By Paige Leigh Reist┃Posted: February 25, 2019
Sudarshan Kriya, is one of the most invigorating, powerful, and transformative methods of meditation humanity have ever practiced. It boasts both ancient roots and modern relevance, and its efficacy for treating everything from depression to body pain has been backed up again and again by both hard science and thousands of personal testimonials.
Annelies Richmond, a senior Art of Living instructor and a passionate practitioner of Sudarshan Kriya, recently joined Michelle Bosch on the inFlow podcast to talk about sudarshan kriya, silence, and the power of our breath. She shares her experiences as a young dancer in New York City, where she started her meditation journey with the goal of centering and re-energizing herself. But when she signed up for a local Art of Living Happiness Program, she found so much more.
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Healing the body and mind with meditation
“[At] the end of those four days, I felt incredible! Everything was completely recharged: body, mind, spirit, emotions. I didn’t expect that. I thought I was just going to learn a nice technique or practice, but even physically. I was halfway through my dance career. I was in my mid to late twenties, and my body hurts every day. After those four days, even though there was barely any physical yoga in the course, it was mostly breathing techniques and this incredible meditation technique called Sudarshan Kriya, my body felt better than it did when I was 19 years old. It was mind-blowing! It did a lot more for the mind and my resilience. Any of the politics at work stopped phasing me so much, any conflicts I used to run into in the workplace… I started suddenly feeling like, “Oh! It’s not such a big deal.” I felt it really impacted the way I react in situations: I started responding instead.
“I just remember feeling like I went into this effortless, incredible meditative state, and I had no idea how I got there, and I was just like, floating in this incredible state. And I was like, “This is like magic. This is what everybody would like to get to, at least as a way to step away from their crazy life. And it was so easy!”
The power of the breath
“Your breath is intimately linked with your state of mind and your emotions. Most meditative practices or journeys are not using this power of the breath yet. But because the founder of Art of Living, Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, is a great yogi, definitely a meditation master, he’s pulling some things that are so old from the yoga tradition.
“There are references to practices like Sudarshan Kriya thousands of years ago in old texts on yoga. So he’s pulling stuff that has been working for thousands of years and somehow is just now resurfacing. But if you look in your own life, you’ve already noticed that your breath is intimately connected to your state of mind. like when you’re angry, how do you breathe? Have you noticed? Or when you’re sad… we have this long exhalation. When you’re happy, you’re joyful or in a pleasant state, if you really pay attention to it, the inhalation is actually longer and pronounced.
“So there’s this really incredible phenomenon that’s happening in our system automatically, and that phenomenon is that every emotion or state of mind that you have has a corresponding rhythm in your breath. Normally, it’s an unconscious function. You’re in a state of mind, you’re irritated, and your breath starts going in a certain pattern, and that dictates to your physiology, and it lets certain hormones come out, and a lot of times, what happens is that our systems stay stuck in that state. Notice when you’re irritated: you often stay irritated for hours, right? But when a child is irritated, it’s like, a minute. Or maybe a couple minutes, and then it’s gone. They’re smiling and laughing.
Getting stuck in our emotions
“We were born with such a flexible nervous system. We were not born to hang onto anger for days and days, but over time, as we accumulated more and more stress, and we stopped becoming conscious of these incredible patterns in our nervous system, how the breath can change the state of mind. Then we started to get stuck in emotions. And that’s actually one of the things that makes us the least efficient in life: because we’re so stuck in our emotion, and emotions rule the intellect, so we’re not able to be as creative, or do as much as we want to do, or be as productive, because the emotions are ruling us.
More than a meditation
“So, to me, a technique like Sudarshan Kriya brings so much freedom in your life, because you have a tool to take care of your emotions, clean them out of your system, become balanced, and it’s also a tool to help you be resilient during the day, even when some really intense event happens. In a way, your emotional body becomes stronger. But the secret is in the breath: Sudarshan Kriya is not only a meditation, it’s a cleansing technique.”
Listen to the full interview here:
Paige Leigh Reist is a writer, editor, blogger, and creative writing instructor.
