Everybody Upside-Down
By Yoko Yoshikawa
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Fountain of Youth
Yogis in India have experimented with their own bodies and breath in search of enlightenment for at least 5,000 years. What they came to understand about themselves was a direct result of sustained self-study and contemplation, or svadhyaya.
In their stringent meditation and ascetic practices, over the slow unfolding of days and months and years, they came to know and love the deep, enduring movements in the body—the pulse and rhythm of fluids and electric charges—and put exercises, images, and language to those movements, so we could follow.
The ancient texts state that there are seven main chakras (or psychic energy centers) along the vertical axis of the body. At the risk of being reductive, one might describe hatha yoga as practices designed to raise prana, or life force, up the spine, the path of the chakras. David Gordon White, in his fascinating book, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (University of Chicago, 1999), writes of an "inner void" that begins at the muladhara chakra at the base of the spine. It runs upward through the heart, and ends at the fontanelle, or "cleft of brahman," known as the brahmarandra, in the cranial vault. He quotes the Kathaka Upanishad (6.16), which states: "There are a hundred and one channels of the heart. One of these passes up to the crown of the head. Going up by it, one goes to immortality."
The Natha siddhas and other Tantric schools, forebears of the hatha yoga tradition, believed that amrita, the nectar of immortality, was held within the cranial vault, at the seventh chakra, the sahasrara chakra. The valued nectar, meting out our days, dropped down through the center of the body and was consumed in the fire of the torso. Turn yourself upside down, the reasoning went, and amrita would be retained, thus prolonging life and preserving one's prana.
The Hatha Yoga Pradipika lists Viparita Karani Mudra as one of "the ten mudras which conquer old age and death." Unfortunately, that requires a daily practice of Viparita Karani Mudra for three hours!
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