The root mud means to be happy. Mudra is something which makes you happy. What does this happiness relate to? Lightness of the pranas. When your pranas are light, you seem to float and walk on air. When your pranas are heavy, your feet tend to sink into the earth, there is heaviness. You have experienced that in your life too, many times. You know your pranas are really heavy and your steps are heavy. There are times when you simply whiz across the room and it feels that you are just flying across the room. There is so much lightness in the body.
At different times, we have experienced this pranic heaviness and lightness. Mudra means lightness of the pranic energy. There is a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Komal karo prana’ and Paramahamsaji has spoken about it many times in his satsangs, ‘Soften your pranas, they are hard right now.’ The pranas have to be softened like a sponge. When a sponge is not wet, it is quite stiff and hard. The moment it comes in contact with water, it becomes so soft that there is nothing hard in it. That is the nature of prana.
Right now, in all of us, the pranas are hard, like a dry sponge. The dry sponge has to be put in the bucket of liquid, to make it wet and lose its stiffness. That is mudra. The stiffness is lost and the lightness, the flexibility, the resilience comes in. Mudra is that practice which makes your pranas lighter and happier. What is the basic theory, concept or understanding behind these pranas becoming lighter and happier? Now, the energy is being radiated like the rays of the sun. The sun is not holding anything; it is always radiating. Pranas have that nature; they continuously radiate outwards, and because they radiate outwards, there is no storage of prana shakti. We are using the prana shakti continuously, day in and day out, at the physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual levels. We are continuously using prana shakti.
When we overuse prana shakti, we feel tired physically. Our muscles feel weak, they cannot support the body, we have to sit down and rest for a while. When we are climbing up mountains and there is a continuous struggle, the body is giving up, and you continue, you force yourself and then tiredness sets in. The physical vitality has come to its limit – the red marker. Now it has to charge. Put your battery to charge. So, you sit down exhausted for half an hour, have something to drink, something to eat, a piece of chocolate to give you some sugar burst. You sit for twenty minutes, your breathing comes back to normal, your pulse comes back to normal, and you say, ‘Time to move,’ and you start again. That is happening at the physical level.
At the mental level, the discharge of prana is seen as mental fatigue. The brain does not work; the mind does not work. If somebody tells you something, you look at that person as something hazy, your eyes look glassy and people know that you are not there. Although your body may be there, you are not there. The glassy look is the sign of mental exhaustion. Again you have to charge. Emotional exhaustion happens when there is strife between two people and the energy is drained.
With the practice of mudra, we are able to reverse the drainage. Instead of radiating everything, we begin to hold. It is like the sun holding the rays back. Of course it cannot do that, yet we can do it. We can hold our rays back and not allow them to be discharged. Therefore, when a mudra is performed where there are major nadis, the energy recycles back into the body.
This is one understanding and there is another understanding which is also quite interesting. We can practise a mudra in different ways and each point that we are pressing is a different nadi. Each point that we are pressing is a marma sthana, a point of pressure, which will activate the flow of prana. There are forty nine maruts which are affected by mudras. The forty nine maruts are conditions of mind, moods of mind and function of the senses, karmendriyas and jnanendriyas. There are two ideas of the word marut. One is representing a mood, a condition of the mind. The Upanishads state that there are forty nine conditions of mind. That means forty nine different moods. You can start counting another and you discover that if you are accurate it would be forty nine as stated in the Upanishads. At the same time, the maruts also represent movement, not only a mood or a condition, but also the movement of vayu, air, which corresponds to the pranic flow.
Here an interesting combination can be seen. The forty nine maruts are the flows of prana in the body, activating the senses, the sense perceptions, the physical activities and at another level it is forty nine conditions, moods or behaviours of the mind. The Upanishads state that there is a link between the pranas and the moods of the mind. There is a link between the forty nine movements of prana and the conditions or the moods of the mind.
19 October 2023 Progressive Yoga Vidya Training, Ganga Darshan, Munger