Light on Pranayama – Techniques II – Recording

Which nostril is more open right now?

I opened the session with that question. I offered no explanation, no theory. Just: pause, feel, notice. Some of you reached for your phones and breathed on the screen to see the condensation. Veronica had a cold and laughed at the timing. I asked everyone to remember their answer and check again at the end of the hour.

That small experiment carried the whole point of the session. Working with the breath begins with learning to listen to it.

What the text says and what we were taught

We read chapters 21 through 24: Bhrāmarī, digital prāṇāyāma, Bhastrikā, Kapālabhāti, and the cooling breaths Śītalī and Śītakārī. Before diving in, I asked Ruti to demonstrate Śaṇmukhī mudrā live on screen. She showed us what most of us know from class: thumbs in the ears, fingers fanned across the face. Then I read the technique aloud from the text, which prescribes something quite different: a precise arrangement in which the middle fingers draw the upper eyelid down, the forefingers cover the space above, the ring fingers narrow the nostrils, and the little fingers rest on the upper lips to feel the flow of breath.

The whole group paused. Maria noticed it first: the photograph and the text diverge. And the anatomy itself creates its own difficulty. It is genuinely hard to reach the upper lip with the little finger.

Here is what I find meaningful about this: within the same chapter, Iyengar already offers an alternative. Wrap a cloth around the head and over the ears and temples. He was, I believe, already aware that the full hand position would be difficult to sustain, and he gave us a way to reach the same inward quality of attention through simpler means. I learned Bhrāmarī in Pune with Geetā using a bandage. Veronica said the same. Barbara too.

What we are taught, what is written, and what is photographed are three slightly different things. That gap is a reality to understand, and exactly the kind of thing that only surfaces when we read together.

The nostrils as an instrument

Nada asked about Svara Yoga, the whole science of working with which nostril is dominant and when. I said: the science begins with the most basic step. Just noticing there is a difference. A pose can shift it. The side you lean on changes it. I mentioned a tradition I encountered in South India that practices asymmetrically, activating one side according to the lunar cycle and choosing strategy over the bilateral symmetry of Iyengar yoga.

The first step is sensitivity. Everything else follows from that.

Playing the flute

The chapter on digital prāṇāyāma opened into something I love. Iyengar compares the sādhaka to a master musician, specifically to Kṛṣṇa charming the gopīs by playing his flute, manipulating and creating a world of mystic sounds. In prāṇāyāma, the sādhaka plays on his nostrils, delicately fingering them to manipulate breath patterns as if playing a flute.

A flute has several openings. A nose has only two. The sādhaka therefore requires greater dexterity than the flautist, controlling infinitely fine and subtle tones and shades of breath.

This image stayed with us. It reframes the entire technical instruction that follows: learning where to place the thumb, how to equalize the width of the ring and little fingers against the thumb, how to make the palm soft, how to hold the wrist so the chin stays level. All of that is the preparation of an instrument.

Bridgette shared that her teacher in London, Alric Newcomb, uses tiny elastic bands around the ring finger and little finger to hold their tips together at the nose. She improvised a demonstration with a cord. Others mentioned the cork that Iyengar himself describes. I find these moments, when the text and the body and the community are all speaking at once, to be the most alive part of what we do here.

Touch, balance, sustained pressure

Act with perfect understanding between the finger tips and the nasal membranes. Touch, balance, and sustained pressure, by the finger tips tracing the flow of breath, will alone lead to perfection in digital prāṇāyāma. And then the sentence that has stayed with me: as we gently take in the delicate fragrance of a flower, practise prāṇāyāma as if drawing in the fragrance of the air.

This image has travelled far into contemporary mindfulness teaching: inhale as if smelling a flower, exhale as if blowing out a candle. The root is here.

I shared something practical: when I first learned digital prāṇāyāma, a teacher always handed us tissues before we began. Pressing on the nasal membranes with too much force or in the wrong location increases mucus. For years I struggled with this. The shift, pressing less and rotating the fingertip slightly up or down against the passage, took me a long time to find. He describes it quietly in the later paragraphs. This is why we need a teacher. And this is why we also need each other.

The prayer that breathes itself

We unconsciously breathe the prayer So’ham: He (Saḥ), the Immortal Spirit, am I (Ahaṃ). Inhalation flows with the sound of Saḥ, exhalation with Ahaṃ. This unconscious prayer, japa, arises without our realising its meaning (artha) or feeling (bhāvanā). When we practise prāṇāyāma, we listen to this prayer with meaning and feeling. When this realisation deepens into nādānusandhāna, the quest in which the sādhaka enters the sound of his own breath, the sādhaka receives the incoming breath as life’s elixir and a blessing from the Lord, and offers the outgoing breath as surrender.

In our previous session we discussed the sound of ujjāyī: do we create it, or do we simply hear what is already there? §36 answers that question more deeply than any technique can. The sound was always there. We are learning to listen.

When breathing becomes forceful

We paused on the warnings about Bhastrikā and Kapālabhāti, the most forceful of the practices we read. On page 179 the text advises women to avoid them: vigorous blasts may cause prolapse of the abdominal organs and of the uterus, and the breasts may sag. Nada asked whether Bhastrikā is still taught to women in Pune today. It is. I shared what I believe is the underlying physiological concern: the pelvic floor, and specifically what happens when the pelvic floor lacks the support of Mūla Bandha and the outgoing breath moves with great force. The note about the breasts remains, for me, genuinely unexplained. I asked the group. Nobody had an answer. Some questions stay open.

I also said something personal here. During periods of intense stress, Bhastrikā can amplify agitation and add heat where the body already has too much. When life becomes very hard, the body calls for a different practice: grounding āsana, rest in Śavāsana, gentle breath. That too is mature practice. Iyengar’s warnings serve as invitations to discernment.

Cooling down

Śītalī and Śītakārī closed the reading. Both cool the system. Both draw inhalation through the mouth. Both, I pointed out, still require digital control: even as breath enters through the tongue, the tables in the book show the nostrils partially closed with the fingers. The technique always involves both tongue and fingers together.

We tried Śītakārī: tongue slightly out, flat, lips slightly apart, breath drawn in with a soft hiss. The cooling is simple. The breath moistens at the tongue and palate, and that moisture cools. Whether through the curled channel of Śītalī or the flat surface of Śītakārī, the destination is the same.

Summer is coming, I said. We will try these again then.

What the nostrils told us at the end

Before we closed I asked everyone to check again. Which nostril is more open now? Several people had shifted. One participant began the session with a blocked left side and found it clearer after an hour of reading, speaking, demonstrating, and attending. The reading itself had become practice.

This is what collective svādhyāya does. It changes the breath even as we speak about it.

Next session we move into Anuloma and Viloma, and toward Nāḍī Śodhana. The structure becomes even more refined. I will send focus questions and reflection prompts as usual.

Thank you for this hour. For the demonstrations, the honest questions, the elastic bands, and the open nostrils. I am grateful for every one of you in this room.