I was walking out of my 80-year-old mother’s house the other day when she stopped me. “Wait, I found something I want to show you,” she said. She disappeared for a few seconds and emerged with a small, old book: Health and Beauty for Women by Margaret Josephine Blair. I opened it to the title page and saw “COPYRIGHT 1923.”

“Oh my,” I said, eyebrows raised. I’ve seen enough horrible examples of the advice women received a century ago to assume the worst. My mom laughed knowingly but then said the book surprisingly had some solid stuff in it. “Just take a look,” she said.

So I took the book home and read it in one sitting. She was right. A lot of the advice in it could have been given by a modern health influencer.

The mind-body connection, in so many words

Throughout the book, Blair pointed out that the mind and body are connected and that each affects the other. “So perfect is the team work between mind and body that neither is independent of the other,” she wrote.

She claimed that if you tell yourself you hate to get up in the morning or that you can’t have a normal bowel movement without a laxative, the body will respond accordingly. She also said that neglecting the body would have “a depressing influence upon the mind of its unfortunate tenant.”

Blair suggested enlisting the help of the imagination and subconscious in achieving optimal health.

“My own way of enlisting the help of the subconscious is to sit or stand quietly alone,” she wrote. “I drop my hands at my sides and relax, breathing deeply. Sometimes, to rid my mind of strain and worry, I hum mentally an old melody.” She suggested readers “take a few minutes several times a day or at night for this communion with your higher self.”

She was basically describing the “mind-body connection” and using meditation as a health tool.

‘Breathwork’ circa 1923

There’s a lot of flashy wellness marketing around “breathwork” these days. Specific breathing techniques are marketed as helping with all sorts of ailments, but conscious breathing is hardly a new trend. We can trace breathwork back centuries, if not millennia.

Blair dedicated many pages to describing how most women don’t breathe deeply enough to “keep........

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