Take A breather: Practice

Practicing yoga can be as simple as paying attention to your breath.  To release the tension and stress of living on the human scene, lay on your back with knees bent.   First just put your hands on your belly and observe your breath.  Remember, Atah Yoga Nushasanam… Now yoga begins, right where you are.  Note the transformation of breath and the effect of just stopping to be with it. Then once you’ve settled, inhale lift your arms in an arc until hands touch the floor over your head.  Exhale through same arc coming down.  To familiarize yourself with Ujjayi breath, which you may remember from previous posts we also call “Sussura del’anima – Whisper of the soul” breath, exhale softly opening your mouth like steam escaping with a HAAAA.  Feel the connection to this as though the navel moving back towards the spine is squeezing out the breath, and all the old stuff you want to let dissolve.  Once you’ve established the breath, continue recreating this Ujjayi breath.   Inhale and exhale through the nostrils with the breath moving to the back of the throat.  Establish a count and balance inhale and exhale.

Visualize an arcobaleno, a rainbow arc being traced by your fingertips and clear away the cobwebs of attachment to doing and just be.  That’s enough.  Just be. Pause for a moment after inhale, just be .  Pause for a moment after exhale, Kumbakha, Just be.  You may find a mantra effective.  One translation of SO HAM, the mantra of breath, is I am.  INhale SO, EXhale HAM.  Listen as the soul whispers, inhale “I” .  Exhale “AM” In the space between thoughts we may touch the infinity of being, atha yoganushasanam.  After that, what more is there to say.

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