What Do We Do When We Do NadiPrana?

The essential magic of how NadiPrana Buddhist yoga rearranges the patterning of the bodymind from ego’s claustrophobia, releasing all of the underlying insecurity into its own inherent space – exactly how this happens and when it happens, this cannot be pinpointed or defined.  However, we can describe the practical steps that need to be taken.  Following them will lead us into the open space, which is none other but our own mind’s inborn luminous space.

In other words, the question here is, what exactly do we do when we do NadiPrana? 

From the outside it may look like we are doing some postures, some slow (extremely slow) movements; we also appear to chant mantras occasionally and we sit in meditation – often briefly, and sometimes for longer periods of time.  This is in the most superficial of terms.  In order to describe the inwardly directed process, which is what precipitates the change, we need to be more precise.  In NadiPrana when focusing inward:

• We make contact with our own body, whether we move, chant or sit.  The body itself (not our thoughts about it or about anything else) becomes the main focus.  We stay with the body.  To begin with, awareness is purely and simply body awareness.
• As we are focusing on the body we actually are focusing on feeling what’s going on.  What do these physical sensations feel like that keep popping up?  We feel them, but we don’t necessarily label them, although we will also do that, as our minds are used to labeling.  In fact this is the only thing the mind usually does: labeling, and then judging.  Now we make the switch – from labeling and judging to feeling.
• When we focus on feeling, we may start to notice spots and areas of tension, physical discomfort, or even pain.  Instead or trying to make these go away, we focus on feeling the tension, the discomfort, the pain.  First, by habit, we may look at or feel, or describe the tension, the discomfort, the pain from the outside, as something that would exist outside the domain of our own conscious awareness.
• But then we allow awareness to make another switch.  We let awareness enter the tension, the discomfort, the pain.  We let awareness feel them from inside.  We are no longer outside the tension we are in it, inhabiting it.  And as we inhabit the tension, it can no longer be just a distraction, something that bothers us from the outside.
• In other words: the tension, the discomfort, the pain, can no longer exist outside the domain of our own conscious awareness.  Rather they are within the field of our conscious awareness.  And as a phenomenon inside our field of awareness, awareness can change them.  Tension no longer rules us.  Instead awareness gains the upper hand.
• As awareness gains the upper hand we may feel tension, discomfort and even pain start to melt.
• In other words, by directly noticing and feeling whatever is going on in the body, we begin to notice and feel how it never stays the same, how unsubstantial and fleeting, even fluid it is.  Feelings that are fluid, even malleable cannot be stuck in one rut.  Which infers that we don’t have to be stuck in one rut either.  We can be free.  We ARE free.

In short, in NadiPrana as in all Buddhist forms of yoga we feel fully embodied.  We move and meditate with the body, with the breath.

Through this inner process the body presents itself as the perfect gate into a much more open & liberating space, where concepts with their never ending and always-proliferating boundaries can never lead.