Breath

Knowing the Flow

The first skill of the science: how to detect which nostril is carrying the breath — by touch, by sound, by the mirror — how the flow alternates through the day and the fortnight, and the classical methods for changing it: posture, the crutch, closure, food.

Everything this literature promises — the right hour for an act, the answer to a question, the reading of a journey — rests on one prior skill that takes a minute to learn and a season to make reliable: knowing, at any moment and without instruments, which nostril is carrying the breath. This page is about that skill, and about its lesser-known twin — the art of changing the flow when the moment demands a current the body is not giving.

What the skill is forप्रयोजन

The doctrine is set out on the science of breath: the two currents alternate through roughly hour-long turns, the lunar fortnight fixes which should be running at sunrise, and every undertaking in the catalogue of acts is keyed to one current or the other. None of that doctrine is usable by a person who cannot answer the plain question — left or right, now? — quickly, discreetly and correctly. The Śiva Svarodaya accordingly treats observation as the practice itself, not as a preliminary to it: the direction to watch the svara from the hour before dawn is one of the few instructions in the text addressed to every single day of the practitioner's life.

Two further uses follow from the first. The trained observer acquires a private clock — the turning of the current marks the hours as surely as a bell, and the finer elemental reading marks the minutes within them. And the observation is diagnostic: a flow that will not turn is the tradition's early-warning sign, taken up on the breath and vitality.

Detecting the flowस्वर-परीक्षा

The tests are deliberately humble. They need no apparatus a household does not contain, and most need none at all. In practice they are used in convergence — two tests agreeing settle the matter; one alone can mislead when the nostrils are near their turning.

Touchस्पर्श: The back of the hand, or a moistened finger, held below the nostrils. The flowing side delivers a plainly stronger stream; the skin feels it at once, and a moistened surface feels it sooner. This is the everyday test, usable in company without being seen to test anything.
Closureनिरोध: Close each nostril in turn with a finger and breathe through the other. The open, flowing side breathes freely; the closed one drags. Slower than touch but harder to mistake, and the standard tie-breaker when touch is ambiguous.
Soundश्रवण: In a quiet room the flowing nostril is audibly the louder, especially on the exhalation. Practitioners learn to hear their own svara at night without raising a hand — useful, since several of the regimen rules concern the breath at waking.
The mirrorदर्पण: Breathe gently onto glass or polished metal held level under the nose: the larger patch of condensation stands under the flowing nostril. The same instrument, read more finely for the shape of the patch, serves the elemental diagnosis — that use belongs to the tattvas in the breath.

When no test finds a clear winner — both sides even, the stream faint and central — the tradition does not call that a failed reading. It is the reading: the breath is in suṣumṇā, the middle state, and the practical instruction attached to it is given under the catalogue of acts. The Śiva Svarodaya's own tie-breaker for a genuinely doubtful case, the falling flower, is described with the doctrine on the science of breath.

The rhythm the observer expectsचक्र

Observation is checked against expectation. The current turns over roughly each hour through the day and night, and the lunar calendar fixes which side ought to open the day: the left from the first day of the bright fortnight, the right from the first of the dark, in alternating three-day runs — the full tables, with the weekday preferences and what a persistent reversal signifies, are set out on the science of breath and are not repeated here. What belongs to this page is the habit built on them. The working practitioner checks the svara at fixed stations — on waking, before eating, before leaving the house, before any undertaking of weight — and notes whether what is found matches what the fortnight predicts. Agreement needs no action. Disagreement is information, and sometimes a summons to act.

Changing the flowस्वर-परिवर्तन

The tradition is not fatalist about the breath. If the hour's current is wrong for what must be done, the svarodaya literature teaches that the flow can be turned at will, and it preserves a small kit of methods for turning it. The common principle behind the physical ones is pressure at the armpit: compressing one side of the body opens the opposite nostril, so every method below names the side to be pressed, which is always the side already flowing.

The received methods for changing the svara, as the svarodaya literature and its modern expositors transmit them.
Method	How it is done	Character
Lying on the side	Lie on the side of the flowing nostril — on the left to raise the right svara, on the right to raise the left — and remain some minutes. A pillow or the folded arm pressed into the armpit quickens it.	The gentlest and the commonest; also the reason for the sleeping-side rules on vitality.
The yogadaṇḍa	The T-shaped crutch the ascetic keeps at hand: its bar is set into the armpit of the flowing side and the body's weight leaned quietly upon it. The svara turns while the practitioner goes on sitting upright, which is the point of the instrument.	The renunciate's method — it changes the breath without changing the posture of practice.
Closure of the nostril	The flowing nostril is closed — pressed shut with a finger, or stopped with a plug of cotton — and the breath made to work through the other until it runs there of its own accord.	Direct and quick; the plug allows the change to be held while the hands are free.
Forced breathing	Deliberate, repeated breaths drawn through the closed or weaker side alone, till it opens.	The active form of closure; near kin to the alternate-nostril purifications of haṭha practice.
Food and heat	Heating food and drink provoke the solar current; cooling, unctuous food — milk is the standard example — settles the lunar. Bathing and warmth are used the same way.	Slow, and used for tendency rather than for the moment — a regimen tool more than a technique.
Attention	Sustained attention placed on the closed nostril, the mind held there steadily.	The subtlest method, and the one the received tradition ranks as the mark of practice: the others coax the body, this one commands it.

Where these methods are written down

The turning-methods are scattered where the doctrine is concentrated. The Svara Cintāmaṇi carries the standing advice at the root of them all — when the required current is not running, change the breath and then act — and gives prāṇāyāma its own chapter; S. Kannan's English rendering of 1967 is the ordinary way readers meet it. The fullest modern collection of the physical methods is Swami Muktibodhananda's Swara Yoga (Bihar School of Yoga, Munger, 1984), which gathers posture, crutch, closure, food and attention into one chapter of practice; Rāma Kumār Rāy's Varanasi editions of the Śiva Svarodaya carry the same lore in their annotation. The methods themselves are older than any of these witnesses, and no one printing owns them; they are attributed here to the literature, not to a verse.

When a change is advisedकाल

When the act will not wait. The catalogue assigns the act to one current; the hour is running the other; the undertaking cannot be moved. The literature's answer is uniform: turn the breath first, act second. Turning the act to fit the breath is always preferred when the calendar allows it — the change of flow is for when it does not.
When the sunrise is wrong. The fortnight rule expects a particular current at dawn. Finding the opposite one, the practitioner turns the flow to the proper side and holds it there through the morning watch — the received tradition treats this as repair, quieting what the mismatch portends.
When one side has run too long. A current that holds far past its hour is read first as imbalance and then, persisting, as a warning; the scale of that reading is given on the breath and vitality. The immediate response is the same in every source: restore the alternation.
In illness. The received rule of thumb runs by opposites — conditions of heat are eased by running the lunar current, conditions of cold and heaviness by the solar. The svarodaya literature states this as regimen, not as a system of medicine; the boundary is drawn honestly on vitality.

One restraint completes the skill. The middle state is not to be induced for worldly purposes — when suṣumṇā runs of itself the practitioner waits or turns to practice, as the catalogue explains — and the turning-methods are for moving between left and right, not for forcing the centre. The texts that teach the centre teach it as yoga, under dhāraṇā, and by another door.