Renegade Yogi

Meditation after pranayama

First I cleared my stopped nose with Jala Neti. I poured water through my nose until it flowed out freely.

You have to remember to breathe deeply after doing that. It’s still wet in there and stuff can move around. If you breath deeply, chances are it won’t clog the passageways.

I used my neti pot because I wanted to practice pranayama. We’ve got so many different ones right now, there’s really no time to do them all. But I do enough of them to make sure I keep getting better.

Yesterday, in class, we started retention. Very trippy. It was getting me so spaced out. We must have done three or four different breathing patterns with retention. Svasana after each was so empty.

So I did some exercises with retention. Oh, by the way, I’ll have to show you all my uddiyana bhanda some day. I can do the side-to-side rolling. It’s pretty neat.

After the pranayama, I had a brief interlude to put the garbage out. Then I sat down for mindfulness. Same deal as always: start out strong, end falling asleep or really wanting to move and stretch. I don’t know if it’s my cushion or what.

There was a point in the middle of my practice where I was just letting each thought arise and I would just note whether it was an image, a sound, or a feeling. It was quite nice when I realized it. I didn’t need to rush back to my breath. I didn’t fight it. It just happened. It felt peaceful and transcendent, and yet totally normal. Someone who know what they are talking about, please let me know if this is some stage in vipassana.

I’m looking forward to next time.