Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

Hof’s ten-week video course,

Last night, Olsson snored for three minutes while I clocked in at six, a 4,000 percent decrease from ten days ago. Our sleep apnea, which disappeared the first night of nasal breathing, has remained nonexistent. My blood pressure this morning was 20 points lower than its highest point at the beginning of the experiment; on average I’ve dropped 10 p

“An early soft diet prevents the development of the muscle fibers of the tongue,” he wrote more than a century ago, “resulting in a weaker tongue which [cannot] drive the primary dentition out into a spaced relationship with fully developed arches which will lead to more crowding of the permanent teeth.”

Humans “rust” as well. As the cells in our bodies lose the ability to attract oxygen, Szent-Györgyi wrote, electrons within them will slow and stop freely interchanging with other cells, resulting in unregulated and abnormal growth. Tissues will begin “rusting” in much the same way as other materials. But we don’t call this “tissue rust.” We call i

sympathetic, has an opposite role. It sends stimulating signals to our organs, telling them to get ready for action.

“feed and breed” system.

What if overbreathing wasn’t the result of hypertension and headaches but the cause? Buteyko wondered. Heart disease, ulcers, and chronic inflammation were all linked to disturbances in circulation, blood pH, and metabolism. How we breathe affects all those functions. Breathing just 20 percent, or even 10 percent more than the body’s needs could ov

The concept of prana was first documented around the same time in India and China, some 3,000 years ago, and became the bedrock of medicine. The Chinese called it ch’i and believed the body contained channels that functioned like prana power lines connecting organs and tissues. The Japanese had their own name for prana, ki, as did the Greeks (pneum

The more we gnaw, the more stem cells release, the more bone density and growth we’ll trigger, the younger we’ll look and the better we’ll breathe.