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One Step Towards Better Breathing
What do I want? I find myself asking this question multiple times a week. Sometimes even multiple times a day. Some days I want this. Some days that, making sticking to a specific plan like going through a maze, not sure where I will end up or how long it will take to get there. Isn’t that true for many people? Of course, we all have to know what we want in order to get it. And we have to take action to have it materialize. The problem is that sometimes we get what we don’t want in the pursuit of what we do…
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More To Say About Breathing
There can never be too much to say about breathing. Especially since it takes practice and attention to not leave it behind when we are doing the most mundane things. James Nestor, author of Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art, provided a 30 minute video for the Feldenkrais Summit this past May. I had talked to people about his book, listened to radio interviews and watched some of his YouTube videos. None of them moved me to buy his book, until I watched the summit video. I was intrigued by his explanation of the size and position of the mouth and throat and how over time,…
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Waking up to breath
Coordinating breathing and swallowing is the first act of coordination that we do as infants. Once that is learned, infants average 30 breaths/minute the first 6 months of life, meaning that infants breathe almost 8 million times by the time they are 6 months old. Pretty amazing! What does that mean for adults? Well, breathing does slow down to 12-20 breaths/minute. If we average 15 breaths/minute, we will have inhaled and exhaled 394 million times by the time we are 50 years old. That is a way larger number than 99+% of us will ever see in our bank accounts. But pretty much we spend more time thinking…
