Become One Living

Extending your Life Force with Pranayama

• Jody & Dan • Episode 7

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Uncover the transformative secrets behind the breath in our latest episode where continue down the 8 limb path.  Promising to elevate your understanding of yoga's approach to wellness, we reveal how mindful breathing can be the key to managing stress, nourishing the nervous system, and rediscovering your core self amidst the chaos of modern life. Let's break away from the shallow breaths that life's hustle often induces and instead, breathe our way to tranquility.

Embark on a thoughtful exploration of breath's power to harmonize the body and mind, as we navigate through yoga's transformative practices together. We shine a light on the oft-overlooked subtleties of breathwork that can soothe the fight or flight response, bringing a sense of safety and well-being that's essential in today's world. We will dive into the symbolism of breath in yoga, comparing it to a melody that guides us back to our spiritual essence, and we illuminate the vast therapeutic potential of pranayama for alleviating stress, depression, and anxiety.

Concluding this breath-centric symposium, we encourage you to make breathwork a staple in your daily routine to unlock the full spectrum of its benefits. As we discuss the interconnectedness of our breath with our body's systems, we delve into the practice of pranayama as a vital instrument for guiding life force and enhancing stamina. Join us in adopting simple yet powerful deep breathing practices, and feel free to reach out with your experiences or questions. Let's all breathe a little deeper and live a little brighter.

We would love to hear from you! Email us at becomeoneliving@gmail.com or reach out to us on Instagram at BecomeOne Living.

Dan:

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Become One Living. I'm Dan Boycitts, here with my wife, Joe, and today we're talking about pranayama. Let's see, it's one of the limbs of yoga, Pranayama. Joe, if I asked you what's the difference between yoga, asana and other types of exercise, what would that be?

Jody:

Well, my friends, that would be breathing the breath. Yes, the breath. The breath differentiates exercise and other movements from yoga and in the eight limbs of yoga. For our new friends joining us, we have been talking about the eight limbs of yoga and if you go back and listen to our other podcasts, you will be able to listen and learn about all the different limbs.

Dan:

Yama's. The yama's the arrangements that set you up, understanding of yourself and yourself in the world and the world around you, and guidelines on how to be, and we move to asana and now pranayama.

Jody:

So pranayama means life force, prana means life force, yama means to extend your life force.

Dan:

It's a compelling piece of yoga that brings together, it awakens you, it calls for you to be more mindful when you're doing yoga, yoga practice, and it's like, in the grand scheme of things, air or oxygen, you know, to the human, is the water, to the fish. We need that.

Jody:

We need the oxygen, we need the breath Absolutely, and I think about the system of yoga and the eight limbs of yoga. We started at a gross level, an external level. Pranayama is moving us towards a more subtle layer of understanding of self, and we cannot understand our true nature, our nature in a more easeful place or our nature in calmness, because most of us are stressed Now because of this stress. The stress impacts our breathing. If we get on our yoga mat and we breathe like we normally breathe, we're actually inducing a stress response. If the breath isn't used as a focal point, we're not using it to learn more about ourselves, and now we're removing the goal of yoga, which is to know ourselves. So the breath is also so important because we live in stressful times.

Dan:

And knowing yourself would require you to become more how would I say that prefrontal. So to self-realize or be self-aware requires you to get out of the limbic part of the brain.

Jody:

Yes, the limbic brain is the middle of the brain, and in the middle of the brain is we can call it a prehistoric or some call it reptilian brain, where it's wired for safe and unsafe. That's about it. It's wired to keep us alive and with all the technology and all the information and all the hustle and the bustle going on in our world now we're inundated with information we don't realize how much stress we're actually under. That alters our breathing and when the limbic system kicks in, it actually creates a shallow breathing.

Dan:

And shallow breath stresses the nervous system out because you're altering, with shallow breath, the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide running through your bloodstream. If you breathe shallow, there's going to be more carbon dioxide running through your bloodstream, so less oxygen. So just that alone will stress out your system. How you get to shallow breathing is other stressors deadlines, responsibilities, work and it's not all negative things that stress the body out. If you were to hike way up high into the mountains to an elevation, the thin air is going to be stressing your body out. So it's not talking about like yes, there's plenty of things that are stressful in life, but it's not exclusively like. What we're focused on we're really trying to get to the point of pranayama is bringing awareness to your breath within yoga asana. Because the lofty goal of samadhi, or lesser than that, the ability to meditate or lesser than that, the ability to concentrate we need to get these tools in order to start to make our way towards those loftier goals.

Jody:

Absolutely. It starts in the body. We have to know ourselves within our body. But if we're not using the breath and the movement, we lose that potential of going deeper inside. The breath starts and the movement follows. In yoga, You'll see or I have seen over years people moving quickly and the breath is not in sync with the movement. What happens is the body's moving and the breath is following that. Instead, we want the breath to be initiated first. Let the breath start like a flow, and then we step into the current of the breath.

Dan:

Yeah, the last five years or so, we've witnessed Asana be hijacked, to be understood essentially as yoga, as being an exercise. You know, we'd like to Reel it in a little bit and offer, continue to offer in this, this episode, a little deeper understanding of how important the breath is when you're doing Asana and how that will bring you into a more mindful space. And then there's nothing wrong with exercise, right? But when you exercise, you say, alright, I'm gonna run this amount of time or I'm gonna run this amount of mileage in this amount of time. So what you're challenging yourself to do is different than mindfulness. It's trying to challenge your heart or, you know, strengthen your heart or strengthen your muscles, or Go back to the goal.

Jody:

There's a framework of yoga. The eight limbs are a logical, clear framework that bring you more in touch with yourself and the self. Before Stuff happened to you, the stuff before the stress, before the injuries, before the dis ease, before the programming that we've learned.

Dan:

Emotional programming can challenge, stress you out Right from early on. You know programming from from our families and different things were told to do or not to do can stress us out is essentially Guiding you away from your true nature.

Jody:

Yes, With the breath also. We want to use the breath in yoga to calm the nervous system down so we can inhabit our body, but also when stressful things happen. Stressful things happen, we can control our breathing or guide our breathing back to calmness.

Dan:

Sure a simple challenge I've found that was offered to me was just simply making your exhales Just any any bit longer than your inhale will help to begin to bring calm to your nervous system.

Jody:

Yes right. So if you're moving your body and focusing on the breath, you can be moving your body and be calm yes, the other aspect of breathing with Asana is Called a body up experience, and body up means when you're moving your body and breathing, you actually communicate to your brain and tell your brain. Hmm, if Jodi is moving Easefully and her breath is a little longer and slower, she must be safe right now.

Dan:

Your brain is getting that message.

Jody:

Yes, and now I go into a relaxation state, rest and digest, we call it, or down regulation, which means I'm no longer Experiencing the stress response, and the stress response can be dilated pupils, higher heart rate, higher blood pressure, lack of digestion something that is missed in a stress response. Digestion shuts off almost Automatically. When we're in fight or flight, you don't need to be digesting your food. When somebody is coming to Hurt you or when you feel threatened, you wouldn't stand there and say excuse me, I need to digest my food. Just give me 20. The body says what's more important? Let me get Jodi safe.

Jody:

So by yoga with breath, we can tell our bodies that we are safe, just through Longer breath. This is important, my friends. I want to share. I don't want you starting if you breathe three beats, meaning inhale one Mississippi, inhale to Mississippi, inhale three. Or we sometimes go one ohm, two ohm, three ohm. Okay, if you count your breaths and you only breathe three on the in, three on the out, don't go to eight. Eight can Retraumatize or stress out a body. It's too much. All at once go to four, then go to five. The goal is, pranayama is actually a practice. It is something that needs to be done repeatedly to stretch the lungs out, because our lungs actually shrink and Almost the high, they get dehydrated and they lose lubrication from the lack of breathing. So to go from three to eight, which I have tried, I'm one of those, or I was one of those work.

Jody:

Yeah, I was one of those type a yogis, if I'm gonna meditate. I'm gonna breathe. Oh yeah, I was at the ashram. I'm sitting cross-legged. It's poor.

Dan:

Yeah.

Jody:

I fell back and so I hit somebody. Thank god I didn't hit my head and the person was like, oh my god, you're right. And I sat back up and I'm like I'm gonna get this ride and I thought all days.

Jody:

Yes, that was the old days and what I realized in that whole experience. The gift was what was I even trying to do? Here I am trying to get the breath right. The breath is an experience, experience. The breath is the music to your soul when we're in yoga and if you follow your breath in and out, that's the music to follow. That music leads you home to yourself, not out to what the pose looks like or I'm sure all my friends listening have heard this line, the final expression of the pose Nobody cares what your pose looks like.

Dan:

No, this is sweet. You just are introducing the idea of you know Pratyahara or drawing in, rather than being distracted by outward whether it's a smell or other sound even if it's not music, you know it could be the fire truck going by really loud noise. Not allowing or concentrating inward rather than being distracted by those types of things.

Jody:

Before we even get there, we have to use the breath to start to prepare us for when there's nothing there. Let me explain. The body is gross, it's dense, it's thick.

Dan:

Versus our spirit.

Jody:

Versus our breath.

Dan:

Versus our breath.

Jody:

Yeah, definitely our spirit. My husband loves to go right to spirit and soul. He's such a soul man. He's trying to keep him here with us so we can stay on topic. Stay with me, dan. He's in the aether sometimes, but I want to come back to this, that. So you have this body, this big, dense skin suit.

Dan:

Bones.

Jody:

Bones that you live in this whole time here on this planet. The breath initiates the movement. The breath is life. That's prana. When your breath moves, oxygenates your body. Within the oxygen the blood flows better the synovial fluid, the cerebral, spinal fluid. If we can get in touch with our breath, our breath is the most gross, subtle thing. I don't know if that makes sense.

Dan:

That makes perfect sense.

Jody:

Well, maybe to our friends it might seem tricky. What I mean is energy we talk about. You can't see it and you have to get really quiet and sensitive to feel it. But the breath you can feel and it's the last thing that that is that dense to engage and to play with before we go into pratyahara, and the rest of the limbs. You've got to get your breath right.

Dan:

Yeah, that symbolism of Krishna and the flute, you know, allowing the breath to move through you as the instrument, learning how it moves your rib cage and learning how deep you can breathe and how full of lung capacity you can get and achieve, and how nourishing that is.

Jody:

And Dan is a body worker If you're just joining us or new to us. He works on numerous bodies for 25 years or so and he'll tell me I was holding someone for 60 minutes before they even took a breath.

Dan:

That's right. Before their breath deepened.

Jody:

Because they were probably in a stress response. Why or how we don't know, but when we're stressed we don't breathe fully, and the concern or the challenge with that is if you breathe shallow, shallow breathing tells the brain you're not safe.

Jody:

Stresses you out, yes, and some people become very depressed because they don't get enough oxygen and some people actually become very anxious because they can't get enough oxygen in their body. That's why now the new trend is breath work. It's such a trend and it's kind of it could be kind of dangerous to. I know my friends people are not going to like when I shared some of these things.

Dan:

Well, they don't like when you share about Asana either, because it's like you really have to get in the game and do it regularly to start to have enough experience with your own body to deepen that.

Jody:

Yes, that's it. That's all I was going to say is we want a quick fix. People go into something and it feels good, but it's cathartic. But the thing is you have to practice the breathing so it becomes yours, so you own it, you live it.

Dan:

Yeah, you can't think your way into this.

Jody:

Some people reverse breathe and I'll share a little about that for all my friends listening. Take a deep breath in. Take a deep breath in and notice what happened to your body when you inhaled. Did your chest lift, did your belly pull in Notice? So try it again. Just take a nice deep breath in and notice if you pulled up. If you pulled up, that's called reverse breathing. That's when the diaphragm moves up. Or perhaps the diaphragm is stuck due to years of not breathing deeply because it's a muscle and the psoas are hip flexors. These muscles, called the hip flexors, they attach into our inner groin, our inner thigh, and goes all the way up into our spine. Where our diaphragm connects into our spine is where our hip flexors are.

Dan:

Yeah, the hip flexors share fibers with the diaphragm, as do all of the visceral organs share fibers with the diaphragm.

Jody:

Wow.

Dan:

That sounds important.

Jody:

Yes, so breathing then reverse. Breathing or lack of breath impacts communication to your organs and can tighten your hip flexors. Yeah, and that's how you get tight hip flexors from sitting can pull on the diaphragm and decrease your ability to take a full breath in.

Dan:

And if you are being challenged with your breath and finding that you have short breath and what I witness is people say I'm anxious. I feel anxious all the time, but that's not truly who they are and that's not truly their demeanor and it's not truly their personality. If they could get connected with the idea of deepening their breath on a regular basis, they will find that they're not the anxious person that they're witnessing or experiencing or perceiving that they are in a moment of being in high stress. This is yoga and the breath work with asana, this great tool and doorway in to beginning to get to know yourself and bring some balance to a very stressful what could be a stressful life.

Jody:

Pranayama regulates the impulses of the nervous system so that you can build a capacity to stay focused and to return to balance. So Pranayama regulates the nervous system. I think of it as a tonic, and when you are moving and doing asana and the breath is moving with it, it becomes a dance not a dance in a way of moving on your breath, if that- Not what has become to be known as vinyasa.

Jody:

Yes, not inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Not that it could be a choppier transition, but if you're breathing with that transition, you're doing yoga. This concept of flow in yoga or it has to be graceful or smooth. I'm not sure where that came in Be.

Dan:

Yeah, I mean, I love your classes when you teach and it could be like three couplings of poses and with exploration and mindfulness to the breath. You've got a wonderful I mean a class, but you've got a wonderful practice that gets you all you need if you're gonna really be with it. Yes, you don't need to do a lot.

Jody:

No, no, you don't need to do a lot, and that's why your breath is one aspect in yoga that is the most overlooked. There's not that much emphasis Sometimes. There's emphasis on ujjayi, on this type of breath. That's what we'll share about ujjayi at one point. But staying just on breath, in general, the breath is to me more important than the asana, because if I'm only doing asana, I'm in my head and I'm trying to get it right. But once I add the breath in with the focus, I'm feeling my way in. And if we can feel our way into a pose with our breath, we can feel restriction, softness, awareness. We can feel things that we can't think. And if we start to feel something different, dan, then maybe we get insight that our life could be different.

Dan:

Then you're doing yoga. Yes, I mean, you're making me think of people are racing to get to yoga class. If you find that you're squeezing it in, maybe rethink it. If you're on a mission to do more than three classes a week, let's say, but you're rushing there and you've got plans after the class, maybe not do that. Maybe try to find one class that really suits your schedule, that you can show up a little bit early. You can not rush out because it's like not something that is squeezed in If you really want to enjoy or get to appreciate or get to know the depth that this practice can bring to you.

Jody:

Mindfulness. Breathing in yoga creates a pause and in that pause there's a slowing down. That's when the aha moments come in. If you get on your mat and you do your practice like you live your life, you ain't never going to change. You will continually repeat the cycles you're in. I don't want to assume your cycles bad, but I've had bad cycles Habits, addictions, whatever you would like to call them. But when we're in them and momentum or the momentum of life happens, we can't see clearly.

Jody:

The breath is a quick way, a tapas, a fire, a burning. A quick way to clear the mind is to work the breath, deep breath in, deep breath out. Do that just a few times and now you get to see clearly. The goal is to see clearly and we cannot do that if we're rushing and if our breath is secondary and the asana is more important. The breath also helps you to sustain the pose, to build stamina in the uncomfortability. So if you're not breathing or holding some poses and trying to breathe through the pose with the pose, you're not building sustainability, which is not going to add to your capacity to regulate stress. You'll keep living that same loop and that same cycle. So the breath and just a little slowing down, not much, but enough to make the breath more important than the movement, or else you're doing exercise.

Dan:

Don't worry about jumping up and jumping back. Don't worry about perfecting crow.

Jody:

Unless, that's where you are.

Dan:

Unless that's where you are, yeah.

Jody:

Right, with breath, we go past, like Dan just did a little while ago. Right, if you're just listening or joining us, my husband, we're talking about breath and he's already on the soul. But that's what happens in yoga. You take a yoga class and the teacher says, oh, we're doing crow, it's your second class. We bypass the progression.

Jody:

There is a progression in yoga. That's why it's called a practice, and if any of you have ever done something that you wanted to learn, you probably know this already. You cannot skip steps because there'll be holes in what you're learning. You can say I want this, I'm just going to go there and think that you've mastered something you have to do. The progression and the progression is are you even in your body? Okay, no, maybe, yes, all right, now that I'm making friends with my body. Where is your breath? That is your life force. If you learn how to use your breath, you can calm your heart rate, you can lower your blood pressure, you can increase digestion and absorption, you can have better sleep. The benefits are endless because of the oxygen in our body. Our body longs for oxygen and oxygen is life. That's why it's called prana, and if you're not breathing, perhaps, maybe you're afraid to take in life because you feel overwhelmed. It could be that simple.

Dan:

Sure, I mean, it's a perfect moment just to revisit. The breath to a human is the water to the fish. We take it for granted. But when you're little or when you're stressed out, when somebody scares you, the very first thing that you do is you go and you hold your breath. That's the response, and that's the response, in a lesser degree, to stress over time. Less breath, less oxygen in the bloodstream, less oxygen going to the head, the brain, and it feeds the vicious cycle of the human body being stressed out. So it's really, really important to get a handle on the breath and in this framework, in this paradigm, we're talking about getting the breath coordinated with your movement.

Jody:

Yeah, I have experienced complex trauma, which means multiple traumas, and I never felt I could take a deep breath in, and a part of me was always afraid to take a deep breath in which I never knew until I knew I wasn't breathing. I don't know if that makes sense, my friends.

Dan:

I didn't know, I didn't tell you?

Jody:

no, yeah, I didn't know. I wasn't breathing until I knew and I was away for a month training Think it was Yin with Sarah Powers years ago, and this young girl said you're not breathing, I wanna work on your diaphragm. And I looked at her and I said work on my diaphragm, how are you gonna do that? Well, she showed me and she was working under my ribs, but up under my ribs and pulling it down and like dough, kneading it and kneading it, and it was excruciating. And after I could breathe and it was in that moment I realized I was stuck in a startled response.

Dan:

For who knows how long.

Jody:

That's the response Dan was saying when you get shocked, now think about this If you live in New Jersey, where we do, it's very stressful. We live right outside New York and traffic and driving in New Jersey is insane. I don't know how many times I go. Oh my God, they almost hit me. Oh my God. Now that might not seem like a lot, but that over time can be considered trauma. The buildup of it can impact not breathing because you're in shock. Please take time to honor and nourish yourself daily, because there's little stressors around us that we don't know that cause us to hold our breath because we're afraid or we don't want to say something or we're surprised at something. It alters our breath and over time, if we don't start breathing fully, it gets stuck that way and then we wake up with numerous dis-eases because the body becomes acidic. Breathing, oxygenating the body, adds alkalinity. When the body doesn't get breath or doesn't push out the CO2, acidity can occur and disease can happen.

Dan:

So, gosh, did we scratch the surface? We didn't even scratch the surface, so Well, we do want to get through a couple more of the limbs, right? So stay tuned. We're gonna try to at least give an introduction.

Jody:

To all of the limbs. And before we end, my friends, I encourage you take a deep breath. Take a deep breath in, take in life, let it feed you, let it nourish you, imagine it being warm and toasty, smelling sweet, and then exhale it all out as long and as deep as you can. Keep letting the exhale go and trust that the inhale will return. And do that even once a day, once at night or once in the morning, and just start to practice now. Don't wait just one breath, no techniques, just a deep breath in and a deep breath out, to start to guide your life force and build your stamina. Pranayama is your breath and it's the music in your heart. May you sing it and breathe it. Thank you so much for joining us today. You can find us at Become One Living on Instagram and please email us any questions or topics that you would like us to share on, if we can, at BecomeOneLiving at gmailcom. Thank you again.

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Dan Boisits

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Jody Domerstad-Boisits

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