Hi Oliver,
yes, I'd be happy to tell you how I did it, or should say, do it. Firstly, 'tooled talavya' is only a name I have made for the technique, which I evolved myself.
quote:
>>> (I call it 'tooled talavya'.) But I'm not going to post it up for general use, (at least not now -- I may convince myself to later) because I think it requires more skill than the cuticle-snipper-based method in order to do it well. This alternative technique though allows for much more significant, and therefore much faster frenum-snipping, and is particularly helpful when the frenum no longer protrudes from the surface of the underside of the tongue, as in my case.
OK, so I have been convinced to put it up. So let's be clear that this is a sort of heavy-duty way that I clip my frenum. It requires more skill and allows more rapid progress in the clipping. All the usual comments about self-pacing apply. Most people probably will not need or want to do this, and many people might be well advised not to.
In general, the complete removal of the frenum is not needed for even advanced Kechari practice. ( See the comments from Yogani below.)But in my particular case, I started meditating about 20 years ago, and if I had known about frenum-snipping then I would certainly have done it. I even clipped once or twice without being told, as I mentioned before on the forum. I might have done it gradually then, if I had known it was a practice, I don't know, but in any case I feel ready to catch up with a more rapid snipping. (It seems that some strange 'karma' stopped me finding out about frenum-snipping through all those years, because I moved in Yogic and even Kriya-yoga circles, read various books, but happen to have omitted certain well-known ones that talk about frenum-snipping!)
I actually started doing faster snipping in two different ways, and I'll talk about them both. First, I started to do chunkier snipping, using the cuticle snipper -- I'm calling the technique 'grasp and clip'.
WARNINGS AND DISCLAIMER -- This is not advice to anyone to follow my lead. This practice is doing minor surgery on oneself and carries risks. I estimated the risks for myself, based on my own skill and knowledge set, and cannot tell you definitively what those risks are; I am not a surgeon or doctor, and I am not any kind of expert in what these risks are. If you do this you may face higher risks based on, but not limited to the following: your ability to discern frenum from tongue, manual dexterity, eyesight, tongue abnormalities, different anatomy to mine, or even medical issues unkown to me, or other risks unknown. And if you are not an adult, be advised by me not to even think of doing this! [If some people from outside the U.S. are looking in, they might think I am crazy, but I am not, I am protecting myself from being sued in this country which is a little crazy in some ways. I felt like adding "you may face additional risks based on possible lack of common sense", but I stopped short of it, figuring that, if the worst comes to the worst, that phrase would backfire by turning the jury against me.
]
At the same time, having said all that, here are my beliefs on the matter. I don't personally think the risk of anything serious is very high. I personally think the risks of this are small potatoes compared to the risks of, say, rock climbing or scuba diving, or riding a motorbike or even driving a car. At the same time though, if you develop a significant infection, you should certainly go to a doctor to see if it needs to be treated.
If you do happen to do this, by the way, (and I am *not* advising you to) you should know what to do if you cause unexpected bleeding. This could happen if you inadvertently clipped even a minor vein for example. Simply apply pressure to the bleeding spot with a clean finger until it clots, which should be a few minutes. Or apply a clean pad made of cotton-wool or gauze to the wound and apply pressure to that.
Also, be sure to wash the mouth out afterwards with clean water and keep the area clean.
MY HEAVIER CLIPPING PRACTICE - 'Grasp and clip'What I started to realize is that I could make a nice, careful cut in the frenum by grabbing some frenum between my thumb and index finger of my left hand (I am right-handed) and using a little pressure between finger and thumb to make a thin vertical ridge of frenum. Then, while still holding this little ridge of frenum with my left hand, I brought the cuticle-snipper in with my right hand and clipped that ridge just
above the finger and thumb that were holding it. I was careful not to make the ridge so big, or try to clip so much that the cuticle-snipper would not cut through it all in one clip. I did this while looking in the mirror at it all so I could see what I was doing.
[It can be a little tricky. The hard bit is probably not getting the grip of a ridge of frenum; the hard bit is using the right hand to get the snipper over the gripping left hand
without obscuring the gripped ridge of frenum. This can be done though --- the right hand slides the clipper OVER the gripping fingers of the left hand and keeps itself down and out of the way. It does require holding the clipper lower down on the handle, so that it is the clipper (not the fingers of the right hand) that extends over the gripping fingers of the left hand. The fingers of your right hand would obscure your view, but the clipper is small and thin enought not to. As usual, you may need to tilt your head up a little while looking in the mirror.]
Having done that, I had a little hole in my frenum. Then I extended this slit by grabbing it again but this time including one end of the slit in what I grabbed, so that a clipping action extended the hole or slit.
If you don't understand what I mean by extend it, to get a better sense of what I was doing, imagine trying to cut a wide horizontal slit in a thick curtain using a cuticle snipper, which can only cut a small slit. A way to do this is to make a little ridge in the curtain between two fingers, clip the ridge with the snipper. Now, you might want to make the slit wider than you have so far. So now you make another ridge which includes one end of the last cut (either the right or the left end), and clip that. This extends the slit. And you can repeat, acheiving symmetry by working on the other side.
If one were to do this, one would have to be careful to be getting frenum all the time in that ridge, and no tongue proper with its veins and arteries. Some things work in your favor here to make that less likely -- the frenum does not hurt so much when clipped, but the rest of the tongue does hurt a lot. Also, the frenum gets hard when taut, but the rest of the tongue does not so much. If you start in the middle and clip, as you get closer to the tongue proper, you would naturally want to make smaller and smaller clips.
Having made one slit across the frenum like that, if it was not too deep I found I could enter it again and repeat the process, making a deeper slit.
I have also tried entering the slit again a few days later, but I backed away from that. That is because the fibers tend to be densely packed near the surface on a healed frenum, but less so further under the surface. So, deeper it could be both sorer and there would not be so many fibers per unit depth. So there would be more slobber, blood and discomfort, and less payoff. I figured it was better to wait the week or two for it all to heal and the surface to collect a dense pack of fibers. The milking the tongue (which I do but not in the shower, but rather I simply use a cotton handkerchief to help grab my tongue) seemed to help to speed up getting the fibers up to the surface. But one might not want to bother milking the tongue for the first day or two after a significant snipping.
I found that heavier clipping did produce a lot of tongue extension, and pretty quickly. This continued while there was always some ridge of frenum on the surface.
But with the frequent clipping, the frenum diminished quickly, and eventually the ridge/bulge disappeared. With the ridge/bulge gone, it was difficult to clip using the heavier-clipping method. At this point, when I stretch my tongue upwards, the frenal area in the middle is actually now in a groove rather than a ridge, with the venous tongue area bulging on either side.
There were still plenty of limiting frenum fibers and they were still on the surface and under it, but no longer in a ridge.
In this case, however, a fact of my anatomy came to my aid.
[Now, many people would probably find that their tongue extension was fine when they were at this point. So many people would not have any need to go further.]
This is when I devised what I called 'tooled talavya'. I think I have seen a version of 'talavya kriya' in which the tongue is pulled out and scraped on the lower teeth. Even in normal talavy kriya, the frenum is ultimately cut on the lower teeth. What I devised is a more efficient and decisive version of this kind of action.
What I discovered is that when I pulled the tongue out, making it a little taut, the frenum would tend to bulge out a little, but at the bottom, close to where the lower teeth would cut it if it were scraped on them.
ENTER 'TOOLED TALAVYA'What I called 'tooled talavya' is pulling the tongue out, making it taut, and cutting the frenum where it is taut at the bottom, pretty much where it would touch the lower teeth if you tried to scrape it on them. Now, how to cut it? A knife is not quite the right tool because it is not focussed enough. Neither is the cuticle-snipper any more. I figured I needed to make my own. What I came up with is a small sharpened screw-driver.
The screw-driver itself is very small, about 6 cm long, with a 2.5-mm 'head'. What I did was turn that flat head into a roughly semi-circular blade. This is ideal and corresponds roughly to a very sharp small tooth. For this I got a file, and sculpted it down to the desired shape. The file, however, while good for the initial shaping, may not be good for the sharpening; I acquired a sharpening 'stone' in a hardware store. You should follow the manufacturer's instructions on the stone for the sharpening. For mine you use oil or water, hold the blade at a certain angle, and scrape in a certain way. For the stone I have, you scrape forward with the blade, almost as if slicing into the stone at a sharp angle. So once I had the initial rough shape it became a case of sharpening (using the stone) each time I wanted to do the tooled talavya (the blade will blunt by itself between uses). Because the blade is semi-circular (roughly) it requires a sharpening process that approaches from many different angles, and you want to do it on both sides of the blade. You'd need to have certain intuitions about how to acheive this.
(Maybe someone can find an instrument just as appropriate that is available ready-made. If they did I'd be happy to learn about it. The best I was able to come up with was this.)
I cut a square out of a cotton handkerchief about 6 cm each side. This I used in my left hand in order to grab my tonge near the tip and pull it out. You could also use a light glove for this purpose -- you just need something with which to get a grip on the slippery tongue. But a full-sized handkerchief is not good because it will obscure your view as you do the procedure looking in the mirror.
Now I looked in the mirror and surveyed the part of my tongue in question. When I pulled, a ridge/band came up there and it was taut. While still looking at it all in the mirror, I brought the sharpened screwdriver up with my right hand, and began to cut a slit cross-ways on this band.
This took a little getting used to. Line of sight and angle is a little tight and you need good lighting. But what I found was that after the initial entry, it became much easier, as the first slit is a guide for the rest of it.
Once I got under the skin, I found that the cutting action is more like scraping than normal cutting. In this technique, I scrape the fibers with the edge of the blade and they break. All the while, I keep the tongue pulled with the other hand so the fibers are taut. If you imagine carpet embedded in flesh, and having to cut that carpet, the process is a little like that. Or more like cutting across a piece of twine embedded in flesh. I sometimes found, while I was cutting, the need to hone the blade further -- the blade was not necessarily uniformly sharp and needed some more work when approaching from a certain angle, etc.
How did I make sure I was cutting the right thing? Some things work in my favor. One is of course that I cut where it was taut. The other thing is the scraping action and the feeling of it, which guides me. The cutting even makes a 'tink-tink' or 'thunk-thunk' sound as the fibers break. So you get used to the feel of cutting the frenum, and it doesn't really hurt.
As I started to approach the sides of the band of frenum it would start to get sore, warning me off from cutting into the tongue. But I worked here very carefully and completed the cut to the edge of the band.
I think I would usually go about 1.5 - 2 mm deep. If you go much further, the phenomenon is as described above -- it gets more sensitive, more bloody, and you get less fibers because they are less densely packed. So I sometimes re-trimmed a few hours or even a day later, but then that was the end of it until it healed fully.
The process takes me now about 15-20 minutes, including all sharpening. I am doing it about every 2 weeks.
Regarding tongue extension history, by the time I had to start using tooled talavya, I found that almost all the remaining fibers at the bottom were almost equally limiting, which suggests to me that my extension will be pretty much on a plateau until they are all gone. And that is pretty much what I am finding. I've been doing tooled talavya for maybe three months now, and there has been a lot of progress in getting the amount of remaining frenum smaller and smaller, but not much gain in extension until maybe a few more months when it should all be gone.
QUESTIONQ. Could you have used tooled talavya rather than heavy clipping in the earlier stages?
I think I could. I'm not sure about the relative merits of the techiques when they are both possible. However, my own subjective sense in my case is that I am personally actually safer from inadvertantly cutting a vein doing 'tooled talavya' than the 'grasp-and clip' technique I mentioned above. This is because the cutting in tooled talavya is always gradual, a fraction of a millimeter at a time as you scrape down into the frenum. Like cutting a carpet, you always know whether carpet is there or not. After an initial learning process you can get very good at tooled talavya.
Notes and further CAUTIONS on the instrument:Again I am not advising anyone to follow my lead but if they do, I'd like to make add a few cautions about the instrument and its use.
Obviously, clean/sterilize the instrument before use.
I would caution people
against using an instrument with a very small head for the purpuse, such as a jeweller's screwdriver. Such heads are so small that if sharpened, the instrument would be like a nail. If you stabbed yourself deeply with such a thing, you could create a risk of tetanus. So don't make something you could easily stab yourself deeply with and leave a closed wound. The objective is a clear open wound, with which tetanus is not a risk.
The instrument should be sharp, but doesn't need to be *that* sharp, and probably should not be. There is some safety gained from the fact that it is not too sharp. Sharp enough to cut a carpet, but not scalpel sharp.
Obviously, such an instrument should be kept well away from children. Also be aware, if you make such a thing , that you have something that could be considered a dangerous weapon in certain cases, and indeed, could easily be mistaken for one, as sharpened screwdrivers have been used as weapons in hold-ups. In particular, don't make the mistake of carrying such a thing with you on your person or in your hand-luggage as you try to board a plane!!!
---------And so there they are, 'grasp-and-clip' and 'tooled talavya'.
I hope someone finds that helpful. Or, if not helpful, entertaining.
-David