MDW: Tell us more, especially about your own spiritual background, and why you are sharing  Nadi Prana Release.

Narayan: I have  always looked for a lot of different ways to express what I've felt to be  Real. When I say "Real" I am not referring to the fleeting phenomena  construed by our thoughts and minds either. I am referring to Reality  Itself, the "Great Mystery".

Over the past 25 years I've met  many teachers, a few of them living Buddhas. Papaji was one of them, but  there were others before him, like Lama Govinda, Khamtrul Rinpoche who  passed away in 1979, and also Tarthang Tulku and his students in  California with whom I studied and worked for ten years in the seventies  and eighties. I also use the system of an accomplished living Taoist master in my own practice.

For over two years Paula and I have been studying with Lama Acharya Dawa Chhodak Rinpoche, a Tibetan Yogi of the Nyingma tradition from Kathmandu. In this  way we continue to be students while we teach.

We go deeper into ourselves; consequently we can go deeper with others. It never seems to end, and yet there is no frantic searching involved. To put it in Papaji's words: The  search has been called off! Studying and teaching just seem like the right  thing to do. You could say that all we do when teaching and studying is  express and share in a caring manner our own heartfelt inner yearning for  THAT which has neither name nor form, a yearning which never stops, even when it has been fulfilled. I am grateful that many people seem to be  interested in partaking in the process.

MDW: Your short  introduction into Nadi Prana makes it sound appealing, even intriguing, like an advanced form of yogic teaching, with a dose of Tantra thrown in for good measure.

Narayan: The intention is to give a broad first overview, the big picture, so to speak.  However, the immediate objectives of Nadi Prana practice are actually very simple: to eat well, to sleep well, to eliminate well, to do well with the  opposite sex, and to be flexible and relaxed physically, as well as psychologically and mentally in everyday situations. These are direct  expressions of a normal healthy life. If you loose those, you loose the virtue of a basic life. Of course, if you are out of touch with the basic life, you'll never lead what you might call a spiritual life. The fantasy  of a spiritual life may be, but your spirituality will remain totally in  the realm of the illusory. Even your everyday life will take on a movie  like, illusory quality. It will eventually evade you to the point that you  don't feel present and alive anymore, but rather like a zombie sleepwalking through your own unacknowledged existence.

MDW: Are you not a little  harsh here?

Narayan: No, I just say it as I see it, and also the way my teachers pointed to the  obvious. I haven't met a real teacher yet who didn't stress the importance of a normal healthy life. People who are in the business of offering strange transformations to the unprepared are either seriously deluding  themselves or are out to make a buck by selling daydreams for hard cash.

MDW: So, how exactly does Nadi Prana propose to open the practitioner to a fresh experience of the  healthy, basic life?

Narayan: Through relaxation.

MDW: Relaxation, I see.  That's all?

Narayan: That's  all. But let's not assume that we know everything about relaxation when we  really don't. For example, many people equate relaxation with having a beer while watching someone score a home run on the tube. The relaxation I am talking about comes from the ability to directly feel your own life. It's the relaxation inherent in deeply felt awareness.

MDW: But isn't it  possible to watch a baseball match on TV and be relaxed or take the grand  kids to an amusement park and have fun with them? It sounds to me, you are inferring that awareness is only present while one is involved in spiritual practice. Isn't that a little extreme?

Narayan: That's  not the point I was trying to make. I only wanted to stress that often people have a drink and watch TV in order to numb themselves out and not  feel their feelings. If that's the intention, their recreational  activities will not provide the desired relaxation.

True relaxation can only happen  when you honestly allow yourself to feel all of your feelings. And that's  precisely what Nadi Prana is stressing. All its body movements, mantras,  visualizations and so forth are designed to help you feel what is happening in the moment.

MDW: Which would make  Nadi Prana just one more of the many already existing tools for enhancing awareness, like Reiki, Yoga, Zen, Vipassana, Tai Chi and countless mind/body therapies developed in the West over the past thirty or forty years.

Narayan: All of  these tools and techniques have their own particular feeling tone, their  own character. Zen, for example, tends to be somewhat brisk with a rather biting sense of humor, Yoga sometimes comes across as being a little rigid, Bioenergetics can make you lose yourself in re-enacting emotional  dramas, Reiki often has a fleeting flavor of evanescence and extreme  subtlety, and so on.

Among all of these, and I have at  least tasted them all, not one suggests the same nurturing, creamy softness of intimately feeling yourself from the inside that Nadi Prana  can occasionally evoke, when you allow for the surface layers of tension  to be dissolved in awareness.

MDW: How does this nurturing quality manifest?

Narayan: Through the three levels of relaxation. At the first level, whatever you feel has a definite tone, like: joy, anger, sadness, constriction, liberation, and so forth. You can easily identify these feelings and describe them, while  feeling them fully. Physically they might manifest as tingling, or as pain  or as rush of energy. Also, a definite sense of duality still  predominates: On one side, is you, and on the other, are the feelings that  you feel.

By closely attending to this first level of ordinary feelings and sensations we can relax and penetrate  to the second level of relaxation, which is a little more difficult to  describe. There is just this uncanny sense that the deeper, indefinable holding patterns are gradually melted and dissolved through our gentle focus and open concentration. The sense of a separate "self" still lingers  in the background but is experienced as less solid.

At the third level of relaxation we become more and more indistinguishable from pure energy. Another way to  describe this energy is as "direct experience, experiencing itself". There  is no longer any sense of "I" to be singled out and identified, only a kind of melting quality, similar to pure bliss. This feeling is not bound  to any location, and we may never get a clue as where and how it happens,  but through its nurturing quality, we feel deeply touched. It will also transform our everyday existence in unexpected and miraculous ways.

MDW: Can you describe  these benefits more specifically?

Narayan: The introductory article mentions them in enough detail. For some people they  manifest after only a short time of practicing. For others it takes a  little longer. When I was first introduced to some of these tools in the summer of 1978, I attended a 15-day retreat, which started at 6:30 in the morning and ran sometimes until 10:00 at night. Because it was structured  as an intensive, it enabled me to almost instantly get a real taste of the incredible freedom which usually remains locked and frozen in our unacknowledged feelings and emotions, and in the experience of physical  pain.

MDW: To come back to our initial question: Why are you starting to teach Nadi Prana Release now,  more than twenty years after your initial experience?

Narayan: I actually taught a related system of practices for a number of years in the mid-eighties, and then stopped because I needed to wait and see. I also had the sense that I had to integrate what I had received. In the meantime, some of the old baggage seems to have been released. In the last  fifteen years, I have also met important teachers who helped me tremendously, like Papaji, Lama Yeshe and Acharya Dawa Chhodak. Now it feels natural to take up sharing what I have received, very slowly and modestly. I don't see myself so much as a teacher, but as a messenger of  the teachers that I was blessed to meet along the way.