If you come to Kundalini Global classes you will be familiar with Sufi Grind. It is a posture that comes into most of the series we work with, often toward the very start of a class. And for good reason.
We have SO MANY yoga postures that we can work with, it’s incredible. When we’re working with the continual invitation to be offended, oppressed and horrified, and in that with us being continually abandoning ourselves, Sufi Grind is one of the most important postures that we can do.
Sufi Grind has incredible impact on our emotional body. It is very grounding.
If we think about when we’re in our emotional body, in our pain body (the pain of the past), we become very very young and we lose our sense of ourselves completely, flying back into being really young. Particularly when we’re anxious or angry.
An extremely gentle posture…
What Sufi Grind does is to stretch the fascial contractions from the top of the feet all the way through the body, up the legs, all the way through the intestines, massages the whole of the core abdominals, every intestinal organ in the body, opens the heart, works on the lymph through the chest, through the throat, underarms… it massages the spine, dorsal muscles, backs of the hips.
It is, in a way, a full body workout. But at the same time it is an extremely gentle posture. A slow and sensual posture. As Carolyn Cowan always describes it, it is ‘radical self love’.
When a teacher demonstrates Sufi Grind the invitation is ‘let me show you how to fall in love with yourself’.
Through the massage of the intestines it releases an enormous amount of serotonin through the body.
95% of your natural serotonin is produced in the gut, your intestines, and when you’re stressed and anxious your body doesn’t produce it.
The job of this posture is to massage the body, to actually become soft, to allow yourself in a very sensual movement to really land.
To try Sufi Grind…
Sit cross legged, tall and straight. Eyes closed.
Hands on the knees. Holding the knees. We begin to make huge rotations around the pelvic girdle with the upper body.
Begin by sliding the ribcage to one side, and, as you inhale, push yourself forward and raise your chin.
As you come round you exhale, push back into a slouch, and drop the chin to the chest.
Inhale forward, pushing forward, pushing belly down. Chin coming up.
Exhaling back, really slouching, stretching open. Dropping the chin. All the time rotating around the pelvic girdle.
You’re really playing with all of the body.
We usually move in one direction for a minute and then reverse and move in the opposite direction for another minute. Then we change direction again for 30 seconds, and for a final time for 30 seconds once more.
At the end, as we spiral back up to a tall straight spine, we take a long deep inhale, hold the breath and pull the body locks. And then, if we can, as we exhale and release we will lie back on the mat without opening our eyes.
This allows for an experience of the stillness that can come from releasing that flood of serotonin into the system. You may just realise that you feel safe enough to be still…
If you come to a Kundalini Global class it is extremely likely that Sufi Grind will have a place in what you work through. We all love it, and it seems that our clients do too.
