Ixchel Lunar

November 19, 2019 Uncategorized

2019-11-19 09:41:58

Somewhere about the age of 2, I remember sitting on the front grass with my mom in front of our duplex Cumberland Road. It was a sunny day. I had my toes in the grass.

I noticed a different plant growing in the grass and touched it. It was prickly. I tried pulling it, but it was steadfast in the ground. My mom helped me dig it out. What came out astonished me. A bright red-purple ball with a tail.

Of course, like any toddler would, I examined it… in my mouth. What came next was a taste I will never forget.

I don’t particularly like #radishes, but I do eat them occasionally for the bitter variety. That memory remains strong as a moment when it was just me and my mom.

As I recently shared, salt can have some pretty catastrophic impacts on the brain. Tau is an essential protein for helping form axonal neurotubules. Too much dietary salt leads to neurodegenerative effects from a build up of tau plaques. Increasing nitric oxide may reverse this.

When we add taste variety, we help shake things up, even build new networks, and strengthen #neuroplasticity.

We’ll be increasing our #nitricoxide through a breath work practice in the upcoming #meditationchallenge. But a big reason it’s a radical #self-love practice is because of how we will use mantra to shut down our inner critic.

Research shows we need 3 times as many positive statements to counteract our negative inner critic. @kotler.steven in his whirlwind flow trip audio book, — Mapping Cloud Nine: Neuroscience, Flow, and the Upper Possibility Space of Human Experience— suggests 10 is better and to really feel into those 10 (like in a solid daily #gratitude practice). These kinds of practices are based in neuro-technological sciences developed by yogis and gurus like Guru #Nanak Dev Ji, celebrating 550 years this month. His monumental work is the Japji Sahib, a sacred chant of Sikhis said to instill illumination.

In #meditation using #mantra (repetitive statements, chanting) and mudras (a special hand posture) we can create transient hypofrontality (temporarily slowing down our prefrontal cortex). Quieting the inner critic sets us up for great #flowstate hygiene rituals. Join us! www.ixchel.love

November 18, 2019 Uncategorized

2019-11-18 06:53:57

Hi! I’m Sita Karam Kaur Ixchel. Call me Ixchel (sounds like ee-shell). I specialize in supporting intuitive changemakers, empaths and spiritual seekers who want to avoid burnout and amplify their radiance by helping them cultivate self-leadership thru daily FLOW rituals and change the world while they’re at it.

But my first twenty years I learned it wasn’t safe to be seen as I fought to survive in a world that made me feel I wasn’t invited and didn’t belong. From deep in my mother’s womb, my twin and I held close for our lives in a violent and unpredictable home. My sister Heather protected me in the womb but left her physical form before we were born. Despite her passing, she stayed with me in spirit during tumultuous times growing up. Together we found solace outside with the plant and animal spirits.

Yet through conscious daily practice over the next twenty years I discovered strength in surrounding myself with the community of others (including people, plants and pollinators) that helped me feel a sense of belonging — re-membering how to feel safe in my skin and embedded in the natural world. Finding that alchemical gold buried deep within the hard rocks of violence, abuse and neglect became my resilience superpower.

And I know all too well what it means to fly too close to the sun and burnout because of it:

I was the first in my family to go to college (while also a single mom of two by the time I was 18), I was the first Latina (of Mayan ancestors) to serve as Vice Mayor of Petaluma, California, I’ve run for Congress and I’ve mentored other women who were running for office or running their own business . . .

I know what happens when we go go go and I know what’s possible when we take 15 minutes a day (or less!) to breathe, pause and reflect.
Which is why I have 35 years of practice in consciousness exploration, meditation, feminist-based self-development and intuitive-based action and I bring it all to my work with change-making womxn leaders.

I am currently on writing sabbatical, living on unseated lands of the indigenous Matagalpa in the highlands of Matagalpa, Nicaragua.
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#introduceyourself #empathsbelike #kundaliniyoga #meditationchallenge

November 15, 2019 Uncategorized

2019-11-15 06:56:53

Too much salt impacts brain function. Did you see the recent study that was released in Nature about how too much dietary salt impairs brain function in animal testing?
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Well, that could be a bummer if you like salt. It’s one of the three flavors that drives human motivation. Maybe you’ve heard of this little @NYT Best Seller by @michaelcmoss , “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us”?
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It’s not our fault that our brains are broken.
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There’s entire industries fashioned off our intrinsic motivators, using our own emotional triggers and taste buds to keep us imprisoned in old ruts. A little of this, a little of that to keep us in a “bliss-state”.
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Except it’s not really bliss, not a real happy place.
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I’ve been developing a meditation challenge on radical self-love that includes this incredible new breathing technique to increase nitric oxide. So when this study came out that showed how too much salt decreases nitric oxide in the brain and increases this plaque build up of tau, I got really excited. .
Nitric oxide balances tau.
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Yep, this crazy simple breathing technique that’s part of my 40-Day meditation challenge is going to create a buzz… And bring you back to your true happy place.
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#nitricoxide #pranayama #brainhealth #meditationchallenge

October 18, 2019 Uncategorized

2019-10-18 09:36:59

Do you need a shift?
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Ixcacao, the Cacao Goddess walks alongside and hold hands with us during our hardest times.
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Chocolate addiction holds a rough status, especially for women. In western culture it’s often used to cover difficult moments like PMS, feelings of loneliness or despair. Or as “gifts” for exchange of sex or matriarchal positions.
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It’s bound up with sugar, which acts like a mask to cover the true medicine of cacao, the bean that chocolate is made from.
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There is a deeper purpose for cacao when we shift our relationship to it and to food.
Instead of choosing to use foods and food-like substances to disconnect from what we are feeling, remaining bound to our behavioral patterns, or our old addictive emotional loops, we can connect with cacao in its strong medicinal state.
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Cacao medicine creates a focused awareness and Flow.
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Pure fermented cacao nibs is comprised of theobromine and cacao butter (good fat) that acts as a carrier for the theobromine (theo broma literally means food of the gods) to reach our neural network and open our blood vessels and vascular system.
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This opening creates a receptivity to our current state for greater awareness of what’s trying to emerge.
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When we resist what’s trying to emerge, it creates stress on our body and that in turn sends dis-ease signals to our genes (epigenetics).
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When we are open to what’s emerging, the cacao is a powerful medicine to reset our DNA and RNA in right relation. Studies have confirmed cacao’s healing functions in the reduction in tumors and other neurodegenerative diseases.
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Of course combining cacao with sugar into chocolate doesn’t do this with the same effect. Sugar is a known stimulator of disease because it creates inflammation in the body. “Chocolate addiction” isn’t really addiction to cacao (which studies prove isn’t an addictive substance). It’s an addiction to sugar.
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The natural state of the cacao bean allows for a unique synthesis of medicine that opens the neural pathways (yes, cacao is mildly psychoactive) thereby opening our door of perception — our third eye and pineal gland.????????????‍♀️
(Continues in comments)
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Image credit @foreverceremonialcacao

October 18, 2019 Uncategorized

2019-10-18 07:57:29

When prayer becomes a habit, miracles become a lifestyle.
Walk in beauty. Live your magic.
xo Ixchel
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#miracles #walkinbeauty #flowstates #sadhana #kundaliniyoga #koyopa

October 17, 2019 Uncategorized

2019-10-17 10:05:47

Where were you 30 years ago when the #lomaprieta earthquake struck?
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I was waiting for the Bay World Series to start and the cable went out. It was new so I thought there was an issue. I got up, holding my 10-day old standing at the TV fiddling with the cable when it hit. ????????
I realized it was an earthquake and moved to the doorway. My neighbor ran out of her house screaming into the middle of the street and a pickup truck screeched to a halt almost hitting her.
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She was from the mid-west and moved back a few days later.

I eventually became trained crisis response. Being prepared reduces pre-event worry stress and makes you available to support those around you when the big one hits. ????????‍♀️ Where were you on 10/17/89? Are you ready for the next big one?
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#earthquake #beready #knowyourneighbor

October 16, 2019 Uncategorized

2019-10-16 18:52:07

Be fierce, Love. ????????‍♀️????
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Repost @atxsarah
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Quite. ????
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#wednesdaywisdom #gurujagat #gentle #fierce #kundaliniyoga #kundalini #40daychallenge

October 6, 2019 Uncategorized

2019-10-06 17:57:50

30 years ago I was in labor with my first daughter. It was also a Capricorn moon, like my own, when I get sh*t done. I labored for 38 hours. I was 17 and treated like a child. Unable to move, strapped to a birth monitor with artificial oxytocin (pitocin) for the last 15 hours.

She was a caulbearer (born in the veil), but the doctor removed it as she was emerging. A very sensitive soul. She was rushed not to my arms, but to a recovery room with lights to alleviate jaundice.
The most visceral of those fight or flight responses I’d become so accustom to happened as I was leaving the hospital. A hospitalized junkie had escaped into the elevator where I held my newborn in the wheelchair. Jittery, itching and talking to himself, I was ready for anything.

The injustices we went through birthed a time in my life of ending cycles of abuse. Married far too young, pregnant again within a half dozen weeks (some say related to caul births). The next birth would be at home on my terms, interrupting old patterns became my life.

What seems like an injustice can become a gift, even a rebirth, as we learn to shift the narrative, end the old patterns.

Eight months later I took a blow to my pregnant belly which awakened my inner jaguar mama. My own twin sister was taken from me in the womb through male-violence. Never again.

Learning nervous system reset from PTSD, or recovering from a lifetime of trauma may take years. Talk therapy, Buddhist meditation, bodywork, altered states of consciousness through psychedelics, and breathwork all required precious time. Though the last two much less time.

Kundalini Yoga is a middle path for me, using breathwork to reset the nervous system, even create altered states without the intensity of psychedelic medicines.
Transformation through conscious pattern interruptions happens much quicker than traditional forms of therapy and meditations. The work is multifaceted, occurring on physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and subtle realms through breathing, movement and meditation.

Stay tuned for my upcoming Shakti School — “Breath of the Cosmos, a Meditation for Radical Self-Love” — we will explore the facets of Kundalini Yoga
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October 6, 2019 Uncategorized

2019-10-06 06:12:45

Give yourself time…
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Repost @alana_fairchild Let’s surrender into the magnificence of our own divine nature. ????????????
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#morningritual #changemakers #banroundup #youarelight #rainbowlight #walkinbeauty #findyourhive #kundalini #koyopa #kundaliniyoga #alchemist #intuition #liveyourmagic #wildfit #knowthyself #kylecease

September 30, 2019 Uncategorized

2019-09-30 07:58:35

Last week I went to a local park while I was in Miami and discovered there were no bees. I’ve been in a wistful state of grief and anxiety since that walk in the park.
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I scanned the park for flowers. Not much blooming. As a beekeeper I tend to take stock of flora for bee foraging automatically.
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Thinking maybe it’s late in the season, even though it’s the tropics and I’ve seen bees that live outside on trees over winter in Florida. I kept scanning. I found patches of clover on the grass. No bees.
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Devastated, I couldn’t even sit and meditate like I had planned. Too hot. And it felt hollow and dead. I was relieved to see a giant lizard in the mangroves.
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As a child, I would lay in the clover at William Land Park, under the stretching sycamore canopy, listening to the hum of bees all around me. The cool damp grass on my back.
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Finding no bees in the clover has shaken my core. My neighbor recently sprayed their property and it wiped out my last native melipona beehive. I don’t want to keep bees here now. It’s now a death trap, not a sanctuary.
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Bees are going to be a central theme in my upcoming 40-day meditation challenge, Breath of the Cosmos: a meditation for Radical Self-Love.
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As I prepare to launch this week, I encourage you to keep an eye out for our pollinators. Do what you can to plant bee forage for them this winter in the northern hemisphere. (My seasonal planting guide has tons of ideas, link in bio). And put out a water spot for them in Southern Hemisphere.
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Meditation has helped me find resilience for climate chaos, sitting with what comes up, especially my grief for Pachamama and her kin. Thank you for looking out for our pollinators.
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Repost @photoe.m
#clover #wildflower #beemagic #bees #pinkflowers #climatestrike #savethebees???? #meditationchallenge