Rudolf Steiner's Indications on Breathing Exercises

The European must be very careful with breathing exercises and embark on only them at a late stage, after appropriate instructions. (Leipzig, July 10, 1906, in CW 94)

Those familiar with Rudolf Steiner's works and his frequent warnings about breathing exercises may wonder how this accords with the relatively numerous exercises accompanied by directions for rhythmic breathing.

it would be wrong to conclude from such warnings, relating primarily to certain potential dangers involved in breathing exercises, that Rudolf Steiner absolutely rejected them. In Esoteric Science (CW 13) first published at the beginning of 1910, Steiner stated that the "ideal" of personal development is not to undertake any exercises involving the physical body at all, including breathing exercises. Instead, he said, everything that needs to occur in the physical body should emerge as a consequence only of pure intuition exercises. But immediately preceding these comments he also wrote that at a certain stage in the practice the spiritual pupil will "briefly experience the need to bring the breathing (or suchlike) into a kind of harmony with what the soul accomplishes in the exercises or in inner contemplation." A similar formulation appears in the lecture given in Dornach on April 24, 1924 (in CW 316).

Rudolf Steiner's view of the indispensable preconditions for breathing exercises was expressed in the lecture series Macrocosm and Microcosm (Vienna, March 1910, CW 119), which he gave a few months after publishing Esoteric Science. Sufficient preparation is absolutely necessary, he said, before one starts doing breathing exercises; and by this he meant careful study of spiritual-scientific literature. His actual words are as follows:

In this domain, unfortunately, many unconsidered instructions are given. Those who know anything of such matters are horrified that numerous people engage in breathing exercises today without due preparation. To the spiritual researcher they appear like children playing with matches. ... Those who wish to work on their breathing should do this only in the knowledge that for spiritual pupils, insight becomes prayer; and that they must be filled with deep reverence.

Without this, no instructions whatever should be given in relation to these matters of profound significance, which require the greatest responsibility.

At the time this was a general kind of warning. But in the years following the World War I, when Indian yoga breathing exercises became increasingly popular in the West, Steiner warned very specifically against them. In various ways he pointed out that in copying such exercises, the modern Europeans could risk destroying their physical body, because their soul life was no longer oriented to sensibility, as it was in the ancient Indians, but instead to intellectual activity. In a life unfolding intellectually, therefore, he recommended using exercises that stay in a purely soul-spiritual realm. This is why exercises such as those contained in How to Know Higher Worlds "touched very slightly at most" on the physical breathing process, as he said in a public lecture in Stuttgart on September 3, 1921 (in CW 78). Likewise, in reports on his own lectures in 1922 (CW 25) he stated that modern people ought not to copy eastern yoga breathing because, "in the course of humanity's evolution they have entered into an organization that precludes such yoga exercises." The word "such" was emphasized by Rudolf Steiner himself, and presumably relates primarily to very specific breathing exercises, described as part of the classic eightfold yoga path in the Patanjali Sutras (second century AD). Rudolf Steiner's library contained a book inscribed with his name entitled Yoga Aphorisms by Patanjali. with notes by W. Q. (German translation of the fourth English edition, Berlin 1904). Aphorism II/51 in this volume states that besides exercises regulating the inbreath, holding of breath, and outbreath to enhance concentration, there

"is another kind" of regulation of the breathing oriented to the breathing's "inner sphere." W. Q. Judge's note explains that this statement refers to a regulation of breathing involving "closely observing a directing of the breath to certain nerve centers in the human body and its consequent influence on these centers in order to produce physiological and subsequently physical effects."

Why Rudolf Steiner gave his esoteric pupils any breathing exercises at all is a question answered in principle in his accounts of the three main types of spiritual schooling methods appropriate in our time.

Here the rhythmic ordering of life, including breathing, is not just a stage of ancient eastern schooling, but also forms part of the Christian-Rosicrucian method, albeit to a lesser degree and in modified form (CW 95).

A lecture of 1922 offers a clear explanation of the difference between the exercises he gives to make breathing rhythmic, and those of the ancient eastern yoga path. In contrast to the exertions of the ancient yogi, who sought to fuse the thinking process with the breathing process, this connection must be entirely separated today. Whereas the ancient yogis returned to their own intrinsic rhythm, modern people must return to the rhythm of the outer world:

"Read the very first exercises I gave in How to Know Higher Worlds, where I show how, say, we should observe a plant's germination and growth. Meditation here focuses on detaching picturing and thinking from the breathing, and allowing it to immerse itself in the growth forces of the plant itself. Thinking should go out into the rhythm that pervades the outer world. The moment that thinking really frees itself from bodily functions in this way, sundering itself from the breath and gradually merging with the outer rhythm, it does not however immerse itself in sensory perceptions, in the sensory properties of things, but in each thing's spiritual nature... All modern meditation exercises are focused on detaching thinking from the breathing process... That is the difference between modern meditation and the yoga exercises of very ancient times."




The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner's: Soul Exercises 1904-1024