Description

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Renowned breathing expert offers a guide to conscious breathing with skills for reducing stress, alleviating tension, returning breath to its natural state of harmony, and opening your heart.

Breath moves in wavelike motions. When breath flows freely within the body, we live in a natural state of harmony, making choices that enhance well-being and generate energy.Each individual breath travels through us in a unique way depending on its flow, texture, speed, and patterning. Like a leaf falling from a tree that spirals to the ground, waves of breath travel through the airways of the body in a spiraling motion. This is the way air moves, the way breath moves, and the way oceans, rivers, and lakes move, too. When we tighten our passageways and compromise our breathing, our health suffers.

Most of us are born with the ability to breathe freely and naturally, but as the years go by, our breathing becomes labored—compromised by fear, disappointment, trauma, and pollutants. So we contract our breathing body and create ways that feel protective of our vulnerable selves but actually constrict the oxygen intake and thus the nourishment our body receives.

In The Breathable Body: Transforming Your World and Your Life, One Breath at a Time, Robert Litman shares the insights and practices he has discovered during more than 30 years of professional experience in conscious breathing and movement. Born with breathing difficulties and suffering from asthma as a child, Robert found ways to overcome his own childhood PTSD and now shares trauma-sensitive teachings to help people breathe and live better.

You can change your life—including alleviating symptoms of asthma, snoring, sleep apnea, insomnia, anxiety, panic attacks, digestive difficulties, and fatigue—by changing how you breathe. The techniques in this book will teach you how to support and protect your body and its respiratory system. Through conscious breathing, movement, sound, and a clear understanding of anatomy and respiration, we learn habits that support healthy and natural breathing.

About the Author

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For more than 30 years, Robert Litman has guided artists, musicians, health professionals, athletes, activists, and countless others to restore healthy breathing rhythms, structural alignment, and coordinated movement. He founded The Breathable Body in 2004 and co-developed the Wellsprings Practitioner Program with Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum Movement. Robert is a certified breathing behavior analyst from the Graduate School of Behavioral Health Science, and a registered educator and trainer of the Buteyko Breathing Educators Association (BBEA). He was a preceptor at the University of Arizona School of Integrative Medicine, teaching The Breathable Body to visiting doctors for Dr. Andrew Weil.

Praise For…

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This loving book comes from the heart of love of a daring explorer of the mysteries of the body. Open anywhere and be reminded how delicious it can be to simply take a breath. - Lorin Roche, Ph.D., author of The Radiance Sutras: 112 Gateways to the Yoga of Wonder and Delight and Meditation Made Easy

If I had to choose among the many books on breath and breathing, The Breathable Body is without question the one I would choose. While clarifying the anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and mechanics of breathing, Litman shows how breathing is a whole-body phenomenon of our dynamic, fluid organism. His depth and breadth of knowledge are present in each explanation and exploration, and if you are one of the millions suffering from a breathing, sleep, or anxiety disorder, chances are the information you need is in this book. - Don St John, Ph.D., author of Healing the Wounds of Childhood and Culture: An Adventure of a Lifetime

Robert Litman shows how you can change your health, your mood, and your connection to all of life by changing how you breathe. Whether you struggle with breathing, need effective strategies for self-regulation, or want to more fully enjoy the pleasures of being alive, this book will provide insight and solutions to some surprisingly common health conditions. The Breathable Body is an essential tool for good health! - Sharon Weil, Registered Somatic Movement Educator, author of ChangeAbility: How Artists, Activists and Awakeners Navigate Change

Litman draws on more than three decades of experience working with clients to bring together a resource accessible to everyone. What sets The Breathable Bodyapart is the connection it highlights between body and breath, and how breathing and movement are linked. Your doctor may not have told you about the benefits of breathing re-education. The Breathable Body does just that! If you breathe, this book is for you. - Patrick McKeown, Director of Education and Training at Buteyko Clinic International and author of The Oxygen Advantage

Robert provides a well-crafted paeon to the sacred and healing act of breathing; it is anatomy as poetry, required reading for anyone interested in the healing aspects of conscious breathing. - Karen M Gardner, PhD in Information Science, UC Berkeley

Combining memoir, breathing therapy, and inquiry into the dynamic movement of body and mind, The Breathable Body offers deep insights and practical instructions on every page. This is a highly relatable book you’ll return to again and again for sagely advice. - Matteo Pistono, author of Meditation: Coming to Know Your Mind and In the Shadow of the Buddha

Robert delivers a message in The Breathable Body that has the potential to not only improve your health but also enhance the quality of your life. He has managed to bridge the gap between cognitive understanding of the scientific knowledge of breathing processes while guiding his readers into an immediate somatic participation with the material. This book offers a transmission of intimate presence with oneself and a reminder that the sacred resides in the present moment. - Gael Rosewood, Continuum teacher, certified Rolfer, and CE teacher and mentor for both modalities

Conscious breathing has become a psychospiritual and energy-medicine meme, popularized in bodywork, yoga, and meditation circles to a degree that makes breathing so hyperconsciously conscious that it becomes even more unconscious. It takes a breath practitioner who has been through its many layers of morphogenesis, phenomenology, dynamic function, micromovement, and personal unlayering to teach you how to make your breathing more endurably conscious. Robert Litman is a true breath healer, explorer, and teacher. - Richard Grossinger, author of Bottoming Out the Universe and Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms

Robert draws you into the world of breath like nothing I've read before! Whether you are looking for help for an ailment or want to enrich your life through breath, this book—steeped with rich resources to expand and explore breathing—is for you. - Bobbie Ellis, Continuum teacher and 500+ Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher

Robert Litman takes us on a psychological journey, leading us through his own history with breathing and the metaphor for life that it has come to hold for him. Based on his hard-won wisdom, he guides us in practical ways that have helped so many—how to bring conscious breathing meaningfully into our lives. - Peter M. Litchfield, President, Graduate School of Behavioral Health Sciences, lecturer in respiratory psychophysiology, self-regulation science, and many other subjects

Breath spirals, listens, touches us on the inside, responds to kindness, tenderness, compassion, and gentleness, whispering its wildness into us. Others teach the science of breath, measuring and counting. Robert transmits the art and flow, letting breath lead us into the unknown. The Breathable Body offers a glimpse into the author’s love affair with breath, a quiet transmission into the most profound relationship we have. What a treasure this book is! - Roxanne Rhodes, Certified Yoga Instructor, Trager practitioner, and massage therapist