#Catophile | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

corkcitylibraries · 3 years

Text

Book Review: James Nestor’s Breath - The New Science of a Lost Art.

by Ed Cashman

“But why do I need to learn to breathe? I’ve been breathing my whole life.”

James Nestor

The fruit of a decade’s travelling, research and self-experimentation, Nestor’s travelogue through breathwork practices, both ancient and modern, is accessible and provocative. He opens his account with an epiphany. Attending a breathwork session to alleviate chronic stress, he experiences an intense physical and mental shake-up. This transformative event ignites his interest in the mechanics and chemistry of breath, its therapeutic potential and inspires him to investigate a range of practitioners operating at the vanguard of this increasingly popular field. His engagement with these “pulmonauts”, as he

terms them, constitute the spine of the book. Nestor adventures through yogic and esoteric hinterlands, all the way to the rigours of research labs in a quest to understand, experientially and scientifically, the art of breathing. For the most part, he succeeds.

His success doesn’t come without sacrifice, however. Alongside Anders Olsson, a Swedish breathwork practitioner, Nestor blocks his nose with silicone plugs to force himself to mouth breathe for 10 days. Supervised by the chief of rhinology research at Stanford, it’s rapidly obvious that this is not a good idea for both of them. Most of their health metrics plummet and they feel simply awful.

So lesson No.1 in the breathwork world? Breathe through your nose. It turns out nasal breathing has many positives. It filters and warms the air via nasal turbines and increases oxygen uptake in our cells by 18% compared to mouth breathing (via a mechanism known as the Bohr effect that counter-intuitively requires an optimal amount of CO₂ in our system). It also enhances production of nitric oxide that facilitates lung health. Breathing nasally, it turns out, has a modest and occasionally spectacular potential to ameliorate chronic respiratory issues, ease mental health conditions and, indeed, raise the game of high-performance Olympians.

So far, this is conventional wisdom in the world of breathwork. However, the book takes an intriguing and informative turn to what can be described as an example of dysevolution. Simply put, our facial structures have collapsed precipitously, especially in the last 300 years. Here’s the theory: from an evolutionary standpoint, a trade-off occurred – as a result of developing cooking skills - between increased brain-size and the shrinking of our mouths and narrowing of our nasal apertures. Sadly, this deterioration led to a tightening of our airways and instigated the positive feedback loop of mouth breathing.

In addition, this state of affairs was amplified after the Industrial Revolution by the advent of processed foods, too soft for the chewing that signals stem cells to grow bone, and thereby weakening our facial structure. Consequently, of the more than 5,400 mammals on the planet, humans are the only ones that routinely show misaligned jaws, overbites, underbites, crooked and crowding teeth. Hence, our current state of less than optimal breathing.

Nestor spends quite a bit of time on this topic and assuages my incredulity somewhat by citing both anecdotal and more rigorous evidence to back up these claims, conducting interviews with experts in anthropology, skull collections, and dentistry. He even takes a macabre trip to an off-limits catacomb in Paris with some local guides known as “catophiles” to confirm this theory and, one might add, spice up his narrative.

So lesson No. 2? Chew more and, for a start, consider the benefits of a proper oral posture - lips closed, teeth lightly touching and tongue to the roof of the mouth while you inhale through the nose. From a developmental point of view, it’s wise to encourage our children to breathe more nasally.

The tagline of the book, “The New Science of a Lost Art”, points to the truth of a curious collective amnesia that sometimes accompanies advances in human potential. For most of the techniques outlined here, there are historical precedents, often neglected and forgotten till a pioneer re-discovers and updates them, becoming popular when the wider culture sits up and takes notice. Nestor relates a fascinating homology between the performance of traditional prayers and chants from disparate religious traditions and the paced breathing practices of contemporary techniques. (The extending of the exhale is relevant here.) Both approaches share a calming and restorative effect because of how the breath is engaged in similar ways.

So lesson No.3? Take time out to practice extending the exhale in a 1:2 ratio (4 seconds in, 8 seconds out, for example). Purse your lips on the outbreath to slow the exhale. This exercise stimulates the parasympathetic system, the mode that puts your body in a state of rest and digest.

There’s a plethora of unusual characters in these pages, outliers and pioneers of the breath. We learn about Alexandra David-Neal, a Belgian – French anarchist who travelled to Tibet in the early 1900’s, absorbed the ancient practice of Tummo, an advanced technique that activates and warms the body. This enabled her to achieve feats of endurance as she hiked the Himalayas on her own in freezing temperatures at elevations above 18,000 feet and, we are told, for up to 19 hours a day with little in the way of food and water!

Tummo is also an influence on Wim Hof, a.k.a. the Iceman, the Dutch extreme athlete, currently the most well-known pulmonaut on the planet. An excitable and charismatic figure, his techniques exert control over the autonomic nervous system and have been validated in the lab. Hof, a holder of numerous Guinness World Records, can control his body temperature in ice through conscious breathing and can also repel the effects of an injected endotoxin, a feat thought impossible by medical authorities. The experiment was replicated with a group of people tutored by Hof, proving his “powers” are available to anyone.

Lesson No. 4? Practice, with due care, superventilation techniques that consciously put you in a controlled state of stress for short periods of time only. This places you in the driving seat of your sympathetic (fight or flight) system, increasing resilience and endurance. However, these exercises are not advisable for people with heart conditions or high blood pressure.

Less well-known in the breathwork domain are the achievements of a choir conductor who developed techniques to alleviate emphysema. Carl Stough, operating in mid-twentieth century America, was extremely private and somewhat eccentric. Nestor does well to shed light on this obscure figure. There’s a fascinating account of how the Russian, Konstantin Buteyko, came to formulate his own technique and how it continues to have success in relieving asthma. Ireland’s Patrick McKeown, a Buteyko practitioner since the late nineties, also features. Then there’s Emil Zatopek, who won gold in the 5,000 and 10,000 metres in the 1952 Olympics. His hypoventilation technique maintained high carbon dioxide tolerance in his system, off-loading more oxygen to his muscles. Stanislav Grof and his Holotropic method, an offshoot of 1960s psychedelic research, is also examined.

Nestor is to be commended for his deep dive and, although it’s not exhaustive (notables in the field such as Stig Severinsen and Belissa Vranich among others are absent), it’s at the very least a worthwhile endeavour to promote awareness and discussion around breathing in a time when the world’s lungs are under attack by a novel virus.

I waited for a note of caution, a caveat to this “missing pillar of health” and thankfully it came towards the end. Nestor relates a tale of a fellow airline passenger requesting him to recommend a breathing technique for cancer. There are limitations. Breathwork won’t help acute events like an embolism, he tells us, but it can alleviate milder, longer-term, chronic conditions and enhance the wellbeing of the healthy or mentally stressed. It’s a prophylactic worth striving for and certainly worth more extensive research.

There’s a useful compendium of practices in the appendix of this intriguing read, ranging from yogic pranayama to box breathing. The latter technique is reputedly practiced by Navy Seals. But it’s not just elite performers that can benefit; anyone can, and this book will make a significant contribution in communicating the profound importance of how we breathe.

And so to the author’s final lesson. If one were to distil, for simplicity’s sake, these sometimes contradictory practices into the perfect breath, try this: breathe slowly and lightly in through the nose for a count of roughly 5.5 seconds, expanding the diaphragm and breathe slowly out through the mouth or nose for 5.5 seconds. This averages 5 or 6 breaths per minute. Do this exercise for 5 minutes at least 3 times a day. That’s it. Easypeasy, you might say but the trick, like the practice of any art, is consistency. Nestor’s wager, and that of his cast of pulmonauts, is that you will be richly rewarded.

Available on BorrowBox

#LoveReading #CorkCityLibraries

3 notes · View notes