Gwen McCarthy - 52 Weeks of Yoga: A Personal Journey Through Yoga

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Gwen McCarthy, 2018

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover design and illustrations by Navina Chhabria

eBook ISBN: 978-1-54394-018-3

Dedication

To my wonderful husband Al,
all our children, grandchildren,
our great granddaughter
and the beautiful memories of my mom and dad.

- Gwen McCarthy

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1:
Living in the Age of Aquarius

W e are at the very beginning of an era that is predicted to bring about a major shift in human behavior and spirituality. One thing is certain: were all on this journey together. Come with me as we learn how the ancient wisdom of yoga can help us transition into a new world of enlightenment and compassion. Welcome to the Age of Aquarius!

The first time most people ever heard of the Age of Aquarius may have been in the late 1960s when the rock musical Hair first became popular. Hair wasnt just any Broadway show; it was unlike anything that had ever been seen before. Its young actors had long hair, appeared nude on stage and stood together to protest the war in Vietnam. But the most lasting impact of the play may have been its music. One of its songs, The Age of Aquarius, became so famous that it is still number 66 on the list of Billboards Greatest Hits of All Time. It described a future that would be entirely different from the world not only then, but at any time in human history.

Harmony and understanding

Sympathy and trust abounding

No more falsehoods or derisions

Golden living dreams of visions

Mystic crystal revelation

And the minds true liberation

What you may not have known about this song is that there really is an Age of Aquarius and we are living in it now. There are twelve astrological ages named after the signs of the zodiac and this one is represented by Aquarius, the Water Bearer. Just as the Earth rotates around the sun, these ages are based on the way our planet moves through space. It takes 26,000 years to complete all astrological ages, and each age is more than 2,000 years long. In the past 13,000 years, there have been six Astrological Ages and the newest, the Age of Aquarius, is the seventh one.

To yogis, one of the most important ages in human history was the Age of Taurus. Yoga began during this era in India, almost 5,000 years ago. With posture names like cobra, camel, cat, crow and fish, it seems certain that the yogis recognized the beauty of the movements of animals and knew that replicating them would help to ease and strengthen their own bodies. The early yogis were attuned to the workings of their human bodies too, and they realized that when they slowed down their breath, they also slowed down their minds. The remarkable practice of yoga that began in Indias Indus River Valley before the appearance of the written word is still practiced all over the world today.

About three thousand years later came the Piscean Age, which was when many of us were born and during which history begins to sound more familiar. The Piscean Age began in 1 BC and ended in 1999. The Piscean Age was the time of the Crusades, the Renaissance, and the discovery of the New World. The genius of Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven and Michelangelo changed art and music forever. Jesus and Muhammad were born and today their 3.5 billion followers make up the two most popular religions in the world.

Over time, we have advanced in so many ways, but our knowledge increased more rapidly in the years from 1900 until 1999 than it did during all the years that came before it. People must have always wondered if it would ever be possible to travel into the starry night sky, but in 1969 a handful of men flew far away from our planet and actually walked on the moon.

We humans are wonderfully creative, but we also have a history of being heartless and destructive. In 1945, we developed and detonated a bomb that killed 80,000 people. Man-made pollution has created havoc in the air that we breathe, in outer space and in our oceans. The plastics and chemicals that we carelessly throw into the oceans kill more than 100,000 sea turtles, birds, whales and dolphins every year. The Pacific Ocean now contains an area of trash the size of Europe that is called the worlds largest landfill.

For a few years now, weve been living in the beginning stages of the Age of Aquarius. Great things have been predicted for this time, but like the ages before it, it will last more than 2,000 years, and this one still has a long way to go. There are many ways in which the Age of Aquarius is predicted to be different from the Piscean Age that preceded it, and a lot of those changes have already begun.

Given how accustomed we are to instant communication in the world today, you may wonder how people were able to get messages to each other so long ago. The answer is that it was done by direct person to person contact. Written messages could be sent by courier to distant locations and someone with important news for those who were close by could communicate it more effectively by making themselves more noticeable (try standing on a rock!) or by talking louder. Imagine how long it would have taken for any information to get from one continent to another. No one could have dreamed of the concept of up to the minute news on television, email, Facebook or cell phones.

As a student in the middle of the Twentieth Century, I know that when I needed information for a report, I had to look for it in encyclopedias, books, magazines and newspapers. That meant going from one library or center to another, and working with information that was months or even years old. Today, 90 percent of American homes have a computer that can access information from around the world as soon as it occurs.

Spiritual practices have always been of great importance to human beings, but for most of our history, they have been kept under the tight control of a few people. In the last 60 years, we have seen yogis from around the world bringing a new type of spirituality to the United States. All of these yogis studied in person with masters of their particular practice before they came here, and they were fortunate to be able to do so because during the Piscean Age, learning wasnt available to everybody.

One such person, Yogi Bhajan, came from a royal family in India where he was allowed to learn the practice of Kundalini yoga. He studied for eight years with a Kundalini yoga master before he became one himself. Decades later, he felt he should take the knowledge of this practice to the Western world, but that idea wasnt well received in India. Kundalini yoga had been carefully guarded by a select group of people for generations and they wanted to keep it that way. It was even widely believed that if you shared the secrets of Kundalini Yoga with outsiders, you wouldnt live to see your next birthday. Threats were made on Yogi Bhajans life when he did just that.

Another famous person from the end of the Piscean Age was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was the spiritual adviser to the Beatles. After completing a Masters Degree in Physics, he felt that there must be more to life than what he had learned in school. He wasnt able to go to a local yoga studio to learn about the practices of yoga and meditation, though. Instead, he spent the next fourteen years of his life in the Himalayas before he left to teach the world about Transcendental Meditation.

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