“Try it. Breathe slowly and smoothly. A pervasive sense of calm descends. Now breathe rapidly and frenetically. Tension mounts. Why? It’s a question that has never been answered by science, until now”.
Those are lines from the first paragraph of a study at Stanford University which seeks to explain why deep breathing calms the mind. The business standard writes “Scientists from Stanford University's school of medicine in the U.S. have discovered the specific neurons that connect breathing and state of mind and blah blah blah….
It actually took scientists till now to find out something that people around the world have been observing ever since Yoga hit the western world. Yoga discovered centuries ago in India and based on the protocols of deep breathing and meditation is finally being proved by science when it never really required proving because Yoga is a science in itself. In-depth study of the subject explains why it helps you. Science it seems never knew that.
Because the one weakness of science is to dismiss anything it cannot see or feel or conform to a physical model.
Well here is how the tenets of yoga and the practice of deep breathing to induce calm have been proved at Stanford. The paper describes a cellular and molecular understanding of how such principles work said Mark Krasnow MD, PhD professor of biochemistry and the senior author of the study. Yes they do mention that the practice of pranyama or yoga advocates the control of breathing to alter ones consciousness from a frantic stressed out state to a meditative one.
Yoga is officially regarded to be 5000 years old developing in Vedic India. However, researchers are of the belief that due to its secretive nature and the fact that its original treatises were written on leaves and bark, many may have disappeared and thus Yoga could well be 10,000 years old.
Image Source: www.wp.com
The formative years of Yoga were unorganized and dealt more with karmic laws of spirituality. Ancient yoga masters like the great sage Patanjali deviated from ancient Vedic text and advocated Yoga more as a metaphysical entity, where the practice could well rid the body and mind of the material obstacles that bind humans to their material existence. Yoga was then regarded as a physical pathway to a developed mental plane of enlightenment. It was this style of yoga that was developed to what is now known in the west as Hatha yoga.
It may all seem too heavy to digest but a more practical explanation of yoga would be physical exercises to cleanse the body of negativity such as stress, tension, hypertension, anxiety and anger. In short exercises of deep breathing calms the mind. What results is the real you as you were meant to be, a happy calm and composed person free from the attachment of materialism and negative emotions expressed by lack of them.
Image Source: www.onlymyhealth.com
Scientists at Stanford have discovered that specific neurons connect breathing to a control center and the state of mind. Breathing erratically signals the control center to display negative feelings such as tension. Yoga believes that the body has seven energy centers or chakras corresponding to various parts of our physiology. Disruption and negativity in these chakras lead to dysfunction. Now isn’t that really the same thing? Couldn’t yoga be a metaphorical version of physical science or vice versa?
Through tests on mice Scientists were able to pinpoint which neurons within the body’s breathing control center generated different types of breathing. By wiping out some of the neurons they found breathing in mice were relaxed as there was no reason to breathe faster.
What scientists found that neurons were actually observing the traits of breathing and reporting it back to a control center to act accordingly. In yoga the chakras are also disrupted through external negativity and thus a body’s natural state of calm is disrupted and tension or stress sets in. Each chakra is connected and meditation channels positivity upwards to the ultimate chakra in the brain which fills a person with the sense of calmness and well being. On a deeper note, the ultimate chakra in the pineal gland region is the area through which a true yoga master reaches a superior heightened sense of consciousness.
That is what yoga has been doing all these years; the problem with science is that it needs a definite model where only physical observation and calculus can prove something to be right even if they know it exists. Isn’t it safe to say that what spiritualism has been teaching us all these years whether western or eastern is also science unproved? And what existed centuries ago is finally being proved because scientists can now see it. Boys…You need to feel too!!! And on a deeper note consider this, rocket science, the theory of relativity, quantum physics isn’t new, there are no mysteries to the universe, everything always existed, it is man’s mind that is developing slowly to figure out the answers now. But all the same yes deep breathing calms the mind.
Image Source: www.squarespace.com