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(Stillness in the Storm Editor) The following is a series of articles and commentary regarding the notion we should never cut our hair—any of it. It details the historical, anecdotal and scientific evidence for this idea, which in my view (if considered fully) is quite compelling.
Speaking as someone who has spent years cutting my head and body hair, I must admit that every time I do so I feel quite different. I used to shave almost my whole body because I felt ugly, but in the past years, I’ve developed more of an appreciation for my natural form.
I think part of the reason why transitioning away from this seemingly benign practice of cutting our hair is because of the social stigma that would come with it. I’m sure most of us can say we remember one time in our lives where we made fun of someone because of the way they looked or were on the receiving end of such juvenile behavior. No one likes to feel like a social outcast, but considering the severely sickened state of those doing the outcasting, perhaps we shouldn’t put stock in the judgments of a socially mind-controlled and disempowered population.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
In our world of keeping up with appearances, where most people judge us by what we look like instead of the fullness of who we are, maintaining a “good look” feels like a security blanket. For myself, I used to feel very uncomfortable around other people if I didn’t at least try to maintain a socially acceptable appearance.
Consider that we’ve been indoctrinated to fear and loath the natural state of our bodies, subconsciously entrained through non-stop commercialized media to develop a physical ideal that is out of balance and unrealistic. We’re trained to consider our bodies as meat sacks filled with disgusting secretions, smells, and instincts that must—at all costs—be suppressed, scraped away and subjugated. The price of this disharmonious vision of beauty is a sickness of mind and body. How often do we look at ourselves in the mirror naked and say “I am beautiful.”
I was always cutting my hair because I didn’t feel whole or complete not doing so. I just didn’t feel comfortable in the world if I couldn’t “fit-in,” which is a subtle message or belief that I don’t accept myself as I am and therefore I loathe my natural state. Clearly, this isn’t a healthy way of being, and this self-loathing state of mind has become the norm in most cultures.
It is perfectly acceptable in society to feel this way about ourselves—which is what marketing companies and the people behind them want. Consumers don’t buy products or services when they feel perfectly in balance and healthy of mind and body, thus getting us to believe we aren’t whole is a primary tool for making us desire things we don’t really need.
But as I started to gain more knowledge of self and how so much of our society is twisted and unproductive, I began to appreciate my organic nature. The more I love who I am in fullness and build my inner foundation of self-acceptance and esteem, the less I needed the acceptance from others—especially from the throngs of a culture that has very little knowledge of self and is therefore easily manipulated. And I think this is important to realize if we decide to make the transition of letting our hair grow fully, as the below article suggests.
At the time of this writing, I still cut my hair—I just did it two days ago—but I know that it’s time to make a change. And I’m not sure if it would be possible to even consider this if I had not made progress in healing my sense of self beforehand. Part of the problem with making changes is that we can tend to ignore the inner world that spawns the outer in the first place.
In short, before we can change anything about ourselves, we have to realize what ideal was guiding our behavior, and then seek to change that by using the power of imagination. A process that can often be facilitated by re-education—or deprograming of false beliefs.
Again, through indoctrination and social engineering, we’re shown a vision of beauty that advertisers want us to accept so we can keep buying their products. Therefore, we must discern that these ideals—while being socially accepted by most of the planet’s population—are not healthy, realistic, or even scientifically valid. We have to deconstruct the illusions of beauty and health we’ve been shown and from those ashes allow a more holistic and balanced vision of health to fill our mind-space.
The following information can help retune our visions of what a healthy and beautiful person is—one that has long uncut hair in this case. But like all personal changes, moderation to account for the inner work that needs be done is essential. If we try to rush things along, it can often lead to feelings of discouragement—whether you’re trying to grow your hair long or just change your diet.
As a final note, and keeping in harmony with the causal principles of effecting change, remember that everything that is manifest in the outer world first existed as an idea in consciousness. Therefore, till the fields of your mind wisely, feed it the food of truth and allow these waters to flow to the depths of your being. If done properly, once we have fully restored emotional balance, then the outer world will change quickly and with little turbulence.
by Deva Kaur Khalsa, 2015
“Our hair fashions might be just a trend, but if we investigate, we may find that we have been depriving ourselves of one of the most valuable sources of energy for human vitality.” -Yogi Bhajan
Consider the possibility that the hair on your head is there to do more than just look good. Man is the only creature who grows longer hair on his head as he grows into adulthood. Left uncut, your hair will grow to a particular length and then stop all by itself at the correct length for you. From a yogic perspective, hair is an amazing gift of nature that can actually help raise the Kundalini energy (creative life force), which increases vitality, intuition, and tranquility.
Cut Hair
Long ago people in many cultures didn’t cut their hair, because it was a part of who they were. There were no salons. Often, when people were conquered or enslaved, their hair was cut as a recognized sign of slavery. It was also understood that this would serve as punishment and decrease the power of those enslaved.
The bones in the forehead are porous and function to transmit light to the pineal gland, which affects brain activity, as well as thyroid and sexual hormones. Cutting bangs which cover the forehead impedes this process.
When Genghis Khan conquered China, he considered the Chinese to be a very wise, intelligent people who would not allow themselves to be subjugated. He therefore required all women in the country to cut their hair and wear bangs, because he knew this would serve to keep them timid and more easily controlled.
As whole tribes or societies were conquered, cut hair became so prevalent that the importance of hair was lost after a few generations, and hairstyles and fashion grew to be the focus.
The science of hair was one of the first technologies given by Yogi Bhajan when he came to America.
“When the hair on your head is allowed to attain its full, mature length, then phosphorous, calcium, and vitamin D are all produced, and enter the lymphatic fluid, and eventually the spinal fluid through the two ducts on the top of the brain. This ionic change creates more efficient memory and leads to greater physical energy, improved stamina, and patience.”
Yogi Bhajan explained that if you choose to cut your hair, you not only lose this extra energy and nourishment, but your body must then provide a great amount of vital energy and nutrients to continually re-grow the missing hair.
In addition, hairs are the antennas that gather and channel the sun energy or prana to the frontal lobes, the part of the brain you use for meditation and visualization. These antennas act as conduits to bring you greater quantities of subtle, cosmic energy. It takes approximately three years from the last time your hair was cut for new antennas to form at the tips of the hair.
Kundalini Hair Care
In India, a Rishi is known as a wise one who coils his or her hair up on the crown of the head during the day to energize the brain cells, and then combs it down at night. A ‘rishi knot’ energizes your magnetic field (aura) and stimulates the pineal gland in the center of your brain.
“This activation of your pineal results in a secretion that is central to the development of higher intellectual functioning, as well as higher spiritual perception.” -Yogi Bhajan
During the day, the hair absorbs solar energy, but at night it absorbs lunar energy. Keeping the hair up during the day and down at night aids in this process. Braiding your hair at night will help your electromagnetic field balance out from the day.
Split Ends
Loose scattered hair can develop split ends. Instead of trimming them and losing your antennas, Yogi Bhajan recommends applying a small amount of almond oil to your hair overnight so that it can be absorbed before you wash it the next morning. Keeping your hair coiled on your crown and protected with a head covering during the day will help your antennas heal. If you have long hair, see if your experience is different when it is clean and coiled at your crown, or down and loose.
Wet Hair
One year after Winter Solstice, when Yogi Bhajan was sitting in our living room with wet hair, he explained that he was drying it before putting it up in order to avoid a headache. When you put your hair up wet, it will tend to shrink and tighten a bit and even break as it dries. A better idea is to occasionally take the time to sit in the sun and allow your clean, wet hair to dry naturally and absorb some extra vitamin D.
Yogis recommend shampooing the hair every 72 hours (or more frequently if the scalp sweats a great deal). It can also be beneficial to wash your hair after being upset to help process emotions.
Yogis also recommend using a wooden comb or brush for combing your hair as it gives a lot of circulation and stimulation to the scalp, and the wood does not create static electricity, which causes a loss of the hair’s energy to the brain. You will find that, if you comb your hair and scalp front to back, back to front, and then to the right and left several times, it will refresh you, no matter how long your hair is.
All the tiredness of your day will be gone. For women, it is said that using this technique to comb your hair twice a day can help maintain youth, a healthy menstrual cycle, and good eyesight.
If you are bald or balding, the lack of hair energy can be counteracted with more meditation. If you are finding some silver strands in your hair, be aware that the silver or white color increases the vitamins and energy flow to compensate for aging. For better brain health as you age, try to keep your hair as natural and healthy as you can.
Tagore’s Hair
Yogi Bhajan told us this story about hair many years ago at Women’s Camp in New Mexico: Recognize how beautiful and powerful your hair is—when you keep it, you live a life of fulfillment in this world. When Rabindranath Tagore, the great poet who found God within himself, tried to meet a friend on a steamer ship, the friend didn’t recognize him and so wrote him a letter.
“We were on the same steamer, but I didn’t find you.” Tagore said, “I was there.” His friend said, “I understand you are now a God-realized man, and I would like to know what your first action was when you became aware of the Oneness in all.” Tagore said, “When I realized the Oneness of all, I threw my shaving kit into the ocean. I gave up my ego and surrendered to nature. I wanted to live in the form that my Creator has given me.”
When humans allow their hair to grow, they are welcoming the maturity, the responsibility of being fully-grown, and fully powerful. That is why you will find grace and calmness in a person with uncut hair from birth, if it is kept well. The Creator has a definite reason for giving you hair.
It is said that when you allow your hair to grow to its full length and coil it on the crown of the head, the sun energy, pranic life force, is drawn down the spine. To counteract that downward movement, the Kundalini life energy rises to create balance. In Yogi Bhajan’s words, “Your hair is not there by mistake. It has a definite purpose, which saints will discover and other men will laugh at.”
Deva Kaur Khalsa trains Kundalini Yoga Teachers and teaches Kundalini Yoga in South Florida. She was a student of Yogi Bhajan for over 39 years. She is co-owner of Yoga Source in Coral Springs, Florida
The Truth About Hair and Why Indians Would Keep Their Hair Long
by C. Young
This information about hair has been hidden from the public since the Viet Nam War.
Our culture leads people to believe that hair style is a matter of personal preference, that hair style is a matter of fashion and/or convenience, and that how people wear their hair is simply a cosmetic issue. Back in the Vietnam war however, an entirely different picture emerged, one that has been carefully covered up and hidden from public view.
In the early nineties, Sally [name changed to protect privacy] was married to a licensed psychologist who worked at a VA Medical hospital. He worked with combat veterans with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. Most of them had served in Vietnam.
Sally said, “I remember clearly an evening when my husband came back to our apartment on Doctor’s Circle carrying a thick official looking folder in his hands. Inside were hundreds of pages of certain studies commissioned by the government. He was in shock from the contents. What he read in those documents completely changed his life. From that moment on my conservative middle of the road husband grew his hair and beard and never cut them again. What is more, the VA Medical center let him do it, and other very conservative men in the staff followed his example.
As I read the documents, I learned why. It seems that during the Vietnam War special forces in the war department had sent undercover experts to comb American Indian Reservations looking for talented scouts, for tough young men trained to move stealthily through rough terrain. They were especially looking for men with outstanding, almost supernatural, tracking abilities. Before being approached, these carefully selected men were extensively documented as experts in tracking and survival.
With the usual enticements, the well proven smooth phrases used to enroll new recruits, some of these Indian trackers were then enlisted. Once enlisted, an amazing thing happened. Whatever talents and skills they had possessed on the reservation seemed to mysteriously disappear, as recruit after recruit failed to perform as expected in the field.
Serious causalities and failures of performance led the government to contract expensive testing of these recruits, and this is what was found.
When questioned about their failure to perform as expected, the older recruits replied consistently that when they received their required military haircuts, they could no longer ‘sense’ the enemy, they could no longer access a ‘sixth sense’, their ‘intuition’ no longer was reliable, they couldn’t ‘read’ subtle signs as well or access subtle extrasensory information.
So the testing institute recruited more Indian trackers, let them keep their long hair, and tested them in multiple areas. Then they would pair two men together who had received the same scores on all the tests. They would let one man in the pair keep his hair long, and gave the other man a military haircut. Then the two men retook the tests.
Time after time the man with long hair kept making high scores. Time after time, the man with the short hair failed the tests in which he had previously scored high scores.
Here is a Typical Test:
The recruit is sleeping out in the woods. An armed ‘enemy’ approaches the sleeping man. The long haired man is awakened out of his sleep by a strong sense of danger and gets away long before the enemy is close, long before any sounds from the approaching enemy are audible.
In another version of this test the long haired man senses an approach and somehow intuits that the enemy will perform a physical attack. He follows his ‘sixth sense’ and stays still, pretending to be sleeping, but quickly grabs the attacker and ‘kills’ him as the attacker reaches down to strangle him.
This same man, after having passed these and other tests, then received a military haircut and consistently failed these tests, and many other tests that he had previously passed.
So the document recommended that all Indian trackers be exempt from military haircuts. In fact, it required that trackers keep their hair long.”
Comment:
The mammalian body has evolved over millions of years. Survival skills of human and animal at times seem almost supernatural. Science is constantly coming up with more discoveries about the amazing abilities of man and animal to survive. Each part of the body has highly sensitive work to perform for the survival and well being of the body as a whole. The body has a reason for every part of itself.
Hair is an extension of the nervous system, it can be correctly seen as exteriorized nerves, a type of highly evolved ‘feelers’ or ‘antennae’ that transmit vast amounts of important information to the brain stem, the limbic system, and the neocortex.
Not only does hair in people, including facial hair in men, provide an information highway reaching the brain, hair also emits energy, the electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain into the outer environment. This has been seen in Kirlian photography when a person is photographed with long hair and then rephotographed after the hair is cut.
When hair is cut, receiving and sending transmissions to and from the environment are greatly hampered. This results in numbing-out .
Cutting of hair is a contributing factor to unawareness of environmental distress in local ecosystems. It is also a contributing factor to insensitivity in relationships of all kinds. It contributes to sexual frustration.
Conclusion:
In searching for solutions for the distress in our world, it may be time for us to consider that many of our most basic assumptions about reality are in error. It may be that a major part of the solution is looking at us in the face each morning when we see ourselves in the mirror.
The story of Sampson and Delilah in the Bible has a lot of encoded truth to tell us. When Delilah cut Sampson’s hair, the once undefeatable Sampson was defeated.
Reported by C. Young
“Human Hair – A Biological Necessity”
Nature (Wahe Guru) put every hair on your body for a reason. The hair of the legs regulates the glandular system and stabilizes a person’s electromagnetic field. The hair under the armpits protects the very sensitive area where the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems come together; this affects the brain and your energy level. Eyebrows protect the eyes from sun and sweat. Facial hair on men covers the moon center on the chin and protects them from excessive moon energy. The hair on top of the head is very long, while the hair on the body is short. If it were only for warmth, the hair on the body would be long also. We only have long hair right over the brain. We are practically the only creatures designed this way. Hair is your antenna to receive a picture of the subtle world around you, to tell when people are lying, to feel things before they happen, etc..
The natural intelligence of the body is to maintain its hairs. If you allow the hair on the head to grow undisturbed; it will grow to a certain length required by your body and then it will stop. Perhaps you have noticed among Sikhs who do not cut their hair that hair length is different for each person. Each body has its own requirement. The hair also reflects the health of the individual.
It has been proven scientifically that people who have long hair tend to be less tired, more energetic and less likely to become depressed. People who have long hair also conserve energy and don’t feel the cold of winter the same as people with short hair. A person who has short hair wastes his body’s energy. A person who cuts his hair over his lifetime forces the body to grow 22 meters of replacement hair. A person who keeps his hair only produces 1.5 meters of hair over his lifetime.
Think of the story of Samson and Delilah in the Bible! He lost his strength when she cut his hair! Another example of the power of hair: To humiliate the conquered people of China, Genghis Khan made them cut their hair and wear bangs over the forehead! (Bangs cover the 3rd eye, inhibiting intuition and subtle knowledge.)
Hair is a conductor of the body’s electromagnetic energy. Ever see how the antenna wire in an AM radio is coiled in a circle? That’s because of something called induction. Induction causes any conductor of electromagnetic energy to induce a current in adjacent conductors. This means that when you coil a conductor, the signal becomes much stronger. Hairs on top of the head act as antennae. They conduct energy into the body. Also, wearing the hair on top of the head protects the top of the head from sun and exposure, as well as channeling solar energy and improving vitamin D absorbtion. Yogis and Sikhs do not cut their hair, they coil or knot it on top of head on their solar center. In men the solar center is on top of the head at the front (anterior fontanel). Women have two solar centers: one is at the center of the crown chakra, the other is on top of the head towards the back (posterior fontanel). For both men and women, coiling or knotting the hair at the solar center channels one’s radiant energy and helps retain a spiritual focus.
This hair knot is traditionally called the “rishi” knot. In ancient times, a rishi was someone who had the capacity to control the flow of energy and prana in the body. A “maharishi” was someone who could regulate the flow of energy in the body, meditatively and at will. The rishi knot assists in the channeling of energy in meditation (Naam Simran). If one cuts off the hair, there can be no rishi knot. By giving us the rishi knot (and the turban) the Guru gave his Sikhs the blessing to have the capacity of a rishi._________________________
Stillness in the Storm Editor’s note: Did you find a spelling error or grammar mistake? Do you think this article needs a correction or update? Or do you just have some feedback? Send us an email at [email protected]. Thank you for reading.
Sources:
https://www.quantumbalancing.com/spiritualhair.htm
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jiddukrish107856.html
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You need not to shampoo your hair, “yogis” you say more like bogis :D now to get an real understanding what you are supposed to do with you hair check what Nithyananda has to say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSQW4iO57gs
It’s been 5 years since I trim or cut my hair. I get more compliments on my hair than I ever have.
It’s great to read this article. I needed this.