Breath and Movement

Welcome to the Yogic Lens. This is Geetha Kandaswamy. This video is about how to enhance your breath, how to improve your lung capacity, how to lengthen your inhalation and your exhalation. Lot of external and internal factors inhibit your breath such as chest infection, allergy, trauma, mental stress and so on. If we learn to master our breath then these conditions will not affect us. Let us see how to do that in this video. In our last video, we saw how to improve our quality of our breath through diaphragmatic breathing or yogic breathing. If you are not familiar with diaphragmatic breathing, go ahead and watch this video, the link for which is given below in this description because diaphragmatic breathing is a very important basic lesson if you are into yogic practices. Now coming back to our goal of how to improve and lengthen our breath capacity. Before that let us look into little bit of school science. We all know that air flows from a higher pressure to a lower pressure. There is this pressure called intrapulmonary pressure inside our lungs which is always maintained equal to the atmospheric pressure which is there in the environment. What happens like when there is a small pressure drop, air flows from the outside because air flows from a higher pressure to a lower pressure. So when there is a pressure drop inside your lungs, the air flows from outside and enters into the lungs. But how does this pressure drop? When there is a volume increase, then the pressure drop because we know that the volume and the pressure are inversely proportional right. So when the volume increases, the pressure drop. How does the volume increases? The volume increases because like when you start inhaling, you expand your chest region, you expand your thoracic cavity. So there is a mild increase in the volume which automatically brings the pressure to a lower level. Automatically air flows in from the exterior environment into your lungs. This is what is happening. We all know about that. Now we have to see how to enhance this, how to maximize this so that you get maximum benefit out of lengthened inhalation and exhalation. Let us see this through a small practice to count your length of your inhalation. Sit comfortably with your back straight. Keep your eyes closed and gently observe your breath. Bring the awareness to your breath. Gentle breathing, your own capacity. We are going to measure your length of the inhalation. At the beginning of the inhalation, start mentally counting OM 1, OM 2, OM 3. Exactly stop counting when there is, when your lungs is full and you are not able to breathe anymore. Continue this practice. Count it couple of more times. Very good. Keep this number in memory. You can write it down or keep it in mind. For some people it may be 2, some people it may be 3 or even higher. Just keep it in memory. You would have heard about Ashtanga yoga. Ashtanga yoga as given by yoga sutras of Patanjali. In that the third limb, the third Anga is Asana and the fourth Anga, fourth limb is the Pranayama. Yoga Sutra says that once a person masters Asana, then he is ready for Pranayama practices. Another ancient text Hatha Yoga Pratipika gives Asana as one of the prerequisite to practice Pranayama. When you see Asana, it need not be complex postures. You need not tie yourself into a pretzel. Simple arm movements will itself actually work on your body.