Prana: The Effulgent Energetic Spring
Prana is a sanskrit word that describes vital energy, or life force. It is difficult to measure, but it can certainly be felt moving through the body, through our relation to the world and through the practice of yoga.
Yoga is first and foremost an energy practice, something that is easy to miss when we stay on the surface level of our experience. The ability to engage with the energetic body as an expression of our aliveness has the potential to completely change our relationship to practice, through both an internal felt experience of our alignment and through a finely tuned awareness.
From Eknath Easwaren’s commentary on The Upanishads, prana is described as:
“Vital energy, the power of life: the essential substrate of all forms of energy.”
In the yoga practice we might associate the work prana with pranayama, the practice of breath regulation through numerous energising, balancing, cooling or calming techniques. Consider your breath like a gateway to noticing the energetic body. When we tune into our breath, we feel its natural pattern of fullness and emptiness and we feel its potential to wash through us like waves. This is an energetic experience and a tangible expression of prana.
Feeling Prana …
Describing the immeasurable can be challenging. Just using the word energy brings on woo-woo connotations. But when we think of energy as an expression of life through us, the ethereal becomes felt.
“This mysterious lifeforce expresses itself through the projection of light from our eyes; it circulates the blood through our hearts and causes the ceaseless cycle of inspiration and expiration.”
Donna Farhi in Yoga Mind, Body and Spirit.
Prana runs through the body through streams or currents known as nadis. This delicate map of thousands of channels allows prana to circulate in a steady and even flow, with the practice of yoga and pranayama seen to clean and maintain these channels, supporting the free flow of prana. Our central channel, sushumna nadi connects the head to the tail, following the communicative path of the nervous system and the original skeleton structure of our spine from which embryologically our limbs grew. We can feel this energetic pathway as a deep route connecting head, heart and gut.
The Effulgent Spring …
Rather than being a finite and depleting resource, prana is refillable. Like an effulgent perennial fresh water spring that continues to refill upon itself, prana renews in the body, the same way our cells are in a continuous state of renewal.
This feels like a reminder in the times when it can seem like there’s no energy left in us to return to the spring of our practice and create the conditions to refill our energetic cup.
“Think of this One original source, as a spring, self-generating, feeding all of itself to the rivers and yet not used up by them, ever at rest.”
Greek Philosopher Plotinus in Eknath Easwaren’s commentary on The Upanishads.