Working with your breath🔗

Do you know how to breathe? Just hearing this question, people are shocked! All your life, since the moment you were born, the one thing that you have done without a break is breathing! Till the moment you die, the one thing you cannot put aside is breathing.

But you will be shocked to hear, 99% of us do not know how to breathe!

Understand: there are two types of actions in our body – voluntary and involuntary. Voluntary action is action which is under our control – like walking, moving our limbs and soon. These kinds of actions always take place with our awareness and intention. Involuntary actions are those which are not under our control – like digestion, brain function and the beating of the heart. Usually, we are not even aware of these actions.

But breathing is one activity which can be both voluntary and involuntary. Breathing can go on smoothly even if we are not aware of it. We don't stop breathing even when we focus our attention on something else. Imagine, if we had to continuously remember to breathe, what a calamity it would be! At the same time, we can also control our breathing. We can hold our breath for a few minutes, or control its duration. We can breathe deeply or shallowly, slowly or rapidly, as we wish.

Because breath is a powerful link between the body and mind, we can alter our breathing pattern to transform ourselves physically, mentally and emotionally. Our breath is closely linked to our body and its functions. But while our physical body creates a boundary between us and the world around us, our breath flow freely in and out. It is our point of contact with the universe. It is also the key to understanding our emotions and thoughts. When we infuse awareness into our breathing, it can become a tremendous meditation. Right now, what we think of as breathing is not breathing. We have reduced our breathing to a purely unconscious activity. We don’t know the science of right breathing. That is why I say, we don’t know how to breathe! All we are doing now is, we are simply letting breathing happen to us.

The whole science of working with breath is based on controlling and transforming our breathing pattern with awareness.

Your breathing is the movement of universal life-energy

In Sanskrit, the word we use for breath is prana (from the root prā , ‘to fill’). Strictly speaking, prana is not breath. It is the life-energy that is contained in the breath. The air you breathe is just a vehicle in which the prana comes in and goes out of your body. When you inhale, the air comes in carrying prana, and when you exhale, the ‘empty’ air goes out . We usually use the word prana in two ways: one, as prana-shakti or the universal life-force; two, as the vital force carried by the breath and performing various physiological functions in the body.

Based on the physiological function it performs in the body, prana is classified into five types: prana (respiration), apana (elimination), udana (meditation), samana (digestion) and vyana (circulation)

This life energy is universal. Your breathing is not just an internal process. The breath does not flow in an internal circuit as you think. It is a moment-to-moment exchange of energy with the universe. Understand, if it wasn't for the universal life energy flowing through your body, you cannot be alive for more than a few minutes. Your very survival depends on the flow of the cosmic life-force through your body.

Do you know, our body has the capacity to take in prana directly from the cosmos? In India, during the Kumbh Mela (the world's largest spiritual gathering attended by over 90 millions people), you can see yogis who bury themselves completely in the earth for three days. They know the technique to take in prana directly from the cosmos without the help of air. As long as you take prana through air, you need to breathe through your nose. You need to inhale and exhale. But when you can take the prana directly without the help of air, you don't need to inhale or exhale through the nose. You don't need to breathe!

As long as the incoming breath is bringing in more prana and going out as an empty vehicle, your life will be strengthened. If the reverse starts happening, if the air comes with less prana and goes out with more prana, it means death is nearing or the life energy is going towards death. When death nears, just the empty air will enter but when it goes out, it will go with the prana. There is a concept in Ayurveda (the traditional Indian system of medicine) known as 'peak age,' which is based on this science of prana. Till a particular age, a person receives more prana through the incoming breath and loses less prana through the outgoing breath. After that age, the amount of prana carried into the body with the incoming breath starts reducing. When the outgoing breath starts carrying more prana than the incoming breath, we know the person is moving towards death.

That is the reason all the great Masters, such as Buddha, Sankara, Guru Nanak and Mahavira could predict their own death. Six months before their passing away, they were able to see very clearly the prana moving out of their body.

Breath is the mirror of your emotions

Your breathing is a powerful index of your emotional state. When we learnt about samkaras, we saw that the breath layer is where all our desire engrams are stored. That is why we can never decide to stop breathing, because breathing is a basic survival instinct. It is much more powerful than our will. We are alive because of our very desire to be alive! This is the most basic desire in all living beings. All other desires are just different expressions of this primal desire. Because our breathing itself is an expression of this desire energy, there is a close relationship between our desires and our breathing. People whose personalities are dominated by rajas (restlessness), will usually have a rapid and heavy breathing pattern. Restlessness itself is the result of a deep dissatisfaction with the present moment. Such people will be carrying a lot of desires in their breath layer, and this affects their breathing pattern. Not only for different individuals, even for the same person, the breathing pattern varies according to the mood of the moment. You may have seen that whenever you are in the grip of a powerful desire like lust, your breathing changes visibly. If you look closely, even emotions like anger, fear and anxiety are indirect expressions of desire. Anger arises when a desire has been thwarted, and fear arises when there is the possibility of a desire not being fulfilled. To cope with situations which are stressful, physically or mentally, we need an additional supply of life-energy. That is why the breath starts flowing rapidly at such times. As you are, so you breathe! Naturally, the reverse is also true. By consciously altering the prana flow in the body, we can heal ourselves physically and mentally.

Your breathing and your thoughts are very closely associated with one another. The number of thoughts you are having each second is directly related to the flow of prana in your system. Please understand, along with the length, breadth and depth of the prana movement, the thoughts per second also increases or decreases. Breath is the fuel for the mind! If the prana movement becomes slow, the number of thoughts also goes down. That is why, when you are tense about something, you are asked to take a few deep breaths. When your breath slows down, automatically your thought flow becomes smoother and clearer. These things you must have observed yourself.

Your entire inner chatter, the flow of thoughts that goes on continuously in your mind, is purely the expression of prana or energy. Usually the prana flow starts from your navel and moves upwards. By the time it comes to your anahata (heart) area, it becomes narrow, and when it reaches the vishuddhi (throat area), it becomes a thin shaft. In the throat area, this energy shaft is known as vak, the energy of verbalization. This is where the prana is molded into words, and comes out as words. If you are carrying worries and samskaras in the navel centre, the prana becomes an alloyed metal, it is not pure prana. Because of the samskara sediment in your navel region, the prana becomes an alloy; it is not pure gold. So the vak will be molded into 18 carat jewellery, not 24 carat jewellery! Your words will be carrying the impurity of your samskaras. Are you able to understand? The purity of your verbalization depends directly on your prana flow. If the energy is pure, you won't even radiate it as words, you will radiate it as silence; just a silence. But the energy will be flowing out.

Breath and mind are simply two sides of the same coin; the same movement called by two names. Do you know, your breath and your mind both move in a circular manner? When you inhale, air enters your inner space as the incoming breath. Then it takes a turn, and comes out as the outgoing breath. At the point where the turn takes place, where the incoming breath becomes the outgoing breath, there is a neutral space. At this point, both your breath and your mind stop for a second! Are you aware of this? The difficulty is, you are afraid of losing your mind for that one moment! That is why you never keep your awareness in the zone where the prana takes a turn. If you know how to drive, you can understand that whenever you shift gears, you have to first come to the neutral zone. In the same way, when the incoming breath takes a turn and becomes the outgoing breath, it has to pass through the neutral zone. You are afraid of this neutral zone, because in this zone you are empty! Because you cannot experience mind in the neutral zone, you don't have any identity.

When you pass through the neutral zone, your breath stops for a moment. When your breath stops, your mind also stops - and when your mind stops, you also stop. That is why you jump this space, why you do not want to look at this space. Every moment, this is happening to you again and again. Each time your incoming breath takes a turn to become the outgoing breath, or your outgoing breath takes a turn to become the incoming breath, there is a neutral zone. But you are afraid of both these neutral zones, because you don't want to lose your identity.

HARNESSING THE UNIVERSAL LIFE-FORCE Working with your breath

The biggest fear human beings have is the fear of losing identity. I tell you, even the fear of losing life is not as great a fear as the fear of losing identity. The fear of death itself is because you don't know how you will be after death. If you are clear in some way, you will not have fear. But you don't know what will happen to you, how you will be after you leave the body. It is the fear of losing your identity which is much worse than the fear of death itself.

You are so obsessed with your identity that you do not want to remain even for a moment, a kshana, without your identity. Constantly, you are protecting your identity. You don't realize, your identity is completely social! It is just comparative reality, not existential reality. Whatever you think of as your identity: your name, your gender, your money and whatever else - it is just societal, and suicidal! The big problem is you are afraid of existential reality, and you are trying to protect your comparative reality. But you think you are protecting something which ‘is’. You don't know you are trying to protect something which has no basic existence. It is really funny actually! You are trying to protect that which is not against that which is!

That which is your reality is that neutral space, that gap. In the neutral zone, the inner space or consciousness is the reality. It is the truth; it exists in you every moment. When you are in that neutral space, you are in the space of consciousness. But you never want to experience that zone, because surrendering your identity means death. Just by hearing the word surrender, people get frightened! See, all your identity is nothing but your mind. When your mind stops, what you experience the zone of consciousness.

But you never stop in this gap. You don't want it in your life. Constantly, you are trying to avoid God; constantly, you are trying to escape from God; constantly, you are trying to escape from consciousness.

Each breath opens a door for you to enter into the space of pure consciousness, into existential reality, into your reality. When you become comfortable with the neutral zone, you are getting ready to go beyond mind and enter that space. The more you feel comfortable, the more you feel protected, the more you feel secure in the neutral zone, the more you will start experiencing and enjoying the neutral zone. When you start enjoying the neutral zone, the more you will remain in the space of consciousness.

Every day, you are passing through three states of consciousness or avastha traya – the states of waking, dream and deep sleep. A simple understanding of the movement of prana in the three states can give you a tremendous understanding of what you call life and death. You may be thinking, why should I worry now about what happens to my prana at the time of death? Don't think that death is something that happens to you at the end of your life! As you become more aware of the subtle movements of prana in your system, you understand that life and death are daily processes happening in you. Your daily activities of sleep and waking are actually a daily process of death and rebirth.

When you are in the waking state, your prana moves, functions, and stays in the area of the ajna chakra (the subtle energy center between your eyebrows).

When you are in the dream state, it moves in the area of your neck, around the vishuddhi chakra. When you are in deep sleep, it moves around the anahata chakra or heart center. That is why you can never fall asleep if your head is erect. You cannot fall asleep unless you relax your head, unless you allow the prana movement to move from the forehead to the heart region. Even if you are lying down, if you keep your head straight and tense, you will never be able to fall asleep. That is why, when your brain is constantly active, when you have a lot of thoughts, you will have trouble falling asleep. The moment you start moving towards the dream state, the prana starts moving from the ajna towards the vishuddhi. The more you move towards the deep sleep state, it moves towards the anahata, the heart center.

It is the same in the case of life and death as well. The more you are alive and energetic, the more the prana accumulates and gets centered in the forehead. When the incoming breath is bringing more prana and the outgoing breath is empty, your prana will be centered in the forehead. If the incoming breath is bringing less prana and the outgoing breath is taking more prana, slowly the prana will slip into the throat center. If the incoming breath is not bringing prana at all and only the outgoing breath is taking the prana, you will fall completely into the heart center. Actually, falling from life to death, and falling from the waking state to the deep sleep state, are both directly related to prana movement. If the prana movements of inhalation and exhalation are handled properly, you can handle dream and deep sleep, as well as life and death. Dream and sleep, life and death can all be handled by this single key, this single thread called prana.

Understand: whatever I am saying is not only going to help you at the end of your life, it can help you in every moment of your life! If you can remain aware when the prana falls into the heart center every time you go to sleep, you can stop, alter and manage your dreams and deep sleep. The dream state is nothing but the state of low prana. If you can be aware at that time, naturally you will be able to control your dreams. Not only will you be able to control your dreams, you can bring yourself up in energy at any moment.

You can use this understanding to heal yourself of illness. When you fall sick, the prana will start traveling towards anahata. So even before you start feeling the other symptoms of sickness, you know you are falling sick. By bringing the prana back to the ajna, you can heal yourself. Whenever you are aware of the low prana, you can increase the percentage of prana in your body. The simple awareness that the prana is becoming low is enough to bring more prana into your body! It is the ultimate technique to heal your body and rejuvenate your body.

Not only that, at the end of your life you will be able to change your life and death. When you are dying, relaxing from the body, when the prana falls to the lower level, you can stop it and bring it up. If you want, you can bring in death a little early. If you want, you can postpone it. You can play in whichever way you want! When you Master prana, you understand that death as you imagine doesn't exist. You will have the freedom to choose your death, to predict it, to postpone it. You will know the art of living and dying. This is the ultimate gift you can receive from any spiritual technique. prana

Prana is the stuff of dream and reality

When you deeply understand the working of prana, you will have the clarity not only to handle your own states of waking and sleep, but to understand and handle the external reality as well. When you start experiencing the subtle movements of prana, you make a shocking discovery: prana is responsible for creating the world as you see it! Prana is the energy of desire, and it is desire which creates and sustains your world. Not only your waking world, your dream world too is created by prana. After all, your dreams are only expressions of your own desires. Even your nightmares are made of prana, because fear is nothing but negative desire. When you have a desire which might not be fulfilled, you experience fear. So it is prana that creates both your reality and your dreams! Whatever you call reality and whatever you call dream are both made of prana. This is what Sankara means when he says this entire world is maya, an illusion. Each individual manufactures his private world, his ‘reality’, according to his conscious and unconscious desires. Not only your dreams, even your waking world is a pure illusion.

Now your mind will ask, ‘If even my waking world is a dream, why should I act? Why should I do anything?’ Why should you not act? If you are dreaming, why should you not do anything? Understand, you ask this question because you take action too seriously! You relate your action with something you need to attain. You become attached to an action because of the result you expect from it.

Be very clear: when you act out of the deep understanding that there is nothing to gain or lose in action, your actions will arise from a center of pure energy inside you. Because of this, suddenly you will have the tremendous energy needed to direct both your life and your dreams. Not only that, you will be totally relaxed and in control, even when you are in action.

As of now, you are just a victim of life. You can’t even control your own dreams! Can you dream what you want? You can’t! You can’t control a single incident in your dream. As of now, either you go through the whole dream or you can try to get out of it by waking up. You can’t control the dream itself. If you can bring more awareness to the dream state, the awareness in the waking state will also increase. When the awareness in the living state increases, naturally you will be able to control death. The person who is aware in his dreams will simply stop dreaming. The person who is aware in his deep sleep will simply stop the cycle of birth and death. He will not take one more body.

When I use the word ‘death’, I don’t mean that you will commit suicide! When I say that when you become aware of life, you enter into death, it does not mean that you will commit suicide. What I mean is, you will stop living in the normal way. You will stop living with an identity. You will be reborn. That is why enlightened Masters are called dead people! Actually, enlightened people are already dead, as far as the world is concerned. Because they no longer carry an identity, they are not alive in the way you understand. Their life cannot be called ‘life’ anymore. If at all you want to use some term to describe their life, the only term you can use is ‘death’! They are not alive as you think. They are no longer tortured by the things of life. Life is like a game or a drama to them. It cannot penetrate them and disturb their inner space.

Watching the breath is a powerful and effective meditation. It has led more people to enlightenment than any other meditation. Watching the breath tremendously increases awareness. As awareness increases, inner awakening happens, and bliss follows. Understand, your breath is entwined with your mind. Your mind is nothing but a constant movement between the past and the future. Your breath holds the key to drop your mind and enter into higher planes of Consciousness. It holds the key to enter into a space of pure awareness, where the mind is no more and only the Being exists. As you watch your breath, you realize the constant movement of life and death in you. Every inhalation is life, every exhalation is death! And you deeply understand one more thing: in the gap between the two, in the neutral space where neither life or death exists, still you exist, YOU ARE! You experience yourself as the silent space that is beyond the inward-moving breath and the outward-moving breath. You are the pure consciousness that is beyond both, your inner-world identity and your outer-world identity. Once you have experienced yourself as pure consciousness, even when you are using your identity, you are free of it! When you know you can fly out if it anytime you want, your identity is no longer a trap, it is just a swing on which you can swing whenever you want. Whenever you want, you can play with your identity. Whenever you feel like it, you can simply drop it and fly.

When you watch your breath with total awareness, it can become a key to liberate you from your very identity!

Prana moves through every part of our body. Every cell is infused with prana. Normally, we only experience prana when it enters our nostrils through the breath. We feel that we can breathe only through our nose and mouth. Now, we are going to experience prana moving in every pore of our body! We are going to breathe through every part of our body.

Close your eyes and sit in a relaxed way. Sit very still and feel the slight tingling sensations happening inside you. This is the movement of prana through your body. You will experience it like a very mild energy current circulating inside. Feel every part of your body filled with prana. Now, visualize every part of your body inhaling and exhaling. Actually, this is not just visualization. Your body is capable of absorbing prana from the atmosphere. It is just that you are not aware of it. One by one, feel each of your limbs breathing deeply. Experience this breathing in your prana, hands, your legs, your upper body. Enjoy this energy flow! Feel the movement of prana in your face. Let your eyes breathe in prana, let your whole face inhale and radiate . Infuse pranic energy into each part of your body. Let every pore of your skin breathe deeply. Slowly, you will feel yourself enveloped in a cloud of powerful vital energy that continuously energizes and protects you. This technique can energize you, as well as give you deep relaxation. Your body begins to glow with new life, and you will radiate peace.

This technique is a quick way to energize your pranic layer. A healthy pranic layer not only enhances your general vitality, it also boosts your immunity to disease.

DURATION: 11 minutes

Close your eyes. Sit in vajrasana with your eyes closed. If you cannot sit in vajrasana, simply sit upright on the floor or in a chair. Inhale through the mouth slowly and deeply. Swallow the air. Feel that you are digesting the prana present in the air. You will feel an intense coolness in your being. Exhale normally, through your nose. Repeat the process, inhaling through the mouth and exhaling through the nose. When you swallow your inhaling breath, automatically, your exhaling breath will come through your nose. This technique can refresh and energize you in just a few minutes.

The same energy which manifested itself as the cosmic explosion constantly keeps exploding and manifesting within your body. Merge your awareness with the meeting point of inhaling and exhaling breaths, the confluence of the powerful and the powerless. When the inhaled air goes out, it will be full of energy, and your awareness as a whole will vibrate. One can touch and feel life energy. The place where the exhaled air returns will be totally vacant. One can touch and feel death. When the inhaled air comes in, one can touch and feel life directly. When the exhaled air returns one can touch death. If we merge our awareness with both these meeting points, we can experience within ourselves both the cosmic explosion and cosmic dissolution. The moment you experience the cosmic explosion and cosmic dissolution happening within you, you transform yourself as the universal energy.