Notes:
I started listening to this book on Audible during my morning walk last week. I had just completed the introduction and told Self: “This is a book you’ll never forget.”
And YOU will likely say, why should I bother. Or as a line from Nestor’s intro says: “But why do I need to learn how to breathe? I’ve been breathing my whole life.”
Exactly what I said.
Now, I can’t get this book out of my head.
Every breath, a gift.
Excerpts from the Introduction:
“90 percent of us—very likely me, you, and almost everyone you know—is breathing incorrectly and that this failure is either causing or aggravating a laundry list of chronic diseases… This work was upending long-held beliefs in Western medical science. Yes, breathing in different patterns really can influence our body weight and overall health. Yes, how we breathe…
This book is a scientific adventure into the lost art and science of breathing. It explores the transformation that occurs inside our bodies every 3.3 seconds, the time it takes the average person to inhale and exhale…
It will take the average reader about 10,000 breaths to read from here to the end of the book. If I’ve done my job correctly, starting now, with every breath you take, you’ll have a deeper understanding of breathing and how best to do it. Twenty times a minute, ten times, through the mouth, nose, tracheostomy, or breathing tube, it’s not all the same. How we breathe really matters…
By your 3,000th breath, you’ll know the basics of restorative breathing…
By your 6,000th breath, you will have moved into the land of serious, conscious breathing…
By your 8,000th breath, you’ll have pushed even deeper into the body to tap, of all things, the nervous system…
By your 10,000th breath, and the close of this book, you and I will know how the air that enters your lungs affects every moment of your life and how to harness it to its full potential until your final breath…
By the law of averages, you will take 670 million breaths in your lifetime. Maybe you’ve already taken half of those. Maybe you’re on breath 669,000,000. Maybe you’d like to take a few million more.”
— James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (Riverhead Books, May 26, 2020)
Notes:
~ sara, from “ways to start feeling again”
Notes:
I’m sitting in his chair, a padded wheel chair at the side of his bed at the Rehab Center.
He’s sitting up on his bed, but bent over, trying to catch his breath.
Oxygen is flowing from a tank down a tube through his Trach.
My eyes are never far from his heart rate monitor.
It’s a lime green digital read out, being fed stats through a line connected to his index finger.
120.
122.
118.
123
A heart rate equal to a light jog.
Not a 10 min, or 15 min, or 30 min jog.
A 24 x 7 jog.
Running. Running. Running.
He coughs, interrupting the signal. The machine flashes yellow alerts, and fires a piercing alarm to the Nurse’s station.
Then silence. [Read more…]
But if anything will soften me, it is food: dumplings, apple pie, sweet tea. A huge silent relief that is stillness passes through me like sun, a warm tongue on the cub’s crown, the thought of being thought of. Breath becomes easy.
~ A. K. Benjamin, Let Me Not Be Mad: My Story of Unraveling Mind
Notes: Photo via ilyfood
Notes:
Whispering “yes” instead of screaming no…
Try it. If you’ve tried it before, try it again…
and soften into it…
No need for fancy formulas or prescribed affirmations.
No goal.
Just be.
Right here…
One breath in front of the other.
~ Mirabai Starr, Softening into the Pain
Notes:
and the way the smallest animals breathe
burrowed into the hills.
(her) ribs
expand a little,
her soft lungs fill
partially, she feels the world
come in softly
as she inhales a breeze.
~ Amanda Beth Peery, from “A Poem About Breathing”
Notes: Poem via 3 Quarks Daily. Photo: Lydia Trappenberg with Breathe
Silence…
thrilling cold —
so much beauty.
Like breathing pure oxygen.
~ Susan Sontag, from “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980“
Notes:
Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.
This opening to life
we have refused
again and again
until now.
Until now.
~David Whyte, “Enough” Where Many Rivers Meet
Notes: Poem: Thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels. Photo: Vadim Stein via Mennyfox55
Who’s the guy in the photo? No idea. Loved the shot, it goes up.
Does he resemble him? No. Hair color? No. Glasses? Hmmm, black frames, but not the polaroids. Body frame? Close. So what’s the connection? For some inexplicable reason, Tattoo runs up shouting “Ze plane! Ze plane!” to announce the arrival of a new set of guests to Fantasy Island. Not “ze plane” – “ze cane Boss“, “ze cane.”
I’ve been in here, this same room, a hundred times, maybe more. Always early morning, and an hour before boarding. The first flight from LaGuardia to Dallas.
Yes, we’re back talking about Lavs, after Lav #1 earlier in the week, and Lav Doors a while back. It’s the Men’s restroom at the American Airlines Admirals Club. Here, there are three certainties when you enter: (1) the smell of clean, before hundreds soil the floor with urine and slop the countertops with water and soap suds, (2) Musak pumping Chill music through the ceiling speakers and (3) Chill, like Arctic air, that triggers goose bumps on your skin…get dancing!
It’s July, 82° F, and he’s wearing a blue windbreaker. Navy blue slacks. A baseball cap. 5’4″ tops, if stretched out from his stoop. Glasses, black frames; lenses…coke bottles. Age? ~ mid 80’s.
He’s standing at the urinal to my left. His cane, hard wood, weathered, has a silver wrapper for a handle. It leans against the wall, waiting. [Read more…]
Orphaned baby elephants take a mud bath at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Elephant Orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya. The elephant orphanage looks after 29 baby elephants orphaned by human-wildlife conflicts and poaching, among other causes. (Dai Kurokawa, wsj.com, April 10, 2018)
I have been thinking how the body
is a vulture—all avarice and need.
How longing creeps up, stalking
for days, catches with such force
it leaves you breathless.
— Carol V. Davis, from “Need” in Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg
Notes:
I was sitting on the seashore…Unconsciously to myself, I looked at a film of sand I had picked up on my hand, when I suddenly saw the exquisite beauty of every little grain of it; instead of being dull, I saw that each particle was made up on a perfect geometrical pattern, with sharp angles, from each of which a brilliant shaft of light was reflected, while each tiny crystal shone like a rainbow. The rays crossed and recrossed, making exquisite patterns of such beauty that they left me breathless… Then, suddenly, my consciousness was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way how the whole universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter how dull and lifeless they might seem, were nevertheless filled with this intense and vital beauty. For a second or two the whole world appeared as a blaze of glory. When it died down, it left me with something I have never forgotten and which constantly reminds me of the beauty locked up in every minute speck of material around us.
~ Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell
Notes:
I would have them be like the branch of the olive tree.
That one which bides its time.
Then they will feel within them,
like the swirling gust which tests the tree,
the impulse of God’s breath.
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, from The Wisdom of the Sands
Notes:
Your light…
Your silence…
In the silence, without listening,
I heard it,
and without words,
without language or breath,
I answered.
~ C.K. Williams, from “With Ignorance” in Collected Poems.
Notes:
Things to do today:
1) Breathe in.
2) Breathe out.
— Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story.
Photo: Huffinton Post. Quote: The Vale of Soul Making
Fragile as ash
a memory stirs
and the past comes back. […]
a single breath
can make it
crackle and burn.
~ Gary Catalano, “Breath,” Slow Tennis: Poems 1980-83
Notes: Poem – Memory’s Landscape. Catalano was an Australian poet and art critic. Photo: Eric Rose.
True singing is a different breath,
about nothing.
A gust inside the god.
A wind.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Sonnet I.III,” in Duino Elegies; The Sonnets To Orpheus in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Notes:
To
take into the air
my quiet breath…
~ John Keats, from Ode to a Nightingale
Photo: Margaret Durow via sotick
Live & Learn 