An Unquiet Mind

There are some truths you fig­ure out your­self with­out need­ing to study them elsewhere.

I learnt a bit of yoga when I was a child, and while doing pranayama, learnt that the left nos­tril leads to the right part of the brain and vice versa.

Some years later, I bought the book Whole Brain Think­ing, and dis­cov­ered the indi­vid­ual strengths (or shall we say per­son­al­ity traits?) of the left and right hemi­spheres of the brain. (For an excel­lent sum­mary of what whole brain think­ing is all about, see this arti­cle by John Adams)

Well, con­nect­ing the dots, I deduced the fol­low­ing principle:

When one is breath­ing through the left nos­tril, the right brain is active, and vice versa.

I decided to put this to the test and here’s what I found:

1. Yoga’s ancient adage about the nos­trils con­nect­ing to the other side of the brain has been proven by sci­ence.
2. My hypothe­ses is held up both by yoga and what’s now called ‘alter­na­tive’ med­i­cine or ther­a­pies.

I’ve tested this hypothe­ses of mine prac­ti­cally sev­eral times, and it turns out to be true with­out fail. What I have not been able to achieve is what the yogis preach: change the dom­i­nant nos­tril at the first sign of any phys­i­cal or men­tal dis­tur­bance. When­ever I try that, not only do I not suc­ceed, I get more frus­trated and upset!

A few asides:

- Spir­i­tual comes from the word Spir­i­tus, which means breath in Latin
– In the movie Out of Africa, Denys Finch Hat­ton (Robert Red­ford) bemoans how the foot has never been appre­ci­ated by the poets. I think the same is true about the nos­trils. Con­sider this: Each day, the nose cleans about 10,000 litres of air, which has to be fil­tered and air-conditioned, to the, um, taste of the lungs — 80% humid­ity and 35 degrees Centi­grade. It is no mean feat!

By the way, this is finally my 100th post. A very grate­ful thanks to all my read­ers — here’s some cel­e­bra­tion to go along with it!

Related posts:

1. Yawn­ing to Compliment
2. Dreams of An Unquiet Mind
3. iNTj — Ratio­nal Mastermind
4. Clas­si­fy­ing a Blog’s Writ­ing Style