THEME FOR ENGLISH B By Langston Hughes
The instructor said, Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you---
Then, it will be true. I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page: It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me---we two---you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York too.) Me---who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records---Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me NOT like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white---
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me---
although you're older---and white---
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.
1951
The instructor said, Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you---
Then, it will be true. I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page: It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me---we two---you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York too.) Me---who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records---Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me NOT like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white---
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me---
although you're older---and white---
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.
1951
How It Feels to Be Colored Me Zora Neale Hurston
I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists go tout of the village.The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat to me. My favorite place was atop the gate-post. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that I liked it.I usually spoke to them in passing. I'd wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: "Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin'?" Usually the automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably "go a piece of the way" with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first "welcome-to-our-state"Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me "speak pieces" and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop. Only they didn't know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county-- everybody's Zora.But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, as Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown--warranted not to rub nor run.But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of 2Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less.No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line!" The Reconstruction said "Get set!";and the generation before said "Go!" I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think--to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed.The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira 1 . I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.For instance at Barnard. 2 "Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, over swept by a creamy sea. I am surged upon and over swept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know .But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly."Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips. Music! The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored. At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce 4 on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company! It's beyond me.But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond 5 , an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two, still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held--so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly.A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place--who knows?
3 Assegai: a weapon for throwing or hurling, usually a light spear or javelin made of wood and pointed withiron. (Wikipedia) 4 American actress and celebrity (1893-1957). Boule Mich : Boulevard St. Michel, a street on the left bank of Paris. 5 A diamond of the highest quality (Answers.com)
I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists go tout of the village.The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat to me. My favorite place was atop the gate-post. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that I liked it.I usually spoke to them in passing. I'd wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: "Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin'?" Usually the automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably "go a piece of the way" with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first "welcome-to-our-state"Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me "speak pieces" and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop. Only they didn't know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county-- everybody's Zora.But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, as Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown--warranted not to rub nor run.But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of 2Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less.No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line!" The Reconstruction said "Get set!";and the generation before said "Go!" I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think--to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed.The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira 1 . I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.For instance at Barnard. 2 "Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, over swept by a creamy sea. I am surged upon and over swept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know .But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly."Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips. Music! The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored. At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce 4 on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company! It's beyond me.But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond 5 , an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two, still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held--so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly.A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place--who knows?
3 Assegai: a weapon for throwing or hurling, usually a light spear or javelin made of wood and pointed withiron. (Wikipedia) 4 American actress and celebrity (1893-1957). Boule Mich : Boulevard St. Michel, a street on the left bank of Paris. 5 A diamond of the highest quality (Answers.com)
Your “Vagus’ Nerve”: The Secret Key to Happiness that isn’t What (or Where) You Think!
November 26, 2012
By Elizabeth Bryan Leave a Comment
Random Fact of Kindness: “Vagal response,” “vagal tone,” and “vagal profile” have plenty to do with how positive you feel on a daily basis, but are completely unrelated to sex, kegels, or how certain body parts appear to the naked eye. They are attributes of the one “nerve” in your body that is responsible for the warm, fuzzy feelings that make you want to help others instead of sleeping with them (yes, these are different things).
“Vagus” is Latin for “wandering,” and this bundle of nerves starts at the top of your spinal cord, wanders down your neck muscles (where it helps to coordinate actions between breathing and heart rate), then drops down even further to your spleen and liver where it regulates parts of your digestion. Your vagus nerve is connected to oxytocin receptors (the “feel good” kind), helping you communicate (presumably nicely) and empathize with others. Some call it the “love bundle” of our bodies, as it is activated by images of suffering, inspiring stories and Oprah.
Some people have a naturally stronger “vagal response” or “vagal profile” than others. In general, individuals with strong vagal responses are more positive on a daily basis, and, often have greater support networks in their lives than others. If your child has a strong vagal profile, he or she is more likely help others with homework or to intervene when another child is being bullied.
Research is bearing out that stimulating this “love bundle” may even help relieve depression. “Vagal nerve stimulation” is a procedure that sends electrical impulses into your brain, and is performed with a device called a “pulse generator” that is surgically implanted in your chest. The possibility that vagus nerve stimulation might work to treat depression was first identified when it was being studied in people with epilepsy – however, the results on depression vary greatly from person to person.
The good news is that you can absolutely activate your vagus nerve without surgery. According to mindbodygreen.com, “The most effective, natural method for stimulating the vagus nerve is deep belly breath breathingthat you typically associate with yoga and meditation.”* When you take a deep breath and relax and expand your diaphragm, your vagus system is stimulated, and you instantly turn on the parasympathetic nervous system – the branch of the nervous system responsible for your body’s ability to recuperate after experiencing pain or stress. Since meditation is a proven technique in reducing depression, the relationship of stimulating the vagus nerve and getting happier makes perfect sense
Hmmm….seems like feeling better through vagal stimulation is easy (and safe) to achieve. And, the more people you share it with, the more you really will help.
Watch the below video about the vagus nerve by Dacher Keltner, UC Berkeley psychologist and Faculty Director of the Greater Good Science Center.
November 26, 2012
By Elizabeth Bryan Leave a Comment
Random Fact of Kindness: “Vagal response,” “vagal tone,” and “vagal profile” have plenty to do with how positive you feel on a daily basis, but are completely unrelated to sex, kegels, or how certain body parts appear to the naked eye. They are attributes of the one “nerve” in your body that is responsible for the warm, fuzzy feelings that make you want to help others instead of sleeping with them (yes, these are different things).
“Vagus” is Latin for “wandering,” and this bundle of nerves starts at the top of your spinal cord, wanders down your neck muscles (where it helps to coordinate actions between breathing and heart rate), then drops down even further to your spleen and liver where it regulates parts of your digestion. Your vagus nerve is connected to oxytocin receptors (the “feel good” kind), helping you communicate (presumably nicely) and empathize with others. Some call it the “love bundle” of our bodies, as it is activated by images of suffering, inspiring stories and Oprah.
Some people have a naturally stronger “vagal response” or “vagal profile” than others. In general, individuals with strong vagal responses are more positive on a daily basis, and, often have greater support networks in their lives than others. If your child has a strong vagal profile, he or she is more likely help others with homework or to intervene when another child is being bullied.
Research is bearing out that stimulating this “love bundle” may even help relieve depression. “Vagal nerve stimulation” is a procedure that sends electrical impulses into your brain, and is performed with a device called a “pulse generator” that is surgically implanted in your chest. The possibility that vagus nerve stimulation might work to treat depression was first identified when it was being studied in people with epilepsy – however, the results on depression vary greatly from person to person.
The good news is that you can absolutely activate your vagus nerve without surgery. According to mindbodygreen.com, “The most effective, natural method for stimulating the vagus nerve is deep belly breath breathingthat you typically associate with yoga and meditation.”* When you take a deep breath and relax and expand your diaphragm, your vagus system is stimulated, and you instantly turn on the parasympathetic nervous system – the branch of the nervous system responsible for your body’s ability to recuperate after experiencing pain or stress. Since meditation is a proven technique in reducing depression, the relationship of stimulating the vagus nerve and getting happier makes perfect sense
Hmmm….seems like feeling better through vagal stimulation is easy (and safe) to achieve. And, the more people you share it with, the more you really will help.
Watch the below video about the vagus nerve by Dacher Keltner, UC Berkeley psychologist and Faculty Director of the Greater Good Science Center.
http://pixiedusthealing.blogspot.com/2012/02/vagus-nerve-and-7-chakras.html
Just Breathe: Body Has A Built-In Stress Reliever
by Gretchen Cuda
December 06, 201012:01 AM
Patients with chronic diseases at the Cleveland Clinic learn to manage their pain using yoga and breathing exercises.
Courtesy of the Center for Art & Photography at Cleveland Clinic There are plenty of ways to relieve stress — exercise, a long soak in a hot bath, or even a massage. But believe it or not, something you're doing right now, probably without even thinking about it, is a proven stress reliever: breathing.
As it turns out, deep breathing is not only relaxing, it's been scientifically proven to affect the heart, the brain, digestion, the immune system — and maybe even the expression of genes.
Mladen Golubic, a physician in the Cleveland Clinic's Center for Integrative Medicine, says that breathing can have a profound impact on our physiology and our health.
"You can influence asthma; you can influence chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; you can influence heart failure," Golubic says. "There are studies that show that people who practice breathing exercises and have those conditions — they benefit."
He's talking about modern science, but these techniques are not new. In India, breath work called pranayama is a regular part of yoga practice. Yoga practitioners have used pranayama, which literally means control of the life force, as a tool for affecting both the mind and body for thousands of years.
Take A Breath
Judi Bar teaches yoga to patients with chronic diseases at the Cleveland Clinic. Bar uses yoga and modifications of traditional yoga breathing exercises as a way to help them manage their pain and disease.
What Happens In The Body When We're Stressed? The physiological stress response is actually designed to be an asset. It speeds the heart rate and diverts blood away from the gut and to the muscles so we can run away. It constricts the pupils of our eyes so we can focus on our attacker. It dilates the bronchi of the lungs to increase blood oxygenation, and converts energy stored in the liver into fuel for strength and stamina. In short, it keeps us safe, says Esther Sternberg, physician and author of several books on stress and healing.
It's in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which makes a hormone called CRH, or corticotropin-releasing hormone. Sternberg says that when you are stressed, you are bathing yourself in a whole soup of other nerve chemicals and hormones. But if they hang around too long, those same nerve chemicals and hormones can impair the immune system.
Eventually, stress hormones make the adrenal glands release another hormone called cortisol. Cortisone, which is the drug form of the hormone cortisol, is one of the most powerful anti-inflammatory drugs available.
"What's happening when you're stressed is that your own body is giving itself multiple shots of that anti-inflammatory hormone, and so that tunes down your immune system's ability to do its job to fight infection," Sternberg says.
— Gretchen Cuda
"Our breaths will either wake us up or energize us. It will relax us, or it will just balance us," Bar says.
She demonstrates a "firebreath."
"So, at first we pant like a little doggy, and then we close our mouth, and then the nostril breath starts right after that. OK, here we go," she says.
Bar then begins to pant, first with an open mouth and then through the nose. It almost makes you feel lightheaded just watching. Afterward, she says she feels a little dizzy but energized enough to run around the block a couple of times.
Putting On The Brake
Research has shown that breathing exercises like these can have immediate effects by altering the pH of the blood, or changing blood pressure.
But more importantly, they can be used as a method to train the body's reaction to stressful situations and dampen the production of harmful stress hormones. Esther Sternberg is a physician, author of several books on stress and healing, and researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health. She says rapid breathing is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system. It's part of the "fight or flight" response — the part activated by stress.
In contrast, slow, deep breathing actually stimulates the opposing parasympathetic reaction — the one that calms us down
"The relaxation response is controlled by another set of nerves — the main nerve being the Vagus nerve. Think of a car throttling down the highway at 120 miles an hour. That's the stress response, and the Vagus nerve is the brake," says Sternberg. "When you are stressed, you have your foot on the gas, pedal to the floor. When you take slow, deep breaths, that is what is engaging the brake."
Changing Gene Expression
Harvard researcher Herbert Benson coined the term "The Relaxation Response" in 1975 with a book of the same name. In it, Benson used scientific research to show that short periods of meditation, using breathing as a focus, could alter the body's stress response.
More From NPR In his new book, Relaxation Revolution, Benson claims his research shows that breathing can even change the expression of genes. He says that by using your breath, you can alter the basic activity of your cells with your mind.
"It does away with the whole mind-body separation," Benson says. "Here you can use the mind to change the body, and the genes we're changing were the very genes acting in an opposite fashion when people are under stress."
Of course, breathing is not the answer to every medical problem. But Benson and others agree: The breath isn't something Western medicine should blow off. It's a powerful tool for influencing individual health and well-being. And the best part is all the ingredients are free and literally right under your nose.
by Gretchen Cuda
December 06, 201012:01 AM
Patients with chronic diseases at the Cleveland Clinic learn to manage their pain using yoga and breathing exercises.
Courtesy of the Center for Art & Photography at Cleveland Clinic There are plenty of ways to relieve stress — exercise, a long soak in a hot bath, or even a massage. But believe it or not, something you're doing right now, probably without even thinking about it, is a proven stress reliever: breathing.
As it turns out, deep breathing is not only relaxing, it's been scientifically proven to affect the heart, the brain, digestion, the immune system — and maybe even the expression of genes.
Mladen Golubic, a physician in the Cleveland Clinic's Center for Integrative Medicine, says that breathing can have a profound impact on our physiology and our health.
"You can influence asthma; you can influence chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; you can influence heart failure," Golubic says. "There are studies that show that people who practice breathing exercises and have those conditions — they benefit."
He's talking about modern science, but these techniques are not new. In India, breath work called pranayama is a regular part of yoga practice. Yoga practitioners have used pranayama, which literally means control of the life force, as a tool for affecting both the mind and body for thousands of years.
Take A Breath
Judi Bar teaches yoga to patients with chronic diseases at the Cleveland Clinic. Bar uses yoga and modifications of traditional yoga breathing exercises as a way to help them manage their pain and disease.
What Happens In The Body When We're Stressed? The physiological stress response is actually designed to be an asset. It speeds the heart rate and diverts blood away from the gut and to the muscles so we can run away. It constricts the pupils of our eyes so we can focus on our attacker. It dilates the bronchi of the lungs to increase blood oxygenation, and converts energy stored in the liver into fuel for strength and stamina. In short, it keeps us safe, says Esther Sternberg, physician and author of several books on stress and healing.
It's in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which makes a hormone called CRH, or corticotropin-releasing hormone. Sternberg says that when you are stressed, you are bathing yourself in a whole soup of other nerve chemicals and hormones. But if they hang around too long, those same nerve chemicals and hormones can impair the immune system.
Eventually, stress hormones make the adrenal glands release another hormone called cortisol. Cortisone, which is the drug form of the hormone cortisol, is one of the most powerful anti-inflammatory drugs available.
"What's happening when you're stressed is that your own body is giving itself multiple shots of that anti-inflammatory hormone, and so that tunes down your immune system's ability to do its job to fight infection," Sternberg says.
— Gretchen Cuda
"Our breaths will either wake us up or energize us. It will relax us, or it will just balance us," Bar says.
She demonstrates a "firebreath."
"So, at first we pant like a little doggy, and then we close our mouth, and then the nostril breath starts right after that. OK, here we go," she says.
Bar then begins to pant, first with an open mouth and then through the nose. It almost makes you feel lightheaded just watching. Afterward, she says she feels a little dizzy but energized enough to run around the block a couple of times.
Putting On The Brake
Research has shown that breathing exercises like these can have immediate effects by altering the pH of the blood, or changing blood pressure.
But more importantly, they can be used as a method to train the body's reaction to stressful situations and dampen the production of harmful stress hormones. Esther Sternberg is a physician, author of several books on stress and healing, and researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health. She says rapid breathing is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system. It's part of the "fight or flight" response — the part activated by stress.
In contrast, slow, deep breathing actually stimulates the opposing parasympathetic reaction — the one that calms us down
"The relaxation response is controlled by another set of nerves — the main nerve being the Vagus nerve. Think of a car throttling down the highway at 120 miles an hour. That's the stress response, and the Vagus nerve is the brake," says Sternberg. "When you are stressed, you have your foot on the gas, pedal to the floor. When you take slow, deep breaths, that is what is engaging the brake."
Changing Gene Expression
Harvard researcher Herbert Benson coined the term "The Relaxation Response" in 1975 with a book of the same name. In it, Benson used scientific research to show that short periods of meditation, using breathing as a focus, could alter the body's stress response.
More From NPR In his new book, Relaxation Revolution, Benson claims his research shows that breathing can even change the expression of genes. He says that by using your breath, you can alter the basic activity of your cells with your mind.
"It does away with the whole mind-body separation," Benson says. "Here you can use the mind to change the body, and the genes we're changing were the very genes acting in an opposite fashion when people are under stress."
Of course, breathing is not the answer to every medical problem. But Benson and others agree: The breath isn't something Western medicine should blow off. It's a powerful tool for influencing individual health and well-being. And the best part is all the ingredients are free and literally right under your nose.
After Earth Will Smith tries to coach his son into becoming an action hero. By Dana Stevens|Posted Friday, May 31, 2013, at 7:05 AM
In the future—at least the one imagined in After Earth, the M. Night Shyamalan sci-fi adventure conceived by Will Smith, who also stars opposite his 14-year-old son, Jaden—our planet will be evacuated after environmental degradation has rendered it unfit to support human life. Those humans who survive will settle on a distant, arid planet called Nova Prime, where all architecture is modeled after the Eero Saarinen terminal at Kennedy Airport, where all garments and surfaces are dominated by a curious honeycomb pattern, and where we eat our meals with implements that resemble three Lucite chopsticks joined at one end.
That’s about as much detail as Shyamalan and his co-screenwriter, Gary Whitta, care to provide about the culture of the colonized planet on which their tale begins. Really, After Earth is barely science fiction at all. The film’s vision of a ravaged post-human Earth is less a jumping-off point for speculation about our collective future than it is an excuse to strand the two main characters, the magnificently named General Cypher Raige (Will Smith) and his son Kitai (Jaden Smith) on an otherwise abandoned planet Earth, where the spaceship they were flying on a routine mission has been forced to make a crash landing. Everyone but the two tough-as-nails Raiges is killed, and Cypher’s legs are both broken (“one of them very badly,” he informs his son, in a tone flinty enough to imply a compound fracture amounts to a minor hassle). It’s up to the inexperienced but arrogant Kitai to make the 100-kilometer trek to the wreckage of the ship’s tail, where there’s a device that can send up an SOS signal to their home planet. (Basically, this is the next-millennium equivalent of those safety flares your dad kept in the car trunk.)
Once you accept the elemental simplicity of After Earth’s plot—it’s a Joseph Campbell hero’s journey straight down the line—you can stop resenting the movie for all the things it’s not (a rollicking summer actioner, a typical Shyamalan twist-based narrative). There’s a compelling creepiness to this quasi-mythical quest tale about a boy who must symbolically kill his father in order to save both their lives. Many summer action movies use the macho one-upmanship between fathers and sons as subplot or subtext; here, it’s both plot and text. And the fact that the battling Raiges (!) are played by a real-life father-and-son pair—not to mention such a powerful, famous, and publicly eccentric one—only intensifies After Earth’s allegorical weirdness.
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. The movie’s structure is as simple as a board game: Kitai must traverse a preselected path between their crash site and the tail, avoiding obstacles along the way. These obstacles include super-predators who have evolved in ways dangerous to humans (a pack of slavering leopard-like hyenas, a bird of prey roughly the size of a jeep); an insectoid alien that can smell human fear; and extreme weather conditions (for reasons not well explained, the Earth freezes over completely every night, so Kitai can survive only by locating geothermal pockets of warmth). For most of his journey, the boy is accompanied virtually by his dad’s voice and face on his naviband, a device he wears on a cuff around his arm. This paternal Panopticon, augmented by another camera on Kitai’s back and still more in the air, enables Cypher to observe every last detail of his son’s behavior. When Kitai lies about how many oxygenated breathing capsules he has left (he’s broken some in a fall), Raige père makes him put his money where his mouth is and display the remaining capsules on screen. I’m not sure whether Shyamalan intended this middle section to be a commentary on parental surveillance in the age of Facebook, but I can imagine how those cumulative busted-by-dad moments (and young Kitai’s eventual act of rebellion) might resonate with teenage viewers.
In the last half-hour, after Kitai slips the bounds of his father’s tech-assisted overparenting, the movie gives full voice to its animating philosophy, which resides somewhere at the convergence point of Life of Pi, Dianetics, and Stuart Smalley’s daily affirmations. Fear is not real; be in the now; you had the power in you all along. In the climactic scene, cut off from communication with Cypher, Kitai performs a kind of channeling act in which his father’s voice, now internalized as his own common sense, talks him toward a solution which I won’t detail except to say that it involves some of the most triumphantly phallic use of technology since Luke Skywalker first brandished a lightsaber. Kitai’s dad-assisted apotheosis serves as an almost too-precise metaphor for what’s been happening the whole movie, with the hardworking but less than mesmerizing Jaden Smith standing in as proxy action hero for his sacrificially self-sidelined father. In his defense, the kid is saddled with a task that even a more experienced actor might have trouble pulling off: He must carry an entire action movie on his slender shoulders, given little more to act opposite than a succession of green-screen predators. Even with his charismatic dad in his earpiece calling the shots, Jaden can’t turn himself into a movie star by sheer force of Will.