Most of us don’t think about our breath until something interrupts it. A shock, a long week, a moment in a yoga class when the teacher says just breathe – and you suddenly realise you’ve been holding it for the past ten minutes.
The breath is easy to overlook. It happens without us. But that’s precisely what makes it so interesting.
Of all the tools yoga offers – the postures, the stillness, the slow turning inward – the breath is the one that goes everywhere with you. It’s there in a held Virabhadrasana (Warrior pose) and there when you finally sink into Savasana (Corpse pose). It’s there on the drive home, when someone cuts you up on the roundabout and there in the middle of the night when your mind won’t settle.
Donna Farhi, whose work on breathwork has influenced a generation of yoga teachers, puts it simply: when we breathe with real freedom, we neither grasp for nor hold on to the breath. She goes further, suggesting that the way we breathe is actually a mirror – a reflection of how we move through life and how we respond to the things we can’t control. I think that’s worth sitting with.
What the Breath Actually Does
Breathing is one of the few functions in the body that sits at the crossroads of the voluntary and the involuntary. Your heart beats without you. Your digestion works without you. But the breath can be consciously shaped – slowed, deepened, redirected – and that makes it a remarkable point of access.
When we breathe in a shallow, effortful way (chest lifted, shoulders involved, jaw tight), the body reads this as a signal that something is wrong. The nervous system responds accordingly. Heart rate climbs. The stress response activates. It’s a loop many of us live inside without realising it.
Breathing more slowly and more fully reverses that loop. Deep, diaphragmatic breathing – where the belly and ribcage expand before the chest lifts – stimulates the vagus nerve, the main trunk of the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the part of your nervous system that tells the body: you’re safe. You can rest now. Heart rate slows. Blood pressure eases. The muscles of the neck and upper chest – which were working far too hard – finally get to let go.
This isn’t abstract. Students often notice it mid-class, sometimes to their surprise.
Learning to Notice
In yoga, breath awareness usually begins with observation rather than instruction. Before we ask the breath to do anything differently, we simply watch it. Is it smooth or a little ragged? Does it stall at the top of the inhale? Does the exhale feel rushed?
Most of us have unconscious habits around the breath that we’ve carried for years. Holding slightly on the inhale. Restricting the belly out of long habit or self-consciousness. Breathing into the upper chest only, which leaves the lower lungs – where the most efficient gas exchange happens – barely involved.
In class, we work through different approaches: Dirga Swasam (the complete yogic breath), which invites air into the lower, middle and upper lungs in sequence; diaphragmatic breathing in lying, seated and standing positions; Nadi Shodhana (alternate nostril breathing) for those evenings when the mind won’t slow down. Each one offers something slightly different. None of them require you to be flexible, strong, or particularly coordinated.
They just ask you to pay attention.
The Longer Effect
Yoga’s ancient texts have spoken about the relationship between breath and mind for thousands of years – long before neuroscience caught up with the language to explain why. The Sanskrit word pranayama, which we translate roughly as breathwork, is built from prana (life force, vital energy) and ayama (to extend, to expand). The tradition understood something important: that learning to work with the breath is not just a physical skill. It changes how you experience things.
Over time, a regular practice of breath awareness builds what I’d call a kind of internal spaciousness. Not detachment – more like the difference between being swept along by a current and being able to feel where the water is going. You still feel everything. But you have a little more room to respond rather than just react.
Sleeping better is often the first thing students notice. Then, gradually, the smaller things – the moment you catch yourself tensing before a difficult conversation and consciously release it. The realisation that you made it through a stressful week without that familiar tightening across the shoulders.
Small things. Real things.
The breath is always there, waiting to be noticed. You don’t have to do anything dramatic with it. Just begin to observe – and let that be enough for now.
If you’d like to explore breathwork in a class setting, you’re very welcome to join us. All breathing techniques are introduced gradually and you’ll never be asked to do anything that feels uncomfortable or forced.
If you’d like to explore the practice behind the philosophy, Practice and Poses is a good next step. For the inner dimensions of the tradition, Meditation and the Chakras section of Spiritual Living go deeper.
If you’d like to explore the breath connection further, The Living Breath is a dedicated course in pranayama.