Why is breathing so important in yoga?
September 29th, 2008By Pam Walatka
If you have taken yoga classes, you may have noticed the teacher constantly talking about breathing: “let your belly expand as you inhale—exhale on the effort—feel the movement of your breath.”
I think breathing is central to yoga because breathing is central to the flow of life. If you can feel your breathing, you can feel life flowing in your body.
As a species, we tend to tighten-up our breathing. We freeze our torsos. Many adults breathe with hardly any movement in their chest and abdomen. If you watch babies breathe, you can see their bellies expand as they inhale, and contract as they exhale.
The diaphragm is a dome-shaped muscle that separates your upper torso from your lower torso. When your diaphragm contracts it flattens to make room for your lungs to expand and bring in air. If your torso is free to move, the flattening of the diaphragm pushes down on your stomach and the other organs in your abdomen, causing your abdomen to expand.
Why wouldn’t your torso be free to move? In my opinion, breathing is tied to emotion. You can suppress an emotion by holding your breath. Say you are a little kid and you are mad at your mom. But you don’t want to be mad because you need your mom. If you reduce your breathing, you don’t feel the anger so strongly. Or maybe you feel like crying but you don’t want to cry in front of people, so you hold your breath. After awhile, you get in the habit of reducing your breathing.
Maybe the fact that you can breathe consciously or unconsciously has something to do with limiting your consciousness by limiting your breathing.
If you are thinking something you don’t want to be thinking, sometimes you can suppress your thoughts by clamping down on the movement of your lungs.
On the other hand, if you want to be more aware of everything life has to offer—the good, the bad, the magnificent—take a yoga class and learn to breathe.
You can reduce your stress by relaxing your breathing—not the first time you try, but with practice over time. Stress underlies many diseases; reducing stress has been shown to reduce illness.
Your body burns oxygen with calories to make energy. If you totally expel all the old air in your lungs and take in a greater amount of new air with each breath, you will have more oxygen in your system. Wouldn’t you be able to make more energy if you had more oxygen?
The yoga word for energy is “prana.” Many yogis think of prana as spiritual energy, and see breathing exercises as a path to awareness of spiritual energy. If you are uncomfortable with the word spirit you can think of prana as the energy that is so elusive and changing that it cannot be quantified. Or you can think of prana as any energy. To paraphrase Einstein, \”Hey, it\’s all energy.”
A significant change in your breathing habits is neither simple nor quick. Learning the habit of breathing deeply may take years of practice. But the habit of breathing deeply is worth the effort. Yoga is the oldest self-improvement practice in the world. Yoga has survived because it works. Yoga provides time-tested practices to improve your breathing.
If you breathe more deeply, you will feel more alive, because you will be more conscious of the flow of life inside you. If you breathe more deeply, your health will improve, because you will be less stressed. If you breathe more deeply, you will have more energy, because your body makes energy by burning oxygen. Deeper breathing can give you more life, more health, and more energy.
