Bhramari

Bhramari is named after bhramara, the black bee, for the sound of it. Strip away the name and the practice is simple: a slow nasal inhale, and an exhale stretched out and made audible as a low hum with the mouth closed. Two things happen because of that.

The first is mechanical. Humming forces the exhale to be long and even, because sound needs a steady stream of air. A wobbling hum is a wobbling breath. That extended exhale, repeated, is the part that slows the heart. A Holter study that compared humming with exercise, emotional stress and sleep in the same people found humming produced the lowest stress index and the highest measures of heart rate variability of the four, which is the physiological signature of the parasympathetic side taking over.

The second is sensory. The vibration is felt in the palate, the nose, the forehead and the crown, and with the ears lightly closed there is very little else coming in. Attention has somewhere obvious to go. That is why Bhramari works for people who say they cannot meditate: it hands them an object they cannot lose track of.

Neither of these requires belief in anything. It is a long exhale and a steady sound, done sitting up, five to nine times.

The hand position is called shanmukhi mudra, the closing of the six gates: two ears, two eyes, nose and mouth. Beginners can hum with the ears closed by the thumbs alone and nothing else, and that is a complete practice. The full mudra is worth learning once the hum itself is easy.

• Thumbs: on the tragus, the small flap of cartilage in front of the ear opening. Press it inward over the canal. Light pressure, held steadily, not pumped in and out.
• Index fingers: resting on the forehead just above the eyebrows.
• Middle fingers: lying along the closed eyelids with no weight. If you can feel your eyeballs through the fingers, lift the fingers.
• Ring fingers: on the sides of the nostrils, without narrowing the airway.
• Little fingers: just below the corners of the mouth.

Elbows come out to roughly shoulder height. Most people cannot hold that for nine rounds at first and their shoulders creep up towards the ears. Drop the elbows lower, or drop the hands to the knees between rounds. A tense neck cancels out everything the practice is meant to do. Some students prefer to keep only the thumbs at the ears for the whole session, and I am happy with that.

Bhramari has no fixed count ratio, and I will not give you one. Unlike nadi shodhana, where a 1:2 or 1:4:2 count is taught, Bhramari is governed by how long the sound stays smooth. Counting while humming makes people push.

• First fortnight: 3 to 5 rounds, thumbs at the ears only. Two minutes. Stop while it still feels easy.
• After a month: 5 to 7 rounds with the full mudra, about four minutes.
• Settled practice: 7 to 9 rounds, roughly five minutes, once or twice a day.
• Longer than that: only with a teacher watching, and only if nothing in the ears, sinuses or head objects.

People ask whether more rounds give more benefit. In my experience nine rounds done attentively, followed by two minutes of sitting still, beats twenty rounds done in a hurry. The published trials that used twenty minute sessions were supervised daily interventions, not a home routine to copy on your own in week one.

This is the reason most students end up practising it. The sequence I give is simple. Sit up on the edge of the bed with the feet on the floor, lights off or very low, phone out of reach. Do 7 to 9 rounds, quietly enough that someone sleeping next to you is not disturbed. Then lower the hands, sit for a minute, and lie down without speaking.

Do not hum while lying down. Sit for the rounds, then lie down. If you wake at three in the morning, the same thing applies: sit up, hum, lie back down.

The trial evidence here is indirect but real. A randomised trial of Bhramari in people with multiple sclerosis found significant reductions in fatigue and depression after four weeks, and studies of slow humming show a clear parasympathetic shift. What I can say from the hall is narrower and more honest: over four decades, more students have come back to tell me Bhramari helped them fall asleep than have said that about any other single practice I teach. If you want a whole evening routine around it, the home practice guide sets out how to place it after a short asana session.

Bhramari is one of the few pranayamas with human trials aimed squarely at blood pressure, so it is worth being precise about what those trials show.

What they show. A randomised clinical trial in 100 patients with hypertension compared Bhramari with nadi shodhana over a twenty minute practice and found both helped balance sympathovagal tone. Smaller studies have recorded a fall in diastolic and mean arterial pressure immediately after practice, and the humming work on heart rate variability points the same way.

What they do not show. They do not show that Bhramari replaces medication. They do not show a permanent change in resting blood pressure from a home practice done a few times a week. Most of these studies are small, short, and measure the effect soon after the session rather than months later.

So the position I take in class is this: practise it daily, keep taking what your doctor prescribed, keep your appointments, and let the readings decide. If you are over forty and new to all of this, start with the beginners over 40 page, which sets out what to be careful with.

In the hall, Bhramari comes near the end. The order that has held up best is: standing work, then the floor sequence, then a short rest, then pranayama, then a proper savasana. Breathing practice belongs after the body has been moved and before the final relaxation, when the ribs are loose and the mind has stopped listing errands.

Doing it the other way round rarely works. Hum first and the body is still stiff and the breath still shallow, and students find themselves counting the rounds until they can start moving. There is one exception: if someone arrives agitated, having fought Bangalore traffic to get to class, I will sit them down for three quiet rounds before anything else, purely to bring them into the room.

If you practise at home, the same shape works at any scale. Ten minutes of surya namaskar or even a few minutes standing in tadasana is enough movement to earn the sitting. Then five rounds. Then stillness. In the online classes I keep the camera on for pranayama, because the thing I need to see is whether the shoulders climb, and students cannot see that themselves.

Nobody publishes a build up for this practice, so here is the one I use in class. It is deliberately slow, because the only way to get this wrong is to hum hard.

Soft and low is the whole instruction. A loud hum is not a stronger practice, it is a sore throat and a shorter exhalation.

Bhramari is the breathing practice I hand out most often, because it is almost impossible to do badly and the effect is immediate enough that people believe it.

• Yoga for anxiety uses it first, before anything with a count in it, because a humming exhalation lengthens the breath without asking anybody to measure anything.
• Yoga for high blood pressure uses it in place of the forceful practices it advises against.
• Yoga for PCOS uses it at the end of a session, and yoga for neck and shoulder pain uses it because the hum settles a jaw that has been clenched all day, and a clenched jaw and a tight neck arrive together.

Sit for it in Vajrasana or on a chair, not in a cross legged shape your hips do not have. It follows well after two minutes of Tadasana, and it closes the bedtime sequence better than anything else I have tried. If you want to be taught it rather than read about it, that is what a class is for.