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breathing
It is essential to breathe deeply, through the nostrils, for at least one or two breaths, at least once daily. If you do not empty out the lungs completely in this manner, the bottom third of your lungs remain full of residual carbon dioxide, resulting in less oxygen going to your brain.
Bruce Frantzis, who wrote Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body, gives this method: fill the lower part of the lungs, expanding the abdomen, then the lower sides of the lungs, expanding them sideways, then the upper sides, expanding them sideways, then the upper lungs, breathing up and back, stretching the lungs until they are completely filled.
This is a good breathing technique for pranayama :
Basic pranayama. Sit in meditation posture, with back held straight (you sort of come to attention and then relax a bit, so that the back is upright but you are not straining). Put a curtain ring or something like it on your right thumb. Use a timer that you can see -- better is a metronome.
Using the breathing method given above, close the right nostril with your forefinger. If breathing is at all a problem, open the other nostril with your thumb and forefinger. Count the number of seconds it takes you to breathe in a complete breath through the left nostril.
Hold your breath for four times the duration of the inbreath. If the inbreath is 6 seconds the breath-retention, or kumbhaka, is 24 seconds. If the inbreath is 10 seconds, kumbhaka is 40 seconds.
The outbreath, through the right nostril, is twice the duration of the inbreath. The rhythm of classic pranayama is 1-4-2. This is given in Gheranda Samhita.
Without stopping, close the left nostril, and perform the same breathing in reverse, into the right nostril, kumbhaka for the same duration, and out the left nostril. This completes the first cycle.
Without stopping, move the curtain ring to the right forefinger and repeat, beginning the second cycle. Eleven cycles of pranayama is a good practice.
At one time I was dealing with serious health issues. I don't know what it was -- it felt like something all through my bones and blood. I was attending a yoga church at the time, and one sunday there was a discourse about healing, explaining that all healing is of the force (roughly equivalent to prana). Drugs from western medicine, chiropractic, herbs from eastern medicine -- these are all methods to evoke the force, from which all healing comes.
So I went home and prayed, “Lord, make me get a whole bunch of force.” After a few days, I began to do eleven cycles of the pranayama described above every morning, and eleven cycles every evening. After a few weeks, a practice I called “the breath-walk” appeared.
The breath-walk consisted of a one-mile walk on a quarter-mile track, doing pranayama in the same 1:4:2 rhythm, counting the intervals with my steps. I did this every day, as well as the 11 cycles morning and night.
This adds up to a whole lot of pranayama. In one year’s time, my health issues were a thing of the past.
Siva Samhita, a 17th-century Hatha Yoga text, speaks of 20 kumbhakas, four times a day. That roughly equates to the amount I was doing.
Siva Samhita says, (Ch. 3, v. 42) “The yogi should continue practicing this until ... the body rendered free of all diseases and pains ...”
Gheranda Samhita, also from the 17th century, (Ch. 5, v. 56), says, “... pranayama overcomes all diseases ...” Siva Samhita and Gheranda Samhita are both considered authoritative HathaYoga texts. (Both are translated by Shyam Ghosh, in The Original Yoga) These quotes imply that pranayama can be a panacea. Possibly, it can cure anything, but you have to do a whole lot of it.
My personal theory is that during kumbhaka, there is a lot of additional time for the exchange of gasses at the alveoli of the lungs. The exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide is not all that is happening there. Impurities are excreted from the blood into the spent air. Over time, with a lot of pranayama, this adds up to detoxification.
Sometimes, when I’m not doing regular pranayama, I do a kumbhaka exercise, breathing through both nostrils in the same 1:4:2 rhythm, using 10 measured seconds as the interval. You do 10 or 20 units of it, counting one unit per breath (sometimes you have to stop and catch your breath, the more so if there’s food in you, but the longer, 40-second breath retention is beneficial).
10 units with a 10-second interval means that your total breath-retention time is 400 seconds. In 216 days, a little over seven months, this adds up to an entire 24-hour day of extra breath-retention. 20 units twice a day (20 in the morning and 20 in the evening), gives you 6.75 days per year of kumbhaka.
Patanjali, in Yoga Sutras, gives the practice of performing dharana on the chakras during the kumbhaka. 40 second kumbhaka -- 40 second dharana. First breath, muladhara; second breath swadisthana, etc. In Dharana the mind is one-pointed; focused on the chakra only -- no other thought. For those not drawn to the spiritual path of raising kundalini, dharana can be on any subject, concrete or abstract. If the subject is "oak leaf", you must think only "oak leaf" -- no other thought or game must intrude. I suggest that if you do a series of dharanas daily, at least one of them should be a power-dharana, in which the focus is extremely intense.
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