Vase Breathing Instructions

       



  Rajujublog, which I used to write when I blogged anonymously, gets hits every day - more than this blog anyway - because it comes up third when you google vase breathing instructions. Since I haven't received the rejection yet from William Clark Associates, I thought I'd write something about vase breathing since I know a bit more about it now.

          I've never used the vase breathing instructions that are in Rajujublog. I started getting an interest in this juju after I read The Bliss Of Inner Fire about fifteen years ago now. Because of reading this book, I took refuge as a Buddhist so I could get a guru since it said you needed one in the book to do the meditations.

          But you don't really need instructions from a guru if it's there already in the book. Anyway, I didn't follow the instructions on vase breathing techniques in that book. This is partly because I was warned off doing this stuff by my root guru about eight years ago and partly because I was never able to do the visualisations sufficiently well, I thought.

           Both sets of instructions tell you to move the attention up through the chakras as you go along. I think the dodgy guru's instructions tell you to do twenty vase breaths per chakra once you get it going. Since I was never able to get the visualisations steady, I've mostly kept my attention on the navel chakra symbol, though most times I wasn't even able to visualise that.

           So I've been practising  vase breathing and deity yoga for about fifteen years, but have never been able to visualise very well. My assumption was always that if you couldn't visualise the symbols and channels properly then you would never be able to consciously move the heat (when you got it!) up through the symbols in the central channel. Or, this might be dangerous.

            However, I was told by one of my gurus about three years ago that my channels were opened up. If that is the case, they'd been open for years and have continued to open up. I think this is because of the amount of bliss I've been getting for years.

             Anyway, despite everything (including my very unconducive lifestyle!!) I seem to be getting heat these days. Usually, I have to be meditating for a couple of hours beforehand, but the amount of heat I'm getting is certainly on the increase these days.

             So it says in The Bliss of Inner Fire that these kind of meditations are suitable for westerners because you don't have to believe anything for them to work. You just have to do them. Well, I'm living proof of that. It's obviously going to take a long time for them to work if you live like me, but I do seem to have got them to work a bit. Sufficiently anyway to make the rest of my life far more interesting than it would have been!!

         

Milk by Ross Dunmore: Traverse fringe.

          Just read a moody review of this fine piece of work in the Sunday Times magazine for last Sunday. The reviewer seemed to think that this debut play was not the kind of thing that the "once reliable Traverse" should not have put on as a main event.

          Well, I would just like to disagree. The guy in the Independent, the "I", said the play came off a slush pile for one thing. I can only remember the Traverse doing one play in all the years I've been going there that was sent in "blind" by a new writer. This is most heartening since the Traverse is supposed to be about encouraging new writing. Putting on a play by someone quite new is just what the Traverse is supposed to be there for.

          Also, I thought it was extremely well written. If someone at the Traverse reads something like this and doesn't want it to be staged .... well, that's really what you might expect. Also, with new work there has to be, of course, a high standard of writing, but there should also be the right to fail.

          There might have been some questions about the shape of the play, but for a new writer I thought it was a great debut. I don't know if Ross is a male or a female, but if the Traverse were to commission a new play from her(him), I'd certainly go and see it. Anyway, Milk was the best thing I saw on the Fringe this year.