In this paper we outline the possibilities of an ethic of care based on our self-affection and subjectivity in the ethical spaces between-two. In this we first refer to three Irigarayan concepts – breath, silence and listening from the third phase of her philosophy, and discuss them within the methodological framework of an ethics of intersubjectivity and interiority. Together with attentiveness, we analyse them as four categories of our ethical becoming. Furthermore, we argue that self-affection is based on our inchoate (...) receptivity for the needs of the other(s) and is thus dialectical in its character. In this we critically confront some epistemological views of our ethical becoming. We wind up this paper with a proposal for an ethics towards two autonomous subjects, based on care and our shared ethical becoming – both as signs of our deepest hospitality towards the other. (shrink)

This work revisits the problem of breathing cues used for management of speaking turns in multiparty casual conversation. We propose a new categorisation of turn-taking events which combines the criterion of speaker change with whether the original speaker inhales before producing the next talkspurt. We demonstrate that the latter criterion provides a good proxy for pragmatic completeness of the previous utterance (and, by extension, of the interruptive character of the incoming speech). We also present evidence that breath holds are (...) used in reaction to incoming talk rather than as a turn-holding cue. In addition to analysing dimensions which are routinely omitted in studies of interactional functions of breathing (exhalations, presence of overlapping speech, breath holds), the present study also looks at patterns of breath holds in silent breathing and shows that breath holds are sometimes produced towards the beginning (and towards the top) of silent exhalations, potentially indicating an abandoned intention to take the turn. We claim that the breathing signal can thus be successfully used for uncovering \emph{hidden} turn-taking events, which are otherwise obscured by silence-based representations of interaction. (shrink)

We investigate the timing of pre-answer inbreaths in order to shed light on the time course of response planning and execution in conversational turn-taking. Using acoustic and inductive plethysmography recordings of seven dyadic conversations in Dutch, we show that pre-answer inbreaths in conversation typically begin briefly after the end of questions. We also show that the presence of a pre-answer inbreath usually co-occurs with substantially delayed answers, with a modal latency of 576 vs. 100 ms for answers not preceded by (...) an inbreath. Based on previously reported minimal latencies for internal intercostal activation and the production of speech sounds, we propose that vocal responses, either in the form of a pre-utterance inbreath or of speech proper when an inbreath is not produced, are typically launched in reaction to information present in the last portion of the interlocutor's turn. We also show that short responses are usually made on residual breath, while longer responses are more often preceded by an inbreath. This relation of inbreaths to answer length suggests that by the time an inbreath is launched, typically during the last few hundred milliseconds of the question, the length of the answer is often prepared to some extent. Together, our findings are consistent with a two-stage model of response planning in conversational turn-taking: early planning of content often carried out in overlap with the incoming turn, and late launching of articulation based on the identification of turn-final cues. (shrink)

Meena Srinivasan began teaching in order to touch lives, but with the demands of covering her curriculum she all but forgot her aspiration. During a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, Meena learned for the first time about mindfulness. In Teach, Breathe, Learn, Srinivasan highlights how mindfulness can be an effective tool in the classroom. What makes this book truly unique is Srinivasan's perspective as a classroom teacher, wrestling daily with the conditions about which she writes. Each chapter begins with a (...) personal narrative concerning a challenge Srinivasan faced during the school day and how a specific mindfulness practice helped. Testimonials from students, colleagues, and parents appear in each chapter, along with a mindfulness practice. Part 1 helps teachers develop compassion and shift from "reacting" to "responding" to demands. Part 2 offers techniques for cultivating loving-kindness and seeing students, colleagues, and parents as oneself. The author shares what research says about the effects of mindfulness practice on academic, social, and emotional learning. The last section of the book introduces the complete curriculum teachers can use to incorporate mindfulness into their classroom, replete with lesson plans, PowerPoint diagrams, handouts, and homework assignments. (shrink)

This article examines the breathing and breathless body in Camille-Vidal Naquet’s Sauvage. Respiration has been characterised by Peter Sloterdijk, in the first volume of his Sphären trilogy, as the first extension of the womb. The air we breathe is a “nobject” that escapes the subject-object relation, like the placenta before it. Sauvage engages the respiratory, alongside the placental and the acoustic, as three pre-oral “nobjects” for exploring what Leo Bersani has termed the body’s “somatic receptivity”. Duration, framing, lighting, and (...) camera movements cultivate a spectator’s receptivity to these “nobjects” and participate in acts of sphere formation. This provides a framework for thinking about how cinema itself might function as a “nobject”: a connective medium or sphere that supports and augments a subject, providing a field of protection and attention. However, the film’s presentation of breathlessness also signals a blocked receptivity, an inability to take in, introducing friction and resistance to the discourse of immediacy and exchange that characterises philosophical reflections on breath. Breathlessness has implications for thinking about bodily autonomy and forms of freedom that speak to the queer politics of Sauvage, as well as questions about movement and stillness, animation and lifelessness, that reflect back on the medium of film itself. (shrink)

Contributors to this volume consider the implications of 'the Age of Breath': a spiritual shift in human awareness to the needs of the other figured through breathing.

Contemplative practices, such as meditation and yoga, are increasingly popular among the general public and as topics of research. Beneficial effects associated with these practices have been found on physical health, mental health, and cognitive performance. However, studies and theories that clarify the underlying mechanisms are lacking or scarce. This theoretical review aims to address and compensate this scarcity. We will show that various contemplative activities have in common that breathing is regulated or attentively guided. This respiratory discipline in (...) turn could parsimoniously explain the physical and mental benefits of contemplative activities through changes in autonomic balance. We propose a neurophysiological model that explains how these specific respiration styles could operate, by phasically and tonically stimulating the vagal nerve: respiratory vagal nerve stimulation. The vagal nerve, as a proponent of the parasympathetic nervous system, is the prime candidate in explaining the effects of contemplative practices on health, mental health, and cognition. We will discuss implications and limitations of our model. (shrink)

Breathe will teach you how targeted breathwork affects the body and mind and how to make the most of it with simple, hassle-free exercises.

Breath is invisible and yet ever present and vital for living beings. The concept of invisibility in relation to breath operates in concrete and metaphorical ways to extend ideas about breath and breathlessness across disciplines, in clinical spaces and in life experience. Using a critical medical humanities approach, I demonstrate that the poverty of narrative accounts and language for breath outside the health context have had a crucial influence enabling clinically mediated interpretations and accounts to dominate. These third-person accounts are (...) important in the articulation of the ‘lived body’, but I balance this with a consideration of the subjective sensation of interoception, which has important implications for the visibility of breathlessness in both clinical and lay contexts. This article illustrates the rich potential of the subjects of breath and breathlessness within body studies and this special issue is a key step in making breath such an emergent topic. (shrink)

Breathing fresh air into the philosophy of mathematics Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9470-8 Authors Marco Panza, IHPST, 13, rue du Four, 75006 Paris, France Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:breatheJohn Cayley (bio)To view the current version of John Cayley's digital work "breathe" as a standalone website, please visit https://work.programmatology.com/breathe/. Use of a Chrome browser is advised, and, for mobiles, the site has only been tested for iOS devices. On the desktop, switching to full screen will avoid having to manually resize the browser window to a more or less 16:9 aspect. To view Cayley's notebook with digital code, (...) visit https://observablehq.com/@shadoof/breathe.breathe is a brief, prose-poetic essay in explicitly paragrammatic language art. The 'supply text' that underlies a fundamentally dynamic, temporal making of meaning is what in other contexts might be read as an original composition by myself, its subject the interior oceanscape of breath that we experienced during the pandemic year of 2020, our respiratory rhythms threatened, invisibly, by disease. The piece is also representative of a category of still largely potential poetic artifacts to which computation lends a dynamic and here, a paragrammatic concretism.Despite Julia Kristeva having made a convincing formalist-polemical case for the paragram,1 it seems to be more or less absent from most contemporary milieux of poetic praxis as an explicit, generative principle.2 For 'poetic praxis' I might have said 'writing' or 'literary practice' but the common usage of the former is overly constrained, and its sense after Derrida is, perforce, radically ambiguous. 'Literary' (with its root and other derivations) I now tend to reserve for language art practices within the domain of which the letter is properly and compositionally constitutive. Is breathe an instance of 'writing' or 'literary practice'? Well, literary practice: yes, but not as usually conceived. 'Letteral,' definitely.In Kristeva's abstracted models of poetic language, the paragram is everywhere in both prose and poetry as such: the (chiefly) literal inscription of alternate, multiplied, yet readable 'grams,' at once within and beyond those of the text as received, generative of new meanings, and of various modes for the aestheticization of poetic objects. In subsequent or adjacent criticism–regardless of whether or not it is psychoanalytically inclined–paragram may be further associated with Lacan's "lalangue" (surfacing in breathe as 'lalanguage'), that part of Language (an anglophone term, distinctly capitalized) which clearly exceeds and eludes most of the dubious, fundamentally orthographic, or designative 'sciences' of linguistics.3 But even lalanguage is only ever at best commensurate with [End Page 97] the 'not all,' despite (or perhaps due to) the ineluctable fact that, as T. S. Eliot's Sweeney puts it, "I gotta use words when I talk to you." What should be clear, however, even from this most cursory of outlines, is that paragrams should be read as poetic and that–particularly if allowed to embrace non-literal, metaphoric instances–a case may be (has been) made that paragrams are (Kristeva would have written =) poetic language.In actually existing 'literature' we might suggest that paragrams are hypostasized or stunned (historically, by literal inscription) in latency or in hiding but, clearly, there are potential movements and/or transformative processes, realized through reading, from the 'grams' of the received text to their paragrams. While the usual sense of the prefix 'para-' is "parallel to, separate from or going beyond" (OED), Kristeva and others call attention to this real if usually implicit movement. (I quote extensively from her essay without further comment except to point out that these words are highly suggestive of other aspects of language art in digital media which are not directly addressed in the present, more focused remarks.)[...] the literary text presents itself as a system of multiple connections that could be described as a structure of paragrammatic networks. [...] The term network replaces univocity (linearity) by encompassing it, and suggests that each set (sequence) is the outcome and the beginning of a plurivalent relation. In this network, the elements will be presented as the peaks of a graph ( [...] ), enabling us to formalize the symbolic operation of language as a dynamic mark, as a moving 'gram' (hence as a paragram) which makes rather than expresses a meaning.4The movements-as-transformative(or deformative)-process in breathe are various modes of letteral replacement, particularly of letters... (shrink)

As part of the Dutch national science program “Professional Games for Professional Skills” we developed a stress-exposure biofeedback training in virtual reality for the Dutch police. We aim to reduce the acute negative impact of stress on performance, as well as long-term consequences for mental health by facilitating physiological stress regulation during a demanding decision task. Conventional biofeedback applications mainly train physiological regulation at rest. This might limit the transfer of the regulation skills to stressful situations. In contrast, we provide (...) the user with the opportunity to practice breathing regulation while they carry out a complex task in VR. This setting poses challenges from a technical – as well as from a user-experience perspective. We illustrate how we approach these challenges in our training and hope to contribute a useful reference for researchers and developers in academia or industry who are interested in using biosignals to control elements in a dynamic virtual environment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Breathing:Proustian Therapy1Christopher Prendergast (bio)I begin with a question I would never have imagined myself asking. Is Proust good for you? Might there even be, albeit in carefully controlled doses, a place for him in modern 'health care'? He certainly belongs in the select, if occasionally scary, company of writers whose name, or that of one of their fictional characters, has lent itself to the designation of a psycho-physical (...) condition often with medical characteristics. A short list includes: Stendhal ('Stendhal syndrome,' the condition of obsessional attachment to works of art); Musset (the 'Musset Sign,' manifested as an uncontrollable tremor of the head); Gogol's Plyushkin in Dead Souls ('compulsive hoarding syndrome'); Dickens's Miss Havisham in Great Expectations ('senile squalor syndrome'); Wilde's Lady Windermere ('Lady Windermere syndrome,' associated with pulmonary illness and breathing difficulties).There is no evidence that Proust was directly acquainted with Wilde's play, but there can be little doubt that what came to be called 'Lady Windermere Syndrome' would have spoken to him loud and clear. In an early story called L'Indifférent, Proust penned an encomium to the air we breathe: "A child who from birth has always breathed without paying any attention has no idea how much the air, which swells so sweetly his chest that he doesn't even notice it, is essential to life." A memory of this is doubtless somewhere in the background of the passing mention in Le Côté de Guermantes of "the alpine resort" that teaches him "that the act of breathing, to which we habitually pay no attention, can be a constant source of pleasure." It was almost certainly also in Proust's thoughts when, in the final volume, he penned the famous definition of Paradise Lost as the place and time of "an air we have breathed before, this purer air which the poets have tried in vain to make reign in paradise and which could not provide this profound feeling of renewal if it has not already been breathed, for the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost."But the early story, like the novel itself, is also haunted by a subtext in which what is precious to life can also be the enemy of life, as, in an access of fever and sudden convulsion, the child feels himself to be suffocating. The story clearly has its origins in Proust's own life, the moment of his first asthma attack as a young boy on a family outing to the Bois de Boulogne. It struck out of the blue with a frightening intensity, and was to pursue [End Page 49] him throughout his life like a fury, proliferating further symptoms such as emphysema and cardiac seizures. As late as 1919, he writes in a letter of an attack that leaves him "gasping like someone half-drowned who is pulled out of water." And it was there again at the moment of Proust's exit from the world, carried off by a bout of pneumonia exacerbated by a pulmonary abscess.There were treatments and consultations galore, the former on a spectrum from inhalations to cauterizing of the nasal tubes, and the latter including a meeting with his father's colleague, Dr. Buissand, who inclined to the view– and increasingly fashionable in medical circles–that the prime cause was neurasthenic. Proust himself hesitated: in a letter he described it as "a bodily illness," but in the Recherche, "asthma crises" are linked to a "mystery" of the "unconscious" and strike out of the blue. The 'mystery' is often, and plausibly, associated with fear of separation from the protective mother. This will be one of the major themes of the novel, and the source of the "sobs that never cease" of which the narrator speaks in the opening volume. But whether physical or psychosomatic, a guaranteed trigger was proximity to tree blossoms (apple especially virulent) and certain flowers–that is, the very things that, for Proust, often something approaching quasi-sacred status, thus illustrating the law that it is what you most love that can kill you.In the novel, however, much of this is distilled into comedy, all terrifying... (shrink)

Lucas, Brian Review of: The breath of the spirit in the church: The sensus fidelium and canon law, by Anthony Ekpo, Strathfield, NSW: St Pauls, 2014, pp. 260, paperback, $24.95.

Within the sociology of sport, phenomenologically-inspired perspectives on sensory embodiment have emerged in recent years. This corpus includes investigations into the senses in water-based sports such as scuba diving (Merchant, 2011), performance swimming (Allen-Collinson et al., 2021 ; McNarry et al., 2021) and in land-based sports such as distance running (Allen-Collinson et al., 2018, 2021 ; Allen-Collinson & Jackman, 2021), and cycling (Hammer, 2015 ; Spinney, 2006). In this article, I draw upon phenomenological sociology (Allen-Collinson, 2009) and ‘sensory work’, to (...) investigate the experience of asthma in sports participants. Currently, despite the prevalence of asthma globally, there remains a lack of in-depth research on actual experiences of coping with asthma and ‘breathing battles’ in sporting contexts. Here, I draw on data from two linked research projects: a collaborative autoethnography and an interview-based study , which generated findings that highlighted sensory aspects relating to the lived experience of asthma and sporting embodiment. (shrink)

Benjamin's famous description of the aura in the `Small History of Photography' starts: `What is aura? A strange texture of space and time...', and ends with: `That means breathing the aura of these mountains and this branch'. Until now, the meaning of `breathing' has hardly been subject to interpretation. In this article it will be shown that Benjamin refers to Goethe's `diastole/systole', and to Hölderlin's concept of the unity of antagonistic dispositions, for example the paradoxical constellation of the (...) sacred/sobriety ( das `heilig nüchterne'). To Benjamin `breathing' means the original, prehistorical, situation of harmony and peace. Together with the decline of bourgeois society, parallel to the development of a new technology in photography and film, the aura disappears. In its place we find the dialectical image ( `dialektisches Bild'). Benjamin tries to show that the decline of the aura is not just some aesthetic question, but that it is connected to the traditional philosophical problem of defining the truth and the relation between myth and rationality. Referring to Benjamin's cosmological speculations, as well as to his references to Baudelaire, it can be argued that, notwithstanding his lyrical description of the aura, Benjamin was in favour of the destruction of the aura. Under the conditions of a capitalist economy and a malfunctioning republic, a society which can be defined as `false', the traditional idea of aura, being the `shine' of a true society, cannot be taken for granted. The `dialectical image', showing that antagonistic forces hide behind a `shine' of unity and harmony, enables us to see that the traditional idea of truth is obsolete and to look for a new solution. (shrink)

Happiness is far more than a positive feeling that comes and goes, happiness is wired into the physiology of our brains. It is a skill we can all develop through cultivating mindfulness and concentration. In Ten Breaths to Happiness Schneider presents a series of simple practices and guided meditations that allow you to literally rewire your neural pathways to experience deeper and more lasting fulfillment and peace. Studies in neuroscience show that it takes about thirty seconds to build a new (...) neural-pathway. Schneider takes these findings and combines them with mindfulness practices based on the teachings of Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. For example, he encourages us to take ten conscious breaths whenever we encounter something beautiful or have a meaningful experience. Consistently exercising this simple practice creates an opportunity for the brain to move from its default reaction of protection to one of appreciation and spaciousness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Breathing with Denise LevertovNoëlle Batt (bio)The BreathingAn absolutepatience.Trees standup to their knees infog. The fogslowly flowsuphill.Whitecobwebs, the grassleaning where deerhave looked for apples.The woodsfrom brook to wherethe top of the hill looksover the fog, send upnot one bird.So absolute, it isno other thanhappiness itself, a breathingtoo quiet to hear.–Denise LevertovI propose to share this poem, "The Breathing," by Denise Levertov, with the readers of SubStance as a (...) moment of calm, an antidote to violence and pain, and a gesture of hope in the future relations between humans and the many creatures of the vegetal and animal world.What is remarkable in this imaginary landscape sketched by Levertov is the peacefulness of the scene which is mostly due to the absence of movement, the absence of action performed in praesentia between the first and the last word of the poem. And since we know that poets are marvelous craftsmen and craftswomen of language, we shall look for the cause to this effect in the poetic language and shall find it in the subtly modulated use (or non-use) of verbs in the poem, a different kind of use in each sentence, yet, converging to the same effect. And since verbs are also the main markers of time in language, the poem appears in the literal sense, as a verbal, a literary "still life." [End Page 160]The first sentence strikes a strong blow since the verb is quite simply omitted in it. The sentence is a nominal clause: "An absolute/ patience."In the second sentence, "Trees stand/ up to their knees in/ fog," we find a static verb "to stand" and the personification of the trees clearly establishes that they might have moved, but they have not; they stand wrapped in the fog up to "their knees," i.e., between a quarter and a fifth of their trunks.In the third sentence, something moves: "The fog/ slowly flows/ uphill." But there is something contradictory in the fact of flowing up. Usually, rivers or brooks flow down. Flowing up, then, implies a difficulty to flow and consequently a slowing down of the rhythm of the flow which is here expressed by the adverb "slowly"; the adverb seems here all the more congenial to the flowing in that the two words are linked by a strong paronomastic effect: slowly flows, set in the two /s/, one at the beginning of slowly, the other at the end of flows: slowly flows.The fourth sentence is characterized by still another pattern: "White/ cobwebs. The grass/leaning where deer/have looked for apples." We now face the result of two past actions, actions that were performed before the scene that the poem invites us to contemplate was composed. In effect, the "white cobwebs" have been woven by the spiders at a previous moment, and they even had time to be colored in white by the drops of the humid fog. And "the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples" tells us that deer were here earlier, looking for food, but they no longer are, and what signals their former presence is a tenuous detail: the inclination of the grass, bent by their walking on it and searching through it, remaining bent for a little while after their passage. And to achieve her verbal strategy, Levertov even suppresses the auxiliary which might have been here. We read "the grass leaning" with a lonely present participle, and not "the grass is leaning."Another interesting grammatical event happens in the fifth sentence: "The woods/ from brook to where/ the top of the hill looks/ over the fog, send up/ not one bird." The first verb is a verb of perception ("to look") and not a verb of action. But the second verb is a verb of action ("to send up"), which is used in a quite unusual variety of the verbal negative form since instead of having the negative adverb attached to the verb (don't send up), we have an affirmative use of the verb ("send... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pairing breaths:Rabah Ameur-Zaïmech's Terminal Sud (2019)Marion Froger (bio)Translated by David F. BellAsphyxiaNever had I felt such a sense of suffocation watching a film by Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche.1 The poisoned atmosphere of Terminal Sud (2019) recalls the atmosphere of the Algerian War (1955-1962) and that of the decade of darkness (1991-2002) in that country. The filmmaker chose not to make a historical film, however, but rather a dystopia that fuses together (...) periods and places. The story appears to be contemporary, in a country bathed in the colors of southern France, apparently in the grip of all the violence that French and Algerian memories are nowhere near forgetting.2 Bandits wearing combat uniforms, policemen wearing outfits sporting an acronym that strangely resembles one used by Islamist Algerian groups,3 and generals evoking the French putschists of 1961 all fight against each other—ransoming, threatening, kidnapping, killing, and torturing the local population. Meanwhile, out in the countryside, guerrillas (maquisards4) try to care for their dying leader, like North African freedom fighters (fellagas) were doing before them, and this in turn evokes French Resistance fighters in the 1940s. The film's work on confused memories, which, according to Thierry Kuntzel, is related to the condensation, overdetermination, and displacement of dreamwork, transforms being out of breath into a symptom that hounds the doctor, played by Ramzy Bédia ("Inhale…Exhale…Inhale again…Hold your breath…Exhale"), a state of the world in the form of a trap that threatens to suffocate him—and launches the quest for a filmic poetics of calm through the pairing of breaths.Peeling façades with tightly closed doors, lowered metal shop shutters, narrow and tense streets: the doctor, his wife Hazia, and their family slip outside in fear of kidnapping and gunfire, climb up stairs breathing heavily, anxiously await by the window, their bodies obscured in starkly contrasting shadows cast by glaring light, hug each other with endless sighs. As they share their grief, they have barely enough breath left to sing to the memory of someone who has disappeared,5 as if after an argument, [End Page 244] when everything has been said and all that remains is a strangled sob serving as last farewell.The film opens with an attack on a minivan used for public transportation: bandits, who could be soldiers, steal everything from the passengers and driver. The doctor sees his patients in a rundown hospital, treats a woman whose breathing is raucous, her voice taut with anxiety, and who speaks about the disappearance of her husband. Back home, he finds anonymous letters containing death threats and, to calm down, he searches for his breath by taking a deep drag from a cigarette and a swig of whiskey. "I can't take it any longer, I can't even stand up, I can't do anything, I'm at the end of my rope, I'm tired […] Is that what our country has become?" he confides to a friend several hours before losing, in the emergency room, his wife's brother, a journalist assassinated in front of his house. "Stay with me," he says as he runs beside the stretcher calling for help, "Breathe, breathe."The spasmodic breathing of Ramzy Bédia, provoked by the fear, effort, and pain that define his character, intensifies as the film progresses. He barely breathes in the car taking him to treat the rebel leader; he is running out of breath beside the leader's bed as we hear the death rattle and as Bédia shouts to the leader's comrades, "Give him some air, everyone get out!" Later, one of the policemen standing guard at the entrance to the hospital will be mortally wounded by a kamikaze attack and will die on the operating table despite the doctor's exhausting reparatory manipulations. Asphyxia will ultimately directly threaten the doctor after his arrest. Tied to an old bedspring, he will be tortured by electroshock,6 will attempt one last time to justify himself to a soldier who wants to know everything about the rebel leader the doctor has treated, and will nearly suffocate in his... (shrink)

In this paper, we consider climate change as a systemic respiratory crisis, and explore how breath can function as a mode of witnessing climate catastrophe. We build on feminist environmental humanities methodologies of embodied attunement to advance a more-than-human witnessing of climate change. We suggest that a feminist “conspiratorial” witnessing of breath(lessness) can afford an embodied, situated, empathetic and systemic mode of witnessing. In this approach, the witness (e.g., “the human”) is part of what is witnessed (the climate crisis). As (...) such, breathing climate catastrophe can reveal the intimate, visceral and personal violences of global climate change, and develop empathetic approaches to climate injustice. Nevertheless, as breath’s social and multispecies differentiation reveals, no-one can witness the entirety of climate catastrophe with their own bodies. We thus advocate for collective, more-than-individual modes of knowing, such as science, art and critical analysis, to augment our own sensorial experiences of witness. (shrink)

In lowland South America, breath animates human and non-human bodies, pulsating through the materialities of organisms. Humans, however, should manage their bodies to recast and reconfigure breath in its most life-enhancing manifestations: singing and smoking. These are the specialized domains of those able to manage their vitalities in such a way as to produce potent effects in themselves and in the world around them, including influencing atmospheric conditions, the lives of animals and plants and the harming and healing of others. (...) In these relational onto-epistemologies, intersubjectivity, intercorporality and states of non-cognitive interaffection find new depths. Breath, properly managed, can make and unmake worldly forms, including bodies and the societies they come together in. Focusing on two Amerindian communities, the Warekena of northwestern Rio Negro, Brazil and the Shipibo-Konibo of the Ucayali valley in Eastern Peru, this article examines the interface between human and non-human subjectivities, and how resonant interaffective atmospheric conditions are induced to promote health. (shrink)

A. Whisper; utter softly; speak privately; [fig.] confide; make known Breathe in Ear more modern God's old fashioned vows B. Inhale and exhale; process air through the lungs; [fig.] live; subsist And now, by Life deprived, In my own Grave I breathe C. Exist; show life force; [fig.] purr; yowl; make vibrant animal sounds With thee in the Tamarind wood -- Leopard breathes -- at last! D. Absorb; assimilate; internalize; infuse; gather. And now, removed from Air -- I simulate the (...) Breath, so well -- E. Gasp; draw in air; respond with admiration 'Tis Costly -- So are purples! 'Tis just the price of Breath -- F. Flutter; flicker; waver; hover; palpitate; [fig.] betray; vacillate; be unfaithful: An hour behind... Read More. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that police performance may be hindered by psychophysiological state changes during acute stress. To address the need for awareness and control of these physiological changes, police academies in many countries have implemented Heart-Rate Variability biofeedback training. Despite these trainings now being widely delivered in classroom setups, they typically lack the arousing action context needed for successful transfer to the operational field, where officers must apply learned skills, particularly when stress levels rise. The study presented here aimed (...) to address this gap by training physiological control skills in an arousing decision-making context. We developed a Virtual-Reality breathing-based biofeedback training in which police officers perform deep and slow diaphragmatic breathing in an engaging game-like action context. This VR game consisted of a selective shoot/don’t shoot game designed to assess response inhibition, an impaired capacity in high arousal situations. Biofeedback was provided based on adherence to a slow breathing pace: the slower and deeper the breathing, the less constrained peripheral vision became, facilitating accurate responses to the in-game demands. A total of nine male police trainers completed 10 sessions over a 4-week period as part of a single-case experimental ABAB study-design. Results showed that eight out of nine participants showed improved breathing control in action, with a positive effect on breathing-induced low frequency HRV, while also improving their in-game behavioral performance. Critically, the breathing-based skill learning transferred to subsequent sessions in which biofeedback was not presented. Importantly, all participants remained highly engaged throughout the training. Altogether, our study showed that our VR environment can be used to train breathing regulation in an arousing and active decision-making context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Breathing Without a Head:Plant Respirations in John Gerrard's Smoke TreesOrchid Tierney (bio)About two hours from where I grew up in Invercargill, Aotearoa New Zealand, is a large finger lake called Lake Wakatipu. The lake is nested in the Southern Alps of the South Island and, at the extremes, its body measures three miles wide and fifty-two miles long. The surrounding mountains are haunting in the evenings when the (...) coniferous wildlife is silent, and for as long as I can remember, Wakatipu has been called the breathing lake. I must have read this moniker on a brochure or travel poster in a hotel or a restaurant—I used to visit the area around the lake regularly during the winter months as a child—but according to local legend, it is the beating heart of a taniwha—an ogre called Matau—that causes the lake's respirations. Matakauri, the hero of this particular myth, set alight the ogre whilst he slept in order to rescue his beloved Manata, the beautiful daughter of a local chief, whom the taniwha had kidnapped. As Matau burned, he left behind his heart, which continued to beat rhythmically in the years that followed Matakauri's daring rescue. The myth brilliantly invokes the scientific expertise of the local Indigenous people, for the lake really does rise and fall regularly throughout the day. Despite being landlocked, Wakatipu has an observable seiche, or standing wave, that occurs every 26.7 minutes and results in a tide that rises and falls almost eight inches. Of course, the seiche is the Western scientific explanation for the lake's regular aquatic behavior. The lake breathes because Matau's heart is still beating.Wakatipu's origin myth proposes a respiration that is both wonderfully metaphorical and scientific, but it also raises questions about the embodiments of breath itself. Namely, I'm curious here as to who is an agent of breath? Who and what breathes? Who can breathe easily in the Anthropocene? Who can breathe easily at all? And yet: what an unnecessarily [End Page 14] cruel question this is when so many people nowadays cannot breathe fluently or joyfully in a global pandemic. Over the course of the past two years, the ventilator has become a vexed symbol of the persistence of life, of political incompetence. Of medicalized racial injustice. The lungs that strain against the COVID-19 virus are sometimes the same lungs that have historically struggled against anthropogenic non-viral forms of air pollution. Industrial air pollutants are indicators of systemic racism, imperialism, colonialism, and the uneven urban distributions of risk. Indeed, in December 2020, a British coroner ruled, for the first time in legal history of the United Kingdom, that emissions of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter on the South Circular Road of London were the cause of nine-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah's acute respiratory failure in February 2013 (Laville). Toxic airborne pollution is vile matter that forcibly connects gentle lungs with racialized environments. As Timothy Choy notes, "Air muddies the distinction between subjects and environments, and between subjects. This thickness and porosity rendered by air is part of what makes the air and the airborne such deeply felt elements" (157). We, human animals, are too porous for the heavy industry and traffic routes that fill the air and the softness of our lungs. And so: we know the matter of the air by the smoothness of respiration; we feel the keen politics of the air when breathing is labored.I can point to numerous examples where respiration in the context of human life is fraught. Indeed, the act of breathing foregrounds the buoyancy of humanity and the formations of life. I want to acknowledge and hold those complexities because breathing in relation to human life, especially for populations of color, disabled people, and transgender communities, is not yet guaranteed. And I want to consider additionally, who and what has been excluded from the formulations of breathing more generally, and how breathing itself has been anthropomorphized at the expense of other forms of more-than-human life. As Jane Bennett suggests, "humans are always in composition with nonhumanity, never outside of a sticky... (shrink)

To conclude the discussion of breath and breathing in the foregoing contributions, this comment sets out from a critical perspective on embodiment. For a being that breathes out and in, should we not add to embodiment its complement of vaporisation? Breath, after all, is fluid, animate and fundamental to human conviviality. While it can temporarily be put on hold, breath cannot be contained. That is why bodily breathing is unlike the ventilation of buildings. Moreover, breathing in and (...) breathing out are dissimilar movements which cannot be reversed. This presents particular problems for those with breathing difficulties, above all in societies where speech, carried on the outbreath, is modelled on print, and where thought is attributed to a self whose powers of cognition transcend bodily experience. In place of the complementarity of self and body, we posit the soul as a vortex in which breathing, thinking, speech and song all flow into one another. (shrink)

In this article, I materially situate air pollution exposure as a topic of social and political inquiry by paying attention to the increasing specificity of spaces and sites of exposure in air pollution and health research. Evidence of the unevenness of exposure and differential health effects of air pollution have led to a proliferation of studies on the risks different environments pose to bodies. There are increasingly different airs in air pollution science. In this research, bodies are often relegated to (...) passive objects, exposed according to the environments they move between. Yet exposure implies a blurring of bodies and environments which also challenges the idea of a discrete body that is distinguishable from its material context. By studying the process of modelling indoor air pollution, I highlight how air pollution, buildings and bodies are co-implicated with one another in ways that demand new ways of materialising human exposure in science. (shrink)

Previous research has suggested that bodily signals from internal organs are associated with diverse cortical and subcortical processes involved in sensory-motor functions, beyond homeostatic reflexes. For instance, a recent study demonstrated that the preparation and execution of voluntary actions, as well as its underlying neural activity, are coupled with the breathing cycle. In the current study, we investigated whether such breathing-action coupling is limited to voluntary motor action or whether it is also present for mental actions not involving (...) any overt bodily movement. To answer this question, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and respiratory signals while participants were conducting a voluntary action paradigm including self-initiated motor execution (ME), motor imagery (MI), and visual imagery (VI) tasks. We observed that the voluntary initiation of ME, MI, and VI are similarly coupled with the respiration phase. In addition, EEG analysis revealed the existence of readiness potential (RP) waveforms in all three tasks (i.e., ME, MI, VI), as well as a coupling between the RP amplitude and the respiratory phase. Our findings show that the voluntary initiation of both imagined and overt action is coupled with respiration, and further suggest that the breathing system is involved in preparatory processes of voluntary action by contributing to the temporal decision of when to initiate the action plan, regardless of whether this culminates in overt movements. -/- . (shrink)

Each action, each thought is accompanied by one’s own breathing. To breathe is always thought of as an individual act. It is one’s own breathing that keeps us alive and it is one’s own breathing that leaves at the moment of death. Up until recently, it was uncommon to talk about breathing as a shared act, as a relational moment that is created with someone else. Yet, Luce Irigaray’s work calls for the cultivation of breathing (...) to enable our ethical coexistence with the other, and the eighth c. commentary on the Sāṃkhyakārikā, the Yuktidīpikā, relates the vital breath of samāna to the function of sharing. This paper searches for a philosophy of breath, such as the one that Irigaray calls for, that can emerge from a close reading of Indian philosophical sources. I explore the relational aspect of breathing throughout the development of the notion of prāṇa in the Upaniṣads and elucidate the meaning given to the term samāna within the classical Sāṃkhya tradition, unique in the Indian theory of the bodily winds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Freedom to BreatheJan Söffner (bio)It almost goes without saying: During the current pandemic, breathing lost its mere subliminal existence as an automated subsystem of our conscious existence and gained an oppressive presence. It did so in medical terms, in the spread of a virus attacking the respiratory system. It did so in terms of the lockdowns that virtualized much of our physical existence, cutting breath off from (...) being part of the communal atmosphere we dwell in. It did so in terms of the fear of taking in the contaminated breath of others, or of letting others inhale our own viruses. It did so by forcing us to wear face masks that simultaneously protected and obstructed our breath, and made us constantly smell our own bad breath. It did so by means of a fear, and regulation-induced deformation of our embodied interaction–which forced us to avoid each other rather than share our embodied lives. Breathing emerged into consciousness in a way that problematized the permeability of our breathing bodies, promoting instead an increasingly monadic existence reducing that permeability–an existence allowing only for an extremely mediated partaking in the world and interacting with others, as if (or indeed) talking to images on a computer screen.This change to our everyday breathing activity, as I will argue, profoundly altered the "metaphor we live by" that breathing is: If the emotional and enacted feeling of being a breathing body is altered, and if the habits of breathing change, then the ways we organize and understand our lives using breathing as a metaphor will lead to different meanings. And these meanings can be centered around a new feel of longing for freedom–a feel by means of which the concept of freedom is changed as well.A bitter example is the now worldwide awareness, and, as I will argue, altered understanding of the rallying cry, "I can't breathe." Originating from the 2014 police murder of Eric Garner, these had also been George Floyd's last words, uttered while being suffocated by police officers in 2020. The agony condensed in these words provided for an even more powerful metaphor to be adapted by the Black American community and beyond: people who had not literally been suffocated, but for whom the phrase spoke on their systemic historical oppression. [End Page 145] "I can't breathe" became a metaphor upon which a continuing legacy of repressions was projected.Yet, the term "metaphor," as precise as it is, can be misleading, because it seems to suggest this act of generalizing the lack of breath to be an act of mere comparison: People who are suppressed and metaphorically lack the air to breathe would then simply compare their lives to the suffocation of George Floyd; the similarity between their suppression and his would then be brought down to an "as if," wherein Black communities would simply feel as if they were suffocated (while what their 'suffocation' really means would remain an open point). However, things are not that simple: Adopting the words "I can't breathe" as a "metaphor we live by" does not only turn George Floyd's last words into an iconic comparison; it also evokes and suggests suffocation as a "feeling of being," as an experiencing of one's own existence. "Metaphors we live by" (Lakoff and Johnson) reside on subliminal bodily re-enaction and embodied empathy, enabling us to experience a feeling of suffocation which–as a feeling–is as real as the coldness of anxiety (as Louise Bourgeois would have it [see Klemm et al. 321]) or the warmth of social inclusion. This experience of felt suffocation, in turn, helps us talk and think about the state of subaltern existence, by replacing the question of whether the subaltern can speak (per Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [1988]) with the question of whether they can breathe. Doing so aids in expressing indignation, and provides conceptual and iconic clarity. The clarity and precision of such metaphors is not about concepts, but about existential feelings. And in order to provide for this particular precision, these metaphors do not only rely on acts of comparison; much more than this, they rely on acts... (shrink)

IntroductionApproaches to improve heart rate variability and reduce stress such as breathing retraining are more frequently being integrated into psychotherapy but little research on their effectiveness has been done to date. Specifically, no studies to date have directly compared using a breathing pacer at 6 breaths per minute with compassion focused soothing rhythm breathing.Current StudyIn this randomized controlled experiment, 6 breaths per minute breathing using a pacer was compared with compassion focused soothing rhythm breathing, with (...) a nature video being used as a control group condition.MethodsHeart rate variability measures were assessed via electrocardiogram and respiration belt, and an automated blood pressure machine was used to measure systolic diastolic blood pressure, and heart rate. A total of 96 participants were randomized into the three conditions. Following a 5-min baseline, participants engaged in either 6 breath per minute breathing, soothing rhythm breathing, or watched a nature video for 10 min. To induce a stressful state, participants then wrote for 5 min about a time they felt intensely self-critical. Participants then wrote for 5 min about a time they felt self-compassionate, and the experiment ended with a 10-min recovery period.ResultsConditions did not significantly differ at baseline. Overall, HRV, as measured by standard deviation of NN intervals, low frequency HRV, and LF/HF ratio, increased during the intervention period, decreased during self-critical writing, and then returned to baseline levels during the recovery period. High frequency HRV was not impacted by any of the interventions. The participants in the 6 breath per minute pacer condition were unable to consistently breathe at that rate and averaged about 12 breaths per minute. Time by Condition analyses revealed that both the 6 breaths per minute pacer and soothing breathing rhythm conditions lead to significantly higher SDNN than the nature video condition during breathing practice but there were no significant differences between conditions in response to the self-critical and self-compassionate writing or recovery periods. The 6 breath per minute pacer condition demonstrated a higher LF HRV and LF/HF ratio than the soothing rhythm breathing condition, and both intervention conditions had a higher LF HRV and LF/HF ratio than the nature video.ConclusionsAlthough the 6 breath per minute pacer condition participants were not able to breath consistently at the low pace, both the participants attempting to breathe at 6 breaths per minute as well as those in the soothing rhythm breathing condition effectively increased HR variability as measured by SDNN, and attempting to breathe at 6 breaths per minute led to the highest LF HRV and LF/HF ratio. Both breathing approaches impacted HRV more than watching a relaxing nature video and can potentially be used as key adjuncts in psychotherapy to aid in regulating physiological functioning, although it appears that consistent breathing practice would be needed. (shrink)

In this article I take an unusual starting point from which to argue for a unified cognitive science, namely a position defined by what is sometimes called the ‘life-mind continuity thesis’. Accordingly, rather than taking a widely accepted starting point for granted and using it in order to propose answers to some well defined questions, I must first establish that the idea of life-mind continuity can amount to a proper starting point at all. To begin with, I therefore assess the (...) conceptual tools which are available to construct a theory of mind on this basis. By drawing on insights from a variety of disciplines, especially from a combination of existential phenomenology and organism-centered biology, I argue that mind can indeed be conceived as rooted in life, but only if we accept at the same time that social interaction plays a constitutive role for our cognitive capacities. (shrink)

Due to the simultaneous linguistic and musical quality of voicing, voiced breath poses theoretical challenges to notions of ‘embodiment’, especially as they are used in theatre practice/studies. In this article, I make two intertwining arguments to address questions of the place of semantic meaning and conscious thought in performance practice/theories as they arose in my anthropological engagement with laboratory theatre. Firstly, theatre and performance practice/theories keen to embrace ‘embodiment’ often leave out things like explicit analysis, reflexivity, referential or semantic meaning (...) and so on because, as my ethnography shows, they are judged as secondary, and thus belonging implicitly more closely to disembodied ‘mind’. I engage in anthropological comparison to show how other ways of being/knowing complicate any sense in which practices labelled ‘embodied’ can be seen as primary in contrast to conscious, linguistic or explicit knowing. Instead I outline an onto/epistemology of emergence that offers an alternative imaginary in which no binaries exist a priori. Rather all is a matter of ongoing mutual constitution. Secondly, while the discourses of embodiment in performance practice/theory that I critique may continue to reproduce dualist assumptions, theatre approaches influenced by Grotowski’s anti-method, focusing on continual revision of practice, offer insights for scholarship concerned with the ontological indistinguishability of social, psychological and physical phenomena. Laboratory theatre practices offer a prospective way of knowing, enabling an exploration of the ontological equality of breath, in this case in song, and the sorts of meaningfulness associated with language and analysis. In 2011, my Nanna (grandmother in Maltese) passed away in circumstances that remain traumatic to me. I turned with to my daily practices to find ways to scream, to grieve: to anthropology and to a particular practice of song in laboratory theatre, where encounter is actively sought. Arising from ethnographic and analytic engagement with such practices, in this article, I offer an anthropologically inflected critique of notions of embodiment in performance studies and performance philosophy. I present the alternative imaginary of emergence onto/epistemologies and the prospective investigative practices of laboratory theatre. I do this by weaving autobiographical, ethnographic and anthropological threads to explore my own practice relating to the work of my collaborator Gey Pin Ang, a Singaporean director, actor and pedagogue. (shrink)

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility investigates the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective, social intellectual practice. Engaging black studies, queer theory, sound studies, literary theory, theological studies, continental philosophy and visual studies, Black Pentecostal Breath analyzes the ways otherwise modes of existence are disruptions of marginalization and violence.

This collection of essays provides a reassessment of the question of sexual difference, taking into account important shifts in feminist thought, post-humanist theories, and queer studies. The contributors offer new and refreshing insights into the complex question of sexual difference from a post-feminist perspective, and how it is reformulated in various related areas of study, such as ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, biology, technology, and mass-media.

Since sound and music are powerful forces and drivers of human behavior and physiology, we propose the use of sonification to activate healthy breathing patterns in participants to induce relaxation. Sonification is often used in the context of biofeedback as it can represent an informational, non-invasive and real-time stimulus to monitor, motivate or modify human behavior. The first goal of this study is the proposal and evaluation of a distance-based biofeedback system using a tempo- and phase-aligned sonification strategy to (...) adapt breathing patterns and induce states of relaxation. A second goal is the evaluation of several sonification stimuli on 18 participants that were recruited online and of which we analyzed psychometric and behavioral data using, respectively questionnaires and respiration rate and ratio. Sonification stimuli consisted of filtered noise mimicking a breathing sound, nature environmental sounds and a musical phrase. Preliminary results indicated the nature stimulus as most pleasant and as leading to the most prominent decrease of respiration rate. The noise sonification had the most beneficial effect on respiration ratio. While further research is needed to generalize these findings, this study and its methodological underpinnings suggest the potential of the proposed biofeedback system to perform ecologically valid experiments at participants' homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

The philosophy of mathematical practice is not only a research topic, but overall a disciplinary field that is extending its importance and attracting the interest of an increasing number of scholars from different communities. The book edited by Paolo Mancosu provides a comprehensive and vivid account of the philosophy of mathematical practice, by showing it at work on different and multifarious topics, and by suggesting a substantial agenda for its development. This is also a momentous programme for the philosophy of (...) mathematics as a whole, aiming at "bringing some fresh air" into it. Furthermore, Mancosu's book gives voice to a community of scholars working in this area that does not only include the authors of the essays contained in it, but also a large group of scholars sharing their approach and often collaborating with them. (shrink)

The question of whether we can perceive absences, in addition to ‘positives’, has received recent attention in the literature on the nature of vision and audition. The aim is to demonstrate that there can be objectless forms of perceptual consciousness; specifically, to show that such episodes can be distinguished from those in which there is merely no perception at all. The current article explores this question for the domain of olfaction, and argues that there can be experiences of the absence (...) of odours, in addition to positive smell perception. Doing so sheds light upon the structure and spatial content of olfaction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 161-164 [Access article in PDF] Dakini's Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism. By Judith Simmer-Brown. Boston: Shambhala, 2001. xxv + 404 pp. For more than a century, the dakini of Hindu and Buddhist tantric literature and practice lore has intrigued, fascinated, beguiled, and confounded Western scholars. First described by Austine Waddell in 1895 as "demonical furies" and "she-devils," S.C.Das's ATibetan-English Dictionary, published just (...) shortly afterward, defined mkha' 'gro ma (the Tibetan equivalent of the Sanskrit term dakini ) as "a class, mainly of female sprites, akin to our witches, but not necessarily ugly or deformed." More recently the dakini has been investigated by scholars as diverse as David Snellgrove, Rene Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Nathan Katz, Janet Gyatso, Miranda Shaw, and myself. Snellgrove suggested in his Buddhist Himalaya (1957) that "their [i.e., the dakinis' ] activities are generally so gruesome and obscene as to earn them quite properly the name witch," but he conceded that they entered Tibetan mythology "in a rather more gentle aspect." Even so, this ubiquitous, powerful, and yet ever-elusive figure —or symbol, image, motif, or principle—has remained, it seems, just beyond our reach. In a certain respect, this is exactly as it should be; for the dakini— at least within the systems of the Buddhist tantras—is the symbol of transcendent wisdom itself, direct and unmediated, hovering just outside the reach of all discursive language and reasoning.Today one scholar, Judith Simmer-Brown, has given us a thoughtful, well-informed, and well-researched treatment of the history and functioning of the dakini (which she prefers to refer to as a "symbol" or "principle") that seeks to present a balanced discussion and overview of this feminine principle and steers clear of the essentializing and reductionist pitfalls of either Jungian interpretations or contemporary feminist ones. It is timely that we take a careful look at Simmer-Brown's work, not only because it represents the most complete exploration to date of the dakini in a single volume, but also because this valuable study has just been reprinted in paperback.Though in the preface of her work Simmer-Brown characterizes her methodology as being "perhaps wildly messy," there is clearly both system and method in her [End Page 161] presentation. Her study begins with a careful delineation of what may be called the two extremes or poles of contemporary interpretations of the dakini: the one, influenced by Jungian psychology in which the dakini is seen as Jung's famed "shadow," and the other, influenced by feminist goddess theology, which has served either to see the dakini as a feminine savior or as the source of a critique of Tibetan Buddhism in which this feminine ideal reflects an objectified product of patriarchal fantasy. For Simmer-Brown, both poles of interpretation are inadequate; and in her first chapter, "Gender, Subjectivity, and the Feminine Principle," she argues powerfully and convincingly about why this is the case. Indeed, in many respects, this carefully argued opening chapter is the true centerpiece of the work.With respect to Jungian analysis, while Simmer-Brown sees "some real benefits in employing Jungian ideas in interpreting the dakini, " she notes the skewing and distorting complications introduced by Jung's emphasis on contrasexuality. Ultimately, Simmer-Brown declares, "the pervasiveness of the Jungian paradigm in examination of the dakini emphasizes contrasexuality, the ultimacy of gender imagery, and psychological interpretation. These emphases have precipitated a blizzard of feminist objections, and no wonder. However, that critique may be directed more toward Jungian tenets than toward Tibetan Buddhism, which has not been properly represented in Western interpretation" (17).Simmer-Brown's case is especially well made with regard to the second pole of interpretation. Here she notes that recent studies of the dakini that employ feminist considerations have generally taken two directions. Namely, "one identifies the dakini as a construct of patriarchy drawn by a primarily monastic Buddhism in Tibet into the service of the religious goals of male practitioners only. The second perspective identifies the dakini as a goddess figure in... (shrink)

Breath, the ephemeral materialization of air at the interface of body and world, engages with and alters the quality of both. As a process of inhalation and exhalation that signals its physiological universality, breath is an invisible prerequisite for life, an automated and functional necessity. Yet it is more than simply a reflexive action and can at times be controlled or manipulated. It can also affect or be affected by experiences, environments and relationships. In this essay, like the contributors to (...) the special issue it prefaces, we aim to address the lacuna that exists in the examination of the meanings and embodiment of breath as a central theme in the humanitics and social sciences. Interdisciplinary perspectives that explore breath as a multifaceted phenomenon, both intrinsically shared and contextually distinct, open new directions in the field of breath and body studies. (shrink)