Pranayama or Yoga Breathing is Now Official Prescription for Preventing and
Reversing Heart Disease

Yes, yoga breathing (pranayama) is now officially recognized and recommended for prevention of coronary heart disease in most of medical text books and health journals.

You can live without food and water, probably, for several days. But, without breath your body can not live even a few minutes. Body can not store oxygen unlike food, water and other nutrients. Breath – oxygen – gives spark to all body cells to create energy form food.

Medical science accepts that pranayama of yogic breathing makes oxygen delivery to body more efficient and is a wonderful stress buster.

'Prana' - The Essence of Life

Over the centuries yogis have maintained that besides delivering ‘tangible’ (measurable) oxygen – breath is the medium of circulating prana in the micro-cosmos of body.

But medical science stops at ‘oxygen’. Science can not study and measure ‘prana’ in laboratory, so it keeps silent on this vital claim of yogis.

'Prana' means the vital force - the factor that makes the difference of being alive and dead. Someone who has just died has all the organs and cells. You can keep pushing oxygen too – but in vein. It lacks something vital. Yogis call that factor – PRANA – the essence of life.

Yoga breathing techniques help in perfusing the whole body with oxygen and prana. Practicing good breathing exercises will benefit you with both oxygen and prana, if the other one exists.

So let us leave ‘prana’ debate, without leaving the ‘prana’ benefit. Let us enjoy magical benefits of 'prana' by simply learning to do different pranayam exercises.Besides purifying the blood and enriching it with life-giving oxygen, a yoga breathing helps you with inculcation of mindfulness. You need not be an automobile engineer to learn to drive the best car on the planet.

Your body-mind is the best computer this planet has ever seen. It is naturally intelligent. This body has survival strategy of billions years of successful evolutional encoded in its genome and biological intelligence. But most of it is unconscious.

You are conscious only of what day is today, whom you are supposed to meat, what is the target for the month – all external things.

When it comes to your internal environment you are blissfully ignorant of your bodily needs, challenges and capacities.

You overeat – because you don’t know when you have eaten enough, you look up to specialists to tell you what food and how much to eat. How much water to drink, what exercise to do, how to sleep, how to enjoy sex…

Oh, the list is long enough to help you realize that you are cut off from your internal biological intelligence. Much of what really matters lies in your unconscious zone.

Your breathing is at the border-zone between your conscious and unconscious mind.

Normally - in your day to day experience – you breathe without being conscious of regular in and out flow of breath. Is it not?

Most of us tend to have very shallow and hurried breath that robs us of much benefit that a deeper abdominal breathing can offer. But the moment you want - you can consciously influence your breathing. You can breath lot more deeper and slower. Your breathing is influenced in a major way by your mood, haste and stress in your body.

By conscious and mindful control of your breathing you are reclaiming your knowing-ness of what life-secrets lie in the unconscious mind at this. Yoga, pranayam and mindfulness of meditation may provide you the door to connect with your intuition and your own body intelligence.

Swami Ram was such an example. He demonstrated it to scientific, skeptical observers. He could control his blood pressure and beating of his heart at will. He demonstrated that feet not to prove his superman capability. He brought it to light to awake all of us to this un-fathomed and unclaimed inner territory – the inner wisdom for a happy and healthy wholesome living.

Listen to this couplet from 'Hath Yoga Pradipika':

“When the Breath wanders, the mind is unsteady, but when your Breath is still, so is your mind."

Yoga breathing or pranayam is conscious awareness and control of your breathing. Certain yoga breathing exercises are found to be specifically helpful in preventing heart disease and reversing blocks in coronary arteries.

Following pranayam (yogic breathing) exercises are recommended for your heart:

• Alternative nostril or Anulom-Vilom exercise.

• Kapal Bhati

• Brahmari or Nasal Snoring

• Sitkari

• Sithali

It is easy to learn and practice these breathing exercises. One thing that you need is the commitment to begin. Just few minutes of yoga breathing everyday can powerfully complement your comprehensive lifestyle change program that includes changes in dietary and physical activity patterns for reversing your heart disease and preventing a pending heart attack.

But, as usual, you are suggested to check with your physician before you make any lifestyle changes.

From Yoga Breathing go to Home Page