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Yoga means 'union' and is one of the oldest holistic approaches to mind/body health. The fundamental premise in yoga is that suffering begins in the mind and comes from a sense of separation: when you lose connection with your own values, purpose, sense of self or spiritual inspiration, dis-ease occurs. Yoga treatment addresses the re-integration of the body, mind, breath and, ultimately, the spiritual self.

When most people refer to yoga, they usually mean the physical yoga exercises, or hatha yoga. However, the physical exercises, known in Sanskrit as asanas, are only one of eight limbs of yoga. The other limbs include: Self-Control (yama), Spiritual Observance (niyama), Regulation of the Breath (pranayama), Restraint of the Senses (pratyahara), Steadying of the Mind (dharana), Meditation (dhyana) and Profound Contemplation (samadhi).

The confusion lies in the identification of yoga with the Indian culture and therefore its religious practices. India was instrumental in recording the yogic principles and to philosophies but they are far more ancient than that, and one must look beyond the Indian culture for the essence of yoga.

I went to visit my friend Ralph Miller who runs the Heart of the Initiate Ayahuasca temples in Brazil. He told me a very interesting perception he had about the nature of rising and descending emotions. Ideas that begin in the mind and drift down to the heart to become emotions are considered to be descending. They are often the result of an affirmation or a contradiction of the ego?s opinions.

Claridad is a dysfunction, an anomaly, that comes about when people on an Aya' journey say, experience the vastness of the Primal Source in all things. At first they are over awed, then they believe themselves to be the Primal Source, or at the very least the embodiment of it, or they see themselves as the Chosen One, the message bringer.