Donald Matthews – författare

Mindful Breathing is a metacognitive strategy for increasing self awareness, regulating cognition, attention and emotions, cultivating wellness and reducing stress. It combines a deep breathing technique with mindfulness that increases our ability to monitor our cognition and regulate our attention and emotions. Mindful breathing increases our resilience to respond to stressful situations and to regulate our responses to them. Using a breathing technique called "diaphragmatic breathing" we can reteach our bodies to slow down and work more efficiently in stressful situations. It also promotes a healthful mindset so we can cope with daily stressors more effectively.

Without an understanding of the conflicts of Mahler's youth one cannot truly appreciate the impulses behind the major symphonies and song cycles of his later years.Available again for a new generation of Mahlerians, Donald Mitchell's famous study of the composer's early life and music was greeted as a major advance on its first appearance in 1958. Revised and updated in the early 1980s, thispaperback edition includes a new introduction by the author to bring this classic work once again to the forefront of Mahler studies.From his birth in Bohemia, then part of the mighty Austro-Hungarian empire, to a surveyof his early works, many now lost, Gustav Mahler: The Early Years forms an indispensable prelude to the period of the great compositions. The conflicts which came to mark Mahler's music and personality had their beginningsin his childhood and youth. Without understanding the territorial, social and familial conflicts of this time one cannot truly appreciate the impulses behind the major symphonies and song cycles of his later years.DONALD MITCHELL was born in 1925. Two composers have been central to his writings on music, Gustav Mahler and Benjamin Britten. His three studies of Mahler, The Early Years (1958), The Wunderhorn Years (1975), and Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death (1985), are among the enduring monuments of postwar Mahler literature. He was founder Professor of Music at the University of Sussex (1971-76), was visiting Professor atKing's College, London, and is currently a visiting Professor at the Universities of Sussex and York.