In this episode of “5 Minutes”, Dr. Svoboda discusses Pratyahara, a way of working with our Prana in order to cultivate interiority.

Ahara in Sanskrit means to take in. Ahara is generally used as a synonym for food, because food is the most important thing on a daily basis that we take in — most important from the perspective of the physical body, because that’s what creates the physical body. But of course we’re taking things in with all of our sense organs. We’re receiving messages from our tactile and proprioceptive senses. We’re picking up sounds even when we’re not aware of them — there are sounds that are reminding us of the environment that we’re in. We’re seeing things, we’re smelling things, we’re tasting things. All of our senses are providing us information all of the time.

Nowadays especially, people are exposed to lots and lots and lots of different factors, and each of these factors is trying to attract our attention. As our attention goes, so our prana goes. So if we allow our attention to be distracted by being attracted to all of these sources, all of these factors that are trying to take away our attention, we will end up depleting ourselves of prana. Then we will not feel vitality, our organisms will not feel vital, and it will be very difficult to be healthy if we don’t have the vitality of having prana that has become well centered in the organism. It is for this reason that pratyahara becomes important.

You’ll notice that Patanjali in his yoga system talks about, after doing Yama — stopping the things that you should stop, because otherwise they’re going to create very bad karmic reactions for you — Niyama, things that you should be doing to promote yourself going in the right direction in your own personal evolution; Asana, learning how to sit; Pranayama, learning how to circulate your prana, not necessarily by torture of the nostrils, which is often regarded as the most important or at least the most standard way of doing circulation of the prana. After the pranayama then comes pratyahara — the idea being that first you should get an idea of how to circulate the prana in your body, and once you have, then you can request your sense organs not to be as active as they have been.

You can suggest to them that in fact what we should do is hold on to the prana, and we should turn the sense organs internally — open the internal eye, the internal ear, the internal tongue, the internal nostrils and the internal skin — so that we can pay closer attention to what’s going on inside us, and eventually encourage those sense organs just to be quiet, quiescent, not feeling any urgent need to move in any direction. They tend to move because they’re being, of course, inspired by prana, which comes from the air element, whose most important characteristic is that it moves.

Instead of initially trying to make the prana and the attention and the awareness completely quiet, the first thing that we’re trying to do is discourage it from its natural direction. Its natural direction is always external, because the nature of the sense organs is that they were evolved over hundreds of millions of years for organisms to be able to determine the two most important things that they do during the day: the first is to find something to eat, and the second is to find those things that might want to eat them. Nourish yourself, and avoid becoming nourishment for someone else.

So the sense organs for hundreds of millions of years have been pointing externally. We want them now to start pointing internally, with the intention that eventually they will be quiet enough that they will be ready to act when we want them to act, but otherwise they will stay in a state of quiet, passive awareness. This is something that, when used in a proper way, will always promote a greater sense of vitality and of enthusiasm and of attention and potential focus in the body. We encourage you to try it out.