What does it mean to act with wisdom—and make every moment sacred?
In Chapter 4 of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna reveals how true wisdom isn’t passive—it’s a call to action. He teaches Arjuna how knowledge, action, and sacrifice are deeply intertwined, offering a timeless guide for navigating moral crises with clarity and courage.
Today, we explore how these teachings apply to your modern life, showing you how to transform every choice, breath, and moment into an offering aligned with your highest purpose.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
🔹 What it means to put wisdom into motion in your daily life
🔹 How to meet crisis with clarity, courage, and spiritual alignment
🔹 The deeper meaning behind Krishna’s words: “When righteousness fails, I create myself”
🔹 Practical ways to bring a sense of devotion and meaning into everyday action
If you’ve ever asked yourself, “What should I do next?”—this chapter offers a profound answer: Act with awareness. Move from wisdom. Make it sacred.
Loved this episode?
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📖 Different translations mentioned:
Barbara Stoler Miller: https://www.amazon.com/Bhagavad-Gita-Krishnas-Counsel-Bantam-Classics/dp/0553213652
Godsong by Amit Majmudar: https://www.amazon.com/Godsong-Verse-Translation-Bhagavad-Gita-Commentary/dp/1524733474
Eknath Easwaran: https://www.amazon.com/Bhagavad-Gita-2nd-Eknath-Easwaran/dp/1586380192
Bhagavad-Gita As It Is by Swami Prabhupada: https://www.amazon.com/Bhagavad-Gita-As-Bhaktivedanta-Swami-Prabhupada/dp/0892131233
FREE Practice: Yoga for Energy & Courage: Power Yoga Sequence, 30-Min Yoga Class
Relevant Blog: Kundalini for Feminine Energy: Ignite Your Creative Power and Passion
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🎧 Also Listen to:
#358 – Intro to The Bhagavad Gita: How Do You Navigate Moral Dilemmas?
#361 – Bhagavad Gita Chapter 1: Dharma, Emotions & Intellect
#367 – Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2 – Part 1: Should You Follow Your Emotions? Or Your Responsibilities?
#374 – Karma Yoga & the Detached Yogi: Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2, Part 2
#379 – Acting Without Attachment in a Messy World: Bhagavad Gita Chapter 3
© 2025 Uplifted Yoga | BrettLarkin.com
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Transcript:
Brett Larkin:
Welcome to the Uplifted Yoga Podcast, where ancient yogic wisdom meets modern business strategy. I’m Brett Larkin, creator of Uplifted Yoga, where I’ve certified thousands of yoga teachers, built a multi-seven figure business, and guided over half a million students on YouTube. Here’s the truth, you don’t have to choose between embodying deep yogic wisdom and building a thriving, freedom-based business.
This podcast is your space to integrate both, because yoga isn’t just what you do on the mat. It’s how you show up in every part of your life. Whether you’re here to deepen your yoga practice, grow your teaching career, or align your energy with your purpose, you’re in the right place.
Let’s dive in. Hello, my friends, today we are talking about the five vayus. We are going to dive into udana vayu, upward moving energy, vyana vayu, the expansive force that integrates everything.
We’ll unpack how to use mudras to enhance your energetic balance, and by the end of this podcast, you are going to understand not only the link between prana, apana, agni, and ojas, but I’ll show you how you can actually use the vayus to refine your personal practice and your teaching. Now this is part two of a two-part episode. I covered the first three vayus in episode 385.
Yes, I had that much to say about the vayus that we had to split them into two episodes. Now you do not have to go back and look into that first episode in order to enjoy this one, but I did want to let you know that it’s there for you if you want to explore the other three. If you want to see this information written out, I’ve also linked up my blog post on the vayus in the show notes, which has some pretty illustrations.
I always put a lot of great resources in the show notes for you guys, including today a link for the Uplifted Membership. If you are enjoying what you’re learning here on the podcast, I want you to know that in the Uplifted Membership, you will be right at home because there are dozens of classes, courses, thematic class plans that guide you through yoga experiences around the eight limbs of yoga, Kali, Lakshmi, the yamas, the niyamas, somatic yoga, kundalini yoga, yoga nidra, and so much more. It’s such a beautiful gateway to deepen your practice.
Many of the courses inside also count for continuing education credit, and when you join, it also supports the podcast. So consider becoming a member at brettlarkin.com forward slash uplifted and a special huge thank you to all of you who are already in the membership. We are back to jump into the vayus.
You do not need to listen to part one of this episode, but if you want to, we went over what are the vayus and we talked about the first three vayus in detail, what they look like in a state of excessive prana, deficient prana, excessive apana, deficient apana, and we discussed samana as well. And today we’re going to look at the last two vayus as well as try to put the vayus in sort of a bigger context because I find students often want the subtle body to fit together and I know I love to try to make sense of these different frameworks within the larger framework of Ayurveda, for example. So we’ll be digging deeper into all of that today.
Again, I’ll do a quick review so you don’t have to listen to the first episode, but we talked about prana vayu. This is a wind or energy current in the body that is representing energy coming in. So think of that as inhaling, right? That subtle energy that’s animating our body and our mind, not just the breath itself, but the power behind the breath.
So prana vayu is this pattern of how life force enters the body. Think inward. It’s said to live in the heart and lungs and chest.
Then down in our pelvis or lower abdominal region, we have apana vayu, that energy of release. So that’s the downward and outward current. So in the first episode, we talked about poop.
We talked about elimination. We talked about constipation of emotions. Irregular menstrual cycles or feeling lethargic.
We definitely want that downward and outward energy of release to be in balance. Then between these two, we have samana vayu, the balancer. So we talked about that as being like the navel center or the dantian, the movement pattern here.
Because remember, vayu means wind. So we’re talking about different energy currents in the body. We’re no longer talking about prana.
It’s just this generic thing like energy or life force. We’re actually double clicking down into like, what are the different ways prana moves in our system? What are the different subcategories of prana? So we have prana vayu, that inward, apana vayu, that outward, and now samana vayu at the navel center, this inward spiral. So visualize it as like this inward spiral.
And it’s the assimilation of our food, of our emotions, of our discernment. It’s sort of figuring out, well, what do I want to keep and absorb in the body? What do I want to pass on and let go? For each of these, we looked at the corresponding chakras. We looked at a specific mudra that we tried to connect with each of these vayus.
We looked at yoga poses, real life examples, as well as what these wind or energy currents look like in a state of excess or deficiency. Today, we’re going to go into that level of detail for the last two vayus. I’m going to give you a hack, if all this information feels overwhelming, and then we’ll also put the vayus in a larger context, as I mentioned.
So part one is there for you, but you can definitely join us today for part two. And we are kicking off with udana vayu. So this is the current of up and out, upward and outward.
It’s said to reside at the throat or the neck or in the head in 300-hour training. We specify it as actually residing in the larynx of the throat. Again, we don’t know for sure.
But right now, I am activating udana vayu as I actively speak and talk to you. I know this is gross, but with udana vayu, I often think of like vomiting, like projecting up and out. Like that would be much too much excess of udana vayu if you were head over the toilet situation.
So with this upward and outward energy, the chakra association here is obviously visuddha, the throat chakra, as well as ajna, the third eye. The element would be ether. We could think of this vayu as governing our self-expression, our speech, our growth.
So similarly to the throat chakra, if we have deficient udana vayu, we’re not able to express ourselves. We maybe don’t have that forward momentum of like up and out. Maybe that means we’re not that confident or we’re mumbling or we’re kind of repressed in our voice or vocal cords.
Those of you who’ve done the somatic yoga teacher training with me know we do a lot of vocal activation and crazy vocal exercises because most of us are just stuck in one vocal register our whole life and one main facial pattern that accompanies that vocal register. And it’s like we kind of got to wake up udana vayu. And in activating that ascending wind, we free our voice.
And then that often allows us to feel more clarity in the body, but also more momentum in our life. Now, the contrast to this would be the excessive udana vayu, which would be over-talking, dominating conversation, maybe erratic thoughts, disconnection from the heart when speaking, maybe saying things without thinking them through. So it’s almost like instead of containing our upward and outward energy and that current feeling in flow and in balance, it’s almost like we’re being pulled forward by it.
It’s like such an excessive flow that we find ourselves maybe oversharing, maybe gossiping, maybe burping. So udana vayu, you want to think up and out. Udana mudra, if you want to try this with me, is that the thumb touches the index, middle and ring fingers, and just the pinky is extended.
So try that now and notice what you feel. It has this light quality. Obviously, if you’re driving, you can try later.
But if you’re able to just hold it with me for a moment, even with just one hand, it’s like I feel this lightness. And we talked about in the first part of this episode, how working with different mudras rather than just always using gyan mudra, like index finger to thumb, which we all sort of default to by having knowledge of the vayus and what you think might be going on or different vayu you want to work with or an energetic quality you want to work with. And then actually using the corresponding mudra is a very simple way to personalize your practice in a deeply profound way.
So if you wanted to focus on that upward-outward energy of expression, this would be a great mudra to do. In terms of poses or pranayama, lion’s breath, that forceful exhale with the tongue out and the eyes wide, right, could kind of clear stuck energy from the throat. When we’re looking at whether it’s throat chakra or this vayu, supported bridge, shoulder stands, semi-inversions that direct energy towards the throat and the third eye, those are nice options for balancing this vayu.
I’m not a big fan of fish pose, never have been, because I don’t want to ever put pressure on my head while putting those teeny tiny delicate cervical vertebrae in extreme extension and at risk. Those of you who’ve done a 200-hour teacher training know that we harp on this a lot. Is the risk of the pose actually worth it? But maybe a supported fish or gently taking the chin back to open the throat, assuming you don’t feel any crunchiness in the cervical spine.
So, so far our body has this inward current, this taking in of pranayama vayu, this releasing, letting go energy of apana vayu, the vayu that’s sort of between those two, that’s figuring out what we want to let go of and what we want to keep, this digestive element, samana vayu. And now we have udana vayu, that up and out projecting, talking. And last but not least, we have vyana vayu, the integrator.
So vyana vayu, where is it? It’s everywhere. It pervades the entire body. So this energy current is about circulation, coordination, integration, expansive energy.
It might sound weird, but I almost think of vyana vayu in some ways, like the tides itself, the changing tides, because the movement they say is outward from the center of the body to the periphery. So it’s like this distribution center or this distribution current that’s, that’s helping the whole system, the whole body of water. I used in part one, an analogy of like these winds, since it’s hard to visualize wind, we could visualize the wind, like moving water, like ripples on a lake, the water going in, the water going out, the water whirling in a tide pool.
So vyana vayu is really different than the others because it’s the current of circulating energy. So if it’s not balanced, one part of your body might feel very disconnected from other parts of your body, or your thoughts are scattered into competing parts instead of all the parts coordinating and connecting. Maybe you have poor circulation or cold extremities, fragmented thinking.
And if we have excessive vyana vayu, that’s like energetic overwhelm. Maybe that results in difficulty focusing, scattered attention, like too many tabs open on your laptop. There’s too much firing, too much distribution.
The integrator, the integrator current isn’t balanced. What’s interesting is the chakra associated with vyana vayu. Some say sacral chakra, or you could just think of it as all the chakras.
I personally just associate it with all the chakras. The element association is water. And if you’ve ever felt like your body and your mind are operating in silos, like they’re not talking to each other, or you’re constantly switching between tasks without finishing a task, or you feel emotionally scattered, unable to land, these are all signs that vyana vayu, this distribution center may need attention.
Let’s look at vyana mudra. So this is the index and middle fingers touching the thumb. Try that for a moment if you can.
It’s okay if it’s only with one hand. Index and middle fingers touch thumb and see if it enhances your awareness of circulation, or if you sense this integration across all of your systems. I definitely feel this.
I actually, I’m really loving this. I’m probably going to meditate with this mudra later today. A great pranayama for balancing vyana vayu is nadi shodhana, or alternate nostril breathing, because it’s balancing that left and right energy channels, ida and pingala, reestablishing that clarity and balance in the nervous system.
In terms of poses, you know, I like eagle pose because it’s very much, you know, activating left brain, right brain, and your balancing, and it’s, you know, enhancing your coordination and challenging you to focus and not fall down. So your mind and your body have to work together. So really any balancing pose does that in a nice way.
I also think any standing yoga pose, like triangle pose or warrior two, where you’re really thinking about a full body expansion and maybe visualizing bringing your energy to the periphery of your body. So if you’re not driving, you can close your eyes. And if you’re driving, you can keep them open.
But just maybe visualize from the center of your body outward towards the periphery, this expansive awareness, and think about how good it would be to feel into that in a big expansive standing pose, like triangle pose, like warrior two. So instead of energy moving up and down, we’re focusing more on energy moving from the center of the body to the left of the room and the right of the room. So you could do an entire asana practice or a standing vinyasa sequence in the uplifted membership and just choose yourself to layer on this awareness of vyana vayu from the center outward towards the periphery, this expansion left to right in all of your poses.
This could be a really fun class theme as well. And again, don’t forget that balancing work for bringing your mind and body kind of back into the same team. So with vyana vayu, I think of flow and wholeness and circulation.
Now we’ve covered all five vayus. And if this is feeling a little bit overwhelming, because it always does for me, I have a simplification hack for you. So if you’re like, oh my goodness, I’m already trying to balance my chakras.
Now I’m like have five vayus to work with. Where do I begin?
This is where I suggest you start. Focus first on prana and apana vayu. Prana the inward current taking in and apana the outward current the releasing out.
Why? Because these are your central axis. Prana and apana act as the central access point of all the other pranas. I like to think of them as being like connected to sushumna nadi.
So when we focus on these two first, the other vayus often adjust naturally. The good news is a lot of the yoga you’re already practicing does this. So maybe you do yourself or explore sequencing a class grounding your energy first or grounding your students first to activate apana vayu.
So you’re going to start with practices that stabilize ground the energy downward like supported child’s pose with slow exhalations like malasana squat. Encourage grounding down through the feet pushing the elbows into the thighs and the thighs into the elbows. Maybe working with apana mudra and then revving things up a little bit with kabbalah bhati.
Maybe closing with some mula buns transitioning then to opening the front of the body and encourage some upward movement. So that could look like cat cow getting you or your class moving. Bhujangasana, cobra pose.
Maybe exploring viloma pranayama, those segmented inhales and exhales that we talked about in episode one, but in a pose like tadasana if you wanted to fit it in earlier in class. We talked about doing it in shavasana, but if you really wanted to you could do it standing as well. Maybe you flow through the rest of your sequence, your standing poses, some forward folds to connect with grounding energy again, and then you close class with nadi shodhana.
So this might sound a little silly, but say you wanted to spend a full week and you could do this for a couple weeks in a row just focusing on the vayus. You could use monday to focus on apana, the grounding element. I know that on mondays that’s what I need.
I want to ground. I usually want to do restorative. So again thinking about that supported child’s pose, working with a lot of props, staying close to the ground.
There’s a lot of great tips about this in my yoga life book as well. How you can do a deeply grounding practice, really emphasizing that downward and outward current on a monday. Then let’s say tuesday, maybe that’s your creative inspiration day.
I’m actually recording this on a tuesday. So right, it’s that prana, you know, inspiration, taking in ideas, perhaps focusing on more energizing practices. And then wednesday could be the hump day, right? Your digestion day, samana, vayu.
So maybe even that means before you start your traditional yoga practice, thinking about how’s this week going? What energy do I want to keep from monday and tuesday? Maybe what do I want to not take? Just taking a moment to reflect and kind of digest your week before rushing through the rest of it. Remember for samana vayu, we focused on some core poses, boat pose, chair pose, or that samavritti breath, equal breath. So like counting in for five, counting out for five or for three, a moment of digestion.
And then thursday could be your udana expression day, maybe recording your podcast or getting on your instagram stories or writing down a new sequence. And then really using your weekend, both saturday and sunday as vyana vayu, your integration time. Alternatively, you could pick one vayu to focus on weekly.
You could integrate these into class themes. You could do these as a class series. Maybe your students are bored of the chakras.
They want something new. Let’s go a little deeper now and talk about how the vayus relate to both the chakras and ayurveda. So starting with the chakras, the vayus and the chakras overlap anatomically.
You’ve probably noticed they’re in some of the same places, key locations in the body, but they actually serve different functions. So the chakras are these energy centers that govern psycho-spiritual themes like safety, expression, identity. While the vayus are a movement pattern of energy, they tell us how energy is flowing through and between the chakras.
Now both of these systems, like we’ve been talking about, can be in a state of excess, balance, or deficiency. So an excessive throat chakra may show up as over-talking, dominating the conversation, over-sharing, gossiping. An excessive udana vayu might manifest the same way, frenetic speaking or ungrounded energy, like too many visions, too many ideas.
I’m going a little bit on a limb here because it’s not like this is written out in a Sanskrit text, but I do think you can say that the vayus are what are making the chakras spin. So you know chakra translates to like vortex, or we often think of it as like the spinning wheel or spinning disc. So if we think of the chakras like pinwheels up and down the spine and the vayus as wind currents, wind animates these pinwheels, causing it to spin and open and become more radiant, but not too radiant, right? We don’t want excessive, but I think that’s a nice way that you can visualize how the chakras and vayus are working together.
The vayus as these wind currents that are spinning the chakras. And so again, this is why it makes sense that our big hack would be to focus on prana and apana, right? Because if the inward and the outward current are working in sync up and down shishumna nadi, our pinwheels are spinning. We’ve got momentum and that’s leading us to talk about kundalini and a lot of other things, but like we’ve got an orbit, right? Kundalini is an orbit friends.
So we’re starting to have this healthy central channel. You can think of prana vayu as governing the heart and lungs and anahata chakra. You can think of udana vayu stimulating that upward outward expression of visuddha and ajna chakras, powering our speech, creativity, our insight.
So another way to frame this is that chakras represent what we’re processing. Are we processing and working in the realm of safety or self-worth or sexuality or love or expression or insight or connection? I always think of the chakras like apps or programs on my phone. So starting at the root, right? Is it a safety program? Is it a sensuality program? Is this a self-worth issue about my own ego willpower? Is this about love, expression, insight, or connection? And then the vayus are describing how energy is moving or not moving in relation to those themes.
So when you balance the vayus, you might say that you’re restoring this energetic circulation that activates the chakras. And it’s kind of interesting, actually, when we talk about this, because it’s like, can you even like, if the chakras are a pinwheel, if we want them to move, like a lot of times, I think when we think we’re working with the chakras, potentially we don’t even realize it, but we’re actually working with the vayus. Now, again, we don’t have a map.
We can’t dissect this. We don’t have any proof, but hopefully this is interesting to think about. Let’s touch on Ayurveda.
So Ayurveda focuses on the three doshas vata, pitta, and kapha. This is detailed very much in my book, Yoga Life. So it’s all about personalizing your practice through these different elements.
But Ayurveda also teaches about the five subtypes of vata. So I find a lot of even yoga teachers aren’t aware of this because Ayurveda is a very deep, deep system, but similar to how we in this episode are taking the idea of prana or energy and double-clicking and being like, actually, there’s five different types of prana, Ayurveda does that a lot too. So beyond vata, pitta, and kapha, vata, if we wanted to double-click into just vata, has five subtypes and surprise, they are the same as the five vayus.
So the vayus exist in Ayurveda as well under the umbrella of vata dosha, the air element. And this makes total sense, right? Because obviously Ayurveda would subcategorize the vayus under the air element because wind is air. As always, Ayurveda’s focus is more physiological while yoga is more spiritual.
So Ayurveda’s focus is usually on digestion and elimination and more direct health body function things while yoga is usually more focused, traditional hatha yoga, or if we want to look at tantras talking more about the subtle bodies, the nadis, the chakras, the kundalini. But it’s very cool that we see the vayus across both of these systems. And then I love making this connection.
Even if you haven’t studied Ayurveda that deeply, you’re probably aware or have heard the word agni. And if you haven’t, agni in Ayurveda is the digestive fire, and it’s a big deal in Ayurveda because if your agni is off, you’re going to have big problems because Ayurveda is really focused on having that optimal digestion, that optimal agni. You don’t want a little campfire.
You don’t want a blazing bonfire. You want your digestion to be just right. And what does that make you think of when we think of the vayus? Well, I think it most directly connects to samana vayu, right? That inward, digestive, organizing fire at the navel.
And isn’t it interesting? In order to have a fire, you often need to blow air on it. Have you ever seen those billow things? Like when I was a kid, we’d make fires in our house. This was before everyone had those like electric fireplaces that turn on or the gas fireplaces that turn on.
And my stepdad would literally have this thing, this billow, this leather thing that he’d open with his hands, and it would go back and forth that would do kind of under the logs to make the fire get started. So fire needs air. So when samana is weak, samana vayu is weak, that agni digestive fire might be more erratic.
That could lead to bloating. That could lead to indigestion. When samana is balanced, agni is strong and steady.
So that means we can digest not just our food, but our ideas and our emotions. And then we could think a little bit about vyana vayu. Remember the one that governs the circulation, taking the prana from the center core of the body, kind of from shashumna nadi, and our chakra pinwheels outward towards the periphery of the body.
I think we can relate that a little bit to the Ayurvedic concept of ojas. In Ayurveda, ojas is like the nutrients, the essence that gets spread through the system. So we have the chakras for understanding key themes like truth or love or relationship, but we have the vayus to actually track movement and apply physical practices.
So again, I think a lot of times when we think we’re working with the chakras in pranayama or asana, we’re actually also, or mainly, even more working with the vayus. And then of course, we have Ayurveda adding lifestyle, food, and seasonality kind of ideas to support both. So as we close, my question for you is what vayu feels strongest in you right now? What is the current that feels the fiercest? Maybe there’s a couple.
Do a little bit of a self-assessment. For myself, I think I have very strong apana and udana to express and talk, but I think I could really focus on the current of prana vayu taking in, receiving more. I could focus on integrating more samana vayu and definitely that distribution, that overall circulation of vyana vayu a bit more.
So how might you do a little self-assessment like that? And then take that knowledge into your personal practice this week, even if it’s just doing the mudra. Like I think doing the samana mudra would be great for me. So to help you out in the show notes, I’m linking blog posts on each vayu.
And in those blog posts, I have a photo of the mudra and a bit of a recap of what I’ve talked about. This can really help you if you want to go back and review any of this material or start incorporating it into your own class themes. As always, I want to thank you so much for being here all the way to the very end and share this episode with a fellow friend or yoga teacher who is interested in this wisdom.
Remember the number one thing you can do to support the show if you have not is to leave a review wherever you were listening. It helps more yogis find this content. If you have requests for episodes or feedback, I am always open to your ideas and you can DM me on Instagram at LarkinYogaTV.
Personalize your practice with this information this week and until next week, take care of you. Thank you so much for being here and listening all the way to the very end. I want us to get to 1,000 reviews on this podcast.
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