No matter what you eat,
how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it
matters if you’re not breathing properly.
There is nothing more
essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let
it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species,
humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave
consequences.
Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure
out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in
pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient
burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and
the smoggy streets of Sao Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women
exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like
Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary
tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe.
Modern
research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way
we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate
internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even
straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it
is.
Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent
cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human
physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we
thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head.
You will never breathe the same again.
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