Iyengar on Prāṇāyāma

Guruji on Prāṇāyāma

An interview by Neela Karnik on the occasion of his 70th Birthday

I, being a sick person, started yoga in 1934, so you can count my age easily, 18 to 34. I had no strength even to stand and my lungs were in expensive. Naturally even normal breathing was a strain. I started doing āsanas. Then, circumstances forced me to teach yoga, and I taught yoga. Because I had to teach I had to learn yoga through my own practice and in order to learn I had to unlearn and relearn. This way, links of the chain of learning moved on and on, and it is still moving. 

Naturally, at that time it was not possible for me to do prāṇāyāma, even my Guru was unwilling to teach me, because my chest was like that (indicating a collapsed, narrow chest). I did not do prāṇāyāma at all up to 1942. When my Guru visited me in Pune in 1940, I asked him about prāṇāyāma, he just gave an outline. You know, what we call deep breathing, probably my age would not have taken more than that he had said. Then he said to do deep inhalation, hold the breath and do deep exhalation. These are the only techniques my Guruji gave me to follow. I tried. As I tried, I did it only on a physical level. Though I did it, I did not succeed at all. If I did deep inhalation, deep exhalation was an impossibility and vice versa. So I questioned him. I said, Sir, I am not getting it, what have I to do? He said, "Continue. It will come." And it never came. Early each morning, I used to get up with fever in my mind to sit and do prāṇāyāma. I had the bad habit of drinking coffee from my early days as soon as I was up. After going to the toilet, with a determined mind to make an effort, I used to sit for prāṇāyāma. After sitting in padmāsana for a few minutes, my legs used to pain and chest muscles used to rebel. The mind was so weak that it surrendered to the dictates of body pain and heavy breathing to give up practice for the day (laughter). Even the moment I placed fingers on my nostrils, the inner carpet of the nostrils used to become rough and irritated. So I said to myself that this is not for me. Each day the same routine continued, of sitting and wishing goodbye to prāṇāyāma, for the day. 

When I got married in 1943 I became lazy to prepare my early morning coffee. I used to wake up my beautiful wife to prepare coffee for me, saying, that I had to do prāṇāyāma. Poor lady used to prepare it, as I was lazy to get up before it was ready. Immediately, I used to brush my teeth and drink coffee and go for nature's calls. My wife then went to bed to have a nap again. I, as usual, set for prāṇāyāma and in a few minutes negative thoughts used to overpower me to give up prāṇāyāma practice for the day after a few trials. Failures lit large on my face and body. Like this, each day I have followed the ritual which ended at once, as I did not succeed in my attempts.

Instead of prāṇāyāma, I changed to trātaka, you know, gazing. I used to draw like the circular disc of the sun with the rays in black paint in the middle of a circular card with several rays in different directions. I said to myself as I can't do prāṇāyāma, let me do trātaka. I started doing trātaka, without blinking the eyes. So my prāṇāyāma ended with trātaka, and began gazing for a very long time. Then one day I thought, what is this, I have not learned anything. I had read in some books that if you do trātaka you get this power, you get that power. Nothing came to me. (laughter). But trātaka gave me unpleasant sensations in my brain cells and eyes. I was getting irritated and eyes began burning and used to become heavy. I developed day blindness. So I stopped doing it. 

Instead of trātaka, I went back to try prāṇāyāma. I began ujjayi with deep inhalation and exhalation, changing from sitting to lying down position. If I was restless in sitting position, I practiced lying down and when restless in lying down position, I sat and did. As I was restless, I changed my mind to do nāḍī śodhana prāṇāyāma as I had read that it was a good prāṇāyāma to start with. 

My guru never did prāṇāyāma in the presence of anyone. He used to do in his own room. So there were no chances to see his practices. But he was a master in prāṇāyāma. In 1944 I had an opportunity of going to Mysore with my wife, as she was pregnant and was expecting Geeta. As such I went to take his blessings. It so happened that when I was there for about four or five days, one day in a hall, he was sitting and doing a nāḍī śodhana prāṇāyāma and I saw his fingers on his nose, and that was the only lesson I had from him. I peeped through the window and observed his practice for some time (say five to eight minutes). I saw how he placed his fingers on the nose, he was moving his knuckles and changing from right to left and back to right and so on. I also watched his way of sitting, movement of his back, side chest and abdominal walls. This I gathered in two or three days and memorized to impart in my practices when I return to Poona.

After returning to Poona, I started practicing what I had seen. To my surprise, I could not sit erect like my Guruji. If I sat straight, in a few minutes, my spinal column used to become sore and painful. My spine used to collapse. I realized that it was on account of my hours of practice of backbends. It was elastic but not strong. It had lost the power of resistance. If I kept up straight by force, my chest became taut and breathing was heavy and labored. So I began to sit, taking the support of the wall. This released the tension of the muscles of the chest but I could not sit longer. The moment soreness was felt, I used to do āsanas like Matsyendrāsana to take off the soreness. Thus, my practice went on with failure after failure up to 1960. It is a long process, but you have to appreciate my patience is my impatience, hopes in repeated failures. Anyone else would have left but I was consistent and persistent with all my setbacks in the practice of prāṇāyāma. 

Each morning, as a religious person, I used to get up at 4 (never missed) and sat for prāṇāyāma. After a few minutes or so, I had to open my mouth, or if I did one or two breaths, I had to wait for five minutes to take another two deep breaths. I was restless throughout. I used to sit in Padmāsana and still prāṇāyāma would not come. I used to lie down, to try. After three or four breaths, I used to feel heavy in my head. Then I used to sit again to try. Restlessly like this I tried in Padmāsana, in Baddha Konāsana, thinking that something may come in some pose. But problems of learning continued to disturb me much. Believe me or not, though I never knew prāṇāyāma, I was forced to teach it to those who requested individual tuition. 

I did not attribute this failure to the wrong practice of āsanas but due to overdoing them more than my nerves could take. As I was suspected of consumption, my lungs were not ready to take the load of prāṇāyāma for a long time. Even my Guruji was not keen to teach me prāṇāyāma on account of my physical condition. Probably he did not like to take risks on my vital organs which were affected due to lung diseases.

All these failures taught me many things in the art of teaching prāṇāyāma. Though it is essential to learn from a master, I learned the methods to impart this art if a teacher is not available. The credit and merit of my repeated struggles, failures and successes, culminated in 1980 with my book on Light on Prāṇāyāma that will act as a living Guru for a long time. Every yoga teacher claims that if one is out of mood or dejected, practice of prāṇāyāma helps to overcome them. You can never do prāṇāyāma with an upset mind. This is what I learnt. Sometimes I used to feel very fresh, and at other times, practice of prāṇāyāma was bringing moodiness and tension because I never knew how to relax the brain in inhalation or the art of grip needed in the process of exhalation. 

When I was a novice in prāṇāyāma, someone gave me a book on prāṇāyāma to read. I read it. In it, it was said that while exhaling, cotton kept near the nose should not move. I tried to exhale like this but when I attempted, I could not inhale with ease. Then I thought to myself, if exhalation is to be so soft and smooth, how should inhalation be? There was no mention of inhalation process in any books. This made me think and remodel my practice to balance activity and passivity evenly. 

In 1948 I was invited by Shri J. Krishnamurti to teach him yoga. He speaks of passive alertness. His psychological passive alertness was similar to those who dealt on the theory of exhalation. Without feeling the breath touching my inner nostrils I tried inhalation. When I attempted on this passivity, my heart began to beat strongly and heavily. This made me do soft inhalation with a gentle touch with the inner carpet of the nose. I felt a sense of exhilaration and quietness. This, I thought, must be the right method and began to manipulate the intercostal muscles of the chest, the fingers on the nose and so forth. 

In 1960, while I was in Gstaad, Switzerland, the weather was very congenial. There I used to prepare my own coffee and practice prāṇāyāma. While I was practicing daily, one day I felt the delight and tested the fragrance of the incoming breath. The weather was neither cold nor warm, but exhilarating. That sensation which I felt, gave me the clue to play my digital fingers and thumb on the gates of the nasal passage to create that feeling. From then on, I practiced prāṇāyāma daily with interest.

Though I had seen my Guru's practice and placement of fingers, I have to confess that I learnt more from my own pupil, the famous violinist Dr. Yehudi Menuhin. Being a great violinist, I observed the ways of placing the crown of his fingers on the strings, flexion of the knuckles, pulling and pressing of the violin strings, creation of space between knuckles and I began to manipulate the fingers and play them on my nostrils as though my nose was a musical instrument. Actually, I translated my pupil's dexterity of finger movement to my nose. Thus, he became indirectly my Guru in the art of manipulating the digital fingers for my practice of prāṇāyāma. 

In short, it took me 20 to 22 years to begin prāṇāyāma with earnestness after I was initiated into Yoga by my Guru. 

As I told you earlier, I was paying more attention to back bends as they were spectacular. In 1958 for the first time, I made up my mind to do forward bends with chronological timings like the back bends. The excruciating pains appearing while performing back bends used to disappear immediately after the practices. But the forward bends brought soreness and dull pains and continued for hours even after the practices. The pain was of such a nature that I felt as if someone was hitting me with a sledgehammer. 

This pain from forward bendings made me live with pain but in due course I mastered them. I do them with timings once a week even to this day and many of my pupils have adopted the same system. 

Forward bends began to help me in keeping the spine erect while doing prāṇāyāma. I learnt from this experience that back bends strengthen the inner muscles while forward bends develop and strengthen the outer muscles of the spinal column. I could sit well and use the inner and outer muscles of the spine parallelly while doing prāṇāyāma. 

This taught me a lesson that forward bends, back bends and lateral movements of the spinal muscles ought to be developed to tone the muscles of the spine as they act as a base for good prāṇāyāma.