Interestingly, your breath can tell you a lot about your yoga practice. Your breath can inform you of your strengths and challenges during yoga asana (posture) practice.
There are a variety of ways that your breath can improve your moving meditation. It helps to cleanse and activate your chakras and energetic channels (nadis), provides you with a focal point so you can drop into meditation (dhyana), and helps to activate your parasympathetic nervous system so that you can release tension and stress from the body.
In this article, we look at what your breath tells you about your yoga asana practice, and how this can help you to improve your moving meditation.
How Can My Breath Improve My Yoga Practice?
1. Highlights Your Mindset
The quality of your breath can highlight the mindset you are using within your yoga practice.
For example, if you’re holding your breath or your breath has become short, sharp, ‘jagged’, and irregular—there’s a high chance you’re over-striving and pushing yourself too far.
Striving within reason is sometimes required during yoga, because this helps you to improve over time. But you should be focusing on finding the balance between comfort and challenge, as opposed to erring on the side of laziness or over-striving beyond your reasonable capacity.
When pushing too far beyond your current capacity, your breath will suffer and it often becomes disrupted as a result.
Often signalling that you’re going too fast, pushing yourself too deeply into a pose, or just pushing a little too hard in general. This also can denote a lack of mindfulness or conscious awareness in your practice—which is the opposite of what we’re trying to nurture and cultivate.
Yes, your breath can become disrupted during your yoga practice at certain times due to a variety of reasons, however, this shouldn’t be the go-to automatic mode that you’re practising yoga in.
As best as you can, try to maintain the quality of your breath as much as possible during your yoga practice—and focus on deep, long, steady, calm, relaxed, rhythmic breathing.
Steady, calm, and relaxed breathing is also optimal for moving meditation—which is the aim of your yoga asana practice.
Focusing on optimal quality breath helps you to notice your mindset during your yoga practice, and highlights what areas you might need to work on. But it also helps to improve the quality of your moving meditation.
2. Informs You Of Discomfort
Your breath can help to forewarn of impending injuries waiting to manifest, and in general, can signal high levels of discomfort (which makes it very hard to meditate during your yoga practice).
Over-striving to the point where your breath is disturbed, quick, and irregular, or you’re holding your breath can signal that you are in unnecessary discomfort or even pain.
There can be some light levels of discomfort during yoga when stretching and lengthening your muscles, but this shouldn’t really be pushed to the point where your breath is uncontrollably disturbed.
If you’re regularly experiencing that your breath is out of control during your yoga asana—it’s likely that you’re pushing yourself too far.
The body often gives warning signs long before an injury is developed. This might be in the form of short, sharp, located twinges, pinches, or shooting pains—and allowing yourself to willingly ignore these can lead your body to injury.
Your body is speaking to you through these sensations, and communicating that you need to pay attention.
Instead of ignoring that your breath is disturbed, and ignoring high levels of discomfort (or even pain) pull back to around 90% of your capacity in the posture. To a point where it still feels challenging, but you’re not pushing yourself too deeply and you can still maintain the quality of your breath.
Notice if coming to 90% capacity allows you to breathe properly, and if it removes the sensation of pain or reduces your level of discomfort.
If you are still experiencing pain, the recommendation is to come out of the posture and speak to your yoga teacher about the posture and your experience so that you can either be given an alternative pose to practice, or a variation which is better suited to you.
Paying attention to the quality of your breath during yoga asana can help to protect you against injuries and improve your level of comfort, therefore deepening your moving meditation and increasing your conscious awareness.
3. Helps You To Activate Your Parasympathetic Nervous System
Your breath is able to inform you if you can go deeper into your yoga postures and meditation.
We often talk about being calm and relaxed within yoga asana practice, but this isn’t just because it feels good.
Being in a calm and relaxed state during yoga helps you to create an optimal meditation environment, soothes your nervous system, and helps you deepen your yoga postures and stretches.
Breathing in a deep, long, steady, and rhythmic manner helps to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which also enables your muscles to relax and lengthen.
When you’re activating the parasympathetic nervous system through the breath during your yoga practice you’re able to stretch deeper into your yoga postures and release tension in the muscles.
Whereas if you’re breathing in a dysregulated, short, sharp, irregular pattern, or holding the breath, you can trigger your muscle reflex which prevents your muscles from lengthening any further—and therefore holds you back from your deepest expression of the pose.
If you’re breathing properly in your yoga practice, it helps your muscles to be supple, you’ll feel calm and grounded, and you’ll be able to drop into deeper states of consciousness.
Try to focus on steady, calm, deep, long and rhythmic breathing to access the deeper levels of your yoga practice for both mind and body.
4. Highlights Your Level Of Focus And Concentration
You may have noticed that it’s quite easy to lose focus and find your mind wandering during your yoga practice.
Your breath can signal to your level of focus and concentration (dharana), and can also serve as a tool to anchor your awareness into the present moment.
The breath and mind are connected. What’s happening with the breath is often reflected in the mind, and what is happening in the mind is often reflected in the breath.
If your breath is dysregulated you’ll not only find it harder to meditate but you’ll also probably find that the mind wanders uncontrollably.
When you drop the quality of your breath during your moving meditation, you generally also drop the meditation too.
Whereas if you focus on regulating the breath throughout your yoga practice, not only do you have an anchor for your attention, but it builds your attention span and capacity to concentrate for longer periods of time.
When you begin to use the breath as a tool for deeper yoga postures and deeper levels of consciousness—you’ll probably notice that disrupted and dysregulated breathing results in a busy and untamed consciousness.
Try to focus on rhythmic, steady, long, deep, and equal breaths to help regulate and enhance your level of concentration during yoga.
5. Can Point To A Subtle Energetic Imbalance
In terms of subtle energy, the breath can signal a balance or imbalance in the energetic channels (nadis).
The inhale is associated with ida nadi (the main left-hand side subtle energetic channel), and the exhale is associated with pingala nadi (the main right-hand side subtle energetic channel).
Ida nadi is also associated with lunar and feminine energy, whereas pingala nadi is associated with the opposing force; solar and masculine energy.
When the inhale and exhale are easily equal and balanced, this can signal that both ida nadi and pingala nadi are balanced and harmonised.
Whereas, if the inhale or exhale is stronger than the other, this can indicate that there is an imbalance between the two main energetic channels.
If the inhale appears more dominant and stronger, this indicates that the subtle energetic flow through ida nadi is stronger than pingala nadi.
And similarly, if the exhale appears more dominant and stronger, this indicates that the subtle energetic flow through pingala nadi is stronger than ida nadi.
Yogic techniques such as (but not limited to) yoga asana, pranayama, mudra, bandha, mantra, and shat karmas are designed to help balance your energetic body. Therefore, you will be harmonising your energetic channels through your yoga practice anyway, but if you’d like a more tailored and specific approach to harmonising energetic channels then it is best to consult with your yoga teacher for guidance.
6. Can Reveal Chronic Tension, Anxiety And Stress
The quality of your breath can reveal if you’re harbouring chronic tension, anxiety or stress in the mind and body.
However, this is nuanced; because if you’re learning a new posture, pushing your boundaries to deepen your practice, or just beginning yoga and improving your fitness levels—it is normal to find breath control a challenge.
But, if you’ve been practising yoga for a while and are still finding yourself holding onto your breath regularly or struggling with deep, rhythmic, slow, comfortable breathing patterns it can sometimes be indicative of stress in the mind and body.
As much as the mind informs the breath, and the breath informs the mind—the body also informs the breath and mind (and vice versa).
If you’re experiencing chronic tension, stress, or anxiety this can manifest as symptoms in both your breathing rhythm, your mind, and your body.
Deep inhales and full exhales can feel really nourishing and often help to relieve the body and mind of tension.
In general, you can use a variety of yogic practices to improve the symptoms of stress, however, you might need to assess your lifestyle more holistically to get to the root cause.
For example, are there areas of your life which need to be adjusted to reduce or remove stress?
Is your diet creating or reducing stress? Is your sleep cycle increasing or decreasing stress?
Working towards removing unnecessary stressors in your life helps to improve your moving meditation. By calming the mind, you help to release tension in your muscles, which supports you in going deeper into your postures, and can improve your overall holistic well-being.
Conclusion
Did you know that your breath can tell you so much about your yoga asana practice?
The breath really is your central guide in yoga, and can inform you of many ways that you can improve your yoga practice!
Ready to learn more about the rules of breathwork for yoga practitioners in asana practice? Check out my article here for more tips.
If you liked my article, why not share it with your friends?
