HS 269 - Hacking Breath, Neuroscience & Your Autonomic Nervous System with Dan Brule

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Welcome to the Holistic Survival show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival show is your family's insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats, and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you'll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

It's my pleasure to welcome Dan Brulee, and he is a specialist in something we all do. Thankfully, we all do this. That is something we all have in common, and it is breathing. We have never done a show before on the importance of breath and how we can use our breath to tap into and hack into our autonomic nervous system to improve our lives in so many ways. I had the pleasure of meeting Dan at a recent Tony Robbins event. When we were actually meeting Tony and taking pictures with him, only. Only 11 out of 3,000 people got to do that. So I was glad to be one of those. Dan was one of those people as well, in waiting for Tony, who's like the President, he's not exactly punctual. I know you know that, Dan. We had a good amount of time to talk there and get to know each other, and I had the opportunity to learn about his great work in this field. So, Dan Brulee, welcome. How are you?

I am doing wonderful. Thank you, Jason. It's great to be here.

Good. And you are breathing today.

You know, if you have a belly button, breathing will probably come in pretty handy for you.

Fantastic. Give our listeners first a sense of geography.

Where are you located at the moment? I'm in Cabo San Lucas in Los Cabos, down the tip of the Baja Peninsula. I have our breathing training center here. We have kind of an eco chic resort off the grid. I run what's called a reboot camp, plugging people back into their inner nature and the outer nature.

Excellent. Good stuff. Well, I've been there a few times. Not to your center, but to Cabo. A lot of people might be listening, saying, oh, is this really that big a deal? You know, does it really matter that much? Obviously it matters if we're breathing. But you know, what can you really do to enhance your breath beyond the natural breathing that we all just do.

Well, I mean, everyone knows that breathing is important. It's a no brainer, you know, and anyone who's into performance or public speaking or martial arts or high stakes life and death situations, people who work in those atmospheres are trained to breathe, but the average person is not. So, you know, we have breathing habits. Breathing is a behavior, and we learn behaviors consciously and unconsciously. And some of the behaviors that we take on can work for us or against us. And breathing is no exception. Breathing is a behavior, and depending on how we engage in it, it can be serving us or it can be holding us back.

Yeah, okay. You know, I've done yoga for many years, for example, and yoga, they talk about the breath and how to use it a little bit. And they have some, you know, very distinct types of breathing that you do when you practice yoga. What do you do? Is that what you do? Like the pranayama breath or whatever they call it tiger's breath, all of these different things. Or lion's breath, maybe. I don't lion, tiger. I might be mixed up. But, you know, is that the thing? Is it breathe in for a count of four, hold for four, breathe out for four, or. I have a feeling there's more to it than this.

You know, there are thousands, literally thousands of breathing exercises and techniques, and with age, some of them have really cool names and so on. It's interesting that you just cued into breathe in for four, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four. That pattern is called box breathing, and it's something that Navy SEALs are trained to do. It's a way to control your physiology. It's a way to manage your mental and emotional state. And that's exactly what a SEAL team is doing when they're in a helicopter on their way to who knows what. It's a way to keep your focus. It's a way to manage your heart rate and so on. And it's so important that seals are trained to do it and they're made to do it, and they know to do it as they prepare for the firefighter mission. So that's an ancient yogic technique, actually might have a name in the yoga world, but it's called box breathing these days. And it's one example of many kinds of breathing patterns that we can do. For example, I was just up in Silicon Valley and where this movement towards autonomous driving, cars that drive.

I just bought one. I just bought a Tesla. And it's amazing, you know, it really is. And you got to hold your breath when you let it go into autopilot mode. Because in the beginning, there's a lot of question as to whether we should trust that you.

Well, you know, the breakthroughs in technology, just in the last six months, I was at the CEO workshop at the Nissan Renault Group in their research labs in Silicon Valley. And just in the last six months, the breakthrough in technology in cameras and sensors is off the charts, Jason. And we might feel like, you know, it's kind of romantic to think, hey, I'm better at controlling my car than some computer. But the cameras and sensors that we have right now can outdo the human eye, you know, a thousand to one. And so if cars are going to be driving themselves, that means we can watch movies, we can read books, we can relax, we can energize ourselves. So this group is quite innovative, and they're incorporating some of the breathing practices into the actual driver's seat of the car. And I mention this because if you want to say energize yourself, here's a rule of thumb that everyone can use. Your inhale can be twice as long as your exhale, and that tends to activate the sympathetic activating mode of the nervous system and calm the parasympathetic. And if you want to relax, then you would make your exhales twice as long as your inhales, which would tip you in the direction of the parasympathetic mode, which is rest and recover and rejuvenate and calm the sympathetic fight or flight or activation mode. So that's a simple formula for anyone who, you know, you don't have to be an expert. You put more stress and time on the inhale. That tends to give you more energy, put more focus and time on the exhale. That tends to tip you in the direction of relaxation and calm. So that's a very simple tweak.

Sure.

That we can use.

Okay. Okay. Good. Good stuff. Maybe a good place to ask you, Dan, about sort of the overview of this work. You mentioned before that there are thousands of different breathing techniques out there. You would say there's like a core few of them. Maybe there's, you know, six. Every pilot knows that on the instrument pan, there are six core instruments, and then there's a whole bunch of other peripheral things. But there are six really important instruments. So they call that the six pack. Maybe you can pick six give or take techniques and just take us through those. You know, let's maybe first identify the purpose of them. You just taught us the Energizing breath and the relaxing breath technique. So maybe there's two. What are some other core techniques and what do they do for us?

Yeah, that's actually a good question. Because the core techniques, fundamental techniques, once you get the fundamentals under your belt, you can be quite creative and you can actually invent and develop your own particular breathing exercises and techniques and apply them to your own life. So to start, the very basic core practice is what we call breath awareness. It means watching your breath, noticing your breath, observing your breath, paying attention to your breathing. Develop that ability, develop that habit of tuning into your breathing. How are you breathing when someone's insulting you? How are you breathing when you're gripping the steering wheel, when you're stuck in traffic? How are you breathing when someone is insulting you, is complimenting you? How are you breathing when you're listening to music? How are you breathing when you're trying to solve a math problem? Because in all of these different psychological and emotional and physiological states, there are corresponding breathing patterns. And so the way you breathe when you're calm and relaxed is different than the way you breathe when you're upset and angry.

What you're talking about, though, is the default breathing that we would do without giving it any conscious direction.

Right.

And by the way, you know, maybe that leads to just an interesting quick question for you. Why is it that our creator didn't make this part of our automatic systems where we would naturally default into the right technique to accomplish what we needed, versus the default pattern? That. That isn't working for us, that isn't beneficial for us.

Well, actually we are. We are born and infants have a very natural breathing pattern. Natural breathing reflexes, natural breathing habits and tendencies. But the accumulation of shocks and traumas, emotional traumas, psychological shocks, physical traumas, they begin to put layers of inhibition on the breathing. And the breathing gets blocked or jammed or held, and we develop unconscious strategies. We end up using the breath. For example, if I don't want to feel something, I'll hold my breath. And so breath holding can become an unconscious pattern. And it starts to disconnect me from the aliveness in my body, from a sense of my body. And we kind of escape the intensity of feeling in the body by moving and shifting up into the head. So we have kind of a conceptual relationship rather than a felt physical relationship.

So a less associated relationship with the feeling or the experience, right?

Yeah, we're head tripping and we're disconnected from our body. And the only way to reconnect with our body is through breathing. So the breathing puts us back in touch with these natural feelings and tendencies and responses that we, you know, when we're stuck up in our head, we're broken off from. So that's why breath awareness is a key. You develop the practice of observing your breath, and you can do it as a ritual, say, 10 minutes in the morning, where you just simply be the witness, just notice your breathing. Now, this is taught Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and so on, because it's a way to come into the present moment. It's a mindfulness process. It quiets all the rational chatter, so it has those kinds of really powerful effects. And you begin to develop a relationship with your breath, a more intimate relationship with your breath. Your intuition kicks in, your situational awareness gets better. There's all kind of benefits to that practice, which is the first core technique, breath awareness. And then you take that practice into your everyday life. You're in the middle of an argument and you just remember to notice, or you're working on your computer and you just stop for a moment and you say, wow, how am I breathing? What's happening my breath right now? And that practice is really a gem, and it's something everyone should do. The second thing is what we call conscious breathing. This is where you give the breathing a certain pattern. You breathe with a certain intention. You regulate the breath, you control the breath in some way for a purpose. And that's where you have lots of latitude and lots of choices about, okay, what kind of breathing exercise or technique do I want to do? And that will depend on your level of health, your degree of skill, your purpose in training. And I just did an interview with Dr. Pat Darbar, who's a clinical psychiatrist in New York, and she has some really key bits of information that are really priceless. And a couple of these things scientists only recently discovered. For example, there are vessels in the brain that just a year ago, medical scientists had no idea even existed. And they're connected to this polyvagal theory. So the vagus nerve, which is these two sets of nerves, they combine into this vagus nerve, which is the biggest nerve in the body. And vagus comes from the same root word of vagabond. It means to wander. And so what was only recently discovered is that 80% of the fibers in this nerve send information from the body to the brain. And that means that the brain is monitoring everything that happens in every corner of the body, moment to moment, so that it can respond and produce chemicals and so on. But here's the kicker. There are millions of Receptors in the lungs alone, in the muscles, the breathing muscles, and in the alveoli, those tiny air sacs where the actual inflation of the lungs takes place and where all the transfer of gases to the blood is infused. There are three separate stretch receptors in the alveoli alone. And so depending on how fast you inflate your lungs, how much you inflate your lungs, how often you inflate your lungs, that's sending a massive information up to the brain. And that's how we can begin to hack into our autonomic nervous system.

Okay, all right, say we're convinced. Okay, let's go back to that six pack idea and let's talk about hacking. I mean, I think everyone wants to try this. The wonderful thing about the world in which you are an expert is that we can just start right now. You know, we probably won't do it on the show, but listeners can literally do the technique as they're listening. This doesn't take any special equipment. You already have all the equipment. Doesn't take a long time. I assume you get better at it over time, just like meditation or sports or any skill. But maybe, by the way, a big part of this skill is just remembering to actually do it, especially in the moment of stress or the moment of need. That may be something, but what are the core? Give us the core. Maybe six techniques.

Yeah. So here's a couple of basics that I teach absolutely everyone. We call it a cleansing breath. We call it engaging the exhale. It's basically a sigh of relief. You know, usually people take a sigh of relief. It comes by itself. If you're afraid and the fear goes away.

Or if you're in pain and the pain has locked up the breathing and then the pain passes.

The sigh of relief happens. And so what we're teaching people is don't wait, actually use the sigh of relief. Give yourself sighs of relief on purpose, deliberately, as an exercise, as a temporary technique. No one has to teach you how to do it. You already know how to do it. So I suggest that people do that a hundred times a day, a thousand times a day, as often as you can. And because when a sigh of relief, the beginning of it is you open and expand, you take in an inhale that's a little bigger than normal, and then you release it and you relax and let go. And this is kind of rebooting your system, you will start to take on the habit of doing that. So when you get out of balance or you start to accumulate tension or you get a little stress or anxiety. If you practice, then the breath will kick in for you by itself and vent that stress. So a simple sigh of relief. But done consciously, done deliberately, and done repetitively as a practice. That's the second core thing there. It is.

Yeah. You know, it is amazing to me how I just pay no conscious attention to this. It's terrible. Most of my life, I have just had these shallow breaths and so easy to implement this stuff. So. Okay, what's. So now we've really got three techniques, right? We've got energizing relaxation and the cleansing, right?

Yep.

Okay.

And I could throw into that this, what we call box breathing, which is it's a way to balance and create a real steady rhythm in the breathing. So, for example, the Navy seals, they're taught to do that box breathing on the way to a scene. But once you get to the scene, you hit the ground. Now you're into a different mode. They take away the pauses, and now you're just breathing in for the count of four, out for the count of four, in for the count of four, out for the count of four. Now that can be the average. There's a sweet spot. There's a therapeutic zone that's between three and eight breaths a minute. So anywhere in that range, you could be breathing in, say, six breaths a minute, which would be a five second inhale and a five second exhale. That's a ten second breathing cycle. That means you're breathing at six breaths a minute. You could do it a little quicker, a little slower. But if you're in that 3 to 8 range, you are lowering cortisol levels, you are increasing heart rate variability, you are lowering blood pressure, you are activating the higher centers of the brain at the same time that you are calming the oval, remote emotional centers of the brain. So smooth, steady, rhythmic breathing at a rate of between three and eight breaths a minute, anyone can just. If you're in that zone, it's gonna work. And then measurable significant physiological benefits to that. Okay, so the next core technique. And now we're moving into what we would call transformational type breathing, where you're actually beginning to use the breath to awaken higher capacities, spiritual capacities, you could say peak performance. Because here's the idea that breathing training is the next major key skill set that high performing individuals need to have. So what works in the battlefield, works in the boardroom, and it works in the kitchen, and it works in the bedroom. So some of these, these simple breathing practices will enhance your performance, your health, your sex life, your digestion you name it, it's that powerful. But it's something that we do, and in our society we kind of default to, well, I'll just take an aspirin for my pain, or I'll take a. Whatever, you know, Valium or whatever. And so we're robbing ourselves of an opportunity to discover that we can really do a lot more, capable of a lot more than we realize. And it doesn't take long with a few. A week, a few days, even a few minutes of breathing practice where you start to feel better. So the next route, what I call the trans, we're entering in transformational techniques, is called continuous breathing. Continuous breathing is inhale, exhale, with no pauses, no gaps between the breath. It's like the breath is spinning like a wheel. It's like a car engine in neutral. And this is a really powerful skill to develop.

This one you might need to demonstrate, I think, by literally breathing into the microphone.

So we can.

How do you not pause? Because you definitely have an inhale and an exhale.

Right. See, there's something magical about it because think about it, inhale, exhale are as opposite as you can get. It's like male, female, Yin yang, active, passive, you know, it's a polarity kind of function. So my inhale, I'm going to be a U shape and the exhale will be, ah, shape. So you can hear the difference.

Okay, got it.

So, so that, that's the. In yoga, that's the pranayama breath, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Yeah, that's one of them, yep. Pranayama is alternate nostril breathing, which, you know, you wouldn't, but exhale through one nostril, inhale through the other.

Maybe I'm calling it the wrong name then.

Which is classic. Yeah, no class. There are so many pranayama techniques and this is one of them. But there's a whole lot to do with right and left brain functioning. So when you do alternate nostril breathing, classic pranayama, that's another core technique. Someone could just sit and practice alternate nostril breathing. You exhale through one nostril, you inhale through it and then switch. Exhale through that nostril, inhale through that nostril, and then switch and do that for five or ten minutes. Very calming, very energizing effect. And this continuous breathing, however, it could be quite quick.

Or it could be very slow.

And that's the whole idea, is to get flexible so you're comfortable with quick breathing, you're comfortable with slow breathing. A Healthy person ought to be able to breathe very quickly, 120 breaths a minute, with no effort, with no weird feelings, and they ought to breathe, be able to breathe at a very slow rate, two or three breaths a minute, quite easily.

Interesting. I've never done a podcast in 3000 or so episodes with a heavy breather.

You're the first. Well, I, you know, it's. Breathing is one of those things that's right under our nose.

Literally, quite literally.

Look at it and we underestimate it. And I'm a simple guy and I'll get on to more advanced things later in life, but I'm still into the basics.

Oh yeah, well, good stuff. So that's four techniques. What did that last one do? What was the purpose? You said now we're into the transformational. The last three are transformational. So what was the specific use for the one you just mentioned? The continuous breathing.

You do it in an active way for the purpose of activating energy in your body. And when you activate energy, you're going to activate feelings and sensations and thoughts and emotions. And the feelings and sensations that you activate are exactly the feelings and sensations that caused you to escape your body, to shift up into your head, to break that connection with your spirit. So what we do is you do a few minutes of that breathing until you start to get buzzing, vibrating, tingling sensations, and then you switch into a smooth, regular, gentle breathing pattern to integrate all the feelings and sensations that you brought up. So it's a way to self transform. You use the breath to activate energy, and then you breathe through the feelings and sensations that got activated rather than try to escape them or block them or distract yourself from them, which is the main problem that caused us to break from our natural spirit. So it's a way to gradually reconnect with this intense aliveness in our body. Believe it or not, most people are afraid of intense aliveness. And as soon as we start to feel too intensely alive, our system tries to, like, protect it. We shut down to try to get down to a manageable level of energy, and we separate ourselves from kind of an infinite, unlimited source of power and potential.

Okay, got it. Two more techniques.

One of them would be to. It's a Sufi technique to kind of shoot the breath. It's like sharp, quick inhales, maybe two or three or four, and then an exaggerated sigh of relief. So it's like this.

So that will wake you up. If you start to get flat or depressed or kind of go unconscious or get fuzzy, you can quickly ch. Charge yourself, wake Yourself up with those. It's a charging, like shooting four or five or two or three quick breaths into your heart and then a sigh of relief. Very powerful Sufi technique for energizing yourself.

Okay, okay, so that's number four, and that's for energy. Okay, go ahead.

And another one would be. So we were.

No, that's number five. Sorry.

So one of the keys in all breath work is what I call the convergences of breath work, where you combine. Here are the convergences. You combine breathing and consciousness. That in itself is very powerful because 99% of the time we're. Well, we're breathing 100% of the time, but 99% of the time we are not conscious of our breathing. And so if you begin to be conscious of your breathing, it's like in the martial arts, where when mind and body come together, a force emerges. That's how you can break a brick. Your mental intention and your physical action come together and a force emerges. And so when we bring our consciousness together with breathing, it awakens a certain energy in us. So that's the first convergence, bringing together consciousness and breathing. The second is crucial and that is bringing together relaxation and consciousness. So most people, when you are in your most relaxed moments of your day, you're literally sleeping. It's as if we have to go unconscious for the body to completely relax and let go. So focusing on relaxation, the zone or in the flow state, is actually a combination of energized alertness and peace and calmness. That combination of energy and calmness is magical. And so we want to bring that any breathing that you can do that brings those two things together, energy and awareness and relaxation and calmness, is going to have a profound effect and anyone can just make it up themselves. You know, if you're awareness is heightened and alert and detailed, and if you are relaxing and peaceful, so you bring those two things together. So those are the two, like key convergences. And I set people free to just make it up. Find a technique where you feel like it's a combination of energy and relaxation and make it up. And the other is bringing together breathing sounds and movement. So, for example, if you're a runner, you're going to breathe in for three steps, breathe out for three steps, breathe in for three steps, breathe out for three steps. So you are bringing the breathing, you're coordinating it with your movements. And the movements could be any movements, any habitual movements you have. You consciously bring the breath in and move the breath in harmony or in sync with any physical or body or Repetitive physical movements.

Okay, good, good. Good stuff. So the sixth technique then is the potpourri, right? It's the conglomeration of whatever techniques you want. Is that correct?

Yeah, I would call it, like, you know, we're into pure spiritual breathing. So a good example of a spiritual breathing technique would be when I breathe in, I'm focusing on my heart center. I'm focusing on my heart, and I'm drawing energy down, say, through the top of my head from the heavens above, bringing them into the heart. And at the same time, I'm drawing energy up through my feet from the earth into my heart, and I'm mixing those energies. Right. And then when I exhale, I radiate like the sun. So that's an example of a spiritual breathing technique. You could be focusing on love or joy or gratitude or peace. And so now you're connecting your consciousness to the breathing with a powerful spiritual intention.

Very interesting. Yeah, go ahead.

And so I just did an interview with Mark Divine, Navy SEAL commander.

I had him on my show. He was a great show. Yeah.

Oh, isn't he a great guy? Yeah. So, you know, SEAL fit. Yep, that's him. So he combines breathing with gratitude. For example, he gets up in the morning, and when he's breathing, he's generating a feeling of gratitude. You know, that's a spiritual breathing technique. You can link this, for example, in Tantra. Tantra is another breathing tradition in the East. You're with your lover, and you bring your breathing together. While she's breathing out, you're breathing in. While she's breathing out, you're breathing in. You combine your breathing. You breathe, and it. It creates an energetic.

You don't breathe in harmony. You breathe as opposites. The yin and the yang. Yeah, interesting. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's beautiful. And it creates an energetic connection. It creates a more sacred connection, and it enhances the sexual experience.

It's a very interesting. It's funny, you've mentioned sex a few times, so I'm just gonna ask you to go down this road a little bit, because that's when a lot of people perk up. So see you all paying attention. We've had a heavy breather on the show talking about sex. Okay. There seem to be two primary things we do as human that if you were to take, like, human motivation and just distill it to its most fundamental thing, we either move toward pleasure or away from pain. And so in our body, sometimes we experience pain. You know, I sleep on my side, so I have some shoulder Pain from sleeping on my side. And I, you know, I work at a computer far too much, and, you know, that's a terrible torture for the body. And so, you know, we either want to relieve the pain, truly dissolve it, or maybe disassociate from it. I think curing it or dissolving it is the right thing, but disassociating with be maybe a second choice. And then, you know, you've. Since you've mentioned sex so many times, that's obviously a very pleasurable activity. And sometimes. And there are other pleasurable things too. Just the kinesthetic thing of touching things or listening to music or engaging in a physical activity, you know, either actively or passively, like being on a roller coaster where we want to increase the association with what we're feeling. Like we want to feel it more. Right, because it's pleasurable. So if you had to take. And I know you touched on this with the six different techniques you talked about, but what, you know, maybe like, take it from a different angle here, if you would, and tell us how to breathe to disassociate from pain, and maybe that's even emotional too. And how to breathe to associate more to what we're feeling. What would be the.

In order to heal something, you have to feel it, and it's normal. If something is uncomfortable, it's normal to withdraw our awareness from it, to try to block the feeling of it. That's just. If you touch fire, you pull your hand away. But if the fire is in you, pulling away from it doesn't make much sense. We have to find a way to embrace it, to relax in the presence of it, to, you know, to let it be as it is so it can heal itself. So breathing allows us to be with. With a pain, for example, and if it happens to be a pleasure, it allows us to get more pleasure by bringing in the breath. So, you know, using sex as an example, which we know, we would assume is very pleasurable. However, if you would observe some people during an orgasm, it's almost as if they're trying to climb out of their body. The body freezes and jams up. They hold their breath, and breath holding is a fear response. So just learning to breathe into an orgasm will transform a person's relationship to their body, to their partner, and to the actual experience of sex itself.

You know, it's interesting though, why. Why is it that we don't do what's good for us, you know, in most of life, you know, and when you look at the body, it Seems like we do logical things, you know, our body reacts in a logical way. You know, if you break a bone, it'll grow back stronger, I guess nature says, you know, you might break it there again, we need to make it extra strong the second time around. Right. If you have a cut, you'll get a scab, and that scab is stronger. It's like protection. Why don't we do the right thing? Like you gave that example of sex and, you know, we do the opposite thing, you know, of what we're supposed to do, according to you at least?

Well, I, you know, we model other people's behavior, you know, and so when we're children, the first few years of our life, we're basically in a hypnotic trance and we're given programs that limit who we are. And by the time we start thinking for ourselves and taking over ourselves, we're already using programs that were given to us. So a lot of it has to do with healing early life traumas and conditioning and programming to kind of reconnect with our original spirit. And so we're modeling people's breathing habits, we're modeling their ways of moving and thinking and speaking. And we just take that on as a child. And unless you had enlightened parents.

Yeah, but you're not watching your, hopefully you're not watching your parents in the bedroom. I mean, how would we know that? How come we're not doing the right thing? You know, like, I don't know, I don't think that's a modeling thing.

You know, we unconsciously take on the habits and patterns of the people around us and it happens automatically and it gets transferred over into different activities and so on. So if I'm a little child and my father's coming home from work, you know, I'm a little girl, my father's coming home from work and I play this game, I hide behind the couch and my father comes in and goes, oh, where's my little girl? I've lost my little girl. And what's she doing? She could be three years old and she's holding her breath. She knows that if you want to be invisible, if you don't want to be noticed, you hold your breath. And so now you're a 14 year old kid and you're in high school and the teacher's looking around the class for someone to ask a question and what are you doing? You're in the back of the class trying to be invisible. And how do you do that by holding your breath? If you're told not to cry, the only way to stop crying is to hold your breath. If you try to withhold laughter, the only way to withhold it is to hold your breath. If you want to express yourself and you suddenly think, oh, maybe that's not a good thing. We're already using our breath for certain strategies and that's how we end up screwing up our natural breathing patterns because we're taking them over for these different particular purposes. And then that becomes a habit serving us on one level and it's screwing us up on another level.

Okay, interesting.

Think about this. That CO2 is a volatile acid and you know about the ph balance in the body, the acid based balance. And so when you're playing with the breath, you're playing with this very vital piece, balance system. And so if you take on psychological or emotional patterns and your breathing is supporting you in those, then it starts to go against you on a physiological level. So that's how we end up getting screwed up. You have a tool, you have an instrument, you're using it for one thing. And however it's working against you on another level and you don't realize it, and then it becomes an unconscious habit or a pattern. And all through your life it's creating these, you know, symptoms out of nowhere. And so one.

Yeah, right, right, right. Very interesting. So anything more on that concept just before we wrap up here, of associating and, and not disassociating, but, you know, dissolving. Like the pain.

Yeah.

Or associating more with pleasure. Just to. I want to make sure that the audience really caught your suggestion there.

Good. Yeah. And the first thing I would look at it on a feeling level. It doesn't matter whether it's a wonderful feeling or a terrible feeling, whether it's painful feeling or a pleasurable feeling, you treat it the same way. So what you do is if I'm using this transformational technique, I'm.

I'm using the breath to activate all these feelings and sensations. Some of the feelings are going to be wonderful and exciting, some of them are going to be scary and uncomfortable. The first thing we need to do is just treat them all the same. Doesn't matter, Right. And then what you do is you literally breathe into the strongest feeling, breathe into the strongest feeling. Breathe from that place where you notice the strongest feeling in your body. And while you're breathing, track the subtle energy changes as you're breathing. So these are like three points to remember. Track the subtle energy changes while you're breathing, breathe into the strongest feeling. And very Deliberately and very consciously enjoy whatever's happening. Let it be as it is, be with it as it is. You know, it's a miracle to be able to feel. And so whether you feel this or feel that, you can back up a little bit and say, thank God I can feel, and bring in that kind of attitude to no matter what comes up in your process.

Yeah, that's interesting. You know, I had Dan Millman on the show for the second time recently. I'm sure you're familiar with his work. Yeah, he's great. His whole thing, if you just sum up his whole philosophy, it's be here now. It's just be in the moment. Experience what you're experiencing, which I remember when I did LifeSpring years ago, is that's one of the steps to mastery. You know, experience your experience. And that's a good way to wrap it up. And a lot of times to experience it, you've got to breathe. You know, you got to breathe into it because it creates a presence, doesn't it?

It very consciously breathe. That's the key. You know, conscious breathing is the mind in motion. It's life force being applied. And so we have an opportunity. You know, breathing is the only system in the body that is both completely automatic and completely under our control. That's not an accident. That's not a coincidence. That's an opportunity. That's an invitation to take part in our own evolution. And breathing is a key to that.

Yeah. Great advice. Excellent advice. Give out your website. Tell people where they can find out more about your work.

Ah, thank you. Yeah. Breathmastery.com breathmastery.com the reason I you I mentioned sex and I is because Valentine's Day is coming and I have a membership, an inner circle membership program. And every now and then it's just for members, but every now and then, I take something out of that, that exclusive membership area and we make it available to the public. And so, because of Valentine's Day, that's what we're doing. We've taken out this Tantra product, which is a book and two audio CDs about how to use the breath to spice up your love life. And that was on my mind when we started to talk, because I just got off the phone with my office. So if you go to breathmastery.com, you'll see that that's kind of like what we're featuring this month.

Excellent. Good stuff. Dan Brulee, thank you so much for joining us.

Jason, thank you very much. Keep breathing, brother.

Happy breathing everybody.

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