A Pranayama practice evolves and changes using subtle patterns. They are baked into the practice itself and so are learned on a deep level.
- Embodied Learning – the learning is intimately experiential and goes beyond intellectual understanding.
- Soft Gradual Change – each transformation of a personal practice seems to come naturally. The transformations are soft, sensible and stay within a boundary of correct effort. Without “pushing”, there is a clear and noticeable, accumulating change in capacity.
- Subtle Sensing – as a practice grows and evolves, so does a personal sense of familiarity with the breath. That familiarity provides a baseline for sensing changes in the breath in other life situations. Stresses become more evident, relaxation sinks deeper.
- Stepping into the Unknown – an experience where the impossible becomes possible; an opportunity to look back at a sequence of consciously enacted changes while not quite knowing what has actually changed.
- Quality – a focus on continuously refined quality as a key to progress. Being able to do more is experienced as an outcome of doing better.
- Unfolding Wholeness – the transformations of the practice describe a nature-like unfolding wholeness. The practice grows from the inside out – like a bud becomes a flower. Every transformation of the practice opens a door to the next and relies on the previous, creating a continuous sequence of changes leading toward an incrementally better whole.
Such patterns are relatively new in our personal and collective fields. If you are reading this, you likely already have some intellectual grasp of them and an intuitive attraction to them. Yet putting them into practice in work or life can be challenging because they often create friction with our established personal & collective habits. We need to find ways to embody these patterns so that we can truly enact them in the world.
Pranayama practice is a way to practice these patterns. The practice itself is a safe and protected space for experimentation with these patterns. Their recurring presence in a daily routine accumulates into an unspoken understanding that carries beyond the practice itself. Breath, being a constant both within the practice and in life beyond it, carries these patterns beyond the practice into life.
How can these individually embodied patterns manifest and resonate in a group setting?
- How can refined internal sensing extend to sensing within a group?
- How can we learn together to softly, gradually unfold our collective work?
- How can we learn to confidently and humbly step into the unknown?
- How can we learn to give preference to better over more?
- How can new internal modalities of communication and coordination inform a group?
- How can we learn to appreciate, trust and prefer soft, gradual changes as an alternative to sudden, ambitious and mechanistic over-reach?