THE BREATH WRAPS itself like ribbons around the internal structure of the body. It wraps but does not bind. It moves but does not stick. It’s only the mind that sticks. As easily as the breath enters the body and mind, it leaves. But the body and mind are dependent on the breath. We only know the feel of the body because of the breath. Take this a step further: If there were no breath, there would be no body to know.
The breath animates the web of life, and in human form this is most effortlessly experienced as breathing. Physiologically, the heart pumps our blood, but the larger organs, including the stomach and spleen, liver and kidneys, are sewn to the respiratory diaphragm—a perfect location. The pumping and vibrating of the major organs of the body occur through the movement of the respiratory diaphragm.
An interesting function of human physiology is that the respiratory diaphragm also controls the nervous system. The respiratory diaphragm, in its movements up and down, like a wave rising and descending, controls the rhythm of the nervous system particularly in the thoracic spine. In fact, in yoga’s model of the physiology of the nervous system, it is said that the nervous system primarily originates in the thoracic spine at the same location that the respiratory diaphragm hooks into the thoracic vertebrae. This would be somewhere close to the twelfth thoracic vertebra.
The breath presses the nervous system into rhythm and as such spreads out across the body like waves on the cosmic ocean or roots beneath the surface of the earth. A root structure, a wave pattern, or even the web of a spider is a combination of lines and circles with an organic purpose. The mind and breath interweave just like patterns throughout the vegetable kingdom, as can be seen in the branching of nerves, blood vessels, and other physiological systems. The One becomes the many as organic complexity evolves.
Like the mind that either spreads out or gets concentrated, like water in a river that diverts and meets up again, the breath, too, moves from the one to the many, from singularity to infinity. When the sensation of the breath is felt in the nostrils, it occurs first as a fine and singular line, a thread, a simple stream coursing through the nostrils. Then it spreads, beginning at the root of the palette where the tongue becomes the throat. It drifts across the shoulder blades and spreads the collarbones away from each other. The inhalation continues as a widening movement across the rib cage, and with close attention one can feel all the bones in the body rotating externally during the inhale and internally during the exhale.
Exhaling pulls the ribs close together and inhaling spreads them out again, drawing the wings of the kidneys across the back, wrapping the skin around the side ribs and pulling toward the front midline of the torso.
With awareness and concentration we can not only follow the patterning of the breath but also control it. In mindfulness of the breath we watch the breath closely without interfering with it. We learn about its structure and patterning as well as its impermanence. But in prāṇāyāma and āsana, we manipulate the breath. In prāṇāyāma we stretch the breath, as Richard Freeman says, “like the sun stretches light.” Without stretching the breath throughout the five sheaths of the body, it moves in habituated patterns. Likewise, when we stretch the breath, the mind that follows the breath is stretched into longer and longer spans of attention until the mind itself—the seemingly solid, stable mind—dissolves into a stream of momentary perceptions arising and passing away, moment to moment, coming from nowhere and going nowhere, yet continuing in sequence without pause. The breath, too, arises and falls away, revealing the mind and breath as a singular phenomenon, which has the effect for the practitioner of placing him or her in a nondual state of awareness.
Most of the confusion about the teaching of the kośas occurs when it is assumed that the kośas refer only to the physicality of the body. It is easy to fall prey to the pull of a Judeo-Christian cultural attitude of a mind split from the body. If we superimpose mind over body on the kośa system, it seems like there is a mind that stands outside these five layers of body. But the kośa theory is the antidote to the mind-body split because it includes the mind within its sheaths. The kośas describe a whole human being rather than a mind apart from the layers of the body alone. One cannot make a case for the workings of the mind alone or for the priority consciousness has in any given moment, because mind, breath, body, and stillness are of one piece, and if the kośas are truly interdependent, one aspect cannot operate without interactions with all the others.
If mind is treated as something apart from the kośas, they become nothing more than an elaborate way of talking about “body and mind.” But traditional texts make it quite clear that physicality refers to the entire range of material conditions both inside and outside our minds and bodies. It includes not only the sense organs but also their objects: colors and shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, as well as such disparate things such as space, gender, heat, nutriment, decay, impermanence, and so on. The functioning, decay, and impermanence of the kośas allow us to see the “unfindability,” in the mind and body, of a stable and sustaining self. On close investigation a picture emerges of a seamless, dynamic process of experience, where not only the body-mind split but also the subject-object split is dissolved. Learning to experience things in terms of these five kośas erodes our sense of being “a mind inside a body inside a world.”
The kośas are not something surrounding or happening to “me.” Where is the “I” among these sheaths? When we try to find a solid “I” having experience within the frame of the kośas, it is impossible. Since the kośas interpenetrate one another in a seamless flow, if we posit permanence or something essential and lasting within that flow, it gets interrupted. This is experienced in mind and body as feeling blocked. Having configured “self,” “mind,” “body,” and “world” as discrete things, we feel that each is cut off from the other, thus blocking the flow of life. This leads to degrees of alienation, in which we feel “out of touch” with our body, our emotions, other people, and the environment. There are moments in life—such as when we are one with the natural world, making love, playing with a child, creating art, ingesting psychotropic drugs, or sitting in meditation—when the blocks within the kośas are temporarily dissolved. But as soon as the mind comes in, or more specifically the “I”-making function of the mind (ahaṇkāra), the blocks return again, leading to feelings of separateness and alienation. However, we are not trapped in a destiny outside of our control, and it is the perspective of the kośas that guide us in seeing that all attempts to create permanence in a dazzling and unstable world will only bring separateness and discontent.
Our subjective experience always appears on the surface as a “me” having experience of some thing “inside” or “outside” a somewhat-stable self. Yoga practice shows us over and over again that what seems like an experience belonging to “me” is simply the contact of perception and stimulus. And the person that perceives, along with that which is perceived, is changing, unpredictable, and unstable. If I like what I experience, I try to repeat it (raga), and if I do not like it, I try to avert it (dveṣa), thus giving myself the feeling of being a real self.
When I feel a bone and create a theory that the leg bone is mine, I give substantiality both to what I perceive and to the self that is perceiving. However, these are simply kośas—in this case the first and third—coming into contact with each other. This contact is one moment in a seamless flow of changing and, paradoxically, impersonal conditions.
Most practitioners view the kośas as a convenient way of describing the interconnection of mind and body. However, the kośas are also a theoretical construct through which we can see the turning cycle of saṁsāra, conditioned existence. A separate self sets up the conditions for addiction, because all addictive patterns stem from the flip-flop back and forth between attachment, aversion, and the consequence of these two reactionary patterns, namely, feeling like a self.
Is there a self that inhabits this mind and body? How can we find it? How do we know it is there? Where is its location?
A personality or psychology convinced of the self as primary leads to a personality embedded in existential disorientation. Since feeling like a separate self solidifies both subject and object—“me” and what is either “outside” or “inside” me—one feels stuck in a compartmentalized world. But the kośas are not separate compartments. They are interpermeating forms moving about within and around one another. The more obsessively we cling to “self,” the more we reinforce a compartmentalized perception of reality configured by existential confusion. The very insistence on being “someone” blocks the possibility of freedom in being no one. As soon as “someone” is born, the anguish of torment, grief, pain, depression, and anxiety is inevitable.1
After looking deeply into the nature and operation of the kośas, it no longer makes sense to commit to a reality or even continually construct a life where we insist on a self that exists independent of the kośas. This maintains the feeling of a self inside a mind inside a body inside a world. Any attempt to ensure the survival of a self inside a mind—strategies that are ingrained and deeply unconscious—create anxiousness and a self-centered mode of perception. Longing to be someone keeps us self-absorbed and intensifies the subject-object split.
Patañjali says that the mind and body and even awareness is svarūpa śūnya (empty of self-form). The word śūnyatā derives from the root shu, which interestingly enough means “swollen.” Something swollen is something beyond original measure, boundless, and by definition, beyond fragmentation and compartmentalization. This is the heart of the kośa theory: by using the lens of these sheaths that make up mind and body, we begin to see that the sheaths, like the jewels in Indra’s net, penetrate one another, are formed by one another, and though singular in one way, are from a larger view, part of everything else in existence.
There is nothing to cling to. Not holding on to any one thing, even the need to be a self, drops the yoga practitioner into a reality that is unmeasured. This unmeasured reality is the way that the mind-body process actually is: a seamless part of a changing whole. There is only consciousness and its objects appearing and disappearing, a moving gyroscope of mind, body, and world, forever impossible to disentangle from one another because they are made up of one another.