Hatha Yoga for Anxiety

Today on the podcast, I wanted to talk about breath and anxiety and the way that it's linked to anxiety in the way of yoga and in yogic terms and so I hear this a lot from people and so I was like you know this is something we should just talk about on the podcast and clear up the air because a lot of people say you know can you do breath work For anxiety and things like that and of course you can so let's dive right in First of all the Hatha yoga perspective of our breath Is really one our breath is connected to our prana and our prana is our life force energy that is like just riding the currents of our body and while we are alive, and when our body dies, our life force energy, our prana, leaves the body, and the breath is the connection point.

And so in yogic philosophy, we see breathing as kind of the active part of ours it's almost like a really beautiful weaving or like a dance you know between our life force energy and our physical body and it's a very rhythmic um happening it's really trippy man when you think about it when it when it comes down to how we breathe and our lungs and all the things it's pretty wild you know taking in this gaseous stuff around us through our lungs and like down through our um trachea and then I was going to say esophagus but the esophagus goes down to your stomach your trachea goes to your lungs and from there it breaks off into tons of little tiny branches and then at the end of those little branches are all these little like they almost look like little grape sacks like little sacks and they're called your avioli we've talked about this on the pod before and And that's where this beautiful oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange happens on a molecular level.

And it trades off in the blood.

The blood runs everything through the body or through to the different parts of the body.

And like our body is literally this like well-oiled machine that's running off of itself and everything around it consistently changing and evolving and repairing and dying all at the same time, you know.

we live as our cells live and die you know what i mean our skin cells are not the same our inner linings like our intestinal lining gets reproduced and changed all the time um and so we like to think that we're so solid and that this is my body and it's been my body forever and it's like actually not one piece of that body is really the same as what it was when you were born or when you were a child or anything, you know, you, you might have some same structure and shapes and genetics and such, but the, on a molecular and cellular level, you are completely different, you know, and this is where resonance comes in and this is where vibration comes in.

And, um, where you reside in the spectrum of energy, you know, and so our breath connects us to the spirit in that way.

And when the breath leaves the body, the spirit leaves the body.

And so this is really kind of like the magical point that we can connect to our body and our spirit in a really physical way um through using our breath and so uh a lot of times when we are experiencing anxiety or anxiousness or um feelings of unease or unsettling in those areas.

A lot of the times, if we were to tune into our breathing at those moments, we would recognize that our breath is very shallow.

It's in the upper part of our chest.

We're just kind of letting the collarbones rise a little bit and then exhaling.

And you're having these small, faster breaths.

now also let it be noted that the sages believed some of the yogic sages believed that you were born with a finite amount of breaths that you were going to take in this life and so that was another key part of slowing down the breathing was because if you speed your breathing you're wasting your breaths of your life you know and so they would perfect the art of doing those long, slow breaths, and they'd be able to bring their heart rates down.

They'd be able to enter these trance-like states, these very deep meditative states, where they could really just experience that oneness and that bliss.

This is where yogic powers and things would come in, such as telepathy and meditation, astral projection, things of that nature.

Anyway, I digress a little bit.