alternate nostril breathing

[markern]

I am very, very strongly drawn to alterante nostril breathing but uncertain wether it is safe for me to start the practice.

 

My style of yoga is more or less Iyengar and I`ve deceided to broadly following his advice on how to structure my yoga practice and aproximately his advice on when to start pranayama. That way I feel certain not to have bad experiences with prana and that my practice takes me in a direction which gives spiritual results while at the same time is likely to make me very functional as a housholder. I`ve encountered techniques before that I think do not work well for people leading normal lives and I`ve had a couple of bad experiences with prana. I`ve also tried a couple of mild pranyama techniques and found them imensly powerfull after just a minute or two of practice.

 

The problem is that alternate nostril breathing seems to be a practice that Iyengar dosen`t introduce before arround two years of Pranayama and it is a year or two before I would be fit for any Pranayama by Iyengars standards. Since alternate nostril breathing feels like a miracle cure for me, adressing almost all my bodymind issues at the same time in just a few minutes, the temptation to start it now is huge. It just makes everything fall into place.

 

I presume that if I start the technique no and experience problems, I could just back of and after a while I would be back to normal. But since Iyengar structures his pranayama so meticously I am afraid that having gained some depth in alternate nostril breathing from the start could mess with the way he attempts to structure you energeticaly.

 

It seems to me that alternate nostril breathing although powerfull, seems fairly harmless since it is taught very, very widely. I can`t realy imagine that it would be taught in beginners yoga courses all over the place if it created problems for a lot of practioners.

 

Thanks in advance for any input you might have:)

[mantis]

who to trust

 

your guru

 

vs

 

the opinions on this forum

 

tough decision

[orb]

 

 

It seems to me that alternate nostril breathing although powerfull, seems fairly harmless since it is taught very, very widely. I can`t realy imagine that it would be taught in beginners yoga courses all over the place if it created problems for a lot of practioners.

 

Thanks in advance for any input you might have:)

 

What they teach in the beginners courses doesn't create problems because people don't do these exercises for too long and too serious.

Breathing exercises are a powerfull method of tweaking your body's functions to obtain certain desired results. Doing them from a book just for good health it's totally not worthit. One of my buddy's got really close the edge with breathing experiments and luckily stopped juuust in time. He hasn't gone back to those exercises in over 8 years and I doubt that he ever will.

Without a very good teacher and close supervision you could cause irreversible damage to your body and it's almost guaranteed to mean GAME OVER.

[markern]

who to trust

 

your guru

 

vs

 

the opinions on this forum

 

tough decision

 

I would never have a guru, I would only have teachers that I would have a high but less then 100% trust in the judgement of. In this case it is absolutely certain that the guru has opinions that are totaly wrong with regards to how to sequence things. He belives that you first need to realy master asanas, then pranayama and only then do you start meditating. This is just stupid and is provably wrong both if you look at historical and contemporary sources of how people got enlightened. It is also clear from numerous studies that stilness meditations are safe and extreemly beneficial for people with no previous experience with any type of energywork. With regards to pranayama he is also in disagreement with a huge amount of other respected gurus. The only reason I put any emphasis on what he says is that his structure of progress in yoga and pranayama is extreemly safe, well written down and has numerous qualified teachers. Safety, clarity and good results is more or less certain. However, most of his students of both asana and pranayama think his structure is good, but his pacing is too slow so they speed things up a bit without experiencing problems. Iyengar also has a tendency to completly disregard and miscredting things that didn`t work well for him despite it working well for loads of other people.

 

What they teach in the beginners courses doesn't create problems because people don't do these exercises for too long and too serious.

Breathing exercises are a powerfull method of tweaking your body's functions to obtain certain desired results. Doing them from a book just for good health it's totally not worthit. One of my buddy's got really close the edge with breathing experiments and luckily stopped juuust in time. He hasn't gone back to those exercises in over 8 years and I doubt that he ever will.

Without a very good teacher and close supervision you could cause irreversible damage to your body and it's almost guaranteed to mean GAME OVER.

 

 

If i am going to do alternate nostril breathing I will do it under the guidance of a teacher from the Bihar tradition that I know and respect. I would want to do it daily but only for about 5 minutes. The effect on me is a wonderfull feeling og harmonisation of my brain and body and a deep feeling of relaxation and concentration in perfect balance. I just don`t achieve anything near this from asana or meditation. Actualy it kind of feels like what I have to do in order to be able to meditate properly. It feels like a I have an energy problem that can be corrected very well by this practice so that my other practices work well and not the other way arround.

[orb]

If i am going to do alternate nostril breathing I will do it under the guidance of a teacher from the Bihar tradition that I know and respect. I would want to do it daily but only for about 5 minutes. The effect on me is a wonderfull feeling og harmonisation of my brain and body and a deep feeling of relaxation and concentration in perfect balance. I just don`t achieve anything near this from asana or meditation. Actualy it kind of feels like what I have to do in order to be able to meditate properly. It feels like a I have an energy problem that can be corrected very well by this practice so that my other practices work well and not the other way arround.

 

 

That sounds pretty safe. Let me know how it goes if you don't mind.

Edited July 19, 2008 by orb

[Birch]

That sounds pretty safe. Let me know how it goes if you don't mind.

 

 

I found out randomly that I liked to do alternate nostril breathing in my bathtub with a lot of steam;-) Just not too often and, especially, I'd stop if it gets to be too much. Currently, too much =after a few minutes and I realise that I'm only able to take in air via one nostril - when I was under the impression that all my deep breaths were equal between the two...

 

But, you should also note (disclaimer;-)) that I'm neither a very disciplined nor very ordered person (see how I screwed up my knees in the private practice forum;-))

 

BUT I think I at least know:

 

- when to stop

- when to get help (AKA someone who knows = teacher)

 

Would also add that it is entirely up to you to attribute power to anyone else. But that's just a thought;-)

 

Rgds,

 

Kate