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This Meditation (on youtube video below breathing
instructions) is best done with headphones and a relaxed straight-back posture. For this
reason, put these three parts of the meditation on your quick list to start. This is a very
effective meditation, but breathing techniques should be mastered first. In particular Ocean Breath
and Fire Breath as below. Take your time, and enjoy the opening.
NOTE Video is below these breathing guidelines
Ocean Breath - Ujjayi
Pranayama
This pranayama is
most often used in association with the practice of yoga poses, especially in the vinyasa style.
Vinyasa yoga is breath-synchronized movement, and the breath used is Ujjayi breath. Learn this
breath while seated in a comfortable cross-legged position. Once you feel confident, begin to use
it during asana practice.
1. Inhale and exhale deeply through the mouth.
2. On the exhales, begin to tone the back of the throat, slightly constricting the passage of
air. Imagine that you are fogging up a pair of glasses.
3. Once you are comfortable with the exhale, begin to apply the same toning of the throat to the
inhales. This is where the name of the breath comes from: it sounds like the ocean. (It also sounds
like Darth Vadar.)
4. When you are able to control the throat on both the inhale and the exhale, close the mouth
and begin breathing through the nose. Continue applying the same toning to the throat that you did
when the mouth was open. The breath will still make a loud noise coming in and out of the nose.
This is Ujjayi breath.
5. Now start to use this breath during your practice. If the teacher tells you to move on an
inhale, make it an Ujjayi inhale. If you need a little something extra while holding a pose,
remember this breath.
Another way to think about Ujjayi Breath is to visualize your throat as a garden hose, with the
breath passing through like a trickle of water. If you put your thumb partially over the opening of
the hose, you increase the power of the water that is coming through. This is the same thing you
are doing with your throat during Ujjayi breathing. The air that comes in through your constricted
throat is a powerful, directed breath that you can send into the parts of your body that need it
during yoga.
Breath of
Fire (Agni-Prasana)
A cleansing & energising breath, powered
by abdominal contractions
Once the
diaphragm is felt during Long Deep Breathing then there are a couple of ways in which one can
begin to do Breath of Fire, where the air is pulled in and pumped out very rhythmically, just
like pumping a bellows, without any tension being felt whatsoever on the abdominal muscles,
chest and rib cage muscles or shoulders, which remain relaxes throughout the breath, so that
it may almost seem that you can continue the rhythm indefinitely with little effort at
all.
One way to start Breath of Fire, which was the
way I learned it some 30 years ago, is to start with long deep breathing, then as soon as the
lungs are completely expanded, as described earlier, to immediately force the air out, and as
soon as most of the air is out to immediately expand the air back in, each time arching the
spine forwards and pressing the palms inward against the knees in a light manner to feel the
diaphragm filling the lungs from the back to the front completely, then contracting
again.
With each breath one expands a bit faster and
contracts a bit faster until without expanding or contracting completely, a rhythm is felt,
and you let that rhythm take over.
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You might liken it to an old model locomotive
where the wheels lurch forwards until some steam and speed is built up, then suddenly the
train is moving forward almost effortlessly, with each breath like the chugging sound of the
locomotive.
The other way to get into the rhythm of the Breath of Fire for some, may be to immediately go to
a powerful rhythmic breath, just by visualizing the bellows like nature of the diaphragm.
Either way, from that point on you can make the
Breath of Fire very powerful or very light.
The Breath of Fire is not the same as Bastrika,
which is a light fast rhythmic breath, usually taught as one of the pranayamas in hatha
yoga.
Nor is the Breath of Fire like Kabalabati, which
is a forceful breath, where you contract the abdomen and rib cage (pulling on the root lock
with each contacting breath), where the simple relaxing of the rib cage brings the air back
into the lungs, without inhaling, and you force the air out again (also in a rhythmic
manner).
While Kapalabati is very powerful and
beneficial, and while it is used in many KY Kriyas, it is not the same as Breath of
Fire.
Breath of Fire will entirely charge the nervous
system, causing the glands to secrete and purify the blood. When it is done with certain
postures and movements, which are meant to put contracting (drawing in) or expanding
(releasing) pressure in nerve plexus and glandular centers, those areas are made to fire and
become completely charged.
As an area becomes charged, the sexual (seminal)
fluids are released into the bloodstream and flow to those charged areas, so that gradually
those areas will maintain that charge and pranic pressure builds throughout the body
converting Bindu (Tamasic and Rajasic energy) to Ojas (Satvic energy), which fills and
permeates the entire body and mind.
Bit by bit, over a period of just a few weeks of
sets and kriyas combining posture, movement, breath, sound and locks, the entire body will
begin to feel magnetically electric and etheric, as the field becomes balanced with an inward
dynamo-like force.
As this charge builds and polarizes, the mind
becomes very still, very clear and bright, and a radiance is felt in and through and around
the body and head.
The feeling of the stressful need to think and
act and to be the "doer" begin to recede, as the mind becomes more receptive and open to
notice that there seems to be an almost automatic connectedness between one's aims and events
and experiences that come to fulfill them. The feeling of a natural ever present oneness
begins to emerge as a clearer always existing reality.
Little by little, outward tendencies of the mind
towards the physical and mental begin to fade, and one abides in one's satvic presence -
spacelike, pervasive, without the sense of me or mine - the Self-Effulgent Heart, where "I
AM" is the single Truth.
The practice of Kundalini Yoga with the natural
awareness and rhythm of the diaphragm in Long Deep Breathing and Breath of Fire allows the
postures and kriyas to have the greatest and most complete effect in bringing the satvic
field to the point where the Self recollects Itself and abides without attention in one's
True Name - Sat Nam.
Try these breaths out this way and see what
happens.
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