May the Prana Be With You! Energy and Yoga

by Baxter

During an evening meal recently, an acquaintance of mine asked me what I thought about the word “energy” as it used today in this country when discussing practices such as yoga and martial arts. I should mention that this new friend is a medical anthropologist and a long time martial arts expert and teacher, and had a few ideas of her own. After we spoke about western and eastern concepts of energy, I had a sneaking suspicion that I had not addressed this idea to any great extent in these blog posts. So, with that in mind, I’d like to begin a conversation about energy as it pertains to the practice of yoga.

For anyone who has been in yoga classes for a while, you will be familiar with a term from Sanskrit that is sometimes translated as “energy,” but really has both a broader and more specific meaning in the original language.  Prana, the term referring to energy (not the yoga clothing line!), is conceived of as being of two types. The first is a substance called prana that pervades the entire known universe of material objects and is contained in such things as our atmospheric air and in the food we eat, so that it could be considered in part as nutrients for living beings. According to Georg Feuerstein, prana “signifies the universal life force, which is a vibrant psychophysical energy similar to the pneuma of the ancient Greeks.” In addition, there is an individual prana, which exists solely within you, that is the animating force of your life. We are born with a certain portion of pranic energy that we slowly use to fuel our life’s activities, and a partly renewable portion of prana that we can derive from food and air. This later source is not able to sustain us, however, if our original store of prana eventually runs out, which it does for all of us eventually.

Prana in the body is also said to move around. It does so via channels or small inner highways, said to number around 72,000 according to some sources, that are known as nadis. Out of the 72K, only three of them get spoken about much: the central channel that runs within or in front of the spine from the pelvic floor to the crown of the head, known as the sushumna nadi, and the right and left nadis known as ida and pingula, that start at the nostrils and end at the pelvic floor at the base of the sushumna nadi. I’ll tell you more on the sushumna nadi another time.

Exploring the Arctic by Michele Macartney-Filgate

In addition to these three large channels and all the myriad smaller ones, the prana is said to move around the body via a series of forces called “winds” or vayu, that assist in moving prana up towards the chest and head via the prana vayu, down toward the pelvic floor via the apana vayu, out to the extremities via the vyana vayu, around the digestive center via the samana vayu, and finally around the throat area via the uddana vayu.

According to the texts on Hatha Yoga from the Twelfth century and forward, the yoga practice itself is designed to have several effects on prana. By correct practice, which is quite detailed and contains enough material to fill up many blog posts, one can conserve one’s individual quantity of prana so as to achieve your goals in yoga or in everyday life. Through visualizations, yoga postures and pranayama breath techniques to name a few, you can also encourage the usual movements of the winds of the body or you can reverse them. For example, apana vayu is associated with all bodily functions where things need to move down and out of the body, such as for urination. Obviously, we want that to happen at certain times of the day in order for our physical body to empty waste and remain healthy, so apana vayu needs to move in its usual fashion. The yogis also suggest changing the normal movement of apana vayu at times, sending it upwards, as a way of holding onto more of your total energy. They figured if you could live longer and remain relatively free of illness, you would have more time to achieve the highest goals of yoga, such as another future topic, samadhi.  

If we try to find a modern interpretation of prana, we might think it has something to do with blood in the circulatory system or nerve conduction in the nervous system, and it is conceivable that it has just such correlates, although not exactly described in the same way as our modern physiology is described. In my personal yoga practice, I find that working with the concept of prana is yet another way for me to bring more concentration and focus on the tasks at hand, be they yoga poses, breathing techniques or even a more mindful way of standing in line at the bank. I’ll leave the idea of prana here for now, but I am certain this essential concept in yoga philosophy and alternative yoga anatomy will pop again before to long. Until then, may the force be with you!