Jean Grant-Sutton

If you practice yoga you know that nearly every aspect of yoga is intricately linked to the breath. If you haven’t tried yoga yet, when you do, you will learn that the breath is synonymous with Prana, the vital life force energy that animates us. The ancient art and science of yoga puts great importance on the breath because it is what sustains all our basic life functions.

The job of the respiratory system is to bring oxygen -rich air into the lungs, which is picked up by red blood cells and pumped by the heart to every cell in the body, providing vital oxygen essential for life. Though humans can survive for sometime without food and water, tissues immediately begin to die when deprived of oxygen. Breath is related to all aspects of physiological functioning including cardiovascular functioning, brain circulation, metabolic activity, endocrine activity, muscle and vascular tone, lymphatic drainage and homeostatic regulation.

A regular yoga practice will give you the time to be more aware of breathing and to actually spend time breathing deeper than you might in normal everyday activity. In yoga you are taught how to use your breath to help relax the body and to control the breath even when the body is active. You are taught how to synchronize the breath with your movement. Some classes will spend time just with particular breathing exercises, pranayama, with the intention to balance the autonomic nervous system, the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and to increase the breathing capacity, which helps expel carbon dioxide and other waste products.

The effects of yoga on asthma are one of the areas that researchers have spent time studying. These studies done at yoga institutions in India have reported impressive success in improving asthma. Physicians have found improvement in anxiety associated with asthma using yoga postures, breathing and meditation techniques. You can Google yoga research on asthma and find many articles are available showing the positive findings.

Guided visualizations and relaxation techniques that focus on calming the entire respiratory system can be extremely helpful to people with breathing conditions like asthma, bronchitis, and emphysema. Putting people in a comfortable position and bringing their attention to their breathing can increase the awareness of how the breath is flowing. Is it shallow or deep? Is it smooth? Are both the diaphragm and the chest muscles moving? Is it noticeable at the nostrils? Using visualization that leads them through their own system from the air entering through the nose into the trachea, down the bronchial tubes all the way into the alveoli, with suggestions to see healthy, receptive, relaxed oxygen exchange happening within can create quiet, peaceful breathing and be a great relief.

How we breathe has important effects on our overall health. Here is an excerpt from The Journal of The International Association Of Yoga Therapists, Vol.2, No. 1, 1991, pages 13-17. This is written by Richard C. Miller, Ph.D. in his article, “The Psychophysiology of Respiration: Eastern and Western Perspectives.”

• With slow, rhythmic, abdominal-diaphragmatic breathing, relatively high levels of CO2 accumulate in the lung arterioles and the blood. As a result, blood pH shifts towards acidosis, triggering numerous psycho physiological processes. Increased CO2 induces relaxation of vascular tone, promotes coronary and cerebral blood flow, oxygenation of the heart and brain, removal of acidic metabolites, and an increase in oxygen transfer from hemoglobin to cellular tissues.

He goes on in much more detail, but the message is clear that respiration, how we breathe, has a large influence on our general well being.

This brings us back to where we started. If you practice yoga ,you have experienced the emphasis that is brought to coordinating breath and movement together. The link to our Prana, or life force energy, is a great reason for choosing it as a self-care method. If you haven’t tried yoga yet, well, what’s stopping you??

Jean Grant-Sutton is director of BodyWorks Integrative Yoga and Stress Management.