Beginning Kriya yoga without pranayama practice
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 3 years before Jun 09, 2016
MiBeloved 3 years ago
Kriya yoga is inclusive of asana postures and pranayama breath infusion practice. If you are beginning kriya yoga and cannot do those two preliminary practices, then to be fair you should understand that you are not doing the practice in the ideal way or in the way which was laid down by Patanjali as ashtanga yoga.
The first thing you need to do is to learn at least theoretically what ashtanga yoga is. For this you only need to study the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. I have translated this and many other writers have done the same as well.
My advice is that you should at least read through that book and when you get to the place where the eight stages are explained, take notes about it.
Someone asked me recently by email about doing kriya yoga, how to start this practice but I cannot change the process of it. Suppose you ask me how to manufacture stainless steel. Then I cannot make up some arbitrary smelting system. We should have at least iron ore and carbon and we must have a heat source. But then you say to me that you have bauxite under your house, and you want to know how to make steel with that.
So I am not a magician. What should I say? Should I tell you, "O yes, bauxite will do.”
That would be a rip off.
Okay, so if you cannot do the postures and the breath infusion, what can you do? You can do part of the process and you will get part of the result only. That is all I can promise. We can use the bauxite, we can heat and we can mix some mineral into it but we will get an aluminum product not a steel product. Aluminum does look like steel and it does have some properties which are similar to steel but it is not steel and some aspect of steel will be missing in it.
Okay, now that you understand my position, I can tell you that if we are to skip the asanas and pranayama, then the next stage according to Patanjali is the mental sensual withdrawal practice, which is called pratyahar. Dissecting that Sanskrit word, we get a prefix of prati and a word of ahara. Prati means what is the opposite or what is reverse, what is against. Ahara means to consume, to eat to acquire.
In this usage pratyahar means to withdraw the senses from the world and to conserve the power which is used to hunt down and acquire things in the material world. To do this one has to sit and meditate while making an effort to withdraw the senses from their external pursuits.
In the Meditation Pictorial book, chapter one has a system of practice which is illustrated for doing this. If you go through those practices and reach an impasse please let me know. That is where you can start your kriya practice without doing asana and pranayama infusion practice but again, you will get only part of the result because of the not complying with the standard requirements stated by Patanjali.
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Special note:
Two of my books discuss the Yoga Sutras:
Meditation Pictorial is here:
