Pranayama:Complex Breathing

1 month ago By Yogi Anoop

Pranayama: Illness Born from Complexity in Breathing

From the moment human beings and living creatures came into existence on this earth, the process of inhalation, its pause, exhalation, and again a pause has been happening naturally. This is not a new discovery, nor the contribution of any special discipline. It is the fundamental, natural pulsation of life itself. The breaths are the same that flow in everyone; the question is only about the perspective with which they are seen. Nature does not hide its laws; what remains hidden is merely our way of seeing. Just as an apple falling toward the earth was not a new event, what was new was the recognition of the law inherent in that fall. The discovery was not the apple’s falling, but the understanding that arose from it.

In the same way, breathing is already happening in everyone, yet whose perspective is of what kind matters. In the breath, someone sees God or the Supreme, someone sees the soul, someone sees vital energy. All these ways are meant only to help the mind become concentrated. However, in Hatha Yoga, while focusing on breath and pranic energy, attention was given to counting. This was because its purpose was therapeutic.

Thus, in pranayama, mathematical ratios like 2–4–8, 4–8–16 were prescribed, emphasizing the creation of mental discipline. In the beginning, this discipline may have been useful, because rules are necessary to bring the mind into a structure. But the problem arises when this discipline itself is taken as the goal, and methods are devised to make it even more complex. Some practitioners of pranayama even begin to practice internal and external kumbhaka for 5–10 minutes.

The truth is that a natural process gradually turned into a forced practice. Discernment diminished, and rigidity increased. It became somewhat like building muscles in a gym. What was only a means became the end itself.

The mathematics of breathing kept increasing, layers of rules kept piling up, and the inner understanding that was meant to arise kept falling behind. Complexity itself came to be regarded as depth. Whereas the truth is that this very complexity slowly takes the form of illness—for the mind as well as for the body. Because the culmination of understanding gets lost in complexity, whereas the awakening of understanding is possible only in simplicity.

If a person lives an eighty-year life and, throughout that entire life, keeps practicing only numerical principles like 2–4–8–16 with the breath, then it is natural to ask where his intellect and consciousness remained engaged. Did he hold on only to numbers throughout life and lose the experience? This is like the event of an apple falling from a tree. Almost everyone in the world has seen some object fall from a tree, but not everyone has seen it with the same perspective. Someone considered it an ordinary event, someone a coincidence, and one person saw in that very event the law of nature.

The same game is going on in pranayama today. Everyone is breathing; the breath is stopping and moving as well. But someone’s attention is stuck on numbers, someone’s on technique, someone’s on performance. Very few people ask what kind of understanding is happening within them through these breaths. Attention has shifted not to the experience received from the breath, but to the method of controlling the breath.

It appears as if we are not being taught pranayama, but the mathematics hidden within pranayama. Breath is a means—to reach understanding, to reach stability, to become a witness to oneself. But when the means itself becomes the goal, the journey stops. Then a person keeps counting the breaths, but is unable to realize the self.

The real question is not how long you held the breath, in what quantity you inhaled or exhaled. The real question is what changed within you between those breaths—what loosened, what became calm, what became clear. If understanding has not increased through the breath, then you are understanding something else altogether—not pranayama.

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