Yoga Breathing Techniques in the time of Covid-19 | Mark Whitwell

One of the silver linings of the corona virus pandemic is that the world has become more attuned to how we breathe. And as Covid continues to spread, affecting the respiratory systems of millions of people around the world, research is growing into how breathing-techniques can help support our health before, during and after an infection.

Early studies in the U.S. and India have shown that the quality of a person’s breath plays a significant role in their response to the virus, alongside existing healthcare.¹

“One of the first things that happens with Covid is that you get short of breath and your oxygen saturation begins to fall,” Californian pulmonologist Raymond Casciari observes. “The better condition your lungs are in, the better off you will be.”

Indeed, the lungs have been described as the “battleground” of Covid. Now more than ever before, it is a good time now to discover the power of whole-body breathing for yourself.

To those of us who are familiar with the spiritual and medical traditions of India, China and Tibet, the link between a person’s health and their breath is nothing new. The thousands-year-old cultures of Hinduism, Taoism, Tantra, and Buddhism, all placed utmost importance on right breathing. As James Nestor, author of the best-selling book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, writes:

“The nose is the silent warrior: the gatekeeper of our bodies, pharmacist to our minds, and weather vane to our emotions…The missing pillar in [western] health is breath. It all starts there.”

Over millennia, our ancestors developed simple breathing techniques that any person can do. In the Ayurvedic tradition, breath-centred Yoga was given as the very means by which any person who engage the nurturing flow of life — the prana (life-force) that spirals from the hrid (heart).

These practices help us to breathe primarily through our noses rather than our mouths (nose-breathing releases nitric-oxide which plays a key role in immune function); daily asana and pranayama exercises the lungs, keeping them flexible and expanding our lung capacity; and deep, rhythmic breathing coordinated with precise movement powerfully clarifies the mind and stabilises our emotions — which we can all benefit from as social conditions continue to change.

In the early 1970s, I travelled to India from New Zealand in search of Yoga. After a few years of exploration, I was told by a friend during a visit to Tirumalavai to go to Chennai and seek out Professor T. Krishnamacharya; a man who was famous in India for his knowledge of Yoga; and most of all, for his incredible aptitude in matters of the breath.

Krishnamacharya was an inheritor of the great tantric tradition of whole-body devotional breathing. In the 1920s, after studying with his teacher Ramamohan Brahmachari in the Himalayas for seven and a half years, he began his life’s mission of communicating these powerful practices to the world. At the time, actual Yoga had fallen out of popular consciousness in India. Aware of the treasure that he held, Krishnamacharya travelled all over India drawing attention to Yoga by performing miraculous feats of breath-control. Most incredibly, he was able to stop his heartbeat at will — an event documented by American and French scientists in the mid-1930s and previously thought to be impossible by western science.

The point of this exhibition was to show the world the degree of influence that the breath has on person’s physiology. But far from encouraging people to replicate such an event, Krishnamacharya used the publicity to spread a set of simple, accessible breath-practices. He made available to every kind of person their own daily vinyasa. A perfectly tailored sequence of breathing and moving that was to be done in the ordinary life at home in a non-dramatic, non-obsessive way.

“My father taught us more ways to approach a person in yoga than I have found anywhere else,” Krishnamacharya’s son TKV Desikachar writes in The Heart of Yoga. “Who should teach whom? When? And what? These are the important questions to be asked in beginning a practice. But underlying all these is the most important question of all: How can the power of the breath be utilized? That is something quite exceptional; nowhere else is the breath given so much importance, and our work has proven that the breath is a wonder drug, if I may use this term.”

For those of you at home who want to test out what Krishnamacharya brought forth, I invite you to try a little moving and breathing right now.

Firstly, stand up straight and find your ujjayi breath (ocean breath). Ujjayi breath is found by closing the mouth, breathing in and out exclusively through the nose, but controlling the breath at the base of the throat. It is as if you are breathing directly into your upper chest. You should hear a soft rushing sound like the ocean on both the inhale and the exhale. You may notice immediately the how much deeper a breath you can take compared to sniffing air through the nose or mouth. The body knows this breath because it is how we breathe when we sleep.

Secondly, place one hand on your upper chest and the other on your lower belly. Continue with the same practice of ujjayi breath. On the inhale, bring the breath down the body from above. Receive the breath into the upper chest and expand the ribcage in all directions. Let the belly come out of its own accord. On the exhale, draw the belly in and up towards the spine and send the breath up from below. Take several breaths establishing this polarity of inhale-from-above and exhale-from-below.

Thirdly, combine these first two principles with a simple arm movement. On the inhale, arms moves in a circle around the body, bringing the hands together, and gently arching the back. Pause as the breath turns around just like the waves on the beach. On the exhale, arms move return to the side of the body. Repeat this movement six or seven times. Consciously link the body movement to the breath movement so it is felt as a single activity.

Finally, in order to be a fully fledged Yoga practitioner, one more principle needs to be added: the breath should envelop the movement. That is, the body movement is completely encapsulated within a bubble of the breath. Begin to inhale and then a moment later start to move your arms around the body in a circle. Begin your exhale and then lower your arms to your sides. When your hands come together at the top of the inhale make sure you are still breathing for a moment longer. When your hands finish at the bottom of the exhale, ensure that you are still exhaling.

Just be with your breath, that’s all.

As the pandemic continues and as lockdown-pressure bites in many countries, try being with your breath in these simple ways every day.

Many people come to Yoga and other breathing practices with the assumption that they need to practice for a long-time each day. There is an idea that it will take years of disciplined effort before we are really practicing. This is simply not true. All you need is seven minutes a day of asana to enjoy the benefits. So long as your practice is perfectly suited to your unique needs — body type, age, health, and culture — then you’ll experience a state of natural meditation, in other words, a sense of intimate connection to Reality in your very first practice.

We do have to get away from the idea of Yoga as a form of physical gymnastics. Krishnamacharya emphatically taught asana as moving pranayama; moving breath-work; moving meditation. There is no physical goal in Yoga, but pleasurable participation in breath only. Sadly, Yoga has been popularised so badly in the west. It has been turned into what Desikachar called “mediocre gymanstics” — a privileged lifestyle activity for an obsessive minority.

It is time now, for the sake of the world, to put the breath principles back into all the brands and styles that derived from Krishnamacharya: Iyengar Yoga, Astanga Vinayasa, etcetera. When the breath principles are in place then these otherwise dangerous practices become powerful, efficient and safe. Your practice becomes truly your own and will support your life in every way.

So many factors come into play when it comes to our health: our state of mind, our posture, our attitudes, self-image, and our emotions. A discord in any of these areas can have the effect of lowering our immune system and burdening the whole body. They affect neurotransmitters which play a significant role in health and well-being. There is no better thing we can do to bring light to each of these areas than to be with our breath.

Every person on Mother Earth deserves to be healthy and enjoy their wonder-full life. As we move through these difficult times, may every person be given access to the physical wisdom practices of Yoga — the easy and for-everyone science of healthy breathing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Mark Whitwell has been teaching yoga around the world for many decades, after first meeting his teachers Tirumali Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar in Chennai in 1973. Mark Whitwell is one of the few yoga teachers who has refused to commercialise the practice, never turning away anyone who cannot afford a training. The editor of and contributor to Desikachar’s classic book “The Heart of Yoga,” Mark Whitwell is the founder of the Heart of Yoga Foundation, which has sponsored yoga education for thousands of people who would otherwise not be able to access it. A hippy at heart, Mark Whitwell successfully uses a Robin Hood “pay what you can” model for his online teachings, and is interested in making sure each individual is able to get their own personal practice of yoga as intimacy with life, in the way that is right for them, making the teacher redundant. Mark Whitwell has been an outspoken voice against the commercialisation of yoga in the west, and the loss of the richness of the Indian tradition, yet gentle and humorously encouraging western practitioners to look into the full depth and spectrum of yoga, before medicalising it and trying to improve on a practice that has not yet been grasped. And yet Mark Whitwell is also a critic of right-wing Indian movements that would seek to claim yoga as a purely hindu nationalist practice and the intolerant mythistories produced by such movements. After encircling the globe for decades, teaching in scores of countries, Mark Whitwell lives in remote rural Fiji with his partner, where Mark Whitwell can be found playing the sitar, eating papaya, and chatting with the global heart of yoga sangha online. Anyone is welcome to come and learn the basic principles of yoga with Mark Whitwell.