Pranayama - Control of the Breath

“I think I already know how to breathe.”

Sure you know how to breathe. Learned it when you were just a baby, didn’t you? Nevertheless, it’s amazing the things you can do with breathing if you put your mind to it. Breathing affects the mind and the mind affects breathing. That’s the basis for pranyama - especially the part about the breathing affecting the mind (and the body.)
Most of the time we let the body control our breathing and never think about it. When we allow habit to control our breathing, that may be good, or may be not so good, depending on what the habit is.

Is your habit shallow chest-only breathing with belly pulled in tight and barely moving?
Not so good.

Is your habit easy slow breathing with belly moving lightly in and out with the breath? Great, you’ve formed a good habit.

But these are still habits. Do you think about how you are breathing under stress? Do you notice your breath as a cue to how your body is feeling? Do you know how to change your breath to modify your mood and energy? Do you use your breath to make you more alert, or to relax yourself when you want to, or to move smoothly with exertion. Maybe you do, and if so, you know how useful it can be to know how to use the breath this way. If you don’t know how to affect your body and mind through breath control, here’s how to learn.

For calming the body and the mind - The Three Part Breath

For energizing the body and the mind - Breath of Fire

For encouraging a state of peacefulness - The Square Breath

For balancing the body and the mind - Alternate Nostril Breathing

There are several other breath techniques, all of them known to help the mind and the body gain the desired state, whether calmed or energized, balanced, open or concentrated. “Just breathing” can be an aid to easing a variety of physical and emotional problems and a useful additive to treatment for those conditions needing medical care. Learning breath control can help reduce the immediate discomfort of such common conditions as asthma, arthritis or headache pain, insomnia, fatigue, hot flashes, sudden shock, performance anxiety, the stress of quitting smoking, and others.

In general, in the majority of people, there is a huge disconnection in Western society right now between body and mind. This is an observation, not a criticism. There are good and sufficient historical reasons why this is so, and it’s not due to carelessness or moral failings on the part of any individual. But it still has its effects and they aren’t good. So individuals who want to change that learned and culturally ingrained state of not knowing what their bodies are feeling until the pain becomes intense may change that habit. Body and breath awareness is one tool for doing that. I know it works because I am one of those people who had to deal with the endless loop of stress - physical tension - chronic stress conditions - chronic pain - increased stress ad infinitum. Since the loop was endless, there was no way to interrupt it. I had to ease it down at every point. Now I watch my body carefully to monitor stress reactions and keep them down to a reasonable level. It has been shown over and over again that some stress is good for you but endless stress can wear your body out, and make your life miserable while you’re living it.

Here then, is another part of bringing the stress levels down. At this level, the very basic level, pranayama can be learned independently of yoga, though it definitely has synergistic effects with yoga that inform and improve both practices.

Pranayama, like yoga, can not really be learned from a book, much less a website. You may think you are learning it, and you may learn some aspects of it, but it’s been my experience, as a person who habitually turns to the “literature on the subject,” first, that you can’t learn it well without a teacher. There will be something you miss. In hatha yoga you may miss some little aspect of the position that keeps you from getting a huge backache, for example. In pranayama, it may well be some little thing that keeps you from just hyperventilating when you think you are doing Breath of Fire. In both cases, you will have wasted your time and possibly hurt yourself, and be wondering what all this was supposedly good for anyway. In addition, a good teacher leads you gently along the path to greater skills and knowledge, and having the class to go to encourages you to continue in it. As in everything else, doing it once isn’t going to do much one way or the other.

Note to those who are upset that I am advocating pranayama on such a basic level and probably shouldn’t even be calling it that, etc. Yes, I am well aware that there are considerably greater depths or heights of experience to be attained by a strong and continuous practice of pranayama. That’s not going to happen at the basic level. Not everyone who does yoga is going to become a wandering saddhu and not everyone who studies pranayama is going to bring their kundalini to its full expression. At this level of practice, it will never get that strong. It is up to a good teacher to spot when she has a student who is starting to go beyond the basics and point that person to an appropriate teacher to take them farther along the path. The purpose of teaching breath control at this level is basic awareness of the body and it’s interconnection with mind. Others can teach beyond that level, but I teach the basics to those who need them.