The funniest joke I've ever heard about pranayama

And why it's seriously good advice

Hey, friends. Just a quick check-in. I’m feeling a philosophical yet whimsical and kind of cheesy yoga post today. You in?

I’ve been thinking about something I heard a very famous yoga teacher say several years ago: “In order for pranayama to work, we have to be able to hold everyone in the world in our hearts.” Everyone in the world. In our hearts.

If you’re not familiar with the word “pranayama,” I have no doubt that you are familiar with the concept. Pranayama is the fourth limb of yoga, coming in line after yama, niyama, and asana. Pranayama describes the subtle energy body, which can be explored through chanting, chakras, or other energy practices, but is most often experienced through breath work.

The teacher I’m quoting here, Richard Freeman, was explaining that the predicate to breath work was to first place everyone in the world in our hearts and hold them there.

Whoa. That seems like a lot to ask, doesn’t it? Everyone in the world in our hearts? If we spent five minutes thinking about it, I bet we could all come up with at least twenty people that we would have a difficult time holding in our hearts. Probably more.

Richard Freeman knew that this was a lot to ask, and he said so. The full quote, as I remember it, was: “In order for pranayama to work, we have to be able to hold everyone in the world in our hearts. If that’s too much to ask, just put someone in your heart who has everyone in their heart and then you’re covered.”

Haha! That’s a solid joke. It made a lot of us chuckle, and I liked it so much I have re-told it in several yoga classes (giving credit to the person who made it, of course). It always gets a laugh.

I think Richard Freeman was trying to make us laugh, and he did, but the more I think about his joke the more I wonder if he was also trying to teach us something profound that took me a few years to understand.

When I lean in to this concept—I think about this idea almost every time I do breath work, which is to say just about every day—the more I realize it is possible. Holding someone in our hearts who hurt us doesn’t mean that we release our boundaries, it doesn’t mean that our hurt and shame simply wash away, it doesn’t mean even that we forgive the person. It simply means that we hope the person who hurt us is all right, that they are finding light and solace in their lives, that they are healing and connecting in ways that are meaningful to them.

When we hold people in our hearts, our focus turns away from ourselves and toward others. When we hold people in our hearts, there is no “them,” there’s only an “us.”

Holding someone in my heart means that I’m working to see that person’s True Nature, however obscured that True Nature may be by a giant, rock-hard, narcissistic ego, however skewed by hurt my experience of that person may be. Maybe this is the work—recognizing someone’s True Nature before they are able to see it themselves.

What if Richard Freeman’s joke—holding one person in our heart who has everyone else in their heart—really is where we go when we need help doing this work? We work to see everyone’s True Nature, but when our own humanness blocks us, we can turn to others. We can turn to people who see spaciousness in us in ways that we cannot yet see in ourselves, and their faith in us bolsters our ability to grow ever more space in our hearts to hold still more and more people.

I think of all of these spacious hearts reaching for each other, creating a shimmering, inter-connected web exponential in its power. Imagine, just for a second, a world where every single person in it is holding every other single person in their heart. That is definitely a world I want to live in. How about you?