Mind Your Breathing: The Yogi’s Handbook with 37 Pranayama Exercises

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Mind Your Breathing: The Yogi's Handbook with 37 Pranayama Exercises is from the award-winning author Sundar Balasubramanian.

In this work, Sundar compiles popular Pranayama techniques, their ingeniously modified variations, and some brand new exercises stemming from the ancient Siddha wisdom.

This book, which captures the essence of the wisdom of centuries along with the innovations resulting from the author's ongoing research into the subject, is the best gift to your Yogi friend.

Dr. Sundar Balasubramanian is a researcher from the Department of Radiation Oncology, at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, SC, USA currently studying the effects of smoking in cancer radiation therapy. Sundar is a Yoga Biology researcher as well. He published the seminal work connecting Pranayama and salivary biomarkers, and uses Pranayama and other Yoga methods in various clinical and social settings.

Although he has a Ph.D in Biochemistry, Sundar's passion for Tamil literature is the driving force for his innovations in Yoga research. He is the author of PranaScience: Decoding Yoga Breathing, and has produced several audio albums including Chanting is Pranayama. Sundar grew up in Karambakkudi, a village in Tamil Nadu, India. He was a speaker of TED Charleston 2015, and is an acclaimed researcher in the field of Pranayama. He travels worldwide to teach workshops, immersion programs, and to train other Yoga teachers and academic researchers in the area of integrative health using Yoga methods. Sundar is working on installing an Endowed Chair specifically to research on Yoga. He lives in Mount Pleasant, SC, with his wife and their three children.

It has been a little over two years since my first book PranaScience: Decoding Yoga Breathing was published. In the interim I have traveled significantly within the US, India, and Canada, giving workshops, teacher training, and speeches. The venues include Yoga studios, academic institutions, Yoga festivals, patient education conferences, and scientific meetings. Simultaneously there are several publications, interviews, and articles published on my research. With the grace of my Gurus, I have been able to do a good job disseminating whatever little I have learned from the Siddhars. I am very happy to see the excitement that the topic of my research brings among the audience based on the feedback. At the end of every meeting, I am filled with joy, hope, peace, satisfaction, and excitement that the time for Pranayama research has come.

One lacuna I see in this area is that there are no technical handbooks for Pranayama. Of course, there are numerous videos online, released by wonderful people who love sharing their knowledge. However, there are only a handful of written books on Pranayama techniques, and those too are limited by the number of exercises that they cover. My first thought was to write a book on how to do each exercise. I originally thought that I should go deep into every exercise and explain all the research if any done on those exercises, bringing related wisdom from the Siddha literature to the practice. However, in the meantime the need for a basic how to book, irrespective of whether more information on the basis of the research is available or not, dominated my preference. So I started putting together this book.

Having been a medical researcher for many years, it is always a joy to meet a colleague in the field. Sundar and I met in 2013 at Yogaville, VA when he attended Yoga of the Heart (a certification to adapt the sacred practices of Yoga for students with cardiac disease and cancer). Meeting him, I had a more complete feeling than what I often experience with other researchers. At the time, I attributed it to the fact that Sundar has been doing research in the rarefied field of Yogic practices for the past several years, while having academic roots from a traditional learning background. He shares what his research has yielded about the subtlety of Pranayama practices for patients' well being, and education.

I felt an immediate sense of kindness and a desire to share the data that he formulated. He seemed incapable of exaggerating the findings to make himself seem important; rather, he wanted to make it available to enhance other people's lives. Because his research involves ancient practices rather than a pill or gadget, the retail portion was exempt. He had a sparkle in his eye and a sense of peace that can only come from many years of dedicated spiritual practice. It was soon obvious that this was not an ordinary researcher, or ordinary research. It does not surprise me at all that the talk he offered as a part of the TEDx series, is one of the most highly viewed talks on Pranayama!

It is now fashionable to investigate the practices and effects of Yoga from a modern, scientific perspective. Yoga, being more than 5000 years old, can easily hold its own in any category from anecdotal evidence alone.

In the journey of Yoga, Pranayama is an important hub. It is also a busy hub. There are people who have marked this hub as their destination. For some, it is a transit. Some may linger for quite some time, some run through quickly. Some miss their next carrier and have to wait longer. Some enjoy the experience here, and some want to move away quickly. Several originations from the East and West have Pranayama as their transit. It does not matter which particular religion, or era, or when they used Pranayama as a tool for spiritual seeking. It might not have been called Pranayama, but it involves breathing. It involves the connectivity that the breath brings between the mind and body. Pranayama belongs to everyone who uses breathing as a key to open the doors to higher spiritual experiences. It could be a singer from Thanjavur who uses the breathing techniques to bring out the extraordinary notes or a marathon runner in Boston who uses efficient breathing techniques to accomplish their goal. Pranayama is a collection of regulated breathing practices that can potentially impact the mind and body. These exercises were developed, organized and disseminated by seekers from various traditions including the saints from ancient India that in Tamil called the Siddhars (or Sithars).