If you stumbled upon this post, reading this introduction might help.
It was 1986 and I was in Kharagpur. SPICMACAY had organised a concert and discussion with the flute maestro Hari Prasad Chaurasia. It was large hall and there were carpets on the floor. Chaurasia sat at the centre of the hall and the audience was all around him. After a couple of hours of music, during which the audience steadily thinned, there were only about a fifty of us left.
One student asked, “They say that playing the flute affects the heart. What do you say?”
Chaurasia calmly took his flute, took a deep breath and played a single note, after ten seconds or so I timed him. He held that note for at least one and a half minutes. More like one minute and forty-five seconds.
He then kept the flute down and in a conversational tone asked, “What was that?” Someone said “breath control”. He asked, “What is prANAyAm?” The answer to that too was breath control. He asked, “If prANAyAm can be good for the heart how can this be bad for the heart?” and rested his case.
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