The library, with every entry weighed honestly.

Zaccaro, A. et al. How breath-control can change your life: a systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Front. Hum. Neurosci. (2018).

Systematic review: slow breathing shifts autonomic balance toward parasympathetic activity, with measurable effects on heart rate variability and reported calm. The strongest ground the method stands on.

Kox, M. et al. Voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system and attenuation of the innate immune response in humans. PNAS 111(20) (2014).

Trained breathing and cold exposure measurably altered adrenaline release and the inflammatory response to an endotoxin challenge. Voluntary influence over 'automatic' systems is real and quantified.

Rizzolatti, G. & Craighero, L. The mirror-neuron system. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 27 (2004).

The neural basis for why a practitioner's state is contagious: observing an action activates much of the circuitry of performing it. Relevant to every session that happens between two nervous systems.

Raichle, M. E. The brain's default mode network. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 38 (2015).

The network that runs when attention isn't directed outward — self-referential thought, mind-wandering, rumination. Quieting it is much of what meditation is doing.

Strack, F. et al. Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: a nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 54(5) (1988).

Facial expression feeds back into felt emotion — the body is not only reporting state, it is setting it. Note that later replications have been mixed, which is itself worth knowing.

Inaba, H. et al. Ultraweak photon emission from human body — measurement and spectral characteristics. T. SICE, Vol. E-1, No. 1 (2001).

Measured the extremely faint light emitted by blood plasma, urine, sputum, saliva, breath, and skin, with intensities and spectral peaks for each. Living tissue does emit photons; what that emission means clinically is a separate and open question.

Kobayashi, M. et al. Imaging of ultraweak spontaneous photon emission from human body. (Biophoton imaging literature.)

Photon emission from the body can be imaged and varies over the day and with metabolic state. Interesting; far from a diagnostic tool.

Zefirov, A. L. et al. Molecular vibration timescales of DNA base pairs (G–C ≈ 3.3 ps, A–T ≈ 2.8 ps, strand ≈ 50 ps).

DNA has characteristic vibrational timescales — that part is measured physics. Whether that vibration can be intentionally tuned by sound is a genuinely open question, one I find worth exploring further rather than one this measurement has already answered.

Soh, K.-S. Bonghan circulatory system as an extension of acupuncture meridians. J. Acupunct. Meridian Stud. 2(2) (2009).

Reports threadlike structures inside vessels and on organ surfaces, proposed as an anatomical basis for meridians — a genuinely exciting possibility if it holds up. Independent replication is still limited and the mainstream anatomical status remains unsettled, so I hold this as an open question worth exploring further, not yet a settled finding.

Maslow, A. H. A theory of human motivation. Psychol. Rev. 50(4) (1943), and later formulations including self-transcendence.

A framework, not an experiment — and a useful one for locating where a person's attention currently lives. The later transcendence tier is where this work mostly operates.

Fludd, R. Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica (1617–21); Kircher, A. Mundus Subterraneus (1665).

Early modern diagrams of the body as microcosm of the cosmos. Historical source material for how the West once thought about the body — read as intellectual history, not as evidence.

Traditional Chinese Medicine five-element (五行) correspondences; classical chakra–endocrine mappings.

Systematic, internally coherent maps built from centuries of observation. Where they align with known anatomy I say so; where they don't, I say that too.