The Little-Known Healing Method Of Myorhythmic Release That Combines Sound, Movement, Breath & More

Hey, what's up? It's Ben Greenfield. We are on a roll this week. In the last episode, we talked about what many would consider to be fringe alternative medicine. Well, in today's episode, we'll get even more fringe. We're gonna chat with my friend and sound healer who I went down to see in Sedona, Arizona.

You're gonna love him, he's pretty cool. And if you decide to go to Sedona, you may have remembered that I interviewed this other healer named Anahata down there. Go. Go see Anahata and Porui. That's what I did. I went to Sedona and I saw them both in one fell swoop. And I went to this amazing restaurant that they have down there called Chocolatry. So there's three things for you to do if you decide to go to Sedona. Buy yourself a plane ticket. Go see this cat. Especially after you listen to this interview. I think you're going to want to this podcast is brought to you by the brand new university that I have launched. It's called Keon U. If it is everything that you would need to become the most qualified professional on the face of the planet, if you're a physical therapist, medical professional, physician, health coach, nutritionist, personal trainer, chiropractic doc, you name it. What I've done is I have taken every shred of knowledge up inside my head. Everything I've gained from 10 years of running this podcast and talking to some of the top experts in the world. And I've put all the information to together into one systematized curriculum that you go through and you learn everything there is to know. And then the icing on the cake as I add all your business tips, blogging tips, podcasting tips, content creation, I'm bringing in guest experts from around the world. For example, a BJ Fogg, a Stanford research and world renowned expert in behavior design. He's going to be joining us this month to teach you how to affect lasting behavior change. You don't have a bunch of knowledge rolling around up inside your head that you can actually get results from your clients or your patients with. I have taken into consideration every last detail in the past two years that I've spent designing this curriculum and putting together this university. And so if you're a health or a fitness professional and you want to get in on this very rare chance to create an amazing career for yourself, essentially do what I do. I mean, that's the idea is I am creating this university that will allow other people to do exactly what I do in terms of educating the world and in terms of really affecting positive change and creating or empowering people to really create for themselves the ultimate human machine. Go to getkeon.com coach that's getk I o n getkion.com coach we're only accepting a limited number of students into Kionu. The time to sign up is running out pretty quickly here, so sign up while you still can. You can become a charter member of Kionu. This podcast is also brought to you by four sigmatic. I was actually just hanging out with my friend and Finnish mushroom hunter Taro.

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I was never quite Brazilian enough to be Brazilian. I was never quite Mexican enough to be Mexican or American enough to be American. So it's like I'm. That's my role in this world is someone that's a bridger.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. Power.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And a couple months ago, I was in Sedona. Sedona, Arizona, where I. I happened upon this gentleman who I was introduced to by a former podcast guest and great guy, Aubrey Marcus. And Aubrey told me I had to go see this guy Porangi, who does sound healing there in Sedona. And so I showed up at his place, and he proceeded to lay me on this special table and blast my body with everything from, like, a didgeridoo to a gong to a flute. And this was all blended with deep tissue massage work and this. This really immersive, musical and sound healing experience that was unlike anything I've ever really undergone. So I had to get Borengi on the show to share this with you. And this guy's fascinating. He blends indigenous medicine practices from Brazil and Mexico and the southwestern U.S. he's a licensed massage therapist. He studied at Duke University in integrative health. He's also an accomplished musician. He has these amazing soundtracks. I mentioned Aubrey a couple of minutes ago, and he did the soundtrack for an ayahuasca film that Aubrey helped to produce and has amazing, amazing music.

This time that we're recording. This, I believe, is down at south by Southwest in Austin, where he's doing a concert down there. But, you know, from crystal and metal tuning forks to Tibetan prayer bowls and crystal bowls, didgeridoos, ton of different therapies.

What I experienced with poren ghee was pretty amazing, so I had to get him on the show to chat with you guys about how this stuff works, how sound healing works, and what exactly he does is so, so different and unique. So pouring Gi. Welcome to the show, man.

Thank you. Yeah, it's great to be here.

Yeah. Yeah. And. And I. I'm so curious about your history and how you learn these things and wove them together. You know, how. How you have brought together Brazilian and Mexican and Southwestern US Therapies and developed this whole healing method. So can you tell me about where this journey began?

Yeah, so it's been quite a journey. I think it's still, of course, ongoing. It never stops. I definitely claim the masterful student rather than masterful teacher here, just always learning. And it kind of goes all the way back to my roots where I was born in Brazil. My father is From Mexico. And my mother's brasileira, she's Brazilian. And they both were musical people and artists in their own right. And. And my mother also is a healer of sorts. And my grandmother, my father's mother also was a healer, what they call sobadora, which is one who lays on the hands. And so, you know, it's kind of been in my lineage to work with the healing arts. And from an early age, I knew as much as I knew that music was part of my path, I also knew that healing was part of my path. And I thought, of course, I was going to be a medical doctor and coming from a, you know, pretty relatively poor family, if you will, by Western standards, but very rich in other ways. You know, I spend a lot of my childhood kind of with that vision, that dream. And so I worked really hard, you know, to kind of eventually get the scholarships together and the funding to be able to go to and get into Duke University, of course, and study and was going for that pre med track and started that whole line of study and.

Oh, really?

Honestly?

Yeah, that's funny. I did the. I did the same thing. I did a pre med track and was going to be a doctor, but I did my, my internship at Duke and spent a ton of time there at the, at the orthopedic surgical facility shadowing surgeons because I was very interested in sports medicine. So, yeah, I worked at Coach K's sports performance lab there at Duke.

Oh, yeah.

And spent the rest of my time in the medical library and, and with the orthopedic doc. So I'm very familiar with, With Durham.

Oh, so you know Durham. Yeah, totally. Oh, no, exactly. So a lot of time in the Duke Medical center. And I also, I shadowed a lot of, in the pediatric center and the intensive care unit, working with a lot of kids that were flown in like, burn, you know, third degree burn victims, you know, I loved it. And I also really quickly realized that it was more about the business than it was about healing, if that makes sense, you know, and I kind of got disenchanted, to be honest. And I really had to look and do some really deep searching within myself. And fortunately, at the time, I was hanging out with these other students who were, they were on the neuroscience and they were all part of a program called program two, which was something really unique to Duke. I think Princeton was the only university at the time that was doing this where they basically, you could design your own major in course of study if you could basically put it all together and then prove that it was Academically rigorous enough. And you'd have to write an honors thesis, of course, and defend it to a board of doctors. And if they gave basically their stamp of approval, you could basically create your own major essentially. And that's essentially what I did. So the title of my major was Healing through Music and Dance, Psychological and Cultural Perspectives. And yeah, I basically blended neuroscience, dance and music departments, cultural anthropology, psych, and put it all into this really interesting line of study, which has honestly been. My life has just continued doing that ever since.

So tell me about, like, if you remember. I realize that sometimes when you've gone to college, it can be a. A far off memory. But what kind of courses do you take for something like that? Like. Like what. What kind of things did you weave together when it came to the education?

Oh yeah, it's. Sure. Let me. Reaching back, I mean, it was a number of things. Of course, Duke didn't have anything even close to that specifically. So I had to really get. Look at. Okay, for me, it was finding who are the mentors, who are the people who are, you know, their, their research and their academic work and what they publish is. Is going to be somewhere in this zone, if you will, at least in this general kind of new sphere of what I was looking for. And I really tracked down a couple people who were really key. Luis Menkes, who was one of my main mentors. She was an ethnomusicologist at Duke from South Africa and really amazing doctor and incredible writer and researcher with a very musical background. And then I sought out Ava, who's an amazing African dance teacher and deep within a lot of the African roots of music and more folkloric ancestral music, and was teaching also for a long time at Duke and pulled her so the kind of dance department pulled in another professor who is a philosopher, looking at kind of the aesthetics of, you know, where our origin comes from and how do we talk about the aesthetics of art and how is art and music, you know, how can we look at that as far as defining that as a unique. Is that a unique quality to humanity or not? You know, which is a really neat question in and of itself. You know, we kind of think of ourselves as like, oh, we're so musical and we have dance and we have these arts, and that's so unique. That's what makes us human. And yet really, when we start looking at other beings on the earth, there's many forms of sound and movement that are intrinsic to how beings manifest and how they relate to each other and how they communicate. With each other. So it's a really cool piece. So kind of brought that in. And then the psych department, of course, pulling up kind of these whole pieces of what we would call psychoacoustics, looking at what is the perception of sound and how does sound then you know, impact our physiology, our brain chemistry, all of these things. And that led me into the neurosci department, which is what I ended up doing a lot of my research in. And I kind of. I thought when I switched out of pre med and the medical program, I thought I was going to go become a neuroscientist. And I actually started there and I worked in a lab there, actually. Brazilian lab. Miguel Nicolelis. I don't know if you ever heard of him. His research was. It was some of the early stuff. It's been on 60 Minutes. And he was pretty high profile for quite some time because he was the first person to develop microelectrode arrays, which are basically the implants that would be implanted into the motor cortex of rhesus monkeys and essentially to control like robotic prostheses. And at the time when I was working there, so we, the lab was basically, we would have these monkeys do these operations on the monkeys, do the implants into their brains, and then these monkeys would basically operate these robotic arms, prostheses that were at MIT across the Internet, which was super revolutionary for the time. I mean, that was. That was the stuff.

Yeah. I mean, this sounds like. There's this guy I talked to on the podcast who discussed exoskeletons and the creation of almost like human robot body suits that could be worn and potentially even controlled with.

Brainwaves or neuronal patterns. It was Ken Ford from the Stem Talk podcast. And it was very interesting what you can do, but this seems like a far cry from what I did when I was with you down there in Sedona.

Where do you go from there to develop this unique healing practice that you do now? How did this flesh itself out for you once you got to the point where you're actually practicing?

Yeah, well, it's actually a really interesting journey because it was in that lab. I was working in the lab and I was working with the lead researcher and a dear friend of mine. His name was actually Siddhartha, of all names. He's another Brazilian. And we actually had met through capoeira, which is an Afro Brazilian martial art. I don't know if you're familiar with.

Capoeira, but yeah, I've twisted myself up a few times attempting to learn that movement.

Yeah, it's an incredible movement practice. And actually, and I'll come back to it, because it's a deep part of what my research ended up focusing on. But Siddhartha and I were basically in the lab one day and we were doing this sleep memory study on these rats. And literally part of my job, of course, is the grunt low level, was to sacrifice these rats. And we had like three minutes from the time you sacrificed them to scoop their brains out, deep freeze it cryogenically. And then my job was then to go back with this giant, very expensive meat cutter, essentially, and do these micrometer thin sagittal cuts of the brain, and then we stain it and see what areas were active during the study, which was a really horrific kind of process, actually, in the end of the day, and especially because I was vegetarian and I still am.

I was going to say we just lost all our vegan listeners.

Yeah, exactly. Well, don't worry. I mean, basically, it converted me, essentially, because I thought I was going to be a neuroscience. I go to him, Siddhartha, and I'm working this meat cutter thing, and I'm just like, okay, this is awful. I just want to help people. I want to. I know my calling is to heal and work with human beings, not to be basically the giant holocaust, silent holocaust of science is sacrificing all these animals that we kill in the name of the gods of science, you know. And so Siddhartha, of course, turns to me and he's like, you have two options. Either you go back to medical school, you suck it up, and you just. You go through that. That's the only way you're going to work legally with humans, or you go get a massage license. And so I chose the latter. I basically went and I was like, all right, I definitely know that's not the path. So I went and got my bodywork license, you know, as a massage therapist, basically, to legally be able to, you know, work, interact with humans and lay my hands on. But then I basically applied everything else that I've learned and so much since then, of course, with numerous teachers going back, studying with my grandmother's teachers. So that's where, you know, kind of more the traditional ways of healing and what I've learned from many different elders and indigenous teachers, as well as more conventional from, you know, everything from myofascial work and kind of what we were doing there, neuromuscular work and kind of looking at trigger points and these kind of techniques, you know. And then basically my life has been all about bridging things. It's kind of, if you will, from the time I was a child, never really fitting into one place. Growing up cross culturally between, you know, I was never quite Brazilian enough to be Brazilian. I was never quite Mexican enough to be Mexican or American enough to be American. So it was like, I'm clearly just. That's my role in this world is someone that's a bridger. I step, I have a foot in multiple worlds. And that also applies, I think, to the energetic and spiritual, which has been a big part of my upbringing as well. And so that's, yeah, it really informs, I think, the healing work and what you experience is essentially the amalgamation of all of these practices and work. And of course my passion with music, which at the same time, since Duke, you know, I've been pretty much professional musician. I haven't stopped, you know, cultivating that and gathering sounds and instruments and stories from people. First peoples from around the world, indigenous people. I feel that the medicine is really there. Our ancestors had it basically all figured out before we kind of overlaid, you know, the domination of science, which is, you know, science is so beautiful in its truth and in the ways in which it's able to really measure and want to quantify. It's like a master of measuring the external world, right? And observing and measuring and quantifying the observable, however, the unobservable, the unseen world, which is actually the majority of the universe and the most interesting, I would argue, part of the universe, it really doesn't know what to do. And so that's kind of where again, being the cross cultural bridger that I've come to know myself as, it's really been my mission is like, okay, how do we connect these dots? How do we reach into this world that is, you know, really hard for a scientist, for instance, to go into and make any sense of. And how do we bridge that into a way that people who don't know that or don't even know how to start to think about that can really start to access it. And what I found in Truth, Ben, is that that really comes out of our direct experience. And so what you experienced on the table and through the session is really it. It's like it's the only way because, I mean, I could try to explain it for days, but until you feel it, you really feel, oh, I feel a tangible, palpable difference in my being. It's really, you know what I mean? Because there's no study, hard study that we have still to date that says quantifiably. Okay, this is doing this, this and this. Right, Right, right.

So when I first. I think when we first got on the table, what you started off with was you were just having me do a special form of breathing. Correct me if I'm wrong, this is a couple months ago now. But tell me about that. Why you start with breathing, where the breath fits in, because you've obviously strung together all these strange and fringe practices that you've collected from the four corners of the planet. And I want to walk people through how it actually works and why you choose what you chose. So tell me about the breath and why you start with the breath and how that actually works.

Okay, so the breath is a great place to start because it is, in fact, the first and last thing we ever do on this human walk. You know, so I really, I feel it is the groundwork, if you will. The breath is basically, it's life that inhale, right? When we breathe in air, oxygenate the blood, when we help the metabolism, all of these processes, chemical processes that happen within the body to begin, we breathe in that life. And then in the pause in between, there's this moment, this still point, right? The pause between the breath, which I'll go into later. But then the exhale, of course, is the death, right? We're releasing all those toxins, everything's been metabolized. You know, it's literally coming out through the exhale, the release, the surrender. And this is. So that's that life and death kind of process. And then you have this other pause. And so these two pause points are what I like to call. It's like the. It's the vacuum, it's like the tension or the motor, if you will, that kind of keeps this. This life force, this process or cyclical process, a rhythmical process of life and death constantly flexing. It's the pump or the Prana pump or the Qi pump, if you want to talk about Chinese medicine or Vedic medicine, really looking at how this polarity moves our body. And in essence, you could call that the rebirth. So you really have this life death rebirth process happening in this micro level with each breath. And then of course, you string those out across the span of a lifetime and you essentially have this journey that is our life. So when we. What I like to tell people, my clients and I feel has been a mantra for myself is, you know, it's the first and last thing we're ever going to do is breathe, so why not master it? And I think that really, you know, it really sums it up. So there's so many practices and ways that the breath has been studied and mastered, if you will, by multiple cultures, you know, across the world, everywhere from qigong, you know, all the way to, you know, to what's the brother. The Wim Hof. Who does the whole cold. Yeah, Iceman. So you have so many, you know, such a variety, of course, but we all have it. It's this common, free medicine that everyone has access to. Right. We all breathe even when we're not thinking. Most of us don't think about it. And so the breath is really essential. Oh, go ahead.

Well, what I was going to say was when you. I think what happened was you laid me down on the massage table and then you coached me through a specific breathing pattern, told me to continue that pattern the whole time that you were doing the work. Can you tell me a little bit about the pattern that you were coaching me on?

Yeah, so that's perfect. So basically, the breath work that I've kind of found between all these various techniques, and there are many, and they each have their applications. What I found is one of the most powerful therapeutic breaths, and that's what I like to call it, is one. It's very simple. And essentially it involves breathing in through the nose and exhaling out the mouth and specifically targeting the diaphragm and breathing all the way down into the pit of our stomach. And really, it's something that's actually really challenging. Challenging for most adult humans.

Well, see, I don't think it's challenging to do like one or two times. It's challenging to do when you're laying there on the table for like, you know, an hour or an hour. And I think it was there like an hour and a half. Like, I almost got into this trance, like state trying to continue breathing into my diaphragm the whole time. You don't realize how difficult a move that is to do for a long period of time. Because you're so used to shallow chest breathing, right?

Exactly. And that's just it. The shallow chest breathing and actually on the table is much easier than standing. In fact. So oftentimes I'll explain the process. We'll do some kind of explanation, some coaching, standing, and then that's applied laying down, which oftentimes is a little easier just because the pressure and the weight is a little easier when we lay down. In fact, when we sleep, we breathe this way, you know, when we go into REM sleep, when we go into our deeper sleep and our active mind Shuts off. You know, it's actually the body's parasympathetic, takes over nervous system. And we breathe from our diaphragm, not from our chest. And this chest breath, I really liken it to this. My theory is, you know, this is my hypothesis is that, you know, human beings, when you look at a baby breathe, watch a young baby, they're breathing from their belly, Their belly goes up and down, their chest is barely moving at all. In fact, you look at a dog, you look at a cat, you look at any animals that you have any contact with, animals breathe from their belly, they're breathing from their diaphragm constantly. You look at an adult human and at most 9 out of 10 adult humans. And I'll tell you this, out of working with thousands of people over my years as a therapist, everywhere from 80 plus years old down to teenager, adolescent, basically this is about the time I think this really gets ingrained and patterned. We start breathing from the shallow breath. And what I believe it comes from, this is my hypothesis is that we're on the playground as a little kid and maybe we start crying, we fall down or whatever and somebody else says, suck it up, crybaby, or you're fat, suck it in. You know, you're such a fat, fat, so fatty kid, whatever that is. Some little thing happened, I'm sure at some point where we told ourselves, suck it in and hold that breath. And it's not okay to be breathing from this connected place, which is actually our authority. This is, you know, breathing down to our diaphragm gives us this power and strength. That's why when we get hit in the stomach and we're breathing from our chest, we get the wind knocked out of us. We literally don't have, we're not plugged into this core breath, which is actually 40% more capacity of our lungs. So we're actually asphyxiating ourselves in essence.

And, and for me, by the way, what happened with me was I was a bodybuilder and so I got so used to sucking my abs in while on stage and breathing from the chest that I developed this really, really nice like V taper in my abs. And I still, honestly, like, I have a really great midsection, really great looking midsection. But I also struggle with psoas issues and diaphragm issues and breathing issues because I trained myself to suck my stomach in not just for the bodybuilding stage, but because as a, almost as like a young westernized male, I was raised with this idea that you Know, you gotta suck in your abs and stick your chest out and flare. Look great for the girls. And that a relaxed posture in which your belly's kind of sticking out, as you might see in photos. You know, you look through National Geographic, for example, see photos of all these hunter gatherer tribes and more indigenous or ancestral populations, and they kind of stand without this lordotic curve in the back and without the abs sucked in. And rather, everything's just kinda you know, in this relaxed posture where the abs are just kind of allowed to be pushed forward slightly. And they're not gonna win any bodybuilding trophies for sure, but I guarantee they're deep belly breathing a lot more efficiently, a lot more.

And I'll argue that they have more oxygen in their blood as a result, and they're a little more activated. They're literally more in tune with their body awareness.

Right? Which is. And so in the converse is also true. You mentioned that for the looks and kind of like to track, you know, the women. But the converse is true for women. So many women, right, are sucking it in, pushing out their butt and pushing out their breasts, because that's what society wants. That's the image that we've been programmed to believe is beautiful, right? So it's a really deep societal, social level of patterning that we basically all ascribe to as adults. And it's really hard to deprogram from it. But it's one of the things that I found, without a doubt, you know, in my. In my healing work. It helps so many people, the moment they start getting more aware of this kind of breathing and connecting to the diaphragm, so much in a person's life changes. I've literally seen people's metabolism totally shift. I've seen the underactive thyroid become normalized. Numerous things, you know, not just more energy overall, as well as. And this is the whole piece that is kind of harder to quantify, but is the emotional states. You know, so much of our emotional state, it comes in the belly. You know, it's held down in our stomachs, right? And it's like when we're disconnected from our stomach. Disconnected from. In Chinese medicine, there's a point in our body called the dantian, which is, you know, the seed of where the qi kind of emanates. That point just two fingers below the belly.

The lower dantian. Well, there's the lower, the middle and the upper.

Right, right, right, totally. So the lower Dan Tien, specifically in this example, but connecting and breathing into that point, you know, activating that Chi and connecting to basically the energy field around us, right? It's like being able to move beyond ourselves. There's kind of this. This notion that, you know, in our society, we're always running around and there's always more to do. We're all on our iPhones, you know, or whatever, and constantly in this stress state, this fight or flight state, and we're really. And we're not breathing while we do all this. And so it's like this idea that we're burning up all of our jing, you know, our life essence, which is stored in the adrenals and the kidneys in this notion that if we could open up and start to gain more awareness about our dan Tien, about literally our breathing and our awareness and our breath in every waking moment, there's going to be this whole ability to tap into the energy force around us. Essentially not running on the battery pack in our kidneys, you know, on this jing and like running and exhausting our jing, you know, life essence, but rather connecting to the infinite energy all around us, which is literally through the breath. It is our Qi pump, our prana pump, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, the simplest tactic I ever learned, this was after I met with you is I was up at Paul Check's house and he just showed me this simple kite string technique where, you know, you tie a kite string right around the belly button and it's like this cue, right? It's just very simple cue in which you think consciously about expanding that kite string when you breathe. And there are now, you know, special. And folks, if you're listening in, by the way, pipe in in the comments section if you know, because I don't recall, but there's a few new devices out that are like, they're like Bluetooth generating devices that tie to your phone that let you know, you know, you wear them around your waist. They let you know when you've stopped belly breathing, you know, and cue you to breathe properly and track your breath work. And so, by the way, I mentioned leaving a comment, if you guys are listening in, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com SoundHealing that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com soundHealing and that's where the show notes are for Porgungui. And I'm gonna put some of his music in there as well so you can kind of see some of the tunes that he creates. I want to move forward to going past the breath and delve into some of the other things that you did. So you taught Me how to breathe. You told me to breathe that way the whole time. This deep diaphragmatic breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Then you laid me on the table. And what comes next? I mean, I know that you call this the style. What do you call it? Myo rhythmic technique.

Yeah, in my arrhythmic release, my arrhythmic technique, I've kind of been. It's a terminology that I've been playing with just in so much as eventually my goal. One day I have this dream that I'm gonna eventually have time to stop what I'm doing. And I've been focusing a lot on my music right now, in large part because through my healing practice, I can reach one on one. But it's really hard to reach many people with the same amount of time. And just given the amount of time in our lives, I've been feeling called to reach. I can reach a lot of people through my music, you know, at once, through performing and through recording. And so that's kind of been my focus currently. But I know that one day I'm going to go back and basically write a book and teach what I do. And so in that vein, I started, you know, kind of coining, like, what's the terminology? What would I call this? So that's where the. My arrhythmic release came from. And essentially, you know, it's kind of like the myofascial work, you know, the myofascial release. And there's a lot of different terminologies for that. I kind of hate terms that, you know, like that. They kind of get convoluted and just. It's just a branding thing. But at the core of what we're talking about is exactly the rhythmic, rhythmic, for me, or rhythm. It has to do with, of course, time and the mastery of time. And also cycles and the way cycles work on various levels within us, micro cycles to the macro. And essentially breathing is one of those cycles that we're dealing with. This work. It's very fundamental. So that's why we start there. That's the groundwork. And then, of course, the other cycles being also your circulatory cycle, lymphatic cycle, also the cycle of the cerebral spinal fluid that's also moving through you. And then also the energy in the meridians and, you know, tuning into what the chi or the prana and how that's moving through your body. So all of these are different levels of cycles that I'm tuning into rhythms. And then there's of course, vibration, which I'll get into. I'm sure we'll talk further about that. But what I want to talk about next, essentially in the session, is that I tune into you and I start doing a technique of, you know, some people would call it rocking. Trager is a technique, a formalized technique that, you know, by Trager, who, you know, basically developed a whole school around just rocking and moving bodies and shaking the body. But essentially, it's a very ancient art, right? Rocking, shaking. You look at a dog, you know, when you pet them, and they try to shake off whatever that energy is, you can see they're very aware of it. Or a bird hits a window and falls, you think it's dead. And I've watched this bird just hop up, suddenly shake off whatever the trauma was, and then fly again. And so it's a really interesting phenomenon, this rocking, shaking. So what I do is then use that essentially to rock your body and to start to essentially recalibrate your nervous system by engaging all your proprioception and, you know, your muscle spindles in your body as they start to feel this rocking mot. There's kind of a, you know, the muscles kind of going back and forth, expanding, contracting, and there's this certain level of tension, baseline tension, that's in your body. And what I can do is by doing this, it's almost like sonar. I'm pinging the vibration from your feet up to your head. And I'm watching where there's any places where I don't see vibration, like where I don't see movement. So where there's a holding where there might be some kind of trauma, some kind of scarring, and literally, it's a way that I can quickly do a diagnosis of the whole body.

Wait, back it up just a second. How are you getting the body to shake? I forget this part.

Yeah, yeah. So there's different ways of doing it. I might start in any part of the body, but one of my favorites is just to start at the feet, because it's usually often not so guarded place, especially if someone's very traumatized. So I'll go to the feet, and I don't know if you remember this, but I'll essentially go to the feet. I'll lift your legs. I'll just create a little traction, and then I'll slowly start to rock from left to right. Yeah. And so this rocking, literally your body, at first, you're kind of like, it's rigid and it's like it's kind of almost resist it's like, no, no, no. And then all of a sudden the body starts to let go and realize, oh, no, this is safe, it's okay. And little by little, everything starts moving. Everything. And I find essentially what the frequency is of your body and your body is unique, Right? Each body is. And so there's a certain level, but, you know, really attunement and tuning into, you know, what that is. And I. It's kind of one of those things where it's a touch. I don't know that I could explain it. You know, it's one of those things that you have to almost. You have to experience it and in practice. But essentially what I do is as I send a wave from your feet spaces, think of an oscillator, your body is essentially like a band and. Or think of about a battle rope, if you will, tied off at the top. Right, Right. I'm whipping the battle rope from the bottom and I'm trying to see at what frequency of the battle rope do I get the whole thing to send a wave all the way up to the top of your head and all the way back down to the. The feet. Right. And so. And essentially then I can diagnose where. And also from either your left or your right, where you're holding and where things are stuck or where things are moving. You know, maybe too much. Maybe there's a. So whatever that is, I'm. That's how I kind of. I do an assessment that way. And it also, at the same time, and I love this, for me, it's like, you know, I'm trying to do so many levels of things in such a short amount of time in a session. So I'm also, you know, as I'm sending this wave up and down, making my assessment, I'm also actually helping your nervous system calm down, helping you drop in a little deeper, because I want to get you as quickly as possible out of your, you know, your sympathetic and into your parasympathetic nervous system and really just get you to basically drop in and surrender all the armor. Because the quicker I can get you to let go of your armor and whatever defenses are there, you know, whether they be conscious or subconscious, the deeper the work, the further we can get. Right.

Okay. So basically you're. You're shaking the body and you're just kind of feeling the. What exactly are you feeling for when you shake?

Yeah, so it's essentially the shaking is vibration. Right. And that's why I go back to the vibrational medicine of what this Is. And so we're vibrating you, I'm shaking you, I'm rocking you, and I'm looking for where there is a lack of movement. In other words, where is the body not shaking back. Because the idea is, and this is. We'll talk about this later, I'm sure, but like a tuning fork, okay, when you strike the tuning fork, the tuning fork will resonate. It'll vibrate, right? And it vibrates at whatever the metal, whatever its shape is, it'll vibrate in that way. And by the same nature, you grab an identical tuning fork, the exact same, let's say, created tuning fork with the same mass and the same shape, and you strike it and it will also vibrate pretty much identically. And you hit them one and you place it near the other and it will vibrate sympathetically, right? Which is this really interesting phenomenon known as sympathetic resonance. And so just to speak to that, so if I were to put something, let's say a mass, like, you know, the poster tacky stuff, you put wall or, you know that, like gummy stuff or a piece of gum, I stick a piece of gum on that tuning fork, let's say, on the left side of it, and I strike it now, it's not going to resonate the same way. Literally, that side will have more mass, more inertia, more density. And that density is going to throw off how the tuning fork resonates as a symmetrical object. And conversely, the sympathetic resonance with that other tuning fork, they're now in a different resonance. They're not going to actually vibrate each other like they would before. And so, and I'll get to that later, I'll come back to that. But the point here being as I'm oscillating your body and we're seeing where things get stuck, where things not moving, where's the tissue not responding. And basically that tells me, okay, we have something going on there. That's going to be one of my first places I want to look. And so that's kind of, you know, that's the assessment part. And then again, I'm tracking your breath, too. So are you having, are you struggling with the diaphragm breathing, or is it getting easier for you? You know, I'm watching your nostrils. The moment I see your left nostril get a little bit more dilated, that's telling me actually you're going to parasympathetic nervous. That's you're dropping in a little bit.

When the nostril gets larger and you can tell nasal Breathing is. Is being enhanced. That's when you know someone's going into parasympathetic breathing patterns.

Exactly, exactly. So I'm watching for all that because in the beginning, you're thinking about it, like you said, you're really like, okay, I'm trying to do what he told me. And so it's this idea, and I try to encourage, also just relaxing into it, let it become more automatic as much as possible.

And I always say this, and I don't know if you remember, if you forget, it's okay. I'll remind you, if we get to something where I need you to take a breath, you know, and that's really important because. Yeah, because, you know, it. Inevitably, my goal isn't for you to really think about the breathing the whole session. It's just to get into understanding that that's where we're at, that's what we're working on, and let go of that now. Like, kind of empty your mind as much as you can, you know?

Hey, I want to interrupt today's show to talk to you about nicotinamide riboside nr. NR is one of the most potent ways to enhance your mitochondrial health. And I've been using it as kind of a fringe longevity tactic for a while now. You may have heard of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. Yeah, there's another big multisyllable word for you. And I even have done an entire podcast on this anti aging molecule that's kind of like the new darling of the mitochondrial health and anti aging community. Because as you age, you lose up to about 50% of your NAD levels. And as soon as that drops, your cells can't produce the energy that they need to maintain your health or to fight inflammation or to maximize your day, to be productive, or to allow you to keep working out at the level that you want to. Or to fight jet lag, which is incredibly important for. Well, there's one supplement that's been clinically proven to raise NAD levels. It's called nicotinamide riboside nr. It's also known as. It's a little bit easier to spit out. And it's the key ingredient in true Niagen. True Niagen. So true Niagen is something that you just take a few capsules of each morning to restore your body's natural balance of NAD every time you take it. They recently had a study published in UC Boulder in which they talked about its potential to improve blood pressure and to improve cardiovascular health. And if you chronically supplement with it, it keeps your NAD levels raised all year long. So it's a pretty beautiful and handy little supplement called Truniagen nr. It's nicotinamide riboside. You find it in this Truniagen stuff and you can find out more. You just go to trniagen.com that's T R U N I A G E N true niagen.com this podcast is also brought to you by Daily Harvest. Now I have a little freezer full this stuff from Daily Harvest upstairs. I'm at my home office right now. And what they do is they take these perfectly portioned cups of frozen organic superfoods and fresh fruits and organic vegetables and they put it all into this little cup and then they send it straight to your door. And we're talking like matcha lattes with mints and banana cacao smoothies. And you just dump it all into a blender. Or if you're doing one of their savory meals, you just put it into a skillet and you can have easy, delicious plant based food meal ready in as little as 30 seconds. My kids have been using this before they go to school in the morning and they simply dump it out into the blender or into the cast iron skillet and it's just ready to go. They've got smoothies, they've got savory harvest bowls, they've got soups, they've got superfood lattes, they've got overnight oats, everything. And you get your three cups of Daily Harvest free when you get that first box from Daily Harvest. To do so, you go to daily-harvest.com it's daily-harvest.com and you enter promo code BEN that gives you your first three cups free in your first box of daily harvest. So daily-harvest.com and use promo code Ben. The one thing that this brings to mind is it's. I don't know if you've heard of mouth taping before, but it's something that folks will do now to enhance parasympathetic nervous system activation while they sleep. And this sounds like a lot of stuff to put on your face before you go to bed, but I've tried this before. You tape your mouth. There are companies like 3M that make like a tape you can, you can put over your mouth. Then you can put one of these, these nasal breathing strips that kind of open up the nasal passages. You know, like you see football players wearing or cyclists wearing, you know, in races that open up the nasal passages and you can Sleep like this to enhance parasympathetic nervous system activation while you sleep. I've had a few people try it. I've done it myself with this ring on that I wear to track sleep. And it actually does enhance deep sleep a little bit. Increases your deep sleep percentage. But I don't like to do it that much because with the mouth tape on.

My wife and I like to chat before we fall asleep at night. So I've tried this before and I, you know, we'll sometimes just like fall asleep as we're talking, right. And then we'll just kind of, you know, fade off and go to sleep. And I can't do that with the mouth tape on. So it's not a technique that works too well for me. But I suppose if you're single or you don't like to chat before you go to bed at night, it could be something to look into. Okay, so. Yeah, exactly. The mouth. The mouth tape trick works sometimes, but it could also destroy your marriage. So.

This whole kind of like pre work pattern that you're doing, you're shaking, you're feeling out the body, teaching the breathing, activating the parasympathetic nervous system. And after that, is that when you get into the sound stuff?

Yeah, well, kind of the sound stuff is woven throughout. And I don't know if you noticed, but I also work with different music. My table is a sound table, which, you know, all of this, everything that I do can be done without the sound table. The sound table is like.

You got to describe this people, by the way. The sound table.

Yeah, the sound table is really remarkable device. It's essentially, it's. This one's made by a guy in Colorado. It's, you know, custom made. And it's made with transducers, multiple different transducers which are essentially. Put simply, it's like taking the magnet out of a speaker. You know, instead of having the cone of the speaker, it's just the magnet so which vibrates the cone and that's what moves the air that we hear the sound. In this case, we're essentially taking those transducers. And these are special ones, not just any speaker transducer, but they're made to recreate frequencies from 80 hertz and below. And there's multiple ones of this style. And then there's a full range transducer which is made to create everything up to 20,000 hertz and down to 20 hertz. And so that's the full range of human, what most humans can perceive. Although not very few people can actually perceive that full range. So this. This essentially is then mounted and into this table, in a way, in a golden mean ratio. And the guy who built it, you know, he's really into sacred geometry and, you know, really feels that that helps enhance this, this. And I don't know one way or the other. I just know it does work phenomenally well. So I just. I trust that. But he essentially mounts that. And what it does, in effect, is turn the entire table into a vibrating platform, or a speaker, if you will. And then it's really more felt and heard. So when your body is coupled with it, the weight of your body pressing down into the table, then you basically become part of that resonator. And so you are essentially the speaker as well. So your body is also resonating. And so essentially it's a way of getting frequencies into the body directly and kind of bypassing the auditory that you're hearing your ears. And so you can actually hear it more. Feel it rather than hear it. I combine it with.

You feel it kind of go through your whole body. I have this pillow. It's made by. I think it's a company. It's called Humu or something like that. I found them in Finland. And it's similar to that. It's like a pillow you lay your head on. It transmits sound through the pillow. And you can just kind of feel the sound going through your whole body. Almost like these underwater MP3 players that conduct sound through the bones in your skull. But basically your entire bed does that. Through the whole body.

Yeah, exactly. The table does that. And so it's really phenomenal tool. And now another great example for people, for listeners out there, if you have a guitar, let's say, at your house or something like that, it's kind of a weird thing to do, but bite the end of the guitar. Like the neck of the guitar at the very top of it, just put your teeth gently on it. And so you basically create this point of contact between your cranial bone, your maxilla and your mandible. And essentially then strum the guitar. And literally it will sound like someone put a speaker put the guitar in your head. And it's pretty neat way to just kind of feel what we're talking about. But that's essentially that I have to.

Try this and get strange looks from my family as I. I totally eat my guitar. I may start with my ukulele. It might fit in my mouth a little better.

Totally, yeah. And have someone play it. Like you could play it, you know, just kind of strum it or hold a chord and just kind of of play it. And it's really amazing experience. And what that is, that conductivity of that direct contact. And so you're essentially getting the sound directly into your being and bypassing everything that your eardrums have to go through. So essentially we're doing that with the table. And then what that's hooked up to is to various instruments that I work with, which you were mentioning earlier, everything from the didgeridoo, which. To Tibetan prayer bowls. And I work with these tools primarily because they are very ancient, they're very primordial. And, you know, I have a newer crystal bowl, if you will, but honestly, I love it for certain things, but it's. I really feel. And we can talk about this later, but I really feel working with the more ancient indigenous instruments, there's just more juju there feels less.

It feels less synthetic, honestly. And I mean, the bowls are cool, but like, the didgeridoo is pretty epic. And I want to get into that in a second. Some of of these, I think you call them. What do you call them? Cymatic sound therapy.

Well, somatic sound therapy is kind of a way to describe the whole thing. So, you know, because cymatics, right, is basically the. It's a coin that was. It was termed by Jan Hensing, who's a. He's, you know, a scientist researcher from. I believe it was Switzerland or Sweden. Switzerland, I believe it's Swiss. And essentially he came up in the 60s and, and with this whole technique, he started this area of study which was then termed a whole field called Cymatics. C Y M A T I C S which was basically looking at the way that sound would basically create structure in the physical realm. And actually he created some really neat experiments and they're documented pretty well. So you can YouTube somatics and just look at some of the videos online and there's some old black and white video videos that were from his scientific experiments that he basically come up with. And it's fascinating. He tried different mediums, like everything from liquids like water and what happens if you basically send a vibration into the water, everything to different types of more viscous liquids and activating those and basically resonating them. Like I was talking about the tuning fork, essentially the tuning fork. You're striking the fork. Fork is then you're putting energy into this, this object, this physical medium, and then that begins to vibrate and resonate. And essentially if you could slow that down or somehow see that or capture that. This is the phenomena of somatics that we see and what he showed, which is really neat and I really recommend. And I actually have done this experiment at home. You can recreate it yourself. A simple way to do it is take a speaker and this is, you know, super. Do it yourself home style. But take your speaker, whatever it is, take the. Lit the front off of it, like the. Whatever the, you know, the nylon that's on the front of it, and just get the cone, if you can, then put a plate that's. And I actually just took it because I'm a drummer too. I have lots of drums in my house. I just put a big drum on top of it with a black, like a kick drum, and with a black, you know, head on it, nylon head. But you could do this just taking like a. A thin plate of metal or something like that, like a sheet, maybe it could be Plexiglas. And then put salt, a bunch of just white salt. And for me, it works really nice if you have a black surface with the white salt on it, because you can see the patterns really well. And then essentially I just hooked up the speaker to a sine wave generator and you can just get those on the app store, whatever, on your phone and start to do basically what would be a sweep of frequencies. So you can start down from 20 hertz, which is. Which you can't really hear. Most speakers can't reproduce 20. But as you start to go up from 20 up into, like, say, you know, 40, 50 to 100 hertz, you'll start really being able to hear that. 100 hertz is, say, where, like, a kick drum likes to hang out. So most music, we all hear the kick drum pretty well, but you usually feel the kick drum more than you hear it. Right. So same idea. So, and then you're going to go, basically sweep it up and you'll take your little app or whatever and filter all the way up to 20,000 hertz, just kind of go through the full spectrum. And if you do this slowly enough, you'll literally watch the salt begin to vibrate. And it'll look like chaos at first. It'll just be like dancing around all over the place, a lot of salt on the floor. So, you know, put a blanket down or whatever. But as you get going, you're going to find certain frequencies that all of a sudden will literally crystallize into a geometry until it looks like someone drew a mandala on this surface with the salt, and it's like a standing wave like the salt will start to organize itself into these concentric circles and different kind of fractal looking geometry. And it's really amazing. And as you go higher with the frequency, the more complex of the shape will take. And literally, as you get high enough like. And you can do this with actual notes, with pitches like playing a keyboard, if you will, it will form these different geometries and some of them, some frequencies will be a little bit more chaotic. It'll go chaos, for instance, all of a sudden you keep sliding up and next thing you know it'll start to form into another geometry shape more complex than the previous. And then you'll kind of find a certain frequency or range of frequencies where it's like the sweet spot where it really holds that shape. And then you'll keep.

This sounds kind of like Masaru Emoto's studies on how when you subject water. And I realize there's some controversy behind whether or not these studies were conducted with rigorous science, but you subject water to emotions or prayers or even specific frequencies, and depending on the quality of that frequency or the positivity of that emotion, they generate a specific 3D geometric shape.

Absolutely. And water is a great. That's why it's such a great medium. And so Hans Jenny, if you look at. I think he has a book, there's a book out that I think either he published or someone published of his work that has a lot of imagery, like photos, stills of this geometry. Because it's really beautiful. It's just breathtaking. What you look at.

What's his name?

Jen's Henny. Let's see if I can just. I want to miss.

Okay, cool.

Sacrifice.

While you're looking that up, what I want to hear about before we delve into how you use the didgeridoo and some of these singing bowls and these other devices is. I'd love to hear your take on what's going on to human organs or human cells. Like how much of a corollary we can draw there. Any science or any research you've seen or what you hypothesize to be going on physiologically when the body gets exposed to these frequencies.

Yeah, it's. Gosh, you know, that's. That's kind of one of those areas where there's a lot of research, I think just really it's. It's a juicy area, I feel, in my humble opinion, for more study. I don't think there's been nearly enough work in that area, but there has been work. And so it's really fascinating what you know, so Hans, Jenny, real quick, it is H A N S Jenny J E N N Y and he was in vax with. So yeah, Swiss medical doctor and kind of got into this whole area. He's passed. He died in 1972. But if people just look it up, look it up. There's a lot of stuff online and it's really beautiful stuff and kind of it is very much like Dr. Emoto's work. You know, it's cool that you brought it up. I mean, I know that he got a lot of slack and there's a lot of questions around how rigorous his research was. However, I do think that there is a lot of direct experience that people can have just doing their own experiments with water and working with water. I mean there's the whole course, the field of homeopathy, which has been around for quite some time and obviously I think more than a statistical amount of evidence that shows that there's benefit to it. So many people have seen benefit from homeopathy. It's been around for a long time. And I really, I know that there's a lot of controversy of course around it, but I myself actually have seen a homeopath I used to teach actually for. On a medical board. It was called Global Medicine Foundation. It was a foundation right after I left Duke that I worked with and they were based in North Carolina there and they basically our job was to take basically leading experts in all these fields of holistic medicine, essentially everything from ayurvedic medicine to homeopathy to body work and you know, basically, you know, somatic work. They had internal medical doctors, they had people working with, you know, all these media. And essentially our job was to take fourth year medical school grads and give them like a two month program that would dose them with, okay, you've studied all this western medicine, now here's how the rest of the world heals human bodies and give them like a download. And so in this program I met this amazing homeopath named Malcolm Smith and he's up in Portland. Incredible homeopath. And you know, he treated me and it really shifted my whole life back when I was about 28 years old. So yeah, it's. I can't say it enough, you know, about 10 years ago, I really recommend people connect to water because essentially we are water, right? We're walking, we're water bags. And so it's like when you think about Emoto's work and you think about ourselves and that we are bodies of water, what we put into our body of water, including obviously physically, nutritionally, but also energetically. Right. Or the thoughts that we surround that we think, you know, when we ideate certain ways we go down into self destructive patterns or we rise up into incredible manifestation patterns. Right. Where we create beauty around us or we create destruction. And so I think there's so much corollary on so many levels of course with his work that you know.

Yeah.

Is it totally quantifiable? Again, kind of what I said in the beginning, it gets into that unseen world where I feel like don't throw out the bathwater. In this case with the baby.

The bathwater has some knowledge in it.

Yeah. It's very interesting when you look at intracellular communication and a previous podcast guest and a very smart triple board certified physician, Dr. Zach Bush. We get into this a little bit it in the show and you can go check that one out. I'll link to it in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com soundhealing but intracellular communication based on photobiomodulation or the conductance of light is highly dependent on the hydration status of the human body. So in a way, the way that our cells communicate, it's dependent on our electrochemical gradient across the cell membranes, our hydration status, and specifically the quality of that hydration status from a mineral and an electrical standpoint, meaning that the type of water and the quality of the water that you actually drink and then also your, your exposure to things like infrared, things like sunlight, et cetera, it's very interesting. Like, like sunlight, breath work, really good water, those are keys to intracellular communication. You know, we're often led to believe that it's all just nerves, right. And that's the way the body communicates. But it goes, goes far above and beyond that. I know we're kind of rabbit holing here, but I'll link an interview with Zach Bush.

I think you hit it on the head and actually it's a really nice segue into the myofascial and the connective tissue, the body, which is a big part of the work that I do. As you said, it's like we're working with vibration on all these levels, right. So there's many levels to it. And so again when we talk about the body itself and the connective tissue of the body or the myofascia of the body. So myofascia is an amazing whole new kind of field, if you will. It's so ancient, of course, but western science is just very recently Starting to get turned onto it. There's actually. And I'm gonna have to look it up and I'll send it to you. But there's a doctor very recently who's starting to do some research with another body worker by the name of Tom Myers, who's also an author. He wrote a book by the name of Anatomy Trains. And he is, of course, he was a student of Ida Rolf, who started the whole movement of Rolfing and that whole technique of structural integration. But I think there's so much wisdom in really potential to understand that we haven't even tapped into with myofascia. And this French doctor. Anyways, recently he's been doing basically this dissection of live cadavers, who are very recent in being able to work on live specimens and to show. Because most cadavers, of course, by the time they dissect it, the fascia has already lost all the hydration. It's already totally broken down. Like, you can't really appreciate the elasticity and the way that fascia actually operates and functions and responds to stimuli. And so what they're showing in this recent research is that the myofascial system is essentially the inner web of the body. It is the Internet, literally, and it's constantly communicating. And like, you're talking about, you know, the cells and how do cells be able to communicate between each other? The same thing goes with the fascia and what that's doing, Very much so. And it correlates with how much our hydration. What is our hydration level and what is the quality of it, just like you said. So it's really, I think, a great segue when we work with the body, when I'm working on the table, part of getting us in the parasympathetic nervous system, taking kind of these measurements, seeing where's the restriction, where's the contraction in the body. And also oftentimes that correlates to the emotional state. You know, where is there an emotional trauma? Where is there a psychological trauma in the body, in the psyche, which, again, is getting into that realm. That's hard to quantify because it's in the unseen realm. But it's very much felt literally, right. It is the feeling realm, and it is oftentimes more than not. And there's many different studies that have shown this correlation between, of course, the physical and the emotional state. Right. Of our beings. So the way we feel bad, we have a certain traumatic thing, or we think about, oh, we have a certain tendency to be very prone to injury. Or constantly dwelling on death, for instance, or we're constantly worrying about getting cancer, and then we manifest cancer. In essence, placebo effect is essentially this, which is statistically significant, which I always is so funny. Right. Placebo actually is medicine.

Yeah, it's crazy. It really, really is interesting. But. But, I mean, I, I think there's definitely more going on when I'm. When I'm on that table beyond placebo.

Right. And.

And. And that's, that's the other thing I, I want to make sure we. We get a chance to get this part in during our interview. The didgeridoo and all these musical instruments that you then blasted my body with. You know, at this point, I'm. By the time you got. Because you. You did, like, a lot of deep tissue work while I was there on the table. As you were. You were. You're blasting my body via the table with the music that you produce. And by the way, please remind yourself, if possible, what I'd like you to do, if you can, is send me, like, a track that I can embed in the podcast, show notes, so people can hear the type of music you'd play during the massage, and I'll put that in the show notes. Or we could even at the end of this podcast, because I've got an audio ninja who can pull this off. We. If I have your permission, we could even, like, play one of your songs at the very end of the podcast so people could see what it sounds like. Yeah. I don't know if you'd be game, but just, Just send me the track you want to play and I'll get it in. So if you're listening in right now, we'll. We'll. We'll play some music at the end of this show, but, but then you, you, you break out all these instruments. Talk to me about what it is that you're then proceeding to blast the body with and why you choose these particular instruments to use.

Sure, yeah. Blast is a great term.

So, yeah, the idea is, for me is so, again, vibration. So with the body, it's like what we're doing is essentially a very gross form of vibration, and gross in the sense of general, more on a larger scale. And what my goal is essentially to get the vibration and bring vibration into the body on more and more nuanced ways. Like, how do we get to the most subtle vibration? So kind of from the most, you know, not so subtle to the most subtle. And so throughout the session, essentially, that's what we're working with. So getting you into that parasympathetic state, getting you to basically entrain. There's also a level of entrainment going on, which is also a really fascinating, you know, thing about nature is this notion of entrainment and how, you know, certain things. When there's a stronger pulse or stronger rhythm, again connecting to that notion of rhythm or cyclical pattern happening, other things around it will tend to gravitate towards that, you know, and you see that everywhere from when women come together, when multiple women are in the same proximate space with each other, their moon cycles will sync up. You know, they're literally. Their menstrual period will sink together, which is a really fascinating way. Same thing goes with, you know, you go into a club and it's pounding this base, you know, 120 BPM music, your heart rate's gonna start to accelerate up. It's really interesting thing. And conversely, if you hear a slower pulsing music, you'll start to entrain into that frequency as well. And we see this also with different brain states, brainwave states with like alpha versus theta. And there's a whole area that we could, you know, haven't even tapped into, which we could talk about too, is binaural beats. And kind of looking at that, which is. Which is one segment of sound healing that a lot of people talk about. I tend to not use it as much in the sessions because I want to do binaural beats really with the human body, you need headphones and I'm working too much, you know, on the body itself. So anyhow, back to blasting with the dig. So essentially we get the body into the state where it's really dropped in and it's wide open. And that's our goal, is really releasing everything. And so the myofascial work essentially is. Is we're opening that space in your connective tissue, unlocking that space, using your breath essentially as a gateway, as a. As essentially as the vehicle, if you will, for taking whatever has been stuck wherever we saw the density in the body and helping to make that density less and less. We want to basically reduce the density in the body, allow it to be as open, activating all your channels, your meridians, your energy center, centers of your body, as well as the physical. And then once we get you into that state where you're wide open, then essentially it's time to have fun. You know, it's time to really then see how can we now bring these subtle vibrations. So that's where it comes into the tuning forks, which we were talking about a little bit. And the didgeridoo is an instrument that I feel is one of the most powerful instruments that I've ever been able to come in contact with out of everything I've ever studied or traveled and experienced. And the reason being is I feel it. There's something to it being such a primordial sound. You know, the didj is an instrument that is arguably the second oldest instrument after the human voice as far as a physical instrument. It's, you know, the aboriginal people of Australia are coined as having the original didgeridoo, as being the first people to know the didj. And they are the oldest living beings on earth that we know of. And, you know, constant culture still existing to this day. And the DJ has been used by them to enter into what they call the dream state, you know, to go in, to connect with source, to connect with creator, with, you know, with the mystery, with the void. And essentially the didj does this in a very powerful way, and that is by tapping into the breath. Once again, the breath that we've been working with throughout is the diaphragm breathing. You cannot play the didgeridoo without tapping to that diaphragm breathing. So as much as it's powerful medicine to receive, it's also medicine to play it. And so I always encourage listeners, really, if you can, it's very easy. Just get yourself a dig and make yourself one out of PVC. There's even one I think you can YouTube hoovery do and watch a really funny video of someone doing it on a Hoover vacuum cleaner, which is like the end of the vacuum cleaner because you just need basically a pipe.

My mouth isn't going anywhere near our vacuum cleaner, I'll tell you that right now.

I don't recommend that. I don't recommend that actually. But you know, a PVC pipe, for instance, which you can get at any hardware store, about an inch and a half diameter and about the length of say 50cm or so will get you into approximately key of C or so. And there's. You can get a different keys by the length of it, which is arbitrary at this point. This what you want. And then just get some beeswax, you melt that, you dip it into the beeswax and you've got yourself a dig. You make your mouthpiece with that and then essentially making the sound itself. Even if you don't get the actual technique of circular breathing or spiral breathing is what I like to call it, you're already going to start to activate the fascia in your throat and strengthen the epiglottis, you start to actually strengthen your diaphragm and start to cultivate that breathing from the core, which is undoing this patterning that Ben and I are talking about here. So I really tell people, get yourself a dig. And even if you don't think you're musical or whatever the story may be, start to practice. Because by doing so. And there's actually been clinical studies on this. Actually a study came out of the UK, I think it was in 2012, and I can send you the link afterwards, but it actually showed that people suffering from sleep apnea were able to actually reduce and reverse. Some people even reverse sleep apnea using and practicing training, essentially with a didgeridoo. They do, which is incredible.

To circular breathe.

Yeah.

And doctor, the other thing, by the way, somebody showed me this. I haven't bought it yet because I'm still. I figure until I get to the point where I can regularly use my harmonica when I travel, which is what I'm working on, because it's far easier to carry through the airports than my ukulele. And then once I get that down, I'll switch to this. But they make like a compact travel didgeridoo. You can just get off of off of Amazon. It's like this cool little like mahogany wood travel didgeridoo that does the same thing. You use it for meditation or deep circular breathing or anything like that. I was thinking about getting a couple for my kids to play around with.

Absolutely no. And they're like a little box and they fit like in your backpack or your carry on. I really recommend it. And literally. So coming back to. As you play it, of course it's doing all kinds of stuff within ourselves, which I can speak to more in a second. But as far as for the person listening. Right. So for you, for instance, as I'm working on the table, the dig that I that I work with is tuned to a frequency that some people call the OHM frequency or the Earth frequency. You know, it's in a C, but it's slightly out of sea. So it's in a relationship to what's called 432A. So essentially A, you know, the pitch that we know is like concert A, if you will, which is a convention. That pitch being 440 hertz, which is how many cycles that it's at, that it's oscillating at. That's basically a convention that was created because of classical music and it was adopted early on in the west, there's many other pitch ways to pitch instruments. Now, 432 is a very interesting one. So essentially, instead of tuning Your A to 440, essentially what that means on an instrument, you tune it down to 432 and then you base all your other notes off of that 432A. So mine was in a C using 432, if that makes sense.

It does. I did a whole podcast, by the way, the guy named Michael Tyrell, a composer named Michael Tyrell, about this, and we even went into how to get a digital tuner if you happen to be an instrumentation or musician and how to. I made up that word just by the way. Instrumentation, instrumentation, and how to actually tune your instruments to the proper frequencies. So, yeah, I've addressed that on podcasts before. It's fascinating.

It's a fascinating whole area of study and people really get deep into it. So I'll let people listen to that podcast. But essentially I use the dig with this tuning. And I also have my bowl, one of the bowls that I work with, is also in this tuning. And so between the two, essentially the whole table, as you felt, resonates with this primordial instrument. And essentially what I really find powerful with the dish, when you're receiving it, when you're listening, is the listener is. It starts to basically clear, energetic blocks. And I know that's a big claim to make and, you know, without having a way to really quantify that, of course, especially if we're talking from a scientific perspective, but I literally, in numerous occasions have seen it just clear stuff out of the way for lack of a better way to express it. You know, kind of just removing the obstacles, if you will, and helping the client or the patient or whoever it is in the space just feel more dropped in and more relaxed in that way. And it creates this almost like the om, if you will, when you kind of like om to yourself, it creates this primordial sound. This sound that's so ancient and speaks to something, I feel, that is on a cellular memory level, like an ancestral sound that I feel has been an throughout all of us, across the ages. And it's something that it's kind of, like I said, it gets a little, I know, fringe to talk about it that way, but it's kind of like I don't want to shy away from it because there's really some medicine there. And all I can say is, for all of you die hard scientists out there, play something, play it. And if nothing else, enjoy the peculiarity. You might feel from it and notice what happens for you when you listen to it and when you put it on through headphones and lay when you can be in the sound, especially on the sound table that. That we're working with, because it really does change things. And so that's a tool that I feel is indispensable for my work, and it's also a tool that I use in my performances when I play on a big stage. I tell you what, I've been in a club or a bar where people are drinking and the vibe is super low and heavy. And when I pull out a didgeridoo and play it through a subsystem through the whole PA system, like a freaking powerful system, nobody knows what hit him. The whole play will shift the energy in the room. Literally just like it goes up an octave and it's a really energetically. And I just. I can't say it enough. I think it's a really powerful tool that we're so blessed that the Aboriginal people allow us to use because, you know, traditionally it was used only by men in ceremony, you know, out of the public eye. In its more recent phenomenon that it's been now spreading across the world.

Say that, you know, the Didj isn't unique to the Aboriginal people. There is a lot of evidence, actually, that the Mayans had a form of didgeridoo. It was made out of other materials, like bamboo and also using gourds. The Aztecas also had this. So there's. There's a lot of pre Columbian instruments that have a similar nature. So I feel that, you know, and of course, you have the giant horns that the Tibetans play. There's other places where we see this use of circular breathing in the. This use of a horn kind of instrument.

Yeah, yeah. It's fascinating. And I know we're running up against time. There's, like, so much. We could talk. We got, like, halfway through the massage session that I did with you, but. But we did. I know we may have to do a part two here, but we did, you know, then you did the gong and did the healing bowls. And honestly, I. By the time we got done.

You know, and then I had to. I wanted to integrate. I wanted to just lay there for, like, two hours, but I had to drive back to the. I think I was flying out of the Phoenix airport like, a couple hours later. So I literally just swung.

I'm so sorry.

I swung into Chocolate Tree in Sedona and just. Just took off. But what I did want to tell people is I'm gonna play some of your music at the end of this show so folks can learn a little bit more about what it is. And I mean, if you're. If you're freaking anywhere ever near Sedona, you know, the trails, the majestic red rock views and the crystals, everything like Sedona is just a magical place.

You got to go to that chocolate tree restaurant as well. That place is pretty good too.

Yeah, they're amazing.

Yeah. Anyways, though, you. You need to drop in and. And try one of these myo rhythm rhythmic releases with Porengi. I mean, it's. It's. It's amazing. It really is. Tell me about the. I. I want to make sure I. I mentioned this too. You. You do like retreats as well, is that correct?

That's correct. Yeah. We do intensive experiences with people from all over the world. Basically come with us. And the retreats are also in different parts of the world, oftentimes in Sedona. I know you've also had a session with Anahata. Her and I are doing a retreat. Yeah, we're doing one coming up here in April. Actually. It's already booked up, but there's going to be another one coming up soon. So people just reach out to us. We'll let them know. But we're also doing. We do a lot with ecstatic dance retreats where we do a lot of movement and intentional, kind of like teaching us how to be able to move our bodies and how to actually move emotional states through.

I was doing that. I dance now sometimes in the mornings with my kids. You know, we'll put on either electronic dance or Disney tunes or whatever, and dance is amazing. You know what I think we should do? Because by the time this podcast gets released, I will also have released a podcast that I did with Anahata. And, you know, I mentioned Aubrey earlier. I think we should get together, you know, like a Ben Greenfield crowd and come down there and just. Just put together a retreat for all of our listeners who want to join in and do ecstatic dance and give people the opportunity to see what you do and maybe go see Anahata. I should talk to Aubrey about maybe doing something out there at the Spirit Ranch. So. Absolutely. If you guys are listening in.

Tell you what, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com soundheel if you're interested in me putting together some kind of a retreat with Porengi and Anahata and Aubrey and I'll bring a group down to Sedona and we'll put something on this year. Just pipe in there in the comments and we'll make something happen. So, Porenguy, like I mentioned, I feel like we delved into, like, about half of what you do and what I experienced. But we're literally. I'm opening the kimono. I'm already a couple of minutes late for another call that I have to get on. So anyways, you bastard. Bastard. You chant me for too long. So what I'd like to do is, folks, if you have questions or comments for Porenguy or you want to visit the website or see a little bit more of what he does or listen to previous podcast episodes I've done on sound healing, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com SoundHealing and I'll link to his website where you can read more about how he combines a lot of these indigenous medicine practices with sound healing tools. And again, if you get a chance to just, you know, fly into Sedona and drive out there, fly into Phoenix and drive out there to Sedona, well worth it. Just spend a couple days out there, you know, visit Anahata and visit Pouringui and, you know, try out, try out this interesting corner of the world. And Porenguy, I'm going to be in touch with you. You got to send me the music that I can play at the end of this episode, and I'll play you guys one of Pouringui's tunes and then stay tuned for more if you're listening in. Because I really think that it would be a lot of fun to put together a little retreat for all the listeners down there to delve into some of the things that I've experienced in Sedona in the meantime, go ahead.

Yeah, I was going to say if anyone would like to experience any of the work that we're doing, whether it's the retreats or performance, we're touring. I'm touring all over the country, actually going to be in Europe this summer doing several festivals. Festivals. So we're. We're always going. We just got back from Hawaii. We're in Austin now. So please jump on our email list, too, over on my website, porangi.com and you can just sign up there and we'll let you know. We also send some music out that way. New album is also on the horizon. Right now I'm working on, as you know, literally in between all these trips fishing up. So I'm really excited to share that with the world shortly. And we're going to be creating then a Patreon platform as well, which so many people have been asking for more content and other ways to learn more from what we're doing. So people are interested in that. Please let us know that, too. And I'll be posting that as well.

Awesome. Awesome. That sounds great. All right, folks, we'll go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com soundhealing I'll put links to everything Again, leave your comments if you're interested in me putting together a retreat in the meantime. Por Nguy, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all this stuff with us, man.

Yeah, you got it, Ben. Thank you so much for having me, brother.

Awesome, folks. Well, until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with POURINGU from Sedona, Arizona, signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.