The Breath that Builds Community
written by Catherine Streigel
Prior to my 200-hour teacher training, I had never formally practiced pranayama. A decade after my first experience with simple Dirgha Pranayama, I now lead monthly pranayama classes with dedicated students, and this is the story of how I got there. In my years of casually dabbling in yoga before becoming a Pranakriya teacher, I had heard nods to Ujjayi breath in vinyasa classes but had no real understanding of the transformative power of a pranayama practice. In my 200-hour training, I had experiences through pranayama that left me changed and instilled a strong desire to share the practice with others. It was also the part of teaching that intimidated me the most. When you teach pranayama, you don’t receive the same real-time feedback from people’s bodies that you do when you teach asana. If you’ve brought students to a place where their attention is introverted, their faces tell you little to nothing about their internal experience. You have to share the practice and trust that it is landing. There is stillness. So much stillness. And quiet. In that stillness, worry and anxiety that the practice isn’t working for the students or that they are “bored” can have a way of creeping up on the teacher.
In 2023, I finally decided to set aside my worries and put into action what I had always wanted to share more fully with my students. I created a three-session series called The Lost Art of Breathing. In each session, I introduced and taught two or three pranayama, along with context and the “why” behind the practices. Sometimes this was yoga philosophy, sometimes history, and sometimes information about anatomy and the nervous system. After this teaching, I would guide a meditative posture class incorporating the new pranayama techniques. Finally, instead of sending everyone out the door after savasana, we’d take 15 minutes to have tea and talk.
This was where the magic happened. I didn’t have to do a lot of talking—I’d ask students if they wanted to share anything about their practice, and generally the conversation would take off from there. As a teacher, it was a valuable opportunity to really connect with what students wanted and experienced, and it gave me the confidence to keep teaching pranayama. They were having the same profound experiences I had had through pranayama, and on many occasions, they had unique experiences that I had never had. It created a sense of community, friendship, and openness that isn’t possible when students pop into a class moments before it starts and leave minutes after the class is over.
Since leading that series, I have established a monthly pranayama class at the studio where I teach. I start by teaching a technique or two, lead a practice with lots of pranayama and a little gentle movement, and end with tea and conversation. I have students who come and go, but I also have students from the original series who attend consistently. Having had time to understand the “why,” to have been given context, and to have had ample room for questions, they appreciate and love pranayama.
Practicing pranayama is such a deeply personal experience that it can be easy to fall into the trap of assuming that we are unique. We may assume that what we experience will not resonate with others or that we, as teachers, are incapable of facilitating similar experiences for others. For me, taking the leap of teaching pranayama has reinforced the wholeness and connection between each of us. It’s important that I guide pranayama skillfully and teach the context. However, the most crucial piece is trusting that pranayama will have an effect on the student if their desire to experience it is there. We must practice yoga over and over again to counter the constant (and very human) forgetting that we are universally connected and whole—and sometimes, for teachers, the most powerful lessons from yoga come from trusting the process of teaching.
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PKTA members, look for Catherine’s series outline on the PKTA resource page.
