Just here to promote yoga, which besides being a full body workout, grants the practitioner the ability to identify weak links through the flow of prana/inner breath.
While Yoga may be a great way to improve flexibility, among other physical benefits, prana is no more than a quack belief if I were to be generous. Unless you're thinking of something remotely testable/measurable/not rooted in a religious philosophy/not tied to breatharianism
Disclaimer: I have no experience with the specific field mentioned here.
I do think these seemingly absurd images have tremendous value for learning.
The openly visible motions and postures are easy to teach. But there is more to movement and the feeling of ones own body that that.
As I see it at the moment, these images are shortcuts coded in emotion and in-body-experience-feelings to teach the things that are very hard to teach otherwise.
The way eg Ki is described does make it sound extremely unlikely to actually exist, but using the images while moving or just breathing is quite powerful, and one can become aware of things inside the body that are not obvious.
(One can often clearly see and feel the difference when someone does or does not do this (during the actions that need them).)
I can highly recommend to try.
edit:
Thinking of examples, the exact tilt of my hip for whatever use is best controlled by emotion. I have control about muscles in my lower body area (?) that do things to the way my body moves and reacts, this works almost exclusively over images and emotion. My posture is subtly different when I use emotion/images to work on it. I can use a lot more force when the images are right (the whole body is used, no joints at a bad angle etc, things that are very hard to do consciously.) Things like this.
It's a mistake to limit your own understanding the universe to what can be measured by science, while surrounded by perceivable phenomena that science can't explain.
It's at the very least arrogant to reject wholesale the common experience of millions of practitioners over thousands of years. Yoga is not dogmatic. Try it and see for yourself.
As for my specific claim, science has neither proven nor disproven the perception of prana, though you might consider that it has been described in many unconnected sources across the written record of history.
Again, I disagree. It's arrogant to say "Hey, X thing I believe in can cure you of Y disease because so many people think it can and you're just ignorant. Nevermind the fact that it's totally untestable or perferms equally to placebo, as long as you feel better it's working!". It's pretty not arrogant to say "Hey, you have a condition that science has at best a limited understanding of, but it might work based on the clinical trials and controlled studies that have been done. It's the best we have to go on, or you could pray."
I think you also mistake "understanding of the universe" for a perceived experience. Just because you did mushrooms at Shambala once doesn't give you a better understanding of anything except maybe why you made some stupid choices in the past.
The tradition of yoga is far more than exercise. Many parts of it, including the exercise, deep breathing, and meditation, are indeed testable and outperform placebo.
Your concept of self is something that certainly happens but is largely outside the realm of science.
Doing mushrooms certainly might impart an understand of, at the very least, the experience of being high on mushrooms. Or perhaps which parts of your perception are merely the reflection of a specific neurochemical balance.
Thousands of practitioners and millions of users also believe in the efficacy of Homeopathy. They are convinced that diluting a substance actually increases its potency! It's not very difficult to find examples of millions of people believing in nonsense. The Placebo effect is very real.
Science hasn't disproven the existence of Invisible Pink Unicorns either. But I definitely would hold off on building unicorn crossings untill we actually have evidence.
Deep intentional diaphragmatic breathing is developed through a sub-practice of yoga known as pranayama. We know now through experiment that this practice can calm the mind, destress the practitioner, and oxygenate the blood.Pranayama is said to elongate and clarify the breath.
Symptoms of underdeveloped breath include a scattered mind, trembling of the extremities, and shallow or ragged breathing. See as a primer clavicle breathing [0] vs diaphragmatic breathing [1].
You may find that deep breathing requires a specific orientation of the body. Yoga postures are in part designed to facilitate deep breathing. You may observe that your body automatically adjusts when attempting deep breaths. These adjustments _tend_ to be the same movements that encourage good posture and correct imbalances.
With much practice it becomes clear that the body is deeply and mysteriously connected to itself and to the breath in non-obvious ways. So flexing your foot or rotating your ankle may have a direct effect on the breath. Releasing the soft palette or raising the eyebrows may align the lower back. It's along these lines of connectivity that prana flows. Yoga is the process of removing the internal blockages that allow this perception, and this internal chain-reaction-like connectivity.
Turns out that deep breathing more or less requires good posture. You can fix your posture via deep breathing, and you can fix your breathing through correct posture. If you have a handle on one, you have a handle on the other.
When the breath does not flow easily, you will learn to identify the error of posture causing the blockage, and will through asana practice have the awareness and strength to correct it yourself.
