Last week my yoga teacher started using the phrase, “Inner body bright.” She said the first time her own teacher used this phrase, something clicked. Up until that point, her yoga practice had been purely physical, but once she heard this phrase, she became aware of her energetic body. She could feel her own prana.

I’ve been aware of my own energetic body for about a decade. I first started to feel it in sivasana, this is the pose at the end of a yoga class, corpse pose, where you lie on the floor as if dead. I would feel the energy, bright from the yoga class, pulsing in my fingertips. At first, I thought it was blood circulation, but the longer I lay there, the clearer it became that it was not the physical body. For the body would calm, and the energy remained bright.

In the midst of a yoga class, the instruction “inner body bright” means to use the bandhas. The bandhas are energy locks—like a lock in a dam, not a lock with a key. A brilliant overview of the bandhas and their role in achieving illuminated self-awareness is available here. The pelvic floor is one such lock (mula bandha) and the lower abdomen another (uddiyana bandha). These are the ones that I typically remember to use in practice. In fact, I had a teacher in Gainesville who would yell at me from across the room “Less uddiyana bandha, Ann!” With time, I realized that I had started to contract my abdomen all of the time. I think it might be because I am short, and when I have to reach for things I am always leaning up against things. Or maybe it is how fitted women’s clothes are. I don’t know the reason. But for years I contracted the belly unnecessarily. Yoga helps us to become aware of such unhealthy patterns. Meditation also helps; while in yoga we firm the stomach, in meditation we cultivate a soft belly, to have full access to our body’s wisdom. Finally, the third bandha is in the throat – jalandhara bandha. Despite my almost obsessive relationship with my throat energetically, I haven’t really experimented much with this bandha.

Lately I have been tuning in to the energetic body a lot during my meditations. I have come to trust it for direction and wisdom. Starting in the fall of 2018, I used to meditate often on a situation that I was in, and I would often experience a bright light. This felt like it was coming more from the bliss body, than the energetic body (yoga recognizes five bodies…). More recently, though, I feel direction coming to me from my energetic body.

I ask my body regularly what to do about various complicated situations. If you would like a guided meditation to help with this, I recommend this one. Sometimes when I consider one of my options, everything in me contracts and my energy goes flat. The body, physical and energetic, says “No.” When I meditate on other paths of action, sometimes everything in me brightens. Energy goes to my mouth and circles my lips, there is a fullness that feels like nourishment. My interior world opens up. My mind is driven by curiosity and delight, not by obligation or fear. I have new ideas, I write better, I get a whim of something to do for someone else. I am seated in the Self. I have access to the flow. I hear a “yes.”

Usually, whatever I hear in meditation is confirmed externally. I am in a situation now that often causes me to lose heart. At those times, external signs tend to increase. A few nights ago I was having one of the low energy days, and I took my puppy Riley for a walk in the pitch black. Halfway around the block, I heard geese. I started looking for them in the cloudy sky, not sure if I would get a glimpse or not. Light from below was reflecting off of the clouds, and there, high in the sky, a flock of geese unlike any I have ever seen, black against grey clouds. We have all seen large flocks of fifty or one hundred geese flying together. But this was other-worldly, hundreds and hundreds of geese, a flock so large it filled the entire sky, flying directly above me. It was still in the famous V-shaped pattern, but there were so many of them that the shape filled out and looked more like a triangle. I have never seen anything so majestic in my life. I stood still, looking up at the night sky. Even Riley knew not to pull on the leash; she sat quietly. I could still hear them at the end of the walk, as we approached the house. Experiences like these don’t really have content; they don’t tell you what to do. But they strengthen the will to keep going, and remind you that you are supported by something or someone.

My advice to readers is this: Be wise, and be very alert. Be certain you are on the right path. Open yourself to what you are hearing. If you feel confirmed, then continue on the path you have chosen. But if your heart is divided or your energy flat, make space and time to open to the wisdom of the body. Sit with every emotion regardless of how complicated or inconvenient it is.

Whatever you do, move in such a way that your inner body is bright, and your vitality is evident for all to see. Then you know that you are on the right path.