“I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart: I am, I am, I am.”
Dear Yogini,
Welcome to this day! With the advent of the vernal equinox and the lengthening light of day, one can feel the clarity and freshness in the air and the birdsong carried by the breeze bringing us out of our New England winter and officiating our season of spring. It is also my father’s birthday today, so I take precious moments to simply breathe and savor my breath and to rest in gentle remembrance of him and the memories that bring me joy. He gave me the gift of independence; and yoga, my love language, has guided me towards the intimacy of how to be unconditionally loving towards myself without concern for what anyone else thinks of me. Breathing in, I claim my independence, my sense of Self; breathing out, I settle into the familiarity of me and the confidence I gain by being friendly with myself.
This intentional modulation of the breath, or breath control, is prānāyāma, the fourth and pivotal facet of your practice. Breath is our life force and allows us to meet each moment with awareness. It is your guide in yoga and reflects too your state of being. Do you notice your breath getting quicker with anticipation when you wait uncertainly for what comes next, or for the other shoe to drop? Are you aware of how you hold your breath when you are deep in concentration? Or the exertion of your exhale when you are putting extra physical effort into something, let’s say your postures? Do you notice that your breath becomes shallower with trepidation? Can you feel when you forget to breathe in? Can you touch with your awareness that moment you notice you haven’t been breathing at all?
And here it is that our energy, our prana, is derived from our breathing. Take a deep breath and notice the pause it gives you to come back to the present and savor the moment. When we don’t breathe well, we become depleted and wonder at our lethargy, our sluggishness, our insomniac tendencies, our inability to focus and concentrate—the litany of ailments and impediments to our well-being. Herein lies the brilliance of yoga: The breath, while automatic, stands alone as the only subsystem the conscious mind can put into ‘manual override.’ So it is through conscious manipulation of the movements of the breath that we can recalibrate our entire system. In other words, you and I have the ability to control the following characteristics of the breath:
What the yogic wisdom understood about the breath long before the science corroborated its capacity to directly regulate the autonomic nervous system is that how we breathe has a direct influence on our automatic physiological responses and thus emotional reactivity and behaviors. More specifically, breath control—with particular attention to slowing the breath and deepening the breath—helps to increase vagal tone which means you can respond to stress in a more measured and resourced fashion.
With mindfulness and consistency, pranayama, combined with other yoga techniques and practices, empowers us to increase our window of tolerance and resilience to traumatic or stressful events. First, you develop awareness of your individual reactions to situations, and then, using the tools and techniques of pranayama or restorative yoga practices, you can monitor your reactivity to external stimuli and gain control over your own behavior, emotions, and thoughts. This is self-regulation and personal agency. In yoga, this quality of sustained psychological stability of mind through a range of experiences and situations, including those of conflict and change, is upekshanam, or equanimity, a concept I introduced you to in one of my previous letters.
Come back to that very first tenet and aid to your yoga, yama, the conduct that is practiced in the form of restraining your natural tendencies towards unbecoming behavior or actions that do not serve your best interest. And now consider its foremost principle, ahimsa, respect for all living things (nonviolence). Ask yourself this: Can I forego doing harm to myself (by what I put in my body and how I treat myself) and unto others (by the way I behave and treat them) by directing my thoughts, and communicating and acting with reverence and kindness? The breath is your guide as you persevere at your practice, dear yogini. For each step forward, there may be two, three, five steps back. But the breath is your constant companion. Turn towards it, and invite it in. It is your life force and at times may well feel like a lifeline. Grab ahold of it, and let it serve as a tether when you are frayed, distraught, or brokenhearted.
How many times a day do we forget to breathe? And yet the day marches on as does life, without regard for whether we are keeping up with it or not. With all the yoga in the world you wonder perhaps at your ability to stay true to the practice, dear yogini. I say this: Keep breathing. Yoga is not a perfect process because we are not perfect in our approach to life. But it is a process nonetheless, and the breath shows us this. The breath does not stop of its own accord until the final exhale, so it behooves us to ride the waves of the breath and with it the rising and falling away of each moment’s experiences.
The breath asks us to honor what it is to be ‘simply human’, this common condition from which no one is exempt. How many times have I fallen off my practice wagon, have I failed to ‘achieve’ my idea of what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ what is ‘good behavior’ and what is ‘bad behavior’? Better yet, what happens when I make it personal? I suck at this [by whose standards of excellence? I ask you]. I’m not good enough [for whom?]. I’m a disappointment [to whom?]. I’m a (complete and absolute) failure [in what regard?].
I hope, dear yogini, this is not part of your self-talk, that you do not berate yourself and bring yourself down, in practice, of your own accord. But, if you do—and we have all done so at some time or another—know simply to bring your attention to this too. When I give myself permission to pause, to take a deep breath and savor the moment, I see that filament of thought, that sensate expression for what it is. It is only that someone, somewhere, at some point in my life disparaged me or invalidated my sense of self. I ascribed it significance, embodied it, then began to believe it, and it became my truth. The awareness I have cultivated through pranayama in combination with my yoga has served to shift the dynamic of my thinking and how I speak to myself and to my body in asana, in prayer. In essence, I have learned to repattern my perception. (17) Is it not worth persevering in practice to shift the dynamic of our understanding, our beliefs, and deepest truths towards manifesting the things we desire for ourselves and in the world?
Nothing is sustainable without breath. Your in-breath is your source of praṇa, the vital principle (in contrast to the vital air that arises in the thoracic cavity, prana vayu). In yoga, the breath is both the most essential and most crucial component of practice because it subdues the ‘monkey mind’ and anchors the attention so you can direct awareness and the energy of your thinking to where you want it to go. It is the connector, the bridge between brain and body, mind and matter, spirit and soma. Your breath is the brahma sutra, this thread of consciousness that defines the current of Life Force (or praṇa) by which all of the universal objects are bound together. Your breath brings this light of awareness and the discerning capacity of the intellect into the realm of the physical—into your body, into your practice and right into asana and perceived bodily sensations. Your breath-based interventions restore and enhance your ability to feel and be more and more at ease with your somatic experiences. So you can see how the breath is a powerful force for shifting dynamics within the body as well as within the mind and our thinking. It becomes a key ingredient to then shifting our speech and behaviors in truth towards serving our own highest good.
Praṇayama is the combination of two concepts we are now familiar with—praṇa, vital life force; and yama, holding back, restraint. You breathe, you pay attention to your breath, and you modulate your breath with praṇayama techniques to remember to be intensely present to what you are doing and how you feel in the moment. Pranayama brings all physiological systems into balance and into synergy one with the other. And because your consciousness is colored by your attachments to sense objects—whether your environment, other people, your thoughts, ideas, opinions, narratives—your breath serves to control your senses by drawing them inwards to focus on the subtlest movements of praṇa under the surface-layer of awareness. I leave you in the sensate arms of Spring to contemplate this.
Practice with patience, breathe deeply, sleep soundly.
Sincerely yours,
Nicole