Establishing A Source Of Perennial Energy

The practice of pranayama is to achieve energy control. Prana is often equated with the breath, and pranayama, with breathing exercises. There is an intimate connection between the breath and the flow of energy in the body. Paramhansa Yogananda often said, “Breathlessness is deathlessness”. Yogic breathing exercises enable the practitioner to rise above the body’s normal need for breath.

“When the yogi, like a tortoise withdrawing its head and limbs into a shell, is able to withdraw his energy from the objects of sense-perception, he becomes established in wisdom” - Gita (2:58). Breathlessness is not kumbhaka in the sense of forcibly retaining the breath. Rather, true kumbhaka comes when the body no longer requires air for its maintenance.

The purpose of respiration is to expel carbon dioxide from the lungs, and to take in oxygen. In pranayama exercises, the breath is used to produce a state of equilibrium in the body, in which state the physical activity of breathing is no longer required to maintain it in a condition of equilibrium.

When one rises above the need to breathe, the heart pump also slows down, then stops altogether. When breathing becomes unnecessary, the heartbeat slows down and then stops. Between these two phenomena — the breath and heartbeat on the one hand and sensory awareness on the other — there is a close connection.

The energy in the senses, as in the whole body, relaxes and withdraws, as happens, to a lesser degree, in sleep. A sleeper may be called. He may even be shaken before he is even aware of being wanted. This diminished involvement with objective reality occurs because, during sleep, energy is partially withdrawn from the body and from the “sense telephones”. It is only when the “sense telephones” have been “switched off ” that the mind can wholly absorb itself in the inner world of meditation.

“One practice of yoga offers the incoming breath into the outgoing breath and the apana into the prana, thereby, through pranayama, rendering the breath unnecessary” — Gita (4:29). The physical breath accompanies the upward and downward flow of energy through the ida and pingala nadis in the spine. Indeed, it is this spinal flow of the energies known as prana and apana which prompts the lungs to inhale and exhale. Prana, more broadly speaking, means energy itself. Prana is Para-prakriti as opposed to Aparaprakriti, Nature.

The slow, careful conscious circulation of energy around the spine constitutes the ancient science of Kriya Yoga. This circulation magnetises the spine, and redirects the mental tendencies, samskaras, towards the brain in a way reminiscent of the realigning of molecules in a north-south direction in a bar of steel.

Similar to the bar magnet, the spine becomes magnetised in the sense that the energy, flowing ever more unidirectionally towards the brain, is drawn into the deep spine, the sushumna, where, with the awakening of the Kundalini, it rises through the chakras, lifting one’s energy and consciousness upward, towards God. Thus, the energy is brought to the spiritual eye, finally to become united with sahasrara — the “thousand-petalled” lotus — at the top of the head.