You probably had a weekend on pranayama. Maybe two. Then you were let loose to teach it, and nobody has watched you do it since.
That’s not a criticism of your training. There’s only so much a 200-hour course can carry, and breath loses out to asana because asana is what students turn up for. But it leaves us teaching breath from memory, and the parts we teach most confidently are usually just the parts we happened to remember best.
Brian Cooper, who co-founded YogaPros, learned pranayama in an ashram in Haridwar in the 1970s and wrote the whole account up in 2016. It’s worth having. The way it describes teaching breath has almost vanished, and it goes at the physiology rather than around it. What follows is that account turned into something you can teach from.
When to use this
- When you’re planning a term and deciding where breath sits inside the hour
- When a student asks why you don’t teach the fast breathing they’ve seen online
- After anybody has gone light-headed or had to sit down in one of your classes
- If you’ve taught breath the same way since your training and never gone back to check it
What the old teaching was actually aiming at
Cooper’s first lesson was a demonstration, not an explanation. One nostril blocked, a completely silent inhale that went on a very long time, then jalandhara bandha held considerably longer, then the lock released and a completely silent exhale. One round took over five minutes.
Everything after that was about making the breath smaller. There’s a traditional measurement for it: a fine thread of cotton held in front of the nose, and you watch for the point where it stops moving. Cooper’s teacher used a licked palm held near the nose instead, because you can feel the coolness of the breath on wet skin. It took months before that palm could touch the tip of the nose and register nothing at all.
The aim was for the breath to stay inside the nostrils. Imperceptible.
Now hold that next to what most of us were taught to teach. Deep breathing. Big breathing. Audible ujjayi filling the room. All of it heading the other way.
The Hatha Yoga Pradipika isn’t subtle about the risk:
“Just as lions, elephants and tigers are controlled by and by, so the breath is controlled by slow degrees, otherwise it kills the practitioner himself”
Most of us can quote that. Fewer of us built a class around it.
The one thing carbon dioxide explains
If you take one piece of physiology into your teaching, take this one. It explains both halves of what you see in the room.
Carbon dioxide isn’t simply waste. It regulates the pH of blood and of the fluid inside and around every cell, and it opens blood vessels. In controlled studies where the air people breathe contains 5 to 7 per cent carbon dioxide, blood flow to the brain rises by around 75 per cent on average. Breathing high-oxygen air does the reverse: cerebral blood flow drops by about 13 per cent, and the brain doesn’t consume any more oxygen for it. Raised carbon dioxide also quietens brain activity, with the EEG pattern shifting towards the drowsy end rather than the thinking end.
One honest qualification, because it matters when a student asks. Those figures come from research with controlled gas mixtures, not from people doing breath practice in a hall. Quiet breathing shifts the balance mildly in the same direction. That’s the claim that holds.
Now the other half. Fast breathing doesn’t add oxygen, because blood is already close to fully saturated. What it does is strip out carbon dioxide, and everything follows the wrong way from there. Vessels constrict. Blood flow to the brain falls, taking oxygen and glucose with it. Smooth muscle in the airways and the gut tightens, which is why over-breathing can make asthma and irritable bowel worse. And through the Bohr effect, as carbon dioxide falls haemoglobin holds on to oxygen more tightly, so the blood can be well oxygenated while the cells get less.
Which is the whole explanation for the room that’s been breathing hard for two minutes and feels strange. The tingling hands. The person who suddenly needs to sit down. Nothing is being released. Carbon dioxide is low.
Once you’ve got that, the quiet practices stop looking like the beginner version of the real thing. They’re the mechanism.
Where retention belongs
Cooper lays out the texts, lays out the physiology, and then declines to settle the question. Whether kevala kumbhaka means genuine retention of the breath or breathing so refined it can’t be detected is left open, because the texts don’t resolve it and reliable physiological data on the effects of breath retention is not available.
That’s an uncomfortable sentence to teach from, and it’s the accurate one. It also beats false confidence, because the limit underneath it is real. Very high carbon dioxide has an anaesthetic effect, and pushed far enough it depresses the respiratory control centres and consciousness goes. That limit is physiological. It doesn’t move because somebody has been practising for years.
So retention isn’t a group instruction in a general class. Teach it one to one if you teach it, progress it across months, and keep it out where a student is pregnant, or has uncontrolled high blood pressure, a heart condition, glaucoma, epilepsy or a history of panic attacks. If you’re not sure, leave it out and tell the student plainly why you have.
The one absolute: never teach breath-holding in or near water, and say so out loud if any of your students swim. Rapid breathing followed by a breath hold is how people drown, and the people it catches are usually the confident ones.
Building it into a term
Breath teaching fails when it’s a bolt-on. It works when it has a slot and a progression, same as everything else you teach. Ten weeks is about right for one step.
Weeks one to three: nose, and length. Two minutes at the start. Through the nose, exhale a little longer than the inhale, no counting. The only instruction that matters is soft.
Weeks four to six: quieter, not bigger. Same two minutes, one change to the language. Ask for the breath to get smaller and quieter rather than deeper. Watch what happens to the room. This is usually the week you realise your old cue was producing the opposite of what you wanted.
Weeks seven to eight: resistance. Ujjayi introduced as mild resistance rather than as a sound. If you can hear it from the back of the room it’s gone too far. Alternate nostril can come in here too, taught slowly, without any retention attached.
Weeks nine to ten: put it at the end as well. Three minutes before savasana. By now the room can do it without being talked through every breath, which is the point.
That’s a term. If you teach a drop-in where the faces change every week, run the first stage every week and let the regulars go deeper on their own. Short and often beats long and occasional, and that’s the classical instruction as much as it’s the practical one.
Action steps
- Before your next class, decide where breath sits in the hour and write it into the plan. Two or three minutes with a stated purpose, not whatever’s left at the end.
- Change one cue this week: swap “breathe deeply” for “make the breath quieter and smaller.” Watch the room and note what changes.
- Take the fast breathing out of your general classes unless you know every person in the room and have a reason for it. If a student asks why, the answer about carbon dioxide takes twenty seconds and earns you more than the practice ever did.
- Write down your own position on breath retention, in a sentence you’d be happy saying out loud to a student or to a studio manager. Then teach to it.
- Ask the swimmers in your class directly, and tell them never to practise breath-holding in water.
- Check that what you write in your class notes matches what you actually taught. If something goes wrong in a class, that record is the thing that speaks for you.
Related resources
- How to sequence a class that goes somewhere
- When a body in your room needs something different
Breath is one of the few things you teach where the difference between careful and careless doesn’t show in the room until it matters. Getting it right is craft, and it’s also part of what being accountable for your teaching means.