Breath as healer, guide and friend
Have you ever turned your open awareness toward your breath and discovered its serene presence in the background of life quietly energizing and regulating your inner quality. Have you noticed how it quiets your mind and soothes the nervous agitation life can generate.
The subtle practices of yoga use breath as an entry point to know ourselves and our source of life and being.
Yogic practices encourage us at first to attune to the sensations and presence of breath rhythm that usher in our every moment. Making the breath conscious enables a profound shift in our quality of vital health, it can quickly alter our state of mind, and give us access to the deeper rivers of consciousness at the root of our nature.
There is a lot of interest in breathing techniques at present. There are frequent articles, research papers and invitations to explore various breathing techniques and know their benefits. Through such practices we can directly influence and regulate the nervous system, endocrine system, heart rate, maintain and restore digestive power, access innate regenerative capacities in organs, tissues and cells, reverse degenerative conditions and work more collaboratively with our own rejuvenating energy source. And that is just the short story of the physical benefits. But do be discerning as some practices can disturb a fragile mind.
Yoga has always cited breath as a means to alter state and quality of being at every level.
Breathwork and pranayama does not need to be intense and strenuous. In fact it works more powerfully for us and within us if we touch the breathing space with respect and gentle control. The Patanjali Yoga Sutras instruct pranayama practice as a means to cessation of the vrittis( movements and modifications) of the mind. At the onset the sutras state that the breath when practiced to access prana for enhanced health and vitality of the body and mind needs the qualities of Dirgha and Suksma (long and subtle).
As breath gives us direct access to subtle and powerful eddies of pranic flow within us, it is important to be respectful and observant when touching in on our depths of power and creative animating force.
If we move toward the breath with too much force, poor guidance, curiosity and ego we may inadvertently do more harm than good. Something that has the power to bring us into life with our first inhalation and take us on our journey out of life with our last exhalation is infinitely worthy of deep respect. It also beckons us to know its innate power to maintain, sustain and regulate our life’s energies.
We of course breath all the time, as an involuntary function. But through the insight born of thousands of years of yogic focus on breaths unique qualities we can make it more voluntary and therefore influence certain outcomes for health and mind state.
We will soon be guiding a breath focused program over eight sessions. We will follow a progressive pathway to meet the gift and power of directed breathing. The first focus will be meeting the breath on its own terms, learning to ground through slowing the breath down while directing it toward different areas and seats within the body. Wherever the breath sits consciously within us something very revealing and powerful occurs. We will also focus on drawing the breath through sense gates and into deep seats of energy storage and emmanation within the subtle layers of the body. This will have the effect of cleansing and purging congested stagnant energies. Our sense gates, mind and nervous system often get fixed in states of hyperactivation, overstimulation, exhaustion and emotional/mental fatigue. It is difficult to find our equilibrium, ease and clear perception when our physical and subtle equipment is in need of a deep refresh and clearing. Breath practices that are deceptively simple and deeply transformative can clear us in ways no other practice can.
Once we learn to slow and extend the breath, while observing our sentient responses, we can then move more deeply. The next focus will be pranayama methods that direct pranic flow intentionally to activate the innate capacity to recalibrate ourselves physically, mentally and consciously. These practices work within the nadis (energy channels). Sometimes and often certain nadis are like blocked arteries and we need to move inside them riding the pranic current to enhance flow and movement. Once the channels are more open to prana we can then upgrade the quality of energy and consciousness that animates us.
The final phase of the eight session program will partner with the intelligence and transformative power of pranic force to guide us even deeper. Finding entry into the quiet and vibrating silent stillness at the root of our being. This abiding depth calls us in our moments of spontaneous abandonment of our ever present thought processes toward an atmosphere impregnated with silence, it is here we meet the greatest revelations awaiting us. We can become absorbed within something so expansive and utterly liberating we may even cease to breathe in a physical way as we meet the potent beauty of conscious unity. The pause to the physical reath awakens a breath so subtle it is experienced as an osmosis between pure being and prana. Breath initiates the meditative state spontaneously if we know how to take its lead and invitation.
Breath is the presence of the Shakti (creative dynamic agency) within us. She is the mother of all that is in form. She gives birth to the myriad of universes, ages and souls. This one abides as the witness and mover of breath. We can meet her and find our potency and peace. She waits patiently for our readiness to uncouple from the facade of externalised living and the pull of a crafted persona. She is the dynamic expression of consciousness and she beckons us home to our source with every breath.
If you have interest in tracing the breath to tap your infinite potentials to heal, find direct access to knowledge and inner beauty join us for the Pranayama, Mudra and Yoga Nidra Program, it is an invitation to know yourself beyond the purely physical and a gift of practice forms that will serve you well through times of stress, mental agitation, emotional exhaustion and equally meet your thirst to know who it is that truly hangs out within the skin.
If you don’t have time or feel called to join us begin anyway! Find a way to touch the infinite transformative power of the breath - she is your ultimate friend, guide and healer. Find good guidance and method and trace your breath to its source.
Sadhana
Co-founder, Senior Teacher and Yoga Therapist Shantarasa Yoga Darshana
https://www.shantarasa.com/workshops/p/yoga-breath-pranayama-mudra-yoga-nidra-program