The following is a journal entry I wrote (with paper and pen) last month. I am posting it verbatim to avoid over-editing!

26/12/08 Friday, Boxing Day

On the plane to Auckland. Uncle Paul to pick me up there and staying the night with my Nanna before on to Kaukapakapa tomorrow 4pm to start Vipassana training.

(Climbing to 37500 feet today and arrival time of 9:20am)

Pranayama practice now:

• Northfield’s warmups, Uddiyana’s as described in Pranayama Practice Overview

Ujayyi

• Ujayyi breath, no retention x3
• Ujayyi with bhaya kumbhaka (exhalation retention) for 10 seconds, 3 times
• Ujayyi with antara kumbhaka (inhalation retention) for 5 seconds, 3 times
• Ujayyi with both antara kumbhaka (5 seconds) and bhaya kumbhaka (10 seconds), 3 times

Nadi Shodana

• Regular action (as described in Pranayama Practice #1 with antara kumbhaka (5 seconds) and bhaya kumbhaka (10 seconds), 3 cycles
• Irregular action with antara kumbhaka only for 15 seconds, 3 times on right, 3 times on left

Irregular action is just like the regular Nadi Shodana except the breathing is done through right nostril repeatedly until the prescribed number of cycles is reached, followed by the left nostril repeatedly the same number of times (in my case, 3 cycles each side). Also, the counts are different as you can see.

Sheetali

• As described in Pranayama Practice #1, 3 times

Savasana

I try to give myself ten minutes absolutely uninterrupted these days. I find that my mind really quietens after a certain length of time. It’s hard to say how long it takes because I don’t interrupt savasana to check, but I find that 80% of the time I’ve reached that quiet state a little while before the ten minutes.

I’ve been doing the above for three days [Editor: remember this post is copied from a journal entry written on December 26th 2008. I had practised considerably more than three times once this post was written]. I see my teacher 1x per week at 4:30pm immediately prior to the Tuesday Mysore-style class.

Until 23rd December (last Tuesday) I was doing the following:

• Northfield’s, Uddiyana’s

Ujayyi

• 3x Ujayyi no retention
• 3x Ujayyi with bhaya kumbhaka
• 3x Ujayyi with antara kumbhaka
• 3x Ujayyi with both

I found that I usually needed more than 3 Ujayyi at the start (around 15 sometimes) in order to “connect with the breath” –> not so much anymore.

Nadi Shodana

• Regular action with antara kumbhaka and bhaya kumbhaka, 3 cycles

As usual, I would finish up with Sheetali and Savasana, as described in Pranayama Practice #1.

Warning: All Pranayama are very powerful exercises. Without proper supervision, you may unwittingly recruit inappropriate muscles to achieve retention of the breath, setting up bad habits that will worsen your health rather than enhance it. Any pracitioner who truly understands pranayama will strongly discourage their students from practicing without regular oversight and guidance, until adequate understanding has been reached (which, same as for regular asana practice, can take years). I humbly add my own voice to their advice.

• Graeme Northfield’s PNF-style warmups for ten minutes
• 12 Uḍḍīyāna Bandha cycles
• Four Five pranayama variations seated in Vajrasana

(I should also mention that this is my at home routine; five nights per week I also do two hours of practice at my yoga school, sometimes Mysore-style other times are led classes).

I already covered the first two items in my earlier post. I will now document the pranayama variations. I have a one-on-one session with my teacher this afternoon, wherein the practice will no doubt be modified:

• Five-count Kumbhaka with no retentions (inhale or exhale), for ten cycles
• Five-count Kumbhaka with five-count inhalation retention, for ten cycles
• Five-count Nadi Shodana (German Wikipedia, translation) with no retentions, for ten cycles. In Nadi Shodana, aka “alternate nostril breathing”, the breath passes in through the right nostril, out through the left, then back in through the left nostril, and back out through the right. That’s one cycle.
• Five-count Nadi Shodana with five-count inhalation retention, for ten cycles
• Five-count Sheetali (can’t find a reference right now as I’m racing out the door!) with five-count inhalation retention

This breathing routine currently takes me about 20 minutes although I’m sure it should be shorter (I use a ticking clock for the count, so by my calculations there are only about 15 minutes worth of counting).

During breathing practice, my mind wanders incredibly quickly. I think about my bandhas, I get caught up in the technicalities of Nadi Shodana (placement of the fingers, trying to breath through a blocked left or right nostril etc etc). I find it very difficult to concentrate on the count, especially with Nadi Shodana. All slowly but surely improving.

The most amazing thing for me so far is the concentration it has brought to Mula Bandha, but more on that in a follow-up post.

Second-most amazing thing is lying down in Savasana after all this and having a direct connection to my subconscious, thoughts floating upwards like little bubbles that burst with a little splash into my rational mind, often (but by no means always!) very calm by the end of practice.

Warning: All Pranayama are very powerful exercises. Without proper supervision, you may unwittingly recruit inappropriate muscles to achieve retention of the breath, setting up bad habits that will worsen your health rather than enhance it. Any pracitioner who truly understands pranayama will strongly discourage their students from practicing without regular oversight and guidance, until adequate understanding has been reached (which, same as for regular asana practice, can take years). I humbly add my own voice to their advice.

Four months ago, my wife and I chose to become more familiar to our Astanga yoga instructors, and deepen our practice by regularly meeting with them for one-on-one sessions, which has been hugely beneficial to my understanding of subtleties like awareness of Bandhas, breathing and daily routine.

Three weeks ago, I began working nightshift at my dayjob (heh, funny sentence that), doing remote contract work from home to a startup in the U.K. This is intellectually challenging work from 8:30pm until 4:30am every weeknight.

After the first week had gone surprisingly well and I was feeling as though nightshift was a piece of cake, my instructor advised (showing a lot of foresight wisdom) that we intensify the yoga practice further by centreing it around the breath (pranayama) and starting twice-weekly one-on-one sessions rather than the bi-montly I had been doing. His reasoning was that my initial feelings of nightshift being “a piece of cake” were probably a honey-moon period, after which I would bottom out and perhaps begin to despair of my ability to maintain the lifestyle.

I had to agree that my feeling of exuberance at the time was probably too good to be true. Anyway, I had been hoping he would offer to instruct me in the breath control practices, so I jumped on the chance without second thought.

Since then, I have been doing the following routine when I wake (at around 1pm most days):

• Graeme Northfield’s P&F-style warmups for ten minutes
• 12 Uḍḍīyāna Bandha cycles
• Four pranayama variations seated in Vajrasana

I will go into details about the pranayama variations in a future post, but I wanted to start this overview with a description of the Uḍḍīyāna practice I have been doing.

Uḍḍīyāna Bandha

Like any good Astanga yoga teacher, my instructors continually remind me of Uḍḍīyāna Bandha during led practices, however I have never practiced the dedicated Uḍḍīyāna Bandha exercises before beginning the routine above.

Currently, the Uḍḍīyāna practice I am doing consists of three different variations.

The first variation (repeated 5 times) begins on a complete and extended exhale, simultaneously dropping from Samasthiti/Tadasana into a knees-bent, Utkatasana-style position (I don’t know the Sanskrit name for it) and fully applying Uḍḍīyāna Bandha (details of Uḍḍīyāna are beyond me to describe in this post :). In this Utkatasana-style position, hands rest halfway down the thighs.

As usual for me, I find that I must pay particular attention to Jalandhara Bandha, or my chin tends to lift and I crunch into the back of my neck. It’s an automatic thing for me that I’ve been working with for years. I also must pay particular attention to Mula Bandha here, or I am apt to round my lower spine unpleasantly, without realising it, but more on that later hence the title of this post.

The second Uḍḍīyāna variation (repeated 3 times) begins the same way as the first, but after dropping into the Utkatasana-style position and fully engaging with Uḍḍīyāna Bandha, I stand back up into Samasthiti while retaining the false inhale.

Until today, I had a sensation of unpleasant tightness in the neck and shoulders, which I knew was due to recruiting the wrong muscles (surprise surprise, my old friends the trapezoids). On top of that, I also found that after the retention, it was very very difficult to relax the diaphragm properly and allow air to flow freely into my lungs. What tended to happen was that my shoulders and neck would sort of rip open in a very undignified fashion and the breath would come gulping and grating into my lungs. Sometimes, there was a hollow feeling of ache in my diaphragm at the same time. But, I didn’t know what to do about it (remember, I’ve only been doing this routine for two weeks). At my last pranayama session, my instructor, seated on the mat before me, simply watched me struggling through this stage with a patient smile on his face, so obviously it was something he considered important for me to work out for myself.

Today I discovered that for me, Mula Bandha is key to preventing this inappropriate recruitment of the neck/shoulder muscles. With Mula Bandha engaged insofar as I am able, I find that there is just no need of trapezoid tension to retain the exhale. Perhaps this is also due to some strengthening within the Mula Bandha area as a result of doing this practice itself (another example of the old virtuous cycle of strength > release > exploration > strength > release > exploration…).

The third and final Uḍḍīyāna variation (repeated 4 times to complete the 12 cycles) again starts with the Utkatasana-style posture (I really must learn the Sanskrit for that position!), and remains there, but instead of retaining Uḍḍīyāna for the whole exhalation retention, I engage and then release Uḍḍīyāna as many times and as rapidly as possible within the length of the retention.

I have yet to draw any deep conclusions from the final variation, although I am sure they await my readiness :) I can certainly understand academically that this variation will increase the sensitivity of my control over Uḍḍīyāna, and that will be obviously beneficial, however I have yet to experience those benefits directly. I can’t wait! :)

Warning: All Pranayama are very powerful exercises. Without proper supervision, you may unwittingly recruit inappropriate muscles to achieve retention of the breath, setting up bad habits that will worsen your health rather than enhance it. Any pracitioner who truly understands pranayama will strongly discourage their students from practicing without regular oversight and guidance, until adequate understanding has been reached (which, same as for regular asana practice, can take years). I humbly add my own voice to their advice.