The One You Feed - Josh Trent on Wellness and Breathwork Practices

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

Josh Trent is the Founder of Wellness Force Media, host of the Wellness Force Podcast and the creator of the BREATHE: Breath & Wellness Program  Josh has spent the past 19+ years as a trainer, researcher, and facilitator discovering the physical and emotional intelligence for humans to thrive in our modern world.  The Wellness Force Mission  is to help humans heal mental, emotional and physical health through podcasts, programs, and a global community that believe in optimizing our potential to live life well.In this episode, Eric and Josh Trent discuss how to implement his powerful wellness and breathwork practices.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!Josh Trent and I Discuss Wellness and Breathwork Practices and...His personal story that led to creating Wellness Force podcast and business.The important scientific and spiritual aspects of breathworkBox breathing and circular breathing How breath is the autonomic lever that we can pull for modulating stressUnderstanding the default mode network and how it can be deemed good or badThe 3 phases of breathworkAcute breathing practice is when you're stressed or reactiveProactive or meditative breathing is what allows long term changes over time (neuroplasticity)Catharsis breathing is a deeper level that requires trainingThe importance of breathing horizontally (expanding your diaphragm) and not verticallyBeginning a breathwork practice requires you to start where you are without judging yourselfThe difference between breathwork and meditationHow breathwork primes your nervous system and is your best ally for meditationInvestigating the inner critic by becoming curious rather than judging itThe balancing of our awareness and lack of awarenessLearning to bridge the gap between knowing and doingHis emotional inventory practiceJosh Trent Links:Josh's Website and Breathwork ProgramInstagramTwitterFacebookWhen you purchase products and/or services from the sponsors of this episode, you help support The One You Feed. Your support is greatly appreciated, thank you!If you enjoyed this conversation with Josh Trent you might also enjoy these other episodes:The Science of Breathing with James NestorMind Over Matter with Wim HofSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Josh Trent, the founder of Wellness Force Media, host of the Wellness Force podcast, and creator of Breathe, a breath and wellness program.

and wellness program. Josh has spent the last 19 years as a trainer, researcher, and facilitator discovering the physical and emotional intelligence for humans to thrive in our modern world. The Wellness Force mission is to help humans heal mental, emotional, and physical health through podcasts, programs, and a global community that believe in optimizing our potential to live life well. Hi, Josh. Welcome to the show. Eric, thank you for having me. It's such an honor. Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. We're going to be talking about a lot of different aspects of your work, one of the big ones being breath work. But before we do that, let's start like we always do with a parable. In the parable, there is a grandparent who are talking with

their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness, bravery, and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I just got chills in my whole body because I've heard you say that so many times on your podcast, and it's pretty surreal answering this question to you in real time. You know, I was thinking about this last night. I was preparing for this question.

And for me, it's about the singularity and the duality that we're living in in this world. And I'm not a religious man, Eric, but Isaiah 45, 7, I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things. In that scripture, we're being told that whether it's good or bad, black or white, and the two wolves, they're all the same and they live inside of us. So if I'm feeding the wolf that's jealous and rageful and resentful, then that's my choice because I'm made in the image of God. And again, I'm not a biblical man. I'm not a religious man. I'm a spiritual man. And then if I feed the wolf that's loving and that's filled with forgiveness,

well, then I'm being God and it's best, most beautiful form. But also it's the reverence for the fact that inside of the singularity, there is this duality. There is this dark and light, this love and hate, and honoring the mystery of all that. It's beautiful. Yeah. I like that singularity, duality. In Zen, we would say emptiness and form, form and emptiness, they're the same thing. They coexist.

The one won't exist without the other. Or the yin-yang, right? The snake eating its tail. It's like, these are all things that we can intellectualize, but to actually feel them and be them, that's a lifelong wisdom journey. Amen. All right. That's a great place for us to start. Just tell us a little bit about your wisdom journey. You know, this is not a show where we explore people's stories a whole lot, but I'm kind of curious how you got to where you are. My mom had manic bipolar when I was young. And so I didn't have the right tools from a nutritional standpoint or a mental standpoint. And my dad left home when I was about two months old. So the universe put me in some dark contrast to be here on earth. Flash forward, I'm like 20 years old. I'm 280 pounds. I'm in a job I hate. I'm in a relationship that's not good for me. It was the ultimate spiritual awakening. And I ended up losing and gaining over a hundred pounds and moved to Hawaii and found spirituality and honestly found God through the ocean,

through the feminine waters of Hawaii. And it was a beautiful time for me. And I found fitness there too. And it was a 10 year journey in personal training and being a fitness professional, then more graduating into wellness with really my heart, my soul, wellnessforce.com and the Wellness Force podcast. That's really my journey in a very small nutshell filled with about three or four dark nights of the soul. But really it came from a space of contrast where I would move towards what my heart was guiding me towards, which is more loving, coming from the contrast of contraction, of really fear and a lot of beliefs from my parents that didn't necessarily serve. Yep. So breathwork is a big part of what you teach, what you do. You've created programs around it. Why have you chosen to go so deep into that area? I think that in our world of wellness and especially personal development,

people are always attuned to what's the latest and greatest hot new thing, whether it's ayahuasca or psilocybin or fill in the blank. But I don't think plant medicine is for everyone. I think plant medicine deserves ultimate reverence and respect. And so in order for myself personally, and also I've seen with students and clients to truly heal and to become whole, to become loving of self, we have to have alternate experiences. We have to have altered states of awareness. We can get it through meditation. We can get it through Vipassana. We can get it through loving kindness meditation or float tanks. But I found, Eric, that for me personally, the more I dive deeper into the breath, the more my stuck energy and stored emotions and memories that are physically residing in my tissues arise. And for me, that's the most powerful thing because all of us, everyone is traumatized, whether it's capital more safe than a lot of these entheogens.

The breath is more safe for people than going to the jungle and sitting with people that you don't know and possibly putting yourself in harm's way. So that's why I think that breath work is both spiritual and scientific because it accesses all the same points. It accesses DMT, it opens up the pineal gland,

it does so many beautiful processes for our biology and the vagus nerve and the enteric nervous system. But it's also safe, right? It's a place where with the right practitioner, no harm can be done. No harm can be done. But that's not about when we say breathwork, what do we mean? It sounds like that could be all away from what you're describing sounds a little bit like Stan Groff and holotropic breathing to, you know, taking 10 deep breaths before I, you know, yell at my kids. Like, I mean, there's a lot, breathwork covers a lot. So for you, you're interested in that whole scope. Is there an area in there you lean more towards? Or so what is the sort of breathwork that you're interested in that whole scope. Is there an area in there you lean more towards? Or so what is the sort of breath work that you're really working on and teaching people? The personal practice for myself, breath work, we can only do three things, right? We inhale, we exhale, and we hold.

So that's it. I'm interested in those three things. But specifically, what I teach and what I practice is box and circular breathing. So in this realm of breath, we have box breath and box is more grounding. It'll bring you down to the earth rather than blast you up. Box breath essentially is when you inhale, hold, exhale, hold. You can do it in multiples of four or five, six seconds. Circular breathing is conscious connected breathing.

So you would inhale and exhale with no hold, with no pause. Those two styles of breath is what we talk about in the breathe, breath and wellness program. It's what I put into my own personal meditations. And actually, you know, it's been lighting me up the most lately. I just remember this last week for the program. I recorded some binaural beats meditations. So I would overlay my voice with a conscious practice of visualization practice. And we would do circular and box breathing in these binaural meditations. That I believe is the next frontier, Eric, of breathwork. Because as you know, with binaural beats and isochronic tones, they can induce different theta and alpha two brainwaves, which puts people in a different energetic state, both spiritually and scientific. And I'm really loving that lately.

So that's my scope. That's my lens of breath work, but really at its simplest form, breath is the only autonomic lever that we can pull in our nervous system. Autonomic meaning automatic. We can't digest our food faster. We can't beat our heart faster. All we can do when it comes to the automatic nervous system, the ANS, is we pull a lever between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic, the rest and digest, and the fight, flee, or freeze. And so what breath is, is truly a lever that is connected to ourselves, but also connected to nature herself. And it's the most powerful tool for modulating stress. Yeah. I often think about two things in sort of our

wellness world that are both automatic and we have some control over. You mentioned one, which is breath, right? It happens automatically, but we have some control of it. The others, I think attention, right? Attention is one of those things like it automatically redirects. You know, the example I always use is if somebody lit a firecracker off behind your head right now, like your attention is going to go back there. You don't need to do it. Right. And we have the ability to redirect attention. We have the ability to do things with it. And so both those things are really powerful ways of working with our systems because they are both automatic and controllable. One of the things that fascinates me the most about breathwork is its relationship to the default mode network. And I know you've

had so many incredible people that talk about behavior change and neuroscience on your podcast. So maybe you have done a little bit into the default mode network, but just on a super high level, it's the posterior cingulate, the prefrontal cortex, and the amygdala. Obviously there's other structures, but those are the very important three. And what happens when we do conscious connected breathing, we do our breath work properly is we can actually turn down on a physical level. We can turn down the volume of the default mode network. And what that does is, so the function of the default mode network is when you're doing a singular task, when you're doing a myopic task, it's the thing that allows you to achieve that flow state when it's at a low level. But when the default mode network is turned up really high, you're ruminating.

You're reflecting on the future in anxiety. You're ruminating on the past for depression. And so people that have a default mode network through trauma, and there's no shame because we all experience trauma. But when our default mode network is shifted into overdrive, we start getting less vagal tone. We start being more in the sympathetic, the fight or flight. And so that default mode network is powerful. And I actually learned this from Michael Pollan. I was at a event he did here in Austin. He was talking about this

with psychedelics. And I wondered, Eric, I was like, I wonder if the same thing applies to breathwork because breathwork and psychedelics are brothers and sisters. And I dove into the research and there it was. I mean, multiple studies on PubMed, multiple studies from colleagues, and I put it into the program. And it was so beautiful because truly when you breathe properly and when you're doing conscious breathing, there's no other focus. There's no other thing to do. You are actually engaged in a loving myopic self-care practice. And depending on the degree of your trauma, that's when your trauma will actually come up when you're doing that breath work. And you'll notice that you're shifting over to the default mode network, default of fear or default of calmness.

Yeah. The default mode network is so interesting because having read so many books, it's one of those things that shows up over and over and over. And depending on the author and what they're talking about, they're either saying, you got to turn it down. These are people who are talking about relaxation, about focus, about dialing down trauma. And then other people are like, you need more default mode network, because it's where daydreaming, creativity, a lot of, you know, free association happens. And I've always been like, well, which is it? And we had a guest recently, Johan Hari, who is a brilliant guy. And in his usual way, he sort of summarized something that was difficult to understand very quickly, which was essentially, if you're in a good place, whether that be in that moment, or in general, the default mode network can be your friend, because it allows you to wander, create and do all that. If you are not in a good place, though, the default mode network very quickly becomes your enemy because where you go is into intense

rumination and it's a creator of misery. So that just really sort of helped me clarify in myself this sort of default mode network good, default mode network bad, you know, that I was ping-ponging between as I was reading all these different things that just came to mind as you were talking about it. I think that's so powerful because I'm 41 and I think you're in your 30s or 40s. So like we have an opportunity. That's incredibly kind of you. You need to increase your estimate there, my friend. Okay.

Okay. Well, you have a young soul, so you appear very, very vibrant. Thank you. And what I can tell about people that are on purpose is that, or at least people that have gone through the dark night of the soul, I'm familiar with your past. We've interviewed before. And so I know the process you've been through and the threshold you've been to, to get where you are.

I'm the same way. And I'll tell you, everyone here with us is the same way. They're all on their own hero's journey. So to the degree that we have made peace and we have unpacked on an emotional, physical, spiritual, mental level, all the things that have happened in our lives, that's the degree that I think the default mode network could be either quote bad or quote good because it's our friend. I'm not here to demonize the default mode network. I'm not here to demonize the ego. I'm not here to demonize any of it. These are all checks and balance systems that are in our physiology that create homeostasis. So if something comes up for me where I'm noticing

that I'm way high on the volume for my default mode network, that's actually a gift. That's an opportunity for me to look at why that's occurring. And then for me to do the conscious work with yourself as a coach, doing a program, doing a breathwork practice, these are the things that are guiding us. And I don't think we could even say that these things are good or bad sometimes. I think that they are just what they are. Even when something appears bad, it's like the dragon in the cave is actually your soul trying to direct you to the thing that's causing you the most pain, to the thing that's breaking your heart. And I think that's part of the default mode network too.

Totally. Totally. Let's talk about the three phases of breath work. What are the three phases? And then I'd like to maybe say, you know, where people begin with this. Yeah. Written on my arm in Italian, I have a Sicilian background. So half my lineage is from Sicily. And I wrote on my arm, se posso respirare, posso scegliere. And what that means in Italian is if I can breathe, I can choose.

And the reason I wrote it on my arm is because I wanted to remind myself every day that if I can consciously breathe, and I mean consciously, like go to it regardless of how I feel, my fear, my sadness, whatever, then that's called acute style practice. So, the first phase of breathing is acute practice. Acute meaning I'm in a state of stress. I'm in a state of anxiety. I'm in a state of depression. I'm in a state of anything other than peace and homeostasis. That is acute style. That's the first phase. That could be breath of fryer, pranayama. It could be doing a longer breath hold retention practice. It could be doing alternate nostril breathing, which is very powerful for connecting and activating the brain hemispheres. So there's many, many ways to do acute style breath. And this is honestly, Eric, where most

people really want to begin. They want to begin when they're the most triggered and when they're the most in fear, right? And then from that place, you start doing the secondary phase. And the secondary phase is more meditative breathing. This is where it's proactive breathing. This is you sitting in the morning doing a 7 or 15 or 21-minute practice. And this is where you're actually teaching over time these new neural connections, the axons and the dendrites in your brain to have a better action potential for being at peace while you're breathing. And so through this proactive breathing, through this meditative breath, that's going to allow long-term changes over time for the neuroplasticity. As you know, you've talked about this quite a bit on the one you feed, our brains are plastic. We have this neuroplasticity that exists. And so the more we

can groove that plastic over time, the more it's going to change. And so that second phase, we go through the neuroplasticity. First phase as well, but second phase is really like the most important because it's one thing to react to your life. It's another thing to train yourself to respond. And that's what we get from the meditative. And then the third is what most people have popularized. The third phase of breathing is catharsis breathing. And catharsis breathing is more like the Wim Hof, the 30, 16, 90 minute journeys. And I'm not demonizing those either. I think there's a time and a place for those, but let me ask you this. If you had never been in outer space, would you just want to get blasted up to

outer space or would you want some training first as an astronaut, right? You'd want to get trained a little bit. So I don't think that people should jump right into catharsis. I think it's really important to take two or three weeks. In our Breathe program, it's three weeks. We take people through phase one and phase two, and then we lovingly introduce them to phase three. And then we connect them with a practitioner like myself or someone in our network, because that's a very deep vein, that third phase, that catharsis phase. And if you don't have the right practitioner, or if you yourself haven't done enough conscious stillness practice, it can be jarring. It can be very emotional. A lot of times

in that longer practice, people get tetany, which is where their arms cramp, their mouth gets smaller, and it's because of the hypoxia they're experiencing. So I don't recommend people start there. So those are the three phases of really how we breathe and how we do breath work. So we've got the acute phase, which is the old saw of, you know, when you're angry, take 10 deep breaths, right? You know, so that's sort of the acute. The proactive is more, I sit down and I make time to do some, you know, focused breathing so I get better at it and I learn how to do it.

And then the catharsis is really where I'm trying to really achieve a stronger altered state via breathing. Yes. And the only thing I'd add is on that catharsis, it's actually where we, if you look at Bruce Lipton's work or Joe Dispenza's work, this is where the issues are quote in the tissues. So the issues we have, the trauma we're experiencing, whether it's the capital T lowercase T, if it's physical trauma, if it's sexual trauma, if it's emotional trauma, it lives within us. The body keeps the score. I think you've maybe even interviewed this person or not. It's Bessel van der Kolk with The Body Keeps the Score, the book.

I'm sure you've referenced it. Huge resource for people that want to understand scientifically, logically, that your trauma lives physically in your sarcomeres, in your muscle tissues. And when you do breath work through that intermittent hypoxia in that third phase of catharsis, this is where everything starts to bubble up. And you really need to be ready for that. Sometimes it can be quite overwhelming for people. It's beautiful, but it also needs clear facilitation. Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls, and I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth

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Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. God bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to

reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to spend a few minutes on those first two phases, and maybe we'll wander more into the third phase. Do you find that the ability to use breath in acute circumstances is greatly improved by spending time in the proactive? Or said another way, if I practice breath work more consistently,

is it going to be a better tool for me in times of stress? And is it going to be more useful to me in dealing with what's happening? I think it's both. But with the caveat of if you spend time cultivating that neuroplasticity through the proactive breathing, through the wellness breathing, your body is going to request or is going to default more over to doing something that's more acute. So another way to say it would be, let's say for a month I I've been practicing my morning breath work, and then I've been doing my meditation. Well, after a month, I'm at work, and my boss throws you have these cycles of recommitment. So the cycles of recommitment will shorten over time as long as you're doing that proactive breath. And then when the acute trigger comes up, what is a trigger really? A trigger is a message from your nervous system that is created by your mind that is accessing a subconscious file that tells you you're under threat. And so if I'm under threat, well, what can I do to make myself feel safe? I can either scream at my boss and say, I'm not doing your reports anymore, or I hate this. I hate my job. Or you

could take a huge deep breath. And this is the key with your lips closed, with your jaw relaxed. And that's the big one. Relax your jaw three times. And this goes for all of us as human beings. Roll your jaw three times. We hold most of our attention in our jaw. So if I can relax my jaw three times and then take six circular breaths in through the nose. So doing that style of breath six times before you do anything else, don't allow your tyrant inside. Don't allow your subconscious memories inside to take control. Remind yourself in that moment. All right, before I lash out, before I do anything at all, I know how good I feel in the mornings. How can I make myself feel safe and good right now when I'm mostly triggered? triggered. And then you do that conscious breathing that I just did twice. The key, and this is the physiological key, you want to breathe not vertically. You don't want to breathe up and down. You want to breathe horizontally. So if you look at an animal in nature, like a zebra, they breathe like a bellow. So they breathe horizontally, not vertically. And I learned

this from Dr. Valisa Branic. She trained me and I took her certification and she also wrote Breathing for Warriors. And she talks about this in her work because we get trained as children to breathe through our mouth and to breathe up and down. And it's actually the opposite. I have a seven-month-old son and I read in her book and I've heard from Dan Brule and a lot of breathwork teachers out there that when we come into the world, we naturally just breathe through our nose. We never breathe through our mouth. And I plugged my son's nose. Don't worry.

I'm not like choking my son, but I plugged his nose just for a second and he started to choke. And I thought, well, why is that? Like what? This is so real. This is so visceral. We are born into this world through nature's wisdom to breathe through our nose and to breathe like a bellow horizontally. And there it was. I knew exactly what that was. When we breathe horizontally, we actually expand the diaphragm and that pushes on our vagus nerve. And when it pushes on our vagus nerve, it interacts with the enteric nervous system. It increases what's called vagal tone. So when we're breathing, we're naturally at a state of peace. If we're breathing properly, we are naturally at a state of peace. And I verified this with my son. It was just

surreal. I mean, he breathes through his nose. It's the most beautiful thing. And so we all need to breathe like a baby. Eric, we need to learn how to go back there. So what is breathing vertically versus horizontally mean? Like, how do I know which way I'm breathing? So if you breathe horizontally, then you can actually feel. So for example, if I take an inhale through my nose, so inhale nose, my belly should go out. My belly should protrude. And as you get deeper into the practices, we talk about this in the program, you actually breathe 360. You breathe into your kidneys and you breathe into your belly button.

Yeah. So the diaphragm, for people that don't know, it's a dome-shaped muscle, but it runs the entire body. If you slice the body in half, you would look down and the diaphragm would wrap around all the rib cage, front and back. And so when I'm doing that deep breath through the nose, my belly should go out. I can't tell you how many clients I've had over here to the studio, Eric, or how many people that we work with us in the Breathe program. They're actually reverse breathing pattern people. So breathing horizontally means when you inhale through your nose, and everybody can do this right now, place your hand on your belly, take a big breath into your nose. Your belly should go out. If your belly doesn't go out. And especially if your belly goes in, you have a reverse breathing pattern.

And so the way that we correct that is by laying on the ground, placing, you know, a five pound weight on your belly. And when you inhale through your nose, you can actually push the weight to the ceiling. You can start to retrain your physiology to breathe properly. That's what I've seen. And honestly, I've seen it to be about 40% of people that have a reverse breathing pattern. Yeah. I think I have a semi reverse breathing thing. Cause I'll find myself sometimes when I'm paying close attention to the breath, noticing exactly what you said. I'll be like, wait a second. My stomach actually just went inwards. I know it's supposed to go outwards. And you know, then I start getting, you know, sort of mixed up, but I think I must do it to some degree for it to show up occasionally like that.

I bet you everyone that did that with us, they just had like a light bulb go off in their head, like, oh yeah, this is the proper way to breathe and to close the loop. If we're breathing vertically, we have tight scalenes. We have tight pecs, we're people that work in jobs where they're maybe at a desk or they're driving a lot, their posture will flex them forward. SSEs third. Because if we stack head, shoulders, and spine that are at the waist, instead of sitting back too far or sitting forward too far, that can actually create dysfunction as well. So posture, then your awareness of what's going on with your physiology, and then your awareness of breath. So in that order. I had like four different questions pop up. I'm trying to decide which I most want to pursue next. When we talked about acute style breathing and proactive style breathing, you rattled off, you know, four or five, six different ways of breathing. I could do pranayama,

I could do box breathing, I could do, you know, like, right? So where does somebody who wants to get started, start, you know, I know you've got a great program on it. So we'll have links in the show notes to that. But if somebody is like, all right, I'm just listening to this podcast, I want to start doing a little bit of breathing, you know, where do I start? You know, I know you've got a great program on it, so we'll have links in the show notes to that. But if somebody is like, all right, I'm just listening to this podcast. I want to start doing a little bit of breathing. You know, where do I start? Okay. Think of the rule of thirds or the Fibonacci sequence that we found in nature. And we know that there's always, at least in our mind, as men and women, a beginning, middle and end. And so for all practices and where you start with the breath is you start by just being aware and just activating. And so in the program, we have activation, we have integration, and we have mastery. So each week has a focus. And where you

start is you start wherever you are. And this is the big key. And I'm not waxing poetic here. I really want all of us to feel this. You start where you are without judging yourself. That's the big one. Because if you go into this breath practice and you're worried about doing it right, or you're having negative thoughts about how your body feels or who you are as a person, that's okay. But you need an inventory practice right there. You need to work with Eric or you need to have an emotional inventory integration practice. Because the one thing that I'll say is like, yes, you start where you are and you do it without judgment. That's like the number, number one. If you do notice judgment arise, well, then there's your work. There's the monster in the cave that's calling you in and saying, hey, I got something for you. I want to teach you something today. That's calling you in and saying, Hey, I got something for you. I want to teach you something today.

But what happens, Eric is, and unfortunately this is the case with a lot of students in the breathe program. They'll have these things come up and it's the things that they weren't breathing through. It's the things that they were doing that vertical breath to keep those emotions packed down. So this is the big one. Like no matter what you guys do, start by activating, start by doing a seven minute morning practice. That's that's in the program.

It's a boxer circular. I like the box because most people are very up. Most people are out of body. And what we want to do is get people into their body. So I really, really like the box breath in the morning. You start by doing 20 warrior breaths, which is just an inhale and exhale through the mouth. You do two rounds of the box breath, and then you do a retention hold and you do that twice. And so in those seven minutes, what we're doing is we're giving your physiology a chance to give you a lesson on what's

there, right? On an energetic level, on a somatic level. And then from that place, then you start doing the other weeks where it's like, okay, I'm going to start integrating what's coming up for me. And then in your third week, you start to have mastery over this. And I tell you, I know in your show, you've had a lot of behavior change people. It's like the science could either be 21 days, 66 days. Everybody's got an opinion as to what happens with real behavior change. Myself and my students, it's about three weeks to really have that neuroplasticity start to come online. And I don't know how you feel about that. Have you seen that in your programs and your teaching as well, about three weeks to really get going?

You know, I think it depends on a lot of factors. You know, what is the habit we're trying to build? How difficult is it to do? How chaotic is our life? You know, a habit for a 25 year old man who lives by himself, it's going to be easier to build a seven-minute breath practice than a single woman with three kids, right? I mean, just the number of things that will get in his way versus her way are very, very different. And so it's kind of hard to say I've sort of moved away from saying, well, if you do something for X amount of time, it'll automatically become a habit because not everybody's the same. That's a beautiful point. I got some of this awareness from Michael Gervais. We did an in-person podcast at this Rockstock event a few years ago. I was like, what's the definition that you really feel about awareness? And he's like, awareness is being at peace with yourself without judgment. And I thought it was the most powerful thing I'd ever heard. And so if we truly want awareness, then we have to be willing to deal with what is there, right? Like what we're holding onto. And I'll tell you in my own life, Eric, personally, the things that I've been scared of feeling

are the things that take away my breath. They're the things that make me breathe shallow. They're the things that make me breathe vertically instead of horizontally. Really, this is a practice of courage. I'm not going to sugarcoat this. Breathwork is courageous. It's not for everyone. It's for the person that feels they want to experience life differently, first and foremost. And I've dealt with anxiety in my life quite a bit, lots of depression. And it wasn't until I had my dark night of the soul in 2014, 2015, that allowed me to meet Mark Devine, learn about conscious breath practice, go deeper into the art, and then eventually create the program after going to Thailand for a month and going to Sedona and Costa Rica and like learning from all the world's best teachers.

Because I was like, okay, if this feels so good and I'm getting so much result from this, how do I feel better? How do I feel the best I can possibly feel? Well, the breath is going to unlock all the emotions that are taking your breath away. Because once you start breathing, there's nowhere to hide. It's like being in any kind of ceremony. You can run, but you can't hide when it comes to your breath. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations.

We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and

ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What in your mind is the role between breath practice and a meditation practice? Do they have different benefits? Are they the same thing? Do you do both? Talk to me about how you think through that. I was recently on a different podcast and I had a lot of controversy around my answer. And I'm always open to my interpretation of the breath changing.

But today, this is how I feel. The key difference between breath work and meditation is that meditation is something that you sit and do nothing with. It's the art of practicing being. So there's work involved with meditation, but really meditation is about letting go and being with what is. The key difference with breath work is that with breath work, you are consciously performing a physiological action. So you are priming your physiology. You are priming your nervous system to be myopic and to focus on your breath.

So the key difference is one is the art of letting go and the practice of being with what is. And then breathwork is the art of using that involuntary involuntary lever so that you can prime your nervous system to be more at peace. They both elicit a beautiful result, but I've learned and I teach that if you have trouble meditating, breathwork is your deepest ally because breathwork will turn down your default mode network.

It'll get you out of anxiety and depression. And I've had lots of students tell me that whether they do the breathwork before meditating or whether they go through one of our binaural beats, one of our binaural meditations with breath work, when you combine the two, something really beautiful happens. Because for most of us, Eric, we are a slave to our phone, our notifications, our responsibilities. When do we ever carve out 30 minutes to just be with ourselves? Sometimes when people try to carve out 20, 30 minutes for a meditation, they won't get that positive result. They won't get that stillness and that spaciousness

because their brain is going so fast. And then unfortunately they'll kick out meditation and they'll say, oh, well, this meditation doesn't work. Well, I promise you, if you were to do a seven minute breath practice, like a guided practice before you meditated, it could change your life. It could change your meditations because you are priming your neurology and your physiology to be more still so you can actually meditate and get the gift of the stillness. I can't find anything controversial in that. Did you say something different on the other show? No, no. Because some people say, well, what about blinking your eyes? That's an autonomic practice, which is true. And a lot of people will say that through the art and science of meditating,

you are actually performing an action, but I disagree. So I had a lot of people on Instagram going back and forth. I think when it comes to meditation, so two parts, the first is, yes, we do blink autonomically, but it's not something that has a direct impact on our stress, right? Like I don't, me blinking my eyes 20 times or once isn't necessarily going to impact my lever for stress. Me consciously breathing has a dramatic impact on my stress. So it's a minute argument, right? And then on the other side of it, I had someone who was messaging me and saying, well, when you're meditating, you're actually practicing a skill, which is true, but you're practicing

not doing anything. You're actually practicing just being, which can be energetically efforting. They're in the same camp, but they're two different recipes. When you're breathing, you actually have to perform your breath work. That's right. With meditation, you're focused on not performing at all. I think that's very, very true. And to your latter point around breathwork being a segue into meditation, you know, I kind of have this, I call it a meditation on ramp. I didn't make that up. Some podcast guests use that term, but I have these, what I call meditation on ramps. They've

changed over time, but they're the things that I do. I sit down, I'm kind of near meditating, I'm on my meditation cushion, but I haven't started whatever my core practice is yet. And there are a variety of things that I do. And one of them is what I would call, you know, it's breath work. I am consciously controlling my breath and breathing in a certain way. And it is a way of settling for me before I start meditating. For me, it's the only thing right here in the studio. I have a juve light and a stool. So I meditate in the morning, get some red light on my skin, and I'm doing my breath work when I'm sitting in front of the juve light. You can describe it however you want, but I call it synergy stacking. So whatever synergistically works together, I'll just stack

that. If I'm going for a walk, I'm listening to the one you feed. If I'm sitting in front of the light, I'm getting photobiomodulation and I'm doing my breath work. If I'm in the sauna, same thing. If I'm in the cold. So I love stacking these things because I just enjoy getting the most out of the day, you know? and regardless of that, I have to be really cautious because my striving to be perfect or my striving to get as much done as I possibly can, that can be deleterious. So I have to watch that. Stack a few things, but don't stack like seven things. Yeah.

Well, I think that's a great point that I'd love to spend a minute on since you walked us right into that territory, which is the number of wellness practices or spiritual practices or psychological work that we could do is essentially infinite, right? You could, in a morning, gather more practices that you could spend the rest of your life doing them, right? So I think we have this thing happening, and our show contributes to this, right? I contribute to this. We all do, is throwing lots of things at people in a sentence listed like five, right? Sauna and breath work and meditation and red light. And, you know, we've got all of them. And so there is this sense, and I see it in people who come to me for coaching all the time, which is I'm not doing enough.

You know, it becomes another way to feel bad about ourselves. You know, are we doing enough? Am I doing enough self-improvement? Am I doing enough wellness practice? How do you think about that for yourself? That's so powerful. That brings up a lot of emotion to me because I too have people that bring this up in our community. Am I doing enough? Am I doing enough? It's this incessant, frenetic loop, the monkey mind. It's really interesting. And it'll come in when you least expect it because it's been doing pushups in the dark. This monster that says, you're not enough. You're not doing enough. And it's very, you'll know that it's coming from fear and lack because really what the monster inside of us feels

is that we're not loved. We're not good enough. We're not enough. And we learned it at a really young age. And sometimes it can be epigenetic and sometimes it can be a family constellation. We can actually inherit this. If you look at Mark Wolin's work, it did start with you. So on a cellular level or on a behavioral level, we can start to believe that we're not enough. We're not doing enough. I mean, Eric, there are multimillionaires in this world that hate themselves. Now, why is that? They have the trappings of life. They have everything they could ever want from a monetary perspective, but they don't have a loving relationship with their children or their wife or their husband. And that's very sad because they have believed

the barking monster inside of themselves that says they're not good enough. So the conscious awareness practice for this is to notice the narrative of the monster inside of your own head. And when that monster occurs, this is what I learned when I had a psychic break. I had a psychic break from plant medicine a few years ago. It crushed me. And I had looping OCD thoughts for six months. They just kept coming in, coming in, coming in. I learned through my mentor, Paul Czech, who actually had to teach me how to do this. And so I could heal myself instead of me trying to bark back or trying to fight the monster inside of me. Or when that thought comes up that says, you're not enough, you should be doing more. It's a very dominating, almost like an animalistic washing of my nervous system. I have now learned to take a deep breath, to make sure I'm breathing

like a bellow, to physically turn my body to the thought wherever I think it's coming from and ask the thought, what are you here to teach me? I am the parent of this child. If you're here to teach me something great, I'm open to your teachings. But if you are here to bother me, or if you are here to try to entangle yourself in me, then by the power of God invested in me, I ask you to leave. And I send you love for the journey. You're not allowed in my inner sanctum and so be it. I send you love for the journey. So instead of me fighting the thought or trying to bark back at the thought, I physically turned to the thought. I emotionally opened to the thought and I asked the thought,

like, what are you trying to teach me here? And that's really it. And I think that's what you're talking about is all of us in that moment can go, ah, if I take a few breaths here and try to learn whatever this thought is or whatever this barking not enoughness is, there's wisdom there. There is some powerful ass wisdom inside of me pausing and turning and learning. And then of course, there's also wisdom and discerning, you know, just like you would to your son, right? We have children and for all the parents out there, the way that you parent your child, it's the exact same way you parent your child inside of you. You either get angry at your child, you start

screaming at your child, like you're not doing enough. When would you ever tell an infant that they're not doing enough? Like when I hold tell an infant that they're not doing enough? Like when I hold my son, I would never even have that thought, but yet I have been conditioned by our world and we have been conditioned by the world. And this is what we need to throw up. This is what we need to get out of our system. Really what we need is a lens of curiosity instead of a lens of judgment. Because when I'm feeling the barking of that monster that lives inside of myself, that's saying you're not doing enough, the first place is to turn to it, ask it what it's there to teach you, do your process. The second place is to be really curious. Okay, why did that come up? And also I'm curious when I look at ABC, what I want to improve, I want to be a better breath work student, I want to be a better podcaster, I want to be a better breath work student. I want to be a better podcaster. I want to be a better husband, anything.

Can I be curious about what it would take to embody that? Because curiosity is a much less pressurized lens than white knuckling and judgment and getting it done. You fill in the blank negative thing. Yeah. Right. And that's the big lesson here for me. And of course, in this moment, Eric, it's easy for us to pontificate about this. The real work is when I feel the monster in the cave come up and I practice what

I'm telling you right now. That's embodied wisdom. That's the kind of wisdom that the world is thirsty for. We're freaking drowning in information. We're drowning in PDFs. We're drowning in certifications. What we need is to slow down, breathe, and start to get wise from the challenges that are coming to us, myself included. Yeah, that's beautiful. I love what you said there. My partner, Ginny, and I were talking about this just last week. We were talking about the inner critic. We were bringing up two approaches that we often hear, right? Approach one to the inner critic is, oh, it must be trying to teach me something. So thank you for your input. I appreciate what you're trying to teach me.

And it's a welcoming. It's a, hey, come on in, you know? And I would say this doesn't go just for inner critic, but we'll keep it on inner critic for now. But it goes to emotions in general. There is one school of thought that says, come on in, welcome it. You know, in the Buddhist schools, they talk about inviting Mara in for tea. You know, the Buddha supposedly invited Mara in to have tea with him, Mara being the, you know, the bad stuff, right? So that's one, come on in, sit down, I welcome you. The other approach is very much one that says, uh-uh, I'm not going to let this voice run through my head unchecked. I am not going to let these negative thoughts just have the ability to run throughout my life without me doing something about it. I look at both those

and I go, oh, interesting. Okay. Those are two kind of different approaches. And I love what you just did was you just put them together. And this is kind of where I've arrived with this stuff too, is that I first turn towards it and I say, OK, what's here? What do I have to learn? What is this teaching me? What's the information that's here? I allow myself to see what it's about. And then at a certain point when I go, OK, this is just a repetitive old pattern that has nothing more to teach me, then it's like enough. me, then it's like enough. I'm not going to let you run unchecked. And I think what you just described is a beautiful practice of that. And I think that's a great way to think about it because these are two very different approaches that I hear over and over. I sort of refer to them as the cognitive and the mindfulness approach, right? You know, the mindfulness is like, let it be. And the cognitive is like, think it through. They're two approaches and I'm really interested in how do they work together? God, I really appreciate your reflection.

And I was feeling something when you were talking, I was visualizing this, that whether you're a parent or not doesn't matter because every single human being is a parent. You're either parenting yourself, the child inside of you, or not. And the same way that we parent our daughters and sons, it truly is a mirror to how we parent ourselves. When I'm feeling that monster in the cave come up that says, you're not doing enough and fill in the blank. It could be in any category. You're not doing enough with like a exclamation point at the end of it. Can I breathe? Can I turn to it? Can I actually parent the child inside of me that is feeling the fear feeling the lack feeling the absence of love and can i give that to myself i will never forget this

moment i had which is exactly what we're talking about and when i had the psychic break through plant medicine i really got down to the core of it with my mentor paul and he was like well what's causing you the most pain? And I said, well, how am I going to do it all? How am I going to be a father? How am I going to be a successful podcast host? How am I going to be a pillar? How am I going to be healthy?

How am I going to do it all? That's a story that I've recognized in my life. How am I going to do it all? Because if in order for me to fill one cup, I have to take from another, which is not true, but that's a story that I learned. And he touched my shoulder and he grabbed me and he said, well, who's doing it anyways? Who's doing it anyways? And it was really interesting because I felt what he was saying.

I am either connecting with my child and with God. And remember, I'm not a religious man. I'm in the awareness that there's something higher than us. There's a higher intelligence of some sort. And so to the degree that I'm connected to my child and to higher intelligence, that's who's doing it. It's my relationship to me, the child in me and to intelligence, the creator of all things, the thing that makes you breathe and the thing that makes nature live. And he looked at me with this really kind eyes. And he said, when you learn to parent the child inside of yourself, the universe will put one in your arms.

And it makes me feel emotional right now because it's been a long road. It's been a really long road to get to be a father and I'm really grateful for it. But I had to learn through some pretty severe training how to love my child because then the universe chose to put Nova in my arms. And it's very emotional because I think every parent can realize this. We learn so much from our children. We learn so much. It's like, you can't even quantify it and it's beautiful and it's wild at the same time. Yeah. You know, I think about you having a six month and I see you as somebody who has to use your phrase. And I think it's a great phrase, embodied wisdom. It's a beautiful thing

to be having the degree of embodied wisdom you have and be shepherding a new life in, you know, my embodied wisdom came a little bit later for me, not that I didn't have some when my son was little, but I took some detours right, you know, right through the middle of all that, you know, and there are times I'm like, I would, I'd like a chance to do it again, but I don't think I really want that. I'll practice on my grandkids maybe someday. But we're about to wrap up. Do you have a few minutes when we're done to do a post-show conversation for our Patreon guys? Okay.

Yeah, yeah. All right. Let's talk now about the space between knowing and doing. This is one of my favorite topics. What is it that causes us to be able to know a lot, but not put it into practice? So when you think about that, you know, what is that space? What's your thinking on that topic? I think if you look at the Libra, you know, the Lady Libra scale, where perfect balance means the scales are flat, you know, one's not high, one's not low. If you put awareness in one of the scales,

low. If you put awareness in one of the scales, and if you put a lack of awareness in the other scale, I think that every single time, much like the wolf, the one you feed, whatever one you are defaulted to, whether being aware or not aware, that is what is going to dictate the course of your life. And so it's a beautiful parable with the wolves because the same thing exists with Lady Libra. Whatever we're aware of or we're not aware of, it's our degree of that state of being that is going to dictate our path. And so when I think about not knowing, and I think about knowing, knowing and not doing is actually more powerful than not knowing. It's the thing that'll direct you. And I learned this from Dan Party and I've heard this from many people, but knowing and not doing is actually the same thing or worse than not knowing. And I believe that because when you know and you don't do, or when

you know and you don't do the training to be, this is really what it is. It's not about frenetic doing. It's about intelligently doing so that we can embody our true self. So we can embody an effortless, peaceful way of being. The way to do that is by having courage. We've talked about on the show, but I'll tell you this, the gap, how do we, how do we bridge the gap between knowing and between doing, and especially between knowing and not doing. It is understanding ourself. It is knowing our self-sabotage patterns it's knowing the ways that we sell ourselves short that we don't love ourselves that we listen to the barking monster that says you're not doing enough there's three or four archetypes and a really good book for this

for men and also for women but but this book was written i think primarily for men and that's king warrior magician lover it's a phenomenal book and they talk about the high chair tyrant, which is one of the archetypes in this book. And the high chair tyrant bangs his fist on the table and says, I want what I want, and I want it now. That is, I think, living inside of all of us. And especially if you look at our politicians and the major media companies in the world, the high chair tyrant is on full display and we're all witness to it. And so the reason it triggers us if we're conscious is because that high chair tyrant lives in me, lives in all of us. And so how do we do this? How do we close the gap between knowing and doing? We close the gap by being courageous and being curious.

Those two things, like your left eye could be courage, your right eye could be curious. How can I have the courage to be curious right now about why I'm knowing what to do, but why I'm not doing it? So just let that land for a second. That's the place you start. And then from there, I have an emotional inventory practice where it's very quick and very simple. I'll share it. I take a blank journal and on one

side of the journal, I will write 10 things that are causing me the most pain. So literally just a simple journal. And on the left side, I'll write 10 things that are causing me the most pain. I do this after breath work and meditation. It's preferably in nature, just in a still space. And then on the other side, I write 10 things that I'm truly grateful for. Now, this seems like a really simple task. It's like, well, Josh, what's that going to do for me? You know, and just know that that's coming from the same monster inside of you because there's so much wisdom and simplicity. So if I write 10 and 10, then I have the courage to circle the thing that's causing me the

most pain because we all know, we all know out of the 10, we know the one that's hurting us the most. And then on the other side, I circle the one that's causing me the most joy. And this is the kicker. You reach out to someone who you can actually share this with. So if you were my friend or you were my coach, I would email you and I'd be like, Eric, I took a practice of my emotional inventory. Are you cool if we jump on a call and for 10 minutes, I just share what I found, but it's because I trust you. So be very, very careful about who you share your emotional inventory with,

because the wrong person who doesn't hold you in high regard or doesn't want the best for you, they could sabotage you. And there's another deep trench where you probably have those people in your life because you want to have the contrast so that you can heal. And they're going to provide you that contrast if you're conscious. Anyways, then you tell them, I took the practice. This is the thing that's causing me the most pain. This is the thing that's causing me the most gratitude, the most joy. And I'm willing to change. I'm willing to do something different about this negative thing because I love this positive thing so much. Can you support me in that? You ask your coach, you ask your friend, can you support me in that? And hopefully if they're great, they'll mirror back to you. Okay,

well, by when, when would you like to do this? How would you like to accomplish this? And you can actually get some progress instead of just rattling around with all these thoughts that go in the head. So it's a long answer, but it's a really simple practice that all of us can do. It's just a quick emotional inventory practice. Well, I think that is a really powerful practice. And I love the idea of then sharing it and kind of coming out of it with like, what's the one thing I can do? You know, we've got an old program we released that we give away for free now to people who sign up for intro call with me about coaching. It's called the One You Feed Stress Reducer. And I think the method is really good. The video quality of the program is not what I would create now, but we do something similar in it, where we just sort of write down like, what is everything that's eaten at me, you know? And then what is one thing that I could do for each of those things? Like just what is one thing, you know, one step, because there is something really beneficial about moving into action of any sort

about the things that are really weighing on us that is really helpful. So tell people where they can find your breath course real quick before we wrap up here. If you have been sparked in curiosity, or if you feel in yourself that breath is something that you want to do, or if you just liked some of the things that I said, and you're just curious, right? Whether you're courageous or whether you're curious, it's exactly what we talked about. Right. Whether you're courageous or whether you're curious, it's exactly what we talked about. Just go to breathwork.io. And at breathwork.io, you can learn everything about our Breathe Breath and Wellbeing. And I'd like to talk a little bit more about the OCD thoughts that you were having also, if you're open to that. So listeners, if you'd like access to the post-show conversation, to ad-free episodes, to a weekly episode I do called Teaching Song and a Poem,

and the joy of supporting this show, you can go to one you feed.net slash join. Josh, thanks so much for coming on. Every time you and I have interacted, it has been a genuine pleasure. I feel a lot of affinity towards you. So I really enjoyed this. Likewise. What a joy to be on your show too. When I started my show, your show was one of the ones that I looked up to because I thought you had such great wisdom. So it's been a pleasure to have this conversation with you and to be here at this time. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits.

It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. Thank you.