Energy, Emotions & Breath

There are so many different practices and aspects of yoga that are simple and nurturing, making them ideal to add to your daily repertoire during times of high stress and anxiety.

This blog will be focused on one of these offerings, from the fourth limb of Yoga, Pranayama- the practice of relaxed breath awareness, and how it can be practiced to restore and rejuvenate our bodies and minds.

Breathing practice is a powerful tool for balancing the body’s nervous system, preventing the onset of depressed moods, and managing stress and anxiety, just to name a few. Breath awareness restores energy during acute phases of depression, lightens your emotional load, and creates needed distance from our habitual thoughts. And it complements other healing strategies by providing an underpinning of relaxation and emotional stability. So when low moods, stress or anxiety threaten to take the joy from life, breath awareness provides a consistent and ever-available inner focus that will help you make the journey towards more balanced health.

Three Dimensions of Life

How can the awareness of breathing be so useful? The importance of breathing is accented in a story from the Chandogya Upanishad. There, the eyes, ears, mind, and breath are found arguing about their relative importance. The eyes and ears, representing the body, claim that they are the most indispensable for life. But in turn, the mind and the breath argue their own cases. To resolve the issue each agrees to vacate the body for one year, leaving the others to manage without it. At the end of four years, when each aspect of the self has returned, a winner will be declared. One by one the eyes, the ears, and the mind depart but even through blindness, loss of hearing, and a coma-like existence, life continues. Then the breath begins to leave. Suddenly, all the remaining functions are uprooted, as if a strong horse, hooves bound with ropes, was tearing its fetters from the ground. Awestruck, the body and mind beg the breath to return and humbly accept it as supreme.

In the story above, and in yoga in general, the act of breathing implies something more than just mechanically moving air in and out of the lungs. This is only the outermost aspect of a field of energy that brings the body/mind to life. The process of breathing sustains that field—carrying away wastes and drawing in fresh energy from the atmosphere around it. All the functions of body and mind perform their work with the assistance of this living energy. At its most visible, it produces physical movement and actuates the various physiological systems of the body. At more subtle levels it animates the functions of the mind.

Despite its profound significance, for the most part breathing is a background to other activities; its ceaseless flow remains on the periphery of awareness. Poor breathing habits undermine the breath’s effectiveness. Low energy levels, shortness of breath, anxiety, low moods, and poor concentration are just some of the resulting symptoms.

Practice: Checking in with your breathing

You can come in touch with this energy quite easily. Simply close your eyes and ask yourself: on a scale of 1 to 10, what is your energy level now? How would you describe the quality of your energy? With a fair amount of confidence you’ll be able to estimate your energy level, and in the process, sense the quality of that energy in you. Since we often lose touch with these aspects of our self, the experiment you have just made can help you be more attentive to them—the first important step toward replenishing energy when it is depleted.