Can a person "suspend their pulse"? The Wikipedia article about **Tirumalai Krishnamacharya**, the "father of modern yoga", claims > During the 1920s, Krishnamacharya held many demonstrations to stimulate popular interest in yoga. These included **suspending his** **pulse** , stopping cars with his bare hands, performing difficult asanas, and lifting heavy objects with his teeth. I had always assumed that the heart muscle was not subject to voluntary control, and thus stopping one's own heart would be an impossible feat, but there might be other ways to (seemingly) suspend the pulse as well, such as tightening blood vessels. **Is it physiologically possible for a person to "suspend their pulse"?**

As noted by user21997, there is a simple magic trick involving a rubber ball under the arm. I've found a few references to being able to do the same thing with muscle control, such as here, but that's still suspending the pulse, not the heart itself.

Probably of more interest to you would be this 1961 paper exploring the ability to temporarily stop pulse and/or heart activity by four yogis. The closest the yogis managed was a cessation of pulse in the wrist, a quieting of cardiac sounds below detectable levels, and a measurable slowing of the heart in one case. In every case, further testing has proven that the heart was still beating. Furthermore, every method essentially used other muscles to change the heart rhythm.