The concept of time is one of the biggest illusions of them all. It is always now and It will always be now. It is very poignant to know that in this moment where you are is always now. We have invented time for practical reasons but really you are always in this 'precious' moment.

There is nothing mystical about this truth is there, it is a fact. It's a great thing to allow the weight and importance of this simple truth dawn on you. Possibly even more important is the question. "What are you choosing to do in this precious moment?" And here we have the essence of it all really, the whole of yoga can be put into this one simple question, profound!

At any given moment if you have the time of course :)), you can check in with yourself/selves. Any Time you do this you are bringing you're wonderful awareness to this moment. It is in the process of doing this that you may begin to see the fluctuations of the 'mind stuff', i.e, how you change throughout the course of the day. That is, to become aware how you change throughout the day from the perspective of the Mind, (Manomaya Kosha), the Physical body, (Anamaya Kosha), and to me, the most important, The Breath (Pranamaya Kosha). As you do this over a period of time you may start to see how habitually you hold yourself at different times of day.

So we can check in from time to time to see what we are thinking about, how we are feeling about what we are thinking about, and how we relate to these two through the breath at any given moment throughout the course of the day. To the uninitiated this may sound a little neurotic. But if you have any chance of going beyond the conditioned reality of the 'ego', then an effort has to made at some point, and anyway what effort? What effort is it to bring you're attention now and again to the most precious thing in the Universe; yourself!

I mentioned three of the five major bodies of the yogi - Manomaya -Anamaya- and Pranamaya Kosha. Pranamaya is the breath body. If you start to look into the idea of what is prana. it can get very complex. So for the sake of simplicity relating to this piece of writing I am referring to prana as breath. But even this is too simple.

If you understand the fact that you tend to think most of the time, but allot of what you think about is background noise. If you add awareness to you're thinking, i.e, Dharana the whole concept of thinking is changed instantly. There is a huge difference between mindlessly thinking and thinking with some intention and purpose. It is exactly the same when it comes to breathing. We cannot be aware of every breath we take all day long, so the nervous system conveniently breathes for us. In other words we don't have to think too much about the act of breathing, the breath breathes as the heart beats, it just does! But if we stop for a moment and make our breathing a conscious act, we are then changing everything aren't we. We make everything come alive with the conscious breath. This in my view is pranayama, i.e, when we make the act of breathing a conscious one then we are performing Pranayama.

Moving on from that, if we then take this realization of momentary awareness and apply the conscious breath to the proceedings, then we are really doing something very profound indeed. And it is so simple!

Hmmmmmm complicated and yet so simple.

Hari Om Tat Sat.