Breathe to Live: Yoga for Energy and Vitality

When something unexpected or challenging happens in your life, you might feel as if you have lost control over what’s going on. This sense of powerlessness can manifest in all sorts of ways, from an urge to micromanage every little aspect of your life that you can control to just throwing your hands up in the air and hiding under the blanket to binge-watch Netflix. Neither of those helps long-term, but at least they provide some sort of distraction. This can also make you feel very small.

What can reliably help is connecting to your breath. Moving with the breath in your yoga practice and taking time to observe and regulate your breath throughout the day can give you both a sense of inner spaciousness and show you that you have some control over your physical and mental state. How you feel emotionally is intimately linked to how you feel physiologically. And how you feel physiologically depends on how well you care for the body and how accurately you interpret the signals that the body sends you. That’s why, to feel better mentally and physiologically, we need to properly manage the three pillars of our physiological health (stress, sleep, energy) AND develop deep awareness of our interception (sensations within our bodies). The most direct path into both of those realms is our breath.

It’s a pretty well-known fact that breath regulation is the most obvious way to control our sympathetic (“fight-and-flight) and parasympathetic (“rest-and-digest”) balance, which directly impacts our stress response, sleep patterns, and energy levels. And breath awareness is the most obvious way to get insights about what’s happening inside our bodies (interoception).

To your brain, there is very little difference between what it perceives from the outside world (via the senses) and what it perceives inside your body (via interoception). Your brain is constantly involved in explaining your inner state and then projecting that inner state into your reality. When you feel balanced and calm, the world seems sunnier, food tastes better, people are friendlier, body aches are not bothersome, and things are generally looking up. When you feel out of balance and cranky, the world seems to conspire against you; nothing goes smoothly, the body is a wreck, people are mean, nobody cares about you, and the world is coming to an end.

Your whole worldview is based on how you feel inside, which is mostly based on how your mind interprets your physiological state. The key to living a happier, more balanced life is to keep your physiology in balance and to become better at interpreting the cues from your body. This doesn’t mean ignoring your reality but simply managing your response to it.

This is what Breathe to Live: Yoga for Energy and Vitality yoga series is about. It helps you develop better interoception through breath awareness and affect your physiological state with breath regulation.

In the Breathe to Live: Yoga for Energy and Vitality series you will get:

• 25 targeted yoga practices that are accessible to most practitioners,
• 30 articles on the modern understanding of the breathing process and how it relates to traditional yogic approach,
• 14 videos with a brief outline of the most important points for each chapter.

In this yoga series you will learn how to breathe more effectively to feel vital, resilient and strong. Here is a short video that gives you the series overview.

This yoga series takes you on a journey to get in touch with your breath and build a more intimate relationship with it. You will begin with breath awareness and then gradually learn how to use your breath to create specific energetic and physiological effects. Full-length yoga practices include both movement and breath work and teach you how to link them together. Short breathing practices help you familiarize yourself with individual yogic techniques and how to apply them to specific situations in your daily life. At the beginning of each chapter, you will see an introductory video that outlines the most important points of that chapter to help you maximize the effect of the practice. Each chapter also features an article (or several!) with reasoning for why we do what we do in our yoga practice and specific details to pay attention to. We recommend that you read the article first before you practice so that you have a better understanding of what each practice is supposed to accomplish.

You can do the practices included in this series in order or pick and choose the ones you need most. In each yoga practice, we will use movement, breath, and awareness to help you feel vital, resilient, and strong. Each short breathing practice is meant as a quick “snack” that you can reach for at any point during your day to reconnect to your breath and become more centered.

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