I lived at Kripalu Ashram for over six years during the 1980s and 1990s. That’s where I practiced—out of devotion and love—an intense, consistent early-morning pranayama every day for several years: 24 minutes of Anuloma Viloma / Nadi Shodhana, that we now call Left Right Breath.
I was in heaven back then.
Every morning after practice there was this extraordinary lightness and joy rising from inside me.
And yet, even with good intentions and deep devotion, after a while almost everyone at the ashram stopped coming. Out of 350 residents, we were down to 9 or 10 yogis. I was getting so much from it even though the practice was excruciatingly difficult to do: sitting cross legged, floating the arm for 24 minutes.
I couldn’t understand it. The practice is so powerful. Why was it so hard to sustain? How do we reinvent the practice so that it is accessible, inviting, and genuinely enjoyable, something people actually want to return to?
Many years later, my life looked very different. I had become a yoga studio director and a yoga teacher trainer, roles I held for most of my working life, all while raising kids and living the full chaos and richness of a householder’s life.
"What we practice, gets stronger.
What we focus on gets bigger.
What we keep doing, is who we become"
~ our sign at Eyes of the World Yoga Studio Providence, RI
At my studios, it was easy to market a one-off pranayama workshop. Everyone is at least a little curious about the breath. Some workshops were mostly information dumps: “Let describe the 77 different kinds of pranayama.” Others went in the opposite direction—rebirthing or holotropic styles with fast, open-mouth breathing aimed at producing a trippy, cathartic “therapy” experience. None of that felt useful to me, not like the ashram practice. And none of it was something people wanted to repeat on a daily basis.
Meanwhile, in my vinyasa classes, students consistently noticed that just a couple of minutes of Left Right Breath at the end of class was profoundly powerful. That brought me back to the same question I’d had years earlier at the ashram:
If Left Right Breath is so powerful, why don’t people stick with it? Why don’t they practice it daily—or for 24 minutes—like we tried to do way back when?
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In 2015, a friend suggested I read The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson. I bought the audiobook and listened during my long commutes to work. It’s a philosophy.
Somewhere in the middle of one of those drives, it hit me:
Pranayama is a Slight Edge practice.
That insight changed everything.
From there, I started reading other writers on habit formation —Stephen Covey, Charles Duhigg, James Clear. Different voices, same reminder: small, doable actions practiced consistently over time shape our lives.
In 2018, I began creating online videos for my first course, This Next Breath 1. Then in 2020, COVID hit, and I started broadcasting live online every morning at 6 a.m.
We’re now past 2,000 consecutive days of daily broadcasts. I don’t see any reason to stop. Giving, loving, teaching everyday by donation keeps me accountable—and my own practice continues to grow in ways that are rewarding, surprising, and deeply insightful.
This is no longer a theory for me.
We’ve taken this philosophy of habit formation and put it into lived, daily practice. You can too.
It all began with a realization back at Kripalu Ashram in 1991. The way we were practicing breathing techniques—Anuloma Viloma and Nadi Shodhana— sitting cross legged, floating the arm was simply too painful and too difficult to sustain for the prescribed 24 minutes every morning. Eventually, the ashram community quietly abandoned the practice. It wasn’t a failure of inspiration, love and devotion; it was a failure of design.
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the work on habit formation by Jeff Olson, Charles Duhigg, James Clear, and others. The principles are simple and powerful: make it doable, be consistent, show up every day, and bring love, enthusiasm, and gratitude with you. There needs to be tangible rewards all along the way. Breathing needs to become part of your morning routine. As far as Left Right Breath is concerned, long term practice is where the astounding breakthroughs happen, a baby step each day.
In 2018, I began offering an online beginner breath course called This Next Breath 1. It was hugely popular. The practice started lying down and included just a few minutes of Left Right Breath—simple, accessible, and doable.
Then in 2020, COVID hit and suddenly every yoga teacher was online. That’s when something important shifted. From my past ashram experience, I intuitively knew we had to go back to the Anuloma Viloma 24 minute ashram length. My mentor Grey Ward (Swami Gitanand) coached me, if this practice was going to lead to any significant neuroplastic connection between the left and right cerebral hemispheres, 24 minutes was the absolute minimum, when sustained everyday without interruption.
So in Mar 2020, I asked the online class to stand up for Left Right Breath. We supported the elbows. We made it comfortable. And since then, we’ve been exploring the left and right inner worlds together, every morning. Much to my surprise, many of the original yogis from 2020, are still showing up every morning online all these years later. That is true habit formation and this class is a miracle!
Standing changes everything. It makes longer breath practices easy and sustainable, easy for everyday practice. It removes strain. It keeps the body alert and the mind engaged. Standing is very, very grounding, and brings the whole inner body awareness and energetics into play. Most importantly, without all the pain and suffering, standing up allows curiosity and experimentation to enter the practice. We use a wide variety of techniques and approaches to meditation, so the practice stays fresh. We learn something new every day and we have fun doing it. We learn from direct experience stilling the attention on dozens of points, moving the attention back and forth, and a variety of mudras, tapping, humming, visualizations and so much more. We have crisscrossed the inner world of "major and minor" chakras, granthis, nadis and meditation points of many traditions so many times, in different ways, that the group has experientially received the direct knowing that comes from walking the walk.
In time, this practice doesn’t require willpower. It is all about habits.
What we practice gets stronger.
What we focus on gets bigger.
What we keep doing is who we become.
You can find me at tomgillette.com.
When we practice with the hands, we are activating a large part of the cerebral cortex, devoted to the sensory and motor neurons of just the hands. It takes a lot of neural computing to perform the complex movements of the hands. Until one has invested considerable time into meditating, focusing and activating the fingers, do mudras start to become powerful and useful.
Until then, mudras are just ideas in the mind, "symbols" or "gestures" for this or that concept. A fluffy adornment. Putting in the time necessary is the essential ingredient most people in our instant gratification culture never realize.
In the past years, we have gone through each finger by finger, each hand posture with care. Mudras take many months or years to mature. It is true that certain people are more sensitive to their hands and others are less sensitive. But in time, what you practice gets stronger. Each finger comes alive and you attune to the postures of the hands.
Disspell the idea that 48 minutes of Left Right Breath is either difficult or only for "advanced, superior yogis." That's Nonsense. Nadi shodhana for 48 minutes is not advanced... but a longer practice does lead to some great results for the rest of your day....