Pranayama beyond the Fundamentals (eBook)

Introduction: I Take Refuge in the Breath

I take refuge in the breath. Breath is all this, whatever there is, and all that ever will be. I take refuge in the breath.—,Chandogya-Upanishad

This is my second book on pranayama. The first, The Yoga of Breath: A Step-by-Step Guide to Pranayama (Shambhala Publications, 2002), covered the beginning ABCs of the practice along with a program that, in the best of all possible worlds, would take a diligent student about a year to eighteen months to complete. Now the wonderful folks at Shambhala have asked me to do a follow-up book—,the DEFs, I suppose—,that presses on bravely to more challenging material.

This new book is written for more experienced pranayama students, those who are relatively familiar with the material in the first book and follow a fairly regular, if not daily, practice. To spell this out more clearly, to benefit from this book I recommend that you have, at minimum, the following:

I won't be reviewing much of this earlier material, if I do repeat myself, it means that the subject has been altered or amplified in some significant way. Remember that although books are fixed in time, a practice isn't, in the past three years, I've come up with some new ideas as well as modified (and hopefully improved) others.

When and How Did Pranayama Originate?

Of course, any 'new ideas' I may have stumbled across are probably new only to me. Since pranayama has been around for many centuries, there's a good chance that somebody somewhere thought of each one of them long before I did. In fact some scholars trace pranayama's origins back thirty-five hundred years (and possibly more) to the Vedic sacrifice. I wish we had the time and space to consider this fascinating ritual in detail, but alas, we don't. Mainstream Western scholars tell us these sacrifices, usually sponsored by powerful and wealthy royals, were originally attempts to symbolically...