Background
Guru Sanju teaches that human transformation becomes much easier when a person begins understanding the body, brain, breath, and nervous system as one interconnected living system. She guides the seeker away from purely mental approaches and toward direct observation of posture, movement, breathing patterns, sensory responses, creativity, coordination, and the body’s instinctive intelligence. Her approach is practical: experience first, observe carefully, and allow the body to reveal where imbalance or rigidity may be present.
In this discourse, she introduces a series of awareness-based practices involving backward walking, non-dominant hand use, posture, nostril observation, diaphragmatic breathing, resting poses, and centering. She connects these practices with creativity, nervous-system regulation, intuitive development, concentration, and greater energetic balance. The deeper purpose is not merely physical improvement. It is to help the individual become less mechanical, more aware, more responsive, and increasingly capable of living through direct feeling rather than habitual thinking.
Your Brain and Body Are Constantly Reading the Environment
Your brain and nervous system are continuously receiving information from your surroundings. Even when you are not consciously analysing anything, your senses are registering sound, smell, movement, proximity, temperature, facial expressions, body language, and countless other details. Your organism is constantly asking one fundamental question: am I safe enough to remain open, or do I need to protect myself?
If you unexpectedly touch something hot, the body reacts before you have time to philosophize about what happened. If you enter an unpleasant environment, you may instinctively want to move away. If a stranger comes too close, your body may create distance automatically.
This protective intelligence is not weakness. It is part of being a living organism. The problem begins when protective responses become unnecessarily dominant even when actual danger is absent.
Your Sense of Safety Changes Around Different People
Observe how your body behaves around different people. With someone you deeply trust, you may naturally sit closer, relax your shoulders, soften your face, and breathe more easily. With a stranger, your body may automatically maintain greater physical distance.
Even among familiar people, your internal response can vary. Some people make you feel more open while others create contraction, discomfort, vigilance, or exhaustion. Do not immediately turn every bodily response into a final judgment about another person, but learn to notice what your organism is communicating.
Your body is giving you information continuously. Awareness begins when you stop ignoring that information.
Return to Instinctive Human Activities
Many ordinary activities reconnect you with parts of yourself that modern life can neglect. Cooking, cutting vegetables, cleaning, walking, carrying objects, using both hands, touching natural materials, and performing practical physical tasks require sensory coordination. They place you back inside direct experience.
These activities may appear simple, but simplicity is precisely their power. When you become absorbed in an activity that requires touch, movement, timing, coordination, smell, vision, and attention, you are no longer living entirely inside abstract thought.
You begin learning your body again. You begin discovering how capable the organism is when you actually use it.
Modern Life Can Make You Mechanically Efficient
You become very efficient at whatever you repeat. If you perform the same professional tasks, sit in similar postures, use the same hand for nearly everything, walk the same routes, and think through the same patterns every day, the nervous system becomes highly automated. Automation is useful, but excessive automation can make life psychologically mechanical.
You may become excellent at performing familiar tasks while becoming uncomfortable the moment something requires a completely new movement or response. This is why I deliberately introduce unfamiliar activities.
The purpose is not to make ordinary life difficult. The purpose is to wake up attention.
Walk Backward and Experience Conscious Movement
Choose a clear, safe, obstacle-free space. First walk forward normally and notice how little conscious attention the movement requires. Your body has repeated forward walking so many times that the process is largely automatic.
Now, while keeping your eyes open and ensuring the area behind you is safe, slowly walk backward for a few steps. Immediately you will notice a difference. You cannot move with the same unconscious speed because the nervous system must pay greater attention to balance, leg placement, space, and coordination.
Observe the hamstrings, calves, feet, hips, pelvis, and overall state of alertness. Do not rush. The purpose is conscious movement, not performance.
The Unfamiliar Makes You Present
When you perform something familiar, the mind can wander while the body continues. When you perform something unfamiliar, attention comes back immediately. The nervous system cannot rely entirely on existing automatic pathways.
This is why a small change can become a powerful awareness practice. Walk differently. Use another hand. Change your sequence. Learn a new physical task.
You are creating novelty, and novelty forces you to become present.
Observe Which Side of Your Body Dominates Your Life
Most people strongly favour one side of the body for many activities. You may write, brush your teeth, eat, open doors, hold your phone, pour water, and perform detailed movements predominantly with one hand. Over many years, this creates strong patterns of coordination.
Your nervous system becomes extraordinarily efficient at what you repeatedly ask it to do. The less-used side may feel awkward simply because it has received less training. This does not mean that one half of your brain is asleep or unused; both hemispheres participate in most complex human activities.
What matters for this practice is simpler: can you increase coordination, flexibility, attention, and novelty by occasionally using your non-dominant side?
Write With Your Non-Dominant Hand
Take a pen and paper. First write a sentence normally using your dominant hand. Notice the speed, confidence, automaticity, and familiarity of the movement.
Then place the pen in your non-dominant hand and attempt to write the same sentence slowly. Your handwriting may become messy. Your movements may feel uncertain. You will need considerably more attention.
This difficulty is exactly what I want you to notice. The unfamiliar hand brings you out of automation and back into learning.
Awkwardness Is Evidence That Learning Is Happening
Do not become frustrated because the writing looks childish. You are asking the nervous system to coordinate movement in a way it has not practiced sufficiently. Naturally, the first attempts will feel clumsy.
Celebrate the awkwardness. It means you are doing something outside the familiar pathway. You are giving yourself a new challenge rather than repeating what you already know.
Improvement comes from repetition, patience, and curiosity.
Use Both Hands Throughout Daily Life
You do not need to perform artificial exercises all day. Daily life itself offers enough opportunities. Cooking naturally involves stabilizing with one hand and cutting, stirring, pouring, or cleaning with the other.
Washing dishes, folding clothes, preparing food, bathing, carrying objects, opening containers, gardening, and household work often require bilateral coordination. Become conscious of how you use both sides of your body.
Do not force dangerous tasks with your weaker hand. A sharp knife, hot pan, or heavy object should always be handled safely. The objective is coordination, not risk.
Creativity Requires More Than Logical Thinking
Human beings need logic. Analytical thinking allows you to calculate, organize, plan, compare, learn technical skills, solve problems, and function effectively. But a life governed only by analysis can become dry and mechanical.
Creativity involves imagination, experimentation, play, sensory awareness, emotion, association, curiosity, and the willingness to produce something that did not previously exist. These capacities must also be used.
Do not think of creativity merely as painting or music. Creativity is the ability to respond freshly to life.
Balance Means Using the Whole Human Capacity
The goal is not to replace logic with intuition. The goal is integration. You need rational intelligence when making financial decisions, planning work, understanding consequences, and solving practical problems.
You also need intuition, imagination, sensory perception, emotional awareness, and the capacity to recognize patterns that cannot always be reduced instantly to formulas. A powerful human being can move between these modes rather than becoming imprisoned inside one.
Your life becomes richer when intelligence is multidimensional.
Your Posture Changes Your Breathing Experience
Now observe how you are sitting. Allow yourself to slump slightly and notice the chest, abdomen, neck, and quality of breathing. You may feel that expansion through the rib cage and diaphragm becomes more restricted.
Then sit more comfortably upright. Let the breastbone rise gently, relax the shoulders, keep the neck easy, and give the abdomen enough space to move. Notice whether breathing feels freer.
You do not need a rigid military posture. Good posture should support breathing rather than turn the body into another structure of tension.
Breath Is One of the Fastest Ways to Observe Your State
Your breathing pattern changes throughout the day. Excitement changes it. Fear changes it. Physical activity changes it. Sleep, posture, nasal congestion, temperature, illness, emotion, and attention can all influence how you breathe.
This makes breath an excellent observation tool. Instead of immediately trying to fix breathing, first notice it. Is it shallow, deep, rapid, slow, chest-dominant, abdominal, comfortable, restricted, noisy, or effortless?
Observation comes before correction. Otherwise you may create tension while trying to become relaxed.
Observe Your Nasal Airflow
Place the hands gently beneath the nostrils without blocking them and breathe naturally through the nose. Notice whether airflow feels approximately equal or whether one nostril feels temporarily more open than the other. It is normal for nasal airflow to vary naturally throughout the day.
The body has a normal nasal cycle in which congestion and openness can alternate between the nostrils. Therefore, do not become alarmed merely because one side feels more dominant at a particular moment. Observe patterns rather than creating fear.
If one nostril remains completely obstructed for prolonged periods, especially with pain, breathing difficulty, repeated infections, or other symptoms, medical evaluation may be appropriate.
Do Not Diagnose Your Mind From One Nostril
I want you to become aware of your breathing, but I do not want you creating frightening conclusions from every small change. A dominant nostril does not prove that you have anxiety, depression, disease, or a particular psychological condition. Human physiology is more complex than that.
Use the observation to become curious. How does your breathing change after walking? After relaxation? After sleep? During stress? After changing posture?
The body becomes your laboratory, but observation must remain intelligent.
Explore Gentle Unilateral Breathing
If both nasal passages are comfortable and there is no medical reason to avoid breathing practices, you may gently close one nostril and breathe through the other for a few relaxed cycles. Keep the breath smooth and never aggressively pull or force air through a blocked passage.
Then release the nostril and breathe normally. Observe how you feel rather than trying to manufacture a particular energetic result. Breathing should remain comfortable throughout the practice.
If you experience dizziness, breathlessness, panic, pain, or unusual discomfort, stop and return to ordinary breathing.
Your First Goal Is Relaxation, Not Control
Many people turn breathing exercises into another battle. They inhale forcefully, push the abdomen excessively, count obsessively, and become anxious about whether the technique is working. This defeats the deeper purpose.
I want your breath to become less controlled, not more neurotic. Use posture and relaxation to create better conditions, then allow breathing to respond.
Sometimes the most powerful instruction is simply: stop interfering.
Let the Belly Move Again
Place one hand gently on the abdomen. As you breathe naturally, notice whether the abdominal wall can move without being continuously held tight. During comfortable diaphragmatic breathing, the abdomen may gently expand during inhalation and soften during exhalation.
Do not inflate the belly aggressively. Do not take breaths so large that you create strain. Let the movement become natural.
The aim is not maximum breath. The aim is freedom of breath.
Use Restorative Postures to Change Your State
Sometimes changing the position of the body can change your experience more quickly than thinking about relaxation. I use a sequence of supported postures to help the body transition from activity toward rest. The movements should always remain comfortable and adapted to your physical limitations.
The first stage is a folded resting position similar to Child’s Pose. The second is a supported prone relaxation using a cushion or bolster. The third is complete resting on the back.
The value lies not merely in the posture itself, but in the transition from movement into progressively deeper surrender.
Enter Child’s Pose Gently
Kneel comfortably on a padded surface. Adjust the knees according to your hip comfort and slowly bring the torso forward. Allow the head to rest on the surface or on appropriate support rather than leaving the neck strained.
The arms can initially extend forward if comfortable. Later they may rest closer to the body. Let the abdomen and rib cage adapt naturally to the position.
Remain for several comfortable breaths. If the knees, hips, back, ankles, or head feel painful, modify the position or discontinue it.
Let Your Attention Become One With the Breath
While resting, do not continuously search for results. Notice the breath entering and leaving the nostrils. Alternatively, notice the gentle movement in the abdomen and ribs.
Do nothing else for some time. You do not have to solve your life. You do not have to analyse what happened an hour ago or predict what will happen tomorrow.
Stay with what you actually feel now.
Gravity Can Become Part of Relaxation
When the body changes orientation, pressure distribution and sensory input change. You may experience the head, spine, abdomen, shoulders, and breathing differently from when you are sitting upright. Let gravity support the practice rather than fighting against it.
Do not imagine that gravity is magically clearing every blockage. Observe the simpler truth: your position has changed, the muscles are working differently, and your experience of the body has changed with it.
This direct observation is enough.
Move Into Supported Prone Relaxation
After Child’s Pose, place a comfortable bolster or supportive pillow beneath the chest and upper torso if this position suits your body. Extend the legs comfortably behind you and allow the front of the body to be supported rather than held through muscular effort.
Turn the head only as much as necessary to breathe comfortably, and change sides if remaining there for longer periods. The neck should not remain painfully twisted.
Allow the shoulders, abdomen, pelvis, and legs to become heavy. This stage is about support and surrender.
Then Practice Complete Rest
Finally, lie comfortably on your back. Let the legs rest naturally and place the arms beside you or the hands gently over the abdomen. Use a small support beneath the head or knees if necessary for comfort.
Close the eyes if this feels safe. Stop deliberately controlling the breath and allow the body to breathe by itself. This is the transition into deep non-doing.
You have moved from an active day into a posture of complete permission.
Shavasana Is the Art of Doing Nothing
Shavasana appears simple because externally almost nothing is happening. Internally, however, it can teach you something profound: you do not always need to interfere with life. You can remain present without manipulating every sensation.
Let the jaw loosen. Let the hands become heavy. Let the feet relax. Feel the support beneath your entire body.
You are not trying to sleep. You are practicing conscious rest.
Give the Nervous System a Transition Before Sleep
Many people carry the speed of the entire day directly into bed. They work, communicate, scroll, think, worry, and then expect the nervous system to switch instantly into deep sleep. The transition is too abrupt.
Create a period before bedtime in which stimulation gradually decreases. A gentle sequence of supported resting postures, comfortable breathing, dim light, and reduced digital activity can help create a clearer transition from doing into resting.
Sleep quality matters because the body needs genuine recovery, not merely unconsciousness.
Morning Is Another Powerful Transition
When you first awaken, avoid immediately entering psychological speed. Before reaching for information, messages, news, or work, spend a few minutes reconnecting with the body. Stretch gently, breathe, or enter a comfortable resting posture.
Notice your energy before the external world begins telling you what to think. This gives you a reference point for your natural state.
The beginning of the day can become a meeting with yourself rather than an immediate invasion by stimulation.
Your Energy Should Be Observed Throughout the Day
Do not wait until you collapse before paying attention to yourself. Notice when concentration decreases. Notice when you become physically dull, mentally overstimulated, irritable, restless, or exhausted.
Instead of automatically reaching for distraction, experiment with a short reset. Change posture, walk, stretch, breathe comfortably, rest briefly, or spend a few minutes in a supported position.
Then observe whether your state changes. This is how you learn what genuinely restores you.
Keep a Written Record of Change
Use pen and paper to record what you observe. Write down the practice you performed, how you felt before it, how you felt afterward, and what happened in the hours that followed. Do not write what you think should have happened.
Perhaps you felt more focused. Perhaps you became sleepy. Perhaps you wanted to study, cook, walk outside, research something, or simply remain quiet. Record the actual experience.
Over time, patterns become visible. This turns self-observation into practical intelligence.
Your Life After the Practice Matters More Than the Practice
Do not judge a technique only by what you feel while doing it. Observe what happens afterward. Are you calmer? Can you concentrate better? Do you sleep more deeply? Are you more willing to move, create, communicate, study, or go outside?
A practice should eventually improve the way you live. If you spend hours doing techniques but remain increasingly disconnected from ordinary life, something needs reconsideration.
The body practice is preparation. Life is the real examination.
Creativity Is a Sign of Available Life Energy
When you are chronically tense, most of your energy can become occupied with protection, repetition, and survival. Creativity requires additional psychological space. You need enough safety to experiment.
This is why I want you engaging in cooking, writing, drawing, arranging things, learning new skills, using both hands, exploring nature, and doing activities that do not belong only to your professional identity. These experiences awaken playfulness.
A human being who can play is not merely wasting time. Play is one of the ways intelligence learns.
Do Not Become Trapped Inside Your Profession
If your work requires constant logic, analysis, screens, data, calculation, or technical thinking, your entire identity can become organized around that mode. You begin approaching life itself like a spreadsheet.
Then relationships become problems to solve. Rest becomes inefficiency. Creativity becomes unproductive. The body becomes something you carry to work.
You need another dimension. Cook. Walk. Sing. Draw. Travel. Garden. Learn movement. Use your hands. Let intelligence become embodied again.
Center Yourself Before Acting
There is another short practice I want you to learn. Place one hand gently over the center of the chest and the other over the abdomen. Close your eyes if comfortable and allow the body to become still.
Bring attention toward the space between the eyebrows or slightly inward from that region, without straining the eyes. Take several comfortable diaphragmatic breaths and feel the abdomen gently moving beneath your hand.
Do not chase sensations. The purpose is centering.
Third-Eye Focus Is Primarily Attention Training
When you concentrate repeatedly on one internal point, sensations may naturally appear there. You may notice warmth, pressure, tingling, pulsation, or simply heightened awareness. Do not immediately interpret every sensation as proof of a supernatural event.
Attention itself changes perception. What you focus upon becomes more noticeable. Use the practice to improve stillness, observation, and concentration.
If focusing on the forehead creates pain, headache, visual strain, or agitation, reduce the intensity or stop. Spiritual concentration should not become physical force.
Develop Intuition Without Abandoning Intelligence
Intuition grows when you become capable of sensing subtle internal responses without drowning them in constant thought. But intuition does not require you to reject logic. The highest intelligence integrates both.
First feel. Then observe. Then verify. If a feeling concerns an important decision, give it enough time to settle before acting.
This prevents impulsiveness from disguising itself as intuition.
Thinking and Feeling Are Different Experiences
Thinking says, I should do this because it makes sense according to the story in my head. Feeling says, something in my present experience is drawing me toward or away from this. Both contain information, but they are not identical.
Your work is to learn the difference. A genuine feeling can exist without twenty arguments supporting it. A thought can continue endlessly even when the body has already communicated exhaustion or resistance.
Become able to hear both without becoming enslaved by either.
Ask What You Feel Before Asking What You Think
Several times throughout the day, stop and ask yourself: what am I feeling now? Do not ask immediately what you should do. Begin with direct experience.
Do you feel open, tired, restless, curious, hungry, inspired, irritated, anxious, peaceful, playful, or contracted? Place language around the present condition without judging it.
Only then ask what response would genuinely support you.
Your Body Can Teach You Before the Mind Understands
You may notice that a change in posture improves breathing before you understand why. You may discover that walking outside improves clarity before you can explain the mechanism. You may notice that creative work reduces mental rigidity even though you did not consciously intend it as therapy.
This is why experimentation matters. Direct experience gives you information that theory alone cannot provide.
Learn first from the body, then use knowledge to understand what you have experienced.
Do Not Turn Simplified Brain Models Into Absolute Truth
People often speak about the left brain as logical and the right brain as creative. This can be a useful metaphor when explaining different styles of processing, but the real brain is far more integrated. Creativity, language, reasoning, movement, emotion, and intuition involve networks distributed across both hemispheres.
Use the metaphor to remember balance, not to create a false biological division. You are not trying to shut down one hemisphere and activate another. You are developing a wider range of human abilities.
The real goal is integration.
Your Nervous System Is Trainable
The beautiful thing about the human nervous system is its capacity to learn. Repeated experience changes familiarity. Something difficult becomes easier. Something frightening becomes manageable. Something unconscious becomes conscious.
You learn backward walking. You learn to use the non-dominant hand. You learn to relax the abdomen. You learn to recognize unnecessary tension. You learn to create a transition into rest.
This is how transformation becomes practical: not through one dramatic moment, but through repeated intelligent experience.
Awareness Must Become a Lifestyle
I do not want you practicing awareness for ten minutes and remaining completely unconscious for the remaining day. Observe yourself while eating, walking, working, cooking, talking, sitting, and resting. Notice which hand you automatically use, how you breathe, how your posture changes, and when tension enters.
Do not obsess over these observations. Keep them light. Awareness is meant to increase freedom, not create another form of self-surveillance.
Notice, adjust when necessary, and continue living.
Balance Is Dynamic, Not Perfect
Your body will not remain in one ideal state throughout the day. Energy rises and falls. Breathing changes. Attention fluctuates. Sometimes you need stimulation and sometimes you need rest.
Balance therefore does not mean holding yourself permanently in one physiological condition. Balance means being capable of adapting. You can become active when action is required and calm when the demand has passed.
A healthy system is flexible.
Become Less Mechanical and More Alive
The deeper purpose of all these practices is not simply better handwriting with the left hand or a different breathing pattern. I am trying to interrupt mechanical living. I want you to become more available to sensation, creativity, movement, intuition, observation, and choice.
The more automatic your existence becomes, the smaller the range of life you experience. The more conscious you become, the more possibilities begin appearing.
You begin participating in your own evolution.
Your Brain Needs Experience, Not Only Information
You can read hundreds of books about the nervous system and remain disconnected from your own body. Knowledge has value, but transformation requires experience. You must actually walk differently, breathe differently, rest differently, create differently, and observe yourself differently.
Then information becomes embodied. You do not merely know that posture affects breathing; you have experienced the difference. You do not merely know that novelty requires attention; you have felt it while using your non-dominant hand.
This is living knowledge.
Life Becomes Your Laboratory
From today, begin studying yourself. Observe your breathing when relaxed and when stressed. Observe your posture around different people. Observe what happens when you use both hands, enter nature, learn something unfamiliar, or spend time creating.
Write your observations. Compare experiences. Notice what consistently brings more vitality, concentration, calmness, playfulness, and clarity.
You do not need to blindly believe anything. Experience, observe, and learn.
From Thinking Toward Feeling
Eventually, the work becomes deeper. You begin noticing that much of your life has been governed by thought before feeling ever gets a chance to speak. The mind immediately tells you what is practical, acceptable, safe, expected, intelligent, or socially correct.
I want you to discover what happens when you first become still enough to feel. Not impulsively act, but feel. Let the body, emotion, intuition, and direct experience enter the decision-making process.
Then let thinking perform its rightful function: examine, organize, verify, and implement.
Integrated Intelligence Is the Real Power
Your power does not come from becoming only logical. It does not come from becoming only intuitive. It does not come from living only in the body or only in consciousness.
Your power comes when the different dimensions of you begin cooperating. The body gives sensation. Emotion gives value. Intuition gives direction. Logic examines reality. Consciousness observes the whole process.
This is integration.
Train Yourself to Return to Center
Whenever life becomes noisy, return to something simple. Feel your feet. Relax your abdomen. Take a comfortable breath. Place one hand on the chest and one on the belly if that helps you reconnect.
Let your attention become steady for a few moments. Then ask yourself what you actually feel and what reality actually requires.
You do not always need another answer. Sometimes you need enough stillness to recognize the answer already becoming visible.
Your Natural Intelligence Is Waiting Beneath Habit
You have spent years learning how to perform life according to habit. Now I want you to learn how to experience life directly. Challenge automatic patterns gently. Use your body differently. Give creativity a place. Improve your capacity to rest.
Observe the breath without fear. Observe the nervous system without obsession. Observe thought without immediately obeying it.
Underneath repeated conditioning, there is still a living intelligence capable of learning, adapting, feeling, creating, and responding.
Become the Whole Human Being
You were not born merely to think. You were born with a body that can move, hands that can create, senses that can explore, a nervous system that can adapt, emotions that can communicate, and consciousness that can observe. Use the whole instrument.
Bring intelligence into the body. Bring awareness into ordinary activities. Bring creativity into mechanical routines. Bring rest into a life overloaded with stimulation.
The more completely you inhabit yourself, the less fragmented your life becomes.