Q: Where can we find information about Niguma yoga?
Kalu Rinpoche: You cannot find, you will find some like very short clip on my Instagram or Facebook and here and there. But it is not the 26 sequence.
We are also publishing a book, next year, by Wisdom Publications, so next year the book is going to be released in Bhutan and also in New York. What I am trying to do is to bring that Buddhist yoga with the brain research, with the physical benefit, with the mental benefit, to schools and the prison and the ordinary people’s life, to spread the message of the Buddhism more quickly and rapidly throughout all the different social level.
* The yoga of Niguma comes to us from a secret tradition passed down over hundreds of years by Buddhist yogis in Tibet. The practice originated with the eleventh-century female yogini Niguma, who mastered and transmitted a tradition of remarkable practices that culminate in physical, spiritual, and emotional wellness. In this book, His Eminence Kalu Rinpoche, a Tibetan master who holds this lineage for today’s generation, is now opening up the practice to make its extraordinary benefits accessible to the modern yogi.
Then also within that book we have research studies about how the frontal [lobe] brain reacts before and after yoga. So we are able to see that the brain activity almost the same stage as falling in sleep. So basically your whole body is moving, so normally your whole frontal [lobe] brain activity is supposed to react, very much active. But even our physical aspect is very much active, but due to the calmness of the mind and the breathing exercise, you can see the brainwave, on the frontal Alpha wave, very strong but at the same time it shows the sign that you are in a deep sleep.
So we are looking for a solution to reduce the depression, anxiety, for people, especially for the youth and so on. So that is the aim and His Holiness Dalai Lama wrote the forward for the book.
So the last 2 years I have being teaching the Niguma yoga in America, in Canada, in UK and also in France. I have met people who have a lot of back pain, and then by doing the Niguma yoga for 2 days, 3 days, and then they ease their muscle tension, and they overcome the pain. Then I have also seen a nurse who are not really Buddhist but they come with a skepticism, there are close friends of Lama, but they are not Buddhist practitioner at all, they just want to see what this is, and they had a lot of blood clot in the right hand and they did the yoga for 2 days, 3 days, they had a little bit of pain and then after that the blood clot was gone after 6 months of no treatment, things like that.
I have encountered lot of positive. Basically the yoga is about accelerating your blood circulation throughout the whole body. When you don’t have a good blood circulation throughout the body, you don’t have a good energy and essence in the physical aspect. So it is mainly to bring some form of energy to the physical and then the mental level, so that we can re-engage more with the Buddhist practice and compassion and so on.
His Eminence Kalu Rinpoche in Riga, Latvia
How to understand and apply the Buddhist wisdom of emptiness in everyday life (Q&A 3)
Ganden Center – September 2024 (53′ 40”)
To be continued…
Comments are closed.