Breathing & Yoga
As one of the eight limbs of yoga, pranayama is a central component of yoga practice. Despite its importance, there are only a small number of yoga teachers who understand the science behind breathing, and the significant impact that breathing awareness and instructed breathing cues can have on the health of our students.
The Yoga Transition covers this relationship between breathing and yoga in our mentorship guidance program.
Contact us to find out more.
How do you teach yoga breathing?
Many yoga teachers learn different techniques of pranayama, including variations on the full yogic breath, in their initial training. Occasionally, those teachers will also gain an understanding of the diaphragm and the secondary respiratory muscles; but often two very important learnings are left out:
- What does a normal healthy day to day breathing pattern look like?
- How can you educate your students to breathe during asana in a way that will cultivate physiological health and therefore wellbeing?
Thanks to our unduly stressed, busy lifestyles, it is estimated that around 80% of people have poor breathing patterns. The dysfunction that most people experience is that they are hyperventilating, which means breathing too much for the body’s metabolic requirements at a given moment. You may observe this in your clients – common symptoms of dysfunctional breathing are mouth breathing, sighing, always trying to catch their breath, or nasal congestion.
Many yoga teachers advocate for ‘big breathing’, encouraging their students to breathe deeply, and often quickly. However, to breathe in such a way is very harmful to our physiological wellbeing. As many knowledgeable yoga teachers already know, hyperventilation is incredibly harmful as it causes a stress response in the nervous system – activating the fight or flight response, increasing anxiety, depleting the oxygenation of cells, and reducing sleep quality.
At The Yoga Transition, we talk to yogic breathing and how to teach such breathing techniques properly. Through our mentorship program, we elaborate in detail how fast breathing (often done with fast Vinyasa) encourages hyperventilation, which has the opposite effect to true yogic breathing.
Why “less is more” when it comes to yogic breathing
The yoga sutras highlight the link between ‘citta’, the mind, and ‘prana’, the breath, or vital energy.
In the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the classic fifteenth-century Sanskrit manual on hatha yoga, it is wisely said that “When prana moves, citta moves. When prana is without movement, citta is without movement.” – echoing this thought, the Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras say “the state of yoga reflects the cessation of movement within the mind”.
As such, one primary goal of pranayama is the opposite of big breathing; instead focusing on the settling of the breath. Breath, according to these ancient texts, is to be gently uncurled like a delicate thread, subtle and prolonged, and kept close to the body.
Our approach to teaching yogic breathing
At The Yoga Transition, we educate client teachers on how to recognise which of your students are hyperventilating (hint: it’s most of them), and how to adapt your breathing cues so that your students will develop a more functional, healthy breathing pattern. This helps shift the physiology from fight or flight dominance, into the parasympathetic – the calm phase of the nervous system.
In regards to pranayama practices, in order for practitioners to benefit in the intended way from practising pranayama, the foundational functional breathing pattern must first be addressed.
We also cover the relationship between the primary and secondary breathing muscles; how they create stability of the asana form and how they can be used to cultivate mobility (particularly of the spine). Rather than limiting your breathing cues to “inhale and exhale”, we will teach you a detailed understanding of how the respiratory muscles biomechanics actually create the posture.
Deepening our knowledge of how the breath works in asana leads us to a subtle and powerful understanding of how the energetic lines in the posture get created and channelled; this shifts our experience from the physical body into the energy body, the breath being the link, the access route. Developing your understanding of the breath is a tried and tested pathway to taking your asana practice to a more intimate and refined level.
An overview of the breathing modules we teach
Our yoga teacher mentorship program covers a number of topics relating to the relationship between breathing and yoga, and breathing in asana including:
- Observation skills – Teachers must learn to identify dysfunctional breathing patterns in students so they can instruct healthy, functional breathing.
- Hyperventilating – Most students will be hyperventilating (over-breathing), so the breathing instructions in asana must encourage less breathing to normalise the breathing pattern.
- “Less is more” – How breathing in asana is actually about encouraging less breathing, as opposed to more breathing (hyperventilating), and how that directly activates the parasympathetic (calming) phase of the nervous system.
- Ujjayi breathing – Ujjayi breath (also known as “the ocean breath”) must be even, balanced, quiet, gentle, and even on inhale/exhale. The more subtle and gentle the ujjayi, the more the mind will draw inwards towards the breath.
- The health benefits of breathing correctly – Healthy breathing is foundational to yoga and asana as it affects the physical health, physiological health and mental, and emotional health of the practitioner, so professional yoga teachers must understand what healthy breathing is to support wellbeing. From that base the tremendous benefits of pranayama can be sought.
- Biomechanics of breathing – The direct relationship between the biomechanics of the respiratory muscles and the stability/mobility paradigm within asana.
Develop your yoga teaching style with mentorship
Your initial teacher training would likely have touched on basic yogic breathing methodology, but it’s impossible to gain a deep understanding of such a broad topic in a short amount of time. In addition to yogic breathing, there are a vast number of teaching elements we help our professional yoga teacher clients develop.
At The Yoga Transition we celebrate individuality through:
- Steering your practice and teaching in the direction that most interests you
- Encouraging you to discover your unique voice
- Guiding you to develop a teaching methodology that has both integrity and individual authenticity
Once you have completed your initial teacher training, contact us to find out how mentorship can bring you to the next level.
