From Pranayama to the Modern Therapies

The most fully developed traditional systems of breath control are the pranayama of Indian yoga and the breathing disciplines of Daoist and Buddhist practice. Yogic pranayama regulates the breath to control prana, the vital energy, as a limb of the eightfold path set out in the classical Yoga Sutras, using retention and alternate-nostril and other techniques to purify the channels and prepare the mind for meditation; the traditions insist these be learned from a teacher and warn of harm from forceful practice done wrongly. Similar breath-centred disciplines belong to Daoist internal cultivation and to Tibetan and other Buddhist yogas.

In the modern West these older techniques have been drawn on, adapted and detached from their frameworks to produce a range of secular breathwork methods, among them the intense, sustained accelerated breathing developed in the later twentieth century for psychotherapeutic catharsis, and various systems marketed for stress, performance and wellbeing. As with meditation and yoga, this migration lifts the techniques out of the cosmological and ethical settings that traditionally governed their use, and practitioners and researchers note both the genuine physiological effects of controlled breathing and the risks of powerful methods practised without the safeguards the old traditions built around them.