Book Review | How to Breathe

Book by Ashley Neese

25 Simple Practices for Calm, Joy, and Resilience

When was the last time you paid attention to your breathing?

Breathing is easily the most overlooked health and wellness practice of all!

As a human being, you can survive about 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water, and only 3 minutes without oxygen.

Because breathing is an automatic function, it is easy not to think about it. And yet the impact that breathing has on your health and quality of life is enormous. Aside from keeping you alive for more than 3 minutes, your breathing serves as a major detoxifier for your system, it shifts your body into the relax-and-repair mode, and it has a major influence on your emotions and mental state.

That is why breathing practices have served as the foundation for mindfulness and spiritual practices since ancient times.

In this lovely little book, the author, Ashley Neese, presents an enlightening orientation to the role that breathing has in all aspects of your life. She shares the story of how her own life was changed when she began a breathing practice and why she refocused her life to become an expert in those practices.

The remainder of the book contains a collection of simple breathing practices for addressing anger, boundaries, cleansing, dreaming, energy, focus, forgiveness, gratitude, grief, grounding, intimacy, intuition, joy, letting go, negative thinking, opening the heart, pain, resilience, sadness, self-healing, sleep, stress, and more.

This book resonates with me because Ashley convincingly presents the enormous impact that a simple - and frequently overlooked - body function can have on your health and wellbeing. Breathing is basic. You do it all the time no matter where you are. With a little experience, you can learn how to enhance your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual lives by simply focusing on something you are already doing.

That's what Life Balance Bodyworks is about! Using the simple daily basics as the tools for creating and maintaining your health. Keep it simple. Keep it real.