Dr. Alok Kanojia

So we call this stuff divine.

I'm not saying it's divine.

I'm not saying it comes from God.

I'm saying that the subjective experience is qualitatively fundamentally different from like a regular logical experience.

So this is a state of mind that is even beyond emotion.

It's in the edit mode.

In scattered mind, emotion brings us down to some amount of focus, but then there's even a level of focus that's deeper.

That's where the rewriting comes in.

And then when you implant something there, that's what a sankalpa is.

So when you do yoga nidra, the physiologic element – so this is what's like not bad but is a necessary step with where we are with science.

All the weird mystical stuff I think is real.

But –

We have to start with the basic science, right?

So the way that science works is we start with, okay, let's look at cortisol production, and then let's look at what happens next, and let's look at what happens next, and let's look at what happens next.

So yoga nidra, whether you're talking about cardiac coherence breathing, so there's the first stage of what we call nadi shuddhi pranayama, which is alternate nostril breathing.

But then there's a text called...

Vashishta Samhita, which talks about a particular kind of cardiac coherence breathing with a ratio of 1 to 4 to 8.

So you breathe in for 8 seconds.

Actually, you breathe in for 16 seconds.

You hold for 64 seconds.