Breath as a Bridge for Balancing One's Body, Energy and Mind

An Excerpt from Teachings Given by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Summer 2024

A strong element in these teachings is the association of mind with the breath. And that's basically true for all of the ancient teachings and yoga traditions as well. They all generally make the connection that if you want to control your mind, then you control your breath. Because controlling or calming the mind is harder, and controlling or calming the breath is easier, so therefore try to control what is easy in order to control what is difficult. The practices of tsa lung work in a similar way, utilizing the breath and the winds. And after all these many years of our practicing the tsa lung, it would serve us well to have a clearer understanding of these tsa lung exercises, leading to a better relationship to them.

[Tsa lung is a series of ancient yogic practices that brings balance and harmony to our physical body, energy, and mind. The Tibetan term tsa lung translates as: energy-winds in the channels. That's because these practices are designed to open the subtle channels, and guide the healthy flow of the energy-winds, so that we can enjoy good health and reconnect with more calmness to a quiet, peaceful mind. These exercises are easy to perform, and are suitable for everyone.]

I want to focus on the first three tsa lung exercises here, because each one can be thought of as supporting our brain health, our heart health and our gut health. You see, as long as you have this brain, and as long as you have this heart, and as long as you have this gut, then these three tsa lung exercises are what nourish them, what maintain them, and what exercise them. Science is talking all of the time about these three centers in the body. One group of scientists is talking about the brain all of the time, the brain experts. And another group is talking about the heart all of the time; for them it's all about heart. And now a new group of researchers is putting a lot more emphasis on gut health.

So, when doing the first tsa lung exercise utilizing the upward moving tsa lung, think about its being medicine for brain health. The teachings say that the upward moving tsa lung practice will help all of your senses. It will help your sense of smell, sight, hearing, touch and taste - all of the senses. Why? Because the upward moving wind acts in a way to open them. Just as increasing the blood flow there would open up the senses more. Opening the channels opens the flow more, so that all of the senses become better functioning. That's the idea. Thinking about it in a very simple way, we could say that exercising this first upward moving wind would be about benefiting the brain, simple as that.

Then when you are doing the second exercise, the life force tsa lung, think about it as a practice for your heart health. The wind, tsa is directly associated with our breath, and our breath is directly associated with the heartbeat. And that heart rate correlates at any given moment to whether the sympathetic nervous system [fight and flight] or the parasympathetic nervous system [rest and digest] is activated in us. You can experience yourself over just a single breath, the effect that your breathing has on varying your heart rate. So just imagine the overall benefit of using your breath throughout the 24-hour cycle to extend the time that your body spends in that rest and digest mode.

I've been having some fun experimenting with bringing my heart rate down in one single deep breath. Particularly during the morning period. And when you're doing so, this is related to the life force wind. The life force is related to the heart. Experimenting in that way, you can then work on staying at that slower heart rate. Or this technique can be of use whenever you're trying to sleep or take a nap, or whenever you're trying to have a deeper meditation, because the heart rate relates to your meditation. So, in light if that, there is a very good reason as we get older, to integrate these things. You want to have the best meditation, and you want to have the best resting heart rate. Both.

I've mentioned quite a bit lately the idea of spontaneous healing, spontaneous remission, and the ability to protect and defend against sicknesses and viruses. And your ability to do that may have something to do with how much energy you have. While how much energy you have has something to do with how much energy you have preserved. And how much energy you've preserved has something to do with how much energy you've not misused or wasted, wasted for nothing. And nothing here means that most of the time you are needlessly activating the sympathetic nervous system, which means that most of the time the body is not relaxed. Instead, it's always fighting against something, always protecting itself against something, when in fact there's no need to. Therefore, it's constantly depleting its energies, and as result, when the time comes to protect against a real threat, it doesn't have the reserves necessary to do so. Therefore, you become vulnerable to being sick.

What we are focused on in this retreat is meditation. And what we also are focused on is rest. Because what we are doing is trying to recover from samsara. The body uses sleep to recover from the experiences of the day. In the same way, as a whole being, we need to recover from samsara. We need to recover from all of our stories. We have so many stories, don't we? And how many times have you repeated those stories to anybody who would listen? You'll exhaust all of your relatives, all of your friends, won't you? Then you'll tell your stories to your therapist and to unofficial therapists, like your hair dresser. And then you may even need to go into the bar and talk to strangers about your stories. [laughter]

So, in the end what we are trying to do here is to rest from our life. From all of these active stories. And the reason that we have to rest from them is because these stories are very slowly eating us up. They're draining us. So throughout the 24-hour cycle we need ways of recovering from our stories. We need to change them up and rest from those old stories.

As I've said before, this process of exhausting and draining ourselves has something to do with the sympathetic nervous system. And I've said that our activating the sympathetic nervous system has something to do with how our breath is working, and the fact that we are not breathing properly. So the idea is to consciously focus on breathing properly. One method of doing this is called the 4 and 8 breath, which I have spoken of regularly. Or you can simply just breathe deeply. Breathe deeper and relax into a pattern of deeper nostril breathing. In doing so, we will end up conserving our power, rather than wasting it needlessly. Then, once this becomes more habitual, we can turn our attention to how best to integrate this resulting new power into our daily life? Does that make sense?

Okay, so moving on to the third exercise, the fire-like tsa lung. When doing this exercise, you can simply think about its being a medicine for your gut, because it's very much supporting gut health. But in a different way than normal, because it's not focused on food or diet, or anything like that. Rather, it's focused on bringing the wind into this location, bringing medicinal wind there.

Those are the three tsa lung excercises which support the health of the brain, the heart, and the gut. And often during teachings I'll include practice with these three tsa lung excercises within other meditations. But regarding the other two wonderful excercises: the fourth tsa lung exercise, the all-pervasive tsa lung, can be thought of as a practice for increasing your mobility and your flexibility. And when doing the fifth exercise, the downward-moving tsa lung, think about it as supporting your intimacy and in some sense union and the deeper aspects of your connections.

So, these five tsa lung exercises utilize the power of different winds to clear different things. I hope now when we do these wind exercises, we'll have a broader perspective on their relation to the cycle of day and night, and their relation to our mental, physical and emotional well-being, and their relation to our sleep, too. And I'll remind you to took at these winds as precious winds, not just oxygen. And to look at these exercises not as merely a mechanical thing, like a machine pumping blood, but rather as sacred too. And to recognize that the heart too is sacred. And the winds are sacred. And you are sacred, and therefore your breath has to be sacred, too. Clear?

(Learn more about the five tsa lung practices in a free online course on Ligmincha Learning's website: Starting a Meditation Practice.)