Yoga and Body Electronics
Similarities Between Yoga and Body Electronics
The two disciplines of yoga and body electronics have so many things in common. HA THA YOGA means the joining of the Sun and Moon - symbolising the deepest essential duality we have of the masculine and feminine. They are both, in theory, heading for the same place - the encompassment of duality or the joining of opposites. Here I am not talking about a Westernised exercise class that misses most of the point of the greater discipline and work which it shadows.
Yoga stresses the need for a pure and vegetarian diet, and dedicated disciples undergo cleansing of the body using salt water purges, enemas, sinus irrigation, fasting and the like. All such things are commonplace in India due to the ready availability of ayurvedic medicine. Similarly body electronics stresses the need for a pure diet, one of nutrient saturation, and with the addition of Western naturopathy which is strikingly similar to ayurveda in its techniques. They aim for the same thing - a clean and well nutrified body and a resurgence of natural healing powers. John Ray talked about hearing an Indian meditation master talk to Western students, telling them that first they would get burning in the body and then later comes the vibration. John assumed that this phenomena was not happening in the West due to the depleted nature of the common diet compared to where the master had come from. People in the West don't burn in meditation for the same reason they don't burn in body electronics pointholding - there are not enough spare nutrients in the body.
The other important aspect of diet is that while we are entrenched in heavy resistance patterns many of us will be using diet to satiate the voracious desires - desire to get to the comfort zone and out of the inner turmoil. On a yogic path or within a discipline of body electronics we need to be internalising desire - experiencing, but not satiating - as the way to transmutation and access to the resistance patterns that the desires are trying to avoid. All the emotionally satiating and addictive components to the diet need to be looked at hard and slowly withdrawn from, at the rate at which the resistance they are burying can be transmuted.
The physical aspects of yoga can move us into the inner experience of burning in exactly the same way as body electronics pointholding. Instead of holding points, it is muscle stretches that pressure and stress the crystals - them being the access points to eliciting a previously resisted memory as emotion, desire, sensory memory and words. If we sit in a yoga posture for long enough, sure enough the body will go into the numb phase, then the intense aching, then the burning, then the release. We just have to be careful not to stretch initially to the point where it hurts, as when this process kicks in it will be far too much to bear. A similar thing happens with meditation. If we hold the body still in a sitting position for long enough it will kick off areas in burning and releasing memory (assuming the nutrition is fine). Of course, again, Westernised yoga hardly touches on this larger process. Yogananda apparently stated that people don't get what they think they should get from meditation simply because they don't do it long enough. In tantric yoga the adept accepts that he has a desire nature and enters into situations which elicit the desire, or elicit a feeling of aversion. Again the body is held still and the desire is internalised for the purposes of transmutation. This is what we are doing in pointholding - the tantric adept uses the outer world to elicit the inner experiencing, the pointholder uses body points to stimulate this inner experience directly. The inner processing is very similar and has the same end goal.
Peter Hinde
Peter is a practitioner and teacher of body electronics and well read in the works of Carl Jung and some of his followers. As a natural researcher he is always looking for greater understanding of the principles and details of this great inner work.