practicing in the tropics

Hello

I have no experience what so ever. But one of the basic things is to get the environemt you practise in nice and comfortable, isn’t it? So perhaps you should put your emphasis in getting rid of the mosquito problem in some or another way, if it is possible. Or at least try to do as much as possible to lessen the problem. Perhaps practising somewhere else or at another time. When you have done everything possible to lessen the problem do your best to concentrate, even when disturbed. And if it gets to much, just stop practisisng that session.

This was realy just a humble try.

Good luck

Swedich Dragon

The big step forward made by humans or flies compared to polyps is that we have an anus: every one of us, however eminent, is a ten-metre tube through which food flows, for most of the time, in one direction. Hydra and its kin are in contrast mere sacs, obliged to suck in sustenance and throw out waste from a single hole. A closer look shows that most animals are, compared to those simple life forms, blessed with an extra body layer. Gorgonians, Medusae and their kin are made from just two sheets of tissue. They are one bag held inside another and stuck together with asort of biological glue. Higher beings (ourselves and worms included) have a third sheet, sandwiched in the middle. From this grows a set of distinct organs such as muscles, blood, kidneys and more…one way to cut down the damage is to eat less. Narcissus as he starved by his pool rather overdid the job, but self-denial, within reason, is good for you . A starvation diet reduces the amount of chemical fuel that courses through the body. Its factories pump out fewer pollutants and smash up less of the local DNA. Hunger cleans up the cell just as a slump cleans up the skies. In rats and mice it increases life expectancy by a third and more…a group of Americans of normal weight volunteered to cut their food intake by aquerter. They lost a few pounds and within six months each had a lower body temperature and less insulin than before – both an attribute of the long-lived. Even their DNA showed less damage than average, perhaps because less reactive oxygen was made…oxygen seem benign enough, but it has a darker side. Now and again it falls into an unstable form in which a free free electron armed with an electrical charge buzzes around its atomic core. Large amounts of that hazardous material leak out of the molecular factories that generate energy from the food. Reactive oxygen species, as the noxious products are called, damage DNA and proteins and attack membranes. A typical cell gets ten thousand hits a day and can survive only because a series of repair mechanisms has evolved to patch up the damage. We take several breaths a minute to fuel our lives, but a hefty proportion of our energies goes to fixing the ravages of the gas that kills us even as it keeps us going…reactive oxygen has a strong tie to cancer, for carsinogenic chemicals such as tobacco, ultraviolet light and X-rays all generate lots of the stuff. Even those who avoid that illness will suffer from oxygen malign effects sooner or later, for the element in its degenerate form causes most of the afflictions of the aged. Deafness, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, feebleness, obesity and many other pains of the years are all side-effects of that ambiguous material. Diverse as they may appear, the conditions that kill us off all share the same chemistry…power stations suffer the worst damage in their furnaces, where air combines with coal or oil. We burn most of our own fuel in cellular structures called mitochondria. like industrial boilers they depend on cheap fuel and plenty of oxygen and’ like them, they wear out quickly…the first steps in the body’s energy-production machinery evolved long before mitochondria appeared on the scene, in the days when free oxygen was rare . They still do not need it. The later stages , in contrast, depend upon the vital gas. As the protein wheels of the mitochondrial factories grind and spin, they pump out vast quantities of reactive waste. The mitochondria pay a heavy price for their inefficiency. Their machinery becomes more and more battered with the years, and they become bloated , obese and inactive. The problem is at its worst in the body’s least hydra-like tissues, the brain and the heart, where cells almost never divide and where, as a result, mitochondria are seldom renewed. Slowly, toxic by-products built up…cold tunes up man’s machinery. Homo Sapiens evolved in the tropics and moved to chillier climes around a hundred thousand years ago. As our ancestors made the journey, evolution worked to improve their central heating. ice and and snow make large demands for energy and the mitochondrial generators must provide it. As a result, mutations that allow them to work better in the cold give their bearers an advantage. They soon spread. Many people in the colder parts of the world bear mitochondrial types that are rare near the equator. They generate more heat (and make less poison) than do their tropical ancestors. That keeps their owners warm and might also protect against the malign effects of age…cnidarians give vivid proof of the importance of sex life to life’s end. Many species exist in two forms, an immobile polyp, which is more or less immortal and reproduces by budding, and an itinerant jellyfish, or medusa, which bears sex cells. The lubricious Medusae are more complex than their lumpish and asexual progenitors. Some weight a ton and have muscles , nerves , eyes and tentacles with which they hunt their prey. The Medusa pays ahigh price for its erotic experiences. It regenerates far less well than its virginal parent and does not bud. Once sperm and egg have been released the animal ages and gives up the ghost. Hydra, too, is immortal only as long as it holds to it its innocent way of life and does not indulge in sex. A sudden chill at the end of the summerspurs the animal into sexual reproduction, but as soon as it succumbs to temptation it pays the price and departs this world Its fertilised eggs then survive the winter to produce a new generation of asexual polyps in the subsequent year…around three-quarters of most cnidarians’ bodies are made of stem cells, which can, when called upon, change into nerves, glands and the precursors of sperm and eggs. As a result, such creatures are able togenerate a new body from a small fragment and can do so again and again. Their powers of renewal are potent indeed. Box jellyfish – lethal inhabitants of tropical seas – have no obvious brain, but twenty.four eyes. most are just pits but eight have a lens and retina and look rather like our own organs of vision (which cannot , neless to say, re-grow, or even be repaired). In the box jellyfish, a whole eye can be regenerated from a single cell. Humans share such talents but not for long. A young human embryo, like an adult polyp, has a unique gift. Every part has the capacity to develop into almost any adult organ. The body has more than two hundred kinds of tissue and, in its first few hours, each section of an embryo can make them all…in spite of the optimism the general use of stem cell therapy is still no more than ahope. Sleeping embryos live in inaccessible places, divide but slowly and need complex messages to do their job. In addition, each bears within itself a terrible threat. this emerges from the tie between the fate of organs as they develop and that of their owners as they slide from cradle to grave. Programmed cell death – mortality foretold – is an essential to life as is the birth of ne tissues. Degenerative diseases happen when a lethal messenger sends too insistent a signal and asegment of the body falls into an undue desire to end it all. An ill-advised decision to stay alive is even worse, for that leads to the second-biggest killer, after heart disease, in the Western world: cancer…cancer has another tie with a Hydra’s ageless state, for it is overwhelmingly an affliction of the old. their tissues have been restored until they can be restored no more and their repair machinery is streched to breaking point. As a result, almost everyone over seventy has some form of disease. The most frequent age of diagnosis for the colon form is seventy-two, and half of that age group has an intestinal polyp. the condition is scores of times more common among the elderly than among teenagers. As the stem cells fail rejuvenation gives way to the ailments of advancing years…medicine can stave off some of the symptoms of age, but not its inevitable end-point. We are ahead of the coral-builders in many ways, but those simple beings retain a talent that we lost long ago, for they have, at least in mitigated form, the gift of eternal youth.(NONSTOP/MEDLEY)
-STEVE JONES, Coral: A Nihilist in Paradise

Technically speaking, and according to Patanjali, pranayama is actually only retention, “…pranayama is the cessation of the movement of inhalation and exhalation” (Sutra 49). They are methods of inducing retention. Retention is most important because it allows a longer period for the assimilation of prana, just as it allows more time for the exchange of gases in the cells, i.e., oxygen and carbon dioxide. Through the breath prana and consciousness are essentially linked. They can be separated by scientific means starting with the yogic technique of learning to retain breath.
-SWAMI NIRANJANANANDA SARASWATI, Prana Pranayama Prana Vidya

‘The absolute authority of will-power possessed normally over the voluntary muscles is acquired by the yogin in equal measure over involuntary muscles’. And they went on to say: ‘In spite of the rudimentary, if not erronous, anatomical ideas of the yogins one can scarcely deny the importance of the physiological results obtained. If they do not understand the structure of their organs they are indisputably the masters of their functions…A rigorous discipline has led to acomplete control of (certain) vegetative activities’.
-JOSEPH NEEDHAM, Science and Civilization in China

Common sense says that it’s better just go to get netting tent/mosquito net and suitable insect repellent, but really there might alternatives to some serious practitioners.

I mean that few of us have gone so far as maybe to be some kind of fakir.

I have impression that Michael Winn himself is promoting especially the development of energy body and not so much physical one especially when it starts to get too arduous. Somebody like David Shen might be more in that direction whether it is good or bad.

But one can get impression that there might be possibilities to understand some of the biological mechanisms which make qigong/yoga work differently than before.

It’s not in my opinion only matter how well one is concentrating. One arrives to real results through using mechanisms which rule our bodily processes long and intensively enough. There is the real alchemy.

C_HOWLER

KEYWORDS: basal metabolic rate, substance P, suspended animation, pranayama

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole_rat