Kumbhaka

This page leads with the warnings because retention is the one part of breathing practice where the risk is not theoretical, and because the list includes conditions that a great many readers have.

Do not practise breath retention if you have high blood pressure, heart disease of any kind, an arrhythmia or a pacemaker, glaucoma or raised eye pressure, epilepsy or any seizure disorder, a hernia, a recent stroke or head injury, a cerebral aneurysm, or if you are pregnant. Do not practise it during an asthma attack or a chest infection, or within three to six months of chest or abdominal surgery. Do not teach it to children. And never hold the breath in or near water: people drown doing that, without warning.

Why those, specifically. A held breath raises the pressure inside the chest, which slows the return of blood to the heart, and the effect grows sharply the moment somebody strains against a closed throat, which beginners do without realising. The same pressure travels up through the chest into the head, which is why raised eye pressure is on the list. And retention changes blood flow in the brain: a study of fifteen men holding for sixty seconds measured significant increases in cerebral flow velocities, which is the mechanism behind both the effects people seek and the dizziness people report.

If you are on that list, you are not missing much. Slow breathing at four counts in and six counts out, which is the practice on the three part breath page, produces most of the measured benefits attributed to pranayama and excludes almost nobody.

Kumbhaka as I teach it is nine rounds at 4:4:6, inhale four counts, retain four, exhale six, with two ordinary breaths between rounds. That is about four minutes, morning only, on an empty stomach, and not until three months of slow breathing without any hold. There is no retention on empty in the first year.

Kumbhaka means pot, in the sense of a vessel holding something. The word covers two practices: antara kumbhaka, holding after the inhale, which is what this page teaches, and bahya kumbhaka, holding after the exhale, which is stronger and belongs with a teacher in the room. Alongside puraka, the inhale, and rechaka, the exhale, it is the third of the three parts every classical description of pranayama is built from.

It is also already in your practice if you do box breathing, where the two four count holds are exactly this, and it is the part of the classical Surya Bhedana and Nadi Shodhana descriptions that most beginner pages quietly leave out. Four counts, comfortably, is the whole practice for most people, and I would rather somebody stayed there for ten years than got to twenty counts in a year.

Nine rounds, four count hold, once a day. The count grows slowly or not at all.

• Prerequisite: three months of slow breathing with no hold. Twelve rounds a day at four in and six out. I do not waive this.
• Month 1 to 2 of retention: 9 rounds at 4:4:6, two ordinary breaths between rounds. About four minutes.
• Month 3 onwards: 9 rounds at 4:6:8 if and only if the four count hold is entirely unhurried. About five minutes.
• Ceiling in a class: a six count hold against four in and eight out. Longer holds exist and they belong to a taught practice with somebody watching, not to a page.
• Frequency: once a day, morning, empty stomach. Not twice, and never in the evening.
• Retention on empty: not in the first year, and not unsupervised at all.

The inhale is to three quarters, not to full. That is the most important number on this page after the four, and it is the one nobody writes down.

Published progressions for retention are reckless in a way that has no parallel elsewhere in this family: 1:4:2 ratios and sixteen count holds handed to beginners in week one. This ladder is measured in months and it starts before the first hold.

That last row is the row I care about most. It is not a lesser practice. It is the practice that has the meta analysis behind it, and the hold adds a long safety list in exchange for something I cannot demonstrate.

The two retentions are not two doses of the same thing.

Bahya kumbhaka is often presented as simply the next step and it is not. Holding on empty produces a much stronger drive to breathe, and it is the version behind most of the frightening episodes people describe when they write about breath work going wrong. It also belongs with the bandhas, the internal locks, which need somebody's hands and eyes and cannot be learned from a description. So: a year, and a teacher, and not otherwise.

Retention goes in the middle of a morning practice, never at the start and never at the end.

1. Three part breath: 12 rounds at 4:6. This is the warm up and it is not optional.
2. Kumbhaka: 9 rounds at 4:4:6, with two ordinary breaths between each. Four minutes.
3. Two minutes sitting still, breathing normally.
4. Anulom Vilom: 12 rounds with no hold. The settling counterweight.
5. Asana, if the day allows it, then Savasana.

Sit for it in Padmasana or Vajrasana if you can, because a hold with a vertical spine is a different experience from a hold with a collapsed chest, and a chair with the back off the backrest is a perfectly good substitute. The eight limbs guide is worth reading alongside this page, because pranayama is the fourth limb and retention is a fraction of that fourth, and treating it as the summit of yoga gets the whole scheme backwards.

In the online classes I teach retention only to people I have watched breathe for several weeks, and I say so at the time. It is the one practice where I would rather be in the same room.

More pages on this site advise against holding the breath than recommend it, and that is deliberate.

• Yoga for high blood pressure excludes retention entirely and gives the no hold version of every practice.
• Yoga for anxiety warns that for some people a held breath is the exact sensation of a panic attack, and sends them to slow breathing instead.
• Yoga for beginners over 40 leaves retention out of the first three months as a matter of course, because blood pressure and eye pressure are so often unknown.
• Box breathing is the one place a four count hold is recommended freely, and even there the table says to remove both holds if pressure or the eyes are a question.
• Kapalbhati is the other practice on this site with a warnings first structure, for related reasons.

If you want the hold watched by somebody rather than counted from a page, that is what an introductory class is for, and this is the practice I would most want to see before you did it alone.