I've never had much use for pranayama...no great results...do you think this work is similar to moving the "assemblage" of a person as set forth by Castanda.
Never read Castaneda, I'm afraid. Basically, I know from personal experience that how my breathing is in any particular moment impacts massively on who I am and what I do in that moment. If it's deep and serene, I can stare at a blank wall for three hours. If it's shallow and staid, it can take me three hours to get out of bed. If it's trapped and tight, I can't hold a conversation with anyone, or look them in the eye. If it's free and easy I can be the most confident, outgoing person in the room.
Why *impose* some bloody fallacious mechanical rhythm on a natural process?
I do think breathing practices (I know much less of Pranayama than I do of Chi Kung) can be massively important, but it's in maintaining the right attitude. Improper maintenance of the skeletomuscular system (which pretty much everyone is guilty of) effectively imposes a fallacious mechanical rhythm on the breath. Like lightning, the breath'll find the easiest way down, bypassing areas of knotted muscular tension if it has to. The longer that goes unchecked the truer it'll become, as the places that really need a good stretch and supply of oxygen will continue to be starved.
(On topic, honest!)....
If we agree (and we might no) that we store memory, good and bad, within the body and the muscles then the worse this gets, the more we reinforce our old and counterintuitive ways of thinking. The more the structure of our bodies is defined by the problems of the past, the more our minds will be too. If that base is insecure, then you'll be looking forward from very shaky ground.
In purely present moment terms, breathing is a process of taking the world in and putting yourself back out. If you can't do both in complete confidence, then it's going to affect everything you try to do from that base.
Which is absolutely everything.
If one experiences a negative emotion based on the past, this is taking you out of touch with the present, right? So, it should be pushed out of your mind, right? While you reconnect with the ever-sunny present? No, wrong. The negative emotion of memory is what you are experiencing, therefore it is part of the present moment, therefore getting in touch with that and exploring that is part of the process, part of the sadhana.
Totally agree with that, which in conjunction with this...
All this is rooted in a regular practice where I sit, and try and continually connect to the present moment over and over again, while noting the never-ending capacity of the mind to wander.
Reminds me on some of the most useful advice on meditation I've ever heard, which came from an Alan Watts lecture on the subject. The short, inelegant (and probably slightly wrong) way... You treat all extraneous noises not as distinct noises but as the one tapestry of sound and avoid attaching images or concepts to them wherever possible. You don't hold onto them, just view them as they pass by and allow them to melt into one.
It's the exact same for the mind. If left to its devices it will wander, providing its own car alarms and barking dogs. These should be treated in the same way as extraneous noise. They should be accepted as they arise and pass but shouldn't be held onto, not even to try and suppress, because the act of suppression only increases the noise. I think he says it's like smoothing rough water with a flat iron. You'll only make things worse.
If you can maintain a position of complete observance in the face of your own chattering mind, then eventually it'll tire itself out without interference. When it does, it'll begin to show those benefits even in day to day life.
Most useful trick I've ever learned (and I've not mastered it yet by any fucking stretch of the imagination). If you can look with a a constant, confident bemusement at the shit your own head likes to throw out, then you can pretty much deal with anything and anyone the world sends your way, taking it as it comes.
If you ever find time/resources to make it happen, I'd love to see a thread like that.
I would like to do it. But I'm shit with promises of that nature. |
