Practices for Dhyana Yoga

Swami Satyananda Saraswati

I will give you some practices for dhyana yoga:

1. Learn to concentrate between the eyebrow centre. This is called bhrumadhya drishti.
2. Concentrate on the tip of your nose, nasikagra drishti.
3. Learn to concentrate on the ingoing and outgoing natural, normal breath.
4. Try to hear and discover the sound of the natural, normal breath as So Ham or Ham So.
5. Breathe deep in ujjayi pranayama and with the help of the breath penetrate through the chakras in the spine, up and down. You should try to breathe in such a way that you really feel that you are breathing through the spine.
6. Find out a mantra or a sound for yourself and it should be repeated as a part of japa yoga, and then concentrate on each chakra for some time and practise your mantra there. In each chakra, starting from the bottom and going to the top to ajna, either every day or every week, because the practice of mantra in every chakra will awaken the chakra and will give you spiritual experience.
7. Hear this with attention. Practise pranayama. What is pranayama? When you inhale that is called pooraka and when you exhale that is called rechaka. In between pooraka and rechaka there is a gap, and that gap is called kumbhaka or retention of breath.

3 February 1982, Trichy