Category: Breath Diary

In the great documentary The Last Dance about basketball legend Michael Jordan and The Chicago Bulls, there‘s a moment when we see Michael Jordan driving away in a red sports car. The licence plate reads „AIR“. „Air“ or „His Airness“ were synonyms for Michael Jordan, relating to his game where at times he seemed to be airborne, in the air as if he could fly.

Yesterday I was at a grrrl gang open mike event in Berlin and met a young woman named Bella. 

I‘m currently collecting questions about breathing and after chatting for a while I asked her if she had a question for me. Rather than asking a straightforward question, Bella told me that she has a heart condition and that is very sensitive to the influence of internal and external stress because her heart immediately reacts. She tried to describe how she felt about being in her body, the experience and the knowledge of her heart not working properly and not being there for her the way it naturally would be. „I feel like I can‘t trust myself“, she said. Her body needed a backup plan, a pacemaker that took over when her heart couldn‘t regulate itself.

In the Heal Podcast, Zach Bush MD talks with Kelly Noonan Gores about his path from a physician to nutritionist to beoming an expert on the microbiome. The microbiome is a term for the diverse non-human living beings like fungi, bacteria and yeast that inhabit our bodies and the earth. Zach Bush is one of the fiercest activists and educators for understanding the role of the microbiome in our lives and the parallel between human and planetary health.

At the beginning and the end of the podcast, Zac Bush gives moving accounts of his associations to breathing, during a personal experience of his first witnessing a baby being born in desperate circumstances and after hearing of the death of George Floyd, when he realised that the way most of us exist on the planet today is taking away the very air we need to breathe. 

I often use an inhaler, especially in the winter and every time I use it, I wonder why there aren‘t any inhalers made from ceramics. The only ones available are made from plastic and as well as inhaling the hot salt or chamomile fumes, I also inhale the smell of plastic.

I‘m currently on the island Rügen by the Baltic Sea Coast with a yoga and fasting group and today there‘s quite a storm. We walked to the beach this morning to do our daily exercises but had to leave because we got covered in sand. The wind was so strong that it was difficult to walk straight. I felt the air pushing into my side like a body, swaying to the left of the path. It intrigued me thinking about air as a body.  

Later, when I was lying down on the floor looking out at the swaying pine trees and hearing the wind roaring through the open windows of the yoga room, I imagined the air being drawn into the nostrils as something more substantial than gas, more like a liquid. It was a strange sensation, like becoming inhabited with the inhale and with the exhale being vacated, and then during the breath pause, the house being empty, so to speak. 

I can‘t remember where I found the entry „well-brethed“ on my many Google search explorations but I was delighted when I did. What a great way to describe breathing well.

Well-brethed meant breathing well, with strong lungs
Best-brethed: with the strongest breath, the best lungs
and
Well-wynded: with good lungs
and, of course,
Best-wynded: with the strongest breath, the best lungs

I love the past participle form, implying that this is something that happens to me, I am „well breathed“, breath moves through me; I am „well winded“, palpable air movement happens inside of me. 

The unique interdisciplinary Life of Breath project which ran from 2015 – 2020 in the UK has come to an end. Life of Breath was led by Prof Jane Macnaughton at Durham University and Prof Havi Carel at University of Bristol. In their exploration of the theme of Breathlessness, they were supported by teams at both Bristol and Durham universities and expert collaborators.

I’m honoured to have participated with a blog post contribution at the beginning of the project and have shared Life of Breath content over the years on this blog.

The Life of Breath Project left a legacy of practical resources, a video archive, a podcast series, and a vibrant blog as well as academic publications. It is really timeless since breathlessness is potentially, and for many actually, ever present.

In this interview, world-renowned and reliably wonderful author David Grossman talks about his book A Horse Walks into a Bar with euronews’ Isabelle Kumar.

The interview from 2016 in Jerusalem is strangely relevant to what is currently going on, I found, as I listened to it today. The central theme of fear in society dominates the conversation. One phrase by David Grossman that particularly struck me was “the air of despair”. It embodies a physical and metaphysical atmosphere that one is exposed to but also something which one participates in and co-creates.

I just took part in an online group session with Gopal Norbert Klein, one of the leading trauma therapists in Germany. Gopal teaches that all we seek, as mammals, apart from survival, is connection. The basis of connecting with others is to connect with oneself, to sense one‘s own body, sensations, needs and feelings. And then to express these sensations, needs and feelings rather than holding them in or overriding them with thinking. 

Gopal said that „with people who can‘t sense themselves, who can‘t do that at all, I tell them to hold their breath. Then a need will come, the need to breathe. The next step would be to sense the need to drink, to eat… Needs have nothing to do with thoughts, with the stories we tell ourselves.”

At the beginning of March this year, I had one of those blast-from-the-past-triggers which promptly brought on a terrible cough. I was back in my childhood, lying in bed, coughing. Looking back, I realised I’d spent the majority of my life coughing. I had chronic bronchitis since I was a child and smoked for thirty years, from the age of twelve to forty-two. Coughing, being ill, lying in bed, were „normal“ to me. 

This time, for the first time, I realised how lonely and painful this had been. Listening to myself coughing was like hearing a whole orchestra of coughs, evoking the different beds I‘d lain in, in different countries and houses over the years.