The Kitchen and Kundalini:
Cooking is an anticipation of digestion, a sort of predigestion. For example, in Africa the papaya tree has the very peculiar quality that its fruit and leaves are full of pepsin, the same stuff which is found in the juice of the stomach, the digestive stuff par excellence. The Negroes wrap up their meat for two or three hours in papaya leaves instead of cooking it—it thus becomes partially digested; it is predigested. And so the whole art of cooking is predigestion. We have transferred part of our digestive ability into the kitchen, so the kitchen is the stomach of every house, and the labor of preparing the food is then taken away from our stomachs.
Our mouth is also a predigestive organ, because the saliva contains a digestive substance. The mechanical action of the teeth is predigestive, because we cut up the food, which is what we also do in the kitchen in cutting up the vegetables, and so on. So you could really say that the kitchen is a digestive tract projected from the human body. And it is the alchemistic place where things are transformed.
Therefore maipra would be a center in which substances are digested, transformed. The next thing one would expect would be the transformation shown as completed. As a matter of fact, this center is right below the diaphragm, which marks the dividing line between anvhata and the centers of the abdomen. ~Carl Jung; Kundalini Yoga