Saturn Returns with Caggie - 6.2 The Power of Breathwork with Stuart Sandeman

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

Expert in breathwork, Stuart Sandeman, joins Caggie in this weeks episode to unlock the power of breathing.  Stuart, a Sunday Times best-selling author and the founder of Breathpod, had a powerful and profound experience during an exploratory breathwork class which led him to consistent practice and an understanding of the power, science and health benefits that mindful breathing offers. This episode sees Stuart and Caggie explore why we are no longer breathing efficiently, how emotions are controlled and can be eased with breath, the effects mindful breathing has on our somatic nervous systems, patterns and techniques we can adopt to fall asleep quickly as well as why practice allows space to confront and cope with grief and anxiety. Other topics covered include the power of breath and speech, the alchemy of emotion and breath, stress responses and how our identities, personality traits and moods are directly linked to how we breathe. Order ‘Breathe in, Breathe out’ by Stuart Sandeman. --- Follow or subscribe to "Saturn Returns" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact of Saturn's return with inspiring guests and thought-provoking discussions. Follow Caggie Dunlop on Instagram to stay updated on her personal journey and you can find Saturn Returns on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.  Order the Saturn Returns Book. Join our community newsletter here.  Find all things Saturn Returns, offerings and more here.

Hello everyone and welcome to Saturn Returns with me, Kagi Dunlop. This is a podcast that aims to bring clarity during transitional times where there can be confusion and doubt. When we gasp for air through our mouth, the times we do that is an emergency. Step off the pavement, onto the road and the cyclist is about to hit me, what i do if we're spending our day talking a lot breathing through our mouth talking a lot breathing through our mouth singing we're just triggering the stress response sounds exhausting i'm so anxious in today's episode we discuss the power of breath work and I am joined by my friend Stuart Sandman also known as BreathPod. He shares his very personal story into discovering this work and the profound

journey he had. Now breathing seems like a simple thing that we are all doing all the time and therefore probably gets quite little attention but after this conversation I was kind of transfixed by everything he had to say because even though it seemed obvious once he said it I had never really thought about it before. As someone that does struggle with anxiety from time to time I found this episode really useful and also just a really touching conversation with someone that I feel like sometimes I meet certain people and it's a really beautiful thing when you meet them at a point in their life where they have been through something really tragic and really heartbreaking but it's put them on a path to their destiny and they are alchemizing

that pain and doing something really magical with it in the world and I really think Stuart's one of those people that has a mission in life like it was what he was supposed to be doing and I think that yeah just hearing his story I mean I barely I barely had to speak in this conversation because it just flowed through him so naturally and yeah I'm not going to say too much more because I think I just want you to experience it because it was very touching and there were moments where I felt incredibly moved by what he had to say and it is a very very sad story um i'm not going to share too much more you'll hear it in the episode but like i said i think it's really beautiful when someone can demonstrate how they have turned their struggle and their heartbreak into not only their personal

strength but also with sharing it with the world and healing the world you know going around and allowing people to have these transformative experiences themselves and unlock their trauma and unearth old emotion all through the power of breath and I can't wait to share this episode with you because I feel like it's something that everyone can take away from and everyone can start actioning immediately. And it's something that I am definitely trying to give more attention and energy to and really notice how that impacts me and how I can manage certain things a lot better when I just tune into my breath. a lot better when I just tune into my breath. So before we get into this beautiful episode with Stuart, let's check in with our astrological guide, Nora. In Vedic astrology and Ayurveda, every planet has an element tied to it. For Saturn, it's the air element, which is interesting considering it rules both an earth sign, Capricorn, and an air sign, Aquarius.

When Saturn makes itself known in our lives, especially during Saturn return or when it goes into the center of our moon sign, for example, we experience both challenges in the material realm, which relates to the earth element, as well as challenges in the mental realm, which relates to the earth element, as well as challenges in the mental realm, which relates to the air element. Through the challenges we experience, through the inevitable process of transmuting events that break our hearts, have us catch our breath, and challenge our thoughts and belief systems,

we learn that in every difficulty, there is a wisdom to be learned, if we open our hearts and our minds to it. Because of Saturn's connection to the air element, in India, for example, a widespread practice called Pranayama has become ingrained in the culture and spiritual practices in the pursuit to not only help preserve our life force, but also in helping it flow,

which in turn balances the body and the mind, which reduces a lot of mental issues, anxiety, a lot of things that just relate to the mental realm. In India, they call this life force prana, which from Sanskrit translates to breath. It's the breath that sustains us, it's rhythm that warns us. So whenever Saturn comes around and teaches us through heartbreaks, pains and challenge, we must remember to not only find the silver lining of it all, but also to sustain our life

force and incorporate a practice in our daily routine that consciously helps us to not only treasure, but also to remember the art of breathing. Welcome to the Saturn Returns podcast. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. I'm very excited for this conversation because, well, I feel like I've known you a very long time probably because I know Nova, but we kind of connected quite recently at Founders Forum. Yeah. And anyway today we are going to be talking about your book and breathwork which is something that I have, I'm not gonna lie, I haven't been practicing it recently but I told you before we started recording that my boyfriend

has. I hope he doesn't mind me saying that and he's been going to like breathwork classes and stuff like that. So just to kind of bring it back to the beginning, how did you get into this work? I got into this work kind of like happy accident, well I wasn't happy at first but the outcome has been. I came to breathing through grief. My girlfriend was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Before that, I was working in music. And when she passed away, I moved back to Scotland where I'm from. I was in a really bad headspace, as you could probably imagine.

And all that happened was I took my mum for Mother's Day to a breathing class. It was kind of last minute gift and went along to this breathing class and had a really, really profound experience. And it kind of changed the course. I think when you have one of these powerful experiences and that was it for me. of changed the course i think when you have one of these powerful experiences and that was it for me i basically yeah i went to this class with my mum not really knowing what breathwork was this was seven years ago it wasn't really a thing and um had a huge release basically i felt my girlfriend was there holding my hand as well who went after she passed away which was really bizarre, really amazing, really powerful, really cathartic. I bawled my eyes out and realized that after that, I thought, right, either I'm going mad,

either someone spiked my drink before that breathwork class and they were not the type to do that, or something special happened in that sort of hour and a half class. So I kind of went with the latter and I started looking, working closely with that type of breathwork and the teachers, trying to find out answers to see if this, was this a one-off? What just happened? And the more I practiced, the more I uncovered, the more I kind of found out that there was this really amazing tool that we all have to help work through life challenges. So that was me. It was really through grief that I came to Breathwork. Absolutely changed my whole outlook, my energy, my mindset, my my life my sleep um and i just couldn't believe the physical um shifts the mind shifts but also the transformation that happened and the

the connection to something much bigger than myself like feeling that my girlfriend was there saying this is where i was meant to be which was quite hard at first but yeah then I just opened this door to see what else is out there with breathing and if it's helped me so much I'm sure it could help a lot more people yeah and that's where I set off kind of on my route to find as much as possible good about breathing and setting up my business and and breath pods and then writing a book about it as well now wow that is a i mean that's a huge thing to go through yeah it was it was um it's funny looking back maybe why i said that happy accident because looking back it was the toughest thing i've been through but i look back and it was quite

a beautiful experience and i don't know if that's because i've worked through the the trauma and the grief and i look back and i think when she was sick it brought us together in a way that people like it was really really tough and challenging and we and we looked at all these deep questions as well why are we here where do we go when we die what happens and these were things that we talk about. What do people believe happens after death? So we really opened this space when she was sick about looking at the body, how do we beat this thing?

And looking at the mind, looking at our emotions, what's going on. So already a lot of the training happened, I guess, when she was sick. I really looked at a lot of these different things and looked at so many different teachings both conventional medicine stuff for cancer but also all the alternatives that are out there and it opened the door to this whole world that I'd been too busy to

look at before that and how long were you guys together for by that point together three years two three years yeah and so when you guys found that out I'm sure your entire world just completely changed in a moment yeah well you'd never expect the kind of string of events and I've always been quite an optimistic person so she found a little lump on her on her chest a little pea-sized lump went to the doctor let's get it removed let's get a scan had the scan results back yes it's cancerous let's get some more scans yes it's spread yes it's quite aggressive so it kind of went like that and I still remember because we were actually in Hong Kong at the time and then she was she was from New York so we went

over to the states when we got this diagnosis because she was like let's get back to where I've got family and everybody's support network and yeah we saw some specialists there and they said look it's spread it's in your spleen your liver your spine your brain and yeah and that point they said well you've not really it's like 18 months ish it's quite we can try and delay it but it's gonna happen um which is quite a hard thing to hear but again as the kind of optimist i was like well we'll beat it we're going to beat the odds we are going to be those people that defy the odds and turn this around and let's find the best people let's look at alternatives let's not just listen to this train of thought and that's that is quite a scary thing, but it felt okay.

We felt like, right, we're here. But there was just this in the back of your mind, like the clock ticking down. Because you go down one route of alternatives. With that optimism. With that optimism. And then you get more scans and it's like, oh, things seem to be going okay, but we're not sure.

And we had flooded with support from both sides. Everyone wanted the best, but everybody's sharing what their solution is. And that is, on one hand, amazing that we had all the support. But everyone's pointing you in different directions. Yeah, everyone's like, oh, go and try this, or go and see this fight in Brazil and speak to this guy. He's saved all these people.

And then you also have this very real thing of time time and then the time ticking down and the doctor's saying no no no go and do this route this will this will give you two years instead of this year potentially or try out this new medicine or then we're like maybe we'll try some immunotherapy which is quite new at that point i know it's actually been rolled out quite a lot for cancer treatments now. And there were certain places that were doing it, trying to get onto different trials. But at the point, which has opened an interesting world as well, of her being too sick to join certain trials. Yeah.

Because they wanted, they didn't want people to die who were on the trial because they weren't in the medicine to go through. So it kind of opened this like really bizarre medical world of like what is the best route when we're actually trying to save somebody as opposed to certain medications getting props up or chosen to be used for different things. And we ended up in Taiwan of all places

and doing treatment there. And she had massive signs of recovery and that was i was like yeah i'm doing it and yeah and then i actually left because i had an issue going on with my flat in in scotland that i had to sort and that's when she passed away which was yeah hard as well so um yeah it was an interesting ride but i think like all these experiences which we all have in our lives like everybody goes through different things and different challenges at different points and they do make us learn and grow and you do look back and if it is even having to work through that grief or work through that sadness or work through that guilt

or weight of an experience and finding the tools really really help and for me breathing was the like I couldn't believe it I couldn't believe how something that was with us through that whole time of searching it was like we're searching outside of ourselves that what can we take what can we get what can we see what can we do but we had this thing called breathing with us the whole time it's funny because I think about it when I'm talking to snow like think about somebody's last breath how the breath just leaves the body or that first breath we take when we're in the cords cut from our mom and we breathe in and the breath lands in the body and for me our breath is like the spirit that's encased in this

human experience and it lands is anchored in our root and it's there and we dance with this breath 20 000 times a day until the breath decides to leave and then the breath leaves the body moves off and that's the way I kind of see it in terms of breathing so if we want to really stay here and we do have something that we wish to do achieve or we want to uncover our like be healthy if we can start to anchor our breath back into our body and I this was like just like started off as a kind of whimsical thing that came to me and the more I started working with people I was doing a lot of sessions with people with cancer and working with a charity in London and doing sessions weekly with cancer patients and I'd see that the breath was kind of

leaving their body and the more that we anchored the breath back down I'd get the breath back in and get them really grounded get the breath back in the body they start to feel better or start to have better recovery or like wouldn't feel as much pain and so it's anecdotal but it's there's definitely something there around it but makes a little bit of sense when we start looking at more science around that as well in terms of if you're stressed or breathing short in our chest and we're going to be stressed and it's going to trigger parts of our body and it's going to affect our longevity but if we can ground our breath we can certainly be here and be here a little bit longer it's so interesting because the way i mean the way you just explained it is so beautiful and so poetic and thank you for sharing that story but it's one of those things where it also seems

so obvious when you put it like that and yet we're completely disconnected we're like that can't possibly solve you know these experiences that I'm having or help ease whatever I'm going through because I think people just don't really give it much thought I've got a friend that's like I don't even notice but sometimes I stop breathing because I'm thinking well you know something and or something stressing them out so how did you end up going to that breathwork class with your mum like because obviously you said that you were going trying out these different things was breathwork was already something that you guys had been thinking about or exploring or no not at all no i think if

somebody said just just breathe just breathe through your cancer or go and do some breathing that will help that will cure your cancer. I would have stuck my fingers up and said, speak some sense. Like, come on, get me a real doctor or let's find something else. How I actually ended up in that class was I was meeting my mum for Mother's Day. Tiff passed away on Valentine's Day, which, again, was quite a tough day for it to happen and it was mother's day so like a month later a bit over a month i think it landed like seven weeks or something that that year and i was meeting my mom for mother's day typical me i actually hadn't got

anything organized and i'm flapping around like ah and just jumped on Facebook and something popped up breathing workshop don't know where I found it don't know how I found it don't know what it was there I didn't know what it was about my mum is a yoga instructor so I thought breathing yoga mother's day tick tick tick perfect sorted bought two tickets and it was for the following weekend that was it that's as far as i thought about it i said mum we're going to go to the breathing class next weekend she was happy i was happy great went along and i went along to that class and it wasn't so much skepticism i just felt like i'd done so much stuff and nothing had worked to cure

cancer so i felt like the alternative world I was a bit tainted like I just didn't everyone had the curative cancer and nobody we couldn't find it and so I've been kind of worn thin with different practices so when I went into that class I was like oh it's one of these sitting in a sharing circle I was just like and I was just there for my mum and then had this really, really profound experience. My mum had an equally profound experience, nothing to do with me or nothing to do with anything around this. It was more about her childhood, which is interesting in itself. So that's what brought me there.

And yeah, and it was more the power and the shift that happened in that session that made me want to go and do more to see if it was a one-off to see if it was maybe I was like maybe it's just something to do with grief and that was my imagination so I was still questioning a lot of these things and what's interesting is something Tiff said is when when it was nearing end at different points because she was having seizures at one point and then she got better and that's when i left but at one point she was like well you know what if this is my fate and we've been doing lots of kind of research on like different religions what's out there what's um what happens when we die where do we go what is is it just nothingness or is there

something beyond this human experience and she'd always said she said well this is like the ultimate science experiment if i pass i'll let you know and there's been so many things that happened yeah there's so many things that happened afterwards that are just beyond human experience including but a lot of it would happen in my breathwork sessions like literally feeling like she's there holding my hand and just like talking be like yeah this is what we're looking for this is where we are this is what you got to go do now this is the answer we're looking for it's breathing it connects everybody it's like this wave i've been talking before about this anchoring in your own human experience but I breathe out so right now we're sitting here you breathing in

it's going through your lungs through your heart through your body then you breathe it out and I'm breathing it in it's like super intimate and that's happening not just in this close proximity but it's happening with airflow around the whole street and around the whole city. There's a bit in my book, I actually share the maths behind, crude assumptions around statistics, but I share the maths behind in a day, when we're looking at stats,

it's likely that you'll breathe at least one molecule of oxygen of every single person on the planet. Not just every single person on the planet not just every single person on the planet living right now but germaphobes are freaking out yeah i know not not just every person on the planet right now but every person that's ever lived on the planet and this is i mean there's crucial assumptions around airflow and but when we're looking at the stats of how many people on the planet how many people have ever been on the planet and how many molecules of oxygen we breathe in a breath then we can figure

all i put all the maths actually in the book and like a fact box and because i found it so fascinating thinking about that but also trying to see if it's possible and it is it is possible so when we start looking at breath and breathing when i start having these amazing experiences that were answering a lot of questions about life and death and where do we go and what is it and what how do we access higher realms and space and how can we do that i was accessing this and it's not just me i've kind of of given up sharing my experience, but since my experience now sharing this work with thousands of other people, comes up time and time again. I witness it time and time again. People having these really profound experiences. I had one recently after the book launch, we did a book launch event and somebody

shared at the end of the session, I'd like to say that I've just let go. I've just released the grief for my dad who died when I was nine years old. And what was so heartbreaking when she was sharing that story was she was like in her 70s or something. And she's lived her whole life. She said in that hour, he came, he grabbed her toe and said, I'm off now. And she shared that and the whole room was in tears at the end and and what was so sad about it was she had been holding on to the weight

that trapped emotion of grief since she was nine years old because she wasn't allowed to grieve she didn't give she wasn't um the world that she was living in, her family, her friends, whatever the situation was, didn't give her the space to feel. So what did she do? She trapped, trapped her emotion, which emotion is just energy in motion. I mean, we don't allow it to have its motion. It gets stagnant. It's there. Now, with emotion, our breath moves.

Now, with emotion, our breath moves. So when we emote, if we tear, if we're feeling a sensation of grief, that will build up, that energy, the chemistry will change in our body and we'll usually burst into tears. So we have that integration cycle. We have this full cycle. And you shared, the person on your podcast talked about the alchemy but the alchemy yeah that alchemy changes and we have this cycle we have a release an emotional release harvard research says that emotional release takes 90 seconds to complete so when

we have an experience we feel an experience our breath moves and we emote, if we're not allowed to emote, either because we don't think it's appropriate to feel, like it's not appropriate to burst out laughing at this person, or it's not appropriate to cry at work in front of my colleagues, or it's in our household, it's not appropriate to cry in front of whatever, whatever the patterns were, it could be very conscious i don't want this to come up or we do that a lot as well if it's like oh sorry i'm just give me a moment

and move and also we say to each other don't cry don't cry don't cry it's okay we constantly even though it's we think we're being supportive it's kind of pushing it down even more you know yeah well a baby gets shushed not to cry when you were just explaining that what came to mind i just went to visit a friend who's got two young girls and i was observing sort of the two-year-old crying at all these different things and you know if the way that a child does like it's you know it gets something will happen it will have an experience and the emotion will come and it will just be a deluge of it and it will come out and then they'll kind of calm down but then we learn to regulate our systems because we obviously can't really function in a society if everyone's going around having a tantrum when they're getting told it's bedtime or whatever so what's the kind of balance there

because on one hand it feels like you're saying that actually the fact that we train ourselves out of doing that and do learn to regulate our sort of emotional state means that we're getting it trapped yeah and so when you were saying that i was just having visions of kind of full-grown men and women tantrum because they're tantrum because they're I still do sometimes to be honest crying on the floor of Sainsbury's ah they don't have my ice cream

yeah I think a toddler is still quite free in their emotions and they will have those tantrums and then we start to realise it's not okay to fully feel our emotions in certain situations and we do conform and the way we conform when we feel an emotional surge is we hold our breath we hold our breath to stop the

emotional flow and the emotion gets trapped okay so an example could be holding back laughter we cover our mouth we stop the flow of laughter holding back tears we hold our breath to stop the tears holding back back the anger and stop that flowing so that's that's how we do it and if you hold back the emotion gets trapped so what we can do is actually breathe through the emotion i i often share this in the book i've shared it on my radio show as well recognize breathe reframe so how do we recognize in a situation what we're going through I'm feeling this certain surge of energy moving through my body where do I feel it I might feel it here might feel it there it's anger okay what do I want to do right now so you recognize what you want to do well the natural

reaction might be to throw your phone at the wall you You say, well, let's not do that right now. That's not appropriate, but allow our breath to move. It may sound abstract. You can allow your breath to move in the flow of what intuitively feels right for that emotion. So the anger might be like, sort of spat everywhere, but the anger might be like this shake it off maybe some movement using our breath to allow that emotional flow to still happen without trapping it then you can cognitively reframe like is there a better way in this solution is that now that i've calmed myself down i've given myself the 90 seconds because 90 seconds is what how long it takes to process an emotion from start to finish so we felt it we breathe through it yeah we allow it to pass and then when

it's passed over the 90 seconds that breathing might take or shaking or using anger as an example maybe another example but we shake it off breathe it out and then go is there a better way okay what could i do here well yes let's not throw my phone at the wall let's just think about what i need to do in this situation and we just reframe it in that moment that's so helpful i think that's going to be such a useful tool for people listening because I actually I am a very I mean we're all emotional beings but I I do cry quite a lot and I'm super sensitive and I you know my boyfriend's amazing and he loves that about me and is able to kind of hold space for my whole emotional kind of landscape but recently um we were out and something had unsettled me that There was nothing, like he hadn't done anything.

It was a historical thing that I'd sort of felt triggered by. And I could feel that emotion and that sort of like prickly feeling and that heat all over my body coming where I was like, I'm going to cry. But because we were in a social place, we were out sitting outside a restaurant, I was like, I can't cry. But instead, and I've never done this before a restaurant I was like I can't cry but instead and I've never done this before but I was like I'm just gonna take like 10 breaths and see what happens so I just but I had to look away from my boyfriend so I just like looked I was just staring straight and he was like what are you doing and I just took these breaths and like, I could feel the emotion kind of there on the surface,

but it didn't erupt. It kind of just passed. And then I did calm down and I was like, okay, that's something I could do. Because for me it is, and I think a lot of people listening will find the same, like when I, a bit like a child does, like when something sets off,

like I either want to stop breathing like you say or it will kind of erupt and so i think that's super useful for people that 90 seconds is very doable you know anyone can just be like okay i'm just going to give myself 90 seconds to breathe through this and see if it passes yeah so it's so nice you were doing that naturally yeah and you did the three steps you recognize you could feel i'm being triggered i'm feeling maybe a change in physical sensation the heat building up something's happening then you're like it's not appropriate to emote right now because of this situation and just taking yourself away and

breathing through it and then reframing it if need be in that moment what i would also say is so that that's how you'd handle like managing yourself throughout the day it kind of whether it's simple emotions or whether it's more complex emotions the complex emotion might be the grief but you're working through that in the background and then you have to carry on with your day and work through things then it's so you have those tools that you can use and 10 breaths like you did is really nice slowing your breath down whatever feels good intuitive usually I'd bear on the kind of more calming slow breaths unless it's anger we need to just like vent it out a little bit or shake it off but then to actually work through what that trigger is the deeper stuff

the deeper stuff requires a bit more intervention and that was that that work that i first found myself in with my mum on mother's day and the big start of what i do i talk about this in my book breathe in breathe out because yes we can manage our simple emotions that's really great to have on our toolkit so that we can optimize our day and not in those moments not contract our breathing allow our breathing to still be open and expansive instead of contracting to hold in place to hold that i've been triggered well let's hold my breath because i don't want to burst into tears and then all of a sudden our breathings contracted maybe our shoulders curl and we hold it in place and we it's like we're just holding on and our body holds on without the idea of time like our

mind we just hold on and it's vibration in the present and we can hold on like that example I gave from nine years old until we're 70 of an experience. So it's also really important that we do the deeper work. Now the deeper work with breath work is understanding what was that trigger? Why am I being triggered in that situation? What was that and can I work through that? And what I mean by this is if we use a really simple example of triggers because triggers is a response in a moment so if you use a stress response if you get stressed in a situation the system of the body is just working like the tigers come in the room like our ancestors very primal the fight or flight kicks on and we run out of the room or we fight off the tiger or we completely shut down and freeze or we fall yeah so we have these different responses that happen

in the stress response if we switch the situation for a dog a dog comes in the room we see the dog one of two things would happen you'd run towards the dog and get excited and your breath would move and it'd expand and you'd be all happy and you'd rub the dog behind the ears and you'd ask what his name was and you'd feel elation and you'd feel joy. Or it'd be like the tigers come in the room and you'd run to the other side of the room or you'd freeze in that experience. So why do you think somebody would be scared of a dog or excited by a dog? Because of past experience. Because of past experience.

So their trigger in the present is because of a past experience. Yeah. You know, I always am aware of that, but I'm so intrigued for the tools because I think logically and in theory I think people can recognize or hopefully recognize that actually their response is unmeasured to the situation because it's historical. One of my favorite teachers always called Mark Groves always says if it's hysterical it's historical but I think you know especially in relationships or whatever it might be like a thing that has happened to us in the past that's caused us trauma or whatever it is.

And then something pretty small and significant happens in the present, but it sets off that response. So, yeah, what is the kind of breathwork approach? The breathwork approach is basically working with the breath in more of a dynamic way, using a faster paced breathing, using sound, using a little bit of movement of the body. Because when we have those experiences from the past, let's say the dog nipped your hand

when you were three years old. The breath holds, we freeze. The brain fires and wires a neural pathway and we create a belief, dogs are not safe. So we avoid the dogs. So that's the trauma experience. The experience of the dog bark bite So that's the trauma experience. The experience of the dog, bark or bite,

that's a felt experience. Or we can have a learnt experience, which is maybe your mum saying, don't ever go near a dog. Dog will bite your hand off. Brain fires and wires. We create a belief, dogs are not safe. We avoid the dogs.

Or we have a traumatic experience, like grief or going through a breakup. Or we have a buildup of small experiences that start to shape our core beliefs like kind of the little t's they're not quite traumas as we know it but being told you're not good enough or your sister's better than you or whatever it is we start to create this way that we view the world so we get triggered in different situations as an adult and our breathing changes so the breathwork approach to this what i share and teach is well how do we go back to this full expansive breath that we would have had when we were before

life really began as a baby before we start to hold our breath and contract and create these micro contractions in our breathing cycle where we're holding on to emotion is this kind of applicable to when people have blocks around stuff, you know, when they'll be wanting to do something, whether that's a career or whatever it might be, and they find themselves sort of sabotaging or messing it up because there's something blocking, but it's so subconscious and it's so deep-rooted that it's not even in their awareness? It absolutely can help, yeah.

The nice thing about breathing and breath work, we can access the unconscious mind because breath is both conscious and unconscious. So it's this bridge that we can access parts of our brain. I like to think of the cellar under the stairs that we've locked and hope we don't go into that. Draw in the kitchen where you have all the old batteries and stuff we hope nobody looks in there a lot of people don't want to go there so when people are going into your classes when even you went into

this class presumably you didn't really have any idea that you're about to have this experience right no idea and a lot of people that come and do classes with you don't either so when that's happening to the body how does the mind know to go to those places it's it's interesting because different things come up and sometimes people come in with an intention of xyz and they something completely different comes up so you kind of have to trust it it's all about trust it's all about surrendering into that practice if you go in with a control thought process your breath starts to be controlled because your mind your thoughts are sending a signal to your breathing in your

body the whole time and this is all this practice is all about letting go, all letting go. Like how we actually let go. And that happens with our out-breath, dropping out of the body and breathing this certain way. So it's about transcending the body and mind, like really transcending, popping through the veil of the conscious mind and sitting in that space that is not our ordinary state of consciousness, being in a different space. And in that space, we can get deep healing.

We can have a lot of answers to the problems that we've been trying to solve or amazing creative solutions to different things, amazing ideas. So it can be used in a number of different ways. Sometimes people come to me because of X, Y, Z, and they walk out going, I didn't realize this is actually what the issue was

and now I'm going to solve it. And I get that quite a lot with people maybe coming, trouble sleep, I've got trouble sleeping. Because that's quite a common one, people struggling with insomnia. And I think we touched on this when I last saw you. How can breathwork help with that? And what have you noticed as a theme that comes up for

people that are struggling with sleeping so there's probably a few different things i can answer there on sleep with this particular example somebody came to me with trouble with sleep and i shared the tools that i'll run through in a second of like this is how to get our body relaxed so we can sleep this is how to improve your sleep when you're asleep. If you wake up, here's some breathing techniques to calm the system. But they're in some ways like little plasters to improve getting to sleep and staying asleep.

Again, I like to uncover what's happened. What's happened that's caused your sleep to be disturbed? Why isn't your body shutting down at night a little bit of detective work around it and i had somebody can't sleep can't sleep tried everything tried all these things we did a deeper work session what's a deeper work session this breath work that was talking about the the when we move into more of respiratory alkalosis trauma release breath work um it's a connected breath it's quite dynamic quite evokes quite a lot of physical sensation and a lot of emotional release and he had a powerful session

again i'm running through it i'm just all i do in those sessions is i can see where the breath is trapped and open up using somatic release guiding guiding the breath, saying different words to that particular person. Breath opens and it's like clockwork. When it opens into the space, I can see your trap. Usually there's emotional release. And this particular client finished the session was like, and it was grief again for this person. His mom had come to him in that session.

He'd realized it was grief and he worked through that grieving emotion in that moment in that hour together came out of it was like oh my god and i put two and two together and me sometimes i'm like how did you not put two two together he said i've not been sleeping since my mum died and i it felt like such an obvious thing but he never explained that when he walked in the door he said I've tried everything this is my this I'm just not sleeping I think it's work I'm too busy did all the kind of usual train of thought very valid but then uncovered this deeper thing for him like actually no this is it went home slept through the night slept through the night again and and and it's it's profound like that there's these magical experiences people have and it's so amazing so that it's like undercovering what is the root

to my discomfort whether it's sleep whether that's stress whether that is emotional pain or physical pain what is it right now that i'm feeling this sense of discomfort around in my day-to-day is it my mind is my thoughts i'm uncovering what is causing causing it is it the past is it my childhood has it been experiences through childhood which play a big part is it maybe other experiences through school or friendships or other things or experiences like grief or change or things that the dog barks and bites whatever they are of various sizes so that for me is still like the main thing people need to go and do the work and the work for me has been so profound by doing these deeper practices with people that said there are some really helpful tools before doing

that to play with when it comes to sleep. To get to sleep, our body needs to be safe. It needs to know that there's no tiger in the room. And our unconscious mind does not know the difference that triggers our breathing, does not know the difference between the tiger in the room and the tiger in our mind. It triggers same breathing response so if we are sitting or we're going to bed thinking about the to-do list what we could have done that day what we should have done that day what we got to do tomorrow we're creating the tiger and in our head we're keeping our mind busy our body's responding to do this tiger yeah it is a big tiger it bites me quite a few times actually um so yeah so how do we give ourselves the best chance to switch off and breathing is quite binary we can breathe faster to switch yourself on like a double espresso or we can breathe slow calm

really long out breaths triggers our vagal nerve to send a signal from our body to our brain everything's cool i'm as safe there's no tigers here there's no tigers in our mind the tigers in the mind might pipe up again and then we do another round of breath another round of breath until we fall asleep so we can do the kind of gold seals. There's the 4-7-8 breath. What does that, how does that go, the 4-7-8? Yeah, so the 4-7-8 breath, Dr. Andrew Wheel, he says, if you practice this, you fall to sleep in 60 seconds.

It's a very bold statement and it's all anecdotal, very happy, sleep happy, anecdotal references. But breathing in through your nose for a count of four using your diaphragm so your belly rises hold for seven and breathe out through your mouth for eight so that out breath that long out breath double the length of your inhale flicks the off switch we move into a parasympathetic state, a rest, digest, repair state. And I sometimes teach this in corporate settings and we're doing like four minutes of it and I can see people's heads nodding.

And people get a bit embarrassed because of that work and they're falling asleep. I'm like, yes, it's working. And I say that, I'm like, if you need to yawn, yawn. Like, celebrate the yawns. This is good good we're giving you tools that you can use to fall asleep um so four seven eight breath in for four hold for seven out for eight the yogic way is actually to keep the tip of the tongue behind our front teeth

okay due for the whole duration of it which connects energy points in the body so the out breath is a little bit harder but it also because it just slows it down as it passes around the tongue so it's in for four keep your tongue there you can practice this if you're listening in for four pause for seven and then breathe out keeping the tongue in place for eight. So out. And on that out breath, really concentrate on letting the body become heavy, drop the shoulders, relax behind the eyes, relax the forehead, relax the jaw. And that all happens on that out breath how do you feel one cycle pretty chill yeah to be fair i can sleep anywhere i've never had a problem with sleeping but my boyfriend does so i'm gonna i'm gonna remember that for him the tongue thing is interesting because i sing so i've

been and i've been doing some singing singing lessons recently and my biggest issue in singing is my breathing because it's when I get my most nervous and so I stop breathing in the breath I cut it up so I also like won't take it in when I need to and it won't it's like the key but um my teacher has told me she's like keep your tongue by your teeth when you're singing. And I don't know why, but it's made such a big difference. Interesting. Well, when you're singing, they were breathing in. I don't know.

The tongue by my teeth has meant that I'm started to breathe more. I don't know why. But you'd be using your nose to breathe, the tongue's by the teeth. Well, that kind of brings me on to my next question is, are we supposed to be breathing in our nose through our nose and out through our mouth or does it not really matter because sometimes someone said you're supposed to actually only be breathing through your nose that someone will be me right now but you just said to breathe out the mouth for that eight exhale. So there's different times we'll do different things.

And quick snapshot, the nose is designed for breathing, filters the air, gets the right temperature, moisture to your lungs, cleans out any airborne stuff, bacteria, germs, anything at all, viruses. We've got a cavity for nitric oxide, which is a gas that opens up our blood vessels so helps with circulation but it also kills off airborne bacteria and viruses as well so our nose gives us the best chance of optimizing the air that arrives at our lungs so it's not too hot or cold and cleans the air as best as possible in the book i actually talk about the nose being the bouncer for the club which is the which is the lungs um is the way i sometimes think about it so in breath the size of

these little guys he's pointing at his nostrils by the way yeah the size of these little guys compared to our mouth means we breathe a lot slower slow breath means we feel calm breathing slow and calm our mind will follow it will feel slow and calm not slow meaning like we can't think but actually the opposite we just feel calm so when we're breathing through our nose in filters the air slows the rate which we breathe and gets the air primed out breath our nose captures moisture and heat leaving the body if we breathe out through the nose or we can breathe out through the mouth and we can do a different thing i mean speaking right now as we speak it's just an audible out breath but where people when they're speaking i've noticed

you doing this as well and people can check this when they're listening a lot of times people gasp for air through their mouth in between sentences well that's what I do when I'm singing as well and it's not good. When we gasp for air through our mouth, the times we do that is an emergency. Okay. So, wander out here, step off the pavement, onto the road and the cyclist is about to hit me. What do I do? Big gasp of air, triggers my stress response, blood flow moves to my muscles I leap to the pavement back to safety that's when we so our mouth breath will save our life

in those moments of stress if we're spending our day talking a lot breathing through our mouth talking a lot breathing through our mouth singing like we're just triggering the stress response. Sounds exhausting. I'm so anxious all the time. And we're probably breathing too much. Breathing too much changes the chemistry of our body. The pH will change. Our brain gets used to this pattern. We get stuck in a bad pattern of breathing.

This is where like the breathing links between thinking, feeling and chemistry. It's all interlinked. So back to your question yes in and out through your nose as much as you possibly can if you're speaking breathe in through your nose and out through the mouth as much as you can if you're excited or you're trying to get a point across you'll naturally maybe start speaking through your mouth a bit more but if you can consciously switch to in through the nose

and talk out through your mouth, you'll come across more considered and you'll feel calm, collected and under control. And when you're singing. Which will be why your singing teacher has got the tongue there. To stop me. The tongue's there. You're not going to breathe in through the mouth.

So you breathe in through the nose when it comes to anxiety because i feel like that's something that people are you know struggling with more than ever at the moment how what are the tools that they can have on a more sort of day-to-day basis on breath work to help alleviate that? Because, you know, from my own personal experience. Did you see what you did there? I just gasped. Big gasp of air through your mouth. I did, didn't I?

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I'm going to keep noticing it. I had no idea that I did that. But, yeah, from my own personal experience, I am trying to breathe through my nose now. It feels really weird. The thing is I do when I'm not talking.

Yeah. But not when I'm talking. But anyway. I mean, it takes a while to practice. If you've been doing something like anything yeah day in day out you can slow down and just start breathing through your nose it won't happen all the time i mean i but i try and get people to really be conscious about breathing through the nose as much as they possibly can okay oh whoops i just did the golfing so you're like don't think

about oranges that's all you can think about but when um with the anxiety piece i can sort of get in a bad loop and start spinning out on thoughts which then will manifest in the body and then that will sort of set off the thoughts and it can all sort of start spiraling i don't really know that much I'm learning a lot more obviously from speaking to you but I there's like a breath work thing which is like blocking one nostril which I would do go to do it now it's become a bit of a joke because every time I'm feeling anxious I start touching my nose so my boyfriend's like why are you touching your nose again because I guess every time I feel a bit anxious I get ready to do that but I don't really know what I'm doing so for myself and also

anyone listening that you know gets into that state where they start spinning and then start catastrophizing what are some really useful tools to kind of reground them and anchor them and stop that? Yeah, emotional spiraling. And in some ways, because of negative bias, because our mind and body is always trying to keep us safe, unless we're doing something to stop it, we will always slightly negative spiral. It's a natural human trait because we're always looking out for danger danger tigers and bears that aren't even there so we kind of need to work to kind of positively spiral because we can positively spiral as well because our thoughts are repeated so it's it's really nice when we

start using some of these techniques so in terms of breathing if we start feeling stressed or anxious the thoughts start spinning the brain says it's a signal to our body so i backtrack anxiety we could call as a state of being my state of being is i'm feeling anxiety now our state of being is a product of thinking and feeling when our thinking and feeling match it creates our state of being got that hence what i was saying about the the mind then creating the physical feeling and then that physical feeling creating more thoughts in the mind and yeah and it's a spiral like you said so let's take anxiety i'm thinking an anxious thought so the thinking's happened the thinking has sent a signal to my body to say whoa we're anxious so

the body's responded with anxiety without stress response the tiger's now in the room our breathing changes we either hold our breath or our breathing becomes short and shallow there's some sort of physiological change that happened heart rate might change or i start to sweat we might feel different that then sends a signal back to the brain says yep check we're check. We're anxious. State of being is anxiety. Now. Have a cup of tea. And really start spinning out.

That's what I do. Well, what we can do is either we can work with our minds or dive in and work with our body using our breath and skew the signal. Because if we break that loop, then the state of being doesn't happen. because if we break that loop then the state of being doesn't happen so if we change our thoughts easier said than done when we're in a negative spiral that's why i just jump in and change our breathing so what you were practicing doing your nose breath yeah if that works for you absolutely was it one side or was it both sides just into left. Yeah we have different nostrils trigger different parts of our nervous system. Left is parasympathetic, right is sympathetic. So our left nostril breathing into your left will trigger a calm response. So that is a good that is a good move if that's been

working for you. What I usually tell people to do is just something that I do anytime I feel anxious or stressed and it switches it super quick is starts with the phrase if in doubt breathe it out. Having a longer out breath than your in breath triggers the off switch. It sends a signal from our body to our heart. Heart rate slows down then that the signal of slow breathing slower heart rate brain says oh we're not actually anxious the mind might throw another anxious thought which means we just need to keep on practicing the technique so the technique usually that i go for a bit similar to the four seven eight breath but it's just in for four through our nose hold for four and then out for eight through our mouth okay Okay let's do it with everyone.

Yeah, so breathe in for four. Feel your belly rise. Hold for four. Just keep calm and still on the hold. And breathe out through your mouth for eight. Let your shoulders drop. Good, let's go again. So in for four.

Pause and hold for four. Breathe out for eight. See if you can drop your shoulders even more. Just melt down. It's that out breath where we start to feel calm. So we do two more. In for four. Pause and hold for four.

This time as you breathe out for eight, relax behind your eyes. Good. One more. In for four. Pause and hold for four. And breathe out for eight through your mouth, relax your whole body, your face, your jaw, your forehead, shoulders, arms, legs. And when you're ready, you can come back in the room. I feel good.

I'm going to be doing that 10 times a day. So for people that are listening, that perhaps this has awakened something in them and the awareness that they have something that they really need to shift, perhaps something that they've been carrying for a really long time, whether that be grief or shame, whatever it might be, and they want to take the steps to kind of move that out. What should they be doing? Because I know you mentioned that it's important that it's in a safe space.

It's one thing doing these day-to-day exercises, but for the more deep, uprooting these kind of core wounds, where should they begin? Yeah, it's something I really try to capture in my book. How can I take people's hand through words on a page in a really safe way to allow them to go where they need to go so that they can by reading the book picking it up working through the exercises in the book by the end of the book they could have that transformation that they can

facilitate it for themselves they can facilitate for themselves which is really empowering and for for me my most powerful experiences of breathwork were by myself really but that was after i'd kind of you've been to the classes been to class or i just understood it wasn't so much been to the classes it was understood because breathing is unconscious it will only take us where we can go like it will override if need be if it will stop us doing something we shouldn't i did google during my research as well i was like can you hold your can you die holding your breath you can't like it will click in it will override your your conscious mind you're going i wouldn't even trying to attempt it don't try and attempt that if you're listening but um i was just intrigued i was like wow maybe could that happen so that like the body kind of knows where it needs to go

and it's always trying to find homostasis trying to find balance the whole time so the big steps happened already i think for anybody that's gone i've now got the awareness of this it might be the issue which is more than some people have when they come to see me they just if they're uncovering some of the deeper parts themselves the traumas the past the experiences they and the experiences we've kind of gone down trauma sometimes it's like people don't allow themselves to feel good because they've been squashed every time they felt good when they were younger and so they start to i'm not it's not okay to fully feel joy i'm not allowed to feel my good i can relate to that and it's that it's about empowering people to actually feel their best and that's amazing when we can start doing that so breathwork has had a big surgence there's a

lot of different breathwork instructors out there now which is amazing but do homework before going to to see somebody because like anything there's fast tracks to go and we're dealing with deep-rooted traumas and parts of ourselves that can come out in these sessions and so just make sure you feel comfortable safe and you you know that what that person is all about before doing a session. That said, that was the big challenge when I wrote the book. I really wanted to do what I do in a really safe way so that I could guide people through this process by themself and empower them to have that change by themself.

So we start off with understanding what your breathing says about you figuring out how you're breathing what your breathing archetype is because that might be what we're holding on to if we're breathing a certain way we're holding on down here then that might um be causing our behavior and our patterns and even our personality just by what way because our breathing triggers our feeling so if i start breathing like this i'm going to start feeling quite elated and or a bit anxious so whatever if i breathe very slow like we just practiced i'm going to start to feel calm and relaxed so our breathing maps our emotional experience it moves and flows through any time we have an experience triggers our

breathing our breathing moves as part of that time we have an experience triggers our breathing our breathing moves as part of that experience we expand and the emotion cycles through now if we have a feeling and we maybe trap it or we have a feeling that lasts so a feeling is linked to breathing a feeling that lasts let's say a week we call it a mood a mood that lasts a couple of months we call it a temperament a temperament that lasts a couple of years we start to say well that's the personality trait so if we backtrack it actually goes back down to how we felt in a moment and that comes down to our breathing so it's something that people come to me quite a lot when we talk about anxiety. People say, I'm just an anxious person. And you can have anxiety disorder in many cases.

And it can be chemistry involved. But a lot of people that come through my door, they say it as they walk through the door. You know, I'm just an anxious person. I'm like, ah! Most times you've had an experience that's caused anxiety that anxiety has persisted and now we say this is just me and what i'd say was actually it's it's not just you we can actually unwind some of this stuff we can let go of whatever that experience was in the first place that's trapped our breathing in this state and now become an identity piece and now become your identity and shift it through so if you that's a very basic

example but we can start to see where someone holds their breath even in their posture we can start to paint a picture of how they're interacting in the world how because our breathing triggers the way we are our energy is flowing how our measure of feeling and if we've got for instance use myself as an example again if when i went into my breathing session that first one with my mum if anybody saw me physio or maybe doctor look at my breathing you look at it and go yeah he's breathing fine i was breathing my diaphragm breathing through my nose as much as i maybe not as much as i do now but i was relatively good breather yet i had no movement in my chest it was all down here because what happens in our chest where there's a heart space this is about feeling so if i wasn't breathing in here i'd close this

down because i didn't want to feel i didn't want to feel grief so my grieving experience was complete withdrawal they kind of freeze response not being out of bed not want to speak to anybody or complete outburst anger because I knew that anger in my mind and body anger was okay or just shut off and don't speak to anybody they were the two responses because I hadn't allowed myself to feel. Now, grief was that trigger for that experience, but why couldn't I feel to my truest in that moment? It was because of the dog bark and bite

that happened when I was younger. Big boys don't cry. I was on a judo mat at four years old, trained to win, be the tough guy. Judo teacher was called Superman. My teddy bear is called tough Ted. Like you can start to see growing up in Scotland, the persona that I was, that men don't cry. We can, we can have anger and we can shout and scream or we keep it to ourself. So when I became an, and that worked for me, this notion of strength worked for me through my

career and through different times until this grieving moment that notion of strength crumbled yeah but where it was held was actually my chest and a lot of the time I try and get people not breathing in their chest but for me it was kind of the opposite breathing very grounded very solid I'm here very present but you need to get into a heart i couldn't there was no movement into my heart space my heart completely closed down now you can see this with people just walking down the street might be someone like frozen breathing their posture is curled their heart is protected they're doing their best to protect their heart i'm kind of curling my shoulders here and protecting my heart like this or you get um yeah

collapse breathers or different archetypes this is what i talk about early on in the book to identify what type of breather you are and that identification might come by looking at how you're breathing but also just looking a bit of our past and saying oh actually what's happened to maybe cause me to be this archetype. And even the good breathers, they can be very controlled. The yogis can be very controlled because they practice so well to control their breath, but they find it really hard to let go. So because their breath is so controlled

because of their practice, they become very good at maybe putting that plaster on, but often there's something there underlying. So that journey for them is about letting go control. So really good place to start is like understanding this part of the book there's the kind of simple fix working with stress understanding pain working through the simple emotions we talked about recognize breathe reframe technique and then once we've got these techniques that kind of base level knowledge and understanding know about the science we can start moving into this deeper process, which I do as a 40 day daily practice, 10 minutes a day.

10 minutes a day, usually in the morning of this certain practice of breath with intention to allow ourselves to release whatever it is we need to release so that we can fully feel what we need to feel. so that we can fully feel what we need to feel. I love that. My heaven, like everyone, we're all going to do the 40 day challenge. Let's do it. We should do it. Yeah.

Okay. And so where can everyone get the book? Because I feel like everyone's going to want it. Yeah, yeah. The book is available in all good bookstores. Waterstones, Amazon as well online and there's an audio version too yeah that sounds amazing i'll put a link in the show notes because i think yeah the audio must be like super useful for people that maybe want that sort of feeling of you talking them through it a bit more yeah so the audio they're slightly different because the book has pictures, images,

some of the exercises come to life through visuals on the page and there's diagrams and there's tables. The audio, we've got the exercise brought to life. Yeah. So in the book, the exercise might say, repeat four times. But in the actual audio one, I do, we repeat it four times in an actual exercise um which is really helpful and so there's there's kind of good in both of them yeah well we'll put a link in the show notes and thank you so much for joining me today i feel like i've learned so much and also for sharing your story because that was very special and very vulnerable I'm sure I think it would have helped a lot of people so

thank you thank you for having me it's been a pleasure to be here I hope you found this episode as moving as I did and that you can take something away from it in your day-to-day life you know it's a very simple practice but if we could just start our morning checking in with our breath and how that might impact the rest of our day I was also really surprised to hear how much you know people can carry grief and these very old emotions and actually through breath work that's with someone like Stuart you can uncover these old emotions in a way that talking therapy can't and it's something that seems to be creeping up in many areas of conversations I've had with people over the last couple of months whether that be on the podcast or you know talks I've been going to is this the somatics the language of the body the dialogue between the

body and the mind and because we have been living so from the neck up we store everything in our body and we don't know how to release it and actually there are ways and it's important that we do and so I hope that you found this episode useful with some helpful techniques of how to do this I also have been actioning and using the very simple term but effective one that Stuart said of when in doubt breathe it out and on many moments recently it has calmed me down tremendously. And like I said to him, when I feel my emotions can hijack me, actually using my breath to regulate my nervous system when I feel activated has been incredible. I think I look a little bit mad when I'm doing it because I'm sort of just suddenly breathing and not really moving that much. But I found it really helpful actually in being able to communicate my truth so you know when people think about breath work

I think they think of it as a quite simple thing and actually I hope that this conversation has touched on the fact that actually it goes incredibly deep and it's a very intimate thing you know this idea that throughout one day it's likely that you'll breathe a molecule of oxygen of everyone on the planet and how intimate that is and how interconnected we all are so I will leave you with that and if you want to hear more from Stuart you can find him on Instagram at breathpod or at breathpod.com. If you would like to dive deeper into the world of Saturn Matans and astrology, we would love you to be part of the community. You can sign up to the newsletter below or you can get a reading with Nora where she deep dives into your chart. where she deep dives into your chart.

And also, I would love to see you at our shows in January on the 18th and 19th in Chelsea and in Manchester. So if you would like to come and meet me there for a magical and cosmic evening and meet some of the community, it would be wonderful to see you. And you can find Link in the show notes. And the final thing is that my book saturn returns is now available for pre-order so you can buy that and it will be with you in january or you can buy it with a ticket and you will get a signed copy at the shows thank you so much for listening to this episode of saturn returns we really get discovered by you guys sharing it with your friends your

colleagues your family so please do keep sharing the show whether that be on social media or just sending it privately in a message to someone who you think will find it useful it also really helps when you write a review on apple not only do i really like reading your messages but it also helps us get discovered by more like-minded people thanks again for listening to this episode of Saturn Returns and remember, you are not alone. Goodbye.