Spiritual Practice Last week, inspired by the articles about the Vagus nerve, I closed my classes with the ‘bee breath’ using a variation where the fingers are placed carefully and gently over the eye-sockets so as to produce a light pressure on the eyeballs. This week I decided to use that as a segue into a spiritually focussed practice. I wrote some notes to introduce the theme and today I thought they might be interesting to one or two of you. So, I wrote them out more fully and here they are. :-) Brhamari pranayama is a humming breath that simulates the buzzing of the black bee. Part of the practice involves trying to create a particular resonance in the skull as well as the thorax. This comes close to including most of the Vagus-stimulating things mentioned in the article in one technique. There is a fairly obvious link between the spoken sound of Bhramari, Brahma and Brahman. Brahman was sometimes said to be the silence underlying the universe while Brahma was the sound itself, rolling out and creating the universe as we perceive it. Sometimes the silence was Brahma (Indra) and the sound was made by his wife Sarasvati (Brhamari Deva). In this context it is said that Bhramari Devi resides inside the heart chakra and emits the buzzing sound of Bees, called ‘Bhramaran’. Likewise, the sound of a Bee humming was emulated in Vedic chants and the humming of Bees represented the essential sound of the universe all across India. This Bhramaran can conveniently be connected to the AUM with the ‘open’ ‘A’ sound (Siva) transforming into the womb-like ‘U’ sound of Sakti which in turn evolves into the ‘M’ sound of the Material universe. The origin of these words comes from a root ‘brh’ which has various meanings assigned to it one of which is ‘sound’. Referring back to the previous para, in this interpretation, the universe is made up of vibrational sound and if we can get the vibrational sound of our AUM to resonate with the sound of Bhramari Deva’s sound we are effectively ‘reunited’ with The One. By the same reckoning it’s believed that Brahma meant the sound of the breath, and so the men who chanted the Vedas, the vision of Divinity made sound, were Brahmins. Brahma became, in effect, the life within the breath. In a similar vein our word ‘spirit’ derives from a Latin verb ‘Spirare meaning ’to breathe’. Breath and life grew to be seen seen as pretty much synonymous and from the verb emerged a noun – ‘Spiritus’. Spiritus meant ‘a breathing’, ‘a breath’, ‘the breath of life’ and even ‘life’ itself. So as we work with our breath in a practice we can focus on whichever of these various meanings works for us. The important thing is that the combination of breathing and focussing are what transform our practice from P.E. into yoga. Spirit, as life itself, evolved further as people pondered on what the source of life might be and so became part of religious or spiritual terminology becoming synonymous with words like soul and animus (which is greek and has to do with ‘that which animates us’). In our spiritual practice, as we work and breathe keep in mind the idea that we’re trying to bring ourselves closer to the ‘life within’ however we might see it and try to imagine that the closer we can get to our inner life the more alive, aware and spirited (or even inspired) we become. Remember too that it this inner life also brings the posture itself to life and the living posture, together with our living breath allows us to transcend our normal level of being. While we’re being inspired (literally breathing in spirit) it’s worth mentioning that our word spire, comes to us not (as we might think) from ‘spirare’ but rather from a middle English word for spike – spire – which, in turn. derives from middle German and Old Norse words for a blade of grass – ‘spir’ and ‘spier’. In this sense we can think of the spire on a church as actually growing heavenward from the body of the church itself and in so doing capture something of its symbolism to early church builders. In that same sense we can also make sense of the idea in yoga that the Susumna and its Chakras emerge from the base of the body, growing through the Sacrum (one meaning of which is small temple), to the ajna centre and from there make a leap, skyward, to whatever we believe lies beyond. And so, if we shift our imagery from a blade of grass on a Scandinavian hillside to a Lotus growing in a lake in India, we have the yogic idea that the Susumna and its Chakras emerge from the base of the body, growing through the Sacrum (one meaning of which is small temple), to the Ajna centre and from there make a leap, skyward, to whatever we believe lies beyond. Doing this, we complete the circle and see the same essential ideas emerging within what, on the surface, appear to be widely differing traditions.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 17:55:50 +0000
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