Saturday, September 16, 2017

The Basic Purpose & Short History of NadiPrana in India


Not many people have heard of NadiPrana, an inner yoga promoting self-healing & a panoramic kind of awareness, which is gradually freeing the practitioner of ego-reference.  Yet, it has been taught and shared with quite a few people here in India as well as in some other places since 1998.


The basic purpose of the system is to heal and stabilize the bodymind by removing blockages from the energy body, which when negatively charged, negatively impacts on our physical and emotional well-being via clogged-up energy channels (nadi in Sanskrit) plus via unbalancing because disharmonious winds (vayu or prana in Sanskrit). 



In other words, by enhancing and accelerating the flow of energy through the proper channels, NadiPrana can eventually transform our by habit grasping and clinging mind into its far vaster & even limitless nature, which spontaneously expresses itself through awareness, openness & naturally manifesting love & compassion.  By practicing NadiPrana under appropriate guidance, we can graduate from ordinary selfish mind to all-inclusive and all-pervasive wisdom mind without getting hung up or unnecessarily proud about how ‘loving’ & ‘compassionate’ we have become.  



After regular and repeated NadiPrana practice, hardened mental & psychological patterns slowly tend to melt in the sun & moon of a self-arising awareness that had remained hidden from our view & taste & touch, thus far. 



Yet after such words in praise of NadiPrana, a note of caution is in order: there is a safety
valve against over-zealousness & commercial misuse built into the practice.  It doesn’t work like a magic wand or even automatically, and NadiPrana teaching certificates after a 300-hour course would feel rather out of place.  With NadiPrana you only can get out what you put in.  Furthermore, NadiPrana is all about a personal journey, not a standardized prepaid trip or package deal, so to speak.  The rewards are fantastic, but you have to apply yourself, you have to fully open up to yourself & the very life flowing through that you habitually & unconsciously may want to freeze into illusory images, all kinds of daydreams & self-centered concepts, thus also freezing the world in the same manner, robbing it of its vitality.



I cannot claim that I have created or even developed the system.  In a way, many far greater teachers than I have been using and plagiarizing or reinventing it since the Buddha’s time.  In my case, NadiPrana sort of developed itself into the present form on the basis of a lifelong practice of Buddhist yoga & meditation, which I learned from Tibetan Buddhist lineage teachers both in the west, as well as in India and Nepal.  In some way this inner & outer journey may actually have started at birth, but definitely was set in motion in 1971 when I first spent full six weeks around the great stupa in Boudha or Bodhnath near Kathmandu in Nepal.  There I got drawn into this magical place’s ungraspable & unnoticeably ennobling & empowering circles.  By the way, as I am writing this today, I am sitting in the Himalayan Java CafĂ©, facing the east side of the very same stupa.



However, this is not the time to go into my life story in detail.  The focus here is sharing with you how NadiPrana could be defined and how has been taught in a few select groups over close to 20 years, and why it was taught in this way – rather than being loudly touted or even professionally marketed.



This particular aspect of the journey with NadiPrana started when I moved to India from the US in February 1998, almost exactly twenty years after I had started practicing Buddhist yoga in 1978.  In 1998 I was married to an internationally recognized American Reiki teacher & workshop leader, who already had quite a few followers in India.  From the beginning, we worked together as a team.  I also became the sometimes silent and sometimes acknowledged co-author of her books.   Through these & other contributions, my ex-wife could see the value of what I had to offer.  As a result, she requested me to share it in some of her 5-day to month long programs.  So I started doing that. 



Thus the first NadiPrana teachings came in the form early morning sessions in what used to be called the Core Empowerment Training, as well as in several 4-week bodymind therapy courses, taught between 1998 and 2005.  Those of you reading this, who have gone through Gagori’s trainings at Aithein in Agonda can easily relate to this approach, because they have encountered their bit of NadiPrana in the same way.  My connection with Gagori, incidentally, started in a Core Empowerment Training and additional bodymind therapy course, in 2002.  She has been working with me ever since for now fifteen wonderful and sometimes at least partially miserable years. 



That the years had both high and low points was indispensable.  Deep spiritual work requires challenging all of our hideouts and misguided beliefs regarding ‘self’ & ‘others’, & sometimes the going gets a little rough.  Furthermore, to believe that only the student would experience the ‘low’ whereas the teacher would stay above it all & always on the ‘high’ in this roller coaster unfolding, is one of the greater misconceptions about the workings of any genuine spiritual teacher/student or student/teacher relationship.  When one of the two experiences heavy challenges the other automatically feels them, too, & distinctly so.  Most people have no idea how connected one can get in this kind of teaching process.  But, of course, connected to each other in this way does not infer being chained to each other.  True connectedness always conveys the taste of innate freedom.



Anyway, in the course of these sessions within the framework of other teachings, some participants voiced their interest in retreats dedicated exclusively to NadiPrana.  Thus they came about, & I have conducted at least one retreat annually since the year 2000, most of them in India, one or two in Scotland and Mauritius.  I have also taught two people in several month-long one-on-one retreats where we explored deeply.



Interestingly enough, a core group formed.  Most of the retreats had some of the same
participants differently mixed and matched, with only a few newcomers and bystanders occasionally joining.  At first, this insider focus happened accidently; later I consciously encouraged & continued to steer the development in this direction. 



Why? I probably felt the need to test myself as a teacher working closely with only a few students, while I was being tested and worked on by my teachers. 



And yet these two processes of teaching and being taught were not directly linked.  My teachers did not teach me NadiPrana.  Rather, they worked with me on traditional Tibetan Buddhist forms of meditation & sadhana.  They further permitted me to share some of their teachings.  They granted me the right to give Buddhist refuge and bodhisattva instructions, which traditionally is considered a rare privilege.  They let me guide people through preliminary practices, even through long traditional retreats, which for some lasted three months.  My teachers observed how these retreats impacted students & what happened in peoples’ lives when they worked with me.  How much I cared.  How much I stayed true to the actual essence and form of the teachings, while spontaneously manifesting new and genuine ways of expressing them in the modern world – finding my own voice, ‘claiming my seat’ as the Tibetan phrase suggests.  How much or how little people actually flourished while occasionally being challenged to the core!



It has been a long and rewarding process, informing the teaching of NadiPrana with far greater depth than otherwise possible, imbuing it with a true spiritual lineage.  And in any genuine and real dharma teaching, lineage is everything.  Lineage means being empowered to inform the present with the accomplishments of the past – keeping such accomplishment alive by re-enacting it now in our individual ways.



Does that mean that you have to turn Buddhist in order to practice NadiPrana for the simple purpose of self-healing or finding some inner sanity in world gone insane?  No, turning Buddhist for such purpose is not required, only being willing to unreservedly explore your own bodymind is.



Why am I sharing all of this now?  May be now more people are ready for this, or I am ready for more people.  Time to get the teachings out and see how they benefit or don’t benefit more people.



To reiterate the key idea on how Buddhist NadiPrana may be different from other forms of yoga, in Buddhist yoga, postures are not of utmost importance and the perfecting of posturing not encouraged.  What is important, however, is to feel yourself, to feel everything that percolates through and bubbles up from your own depths – without judging it or imprisoning it in fixed self-images & concepts & worldviews.



In short, you liberate and free yourself through NadiPrana mostly by feeling your bodymind moment to moment anew, not getting stuck in any particular ‘feeling’ or ‘experience’ or ‘observation’.  This sounds so simple but is one of the most difficult things to actually do – even more so when you consider that the awareness that is thus called forth is not bound to your ego & has no center.  It invites you to join into your own vastness.


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