Pranayama: where yoga's breathing practices come from

What the word means

Pranayama joins prana, breath, with ayama. Sanskrit dictionaries don't settle on one reading. Macdonell defines it as the suspension of breath, and Apte translates ayama as to restrain, control or stop. That's why you'll see it rendered as breath control, breath regulation or breath retention.

Later manuals split each breath into three parts: puraka, the inhale; kumbhaka, the hold; and rechaka, the exhale. Of the three, the hold is the one the texts put at the center.

Before Patanjali: hints, not a method

In Roots of Yoga (2017), James Mallinson and Mark Singleton write that before about 500 BCE there is very little evidence of systematic techniques of the kind later called yoga. They do point to hints: the Atharva Veda, from around 1000 BCE, mentions practices that may be forerunners of breath retention, and the Jaiminiya Upanishad Brahmana, from about 800 to 600 BCE, teaches repeating a mantra together with control of the breath.

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad asks for a single vow tied to the breath (1.5.23), and the Bhagavad Gita speaks of offering one breath into the other and restraining both (4.29). The Pali Canon says that the Buddha, before his awakening, tried forcibly holding his breath and found it painful and no help toward his goal. These are scattered mentions, with no instructions anyone could follow.

The Yoga Sutras: five lines

Patanjali's Yoga Sutras list pranayama as the fourth of yoga's eight limbs and give it five aphorisms, 2.49 through 2.53. The first defines it: once posture is steady, pranayama is cutting off or regulating the movement of the inhale and the exhale. The next ones say the breath is observed by place, time and number until it becomes long and subtle, and mention a fourth kind that goes beyond the others. The last two describe the result: whatever covers the inner light thins out, and the mind becomes fit for concentration.

That's all. No named techniques, no nostrils, no ratios. The date isn't certain either: proposals run from 500 BCE to 450 CE, and later dates are now preferred. Philipp Maas places the text with its commentary at about 400 CE.

Hatha yoga fills in the details

The named techniques show up centuries later, in the hatha yoga manuals. The best known is the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, which Svatmarama put together in the 15th century as a compilation of earlier texts. Mallinson has identified eight early works that may have fed into it.

Its second chapter opens with an idea people still quote: when the breath is disturbed, the mind is disturbed. It teaches alternating nostrils to clean the nadis, the body's channels in yoga's own map, and names eight kumbhakas, among them ujjayi, sitali, bhastrika and bhramari. The aim is a hold that no longer needs an inhale or an exhale, and the purpose is liberation, not calm. The same text asks you to go slowly, the way a lion, an elephant or a tiger is tamed, and warns that practice done wrong makes people sick.

The Gheranda Samhita, probably from the late 17th century and from northeast India, arranges yoga in seven parts across 351 verses.

The 20th century: lab, classroom and book

Swami Kuvalayananda (1883-1966) began researching yoga in 1920 and in 1924 founded Kaivalyadhama, in Lonavala, along with the journal Yoga Mimamsa. Among other things, the center measured how much oxygen yogis used while practicing pranayama. Singleton describes the journal as part scientific review, part illustrated practice manual.

Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888-1989) taught in Mysore, where his school opened in 1933 and closed in 1950, and later in Madras. He stressed joining breath with movement. His students included Indra Devi, Pattabhi Jois, his son Desikachar and his brother-in-law B. K. S. Iyengar. His own accounts of his life contradict each other, so parts of his biography are disputed.

Iyengar (1918-2014) published Light on Yoga in 1966 and Light on Pranayama in 1981, a whole book on the yogic art of breathing. He asked that pranayama be taken up only on top of an established practice and with an experienced teacher.

Where scholars disagree

• How old it is. Mallinson and Singleton call it entirely speculative to claim, as several popular writers have, that the Vedas show systematic yoga practice.
• Patanjali's place. The same authors argue that his text is not the foundation of all yoga but a partisan work, one that adopted techniques from ascetics outside the Vedic world, such as the early Buddhists.
• What pranayama meant. The scholar Andrea Jain, drawing on Johannes Bronkhorst, writes that in the Gita and the Sutras it meant the complete cessation of breathing, not breathing exercises.

What reaches this page

Several breathings on this site come out of that history: Alternate nostril breathing (nadi shodhana), Ujjayi, the ocean breath and Bhramari, the bee breath. All three are gentle and good places to start. The 1-4-2 ratio, in for 4, hold for 16, out for 8, is a different matter: a long hold, for experienced adults, done sitting down and built up gradually.

The seconds are modern. The tradition counted differently and taught with a person in the room. What you'll find here are breathing exercises, not a spiritual path and not a treatment. If you have a heart, lung or blood pressure condition, or you're pregnant, check with your care provider first.