“What the bodily form depends on is breath (chi) and what breath relies upon is form,” states a Chinese adage from 700 AD.

4-7-8 Breathing This technique, made famous by Dr. Andrew Weil, places the body into a state of deep relaxation. I use it on long flights to help fall asleep. Take a breath in, then exhale through your mouth with a whoosh sound. Close the mouth and inhale quietly through your nose to a mental count of four. Hold for a count of seven. Exhale

I was in a rut—physically, mentally, and otherwise.

They discovered that the optimum amount of air we should take in at rest per minute is 5.5 liters. The optimum breathing rate is about 5.5 breaths per minute. That’s 5.5-second inhales and 5.5-second exhales. This is the perfect breath.

the sympathetic, has an opposite role. It sends stimulating signals to our organs, telling them to get ready for action.

“The yogi’s life is not measured by the number of his days, but the number of his breaths,” wrote B. K. S. Iyengar, an Indian yoga teacher who had spent years in bed as a sickly child until he learned yoga and breathed himself back to health. He died in 2014, at age 95.

Dr. John Douillard, a trainer to elite athletes, from tennis star Billie Jean King to triathletes to the New Jersey Nets. In the 1990s, Douillard became convinced that mouthbreathing was hurting his clients.

They discovered that our capacity to breathe has changed through the long processes of human evolution, and that the way we breathe has gotten markedly worse since the dawn of the Industrial Age. They discovered that 90 percent of us—very likely me, you, and almost everyone you know—is breathing incorrectly and that this failure is either causing

The Native Americans explained to Catlin that breath inhaled through the mouth sapped the body of strength, deformed the face, and caused stress and disease.