Down in the Subtle Body
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 5 years before Aug 20, 2017
MiBeloved 5 years ago
Breath infusion this morning had a few unusual charged areas. One was the insteps which is a very hard area to reach. Even people who do visualizations in meditation, something that I think is ridiculous, might have a difficult time effectively targeting the insteps.
The nice thing about breath infusion is that you get to go where the train is going. Instead of dictating that the conductor take the train here or there, you just ride along, pay your fare as stipulated by the practice, and then you go wherever the trains goes. Replace train with pranic energy, charged subtle breath energy.
As this energy penetrates through various nadis, it goes here and there and you just follow along for the ride. Some days it takes you down into the subterranean parts of the city, down in the sewer pipes which run under the city carrying filthy waste. Some of these pipes, (read nadis) are blocked up and so when that fresh energy charges down there, it is like the pressure in a fire hose or in a mine shaft being filled with water which is gushing or goring its way through, ripping and tearing away all the slush and filth which clogged up after many years of not being flushed by anyone.
Today it hit the insteps and ankles. This felt like when you have little tiny tingling twinkies moving and moving at rapid speed in those two areas of the psyche.
It was shimmering and wavering.
Breath infusion practice with bhastrika or kapala bhati pranayama if done with full inner focus to see what is happening within the subtle body (read psyche), does wonders to accelerate purification of the energy intake of the subtle body. It also facilitates removal of stale energy which lingers in various hard to reach places. The result of this is that in a meditation after, one reaches new heights in levels of consciousness. Most of all new subtle and supernatural perception ability comes into play so that what was nothing, what was void before, all of a sudden is discovered as having supernatural sensual perceptions.
Mostly the reason why meditators do no pranayama practice is based on either they do not know about it or they never learnt it in the way which gives infusion of the subtle body and discharge of the heavy astral force in the subtle body. If you do not know about that, if you have never experienced that then it makes no sense to do pranayama before doing meditation.
But another reason is that if we look at how we keep the physical body, it is mostly about its external appearance. People eat junk food and are not concerned with what and how the body excretes the waste of that food. To put it mildly they are not concerned with the internal processing, digestion and excretion of that food. Nature takes care of that. People feel that their duty is to keep the external appearance of the body in order and to some extent we do the same thing in meditation. In meditation we are hardly concerned with the internal energy of the subtle body or we feel that it will be transformed by saying sounds (mantra) or by visualizing (imagination) or by mood adoption (TM).
In the same way people meditate and they are not concerned with what is going on inside the subtle body. For that matter most meditators have no clear concept of the subtle body. They feel that they do meditation irrespective of that subtle form, meditation which they feel they do in the mind.
But where is the mind?
How is it related to the subtle body?
Where is the true self?
How is the true self located in respect to the subtle body?
Alfredo 5 years ago
Thanks Michael!
That's correct, because the pranayama I was taught before meditation, as part of the Kriya Yoga package, is not forceful enough to access the subtle body as it does in the case of Yogi Bhajan's or yours. Or you have to go on and on for hours as some of the early disciples of Lahiri Mahasaya did at the beginning. Thus Bhastrika takes you there quickly.
It is also true that most meditators and meditations stay in the head or third eye or concentrate above the head, and fall into some kind of stupor in the process. This is due to lack of instructions. Pavitra's (French disciple of Sri Aurobindo) wrote some instructions about meditation and they all fell within this category. In that school there was no specific instructions about meditation or pranayama for that matter. However, Sri Aurobindo once practiced pranayama for one year from 6 to 8 hours daily in 2 daily sessions. No one knows that I know which kind it was.
Thus your book "Meditation Pictorial" has gone a long way to enter into these explanations and avail the layperson out here with specific instructions.
