Breathing, identity and avidyā:
Why are people so attached to their acquired manner of breathing? People shouldn’t need experts like me to instruct them in how to breathe; it should be common sense. Yet, is still possible to get into a lift/elevator and have somebody say “getting crowded, everybody, breathe in!” What is it that keeps this nonsense in circulation?
Recently, I attended an excellent talk on complex PTSD. However, during an included mindfulness exercise, we were instructed to inhale up from our feet and exhale back down to our feet, through our mouths! No sense in that at all, not even common sense.
How so, where do these ideas come from and how do they persist? I think they stem from a certain sort of ignorance. In this world, we have simple ignorance, where we just don’t know certain things. This can easily be done away with. But we also have a kind of ingrained, in a sense, wilful ignorance, that is very resistant to change.
In yoga, following Patañjali, we refer to this kind of ignorance as avidyā. Avidyā persists because it’s the root of all our drives for physical survival and social acceptance. These drives are very important to us in any emergency situation, where it’s better to do something or say something rather than nothing. But they do stand in the way of any new understanding.
A few years ago, when I was researching for my book, ‘Breath for Health’, I was told by an experienced physiotherapist that she’d seen how young people acquire their peculiar patterns of breathing from family and friends. So, could the way that people learn to breathe during their formative years actually become a part of the identities they experience? Does breathing in a certain way identify one as an acceptable member of a particular group?
We are all very sensitive to non-verbal signals and, if we’ve actually picked up the way we breathe from other people, that means that we remain, at least subconsciously, continuously aware throughout our lives of the way that people around us are breathing. Yoga therapists train themselves to have this awareness consciously.
This, I think, is why those of us who know what natural, unaffected breathing is like are so often up against considerable resistance from people who could benefit from our knowledge and experience. Their resistance comes from their drive, which Patanjali calls asmitā, to protect their personal identities, including their breathing aspect, and avoid being subconsciously experienced as ‘odd’ by their peer group.
If, as yoga teachers and therapists, we fail to examine the ideas and habits about breathing which we have previously acquired, then we are going to pass on those habits to others, when what we should be doing is going back to first principles, learning what natural breathing really is, and practising ways of reinforcing this natural pattern on a daily basis.
And if our acquired breathing patterns form part of our ego-identities, or asmitā, then by challenging these patterns, or samskāras, as Patanjali calls them, we are also making progress in yoga.
Michael Hutchinson, 13th December 2025
Yesterday (10 January 2026) I discovered there are two psychologists (Kaiser and Butler in Front. Psych. April 2021) who have coined the term ‘social breathing’. Although it may appear we share the same insight, the ‘breathing’ they describe isn’t actual respiration, but the to and fro of unconscious mirroring at both a physical and psychological level which creates bonding within human interactions. Kaiser and Butler use a physical process, breathing, as an analogy of a socail process.
