"Why do we breathe in yoga? Why is it so important?"- a new student asked me the other night in class. My answer was, "That is a great question!"
And so, I began to tell her about why we breathe. I do have a workshop on breath and breathing, why we do it and how it can help us relieve stress and improve our life in ways you may have never thought. But I thought, if she doesn’t know, then there must be others who also don’t know or are not sure.
Here in this blog I am going to try and briefly explain it for you- the physiological reasons, the spiritual reasons and the emotional reasons.
Let's talk about what happens when we breathe. Obviously, we breathe to take in oxygen. Could we live without oxygen? No! So, it stands to reason that breath equals life- and life is energy in motion. In yoga, breath is called prana and prana in Sanskrit means energy. When we breathe while doing yoga, we are bringing oxygenation and vital energy to our entire body.
Learning to control our breath in yoga, allows us to control our flow of life. When our bodies- right down to muscle fiber and cells are well oxygenated, they function at an optimal state of health and well-being. Spiritually speaking, breath as prana is used to cleanse impurities. These impurities, in our day-and-age are mostly all the stress we carry around with us- all the tension. We can release what no longer serve us through our breathe and postures during Yoga- when we focus on our breath, we are more focused on being in our bodies aka- being present, in the now moment- especially when we join the three-part breath with ujjayi breathing to further “purify”.
There is a beautiful story from the Hindu epic Mahabharata, part of the Bhagavata Purna in the Bhagava Gita that ‘explains’ the purpose of ujjayi breathing. It goes that the gifts of the gods were sunk to the bottom of the ocean and laced with poison by the demons. The gods needed at least two of these gifts to destroy the demons from ruling the worlds. One of the Hindu gods volunteered to drink the poison. While doing so, he tightened his throat to stop the poison form affecting the rest of his body, turning his neck blue (the color associated with the throat chakra). ‘Ujjayi’ in Sankrit means “ one who is victorious”. The premise of the ujjayi breathing is to tighten the throat or epiglottis- as if you are fogging a mirror, only with keeping your mouth closed. For me, this story represents the clearing of impurities. Ujjayi breathing creates heat in the body and breath- when we think of purification or sterilization we tend to think boiling or heat, right?
A person who is healthy and has a sense of well-being feels vitalized. In yoga we breathe to deepen our relaxation, to gain focus, to properly feed our muscles with oxygen rich blood and increase our energy flow.
In my classes, I talk a lot about the three-part breath. We practice this breath at the beginning of every yoga class. I always tell my students it is important to breathe into all three parts of our lungs: the base (belly), the mid (side-ribs) and the Apex (chest)- because when we are holding certain positions or are in certain twists, you may not be able to breathe fully into the base for instance- and is it important to know how to still get good oxygenation into our bodies so that we can feed our muscles what they need and support our focus. We talk about, and experiment with the three-part breath. I help them notice that the deeper and more fully they breathe, the less breaths they need to take.
The drive to breathe is turned on by a negative pressure response (deflated lung from exhalation) and the lack of oxygen in the body, or the rise of CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) in the body. If your body is well oxygenated the drive to breathe becomes less urgent and less frequent....I'm sure you have heard about yogis that can slow their breath down and slow the heart rate down, right?
As a nurse, I have seen how proper oxygenation affects vital signs, moods, behaviors and concentration- I have seen breath at work! Blood pressures and heart rates return to normal limits and respirations decrease without distress. Moods elevate, behaviors become stable and concentration increases.
One of my favorite sayings is, " There is a breath for that." There is a breath you can use to energize when you have your midday lull of energy. There is a breath to help even and calm the mind, to balance the right and left brain. There is a breath that helps create heat during your yoga practice, that can raise the temperature of your body causing the heart rate to elevate slightly which can help burn calories. There's a breath to help you to relax and fall asleep!
Breath and breathing are instrumental in learning how to manage our stress levels, our hormones and our lives. Want to know more? Come to my workshop: Improving Your Life One Breath at a Time- Where I talk more about breath, stress how it effects the body and how to manage it by breathing.