The Awakening Body by Reginald A. Ray

Author:Reginald A. Ray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2016-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

10

Practice Six: Twelvefold Lower-Belly Breathing

OVERVIEW

Twelvefold Lower-Belly Breathing is used extensively in all the practicing lineages of Buddhism and also in Hindu yoga. I myself first learned it from my friend Edo Roshi in 1981; a yoga teacher, who was an academic student of mine, showed me some important refinements shortly thereafter. And when I was training in Mahamudra where this same practice is extremely important, it became a staple for me and has remained so ever since.

At this point, it may be helpful for me to share with you how Twelvefold Lower-Belly Breathing is explained in the Tibetan tradition. Beneath the operations of our thinking mind runs our prana, or life force. This energy runs through channels or pathways known as nadis. The most important of these is the central channel with which you now have some experience. On either side of the central channel, almost abutting it, are two other principal nadis carrying feminine and masculine energy. These connect with weblike nadi structures in our major energy centers known as chakras. All told, there are said to be eighty-four thousand nadis in the body. This representation may sound rather complicated, but it really is needed to clarify the experience we are going to have within the body. I’ll be talking about all of this more later on.

The conceptualizing that our ego is constantly manufacturing tends to tangle up our nadis and disconnect them from the central channel. What this means experientially is that our conscious experience gets disconnected from the underlying infinitude of our basic being, our unconditional awareness or “natural state.” So our prana gets trapped in endless loops, can no longer flow into and through the all-purifying central channel, and therefore becomes stale or polluted. The result is that our experience of life is fundamentally scattered, cloudy, obstructed, and confused. Since we have lost access to our nonconceptual experience, we tend to live in our facsimile versions. Having lost touch with the central channel, we have lost contact with our groundless ground, the natural state, our basic nature, and hence with our true Self and our life.

Twelvefold Lower-Belly Breathing does two things, which are two aspects of the same process. First, through a vigorous out-breath, stale or polluted prana is cleared out of our system. Since stale prana underlies all of our dysfunction, whether physical, energetic, emotional, or spiritual, this emptying-out process is highly beneficial. Then, second, the vigorous out-breath also brings our prana into the central channel. As this happens, our peripheral nadis untangle themselves. As we are about to see, the subjective experience of all of this can be powerful and profound.

The uses and benefits of this practice are many. All of them have to do with coming strongly back into our true body, our Soma. Most importantly, it is a way of bringing ourselves back, when we find ourselves checked out, wildly conceptual, overrun with emotions, frantic, or sunken in depression—that is, when we are one way or another lost in our heady and energetically confused versions of reality.

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