Breathing Life or Breathing Pollution?

Nobody knows the importance of clean air more than me….I am a mother of a 10 years old child who suffers from seizures from the time he was born. And the biggest reason for seizures is a lack of oxygen to the brain…

In my wellness consultations, I get dismayed by the number of small kids (as young as 2-3 years old) who were put on nebulisation due to frequent cough and cold and constant wheezing. When I was growing up, nebulisation meant “severe” asthma attack…only those people got nebulizers. Today, at most hospitals, thats the first (or second) line of treatment for kids with breathing problems. A baby born today does not have the clean slate that we once had in our childhood.

Have you seen if one person in the household falls sick, usually everyone in the family falls one after another like a domino. Ever wondered why?

Why are all these problems so common today? What is the source of all these problems?

We treat our water and have only purfiied water, we have understood that water borne germs can significantly affect our health. We take care of the chemicals/pesticides/pollutants in our food…even to the extent of switching to organic food and paying double the price.

But are we conscious of something as omnipresent as air…something as unconscious an activity as breathing? 

Have you ever felt suffocated as soon as you enter a kitchen where tadka has been done? Or someone passed by who had literally taken a bath in deodorant? Thats an exaggerated scene, but in milder version, our bodies are going through the similar phenomena throughout the day.

We breathe an average of 24000 times in a day…and our kids upto 3 times of that amount. Thats definitely more than the food that we eat and the water that we drink! Imagine if this air was not as clean and fresh as we think fresh air is while opening the doors and windows of our homes?

“Breath” in our ayurveda…is called prana. It is considered as a life-giving force.”prana" is seen as a universal energy which flows in currents in and around the body. And most of us have been caught in the last decade by the pranayam trend. We proudly spend an hour everyday in the morning doing paranyam, thinking that we are giving deeper breaths and hence more  life-giving force to ourselves. But along with all the good, we are also giving all the particulate matters, biological bacteria, virus and the volatile compounds (90% of the materials used in our homes today emit VOCs, including paint, furniture, home furnishings….)

With cleaner air, I have seen greatly reduced colds, bronchitis, asthma, and other respiratory problems. Light sleepers have started to experience much deeper sleep and restfullness. Problems that were once untreatable, suddenly decline in frequency and intensity and eventually vanish altogether - almost as if magically. The examples are just too many to ignore. 

So, if you had never thought about the air around, you might want to start minding that business now. A good place to start is with a high quality air filter that you use for 8-10 hours during sleep time (choosing the right one is another topic for another day in another blog).