Hatha Yoga Breathing

Health and fitness are often touted as Hatha Yoga’s benefits. However, in this excerpt from Sadhguru’s latest book “Three Truths of Well Being,” he tells us that though the practice of kriyas and hatha yoga benefits the physical body in many ways, these are just side-effects! Classical hatha yoga is a powerful system to explore human potential and align the system for a “cosmic download!”

Sadhguru: This whole existence is a certain kind of geometry, and so is your body. This makes it a tremendous possibility.

Probably these days, this is no longer a problem, but just a few years ago, after every storm, you had to go up and adjust your TV antenna. Only if it was angled in a certain way did you have television reception. Or else, as you were watching your soap opera or a cricket match, suddenly a blizzard would appear on your screen. You had to fine-tune the antenna.

This body is like that: if you hold it in the right position, it can receive the whole cosmos. If you hold it in some other way, you will know nothing beyond the five senses.

Your body is like a barometer. If you know how to watch it, it can tell you everything about you and the world around. The body never lies to you, so in yoga, we learn to trust the body. We transform the very physical body from a series of compulsive processes to a conscious process, and convert it into a powerful instrument of perception and knowing.

The Greatest Gadget

There is a whole science and technology of how to make this body more than just a heap of food, an accumulation of what we have taken from the earth, and more than the compulsions of our chemistry, flesh and blood. If you know how to read the body, it tells you all your potential, your limitations – your past, present and future. That is why the fundamental yoga starts with the body.

It is as simple as this. The more you know about your phone or any other gadget, the better you can use it. A few years ago, the cell phone companies in India did a survey, and they found out that ninety-seven per cent of the people are using only seven percent of the capabilities that are there in a phone. (I’m not talking about the smart phone here, but the “dumb” one!)

Even in that little gadget, you are using only seven per cent. Now, this body of yours is the gadget. Every other gadget on the planet has come out of this. What percentage of this gadget do you think you are employing?

Well below one per cent. To conduct your life in the material world, your survival process, you do not even need one per cent of what this body is. We are doing all kinds of trivial things with it because right now our whole perception of life is limited to the physical nature of existence. But your body is capable of perceiving the whole cosmos. If you prepare it properly, it can grasp everything in this existence, because all that happens to this existence in some way is happening to this physical body.

The Next Step