Принципы йоги: введение в прану и каналы, занятие 4

[Говорящий 1]
There's a really important idea in the Tibetan book of yoga called all-day yoga. And this is very big in the Tibetan tradition of yoga. I'll give you the name in Tibetan.

It's called chulam, ki, neljor. Chulam, ki, neljor. Chul means acting, charya in Sanskrit.

Lam means marga in Sanskrit, path. And neljor is the Tibetan word for yoga. Nelma means accurate, or precise, or ancient, or primordial, like that.

And then jor means to connect, like yoke, yoke. So Tibetans translated yoga as connection with the primordial reality, connection with ultimate reality, neljor. And so chulam, ki, neljor means all-day yoga.

And there's this thing, we had a chance, Nanette, I don't think she's here, in New York, she's a dancer. And then there's another dancer, who's the one in England? Eva, who dances for the Royal Ballet in England.

They are students of this group. And they arranged for us to have a dance class with Sukhi Shor. She's like the teacher of the New York City Ballet.

So we're really completely incompetent. And somehow, because our students know her, she agreed to give us a class. So we went in, they opened Lincoln Center for us, like four guards were standing there waiting for us over here.

And we had this beautiful class with her. And she was very, what do you call? Gracious.

Gracious, or, you know, she put up with us. But then they were talking about George Balanchine, who's the greatest choreographer of ballet in, probably in history, I would say, who was her teacher, you see, and founded the New York City Ballet. And he used to tell the ballerinas, don't waste your time outside the class.

Like, when you get out of here, you're going to walk across Lincoln Center and you're going to stand on the Columbus Circle and try to catch a bus or a taxi. So while you're standing out there, do something with your toe. Or practice something while you're standing there.

And then when you get home and you're mixing something in a bowl, then do something to the back or something. But as you go through your day, use your time to do yoga. So even in physical yoga, this is a really helpful thing.

So there's a chapter about all-day yoga. And it relates to all five layers of that onion that we talked about. So I'm going to do it that way.

So first is your physical body. What should you do with your physical body all day long? Then if you're in a certain kind of pattern with your physical body, then when you go into yoga class, it's nothing new.

You're not doing anything different. You've been doing it for 6 or 10 or 12 hours already that day. And the first thing is just to sit up straight.

Just to sit straight. And all yogis do that. Sakya Pandita, who brought Buddhism to Mongolia and China in the 1200s, this was his big shtick.

You just sit up straight. Everything will be fine. And he memorized the 8,000 verses in Sanskrit for fun.

And this is 1,000 pages long. But he attributed it to prana moving properly to his body. And he said, I never slouch.

And I stay straight. And then my prana can move. And then I can think straight.

I can remember things that you slouchers can't remember. So this is a big practice in Tibet. Second way is to keep a light bandha here.

It takes years to develop a bandha. Bandha in Sanskrit means bond or a constriction. And there are different ways of constricting your body.

One is in the anus, which is called a horse butt constriction. And then there's a muladhara constriction in your groin. And then you can do a lower constriction of your abdomen.

And you can do an upper constriction of your abdomen. Things like that. There are different constrictions that you can do with your body.

And they aid the flow of prana through the body. When you learn them, then your body changes. And your body gets stronger and lighter.

And ultimately, if you keep it up, working with the prana properly, then the body turns into light. So reducing your waistline and getting some muscles and all that is the first 1% of turning into light. You still have 99% to go after that.

So keep a light bandha here. And at first, you don't know what it is. So just fake it.

In Tibetan tradition, they say faking it leads to the real thing, you see? So you just sit up straight. Wherever you go, you're talking to somebody.

And you pretend you have a bandha. And you just kind of suck it in in the wrong place. And that's fine.

And you don't have to really do this. It doesn't have to be. Just very light and very comfortable.

If you overdo these things, you get hurt. You get sick. The reason they show yogis sitting on tigers, it comes from the Hatha Yoga Pradipika.

There's a quotation that says, working with the channels is like riding a tiger. And if you overdo it, or you do it poorly, or you do it without a teacher, the tiger can turn on you and eat you. Which means you can get sick.

You can get nervous diseases, or you can't sleep, or your hands will start shaking. Or you can get asthma from doing pranayama wrong. So you have to do it very modestly and very steadily, rather than very strongly and one day a week.

That's just the principle of life. Anything you want to get good at, you can get good at. But just do it every day.

20 minutes, half an hour, 10 minutes. Don't go crazy. Don't do it like, go home and do Bandhas for six hours on Monday, and then don't do them until the next month.

It doesn't work that way. Slow and steady wins the race. So there's a slight Bandha here.

There's another physical asana that's very big in Tibet. It's called Smiley Asana. And you just smile.

Try to smile. And again, this can be this thing where it's artificial at first. It doesn't reach your eyes.

It just reaches your mouth. But if you smile artificially, you get up, you feel like crap, and you just start smiling at everybody. And at some point, it kind of takes over your mind involuntarily.

The smile infects your mind, and then you feel happy suddenly. So again, there's a physical reason for that, that the two side channels come down here. And when you smile, it releases energy here.

And when you frown here especially, then there's a tie up, choke point at the Ajna chakra. And that disturbs the flow of prana in the central channel. And then you don't feel happy.

And you can't think as well. You can't think as clearly. So when you do Sinhasana, the lion pose, and you're all into that, the point is that the tongue's not as important as there's two pieces of skin.

Try it. I feel the skin coming like here. It stretches here, right?

And here. And the point is to feel the stretch in the skin here. The point is to get a stretch in the skin here.

And then that pulls down these two channels. If you're into it, you can try to turn your eyes up towards your Ajna chakra, like that. And that intensifies that stretch.

So this stretch is really important. We're always doing arm stretches and leg stretches. These are cheek stretches, upper cheek stretches.

And this is the right here. And so halfway there, and then all the way there. But during the day, you're not going to go like that.

All day long, you've got to keep a smile on. And then try to, I have a problem with this. She's always slapping me on the forehead.

Sometimes when I'm not frowning. But I have a problem with this one. I have trouble with this one.

If you can keep this forehead relaxed, that's a very good asana for all day practice. So that's the physical body. I'm not going to go into eating and other things like that.

That's a long story. I think we'll do it on one of the later series. One thing that's important is elimination.

Like poo-poo and pee-pee, it's poison. After it's been processed by the body, the body sends it down here to just sit there until it can get rejected, ejected. And it's poisonous.

It's toxic. If there's, for example, in the lower colon, if there's damage. And like they tell soldiers, don't eat before you go out into battle.

Because if there's damage and that material gets out into the rest of the body, it poisons the body and kills you. So they have this thing in Vietnam, they told people, don't eat six hours before you go out on a firefight. Because it would come out into the body.

If you got wounded, it would come out into the body. So it's important to try to eliminate it. Don't hold poo-poo, don't hold pee-pee.

Like you're at work and you're busy and you have to go and you feel like, oh, I've got to finish this up. Just tell the people, I've got to go to the bathroom. My experience, even in corporate New York, is that they'll let you go.

And those of you doing a book, this is a good trick. I used to excuse myself, even from board meetings, and go to the bathroom and do my book. And so don't hold it in, get it out.

Also, if you have any kind of phlegm up here and you feel like blowing your nose, get it out. It's not as toxic, but it's also just dirt that the hairs in your nose and your upper sinuses have collected out of the air, and you can either swallow it or get rid of it. And when you swallow it, it's not as good as if you could get it out.

And Hatha Yoga Padipika talks about this also. That's physical. Next level down would be what?

Yeah, your breath. So during the day, very, very important, try to do reflex breathing. And that's just very, very, keeps your mind calm.

Thich Nhat Hanh has a beautiful thing, Master Thich Nhat Hanh, in his village in France. There's something that goes off. Is it every 15 minutes, I think, a bell goes off.

And everybody's supposed to check their breath to see how their breath's going. Even if you're in the store helping somebody, or wherever you're digging something, or the bell goes off, you're supposed to check your breath. So try to check your breath every once in a while.

Make sure you're taking full breaths until you get that spasm in the lower abdomen. And there's a spasm up here, which we're calling reflex breathing. So try to do that all day long.

What you're really doing is feeding yourself. You're really getting food. It's like the breakfast that you never got before.

And then your body changes, and you get stronger and healthier. You don't get sick. We didn't get sick in three year retreat, I think.

We were out in the middle of the desert. It was snowing at night. In the day, it was up to 110, 120.

And we just didn't get sick for three years. It's just if you breathe properly, then you're eating well, and then your body gets stronger. And it makes your mind more calm.

Next level down is what? Yeah, prana, which is connected to the breath. So prana, you can go out from the outside by breathing properly, but you can also go at it from the inside, which is how?

Sorry? Yeah, thinking, which is like meditation or tonglen. OK, so this is the coolest part of all day yoga, OK?

And then I don't have much more to say, really. Do it wherever you are, just quietly. Like I used to do it on the subway coming back from work.

I used to take the subway like 20 minutes from Tribeca up to the Lincoln Tunnel, and in two hours, I'd be on the bus home on the bus, OK? And every day, four hour commute. And I would do tonglen on somebody in the bus or in the subway, you know?

So whoever, and it's always exhausted businessmen or something, they're sitting there with a briefcase, and they're like that, you know? And sometimes they roll over on you in the bus, and you're like trying to, I have a briefcase that I would like push them, and they're just so exhausted. They're sort of in a bad place.

In Tibetan, they say, Kamalashila Sen, which you're going to learn from Kristi this semester, term, he said they're like sitting on the edge of a cliff, OK? You know, when you get big in corporate life, you're just about to get your first heart attack, and it takes that long to get into a good position at work. And then you're only like 5, 10 years away, or one year away from your first heart attack.

And then no one wants to talk to you anymore. They just send you home with a gold watch, and they say, don't come back, you know? And so they're really, they look like these powerful suits, we call them suits, right?

Like guys in a suit, right? But they're sitting on the cliff. They're right here on the edge of the cliff.

And they're exhausted, and they're tired, and they're working on their heart attack in the bus, and do tonglen on them, you know? I mean, you can do tonglen on Indian villagers who don't have enough to eat, but they're a lot happier, and a lot more peaceful in southern India, where we were. It's refreshing to go from Manhattan to southern India, because everybody's so relaxed.

And they don't have anything to eat, but they're happy, you know, and then in New York, everyone's like this, you know? And on the subway, everybody's like banging their foot, you know, because they're all nervous, you know? And you have to do tonglen on them, okay?

These are the poor people, are the suits, you see? And then you have to do tonglen on them, you know? So wherever you are, you're at work, and you're watching somebody, and they're doing this nervous thing, or they're on the computer, and they're like panting, you know?

And then you have to do tonglen on them, you know? I give you calmness, I take away your stress. I give you calmness, I take away your stress, okay?

And you can do it at home. You know, there's going to be somebody in your family, there's going to be somebody at home who's stressed out, who's not having a good day, and you do tonglen on them, and you never tell anybody, okay? I used to get stuck in the tunnel sometimes, Lincoln Tunnel, 5.30, you know?

Three million people trying to get out of New York. And no, and sometimes I'd fall off to sleep in my own exhausted thing, and then I used to sleep half the way and then do my prayers half the way. So I'm asleep for the first hour, right?

And then I wake up, and we're still in the Lincoln Tunnel, an hour later, breathing these fumes, you know? And I look next to me out the window, and there's a car. And there'd be some guy there, and then I would do tonglen on him, you see?

You can do, take away their pain, give them happiness. So do it anonymously, secretly, quietly. People will think you're doing cocaine or something, like you know, it's really funny.

Just do it quietly. That's real all-day yoga, okay? If you forget all the other all-day yogas, this is the all-day yoga that works.

Why? Because that's also making karma. That's raw karma.

Thinking is raw karma. Leni Sambadandece, from the Abhidharmakosha, okay? Karma means thinking, intention, you know?

When you think about somebody and you want to help them, you're making good karma. And that makes the breathing stuff work. And that makes the sitting up stuff work.

Like you could just sit up and get in a crash and die today, and the sitting up didn't help, you see? If you do this meditation and help people all day long, then sitting up will work, you see? There's the why and the how, okay?

Why? How does yoga work? You do your right postures, you don't cheat on the pose, you breathe at the right time.

That's how yoga works. But why does it work? You see, there's a difference.

Why that stuff works on you is that you try to help other people. You take care of other people. If you don't take care of other people and you do everything else right, you'll just die in a car accident.

Or you'll hurt your neck or something. You see what I mean? If you take care of other people, it almost doesn't matter what kind of technique you have, okay?

And that's another thing I wanted to say. We're teaching Tibetan Heart Yoga, but the principles are the same. We happen to do everything.

I mean, we do Ashtanga a couple of days a week, we do Kaivalya Dham, we do Iyengar, you know, we do all kinds of... We enjoy all of it. So the purpose of this series is not to say, oh, you have to do it this way.

The technique is not as crucial as the intention, right? As the meditation that you do. Nothing will work on you if you don't take care of other people.

And everything will work if you do take care of other people. So for all day yoga, you have to take care of the people. That's the main thing.

I think that's what distinguishes this yoga from other kinds of yoga. This is the emphasis. And you will find over the years that people who do their yoga this way will be successful at everything.

And if you don't do your yoga this way, even if you do these special Tibetan poses, nothing will happen. So the key is taking care of other people. And then you guys will slowly, over time, as that karma ripens, you will get the results, like amazing results of yoga.

You know, your body will start to change into light. And at the same time, the people around you start to change. You start to see other people differently.

That's all I have.