Workshops - Breath Symposium 2020 - Inhale / Exhale / Inspire

Week Four

During this workshop you will be introduced to the Courage Child Protection Toolkit and Community Engagement Process. This includes understanding the disempowering nature of child protection challenges, and the equally empowering nature of solving them at a community level. Delegates will be taken through a range of exercises with supporting literature and toolkit elements which will assist them in:

Defining a community vision for children
Identifying, understanding, and prioritising child protection challenges
Moving from disempowered to empowered child protection
Understanding child protection and safeguarding processes
Identifying and working with our community child protection partners
From rights, to responsibilities to meaningful behaviour change
Developing an empowered action plan

Week Three

Thursday, November 5, 2020

Breathing Back to The Future with Oxygen Advantage

Billy Carr

Born in 1960 in a rural part of County Cork in Ireland. A new, baby breathing to perfection. Throughout the passing years mystery illnesses started to be more common. Causes of the diseases always seemed hard to establish and funding of research was vital. Modern medicine made significant progress with development. Did these changes affect prevention? 1995 to 2016 is potentially the period where my breathing changed. Mystery illnesses continued to increase. In 2007 I was diagnosed with sarcoidosis and introduced to a daily routine of medication. When hit with a second health issue in 2016 the mind wonders what is to follow. Since the beginning of 2016 has been a time of huge personal change and education for me. Oxygen Advantage played a central role ridding me of old beliefs and replacing with new. Who is this new person that has taken over my body and thinks has he found a way to reverse the body’s illnesses? It is interesting to examine what breathing is doing for body and mind including potential for disease reversal. Everything in moderation is a statement that never grows old.

Week Three

Wednesday, November 4, 2020

Music and Digital Storytelling as both Methods and Outputs for Research and Action on Air Pollution

Cressida Bowyer et al.

Air pollution is a growing threat to health globally, particularly in urban areas. The inspiration and expiration of polluted air not only can cause disease, but can exacerbate existing illness. In the case of Covid-19, air pollution is thought to not only exacerbate the risk of infection, but also the severity of symptoms and mortality. In light of this global pandemic, tackling air pollution has taken on a new level of urgency and creative arts-based methods have much to offer. In this workshop, members of the AIR (Air Pollution Interdisciplinary Research) Network (https://airnetworkafrica.com/) will showcase two creative methods for both research and action: digital storytelling and music-making. Participants will get some first-hand experience co-creating a digital story online during the workshop on the topic of breath and pollution*. Examples of songs, music videos and digital stories from two projects will be shared. In the most recent Tupumue Project (https://www.lstmed.ac.uk/tupumue), creative arts-based methods were used to explore the topic of air pollution and produce audio-visual resources for awareness raising and community mobilisation. In this workshop we will outline issues of process and highlight lessons learned. We will facilitate a discussion around using music and digital storytelling as both research and community-engagement strategies.

Week Two

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Integrating dance to enrich breathing rehabilitation globally

Siân Williams

There is emerging evidence of the benefits of dance for people who are breathless in the UK and Canada. This session will summarise these benefits, based on work from the UK https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2213-2600%2820%2930309-X invite the audience to try some dance moves to gain personal experience and then to collectively consider how this might translate to their settings and cultures. Issues that we can consider are the connections between breathlessness, breathing awareness, movement, rhythm and pace; touch and what happens when we have to work remotely; the power of dance to scale up scarce interventions such as pulmonary rehabilitation; using dance to build social capital; the value of dance as a holistic intervention affecting the mind, body and spirit; “demedicalising” breathlessness without invalidating its impact and burden.

Week One

Thursday, October 22, 2020

Gateways to Presence (Mindfulness in the time of Covid)

Michal George

It is said that healing can only occur when we are able to be present where we have been absent. Mindfulness is the art of being present. And mindful breathing is one of the gateways to presence itself. This seminar will be an investigation of how the mechanisms of mindfulness inform personal transformation and wellbeing in times of stress. The session will include an exploration of the following key points:

An introduction to mindfulness
The purpose of mindfulness
The science behind the theories
The key points to practising meditation
A taste of mindfulness in practice

Week One

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

"I can't breathe," - The Triad of Pandemics Facing us in 2020

Firdose Moonda

The year 2020 lies at the intersection of a triad of pandemics that could shape societies for decades to come. The overwhelming one is the coronavirus, which, in its most aggressive form, causes respiratory difficulty and has already claimed more than a million lives. As Covid19 became a part of everyday life, a resurgence in the Black Lives Matter movement took place when after a black man was murdered in Minneapolis by asphyxiation at the hands of a white police officer, and all that happened while campaigns against gender-based violence swept through social media as women cleared their lungs and screamed “enough.” These three subjects have one overarching commonality: they show that the ability to breathe, is the ability to be. In this offering, we will look at the historical significance of breath and its connection to the self through the ancient Indian texts, including the Upaniṣads, before moving to contemporary understandings of how breathwork is used for self-regulation. In this part-theory, part-practice presentation, we will consider the breath as mechanical, spiritual and conscientising and examine how our connections to it have changed as we enter the new normal.