Cooling Breaths

Two practices that draw air over a wet surface, which measurably cools it before it reaches the airway. Traditionally prescribed for heat, and among the few breath techniques with an immediately obvious physical effect.

Sitali

The tongue version.

How:

1. Sit comfortably, spine stacked.
2. Roll the sides of your tongue upward to form a tube, and extend it slightly past your lips.
3. Inhale slowly through the tube, as though drinking through a straw. You will feel the air cool as it passes over the wet tongue.
4. Draw the tongue in, close the mouth, and hold for a moment.
5. Exhale slowly through the nose.

Rounds: eight to twelve to start. Build to twenty.

Sitkari

The teeth version, for people who cannot roll their tongue.

Roughly a third of people cannot form the tongue tube. It is a genetic trait, not a skill, and no amount of practice will produce it.

How:

1. Bring the teeth lightly together and part the lips, so the teeth are exposed.
2. Rest the tip of the tongue lightly against the back of the upper teeth.
3. Inhale slowly through the teeth, making a soft hissing sound. The air cools as it passes over the wet teeth and tongue.
4. Close the mouth.
5. Exhale slowly through the nose.

Rounds: the same.

Sitkari is at least as effective as Sitali and is the more practical of the two for most people. If your teeth are sensitive to cold, this one may be uncomfortable — use the tongue version or skip it.

Why they work

Evaporative cooling. Air drawn over a wet surface picks up moisture and, in doing so, loses heat. The air arriving in your airway is genuinely cooler than the air in the room.

The effect on core temperature is small. The effect on the sensation of being hot is immediate and disproportionate, because the airway and the mouth are well supplied with thermoreceptors, and cooling them changes how hot you feel considerably.

There is also a settling effect from the slow rate and the extended exhale, which is doing part of the work.

When to use them

In heat. Summer, a hot room, after a heated class. The obvious use and the traditional one.

After a strong practice. Three minutes of Sitkari after a hard sequence brings the temperature and the heart rate down faster than sitting quietly.

For irritation and agitation. The traditional texts describe these as reducing pitta — heat in the temperamental as well as the physical sense. Whether or not that framing appeals, the observable effect is settling, and it is a reasonable thing to reach for when you are hot and short-tempered.

Before sleep in summer. Ten rounds.

When not to

In cold weather, or if you are already cold. They work. You will be colder.

With a respiratory infection, or asthma triggered by cold air. Drawing cold air into the airway is exactly the trigger.

Low blood pressure — the settling effect can lower it further.

Sitkari with sensitive teeth, for obvious reasons.

Constipation, or a tendency to feel the cold, are the traditional cautions. Take them or leave them; the first two on this list are the ones that matter.

The mouth-breathing exception

These are among the very few practices in which you deliberately inhale through the mouth.

The reason is the whole mechanism: the cooling happens because the air crosses a wet surface, and the nose, however moist, does not cool air — it warms it. That is the nose's job.

So the exhale returns to the nose and only the inhale is oral. It is a deliberate, bounded exception rather than a relaxation of the rule.

A practical session

Three minutes, in heat:

• Sit up, take three normal breaths.
• Ten rounds of Sitkari or Sitali, unhurried.
• Sit for thirty seconds with normal breathing and notice the difference.
• Ten more rounds.
• Sit for a minute.

Do not rush the rounds. The inhale should take four or five seconds and the exhale six or eight. Speed defeats it.