- Updated on August 3, 2026
By Dr. Artour Rakhimov, Alternative Health Educator and Author
What is the essence of yoga?
Most people believe that yoga is mainly about yoga poses. Well, you may spend years practicing yoga asanas and thousands of hours doing other yoga related activities that may include breathing exercises, but if your body-O2 content (which can be easily measured) remains unchanged, then you will suffer from the same health problems as before.
Essence of yoga is in correct (or ideal) automatic breathing day and night for maximum oxygenation of the body cells. The real journey to better health, while using yoga, is about making changes in your automatic breathing patterns.
Modern yoga vs. ancient yoga
Modern yoga teachers do not know how to breathe. Ask them about the ideal automatic breathing pattern that ensures maximum possible O2 content in body cells. Most likely, they would tell you about deep diaphragmatic breathing, but healthy people never have DEEP breathing. They take a very small amount of air per one breath with only 10-12 breaths per minute at rest.
Yoga teachers believe that breathing more air (or chronic hyperventilation) is good for our health. They say this is because such deep breathing provides us with more oxygen in cells. (In reality, it is the other way around.)
If you want to find out all these details and discover the yoga secret, here is a PDF book that quotes over 120 medical studies and numerous quotes from ancient yoga texts and modern yoga resources. (The price of the book is 7.00 USD.)
Yoga Benefits Are in Breathing Less (Amazon Kindle and Paperback)
If you have a Kindle reader, you can get this book from the Amazon Kindle store using this link “Yoga breathing book“. If you want to have the paperback version from Amazon, click here: “Yoga breathing book“. Success in your yoga journey!
How to pay for and open your books
You can find details on this page: How to pay and open your books. Short summary: use your credit card and open the book with your email address as the password.
If you are interested in this or other books that I wrote, but cannot afford it (e.g., you are unemployed, low-income, from non-western country, etc.), visit this page. It provides details of exchange that we can make: you promote health- or breathing-related content and get a book in exchange for that. I can help you to get nearly any of my books (with a few exceptions) for only 1 USD or even for free.
You can read nearly 40 % of this PDF book here: Yoga Secret.
Related yoga pages
The main article from Yoga pages
Yoga video about mistakes of yoga gurus and details of classic and modern yoga teaching
