If I have rested after meditation and find hours later that I am irritable or my spouse says I am 
is it recommended to go an rest awhile even though it is not right after my session? I am finding myself trying to push my practice but using irritability as my guide for self pacing. I donāt want my family to pay the price for my impatience. If this has been addressed before, just direct me to the right place. Thanks.
Jill
Hi Jill.
Resting after practices helps to even out any energy imbalances. But it isnāt a cure all for going over during practices if that is what is happening. Then youāll need to self pace a little, or maybe increase the duration of your spinal breathing.
Are you still having problems sleeping? If you are, and you think this could be pushing you over timewise, you could try sleeping on your side. I find that when I lie on my side, it doesnāt matter what is going on energy-wise, it simply doesnāt push me over the edge in terms of overload symptoms.
Orā¦ maybe youāre not irritable at all, maybe itās your spouce being really annoying and winding you up 
. Men can be like that sometimesā¦ itās a major fault in our design.
Christi
Thanks Christi for your support. My spouse can be annoying it is true. And I didnāt feel cranky but who knows.
As for sleep, it is somewhat improved. Thanks for asking. There are a few nights lately where I have slept through the entire night without waking. 
The last two days have been one of those phases where I feel sleepy a lot. Been trying to just give myself what I need.
I have been cautious with self pacing right along due to energetic imbalances, only doing pranayama for 5 min. and mantra for 15 or even less at times. This last week I am trying to work up to the regular 10 and 20 with very pleasant results. Donāt want to scale back but am ready to if necessary.
Jill
I get the same way sometimes. I find when I come out of meditation and I have a phone call to make, I will rest for what I think is a goodish amount of time, make the callā¦and then find myself more or less unable to speak like my normal selfā¦and it builds up a frustration feeling in me. I describe it like I am uncomfortable in my own skin, like not so much a mental frustration but a physiological or nervous. I would say even if you have rested still try to allow yourself as much solitude as you can before rengaging. I think some people need more buffer time than others.
Hi Christi,
Did you mean decrease here, rather than increase?
Great advise above, I definitely concur that when I am over in the energy department, it is tough to sleep properly. Sleeping on my left side seems to help me as well.
A
Hi Anthem,
I did mean increase, rather than decrease. I noticed a number of times in the main lessons that Yogani advises people with energy imbalances to try increasing the time spent doing spinal breathing for a while to see if it sorts the problem out. It is something I do myself if I ever get problems.
Something else that I am interested in is the relationship between dynamic jalandara and energy overload problems in the head area. In my experience crankiness is a first sign of this kind of overload problem. I believe it was you who wrote a post a while back saying that you were cutting back on your practice times because of overload, but you were leaving dynamic jalandara in to stabalize energy in the head. Have I got this right.
Thanks for clarifying, I see where you are coming from. I thought you were referring to pranayama time when self-pacing rather than in regards to blockages. I agree for smoothing out energy blockages, if there are no signs of being over, then extra pranayama time can certainly help.
In my case, when ever I am over in any way I feel the symptoms usually in the crown or at the 3rd eye and irritability, cloudiness or over-sensitivity are the primary symptoms for me. Burning, throbbing or aches are secondary symptoms for me. These latter two show up when Iāve really over-done things.
Yes, I have cut back on my practice times significantly over the last 1.8 years. For my first year of AYP I did almost 60 minutes of total practice time including all mudras/ bhandas, pranayama, meditation and samyama (not including asanas). Nowadays, my total routine is around 18 minutes long not including rest time. Despite the vastly shorter routine, I still do one round of Yoni Mudra kumbhaka because I noticed if I donāt, I develop a headache after a couple of days somewhere between ajna and crown. So it does seem to be stabilizing for me. Every once in a blue moon, dynamic jalandra will happen automatically at some point during practices perhaps keeping things stabilized?
A
Hi Anthem,
Just to clarify furtherā¦ I dont think I said any of that stuff about blockages. I was talking about someone experiencing energy problems, like experiencing too much energy in the head and so feeling cranky as a result, increasing the time spent practicing spinal breathing in order to see if it helps balance the energy in the body. This would be an alternative to reducing mediatation time as a way of self pacing. As far as I remember, Yoganis advice in the main lessons in respect to increasing the duration of spinal breathing was given to people expereincing energy problems of this kind, rather than to people with blockages that needed clearing. But I would agree that it would also work for someone who had blockages that needed clearing.
Just wanted to clarify that for the sake of the advancement of spiritual practice as a science.
I have the same experience as you with dynamic jalandaraā¦ that it helps even out excess energy in the head area.
Christi
Hi Christi,
Thanks for clarifying further, yes āblockageā was my word not yours, my mind immediately associates blockages with energy imbalances and I see it all as a lack of proper flow of energy.
So any excess energy in the head for example, from my perspective, would be caused by some blockage somewhere inhibiting the natural flow of energy that would move in balance without it. I may be guilty of blending what you see as two distinct situations, together too generally.
I think it is important for us to be specific as you say, for the sake of advancement of spiritual practice as a science.
A
I thought irritation was a symptom of too-long meditation, rather than spinal breathing (if rest time is adequate, that is).
Hi A
Words like blockage, and energy, and imbalance and overload are used pretty vaguely, I agree, so lots of room for confusion . As I use the terms, if someone is having a hard time opening a specific chakra, then that could be due to a blockage in that chakra, or elsewhere in the nervous system. When the blockage is cleared, hey presto, the chakra opens. But when the blockage is cleared, it could leat to too much energy flowing through the body/mind system, and that could cause lots of things to happenā¦ heat (burning), pressure in the head, shaking, crankiness, rashes, and all the rest. So clearing energetic blockages can cause problems, as well as aleviate them.
Andā¦ we can use spiritual practices to clear the nervous system of blockages, as well as to balance out the increased energy flow that results from those blockages being cleared. I see spinal breathing as a balancer of energy as well as a blockage clearer. A practice like spinal bastrika isnāt an energy balancer, it is only a blockage clearer. Thatās how I see things anyway.
As I see it, if someone becomes cranky as a result of doing spiritual practices, it could be that they have too much prana in the system ,an energy overload, especially higher up in the body (6th and 7th chakras) which makes us feel āon edgeā all the time; or it could be caused by the mind expanding too fast which makes us feel āspun-outā and a bit overwhelmed with everything. Eitherway, spinal breathing could help to balance things out.
It could also make the situation worse by clearing the pathways to let even more energy flood the system, which is why we canāt just sort out every kundalini problem by cranking spinal breathing up to an hour a day. Itās a fine balancing job.
Thatās my understanding anyway.