These Fukken Feelings Podcast© - Unveiling the Path to True Happiness: A Journey of Transformation w/ Richard Blake | Season 2.5 EP: 114

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

Send us a Text Message.Join hosts Micah and Rebecca on an enlightening episode of These Fukken Feelings Podcast as they engage in a heartfelt conversation with Richard Blake, a multifaceted expert in personal development and well-being. Richard, a certified facilitator in Clarity Breathwork and a seasoned life coach, shares his inspiring journey from corporate success to a meaningful pursuit of happiness. In this episode, Micah and Rebecca dive deep into Richard's story, exploring the pi...

you don't have to be positive all the time it's perfectly okay to feel sad angry annoyed frustrated scared and anxious having feelings doesn't make you a negative person it doesn't even make you weak it makes you human and we are here to talk through it all we welcome you to these fucking feelings podcast a safe space for all who needs it grab a drink and take a seat. The session begins now. What's up guys and welcome to these fucking feelings podcast. I am Micah. Got my girl Rebecca over here. And we're here today with Richard Blake.

We believe that no one can sell you like you can sell you. So we're going to ask you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Well, yeah, from my accent, you can tell I am from England, not Australia. A lot of people go with Australia. I think it's the beach vibes. But I am a PhD researcher in psychology. I am particularly interested in breathwork and its effects on mental health. And that is what I am working on at the moment. I'm designing a trial in using conscious connected breathwork as a remedy for anxiety in particular. I'm also a holistic counsellor. I also have a background in corporate real estate. That was what I was doing long before my mental health journeys. And prior to that,

I was also, or during that, I was also doing some fitness modelling. So I'm also very into the gym. I've never been into the gym. I've never been into the gym. Yeah, it takes, I don't know, does it take a strong kind of sense of humor or sense of person to become one who just loves the gym? I think that's a good question because I think, you know, people say to me, oh, well done for going to the gym. You're really dedicated and you must have really good discipline. And I'm just like, no, really, I just really like going to the gym. When I go to the gym, I feel great afterwards.

And I kind of think that that explains a lot of people's success. Like I've got a friend who wasn't like, you know, didn't get straight A's in school, wasn't the brightest, the sharpest, but now he's super successful out in Silicon Valley and he just loves to work and he's really good at it because he really loves it. And I think that's kind of the same for the gym. I really love it. So I go a lot and then I get results from it. That's great. Yeah. I saw a guy running this morning because it's funny that you bring that up, but I just saw a guy running this morning and I was like, it is seven o'clock and you out here running, like go to work. So breathwork, what does that mean?

What does that mean? Good question. Yeah. So breathwork, I guess is like an umbrella term some people would associate it with pranayama and the yogic type of breathwork and a lot of people go like oh breathwork yeah i've done that yeah whatever like dismiss it but the one i am particularly interested in and the one i'm designing my trial on is something called conscious connected breathwork and that's another umbrella term we've got lots of umbrellas i'm from england we need umbrellas it rains a lot but this one in particular so there are a lot of schools of conscious connected breath work the most famous one would be holotropic breath work there's also transformational breath work there's breath guru there's clarity breath work there's rebirthing and this one in, it's kind of akin to a psychedelic

ceremony. It puts you into a non-ordinary state of consciousness. And in that state of consciousness, all sorts of unusual things happen. One is something called transient hypofrontality. So that is basically you get less oxygen to the prefrontal cortex of your brain and part of the job of the prefrontal cortex is to protect us from pain and in relation to mental health and anxiety our prefrontal cortex is the part that suppresses emotion suppresses grief suppresses all these terrible things that we don't want to be experienced but when we down regulate front part, those emotions come up for processing. And you can, when you are in this safe space of a ceremony being held by a facilitator and a group, you can then clear those emotions, clear those, whatever it is, you know, grief, trauma trauma all sorts of things and it is um it is like clinically proven to clear trauma you know trauma is a word that just gets thrown around all the time everyone seems to

to think they have trauma and certainly there is research to suggest that trauma is an undertreated area of mental health definitely we need more focus on on trauma but i also think the pendulum is swinging a little bit too far you know you hear you go to a yoga class these days and you know someone will have tight hamstrings and the yoga instructor will diagnose them with the reason your hamstrings are tight is because of your childhood trauma and i'm just like oh you probably didn't learn that in a six week 300 hour yoga teacher training um let's not go diagnosing everyone with trauma who doesn't have it whilst at the same time recognizing a lot more people have trauma than they don't another thing you you've set the ball rolling i'm just all you

said is where's breathwork and i'm still going one more super interesting thing is uh mystical experiences so these are things that uh happen in various states ayahuasca psychedelic psilocybin a lot they're getting a lot of research into how they can facilitate mystical experiences near-death experiences are another way people have these uh mystical experiences and breathwork is another one of these sort of rainbow bridges to these mystical experiences and what is a mystical experience so the most common ones reported are like meeting God, meeting ancestors, meeting deceased family members, meeting guides and that's not just just like, oh, great, I met God. Cool, I'm going back to work on Monday.

It's like people come back from these mystical experiences fundamentally altered. Depression, gone. Addictions, gone. Anxiety, gone. So having a mystical experience is one of the most powerful things a person can do or experience to change their their mental health the better what does one what do you do with that person to get them into that mystical experience how long does it take you to work you know working with that person yeah so the the breathwork i teach

it's uh it's quite a complicated technique so it takes about 15 to 20 minutes of explanation and you do need quite a lot of like coaching to go through it you do need to me or another facility to take facilitator to say something like relax your exhale connect the inhale do there's there's moving parts that kind of like guided meditation in the way of like you get instruction with it yeah you get a lot more instruction than with a guided meditation in a way of like you get instruction with it yeah you get a lot more instruction than with a guided meditation in that um so meditation guided meditation i love it do it every day um do mindfulness uh but in particular i listened to another one of your your shows with a meditation expert and um i think you shared that meditation was really difficult for you and i totally understand that it's really difficult for people and I think you've also shared that you've had traumatic experiences. And it does not surprise me that you find meditation difficult. trauma researchers, he's written this amazing book that everyone should read called The Body Keeps the Score. He now doesn't recommend mindfulness meditation to anyone who has

PTSD because going into the internal state, just being in that being passive can be really destabilizing for people. Their internal environment can be so chaotic that it's harmful. They can re-traumatize themselves. And that is, you know, love meditation. Everyone should try it, but someone who can't do it, don't feel bad. You know, you, there's probably a good reason you can't do it. Yeah. I'm still that horrible person from that same episode, you know, from that episode where I've never tried meditation or anything. And in that episode, I said, I'm the worst person in the world right and he said i was i'm still that person uh yeah i doubt you're the worst person i know

it's like thanks for the awkward moment well no you know i just i don't know if i'll ever be able to try meditation but okay maybe i can convince you to do breath work because it's a lot more more active well i was looking it up today it is pretty interesting that's for sure i kind of just think about when like you're having a moment and people are like just breathe you know it was like isn't that kind of yeah the concept of absolutely yeah um so yeah you've asked a couple of questions that i have realized i haven't answered so i can go back to those so um what is breath work so yeah like you've said breath work is yeah just breathe you know in in during pregnancy uh people go to breath classes because it can be really useful for for pain there's a another sort of branch of of my umbrella

my umbrella's grown branches it's an umbrella tree um uh functional breathing so functional breathing this is more like um people like Patrick McEwan and the Botteco Clinic and they sort of teach you how to breathe I we should all be breathing through our nose all the time pretty much and you know that old saying of like oh yeah yeah, that guy, you know, he wasn't very smart. He was a mouth breather. There's a reason for that. It's because when we breathe through our mouth, we're not doing ourselves any favors. When we breathe through our mouth, we're activating the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, which is the fight or flight. Whereas when we breathe through our nose, you're activating more of the parasympathetic, the rest and digest. Also, this is a breathing device, the nose,

the mouth is a talking device, a swallowing device, a chewing device. The nose filters the air, you know, filters bacteria, viruses, mold, it's got mucus and hairs to do that. Also conditions the air. So it humidifies it as well as well you know when we breathe out through our mouth we lose a lot of moisture a lot of moisture and this is a particularly a telltale sign in the morning so have you guys ever heard of mouth taping no no okay so it's a little bit like what you would see in a hostage movie, someone's mouth is taped. But you would do it more like a Charlie Chaplin-sized moustache of tape. You put it over your mouth,

and you are basically training yourself to breathe through your nose at night. And a lot of people have sleep apnea, obstructive sleep apnea, which can cause all sorts of problems. Of course, annoying your sleep partner and keeping them up all night, but also it puts a lot of stress on the heart. And also, if you are someone who wakes up in the morning with really bad breath and drool on your pillow, that's a telltale sign that you are breathing through your mouth. And that causes bacteria to to flourish it can also put stress on you in your teeth and your gums and things like that so mouth taping is one of

these like hacks hacks that are super cheap that could work for so many people and um yeah i recommend it to everyone i work with for me it would have to be some really strong tape i talk in my sleep i like to talk so much i talk in my sleep so i'm not surprised no you know what i wake up with really dry mouth and i think that's part like i said losing the moisture i think i do breathe through my mouth a lot but sometimes you don't think it's like something that important being that important, if that makes sense. Yeah, it is. It's kind of like I think I was listening to your show and you or someone, your guest said like meditation is really trendy these days. And before it was the gym in the 1950s, the gym was just for boxers. And then everyone goes to the gym now, or a lot more people. I think breathwork is this next step. People are going to start to start appreciating how important our

breath is, particularly with going through the pandemic that was related to lungs. Breathwork searches on Google Trends have gone up 3,000% in the last 15 years. even after the uh the pandemic they're still going up about two three hundred percent per year so yeah the breath illusion is what we call it and uh yeah it's coming i know when i'm climbing those five flights of stairs and sometimes i forget to breathe and then i remember to breathe and i can tell that I have a little bit more energy to go continue on up those stairs when I actually breathe to hold my breath. Yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, that will definitely help you climb stairs. He's like, oh, you still breathe when you're in a hurry.

You just kind of, I don't know, not breathe so deeply or concentrate on your breathing, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. I actually, um,

so I'm, uh, I went through a battle with cancer, but I remember them having someone that wanted to come and like breathe with me. And I was like, it's the most corniest thing. My breathing is gonna help leave me alone and I never did it and it's like you know but now I was thinking about it was like that it probably you know might have helped but

what would you say to a person like me yeah well in particular cancer so they've done I wouldn't just say cancer that wasn't my question um What I would say is, in animal studies, the animals that breathe the least live the longest. So there is this very interesting animal called the naked mole rat. And it lives underground, and it can hold its breath for like three, four, five, six, seven minutes. And it breathes at like a rate of about two or three breaths per minute. And basically they take it. They're so anaerobic. They are incredibly resistant to disease, in particular cancer. Like in in lab studies, they've injected these naked mole rats with cancer and they can't get cancer effectively. And they believe that one of these reasons is because this low oxygen environment.

So you might think, yes, I need to breathe more. And yes, certainly there are times where we do need to breathe more. But actually, it's not just about breathing more. It's about, as Patrick McEwen would say, breathing light, slow and deep. So we want to be breathing through our nose all the time for the reasons I mentioned earlier. But we also want to be breathing really slowly at about 5.5 breaths per minute. So I wear something called the Aura Ring, which tracks a lot of my bario markers and it tracks my sleep and things. And I'm a pretty active person and I breathe about 14, 15 breaths per minute, so way too much. 5.5 breaths per minute interestingly is about the same as um an ave maria or an om in these yogic traditions and then with you know the christian tradition we they they sort

of worked out that 5.5 seconds or five yeah 5.5 seconds on the inhale and exhale for about 5.5 breaths per minute is sort of the perfect amount of time to be breathing. So yeah, we want to be breathing less. We don't want to be breathing over breathing, which a lot of us are doing because of the breath is actually our biggest detox pathway. And when we're living toxic environments, living in cities, eating junk food, the breath is overworked trying to to rid us of these toxins i fear i'm going to ask a stupid question here uh what does a yawn do for a person i mean that's is there an answer to that? What does a yawn do?

I know they're contagious, so don't yawn around other people. I just, I mean, that's like a deep breath, right? Yeah. So it is a deep breath. Yeah, absolutely. So what I specifically, I can't answer your question directly. I'm going to pivot to something that maybe it will be helpful to you but uh when people go into these non-ordinary states of consciousness during the conscious

connected breathing what happens is clearing a lot of people do something called we call clearing and it's clearing things from their body so crying would be something we would call clearing. You know, that's clearing tears and sad emotions. A lot of people have burping and farting and vomiting and diarrhea and shaking. The body is... I feel like I had all those things today. But yawning is something that happens as well. yawning is um it's almost like uncontrollable yawning and whenever i do breath work or whenever i've done ayahuasca i get these huge bouts of yawning yawns like yawns that i feel like the whole earth is is opening up and i'm being birthed because these yawns are so powerful and so so long and i think that what's happening there is is the nervous system you know it's the parasympathetic nervous system the body is

switching over into that rest and digest and i think it feeds into the idea from um somatic experiencing and peter levine and his work with trauma and how trauma doesn't necessarily just live in the mind it also gets trapped in the nervous system and the idea behind that is when we face a serious event you know running away from a tiger as the classic example we want to liberate all sorts of survival energy all sorts of energy to run away from that tiger or fight it off. And then once we are in a safe environment, we discharge that survival energy. And the way mammals do this, if you've seen a deer or a dog after a fight, they go and shake. You can see they shake off that energy. Children do it as well.

Mammals do it as well. But for for some reason we have decided that that's not good we decided well if we see a child shaking we'll be like no don't don't shake don't cry don't clear don't liberate that don't discharge that survival energy and then it gets stuck in the nervous system and then ptsd trauma type things happen and i think yawning when it's done in the right environment, like a healing ceremony is another way of discharging survival energy from the nervous system. See, it wasn't a stupid question. It was a genius question.

Well, I was going to ask about panting. I was like, panting must be horrible then. That was an amazing answer. So yeah, it was a good question. So we keep track on how many good questions. Yeah. And I'm beating her right now. Oh man, he's kicking my ass. So we got to give her this one. Well, I have some other good questions. Well, I saw on your website, sorry, that you were featured in the Men's Health magazine. I find that pretty dang awesome. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so it's kind of, I'm going to turn it into a bit of a tragic story because whilst it seems like a triumph, it was actually a real letdown in my life. So I had depression and anxiety for pretty much all of my teenage years.

I had body issues. I wasn't happy with the way I looked. And I was very into anime like Dragon Ball Z. And I thought, you know, that's what a man looks like. That's how I have to look. And I basically obsessively went to the gym throughout my college years and finally got into to men's health and got an agent for being a fitness model. And this whole time when I was depressed, but going to the gym, I say, once I'm in men's health, then I'll be happy. All my problems will go away and I will be completely fine. And then obviously, you know, it's not a spoiler alert to say I got in men's health. I was really happy for a little while. And then I was, I was more depressed than when I started. Plus with all the extreme dieting I developed an eating disorder which took about

10 years to um to be free from so um yeah being in mental health was amazing and you know all my friends gave me you know pats on the back and that was great but then it led to a long long long long period of yeah a long a long road to recovery right yeah so what was it about breath work that made you know that was the method for you yeah well as i mentioned i had depression did a lot of psychotherapy did um various things and um i had done a lot of meditation as i mentioned and i think meditation is wonderful but i don't really feel like it heals. Certainly it didn't heal me. And a lot of the time, you know, you do things like Reiki or yoga and everyone's like, oh, you've got to try this. It's the best.

This does this. And I was just like, oh, yeah, OK. Yeah, I think it's doing something. I think it's working. I think this is good for me. And then I went to a breathwork session with a guy called Alan Dolan, the breath guru. He is he's an English guy and he's now my my mentor and he has a training school which you should check out he's who i recommend people train with but i did this session with him didn't really know what to think i got

recommended to go to him because whenever i would speak about anything you know particularly difficult you know sad i my breath would go really short i would take deep breaths and i thought he was going to go and tell me teach me how to breathe basically functional breathing but that's not what he does he does the conscious connected breathing and so i went there went um late he teaches you the technique and then you lay down and you do this technique and i the session was 90 minutes but after the end of coming towards the end of this session when he was bringing me back out of this non-ordinary state state of consciousness i assumed i'd been gone for like a lifetime time just didn't exist i came out

i looked up at him i was just like what where where have i been where did i go what just happened and i was just like i cannot believe i've just experienced this just from breathing in a different way i immediately booked my wife in the next day for a session she now works for him as well she's um she's the breath chico on instagram you know we were just complete converts and this is the thing it's like yeah you know a lot of this stuff maybe it's just placebo whereas, yeah, you know, a lot of this stuff, maybe it's just placebo, whereas breathwork, you know, something is happening. I don't know if you've seen the book Breathe by James Nestor. That's sort of the most famous book on breathwork. It really went mainstream. But he basically that's how he got into it.

He did one of these conscious connected breathwork sessions and just like sort of woke up at the end in a puddle of sweat like feeling like he'd done 10 years of psychotherapy and um decided wow i'm as a journalist i'm going to spend the next five years investigating it and he wrote this this very well-known book about it wow so conscious connecting breathing that's what you said right yeah it's not a great name it's not that memorable um in my phd proposal yeah i just i could just call it ccb but yeah better names for it like shamanic breath work and clarity breath work and things like that they're just sort of different trademarked schools but um they're basically all doing the same thing okay and i guess it's just connecting the mind

to what you're doing or yes I'm like did I miss the definition did you explain this already I did okay cool so the reason why it's called conscious connected breathing is one because you are making your breath work your conscious because most of the time we're breathing unconsciously, which is, you know, that's fine. But when one of the wonderful things about breath work or our breath is it's the only way we can affect our autonomic nervous system and our body. Everything else is automatic. You know, our digestion, our heartbeat, our sweat glands, they all happen without any of our control. They're just, you know, on autopilot. Whereas our breath, you know, we can hold our breath, we can speed it up, we can slow it down. And hence we can affect the body. Hence, you know, the mind affects the body, the body affects the

mind. And the connected part is part of this technique is you're removing any pauses between the inhale and the exhale. Because normally when you're breathing, you pause after you exhale when you do this technique you're speeding it up and you're connecting it you're also breathing in through the mouth which i know i said don't do but um there are circumstances where breathing through the mouth has advantages and this conscious connected technique is one of those examples. You're also like elongating the inhale to the exhale. So it's like a four to one inhale to exhale. And you're also exhaling like really shallowly. So you're not hyperventilating.

So a lot of times people get the technique wrong and they have bad experiences like their hands start cramping. But that's why it's so important to do it with a facilitator and not just a facilitator if you're going to a big group and someone's like yeah i'm i've got 100 people coming to my workshop and it's just me i'm just like yeah you're gonna have a nightmare for a lot a lot of people are gonna have a nightmare because you do need to to regulate people and um yeah this is a another sort of part of my my campaign is uh i'm uh trying to promote the the global practitioners of breathworks alliance which is kind of like a regulating body because there's so many um sort of cowboys out there in the wellness industry you know peddling snake oil or just taking really big risks with people's health definitely so it's

kind of crazy because as you're talking, I'm like, so you're really consciously thinking about the breath, which is kind of cool. And I'm like, sheesh, if I ever got the opportunity to just focus on one thing and not feel everything else I feel so much, I think that could be healing, you know, because you got to focus so much on these breaths and follow these instructions that you don't have time to feel the trauma. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And yeah, you mentioned trauma and it has been studied briefly. So this is there's not a lot of research on it. There's maybe 20, 30 studies and they're not they're not the highest quality they've been around for for a long time and this is part of why i'm doing my phd in breathwork is is to get to get support for it because in the uk

meditation can now be prescribed by doctors on the national health service and the reason they can do that is because meditation is evidence-backed it's had hundreds of studies proving its effects breathwork is now starting to get those studies to support the anecdotal claims. But PTSD, so one trial, yeah, was done with someone. It was only a clinical case study with only one person, but in eight weeks of doing weekly sessions, this person had complete remission of their PTSD. Nice. That's great.

I feel like I smoked one joint and i was free from my ptsd um i saw that you did a lot of traveling um around the world was that because you were trying to learn sorry learn about the different cultures or what was your reason for traveling around the world yeah learning it was a period of my life where I was maybe a little bit lost and looking for to run away from some of my problems but they of course come with you um but at the same time i did try to learn about different spiritual traditions you know i studied reiki in cambodia i worked at the osho ashram in pune india um i did an ayahuasca apprenticeship in peru and i guess i was trying to to heal myself because i come from a really bad place, you know, internally bad place and getting out of the sort of the rat race in the UK, meeting other people who are struggling with mental health like, it's cliche, but, you know, people are really happy with much less.

You know, people are they don't have the latest Tesla and yet they are much happier than some of us over here in the West. Certainly a lot happier than I was. How are they handling? You said you spent some time with those who also dealt with mental health issues how were they handling some of their challenges over where you were yeah i guess um doing similar things you know do the i think there are many different paths to healing um the the trendy ones right now are i would say ayahuasca a lot of people are turning to ayahuasca for good reason because it is super powerful. Breathwork as well.

I did breathwork retreats in Costa Rica. I trained in breathwork in Costa Rica. And this is kind of the thing. It's like our medical system, as phenomenal as it is and, you know, how it increased our our life expectancy to to to a certain point it has limitations when it comes to mental health because um don't want to go into conspiracy theories here but um basically they're not really treating root causes you know it's symptom management if you have depression you get a pill and you get numb that's what i had uh it didn't work for me and i think it doesn't work for a lot of people

um you know the evidence shows that um i think 48 50 53 percent of people um don't get any benefit from from antidepressants and like they're you know the side effects can be worse than the actual thing with it with anxiety you know you get a peak of anxiety in those first two weeks there's worse than your anxiety suicidal thoughts is a side effect of some of these antidepressants and similarly with cbt cognitive behavioral therapy they hold it up as the gold standard of therapy but it's really not that good again 40, only 48% of people who do CBT respond to the treatment. So that means 52% of people with anxiety, this is specifically for, go to CBT and nothing changes for them. And then also there's about 50% of those people who do respond relapse as soon as they get out of CBT, as soon as they finish their course and this is why yeah i think we just

we just need better mental health services i'm not trying to call anyone out i know everyone's trying to help but the next generation has to has to take on board things like psychedelics and breath work and and exercise and things like that and treating treating root causes so yeah the people your question was about what are the people doing off in these other countries who I met out there, they were treating their root causes. They were going into breath works and ceremonies. They were feeling their feelings.

Your podcast is called These Fucking Feelings. And I love that saying that feeling better is about better feeling. We need to feel our grief, our trauma, our sadness, our anger. We can't just numb it all out like antidepressants try to do. Right. Exactly. I think that's another big thing that we kind of speak on just why we created this podcast to show people that there's more than one method and the method is different for everybody and you just need to find your method.

It's okay to have these feelings. Yeah, definitely. Definitely okay to have these feelings. So is there a part in someone's healing journey that they should look into Breathworks? Or is that something like if you feel like, oh, I need help, I can go into this right away? Yeah, I think there's almost no contraindication. So there's a study by Pressman where they had 11,000 participants in patients in a mental health clinic over 12 years, and then not a single adverse event was reported. So no one had anything terrible. So it can be tried by almost anyone. I really would recommend going with a facilitator who is certified

drive me mental that some i once went before i got into breath work i was on a yoga retreat and the guy leading it was like i went to this amazing breath work thing the other day it's going to blow your socks off and he he led a ceremony he'd been to one thing and everyone was like crying everyone got tetany everyone was cramping and people were like shaking outside because there was just no support please check out the global breathwork practitioners alliance find a practitioner who's certified it has insurance because like i said there's a lot of sort of like cavalier people who think they can just you know heal people with one one experience so yeah the schools i would recommend the two i've trained with three so breath guru is one in europe clarity breath work

is one in the us and soma breath work is sort of as one it's sort of online all over the place so people can check those out um but your question was specifically about wearing people's journey. I think you've got to take on the mantra. You've got to be ready to face yourself. You know, so many of us understandably, like I said, I did it. I ran away from my problems. I wanted someone else to fix me. But the answer wasn't in other countries it was in facing my emotions facing my feelings and doing it with with the skill of you know mentors facilitators who who guided me through this this way of being

well and then how long in this journey do you think that people start to feel different if they went the breath work way yeah well my trial the one i'm designing at the moment has is six weeks so we'll have people doing six weeks of uh six weekly 90 minute sessions and i guess once i've completed that trial i'll be able to say six weeks six weeks okay this is kind of like the irony of of science it's like um let's say i prove that breathwork reduces anxiety like it's already been partially proven in another study but this will be the first one done online and it'll be the first um randomized controlled trial and it's going to be six weeks and the reason is six weeks is because it kind of aligns with my vacation. I just can't do it any other time.

I just need to get my PhD. I need to fit it in with my lifestyle. So maybe for the next 10 years, people will be like, six weeks is the amount of breath work you have to do. And I'll be laughing, you'll be laughing as well. Yeah, because he had to go on Christmas holidays. Not a day over. Just because he had to go back to school. on christmas holiday right it's just not a day over school well that is pretty funny and yeah i kind of we would like to know what you find out yeah okay yeah i i do this and every time i talk to somebody i'll be like yo this i could think i could use this will benefit me a little bit did your trial start already or you haven't started it because it's still in the works of

being made yeah i'm still designing it. Yeah, right, right. Just making sure. She needs some breath work. She needs some breath work right now. What? You got to excuse us. We're a bit nutty up here.

Yeah, it's been a long day. So we have a producer, but she wants to know, like, during one of these sessions, do you feel sedated? Is it like that kind of feeling? Yeah, I guess you could call it a type of sedation. So people have different experiences. So definitely that sort of racing mind would probably go away after a while. It takes probably, for most people, maybe 10 to 20 minutes to get into it, to get into that place where the healing can happen, where the traumas can be faced, where the emotions can be expressed, where the mystical experiences happen. I used to think uh you know holotropic

breathwork the sort of the originator or stan groff who invented it was the originator of this um i i'll i'm gonna explain the history and then i'll actually go people probably want to know how it started so stanislav groff he's a czech american psychiatrist he was working at the esalen institute in california he was doing a lot of clinical trials in the 60s with LSD for mental health. Back then, the second wave of psychedelic therapy, people were doing, obviously, all the press was about hippies using it and things like that. But actually, there was a lot of research being done on mental health with psilocybin and with LSD. And as soon as that was made illegal, Stanislav Grof, well, he noticed in these LSD patients that they were breathing in this way, in this conscious, connected way at the end of their trips.

And then he's decided to experiment what would happen if I just did this breathing. And he realized that you can get into similar states as you do with LSD with this breathwork technique. So that's how it sort of evolved by accident from on the back, the tail end of the psychedelic research. And then how long does it take? So holotropic breathwork sessions are normally like three hours i don't teach three hours because i don't think we need that long um i recently taught a group and it was like i got constrained for time but basically i only got given half an hour it's like oh half an hour so i'm gonna be nearly enough and it took me like 15 minutes you know just to introduce myself and then introduce the technique and then obviously we had mostly only had about 10-15 minutes of breath work and we came back and there were people who were like who had been shaking that people

who had cried there was a person who'd met her two sisters who had passed i was like it just continues to blow my mind just in 15 minutes in the environment you can have these amazing experiences i'm like i'm gonna be scared i had that a little bit but yeah i kind of could be so we've been talking about breath work and how it works for people how it can help people mentally but is it physically that people can be healed from ailments or yeah yeah so um as i mentioned breath is the the largest detox pathway you know wherever you're losing body fat people wonder where that body fat goes it goes out of the breath and that's why people who do like the keto diet they have terrible breath also the breath is when you're doing those deep diaphragmatic breaths that we would be doing in a conscious connected ceremony you're pump pumping your

lymph system so lymphatic drainage and is occurring another study that was done with cancer patients they did a pre and post test immunoglobulin a which is a marker of immune function and they had people do the breathwork they remade their immunoglobulin a and the people who did the breathwork had much higher levels of immunity than the people who did not do the breathwork so breathwork improves the immunity and the the hypothesis for why this happened is based on linda timershock's research where basically she found that emotional suppression also suppresses the immune system so this is what you'll find if you read the work of Gabor Mate and his work like when the body says no there's all sorts of correlations between people who suppress their

emotions in particular anger and cancer and in particular breast cancer that is seems to be in particular women who suppress emotions have a much higher risk of breast cancer that is seems to be in particular women who suppress emotions have a much higher risk of breast cancer hence expressing those emotions in healthy ways through something like breath work which is your risk of cancer yeah i feel like that's every woman i know right now yeah um i had a really good question i think it it slipped my mind. It was that. I think everybody should start this breath work ASAP. Oh, okay. There goes my question. And it's just kind of, look, me losing or forgetting my thought, maybe remember my thought, right? Can someone like me, you think someone like me who my mind is always busy can do breath work?

Yes. I feel like I couldn't concentrate on that one thing. It's like my mind is always on the next thing already. Yes, I do think you could do it. One, because you would have a coach, you would have someone monitoring you. So ideally, you would find an in-person ceremony there happening. I don't know where you both are located. Is it New York?

New York, yes. Okay, I bet you there's a conscious connected breathwork ceremony happening right now somewhere in New York. You can also do them online. As I mentioned, I'll be the first person to measure breathwork done online, but it definitely works online. I've seen it so many times um during the pandemic um my mentor the breath guru he calls this meditation for people who can't meditate it's because as i mentioned it's that passivity that people really struggle with you you see you know your mind is always on the next thing but if you're constantly thinking about a fairly complicated breath work technique and you also have a facilitator telling you, you know,

connect that breath, slow down your exhale, all sorts of different things, then you are able to stay with the technique much more easily. Because I'm kind of one of those people that's always, I kind of am always conscious of my breath. Like I know what it's like when I don't feel good. And when I'm tired, I feel like I can always tell those things by how I breathe. Am I thinking too far into it? Is that can be a reality? Sorry, what was your question? I guess it really wasn't a question. I kind of just stayed in that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Then in terms of how to breathe and the apnea and holding the breath, you know, there's this thing now called tech apnea. So it's basically when people are on their phones, they're holding their breath and that's causing again stress on the heart anxiety as well

so yeah if you can be mindful especially if you're on your phone of your breath you're probably going to do yourself some favors yeah because i hold my breath when i work out that's why i don't work out oh yeah that's why yeah because i'll be doing little exercises and i hold my breath so it makes perfect sense yeah it's a good reason not to work out. Right. So of course, we'll definitely list all of your contact information inside of all of our episodes. It's going to be online on our website and those kinds of things. But is there anything that you've got going on, other things that you would like to let us know about? Well, I'm full time with my PhD at the moment uh i will be looking for trial participants

eventually so um maybe uh i can you can share that at some point in future it's obviously it's free to join um you would have to have mild to severe anxiety and no other sort of illnesses and not not extreme anxiety or normal levels of anxiety so there'll be a few research uh inclusion criteria but um yeah that's that's the the main thing i've got going on at the moment and uh yeah instagram is where people find me most um that i'm at the breath geek on instagram and i share informational content, um, about breath work and mental health on there. Yeah.

We'll check. I'm definitely going to check some out. I feel like someone, you know, I've heard of breath work and people always tell me to try it. Cause even now I'm in remission, but I still go through a lot of like random codes. I like to call it,

but I'd be, I'm really sick during that cold period. I was like once a month that people always tell me like, Oh, but I'm really sick during that cold period. Happens like once a month that people always tell me like, oh, don't take medication, don't do that, you know, antibiotics. And, you know, you need to meditate and work on your breathing. And I feel like I hear that all the time. And it's like, what does that mean? You know, so it's kind of cool to now know. I mean, I could have looked it up, but I'd be busy. I'm too busy to look it up. Why do you have a podcast to get people to come and you know

explain it for you that really is see this is free therapy for me you know i'm up look we're putting you out there too which is but i'm also learning and i've learned like there's three people i want to call and see now you're like number four because i'm like because even now i still try to listen to like you know Alexa like Alexa put guided meditation on while I go to sleep and I'm supposed to be following the voice and I'm still like at work tomorrow I gotta make sure I do this I gotta make sure I process these bills and it's like it doesn't work so this is something that you think I'm trusting you now Richard if you think it's I can do it okay it's a lot of pressure it is because i got a podcast now yeah we're not about look we're number seven right now

on the top 100 health and fitness podcast number seven so people watch us right and i'm gonna tell them if it don't work okay yeah don't you worry don't worry can ask about that though is this something that is expensive or is it kind of um i would say it's not expensive you know it's not um you know like life coaching where someone charges like a thousand dollars an hour to tell you i don't like the life coaching industry sorry i'm very ashamed of it um it's not particularly expensive. No, you know, it's about the same as, you know, the price of a massage to have a one to one session or a psychotherapy session. But there are free resources. So Soma Breathwork is the other one that I mentioned I'm trained in. They have free videos on their YouTube channel. And so soma breathwork is slightly different it's very similar to wim hof have you heard of wim hof the wim hof method no okay so he is the most famous

breath worker and he's this sort of very extroverted dutch guy who has all sorts of world records for like being in ice baths for you know seen amounts of time climbing mount everest in his shorts and no t-shirt and he also has this breathwork technique and soma breathwork is a very similar one so i never finished my branch and umbrella analogy earlier but this is another branch the umbrella tree that I've invented just now. The intermittent hypoxic branch of breathwork. So intermittent hypoxia means like short term holding your breath. So people would say like, oh, you know, holding your breath is bad for you. So chronic hypoxia is bad for you. But if you're doing doing it deliberately it's really very beneficial for you

so it's a type of stress called hormetic stress so hormetic stress is a thing like going to the gym exercising when you're doing a bicep curl you're tearing the fibers in your muscles but then your body is making them bigger making them grow back stronger same with sauna sauna is a heat stress too much sauna they say you're out in the desert for a few days and you die a little bit of sauna and your body reacts with all sorts of positive things like you know detoxing increasing dopamine increasing heat shock proteins same with cold same with ice baths that's why they're so trendy at the moment a little bit of an ice bath like jack in the titanic you know he doesn't make it back from

you know being pushed off the door um and then a little bit of ice a little bit of cold all sorts of wonderful things happen you get more dopamine than a line of cocaine and it lasts many hours more you get norepinephrine which is an adrenal same with intermittent hypoxia a little bit of breath hold and you get all these things happening. The body starts to liberate stem cells. The body starts to liberate P53, which is one of our own anti-cancer fighting chemicals. And it's also increasing resilience. Basically, your window of tolerance to stress can be increased by doing things like these short term breath breath holds that you would do on Soma Breathwork. And as I mentioned, you can find these on YouTube just for free and they'll teach you right then and there. Now, is that something that you recommend though? Because me right now, I'm still a little skeptical. I'm like, eh, I might reach out, but I still don't think it's going to work. No i mean seriously it's like you know i have that mindset that i'm like i'm no one understand me i'm too different and maybe a little too broken

sometimes to like uh they won't be able to like like they're not gonna get me to be able to think on my breathing because it's not gonna you know what would you say to me um so i would say work one-on-one with someone uh find a one-on-one instructor because if you think you are um you know in that sort of like the the one percent of people who nothing works for finding a good mentor to to sort of hold you accountable in the breath would really help and you can do sessions online with um with with some of these people I've mentioned. So maybe going to a group session might not be as helpful for you because you get less attention. And maybe you will squirm out. Maybe you will back out the front, the back door when no one's looking. And Soma Breathwork, maybe that doesn't work for you initially because it's just online.

For people who are able to just show up, they're very self--motivated so my breath work is going to be a great intro but for you i would say yeah find a really good local breath worker and go to their their venue i already think that i'll be worried about how good i need to be at it like i gotta be good at this because you know that's my thing i gotta be the best and so i'm going if i'm gonna do this i gotta be the best and if i can't be the best i'm not gonna do it you will be a an over exhaler so that is the we we can read so much about a person when they're doing breath work and we do like we also do um it's called acupressure so it's like it's crossed between acupuncture and massage so there's certain spots in the body that we will press on when a person is breathing so um you know you can press this spot up here on the sort of the top left pec and that is often where we people hold emotions and so you would say to someone like

it's okay to feel your feelings and that sort of combination of the the words the breath and the acupressure can often unblock things for a person and then you mentioned you're someone who um wants to get it right for those types of people they always force their exhale and i'm always going to be like no it's okay you know there's no grades for breath work there's no pass marks and uh yeah what often happens with those types of people is they get tetany which is kind of cramping in their hands there's no long-term side effects to it it's just a little bit uncomfortable and it's a clear sign that you are um forcing your exhale but also sometimes people would say oh you know this is this is a change in your calcium channels and that's what's really happening it's your your blood ph changing

which it is but in the more spiritual um schools they would say to you what are you clinging on to and often when you ask someone that during their their breath work then when they're in this altered states they'll release and i'll be like i'm you know i'm clinging on to a sense of control i'm clinging on to you know my grief over my father or things like that and so this sort of this mind body spirit connection all comes into one and one big explosive release at times for people because i was gonna ask you know i was gonna ask that does it kind of involve also the mind and kind of what's going on up there. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it involves all sorts, you know, whatever.

The breath is sort of like, you know, self-diagnosing almost. It's like, you know, if you're someone who needs to release trauma from their nervous system, maybe they'll just be shaking like a deer for half an hour. If you're someone who has a lot of grief, maybe there's someone who's just crying for half an hour. If someone has a has a lot of grief um maybe there's someone who's just just crying for half an hour if someone has a lot of anger we also have tools called kicking and pounding that we do with people there to to release their anger in a healthy way if there's someone

who you know is feeling sort of spiritually bereft maybe they get a spiritual experience experience. I saw something on your website about red light rising. Red light, yes. So red light rising are a brand of, it's called photobiomodulation. So red light in particular has been shown in a lot of trials to do things like boost collagen when it's, you know, it's particularly on the face. You go to a beauty salon, they'll have one of these red light panels. Shining on the testicles boosts testosterone in men. It's also been shown to reduce inflammation. So it's very good for athletes or people who have injuries in the joints. It also is a photon donor.

So in the electron transport chain, which is where the cell makes its energy and basically this red light when it's shine shine on on the whole body increases our energy by giving us these photons maybe that's why red is my favorite color could be interesting that's very interesting i keep thinking in my mind about what you just said about the photons and glucose you know kind of being the same thing in a in a way sometimes when you have too much sugar or whatever you have that high and then you have the crash does anything like that happen like if once the photons not not really no it's more of like a sustained source of energy um yeah i i think well the this idea of of the red light comes from sunrise and sunset you know traditionally we would see the

sunrise and the sunset and during the sunrise and sunset because. And during the sunrise and sunset, because the sun, the beams of sun come through the atmosphere at that angle, a lot of the blue light gets blocked out. And then you just get more of that red light. And, you know, sunlight is such an underappreciated health, like vital part of our health. You know, people just think, oh, yeah, sunlight, vitamin D, but there's so much more to it. You it creates serotonin it creates um it feeds our mitochondria it proves our mood and boosts our libido it's um it's antiviral it's anti antibacterial and i just think so many people would do so much better when they are out in the sunshine you know getting getting full body exposure to the sun to an extent,

because also, you know, burning is not good. Yeah, we don't want to burn, but we want to get a bit of sunlight on our bodies, you know, as much as we can. I don't like heat, so I try not to do it. I don't like going outside when it's hot. I'm one of those people, but i know i need to start so before we end any last things any last words of encouragement you want to tell our listeners um yeah i i guess what i mentioned earlier is like you've got to i certainly had to to come to the realization that no one was going to do this for me no one was going to come and heal me no no injustice was going to be righted in the past like I had to sort of pick myself up and do the hard things uh there's one of my favorite books called the comfort crisis by by Michael Easter and it's

just like our lives have become so comfortable that we have no no tolerance and we can't do anything for ourselves and um breath work is is relatively easy compared to a lot of things we do in our life. But it can also be quite frightening to be like, okay, actually I'm going to go and confront my demons, confront my emotions, and just want people to know that the breath and this spiritual technology, as some people have it, it is incredibly powerful and it really will help you if you give it a chance. Cool. And I was thinking that too, like while you were talking throughout the show,

I was like, it kind of sounds kind of like a spiritual kind of journey as well. So that it's pretty, pretty cool. But we thank you for being on. We will post your links and your contact information, but we're also going to check back in because I'm going to try this. Yeah. And I'm going to let you know. Okay.

You can come back and we're going to talk about it. Okay. All right, cool. Sounds good. So thank you so much for being on. Thank you guys for watching, and we'll see you soon