It wasn’t my intention when searching for this thread, but wow, fun to look back at these "old" posts and see how much perspective and awareness has changed since then.
From reading this thread, I can safely say that my experiences with pranayama and the expansion of inner energies have been way less dramatic then indicated here and more back and forth or up and down than it sounds from the way I posted back in 2005.
Some days I have had lots of energies and strong awareness of the spinal nerve and other days less awareness of energy and parts of the spinal nerve have definitely been difficult to perceive. These cycles can come and go over weeks and months, but the biggest difference now is, I don't mind what they do, it doesn't matter.
Overall, looking back to 2005, I can say that the energies use to be more diffused and occurred everywhere in the body in a random and more dramatic fashion. If this intensity diminished, I worried it would go away, and I typically looked for ways to amplify it again which usually got me into trouble in terms of going over and then subsequently needing to self-pace.
After the initial inner-energy awakening which was very intense for me, especially for the first 4 months or so, things have quieted down significantly. Overall, energy has it's own inherent intelligence, and operates quietly in the background for the most part with a gentle ecstatic feeling throughout the body which comes and goes for random periods of time outside of practices. The time that it comes outside of practices if plotted on a graph would be ever increasing but with many ups and downs along the way. Giving up chasing these energy experiences was the best thing I could have done.
Energy seems more focussed in the spinal nerve and when it is, the energy centers in the front of the body respond in kind. It seems to move in a more orderly fashion now. The energy centers in the feet and palms were the latest to come into awareness outside of practices. Thanks to guidance from Yogani’s posts, I go to Samhavi and no longer the crown whenever waves of ecstasy are experienced outside of practices. Going to the crown during ecstatic waves, gave me an unstable practice experiences for several months last summer and early fall 2007. Live and learn![
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I think the biggest change in the energy dynamics from 2005, is the expansion of tantra. This occurs completely by itself as the desire to not ejaculate surpasses the desire to ejaculate. So when practicing tantra, either alone or with a partner, not ejaculating has lead to the biggest expansion of the inner energies outside of practices for me. I think this expansion outside of practices would have occurred anyway, but I just feel that tantra has been an accelerator for me.
I am definitely what would be called a left-handed yogi, and have found tantra practices to be a wonderful boon to the rest of my sitting practice routine. It is important to point out that it was an up and down process with tantra practices as well, and there have certainly been rough periods that fortunately smooth out over time. I agree whole-heartedly with Yogani, though I saw it differently before, that there is energy loss from ejaculatory orgasm, which we can all agree, but there is a slight loss from non-ejaculatory orgasms as well. From my experience, there is an amplification in energy if there is tantra without orgasm. Luckily, pre-orgasmic feelings become fulfilling on their own.
This is becoming a long post, but now that I have finished reflecting, I have to report that I have played with visualizing an intense white light in the spinal nerve again as the inner light I see is random and more diffused. I started doing this a few months back primarily because I was doing such a short 3 minute spinal breathing routine that I thought it might be a good idea since realizing how easy it is to move energy around the body and how powerful that can be as it manifests physically. As probably could have been predicted by others, the effects were similar to 2005 in that it lead me to be over, just in a very different and subtle way. This time I did it for about 2 months before I started to notice that dormant thought patterns seemed to be a little "louder" than normal, and that I was reacting to them more than I had been. All it took was dropping this little enhancement to feel the inner peace and emotional stability return within a day. That said, the last 4 months have been my most stable sustained period of practice since I started AYP 3 years back. Yes, I have slow pattern recognition when it comes to self-pacing![
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The wonderful realization that occurred from this little experiment has been that once we really, really want to wake up, to end suffering with our whole being and no longer ride the roller-coaster ride of duality, life/ the universe responds in kind. We are moving in that direction as quickly as is possible for us given the type and amount of purification we can handle. Thought patterns of the past which have caused us so much pain and suffering need to die out and this takes time. As we become infused with more inner light, it amplifies everything on the inside. So if there are any old thought patterns that have not dropped away completely, they can become "re-animated" by the inner energies if we take on too much too quickly.
Moral of the story? If we have the intent, we practice twice daily and inquire within, we will clear ourselves out as quickly as we can handle despite our meddling minds and all the good ideas we "think" will help us along. We don’t need to help things along once we have established our daily routine, if anything our extra efforts will just slow us down. We are taken care of in ways that are hard to comprehend, suffice to say we are in good hands.