Iyengar Intensive Pranayama
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Iyengar concluded the class session with a talk on pranayama.
"We do pranayama to store prana [energy]," he said. Primarily, we store it in the trunk, especially in the upper chest, the area at the top of the breast below the clavicles. And one of the touchstones of a proper pranayama practice is the softness of the skin at the temples. "The temple is the door to go inside the mind," Guruji said. "Soft temples are necessary for meditation. Meditation is passive reflection. And pranayama is half way to meditation! It is the gate to come closer to the self."
Guruji told us that one key to pranayama is properly lifting the spine--not by lifting the top of the sacrum into the body as many people have been taught, but by a much subtler movement: a gentle lift of the anterior spine that begins with the anterior surface of the tailbone.
Mr. Iyengar went on to compare the three parts of the breath--inhalation, retention, and exhalation--to the triune godhead of Brahma the originator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. As we inhale, the breath touches the atman, the self or soul, and moves it from the core of the body toward the surface, toward meeting the outer world. In the kumbhaka--the retention--the self is held in contact with the inner surface of the body. (When this contact recedes, Guruji said, you are no longer doing kumbhaka pranyama; you're merely holding your breath.) Finally, in exhalation, the body follows the self back toward the core.
"The spiritual value of pranayama is not [measured by] the length of the three segments of the breath," Guruji told us. What is important in pranayama is not the length and depth of the breath, but the contact between the body and the soul.
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In the afternoon pranayama session, Manouso Manos elaborated in great detail on Guruji's instruction. He explained how instead of the harsher action of lifting the spine from the back body, which shifts us onto the front edge of our sitting bones, we should instead slighty increase the natural curl of the tailbone by drawing its front surface slightly back. "How big is this movement?" he said. "An eigth of an inch, a sixteenth of an inch, a fingernail."
But this tiny movement can help us find a perfect balance on the exact middle of the sitting bones. And this in turn creates a foundation that sets up the posture in which true pranayama can occur. When we get this posture just right, Manouso said, we realize that pranayama is not something we make happen, but something that we allow to occur naturally.
