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Tumo (also spelled Tummo, or Tum-mo ) is a Tibetan term for a type of contemplative practice that causes an intense sensation of body heat to arise. It is one of the six yogas of Naropa. Stories and eyewitness accounts abound of yogi practitioners being able to generate sufficient heat to dry wet sheets draped around their naked bodies while sitting outside in the freezing cold, not just once, but multiple times. These observations have also been discussed in medical studies (Ding-E Young and Taylor, 1998). Tibet (Tibetan: བོད་, Bod, pronounced pö in Lhasa dialect; Chinese: 西è—, pinyin: XÄ«zà ng; older spelling Thibet) is a region in Central Asia and the home of the Tibetan people. ...
The six yogas of Naropa describe a set of advanced Tibetan Buddhist tantric meditation practices developed in and around the time of the Indian monk and mystic Naropa (1016-1100 C.E.), and conveyed to his student Marpa the translator. ...
This page is Yogi as advanced practitioners of Yoga. ...
One of the most famous practioners of tumo was perhaps the Tibetan Buddhist saint, Milarepa[1]. The biography of Milarepa is one of the most popular among the Tibetan people (Evans-Wentz, 2001). Modern western witnesses of this practice include the adventurer Alexandra David-Neel (David-Neel, 1971), and Lama Anagarika Govinda (Govinda, 1988). Tibetan Buddhism, (formerly also called Lamaism after their religious gurus known as lamas), is the body of religious Buddhist doctrine and institutions characteristic of Tibet and the Himalayan region. ...
Jetsun Milarepa (Wylie: Rje-btsun Mi-la-ras-pa), 1052-1135 (approx) was one of one of Tibets most famous yogis and poets, a student of Marpa Lotsawa, and a major figure in the history of the Kagyu (Bka-brgyud) school of Tibetan Buddhism. ...
Alexandra David-N el (October 24, 1868 - September 8, 1969) was a French explorer, anarchist, spiritualist, Buddhist and writer. ...
Lama Anagarika Govinda (born Ernst Lothar Hoffman, 1898-1985) was the founder of the Buddhist Order of the Arya Maitreya Mandala and a expositor of Tibetan Buddhism. ...
While the practice could be said to have some practical benefit in the frigid climate of Tibet, it cannot be said to be cultivated merely for the sake of keeping warm, but is rather a side-effect of a religiously oriented intensive meditation practice, and is understood to be the outward manifestation of an inward state of religious ecstasy or divine union. Similar experiences of a mystic fire have also been described among practitioners of other contemplative paths, such as the Sufi Irina Tweedie, and among practitioners of Kundalini Yoga. Tibet (Tibetan: བོད་, Bod, pronounced pö in Lhasa dialect; Chinese: 西è—, pinyin: XÄ«zà ng; older spelling Thibet) is a region in Central Asia and the home of the Tibetan people. ...
Ecstasy, from the Greek ekstasis, to be outside oneself, is a category of trance or trancelike states in which an individual transcends ordinary consciousness and as a result has a heightened capacity for exceptional thought or experience. ...
Sufism (Arabic تصوف taṣawwuf) is a system of esoteric philosophy commonly associated with Islam. ...
Irina Tweedie (* 1907 in Russia; †August 1999) was a british Sufi teacher. ...
Kundalini yoga is a meditative discipline, comprising a set of simple techniques that uses the mind, senses and body to create a communication between mind and body. The concept of pranotthana or intensified life-energy is central to the practice and understanding of kundalini yoga. Kundalini yoga focuses on psycho...
An attempt to study the physiological effects of tumo has been made by Benson and colleagues (Benson et.al, 1982; Cromie, 2002) who studied practitioners in the Himalayas and in India in the 1980s. In the first experiment, in Upper Dharamsala (India), Benson et.al (1982) found that these subjects exhibited the capacity to increase the temperature of their fingers and toes by as much as 8.3°C. In the most recent experiment, which was conducted in Normandy (France), two monks from the Buddhist tradition wore sensors that recorded changes in heat production and metabolism (Cromie, 2002).
It is not considered wise to engage in the practice of tumo, or any other intense form of meditation, outside of a proper socio-cultural context (such as a genuine spiritual lineage), without the supervison of a credible teacher, or without thorough psychological and physiological preparation. Intense, or unsupervised forms of meditation, might sometimes lead to substantial meditation-related problems. See Lukoff, Lu & Turner (1998) for more details on these problems.
References
- Benson, Herbert; Lehmann, John W.; Malhotra, M. S., Goldman, Ralph F.; Hopkins, Jeffrey; Epstein, Mark D. (1982) Body temperature changes during the practice of g Tum-mo yoga. Letter to Nature Magazine, 21 January 1982. Nature 295, 234 - 236
- Cromie, William J. (2002) Research: Meditation changes temperatures: Mind controls body in extreme experiments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Gazette, 18 April 2002
- David-Neel, Alexandra (1971) Magic and Mystery in Tibet. Dover Publications
- Ding-E Young, John and Taylor, Eugene (1998) Meditation as a Voluntary Hypometabolic State of Biological Estivation . News in Physiological Sciences, Vol. 13, No. 3, 149-153, June 1998
- Evans-Wentz, W. Y. Editor (2000) Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa: A Biography from the Tibetan being the Jetsün-Kabbum or Biographical History of Jetsün-Milarepa, According to the Late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English Rendering. USA:Oxford University Press
- Govinda, Lama Anagarika (1988) Way Of White Clouds. Shambhala Publications
- Lukoff, David; Lu Francis G. & Turner, Robert P. (1998) From Spiritual Emergency to Spiritual Problem: The Transpersonal Roots of the New DSM-IV Category. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 38(2), 21-50,
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