Sorry Pranayama

Yoga, I love you, but we need to talk...

“Focus on your breath.”

“Relax and breathe.”

“Inhale. Exhale.”

“Let your breath flow naturally.”

“Exhale slowly as you fold to the floor.”

Yoga, as both a spiritual and physical practice, asks folks to reconnect to their breath. In fact, most yoga books and websites open with a long description of how stressed out, unhealthy modern people breathe incorrectly. We breathe, the story goes, too quickly, too shallowly, and too high in our lungs. As a result, our stress levels increase and our wellness decreases in an endless feedback loop. Yoga offers a solution: focus on your breath. Think about your breath. Learn to breathe better.

Breathe better? What's wrong with my breath? Is something wrong with my breath? I thought my breath was fine a moment ago. It carried me through my day. But, no. There is something wrong.

Now I'm thinking my breath and that makes it impossible to breathe.

This isn't a criticism of nonsense along the lines of, “Breathe through your toes.” We all know that's ridiculous. I'm proposing a yogic revolt lead by all us folks who grew up with nervous ticks, by all the folks who struggle with compulsion, and those who spend their lives thinking, thinking, thinking. For us, thinking about breath leads to the rabbit-hole we're probably practicing yoga to escape.

Breath is a function of the autonomous nervous system. While it can be subtly altered through yoga, breath, for the most part, goes about it's own business of sustaining life without any input from the conscious mind. I personally believe well-meaning yogis should leave it at that.

I grew up struggling with nervous ticks. One of my clearest childhood memories is the day I discovered swallowing. It came up as the answer to a riddle, something about a bird who lives in a barn and an automatic bodily function. As the conversation ranged, it occurred to me that my mouth was indeed full of saliva which needed swallowing at internals. However, having discovered this amazing automatic response, I couldn't stop thinking about it. My compulsion (de)evolved over the next week into a nervous swallowing-click in the back of my throat. Think Gollum, my precious.

Expectation: I am cleansed and healed by aligning
my breath with the breath of the planet.

Fast-forward a decade to a teenage girl discovering yoga. Imagine this girl stretched out with her hand on her belly prepared to learn the art of diaphragmatic breathing. You can probably imagine how it all went wrong. My breath didn't feel easy and full. Was I doing it wrong? My chest felt tight. My mind went panicky. I sat up and told myself, “Stop thinking about it. You breathe all the damn-time. Your body's got this!” Except my body didn't “have” it any more. My compulsive brain had seized control and my body wouldn't regain control until I moved on and redirected my meddling mind elsewhere.

Since then, I've made an uneasy peace with breathe and yoga...the same way I've made peace with sidewalks whose gaps must be crossed alternately leading with the right and left foot.

Reality: A panic attack is crouched like an
incubus on my chest. 

However, my most miserable moments in yoga class invariably include those minutes when the instructor asks everyone to sit quietly and “connect” to their breath. The idea is to tune-in to the natural rhythm of the body and subtly nudge it toward those long seamless inhalations and exhalations of Ujjayi.

I, on the other hand, often find myself at the edge of a panic attack.

I gain so much from my yoga practice, but I grow increasingly uncertain that those benefits balance out the damage of relinquishing control of my breath from the unconscious to the conscious mind. Unconscious breathing carries me through bicycle rides, when my lungs are pulled open by exertion and I gasp in breaths of bright spring air. Unconscious breathing gives voice to conversations, songs, and whistles. I don't think about my breath when I dance or jump on the trampoline.

So, I ask, “Yoga Guru, why, to move through the healing, invigorating asanas, am I required I sit through three minutes of torture while my compulsive mind makes a muddle of a good thing?”

And Yoga Guru replies, “Your resistance is a sign that this is the most important practice at all.”

Fuck that.

Sorry, pranayama, we're breaking up