On Yoga, COVID-19, and Restoring Our Breath
“Deep and focused breathing communicates to our bodies that we are safe. It has the power to immediately reset our fight, flight, or freeze response.”
Photo by Avrielle Suleiman
COVID-19 stole so much from us. It stole a wedding celebration with all the people I love. It stole my hope and expectation for the future. My husband was hospitalized in isolation for the eight longest days of my life as COVID-19 pneumonia made him fight for every breath.
Over the past two years, many of us have experienced a battle for our own breath. COVID-19 didn’t just threaten the air in our lungs, it stole breath and life from our relationships, our dreams, and our day-to-day experiences.
COVID-19 took our breath away.
This year, I decided to become a trained yoga instructor. A dear friend and I felt compelled to embark on a Christ-centered teaching program together, not knowing how deeply it would mark our lives.
Breath is the foundation of hatha yoga. Each practice starts and ends with a focus on breath. You might have been asked to “notice” your breath, invited to “control it” by inhaling and exhaling through your nose, or encouraged to “connect one breath with one movement” during a vinyasa — a flowing sequence of poses strung together and integrated with the breath.
Do you know how powerful our breath is?
THE POWER OF GOD’S BREATH
In the Bible, breath is introduced as the mechanism God uses to bring Adam to life. Everything else was spoken into being; the literal breath of our Divine Creator is what Genesis tells us brought humankind to life. “...God formed Man out of dirt from the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life. The Man came alive—a living soul.”
And physiologically, when we invite oxygen to fill our lungs by taking a deep breath, it signals to our parasympathetic nervous system to calm the body down. Deep and focused breathing communicates to our bodies that we are safe. It has the power to immediately reset our fight, flight, or freeze response. Yet doctors tell us that, even at maximum exercise intensity, humans only use 70% of possible lung capacity.
So how do we respond when we’re overcome with anxieties and expectations that we don’t have the resources to face? How do we respond when we need answers or miraculous healing for our loved ones suffering from COVID-19? How do we respond when pain clouds our days with heaviness and hopelessness?
Well, we can start by taking a deep breath.
When my husband Ben was hospitalized, the nurses gave him an incentive spirometer—a device he could use to facilitate deeper breathing practices and strengthen his recovering lungs.
Deep breathing calms our body. As we breathe, we can marvel at the intricacies of what is happening in our bodies as we fill it with oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. We can find gratitude, even for just a moment, at the God who created our bodies to work that way.
Expand your belly, side body and then chest as you inhale through the nose, and exhale through the nose, every last ounce of breath that is no longer serving your body.
Christ-centered yoga is a spiritual practice that restores us to God by re-connecting us to the unique and incredible bodies God has given us. After experiencing my own COVID-19-related trauma, yoga training equipped me to share this practice of yoga with others journeying through suffering.
THE POWER OF OUR GOD-GIVEN BREATH
Yoga is a tool available to every single body. It reminds us of the power of our God-given breath. Christ-centered yoga can strengthen our relationship with God by inviting us to physically move through asanas (poses) as we emotionally and honestly surrender to God all our thoughts or feelings that are stale or stuck. This method of prayer includes every aspect of our being, like the encouragement to “love the Eternal, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.”
The gift of yoga helped me move through the most difficult year of my life. I’ve remembered the miracle of my breath, I’ve become stronger, and God has taught me more ways to “pour out all [my] worries and stress upon him and leave them there, for he always tenderly cares for [me].”
Are you struggling to find your breath?
If so, I invite you to check out The Well Church’s yoga and meditation offerings, open to all skill levels.
Let’s restore our breath together.
Lauren is a strategic communications and digital marketing consultant at the intersection of political and nonprofit spaces. She has worked for local, state & national political campaigns, and currently works with nonprofits and NGO’s that fight homelessness and human trafficking. Lauren is also a Certified Holy Yoga Instructor (C-HYI 200). She loves eating tacos, going to the theater to see her incredibly talented friends perform, and book store/thrift store hopping. Formerly in the Village and the UES, she lives with her husband Ben in Brick, NJ.