For the longest time, every little stressor in life, whether it was a test, a discussion with a superior, or a disagreement with a friend, was somehow able to make me spiral until I was in a full blown ball of anxiety.
Of course, I tried many things to combat this problem: I subscribed to many different meditation apps. I also practiced self care habits and I journaled my thoughts. In fact, I even tried to become a gym girl, as I heard that exercise can help one fight anxiety. Unfortunately, this ended up backfiring on me even more, as I ended up dislocating my knee from exercising while trying to stop my anxious thoughts.
But, everything changed for me once I started to incorporate the Sudarshan Kriya Yoga, otherwise known as SKY, Breath Meditation Program into my daily life.
Now, I found the SKY program thanks to my mother, who had been following the program for years now and had felt that her anxiety had greatly lessened after starting. I decided to take her advice and sign up for an online class with the Art of Living foundation after getting a student discount.
To be clear though, I was not necessarily all excited to try it at first. I really thought that it was just going to be another failed experiment because everything else failed me before, and I thought that I would just have to live with my unmanaged anxiety forever.
However, once I started taking the SKY classes, my whole perspective on stress management changed entirely. What makes the SKY program unique in comparison to other meditation programs is that it is not just a “let’s sit down and think” type meditation program, which often led me to spiraling down even more anxious trains of thoughts.
Rather, the SKY Breath meditation program is a type of cyclical controlled breathing practice with roots in traditional yoga. According to Dr Emma Sepala, the science director at the Stanford Center For Compassion and Altruism Research and Education and lead scientist on a Stanford/Yale study that looked at the benefits of SKY Breath Meditation, “SKY focuses primarily on activating the parasympathetic parasympathetic nervous system, which can calm your heart rate, lower blood pressure, and overall just make your body feel less anxious.”
The practice itself is very focused on teaching yourself on how to breathe for ultimate stress relief. There are four different types of breathing techniques done in the practice. The first is the Ujjayi or “Victorious Breath”, which is a slow breathing technique that increases airway resistance during inspiration and expiration and controls airflow so that each phase of the breath cycle can be prolonged to an exact count. The second is the Bhastrika, or the “Bellows Breath ” which asks you to rapidly inhale and forcefully exhale as you breathe. Next, you chant the word Om with a prolonged expiration. Finally, you participate in the Sudarshan Kriya itself, which follows a rhythmic, cyclical breathing in slow, medium, and fast cycles.
When I was first learning this practice, I honestly wondered why it was so important to focus on breathing in such a particular way instead of focusing on more mental health related things. However, over the course of the two years that I have been doing this practice every single day, I realized that oftentimes, many symptoms of stress aren’t just mental. In fact, more often than not, they manifest physically too. Therefore, once I was able to control myself from going into stress overdrive physically, I found myself able to manage and live with a lot of my mental stress too. In turn, this led me to being a happier and all around much more balanced person who is easily able to navigate everyday stressors with a lot more ease.
And, I am not the only one whose life changed for the better. Many studies with both Harvard and Yale students found that after completing and incorporating SKY Breathing Meditation practices in their everyday lives, students had reported improvements in six areas of well-being: depression, stress, mental health, mindfulness, positive affect, and social connectedness, which are all things that I have experienced when I started incorporating the SKY program into my everyday life.
Therefore, if you are finding yourself stuck on dealing with stress in your everyday life and feel like nothing else is working, do not hesitate to give the SKY program a try. It may be able to help in ways you would never even expect.