YOGA FOR KNUCKLEHEADS 23 "STALE AIR"
Samantha and Reggie repeatedly emphasize that breathing is every bit as important in your yoga exercise as the stretches and poses and must be coordinated for maximum affect. I am constantly reminded as to when to inhale and when to exhale. Reggie says correct breathing minimizes pain during extremely demanding stretches or poses, but so far, in over a year of yoga, I have no idea if I am coordinating my stretches with my breathing, but I'm trying. Half the time, when a pose becomes excruciating, I find myself panting like my old dog after we've walked over a mile on a warm day on the beach, and this is usually when I wish the pose would mercifully end and I begin to drool on myself, or on the mat, or if I can I wipe at my mouth before the drool hits the rental mat, which would be a horrible omission in yoga class.
Reggie uses the term, “stale air,” but Samantha does not, though I'm sure she knows full well what stale air means. Samantha would rather talk about “feeling” the air course through certain areas of the body, like the lower right rib cage, or your back ribs, and sometimes other parts of the body, like the arms and shoulders, legs and neck, but I must confess I never feel air circulating through any part of my body except my lungs. Reggie says that when we take a huge inhale and hold it, and then let it all gush out in a massive exhale with your mouth wide open like a perch about to be hooked by a deadly fisherman, there is an instant where your lungs are empty and we must replenish.
I don't know about any of this, yet I believe in Reggie when he says we're gushing out stale air. The times when my breath runs short and I begin panting and feel a bit of panic and start to drool is usually when I'm engaged in a forward bend, a sort of immersion with my legs spread as far apart as possible without ripping a groin, and bent over as downward as possible without pulling something in my back. A pose that seems to last forever. Perhaps during this pose I am collecting stale air and need to blow it out, or else I have no air and am beginning to grow light-headed.
During my prime years, when I played basketball in two leagues at night and pick-up at a park in Manhattan Beach 3 afternoons a week, I suppose I was exhaling a lot of really nasty stale air, especially since I worked 4 nights a week in a local hot spot called Brennan's Irish Pub, where huge crowds of boozers smoked and created massive plumes of smoke to infiltrate my nostrils, mouth and lungs and saturated my clothes, so that when I arrived home half drunk I smelled like a smoldering cigarette. Even though I didn't smoke, the big scare about second hand smoke was prevalent, so I guess running and scrabbling around and jumping up and down and banging bodies on an asphalt hoop court in the hot sun helped cleanse my lungs, and I cannot imagine Reggie trying to form a term to describe the air I must have been exhaling while playing this game full tilt.
During these games, I only felt my lungs burn when a game went on and on and on and I pushed myself to the limit of physical exertion, and my lungs transitioned from burning to near bursting, only they didn't burst, and when the game ended it took me a while to regain my breath, kind of like Reggie's proclamation when describing the absence of air in the lungs after a massive exhalation. Ten minutes later, I could hardly tell I was breathing and an over-all feeling of serenity and near euphoria settled in, replacing the hangover and stale, smoke-contaminated, toxic, deadly air in my lungs.
Although none of this has anything to do with yoga and breathing, it confuses and stuns me that I can be more out of breath from an extended posture of immersion than when running myself into exhaustion on a hoop or tennis court.
Anyway, I have not felt my breath in any singular part of my body yet, and I wonder if some of my peers have, which makes me feel like a nincompoop if they have. I have concentrated really hard, eyes closed, squatting straight up, hands in prayer at my chest while Samantha urges us to feel our air flow through certain body parts. I have remained thus under Reggie's tutorage when he claims, “your heart is your drum, your breath your music.” I have watched some of the really serious yoga ladies who come early and squat like Indians, eyes closed, erect, hands opened out on knees, still as statues, possibly meditating so deeply they do feel air flowing through certain areas of their body, for they seem so transfixed and impervious to their surroundings that perhaps they are feeling air course through their kidneys, their collarbones, their feet, their toes, their fingers, as often Reggie encourages us to feel air flowing through these areas when we take our final rest, our surrender to ultimate and infinite relaxation.
Truth tell, I'm not sure I'm ever going to feel my breath or air flow through any part of my body, except my lungs and nose, which has been broken three times and runs most of the time, especially when I eat hot Mexican food. Perhaps I should explain to Reggie that not once when my nose was broken did I see a doctor to set it, but sort of set it myself, so that when we do breathing exercises early on in class I usually have to gulp stale air through my mouth, like a grounded perch, because one of the passages in my nose is clotted up with gook or dislodged cartilage and the other passage is not much better, so that when I make the great encouraged-by-Reggie-to-take-a-big-big-deep inhale, the deepest inhale of the day, through my nose, it makes a snorkeling sound, like one of those machines that sweep up leaves on sidewalks by Mexican gardeners.
Another of the breathing exercises involves holding your thumb to your nostril and squeezing it shut while inhaling through the other nostril, then closing that nostril with a ring finer of the same hand and expelling air through the first nostril, then applying the same exercise to the other nostril, and each time I execute this exercise my right nostril whistles and clots, while the other whistles raggedly but does inject some air into my lungs, but there is a timing device, a rhythm Reggie urges while executing this exercise, and I always seem off rhythm, as if I have six thumbs, and mostly blunder through the whole ordeal, knowing it's not doing me a bit of good, though Reggie and Samantha maintain doggedly that improved and pure breathing is the “secret to health and life.”
This morning, I showed up early, and a lady who is usually friendly and always returns my hellos with a smile and a hearty hello, was squatting Indian style, eyes closed, erect, as she performed the nostril squeeze, inhale, and exhale, and was so transfixed she did not hear my hello and continued the exercise, and I wondered did she feel her breath flowing through any of her organs, limbs or bones in an extra-sensory out-of-body experience that eludes me.
I didn't dare ask her in fear she might deem me a yoga knucklehead.
Reggie uses the term, “stale air,” but Samantha does not, though I'm sure she knows full well what stale air means. Samantha would rather talk about “feeling” the air course through certain areas of the body, like the lower right rib cage, or your back ribs, and sometimes other parts of the body, like the arms and shoulders, legs and neck, but I must confess I never feel air circulating through any part of my body except my lungs. Reggie says that when we take a huge inhale and hold it, and then let it all gush out in a massive exhale with your mouth wide open like a perch about to be hooked by a deadly fisherman, there is an instant where your lungs are empty and we must replenish.
I don't know about any of this, yet I believe in Reggie when he says we're gushing out stale air. The times when my breath runs short and I begin panting and feel a bit of panic and start to drool is usually when I'm engaged in a forward bend, a sort of immersion with my legs spread as far apart as possible without ripping a groin, and bent over as downward as possible without pulling something in my back. A pose that seems to last forever. Perhaps during this pose I am collecting stale air and need to blow it out, or else I have no air and am beginning to grow light-headed.
During my prime years, when I played basketball in two leagues at night and pick-up at a park in Manhattan Beach 3 afternoons a week, I suppose I was exhaling a lot of really nasty stale air, especially since I worked 4 nights a week in a local hot spot called Brennan's Irish Pub, where huge crowds of boozers smoked and created massive plumes of smoke to infiltrate my nostrils, mouth and lungs and saturated my clothes, so that when I arrived home half drunk I smelled like a smoldering cigarette. Even though I didn't smoke, the big scare about second hand smoke was prevalent, so I guess running and scrabbling around and jumping up and down and banging bodies on an asphalt hoop court in the hot sun helped cleanse my lungs, and I cannot imagine Reggie trying to form a term to describe the air I must have been exhaling while playing this game full tilt.
During these games, I only felt my lungs burn when a game went on and on and on and I pushed myself to the limit of physical exertion, and my lungs transitioned from burning to near bursting, only they didn't burst, and when the game ended it took me a while to regain my breath, kind of like Reggie's proclamation when describing the absence of air in the lungs after a massive exhalation. Ten minutes later, I could hardly tell I was breathing and an over-all feeling of serenity and near euphoria settled in, replacing the hangover and stale, smoke-contaminated, toxic, deadly air in my lungs.
Although none of this has anything to do with yoga and breathing, it confuses and stuns me that I can be more out of breath from an extended posture of immersion than when running myself into exhaustion on a hoop or tennis court.
Anyway, I have not felt my breath in any singular part of my body yet, and I wonder if some of my peers have, which makes me feel like a nincompoop if they have. I have concentrated really hard, eyes closed, squatting straight up, hands in prayer at my chest while Samantha urges us to feel our air flow through certain body parts. I have remained thus under Reggie's tutorage when he claims, “your heart is your drum, your breath your music.” I have watched some of the really serious yoga ladies who come early and squat like Indians, eyes closed, erect, hands opened out on knees, still as statues, possibly meditating so deeply they do feel air flowing through certain areas of their body, for they seem so transfixed and impervious to their surroundings that perhaps they are feeling air course through their kidneys, their collarbones, their feet, their toes, their fingers, as often Reggie encourages us to feel air flowing through these areas when we take our final rest, our surrender to ultimate and infinite relaxation.
Truth tell, I'm not sure I'm ever going to feel my breath or air flow through any part of my body, except my lungs and nose, which has been broken three times and runs most of the time, especially when I eat hot Mexican food. Perhaps I should explain to Reggie that not once when my nose was broken did I see a doctor to set it, but sort of set it myself, so that when we do breathing exercises early on in class I usually have to gulp stale air through my mouth, like a grounded perch, because one of the passages in my nose is clotted up with gook or dislodged cartilage and the other passage is not much better, so that when I make the great encouraged-by-Reggie-to-take-a-big-big-deep inhale, the deepest inhale of the day, through my nose, it makes a snorkeling sound, like one of those machines that sweep up leaves on sidewalks by Mexican gardeners.
Another of the breathing exercises involves holding your thumb to your nostril and squeezing it shut while inhaling through the other nostril, then closing that nostril with a ring finer of the same hand and expelling air through the first nostril, then applying the same exercise to the other nostril, and each time I execute this exercise my right nostril whistles and clots, while the other whistles raggedly but does inject some air into my lungs, but there is a timing device, a rhythm Reggie urges while executing this exercise, and I always seem off rhythm, as if I have six thumbs, and mostly blunder through the whole ordeal, knowing it's not doing me a bit of good, though Reggie and Samantha maintain doggedly that improved and pure breathing is the “secret to health and life.”
This morning, I showed up early, and a lady who is usually friendly and always returns my hellos with a smile and a hearty hello, was squatting Indian style, eyes closed, erect, as she performed the nostril squeeze, inhale, and exhale, and was so transfixed she did not hear my hello and continued the exercise, and I wondered did she feel her breath flowing through any of her organs, limbs or bones in an extra-sensory out-of-body experience that eludes me.
I didn't dare ask her in fear she might deem me a yoga knucklehead.
