About six months ago I started to explore non-dual awareness by using Michael Taft's collection of guided meditations. Each of these videos starts with an initial period of deep belly breathing where you focus on making the exhale longer than the inhale. Initially, manipulating the breath in this way felt effortful, but once I got the hang of it, I found it shockingly and viscerally relaxing. The effect was powerful enough that just about every morning I found myself wondering what the hell was going on and remembering that I had seen physical therapist and shoulder guru Eric Cressey recommend a book about the anatomy of breathing.
So finally my curiosity got the better of me and I picked up Blandine Calais-Germain's book. It is just exactly what it says it is. She goes through all the terminology that a physical therapist or voice coach would use to describe types of breathing (tidal volume, inhale and exhale reserve volume) and then goes on to describe and provide an anatomical sketch for every muscle and bone that has any role in the process of breathing. Since I knew next to nothing about this stuff, I found it surprising and enlightening -- it's amazing how much is involved in this simple motion that we take for granted. The book ends with a series of exercises you can do that allow you to actually feel the action of each of the muscles involved.
Overall, I found it well worth reading. If you're a physical therapist or have already studied this anatomy for some other reason, I imagine that it would mostly be just a review. My only disappointment was that there weren't more exercises that describe specific breathing techniques from various traditions -- meditation, yoga, opera, martial arts. She mentions these traditions in passing during her anatomical explanations, but it would have been great to see a survey of those techniques linked directly to the anatomy they use.
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