Here and Now

Our minds run a slideshow of thoughts all the time. We may hardly have any control over the shape of those thoughts, yet a lot of us end up identifying with them. The question of us being our thoughts or merely our actions is the one many of us have wrestled with. Many would argue that thoughts may enter and leave but what we act upon defines who we are while some would punish themselves for even having sinister thoughts in the head. Whether or not we have any real control over these thoughts is debatable yet there is one thing we all might agree on which is the desire to make it stop. Any real relief we get is in the space between the transition of slides in this carousel of ideas. 

There is neither malice that lives there nor benevolence. It is a threshold of any real peace we find. It is the space between breaths. 

After I came across a podcast by Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist, on “The Neuroscience of Breath: How to Use Breathing to Control Emotions” shared on LinkedIn, I met with a paper she cited by Andrea Zaccaro and colleagues called “How Breath-Control Can Change Your Life: A Systematic Review on Psycho-Physiological Correlates of Slow Breathing.” Their review didn’t simply conclude that slow breathing calms the body. It concluded that slow breathing makes the autonomic system, the cortex and the psychological state more flexible, and that the three become flexible together. Each process impacts the other rather than one driving the rest.

It makes one wonder how controlled breathing impacts emotions by directly signalling the nervous system, slowing your heart rate, and calming the brain’s alarm centre through simple shifts in airflow.

Crystal Goh, PhD, wrote an article on similar lines long before. It was titled ‘Your Breath is Your Brain’s Remote Control’ in the Mindful magazine back in 2017 and it explored the role of ‘in-breath’ in optimising brain function based on the research conducted by Christina Zelano and colleagues in The Journal of Neuroscience, December 2016. She also acknowledges, ‘While the in-breath specifically alters our cognition, the act of slow, deep breathing, whether the inhalation or exhalation, is beneficial for our nervous system when we wish to be more still.’ It is particularly fascinating knowing that it is not just anxiety that can be addressed through breathing but also cognition. 

Neuroscience may treat breath as something that has the power to operate you but Yoga treats breath as something that opens a door that you then have to walk through yourself. What strikes me is that the review itself, does not arrive at the breath from outside. It, in fact, even lists prāṇāyāma among its keywords, and mentions Patañjali along with the concept of samādhi in the Rationale. It doesn’t name it again in the entire paper. Samādhi isn’t something that any instrument can measure or hold anyway. Neither the study nor the review even attempt to measure it. One measures in-breath and the other measures slow breathing. Neither is looking at the pause around which Patañjali built.

Patañjali, Yoga Sūtras 2.49–2.52, on stambha vṛtti (later called kumbhaka in haṭha texts), the retention of breath, is where the retained breath is said to thin the veil over the inner light. To my understanding, prāṇāyāma, treats the pause in the breath as a doorway. Tranquillity cultivates in the space between the held breaths. Tranquillity is not even the right word for it, because it is simply the state of being, a state of existing, without any real thought or identity.

Humans, I believe, are designed to look for these moments of stillness wherever they can find them, especially today when everyone is in a fight for attention. It is the breaks between lectures, a sigh of relief after the completion of a task and it is the long breath right before the next piece of work needs to begin. Ma (間), is a Japanese concept for space, time or pause. It is not just an empty gap but a meaningful pause. Similarly, a caesura is a natural pause or break in a line of poetry which has its own significance. In Old English verse the line is built around a medial break, two stressed syllables on either side of it. Imagine, even literature has evidence of a pause not being a gap in the structure but being the structure itself! 

Meaning is allocated to stillness in both the concepts of Ma and caesura. Emptiness is not treated as a void. In fact, it is treated as something that is vital in shaping meaning.

A thought occurred to me while I was thinking about all this between, mindfulness, Yoga and neuroscience. I wondered how a smoker’s drag fabricates the same state of liminality in a bid for a manufactured stillness. 

The designated smoke breaks in the corporate sector are a search for that threshold that gives them the stillness they seek in their burnout. It is a manufactured pause in the middle of the chaos. 

Think of it. A smoker, takes a drag and then holds. The body built a partial tolerance to the immediate effects of nicotine long ago. What remains is the ritual of the hold itself that creates conditions for a slowed breathing. The body is certainly absorbing the ill effects of the smoke but isn’t really getting any sense of relief out of it, or at least not from where one thinks they are getting it from. It might as well be coming from just the long draw and hold. It is the nervous system reaching for a threshold because it needs one and has not found another way in. The cigarette and the breathwork are not opposites. They are the same longing, expressed differently. 

Patañjali offers a state of being that supersedes the longing for the held breath. The Yoga Sūtras define Dhyāna as something more than the stillness between the breaths.

तत्र प्रत्ययैकतानता ध्यानम् ॥
tatra pratyaya-ikatānatā dhyānam
An unbroken flow of knowledge to that object is Dhyāna. 
(Yoga Sūtras 3.2)

Dhyāna isn’t found in the held breath, it is instead a state of being that sustains through the breathing. The held breath is only where you get a glance of it through stillness, through the stopping of that slideshow of thoughts. It is the first step towards dhyāna. 

तदा द्रष्टुः स्वरूपेऽवस्थानम् ॥
tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe-‘vasthānam
At that time (the time of concentration) the seer (the [Puruṣa]) rests in his own (unmodified) state. 
(Yoga Sūtras 1.3)

Swami Vivekananda annotated, ‘As soon as the waves have stopped, and the lake has become quiet, we see the ground below the lake. So with the mind; when it is calm, we see what our own nature is; we do not mix ourself but remain our own selves.’ This is his interpretation based on his Advaita Vedāntic leanings and the beautiful metaphor of the lake is also his own and does not appear in the text itself. I happen to see this “time” as stillness, the “seer” as witness and the “flow of knowledge” in 3.2 as the flow of awareness.

The very question of whether we should identify with our thoughts or not seems to dissolve in this state of still awareness. The only identity that remains within this awareness becomes that of a witness. Nāsadīya Sūkta (Ṛgveda 10.129.2), is a beautiful hymn describing the cosmological conditions at the beginning of time, or when even time didn’t exist. I believe it also corresponds to this liminal state of stillness.

आनीद् अवातं स्वधया तद् एकं तस्माद् धान्यन् न परः किं चनास ॥
ānīd avātaṃ svadhayā tad ekaṃ tasmād dhānyan na paraḥ kiṃ canāsa
That one breathed, windless, by its own impulse. Other than that there was nothing beyond.
(Ṛgveda 10.129.2, last two pādas)

A threshold is not a place. It is a condition. The space between one state and another. It is not the departure, not the arrival, but the crossing itself. It is the in-between-times, the not-yet and no-longer. It is the only place where what you are and what you are becoming briefly coincide. It is the becoming, here and now.

Citations: Tracey Marks, “The Neuroscience of Breath: How to Use Breathing to Control Emotions”, Youtube, 2025; Andrea Zaccaro, Andrea Piarulli, Marco Laurino, Erika Garbella, Danilo Menicucci, Bruno Neri, and Angelo Gemignani, “How Breath-Control Can Change Your Life: A Systematic Review on Psycho-Physiological Correlates of Slow Breathing,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2018; Crystal Goh, “Your Breath is Your Brain’s Remote Control,” Mindful, 2017; Christina Zelano, Heidi Jiang, Guangyu Zhou, Nikita Arora, Stephan Schuele, Joshua Rosenow, and Jay A. Gottfried, “Nasal Respiration Entrains Human Limbic Oscillations and Modulates Cognitive Function,” The Journal of Neuroscience, 2016; Swami Vivekananda, Patanjali‘s Yoga Sutras, Fingerprint Classics, 2023, page 109 for Yoga Sūtras 3.2, page 17 for Yoga Sūtras 1.3 (my edition prints Purasa for Puruṣa), originally published 1896; Richard B. Pilgrim, “Intervals (Ma) in Space and Time: Foundations for a Religio-Aesthetic Paradigm in Japan,” History of Religions, 1986; R.D. Fulk, A History of Old English Meter, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992; Thomas Cable, The English Alliterative Tradition, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991; Ṛgveda 10.129.2, Nāsadīya Sūkta, verse translations drawn from Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, The Ṛgveda: An Anthology, Penguin Classics, 1981.

This essay sits at the intersection of Time & The Threshold, Philosophy & Existence and Mind & Entanglement.