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Unit 2: The Breath

Module # Topic Timestamp Page #

2.1 “Getting to Know You” 00:01:02 1

2.2 Breathing: An Introduction 00:10:00 3

2.3 Cellular Breathing 00:16:09 4

2.4 Somatization: Cellular Respiration 00:22:18 5

2.5 Mechanics of Breathing 00:30:15 6

2.6 Looking at Language: Breath vs. Air 00:55:01 11

2.7 Geek Out: SLARA, the Diaphragm Formula 00:59:24 12

2.8 Accessory Muscles & the See-Saw Breath 01:10:00 13

2.9 “Diaphragmatic Breathing”: Discussion & Exploration 01:24:00 16

2.10 How Do You Use Your Ujjayi? 01:39:17 18

2.11 Ujjayi for Stability 01:42:48 19

2.12 Bandhas 01:51:54 21

2.13 Prana-ayama 02:00:00 23

Review Unit 2: In Review 02:03:28 24

Unit 2: The Breath

[Timestamp 00:00:00]

Narrator: Welcome back to YogaAnatomy.net Fundamentals. This is Unit Two, The Breath. Before you got interested in yoga, did you ever think there was so much to learn about the breath? In this unit we’ll look at the breath from many different perspectives. We’ll start with a look at the mechanics of breathing on an anatomical level. Then we’ll look at the language we use as teachers when we discuss breath with our students. Next we’ll look at ujjayi, one of the most popular breath patterns in yoga, and examine some times it might be useful in your practice and some times where you might want to try out another pattern. And we’ll end with a look at the history of bandhas. How they were first used in an asana practice, and how we might look at them now. But first, we will start with a little "getting to know you" with Amy and Leslie to hear about how they got into yoga and why the breath is so important to them.

Module 2.1 “Getting to Know You"


Leslie Kaminoff: So Amy and I have known each other for quite awhile now. How long has it been? It's been about, what? We've been working together for almost 12 years, right?

Amy Matthews: Mm-hmm.

Leslie: Because that's about how old the...

Amy: That's about old The Breathing Project is.

Leslie: ...The Breathing Project is. Especially since we decided to work on the book together, Yoga Anatomy. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from around the world, and people send us things. "Oh, here's a great link. Look at this. What do you think of that? This person said something that sounds a little weird. What do you think about what they said?” And so I occasionally forward these things to Amy via email just so I can hear her from across the hall going, "Grr!" It's one of my favorite sounds that she makes. So there's a lot of interest in anatomy as it relates to the practice of yoga. People like to use anatomical language to explain what they are doing. But Amy, actually, something you may not know about her, she doesn't think you need to know much anatomy at all in order to be a good yoga teacher. So that raises a perfectly reasonable question—what are you doing with your life? You are teaching anatomy all day long. You have written this book. You are really into anatomy, and really into just geeky levels of detail that are extraordinarily fascinating. So if you don't think you need to really know anatomy to be a good yoga teacher, why are you so into it?

Amy: Mmm. It’s true. I don't think you need to know anatomy to be a good yoga teacher. I think that teaching is a skill set all its own, and it’s not about what you know, or having the right information or the right vocabulary. So knowing a little bit of anatomy and using it badly can actually be more dangerous than just naming what you see and inviting people to have an experience. Having said that, I think studying anatomy is fascinating for me. For me it's a way into experiencing myself that makes a lot of sense, that helps me actually have different experiences in my own body. So it's a tool, but it's not the only way in. And I feel like people who get really caught up in thinking they need to know things, it gets in the way of them just being a teacher. I started out as a dancer and then studied something called Laban Movement Analysis that was all about getting vocabulary for describing movement. Not necessarily anatomically, but using other language. That exercise of trying to describe movement without saying whether it was right or wrong was a hugely valuable exercise. Somewhere in there I started shifting from dance to yoga and studying yoga. I had some great yoga teachers. Then I met Mark Whitwell. He is one

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Unit 2: The Breath

of the really significant teachers in my practice, in my teaching life and yoga life. At the time I was studying with him I was also taking some anatomy classes. And he would say, I was often late for him because I was coming from anatomy class, and he would say, "Why are you taking anatomy?” I'd say, "Because I don't know enough to be a teacher yet.” He would say, pardon my French, he wouldn’t say that, he would say, "That's bullshit. You're a teacher. Go teach."

Leslie: That's his French. That's not yours.

Amy: That's his French, not mine, right. He would say, "That's bullshit. You're a teacher. Go teach.” I would be, like, "I don't know enough. I don't know enough yet.” So I would keep studying with him. He would keep saying, "You are a teacher. Go teach.” I would go try to accumulate more information. He challenged me every time for two years about all the anatomy I was studying. Finally, one time I came back and he said, 'Why are you studying anatomy?” I said, "I'm studying anatomy because I love it and it's fascinating.” He said, "Fine. Great.” So to me that was really significant. To get under my insecurity about being a teacher, to inhabit teaching as a practice separate from the study of anatomy. Anatomy is a useful tool. It is a useful story. But it is not the only way in to an amazing experience in your body. Because it works for me, it doesn't have to work for everybody.

Leslie: But if you are going to use anatomical language when you're teaching..?

Amy: If you are gonna use anatomical language when you're teaching, you had better know what you're talking about. Yes.

Leslie: Otherwise it will end up being one of those emails that I send to Amy and it makes her go, "Grr!"

Amy: Grr!

Leslie: Right.

Amy: Yeah. But what about you, Leslie? You spend all your time teaching anatomy too. But you don't use the anatomical language very much in your teaching.

Leslie: No. When I teach I actually avoid using anatomical terms as much as I can. I don't even use that much Sanskrit. First of all, I tend to be somewhat dyslexic. So even words like right and left can confuse me...

Amy: Yeah.

Leslie: ...Let alone superior and inferior and anterior and posterior and medial and lateral, and all those things. So just for me as a person, to avoid confusion, I try to keep the language as simple and basic as I possibly can. Hopefully, in my keeping it simple enough so that I don't get confused, I'm avoiding confusion with the other people who are in the room.

I came at this from a completely different perspective, as you know. You apparently enjoyed going to school a lot more than I did. I mean, you went all the way through college and all of that. I barely got out of high school. It's somewhat a function of being, of having slight learning differences. But it mostly has to do with severe issues with authority that I continue to have. So I was off on my own learning things, reading books. If you can imagine a time in history where a parent would be overly concerned about a child because he was reading too much... They were concerned about me. He's always got his nose in a book. He will never be out there experiencing life. But I managed to get out there and experience life because I simply had extra time because I wasn't going to school. I’ve always been more of I guess what's called an autodidact. To put myself in situations where I felt connected with what was going on and where I got to observe people who were really good at what they were doing. I was very fortunate in my yoga life to initially learn from Swami Vishnu Devananda when he was still involved in teaching in the


Unit 2: The Breath

Sivananda yoga organization. Then, years later, about 10 years later to get connected with Desikachar and to observe him and how he taught, and to have access to the amazing information that's available through that lineage.

But then on the anatomy side I actually learned more through the sports medicine and dance medicine fields when I was in Los Angeles in the early '80s. I left the Sivananda organization and went to work for a sports medicine doctor who was actually a chiropractic orthopedist. So I got to watch him do what he did. I got to look at tons of X-rays. Just another thing about getting involved with Desikachar and the teaching lineage of Krishnamacharya. I had initially heard about Desikachar from a friend of mine, who you know. Larry Payne. He had just gotten back from India and had visited with all of these great yoga masters, many of whom are either no longer with us or no longer teaching. But Desikachar was the person who impressed him the most. I said, "Well, what's so special about Desikachar?” All he would tell me is, "It's all in the breath."

This is 1981. I didn't meet Desikachar until 1988. So for the next seven years, for whatever reason, that idea lodged in my head. I began seeing everything I was doing as a yoga teacher through this lens of the breathing. How does the breath relate to this movement? How does this movement relate to the breath? Should you be inhaling or exhaling when you do this? By the time I met him, finally, in 1988, I had really done a lot of thinking and a lot of practicing and teaching from this standpoint of having the breath at the center of this inquiry, of this practice. I hope to share some of that as we go along in this unit about breathing.

Module 2.2 Breathing: An Introduction


Leslie: So in our exploration of breathing, a particular story that I like to tell has to do with the relationship of how our human breathing works in relationship to the fundamental definition of yoga practice that we find in Patanjali's Yoga Sutra. The second chapter of Patanjali is called Sadhana Pada. It's the chapter on practice. The very first sutra of that chapter gives us a definition of what's being defined as kriya yoga. Kriya means, well, to act, really. The root kri means to act. The word karma means from the same root. So it means to take some action in the direction of yoga, or yoga practice. This definition it has given is very interesting. It has three parts. The Sutra is tapas svadhyaya ishvara pranidhana kriya yogaha. So the three parts are the tapas, svadhyaya and ishvara pranidhana.

The translation, the commentary that Desikachar gives about this sutra is not the usual kind of scholarly interpretation of these terms, wherein tapas is this idea of doing some kind of austerity, some sort of mortification of the flesh or some sort. Svadhyaya is the study of sacred texts or scriptures, and ishvara pranidhana is surrender to the Lord. There's a much broader interpretation of these terms. The thing that I find so beautiful is that it goes right to the heart of our biological process of breathing.

I can demonstrate that very easily for you. If I simply ask you right now, as you are listening to what I'm saying, to take a deep breath [breath] and then hold that breath, and then exhale that breath [breath], and then hold at the end of that exhale and wait? As I have mentioned earlier in the course, of course, when you do wait, something happens. It's that life force we spoke about. That prana. But what we've just demonstrated is that we do have voluntary control over our breathing. You exhibited that when you inhaled on cue, when you held on cue, when you exhaled on cue and when you held out at the end of the exhale on cue. All of that was voluntarily in time and you could do it whenever you wanted to. What you cannot do is hold at the end of an exhale or an inhale, for that matter, indefinitely, without something being forced to happen next. So what that little exploration was meant to illuminate is the fact that our


Unit 2: The Breath

breathing is both voluntary and autonomic. We have control over it within certain physiologically imposed limits, beyond which we have no control.

Now, how does this relate to this definition of yoga? Well, how should we relate to the things that we have no control over? This has to do with the term ishvara pranidhana. Ishvara doesn't just mean Lord. It also can mean the forces of nature that surround us and that are inside of us, over which we have no ultimate control. The only reasonable relationship we should have to these forces, is surrender, because we can't control them. One is reminded of Francis Bacon's famous saying, that nature, in order to be commanded, must be obeyed.

But what about the stuff that we do have control over? That's tapas. That's what we can change. That's changing what is changeable. We do it every time we try an asana we haven't done before. Every time we breathe a different way. Every time we put our body in a position that it wouldn't get into on its own over the course of our daily activities. That's really what asana practice is. It's kind of a controlled stress experience, a controlled experiment in change, in what we can change. But we can only change that which is changeable. So this will show us why the svadhyaya component is so important and necessary, because svadhyaya doesn't just mean study of sacred scriptures. It means study of oneself. It means self reflection, introspection, to get next to one's self. Svadhyaya is what that term means.

So when you take these three terms together in their relationship to each other, we come up with something that is actually quite familiar. We come up with this idea that we have the strength to change the things that we can. We have the serenity to accept the things that we cannot change. But in order to have both of those, we need to have the wisdom to tell the difference between the things we can and cannot change. And this is our breathing. Our breathing is both voluntary and autonomic. So when we place the process of breathing at the very center, at the very core of our practice, it will teach us this principle. It will show us what our limitations are. It’ll also show us the immense possibilities that we have. This is the way I like to think of this fundamental definition of yoga practice and how it relates to the breath, and we’ll be reminded of this over and over again as we proceed through the rest of the material on breathing and on yoga practice.

Module 2.3 Cellular Breathing


Amy: In my studies with Mark Whitwell, who is also a student of Desikachar's, like Leslie, I also learned an orientation to the breath that put the breath at the center of the yoga practice. After that I went on to study Body-Mind Centering, and actually, at the same time, I studied Body-Mind Centering. In that approach to study, we look at all kinds of different body systems and orientations to things that support life. So along with the breath that comes in and out of the lungs that so many of us are familiar with, we also looked at things like the circulation of blood, the movements of fluids, the roles of our cells and our tissues and our awareness of movement and in supporting being alive.

In the yoga practice, both Leslie and I and many other teachers do focus on the breath a lot. It's a wonderful starting place for exploring any kind of movement and experiences in the body. It's accessible to a lot of people. All of us are breathing. So it's a great way in. It also, though, can be a really challenging way in. And for some people, to pay attention to their breath can be terrifying or really frustrating or challenging in any number of ways. So it's an accessible way in and it can be very challenging. Changing breathing habits might be one of the hardest things we ask people to do. When we look at the breath, we can also then look at other ways to see what it is that brings life, or other aspects of breathing besides the pattern that we're most familiar with, of bringing the air in through the nose and into the lungs and out of


Unit 2: The Breath

the lungs and back out into space, which we are going to spend a lot of time talking about and looking at different takes on.

Before we dive into those specifics of the inhale and the exhale, I want to spend a little time telling you about what happens once the air gets into the lungs and some other ways that we can look at what the breath might be. When we inhale, and we'll look at the mechanics of the inhale a lot with Leslie, when we inhale and we get air into the lungs, then from there the oxygen needs to get somehow to the rest of the tissues in our body. It doesn't happen because the air itself goes to our little toes. That doesn't happen. If that's happening, there's a problem. The air itself goes into the lungs. In the lungs, then, we have to get the oxygen from the air into the blood stream and we have to get carbon dioxide from the blood stream into the lungs so that it can be exhaled. So it's a process of moving these molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide across the membrane.

So the membrane that I am talking about is the lining of the alveoli, which are the tiniest part of the lungs. So as we inhale, the air comes in through the nose, through the trachea, branches into the bronchial tubes and then branches and branches and branches. The very end of those branches are these globes or globules called alveoli. Which, we have a picture of one alveoli up here. So those alveoli are the deepest that the air goes into our body. Then, each alveoli is surrounded by a network of tiny, tiny blood vessels call the capillary bed. As you can see, the red and the blue are continuous with each other, and showing blood vessels that have come from the heart to the lungs and then blood vessels that are turning around and heading back to the heart. From the heart they will go out to the rest of the body.


These little tiny capillaries, the tiniest blood vessels we have, have very thin walls to them. They meet right up with the very thin walls that line the alveoli. It's across those two membranes that oxygen has to travel to get from the lungs into the blood vessel, and that carbon dioxide travels to get from the blood vessel into the lungs.

So that when we inhale and bring air into our lungs, then the next thing that needs to happen is for the oxygen to get from the air into the blood vessels and to travel then in the blood vessels, riding on the red blood cells, back to the heart, and then from the heart back out into the body. That oxygen rich blood then travels out into the body through arteries that branch smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until they get into a tissue, maybe in a bone, maybe in a muscle, maybe at the skin, maybe all the way out at the tips of the fingers or toes. Maybe right in the tissue of the heart. Those blood vessels get so thin that the oxygen on the red blood cells can leave the red blood cells, travel through the walls of the blood vessels and into the fluid that surrounds the cells, and then can be picked up by the cells and used in their metabolic activities. They then release carbon dioxide that diffuses back into the blood vessels and travels back to the heart and then travels back to the lungs, where it gets released into the alveoli, and that exchange happens again, of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

So the process of breathing is that of getting the air into the lungs. But if we get the air into the lungs and we don't do the fluid cellular process of breathing, then the cells can't survive. Then we won't actually get the breath into the body without that fluid travel, voyage. We won't actually get the breath into the tissues without that voyage through the blood to the cells so that the cells can breathe.

Module 2.4 Somatization: Cellular Respiration


Unit 2: The Breath


Amy: Okay. Take a position lying down, and I would suggest not being on your back, actually. Any other surface of your body you want. If you really love lying on your back, you can certainly be there. But because so often that's the position we take, see how it is if you are not on your back. Now, if you find lying on your side or on your front that you really can't settle, that you really can't find any ease, then go ahead and change your position. If you start to settle and you find you need support, you want something under your head, you can certainly get yourself what you need for support.

Then begin to settle your intention inward. Part of the idea here is that you do not need to be symmetrical to tune into the movement of your breath. As you bring your attention inward, from the movement of your breath into and out of your lungs. So from the movement of the air into and out of your lungs, can you shift your awareness to your blood? What would it feel like to feel the movement of your blood? If you can't feel it, you could imagine it or visualize it. If you find that you are looking with your attention really hard, see if you can let that go. Because it might also be, if you open up the question, that your blood will tell you what it feels like.

So as you consider or entertain, or invite an awareness of the movement of your blood, feel or imagine or visualize that the red blood cells traveling through the vessels of your body, the arteries and veins, are carrying oxygen that they picked up from the lungs. Can the fluid movement of your blood be a part of your sense of your breath?

Your blood moves through your tissues. Every cell in your body is close to blood in the sense that, spatially, there is a blood vessel in the region of every cell in your body. So the movement of your blood through the blood vessels, through the veins and arteries, that is a part of the movement of your breath.

Then the cells themselves receive oxygen or gather it, or are invited in from the blood. They release carbon dioxide and other products. Cells are taking in and letting go all of the time. There is constant transporting across the membrane of the cell, from outside the cell to inside the cell, from inside the cell to outside the cell. So the process of cellular respiration is happening constantly. Each cell in your body, hundreds of billions of cells in your body, are breathing. This also is an aspect of your breath.

All of these movements of your breath are happening at the same time. Your cells are breathing. Cellular respiration. The movement of oxygen in your blood to and from the cells, to and from the lungs, is happening continually. The internal respiration through the tissues of your body, the blood and the cells, is always happening along with the external respiration, the inhale and the exhale. So can you feel all of those aspects of your breath, external respiration and the internal respiration of the movement of your blood and the breathing of your cells,


as you find your way back out into the room and up to sitting. Thank you.

Module 2.5 Mechanics of Breathing


Leslie: All right. We're gonna be talking about breathing now. I am very fond of having a good, solid definition for any topic that we go into in depth. Breathing is one of the topics we'll be going into in the most depth. So how can we define breathing? Well, there's a lot of ways, potentially, to define breathing. If you look it up in the dictionary you will find definitions that have something to do with the process of


Unit 2: The Breath

taking air into and out of the body. You will find definitions of respiration, external respiration, internal respiration. Amy talked about some of that. But for our purposes, from the standpoint of the relationship of breath to asana on a structural level, on a movement level, there's a particular definition that I found to be most useful.

We started by looking at the cell, okay. The idea that nutrition moves in and waste moves out is something that's fundamental to all life. So before we can look at our definition of breathing, let's just look at what breathing does for us. Okay? We are more of an organism made of cells doing this dance of prana and apana. So when we use the term prana and apana to refer to the in breath and the out breath, there's some kind of classical definitions that we find in the ancient texts. Some of them aren't so ancient. Some of them are 1400-1500’s, which, by Indian standards, aren't particularly ancient. Some of them are older. Some of them are much older. But this idea of the in breath and out breath is there through all of them.

Now, in the later texts you hear definition of prana and apana in terms of the directions in which they move. So you have heard about apana, right? It's the out breath. It's the energy that removes waste from the body. You’ve also probably heard that it moves in a certain direction? Which way does it go? It does down. Apana goes downward. Well, that's absolutely true, as we can see from our very sophisticated anatomical chart here. Let me just resize it there. Okay. If we look at the stuff pictured in blue, solid and liquid, it enters at the top. Through our mouth we swallow it. It comes down to the stomach, the intestine, swirls around and basically down is the way it goes to get out. That's anatomy that just about anyone can understand. However, we are going to be talking about breathing. If we're talking about breathing we have to talk about what is going on with the red stuff. The red stuff in this drawing is what happens to air. Air comes in at the top, just like the solid and the liquid, but it goes back out the same way it came in. So what we would say is that apana, as a force that removes waste from the body, has to be traveling in a way that's consistent with what's being removed. If what's being removed is solid and a liquid, yes, it's a downward moving force. If, however, it is acting on the exhale, it has to move up. That's a simple result of the way we are anatomically put together. So apana, as it relates to the breath, can be thought of as an upward moving force. So much of understanding how breath and movement interrelate has to do with this one specific identification of apana having the ability to move upward when it's acting on the breath.

We all know, pretty much, about the downward moving force. It's how we get urine and feces out of the body. It's how babies get out of the body. It's how we learn to squeeze in and push down when we're infants to relieve internal discomfort. We don't necessarily need to be taught how to do that. But if that's the only direction you have been squeezing all of your life, when you come into a yoga class and someone asks you to do something like kapalabhati for the first time, okay, and all you've got is that downward squeeze, then you have to unlearn something. So kapalabhati, as an exercise, is specifically about upward moving apana, upward moving exhale. If all you can do is squeeze in and push down, you can't do kapalabhati. So let's keep that in mind as we move into our definition of breathing. Right?

So this, like this, very complicated anatomy. Right? We have reduced all the complexity of breathing in terms of our definition to this simple image. This shows that we have two cavities. The thoracic cavity—chest cavity, the abdominal cavity. So here's the definition. This is what I eluded to in the very beginning. Breathing is the shape-change of the abdominal and thoracic cavities. That's it. You can take this idea of shape change and substitute it for the word breathing whenever you encounter it, and you'll actually have a deeper window into what's going on. If I say, [inhales and exhales] "I just had a really good breath," you can translate that now. I just had a really good shape change. If, however, I had a crappy breath, I had a crappy shape change. The reason it felt crappy is because my cavities couldn't change shape well. They had some problem in coordinating. Some of the moving parts weren't moving very well. Some of the spaces that needed to be spaces weren't spaces. So understanding breath as shape-change gives us a window into how the body does it, and how it can be helped when things don't go so well.


Unit 2: The Breath

It also gives us a window into a very, very important connection. That is the connection between the breath and the flexible shape changing structure that occupies the back of the cavities. Your spine. So if breath is shape change and the spine is the back of the cavities that are changing shape, then the movements of the spine have a very deep connection with, and influence upon, how we breathe. And the way we breathe has a very profound influence upon the spine. How it moves and how it can be supported. How it can be supported in movement. So you can see how we're building upon this simple definition of breath as shape change to show how yoga works as a practice that coordinates breath movement with spinal movement and support.

So going back to the cavities. What we need to explore now is exactly how the cavities change shape. Because the abdominal cavity and the thoracic cavity, although they both change shape, they have that in common, do not change shape in the same way. Which is why I have these toys, and I have enough for everyone here. You can pass that around. You can pass that around. Everyone gets to play with the toy. You can buy these on Amazon. If you want to have the tactile experience at home, find a water snake at a toy story or on Amazon. That's where I got these, okay? I have a big supply. I need to have a big supply because occasionally they get confiscated by the TSA when I travel. Okay? So I need to have replacements.

So this, unless you had not already guessed, is your abdominal cavity. The water balloon is the abdominal cavity. The abdominal cavity in breathing behaves like a flexible shape changing fluid filled structure that changes its shape but not its volume. It's important to remember. Understanding that can help us understand some of the better ways to use language when we're describing breathing. For example, this pattern of breath here where the top of the water balloon, which happens to be your diaphragm, goes this way and causes your water balloon or your abdominal cavity to bulge that way. Okay? So is that your belly expanding? It looks like it's expanding.


We say it's expanding. We say, "Expand your belly when you take a diaphragmatic breath.” But it ain't happening. That is not true. It's bulging, not expanding. Expansion is something that implies change in volume. That's actually what happens here in the thoracic cavity. The thoracic cavity changes volume. When we get into the discussion about bandha, we will also understand this pattern of shape change, where you impose a squeeze at the bottom, which requires the top to bulge, which means that there needs to be space at the top for that bulge to move, right? This would be mula bandha and the space that opens up above it to allow for that shape change would be uddiyana bandha. So understanding the abdominal cavity as a water balloon, actually, is very, very instructive and very useful when understanding the basic mechanics of breath and how we can support movement with it. But we have to remember it's not getting bigger. It's bulging.

What gets bigger is the thoracic cavity, which behaves more like this accordion. You can hear it breathing. Air is being moved into and out of it because of the volume changes that are going on as it changes shape. So to put these two ideas together tells us that our body, our breathing body, these cavities, behave very much like a water balloon shoved up inside the bottom of an accordion. All right? So to go back to that exercise of kapalabhati, that's basically what's happening. A squeeze is happening at the bottom of your water balloon because there are muscles there they can squeeze, and it's causing your water balloon to bulge up into the accordion, which reduces its volume, which pushes the air out. Then you relax the squeeze, things fall back to there they were and the air comes back in. All right?

Remember. That's upward apana. What's your beginner gonna do if they don't know how to do that? They are gonna do the poopy breath, the one they already know how to do. Downward apana. Squeezing and pushing down. Does the air go out? Yeah. It's just not the exercise. This brings up a very important point. You will hear Amy and me say that there is no single right way to breathe. That's true. That doesn't mean


Unit 2: The Breath

there isn't a correct way to do techniques. If there wasn't a correct way to do a technique, it wouldn't be a technique. Right? So what I would say, though, is the reason we learn techniques, the reason we would want to learn a new way of breathing, is to get the benefit of what happens when we unlearn our old way of breathing. You can't learn the new pattern unless you uncover and release the old pattern. So the real benefit that comes from these exercises is actually not in having mastered the exercise. It's what you had to do to master the exercise. That's where you're getting the benefits, because you have to discover and unwind whatever obstructions are in your system. Let's face it. The first time you try something new, you can't do it right away. There's a learning curve. What is the learning curve? It's about finding what's in the way in your system that makes it difficult to do the exercise. So that's the accordion and the water balloon.

Now, breath is shape change. The abdominal cavity changes its shape, but not its volume. The thoracic cavity changes its shape and its volume. This shape change is three-dimensional. We're showing two dimensional images here. I am holding three-dimensional objects here. The body is a three dimensional object. But unlike the accordion, which I use to represent the thoracic cavity, okay, the thoracic cavity changes shape in three dimensions. This is only changing shape in one direction. It's getting bigger from top to bottom, right? The thoracic cavity gets bigger in all three dimensions, and we have a wonderful video to show that. This is from The Art Of Breathing, produced by Jessica Wolf. You can get it in DVD form on Amazon. Yes, the lights now can come down for this part.

So what you can see is that the depth of the ribcage increases. It gets bigger from front to back. That's a dimension of increase in volume. And notice how it gets wider from side to side. It's getting wider from side to side. It's getting deeper from front to back, and although you can't see it here just yet because the diaphragm isn't being shown, it's getting bigger from top to bottom. As the diaphragm descends, the space inside the ribcage gets bigger from top to bottom, just like this. So we talk about three-dimensional breathing much more than three-part breathing. The interesting thing is that it's all diaphragmatic. If you showed this video to anybody on the planet pretty much and asked them, "What are we seeing here?" And remember it's just bones and cartilage. There's no muscle, there's no lungs, there's no nothing. Nobody in their right mind would look at that and say anything other than, "Oh, that's breathing.” But if you asked a yoga teacher—not all yoga teachers, but most yoga teachers, "Is it diaphragmatic breathing?” That would actually raise a question, wouldn't it? The ribcage is in motion. You can't see the belly bulging, right? So whether that's diaphragmatic breathing or not would be an open question if you think that all that the diaphragm does is move the belly, and other muscles have to kick in to move your ribcage.

I'm gonna demonstrate here in as simple a way as I can how this single structure of the diaphragm creates all of that three dimensional shape change. So the best way I found to visualize that is to look at a jellyfish. Notice the movement of the jellyfish, which has this dome like structure. Notice how, as the center of the dome moves downward, what do the edges do? They fly upward, don't they? It's all part of the same movement of the same one structure. The center dome moves down and the edges fly up, right? So all you have to do to imagine how the diaphragm gets all of that to happen is to picture a jellyfish swimming around inside of that. Here it comes. Watch carefully. Notice, just like the jellyfish, the center of the dome moves down, and at the same time the edges fly upward. That's how the diaphragm creates three dimensional shape change. It's not just the domes pulling downward, moving your viscera forward. It's also the edges, the lower attachments of the diaphragm, pulling the base of the ribcage upward and open, which increases its dimension side to side and front to back.

So diaphragmatic breathing is three dimensional breathing. Three dimensional breathing means that all three spatial dimensions are being increased in the space inside the ribcage through the action of this single muscle, the diaphragm. So it gives us a little bit to think about when we use the term diaphragmatic breathing. It doesn't just mean your belly is moving. All of this gets put in motion as well by the diaphragm.


Unit 2: The Breath

So we've spoken about how the cavities change shape. The abdominal cavity changes shape like the water balloon, the thoracic cavity changes shape like the accordion. You can't really see the mechanisms so much here when I use the accordion. So I built a model that lets us see inside this mechanism in a way that's similar to how the thoracic cavity and the lungs are operating. It's not too hard to build. You just need a bottle and some tubing and some balloons and some latex and a rubber band, and a little thumb tack to seal it all up so there are no leaks. That's the thumb tack. Okay. So you can see that the balloons there hanging inside clearly represent the lungs, and this clearly represents the diaphragm. The space above this diaphragm where the lungs are hanging represents the space in the thoracic cavity.


Now, again, like the accordion, this is only gonna be changing shape in one dimension. It's only going to be getting bigger from top to bottom, cause this is a rigid structure. So that aside, the actual mechanism is the same. Watch the balloons. Look at that. See? This is a demonstration of the fact that volume and pressure are inversely related. When I pull this down I'm making more room, more space inside the bottle, which means the air molecules are packed in less tightly. Okay? It's making room. That's what causes the balloons to expand. So this brings up a very interesting question. Even though you see me exerting energy here to operate this diaphragm, which represents the muscular energy of your body operating your diaphragm, the real question is, what is the location of the energy that actually fills the balloons? Is it inside the body? Is it what your muscles are doing, your diaphragm or your other breathing muscles, to make this space bigger? Or is it outside your body?

We identify so much with what we're doing on a muscular level to get our breath to happen that it's easy to remember—it’s easy to forget. I'm gonna want you to remember. It's easy to forget that the actual answer to that question is outside. The energy that gets the air into your lungs is the same energy that got the air into these balloons, and it's outside. It's here. It's the atmospheric pressure. We are sitting inside an ocean of air molecules. They have weight to them. We express this weight as a number, pounds per square inch. PSI. You have probably heard it. At sea level that represents 14.7 pounds of pressure per square inch of surface area. That's how much the air weighs that's sitting on the planet, that's sitting on your body, that's sitting right here outside your nostrils.

When you make some space inside of you, when you lower the pressure inside your ribcage, that air literally forces its way into your body. It's the weight of the air that pushes its way into your lungs. Even though it feels like we are pulling it with our muscular effort, the actual energy that gets the air in is outside of you. It always has been. It always will be. Not so easy for somebody with a breathing disorder to recognize if they are identifying with the struggle they have to go through with every breath to fight for their breath. This idea of trusting that you live in a universe that simply wants to fill your lungs with breath every time you make the space is a novel concept for somebody that has to fight for their breath. It also illuminates a certain element of counter-intuitiveness that surrounds breathing practices in general. That is that, the harder you work to improve your breathing, generally speaking, the less improvement you get and the more you get in your own way. The more we identify with the struggle and the less we are able to surrender to the part that's not in our control, the more we tend to get in our way. You see, because everything we have accomplished in our lives has to do with pretty much the same causal chain of events. We see something that wants to happen. For example, I want this to move from here to here. What do I do? Well, I move it. Case closed. Mission accomplished, right? You act on it with your muscles and your senses and whatever else it takes to reach out, grab it, lift it and move it. That's how you get things done. But, actually, if you think about how this mechanism works, that's not how breathing works.

If I wanted to use the same mechanism that operates our breathing to make this bottle move from here to here, I don't go there. I have to go here. I have to go to the space where I want the thing to happen and


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make the space. I would have to somehow push enough air molecules out of this space so that a region of lower pressure develops that's sufficient to suck it in. That's counter-intuitive, the idea that we should tend to the space and let the universe take care of the rest. But that's how breathing works. That's how you can try to stay out of your own way sometimes, just by trusting that you live in a universe that is constantly trying to fill your lungs with breath if you just make the space and surrender the part that's not under your control.

Module 2.6 Looking at Language: Breath vs. Air


Amy: So we have heard from Leslie about the mechanics of breathing and a definition of breathing that's very adaptable and flexible. Let's take a moment and talk about what happens when we talk to other people about breathing and how to breathe.

One of the important distinctions to make, I think, in talking about breathing is whether we are inviting people to experience their breath or to control their breath, and what the purpose is of inviting attention to the breath. Controlling the breath runs the risk of suggesting that there is a right way to breathe. Neither Leslie or I believe that there is a right way to breathe. In fact, if we only have one way to breathe, we are stuck in a pattern that is not adaptable and does not give us the resources for dealing with different situations. Instead, the adaptability of the breath would be a more desirable state to cultivate. In light of that, though, we might play with controlling the breath or inviting the breath to explore different patterns. There is certainly great value in experimenting with different pranayama practices, or ways of engaging with the breath, so that we have more choices about how we respond to any given situation.

One of the important things about teaching language is to also distinguish between breath and air when we're talking about what happens in our body. The air itself goes into and out of the lungs. It does not travel into the belly. The air does not travel to your fingertips. The air does not get to your toes. If it were to do that, it would be a big, big problem and you might be dying. The air only goes into and out of the lungs because it is the lungs that have the tissues that are specialized to be able to get oxygen from lungs into the bloodstream. So that aspect of breathing, where we get the air into our lungs, is called external respiration. It involves the complexity of 3D shape change and what we're yet to learn about the movements of the diaphragm and other muscles. Internal respiration, then, is the movement of the oxygen in the blood to the cells, and then the cellular respiration itself where the cells take in what they need and let go of what they don't need. So internal respiration, including cellular respiration, is a part of our breath. But it is not part of what the air does.

So when we talk to people about their breath, it's important in our own understanding to be clear about, are we talking about the movement of the air into and out of the lungs, or are we talking about something broader, like the movement of oxygen in the blood or the movement of the cells that take in and let go? Our language around that can be really informative and inviting, or it can be limiting. One of the ways that I like to describe it is to say that the movement of the breath can travel through your body as opposed to describing where your air goes. For many people, just beginning that inquiry about where we feel movement and where we feel the movement of the breath, can reveal all kinds of habits and patterns. What we notice, usually, and what we don't notice. It can be a way to invite people into observing or sensing what's happening, particularly if they are not used to paying attention to that. The important thing, though, is to not say that the air is doing that movement, but instead, that the movement of the breath or the movement of the fluids, or the traveling of the oxygen in our bloodstream, are always that internal


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respiration—that the movement of the breath can travel through the body as a complement to the movement of the air into and out of the lungs that is our external respiration.

Module 2.7 Geek Out: SLARA, The Diaphragm Formula


Leslie: We're going to look in great detail now at the most fascinating muscle of the body, in my opinion. The respiratory diaphragm. I have developed a formula for understanding the diaphragm. It is an acronym. SLARA. S-L-A-R-A. So what does SLARA stand for?


It stands for shape, location, attachments, relations and, once we have understood all of that, then the action, or what it does, becomes clearer. When I present this material to audiences of yoga teachers, quite often there is some surprise surrounding some of these attributes. So what I like to do is just have you experience the individual elements of this formula one at a time and see what comes up for you.

First, shape. What does that shape remind you of? Just think of things that pop into your head when you look at that shape. Quite commonly, what I hear are, "Hm, it looks kind of like a tooth. Like the cap of a tooth." Or, "A mushroom." Or, "A parachute." Or, "A helmet." Something that goes over someone's head, right? These are very common images that spring up in people's minds when they see the shape of the diaphragm. This one is a bit of a trick question. That's actually a plastic model of a diaphragm. The parachute. Now, if you think about it, all these shapes have something in common. They are deeply domed. In fact, the diaphragm, as a shape, has a double dome to it. But it's a deep, deep pocket formed by this shape, by this muscle. So that's the shape of the diaphragm.

You're seeing it here just hanging out in space. There's nothing that it's attached to, right? But before we even explore the attachments, you have to see the location of the shape in the body. Cause that will actually tell us where the attachments are. So here's another image for you. Now you can see that shape located in the body. Does this surprise you at all? Is it somewhere different than you thought it might be? A very common reaction among yoga audiences is that, "Wow, I didn't realize it was so high up there.” It's also inside the ribcage. Because so much of the focus of diaphragmatic breathing that gets taught in yoga circles has to do with what's going on in your belly, in your abdomen. In fact, belly breathing, abdominal breathing, is often taught as being synonymous with diaphragmatic breathing. So people's sense of where the diaphragm is tends to be a lot lower than where it actually is, because they are used to thinking of the belly as part of what the diaphragm does. And it is part, but only part. So that's the location of the diaphragm. Notice how most of its structure, except for these little legs that come down here onto the front of the lumbar spine, most of its structure is up inside the base of the ribcage. If I were to put my hands in this model and have the shape and location of the diaphragm be reflected by my hand placement, that's where it is. Everything above the diaphragm is going to be the heart and the lungs and all the vessels in there, and everything else, all your other organs are below, which means that the upper abdominal organs are actually inside the base of your ribcage. We'll talk about that a little bit more when we get to relations.

So, attachments. What does that mean? Well, what is this shape anchored to up there inside the ribcage? We'll have a separate visual for you in our glossary section that outlines this specifically, but what I like to talk about in general terms are the lower and upper attachments to the diaphragm. Now, you will hear


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these referred to as origin and insertion in anatomy books. I don't use those terms because in general the terms origin and insertion can be confusing. In particular. I think that the origin and insertion labels have been reversed from what they should be in most anatomy books. Another discussion further along the road. But the lower attachments of the diaphragm start at the xiphoid process and they come along the back of this costal cartilage. This is not bone. This is cartilage. When it runs out of cartilage, it jumps from a ligament to the tip of the 11th rib, to the tip of the 12th rib, to the transverse process of the first lumbar vertebra, and from there onto the body of that vertebra, forming a series of arcs as it does that. That ligament, therefore, is called the arcuate ligament, or arcuate ligaments. Then it arches up over the aorta and the front of the spine, and of course that happens in a similar fashion on both sides. So the lower attachments of the diaphragm are basically the back of the costal margin, what we call, which is all cartilage, and the ligaments that bridge the gap from the costal cartilage towards the spine, and then down onto the front of the lumbar spine. The parts of the diaphragm that attach to the front of the spine are called the legs of the diaphragm, or in Latin, the crura of the diaphragm.

The upper attachments, what does that mean? Well, these are muscle fibers. Like any other muscle fiber in the body, they attach from one end to somewhere else. Where are the upper attachments of the diaphragm? What are they anchored to? Well, the upper attachments of the diaphragm are anchored to what's called the central tendon. In essence, the diaphragm is anchored to itself. The top horizontal part of the diaphragm, the top of the domes, are not muscular in structure. They are tendinous. So the muscle fibers simply run out and blend with the central tendon. So the upper attachments of the diaphragm fibers, the muscle fibers, would be the central tendon. This will be important to remember when we look at the action of the diaphragm.

But first, relations. So if attachments are what the diaphragm attaches to, relations are what attaches to the diaphragm. Basically, we could say pretty much all your internal organs attach to the diaphragm. There’s places of connection between the base of your lungs and the top of the diaphragm, the heart, which is encased in a fibrous sheath called the pericardium. This is a photograph of a dissected diaphragm from above. It's anchored to the top of the diaphragm, okay. Below, the peritoneum, which surrounds your viscera, your abdominal organs, has a relationship with the bottom of the diaphragm. So, basically, as your diaphragm moves, so do your organs. As your diaphragm does not move, so too do your organs not move. So healthy diaphragmatic movement is healthy visceral organic movement.

So the action of the diaphragm. From a certain perspective, it's very simple. The action of the diaphragm is to increase the volume of the space above it in the thoracic cavity, where the lungs live. It does that three dimensionally. We will keep coming back to this idea of the three dimensional breath, which is how I like to talk about diaphragmatic breathing, as opposed to the three part breath. So this action of the diaphragm to increase the volume of the thoracic cavity occurs in three dimensions. Front to back, side to side and also top to bottom. It's the top to bottom part that's most famous, because that's what makes the belly bulge. But the diaphragm also lifts and opens the ribcage side to side and makes it deeper from front to back. It can do that because of its shape, location, attachments, and relations. We will be going into that in more detail as we move forward.


Module 2.8 Accessory Muscles & the See-Saw Breath



Unit 2: The Breath

Leslie: So we've defined breathing as the shape change in the abdominal and thoracic cavities. We have seen how that shape change is three dimensional, and that the primary muscle that is responsible for all of that three dimensional shape change is the diaphragm.

Now, the diaphragm is not the only muscle that can effect a shape change in the cavities. So any muscle in the body other than the diaphragm, and that potentially could be just about any muscle of the body that can effect or participate in the shape change of the cavities, is what I would call an accessory breathing muscle. So basically, every muscle in the body except the diaphragm is potentially an accessory muscle. We're not just talking about the muscles that directly attach to the ribcage or surround the abdominal cavity. We're talking about other muscles that could potentially be in a position to stabilize or mobilize some of that other musculature. The body works in kinetic chains, not in parts and pieces. So how we exist and move in gravity, in a breathing body, requires the participation of just about every part and system of the body. However, we can pull out certain particular muscles, accessory muscles, that have a much more direct effect on the movements of the cavities and look at them.

Now, here's an illustration from Yoga Anatomy, which is based on a fairly traditional depiction of the accessory muscles of breathing. In blue are ones that are generally labeled as muscles of exhalation, and in red are labeled muscles that generally refer to as muscles of inspiration. I don't go with that nomenclature, with that labeling, for the reason that I just stated. It's not like, let's say, all the blue muscles fire up and become active when you're exhaling and all the red muscles relax and stop doing what they're doing. Then, when you inhale, the red muscles fire up and the blue muscles relax, okay. If that were the case, you could label muscles very clearly. “Oh, these muscle make an inhale happen. These muscles make an exhale happen.” But at all times and in all positions, there are muscles from both groups that are active in various ways during in inhaling and exhaling. So what we can say, though, is based on the attachments of these muscles and the orientation of their fibers, we can say whether their action would likely create an increase or a decrease of thoracic volume. When I say action, I'm referring specifically to concentric action, which we will get to. In other words, the action that happens when a muscle gets shorter from end to end. Okay? You see how it's more complex than just, oh, these muscles inhale, these muscles exhale.

So what are some of the muscles of—let’s start with the decrease in thoracic volume. Well, clearly the muscles that surround your water balloon could have a lot to do with that. If I put my hand in various orientations around the water balloon, for example, straight up and down or to the side this way, or obliquely this way, or even horizontally this way, my fingers would be representing the orientation of both the abdominal wall layers and the intercostal layers. So, clearly, when those muscles squeeze here, okay, in the abdominal region, you're gonna create this movement of the diaphragm upward towards an exhale. It gets a little more complicated when those fibers extend themselves into the ribcage, because then some layers of them actually produce that decrease in thoracic volume. But some of them actually increase. In fact, the simple way to remember that as far as the intercostals are concerned is the in is ex and the ex is in. In other words, the internal intercostals tend to produce the exhale through their concentric action, and the external intercostals tend to produce the movement of an inhale through their concentric action.

So we have the intercostals. We have the abdominals, the rectus abdominis, the internal oblique, the external oblique, the transverses abdominis. These are all muscles that, basically, can steer the direction of shape change. This is the main idea I want to get across. Rather than memorizing a whole list of muscles and whether they are blue or red muscles, or whatever, I'm gonna give you an experience of what it's like to engage various portions of your accessory mechanism in order to steer shape change. The important image to remember is an automotive one. Okay. The diaphragm is the engine. The diaphragm is the engine. Just like in a car, the engine is responsible for all of the power, all of the motion, all of the energy that all the other systems of the car are running off of, including the electrical system and all of that. But you don't steer your car with your engine, you know?. It's not like you put your foot on the right side of


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the gas pedal and somehow the engine makes the car go right, or you put your foot on the others and then it goes left. So you're steering with the steering and you're controlling the motion with the transmission and the brakes. So think of the accessory muscles as the suspension, steering and brakes of your body's breathing mechanism. The fundamental three dimensional movement that's constantly being generated is being generated by the diaphragm. But whether that movement is exhibited more as chest motion or belly motion or side motion, or front or back motion, has to do with what all of these other muscles are doing. Some muscles can release while others tense, which will steer the direction in the shape of the release, in the direction of the release, right?

That's what we're gonna do now. So let's have you go back to your mats and just lie on your back comfortably. You can have something under your knees or your knees bent, or in savasana, whatever is comfortable for you. We'll just explore what I like to call seesaw breathing. Okay. So just to reiterate what I said, when I ask you to take, let's say, a belly breath or a chest breath, you are not changing in any fundamental way the signal that's being sent to your diaphragm. Your diaphragm is not doing it. It's the accessory muscles.

So I'd like you to place one hand on your belly and one hand on your chest. The hand that's on the chest, make sure that the elbow of that hand is at rest on the floor, not suspended weirdly in any way, so it's relaxed. Okay. So this is just a very simple exploration of moving the shape change around and how you're doing it. So what I'd like you to do is notice the connection between your lower hand and the abdomen, and notice if there's any movement there that's associated with your breathing. Bring your attention to your upper hand, the one that's resting on your chest in your thoracic cavity. Are you noticing any movement there associated with your breathing? Any shape change happening?

Now, what would you do if you wanted to direct that shape change more towards your lower hand? Can you feel where you have to engage and where you also have to release in order to get that particular flavor, if you will, of shape change happening. What about the opposite? What if you wanted the focus of the movement to be where your upper hand is in the chest?

Okay. So when you shift your attention to moving the breath to the thoracic region, what do you have to engage? What do you have to release in order for that to occur? Now, what would it be like to seesaw the two breaths? To alternate? First a belly breath and then a chest breath, and then a belly breath again. Please make sure you take a little pause at the end of each exhale to relax and release and make sure you don't carry any muscular tension, or unnecessary muscular tension, from one breath to the next.

Now, as you do the seesaw breath, are you trying to sort of contain the movement in just the belly or just the chest?


In other words, when you take a belly breath, are you intentionally making your chest not move? When you take a chest breath, are you intentionally limiting the movement in your belly? What if we changed the language a little bit and said, "How about just initiating the breath, first in the belly and then in the chest?” So that, for example, a breath that starts in the belly could spread anywhere else, and a breath that starts in the chest could spread wherever it wants to go. So it's not being contained, so much as just initiated. First in one place and then in the other.

The point I would make in this exercise is that the fundamental thing that goes on with each breath is that the diaphragm fires, and it, if left to its own resources, would create three dimensional shape change everywhere in your torso, both the belly and the chest. But when we start manipulating the pattern of shape change, we do it with the accessory muscles. We do it with the muscles in the abdominal wall, sometimes even in the pelvic diaphragm, muscles that surround the ribcage, sometimes muscles in the neck and shoulders and chest. Muscles that kick in to stabilize the muscles that we are trying to use.


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So now let your arms drop to your side. You can stop seesawing for now. I'm gonna let you finish with a more unifying kind of an idea. Just imagine a sphere. Just a three-dimensional bubble of light or color in your mind's eye. Imagine that it's in motion across its entire surface all at once, as if it were inflating and deflating. Notice that it's doing that motion in rhythm with your breath. Expanding and condensing. Just hold that image of that spherical motion and see how that might be affecting the shape change in your body.

As a teaching point, I will bring your attention to the fact that I said expanding and condensing, not expanding and contracting. Contracting is a somewhat loaded word in these discussions, particularly around the diaphragm. It's the contraction of the diaphragm that creates an expansion of your thoracic capacity. And that sometimes brings the mental gears to a grinding halt trying to wrap our head around that. So I avoid the word contraction in certain instances to stay away from that particular bit of confusion. Nice. So, when you're ready, you can come on up and just in place, seated where you are, feel your breath for a moment or two. That concludes the accessory muscle see-saw breathing exercise.

Module 2.9 “Diaphragmatic Breathing”: Discussion & Exploration


Amy: So we have heard lots of things about ways to breathe, about shape change, three dimensional movement of the breath. I'm gonna take a few minutes now and talk about the assumptions that we make about breathing, and mainly the assumption that there is a right way to breathe. There is no right way to breathe. We could just stop right there, except for that needs to be unpacked, right? There is no right way to breathe. One of the things that gets said in that there is a right way to breathe is that belly breathing is better or chest breathing is better, or, not that it's better, but that chest breathing will stimulate you and belly breathing will calm you, or belly breathing will be relaxing and chest breathing will be energizing. And, then also in that, the assumption that one of those is diaphragmatic breath and the other one is not. None of those are necessarily true. Belly breathing may be calming for some people some of the time. And chest breathing may be stimulating for some people some of the time. But those descriptions of calming and stimulating, those psycho-physical aspects of the breath, are not tied only to what part of our body is moving when we breathe. We can't leave out of that experience or conversation or question the understanding that all of our previous experiences have an effect on how we respond to a breathing pattern.

So it is never just what part of my body is moving that creates a psychological or an emotional state. Never, only. Certainly what part of my body is moving will have an effect on my psyche and my emotions. I definitely think what part of our body moves has an effect on our experience. But to say what that experience will be without knowing a person's circumstances, history, context, we can't say. We can't say what someone's experience will be only based on their physical movement. Previous experience has such a huge effect on what we consider comfortable or familiar. Comfort and familiarity have a lot to do with what we consider relaxing or soothing, or anxiety provoking. Things may be very familiar and automatically anxiety provoking in that familiarity. Yeah? Things may also be unfamiliar and anxiety provoking just because they are not familiar. Not because of what the movement is. Then someone else might do something unfamiliar and love the experience of doing something different. So familiar might be comforting. Familiar might be uncomfortable, disconcerting. Unfamiliar might be comforting. Unfamiliar might be disconcerting.

When we ask someone to do a movement and we assume that they will have a response to it, we run the risk of taking out of that conversation their own previous experience and their own understanding of


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themselves. So when we tell someone what experience they will have, we run the risk of taking their own experience out of the valued parts of the conversation. It's possible. It's challenging, I know, because we want to be able—I do, and I think lots of teachers do, we want to be able to help people. We want to be able to tell them what will make them feel better. But I think in the big picture what's going to eventually help the world get better, is empowering people to have their own experience and giving people more ways to feel successful at what they do.

In my own experience around chest breathing and belly breathing was one of—my first teacher that I really got involved in the breath in—other people talked to me about breathing, but the first teacher I really got it and went there with him was Mark Whitwell. The kind of breathing that he taught was to inhale and feel the expansion of the chest cavity, and to do this kind of inhale top to bottom, and to exhale bottom to top. I so enjoyed being in his classes. I so had always before,[someone sneezes], bless you. I had always before been so bored by breathing, which is funny now. But, that the experience of being in his class and exploring my breath in that way, it became deeply relaxing and sedating, almost, to free up my ribcage enough to move that way.


So I cultivated and ended up with a sensory pattern, a sensory experiential pattern, of feeling like letting my ribcage really move with my breath was deeply soothing. It was great. It was because I loved and respected him. It was because of the time in my life when I was taking his classes. It was because of whatever he said that opened me up to my own experience. It was a whole set of things that made that. It was the studios we were in, and they were quiet. Incense, or whatever it was.

Then I went to a class, and every so often I do this, and I go around, and luckily, being in New York, it's easy to do this. I go around and I try different styles of yoga because I want to know what people are doing. So I go on these yoga tours. I went to some class and I don't remember what style it was, but we lay on the floor and they said, "Breathe and move your belly as you breathe. This will be relaxing.” I couldn't, and it was really stressful. It was really stressful for me to try to belly breathe because I didn't have the coordination in my muscles to do that easily or automatically, and being told that it would be relaxing then made me, who wanted to be the perfect student, totally stress out about being a bad yoga person because I couldn't belly breathe. So this experience that was intended to be really freeing and relaxing, I’m sure the teacher meant well. I'm absolutely sure. But it was a very stressful experience for me to be told to do something and that it should be relaxing, and it wasn't. All I wanted to do was what was familiar to me. But I was trying to do what the teacher said and added to that the challenge of it being unfamiliar, and not actually easy to do. I was contracting all these muscles and trying really hard. I think that experience, well—so, belly breathing was not relaxing for me in that moment. It wasn’t. Being told that it should be added a layer of stress.

Now, I think exploring different kinds of breath is of incredible value. I think that trying to things that are uncomfortable and difficult are really fascinating and really interesting, and then the success is that I even engaged with the unfamiliar thing. Whether or not I did it well, or got the physical experience of it, that's not the point, I think. I think the point and the point of exploring breath, and the point of exploring different exercises in pranayama or different breathing techniques is not to find one that we can master. But to see how many different ones we can do. How adaptable can we be. Because I was, in my own way, totally stuck in a breathing pattern and totally attached to being able to do one. And I found myself in a situation where I couldn't do the one I imposed on my self. I couldn't do the one I had been told to do, and I felt unsuccessful. I didn't have any choice about what I was doing. That was the problem. That I didn't have any choice, and then was unsuccessful.


Unit 2: The Breath

There's also this little or big thing that gets said about belly breathing. Or, two big things. One is that it is diaphragmatic, as if the movement of the ribcage is not diaphragmatic when we breathe. I think that, from what Leslie has said about the diaphragm, its attachments, all of the shape change and the thoracic and abdominal cavity, it's clear now that lots of things move in response to the diaphragm. We can inhibit movement or facilitate movement, but if we are breathing our diaphragm is moving. It is all diaphragmatic breath.

The other thing that gets said is that belly breathing is better because babies do it. I would like to say that that is not true, that it's better because babies do it. Because the implication in that is that babies are relaxed and happy and manifesting that in their belly breathing. Babies do breathe. Their bellies move when they breathe. I don't meant to say that babies' bellies don't move when they breathe. They totally do. But they are not doing that because they are relaxed and happy. Their bellies move when they breathe for a couple of physiological and anatomical reasons that have nothing to do with them choosing it. When a baby is born, their ribcage is very small and very flexible, and relatively high up, kind of lifted up, compared to their abdomen. Their liver is huge and the abdominal organs are really big. Because up until the moment of birth, the liver is the organ that's facilitating their breath via the blood. So when they’re born their ribs are small and they are so flexible that they don't actually have the rebound that makes breathing have a kind of automatic or easily shape changing quality to it. So it is not easy for a newborn to breathe. They are actually exerting an enormous amount of energy to breathe. Because of the height of the bottom ribs and the size of the liver, the diaphragm is also relatively flat. As we grow, the diaphragm develops its dome shape. So that flattened out diaphragm, it doesn't generate very much shape change yet. So the diaphragm is not the easiest way in a newborn, it’s not facilitating. It's not that it's not the easiest way. The diaphragm is not doing this huge percentage of the action of creating the shape change in a newborn. So they have to use all of these other movements. So there's no automatic correlation between belly breath and ease and chest breath and anxiety, and we cannot use babies as a model of what works for us as adults.

Go back to your mats. Once you settle—any support you like—and knowing that it is all diaphragmatic breath, where do you feel the movement of your breath? What is familiar? Is there an unfamiliar place in your body that you could invite the movement of your breath? Then invite the movement of your breath back into that familiar place. Then pause the tape and take a few moments to compare and write down some notes about those experiences of breathing in a familiar place and breathing in an unfamiliar place. If you are in the room, find your way back out.

Module 2.10 How Do You Use Your Ujjayi?


Amy: So we've heard all about all kinds of what goes into breathing and the diaphragm and the belly and the chest and accessory muscles. We're going to move into talking about specific ways of breathing. One of the ways of breathing that is so commonly taught in asana classes is ujjayi, which is defined in a variety of ways. There are a lot of different things written about it. One of the things I would like to point out is that there are many different ideas about what ujjayi is, about where it's supposed to happen and about what effect it has.


If you take just a moment and write down where you think ujjayi happens or where you have heard that it happens, and what purpose you think it serves. Then, after you write that down, check with other people and see how many different ideas there are about ujjayi. It's not a problem that there are different ideas


Unit 2: The Breath

about ujjayi. I don't think the point is for us to all get to the same idea, but to see what each idea might serve, what each exploration might do for you.

Some people do ujjayi very loudly. The idea is to do it so that someone else can hear you, so that maybe the whole room was breathing the same. There's something that happens when it's that loud. I have had the experience in a class of the whole room getting their breath together, and there is something about a group of people synching up like that. I have also learned, and this is what I do myself more often, is using ujjayi as a kind of way of attending to myself, of keeping my attention oriented on what I am doing, and as a monitor of the steadiness of my movement and my awareness. In that case, ujjayi is not about matching up with someone else, but should only be “should” be as loud as I can hear it. Then each person can have their own personal practice. Ujjayi might be in the nose. Ujjayi might be created in the throat. It might be in the vocal folds themselves. I have heard the idea of creating an ujjayi sound all the way down where the branches of the trachea turn into the bronchial tubes. All of those are ideas that can be really interesting to explore. I think that ujjayi, like other things we will talk about later, like bandhas or the other stories that Leslie mentioned, like nadis and chakras, it’s an experience that we can frame and create through different body parts, through different tissues, through different actions. The idea that our anatomy needs to match exactly up to a way of doing ujjayi or a way of creating a bandha, or a way to feeling a chakra, limits our experience too much. So as you are exploring ujjayi and as you listen to Leslie talk about how he thinks it's useful, I invite you to keep thinking about all of the different ways you have heard about ujjayi and see what each might do for a person that you might meet as a student or that you might explore yourself.

Module 2.11 Ujjayi for Stability


Leslie: All right. Continue our discussion about breathing. Amy started off with some information about ujjayi, and pointed out that it can be used in a variety of ways at a lot of different volume levels, and it can come from a lot of different places in the body. There are as many opinions about ujjayi as there are people doing it, probably.

Amy also mentioned some flawed role models that we have for breathing. One of them being the baby. Oh, they are so relaxed and happy and their belly is moving, and therefore we should breathe like babies. That really comes from the misconception that belly movement is diaphragmatic movement. So the physiological fact that a baby's immature breathing mechanism as all the forces of sthira and sukha reversed seems to be lost on people. The lung tissue, which, in an adult, should be sort of loose and mobile, is very stiff in a baby. The ribcage, which should be kind of stiff and springy, is actually very loose and mobile. So, to use yoga terminology, the forces of sthira and sukha are reversed in the baby. They actually have a harder time breathing than they will be having when they mature a bit.

Another flawed role model for breathing centers around this ujjayi conversation. I don't quite know how it started or where it started or who started it. But using an evil, lung damaged Sith Lord who is being kept alive as a respirator for yogic breathing is not, in my mind, a terrifically good strategy. For those of you who didn't get the Star Wars reference, I'm talking about Darth Vader. It's a very loud, harsh, mechanical sound. As Amy pointed out, sometimes you do want to do ujjayi loudly enough so that people can hear you doing it. Most notably, probably the teacher who was teaching it to you, who wanted you to do it loudly enough so they could tell that you were doing it. What we have found through endoscopic—not endoscoptic—the scope that you put down, laryngoscope. Thank you. Laryngoscopy studies. The softer


Unit 2: The Breath

you do ujjayi, the more it's like a whisper. A very soft whispering sound. That can be accomplished through just a manipulation of the vocal cords.

So this is a sort of a classic image. It's in our book. There are muscles that control the position of your vocal cords and create different spacing in the glottis, which is the space between the cords. When those muscles are relaxed they are just kind of hanging there, which is what presumably you are all doing now, if you're not doing anything else. Or if you are sleeping, presumably they are relaxed as well. When you need to get a lot of air in really quickly, the muscles that pull the cords apart activate and you have a nice big wide opening. That's called forced inspiration. In fact, I'm doing it right now because I'm speaking. Most of what I'm doing is exhaling. But watch what happens. I have to get air in really quickly. Do you see me do it, right? It had to move really quickly. So my cords had to go like that for the air to flow in really quickly. That also would be true in yoga exercises where you are moving a lot of air rapidly in and out of the system, like with Bhastrika. [Rapid breathing] Right? Big pipe. Cords wide open. What I'm doing now at this very moment is called phonation, where the cords are being pulled together and the air being forced across them causes them to vibrate. That's my voice.

There's an interesting thing we can do with the cords called whispered speech, where they are pulled together, except at the very bottom, back, actually. The bottom of the drawing is the back of the body. They rotate open to form a little pinhole. That, as well as being whispered speech, is also a quiet ujjayi. When you do a forceful loud ujjayi, or you are using ujjayi to help stabilize big, long, strong movements of the body, more than just the cords can get drawn into it. In fact, the throat muscles above the vocal cords will start to constrict and activate. The stronger the action that is being stabilized with the breath, the more musculature tends to get drawn into this narrowing of the passageways. So essentially what we are seeing is that ujjayi is a valve. It's a valving of the airway. The manner in which the airway is being valved is dependent upon what the valve is being used for.

This, another illustration from the book, gives an example of doing a movement that's supported by the breath. [inhale exhale] And so on. Okay? It's similar to what a weight lifter or any person would do upon lifting a heavy weight, when you instinctively hold your breath. Why do we do that? To stabilize the musculature around our torso to protect the spine from damage. Now, we don't encourage people to hold their breath to protect their spine when they are doing vinyasa. We encourage them to restrain it or to valve it, and thus the ujjayi, the use of ujjayi in stabilizing movement that's coordinated with breath. What happens when you do that is you create, in essence, a pressurized situation in the torso through your two cavities, where the cavities are then really supporting all along the anterior, or front part of the spine.

The alternative to do a movement like that without that kind of breath support is depicted here, where you are actually in a kind of a dangerous, bad leverage situation, where all you've got to stabilize this movement is the posterior musculature, and it's acting on a bad lever across a vulnerable fulcrum, which would be L4, L5 lumbosacral area. So without coordinated, integrated breath support, these movements that we do in yoga, which are repetitive, over and over and over again, have the potential to damage, rather than help, the body. This will come out later one when we talk about the fundamental principles of healthy movement being well-distributed movement. Movement that is distributed across a wide network of joints and musculature and structure, rather than focus on just a few places that are moved over and over and over again.


That's what can damage you. So that's ujjayi as a breath support.

Now, to use yogic language about this effect, what we're saying is that ujjayi creates more sthira in the system. More stability. An example we may all have from our experience is, if you have a garden hose that's hooked up to a valve, okay, and you hook it up to the faucet at one end and on the other end there's


Unit 2: The Breath

just an open hose. The water is just kind of dribbling out. It's not under any kind of pressure. The hose itself is kind of loose and flexible and pliable. Now, that's a perfectly fine situation if you want to water some seeds that you’ve just put into the soil and just gently give them some water, right? But if you want to get the dirt off your car or get the leaves out of the gutters of your house, you need pressure. So you're gonna put a valve at the end of that hose, which is gonna restrict the opening through which the water is coming out. And it's gonna create more pressure, but the hose itself is also going to stiffen. It's not going to be as loose and pliable. It's going to stiffen. A extreme example of this, of course, is at the scene of a fire where the fire truck has that loose hose lying on the ground they hook up to a hydrant. Everyone knows to stay clear of it. As soon as they open that hydrant and that hose gets pressurized, boom! It's a powerful, stiffening movement of that hose because it's got that nozzle at the end of it and all that pressure behind it. So that's another example of it.

By the way, about appropriate breath, if you have that highly pressurized hose with the nozzle and you go to water your seeds with it, that's not appropriate either. It's gonna blast them out of the soil and they are not gonna grow. So the appropriate valve for the appropriate job is what we're looking for.

Module 2.12 Bandhas


Leslie: So we're gonna have a conversation about bandhas. It occurs to me, I have never actually asked you where or when this idea was first introduced to you in your yoga life.

Amy: Mmm. Well, I started my yoga life surfing around a lot of different classes. So I first heard bandhas described as a thing to do, and probably in a vinyasa practice to engage mula bandha, and then whatever assortment of muscles were mula bandha, I was told to contract.

Leslie: Did that include your anal sphincter?

Amy: No.

Leslie: Oh, okay.

Amy: It did not include my anal sphincter.

Leslie: That came later.

Amy: The instruction at that time didn’t. No, but I did also hear that. Use your anal sphincter.

Leslie: Yeah.

Amy: In my anatomy studies. Then I went and I was, like, "Well, what is this? What do they mean? How come one people say this set of muscles, and how come other people say this other set of muscles?” I read some books about it. Yeah. So I did hear it a lot, and it didn’t… There was a whole lot of my beginning yoga stuff that was things to do. Use this muscle, use this muscle, contract this thing, lift here, squeeze here.

Leslie: And you were being a really good student and you would probably actually do all of that.

Amy: Yeah, and I did. I did them all. But the first place I heard it make sense... Yeah. Anyway. The first place that I heard something I really wanted to take on was Mark Whitwell saying, "The bandhas should


Unit 2: The Breath

just arise from doing your breath.” From doing your breath. The bandhas just arise from breathing. From doing this top to bottom, bottom to top breath, the bandhas arise. I loved that idea. It's something that I have carried forward since then, to be, like, "Don't tell me to do it. If it doesn't arise, then I don't need it, or I'm not paying attention enough," or something. Which, I think, matches up with what you say, right?

Leslie: That's the place I have come to as well. I have come to the conclusion that ujjayi, which we have been discussing, and bandhas, are massively over-taught in classes, whether it's to beginning students or advanced students or whatever. The place I have come to is very similar to Mark's perspective, which is that the minute you ask a human being to move their body in a long, slow, steady manner, and to move their breath in an integrated way in a long, slow, steady manner, how do you actually get that accomplished? That's bandhas. The act of integrating breath and movement gives rise to the bandhas. I don't see that there's any way else you can do it. Plus, you also have to learn ujjayi. How else do you make the breath last that long, other than by finding a way to narrow the passage way, which makes the breath take longer to get into and out of the body? So I think just the simple act of coordinating breath with movement gives rise to these practices in a natural way. That, I think, is pretty much what Mark was pointing to. Also, the fact that there is that particular, I would call it vertical axis integration, which is a key component of the teachings of Krishnamacharya. We have to remember that this really comes from Krishnamacharya. I learned abut bandhas originally in the 1970s, when I did my first yoga teacher training with the Sivananda organization.

Amy: Sivananda.

Leslie: But bandhas were something that happened when your body was still, you were seated, and you were retaining your breath, so your breath wasn't moving. So the idea of your breath and your body being in motion was not a part of the bandha conversation. It was a lock you did on retention. The first time I ever heard of the concept of bandha being applied to the body and breath in motion was when I studied some Ashtanga back in the early '80s, when it was first being taught a little bit more widely. That blew my mind. That was a learning curve for me.

Amy: Yeah.

Leslie: That was a real learning curve to get that happening. It seemed like an extra thing I had to keep remembering to do.

Amy: Yeah. Exactly.

Leslie: And it took a long time to stop worrying about it and realize that I'm already kind of doing it.

Amy: I think also then that it's really interesting because they can arise—I feel like when I added into the yoga studying that kind of vertical axis in that particular way, breathing and even doing ujjayi, adding in the explorations that come from Body-Mind Centering, like a fluid moving or paying attention to cellular breath, that there are more ways to slow down the movement of the breath, or to coordinate the movement in the breath, than doing ujjayi. Ujjayi is a great way. There are lots of other ways to coordinate movement and breath, or to even not pay attention to the breath and to coordinate to a fluid rhythm or to sense bones or something else, and that then there are other places where we manage the flow of movement through, and that those could be called, on a body level, diaphragms.

We could look at muscular places where that modulation of the flow through, like through a fire hose, happens. But there are all kinds of places in the body where we are kind of managing flow, releasing, allowing, releasing, allowing, and that all of those—somewhere in that I heard the phrase of seal instead of lock. The translation of bandha is a seal instead of a lock. I liked that idea. I picture the iris of a camera lens, that it can dial open and dial closed. But it's not locked or unlocked, but much more fluid in its possibilities. Which I think is just what happens when we start exploring all the things that could be.


Unit 2: The Breath

Leslie: Absolutely, and with a take on flow. Another way to understand the word lock is the locks in a canal, which are gates that open and close to let the water level rise or lower to seal that part of the canal to regulate the flow of the water. So that's another take on lock, which is kind of cool.

The other thing you mentioned that made me think of this multi-dimensional model of yoga is the idea that we have a physical body and a vital body and a mental body, and so on. The idea, the principle of bandha, we can first discover it most easily on the physical level through the coordination of our diaphragms and our breath and valving and all of that. But the idea of managing flow in more subtle ways, we can take a cue from how we do it physically and mechanically to the more subtle layers of fluid and thought and feeling and emotion, and all of the other multiple dimensions that we exist on simultaneously. So I like the idea of bandhas not just being physical, but we start learning them there.

Amy: And I think we do them a disservice when we make them just a set of muscles. That a bandha is much more than that and that it might incorporate muscles, but that it might not be the same set of muscles for every person. So, to say a bandha is a set of muscles, I think, isn't fair to the muscles and it isn't fair to the bandha. It doesn't serve either paradigm.

Leslie: And it's not fair to my students, most of whom happen to be female, for me with a whole different set of pelvic floor arrangement, to assume that I know what most of the people in my class are gonna be feeling when I say, "Okay, access your pelvic floor." When I do it I feel something, but I've got a different arrangement there than most of the people in my classes.

Amy: Well, and then even to assume that in a group of 15 women, they’re all gonna have the same experience of their pelvis floor too.

Leslie: Yeah. That's not a given by any means.

Amy: That's not a given at all.

Leslie: Yes.

Amy: Yeah.

Leslie: Okay.

Amy: All right.

Leslie: Bandha conversation. I like it. All right.

Amy: Great.

Leslie: Cool.

Module 2.13 Prana-ayama


Leslie: We have shared a lot of information about breathing with you. I think what I'd like to do now is just take a bit of a deeper look at this term we have in yoga for breath practices. Pranayama. As with other Sanskrit terms, they’re understood by breaking them down into their component bits. We have spoken about prana a bit. So that's clear that this term has something to do with life force, breath. The way that it


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usually gets divided is prana yama. Now, yama is a term that's quite familiar to all of us in yoga. In fact, it is, from a certain perspective, the very first step of the first limb of yoga. If we take the classical eight limbed system that is outlined in Patanjali, the first limb is yama. The idea of yama is that you are restraining, or controlling, something or some behavior, or some aspect of your thoughts or actions. When we apply that principle to prana, the translation of pranayama often comes out as breath control.

Now, phonetically, the word pranayama contains a long 'ah' in it. It's actually pranayama. What Krishnamacharya, the master grammarian, would tell us, is that actually the two terms are prana and ayama. Now, ayama means something different than yama. In fact, it's kind of like the opposite. As in English, in Sanskrit, when you put 'ah' in front of a word it reverses or negates its meaning. So if yama means to restrain or control, then ayama must mean something like remove constraints or controls from. It usually translates to lengthen or extend, or to stretch.

So the idea that we are not just learning to control the breath with breathing exercises, but we are learning to release constraints or controls from it, should free us up from this idea that we are always learning how to regulate or control or impose some kind of order on breathing. Sometimes it's about removing all of those controls to allow the natural order that's already there to express itself.

So this is a much freer, broader definition of this term pranayama, and it also relates all the way back to that principle that I mentioned earlier, which is that our breathing is both voluntary and involuntary. Any science that proposed to encompass the reality of our human breathing has to take that into account. So I would say that prana-yama, as breath control, has its place. But prana-a-yama as breath extension or release, or un-obstruction, also needs to be taken into account. Our breathing is only partially under our voluntary control. The rest of it is involuntary. So that's my take on pranayama.

Unit 2 In Review


Amy: We began Unit Two with the two of us discussing what brought us into anatomy and how we use it, and why we studied, and a few of our significant teachers.

Then I talked about how we use breath as a tool in teaching asana, how it's useful and also possibly challenging, and the way that our breath goes from external respiration in the lungs to movement in the blood and the cells, and internal respiration.

Leslie: Then I talked a little bit about this fundamental definition of yoga practice that we get from Patanjali as tapas svadhyaya ishvara pranidhana, and how that relates to both the voluntary and autonomic functions of breath, and how, by placing that principle at the center of our practice, we can let the breath teach us about that which we can change and that which we must surrender to.

Amy: Then we did a somatic exploration of the voyage that oxygen takes to go through the lungs to the blood, to a cell.

Leslie: Next we talked about a fundamental definition of breathing as shape change in the cavities. We talked about how each cavity changes shape in its own unique way. The abdominal cavity changing shape but not volume, like a water balloon, and the thoracic cavity changing shape and volume like an accordion.

Next we talked about how the energy that gets the air into your body is actually not inside your body. All we do with our musculature and the shape changing of the cavities is make space, which then is filled by


Unit 2: The Breath

the universe. So the location of the energy that gets the air into your body is actually outside your body. Another way to say it is that we make the space, the universe fills it.

Amy: We talked for a moment about the language we use as teachers around breathing, and ideas about how the breath moves and where the air actually goes in our bodies.

Leslie: Then I mentioned how a lot of what we are trying to accomplish with the breath is actually a bit counterintuitive, because it runs against the way we are accustomed to doing things, where we exert some action and make it happen. The more you try to do that with your breath the more you get into your own way, and that's because breathing is about making the space for something to happen and letting the universe take care of the rest.

From there, we started to talk about this amazing muscle that creates all of this shape change for us, the diaphragm, in terms of its shape, location, attachments, relations and action. The SLARA formula.

Next we talked about some of the other musculature that can create shape change in the body. Basically, anything other than the diaphragm that participates in the shape change of breathing we categorize as accessory muscles. We explored that a little bit with the exercise I like to call the see-saw breath, where we move the breath from one region to another by manipulating the accessory muscles, which changes the direction of shape change being generated by the diaphragm.

Amy: With all of that information, then we talked about and explored what diaphragmatic breathing is, what people mean by it, how we might experience it, and all of the different things and experiences that could arise from what is diaphragmatic breathing.

From talking about diaphragmatic breathing, we then also moved to talking about ujjayi, which is another thing that has lots of things get said about it. So we unpacked that idea a little bit, and then Leslie...

Leslie: I also talked about ujjayi.

Amy: Yes.

Leslie: And one of the possible advantages we can get from moving with ujjayi and our breath to create more support for the system to help disperse some of the mechanical forces that would otherwise be injurious.

Amy: We then moved into a discussion about bandhas, where we both talked about ideas about bandhas that come up, what it might mean and what maybe it doesn't mean.

Leslie: Then, to wrap things up, I broadened for us a little bit this idea of pranayama as being not just breath control, but the a-yama aspect, which is a lengthening and un-obstructing. Something that takes into account both the voluntary and involuntary aspects of our breathing.


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