Tag Archives: Yoga

The Five Tibetans by Christopher S. Kilham

The book I’m going to recommend in this post borders slightly on the esoteric, so if you don’t believe that you can find benefit and value from things of this nature, I would recommend that you do not continue to read this article, because if you don’t believe that those things are possible, then you aren’t likely to receive any benefit.

If you are of the mind that there is always something useful to be found in most anything, read on. 

The book I’d like to bring to your attention in this post is called The Five Tibetans, by Christopher S. Kilham. These are five simple exercises to learn and to do. The book itself is rather slim, but at just over eighty pages, it is absolutely packed with these simple yet ancient exercises that can help you whatever you esoteric or spiritual orientation.

The book covers five exercises called, of course, The Five Tibetans, or sometimes as the Five Rites as they are sometimes called. The story goes that a retired British army officer “discovered” them from the local Tibetans in the early twentieth century. How long they’ve been practiced before that is anybody’s guess.

Christopher S. Kilham is an accomplished teacher of yoga, meditation, and natural healing. He has traveled extensively giving talks on television, the radio, and in front of live audiences.

The first five chapters of Kilham’s concise work is an overview of the background of the Tibetan exercises. He also includes a brief but extremely comprehensive overview of energy, and the relation to the body and the mind. He also discusses Kundalini energy, and how it relates to breathing.

The sixth chapter gives and overview of each Tibetan, with easy to follow photographs. Chapter seven gives you the basics of when and where to practice, and discusses matters of importance such as clothing, time of day, what to wear, etc.

It is the eighth chapter that I personally found the most rewarding and insightful. In this he talks about Yoganidra, which is the control of all the energies that are flowing through the body. Another name for this is yogic sleep. Here he teaches you how to calm the mind and reach states of relaxation so deep that you can start to control body functions that are thought to be wholly unconscious, like your heartbeat, and brain waves. That these advanced techniques were put in after the main exercises, almost as an afterthought is a testament to the absolute power of these simple but profound practices.

The ninth and final chapter is a fascinating introduction to Kundalini energy and Kundalini meditation. Both chapters eight and nine are worth the price of the book in their own rite.

He tells you to start off slowly, doing only one iteration of each exercise, and increase gradually. Similar to beginning a running or weight lifting program. The most iterations he recommends is twenty one of each exercise. That is only one hundred and five repetitions, so they will take you only a few minutes.

If you don’t believe anything about controlling brain waves, or Kundalini meditation, that’s ok. By doing these exercises simply for the physical benefits you will reap the fantastic rewards of better flexibility, improved circulation and digestion, and even deeper sleep every night. You don’t need to buy any equipment, or pay any gym membership dues. These exercises are truly one of the economically efficient and metaphysically profound I’ve ever run across.  When you realize how much you will easily improve yourself after doing these exercises for only a few short weeks, you’ll wonder why you hadn’t discovered them earlier. Go on over to Amazon, and have a look. You won’t be disappointed.

 

 

 

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