Questioner: Namaskaram, Sadhguru. You said we should not drink water or use the restroom during the practices – why not? 

Sadhguru: This whole idea that you have to sip water all the time has been established, particularly in the United States, because water is a big business. 

The fact is, if you do not have enough water in your body, the sodium concentration in the blood increases, the brain will swell a little bit; you will feel pressure in your head and get a headache. If you drink a larger quantity of water at once, the body will know how much to absorb. But if you are sipping water all the time, the body will get confused. When you sip water little by little, the absorption will be much higher, the blood will get diluted, and the sodium level will fall. If the sodium level falls beyond a certain point, once again the brain will swell. That is far more damaging than the swelling from increased sodium concentration. Nature has provided mechanisms to manage a lack of water in the system to a certain point. But nature never expected you to drink excess water and cause a problem for yourself. Therefore, there are no defense mechanisms for that. 

When you practice yoga, you systematically raise the ushna [heat] in the body – we do not want it to fall. If you drink cold water, the ushna will rapidly fall, and this will cause various other reactions. You will become more susceptible to allergic conditions, excess mucus, and the like. If you are doing intense asanas and suddenly you drink cold water, immediately, you may catch a cold. Therefore, never drink water when you are doing asanas. And never go to the bathroom during practice time, because you should work out the water in the form of sweat. It must pour from the top of your head – not all over the body. Slowly, as you practice, as your yoga takes shape within you, if you do any asana, you must sweat from the head. The rest of the body may sweat according to the weather conditions, but the main sweating should happen from your head. That means you are directing your energy in the right direction, and the asanas will naturally do that. 

If you do the asana properly, slowly, you will start sweating from the head. Ultimately, you want to become a fountain head of something else, so you first practice with waste water. If you keep working up your ushna, it will naturally take the waste water upward. If your system gets too hot, slow it down with a little bit of shavasana, but never reduce the heat with cold water. You should sweat it out rather than going to the bathroom because the level of purification is much higher when the wastewater comes out as sweat. 

When you are dripping with sweat while practicing yoga, usually your clothes will soak it up. But if you are bare-bodied, always rub the sweat back into the body, because there is a certain element of prana in the sweat, which we do not want to lose. When we rub the sweat back into the system, it will create a certain aura and strength for the body; a cocoon of your own energy, which is also known as kavacha. We do not want to flush it down the drain. Yoga is about using the body to its maximum benefit. 

If you do asanas regularly and you rub back your sweat into the system, you will generate a certain level of ushna and pranic intensity. Hot weather, cold weather, hunger, thirst – it all will not bother you. It is not that you are completely free from it all, but this puts you in a different place. 

The idea is to slowly grow beyond your physical compulsions. The physical is a series of compulsions – but whether it is food, drink, bathroom, or whatever else – the level of a particular compulsion is different from person to person. The idea is to reduce the compulsions gradually so that one day, if you sit, you become yoga – you are not just practicing yoga. To become yoga means that your level of perception is such that there is no distinction between you and the universe. You have to build your system in such a way that it can take that. Otherwise, if by accident someone perceives something very intense and their system is not ready for it, their fuse will blow out. Many people who have done wacky yoga through books or whatever else have lost their minds. It is very important that you build your system in such a way that the higher ways of living and doing things will naturally come to you. For that to happen, you have to climb high enough. Do not sit here and ask for higher dimensions to come down to you. If they come down, it will not be good for you. You have to climb to a place where higher dimensions are with you.