Week 5: New Beginnings

This is the first week that I’ve had while doing this project without engaging in my morning Kundalini yoga class. I definitely miss the structure that it provided and how effortless it had become for me to fill the first 45 minutes of my day. Another thing I miss is the clarity that I find Kundalini provides. As I expressed previously, and although I haven’t experienced trouble making decisions or responding to others in an organized manner, I still feel as though there is something missing that causes my brain to be a bit foggier. To fill the slot of time that the daily yoga course used to fill up, I have begun reading a book entitled The Yoga of Breath, A Step-By-Step Guide to Pranayama by Richard Rosen. I had been googling the word Pranayama every couple of pages because I would always forget what it means, but the explanation on page 18 helped it stick: “If you pull pranayama apart, you’ll find two smaller words, prana and ayama. Prana literally means ‘to breathe forth.’ It comes from the prefix pra, ‘to bring forth’, and the verb an, ‘to breathe’ or simply ‘to live.’ The entry for prana in the Sanskrit-English dictionary reads, ‘breath of life, breath, respiration, vitality, vigor, energy, power, and spirit’. This book was recommended to me by my off-site advisor, Pilar Tumolo, whom I have started to meet with to do yoga ever since the Kundalini course ended. Pilar is incredibly helpful, and I am very grateful for her willingness to help me with this project. Our meetings usually start with some stretching while my breathing helps my muscles relax. Overall, practicing yoga has helped me better understand, first-hand, the body-mind connection and its calming effects. A yoga session will usually then carry into some alternate nostril breathing which I have found helps replace the mental clarity that Kundalini used to provide. This clarity is something that I find useful because it allows me to make better decisions, which is why I think breathing exercises can assist students in improving their test scores.