PRĀṆA is a mysterious term, most commonly applied to the act of breathing. But it actually refers to something much more universal, traditionally describing life energy as a whole and the way energy vibrates, circulates, and forges new pathways. Prāṇa is the energy that animates life, and in human form prāṇa is most perceptible as the breath. When we go even farther into the breath itself, we see that it is made up of an infinite number of qualities, called vāyuus, or “winds” of the breath. Like a full-color spectrum, there are many layers to the breath, with currents and subcurrents, texture and weave, and as one follows, feels, and gets to know the breath as a form of devotional practice, the breath reveals its many winds.
The winds are like currents of energy, and when we tune in to the various currents, we see they are made up of perception, thought, nervous system, cognition, and all activities of mind and body. Yoga practitioners, when sensitive to the internal currents of the body, use these currents to gather information about the functioning of mind and body. These winds of prāṇa are the fundamental processes of human existence. Energetic sensing brings us into contact with the subtle winds that move within us and govern perception and action.
Prāṇa, which we can translate as “life energy” or “breath,” flows within meridians that spread throughout the body, and these meridians in turn are conditioned by the saṁskāras. Saṁskāras are internal structures that inform the way in which prāṇa flows through the mind-body and therefore the way we perceive, move, think, and act. Where do these habitual grooves come from? In most lineages, it is thought that these basic grooves come from three sources: nature, nurture, and past lives. Nature refers to the biological blueprint that we come into the world with. Nurture refers to the way in which that blueprint is formed in its meeting with environment and culture. Past lives is an essential category, because not all patterns in mind and body fit neatly into the two-category system of nature and nurture. Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal, describes this well:
Of course, you can argue with the proposition that all we are is . . . genes and environment. You can insist that there’s . . . something more. But if you try to visualize the form this something would take, or articulate it clearly, you’ll find the task impossible, for any force that is not in the genes or the environment is outside physical reality, as we perceive it. It’s beyond scientific discourse . . . this doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.1
Whether you believe in past lives or not (a future discussion to be sure), we must create an extra category for certain tendencies that are unexplained via nature or nurture.
The practice of yoga postures invites us into this domain between—literally right in between—the psychological and physiological components of conditioned existence. As you can see from investigation of the saṁskāras, you cannot talk about a psychological holding pattern without talking about physiology, and you can’t explore physical holding patterns without looking at psychological grooves, because every saṁskāra is composed of and manifests the mental, emotional, energetic, and physical elements that make up the matrix of the mind-body. Notice in yoga postures how certain physical sensations bring with them specific mental formations and emotions. The more we start thinking, the more agitated we become. Past impressions, associations, and memories are always lying dormant alongside physical sensations. History is always falling in our lap. To attend to the truth of what is happening, to the immediacy of our experience rather than to our ideas about what is happening, teaches us how to handle the events of experience with more clarity.
We live in a culture that tries endlessly to find more and more pleasure, thinking that sensory gratification in every sense organ will lead to happiness. We end up caught in numerous shopping options, consumers of instant gratification. The effect psychologically and physically is not only restlessness but also a mind and sense organs that are clogged up with sensory overload and the inability to take in anything with clarity. Life becomes about producing and consuming. So just beginning with simple movements and breathing, we return the mind-body to a less chaotic pace, and then, sense organ by sense organ, open up the channels, and eventually the heart, so that our perceptual faculties are less polluted. Then we can breathe again. Then we can be silent. And everything is crafted out of silence.
The inhale is born out of silence and the exhale returns us to silence. Thoughts and sensations arise and pass away to nowhere. Or is it everywhere? I always begin sitting meditation, āsana practice, and also prāṇāyāma by sitting silently and feeling the sense of body and breath occurring without interference. It’s hard not to interfere. No longer offering mind and body to ceaseless distractions, they settle themselves by being left alone, like the noiseless flight of birds.
The practice of yoga postures is a practice of prāṇāyāma; both are rituals of attention animated by the currents of the breath. Āsana and prāṇāyāma practice have to do with following the flow of the breath and the flow of energy within the body. Once some concentration and ease is established, we notice where energy flows and where it is interrupted. We give immediate attention to the patterns and disruptions of the breath, the nervous system, the heart rate, and the feeling tone in the muscles, fascia, and so on. All of these objects of awareness become objects of meditation (dhāraṇā) and eventually opportunities for absorption (dhyāna).
As we deepen our focus on the quality of breath as it moves through the constantly changing configuration of mind-body, we come to see that there are two streams we are working with: a stream of breathing and a stream of mental formations. These two streams can be thought of as prāṇa (breath, life energy) and citta (mind, imagination, perception). We are trying to bring these two streams closer and closer together. The paradox is that the two streams are fundamentally intertwined, but our distracted mind keeps pulling them apart. The material and mental are two aspects of the same movement.
Yoga postures teach us how to perceive with ever greater levels of clarity. At first we breathe in, synchronizing the mind, body, and breath, then we breathe out. Eventually we begin to feel and even intuit dozens, if not hundreds, of universes in the breath. With clarity of attention, any feelings that arise, even if unpleasant, do not automatically become moments of dissatisfaction, nor do they unfold into stories of “me.” Human experience is always carving out a world through limited means of perception, but it is precisely our limited means that open us up to the world. When we notice our drifting attention span or contraction in a shoulder socket, we at once notice our limited mobility and awareness and also pave a path out of the conditioning simply by bringing awareness to it. Remember that Pattabhi Jois did not go into details about how to work with the six poisons. Instead he treated them as symptoms and said, in fewer words, that if one wants to work with the symptoms of duḥkha, one begins not with the symptom itself but the five kleṣas and how they interact with one another in sequence.
In reflecting on Pattabhi Jois’s suggestion, I have come to see the wisdom in witnessing the underlying patterns of attachment and aversion that give rise to a symptom rather than pursuing the elimination of the symptom itself. Our task is to move through the symptom toward the factors that give rise to the symptom in the first place.
Even on a collective level, greed, anxiety, depression, and even anger are not dealt with appropriately when we are quick to eliminate them from awareness. Anxiety in a culture often points to where change needs to happen; so in a collective sense, anxiety as a symptom is not something to eliminate too quickly. Likewise, painful sensation often teaches us the difference between feeling and reaction to feeling and is an inevitable part of human aging. Fear is important—an animal without fear is a dead animal. We shouldn’t be too quick to eliminate the symptom; instead we try to get to the bottom of it. The process of nirodha is one of freeing obstructions, making space, getting to the bottom of things. Nirodha comes into English literally as “root,” “radish,” or “radical,” which connote getting to the bottom of something. For Pattabhi Jois, the kleṣas bring us to the root cause of a symptom. This serves to map out the landscape of lived experience, which, when seen through the lens of the kleṣas, is seen to be always a constructed experience. This is a phenomenologically based psychology. Instead of starting with a diagnosis or even a creation myth, there is no context given in which everything is settled. Even when we do finally accept or let go of something, we don’t always have an explanation for why or how it came to be in the first place. That is why we begin in the body. We begin our investigation of the symptoms of anguish, torment, and dissatisfaction by asking, What is it that is present in human experience in the present moment?
If yoga is the science of studying the way we perceive and construct our experience in order to bring about a fundamental shift in perception, we need to begin by understanding just how knowing operates. The way we know anything is not independent of the body, so waking up our pathways of perception means waking up the intelligence of mind and body. Not only do we have personal habits in the way we construct our world, we of course have personal habits of movement in the body. If the practice of Hatha Yoga is internally focused on these layers of mind and body, we come to study the way we know what we know and how intimately linked are our ways of knowing and ways of moving. Formal practice matures as awareness interiorizes, not through constant attention to superficial form. Otherwise, āsana practice becomes another field in which we act out the habitual demands of an unconscious self.
Many contemporary yoga communities find this out the hard way. People begin āsana practice who are drawn to the physical, aesthetic, and great benefits of the practice and there is nothing wrong with that; but when we lock on to a technique as the mode of improving our practice, the practice has the inverse effect. After a time, people do the practice, which consists of nothing other than the refinement of technique. The technique becomes confused with the experience of yoga, to say nothing of the other limbs, much like being a virtuoso musician who has no experience, no character, and no soul. Teachers and students of yoga may indeed have authentic openings, but from the perspective of an eight-limbed practice, there is work to do on many fronts. Practice must infiltrate everything, awareness capturing all of life, without exception. The breath is seen to be the morning wind; our ideas, the greening of a landscape; compassion, the embodied realization of our practice.
The habits of attachment and self-centeredness are relentless, and unless we continue to practice and move always beyond our favorite techniques, the habitual patterns of mind and body will continue to act themselves out. Then we come back to practice with more wisdom, because we can see technique as something instrumental much like the way a trumpet is used for manipulating sound but is not the source of sound itself.
When we go deep inside the sound of the breath as a whole, or when we listen carefully to the variations of the inhalation and exhalation, we are looking directly into the nature of the universe as it presents itself in these particular instances of experience. Feeling the subtle movements of the breath in the body and listening to these movements year after year has taught me how to pay attention to the way that the arising and passing of everything that moves through awareness happens and will continue to happen in a seamless flow. It has also taught me to view the world in terms of universal changes of events and processes. The breath is an integral part of the web of life, and studying the breath without being apart from it puts me in that very web. I am nothing other than the web of life.
When I transcend the habits of dualism and fragmentation, it’s as if I become what I am observing. What is left for us to compare ourselves to? I feel the breath so clearly in the pelvic floor that the whole experience opens up before me and I experience what is occurring as a process of nature, the movement of butterfly wings, an ongoing linking of form and formlessness. The best way to describe this is as intimacy with the flow of all existence, in which the body and mind become unsurveyable, not apart from anything. When my mind finally settles into the full flow of the breath, it feels as if this is the ultimate purpose for being in the world. Nothing is clearer.