Breath Token November 2018

15. November 2018
Breathwork
by Nicola Caroli

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

Riding the breath wave

Lying down on the floor, let’s allow our weight to be carried. We can sense the back of the body in contact with the floor. Then let’s place our hands on the belly and allow them to settle there. On the front of the body, we can sense the palms and fingers on the belly, also the structure, the temperature, the fabric of our clothing etc. In time we can also sense the movement of the breath underneath our hands. Our hands are carried along by the breath movement, like when we lie on our back in the ocean. Read More

“The age of breath”

15. November 2018
Breath in Literature & Art
by Nicola Caroli

„The age of breath“, an essay by French philosopher and feminist Luce Irigaray, opens thus: „The divine appropriate to women, the feminine divine, is first of all related to the breath. To cultivate the divine in herself, the woman, in my opinion, has to attend to her own breathing, her own breath, more even than to love.  Breathing, in fact, corresponds to the first autonomous gesture of a human living, and it is not possible to be divine without being autonomous with respect to the mother and the father, to the lover, to the child, to the others in general, women and men.“ Read More

“Behold your tender Nurse the ayre”

15. November 2018
Breath in Literature & Art
by Nicola Caroli

In his poem „Orchestra or a Poeme of Dauncing“, the British lawyer and poet Sir John Davies (1569 – 1626) „judicially prooves the true observation of Time and Measure, in the authenticall and laudable use of Dauncing.“ By “dauncing” he not only refers to rhythmic movements of the body but to the movements of breath and sound in the air (in the excerpt I’ve chosen). Air is seen as a “tender nurse” that accompanies, carries, fosters and inspires the voice, as well as the wind:

“And now behold your tender Nurse the ayre
And common neighbour that ay runns around,
How many pictures and impressions faire
Within her empty regions are there found
Which to your sences Dauncing doe propound?
For what are breath, speech, Ecchos, musicke, winds,
But Dauncings of the ayre in sundry kinds? Read More

“Just like stars expand and shrink, so do we”

12. November 2018
Breathwork
by Nicola Caroli

In his audio CD Miracle Eyesight Method: The Natural Way to Heal and Improve Your Vision, Meir Schneider from Israel talks about how the eyes work and about his own journey towards healing. He then guides his listeners through various vision exercises.
Meir Schneider is the best possible role model for this as he was born almost blind and healed himself to see. His teachings are based on the Bates Method. I find the Bates Method and Meir Schneider‘s way of teaching to be closely related to natural breath work, for example, a session always begins by becoming aware of and releasing tension in the body before doing any further exercise. Breathing is gentle and happens only in and out of the nose. Read More

Breath Token October 2018

15. October 2018
Breathwork
by Nicola Caroli

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

Hope

At my local station in Biesenthal is a „street library“ in an old telephone box. This morning, on my way to the train, I spotted a volume of poetry I‘d always wanted to get: „Im Atemhaus wohnen“ („Living in the house of breath“) by Rose Ausländer. There are many poems in this volume in which the subject of breath directly occurs and one of them is called „Hope II“:

“When we hope
we‘re young.

Who could breathe
without hope
of roses opening
even in the future

a word of love
surviving the fear” Read More

“Tis so much joy!”

15. October 2018
Breath in Literature & Art
by Nicola Caroli

One of the most beautiful use of the rhyming of “breath” with “death” occurs in Emily Dickinson’s Poem 172. The punctuation, as always in her poems, is as telling as the words. Do try out reading her poems aloud, following the punctuation. I always find it challenging and surprising. Particularly masterful is the punctuation in the lines “:Life is but Life! And Death, but Death!/Bliss is, but bliss, and Breath but Breath!”, marking “life” and “breath” as fluid and “death” and “bliss” as somewhat separate. And yet, the rhyme occurs between “death” and “breath”, connecting them at the end of the line, at the end of life. Read More

“This is what my breath looks like”

11. October 2018
Breathwork, Featured
by Nicola Caroli

In a post for the Life of Breath Project Blog in 2015, I wrote about my breathwork with children. The title was “This is what my breath looks like”:

“This is what my breath looks like and when you have no breath you can no longer live,” wrote Maya, 7 years old.

I met Maya in a children’s recreational facility in Berlin where I offered an introductory “Creative Breathing” session. The participants were between 7 and 12 years old. Maya didn’t, strictly speaking, take part. She just wanted to know what we were doing and I told her we were exploring breathing. That was sufficient information for her to go off and spend the next hour doing her drawings. She started out drawing blood vessels, then added the heart, which looked like the lungs and later the lungs, which looked neither like the lungs or the heart. I asked her if she wanted to write something about what she had drawn and she went off to do some writing. (See Maya’s drawing above)

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Breath Token September 2018

16. September 2018
Breathwork
by Nicola Caroli

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

Breathing is variable I

Breathing adapts to everything we do, sense, think and feel. We can directly experience this by making any movement, while small, simple movements are best to begin with.
Generally any movement stimulates breathing palpably. When we allow the breath to adapt to the stimulus and don‘t interfere, our breathing supports the movement. For example, if we gently lift an arm and lower it again, our breathing, in its own time, responds to the opening on that side of the body. Read More

“To make a sentence, all you get is the air in your lungs.”

14. September 2018
Breath in Literature & Art
by Nicola Caroli

Lying in the emergency unit due to an asthma attack, Israeli author Etgar Keret wrote the following text:

“When you have an asthma attack, you can‘t breathe. When you can‘t breathe, you can hardly talk. To make a sentence, all you get is the air in your lungs. Which isn‘t much, three to six words, if that. You learn the value of words. You rummage through the jumble in your head, choose the crucial one. And those cost you, too. Let healthy people toss out whatever comes to mind the way you throw out the garbage. When an asthmatic says “I love you” and when an asthmatic says “I love you madly”, there’s a difference. The difference of a word. And a word is a lot. It could be „stop“ or “inhaler”. It could even be “ambulance”.“ Read More