What we call “I” is just a swinging door, which moves when we inhale and when we exhale.
SHUNRYU SUZUKI
Your breath is the key to unlocking your body’s potential. Maintaining steady, rhythmic breathing is the single most important element of yoga practice. The practice here is to begin to see your breathing in relation to the actions you’re taking. It requires something extraordinary for any of us to really get to a true and connected relatedness to our breath, and the impact of it on our bodies, energy, and movement. As you become skillful at matching your breath to your movement, the two will no longer feel separate, but rather one thread that carries you through the fabric of your practice.
When used consciously, your breath becomes pure, raw energy that sweeps through you like a cleansing wind. With every inhalation, you bring new life into your body, with every exhalation, you clean house. As you breathe your way through your practice, you send signals to your brain that you are calm and safe. Matching and mirroring your movements with your breath, you peel away layers of physical and mental resistance. Your breath is what sustains you when you come to your edge in a pose, and allows you to move into new mental, emotional, and physical frontiers.
In Baptiste Yoga, the breath we use for asana practice is called ujjayi. Ujjayi breathing is the thread of breath force that elegantly weaves through the tapestry of our vinyasa practice. It is the access point to the source of serene passion required to intuitively lead yourself through your practice, and through your everyday life. Ujjayi serves as a source of equanimity and ease when the path gets tough. It is a doorway to vitality and creative energy.
The Sanskrit word ujjayi translates to “victory.” In yogic principle, victory comes by being committed to something bigger than oneself. The question becomes: How do you create your practice to be about something bigger than yourself? The answer to that question is found in being aware of and tuned into the transformative power of your breath.
Breath and the absence of thoughts are correlated. By correlated, I mean a specific kind of connection in which breath, thoughts, and emotions are in a dance with one another. As you become conscious of your breath, you begin to notice it reflects your thought patterns, energy, and emotional moods like a mirror.
In my experience, most of us need a breakthrough in being conscious of our breathing, and our understanding of the impact it has on our practice. Most—if not all—of us are very poor observers of our breathing. Has this been your experience, perhaps? Most of us do what we do on our mats, and we produce positive results for the most part without really noticing our breathing. So the first step—the most important step—is to simply notice your breath. Try that right now; simply pause for a moment and notice your breath.
Observing breath is a tool to cultivate self-awareness. With every mood and emotion, your breathing has a different rhythm. When you are angry or frustrated, watch your breath; you will notice it has a certain quality. When you feel fear, observe how your breath responds. When you feel love, watch how the breath flows. When you are sad, notice the tempo and rhythm of your inhalations and exhalations. When you are calm, feeling happy, or just hanging out in Savasana, clue into your breath and see how it feels and sounds.
Have you noticed that when your body is healthy you breathe differently than when your body is sick? When you are ill, the breathing is off-center, or may alert you that something is wrong in the ecosystem within. In contrast, when you’re in perfect health, you typically forget about your breathing because it flows without friction.
We are typically unaware of our breath, but the receiving pose is the perfect opportunity to get conscious of it. You get to know your breath patterns and their different qualities, and observe that whenever your state of mind changes, the breathing changes. The reverse is also true: change your breathing, and the state of mind and emotional energy changes. Breath awareness is a tool that has transformative powers; you can literally change your mind and your mood just through breath.
Pranayama is the practice of putting your attention on the breath and intentionally being at play with it. A big breakthrough awaits those who are at conscious play with their breath. When you bring your awareness to your breath while in the receiving pose, you are training the mind to hone its focus. Training yourself to keep your attention on your breath brings a meditative power to the pose and integrates the body, mind, and being. This cultivated mindfulness on the mat will then empower an overall ability to focus during everyday tasks.
In an article published in 2012 in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, researchers evaluated people who had no previous exposure to meditation. Some of the group were given 3 hours of mindfulness meditation training and were asked to meditate for 10 minutes each day for 16 weeks, and some of the group did not meditate at all. Both groups were then given tasks that involved attention to detail, and the meditators showed more control over executive functions. This study points to the possibility that even small amounts of meditation training can significantly change neural patterns in the brain.
The work for the newer yogi is to relate to the breath as something very interesting. Get really interested in its rhythm and effect, and you begin to create a new depth of relationship with your breath. Learn to just be with your breath in the pose. Observe it, and be at play with controlling the flow of breath into and out of your body. Observe the impact of your breathing on your physical structure, on the energetic vibration in your body. Do that and you will experience a sense of expansion. The simple act of observing your breathing will alter its flow, and as it alters, so will your ground of being.
The word pranayama is often translated to mean “breath control,” but personally, I never liked that definition. I’ve discovered that pranayama is less about breath control and more about the expansion of energy and the flow of vitality that comes through conscious breathing. Prana means vital energy found in breath, and ayam means infinite expansion.
If, on the mat, the aim was to control the breath, that would put you and I in the role of “controller of life force,” which diminishes what’s possible in the vast landscape of pranayama. Pranayama offers a great expansion of your life force. Its gifts come when you become one with the flow of breath and experience it as part of the organic pulsation of your body, your emotions, and your energy. That might sound a bit like new-age fluff, but try it for yourself in the pose and see what happens. Allow your breathing to be a holistic, natural experience, in sync with the ebb and flow of your body’s pulse and sensations and your energetic movement, and you’ll see what I mean. This is how we break from “doing breathing” to being moved and used by the breath into an experience of total aliveness.
The goal of ujjayi breathing—the deep, rhythmic inhalation and exhalation used in yoga practice—is to do so in concert with the whole. This brings us to full presence and, very often, into harmony with those around us. This is true in a pose, or in life. I remember a time when I had first fallen in love with the woman I was going to marry. We were quietly sitting side by side on the beach in Del Mar, California, holding hands. We were in the experience of being really in love, and suddenly I became aware that we were breathing in unison. Without words, we were in a deep physical and emotional rapport, not breathing separately but as one. We weren’t trying to inhale and exhale simultaneously; it just happened naturally.
Try this the next time you’re sitting with a friend or loved one. Pay attention and you’ll notice: if you’re connected, you will likely be breathing together. If you are not connected, or there is agitation, you will likely be breathing separately. If you’re sitting out in nature, meditating or just being quiet and enjoying being “out there” (i.e., outside your head) and at ease, you will notice your breathing is in sync with the sounds of nature around you. On the other hand, if you’re in nature and lost in your mental commentary, there will be a disconnect from the pulse of nature, and your breathing will reflect that.
In a pose, if you are in true north alignment with your drishti—a soft, steady gaze—and your breathing is deep and free, you will become aware that your physical experience in the pose is flowing to the same rhythm you are breathing. You will notice that when breathing is happening as a holistic phenomenon, there is an absence of resisting and struggling. You have the experience of being surrendered, powerfully at ease and steady in the zone—so much so that there is no need to “do breathing,” because you are already moving, breathing, and being from the center of the pose. You are in the experience of being whole, complete, and perfect, with nothing lacking or required.
Alternatively, let’s say you are resisting, fighting, or struggling in the pose. Or you’re bored, counting time until the pose ends. It would be a given, then, that you are breathing separately from the pose. True, you are breathing, but not in rhythm with your body, emotions, and experience. When you’re dialed in and connected in the receiving pose, you will be breathing from and with your body; this can never happen when you are lost in the narratives and default conversations in your head.
This distinction of in my head vs. in my experience way of breathing is something I’ve discovered for myself from my as-lived experience on the mat. When you experience this for yourself, you will find that this energetic experience can be transferred and shared with others. In this way, the breath can transform not only us but our relationship to others.
When I was a kid, I traveled through India with my parents visiting many yoga and meditation masters. Each time, my father would say to me beforehand, “When you meet the master, always watch his breathing. If you feel a connection and relatedness to him or her, watch your own breathing, too.” When meeting certain yoga masters, I would suddenly experience my breathing with full awareness, and my emotional mood would calibrate in tune with that master’s breathing. I’d be left feeling deeply grounded in my body and connected to the core of my being.
Beyond being connected or disconnected to my own breath, or with another’s, I’ve also had similar experiences on a group level. When teaching in a room full of yogis, I’ve felt what it’s like to have my breath connected to each and every person in the room, all of us unified in a frictionless flow of breath. It flows from “me” to “we.” As a teacher, if I am stuck in the confines of my head, not present and not leading from my body and being, I’ll notice the breathing in the room is compartmentalized to each person and out of sync. If, however, I am outside my head and fully with them, authentically listening to the room, I will organically breathe with them, and them with me.
To me, pranayama means “to breathe holistically through your body, as a source of all movement and connection to others.” This is the translation we use in Baptiste Yoga, in contrast to the common “control of breath.” I believe that when we try to control the breath, we restrain it, and thus cut off the reservoir of vitality available to us. In the space of free-breath flow, your life energy expands you, on the mat and off.
The yogis say that in the gap between exhalation and inhalation—the place of “no breath”—you will find the secret of life. At face value, that assertion might seem absurd. Why look to a place of no breath to find the secret of life? No breath equals death, right? But it’s a paradox. If you want to know life, you will be able to find it in the place of breathlessness. In that gap, there is no-thing; it is said that there you will find the energetic, creative source of life.
You can begin to do this by distinguishing the pause between the exhalation and the inhalation. That gap between breaths is your access point to the extraordinary and miraculous in your practice. In the receiving pose, after you inhale, take a conscious pause. Maybe play with holding the pause a little longer than usual and allowing yourself to feel the still space and vital energy. When you exhale, hold the pause in breathlessness a little longer than usual so you can experience the gap a little more deeply. Play with creating more time and spaciousness in your pattern of breaths in the pose.
One practice to alter your view and your emotional state is to play with stopping your breath for a brief moment. Anytime you are in a pose or even just taking a walk and realize you’ve drifted off into your thoughts, just stop the unconscious flow of breath and you’ll notice in that pause you get jolted awake. The thoughts will stop immediately. This is a good practice because it demonstrates how breath and thoughts are correlated. When you rest in the pause of breath, thoughts disappear; you get present, and new possibility enters. Thoughts and breath are part of the physical world. No thoughts and no breath are part of the world of being, from which creation is generated.
There is great learning on the mat that comes from playing with the length of each breath in the gaps between breaths, but there is even greater power that comes from simply watching the whole process of breath as it comes in and out of your body. Watch: don’t miss a single point as the breath comes in. Stay with it and you’ll notice there is an automatic gap after the breath has entered. Be with that gap. Don’t do anything; simply be a witness. As the breath begins to leave your body, continue watching. When it is completely out of your body and the breath stops, watch. Allow the breath to continue coming in, going out, coming in, going out, as you simply watch.
In those brief gaps, you’ll immediately notice the thoughts disappear. When I say they disappear, I mean that your identification with them is broken, and in that opening, you can now point to them as being separate from you. You have them rather than them having you. You will consistently start to experience breath running parallel to thoughts coming and going in the mind. They are twin forces, as connected and opposing as two sides of the same coin. The process of watching the breath in the pose is where meditation and physical movement intermingle and meet up in real time in your poses.
The beauty of working with the breath is that it creates remarkable openings for people who are more body-oriented, as well as those who are more mind-oriented. Breathing practice is where the body and mind get aligned in the experience of being whole and complete. In my personal experience, it is not too much of a stretch to say that pranayama is the beginning and the end of yoga practice.