The Importance of Breathing: A Comprehensive Exploration of Breath Habits

This book is very informative and really got me thinking about how I breathe. It can be a bit dry, and I did end up not reading the last part because it was pretty boring.

I am serious when I say that this book has completely changed my outlook on breathing! As a singer, breath is extremely important…but knowing the whys and hows so intimately will rearrange your thinking about what seems to be such a simple and mundane experience.

5 stars for the book, two stars for the narration. A very interesting and informative book. The narrator, apparently the author, has an extremely annoying habit of reading in a strange, strained voice when narrating other people's quotes. He uses essentially the same weird voice for every person he's quoting. It's really distracting.

The book was well organized, easy to follow and very relevant. As a yoga practitioner, I learned the “Why” behind the different breathing techniques.

James Nestor does a wonderful job covering all sorts of breath, starting with why this topic deserves the importance in today's world. Must read for anyone that wants to lead a heathy, fulfilled life.

The book starts out strong with an intriguing approach to the wild mystery of good breathing and why it’s so important (perhaps the most important) thing we do — and why we should pay greater attention to cultivating how well we breath and how it acts simultaneously as a barometer and tool for our own well-being.

It was enjoyable to learn about the author’s journey into breath awareness through modern research, but I wish he’d gone to the trouble of finding out a lot more on the roots of breath work in ancient human societies—he touches upon it, but he didn’t really go there, alas. (Disclaimer, I’m a yoga practitioner of about 33 years, old school yoga that focuses on breathing as the most important part of the practice—vs. the exercise-oriented stuff that pays little attention to anything else besides postures and burning calories and looking fit, which most folks mistake for “yoga” these days.)

He does at one point say that the original folks who really deeply explored the breath and devised breath practices (pranayama) were from ancient India. But for some strange reason, he doesn’t actually GO to India to research this further, or to find teachers of pranayama to learn directly from the source. (And believe me, these folks do live and teach and can be found in India, or even online via zoom these days.)

Instead, his research into yogic pranayama techniques brings him to…Brazil (?) to interview a widely respected teacher (well, widely respected/practically canonized there at least, but essentially unheard of outside of Brazil) who from what I can determine, cherry-picked elements from yoga to develop his own obscure, highly athletic method that seems to combine yoga practices and capoeira. This teacher claims that his method is rooted in teachings that “predate” Indian yoga practices. A search to verify this claim turned up nothing to support it. And, as it turns out, there is very little there, there…the author was vague about the breath practices he learned while visiting this Brazilian yoga studio.

So I was left wanting more frankly, a little disappointed he didn’t delve into the actual roots in his ten years of research. That effort would simultaneously honor those roots and give more of us in the West the encouragement to explore these ancient methods that came to us mostly from India. That is, a few recommendations of yogic modalities and teachers actually from India, the actual place where pranayama was birthed and shared, would have been a good thing on a book that deals with, essentially, Indian pranayama practices.