Modo Elefante is an (online) Breathing Meditation Center (with some private on-site retreats; request on-site programs for groups and companies). Whether online or in person, I always work with small groups, thus guaranteeing an intimate and personal atmosphere.
Over the years I learned that whoever meditates does not need to become an spiritual performer. It does not need a special language, a specific aesthetic or the promise of permanent illumination. Least of all does meditation need someone to step into the role of the person who claims to have all the answers.
We live in times where inner experience has become a market. We are frequently invited to pursue an idealized version of ourselves, as if there were always something more to heal, unblock, elevate, or manifest. On this journey, it's easy to lose sight of the simplest and most important thing: the direct experience of being alive.
So Modo Elefante was born to return to simplicity. Here breathing, movement, meditation and silence are practices aimed at developing a more intimate relationship with one's own experience of living, and a lucidity capable of sustaining life as it is; to observe before reacting, to listen before interpreting, to discover that many of the answers we seek arise when we stop forcing them and learn to remain present in the body and breathing.
Hence, this space maintains a profoundly secular, critical, and open spirit. It doesn't propose belief. It proposes experience. It doesn't invite the adoption of a particular philosophy of life, but rather the cultivation of a form of awareness that each person can carry with them beyond the practice and any label.
If, after many years, I continue to share meditation, it is because I know that conscious breathing is one of the simplest and most profound ways to remember something that was never lost: our capacity to remain still in the life that is already unfolding.
Below you can get a broader idea of ??the project, reviewing its fundamental theoretical and practical bases.
The really deep moments in meditation are unpredictable, unique, unforgettable, always unrepeatable and, generally, indescribable. They are like a trip of self-discovery through unexplored internal lands, which is completed only when we open our eyes with perceptions of the beyond different from those who have never embarked on experiences of this kind... They are like the episode of a ceremony which celebrates connecting to an inner source of inexhaustible energy.
The routines in Modo Elefante are based on ancestral meditation techniques, breathing exercises and physical movement practices from ancient yoga culture, as they did in lay spiritual communities of old India thousands of years ago.
Breathing meditation is practiced to access the emotional forces of body and mind. Breathing is a physiological process of energy absorption and the way we breathe triggers vibrations that influence our entire being.
Breathing is directly connected to the brain, the central nervous system, and virtually to every system in the body, making it the most vital process in the human structure. It also connects to the hypothalamus (the part of the brain involved in emotional responses) and the vagus nerve. Both the hypothalamus and the vagus nerve, along with other physiological parts, are responsible for transforming our perception of life into cognitive experience, which we can refine through the practice of ancient breathing patterns in a meditative environment.
In this way, Modo Elefante uses breathing as a fundamental axis of self-knowledge, and it does so through ancestral patterns to create states of deep connection in order to observe ourselves from an internal perspective different from the usual one.
Ancient yoga is simple, secular, poetic and based on a meditative trend according to the principles that gave rise to it in classical India.
Its most basic objective is to strengthen the following four faculties of the mind through yogic postures and breathing exercises:
I. Power.
II. Detachment.
III. Knowledge.
IV. Virtuosity.
It also sees life holistically with the following four pillars:
I. Healthy diet.
II. Healthy recreation.
III. Healthy routines.
IV. Healthy thoughts.
Samkhya is one of the first philosophical structures of humankind and the theoretical framework of ancient yoga (it begins to take shape about 3,000 years ago), a few centuries before Buddhism, which is why both currents share several principles.
In it, for the first time, the human mind dares to question the concepts of consciousness and evolution without having to go to a divine entity to answer its questions.
The result: an elegant 25-point outline of the evolution of consciousness, exhibiting complete freedom of thought along with a reliance on agnostic wisdom.
Movement at the level of joints and endocrine and nervous systems is key, since in the body our entire emotional spectrum, our reactions and program of beliefs are densified.
By doing physical exercise together with specific breathing patterns, we create balance in these systems, which opens a channel of energy that goes directly to the mind, where the true process of self-knowledge and harmonisation driven by meditation begins.
Both the meditations as well as the breathing patterns practiced in Modo Elefante generate a degree of movement designed to remove the energy lodged in the different parts of the body.