A Breathing Prayer: Radiance Sutras Verses 155-156

During this session, we discuss Verses 155 & 156 of the Insight Verses from the 'Radiance Sutras', a translation of the Vijanana Bhairava Tantra by Lorin Loche. A meditation follows our discussion.

These sessions are recorded every week, and all are welcome.

Transcript

So today we're reading from the Radiant Sutras and this is a beautiful poetic interpretation of the Vijnanam Bhairava Tantra.

If you were to translate Vijnana Bhairava Tantra there's a million ways you can interpret it.

Vijnana can mean wisdom,

It can mean the sheath of kindness kind of thing.

There's a lot of ways but wisdom and wisdom like when you go deep in your heart there's something you deeply know even if you can't put words to it every one of us can tap in to it's almost like the real truth even though we might be playing in the personalities we were given out in the world with this this may be my job this may be my relationship this might be what I was raised with that's sort of one layer of who we are right that's what we're we're doing but then deep inside there's something we know and I actually think that that's what causes the cognitive dissonance in our life like I think that's what causes a lot of angst the difference between this deep wisdom that we know even if it's kind of almost unformed in words the difference between that and the life we're living you know and and even though on the we're doing the best we can we're fitting in the best we can but every single one of us here knows something else that's Vijnana or Vijnana that's what that wisdom is so that's the first word of this book Bhairava Bhairava is it's like the energy of life we might call it God but God has so many stories about it from religion it's sort of like we've taken this eternal infinite it power and made it into a human in some way and called it a name we called it God we called it Brahman we called it Shiva Shakti we called it the quantum field whatever we called it but there is no naming it there is no telling stories about here's what God thought it's not a thing it's beyond our comprehension and yet it's everything that we're made of it's what all humanity is about it's what the mountains are about it's what earth is about it's Bhairava and Bhairava can feel like bliss but it can also feel like terror that's one of the translations of Bhairava is terror because life it isn't all sunshine and happiness it's not supposed to be and what's interesting is let's imagine you're watching a scary movie like I don't like scary movies at all I don't like I don't know maybe this is telling me something about myself but I don't like suspense I don't like being scared I don't like it but just for a moment let's imagine we go there and you feel this terror inside of you like you're so scared and you tap in to the feeling of life inside of that terror like you are a hundred percent here right now that feeling of intense terror is actually not a whole lot different than the feeling of intense happiness if you track back get out of the pleasure or pain and go all the way back into the core that really lights us up that's Bhairava and it's really interesting because knowing that Bhairava is all the things it's fire it's sun it's rain it's all the things it allows us to almost experience life without the judgment of this is good and this is bad and this is righteous and this is sinful and this is that it's like no Bhairava God Brahman it's all the things it's every single thing you can see touch smell hear it's everything that is Bhairava and Tantra is simply book or teaching so Vijnana Bhairava Tantra the wisdom of Bhairava like that is within each of us that's the goal of this book to help us access that deep wisdom of reality of the essence of life that's what this is and Lauren Roche created this beautiful translation of it because the straight Sanskrit is hard especially in the west we don't even have enough context for the Sanskrit to really deeply understand it so Lauren Roche did this beautiful deep dive for I think over a decade he wrote it in a way that would appeal to our hearts which of course is what appeals to our Atman our deepest self our deepest truth our divine self so I'm going to read two sutras today 155 and 156 because they they go together and then we're going to have a conversation about it but what really matters is how it touches you because this could be interpreted billions of ways and I could read it and your heart could go oh wow this is what I mean this is what it means to me and someone else would be like wow that brought up something completely different for me and both are correct so it's just important to know that and for anyone who's new these are all recorded so you can go on to my profile and look at the Radiant Sutras playlist and see all of the previous recordings nearly all of them okay you guys ready so let's just close our eyes and breathe deeply expanding the belly as we inhale contracting as we exhale and just as we're breathing I'd like you to listen to the sound of your breath if your breath could make sound what sound is it making here we go breath flows into this body as a nectar of the gods every breath is a whisper of the goddess here is the ritual I ask of you be the cup into which I pour this bliss the elixir of immortal peace the breath flows out with the sound sa the breath flows in with the sound ha thus thousands of times a day everyone who breathes is adoring the goddess know this and be in great joy listen to the ongoing prayer that is breath life shall dance in you a dance of ever-renewing delight what comes up for you when you hear that like an emotion or words or how do you feel I felt an offering well just for fun just allow your mouth to open just a little bit and as you inhale can you hear ha and then as you exhale imagine the the sound almost going over your teeth a little as you exhale inhaling ha exhaling sa and then imagine it through your nose as you inhale hear ha exhaling sa so we're not speaking it we're actually listening to the sound of the breath grateful to have this reminder constantly breath of this truth that lives within us totally griff faith and joy right here right now can everybody hear that in the sound of the breath that ha as you inhale sa as you exhale what's interesting so em mentions that she hears inhaling she hears ah exhaling ha and I don't want to get this to be super confusing because there is a confusion here because in a lot of teachings and I'm just going to take that we're going to just go off in a little tangent off to the side but then we're going to come back to this teaching so this is called the hamsa meditation h-a-m-s-a and hum is ha it's a combination ha is like shakti a hum means I am so hum is like the human experience they call it the jiva this is the human experience sa is shiva energy or it's also infinity all that and so hamsa actually means I am that so when we hear this breath inside of us and we hear hum on the inhale sa on the exhale hum on the inhale sa on the exhale we are essentially hearing the mantra I am that this incarnated being is infinity this limited being is also the infinite self this shakti manifestation is also shiva with every breath we are breathing this mantra so what's interesting is there's another meditation called so hum which is similar and so in this mean is like say it's the same as sa it's that infinite space hum is after so this mantra actually means that I am that I am and so when you chant so hum so hum so hum you're saying I am that but what's interesting and this is also partly why I was a little bit late or later than normal coming to class is that in many teachings they actually hear the so on the inhale that it's the sound of the breath rushing in the nostrils they hear that as so and the hum on the exhale so just just for fun and you may remember that in our last reading last week we also learned about this weird flip of prana and apana which was different than most yoga teachings which was confusing also so this is a little bit in that realm and again I don't want to get lost in the confusion of this but I just bring it up because the hums of meditation is in many ways related to the so hum meditation and yet they hear the so on the inhale hum on the exhale in many many many yogic traditions and yet specifically in the vijnana bhairava tantra teaching they teach it opposite that we hear the ha on the inhale and the sa on the exhale here's the thing what's really important again is your experience of this so just right now let's just take a moment a couple minutes and just listen to the sound of your breath either through the nose through the mouth a combination and which do you hear the most do you hear so on the inhale and hum on the exhale or do you hear hum on the inhale and sa on the exhale just play with it for a minute there's no right answer here and I think this is why it's important and then I would love once you sort of have a sense of what you you seem to feel I'd love for you to put it in the chat do you so if you feel if you mostly identify with ha on the inhale some on the exhale please write hamsa because that's the order inhale exhale hamsa if you more hear the so on the inhale and hum on the exhale what do you hear so on the inhale hum then write so hum just as an experiment let's see what we all hear so we have a so hung so hum so hum so hum so hum hum sa hum sa isn't that interesting so hum hum sa so hum so hum so hum but probably because I've used this often so one of the discoveries I found was that so hum so hum means that I am tends to be very calming and grounding we can imagine why we use this so often in yogic techniques inhaling so exhaling hum hum whereas hum sa tends to be energizing and sometimes is used when we want to awaken spiritual energy we want to awaken the kundalini and that's very often why it's used in in teachings like this it actually is different oh if I exhale with the mouth open then hum sa oh that's interesting let's play with that for a minute if you inhale and exhale through the nose what's easier and if you inhale and exhale through the mouth then what because that's also my experience it's just something to play with oh it stays the same for Paula and it changes for Carla so again it's like everybody has a completely different experience it changes and so here's the thing within this particular teaching within the vijnana within this the goal is always actually to access the gap in between the so and the hum whether it's hum sa or so hum it's always the gap in between that's really interesting sa is an open vowel at the end allowing prolonged sound for exhalation um that's interesting so we're just going to cycle back we're going to come back into this teaching of the hum sa just for now I just wanted to include the other because like Christina said because we've often done the so hum or in kundalini yoga so hung meditation we may default to that but just for now we'll come back into the radiant sutras we'll come back into this teaching or at least the teaching of this sutra and look at hum sa inhaling hum exhaling sa and the m is very interesting like when you really when we study the chant om om is actually not it's not like you go om like it's not like you actually do it with your voice if you simply open your mouth and you go and you just allow the sound to emerge out with an open mouth down to a closed mouth so imagine this creation energy into the created energy right so we take a deep breath in and we go and then we go um i'm not chanting i'm just making whatever sound happens from the open mouth to the closed mouth just try that and that's why the sound of om is the sound of creation the m is natural the om so very similarly when we inhale ha and we exhale sa it's like inside you hear this and then like it turns in an m and it exhales sa and it's sort of this beautiful turning so what's interesting is they say that we have chanted this meditation through the breath not orally the breath meditation of this 21,

600 times a day since the day we were born and this number comes from assuming that you take one breath every four seconds and because we would chant hum sa or so hum however we understand it we have literally chanted this on the breath every four seconds from the time we were born 21,

600 times a day since we were born so this is why it's actually sometimes hard to access the wisdom of this mantra because we think to ourselves but i'm just breathing i'm just listening to the sound of my breath like how can that be deep how can that be healing i've done it my whole life and this is where it's really interesting to kind of dive inside dive deeper inside and really access the magic or the miracle that we're we are alive like really think about it like you think about this this body that we're in and we have all of these seemingly magical processes inside of us that we are able to just simply inhale the atmosphere around us it goes into us oxygenates all of our cells our muscles our our thoughts and everything we exhale we're in this constant state of renewal we have these organs inside of us that for all intents and purposes are made of the exact same dna you know like when you think that you're born and you are this single cell and that single cell replicates over and over and over again hundreds of thousands of times millions of times and each time that identical cell travels through the body and this exact cell becomes a liver cell and then it becomes an eye cell or a hair cell or a blood cell or a tooth but it's all the same dna that's a miracle like when you really look at it you really look at the way we can think the way we can walk the fact that we can be intimate the fact that we can ingest food and that we can taste the food and we can have pleasure from tasting the food like how can you create that do you know what i mean like if you really look at it this body we can't we can't replicate it it's an absolute miracle and so now you imagine from that miraculous place just watching this breath listening to the breath move through our nose or our mouth and letting the sound of our breath nourish us that the very active breathing is amazing and if you want if we want to get philosophical about it which i love the hum is the human and the saw is our divine self every time we breathe we are accessing we are connecting our human self and our divine self and even the meaning of the sound of the breath the meaning of the sound hum means i am i am i exist this individual being was created out of infinite divinity and i call it i i am hum sa i am infinity i am by rava i am brahman i am all that every breath the sound of our breath is a mantra that we have repeated since birth that reminds us that we are divine beings imagine if it was that simple like to really deeply embody that that there's nothing we have to do here the very fact that we breathe is an epic experience here on earth is so hum the same as so hung yes so hung is a big one in kundalini yoga hung and you can hear that like when you chant so hung for example you can feel that it's a little bit different so i guess i should probably say i don't know because the language is the same like so hung also means i am that i am divine it means the same but what's interesting and i'd love for everyone to do this chant so hum and feel what that feels like in your body so hum and then say so hung where does it live in you where does it resonate where do you feel the vibration of so hung versus so hum the self-realization fellowship uses hung sa right hung goes deeper throat and this is very important the back of the palate hung has more energy at the end and it's so important that you know we have this hour together to discuss this but the reality is this teaching is multi-dimensional and you could go into this single teaching and just sit and meditate on this and have all kinds of realizations and hear these sounds as they resonate into the body and this is the deeper teaching and and maybe that's why it's important that we talk about isn't that interesting that some teach so hung some so hum some hum saw some hum saw it's all an exploration my friend Alyssa and i were talking about this this morning how important it is for each of us to do our inner work and so often the inner work might be philosophizing or understanding or forgiveness and all these kind of things you know but the inner work really is having an experience inside of us that's not in our head that's not connected to anybody out there that we're actually inside our own self exploring this without any experts it's so important imagine you said you know there's something about this so hum that's really it's really triggering something inside of me in a good way it's making me really think about this i'm gonna go and i'm gonna explore this and i'm gonna explore so hum i'm gonna feel that m or maybe i'm gonna feel this so hum and to actually know that you are a divine being you have the authority to explore these ancient techniques you do it doesn't matter what the experts say you know when i prepare for these classes i reference multiple books multiple commentaries on the sutra and they always say different things you know we're going to begin studying the bhagavad-gita soon if you want to watch people if you want to watch experts contradict each other read multiple interpretations of the bhagavad-gita you will see such radical absolute opposite commentaries by experts and this is really important they're not wrong they're just their perception their divine interpretation of it and to know that every person here can do the same thing the important thing is that we have an experience inside of us that we're not philosophizing from our brain or we're because then you know we get into all kinds of weird stuff and we bring up our own traumas and triggers and trainings and religious teachings and all that stuff we don't want to go there but when we sit in meditation and we have an inner experience of our own breath the most important thing is to trust it and listen to whatever that is and follow that and then we have our own authentic experience of the divine imagine this to walk around the world always having your own unique experience of the divine and to know that there is not one other person on the planet who is having the same experience not one everybody by design is having a completely different experience and this is the journey of the spiritual path it's always wonderful to learn from teachers it's wonderful to read books it's wonderful to learn practices it's beautiful it's a beautiful thing because we get inspired we unlearn things that we were taught growing up but at some point we have to leave the teachings and go within and start to have our own unique experience of our own divinity and it doesn't have to be like cut and dry like that's it i'm never reading anything again i'm just going within it's a combination we go so far and then the crazy thing is you start having your own experience of something and then you go back and you read a text some beautiful sacred text tantric text and it sounds different and you hear something new in it that you've never heard before because you're different so we're going to do a meditation and then after the meditation i'm going to read the sutras again so wherever you are just close your eyes and focus on the movement of your belly as you inhale expand the belly as you exhale let the belly contract and just expand the belly a little bit more as you inhale and releasing it as you exhale and then allow your breathing to make sound just breathe a little bit stronger whether through your mouth or your nose it doesn't matter but just try to stay out of your head and focus on the sound of the breath and as you inhale here as you exhale here here as you inhale size you exhale and you can make your breath hear the wind blowing through your nose or your mouth ha means i am sa means that every breath is the repetition of the mantra i am that i am eternal i am brahman nyat breath flows into this body as nectar of the gods every breath is a whisper of the goddess here is the ritual i ask of you be the cup into which i pour this bliss the elixir of immortal peace the breath flows out with the sound sa the breath flows in with the sound ha thus thousands of times a day everyone who breathes is adoring the goddess know this and be in great joy listen to the ongoing prayer that is breath life shall dance in you a dance of ever-renewing delight and just breathing naturally how do you feel are there words flowing through your mind is there a mantra repeating itself in your native language thanks everybody we'll see you later

Reviews

Ahhhhhh🌬️
Love this one. And love rereading in my own book! 🙏💕
I also practice the Yah-Weh breath. So much sound in our simple act of breathing!

One of my favorites.❤️ Sorry to miss the live but grateful for the recordings of all of these! Thank you Katrina! 🙏🏻