Day 17 - Pranayama

As I further explore yoga and meditation, it is inevitable that I would develop an interest and come across more information on Pranayama. Luckily I had a meeting with Megan on Saturday and she went further into the practice with me. Pranayama is the practice in which the control of prana is achieved from the control of one's breathing. In yoga, pranayama techniques are used to control the movement of these vital energies within the body, which is said to lead to an increase in vitality in the practitioner. Although Prana is essentially the breath, it is also the notion of a life-sustaining force of living beings and vital energy, found also in blood, and in its most concentrated form as other bodily fluids. Prana is a central concept in Ayurveda and Yoga where it is believed to flow through a network of fine subtle channels called nadis.

Nāḍi, the Sanskrit word for "tube or pipe", are the channels through which, in traditional Indian medicine and spiritual science, the energies of the subtle body are said to flow and connect at each chakra. According to the tantras there are 72,000 or more such channels or networks through which the stimuli flow like an electric current from one point to another, the picture above is a map of the nadi's or said channels . It was interesting for me to see how far away from the body these channels expand. Of course we have energy moving within the body, and when an object is very close to us we can also sense that, but this actually expands way further than that. This may sound familiar to you, more commonly referred as your Aura. In many forms of spiritual practice, an aura is a field of subtle, luminous radiation supposedly surrounding a person or object that some people are claimed to be capable of observing by means of their third eye (aka the ajna chakra).

The tangible benefits of pranayama include:
• the releases of acute and chronic muscular tensions around the heart and digestive organs
• helps sufferers of respiratory illnesses such as asthma and emphysema to overcome the fear of shortness of breath
• it actually increases lung capacity
• encourages proper nervous stimulus to the cardio-vascular system
• dramatically reduces emotional and nervous anxiety
• improves detoxification through increased exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen
• amplifies the auto immune system by increased distribution of energy to the endocrine system
• calms the mind and integrates the mental / physical balance.