Cultivating Prana

Transcript

hi and thanks for joining me today today we're going to talk about cultivating prana and what that even looks like part of the practice of yoga is to cultivate and purify prana to do that we first need to purify the body purification processes and yoga are called kriya kriya are designed to rid the body of amma or undigested food or material can be in a physical form as undigested food or a coating on your tongue for example but it can also be psychological everything that we take in from the outside world is a form of prana now there's different qualities of prana for example if i'm listening to mantra and i'm making dinner that's a different type of chronic environment than if i'm listening to death metal and making dinner one has a different quality of prana than the other and it will affect not only my psychological mood but my physical body as well as the food that i'm cooking on the stove when we are looking to cultivate quality prana we're looking to take in prana that's fresh authentic that is clean we want to eat vegetables and meats and fruits that are directly harvested not old food that's been sitting around in a tomasic state we want to take in activities and engage in relationships where there is interdependence and mutual respect this creates an opportunity for quality psychological and intellectual prana that supports quality emotional prana we process this prana through a digestive process either psychologically or physically all the prana that we take in must be digested when we digest prana it is used for our vital life force we have both prenatal prana and postnatal prana our prenatal prana is gifted to us by our mother and it lasts us our entire life our postnatal product comes from the foods we eat the experiences we have the relationships we have the things we look at all of our external experience if we aren't fully digesting our prana we end up with excess undigested material this excessive undigested material is called amma amma is sludgy it is an energetic blockage in and of itself it's prana that wasn't fully converted into life force and it can back up the system and cause dis-ease when amma accumulates in the body we have potential for a disease process to begin in ayurveda the disease process has many steps and it all starts with a build up of amma we use kriya practices and asana practices along with pranayama practice and pratyahara practice to clear the body of unwanted amma to cleanse the body and mind so that we are prepared to sit in quiet contemplative union with pure awareness pure prana as you go about your day-to-day life notice when you experience amma if you scrape your tongue in the morning all of the stuff that you're scraping off of your tongue is amma if you floss or brush your teeth the smell or taste inside of your mouth when you're flossing is ama if you clean out your ears and get wax on your q-tip that is amma when we are cleansing the digestive system and the liver is detoxifying the body and our bowel movements are sluggish or silty that is amma when we experience a sluggish or silty menstrual cycle this is another form of amma we can rid the body of amma and decrease the chances of the disease process starting through kriya practices pranayama practices and asana practices i hope this lecture has been helpful be well yogis namaste