How Conscious Breathing Can Help You Return to the Essentials
You want to make cool new shapes? Learn to breathe.
You hear it in every yoga class: “Inhale. Exhale.” Child’s pose where perhaps easy, but connection to breath takes real work when you’re still not used to something new and difficult. It’s true, in fact, that when we’re in a bind, our first inclination is to cough or shallow the breath. When we decrease the quality of the breath, we increase the struggle. Every. Single. Time. The basics of breath are also used in a strong, advanced practice.
With over 15 years under my mat I’ve spent the last year putting in a lot of time (and money) growing my asana. I’ve been taught by ashtangis, contortionists, partner acrobats and hand balancing experts. I’ve made some pretty phenomenal returns on investment in terms of these pursuits. I am a 33 year old woman and guess what I have new shapes in my body, shapes that I simply never dreamed possible. These experiences I collect (here is a new one) teach me I can do anything on and off the mat. Continued success and evolution, however, rides on one common, simple thread: The breath. They tell me this from every single one of my teachers. “Breathe more, Lauren. Breathe more.” If I do that, magic happens, and it always does.
There’s a number of reasons why the breath is important, both subtle and important. The breath is physical. You can feel it move through your body — in your belly, your ribs, up into your chest. You can isolate the breath with it and do pranayama, controlling the breath.
From a scientific point of view, the breath actually goes directly to the central nervous system. A shallow breath makes you feel like you are in that anxious state. That’s why you always tell someone who’s crying or in a panic to just take a deep breath. You inhale longer and deeper, and a more calm state of mind follows especially when you have to keep your cool, such as when you are doing something new and possibly scary. The translation from there to a physical challenge is pretty obvious, right? If you are moving into a new posture with fear in mind and shallow breath, you probably won’t go far. Or, you could be literally unable to move.
Staying out of the chitta, what the yogis call the mind chatter, means staying in the connection to breath. You remain present all while you don’t naturally fall for thoughts that constitute hindrance to your range of movement. For instance, if you are doing a handstand, your mind could tell you, I can’t do this. It’s too hard. I’m going to get hurt.” Some of these kinds of thoughts make sense according to reason, but most often they’re coming from fear and limiting ourselves. By staying with the breath, we can see these thoughts like a passerby. We don’t get trapped by them. We breathe past them, and then we take the next right action.
As energetically the breath is like the waves of the ocean. Consider yourself a surfer. But if you catch a swell you ride with ease back to shore. You are charged and linked. Brute force might be able to make the same journey, but it’s going to take the life out of you, and it shouldn’t have to. The fast lane to where you’re going, and still making you feel good at the same time. When you’re trying poses that involve momentum this is especially true.
Deep breathing opens you to the possibilities in your body. Stretching or stabilizing, it blossoms if you breathe into it. You take social media’s climate as its’ own and air it out and up for the taking. Your body, physical practice, helps you learn how to stay close to the breath, and naturally you ultimately learn how to stay close to the breath, the relationships in your life, and in your life also. Intuitively you know how to breath into difficulty and you become better tuned in to which shapes in life are better to try, and which ones just won’t fit.