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.

Explores the history of breathing and how it has shaped our social history and philosophical beliefs.

**THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER** 'Rattling. Heartbreaking. Beautiful,' Atul Gawande, bestselling author of Being Mortal What makes life worth living in the face of death? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and finally into a patient and a new father. Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both. 'A vital book about dying. Awe-inspiring and exquisite. Obligatory reading for the living' Nigella Lawson

“An intimate and deeply human memoir that shows why we should all be concerned about nuclear safety, and the dangers of ignoring science in the name of national security.”—Rebecca Skloot, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks A shocking account of the government’s attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic waste released by a secret nuclear weapons plant in Colorado and a community’s vain search for justice—soon to be a feature documentary Kristen Iversen grew up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." Full Body Burden is the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and--unknown to those who lived there--tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium. It's also a book about the destructive power of secrets--both family and government. Her father's hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what was made at Rocky Flats--best not to inquire too deeply into any of it. But as Iversen grew older, she began to ask questions and discovered some disturbing realities. Based on extensive interviews, FBI and EPA documents, and class-action testimony, this taut, beautifully written book is both captivating and unnerving.

Breathing is not a common subject in feminist studies. Breathing Matters introduces this phenomenon as a forceful potentiality for feminist intersec-tional theories, politics, and social and environmental justice. By analyzing the material and discursive as well as the natural and cultural enactments of breath in black lung disease, phone sex work, and anxieties and panic attacks, Breathing Matters proposes a nonuniver salizing and politicized understanding of embodiment. In this approach, human bodies are conceptualized as agential actors of intersectional poli-tics. Magdalena Górska argues that struggles for breath and for breathable lives are matters of differential forms of political practices in which vulnera-ble and quotidian corpomaterial and corpo-affective actions are constitutive of politics. Set in the context of feminist poststructuralist and new materialist and postconstructionist debates, Breathing Matters offers a discussion of human embodiment and agency reconfigured in a posthumanist manner. Its interdisciplinary analytical practice demonstrates that breathing is a phenomenon that is important to study from scientific, medical, political, environmental and social perspectives.

From the early Christian era and throughout the Middle Ages, theologians exerted considerable effort to achieve a synthesis bringing together Greek cosmology and the Creation story in Genesis. In the construction of the medieval Empyrean, the dwelling place of the Blessed, Aristotle’s philosophy proved of critical importance. From the Renaissance on, largely in revolt against Aristotle, humanist Bible critics, Protestant reformers and astronomers set themselves to challenge the medieval synthesis. Especially effective in the ensuing dismantlement, from the 16th to 18th centuries, was the pagan concept of an infinite universe, resuscitated from Antiquity by the Italian philosophers Bruno and Patrizi. Indirectly inspired by the latter, the doctrines of the French pre-Enlightenment thinkers Descartes and Gassendi spread throughout Latin Catholic Europe in spite of considerable resistance. By the middle of the 18th century the Roman ecclesiastical authorities were brought to acknowledge an end to the medieval cosmos, allowing Catholics to teach the theory of heliocentrism.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING PHENOMENOM 'I've never felt so alive' JOE WICKS 'The book will change your life' BEN FOGLE My hope is to inspire you to retake control of your body and life by unleashing the immense power of the mind. 'The Iceman' Wim Hof shares his remarkable life story and powerful method for supercharging your strength, health and happiness. Refined over forty years and championed by scientists across the globe, you'll learn how to harness three key elements of Cold, Breathing and Mindset to master mind over matter and achieve the impossible. 'Wim is a legend of the power ice has to heal and empower' BEAR GRYLLS 'Thor-like and potent...Wim has radioactive charisma' RUSSELL BRAND