Image by: Jeff Rinehart(licence)

Breath comes and goes three ways – unconsciously, subconsciously and consciously.

One can take breath consciously like we do in Pranayam, one can take breath subconsciously (when not taken consciously) and breath also exists when one becomes unconscious.

Breath is the bridge between conscious and subconscious mind. When you witness your breath, you start connecting with subconscious mind, and this is the mind which determines 90% of an individual.

One day, I asked one of my friends to witness his breath, when he did it just for 5 minutes; he told me that he was feeling vibrating and shaking inside. That happened! Because first time he confronted with the bigger picture of himself, first time he realized adjoining emotions and feelings along with the breath.

Breath is regulated by emotions, feelings and thoughts or vice-versa. In every emotion breath is different: in love it is different, in anger it is different, and when one is sad or depressed it is entirely different. (That’s why Pranayam for depressed people turn to be the best solution because it changes the state of breath.)

By making change in breath, you can change your emotions, i.e., whenever you feel angry, just change the way of breathing – your anger will be disappeared.

I heard much criticism for one of the Osho book ‘from sex to super-consciousness’; even I get mails that I shouldn’t write for Osho because he isn’t a Guru, lol! Anyways, that book doesn’t tell having sex and getting God. It tells about transformational shift of the energy from base chakra to crown chakra. And, how to use breath for that? Because breath can also control sex impulses. I just cite that book here because it gives example of using breath in energy transformation.

How breath is the secret of self-realization?

Self realization doesn’t happen due to impurities in thoughts, emotions and feelings. Right!

When we witness breath, we also witness our thoughts, emotions and feelings (please give it a try!). Because, three of them are controlled substantially by subconscious mind; and a breath is connected to both conscious and subconscious mind.

Witnessing breath makes very easy to see ever changing patterns of thoughts and emotions. The more we witness, the more we start knowing how emotions/thoughts are being created? How they affect us? How they drive us crazy? How we act/react with those emotions?

We start knowing all the mechanism and start building a distance from them; as the distance increases, they decreases. Because, we are the witnessor (observer) and what we observe is not us (isn’t reality). And when the witnessor remains alone, Self Realization happens. That’s what exactly would have occurred to Gautama Buddha sitting under a tree.