Now if you continuously breathe from the chest, you will have tensions in your mind. If you continuously breathe from the chest, you will always be afraid because the chest breathing is meant only in fearful situations. And if you have made it a habit then you will be continuously afraid, tense, always in flight. The enemy is not there, but you will imagine the enemy is there; that’s how paranoia is created.

In the West also a few people have come across this phenomenon – Alexander Lowen and other bioenergetic people who have been working on bioenergy. That is prana. They have come to feel that people who are afraid, their chest is tense and they are breathing very shallow breaths. If their breathing can be made deeper, to go and touch the belly, the hara center, then their fear disappears. If their musculature can be relaxed, as it is done in Rolfing…. Ida Rolf has invented one of the most beautiful methods to change the inner structure of the body because if you have been breathing wrongly for many years, you have developed a musculature, and that musculature will be in the way and will not allow you to rightly breathe or deeply breathe. And even if you remember for a few seconds and you will breathe deeply – again when you are engaged in your work you will start breathing shallow chest breathing. The musculature has to be changed. Once the musculature is changed, the fear disappears and the tension disappears. Rolfing is tremendously helpful; but also working on pranamay kosh, the second bioplasma body, bioenergy body, chi body, or whatsoever you want to call it.

Watch a child and that is natural breathing and breathe that way. Let your belly come up when you inhale, let your belly go down when you exhale. And let it be in such a rhythm it becomes almost a song in your energy, a dance – with rhythm, with harmony – and you will feel so relaxed, so alive, so vital that you cannot imagine that such vitality is possible.

Then is the third body, manomay kosh – the mental body. The third is bigger than the second, subtler than the second, higher than the second. Animals have the second body but not the third body. Animals are so vital: See a lion walking – what beauty, what grace, what grandeur! Man has always felt jealous. See a deer running – what weightlessness, what energy, what a great energy phenomenon! Man has always felt jealous, but man’s energy is moving higher.

The third body is manomay kosh, the mental body. This is bigger, more spacious than the second. And if you don’t grow it, you will remain almost just a possibility of man but not a real man. The word man comes from man, manomay. The English word also comes from the Sanskrit root man. The Hindi word for man is manushya; that too comes from the same root man, the mind. It is mind that makes you man, but more or less you don’t have it. What you have in its place is just a conditioned mechanism. You live by imitation: then you don’t have a mind. When you start living on your own – spontaneous – when you start answering your life problems on your own, when you become responsible, you start growing in manomay kosh. Then the mind-body grows.