![]() ![]() This is optional, but it allows you to be fully in touch with your breath. Allow the exhalation to carve ever deeper paths for prana in your body.įrom here, depending on how much time you have for your practice, you might move to legs up the wall. For this practice, breathe in softly through both nostrils to an even count of four and then breathe out to a longer count of six. Stay here for three to five minutes before choosing a more formal pranayama, the one that will become the anchor for your practice, your place of perpetual return. Enjoy both the u-turn at the top of the inhalation and the void at the bottom of the exhalation. On inhalation fill from the belly, through the ribs, to the collarbone then on exhalation empty from the collarbones, down through the ribs, to the very bottom of the lungs. Find a yogic breath to explore the full capacity of your lungs. If not, move directly to a deepening awareness of the breath. If you open your practice with chanting, begin that practice. Part of you is soft and open, while part is alert and aware. ![]() Feel the energy of the earth moving from the tailbone along the back body and out the crown of the head. Close your eyes and soften through the face and the heart. Perhaps sit on the edge of a blanket, or you may prefer to sit on a block in thunderbolt pose. You might consider not playing music for this practice so that you can be entirely with your inner landscape.īegin in sukhasana, easy-seated pose, with palms face down on your legs. Therefore, in our alchemical yin practice, we will begin at the base and transmute that which is most heavy (tamasic) into that which is most filled with light (sattvic).ħ5 minute practice. ![]() The alchemist knows that what is most difficult in our lives offers the possibility for the greatest transformation. As a process in a laboratory, it begins with fermentation, decay, stench. Like yin, alchemy moves toward rather than away. She says later, “Your son, born of your body, is not you.” So we want to approach the entire practice-from breath to body-as a way to get us closer to reality, possibly even experience transcendence, but not confuse the sadhana, the work or practice of yoga, with the goal of yoga: union.Īlchemy, like yoga, embraces the difficult. She writes, “The rays of light emanating from the sun and the heat produced from the sun are essential aspects of the sun, but they are not the sun itself.” In the same way, when we work with the Tantric body by visualizing the chakras, energy centers, we are getting in touch with these subtle energies but the visualization is not transcendence itself. The goal of yoga is transcendence, but most of us won’t get there in this lifetime. Much of yoga practice–from the chakras, to the breath work, to the poses themselves-works as a kind of a crutch or support for our journey. Our identification with the mind makes it difficult for us to separate what is not real (our thoughts) from what is real (our true, divine nature). As Swami Satysangananda Saraswati writes in The Ascent, most of us need help realizing our true nature. One of the simplest ways to access the alchemical potential in the body is by focusing on the chakras and their relationship to the elements. All you need to practice is a few props, silence, and the willingness to become the cup. Yin, because it is a quiet practice where our bodies are focused and still, serves as the ideal laboratory for alchemical work. We become more in touch with the transmutation that lies at the heart of all alchemical work: the movement from the gross to the subtle. Having a strong understanding of the alchemical aspects of yoga allows us to see our bodies as the crucibles that they are. But for the student of yoga, alchemy is not some hip new way to describe transformation rather, alchemy has deep roots in the history of the practice, roots that can be traced back to the Tantrikas in the medieval period (for further reading I would suggest David Gordon White’s The Alchemical Body). The word is used so freely these days, it often becomes unmoored from its meaning and certainly from actual work in a laboratory.
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