Śivasaṃhitā 5.54

Sakṛd—“even once”—is the most radical expression of this practice’s potency: even a single execution destroys pāpaugha—“the accumulated mass of sins.” Ogha (“mass,” “torrent”) suggests the quantity: not one or few negative karmic acts but their complete accumulation across lives. This soteriological hyperbole is not literary exaggeration but affirmation that correct practice acts on karma’s cause—ignorance of the Self—not only on its manifestations.

The entry of vāyu into madhyanāḍī—the central channel, suṣumnā—is the key technical event of all haṭhayoga practice. While prāṇa circulates through iḍā and piṅgalā—the lunar and solar channels—the mind remains fluctuating and samādhi is unattainable. Only when prāṇa enters suṣumnā—an event the Śivasaṃhitā calls madhyanāḍī praveśa—does the mind quiet and liberation become possible. This verse promises that the described practice produces that decisive event.

The relationship between karma purification and prāṇa’s entry into suṣumnā reveals the Śivasaṃhitā’s integral understanding: karma is not only an abstract moral record but a densification in the energy channels that prevents free flow of prāṇa toward the central channel. Yogic practice acts simultaneously at the moral level (purification of pāpa) and the energetic level (opening of suṣumnā), because both are expressions of the same process.