Cultural Significance
In t'ai chi ch'uan, aerobic training is combined with breathing to exercise the diaphragm muscles and to train effective posture, which both make better use of the body's energy. In music, breath is used to play wind instruments and many aerophones. Laughter, physically, is simply repeated sharp breaths. Hiccups, yawns, and sneezes are other breath-related phenomena.
Ancients commonly linked the breath to a life force. The Hebrew Bible refers to God breathing the breath of life into clay to make Adam a living soul (nephesh). It also refers to the breath as returning to God when a mortal dies. The terms "spirit," "qi," "prana" and "psyche" are related to the concept of breath. Also cognate are Polynesian Mana and Hebrew ruach.
Common phrases in English relate to breathing e.g. "catch my breath", "took my breath away".
Read more about this topic: Breathing
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or significance:
“All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The hysterical find too much significance in things. The depressed find too little.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)