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

Dylan Werner is a yoga teacher and an author. Breathing is one of the few ways we can directly interact with how our physiology is operating, and yet no one ever taught us how to do it. Dylan Werner is one of the world's best known yoga teachers and today he gives us a breakdown of not only how the breath can impact our mood and performance but also explains the biology of how our breathing works, how you can implement breathwork into your daily routine, plus he guides us through an entire breathwork sequence at the end of the episode. Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy The Illuminated Breath - https://amzn.to/2N9aNu2 Follow Dylan on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/dylanwerneryoga Check out Dylan's Website - https://www.dylanwerneryoga.com Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Breathing is one of those things, we're always doing it. How you do it matters. What's the famous saying? How you do one thing is how you do everything? How do you breathe? Because that's what you're doing the most of. You're not doing any one activity more than that.

• 0:15Chris Williamson?

  Where are you practicing your yoga in Chang'e?

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Where am I?

• 0:20Chris Williamson?

  Where are you practicing it in Chang'e? Are you going to a studio?

• 0:23Speaker 00

  Oh, you look right behind me, like right there, that that little space behind me on that floor. That's a, that's where I practice.

• 0:32Chris Williamson?

  So you're not going to, obviously, there's a lot of different yoga studios out there. Nice places with bamboo leaves and everyone in Lululemon. And you're not bothering to venture?

• 0:42Speaker 00

  There's, there's some beautiful studios here. On Saturdays, I go to Kirtan, which is like yoga music. So basically, people get together and someone plays harmonium and someone plays a drum or something and you sing mantras and kirtans. Yeah, it's a, I know, it's, it's kind of a, it's called bhakti yoga. Bhakti means the yoga of devotion. And so it's a, it's a different, different sector, different aspect. It's a, it's good, though. Yeah.

• 1:16Chris Williamson?

  I didn't realize until reading your book that there was a philosophy behind yoga. I knew that it was to do with embodied practice and different levels of awakening and stuff like that. But I didn't realize that there was a full philosophy behind it. Can you tell us a bit about that?

• 1:33Speaker 00

  The full philosophy of yoga? There's, there's a lot of philosophy in yoga and it really depends on what, what you're talking about. I think, I think what most people are familiar with as far as like the fundamental philosophy of yoga would be the yoga sutras and Patanjali's Eight Lems, which is essentially like the path of yoga towards enlightenment.

• 1:58Speaker 00

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

• 2:41Speaker 00

  Like I know when I came into yoga, my definition for the word yoga was very different than what it is now. It was, it was like what I think the vast majority of people think of yoga. It's stretching and sun salutations or maybe ashtanga or some sort of like physical calisthenics type movement. And that is, that is definitely what yoga is, but it's, it's also, it's also like the way that you interact, the way that you think, the way that you breathe, there's the way that you conduct yourself.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  I don't know, for, for me like it's just, it's the word that encompasses understanding your fundamental truth.

• 3:25Speaker 00

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

• 4:08Speaker 00

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

• 4:50Speaker 00

  And when I practice yoga, like I I use the common vernacular that everyone uses. Like, yeah, are you gonna go to yoga? And I know what they mean is, are you gonna go do asana? And which is fine, right? Yeah, cuz yes, that is a part of it. That is definitely part of it. So I'm gonna go practice asana. But, uh, yeah, it's definitely the definition for it has changed. And and that's kind of just like the start of the philosophy. I mean, we could spend the whole time talking about different aspects of philosophy of yoga. We could talk about Maya, how we see everything as illusion. We could talk about the yamas and the niyamas and and conducts with yourself. And we could talk about what enlightenment is and spirituality and all that.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  But I think I think at the end of the day, everybody is going to find what those words mean to them and define those words and give those those things significance. And and essentially, that's what all philosophy is. It's finding the significance.

• 5:47Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that a lot of people who are practicing yoga are missing out on that side? I've been to a number of yoga practices, some where you are in Chengdu and also local ones in the UK. And although there is a talk of something broader than the movements themselves, kind of on the surface, connect to the breath, connect to yourself, like, you know, the the meditative practice sort of words doesn't ever really seem to leave the mat?

• 6:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's I I don't want to really make that judgment towards anyone else for their journey cuz there are definitely some people that it what's important is that whatever you're doing, you're getting something from it. And you're gonna take what you need at that time. For me, I ended up taking a lot more of the the philosophical part or the the quote unquote spiritual part from yoga because that's what I needed. I was I was so lost in my life. I was, um.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  I am and always have been kind of an adrenaline junkie or whatever. Like I, if there, I love to surf, rock climb, I was into skydiving, I've, you know, snowboarding, whatever was like fun and fast, I enjoyed, but I did it not, I did it because I loved it, but there's also like, there's something that I realized was missing in my life, or I didn't know was missing in my life, but I was getting it through those things. And it was, it's something that was as simple as being present, and we talk about this all the time in yoga. And even like as yoga is now, the, the philosophy of yoga is seeping out into, into other, you know, I know you, you do a lot of the biohacking stuff and you're into that, and this mindfulness

• 7:36Speaker 00

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

• 8:21Speaker 00

  If you're a little bit younger, you might live more in the future because you, your aspects and your goals and the, the prospect of, of your life being better lives in the future. And so you miss out what it is to actually live. And, and doing those extreme things.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  I was, for the first time, living. And it was first time being, like the, in yoga, I talk about this almost every podcast because I think it's such, such an important thing, but the word sattva, the, the truth, which means like unchanging, right? Everything in the world is changing, everything in the universe is continuously changing. There's actually an epic YouTube video that shows the, the history of the universe, and it goes into trillions and trillions and trillions of years, and it's, and it's done to this like cool thing, but it, it shows basically the end of all things when all the finals, the final star burns out. Because that, that, that's a crazy thing to think about.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  At one point in the future, the last sun will use up all of its energy and there'll be no light in existence. And so if we could, you know, like the, the whole universe will cease and then, and then there'll be the cooling and everything will come to absolute zero and then there'll be no movement and then time becomes completely irrelevant. Right? There's, there's going to be a point where time no longer exists because there's nothing moving for time, there's nothing to experience it. So, I know we're getting kind of way off into a tangent here, but there, there's one thing that at least we could experience now because, because to live is to experience. And that's what life is. Death is non-experience.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  That, that's the only thing that separates those two. We know, we know what experience is, so we, so we, uh, we tend to try to hold on to that and we, we're afraid of the non-experience because we don't understand that, even though you can't experience non-experience, it's just, it's just there. But the truth, the unchanging truth is this present moment. It's the window that, that looks out into the changing world that never changes itself. It's like sitting on a train and you, and that, and you're just going down and you look and you see everything pass while everything passes through that window and it's essentially what your life is.

• 10:45Speaker 00

  And if you, uh, you know, if you, if you turn your head, then, then you miss actually what's going on. So, I don't know, yeah, that's...

• 10:57Speaker 00

  As far as people getting there, I didn't think I would get there. I got there because I needed to get there. And I think the more people that practice it, practice yoga, because yoga is really, like that whole like, focusing on the breath and the body and the thoughts, that's all that is, is connecting those things together. We're used to living in this world where, where the mind and the body are two different things, and we think that they're separate.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  And we think because I'm the one looking, because I'm, I'm from my point of view, that everything else is not me. And, and that's just the perspective of things. It's like the tree, the, the leaves on a tree thinking that they're not the tree. And, so, yeah, I don't even know where I'm going with this, but the...

• 11:48Speaker 00

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

• 12:31Speaker 00

  I, I think it's more helpful to find the things that yoga is than to try to find the things that yoga isn't. Uh, there's, I've spent too much time trying to defend what yoga is when it needs no defense.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  And, and if, if people listening, if you're out there trying to find out what yoga is, and it's not going to help you in your journey towards anything. Yeah, my thoughts, I don't know.

• 12:58Chris Williamson?

  I had this conversation with Paul Bloom, who is a psychologist and philosopher from Yale, I think. And he quoted this dominatrix, talking about why people are into BDSM and hardcore sex. And he arrived at it in the same way as why people do extreme sports and why people do scary things. This quote from this dominatrix is, "Nothing captures attention like a whip." And the point is that if someone slaps you in the face really, really hard, for one to five seconds after that, you're not thinking of anything. The mind is completely blank.

• 13:38Chris Williamson?

  But you are there, you are in the moment. And I think that the people that chase extreme sport are looking for that same presence. You can't, if you're base jumping, or snowboarding, or rock climbing, and you do allow the mind to drift, the implications are incredibly grave. You might die.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, they can be. And I could take that to kind of play a little, to maybe devil's advocate, or, or I completely agree with that. But if that person continues to slap you in the face for the next, like, 12 hours, at some point in time, you're going to start thinking about something else, or you're going to try to disassociate with that experience.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  You know, so it's, you could only, outside stimuli, whatever they are, that it's eventually, and that's what I noticed with, with skydiving, that after, after a certain number of jumps, that I was thinking about the next jump, rather than enjoying the jump that I was on, you know, and so.

• 14:49Chris Williamson?

  Is that part of the usefulness of yoga, that you are always in control, that you do have to have this intentionality, that you are going into it, and that whatever happens is down to you, whatever doesn't happen is down to you, there aren't any, other than gravity, there aren't really very many external stimulus that are acting on you? Is that why it's forcing you to connect that mind, body, breath?

• 15:16Speaker 00

  I wanna say I don't know.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  I mean, that's a, that's a really good question to kind of explore into.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  I, I just, I think it's kind of different for everybody.

• 15:30Chris Williamson?

  You've been working on the breath a lot recently, though. How come you decided to focus so much on that and a little bit less on yoga when writing a book?

• 15:40Speaker 00

  It's not that it's something that was the recent, I think, I think people, when they, when they see me or the people that follow me and, and my practice, they really just see the physical side of it because that's the easiest thing to show. And if, uh,

• 15:58Speaker 00

  I, I do like to write a lot and I, and since I started my social media, a big part of, of what goes into my post is, is writing about philosophy or writing about the thoughts, even if it's just like a simple line or something, trying to provoke some sort of thought into someone else. So that maybe start a conversation or start a, that person starts a conversation with themselves or someone else. But always, always in my practice, since I started yoga was a breathing aspect. I, I learned pranayama from it. And I talk about this in my book, in the beginning of the book of like, of coming into pranayama and really not understanding what it was for, other than I was supposed to do it.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  All right. And I, I think a lot of people that practice breath work, they just know that they're supposed to do it. And we know that we're supposed to breathe. We, we have to, we have no choice. And people that start, like, people are more into like the biohacking stuff, people that are taping their mouth at night because they know I'm supposed to breathe through my nose and, and I'm supposed to breathe less, like, they, they get that part of it. But there is a a much greater aspect to the practice, other than just breathing right or breathing less. And that is that everything energetically, physically, emotionally is linked to the breath. And because it's linked to the breath, the breath has some control over it. And so essentially that you could control almost every aspect of your life

• 17:25Speaker 00

  by learning how to control the breath, how the breath works. And you could, what, what I do mostly in my breath practice, and this is something that I think, um, Maybe for just the past six or seven months or so, my breath practices focused almost entirely on increasing athletic performance. And though you could do it for everything, and sometimes I do other practices and stuff, but it's a tool. It's a tool, so you pick the tool that you need and you figure out what that tool does and how to use it and how to benefit, benefit your life with it.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I've been, I've been doing breathing and studying breathing and I've been teaching it, been teaching workshops and seminars on breath work.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  I want to say for like seven or eight years I've been doing, doing those where I actually get quite deep into the philosophy and all that.

• 18:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's always been a part of my practice. I had no intention really of writing a book on, my first book anyways, to be about breathing. I was in, I was here in Bali last year, right before I flew to London. And my publisher reached out to me. And it's really kind of like a serendipitous kind of thing because it was actually his wife that contacted me first, him or her and the owner of, of the publishing house, Victory Belt Publishing. They had been practicing with me online for a good period of time and the, the owner

• 19:11Speaker 00

  of Victory Belt said that he started yoga through my classes and it just, talked to him and it kind of felt right and I felt like he understood me a little bit, like knew me a little bit and, because I honestly didn't think I could write a book. I was like, there's, there's no way that I, that I can do this and if I did, I thought my first book would be solely on like philosophy. Like I was thinking about, I'm going to do a book on, I wanted to call it, like something like unveil the Maya, like basically like removing the veil of illusion.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  And when I talked to him, we talked about like five or six different books. And we arrived at doing this book on breathing. And one of the things I thought was like, well, this is going to be the easiest book because I've done so much work with it. And when you've, when you've spent a lot of time with something and you've taught something for a really long time, and I think that's another thing that I feel really grateful about before writing the book is that I spent so much time teaching it that it, that I knew exactly how the whole thing was going to come together before I even put pen to paper. Yeah.

• 20:26Chris Williamson?

  What do most people have wrong about the breath? What do they think it can or can't do that it can't or can?

• 20:34Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, that depends on who you're talking to or who you're asking. Like if you're asking a yogi, almost all yogis know pranayama. Like if you're, if you've been practicing yoga for more than six months, you've at least heard of pranayama or done some sort of breath work. I think what they mostly get wrong is they don't know why that they're doing that. It's like, it's like, I mean, I could also say that it's probably true of a lot of people that practice the physical osama stuff. They don't understand what's the purpose of triangle pose. They just do it because the teacher says to do it. So if you go down and you start doing a practice, like one of the classic ones is called Nadi Shodhana, which is alternate nostril breathing. It's really to balance, you know, and they'll, and they'll explain this, it's to balance

• 21:19Speaker 00

  your eda and your pingala energies.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  Like, what does that mean? Right? So I, I remember the first time I did it was in, in my, my 200 hour teacher training.

• 21:32Speaker 00

  And I'm a very like, kind of scientific, kind of very literal. I want facts and evidence and I want things to be cited. That's why there's citations in my book, you know, like reference, yeah, I, I want to understand where this is coming from, why we're doing it, what's the benefit? And then, and this practice of alternate nostril breathing, you know, like you inhale through the left nostril, then you exhale through the right, inhale through the right, exhale through the left, so you're switching back and forth. But I know when, once you go past the septum, it just goes right into the perinatal, the perinatal cavity in the sinuses and, and then down the trachea into the lungs. Like it's, it's, it just goes together and then it's one. And so I didn't understand how there is benefit of the physiological benefits.

• 22:15Speaker 00

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

• 22:57Speaker 00

  you're given these practices and it's like, here's this practice in the box and you gotta keep it in the box and you can't really mess with it. You just gotta do it exactly like this. And then here's this other practice and these don't really go together. And then do this and it's like, okay, now we do Bashtrika, which is like a fast breathing practice. And I don't think I was ever taught why I would want to do Bashtrika or, or a lot of them. And even if you go and you start studying like the older, the older texts that talk about pranayama, the, the information that you're gonna get seems pretty, pretty like

• 23:35Speaker 00

  out there. And, and for me as, as a spiritual yoga, yogi to say that like out there, it's like if you practice this in the way of the master, exactly as taught, which is not referenced in there, uh, cause you're supposed to learn everything directly from your guru. People that are old will be young. You're like, oh, well, that sounds pretty good. Right? And it's just like, uh, or, or the other thing that you get is this, this breathing practice, if I, if I look online and I go, what does this breathing practice do? And I find somebody's website that wrote up about it. I'm gonna see like a hundred different things that this one breath practice does. And it's like, does it really do all those things? What does it do the most effective and, and why does it do those things? And so when I

• 24:17Speaker 00

  When um, I think as far as what people get wrong with the breath is not understanding the potential and then not understanding what the breath that they're doing actually does.

• 24:29Chris Williamson?

  What are the principles of good breathing then? What the foundational principles of it?

• 24:36Speaker 00

  Like if you want to talk about just like daily breathing, like how how should I breathe normally?

• 24:44Speaker 00

  Well, I think I think at this point, most people know always breathe through your nose. Always, I mean, the nose is a filtration system, it humidifies and it down regulates the amount of air that we breathe. It's funny because like now in covid time and talking about everyone wearing masks and watching, especially in um, my my once home country, I haven't lived there in a really long time, but my my home country of the States, the good old America where people are like, it's my God given right to breathe and I can't breathe if I wear a mask and all and I don't know, I did a racist country accent there.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  I have anything against people that are from the country or the Midwest, but yeah, like the fact that you can't breathe with a mask or that wearing a mask is is bad. It's actually one of the things that we we the benefits or the reasons why we want to breathe less is to increase carbon dioxide, to increase our our CO2.

• 25:44Chris Williamson?

  Why would you want that?

• 25:46Speaker 00

  Uh, well, the effects that CO2 has on the body, first of all, we so if I breathe, right, the the one of the common misconceptions that people have is like if if I breathe a lot, if I breathe really fast, I get more oxygen. Right, if you heard that before, breathe more, you get more oxygen. Have you ever put your finger in like a an SpO2 monitor? So SpO2 monitors, you probably have at some point, they they just put it like little thing on your finger, it measures your your blood oxygen saturation. And it says, oh, it's like ninety-seven to ninety-nine percent. Generally, most people aren't below ninety-five percent.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  And, and the majority of the air that you breathe out, or the majority of the oxygen that you take in, you breathe the majority of it out. So you're not even utilizing most of the oxygen that you take in. And it's not at a hundred percent, usually because there is some sort of, uh, there's, there's a chemical, or there's an, there's a, an exchange between the oxygen and the carbon dioxide on the cellular level. So that's always happening. If I breathe more, what happens is I, I start to change my pH. So I, I have, I, by breathing more, I'm not actually getting more oxygen, I'm breathing off more carbon dioxide. So that's, that breathing more is going to affect my sympathetic nervous system. And we see this in HRV, heart, heart rate variability.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  So we know as I inhale, I stimulate the sympathetic nervous system and the heart speeds up and it becomes more regular. As I exhale, I stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, the heart slows down and it becomes more varied or irregular, which is, which is a good thing. The more you, you, I'm sure have studied a bit into HRV. So, so we know that, we know just through that as, as one of the many things that the breath affects the nervous system. So if I breathe more, I breathe faster, I get more sympathetic. Uh, the other thing is I breathe off more carbon dioxide, and so that changes my blood chemistry, so I actually become more alkalineic, which we like, oh, I want to be alkalineic. And I mean, we could talk about that. I do, I do discuss that, why you actually don't want to be alkalineic through breathing,

• 27:58Speaker 00

  but sometimes you do. I lose the carbon dioxide. And the other thing that happens is the oxygen bond to the hemoglobin becomes, uh, becomes much stronger. So when I breathe in, we have the part, the atmospheric pressure that's in the lungs and that kind of helps push it onto the hemoglobin. Also, also the hemoglobin, it, it, it's a different shape when it lets go. So then it attaches, the oxygen molecules attach to the red blood cells and it kind of like locks on there and then it goes. Well, there's a system that tells it to release. And that system is described through the Bohr effect, which is, you've heard of the Bohr effect before. In your book.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  In my book, yeah. Okay, so the Bohr effect basically states that that by increasing carbon dioxide and decreasing pH, which is, makes it more acidic, that you decrease the affinity or the attraction of oxygen to hemoglobin. And so that allows the oxygen, and this is on, in the, in the tissues, in the cellular, in the cells, this allows the oxygen to be released from the red blood cells and go into the cells. And so then you have that exchange between, between oxygen and carbon dioxide. Right? So with, without that, we don't really get the oxygen into the body. So we need that carbon dioxide.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  We also breathe, we take our breaths based on how much, how much carbon dioxide that we have in, in our body. So this is, there's, there's several different breathing ways, but one of the ways is, is in the, in the aortic arch, it kind of measures that. And then we have also in the brain too, which that measures oxygen. But we have it measuring like how much carbon dioxide. So if my levels of carbon dioxide get high, then my body says breathe. If they're low, it says don't breathe. It's one of the reasons why Wim Hof method works how it does. You breathe really fast, you become, you don't, you don't increase your oxygen levels. In fact, you're, you're doing the opposite. By breathing fast, you don't get the exchange of oxygen on, onto the, into the cells.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  And one of the ways that you can just test that real quick is to hyperventilate and then feel lightheaded and dizzy. Well, the reason why you feel lightheaded and dizzy is one that you change the pH. It's not that you have more oxygen, because you know, if you put on like 100% oxygen, you actually think clearer, not less. You don't go, ooh, dizzy. But then also you continue to do that, then you, because you're not getting the oxygen to the tissues at the extremities, you start to have what's called carpal pedal spasms, carpal hands, pedal feet, where you start to do this, this posturing stuff. If you really, you see, like, I was a paramedic for eight years and people that... Have panic attacks and hyperventilate, they're like this. And then if you do long, long breathing,

• 30:50Speaker 00

  like more controlled, you'll feel your face get numb, your belly get numb. Well, all these are, are effects of having low carbon dioxide. You become hypocapnic or deficient in carbon dioxide. Well, so when you do Wim Hof breathing, you do this rapid, fast breathing, you become hypocapnic. And, and so then you're able to hold the breath for a really long time. Because those CO2 levels have to rise back up to get to the point where you want to take a breath again. And that's why you're able to do this. And, and you hold on the exhale, which gives you the advantage of, of using up more oxygen. So then, once you start using

• 31:31Speaker 00

  up the oxygen, you're holding the breath, your CO2 levels come back up, the oxygen levels go down. And, and now you, this is where you start getting into increasing like athletic performance and all the other benefits that come from breathing less. And, and so then your body said, we, we make about 2 million to 2 and a half million red blood cells every second. And also, we lose about 2 to 2 and a half million red blood cells every second. And those red blood cells live for about 3 to 4 months each. And it's a demand system. So the body's always trying to main, it's always trying to do what it needs to do to do what it needs to do. Right? This is, this is like, we want, we want to give the, the body wants to give you what you need. But if you sit on the couch and

• 32:16Speaker 00

  you over breathe all the time, when you get up and you try to run, what your body did is when those red blood cells died, it said, well, you know, be, because we're over breathing, um, the, the oxygen is staying on the red blood cells and it's coming back to the lungs. And so they're coming back with oxygen. So we don't really need that. We have too many red blood cells. Those take energy to make. And we're making 2 million of them every second. So let's make less. And then, then you go to run and you're like, then you're like, shit, I'm so winded. Uh, but if you breathe less, even if you just, like, so if you do cardio, that you are working towards the upper end of your cardio respiratory

• 32:58Speaker 00

  limit. Your heart is beating fast, your metabolism is increasing, even though you're breathing faster, you're using more oxygen than what you have. And so the body goes, oh, we need, we need to. We need to make more red blood cells so that we could carry more. The analogy that I use, there's a lot of really good analogies, but it's like if you go, you've been on the tube before. So people that aren't Londoners or whatever are familiar with the tube, or the subway, or the underground, or whatever, some sort of underground system. Or like in China, you see all these people, or Japan, I think it's Japan,

• 33:38Speaker 00

  all these people like pressing in, trying to get as many people into one train car as possible. Well, this is what we're trying to do when we don't have a lot of red blood cells. Right? We pack those, they can only be packed full. And so if you try to breathe more, to pack those more, it's not going to do anything. And we already know that breathing more is, in fact, actually when we breathe more, we're not allowing those passengers to get off. So it's like they do the whole circuit and they come back and there's still people on there. Right? But what we need to do is we need to add more train cars. And we need to be more efficient about getting those people off of the cars. And so that's what adding more red blood cells does.

• 34:21Speaker 00

  It adds more train cars to the system so that they're able to get more oxygen on there. And then by breathing less and getting carbon dioxide levels up, and being more acidic in the blood, we're able to get the oxygen off quicker and more efficient. And so this helps with the efficiency of breathing. I think a really good analogy with breath is understanding, kind of the same thing with diet. So we think, oh, this is how much I need to breathe, I'm breathing on demand, right? And if you're someone that over breathes, right? That's what you need to breathe, you're just, or especially if you're breathing through the mouth.

• 35:01Speaker 00

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

• 35:45Speaker 00

  as soon as you go on a diet, then your body goes, oh, the first part, when you go on a diet, you go, oh, I'm starving, I'm hungry. And, and this is what air hunger is. This is what holding the breath does. We, we, we are, we're basically pushing our CO2 tolerance, right? Our, our tolerance of how much carbon dioxide can we have in our system. Well, if our tolerance is really low, we're going to breathe really fast. If we're able to build that tolerance up, we start to breathe slower. So it's like, you know, so I go on a diet, I start to eat less, I lose weight, and then my body adjusts to that new weight, adjusts to the new caloric intake, and then I'm healthier and I have a new normal. So when it comes to like breathing, like first off, it's just to be conscious of how much

• 36:30Speaker 00

  you're breathing. Like breathe less, I know this is a long way to get to like one question, but breathe less. Breathe through your nose is the first one. It's, it's already, it's already going to down-regulate how much you're breathing. Breathe slower when you could think about it. And, and if you can like periodically hold the breath or do practices where you have breath-holding, if you're like someone like me that you want to increase your athletic performance, really working into doing long breath holds will, will help to increase your, I mean, there's, there's a whole, there's a whole like formula of all the things you need to do to increase your athletic performance through breathing. But, you know, you increase your vital capacity, how much oxygen the, the lungs could hold,

• 37:12Speaker 00

  you increase your respiratory strength, just like any muscle, when a muscle is stronger, it has to work less hard. So if you increase the, the strength of your respiratory muscles through doing things, I think we'll, we'll do like a practice of how to increase respiratory strength. So you increase the strength of your diaphragm, your, your, your corset muscles, like all, all your core muscles, your intercostal muscles. They're stronger, so that means they work less. They, they don't have to use as much energy to do the, to do the job. So when you go out running, those are muscles that aren't having to work as hard. So that means they're not using as much, much oxygen. You decrease your, you, you increase your CO2 tolerance. That means you could get carbon dioxide levels up higher. So when you

• 37:56Speaker 00

  are running, you don't feel, or whatever you're doing, you don't feel the need to breathe as heavy.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  And then you're also, because you're increasing that, you're also through like the Bohr effect, you're getting more oxygen into the cells. So that's like, like the real quick, quick, like a quick and dirty way to do that. So breathing less whenever you can, whenever you could think about it, doing a breath practice that focuses around breathing less. That doesn't mean the whole breath practice is about breathing less. Like my, my athletic performance breath practice, there's a, a heat building part of it where I do a lot of fast breathing, or I do like something like Wim Hof where I do some rapid breath where I'm really working my respiratory muscles really strong. And then, and then I hold on an exhale, then hold on an inhale. Or there's different advantages to holding on exhales compared to holding on inhales, and they're both good. So I do both. You know,

• 38:49Speaker 00

  one works more towards CO2 tolerance, one works more towards lowering, lowering SpO2, right? So you kind of need both of those. You want both of those. The other thing is breathing efficiently. So if I were to ask you right now, take a deep breath. Take a deep, deep inhale. Inhale deeper, inhale deeper, inhale deeper. Alright, so notice that thing, what just happened when you really started doing, and breathe, fill your lungs as full as they get. As full as they do. And if you're listening, do this also at home. So if you noticed, did you see your shoulders went up like this? Alright, so that is, that is

• 39:30Speaker 00

  essentially inefficient breathing. When we are filling the lungs, we're looking for space. Well, as the lungs go out, the lungs, there's, there's a little space. So the way the diaphragm works, it's kind of like, it's, it, like an M, you know, it's not so much like an upside down U, but it's more like an M. The, the top of the diaphragm is connected, the, the central tendon is, is connected to the mediastinum, which is at the bottom of the heart. So this does move a little bit, but if it were to move... Down as much as the rest of the diaphragm did, it would cause some trauma to the heart. The heart would be going like this every time you started running or taking a deep breath. So it doesn't want to do that. The side of the diaphragm pulls down.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  And then the lungs, as they fill up, well, they could only go out so much. And then where they want to go is actually down. And they don't go down into the core. As we expand the belly, what expanding the belly does is it allows the rib cage, the bottom ribs to open up outwards like this. And then the intercostals open this way. So we want the intercostals to open downward like this so that we could get into this place where the lungs go into, which is called the subcostal recess. Little space. If you look at an X-ray of the lungs, you see like a little black area in the pleural cavity right between the diaphragm and the ribs. So this is the upper cavity. So you see that.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  You want the lungs to be able to move down into that. And as you move the lungs out, or the ribs out and down, you open up that space, which opens up your vital capacity, which is how much air you can put into your lungs. So you basically, with breathing, with deep breaths, you're trying to open up as much as you can. Well, so that happens by breathing down. If I breathe up like this, there's not so much space. And now I start moving into this platysmus area, these muscles here. And I'm like coming up there and I'm lifting my shoulders up. Well, as I lift up my shoulders, this pulls everything else up and it also deflates the chest. So I'm not able to move. And it also takes a whole lot longer.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  When you breathe, when you take a deep breath, you want to imagine like you have a rubber band right around the center of your ribs. So the middle part of your ribs. So as you inhale, instead of inhaling up or down, you want to think of expanding it out in 360 degrees. So try that same breath really deep, but this time try to expand just in the middle. So you just inhale.

• 42:01Speaker 00

  And keep the shoulders where they are and feel how fast and full you could feel the breath. You feel that like immediately your lungs are so much fuller and there was way less effort. Right. Did you feel that way less effort? You're completely full. You couldn't expand it. And you might actually feel like you could go even more. So this is like, this is how we should be breathing all the time. And when we're, when we're doing something heavy, where we have heavy breathing, we need to be aware of like if I'm running or something like this, I don't want to be, I don't want to be breathing. Or if I'm doing something that's, you know, uh, if you do like jujitsu or anything that really makes you breathe super heavy and super hard. Uh, when I, when I watch, I mean, this is something I could go to the, just the UFC and, and train UFC fighters

• 42:43Speaker 00

  and immediately improve their performance just by when they're, when they're working, we see them breathing up into their chest like this, or you know, they're breathing through their mouth because they're trying to get more oxygen. Well, if, if they had more red blood cells, they wouldn't need to breathe through the mouth. Another thing is when you're doing physical activity, always breathe through your nose. Right. And, and, and let that, so if you can't do what you're doing, if you can't run faster breathing through your nose, run slower, right? Get that part up first and then, and then you'll be able to increase your performance so much more. And there's a lot of studies with runners and Olympians that change their, their training practice of breathing through the nose and they increase their time. I mean, by, by a small amount, but if, when you're at an Olympic level to increase your time by anything

• 43:27Speaker 00

  is huge. Like you think like between first place and fifth place is less than a second. Right. It's, uh, it's between being on the platform or, or not on the podium. Yeah.

• 43:40Chris Williamson?

  How much can doing a practice of between 10 and 20 minutes a day? How much can that affect something, a habit that we're going to do for the rest of the 23 hours and 40 minutes every day? I can't, one thing that I'm interested in is looking at something that is, is it habituated? Is it necessary? Do we have conscious control over it? How much of it is part of the, is it autonomous system? And how much of it is part of, like, what I'm trying to work out is can we undo the good work during a breath practice of 10 or 20 minutes by not being conscious of it throughout the day? And obviously we're doing stuff, but I can't spend my whole day thinking about breathing.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  Well, the one part you should think about is breathing through the nose. Right? You should spend the, if you notice you're breathing through the mouth throughout the day, you should be like, oh, I'm, or if you take, if you yawn. Like this, if I yawn, for whatever reason, I hold my breath. Why? Coming into this, it. Because if I, I yawn, I took, I took a deep breath, it's a, it's a minor over breathing. A minor little bit of over breathing and now I have. I just inflated my, my lungs. A normal breath is, is on average is about a half liter. A full breath is on average about for, for a man is about five and a half to six and a half liters. So.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  You know, you just, you, they, you have residual volume and stuff that you say, you're, you're actually probably breathing about three liters with a deep breath. Uh, compared to the half of liter. So you're breathing like six to seven times more than what you need to. So already like that one deep breath, I'm like, okay, so I just, I just took like my breath, all the breaths I need for this entire minute. So I'm gonna hold my breath right now. Like, that's how I think about it. But like, as far as like doing the practice in the morning, this really gets down to why you're doing the practice or where you're doing the practice for, because. You're gonna change, like for athletic performance, if you want to increase athletic performance, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes a day is not gonna do it.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  It's the same thing, like if you want to increase long distance running, running for five, 10 minutes a day is not going to increase your long distance running or, or any sports. When it comes to athleticism, you need to move more or do more. Uh, with, um, and then also there's something called a, like splenic contraction. So when you are in a place of, of oxygen deficiency. For so, for a certain period of time, which is, it changed, it's different for everybody, but roughly about fifteen minutes. It's like when you're working out or you're running, you get that second wind about after like fifteen minutes or why people warm up. Uh, um, when you do like these, like crazy warmups, it's to get that splenic contraction. So the spleen, which holds red blood cells.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  contracts like this and it squirts out a bunch more red blood cells into your system. So then you have more red blood cells so you can do more. The body's pretty smart like this, so it's already thinking ahead. So it's another way to become more polysytamine. But you need to be able, if you're doing this regularly and you're constantly working the spleen, the spleen is going to get used to contracting more because it doesn't necessarily empty itself. It gives maybe a little bit, it doesn't want to give everything all at once. But if you work into lots of retentions like that, into breath practice, you're going to get more of that and it's going to, it's why if you do a breath practice, you're, like how I do my practice, I normally start with two minutes outer retention,

• 47:16Speaker 00

  two minutes inner retention, and then two minutes, 2:30 outer retention, 2:30 inner retention. So it's just like exhale, hold the breath, take an inhale, hold the breath. And the last one, three minutes outer retention, exhale, hold for three minutes, inhale, hold for three minutes. And the third one that I do is easier than usually the first one. And that's because your body is getting those extra red blood cells through that spleen contraction. So if you're looking like that, 15 to 20 minutes isn't going to really increase it. But doing this kind of practice every day, just like any kind of workout, is going to increase everything else. And as far as like the other aspects of like, you know, if I wanted to do something to be more calm

• 48:00Speaker 00

  or relaxed, I'm going to feel the effects immediately afterwards. I'm not going to, I'm not going to feel it necessarily all the way throughout the day because as soon as something else comes in to change my nervous system, right, I'm going to feel those effects of the nervous system. Or if I do a practice that, like in the morning, let's say I do like an energizing practice, like a wake up practice and I'm doing a lot of, a lot of things that really work into the sympathetic nervous system, I'm going to feel really energized for a bit, but as soon as, that's going to wear off. It's like having a coffee, right? Coffee only lasts so long. You could essentially get the same effects with that. So it's not really going to change the autonomy of your life, but it's a tool for what you need, depending on what you're doing.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  Like I said, if you're doing like 30 or 40 minutes of something to increase your VO2 max, like that kind of stuff, you will see those effects anytime that you need to do anything that increases your demand for cardio.

• 49:01Chris Williamson?

  Do you have any other triggers that you use throughout the day? So you mentioned there that if you yawn, you hold your breath. Are there any of the triggers that people can use to ensure that they're breathing correctly through their normal day to day existence?

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Uh, other, other kind of...

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Not, not, not so much. Like when I, when I think about it, I just try to breathe slower. Doing a breath practice where you, where you're, even if you're doing 15 or 20 minutes a day, like you don't have to be a psycho like me and do 45 minutes to an hour every single day. But ju- but just doing something like that is, especially if you do it in the morning, is going to start your day with at least that mindfulness around the breath. So that awareness around the breath. And, and the way that I talk about the breath, like, um, there, there's a lot of people out there with, with, you know, their, their kind of biohacking thing and saying this fixes all that, and the breath doesn't fix anything. It's, that's, it, it's like anything, it's like anything else.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Like, uh, we have these, these different aspects of health, right? Diet, fitness, sleep, stress, good stress or bad stress, and breathing. And so if we don't have a, if we don't, um, have proper diet or we eat bad, we feel it through everything else. And if we don't sleep well, we wake up, we feel it. Same, same thing with the breath. So we gotta, the breath is going to affect everything on, on how we use it, but it's more of, more of a tool. So it's like, uh, if I breathe and I'm doing a practice that's maybe really about balancing and centering my mind, balancing my nervous system. Good practice for this is box breathing, square breathing, where you inhale, hold, exhale, hold for like the same amount of time.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  There's been research around HRB with this, how it shows to balance the nervous system. So a practice like this is good to put you in a mindset where you are more rational and more clear or more, more balanced, less, um, less reactive.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  But if you, like, you know, breathing could fix your relationships if you're in the right place to fix your relationships, but breathing can't fix your relationship. You know what I'm saying? It's like, so it could kind of act as a tool to put you in a more conscious mindset, or to bring you out of, out of the sympathetic tone that's triggering whatever it is. Or if you are just feeling super lazy and lethargic, sometimes like if I'm just, if I'm wanting to do something and I'm on the couch and I don't feel like getting off the couch, I'll do a breath practice that'll increase my tone. I'll do some, some Kabbalah Bhatia or Bostrika where I'm like,

• 51:42Speaker 00

  just really fast in and out through the nose, pumping my breath, and then maybe I'll hold at the end, because any time I do fast breathing, I usually add in some breath hold after that. But that brought me into my sympathetic nervous system. I'm in a safe place, so I talk about this, the polybagel theory in the book. You know, it's sympathetic nervous system doesn't always mean fight or flight. It's also like mobility, so I'm, and I'm in, I feel, I'm in a safe place, sympathetic nervous system, and now it's like, alright, let's go. And already, I just motivated myself to do whatever that is. But, yeah, so it's like, the breath acts as a tool to help fix the areas of your life. Like, breathing is amazing for sleep. It's amazing to do, like, I'll do breath practices if I'm going to sleep, but if I drank coffee

• 52:27Speaker 00

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

• 53:07Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, I suppose it's the same as talking about will exercise make me fit outside of exercise. And you go, well, there is a component of that. You need to train in the gym, but also you should try and get a little bit of movement in throughout your day. It's like, do I need to eat well all the time? It's like, well, the more that you can eat well, the better. You need to have your square meals being good. But if you keep snacking in between those, i.e. good diet, bad diet, that's also going to have an effect on you. If you sleep well, once a week, and then for the other nights of the week, you don't sleep so good. So yeah, it makes sense that you have a focused period on the breath, which is your practice, and then you're cognizant of it throughout the day, and you're trying to instantiate those good habits as best you can. That does,

• 53:51Chris Williamson?

  that does make sense. One of the things that I found interesting was energetic locks. Can you explain how that works?

• 54:00Speaker 00

  So the energetic locks in yoga, we call these bandhas. And this is a, what I, what I really, like, I hope, I hope as being a non-yogi is like the stuff made sense to you because I really tried to write it for non-yogis, but still also appeal to, because I am a yogi, in every sense of the term. So still, still appeal to what those things do. So a banda is an energetic lock. It's kind of from this old ancient school of yoga. I do talk quite a bit into it. There's, there's essentially, there's locks, like you could say there's locks everywhere. But I talk about the three major locks, which is mula banda, the root lock, udyanabanda, which is the naval

• 54:44Speaker 00

  lock, and then jalandhar, jalandhar banda, which is the throat lock. In like practices, like physical practice, like ashtanga, you hear a lot of mula banda and stuff.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  Essentially, it's a contraction. Each one of them is a contraction of a different muscle. They do different things. And the idea is to regulate the energetic flow. And I think with like, one thing that people get really confused on or don't understand is like, what is energy? That's like, you know, you could talk to, if you, if you talk to a structural engineer about what energy is, or you talk to an electrician about what energy is, or if you talk to like a spiritual guru about what energy is, they'll give you different answers. I mean,

• 55:35Chris Williamson?

  What does it mean to you then? What does it mean in your?

• 55:37Speaker 00

  It's not that what it means to me. It has a lot of different definitions. So you have thermal energy, you have, you have electrical energy, you have kinetic energy.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  You have, so like the nervous system as we move, like, this, this movement that we have is, is energy. What tells my, my muscles to fire is, is an electrical impulse that happens through a sodium potassium pump on the cellular level that sends a signal up or down from the brain depending on Efferent or Aferrent nerves. And then we have movement. So this is very much the Western sense of what we feel energy is in our body. Right? We have thermal energy, obviously, like is, is we, we produce heat. I'm, I'm in Bali. It's quite hot right now. I'm, I'm talking to you with my AC off and I'm feeling my body heat as I sweat up my shirt.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's a, you know, that's, that's another type of energy. And then when we get into yoga, we, we don't really know what we're saying when we say energy. And we talk about like, how the energy moves through the body. And so this was like the, the yoga, we have

• 56:49Speaker 00

  The yoga, yoga is quite old, you know, it's thousands of years old and they didn't have the tools to see how myelinated and unmyelinated nerves work, or how the signal transponds, or anything like that. But they mapped out, before they even knew what nerves are, they mapped out these things called nodis, which is how energy flows through the body. And if you, if you, you'll feel it, like if you hit your funny bone, or if you get a kink, you ever had like a kink in your back and you feel it in your hand, right? So that like the yogis maybe understood that is, oh, here's like an energetic thing, or, or just your level of energy, how much, how much, um, energy, you know what I'm saying?

• 57:32Speaker 00

  Like your energetic levels of like to get out and do stuff, or if you're low on energy, you don't want to do something. So this is all things that we refer to as energy, and on a side, on the western side, I see this as sympathetic, parasympathetic, right? What is producing this level of energy? Well, the yogis had a different map, or a different system of energy, but it's the same thing. They just, they just describe it different. And, and one of the things that I love, and I really tried to do in this book, was to show how these two, actually, it's four or five systems, depending on how you're looking at it, but how these systems intertwine. Because if we're talking about energy, it's all the same thing, and we realize it's, it's all the same thing.

• 58:17Speaker 00

  It's my, energy is essentially your inner, like as far as you're concerned, as a subjective experiencer, it's your interaction with the world, and how you move through it. That's, that's your energy. Or how outer things affect you. Right? So cold affects you, that's an energetic thing. Heat affects you, that's an energetic thing. Emotions affect you, right? That's an energetic thing. If someone, if someone you don't know just comes by and gives you the bird, or, or in London, the, the reverse peace fingers.

• 58:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm used like California, we're like, ah, peace, right? And then like, like, I'm always like, peace, peace out. And then they're like, oh, why, why you, why are you doing that to me? I'm like, oh, peace, brother? Like, no, no, no, that's like that. Yeah. But you, you know, that's, that's felt with energy. We actually feel that, or if you go into a room and somebody, you, you immediately feel someone's like good energy or dark energy. And this is something that we have been programmed from, from an evolutionary standpoint to keep us safe. Is that person dangerous or not dangerous? Well, we use that word energy to say that this person has bad energy, meaning this person is dangerous. Or this person has good energy, meaning this person's not dangerous. Maybe I want to mate with this person.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  Maybe I want to fight this person, right? So we, we feel that. Uh, well, the yogis did a, a great job of, of mapping these types of energies out and how they, they manifest in us and how they, on maybe an emotional level. So when I start thinking about the energetics of, of yoga, I think of like more, how are these affecting the ener, the emotional energetics of my life?

• 59:57Speaker 00

  And how do I bring balance about this? And because I, I know and I understand that how through the Western system and energy and how, you know, emotions are essentially just hormones and neurotransmitters. And they're affected through the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, right? So our feelings, our imbalances, like if I have relation, relationship problems, well, you ever had a relationship problem with somebody you don't really care about?

• 1:00:23Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, you don't, it doesn't really affect you so, so much, right? You don't have those, those emotional imbalances, even though you have a relationship problem, you're like, well, I guess this relationship's over, you know, right? Or but if you have a relationship problem with someone that you care a lot about, they affect you really deeply. Even though they're both relationship problems, so it's, but we're, we're trying to, it's the, the hormones that are, that are released in the neurotransmitters are released that make us feel that way. Which is, so I know, well, I know that through the breath by inhale.

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  Then that's going to affect my parasympathetic nervous system. I know if I exhale is going to be, or sorry inhale is my sympathetic, exhale is going to be my parasympathetic. Well, also, if I inhale, this is going to, like I talked about, the yoga side of my, my Rajasic energy. So Rajasic energy is the energy that goes out and expands and dissipates, right? It's, uh, we think of this energy as the doing energy, right? This is, this is the energy that we have. And we think about the sympathetic nervous system, this is the moving energy. Well, what are the imbalances of always needing to do, always going after goals or whatever? Like, we burn out, we get exhausted, we need balance in that. And so now I'm looking at something on an energetic level of, okay, well, I don't just want more

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  uh, energy to get going, but, but where the imbalance here where I'm burning myself out, right? And I see that. And it's like, okay, well, I want to bring balance into this. So maybe I need more Tamasic energy. And Tamas is things coming down and contracting together, consolidating, right? But if I have too much of it, then I'm just like stuck. I'm stuck in my system, or I'm wilting away. You know, if you don't move, you atrophy. This is, this is the, if we stop moving, it's not that we stop doing anything, we start dying. And this is the, the energy of Tamas. And so we don't want to be there. But if we're always moving, then we burn out. So somewhere in there, there's a balance. And this is, that balance is called Satva in yoga. And Satva is the energy of being.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  So Rajas is doing, Tamas is having, it's, there's good parts of it, you know, feeling warm, safe, comfortable, right? These, these things like, but if too much of that, then you're like, you know, the, the saying like, uh, you never want to be too comfortable because then you don't do anything. Uh, that's not really a saying, but it's based off of the saying that, I don't remember what the saying is. But yeah, you know what I'm saying? Like there's, like, we don't want to be too comfortable because then we lose our Rajas of doing. So when we find the balance of that, we get into being. And being only lasts so long, like, and we, like, why don't we always just wanna be in sattva? Well, we do, but is that a possibility that's realistic for people? Usually not, usually not. Usually we need to move or we need to rest.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  And so we're, we're tiptoeing like around this. We're always looking for homeostasis until we find homeostasis and then we're looking for something else. Right? What, you know what I'm saying? Like, that's how the body works. We're trying to get balance. As soon as you're balanced, the body goes, okay, we're, let's, there's no growth in balance. We need to unbalance ourselves so we could grow again. And, and this is just the, the yogi saw this and they kind of, so this is where that system comes together. And so sattva to be, the energy is actually upward. I didn't understand that, but when you talk about upward, it's the upward flow of energy is growth. And in sattva, really it's our spiritual growth or enlightenment. Enlightened means to shine light upon something that's dark so that you understand it.

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  You know, so illuminated, the, the, the name of my book is called The Illuminated Breath. And it's to basically remove the darkness around the breath so that we understand it. And that, that's, that's, when you understand it, it's useful. It becomes a tool and you could, you could work with it. So this is like, we see these energy systems as the same thing. And when we see them as the same thing and we just realize that it's, yeah, I, I use the, the illustration of looking at a map. If you draw a map, well, the map is nothing. It only represents something that's real. Right? If I, if I have a map of England, well, that's a representation of England. If I wanna go, you're in Manchester?

• 1:04:33Chris Williamson?

  Newcastle.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  Or Newcastle, Newcastle. So if I wanna go up to Newcastle from London? Yeah, I would follow the M1 or something. I don't know the roads there. Is that right?

• 1:04:43Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah, the A1, what it turns into is about a mile away here.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  Oh, cool. All right. So, so I would follow the road system. But if I was to, to build something, I would look at like city planning. Or if, you know, or plumbing or something like that, or if I wanted to go hiking, I might look at a topography map. Well, they all just represent the same thing. They're just different aspects of that thing. And so when I, when I know that what the map is representing, and I, if I know I move north, I move north across all maps. Right? But it's But what do I need from that map for it to be useful to me? And that's why the different systems are important. That's why understanding is important. Moving is the breath. So I need to move north. The breath is going to take me north.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  How do I, why do I need to move north? Am I going north to come see you? Am I going on a hike? You know, it's like, what do I want to see? And so like, we understand that. I know how the breath affects these different things. And this is something that I laid out in the book to kind of make it. It's really simple. There's one Venn diagram in there called the Systems of Balance. It shows the autonomic nervous system, the polyvagal theory, the nodis, the vayus and the gunas, and how that's affected through the inhale or the exhale. And then there's a chapter on each of those that tells you what that map actually represents.

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  So you could be like, okay, well, you know, I'm feeling like my head's lost in the clouds. I'm just a dreamer. Well, this is like Viana vayu. And that's what that map represents. So it takes something that's really like kind of foo foo and gives you something that that allows you to take a little bit more control of your life so that you could find balance if you need balance. Or if you're like, I'm too stuck in the center. How do I move out of the center? Right? Because that might be something that you need as well.

• 1:06:44Chris Williamson?

  The final paragraph in your book is really, really beautiful. I just want you to read it here. "Learning to breathe is like learning to live. The smallest details hold the most significance. A single step in an epic adventure carries with it all the subtleties of experience that we have gained along the way. The destination is just one more step in the perpetual cycle of inhalations and exhalations. Each breath contains all the potential of life, and we can't hold either one forever. Maybe by learning to breathe, we can discover living. We're guaranteed only two breaths in this life, our first and our last. We can waste every breath merely existing, or we can use every breath to create meaning and experience the true miracle of living." Sick way to finish your book, man.

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  Thanks.

• 1:07:27Chris Williamson?

  Really good.

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. Spoiler alert.

• 1:07:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. That's it. And then, and he dies at the end. He dies at the end.

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  Then he died.

• 1:07:36Chris Williamson?

  You were gonna show us a breath practice and maybe people who aren't, aren't driving or operating heavy machinery could follow along at home.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  You could do, you could do part of this operating heavy machinery. In fact, that's, that's the thing about the, the breath practice. You could pretty much do it anywhere. Right? Where like, um, I, this, this sounds pretty bad, but I don't, like, when I do my breath practice in the morning, I'm not like, I do a meditation practice. I get up, I get out of my bed. I have, I have this beautiful view of the jungle. I, I open up my curtains. I have a, I have a seat at the foot of my bed where it's elevated up and I sit there and I do my 30 minutes of meditation. Then I go downstairs and I prop myself up on the couch, which is

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  right here. And then I

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  look at the TV, which is right there. And I do my, my 45 minutes to an hour athletic performance while I'm watching the news or catching up like as, you know, being in Bali, I want to see what's going on in the rest of the world. Less now that Trump's out of office, but it's still pretty interesting, but also because

• 1:08:47Chris Williamson?

  America's season three is going to be so boring now that he's gone. He was the only good character in it.

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. I'm like, I got, kind of got addicted to the crazy drama.

• 1:08:57Chris Williamson?

  Did you see, sorry, did you see that the, the news anchors had done a little campaign, make news boring again?

• 1:09:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

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

• 1:09:47Speaker 00

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

• 1:10:05Chris Williamson?

  That's a cool trigger.

• 1:10:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh yeah, trigger, yeah, so that, so that's like, I do those, those kinds of things, like, you know, when you think about opportunities to breathe consciously, or opportunities to in- increase something that you, you wanna work on. I'm someone that's very much into fitness and, and increasing like my fitness levels and all that, so, yeah. So you could do, you could do this, really, most breath practices anywhere. Uh, I teach on the, this app called Allo Moves, and they, they wanna do like something for the plane, and they, they said something, they didn't wanna use any of my programs, there's a lot of like touching your face and stuff, which is obviously not good with COVID times, as well, but like the Nadi Shodhana practice, uh, is a lot of, that's, that's really the

• 1:10:50Speaker 00

  only one where you're touching your face, or if you're doing Brahmari, where you're like, and doing Shankara Mudra. Uh, anyways, uh, but yeah, so it's like, yeah, you've, uh, you can do this breath practice anywhere. Anyway, so getting into it, so we're gonna do a, a really quick practice, I'm actually gonna teach you three different breath practices, which is kinda fun, three different breath practices. Uh, and what we're doing, the first two is like level of energetics, right? So these, these are all to increase respiratory strength. Uh, one, the first one is going to help you learn how to actively, or sorry, passively

• 1:11:30Speaker 00

  relax your belly, which is something that we, uh, another thing that we do that creates inefficient breathing that I didn't mention is, especially if you're a fit guy, or, or if you, if you like your six pack, or whatever, or you just hold your gut in all the time, right? If you, if you're constantly contracted through the core, you're not allowing your bottom ribs to release, and so you're basically inefficient in breathing. So, um, so what we're gonna do is you're gonna inhale, talk about those bandhas, the uddiyana bandha, which is the naval lock, which is like, another way to think about it is like a vacuum breath. You pull the belly in and up towards the spine. And this isn't good to do if you've drinking a lot of water, if you've just eaten, or you need to go to the bathroom, it's

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  uncomfortable. You can still do it, but it's, it's not as comfortable. I like to do these, all my athletic performance, breathing on a completely empty stomach. So it's a active forced exhale. And, and if you just actively force exhale through the nose, and a passive inhale. Normally, what we do as we breathe is we do an active inhale and a passive exhale. So this is flipping it. We're, we're moving, um, a little bit more air. If we, like I said, if we're moving about 500 mls, now we're moving about 700, 800 to 1,000, maybe. So a, a little bit more, not, not a dramatic amount. You kind of want to go at the pace that you do. So, uh,

• 1:12:56Speaker 00

  I'm gonna first just sit here and do it, and then I'll show you what my stomach is doing. Uh, pull up my shirt, so you could kind of see my stomach. So it's the first one is, it's just exhale through the nose, passive inhale. Yeah, maybe clear the nose, get the boogies out. So it's...

• 1:13:16Speaker 00

  It takes practice to build up speed, so it's good to, when you're starting it, to maybe go slowly, maybe go...

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  We'll do it at that speed. My normal speed is like...

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  But the inhales, you hear the inhale is passive. So it looks, on, on this level, it looks like this, so...

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  Right. So that's the first one. We're, we're gonna do that one, and, and here, we'll, we'll do these together. I won't count it. We'll do it for about, actually, yeah, we'll do it for about 20 seconds each. I'll say, I'll say, first practice, kabbal bati, and I'll say, second practice, bhastrika. So kabbal bati means skull shining breath. I'm not gonna get into why it means that. Second practice, it's in the book, doesn't matter. Second practice is called bhastrika, which is billows breath. So billows, like, is something that they used to have, I don't know, you guys, like, fire things, like, you do, like this...

• 1:14:14Speaker 00

  And it goes in and out. So this is a forced inhalation and a forced exhalation. So as we talked about like the energetics of breath or how much it's affecting the nervous system, this is more extreme. It's like, well, why are they different? Well, why do you do jogging? Why do you do sprinting? Right? The one, one is more than the other. So it's doing the same thing, but it's affecting it more. And little difference with how it's affecting respiratory control or your dexterity over breathing, which is also something important that we haven't talked about so much in this. And increasing the respiratory strength on a forced inhale and a forced exhale. So here we're adding the forced inhale. So this is deeper. First one, we're moving, like I said, between maybe 700 to 1,000. Now we're moving from like 1,200

• 1:14:59Speaker 00

  to if you're really good at it to maybe about 2,000 or 2,500 mls. Remember, average breath is about, uh, about 500 mls. Full breath, full deep breath is about 3,000 to 4,000 mls, depending on how efficient you are at breathing. When you get really efficient, you take a full breath, it's going to be four, or once you get your vital capacity up and you, full breath might be five or 6,000 mls. Styx Ferenson is, he's, uh, 11 and like a half liters. He's, he could hold his breath for like 22 minutes. Free diver guy. Awesome, awesome breather. Uh, but yeah, so you could really increase your capacity quite a bit. So this one, it looks like this, like

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  Notice my shoulders, I'm not like this. It's

• 1:15:49Speaker 00

  So if you look at the belly, now it looks like this.

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  Getting that forced exhale. It's harder to do it standing up. It's a little easier to do it sitting down. So that's the second practice. Do that one about 20 seconds. So the first one, it'll look like this as we're building. It'll be like

• 1:16:17Speaker 00

  We'll do it a little slower. So maybe more like this.

• 1:16:22Speaker 00

  And we'll go into Bastrika. Be a little bit more like this.

• 1:16:28Speaker 00

  Roughly about this pace and the last one we're gonna do is on an outer retention. So what we're doing in this one, we're decreasing our carbon dioxide. So we become that word hypocapnic. So once we decrease our carbon dioxide, we become hypocapnic. And then we're going to hold the breath on the outer retention. In yoga, it's called biya kumbhaka. Biya means outer, empty. Kumbhaka means container. So it's basically is referring to the breath hold. And this one, I did this as a kid. So it's the like udyanabunda where you I try to make myself look like Skeletor or whatever. Like suck my stomach in and try to be as skinny as I can see.

• 1:17:11Speaker 00

  Do this on a full exhale, empty out as much as you can out of the lungs. Then you're gonna pull the belly in as, as deep as you can. Like you're trying to glue the navel to the upper portion of your spine. So you don't wanna think just in, you wanna think like in and up. Right. And this is, it's another way to do that is like you exhale completely and then you inhale, but without inhaling through your mouth. So you're creating inter-abdominal pressure. So that you're, and that's gonna suck the belly up. And then while holding the breath still, you're gonna release and, and completely relax all the muscles. And so it's gonna act like this pumping thing. When I'm down, uh, sometimes like it sounds like a slapping action, like it's slapping my, my, my stomach.

• 1:17:55Speaker 00

  So it's like, so do this one again. So exhale, I can't talk after I do this, so I'll just show you.

• 1:18:18Speaker 00

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

• 1:18:35Chris Williamson?

  What's the reason, what, what's the reason for the movement of the stomach, uh, upon the exhalation?

• 1:18:42Speaker 00

  So firstly, you can't really do this breath on an inhalation, right? You could try it, but you're not going to get as much movement. But really, you're doing two things. One, it's an outer retention breath hold. So when you hold on outer retention, your body uses oxygen, the available oxygen, a lot faster. Right? So you start to decrease SpO2 faster before CO2 tolerance comes up. Because that's what's causing us to breathe. It's not so much the oxygen. At a point, the oxygen will be like, "Oh, it's time to breathe." But for most of us, we're on a carbonic drive, so that's CO2.

• 1:19:23Speaker 00

  When I hold it on the inhale, I have a longer time. I have more oxygen in the lungs, so I have a longer time for the oxygen to come down. And so the CO2 tolerance also has a longer time to build up. We could hold our breath much longer on an inhale than an exhale, because there's more available oxygen there. So that's one of the advantages. There's less available oxygen, so we decrease oxygen faster, which helps with the body's effect to want to make more red blood cells. So that's a really good advantage there, holding the breath on the exhale. The other thing, what we're doing is, this practice is all about strengthening respiratory muscles, really the deep respiratory muscles and the diaphragm.

• 1:20:07Speaker 00

  So I'm really using the diaphragm, because what the diaphragm does is it's for inhalation. As I inhale, it pulls down. As I'm doing this breath, I'm doing it against a greater resistance, because I'm holding it closed. And so that extra resistance, as I pull the navel in and up, helps to strengthen the diaphragm even more, and it's a muscle, so like all muscles, it gets stronger when you use it. Relaxing the belly allows me to go quicker, because we're not breathing, so you could push it out, but it's better just to relax it in this sense. And it's much faster. So we're trying to get as many, you know, as many effective... It's called Agni Sar. Agni Sar means fire essence breath.

• 1:20:52Speaker 00

  Agni is fire. So this is centered around the third chakra, which is related to fire. And that's a whole bunch of yoga, yoga stuff that we don't need to talk about. But yeah, so anyway, so we're, we're working to that. And this, this whole practice is about increasing respiratory strength. So that's the purpose of this. I wouldn't, I wouldn't do this by itself. I would do this as part of a greater practice. And I have an intermediate sequence where this is, what in the book I talk about the different parts of a breath sequence, this would be like the heat building sequence. Cool. So we know why we're doing it, which is really important. If you don't know why you're doing it, why do it? Right? It's, it's just like, and that's, I have a clear intention.

• 1:21:35Speaker 00

  And when I have a clear intention, I'm clear about the goals that I want to do. And so if I know my goals and I know my intention, it helps me to find the tools that I need to get there. And so this is one of those tools to get there. And that's, that's, we're just building, we're just building this growth equation, equation for, I don't know. Yeah. So my, my equation for life, how to grow. Intention, action, purpose. Let's do it. All right. So we're gonna do it. Uh, should I just sit here like this? Or do you want to see the belly? If everyone's okay, okay. All right. Everyone understands it. And this is recorded, so just rewind it if you forgot. So I'm, I'm going to do the practice with you. I will just cue, we'll do each one.

• 1:22:20Speaker 00

  Uh, let me start a little timer on my phone so I can just see. So I can just see, we'll do 20 seconds of each. Uh, each one and move on to the next. So 20 seconds Kabal Bati or Skull Shining Breath. 20 seconds Bastrika or Billows Breath. And then 20 seconds Agni Sar, which is the exhale hold. Exhale. So if you see me not, if you don't hear me breathing, that means you shouldn't be breathing. All right. If, and just, I want to breathe kind of a slower moderate pace. If you can't breathe as fast as me, breathe that you're on pace. That's really like, breathing is one of those things you could 100% approach at whatever level you're at. So here we go. Three, two, one Kabal Bati.

• 1:23:26Speaker 00

  Last week.

• 1:23:47Speaker 00

  Inhale. Exhale completely. Agnes are begin.

• 1:24:08Speaker 00

  Inhale.

• 1:24:13Speaker 00

  Exhale.

• 1:24:16Speaker 00

  So that's a, that's just like one round, you know, real quick. That took one minute. Uh, this would be something that's really good to do for like five or 10 minutes. And then you work at your own pace, just 20 seconds of each. And you could already feel, do you feel a little bit more energized? Yeah. Immediately, that's a sympathetic nervous system kicking in and going, all right, you know, we, we got some energy to move. It's a really great practice. It's, uh, and it's something you could do.

• 1:24:43Speaker 00

  It's something you do like between sets as you're, as you're getting going from one thing or another. Or if you're just like right before you're ready to start running or even on like, yeah. Like I said, breathing is one of those things we're always doing it. We're always doing it. And, um, how you do it matters. All right. What's the favorite saying? How you do one thing is how you do everything. Well, how do you breathe? Cause that's what you're doing the most of. You're not doing any one activity more than that. Not one that you can control anyways.

• 1:25:17Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I love it. Thank you for today. One of my favorite things that I'll be taking away is reframing the way that the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system work. It's kind of like, almost like the sympathetic nervous system's been demonized now. Very much so, and sort of common, common discussions around it, but it's got a usefulness.

• 1:25:37Speaker 00

  So, so much so. And I, and I think it's not without, without reason why the sympathetic nervous system is demonized. Most people are chronically in it. And so if, I think if everybody was chronically in their parasympathetic nervous system, if we lived in a society where everyone was so relaxed and they just like, you know, we would demonize the parasympathetic nervous system because no one would be doing anything. They'd just be like, oh, everyone's just so lazy and lethargic, right? But because we are in this like, this to-do mode, this Rogers motive, we always need to do something, always need to be productive. And one of the things that is, even if you're not doing something, you're thinking about doing something. And thinking, the body, like thinking about doing something and doing something affects the nervous system

• 1:26:20Speaker 00

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

• 1:26:59Speaker 00

  its physiological response is very different based on whether we feel safe or unsafe. And that's, that's a huge thing. And that's really important to understand.

• 1:27:09Chris Williamson?

  Well, a big part of that is going to be because of what, how people interpret the sensations that are going through their body. So Harris talks about this, where he says, imagine that you felt... Spontaneously, the way that you do at the end of a very heavy set in the gym, or at the end of doing a heavy cardio workout, you'd think that you were dying. It would be awful. You'd be terrified. And yet you elect to do that when you go into the gym. So it shows us that it isn't about the sensations. It's about our judgments upon them. That's what Marcus Aradis said, right?

• 1:27:43Speaker 00

  It's 100%.

• 1:27:44Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether some people perhaps aren't allowing themselves to lean into that discomfort the same way that they would do from the sympathetic nervous system because of a fear of it. I've been told that the flight and fight response is bad for me, that I need to be parasympathetic. One of the things that I've relied on the most, especially over the last year when training, has been to remind myself that this is why you're here. When you're doing something which is challenging and worthwhile, and it becomes challenging, that's why you're here. You're not here for it to be easy. You're here because the discomfort is growth. That can be pushed too far, but for the most part, I think people under train rather than over train.

• 1:28:27Chris Williamson?

  I think that they probably over breathe rather than under breathe. So the discomfort of feeling that breath hunger, the discomfort of feeling the burn in the gym, the ache in the muscles, like that's why you're here. It's a feature, not a bug of this system. And yeah, reframing it that way, I really hope that some people have taken that away from it. Where should people go? They want to check out the book? They want to learn more about you? Where do they go?

• 1:28:54Speaker 00

  So here's the book. I just got this yesterday. You have like so excited about it. Yeah, The Illuminated Breath by me.

• 1:29:05Speaker 00

  Where you could buy books, that's where you could get it. So if you go on Amazon, go on Amazon, you could get this. If you go to my website, dylanwerneryoga.com, there's on the on the top menu thing, there's a link that says The Illuminated Breath. Click on that and I have a ton of different links of different places you can buy it. So that's really for like, if you're in the US or you're the UK or somewhere else outside. I'm pretty sure it delivers, it ships everywhere. So I mean, I'm here in Bali. I got it here. It's the launch date for the US, I think it starts delivering the 23rd of February. I'm not sure when this is going to come out. And I think the UK is like the 28th or the 29th.

• 1:29:51Speaker 00

  Whatever day it is for you, just like go out and order it right now. So you're like the first one to get it.

• 1:29:55Chris Williamson?

  The link to preorder will be in the show notes below. And of course, your Instagram as well, where you share quite a lot of cool stuff.

• 1:30:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, Dylan Warner Yoga. That's, that's just got a couple of followers on there.

• 1:30:11Speaker 00

  I feel really, I'm really grateful for, for the followers that I do have. Yeah, I, I actually just really grateful for this life that I have. I'm, you know, it's, I, I, you just get lucky sometimes. I feel like I got super lucky in life to land here. But yeah, check me out there. I, I just, it's mostly posting handstands and arm balances and other stuff that people think is impossible. But if a 40 year old dude like me can do it, then anyone can do it. Yeah. That is, to be, to be fair, I didn't even start handstanding until I was like 29 years old. So it's, it's never too late.

• 1:30:49Chris Williamson?

  Brother, I love it. Thank you very much for today. I hope that everyone's taken a lot away from this. Links to everything you've spoken about, your website, illuminated breath and your Instagram will be in the show notes below. And if anyone's got any feedback, just leave it in the comments or abuse Dylan in his DMs.

• 1:31:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, please. I don't really answer my DMs because I don't know. Sometimes, sometimes I do. It depends. It depends. But if you get lucky, I'll, I'll answer you in there. But if, yeah, abuse, abuse Chris or.

• 1:31:18Chris Williamson?

  Don't abuse me. No, this is your, this is your turn. Look, man, thank you so much. Enjoy Bali.

• 1:31:23Speaker 00

  Thank you. Thank you. Really appreciate you having me here. Truly honored and lots of gratitude. Thank you.