The Breathable Body: Transforming Your World and Your Life, One Breath at a Time

Renowned breathing expert offers a guide to conscious breathing with skills for reducing stress, alleviating tension, returning breath to its natural state of harmony, and opening your heart.

Breath moves in wavelike motions. When breath flows freely within the body, we live in a natural state of harmony, making choices that enhance well-being and generate energy.Each individual breath travels through us in a unique way depending on its flow, texture, speed, and patterning. Like a leaf falling from a tree that spirals to the ground, waves of breath travel through the airways of the body in a spiraling motion. This is the way air moves, the way breath moves, and the way oceans, rivers, and lakes move, too. When we tighten our passageways and compromise our breathing, our health suffers.

Most of us are born with the ability to breathe freely and naturally, but as the years go by, our breathing becomes labored—compromised by fear, disappointment, trauma, and pollutants. So we contract our breathing body and create ways that feel protective of our vulnerable selves but actually constrict the oxygen intake and thus the nourishment our body receives.

In The Breathable Body: Transforming Your World and Your Life, One Breath at a Time, Robert Litman shares the insights and practices he has discovered during more than 30 years of professional experience in conscious breathing and movement. Born with breathing difficulties and suffering from asthma as a child, Robert found ways to overcome his own childhood PTSD and now shares trauma-sensitive teachings to help people breathe and live better.

You can change your life—including alleviating symptoms of asthma, snoring, sleep apnea, insomnia, anxiety, panic attacks, digestive difficulties, and fatigue—by changing how you breathe. The techniques in this book will teach you how to support and protect your body and its respiratory system. Through conscious breathing, movement, sound, and a clear understanding of anatomy and respiration, we learn habits that support healthy and natural breathing.

For more than 30 years, Robert Litman has guided artists, musicians, health professionals, athletes, activists, and countless others to restore healthy breathing rhythms, structural alignment, and coordinated movement. He founded The Breathable Body in 2004 and co-developed the Wellsprings Practitioner Program with Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum Movement. Robert is a certified breathing behavior analyst from the Graduate School of Behavioral Health Science, and a registered educator and trainer of the Buteyko Breathing Educators Association (BBEA). He was a preceptor at the University of Arizona School of Integrative Medicine, teaching The Breathable Body to visiting doctors for Dr. Andrew Weil.