Pranayama and the spinal nerve

[YogaIsLife]

An interesting development happened to me recently regarding spinal breathing.

I was imagining the thead in the beggining and was tracing it up and down as (in my awareness) kind of like a ball of energy or light going more or less around my spine. Recently it moved to a more precise place kind of like inside the spine, like I am inside the spinal nerve maybe, inside a tube, going up and down. Very interesting.

I associate this with some clearing of the nerve. I had a bad tooth on my left side for a long time that was causing a lot of reflexive pain in the left side of my body. I had it removed recently and found spinal breathing is much more easy to do and pleasant (as if past obstructions were cleared as my bad tooth came out). Like the awareness passes more fluidly and also cleans better.

Just wondering if people had similar experiences and also to leave this note.

[Divineis]

Indeed, my left side also has felt somewhat more "blocked". Every once in a while i'll just focus on my left foot or my left side, and I can feel the energy balance out in my body, from the foot to the leg and up (sometimes it'll start as a grounding sort of buzzing in my left foot). I dislocated my left shoulder once too which definitely doesn't help that left side imbalance. For a while, every time I'd meditate and my body would relax itself enough, I'd always feel this underlying knot in my left shoulder (hehe, meditation works on the body just like the mind). I've found allowing a bit of automatic yoga would help that tension.

When my left and right are balanced, I can definetly feel much better the awareness just flowing up and down my spine.

I find it a bit interesting how the "up and down" aspect of yoga is always talked about, though left and right much less.

[YogaIsLife]

Thanks Divineis for sharing. What you describe about your feelings in the left side are similar to mine. I had what felt like a root (actually felt like something solid like that, like a vine) running from the back of my eye (I had problems there) to the sole of my foot with several and specific nodes (felt like knots) in several places (neck, abdomen, etc.). This made me think that the idea of energy meridians (like in chinese medicine) might indeed be true, since we have all this reflex zones.

 

quote:I've found allowing a bit of automatic yoga would help that tension.

Yes, this might be true for me as well. I find now that when I am meditating I sometimes gently sway or rock from left to right or from back to the front. I associate this with energy going (or trying to go) up  the spine and unblocking things in the way, probably bringing some balance between left and right.

 

quote:I find it a bit interesting how the "up and down" aspect of yoga is always talked about, though left and right much less.

Yes, I agree with you and I have wondered about this myself. I think this is probably because it is something that gets done automatically with overall purification (with spinal breathing and meditation). I think yogani speaks about this in a few lessons I read. I guess it would be quite complicated to go into detail on each block each person might have in either side of their body and it is simpler to aim at overall purification. Like yogani says, that is stuff going on under the hood of the car, we should just worry about using the simple controls of spinal breathing and meditation. That made sense to me.