Podcast Ep. 10 ~ Ajapa Japa – Healing the Mind Stage 1

You can view this podcast episode on Big Shakti’s YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@BigShakti

In this episode, we are providing you with the Introductory lesson from Healing the Mind – Ajapa Japa Stage 1 Course. 

Ajapa Japa is a wonderful and extremely powerful form of meditation that combines many forms of meditation, including relaxation, mindfulness, breath, prana, life force, and a mantra to heal the body and mind and activate and awaken the chakras and kundalini. It calms an overactive mind, balances emotions, and creates physical and mental resilience, as well as awakening consciousness.

Of all the meditation practices I use in my medical practice, Ajapa Japa is the most powerful and useful. Of course, learning the technique is one thing, but understanding how to apply it to achieve your desired results is another. 

Learn More About Ajapa Japa

To learn more about how to apply Ajapa Japa meditation for healing and your spiritual evolution, Big Shakti teaches guided yoga and meditation techniques that systematically guide you into the practice of Ajapa Japa. This guided training program is called Ajapa Japa, Breath, and Mantra.

If you wish to really understand how to use Ajapa Japa to support the healing of mental illness and to cultivate a strong mind, then we highly recommend that you enroll in the online course, Healing the Mind Course - Ajapa Japa Stage 1 

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Podcast Transcript ~ Episode 10

Healing the Mind – Ajapa Japa Stage 1- Course Overview

Welcome to Healing the Mind Ajapa Japa Stage 1 and to this Course Overview. My name is Swami Shankardev, the co-creator of this course with Jayne Stevenson. We are sure you will get a lot from this very enjoyable and informative course on Ajapa Japa meditation. It was developed as part of Big Shakti’s mission to create an online platform to spread yoga, meditation, and authentic wisdom sciences from door to door and shore to shore. We’ve had great feedback about our courses and are sure that this course will provide you with the tools and knowledge you need to create better health, improved well-being, and a connection to higher spiritual awareness.

Ajapa Japa is an amazing meditation practice in which you fuse your awareness with the breath and a mantra, a sacred sound vibration, and move them through the body via a psychic passage. You will be taught how to do this in a step-wise process. The techniques in this course enable you to relax and heal your body and mind and to illuminate your consciousness. Every step is guided, and by the end of this course, you will be well on the path to becoming an enlightened practitioner of Ajapa Japa.

The complete practice of Ajapa Japa is learned in three stages. The purpose of this course is to teach you stage 1 of Ajapa Japa, healing the mind. How many stages you wish to learn is up to you, and many people find that stage one is enough and gives them all the benefits they desire. Others are keen to progress to deeper levels of self-discovery. Here is a brief overview of the three stages:

Stage 1 – Healing the mind is a foundation course. You learn the technique and how to apply it to heal yourself. You will learn how to relax and purify your mind, stabilize your emotions, and enlighten your spirit.

Stage 2: Strengthening the mind requires an intermediate level of skill. You learn advanced breath control methods, chakra meditations, and visualization techniques.

Stage 3: Awakening higher consciousness is an advanced course. The training incorporates various esoteric rituals, advanced breath control, and more advanced mantras. Each stage provides prerequisite skills that empower the next stage and ensure your success. By the end of this learning path, you will have a complete system of self-healing and self-realization.

Each stage introduces knowledge and skills that support you throughout your life and deepens your experience of the practice, but most importantly, of yourself. Each stage enables you to gain more control over your body, mind, and emotions. As you progress, you feel more connected to your essence, your spirit.

Course Benefits

What are the benefits of doing this course? The practice of Ajapa Japa enables you to relax and manage stress, better cope with life's demands and challenges, and reduce excessive thinking, worry, and anxiety. That is, you will learn how to train a restless, unruly, and overactive mind.

You will learn how to better manage any form of physical or mental illness, develop greater mental strength and emotional resilience, and connect with the power of your subconscious mind to increase your intuition and creativity.

And Ajapa Japa enables self-development, which leads to enlightenment of the mind and spirit. In turn, this leads to a more expanded and joyful sense of self, which is the great antidote to anxiety and depression.

The practice of Ajapa Japa is unique. It is one of the most potent, accessible, and effective meditation practices on the planet today. It is a unique practice because it combines many forms of meditation into one practice, giving multiple benefits. The great yogis of India, who understand its power and potential, have revered it for millennia.

Ajapa Japa is a complete system of self-development, a practice that can improve every part of your life, physical, mental, and spiritual. Even in its most basic form, it heals the body and nervous system, builds mental strength and emotional resilience, and illuminates consciousness. It is extremely beneficial in the treatment of many forms of mental illness, including anxiety and depression, trauma, and so on.

Over the last 40 years, I have taught Ajapa Japa to thousands of patients and students in my medical and psychotherapy practice. I have found that everybody who practices Ajapa Japa consistently gains some benefit. It supports a more robust nervous system, a calmer mind, and greater emotional resilience. Most importantly, it supports a better sense of self, which is the key to mental health. When you have a strong and healthy sense of self, you are able to better deal with whatever arises in life.

There are many different styles and forms of meditation, each with a different focus. Some are focused on:

• Relaxation alone
• Some use breath awareness alone
• Some a mantra alone
• Some mindfulness alone and
• Some use pure awareness training alone.

Ajapa Japa combines all of these methods into one powerful technique that can take you from basic relaxation training all the way through to self-realization.

1. It combines relaxation, which recharges your body and mind with the power of the breath to energize you by cultivating your life force, your prana.
2. This is combined with a mantra, which soothes and purifies the mind.
3. The practice is performed with total mindfulness, which keeps you present-centered and self-aware.
4. Self-awareness reveals all the wonderful things that have been buried deep within you.

Each lesson in the course is divided into two main components – theory and practice.

The theory in this course is mainly derived from the great Indian wisdom tradition of yoga tantra. Yoga tantra is a science of enlightenment that combines yoga psychology and yoga philosophy. This theory provides you with a sound foundation for understanding how yoga and meditation affect the body, mind, and spirit.

The course also includes elements of modern Western psychology, which helps you apply ancient Eastern systems of thinking to a modern context.

You will learn several meditation techniques, including what to do, how to do it, and when to do it.

The essential components of Ajapa Japa are taught sequentially, and you will learn how to combine them into a single integrated meditation practice. You will learn this in a structured and systematic way so that your progress is smooth and easy.

Lessons Overview

Lessons Overview - There are three main lessons in this course.

In lesson one, you will be introduced to an overview of Ajapa Japa, its various forms, and its benefits. We explain certain Sanskrit terms that are important to know as they have no English equivalent. You will learn about three of the five keys that unlock the power of Ajapa Japa and that enable you to calm and heal your mind. You also learn why active meditations such as Ajapa japa are so powerful.

You will learn a form of breathing called ujjayi, which is very useful because it is the foundation of so many yoga-tantra meditations.

In lesson two you will learn about all Five Keys that unlock the power of Ajapa Japa so that you have an overview of the practice of Ajapa Japa. The five keys are the following:

1. Psychic breath, ujjayi
2. Psychic sound, mantra
3. Psychic passages, nadis
4. Psychic centers, chakras
5. Psychic symbol, the ishta devata, is the symbol of higher consciousness.

This lesson goes into all five keys in depth and strongly focuses on the psycho-spiritual dimensions these keys can unlock. In lesson one, we described the three main keys: ujjayi, the mantra, and the psychic passages. In this lesson, we look at all five keys from the psycho-spiritual perspective. You will learn about them individually and how they combine to integrate your body, mind, and consciousness. And in this course, you are really only going to focus on the first three keys, and they will give you tremendous benefits.

The meditation technique in this lesson is to practice Ajapa Japa in the nasal passage. This simple and useful technique of observing the breath moving in the nostrils while you chant a mantra reduces excessive thinking and worries, sharpens your mind, and awakens the third eye of intuition, ajna chakra.

In Lesson 3, you will get an overview of how to improve your physical and mental health, with a special emphasis on increasing emotional resilience. You will learn how to build positive mental and emotional patterns. You will also be introduced to ways of better managing negative patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, such as worries and anxieties, unpleasant emotions, and old traumas. You will learn how to free the energy embedded in these patterns and use it for more creative purposes, and gain a solid foundation for spiritual growth.

In lesson 3, the meditation practice is Ajapa Japa in the frontal psychic passage. Moving the breath in this passage is especially good for developing greater emotional resilience and mental calm.

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