You breathe constantly, continuously, every single day. But how much time you do you actually put into focusing on your breathing? Breathing exercises, putting focus on how you breathe and even why you breathe, can help propel you to higher levels of fitness, well being, health and happiness.
“Man may exist some time without eating; a shorter time without drinking; but without breathing his existence may be measured by a few minutes.”
– Yogi Ramacharaka
Probably not. Do you know what “entropy” is? Entropy is the measure of disorder in a system.
What that means to your body is that everything is slowly degrading and falling apart. The less attention you put into a part of your body, the more you’re allowing the natural inertia towards increased entropy to occur. Consequently, you’ve got to put work into your breathing, just like you do your muscles. And just like with training muscles, you’ve got to start at the beginning with Diaphragmatic Breathing.
Unless you’re hyperventilating, there are spaces between breaths, both after the inhale and after the exhale.
Most of the time, you won’t notice or pay attention to these spaces. But each of them has value and spending some time expanding both of the retained segments of a complete breath
The science has show that Nadi Sonham (Alternate Nostril Breathing) can lower blood pressure and pulse rate1, improves manual dexterity2 and has a balancing effect on the functional activity of the left and right hemispheres of the brain3. All that just from breathing!
Now that you've started on the path of training your breath, you can continue on with these advanced yoga breathing exercises. All these breathing exercises are built on the Yogi Complete Breath, so if you haven’t already been practicing your belly breathing and your Yogi Complete Breath, please go back to those pages now.
Now that you’ve strengthened your diaphragmatic breathing, it’s time for the Yoga Complete Breath. (You have been practicing diaphragmatic breathing, right???) The belly breathing exercise is the beginning. Now we’ll add in the rest of the lung capacity.
There are three parts of a Yoga Complete Breath. Unless you specifically develop all three aspects in the correct order, you are most likely over-emphasizing one of the aspects to the detriment of optimal breathing mechanics.