My friend Mark, a retired woodwind player—sax and bassoon—dropped a book off for me that he said I had to read. The book is Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, and the author is James Nestor.
Nestor was a middle-aged man with a number of respiratory maladies who’d just recovered from a bout of pneumonia and still coughed and wheezed enough so that his doctor recommended a breathing class. The class, held in a small, dusty, four-flights up room, featured a staticky recording of a man in an East Indian accent guiding breathing. After a few minutes, Nestor was ready to quit, but his doctor had suggested—and the class was free; after 30 minutes, he actually felt better.Read Rich’s Post →