True to Yourself Podcast 19: Spiritual Practices to Be Mentally and Emotionally Stable with Ananta Ripa Ajmera

I recently experienced the life-altering impact of a major car accident. But instead of taking painkillers prescribed in the ER, I delved deeper into my spiritual practices, finding solace and strength to be mentally and emotionally stable in the midst of trauma and adversity. Listen in to learn how you, too, can find inner peace that goes beyond temporary relief with simple and short Yogic and Ayurvedic rituals to unlock your own potential to remain calm in the face of the storms life throws your way. Let the storms be the catalysts for your growth and embrace the serenity and strength that comes from within. In this show, I show you how.

Resources:

Order Sahajan's award-winning Ayurveda Ritual Body Oil with a 15% discount using THEANCIENTWAY code: https://www.sahajan.com/collections/all-products/products/ritual-body-oil

Order a specialty pain reducing Ayurvedic herbal oil I used to heal from my accident: https://snp.link/dee033a5

Order an herbal Ayurvedic muscle relieving balm I love: https://snp.link/a60b0b20

Take your first step to take ownership of your destiny and make new spiritual friends while nourishing your body, mind and spirit with a wealth of stability promoting yoga practices, recipes, and much more in a free 14-day trial of The Ancient Way's Circle of Life Community: https://theancientway.co/community

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• 1 wisdom quote straight from an age-old sacred text

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• 3 introspective questions to awaken your inner guru, no matter how packed your schedule is

Let's connect on Instagram for spiritual empowerment and inspiration to awaken your inner guru: https://instagram.com/ananta.one

Embark on a heroic spiritual journey with daily rituals rooted in ancient Indian goddess wisdom in my award-winning book The Way of the Goddess: https://theancientway.co/wayofthegoddess

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TRANSCRIPTION

Episode 19: Spiritual Practices to Be Mentally and Emotionally Stable with Ananta Ripa Ajmera

[00:00:00] Namaste and welcome back to the True To Yourself Podcast, a place where we explore the power of authentic living. I am your host Ananta Ripa Ajmera, and today we're going to talk about practices to help you cultivate the power of stability. The power of stability is the first step that we need to really master as a foundation for our entire journey of spiritual evolution and progress through the nine steps of the framework that I outline in my book, The Way of the Goddess Daily Rituals to Awaken Your Inner Warrior and Discover Your True Self.

[00:00:48] This is a nine step framework that leads us from cultivating stability in the root chakra to channeling our creativity in the sacral chakra to igniting the fire of transformation in our solar plexus, to healing with the healing power of love in our heart, to liberating the sound of our voice, trusting our intuition, being able to discern the truth, rejuvenating ourselves with beautiful new beginnings, and ultimately all to be able to lead, serve, and love with integrity.

[00:01:23] So this first step is really, really important for us to be able to progress on our entire journey, and it's one that we have to come back to again and again. I am a very living example of this. I actually got into a pretty major car accident a few months back. I was a passenger in the car and we were just on the way to the post office to be able to actually send copies of my book to people who are supporting it and promoting it and helping to spread it and along the way,

[00:02:02] suddenly out of nowhere, the card crashed, and was in a wreck with three cars involved and one flipped over and it was such a scary experience where suddenly we were in the car and then there were fumes all over and it was potentially a very destabilizing experience. But because I am so grounded in this practice of coming back, again and again, to cultivating this power of stability within my root chakra or the first chakra, I was able to really

[00:02:45] stay calm in the midst of this storm. And as soon as it happened, I knew that this is going to take some time to recover from, but I will recover from this and all I can feel is gratitude for having survived this scary situation and what could have really shaken me up actually really didn't phase me that much.

[00:03:12] It was a wake up call, if anything, to just get more and more deeply embedded into my own power of practice. And to really go back to the root, to the foundation of this entire journey, of the framework that I've created, first of all, for my own self and my own personal transformation, and to really master it and to really understand what it means to cultivate it.

[00:03:40] When you go through something that destabilizing, it's really easy to lose our center. It's really easy to feel like you never wanna be behind the wheel again. You don't wanna go in a car. You are, you know, not feeling ready to be in that same situation again. But with these practices that I'm about to share with you, I was not only able to get myself back up into a car within two weeks of this experience,

[00:04:09] but I also was, more importantly, able to not have to take any of the many painkillers that I was prescribed at the emergency room for the trauma and whiplash that I had in my neck. And of course my neck still had pain. It had a lot of pain, and I had trouble sleeping at night, and I had, you know, the pain waking me up at night, but my willpower, my resolve to not take anything artificial and to just tap deeper into the healing power of my own self and my own abilities as a healer, to give that all back to myself, to be able to come through this storm

[00:04:56] without anything artificial was my intention, because I believe in, as I said, leading with integrity. So this was, for me, a test of how much can I really trust and lean into my own practices to be able to heal myself in an all natural way. And so the first practice I'll share with you is actually the practice of oiling your body.

[00:05:22] This is super, super important. I was so happy that I did oil my body the day of this crash because what oiling your body does is actually put a layer of protection over your skin and your bones to be able to help you better withstand any of the normal wear and tear of our lives, but especially accidents and injuries and unexpected trauma to the body.

[00:05:51] Oiling is an incredible practice. People often ask me how it is that I seem to get younger as I get older, and there are many secrets to that, which I'm happy to not keep as a secret and to openly share with you, and empower you to do as well. But I have to say I am really, really, really avid on my oiling practice.

[00:06:16] The oiling practice is so life-changing. It's so beautiful, it's so wonderful, and really, really therapeutic and healing. And the best part is it's easy. It doesn't even take very long to do. You literally just take some warm oil or you, first of all warm up the oil. What I like to do is take a bottle of

[00:06:37] sesame oil or some herb infused oils, which I can share with you in the show notes if you want my recommendations for amazing quality Ayurvedic oils. I take that and I put it into a small bowl, into a crock pot. And then I put it on the warm setting. If you put it on number one or two on the mini lunch sized crock box, then it tends to get really, really hot and not be even touchable.

[00:07:08] So I put it on the last setting of warm, and then I just let it warm up while I'm doing my yoga practice. Yoga is an incredible practice for grounding and cultivating stability in the body. It's actually not just about the physical practice, but it truly is about the intention of getting grounded in your body.

[00:07:31] I'll come to this when I share a little bit about some favorite yoga practices that I would recommend for cultivating this power of stability. When we talk about oiling, it is helpful to keep the oil in the crock pot and to just let it warm up and stay warm while you're doing your exercises. That's what I like to do with my yoga.

[00:07:52] Let the oil warm up, do my yoga practice, and now I've also restarted my classical dance training and martial arts, which I'll get into in a little bit, but. I will let the oil warm up, do my thing with my movement, because movement is medicine and it really, really creates stability in the body. Then I go back and when I'm ready for a shower, first I take that warm oil from the Crock Pot and I literally apply it on my skin, and I go up and down really fast on the long bones of your body.

[00:08:34] And then you go in a circular motion around each of the joints of the body and you really wanna go brisk and really get vigorous with it. Don't apply it like you would lotion, just softly, gently placing it. You wanna rub it and really do it good and make it go, you know, fast because the friction helps the oil to have more heat, which then the heat allows the oil to

[00:09:02] penetrate deeper into your skin to be able to deliver the medicinal benefits that it has to offer deep, deep, deep into the layers of your bones and your skin. That's really, really important. And you can spend some more time anywhere that you have pain. So while I have been recovering from this accident and having some neck related pain and stiffness and things like that, especially in the beginning,

[00:09:28] I really spent more time on my neck and I realized that there are little parts of my neck that I've actually been missing. So every time I get a physical checkup, I get made aware that, oh, I missed a spot in my regular oiling practice, and that is my catalyst to come back to cultivating this power of stability and really get thorough on all the important joints and bones and parts of the body that I may have accidentally neglected.

[00:10:00] This is the part of the neck, you know, that goes up into the hair. And I think I was thinking, oh, I don't wanna get my hair all oily, but I just started pulling it up more and making sure that I get these bones on the cervical part of the neck so that I am really protecting my neck and healing my neck from the trauma that it has experienced.

[00:10:25] So that is really, really helpful to spend more time on any area that you have pain, stiffness, etcetera, really be with it. Really pour not just the oil into it, but your intention to love yourself. The practice of oiling in Sanskrit is called sneha. Sneha means to oil. Sneha also means to love, so you want to really infuse

[00:10:51] your grounding and your stability with the power of love, which incidentally comes in the fourth step and a higher chakra, but we want to make this the driving force of our whole experience of really getting into our body and starting this journey of spiritual growth, transformation, and evolution. So after you applied the oil all over vigorously, not missing any little spot, then you can go ahead and take a nice warm shower and the warmth of the shower will allow that oil to go deep into your skin.

[00:11:29] It's best to do this oiling practice on an empty stomach after you've eliminated your bowels, ideally in the morning before eating your food. The sequence of operations in the morning is really, really important because our skin is an organ of digestion. Our skin has to digest whatever we put into it, just as our stomach has to digest whatever food we've eaten.

[00:11:56] So when you are eating food before taking a shower, what happens is that the prana or the vital life force energy that was supposed to be just focused on the digestive area of the body is suddenly activated through all the water of the shower, and it starts to travel out of the skin. It travels up, it travels down, and it's all confused.

[00:12:24] It's not concentrated anymore on your digestive activity. So what happens when you eat and then shower is that that same digestive fire in your body tends to go out into the skin. It tends to disrupt your digestion. It tends to cause a lot of other problems for your body. So we really feel that it's very important in Ayurveda to be able to

[00:12:50] take a shower first. To do your oiling, take a shower, and then eat. So it helps to exercise as the first step, and then do your oiling, do your shower, and then do your food, and then do your day. That's the ideal morning routine, to be able to really get grounded into the day and for everything that will unfold.

[00:13:13] Another really, really helpful practice that will help you get into your body is yoga. I did a lot of yoga even the next day, believe it or not, after this major car accident with all my whiplash and neck trauma. I just told myself actually within the ambulance itself that the way to regain my mobility is by mobility itself.

[00:13:43] Movement is the medicine. And I told the person in the ambulance that actually I don't wish to wear this neck brace because I feel that it will make my neck more stiff. And I just feel that by moving it continuously, however difficult that may feel for me right now, I'm going to be able to regain my mobility a lot more efficiently, so I'm just gonna do this and trust that this is gonna help me.

[00:14:11] And thank you for the collar. But no thank you. So I just really committed to turning my head from one side all the way to the other side. This was a huge, huge practice for me for the first couple of weeks, or even for a while after that of just simply rotating my head from one side all the way to the other side and doing neck rolls, and really being intentional with the idea that it's ultimately the power of the soul within us that is empowering us to have a body and to be able to move our body.

[00:14:55] That intentionality of movement is really, really important, and it works with consistency as key to cultivating stability. I was able to unlock my body's ability to move as it did before within just 10 days. I was so amazed because there were a lot of painkillers that were waiting in the medicine cabinet that my family members were, you know, kind enough to get in case I should have needed them.

[00:15:25] But with the persistent oiling, and I oiled my neck a few times a day, because I needed it during that time, and with the consistency of movement and being intentional with that movement and really bringing my soul power and awareness into that movement, I was able to do all of the yoga that I did before within a pretty short period of time.

[00:15:49] And, felt so much better just from that. So I would invite you also to really cultivate this grounding and stability through Tree Pose. It's a perfect practice for grounding yourself into Mother Earth and really approaching it with that intention of connecting with Mother Earth, feeling her healing roots

[00:16:16] in the ground and you with your feet getting rooted into her roots and being one with nature. Ayurveda is ultimately about living in harmony with nature, and it's about balance. These are the keys to unlock radiant wellbeing and health at every level of your body, mind, and spirit, according to Ayurveda.

[00:16:40] So when you're practicing the Tree Pose or even just standing in Mountain Pose, I want you to really stand and trust. Trust in Mother Earth. Trust that Mother Nature is this goddess, is this mother goddess who is holding us always. No matter how much pain or injuries or trauma we go through in our lives, Mother Earth is here to hold us and to protect us.

[00:17:08] And we need only to trust in her loving embrace in order to feel her healing power throughout every cell of our being. So when you're standing up straight with your arms by your side, and really keeping your head held high, and your neck and spine tall and elongated, really trust in the power of stability that lives within you and really trust in Mother Earth.

[00:17:37] And once you've connected and cultivated this beautiful, loving relationship and connection, then you can bring your hands into what is known as Anjali Mudra, or where you have your palms together touching, and your thumbs are actually touching your heart center. And this is a wonderful way itself, just by itself, just doing this to calm anxiety.

[00:18:05] To be able to channel some dark emotions, fear, anguish into a feeling of universal love and universal friendship. This is a really powerful practice to do by itself, especially if you face the sun rising as you do it. Watching the sunrise itself is an incredible practice for cultivating stability. So while you're here with your hands in Namaste Mudra or Anjali Mudra, a

[00:18:36] hand gesture of devotion and reverence, ultimately to that divine sun or the soul, within yourself, then you can actually lift one of your feet and place it above your knee or below the knee or just at the ankle of the other foot, and you're going to either keep your hands here or you can lift your hands all the way up and

[00:19:01] become a full tree. It doesn't matter how you do the pose, but what really counts is that you are cultivating this intention, even just standing in Mountain Pose, of grounding into the earth and making yourself so stable that any creature can come and take refuge in you, that a bird can rest on your shoulders.

[00:19:29] That squirrels can come and take shade in your branches and that you are offering your gifts, your fruit, your flowers generously, not to gain anything from doing so, but simply because it's what you ought to do. Mother Nature is such a teacher for us. She has so much wisdom for us that we're not meant to just read about in a book.

[00:19:56] Although I hope that you read books, and I hope that you'll even consider reading my book to learn more about cultivating this power of stability in your root chakra. But what's even more important than reading is living the wisdom, embodying the teachings, and that's really what cultivating the power of stability is about.

[00:20:19] It's about application. It's about not just theoretically kind of knowing or understanding things, but embodying them, practicing them, living them, and thereby unlocking their full power and magic in your life. And when you cultivate that intention, that may I be a provider of shade and a giver of refuge and a friend to all living beings, then you ultimately become whatever it is you're looking for in life.

[00:20:54] So how you approach these simple practices, with a spirit of love, first of all for yourself, which I cannot think of a better practice than oiling to cultivate and then being that love for all beings to benefit from by being one with nature and really embodying that spirit of the tree are just some beautiful, beautiful ways to really cultivate the power of grounding and stability to be able to unlock the magic of

[00:21:28] the root chakra and the kind of security and calmness that it can give you from within yourself, and you know, really connecting with your center and trusting in your root. This is super important. Then consistency is really the key. You have to do it a lot in order to really feel the magic of these practices unfold.

[00:21:55] The first time in the ambulance when I turned my neck to the right and then to the left, oh, it was so painful that I just didn't even wanna go back to the right again. But I said consistency. This is the power of practice. Right center, left center and remember to breathe. Breathing is so, so important and it really is so transformational to do that.

[00:22:27] And I invite you to actually take a deep breath in through your nose and a deep breath out through the nose.

[00:22:38] Inhale through the nose. Feel your belly expanding out. Exhale, release, inhale, filling up,

[00:22:56] exhale, release, letting go.

[00:23:07] By being really consistent with my oiling practice and my yoga practice, I was able to regain my mobility pretty efficiently after the car accident and decided to actually return back to my classical Indian dance training. And then a couple months later, I decided to take up a new practice of TaeKwonDo and I actually joined a class with a lot of kids who are about half my age, and it's been so amazing to take all of these principles of practice, of stability, of grounding, of consistency, of application.

[00:23:50] into a totally new classroom and to unlock the magic by really embodying the power of a warrior. And I recently actually broke my first two boards. The first board got broken by my hand with a fist or a hammer punch with a fist on the second try, after I told myself I can do it because I am not this body, I am the Self.

[00:24:19] And the second board got push kicked into two on try number one. So you're never too old to learn something new, but practice and consistency and trust and faith in the power of your own soul to overcome everything are really the keys. To be able to blossom with grounding within yourself amidst all the turbulence of this world and of our own life, and the unfolding of our own karma.

[00:24:54] So if you've enjoyed this episode and you're feeling really inspired and excited to cultivate the power of practice for yourself, I really would encourage you to not only get a copy of this book, to read it and then to live it. And then when you're living it, you can also join us, or you can start by joining us in our Circle of Life Community Program.

[00:25:18] This is an online community that is an incredible resource library full of embodiment tutorials, videos, audio recordings, recipes, guidance for difficult digestive problems like constipation and diarrhea, power of practice circles that are live that you can join to connect with like-minded seekers looking to get more consistent with whatever it is they're doing for wellness.

[00:25:48] that are going to be open to all people all over the world who are part of our Program. We have members all over the world, and sessions are also recorded. So if you're like, oh, that time doesn't work for me, then let us know your time preferences. We have a survey actually in the member library to figure out what is the best time for our members with all the different time zones that we have represented to connect live because we love

[00:26:13] connecting with each and every person who comes into our community. We will connect you with a spiritual mentor who I have personally trained through my nine step framework over the course of the last year. They are awesome people. They are really, really kindhearted compassionate empaths who are also warriors and able to stand for peace, stand for truth, stand for goodness, not just be good, but actually promote

[00:26:40] and stand for all that is good. And I'm so proud of my team of spiritual warrior graduates who have gone through their own transformations and have a lot of wisdom to share with you from the power of their own practice and their own experiences to inspire you, to support you, to hold your hand as you make big changes in your life.

[00:27:00] And also, they'll be able to connect you with other members that you can connect with one-on-one through our community buddy system. And then in our live circles, we'll also be having member-led workshops where you can learn amazing things like reflexology, aromatherapy, different kind of holistic.

[00:27:17] therapies that are aligned with Ayurveda and that are really complimentary to the mother traditions of Ayurveda, Yoga and Vedanta spiritual philosophy that I teach in the program. We also have full Ayurveda master classes that I've recorded live and that are available in the library for you. So if you really want to learn more about how to follow Ayurveda's, beautiful circadian rhythms to live in harmony with nature, if you want to learn the magic in terms of seasonal practices, to be able to live in harmony with nature, and really just immerse yourself in this beautiful,

[00:27:59] blessed world of holistic healing and amazing new friends, then please do join a free 14 day trial for yourself to be able to go deeper into this framework. With the power of stability, you can actually learn in the library with an incredible 80 year old, or rather 80 year young Uncle Mitch, as I call him. His name is actually Dr.

[00:28:23] Mitch Hall. He's an amazing human being, has decades of experience with yoga, Tai Chi, qigong, and so many other awesome modalities. He has recorded a bunch of videos that are available in short bite size, digestible form, so you can actually take them and do the practices at your own pace. If you have five minutes, or even if you have a whole hour, it doesn't matter.

[00:28:47] You can do it in whatever way is suitable for you, and it's easy. It's in a library. You can just press play and start it. And if you really enjoy it, we can connect you with him and you can have more and do live sessions with him as well. So there's so much waiting for you and there's so much more that's constantly being poured into this library, and I really, really hope that you'll consider joining us and being a part of our spiritual party all around the world.

[00:29:13] You can actually go to theancientway.co/community to learn all about our community, to see the team of mentors and read about their experiences. We'll be uploading some videos of theirs soon as well, and then you can also just check out all the resources and links in the show notes to be able to take the next step on your journey of cultivating this incredible foundational power of stability in your root chakra.

[00:29:48] This is Ananta Ripa Ajmera. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the True to Yourself podcast, a place where we explore the power of authentic living. I look forward to connecting with you again next week.