Summary of 9 months of AYP practise, twice daily, pretty much without fail, every day since august.
Effects
A lot has changed.
Desire: Almost all my desire is now just for spiritual unfolding. It’s all bhakti. Worldly desire diminished to practically zero. Once I started to experience the first few benefits of AYP, BAM! That was all I needed. I found what my purpose was. I’ve always found it hard to motivate myself to do anything worldly, or to get particularly excited by any external experiences. Suddenly, with meditation and going inwards, it was like I finally found my passion.
Stillness: Whatever is experienced, tends to be experienced in stillness. Even whilst feeling deeply negative emotions – sadnesses, depression, they are all set against a background of peace and stillness.
Joy of dying: I am experiencing something I can only describe as ‘the joy of dying’. Happiness which is also sadness. I feel like I’m dying to the world, dying to externals, dying to attachments and aversions, letting everything go, and it’s joyous and sad simultaneously.
Ecstatic experience: There have been weeks or months of ecstatic experiences. Many ecstatic experiences have taken place. Generally I’d say fairly low level ecstasy – nothing overwhelming, just pleasure through the whole body combined with joy.
Sexual desire: has waxed and waned, but generally feeling less sexual desire than before ayp practice.
Energy: Generally much higher levels of alertness and energy during the day. Waking up in the morning and leaping out of bed is a joy.
Nervousness: I used to get nervous in some social situations and tense up. I don’t now. I’m just relaxed pretty much the whole time, whatever movie is playing on life’s movie screen is less likely to affect me.
Bad habits: Drinking heavily and other methods of intoxication have lost their hold on my life. I used to drink pretty heavily just once a week, or once every two weeks. It was a compulsive habit rather than addiction. So the habit is slowly falling away, I didn’t get drunk in over 3 months, I had a few blips before that, and then before that – a long period of several months of being practically tee-total.
Desire for different activities: Joy now mainly comes from stillness, nature, love with people I’m close to, painting, writing, reading, solitude. Before there was a lot more desire for going out, having fun, getting drunk (!), and seeking ego fulfillment in one way or other.
Wanting to know who I am: The question “who am I?” keep arising and being released. Strong desire to know by experience the answer to this.
Improved complexion: Probably more related to the increased blood flow to the face from asanas, but also a decrease in stress has played a part.
Desire for service: strong desire to serve and help others arose and I’m volunteering in the Bronx in various projects to help people
Love: much stronger feelings of love. Often will be overwhelmed with a feeling of love for family or girlfriend. This did not happen much at all, heart was much dryer.
Challenges
Two simple ones, due to overload:
-anger outburst: If I feel strong physical ecstasy, I’ve found this can quickly flip into becoming angry, and not even being able to check my anger before I react. It’s not been a major problem. But this is me usually when angry: Take myself to a quiet place, breath into the anger, experience it fully, feel its intensity, feel it culminate, then often it ends in laughter or tears. Then I realize there is nothing to react to. But if I’ve been overdoing meditation, BAM! It’s like I lose consciousness and later find myself regretting what I said.
-Depression: again, overdoing it leads to depression for me.
Challenges overcome
Basically, I just can’t seem to handle Deep Meditation. The ideal yoga practice for me seems to be lots of asanas, 2-3 minutes of spinal breathing, then 7 to 8 minutes of watching the breath, then 20 minutes rest. Meditation on ‘I am’ just overloads me every time. On an average day, perhaps 4 minutes of breath watching, making the buddhi hand mudra (as described in The Spiritual Science of Kriya Yoga, representing enlightenment), then resting for 10 – 15 mins, creates a pervasive joy which does not lead to overloading.
I will do SBP + DM once or twice a week, for a total of 10 minutes (1 to 2 min SBP + 8 to 9 mins DM + 20 to 30 mins rest), on the weekends, if I have long hours of solitude to process it. Mainly what I’ve learned is that I’m just extremely sensitive.
At first I thought – how can 4 minutes of meditation actually do anything worthwhile? You must at least do 15 minutes. I repeated this over and over again, feeling that everyone else seems to be able to meditate for longer, and consequently, so should I. Every time I’d overload and end up either feeling really depressed, or blowing up at someone.
When 3-4 minutes of meditation creates an ecstatic joy, why do any more? I learned to follow my intuition on this one.
It’s been tough, because there’s a slightly reckless part that thinks more is better and wants to add all these special practices, mudras, bandhas etc but since I blow up from 9 minutes of DM, it’s not wise.
Running and physical exercise has helped to ground a lot also.
-attachment to emotions: there’s a thick tree trunk inside my being that is attachment to feeling good, and aversion to feeling bad. Yoga and meditation has taken an axe to this tree, so there’s a much decreased preference. At first though, when I started getting ecstatic experience, it was like depositing a single drop of water on the tongue of man who is dying of thirst. I desperately clung to it. Eventually the ecstatic experience went away (around about January), leaving me absolutely devastated. I embraced my feelings of devastation, willingly allowed them and opened myself to them. Willingly submitting myself to this resulted in a big chunk being chopped out of the tree of attachment to emotions. There is less tendency to turn pain into suffering, or to cling to transient good experiences.
Summary
Initially I used to be able to do a full 20-30 minutes session including pranayama and DM, but I’ve been forced into acknowledging that less is more, after a very bumpy stretch of practice. It was difficult because with such extreme bhakti and hunger for spiritual unfoldment, having to do such a short practice is frustrating!
It’s also been a little bit difficult that very rapidly all desire and motivation for life just died. My life has been quite happy and had many intense, joyous, blissful highs. But there’s always been a sense of not particularly wanting to be here, to live, or to be incarnated, and also, particularly as a child, a great deal of shock, disgust and heartbreak with life in this dense and heavy universe. All I’ve ever wanted to do was to retreat and retire and die to it all. I found if I pumped myself full of enthusiasm using self-help stuff like Anthony Robbins, I was capable of achieving material success, and making generally making life fairly positive and bearable. But this stuff only seemed to mask or temporarily alleviate an underlying desperation. But then I found AYP, and suddenly, I knew what I came here to do. So I threw myself into it. But I began to neglect everything else in my life, particularly my job.
I’ve managed to get back into my job again, and am performing pretty well, but this time around – I’m slowly starting to act in the world with very little attachment to the outcomes of my actions. I used to frantically care whether or not I closed a deal, and got everyone’s signature on the contract, but now I don’t really care. Learning to function in an aggressive corporate results-driven environment, when you no longer want the money, or would even care if you were fired, has been tricky. Overall though, I’m starting to enjoy it a bit, and find motivation again, now it’s more like a fun game, good to play but it’s not going to hurt me if my avatar gets blown up.
What does the future hold? I can't say, other than referencing the experiences of other AYP practitioners. There have been many blissful and happy experiences, life is a lot more peaceful, I'm a more loving and kinder person, less egocentric, have an intensely increased amount of bhakti, but it's hard to say with conviction exactly what this is evidence of. I'm not quick to believe in anything, although my heart trusts Yogani's words. Right now there is no certainty, I'm just going down this road, hoping, trusting, that it leads to enlightenment and spiritual transformation. The fairly transformative results are encouraging enough to keep going.
Apologies for any typos, poor grammar, etc. I simply could not be bothered to proof read this! ;-)
