We can measure our life in breaths.

About 15 breaths per minute.

21,000 breaths per day.

7.5 million per year.

And 600 million over the course of an average lifetime.

Each a portal into known and unknown worlds. 

To yogis, breathing is like a bank account. More controlled breathing, more the number of breaths in that account— secret to a longer and livelier life. And yoga the key to unlocking its science.

Eddie Stern, yoga yoda and a man whose students include people like Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow, Willem Dafoe, Chris Martin, Russell Brand— makes this science central to the process that pumps life. Can yoga help us fend off diseases as much as it can help us find inner peace? Perhaps. 

But Stern also believes that breathing is the secret language we use to communicate with the outside world. To forge, maintain and cultivate the relationship between our body and the biosphere. 

Consider this: the first breath you take, as a just-born, is 500 times faster than any other breath you will take in your lifetime. It kickstarts the rhythm between the body and the outer environment, one that doesn’t die until death.

Consider this, too: we think sleeping and waking up to be a natural, almost automatic part of everyday life. And yet, it is being coordinated by something within our bodies. That something is our body’s natural alarm clock. A rhythm activated from the center of our brain. Tracking light, darkness, Sun, Moon and the stars outside. Tuning into those patterns. Governing our sleep cycles. 

The goal is to understand and adapt to these patterns. And the trick is to take a moment to breathe right.

Punk rocker to yoga “rockstar” 

Stern has been teaching this to his students for over thirty years now. 

His journey began in New York of the 1980’s, where he was a punk rocker playing in a band called Chop Shop with a Mohawk that was seven inches tall. He was dabbling in music, psychedelics and skateboarding in a quest to find out who he was. A quest that began in ninth-grade, with a book. 

Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. 

And a challenge. 

Stern’s English teacher told him to ask himself three questions: who am I? What am I doing here? And what do I do next?

A friend at the record store he was working in introduced Stern to yoga. Fascinated, he practiced yoga for a while in the US. And eventually packed his bags, came to India, and lived in the country, on and off, for two decades. 

Stern practiced Ashtanga yoga in Mysore, with Krishna Pattabhi Jois, who introduced it and then took it to the world. Ashtanga yoga, more than any practice, ties the science of yoga to the science of self. Every sequence is matched with an inhale and an exhale. Pose by pose, the number of breaths are mandated. It requires patience, and profound persistence. 

Stern has practiced it for decades. He opened Asthanga Yoga New York in 1995. There was no fanfare or publicity — a lesson from his guru. Empty pots make the loudest noise. Noise Stern did make, but in a good way. Serious practitioners flocked to his school, which also doubled up as a temple. 

But in recent years, the questions of his ninth-grade teacher have come back to bother him. Answering to their call, Stern has now moved away from Ashtanga. “My body,” he says, “had started to fall apart from extreme yoga and teaching. I wasn’t feeling nourished by doing the same sequences again and again. It was becoming performative.”

So he is back to the basics of yoga as he learnt it pre-Ashtanga — a holistic, modified approach towards different forms to find what he calls are “deep states of inner calm.”

A necessity in the age of chaos. Food deliveries are four minutes away. Internet speed is 5G. Instagram reels less than a minute long. Taking a moment to breathe is just a maxim. Sanity is at stake. How does one retain it?

The answer is to boomerang back to the body and the biosphere. 

Process, pattern, peace 

During his days as a teenager in downtown New York, Stern experimented with psychedelics. Yoga helped him go clean. Because he realised he did not need the psychedelics for insight and realisation and awareness — yoga could do that for him. 

Young seeker Stern wasn’t exactly looking to be healthy. His quest was spiritual. Which corresponded with the four pathways of yoga in India — Karma, Bhakti, Raja and Jnana. Action, devotion, stillness, and inquiry. The ways in which our interaction with the world happens. Lessons of Patanjali — practising one, coherent truth underlying all forms — which could lead to a path of evolved enlightenment.

Ancient yogis did this by using breath as a “fulcrum with which to shift the awareness inwards.” Yoga is assessing the body’s rhythms so that the mind can access the world’s pulse. A heart throbs 108,000 times in a 24-hour cycle. You can fit 108 moons between the Earth and the Moon. The number 108 has ancient meaning in Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Mathematical patterns govern the world, and our body is in sync with them. Breathe right for just over a minute, and you can find the surrounding a little brighter, expanded. 

Simply put, Stern’s practice is to marry the science of yoga to the science that goes on in our bodies. How simple, conscious breathing can help us evolve. Expand. Expunge. Explore — the nature of this world; and the realities beyond ours. As Stern says in his lectures, “There is not just one infinity, but an infinite amount of infinities.”

At SYNAPSE 2025, Eddie Stern will discuss yoga and yearning. Practice and purpose. Evolution and enlightenment. How yoga can help us fight internal-external demons. Depression. Diseases. How to meld ancient wisdom with modern science. And how that can open up pathways to nourish, maintain, and maneuver our physical, psychological, and physiological selves. 

Previous Next