Longer pieces on the texts, the practice, and what the research is finding. New post most weeks.
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The Shiva Svarodaya does not only claim you can read which nostril is flowing. It claims you can change it. That is the part of the system I had never properly checked, and it is the part that mostly survives.
The advice bundles two claims together. One of them is among the best-evidenced things in the field. The other has barely been tested, because nobody agrees how to measure it.
I spent two days listening to meditation researchers present to other researchers rather than to the public. The register is completely different, and the difference is itself the finding.
The Shiva Svarodaya sets out an eightfold scheme for reading the breath. The scheme is better built than I expected. The flaw is not that three of its dimensions are unverifiable — it is that all seven are collapsed into one verdict.
The Trika tradition says the brain is something consciousness appears as, not something that produces it. I find the argument serious. I also want to be plain about what neuroscience can and cannot settle here — which is less than either side tends to claim.
I built a tool from a tantric manual on the breath in the nostrils. Four things the text teaches are not in it. Here is what each one would have required me to assert, and what the evidence actually supports.
A new EEG study finds that a month of OM meditation speeds up responses and shifts one brain component — but only under moderate cognitive load. Working out what that actually shows is the whole problem.
What has actually been published on the nasal cycle: the range of reported periods, the autonomic evidence, and the size of the studies. Short version — smaller than you'd hope.
The text is more specific than most summaries admit, and specificity is what makes it testable. A close reading of the passages on timing, and what would count as evidence either way.
I have been building a tool from a tantric manual on nasal breathing. The text is a better observer than I expected, and the one verse the whole tool depends on is the one the evidence contradicts.
Forgiveness is said to rewire the brain and heal the body. Here is what the trials actually found, and why the brain-imaging part of the story is the weakest.
Consciousness, freedom and the world in Abhinavagupta's non-dual Śaivism: why the Trika treats the world as the self-display of a free awareness, and liberation as recognising what you already are.
Alternate nostril breathing is said to balance your brain's hemispheres. Here's what EEG studies found, and what the practice does seem to do.
A yogic inquiry into conscience, clarity, discrimination, and the science of observing one's own mind.
On the difference between a platform that sells relief and one that hands you a method. Written after a month of questions we couldn't answer honestly.
