EP 189: John Douillard | Ayurveda and Resilience

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Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is Fleet Maul, your host and today I'm talking with John Duyard, who for my money is really one of the leading Ayurvedic healers and physicians in the world. He is just absolutely brilliant. I don't think I've ever met anyone with a deeper understanding of the human body. You can check out his work@lifespa.com and he has many free resources there. And all you have to do is listen to just one video or audio with him talking about any aspect of human health and you immediately pick up on just the genius that he has and the deep level of understanding and education. He's deeply grounded in both traditional Ayurvedic science and in current Western science and integrates the two beautifully and just deep, deep view of what human health and thriving is all about and how to really work with our own.

Health and well being regimens from diet and all the rest of it in order to optimize our health and well being. So, John Duyard, give it a listen.

And I'm really thrilled to be here today with Dr. John Douillard. How are you, Dr. John?

Great, Fleet, thanks. Good to be here.

My name is Flea Ball, I'm your co host for this session and I'm really looking forward to this conversation with Dr. John because I can't think of anybody who has a more whole system, holistic, whole person knowledge of the human body than you do. So I'm looking forward to this. So I'm going to share a bit of your bio with our audience and then we'll get started.

Okay, sounds good.

Dr. John Duyard, DCCAP, is a globally recognized leader in fields of natural health, Ayurveda and sports medicine. He's the creator of Lifespa.com, the leading Ayurvedic health and wellness resource on the web. With more than 9 million views on YouTube and and more than 130,000 newsletter subscribers, LifeSpa.com is evolving the way Ayurveda is understood around the world with thousands of articles and videos joining ancient wisdom with modern science. John is the former director of player development for the New Jersey Nets NBA team, author of seven health books, including his newest Amazon bestseller, Eat Wheat, a Repeat guest on Dr. Oz and newly released Yoga journal video course Ayurveda.

Ayurveda 201 on Ayurvedic Psychology. He directs Lifespan Ayurvedic Clinic, the 2013 holistic wellness center of the Year in Boulder, Colorado. And.

One thing I've always loved about your work is how you integrate both Western and Eastern science and develop such a deep understanding of the functioning of the human body and really recommend people to check out your work. And you have so much.

Free information and videos and everything available on your website. I think all anyone has to do is just listen to one of your videos and they pick up on the depth of the approach that you take.

So today we are focused on individual resilience. Overall, the summit's about how can we deepen and sustain the individual, collective, systemic climate. Resilience. We need to face the really daunting problems that face humanity today with the climate emergency we're in, the pandemic we've been in for a couple of years, increased divisiveness and polarization culturally and politically around the world, and ongoing geopolitical conflicts. And now this latest war, the war in Ukraine, and another refugee crisis. So very challenging times we're living in. And today we are focused on individual resilience. And I wonder if, to begin with, you could just say maybe what resilience means to you from an Ayurvedic perspective. How would you define resilience?

Yeah, no, you're right. I think I can't remember there ever being a more challenging time than this. And from the ayurvedic perspective.

We talk about something called weatherproofing. And weatherproofing means that, you know, you're not. It's in, in psychology, it's called field independence, where you're not affected by the field. There's an old story with Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers, and I'm not necessarily a big golfer really, but he was putting like a big, very long putt to win the tournament. And as he's pulling back the putter, the train comes by, blows the whistle, and everybody in the crowd goes. And he hits the putt with this strain, blowing the whistle, which was right next door. And they thought he was just going to miss the putts or disturb him. He hits the putt, sinks the putt. And at the end, they are interviewing, he said, you know, Mr. Hogan, what did you think when that train came by and blew the whistle to disturb your putt? And he goes, foot train. And that's, that's called weatherproofing. You know, the ability to be independent of the field, which doesn't mean oblivious or not having compassion or understanding to the field. Because in this situation with the war going on, I mean, that's. There's nothing. There's. We should all in the compassion is just overwhelming. And it's overwhelming around the world. But weatherproofing means, you know, when. When we're happy, when something good happens and we're sad, when something bad happens, then our happiness, our state of being is affected by what's happening which is outside of us, which we can't control. So from the Ayurvedic perspective, it's like we can change what we can control, but we can't change what's coming in the incoming. We can't. And if we're constantly addicted to wanting good things and nice things to happen or buy things or get things, and that makes us happy, then when those things stop, we're really, really depressed, we're unhappy. So happiness is sort of that thing that depends on what's happening, happening in your life. And weatherproofing is what really Ayurveda is about. Because there's two ways of looking at life. One is objective referral and one is subject referral. Object referral is like everything outside. The objects around me are going to make me happy or sad. So I try to manipulate them to make me happy all the time. Subjective referral means I'm referring life based on me. And in Ayurveda, it's really cool. There's an aspect of the Vedas called Dhanur Veda, which is the Dhanurasana is the bo asana and it's the asana of the bow. Where the analogy was if you pull back the bow and you hold it perfectly still.

And then you take action or shoot the arrow in your life from that place of deep being and awareness, then you're going to have a transformational, precise action. But if you take the bow back and you're moving it around all over the place and your mind's wandering and sometimes you get what you want, sometimes you don't, and your mind's just monkey mind, you know, then you're never even going to find the arrow, let alone have a transformational action. And that's what Ayurveda calls a karmic removing, releasing action. That that action, if it comes from that deep place of silence or peace in your being, from you as opposed to you in your mind, manipulating the outside world to try to make you happy from the outside. It's you. Actually, we have to sort of. To navigate this Crazy world. More than ever before, we have to navigate inner space, we have to pull back the boat, become more self aware and realize that at that place inside of us we never change.

And you know, that's the part of us that where our joy and our happiness and our love and our satisfaction resides. And Ayurveda calls that Sattva. And that's a big piece of the Ayurvedic puzzle is to live a very sattvic, happy, loving, giving, caring, compassionate and understanding life. But not with your mind trying to make the outside stuff, the incoming all wonderful and rosy and sensory stimulated.

I love that. So you referenced so feels independent, which is not indifference, but it's the ability to be engaged with the world around us from a place grounded in that unconditionality you're talking about. And that's up and so that we can respond in that way. And I love that. And then you said subject, what were the terms? Subject?

Subjective referral.

Yeah, subjective referral versus object referral.

Right.

And yeah, I mean this is really about self empowerment and self agency and, and so it sounds like your definition of resilience. I know we're going to talk about how we can be more physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually resilient today in lots of different ways and lots of things can contribute to that. But it sounds like you're saying almost the deepest resource or reservoir for our resilience would be having access to that deep place in our being where we know that we're okay, that we fundamentally know we're okay. Where there's that innate wholeness, innate goodness, the sacred, the divine. And if we at least have a foothold down there, it kind of changes everything about how we respond to life.

Yeah. And I think the game of life, Ayurveda calls it the Great Battle or the Mahabharata. But the game, I like to think of it as a play. And if you start engaging in that play, where you start to become more self aware of when you're engaging in behavior that's manipulating your environment to please you, the manipulating the people around you to like you as opposed to you dropping into your inner space and using tools like meditation, yoga and breathing, we can talk more about how to get there. And there's many ways, lifestyle, diet, exercise, so many ways to do it from the Ayurvedic perspective that are different. But when you start to attack this from all angles, you become a level of self aware that you begin to see that there's a couple of doors you can walk through, there's Door number one, which is the old way, you've been doing it since you were a kid, trying to manipulate the environment and to please you in some way. And then there's you taking, you know, pulling back that bow and taking action through the window of compassion and understanding as opposed to judgment and manipulation. And you begin to realize that once you become more self aware, you don't automatically go down road number one or door number one. You actually can you actually see that there's another option for you. And we start to take that road to. This is what I call the game of life. When you walk around with some level of self awareness, you begin to see that there's two ways I can engage in this thing. I can manipulate the outside world and make me happy, or I can drop in and just do me. And that's a beautiful thing when it begins to happen. And that's what gives you resiliency and weatherproofing where you're not affected by the good weather, the bad weather, you're just doing your thing, but you're fully engaged in trying to, you know, expand your joy, your bliss, your love, and help the world be a better place. And we have good science behind how that actually happens.

We're going to explore that science today. And. But you're referencing there the timeless conversation between Krishna and Arjuna and the Bhagavad Gita, part of the Mahabharata epic. Right. And that was certainly about engaging. It had nothing to do with indifference, but it was engaging from that deep place of beingness. Absolutely. So, and you know, we also, and this isn't to in any way romanticize or idealize any kind of poverty. There's tremendous suffering in poverty. But we do know that there have been traditional cultures that by Western standards it might have been a level of poverty, but it was really a much less material culture where the people had a more abiding happiness. It wasn't so, you know, in the west we've gotten used to the idea that we should have all this stuff, right? And we have so much power, we think we have so much power to manipulate the world to be the way we want it to be. So much hubris around that, that actually sets us up for a much bigger vacillation and happiness and unhappiness than traditional cultures had.

I think. Yeah, a couple of my kids went down to the Copper Canyon in Mexico where the Tower of Hamar lived, which is like right next to all the weed growing and all the cartels and all that.

And they were just so blown away by the simplicity of their life. They didn't have anything. Didn't have TV or anything like that. But they were. They came back and they said, dad, they are so happy and they are so content, and they have nothing. I watched these kids play for three hours with a Coke bottle, an old Coke bottle and a string. And they're just playing and playing and laughing and giggling. And it was just the most amazing thing. And I think it was really great for my kids to see that. And they're both doing really cool things now in their life to try to help change the world. But the point being is that we just, like you said, we're so addicted to this environment. Then when we take a little bit of it away, we're like, oh, my God, my Internet went down. My God, the world's ended. As opposed to trying to find, you know, some level of happiness and contentment from inside, which is permanent. You know, it doesn't come and go.

Absolutely. So when thinking about resilience.

Even at the individual level, and we could broaden it out to the collective level, but we can talk about physical resilience, our ability to bounce back from challenging physical situations or illnesses.

Mental emotional resilience, the health of our brain, our ability to be more emotionally balanced and bounce back from. Or move forward from challenging emotional experiences and also spiritual resilience. And I wonder if you could talk about how those four areas, at least one kind of map for our human experience, Right? The physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, how those are interrelated from Ayurvedic perspective.

Yeah, well, I think you've kind of.

Been addressing that already a little bit.

Yeah, I think the cool thing about that, but Ayurveda is that they never were disconnected, you know, that everything you do. The goal of Ayurveda is full human potential. And that this human body is an instrument for perceiving the subtle. Perceiving subtle energy. And, you know, and letting that subtle energy. The love, the joy, the giving, the caring, the compassion, the understanding of why people do what they do. That's the fuel that really ultimately drives us. And when we were young kids, and this is kind of the. This is what Ayurveda is about. They understood that at young, that children, the first six years of life, we get these impressions that as adults make up 95% of the things we think and say and do, according to a number of studies. So which means that we're walking around basically unconscious, because we are. And when you're a young kid, you want mom and dad to Love you. You want them to appreciate you, want them to buy you stuff. So we get addicted to that world of manipulating the environment by mom and dad in particular to get what we want. That is a pretty unconscious way of being. And that according to the science is affecting 95% of the stuff we think and say and do. Which is pretty crazy, right? So Ayurveda realized that was pretty unconscious. So at around teenage years there was a rite of passage that would be what kids would go through where they would start to realize that we can't keep getting happiness from mom and dad. I have to start doing me as opposed to doing them. And we've created certain levels of neuroplasticity in the brain that are roads that we drive down that are really ingrained in making us do the same dumb thing again and again and again, manipulate our environment. We go home for the holidays, we treat our parents terribly, we're upset with them. We start acting like a four year old again. These are old ingrained patterns. And Ayurveda is like that is such an unconscious state of mind. We can't take that into our adult life because our adult life is about beginning to become more aware of the subtle taking action on you versus them and starting to free yourself from those old mental, emotional patterns of behavior. They knew that the mind, this crazy mind of ours is what drives our body into physical disrepair, into degeneration. And they knew that that's what the mind is this cause of most imbalances. So they needed to become conscious. And that's why Ayurveda was created, to help us become conscious. So it's different. So when you think about lifestyle and diet and exercise and yoga and breathing and meditation.

I can cite for you science underneath all those aspects of self help that support neuroplasticity, transforming old patterns of the brain and behavior that make us do that same dumb thing again and again and again. That's what's so cool about Ayurvedic medicine and is that it was designed for what we're all trying to become is somewhat weatherproof. But not just weatherproof, like you said, indifferent, but weatherproof where you're not, you know, you're not attracted and tempted by the outside world to be your source of happiness, but actually to have your inner space become your source through temptation. And starting to refine this human instrument to become aware of the subtle, which is love. You can't see it or touch it. The microbiome is a very subtle energy that regulates pretty much even all of our Behavior, you can't see it. The circadian rhythms which govern birds flying south and whales migrating and is now Nobel prize winning science. You can't see it, but these things that we can't see are the most powerful things.

That are affecting our behavior. And that's what Ayurveda was about starting to realize, wow, this game of life is to start to choose not the gross, but start to choose the subtle. And the subtles that expand you free you, make you happy and joyful for the right reasons and sometimes for no reason, because it's your nature.

Wow, that's so powerful what you're talking about. This is the basic fork in the road in human evolution where we choose consciousness versus continuing to lead a mechanical life. Also, as you were speaking, it made me think about 25 years ago I first did this very intense training called the Event, which I still have the privilege of leading today. And I haven't let it during the pandemic because it's just, you can't. Not something you can do online. But it's a very intense kind of group process that takes you deep into your family of origin conditioning. And I had done a lot of work on myself at that point, you know, for years in meditative traditions and in psychology. I had gone through all kinds of therapeutic processes as part of my psychological training. And yet in that training I saw a whole nother level of how basically my mom and dad stuff was still running my life. You know, that my, that that stuff was on some level and it was shocking to see it and kind of insulting, but it opened up a whole new level of growth for me to really see that, to be able to really free that myself from that and start living my own life. Right. To free myself to live my own life. Absolutely. So as I mentioned before, one of the things I've always admired about you is how you integrate Western and Eastern science at such depth and you're continually staying up to date. There's, and.

You know, it seems like there's so much confusing information out in the world about health today. There's so many different systems, some of them seem contradict or contradict each other and probably everybody kind of has to find what works for them. But I'm curious, since you continually learn and you're deeply grounded in Celia Vedic science, you're continually learning on every level of Western science and current neuroscience and so forth, what do you use as kind of your guide to not get lost in the confusion of different models and different approaches and stay on track with something that makes sense.

Yeah, that's a great question. You know.

Let me start by giving you a little bit of ancient Ayurvedic wisdom and how we get to where we are. You know, today we feel impressions through our heart. It's called sadhaka. Those impressions are then carried to our brain through avata, or what's called pranavata. And that pranavata writes or etches those impressions into the white matter of our brain. Ayurveda calls that tarpaka, which means to record and to store and to flush and to detoxify that. And that tarpa kapha is the brain lymphatic system, which we now know is called the glymphatic system, which dumps three pounds of plaque and garbage out of your head every year while you sleep. Well, we know that those old impressions are then written into the white matter of the brain. This is the alcohol of neuroplasticity. So I did a lot of research on.

Yoga, a lot of different things in Ayurveda, but one of the things that. That I really thought that is very, very powerful is the breathing, the pranayama techniques. Because I did, I looked at the research on every different pranayam technique that I could find research on, and I found that the one common denominator fleet was something called neuroplasticity, where these breathing techniques were designed to change the brainwave pattern, to actually rewrite the programming so we can stop driving down those same roads. And those roads that make us not weatherproof are the ones that are giving us information or feedback from the outside world. And that, I think, is one of the things that I spend a lot of time doing personally is, I think pranayama is the key. It's without. I think meditation obviously is really key. But pranayama preps your brain for the transformational benefit of meditation. Pranayama is the key for exercise. That's what you're doing when you're exercising, when you're breathing.

The research on just the benefit of the diaphragm functioning optimally. In one study, half of the elite athletes in the world don't even have a diaphragm that contracts and relaxes fully. And exercises for the diaphragm are used for heart failure, lung failure, for Covid, before, during and after, proven for lowering blood pressure, for reversing gerd, heartburn and indigestion. It's also used for. It's the number one pump for your entire lymphatic system. Now, in Ayurveda, the Lymph is called rasa. And the study of rasa is the study of longevity. So they had all these breathing techniques designed to get that diaphragm, which is the comfort of trash, to get the trash out of your body to support longevity is the number one thing. And it changes your neuroplasticity. So it keeps you, that energy of breathing, keeps you vibrating at a higher level. You know, when they go low, we go high kind of a thing. And you got to keep. That's such a beautiful thing to understand that, you know, go low, go high thing because. Because Ayurveda is about giving us the physiological fuel to choose to go high as opposed to being tempted with sensory stimulation. To stay low and not that low is necessarily bad and sensory stimulation is not necessarily bad. We're all going to want things in our life for sure. But if that's what governs your behavior, then we're lost in that we're addicted, that we have no way out of that. As opposed to starting to realize that you can feel and experience a level of freedom in a level of joy and real compassion for others.

When you stop doing them and start doing you. Because inside of all of us, when you dip down and pull back that boat, we're all the same. And connecting with that level with yourself is the only way you can then connect it, I think with others truly. Because there was a study that was done, it was a crazy study. It was giving gifts to people in a hedonistic way where you gave, but you wanted something in return. And the other group gave in a eudaimonic way, which means you gave in a way that you didn't have any expectations to get anything in return. And when the group gave hedonistically with a little bit, they wanted some like praise for their giving. It had a negative effect on the genetic code of the people you were giving it to. But when they gave it a eudaimonic way with no expectations, it had a positive life supporting effect on the genetic code in those people. So when we're doing us and giving truly, we're not only doing it because it's connecting with us, is connecting with them at a true deep level that you don't get when you have a little hook in what you're trying to get in return, right? And that little manipulation. But when you give fully and freely with no expectation, you're opening them up to experiencing the truth inside of them. Which is why Ayurveda, the word ayur means life, Veda means truth. It Literally means finding and accessing the truth of your life. And when you start doing you and people feel it in a deeper, different way, and they start feeling connected to that part of them, the truth of them, and they start letting that out. And that fleet, I really believe, is how we change the world with love, giving and compassion. That, like I said earlier, is called salt la. That kind of behavior. We're not doing it for yourself personal gain. You're doing it because it's your nature to be altruistic.

You know, I think, and I want to circle back and talk about. We're going to talk about breath work a little later in our conversation, but a couple things you brought up. One, you know.

I think that what you're referencing is Sattva, how you defined Ayurveda and sort of life truth, the truth of life.

That is there like sort of a signal of the truth in ourselves, of authenticity, of truth within ourselves, within others that can kind of be our guide. That we actually have this capacity to recognize that if we kind of clean things up enough, we have that innate capacity to have that North Star that knows kind of when we're on track and knows when we're getting off track. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, and I think it's really simple. I think it's the feeling of either contraction when something is happening that's not life supporting you feel a little contracted or expansion. And I think if you start tuning into just those two things, when you do something, does it expand you or does it contract you? And then, you know, if you're on the right track, that's a simple guide that I like to use a lot.

That's very simple. That's wonderful.

Also, you. You were talking about sense perceptions and. And we can get kind of very externally kind of addicted to, you know, the sensory fields and seeking pleasures through the sensory fields. But when we're able to sort of relax back into our being and start doing me as opposed to, you know, that, as you said, and get in touch with that level of our being where we recognize that unconditional wholeness, that unbrokenness, and then our sense perceptions can actually be a source of further expansion and awareness. And I'm wondering and could we not, you know, almost then also know how to make decisions around health and diet main things, Just because our sense perceptions have kind of gotten cleaned up a bit and we're not using them to try to capture the world.

We're.

We're coming from that place like you talked about, the bow. We're back Here and in a state of beingness instead of, you know, like that.

Yeah, I call it coming to your senses. And you know, the senses are bidirectional, you know, they of course, you know, give us information about the outside world, but they're avenues of consciousness and they actually give us awareness of ourselves as well. This is called pratihara in Ayurveda where you actually start using your senses to become more self aware. And the tools of the senses are very powerful. You know, light therapy, sound therapy, music therapy, you know, touch therapy. You know, there's so much research on the benefit of those because those sensors, those sensory therapies really do work because. And they work at a level of enhancing self awareness. When the body is more self aware, the body can recognize the problem as a problem and then elicit a healing response naturally. Like when you put a scab on your, you have a cut of your finger and your body grows a scab. You're not thinking, scab, please make a scab, scab, scab. The body is involved. That healing system is involuntary. All it needs is awareness of the problem as a problem and it'll elicit that healing response. And that's the beauty of our senses. That's why the senses are such powerful healing tools at the deepest level. Because it's not, you know, it's not a medicine where, you know, it sort of stops working over time. Your senses are, are creating a level of self awareness that creates spontaneous healing constantly.

I wonder if we could talk about.

Diet for a minute from an Ayurvedic perspective. You know, there again, there's so much information out there today and so many different approaches. A lot of people are attracted to the keto diets. There's the classic Mediterranean diet and then there's practices like intermittent fasting and just so many other things. And it can be quite confusing to figure out what's going to work for you. And my limited understanding of Ayurveda is there are different types. We're of different, at least three different types. And so there may be adjustments. But could you talk about just some of the basic principles of nutrition from an Ayurvedic perspective? I realize that's a big subject, but maybe just a few guiding principles.

Yeah, it's a huge subject. But yeah, I actually published something called the Three Season Diet Eating Guide where we publish grocery lists and recipe lists and superfood lists for every month of the year for free. So people can just get the information to connect with nature. Food is seasonal, it's circadian and they change from one season to the next to the next. In fact, the bugs in our gut, according to the science, change from one season to the next to the next. So we have certain foods in the winter to help us build immunity and store energy and insulate ourselves. And we have certain foods in the spring which are, you know, help us decongest so we don't get overly congested in the wet, rainy, muddy spring. And we have foods in the summer to dissipate heat and they change. And the bugs have these very powerful effects because the bugs on the food change, bugs in our gut change. So we should eat, you know, somewhat in a seasonal manner. And I think that's what I think is the basic goal, making that shift, that if you were living off the land, you would do it automatically, you wouldn't think about it. And the science behind that is emerging and it's quite fascinating. And it's sort of ayurveda, you know, 101. Then you look at how much meat should we eat? Well, the hunter get, the hunter gatherers even, but also the centenarians, people who live over 100 generally eat majority of their diet as a plant based diet. So the goal generally is about 10 to 15% of your diet being animal protein. So you want to kind of dial that down as a little bit more if you can, and that'll be healthier. But you do it in a gradual, graceful manner. And then I think then the other piece of the puzzle is just, you know, whole foods versus refined foods. This is critically important. And then, you know, processed foods and organic foods are really critical because the sprays that they put on the food that we eat, if it's not organic, over time they kill the microbes in your mouth and intestinal tract that make the enzymes that help you digest foods like wheat and dairy and nuts and seeds and grains and legumes and beans that everybody says you can't eat those foods anymore because they give you indigestion. So take them out of your diet. And that's why I spend so much time teaching people how to reboot their digestive system. Because if you can't digest weed or grains or nightshades or lectins, which have been eaten for millions of years, which have a hormetic effect on your intestinal lining, which means that they irritated a little bit enough to create an immune response which we now call gut immunity, which is 70% of your immune response because you ate harder to digest foods. And science is now showing that when people stop eating Those harder to digest foods because they give them a little gas or whatever as opposed to fixing the digestive problem weak link that it actually creates compromised immunity. So we begin to challenge our own immune system which was brewed over millions of years because we did eat a variety of challenging foods. And that's what gave us that immune response. Taking it away now science showing it actually starts to compromise that immune response. So the key is you have some indigestion, sure. Stop the food for a while, but fix the problem. Eat whole foods, eat in season. And when it comes to intermittent fasting. Absolutely. There's a well end with this one saying Ayurveda says eat one meal a day, you're a yogi. Two meals a day, you're a bogey. Which means a worker class person lifting and heavy labor needs a couple another meal for the day. And a person who eats three meals a day is a rogi, which is a mostly dead person sick in a hospital. They don't even have a name for four, five and six meal a day people because you're mostly dead at three. So we eat too much. Clearly this is called calorie restriction. There's no better science behind the benefits of calorie restriction. Eating a little bit less and I do think eating in an eight, you know, starting at a 12 hour window and work your way down to an eight hour window of eating. The science that is in is very, very ayurvedic. Ideally, if you could do it according to the circadian rhythms, having a good breakfast, which has been proven to be really valuable for your metabolism, people eat breakfast, you have significantly less risk of type 2 diabetes. The epidemic of our time and a big, possibly even later, but a bigger lunch and then a lighter supper. The word supper comes from the word soup or supplemental. And the circadian research is in, we digest in the daytime, not at the nighttime. And if we follow those very simple rules and have a relatively small eating window, eight to 12 hours.

You'Re going to be fine. And those are the rules.

Yeah, that's really simple and straightforward and clear. That's incredibly helpful. You know, you were mentioning, you know, these things are also interdependent. You know, reading James Nestor's book Breath, which we'll probably reference later, you know, he talked about how the shift eating soft foods completely changed our facial structure and then that impacted our breathing because it was smaller nasal passages and more narrow faces and you know, the whole thing. So you know, our getting away from our natural, more natural diets and then this idea that we think we should be anything we want all year round because it can be shipped to us.

Right.

And we developed this global system that's highly fragile and actually is not good for us to try to just eat whatever we want whenever we want. Yeah. So return to what you're saying. Just seems like real common sense and coming back to tuning into the natural rhythms of life.

Yeah, yeah.

And you mentioned the gut, the biome, and we're hearing so much about how the healthy functioning of our biome impacts every dimension of our life as our emotional life. And that, you know, that we actually have. Sometimes they talk about another brain there, that we have neural networks in the, in the biome. I think it's. Whereas we have like a 100 billion neurons in the brain, over a trillion brain cells, but 100 billion of the neurons, the one that form all the neural networks, and then maybe like 100 million in the gut, which is not as many, but it's still very significant. And I think we also had said we have neural networks in the heart as well. So sometimes when people are talking about the brain these days, they're saying, well, which, you know, you have these different brains within the body. It's all part of one holistic system. But I wonder if you could talk more about the healthy functioning of our biome. And I know a lot of your work when, and working with people like me is to get our biome back on track, to get our digestive system back on track, rather than just the symptomology.

Yeah, no, very true. There's so much science behind the lack of diversity that's taking place. There's one study with, they took some poop samples from some museums in New Mexico that were a thousand years old and they looked at, they could still figure out what microbes were in that food sample. And there was such a, compared to a modern human, and there was such a lack of microbial diversity in the modern human sample compared to the thousand year old sample that they actually literally called it an extinction event because of that lack of diversity. In the last 30 years, the food diversity around the world that we eat has decreased by 50%. So 30 years ago you go to, you know, Taiwan or wherever you go, you go and you had a wide diversity of food and now it's starting more and more just to become more industrialized. And we're all eating the same, unfortunately, highly processed food that have been sterilized with no bugs. I think that's really the, really the reason why you don't want to eat processed food because they put oils in it that are bleached and boiled and deodorized. So safflower, sunflower, canola, oils that make things stay on the shelf forever. But. And the reason why they stay on the shelf forever is because the bugs right on the counter and they're there, won't eat that stuff because it's been so highly processed. Even though microbes, good microbes, actually eat oil for a living, that's what they eat. But they won't eat that highly processed oil. They know better. So when you eat that oil, where does it go? It doesn't get digested. It doesn't get eliminated. It goes to the. To the garbage site, which is your liver. And this starts to create congestion of the liver and gallbladder. Number one abdominal surgery in America today is get your gallbladder removed because it's full of bile sludge. And that bile is the kingpin of digestive strength. If you don't have bile, which is the natural buffer for the acid, you're not going to make the acid because your body's smart enough. I'm not going to make acid if you don't make any bile. So what happens is the body realizes, hey, you got to stop making the bile. Years ago, I better stop making the acid or I'm going to get a heartburn. And now my digestive strength gets weaker. So whatever I eat now, that's a little bit on the challenging side that gives that hormetic benefit of immune response. We can't handle it. So we blame the food as opposed to fixing the real problem. And that's why it's such a beautiful, beautiful understanding in Ayurveda to fix the host, not the invader, not the food. But you fix you. You can do it. And there's no excuse for getting old. Just because you're getting old doesn't mean that you can't digest anymore. I had some digestive issues when I was younger, and now I'm 65 years old, and I digest as good as I ever did.

You just have to keep tuning into the weak link of your digestive system, supporting that weak link, and that students taking some of the bad processed food out and rebooting some of those systems with herbs, foods, and also lifestyles, which is really, really very simple. We have a whole ebook called Question youn or the Digestion Troubleshooting Guide, which is free, and it gives you step by step to go through your digestive system, say, hey, what part of my digestive system is broken? And how can I fix it with herbs and foods or lifestyle? And that's what we provide so we can get back on track and start eating a little more diverse foods again, as opposed to just going down that road where I keep taking stuff out of my diet because I can't digest anything, anything else. And that's going to cause real severe immune compromise, which when you look down, we look at Covid having such a massive effect on so many people. It's an immune response that works through the skin of your intestinal lining or the skin of the epithelium of your respiratory lining. And we now know that both of those have microbiomes and they're both bidirectional. That if your gut health is wonky and not healthy, it's going to affect respiratory health and respiratory health is going to affect gut health. They work together. So now we now have good science to say, hey, if your gut's not digesting work well, and that 74% of Americans don't digest well, according to one study, that means that your respiratory resiliency is going to be compromised as well. And does that make you vulnerable to the next pandemic virus epidemic? More so for sure. And there's things we can do short of antivirals and fixing again the invaders that's fixed the host.

So does that mean that breath work would also have a beneficial impact on digestion?

Absolutely. Because remember I mentioned the study that was like 10 different studies that show that just doing diaphragmatic breathwork. Specifically there's a breathing technique called pratuloma was shown to reverse GERD heartburn, indigestion and reflux. We're talking about going to the doctor with heartburn and the doctor says you don't need prilosecromeprazole. I going to give you this breathing technique because it's proven in study after study to study to reverse your heartburn. But they don't give you that in the doctor's office, even though it's in their journals. Right. But it's absolutely something that is proven to reverse that imbalance.

Wow.

I would have, yeah. One of the big challenges obviously in our healthcare system is that which can be monetized and that which can't drives.

A lot of breathing. Is hard to put a price on that.

Right, Exactly. So.

I would imagine that shifting to a largely plant based diet, eating a three season diet, all this will probably give us mostly what we need. Is there a place for probiotics and prebiotics in our diet on a maintenance level? Or more to get things back on track or what's the use of these?

Yeah, no, I think they're really important. I think people have said three seasons. Did you say three season diet? Because there's like four seasons and what happened to the four seasons? Just so everybody knows real quick. In nature, there's a harvest in the spring, there's a harvest in the summer and the harvest in the fall for winter eating. And one season always takes, one season is always dormant. So from the way we interact with nature, it's three seasons. Thus the three season diet. But from the point of view of the microbes, you're going to get them from the plants that you eat, pull out of the ground in the right season. You get the right bugs in your gut for the right season that have specific and beneficial effects for our health and well being. That's important. I am a believer of the science behind probiotics. It's still very emerging in terms of what they're learning about the microbiome. That's an amazing discovery and still growing. I'm personally a fan of using what are called colonizing probiotics, one that actually been proven to adhere to and stick to your intestinal lining and also proliferate the growth of new permanent bacteria. We use one called Bifidobacteriolactus HN019, a very specific strain of Lactis bifidobacteria that actually have been proven to stick to the intestinal lining and become permanent and increase the diversity of your gut that are also permanent and that I use with some soluble fibers. Like we have a thing called slippery elm prebiotic, which is slippery elm marshmallow licorice root. Would you boil it down and make it a real thick fist to stay. You drink that while you're taking this probiotic. So you create a fertilizing kind of healing the skin environment of your gut, which is what they eat, that soluble fiber. Then you give them the colonizing probiotics, they do it for a month, you reset the probe, the microbiome and then you're done. You don't have to take the probiotics forever, you know, every once year or every so often you feel like you need a bit of a reset. You can go back and do that. But I'm not a believer in probiotics every day. I'm a believer in fixing the underlying cause. When I was, you know, first in practice in 1984, we, we gave probiotics way back then. There were probiotics, believe it or not. And we used them, and I noticed very quickly, and we picked people off of wheat way back then too. And we realized that if you take them off of wheat, you give them a probiotic, they feel better. But then shortly thereafter, the problem comes back because you didn't actually really fix the problem. You just gave them a pill or a powder or you gave them a symptomatic relief. And that's where I started realizing we got to dig in deeper here to really fix the real cause of the problem, which is usually digestive strength or the overwhelming amount of processed food. Which is really sad that that processed food is so inexpensive. And so many people choose that because now with all the inflation we have, people just choosing easier because you can't afford good, healthy food. And that should be changed. We shouldn't have to be rich to be able to afford to be healthy. It's in everybody's best interest, the government in particular, to make sure everybody gets food that keeps it and sustains them in a healthy manner. This processed food's killing us.

Yeah, that's a real economic and social justice issue in our country. These food deserts that exist in urban areas, but also in some rural areas where people just don't really have access to high quality food. I feel very lucky. We live in a little New England town surrounded by farms and we get our farm share. Literally. We can walk down block away and we're growing a lot of our own food in our backyard and that's all great. And there is a co op nearby where we can go get things for where that we can't grow ourselves or get from the farm share. But it. But you know, I feel very privileged to have that kind of situation. A lot of people don't have that access to the good quality food.

So you mentioned doing, you know, reset. So I know you're also a proponent of doing cleanses. And my wife Sophie and I do your short home cleanse a couple times a year. We have managed to do the full Colorado cleanse, yet. I aspire to do that. But could you talk a little bit about the practice of cleansing?

Yeah. You know, in 2019, the EPA reported that they dump 70 million tons of toxic chemicals into our environment that filters down onto the water we drink and every organic vegetable we eat. So you can't avoid it. Right. There's mercury from the coal mine. Plumes that spit are on everything, and those are fat soluble. So we boil down to okay your digestive strength, which means eating a variety of foods and being okay with it is directly linked to your ability to detoxify. And with so many people not having good digestive strength.

We then realize that most people aren't detoxifying well. And those fat soluble chemicals, toxins, environmental pollutants end up getting stored in your fat, in your brain tissue. And that's hard science. So how do you get it out of there? B created many techniques to do that. You know, there was, there was arsenic in the rice thousands of years ago, there was mercury that could create toxicity. So they knew they had to how to pull these chemicals and things out of the body even thousands of years ago. And they use something called lipophilic mediated detox where you take certain fats and you put them in the body kind of on a mono kind of a clean diet and those fats will pull other fats out of your body. And it's really amazingly good science to pull out pesticides and preservatives and heavy metals. And that's what the ayurvedic cleanses are built around. Using ghee or clarified butter or olive oil or coconut oil, some alternative if you don't want to eat dairy, you know, animal product. But ghee is the classic way to do it. And then you take that for a handful of days on a no fat diet because you don't want to compete with the feed that you're having. And that flips your body into fat metasm. It chelates the impurities out of the deep tissues and, and it does a deep intestinal skin repair. And the ghee, which is the ayurvedic highest food source on, on the planet, or what's called butyric acid.

Is the fatty acid that your gut bugs eat and it supports the health integrity of your intestinal lining. And that's what they use for their cleanses, which I think is again this ancient wisdom is so amazing how they were so prophetic to use make, even to figure out how to make ghee number one. But then to actually use it as a food for cleansing and as a food to keep the gut health alive and well is so critically important. So that's how we do these cleanses. We do a four day version of that, or we do a 14 day version of that, you know, depending on how much you can bite off. But they're amazing. They're people, you know, get the weight that they want, they get the digestive strength back that they need, they start feeling that energy and that vitality that they didn't have before. And it also, you know, when you start, when you're burning fat, you're releasing toxins out of your fat cells, which is also, interestingly, where the molecules of emotion, Ayurveda calls it mental ama, are also stored in your fat. So when you force the body into a fat metabolic state, which happens naturally in nature in the spring, because there's been, if you think of eating off, eating out of the land in the spring, there's no pasta in the spring being harvested. There's very little of anything being harvested. You force you into a very sort of a fasting, intermittent fasting type state where you don't get much food, where you burn your own fat, not dietary fat, not keto fat, but your own fat. And then you go into fat metasm, where you're burning all the fat, detoxifying, but you're also releasing all the molecules of motion, which then come up on your screen and you can see more clearly old patterns of behavior that we want to get rid of and make transformational change in that department, too. So these cleanses are not just physical. They're mental, emotional, physical, as well as spiritual, which is kind of the beauty of Ayurveda. Everything that they employed, we touched on all those fronts, which I think is what's really fascinated me about it. It wasn't just, we're going to fix your body heartburn, you're going to be fine. You're not going to be fine without heartburn, because if you don't fix the cause, something else is going to bubble up.

And I know you create community around these cleanses and people can come together and do the Colorado cleanse in community online, or if people are in person out there where you are in Colorado, but you have this online community going through a cleanse together, and really you provide everything. One and one thing I love about your approach with lifespyle.com, you have all the information anyone needs there and you have really good quality products if people want to use those products. But you also let people know, if you want to get your own resources, here's what you need and here's where you can get it and so forth. So I really love that approach. And so I would like to talk about, with the time we have left, explore breath work a little bit. Fortunately, there's been kind of a huge renaissance and interest in breath work. Breath work's been around. The science of breath work's been around for thousands of years, and it seems like the west rediscovers it every hundred years or so. I mean, reading James Nestor's book was really interesting how he went over that the last two or three hundred years here in the west and how breath work comes up. People realize it cures all kinds of things, and then they forget it about it. They forget it about it, I guess, because it can't be monetized very well. So it goes away and then, you know, first they're heretics and then, oh, it works, and then they die, and then people forget about it and it comes back another 50 or 100 years later. But we are in this incredible renaissance right now with so many books, James Nestor's book out there, the Wim Hof work, and. And so much. And you've been involved in pranayama and breath work for a long time. So how would someone get started with that? If someone's interested, has heard about breath work, you know, how do they get started? What might be the minimal something could bring in, you know, bring into their life that would start to have some health benefits of just starting to work with their breath a little bit?

Well, I was flattered when James, Esther, you know, used some of my original research in his book. And that original research was very simple. You know, when you exercise. My first book, Body, Mind and Sport, was about our research on nose breathing versus mouth breathing during exercise. So that's something that everybody can do is just start, you know, breathing through the nose when they go for a walk or a hike or in the gym. And one of my favorite exercises to do is just count. If you're going for a walk, simply count how many steps you take for every in breath and out breath. So let's say if you take 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 steps for the in and 1, 2, 3, 4,. 5 for the out. The goal is to get 10 on the in, 10 steps for your in breath and 10 steps for your out breath. Once you get to 10 and 10, then you can take step two, the next level, which is to start to extend your exhalation. So you do 10 on the inhalation, 10 steps for your inhale, and 15 to 20 for your exhale. That's a goal, and you're going to have to work towards it, but it'll actually challenge you. And we'll spring around the corner here. You're going to be able to, you know, get outside more and do some walking. And when you extend that breath, what you're actually doing and slowing down the breath, for that matter, taking longer breaths, you're actually on carbon dioxide levels to build up. And when carbon. Carbon dioxide levels build up, that's the Trigger, the biochemical trigger to release the oxygen from your blood into your tissues. So many of us walk around with the blood and the oxygen kind of bound together and we have what's called CO2 intolerance, where we always have to take another breath and that causes something called over breathing where we breathe really shallow through our mouth a lot. But as you start to train longer, slower breath and longer exhalations, you begin to allow CO2 tolerance to build up. And as CO2 tolerance builds up, you're blasting oxygen into your tissues which allows your body to not run on oxygen tissue hypoxia, which is, you know, puts the risk for, for hypoxic stem cells to proliferate and cause real problems. It actually allows you to actually do deep rejuvenation and repair and healing. And it of course is, raises the vibration we're talking about to create that subtle level of awareness to create more transformational change or at least awareness of what the change might be. That's you know, what fruit is ripening on your karmic tree that gives you opportunity to make transformational change. Well, you're going to be able to see that if you have a higher vibration, if you're pumping ox your tissues, if you don't, it's pretty dull in there and you don't know what to do. You don't know what, what am I doing wrong? I don't even know. We have no level of awareness. That's the beautiful thing. But that's a really simple super brief intro to what the breadth of science can do. And when you look at free divers, the record for holding your breath for example is 25 minutes.

I know, that's amazing. That's just hard to imagine, right?

So we have this mammalian dolphin, whale gene that allows us to hold our breath for significant lengths of time. And it's what, and that actually creates a level of health and, and, and oxygenation of the tissues and other incredible benefits like intermittent hypoxia. When you hold your breath, the body goes into a state of intermittent kind of short term hypoxia, which has been shown to boost stem cell activation, increase Nobel prize winning nitric oxide, you know, change blood pressure, increase neuroplasticity, and also amp up what are called transcription factors called the guardian of your genomes to protect your genes from expressing negative traits. And the list goes on and on and on. When you just do pranayam which means breath and yam means to pause or hold or extend your breath. That's what they talked about thousands of Years ago you got to learn how to hold your breath so you don't breathe like a little rabbit all day long. Running, fight or flight energy throughout your day, all day long. Which is why when people have anxiety, what do they do? They put a paper bag over their mouth and what do they do? They rebreath carbon dioxide. Which does what? It calms you down. And there's hard science behind the anxiety balancing benefit of just being able to have a longer, slower breath or using pranayam techniques to actually hold your breath, which is what's called kumbak in Ayurveda. In the original text.

Patanjali, they talked about if you didn't do the breath hold as part of your pranayama. It wasn't pranayama, it was a breathing exercise. But it wasn't what they were really attempting to do to access that crazy 25 minutes. We're ever going to get to 25 minutes. That's not the goal. But to build CO2 tolerance is definitely the goal. Bring the balance back between CO2 and O2 for oxygen and carbon dioxide as well as your nitric oxide. That balance has to be there, otherwise we do pay a health price.

Yeah, I think a lot of us. And before I started learning about this, I thought, you know, if I feel like out of breath or you know, that what I'm, I'm experiencing oxygen starvation and I'm not, there's plenty of oxygen there in the blood and it's not being released. I'm actually experiencing carbon dioxide intolerance. Right. And so, and I love what you said about, you know, doing it with the walking because boy, what a win, win that is, right? Get out and walk and then also do the breath work. And so I'm going to start doing more of that. I do a lot of breath work in the morning. I integrate it with my exercise and I slow down my breath and extend the out breath, you know, in relation to various exercise, rhythm exercises I'm doing. And then I do just straight pranayama and I, you know, I on the in breath, you know, I hold, I mean I hold after expelling the air.

And you know, I can do it from around, you know, 90, sometimes 100 seconds.

It's easier to hold. I don't do it so much after taking a full breath. I do some where I take a full breath and hold it. But I suppose you can hold it longer on a, with having taken a full inhale than at the end of an exhale, I would assume. But the main one I Do where I really try to develop that carbon dioxide tolerance is, is at the end of the exhale. I'm holding it up, you know, somewhere, depending on the day, it's somewhere between 90 and 120 seconds.

When you look at the Pranayam textbooks, how they would prescribe breath hold, whether it be on the inhale or the exhale, when you breathe out you're going to, like you said, you're going to build CO2 levels, tolerance quicker and it's going to create a calming effect. So the breathing out Kumbak or breath held on the exhale was used for anxiety to calm people down. Breathing in was actually used to stimulate people and to get them energized people who are more lethargic and more depressed. So they actually prescribed, described that thousands of years ago for those two different purposes because. And now we have the science to back that up. Pretty neat.

Great. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of information out there about breath work today. And of course everybody, I assume people should approach this with some good information or at least be gentle and benevolent, not get ambitious about it because you can kind of get your system out of whack if you get super ambitious about, you know, trying to create something with breath work.

Very true, yes. That's why starting with walking, starting with nose breathing exercise, starting with, you know, practicing, you know, the next step would be practicing just some real, you know, sitting in before meditation, just doing some really slow breathing. You try to get your breath rate down to, you know, three minutes, you know, one, you know, like, you know, a one minute breath, you know, where you actually can take one breath in one minute, which would be, you know, or maybe three breaths in one minute or four breaths in one minute, you know, or, you know, just. Or six breaths in one minute even would be a good place to start. But going from six and kind of gently, comfortably working your way down just to really slowing your breath down. The only way you're going to do that is by slowing down your breath and that gets us to kind of really slow down. Another way of pulling back that bow is just by slowing down the breath rate.

So.

Yeah, this has been fascinating and I'm just curious if there are any other kind of final bits of advice you have in terms of, especially in these really challenging times that we're all facing and we're all. You can't. I think we do have to titrate the amount of news. I saw a term I wasn't aware of somebody that talked about doom scrolling on your phone. Where we're just scrolling through all the bad news all the time. So we can't live in a bubble. And I think we want to know about things that are going on. And I'm certainly trying to engage with the current situation in Ukraine in different ways and try to be helpful and support other people that are being helpful. But at the same time, we are exposed to so much negative information during this pandemic, whether we know it or not. Our threat systems have kind of been on high alert all the time because of our fear of contracting Covid and other things. So. So given that the really challenging times we're in, I wonder if you just have any other pieces of advice about how to build and deepen and sustain our resilience.

Yeah, absolutely. And there's really one thing and the most important thing of all, and that's get outside. I've been writing and reading and doing a lot of research lately on light, on what the sunlight does and how the sunlight rays change throughout the day. I've been just fascinated by the research of the sun and, and how it affects us physiologically, mentally, and emotionally. And when you go outside, first of all, 90% people, average American, 90% of their time is indoors. And we're not going to get enough light to actually change our physiological health. When you go outside, 70% of the light that's out there is what's called near infrared light. And that is what blasts and bounces around the trees and the leaves. When you go into the woods or the forest, you're actually being bombarded with infrared light, which penetrates your skull, your clothing, and activates what's called the mitochondria inside of your cells to make energy. And if you don't have that kind of. It's almost like a battery charger, that infrared light is the battery charger for us making energy. And as we get older, we don't get out as much, and our ability to make that energy becomes problematic and. And we end up having a lot of waste products. We are byproducts of energy production that build up in the cell and they cause degeneration and aging, accelerated aging. So one of the best ways to not age and one of the best ways to stabilize mood and get deeper sleep. I just read an article about the benefit of the sun for sleep is to get outside. Doesn't mean bathing in the. In the full sun, but under a tree, you're protected from the UV rays, but you're getting blasted with infrared. And that is one of the most healing rays that we can get. And also I wrote about the science of the sun rise and just being there for the start of the day, which traditional folks all did. So I think one of the ways to not be in front of our phone and looking at the TV and getting all the bad news all day long is just to make an effort to just get outside and go be in nature. And that's a reprieve for this, for the information.

That we're being bombarded with, which isn't great. I don't mean to insulate. We have to know. I think it's important to help and do everything we can with Croatia, I mean with Ukraine and, and everything. It's, it's incredible. And I think we have to do, do our best. But we also want to, you know, we also want to stay composed and calm. We want to be able to have that boat pulled back so we are more self aware. So we're reacting based on us versus reacting to what's being, you know, what we're being bombarded with. And that's the problem is we're all reactive. We're all what we call, as we said earlier, right. Well, objective referral based versus subject referral based. And if we could stop doing that, we would probably love each other a whole lot more.

Wow. Incredibly sound advice. And this has been so rich and so helpful. So thank you so much, Dr. John, for spending your time with us on the Global Resilience Summit. Again, thank you.

Thanks for having me, Fleet. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, be well. Wish you all the best with your work. It's benefiting from so many people. Thank you.

Thank you.

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