Yoga

I recently started taking a yin yoga class twice a week and find it to be an amazing focused period of stretching and relaxation, that has helped me to feel recovered from hard exercise. There is a double whammy from this practice: in addition to the benefits of stretching itself, holding the stretches for up to five minutes allows you to relax your mind and focus on the breath, practicing diaphragmatic breathing essential for relieving tension, both physically and mentally. By holding passive stretches and relaxing into them – something that never made sense to me –  you become aware of areas where you may be holding on to tension. The key to the art of relaxation is being able to recognize when an area of your body is tense, and then releasing the tension from your muscles and letting go of tightness.

Prasara yoga, for its part, emphasizes synchronizing the breath with movement. In fact, Prasara yoga is fundamentally the practice of breath mastery. It is based on the premise that we can gauge our level of mastery in a particular pose or transitional movement by how we breathe.

The breath mastery scale looks like this:

• Resistance (or fear) - reflexively inhaling and bracing on perceived effort
• Force (or anger) – actively inhaling and pressurizing on perceived effort
• Discipline (the beginning of yoga) – actively exhaling through effort/discomfort; passively inhaling on cessation of effort/discomfort
• Flow – passively exhaling on compression; passively inhaling on expansion
• Master – the controlled pause after exhalation during the pose or movement

With breath mastery, the idea is that the more poses and transitional movement in which we become more masterful, the more transferable that base level becomes to all of life. I think we have all seen people who are at this level: they are masters of movement.

Depth of breath teaches us how to allow the relative intensity of the effort to determine the depth of the breath, as well as to experience the passive inhalation in controlled settings. This is related to the four types of breath volume in our lungs, as follows:

• Normal breath – the volume of normal exhale and inhale
• Complementary breath – the volume above normal breath requiring moderate effort to exhale
• Supplementary breath – the volume above normal breath requiring intense effort to exhale
• Residual breath – the volume of breath remaining in our lungs above maximal exhalation

In yoga, the more challenging the pose, the more we must exhale. At first we only exhale just off the top of our lungs, at the level of the clavicle. Over time, it is possible to relearn the ability to exhale more deeply from the normal breath to the complementary depth into the intercostals. Eventually, we can learn to get deeply to a diaphragmatic level through exhaling our supplementary breath depth. The theory is, with each of the three volumes of air expelled, we become increasingly more stabilized and able to release deeper and deeper bound structures in the body.

Typical yoga practice is based on using breathing and postures to release tension in the body and mind. At most it is possible to explore and integrate your breath, structure, and movement to release tension, strengthen the body, and develop breath mastery with Prasara Yoga. At the least you can improve the quality of your movement and your state of health through yoga practice.