Your breath is the interface between your body and your mind. Every thought you have, action you take and emotion you experience influences your breathing – for example, excitement might speed your breathing to prepare your body to take action, or a surprise might cause you to inhale sharply to supply your brain with oxygen, promoting quick thinking.
When I teach breathing exercises, I often begin by demonstrating this intimate body-breath-mind connection. I ask students to close their eyes and count while I tap on a table. I begin by tapping slowly and loudly. Then I make the taps more irregular and softer. Most students hold their breath as they try to concentrate, without being aware of it. Such a reaction is common even in the animal world. Watch how your cat, intent on catching a bird, stays perfectly still. Her concentration is so complete that she barely breathes. We understand this mind-breath body connection as children. If a two-year-old were to find you breathing irregularly or fast, he or she would ask, “What’s wrong?” This is not something that is taught; children know it instinctively. By practising breathing exercises you can relearn this instinctive knowledge and come to understand how powerfully your breathing influences your quality of mind and body. And because your body is a living system that constantly recreates itself, by practising breathing exercises you can voluntarily exert control to change unhealthy patterns of breathing, thinking and acting. For example, consciously slowing and deepening your breathing can help you to focus and act calmly under duress.
If you practise yoga, you are already retuning your body-breath-mind connection when you do breathing exercises called pranayama, a Sanskrit word meaning “control of the prana”. Prana is the energy that animates you, and yogis regard breath as its physical manifestation. The exercises in this book help you to see how prana flows through you and how you can control it to enhance your physical, mental and emotional wellbeing.