Yogis ahead of science: What yogis knew before science caught up
In 2023, a study published in Cell Reports Medicine opened with this line: “Controlled breathwork practices have emerged as potential tools for stress management and well-being.” A statement like this would make any yoga practitioner smile. “Emerged?” Like this is a new discovery?!
In this study, a team at Stanford asked 108 people to spend five minutes a day on a breathing practice for one month. Three groups practiced different types of breath regulation, and a fourth group did mindfulness meditation. The scientists write: “We show that breathwork, especially the exhale-focused cyclic sighing, produces greater improvement in mood (p < 0.05) and reduction in respiratory rate (p < 0.05) compared with mindfulness meditation.” (1) Anyone who has spent time on a yoga mat could have told them that. Lengthening the exhale to settle down is one of the oldest instructions in pranayama.
The nasal cycle is another example. Most of us breathe more freely through one nostril than the other, and the dominant side switches every few hours. Western medicine began documenting this in the 1890s. Yogic texts had been describing it, and building breathing practices around it, long before that.
There are many, many other examples of phenomena that yogis figured out long before the scientists did. How did yogis get there first? They had no labs or brain scans. What they had was time, attention and their own bodies. Generations of practitioners sat, breathed and observed, then passed on what they had learned. It was a long-running experiment with the practitioner serving as both researcher and subject.
Many observations that yogis made about the body, breath, energy and mind are turning out to be remarkably accurate. Again and again, science arrives at the same or similar conclusions using other tools. The scientific method brings something the tradition lacked: the ability to test, quantify and explain, in scientific language, the mechanisms behind what we feel. It’s always exciting to see where the two approaches meet. When centuries of observation and modern measurement describe the same thing in different languages, we can trust it much more.
Patanjali offered a test for this kind of trust. Yoga Sutra 1.7, pratyakṣa anumāna āgamāḥ pramāṇāni, can be loosely translated as “information is considered trustworthy when three kinds of proof converge: direct experience, inference and authoritative testimony.” In other words, a piece of information is much more likely to be true if we can feel it in our own body, it makes logical sense, and reliable sources confirm it. Our yoga practice gives us the first proof, our ability to reason gives us the second, and traditional texts and research provide the third.
Knowing the science also changes how we practice. When we know that a long exhale slows our heart rate, or that a few minutes of left-nostril breathing cools the system, we can reach for these techniques when we need them.
Over the next few weeks, we will look at phenomena that yogis discovered and passed down, and that science is confirming today. We will use Patanjali’s system of three proofs to evaluate each one. You will get a chance to try them out and decide for yourself whether they work. Tune in!
References
- Yilmaz Balban, M., Neri, E., Kogon, M. M., et al. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine, 4(1), 100895. [link]
