Contents Foreword Introduction 1. FROM THE GROUND UP The Journey from Root to Crown 2. THE PELVIS POTENTIAL Unlocking the Power of the Spine 3. THE SACRED SACRUM The Watery Realm of the Lower Spine 4. THE BELLY BRAIN The Third Chakra, the Hidden Power 5. THE DIAPHRAGM The Prāṇa Pump 6. THE LUNGS AND THE LOTUS HEART The Epicenter of Feeling 7. BLUE THROAT The Confluence of Many Rivers 8. THE CROWN JEWEL Light on Infinite Space Notes Afterword Acknowledgments References Index of Guided Practices Index About the Author E-mail Sign-Up Foreword I extol bhavānī whose body is nectar and whose very form is joy. She triumphantly shines forth at the end of a string of six lotuses. Exceedingly lustrous in the middle way of the suṣumnā, She melts the moon of nectar to drink its light. 1 —Bhavāni Bhujaṅgam of Śaṅkarācarya, verse 1 The subtle body in yoga is not only the secret to the optimal functioning and alignment of the body; it is the key to delight, love, understanding, and good relationships. And subtle this body is! At times it dissolves into pure awareness and at other times it cranks out the endless fabric of daily life. The subtle body is often represented as being populated with gods, goddesses, wheels, flowers, amazing animals, and mythological realms. It maps the nature of mind and reality with its paradoxical loops and bright seas of nectar. We must constantly remember that subtle means mysterious, irreducible, delicate, and fine. Looking into subtle things tends to temporarily suspend the thinking process into a state of open inquiry and wonder. We all have a subtle body, because we all have a body and a mind. Our minds make all kinds of images, symbols, and tags to remember, recognize, and organize experience. We plant those in the otherwise open, radiant, and unbiased tree of the sense fields. We push and pull on these symbols, tags, and ideas for they represent and map our vital interests, needs, hopes, and fears. Even when we think about subtle things like consciousness, God, or time, our minds create a symbolic representation for them all and arrange them like objects in various relationships. Because of this seemingly ceaseless symbol-making power of the mind, our experiences and our ideas about ourselves and others can be quite imbalanced, biased, and miserable. To be honest our subtle body is at least a little miserable most of the time. This misery that the subtle body suffers is caused by an ignorance in our minds that confuses the symbol with the thing or the map with the territory, while at the same time the mind tries in vain to make the subtle gross, the impermanent permanent, and the deep shallow. The yoga and tantra traditions of India, Tibet, and Asia are happy to turn the mind back around on itself and contemplate the interfacing of myths, metaphors, and symbols with the everyday particulars of the breath and the experience of raw bodily sensation. Mindful awareness of internal breath and associated sensations and thoughts naturally reveals context, depth, and counterbalance to any mistakes of our mapping habits. Traditional yoga practices can speed up or encourage this process by having us visualize and feel areas of internal breath using colorful imagery, or reciting and directing mantra into specific places in or around the body. This allows us to experience things on a truly subtle level where labels and referential ideas temporarily fall away and the fullness of the interconnected world shines forth. Mind, thought, and image are used together to see through the overlapping confusions in those very thought processes. Subtle body meditation can eliminate the misperceptions that create suffering and confusion in the first place. As the subtle body is balanced and its channels opened free of bias, experiences come where each particular thing, thought, or sensation already contains all of the others, even to the point where each pore of the skin might contain a delightful universe, and each sensation point reveals delightful nectar. Ultimately the subtle body, your body, is meditated upon as the sacred, astonishing, and infinite body of pure awareness, intelligence, and compassion. The beauty of Tias Little’s book Yoga of the Subtle Body is that he delights in keeping the subtlety and mystery of the mind and the body. This keeps our minds open, so we continue to look, explore, and enjoy the fresh and always new face of reality. How exciting to explore with Little the detailed nature of anatomy, physiology, and neuroscience in relation to the ancient wisdom of yoga, the chakras, and nāḍīs. This grounding of the esoteric and the profound in the nitty- gritty of the body serves to sharpen the cutting edge of any yoga practice. —Richard Freeman, Author of The Mirror of Yoga Introduction What is the subtle body? Is it something material like connective tissue, hormonal secretion, or neuronal pulse? Or is it formless, like space, pure energy, or consciousness? Is it tied to emotions such as fear or passion? In the tradition of yoga, the subtle body suggests that which is fine, delicate, and infinitesimally small such as an atomic particle. It also speaks to the all-pervading spirit in the body and is one of the names of Śiva. In this book I undertake an investigation of the subtle body, bringing together notions of the animating spirit that appear in traditional yoga sources with the anatomical body. I will proceed to look at the body through a variety of different lenses—including the body as it is portrayed in classical Indian mythology, the esoteric anatomy of the chakra and nādī systems, and the structural body as it is charted in contemporary systems of holistic health. While there are many books on yoga philosophy and also many books on anatomy, there are few that weave the two together. The intersection of mystical anatomy described in many old yoga texts with the body’s glands, connective tissues, and organs has long been an interest of mine. My intention for this book is to provide insights into metaphysical speculations as they relate to the body, and through guided exercises, meditations, and reflections to give readers an experience of the subtle body. When imagining the subtle body, the mystics and yogis of India and Tibet designed elaborate systems for navigating the body’s interior, akin to the network circuitry of a computer. These systems map the flow of breath called prāṇa whose dynamic potency pumps, flows, and trickles through myriad channels, called nāḍīs. The exact nature of these pathways is difficult to articulate in any one biological system; their potency suggests a physio-spiritual force that transcends scientific rationale. The language and imagery used to articulate the subtle body, in collections such as the Upaniṣads that date back as far as the fifth century B.C.E. and the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā in the fifteenth century C.E., are metaphorical and cryptic. This is due in part to the fact that the landscape of the inner body, long before the era of the microscope or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), was visualized during states of profound meditation. Also descriptions of the subtle body were shrouded in metaphor and obscure so as not to be readily understood by the uninitiated but reserved for those who trained with a qualified master. Ironically, today we have the opposite scenario, where yoga teachings are ubiquitous, launched on the World Wide Web, and made available to everyone at any time. In this book I attempt to capture some of the flavor of this metaphorical body and relate it to yoga practices today. This stems in part because as a teacher, I am drawn to the poetic imagination and use metaphor regularly when I teach. I believe that ultimately it is impossible to articulate the yogic experience in words. By articulating the body-mind connection through analogy and image (such as lifting the brain stem upward like the hood of a cobra), a direct experience of the subtle body becomes more palpable. Metaphorical thinking allows for greater flexibility, imagination, and openness, all of which are integral to the mind in meditation. In writing this book, it became clear to me that in the eyes of the ancient seers of India, the form of the body is not simply utilitarian, whose purpose is to eat, sleep, and reproduce. Rather the body is a microcosmos where energies get played out. In it, sunlight is reflected, wind roams, rivers flow, and flowers bloom. It is where lotuses, turtles, serpents, and dragons dwell. In this sense the body is not to be taken literally but figuratively. Thus, in the history of yogic thought and practice, the subtle body not only involves complex and compelling biological rhythms but is the home of a multitude of archetypal forces. Also, within the visual corpus of yoga-inspired art, the psychospiritual life has been rendered in wild and provocative ways. Through myth, sculpture, and story, benevolent and malevolent forces are carried out by multiheaded deities, treacherous demons, intricate mandalas, and animal spirits. For instance, Śiva, the arch yogi, is depicted riding a bull, seated atop the highest Himalayan peak (in the full lotus posture), in the form of a stone phallus (the liṅga), or as an anrdrogynous being. In the art of yoga, the complexity of the human psyche gets expressed in ways that are at once multidimensional in form and affective singular in spirit. The archetypal forces in the body are sustained by the vivifying effect of prāṇa. Prāṇa is a mysterious energy, the immeasurable source of life itself. As an avid practitioner and student of the internal arts, I have found it invaluable to understand the structures of the body through which this vivifying force of prāṇa flows. My studies began with how the musculoskeletal system relates to yoga postures and has evolved to include an understanding of how yoga practice affects digestion, circulation, and the flow of lymph and hormonal secretions. In this book on the subtle body, I detail how the anatomical architecture of the body provides organization and support for the flow of prāṇa through blood vessels, nerve tracts, and lymph capillaries. Prāṇa within the subtle body is impacted by the powerful effects of emotion. Thus, my research includes how divisive psychological and emotional states become embedded in the tissues of the body: buried under the skin, held in the pelvis, stuck in the diaphragm, or locked in the jaw. Since the effects of stress and trauma, so prevalent in our world today, can disrupt the body’s delicate balance dramatically, I dedicate time to discuss the effects of trauma on the subtle body. I then provide postures and meditations that help counter the effects of stress. In today’s anxiety-ridden society, it is difficult to become what one of my meditation teachers described as a “happy, healthy human being.” By looking closely at how psychosomatic stress today affects digestion, heart rate, sleep patterns, and musculoskeletal strain, I offer contemporary insights into an ancient tradition. While it is valuable to study and reflect on the various systems of the body as unique (musculoskeletal, digestive, neurological, etc.), in a living being every structure in the body is interdependent. All connective tissue, every organ, every blood vessel, and every cell is interconnected within the body’s overall fluid matrix. The notion of interdependency plays an important and powerful role in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. For instance, the well-known parable the Net of Indra depicts the interconnectivity of all phenomena, from the outermost corners of the galaxies and intergalactic dust to the cellular structure of the spleen and stomach. In the telling of the myth, the primeval god Indra has hung a vast net, one that extends infinitely in all directions. At each node in the net there is a perfectly clear gem that reflects all other gems in the net, so that the process of inter-reflection goes on and on. In this book I suggest that the body is a similar net, web, or continuum of interrelated structures. Understanding the interconnectivity of living structure leads to a more direct sensory experience of totality and integration on the mat. The organization of the book follows an outline I have used in my yoga teacher trainings for over fifteen years. I follow a course upward through the body from the feet and legs, along the spine and trunk, to the crown of the head. By starting at the ground, the root, I travel from lower chakras to upper chakras, from coarse to subtle, and from dark to light. This follows a well-established trajectory in classical yoga that involves a passage from dormancy and inertia to illumined realization. I also point out how a series of horizontal structures in the body, here referred to as diaphragms (in the feet, pelvic floor, respiratory center, vocal cords, palate, and tentorium cerebelli), serve to orient posture and provide internal support. In yoga today, the chakras are the most recognized representation of the subtle body. The word chakra, like many words in the Sanskrit language, has multiple meanings. It can mean a winding river, a cycle of years, a snake, a circular flight of birds, a potter’s wheel, a prayer wheel, or an astronomical circle like the zodiac. In the body, the chakras are part of the imagined body: they have associations with geometric designs, animals, acoustic resonance, and are likened to blooming flowers. In the following chapters, I look at the metaphorical implication of each chakra along with its biological associations. In keeping with the theme of the body as a relational field of interdependent structures and in keeping with the way our bipedal posture is organized from the ground up, I imagine the chakras beginning in the feet. Given the importance of the feet in helping align and stabilize the framework of the body, I decided to devote an entire chapter to the feet. In the sacred architecture of the body, the feet are the foundation to the temple. The feet and legs have important skeletal, fascial, and neurological connections to the spine. While the chapters herein trace the trajectory of the traditional spinal chakras, I have allocated an entire chapter to the respiratory diaphragm given its preeminent position in the body. The two chakras typically noted in the cranium, the third-eye center (ājñā chakra) and the crown (sahasrāra chakra), I cover together in one chapter, “The Crown Jewel.” Within the subtle body, the spine is the axis mundi, the channel through which the kuṇḍalinī, the primary biological force, is believed to reside. The midline of the body is relevant to the spinal cord, limbic brain, and autonomic nervous system. The middle axis through the body is charged with a kind of magnetic force (śakti), and its life-bestowing power is celebrated throughout yoga. I map the spine relative to the subtle body and delineate how the central nervous system