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One hour of slow breathing changed my life

theguardian.com

101–110 of 332 posts

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#101
post #86

> We’ve become conditioned to breathe too much, just as we’ve been conditioned to eat too much. How is one conditioned to breathe too much? We eat too much because there is so much available to us and it's engineered (by trial and error) to be as delicious as possible. That has not been done to air.

It's the corporations, and big Pharma, and the Pentaverate.

Big Air

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#103
post #51

All Europe has gone mad about breathing exercises. For four or five years I have made money by treating people who had ruined their breathing by such methods! Many books are written about it, everyone tries to teach others. They say: "The more you breathe, the greater the inflow of oxygen," etc., and, as a result, they come to me. I am very grateful to the authors of such books, founders of schools, and so on. If, fo…

Please use quotation marks or a blockquote (>) for quotes. It took 4 paragraphs until you mentioned that you were quoting an Armenian mystic.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#104
> Hindus considered breath and spirit the same thing

It's funny, because I just realised that πνεύμα(pneuma)/spirit in Greek has the same root as πνεύμων(pneumon)/lung: the verb πνέω(pnéo), which means I breathe.

This is not Mr Portokalos talking from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, people: πνέω is traced to the older Indo-European stem pnew- , and the whole point of my comment is that there is a lot of heritage in language through the eons from older cultures and civilizations.

Trivia: the suffix -μα (like in the words pragma, dogma, trauma etc) generally means “the result or the carrier of the verb's actions”, so like pragma (“thing”, what is/has been made/done), dogma (what one believes in; the firmness of the belief is irrelevant to the ancient word), trauma (“wound”; the result of being wounded), pneuma would be what is being breathed; and there's another connection to old roots: alcohol is «οινόπνευμα» (spirit/fumes of the wine), and alcoholic drinks are called “spirits”.

Fun stuff :)

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#105

I started reading his book Breath , and he made the starting claim that, in essence, you could choose to be either energetic or restful by picking one nostril to breathe out of for awhile. (Naturally we breath out of one nostril at a time, and the body goes back and forth, but "it's a balance that can also be gamed"). I found this claim a bit... suspicious, and Googled, and didn't find much scientific evidence for th…

why don’t you simply try it and see?

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#106

I started reading his book Breath , and he made the starting claim that, in essence, you could choose to be either energetic or restful by picking one nostril to breathe out of for awhile. (Naturally we breath out of one nostril at a time, and the body goes back and forth, but "it's a balance that can also be gamed"). I found this claim a bit... suspicious, and Googled, and didn't find much scientific evidence for th…

why don’t you simply try it and see?

How do you handle the placebo effect?

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#107

I started reading his book Breath , and he made the starting claim that, in essence, you could choose to be either energetic or restful by picking one nostril to breathe out of for awhile. (Naturally we breath out of one nostril at a time, and the body goes back and forth, but "it's a balance that can also be gamed"). I found this claim a bit... suspicious, and Googled, and didn't find much scientific evidence for th…

> Naturally we breath out of one nostril at a time I don't understand how anyone can make that statement with a straight face. Unless one nostril is blocked, we use both simultaneously. There's no balance to be gamed.

Can you clarify whether or not you have a background in medicine and/or deep understanding of physiology?

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Naturally we breath out of one nostril at a time I don't understand how anyone can make that statement with a straight face. Unless one nostril is blocked, we use both simultaneously. There's no balance to be gamed.

That's not actually true. If you research it, you'll find that most people's nostrils alternately dilate and contract (the tissues reduce/swell). Most of us breathe primarily through only one nostril at a time, and it switches approximately every half hour. This is entirely unconscious and we're generally not aware of it. There is a little bit of airflow in the constricted nostril, but nowhere near comparable to the…

Wow. I've noticed this my entire life but just thought it was chronic allergies.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Naturally we breath out of one nostril at a time I don't understand how anyone can make that statement with a straight face. Unless one nostril is blocked, we use both simultaneously. There's no balance to be gamed.

Watched a program on TV where a professor demonstrated stereoscopic olfactory ability. A person was blindfolded and knelt on a grassy area where an invisible smell trail was laid out. The person was able to track the trail because of this ability. The key part is your sinus cavity slightly closes one nostril creating a differential air flow. This difference allows us to figure out the direction the smell via the diff…

Brilliant! I had no idea!
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