Liberating suffering from muscle memory – a secret from the original tantric hatha yoga

Much of our personal experience of the patterns of cause and effect, which Eastern philosophy terms “karma,” are ingrained directly in the cellular and muscle memory of our human bodies.

The subconscious patterns, trauma memory, and enslaving habits that we repeat over and over, literally become encoded in the contractions of our muscles.

When these are emotional experiences, we experience them in the smooth muscles and connective tissue of our viscera more than in the structural muscles that move our spine and limbs.

Anyone experiencing verbal abuse, or engaged in an emotional discussion, has felt the solar plexus grow tight, or the lower abdomen twist when facing unwelcome feelings and beliefs. Many adults have experienced how with repetition, these contractions become ingrained, and how those ingrained contractions limit our ability to digest and eliminate old experiences, and to express our feelings freely.

Modern gym-based hatha yoga certainly gives some tools for liberating frozen bodies and freeing the muscles and joints, but its proponents are largely unaware of the original secrets sages used to literally “erase” karmic patterning from the pelvis, abdomen, and solar plexus, our emotional centers, and thus free our minds from anxiety, fear, anger, and sadness…

These secrets are named in the original texts of hatha yoga*, and greatest among them is a practice called nauli kriya.

“Nauli is foremost of the hatha yoga practices. It kindles the digestive fire, removing indigestion, sluggish digestion, and all disorders of the doshas, and brings about happiness” – Hatha Yoga Pradipika

Think you might want to learn nauli, in it’s unvarnished original purity? I agree!

Until next time,
Tao Semko

*the original texts of hatha yoga are Hatha Yoga Pradipika, Hatha Yoga Ratnavali, Gheranda Samhita, and Siva Samita. This original hatha yoga, also known as tantric or natha hatha yoga, manipulates the body to access the mind, creating one-pointed meditative absorption, releasing and integrating the bodies energy, known as kundalini, with the consciousness, and freeing the body-personality from bondage and suffering. As you’ll see when you explore our nauli video learning, it is the original tantric yogas and more that I teach in the Practitioner’s Group.