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DRU YOGA – A HEART REVOLUTION

In ancient times the sages asked themselves two vital questions:

How do you eliminate pain?
How do you overcome death?

They then set about developing the answers to these questions which have endured for thousands of years.

For physical pain they developed physical asanas.
To overcome emotional pain, where ‘e-motion’or energy-in-motion has become blocked, they used movement of body, breath and mind.
And to overcome death, they developed the path of meditation, which leads a seeker to samadhi and the timeless bliss of unity with our highest nature.

Dru Yoga, which traces its origins to the stories contained in the great Indian Classic, the Srimad Bhagavatam, was brought to the West by a small group of university colleagues, Mansukh Patel, Chris Barrington, John Jones, Rita Goswami and Annie Jones who were students together at Bangor University , North Wales, UK.

Dru Yoga teaches how to balance body, heart and mind by using the heart as the pivotal point around which all else revolves. Dru Yoga is characterised by beautiful flowing movements that channel and transform the body’s subtle energy through the heart to create healing and unity.

Dru comes from the Sanskrit word Druvam, which means fixed, immovable, in one place. Just as the eye of the hurricane remains still and quiet, whilst there is movement all around, so Druvam is a state of stillness within the mind and heart. Dru Yoga is about being fixed within yourself so that you are unassailable, untouchable by the world.

The keystone of Dru Yoga is a process that we call energy block release. Every day we have emotional energy thrown at us. Sometimes we can handle it, and sometimes we can't. Actually, emotional energy enters the body via the joints, enters the muscles structures, and ends up in the internal organs, whence disease begins.

To prevent the build up of energy we need to constantly turn energy around, and allow it to flow back into nature again. Dru Yoga is a kind of emotional and energy detoxification. The energy block release sequences within Dru Yoga facilitate this process. They focus upon the softness of the body and take the awareness deeper and at a faster rate.

Very often the question is asked how Dru Yoga is different to Hatha Yoga, or any other branch of yoga. In Dru Yoga we make use of the different levels of being to facilitate the release of energy, and to transform awareness & consciousness. Because we can directly reach these levels the effects of Dru Yoga are rapid.

Mansukh Patel and the Dru team have taken Dru Yoga as the basis for the detraumatisation work they have pioneered in war zones. Dru Yoga has proven particularly effective in these arenas because it allows a person to transform emotional pain without having to relive the experience of trauma.

The Heart Connection

Science has now proved that the heart is the body’s most powerful centre of vitality and healing, a fact that the ancients have always known. The power of love is familiar to all of us; that familiar feeling of invincibility when we are in love, the strength that allows a mother to go without food in order to save her baby from hunger. This is the power of the heart with the Anahata Chakra (the heart centre) acting as the pivot point in our subtle energy body. In fact research by the Heart Math Institute in the US has shown that the energy field around the heart is 60 times stronger than that around the head.

Modern society has undergone dramatic changes over the last hundred years. The trend towards a power driven society has intensified so much that there is an urgent and essential need to move towards a culture based on the qualities of the heart – listening, intuition and an awareness of nature. If we lose our deep listening capacity due to the pace at which we live, stress, burn out and emotional crisis will become the outcomes of a culture no longer centred in the heart.

The Chinese sign for ‘busy’, translates as ‘to lose one’s heart’ and although staying centred in one’s heart is not easy, with a few well practised methods you can gain immediate success.

The Heart Centre

Within the body, located along the length of the spine are seven main centres of energy. Of these the heart is the central point, with the three chakras below and three above. Each centre has its own energy field, sound, colour and quality. For example the heart is associated with the colour green which is also the predominant colour in nature and is said to be the colour of healing.

The heart is unique in it’s capacity to give out only positive vibrations of kindness, compassion, selflessness and caring. When we live each day with an open heart we are more ready to experience life in its fullness, meet changes and challenges with an open mind and live in the moment free from worries.

The state of our emotions very quickly determine our thought processes and clarity of thought. Intuition and sparks of inspiration come into our being through an open heart. We rarely have great insight when we are ploughing our way through feelings of rejection, grief or anger.

Much of society today is ruled by the qualities of the three centres below the heart- fear, survival, greed, manipulation and exploitation. The aim of heart-based Dru Yoga is to raise our energy from these base centres, up to the heart and with it our awareness and consciousness.

Dru Yoga is a heart yoga that accesses the power of the heart through combining asana (posture) Pranayama (the science of breath) and the ancient Eastern tradition of Mudras (hand gestures). All of these come together to create flowing sequences that balance the energy centres of the body and help us to express ourselves to the world through our heart.

If you ask anyone to point to themselves they will point to at their heart – not at their ear, their eye or their toe! We each have an inherent understanding of our true nature, even though we may not always remember to live from the perspective of the heart.

Accessing the power of the heart is essential to the process of healing the emotions that each one of us face in our life and within Dru Yoga there are specific sequences that work to transform different emotions into their positive counterpart.

If you are experiencing grief, there is a specific sequence to transform the feeling into freedom and renewal. Or if you are feeling anxiety, there is a sequence for transforming that emotion into courage to move forward. And so-on, for every painful state: rejection into confidence, depression into vitality, anger into creativity and dynamism.

We have all been through traumas, great and small, which have left their mark in us as unconscious patterns of emotional pain. They hinder our ability to have successful relationships and to achieve our dreams.

Dru Yoga sequences simply take the trapped energy caught in such a pattern and releases it, safely through the heart.

The Su Breath Transforming depression to self empowerment.

1. Sit in the thunderbolt with the palms joined together
2. Breathe in, raise your hands up to your mouth
3. Breathe out, extending the arms forward, turning the palms outward and keeping the index finger and thumb in contact. Breathe in.
4. On the next out-breath, make the sub vocal sound ‘Su’, bringing the arms around sideways and down to the sides. Feel the expansion in the heart space.

For more information, consider:

Dru Yoga – Stillness in Motion – Chris Barrington, Anita Goswami, Annie Jones, Mansukh Patel
Dru Yoga DVD - Mansukh Patel and Coby Langford
Easing Backpain CD - Mansukh Patel and Coby Langford
Face to Face with Life - Mansukh Patel and John Jones
The Dance between Joy and Pain – Mansukh Patel and Rita Goswami
The Flame that Transforms – Mansukh Patel, Savitri MacCuish, Andrew Wells
The Peace Formula – Mansukh Patel
The Secret Power of Light – Mansukh Patel