Closing the mouth, inhale with control and concentration through ida and pingala, so that the breath is felt from the throat to the heart and produces a sonorous sound. This pranayama, called Ujjayi, can be done while moving, standing, sitting, or walking. It removes swelling and disorders of the energies and channels of the body.
Hatha Yoga Pradipika I:51,53

Lying flat on the ground with the face upwards, in the manner of a dead body, is Savasana. It removes tiredness and enables the mind (and whole body) to relax.
Hatha Yoga Pradipika I:32

Lying down is a nice place to start, especially when you are new to practice, or feeling any fatigue. Starting practice with simple breath awareness allows the mind and body to quiet down so that you can approach the physical aspects of Hatha Yoga not with a willful drive to dominate the body, but rather from a place of surrender and acceptance of what is actually going on, working with what is actually there, instead of approaching with driven, goal-oriented reaching for what is not.
1. Lay down on your back. Place your heels about eighteen inches apart and allow your legs to soften, releasing them down into the earth. Palms are face up at your side, about a foot outside your hips. Let your arms release into the earth, hands passive, free. Place your head on the floor so that it feels like the back of your neck is long, and your chin is slightly closer to the floor than your forehead. Lying still, simply begin to observe the sensations, the simple physical sensations, arising in your body. Allow your face to soften, and a spaciousness to arise between your eyebrows, a broad spreading feeling across your forehead. Eyes are soft in their orbits, inner eyes softening, releasing inwards. Tongue softens in the mouth. Your palette is relaxed, and there is an increasing feeling of subtle broadening across the bridge of your nose. Eyelids rest lightly closed, with the seed of a smile on your lips.. Jaw is passive, gravity drawing the chin subtly to the earlobes. Brain feels soft inside the skull. Lying still, observe the feelings of relaxation in your face. Later, in more intense Hatha Yoga practice – Vinyasa or Iyengar – return again and again to the softness, the relaxation of your face, allowing it to remain in Savasana, through all the other changes you take your body through.
2. Begin to notice your breath, just observing, witnessing it. Notice how it feels. Without directing it, without analyzing it, just take a little while to observe the simple physical sensations of the breath, as you move your awareness into your inner body. Notice if it is challenging to be still, or not. Notice if it is difficult to keep your mind on the simple object of the breath. Just watch. As soon as you observe the mind moving to another object gently return your awareness to your breath. Again and again, return your awareness to your breath. Notice, perhaps, if your mind has the tendency to try to control the breath, as soon as it is observed. Just notice: do you retreat from the object held in awareness, or try to control it, or can you simply be with it, as it is, feeling it deeply?
3. Beginning to look a little more critically at the breath, notice where in the body the inhale is expanding. Notice the sensations in your lower belly, upper belly, side ribs, and upper chest, during inhalation. Not controlling, just observing: What expands? What does it feel like on the surface? On the inside? What do you feel? Where is there a complete lack of feeling? And then observing the exhalation in the same fashion. How are the feelings balanced, left-to-right? Do they mirror perfectly, or are there areas of imbalance? Does this bring up any emotions? Is the inhale or the exhale deeper? Which one is happening more of the time? Are you breathing or not breathing more of the time? Does your throat close between cycles, or does it remain open? Are there naturally pauses during the in- or out-breath? More subtly, can you feel the difference in temperature between the air going in and the air coming out, as it moves across your upper lip? Through your sinuses? In your throat? Are there any areas of darkness? What do you feel at the floor of your pelvis? In the center of your pelvis? Just above your Pubic Bone? Inside your Sacrum? Around your Coccyx? Under your Sternum? Without action, what do you feel? How able are you to feel the boundaries of your body, without movement?
4. Hatha Yoga – including Vinyasa and Iyengar Yoga – can be translated rougly as the Yoga of Force. We use conscious action to become aware of the Self with increasing subtlety and refinement, generally working from the most peripheral towards the core, from the gross to the subtle, from the muscles and bones to the inner body. In Vinyasa Yoga practice we use the breath, consciously and actively, as a bridge between body and mind, generating the actions through the medium of the breath, so that as awareness penetrates more deeply the outward practice becomes genuinely effortless. So now, we’ll commence intentional work with the breath (Pranayama). When you are ready, begin to take control of the breath, exhaling fully until the lungs feel empty, but without straining, observing the Savasana of the face. Without directing the breath in terms of telling it where to go, inhale fully, and allow the breath to become circular, round, inhale giving directly into exhale, into inhale, each cycle taking perhaps five seconds, but at a length that feels comfortable and complete with no struggle. Notice that as you deepen the breath there is, naturally, a small pause at the top and bottom. Allow it to be there, this momentary pause, and observe the sensations in the body, in that stillness. Let your throat remain open in this tiny gap, before turning the breath around into the complementary cycle. As you breath, deep circular breaths, balance as well the size of the breath, inhaling as much as you are exhaling, and for the same length of time, to the best of your ability, in comfort. Still not telling the breath where to go, notice where it is going. What expands during the inhale? Where does your exhalation come from? Just observe where the breath happens, how it feels.
5. Allow a slight contraction to come in at the pit of the throat, a subtle in-drawing of the pit of the throat, narrowing the aperture creating a gentle hissing sound, internally, sounding like the ocean in a sea shell, like wind in a forest. A soft aspirant sound, free of struggle. Hear the breath from the inside. The narrowing of the throat warms the breath as it comes into the lungs, and the sound is a sort of internal Mantra, focusing the mind on the rhythm of the breath in practice, giving clear indication of the balance between inhale and exhale, and of the evenness of the flow. Although the quality of the sound of the cycles differs, the quantity of the sound is matched, just punctuated at the top and bottom of the breath with an open-throated pause. Allow the sound of the breath to drop down out of the sinuses – it’s not a nasal sound, at least not intentionally – and into the throat.
6. Now begin to imagine that your entire torso is a single container to receive the breath: this is just the barest beginning of directing the breath in terms of telling it what to do, where to go. From your Pubic Bone to your Clavicles, imagine your entire torso is a balloon, equally everywhere expanding at once to receive your breath. Then, allow your breath to be released everywhere equally at once. Notice the Savasana of your face.
7. Take your right hand and rest in on your heart, so that your thumb and index fingers just touch your Clavicles – your hand need not be exactly centered – and allow you upper arm bone (Humerus) to rest into the floor. Take your left hand and rest in on your lower belly with you pinky touching your Pubic Bone, Humerus resting into the floor. See if your external sense, through your hands, corresponds exactly to your inner sense. Are your upper chest and lower belly rising and falling equally with your breath? Notice the Savasana of your face.
8. At the end of your next exhalation, hold your breath out, without closing your throat. Holding your breath out, hollow your belly to your lower back without tensing your surface abdominals (especially Rectus Abdominis), and holding this hollowness, from the surface of your ribcage expand laterally towards your inner arms and lift your Sternum out of your belly and towards the sky, keeping your shoulders and upper arms released into the ground, and then inhale into this expansion. At the top of your inhale, hold your breath inside without closing your throat, and holding your breath inside, again from the surface of the ribcage expand and lift, and holding this openness slowly exhale, hollowing your belly from bottom to top, and continue breathing roundly, pausing naturally, briefly, at the end of each cycle. Inhaling, expand into your right hand; exhaling, holding the height of your Sternum and hollow your belly starting under your left hand. Inhaling, expand from your Clavicles to your Pubis; exhaling, hollow from your Pubis to your Sternum. Notice the Savasana of your face.
9. Lastly, take the heels of your hands to your side ribs, close to the floor and to your armpits, and with each inhalation expand into your hands (without pressing with the hands at all). As you exhale, hold a sense of this expansive quality, without strain. This is Ujjayi Pranayama, which means “Upward-moving Breath of the Conqueror”, sometimes called “Ocean-sounding Breath.” In Iyengar Yoga this breath is only used in sitting or in restorative postures, particularly Savasana, but in Vinyasa Yoga we use it as the core support and integrating thread of the entire practice. Vinyasa Yoga practice is basically an incredibly complex, infinitely engaging Pranayama exercise. What we have developed in the last few paragraphs is the essence of Vinyasa Yoga. The poses are simply a laboratory in which different aspects of this breath practice are facilitated and challenged, relaxed and strengthened.

Comments are welcomed!