kriya-helper

This is a program to help guide you through Kundalini Kriyas The program is currently a "proof of concept" for personal use, but it will be refined and beautified so I can give it to friends too! Please feel free to use it now, too and offer any feedback if you'd like!

Context

In Kundalini Yoga, you practice a different kriyas for different intentions (like moving past emotional blockers, boosting your discipline, making money more fruitful, etc). The kriya will be made up of several components--some of them are movements (or asanas), and some of them are chants. The order of movements, and the time you spend doing them, is important and exact for the intention you are trying to manifest..

When practicing the kriya, you want to ideally move from section to section quickly and without thought. This way you can stay in the moment and intention. But if you are new to Kundalini (like I am!) then you often have to break the session to check the scribbled piece of paper where you wrote the kriya down, or you continually have to reset your timer between asanas. This def breaks the flow.

So this program has two major functions. The first is to be able to record my personal kriyas and make the program move through them at the right times, so that I can set them up quickly and not have to check my phone or scrap paper all the time. The second is to be able to share different kriyas among friends and quicky read about and load one up in your own helper.

Usage

You can use the helper right now, it works! But it's definitely rough, and the amount of poses (and kriyas) are small.

The way you would use it is to navigate to the kriyas folder and read the different ones there. Each one would explain the poses, and the reasons for them. Find the one you want to practice. Then call it with the kriya-helper. The helper will automatically bring in this specific kriya and guide you through it at the right times.

Dependencies
This program is written in Python 3, and so you would need Python 3.5+ to run it. Additionally, it uses the third-party module pyglet, which would need to be installed separately.

To set up both you will want to:

Open up your terminal, and check what version of Python3 you have. To do this:

python3 --version

If nothing comes, up you will need to install Python 3 from Python's page: https://www.python.org/downloads/

Then, install Pyglet. you can do this using Python's package manager pip. And so you'd enter the command.

pip3 install pyglet

And let it do it's thing.

Installation

Clone this repo onto your computer through git-ssb: git clone ssb://%bs+LbzBBxSK7ttCmf6ysfl0/8FTt4NYB+X6O8K0dbqE=.sha256 kriya-helper

Using It
move into the kriya-helper repo: cd kriya-helper

Browse through the current kriya's by navigating to the kriya folder

cd kriyas/
ls
cat kriya of your choice!

When you find the kriya you want to do, change directories back to the home kriya-helper, and then Initialize the app and kriya together with python3. This is how I would do the morning kriya:

#in /kriya-helper
python3 helper.py kriyas/morning-kriya.ini

If successful, you will see a big ascii "kriya helper" and can press enter to begin!

If you want to write up your own kriya. It is simple to do! you just want to save it as an ini file that follows this general format:

#file name in this case  is you-are-great.ini

[You Are Great]
;Now write the name of the pose, and how long you want to spend doing it.
Breath of Fire = 3
; you can write comments on their own line, by starting the line with a semi-colon
Cat Cow = 1
Chest Thump = 2
Hollow Body = 4

This file would run through each pose in order for the duration you've set.

Future

I want to make this code more elegant and modular. For example, all the kriyas are within a possiblefuncs class. I would rather that each one had it's own module within the asanas/ directory. This would make writing up new ones (and the help docs for them) easier(i think).

I want to write up help docs for each kriya and each pose, so that someone can start doing them without any prior knowledge of kundalini.

I want to boost the amount of poses available, and find some way to browse through them easily.

I will feel happy with this when people are able to share kundalini kriyas as digital ini files, and someone can then read thorugh all the notes about them and quickly load them into their helper. And even if someone doesn't have coding experience, the program itself makes general sense.

I don't want this to exist outside of the terminal, as one other aspect of this helper is to lay its code bare. I want it to be easy to use, but for someone to be learning how to navigate the terminal, write programs, and initialize scripts easily. So smart architecture and good help docs will be key I think!

Contributing

If yr keen on this program, I'd love your feedback! The helper is ultimately a way for me to learn python, and so it is rudimentary and maybe ugly right now. But if you have feedback on how to better style the code and interactions, please let me know! Also, if you have opininos on kriyas and asanas to add, also let me know!