to teach Sacred Breath to, beause they think they already know how to breathe. “After all”, they think, “I’ve been practicing pranayama for twenty years; of course I know how to breathe.” And actually, they do know how to breathe, but they have not yet experienced how to breathe. They haven’t learned how to breathe from the breath itself. They’ve learned how to breathe from a book. Or from a teacher who very likely did not learn from the breath itself.
During a Sacred Breath session, at a certain point, the energy takes over and the practioner’s body just begins spontaneous perfect yogic breathing. In many cases they also manifest the classic mudras; even people who know nothing about mudras will do this, once the sacred breath energy is flowing.
This is probably the basis of all yoga. Someone in antiquity somehow (maybe even accidentally) got the energy flowing and spontaneously went into yogic breathing and mudras. Their spiritual state became noticibly improved. So the people around them thought, “if we copy the way he breathes, and copy his hand movements, perhaps we will achieve that same spiritual state.”
These became the various yoga teachings and schools; passed down orally from teacher to student, eventually written down.
Sometimes this works, since the body, breath, and mind are all interrelated and interdependent . So physically copying the manifestations that spontaneously occur in someone who is flowing the energy can sometimes trigger that energy to begin flowing in you, but rarely.
Better to learn from the breath itself, and manifest spontaneously and naturall y.
Professional singers are also difficult because they too have learned an habitual way of breathing which has to be overcome in order to learn the Sacred Breath. In both cases, I imagine it’s like teaching a pianist how to play the guitar. She’s learned to hold her fingers in a certain specific way and now she has to hold her fingers in a completely different way. So you just have to overcome those habits.
But what makes it more diffiicult with yoga teachers is that their habitual breathing pattern looks exactly like the breathing pattern the Sacred Breath takes you into once the energy has taken over. But you can’t start with that pattern; if you do, why, you can huff and puff all day and nothing happens. You have to start with the Sacred Breath pattern so that the energy can be triggered.
So what makes yoga teachers hard is that we start with the Sacred Breath pattern and then after a few minutes they are breathing the way you breathe if the energy has taken over. So then the question becomes, “has the energy really taken over, or have they just lapsed back into their habitual breathing pattern?” It can be dificult to tell the difference, so communication is key.
Sacred Breath 