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Sacred Correspondences
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Ida in Breath Practice, and How It Differs from a Meridian

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Ida in Breath Practice, and How It Differs from a Meridian

Nadi shodhana, alternate nostril breathing, is the practice most directly built around Ida and Pingala: the practitioner closes the right nostril and breathes through the left, Ida's channel, then closes the left and breathes through the right, Pingala's, in an alternating sequence said to balance the lunar and solar currents and prepare the subtler central channel, Sushumna, to open. Ida's opening at the left nostril is why left nostril dominant breathing is traditionally read as a lunar, cooling, introspective state in yogic physiology.

Where Ida, Pingala and Sushumna are said to cross is marked by a granthi, a psychic knot, most notably at the base of the spine, the heart and the point between the eyebrows, and yogic and tantric texts describe these crossing points as the sites kundalini energy must pass through as it rises.

Nadis are sometimes compared to the meridians of Chinese medicine because both describe channels carrying a vital force through the body, but the two are independent systems from separate traditions with different maps, different numbers of channels and different diagnostic uses, and treating one as a translation of the other rather than as a parallel, historically unconnected framework is a conflation the sources themselves do not support.

Sources The Serpent PowerSir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) with Roots of YogaJames Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.)

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