Nine Cleansing Breaths

“Perhaps you have noticed how much tension is carried in the body and how the tension affects breathing. When someone with whom we are having difficulties walks into the room, the body tightens and the breath becomes shorter and sharper.

When we are frightened, the breath comes quick and shallow. In sadness, the breathing is often deep and punctuated by sighs. And if someone we genuinely like and care for enters the room, the body relaxes and the breath opens and eases.

Rather than waiting for experience to alter the breath, we can deliberately alter the breath to change our experience. The nine breaths of purification is a short practice to clear the channels and relax the body and mind.”

- Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Sit in a cross-legged meditation posture. Place your hands palm-up in your lap, with the left hand resting on the right. Bend your head just a little to straighten the neck. Visualize the three channels of energy in your body.

1. Clearing the White Right Channel

Activate an experience of anger or aversion - the tendency to avoid, reject or push away. Connect with the feeling in your body and mind.

Close your RIGHT nostril with your RIGHT ring finger. Slowly inhale clean, light green air through the LEFT nostril, imagining that it flows through the left (red) channel down to the junction. Hold the breath here and switch your hand over to close the left nostril. Breathe out while imagining that the air moves up the RIGHT channel, clearing out all feelings of anger and aversion, which dissolve into space. The outbreath is gentle at first and then more forceful towards the end.

Repeat three times.

2. Clearing the Left Red Channel

Activate an experience of attachment - the tendency to cling and crave, or the desire to fill silence and space. Connect with the feeling.

Close your LEFT nostril with your LEFT ring finger. Slowly inhale clean, light green air through the RIGHT nostril, imagining that it flows through the right (white) channel down to the junction. Hold the breath here and switch your hand over to close the left nostril. Breathe out while imagining the air moves up the LEFT channel, clearing out all feelings of anger and aversion, which dissolve into space. Repeat three times.

3. Clearing the Central Channel

Activate an experience of dullness, doubt, disconnection, or lack of confidence. Connect with the feeling in your body and mind.

Slowly inhale clean, light green air through both nostrils, imagining that it flows through both side channels, down to the junction. Hold the breath here briefly then exhale from both nostrils while imagining that the subtle breath clears the entire channel and pushes obstacles out of the crown of your head, where they dissolve. The outbreath is gentle at first and then more forceful towards the end. Repeat this three times.

4. Resting

Rest in a relaxed, open way and breath freely. See and experience all three channels as clean, clear, and radiant. Feel the openness at the centre of your body and rest in that spacious, luminous, warmth.