Hi Casey,
I currently don’t do much energetic practices to stay away from overload symptoms. So, I’ll get back to exploring Jala Neti in the future. And not using the pot, but sucking in the water as you describe, sounds intriguing. For the same reason I also don’t do much kechari at the moment, but just putting the tongue into “stage 2” for a few seconds has a noticeable boosting effect on Deep Meditation for me. So rather than keeping the tongue in kechari throughout DM, I just put it there right before for a few seconds. That’s just my current habit, and I also plan to go back to keeping the tongue in kechari in the future. Kechari 2 can also make it easier for me to feel the spinal nerve when I do a longer (10 min) SBP session, but currently I do a very short (3 min) SBP session, and there I noticed that kechari 2 seems to be more distracting than assisting SBP.
About your question. Indeed, in that Buddhist tantra course the “central channel” was pointed out to be in the center of the torso and not in the spine. However, if I remember correctly I didn’t feel it that way. Instead I felt it more like it was going along the spine. Not sure if inside the spine though or directly in front of the spine (like suggested in the video). That’s a tricky thing to say, being not an expert in anatomy and because the felt sense back then would come alive only deep in meditation. Yogani pointed out that the route and shape of the spinal nerve can change over the years, usually starting closer to the spine in the beginning and then moving towards the center of torso (but not at the front or back of the torso) and becoming thicker:
The spinal nerve is more in the center of the body than in the back, and in the throat area it is right behind the back of the throat and esophagus (gullet). As ecstatic energy awakens and expands, it is found to be even more in the middle, and less following the physical anatomy of the spine, passing through the entire region of the throat instead. That is what happens as the spinal nerve awakens – it expands from the center to become a large column of energy, eventually reaching far beyond the body itself. That is ecstatic radiance.
In lesson 44 Yogani writes
What we are doing in spinal breathing is simultaneously finding the spinal nerve and opening it. We find it by opening it, and then we keep opening it. It will not be the imagination alone for very long.
This last quote matches my experience. After having switched to AYP I felt more and more of the entire length of the spinal nerve simply through doing SBP, and trusting its process of purification and sensory refinement. First, the spinal nerve just became easier and more reproducible to feel during SBP, and eventually the felt sense basically never left throughout the day. It’s always readily available. This has been a very gradual process, and from the first quote above I expect the process to continue in fascinating ways. So, while I believe that SBP is sufficient to make eventually that felt sense appear out of nowhere, it might still be ok to look for it with some extra dedication outside AYP sitting practices for a limited time. A limited time is enough because once the spinal nerve (or segments of it) are felt a single time, it becomes very easy to feel it again. So that’s why I think a single or a handful of such dedicated 5 minute explorations of the torso as described in the video can be a good thing.