Modern Wisdom - #282 - Dylan Werner - How To Breathe Like A Yogi

Episode Date: February 13, 2021

Dylan Werner is a yoga teacher and an author. Breathing is one of the few ways we can directly interact with how our physiology is operating, and yet no one ever taught us how to do it. Dylan Werner is one of the world's best known yoga teachers and today he gives us a breakdown of not only how the breath can impact our mood and performance but also explains the biology of how our breathing works, how you can implement breathwork into your daily routine, plus he guides us through an entire breathwork sequence at the end of the episode. Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff:   Buy The Illuminated Breath - https://amzn.to/2N9aNu2  Follow Dylan on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/dylanwerneryoga  Check out Dylan's Website - https://www.dylanwerneryoga.com  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Dylan Werner. Yoga teacher, extraordinaire and an author. Breathing is one of the few ways that we can directly interact with how our physiology is operating. And yet, no one ever actually taught us how to do it. Dylan is one of the world's best known yoga teachers. And today he gives us a breakdown not only how the breath can impact our mood and our performance, but also explains the biology of how breathing works, how you can implement breath work into your daily routine, and you guide us through an entire breath work sequence at the end of the episode. Despite what Dylan says, please do not do it if you're operating heavy machinery

or driving a car because I'm not liable for you doing weird breath work and crashing. But for now, it's time to learn how to breathe like a yogi with Dylan Werner. You're the one who welcome the show. Thanks, thanks for having me. Pleasure to have you here, man. How's Bali treating you? What are you getting up to up there? It's good.

I was actually in London through the whole lockdown. I left Bali to go to London to teach, and that's when the whole pandemic kind of started. Got stuck there, got in lockdown. I wrote a book, which I know we're going to talk about. Yeah, so then since then, I've been kind of just trying to get back here, but it's been great. It's like the whole pandemic just grazed, Bolly. So you see little signs of COVID here and there. Like you got to get your temperature taken

when you go into a restaurant and the staff wears masks but no one else does, it doesn't really make sense. It's more just like people follow rules because of rules but they're not really in place. But yeah, Bolly's an amazing place to be right now. So is there no public masking when you're walking about on the street? No, it should be.

It just feels like a different world now. Yeah, I know when I watch the news and I talk to my friends back in the States or my friends in Europe, it's like, it is totally different. I spent, I did experience most of that before getting back here in October. So I'm well aware of what the new normal is and tell you what, it's good to be here right now. Where are you practicing your yoga in Chenggu?

Where am I? Where are you practicing it in Chenggu? Are you going to a studio? Oh, you look right behind me, like right there, that little space behind me on that floor. That's that's where I practice. So you're not going to, obviously, there's a lot of different yoga studios out there, nice places with bamboo leaves and everyone in Luthe Leman and you're not bothering to venture. There's some beautiful studios here on Saturdays I go to Kierten, which is like yoga music. So basically people get together and someone plays harmonium and someone plays a drama or something and you sing mantras and Kierten's. Yeah. It's kind of it.

It's called bakti yoga. bakti means the yoga devotion. And so it's a different, different sector, different aspect. It's good though. Yeah. I didn't realize until reading your book that there was a philosophy behind yoga. I knew that it was to do with embodied practice

and different levels of awakening and stuff like that, but I didn't realize that there was a full philosophy behind it. Can you tell us a bit about that? The full philosophy of yoga. There's a lot of philosophy in yoga and it really depends on what you're talking about. I think what most people are familiar with as far as the fundamental philosophy of yoga would be the yoga sutras and potentially as eight limbs, which is essentially the path

of yoga towards enlightenment. Yeah, there's a lot of different ways you could look at it or interpret it. And I think just like religion, people take the text and they kind of interpret it to make sense of their lives. And yoga philosophy is really kind of the same way, but it's a guide just basically to understand your life and how to live a more harmonious life like any philosophy is. And I think that's really one of the big differences with yoga compared to other kinds of fitness. I mean, yoga is an interesting word in and of itself because like all words we give

words meaning and we define them to be what it is. And so like I know when I came into yoga, my definition for the word yoga was very different than what it is now. It was like what I think the vast majority of people think of yoga, it's stretching and sun salutations or maybe ash tango or some sort of like physical calisthenic type movement.

And that is definitely what yoga is, but it's also the way that you interact, the way that you think, the way that you breathe. And there's the way that you conduct yourself. I don't know, for me, it's the word that encompasses understanding your fundamental truth, which I'm not going to tell you what your fundamental truth is, everyone's is like that's the journey. It's like understanding that of itself.

We're all living a subjective experience. We all see the world through our eyes. I know for a long time, I thought the world might kind of revolve around me, right? It's like you become self-centered and not even in a negative way. It's just you are the center of yourself. And that's how you see things. And I think as you become more mindful and more aware of reality or the truth of reality you see that your perspective is simply that it's your perspective and no one else shares your perspective.

And therefore you can't understand anyone else's perspective because you can only understand their perspective from your space. And Nyoga shows you kind of where you fit into that whole not being separate, but more of being a part of it. And I think I have one of my favorite teachers, his name is Shiva Das. He talks about what the true meaning of yoga is and it's not about trying to be happier, be fit or anything, or even like the freedom from suffering, but it's returning back to the truth and the truth is that we're whole.

And so that's kind of like when I think of yoga, that's what I think of. And when I practice yoga, I use the common vernacular that everyone uses. Like, yeah, are you going to go to yoga? And I know what they mean is, are you going to go do awesome? And which is fine, right? Yeah, because, yeah you going to go do osama? Which is fine, right? Yeah, because yes, that is a part of it. That is definitely part of it. So I'm going to go practice osama. But yeah, and it's definitely the definition for it is changed and that's kind of just like the start of the philosophy. I mean, we could spend the

whole time talking about different aspects of philosophy of yoga. We can talk about Maya, how we see everything as illusion. We can talk about the Yamas and the Niyamas and conducts with yourself. We can talk about what enlightenment is and spirituality and all that. But I think at the end of the day, everybody is going to find what those words mean to them, and define those words, and those those things significance and and essentially that's what all philosophy is. It's finding the significance. Do you think that a lot of people who are practicing yoga and missing out on that side have been to a number of yoga practices, some where you are in Changu and also local ones in the UK. And although there is a talk of something

broader than the movements themselves, kind of on the surface, connect to the breath, connect to yourself, like, you know, the meditative practice sort of words, doesn't ever really seem to leave them at. Yeah, I mean, that's... I don't want to really make that judgment towards anyone else for their journey, because there are definitely some people that, what's important is that whatever you're doing, you're getting something from it.

And you're going to take what you need at that time. For me, I ended up taking a lot more of the philosophical part or the quote unquote spiritual part from yoga because that's what I needed. I was so lost in my life. I am and always have been kind of an adrenaline junk here, whatever. If they're, I love to surf, rock climb. I was in the skydiving. I've, you know, snowboarding, whatever it was like fun and fast.

I enjoyed, but I did it, not, I did it because I loved it, but there's also like, there was something that I realized was missing in my life, or I didn't know it was missing in my life, but I was getting it through those things. And it was something that was as simple as being present. And we talk about this all the time in yoga. And even like as yoga is now the philosophy of yoga is seeping out into other, you know, I know you do a lot of the biohacking stuff and you're into that and this mindfulness

and meditation. And that really has strong roots in yoga, but not only in yoga. So we see these things all starting to interconnect and seep into each other. But I needed to figure out what it was to be here, and I didn't know I needed that. All I knew was that I thought my life would be better in the future or the past. And for me, it was generally the future. There's kind of, there's not like to kind of put people into like a general place. Like there's some people, especially older people, they, they reminisce of the past. And so they tend to live in the past. And if they're older, there's more past for

them than there is future. Right. So they tend to be there. If you're a little bit younger, you might live more in the future because you're aspects and your goals and the prospect of of your life being better lives in the future. And so you miss out what it is to actually live. And doing those extreme things, I was for the first time living, and as first time being, like the, the, in yoga, I talk about this almost every podcast because I think it's such such an important thing, but the word sought, the truth, which means like unchanging, right? Everything in the world is changing, everything in the universe is continuously changing. Everything in the world is changing. Everything in the universe is continuously changing. There's actually an epic YouTube video that shows the history of the universe and it goes in the trillions and trillions and trillions of years and it's done to this like cool

thing. But it shows basically the end of all things when all the final star burns out. That's a crazy thing to think about. At one point in the future, the last sun will use up all of its energy and there'll be no light in existence. And so if we could, you know, like the whole universe will cease and then there'll be the cooling and everything will come to absolute zero and then there'll be no movement

and then time becomes completely irrelevant. There's going to be a point where time no longer exists because there's nothing moving for time, there's nothing to experience it. So, I know we're getting way off into a tangent here, but there's one thing that at least we could experience now because to live is to experience. And that's what life is.

Death is non-experience. The only thing that separates those two. We know what experience is. So we tend to try to hold on to that. And we're afraid of the non-experience because we don't understand that, even though you can't experience non-experience, it's just there. But the truth, the unchanging truth, is this present moment. It's the window that looks out into the changing world that never changes itself.

It's like sitting on a train and you're just going down and you look and you see everything pass, everything passes through that window, and that's essentially what your life is. like sitting on a train and you're just going down and you look and you see everything pass while everything passes through that window and that's essentially what your life is. And if you, you know, if you turn your head, then you miss actually what's going on. So, I don't know, yeah, that's as far as people getting there, I didn't think I would get there. I got there because I needed to get there. And I think the more people that practice it, practice yoga, because yoga is really, I think that whole, like, focusing on the breath and the body and the thoughts, that's all that is, is connecting those things together.

We're used to living in this world where the mind and the body are two different things, and we think that they're separate. And we think because I'm the one looking, because I'm from my point of view that everything else is not me. And that's just the perspective of things. It's like the leaves on a tree thinking that they're not the tree. And so, yeah, I don't know where I'm going with this, but, um, yeah, so we're in yoga.

We come into that class and we start to move into our body. We start to actually move into our breath a little bit deeper and just, and we're, and we start to understand a little bit more of what being means because all that meaning comes from intention. And that was a real difference from coming into the yoga and doing extreme sports. Like in extreme sports, I was brought to the present moment but without intention. And because I didn't have the intention, I didn't last a very long. With yoga, it wasn't the fact that I was practicing yoga, but it was the fact that there was an intention placed upon that.

That could be a definition of yoga. If you do anything with it, intention, that could be yoga. I don't know. I think it's more helpful to find the things that yoga is than to try to find the things that yoga isn't. There's, I've spent too much time trying to defend what yoga is when it needs no defense. And if people listening, if you're out there trying to find out what yoga isn't,

it's not gonna help you in your journey towards anything. Yeah, my thoughts, I don't know. I had this conversation with Paul Bloom, who is a psychologist and philosopher from Yale, I think. And he quoted this dominatrix talking about why people are into BDSM and hardcore sex. And he arrived at it in the same way as why people do extreme sports and why people do scary things. This quote from this dominatrix is nothing captures attention like a whip. And the point is that if someone slaps you in the face really, really hard for one to

five seconds after that, you're not thinking of anything. The mind is completely blank, but you are there. You are in the moment. And I think that the people that chase extreme sport are looking for that same presence. You can't, if you're base jumping or snowboarding or rock climbing, and you do allow the mind to drift, the implications are incredibly grave. You might die. Yeah, they can be. And I could take that to kind of play a little, to maybe devil's advocate or, or I completely agree with that.

But if that person continues to slap you in the face for the next, like, 12 hours, at some point in time, you're going to start thinking about something else or you're going to try to disassociate with that experience. You know, so it's, you can only, to start thinking about something else or you're going to try to disassociate without experience.

You know, so it's... You can only... Outside stimuli, whatever they are, that it's eventually... and that's what I noticed with skydiving, that after a certain number of jumps that I was thinking about the next jump, rather than enjoying the jump that I was on. Is that part of the usefulness of yoga that you are always in control, that you do have to have this intentionality, that you are going into it and that whatever happens is down to you, whatever doesn't happen is down to you. There aren't any other than gravity, there aren't really very many external stimulus that are acting on you.

Is that why it's forcing you to connect that mind, body, breath? I wanna say, I don't know. I mean, that's a really good question to kind of explore into. I just, I think it's kind of different for everybody. You've been working on the breath a lot recently though. How can you decided to focus so much on that and a little bit less on yoga when writing a book? It's not that it's something that was the recent. I think people, when they see me or the people that follow me

and in my practice, they really just see the physical side of it because that's the easiest thing to show. And if I do like to write a lot, and since I started my social media, a big part of what goes into my post is writing about philosophy or writing about the thoughts, even if it's just like a simple line or something, trying to provoke some sort of thought into someone else, so that maybe start a conversation or start a person starts a conversation with themselves or someone else. But always in my practice, since I started yoga was a breathing aspect.

I've learned pranayama from it. And I talk about this in my book, in the beginning, the book of like, of coming into pranayama and really not understanding what it was for other than I was supposed to do it. All right. And I think a lot of people that practice breath work, they just know that they're supposed to do it. We know that we're supposed to breathe. We have to. We have no choice.

People that start, people are more into the biohacking stuff, people that are taping their mouth at night because they know I'm supposed to breathe through my nose and I'm supposed to breathe less. They get that part of it, but there is a much greater aspect to the practice other than just breathing right or breathing less. And that is that everything energetically, physically, emotionally is linked to the breath. And because it's linked to the breath, the breath has some control over it. So essentially, that you could control most every aspect of your life by learning how to control the breath, how the breath works. And you could, what would I do mostly in my breath practice? And this is something that I think maybe for just the past six or seven months or so My my breath practices focus almost entirely on increasing athletic performance and

Though you could do it for everything and sometimes I do other practices and stuff, but it's it's a tool It's a tool so you you pick the tool that you need and you figure out what that tool does and how to use it and how to benefit your life with it. Yeah, so I've been doing breathing and studying breathing and I've been teaching it, I've been teaching workshops and seminars on breath work. I want to say for like seven or eight years I've been doing those where I actually get quite deep into the philosophy and all that. Yeah, so it's always been a part of my practice. I had no intention really of writing a book on my first book anyways to be about breathing. I was here in Bali last year, right before I flew to London. And my publisher reached out to me. It was really kind of like a serendipitous kind of thing

because it was actually his wife that contacted me first to him or her and the owner of the publishing house, Victory Belt Publishing, they had been practicing with me online for a good period of time, and the owner of Victory Belt said that he started yoga through my classes, and it just talked to him and it kind of felt right, and I felt like he understood me a little bit, like knew me a little bit. And because I honestly didn't think I could write a book. I was like, there's no way that I can do this. And if I did, I thought my first book would be solely on like philosophy.

Like I was thinking about, I'm going to do a book on, I wanted to call it like something like unveil the Maya, like basically like removing the veil of illusion. And when I talked to him, we talked about like five or six different books and we arrived at doing this book on breathing. And one of the things I thought was like, well, this is going to be the easiest book because I've done so much work with it. And when you've spent a lot of time with something and you've taught something for a really long time, and I think that's another thing that I feel really grateful about before writing

the book is that I spent so much time teaching it that I knew exactly how the whole thing was going to come together before I even put pen to paper. Yeah. What do most people have wrong about the breath? What do they think it can or can't do that it can't or can? Well, I mean, that depends on who you're talking to or who you're asking. Like if you're asking a yogi, almost all yogis know pranayama.

Like if you've been practicing yoga for more than six months, you've at least heard of pranayama or done some sort of breath work. I think what they mostly get wrong is they don't know why that they're doing that. It's like, I mean, I could also say that, it's probably true of a lot of people

that practice the physical, awesome and stuff. They don't that it's probably true of a lot of people that practice the physical awesome and stuff They don't understand what's the purpose of triangle pose They just do it because the teacher says to do it So if you go down and you start doing a practice like one of the classic ones is called nadi showed a nā which is Alternate nostril breathing. It's really to balance you know and they'll explain this. It's to balance your Eda and your pingala energies. What does that mean? I remember the first time I did it was in my 200-hour teacher training. And I'm a very kind of scientific, very literal.

I want facts and evidence, and I want things to be cited. That's why there's citations in my book. I want to understand where this is coming from, why we're doing it, what's the benefit, and this practice of alternate nozzle breathing, you inhale through the left nostril, then you exhale through the right, inhale through the right, exhale through the left,

you're switching back and forth, but I know once you go past the septum, it just goes right into the perineas, the perineas, the perineal cavity and the sinuses, and then down the trachea into the lungs. It just goes together, and then it's won. And so I didn't understand how there is benefit or the physiological benefits. And there actually is.

There is a lot that has to do with right and left hemispheres with actually balancing those energies, but now I understand what those energies represent. There's has to do with decreasing the amount of breaths of breath regulation. So you actually are breathing less, and what that breathing less does as far as stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system and increasing dorsal bagel complex tone and slowing the heart rate and just bringing it down into like a deeper state. And I also know how I could take that practice

and change it now. And that's the other thing, it's like you're kind of given with traditionally, you're given these practices, and it's like here's this practice in the box, and you gotta keep it in the box and you can't really mess with it and you just got to do it exactly like this. And then here's this other practice and these don't really go together and then do this and it's like, okay, now we do bus three which is like a fast breathing practice and I

don't think I was ever taught why I would want to do best, or a lot of them. And even if you go and you start studying like the older, the older texts that talk about pranayama, the information that you're gonna get seems pretty, pretty like out there and for me as a spiritual yoga, yogi to say that like out there, it's like if you practice this in the way of the master exactly as taught, which is not referenced in there, because you're supposed to learn

everything directly from your guru, people that are old will be young. You're like, oh, well, that sounds pretty good, right? And it's just like, or the other thing that you get is this breathing practice. If I look online and I go, what does this breathing practice do? And I find somebody's website that wrote up about it. I want to see like a hundred different things that this one breath practice does. And it's like, does it really do all those things? What does it do the most effective? And why does it do those things? And so when I think as far as what people get wrong with the breath is not understanding the potential and then not understanding what the breath that they're doing actually does. What are the principles of good breathing than the foundational principles of it?

Like, if you want to talk about just like daily breathing, like how should I breathe normally? Well, I think at this point, most people know always breathe through your nose. I mean, the nose is a filtration system, it humidifies and it downregulates the amount of air that we breathe. It's funny because now, in COVID time time and talking about everyone wearing masks and watching especially in my once home country. I haven't lived there in a really long time, but my home country of the states, the good old America where people are like, it's my God given right to breathe and I can't breathe if I wear a mask and I don't know, I did a racist country accent there.

I don't have any, but anything against people that are from the country or the Midwest, but yeah, like the fact that you can't breathe with a mask or that wearing a mask is bad. It's actually one of the things that we, the benefits over the reasons why we want to breathe less is to increase carbon dioxide. To increase our CO2. Why would you want them? Well, the effects that CO2 has on the body. First of all, we, so if I breathe, right, the, one of the common misconceptions that people have is like, if, if I breathe a lot, if I breathe really fast, I get more oxygen, right?

Have you heard that before? Breathe more, you get more oxygen. Have you ever put your finger in like an SPO2 monitor? So SPO2 monitors, you probably have at some point, they just put it like little thing on your finger it measures your blood oxygen saturation. And it says, oh, it's like 97 to 99%. Generally, most people aren't below 95%. And the majority of

the air that you breathe out or the majority of the oxygen that you take in, you breathe the majority of it out. So you're not even utilizing most of the oxygen that you take in. And it's not at 100% usually because there is some sort of, there's a chemical or there's an exchange between the oxygen and the carbon dioxide on the cellular level. So that's always happening. If I breathe more, what happens is I start to change my pH. So I have, by breathing more, I'm not actually getting more oxygen. I'm breathing off more carbon dioxide.

So that breathing more is going to affect my sympathetic nervous system. When we see this in HRV, heart rate variability. So we know as I inhale, I stimulate the sympathetic nervous system and the heart speeds up and it becomes more regular. As I exhale, I simulate the parasympathetic nervous system, the heart slows down and it becomes more varied or irregular, which is a good thing. The more you, I'm sure, studied a bit into HRV. So we know that, we know just through that as one of the many things that the breath affects

the nervous system. So if I breathe more, I breathe faster. I get more sympathetic. The other thing is I breathe off more carbon dioxide and so that changes my blood chemistry. So I actually become more alkaline. Which we're like, oh, I want to be alkaline. And I mean, we could talk about that. I do discuss that. Why you actually don't want to be alkaline through breathing, but sometimes you do. I lose the carbon dioxide, and the other thing that happens is the oxygen bond to the hemoglobin becomes much stronger. So when I breathe in, we have the atmospheric pressure that's in the lungs, and that kind of helps push it onto the hemoglobin.

Also, the hemoglobin, it's a different shape when it lets go. So then it attach the oxygen molecules attached to the red blood cells and kind of like locks on there. And then it goes, well, there's a system that tells it to release. And that system is described through the bor effect, which you've heard of the bor effect before. In your book. In my book, yeah. Okay. So the bor effect basically states that by increasing carbon dioxide and decreasing pH, which makes it more acidic, that you decrease the affinity or the attraction of oxygen

to hemoglobin. So that allows the oxygen, and this is on the tissues and the cellular in the cells. This allows the oxygen to be released from the red blood cells and go into the cells. So then you have that exchange between oxygen and carbon dioxide. So without that, we don't really get the oxygen into the body. We need that carbon dioxide. So without that, we don't really get the oxygen into the body. So we need that carbon dioxide. We also breathe, we take our breaths based on how much carbon dioxide that we have in our body.

So there's several different breathing ways, but one of the ways is in the aortic arch. It kind of measures that. And we have also in the aortic arch, it kind of measures that, and we have also in the brain too, which that measures oxygen, but we have it measuring like how much carbon dioxide. So if my levels of carbon dioxide get high, then my body says breathe.

If they're low, it says don't breathe. It's one of the reasons why a WIM-Hoth method works out, does he breathe really fast? You don't increase your oxygen levels. In fact, you're doing the opposite. By breathing fast, you don't get the exchange of oxygen onto the cells. And one of the ways that you can just test that real quick is to hyperventilate and then feel light-headed and dizzy.

Well, the reason why you feel light-headed and dizzy is one that you change the pH. It's not that you have more oxygen because you know if you put on like 100% oxygen, you actually think clear, not less. You don't go, ooh, dizzy. But then also you continue to do that than you, because you're not getting the oxygen to the tissues at the extremities. You start to have what's called

carpal petal spasms, carpal hands, petal feet, where you start to do this, this posturing stuff. If you see it, like I was a paramedic for eight years and people that have panic attacks and hyperventilate like this. And then if you do long, long breathing, more control, the affiliate face, Vietnam, your belly, Vietnam, well, all these are effects of having low carbon dioxide.

You become hypocapnic or deficient in carbon dioxide. So when you do whim off breathing, you do this rapid fast breathing, you become hypocapnic. And so then you're able to hold the breath for a really long time because those CO2 levels have to rise back up to get to the point where you want to take a breath again. And that's why you're able to do this and you hold on the exhale, which gives you the advantage of using up more oxygen. So then once you start using up the oxygen, you're holding the breath, your CO2 levels

come back up. The oxygen levels go down and now this is where you start getting into increasing like athletic performance and all the other benefits that come from breathing less. levels go down and now this is where you start getting into increasing like athletic performance and all the other benefits that come from breathing less. And so then your bodies, we make about 2,000,000 to 2.5 million red blood cells every second. And also we lose about 2 to 2.5 million red blood cells every second. And those red blood cells live for about three to four months each. And it's a demand system.

So the body is always trying to do what it needs to do to do what it needs to do. This is like, we want to give you what you need. But if you sit on the couch and you over breathe all the time, when you get up and you try to run, what your body did is when those red blood cells died, it said, well, you know, because we're over breathing, the oxygen is staying on the red blood cells and it's coming back to the lungs. And so they're coming back with oxygen, so we don't really need that. We have too many red blood cells. Those take energy to make.

And we're making 2 million out of every second. So let's make less. And then then you go to run and you're like, then you're like, shit, I'm so winded. But if you breathe less, if you just like, so if you do cardio, that you are working towards the upper end of your cardio respiratory limit. Your heart is beating fast and metabolism is increasing. Even though you're breathing faster, you're using more oxygen than what you have. And so the body goes, oh, we need to make more red blood cells so that we can carry more. The analogy that I use, there's a lot of really good analogies, but it's like,

if you go, you've been on the tube before. So people that aren't aren't lug dinners or whatever aren't familiar with the tube or the subway or the underground or whatever, some sort of underground system. Or like in Chinese, see all these people, or Japan, I think in Japan, all these people,

like pressing in, trying to get as many people into one train car as possible. Well, this is what we're trying to do when we don't have a lot of red blood cells, right? We pack those, they can only be packed full. And so if you try to breathe more, to pack those more, it's not gonna do anything. And we already know that breathing more is, and fact, actually, when we breathe more, we're not allowing those passengers to get off, so it's like they do the whole circuit and they

come back, and there's still people on there. What we need to do is we need to add more train cars, and we need to be more efficient about getting those people off of the cars. That's what adding more red blood cells does. It adds more train cars to the system so that they're able to get more oxygen on there and then by breathing less and getting carbon dioxide levels up and being more acidic in the blood,

we're able to get the oxygen off quicker and more efficient. And so this helps with the efficiency of breathing. What, I think a really good analogy with breath is understanding kind of the same thing with diet. So we think, oh, this is how much I need to breathe. I'm breathing on demand. And if you're someone that over breathes, that's what you need to breathe. You're just. Or especially if you're breathing to the mouth. And mouth breathers, I mean, other than it's a sign of unintelligence, but also halitosis,

and all kinds of other things that come up. But if you're breathing through the mouth, you're breathing more than what you need to immediately already. So you're breathing too much. So it's like if you eat too much, if you eat 12,000 calories a day, and that's what you're used to eating, you're going to put on a lot of weight, and your body is going to need those calories because of the excess weight and all those things. And so you think that you need to eat more and it becomes a cycle. And then as soon as you go on

to diet, then your body goes, oh, first part, when you go on to diet, you go, oh, I'm starving, I'm hungry. And this is what air hunger is. This is what holding the breath does. We are, we're basically pushing our CO2 tolerance. Our tolerance to how much carbon dioxide can and we have on the system. Well, if our tolerance is really low, we're gonna breathe really fast. If we're able to build that tolerance up,

we start to breathe slower. So it's like, you know, so I go on a diet, I start to eat less, I lose weight, then my body adjusts to that new weight, adjusts to the new calc, chloric intake, and then I'm healthier and I have a new normal. So when it comes like breathing, like first off, it's just to be conscious of how much you're breathing.

Like breathe less, I know, this is a long way to get to like one question, but breathe less, breathe here, you know this is the first one, it's already, it's already gonna to downregulate how much you're breathing. Breathe slower when you could think about it. And if you can periodically hold the breath or do practices where you have breath holding. If you're someone like me that you want to increase

your athletic performance, really working into doing long breath holds will help to increase your, I mean, there's a whole formula of all the things you need to help to increase your, I mean there's a whole, there's a whole like formula of all the things you need to do to increase your athletic performance of breathing, you know, you increase your vital capacity, how much oxygen the lungs could hold, you increase your respiratory strength, just like any muscle in a muscle is stronger, it has to work less hard. So if you increase the strength of your respiratory muscles, through doing things, I think we'll do like a practice of how to increase respiratory strength.

So you increase the strength of your diaphragm, your core sit muscles, like all your core muscles, your inner-costal muscles. They're stronger, so that means they work less. They don't have to use as much energy to do the job. So when you go out running, those are muscles that aren't having to work as hard. So that means they're not using as much oxygen. You increase your CO2 tolerance. That means you can get carbon dioxide levels up higher. So when you are running, you don't feel or whatever you're doing, you don't feel the need to breathe as heavy.

And then you're also, because you're increasing that, you're also through the bore effect, you're getting more oxygen into the cells. So that's like the real quick, quick and dirty way to do that. So it's a breathing less whenever you can, whenever you could think about it, doing a breath practice that focuses around breathing less. That doesn't mean the whole breath practice is about breathing less. Like my athletic performance, breath practice, there's a heat building part of it where I do a lot of fast breathing or I do something like Wim Hof work. I do some rapid breath work, really working my respiratory muscles,

really strong, and then I hold on an exhale and hold on an inhale or there's different advantages to holding on exhale compared to holding on inhales and they're both good so I do both. One works more towards CO2 tolerance, one works more towards lowering SPO2. You kind of need both of those. You want both of those. The other thing is breathing efficiently. So if I were to ask you right now, take a deep breath. Take a deep, deep inhale, inhale deeper, inhale deeper, inhale deeper.

All right. So notice that thing, what just happened when you really started to begin, breathe, feel your lungs as full as they get, as full as they do. And if you're listening to this also at home. So if you notice, do you see your shoulders went up like this? Right. So that is that is essentially inefficient breathing. When we are filling the lungs, we're looking for space. Well, as the lungs go out, the lungs, there's a little space. So the way the diaphragm works, it's kind of like an M. It's not so much like an upside down U, but it's more like an M. The top of the diaphragm is connected, where the central tendon is connected to the media

Steinem, which is at the bottom of the heart. So this does move a little bit, but if it were to move down as much as the rest of the, I frammed it, it would cause some trauma to the heart. The heart would be going like this every time you, you started running or taking a deep rest. So it doesn't want to do that. It's the side of the diaphragm pulls down. And then the lungs, as they fill up,

well, they could only go out so much and then where they want to go is actually down. And they don't go down into the cores. We expand the belly. What expanding the belly does is it allows the rib cage, the bottom ribs, to open up outwards like this. And then the intercostals open this way. So we want the intercostals to open downward like this so that we can get into this place where the lungs go into, which is called the sub-costal recess.

Little space. If you look at an x-ray of the lungs, you see like a little black area in the plural cavity right between the diaphragm and the ribs. So this is the upper cavity. So you see that. You want the lungs to be able to move down into that. And as you move the lungs out or the ribs out and down, you open up that space, which opens up your vital capacity, which is how much air you can put into your lungs. So you basically, with breathing with deep

breaths, you're trying to open up as much as you can. Well, so that happens by breathing down. If I breathe up like this, there's not so much space. Now I start moving into this platissimus area, these muscles here, and I'm like coming up there, and I'm lifting my shoulders up. Well, as I lift up my shoulders, this makes this pulls everything else up, and it also de-flates the chest. So I'm not able to move. It also takes a whole lot longer. When you breathe, when you take a deep breath, you want to imagine like you have a rubber band right around the center of your ribs. So the middle part of your ribs, so as you inhale and set the inhaling up or down, you want to think of expanding it out in 360 degrees. So try that same breath really deep,

but this time try to expand just in the middle. So you just inhale and keep the shoulders where they are and feel how fast and full you can feel the breath. You feel that like immediately your lungs are so much fuller and there was way less effort, right? Did you feel that way less effort? You're completely full, you couldn't expand it. And you might actually feel like you could go even more. So this is like, this is how we should be breathing

all the time. And when we're doing something heavy, where we have heavy breathing, we need to be aware of like a farm running or something like this. I don't want to be, I don't want to be breathing. Or if I'm doing something that's, you know, if you do like two jits, or anything that really makes you breathe super heavy and super hard, when I, when I watch, I mean, this is something I could go to just the UFC and train UFC fighters and immediately improve their performance just by when they're working when you see them breathing up into their chest like this or, you know, they're breathing through the mouth because they're trying to get more oxygen. Well, if they have more red

blood cells, they wouldn't need to breathe through the mouth. Another thing is when you're doing physical activity, always breathe through your nose. So if you can't do what you're doing, if you can't run faster breathing through your nose, run slower, get that part up first, and then you'll be able to increase your performance so much more. There's a lot of studies with runners and Olympians that change their training practice to breathing through the nose and they increase their time. I mean, by a small amount, but if you're at an Olympic level

to increase your time by anything is huge. Like you think, like, between first place and fifth place is less than a second, right? It's between being on the platform or not, the podium. Yeah. How much can doing a practice of between 10 and 20 minutes a day, how much can that affect something, a habit that we're going to do for the rest of the 23 hours and 40 minutes every day? I can't, one thing that I'm interested in is looking at something that is,

is it habituated, is it necessary? Do we have conscious control over it? How much of it is? Part of the is it autonomous system and how much of it is part of Like what I'm trying to work out is can we undo the good work during a breath practice of 10 or 20 minutes? By not being conscious of it throughout the day and obviously we doing stuff. I can't spend my whole day thinking about breathing. Well, the one part you should think about is breathing to the nose, right? You should spend, if you notice you're breathing to the mouth throughout the day,

you should be like, oh, I'm a, or if you take, if you yawn, like this, if I yawn for whatever reason, I hold my breath. What? Coming into this, because if I, I, on, I took, I took a deep breath. It's a, it's a minor over breathing, a minor little bit of over breathing.

And now I have, I just inflated my lungs, a normal breath is, is on average, is about a half liter. A full breath is on average about, for, for a man is about five and a half to six and a half liters. So, you know, you just, you have residual volume and stuff. So you're actually probably breathing about three liters with a deep breath compared to the half of liter.

So you're breathing like six to seven times more than what you need to. So already like that one deep breath, I'm like, okay, so I just, I just took like my breath, all the breaths I need for this entire minute. So I'm gonna hold my breath right now. Like that's how I think about it. But like as far as like doing the practice in the morning, this really gets down to why you're doing the practice

or what you're doing the practice for. Because you're gonna change, like for athletic performance, if you want to increase athletic performance, 15 minutes, 20 minutes a day is not gonna do it. It's the same thing, like if you wanna increase long distance running, running for five, 10 minutes a day is not gonna increase your long distance running, or any sports.

When it comes to athleticism, you need to move more, or do more, and then also there's something called the like, spleen and contraction. So when you are in a place of oxygen deficiency for a certain period of time, which is a change is different for everybody, but roughly about 15 minutes. It's like when you're working out or you're running,

you get that second wind about after like 15 minutes or wipe people warm up. When you do like these like crazy warmups, it's to get that spleen in contraction. So the spleen, which holds red blood cells, contracts like this and it squirts out a bunch more red blood cells into your system. So then you have more red blood cells

so you can do more, the body is pretty smart like this. So it's already thinking ahead. So it's another way to become more polycythemia. But you need to be able, if you're doing this regularly and you're constantly working the spleen, the spleen is going to get used to contracting more because it doesn't necessarily empty itself. It gives maybe a little bit. It doesn't want to give everything all at once. But if you work into lots of retention like that, and into breath practice, you're gonna get more of that. And it's gonna, it's why if you do a breath practice,

your, like how I do my practice, I normally start with two minutes outer retention, two minutes inner retention, and then two minutes, two 30 outer retention, two 30 inner retention. So it's just like two 30 outer retention, two 30 inner retention. So it's just like exhale, hold the breath, take an inhale, hold the breath. And the last one, three minutes outer retention,

three exhale, hold for three minutes, inhale, hold for three minutes. And the third one that I do is easier than usually the first one. And that's because your body is getting those extra blood cells through that that splint of contraction. So if you're looking like that, 15 to 20 minutes isn't going to really increase it.

But doing this kind of practice every day, just like any kind of workout, is going to increase everything else. And as far as the other aspects of, if I wanted to do something to be more calm or relaxed, I'm going to feel the effects immediately afterwards. I'm not going to feel it necessarily all the way throughout the day because as soon as

something else comes into it to change my nervous system, I'm going to feel those effects of the nervous system. Or if I do a practice that, like in the morning, let's say I do an energizing practice, like a wake-up practice, and I'm of a lot of things that really work into the sympathetic nervous system. I'm going to feel really energized for a bit. But as soon as that's going to wear off, it's like having a coffee, right? Coffee only lasts so long. The good, you could essentially get the same effects with that. So it's not really going to change the autonomy of your life, but it's a tool for what you need. Depending

on what you're doing. Like I said, if you're doing like in 30 or 40 minutes of something to increase your VO2 max, like that kind of stuff, you will see those effects anytime that you need to do anything that increases your demand for cardio. Do you have any of the triggers that you use throughout the day? So you mentioned there do anything that increases your demand for cardio. Yeah. Do you have any of the triggers that you use throughout the day? So you mentioned there that if you're young, you hold your breath. Are there any of the triggers that people can use to ensure that they're breathing correctly through the normal day to day existence?

Other kind of. Not not so much like when I when I think about it, I just try to breathe slower. Doing a breath practice where you're even if you're doing 15 or 20 minutes a day, you don't have to be a cycle like me and do 45 minutes to an hour every single day. But just doing something like that is, especially if you do it in the morning, is going to start your day with at least that mindfulness around the breath, so that awareness around the breath. And the way that I talk about the breath, like there's a lot of people out there with,

you know, they're kind of biohacking thing and saying this fix is all that. And the breath doesn't fix anything. It's like anything else. Like we have these different aspects of health, right? Diet, fitness, sleep, stress, good stress, or bad stress, and breathing. And so if we don't have a, if we don't have proper diet,

or we eat bad, we feel it through everything else. And if we don't sleep well, we wake up, we feel the same thing with the breath. So we got it. The breath is going to affect everything on how we use it, but it's more of a tool. So it's like, if I breathe, and I'm doing a practice that's maybe really about balancing and centering my mind, balancing my nervous system, good practice for this is box breathing, there's square breathing where you inhale, hold, exhale,

hold for like the same amount of time there's been research around HRB with this how it shows to balance the nervous system. So practice like this is good to put you in a mindset where you are more rational and more clear or more more balanced, less, less reactive. It, like breathing could fix your relationships if you're in the right place to fix your relationships, but breathing can't fix your relationship. You know what I'm saying? It's like, so he kind of act as a tool

to put you in a more conscious mindset or to bring you out of the sympathetic tone that's triggering whatever it is, or if you are just feeling super lazy and lethargic, sometimes like if I'm just, if I'm wanting to do something and I'm on the couch and I don't feel like getting off the couch, I'll do a breath practice that I don't increase. I tell them I'll do some Kabbala Bhatriya Bhastriya Kawera, I'm like, just really fast in and out some nose, pump in my breath and then maybe I'll hold at the end

because anytime I do fast breathing, I usually add in some breath hold after that. But that brought me into my sympathetic nervous system. I'm in a safe place, so I talk about this the polyvagal theory in the book. You know, it's sympathetic nervous system doesn't always mean fight or flight, it's also like mobility. So I'm in a, it's synthetic nervous system doesn't always mean fight or flight. It's also like mobility.

So I'm, I'm in, I feel, I'm in a safe place, synthetic nervous system. And now it's like, all right, let's go. And all right, I just motivated myself to do whatever that is. But yeah, so it's like the breath acts as a tool to help fix the areas of your life. Like breathing is amazing for sleep. It's amazing to do, I'll do breath practices if I'm going to sleep, but if I drink coffee after two or three o'clock in the afternoon, if I'm stressed, one of the things that breathing can

do is it could help with my mind, with my thoughts and letting go of all those things. So if my mind is really busy, the breathing could help with that. But if I'm, yeah, if I've just done a lot of coffee or I'm on my computer till late at night and I have all this blue light and stuff like these different things are going to affect my sleep. Yeah, breathing is going to help, but it's not going to solve the problem. I have to go in and fix those other aspects to help improve my help improve it. It's one it's one thing So the breath is a tool. It's not it's not a cure all I suppose it's the same as

Talking about will exercise make me fit outside of exercise and you go well There is a component of that you need to train in the gym But also you should try and get a little bit of movement in throughout your day It's like do I need to eat well all the time? Is that well? The more that you can eat well, the better. You need to have your square meals being good, but if you keep snacking in between those, are you good diet, bad diet, that's also going to have an effect on you.

If you sleep well once a week, and then for the other night to the week you don't sleep so good. It makes sense that you have Focus period on the breath which is your practice and then your cognizant of it throughout the day and you're trying to Instantiate those good habits as best you can that does that does make sense What kind of the things that I found interesting was energetic locks in ux I don't know how that works So the energetic locks in yoga, we call these bonders. And this is a, what I really, I hope

is being a non-yogi is like the stuff made sense to you. Because I really try to write it for non-yogies, but still also appeal to, because I am a yogi in every sense of the term. So still appeal to what those things do. So Abanda is an energetic lock. It's kind of from this old ancient school of yoga. I do talk quite a bit into it.

There's locks, like you could say, there's locks everywhere. But I talk about the three major locks, which is Mula Ba, the root lock, Udeana Bunda, which is the naval lock, and then Jalindar Bunda, which is the throat lock. In like practices, like physical practices like Oshatanga, you hear a lot of Mula Bunda and stuff. Essentially, it's a contraction. Each one of them is a contraction of a different muscle. They do different things. The idea is to regulate the energetic flow.

I think with one thing that people get really confused on or don't understand is what is energy. You could talk to a structural engineer about what energy is, or you talk to an electrician about what energy is, or if he's talked to like a spiritual guru about what energy is, they'll give you different answers. I mean, I mean, is- What does it mean to you then? What does it mean in your- It's not that what it means to me, it has a lot of different definitions. What does it mean in your? It's not that what it means to me,

it has a lot of different definitions. You have thermal energy, you have electrical energy, you have kinetic energy. You have, so the nervous system, as we move, this movement that we have is energy. What tells my muscle's a fire is an electrical impulse that happens through a sodium potassium pump on a cellular level that sends a signal up or down from the brain depending on e-fair and or a-fair and nerves and then we have movement.

So this is very much the western sense of what we feel energy is in our body. We have thermal energy obviously like is we produce heat. I'm in Bali. It's quite hot right now. I'm talking to you with my AC off and I'm feeling my body heat, as I sweat up my shirt. Yeah, so that's another type of energy. And then when we get into yoga,

we don't really know what we're saying when we say energy and we talk about like how the energy moves through the body. And so this was like the yoga, we have, the yoga, yoga is quite old, you know, in thousands of years old. And they didn't have the tools to see how myelinated and unmyelinated nerves work or how the signal transforms or anything like that. But they mapped out, before they even knew what nerves are, they mapped out these things called nautis, which is how energy flows through the body. And if you feel it, like if you hit your funny bone,

or if you get a kink, you ever have a kink in your back, and you feel it in your hand. So the yogis maybe understood that is, oh, here's an energetic thing or just your level of energy. How much energy, you know what I'm saying? Like, you're energetic levels of like to get out and do stuff or if you're low on energy, you don't want to do something. So this is all things that we refer to as energy

and on a western side, I see this as sympathetic, parasympathetic. on energy you don't want to do so on. So this is all things that we refer to as energy and on a scientific, on a western side I see this as sympathetic, parasympathetic, right? What is producing this love of energy? Well the yogis have a different map, a different system of energy and but it's the same thing. They just describe it different and one of the things that I love and I really tried to do in this book was to show how these two, actually, that's four or five systems depending on how you, you're looking at it, but how these systems intertwine.

Because if we're talking about energy, it's all the same thing and we realize it's, it's all the same thing. It's my energy is essentially your inner, like as far as your concern as a subjective experience or it's your interaction with the world and how you move through it. That's your energy or how outer things affect you. So cold effects you, that's an energetic thing.

Heat effects you, that's an energetic thing. Emotions affect you, right? That's an energetic thing. If someone, if someone you don't know, just comes by and gives you the bird or or or and London the reverse piece fingers, they I'm I'm used like California, we're like, uh, piece, right? And then like, like, oh, I'm always like, peace, peace out. And London, they're like, oh, why why why are you doing that to me? I'm like, oh, a piece brother? Like, no, no, no, that's like that.

But you know, that's felt with energy. We actually feel that, or if you go into a room and somebody, you immediately feel someone's like good energy or dark energy. And this is something that we have been programmed from an evolutionary standpoint to keep us safe. Is that person dangerous or not dangerous? Well, we use that word energy to say

that this person has bad energy, meaning this person is dangerous. Or this person has good energy, meaning this person is not dangerous. Maybe I want to mate with this person. Maybe I want to fight this person, right? So we feel that. Well, the yogis did a great job of mapping

these types of energies out and how they manifest in us and how they, on maybe an emotional level. So when I start thinking about the energetics of yoga, I think of like more, how are these affecting the emotional energetics of my life? And how do I bring balance about this? And because I know and I understand that through the western system and energy and how emotions are essentially just hormones and neurotransmitters and they're affected through the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. So our feelings, our imbalances, like if I have relationship problems, will you ever

have a relationship problem with something you don't really care about? Yes Yeah, you don't it doesn't really affect you so much, right? You don't have those those emotional imbalance even though you have relationship problems You're like all the guys relationships over, you know, right? Or but if you have a relationship problem something you care a lot about they affect you really deeply even though They're both relationship problems. But we're trying to,

it's the hormones that are released, and the neurotransmitters are released that make us feel that way, which is, so I know, well, I know that to the breath, I inhale, then that's going to affect my parasympathetic nervous system. I know if I exhale, it's going to be, or sorry, I inhale it's going to be my sympathetic, exhale is going to be my parasympathetic nervous system. I know if I inhale, I'm sorry,

I inhale some sympathetic, exhale is going to be my parasympathetic. Well, also, if I inhale, this is going to, like I talked about, the yoga side of my rejostic energy. So rejostic energy is the energy that goes out and expands and dissipates. It's, we think of this energy as the doing energy.

This is the energy that we have. And we think about the sympathetic nervous system. This is the moving energy. Well, what are the imbalances of always needing to do, always going after goals or whatever, like we burn out, we get exhausted, we need balance in that. And so now I'm looking at something on an energetic level of, OK, well, I don't just want more energy to get going, but where the imbalance here where I'm burning myself out, right, and I see

that. And it's like, okay, well, I want to bring balance into this. So maybe I need more tomasic energy. And tomas is things coming down and contracting together, consolidating, right. But if I have too much of it, then I'm just like stuck. I'm stuck in my system, then I'm just stuck. I'm stuck in my system, or I'm wilting away. If you don't move, you atrophy.

If we stop moving, it's not that we stop doing anything. We start dying. This is the energy of Thomas. We don't want to be there. If we're always moving, then we burn out. Somewhere in there, there is a balance. That balance is called Sapa in yoga. And sapva is the energy of being. So rojas is doing, Thomas is having, there's good parts of it, feeling warm, safe, comfortable. These things, but if too much of that, then you're like,

you know, the saying like, you never want to be too comfortable because then you don't do anything. That's not really saying, but it's based off of the saying that I don't remember the saying is. But yeah, you know what I'm saying? Like, we don't want to be too comfortable because then we lose a rages of doing. So, when you find the balance of that, we get into being. And being only lasts so long. Like, why don't we always just want to be in

SOFA? Well, we do, but is that a possibility that's realistic for people? Usually not. Usually not. Usually, we need to move or we need to rest. And so we're tiptoeing around this. We're always looking for homeostasis until we find homeostasis, and then we're looking for something else.

Right? You know what I'm saying? That's how the body works. We're trying to get balanced. As soon as your balance, the body goes, okay, there's no growth in balance. We need to unbalance ourselves so we can grow again. This is just the yogis all this and they kind of, so this is where that system comes together. So Sapa to be, the energy is actually upward.

I didn't understand that, but when you talk about upward, it's the upward flow of energy is growth. And in Sapa, it really is our spiritual growth, our enlightenment. Enlightenment means to shine light upon something that's dark, so you understand it. So illuminate the name of my book is called the illuminated breath. It's to basically remove the darkness around the press that we understand it. And that's when you understand it, it's useful. It becomes a tool and you could work with it. So this is like, we see these energy systems as the same thing. And when we see them as

the same thing, and we just realize that it's, yeah, I use the illustration of looking at a map. You draw a map. Well, the map is nothing. It only represents something that's real. Right, if I have a map of England, well, that's a representation of England. If I want to go to your Manchester, or Newcastle. Newcastle.

Newcastle. So if I want to go up to Newcastle from London, yeah, I would follow the M1 or something. I don't know the roads there. Is that right? Correct. Yeah, the A1, what it turns into, is about a mile away here. Oh, cool. All right. So I would follow the road system. But if I was to build something, I would look at like city planning, or if you know, or plumbing or something like that, or if I wanted to go hiking, I might look at a topography map.

Well, they all just represent the same thing. They're just different aspects of that thing. And so when I know that what the map is representing, and I know I move north, I move north across all maps, right? But it's, but what do I need from that map for it to be useful to me? And that's why the different systems are important. That's why understanding is important. Moving is the breath.

So I need to I need to move north. The breath is going to take me north. How do I why do I need to move north? Am I going north to come see you? Am I going on a hike? You know, it's like, what do I want to see? And so like we understand that I know how the breath affects these different things. And this is something that I laid out in the book to kind of make it, it's really simple.

There's one then diagram in there called the systems of balance that shows the autonomic nervous system, the polyvagal theory, the nautis, the values, and the goonas, and how that's affected to the inhale or in the exhale. And then there's a chat on each of those that tells you what that map actually represents. So you could be like, okay, well, I'm feeling like my head's lost in the clouds. I'm just a dreamer. Well, this is like Viana by you. That's what that map represents. So it takes something that's really like kind of Fufu

and gives you something that allows you to take a little bit more control of your life so that you could find balance if you need balance or if you're like, I'm too stuck in the center, how do I move out of the center? Because that might be something that you need as well. The final paragraph in your book is really, really beautiful. I just wanted to read it here. Learning to breathe is like learning to live. The smallest details hold the most significance. A single step in an epic adventure carries with it all the subtleties of experience that we

have gained along the way. The destination is just one more step in the perpetual cycle of inhalations and exhalations. Each breath contains all the potential of life and we can't hold either one forever. Maybe by learning to breathe, we can discover living. We're guaranteed only two breaths in this life are first and our last. We can waste every breath merely existing or we can use every breath to create meaning and experience the true miracle of living. Sick way to finish your book, man. Thanks. Really good.

Yeah. Spoiler alert. No. Exactly. That's it. And then he dies at the end. He dies at the end. Yeah.

And then he dies again. You were going to show us a breath practice. And maybe people who aren't driving or operating heavy machinery could follow along at home. You could do, you could part of this operating heavy machinery. In fact, that's the thing about the breath practice. You could pretty much do it anywhere, right? Where it like, this sounds pretty bad,

but I don't, like when I do my breath practice in the morning, I'm not like, I do a meditation practice. I get't, like when I do my breath practice in the morning, I'm not like it. I do a meditation practice. I get up, I get out of my bed, I have this beautiful view of the jungle, I open up my curtains, I have a seat at the foot of my bed, where it's elevated up and I sit there and I do my 30 minutes of meditation. Then I go downstairs and I prop myself up on the couch, which is right here.

And then I look at the TV, which is right there. And I do my 45 minutes to an hour athletic performance while I'm watching the news or catching up. Like, as, you know, being in Bali, I want to see what's going on in the rest of the world Less now that Trump's out of office, but it's still pretty interesting But all America season three is gonna be so boring now that he's gone. He was the only good character in it Yeah, for sure. I'm like I kind of got addicted to the crazy drama. Did you see that the the news anchors had done a little campaign make news

boring again? Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. And all of them are the Stephen Colbert and all those guys are all talking about like, oh, you know, I'm so excited for boring stories. Yeah. But my point is I do my practice while I'm watching TV. So it's not like something that you have to like separate your life from it. If you're someone that commutes a lot, actually this is something that I've been doing for years in London, because I spend a lot of time in London. When I go from one stop to the next stop on the tube,

I hold my breath between stops. So I'll do that. It doesn't matter if there's like 18 or 20 stops, or whatever, if I'm going super far, usually it's only like four or five. But I, and sometimes they're pretty far in between, but I breathe when the doors are open, and when the doors close, I hold my breath.

And I'm like, that's a cool drive. Sometimes, yeah. Oh yeah, trigger, yeah. So that's like, I do those kinds of things. Like, when you think about opportunities to breathe consciously, or opportunities to increase something that you want to work on, I'm someone that's very much into fitness

and increasing my fitness levels and all that. So, yeah. So, you can do this really most breath practices anywhere. I teach on the SAP called the ALO Moves and they want to do something for the plane. They said something. They didn't want to use my programs because a lot of touching your face and stuff, which is obviously not good with COVID times, as well, but the naughty show to not practice is a lot of, that's probably the only one where you're touching your face or if you're doing Brahmmery, where you're doing Shankar Buddha. But yeah, so it's like, But yeah, so it's like, yeah, you do this press practice. Anyways, so getting into it. So we're going to do a really quick practice.

I'm actually going to teach you three different breath practices, which is kind of fun, three different breath practices. And what we're doing, the first two is like level of energetics. Right. So these are all to increase respiratory strength. The first one is going to help you learn how to actively, or sorry, passively relax your belly, which is something that we, another thing that we do that creates inefficient breathing,

I didn't mention is especially if you're fit guy or if you like your six pack or whatever or you just hold your gut in all the time. If you're constantly contracted through the core you're not allowing your bottom ribs to release and so you're basically inefficient in breathing. So what we're going to do is you're going to inhale, talk about those bandas, the Udiana banda which is the naval lock, which is like, another way to think about it is like a vacuum breath.

You pull the belly in and up towards the spine. And this isn't good to do if you've drinking a lot of water, if you've just eaten or you need to go to the bathroom, it's uncomfortable, you could still do it, but it's not as comfortable. I like to do all my athletic performance, breathing on it, completely empty stomach. So it's an active forced exhale.

And if you just actively force exhale through the nose and a passive inhale, normally what we do is we breathe is we do an active inhale and a passive exhale. So this is flipping it. We're moving a little bit more air, like I say, for moving about 500 to MLs, now we're moving about 700, 800 to 1000 maybe. So a little bit more, not a dramatic amount. And you kind of want to go out the pace that you do. So I'm going to first just sit here and do it,

and then I'll show you what my stomach is doing, pull out my shirt, so you can kind of see my stomach. So it's the first one is it's just exhale to the nose. Pass it in there. Yeah, maybe clear the nose, get the boogies out. So it's it takes practice to build up speed. So it's good to, when you're starting it to maybe go slow, maybe go

we'll do that at speed. It takes practice to build up speed, so it's good when you're starting it to maybe go slow, maybe go. We'll do that at speed. My normal speed is like, but the inhales, you hear it, the inhales pass it. So it looks on this level, it looks like this. So that's the first one. We're going to do that one. And here we'll do these together. I won't count it. We'll do it for about, actually, yeah, we'll do it for about 20 seconds each. I'll say, I'll say, first practice, Kabalbati, and I'll say, second practice, bus three

cut. So Kabalbati means skull shining breath. I'm not going to get into why it means that. Second practice, it's in the book, it doesn't matter. Second practice is called bus three cut, which is billows breath. So billows like it's something that these to have, I don't know, you guys like fire things like you do it like this. And it goes in and out.

So this is a force inhalation and a force exhalation. So as we talk about like the energetics of breath or how much is affecting the nervous system, this is more extreme. It's like, why are they different? Why do you do jogging? Why do you do sprinting? One is more than the other. It's doing the same thing, but it's affecting it more.

Little difference with how it's affecting respiratory control or your dexterity over breathing, which is also something important that we haven't talked about so much in this, and increasing the respiratory strength on an forced inhale and a forced exhale. So here we're adding the force inhale. So this is deeper. First one we're moving, like I said, between maybe 700 to a thousand. Now we're moving from like 1200 to if you're really good at it to maybe about 2000 or 2500 mls. Remember average breath is about about 500 mls, full breath, full deep breath is about three to 4,000 mls depending on how efficient you are at breathing. When you get really efficient,

you take a full breath, it's going to be for, once you get your vital capacity up, a full breath might be five or six thousand mls. Sticks Ferenson is 11 and a half liters. He gets all the breath for like 22 minutes, free diver guy. Awesome, awesome breather. But yeah, so you could really increase your capacity quite a bit. So this one, it looks like this like. Notice my shoulders are not like this. It's... So if you look at the belly, now it looks like this. So getting that force exhale, it's hard to do it standing up. It's a little easier to do it sitting down. So that's the second practice. Do that one about 20 seconds.

So the first one, it'll look like this is we're building it'll be like, we'll do a little slower. So maybe like this. We'll go to Bostrica, be a little bit more like this. Roughly about this pace. The last thing we're going to do is on an outer retention. We're doing in this one, we're decreasing our carbon dioxide. We come that word hypocaptinics. Once we decrease our carbon dioxide, we come hypocapnik,

and then we're going to hold the breath on that outer retention in yoga. It's called bia-kumbaka. Bia means outer, empty, kumbaka means container. So it's basically is referring to the breath hold. And this one, I did this as a kid, so it's like Udyanna Bunda, where you try to make myself look like Skeletor or whatever, like it's suck my stomach in and try to be as skinny as I can. So you do this on a full exhale, empty out as much as you can out of lungs, then you're gonna pull the belly in as deep as you can, like you're trying to glue the navel

to the upper portion of your spine. So you don't wanna think just in as you can, like you're trying to glue the navel to the upper portion of your spine. So you don't want to think just in, you want to think like in and up, right? And this is, it's another way to do that is like you exhale completely and then you inhale, but without inhaling through your mouth. So you're creating inter abdominal pressure. So that you're, and that's going to suck the belly up. And then while holding the breath still, you're going to release

and completely relax all the muscles. And so it's going to act like this pump eating. When I'm down, sometimes it sounds like a slapping action. Like it's slapping my... So it's like, so do this one again. It's all exhale. I can't talk after I do this, so I'll just show you. So... So I do this one again, it's all exhale. I can't talk after I do this, so I'll just show you. So,

I'll just show you. So that one is just in, out. It's this one's a lot easier to do sitting down as well. I think, at least I always practice it sitting down, so I don't really practice it standing up. And it's also awkward to like look at myself in the screen while doing it. What am I doing?

Rather than doing so. What's the reason for the movement of this stomach upon the exhalation? Well, firstly, you can't really do this breath on an inhalation. You could try it, but you're not going to get as much movement. But really, you're doing two things. One, it's a outer retention breath hold. When you hold on outer retention, your body uses oxygen a lot, the available oxygen a lot faster. So you start to decrease SBO2 faster before CO2 tolerance comes up. Because you know, that's what's causing us to breathe. It's not so much the oxygen.

At a point, the oxygen will be like, oh, it's time to breathe. But for most of us, we're on a carbonic drive, so that's CO2. When I hold it on the inhale, I have a longer time. I have more oxygen in the lungs, so I have a longer time for the oxygen to come down. So the CO2 tolerance also has a longer time to build up. We could hold our breath much longer on it in hail than in X-Hail because there's more available oxygen there. So that's one of the advantages.

There's less available oxygen. So we decrease oxygen faster, which helps with that, the body's effect to want to make more red blood cells. So it's really, that's a really good advantage there holding the breath on the X-Hail. The other thing what we're doing is this practice is all about strengthening respiratory muscles, really the deep respiratory muscles in the diaphragm. So I'm really using the diaphragm because what the diaphragm does is it's for inhalation.

As I inhale, it pulls down. As I'm doing this breath, it's I'm doing it against a greater resistance because I'm holding it close and so that extra resistance as I pull the navel in and up helps to strengthen the diaphragm even more, and it's a muscle. So like all muscles, it gets stronger when you use it. Relaxing the belly allows me to go quicker because we're not breathing.

So it's not, you could push it out, but it's better just to relax it in the sense. And it's better just to relax it in the sense, and it's much faster. So we're trying to get as many effective, it's called Agnesar. Agnesar means fire, essence breath. Agnes is fire. So this is centered around the third chakra, which is related to fire.

That's a whole bunch of yoga stuff that we don't need to talk about. But yeah. So, anyway, so we're working in that. And this whole practice is about increasing respiratory strength. So that's the purpose of this. I wouldn't do this by itself. I would do this as part of a greater practice. And I have an intermediate sequence where this is what in the book, I talk about the different parts of the breast sequence.

This would be like the heat building sequence. Cool. We know why we're doing it, which is really important. If you don't know why you're doing it, why do it? Right. It's just like, and that's, I have a clear intention. When I have a clear intention, I'm clear about the goals that I wanted to. And so if I know my goals and I know my intention, it helps me to find the tools that I need to get there. And so this is one of those

tools to get there. And that's that's we're just building we're just building this growth equation equation for. I don't know. Yeah. So my my equation for life, how to grow intention action how to grow. Intention, action, purpose. Let's do it. All right. So we're going to do it. Should I just sit here like this or do you want to see the belly? Everyone's okay. All right. Everyone understands it and this is recorded. So just rewind it if you forgot. So I'm going to do the practice with you. I will just queue. We'll do each one. Let me start a little timer on my phone so I can just see. So I can just see. We'll do 20 seconds of each. Each one and move on to the next. So 20 seconds, Kabalabati or Skullshining breath, 20 seconds Bastrika or Billow's breath and 20 seconds Ogny's Saur which is the exhale hold exhale so if you see me not eat if you don't hear me breathing that means you shouldn't be breathing

right if it and just I'm gonna breathe it's kind of a slower moderate pace if you can't breathe this fast as me breathe at your own pace that's really like breathing is one of the things you could 100% approach at whatever level you're at. So here we go. Three, two, one, kabbalabati. Last week. Inhale, exhale completely. Ogni saw, begin. Inhale. Exhale. So that's just like one round, real quick, that took one minute. This would be something that's really good to do for like five or ten minutes.

And then you work at your own pace, just 20 seconds of each. And you could already feel it. You feel a little bit more energized. Immediately, that's a sympathetic nervous system kicking in and going, all right, we got some energy to move. It's a really great practice. Something you can do. It's something you do like between sets as you're getting going from one thing or another or if you

just like right before you're ready to start running or even on like yeah. Like I said, breathing is one of the things that we're always doing it. We're always doing it it and how you do it matters. What's the favor of saying? How you do one thing is how you do everything? How do you breathe? Because that's what you're doing the most of. You're not doing any one activity more than that, not when they control anyways. Dude, I love it. Thank you for today. One of my favorite things that I'll be taking away is reframing the way that the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system work. It's almost like the sympathetic

nervous system has been demonized now, very much so in common discussions around it, but it's got a usefulness. So much so. And I think it not without without reason why the sympathetic nervous system is demonized most people are chronically in it and so if I think if everybody was chronically in their parasympensic nervous system because no one would be doing anything. They'd just be like, oh, everyone's just so lazy and the thargic, right? But because we are in this like this to do mode, this roger mode of we always need to do something, always need to be productive. And one of the things that is even if you're not doing something, you're thinking about doing something and thinking the body like thinking about doing something and doing something

affects the nervous system basically the same way. But yeah, it is definitely very useful. And I'm glad you brought that up because I did try to spend quite a bit of time in the book talking about the usefulness of the sympathetic nervous system. And it's like, I don't know if you've read any studies on stress and the body's response to stress is significantly different if it's viewed as a positive thing versus if it's viewed as a negative thing. And the nervous system, which is affected by stress and kind of both ways, it's physiological response is very different based on whether we feel safe or unsafe.

And that's a huge thing and that's really important to understand. A big part of that is going to be imagine that you felt spontaneously the way that you do at the end of a very heavy set in the gym or at the end of doing a heavy cardio workout, you would think that you were dying. It would be awful. You'd be terrified. And yet you elect to do that when you go into the gym. So it shows us that it isn't about the sensations. It's about our judgments upon them, that's what Marcus Aradius said, right? And I wonder whether some people perhaps aren't allowing themselves to lean into that discomfort,

the same way that they would do from the sympathetic nervous system because of a fear of it. I've been told that the flight and fight response is bad for me, that I need to be parasympathetic. One of the things that I've relied on the most, especially over the last year, when training has been to remind myself that this is why you're here. When you're doing something which is challenging and worthwhile, and it becomes challenging, that's why you're here. You're not here for it to be easy, you're here because the discomfort is growth. That can be pushed too far. But for the most part, I think people under train rather than over train, I think that they probably overbreed rather than underbreed. So the discomfort of feeling that breath hunger, the discomfort of feeling the burn in the

gym, the ache in the muscles, like that's why you're here. It's a feature, not a bug of this system. And yeah, reframing it that way, I really hope that some people have taken that away from it. Where should people go? They want to check out the book. They want to learn more about you. Where do they go? So here's the book. I just got this yesterday. You have like so excited about it. Yeah, the illuminated breath by me. The where you could buy books. That's where you could get it. So if you go on Amazon, go on Amazon, you can get this. If you go to my website,

DylanWarnerYoga.com, there's on the on the top menu thing, there's a link that says the illuminated breath, click on that, and I have a ton of different links of different places you can buy it. So that's really for like if you're in the US or you're the UK or somewhere else outside, I'm pretty sure it delivers it ships everywhere. So I mean I'm here in Bali I got it here. It's the launch date for the US. I think it starts delivering the 23rd of February. I'm not sure when this this is going to come out. And I think the UK is like the 28th of the 29th, but uh, whatever date is for you, you should just like go out and order it right now so you're like the

first one to get it. The link to preorder will be in the show notes below. And of course, your Instagram as well where you share quite a lot of cool stuff. Yeah, Dylan Werner Yoga. That's just kind of a couple of followers on there. I feel really, I'm really grateful for the followers that I do have. I actually just really grateful for this life that I have. You know, it's, I do it. You know, you just get lucky sometimes. I feel like I got super lucky in life. Like, it's a land here, but yeah. Check me out there. I just, mostly posting handstands and arm balances

and other stuff that people think are as impossible, but if a 40-year-old dude like me can do it, then anyone can do it. To be honest, if I didn't even start hand-staying until I was 29 years old, so it's never too late. Brother, I love it. Thank you very much for today. I hope that everyone's taken a lot away from this. Links to everything you've spoken about, your website, Illuminated Breath, and your Instagram. We'll be in the show notes below. And if anyone's got any feedback, just leave it in the comments or abuse Dylan and his DMs.

Yeah, yeah, please. I don't really answer my DMs because sometimes I do depends, but if you're lucky, I'll answer you in there. But if abuse, abuse, Chris, or don't abuse me, no, see, this is your turn. Look, man, thank you so much. Enjoy Bali. Thank you. Thank you. Really appreciate you having me here. Truly honored and lots of gratitude. Thank you.

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