Breath as a Medicine

Last year I volunteered at a music festival in the medical tent. Because of my history with asthma, I worked with the patients who rushed in with asthma attacks. They were helpless. Unable to be at peace and afraid they might never find a satisfying breath again. There seemed to be an endless stream of them throughout the night.  There were so many actually that we didn’t have enough nebulizers – a machine used for delivering asthma medications – to give to medicine to all the patients that came in.

I was forced to help people without medication. It was in the middle of my second yoga teacher training. I was ready and willing to be a healer. I did my best and guided them through a breathing technique that I used to manage my own asthma. This was the same technique that allowed me to overcome my dependence on inhalers. I would take in a deep breath, exhale naturally, then take a second exhale sharply. It worked!

How Yoga Empowers

As humans, we rely on tools, medicines, and other people to heal us.  It’s a cultural mindset that many of us carry. It’s a part of being plugged into society and the economy.  When you get a headache you take a pain pill.  When your body aches you get a massage.

Yoga can offer another way of life, less reliable on things outside of yourself. 

Yoga empowers you to be your own healer. It empowers you to rely on simple means for maintaining health and well being. The techniques empower you to know yourself better, as you are constantly putting in work on your mind and body. It empowers you to relax and deal with stress, without help from someone else, or medicine. It empowers you to be more responsible for yourself and less consuming. 

How Pranayama can help you

The day after my experience helping asthma patients at the festival I met a woman that sat next to me outside a food truck. Dazed from my work of the previous night I told her about my experience.  She found interesting because she came from a family of shamans. Then she gave me a simple but profound piece of wisdom passed down from her ancestors. “Breath is the first medicine,” she said. 

It sounds so simple but I had just never thought of it that way. The breath is one thing that you can control anytime, anywhere. Regulating your breath with certain techniques is medicine. Control of the breath is commonly referred to as ‘breathwork’. In yoga practice, it is called pranayama. The word pranayama consists of two parts. Prana means lifeforce or vitality.  Ayama means to extend. Thus pranayama means to increase our lifeforce and vitality. 

Pranayama uses

You can use it to warm yourself up or cool yourself down. You can use to induce relaxation and you can even use it to empty a busy mind.  In yoga classes, we use the ujjayi breath to promote focus and bring smoothness to movement.  Going deeper into stretches and holding a steady handstand both rely on ujjayi breath

In pranayama practice, you emphasize the inhalation, the exhalation, or retention of the breath. Retention means to hold the breath after an inhale or exhale. Controlling the breath like this takes advantage of the breath’s intimate connection to the mind. You can use it to deal with anxiety or depression or simply to just slow the mind down.

Breathing Life Back Into Your Life

So many times we get stuck and we don’t go anywhere. We tell ourselves that we can’t do what we want because we don’t have the things it takes to do it: energy, possessions, friends, rest, encouragement, the technology, the right circumstances, or whatever it is that we wish we had. 

It’s natural to think this way. Our culture is defined by tool use. We are a tool bearing animal. We can’t disassociate ourselves from tools. Imagine the backpacker without his pack, or the hunter without his gun.  Imagine the programmer without his computer or the doctor without his stethoscope. These dualities are so strong that they are just a part of who we are and how we think. 

No tool is so significant that its absence leaves a void. Anything can bridge the gap in your path forward. Forget the tool. All tools are replaceable, but you are not.  That’s what makes you so great, and that is why you are human, and not a tool. 
 

About the author 

Doug Duchon is taking the 300 hour Advanced Yoga Teacher Training at the Doron Yoga & Zen Center in Guatemala. He has spent 4 months of living and working for Doron in Guatemala. Doug’s other training includes 200h Bhakti Vinyasa, 50h Yin and Restorative, and 50 hour kirtan training from Govind Das at Bhakti Yoga Shala in Santa Monica, California. 

Doug writes about how yoga can be integrated into the modern workforce and used to achieve a better work-life balance. Before becoming a yoga teacher he spent 10 years working as an engineer in various industries including Aerospace where helped build rockets and spacecraft for NASA’s astronautical programs.

Instagram: @updougyoga