Breath Is Life: A Talk With Kula Founder Randi Schiffman

We hear the phrase "breath is life" so often- but what does that mean in a yogic context, and how can we carry our breath practices off the mat and into our lives? Join Kula founder & facilitator Randi Schiffman for a talk on how to do just that.

Transcript

Hi.

Today's class was on the concept of breath and the fact that breath is our life force energy.

So I wanted to just have a little gentle discussion on taking the breath and the idea of it being your life force energy off the yoga mat and into our lives and how by deepening the breath and lengthening the breath and expanding the breath can help us to really enter into the flow of our life.

It really helps to notice the breath as such a beautiful healing tool in life that we have access to at any moment whenever we need it.

If we can cultivate the awareness to be able to notice the breath then in a way we can manipulate or control the breath to provide a more calm,

Content,

Beautiful,

Soft experience in life.

Now a lot of us that are living in the world are experiencing high amounts of stress and anxiety and discomfort and tightness in our body related to everything.

All the chaos that exists around us,

Our families,

Our relationships,

Our work,

Our living situation.

So who knew that the breath can help us relax into the present moment.

It helps us to accept the circumstances of our life and it helps us to come back to a place of home that is in our own body and is in our own mind.

The breath in many ways we practice on the yoga mat and then our life practice becomes okay how do we take that long deep rhythmic breath that I experienced on my mat with such bliss off my mat and into my life and into my world so that the way that I feel when I'm doing yoga is the way that I feel in my life.

A great teacher once told me that yoga is not a thing that you do but a lifestyle in which you do all things and so this is what I mean when I talk about carrying the breath and the idea of the expanded breath off the mat and into our world so that we can experience a more peaceful existence full of beauty and contentment.

So the breath becomes a really beautiful healing tool for us to utilize at any moment.

The breath it when we inhale deeply and and we've forgotten about this along the way because of the stress that exists outside of our system it makes us tight in the chest and we we end up breathing very short and shallow into our into our chest but we can when we can breathe deeply into the abdominals and really to the very bottom part of our lungs we can we can feel the energy of our our body start to open up so what might when we live in this sympathetic state of fight or flight it's very hard for us to feel the flow of our energy and hence the flow of our life so when we breathe deeply it literally and spiritually opens up the channels of our body it opens up the space around the heart so that we can literally expand the heart into the present moment and the veins the capillaries the arteries once we send breath which is literally our life force it's it's how we feel alive when we send that into all parts of our body all of the cells then we inspire life and who knew it was as simple as just breathing deeply so I invite you to notice for one we can just take a pause and experience what our breath is like in our body so let's close our eyes just for a moment are you breathing in your belly are you breathing in your chest are you having a 360 degree breathing experience do you come alive as the breath expands into the heart do you soften on the exhale do you surrender there's surrendering quality to the breath how can we experience life through the breath if the breath had a shape or a color a tonality what would the quality of the breath be like in this moment for you clear flowing breath is like a beautiful crystalline river that's continuously flowing without rocks in the way stones in the way but even so the water just flows around the rocks around the pebbles cultivating flow of energy from there just like the eyes open so we can change the state of our mind and we can connect our body with our mind if we just take a moment and that was just a minute or two to experience the breath in our body and shift it from a tight constricted place to a place that feels open spacious expansive so when we think of the it's like the breath is cleaning our energy in our body the breath is helping us to detoxify what is what doesn't belong in our body it's helping to clean it out clear it out so that we can have imagine those clear energy channels just moving in our body and when we work on our own breath and our own being it's undoubtedly that we have a ripple effect on the entire world so we have we work on the microcosm we work on ourselves and then you'll notice as you can find life in your breath people will start to notice that aliveness inside of you your eyes will be brighter and shinier you'll want to smile you'll want to appreciate life you'll want to move your body and feel that flow of energy and imagine yourself like that crystalline river that is continuously flowing so the breath is so powerful in that way that in just a moment's time a minute or two we have the tools and the ability to shift our experience so when we shift our breath we're able to unite mind and body connection and when we're in union we're able to lift our vibration and have a ripple effect in in our relationships and in the world so we're filling our our selves with with life on each inhalation so want to quickly talk about the insulate in inhalation the exhalation and the pause so the inhalation of the breath I mean you feel it on the inhale what's happening well there's a spark of energy there's a aliveness there's a lift an uplifting of energy inhale is for inspiration and so there's a coming to life on the inhalation an expansiveness on the exhalation there could be a few things happening as we start to engage the core a little bit we can experience strength and we can experience integrity and salts a solid structured experience we can also experience surrender and a softness and a journey back back home so we learned about the anatomical experience in or we will in the pranayama video but this spiritual concept of interconnectedness as how the inhale the pause and the exhale work together not only in our body but with the universe so our inhale is the universe's exhale and the exhales the universe's inhale which will be later explained in in that video but that interconnectedness is another example of union coming together and experiencing the life of all things so it's really important how we act in in the world as we know there's an interconnectedness and that our actions and experiences really do have an effect on the people closest to us but also the people that are very very far away so we want to be in integrity when we think when we speak when we act and sometimes the breath can be the beautiful tool that helps us to ground and center and to remember what the inhale and the exhale is all about and that pause that exists that natural pause at the top of the breath that exists is so beautiful because it gives us the opportunity to to pause to stop when life is very busy to reflect to hold our center to be undisturbed from what's going on around us and then the exhales just surrender that so again just inhale inspiration excitement creativity life pause in that experience and then the exhale is just surrender the breath is very much like life and death as well so the first breath that we take when we get into the world as babies it's an inhalation the last breath we take before we pass to the other side is an exhalation so we can see that life is is like a circular experience that is coupled with many lives and deaths of in every opportunity every breath is an opportunity to experience life once again so we have that inhale that brings us to life and the exhale that reminds us how to surrender and how to die to any experience that that we're having