As a profound tool for healing, water purification ceremonies are held periodically throughout training at the most well-known and sacred temples on the entire island. These ceremonies give trainees a deeper understanding of the magical mysteries of Balinese spirituality that represent healing, love, and transformation.
After putting on your sarong gifted to you by alchemy of yoga, you will be escorted for a guided tour of the peaceful and ancient site, where you will learn the history of these sacred grounds. Then the ceremony will be conducted by a Mangku (Balinese Priest). While sitting in meditation the priest will prepare some holy water in a vase with flowers and incense while chanting mantras in ancient Sanskrit. Following the mantras, you will be invited to receive a holy water cleansing as this blessed water is sprinkled over your head.You will then be guided into the sacred water pools where several Koi fish swim and live. Once you are emerged in the sacred pools, it will be requested that you bow down before each spring, putting your head under the stream of water. First you will wash the holy water on your face as the symbol of physical purification, then over your fontanel (crown of the head) as the purification of the tirtha. After, you will also consume the water three times as a symbol of spiritual purification. This will create a full sensation of the body receiving a ‘holy bathing’.As you transform from the inside out throughout training, we incorporate ceremonies that allow you to cleanse your old self to reveal your true self to the world around you.
Here at alchemy of yoga we believe that ceremonies are critical to your evolution as a human being. As teachers, we never want to drag a student across their threshold of initiation. The old adage of “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear” certainly applies here. The student must step into the field of the teacher, and through Adhikara, or studentship, the teacher helps the student to “strengthen the vessel of the body” in order to hold more energy, and thus transform. “Your teacher can open the door, but you must enter by yourself.”
Our lives are full of all sorts of initiations – baptism, confirmation, graduation, marriage. Initiation can also mean a challenge, application process or test. If you pass, you step through the threshold to the next level of knowledge, and your level of personal power also rises. The practice of yoga is an initiation into the deeper knowledge of ourselves. This is the highest level of yogic initiation, to see the supreme nature within ourselves and in every person.
“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.” – W. B. Yeats
