Yoga practice gets your energy moving.
In yoga, this energy is known as prana and it is the foundation of all life, the subtle life force energy that flows through our bodies and animates our living world.
The Sanskrit word prana is first found in the Chandogya Upanishad text 3,000 years ago and was further refined and described in later yoga texts and teachings.
Most yogis have had an experience of prana - it's the way your body loses sluggishness as you practice; or the way that you sometimes bring jangly anxiousness to your mat and replace it, through breath and movement, with grounded calm.
It is said that prana gets stuck within our bodies, and this leads to spiritual stagnation: instead of blooming into the creative humans we were born to be we get plagued with inertia, doubt and restriction. These knots are known as granthis and the practice of yoga clears them.
The aim of yoga is to increase the amount of prana within your body so that you become shining, well-balanced and calm. The aim of yoga is to clear all the granthis and to live a confident life of self-reliant peace.
Our practice not only teaches us how to increase this energy, but also how to contain it within. If we are not disciplined, we lose prana all the time and everywhere. We become embroiled in commotion, inner and outer and we become exhausted, with no time for the important things, sometimes we become unwell.
Think of your body as a permeable vessel and imagine your prana stimulated by your yoga practice (breath and movement), imagine actually drawing prana within yourself as you practice, whilst also moving your body and breath in order to release old stagnant prana and release it, untying all of those knots. Imagine holding all of that energy within you then as you move through your day, your week, your year, your life.
This concept of prana is easy to witness in a teacher that seems to embody a powerful sense of compassion and calm; it is there in the grounded smile of the Dalai Lama, or the powerful righteousness of Martin Luther King. It is in you too. All you have to do is learn how to build it, move it and contain it within.
Sarah x