Change Your Breath, Change Your Life: Lucas Rockwood (Transcript)

Here is the full text of yoga teacher Lucas Rockwood’s talk titled “Change Your Breath, Change Your Life” at TEDxBarcelona conference. In his talk, Lucas breaks down the fundamentals of yoga breathing in a way that you can easily remember and apply to your practice.

TRANSCRIPT:

So what if I told you that there was an exercise that was so powerful, that it could change the pH of your blood, it could make it more acid or more alkaline in minutes?

What if this same exercise could boost your digestion, lower your heart rate, lower your cortisol levels and help you go to sleep at night?

What if this same exercise practiced in extreme fashion could create LSD like experiences, out-of-body experiences?

This exercise, I’m talking about, is something you’re doing right now without even thinking about it.

My name is Lucas Rockwood. As José mentioned, I’m a yoga teacher. And what I’m talking about here are breathing exercises. And breathing exercises done correctly, done safely, are one of the most powerful ways to control your mind and your body, your nervous system, your endocrine system.

But if you practice them recklessly, they can cause a whole bunch of problems. You can black out, you can scrip your digestion, you can have anxiety attacks as well.

Now breathing for most of us is something that’s just totally automatic. In fact, it’s controlled by our autonomic nervous system. It happens all by itself. For example, you’re crossing the street and a car swerves into your crosswalk and almost hits you.