Primary Essay: Breathing with Surrender
Breathing with Surrender
By Acharya Satyam Ehinger
Watching the breath is quite possibly both the simplest and most profound practice in the yogic tradition. Sri Shambhavananda teaches that most of us tend to over-breathe, to use too much doership when working with our breath, leading us to im-balance instead of re-balance. Recent scientific studies show the same conclusions, that our efforts to control our breath flow often cause more harm than good. When working with our breath we often find that it is all too easy to breathe willfully instead of skillfully because the breath and mind are so inextricably linked, causing us to double down on the very stress we are meditating to transcend. This ‘breath intervention’ is here to help us see which way we are walking on this bridge of the breath— are we huffing and puffing towards suffering, or are we flowing with the breath towards surrender? This isn’t a question we can answer with our mind, only one we can answer with practice.
Shiva Sutra 2.2 is an easy one to misinterpret. The Sutra states that “Pauseless effort brings attainment”. Pauseless effort can at first be thought of as ‘endless effort’, like practicing all day every day. Babaji has taught in multiple satsangs, though, that this is not necessarily the best path to growth, as it can lead to its own kind of tension. And as we look closer at this Sutra we see a subtler teaching under the surface, a description of a very unique kind of effort that is the true fuel of our growth. This is the sincere effort of non-doership, a fervent longing that comes from the heart, not the head or the will. As the Sutra teaches, “The explanation of this sūtra is that your effort must not be artificial (akṛita). It must be absolutely natural, filled with intense desire and fervent longing, and originating from the center of your heart.” This unique kind of effort itself takes practice to understand and eventually achieve, because the mind is itself a tool, and we must go beyond our mind to identify with the user of the tool, instead of becoming the tool itself.
The reason it is so hard to separate the breath from our mind and tensions is that the breath and mind are mirror images of each other. When we are stressed, the breath is shallow and quick. When we are relaxed, it too moves smooth and deep. As the Upanishads describe it, ‘the breath of life is the consciousness of life, and the consciousness of life is the breath of life’— meaning that our awareness of breath is only as clear as our awareness of our life. If you feel stressed, you’re probably going to breathe stressfully, which is why we have to take time to work with our breath skillfully through meditation. By consciously working with our breath we can raise our own consciousness— and the most conscious way any of us can work with our breath is to simply let it flow. Yes that’s it, let the breath flow. An intentionally simple teaching to prevent any mental manipulation. But of course, as anyone who has spent time working with this practice knows, how we eventually learn to swim with this mystical current is itself the journey we are here to undertake.
Lucky for us, we have teachings and a teacher to guide the way. Sri Shambhavananda has been emphasizing using less doer ship with the breath for all of 2022— a message that was delivered at the New Years intensive and has only gotten clearer and simpler as the year progresses. His message is simple— forget what you know and let the breath flow. Let go of technique, let go of circulating your energy, let go of it all and let it flow. Everyone that I have talked to about this shift in our practice has felt incredible relief, finally dropping their backpack of doer ship and experiencing the sheer joy of their natural state of breathing. I have felt the same and am supremely grateful to have this time to really revisit the fundamental essence of our practice, surrendering our thoughts and observing our reality.
That being said, it can be helpful to hear more specifically what Shambhavananda says on the topic— here is an excerpt from his most recent book, Spiritual Practice, “Think of the breath as a vehicle rather than a jackhammer. Often students use the breath too strongly. You should attach your attention to your breath in a way similar to the way you attach your attention to a mantra. You will not be using the breath to cut the rock open. Instead, the breath is a vehicle that you are riding on, and you are consciously feeling it move through the chakras, or at least to experience where they are. For example, when you take a breath in, you can feel the heart chakra. You do not try to tear and rip it open with willfulness. The breath is like a massage, and as you exhale you surrender all the negativity that gets kicked up. When students are able to be open and simple with their breath, they realize that watching the breath is not the same as trying to control it. The pranayama within the breath is simply flowing with the breath.”
As we see in this teaching, our goal is to ride on the breath like a vehicle, not direct it like a jackhammer. In this natural way the breath will take us organically to our energetic centers, will massage out our tensions and negativity— if we let it. Ultimately this practice teaches us the difference between watching and directing our breath, ie. This practice teaches us how to practice. Patanjali summarized his thoughts on the breath in much the same way 2,000 years ago, “besides these methods of altering the breath, the subtlest pranayama transcends the concept of the breath existing merely inside or outside the body.” Meaning that the most powerful pranayama goes beyond the breath as moving in or out of the body, but as seeing the breath as a whole flow.
Breathing behavior analyst Dr. Crystal Frazee agrees that seeing the breath as a flow can be one of the most effective ways of working with our breath. She said our western culture is in a constant state of hyper ventilation, breathing in too much and too often for our own good. Our constant and heavy handed inhaling actually throws off the balance of our O2 and CO2, and literally prevents our body from assimilating the O2 it already has. In short, our heavy breathing is making us feel out of breath— wild but true! (I’ve included a little scientific explanation of this phenomenon at the end of the essay) For now its simply good to know that the most productive thing we can do to our breath is simply let it flow, which Dr. Frazee says is the number one cue she uses to teach her clients how to breathe again. The idea is that when we learn to see the breath as a ceaseless flow, instead of separate parts, it helps us feel the bigger flow that the breath is truly a part of— the pulsating flow of Shakti known as Spanda. This of course has been at the heart of every teaching in the Yogic tradition for thousands of years, to the current teaching in Monday night Satsang. As one of the oldest yogic texts, the Vijnana Bhairava, teaches, “As breath turns from down to up, and again as breath curves from up to down—through both these turns, realize.” Instead of seeing the ends of our breath as ends, as walls, we can see them as bridges that complete the cycle. When we can feel the breath as a flow we realize the flow.
Feeling the breath flow is a creative and intuitive practice— What can you see flowing around you right now? Can you see a sun slowly setting? The white noise of rain falling, traffic passing, leaves flapping in the breeze? Can you find your own flow with fluid walking? Take a moment to observe a flow of any kind around you right now, they’re all around us, even in us, as the 14th Dharana of the Vijnana Bhairava teaches, “Bathe in the center of sound, as in the continuous sound of a waterfall. Or, by putting fingers in ears, hear the sound of sounds.” The first challenge may be finding a flow, but the real challenge, as we find out, is maintaining our awareness of that flow. A weak mind becomes quickly bored and distracted— but a well trained mind can stay focused with detachment on the flow for a duration. And that’s why we practice. Because as we begin to focus on the flows around us, we are able to recognize the flow within us. You can imagine it like ‘swimming with the current’, where you are applying effort while simultaneously feeling yourself as part of something much bigger, as Paul Reps describes it in his teaching of how to watch the breath:
“Eyes closed
or Half Closed
Seeing Released
l e t breathe
as you let wind blow
rain fall
Enter
one breath
WHOLLY
Going with
not Against
THE harmony”
As we can see with focusing on flow, the breath is both an intuitive aspect of our practice, ie. Something you can try your first time meditating, but also a profound part of our practice that takes a lifetime or more to master. This is because the breath itself is a bridge between Shiva, our true nature and highest aspirations in our practice, and all of manifestation, our likes and dislikes as well as the world around and within us. As the Tattvartha Cintamani teaches, “Entering in breath (prāṇa) is the first change of God consciousness. This is the initial step towards manifestation.” This means that the breath is itself the first formation of Shiva in manifestation, a literal bridge between the physical and energetic, the transient and the eternal. In Patanjali’s eight limbs of yoga we also see the practice of pranayama as a stepping stone between the physical practices of yoga and the energetic practices of meditation. The breath is a bridge, but we must remember that a bridge can be walked in either direction— it’s up to us to make sure that we are walking from the out to in, from doership to surrender.
Because if we aren’t paying attention to the quality of our work, we could be pouring our energy in the wrong direction, that of doership, which is essentially why we are revisiting this topic so deeply right now. As the Guru Gita describes it, we should allow “the breath to rise and be stilled immediately of its own accord,” in order to “attain the spontaneous natural state”, otherwise ‘long and windy’ breath brings disease instead of defends us from it (V53). So at any point in our work with the breath we can ask ourselves, 'am I moving towards surrender, or am I maintaining doership? Which way am I walking on this bridge?’ Because as Swami Rudrananda teaches, if we push and pull our breath too strongly, and for too long, we may lose the ability for our breath to self regulate altogether. So take a moment to feel the wind blow, to let rain fall, to watch a flow, and as soon as you do, you’ll notice that the breath is right there with you, all the time. Can we float on our back in a state of surrender, breathing without doing, floating without moving? Of course we can, it just takes practice, the right kind of practice— And that’s what we’re here to explore again and again.
A tip or trick to help safeguard you against the trap door of doership in your breathing practice is something we call backwards breathing. It’s only called backwards because it helps us detach from our tendency towards doership in the normal ways that we breath. For example, try walking around the room you’re in right now backwards. You’ll probably walk slower, you’ll pay more attention to each step, you’ll surrender your destination and simply focus on your walking. Backwards breathing is meant to accomplish the same thing— it allows you to re-experience your breath and drop your doership. This technique is derived from the ancient text the Svachanda Tantra, and taught in the Shiva Sutras. The text writes, “Shiva is first manifested in the initial movement of the breath, which is only filled with life. And then in breathing in and breathing out, which in exhaling creates and in inhaling destroys.” First, our tendency to always think of the inhale as the beginning of the breath can lead to unconscious breathing, and by simply noticing the exhale first, instead of the inhale, we might come closer to an awareness of our present breath. This is also present in the So-Ham practice, the exhale based breath mantra. And most importantly, in this quote from the Svachanda Tantra, we also see that the inhale is described as the destroyer and the exhale as the creator, yet another swap of our normal associations. When you dissolve with the inhale, you surrender that grip of trying to pull the world in. And when you create with the exhale, it keeps you centered in your heart as you expand out. Babaji has been teaching to expand our hearts on the exhale for a long time now, maybe the Sutras will help us hear him. Trying this practice in a relaxed and gentle way might give you a glimpse into the practice of surrendered breathing.
Our mission is simple, breathe without doership, breathe with surrender, let the breath flow. Release technique and re-find the core of your practice by watching the breath. There is no doubt that this presents its own challenges, as we have seen the breath and the mind are hard to tell apart, and the breath is simply a bridge that can walk us towards suffering or surrender depending on how we use it. But feeling the breath flow is as natural as feeling rain fall, there is nothing that can keep us from this innate teaching if we truly desire to know it. So spend some time with your breath in the coming week and see how you can begin to swim with the current, and not against THE harmony.
Science of Breathing Post Script: It’s important to note that the teachings of the yogic tradition are also verified by modern scientific research in pulmonology, the science of breathing. Study after study shows that as a culture we are over-breathing, aka hyper ventilating, and that the best thing we can do for our breath is get out of its way, to let it flow naturally. In fact, our heavy handed approaches to breathing could quite literally be the very causes of our imbalance.
When your friend is having a hard time, or spinning into a worry spiral, its common for all of us to say “just take a deep breath”— oxygen to the rescue! But it might come as a surprise that too much oxygen in our system actually leads to less and less oxygen absorption, ie. the more we inhale the less we can ‘breathe’!
To understand the paradox of why ‘taking a deeper breath’ doesn’t actually yield more oxygen absorption, you can imagine your blood like a delivery person dropping off cartons of Oxygen at each “cellular household”. The cell uses that oxygen to transfer energy stored in food to a usable form. This process, which is called cellular respiration, allows the cells to harness energy to perform vital functions such as powering muscles (including involuntary muscles such as the heart) and the movement of materials into and out of cells. Cellular respiration produces the waste product CO2, which the cellular household puts back on their doorstep. The presence of this CO2 on the doorstep is what tells the Oxygen delivery person that the oxygen in the cell has been used up, and that more Oxygen is needed for daily functions.
When there is no CO2 on the doorstep, the delivery person assumes that the oxygen is still in use for that cell and therefore they don’t deliver a new batch. It is for this reason that pulmonologists define the breath more as a measure of CO2 than O2, because it is the presence of CO2 that actually determines whether the oxygen in our body is delivered, ie. We can huff and puff all day, but until our CO2 levels increase that O2 will be expelled with little to no absorption. So though it would seem good to have a lot of oxygen in our system, this imbalance actually prevents our body from assimilating it, as Dr. Crystal Frazee, a breathing behavior analyst, describes it, “Good breathing is actually defined as: 'Retaining the proper amount of CO2 so that we can oxygenate properly and that our systems remain in harmony’…Respiration is all about CO2…When CO2 is at right levels in blood and airways, then we can have adequate oxygen levels.”
So the first step to ‘getting in the flow’ of our breath is to stop over-breathing. Deep inhales don’t have the balancing effect we think they have, in fact they could literally be the source of our imbalance. if you want the oxygen in your system to be assimilated, let your breath flow in a balanced way, and if anything place a little extra attention on your exhales, allowing your CO2 levels to increase, as this is the defining factory in overall oxygen absorption. Studies show that our exhale is the most overlooked aspect of our breath flow, and not surprisingly it is precisely the exhale that could restore the balance to our breath flow in order to allow for better absorption, because it is during the exhale that our CO2 levels actually rise.
Science has even shown that without adequate CO2 in the system, the oxygen of a ‘deep breath’ is literally expelled in our next breath— it goes in and comes right back out! And with each deep breath we take, our O2 levels keep rising, and our CO2 levels keep falling— deepening the pattern of hyperventilation. It is safe to assume that you and I are reading this right within a mild, or more than mild, state of hyperventilation. So, step one is to let go of the urge to ‘breathe deep’ in our daily lives, on our mats and on our cushions, and instead focus our awareness on the breath as a constant and steady flow— this is the essence of the our work with the breath.