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Let’s start our exploration of the yoga of breathing by asking an easy question: Why do we breathe? We don’t tend to think much about our breathing. Why should we? Although we can influence the way we breathe, breathing is largely an automatic process. Why be concerned about something that seems to take care of itself just fine, when there are so many other more important things to worry over?

But the answer to this question is fairly obvious. Breath, as we all know, is life, an equivalence that’s been recognized all over the world for thousands of years. For example, remember that the word prana is rooted in the verb an, which means “to breathe,” but also “to live” and “to move.” In Sanskrit a pranaka is a living being. When we stop breathing, at least for more than a few minutes, we stop living. I’m sure you’ll agree that this alone is a good enough reason to keep on breathing. We breathe to take in and replenish the body’s store of oxygen for the production of energy in the body; maintain balanced levels of oxygen and its essential partner, carbon dioxide, in the body; and expel waste gases to purify the body.

So the why of breathing isn’t much of a mystery, but let me ask you another question you might not have considered before: How do you breathe? Again, the answer seems obvious—with lungs and diaphragm and nose and a few other things that we may not be quite sure about but that we’re confident are working away to keep us alive. Obvious again.

But that’s not exactly the answer I’m looking for. Maybe I should rephrase the question: How well do you breathe? You might believe that we all breathe in pretty much the same way and that it doesn’t take a breathing genius to breathe well. But in fact, each of us has a unique breathing behavior or breathing identity. Some of us are very efficient breathers, while others—many others—aren’t. Although it may not seem that important to be an efficient breather, inefficient breathing can have far-reaching consequences. Breath­ing experts cite three conditions in particular that contribute to inef­ficient breathing:

1. Poor posture, which might include a sagging spine and a stiff or sunken rib case.
2. Weak, uncoordinated, or constricted respiratory muscles, especially the diaphragm, our primary breathing muscle, and its breathing synergist, the rectus abdominis.
3. The wear and tear of everyday stress.

How does an inefficient breather breathe? She’s inclined to breathe too shallowly, mostly high in the chest because the diaphragm is stuck, and too fast—she hyperventilates, which makes the flow of the breath turbulent. She often breathes through the mouth, which is universally censured because it reinforces hyper­ventilation, and under extreme stress she’ll tend to hold her breath. Shallow, fast breathing reduces the carbon dioxide in the body, which constricts blood vessels and slows the circulation of blood and oxygen to the body and brain. Oxygen starvation chronically excites the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system and the fight-or-flight response. So the heart beats rapidly or irreg­ularly, she’s by turns forgetful or confused, anxious or fearful, tense or irritable, and she’s always tired and emotionally drained or flat.

On the other side of the ledger is the efficient breather. She breathes slowly, which streamlines the breath, with the free and easy movement of the diaphragm, engaging the entire torso (in fact, the entire body). She mostly breathes through the nose, which filters, warms or cools as needed, and humidifies the breath. Nose breathing naturally slows the exhale, because the nostrils offer more resistance to the breath than the mouth, and gives the lungs enough time to extract the maximum amount of oxygen and energy from each breath. With the correct proportion of oxygen and carbon diox­ide in the body, which dilate the blood vessels, blood and oxygen cir­culate smoothly and easily through the efficient breather’s body and brain. The full excursion of the diaphragm and the well-toned abdominals massage internal organs, like the heart and intestines, and so improve digestion and elimination. Efficient breathing acti­vates the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system and the relaxation response. In all, the efficient breather is much calmer and more clearheaded, and probably healthier and happier, than her inefficient friend.

So how would you identify yourself as a breather? Efficient or inefficient, or somewhere in between? It’s hard to answer a question like this objectively, especially when you might be a little fuzzy on the details of the function and machinery of breathing, with a breathing identity that’s largely unexamined.

It’s not surprising that the yogis have their own ideas about breathing. Of course, they’re interested in efficient everyday breath­ing, but they’re also interested in something more: not only why we breathe and how we breathe, but who is breathing.

We understand intuitively that breathing reflects consciousness and that we can affect or influence consciousness by changing our breath. We probably do it all the time and don’t think much about it. For example, what happens to your breath when you get angry? Speeds up, right? And have you ever tried to soothe that anger by slowing down your breath? Probably, though it’s not a sure thing. Just because you breathe slowly doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to calm down, though it’s a good start.

The point is, most of us don’t think about the relationship between breath and consciousness and what it means. But luckily for us, the yogis do: it’s their job. Thousands of years ago, they set about methodically investigating this relationship. They discovered that breath and consciousness are just the flip sides of the same coin and that in order to find out who is breathing, the first thing we need to do is ask how we breathe.

Individual Prana

Once the cosmic prana is appropriated into our body, it’s converted into individual prana (vasti-prana), which has five major branches, usually called winds (vayu), collectively known as the great winds (maha-vayu). (There are also five minor branches, the upa-vayu, which won’t concern us.) Each wind has its own special seat in the body (except circulating wind) and works to sustain us physically, mentally, and spiritually. Different teachers locate the seats of the winds in different areas of the body and give them different func­tions. For our purposes, we’ll say that

• Forward wind (prana-vayu, not to be confused with cosmic prana) is seated in the heart and stimulates and regulates the rising energy of reaching out and taking in—that is, appropriation or absorption. Its primary manifestation, though not its only one, is inhalation.
• Downward wind (apana-vayu) is seated in the lower pelvis and stimulates and regulates the falling energy of elimina­tion or giving out or away. Its primary manifestation (though, again, not its only one) is exhalation.
• Middle wind (samana-vayu) is the fire in the belly, seated in the navel, which stimulates and regulates assimilation or incorporation. Middle wind digests the food we take in from the world (with prana-vayu, whether physical, mental, or spiritual) and cooks it, as the yogis like to say, transmuting it into something uniquely our own.
• Circulating wind (vyana-vayu) circulates throughout our body and so has no specific seat. It’s the glue that holds us together and the network that distributes what’s been digested to every cell. Circulating wind also urges us to openly share what we’ve assimilated to ourselves with the body of the world.
• Upward wind (udana-vayu) is the energy of expression, appropriately seated in the throat. Lama Govinda (quoting René Guénon) notes that upward wind is a “vehicle of the mind, namely of word and speech, and thus, in a certain sense, the medium of an enlarged individuality.”

It’s worth remembering that the five winds are not abstractions and not the preserve of just a few isolated yogis. They vitalize each of us, always and everywhere, whether we know it or not, with intel­ligence and creativity. Certainly, as beginning breathers, we can’t be expected to immediately distinguish among these subtle currents and put them into play in our practice and lives. But wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, it takes no particular training to begin to feel the great currents of aliveness that animate our body­-mind. You just need to turn your attention, for a couple of minutes, to the movement of your everyday breathing.