The Nature Of Breathing

A healthy lifestyle means breathing well - but most people breathe badly. To breathe well only means not to obstruct the natural processes, including breathing through the nose, and to develop a posture that allows this, because naturally we know exactly how to breathe. We just forget, and inhibit ourselves. The yoga principle of pranayama is explored in detail here, and yoga postures that assist in good breathing make this an excellent 'remedial' book - but primarily it is a book which simply allows, and seeks, a return to nature. In our post-pandemic world understanding the breath has a whole new relevance. The book also covers anatomy, chanting, and meditation or mindfulness.

Attempts to think anew about philosophical questions from the perspective of breath and breathing. As a physiological or biological matter, breath is mostly considered to be mechanical and thoughtless. By expanding on the insights of many religions and therapeutic practices, which emphasize the cultivation of breath, the contributors argue that breath should be understood as fundamentally and comprehensively intertwined with human life and experience. Various dimensions of the respiratory world are referred to as “atmospheres” that encircle and connect human existence, coexistence, and the world. Drawing from a number of traditions of breathing, including from Indian and East Asian religion and philosophy, the book considers breath in relation to ontological, hermeneutical, phenomenological, ethical, and aesthetic concerns in philosophy. The wide-ranging topics include poetry, theater, environmental issues and health, feminism, and media studies. Lenart Škof is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Institute for Philosophical Studies at the Science and Research Center of Koper, Slovenia, and the coeditor (with Emily A. Holmes) of Breathing with Luce Irigaray. Petri Berndtson is a doctoral candidate of philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

In this landmark Companion, expert contributors from around the world map out the field of the critical medical humanities. This is the first volume to introduce comprehensively the ways in which interdisciplinary thinking across the humanities and social sciences might contribute to, critique and develop medical understanding of the human individually and collectively. The thirty-six newly commissioned chapters range widely within and across disciplinary fields, always alert to the intersections between medicine, as broadly defined, and critical thinking. Each chapter offers suggestions for further reading on the issues raised, and each section concludes with an Afterword, written by a leading critic, outlining future possibilities for cutting-edge work in this area. Topics covered in this volume include: the affective body, biomedicine, blindness, breath, disability, early modern medical practice, fatness, the genome, language, madness, narrative, race, systems biology, performance, the postcolonial, public health, touch, twins, voice and wonder. Together the chapters generate a body of new knowledge and make a decisive intervention into how health, medicine and clinical care might address questions of individual, subjective and embodied experience.

A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020 Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR “A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.

Our knowledge of breathing has shaped our social history and philosophical beliefs since prehistory. Breathing occupied a spiritual status for the ancients, while today it is central to the practice of many forms of meditation, like Yoga. Over time physicians, scientists, and engineers have pieced together the intricate biological mechanisms of breathing to devise ever more sophisticated devices to support and maintain breathing indefinitely, from iron lungs to the modern ventilator. Breathing supplementary oxygen has allowed us to conquer Everest, travel to the Moon, and dive to ever greater ocean depths. We all expect to breathe fresh and clean air, but with an increase in air pollution that expectation is no longer being met. Today, respiratory viruses like COVID-19 are causing disasters both human and economical on a global scale. This is the story of breathing—a tale relevant to everyone.

The Guardian's Best Science Book of 2017: the fascinating science and history of the air we breathe. It's invisible. It's ever-present. Without it, you would die in minutes. And it has an epic story to tell. In Caesar's Last Breath, New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean takes us on a journey through the periodic table, around the globe, and across time to tell the story of the air we breathe, which, it turns out, is also the story of earth and our existence on it. With every breath, you literally inhale the history of the world. On the ides of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar died of stab wounds on the Senate floor, but the story of his last breath is still unfolding; in fact, you're probably inhaling some of it now. Of the sextillions of molecules entering or leaving your lungs at this moment, some might well bear traces of Cleopatra's perfumes, German mustard gas, particles exhaled by dinosaurs or emitted by atomic bombs, even remnants of stardust from the universe's creation. Tracing the origins and ingredients of our atmosphere, Kean reveals how the alchemy of air reshaped our continents, steered human progress, powered revolutions, and continues to influence everything we do. Along the way, we'll swim with radioactive pigs, witness the most important chemical reactions humans have discovered, and join the crowd at the Moulin Rouge for some of the crudest performance art of all time. Lively, witty, and filled with the astounding science of ordinary life, Caesar's Last Breath illuminates the science stories swirling around us every second.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1894 Edition.

Breath is the flow of air between life and death. Breathing is an involuntary action that functions as the basis of all human activities, intellectual, artistic, emotional and physical. Breathing is the first autonomous individual action that brings life into being and the end of breathing is the definitive sign of disappearance. Starting from the question how breathing affects the body, levels of consciousness, perception and meaning, this book, for the first time, investigates through a variety of philosophical, critical and practical models, directly and indirectly related to breath, aiming to establish breath as a category in the production and reception of meaning within the context of theatre. It also explores the epistemological, psycho-physical and consciousness-related implications of breath. Aristotle dedicated a volume to breath exploring and enquiring in to its presocratic roots. For Heidegger, breath is "the temporal extension" of Being. Artaud's theatricality is not representational but rather rooted in the actor's breathing. Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray investigate the phenomenon of breath in order to explain the nature of human consciousness. Breath as a philosophical concept and as a system of practice is central to Indian thoughts, performance, medicine, martial arts and spirituality. As the book argues, individual consciousness is a temporal experience and breath is the material presence of time in the body. Cessation of breath, on the contrary, creates pause in this flow of the endless identification of signifiers. When breath stops time stops. When time stops there is a 'gap' in the chain of the presence of signifiers and this 'gap' is a different perceptual modality, which is neutral in Zero velocity. Restoration of Breath is a practical approach to this psychophysical experience of consciousness in which time exists only in eternity and void beyond memory and meaning.