Day 7:

The past couple of days I've been getting mild but noticeable sensations of light pressure and heat of a 2-inch diameter at the crown of my skull. Since I've been doing a number of sadhanas, I may have to observe more closely for a few more days before I can suss out the cause. It may be some mix of the kapalabhati with the Saturn sadhana, although I don't feel this immediately after doing kapalabhati.

Also, I am doing Juru 1 (Pencak Silat martial arts kriya) using quite high intra-abdominal pressure, considerably higher than what is instructed or what is taught in KAP. I find that if I don't push down from my solar plexus while I'm drawing the belly in and pulling up on the pelvic floor, that it is quite easy for the pressure to go up to my thoracic region. In the beginning of Juru 1, I wasn't pushing down and I had the pressure go up into my physical heart, and it was honestly a bit frightening b/c my heart felt like it was being highly stressed from the internal pressure and potentially would get damaged if I kept doing that.... so I've been trying to be more careful. Note, I still feel some thoracic pressure once I exhale the Juru 1 internal breath retention... (need to talk to Santiago about this, although he's quite busy.)

In other news, during my last mala round of the day, two karmic interactions from the past (one recently and another years ago) came to me spontaneously, and almost instantly I proceeded to go into a very beautiful almost spontaneous mahamudra chöd experience with both cases -- there was one in particular (the older one) that I always had trouble facing, and with chöd it was enormously smoother. At no point did I turn away from the recall; I stayed with it, with the wish to be more present, resulting in the bliss experience of the chöd amplifying -- bliss and emptiness are truly the perfect couple. It helped to titrate the impressions of Tao's KAP3 mahamudra transmission; this wasn't effortful; it just felt like one stream converged with another. As this was occurring, I was hit by the realization of how easy and simple it is to apply mahamudra chöd to personal interactions -- hehe, now I will just have to try to actually put that realization into practice 　 Anyway, in the experience, I consciously facilitated the clearing, and I went into deep spinal-undulating kriyas (not sure how I would handle kriyas with on-the-spot mahamudra in personal interactions... Once the kriyas subsided, I felt compelled to do Ho'oponopono with the person with whom I'd had that interaction. At least 50% of the immediate interaction karma was cleared... there are deeper soul-level and causal layers that may warrant further attention.

What a ride! Saturn really gets things moving -- and it feels good! At least so far -- I've learned that consciousness has a trick it plays on me constantly: expansive experiences transpire, seemingly almost just to prepare me for a subsequent/eventual deep dive into transformation of some kind. An analogy for Saturn: feels like boba tea tapioca balls bubbling up sushumna, each black ball being a caked up karmic sludge composite coming up for processing. Maybe I'll have a better analogy in a few weeks ;) Also, I didn't sleep relatively well last night, and as a result there was an increased effort required to pay attention to the mantra. Next time, some extra inversion and kapalabhati ought to do the trick. That was long-winded -- thanks for reading!