Find Your Roots

Move your energy downward and watch your Kraunchasana grow.

By Richard Freeman

The great eighth-century yogin and philosopher Shankaracharya said, "Yoga asana is that in which meditation flows spontaneously and ceaselessly, not that which destroys happiness." In other words, when yoga poses are well aligned, they feel so good internally that the mind is practically stunned with awe, and the breath flows right up the front of the spine into the spacious radiance of the body's central axis. The experience is beautiful and sublime. Realistically, our practices can rarely be called sublime. The mind and ego seem programmed to stay out of the central axis, making practice a superficial exercise in self-improvement rather than the precise observation of, and insight into, the nature of our body and mind.

An excellent way to counteract this tendency is to link the two basic internal patterns that control inhaling and exhaling. These are called prana (upward spreading breath) and apana (downward contracting breath). The prana controls inhaling; it is felt as an upward floating, spreading, branching, and flowering pattern. Its home is the core of the heart. The apana controls exhaling. It is the downward rooting flow, which contracts, or tones, into a seed point at the center of the pelvic floor. This small area in the perineum is also known as the mula, or root, in yoga. The poses in this series will increase your awareness of apana by bringing attention to the pelvic floor, which will help you feel rooted to the earth, grounded, and calm.

With each breath you take, prana and apana organize the movement of bones and muscles. Prana lengthens, or extends, the spine (as in a backbend) and brings the legs into internal rotation; apana rounds, or flexes, the spine (as in a forward bend) and spins the legs externally. In the sequence that follows, I strongly encourage you to go beyond the external forms of the asana and into the realm where prana joins apana. You can experience this joining energetically, by feeling how the two pull against each other as you breathe. And you can feel it physically by playing with the resulting extensions, flexions, spins, and counterspins that naturally occur in your spine and your limbs as you do the poses. By practicing this way, you will learn to cultivate the full spectrum of breathing and muscular rhythms that goes on deep inside your body, which will enable you to tap into the radiant nature of your core body and bring you into meditation.

To start this process, be mindful of your breath. In each pose, make the gaze of the eyes steady and soft, and empty the palate by relaxing the mouth into a Mona Lisa smile. Then begin to draw the breath into long, pleasant threads as you work in the pose. After some time with the breath flowing in this way, the four corners of your pelvic floor—the coccyx , the pubic bone, and the two sitting bones—will simultaneously drop, and the center of the pelvic floor will draw up like a flame into what's known as Mula Bandha (Root Lock), forming an intelligent base that brings the rest of your body into harmony. When the mind is distracted, the apana and the prana are not integrated, and the coccyx and the pubic bone will not pull down at the same time. Pay attention to dropping the coccyx, which strongly stimulates the apana pattern, at the same time as dropping the pubic bone, which strongly enhances the prana pattern.

The strong work of grounding, connecting to the earth, and of spiraling and counterspiraling that you'll do in this sequence is like laying down a root to hold on to the earth. If you can do this work with a sense of kindness and compassion, and with an empty palate, the root will sprout and, as it grows, it will bear flowers of openness and natural insight.

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