Playing Polarity

I often hear or read in yoga forums phrases along the lines of "I don't like doing breathwork," "I don't see any benefit," "I feel anxious when I do breathwork," "breathwork is uncomfortable."

I have great compassion for this. I felt the same way at one point in my yoga journey. I liked the deep, steady, slow belly breathing but all of the rest of it seemed silly at best and pointlessly irritating at worst. I didn't take much time to investigate my feelings or experiences with pranayama (breathwork) I just knew it wasn't for me. 

Teachers sniffing rapidly out their noses, slamming their belly back, alternate nostril breathing, practices with arms flapping. It all seemed a little absurd. I played along in group classes but I was resistant and uncomfortable. 

Lucky for me often when I don't like something it sparks my curiosity and I'm just stubborn enough to keep going. I figured that even if I didn't "like" it there must be a reason it was so popular and had stood the test of time. 

20+ years into my yoga journey I've had time to digest, assimilate, study, and build my relationship with breathwork. And what I found pretty early on is that the reason I didn't like it was because it was uncomfortable. And that discomfort was similar to the  discomfort I once felt in quiet yoga classes, slow classes, and in meditation. 

What do these things have in common? They require steadiness. And they put us squarely at the center of ourselves. 

They make us more aware of how and who we are right now. We get UP CLOSE and personal with ourselves.

If you’re anxious, well now the anxiety is elevated because you’ve built this thing called interoception. Interoception is awareness of your interior experience and state. 

You were anxious and now on top of that you’re AWARE you’re anxious. It’s intimacy with your subjective state. AKA how YOU experience yourself. Breath work, yoga, mediation makes us aware of how we already feel. And for many of us that is not what we want. We want pleasure. We want to avoid, move away from ourselves. Look for the “cure” in a cocktail, another workout, loud music, anything to pull our senses and experience outward.

Breathwork is always present. It's movement. It demands you be now, here, with you. 

Breathwork like Kapalbhati (skull shining breath) with it's forceful exhalations, pulls you up into your head (hence the name), it can make you feel spacey and anxious, up and out. What we experience when we play this game is what it is to ascend a mountain. Where the air gets thin. It's an act of seducing ourselves out of our habits. And playing our anxieties. It's to throw the windows open to your house and to clear things out. Stay there too long and you'll be high strung, ungrounded, flighty. 

When we play the game of belly breathing we slow down, sink in, play our depths. Stay here too long and you're a stick in the mud, there's no fire under your ass, and no vision. 

We play the polarities to put ourselves at the center of our circumference and our circumstances. We play the polarities to learn to mediate. 

There's lots of physiological reasons to do those seemingly weird breath practices. The benefits are well-documented and a quick review of medical literature will pull up a wealth of studies of varying degrees of quality showing the power of breath. Breathe slowly through your nose while you're learning and memory and recall is increased. Studies of hyperoxygenation practices (forceful inhalation practices like the now famous Wim Hof techniques, bastrika "bellows breath") are linked to speedier recovery from acute injury. The list goes on. Pranayama is alchemical. It works with our chemistry. And those hyperoxygenation techniques and various other mechanisms have very real impacts on our bodies.

But all of that aside these are tools for occupying ourselves, for giving ourselves a kick in the pants when that is required, to slow down when the tension is high.

We learn and train our bodies to alternate at will between states of hyper-stimulation (sympathetic branch of the nervous system) and stimulation of our rest and digest mechanism (parasympathetic branch of the nervous system). 

Having a tough conversation? There's breath for that. 

Overheated? There's breath for that. 

Too cold? There's breath for that. 

And perhaps most critically breath work teaches us to gently, compassionately over time press into discomfort. To ascend the mountain, to flush the heat, to stay in something that is not intuitive. 

As my teacher Abbie Galvin says "all real practice is counter-intuitive." Otherwise it's your lunar, first nature. Practice is scholastic, scholarly, it's your educated self, it's you overcoming patterning and habitual tendency to occupy more of your potential. Every time you move against the grain you invite possibility. 

Keep practicing and in time you will learn to soothe your own soul, to cool yourself down, to heat yourself up, to play the polarities of being spun out and being a total stick in the mud.

Your body is a house and if it's too hot or too cold it won't be a nice place to live. So light a candle, seduce yourself, and do your practice. Every time we move against our habits we get more access to ourselves. 

You play polarity and you create a trinity by putting yourself in the middle. Now you have a relationship. Now you have a conversation.

When you learn to play in extremes and mediate the center and BE with you THEN you have options.  And when you have options you’re very powerful. And then you’re the magician.

This is how we invite fluency to let things in and let things out and hold at our center. We build a relationship with wildness. With quiet. With our anxious self. 

The best part about breathwork is perhaps how sneaky it is. I can quietly curl my tongue and sip gently through my tongue and cool off in the middle of a store and no one will know. I can take two sniffs through my nose and a long exhale three times and turn down the anxiety via my phrenic nerve. Magic. 

Next time you want to run away maybe try leaning in. Do you loathe slower yoga and breathwork? Or do you loathe being that quiet with YOU? I know it's a harsh question. It's one I ask myself a lot. And it's worth inquiring. Next time you practice turn down the music and be soothed by the sound of your breath. Ride that oceanic wave deeper into your implicit self and see what's there.

Perhaps come to breathwork with the whole of yourself, mind, body, imagination, and see what games you can learn to play. 

This Saturday join me for a free Katonah Yoga™ Pranayama practice at 9am MT time and explore these maps of the self. Register for class here

To practice another day enter code FREECLASS to book a live-session or download an On-Demand Class.