I did not come to breathwork through a textbook. I came to it the way most people come to practices that change their lives—through need. Through the particular kind of need that accumulates quietly across the changing seasons of a life. Through loss, disease, and transition. Through the ordinary and extraordinary pressures of leading, serving, and showing up. What I discovered in the silences of these seasons was not an escape from the waves of suffering but an anchor within them: a way of returning, breath by breath, to the God who does not change even when everything else does.
That discovery has shaped not only my personal life but my sense of what it means to care for whole human beings. As an RYT-200 certified yoga instructor and a communicator for a university whose mission is the integration of faith and learning,[1] I find myself increasingly drawn to the places where ancient spiritual wisdom and modern science illuminate each other—and to the ethical questions those convergences raise. It is precisely that kind of intersection that The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity exists to explore, and it is a deep honor to contribute to this new series celebrating LeTourneau University’s partnership with CBHD.
LeTourneau University carries in its bones a particular vision: That rigorous technical mastery and wholehearted Christian faith are not rivals but partners in the pursuit of human flourishing. R. G. LeTourneau himself—engineer, entrepreneur, and devoted follower of Christ—embodied the conviction that the sacred and the practical belong together, that the hands that build machines and the heart that kneels in prayer are not in contradiction. That same integration animates CBHD’s work at the frontier of bioethics. And it illuminates, I would argue, a striking case study in convergence: two thinkers working from entirely different starting points—Thomas Keating’s theology of Centering Prayer and James Nestor’s investigative science of the breath—arriving at remarkably similar conclusions about what human beings need in order to flourish.
The Science of Breath: A Forgotten Art
A journalist by trade, James Nestor began researching breath after attending a free-diving course in which he watched participants sink motionless to depths of one hundred feet on a single lungful of air, and surface—calm, unhurried, seemingly transformed. What followed was a decade of investigation into pulmonology, anatomy, anthropology, and the history of breathing practices across human civilizations.
His findings, published in Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (2020), are both startling and sobering.[2] Nestor documents through scientific literature and hands-on experimentation what he describes as a catastrophic decline in human respiratory health over the past several centuries. Modern humans have largely forgotten how to breathe. We breathe through our mouths rather than our noses, too quickly and too shallowly, filling only the upper lobes of our lungs while the lower, more efficient lobes go largely unused. The consequences are wide-ranging: increased anxiety, sleep disorders, cardiovascular disease, and diminished cognitive function.
The nose, Nestor explains, is not merely a passage but an organ of remarkable sophistication. Nasal breathing filters, warms, and humidifies air before it reaches the lungs. It produces nitric oxide, a molecule essential for dilating blood vessels and facilitating oxygen exchange. Nasal breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system—the rest-and-digest response—while mouth breathing tends to trigger or maintain a low-grade stress response. One of Nestor’s most striking experiments involved ten days of deliberate mouth-breathing, after which he developed sleep apnea, elevated blood pressure, and measurable cognitive impairment. Ten days of nasal breathing reversed all of it.
Beyond the nasal question, Nestor explores the science of breath rate and volume, converging on a finding that appears independently across multiple research studies: A breathing rate of approximately 5.5 breaths per minute—roughly six seconds in, six seconds out—seems to optimize heart rate variability, nervous system balance, and emotional regulation. This rate aligns with the rhythms encoded in ancient chants across religious traditions. The recitation of the Ave Maria in Catholicism, the Sanskrit om mane padme hum, and certain Zen chanting practices all produce a breathing cadence of approximately 5.5 breaths per minute. Nestor suggests this was not accidental—that ancient practitioners, through centuries of trial and careful observation, discovered what physiologists are now measuring in laboratories. What this convergence reveals, from a Christian perspective, is not that all religious paths are equivalent, but that God designed the human body with a physiology that responds to stillness and rhythmic breath—a reality that practitioners across traditions have intuited, even if they have understood it through very different theological frameworks.
This convergence between empirical science and spiritual practice is not merely interesting. It is ethically significant. It suggests that the body’s own rhythms, when honored, become a pathway to states of integration, attention, and peace that human beings across cultures have recognized as deeply good.
Thomas Keating and the Interior Silence
Father Thomas Keating (1923–2018), a Cistercian monk and one of the founders of the Centering Prayer movement, approached the breath from a different direction but arrived at a remarkably similar destination. For Keating, prayer was not primarily a matter of words addressed to God but a disposition of the whole person toward divine presence. Centering Prayer, which he developed with fellow monks Basil Pennington and William Meninger in the 1970s, is a method of contemplative prayer grounded in the Christian mystical tradition—particularly the anonymous medieval text The Cloud of Unknowing—adapted for modern practitioners.
The practice is deceptively simple. A practitioner sits quietly, chooses a sacred word as a symbol of their intention to consent to God’s presence, and returns gently to that word whenever thoughts or emotions arise. The goal is not emptiness for its own sake, but what Keating described as “the consent of the will to the presence and action of God."[3] Silence is not absence—it is attentiveness. It is the clearing away of mental noise so that a deeper reality can be received.
Breath is integral to this practice, though Keating did not always foreground it in technical terms. The settling of the body through slow, intentional breathing creates the physiological conditions for the interior stillness that Centering Prayer seeks. Keating understood, as the Christian mystical tradition has long understood, that the human person is a unity of body and soul, and that disciplines of the body shape the capacities of the spirit. The Desert Fathers and Mothers of the early church, whose insights Keating drew upon extensively, were deeply attentive to posture, breath, and bodily rhythm as vehicles of contemplative attention.
Keating’s theological anthropology deserves particular attention here, because it has direct bearing on bioethical reflection. In his framework, the human person is constituted by an innate drive toward divine union—what he called “the human condition in its deepest reality.”[4] Suffering, in Keating’s account, arises not primarily from external circumstances but from what he termed the “false self”: the constellation of survival strategies, emotional wounds, and defensive identities that accumulate through life and obscure the deeper self, made in the image of God. Crucially, for Keating, the false self is not a problem of the body acting against the spirit, or the spirit corrupted while the body remains intact. It is a distortion of the whole person—body, mind, and spirit together—shaped by the wounds of a fallen world. The false self is, in a sense, integration gone awry: the entire person organized around fear, approval, and control rather than around God. Contemplative practice does not set one part of the self against another; it invites the whole person, in all its integrated complexity, back toward its truest orientation. The purpose of contemplative practice—of silence, breath, and interior attentiveness—is the gradual dismantling of the false self and the emergence of the true self in relationship with God.
I have found this framework to be not merely theologically compelling but personally true. The breath, returned to again, and again, in silence, becomes a kind of homing signal—a way of releasing what we have clutched and being found, once more, by the One who holds us.
Where Science and Faith Converge
The conversation between Nestor’s findings and Keating’s practice is not a forced dialogue. It emerges naturally from attention to what the breath actually does in human experience.
Nestor documents what researchers call the “relaxation response,” a term coined by cardiologist Herbert Benson at Harvard in the 1970s.[5] Benson, who studied Transcendental Meditation practitioners, discovered that slow, rhythmic breathing and focused attention produced measurable physiological changes: decreased heart rate, lower blood pressure, reduced cortisol, and increased alpha brainwave activity associated with calm alertness. Benson himself noted that this response could be elicited through practices ranging from Eastern meditation to Christian contemplative prayer, including the use of sacred words or phrases—precisely the method Keating was developing at the same time.
What both traditions recognize is that the autonomic nervous system, long thought to be beyond conscious control, is in fact accessible through breathing practices. The vagus nerve—the great nerve of the parasympathetic system, running from the brainstem through the heart, lungs, and gut—is directly stimulated by slow diaphragmatic breathing. Stimulating the vagus nerve shifts the body out of fight-or-flight reactivity and into the integrated, restorative state that physiologists call “ventral vagal” tone: a state characterized by openness, social engagement, and the capacity for nuanced emotional response.
This is, in the language of neuroscience, the physiological substrate of what Keating might call “recollection,” the gathering of the scattered self into presence. It is not a reduction of the spiritual to the biological. It is rather a recognition that the human person is so constituted that bodily practices of breath and silence open into spiritual realities, and that those spiritual realities, in turn, transform the body. The two are not in competition but in mutual service. This is deeply consistent with a Christian anthropology that refuses to split the person into body and soul as if they were adversaries and instead insists on their profound unity.
Ethical Implications for Human Care
These convergences carry direct implications for those working in bioethics, medicine, and pastoral care.
First, they challenge reductive anthropologies. If breathwork and contemplative practice address the human person at multiple integrated levels simultaneously—neurological, cardiovascular, psychological, and spiritual—then any account of human health or flourishing that excludes the spiritual dimension is incomplete. The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity has long argued that human dignity is grounded in the imago Dei—the conviction that every person bears the image of God and cannot be reduced to their biological substrate. The science of breathwork provides unexpected empirical support for the intuition that human beings are oriented toward something beyond mere survival: toward integration, attentiveness, and transcendence. Our bodies, it seems, are designed for more than mere survival—they are made for flourishing.
Second, they raise questions of access and justice. Many of the most effective breathing practices are freely available. They require no medication, no expensive equipment, no specialized credentials. Yet this knowledge has been largely absent from mainstream medical education and public health messaging. This is particularly significant given that communities bearing the greatest chronic stress burdens often face compounding disadvantages—including environmental factors such as poor air quality that further compromise respiratory health. Breathing practices are not a substitute for addressing those systemic inequities, nor do they replace medical interventions; conditions like hypertension have multifactorial causes, including genetics, that require professional care. But as one accessible, low-cost tool among many, the failure to disseminate this knowledge widely is a question of justice, particularly for those who have fewest options.
Third, they invite a recovery of integrative care. Both Keating’s work and Nestor’s research point toward care models that treat the human person as a whole—body, mind, and spirit—rather than a collection of organ systems or symptom clusters. Hospital chaplaincy, pastoral counseling, and spiritually integrated psychotherapy are all arenas in which the practices described here can be offered not as alternatives to medicine but as partners with it. Bioethicists have a meaningful role in advocating for institutional structures that make this integration possible and sustainable.
Fourth, they illuminate the value of cultivated stillness. In a culture defined by noise, productivity, and constant stimulation, the practices of Centering Prayer and intentional breathwork are quietly countercultural. They insist that stillness is not waste, that silence is not absence, and that the human person requires interiority—the capacity for reflective, attentive presence to God, self, and others—in order to love and serve well. There is an ethical claim here about the conditions of flourishing—about what we owe one another and what our institutions owe the people in their care. A healthcare system that has no room for silence, for presence, for the slow breath, has implicitly adopted a diminished account of what a human person is.
The Sacred Breath
There is, at the root of both the Christian mystical tradition and the scientific inquiry into breathing, a recognition that breath is not merely mechanical. In Hebrew, the word ruach means both breath and spirit. In Greek, pneuma carries both meanings. The book of Genesis describes God breathing life into Adam—the nishmat chayyim, the breath of life, the animating gift that distinguishes the living person from inert matter. Across the world’s contemplative traditions, the breath has served as the threshold between the interior and the exterior, between the self and the world, between the human and the divine.
Thomas Keating spent fifty years teaching people to sit in silence, to breathe, and to consent to a presence greater than themselves. James Nestor spent a decade documenting what that silence and breath actually do to the human body. They work in different registers, with different vocabularies and different ultimate commitments. But they are, in a deep sense, pointing at the same reality: That the human person, when given the conditions of stillness and the simple practice of breathing well, tends toward integration, health, and something that religious traditions have always called grace.
For bioethicists and those in the church (pastors, counselors, and all who shepherd people through seasons of suffering and change committed to human dignity), and for all of us who serve institutions shaped by faith, convergence is an invitation. To take the body seriously as a site of spiritual formation. To take contemplative practice seriously as a contribution to human health and pastoral care. Pastors who understand the physiology of stress and the practice of breath may find they have more to offer a grieving or anxious congregant than another word of advice: Sometimes the most pastoral act is to slow down, to breathe, and to wait together in trust. To advocate for the conditions in which whole persons, body and soul, can flourish. And perhaps, in the midst of whatever season we find ourselves in, to simply breathe—slowly, fully, and in trust.
The breath, it turns out, is not a small thing. It may be the place where science and sanctity most naturally meet.
References
[1] The use of yoga as a physical and contemplative discipline in this context refers to its practices of posture, breath, and attentiveness—not to its theological commitments. Christians have long adapted physical practices from other contexts when doing so serves the formation of the whole person toward God. The concern that yoga constitutes a pathway to Eastern religion conflates a set of physical and respiratory practices with the belief system from which they originated. Many Christian practitioners and theologians have addressed this distinction at length; the present piece employs yoga in its role as a somatic practice, consonant with the Christian conviction that the body is a site of spiritual formation.
[2] James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (Riverhead Books, 2020).
[3] Thomas Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart (Continuum, 1986), 127.
[4] Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart, 44.
[5] Herbert Benson, with Miriam Z. Klipper, The Relaxation Response (William Morrow, 1975).