Design of my Breathe Experiment

I was amazed with my first exposure to 'Mudra' exercises. Just simple movement and changes of fingers and hands positioning, and you are able to channelise your breath to different body parts, and you can so easily feel this yourself. That was 'Eureka' moment for me, and I became more alert about my breathe. Over time, I have experienced following:

1. Our emotions, internal feelings and state of mind are reflected (or expressed) in our breathing patterns.
• When we are angry, we breathe fast.
• When we are in peace and smell a flower or stunned by natural scenery, we tend to take long breathes.
• When we are afraid or scared, then also our breathing becomes fast.
  
  
2. Our breathing affects our emotions, state of mind, and also health.
• When we do any kind of pranayams, we instantly feel the shift inside.
• When headache, and you try deep inhales and exhales through individual nostrils (closing other), do it 11 times with each nostril, and you will feel relieved.
• Try taking a jog (or fast run), when you are hit by multitude of thoughts and need to find a solution. The fast breathing and physical pursuit calms your mind and allow you focus and reach to decision by end of your run.
• Do surya namaskars (sun salutations) with right two lower 'bandhas' (by tucking in your anus and stomach), and doing 'ujjai' breathing (victorious breathe through throat and making sound), and you will see that your back pain goes away and you are comfortably and flexibly enter into different postures.

With the engineer and mathematician inside me, I asked following questions:

1. How is my quality of being (body, mind/ thoughts, heart/ feelings) affected by breathe?
   
   
2. How can controlling breathe allow me to influence/ affect my quality of being (body, mind/ thoughts, heart/ feelings)?

And I want to do this quantitatively through my own experiments and measurements and share scientific results with everyone. I am not aware of any scale being developed so far to judge 'quality of breathe'  and 'quality of being'. And hence my own developed scale and measurements on myself every day.

1. I am measuring quality of breathe on scale of 1-5 for inhale and exhale from each nostril, where 1 is most natural free flowing breath, and 5 is most constrained/ limited breathing. So, I record 4 readings at one point of time:
• Left nostril - inhale
• Left nostril - exhale
• Right nostril - inhale
• Right nostril - exhale
  
  
2. Additionally with above, I am recording following: 
• Location (home, office, work etc.)
• Activity (working, praying, traveling, eating, chatting, entertainment, playing, walking, sleeping, browsing)
• Feeling (stressed (known reason), heavy (unknown reason), ok and not much, relaxed, happy, bliss)
• Physical problems if any (tired, headache, stomach related, fever, other)

I am collecting this data, recording in my diary, digitising into excel, and working to put a mobile app to do this automatically. Over time, I will be analysing this data and building patterns and sharing insights with the world through this post, and later through a book whose title would be same "My Experiments with Breathe".

I am inspired by Mahatma Gandhi with sharing his learnings through his book "My experiments with truth" and by Sri Sri at Art of Living Foundation, who is touching millions of people all over the world, through his simple and powerful breathing technique Sudarshan Kriya. My indebtedness to all past and present teachers (gurus, rishis) who are using breathe as medium to heal people sufferings. I hope to learn from all of them and dive deeper into my experiments and make it useful for the world.