Everything written here

Pattabhi Jois kept moon days and taught that they mattered — his students are unanimous on that. What cannot be sourced to him is the prāṇa/apāna paragraph everyone repeats: that traces to an unsigned web page up since 2002. And the calendar itself traces to a Sanskrit college that closed on those days for ancestor rites.

The complete Ashtanga Primary Series — opening and closing mantras, every pose in sequence with Devanāgarī and English names, and notes on breath, bandha, and dṛṣṭi.

The Primary Series in full detail — vinyāsa counts, which count you stay in, the gaze point for every pose, and where the hands go.

Sūrya Namaskāra A, step by step — with the practice attitude that makes it a complete practice on its own.

Puraka, rechaka, kumbhaka — filling, emptying, holding. The two retentions as taught in the Ashtanga prāṇāyāma sequence, with their ratios and transitions.

Mūla Bandha beyond the muscle — the energetic dimension, how to refine it, and how to carry it off the mat.

Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā's warning on the pace of prāṇāyāma: the breath is tamed the way a wild animal is tamed — gradually.

A Latin rosary and a Sanskrit mantra, said at their ordinary pace, both slow the breath to almost exactly six a minute. That is the frequency the cardiovascular system resonates at.

About a hundred and seventy-five neurons a side wire the pattern of the breath to the state of the mind. Take them out and the breathing is unchanged. The animal just stops being alarmed.

Sixty-six students, a panel of judges, and two breathing techniques. The ones who breathed did not spike. Neither pattern is in the old texts.

Bhrāmarī is named for a bee. Humming on the exhale raises nasal nitric oxide fifteen-fold — and the effect runs out if you keep going.

Nasal airflow drives a rhythm in the amygdala and hippocampus that mouth breathing does not. The nostrils do alternate. The hemisphere story built on top of that has not replicated.

Bhastrikā is named for a blacksmith's bellows and promises heat. Twelve men trained in a modern forced-breathing method were injected with bacterial toxin and mounted a measurably quieter immune response.

Twelve weeks of yoga and slow breathing raised thalamic GABA in people with major depression. The rise may be short-lived — a trend, not a finding, and an argument for practicing weekly.

Pratyāhāra says the senses draw in. In 1961 two yogis in samādhi were shown a strong light, touched with a hot glass tube, and given the vibration of a tuning fork, and their alpha rhythm did not break.

Your body is mostly water and the moon moves the sea, so the moon must move you. The tidal force it exerts across your body is about one nanogram — a mosquito on your arm beats it two thousand times over.

The one place a lunar effect on the body keeps turning up is sleep onset — twenty to thirty minutes, not hours. The famous deep-sleep study was thought up in a bar, after the fact, and larger samples could not repeat it.

Notes on Ashtanga yoga and related practices — the sequences, the breath work, and the texts they come from.

A working bibliography for prāṇāyāma study — primary texts and modern scholarship.

A working glossary of prāṇāyāma in Sanskrit — prāṇa, apāna, samāna, udāna, vyāna; pūraka, rechaka, kumbhaka; the nāḍīs, bandhas, mudrās, and the philosophical terms around them, each with its Devanāgarī.