Evacuation Inefficiency

In hatha yoga practice there is a section dealing with digestion and evacuation, as to the efficient processing of food and food waste through the track which begins at the mouth and terminates at the anus. Of the yogis of the various methods known, few consider the evacuation efficiency to be important. For that matter people who are obsessed with meditation may not consider the condition of the stomach, intestines, colon, and rectum, to be significant. They feel that if the track malfunctions it has no significant impact on anything.

Even some famous gurus who mastered some asana postures when they had youthful bodies, abandoned the physical practice as soon as their reputations as great yogins became established. Especially in the elderly years, these teachers sat to meditate only and did not do the postures or breath infusion they did early on.

To their view, it is not something to consider and it has little relevance to samadhi absorption states or to what one would attain hereafter. Some profess the infinite. Others, the oneness of whatever there is. Some, the heaven of a deity. Others speak about existential demolition. Some are aggressive about erasure of the personal self which they earmark as a persistent but bothersome shadow which trails the real.

For those ascetics who do haṭha yoga, malfunction of the stomach, intestines, colon, or rectum is an impediment. It negatively affects the practice. Why? When there is an inefficiency in the operations of the physical body, the subtle form is affected whereby there is decreased psychic perception and reduced clarity for the yogi.

In addition, unless the yogi can scrap the subtle body, its condition causes positive or negative feedback to the coreSelf. The yogi should be sure that the physical body requires the least amount of subtle energy, so that the subtle form is highly energized and does not have to give extra focus to the physical system.

As the physical body ages, it becomes more and more inclined to inefficiency in its operations. This means that it will take more energy from the subtle form for its maintenance. A yogi must ledger this accounting so that he can do whatever he can to keep the energy expenditure of the physical body to a minimum.

If any part of the digestive and excretive functions become damaged, the physical body will act inefficiently into two ways.

• longer processing time
• decreased nerve sensitivity

A longer processing time, means that consciously or subconsciously the yogi will be involved mentally with ideas and opinions relating to the damage done which causes the increase in application of the attention to the cause.

Decreased nerve sensitivity will make it impossible for the yogi to know what to do to assist in the efficient transport of the food and food waste. The lingering of the waste in the colon and rectum will attract more consciousness to those areas of the body, resulting in constant thinking about the condition. This will steal time and focus energy which should otherwise be invested in meditation practice.

There is a risk that the subtle body will run a parallel ailment, where the energy which surges through it, will be obstructed, causing a lower level of psychic force to flood the corresponding part of the psyche.

On the physical side, there will be constipation. Or there will be addiction developed from the chronic use of laxative, enemas and massages. As time goes by, over a period of years, the yogi may or may not sense the deterioration of the muscles and nerves of the track, such that the transport of food waste through the colon slows down considerably, making the passage slow, and causing the sensory alarms about the effort to evacuate to be silent, or be totally absent, where the yogi/yogini does not know that the waste was transported to the end of the colon or into the rectum.

Waste will linger somewhere in the passage and due to insensitivity of the nerves, the yogi will have no information about it. Even for those yogis who are alerted sensually, there may be such a loss of muscular control, that exerting the body to discharge the waste, will result in no outward movement. Physical means like digital (finger) extraction will have to be made, or enemas will have to be done for each evacuation session. This will continue until the body is deceased. In fact, the muscular and nervous systems of the track will deteriorate more and more as the body ages. Hence even with stomach churning exercises and other postures and movements which crunch the intestinal pack in the abdomen, still the yogi will experience a sluggish transport and a lack of sensitivity as compared to the youthful days of the body.