Finding Your Breath

Finding your breath is an important component of many contemporary yoga classes. If you've been to a class, you have probably heard some iteration of this phrase. The first time I had a teacher direct me to find my breath, I thought it was a little odd but I made an assumption about what she was saying. As I understood it, the instruction was to simply pay attention to my breathing: inhale, exhale. While no one ever explained the actual purpose behind this practice, it gave me something to focus on besides all the other thoughts flying around my head. That was good enough for me.

Ancient yogis took it a little further. They realized that if you can control your breath, you can control your mind. This simple statement clearly describes one of the main benefits of yoga practice. Our breath and our minds are interconnected, and there is a relationship between the rate of our thoughts and the rate of our breathing. When we are angry and our minds are moving fast, our breathing becomes rapid. When we make an effort to take deep breaths, our thoughts slow down. This might be a place where experts could have a "chicken or the egg" debate, but I don't think it really matters which comes first because one of these factors is clearly easier for me to control: my breath.

When we practice yoga and we concentrate on finding and controlling our breath, we slow down and connect our breathing to our movements. This slows the runaway train of thoughts that is constantly racing around our heads. And as we get further along into our practice, we may notice that we actually start to have little bits of space in between our thoughts. We can see the gaps between the cars as they are passing on the tracks. These gaps might occupy only the briefest of moments, but we see that they can exist. We don't have to have a thought and then immediately judge it or–even worse–judge ourselves for having it. We don't have to automatically react to it in any way, possibly by saying or doing something that we later regret. Instead, once we cultivate those spaces we can look at each thought for what it is: a thought. And we can choose if or how we want to respond to it. 

This isn't something that happens overnight. It takes a lot of practice, a lot of time finding your breath, to find the spaces. For me it is worth the effort.