Joe, relax. Breathe easy.

22. July 2021
Allgemein
by Nicola Caroli

I‘ve just re-watched the brilliant crime drama The Wire. In The Wire, the worlds of drug dealers, policemen and women, politicians, school teachers and children, as well as the media people of Baltimore are intertwined in revealing and challenging-to-watch ways. The drug dealers and the politicians drive around in the same cars, albeit through different streets. The crime stats are fluked as much as the school test scores to get the next mayor elected.

Each world is so multi-layered and complex with its themes, its characters and their different codes and languages that you could finish watching The Wire and start all over again straight away.

In season 5, episode 4, aptly called “Transitions”, is a fantastic breathing-cum-execution scene. Proposition Joe, an enterprising gangster who does big business out of his repair shop meets his maker, the top gangster Marlo with his right-hand man Chris. 

Read More

At the atomic level, we are in a sense eternal.

14. July 2021
Breathing Science
by Nicola Caroli

In his entertaining book about how the body works, Bill Bryson devoted a chapter to the airways and the lungs, as well as the heart. The Body, A Guide for Occupants offers fascinating insights into our physical home. What I enjoyed most in the the chapter about the respiratory system, was the author making a case for the efficiency of the airways to deter, get rid of and kill any possible pathogens that dare to enter with an inhaled breath. And I was educated by his explanation, in alarming detail, about what happens during sternutation, better known as sneezing.

Read More

Breath Token July 2021

5. July 2021
Breathwork
by Nicola Caroli

A breath token is a breathing exploration that I develop for friends & clients and send out as a gift.

In 2021 the breath tokens are about our relation-ship to breathing.
In the current climate, rather than giving an instruction, I feel like taking a step back and formulating an open question instead.

The question for this month is: What am I willing to let go of?
How does the breath respond to this question? Maybe the exhale feels pleasurable, the pleasure of letting go, of letting be. Or maybe there’s a sense that it’s too difficult to let go, even a single breath. In any case, there’s much to be discovered.

Read More

Take a breath and just claim your life right now again

29. June 2021
Breath Diary
by Nicola Caroli

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. 

Read More

How do your body and breath feel when you straddle two chairs?

22. June 2021
Breathwork
by Nicola Caroli

After her phenomenal memoir of surviving Auschwitz, psychologist Dr Edith Eger wrote a book about her work as a psychiatrist The Gift, 12 Lessons to Save Your Life.

Based on the Hungarian saying „if you sit with one butt on two chairs, you become half-assed“, a metaphor for leading two lives and keeping a secret, Dr Eger developed an exercise, taking the saying literally. 

„Healing can‘t happen as long as we‘re hiding or disowning parts of ourselves.“, she says. By physically experiencing what it feels like to sit on two chairs at the same time, we can get a sense of the cost of having to „bridge the gap between our ideal self and our real self“. And then, in comparison, what it is like to sit in one chair, in „our own fulfillment“. In the exercise, Dr. Eger also guides us to experience the breath in the two positions.

Read More

As long as you can still grab a breath, you fight

10. June 2021
Breath in Literature & Art
by Nicola Caroli

I‘ve finally gotten round to watching the movie The Revenant by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, inspired by the life of frontiersman Hugh Glass, played by Leonardo Di Caprio. It is an epic exploration of humankind‘s relationship to nature in general and specifically in the context of the fur trade in North America in the 1820s.

Previously I was a bit scared to watch it because I knew it would be challenging and moving for me. And, indeed, it was.

In the film are some great breathing scenes: even before the title comes up, we hear Glass whispering in an American Indian language during a dream of his Pawnee wife and son and the destruction of their village by soldiers:

Read More

Breath Token June 2021

10. June 2021
Breathwork
by Nicola Caroli

A breath token is a breathing exploration that I develop for friends & clients and send out as a gift.

In 2021 the breath tokens are about our relation-ship to breathing.
In the current climate, rather than giving an instruction, I feel like taking a step back and formulating an open question instead.

The question for this month is: How do I feel?
As the years go by I find this question more and more essential because how I feel influences my breathing and when I don’t know how I feel or I don’t want to feel how I feel, the breath cannot flow. Feeling and breath move together, coming and going of their own accord, if we let them.

Read More

Breathing and tasting

31. May 2021
Breath in Literature & Art
by Nicola Caroli

Spring, a timely love poem by Mary Oliver, is about a bear and not about a bear. Rather, Mary Oliver imagines herself having the bear‘s experience, a pure physical sensation of the freshness and richness of springtime. And part of that is, of course, breathing, the steady inner and outer flow amidst the apparent, bursting energy.

Another aspect of the poem is also related to breathing, namely the way Mary Oliver feels herself connected to the bear in a shared sense of aliveness. This naturally includes breathing, a shared breathing with the other. And this makes me believe her when she says, “There is only one question:// how to love this world.”

Read More