Baby steps on the path to enlightenment

Lalit, the author of the Yoga and Ayurveda articles on FurtherHealth, and a teacher of these disciplines, has been encouraging me to try some of the techniques that he has been writing about.

This was particularly in response to my blog about the meditating monks in Burma, and my confessed lack of patience to develop these skills.

Lalit had suggested that I try Pranayama, specifically five minutes each of Aalom Vilom (AV) and Kapalbharti (KB), as explained in our article about Yoga and diabetes.

As it is a nice sunny day today, I decided to put a blanket on the lawn and do five minutes of AV followed by five minutes of KB. At the very least it would be ten minutes sitting quietly in the sunshine!

Reading our article I could easily understand how to perform Aalom Vilom so I sat crossed legged on the blanket, closed my eyes and started to concentrate on inhaling and exhaling through each nostril seperately - long slow inhalations followed by long slow exhalations.

Concentrating on each breath I suddenly remembered to look at my watch to see how long I had been doing the exercise. Expecting it to be two minutes, I was surprised to see that I had been doing AV for seven minutes!

I noticed that by the end of the exercise that I was taking much deeper inhalations than when I started. As a Physiologist, at least by training, I know that this is a very good thing as air can linger and stagnate in the depths of your lungs if you don’t inhale and exhale deeply.

I felt good after this brief AV exercise - there is no doubt about it.

The KB exercise was more difficult to fathom so I need to ask Lalit to explain this better so that we can update our articles to better inform, but I can see (and feel) that controlled deep and slow inhalations and exhalations are highly beneficial.

I’ll learn more about KB and keep the blog updated with my progress.

Samadhi, here I come!

Add comment July 11th, 2006 Written By: chris