Wellbeing is what the body does when nothing is in the way. The work, mostly, is to remove what is in the way and to give it the conditions it needs.
Trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you. Bessel van der Kolk · The Body Keeps the Score
Where you place your attention is where you place your energy. Joe Dispenza · Becoming Supernatural
The body is literally manufactured and sustained by mind. Paramhansa Yogananda · Autobiography of a Yogi
Across modern science, classical yoga, and the contemplative lineage, the same observation keeps surfacing. Of all the practices that build wellbeing, breath is the one that the body is literally designed to be regulated by — the bridge between the autonomic nervous system and conscious control.
Nestor's book Breath is a five-year journalistic investigation across labs, Buddhist monasteries, free-divers, and Czech breath researchers. His central finding: the modern population is breathing too fast, too shallow, and through the wrong organ. Slowing the breath to roughly five-and-a-half breaths per minute reorganises the body's stress response.
A last word on slow breathing. It goes by another name: prayer. James Nestor · Breath
Iyengar treats pranayama as the bridge between the body and the mind — the third of yoga's eight limbs. Light on Yoga dedicates its longest section to its forms and stages, calling breath the only physical function that is both involuntary and consciously controllable.
Look after the health of the body, and the fragrance of the mind and richness of the spirit will follow. B.K.S. Iyengar · Light on Life
Yogananda dedicates chapter twenty-six of Autobiography of a Yogi to the Science of Kriya Yoga — a specific pranayama method his lineage trained him in. Kriya, he writes, decarbonises the blood, recharges it with oxygen, and directs the life force along the spine. Breath, properly regulated, is the pathway between the human and the divine.
Kriya Yoga is union with the Infinite through a certain action or rite. Paramhansa Yogananda · Autobiography of a Yogi, Ch. 26
The practice is older than any of these books. Pranayama in the Yoga Sutras. Anapanasati in Buddhism. Sufi breath cycles. The same observation, repeated across millennia.
Live quietly in the moment, and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself. Paramhansa Yogananda · Autobiography of a Yogi