पवनः पवतामस्मि रामः शस्त्रभृतामहम्।झषाणां मकरश्चास्मि स्रोतसामस्मि जाह्नवी॥
pavanaḥ pavatām asmi rāmaḥ śastra-bhṛtām ahamjhaṣāṇāṃ makaraś cāsmi srotasām asmi jāhnavī
Word by word
The verse says
Among things that cleanse I am the wind. Among those who bear weapons, Rāma. Among fish I am the makara — and among flowing rivers, the Ganges.
In plain words
Wind as the thing that cleanses, named first.
Not water, which is what you would expect, and which turns up later in the same line as the Ganges.
Wind cleans without touching anything. It just keeps moving.
Where you've felt this · in health
A room that has been shut all winter smells wrong the moment you walk in, and no amount of wiping surfaces fixes it. You open two windows on opposite sides of the house for ten minutes. Nothing has been cleaned. The room is completely different.
Going deeper
Movement as a form of cleansing is the quiet idea in this verse.
Water cleans by taking the dirt with it. Wind does something else: it does not remove anything, it only refuses to be still, and staleness is a property of air that has stopped moving. Nothing is scrubbed. The condition simply cannot persist in moving air.
That distinction has an obvious application to a mind, and the book has been circling it since Chapter 6. What settles in a mind settles because the mind has stopped.
The Ganges at the end of the verse is the other kind — the river that purifies by carrying away, and that is holy precisely because it flows. Both items in the same line are about things that are clean by virtue of not stopping, which is not a bad description of the attention this book keeps recommending.