iii: Anthroposophical Views
The healing gifts of warmth and air Dora Wagner If I could make a wish I think I'd pass Can't think of anything I need. Sometimes, all I need is the air that I breathe ‘The air that I breathe’, Albert Hammond for The Hollies
"Learn how to float," my father told me when helping me to become a swimmer. This advice has stayed with me all my life. Now it lifts me up during challenging situations, reminding me to take a deep breath and, thereby, relax. The ability to hold my breath kept me very busy as a little girl, competing to see who could stay underwater the longest. Only when exhausted did I learn to value breathing and cooperation above competition. They say a person may survive three weeks without food, three days without hydration, but only three minutes without oxygen. Our respiration, along with warming and caring interpersonal affection, is the very precondition of our existence. A healthy adult breathes about 25,000 times a day, and up to 15 times per minute. Fortunately, we usually don't have to think about it. Even when we are stressed or excited, we are sometimes unaware that our breathing is changing, yet our cortisol levels shoot up, our muscles contract and our respiration becomes shorter, shallower and no longer comes from its
happy place, the diaphragm. Practising slow, deep, belly-breathing can turn our proinflammatory stress into calm. That is much harder when wearing an anti-Covid mask, so we need to learn how to keep our airways healthy and protect ourselves from infection, so that we can all breathe a little easier. Anthroposophical medicine’s tripartite perspective describes the ‘rhythmic system’, the central part of our organism, constantly working to balance the ‘metabolic-limb’ and the ‘nervous-sense’ systems. It is primarily located in the chest area, regulating the rhythm of breath and blood circulation; the heart and the lungs sharing the task, down to the pulmonary bubbles which supply the entire organism. If we spread out the cell layer of our 300 million alveoli side by side, they could cover the floor of an average three-room flat. Thanks to these 100 square metres of gasexchanging tissue, all cells of our body are constantly supplied with sufficient oxygen, even during hard physical exertion. In anthroposophy, however, breathing is not only understood physically, but also emotionally and spiritually. In the rhythmic
