Exhalation: A Versatile Force Prashant Iyengar (with Rebecca Lerner and Chris Saudek) When you are not paying attention, the exhale is happening automatically. It is taking place for your subsistence, for the autonomous system to work, for the involuntary system to work, for you to breathe, and for you to live. Unconscious exhalation is just aiding the carbon dioxide, it is making you live. Apart from that, the breath is not doing anything, and if it is doing something, it is for the involuntary system to function.
Lindsey Clennell
But when you are doing asanas, then the breath has multiple roles to play. It is a body supplement, it is a mind supplement, it is supplemental to every aspect of you: ego, intelligence, mind, thought process, deliberation, action, sensory actions, body actions. So it is going to be a major component for you to do, think, see, feel, understand, execute. As you read this, the breath is not playing a specific role. It is not playing any extraordinary role, but when you get into Marichyasana or Sirsasana, it is going to play a different role, a specific role.
Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, We’ve based this issue on “letting go.” As a culture, we’ve been inhaling and inhaling—building, growing, acquiring, accumulating, hoarding, and holding on—and now, with the economic downturn, we find opportunities to exhale. We hope this issue will support this sometimes uncomfortable but ultimately releasing and joyful shift.
So the breath altogether is not the breath. I have said that the breath gets the body aspects and factors into it. The breath gets the mind aspects into it. If you want to activate the body, suppose I plaster your entire body, all limbs are plastered, what kind of activity can you carry out? So we want the mind to be active. If the mind has to be active, the mind must have joints, the mind must have muscles. The body requires muscles, joints, and joint mechanisms to activate or be in an activity. Similarly, for the mind to be active, it requires similar such things like joint mechanisms, muscles, etc. The breath, too, should be active, so the breath needs to have joints and mechanisms, etc. There are body–mind aspects, which are transmitted into each other, transforming each other. I have expressed it this way, that the breath is bodyfied, the breath is mindified; the body is breathified, the body is mindified; the mind is bodyfied, the mind is breathified. So it becomes a composite material.
Many thanks to my co-editors Pat Musburger and Richard Jonas, to designer Don Gura and copyeditor Alexandra Anderson, and especially to our writers, who have put heart and soul into their work.
Exhalation means the expiratory act of the breath. There is an exhalative body, there is an exhalative mind in an asana….
Warm regards, Constance Braden Samachar Content Editor
Exhalation means the expiratory act of the breath. There is an exhalative body, there is an exhalative mind in an asana, that will not be taken into perspective if you say that exhalation means gaseous emission from the lungs or the abdominal cavity through the nostrils out. There is something like an inhalative body in an asana, an inhalative mind in an asana, also. Try to watch and understand your body in an asana, how the muscles, bones, joints are, exhalatively and inhalatively. In Tadasana, you don’t just stand by your biomechanical actions. The exhalation and inhalation are going to contribute for transformations in it. There is an exhalative body and tissue culture which is different from the inhalative body. The breath is not merely an element of air going in and coming out. In an asana, the exhalation has a different role because it has body aspects and factors and mind aspects and factors. 3
Spring / Summer 2009 Yoga Samachar
