Stand up and cut yourself into five pieces with four horizontal lines. The first line runs across your knees. The second across your anus. The third through the middle of your heart. The fourth across your eyebrows. That leaves five slabs, and each one gets an element and a sound.1
| Region | Element | Sound |
|---|---|---|
| Feet to knees | earth | Lam (or Lah) |
| Knees to anus | water | Vam (or Vah) |
| Anus to heart | fire | Ram (or Rah) |
| Heart to eyebrows | air | — |
| Eyebrows to crown | space | Yam (or Yah) |
That's the Yoga Yājñavalkya, a dialogue between the sage Yājñavalkya and Gārgī Vācaknavī, the daughter of the sage Vācaknu and herself a well-known expounder of the Vedas.2 It carries some of Patañjali's material and a good deal that isn't Patañjali's, including the energy work.
Prāṇa is the body's live energy — the book uses the Chinese word Qi for the same thing, and nāḍī and "Qi channel" interchangeably for the paths it runs in.3 So this is the whole nyāsa idea at its coarsest: five stations instead of fifty-two, four lines drawn on a standing body.
The method for a slab is the method for any region, run at a larger scale. Take feet to knees. Recite Lam, and "try to feel the vibration within the body throughout that section." If you want a figure to hold, visualise Brahmā there. If you'd rather not, imagine the feet becoming luminous or changing colour.1
Knees to perineum is the water element, with Vam. You may visualise Nārāyaṇa, "the Hindu lion-faced Buddha," or simply imagine that section — or the whole body from the hips down — becoming cool, blue water.1 The fire slab from the anus up through the chest takes Ram, with Rudra as the optional figure, or the region simply turning reddish.4
The head takes Yam, recited from the centre of the brain rather than at the forehead.5 And when you work the head there's an extra instruction that has nothing to do with any of the classical figures: get diffusion tensor imaging pictures of the cranial nerves off the internet and use them to guide where the energy goes.5
The deities are offered and then made optional in every case. What's compulsory in each slab is the same two things — feel the region, and get something in it to move.
Then the last region breaks the pattern, and it is the most interesting move in the chapter:
The last visualization corresponds to space, which means that you let go of any of the feelings you have generated through the prior practices, and let your mind rest empty as if it is boundless space (as if your consciousness is space that accepts everything arising within it without moving or attaching to anything). You don't have to chase away any thoughts but just let go of everything that arises within your mind.5
Four slabs of work, and the fifth is stopping. There's no element to feel, no colour to impose, and nothing to push. The sequence has the closing meditation built into it as its final station rather than appended afterwards.
And the reason given is worth having, because it explains what emptiness practice is supposed to be doing physically: "This is basically detaching from the Qi in one body and then centering yourself in the more subtle Qi of a yet higher body, thus cultivating it. The cultivation of infinite space is actually cultivating the Causal body."5 Letting go isn't a pause in the energy work. It's the energy work at the next level up.
The same text gives a second and finer scheme, and identifies it with something nobody files under nyāsa: pratyāhāra, the withdrawal of the senses, the fifth limb of yoga. The reading offered is that they are the same operation. "Nyasa really means that you withdraw your attention from your external senses and concentrate internally as you draw your Qi from one area to another to open up Qi channels in particular regions of the body. The lists of body parts you find in ancient texts, with attendant mantras, just provide a sequence you can follow."6
The eighteen vital points — marmasthānas — run bottom to top. The big toes, the ankles, the mid-shanks, the root of the calves, the knees, the middle of the thighs, the root of the anus, the centre of the body, the generative organ, the navel, the heart, the neck pit, the root of the palate, the root of the nose, the circular orb of the eyes, the centre of the eyebrows, the forehead, the crown of the head.6 Eighteen stations, every one of them nameable without a chart.
The text's own framing is unusually confident, and it attributes the scheme to the physicians of the gods: "The following pratyahara is the greatest yogic practice and is praised and followed by yogis always. Having drawn the prana from one point to another, holding it in the eighteen vital points is spoken of as pratyahara. The Asvini Kumaras, best among the physicians of the celestials, have spoken thus of the vital points in the body, for the attainment of liberation from yoga."6
The second pratyāhāra is where this stops resembling anything else in the book, and it is the sharpest technique in the chapter:
During the practice of pranayama, the prana must be held by the mind from the big toe to the crown of the head, like a totally filled pot.6
Fill yourself, foot to skull, and hold it there. That's the first move and it's a whole-body act rather than a regional one.
Then you drain it, one station at a time, from the top. Draw the energy from the crown and focus it in the forehead. From the forehead to between the eyebrows. Then the centre of the eyes, the root of the nose, the root of the tongue, the base of the throat, the centre of the heart, the centre of the navel, the generative organ, the abode of fire at the centre of the body, the root of the anus, the mid-thighs, the centre of the knees, the root of the calf, the middle of the shank, the ankle, and finally the big toes of the feet.6
Down, not up. Every other spinal practice in this material sends energy from the perineum toward the head, and this one fills the whole vessel and then walks it back down to the toes.
The promise attached is large. The one who draws the prāṇa from point to point in that manner "will be freed from all bondage and will live as long as the moon and the stars exist." It is praised as the means for the fruition of yoga even by Agastya, and "among the pratyaharas, this one is considered as the best by yogis."6
There's a third variant in the same text and it's the most compact of the three. You inhale into the chest and abdomen, hold the breath, and while holding it concentrate on three places in turn: the navel, the tip of the nose, and the big toes.7
Holding the breath while concentrating somewhere is said to "force open particular Qi channel routes to those areas." That is the stated reason the Yoga Yājñavalkya gets classified as a tantric or kuṇḍalinī text rather than a general yoga manual.7 The mechanism is pressure rather than invitation.
Two things get flagged. Side effects are expected and named — perspiration, trembling, and other sensations, the same ones the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā lists.7 And there's a marker for a session that went well, which is one of the few given anywhere: "One of the best sensations is to feel a lightness in the body because your Qi circulation has become smooth and balanced through this process. This is what you want to feel at the end of all energy work."7
Lightness. That's the sign, and it applies to every method in the book, not just this one.
Of all the sources drawn on here, the Yoga Yājñavalkya carries the most technical weight, and the reason is visible in what it supplies. It gives three schemes at three resolutions — five slabs, eighteen points, and three points held under breath retention — from one text, attributed to one teacher, addressed to one student. Nothing else quoted here does that. The Mātṛkā sequences give one resolution and no rationale. The Mahāvairocana Sūtra gives an alphabet allocation with no procedure attached.
It also supplies the two things the rest of the genre leaves out. There's a direction of travel — down from the crown, station by station — where most sources give an order without saying why it runs that way. And there's a terminal marker in lightness, where most sources leave you to guess whether anything happened.
The frame matters as well. The dialogue is with Gārgī, a woman named as a Vedic expositor in her own right, and the practice is offered without any gate on who may use it. That sits oddly with the surrounding tradition's habit of restricting exactly this material, and the book never remarks on it.
What the case doesn't establish is authenticity. The text is quoted through a single modern translation, no dating is offered, and the identification of pratyāhāra with nyāsa is this book's reading rather than the text's own claim.
Start with the five slabs, because you can hold them without a list. Sit and take feet to knees. Say Lam several times from inside that slab and try to feel a vibration through the whole of it, not at a point in it. If a picture helps, let the region go luminous.1 Then knees to anus with Vam, and let it go cool and blue. Then anus to heart with Ram, and let it warm and redden.4 Then the head with Yam, said from the middle of the brain rather than the forehead.5
Then do the fifth slab properly, which means doing nothing. Drop everything you've generated and sit with the mind open, not chasing thoughts and not clearing them.5 That station is the practice, not the cool-down.
On another day, run the pot. Breathe in, and hold the energy from your big toes to the crown all at once, like a filled vessel.6 Then walk it down: crown, forehead, brow, eyes, root of the nose, root of the tongue, throat, heart, navel, genitals, centre of the body, root of the anus, mid-thigh, knee, calf, shank, ankle, big toes. One station at a time, and don't rush the descent.
Expect to sweat or shake a little.7 What you're after at the end is lightness — the body feeling smooth and evenly supplied rather than charged in patches.7 If that's absent, the smoothing step didn't happen and the session isn't finished.
Strongest support. The three schemes are internally consistent and come from one named text with a named translator, which is more than most of this book offers. The descending sequence and the lightness marker are both specific enough to follow and to check.
The central tension. The eighteen-point sequence runs downward from the crown to the toes, and almost everything else in the book runs upward from the perineum. Both are presented as correct without comment. Follow one and you spend your sessions raising energy toward the head; follow the other and you spend them draining it to the feet, and nothing says when a practitioner should do which.
A second tension. The deities are optional in every slab, and are offered anyway in every slab. A reader is told that Brahmā, Nārāyaṇa and Rudra may be visualised and that changing the region's colour does the same job — which leaves the figures with no stated function beyond preference.
Source notes. 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY — the Yoga Yājñavalkya is quoted only through one modern translation, with no dating or manuscript discussion. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE for the identification of nyāsa with pratyāhāra, which is this book's reading rather than the text's claim. [POPULAR SOURCE].
Absence note. Drawn from printed pages 84–89 and 114–117. Nothing here claims what the book says elsewhere.
Open questions. Does the downward sequence appear in the text as an alternative to the upward one, or as the only one — and if the latter, where does the upward emphasis in the rest of this book come from? And is "lightness" a marker anyone else in this literature names?
Two ideas about how coarse a map should be sit next to each other here and produce different practices. The five-slab scheme is the coarsest map anywhere in this material. Four lines, five regions, and one of them isn't even worked. A practitioner running it has almost nothing to hold and nowhere small enough to get stuck on.
The eighteen-point scheme is from the same text, the same teacher, the same conversation — and it's four times finer, with a fixed order and a specific direction. A practitioner running that has a long list and a lot of places to fixate.
The book uses both without preferring either, which is the same permissive stance it takes toward the correspondences. What's missing is the criterion. Three Elixir Fields Beat Seven Chakras argues from the other side that a coarse map is better teaching precisely because named locations collect attachments, and if that's right then the five slabs aren't a simplified version of the eighteen points but a better instrument. Nobody makes that argument here.
There's a convergence with Asanas Cannot Open the Central Channel that's worth naming as a collision instead. That page has nothing physical igniting the rotation. The breath-retention variant here says the opposite in plain terms — holding the breath while concentrating on the navel, nose and toes "will force open particular Qi channel routes to those areas."7 Forcing is exactly what the other account rules out.
Felt Sense and Somatic Awareness describes attending to the inside of the body as sensation rather than as an idea about the body. The literature on it is consistent about one thing beginners get wrong: starting small. Asked to feel a single joint, most people report nothing and conclude there's nothing to feel. Asked to feel the whole body at once, the same people usually get something immediately — a vague, unlocalised sense of occupancy that's easier to catch than any single part.
The pot sequence is built the way that finding would recommend, and no other practice in this book is. You fill the whole vessel first, toes to crown, and only then work stations. Every other route here does the reverse: it works parts for an hour and hopes a whole-body sense assembles itself at the end.
What the pairing gives that neither side supplies alone is a reason the descent might be doing something the ascent can't. Going down from the crown means each station is subtracted from a whole you're already holding, so the reference stays global while the attention narrows. Going up from the perineum means each station is added to nothing, so the reference is local the whole way and the global sense has to be manufactured at the end. The second is harder, and it's the one everybody teaches.
It also explains why the lightness marker sits at the end of the pot practice rather than in the middle. A smooth, evenly supplied body is a global perception by definition. You can't detect it while your attention is parked on a kneecap, which means the marker and the part-work can't be run at the same time.
One handshake. A second candidate — DTI scans replacing a chakra diagram — is its own page.
Sharpest implication. One text, one teacher, one conversation, and three incompatible resolutions of the same body — five regions, eighteen points, three points. If those were competing claims about anatomy they couldn't all be right. As routes, they can be, and the text's willingness to hold all three is quiet evidence for the deflationary reading of what a route is.
Generative questions.