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Pranām Swāmījī, Hari Om, brothers and sisters. I was given the task to say something nice, so I will try my best. In truth, there are so many beautiful things on our Yoga path that it is not easy to choose which part to talk about. I was recently reminded during a consultation with a guru-sister. She was facing some problems in life, and we agreed that our life is truly special—not just my life or her life individually, but our lives together, your life and our life. It is quite special. As I observe others, life often seems like a difficult boxing match: you get punched and you fall down. You hope to stand up and continue, only to receive another punch from life. You are down again. This is normal life. All of us, I think, have received these punches. Yet we have a fantastic, great blessing. We receive an infusion, time and again, from Gurudev, from the paramparā, and from the Yoga in Life system. This allows us to get up quite quickly and easily. Perhaps after a while, we can even learn how not to receive those punches at all. I do not know how this great fortune came to us—that we met the real source of light and knowledge. It is truly something incredible, a blessing. For our development, we receive clear vision and purity. And for our life, we periodically receive a recharging of our batteries. When you are down, you truly need some infusion to rise and continue. It is not easy, of course, but it is a great fortune—ale je to naše velké štěstí—that you receive the blessing from the rain. Máte požehnání deště, good for you. (Sorry for that.) One of the sources from which we gain this clarity and energy—jeden ze zdrojů—is the breathing exercise, Prāṇāyāma. I think we can agree that most of us practice āsanas, mantra, and meditation. We also practice Yoga Nidrā, of course. But Prāṇāyāma is somehow… when I have time, okay, I do some Prāṇāyāma. So it is not our direct, constant helper, but we do it from time to time. Yet, we could utilize it much more. Recently, I was asked to give a lecture on Prāṇāyāma in Hungary for psychologists, my colleagues. I began to think about what to tell them. They were really waiting for it. I started to collect various points in my mind, and I would like to share some of them with you now. One point came from my own experience about a year and a half ago. I was having trouble sleeping at night. In my body, especially the hip joints and shoulders, there was… okay, not my karma. So, quickly—they say, "Speed up, boy"—I couldn’t sleep well. I have techniques to fix my sleep, but in this case, nothing worked. I tried melatonin, tryptophan, herbal teas, bilateral techniques, ensuring complete darkness—everything. Nothing helped. I couldn’t figure out what was happening. Then I checked my nostrils. I realized that throughout the entire night, my left nostril was more or less blocked, and my right nostril was constantly open. Why did this happen? I’ll tell you the solution quickly. I had problems with inflammation in my hips, especially on the right side, which was very painful. It was unpleasant to turn and sleep on my right side; the left side was a bit better. So I constantly slept either on my back or on my left side. You may have already guessed. This is the science we learn from Viśva Gurujī, from the paramparā, from Yoga—it is Svara Yoga. When I slept on my left side, I blocked my left armpit, which meant the right nostril (the active, solar nāḍī) was constantly open. I was perpetually in the active, sun nāḍī. When I realized this, I forced myself to find a solution for my right side and began sleeping on that side from time to time. Everything was solved. I also asked some patients with sleep problems to try changing their sleeping position in this way. Immediately, their sleep was fixed. This demonstrates the power of this knowledge—how to play with energies in your own body—that comes from Yoga and our paramparā. It is incredible knowledge, and we do not fully know how much it works. Another topic from my practice and consultations is panic attacks and panic disorder itself. In panic, certain factors must be considered. One is that panic often starts when your energy level is low. This ongoing fatigue and tiredness in your life can trigger panic if you have a genetic sensitivity to it. A low level of energy is a direct cause of panic attacks. But at a deeper background level, it is also our own material. It is the experience of loss—losing something important to you psychologically. You might lose your job and feel insecure. Someone important to you dies, causing emotional loss and pain. You can lose many things. Ultimately, the real cause is loss, and your identity is connected to that person, money, or object. That is the problem. You feel you cannot exist without it. It is "me and mine" again. This is the real topic of Yoga: how to establish your true identity, how to create a stable personality and a strong mind. Of course, we are kind and helpful to others, but we are not attached to them, to money, or to things. Otherwise, losing them creates an internal earthquake; you are shaken from within. These are the layers. For us, the Yoga in Life technique of self-inquiry meditation is one of the strongest tools to make you clear and strong from within. So we come to our technique of self-inquiry. This is one method to approach panic. The other is that panic is triggered by a lack of energy. However, the actual experience of panic comes from the breath process. Just a few years ago, a paper was published in the prestigious journal Science. It described how researchers found specific cells in the brainstem, part of the center that controls breathing. These cells send information to your cortex, the upper part of your brain. They deliver a message: if everything is settled and calm in the breathing process, or if there is stress. As Vivek Purījī said the other day, when you have a stress-type breathing pattern—clavicular breathing, which is very short and uses only the upper part of the lungs—your brainstem sends information upward that something is not good at all. We are in trouble. The body must either fight or flee. Your entire body receives the signal from top to bottom to be ready to run. The problem with panic is that when this message goes from the brainstem to the body, you immediately feel a sensation of suffocation: no breath, no oxygen. Essentially, a panic attack is based on an imitation of suffocation. It is an exaggerated reaction where the body even seems to stop the breath. Again, if you do not have a strong mind and a strong inner structure, this message to your body causes you to worry even more. It becomes double trouble. Not only are you in trouble, but your body is now afraid of having no oxygen. This whole process starts, spiraling upside down, and suddenly you have all these problems. So, when you are in this situation experiencing a panic attack, you naturally have physical sensations. How can we handle it? As we might expect, we take the most basic element of Prāṇāyāma: the full Yoga breath. A slow, deep breath, especially into the abdomen, immediately sends information to your breathing center that everything is okay. That center then sends information upward that everything is okay, and this signal spreads to the whole brain. With such a simple tool as conscious breathing, you can become okay. All that we have in our hands as Prāṇāyāma is such a powerful tool for everyday life, even against certain illnesses. May I continue, Swāmījī? Yes, okay. I do not want to steal the whole evening. I will do my job, and Swāmījī will do his. How is it with the rain? I told you at the beginning that for spiritual progress, we essentially need two very important things: clarity and energy. Without these, we are more or less lost. With Prāṇāyāma, both are in our hands. One thing we can do to release our tensions is not only full Yoga breaths and special Prāṇāyāmas. The breathing process is like a roll, a kind of tube. When we inhale, part of the trunk expands; on exhalation, it contracts. It can be abdominal breath, chest breath, or even higher clavicular breath. This roll expands and contracts. But this tube also has a bottom, which is very important. This bottom part is our pelvic floor muscles. These muscles are crucial not only for their direct functions but also for creating sound. Without a strong pelvic diaphragm, you cannot create a proper, strong sound. If they are not strong enough, you can even develop a hernia in that area. For our breath, these parts are very important because, from the knowledge of the cakras, we know these areas can be full of tension. These muscles are important for initiating action. This is not a problem in general, but for most of us living hectic daily routines, the problem is that we contract these muscles (which is a kind of bandha from Yoga) to get energy and start acting. But when we stop, these muscles often remain contracted. They become a storehouse for our stress. In yogic knowledge, it is well known that they store not only current stress but stress from previous lives. We work with the breath in the stomach, abdominal area, and upper trunk. But how can we go deep in meditation or in Prāṇāyāma? When you go deep into Prāṇāyāma, you also handle these lower parts, the diaphragmatic and pelvic muscles. So, when practicing the breathing process, try to check how deep your breath goes. Not the volume of air, but the anatomical depth—how deep you can release and feel it. If you are taking a truly deep breath, you can feel an expansion there upon inhalation and a gentle release and contraction upon exhalation. This is key not only for deep Prāṇāyāma and deep relaxation for meditation but also for retraining your brain that, actually, there is no problem; you are quite all right in your skin. With this tool, which is simple, up-to-date, and always with us, we can release our basic tensions from deep within the body and psyche. Thanks to this simple technique, you learn to release those deep tensions. So, try it the next day, or even today. Experiment with it. When we try to relax these parts, they respond quite quickly. Here in Střílka, together with Gurudev, it is a little tricky because we are in an ocean of spiritual energy. In this energy, your energy level is quite high. It means not only that you do not have panic, but you are generally relaxed. Often, you do not feel tensions when you are here. But when you go home in a week, you will see. However, you now have the tool. Try to experiment and play with it a little. It is really good. When you do Prāṇāyāma, observe how deep it can go and how much you can release your tensions. Then you can utilize this throughout the day. This is the richness we have and have received through Yoga and Yoga in Life. It is truly incredible and indescribable. The techniques are quite nice and effective. But I often ask people who mention they practice yoga, "What type of yoga do you practice, and where do you go?" Often, it is a Western type of yoga, which is more or less aerobic. It is not really Yoga anymore. Even the names of the āsanas are changed; it is not Sumeru āsana but "Downward Dog" or "Down Dog." They do not use the traditional names. It is something different from what we actually have. Of course, techniques work to some extent. But such depth and clarity can only be gained through a source of spiritual knowledge and energy, which we have here. This energy we can utilize is quite wonderful. From time to time, we recharge our batteries. Whenever we can, we come to Gurudev for darśan, bathing ourselves in this great blessing and energy. The other part is that we receive not only techniques and energy but also a blessing. By regularly attending our weekend seminars, weekly seminars, summer programs, or trips to India, we receive the blessing of Knowledge for life and spirituality from Gurudev. This is not only about techniques and energy. By coming to our programs, satsaṅgas, or to India, we receive endless blessings and the blessing of wisdom, which we then bring into our lives. This is the true source of the clarity we need to progress. This clarity is the source of inner certainty and purity. I have had some interesting impressions about how this clarity works in the brain. In my consultations with patients, I realize that one of the most important issues is that people often lack proper, well-functioning self-boundaries. In psychology, this is called self-boundaries or inner limitation. In short, it means you are not fully aware of your identity and where your borders are. This is not inherently bad, but for a healthy personality, you need to know your boundaries. They should be flexible, but you should know how much you let others use you—your time, energy, emotions, money—and how much you do not. It depends on us what we allow others to do with us. Unfortunately, we learn this very early in childhood, and parents pass on their karmas. Our self-boundaries often are not clean, flexible, or strong enough. This is the problem. Then, someone who knows psychology, a tricky person, can catch us quite quickly and easily. Psychological tricks can reach us very fast because our system works automatically, automatically coloring reality. We see your reality and my reality; they can be quite different. Someone sees a frog and thinks, "Wow, a frog, so nice! Life is here, we are in nature." Another person sees the same frog and thinks, "My God, a frog!" This is our inner, automatic reality. Our responses are generally automatic in life. When you can clear this automatism—which involves areas like the frontal lobe and the insula in the brain—then you begin to see outer reality as it is. I remember one of Swāmījī’s lectures about a certain center, a cakra, that has immense power and should be clear. It is also called the third eye, not in an esoteric or mystical sense, but as something for intuition, understanding, something truly human within us. When you clean it step by step and see outer reality clearly, that clarity of vision becomes yours. Gurudev also explained that this center has two parts: one facing outward and one facing inward. At least by cleaning one part, our life improves significantly, jumping to a much higher level of quality. What is the tool for this, for us? It is self-inquiry meditation. It has eight parts. The parts after the first, second, and third deal with what you like and what you dislike—rāga and dveṣa: what you are attracted to and what you try to avoid. Through this type of self-inquiry and self-reflection, you can step by step learn to observe your thoughts, your inner qualities, and your inner patterns. Ultimately, you truly become an observer from this point. You become much more objective and realistic than before, when you were caught in the net of your imagination, automatisms, and past patterns. This is a big jump, a high jump in the quality of your life. So, again, this is the richness we have in our system and on our Yoga path. In a special way, I utilize this in my consultations. To deeply release these automatisms and problems with self-boundaries, I often use meditation with my patients. I am always admiring and amazed at what can be accomplished through this method. It is essentially about connecting to the source—the source of knowledge and energy—and inside, you can ask for help to release your tensions. And it happens. Thank you. Thank you. Mbakoana k’iche’au.