The Power of your Breath to Focus your Mind

Whether you are on or off your yoga mat, how you breathe will affect how you feel

A few weeks ago, one of my yoga students asked me how to know when to breathe when practicing yoga. I teach Vinyasa yoga which connects each part of the breath with different movements. Some poses I cue an inhale, and other poses I cue an exhale. She said she’s often breathing opposite of what I am cuing, meaning she’s inhaling when I say exhale and vice versa. This is common when students are new to connecting breath with movement.

Breathing intentionally while moving is a powerful way to focus your mind. If you breathe in time with your movement, it’s hard to think of anything else. Your To do list moves to the back of the line as you exist fully and consciously in your body. Stress and anxiety fall away as you move, flow, and breathe.

Ujjayi Pranayama (Ocean Sounding or Victorious Breath) becomes an audible focus for your practice and can enhance your yoga practice, but knowing when to breathe can be a challenge. The good news is there is a relatively simple way to think about it. When you understand how the breath affects your body, you’ll be able to decide when you need to inhale or exhale during your yoga practice.

How the breath affects the body

There are natural movements associated with breathing. Ideally when you inhale, the abdomen expands, and when you exhale, the abdomen contracts. This expansion and contraction also affects the movement of the spine. There’s a natural elongation of the spine as you inhale, and a relaxation as you exhale. Inhaling gently opens the body and exhaling gently closes it, relatively speaking.

Place your hands on your abdomen and just notice the breath moving in and out. If you notice your chest moving, try to drop your breath down into your belly instead. Abdominal breathing calms the nervous system and gets you out of Fight or Flight. Chest breathing is associated with being in a stressed state and tends to be shallow and less efficient for calming the mind and body.

When you breath deeply and slowly, think about filling the torso with air from the bottom to the top, also known as Dirga Pranayama (Deep Slow Breath). Try to breathe in and out through the nose and notice how your body responds to each breath. You may notice expansion and contraction in the torso. Maybe your shoulder blades move apart and together as you breathe. Observe your breath and see how it affects your body so that you can embody the experience of breathing, and not just take my word for it.

Ujjayi Pranayama

Once you feel how the breath affects your body, you can get more specific with your breathing. When practicing Vinyasa yoga, we use Ujjayi Pranayama rather than Dirga Pranayama. Ujjayi generates heat in your body as you practice and becomes an audible focus for your practice. It sounds like an ocean wave going in and out and is a one way that practicing yoga helps you focus your mind.

I demonstrate Ujjayi Pranayama in the short video below:

Connecting your breath to your yoga poses

When you apply the breath to your yoga poses, you’ll breathe in when your body/rib cage expands, like in Cow pose,/Bitilasana and you’ll breathe out when your body/rib cage contracts, like in Cat pose/Marjaryasana. Not every pose is so obvious though. When you flow from one pose to the next, there’s not always a backbend followed by a forward bend. Sometimes you move from Downward Dog to Plank pose, how do you know what to do then?

In those cases I like to think of it this way: when your head and chest move forward and/or upward, you inhale. When your head and chest move backward and/or downward, you exhale. This rule works probably 95% of the time and will serve you well in most flow yoga classes.

Think about the common Vinyasa flow sequence: Plank pose/Phalakasana, Four Pointed Staff Pose/Chaturanga Dandasana, Upward Facing Dog/Urdhva Mukha Svanasana, and Downward Facing Dog/Adho Mukha Svanasana. Relative to Downward Dog, where you typically start, Plank pose moves forward, so you inhale. Although you move forward again for Chaturanga, you also move downward, so you exhale. Upward Dog is a backward bending pose where you lift your chest, so you inhale. Downward Dog moves your chest backward toward your legs, so you exhale.

Standing poses, like Warrior 2/Virabhadrasana 2 and Triangle pose/Trikonasana are more fluid and can happen on either an inhale or an exhale. In that case your breath sequence depends on the pose before. If you lift up to Warrior 1 then as you open to Warrior 2 it’s time to exhale. You can think of one side of your body moving backward as you flow to Warrior 2, so you exhale. Play with it and see what makes sense for you in your sequencing.

Breath to help you sleep

One final tidbit about Pranayama (Breath Control) practices is that the breath can affect how you feel in many ways. If you struggle to fall asleep, doing a short breath practice before bed can help ease you into sleep. If you wake up in the middle of the night, these breath practices can ease you back to sleep.

There are a few practices you can try, see which feels best to you. As I mentioned before, the exhale creates natural relaxation in the body and mind. If you lengthen out your exhale relative to your inhale, it taps you into your Parasympathetic Nervous System (“rest and digest”). One practice to try is to inhale for the count of 4, hold your breath for the count of 4, then exhale for the count of 6. You can also do this inhaling for 4, holding for 7, then exhaling for 8. What matters is that the exhale is longer than the inhale.

I often use the 4-4-6 breath and find it effective for both falling asleep quickly and getting back to sleep if I wake up. If my mind is very active, I find the counting soothing, and helps me redirect my thoughts to something that takes little mental effort. If hot flashes wake you up, doing Sitali Pranayama will cool your body and get you back to sleep quickly. I demonstrate Sitali Pranayama in the video below, beginning at time stamp 2:11:

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I don’t always remember put this graphic in, but it’s always true. All of my essays are 100% written by me, not AI. They are my thoughts, my words, and my experiences from over 30 years of practicing and teaching yoga. Thanks for reading! 💜 Janine