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Author: telecaster

I think you are on the wrong forum for specific questions about "yogic breath." I am sure there are hatha yoga sites that can answer that.
This site is mostly people helping each other get stream entry and beyond and in those practices, usually, the breath is observed just as it is, with no manipulation such as the "yogic breath."

For what it's worth, I was taught variations of breathing for chi kung... You really need a teacher to help you out on this stuff, not just someone on the internet. But just for your thinking, here's an important point. If the goal is natural breathing, I was taught that you don't do anything. Natural breathing just happens, the body knows what to do. Belly breathing (belly expands on in breath) is what happens when you breathing naturally at rest. You do this naturally when you sleep. It is the baby's breath. The only hard part is just settling down and letting the body do its thing.

Hope that helps.

By the way, I saw your other posts on a the 'help with grounding' thread... I don't know what system you are practicing, but It does seem like there is a similar concern of trying to push ahead with progress while being a little unclear on the instructions, and yet still trying to ground/relax.

Please don't push ahead unless you know what you are doing or have a teacher that can help you through it. Okay? You'll just waste your time. If you don't understand 100%, then chances are you will just be building bad habits that will take even longer to correct. Good luck!

A few thoughts about the breath: by "natural" breath we mean the breath just as it is, functional, dysfunctional, or otherwise. It is well known in a variety of medical and/or healing systems that the breath can become pathological in a variety of ways, but by natural breath we mean whatever it is that we've got, that is what we work with.

In applying a simple introductory practice of "Mindfulness of Breathing" (or should it be called Remembering the Breath) the Anapanasati Sutta whatever it is we got is just observed, so yes, this is the mind observing the body. What is interesting is that in performing this simple practice, the breath begins to move to the more subtle and functional mode automatically, as though it were an experiment in quantum mechanics. Try it.

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If you want to get unconfused about yogic full breath try swimming a mile or so and sprint the last few laps. Or try timing yourself underwater see if you can stay under 2-4 minutes. You'll get full yogic breath right away. And it will be a completely normal, natural reaction too.

The idea as I remember it is that in our stressed-out mechanically oriented dysfunctional pathological way we tend to breathe only a partial exhale, then we suck in the next inhale before the exhale is complete. People with post traumatic stress syndrome are the canaries in the mine shaft on this one, they usually experience this worst of all, but it is true of most of us to normally exhibit some dysfunction. The yogic approach is to regulate autonomic functions, but what I suggest is quite the opposite. When you apply mindfulness/remembering/memory/sati to the breathing just as you already breathe, it changes into something else. As you move the mind to a more subtle activity, the breath moves with it. This forms a positive feedback loop that result in extraordinary relaxing mental states. The breath will eventually bottom out, the exhalation will get to completion. And all this is without using one iota of force or control.

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