Staying away from mystical explanations that are often given, I will limit myself to more logically based reasons, for the working of these techniques.
The word ‘Prana’ is a highly talked about mystic word in many ancient scriptures; not just in Indian systems, but also in other ancient cultures and practices. In Greek as well as Chinese, equivalent concepts do exist. The predominant meaning given to this word Prana in the Indian context is ‘life force’, meaning some energy that keeps the body alive. Since breathing is the most visible sign of life, Prana is generally associated with breathing or the air that we breath.
Given its association with life, the process of breathing is given lot of importance in Hatayoga techniques. In Hatayoga, one of the main goals of a Yogi is to become immortal. Some Hatayoga books even go to extent of recommending complete stoppage of the process of breathing to attain the ultimate goal of Yoga i.e. becoming immortal. Immortal by stopping the breath??!!!!
Others, realizing its impossibility, talk about controlling the breathing process, its speed, intensity and so on. They associate the breathing process with lot of mystical ideas and make breathing rhythms as an important part of their version of Yoga. This is the popular ‘Yoga’ taught by many modern Yoga Gurus.
Patanjali talks very briefly about breathing practice as part of his eight step Yoga process. He calls it Pranayama. He defines Pranayama as
“shvaasa prashvaasayOr gati vicchEdah”
That means
“Obstructing the regular flow of breathing in and out is called Pranayama.”
-- Yoga Sutra 2.49
While looking for mystical explanations associated with Prana or life force, we tend to overlook the words ‘gati vicchEdah’ – obstructing the flow, in Patanjali’s definition of Pranayama. The benefit comes when we forcefully stop breathing in or breathing out momentarily.
Why does it happen?
Try forcefully holding your breath for a while, you will know 😉. When you are in the verge of getting choked, all your mental activity stops except those that try to bring you out of that suffocation. At that moment, you would be thinking of nothing else. Your entire attention would be on one single task – somehow come out of that difficult situation 😉 This is because, breathing is such an essential part of our life that we can afford to ignore all other activities of the mind, but not breathing.
Every time you forcefully hold the breath, you are unknowingly playing with the ‘attention system’ in the brain. This center rooted in the thalamus is responsible for providing the necessary connectivity between various brain regions. It also boosts the activities in those regions. We have seen how this works in the previous episode.
So, by practicing Pranayama repeatedly, you can train the attention system in the brain to forget all other activities and focus on a single essential activity. Basically, you are training the circuits in the Thalamus that are involved in the attention. With prolonged practice of Pranayama, the thalamus can be made to attend to any given task and ignore all other distractions.
Interestingly, when I gave this reasoning for how Pranayama helps in training the attention system in my book “How and why of Yoga and Meditation – Yoga scientifically explained”, one of my readers drew my attention to the fact that this was exactly the reasoning given by Ramana Maharshi. Ramana Maharshi was one of the well-known Yogis of recent times. I was not aware of Ramana Maharshi’s views on Pranayama at that time. But I was pleasantly surprised as to how this Yogi, with almost no background in neuroscience, could infer that!
In Buddhist practices, the closest to Pranayama is the so called Anapana sati. Anapanameans breathing in and out. Instead of controlling these breathing rhythms forcefully, Buddhists merely observe them. That also achieves the same thing. Prolonged practice of even Anapana Sati trains the Thalamic structures to focus on any given target, at will, without getting distracted.
Instead of focusing the mind on the breathing rhythm, one could even focus on any other routine activity, be it sitting, standing, walking and so on. All of them, if practiced properly, have the same effect. Buddhists call it Kaaya Sati – observing the body. In Buddhist meditative practices, one needs to master these Sati techniques before one ventures into meditation. In other words, attention training is crucial prerequisite to mediation. That holds true for Patanjali Yoga too, as we will be seeing later.
Some modern Gurus hype these well-known Buddhist techniques as ‘Mindfulness’ and make tall claims. Basically, all of them end up in an attention system that can be made to focus on any target, at will.
But these Sati techniques, though they appear to be simple, are not so easy things to practice. Most of us are so over powered by our body, that all our thinking revolves around physical actions 😉 Such heavily body conscious people can neither do Anapana Sati nor Kaaya Sati since neither of these involve any willful manipulation of the body. These techniques are mostly mind-oriented processes, that involve merely observing a body phenomenon without taking active part in it.
There are many other focusing techniques similar to Pranayama, Anapana Sati, Kaya Sati, and so on that can be effectively used to train our attention system. All of them are quite easy, requiring almost no resources. Depending on your bent of mind, you can choose any or all of them to attain an attention system that can be made to focus on a given target at will. I have discussed at least half a dozen of them in my book “The Ultimate Book on Yoga – all that you want to know about Yoga”. I will skip those details here and urge you to read that book instead 😉
What do we achieve by having an attention system which can be made to focus on any given target?
Have you ever realized why many of us fail to achieve what we would like to achieve in our lives? It could be your performance in your studies if you are a student. It could be carrier building if you are a carrier-oriented person. Or it could be making some great break throughs if you are a researcher. Or it could be achieving anything in life.
The main reason often times is lack of focus. We are just incapable of paying single pointed attention to what we do. Our attention is often diffused into many things around, and we can’t do justice to any one of them. Afterall, we have a single brain which is needed to do whatever we want to do 😉 Not paying full attention to any one or a few most important things in our lives, is inefficient use of our valuable brain resources.
So, by developing a focused mind, or Ekaagra Citta as Patanjali calls it, where your attention system is at your command, you can achieve great success in whatever you do.
Having a focused mind is also very important in later steps of Yoga namely meditation. We will discuss neuroscience of meditation in later episodes.
For those of you who are content with just enjoying a healthy life, these focusing techniques can also help. They help in thwarting unnecessary thoughts that just build up stress. And stress means health problems, as we will see later. A focused mind pays attention only to those thoughts that are beneficial to us. Rest of the nagging thoughts gradually die down, since they get no attention. Remember, any complex brain processing needs the attention to enable interconnectivity and boosting? Thoughts are no exception. We discussed that in the previous episode.
Whether it is Pranayama, or Buddhist Sati techniques, or the ones that I have discussed in my book, all are mostly mind oriented practices with minimal physical action. But most of us have an intense urge to do predominantly physical action 😉 Mere mental process does not attract us. That is where the so-called Asana, propagated by modern Gurus, comes handy. I will talk about the ‘neuroscience’ of Asana in the next episode.
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