Yoga, Breath and Darth Vader

I have studied yoga and meditation for the majority of my adult life. Breathing is a big part of it. Are you breathing? Yeah. I thought I was too. Let’s talk about how to use breath to cope with stress. Yoga can enhance our lives through awareness of breath. Apparently breath goes a lot deeper than I thought it did. As one of my yoga teachers recently told me “breathing is good. Not breathing is bad.” She’s subtle like that.

My First Day of Yoga

I remember my first yoga class vividly. I had already been a student at a meditation school for quite some time and it seemed yoga was a natural complement. Sure, I can do the yoga. Sign me up. I picked myself up some lululemon clothing that were perfect for yoga and my first class started. The teacher was approximately 108 years old and we did a series of flowing movements that I greatly disliked. Everyone was breathing like Darth Vader. Then it ended, with bowing and saying some random word in a language that I didn’t recognize. Conclusion – yoga is a giant, linguistically-challenging stretchfest with a bunch of heavy breathers. I assumed the stretching was the beginning of the class. Sometimes in sports we call this ‘warming up’. Then the class ended. Where was the yoga? We did a giant, hour long warm up that led to nothing. WTF was that.

I quit that day. As if I was going to pay money to participate in solely a warm up.

Ten years later

I am a certified yoga teacher and love it with all my heart.

When I began practicing on a regular basis, yoga was a physical practice. I struggled to understand how downward dog would help my life. It made very little sense to me. I liked exercise and I liked hot yoga in January; the month when even my cell phone needs to be swaddled and put on a seat warmer for it to stay alive. My teachers encouraged me to ‘come back to my breath’. I will attempt to translate what exactly that means and why it is helpful, because it is extremely important, simple and hard to implement.

Yoga can enhance our lives through awareness of breath.

Your awareness is like a flashlight. Anything the flashlight is shining on becomes your reality. There is no single, stand-alone reality; there is only awareness. When you dream, your awareness is focused on the scene in your dream world and that becomes your entire reality. You don’t transform (most of us) into another gender or an animal. We generally remain ourselves, to a degree, and that is called our awareness. Self-awareness is the ‘I Am’. The ability to see oneself as a Self begins and ends with I Am. We work towards deconstructing the self until we reach the non-self stage however for this particular post, we aren’t shining our flashlight of awareness on that concept.

What possible benefit could be found in noticing the feeling of breathing when it is such an automatic, primal and mandatory activity?

I’m always breathing. How does this help with stress?

What happens when we receive a troublesome email? What happens when we feel distressed about our work, our self, our family or our situation? We tell ourselves a story about it. An extension of what happened, what might happen, should happen and shouldn’t happen. We use a single experience; expand it massively in our mind and it becomes a full blown entity. A thought has no inherent substance of its own. You can’t capture it. It’s a mental process and much to our dismay, we cannot control the thoughts that arise in the mind. Isn’t that troubling? Agreed.

We cannot control our thoughts. I was equally as saddened by this as you probably are right now. Anyone who believes they can control every thought that they have is manufacturing each thought, which leaves very little space for that which arises from causes, conditions, beliefs, emotions, etc. In my opinion, that is impossible.

We CAN control how we approach our thoughts but we cannot control whether or not they arise.

Using yoga and breath to cope with stress

We’re practicing our downward dog. We’re trying to focus on our breath. We focus for 0.4 seconds and our mind trails away, back into the story of ‘that crazy woman who told me I couldn’t control my thoughts’. Panic ensues. Still in downward dog. Let’s begin here; what is happening in that moment? And where is the flashlight of awareness? Are you reading my blog while in downward dog? If so, please stop.

In that moment is simply a downward dog and perhaps a serene environment with a seemingly calm teacher. There is zero threat in that moment however the fictitious individual in this story isn’t in the moment of serenity and downward dog awesomeness. They are in a reality of panic because the flashlight of awareness is focused on the story in the mind (which may be true, but is not happening). The mind loves to convince us we need to listen to and believe it all the time. We don’t. The mind is a tool that we can use when needed and ideally, make peace with when we aren’t doing any analytical work. Clearing your mind is not possible, generally, unless you have no brain function. So please don’t aim for that.

The mind is a constant stream of thoughts however we can take a step back from the stream simply by feeling the sensation of breathing. This is called Awareness of Breath. It gives our mind permission to take a break. To be free. Even for one full round of breath; it is a huge accomplishment. It creates a space between the intensity of the thought stream and our reaction to it. It dilutes the impact of it. Life can perhaps become an intelligent response to thoughts and experiences instead an impulsive reaction to them.

Why Awareness of Breath?

The reason we come back to noticing our breath is that it is ALWAYS a path to the present moment. You never return your awareness to the sensation of breath and start reflecting on your exhale from last Tuesday. And the breath is always with us. It’s the perfect tool to utilize because it is so unlikely you’ll go anywhere without it. It’s your constant companion.

Never will your mind attach permanently to your breath. I think that’s one of the hard parts of the practice; our egoic layer needs to feel as if there is a tangible goal. We will never be all breath, all the time. Human beings don’t function like that and we wouldn’t want to. We need our mind but we need it to be our tool; not our life manager. Not all thoughts are true. Not all rumination will lead you to a conclusion that alleviates distress. Distress is often caused by a stimulus that precedes a detailed and ongoing horror show of future prediction’s and worries.

Breathing is enough

The practice called Awareness of Breath is enough. You don’t need to become a registered yoga teacher, go to an Ashram or purchase a couple dozen self-help books about this. This is truly the entire instruction manual. Feel your breath in body. Feel it? Belly? Chest? Tip of nose? Any will do. Then practice in non-threatening settings, such as Yoga. When the shit hits the fan in your life, you’ll have a tool and it won’t be downward dog. It won’t be dropping down in the middle of crisis and sitting lotus style for thirty minutes. It will be deep, conscious breaths. Awareness of Breath is the practice. Life itself is the main event. Try an Awareness of breath, or other meditation, in the TR Meditation Club. They are free, guided and available on mobile devices.

So in reality, I suppose Yoga is one enormous warm up. A warm up for a better life.

Have you ever had a moment where your breath has saved you? I have. #toddlermornings