Pranayama

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Pranayama is the yogic discipline of regulating the breath. The Sanskrit compound joins prana — breath, and beyond breath the vital force that traditions hold animates the body — with a second term read either as ayama, extension or lengthening, or as a negated yama, restraint. Both readings have a long history, and together they name what the practice does: it draws the breath out, holds it, and reins it in.

In the classical system codified in the Yoga Sutras attributed to Patanjali, pranayama is the fourth of eight limbs, set after posture and before the inward-turning stages of concentration and meditation. The text defines it tersely as the cutting-off of the motion of breathing in and breathing out, and describes the discipline in terms of the inhalation, the exhalation, and the retention between them, measured by place, time, and number. Stilling the breath, in this account, is a step toward stilling the mind — the two were understood to move together, so that to quiet one was to quiet the other.

Hatha yoga, the medieval body-centered tradition whose manuals include the Hathayogapradipika, gave pranayama a more elaborate and physiological role. There the breath techniques — alternate-nostril regulation, the several named retentions, the locks that seal the breath within the trunk — are held to purify the nadis, the channels through which the vital force was believed to travel, and to rouse the latent power called kundalini up the central channel of the subtle body. These texts treat the work with care and some warning: practiced wrongly, the manuals caution, the breath disorders rather than heals.

What scholarship can establish is the textual and historical shape of the practice — its terms, its codification in the Sutras and the hatha manuals, its transmission and later spread. The physiology of channels and vital force belongs to the traditions’ own account of the body, an account those who practiced took as describing something real. Modern yoga, in its global forms, has carried pranayama far from those settings, sometimes keeping the classical vocabulary and sometimes recasting the techniques as breathing exercises for health or calm.

Across its versions the discipline rests on one observation, plainly made and easily checked: the breath is the one bodily rhythm that runs on its own yet answers to the will, and so offers a handle on states that otherwise lie beyond reach. The traditions diverge widely in what they built on that single observation, which is the one thing all of them share.

→ In the library: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (Johnston, 1912) · The Hathayogapradipika (Sinh, 1914)

→ Related: Hatha Yoga