Pranayama for Everyone: Bhramari Breath Practice

by Timothy

Bee and Flower by Melina Meza

One of the dirty secrets of the yoga world is how few yoga practitioners—and how few teachers—do pranayama, yogic breathing exercises. It's better in some yoga traditions than others, but overall I've been shocked to see how few of my colleagues practice pranayama regularly. This is a shame!

The breath is probably the single best way to affect the autonomic nervous system, which in turn controls the function of every internal organ, as well as systems like digestion and immunity. Pranayama can also be the gateway into meditation and higher yogic practices. Furthermore, there is a potential synergy: the regular practice of pranayama can make your asana practice subtler and more refined, and your meditation deeper and more concentrated. For therapeutic purposes, I believe there is synergistic benefit from doing some asana, along with pranayama, meditation, and other yogic practices.

Some schools teach that only experienced practitioners should attempt yogic breathing practices. There is wisdom in being careful, as pranayama done incorrectly—and especially if it's done too aggressively—can lead to problems with the nervous system and, in extreme cases, to psychological decompensation. But there are a few basic pranayama practices that I have found are safe for virtually everyone, and I'll be writing about them in this and my next few blog posts.

I'll begin today with one of my favorites: Bhramari [pronounced brah mah REE], which means the "buzzing of the bees." Although, in my experience, this is one of the pranayama techniques that's rarely taught (at least in many traditions), it's simple, safe, and has tremendous therapeutic potential.

To do a simple version of Bhramari, sit in a comfortable upright position as you would for meditation. Keeping your mouth closed, with your exhalation make a low- to medium-pitched humming sound in your throat. As you make the sound, which should last the entire length of the exhalation, tune into the literal vibration of the sound waves in your throat and even in your skull and brain. Then inhale through your nose, and if you're comfortable, repeat. Try to make your transitions into and out of each humming exhalation as smooth as possible.

At first, you might try Bhramari for a minute, but if it's goes well you can progress to a few minutes at a time. Depending on your breath capacity, the exhalation might vary from short to quite long. I'd suggest doing as long an exhalation as feels completely comfortable. At all times, each subsequent inhalation should be smooth, without any breath hunger. If you are feeling at all short of breath, you've likely pushed harder than you should, and if so, simply take a catch up breath and then resume Bhramari. If you feel at all agitated, I'd suggest you suspend the practice for the day and try it again another time with shorter exhalations.

Most people who do Bhramari as I've described it above will find the practice soothing. Since you will be lengthening your exhalation relative to your inhalation, the Bharmari breath activates the parasympathetic nervous system, and within a few breaths can bring you to a greater sense of relaxation and calmness. According to the classic text Hatha Yoga Pradipika, "with regular practice of bhramari, bliss arises in the heart."

A recent study Immediate effect of a slow pace breathing exercise Bhramari pranayama on blood pressure and heart rate suggested that the practice can lower blood pressure. In my yoga therapy work, I've found it useful for stress and various stress-related conditions, including insomnia (try a low-pitched sound). It's also useful for nasal congestion due to colds, allergies or sinus infections (use a slightly higher-pitched sound so that you can feel your nose and sinuses vibrating).

I even sometimes recommend Bhramari as a meditation alternative for people who find their minds so distressingly busy when they sit that they can't do the practice. It's harder for the monkey mind to go wild over the racket the buzzing of the bees makes internally, allowing you to settle in something moving in the direction of meditation.

Next up: Alternative Nostril Breathing.

Balancing Your Emotions with Your Breath

by Nina

Close-Up of the Falls by Melina Meza

As I wrote in Your Breath: The Key to Your Nervous System, while you cannot tell your nervous system directly to slow your heart beat, digest your food more quickly or to start relaxing right this minute, you can control your breath. And because your heart rate tends to speed up on your inhalation and your heart rate tends to slow on your exhalation, this enables you to consciously access your nervous system. By intentionally taking in more air (either by speeding up your breath or by lengthening your inhalation) you can stimulate your nervous system. And by taking in less air (by slowing your breath or lengthening your exhalation), you can calm yourself down.

Last week, I wrote about emotional counter-poses that you can use to balance your emotions. You can use various yogic breath practices in the same way. You can use breath practices when nothing serious is wrong but you’re just feeling slightly hyper (see anxiety or stress) or slightly down (see clinical depression). And you can also use them as a supplement to other treatments if you are suffering from anxiety, agitated depression, clinical depression or chronic stress.

(Note that yogic breath practices have evolved over thousands of years as yogis experimented on themselves and passed on discoveries their students. And while some schools of yoga teach yogic breath practices (pranayama) to beginners, the type of yoga that I’m trained in, Iyengar style, considers breath practices to be so powerful that pranayama is introduced very gradually. So if you start experimenting with breath practices to balance your emotional condition, do take it easy.)

Anxiety and agitated depression. Because anxiety and agitated depression—which is anxiety based—are so often related to an overactive sympathetic nervous system, for these two conditions it’s best to focus on your exhalation. You can simply work on exhaling completely or lengthen your exhalation a beat or two (by pausing after your exhalation is complete). Or, you can try a more formal practice that focuses on lengthening the exhalation, such as Viloma with interrupted exhalation, where you actually pause twice during your exhalation and once at the end. This is the practice that Iyengar himself recommends in Light on Life in his “Asanas for Emotional Stability” practice.

If manipulating your exhalation causes you to feel any agitation whatsoever, stop the practice. In addition, practices that lengthen your inhalation or even that bring your awareness to the inhalation (which can cause you to unintentionally lengthen or deepen your inhalation) may aggravate your condition, so you may want to avoid them.

If you’ve noticed that you are a chest breather—a type of breathing that seems to be associated with anxiety—and it doesn’t make you feel more anxious to work with your inhalation as well as your exhalation, you could practice abdominal breathing. In abdominal breathing, you focus on slowly inhaling into and exhaling from your belly rather than your chest, as you intentionally keep your abdominal area relaxed. You could lie on your back, and place a block or other light weight, such as a 1 pound bag of rice, on your belly to bring awareness to your abdomen, and keep your abdomen relaxed as you slowly inhale and exhale. Or, if lying on your back makes you anxious, you could lie in Crocodile pose (on your belly with your arms out to the sides, elbows bent, and forehead resting on stacked hands) so you can feel your abdomen moving toward and away from the floor as you slowly inhale and exhale.

You can also use any of these techniques if you're just feeling mildly hyper and want to calm down.

Clinical depression. For clinical depression, which tends to make people feel heavy and lifeless, focusing on your inhalation or breathing more quickly can stimulate your nervous system and bring you out of your lethargy. This is one reason why an active vinyasa practice, such as the Ashtanga series or Sun Salutations, can be helpful to those with clinical depression because when you move with your breath, you tend to breathe more quickly and take in more oxygen. So for you, it may be helpful to focus on your inhalation. You can simply work with inhaling more completely or lengthen your inhalation by holding it for a beat or two. Or, you can try a more formal practice that focuses on lengthening the inhalation, such as Viloma with interrupted inhalation, where you actually pause twice during your inhalation and once after. In Yoga As Medicine, Timothy McCall recommends Ujjayi breathing, which tends to lengthen both the inhalation and exhalation, as well as the version of Viloma with interrupted inhalation

Some people who are depressed tend to have a slumped posture, with a collapsed chest, so focusing on opening your chest and inhaling into that area can be beneficial. In Yoga As Medicine, Timothy quotes Patricia Walden, who herself has suffered from clinical depression, saying:

“When you start focusing on your breath, and taking the breath into your chest and breathing deeply, you begin to feel the presence of your breath. What comes with that is a feeling of life returning, a feeling of warm that percolates throughout your chest at the beginning, but then throughout your entire body.”

You can also use any of these techniques if you're just feeling mildly depressed or blue.

Because stress is often a trigger for clinical depression, it’s possible that working with your exhalation as described for anxiety rather than your inhalation, could be helpful for you. So don’t hesitate to give it a try if you feel so inclined. As I said in my post Anxiety, Yoga and the Front Body, when it comes to emotional balance, anything that makes you feel better is working.

Stress. Because chronic stress is the result of an overactive sympathetic nervous system, it makes sense to focus on pacifying your nervous system by working with your exhalation as I described for anxiety. However, from my observations of people doing pranayama, some people find any kind of pranayama relaxing (I, myself, do not, by the way). If you do find all breath work relaxing, go ahead and do whichever breath practice quiets your mind and relaxes you. Simply slowing your breath in general, with long, slow inhalations as well as exhalations, could be helpful in reducing stress. Practices where you speed up your breath will no doubt stimulate your nervous system. So if you are doing an active vinyasa practice to burn off your excess energy, end your yoga practice with a calming breath practice or an emotional counter-pose (see Balancing Your Emotional Body With Counter-Poses) that triggers the relaxation response.

Ssshh! Falling Asleep the Way You Like To

by Nina

"The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases." Carl Jung

I've had more than one person ask me the same question about my post recommending practicing breath awareness or pranayama in bed for insomnia (see Yoga for Better Sleep: Workshop and Tip). The question had to do with the position you should take while you are practicing in bed:
Was wondering whether this breath practice was to relax you enough so that you can then turn over and fall asleep or to fall asleep while doing this practice? If you are to fall asleep while doing the practice and you happen to be someone who cannot fall asleep laying on your back, do you then do the practice in the position that you fall asleep in?

The simple answer is: it's up to you! The description I provided of practicing on your back with your hands on your belly just happens to be the way I do it, at least most of the time. It was never meant as a prescription.

Although breath awareness and pranayama are typically taught either in seated positions or supine positions (on the back), in this case your aim—the opposite of that for a formal breath practice—is to fall asleep. So you will need to experiment to see what works best for you. Maybe you'll practice on your back until you feel ready to turn over and fall asleep. Or maybe you'll practice in your typical sleeping position and fall asleep while practicing. As it happens, I've also been taught to practice pranayama in supported Child's pose, feeling my breath in my back body, so practicing in a prone position (face down) even turns out to be legit!

Supported Child's Pose

Or, if you practice on your back, you might, to your own surprise, find yourself drifting off to sleep in that position, maybe even turning over in your sleep. (To be honest, I'm pretty sure I've done all these things, at one time or another.) And what works one night (or one month) may not work at another time, for any number of reasons, including physical ones, such as having a cold or a physical problem that requires a change in your sleep position.

The point is: Ssshh! It's dark, no one is looking, and you can do whatever you want! 

Friday Q&A: Pranayama on an Airplane

Q: I have a question for your esteemed teachers on Pranayama: I do a lot of air travel: Internal (within US) and international. My international trips involve a minimum of 10-12 hrs of continuous travel. Flying at an altitude of more than 30,000 feet and with the air pressure being so low outside, we are breathing in compressed air inside the plane. Is it safe to do Pranayama inside the plane on long flight duration since the air is primarily re-circulated?

A: I have had the good fortune to travel to Estes Park, Colorado on a number of occasions to teach or study at an annual yoga conference there. Many of the classes held there include breathing practices or pranayama. The altitude at Estes Park just happens to be 7552 feet above sea level. I had no problems, personally, adjusting to the altitude and participating fully in my classes. In the history of yoga, there are many stories of yogis doing their training in the mountains of India, Nepal and Tibet, at high altitudes. My reason for mentioning these facts is that a pressurized, temperature controlled modern jet plane creates an atmospheric pressure of somewhere between 5 to 8000 feet above sea level, not unlike my elevation while studying in Colorado. This means that the percentage of oxygen in the air inside the plane is the same as it would be in Estes Park. So, from a purely atmospheric pressure standpoint, pranayama could safely be practiced on your flight.

Regarding the safety of the air you breathe on planes, I found this online article by an airline pilot illuminating and reassuring in regards to both the amount of fresh air and re-circulated air (50:50 mix in most cases) and the high quality filters that are used on modern jets, considered hospital quality (To read the pilot’s full post, see Cabin Air Quality. And if you want to understand how pressurized cabins in airplanes developed, here’s a great article for Air and Space Magazine online that will give you all the details: How Things Work: Cabin Pressure) In fact, when I posed this question to my colleague Richard Rosen, author of two books on pranayama, he pointed out that the air quality in a plane is a lot better than the hot, polluted air in Pune, India, home of the Iyengar family.

As I researched this topic, the one fact that did jump out at me that could have an effect on the quality of your pranayama practice is the relative humidity of the air in a modern jet. It runs around 12%, which is equivalent or lower than the humidity in a desert setting, which is pretty darn dry! So, the one recommendation I would make regardless of whether you are practicing yogic breath techniques or just napping on the plane, is to drink more water than you might normally at home. This would be doubly true for longer flights. This way you will avoid the dehydrating effect of air travel and you will likely feel better physically when you land at your destination! Richard mentioned that caution should be used with any pranayama technique that you’d be careful with at home or if you were inexperienced. He mentioned bastrika, or bellow’s breath and kapalabhati, or skull brightening breath, as two he would suggest you avoid. Richard did suggest that the “best bet” for airplane breathing is the modern version of ujjayi (in the traditional version the right nostril is closed on exhale), with a “special focus on the exhale and then a pensive pause at the end of each exhale.” So, there you have it, some common sense advice and some expert suggestions from one of the experts on pranayama in this country. To learn more about yogic breathing, check out Richard’s two books on the topic:

The Yoga of Breath
Pranayama, Beyond the Fundamentals