In my last post Capturing Breath Bubbles,I wrote about a workshop with Jayne Wilton at the „Catch your breath“ exhibition. Part of the workshop was a global engagement art project by Jeppe Hein, called Breathe with me.
The participants and browsing visitors were invited to paint one brushstroke with an exhale on a large paper canvas. One after another, the visitors took the brush from the ink pot and painted a line down the paper.
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In October I was in London, to visit friends and to attend Jayne Wilton‘s workshop at the „Catch your breath“ exhibition at the London College of Physicians. Jayne is the resident artist of the Life of Breath Project and I‘d met her at the launch of the project in Durham university, 2015. So this was a happy reunion for us. I went with my friend Vanessa Mildenberg, a theatre artist and change and communications manager. We first participated in the workshop and then went on a guided tour of the exhibition.
Jayne‘s workshop consisted of four activities: a global breath- brushstroke project which I‘ll write about in the next post “Breathe with me”, a breath lithograph, an articulation sculpture and capturing breath bubbles.
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This week I was at the Mexican Day of the Dead Festival in Berlin. With two other somatic practitioners, Mónica Toimil Robert and Frauke Felsch, and two Papiermaché skeletons, we did a movement session for schoolchildren.
One of the characteristics of the dead is that what remains of them, visibly and palpably, are the bones. So it was Mónica‘s idea to do something around bones, to create a „skeleton dance“.
I started off with „knocking on the bones“, sensing the structure of the individual bones from the skull to the feet and back up again. Monica then invited the children to move the individual bones, developing into a dance, where in effect, the bones danced with each other.
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A breath token is a breathing exploration that I develop for friends & clients and send out as a gift.
Rolling from shoulderblade to shoulderblade
Yesterday I was walking in the forest where I live and leant against a tree. I could feel the bones of my shoulderblades against the wood and began rolling from one shoulderblade to the other. As my sensation of my upper back increased, I rolled from one outer tip of the shoulder blade to the other, as if I were sensing my wingspan. The rolling motion and the gentle stretch of the back muscles softened and opened my chest. I imagined creating space for my heart, enveloped by the lungs, and the heart expanding, pulsing more freely against the pleura and the diaphragm. It made me glad and so I invite you to join me. You can do this pretty much anywhere, against a wall, the back of a sofa or a seat on the train. And, of course, back to back with a partner.
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The TV series Orange is the New Black gives a hilarious and disturbing example of how breathing techniques today are instrumentalized by a corporate performance pressure mindset. In season 4, episode one, Litchfield prison, the setting of Orange is the New Black, has been taken over by the private corporation MCC. Part of MCC‘s measures to increase the profit margins of their share holders is to double the prison population and installing four beds to a bunk instead of two. (Previously, funds for the prison were embezzled for a political career; this was still considered illegal.) In the first assembly of all the prisoners in the prison chapel, the prison ward, re-labelled „Director of Human Activity“, Mr Caputo, gives a corporate lingo speech, selling the installation of outdoor toilets as a courtesy and cheerily offering the customary freebie: in this case a set of earplugs. A breathing technique exercise is supposed to help the inmates manage their stress levels in the overcrowded conditions. The new Captain of the Guards from a maximum security prison, Mr Piscatella, instructs the inmates to breathe in on the count of five etc which doesn‘t go down well…
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At the beginning of October, the The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced the winners for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: William G. Kaelin Jr., Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability. The press release reads as follows:
Animals need oxygen for the conversion of food into useful energy. The fundamental importance of oxygen has been understood for centuries, but how cells adapt to changes in levels of oxygen has long been unknown.
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In his article in the The American Journal of Psychology, Stephen David Edwards of the University of Zululand, takes us on a journey of spiritual healing traditions and contemporary practices with the breath. „Psychology is originally and essentially concerned with the breath, energy, consciousness, soul or spirit of life that leaves a person at death and continues in some other form.“ Instead of just naming various breathing methods for health, excercise and sport, he explains the psychology behind them. From breathing through a Zulu diviner to an increase in grunting in tennis players, this makes for an interesting read.
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A breath token is a breathing exploration that I develop for friends & clients and send out as a gift.
Clasping the shoulder to become alert
I read more and more about breathing techniques and how they‘re supposed to help with regulating ourselves, usually calming down or being alert.
We don‘t need a breathing technique for either. I‘d like to propose a simple touch that has a “waking-up” effect without unneccessarily interfering with the self-regulatory breathing mechanism. (This is just one example, there are countless other possibilities)
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A friend of mine, dance teacher Melanie Jung, kindly sent me a link to Natalia Doco‘s song Respira, („Breathe“) with a very cute video. I‘ve translated the lyrics from the original mix of French and Spanish, more or less correctly, I think, into English and am sharing it here, after the video.
Respira
Alors, alors je respire
Même si la tête s’enferme dans le noir
Alors, alors je respire et même si le cœur ne bat plus pour moi, Ha, ay
Alors, alors je respire même si ce monde no entiende nada
Alors, alors je respire
Et respire même si le ciel todavia no clara
In the German lifestyle magazine Carpe Diem,breath teacher Norbert Faller spoke with Nicole Kolisch about breathing „elastically“ in a given situation.
“Are you breathing „elastically“ in a given situation?
A few questions to something that should be a matter of course, but isn‘t.
Carpe Diem: Mr Faller, you are a breath teacher. Of course, the obvious question is, why should I learn to breathe? Can‘t I do that already?
Norbert Faller: We wouldn‘t live – none of us – if we couldn‘t. Most people who are born healthy, breathe reasonably well. But there are conditions in life that can lead to the loss of something actually quite intuitive that is self-regulated by the body. This can have many causes: monotonous movements or lack of exercise, poor posture, tension, stress, mental problems, sometimes it is also due to certain thoughts that „take our breath away“. There are also environmental influences (allergies) or smoking.
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