Lets Talk About the Nadis

Just like we have tens of thousands of nerves mapping our human form, it's also said in our energetic map of our form that we have 72,000 nadis. Nadis are these channels, these rivers that the prana flows through, and these 72,000 nadis all emanate from the center of our form from a place called khanda. So I'd like to now name all of the nadis for you. So we're going to focus our attention on what's considered the three most vital of these nadis. The center channel called shishumna nadi is said to exist in the center of the body like a silver strand that runs from the pelvic floor to the crown of the head.

Connecting I like to think of it as this superhighway of consciousness that connects the concepts of shakti and shiva or manifest energy or consciousness and the unmanifest consciousness. This is the kind of the telephone wire in which they speak to one another. And we also have ida, which is our more, it's found on the left side of the body, and sometimes specifically they refer to it as running from the left side of the pelvic floor up the left side all the way into the middle of the brain and then back to this point kind of right above where you'd get a nose piercing right above that little wrinkle in the nose at the end of the bony cartilage and it's said to be the end point of that ida. Iida is considered the more lunar channel, the cooling passive feminine channel. The other channel, the right channel called pingala or pingala, depending on who your teacher is.

And this considered the more heated, masculine, active solar channel of the body on the right side, it's expressed, and more specifically running from the right side of the pelvic floor up through the right side of the spine to the middle of the brain and then back to this little nerve point or naughty point on the right nostril. When these two dualities of active and passive or feminine and masculine or lunar and solar, when those two channels are in harmony or balanced, sometimes they're visualized in the iconography of this philosophy as almost a serpentine dance, which is very reminiscent to the double helix model of our own DNA, this kind of super sweep, which then illuminates shushin the naughty, we move from the dualities to this place where union can be found. These channels sometimes seem a little bit esoteric or confusing when we first start looking at them, but I think there's a really special correlation of poetry to be found even in our own fetal development, so the fetal development of you, we can see the development of these three vital naughties. So starting from the beginning, sperm meets an egg. So from this newly fertilized cell, this one cell in union, duality begins to become expressed and the cell begins to divide and divide and divide and divide and divide until it becomes kind of a clump of cells, a cute clump, but a clump of cells.

Those cells begin to flatten out into almost a, like it looks like a little bit of a pancake or a three layered pancake at that point. This is only around your 20th day of existence, but at that point something quite special begins to happen. There's something that's called a primitive streak, and this is the anatomical language of it. A streak begins to appear that runs from what will be the head down to what will be the tail, and as that primitive streak begins to recede back, it forms a little groove. So as the streak begins to recede back, it forms a groove and that groove begins to seal off and becomes this neural tube.

And this will be what later is expressed as your central nervous system, your brain and your spinal cord. And we might see this as having a really special relationship to Shoshumna Nadi. Now these two flaps after this tube seals up, these two flaps will later become your peripheral nervous system, and more specifically parts of the nervous system that are called the autonomic nervous system, your sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves. And these will have a really special relationship with Ida in Pingala. So sympathetic, your more heated channel, your more solar channel has relationship to a sympathetic nervous system activation, whereas the Ida channel, the more feminine lunar cooling passive energy channel, has a very sweet relationship to a parasympathetic nervous system activation.

So I think that when we look at the beauty in both our fetal development, but also in the development of these nadis, it gives us a richer discussion, a richer way to tap into a deeper experience of these channels. So in the next video, we'll begin to work with these channels using breath and visualization and some nervous system activation to help give us a little bit more tangible feel of these very vital areas. Thank you.