For translation of subtitles into languages other than English, view the podcast on YouTube here. Turn on Closed Captions (CC) and use the settings button to select the preferred language for the subtitles. 

Okay, and the crown. So, the crown is “sahasrāra”, in Sanskrit. It means “thousand petals”, and, uh, it’s a particularly beautiful chakra, right on top of the head. Or, you could say, slightly above the top of the head. Or, you could even say that the, the point of light that is the beginning of the, of the chakra, is inside the head. So, just as with the first and second chakra, they share a common source in the middle of the pelvis, the, I would say that the third eye and the crown share a common source, as a point of light around the centre of the head. So, the crown’s coming up from that point of light, the third eye comes forward from that point of light.

So, you’ve got the crown on top of the head, and again it’s a kind of cone shape, coming up, coming upwards from here, and it can be experienced as swirling energy above the top of the head. It can also be experienced in other ways. I think maybe I mentioned before, ants crawling? Did I mentioned ants crawling on top of your head, always in the same direction. They always go around in the same way, that’s how you know it’s not real ants. Real ants would just randomly walk around. So, if you notice something walking around in a circle, that’s the crown starting to open. Tingling sensations, on the top of the head. Sparkles of light. Sort of being able to look upwards and see sparkles of light, above the top of the head with our inner vision. And then some quite, when it really opens, and it really starts to open, you can get sensations like an upturned bowl sitting on top of your head, made of light. Or, petals opening. If you imagine a hundred petals sitting on top of your head, just curling, starting to curl upwards, one at a time. An absolutely bizarre sensation to experience! And, uh, that’s why sometimes it’s referred to as the thousand-petalled lotus, the lotus flower has these petals around it.

“What does the crown chakra opening prematurely mean?” Okay, so, the crown chakra is actually quite an unstable chakra. And unstable means, um, that it’s difficult to control what’s happening at the crown. And, maybe tonight I’ll, just because we’ve only got a few more minutes, tonight I’ll talk about the symptoms of the opening crown, and the symptoms of an unopened crown, and then tomorrow night I’ll talk about the sort of, dynamics of, of energetic awakening. You know, how we would know if something’s happening too soon, prematurely, or things are happening at the right time? So, I’ll leave that till tomorrow night because it’s quite an involved subject. And what to do about it, as well.

So, tonight just looking at the energetic aspects. The energetic aspect associated with the crown is bliss, or you could say pure-bliss-consciousness. So, as we rise up into the crown, we feel bliss. So, the negative symptom, when it’s closed, is simply the absence of bliss. If we don’t, if we don’t experience bliss, then that’s a closed crown chakra. So, it’s a very beautiful experience to go through, to experience the, the awakening of the crown. Some of the, there are some negative symptoms associated with it, so it’s not just the absence of bliss. If the crown is opening, as the crown starts to open, we can feel ungrounded, a sense of being ungrounded, or disconnected with reality. When you see people wandering around, looking lost, that can be a symptom of their crown chakra starting to open. Sometimes you can get bliss, and the symptom of being ungrounded, at the same time. So, someone’s wandering around lost and they don’t care, because they’re in bliss. So, uh, those people are fun to, fun to work with! But, it’s a very beautiful, it’s ecstatic as well, when the, when the petals are opening, when the prana is coming up. It’s an ecstatic experience, so you get ecstatic-bliss at the same time.

So, once these higher chakras are opening, you know, in terms of the journey of yoga, you’ve got a, it’s a, it’s a bit like a journey that can start off, you know, it’s like climbing a mountain, you’ve got to get to the bottom of the mountain first. And, that can be, sort of, a bit of a trek. But then, and that’s like the first three chakras. You’ve got to deal with those. And then you start going up the mountain, and you, when you’re going up the mountain you start seeing the views down over the valley. And it’s all very beautiful. So, yoga is just like that. Once you get to the heart things start to get very beautiful and then as you move up through the throat, the third eye, and the crown. The crown’s a little bit like sitting on top of the mountain and uh, just looking out, on the view. It’s not quite the end of the journey. As I mentioned last night, or the night before, there’s actually a coming back down of kuṇḍalinī into the heart again. So, there’s one part in the, in the AYP lessons, where Yogani says that the journey can begin at the heart, and then move through the heart, as kuṇḍalinī rises, and then come back down, and end up at the heart. So, in a very real sense, yoga is very much about the heart. It’s the, it’s the, pretty much the centre of everything. So, love, love is the centre of everything in yoga, with a lot of bliss happening on the way.