The Benefit of Yoga

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Seven Minor Breathing Exercises

The main purpose of breathing exercise is to give you control over your Prana and unfold the Psychic Force latent in you. Seven minor breathing exercise  that develop your mental and physical strengths are-

Exercise I

(1) Stand erect with hands at sides.
(2) Inhale complete breath.
(3) Raise the arms slowly, keeping them rigid until the hands touch over head.
(4) Retain the breath a few minutes with hands over head.
(5) Lower hands slowly to sides exhaling slowly at the same time.
(6) Practise cleansing breath.

Exercise II

(1) Stand erect with arms straight in front of you.
(2) Inhale complete breath and retain.
(3) Swing arms back as far as they will go; then back to first position; then repeat several times, retaining the breath all the while.
(4) Exhale vigorously through mouth.
(5) Practise cleansing breath. 

Exercise III

(1) Stand erect with arms straight in front of you.
(2) Inhale complete breath.
(3) Swing arms around in a circle, backward, a few times. Then reverse a few times retaining the breath all the while. You may vary this by rotating them alternately like the sails of a wind-mill.
(4) Exhale the breath vigorously through the mouth.

(5) Practise cleansing breath.

Exercise IV

(1) Lie on the floor with your face downward and palms of hands flat upon the floor by your sides.
(2) Inhale complete breath and retain.
(3) Stiffen the body and raise yourself up by the strength of your arms until you rest on your hands and toes.
(4) Then lower yourself to original position. Repeat several times.
(5) Exhale vigorously through the mouth.
(6) Practise cleansing breath.

Exercise V

(1) Stand erect with your palms against the wall.
(2) Inhale complete breath and retain.
(3) Lower the chest to the wall, resting your weight on your hands.
(4) Then raise yourself back with the arm muscles alone, keeping the body stiff.
(5) Exhale vigorously through the mouth.
(6) Practise cleansing breath.

Exercise VI

(1) Stand erect with arms "akimbo" that is with hands resting around the waist and elbows standing out.

(2) Inhale complete breath and retain.

(3) Keep legs and hips stiff and bend well forward, as if bowing, at the same time exhaling slowly.
(4) Return to first position and then take another complete breath.
(5) Then bend backward exhaling slowly.
(6) Return to first position and take a complete breath.
(7) Then bend sideways exhaling slowly (vary by bending to right and then to left).

(8) Practise cleansing breath.

Exercise VII

(1) Stand erect or sit erect with straight spinal column.
(2) Inhale a complete breath but instead of inhaling on a continuous steady stream, take a series of short, quick "sniffs" as if you were smelling aromatic salts and ammonia and did not wish to get too strong a "whiff." Do not exhale any of these little breaths, but add one to the other until the entire lung space is filled.
(3) Retain for a few seconds.

(4) Exhale through the nostrils in a long restful breath.
(5) Practise cleansing breath.

How to take Breathing Excercise

Find a quiet place as far as possible, where the air is pure and the surroundings soothing and pleasant. After a bath or a thorough rubbing of the body from top to toe, with a wet towel, on an empty stomach, take this exercise: Send a current of holy thought to everyone, on planes seen and unseen, north and south, east and west, engage in meditation--take anyone of the meditation exercises you like. When you are perfectly calm and relaxed, seat yourself cross-legged, assuming any posture that comes easiest to you, with head, neck and chest held in a straight line and the weight of the upper parts of the body resting on ribs. Keep the region about the waist quite free. Loosen the cloth there out and out. Now inhale air slowly and steadily through right nostril after closing left nostril with your finger as long as it takes to count sixteen mentally. Close nostrils, holding the inspired air within and count sixty-four. Then very slowly exhale the air through the left nostril for as long as it takes to count thirty-two. You must begin with a 4 second inhalation, 16 second retention and 8 second exhalation. Instead of dry counting you might improve yourself decidedly by repeating the word "Fearless" as many times holding mentally that dominant idea back of the word. Practice 5 pranayamas mornings and evenings for one week daily. Increase to 10 next week. Work up to 20. Go slowly. Practice as long as you like, but not less than 6 months. Be serious and earnest. This is not for non-serious minds. This exercise will augment digestive power, steady heart-action, make the body light and the mind calm. It shall help also miraculously in your Soul-Unfoldment. During this practice be pure in all ways. Observe Bramhacharya. Practice mental concentration and spiritual meditation. Don't talk much with others. Don't encourage any but holy society. Don't sleep much. Don't work very hard. Keep your emotions well-in-hand. Be always engaged mentally and physically. Be hopeful and cheerful. Never encourage negative thinking. It shall do wonders for you.

How to Purify your Body

Skills development for the part of consciousness include cleaning of the body is the question. You need to clean each of the three working bodies - mental, astral and physical. Without cleaning yoga is best left alone. First, as the body of thought is purified? When thinking absolute. Then you need your imagination, your great creative tool, nor to use once. Imagining things, and believe his form of mind-body in the organization you want. Imagine something strongly, as the painter imagines when painted. Display an object if the power of visualization in all, if not, try. It is an artistic faculty, of course, most people shed more or less. See how far you play perfect face you see every day. Through this practice to strengthen your imagination and strengthen your fantasy is you will be great tool you need to do yoga practice.

There is another use of the imagination, which is very valuable. If you feel in your body, mind the presence of the qualities you want, and freedom from those who do not, then you are half and did not. Would also weaken many problems in your life when you need to do before they pass? Why wait until you are helpless in the physical world. If you thought that their problems come in the morning, and until it acts exactly in the middle (you should never hesitate to suggest perfect), if the matter in the day seemed to lose its power, and no longer feel the sting in the same measure. Now each of you must put something in your life than your own problems. Do you think of the phrase and not a question, and if he leaves, you get what you think. You can through their problems and get rid of errors when dealing with them by your imagination.

As the thought body, becomes purified in this way, you must turn to the astral body. The astral body is purified by right desire. Desire nobly, and the astral body will evolve the organs of good desires instead of the organs of evil ones. The secret of all progress is to think and desire the highest, never dwelling on the fault, the weakness, the error, but always on the perfected power, and slowly in that way you will be able to build up perfection in yourself. Think and desire, then, in order to purify the thought body and the astral body. And how shall you purify the physical body? You must regulate it in all its activities--in sleep, in food, in exercise, in everything. You cannot have a pure physical body with impure mental and astral bodies so that the work of imagination helps also in the purification of the physical. But you must also regulate the physical body in all its activities. Take for instance, food. The Indian says truly that every sort of food has a dominant quality in it, either rhythm, or activity, or inertia, and that all foods fall under one of these heads. Now the man who is to be a yogi must not touch any food which is on the way to decay. Those things belong to the tamasic foods--all foods, for instance, of the nature of game, of venison, all food which is showing signs of decay (all alcohol is a product of decay), are to be avoided. Flesh foods come under the quality of activity. All flesh foods are really stimulants. All forms in the animal kingdom are built up to express animal desires and animal activities. The yogi cannot afford to use these in a body meant for the higher processes of thought. Vitality, yes, they will give that; strength, which does not last, they will give that; a sudden spurs of energy, yes, meat will give that; but those are not the things which the yogi wants; so he puts aside all those foods as not available for the work he desires, and chooses his food out of the most highly vitalized products. All the foods which tend to growth, those are the most highly vitalized, grain, out of which the new plant will grow, is packed full of the most nutritious substances; fruits; all those things which have growth as their next stage in the life cycle, those are the rhythmic foods, full of life, and building up a body sensitive and strong at the same time.

Complication to Yoga

The obstacle to Yoga is very inclusive. First, disease: if you are diseased you cannot practice Yoga; it demands sound health, for the physical strain entailed by it is great. Then languor of mind: you must be alert, energetic, in your thought. Then doubt: you must have decision of will, must be able to make up your mind. Then carelessness: this is one of the greatest difficulties with beginners; they read a thing carelessly, they are inaccurate. Sloth: a lazy man cannot be a Yogi; one who is inert, who lacks the power and the will to exert him; how shall he make the desperate exertions wanted along this line? The next, worldly-mindedness, is obviously an obstacle. Mistaken ideas are another great obstacle, thinking wrongly about things. One of the great qualifications for Yoga is "right notion" "Right notion" means that the thought shall correspond with the outside truth; that a man shall he fundamentally true, so that his thought corresponds to fact; unless there is truth in a man, Yoga is for him impossible. Missing the point, illogical, stupid, making the important, unimportant and vice versa. Lastly, instability: which makes Yoga impossible, and even a small amount of which makes Yoga futile; the unstable man cannot be a yogi.

Meditation With and Without Seed

What do we mean by meditation? Meditation cannot be the same for every man. Though the same in principle, namely, the steadying of the mind, the method must vary with the temperament of the practitioner. Suppose that you are a strong-minded and intelligent man, fond of reasoning. Suppose that connected links of thought and argument have been to you the only exorcise of the mind. Utilise that past training. Do not imagine that you can make your mind still by a single effort. Follow a logical chain of reasoning, step by step, link after link; do not allow the mind to swerve a hair's breadth from it. Do not allow the mind to go aside to other lines of thought. Keep it rigidly along a single line, and steadiness will gradually result. Then, when you have worked up to your highest point of reasoning and reached the last link of your chain of argument and your mind will carry you no further, and beyond that you can see nothing, and then stop. At that highest point of thinking, cling desperately to the last link of the chain, and there keep the mind poised, in steadiness and strenuous quiet, waiting for what may come. After a while, you will be able to maintain this attitude for a considerable time.

Composition of States of the Mind

The word which is used for the states of the mind by Patanjali is Vritti. This admirably constructed language Sanskrit gives you in that very word its own meaning. Vrittis means the "being" of the mind; the ways in which mind can exist; the modes of the mind; the modes of mental existence; the ways of existing. That is the literal meaning of this word. A subsidiary meaning is a "turning around," a "moving in a circle". You have to stop, in Yoga, every mode of existing in which the mind manifests itself. In order to guide you towards the power of stopping them--for you cannot stop them till you understand them--you are told that these modes of mind are fivefold in their nature. They are pentads. The Sutra, as usually translated, says “the Vrittis are fivefold (panchatayyah)," but pentad is a more accurate rendering of the word pancha-tayyah, in the original, than fivefold. The word pentad at once recalls to you the way in which the chemist speaks of a monad, triad, heptad, when he deals with elements. The elements with which the chemist is dealing are related to the unit-element in different ways. Some elements are related to it in one way only, and are called monads; others are related in two ways, and are called duads, and so on.

How to Improve Mental Body

We must now deal with the mental body, which is taken as equivalent to mind for practical purposes. The first thing for a man to do in practical Yoga is to separate himself from the mental body, to draw away from that into the sheath next above it. And here remember what I said previously, that in Yoga the Self is always the consciousness plus the vehicle from which the consciousness is unable to separate itself. All that is above the body you cannot leave is the Self for practical purposes, and your first attempt must be to draw away from your mental body. Under these conditions, Manas must be identified with the Self, and the spiritual Triad, the Atma-buddhi-manas, is to be realized as separate from the mental body. That is the first step. You must be able to take up and lay down your mind as you do a tool, before it is of any use to consider the further progress of the Self in getting rid of its envelopes. Hence the mental body is taken as the starting point. Suppress thought. Quiet it. Still it. Now what is the ordinary condition of the mental body? As you look upon that body from a higher plane, you see constant changes of colours playing in it. You find that they are sometimes initiated from within, sometimes from without. Sometimes a vibration from without has caused a change in consciousness, and a corresponding change in the colours in the mental body. If there is a change of consciousness, that causes vibration in the matter in which that consciousness is functioning. The mental body is a body of ever-changing hues and colours, never still, changing colour with swift rapidity throughout the whole of it.

The Function of Yoga in Mind

"Yoga is the inhibition of the functions of the mind," says Patanjali. The functions of the mind must be suppressed, and in order that we may be able to follow out really what this means, we must go more closely into what the Indian philosopher means by the word "mind". Mind, in the wide sense of the term, has three great properties or qualities: cognition, desire or will, activity. Now Yoga is not immediately concerned with all these three, but only with one, cognition, the Samkhyan subject. But you cannot separate cognition, as we have seen, completely from the others, because consciousness is a unit, and although we are only concerned with that part of consciousness which we specifically call cognition, we cannot get cognition all by itself. Hence the Indian psychologist investigating this property, cognition, divides it up into three or, as the Vedanta says, into four (with all submission, the Vedantin here makes a mistake). If you take up any Vedantic book and read about mind, you will find a particular word used for it which. Translated, means "internal organ". This antah-karana is the word always used where in English we use "mind"; but it is only used in relation to cognition, not in relation to activity and desire. It is said to be fourfold, being made up of Manas, Buddhi, Ahamkara, and Chitta; but this fourfold division is a very curious division. We know what Manas is, what Buddhi is, what Ahamkara is, but what is this Chitta? What is Chitta, outside Manas, Buddhi and Ahamkara? Ask anyone you like and record his answer; you will find that it is of the vaguest kind. Let us try to analyse it for ourselves, and see whether light will come upon it by using the Theosophical idea of a triplet summed up in a fourth, that is not really a fourth, but the summation of the three. Manas, Buddhi and Ahamkara are the three different sides of a triangle,' which triangle is called Chitta.

The Literature of Yoga

Unfortunately for non-Sanskrit-knowing people, the literature of Yoga is not largely available in English. The general teachings of Yoga are to be found in the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad-Gita; those, in many translations, are within your reach, but they are general, not special; they give you the main principles, but do not tell you about the methods in any detailed way. Even in the Bhagavad-Gita, while you are told to make sacrifices, to become indifferent, and so on, it is all of the nature of moral precept, absolutely necessary indeed, but still not telling you how to reach the conditions put before you.

Is Yoga a Science?

Yoga is a science, and not a vague, dreamy drifting or imagining. It is an applied science, a systematized collection of laws applied to bring about a definite end. It takes up the laws of psychology, applicable to the unfolding of the whole consciousness of man on every plane, in every world, and applies those rationally in a particular case. This rational application of the laws of unfolding consciousness acts exactly on the same principles that you see applied around you every day in other departments of science.