Breath to become a subtle living presence, a flame, where AUM and chants are offered.
This subtle breath then can be requested to flow into all parts of our body.
Practice Date: 28th February 2025 | Duration 30 minutes | Guided practice | Facilitator : Arul Dev
Guided Audio Recording of Practice Link:
Details of Practice
Intuitively for today, a practice is coming more on our breath. There are two insights which we need to bring into our experience. The subtle breath is something that can collect a lot of the new consciousness within itself and this breath needs to intermingle with our body’s substance so that the substance can get fully nourished, especially in areas where the body is holding some kind of an illness or memories and stuff like that.
Approach today’s practice with a complete space of the unknown, the mystical, allowing more nuances to get revealed each time. The freshness in the practice is what is very important. So touch your body with your awareness as if you’re doing this practice the very first time in your life ever. And just see how it feels to touch your body substance with your awareness across your body.
You will find that in many of the places, your awareness is not alive, it is not very fresh, it is not living and actually you can’t do much about it also. It’s almost as if we need to recognize another layer of consciousness, which is directly sensing our body.
Now keep your awareness outside your body perhaps in the aura region or perhaps beyond. Don’t define anything today. So just place your awareness outside your body. It’s neither inside your body nor is the awareness lost in some transcendental realms. The awareness is outside the body, but it is fully aware of the body. From outside the body, you will perhaps be able to sense the vastness incoming. So there’s an aspect of vastness that is expansive, where you get into the expansiveness, and there’s another aspect of vastness that is incoming, which acts on you. So with your awareness outside your body, catch that aspect of the vastness as it acts on your body.
You can easily do it if you completely identify with the domain of the cricket sound, as an example. If you identify with that zone of cricket sounds, you’ll get exactly this phenomenon. You’re not inside the body, but you’re not disconnected. And you’re in that vast circular field, which is acting on the body, in a way. This is just one way.
Now, slowly bring your awareness to your breath, especially in your heart region or anywhere else where it comes to you. We’re not talking about the In breath full and the out breath full, we’re not really focusing on that part of the breath. There is a part of the breath that is subtle which is always holding a Presence. Like if you take a flame, and if you really concentrate on the core, it’ll be soft. Similarly, there’s an in breath, out breath. There is somewhere in this breath a presence, a light, a dance. This breath will not be flowing up and down across the full body. This breath will be almost like a joyful light, like a flame. This breath will all be almost be like a flowing Lingam, present, upward rising, but at the same time it can be steady and collect something as a base.
The origin of this breath and what is being sustained in this breath is not necessarily from within your body, it’s from the beyond. So keep this breath connected to that field outside your body, which by itself is connected to the Infinite. And that’s what is nourishing this breath which can collect something from the beyond.
Very silently you can chant something into this breath. It can be a AUM, or let us say you use a particular chant regularly. Chant into the breath like the way you would do to a flame or like the way you would chant to a lingam. This is now a living breath filled with a Presence. You can chant into this breath whatever you wish, silently.
This breath, you’re just focusing in a tiny space within your body, which will sometimes almost feel static. It’s not going really up and down like your regular full breath and all. It’s just there, alive, present, connected to the field around, the incoming vastness, which is connected to the beyond.
As you chant into this breath, you would find something occurring in your body through the breath. This breath could feel localized inside your body or it could sometimes be even outside, it doesn’t matter. This breath is a Presence. Connect the rest of your body to this breath, to this Presence, to this living breath lingam that is present inside you somewhere.
Connect the rest of the body substance to this breath and it’s almost like you allow the body to breathe into this breath. Each part of your body has its own breath movement, and pulsations. So allow each part of the body as much as possible to connect to this subtle breath of Presence or Light, to breathe into this subtle breath and be nourished by this breath. And you can continue to chant into this subtle breath as you allow all other parts of the body to breathe into this subtle breath.
You observe and you can even do it in one specific part of your body where there is some persistent difficulty. This central breath Presence that you’re becoming aware and chanting into can act very minutely into any body region that you focus upon. It’s not you who are acting now in the body region. This subtle living breath itself will act directly on your body parts. We just have to request and direct this subtle living breath to specific body parts or body as a whole.
There could be a lot of stuck energies and old breaths stuck in a particular way. Keep nourishing your subtle breath. Keep connecting it to that part of the body you are working on. And you will notice the subtle breath itself acts. Let this Breath Lingam, act directly and you bring absolute faith, not on the problem, not on the history of your body or the challenges inside. But you bring absolute faith on this potent breath, on this subtle breath presence. You bring absolute faith that this subtle breath will act fully into the minute pores and cells in each part of your body.
Continue to nourish this breath flame throughout this week and let it act on the tiny pores and cells of your body. Thank you.
In this practice session we work here on the substance of our body to make it more conscious and offer it and link it with the Divine. When we use the word substance, what we are referring to is the matter, the weight and density of the body. Just allow the substance to rest on the substance itself to just make it a little bit more relaxed. We’ll also bring our awareness below our feet and through that we are actually trying to enter into our subconscious and inconscient, which is also the collective and we’ll try and go deep down.
And when we read Savitri or we use the chant AUM, everything we’ll do silently. We can offer it to the body and we can also offer it to the below, and we’ll see. The aspiration all of us can keep is, some day it’ll be beautiful if we discover the Divinity at the very depth below in the inconscient also. Like we do the practice above the head, this is also important.
If you connect to your body, you will feel its weight and its sensations. Normally, we are trained on a single point concentration. Try and develop a multiple point concentration where your awareness can touch 10, 20 or even 100 points across your body and learn to hold your awareness across your body to some extent. Keep attention across the body, hundred points or thousand points across. Show those points to the Mother, to Sri Aurobindo, to the Divine, so that they can directly act.
Notice when it is a flow – a continuous flow. Notice when you get stuck. And then shift your awareness so that you’re living in with your awareness inside a particular point and show it to the Divine.
From the learnings of The Mother, how She used to do the prayer of the cells, in our own simple way, be within these many different points and silently pray to the Divine. For example you can say, may Your beauty be manifest here. So when we say may Your beauty, you’re looking into the Divine. May Your beauty be manifest here. And when we say ‘here’ focus on one or two or three, four points in your body that intuitively emerges.
May Your beauty be manifest here. May Your joy manifest here. May Your wisdom manifest here. Drop deeper within your body, feeling into your body’s mass, matter, substance. Go deeper overall into it. But for that you have to develop an interest, a love for matter – the basis of existence. So go deeper into your body’s substance. And there continue the prayer.
Now when you go deeper into your body’s substance, be free in your mind, so that you discover new domains of the substance, which you’re not aware normally. A substance is not just gross matter. As you go deeper, you move into subtle, supple domains of matter which seems more softer, more lit. And that will come when you just do this in a very relaxed way. You relax your body and just move in to the very substance and if possible you discover a matter which seems more softer, more lit, more nicer, to put it that way.
Develop an attitude of worship because there is a Divine matter inside all of us. We see that in the Mother’s Agenda very clearly. It’s not Divine present as matter, there is a Divine matter itself inside all of us. Even if you are not aware, with faith, bow down and touch the depth of your body’s substance.
Now the beauty about the deeper substance is that it is very malleable. So with your awareness just compress, condense this substance. Which means you are not just doing on the physical matter. Whatever is the inner part of the matter that is appearing to you or you are feeling it, just condense that for a few moments, and then just allow it to expand for a few moments.
On your own, you will do this condensing and expansion across your body, hugging the cells of the matter closer intimately, that is condensing, and then allowing it to connect to vastness which is expanding.
Into this, wherever we read some Savitri, just allow the Savitri lines and consciousness to touch the depth of your body. So you be in your body’s depth. We will chant the mantra AUM once or twice for the sake of the collective. You silently receive it in the depth. of your body. So you’ll have to be inside your body’s substance. Today, be in the depth of your body’s substance and receive the AUM and a few lines that I read from Savitri, giving a lot of break time.
And while you are in this practice, leave your body connected to the Consciousness above. So, you are aware of your body and you are also aware of the above. Which means, there could be a zone of silence, vastness, a zone of light or a zone of joy, whatever is there, you are connecting to it and allowing that to take over your body.
Now if you bring the tradition of breath and prana work, as you are inside your body, there is a prana that is spread across the body. If you become aware of that, that conscious breath and prana opens the body, allows cells more to be receptive to what comes from above.
In this posture, receive the sounds and Savitri lines…
We can prepare for a labour of love to go into our subconscious, unconscious, to offer that too to the Divine, so that the Divine’s glory can manifest. So we’ll begin with our body itself. Intuitively connect to your body, where you have deeply ingrained patterns, habits that are pretty much hardened and no matter what we try, there is a repetitive stubbornness. This could be in a particular way of being or health. Just get into the process. These hard habits are ingrained in our body. Intuitively connect across your body into layers of rigidness, falsehood and patterns that are there. Look into these patterns. Half the time we won’t even know what these are but we would have an intuitive feel. Look deeply into these hard grained habits, illnesses present within us and silently tell into these regions, praying to the divine, ‘May Your force manifest here. May your force manifest here.’
Continue to look very deep. And sometimes when we are looking into these hard grained habits, certain images may come, certain memories could pop up sometimes not even from our lives. Just take them as embedded stuff in the cells of your body and look at them neutrally, but directly and pray to the divine. So from the cells, you’re looking up to the Divine and you’re praying ‘May your love manifest here. May your will manifest in this body, across all the cells.’
Now, take your awareness below your feet. For some, it could appear as if you’re entering and going down into the earth. That’s if you’re doing it very materially. That’s also fine. For some, it’ll appear as if the moment you go down, you will notice a dark zone. And if you’re very sensitive, you will notice some untransformed stuff. So I’ll be reading lines of Savitri once or twice. You don’t pay attention to Savitri, but you go down below your feet. If you get that zone of darkness, travel through that and every part of that, offer it, like you may offer your home. Allow the AUM to touch below your feet into the darkness. Offer the words of Savitri into the darkness. And by doing like that, keep going down and down.
Receive the sound AUM in the darkness below. Keep on going down. And the terrain is vast. On all sides you will find all kinds of things if you are sensitive. Grasping the hand of the Divine keep going down and keep offering the sounds into that regions wherever you are. Connecting to the Divine Mother or Sri Aurobindo or both take a final dive of your awareness into whatever depth you are able to touch with an aspiration that today or another day you discover the golden Divinity below. In whatever manner it comes to you, take the deepest dive possible, aspiring to touch the Divine source below. Wherever you have reached, receive these lines of Savitri there as seeds, so that the work can continue by the grace of the Divine.
Both deep within our body’s substance and also in the consciousness below our feet, we read the following lines of Savitri, and allowed its vibrations to touch our body and subconscious / inconscient:
“A lamp was lit, a sacred image made.
A mediating ray had touched the earth
Bridging the gulf between man’s mind and God’s;
Its brightness linked our transience to the Unknown.
A spirit of its celestial source aware
Translating heaven into a human shape
Descended into earth’s imperfect mould
And wept not fallen to mortality,
But looked on all with large and tranquil eyes.
One had returned from the transcendent planes
And bore anew the load of mortal breath,
Who had striven of old with our darkness and our pain;
She took again her divine unfinished task:
Survivor of death and the aeonic years,
Once more with her fathomless heart she fronted Time.
Again there was renewed, again revealed
The ancient closeness by earth-vision veiled,
The secret contact broken off in Time,
A consanguinity of earth and heaven,
Between the human portion toiling here
And an as yet unborn and limitless Force.
Again the mystic deep attempt began,
The daring wager of the cosmic game.
For since upon this blind and whirling globe
Earth-plasm first quivered with the illumining mind
And life invaded the material sheath
Afflicting Inconscience with the need to feel,
Since in Infinity’s silence woke a word,
A Mother-wisdom works in Nature’s breast
To pour delight on the heart of toil and want
And press perfection on life’s stumbling powers,
Impose heaven-sentience on the obscure abyss
And make dumb Matter conscious of its God. ”
Page 353-354, Savitri, Sri Aurobindo
I’ll be quiet for five minutes now. Either you can be silent or you can open your own Savitri and intuitively pick just two lines. Just read two lines and offer it to your body and to your breath.
We simply close our eyes for the final prayer, connecting to your entire body and its substance, bringing that attitude of worshipping your own substance. What comes to us in the first glance is our illnesses, our discomforts, our good and bad. But beneath that, everywhere there is Divine matter. So with faith, we go down into our body’s substance.
Connecting to our entire substance of our body, we look up to the Divine above with the concluding prayer:
May your will manifest within this body.
May your joy manifest within this body.
May your love manifest here.
May your purity manifest itself here.
May your flow manifest here.
We offer ourselves unto you, O Lord.
By ‘here’ we pointed to specific points / cells of our body and also in general across our body.
Poems, Sonnets, Insights, Chanting and deeper body work with Lord Shiva in the light of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo Facilitators: Arul, Archana, Shweta
Insights on Shiva Consciousness from Thirumoolar Thirumanthiram by Niveditha Ramaratnam
A soul touching performance by: Odissi dance – Kavita Dwibedi Indian classical vocal music – Reeshabh Purohit
Bhajans and songs by : Ramakrishna Ganta & Vaibhav Pandya
Join us this Mahashiva ratri, do the chant together in your own quiet space, let your body cells open to The Shiva Consciousness.
“A face on the cold dire mountain peaks Grand and still; its lines white and austere Match with the unmeasured snowy streaks Cutting heaven, implacable and sheer.
Above it a mountain of matted hair Aeon-coiled on that deathless and lone head In its solitude huge of lifeless air Round, above illimitably spread.
A moon-ray on the forehead, blue and pale, Stretched afar its finger of still light Illumining emptiness. Stern and male Mask of peace indifferent in might!
But out from some Infinite born now came Over giant snows and the still face A quiver and colour of crimson flame, Fire-point in immensities of space.
Light-spear-tips revealed the mighty shape, Tore the secret veil of the heart’s hold; In that diamond heart the fires undrape, Living core, a brazier of gold.
This was the closed mute and burning source Whence were formed the worlds and their star-dance; Life sprang a self-rapt inconscient Force, Love, a blazing seed, from that flame-trance.”
Page 548 – 549, Collected Poems, Sri Aurobindo
INSIGHT
“The Inconscient as the source and author of all material creation is one of the main discoveries of modern psychology, but it agrees with the idea of a famous Vedic hymn. In the Upanishads, Prajna, the Master of Sushupti, is the Ishwara and therefore the original Creator out of a superconscient sleep. The idea of the poem is that this creative Inconscient also is Shiva creating here life in matter out of an apparently inconscient material trance as from above he creates all the worlds (not the material only) from a superconscient trance. The reality is a supreme Consciousness — but that is veiled by the appearance on one side of the superconscient sleep, on the other of the material Inconscience. Here the emphasis is on the latter; the superconscient is only hinted at, not indicated, — it is the Infinity out of which comes the revealing Flame.”
Page 555, Collected Poems, Sri Aurobindo
INNER PRACTICE
Connecting to the inconscient:
We can connect to the domain of consciousness present beneath our feet. We can start from our feet or from our pelvic region and take our awareness deep down. Some do it like entering within the earth and going down to its core and beyond. The true journey we are doing is that we are learning to take our awareness within the subconscient and below within the inconscient. As we enter this region with our awareness, we may experience the darkness, the dark night or even some fluid stuff or some images. We need to pass through this collective untransformed. There is also huge vastness here, the domain of silence ever present. And this is also the abode of Shiva, the potent ‘seed’ unmanifest, lying dormant in a state of calmness and light, waiting for the touch of Divine Shakti.
The inconscient is also present right within all the cells of our body as the hardened crust of our habits, mental, vital and physical patterns.
Practicing Chanting:
Keeping your awareness right below your feet into the vast and deep depths you can offer any chant of Maha Shiva there. Or keeping your awareness within the depth of your cells intuitively in the hardened crust of habits, you can offer the chant of Maha Shiva across your cells.
Based on your own tradition and learnings you can choose the chant. Some simple suggestions are offered here:
1) AUM – The primordial sound of creation
2) AUM Shivoham – I am Shiva, In our true nature we are all The One True Pure Consciousness
3) AUM Namah Shivaya – A deep adoration of Lord Shiva, rising across ages
There are many more Shiva stotras and mantras. Whatever you have learnt or practicing you can also practice them as offering Lord Shiva vibrations within the inconscient. This offers all our subconscious and also our inconscient into the feet of the Divine Lord and Mother, for Their manifestation and play.
In life, we always need to have a referral point. Only when we are fully united with the divine, and I guess most of us, or all of us, are quite far away from that reality, we need to have a referral point. Actually, we always have a referral point, either unconscious or habitual, or borrowed from others, or society. But the beauty is to make this referral point conscious and to choose a referral point that is closest to one’s deepest aspiration, free, vast, high and pure. For all those who really want to progress in deeper body work, the yoga and its practice, alone needs to be the referral point.
This yoga sadhana cannot be something static. This is not something that we do for 20 or 60 minutes a day, and then squander our energies in random ways. It’s about the way we live our life. It’s about the way we work. In our deeper body work sadhana, the practice of the deeper body yoga or the yoga of the cells alone needs to be the referral point. And what would that mean? It would mean that we should be primarily thinking about this, reading about this, concentrating on something not clear yet, for example ‘What is subtle body?’ or ‘how to practice condensing and expansion of subtle matter’ or ‘ how to wait within our body to receive Delight pure’. Unfortunately for many of us our referral points are scattered here and there around some agendas at work, interactions with close family members, interactions with others and the like. We need to have one or a few deep, larger and all-encompassing reference point/s and in all the works, interactions and activities we do in our life, this reference point should be active and living. Now when we take the yogic sadhana of substance or cells of our body, many of us may feel that we are still getting only kinder-garden experiences and capacity to do the practice. Well still with resonance, joy and faith we can make this the very centre of our life and work and the rest follows by Grace. The beauty of this body-centred yogic sadhana is that this also leads to a clearer mind, purer and stronger vital and a calm capacity to creatively manifest.
Reflect how are you interacting with others. What are you doing? How and in what manner are you doing these? How are you working? While at a practical level, each area of your life will have its goals. So at the relationship level, we’ll have goals. At the work level, we’ll have some goals like, make money or make this product sell or get a new customer and stuff like that. That is great. These should be there. But the underlying secret or mystical referral point always should be present in a conscious and living way no matter what we are doing on the outside.
There are two ways to look at it. One is that no matter what we are doing on the outside we should be with our reference point. In case of deeper body work lovers, this would mean that they are in practice most of the time of the day. To do the practice is why they are living, breathing and working. They want to be skilled and excelling at work. They want to nurture loving relationships. And the basis of all this needs to be the reference point of conscious practice, running as a background all the time. The second option is even more powerful. We create work opportunities and relationship interactions governed by the needs of our reference point and in the case of deeper body work lovers, governed by the dictates of the sadhana as it unfolds with aspiration, daily practice and Grace.
Now while a major portion of our sadhana is to surrender or wait with practice for the Divine’s Grace and decent, we need to have faith in an integral victory like a white peacock. This is not a victory for a ego efforts. But this is a faith in victory in the practice itself that will certainly unfold over time in its fuller perfection and ease.
For this we need to go into the minute details of how we need to do things. In all that we do we need to look at, how do we do these things that at the practical level there is expertise, goodness and progress building up. However our inner eye at an underlying level, should look at every interaction, work and activity as a phenomenal opportunity to do our sadhana – to honour your reference point, to do the deeper body work and to do the yoga.
Keep a gentle reflection what should I do in my external life or how should I relate? How should I work? How should I act so that it gives me the maximum time, maximum capacity to be able to do this sadhana? One tendency we need to be careful about is we should not allow laziness, tamas, to set in or a tendency for a less work or action. Less or more work there should be no preference. There should be no preference for less work. There should be no preference for overwork. What comes and what is needed is all taken as part of the sadhana to live the reference point or do the deeper work well.
Action:
We hope that post reading this article you move to its actions too:
1. Choose and clarify your reference point
2. Hold it and be in practice of it throughout day
3. When you forget and you will a 1000 times, always start back the practice a 1000 times with the fullest love and aspiration as if you are beginning for the first time ever.
