Box breathing—Or boxed in?
With the internet—and particularly social media—any idea can become a trend in days or even hours. Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot about a yoga technique called box breathing or square breath (which yogis know as sama vritti pranayama). Box breathing, according to Web MD, has a wide range of positive and desirable effects:
- It can help you cope with panic and stress when you’re feeling overwhelmed.
- It can help you to sleep when you are dealing with insomnia.
- It can help to control hyperventilation, as you can “instruct” your lungs to breathe rhythmically.
- It lowers blood pressure and decreases cortisol (a stress hormone), which can improve your mood.
These and similar claims about box breathing are now ubiquitous in cyberspace, and they often come with a how-to. These instructions are usually simple, such as breathe in for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, breathe out for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, then repeat. (The count varies among sources.) Kristine Weber, C-IAYT, recently covered box breathing on her blog, and lots of folks commented about how the technique had induced anxiety, not calm. As Weber details, any one person’s breathing is subtle and complex, and learning to manipulate it takes skill, practice, and time:
[P]eople need different things. Your breathing pattern is a reflection of your biography. It is influenced by your genes, epigenetics (whether or not certain genes have been turned on), disease processes, your mental health, your mood in the moment, your environment, your culture, your sleep, the quality of the air you breathe, and more. So putting everyone into the same box for breathing is not taking any of those factors into account. Like everything about human beings, breath is biopsychosocial-spiritual. And a breathing practice should take your own personal, rich history into account.
In Light on Pranayama, a well-known yoga text on breathing practices, the instructions for sama vritti pranayama are 18 steps long and only gradually work toward the four-part breath so often shared on the internet as the starting point of box breathing. To understand more about this kind of breathing practice—and why you need a well-trained guide to help you get the most from it—visit Weber’s post, “Please Don’t Put the Breath in a Box.”
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Could expand on your statement that “if you know how to help folks prepare the respiratory musculature through asanas, they are going to have better breathing experiences.
The kind of asanas you will do depend on the breathing practice you are working up to. When your respiratory muscles are prepared with asanas, then the breathing practice is going to be significantly more effective”? It makes perfect sense, but I’ve never seen this practiced or taught specifically.
Hi Joy, Thank you so much for the great question! So, the way that I teach yoga and have studied yoga therapy, a la Viniyoga, is that asana prepare us for pranayama. So, for example, let’s say you want to practice a more relaxing or letting go kind of pranayama, like a simple long exhale ratio, then you are going to want to prepare the musculature that helps you exhale. We can’t easily get to the diaphragm (which is technically more fascia than it is muscles anyway), additionally, exhalation is largely a passive process. But, if we really want to explore a fully exhalation, we we can get to the secondary musculature of exhalation – the internal intercostals and abdominals muscles. Twist poses and forward bends assist in accessing those muscles. So an asana practice that centers twist and forward bends may be quite helpful for that specific pranayama. And that’s just one example of a very beautiful and intricate science of yoga therapy!
I heartfully cheer your conviction (and Kristine Weber’s) that putting everyone if the same “box” for any kind of breath practice/pranayama beyond awareness and understanding of one’s natural breath and practices to develop awareness of breathing aspects (the 4 parts of a breath, shape change, rate ,volume, smoothness, etc). Unless the teacher/guide/therapist has worked with the person – for all the reasons that you list – it’s just not appropriate. I’m not even a big fan of adding a pranayama session into group asana classes. Breathing cues while teaching asana (breath in support of asana) are very important but that is not the same as teaching asana in support of the breath.
Thank you for the opportunity to share thoughts.
Thank you for your comments! We hope to inspire people to share their thoughts and hopefully build community around shared interests in yoga therapy.