The Body Electric, Part 2: Prana, Yin, Nidra, and Sound

In Part 1 of this article I looked at the human body's electrochemical activity, how it relates to the two branches of our autonomic nervous system (sympathetic and parasympathetic), and how the essential first step in becoming a more sane human being is learning to self-regulate the balance between these two.

Here in Part 2, I look at four specific teaching modalities I use with students to help them (and me!) restore balance to the nervous system's electrochemical activity, specifically engaging the parasympathetic nervous system and the relaxation response.

PRANA

As yogis have known for thousands of years, the breath is closely intertwined with the electrical activity of the nervous system. I examined this relationship in detail in a previous article, The Psychobiology of the Breath. Because of this close relationship, breathing practices are among the most basic tools for self-regulating nervous activity and inducing the relaxation response.

In the eight limbs of yoga taught in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, held sacred by most contemporary schools of yoga, one of the eight limbs is devoted to "pranayama," the science of breath work, using different breathing techniques to move or hold or clear "prana" or energy from the body in various ways.

Among the the principles and practices from pranayama that I find most useful in working with meditation students is the practice of ratio breathing. This technique involves measuring the length of the inhalation and exhalation so the whole cycle of breath moves at a specific ratio and pace. It might mean breathing in for a count of five and breathing out for a count of five (a 1:1 ratio, also known as "coherent breathing") or breathing in for a count of five and breathing out for a count of nine or ten.

Slowing down the breath and using more of our natural lung capacity, in itself, has a naturally calming effect on the nervous system and its electrical activity that can be experienced almost immediately, sometimes in just one or two breaths. Specifically, extending the length of the exhalation stimulates the vagus nerve, the main pathway to engaging the parasympathetic nervous system and the relaxation response.

YIN

Although I'm trained and certified as a yoga teacher, I don't really enjoy teaching the fast-paced, sweaty, flowing styles of movement and strenuous workouts that many people these days think of as "yoga."

The style of yoga I do enjoy teaching is one that's much more directly linked to relaxation and engaging the parasympathetic nervous system: Yin Yoga. Yin involves far less movement, and much more stillness. Less fire, more cooling. It's a unique approach to postural yoga that was designed to bring more elasticity into the connective tissues, specifically the great web of fascia that envelops the musculoskeletal system and all the organs of the body.

In Yin Yoga, we typically stay low to the ground, and we hold postures for extended periods of time -- sometimes up to a few minutes in a single pose. Rather than using our muscles to aggressively push or twist ourselves into a posture, we passively use the forces of gravity and time to slowly open the body and release tension within the tissues at a deeper level. Even the music I play in a Yin Yoga class has a slower pace, fewer beats-per-minute, to encourage the brain to stimulate the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system. The feeling coming out of a Yin Yoga practice can be a deep sense of relaxation within the body and mind.

NIDRA

Yoga Nidra, sometimes called "the yogic science of sleep," is actually a system of techniques for guiding students into a profoundly deep state of relaxation bordering on sleep -- but ideally not crossing the line completely.

In a Yoga Nidra class, I use my voice and a progressive series of passive exercises (body scan, visualizations, etc.) to guide students into the hypnagogic state -- a precursor to actual sleep, the state between waking and sleeping. When students are able to hover in this liminal space, this border zone between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind, the sense of relaxation that can be experienced is very deep. And because awareness is suspended in that in-between space, various kinds of communication between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind can take place, creating a feeling of wholeness and integration unlike any other.

Needless to say, during the entire process of Yoga Nidra, we are engaging the parasympathetic nervous system and entraining our brains in producing the electrochemical activity that leads to the relaxation response.

SOUND

There has been a revolution in my teaching activity during the past year. Up until a year ago, I had been aware of the growing trend of "sound bath" classes in yoga and meditation studios, but I regarded this trend with a skeptical eye. I come out of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and we always had Tibetan bowls in the meditation hall, but they were used primarily for one thing only: they were struck to signal the beginning and the end of a meditation session. In 15 years of study and practice within that venerable tradition, I never encountered a single teaching about making the bowls "sing," or using sound for healing purposes. So when I would see people playing the bowls that way, I dismissed it as a bunch of New Age nonsense.

Fast forward to last year, when I started teaching classes at a local studio and got curious about their sound classes, which seemed to be more popular than any other class on their schedule. One day I decided to try one, just to see what all the fuss was about. In that first sound bath class, I felt a sense of relaxation so deep that the only thing in my previous experience that I could compare it to was Yoga Nidra. In fact, in explaining sound meditation I often draw comparisons to Yoga Nidra, because a skillful sound bath can also guide students into the hypnagogic state.

I was immediately hooked, and I signed up for a training in sound healing with a teacher at that studio. A few months later, I did a second training with another teacher, and a set of crystal singing bowls found their way into my life. Quite suddenly, I found myself in the role of a teacher of sound meditation and practitioner of sound healing.

When done skillfully, a sound bath can not only guide students' minds into a state of profound relaxation; it can also have powerful healing effects on the body. The vibration of sound waves is not merely perceived by the ears and the mind; those same waves carry into the cells and tissues of the body, interacting with the electrochemical activity of the nervous system and helping to restore balance and homeostasis. After all, at a cellular level the body is roughly 74% water, and sound waves travel easily through water, so in a sound bath you are not only hearing sound; the pulsations and vibrations of sound waves are literally washing through you, inducing effects  on the body that are beyond the mind's purview.

When I experience a good sound bath I leave feeling like a washcloth that has been wrung out. During the sound bath tension in the body melts away, the mind stops fighting with itself, and a whole range of metabolic changes take place: the heart rate and breathing slow down, body temperature drops, and electrochemical activity shifts very noticeably into the parasympathetic nervous system. I often have students in sound bath classes tell me they've never before experienced such a profound sense of relaxation.

That's good enough for me. I've gone from a sound bath skeptic to someone who teaches sound baths two to three times per week and attends them as frequently as I can. Along with breath work, sound healing is among the most powerful tools I've encountered for altering the electrochemical activity of the body and entraining the human brain and nervous system to relax.

With a relaxed body and open mind, the possibilities are almost limitless.

The Body Electric, Part 1: Energy, Stress, and Relaxation

Electrographics of a hand, Hermann Schnauss (1900)

It's common to think of a human being as flesh and blood and bones and organs -- something made of matter. It's less common to think of a human being as an electrical system -- something made of energy. But we are both.

Your body is permeated by electricity and its interaction with the body's chemistry. The presence and movement of electricity throughout your body is part of what distinguishes you as a living being from an inert and lifeless piece of steak, which is made of the same flesh and blood. As with Frankenstein's monster, electrical activity is one of the things that separates a creature that's alive from one that isn't.

From the top of your head to the soles of your feet, electrochemical signals travel at up to 150 meters per second along the roughly 45 miles of pathways of the central and peripheral nervous system. This is our modern medical way of talking about the body's energetic network of highways, roads, and side streets, and the traffic of energy flowing along them. Ancient yogis described these channels as "nadis" and the energy as "prana," while traditional Chinese medicine speaks of "meridians" and the "qi" or life force that flows along the meridians. Like a large city glowing at night when seen from outer space, your entire being is lit up with an electrical field that may be invisible to your eyes, but can be measured with scientific instruments and seen by other kinds of creatures with different eyes.

Electrochemical signals mediate your experience of yourself and the world around you. They make possible your every perception, movement, word, and thought. In fact, our human cognitive ability and capacity for abstract thought and reasoning is one of the unique ways that humans have evolved to exploit our brain's powerful electrical activity. No other creature on earth can harness the electrical activity of its brain to do algebraic computations or read a book or send a rocket to the moon or build an artificial intelligence system or map out and follow a path to enlightenment.

Other animals have evolved different ways of using electricity. Sharks have unique electrical sensory faculties that allow them to see the electrical fields of other creatures in the water, which is part of what makes sharks such good predators. And electric eels can store and release electricity at a very high voltage, delivering a powerful shock of up to 600 volts for defensive or hunting purposes.

The central processing unit of the brain sits atop the vast network of electrochemical pathways in your body, receiving, interpreting, and sending signals that make it possible to sense and know what you're feeling and to interact with the world around you. When it's time to respond to a threat with a defensive measure of fighting or running, the brain orchestrates a burst of electrical signals into the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, triggering the release of adrenaline and epinephrine and other chemicals that enable a fast and powerful physical response to the perceived threat. The pupils dilate, digestive functions slow down or pause temporarily so that vital energetic resources can be diverted to the parts of the body needed for running or fighting. Glucose is released into the body, and there's a sudden increase in the heart rate and breathing rate. This rapid and intense cascade of physiological responses in the body happens because of the electrical signals received and processed by the brain.

And hopefully, when threats have been dealt with and it's time to chill out, digest your food, and go to sleep for the night, the CPU of the brain sends electrochemical signals into the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, bringing about an opposing response. The pupils and airways constrict, the heart rate and breathing slow down, the release of glucose is inhibited, the glands stop secreting that intense surge of activating hormones and neurochemicals, and energy is redirected back to the digestive functions and to cellular recovery. In a word, you relax.

Both of these powerful responses in the body happen without the interference of the conscious mind. That's why they are part of the autonomic nervous system, which basically means automatic. And they are both necessary for our survival and healthy adaptation to our world and our experiences.

One of the big problems with human beings today -- and it's something I observe in myself and in my meditation students -- is that our autonomic nervous systems are out of balance. There's too much electrical activity firing into the sympathetic branch, stimulating a chronic "fight or flight" response, a pattern of overstimulation that's very difficult to step out of. We commonly call this stress or anxiety. The habitual response and activity of our sympathetic nervous system is disproportionate to the actual threat level posed by anything in our environment. Biologically, we are bringing a physiological response that evolved to help us survive life-or-death situations, and we're applying it to everyday situations like relationships and jobs and emails and social media, things that don't objectively merit such an extreme physiological reaction.

So one of the first and most essential steps for us when we sit down to practice meditation is to recalibrate that balance and get more electrical activity firing into our parasympathetic nervous system in order to trigger the relaxation response. Forget about balancing chakras, cultivating bliss or higher states of consciousness, raising kundalini, or achieving enlightenment. What the majority of meditation students I work with need first and foremost, before starting to think about more lofty spiritual goals, is to simply slow their roll on a purely biological level.

If we can't first train ourselves to relax, there's not much point in talking about enlightenment or discovering the true nature of mind. As Step One, we need to learn and practice techniques that help us retrain the brain's electrical activity and the nervous system to be less chronically stuck in a sympathetic "fight or flight" response, and more skilled at shifting into the parasympathetic relaxation response.

You get good at what you practice. As you repeat certain thoughts and actions, the brain builds neural pathways -- electrochemical grooves -- that encourage signals to run along the same pathways more and more habitually. A pattern of responding to situations with stress or anger builds neural pathways that make it more likely that you'll respond with stress or anger to the next situation.

But the same is also true of more wholesome responses. With time and practice we can train our brains and rewire our neural pathways and our body's electrochemical activity to respond to stressful situations with more calmness and steadiness of temper, more empathy for others, more compassion and loving-kindness. Once we start building electrochemical patterns in the brain and body to sustain those kinds of wholesome feelings and responses, creating those sorts of neural pathways, and becoming more skilled pilots of our own nervous systems, then maybe we can start talking productively about cultivating mystical states of consciousness or investigating the true nature of mind. Let's keep the cart behind the horse.

For now, most of us just need to learn to relax.

Yes, there is a lot more to meditation than just relaxation. But relaxation is an absolute prerequisite for all other practices. And honestly, if we all simply learned to relax and nothing more, we would still become happier people, we would probably cause less trouble for ourselves and others, and the world would be a better place for it.



In Part 2 of this article, I'll look at four teaching modalities I use with students to help them (and me!) restore balance to the nervous system's electrochemical activity, specifically engaging the parasympathetic nervous system and the relaxation response.

Confessions of an Anxious Meditation Teacher

In my role as a meditation teacher I often feel like people don't get a chance to know the real me. They see a curated persona who speaks with a calming tone of voice, someone who spent two years living in a Buddhist monastery and has written two books on meditation and spiritual life. I can imagine those things might give them certain misleading ideas about me.

Behind that persona, the truth is that I struggle a lot with anxiety. I don't mean regular garden-variety anxiety, I mean the kind that I see a doctor about, the kind that has a diagnostic code in the DSM-V. Anxiety is something I have experienced for most of my life, going back to childhood. It can flare up along with insomnia to affect my sleep, my relationships, and my work. Many people might never suspect this about me, because I'm good at keeping it under wraps and showing the outside world an exterior facade of calmness and serenity.

I've been practicing and teaching meditation for 16 years, and while I can say truthfully that meditation helps me regulate my anxiety and work with it more skillfully, I cannot truthfully tell you that meditation cures it. Meditation alone, practiced in solitude, doesn't address the underlying structural issues in my personal psychology. I stopped expecting the practice to do that for me quite a while ago.

I share this confession because in the world of yogis and meditators and people walking various kinds of modern spiritual paths, there's a pervasive misconception that anyone who's been practicing for a while — and especially anyone who has stepped up from practicing into the role of teaching -- is supposed to have it all together.

In my observation, and in my own personal experience, nothing could actually be further from the truth. And this misconception creates some really toxic dynamics between teachers and students.

One of the great ironies about people in the helping professions is that they are often among the ones who need the most help. I know a psychiatrist who has borderline personality disorder. A lot of therapists and social workers I know are depressed. The suicide rate among doctors in the U.S. is two or three times as high as the general population. There's a powerful stigma that prevents us from talking openly about how people whose job is to help others may themselves need help addressing their own mental health issues.

The world of yogis and meditators and spiritual teachers is no exception. But you wouldn't know that from looking at the marketing hype.

If you're that sort of teacher, it's often assumed that you've wrestled with your demons, and vanquished them. You've worked out the kinks and foibles in your human nature, so you stand a cut above the rest of us. Your inner light shines through at all times, unclouded by ordinary human neuroses. Traumas? Shadow material? You're beyond all that. This must be why you look so beatific and well composed in your Instagram photos.

My personal advice? Run as fast as you can in the other direction from any teacher who presents a highly manicured image of having it all together. Run from any teacher who looks down at the world from a superior perch and appears to have it all figured out, or who claims to have packed away all their emotional baggage.

In the past few years I've seen a lot of teachers who projected that sort of image fall from grace — exposing suddenly and almost violently their humanity, their struggles, and the demons with which were secretly wrestling. I've learned not to project too much of a sacred aura onto any of the cows roaming about in the contemporary spiritual pasture. If you spend much time around cows, sacred or not, you'll find most of them are full of something. I know I am.

My struggles with anxiety, among other things, are part of what initially drew me to the path of meditation, and they're still part of what keeps me practicing — and, perhaps just as importantly, part of what keeps me teaching. I may not always reveal to a room full of students what's roiling beneath the surface of my own psychological waters, because it's generally bad decorum to appear like a basket case when you're sitting in the teacher's seat. But within the inner sanctum of my own mind, where no one else goes, I'm never far-removed from a lifetime of roiling waters, or from the wellspring of shadow material that percolates just beneath the surface.

There's a famous quote from Richard Bach: "You teach best what you most need to learn."

The longer I teach, the more truth I find in that statement. When meditation students tell me how calming my voice and my presence are, or how much a certain practice or teaching I shared helped them reframe their perspective on a difficult situation, I know that sharing it with them probably helped me twice as much. I needed just as much as they did, if not more, to be reminded of the teaching by sharing it with them.

I think what I'm learning is that it's not in spite of my imperfections and human foibles, it's not in spite of my ongoing struggles with my own inner demons, but because of those things, that I have something genuine to offer as a teacher.

I'm coming clean here about my struggles with anxiety because I think coming clean is necessary. In the world of spiritual teachers and students, we need fewer sacred cows and more transparency and disclosure. Without an honest and open relationship to the more troublesome aspects of myself, I would be just another one of those slick Instagram gurus trying to sell you the path to happiness, as if I had it all figured out.

If you ever catch me doing that, feel free to slap me, and bring me back down to earth.