Elemental Yoga: Fire Practices

F I R E. Agni. 🔥 Purification. Passion. The transmutation of matter into energy. The burning away of impurities. Tapaha. Fire is both matter and energy: a mixture of incandescent gases (matter) and light and heat (energy).

The first mantra of the oldest yogic text — the Rig Veda — tells us that life begins with fire. In the Vedas agni represents all concepts of spiritual energy that permeates everything in the universe. In the Upanishads, agni becomes any energy or knowledge that dispels a state of darkness, that transforms and creates an enlightened state of existence.

In the Elemental Yoga practice, the fire element represents pranayama, warrior breaths, and the Himalayan kundalini kriyas that we practice.

Pranayama

Pranayama means energy tuning. It’s a method for using the breath to work with our energy. Breath is the only bodily function that’s both autonomic and somatic. And so prana is the interface between the physical body and the mind, though it is subtler and more fundamental than either. It’s the most efficient and direct means for controlling the energy. It’s our connection to life and to our surroundings.

Kriya

Broadly, kriya is any evolutionary action. In Elemental Yoga, it’s any combination of breath, movement, and sometimes mantra, for working with prana and, specifically, kundalini.

First, kriya tunes and prepares the body for increased levels of kundalini energy. It then frees up and channels that energy. Normally, one’s energy flows outward, where so much of it is wasted. Kriya helps to channel our life energy more efficiently, back into the energy channels of the body to be used for increasing awareness, expansion, and self-realization, creating deeper harmony with the cosmos, helping us move toward unity.

Kriyas have physiological benefits and psychological benefits. Kriyas can be energizing, calming, or transcendent. One can more easily control the fluctuations of the mind through controlling one’s energy, one’s life force. In addition, through these kriya practices, this evolutionary action, we can burn through past karma in a way that frees us from the chain of karma. Kriya helps us shift our awareness so that we think thoughts instead of thoughts thinking us, arriving at a state in which we take spontaneous right action. In other words, the state created through kriya is a dharmic or purposeful life, rather than a life ruled by past karma. For more on kriya, see my blog post about it.

Warrior poses

The fire practices of Elemental Yoga also include warrior breaths, which transform the energetic body by releasing, shifting, and expanding energy, increase the capacity for the body to receive and move energy. They are uplifting, invigorating.

The Manipura Chakra

Our third chakra — the manipura chakra — is our agni chakra. When it is balanced we take clear, decisive action; we act with determination and discipline; we have passion, courage, resilience, and vitality. By contrast, when it is imbalanced we experience self doubt, fear, anger, depression, and a victim mentality. This is the chakra of Hanuman, Arjuna, and Rama. Its bija mantra is RAM.

Through the element of fire we refine our will and assert it in the world through dharmic action.