concentric jellyfish pranayama

Posted on October 25, 2012 by admin

I can’t find any images of concentric jellyfish, so you will have to use your imagination a bit. But, the human diaphragm looks and acts much like one of these guys. Imagine your body being made of several jellyfish nesting together like Russian dolls, one inside another, with a common center. To help differentiate the layers, use the breathing, inhaling to inflate the outer and exhaling to shrink the next one in. then in hale into the inner one and exhale from the third one in, and so on. As the each outer one expands and can sustain its size, the inner ones become easier to feel. Feel the expanding and condensing radially and notice which segments are stuck. If a jellyfish layer has a stuck place, you will often be able to feel both an inability to expand in that segment and a sense of being stuck onto other layers, like layers of clothing that have inadvertently been sewn together somewhere. Keep the top of the jellyfish lifting up and maximize the mobility of the peripheral, circular ‘wings’. You can play with a viloma-like breath where you pause between each segment and you expand and condense the individual layers.

After the diaphragm opens more, you can experiment with the each of the ribs, especially the ones above the diaphragm. These ribs tend to be less mobile, but respond very well to the jellyfish image. Let each rib be a jellyfish and breath rhythmically up and down the ribs. Keep the center lifted at all times by the abdominal pressure within the lower jellyfish, not by using the spinal muscles.

Find the jellyfish everywhere within. Surprise yourself. Feel the fluid, oceanic freedom and effortlessness of the inner movements as they liberate the outer body from its holding patterns and unnecessary tension. Feel whole, awake and alive!

Culture as a Field Effect

Posted on October 17, 2012 by admin

As we explore the somatic nature of the three bodies of classical yoga, gross, subtle and causal, we might relate them to the three levels of reality in modern physics: matter, energy and fields. In ‘The Biology of Transcendence, written in 2002, Joseph Chilton Pearce has a lot to say about how culture itself is a field and plays a major role in inhibiting our capacity for spiritual awakening. It also rather clearly, describes the insanity of the modern electoral process. As such, our on-going homework is to remain present to whatever arises moment by moment, keep resting in the infinite spaciousness of the heart, keep awakening, keep nurturing the field of cosmic creativity!

“By the very nature of the human brain we create field effects and are affected by them. In this way, fields become culturally shared and move history accordingly. One of the largest factors in our history, perhaps making that history what it has been, is that culture is itself a field, independent of any of its expressions.” and…

“A new and all pervasive negative field has been growing among people worldwide, an angst or fear without an object and tinged with rage. The angst or fear is fed by the mass media. Saturating all societies our mass media feed into and feed on, this global angst is a typical bio-cultural process. No one knows where it might lead. Already it is a kind of demonic spirit that blows where it will.

This angst ridden energy is nothing less than our longing for transcendence, which, in light of its enormous evolutionary power, must be derailed or subverted by culture, if culture is to survive.

But is culture real? Or is it, like a Tibetan tulpa, a phantom of the human intellect? Once isolated from the intelligence of the human heart, once entrained with and by culture, we interpret cultural survival as our own survival and respond as …culture. We then are culture, just as we are nature and evolution.

Delivery from this massive and ancient error of the mind has been the intent of every great being in history, was surely the intent of Jesus. Tackling culture was the thrust behind the cross. Jesus demonstrated that our true nature is transcendence itself, and his attempt to awaken us to enculturation and its power strikes me as the most outlandish tilting at windmills in history.”

circles (part 4)

Posted on October 15, 2012 by admin

We have been exploring concentric circles in nature (see previous three blog posts) and today we will look at them in a form near and dear to all of us, sphincters. According to freedictionary.com, a sphincter is: A ringlike muscle that normally maintains constriction of a body passage or orifice and that relaxes as required by normal physiological functioning.

Wisegeek.com adds: A sphincter is a ring of muscle which holds any kind of biological opening closed. Sphincters are an important part of almost any system in a body. They help to both regulate the exit, entrance and circulation of fluids, gasses, and solids. Sphincters help blood to move through a circulatory system and bile and nutrients to go through the digestive systems. They also assist in the voiding of wastes.

There are as many as 50 different sphincters inside the human body. Some are external, such as the mouth, and others are microscopically internal, such as the ones in capillaries. A sphincter in the eye controls the contracting and widening of the iris when it is exposed to light, and there are sphincters which help control the flow of pancreatic juices.

Some sphincters are under voluntary control, while others are involuntary. These sphincters are differentiated by being controlled by two different types of nerves, the somatic, or voluntary, and the autonomic, or involuntary. An example of an involuntary sphincter is the Ileocecal sphincter. Also known as the Ileocecal valve, it closes off the the small intestine so that food that has not been fully broken down won’t pass into the next stage of digestion. The rectum has both a voluntary and an involuntary sphincter—the first moves wastes through the tract, while the second allows control over bowel movements.

In the digestive track we have a long convoluted tube with both longitudinal muscle fibers and ring-like circular fibers and it is these muscular rings that we will focus on. In healthy peristalsis, the wavelike muscular contractions of the intestine or other tubular structure that propel the contents onward by alternate contraction and relaxation, the rings oscillate between expanding/opening and condensing/closing. Sphincters are like one-way gates that open to allow material to pass through and then close to prevent back-flow.

In a healthy body the rhythm of peristalsis depends upon the demands of the moment. When sympathetic activity like exercise or stress dominates, peristaltic motility decreases, the sphincters contract and secretion of enzymes decreases. When relaxing parasympathetic activity dominates, there is an increase in motility, a relaxing of the sphincters and an increase in secretions. A healthy organism transitions smoothly back and forth across the whole spectrum of possibilities, widening and narrowing, expanding and condensing. The relationship between skeletal muscle and smooth muscle is alert and respectful, like yin and yang.

Is it possible, in a yoga posture, to have the inherent motility, the rhythmic oscillation between expanding and condensing of the rings in the digestive track, be the primary source of information and support? What would it feel like if the whole digestive system were in synchrony with posture and movement? In forward bending poses, there is the obvious tendency, if we are not attentive to collapse onto the GI tract and restrict the organs altogether. In backbending poses, if we are not careful and alert, instead of relaxing and opening the GI tract even further to open the pose, the tendency is to go sympathetic, contract the outer spinal muscles, and constrict GI motility. In twits, ride the rings around an a circle, remembering to always have a seed of clockwise balancing counterclockwise movements, and vice versa. Find the peristaltic rhythm. Feel it from mouth to anus and everywhere in between. Find the sphincters. Stay in at least three dimensions. Add tone where needed, relax tone where there is excess. Then let the muscles and bones find flow and harmony within and without.