The Secret Path by Paul Brunton

Author:Paul Brunton [Brunton, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2018-01-14T05:00:00+00:00

The exercise consists in slowing down the rhythm of breathing to a point below the normal rate. The precise point cannot be prescribed here as it varies with different persons, partly according to varying lung capacities and partly according to different degrees of nervous sensibility. The average healthy person breathes approximately fifteen times each minute. Nevertheless, the full reduction should not be made straightway. It is always better to introduce such changes gradually and not violently.

Begin by exhaling very slowly, then inhale gently, then hold the breath momentarily, then breathe out again. Practise this with full attention and with eyes closed. It is important that the student should pour all his consciousness into his breathing until he seems to live in it for the time being.

This exercise is to be practised by beginners for five minutes—no longer. Advanced students may extend the time successively to ten, fifteen and twenty minutes as they progress. None should go beyond the last time-limit.

A slow, regular and quiet effort alone is called for; there should be no straining and no violent deep breathing as that would defeat the student’s aim; and complete muscular relaxation should reign. He may take it as a sign of success when the breath rhythm flows gently and effortlessly, so that if a feather were held before the nostrils it would not move. Yet if he feels the slightest discomfort or gasping for breath at any moment, he should stop at once and realise that he is practising wrongly.

Breathe through both nostrils: any European or American student who practises the alternate nostril Yoga breathing is taking great risks with his health and sanity; leave it alone. Dilated lungs are the least danger. Such artificial and unnatural breathing exercises are usually practised with a view to obtaining psychic powers: they have nothing in common with the natural control of breathing here advocated as a means of quietening the restless fever of thought and making the respiration as peaceful as that of a babe in the womb.

This exercise is based on the simple fact that breathing is a medium between the mind and the body, because it supplies arterialised blood to the brain. To diminish the cycle of breaths is to curtail the supply of blood to the brain, and therefore to retard the cycle of thoughts. ‘Breath is the horse and mind is the rider,’ say the Tibetans. Thus the tension and relaxation of the brain, the uprising and disappearance of thoughts, correspond in peculiar harmony with the cycle of breathing and can be brought under control.

The effect upon the student of consciously dropping the rhythm of his breathing will be a pleasant relaxed mood, a calming of the constant vibration of thought, a pouring of oil upon the troubled sea of life, and a more abstracted mental condition. And the intent concentration of his attention will cause him to forget other things in the act itself, so that he feels that he has become a ‘breath-being’, as it were. He

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.