Pranayama
Lets look at the fourth limb of yoga – pranayama. As you already know pranayama has something to do with breath and breathing. The average person takes around 15 breaths per minute during heavy exercise or under stress the breath rate can easily double. During a yoga class you will take around 1,350 breaths. Over the course of a day over 21,000 breaths. Breathing is something that is always happening in the body, consciously or unconsciously, from birth until death. In this article we are going to look at the type of pranayama which you do in every single yoga class.
To define pranayama it is most commonly broken down to prana and yama. Prana is translated as breath, energy or life force. Yama is translated as control. So then pranayama translates into controlling the breath or controlling your life force.
Lets take a moment to look more closely at the form of pranayama that as a yoga student you are most familiar with. This is the breath that you use while doing asana. Depending on the tradition of yoga you have studied this is likely a natural breath, a ujjai breath, or something in between the two. Lets take a step back and look at the bigger picture. How often have you heard a yoga teacher stay something like “lift the arms up above the head with an inhale” or “exhale the hips back and up into a downward dog”? You have heard something like that many times in each yoga class. In each statement there is a breath instruction and a movement instruction. It is not always clear how the two are linked.
In the beginning when we started doing yoga we paid more attention to the movement instructions since that is what it appears everyone is doing. When we are trying to learn the movement and are concentrating very hard it is easy to forget about the breath instruction. As we become more proficient we begin to follow both instructions, however the movement instruction usually leads and we force a breath onto a movement. Notice how this is similar to the definition of pranayama that we started with – controlling the breath.
However the breath instruction is the most important instruction, it should always come before any movement. In yoga we work to always move from the inside out from the subtle to the physical. So lets reword those common instructions to reflect that the breath should inspire the movement. We might say “waiting for your inhale, allow the natural lift of the inhale to float the arms up above the head” or “let the exhale begin and as the air leaves your lungs let your hips leave the floor and be exhaled into a downward dog.” With this distinction in mind lets look a little more closely at the meaning of pranayama.
A more serious treatment of the translation of pranayama is braking it down into the two root words of prana and ayama. As before prana is breath, energy or life force. Then ayama is non-control and if you are not in control you are more simply going with the flow. So this translation would be to flow with the breath or to flow with your life force. This is very similar to our final evolution of the breath in a yoga class of letting the breath inspire the movement.
In yoga there are many forms of pranayama. However in every yoga class you have the opportunity to work with a powerful yet very simple form of pranayama. Instead of molding the breath into each movement take a step back and let go of trying. Watch the breath and wait. Allow the breath to lead you through the dance of yoga.