Aquarius - Set Myself Free

by Guru Rattana, Ph.D. - Issue #101 - January 23rd, 2005

The Sun moves into the revolutionary Aquarian zone January 19th at 3:22pm PST. It revels in this spirit of freedom through the 17th of February.

Leo Full Moon January 25^th and Aquarian New Moon February 8^th

The Leo Full Moon is January 25th at 2:33am PST (10:33am GMT). The opposing forces of the Sun and the Moon at 5° Aquarius and Leo make us very aware that something must change. To achieve our collective humanitarian goals, and to be able to align with others sharing the same vision, we have to reclaim our soul power and be able to take action from a place of higher truth.

The Aquarian New Moon (20°) is February 8th at 2:28pm PST (10:28pm GMT). Both the Full Moon and the New Moon remind us that if we wish to play a meaningful role during this critical period of history, we have to leave outdated beliefs and social mores behind. Aquarius is the last air sign. To complete the development of our mind, Aquarius opens the space to allow our mind to be the channel for universal truth and wisdom. Aquarius teaches us that our revolutionary spirit can take a leadership role in humanity's evolutionary process, but only if we can leave our egotistical power games behind and open our minds to identify with the greater whole.

Aquarius, like Capricorn, has both an internal/personal and an external/collective dynamic. The Mountain Goat has to become the leader of his own life before he can effectively take a leadership role in the world. The Water Bearer has to set himself free before he can expect to participate in endeavors that can be effective in creating equity and freedom for humanity.

Who Owns You?

When the Sun moves into Aquarius we get interested in questions of freedom. We can start our exploration of freedom by asking some questions that go to the heart of the matter. Who owns you? Who controls your will? Who do you pay to subjugate you? These are all Aquarian questions, but the real answers are not the multinational corporations that control our taste buds and our pocket books, nor any of the government bureaucracies, religious institutions, social belief systems and the collective unconscious. The real answers lie within ourselves. The real question is why are we controllable?

Overtime, us and them, have collaborated to set up economic, political and social systems that favor the elite, and effectively disenfranchise most of the world's population. One of the reasons that inequality is able to continue, is that the disadvantaged have bought into the system and, ironically, many times those who get the short end are the most fervent supporters of the structures that take advantage of and exploit them. We buy into the slogans and we believe the rhetoric. Many are even willing to kill and die for a deceptive ideology.

Freedom is like peace. We have to establish it inside ourselves before it can manifest in our external reality. Peace begins with me. Freedom begins with me too. The bottom line is that to be free we have to take back our will.

The Answer is the Navel Center

Whatever the question concerning how to reclaim our power, the answer always begins at the navel center. The third chakra is our power center. We have to have a strong, tuned up, navel center:

1. to be in charge of our own will,
2. to take responsibility for our own lives,
3. to make and break habits,
4. to stay healthy,
5. to be able to commit and
6. to have the energy to take action.

Without a strong navel center and the internal connection to take charge of our own lives, our ideas about freedom are mere talk. If we aren't in control of ourselves, someone or something else is. If something else is in control, we are puppets and/or victims. If we feel like a victim, we externalize authority. We think freedom is solely a question of getting rid of the bad guys, but it is not going to happen because it ia ua, in fact, who are keeping them in power!

Inner Authority

To take back our power, we have to examine how and to whom we give away our power. Smokers, for example, are owned by tobacco companies. These addictions - smoking, sugar products (there are a lot of them!), alcohol - are easy to identify. But there are also many subtle ways we give away our power. One way to identify how we have externalized our power center is to ask:

• Who do we believe?
• Who do we trust?
• What criteria do we use to decide what to do?
• Who do we turn to for advice?
• What slogans have the power to manipulate our emotions?

We could pursue answers to these questions for a long time. The bottom line is that, until we are inner-directed, have a relationship with our intuition and instincts, and are able to both hear and follow our inner guidance, we can be controlled by outside forces. The extent to which we need approval and confirmation from outside ourselves is also an indicator of the degree to which we are giving away our power.

We have to be our own person, to cultivate and enjoy our unique identity, and to be our own best friend to experience the true meaning of freedom. If we need others, we can also be controlled by them as well. Even if they have no need or intention of controlling us, our psyche is externally focused to try to ensure that we feel safe, secure and loved. So we have to examine the fact that it really is not about others. It is about us.

Consciousness and Responsibility

The extent to which we are unconscious impacts the extent to which we can be controlled, and thus the degree to which we are not free. The more conscious we become, the more we earn the possibility of setting ourselves free.

Freedom and responsibility go hand and hand. To be free, we have to be willing and able to take responsibility for our actions, our thoughts, our projections and our emotions, i.e. how we create our reality. The magnitude of the task can seem overwhelming. The key is to start somewhere and keep going. It is the human journey to figure out how to set ourselves free. We aren't going to do it overnight or in our dreams, but we can make significant progress if we take steps every day.

Responsibility runs deep. To become more responsible, we can watch how our emotional responses, programs and projections attract invaders, controllers and abusers, who impinge upon our freedom. We can monitor how we allow and even invite this to happen.

We can also monitor how we attempt to control others and situations. The degree to which we think we need to be in charge, of how others feel and what they do, limits our internal freedom. We have to be able to separate caring from controlling. We have to be able to not feel threatened, and not feel that our safety and security depends upon what others say and do. This is a big one for many. It is also another requirement to earn our freedom. To be self-contained, we have to focus on our own energy, and not be dependent upon others to nurture our wounds, or to give us their energy.

The Collective Component

Being a rebel with a cause is not enough to liberate us. Rebelling against authority is an adolescent activity. It is a phase in the human development cycle. If we are able to move through this phase, we discover that we are our own worst slave driver. We become aware of how we let our inner anger, fear, resistance, negativity and past wounding direct our lives. We have to claim our inner authority back before we can effectively contribute to the collective component of freedom.

The means by which we are controlled can be very subtle and include:

• being bought off with promises and material benefits,
• assimilation,
• neutralization through shame and guilt,
• connversion,
• appealing to emotions including pride,
• intimidation through fear
• creating a sense of belonging and identity.

To not succumb to these tactics, a deep connection with our own personal identity is a requirement. Our freedom is easily compromised if we can be manipulated. If we don't have a sense of our own identity, we will succumb to finding it in a group. We lose our Self before we ever find it. We can't accurately determine what is in our self-interest, because we don't know our Self.

Historical Perspective on Personal Empowerment

To appreciate the significance of our personal empowerment path, it is important to realize that self-empowerment is available to everyone for the first time in human history. The collective mentality has dominated the global psyche for eons. Individuals are just now breaking loose from the confining grip of group consciousness. In the past our identity was determined by our group association, i.e. tribe, family, nation, religion, etc.

Appeals to collective pride defined our sense of self-worth and belonging. When our individual identity is equated with our group identity, slogans and social pressure have more power than our intellect and common sense. Our reasoning power is superceded by the power of the collective. We are easily swayed, influenced and controlled.

The collective unconscious is precisely that - UNCONSCIOUS. We have to both break away from the collective unconscious and reunite consciously under an all-inclusive banner of our shared humanity. It is a big task. It is a huge evolutionary step for humankind.

For millennia, we have been trained to externalize power and to subjugate ourselves to it. This mode of being is in our genes, but this must change and is changing. We are learning how to individualize. To experience our humanity, we must first embrace our humanness. We must take off the lenses that have blinded us to ourselves and to our common humanity.

Reclaiming Ourselves and our Institutions

We have to reclaim ourselves before we can reclaim our institutions. Political, economic and social institutions are supposed to serve public, not private, interests. They seldom ever did. If we believe that our inner reality creates our outer reality, we could argue that they couldn't, given the unempowered state of humanity. However we try to explain the sorry state of our institutions, they are galloping toward the privatization of global resources, for the benefit of a few at the expense of the rest.

To reclaim ourselves and our institutions, we have each to take back our will. As individuals all over the planet identify and reclaim themselves, our collective energy will have a different vibration. We will send out different messages. Together we will create an elevated group consciousness to which we can belong. There will be another tone and substance to our actions when we are not puffed up with false pride, consumed by anger, or deflated with disconnected despair. We will be able to create another reality because another reality exists inside each one of us.

Piscean Institutions

The world abounds with exclusionary institutions, belief systems, ideologies and mindsets. These are by definition NOT Aquarian. These basically fundamentalist approaches and organizations can be identified by some of the following guidelines:

1. People are either in or out of the organization.
2. They are either believers or disbelievers.
3. There is only one way and this is it.
4. Those who don't follow this path are wrong (evil, misguided, unfit), and those who do are right (righteous, chosen, acceptable.)
5. An authority other than the inner authority of the individual determines the right way, the path and the best way to do things, and everyone needs to follow this authority or be punished in some way.

Most organizations created in the Piscean age are, by their very nature, dysfunctional and to varying degrees anti-freedom. One of the main reasons is because they are hierarchical and based upon control, elitism and exploitation. Those at the bottom expect caretaking, and relinquish responsibility to get perceived benefits. These are not Aquarian principles. In order to create Aquarian institutions, not only must everyone participate, but everyone must take responsibility. Participating and taking responsibility begins inside one's own psyche. The players have to prepare themselves to play a whole new game and to play by different rules.

Aquarian Institutions

Aquarian institutions aren't going to just happen because we think they are a good idea. Hierarchical fear and control based institutions will lose their grip only when control CAN'T work. Aquarian institutions are going to become possible because there are enough empowered individuals:

1. who have taken charge of their own lives,
2. who don't need anyone to take care of them or to give them approval, and
3. who are able to honor the gifts and contributions of others and to share their own.

Once we can deeply appreciate that equality does not mean uniformity, we can work together for equity, justice and peace

Aquarian institutions are, by their nature, decentralized. They function effectively because they honor individual integrity, and are composed of individuals who instinctively act out of integrity. Aquarian institutions do not fight with each other. They are not at war with each other. They cooperate with each other to achieve a higher purpose, i.e. peace, equality and meeting the basic needs of all. Mostly they simply gracefully and gratefully share this beautiful planet. They support each other when appropriate, but they certainly don't waste time attempting to control others, or trying to get them to do things their way. Everyone is too busy enjoying doing their part to make this world a better place in which to live.

Kundalini Yoga - Where is the Power?

The underlying issue of freedom is the source of power. If we are led to believe and buy into someone else's claim to power over us, we have not understood the ultimate source of power. The ultimate source of power is the Divine. The question is how to access IT. If we believe we can access IT only through someone else, we will never gain access. Control works that way, but universal energy flow doesn't.

The Aquarian Age is about direct connection to the Divine. This huge paradigm shift for humanity is the crux of freedom. To be free we have to cultivate our personal experience of the Divine. When we have established our direct connection, we cannot be controlled.

One of Yogi Bhajans main contributions was to give us a formula for direct Divine connection. He taught us the tune in mantra ONG NA MO GURU DEV NA MO. Chanting this mantra gives us access to the Golden Chain of enlightened Masters who hold the space for Divine connection. So not only can we connect directly, we have assistance!

The Divine pulses within each of us. The wisdom of our soul is available, if we can only slow down enough so that we can listen and pay attention. We can accurately determine what is in our best interest only when we know our Self.

Being able to tune into, and follow, our Soul and Divine Will, is what personal freedom is all about. Obviously, there are many methods to cultivate connection with the Divine, the light of our Soul. But ONG NA MO is the one that works with the specific technology of Kundalini Yoga. So tune in and say tuned. Freedom is your birthright. Claim it and enjoy it!

Love to all. Light to all. Peace to all.

Pump Your Navel

Before practicing Kundalini Yoga, tune in with ONG NA MO GURU DEV NA MO.

A basic step to freedom is to strengthen your navel center. A great set for this is Nabhi Kriya, featured in my free online Kundalini Yoga Course Lesson 10.

Other great sets for the navel center are found in my book Transitions to a Heart-Centered World 2nd Edition.

You can start right now by doing navel breathing:

• Inhale and expand the belly at the navel.
• Exhale while you pull the navel toward the spine.
• Notice the space between the front of the body and the spine.
• Keep practicing until you experience a pulse and a fluid movement of the breath.
• The navel exercises and breath of fire will greatly facilitate the process.

Also practice the Four Part Breath several times a day. For those who wish to break addictive habits this is a fabulous exercise. Every time your will gets pulled in the direction of the habit, do this exercise. This exercise will help you reclaim your power.

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