I’m going to let other people do most of the explaining, in this post beginning to look at the importance of breath.
Partially, that’s because experiencing this for yourself will do way more than a million words of ‘convincing’.
And partially, because I’m trying to pace myself, here, as there’s a lot of info to get through.
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Over shabbat, I read a book that came highly recommended by reader S. (thank you!) called ‘Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art’.
I learnt an awful lot of things, some of which we’ll be exploring in more detail in different posts.
But for now, here’s the author, James Nestor, explaining the five things you can do right now that will make some huge improvements to your physical health.
Just by breathing a bit different, and making an effort to breathe through your nose as much as possible:
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In his book ‘Breath’, he also details a number of different breathing patterns – and the scientists and ‘pulmonauts’ who developed them, mostly accidentally.
One of the key ones is something called Buteyko Breathing.
If you want to read some of the cold, hard science behind ‘Buteyko Breathing’ – written by none other than Dr Buyteko himself, when he was developing his breathing methods to help cure patients of ‘incurable asthma’, amongst other things, go HERE.
And / or, you can also go to Patrick Mckeown’s website HERE, which sets out a huge amount of information, and offers a lot of ‘free exercises’, including this one, to quickly unblock a blocked nose in five minutes:
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Mckeown had chronic, serious asthma into his twenties, and basically stumbled across Buteyko’s Soviet era information when he was at the end of the rope, and even all the surgical procedures hadn’t helped him cure his asthma at all.
(Quelle surprise!)
He started following the main advice of just breathing through his nose – and that all by itself started to make enough of a difference to his breathing, that he started exploring further.
Before long, his life-long, ‘incurable’ asthma had totally disappeared.
Again, we’ll come back to all this in more detail, but Mckeown’s website has a ton of information on helping asthmatics to consciously breath their asthma away HERE.
Amongst many other things.
Read more clinical trials on this method HERE.
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Then, try this out, if you have 10 minutes spare:
It’s a ‘resonant breathing’ session – to be done via nasal breathing – where you basically calm your breathing down, and get it into a good groove.
It’s shmirat eynayim friendly, and has no unfortunate ‘yoga’ stuff attached.
Resonant breathing is another method that’s highly recommended by James Nestor.
Me and my husband tried this yesterday, before bed – and we both slept better than we have in a very long time.
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Finally, this is another different way to breathe yourself into a more relaxed state to try, that is from Dr Andrew Weil.
He did get this idea from ‘yoga’, so we will all have to grope our way through the birur to see if religiously, this can be pulled up out of the muck of idolatry, and used in a good, kosher way.
If they can hijack breathing and turn it into idolatry… then we’re stuffed.
But the birur has to be carefully felt out, because it’s the small things that make the difference here, the intentions, the associations, the connections.
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The last few days, I’ve been realising that I have been dealing with a constant, physical sense of ‘panic’ and stress.
My heart is racing, then my thoughts start following.
More and more, I am coming to the conclusion that these sensations are a RESULT of being ‘radiation poisoned’, as they’ve chemtrailed all over Israel, super-heavily the last couple of weeks, and also presumably turned up the radiowaves again from their 5…G towers, or whatever, to achieve ‘the next pandemic’.
They’re busy predicting it again, don’t you know?
And they’re very good at apparently knowing exactly when these next ‘pandemics’ are meant to break out.
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While you’re pondering the implications of all this for what is really making us ‘sick’ and what could really be keeping us healthy, watch this short clip of Dr Robert Young basically spelling out that NOT BEING ABLE TO BREATHE IS A KNOWN CONSEQUENCE OF RADIATION POISONING.
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(Remember George Floyd? That wasn’t a CO-IN-CID-ENCE.)
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When we can’t breathe properly…. when the mechanisms that control our breathing is being ‘zapped’ all the time, so we are constantly taking shallow, panicked breaths, even at night, even when we’re trying to sleep….
That by itself is enough to totally ruin our physical health.
And to also cause a bunch of other mental and emotional issues.
But the very good news is that learning to breathe in a healthy, conscious way, that minimises ‘breathing bad habits’ can do a huge amount to reverse the damage being done, and maintain our health.
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Again, this is just a ‘taster’ into this subject, for now.
Go and read James Nestor’s book, Breath, go and read up about Dr Buteyko’s method and life and successes, go and scrounge around on Youtube to find more of the videos with Patrick McKeown, more of the people who have been helped.
And most importantly of all, try some of these things for yourself, especially breathing with your mouth shut as much as possible.
With God’s help.
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Remember, we are still in the middle of doing the birur with all this, and there are still a huge number of puzzle pieces to fit in still, until we have anything approaching a definitive approach to all this.
For example, Wim Hof’s breathing method, based on another yoga tradition appropriately called ‘Tummo’, emphasises breathing through the mouth for 30-40 breaths, to induce hyperventilation, before holding the breath for at least a minute.
Personally, I didn’t like it all.
(And I stopped doing it after the person who told me about it developed strange heart palpitations around a month into their own experiment with his breathing method.)
But many other people have seen big improvements in their health, and Hof himself used that method to avoid E-coli poisoning in a scientific trial conducted in hospital.
(While we’re on the subject of Wim Hof, I’m still following Hof’s recommendation for the cold showers – and I think they’re very beneficial!)
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So.
This is a process of trial and error.
To see how we can reclaim the gift of ‘breath’, and start to use it, as believing Jews, the way God really intended.
Not as something to exert control over ourselves, and our health, necessarily, but something to bring us closer to the neshama / neshima connection, that is the real underlying basis of real human health.
And that’s why, the battle over breath is the front line.
TBC.
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Note: I’m taking a couple of days’ off the internet.
So if you comment, it will take some time to show up. But still feel free to comment, respectfully, so we can continue to move this discussion forward.
I still think all things ‘yoga’ are tumah, and that there is a very intense birur to be done here.
But that doesn’t mean we have to take ‘breath’ off the table as a healing tool, just because idolaters have got their hands on it.
That’s ridiculous.
But it could well be our way of using breath to heal is going to end up being way more focused on prayers, hitbodedut, singing, niggunim… we’ll see.
All options need to be explored, with God’s help, and with useful input from anyone who has some honest insights to share about this.
TBC
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