The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart

Some Distinctions between Waking Down® and The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart™

Some people may be concerned that our bringing out The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart implies that there are things missing or wrong with Waking Down. But it is a simple reality that no single approach can be all things to all people.

Waking Down is an amazing breakthrough path that, in unique ways, democratizes embodied awakeness in profoundly engaged mutuality. The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart is a more specialized path that likely will attract fewer people. There is ample room for both in the greater community of our shared work – and hopefully there will be room for other distinctive approaches to emerge as well.

In addition, The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart approach requires its practitioners to have substantial knowledge and significant grounding in the practice of Waking Down in Mutuality® (which is simply another, more complete name for Waking Down). This is very clear to us and will become clear to anyone who studies these two teachings in any detail. The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart does not supplant Waking Down. It relies upon its basic principles, teachings, and practices, yet also builds upon them and reframes one's orientation to life and practice in unique ways. The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart honors Waking Down and celebrates its unique gifts and offerings to all practitioners that this newer yoga cannot – and does not need to – duplicate in different forms.

(By the way, we both, Saniel and Linda continue to teach Waking Down. Our second major core curriculum course, The Human Sun Seminar, is our original formulation of the fundamental principles of Waking Down – without the addition of non-Waking Down elements from The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart or elsewhere.)

Here are four examples of distinctions between the two teachings and their cultures of practice. Each of them comes from one of the four triads of The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart's "12 Mysterious Gateways to Advanced Evolutionary Emergence":

Three Foundations of the Way:
  The Heart, White Heat, Activation
The Heart is the most fundamental of these three foundational gateways of The White-Hot Yoga. As the Waking Down work evolved democratically over the last two decades, this most primary principle of Saniel's original teachings never became a significant factor in the Waking Down teachings.

Three Treasures of the Life:
  Adept, Teaching, Community
Gratefully derived from the Buddhist teachings on the "Triple Gem" of the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, this triad of gateways explores mysteries of mastery and lineage beyond both guru-centrism and aspirant-centrism and what it means to truly cultivate and cherish these treasures, for the Good of all. Waking Down is more specifically aspirant-centric.

Three Pillars on the Path:
  Individuation, Communion, Appreciation
The paradoxes of individuation as reciprocal autonomy and communion as radical co-participation in the Onlyness of Being – and how profound appreciation of self and other in this Way may take appropriate tangible and practical forms not generally emphasized in Waking Down.

Three Stages of the Journey:
  Persona, Person, Personification
The Waking Down work generally addresses issues related to Second Birth awakening – the passage from being an unawakened Persona into the early life of an awakened Person. The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart introduces and develops a passage of potentially equal significance: the growth beyond awakened Personhood into "Personification of the awakening cosmos." Paradoxically, this shift is at least as humbling as it is exalting, and requires years of tempering and refinement in one's awakened life.