How to use breath?

“Maximum breath = Minimum stress”, said once my brother, a dervish dancer Ziya Azazi.

Every human being is making 23.000 breaths per day. How many breaths are we aware of during the day? We all know that being inside of your breathing is key to being present, being connected with yourself, body, mind, emotions a key to mindfulness. A key to meditation. A key to dance. A key to performing. A key to improvisation and of course, a key to living your life at your full potential.

But how to get into the breathing and presence? They all teach us meditation or yoga but sometimes for the contemporary man and especially for dancers, being still and sitting in meditation is very difficult. I tried all possible meditation techniques and yoga and realized that for my character best meditation is active meditation where I can move my body freely.

For me, this modality is the most important one in this program because if you start implementing its essence into dance and teaching practice, it changes the quality of dance enormously, and more importantly, it slowly changes your life and the lives of your participants.

How to breathe? Maximum inhaling and guided exhaling Pranayama is the control and extension of the breath which awakens Prana (life force energy). Did you know that you can dramatically shift your mood in sixty seconds of intentional breathwork? Plus the results will improve if you guide your intention inside of the body to release obstacles if you are redirecting your energy toward it. Activating your connection to this infinite fountain of energy within can allow you to achieve results in your life you never imagined possible. But for the purpose of Dance Alchemy with this technique, you can access your inner power with your breath and it’s a useful tool when you want to guide participants into space where dance and alchemy is happening:.

Breath control or breath liberation? Pranayama is often neatly divided into two words - pranayama - prana meaning 'life force' or 'energy source' and Yama meaning 'control' or 'restraint’. In this respect, ‘pranayama’ can be translated into 'breath control’. However, the same word may be differently divided into prana and Ayama. Where Yama means to 'restrain' or 'control', Ayama means the opposite - i.e. to not do that. Thus in a Pranayama practice, we are not in fact trying to control the prana, but instead to free it.