Breathing / Rishi's Opinion

Meditationtime Forum Post

Date:  Posted 5 years before Apr 06, 2017

MiBeloved 5 years ago

During exercises this morning Rishi Singh Gherwal mentioned another verse from Patanjali Yoga sutras. This verse is used as a quote in the Anu Gita which I am now translating and which more or less is Rishi Singh’s book with me as a ghost writer. Of course people will feel that I am the author, because he is deceased and hardly anybody is going to buy into the idea of a deceased person dictating a book into the head of somebody on the living side of existence.

Anyway here is the verse from Yoga Sutras:

tasmin satiśvāsa praśvāsayoḥ

gativicchedaḥ prāṇāyāmaḥ

Once this is accomplished, breath regulation, which is the separation of the flow of inhalation and exhalation, is attained. (Yoga Sūtras 2.49)

Rishi said that this means that if the body has sufficient breath energy, the breathing process will occur with a short respite between the in-breath and out-breath except that the breath will go down to the very bottom cells in the lung.

In normal breathing there might or might not be a respite between the in-breath and out-breath but in either case, the air never gets to the very bottom of the lung. There is only top breathing, where air reaches the top 1/3 of the lung and the alveoli which are in the central part of that top part.

If one can train the lungs to use all of the absorption cells, then one would be doing this pranayama practice. Rishi claims that top breathing results in lack of access to the extremities for the life force. And this causes deficient energy in many parts of the physical and subtle bodies, which result is gasping for breath or in normal shallow breathing. Human beings are disinclined to helping the lung system since their intuition is that the body should work perfectly by itself and should maintain itself.