James Nestor

"There are as many ways to breath as there are foods to eat," said one... instructor... Another diver told me that some methods of breathing will nourish our brains... others hasten our death.

I looked for... verification... recent research in ... but found next to nothing... breathing technique wasn't important. ...Pulmonologists work mainly on ...maladies of the lungs ...collapse, cancer, emphysema.

[S]omething happened. ...[I]t was as if I'd been taken from one place and deposited somewhere else. It happened in an instant. ...I had somehow sweated through my clothes as if I'd just run a marathon.

Seven books of the Chinese Tao dating... to around 400BCE focused entirely on breathing... Even earlier, Hindus considered breath and spirit the same thing, and described elaborate practices... to balance breathing and preserve... mental and physical health. ...Buddhists ...use breathing ...to lengthen their lives [and] reach higher planes of consciousness. Breathing... for all... these cultures, was powerful medicine.

[T]he voice of a man... flowed from the speakers... too melodious to sound natural... instructed me to inhale slowly through our noses, then exhale slowly. To focus on our breath.

The next day I felt even better. ...[T]here was a feeling of calm and quiet that I hadn't experienced in a long time. ...The tension was gone from my shoulders and neck. This lasted a few days...

I'd just recovered from pneumonia, which I'd also had the year before and the year before that. I was... wheezing, working, and eating... in a rut—physically, mentally [etc.]

I... signed up for an introductory course in breathing to learn... Sudarshan Kriya.

They discovered that our capacity to breath has changed through... evolution, and that the way we breath has gotten markedly worse since the dawn of the .

I went to Greece to write a story on ... When most people go underwater... they bail out at ten feet... ears screaming. The freedivers told me they'd previously been "most people." ...To freedive, they said, all anyone had to do was master the art of breathing.

I read through reams of literature on the subject. ...The problem was, the sources were hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years old.

[B]reathing research has been taking place... in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites... dental offices, and... mental hospitals.