Breath and Your Brain
How does the breath fit into yoga? And how does breathing affect our brains?
Yoga is not just poses or flowing movements (asana). Yoga can also look like:
Sitting still and quietly harnessing your thoughts
Lying down, relaxed, but aware (yoga nidra - a poseless deep rest)
Breathing with intention any time you notice your breath is shallow
Ancient yogic practices teach us that not just asana but meditation, highest action towards yourself and others, and the breath, among other sacred keys to long life come together to support our total wellbeing. Western knowledge assimilation separates out these individual topics but in fact, they are all intertwined in the historic practice of yoga as it originated in India. Breath from the yogic perspective is pranayama, which translates roughly to breath extension: (prāṇa), breath + āyāma, restraining/extending.
Pranayama as a way of suspending breath and extending life is mentioned in some of humanity's oldest texts. Written around 2000 years ago, Bhagavad Gītā discusses pranayama:
"...those who are inclined to the process of breath restraint to remain in trance, practice by offering the movement of the outgoing breath into the incoming, and the incoming breath into the outgoing, and thus at last remain in trance, stopping all breathing."
Western hunger for quick knowledge breaks the yogic lineage, an epic golden chain of teachings from here all the way back to the first teachers. We can observe this by looking at how yoga is depicted in pop culture which is so far from the heart of yoga. (To dive deeper you might Google householder yoga or the eight limbed path.)
Take my limited point of view as a white lady practicing yoga with several grains of salt. Let us hold the knowledge originators in mind who developed yoga thousands of years ago. And especially the intention for the practice to be holistic. Breath work (pranayama) is one limb of the eight-limbed tree of yoga.
Anatomy of Breathing Basics: 360 Degree Change
Breathing is the three dimensional shape-changing of the body's cavities. It centres on the abdomen and thoracic cavity, a fancy way of saying the diaphragm (kind of like a bellows) and the area that holds the lungs.
The abdomen changes shape but not volume. It acts like a water balloon: fluid, but not compressible. Picture how when you squeeze a water balloon, water flows and the balloon bulges. The thoracic cavity acts more like an accordion which changes both shape and volume. In fact, our ribs act like horizontal blinds. When we inhale, our ribs flip open and torsional rotation expands the circumference of our ribcage for the breath. On the exhale they flip closed as the ribcage empties.
In my yoga teacher training at The Branches the Breath module was the one I struggled with the most. This was pre-pandemic: I missed class due to illness so I listened back to the module later. The familiar sound of the group shifting around on the creaky wood floors peppered the audio. Guest teacher Jennifer Snowdon talked about how coughing, smoking, snoring is "disordered" breathing. I was taken aback and fascinated at the same time: it stuck with me a long time. What made sense to me was that mouth breathing is making us less resilient and that we breathe too much in general. “Take a big inhale and…” is such a common yoga cue. But it is not relaxing because that big inhale signals danger to the central nervous system. Yet I had so many questions after that module. This idea that taping our mouths shut at night can cure asthma raised so much curiosity.
Thinking Critically about Resources Available on Breath
The course at The Branches, like my education and background in contemporary arts and visual studies, prioritizes critical thinking. My teachers Leena Miller Cressman, Emma Dines, and Leslie Stokman encouraged continued learning and curiosity which aligns with the most exciting parts of artmaking and curating: ask questions, get into the details, and look at things anew, especially those we think we understand.
Some yoga folks are reading James Nestor’s book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. I wanted to understand the hype. Nestor crosses over with Snowdon: mouth breathing is detrimental to our wellbeing and we overbreathe in general. He asserts that we have adopted and passed down traits that are detrimental to our health, called dysevolution. Smaller mouths, smaller sinuses, and crooked teeth cause mouth breathing. Mouth breathing results in sinus infections, snoring, sleep apnea, asthma, high blood pressure, weight gain he says. Some of this is hard to have faith in without supporting studies. Plus I love to swim and my partner has asthma and is an accomplished snorer, all of which involves mouth breathing. Does that mean we are making ourselves unwell? This verges on nocebic language that takes me down a guilt-worry spiral about our health. It can't be that simple.
There are some great moments in the book. Nestor details his experimentation with mouth and nose breathing, the latter of which gave him more energy and clarity. But I search for a clear connection between how we breathe and brain function rather than reading the accounts of one person with the time and means to do tightly controlled breathing experiments.
And I find it problematic how Nestor regularly references the work of his colleague Anders Olsson, the person he did the breathing experiments with. This is because Olsson also references Nestor in his own book Conscious Breathing: Discover the Power of Your Breath. Circular legacy-building in the name of science highlights the privilege we have in the West to repurpose traditional teachings as well as the lack of reverence and care we exercise in practicing them. I question the ethics of barely mentioning where these practices come from and marketing it as your own discovery, especially in tandem with another person.
In her instagram video, @yoganama (Namita Piparaiya, Mumbai) uses the half filter feature to address the constant renaming, co-opting, repurposing, and monetizing of techniques from ancient yogic and ayurvedic practices. In a few seconds, she shows that this is not cultural appreciation but cultural appropriation which turns the traditional into the transactional.
@yoganama says in the description:
“Even at a personal level I leave many *esoteric* topics out of some conversations even though I am very curious and invested in them namely Ayurvedic Doshas and the Chakra system. Mostly because either people have an unhealthy level of attachment and dogmatic attitude towards them or they will roll their eyes at the very mention of such unscientific subject matters. Whereas these systems are excellent to enhance our intuition, self awareness and power of observation. And all we need is an open mind and a good level of curiosity.”
After reading Nestor’s book and seeing @yoganama’s reel, all these questions about breathing were fired up again, so I returned to my past readings to find the most helpful information about breathing from my yoga studies.
1. Breathing is one of the few body functions that is both automatic and voluntary.
The main respiratory muscles are under both automatic and voluntary control. These two control systems come from separate sites in the central nervous system and have separate descending pathways. During normal breathing, the muscles are controlled automatically from the brainstem, but can also be controlled voluntarily from the motor cortex. Our anatomy is designed to shape the quality of our breath if we take notice with our brains.
2. The universe breathes us because of the pressure around us in the atmosphere.
Check out this anatomical and somewhat celestial perspective on breathing from Yoga Anatomy: “Volume and pressure are inversely related; when volume increases, pressure decreases, and when volume decreases, pressure increases. Because air always flows towards areas of lower pressure, increasing the volume of air in the chest will decrease pressure and cause air to flow into it. This is an inhalation. In spite of how it feels when you inhale, you do not actually pull air into the body. On the contrary, air is pushed into the body by the atmospheric pressure (about 1 kilo per square cm) that always surrounds you. This means that the actual force that gets the air into the lungs is outside the body. The energy expended in breathing produces a shape change that lowers the pressure in the chest cavity and permits the air to be pushed into the body by the weight of the planet’s atmosphere. In other words, you create the space, and the universe fills it.” Our anatomy is also designed to take over the quality of our breath if we are unable to take notice with our brains. Let’s say we are in a fight or flight situation. Our bodies and the universe take over!
A Simple Pranayama Technique and an Alternative
@yoganama was recently on ETNow (an English-language business and finance news channel in India) sharing traditional yogic breathing practices one of which was Sama Vritti Pranayama. From experience practicing this, I get a bit anxious during the holds, and I know I calm down more with Triangle Breathing. So when I’m more in tune with my breath, I can practice the more advanced Sama Vritti Pranayama, which has been rebranded in the west as Box (Square) Breathing.
Coming back to the yogic perspective that breath is a life extender, it makes sense that exerting voluntary control over your breath steadies the rest of the body, mind, thoughts, and psychological state. Knowing that I can control my breath or let the universe take over helps me find the right breath rhythm. When I become aware that I am breathing too hard, too fast, or too much for too long I can do something about it. If I notice my anxiety spikes, I can voluntarily change the shape of my chest and belly in three dimensions to calm my mind. Are there breath techniques you use, yogic or otherwise? If so, I’d love to hear them.