Nadi shodhana, alternate nostril breathing, is built directly around Pingala and its counterpart Ida: the practitioner alternates breath between the right nostril, Pingala's channel, and the left, Ida's, in a sequence said to balance the solar and lunar currents and prepare the central channel, Sushumna, to open. Pingala's association with the right nostril is why right nostril dominant breathing is traditionally read in yogic physiology as a solar, heating, active state, the counterpart to Ida's cooling introspection.
Where Pingala, Ida and Sushumna are said to cross is marked by a granthi, a psychic knot, at points including the base of the spine, the heart and the point between the eyebrows, and tantric and yogic texts describe these crossings as the sites through which rising kundalini energy must pass.
Pingala is sometimes compared to a meridian of Chinese medicine, since both are described as channels carrying a vital force through the body, but the two come from independent traditions with different maps, different numbers of channels and different diagnostic aims, and reading one system as an explanation of the other, rather than as a separate, historically unconnected framework, is not supported by either tradition's own texts.
Sources The Serpent PowerSir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) with Roots of YogaJames Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.)