Prana is the life force-the stuff of those zillion stars circling and exploding. Human beings receive it directly into the body through the air. We take it in in other ways as well, through live foods, freshwater, through living, breathing trees, and vegetation. Yogis discovered the beneath the physical structures of the body and interpenetrating and underlying subtle sphere of reality, which they called the energy body or the pranamayakosha (sheath of vital airs). The very nature of this subtle structure is movement, flow, change.
Yogis found that pranamayakosha to be replete with thousands of invisible channels, or nadis, through which prana flows, energized and sustaining all parts of the physical and energy structure. Nadi system looks much like our circulatory system, or nervous system, but much more dense. The prana body contains seventy-two thousand, detailed descriptions of the nadis was apparently mapped out in deep states of meditation in some ancient text that nadis reach over 300 thousand.
There are fourteen major nadis and just three with which we need to be concerned. All three major nadis originate at the base of the spine and move upward through the body. Two of them, the ida and the pingala, crisscross back and forth as they ascend along the areas of the spinal column find their endpoints in the left nostril (ida) and the right nostril (pingala). The third, the shushumna nadi moves up the spine and splits off into the larynx and the cavity of brahman or the ventricle cavity in the physical body.
Yogis beleieve that this energy body is deeply intelligent, possessing what Chogyan Trungpa Rinpoche called “basic intelligence”.
The major receptor sites for prana in human beings are in the nostrils. More than anything else it is breathing that builds and regulates the flow of prana. The breath has an immediate impact on the flow of prana through the Nadis. The rate, depth, balance, and regularity of the breath directly determine the quality of energy flow into the prana body, which directly shapes the pattern of energy flow that underlies and sustains the physical body.
If we disassociate, become ridged and the breath becomes slow and weak we may start to have panic attacks which are an alarm system that tells us there is a lack of vital energy entering our energy bodies/fields and nothing to run the energy framework of the physical body. We may believe that we die from the disease which is the illusion it is the energy body that becomes deflated and energetically suffocates us in the end.