About Breathing
The other day someone said to me, “Yoga is all about breathing, right?” Which got me thinking. You know, with all the breath work that I practice and teach in yoga, I never thought of yoga as being ALL about breathing. In the end, yoga is all about what you want to get out of it, but if it were to be all about breathing then this is how I would interpret it…
When you start a yoga practice in a comfortable seated position, you listen to your breath. It’s slow, steady and easy. You’re listening but you don’t have to think about breathing, it just happens. Then you open your eyes and begin to move through some warm up postures and then the practice may become more vigorous as you do some vinyasa flow. Then you begin to hold postures that become increasingly more challenging including twisting, binding, balancing, inversions and backbends. Then you wind down with some gentle stretches on the floor and relax in savasana, corpse pose. Lastly, you come back to sit in the same seated position from the beginning of the practice and listen to your breath. It’s slow, steady and easy.
My idea of the breath during the practice is to achieve that slow, steady, easy breath in every single posture. Down dog, revolved side angle with a bind, headstand, any posture. The challenge in yoga is not to perfect the posture from the outside, but from the inside with your calm breathing, then your body can relax into the pose rather than being pushed into it. A yoga teacher once said to my class, “You should be able to meditate in any posture.”
That’s my interpretation of a yoga practice being all about breathing. What’s yours?