A daily guide to harnessing the amazing power of breath. Breath Perception is your companion to understanding the power of breath and using it as a tool to improve your physical and mental health. Partly because we take breath for granted and do not “work” with it, we are somewhat unaware of the potential it holds to reduce stress, change metabolism, and increase our supply of energy. Breath Perception presents 261 simple exercises—one for every Monday through Friday—for using breath to attain greater well-being. On each page is a daily exercise followed by a “wake-up call,” bits of wisdom to inspire you and enrich your meditation. Develop compassion, gratitude, and forgiveness while de-stressing, lowering your blood pressure, and building up your immune system. Yes, simple breathing has the power to do all of that and more! Sleep better at night, concentrate better at work, and connect better with loved ones at home. Once you learn to harness the power of breath, you’ll find that it serves you wherever you are, in whatever situations you find yourself. Smartly packaged and attractively designed, Breath Perception is perfect for anyone who wants to give the gift of well-being or who is looking for a way to enrich a yoga or meditation practice.

A daily guide to harnessing the amazing power of breath. Breath Perception is your companion to understanding the power of breath and using it as a tool to improve your physical and mental health. Partly because we take breath for granted and do not “work” with it, we are somewhat unaware of the potential it holds to reduce stress, change metabolism, and increase our supply of energy. Breath Perception presents 261 simple exercises—one for every Monday through Friday—for using breath to attain greater well-being. On each page is a daily exercise followed by a “wake-up call,” bits of wisdom to inspire you and enrich your meditation. Develop compassion, gratitude, and forgiveness while de-stressing, lowering your blood pressure, and building up your immune system. Yes, simple breathing has the power to do all of that and more! Sleep better at night, concentrate better at work, and connect better with loved ones at home. Once you learn to harness the power of breath, you’ll find that it serves you wherever you are, in whatever situations you find yourself. Smartly packaged and attractively designed, Breath Perception is perfect for anyone who wants to give the gift of well-being or who is looking for a way to enrich a yoga or meditation practice.

In this landmark Companion, expert contributors from around the world map out the field of the critical medical humanities. This is the first volume to introduce comprehensively the ways in which interdisciplinary thinking across the humanities and social sciences might contribute to, critique and develop medical understanding of the human individually and collectively. The thirty-six newly commissioned chapters range widely within and across disciplinary fields, always alert to the intersections between medicine, as broadly defined, and critical thinking. Each chapter offers suggestions for further reading on the issues raised, and each section concludes with an Afterword, written by a leading critic, outlining future possibilities for cutting-edge work in this area. Topics covered in this volume include: the affective body, biomedicine, blindness, breath, disability, early modern medical practice, fatness, the genome, language, madness, narrative, race, systems biology, performance, the postcolonial, public health, touch, twins, voice and wonder. Together the chapters generate a body of new knowledge and make a decisive intervention into how health, medicine and clinical care might address questions of individual, subjective and embodied experience.

As a physiological or biological matter, breath is mostly considered to be mechanical and thoughtless. By expanding on the insights of many religions and therapeutic practices, which emphasize the cultivation of breath, the contributors argue that breath should be understood as fundamentally and comprehensively intertwined with human life and experience. Various dimensions of the respiratory world are referred to as "atmospheres" that encircle and connect human existence, coexistence, and the world. Drawing from a number of traditions of breathing, including from Indian and East Asian religion and philosophy, the book considers breath in relation to ontological, hermeneutical, phenomenological, ethical, and aesthetic concerns in philosophy. The wide-ranging topics include poetry, theater, environmental issues and health, feminism, and media studies.

Use the unique Buddhist practice of meditation on perception, as taught by the best-selling author of Mindfulness in Plain English, to learn how shifting your perspective can transform mental and physical health. Perception—one of the basic constituents of the body and mind—can be both a source of suffering and pain, as well as a source of happiness and health. The Buddhist tradition teaches that perception can be trained and ultimately purified through the practice of meditation. When we understand how perception impacts our lives, we can use it, just as we do any other object of meditation, to overcome harmful ways of thinking and acting and to develop healthy states of mind instead. In Meditation on Perception Bhante G brings us, for the first time in English, an illuminating introduction to the unique Buddhist practice of meditation on perception as taught in the popular Girimananda Sutta. The ten healing practices that comprise meditation on perception make up a comprehensive system of meditation, combining aspects of both tranquility and insight meditation. Tranquility meditation is used to calm and center the mind, and insight meditation is used to understand more clearly how we ordinarily perceive ourselves and the world around us. Alternating between these two practices, meditators cultivate purified perception as explained by the Buddha. As a result of these efforts, we progress on the path that leads to freedom, once and for all, from illness, confusion, and other forms of physical and mental suffering. Meditation on Perception gives us the keys to move beyond ordinary, superficial perception into an enlightened perspective, freed from confusion and unhappiness.

Winner of the International Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and to the sensuous terrain that sustains us. This major work of ecological philosophy startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception. For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patters) that we have only lately come to think of as "inanimate." How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth? In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand of magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which--even at its most abstract--echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eisleley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.

An interpretation of God's love and human identity. Based on "A Course in Miracles" and the "Bible". With great love and joy during His new creation, God included the tree of life in the middle of the Garden of Eden. God's plan of perfect love was for Adam and Eve to deny the temptation to sin and never to learn about evil. Hence, they would be able to eat from the tree of life and inherit immortality to humankind.In this book, we analyze how human life would have been if sin did not exist and how humans, through their divine perception, can see beyond their human perception. Dressed with their divine perception, they acquire the internal feeling of perfect peace, love, and joy. This is produced when the awareness of God is present in daily living.Also analyzed is how the devil hates the children of God, thus offering them an evil perception, and how he creates personalized sins for each human being. Humans who are deceived want to be gods of their own will. Thus, they deny their love to God, to creation, and to humanity. By denying their love, unknowingly, they deny love to themselves. In this manner, the devil keeps humans in a state of anguish and depression with the goal to destroy them.The devil's goal is for humans to commit suicide or wish the death of others. When humans decide to ask God for forgiveness of their sins and they reject their sinful will, then they recover their divine perception. As they remember God and accept God as their Creator, their spirits are filled with love. They then realize that the only responsibility of God's children is to forgive and love.