Many years ago, in my yoga teacher training, my teacher told us a secret. He said: “If you do this, it will completely change your life, make you healthier, enhance your relationships, and make you a better person.” Then he added: “Too bad that you will not find out for yourself, because you won’t do it.” This was a provocation, he was challenging us to prove him wrong.
This best-kept yoga secret is pranayama. Prana means “life force” and ayāma means “expansion”. Pranayama is about expanding our life force, and different breathing practices are means to make it happen. Pranayama technically is not breathing, but controlling the muscular power that moves the lungs. The yoga tradition says that once you learn to control that muscular action, you can then learn to control your other physiological systems.
Breathing is a fascinating process that is different from all other physiological processes, because it can both reflect our mental and physiological state AND affect it. When you feel stressed or uncomfortable in any way, your breathing will reflect it by becoming short, shallow and labored. When you feel calm, relaxed and at ease, your breathing will naturally become deeper, longer and more subtle. However, with current pace of life and internal and external stressors, we rarely experience full-blown, life-threatening stress, but we never fully relax either. James Nestor in his book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art says that “We spend our days half-asleep and nights half-awake, lolling in a grey zone of half-anxiety.” This is not a healthy way to live, and breath can come to our rescue. We can use our breath to affect our sympathetic / parasympathetic balance by revving up our systems for any upcoming challenges and slowing our systems down to be able to rest, process and restore. It is especially useful when we are working with three pillars of physiological health: energy levels, sleep issues and stress management.
How and how much we breathe matters. Proper breathing is essential for efficient blood-oxygen exchange, brain function, energy release, organ function, all other physiological processes and our longevity in general. By now it is widely accepted that vital lung capacity is a reliable predictor of one’s mortality. Breathing exclusively through the mouth instead of the nose has a lot of unfortunate consequences for our health and has been linked to rise of stress-related hormones and blood pressure, fatigue, irritation and anxiety, as well as sinus infections and sleep apnea. Shallow gulping breathing goes hand-in-hand with neck tension, mental agitation, panic attacks, and so on.
Unfortunately, the aging process is not kind to our respiratory function either. As you get older, your lungs gradually lose their elasticity and, as a result, their vital capacity; your rib cage stiffens, any rounding of the upper back tends to exaggerate, the respiratory muscles gradually lose strength. It is expected that the lungs will lose 12% of capacity between the age of 30 and 50 and continue a steady decline from there.
We can slow down and potentially reverse this natural decline by learning to pay attention to our breath and by doing simple intentional breathing practices. In this yoga series we will explore different qualities of our breath and why it matters how we breathe. We will question some widely accepted assumptions about breathing and investigate the most effective breathing patterns, we will compare modern understanding of the breathing process with traditional yogic approach and analyze the usefulness of some traditional breathing techniques in our daily lives. We will make this exploration as straightforward and relevant as possible. We will focus on the foundational aspects of breathing that would be easy to understand and beneficial for anybody.
We are all busy. We are busy with responsibilities, juggling careers, children, aging parents, scary news cycles and all the other things that come with adulthood. On top of that, we are dealing with uncertainty and turbulence of the moment. What we need most is stability and resilience at every level of our systems – structural stability to keep the body healthy, physiological immunity to keep us resilient, and emotional balance to manage the challenges that come our way. Intentional and mindful breathing practice can help us cultivate stability and resilience at every level of our system.
This yoga series takes you on a journey to get in touch with your breath and build a more intimate relationship with it. You will begin with breath awareness and then gradually learn how to use your breath to create specific energetic and physiological effects. Full length yoga practices include both movement and breath work and teach you how to link them together. Short breathing practices help you familiarize yourself with individual yogic techniques and how to apply them to specific situations in your daily life. At the beginning of each chapter you will see an introductory video that outlines the most important points of that chapter that will help you maximize the effect of the practice. Each chapter also features an article (or several!) with reasoning for why we do what we do in our yoga practice and specific details to pay attention to. We recommend that you read the article first before you practice so that you have a better understanding of what each practice is supposed to accomplish. We put all those articles together into a handy pdf file that you can find in the last chapter of the series. I hope that you will learn lots of new things about your body and use your breath to change your life, make you healthier, enhance your relationships, and make you a better person, just like my teacher promised. Will you find it out for yourself? I am Olga Kabel, yoga teacher and yoga therapist – let’s get started!
Breath: A path to stability in uncertain times
Recent events had brought the subject of breathing to the forefront of many people’s minds and made them suddenly aware of this natural process that usually takes place underneath our conscious awareness. It made them acutely aware how essential breathing is to their very survival and to their health and well-being.
