Reclaiming the serious Path
I have often thought that the greatest luxury afforded to any man is not a collection of fine things, but the simple possession of a quiet hour. In the course of my daily duties, I am surrounded by the noise of modern progress, the persistent hum of machinery and the endless demands for an immediate answer. It is quite easy, I find, to lose the thread of one’s own thoughts in such a clatter.
When a man finally finds himself in a quiet room at the end of a long afternoon, the common advice is always to stop and take a deep breath. Doctors offer this counsel, and the modern fitness rooms repeat it, yet it seems to me that very little thought is given to the actual condition of the man attempting it.
Most work culture today involves sitting, and I see how the body sets into a mold because of it. By evening, the shoulders have rounded and the chest is shut tight. If you try to force a large breath into that shape, you can feel the strain in the throat and the front of the neck. The chest hitches up, but nothing genuinely opens. It is an unpleasant sort of work, and it leaves a person feeling tighter than before, because you are trying to stretch a muscle that is still locked in place.
It makes me think of how different this is from the older way of doing things. In the traditional schools of yoga, they were incredibly stubborn about this. A teacher would look at a beginner and tell him to leave his breath entirely alone. The movements were never meant to be a performance or an achievement; they were just a rough, necessary sort of manual labor to clear the stiffness out of the joints and free the ribs.
The old books always suggested that a deep breath is something you have to earn. It only comes naturally after you have walked a few miles, or done some honest work that leaves the limbs warm and the stomach relaxed. When the body is ready, the lungs just fill up on their own, without any shrugging or straining. We have it backward today. We try to use the breath to fix a tired body, when we ought to be using the body to clear a path for the breath.