The breath is the lever

You've been breathing all your life without instruction. Today you get some.

Pranayama is the yogic science of breath, named in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras around the fourth century as one of the eight limbs of practice, and taught in India for far longer than that. The word means something like extending the life force. The claim underneath it is one the West spent centuries ignoring and then confirmed in a lab: the breath is the one part of the nervous system you can drive by hand. Change the breath on purpose and the heart, the blood pressure and the mind follow.

A few of its practices have become household names. Alternate-nostril breathing, closing one side then the other, which steadies the mind before sitting. Box breathing, in for four, hold four, out four, hold four, which special-operations units adopted because it works under fire. Kapalabhati, sharp exhales from the belly, which wakes you up. And the simplest one, the long exhale, which the body reads as a signal that the danger has passed.

The research is clearest on slow breathing. Somewhere around six breaths a minute, the heart rate and the breath start to move together, and the body's rest-and-repair system takes the wheel. You don't need a mat or a teacher for that one. You need a chair and a minute.

This is the key the whole chamber turns on. The second month is the Body, by Breathing. Everything that follows this month, strength, sleep, food, rest, works better in a body that knows how to exhale. Most of us have been taking shallow breaths at the top of the chest since we got our first job. The lungs are waiting at the bottom.