‘Breathe in and breathe out’, ‘take a deep breath in and breathe out’, we hear plenty of instructions on emphasizing the importance of breath in any yoga class. Its’ time to see what is so important in breathing that everyone keeps emphasizing it!
Everyone knows the mechanism of air entering from the nose onto little alveoli in the lungs when we breathe in. Lungs extract the oxygen from the air and delivers it to the bloodstream. Blood ensures oxygen reaches every organ & cell and collects carbon dioxide and other impurities which are delivered back to the lungs and then back out of the body through the nose when we exhale. Breathing is so implicit that we some time… well, lot of times, are not aware of it and forget to breathe to our capacity. Without our knowledge, our breathing becomes shallow and hence not utilizing our complete lung capacity.
One more interesting thing to observe is how our breathing pattern changes as our mood, emotions, change in feelings or on changing physical activities. When we run, breathing is faster. We drift into shallow breathing when we overthink something. When we are angry, breathing is faster and intermittent. We inhale forcefully and exhale weakly when we are sad. When we are afraid, we tend to hold our breath. We feel short of breath when we are anxious or crying. When we are sick, it does affect our breathing pattern again.
All this happens without our conscious knowledge, but actively affecting the breathing!
Breath or PRANA is much more than just air passing in, filtering and passing out of the body. In yoga, breath has got a different significance than just air. Its regarded along with PRANA(vital life force), as ‘PRANAMAYA KOSHA’, one of the 5 layers enveloping our body as per yoga philosophyfor survival, existence and sustenance. It is said that each of the layer around Jeeva has profound influence on the other. For now, it is enough for us to understand that Pranamaya Kosha around our body influences on ‘Annamaya kosha’ outermost layer of body that is physical organ system of our body.
Breath influences every cell of the body and performance of the brain. On an average, we breathe around 15 times per minute and 21600 times per day. Breathing fuels every muscular contraction and mental process, processing of organ system thus linked to each and every aspects of human experience. The lifespan and quality of our life is said to connected to rhythm of respiration. Usually slow breath rate result in long life span. Animals like elephants, Tortoise who breathe slowly have a longer life span. Those who breathe in short, shallow, quick gasps, likely to have shorter lifespan.
Let’s take a moment and think how we breathe. In today’s fast paced life, we are dominated by changing emotions — most of them negative, resulting in different patterns of breathing most of which using only a small portion of lung capacity. With this and the fact that breathing influences our body and mind functioning, we can figure out the repercussions of our lifestyle to breathing and ultimately health. Irregular breathing slowly creates physical, emotional, mental blocks in-terms of energy thus mounting pressure on certain body parts to store negative tensions — resulting in unbalanced personality and leading to somatic disease like Diabetes, Ulcers etc.
This article does not offer any complex logic, yogic terminologies, but to create awareness about importance of breathing in very simple terms.
Although breathing is unconscious process, conscious control may be taken at any time if we wish to do so. Deep, slow breathing with control results in calm, content state of mind. When we are aware that all we need to do is to practice deep breathing, what’s stopping us from doing so?
Well.. its easier said than done. Don’t forget the fact that every emotion, feelings, thoughts are trying to gain control over breath all the time. It’s like constant battle between them. We can achieve great synchronization between them too, provided we work on one of them i.e breath and thus influencing the other.
Developing the awareness about breathing and working on it to further to improve it, thus helping improve the lifestyle is the main goal of this article series. Let’s just focus on becoming aware of breathing as a whole and take it as really a serious business — which we want to improve upon. I will leave you with that thought, but will be back with you guys regarding the various ways through which we can improve out breathing and life in next one!
See you later… until then, take care! Inhale and exhale and be present at moment!
