The Breath We Share collects essays, poems, scores, and performance writing from more than fifty contributors, including some of the somatic practitioners and thinkers I most love and respect like Nita Little and Jamie McHugh. It comes from art.earth Books. My chapter is called Vatarakta: The Wind That Corrupts the Blood, and it reads the Anthropocene through a disease the Ayurvedic texts named two thousand years ago: wind and blood obstructing each other.
Here is a little of it.
The wind is a sensation first, thickening in the small joints of the feet, heat that is not quite heat, mobile and throbbing pain. This is how vatarakta begins, with the wind entering where it should not be, finding blood already too burnt out to receive it and keep flowing. The two meet, and each makes the other worse. The classical texts call this meeting avarana: obstruction. One force blocks another, the blocked force intensifies, the intensification blocks further, the snake eats its tail. […]
Planetary Vatarakta means that Vayu’s madness has poisoned the circulation of the waters and fires. Vayu, the air, the spirits of the winds, the many-faced force of movement itself in the world and in your body, synonym of Vata dosha. The shared breath this book names has become pathogenic through avarana, obstruction, rather than through contamination alone. We are living inside a planetary pathology whose name and logic were written down two millennia ago; the Anthropocene is a case of Vatarakta. […]
Vatarakta can be managed. The superficial form responds to treatment. The deep form, once established in bone and marrow, can be slowed but not cured. The treatment continues for life. The patient learns to live with channels that have silted, to avoid what aggravates, to support what restores movement. Healing is possible, in restoring flow within the limits of accumulated damage. The body will not be what it was, and it can still navigate. […]
art.earth Books is non-profit, and everyone who contributed did so unpaid. Pre-ordering is what funds the print run. If you want the book, order it now, at the pre-publication price through November 30. Publication is set for December 2026.