Getting ripped inside and out is a real trip, a high. But being loose, easy and following our inner free spirit is totally part of our personality, our freedom. How do we balance those needs, desires for the perfect body, great inner spirituality and total freedom? Obviously something has to give. I know that my kriya yoga teacher is a really nice guy but totally disciplined and he said that your success is the sum of your discipline. I always found that a hard row to hoe as the saying goes. I reason that he started into yoga, meditation while in college and was squeaky clean, healthy even beforehand so had few really bad habits to discard. So how to get there for the average Joe with lots of excess baggage? Most people develop lots of bad habits over years and even decades ( previous lives?) and have to get off the wagon. It might be easy if everyone around you is eating right, encouraging you to meditate, do yoga, et. but like any ex- smoker knows a relapse comes easiest when others smoke on their break and offer you a puff. I find that change comes gradually over many years, organically as you get more involved in different situations and with the kind of people your long term goals are suited to. At first dragging yourself out of bed to do yoga / meditate or dropping those old eating habits is difficult but after a while it feels much better, on a higher level of awareness, physical and emotional stability/flexibility. There is always a higher stage to climb up to. That is the carrot. I recently changed my diet to low carb, eating now salads and nuts/seeds/berries instead of noodles/potatoes/bread and high sugar fruits like oranges. This is not vegetarian but not high protein either. This was not hard as I eat lots more variety in small amounts( some walnuts, a little dark chocolate daily, handful of blueberries) and that is better than oats with fruit for breakfast( now an omelette with red onions, brown champignons, bell peppers),sandwich for lunch and snacking at work randomly whatever is not eaten up of the canteen grub sent to the doctors/nurses where I work. And since I eat so tastily, varied and quite a lot to breakfast and lunch before work( lentils, brussel sprouts, red beans, salad, kefir) then I don' t notice hunger until breakfast again if at all. So I manage about 19 hours without eating. This is called intermittent fasting. Blood sugar goes low after 12-16 hours, body eats up fat reserves automatically so you don' t worry about dieting, calorie counting and hunger, snacking, getting munchies is zero problem. A thing about this whole process is that once you beat one addiction then others fall away or at least patience, stamina, resistance is improved.( now I find meditating 45 minutes relatively easy and my yoga stretches due to patience have improved) My big point here is that the carrot, or positive motivation, has to be bigger than the stick, or negative motivation, or you won' t continue( hypocrisy is key word here). Cake, cigarettes, porn will always be appealing if you don' t find a more powerful and ( very important) more pleasurable substitute. Sex vs. spirituality is another area I have noticed personally. I had gotten into yoga before marriage and noticed changes in my energy flows, calmness, later took up kriya yoga which deliberately stimulates spinal currents, awakens defacto kundalini. My wife OTOH had had a long relationship where she practised, learned to awaken her energies tantrically. She was never interested therefore in yoga, meditation or pranayama as she always saw the love reationship as the only way to become ecstatic( no drug use but some alcohol) in that sense. I noticed she could only get so far with my help and the energies(heart, 3rd eye opening) went away afterwards. Energy or bliss, ecstasy is therefore the carrot. How we get to it is the problem. Celibacy is a standard dogma so that we don' t waste our energy. It seems frequent ejaculation slows down kundalini development. Since the whole spine gets heated up and all our chakras get opened this is really important. So essentially we need some sort of initial patience and discipline( sex without ejaculating for example) to allow spiritual bliss to grow until it runs on its own steam and to where sex as such, (like sweets, pasta and snacking in my case) is no problem. Seeing the big picture of where we want to go vs. where we are or even that there are higher possibilities( most spend their lives at lower energy levels, cynical and self destructive or neurotic) is important to motivate ourselves to change certain habits for other habits. Short term pleasures might not be as high initially but after a few weeks generally speaking we notice how much bettet we feel after yoga or with a really healthy diet, etc. Then we build on that. It actually takes years of refining, cleansing the energy body to where it can manage high energies(heart stress here as energies burn through fast sometimes) and this allows us to get at all those subconscious childhood traumas, reprogram ourselves more easily. Nowadays I pick up on people' s energies readily and take on their behavior even. This is a pain actually, you can resist it but if you can integrate lots of energies, balance them, then you can learn about other people faster, make friends quicker and eliminate old bad behaviors from childhood like posture or walk. IOW personality is not permanent programmed in childhood from birth or parental neuroses, nervous ticks but with high energy levels can be adjusted to the situation flexibly, even with age. I am 55 and as my energy levels rise, so does my physical agility and emotional flexibility. Mostly we are stuck in our 20s, 30s and get more stiff, set in our ways and accepting of routine coming from habit of personality, developed from random patterns from our initial infant years. It does not have to be like this important is general sport, lots of contacts, good dietary habits and yoga and similar disciplines directed towards developing our spiritual side.
Alternatively some people get a skewed developmental pattern by using drugs for example or when they have lots of childhood stress or study really hard for years or do too much meditation without adequate buildup of physical and emotional stamina and balance over years. So people can have a supercharged energy body or just in certain chakras and their physical bodies as a whole can't handle it or their mind and they go crazy, end up homeless or on medication. Spontaneous kundalini awakening is therefore problematic. Lots to think about here in general. Most just live average lives. I imagine, after examing my horoscope, that I had some previous lives looking into this stuff, or I wouldn' t have gotten so far, as frankly it is pretty risky( like playing atround with drugs). And I imagine if it isn't in our karma we aren't getting really far anyway. I notice for example how horoscope seems to be a mechanism controlling behavior daily and what happens to us next, how our behavior, destiny develops. I believe only conditionally in free will, particularly at the conscious, daily level. As Seth would say, our Oversoul keeps an eye on all our past and future lives, communicating between them simultaneously. I am certainly amazed every day at stuff that happens and in awe. I tread lightly, wary of God's anger, thankful for his blessings, out of due caution and experience, not due to old fashioned superstition or religious habit. This is rebirth of real religious belief through high level spirituality in an age of decadence, decline and cynicism. God always wins out. Computers, technology and rationalism are tools of the human mind and ego. We can only play God but it ain't so.
