Isha Foundation
kriya
PREPARATION
Sit in a cross-legged posture with your eyes closed, facing East.
Keep your hands open, palms facing up, with a slightly upturned face.
Keep a mild focus between your eyebrows.
THE MEDITATION
This meditation will happen in three stages:
STAGE 1
Inhale and exhale gently, slowly. With each inhalation, mentally say to
yourself: “I am not the body”and inhale for the whole duration of that thought.
With each exhalation, mentally say to yourself: “I am not even the mind” and exhale for the whole duration of that thought.
Do this for 7 to 11 minutes.
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STAGE 2
Utter the sound “AAA” with mouth open. The sound should be coming from just below the navel. You need not utter
it very loud, but enough to feel the vibration.
Utter the sound 7 times, exhaling fully into each sound.
STAGE 3
Sit for 5 to 6 minutes with your head slightly upturned, and focus between your eyebrows.
The total time is between 12 to 18 min.
You can sit longer if you want.
PLEASE NOTE
• While you sit for Isha Kriya, do not participate in the activity of the mind or body. Whatever is happening in your body or your mind, just ignore it and simply sit there.
• Do not take a break during the practice or it will disturb the reorganization of energies that will be in process.
• Anyone can practice this kriya and enjoy its benefits. Simply follow the instructions without making any changes. This is a simple but very potent kriya.
• You can remind yourself about this
(I am not the body, I am not even the mind) anytime during the day.
• Each time you do the kriya you must do it for a minimum of 12 minutes, and twice a day for 48 days, (considered as a full mandala or cycle) or once a day, for 90 days.
This is your commitment. This is your
Gurudakshina.
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Question: What can I possibly gain out of this?
Sadhguru: Where is the need to meditate, first of all? Starting the process of life was not your conscious choice, it “happened” to you. When you were born your body was so small, and now it has grown. So obviously, the body is something that you gathered. It is an accumulation. What you call as “my body” is an accumulation of food. Similarly, what you call as “my mind” is an accumulation of impressions.
Whatever you accumulate can be yours, but it can never be you. The very fact you accumulated it means that you gathered it from somewhere else. Today you could gather a 70 kg body, but you can decide to make it a 60 kg of body. You don‟t go looking for those 10kgs, because they were an accumulation. Once you drop it, it is gone. Similarly, with your mind, it is an accumulation of impressions.
The moment you are identified in your experience, the moment you are identified with something that you are not, your perception goes completely haywire. You cannot perceive life the way it is; your perception is hugely distorted. So the moment you start experiencing this body, which you gathered from outside, as “myself,” the moment you start experiencing the impressions that you have in your mind as “myself,” you cannot perceive life the way it is. You will only perceive life the way it is necessary for your survival, and not the way it really is.
Yet once you have come as a human being, survival is very important, but it is not enough. If you had come here like any other creature on this planet, stomach full - life would be settled. But once you come here as a human being, life does not end with survival. Actually, for a human being, life begins only after survival is fulfilled.
So meditation gives you an experience, an inner state where what is you and what is yours is separated. There is a little distance, there is a little space between what is you and what you have accumulated. For now we can understand this as meditation.
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What is the use of doing this? It brings an absolute clarity of perception. You see life just the way it is. No distortions about it; simply seeing life just the way it is. Right now if we see this very hall as a world, your ability to go through this world is only to the extent that you clearly see it. If I have no clarity of vision but if I have confidence and if I try to go through this, I‟m going to be a bumbling idiot. Whenever there is no perception, people try to overcome that by building confidence in them. Without the clarity of perception people are trying to make it up with other kinds of substitutes; there is no substitute for clarity.
Once you understand this you naturally become meditative; you want to clear up everything and just look at life the way it is, because you want to walk through life with least amount of friction, without stumbling on this or that.
Question: Why should my head be slightly upturned?
Sadhguru: Sitting with your head slightly upturned is not because you want to see something floating in the sky or imagine something. You keep your head upturned because when your system “looks” upward it becomes receptive. It is like opening a window. This is about becoming receptive to Grace. When you become willing and receptive, your body naturally arches up.
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Question: What does this meditation do?
Sadhguru: This Kriya will create a certain space between you and your body, between you and your mind. If at all there is any struggle in your life, it is because you identify yourself with these limited aspects of yourself.
So the essence of meditation is that it creates a space, a distance between you and what you refer to as your „mind‟. All the suffering you go through is manufactured in your mind, isn‟t it so? If you distance yourself from the mind, can there be suffering in you? This is the end of suffering.
Now while you are meditating, there is a distance between you and your mind, and you do feel peaceful. The problem is that the moment you open your eyes, you are again stuck with your mind.
If you meditate every day, a day will come when you open your eyes, and you can still experience that the mind is there and you are here. This is the end of suffering. When you are no longer identified with your body and mind, you will be in touch with the source of Creation within you. Once this happens, Grace happens.
Whether you are here, or beyond, this is the end of suffering. That means your whole karmic bag – your past or unconscious mind – has been kept aside. It cannot have any influence over you. Once the past has no influence over you, then life becomes a huge potential.
Every breath becomes such a tremendous possibility in your life, because the past is not playing any role in your existence here now. If you sit here, you are absolute life. Life becomes effortless.
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Question: What is the importance of the breath? Is there more to breathing well than being healthy?
Sadhguru: Breath is the thread which ties you to the body. If I take away your breath, your body will fall apart. It is the breath that has tied you to the body. What you call as your body and what you call as “me” have been tied together with breath. And this breath decides many aspects of who you are right now.
For different levels of thought and emotion that you go through, your breath takes on different types of patterns. If you are angry you will be breathing one way. You are peaceful, you breathe another way. You are happy, you breathe another way. You are sad, you will breathe another way. Have you noticed this?
Based on this conversely is the science of pranayama and kriya: by consciously breathing in a particular way, the very way you think, feel, understand and experience life can be changed.
This breath can be used in so many ways as a tool to do other things with the body and the mind. You will see with the Isha Kriya, we are using a simple process of breath, but the kriya itself is not in the breath. Breath is just a tool. Breath is an induction, but what happens is not about the breath.
Whichever way you breathe, that is the way you think. Whichever way you think, that is the way you breathe. Your whole life, your whole unconscious mind is written into your breath. If you just read your breath, your past, present and future is written there, in the way you breathe.
Once you realize this, life becomes very different. It needs to be known experientially; it is not something you can propound like this. If you know the bliss of simply sitting here, the blissfulness of just being able to simply sit here, not think anything, not do anything, simply sit here, just being life, then life would be very different.
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In a way, what this means is today there is scientific proof that without taking a drop of alcohol, without taking any substance you can simply sit here and get drugged or stoned or drunk by yourself. If you are aware in a certain way, you can activate the system in such a way that if you sit here it is an enormous pleasure. Once simply sitting and breathing is such a great pleasure you will become very genial, flexible, wonderful because all the time you are in a great state within yourself. No hangover. Mind becomes sharper than ever before.
Question: What effect does uttering the sound “AAA” have on me?
Sadhguru: When you utter the sound “AAA,” the maintenance center in your body gets activated. This is Manipuraka chakra, or the navel center. Manipuraka is just three-fourths of an inch below your navel. When you were in your mother‟s womb, the “maintenance” pipe was connected there. Now the tube is gone, but the maintenance center is still in your navel.
Now as there is a physical body, there is a whole energy body that we generally refer to as either prana or Shakti. This energy, or prana, flows through the body in certain established patterns; it is not moving randomly. There are 72,000 different ways in which it moves. In other words, there are 72,000 pathways in the system through which it is flowing. So nadis are pathways or channels in the system. They don‟t have a physical manifestation; if you cut the body and look inside, you won›t find these nadis. But as you become more and more aware, you will notice the energy is not moving at random, it is moving in established pathways.
When you utter the sound “AAA,” you will see the reverberation will start about three-fourths of an inch below the navel and spread right across the body. Sound “AAA” is the only reverberation which spreads right across the body because this is the only place where the 72,000 nadis meet and redistribute themselves. They all meet at Manipuraka and redistribute themselves. This is the only point in the body like that. If you utter the sound “AAA,” the reverberations of this sound are carried right across the system.
This reverberation can assist greatly in energizing your maintenance center. Activating this center will bring health, dynamism, prosperity and wellbeing
Once you practice this yoga method you will truly enhance and empower your life, after which when You Are Ready to take yourself to the next level and deepen your experience, you can Sign Up For The Online Inner Engineering Program Now here: ==>> Click Here Now For Inner Engineering Online
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