Unraveling Prana: A Journey Through Time | Bernie Clark | YogaScussion Preview

Bernie Clark (00:00) So my intention with that book was to kind of build a bridge between East and West from a mythological point of view. And one of my main influences there was Joseph Campbell and a bit of Carl Jung and a lot of the other yoga teachers of the day or yoga researchers of the day like Mirchai Alladis. So that was covering the mind body. And then I spent about eight years writing a trilogy called Your Body, Your Yoga, dealing with the physical body and the uniqueness of our bones and... how that shows up on our yoga practice. But I'd never done a book on the energy body. So that was why I wanted to write about prana. And just like in the course, we talk about kind of the historical view in South Asia of the Nadi's and prana and the Vaayus, but also a little bit further north, traditional Chinese medicine and Taoist philosophies of Qi and Jinglu, the pranas, sorry, the Merdians. So I wanted to put that out there as well. But the studio that I joined first when I first started doing yoga was called the Prana Yoga and Zen Center. So there's Prana again. So part of it is my own history of learning yoga through Prana and Shakti Mai. Part of it is just the historical evolution of what did Prana mean to people. Because today we have a kind of a quick definition of Prana as life force or life energy. But the term energy didn't really exist 2000 years ago. What we think of prana today is not what they thought prana meant back then. The word prana comes from kind of two words, pram, to bring forth and an, which can be the breath or movement or volition. So prana back then was the volition, it was a God. Indra says in one of the Upanishads, I am prana, prana is me. So anything that moves you is prana. So it's not just the breath, that's part of it, but it's a much bigger thing. So I wanted to go through culturally how the use of the term prana, life force, fatality, kind of evolved over the centuries. But I also wanted to end with the modern scientific view of life. What is life? What is life force? What makes us alive? How do our cells communicate? So I wanted to weave these three threads together like gunas, the three gunas that make up all of existence, all of property. So that was kind of my reasoning for doing it that way. Gina Clingerman (02:16) How long did it take you to kind of pull all this together? Because I imagine ⁓ from an archaeological perspective, a person who does research and has to write reports and do all of these things, it's like, that can take a lot of time and effort and energy to just be reading things and pulling your mind together on ⁓ all that information. Bernie Clark (02:41) Well, I started it back in the 1990s. Fortunately, I was a bit OCD. I always took lots of notes whenever I went to visit Eric Schiffman or go to the conferences with David Life or Richard Freeman and Tim Miller would come to Hound and David Swenson. All these people would come and I'd just be sitting there writing notes after notes. So I got all these notebooks I've got from 20, 25 years ago. So that was my archaeological digging into those notes. to what did they say then? And I was realizing, just as an aside, that what I taught 20 years ago is not what I teach today. Science has progressed and there's different understandings of how the body works, how bones work. So the same thing probably happened with these teachers. I'm quoting them back in the late 1990s or early 2000s. And I'm sure today they would say things differently, or they may not even agree with what they said then. So I was very cautious that I don't want to put too much on what they were saying then because time moves on. But in history and archaeology, you're looking at a snapshot of this is what we thought at this strata of time and in this particular culture. So I kind of to leave it there and just give a warning to the readers, you know, that things do change and evolve. So on the science side, I like to think, well, if prana is some sort of life force, what does that mean? It's no longer thought of something mysterious and subtle. It's more... physical these days. On the physical side we do have lots of ways cells talk to each other. So today I kind of evolved to the Prana is communication energy. It's the way the cells communicate to each other through physical stresses, through electromagnetic fields, through chemical signals, through light. There's lots of ways that our cells are in communication because they're in community. They're all working together. So I wanted to kind of end with the of the modern view of what Prana might be if we had to define something like a life force today.