The Vayus: Udana Vayu

We are exploring prana, our aliveness, and how our prana is subdivided into five more subtle vayus or “winds.” Each of these pranas travel in specific directions and are responsible for various places and systems of the body. Thus far we have examined, prana, apana, and samana vayus (checkout the previous blogs for more on those). The fourth subtle prana is udana vayu. Udana vayu is an ascending, circular, radiant force that moves from the heart to the head and is associated with the throat chakra or vishuddha chakra. Udana energy guides and graduates us from the lower planes of consciousness to the higher planes of consciousness. When udana is in balance, we can feel inherent joy and enthusiasm for life, express ourselves clearly and confidently and take ideas from imagination to reality. When udana is imbalanced, we feel cloudy and hold a negative attitude towards others and life, we struggle with communication, and feel uninspired to create, devoid of passion.

A closer look at how this energy moves, reveals its’ pathway, from heart to head. Now it is important to note that we can establish a conscious, direct line of communication that needs to be fluid, and unobstructed for us to thrive. We commonly try to overpower this natural flow of udana and instead of moving from heart to head, move from head to heart. We think we know, we think the answers, and we think the problems, rather than empowering our feeling. This in turn empowers our knowing, our answers, and our thinking in general, with our hearts. All of this thinking reverses our upward flow, into a downward flow, and we bog up our entire system!

Unfortunately, we live in a world that generally emphasizes thought over feeling. I often hear the phrase, “facts don’t care about your feelings,” and while I agree to a certain extent, it is impossible to see the facts without first processing our feelings, so we can in fact, see the facts clearly, free from the biases of our limited perspectives. Our perspectives are affected by past and present traumas, especially, those we have yet to acknowledge and work with because quite frankly, our bodies stored trauma, doesn’t give a shit about the facts!

Yoga gifts us the time and space to process and purify our pain, so that we are free to feel our passions, access our creativity, mold passion into vision, and birth vision into reality.

Muchas Gracias lovey human,

May you know just how incredible you really are and give yourself grace and shower yourself in gratitude and compliments. What might it be like to be your own very best friend and advocate?

Blessings,

Andrea Dawn