If you and I have exchanged emails, you know I like to share what I’m currently reading in my email signature. Many of the books I share not only inform my work but often transform how I look at life.
When friends and colleagues tell me they love getting a glimpse of what I’m learning, I feel as if we’re back on my stoop, sharing a moment together. In the spirit of my stoop and the community we’re creating through conversation, I’ll continue posting what I’m reading here on my new website. Please join me. I’d love to hear what you think.
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor
For years, I’ve been training and working with a mindfulness coach on various breathing techniques for health and mental wellness as part of my meditation practice. Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art offers a lot of proven practices backed by science that reinforce why inhaling and exhaling properly has a significant impact on our physical and mental health. Incorporating breathing techniques on a regular basis can even cure illness and eliminate anxiety.
I’ve started practicing the “5.5 Breathing Technique” and will continue to do so until it’s on autopilot. I recommend the documentary version of The Rescue; it’s extraordinary, and the mindful breathing practices kept the boys alive.
Here’s an excerpt from the book jacket:
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.
