotional, psychological, physical, and spiritual health through meditation. Gaia House Meditation Retreats are open to all. To benefit, all that is needed is an interest in inner exploration and development.
Author: Rak Razam
Ayahuasca is a plant medicine that has been used by the indigenous people of South America for millennia to heal physical ailments—and, they claim, to cleanse and purify the spirit. It was discovered
by the West in 1851 when the legendary British botanist Richard Spruce explored the Rio Negro Basin and was introduced to the vine by the Tokanoan Indians. Spruce gave the vine its scientific name, Banisteriopsis caapi; in different areas of South America it is also known as yagé or hoasca. For a while in the mid-twentieth-century chemists who isolated the active properties of the vine called their compound “telepathine.”
Research showed it contained various harmala alkaloids, which are boiled up in a brew (also called ayahuasca) with a multitude of other plants, one being the leafy Psychotria viridis, which contains the powerful hallucinogenic chemical Dimethyltryptamine, also known as DMT. On its own the vine is only orally active at very high doses, but it also contains potent MAO (mono-amine oxidase) inhibitors that overpower the body’s own enzymes and allow the DMT to potentiate.
Science has made cautious forays into the jungle to study the vine in its native setting or, as with the “Hoasca Project” in the 1990s, to study church members of groups like União doVegetal (UDV) who drink ayahuasca as part of their syncretic Christian-jungle religion. What they found was that regular ayahuasca use flushed the brain clean and improved receptor sites, suggesting the vine could be a medicinal goldmine.
But what science cannot explain is the psychic effect of this “mother of all plants,” the sense of the numinous and the spiritual world it reportedly opens up. Those who drink say that each ayahuasca journey is unique. They say that the spirit of the vine comes alive, it guides and teaches, and on the other side nothing is ever the same. Or so they say.
The native men and women who safeguard the knowledge of the vine and of the spirits it is said to reveal are the curanderos and curanderas—or, as the West would call them, shamans. Their role has been that of healer, priest, and traveler between worlds, acting as intermediaries between the spiritual dimension and this world on behalf of their patients.
Yet the demands of the work and the rise of Western materialism throughout South America have seen a fall in prestige—and customers— for the curanderos. The profession, usually hereditary, was in danger of extinction before an unprecedented wave of Western gringos started coming in search of ayahuasca and the healing it can provide.
Over the last twenty years or so a new gringo trail—this one a journey of the soul—has been blossoming in the jungles of South America. Seekers and thrillseekers alike have been coming from theWest for a reconnection to the deeper reality shamanism connects one to—and bringing back amazing stories of hallucinogenic trips, healing, and enlightenment.
Indigenous shamanism has quickly become the most profitable business in town and numerous jungle lodges and retreats have sprung up across South America to cater to the influx of rich tourists. This has spilled over onto the internet as hundreds of ayahuasca websites, chat rooms, and forums have emerged to crystallize a global subculture engaging with an indigenous spiritual practice and seeding it back into theWestern world.
As well as being used by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of indigenous peoples throughout South America, ayahuasca has also become one of the world’s fastest growing religions, with branches of Brazilian churches like Santo Daime and União doVegetal springing up in Europe, Britain, Australasia, America, Japan, and elsewhere. In January 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a New Mexico branch of the UDV, saying they had a constitutional right to be allowed to legally practice their ayahuasca ceremonies under the freedom of religion law. The U.S. government immediately appealed, but the genie was out of the bottle.
The mystery of ayahuasca had left the jungle and entered the cities, via religion, media, and the web. And what did it say about the growing Western need for an authentic reconnection to the planet?
Author: Rak Razam
Permissions: The following is an excerpt from Aya Awakenings: A Shamanic Odyssey by Rak Razam (North Atlantic Books, 2013)
New Plasma Device Considered Holy Grail of Energy Generation and Storage
Scientists at the University of Missouri have devised a new way to create and control plasma that could transform American energy generation and storage.
Randy Curry, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri’s College of Engineering, and his team developed a device that launches a ring of plasma at distances of up to two feet. Although the plasma reaches a temperature hotter than the surface of the sun, it doesn’t emit radiation and is completely safe in proximity to humans.
While most of us are familiar with three states of matter – liquid, gas and solid – there is also a fourth state known as plasma, which includes things such as fire and lightning. Life on Earth depends on the energy emitted by plasma produced during fusion reactions within the sun.
The secret to Curry’s success was developing a way to make plasma form its own self-magnetic field, which holds it together as it travels through the air.
“Launching plasma in open air is the ‘Holy Grail’ in the field of physics,” said Curry.
“Creating plasma in a vacuum tube surrounded by powerful electromagnets is no big deal; dozens of labs can do that. Our innovation allows the plasma to hold itself together while it travels through regular air without any need for containment.
The plasma device could also be enlarged to handle much larger amounts of energy,” he said.
For the current work, Curry and his team used older technologies to build their prototype of a plasma-generating machine. But a considerably smaller device using newer, miniaturized parts could also be built within three to five years with sufficient funding, Curry said.
“We have a world-class team at MU’s Center for Physical & Power Electronics, but that team will evaporate without funding.”
Author: Posted May 22, 2013 by RLM Press in Neo-Science
Source: Red Orbit
Deforestation – the loss or destruction of naturally occurring forests primarily due to human activity – is a growing problem throughout the globe with tremendous environmental and economic consequences. Deforestation is primarily created by logging, cutting down trees for fuel, slash-and-burn agriculture, clearing land for livestock grazing, mining operations, oil extraction, dam building and urban sprawl. Logging alone, which in many cases is illegal, accounts for the loss of more than 32 million acres of natural forest every year according to The Nature Conservancy.
To imagine deforestation is quite tricky and to nail its patterns down is quite tricky. We know forests are shrinking, but knowing exactly where and by how much often means compiling locally reported data that can be shoddy, incomplete, or outdated according to University of Maryland geographer Matthew Hansen. Better data would be an invaluable tool for resource managers looking to preserve trees, and for climate scientists who want to crunch how much carbon they can store, Hansen realized. So he set about to create the most high-resolution map of global forests ever made, partnering with Google Earth to process some 650,000 images taken by NASA satellites over the last decade.
In the exclusive video above, Hansen takes us on a tour of his new maps and the startling situation they reveal. “It’s a big leap forward in terms of a set of facts, a set of observations on what this dynamic is,” Hansen said.
One of the next steps, Hansen said, is to use the data to gauge exactly what this deforestation means for climate change. Trees are one of the largest “sinks” for carbon dioxide; previous studies suggest forests absorb a third of the carbon released by burning fossil fuels.
Sources:
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/11/watch-mapping-deforestation-google-earth
http://environment.about.com/od/biodiversityconservation/f/deforestation-overview.htm