The other night I was reading this meditation pamphlet by Elsie Sechrist I had bought several years ago at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz. It’s been on my shelf for years but I just looked into it. She made an interesting point that really stuck with me. She said, just as you eat food for strength in your body, you should meditate every day for strength in you spiritual bodies (In Kundalini Yoga we know them as the ten bodies.) She further illustrated by saying that if you failed to eat for several days your body would be come weak and your preformance of every day duties would suffer. The same is true for our spiritual side but most of us don’t think of it that way.
This point really made me think about this concept of nourishment. Since I’ve taken up yoga both as a student and teacher I’ve realized perhaps the most important thing out there is the breath… for reasons which go on for days. The big reason is prana, the life force. Prana is the subtle substance which is the spark of life that sustains us. Yogi Bhajan illustrates this by saying, “the breath is the life. You can pump as much oxygen as you want into a dead body and it won’t come back to life.” So the pranic energy is what nourishes us in the breath. But it’s also what nourishes us in our food. The food you eat has a life force in it from the prana that it contains. That’s why fresh food tastes better and is more nourishing. So it’s all pranic energy. When you meditate, you focus attentively and consciously on the breath and those two things cause the pranic energy or life force you take in to increase considerably. So this business of spiritual food is a really important thing. Meditation clears the mind and increases the pranic energy in the body just as eating food gives you the prana or life force it contains. Something to think about.