Loma- Viloma and the sacred container (Continuation of “Sex, food, associations: The great consumers”)

It seems that no matter how many times we mention the sacred container in the yoga classes, it is not enough. People are very keen to understand it, but I suspect that only half of the information offered is absorbed. The rest is rejected because if the individual were to accept it… their life would be overturned.

Let us begin with the word Brahmacharya. The  5^th social comtition of Yoga. Brahmacharya means “To be able to control divine energy”. Divine energy is another way of referring to sexual energy. To be able to control sexual energy. Not to reject it but to control it. Of course when something is very powerful and out of control, you have two choices: You either reject it entirely, or you devote time and energy to disciplining it. In most religions, rejecting has proved to be the safer method. As a result people have divided themselves into two categories: religious people; who have sex only to bear children and are holy, and non-religious people; who have sex for pleasure and are sinful. Yoga recommends discipline, offering practices that help us to both cultivate divine energy and to control it.

The Loma Viloma practices help us to understand and learn how to cultivate this divine energy in the pelvis, using:

1.       Asanas – body postures (The “Waterfall phenomenon”: In other words, using the edges of our body, preferably ones that are horizontal to our body, towards the pelvis, and taking advantage of gravity to increase the blood circulation and the energy in the pelvis.)

2.       Visualisation (In order to keep our mind at the pelvis and help the charging. The visualization is: breathing in we move towards the right through our pelvis with red colour, breathing out we move towards the left through our pelvis with blue colour.)

3.       Breathing (We do complete breathing through the nose only in order to create the maximum positive charge with the inbreath and the maximum negative charge with the outbreath. When we consciously and equally create a positive and negative charge, we generate electricity; energy which we then guide through the visualization to the pelvis.)

 

What we do for over an hour is an energetic meditation concentrating mind, body and breath at the pelvis.  

In this way we create energy at the pelvis. The pelvis is the container in which our system stores prana – the original form of energy for ALL of its actions.

Our system’s actions: The creation of thoughts and inspiration, emotions, digestive fire, sexual charge. What is vital for us to understand is that our system uses THE SAME ENERGY FOR ALL OF THE ABOVE. It simply converts it according to its actions. In order to better understand this, we can observe the example of money: We use money for all of our needs. But certain things require more money than others. In the same way, our system orders its needs (beginning with the most “expensive”) as follows:

1.       Sex (As there is always the potential and the effort of our system to procreate, a great deal of energy is assigned to each sexual contact. The system cannot separate when we have sex simply for pleasure and when we have it in order to create children. For this reason, each time it offers a large amount of energy to the sexual act, in preparation for the creation of life.)

2.       Digesting food (particularly if the food is complex eg. Meat The system must break down and convert food into primary material which can be used by the body to build its own protein. For this reason, the simpler our food is, the more “economical” it is in terms of prana.)

3.       The creation of thoughts and inspirations/ emotions. When a thought is combined with an emotion it is more economical. However when the emotion becomes more intense, surpassing the border, it drains the body of energy. Everything with measure.

 

When the mind/body/emotions manage to remain NEUTRAL and in NOW, there is no use of prana (energy). This is when the channel automatically opens up to the hidden parts of our mind, and the energy which we have saved “enlightens” the mind. This is why religions suggest (or demand) restraint from sex, food (fasting) and control of thoughts and emotions. So that we can “save” the energy in our pelvis (the same way that we save money in the bank) and invest it in awakening the higher parts of our mind through prayer. Prayer (for religious people) and meditation (for atheists), or a combination of the two, is a way of moving the stored energy “upwards”. Of course there are many other ways, such as kountalini Yoga, which I personally do not use as I find it too complex and unreachable to teach. Certainly there are some masters who can convey the practices of kountalini with safety and ethos, but I advise you to be cautious with these methods.   

 

Therefore, with the LOMA VILOMA practices, we generate energy directly in the pelvis, and then sit quietly in meditation so that the energy can move “upwards” through our spine to the brain. And then suddenly solutions to long-term problems begin to arise, negative emotions do not touch us, we understand what others feel and need, we have wonderful artistic inspirations, and most importantly, we feel more powerful on every level.   

Korina Kontaxaki – Yogalife