203: Breathwork w/ Dan Brulé

to meet you. Come with me right now. And I grabbed you and I yanked you over and brought you to my sister and I was like, this is Dan, and I just feel like from there on out it was chemistry, and you know, it was It was really cool to meet you and to have the experience of becoming your friend at this conference and having and I will say, you know, for the listener's sake, that I was very blessed to experience a private session with you,

which was very profound. So anyway, enough about me, and enough of I just wanted them to know how we met, and you know how it was organic and it was this really cool thing.

And I just actually finished your father's book. And one of the news is actually, since I'm traveling and I'm passing through, she's going to read it before I leave. So she's actually in the other room reading it right now.

you and have that experience with you. It was very profound and just like you said about my dad and my family, that you feel that heart from a football field away, I've I did feel the very same thing, just you know, becoming your friend. I just was like, oh my god, I've never met anybody like this, and

I knew that I had to learn from you. And the weird thing, Dan is, for a good year now, I've been thinking to myself, I want to learn more about the breath because I've been going through the journey of sort of becoming a meditation instructor. I told you a little bit about this, but it's through sound and that's very cool. But in my mind, I was thinking,

but there's something a little more ancient. You know, maybe there was a time when they didn't have instruments or didn't have you know, records and vinyls and CDs.

happening in the breath work world. You know, I've been i spent a lot of time in India, a lot of time in China, tried to westernize a lot of the Eastern approaches and you know, make it more palatable for the Western mind. We don't really have in the West any sort of spiritual tradition around the breathing, but every ancient religion, every genuine spiritual tradition, makes use of the breath, honors the breath, talks about the breath, recognizes

the power of the breath. And if you just look at the word inspiration, expiration, respiration, the root of that word is spirit. So it's not an accident. When you begin to breathe, you unlock spiritual potential, You connect to your source. Uh And in the process of practicing breath work, you become more meditative, You develop meditative awareness, your intuition gets better, you can connect more deeply, you know, just

on a very practical level. More of the world comes in contact with you through the breath, and you can possibly wrap your ounds around. I mean, if you were to take the surface area of the lungs, including all the alveoli, those little microscopic air sacks, it's half of a tennis court, and wow, right, and and When you breathe in you are filling yourself with the world. Literally, I mean all of the universe is pouring into you.

And molecules of air that the Buddha breed, that Jesus breed, that all the saints and great warriors and mystics and Caesar and Moses and some of the literal molecules of air that circulated in their bodies is circulating in our body. And that's information. Energy is information, and so breathing kind of it clears our antenna. So we can actually start

to pick up more subtle energies. We were more fine tuned, we're less reactive, we're more sensitive because most people there's a lot of trauma trapped in the cells of their body, in their nervous system and accumulus like boiling a frog. You know, we get less and less resilient, we get less and less alive. But maybe if we can open up the power of our breath, it affects longevity. And it's unarguable. Now, you know the Framingham heart study, very

famous study back Framingham, Massachusetts. They followed several thousand guys through life that's fifty years old now longer sixty seven years old, and out of that study came a lot of the lifestyle factors that affect heart disease. A lot of the medications and protocols were developed using data from that study. But there was so much conflicting information. You know, you had guys who lived to be one hundred who they smoke and they drank and they were meat eaters,

and at one hundred and two they're still alive. And then you got people who did everything right, you know, there were vegan, vegetarians, they whatever, you know, and they dropped when they were forty eight. But the only data point that had no exceptions across the board respiratory capacity

and linking respiratory capacity to longevity and overall health. And if you look at the graph of respiratory capacity, the average person reaches their peak respiratory capacity between twenty seven, twenty five, twenty six years old, and then for every decade of life they lose ten to fifteen percent of their respiratory capacity. And so if you put that graph of respiratory function and you put it on the same graph of life expectancy, they follow each other, they're mirror

each other. And so very early on I realized, wow, if I can keep up my respiratory capacity, I'm going to bump up my longevity curve. And it's the only data point out of that study that was true across all people, across all all religions, ages, everything. If you maintain your respiratory capacity, you know, let it, let it grow to peak, and then maintain it, it's guaranteed your odds for living longer and being healthier are increased. There's

just no argument about it. So it's just a matter of practice and being motivated to actually do breathing practices which aren't complicated, and a lot of them you get really high off them, So eat a lot of discipline. I've had a lot of people sit up from sessions and go, wow, I've taken a lot of drugs to feel like this. We got a pharmacy in our head and it'll produce whatever chemicals and DMT and brain waves

are affected, chemistry is affected, cognitive abilities, intuition, emotions. So you get your handle on your breath, and wow, you can deal with just about everything else.

You said some things that stuck with me that were very profound that I had never heard before, and things that some things I had heard before, but hearing them from you, it was so much more simple and it made more sense. So I'll just give you the report. So last week after Wisconsin, when we all left and went our separate ways, I went home for one day and then I turned around and I had a six

hour drive back to them in Rome Institute. I was there for like two days doing some things with them, and I stayed up really late both nights in a row, like two am, hanging out with people, getting up at like seven the next day.

to stay awake. I'm desperate to stay awake. I was so tired and I had like three hours left.

in the world, it wouldn't work. Breathe for a minute, and I was just energized, and that was profound for me.

what they think is empty isn't empty at all. There's still a lot of bad a lot of juice in your battery. You just got to learn how to access it. And then it comes down to generating energy, which is what breathing is all about. That's we're getting energy from the breath all the time. The problem is, most people's

breathing is like the pilot light in an oven. It'll keep you alive, but you can't cook anything with it, and so got to you gotta sort of take over from the autopilot and then do some breathing to ramp up or calm down or whatever's required. And each time you do that, you're training your breathing system and pretty soon it starts will really work better on its own.

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the canary in the coal mine. Your breath is the first thing to go out of balance when anything else in your system goes out of balance. So the more intimate connection you have with your breath, you can stay ahead of a lot of things.

up in me. I have vague memories of it, but I knew it was like, why isn't everybody excited? Think about that when we breathed, God is breathing into us. Why isn't everybody jumping up and down right now? And I think I got a little too animated. I have vague memories, but I remember the priest pushing my shoulders down, trying to sit me in my chair, and the nun was tapping me on my head trying to calm me down. I guess I got too animated, but it lit. It

was a spark. And then I became the kid who was, you know, organizing breath holding competitions in the schoolyard and you know, hyperventilating and squeezing each other until we passed us. I was just obsessed with the breathing and I had I can't tell you how many times I got the wind knocked out of me, and sports and fights and falling off a bicycle, climbing a fence, whatever I mean,

and near drowning experiences. I've had a number of near drowning experiences and the last one I had to be resuscitated. And my first job was as an X ray technician, and a very easy One of the easiest X rays is the chest X ray. So I was getting all the chest X rays as the newbie. And when you take a chest X ray, you tell the person taking a deep breath hold it, and then you click their picture.

And so I had to watch people carefully because if they were breathing, the X ray would come out blurry. So as I gave everyone those same instructions, and a couple of thousand people over two years, I watched them take a breath and hold it, and everybody did something different, the muscles, they used, the expression on their face, how

they coordinated their breathing. And I started to see that everyone's personality is reflected in their breathing pattern, and their relationship to life and their relationship to their body is being expressed in their relationship to the breath. And then I learned CPR as an X ray technician. I took a weekend CPR course cardiopulmonary Resuscitation. I was so surprised to show up and there was no one else from the X ray department taking this course, and I thought,

doesn't everybody want to learn this? And two weeks later I was with a portable X ray machine up in the intensive care ward and the guy I came to do a chest X ray on he died while I was in the room. His heart snupped, he flatlined, that beat beat went deep, and so there I was the only one in the room, so my training kicked in. I remember from the class a couple of weeks earlier. I pumped his chest. At the time it was five compressions, one breath, five compressions, and then I blew into him

and he blinked and woke up. I mean, a freaking miracle. The guy was clinically dead, fixed, dilated pupils, no pulse, no breathing, look dead ashen gray. And I blow into him and he wakes up and blinks. I mean, I was vibrating for days. It was I mean, being part of a miracle, the miracle of breath, the miracle of life, and then when I went into the military, I got into deep sea diving and underwater rescue and special operations.

So I was practicing breath control. I was practicing breath holding, and I learned that in order to manage your arousal, manage your mental state, your emotional state, you need to manage your breathing. When you get pushed and when the poop hits the fan, what can you do? You know, you don't grab your weapon, you don't grab the radio, you can't call your mother. You get a handle on your breath. And as soon as that happens, everything else

comes into focus. Everything else lines up. And so I realized that, wow, you know, it's easier to keep up than it is to catch up. And so I just became a lot more conscious of my breathing. And because I was then training emergency rescue people, I was training special operations and submarine escape people and underwater salvage and everything that, and I was very often I would be attached to a team and I didn't know these guys. I was like the pro from Dover that they just

flew in to take part in the mission. I had demolition skills and I had surgery skills so I could blow people up and then I could sew them together again. And I had a lot of other training, and so I ended up on these special projects, and I was really concerned that, you know, if things really go squarely, how are these guys going to perform? Who do I have to worry about? Because I noticed being in enough

emergencies that people fall into two categories. One of them, they're like a chicken with their head cut off, running around doing a whole bunch of useless stuff yelling a whole bunch of crazy things that isn't helping anybody, and that kind of person. I need to be a human straight jacket. I need to sit them down and shut them up. And then you have the other ones who just freeze, so they're like zombies and you know, hey, a trainer's coming, a trainer's come, and you wash the

whole thing happen and go. They just had to move three inches well, and so I needed to know which of these who was gonna go off in which direction. I want to know ahead of time because one of them I need to kick them in the butt, give them something to do, slap them, shake them into moving, and the other one I need to wrestle and makes it still. So I discovered that when I pushed them to their limit with stress, and they would fall into

one or two categories. They were either overbreathed, they hyperventilated, or they underbreathed, they held their breath. And sure enough, those overbreathers guess which ones they were. They were the ones running around crazy, and the people who hold their breath they were the ones who froze and didn't move. So I was applying what I learned by observing people's breathing patterns, especially under stress, how they're going to perform and which way they're going to go out of balance,

and I could keep them from going into dysfunction. I was training guys underwater. We had a radio on the surface. We're watching them, and I could tell them, hey, slow your breathing down, or hey, take a few breaths. You know, you could follow breath to breath and know which way they get out of balance. And that saved my life,

saved a lot of other people's lives. And it goes deeper than that, because every emotional state, every psychological state, every physiological chemical state has a car corresponding breathing pattern. A very specific breathing quality. And we know that when you're angry and upset and afraid, you breathe differently when you're peaceful and calm and relax Anybody can see the difference.

And when your state changes, your breathing pattern changes. And so the magic, the power of breath work is it's a two way street. By changing my breathing pattern, I can change my state. And so that's and there were breathing patterns associated with very high ecstatic spiritual states, and there are breathing patterns and breathing qualities that are associated with sublime and profoundly peaceful states. And so by getting a handle on your breathing, you get a handle on everything else.

and a half. You know, I've been sitting here going through this training of how to like prepare people to do guided meditations, you know, on a headset, and here you are, Yeah, sure, let's do a private session.

did my little part. But most of the time, it's just watching the power of the breath do its work. When people open and relax and allow it to take over. We're so accustomed to being in control, you know. Being traumatized and hurt, we close off, we tighten up, we withdraw, and all of that separates us from life. It separates

us from the source. And so breathing is a way to open our heart if it's been hurt, and open our mind if you're stuck in a box, and open and relax the body if it's caught in illness, diseases programs. So breathing affects every level mechanical, structural, heart rate. You control your heart by controlling your breathing, control your blood pressure, you control your focus. That's why in the East Pranayama, which is the Hindu science of breath, it was developed

as a way to regulate the mind. So the ancient Yogis realized that a chaotic wild mind is connected to chaotic wild breathing. And as soon as you control your breathing, something starts to shift in your mind and your brain activity. And so the original purpose of controlling breathing was to

regulate the mind. So it has a direct effect. And now the science is unarguable because when you are breathing you're playing with carbon dioxide, for example, and carbon dioxide is a volatile acid, so it plays a key role in the pH balance of your body acid base balance. So if you hyperventilate, for example, and you blow off carbon dioxide and you reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in your cellular tissues in your blood, all of the

microvessels constrict. And that includes little microvessels that feed the brain and get oxygen and nutrients to the brain. It includes bronchio vessels like people who have asthma and their bronchio vessels spasm and they have to take a steroid to dilate those bronchio vessels. Well, carbon dioxide will do that. If you can tolerate the CO two level rising in your body, this carbon dioxide is going to dilate do all the work of those steroids, those dangerous steroids that

people use with asthmin inhalis. The carbon dioxide will do that. But the problem is people can't cope with they can't tolerate the symptoms of air hunger. And that's a basic practice to get comfortable with the symptoms of air hunger. So you can gradually get used to higher levels of CO two peak levels of CO two in exhaled air should be around you know, five percent thirty forty millimeters

of mercury. For most people it's below four percent. There's four percent, and it's way down twenty millimeters of mercury. And that's responsible for all kinds of cognitive deficits. It sets us up to be susceptible to all kinds of illnesses that are based on needing that pure balance of

acid and base. And so if you're unconncious breathing patterns are upsetting your chemistry, then you can expect a whole lot of reactions chain reaction from that, and as soon as you get your breathing back in order, you kind of reset everything. But no one is trained to breathe, and most people don't give their breathing any attention until

and unless they have a problem with it. But if you work in high stakes life and death situations, you're trained to breathe first respond to special for USUS you know, seal teams, you name it, corporate executives. You need to command a room, you get important presentations. You know, artists, musical performers, psychotherapists who need to stay grounded and not take on the energy of other people. Everybody you know needs breathing. We all have our high stakes experiences, we

all have our day to day stresses. It might not be at the level of some of these extreme jobs and populations, but don't tell me what's big in my life. You know. The next important conversation I have with my teenage child is everything. And I want to be in a place where I'm open and receptive and calm so I can communicate and not be reacting emotionally. And that's where breathing comes in handy.

now you're going to do something about it. I'm a big believer in belief systems. Right if I believe I'm surrounded by evil monsters who are going to eat me as soon as I'm my guard is down, that's the kind of world I'm going to live in. I create my reality, and if I have a trust in the safety of the universe and the influences around me are loving, I'm going to be more relaxed, and I'm going to create a different reality for myself based on my beliefs.

You know, thoughts become things, and we have to pay attention. You know, I have a moral obligation because I know that the mind gets its creative power from the breath. And if I help somebody increase the power of their breath, they become more creative. If they're negative, they're going to become more negative. If they're violent, they're going to become more violent. And so I don't want to sport that.

So along with breath work, we're doing hard work. We're doing consciousness work where we're working on our beliefs, We're working on our attitudes, our emotions, and it has to go hand in hand with breath work. The universe wouldn't give us power unless we earned it, unless it's safe with us. And so you know, I breathing is a lot more than breathing, but it's the source and the center in my life for everything.

actually started to do some kind of breathing training. But even then a lot of people it stays locked in that particular arena. They don't take it into their everyday life. They only apply it in those areas where they were trained to apply it. So everybody's a thousand times a day people hold their breath. Putting a key in the door, and you hold your breath for a moment, trying to

remember something, and you hold your breath. You're getting up from a chair and you hold your breath, and so that sends an emergency signal to the brain, because breath holding is an emergency signal. You know, imagine an antelope chomping on the grass and the Serengetti planes and there's a noise in the bushes. You think it's crump rump.

That holding the breath is an emergency reaction. And so people watch the news and TV, and they read the newspaper and they don't realize that they're holding their breath every time they get a little piece of bad news, or unconsciously, they've learned to hold their breath in order to stop themselves from laughing or crying a little child. If you tell them sit still, be quiet, they got so much energy. The only way to manage that energy is to manage their breath. And if you want to

hide and be invisible, you hold your breath. You don't have to teach that antelo open the wild. If you want to be invisible, stop breathing, because you're giving away your presence. And a little two three year old girl hiding behind a couch playing hide and seek, she's holding

her breath. Nobody had to teach her of that. And if you're a kid in the back row of the school and the teacher's looking for somebody to ask a question about the homework and you didn't do it, you're back there hoping you can be invisible, and you're going to automatically be holding your breath. And if some toxic force it's going to come down onto you, it's an

instinct too. You take a breath and you hold your breath, and you fight to resist that toxic force, right, and if something wants to come out of you, that's you know, try not to laugh. How do you stop yourself from laughing? You have to hold your breath. How do you stop

yourself from crying? You've got to control your breath. So we don't realize that we've been engaging in breathing behaviors our whole life, and those breathing behaviors, some of them are functional and useful, and some of them disturb our chemistry,

disturb our performance, disturb everything else about us. So, if you haven't consciously practiced breathing, the odds are pretty damn good that your unconscious breathing habits could use some upgrading, some up leveling, some improving, because when you don't have time to think, it's your habits that kick in, it's your training that kicks in, and that goes along with breathing.

So unless you've actually practiced breathing and distress so that when stress comes you automatically breathe in a better way, the odds are pretty good that you're going to launch into dysfunctional breathing and you're going to make If it's anxiety, for example, if you start to feel anxious, the way that you breathe when you're anxious can actually make the anxiety worse, and then you work yourself into an all out panic attack. Yeah, and so become that's where everybody

needs to start. You need to just become conscious, aware of your breathing when you're stuck in traffic How are you breathing when you're listening to music and enjoying it? How are you breathing when you're stuck on a math problem trying to solve. How are you breathing when someone is insulting you? How are you breathing when someone is praising you? How are you breathing when you're making love?

How are you breathing? Like you know, and I work with people who specialize in the sports world, how are you breathing during that stroke, during that punch, during that grab? You know, for certain moments, breathing is everything. And unless you're really have been starting to notice your own breathing happens, that's where it starts. You have to become aware. You get up in the morning. You don't have to breathe

in any special way. Just tune into your breathing like you're meeting a friend who's with you all the time. How is my breath this morning? Is it easy? Is it opens? It flowing? You know, I don't feel like breathing? Am I full of energy? And just start to develop this habit to just notice how you're breathing, And that starts the whole journey because breath awareness leads to the awareness of habits and patterns, the words that you choose,

the reactions, your emotions, your posture, your behavior. The more conscious you become of your breathing, the more conscious you become of everything. The more aware you are of your breath, the more aware you are period. And so breath awareness starts the door, opens the door, and then from there we can start practicing conscious breathing. So breath awareness, you don't even do the breathing. It's your body's breathing itself. In fact, don't do it. Just tune into it, observe it,

feel it, watch it, notice it, sense it. And it's just you're forming a relationship. You're becoming more aware of what's happening inside of you, and that's going to lead to awareness of a lot of other things.

Can you begin to breathe energy and direct energy and channel energy and train your system to tolerate more energy, receive more energy, contain more energy, and that's where the good stuff really starts to show up.

That's a skull that's nobody can teach it. Anyone can learn it. You can't teach it, but you can learn it. And so that's you want a shortcut. You could start by breathing in a real powerful way and then as a practice, as a discipline, as a as a process, start relaxing more and more and more, relax whatever you don't need to to allow that breath to remain powerful. So you get the powerful breath going and you relax more and more and more without losing the power of

the breath. And the other way is you relax completely and then you start turning up the power of the breath without losing your relaxation. And until then maybe you can go back and forth. You know, active inhale, passive exhale or active exhale s sh and reflexive inhale. So you know, you start you get a play. It's about playing with your breath. But there's a shortcut for you. And when those two things, when peace and power mix, when energy and relaxation blend, that's the flow, that's the zone,

that's the flow state. That's when potential is unlocked. It's like I get that lesson from a good Navy seal friend, commander of mine, Navy seal commander who said, you know the control the power is about control, and the piece is about relaxation. And that combination of peace and power makes you the most dangerous guy on the battlefield. That combination of energy and relaxation. That's what opens the doors of our perception. That's what that's when our heart opens.

It's the combination. So I live in Mexico, down in the Baja, and actually every in January we have my twentieth annual breathing gathering, a Cabo breakfast. We call it January twenty third to the twenty ninth, and I invite some of my favorite breath workers from around the world, so I don't have to do all the work. I choose and I let other people and I'm catching up with what they've been doing anyway. So I live in Mexico in the Baja, and it's just below the Tropic

of Cancer. Our property is about one hundred yards below the Tropic of Cancer. So we're in the tropics, but it's arid tropics, dry tropics, and the soil there is very hard packed, mineral rich, but hard packed soil, and so when it rains, the water just washes along the surface and it tries to find the ocean. It doesn't penetrate. But if you loosen the soil, if you soften the soil, if you turn the soil, then when it rains, the soil drinks up the water. So this is exactly the

phenomenon with breathing. You breathe in a powerful way. Now you're pulling a lot of energy. But if you don't relax, that energy cannot penetrate you, it can't do its work. It can't do the healing, the transformation of work, or the balancing or purging or whatever's required. So it's that combination of breathing and relaxing, and so we build that into I build it into our first core technique getting

people in the game and getting moving. You want to be sure that what they're practicing, they're going to get the most bang out of their buck, right, and so to get the most bang out of their buck, you need to have three qualities. You need to unlock what

I call my formula for transformation. Every time I've ever seen an experience someone go through a deep, powerful healing, a huge transformation, a quantum leap in awakening, some powerful growth experience or healing experience, I noticed there were three things at play. There was consciousness awareness. Now you could go for surgery, somebody could you're totally unconscious and they sew you up and fix it. You didn't have any

part in your own healing. So being awake is like the first rule in life, you know, like wake up, Okay, let's be conscious. Let's be aware. That's like primary. The second thing is you're going to be able to let go. You got you know, most problems that we're fighting with, we don't need to fight with them. You can just let them go. And the third is you've got to

be able to generate energy with your breath. So I get people very early on practicing breathing that makes them more conscious, helps them to relax more, and gives them the ability to generate energy. And then after that they don't need me. You know, you're connecting to the energy that built your body in the womb. You're connecting to the energy that comes direct from source, from the creator.

You don't need a middleman. And so when you use the breath to awaken to your own spirit, Hey, priests and politicians and doctors, they don't play such a dominant role in your life because you're connected to something bigger, something deeper, and you're guided by something deeper.

running through my mind. There was there's so many conditions present where I may not have been able to meet you. You could have looked at that and been like, uh, I don't know, I'm not into UFOs, but for some grand reason.

You're just talking about your breathing. You didn't care about the program. And I thought that was amazing. I thought that was so funny. You're just like, hey, don't tell me how to breathe. Everyone in the room just erupted into laughter.

You know. So people have done a lot of work themselves, and I mean people who've like you know, been honest with themselves about their limitations about their programming, their negative thoughts,

their illusions there. And you know, I have to admit that that uf go UFO conference that my my bullshit meeter, it was going off pretty regularly but mixed in with it was like very real, very genuine, unarguable, sincere experiences and so you know, you gotta I have to kind of I try to sort through, you know, stuff, and but I did leave with something really beautiful. It really helped me. And you know, I know, I look at you know, why why did I accept this inmitation? And

why am I showing up when I'm showing up? I know that one of the main reasons was to meet your father and to meet your family. I had no doubt about that. And the other was that I was watching my internal reactions around these people, and and I realized the import and I've been practicing it everywhere since, is to be able to just listen without pushing back, To be able to even quietly in my own mind

not pushing back. Not that I would come out and argue and stuff, that's another level of that, but just in my own watching my own space, my own fields, the ability just grew to be able to just really listen without automatically pushing back. That's that's man. One of the reasons I'm grateful that I was there because I had a lot of practice over that weekend.

our intuition. These little things that prompt us, and that's otherwise we're just getting blown around in the wind out there, pushed and pulled, and we could be all like lemmings, just heading off the edge of a cliff, you know, and everybody's that's what everybody's up to. So I've never fit in to the mainstream. But breathwork has become mainstream.

My dream fifty years ago was they're going to be teaching breathing in schools and doctors are going to be approving it, and science will beautiful and that's all happening now. But now it's creating a new problem, at least for my being a kind of an elder in this movement.

You know, there was a time when the problem was there just wasn't enough any information, good information about breathing, and I had to go to China, I had to go to India, I had to go to the source because there was you know, there's no there was lack of information. Now the problem is too much information or misinformation, right.

You know, you got somebody who learns the whim Hoff technique in an hour and then a week later they're a TikTok influencer with a million followers and they don't know what the hell they're talking about, you know, And so a lot of the people in breath work, I don't want to it's my own fields. I can put them down. There was a time when I could say

I've never met a breath worker that I didn't like. Ooh, that's starting to make me have to like work a little bit, because I'm finding some people are not, as the saying goes, compassionate for the cash in it. You know, they're not suited for this work, but they see the opportunity and they you know, they're put up on a guru pedestal, and so that's very tempting and very seductive, you know. And the higher you get and the more serious and sacred things get, the more you need to

be curbing and taming those darker elements of ourselves. Otherwise we become dangerous to the world. And so we have to be growing our heart. We have to be getting more and more into love and compassion and tolerance and not wanting to dominate and control and overpower people or force them into things. And you know, when you know you're right, it's very tempting to do that.

and then you realize how important it was. And so I just learned that the hard way. I discovered the ecstatic nature and the breath. But it was what brought me to it was very dangerous moments, life and death kind of situations. And so when I got out of the military, I wanted people to discover what I discovered, experience what I experienced. But by the way that I learned it, you're not going to get a lot of

people who volunteer for that kind of stuff. So I was looking for another way, a school, a style approach, a tradition that I could see was connected to my experience and confirmed it or validated it. So that's what took me to India and China. It's what took me into the touchy feely movement the late sixties and the hippie movement. You know, if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with, and you know, and and the nonviolence vow of I was a practicing Buddhist.

With the vow of nonviolence, I wouldn't step on an ant and so it was a lot of purification that was required. And some of that purification was forced on me, but I realized I couldn't force it on other people. So I had to find paths or traditions that resulted in that. And that's why I ended up in India. In China, they've been studying the breath for thousands of years. They've worked out some really good hacks and some really good processes and techniques, and we can sort of tweak them,

shape them for our current modern times. And it's like prescription, here, play with this, try this. And so I it was my search for how do I communicate what you can't put any words to. You know, It's like there's a course called the Course of Miracles. I don't know if you've heard of course called the Course of Miracles. There's a beautiful quote in there that says, a universal theology

is impossible, and that makes sense. You're never going to get Jews and Muslims and Christians and Catholics and Buddhists to all agree on a single theology.

work for you. And so I went to the East, to India. I practiced those things because in the first place, there was no other way to go. I mean, they don't teach it in schools, not a university course. You don't find breathing corners like on it where there's more CVS pharmacies. We should have breathing clinics where there was every pharmacy, but there wasn't. So I had no choice. I had to travel to the East and start hunting down people who really embodied a tradition. And they didn't

just read it in a book. Somebody just didn't tell it to them. They embodied it. They own that knowledge and from that you can catch it from people. You know, it's not what you say, it's not what you do, it's who you are. That's what gets communicated. That's what does the healing work. My presence, you know, presence is much more important than words are techniques, and so breathing that's that's we're working on the level of pure presence, pure being.

it's like it wasn't like that. I mean, fifty years ago, it was a whole different world, and I'm I'm willing to bet a lot of this was probably really taboo and not very easy to track. So it's very admirable this this path that you've you've gone down, and it does remind me a little bit of my father in the sense that both of you had these kind of very profound experiences in your youth. I guess you know this now, but my dad was shot by a shotgun when he was.

whole UFO thing. And as a teenager, my dad would tell me these things, you had to have positive thinking, son, You gotta you know, you you got to think about this, You got to think about that. And as a teenager, I'm like, I don't believe that, you know what I mean, this is stupid.

I understood it, but now I really do. And sure enough, growth happens and you go, wow, okay, there's no end to this. I'm not gonna I'm not going to crystallize anything as carved in stone because it seems like I'm getting deeper insights, I'm getting better understanding the more I grow. And if I lock onto a position and I dig my heels in, I just stop the whole process of true understanding and growth, because it evolves as we do. I mean, we used to think. Well, look in the Bible,

they're talking about chariots a fire. Well now with some of the UFO site and they're going, hmmm, I wonder you know, So call it what you want. There is something happening out there. There's more to life than we realize, and that should be our focus to uncover and awaken to things that are surrounding us, all around us, feeling us, and we're oblivious to them. Wake up, you know. We know that when I look out at the world, I'm looking at a very narrow range of the whole electromagnetic spectrum.

I'm missing more than i'm getting. My senses are actually limiting more of the reality then they are opening me too. And so that's why I'm a believer in the heart, and that's why I'm a believer in connecting with the energy. The energy that's in the stars, it's in the rocks, it's in the trees, it's in me, it's in you. It surrounds us, it infuses us. And if we can if we can connect with that energy, then we're going to have the support of the universe, and we're going

to stop to see ourselves reflected in each other. I see myself and you, I see you and myself, and that's that's heart intelligence. And you know, it used to be if you wanted to survive in this world, you have to be fast and you have to be strong, and that's who survived. And then along came smart, and then if you were smart enough, you could over you know, you could beat out the fast and the strong. Smart

trumps fast and strong. And but now some of the worst things that are being perpetrated on the planet are being done by some very smart people, intelligent iiqs. And so now and into the future, it's not who's strong, who's fast, who's smart, it's who's most conscious, right, who's as a wake that's where we should be focusing on raising our consciousness, expanding our consciousness, refining our consciousness. And that's what that's the direct result or benefit of breathing practices.

That's where most of the benefit occurs in breath work is on the level of consciousness.

of glanced past it. But if you really know my mother, you know that she's really not open to this kind of stuff and she was very closed off against this, and she's never done a meditation, she's never done anything extra normal.

meditation or practice with or whatever. And when you saw her, she was streaming tears, she was kind of babbling, she didn't even know how to describe what was happening. And we were laughing and she's like, you guys are laughing at me. We're like, no, Mom, we're not laughing at you. We're laughing for you.

and balanced consciousness experiences. I believe that night my family experienced one going through this with you. And we may have experienced some of these kinds of things on some level with other people, but that night was different and it was profound and it was really a gift to us, but great to hear. Yeah, thank you, And I wanted to ask, like, what were your thoughts on the book because we kind of breezed past that, you know.

them through their whole process. You can just touch on different people at different points and try to like, you know, what's what's the one piece of advice that everybody can benefit from, Because everybody's at a different place in their process and at a different point in their development, and each each of our inner worlds is so very different. So I try to just focus on on fundamentals in the beginning and and and trying to guide in a way that no matter where you're at, no matter what

you're going through, it's it can help. Now if I if I would have worked just with your mother, just with your father, just with you, then I could watch every single breath I can, I get into your I can sense, I can feel, and my intuition guides me, and I can observe little things. And so that's that's the best way to make use of this process to get, you know, the most out of it. But it's not scalable. I can't literally work with every single person in the world.

So I have to develop methods and styles and processes that can affect more people without giving them something that wasn't meant for them, you know, Like I work with Tony Robbins, so you know he'll do an event ten thousand people whatever. I don't know what the odds, what the percent is of but something like three percent, five percent or whatever of the population is suicidal. So do

the math. And in a room with ten thousand people, you got forty to fifty least suicidal people who can take whatever you say and do and use it to deepen their suicidal tendencies. So and you got to account for that. Some people have heart problems and you don't want them doing these powerful Cathard breathing. Some people are schizophrenic, and you know, you don't want them playing with weird kind of multi dimensional experience and stuff. So so we've got to, you know, try to not water it down,

but keep the process gentle so everyone's included. And first, do no harm.

of your loving energy. And you just set all these different sayings and phrases, and it was just really deep, and I was this guy going really deep into it.

to be contray? You know? And so it behooves us to very consciously and very deliberately, and I use that a lot at my seminars because it happened to me and it was something really real. And I use this model. You throw a stone out in the water calm lake and you see the circle wave go out. So every time we breathe and we put a heartfelt intension behind it, it's like throwing a stone in that lake and that

wave goes out. And that wave of peace or love or compassion, it's passing through everything and everyone, and at some point it could be just passing through somebody just at that moment they want to hurt and that wave happened to pass through them and it caused them to pause. I'm sure that things like that happen because of our loving intention. The vibrations that we put out in the world affect other people.

the benefit. One is a sigh of relief. So I say sigh of relief, and everybody knows exactly what I mean. That means you know how to do a sigh of relief, You recognize it when it happens, you can observe it in somebody else, and you know what it feels like in you. So all you need to do is give yourself a sigh of relief. However, do it very consciously, much more consciously than usual. Exaggerated, dramatize it, make it theatrical, exaggerate the sigh of relief and what are all the qualities?

So a sigh of relief begins with an inhale that is twice as big as your average breath. That's the medical definition or description of a sigh. We think of it in terms of the exhale ah. But in order for that side to occur, you needed a big inhale in front of it, and that inhal needs to have an extra stretch, extra expansion. So you literally take an in breath and inhale that's twice as big as normal. Now you've created that extra expansion, that extra stretch, and

when you release it power behind it. You don't have to do anything. It happens to you. It's a wave of peace and relaxation. Because relaxation isn't a doing. People talking hey, relax relax as if it's a verb, as if it's something you need to do. But relaxation is non doing, it's undoing, right, And so you do the inhale and take your time. When you're breathing in you get your skill down that you can extend your innail for five, six, seven, eight seconds, ten seconds would be great.

Then you have real time to track the sensations of expansion side to side, front to back, top to bottom. So you take your time on the inhale and make it a meditation. You're tuning into the details, feeling the expansion, the stretching, the opening, the expanding. And then you reach that full point and you snap the exhale loose, you dump the exhale out, you let it go, you set it free. And when you do, let go of your jaw. See, most people their jaw, they have a place where the

jaw sets all the time. Some people can grind their teeth and their sleep and you know they have TMJ problems because there's constant chronic tightness in their jaw. So every time you exhale, for that moment that you release the exhale, release your jaw, for that moment that you release the exhale, release your shoulders, and you can go through your body like that, and you can go from head to toe. Every time you exhale, relax a muscle,

relax joint at the same time that you're exhaling. If you relax a muscle, when you relax, something open, something softens, and then the breath can take away whatever now is exposed, has been open. If you just breathe without relaxing, you can't release anything. If you relax without breathing, you can't release anything. So every time you exhale, let go, let go of a negative thought, let go of anger, let

go of confusion. Start by letting go of muscles and joints, and then you let go of the past, and then you let go of anger, You let go of whatever, prejudice, bias, whatever. The letting go gets deeper and deeper and deeper. So just a sigh of relief. Exaggerate it, turn it into a meditation. So when you breathe in, what's your favorite fragrance? What can you think about that will make you feel beautiful?

I can think of many, many things. I focus on my friends, my family, my child, a day in Hawaii on the beach, you know whatever. I can just look the smell of lilacs, you know, moments from childhood. Whatever gives you joy, pleasure while you're breathing in, just bring it to mind. And then when you exhale, really let go. Don't be afraid to let go, and layer by layer, you're gonna start washing tension out of your system. Alka a simple sigh of relief done creatively exaggerated, add visualization

to it, add affirmations to it. So, for example, the first time I learned that principle was from Ramdas, and he said, Hey, when you breathe in, think to yourself, the power of God is within me. And when you breathe out, think to yourself, the grace of God surrounds me. And I was in a and an event with him, and we all just started doing that, breathing in, the power of God is within me, breathing out the grace of God surrounds me, and in and out, repeating that phrase.

And you are programming yourself in a very beautiful way. And I've never from that day, I've never been able to breathe without thinking about God. And I've never been able to think about God without taking a breath. In NLP, I think they call that anchoring. So what you do is you practice a sigh of relief and you use it as an anchoring technique to shift your state, to return to a comfortable state, wake yourself up if that's what you need, Calm yourself down if that's what you need,

and just by playing with the sigh of relief. You don't need any complicated techniques, just a sigh of relief. And then so that's one core technique along inhale. Think about something beautiful, enjoy the sensations, get in your body, imagine breathing light, repeat some powerful affirmation to yourself, and then let go and relax physically. And while you're exhaling, something can pour into you, so we can actively pull something in. What kind of energy do you want to

fill yourself with? Strength, courage, freedom, intelligence, wisdom, love, compassion? If you know yourself, and how can I improve myself? You know, I need to be more patient. Okay, when I breathe in, I'm going to be patient with my inhale. I'm going to tell myself that I'm becoming more patient. I'm going to remind myself that it's important. I'm going to remember moments when I was patient and I'm glad

I was. And then I'm just gonna let go. And as I empty myself, Nature abhors a vacuum, so as I'm exhaling, some energy can be coming in, so I can give to myself with the inhale and I can receive on the exhale okay, and you just need to play with the sigh of relief. Do it fast, do it slow, Do it through your nose, do it through your mouth. Pretend you're angry when you do it. Pretend you're sad when you do it. Pretend you're hilariously. You know,

laughing is something. When you do it, just sigh of relief. And the second technique, and these both come from my work way back in military special forces, survival training and everything. The second is now it's called tactical breathing, but we I originally called it circular breathing. Connected breathing that is inhale exhale, inhale, exhale in so no pauses, no gaps, no breath holding, and you combine that with a sigh

of relief. So as a takeaway exercise, let's do it right now, we can do a couple versions twenty connected breaths, and that means you're gonna count them. You're going to do twenty breaths, four short breaths, one long for short, one long foreshort, one long show that long breath that every fifth breath is a big sigh of relief. And the other four breaths is like spinning a wheel. So it's like this, and then notice your energy, what just moved? What changed in your body?

second time. Mix it up and get different versions of it, but keep to the same general pattern. A few short breaths and a big sigh of relief, and in the beginning for to one four one, just to get you in the game.

no limit. No matter how much we clear away, we find another layer. No matter how high we get, we find out that there's a much higher mountain behind this beacon. There's no end to it. So that's a very simple practice and if you remember the fundamentals, So if you practice any breathing technique, do it consciously. Be total focus, one hundred percent. That in itself is powerful, the ability to gather all your energy and focus it totally and

not be ten percent here, ten percent there. Sort of interested in this, but also you know you're scattering all your energy. You can't create anything, So this is a good exercise to be total, really focused, and don't use any muscles that are unnecessary. Like you know, I have

a principle call the effort to energy ratio. So if people are breathing deep, if you get a certain amount of energy from every breath you take, and it costs you a certain amount of energy to breathe every breath, and some people it's costing them so much energy to breathe that they don't have energy left. It's like bad business. So you've got to get very practice getting economical and efficient and elegant with your breathing and graceful so it's

not costing you a lot of energy. And then all the energy you're getting is available to do healing and growth work, and it's not just being used up by the process itself. So just remember the basic principles and play and you'll get somewhere.

one specific exercise so you can practice something different. I have a monthly newsletter where I write an article about breathing. You know, I've written an article about breathing every month since June of nineteen seventy six. Wow a month. Yeah. I was at the University of Hawaii University of Massachusetts when i started my monthly breathing reports, and I've never missed a month since then.

feel it. After that breathing thing. So I'm definitely gonna practice this. So thank you for that. That was a gift, and you know, this has been amazing. Maybe maybe maybe a note to ourselves is when we're, you know, doing an interview, don't alter our consciousness.

I call it butterfly breathing, but subtle energy breathing.

very useful. I'm really proud of it. We Uh, you get the three cornerstones which I mentioned. You can practicing breathing for becoming more mindful, practicing breathing for relaxation, and practicing breathing for energizing, and with those three skills you

can start to really build. And so yeah, the app has what we have like eight paths why people come to breath work, physical healing, psycho emotional healing, personal growth, business performance, sports performance healing the healer, helping the helper, creativity, artists, performing artists, so on, and spirituality. So there's eight paths and you can pick your path and you complete one and you can go down another. And if you complete all the paths, you graduate, you grow, You assend from

student to apprentice to teacher to master up. And we have every day breathing exercises in there, hangover breath, stuck in traffic, two o'clock, sugar crash, you know, very practical

breathing for very everyday practical stuff. And in there I also have my Basic series because for a long time I was teaching only my Basic Series and it was like, okay, if I can only teach five or six breathing exercises, if people get these under their belt, then anything else they practice they're going to get a lot more benefit out of than if they haven't learned these. This what

I call the Basic Series. So that's in there too, and there's video lessons, there's audio guided lessons, there's an article about each lesson, so it's pretty comprehensive. I'm really pleased with it. It turned out to be a much bigger job than we all expected, and there's a lot of tweaking going on right now. But yeah, thank you for mentioning that download breath tech app.