prana

Prāna is life-force, and life feeds on life. The main function of prāna is to maintain itself, to keep you alive. To generate prāna in your body you need to extract energy from the world, for example in the form of food, water, and oxygen, and use this energy to generate more energy within you.

(See Master the Life Force – Prāna Part 1)

To reach your greater prānic potential you need to fill yourself with the best quality of fuel at all levels of your being, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.

You produce physical energy in mitochondria, little powerhouses that exist within the cells of the body. Healthy mitochondria are the physical basis of prāna in your body. You have approximately 37 trillion cells in your body, and approximately 1,000 mitochondria in each cell – a lot!

All activity (all karma) uses prāna. This includes movement, speech, thought, and emotion.

Healthy forms of exercise both use and generate more prāna by stimulating the growth of mitochondria in your muscles. Certain activities use excessive amounts of prāna, for example, worry or emotional distress, leaving you feeling depleted and exhausted, while poor diet and lifestyle can damage prāna. Whereas negative emotions and depression deplete prāna, loving experiences create prāna.

You take in energy from in the form of food and liquids, and from the air, you breathe. The more alive a substance is, that is, the more prāna it has, the more life-force you can extract from that substance.

Generation of prāna also occurs through stillness and deep rest. Deep restful sleep and meditation are the two best ways of generating prāna. Though sleep is designed to restore energy, it is not always efficient, especially if you go to bed exhausted or full of worry and tension. This is why relaxation and meditation practices are the more efficient form of rest, allowing you to calm the mind and emotions and to deeply replenish yourself with energy. You can actually use meditation to tune into and access your prāna at a very deep level of being.

Generate, Store and Utilize Prāna

Yoga and meditation enable you to delve into the mystery of the life-force via an exploration of the relationship between the breath and prāna. You do this by utilizing physical postures, breathing techniques, and specific mental visualizations. These techniques provide a profound and systematic approach to sense what prāna feels like, how to generate and store it, and how you use it to your best advantage.

Yoga and meditation enable an authentic experience of prāna.

You discover what lack of prāna feels like and can feel where it is flowing and where it is blocked. You can then liberate the energy blocked and trapped within tensions, contractions, and negative patterns, thereby reducing the degenerative effects of aging and support healthy flow. You can actually influence the smooth flow of prāna using techniques such as ujjayi prānāyāma, throat breathing, which is taught on several of Big Shakti’s meditation training programs.

As you develop prānic awareness you are tuned into, and become more sensitive to your body’s needs. You intuitively sense what makes you strong and healthy, and what makes you weak and sick.

Prāna is the energy at the basis of all creation. Everything that exists, animate and inanimate, is a manifestation of prāna in one form or another. At the macrocosmic level, prāna is called Mahā Shakti, which means ‘great power’ (mahā = great, shakti = power).

Within the microcosm of living beings, Mahā Shakti manifests as prāna shakti. Whereas Mahā Shakti is responsible for all creation, animate and inanimate, prāna shakti is the source of all sentient life.

Prāna is your life-force or vital energy, your inner power and strength. It is the energy that powers growth, change and your ability to engage with life. Prāna empowers both the gross physical and the subtle dimensions of your being, for example, prāna powers your intelligence and intuition.

The word prāna can also be translated as breath. At the subtlest and most refined level, it is the energy that powers your spiritual essence.

The term prāna, therefore, has multiple meanings depending on the context. For example, Mahā Prāna is macrocosmic prāna, prāna shakti is microcosmic, and prāna vāyu is the term used to describe a sub-prāna (which will be explained in more detail in part 2 of this article), which lies in the chest. The fact that each of these areas shares the name prāna, points to the fact that it is via the chest, the heart and the lungs that we can connect our individual prāna and consciousness heart to cosmic prāna and consciousness.