Transcript:

So yesterday — not yesterday, a couple of days ago — I was asked a very interesting question. The question was this: while doing pranayama, is it okay to breathe through the mouth and not through the nose or the nostrils? And the answer is no. Here's why.

Prana, the life force, is part of the subtle body. It's called the sukshma sharir. Pranayama, the exercise of pranayama, is done by the gross body, the sthool sharir, the physical body. Okay.

Now, in the subtle body, there are these various energy channels called nadis, and prana flows through these nadis. But they are in the subtle body, and there is a mapping — there is a mapping of the subtle body onto the gross body.

And a friend of mine, Swami Yeleswaram, he did this; he did a detailed study on this mapping as part of his 300-hour Sri Sri Yoga TTC. And I read the report that he wrote. Interestingly, none of the nadis from the subtle body map to the mouth. There are two important nadis that map to the two nostrils. They are called the ida and the pingala nadi. But none of them map to the mouth, which is why pranayama is never done through the mouth.

Pretty interesting.