“How to take a breath” by Tania Clifton-Smith
I’m not kidding when I say this is the most important book I’ve read this year…
And I thoroughly recommend you read it, too.
Breath is fundamental to life. If we’re not breathing, then we’re not going to be living for long! Yet how many of us truly know how to breath well?
I used to think I did, then COVID came along and up-ended all that… and I didn’t even notice. It took an ambulance ride and a night in the ED to help me discover that, then a specialist physio to help me get back on track.
Tania Clifton-Smith is a specialist physiotherapist and expert on breathing. In this book, she writes for the lay-person in a clear, readable style. I really appreciated the way she connected things together – I had no idea just how many of my bodily functions were affected by my breathing habits.
There’s a lot of useful and useable information in here on different aspects of breathing and of life. I like how the book revisits concepts throughout without feeling repetitive. It can take awhile for concepts to sink in fully, so seeing these applied across different aspects helped me make sense of it all.
And, of course, once you start reading a book like this, you do start paying attention to your breathing and your body! I found my posture adjusting for the better every time I picked the book up! (And indeed while I was writing this!) And I’ve been consistently giving my breath and my body more attention.
I haven’t dived into all the suggestions yet. I decided it was more important to take things slowly and build up habits gradually – rather than my usual “do all the things and overwhelm myself” approach.
I’ve started with the breathing basics (making sure I’m breathing into my belly and exhaling well) and with relaxation (taking time every bedtime to let my body relax). It was a bit scary discovering just how unrelaxed I was. I thought I’d been managing myself better, but it turned out I was tension city all over.
I’ve come up with my own little visualisation of imagining everything around my bones going soft and floppy (my brain wasn’t keen on my bones going soft and floppy!) I’ve taken to calling this ‘noodle’ mode (as in ‘limp noodle’) because I am a grown up and thus allowed to name things whatever I like. Having a name for this relaxation mode is proving more helpful than I initially realised: at the dentist recently, I was able to tell my body ‘noodle time’ and feel my muscles go soft immediately.
Anyway, do get hold of this book and have a read for yourself.* If you are reading this, you probably have a body and need to breath, so you might as well make sure you’re doing that as well as you can.
And keep breathing! Especially breathing out…
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*I’d offer you a loan of my copy, but I’m going to be re-reading it and choosing my next thing to work on. Sorry!