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83. EatingPrana 4/27/06
We need to
take care of the healthy seeds that are in us by watering them every day through
the practice of mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindfully doing everything.
We need to touch the Buddha within us. We need to enter our own heart, which
means to enter the heart of the Buddha. To enter the heart of the Buddha means
to be present for ourselves, our suffering, our joys, and for many others.
~~Thich Nhat Hanh ~~ pg. 236 The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching.
Breathing earns the primary position in all forms of
transformative activities of our multidimensional art form, the body. In the
process of breathing we are consuming and digesting Prana energy, blending
material body with subtle body dimensions, tickling the soul, opening the heart
and allowing intuitive actions to play in the space. Prana is a food we can eat
all day long without overeating. Maintaining a constant wakefulness in the
present we can observe non-separation with all its colorful diversity.
The nature of our potential for change is directly related to the truths we consume. We can make remarkable change by eating prana, plain and simple. Any truth works wonders in its application to the material world and we can see this with the body and the truth of breathing. Breathing is both sacred and ordinary as we move through days full of surprises. Breathing and thinking work well together since breathing allows space and flexibility for our thought moments to form in. Our emotional and kinetic senses are enlivened by prana food and formative thought patterns tend to have life giving impulses. Sounds pretty good to me!
A simple search of the word Prana will reveal all the goodies contained in this free food source. In breathing practices prana enters and we feel better for it. Feeling better refers to both the ups and downs of our living. The physical game plays out before us and we can make better choices with the energy of prana circulating in our system. The methodologies of breathing traditionally existed primarily in spiritual practices while in the contemporary world we find breathing part of sports, health and psychology.
We also understand the use of breathing for its use in opening and maintaining the structure of the body. The remarkable aspect of our body to respond to breathing at any age and in any condition is something I have observed in thousands of sessions. By using breath to expand open internal spaces and elongating muscles, the body can open after a life time of tension, stress and poor postural habits. Bringing the body into alignment uses breathing to expand the body open and create more room for internal spaces and organs to exist in. The efficiencies of motion, when the body is open and the joints are aligned, presents us with the dignity and grace we see in any self respecting animal form. The ordinary experience can also have transcendental qualities by the very nature of conscious use of breath.
For me there are two benefits of working with our breath. One is the prana exchange, the second is the open body spaces. This activity becomes more of a practical way of going through the day in a relaxed fashion. Applying alignment ideas to the physical also gives a full array of wholesome work that we can do in a relaxed fashion with out making a big deal of the whole process. As Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche would say, ‘the extraordinary is ordinary’ and we can except that notion that we are not doing anything special but living. The fact that we are dynamic in natural quantum ways doesn’t mean anything out of the ordinary is going on as we experience just that.
We could also say that prana is the ultimate organic food, not subject to FDA regulations, and full of nutritional gems of the ongoing play of life. As we ‘organize’ our wisdoms, prana renews the constant festival of energy directing us to more joyful and happy outcomes. How we consume prana is but a matter of table manners. The master is within.
"If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so
much in despairing of life, as in hoping for another life, and in eluding the
implacable grandeur of this life."
-- Albert Camus
Posted by harmon at April 27, 2006
Comments
Harmon - I believe this is the most eloquent and persuasive statement on breath/ alignment-being that I have ever read. The simple reading of it opens and transforms my thinking and makes welcome the relief of pure breath that the daily grind (at one school after long class on the way to another) can make, seem a remote and difficult oasis. It is always right here.
Posted by: Scott Williams on April 27, 2006
Dear Heart, Harmony,
I absolutely agree with Scott.
I have followed your writing style
maturing through the years.
I am a Harmony reader, so to speak.
You are now graduated into the preterpluperfect!
You have peaked!
Thanks for sharing your great knowledge with the art of Writing.
Love and Blessings always, dear Teacher OF Mine!
Dr. Geronimo Sands
Artistic Director
Priscilla Beach Theatre
Plymouth, Massachusetts
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Posted by: Geronimo Sands on May 2, 2006
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