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Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois were teaching this
long before science had the language to explain it.
And yet… almost no one teaches us how to breathe.
We think we’re breathing,
until one day,
we finally really breathe.
And it hits you:
you’ve been living in a kind of silent apnea.
Holding air,
holding tension,
holding responsibilities,
holding everything you never had time to feel.
Breathing fast and shallow,
as if your body was always slightly on alert.
In Monterrey, that almost feels normal.
Everything runs fast here:
traffic, deadlines, ideas, life itself.
If you don’t keep up, you get left behind.
And without noticing,
your breath starts sprinting with everything else.
I often catch myself breathing like I’m in a hurry…
even when I’m completely still.
As if my body never got the memo
that it’s allowed to rest.
But no one ever explains what it actually means to breathe well.
What “good breathing” really is.
Breathing well isn’t “taking in more air.”
It’s not lifting your chest.
Breathing well means:
Breathing through your nose,
so the air arrives warm, filtered, and rich in nitric oxide
(a molecule that opens your airways and calms your nervous system).
Breathing slowly,
so your brain understands: “we’re not in danger.”
Breathing deeply,
not into your chest —that’s where urgency lives—
but into your diaphragm, beneath the lungs.
Breathing with rhythm,
inhaling and exhaling without force,
without holding,
without fighting the air.
Breathing with presence,
feeling yourself from the inside,
not letting your mind run ahead while your body stays behind.
And in yoga, breath means even more:
In yoga, the breath leads.
The movement follows.
You don’t move and then breathe.
You breathe… and then you move.
Inhalation creates space.
Exhalation releases it.
The breath is the engine.
The movement is the echo.
When you’re not breathing,
the posture stops being a posture—
it becomes just a shape.
Yoga begins
when the breath becomes conscious.
Because it’s the breath—not strength, not flexibility—
that builds the posture from the inside out.
The breath regulates your nervous system as you move.
It turns the practice from effort into presence,
from tension into ease,
from ego into essence.
You can do the most advanced posture,
but if you’re holding your breath,
your system is in threat mode.
Yoga isn’t a collection of shapes.
It’s a way of training your mind
through something as simple as inhaling and exhaling.
That’s why yogis say:
“Where the breath goes, the mind follows.
Where the mind goes, your life follows.”
In yoga, an entire limb of the practice is devoted to the breath.
We call it pranayama:
the study and practice of intentional breathing
used to:
regulate your vital energy (prana),
steady your mind,
balance your nervous system,
refine your attention and presence.
In classical texts
—like the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and Light on Pranayama—
pranayama is described as the doorway between body and mind,
the bridge where true transformation happens.
It’s not just how you breathe,
but what changes inside you when you breathe that way.
It’s the foundation of every style of yoga,
even though each tradition uses different techniques depending on the intention:
- to calm (diaphragmatic breathing, long exhales)
- to focus (ujjayi)
- to cleanse (kapalabhati)
- to balance the hemispheres (nadi shodhana)
- to energize (bhastrika)
All of this lives under pranayama.
And among all the techniques,
in dynamic practices
—Vinyasa, Rocket, Ashtanga, Power Yoga—
there’s one breath that centers you, warms you, and focuses you:
Ujjayi.
Imagine fogging up a mirror saying “haaa,”
now do it with your mouth closed.
That soft sound you hear inside—
that’s ujjayi.
In the back of your throat,
there’s a little “gateway” called the glottis.
You gently narrow it,
just enough to control the flow of air,
and that creates the ocean-like sound.
That control slows the air down.
That sound helps you:
stay in rhythm,
warm the body from within,
keep your mind steady,
avoid panic in challenging postures,
and regulate your nervous system.
Without that soft sound, your practice is exercise.
With it, your practice becomes moving meditation.
And the beautiful thing is:
ujjayi doesn’t stay on the mat.
The way you breathe in a difficult posture
becomes the way you breathe
when life feels heavy outside.
Because breath doesn’t just change your practice—
it changes your entire day.
Off the mat, that breath is there when:
You’re driving and feel stress rising,
— ujjayi slows your internal speed.
You’re about to cry on a hard day,
— a long exhale tells your body: “you’re safe.”
You wake up with anxiety for no clear reason,
— diaphragmatic breathing warms and steadies your heart.
Your mind is spinning with a thousand thoughts,
— the sound of ujjayi anchors you: “one thing at a time.”
You feel disconnected from yourself,
— returning to your breath brings you back into your body.
Your day moves so fast you don’t realize
you haven’t taken one real breath,
— two or three conscious breaths
can reset your entire system.
Breath is that reminder you can carry anywhere:
in the car, in line at the store, during a hard conversation,
in the pause before saying something you don’t mean,
in the moment that saves you from reacting on autopilot.
That’s why ujjayi (and any mindful breath)
isn’t just a technique:
it’s a way of coming back to yourself,
again and again,
wherever you are.
My life changed the day I understood
the body calms long before the mind does.
That if you guide your breath,
your mind follows.
And the way you breathe on the mat
trains the way you live off the mat.
Because every inhale is a kind of rehearsal—
a reminder of how you want to exist outside the practice.
And every exhale is a chance to release something
you no longer need to hold.
Breath teaches you to live with more pause,
more clarity,
more honesty.
And when you learn to breathe like that on the mat,
you start breathing like that in your life.
You notice it in the small things:
how you move through a difficult day,
the patience you never used to have,
the tightness in your chest that no longer rules you,
the thoughts that no longer sweep you away.
Your breath does that.
It accompanies you.
It holds you.
It brings you back.
And once I understood this,
my practice shifted completely:
The postures that scared me the most
weren’t solved with strength.
They were solved with breath.
Breath taught me to stay.
Not to run from myself.
Not to shut down when something hurts.
To feel without collapsing.
To realize I can be in difficult places
without disappearing on the inside.
Breath became the bridge
between what was happening inside me
and how I responded outside.
And then I learned something deeper:
Breath doesn’t change the posture.
It changes the person inside the posture.
It changes how you meet discomfort.
How you inhabit your body.
How you respond to life.
Breath makes you softer where you were rigid,
more present where you had gone missing,
more honest where you hid,
more conscious where you lived on autopilot.
And maybe that’s the most beautiful part:
The most powerful tool you have
doesn’t depend on flexibility,
or strength,
or how “good” your postures look.
It depends on something
you’ve carried with you since the beginning.
Your breath.
Your first home.
Your first pause.
Your first medicine.
Your first “come back to yourself.”
Because every conscious breath wakes you up a little.
Brings you back a little.
Reveals a little more of who you are.
And that’s when yoga stops being something you do
and becomes something you are.
Breathe.
Return.
Come home.
Here we meet—
one breath at a time.
