Learn Why Pranayama Helps And Avoid Common Practice Mistakes
Pranayama is the name given to a set of breathing exercises that will clear the emotional and physical obstacles that the body showcases in prana flow. By practicing pranayama regularly, the entire body can be charged.
Simple actions like moving, thinking, breathing and acting will contribute to prana’s vitality and flow. Breathing is particularly important since it is something that we do in every second of our lives. This is basically the one thing that is constant and without it, life cannot exist.
Every single day we are faced with negative physical habits, tensions and stressors that will create energetic and physical obstacles inside the body. We do not even notice it but our breathing ends up being shallower and more stilted. Unconscious breathing patterns become common. This makes prana and breathing flow restricted.
As we do specific exercises to free our breath by using pranayama, we gain various benefits as life energy starts to flow properly through our body. We end up more relaxed and energized with the body being healed.
Pranayama Benefits
To put it as simple as possible, the entire body ends up supercharged when we practice pranayama. At a simple physical level, these techniques strengthen all the respiratory organs. All breath parts are explored while we regulate exhalation, retention and inhalation.
Regular pranayama practices will stimulate the body’s parasympathetic system. This counters overstimulation. Breathing patterns are linked to emotional states. You surely know that you tend to breathe differently when you are excited, angry, nervous or tired. Pranayama teaches you to use breathing in the opposite way so that you can energize and calm yourself.
Pranayama Practice Mistakes
For starters, you need to always learn from someone that actually masters pranayama and that can properly teach you the breathing exercises you have to go through. While there is no huge danger associated with improper pranayama practice, in extreme cases you can end up with various physical and mental issues.
Explaining absolutely all problems would take a lot of time so we should just get to the point and remember the following facts.
Avoid these common practice mistakes:
- Having a stomach that is too full or too empty.
- Doing too many exercises. For instance, 2 Vata Dosha rounds would be too much.
- Make sure that you do not do more than twenty respirations during one round.
- Don’t overdo it in the event that you missed practice. There are some people that will practice for over 30 minutes after a break of one week. It is better to just get back to the level you are at and in the event that you feel bad, simply stop.
- Doing breathing retention while holding the breath with second intervals that are longer than 8 seconds over 1 to 3 minutes. In fact, the only situation in which you would should consider breathing retention exercises is when you went through constant pranayama practice or/and you are in tip top shape.
- Meditation is all about patience and proper practice. Too many pranayama teaches and students make the mistake of doing too much. Never do absolutely everything that you know. Just because you know many practices does not mean you have to use them all. As a simple example, we have different breathing cooling exercises that we can use. You do not have to do all of them in one session. The exact same thing can be said about mucus removing breaths and cleansing breaths. When you have free breathing as the mucus is completely gone, there is absolutely no reason why you should go through 10 more breaths with cleansing as the purpose behind them.
Remember This About Neti Pots
Never use it in the event that you are currently sick. Neti has preventive uses. You need to use it when you are feeling well so that it will help you to keep staying well. When you use it as you have a cold, sinus or/and ear canal infections can appear. Make sure that you add salt as without it you end up with nostrils imbalance. This makes them produce too much mucus or dry out while trying to restore natural balance. Lubricate the nostrils by using Ghee in the event that you still feel too dried out when you use salt.
Remember that pranayama is a routine that needs to be regular. If you cannot maintain a constant routine, simply tone it down a little. Never overdo it and stay focused on what feels right for you and your body. Your goal should be to gradually build up to a higher number of rounds. Build up towards one year of steady practice with small growth over the duration of this period.
Conclusions
Pranayama practice is not something that you should take lightly. It takes a long time to be able to master it and you should not be afraid of making mistakes. In the beginning, you need to be supervised. The main purpose of this practice is the awakening of prana while also expanding its dimension.
Breathing is extremely important for the body and through pranayama you can help establish breathing patterns that will help you out a lot in life. The mistakes that we highlighted above should be avoided so that you can continue growing. You cannot gain the benefits if you make mistakes during practice. This is true for everything in life, not just yoga. You cannot build muscle mass if you do not do the exercises properly. In fact, you can get injured when you do that. The same goes with pranayama. You can end up with some problems and it is a shame since they can so easily be avoided.
Share your experiences with us. Let us know what your problems were with pranayama and do share how you got over them. We are sure that our readers will want to learn about your experience and we all need to help each other so that we can reach the level that we know we can get to.