Understanding Breathing Exercises

Breath is life. No breath, no life. Have you ever heard of anyone committing suicide by stopping the breath? It would be the easiest way to commit suicide. It is not possible. Even if someone forcibly tries to stop one’s own breathing, a point comes when that person will become unconscious. Then the body’s own intelligence takes over and it will start to breathe again. Thus, we cannot indefinitely stop breathing as we will become unconscious and the body will take over. We cannot even breathe fast and deep for a long time as we will again become unconscious and the body will take over. So we can voluntarily stop breath to a particular limit, maybe up to a few minutes (as people practice doing some kinds of pranayama). There is no doubt that this superficial breathing ensures a superficial experience of well being, and to some extent, stops the mind.

We must understand that our poor breathing habits have arisen out of our own mind-body ignorance and our own unconscious need for a buffering mechanism to keep us from sensing and feeling the reality of our deep-rooted fears and contradictions. There is a universal tendency to hold our breath or tightening of our abdominal muscles when we feel pain. This response becomes ingrained over a number of years so that deep natural breathing becomes impossible. Relax the abdominal muscles and automatically it will allow the flow and direction of the breath.

People who start practicing breathing exercises in an effort to change the breathing without understanding the interrelationship of the rhythms of mind-body will cause great harm. One must learn to relax before attempting breathing exercises. Getting into the breathing exercises prematurely induces new tensions onto the already existing ones, and brings about an artificially induced vitality. The tools used for doing advanced breathing must be slowly fine tuned, just like a musician would fine tune his instrument to get the right notes.

One could say that ‘since natural breathing is natural, any effort (at the physical level) to breathe naturally both misses the point and is counter-productive’. So they say, ‘When the mind becomes calm and empty, natural breathing will arise automatically’. This brings up another question: ‘What are the conditions which allow us to calm and empty our minds?’ It is of no use to shift the problem from the body to the mind or from the mind to the body. Natural breathing involves the participation of both. We have to use the same mechanism that we learned to breathe unnaturally, we have to unlearn it. Just becoming aware of the breath in the here-and-now will pave the path to natural breathing.