“It all begins with awareness of ourselves breathing.”

In his article „The First Step to Healthy Breathing“ Dennis Lewis, one of my favourite breath teachers, focusses on the causes and effects of unnecessary tension and how they relate to breathing. I‘ve taken the liberty to highlight the sections where he addresses this directly.

“The First Step To Healthy Breathing
The first step to healthy breathing is to become conscious of how we actually breathe. From the perspective of the world’s great spiritual traditions, our breath not only brings needed oxygen and other gases to the physical body, but it can also bring, when we are conscious of it, the finer energies (prana, chi, and so on) needed to help nourish our higher bodies–the subtle body, causal body, and so on. Whatever we may believe about our soul and spirit, our breath, and how we breathe, is intimately connected with all aspects of our being. Read More

“An Underappreciated Muscle”

I wanted to share this beautiful image of different diaphragms by illustrator Shannon May. The image was the cover picture of the article “Behind Each Breath, an Underappreciated Muscle” by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times, April 2, 2015. The article deals with the evolutionary development of the diaphragm and its mutations. I don’t post the article itself as it’s based on research involving animal experiments.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/07/science/behind-each-breath-an-underappreciated-muscle-the-diaphragm.html

 

Breath Token January 2019

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

Standing while sitting

Recently I took part in a workshop held by my teacher Erika Kemmann. We explored basic aspects of breath work in-depth and started with sitting. Erika said that while sitting, we often forget our legs and the perception is that the upright posture comes from lengthening and straightening the spine. In fact, the upright posture begins with the contact of the feet with the floor, as if we were standing. Read More

Expiring

In my teaching process I focus on ways to enable people to find out for themselves what helps them with their breathing. Trying to put that into writing the other day, I formulated „find out what works for you, what‘s helpful for you and what inspires you.“ And I thought, hang on a minute, why only „inspires“? It could equally be „expires“.
„Expire“ etymologically means “to breathe out”, from ex– „out“ and spirare „to breathe.
To „expire“ used to be synonymous with dying, the last breath marking the end of life. In a way, each exhale or expiration, marking the end of one breath cycle, metaphorically stands for the end of a whole life cycle.

Read More

“The presence of breath”

In this podcast by the Life of Breath Project, visual artist Jayne Wilton talks about how she came to work with breathing in her artistic practice.
When she first gave workshops for patients in a hospice, Jayne Wilton discovered that the patients enjoyed experimenting with their breathing and she asked herself “what can visual art add to that?” She came up with various creative ways to record breathing and to translate the relationship “we all have with our breath in terms of how it feels viscerally to us” into art.
Read More

Breath Token December 2018

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

Revisiting

Now that we‘re coming to the end of the year, rather than add a new exploration, let‘s revisit a breath exercise that resonated with us, that felt good, brought joy or comfort.
“Riding the breath wave” from November or “Moving the spine” from June are favourites of mine, for example.
Let‘s repeat an exploration and sense how something has the same or a different effect, how we’ve changed within the repetition. What’s changed and what’s stayed the same? Let’s meet it with acceptance, let’s meet ourselves with acceptance, receiving ourselves as we are.

I wish you all a good transition into the new year. Let’s stay in touch. Let’s be breathed.

 

“Where the breath is”

As I was helping my friend Judith to look for a poem for her art class, I came across this poem by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. I had once dedicated a whole year to his poetry when I still ran my interdisciplinary art space wortwedding. At that time I read all his poems and prose that were available in translation. When I checked on my book shelves and found this poem, it was like reading it for the first time. Here’s to repetitions and new beginnings.

Where the breath is

She stands alone onstage
and has no instrument.

She lays her palms upon her breast,
where the breath is born
and where it dies.

The palms do not sing
nor does the breast.

What sings is what stays silent.

 

Source: Adam Zagajewski, Selected Poems, Faber and Faber Ltd, 2004

“And still you will forget what does not live next to you and breathes.”

Last month I went to the opera „The dead city“ by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1920) in which breath and absence of breath, as signifiers of life and death, played a major part. Let me first tell you the story: A man, Paul, in his grief over the death of his wife Marie, takes a mistress called Marietta, who, in many ways, resembles the deceased Marie. He is unable to accept that death has taken Marie away from him – and wishes for Marietta, a dancer full of joie de vivre, to embody Marie. She, at first, plays along, accepting this as another role, wearing Marie‘s clothes and posing next to the countless photographs of Marie placed all over the bedroom. Read More