Breathing is a smart thing to do
This piece may not be helpful to read for non realized people who should find in these lines nothing more than a road map of possibilities for a future time. If and when the experience of self-realization will have opened their sahasrara charka in the limbic area of the brain, they will have a chance to test this proposal. To practice the following technique with a sahasrara still closed will not make sense at all. Reading about mango does not give you the taste of mango.
Breathing is the most unnoticed thing we do and yet the most essential. Stopping it would be a bad idea. Long ago, in a far off planet and time when people where experimenting about spirituality, a technique was developed to utilize breathing as a sustaining force for achieving higher spiritual states. This technique was called pranayama but whatever is left of it, through hatha yoga practitioners, tends to be mechanistic breathing control exercises. We are talking here about something else.
The principle behind pranayama is genial in its simplicity. Yoga masters of the past had sought to insure that standard bodily processes sustain or enhance the practices of spiritual awakening. Of course the sexual practices of tantrism are a perversion of this principle and landed their adepts into difficulties for the secret energy of spiritual transformation, the Kundalini, has no relationships whatsoever with sex. But there are methods that proved to work. For instance nidra yoga was the feat of achieving a yogic state through sleep, ie merging in the regenerating vacuity of the universal unconscious during our slumber. Pradakshina yoga amounted to meditation through walking, and walking paths for pilgrims around sacred temples or hills in India testify that it was a widespread practice. Again, both these techniques work fully only after the awakening of the Kundalini and the opening of the seventh charka. We will not discuss them here.
Pranayama should not be overdone but it can help focus the attention on the process of loading and distributing energies. Breathing includes four steps: two are movements and two are static. Inhaling (let’s call IM, the inhaling movement) and exhaling (EM, the exhaling movement.) There are also the two points of equilibrium in between, when the lungs are full of oxygen, after IM, and devoid of it, after EM, but we shall not focus on these here. Many permutations can be built on these four steps but we shall only describe one exercise by way of illustration.
Let us now try to describe it. Seat comfortably in meditation, if possible before a source/emitter of chaitanya, vibrations of the highest energy flowing from the Holy Spirit.
During IM focus your attention on drawing in the energy from above through the fontanel bone at the top of the limbic area of the head and draw it within the spine until the basis of the body.
During EM push the energy sidewise to increase the width of the central channel and vibrate the two lateral channels corresponding to the Yin (pingala nadi) and the Yang (ida nadi).
Repeat the exercise 10 times and then maintain the attention on the top of the head without concentrating on breathing and stay in silence as far as possible.
If it does not work for you forget it. If it works, do not overdo it: everything done in moderation is conform to the ways of the heavens.