Mastering Breathwork: A Journey into Somatic Healing and Emotional Liberation with Steven Jaggers

Transcript

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Hi everyone, welcome to Exploring Health Macro to Micro.

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I'm your host, Parker Condit.

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In the show, I interview health and wellness experts around topics like sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress management, mental health and much more.

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So by the end of each episode you'll have concrete, tangible advice that you can start implementing today to start living a healthier life, either for yourself or for your loved ones.

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And that's the microside of the show.

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The macro side of the show is discussing larger, systemic issues that can be contributing to health outcomes.

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So an example of that is understanding that much of the traditional medical community treats the mind and body as separate entities, which leads to disconnected and disparate care.

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This is an idea that came up on today's show, and my guest today is Steven Jaggers.

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Steven is the founder of somatic breath work, which is headquartered in Austin, texas.

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He has an educational background in addiction therapy and physical therapy, so it's fitting that he operates in the breath workspace, since breath is the bodily function that bridges the mind and body so well.

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As you can probably guess, this episode is primarily focused on breath work, and I think there's something in here for everyone.

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If this is your first introduction to breath work, there's plenty in here that will be applicable and easy to implement right away, and, if you're more familiar with breath work, there are some deeper concepts that'll be fun to explore.

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With Steven and I, we ended up discussing a basic framework for how to use your breath to control your state, how emotions and trauma are stored in the body, the distinction about stress that most people misunderstand.

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He talks about how our nervous system is tied to communication, and we also go over an overview of what a somatic breath work session entails.

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Steven is a leader and a great communicator in the breath workspace, and I've actually been following his work for a little over five years now, so I was truly excited to have him on as a guest to introduce this topic, which is probably not as mainstream as some of the other topics that I've had on the show.

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So, without further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Steven Jaggers.

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Steven, thanks so much for being here.

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We don't directly know each other, but we have a mutual friend in Paige Fleishman who I used to work with when I was personal training.

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She was a client of yours and then probably subsequently a friend as well, but I'm really happy to have gotten connected and to have you on so we can chat today.

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Yeah, it's an honor to be here, parker.

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Yeah, she was a client of mine, I was a client of hers, and we need a multitude of modalities, especially dealing with the modern issues in our world.

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So, yeah, excited to be here, brother.

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Yeah, so we're gonna talk a lot about breath work and a variety of things in and around that realm.

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But I think I'd like to kind of frame the conversation around connection.

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And it feels like we're kind of in a strange transitional period right now where there's maybe a lack of community and a lack of connection and partially this is due to the increase in technology and the technology is awesome in what we've been able to achieve because of it.

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But there's also, you guys, two sides to every coin, right.

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So I feel like there's been a step away from sort of in-person connection and community and humanity.

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But it feels sort of like we're shifting back towards that, back towards a collective consciousness, awakening whatever language you wanna use around that.

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But it does feel like we're sort of shifting towards that and kind of moving in the right direction from a humanity standpoint.

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I'm curious.

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I just wanna hear your thoughts on sort of where you think we are to get your thoughts on the kind of the current state of affairs.

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Yeah, man, I'll tell you that I see a lot of like our in-person trainings, in-person events.

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People are so hungry for it.

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I think that connection and community and even I'm a big fan of kind of etymology, in a way like to commune is probably one of the biggest purposes for us being here To communicate with each other, to be in connection with each other, to be in connection with ourselves.

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I mean, the thing that I'm the most fascinated in is reconnecting our mind back to our body, like that is the first step in sort of healing.

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Anything is to get your mind to communicate back to what's going on inside of your body, and that's the basis of actually being able to connect with other people too.

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I mean, there's a lot there.

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I think that we are hungry for in-person connection because that's how we're designed.

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I'm fascinated by the human nervous system, and not just its capacity to control our body and but also its capacity to communicate with other people and how.

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That's an essential nutrient.

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There's a term called co-regulation that is maybe we can dive into, and it's an essential skill and nutrient that we actually need as humans and especially in our developmental stages that we become so disconnected that we're lacking, like healthy nervous system, co-regulation between people, and that's essentially the felt sense of being deeply connected to a tribe, to your friends, your family, and, yeah, there's a multitude of different things around that that we could dive into.

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Yeah, so I mean, we're already there, so let's just talk about that a little bit more.

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But I'm curious if there's I feel like there's been so much there's very much online tribalism, where people sort of get in these camps of thinking and that can lead to sort of like online infighting, which probably isn't particularly helpful.

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But do those sort of online tribes and communities just give you like glimpses of that, like very short-term, very low level doses of that co-regulation where the in-person is actually more like the real deal?

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And I, to be honest, I come from a bodywork background, a practitioner background, where I'm working with people in a very physical way, and I was always against like online communities, and not necessarily against, but I just I negated how powerful they can actually be and it's obviously not gonna replace being together with another human.

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But I think the timing of everything for me was really fascinating because I started like going into the breathwork stuff more and the somatics and right around when COVID kind of was popping off and I hired a social media woman and she was.

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She was like hey, you should showcase kind of what goes on in your sessions and you should showcase someone like having an emotional release.

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And I actually was really against that.

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I thought that people wouldn't necessarily understand and there's not enough context around what's actually going on and people might just think it's like a cult or something.

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They don't understand the actual like benefits of it.

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And I ended up posting you know this woman, I'm working with her, she's having an emotional release and we started going viral from that, but not just in the United States, it was a global thing.

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And what blew my mind was we had thousands of messages come in overnight and I would say probably 60% of those messages were not in English.

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And all of those messages I'm sitting there on Google Translate and I'm like so many people are like I don't even know what this is, but I need it.

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Like right now I'm so disconnected and I'm so suppressed and I'm numb and I don't know what's going on.

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But I'm watching another person who's feeling and I want to feel because essentially, feeling is equated to being alive.

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The opposite of feeling is numbness and to me I feel like that's the bigger epidemic that's going on is this numbness, this parasitic tension that a lot of people are faced with.

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It's interesting you share that, because I probably didn't know exactly what you did for a while and I'm not sure if it was the video that you're talking about that went viral.

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But kind of what you've shared quite a few of these of people having emotional releases.

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My first thought when I saw them was that looks nice.

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That looks like something I would benefit from, not really knowing what it was, how you got there, what the modality was.

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So it's funny that that was sort of a ubiquitous response to that first sort of viral post that you had.

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Yeah, you talked about community and like communication and for me, just being so fascinated with the nervous system, I'm trying to figure out, okay, what is the primary function of it?

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Obviously, one of it is to maintain safety, maintain homeostasis, to send and receive messages from your central nervous system to your periphery, to function your autonomic nervous system.

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But how is it doing that?

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It's doing that through communication.

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It is the communication system and because it's communicating internally but you're also communicating externally.

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And another thing that kind of blew my mind was I posted a lot of stuff about me teaching and concepts and just speaking, a lot of clips from my training, whereas this was no words, this was only just watching someone release emotion and I'm like, why are all these people messaging us?

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It's because not everybody speaks English, not everybody speaks my language, but everyone speaks emotions, like if you're a human, you speak.

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Like that is a level of communication that we all speak.

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It is a universal language and so it's, you know, emotions I consider like the Connective tissue of our, of our life.

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It pulls people together or it pushes people apart.

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So that was kind of another fascinating aspect of that as well.

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Yeah, I think that demonstrates the point perfectly where I didn't really know what was happening.

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But it and yeah, I don't even know that there was audio on it.

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You know, instagram just audio is off to default, but I saw it, it just resonated with me.

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It's just a very kind of ubiquitous human, human experience that you were sharing.

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Yeah, so I think before we move on, maybe it's best to just give people some context around what it, what exactly it is you do, and we'll kind of get into somatic breath work and then we can kind of circle back to more of your background and take the conversation from there.

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Yeah, so I don't know if it might be best to start like a little bit with my background sure wherever you want to take this.

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Yeah, so you know I I originally went to school for addiction, psychology and also and and also physical therapy.

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I couldn't decide which route I wanted to go, whether it was like I was fascinated by understanding how people's minds work.

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And you know, I grew up, I grew up in a family of addicts an only child and I watched my parents struggle with addiction, and you know, to hard drugs and also prescription medications and I really there was a drive to understand that, that, what causes a person to do that.

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And I also was very physically active.

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You know I played basketball.

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I played, I was an amateur skateboarder, I did, I did so many different things.

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So I was, I was fascinated by both and I couldn't decide which route I wanted to go down Because in our modern schooling there is no kind of the connection in between them.

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So I ended up dropping out and I found a holistic based school that taught Different forms of body work from, you know, kind of the Western injury rehabilitation style, body works, postural therapies, neuroma.

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I became a neuromuscular therapist, really working on people's physical alignment, and then you know that school also taught some of the energetic modalities and the somatic based modalities of like, how the body stores emotion and you know, kind of equating the nervous system to the Chakra system, and I was so fascinated by like, okay, if we strip it from its dogma, what like, what's the what's the essential thing that it's getting across, and so I became fascinated by that.

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I was a body worker for a long time and I was an instructor and teacher at a at a school in Arizona, and At that time I, you know, was fascinated by Different psychedelics.

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I kind of went down that route for a little while.

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I volunteered for a nonprofit organization called maps and they are, you know, in getting into that realm, I was like, okay, if I, if I want to explore this, I want to know how this is applied to our modern world and who's doing it in the best way possible.

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So I went down that route for a little bit and it took me to.

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In 2017, I volunteered for their conference and I had a friend say you should go to this holotropic breathwork session by a man named Stan Groff, who is Kind of the father of most of these more powerful styles of breathwork, and I had a massive emotional release in this session.

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I had, you know, I Was diagnosed with some thoracic scoliosis when I was about 17 and Now my parents were addicted to some pretty heavy stimulants.

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You know the your, your thoracic spine, from a, from a, like an Eastern standpoint, is like your fire center and it controls, like the adrenals and like you know people that are addicted to stimulants.

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You're burning out your fire in a way, or you're operating off of whether it's stimulants, or you're operating off, operating off of a false sense of fire, and that was kind of the developmental thing that I think they passed down to me from doing so many drugs.

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And I felt, when I started getting into the breathwork I'd started, I I felt this pop in my thoracic spine and you know I'm kind of an anatomy nerd and I'm like, okay, well, your diaphragm is actually connected to your lumbar spine or originates or whatever.

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But I felt this pop and and then I was just flooded with Anger, like I had so much anger rushed through me towards my parents, towards just the upbringing that I had Towards, just being pissed off at life, and that came through me out of nowhere.

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And then after that it was like waves of sadness and tears and and then it was like waves of actual just forgiveness for them, doing the best that they could, and like after I had this massive emotional release and and by that time I had tried so many different modalities, from EMDR to acupuncture, to you know, all the body work stuff, to somatic psychotherapy, and I had that release of emotions and I just became so clear mentally that, okay, as a body worker or a trainer, I'm actually a breath worker.

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First, because if I'm not attuning to someone's breath, then whatever they're doing, their nervous systems in a contracted state, if someone's holding their breath, then whatever I'm doing is probably not landing.

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Whether I'm doing actual physical Tissue manipulation or if I'm guiding someone through an exercise, if they're holding their breath, it's probably not a beneficial thing.

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So I'm like, okay, fuck, let's study all the different types of breath work.

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And went down that journey of studying.

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You know a lot of the up regulating styles of breath work to down regulating styles and you know there's dogma and those like which ones you should only breathe through your nose or only breathe through your mouth, or you know they all have benefits for different things.

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And I think I take that that lens of let's strip it of the dogma and see, okay, what's the intention of this.

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And so I started utilizing like a few different styles of breath work in my body work sessions, combined with some, you know, guided verbal cues and processing.

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And Now I had a.

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I had a woman who was a therapist who asked me if I could start to teach her kind of what I was doing with her and at that point I knew how to make a curriculum and Just kind of slap something together and held a little training out of my house and hit up my clients and like, hey, do you want to learn about this?

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And and now you know, hasn't even been that long.

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Three years later we have over a thousand practitioners worldwide and you know we're accredited, fully accredited, and it's grown Tremendously.

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So that's kind of the background story and we can get into any of the specifics on there if you want.

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Yeah, there's so many interesting threads but right before we started recording you were talking about the recent accreditation from ASU and sort of building a curriculum.

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So I'd love to just hear more about what exactly the Accreditation is through ASU, just for people who are curious, and then just to hear a little bit more about the specific Practitioner training that you you take people through.

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Yeah, so as far as the accreditation, it is for continuing education credits for practitioners.

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Now, practitioner is definitely a broad statement.

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It's a vague statement depending if you are, you know, if you're you know massage therapists or your Chiropractor or you're an actual, like psychotherapists.

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Most most licensures require you to have continuing education, ongoing continued education Every two years or something like that which you have.

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You know you have a certain amount that you can have, general CE use which allows you to study a multitude of different things, and a lot of times they require specific CE use depending on your license.

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So right now we're, we are accredited for general CE use from anybody who is a therapist to a Physical therapist.

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I get a lot of people that come from the mind side of things, like therapists and coaches and and counselors, and I get a lot of people that come from the body side of things Personal trainers, chiropractors, physical therapists because you know, breath work is essentially working with the nervous system and it is the bridge between the mind and body.

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So From a marketing standpoint it's been hard to niche myself, but, but it's really cool to be that kind of centerpiece in between.

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Certainly, breath work is so interesting because it's it's one of the only functions in the body where it happens consciously and subconsciously, where, luckily, we don't have to be paying attention to our breath and we'll just keep doing it.

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It's a very it's a clever evolutionary trait that we got, but we can also control it too, and that's like the bridge that you're talking about where it can be this just such a powerful tool for us to use our breath to tap into these different states within the body, and I think people don't Understand what a powerful tool it is and possibly leverage it as much, because it really can be almost a superpower If you can really harness it in a particular way.

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Yeah, we're not.

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We're not taught that from a young age that you can control your state based on how you're like, how you're breathing.

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We can't always control the external world and we can't always control what's going on outside of us, but you can control your internal state and you know when you look at Trauma or if you look at stress would you just take stress, for example, like what's stressful to you might not be stressful to me, based on my level of resilience, and so trauma and stress are a subjective thing and Based on a based on an organism's like ability to regulate itself when they're going through something.

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And so, yeah, utilizing your breath, which we can get into, all like the basic rules within that.

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It's not something that we're taught, but it is.

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It's something that we're doing all the time.

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That seems, you know, it seems like just so simple, but it can have profound, profound effects and, to be honest, my mind is always blown when I'm working with people.

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I'm like I don't know if they're getting anything from it, but people have some pretty life transforming awarenesses which, you know.

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This wasn't really the thing that I thought I'd be going into, but it it has kind of chose me in a way and it's it continuously blows my mind.

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Yeah, it is interesting how it's something so benign.

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I think it is because it's so.

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It feels like a very passive thing and it can be overlooked, like one of the things I harp on the most with people is how important walking is.

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But it seems like such a low threshold activity where you see all the high intensity stuff, especially in the fitness world, you think how effective can walking really be.

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And Walking, I think, is also a superpower if you really harness it.

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But breath work, in the same vein, where it seems so simple, you're like I do it all day.

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How much of a difference can it really make?

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And you've seen clearly the power of it and how, how positively influential it can be.

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Yeah, I'll say one other piece within.

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That is that, like I have a lot of people that ask me what's the best breath work practice that I can do on a daily basis, like what Kundalini exercise or what you know, oxygen advantage technique or whatever it is, what thing can I do on a day-to-day basis?

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That's the best, like daily practice.

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Well, you're not what you do sometimes, you are what you do all the time and, like you said, your breath is something that you're either aware of or you're not.

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It's conscious or unconscious or subconscious, and so it's not about what you do once a day.

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It's about, like, can you be aware of your breath for a multi for for most of your day?

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Right when you're in an argument with your spouse?

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When, when you are in the line at the grocery Store, it's like doing an hour of yoga or doing an hour personal training session?

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Well, if you're not aware of your body the rest of the day and you're in a, you're sitting all day, it's not really going to do a lot for you.

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Mm-hmm.

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Yeah, it's helpful to have that practice, but the practice should then sort of expand into the rest of your, your conscious day, hopefully.

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So you were talking about a variety of different breath work protocols, up regulating, down regulating.

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Have you distilled sort of the first principles out of those and, if you can, if you have, can you share kind of what those are and what you Gravitate towards now from a teaching perspective?

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Yeah, yeah, this is a fascinating topic that I would love to hear your perspective on it too.

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I Think, as a body worker first, I kind of came up against this limitation of being taught that if someone has tension in their body that, like my job is like let's just go release it, let's go work on it, let's physically, like manually, try to you know, someone has a knot or a trigger point let's go try to like get it out of them.

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And then at the same time I'm like, well, if the body is so intelligent, why is it creating that?

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That there to begin with.

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And you know, then I started studying, like FRC and like some other activation stuff, you know.

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And so I'm like, well, maybe they actually need strength there, maybe they actually need to turn that part of their system on, maybe they actually aren't even able to occupy that part of their body.

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And so for me, it's always this balance of you need to be able to turn things on and you also need to be able to turn things off.

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Not everything needs to be released.

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Sometimes things need to be activated.

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Sometimes, when you activate something, then it can relax a lot more.

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And so I take this very dualistic approach to almost everything because we live in a duality.

00:26:02.911 --> 00:26:04.045
We need both sides.

00:26:04.045 --> 00:26:12.810
When you look at the nervous system and specifically the autonomic nervous system, like we have the states of parasympathetic rest and digest.

00:26:12.810 --> 00:26:14.766
We have the states of sympathetic.

00:26:14.766 --> 00:26:18.048
You know, go, go, go, do, do, do all the time.

00:26:18.048 --> 00:26:19.704
Both are necessary.

00:26:19.704 --> 00:26:28.587
Now you might just be stuck in one of those states and having a hard time going and like transitioning to the other, and that's where issues are.

00:26:30.420 --> 00:26:53.403
So when it comes to the breath work side of things, I kind of took that similar principle as in most of the sessions that I do, I work on like I take someone through this journey of let's actually spike their nervous system, let's take them into a stressful state, and you know there's a term called hermetic stress.

00:26:53.403 --> 00:26:54.407
It's a lot of the.

00:26:54.407 --> 00:27:06.968
It's very similar to like what Wim Hof stuff is based off of, like let's put the body into a state of stress and then show it how to come back down into a relaxed state.

00:27:06.968 --> 00:27:23.988
And so I usually spend half the time up regulating, taking someone's system into a state of stress and we can talk about how that actually can bring up like unprocessed emotions for people.

00:27:23.988 --> 00:27:40.008
And then I spend the second half of the time helping people retrain their nervous system, to when I get into a state of stress, I know how to come back down into a regulated state and there's other parts of that.

00:27:40.180 --> 00:27:49.628
But I had a mentor once tell me that health is the ability to choose, and for me that has always resonated.

00:27:49.628 --> 00:28:18.786
You need to be able to turn things on and you need to be able to have passion and fire and, like you know, activate yourself and go, perform all the necessary physical activities, and then you also need to be able to shut it off and relax, and you need both sides, and so I take a very balanced approach of utilizing both, and for me, I can always relax so much more if I've pushed myself physically.

00:28:18.786 --> 00:28:31.147
So you know what goes up must come down, and there's a multitude of other aspects within that, but on a basic like physiological level, that's kind of the process that I take people through.

00:28:32.119 --> 00:28:35.349
Yeah, so just to share sort of a concrete example of that.

00:28:35.349 --> 00:28:43.267
I also, like you, mentioned stress a few times and I always feel the need to clarify for people that stress is not necessarily a bad thing.

00:28:43.267 --> 00:28:45.707
Stress is required for adaptation.

00:28:45.707 --> 00:28:48.488
So I always use exercise as the example.

00:28:48.488 --> 00:29:00.803
You're stressing a particular tissue or your cardiovascular system and the goal is to get your body to freak out a little bit because it was hard and then your body doesn't want to be freaked out like that, so it adapts.

00:29:00.803 --> 00:29:07.506
So the next time you provide that level of stimulus, that level of stress, you've adapted, so your body doesn't freak out as much.

00:29:07.779 --> 00:29:11.203
And that's sort of the idea of progressive overload and personal training.

00:29:11.203 --> 00:29:14.008
So stress is not necessarily a bad thing.

00:29:14.008 --> 00:29:20.769
But constantly being stressed, kind of, as you were saying, being up or down fine, it's great that you have both.

00:29:20.769 --> 00:29:23.808
But sort of being stuck in one area is not ideal.

00:29:23.808 --> 00:29:32.988
But the idea of kind of doing that up to down would be like a strength training session or like some sort of exercise session.

00:29:33.789 --> 00:29:41.410
That's your up, that's the stress, that's sort of mobilizing a lot of stuff within your body adrenaline, cortisol, stress hormones but that's great.

00:29:41.410 --> 00:29:55.286
You want that sort of energy If you're being chased by a bear, you want to mobilize as much energy as possible, but then afterwards what I taught people, the simplest way to do it is just to sit and focus on your breath for like five minutes afterwards.

00:29:55.286 --> 00:30:12.529
Probably not in a gym, because it's harder to do, harder to control the environment there, but if you can find like a calm place, maybe somewhere dark, and you just close your eyes and there's not even a particular protocol, give them be like, just be with your breath for five minutes, and that's trying to teach them to then go down afterwards.

00:30:12.529 --> 00:30:16.181
So that's just if people are sort of listening or like.

00:30:16.181 --> 00:30:18.888
I don't have a clear example of what this sort of up and down is.

00:30:18.888 --> 00:30:20.967
There's been a lot of talk about breath work.

00:30:20.967 --> 00:30:28.785
Hopefully that's a concrete example of how you can integrate that from something that a lot of people listening are probably going to be familiar with.

00:30:29.227 --> 00:30:36.384
Yeah, and there's one kind of basic rule that is really simple that will help people with.

00:30:36.384 --> 00:30:46.670
That is that if you are elongating your exhales, you're naturally going to take yourself into a parasympathetic state or a state of rest.

00:30:46.670 --> 00:30:49.680
You're naturally going to start to calm yourself down.

00:30:49.680 --> 00:31:09.212
If you start to elongate your inhalations, well, you're going to start to activate your system and you're going to start to, like, take yourself into an activated state I don't want to say stress state, but that's a very basic rule to change your state depending on where you're trying to go.

00:31:09.433 --> 00:31:24.787
Yep, yeah, it's so easy to get lost in the weeds of this protocol, this type of breathing, so, yeah, I love that you gave that example and that very basic rule Longer exhales if you want to relax or down-regulate, longated inhales if you want to up-regulate.

00:31:24.787 --> 00:31:38.346
Yeah, so you mentioned how stress or trauma can sort of be stored in the body and how certain up-regulating breathing can sort of release that.

00:31:38.346 --> 00:31:44.324
Could you speak more to that, because I'm very unfamiliar with sort of the nuance and the mechanism of that.

00:31:45.288 --> 00:31:53.627
Yeah, yeah, I'm fascinated by it, and that's so.

00:31:53.627 --> 00:32:14.666
The thing that a lot of people don't realize, especially as breath work is gaining popularity, is that when you are breathing heavily for an extended period of time, you're mimicking a state of distress, or you're mimicking a trauma state on a physiological level, like if I was being chased by a tiger.

00:32:14.666 --> 00:32:15.865
How would I be breathing?

00:32:15.865 --> 00:32:18.288
It'd be like yeah.

00:32:20.083 --> 00:32:27.809
So a lot of people say that you're hyper-oxygening the system or there's some metaphysical aspects behind it.

00:32:27.809 --> 00:32:38.053
But what you're doing is you're really just mimicking a state of trauma within that and you're sending yourself into this activated state which.

00:32:38.053 --> 00:32:58.865
There are benefits to that, and the benefits of that is that in a safe session, in a safe container, if you will, and you have a practitioner that's trained and knows how to guide you, you can take someone's physiology into that state.

00:32:58.865 --> 00:33:05.426
And what happens is, a lot of the time, you're mimicking this stress state.

00:33:05.426 --> 00:33:07.165
You're mimicking a trauma response.

00:33:07.165 --> 00:33:15.111
Nothing's necessarily happening to you in your head, right, but on a physiological state you're mimicking it.

00:33:15.111 --> 00:33:49.528
And so, in the safe container, a lot of the times, people's unprocessed emotions will come back up, because when we go through something stressful or traumatic in our normal life, our society has taught us to suck it up and don't show it and just get stuck in this inhalation, sympathetic, fight or flight response and then go and go to a therapist and work through the story mentally.

00:33:49.528 --> 00:33:59.469
Well, you can work through the story mentally as much as you want, but if your body is still stuck in that state, there's not a lot you're going to be able to do.

00:33:59.469 --> 00:34:09.690
And so what's going on in those up-regulating breathwork styles is you're mimicking a state of distress which gives your organism an opportunity to discharge.

00:34:09.690 --> 00:34:24.469
Now this discharge, if you will, is and if people want to learn more about this, you can go read Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine or the Body Keeps the Score by Vessel Vander Kolk.

00:34:25.519 --> 00:34:37.311
If you look at animals when they go through something stressful or traumatic, they have a certain process, response that they go through afterwards and it's considered a discharge.

00:34:37.311 --> 00:34:49.626
Usually there'll be some sort of shaking, maybe there's sound involved, deep belly breathing, and I consider a discharge as like it could be an emotional release.

00:34:49.626 --> 00:35:01.429
It could be crying, yelling, screaming, it could be laughing, could be singing, could be moving your body in ways you haven't let yourself move.

00:35:01.429 --> 00:35:13.965
What's going on is this discharge is completing the necessary action that your physical body needed to do in the moment of that stressor but never had the opportunity to do it.

00:35:13.965 --> 00:35:26.887
And why that's powerful is that when you have this discharge, it's a signal to your nervous system that the threat has been completed and we can go back into a relaxed state.

00:35:26.887 --> 00:35:45.588
And so that's why you get people that are stuck in these chronic states of fight or flight because they never actually had an opportunity to discharge, to feel their emotions, to shake and cry and yell and scream and hit a pillow as hard as they can.

00:35:45.588 --> 00:35:55.425
And if you look at a child, one of my favorite quotes in the Bible is like unless you become a child, you'll never enter the kingdom of heaven.

00:35:55.425 --> 00:36:19.110
And as you look at children, they're so much more connected to the innate intelligence of their body that when something stressful goes on, they immediately start having a temper tantrum because they know that if they don't move it through them in some sort of way, then it's going to be harbored and held in the body and then eventually it's going to bottle up and it's eventually going to come out somewhere.

00:36:19.110 --> 00:36:20.443
And there you get.

00:36:21.125 --> 00:36:24.487
One of my favorite examples is passive aggressiveness.

00:36:24.487 --> 00:36:35.768
Well, emotions are designed to move through us and usually in a healthy person an emotion takes about 90 seconds to move through you.

00:36:35.768 --> 00:36:40.963
If you have a hard cry and you let yourself cry, you just let it out.

00:36:40.963 --> 00:36:45.583
Usually it's only going to take about 90 seconds and then you're going to be like all right, I feel a lot better.

00:36:45.583 --> 00:36:52.463
But for some people it takes 20 years because they just don't know how to do it right, or if it's anger.

00:36:53.204 --> 00:37:00.684
You never allowed yourself to actually feel anger, and anger is like every human, it's a byproduct of being human.

00:37:00.684 --> 00:37:04.130
We experience anger, but it's a very scary thing in our culture.

00:37:04.130 --> 00:37:20.630
If you bottle it up, that anger wants to go somewhere and it'll find very sneaky ways to come out, such as the people that you're around, your closest relationships, this passive aggressiveness where it just starts leaking out on all the people around you.

00:37:20.630 --> 00:37:32.405
And so I look at this modality as almost like a preventative health, where it's like you're able to prevent, so that you're not venting on other people.

00:37:32.405 --> 00:37:38.947
There's one aspect of that and there's a multitude of other things, but does that make sense?

00:37:38.947 --> 00:37:39.802
Did I put that in there?

00:37:41.007 --> 00:37:41.528
Yeah, totally.

00:37:41.800 --> 00:37:54.728
I just keep coming back to the more and more you speak, I keep going back to what you end up studying in school, how you had the mental side and the physical side, so the addiction therapy and the physical therapy.

00:37:55.440 --> 00:38:13.490
And it seems like so many of the conversations I have on this show are around health care and the medical community and the disconnection or the siloing of even just within the medical world, the siloing of a primary care from an endocrinologist from an OBGYN.

00:38:13.490 --> 00:38:24.909
I feel like that is just driving so many of the issues at least from just the medical community, with how hard it is to communicate and how we treat the body as if it's not connected.

00:38:24.909 --> 00:38:56.126
So I think a lot of what you are talking about and what you've been able to do so successfully is bridging the mental and the physical and it just seems like in, at least in America, in our society, this concept is being touted as revolutionary and progressive and a lot of the rest of the world just figured this out like thousands of years ago, like the thing that's on top of our head is connected to the rest of the body as well, you figured there would be some sort of overlap.

00:38:57.179 --> 00:39:17.465
No, I think that was a really good explanation of kind of understanding how that sort of up regulation, that sort of energetic stimulus is, can be used as a therapeutic avenue for people to teach themselves how to work through something.

00:39:17.465 --> 00:39:26.987
And I've never heard that an emotion can be kind of worked through in 90 seconds before and you gave the comparison of compared to like 20 years.

00:39:26.987 --> 00:39:34.202
I was gonna say, yeah, people hold onto these things like for a lifetime, when it's something that you could work through rather quickly and like.

00:39:34.202 --> 00:39:39.588
Let's be clear, I'm certainly one of those people too where I need to get closer to that 90 second spectrum.

00:39:40.619 --> 00:39:42.746
I mean, yeah, that's most of us.

00:39:42.746 --> 00:39:45.364
I'm really fascinated by.

00:39:45.364 --> 00:40:12.143
Gabramate is another guy that I kind of study in his book, new Book, the Myth of Normal, and most of our issues are a very normal response to an abnormal environment and, like most of our trauma responses are most of our inability to be connected to our emotions and our body is because of the environment that we grew up in.

00:40:12.143 --> 00:40:17.170
And I almost equate that to like sitting in a chair.

00:40:17.170 --> 00:40:29.150
Well, most of the responses and the issues inside of my body from sitting in a chair, it's a very normal response to an abnormal environment.

00:40:29.150 --> 00:40:36.510
The tension in my hips is a normal response To an abnormal environment because my body didn't adapt to sit in a chair.

00:40:36.510 --> 00:40:40.248
So I'm like I'm gonna have these normal pathological issues.

00:40:40.248 --> 00:40:43.427
So there's the environmental aspect.

00:40:43.427 --> 00:40:45.206
And now to your point.

00:40:45.980 --> 00:40:59.659
The only reason why this modality is growing is, in my opinion, is because we've weeded out a lot of the natural ways that we discharge in our culture.

00:40:59.659 --> 00:41:36.684
In our culture you look at indigenous cultures that like they would sing and dance and shake and cry and yell and scream and around a fire, altogether Like this full expression of just getting it and moving it out of your body together and like none of it's bad or good, it's like let's just all move it through us and we've definitely weeded out a lot of those ceremonial practices that help us to move that through.

00:41:36.684 --> 00:41:52.273
And I'll just say one other thing on that is that, like the up-regulation part of this breathwork, it's powerful for emotional release, it's powerful for this discharging, which has benefits.

00:41:52.273 --> 00:42:10.588
But it's also just as necessary and I see a lot of breathwork techniques that are in this same field of kind of emotional release, and because there's other breathworks that are in, like sports performance, and that's a completely different thing, but it's just as important to now.

00:42:10.840 --> 00:42:14.005
Okay, we had this emotional release, we had this discharge.

00:42:14.005 --> 00:42:17.708
Let's bring it back down to a relaxed state.

00:42:17.708 --> 00:43:05.565
Let's start to showcase the nervous system how to come back down utilizing elongated exhales and I'll say one other piece on that and let's start to fire and wire elevated emotions within that, because it's never about the release, it's about the space that you created to then bring in how you want to feel, how you want to show up and starting to and this is based off of a lot of Joe Dispens's stuff, which he has plenty of research on what the benefits of, like creating elevated emotions and firing and wiring elevated emotions back into the body while taking the nervous system into a relaxed state, is incredibly powerful.

00:43:06.699 --> 00:43:15.306
Is that the idea that there's just gonna be, if you've had sort of this very strong negative emotion for a while and you sort of clear that there's gonna be a void?

00:43:15.306 --> 00:43:20.449
So you're just being very deliberate about what you're sort of replacing?

00:43:20.449 --> 00:43:26.344
I don't know if replacing is the right word, I don't always have the right language for this, but yeah, no, through my.

00:43:26.545 --> 00:43:27.688
I mean, you're spot on.

00:43:27.688 --> 00:44:03.987
Most people's identities are associated with their stressors and their traumas, and so when you start to like move that through and like deactivate that, because essentially nothing's ever released I think that word is probably misused in a way, because it's really like we're deactivating these natural responses such as fight, flight, freeze, fawn, which are helpful, but if they're left activated chronically they become the thing that causes issues.

00:44:03.987 --> 00:44:13.367
So when that's deactivated, people's identities are often like so intertwined with their trauma that they don't know who they are.

00:44:13.367 --> 00:44:27.469
But there's this space that is like okay, let's actually now start to like tune into, well, how do I wanna feel and who do I wanna become?

00:44:27.579 --> 00:44:39.925
Because I've seen it a lot of the times with these powerful breathwork modalities where people have this powerful release and then they're kind of just like in this void space of not knowing who they are.

00:44:39.925 --> 00:44:44.248
And you know there's probably still in the dysregulation of it too.

00:44:44.248 --> 00:45:13.606
But it's just my point being is that we need to make sure we're doing the other side as well, and that's there's concepts in I think it's positive psychology as well that showcase, like once you have someone go into their negative story, that we actually need to have something to replace it and to anchor this person into the opposing side, and it just kind of follows that, that duality model of everything that I base things off of.

00:45:14.860 --> 00:45:22.164
Yeah, so this is something I was gonna ask more about, like the specifics of sort of your teachings, but it seems applicable here.

00:45:22.164 --> 00:45:29.907
Where is there like, do you encourage people to do this in a sort of coached setting?

00:45:29.907 --> 00:45:41.724
Because you can just go on YouTube and look up a variety of breathwork protocols and you just do it in your room, right, and it's probably like anything where there should be certain intentionality behind whatever you're doing.

00:45:41.724 --> 00:45:43.306
That's gonna make it much more powerful.

00:45:43.306 --> 00:46:00.541
But do you have suggestions around maybe the environment that somebody should get introduced to this in whether it be in a group setting, in a coach setting, having some sort of instructor, or just having the right intentionality doing it on your own Is that?

00:46:00.541 --> 00:46:02.306
Can that be appropriate in some situations?

00:46:03.079 --> 00:46:04.465
No, this is a great question.

00:46:04.465 --> 00:46:08.081
There's benefits to both, I would say.

00:46:08.081 --> 00:46:23.985
When it comes to the modality that I teach, somatic breathwork, it is done with a practitioner and there's certain reasons why Self-practices are powerful.

00:46:23.985 --> 00:46:32.210
Like Wim Hof, some of these shorter breathwork practices are great for you know, you can go and do a YouTube video.

00:46:32.210 --> 00:46:51.648
But the longer breathwork style journeys, I would kind of categorize them as there's benefits to having someone guide you, because most of our stressors, our traumas, are actually come from another person.

00:46:51.648 --> 00:47:14.789
Like most of our stuff happened in relation to our parents, in relation to, you know, other people, most of our wounding happens from other people and one of my favorite quotes in Body Keeps the Score is healing happens in the presence of an empathetic witness, and so it's actually having another person there for you.

00:47:15.179 --> 00:47:15.943
That's a great line.

00:47:16.786 --> 00:47:17.228
What'd you say?

00:47:17.639 --> 00:47:18.402
That's a great line.

00:47:19.119 --> 00:47:32.005
Healing happens in the presence of an empathetic witness man and I'll give just an example of this is like you can, you know, spend a lot of a long time and feel so enlightened and feel like, so, you know, solid in yourself.

00:47:32.005 --> 00:47:55.739
Go try to get into a relationship and that's gonna bring up all your triggers, all your wounds, because it's stored in the body but it doesn't get activated until you have someone else there to like to trigger it, and so the repatterning of it is incredibly powerful to have another person there to actually witness you in that.

00:47:55.739 --> 00:48:03.780
And that speaks to the first thing that you, you know, brought up in this conversation is community, is communion.

00:48:03.780 --> 00:48:22.329
We all wanna feel like we are seen and heard and beyond seen and heard, we all wanna feel like we're felt by other people, that we're understood, that we're like in this together, that, hey, I'm bringing something to the table for my tribe and it's helping you and you're helping me.

00:48:22.329 --> 00:48:31.206
It's an essential thing that we're wanting and I have seen it's just so much more powerful to have another person there for you.

00:48:31.206 --> 00:48:33.067
And there's a multitude of reasons there.

00:48:33.067 --> 00:48:56.670
I'll give one example Because I'm a body worker, I do add a lot of hands on touch aspects of this, which is not always necessary in a breath work session, but it can be really powerful and there's a lot of amazing ways that you can work with somebody physically in that and I always, you know, obviously ask for consent.

00:48:57.019 --> 00:49:25.347
The this style of breath work is an inward journey, so I ask for consent if someone's you know, okay, if with me physically working on them during the session and I was working with a woman and I also say within that that at any time during the session that you feel like I'm kind of taking you out of your state or it's not benefiting you in any way, like feel free to just kind of push me away, like I don't, I don't fully know where they're at.

00:49:25.500 --> 00:49:28.465
I can attune to them, but I don't fully know where they're at.

00:49:28.465 --> 00:49:44.485
And I went to work on this woman and she, you know, I'm like getting down to like do a physical technique with her and she just throws me off of her and in my head I'm like, oh shit, did I do something wrong?

00:49:44.485 --> 00:49:49.364
Like, oh God, I this, uh-oh, you know I did something wrong.

00:49:49.364 --> 00:50:27.809
And she shared at the end that that was one of the most powerful things that I've ever gone through, because that was the first time I've ever said no to a man and he's actually listened to me and so, like, if we're like, I basically played the part of being able to help her repattern, feeling safe to say no and having a masculine figure that's going to actually honor that for her and her nervous system feeling safe in that context, like that's an example of repatterning within that.

00:50:27.809 --> 00:50:42.050
So that's an example of how having a practitioner there can bring up different relational dynamics that make this just make it very interesting.

00:50:43.820 --> 00:50:45.987
I'm sure interesting is a good word for it.

00:50:45.987 --> 00:50:49.505
I had down here a note about fear.

00:50:49.505 --> 00:51:04.844
I'm not sure if that's the right question or the right word, but maybe do people need to know what exactly like I don't wanna say issue, but like what would they're hurting from before going through this.

00:51:04.844 --> 00:51:10.284
Or can they just have some sort of ambiguous pain that they know where?

00:51:10.284 --> 00:51:14.329
Maybe they're not targeting something specifically, but they just know right.

00:51:14.329 --> 00:51:19.005
They have some sort of underlying depression or just darkness within them that they wanna try to address.

00:51:19.860 --> 00:51:21.606
Yeah, this is a great question as well.

00:51:21.606 --> 00:51:24.965
I always tell people not to.

00:51:24.965 --> 00:51:33.739
It's better not to, because we can try to get caught up in the mind and the story.

00:51:33.739 --> 00:51:52.659
A lot of the times it's not about the story of what happened, and that's why this is somatic breath work, because it's just giving someone's organism an opportunity to complete whatever necessary action it needed to do, and a lot of the times we don't know in our head.

00:51:52.659 --> 00:52:03.320
We don't always know what our physical body needed to do, because we have evolved from this bottom up.

00:52:03.320 --> 00:52:14.179
Our nervous system and our being operates from a bottom up perspective, meaning that when something stressful happens, we immediately have an instinctual response.

00:52:14.219 --> 00:52:18.320
If someone breaks into your house right now, you're not gonna be thinking about it.

00:52:18.320 --> 00:52:22.880
You're either going to run towards them, you're gonna run away from them, or you're gonna freeze where you're at.

00:52:22.880 --> 00:52:26.340
And that's happening like that because of your survival.

00:52:26.340 --> 00:52:28.199
It's not happening in your mind.

00:52:28.199 --> 00:52:42.340
Then you're gonna have an emotional response, you're gonna feel a ton of fear, maybe you feel a ton of courage, and that's your body's getting pumped full of a chemical concoction of glandular secretions.

00:52:42.340 --> 00:53:01.340
You're feeling a lot of emotions at that point and only lastly does the mind come in and create a perception, and that perception is usually based on what happened and what patterns you chose on an instinctual and an emotional level.

00:53:01.340 --> 00:53:03.327
So I'll give you an example.

00:53:03.327 --> 00:53:12.340
Say, someone did break into your house, you had this instinctual response to run away and you felt a ton of fear.

00:53:12.340 --> 00:53:18.269
You made it to safety and then you called the police and they came and arrested this person.

00:53:18.269 --> 00:53:29.340
Only after that whole scenario went down, your mind will start to create a story that, oh shit, I'm not safe in my house anymore, or I'm not safe in the world anymore.

00:53:29.340 --> 00:53:34.340
And now that story is gonna be the perception that you're moving through into the world with.

00:53:34.340 --> 00:53:39.340
But we have to address things on both sides.

00:53:39.340 --> 00:53:57.077
That's why this part is powerful is because we actually need to allow someone to complete the necessary action on an instinctual level, on an emotional level, and a lot of times that will provide space for a new perspective to happen.

00:53:58.021 --> 00:54:05.027
Another example that I'll give is speaking about the current state of affairs in the world.

00:54:05.027 --> 00:54:14.403
Know the governments, the institutions that have been in power for a long time, religions?

00:54:14.403 --> 00:54:26.260
They understand that if I can keep you in a state of fear or guilt or shame, you're going to be operating like instinctually, you're going to be operating emotionally.

00:54:26.260 --> 00:54:35.746
You're probably going to run to the store and buy all the toilet paper Like that has anything to do with your social survival or your survival whatsoever.

00:54:35.746 --> 00:54:37.632
You're not going to be thinking clearly.

00:54:37.632 --> 00:54:46.135
A lot of times it's like let's just help people move through the physical aspect and the emotional aspect.

00:54:46.135 --> 00:54:49.231
When you clear that, a lot of times you become clear.

00:54:49.914 --> 00:54:55.434
If your body is stuck in a state of fear and contraction, you're going to be picking up on contracted ideas.

00:54:55.434 --> 00:55:00.833
This might be a little woo-woo for your audience, but they haven't necessarily figured out.

00:55:00.833 --> 00:55:04.748
Okay, where does mind happen inside of your body?

00:55:04.748 --> 00:55:06.192
Does it happen between your ears?

00:55:06.192 --> 00:55:19.380
A technology such as yoga has understood this for a long time is let's actually put the body in different positions, because your nervous system is an antenna.

00:55:19.380 --> 00:55:24.880
Based on the state of that antenna is going to be what you're actually picking up on mentally.

00:55:24.880 --> 00:55:30.121
If your body is stuck in a state of fear, you're going to be picking up on fear-centered ideas.

00:55:30.121 --> 00:55:38.297
If you're dysregulated and you're stressed, well, your mind is probably going to tend towards stressed thoughts.

00:55:38.297 --> 00:55:50.050
I'm focused on working with the body first and then let's see what type of space that actually creates and changes the mindset that you're inhabiting Does that make sense Totally.

00:55:50.271 --> 00:56:06.181
I appreciate you sharing that, because I've wanted to be able to talk about these things, but I don't think I'm the most skilled communicator at this yet I wanted to be very particular about the first person I brought on to communicate some of these concepts.

00:56:06.181 --> 00:56:11.291
I know you're such a good communicator about these, so I'm glad we ended up getting there to that point.

00:56:11.291 --> 00:56:15.181
That's what I'm touching on the idea of law of attraction.

00:56:17.856 --> 00:56:22.295
I expand upon that a little bit how you were saying the body is an antenna.

00:56:22.295 --> 00:56:27.436
The type of energy you're holding inside is kind of what you're going to attract and be attuned to.

00:56:33.818 --> 00:56:54.239
Definitely, especially in the spiritual community there's a lot of like let's expand our consciousness, let's connect spiritually, but all of that has to be done through actually feeling expansive and feeling safe in your body.

00:56:54.239 --> 00:57:07.922
For me, I had someone ask me do you believe that there's some sort of spiritual war going on or attack on our souls or something like that?

00:57:07.922 --> 00:57:15.867
I'm like I don't get too far into that, but I do believe that there is actually kind of a war going on against our body.

00:57:15.867 --> 00:57:32.862
If you look at the very predatory marketing that's done towards women makeup and breast implants your body's got to look this way or you're not going to find a mate same with men.

00:57:32.862 --> 00:57:38.992
You got to be successful, you got to take steroids, all these different things that the poison in our food.

00:57:38.992 --> 00:58:06.842
There is a war against our body because our body is where we have any sort of experience of every experience of love, every experience of every spiritual experience I've ever had, every experience of pain, every experience of joy has been through my body, because the body, essentially, is the temple, and the temple is where you connect to something that's greater than yourself right, god, source, spirit.

00:58:06.842 --> 00:58:12.436
If your body's in pain, it's going to be really hard for you to connect.

00:58:12.436 --> 00:58:18.717
That's why I'm just focused on like let's get the body in the best operating place.

00:58:18.717 --> 00:58:26.096
It can be from a physical fitness side of things, an emotional fitness side of things, a nutrition side of things.

00:58:27.217 --> 00:58:30.623
Then, for me, I struggled.

00:58:30.623 --> 00:58:40.197
I didn't necessarily struggle with a lot of mental stuff, but anytime I was struggling mentally I would just go do something to get myself in my body.

00:58:40.197 --> 00:58:43.003
I was growing up.

00:58:43.003 --> 00:58:50.168
I was always the kid outside playing and running and playing sports and skateboarding.

00:58:50.168 --> 00:58:54.376
I played basketball through high school and I played in college for a little bit.

00:58:54.376 --> 00:59:01.054
I wondered why I love that so much.

00:59:01.054 --> 00:59:10.273
When you're in your body and you're doing something physical like that, you're not thinking about what's going on in the past, you're not thinking about what's going on in the future.

00:59:10.273 --> 00:59:14.525
You're engulfed by the moment in time.

00:59:14.525 --> 00:59:17.835
To me, that's the most spiritual experience someone can have.

00:59:19.452 --> 00:59:29.798
Yeah, it's amazing how much physiology can affect psychology and psychology can affect physiology, Just going back to the idea that both speak to each other so much.

00:59:29.798 --> 00:59:32.911
Maybe we should have done this earlier.

00:59:32.911 --> 00:59:34.498
But can you explain what somatic is?

00:59:35.449 --> 00:59:38.934
Yeah, somatic is.

00:59:38.934 --> 00:59:51.059
There's a couple different understandings of it the Western understanding of somatics and Peter Levine is the father of modern-day somatics.

00:59:51.059 --> 00:59:59.460
The definition of somatic is of the body in relation to the mind.

00:59:59.460 --> 01:00:06.597
The field of somatics is basically how the state of your body is affecting the state of your mind.

01:00:06.597 --> 01:00:20.179
It is this bottom-up process, it's looking at the body and how it's affecting the mind, versus modern psychotherapy has a top-down approach to things.

01:00:20.179 --> 01:00:27.639
It's like let's look at the mind and see how it's affecting your body, which there are pros and cons to both of those and they're both necessary.

01:00:29.449 --> 01:00:38.358
For me, the pendulum needed to swing to the other side because we've been such a mentally dominant culture and we've forgotten the intelligence in our body.

01:00:38.358 --> 01:00:43.438
There's more intelligence in my body than my mind can ever even fathom.

01:00:43.438 --> 01:00:51.539
Try to wrap your head around digesting your food and absorbing and assimilating your nutrients and growing this hair on my face To me.

01:00:51.539 --> 01:00:57.664
To try to wrap my head around that mentally, my mind can't even do that.

01:00:57.664 --> 01:01:07.494
I've always swung the pendulum to let's attune to the intelligence of the body and then connect to the mind.

01:01:07.494 --> 01:01:19.175
The root word of somatic is from a Greek origin, soma, which they looked at soma as your living wholeness.

01:01:19.175 --> 01:01:24.061
They didn't separate mind, body, spirit.

01:01:24.061 --> 01:01:32.974
It's your soma, it's considered your living wholeness and it's all connected and they're all affecting each other at the same time.

01:01:34.157 --> 01:01:37.233
I think that's a really nice way to think of it You're living wholeness.

01:01:37.233 --> 01:01:41.472
I think I need to jot that down on a sticky note and keep it on my computer.

01:01:41.472 --> 01:01:57.822
When you were talking earlier about shorter duration breathwork protocols that you can probably just do on YouTube by yourself, and then you were saying longer breathwork journeys, how long is a session that you would take somebody through?

01:01:58.931 --> 01:02:03.746
Yeah, a typical somatic breathwork session is usually done for about an hour.

01:02:04.829 --> 01:02:06.172
It's an hour-long session.

01:02:06.172 --> 01:02:09.943
There's ways to make it short.

01:02:09.943 --> 01:02:14.936
You can condense it and do a 30-minute session or you could make it longer into a 90-minute session.

01:02:14.936 --> 01:02:34.032
Traditional holotropic breathwork, which is probably the most well-studied modality when it comes to these longer breathwork journey-style modalities, that's typically done for three hours long and it's up-regulated in the whole time.

01:02:34.032 --> 01:02:36.036
It's really intense.

01:02:36.036 --> 01:02:45.260
Essentially, what you're doing is you're creating an NDE, which means a near-death experience.

01:02:45.260 --> 01:03:03.963
You're pushing that state of physiological stress and reenactment of trauma to the point of like I'm having an NDE and I'm probably going to have some sort of psychedelic or spiritual experience from that, which is definitely unnecessary and, in my opinion, too much for the general population.

01:03:03.963 --> 01:03:18.338
That's why I kind of condensed it and we have rounds of breath holds where we're balancing CO2 to O2 ratio and kind of making sure people don't get too much respiratory alkalosis.

01:03:19.822 --> 01:03:22.378
Typically a somatic breathwork session is an hour-long.

01:03:22.378 --> 01:03:29.476
There's 30 minutes of up-regulating, 30 minutes of down-regulating, with some breath holds in between.

01:03:29.476 --> 01:03:35.934
As far as the daily practice goes for me, I like to stay pretty balanced.

01:03:35.934 --> 01:03:45.644
I'll do like three minutes of up-regulating, deep inhales and exhales out of my mouth where I am taking myself into a stress state.

01:03:45.644 --> 01:04:03.684
I'll do a breath hold, kind of at the top, an inhale hold, and then I will switch to breathing in through the nose and elongating my exhales for another three minutes and then I'll do a breath hold at the bottom and just really try to….

01:04:03.684 --> 01:04:08.226
A lot of times that'll take me into quite a meditative state and maybe I'll meditate for a little bit.

01:04:08.226 --> 01:04:15.347
It actually has helped my meditation practice as well, because I definitely had a….

01:04:15.347 --> 01:04:22.916

Mastering Breathwork: A Journey into Somatic Healing and Emotional Liberation with Steven Jaggers

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