There are many practices that
cause kundalini to rise and fall through the
charkas. Many
times, a particular practice will have a whole
religion dedicated to it, sometimes professing
it as the one and only way to Enlightenment.
In his book Autobiography
of a Yogi,
Paramahansa Yogananda reveals the ancient spiritual
practice of Kriya Yoga. One
kriya is
the cycle of raising the kundalini through the
charkas from the root, located in the sacrum,
to the crown at the top of the head and then
back down again. Yogananda writes that
Kriya Yoga can “burn off” one’s
karma at an accelerated rate for the purpose
of accelerating spiritual advancement. Yogananda
is reported to have said that one well-done kriya
is worth twelve years of good clean living. In
early printings of Autobiography of a Yogi, I
remember reading Yogananda saying that Lathi
was taught at his school in Ranchi. More
recent copies do not mention it. I do not
know why.
Lathi is such a spiritual practice. It
is a moving, physical, whole-body meditation
mantra that harmonizes body, mind and spirit
by moving kundalini energy. Its central
idea is continuous circles, which describe
the figure-8 or infinity sign. The movement
of Lathi is balanced, organized, symmetrical,
stimulating, soothing, pulsing, wavelike, meditative,
healing, therapeutic, dance, exercise and fun.
The movement of Lathi is continuous and repetitive…what
we in the western world might call hypnotic. It
moves kundalini (energy) through the body and
evokes a deeply internal meditative state on
a physical body level. I am the kind of
person who had limited results with “meditation”,
as in sitting cross-legged and trying to empty
my mind. This on the other hand, is very
active. It is a physical moving-mantra
meditation that creeps so deeply into my
total being that it reaches to the core of my
mind and calms it. If you love meditation,
this is for you. If you have gotten nowhere
trying to meditate and wish you could love it,
this is really for you. It is
an extraordinary experience. I highly recommend
it.
Although Lathi shares many principles with other
martial arts, it is totally unique from any
other I have encountered in the world. Of
all the martial arts I have seen, most are
from the Orient; ie: China, Japan, Okinawa,
Korea, etc. These martial arts have one
thing in common – they use the dan-tien as
their energy center. The dan-tien is
two fingers below the navel and corresponds
to the solar plexus. This relatively
low center of gravity causes these martial
arts to be mostly performed out of a knees-bent
crouch, which is called horse stance.
The energy center of Lathi, on the other hand,
is the heart chakra. This higher
center of gravity allows the Lathet (practitioner
of Lathi; pronounced la tet) to practice
from a higher, longer, more extended posture. This
provides a natural alignment with gravity that
balances, orders and aligns the body with the
earth’s gravity field. This means
that Lathi can be used as a powerful therapeutic
tool to heal the human body of all kinds
of chronic and acute structural troubles.
It is worth noting that in dan-tien-centered
martial arts, belly breathing is the
predominant pattern. In Lathi, the higher heart
center allows for the breath to flow into the
high chest. The high chest breath moves
energy, nourishes the heart and lifts the body
structure into a natural and therapeutic alignment
with gravity.
Lathi is not only a deeply powerful spiritual
practice and healing therapeutic tool. It
is a devastatingly dangerous martial art. It
is the big guns of the martial arts. And
make no mistake about it – it is not
a gentlemanly game. It was taught to
me as the dirty street fighting of the martial
arts. The object is to win. My
Master, who was an ultimate man of peace, taught
me that even in a spiritual world, I have the
right to protect myself. He said,
“If somebody hits you once, you hit him 100
times; Quick-quick, fast-fast.”
One day, we had class in a park. Not far
away, a sword class was wrapping up and we chatted
with the instructor. In this martial art,
they attack with bamboo canes that represent
swords and they wear body armor because they
hit full on. Interestingly enough, there
is no leg armor. My Master asked, “How
do you defend the legs?” The
reply was, “We don’t attack the legs;
it’s against
the rules.”
As we walked away to our car, my Master, this
man of God and peace said to me, his jet-black
eyes twinkling, rolling the “r’s” in
his lilting Indian accent, “This is a game. In
a real fight, the first thing I would do is break
his knees.”
And there you have it, the dichotomy. On
the one hand, Lathi is a gentle, soothing, healing,
elegant, lyrical, loving, sacred and spiritual
way to move the human body. At the same
time, it is an efficient and effective system
to quickly bust a body up in the most damaging
and painful ways.
Perhaps Lathi is a lot like the India it comes
from: On the one hand holy and peaceful
and yet, not long ago, India was moments from
an unspeakable nuclear war with its neighbor
Pakistan. The lesson for me is that energy
is impartial and impersonal. It can be
used to heal and create or it can be used as
a most powerful weapon. Such is Lathi.
I have been blessed with a unique profession. I
do a rare and powerful form of Therapeutic Bodywork
called Rolfing® Structural Integration. Trained
at the Rolf Institute® in Boulder, Colorado,
I am expert in the field of human physical structure.
I became interested in Rolfing after I met Dr.
Ida P. Rolf (1896-1979) in 1972. I experienced
Rolfing in 1973. I learned through this
experience that the human body is not what we
have taken it for. It is not what society
tells us it is. It is not what the western
medical establishment says it is and it certainly is
not what we were taught about it in high school
physical education. (By the way, Dr. Rolf
called “physical education” as it
is taught in American schools a misnomer and
I can’t help but to agree with her.)
My Structural Integration experience demonstrated
to me that Dr. Rolf was absolutely correct in
her assertion that the body is a plastic
medium. She taught that gravity
is the therapist. Her life work demonstrates
that the human body frame can be released from
its chronic pattern of collapse in gravity and aligned
with the gravitational field of the earth.
What a concept! Imagine the good news
it would be to the world that bodies do not just
have to collapse, dis-integrate and fail with
use and age. Bodies can be put back
together. How about that!
Early in my Rolfing career, I realized that
when a body loses its alignment with gravity,
the next thing that disappears is the possibility
of balanced movement. I knew this
was true because I had experienced it in my own
body. I knew that there had to be a practice
that would teach the body how to move in a balanced
fashion. When I found Lathi, my heart sang
because I knew instantly that this was the missing
piece.
Over the decades, I have drawn some interesting
distinctions about Lathi. I knew that the movement of
Lathi is a powerful therapeutic tool to
help bodies to heal and to move according to
their anatomical design. But I
also knew that learning a martial art is too
far, too much for many people who don’t
want to fight; they just want to feel better. There
is also another segment of the population who
want to exercise in a balanced, sane and sensible
way that does not take them apart like most sports
and calisthenics do. I knew that I had
to find a way to separate the movement from
the combat.
And that is exactly what I did. I extracted
the pure human body movement from the
martial art known as Lathi and I created a system
of balanced body movement that I named Balanced~Movement. (© 2000—Texas
School For Structural Integration.)
Balanced~Movement is ancient wisdom for
modern times about how the human body
moves and how it does not. It is tremendously
valuable to Therapeutic Bodywork on many
levels. Balanced~Movement taught me how
to find my center from where all movement
radiates through the body and out into the
world. I found that every movement validated
what I had experienced about Ida P. Rolf’s
work. In Structural Integration, we talk
about gravity, line, core, balance, length,
extension, order and movement. In Balanced~Movement,
I found that I could experience all these concepts
on a physical body level. Now as a Structural
Integrator, I am better able to transmit this
valuable information into the bodies and the
consciousness of my clients.
As a Structural Integrator, I am especially
interested in the effects that Balanced~Movement
has upon the body structure. The movement
is organized so that every vector of force is counterbalanced by
a matching and opposite vector. This takes
place in all dimensions, left-to-right, front-to-back,
top-to-bottom, and that most elusive of balance—inside-to-outside
or as we know it in Structural Integration, core-to-sleeve. The
result of this symmetry and balance is
that the entire body is in full balanced motion
except for only one still point — the
center.
Structural Integration and Balanced~Movement
combined to give me my first experience of a still
center. It is from this place that
I strive to work and to impart that experience
to my clients.
In 2000, I established the Texas School
For Structural Integration, the first
and only school in Texas to teach the Ida
P. Rolf Method of Structural Integration. Dr.
Rolf considered that Structural Integration
is incomplete without a balanced movement form
and I agree. Therefore, at the Texas
School For Structural Integration, Balanced~Movement
is an integral part of
training. There is an organized Balanced~Movement
curriculum that is built right into our Structural
Integration training. Graduate practitioners
may be licensed by the Guild For Therapeutic
Bodywork as Balanced~Movement Teachers. They
may then incorporate private Balanced~Movement
lessons and classes into their Structural Integration
practice.
There are Balanced~Movement classes for the
general public taught right here in Austin, Texas. See
our school website for the schedule. www.TXschoolforSI.com
©Balanced~Movement is
a copyright (2000) of the
Texas School For Structural Integration Austin,
Texas USA
Rolfing® is a registered service mark
of the Rolf Institute®, Boulder, Co.
This training program is not sponsored
by nor affiliated with the Rolf Institute®,
Boulder, Co. USA
The instructor of this training program
is not a faculty member of the
Rolf Institute®, Boulder, Co. USA
 How Nityananda got from India to America is
not my story to tell. I was living in Boulder,
Colorado, and I met him because dear friends
and business associates of mine had converted
the basement of their home into a small apartment,
which they rented out. In 1972, Nityananda
moved in to live there. I saw him practically
every day and I got to know and like him.
Nityananda was a Siddhapurusha, which
means he had powers. He was a real live
Hindu Tantric Holy Man of God, fresh off the
plane from a lifetime in the countryside and
monasteries of northern India. Nobody knew
his birthday or his age, not even him. They
don’t keep track of such things where he
is from. His mother is said to believe
he was born in the mango season but she did not
know what year. Because mangos in India
are harvested in the Fall, we assigned him a
September birthday and that was okay with him. He
was ageless and it was very difficult to guess
his age by his appearance. He used to say, “To
the children, I am a child. To the old
men, I am an old man.” It was true.
Nityananda was a little man about 5’ 2” tall
with chocolate skin, jet-black hair, a jet-black
beard and jet-black eyes. If you know how
to spot such things, it was apparent that he
had been malnourished as a child but he was lively
and vigorous at all times. His eyes twinkled
but they could also pierce and he spoke in a
lilting Indian accent with rolling “r’s”. He
loved to joke and laugh and he did so all the
time.
I knew Nityananda for a few years and I’d
heard rumors that he was the master of a strange
and unique martial art that nobody had ever heard
of. He was the youngest of five brothers
and the story was that he had to learn Lathi
extra fast because his older brothers took delight
in beating him to accelerate his training.
I was particularly interested in Lathi because,
as a youth, I had what Structural Integrators
call an imploded core. This is
a structural condition that is not recognized
by western medical science. My body was
like a beer can with all the air sucked out of
it. Some people might have called me just
a skinny little kid but it was more complex than
that. I was always smaller than other kids
my age and I had a whole childhood full of bullies,
some younger but bigger than me who pushed me
around.
Also, about three years previous, I had been
robbed at knifepoint on the streets of New York
City. While it was happening, I remember
my humiliation and looking at my robber and thinking, “If
only I knew how to defend myself, this could
turn out very different.” I also
knew that no matter how well I defended, I could
just as easily end up stabbed and dead. Nonetheless,
I knew deep in my soul that Nityananda had something
that I needed to complete myself. I asked
him for a private consultation. It was just before
Christmas, 1974.
When I arrived at his apartment, he immediately
invited me in to join him in a meal. His
living room was fully furnished with sofas and
chairs but we sat on the floor. He ate
rice out of a bowl with his fingers and he served
me some too. I took one bite and my whole
head instantly lit on fire. Tears filled
my eyes and my neck and forehead broke into a
heavy sweat. My throat clamped shut and
I couldn’t talk. I was breathing
in gasps. Steam must have shot out of my
ears because Nityananda threw back his head and
laughed his rollicking laugh. He
said, “Curry! Is good! Hot
like India.”
When we stopped laughing and I could again speak,
he got serious. His expression changed
and he looked me square in the eyes, this time
without a trace of humor and said, “I want
to teach you how to meditate.” I
looked back squarely into his jet-black eyes
and just as firmly, I said, “I have no
interest whatever in learning how to meditate.” This
surprised him and he was briefly taken aback. He
quickly recomposed himself and just as seriously,
he asked, “So what do you want from me?” I
choked back a small sob and said, “I want
you to teach me how to fight.”
“Aaahhh,” he said. “Lathi.”
“Yes,” I whispered from my soul
through my stinging throat, “Lathi.”
Our eyes locked and he looked deep into me for
quite some time. Then he reached behind
for a pencil and a small piece of paper. He
wrote on the paper and handed it to me. He
said, “You be here.”
I looked and on the paper was a date, time and
place for me to show up for my first Lathi lesson. The
date on the paper was the first Saturday in January
of 1975.
On that day, I showed up at the appointed time
and place. You might remember that Nityananda
wanted to teach me how to meditate and I told
him I wasn’t interested. The funniest
part about my first lesson and all the other
lessons that followed was that Nityananda began
the class with…you guessed it… a
15-minute meditation. Then he taught
the lesson. Then we finished up with…you
guessed it…a 15-minute meditation. It
turns out that the whole thing is meditation. So
we both got our way.
There was only one other person there at my first
lesson, a woman who showed up for a few more
lessons and then I never saw her again. In
fact, over the next six years, many people
came and went. In that time period, about
200 or more people came for Lathi lessons. Out
of those, about 20 people stuck with it long
enough to get pretty good. Out of those
20, about ten took it seriously enough to learn
it well. Those individuals are now out
in the world somewhere and I haven’t
heard from any of them in more than 30 years.
Nityananda did not seem to have an ordered way
for presenting the lessons. Perhaps there
was one but I didn’t see it. Nor
did he really teach at all in the sense that
a tennis coach, for example, breaks down each
technique into its component parts and corrects
mistakes before bad habits develop. Nityananda
merely did a technique or move and then said, “You
do this.” Then he let us fumble
and find our own way.
And fumble I did! I was not a natural
at the martial arts. Au contraire. I
struggled with it until even my best friends
were telling me, “Give it up, Ritchie,
before you hurt yourself.” It took me a
year to find my feet but I did. It took
me longer to find my center but I did. Then
an amazing thing happened.
After 2 years, I had an ahhah! moment and
I suddenly got the “big picture” of
what Lathi was about. It was an amazing
experience and it changed my life forever. Nityananda saw
it instantly and congratulated me by saying, “You
learn slowly but for long time.” He
was right. I struggled with it seemingly
forever but when I had my big breakthrough, I
knew that I would never again “not have
it”.
I was a Lathet. Nityananda had initiated me
into an 8000-year lineage of Great Masters who
love me deeply, smiled upon me and gave me a
precious gift. I thank you forever.
In the midst of my ahhah! moment,
I had a vision of how Lathi could be organized
so that the techniques are taught in a more learnable
order. Like words of a language, I saw
that complex techniques came out of, or were
related to, other simpler ones. I
saw that a lot of what I was taught was out of
order. I saw a hierarchy of complexity
that suggested a logical curriculum.
A lot of this awareness came from long years
of teaching music. I started playing music
entirely by ear at age 8. When I was 15,
I was teaching adults how to play. Frankly,
most of them had no innate talent so I had to
break down the instruction into component parts
with logical steps that went from beginning to
end, from simple to complex. And from that,
they learned and they played music. My
guarantee to my music students was this: If
you do what I say, you will learn how to play. And
they did.
That is what I did with Lathi. That is
also how I created the Balanced~Movement curriculum
out of Lathi. I designed an organized curriculum
to teach Lathi so that anybody can learn it. It
is taught simply and logically and any beginner
can enter the class at any time.
One way Nityananda taught that was great, was
that he ran the class like a one-room schoolhouse. He
had an amazing ability to compartmentalize the
people by ability levels and oversee the whole
class like an air traffic controller looking
down over the whole airport from up in the tower. He
kept traffic moving by assigning those who had “gotten” a
technique to help teach it to the newer students. Everybody
was learning and everybody was teaching. It
allowed Nityananda to manage a very large class
by himself and that is how I teach it today.
Did you ever hear of or study Lathi? Are
you a Lathet? Do you know anybody who has
studied it, a friend or a relative? I am
eager to connect with anyone who knows Lathi
and I am hungry to learn more and to play.
The great futurist R. Buckminister Fuller said
that humans should leave behind tools and
artifacts so that future generations can
learn the ways. I am dedicated to leaving
all I know about Lathi in writings and in video
format as a legacy for the future. My
goal is to document my entire body of knowledge
of Lathi into teachable, learnable lessons
and make them available on the Internet so
that anybody in the world can learn it.
Siddhapurusha Nityananda lit a fire that has
warmed me since that cool crisp Boulder Saturday
in January, 1975.
Will
it catch? Will it spread?
Watch this website and we’ll see.
Lathi in Your Town
Would you like to learn Lathi or Balanced~Movement
in your hometown?
The possibilities are endless.
Write or email.
Educational Materials
Lathi Sticks
Lathi curriculum |
