Benefits Of Pranayama

Many years ago Yoga was defined as "the complete mastery of the mind and emotions." You can readily see how great a part concentration plays in reaching this mastery. For as man thinks, so he is.

Thus, although we are always being told that it is impossible to change human nature, you, the individual, can indeed change yourself to a very great extent by determining what your thoughts will be.

For the mind is wonderfully flexible and will respond to cultivation as fertile soil responds to it. Think peace, and gradually your entire outlook becomes one of serenity and inner calm. Empty your mind of anger, of resentment against your fellow-beings, substitute an attitude of live-and-let-live, and you will be rewarded by a sense of tolerance that will make living with others infinitely easier.

Refuse to be ruffled by the thousand-and-one phenomena that yesterday distracted you from your chosen course, and a deep and genuine feeling of equanimity will soon make it easier for you to live with yourself and, of course, with others.

The Yogis go much further. They claim that the mind of each of us influences the minds of others by means of currents we set up. Therefore, they say, harsh and hostile thoughts spread harm and may actually do harm to those who come in contact with us while on the contrary calm and kindness contribute to their well-being.

Be that as it may, we do know and both medical men and psychologists are the first to agree with this a hostile, negative attitude is invariably destructive both to ourselves and to our relationships with others. The only constructive approach is the positive one. Through practice of Yoga it is possible to achieve such an attitude without having recourse to such long, arduous processes of emotional re-education as people are given on the psychiatrist's couch. It would be the height of folly not to profit by what is at hand.

For the ordinary person, there is, of course, no such thing as complete detachment. The highly trained Yoga on the other hand is able so completely to detach himself from the world around him that he achieves startling results.

For instance, it is basically through intense concentration through his single-minded refusal to permit any outside manifestation whatsoever to disrupt it that the Indian fakir learns so completely to control his body as to perform the feats for which fakirs are famous.

Suspending breath for days at a time, halting the beating of the heart, sitting on a bed of nails without any seeming ill-effects all these are the more spectacular results of complete, intensive concentration combined with the exercise of highly-developed will power.

We in the West aren't interested in such accomplishments. If the fakirs' feats are mentioned here at all, it is only to demonstrate to what extraordinary lengths it is possible to triumph over normal human limitations. Our immediate interest is to learn to benefit from concentration in practical ways.

Yoga And Pranayama

Yogi pranayama is not physical breathing alone. Nor is prana to be confused with air. It is a far more subtle substance. Without going too deeply into Yogi metaphysical concepts, let us try to arrive at an understanding of it in terms acceptable to us Western materialists.

A century before the scientists Priestley and Lavoisier conducted their famous experiments isolating oxygen as the substance which made air all-important to life, a British chemist named Maynow ran a series of tests, revolutionary for his times, which convinced him that life was supported "not by air alone but by a more active and subtle part of it."

He went so far as to suggest that the lungs were the organ which separated this substance from the atmosphere and passed it into the blood. This substance, or rather this hidden property in the atmosphere, he called spiritus igneoaereus, and excitedly presented a paper on it to his fellow-members in the Royal Society.

But because in mid-seventeenth century the accepted medical belief was that the purpose of breathing was "to cool the heart," Maynow's learned colleagues held him up to ridicule. His theory was most effectively buried.

The Hindu theory of prana goes much further than Maynow's intuitive reasoning. We might paraphrase it by saying that oxygen itself is the overall stream within which flows a far more subtle force about which we Occidentals know all too little; nor have we ever paid much attention to it in as much as no instruments have yet been invented with which to measure and define it.

No need here to dwell on how skeptical we in this part of the world tend to be of whatever cannot be explained away in purely materialistic terms! Yet whether we like it or not this force seems to exist just the same a latent vital power ready to be harnessed for our benefit if we so desire. In fact, the Hindus believe that all physical and mental manifestations are dependent upon prana. They call it the breath of life. Another definition of it is Absolute, or Cosmic, energy, and it may help your concept of it if you think of pranayama as the means for filling the physical body with this cosmic energy.

The Yogis say that prana circulates through the human body via a network of special channels called nadis, roughly equivalent to our network of nerves and blood vessels. The nadis, in turn, are governed by seven chakras, or wheels, which roughly are the astral counterparts of our anatomic plexuses.

The three main nadis are called Ida, Pingala and Shushamna. Shushamna corresponds to the spinal cord, while Ida and Pingala are represented as two inter-circling snakes on either side of it and may be identified with the sympathetic nervous system.