Annamaya
Though the physical sheath, or physical body, is the most tangible aspect of ourselves, very few of us have a real sense of where our organs are or what goes on inside our bodies. If you have difficulty fully entering your physical body, you may feel ungrounded, spacey, and fearful. But once you learn to feel your body, to sense it from within, you will learn how to move inside a posture to protect yourself from injury. You will begin to sense what kind of food you need and how much. Your attention will become grounded. Consciously inhabiting your physical body will bring more presence and ease to your life.
Pranamaya Kosha (Vital Energy Sheath)
The pranamaya kosha, or vital energy body, interpenetrates the physical body but is much larger. When you feel energy expanding into your heart or head during meditation or asana practice, or when waves of heat ripple through your body, you are in contact with the vital energy body. Feeling energized, sleepy, dull, restless, or calm are all attributes of the vital energy body.
Manomaya Kosha (Mental Body)
The manomaya kosha—within which you think, fantasize, daydream, and practice mantra or affirmations—is the part of you that creates meaning out of the world you inhabit. But just as the physical body has layers of skin, fat, blood, and bones, so the mental body has its own layers. The most superficial layer comprises passing thoughts, images, perceptions, and emotions that bubble up in your inner world.
The deeper levels of the manomaya kosha contain the powerful mental structures formed by the beliefs, opinions, and assumptions that you've absorbed from your family and culture as well as from your accumulated mental patterns. Called samskaras in Sanskrit, these deep thought grooves in the mental body cause your perceptions of yourself and your life to run in certain fixed patterns. When you examine the contents of the manomaya kosha closely, you can often see these patterns, which take the form of repetitive thoughts like "This isn't how things should be" or "I'm not good enough." Samskaras not only color your experience but also help shape it, which is why one of the most effective practices is to notice and question the "stories" that, without conscious prompting, run through your mind over and over again.
Vijnanamaya Kosha (Wisdom or Awareness Body)
As you explore your inner world, you may begin to notice that along with your thoughts there are things that come from a deeper and subtler level of your being. This sense of inner knowing comes from the wisdom body, the layer composed of intuition and awareness. The wisdom body is also responsible for insight. The wisdom body, at its subtlest level, is simply awareness–the objective, observing part of the self. It's where you can stop identifying with your powerful thoughts and
self-descriptions, and just witness your mind and your life.
Anandamaya Kosha (Bliss Body)
The bliss body is the most hidden part of us, yet its subtle presence is felt as the instinctive sense that life is worth living, that to be alive is good. You're literally born to be blissful because the blissful body is the deepest layer of your personal Self. Separated by a thread from the universal Self, your bliss body is filled with natural ecstasy, dynamism, and goodness.
Contact with the bliss body develops through practice, especially practices such as mantra, meditation, and prayer that teach the mind to let go of the thoughts that hide the bliss body. To fully enter the bliss body, however, you usually need to be in a state of deep meditation. When you are in touch with your bliss body, you know that your nature is joyful, free, and capable of every flavor of happiness from rock-out ecstasy to simple contentment.
You are in the bliss body in those moments during which you recognize—viscerally rather than intellectually—that love is the deepest reality, beyond mental constructs or ideas. In fact, one of yoga's greatest gifts is its power to awaken us to our bodies of bliss.
