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Yoga (proper yoga, not the gymnastics they do in most gyms) is all about stimulating the vagus nerve and several others. The "locks" (bandhas) and various breat

• moate 9y ago
  Yea, but like, acid and mushrooms don't require any effort.
  • domparise 9y ago
    Their effects are not well controlled either.
    • mr_overalls 9y ago
      And they tend to be transitory as well. Meditation, while slower, tends to do a better job of integrating insights into one's personality and daily life.
  • Stanish 9y ago
    What are you talking about, they require money and effort to acquire, and can produce horrendously difficult trips. Breathing is quite a bit easier than all that...not that they should even be compared. Not sure why you are taking cheap shots at people who find value in these things. Value which is becoming more and more scientifically understood each year, by the way.
  • nsouth 9y ago
    Ha ha I can't argue with that. I've heard of some yogis comparing hallucinogens to having a day pass, while they've got a lifetime membership. One warning - don't mix drugs with yoga. I've heard of a few people who did. They ended up "walking with the gods" for a while and then it just stopped and they crashed down majorly. If you need drugs to force your body to produce these chemicals, at some point the party will finish.
• l_t 9y ago
  What kind of negative side-effects are you referring to? I've heard a fair number of people talk about high-level Yoga stuff being dangerous, but I've never really understood what they meant. Is it related to the suspension of breath, like risk of unconsciousness? Long term joint damage? (BTW, thanks for the book rec -- Kundalini Exposed looks pretty interesting).
  • embwbam 9y ago
    I don’t know what he was referring to but it’s really easy to get injured if you don’t take the time to learn. For example, you’re supposed to flex your foot whenever you’re doing something like lotus or it can hurt your knee
  • nsouth 9y ago
    Gopi Krishna is the canonical worst-case scenario of an unprepared Kundalini awakening, so check out his "Kundalini: Evolutionary Energy in Man". I've heard that if you're careful, you should have an easier ride. However some people can have spontaneous awakenings, sometimes following traumatic (near death) events. One guy suggested there was a link between the adrenals and kicking off this process. The endocrine system is certainly involved. But in general, symptoms can include some/all of the following, and vary in severity depending on how slowly you progress, how clean your lifestyle, etc: * Energy surges - intense feelings of heat/electrical sensations in the body, typically in the spine (I've been woken in the past with electrical sensations surging through my body) * Dietary issues - one of the nerve passes near the stomach and apparently can alter appetite as well as making you intolerant to some foods (I read of one guy not being able to keep water down for several days), etc. * Sexual side effects - feeling intensely horny or totally disinterested * Insomnia * Headaches, feelings of congestion * Hallucinations - auditory, visual, kinesthetic * Spontaneous out of body experiences Apparently these all settle down over time but can be a bit unsettling (e.g being woken in the night to ghoulish laughter, but there's nobody there). On the plus side: * Feelings of intense bliss/ecstasy, contentment * Mental clarity I've only experienced a few of the above negative side effects, and generally only mildly. But the Supreme Fire exercise has kicked things up a gear. Plus, I'm almost able to perform "full khechari" (look it up). My body just wants to do it. Spontaneous yoga can happen sometimes. Your body knows what it wants given half a chance :-) As for joint damage - yes that is a definite risk. Never force the lotus position since it can put pressure laterally on your knees which can damage them over time. Also, there's debate around inversions (who'd have thought putting your entire body weight through your cervical vertebrae could be damaging :-D?), so while some people say they're amazing, I avoid them. As it turns out, one of the most useful sitting postures places direct pressure on the perineum. This is traditionally done with the heel (siddhasana) but can be done with a prosthetic. Roll a sock up and sit on that. I use that on a Zen-style meditation bench to spare my knees sometimes. So you don't need great flexibility, certainly not to the level of the hyper-flexible people in yoga magazines. A lot of it is common sense - don't force yourself with either the physical postures, or breath retention, and listen to your body. You need to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and operate in that mode. The other thing to bear in mind is you can have a delayed reaction. So you might do some breath retention, and feel great. So you do more. And more. Then that night you get the congestion/headaches/insomnia. So just build up gradually over several weeks, and back off if you need to. It's no different to pacing yourself with weights at the gym. The AYP site has a very helpful forum with people far further down the road than I am. If you're interested you'll find lots of information on that forum to peruse at your leisure, and a friendly community to answer questions.
• gerbilly 9y ago
  As someone who has been programming for 20 years, and experienced a lot of stress from it, it seems to be like I have been unwittingly practising 'anti yoga.' When I code difficult problems, my breathing becomes light and shallow and from the chest: almost the way you would breathe if nervously anticipating some outcome. The physical posture is more often than not slumped in a chair, and locked into a narrow range of motion, due to needing to use the keyboard and mouse. The mental experience is often one of stress due to time pressure, or due to the confusing and often frustrating nature of the work. The physical body reflects the mental state, when frustrated or confused or even angry, the body tightens, especially in the neck and shoulders. I'm sure it's possible to program and not to fall into these traps, but for me more often than not this is how it seems to go.
  • portofcall 9y ago
    It’s not easy, it takes time and effort, but it can be overcome. Mindfulness, setting periodic alarm reminders (at first frequently and then less so) to sit up straight and breathe deeply, meditation, all help a lot. The problem is that it can take a while to start to see results, and people often give up. They’ll come back to it when they pull something or herniate a disc, but until then posture and breathing are not a priority. You can definitely do it though, it just takes some initial inconvenience and effort. The payoff is not insignificant though, including positive impacts on productivity!
    • colmvp 9y ago
      > The problem is that it can take a while to start to see results, and people often give up. I recall listening to two pretty well known experts in mindfulness meditation, and they said it can take thousands of hours of practice before you start to see profound results. Like anything, it requires practice and patience.
  • nsouth 9y ago
    Apart from practicing deep breathing periodically, you might want try getting a lacrosse ball and using it for deep point massage. I was able to release a lot of tension from my neck and shoulders with one. Also, a theraband was recommended to me by a physio so I could do flys to help pull my shoulders back into proper alignment. I'd recommend seeing a physio - one did me the world of good and was able to suggest exercises and make me aware of what good posture looked like. I've had to do a lot of core strength work to fix bad habits and now I feel much better.
• lhorie 9y ago
  > that's when the doorway to the inner world opens Sorry the metaphor is lost on me. What does that mean in layman terms?
  • nsouth 9y ago
    A loss of awareness of the physical body and physical world, and various phenomena may manifest such as visions, sounds, etc. Perhaps it's the hypnogogic state or similar, but some sources suggest it gives access to the subconscious mind.
  • agumonkey 9y ago
    You're less caught up by external influences that may distract or pain your mind. IIUC you're in a introspective state, exploring your sensations, ideas and emotions. Grief forced me to learn that, it's an effort at first, and absurd because you're forcing not to move mentally, in the end you drop most your thoughts and a calmer part of you may fill the room.
• jocoda 9y ago
  From Wikipedia's entry on Kundalini[1] >This article contains weasel words: vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. (August 2014) the flagging goes on ... A brief online search on K. found only articles and fora that have the same issue - weasel words, embedded superstition, subjectiveness, etc Curious whether this has been examined from a strictly physiological viewpoint minus the typical subjective, superstitious spin that I've found so far. [1}: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kundalini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kundalini
  • 09bjb 9y ago
    You'll keep coming up empty, so to speak, trying to nail down the result of spiritual disciplines into a concrete definition. Science's point of view is verifiability by repeatable, direct observation. With spiritual stuff, the healthy attitude that you'll usually get is, "try it for yourself!" The direct experience of the result usually precludes further need to verify from other perspectives. All that said, I think understanding the science underlying the remarkable experiences people have during or as a result of "mystic" experiences (for which we have pretty decent scientific definitions; see the Johns Hopkins psychedelics questionnaires) is probably what's holding us back from spreading more and better healing. We're not going to move forward giving everyone the usual "Well, it's definitely weird, but it works, just trust me." Disclaimer: not a Kundalini practitioner. My healing has mostly been reading-, meditation-, and psychedelic-flavored.
  • nsouth 9y ago
    I'm not sure if it has, at least not rigorously. I've seen various research quoted in several books, but I tend to ignore those sections because "research" can pretty much come up with any conclusion depending on who's paying. Plus there's little point accepting the conclusions without investigating the methodologies, participants, etc. for which I have neither the time nor inclination. All my "research" is based on trying to experientially validate the experiences for myself. I'd love to see rigorous research done on this, and I'm sure over time it'll happen. But first, I think there needs to be a general increase in awareness of this phenomenon, certainly in the West. While we've leapt on the meditation bandwagon, it's far less common knowledge that these practices traditionally were focussed towards a specific "end-game", i.e. they are intended to lead to certain definite, reproducible outcomes, rather than being practiced as techniques in their own right ad infinitum. It seems to me as if the "first generation" of Western practitioners went to the East around the 60s and the majority came back with superficial knowledge and someone else's culture ("let's do all this cool exotic stuff people..."). Now, slowly and gradually, more Westerners are discovering the stuff that the first generation didn't bring back, and are having profound, authentic experiences for themselves. One benefit of this should be an increase in the clarity of teachings since different cultures have their own metaphors, language and mental models that can be used to convey meaning. Western teachers should be able to strip out the Eastern dogma and superstition and leave only those practices that do actually aid or accelerate the process (and incidentally describe the roots of Western religious dogma and "morals" as well, since Kundalini is alluded to in Christianity, just less explicitly and couched in different terms. If you can ignore the author's enormous ego, Electrical Christianity explains all, also on Kindle if you're interested). One interesting thing to note is that there is generally broad, cross-cultural and cross-temporal agreement of some of the subjective experiences that result from these practices and Kundalini awakenings. So while looking purely from a physiological perspective would certainly be interesting, it seems that experiences are almost always accompanied by "spiritual" experiences (much like hallucinogens), often involving: * a dissolution of the ego (the mental narrator/individual personality) * a greater sense of connection, deep feelings of love and altruism * common imagery/symbology * heat, feelings of electricity/"energy", and points of high electrical/energetic conductivity that can be perceived as lights, commonly called "chakras" * that we are all part of a single, pure consciousness out of which everything else arises. Nothing else fundamentally, permanently exists. Jung came up with his "collective unconscious" as a result some of his own experiences. So given these experiences suggest a very different world-view to the prevailing Western one (that we are in fact "spirits" with material bodies vs material bodies with some emergent property called consciousness), could it be possible to really understand this process objectively? It would appear that the conscious subject - indeed consciousness itself - is inherent in the process. Western science more or less proceeds from the standpoint of "if you can't poke it or work out its physical foundation, it doesn't exist", while here we have something diametrically opposite that says the physical only exists because of consciousness (BTW I may be way off here but doesn't Quantum Theory stipulate something similar - the result of a quantum probability isn't decided until it's observed, so the observer is required for the uncertainty to collapse to a specific state? Ignore me if I'm wrong, I'm not a physicist). So anyway, back to your point. Some resources out there do contain what comes across as subjective, superstitious rubbish, but perhaps for the reasons above (i.e. they may be recounting experiences that are subjectively real, but which seem so fantastical and are so far removed from our normal day-to-day experiences they put people off this whole subject). And to be clear, some are legitimately, complete drivel. However, there are a few people putting stuff out in a much more neutral manner, more like "try this and see what happens", "what if you add on this extra practice?", etc. The latter approach provides fewer points of resistance to the Western, science-orientated mind, and better yet, actively engages you as the scientist. Yogani at aypsite.org is one such author. Based on my own experiences, I believe science will catch up in due course. I'm pretty open to entertaining the possibility of some of the wilder claims now since so much of what I heard would happen up to this point has indeed happened, but I await my own verification. In the end, should you investigate this for yourself, you'll be the judge of whether this stuff is real and yours will be the most important opinion to you.
• amrx101 9y ago
  Whatever I am saying I have no "scientific proof" but I come from a traditional family of meditators. We have history of monks and sanyasis in my family who in their prime youth just went to jungle and meditated and died their just sitting. If you come to east India, you will find many small shrines built at places where my ancestors died. Whatever @nsouth has said is correct. What Westerners call Yoga are actually Asanas. What I want to add is a warning that is passed in my family from generation to generation. If you are a materialistic and sexual person dont try to do exercises that will arisen the Kundalini. If you are are materialistic and sexual Raja Yoga is not for you. Have a good life(marry, earn and be a force of good in society(what we would traditionally call Dharma)), you can definitely do Asanas and even meditation but you should never ever start a practise that specifically targets Kundalini. In breathing exercise, you can do all breathing exercises sans the retention part. I have no proof or logic behind this warning but I just stated what has been stated in my family for ages.