On cleansing, associated resistance, and the path of least resistance

Today, I want to talk to you about cleaning, and about the resistance that is felt in certain yoga processes. In the end, this will lead me to a closer look at the relationship between the yoga principle of following through rituals and processes to the end vs the newer principle of follow your passion and the path of least resistance. I will also outline my current experiment of combining the yoga technique called Shankprakshalana with the modern 30 day detox process by Dr Schultze.

Figure 1: Pippi Longstocking, one of the more famous Swedish fictional characters (here in an English version) has her own particular version of a cleaning period. Imaginative and a re-exploration of an older way of doing the same thing.


Cleaning period

The reason why now is a good time to dive in to this topic, is that I myself am in the middle of an extensive cleaning period. More specifically, I am just back again from a vacation in Amsterdam, and still have a couple of weeks of vacation, which I essentially will spend at home. This is therefore a perfect time for me to do my yearly cleaning period. As usual, this cleaning period involves all aspects of my life: my apartment, my body, my mind, and my habits and visions.

While I could write a lot about all of these things, now I will only talk about one of them: cleaning of the body, and a specific aspect of yoga that this particular cleaning reveals. As per usual, I am doing my body cleaning using something called Shankprakshalana, which is a sanskrit word for a yoga ritual, which means approximately "intestinal cleansing". Intenstinal cleansing means precisely this, one cleans all the inner intestines, and actually even all organs, in the body. How is this done? Using salt water!

Figure 2: The principle of Shankprakshalana: to use physiological salt water to completely empty the whole gastrointestinal tract.



What is Shankprakshalana, and why can it imply resistance? 

I will give a more detailed description and tutorial of how to do Shankprakshalana later, but here is a short overview, so that you can understand my main points. The first and main aspect of Shankprakshalana is to drink physiological salt water, which has the same concentration of salt as the body itself has, implying that the body cannot take up the water. In other words, this water just goes through the entire gastrointestinal tract in a short period of time (with the help of some yoga exercises), and is thereafter excreted as feces. After around 4 liters of such water has been drunk and excreted, the gastrointestinal tract is more or less completely clean: no particles are visible in the feces, and it looks like green water. One then goes on to cleaning other aspects of the body, such as the stomach (by drinking about 1 liter of water which one then trows up), the nose (using a neti pot) and the teeth (using an ordinary tooth brush). All in all, this process takes some 3-6h, and is then followed by some additional excercises, and a strict diet, for ideally 4 weeks thereafter. During this diet, the cleansing of the body also progresses to the rest of the organs, and especially the liver and the kidneys, who can secrete their accumulated toxins, since there are no toxins remaining in the gastrointestinal tract.

Now, the thing that I want to talk to you about is the resistance that many people feel to this exercise. Even if you haven't done this yourself, I guess that you can imagine this: in the beginning of the process one drinks much more water in a short period of time than one has ever done before, and it feels like an unpleasent build-up. This build-up is then released, when the flow out through the rear end has started, but before that - especially the first time - this build up is often felt as a weird and unpleasent feeling. "Do you really want to drink even more water?", you can hear the body saying to you. This feeling is even stronger in the cleaning of the stomach, since one then drinks even more water in a very short period of time (about 1 liter in 2-3 minutes), to fill the stomach up completely, before one throws up. I think that most people can imagine that this process has a psychological unpleasentness to it, especially the first time one does it.

Figure 3: The experience landscape in many tantric rituals as it is before any progress or training has been made. One starts out at a relatively high degree of uncomfort and stress (from the life up until this point), but has to go through an increased feeling of unpleasantness (blue arrow) before the ritual has broken through, and the positive effects are felt (green arrow).


Breaking through resistance is central in tantra, and always worth it

Moving on now to the analysis in this blog post, the first thing I want to say that this unpleasantness is only temporary, and worth it. In other words, although it feels like a weird thing to do, and although it might trigger all sorts of psychological barriers (like a resistance to throwing up), this unpleasant feeling partially goes away after the process has reached its next breakthrough. For instance, once the water has been excreted out of the body for the first time, an immediate release is felt, and one can sense that the body feels a little bit more sure that you know what you are doing, and that the build-up of the water won't go on for ever. More importantly, once the entire process is completed, the resulting final feeling is much much better than it was before the whole thing started, and is - in fact - a quite uniquely wonderful feeling: the after-effects of Shankprakshalana are absolutely amazing, one feels incredibly light, and over the coming days the body becomes increasingly more flexible, food tastes more, one has more energy, etc etc.

The second point I want to raise in this analysis is that this feature - initial resistance leading to a breakthrough and eventually to a better feeling than one has ever felt before - is something that is very central to how yoga and tantra works. In other words, many techniques in tantra follow the general principle of Figure 3, and although it might sound strange to some, Shankprakshalana is still a relatively beginner's exercise. In many of the more advanced techniques, much more deep and profound resistances are triggered, awakening deep unconscious fears and mental patterns. In all of these cases, the best attitude after you have decided that you want to do this ritual is the following: let go and follow the laid-out and carefully tested ritual - which has been tested and refined over millenia -  i.e.just follow the instructions and just focus on what you are doing right now, this very second. Minor modifications can of course be done, but one achieves the best experience by letting go of the fear-projecting mind: this just increases the resistance. In this laid back experiencing-whatever-comes-feeling, one just lets resistances come and go, and trusts that the reason why one feels this resistance is that the body and mind is not used to going to this particular place. In fact, these resistances are often there actively to prevent you from going to these wonderful places. Therefore, once a tantric ritual has been completed a few times, it is almost always the case that this resistance disappears, and that one immediately recognizes the wonderful place that awaits in the end. So for instance now, already when I taste my first sip of salt-water, my body immediately revels in the recognition and expectation of what is to come, and the intestinal tract quickly and effortlessly switches to flushing-through mode, without first resisting the switch to this mode during an unpleasent build-up time (Figure 4).

Figure 4: In response to a deep examination of the mind, or just be doing the ritual a few times, the unpleasant bump that needs to pass becomes significantly less, and may even disappear altogether. In this way, the tantric ritual-based principles can be merged and understood in a common framework together with the now so common principle of "follow the past of least resistance". 


Resistance-breakthrough vs the highest excitement principle

Now we are at last ready for the main thing I wanted to take up in this blog-post: how this ancient tantric principle "breaking through resistance" relates to the today much more commonly heard principles such as "follow your excitement", "follow the path of least resistance", "never follow somebody blindly", etc. 

The first thing I want to say to this is that yoga was developed in a very different time than we live in now, and in a very different mindset. Historically, tantric yoga - especially in traditions like the one I have been trained in - have been taught in a rather strict guru-disciple relationship. These teachings have therefore not been anything that has been mass-produced, and the large yoga classes that we see today are very different compared to the more or less one-on-one teachings of old. Because of this exclusivity, the main focus of the teaching has been to not dilute the depth of the knowledge, and to find only those select few (sometimes only one student in a lifetime) that is ready to carry the knowledge onwards. In other words, there has often been a highly strict "screening process", where the guru first wants to see if the potential student really is ready and willing to do what it takes to internalize and discover and cherish all of the knowledge he/she has to offer, and not just a watered-down, quick-and-dirty version of it. Because of this feature, the presence of a resistance in the middle of a process is not something that has been considered a problem in traditional yoga teaching - on the contrary, it can more or less be considered as a central part of the "screening process". However, the tight guru-disciple setting also implies other central things relating to this issue. For instance, the fact that the teacher is so focused on his one or very few students implies that he also is there to monitor all processes, and to ensure that nothing really has gone wrong - even though the student might experience the current situation as extremely troublesome. Another aspect of this is that the disciple usually considers himself/herself in the hands of the guru, i.e. he/she completely trusts the way that the guru is leading him/her on. All of these are key reasons why it has been completely natural to have intermittent phases of build-up of unpleasantness during a process in the original way of teaching yoga.

Figure 5: Sri Yukteswar (left) and Paramhansa Yogananda (right) provide a good example of the traditional way of teaching yoga. Yogananda lived for many years in the house of Sri Yukteswar, and Sri Yukteswar therefore had full control and oversight of all the phases that Yogananda went through in his yoga development. Yogananda was one of the very few disciples that Sri Yukteswar had, and the only one who is known to have stayed with him for any extended period of time. In contrast, Yogananda himself is an example of a modern-day teacher: he went to the US and started many schools and ashrams and he trained thousands upon thousands of students.


Now, let's put these perspectives in contrast to the current way of teaching, and the common spiritual paths of today. As already mentioned, most yoga teaching today has done the transition from one-on-one, guru-disciple, many-years, 24/7 relationships to yoga teaching in big classes, ranging from 30 minutes to retreats of up to 30 days. The number of people doing yoga has also grown exponentially, perhaps even super-exponentially: when I started doing yoga in the late 80s, yoga was still a quite suspicious thing to do (almost equivalent to being a member of a cult) but now yoga is something that almost everybody at least has tried a little, and generally has a positive attitude towards. This transition was done in just around a decade, say between 98 and 08. Because of this, much of the original depth has been watered down, and today's yoga teachers can have any degree of shallowness of knowledge one can imagine. In parallell to this growth, there has also been a corresponding growth of yoga-independent spiritual teachers, with a new line of teaching. These new teachers range from very down-to-earth self-help coaches and mindfulness teachers to more exotic and imaginative healers and channeled teachings - and everything in between. I am myself highly interested also in these new line of teachers, who - in my view - has helped to bring down and discover new and more up-to-date types of knowledge, that are more appropriate and easy-to-digest for us in our lives today. A very central theme among these new teachings have been to "follow your excitement", "follow your bliss", "follow the path of least resistance", etc. I generally think that these principles - if corrently understood - are utterly important and sound, and that they also bring us insights that I believe have been lost from the yoga traditions. Let us therefore have a closer look at how these principles relate to the ancient yoga principles, and how they can be merged.  


Differences and mergings of the two approaches

First, let us just point out three of the most central apparent differences. (1) it might seem that there is a contrast between the principle of "going through initial resistance and unpleasantness to reach a better place" and "follow the path of least resistance". In other words, it might seem like a person who follows the path of least resistance never would choose to go upstream, as is required in Figure 3. (2) Another important difference is the degree of depth that these different paths go to. The new way of teaching is meant for the masses, and is therefore easy to digest, and applicable for everybody. The old way of teaching has one primary purpose: to not lose the depth of knowledge when moving from one generation to the next. Therefore, the yoga methods go much deeper into its understandings, especially of the human body and what it is capable of, and into the inner realms explored through meditation. To be frank, even though I have a very high degree of respect for several of the new teachers of today and think that they bring invaluable new knowledge to us, their teaching of meditation is extremely shallow in comparison to what I myself have gotten from my yoga training. (3) Another difference concerns the speed of development: yoga rituals can be highly powerful and bring you very far into the depths of your being in a short period of time, whereas "follow your passion" principles are more gradual improvements of your daily life. However, because of this, "follow your passion" and "path of least resistance" developments are - if done correctly - easier to sustain. In a way one can say that yoga-techniques move you to a drastically different place, they through you into the deep water immediately so to say. In that way you can feel what it is like there and see if you can sustain it, by rapidly learning to swim. In most cases one fails, and therefore gradually regresses back to high resistance again, whereafter one needs to do more yoga rituals. Using the same image, the path of least resistance is more like a slow lowering of your body into highly pleasant and perfectly warm water, where you gradually can get used to being there, learning to float and swim in the shallow waters, and then in your own pace move out to the deep waters. This last differences is not so much a matter of right and wrong, but a matter of taste: some people like to go into strong experiences, and feel that they really evolve (at least for a while), and some people like the more soft approach of "go with the flow". However, the best approach - in my view - is to explore how these two approaches can complement each other, and even be merged. 

There are many aspects of such a merging - and in a way, this merging is really to the heart of what my new yoga school is all about - but let us, for now at least, consider this merging in the case of an initial resistance that builds up in a yoga ritual, such as Shankprakshalana. There are a few ways in which such a ritual can be followed, while still working within the principle of following the path of least resistance. The perhaps most central insight in understanding how this can be possible is to realize that the path of least resistance is about doing the thing that feels like the most natural thing to do in the current moment, like the thing you really want to do - like the thing that calls to you the strongest. In other words, to do the thing that - if you would not do it - it would feel like resistance, like holding back. The first question to ask yourself in this situation is therefore if this yoga ritual is something you want to do? A key aspect of this is of course if the end goal of the process - a cleansed body - is a goal that calls to you? If that goals seems appealing, if that feels like the thing you most of all would like to achieve, then you can start to find out about the ritual, and the teacher. How does it work? Is the teacher somebody you feel confidence for? If you feel confident that the ritual and the teacher both seem sound, if they sound like somebody you would like to interact with in this way, then you are already in a good place to be able to do this ritual using the principle of least resistance. Apart from this, there are many other things one can do as well. One of them is to realize that there is a difference between a physical sensation and the thought about that sensation. A physical sensation is what it is - and it in itself is not a determiner of whether you follow the path of least resistance or not. It is the thought about the sensation that determines that. Therefore, if you can change from a thought like "urgh, this feels really weird", to e.g. "this weird feeling is fascinating, I would normally not continue in this direction, but now I am excited to find out what happens if I do - since I believe that it will bring me to a place I really want to be". This separation between impression and thought about impression is also something that is really to the heart of both yoga and new spiritual teachings - it is one of their most obvious meeting places. I therefore want to point out that there are many yoga techniques that allow you to work the changing of perspective in very powerful ways. In other words, ancient yoga techniques can really strengthen and potentiate your ability to walk down the paths outlined by current teachers. In future blog posts, I will write much more about that. 

Figure 6: I have now started the second phase of my body's cleansing process, and this year I have replaced the normal yoga diet with Dr Schulze's herbal cleansing of the liver and kidney's. As you can see, this involves quite a number of supplements, and a crazy amount of oranges and other fruits and vegetables that goes into juices. Fortunately, I am a big fan of freshly squeezed orange juice, so that part suits me just fine! :)

A combination of Shankprakshalana and a modern herbal detox

Here in the end, I just want to give a short outline of how I explore another combination of  ancient yoga techniques and new modern techniques: the merging of Shankprakshalana and the 30 day detox by Dr Schulze. Dr Schulze's 30 day detox is in many ways similar to a yoga ritual: it contains a series of instructions that one should follow over an extended period of time. Similarly, in Dr Schulze's technique, which also cleanses the entire intestinal system and several key organs, it is common to percieve some resistance. When his herbal detox-fluids (which only consists of natural organic herbs and vegetables) cause toxins to flow out of the liver, they enter into the blood stream, before they are excreted. Therefore, one can also here percieve an initial sense of resistance, before the ultimate goal of a vital and enjoyable body is obtained. 

Moving more into detail, Dr Schulze's 30 day detox programme has 4 phases. The first cleans the intestines, the second the liver, the third the kidneys, and in the end one again flushes out the intestines again. Each of these phases take approximately 5-7 days. The new merged version of his detox that I am doing now is to let Shankprakshalana replace the first of these phases. In that way, one gets an even more potent flushing out of all the content present in the intestines than in his original version, and in this way one also gets an even more potent flushing out of the liver and the kidney's compared to when using the normal yoga diet in Shankprakshalana. In phase 4, I will this year try the intestinal cleansing by Dr Schulze, instead of doing (the short version of) Shankprakshalana again, which would be another option. 

This particular combination of yoga and modern techniques is an experiment that I am trying this year for the first time, and I will let you know some more details of how it goes along the way, or at least after it all is finished.  So stay tuned for that too! :)