The Power in the Light

Winter 2019

You say you’re not feeling well and some of your friends tell you they’ll send light or, perhaps, love and light.You might be someone who think it sounds a little new agey or, even, corny. But you thank them anyway and say you appreciate it. What the heck, you think, it can’t hurt.

Or, you might be someone who sends light yourself. Even so, you may never have given much thought to whether this light is real in the way the physical world is real to us.

I believe it is. And that the light we are “sending” is, in fact, prāna. As you may know, prāna is the word in yoga both for breath and for life energy. The age-old sacred texts known as the Tantras tell us that prāna – or, more specifically, prāna-shakti – is the way the creative force of the cosmos known as Shakti manifests in the world around us. In other words, prāna is the “stuff” the universe is made of. It is the basic building block of reality as we know it.

According to this tradition, everything in the world around us is created out of this one living, pulsating, intelligent life force. And, thus, everything is One – a Oneness that is often described as a radiant, luminescent light.

If this is so, it is easy to imagine that sending light (and love, too, but that’s a subject for another day) activates the life force in another part of the Oneness just as a tap on a tuning fork sends out vibrations that set another tuning fork to humming at the same frequency.