Raise your potential by understanding Agni and Prana
Yoga is able to open your full potential in life. There is life force in you. A lot more than you know.
We should never give up to look for it and try on and on to perceive it. It is subtle energy and can just be perceived practicing techniques that rise your perception to a higher level.
You can obtain much more energy by learning how to guide you vital energy. There are to concepts that you should understand and that are related to our vitality: Prana and Agni. Prana is the subtle energy that is flowing through all living things and that makes you a fresh and vital and that is the difference between a raw fruit and a canned fruit. It is the intelligence of life and is flowing through our whole body and mind. We are just an instrument to this vital force. It is always close and still so difficult to notice. We should never give up to look for it and try on and on to perceive it. It is subtle energy and can just be perceived practicing techniques that rise your perception to a higher level like yoga or meditation. Than you will start feeling this force in everything you touch, eat, smell, see, hear it is everywhere and can never die.
Agni is different. It is our inner fire and can be extinguished and will be extinguished when we die. It gives us also vitality but in a more direct way. It is the cooker, the force that digests everything that we ingest physically and mentally. A strong Agni can digest everything properly and makes us look luminous and happy and full of positive energy with a glooming skin and shiny eyes and motivated to work and create things in our life. It is the power of digestion of our food but also of everything else that comes through our senses, everything we see, hear, touch and smell. All our experiences have to be digested as well. Only with a strong Agni we can really absorb our experiences and gain wisdom and learn from them. A weak Agni leads us into situations where we feel stuck and running in circles or just repeating the same patterns every time. Agni is also our will power and the force of our own motivation. It is the fire that pushes us through our life. A strong Agni helps you to move on and find new and better and good solutions, in the same way as it helps your food to move properly through your body. If the Agni is weak you will feel heavy after eating and the digestion will not be smooth and create gases or even pain or just makes you tired.
Agni is the cooker, the force that digests everything that we ingest physically and mentally. A strong Agni can digest everything properly and makes us look luminous and happy and full of positive energy with a glooming skin and shiny eyes and motivated to work and create things in our life.
There are several ways to raise your Prana and also your Agni. I want to speak about the most common ones.
You can increment your Prana by eating natural and fresh food, that is cooked with love and you can absorb great quantitiesof it by doing Pranayama and also Meditation. Doing Surya Yoga, as by Hira Ratan Manek and looking at the sun will also increase your level of Prana.
The Agni can be treated with special Yoga practices of Agni Sara and ayurvedic remedies. Yoga Poses that strengthen the core and activate you 3rd chakra and abdominal muscles will also strengthen your Agni. The careful practice of Uddiyana Bandha is very powerful as well. In Ayurveda you use pungent spices and herbs to activate Agni. For example you can eat a slice of ginger with some drops of lemon and a bit of salt before each meal. That will activate and increment the digestive acids. Pepper, chili, cinnamon, anise, clove and ajwain increment Agni as well. A hot tea with digestive herbs will strengthen the fire as well.
Mental waste like not digested emotions will also stay in the body and often manifest as tensions in the head and shoulder and neck muscles.
Another important aspect to keep your Agni alive is your daily routine and to respect the natural rhythms of going to bed early enough before midnight and wake up with the sun around 6 am and having your main meal around noon. Your Agni moves with the sun and is strongest around midday when the sun is highest. In the morning and evening it is weaker. Also moving your body regularly is important to keep the Agni alive. At least 15 minutes every day of a soft exercise like walking or yoga is good. Too much exercise will extinguish Agni. That is why after a very long and exhaustive run you are usually not able to eat for some hours until your Agni has recovered. Also eating too much will turn off the fire as it happens to any fire when you put too much wood on it at once. The same happens with too much water especially cold water or drinks before a meal are mortal for Agni.
Ayurveda says that most of the diseases start with a weak Agni. When our food or our experiences are not properly digested then all the undigested waste stays in the body and starts creating toxics that are called Ama. Ama is sticky and dense and may block all kinds of functions in the body. Mental waste like not digested emotions will also stay in the body and often manifest as tensions in the head and shoulder and neck muscles. Once you have physical or mental waste in your system you have to clean it before it accumulates and creates chronic diseases. For the body we have the Panchakarma treatments that lead out physical Ama and also mental Ama. And especially for the mental waste it is very important to meditate regularly as a cleansing process of all kinds of negative thoughts and tensions.
Meditation will improve your Prana and Agni at the same time. It has been proven, that a regular meditation is able to cut your mind off from the carousel of negative and repetitive thoughts that lead to nothing and are only limiting you.
So Agni and Prana are no easy concepts to comprehend, especially in the west, but once you try to come closer to their meaning it will be a strong tool for your life and your happiness. Me myself I heard of these concepts for the first time maybe 15 years ago and my comprehension is still growing every time that I put my attention on these aspects of nature. It is a slow and experimental process to understand the true meaning of these powers. And I can only guess that if we would fully practice and respect the principles of these forces, we would live in very big joy and nearly unlimited energy.
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