Last Updated on August 13, 2024 by Tejaswini

As I have mentioned in my earlier posts the Upanishads, ie the Vedant and the Tantra ie the Shri Vidya are the same. One is the theory manual and the other is the practice. You cannot have one without the other. The ideal route is to first start with the Vedpurva to start channelising the mind. Then to move on to the Upanishads, understand the concepts presented in the Vedant and then to practice them ie Tantra. Jumping to Tantra directly is not advisable and will be dangerous.

The easiest practice that I have recommended in this blog is a Dhyan with Soham as the Dhyan mantra.

You inhale/ purak while mentally reciting ‘sooooo…’ and then exhale/rechak while mentally reciting ‘hummmm’. In between the rechak and the purak there are the two short intervals where you neither breathe in nor out and neither do you recite any sound in your mind; these two spaces are the two Kumbhaks – Antar and Bahya.

The breathing should be steady, this is the most important part. The interval of the breath in/out, can be short or long but the stream of air should be steady. Avoid jerky and forced movements of the air. Similarly the Kumbhaks too should not to be forced, never ever hold your breath on purpose, it can damage. When the body/ mind is ready the Kumbhak will happen spontaneously eventually extend in time.

So basically we have two types of processes,

Rechak/exhale and Purak/inhale where the air/pran is moving, in a controlled steady stream of motion.

Kumbhak – Antar and Bahya – where there is a natural stillness, a pause. Even now as you are sitting reading this post, there is a small pause, a microsecond between the inhalation and the exhalation of your breath. In Dhyan, this pause/ Kumbhak will slowly become longer. This will spontaneously happen only after you do systemic Dhyan for years. If you think that you can forcibly extend the ‘pause’ within a week or months then you are mistaken. It is a process where the length of the breath gradually slows down, the flow of the air becomes thinner (said to be like a stream of oil) concentrated on a point. This is in deep Dhyan, that the real Kumbhak begins. (My Guru once mentioned that real progress was when the Kumbhak extended for 9mins+)

Let’s put it in another way, so that it is easier to understand. When you sleep, the only activity you perform is to breathe. And in case, for some reason, you cannot breathe, eg the blanket gets on your face, you struggle briefly and then wake up. But if you are not allowed to breathe at all even for a few mins, the struggle will intensify, go out of control and result in physical death. The body will get damaged to such an extent that your soul will have to leave it. Breath is everything.

The Kundalini is also ‘sleeping’ and the only thing that she is doing while in this state is ‘breathing’. The outer breathing synchronises with her ‘inner breathing’. As long as we keep on breathing, she too remains undisturbed, ‘breathing’ in her ‘sleep’. In Dhyan we ‘disturb’ her in a controlled fashion. We keep our breath, Purak/ Rechak smoothly flowing but over time as the length of the Kumbhak starts extending, she starts feels ‘breathless’, as if a blanket is briefly kept over her head. The trick is to not let her get so restless, that she ‘wakes up’ with so much anger/explosive energy that that the physical body dies but yet keep her sufficiently disturbed so that she very very slowly ‘wakes up’, very gently from her ‘sleep’. This is a very delicate balance, literally a matter of life and death. (If you mess up here, physical death, insanity or severe diseases are possible and some repercussions can also extend to the future lives.)

Another way of putting this is that as she is ’sleeping’, a sheath surrounds her like a cocoon. This cocoon does not allow our mind/ manas to be aware of her presence within us. As we do Dhyan, we ‘disturb’ her in a controlled way. As her ‘breathing’ gets disturbed, it is like the sheath over her gets slightly pushed away. Once this happens, the mind is made aware of her presence and automatically goes near her. Initially it tries to pull her blankets up again, repair the sheath, seal her cocoon again, because it is simply not prepared to acknowledge her presence. But as we continue our Dhyan, the sheath covering her keeps opening repeatedly. As the mind goes near to her, again and again, there comes a point where the mind starts getting absorbed in her. It realises that she is right here in all her glory and it now wants to just be with her. Once the mind starts wanting this internally, it also realises that the external world is but an illusion. This marks a very significant milestone in your sadhana as now onwards your mind will not fight you, it will cooperate and help you move forward. It will help you in completely removing the ‘sheath’ from around her, completely ‘waking’ her up. This the so-called ‘activation of Kundalini’.

The only way all this can be achieved is regular Dhyan. Control over the breath is the foundation of all spiritual practice. There is no other way.