The breath that steadies the mind
A verse on prāṇāyāma from the Yoga Sutras, set beside what contemporary neuroscience now understands about slow exhalation and the parasympathetic state.
The Yoga Sutras treat the breath not as a metaphor but as a lever: steady it, and the mind steadies with it. Below, the verse stands beside what the instruments now trace from without.
The discipline is small and unspectacular — a few minutes, a longer out-breath — and that modesty is the point. The verse does not promise transcendence; it promises steadiness, which is its precondition.
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