Tummo Meditation to Keep You Warm This Christmas :)
Updated: Jan 12, 2022
Spiritual blessings come wrapped in trials, however there exist scientifically proven tools to help you along your way to happiness and success. This Christmas I would like to share with you a technique that is considered sacred (and kept as a secret) in the Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana tradition - Inner Fire Meditation or Tummo Meditation. This practice has enormous potential to heal emotional wounds, clear the mind, calm the body and bring tremendous joy and confidence into your life. Please give this technique a try and let me know, how your inner & outer world changed!
Below is a detailed description of Tummo Meditation / Inner Fire Meditation and a video with a simplified version, to help you start the practice.
Sit in an upright and comfortable meditation posture.
Visualize yourself as hollow, empty inside (like a balloon). Your skin is glowing and brilliant on the outside and on the inside there is only empty space. Take a few moment to strongly establish this visualization.
Visualise a ‘central channel’ (at a base of your spine or root chakra), about a 1cm thick from your perineum to the crown of your head and two ‘side channels’ going in through the nostrils up to the third eye or eyebrow level and then going down either side of the central channel and merging at just below the navel. All the ‘channels’ are hollow like plumbing pipes. Take a moment to establish this visualization; it does get easier and even instantaneous with practice.
Even if you cannot do the former visualisation this next step is the most important in generating the blissful energy: Imagine your breath energy going down the two side channels and merging into the central channel (root chakra) just below the navel (about a few cm in front of the spine). Imagine a very small and very hot ball of light in the central channel and your breath ignites this fiery ball and makes it extremely hot. Now hold the breath there in that ball of heat at the navel, for 5-15 seconds (experienced yogis can hold the breath here for several minutes). WARNING: stop immediately and breath normally if you get dizzy or lightheaded.
This next step is optional but helps to generate even more heat and focussed attention: As you are holding the breath inside the central channel at the small ball of heat just below the navel, draw energy up from below and down from above and lock & trap it in the ball of heat. Draw it up by activating the perineum muscle (like you are holding back from urinating), hold the kegel muscles and lock it in. Simultaneously swallow some saliva down to get the feeling of pushing down on the ball of heat at the navel and lock it in. Experiment with this. You may wish to lock it in by drawing up from below first and then push down from above, or vice versa. Do what feels best for you to get the sense you are locking in a tremendous amount of energy in a tiny space at the navel.
Now release all the energy you have created – straight up through the central and bursting out the top of your head like a fountain. As the energy rushes up through the central channel, it blows away any blockages in all the chakras from the solar plexus, heart, throat, the third eye and the crown chakra. This energy cleanses and purifies your entire body & mind system. You can also imagine releasing the energy into parts of your body you need to heal.
Repeat steps 2-6. Practice the Inner Fire Meditation for 2-5 minutes daily, to establish a strong foundation. Do not practice for extended periods of time until you become familiar with the technique and feel confident and strong enough to do so.
Benefits of Inner Fire Meditation:
Greatly improves your ability to stay warm in a cold weather.
Improves your concentration and memory power.
Promotes emotional and mental balance.
Cleanses your heart, and keeps your body.
Improves the health of your lungs.
“The meditators sit on the ground, cross-legged and naked. Sheets are dipped in the icy water, each man wraps himself in one of them and must dry it on his body. As soon as the sheet has become dry, it is again dipped in the water and placed on the novice’s body to be dried as before. The operation goes on [in] that fashion until daybreak. Then he who has dried the largest number of sheets is acknowledged the winner of the competition. Besides drying wet sheets on one’s body, there exist various other tests to ascertain the degree of heat which the neophyte is able to radiate. One of these tests consists in sitting in the snow. The quantity of snow melted under the man and the distance at which it melts around him are taken as measures of his ability.”
Wishing everyone a beautiful journey within! Namaste
