Asana & Pranayama

Asana: Giving Structure to the Desire for Yoga
(from Jivamukti Yoga by David Life and Sharon Gannon)

Sit down!  Just sit down and hold still!  Sounds simple, but it's not so easy when you have a mind filled with thoughts moving this way and that.

The Sanskrit word asana is most commonly known as the name for the yogic practice of assuming various physical contortions, but it actually means "seat."  By taking a seat, you establish a connection to the Earth.  So asana, or the establishment of the seat, means the practice of connecting to the Earth.  By Earth we mean all things, all manifestations of reality.  Earth not only means the ground we walk on, the air we breathe, or the water we drink, but also all the beings--animals, plants, and minerals--that we come into contact with daily.  Through asana practice we consciously connect to a touchable, tangible, sense-able level of reality.

According to Patanjali, the seat that you establish should be steady and joyful, in body as well as mind.  The word asana, therefore, also describes the goal of this yoga practice, which is to consciously relate to all beings with steadiness and joy...

Once you have established a seat, you are grounded and can begin to play with prana, the life force.  The form of cosmic energy that moves a muscle is electrical.  Electrical energy moves through nerves to the muscles, causing them to respond in a certain way.  Your ability to articulate the muscles depends on your ability to control these electrical impulses inside the body.  You could define life as the gradual transformation of energy into matter.  Likewise, death can be defined as the gradual transformation of matter back into energy.  Yogis are interested in how matter changes into energy and how subtle energy changes into matter.  They harness energy to direct it toward God-realization, or enlightenment...

Asana encourages a balance of acting and being and movement within stillness that helps us strip away our layers of opinion, preference, attitude, and prejudice to reveal an unstained consciousness in touch with its source: Bliss...

Usually people come to class with certain ideas about what they are capable of achieving.  For example, they may feel that a handstand is something for kids.  Maybe they did such stunts when they were young--twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty (or more) years ago--but believe they could never do them now.  In some cases, this attitude prevents them from even attempting a challenging asana like handstand, or at least causes them to fail in their attempts.  With regular practice over a long period of time, however, one day they find themselves in handstand.  In this way, asana undermines the hold that our beliefs about our limitations have on us, and we gradually see that they are not necessarily true.  When we find that the old dog can be taught new tricks, we feel reborn...

There are asanas for bending forward, bending backward, sitting, standing, bending sideways, balancing, twisting, inverting--even asanas for practicing being a corpse.  By far the most potent asanas are the inverted practices.  In an inversion, the head is placed below the heart.  The Downward-facing Dog, Adho Mukha Svanasana, is one of the simplest inversions.  The profound nature of the inverted poses is due to their dramatic effect on both the physiology and psychology of the practitioner.

Physiologically, inverted postures reverse the internal dynamic pressures that affect blood flow, endocrine function, bone formation, muscle tone, connective tissue, waste removal, and organ function, including brain chemistry.  The effect of gravity is reversed, and to compensate for that reversal, the body must make dramatic internal changes.

Psychologically, inverted yogic practices make us feel "My whole world was turned upside-down today."  If we could get used to that feeling, it would not be such a drama when our lives are overturned.  If we turn things upside down, voluntarily and regularly, it's less of a shock when that happens without warning.  Inversions also give us a fresh perspective, such as a painter obtains when he or she turns a work upside down to view it with more detachment.  When we look at things from a completely different point of view, they may appear in a more honest light...

Whether you are in handstand or mountain pose, your breath should remain the same: even and steady.  If it fluctuates, you've let your thoughts take over.  Any thought besides "I am the immortal Self, breathing in and breathing out" interferes with smooth, easy breathing.  Thoughts like "I can't do this" or "I'm doing this so well!" will distract you from your breathing.  

Prana: Freeing the Life Force 
(from Jivamukti Yoga by David Life and Sharon Gannon)

Where there is life, there is prana.  In Sanskrit, Pra means moving and na means always.  Prana is like electricity, in that electricity exist in the natural world in wild and unpredictable forms.  Lightning strikes here and there; you never know where it's going to hit.  But if you capture that same electricity inside a wire, its movements become predictable and controllable.  The electricity can be conducted via wire from point A to point B.  The difference between electricity that will strike anywhere and electricity flowing through a wire is that the latter is useful for turning lights on.

Pranayama is one such practice for gaining control of prana through conscious breathing.  Pranayama is really two words combined: prana and yama.  Yama means "to restrain or control."  Pranayama is the practice of restraining or controlling the normal movement of the breath to restrain or control prana.  But pranayama is also the combination of prana and ayama.  Ayama means "unrestrained."  The double meaning does not contradict itself.  To set prana free, the yogi must first learn to restrain it and direct it into the sushumna nadi, or central energy channel, where it can then flow unrestrained toward Self-realization.

The first step toward pranayama is breath awareness.  Relax on your back with your eyes closed and feel your breath going in and out.  Don't regulate or modify the breath in any way.  Experience the wonder of being breathed.  Who is in control of this breathing?  It happens twenty-four hours a day, every day for your whole life, without conscious effort.  Unconscious breathing is regulated by the medulla oblongata, the primitive brain at the top of the spine that regulates heart rate, digestion, and all other autonomic working of the body.

Now sit up in a comfortable position.  Sit still and breathe awareness into your muscles.  Don't let the breath get blocked anywhere along the way.  Endeavor to make it like the mirror surface of a windless lake.  The breath is the seat, the foundation for yoga practices like asana and meditation.  A steady, unhindered breath seats both the mind an dthe body in an unwavering state...Bring the chin parallel to the floor and open the chest, moving the shoulders back.  Lifting the chest creates an uplifting and inspiring psychological effect.  The chin is directly connected to the sense of ego self, so lift the chest to the chin and allow the mind to subside into the heart.

By consciously controlling the breath, you have moved this function from the primitive medulla oblongata to the frontal lobes.  you have made an unconscious activity conscious.  This is pranayama: replacing unconscious breathing, and consequently energetic movement, with conscious breathing and the conscious movement of energy toward enlightenment.