Body and Breath - Yoga Shop Talk

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Yoga shoptalk, August, 2003

Are there any yoga practices that can alleviate mid-summer allergies? About half the time one side of my nose or the other is stuffed up with mucus, and even when both sides are open it is difficult to breathe. Also I find myself restricting inhalation because I am embarrassed by the noise. As a result I frequently resort to mouth breathing, which makes me feel like the guys pretending to be nut cases on the boat in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I do a saline nasal wash twice a day, morning and evening, and except in emergencies I am committed to avoiding habit-forming medications that dry up my nasal passages.

Answer: You are on the right track. Holistic medical practitioners generally agree that it is best to avoid habit-forming allergy medications. And if your nose remains stuffy even though you do two nasal washes per day, there are indeed several yoga practices that will be helpful.

First of all, over a period of several weeks, develop extensive practices of the bellows breath and kapalabhati (please scan the entirety of chapter two of Anatomy of Hatha Yoga, and refer especially to pages 115-119 and to the cautions on pages 67-68 and 131-132). The main idea is to be ready to do the bellows and kapalabhati anytime your nostrils are both relatively open. So long as you are by yourself and will not be calling attention to your breathing, don’t worry about making noise. Watch and wait for those precious moments when both nostrils are open; then do the practices whenever you can. Start with doing them only for a few seconds each, and as you gradually increase your capacity for doing the exercises with more commitment, depth, speed, and enthusiasm, they will gradually become more effective in drying up your nasal passages and making an end run around the stuffiness and misery that accompanies allergies.

The bellows and kapalabhati are ordinarily done in short bursts of several seconds to perhaps a minute or so several times a day. There is another exercise (not mentioned in Anatomy of Hatha Yoga due to limitations in space) that you can practice on a more regular basis, and that is ujiya breathing. To do this practice you need to press the mid-section of your tongue to the roof of your mouth and generate a soft noise at the back of your throat during both nasal exhalation and nasal inhalation. You make this noise by constricting your glottis, and you will probably need personal instruction from teachers who can demonstrate the practice to you and make sure you are doing it correctly. Ujiya practiced regularly (again preferably when both nostrils are open and ideally when they are in right-left balance) is also an effective method of breaking up mucus, and you can do it anytime you are out of earshot of your companions or passers-by. For example: Don’t do it in crowded elevators, movie theaters, or in work environments (excepting work places that have enough white noise in the background so that your breathing cannot be heard). In some traditions, ujiya is practiced during the course of performing yoga postures, at which time it is especially effective. Again, however, noisy breathing is generally unwelcome in classroom groups unless everyone is doing it.