Fantastic Voyage

One of my favorite childhood movies was Fantastic Voyage - the story of a group of people who were shrunk down to a size that made it possible to travel (via shrunken submarine) into the body of a regular-sized human being. Little did I know, at that time, that in years hence I would be engaged in a pursuit not all that different from theirs: taking my awareness - as though a tiny version of "me" - into my own body, using various yoga and qigong techniques to explore this amazing internal terrain.

From a yogic perspective, what makes a precious human birth "precious" has a lot to do with our human nervous system, which - in its gross and subtle forms - is able to "wake up" in ways supportive of the psychophysical transformations of what is called "Enlightenment." As I've written about in previous posts, the kinds of yoga practices which support this kind of waking up appear in many forms, including:

* Taoist Qigong practice, many of whose forms are demonstrated beautifully in this Shaolin Monk Rain Demonstration.

* Tibetan Yoga practice, as seen in this video clip (an excerpt from the wonderful film "Tantrism" by Arnaud Desjardins).

* Hindu Asana practice, as demonstrated here by the amazing Siberian yogi, Vladimir Kalabin.

Each of these practice forms is a science - a set of techniques which, when skillfully applied, produce specific results. Yet what's also obvious, from the above examples, is that these practices can at the same time be art-forms: arenas in which something uniquely beautiful is being expressed. In the same way that a poet's artistic medium is the rhythm, tone and meaning of words, and a painter's medium is shape and color as expressed through paint, so the artistic medium of the yogi or yogini is life-force energy (qi or prana).