Yogi explains Practice

Meditationtime Forum Post

Date:  Posted 5 years before Jul 10, 2017

MiBeloved 5 years ago

This morning’s breath infusion was productive. I was able to bridge the instructions of two yoga gurus, being Tibeti and Yogeshwarananda. Yogesh gave the top end instruction which can be followed after completing Tibeti’s process to proficiency during a session. It takes a huff and a puff to reach this stage, like when a train moves up a long mountain. Once it get to the peak, it is no sweat from there on down but to reach the peak there is a struggle for the engines.

The engineer has to know what he is doing; otherwise if the engine gives out on the steep ascent, then the train might begin sliding backwards or it might stutter, stall and be parked until another engine is added to the pull.

People who speak about the happiness in meditation and about the good spiritual life are obviously on some utopian stretch of the imagination or they are just plain not making progress in the way I am. For me this is an uphill battle every step of the way.

Just to get up in the morning is a hassle and a balking from the body and mind. I was doing this practice since around 1972 when I learnt bhastrika pranayama from Yogi Bhajan and still today so many years after, it is an uphill climb pretty much every morning. But while I am fighting with the devil of sleep, most other people are slumbering away in the arms of the devil which is their darling, their nightly lover, more dear to them than their sex partners even.

The material body has cells which need to rest and recuperate on a daily basis. These guys have no interest in spiritual life. Getting up early at about 4 am is not their thing. Then there is the subtle body which likes to roam around on the astral planes early in the morning to finish out its activities there before it is sucked back into the physical body and is forced to confirm to the rigors of being a human being. In an animal form it has no such rigors to deal with. It can piss anywhere, shit anywhere, eat anywhere, have sex without being married and without having to pay child support, wander here and there and not have to confirm with a so-called civilized life style. But in the human body the subtle body gets batted down to all these rules of behavior, that it becomes necessary for it to escape in astral projections so that it can get rid of the inhibitions which are enforced in the human society.

The subtle body needs rest too. Sometimes it is floating inside or outside of the physical form and sleeping like that just the way fish floats in water and sleeps without touching any hard surface. Is the self, the glorious, spiritual self, the god-self concerned with all this?

Hell no, the guy is an idiot. The guy is couch potato. The guy is content for certain psyche mechanisms to do the work for him in thinking and feeling. He is a lazy bum, a welfare case but he parades himself up and down as a great philosopher, as a something which will be an oneness when it reaches perfection. The guy is hoax!

I was able to satisfy Tibeti’s requirement for getting the old energy which was lingering down in the subtle trunk, even in the thighs and then in the arms, removed. This is done by doing rapid breathing (bhastrika pranayama) in various yoga postures (asanas). Yoga postures are the third stage of yoga which is asanas or postures. Pranayama is the fourth stage which is breath infusion.

And this is not about sitting and observing your breath. This is about pulling out all the carbon dioxide in the body and replacing that air with fresh air, even from the feet, from the thighs, from in the bones and anywhere else it is stored in cells.

What sort of breath infusion are you doing? Is it the imaginary type, where you sit and imagine that the breath is going up and down into the body touching certain points? Well if you are, that is not what I am doing. I discovered long ago that my imagination isn’t worth a damn. It does absolutely nothing to change the energy content of the subtle body. So then I was glad that Yogi Bhajan gave me the gift of bhastrika pranayama. I am not saying that your imagination isn’t worth something. I am sure it is. But mine isn’t worth even a poop.

When after creating everything else, God created me, he said to one of the angels, who made the mind,

“Give that one an imagination which is ineffective. There are enough visionaries in the creation already. We need to start dumping down everything from here on out. Too much creativity is not a good thing.”

So I have to aggressively fill up the system with new pranic energy on the subtle side, and new fresh air on the physical side to effectively do the pranayama practice. Once this is done, then there is day light in the dark psyche and I can sit to meditate and make a little progress.

During the night in the astral world, somebody was asking me about the process which I use but it is no mystery. It is the aggressive breath practice listed as bhastrika or kapala bhati. I do this in various postures in order to reach various parts of the psyche and to pull out the stale energy and replace it with fresh energy. That is the gist of my practice. Nothing mysterious.

I don’t run my mind up and down chakras. I do not follow breath in meditation. When I sit to mediate after breath infusion, I am done with breath. I give breath its quota of practice during breath infusion and then I leave that aside and practice samayama (dharana->dhyana->samadhi). That leaves out pratyahar sensual energy withdrawal except that breath infusion is so effective for me that it accomplishes the pratyahar practice and I do not have to do that. This is like when you buy something and you get a complimentary gift from the shop owner. When I do a thorough bhastrika session, I get pratyahar in a completely way without having to actually do it. Thus when I sit to meditate I can do samyama, which is the three higher states of yoga as one sequential practice.

Patanjali, the guy was a genius. He wrote the whole thing down. You don’t have to beg any guru for it. Forget pranams to gurus. Just read Patanjali and take what he says seriously and don’t try to warp his literature or use it to support New Age bull.

When you have a bad plumbing problem in your house, and you tried a plunger and then you tried drain cleaner and then you bought a little router and it did not work to clear it out, then you have a choice: Either you face up to the expense of calling Roto Rooter or you decide to just live with it and pretend that there is no problem.

My process of bhastrika is like calling Roto Rooter. The guy comes in this van and then he pulls out this ugly looking whatever it is. He sends a rotating shaft down the drain and in a few minutes, he writes a bill and is gone.

Once when I was a janitor at a church, we had to call Roto Router because the drains backed up in the kitchen. The cook who was a woman was paranoid about sewage and left saying not to call her back until it was all cleaned up. When the router man came out with this big auger thing, he was dead serious about the problem. After about four hours he said to me, “I have never experienced any clog like this, I have snaked 200 feet of the line already and still this thing is not breaking through.

Then after half hour, he came back to me all smiles. He said: “I busted the blasted thing. Concrete in the line. They left it there during the construction so many years ago.”

What?

Concrete in the line?

So my system was like when I began with yoga, so all those imagination process of the new age gurus were useless. I had to get something professional like this router the plumber used. Others who have less crude system do not require that. They can get the little can of drain cleaner and pour it down and their drains start flowing nicely.

I was able to work on the lower trunk of the body and on the head area of the subtle body. Then there was this energy link between the two areas. Just before this happened when I was working on the head of the subtle body, I began to perceive Srila Yogeshwaranand. This is always nice when he is seen because it means that I have reached the level of existence where he now resides.

Yogi doing practice, joining head and trunk energy

================================

When the infusement of the trunk and the infusion into the head made contact with each other there was an energy flow which I will try to show in the diagram below. This morning a student came to practice. Right now I am not concerned about students. To hell with them. My body is 61 years of age. I have to deal with upcoming death. If you are on a highway and the GPS announces that for sure, your car will crash in two minutes and you will be dead why would you be concerned with others? To hell with everybody else. I just don’t have time for students anymore.

Gone are the days when I was trying to help students. That is finished. But whatever I wrote down, that is my gift to the students of the future. Don’t try to be my student because a dead teacher is useless. My time is up. I can’t be here much longer. My crisis is on because I am not a “now” guru who is not concerned about his death. I am in anxiety regarding mine, to be sure.

I don’t want it to catch me teaching students. I want to be attentive to my personal practice and my teachers when death happens.

Fortunately for me, I am not an atheist. I believe in God. And I don’t care what you have to say about how religion and belief are bulshit. I don’t care if it is. I believe in God. And so like that I do not have to worry about the world, about students, about anybody advancing. What, I am worrying about you and God is on vocation in heaven? Forget it. You are God’s problem. Let him take care of it.

Jesus Christ came and claimed that he was the Son of God. Then he said he would come back to get the good people. Well you know what! The guy has not showed up as yet. Two thousand years have passed and still the guy has not even sent an email, not even a postcard. He is not worried about your situation. Shit! I like this guy. I am going to stop worrying as well.

Alfredo 5 years ago

MiBeloved wrote:

[What sort of breath infusion are you doing? Is it the imaginary type, where you sit and imagine that the breath is going up and down into the body touching certain points?]

[I don’t run my mind up and down chakras. I do not follow breath in meditation.]

Alfredo's Reply:

By the way, in 2nd Kriya Pranayama as I was taught and use, from Lahiri Baba, there is nothing imaginary in it. You do not imagine that the breath is going up and down because the breath indeed goes up and down, and you fill and empty the lungs in stages accordingly, so it is not the mind, but the breath indeed that runs the chakras. Thus the effect, although not as aggressive as Bhastrika, can, at will, be made to resemble it.

Marcia Beloved 5 years ago

Several people have taken videos of Michael's bhastrika practice and we have these posted in the Video section of Inselfyoga.

Here is one direct link, to get you started:

Video Link: http://www.veoh.com/watch/v207109612W6t7wb2

Video Title: Kundalini Yoga_4 by bhagiratha5

Alfredo 5 years ago

Very nice, thank you.

MiBeloved 5 years ago

Alfredo wrote:

You do not imagine that the breath is going up and down because the breath indeed goes up and down, and you fill and empty the lungs in stages accordingly, so it is not the mind, but the breath indeed that runs the chakras.

MiBeloved’s Response:

Speak for yourself. Dont run off with assumptions that everybody is equal and everybody is the same. In my system I never got the breath to go down and up to the base chakra.

In my system the breath does go down and up from normal breathing but only down to above the navel.

Once Authur Beverford, a disciple of Rishi Singh Gherwal showed me in 1973 the anuloma viloma alternate breathing technique for forcing the breath to alter its course and move down to the base chakra (with stress on forcing it mentally to do so by holding a special count ratio of inhalation, retention, exhalation and holding breath out). That is the only system which worked in my system to do this but it had to be done for at least one hour to really penetrate and stay in a penetrant way. And as soon as I stopped doing it, the breath resumed its passage up to above the navel. And it did not awaken kundalini in a distinct way but only gave it very subtle proddings which it simply ignored.

The other thing is that if someone is doing this, then I have to hear how long it takes before kundalini rises in a distinct non-vague way and what is the experience when kundalini rises. If kundalini does not rise during each practice, then for me it is an incomplete practice.

In the practice I used which I got from Yogi Bhajan, kundalini rises without fail at each practice. This guarantees that it does not remain sleeping and doing its own thing at muladhara chakra and best of all it guarantees that it courses through the nadis and keeps them open and clear. In my experience, otherwise they clog up and stay clogged which in my system is their natural state.

Can someone have a different type of subtle body?

Sure, why not?

If your system is as sensitive as you described, then good for you!

Some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouth.

Others can't even buy a copper spoon with their week's wages.

Alfredo 5 years ago

Michael: I saw the video pointed out by Marcia (thanks Marcia), it is impressive, and definitely places my practice, compared to yours, in the amateur category...A question: I quite not get whether you are inhaling through the mouth and exhaling through the nose. Can you explain?

MiBeloved 5 years ago

Alfredo,

This is an open site which means you are free to write what you desire.

I am also free to do so.

If you feel disrespected then state your case and continue posting.

At this site we have to agree to disagree.

At this site we do not have to be agreeable to anyone.

This is a frank site which includes human behavior and misbehavior.

You are welcome to state your case or to ignore anything which you interpret is hostile to you at this site and we will continue posting regardless.

You don’t have to be agreeable to me on this site. I do not have to be agreeable to you either.

If people feel intimidated by my information that is okay. There is nothing wrong with that. I still have to give the information because that is why I took this body.

I am not hog-tying anyone to the site. People are free to come and go.

You should stay at the site and should not be frightened away by anything I write to you or to anyone else.

That is my advice.

The way to deal with this is that if you are offended by something I write, then try not to take it personally.

================================

Alfredo,

Inhale through the nose exhale through the nose.

Mouth may be open during these actions and a sound might emit from it due to action at the throat (epiglottis) but it is mostly a nose inhale and exhale.

It is sometimes done with mouth closed and with tongue rolled up and back, but it can be done with mouth open, even though the breathing takes place primarily through the nose.

On occasion there are mouth exhales but rare any mouth inhales.

Bhastrika and Kapala Bhati are aggressive practices. Yogi Bhajan called it breath of fire.

Some yogis do it slowly with little aggressiveness but when he first came from India Yogi Bhajan taught the aggressive type combined with various postures.

In India some yogis are seen doing it only in the sukhasana or padmasana (easy pose or lotus posture). It is done in those postures but also in other postures. In each posture one puts the mind where the posture focuses. In this way one gradually begins to learn how to target and infuse specific areas of the subtle body and one does not take it for granted that the energy is going everywhere.

So this process is a combination of asanas and pranayama as one practice. It is reminiscent of Patanjali's combination practice of samyama, which has to do with the three higher stages instead of the 3rd and 4th stages in combination.

There is a technical difference between bhastrika and kapala bhati which is that a beginner should do kapala bhati and should begin bhastrika only when kapala bhati has developed into an easy habit.