Sivaratri Night out (Jaagran/Jaagaram)

This is a big celebration in India, and every year, it falls  in Feb/March month.  Normal practice is to fast and stay up the whole night, and not skip a beat on the next day…   How do you do it?  This blurb offers some clues to this challenge.  Yogis’ main purpose for suggesting this practice is to probe some of the fundamental existential axioms…

The ultimate goal is to transcend the basic conditioned dependence on food, water, breath, sleep, communicate…; experiencing their lack is the first step. Essentially an opportunity to pull together some of the kriya yoga techniques … This won’t happen in one day. By that, it’s not like on the day of Sivaratri, we decide to stay awake, and everything will go fine; even with best of intentions and efforts…  Just like how we train to run a marathon, it takes training.  To have a good Sivaratri night, even for regular yoga practitioners, it takes at least 48-72 hour preparation, before the attempt.

According to some accounts, Arjuna meditated for 21 days straight, without food, sleep and water, and then, in that state, fought a strong opponent (Siva in disguise), to claim the esoteric knowledge of pasupata… Apparently, it is at that yogic skill level that we gain the knowledge of how to tame our animal (pasu) instincts, and become fully conscious. After not eating and sleeping for that long, he still retained his full strength where he could take on such a strong opponent!  And Amba from Mahabharata is another example.  Something to contemplate on….

We will explore five such axiomatic processes that act at both physiological and psychological levels:  1. Hunger, 2.  Thirst, 3. Breath, 4. Sleep and 5. Socialization (need to connect and communicate).

Let’s explore one question at a time… but,  these triggers are all interrelated.

1. Hunger

What triggers hunger, and when do we feel that sensation? Does yoga lead to weight loss?

Food and hunger operate at the level of the outermost sheath (annamaya-kosha or food sheath in yoga terminology) and provide most tangible symptoms.

Food and Hunger

The trigger for hunger is an indicator of “energy availability” – when it’s low, we feel hungry first. We “unconsciously” respond to that trigger by eating – but it’s not always the right solution.  Why can’t the body access the reserves it already has?  This requires our strongest consideration.  Simple answer?  Our mind doesn’t remember the stored reserves – nervous system!

Taking a yogic look at this phenomenon, this is only one of the manifestations of dropping levels of “prāna” in healthy individuals. Metabolism requires not only food but also breath (air/oxygen). Once we have those two, we need functional body internals to combine and convert them into energy – agni is that agent. Sometimes, we have plenty of food reserves in the body, but the body does not reach for them, nor does it acknowledge their existence for some reason (e.g., due to shrunken nervous system, toxin accumulation)… Of course the path of least resistance is to make us to reach for a snack/meal. Sometimes, just breathing properly might be sufficient! So, in the yogic practice of fasting, both supply and demand sides of the equation are explored, in an effort to find a new balance.

For the shivaratri night out, on the supply-side, we try to lower the food intake, which is the most obvious part of fasting. Given a chance, this allows the mind to find the existing food reserves.

The less obvious part is the way the yogic practice alters the demand-side correspondingly. So, on the demand side, we try to lower it by keeping the physical and sensory activities to a minimum, and lowering the brain activity through meditation. Brain in a resting person is like a 20 watt bulb – consumes about 20% of our calorific intake! How much of that energy expenditure is really necessary? By focusing the thought energy for useful purposes only, while minimizing subconscious emotional responses, and slowing down unconscious life-sustaining functions, such as breathing and heartbeat, how dim can we make this bulb? Try it yourself!

Another key implicit parameter is the efficiency or utilization; how much of what’s consumed and converted food is utilized? Yoga asana training makes food absorption/utilization rate higher, while pranayama practices allow management of oxygen levels efficiently to meet the metabolic demand. So, asanas and pranayama are about improving process efficiency. So if one keeps eating the same amount, and starts doing yoga regularly, there is a chance that person would put on weight! Alternatively, if same amount of food is consumed while doing yoga, that person could be bouncing off of the walls like a kid, to dissipate the excess energy generated due to higher absorption and metabolism…

So the answer to this commonly asked questions of – does yoga lead to weight loss? It depends:-)

Yogis are extremely good at bringing up contemplation-worthy questions, turning our belief systems upside-down. They of course suggest some exploratory methods as starting points, but trust each one of us to be intelligent enough to realize full answers by ourselves…

2. Thirst

When and Why do we feel thirsty?

Second trigger on our list is Thirst- like hunger, this trigger also pertains to the annamaya kosha (or the outermost, physical sheath). There is a lot of information online on water physiology, and therefore we will pick up points that are pertinent to thirst sensation only.

When it comes to drinking water, it is important to note that repression is not the way, but managing it through awareness is the way. This is always the way with Yoga – awareness, not repression. If you are feeling thirsty, you should absolutely replenish your body with water. The only question is whether we can manage the demand side of the ledger proactively to conserve this important resource, or not. Of course, the answer is a big yes.

One of the main purposes of water is to remove waste products of metabolism from cells – essentially physiological equivalent of dish-washing. When toxins are not removed in a timely manner, cells get poisoned. Gradual accumulation of toxins is one of the key reasons for lower functionality and eventual shrinking of the nervous system. Humans can survive anywhere from 3 to 10 days without water, while we can survive without food for about 21 to 40 days.

Water also has another very important purpose, which is to maintain blood serum sodium/potassium (electrolyte) balance. So, when toxins accumulate at the cellular level or sodium is in excess, we generally feel thirsty.

We can now see that all this is to facilitate effective metabolism to generate energy for all the interesting, useful and goofy things we do and think of:-) So thirst also boils down to metabolic requirements. As discussed in the previous “hunger” discussion, if we can reduce food requirements by minimizing unnecessary mind processes and physical activities, we can also reduce the metabolic load, and thus the water requirement. This in turn delays the thirst sensation. For example, as simple as talking less can conserve significant amounts of water loss, by reducing moisture loss through exhaled breath.

So, the “night out” exercise is intended to put this theory to test. After all, direct experience, not reading somwhere or believing, is at the core of Yoga. In Yoga science, we are expected to ask “how” anytime we hear a theory or a saying.

3. Breath –

Breath and its super-science (pranayama)

This is the third item on our list, after hunger (food) and thirst (water). Breath is a huge topic in yoga science, and we will soon see why. From a modern science standpoint, we are only beginning to scratch the surface in terms of understanding its role. Trying to summarize it in a few paragraphs is like trying to catch lightening in a bottle. But, let’s try to catch the highlights…

Let’s get the most obvious part out of the way first, as the theme is starting to repeat itself – metabolism. The demand-side of the breath ledger is controlled by metabolism. To support a certain level of metabolism (~100 Watts for the whole body with ~20 Watts of that for the brain), we need air (oxygen) to go with the food (the fuel). The key byproduct of metabolism is carbon dioxide (CO2). Our body uses this CO2 level as the trigger for breath: carbon dioxide in the arterial blood and lower brain is what drives breathing in healthy individuals. We can already see the chain: moderate physical/mental strain, moderate food intake, lower metabolism, less CO2, slower breath.

In yoga terminology, this trigger pertains to the second layer of our “body”, called pranamaya kosha (breath layer). Breath connects the mind layer (manomaya kosha) and the physical layer (annamaya kosha) – essentially, breath is the mind-body connector. Breathing is normally an unconscious process, but the control can be taken over by the conscious mind, within limits. Yogis, through practice, stretch those limits. But, if we start going too short on breath, and accumulate too much CO2 in the blood, the unconscious simply takes over the process by overwhelming the conscious part. Doesn’t matter what your wishes are. So, who exactly does your unconscious work for? Yeah, you tell your unconscious that 🙂

A related but critical phenomenon is what’s called Oxidative Stress, which is imposed upon cells by metabolism. It is due to incomplete and/or ineffective usage of oxygen radicals in cells during metabolism. This stress is now known to be one of the key factors in aging. Essentially, left over oxygen radicals attack the cells. Higher the metabolism, greater the oxidative stress… So, faster metabolism is not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s like driving a car at very high RPM… By eating moderately, we can reduce the breath demand, and in the process lower the oxidative stress. Staying calm and emotionally neutral also helps lower the breath demand.

As the mind-body connector, our breath carries the imprints of our emotions; for example, consider how and what happens when you get angry. Now, can you reverse this? That is, by imprinting a certain pattern on your breath (and assuming the corresponding stance), can you evoke the target emotion? This is an immensely important hypothesis…. This is the genius of the yogis and their science! If yes, can we figure out a pattern for empathy and compassion, and follow that, like forever? Now think of all sorts of breathing techniques we practice: breath of fire, oceanic, segmented, canon, bee, sitali/cooling breath…. Every sustained breath pattern has a specific impact; it may not be apparent to us immediately.

One last thing… respiration or breath is a rhythm that can tune various other internal “rhythms” running in our bodies. We all experience dozens of periodic, fairly regular ups and downs in physiological functions, which are called biological rhythms. A biological clock in our brains governs the rise and fall of hormone levels, lung function (breath!), heart rate, blood pressure, and sleep. You can already see it… yogis use the lung function in reverse to affect the biological clock, and all the downstream rhythms. Amazing!!

The “night out” exercise is an opportunity to observe our own biological rhythm for a complete 24 hrs.

4. Sleep

Also, why do we close our eyes during meditation?

This is the fourth on our Shivaratri “night out” preparation list – after Hunger, Thirst and Breath.  We will start with what modern science teaches us about sleep, and then look at the contributions of yoga science to this topic. Sleep pertains more to the manomaya kosha (mind layer), the third layer of the self, and it has significant hooks into the deeper layers, the vijnanamaya (knowledge layer) and anandamaya koshas.

So why do we sleep? Let’s get the most obvious part out – to clean up after metabolism. Between the toxins we ingest and metabolism, we do a lot of damage to our cells. Sleep is like taking your body to the shop: the body uses this mode to eliminate waste products from muscles, repair cells, restock cells with energy, strengthen the immune system, etc. Basically, recover abilities lost while awake. When we do not get enough sleep, all these aspects will get compromised.

But, what’s new with sleep is that it actually gets rid of mental waste, or info-garbage! During the day, our senses collect and (temporarily) store a lot of information. Not all of that info is useful, memorized or converted into knowledge (Jnana). We use sleep to “consolidate”, and strengthen the selected synaptic changes associated with recently stored memories durable and stable, making memory more reliable.  Not allowing this info-garbage clean up process makes the brain stressed, and creates a lot of health problems.  Chronic sleep deprivation is known to increase levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which may damage or impair brain cells that are necessary for learning and memory. Even within sleep, REM sleep is a lot more important than non-REM sleep apparently, as the info-garbage clean up takes place during REM sleep.

Yogis thought and wrote relatively extensively on states of consciousness – awake (vishwanara), REM (taijasa), non REM (prajna) and transcendental (turiya, or both awake and asleep). Yogis’ three-and-half-state awareness schema agrees well with modern science, except that modern scientists do not yet concern themselves with the transcendental (half) state. That is to be expected because modern scientists’ goal is different.

So, it’s obvious that we need sleep. Then how are we going to stay awake for 24 hours, and not skip a beat the next day (Shivaratri “night out” goal)? Let’s look at both supply and demand-side of the sleep ledger. On the demand side, if we did all the three things that we talked about before to slow down the metabolism, we will reduce the demand due to the physical aspect.

On the information-collection side, we need to minimize the waste generated due to wide-open senses! For humans, vision is the primary sense. Greater than half of our brain is used in processing the incoming data from our eyes. Now we see why we close our eyes during meditation! Next ears – sit in a quiet room… Touch – minimize wind exposure (caves, closed rooms, and cover yourself with a shawl)… There you go – sense withdrawal or pratyahara- that’s the fifth step of eight-step yoga path. Now we see why meditation is typically done with eyes closed, sitting in a quiet room – to minimize information collection through senses, and thus minimizing information waste that the mind has to get rid of later. With that, the sleep demand drops proportionally, and delays this trigger correspondingly!

On the supply side, how do we get enough sleep? Yogis asked the following question – granted we need “sleep”, do we have to fall asleep to get “sleep”? A typical yogis’ style – reverse the question. Yogis look at pretty much everything, including sleep, from both ends of the barrel. Reversibility is an extremely useful characteristic, as we learnt while discussing breath.

Long story short, yogis developed a set of techniques under the category of Yoga Nidra (or Yoga sleep) to achieve these goals. Apparently, sleep follows their standard template of – everything can be done in one of two ways – consciously or unconsciously. We normally follow the standard “unconscious” way of falling asleep to get to the REM and non-REM/deep sleep states where all the cleaning and healing happen. On the other hand, Yoga Nidra involves getting to the same states while staying mentally awake. The senses are completely withdrawn (pratyahara) and anything that bubbles up from the memory banks is only witnessed.

Savasana that we sometimes do at the end of our sessions uses beginner-level techniques to get to the edges of sleep. It is important to remember to physically relax to a point where, to an outside observer, we look like dead bodies – complete absence of mind-muscle communication, with slowed down breathing. More advanced techniques can not only clean out the most recent info-garbage, but can apparently clean out very old stored memories and traumas….

A long one indeed, but hopefully this gives all of us some glimpses into the Yoga thought. We just have one more, before we attempt another Sivaratri “night out” practice session….

5.  Socialization – The “Connect” Trigger

We are born to interact and network, as we also share a “collective” mind…. At a subtle level, we are all waves in the ocean of brahman.  We are already connected, or born connected, at a subtle level.  Another reason for that innate urge and proclivity to bond…  There’s a reason why social media became ultra-popular, right?

This is the fifth and the last one – the “connect” trigger, or our urge to socialize, communicate, interact (verbally or non-verbally), and network. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram… This trigger is the subtlest of the ones we have discussed. This urge centers around the knowledge layer of our “self” – vijnanamaya kosha (fourth of the five) – with heavy play from the two sheaths around it. At an epistemological level, there’s always a model of the world we all have, which is built upon our individual experiences and ethical values.  Unless already enlightened about this phenomenon and comfortable with it, humans as well as animals exert themselves to externally corroborate the validity of this inner reality, sometime through heated arguments, and even using force in some cases! When there’s no one for this type of communication, there’s evidence that human go psychologically unstable, in a clinical sense.  This urge is programmed into our deepest parts of our makeup, through evolution. These activities also consume a lot of energy, and thus consume resources.

What happens if we are forced to stop talking, and stop bonding with other people for a long time? Well, we have some very well researched and documented data on this – prisoners in solitary confinement, caged zoo animals, and animals that are used as medical subjects. (http://www.pbs.org/…/what-does-solitary-confinement-do-to-…/); a blurb from that link:

… in 1951 researchers at McGill University paid a group of male graduate students to stay in small chambers equipped with only a bed for an experiment on sensory deprivation. They could leave to use the bathroom, but that’s all.  They wore goggles and earphones to limit their sense of sight and hearing, and gloves to limit their sense of touch. The plan was to observe students for six weeks, but not one lasted more than seven days. Nearly every student lost the ability “to think clearly about anything for any length of time,” while several others began to suffer hallucinations. “One man could see nothing but dogs,” wrote one of the study’s collaborators, “another nothing but eyeglasses of various types, and so on.”

Needless to say, one of the cruelest thing one can do to a human or an animal is to restrict them to solitary confinement for a long period. Apparently, damage is guaranteed – it’s just a matter of how much and what kind. Confined animals and even humans, at a minimum, exhibit what’s called stereotypy (Wiki it for more info).

The goal is to achieve a balance, and not eliminate this urge… To be useful to the Society, which is the ultimate goal, it’s important to interact. So, how do yogis and heavy meditators, such as Tibetan monks, tame and balance this urge?

Imagine yourself in a group of your friends… when do you get the urge to speak and when do you listen? What triggers the “talk” sensation and how does that urge grow? What happens when you don’t talk when that urge occurs? (important to remember that yoga approach is not to restrain urges, but to address them at the point of inception or before the “trigger point”, through awareness). Yogic theory is that everything including a thought stream is an energy flow. When it is forcefully blocked, the energy flow tries to redirect itself. Even in a normal person, this energy flow can go the wrong way creating all sorts of physiological and psychological problems, including full-fledged psychosis.  That is exactly what happens to prisoners under solitary confinement.  This is one of the main reasons why yogis never recommend forceful restraint – don’t know how that energy will be redirected.

The source of energy for the thought streams? Our old friend-metabolism! More food, faster metabolism, more thought streams. Even types of food and the company we keep can affect brain activity…. If we eat moderately, and eat healthy and balanced diet, we should be able achieve the desired effect on the supply-side.

The demand side is very simple: unless we are surrounded by a bunch of needy people, the demand on us to talk is very little. Actually there’s a lot bigger demand for good listeners on this planet – don’t you think? But, seriously, we need the company of right people (sat-sang) for this, so that you are not misunderstood for your limited talking and interaction. Actually, the biggest contribution to the demand, comes from within. Our wide open senses generate a lot of input, which in turn stirs the mind and knowledge layers to generate “thought” bubbles. We want people and occasions to vent this thought-“junk” – so we seek audience (why we seek audience is in itself is a huge topic, including our need for validation). Functioning in “witness”-mode is the best way to deal with this thought junk. That way, the “I” or the ego is not attaching itself to the thought waves. That’s why our kriya sessions typically end with instructions such as: “drop everything, let everything go and just witness…”. If we know how to “just witness”, we are almost there!

Yogis consider “speech” to be very sacred, and it is associated with the subtlest of the five elements, “akasha” (sky or ether element). What they mean by “speech” is not just physical words, but also the entire process of speech or Word generation. This transformation process is associated with the element “fire”. It starts as a thought wave, and after a lot of steps, it transforms into what we call words.
.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” – (John 1:1).
Saraswati is the Word (Vac), and the Word is the way of gods… (Jaminiya Brahmana, 2.298)

Digging a little deeper, the urge to network with people also has a holistic aspect. When we connect, we are becoming a part of that whole (the universal “self”)… Refer to the Wholeness Paradigm we discussed a while ago. Rishis extolled this aspect by ending one of their master treatises, Rig Veda, by ending with a Shanti Mantra reflecting this:

“Move together, speak together, Let your minds be in unison. May your thoughts be common, the place of assembly be common: common the minds, and hearts of all united, a common purpose and common provisions. Let your resolutions be the same, Let the commonness of your thoughts bring the co-operation of the highest order, so that all attain the same goals and have peace and prosperity.”

This can happen only if we interact… and more importantly interact constructively. A good reason why evolution instilled this urge to network in us – for achieving a greater purpose.

In summary, if we can hit a balance on the five triggers we discussed, we should be able to coast through a night with relative ease, and not skip a beat the next day. Let’s do some practice partial night outs before the full one next year.

Good luck to all of us!

May we all be blessed with a vibrant mind and a full experience of Shivaratri_/\_/\_/\_
भद्रं नो अपि वातय मनः
(bhadraṃ no api vātaya manaḥ)