Pranamaya kosha
Without breath, we cease to exist and yet we spend very little of our time or attention understanding its healing power. Unless we’re in a yoga class. That’s our Work IN today, exploring pranamaya kosha, our energetic self, through the breath as a communication pathway between the body and the mind for stress and trauma healing. And practical ways to incorporate this understanding of our energetic self and our breath both on and off the mat.
Welcome back to our series on the koshas. Today we’re talking about the 2nd kosha.
Prana = Breath, vitality, energy, life. Maya (as we learned last week) = illusion Pranamaya kosha is all these and more. This layer of our self lies beneath our physical body and permeates all other layers.
The breath is one of the few things that are biologically necessary for our survival that we can consciously control but don’t have to. It has a direct influence, a direct line of communication with the autonomic nervous system and at the same time is a part of that system. I think of the breath as the string between 2 telephone cans. Did you ever talk to your friends that way as a kid? That was back in the day before cell phones. That string carries messages by its vibration. And in the body that vibration tells a story of either safety or threat.
When we breathe easy, effortlessly, when we’re calm, that message to the heart and lungs and muscles and digestive system and immune system, every system in the body gets the message that we are safe and secure. That tells all of our systems that we can go ahead and do any number of things. We could rest, take a nap, get close to another person, play, be creative, make friends, have fun, think big thoughts, solve problems etc.
When our breath starts to increase a little bit it tells all those systems that they need to pay attention. Something is going on that might be dangerous. The brain and body raises its alert level. Increasing our focus, decreasing our need for certain systems like digestion and reproduction, increasing readiness of the immune system. This isn’t a full on high alert but it is elevated.
When we are breathing very hard, very fast, or not at all, like during high intensity exercise or an actual fight or conflict, or we’re very afraid for any reason. The danger and threat switches get thrown on and off. Kind of like a fuse box. Cognitive function and speech shut off. Digestion, reproductive and endocrine systems, shut down. Heart rate increases as well as blood flow and tension to all the muscles. Immune response goes up for a time and then drops if we stay in this danger threat response too long. We can lash out in emotional dysregulation. Reacting first and apologizing or not later.
These extreme threat signals fire the same way if it’s a conflict with a coworker or if it’s an actual tiger chasing you down the street. They’re a hold over from our evolution. The body, just like your home, can blow a fuse in this state and get stuck there.
It’s not our fault, remember these are autonomic responses. Automatic. They are fast and they have to be in order to be effective for our survival. They fire before we can think. And often how we react or don’t react to these signals can become part of our identity. Who we believe ourselves to be. This is where we start to see some of the overlap between koshas.
The first overlap of course is that our physical body does the biological action of breathing. The body breaths. With or without our conscious control. That should tell us something. Anything that the body does for itself you can be pretty sure it's required for survival. Basically the body says “you can’t be trusted to do this for me, so I’m going to take care of it.” That’s pretty much the same conversation that repeats throughout the autonomic nervous system. But we know that there’s more going on than just the mechanical act of breathing in and breathing out. The breath and this energetic connection that makes us alive can’t be replicated. Take for example what happens when someone is catastrophically injured. Medicine can keep the body alive. Machines can make the body breathe and restart the heart beat. But there is something else, some other energetic connection required to “come back to life”. If nothing else this is evidence that we are not only more than our body but also more than our breath. It’s literally the breath of life. You can see an understanding of this concept repeated in our collective consciousness throughout art and literature. One comes to mind in the Narnia books by cs lewis when Aslan returns to Narnia and breathes life back into the animals who had been turned to stone.
Pranamaya kosha is this energetic layer that connects the body and its systems to deeper layers of our self.
It also overlaps with our next Kosha that we’ll go deeper into next week, and that is the mental layer, Manomaya kosha. Pranamaya kosha and the breath link the body and the mind through our emotions.
When any sensation arises in the body regardless of the source, the mind will try to create a meaning for it. That meaning is what we call emotion. Emotion has a biological source through neurotransmitters and neuromodulators and hormones. Those biochemical reactions create some kind of felt sense in the body that we notice. It might be a pleasurable, negative or neutral but it is an energetic charge. The mind (that mental layer) will give it a name and a category and then determine how we react to that emotion. I think of emotions as literally energy in motion because of that energetic charge and because they cause us to react in some way.
The good news is that these energetic messages both to and from the nervous system between our body and our mind are traveling through this prana, our breath. Through our breath we have the ultimate tool not only to reset our fuse box so to speak but also to begin to rewire our system for a more measured response to stress in the present moment as well as healing past traumas when they rise up.
How do we do that? Well in yoga we have pranayama, the breath practice which includes many different kinds of breathing techniques to direct our energy. Some raise energy and focus and others calm our energy. And they work because we can control how we breath in any gien moment.
Most of us take our breath pattern for granted. Like many other things we simply expect that because the body can do it by itself, then it must mean it always does it correctly. But that’s simply not true. The body (and the mind) is all about efficiency. But that means it does a lot of things by habit patterns. Those feel easy (and efficient) because they were learned. Probably early on.
Take for example running. Most of us can run. We might not want to. We might not have run since we were children but we could if we had to. But running is a skill. We see that because some people are really really good at it. That doesn’t mean they didn’t have to work at it, or that they were necessarily born knowing how to run with perfect form or eating perfectly or hydrating, etc.
Breathing is similar. If we’re alive we all breathe. Do we all use all of our lung capacity? Nope. Most people only use a fraction of their capacity. We tend to breathe in a very shallow way. Only into the top third of our lungs usually.
You can try this without changing anything about your breath, notice where your next inhale goes to in your lungs. Challenging, because I bet as soon as I said that you expanded your breath a bit. It’s ok. No judgment here. My point is that we have control of that and we know from more recent studies on the breath and both nervous system response and athletic recovery that there are some very effective breath patterns that can shift our stress response and boost our immune system and improve biological health.
Yogi’s have known this for thousands of years. But it's good when western science catches up.
So what are some of those breathing techniques?
I’m going to share a few of my favorites and why.
Bee’s breath - for the vibration
Ujayi breath + 3 part breath- for the physical practice
Lions breath - the energetic release
Breath of joy/ physiologic sigh - nervous system interruption
Box breathing - for the pace + to soothe the nervous system
Now you’ve been breathing how you breathe for your entire life. Your natural breathing pattern is or should be effortless for you. It’s not wrong. None of these techniques are designed to replace how you breathe, nor will they.
What they will do is raise your awareness of how you’re breathing. And just like all the other koshas, when we raise our conscious awareness we can change our experience and how we see ourselves and the world around us.
You may start to notice you’re holding your breath in certain situations. That was what happened for me. I started noticing that every time I got a notification on my phone I’d hold my breath and literally brace myself. That reaction in breath and body is a danger signal. And it was happening hundreds of times a day. When I noticed I made changes. I silenced notifications. And then looked for ways to actively replace that response every time it happened.
That’s just one example. You might notice your breath is quicker in certain situations or that you maybe run out of air when you’re trying to talk to someone, maybe because you’re nervous or uncertain.
That’s the kind of thing where any of these breathing practices can make a difference. You only need a few minutes of that to shift the nervous system. An emotion only lasts about 90 seconds. After that they need to be fed by our thoughts in order to hang around. Which we’ll get into next time when we talk about our mental layer.
I think the most important take away here with pranamaya kosha is that while it can easily become a part of how we identify ourselves through our emotional regulation or lack of it, it is so much more than that. It is a powerful energetic connection to our true self and a way for us to consciously soothe, heal ourselves from stress and trauma injury and build resilience in real time.
Next week we’ll dive into Manomaya kosha, our mental self. It’ll be a good one!
Thanks for listening!
If you're looking for ways to handle the effects of stress, physically, mentally and emotionally through the body head over to savagegracecoaching.com/theworkin you’ll find all the show notes for this and other episodes plus lots of free resources. And if you’re in a place where you are ready for more and you live in the Dayton Ohio area I’m taking private clients for trauma informed yoga and trauma release exercise in person and online. So book a discovery call and we can have a real life conversation. And of course I’d be ever so grateful if you would take a moment to like and subscribe to this podcast wherever you’re listening.
Thanks again everyone and as always stop working out and start working IN.
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