The first of Steiner's seven life-processes: the rhythmic exchange by which every living organism takes the outer world in and gives itself back to it.
The breathing process is the first and most outward of the seven life-processes Rudolf Steiner identified in 1916. It is the living rhythm through which an organism and the world around it keep exchanging substance, air drawn in from without and perpetually renewed within. Steiner placed it at the head of the sevenfold life that flows through the human senses, ahead of warming and nourishing, because no living thing can stand apart from this breathing relationship with its surroundings.
The Breathing Process in Anthroposophy is the first of the seven life-processes Rudolf Steiner described, the rhythmic exchange through which every living organism enters into relationship with the external world. In The Riddle of Humanity (GA 170, 1916), Steiner places breathing at the head of the sevenfold life that pulses through the twelve sense-zones, calling it a manifestation of life necessary to all living things. It is the most outward of the life-processes: air taken in from without is perpetually renewed within, and its benefit flows to every sense. Borne primarily by the etheric body and ordered through the rhythmic system, breathing is not merely the lung's chemistry but the continuous in-and-out by which inner and outer belong together, air outside and air within. In anthroposophic medicine it is read as a rhythmic mediator between the nerve-sense pole and the metabolic-limb pole of the human being.
In Steiner's Own Words
First of all there is breathing, a manifestation of life necessary to all living things. Every living organism must enter into a breathing relationship with the external world. Today I cannot go into the details of how this differs for animals, plants and human beings, but will only point out that every living thing must have its way of breathing. The breathing of a human being is perpetually being renewed by what he takes in from the outer world, and this benefits all the regions associated with the senses.
What it Means Today
Steiner's placing of breathing at the head of the life-processes became, after his death, the seed of a whole physiology in anthroposophic medicine. The decisive move was to read breathing not as a lung function alone but as the clearest expression of the rhythmic system, the middle region of the human being that mediates between the cool, form-giving nerve-sense pole in the head and the warm, dissolving metabolic-limb pole below. Breath and heartbeat hold these two poles in a moving balance, roughly four pulse-beats to each breath. Clinicians treat that balance as something that can fall ill and be healed.
You can see this worked out at the Filderklinik in Filderstadt-Bonlanden, an anthroposophic hospital founded in 1975 by the Mahle family, where the rhythmic system is approached therapeutically through rhythmic massage in the Wegman and Hauschka lineage, warmth applications, and curative eurythmy. The shared assumption is the one Steiner names in GA 170: that the in-breath and out-breath are a true exchange between organism and world, not a closed mechanical pump. Where a sleepless or anxious patient is breathing too far toward the waking, nerve-sense pole, the therapeutic aim is to restore the rhythm, to let the out-breath carry the person back toward warmth and sleep. The breathing process, first of the seven, is read here as the place where soul and life most visibly meet.
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