All Kinds of Model Trains Equipment

How To Do The Yoga Breathing Exercises (Part 1)

Friends, now that we have gone over the Yogic Abdominal Exercises, the next steps in the Sivananda Style of Yoga are the Breathing Exercises also known in Yoga Circles as "pranayama".

 

Before delving any further into the Breathing Exercises, will discuss the next topic titled below.

 

How to Breathe Properly:

 

If you really want a great illustration on this, observe an infant. They breathe diaphragmatically and naturally. In other words they don't use their shoulders or squeeze their stomachs (as some vocal coaches will tell you, which by the way, the world renowned vocal coach of the stars, Mr. Seth Riggs, said in his book to be incorrect)

 

Considering the man coached Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie, Natalie Cole, Luther Vandross… He can't be wrong!).

 

Truthfully, the better you are able to perform Sun Salutations the better and quicker your breathing is corrected, so concentrate on them intensely.

 

I will outline various tests to show you the different forms of breathing and then how to combine all to get the most in your inhalation.

 

Yoga gives first attention to the physical body, which is the vehicle of the soul's existence and activity. Purity of the mind is not possible without purity of the body which may be attainable via a mucus-less diet, asanas (or positive exercises) and breath control pranayama.

 

Pranayama is one of the most important practices in all forms of yoga. In its practice, one is able to control the nervous system and thereby gain gradual control over vital energy and the mind. To breathe means to live and to live means to breathe! From the first cry of the infant to the last gasp of a dying man, they are nothing but a series of breaths.

 

Truthfully, the air you breathe is more important than what you eat as you derive the bulk of your energy from that very breath of life.

 

Yogis of old have declared that the correct habit of breathing, with natural diet, would regenerate the race and the modern diseases of civilized man such as blood pressure, heart diseases, asthma, tuberculosis would only be medical names in the Dictionary!

 

In several institutions in the western hemisphere, correct breathing is being taught for the sake of physical health.

 

CORRECT BREATHING:

 

In order to acquire the most amount of air through minimal effort, do the following tests to see which is the most beneficial.

 

Test 1

Sit erect in Vajrasan (see Chapter 3 on asanas); cross legged or in a chair. Ensure that the spine is straight. Now relax the abs. Do not raise the chest or bend forward.

 

Now accompanying the sound of your metronome, set at 60 bpm, inhale while allowing the diaphragm to descend without raising the chest and/or shoulders. The aim should be for the dome of the abdomen to have a slight outward curve NOT, as some so-called vocal instructors insist, as in "Sing from your diaphragm!" Count how many seconds of inhalation you can do with this method and take mental notes!

 

Test 2

 

-Sit erect as in Test 1.

 

-Now defy test one's objective and stiffing the diaphragm.

 

-Next expand the chest and take a long deep breath. Here the breathing will be done via the respiratory muscles connected with the ribs.

 

-Do you notice how much air you can actually inhale through this...not much right?

 

Test 3

 

-Again sit erect as in the previous positions.

 

-Contracting the abdomen take a deep breath by raising the shoulders and the collarbones, -Your test will show that you can inhale only but so much via this method.

 

Test #1 is known as Deep breathing

Test #2 is known as Chest breathing

Test #3 is known as High/Shallow Breathing

 

Naturally Deep breathing is the best and might only be mastered by conscious effort or via the Sun salutations and especially the Shoulder Stand and its counter poses.

(Although a proper diet tends to steer you in that route naturally!)

 

Now that we have gone over an overview of rediscovering how to breathe, something babies and virtually all animals know instintively, in part 2 we shall be going over some actual Yogic Breathing Exercises.

 

Namaste,

 

 

Foras Aje

About the Author

Foras Aje is an independent researcher and author of Fitness: Inside and out, a book on improving physical and mental health naturally. For more information on natural health,news and breakthroughs visit his site at http://www.bodyhealthsoul.com/

Lionel Great Western

Cigars And Music: A Natural Combination

Perhaps it's because there's a close cultural connection between great music and smoky bars. Anyone who knows anything about jazz knows that its truly legendary improvisers - Coltrane, Bird, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie - cut their teeth playing in bars so smoky that it's a good thing everybody was too busy improvising to need sheet music.

Or maybe it's because both cigars and music are contemplative pleasures. A casual smoker can get a quick tobacco-fix from a cheap cigarette, just as a casual music listener can enjoy the background hum of pop songs on the car radio. But to really enjoy a great performance, or a good tobacco, sitting still and paying attention are necessary.

In any case, music and cigar smoking seem to belong together, and some of the most famous musicians are (or were) cigar devotees - just as, it turns out, one of the most famous of cigar devotees is also a musician. Avo Uvezian, the maker of Avo cigars, is also a respected classical and jazz pianist, a Julliard graduate, and even the one-time official pianist of the Shah of Iran. After a successful musical career based first in his native Middle East, and then in the contiguous United States, Uvezian moved in the 1980s to Puerto Rico, where he opened a restaurant and bar and dabbled in cigarmaking. After customers at his Puerto Rico restaurant told him how much they enjoyed some cigars he'd had rolled himself, from a blend of tobaccos he hand-picked, he opened his own Dominican Republic-based cigar factory, working with noted cigar maker Hendrik Kelner. Now his company makes three million cigars a year, and Uvezian himself still makes music - his first CD, Legacy, was released in 2004.

For another example, consider the great trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, who smokes, by his own estimation, four or five cigars a day. Music allowed the Cuban-born Sandoval to rise to fame in his native Cuba - and to defect from that country in 1990, during a long stint playing concerts in Europe (he now lives in Florida). Sandoval has played the horn for Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie, Gloria Estefan and Johnny Mathis, Michel Legrand and Frank Sinatra. His technically flawless playing has resulted in his being the kind of musician whose work is often known by people who couldn't name him - he is brought in as a session musician by some of the world's finest and best-known (see above), and he often scores movie soundtracks. As his work with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Leningrad Philharmonic prove, he's even proved able to handle the rigors of classical music as well as jazz - sometimes doing both in the same concert.

The cigar-music connection is especially strong in Cuba, known as one of the world's cigar capitals. Both cigars and music are staples of island life (the cigar remains one of the island's most prominent exports), and the strength of both in Cuban culture depends partly on the nimble and intelligent blending of elements from everywhere - wrappers and fillers from different parts of Latin America, rhythms and melodies from the African coast, South America, US pop, Western European classical, etc. In other words, Cuban cigarmaking and Cuban music have both survived, and flourished, by mixing and melding.

For generations, cigar rollers were entertained by the sound of paid musicians or by music from the radio. (This tradition continues even now in the Dominican Republic, where workers at the Arturo Fuente factory, among other places, are treated to the work of performing musicians.) With this tradition in place, it's no wonder that some of Cuba's music legends got their start as cigar-factory entertainers; and since tobacco smoking has been a part of Latin American life far longer than it has in some other places - Columbus's sailors noted it being smoked in what is now modern Cuba in the year 1493, so there's many more centuries of lore to draw on its psychological and emotional associations are deeper and richer, providing better material for songwriters to mine. Thus famous Cuban songwriter Beny More, himself a former entertainer for the cigar-factory workers, touches on the song in a number of his classic compositions.

About the Author

CigarFox provides you the opportunity to build your own sampler of the finest cigars that include cigar brands like Montecristo, Romeo & Julieta, H Upmann, Macanudo, Cohiba, Partagas, Gurkha and many more. Choose from more than 1200 different cigars! Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters.