Saturn Returns with Caggie - *Moments* Soothing Insomnia with Breathwork, with Stuart Sandeman

Episode Date: October 16, 2022

These minisodes are clips, taken from the full episode, that consist of Caggies most poignant, thought-provoking or favourite moments from the conversation with her guest. In this week's moment, you���ll hear Caggie and Breathwork Specialist, Stuart Sandeman, discussing breathing tools that improve sleep and soothe insomnia. The full episode will be available to listen to tomorrow and covers topics such as the science and alchemy behind breath work, how we can confront painful and difficult emotions with our breath and how we can improve our health by simply cleaning up our breathing habits. 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 i hope you're having a wonderful sunday just checking in ahead of tomorrow's episode of saturn returns to share with you a moment from the episode which is a new thing we're going to be doing um it's a highlight from the episode that i find particularly profound or useful and this week i'm joined by my friend stewart sandman aka breath pod as we explore the power of breath work this is relatively new to me and i found it so informative and so interesting and i think you're going to find it amazing just as a tool to take away for your day to day practices to ease anxiety, to help with depression or in more extreme form to unearth trauma. So here is our moment. And I hope you enjoy it.

And don't forget to listen to Monday's episode. It will be out at 7 a.m. And I get that quite a lot. People may be 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 sleep, tried everything, tried all these things. We did a deeper work session.

What's a deeper work session? This breath work that I was talking about. When we move into more of respiratory alkalosis, trauma release breath work, it's a connected breath. It's quite dynamic, evokes quite a lot of physical sensation and a lot of emotional release. And he had a powerful session. 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 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 who you 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 and two together he said I've not been sleeping since my mum died and I 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 is 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 is 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 the 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 in our head. We're keeping our mind busy, our body's responding. To-do list tiger. Yeah, it is a big tiger. It bites me quite a few times actually. It is a big tiger.

It bites me quite a few times, actually. 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 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

four, seven, eight breath. What does that, how does that go? Yeah. So the four, seven seven eight breath what does that how does that go the four seven yeah so the four seven eight 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 or rest digest repair state and i know 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. We're giving you tools that you can use to fall asleep. 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 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