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pranayama pranayama are the breathing exercises we do in yoga with these exercises we are
controlling the breathing to essentially control the pran or as some call it prana see in the
word pranayama ayama means control and pran is what we are controlling
so now the question becomes what is pran what is the thing we are controlling well in yoga
it is believed pran is the life energy that rides in on the breath when we inhale now
pran is not the oxygen and all the scientific stuff that rides in on the breath with pran
but rather pran is separate from all those things whereas pran is life
see for me this separation became clear when i saw my dad take his last breath who was
a heavy smoker for 60 plus years now to make a long story short about a few weeks before
he went into the hospital where he eventually died he was complaining he couldn’t breathe
because he couldn’t breathe in deeply and this made him feel like he was dying he literally
said i feel like i’m dying see he felt like he was dying not just because his breathing
was limited where he couldn’t breathe in enough oxygen but rather he felt like he was
dying because he couldn’t breathe in enough pran he could not breathe in enough life and
if you can’t breathe in enough life well you’re going to feel like you’re dying
now eventually he ended up in the hospital and was put into an induced coma and he was
on machines that were basically helping his body stay alive and basically helping him
breathe and even though he was in a comma you could tell he was still there you could
tell pran was still there life was still there but one day days later you could tell he was
no longer there pran was no longer there life was no longer there even though his body was
alive his heart was beating his lunges were breathing and so on but there was no more
life no more life riding in on his breath no more pran riding in on his breath in other
words the machines could not pump in pran the machines could not pump in life
and to make a shorten story even shorter a few days later based on conversations with
the doctors we decided to remove the machines and when they were finally removed his body
basically continued the momentum of the machines his lungs continued breathing his heart continued
beating and then minutes later his body finally slowed and then stopped and at that time his
body died but the pran was gone days before life was gone days before
so for me this event put pran into perspective and it made me understand pran as a real thing
that we control in yoga with breathing exercises in yoga with pranayama so the point and importance
of pranayama which i hope you can take away from my story is that controlling and learning
how to control our breathing in yoga is deeper than just breathing is deeper than just getting
in enough oxygen rather it’s about giving ourselves life giving ourselves as much life
as we can because pran is life and pranayama is how we learn to control it
so be true be you namaste