The Yogic scriptures refer to humans as Pranees, meaning “ones who consume the Prana.”
The concept of Prana is central to many holistic models of healing and is usually translated as “life force.” Related ideas of life energy appear across Eastern traditions as Prana, Qi (Chi) and Ki.
While “life force” is not a wrong definition, it doesn’t fully convey what Prana is: “the energy that makes the atom move,” the force behind all life and movement.
Do we really know how much we are working with when we practice Yoga?
A posture may be working with far more than the muscles and joints. A breath may affect more than the lungs. Even the placement of the hands can have a purpose that isn’t immediately obvious.
Let’s consider, for example, the rib cage.
It houses the lungs through which we breathe, making it easy to understand why we might associate this region with breath and life force. But when we look at the same area through other maps of the body, a different picture begins to emerge.
In Chinese medicine, the Spleen is not understood simply as the anatomical organ familiar to Western medicine. It is part of a larger system associated with our ability to transform nourishment into energy, digestion, the muscles and flesh, and the movement of fluids.
And the map doesn’t stop with physical function. The Spleen also has psycho emotional connections. Pensiveness, worry and overthinking are associated with the Spleen, while sweet is its associated taste. Something as ordinary as our tendency to worry, mentally chew something over and over, or reach for something sweet can suddenly be viewed through a different lens.
At the side of that same rib cage lies Spleen 21, known as the Great Connecting point, with an influence that extends beyond a single meridian to the larger system.
Yogic teachings identify this same region as a prana control point, through which the larger energetic system can be influenced. Certain yogic practices deliberately bring the hands to this area of the rib cage.
And then there is another connection. The biblical account of creation tells of Eve being fashioned from Adam’s side or rib. Through a yogic interpretation, this ancient story can be viewed as an image of one pranic body being divided to create another.
Three very different traditions and ways of understanding the human being, yet all drawing our attention to the same area of the body.
Coincidence? Different ways of describing the same territory? Or simply an invitation to look more closely?
This is where the exploration of the Mystical Body begins. What we might call the Mystical Body has been explored by cultures around the world. Yoga describes aspects of the human being that extend beyond the physical body. Kabbalistic traditions describe the Merkabah, or body of light. And the halo, one of the most familiar images of awakened consciousness, appears in Christian, Buddhist, Sikh and Hindu sacred art.
The language and the maps may be different, but again and again we find the idea that the physical body is not the whole of who we are.
Yoga, however, doesn’t ask us simply to believe this. It gives us ways to experience it directly.
To prepare the human body to, as William Blake put it, “cleanse the doors of perception,” yogic practices were developed to heal, enrich and expand not only the physical body, but the metaphysical body.
What may appear to be a simple physical practice can be working on many levels at once. A posture, a breath pattern, a point of pressure or a meditation may be doing much more than we realize.
When we begin to understand the connections between physical anatomy, subtle anatomy, energy and consciousness, even familiar practices can take on a whole new dimension. We begin to understand not only what we are doing, but why.
On Sunday, Nov. 8th, we will explore these relationships through teaching, discussion, Kriya and deep meditation, looking at the physical and metaphysical bodies and how yogic practices work with energy, the nervous system and consciousness.
The purpose is not only to learn another map of the body, but to experience the territory for ourselves, and discover how much more we are working with than we may have realized.