The Surprising Way Your Tongue Affects Your Entire Body | Ryan Today

What did you realize about the tongue?

That it's not only connected to everything, but what that connection means. Sharpshooters, just before they take their shot, they'll bite their tongue, telling their body, chill out while I take this shot. The only organ and muscle that we can control that affects our nervous system, our brain wave patterns, our digestion, how we move, how we talk, how we receive the world, how we literally take in all the world, process it, and then remit that into the world. Hey.

Hey, Ryan. It's been a while. Okay. What is your healing journey like? How did the tongue even come into the picture?

It came in twofold. One, I got into systems thinking. So getting out of homelessness was a combination of systems thinking and how I talked to myself and how I related my present self to my past and my future self. That's when I took on the name Ryan today. Because the question was, what can Ryan today sacrifice to give Ryan tomorrow a different reality? Because I had to acknowledge that I didn't want a better life. I didn't care. I was tapped out. And. But maybe the only reason why I was tapped out is because Ryan yesterday literally sold me down a river. What he said, how he said it, what he did, all the world that he consumed with his tongue, all that he ate, was this put. Put me into a situation where I woke up on the riverbed of today, looking at the world. So all that I could hope for, all I could dream for, all that I wanted, all that I didn't want was based off of where Ryan yesterday landed me. Ryan today.

Hold on right there, because I want to hear about homelessness. What happened? How did Ryan yesterday get to where he was?

Ryan yesterday was sick in ways that I didn't even realize how sick I was. And that's how healing often is. It's like we unpack and we heal one thing, and we realize that there is something else under and something else under, and we. That's the healing journey we all go through and in these layers. And so you're talking. You started this off talking about forgiveness. And so a lot of it was. You know, the pathway out of homelessness was forgiving my former self for landing me here and allowing my present self to realize that, well, I may not want a better life. I may not want anything more, because why would I want anything more? To want something you can't have hurts. I'm already hurting. The autoimmune disease, optimus. Mouth ulcers, the stomach issues, the brain fog, the joint issues, everything was just destroying My life. And so why would I want anything more? Because I knew I could. And my reality then I couldn't get it. So it was just more grief on top of grief. And so with that awareness, so you got sick.

Was it from a lifestyle choices, childhood trauma?

If I were just to pinpoint one thing it would be, you know, I witnessed, you know, without getting into detail, I witnessed multiple family members commit suicide. My parents were divorced shortly after that. And next thing I know I found myself not feeling safe anywhere. And so I started living like telling my mom I'm just going to be staying the night at a friend's house. And I was really just packing my backpack full of clothes, a blanket in my backpack and going, hitting the streets and sleeping under overpasses because I didn't feel safe anywhere. And at least with my skateboard I could feel safe because I could defend myself. A little, a little baby faced kid out on the streets in second and third grade, you know, it does not make sense and there's a lot of, there's a lot of illness on the streets and so but I felt safe when I had my skateboard and I was in my own sphere. And so that was. So homelessness wasn't necessarily all sound like, oh no, I find myself homeless. It's like I had was a street urchin and a gutter punk. Growing up as a coping mechanism for the things that my family was going through. One of the symptoms of my autoimmune disease is optimus mouth ulcers. So optimus mouth ulcer ulcers appear as canker sores they call them. It's not a herpes virus, it's not the kind in the corner of your mouth there. Most people experience them as a little red, you know, ulcer that shows up and then goes away. They're extremely painful. And so as I was coming out of homelessness, you know, a number of drugs were actually kind of somewhat good for me in the way that they suppressed my immune system and kept me in the state where I wasn't in pain as much and my immune system wasn't, you know, anywhere near a situation to where it could even attack me. So when I was doing stints on the streets, the stress, I don't know what it was, but the hyper vigilance. So there was like some kind of equilibrium there where I wouldn't get these expressions of optimus mouth ulcers, brain fog, joint pain, all these other things. And so at least that's what I felt happening at the time. And so as I. So I was always a communicator. That's how I made a living. Whether I was panhandling, whether I was playing the didgeridoo, whether I was, you know, on the phone selling something door to door, it didn't matter. I was a communicator. I knew that. And so to be a communicator, to be have a gift of a golden tongue that's literally covered in ulcers because it would get so bad that I would have not just one or two or small ones, my mouth is actually filled with scars and it's really hard to scarify the tongue. The cell turnover rate in the tongue and oral. In the oral. In the oral cavity, the cell turnover rate there is crazy fast. So it doesn't scar way that traditional other tissues do. But I've got scarified tongue because I've had chunks out of my tongue missing. There were moments where I was afraid my cheek was literally just going to pierce a hole and it was going to come out the other side because I had them so deep in places, they would just merge into these massive things. And I earned a reputation as that bloody mouth guy at University of Phoenix because despite that pain, I had a higher talk time average by, by hours, higher average talk time average on the phone when I was a rep, and even as a manager and as a leader in the company, my talk time was extremely high. So I got into reputation as that bloody mouth guy because the ulcers would get so bad that I was bleeding. But it gave me a great chance to work with placebo mindset, my own body's relationship with pain, and to show up lovingly and servingly for others regardless of what I was going through. And so that gave me great resilience in learning to work with my tongue to. How do I speak when I've got this massive hole here? I got this one here, this one here, this one there. How do I pronounce this word in an articulate way that doesn't sound like I have a lisp and doesn't tear up my tongue so much that I can only get an hour or two into the day before I'm tapped out and I've got to go home, guys. Sorry. Done. I know you're counting on me. I know everyone's counting on me. I literally can't move. I can feel every heartbeat in my tongue through all these wounds. I can feel it. And every single one is a 10 out of a 10 on the pain scale. Like, I can't. My ability to self Hypnosis and to turn off the signaling is at a maximum. So I had to find a way to communicate clearly, deftly, while having this ridiculous amount of tongue coordination and fitness. So it was actually the autoimmune disease and that specific symptom of it that led me down this path and got me into health and healing. Because it was one of those nights where I couldn't sleep because. Because I could literally feel my heartbeat in like I was counting, I'm like, can I feel it here? Can I feel it there? So to get out of the pain, to go into the pain instead of making it where, oh no, I gotta avoid it. It's like, no, where are you hurting from? Body. I can feel my heartbeat here. I can feel you here. I can feel you here. I can feel you here, here, here. And so I stopped counting ulcers by that way. I started counting them by where can I feel my heartbeat in my mouth? But it just became too much. And so I did a Google search. Late night at 3 o' clock in the morning, I could still remember the glow of the computer. I was searching for optimus mouth ulcers and causes. And that's when I found out about celiac disease. And that was 2007. That was the year I was able to get med free. I did try going through the meds and the routes they gave me. In 2004, they put me on lithium, they put me on a number of different things. And none of them, they took me further away from what had gotten me off the streets in the first place. A trusting, loving relationship with my body and my brain. Even when it's doing things that I can't, cannot bear. So what, it's all signal, it's all data. You know, if that relationship is bad, I can't divorce myself from my body. But that's what I was trying to do. And that's what the healing journey looked like for me. And the more that I started studying this, the more I realized something was there. So by the mid-2000s, I was talking about the word neurophonetics. So as opposed to neuro linguistic programming, I was dialing phonemes. And how it wasn't just what you said, but how you said it that really made a difference in how people interpreted yourself and how you interpret yourself when you speak about your pain, about your grief, about your hope, your joys, your wants. And so neurophonetics is that tighter thing. By late 2000s, it started showing up in other resources. By 2011, it was showing up in pubmed and there's now dozens of research articles demonstrating the actual proof of how neurophonemes impact us on this level. And. And so that's been my gift and my curse. And so as I've done all this healing work, and that's why I got into biohacking. And I did all this because I was dedicated to find a way to show up fully for my wife and my kids and my clients and everybody that I had in my life then at the time and play more fully with them. Because, joy, what's the point of healing but to get back to play?

So what did you realize about the tongue that you think people don't understand.

That it's not only connected to everything, but what that connection means? You know, that connection means, you know, I'll prove this to all the sports athletes out there. Michael Jordan was known for two things. Jumping higher than anyone else and sticking his tongue out while he jumped. Because he was the first athlete to come along. Yeah, his first athlete to come along and say, I don't care how I look in front of the cameras body, we're making this jump go. And so that's what his tongue needed.

So what do you think that was? Why did he feel like he had to stick his tongue?

He didn't have to. His body did it intelligently. And that's why I'm so fixated on people under waking myself and everyone else up to the power of the tongue and tongue fitness and doing this because it's about the innate intelligence of our own body. He just got himself so in tune with his own body and what his limits were and working within his limits to set, make himself free that he was able to just force his body to allow himself to do what he needed to do. And sharpshooters naturally do this as well, except. Except in the opposite side, sharpshooters, just before they take their shot, or archery people, they'll bite their tongue or they'll stuff it into a corner of their mouth, telling their body, chill out while I take this shot. And look at video game players. They're there moving their tongue around while they're playing their video games. So the tongue is connected to basically all sensory motor awareness. Wiggle your toes, pass through your tongue. It's connected to all of these senses. And so because it's connected to everything, that doesn't just mean it's static. It's a sovereign organ, an organ. The only organ and muscle that we can control that affects our nervous system, our brainwave patterns, our digestion, how we move how we talk, how we receive the world, how we literally take in all of the world, process it, and then remit that into the world. And now that I've. After all these years, I've gotten much more into biology and physics and quantum. Quantum biopsychology and all of this, I'm starting to realize how the, the tongue is an analog for how DNA is a fractal antenna. DNA. If you're our WI fi router.

Okay, you have to unpack that.

Yeah, working at. We're. We're connecting on WI fi routers, effectively. WI fi routers are shaped like fractal antennas. So an antenna can pick up one frequency. Basically, you are set up to set a frequency. So a fractal antenna is set up with basically the same kind of shape at same similar sizes and scales to pick up a wide range of frequencies. That's what a fractal antenna is. We use it every day. It's in all kinds of stuff. It's in your phone, it's in your WI FI routers. It's everywhere. Well, it turns out, as we've been doing this, there's a lot of scientists who found out that DNA is shaped the same way. DNA acts as a very literal fractal antenna for electromagnetic frequencies to pick up the world around us. It then acts as a resonance cavity. So you see me walking around with my ukulele all the time. I surprised I don't have it in my hands right now. It's right there, you know. But I've got my ukulele and people ask me, it's like, what's with the ukulele? It's like, well, I got lots of things. How much time you got, you know, to answer that question? But one of the, one of the reasons is because it's a resonance cavity. When I'm just holding my ukulele and I'm not even playing, I can feel the room around me. And I'm having this subtle neurophonetic, biophonetic conversation with my body and my mechanoreceptors to take in the resonance of this room in a different way and incorporate it into this. And so I'm establishing an ability to. Where I'm actually learning the language of my own DNA through resonance cavities of my ukulele. That's one reason.

So it's almost like a form of antenna for you.

That's exactly right. And then, and then to ask my body, without needing an answer, hey, DNA, is this kind of like what you're doing Right. So if DNA is a resonance cavity, this is a resonance cavity. My chest is a resonance cavity. Every cell is a resonance cavity. I'm actually, by this one simple innocuous act of holding my ukulele, I can feel someone's laughter. And I'm asking my body to do what it's already doing. It's decoding those frequencies, it's doing all of this work on its own. And I'm just simply saying, wow, aren't you amazing, like, and I'm just a student of what my body's naturally doing, empowering that innate intelligence. And that's why again, I work with the tongue because it is the synthesis point of all of these things that we have to work with.

Well, you're making that statement that the tongue is connected to so many systems in the body. Like how, how do you know that for sure?

Anatomically it's, it's proven so anatomically speaking, the tongue is, it takes a number of cranial nerves that come into it, that come out of it. It's directly connected to the enteric nervous system, you know, not only through hard wiring, but also through sensory smell perception. So even smelling something sweet can break a fast. Insulin doesn't get produced when you in the gut, it doesn't get produced when the gut hits something sugary. It gets produced when something hits the tongue that's sugary. And if you simply smell something, it's hitting the tongue. So simply going into a bakery can lightly take someone out because can, can produce an insulin response. A, a walking into a candy shop can produce that via the tongue and the olfactory senses that it's directly connected to. So they even have tongue stimulators to help blind people see. Stimulating the tongue. Dr. Tomatis. The Tomatis method is a fantastic modality for helping kids with autism and other verbal issues retrain train their ability to speak. Because the tongue can't speak what the ear can't hear. So if we use bone conduction along with sensory motor, movement, coordination, and we do some multi sensory input, we could now get the ears to hear differently and the tongue to reproduce sounds they can't hear. You know, someone who's deaf, for example, who gets a muted sense of what they're hearing, ends up sounding a little different. So the tongue can't produce what the ear can't hear. You know, so, so there's all these modalities that actually use the tongue without directly even addressing it per se. They don't come out. No one's come out so far. You can go pockets of the world, especially if you go to the world of myofunctional therapy. Everyone there is like, I go there and I play a didgeridoo on a stage to hundreds of doctors, and they're cheering me like I'm a rock star for playing the didgeridoo. I take the didgeridoo to some other conferences. They're like, what's that? There's some hippies there, there's some people who get it, but biohacking conferences, medical conferences, but you go to a myofunctional therapy conference, and people are like, oh, they know what the didgeridoos. They know how the breathing mechanic can cure sleep apnea, can treat sleep apnea, can prevent sleep apnea. Because you're training the tongue to get to where it's supposed to be so it doesn't fall to the back of your throat when you try to sleep, you know, so it's here in pockets. If you're doing fascia work, you're doing tongue work. If you're doing breath work, you're doing tongue work. If you're doing brainwave entrainment, you're doing tongue work. If you're doing meditations, if you're doing affirmations, anything you do. And that's, I guess, basically my challenge to the world is simply this. Bring me any healing modality, any technology, any technique, and. And I will show you how the tongue is either directly or indirectly related to that within one, maybe two steps max, and we can use it.

Okay, well, let's say hormone balance.

Sure.

How. How's the tongue related?

In a couple ways. One, again, we can use the tongue as a diagnostic tool. So certain hormones are going to affect hydration levels, they're going to affect the electromagnetic chemistry of the body. They're going to affect. Because. And I can say that because they affect the fascia. So if the fascia is hydrated, dehydrated, the tongue's going to be dehydrated. So there's this direct connection there. So you can feel certain biological effects of certain hormones, hormone patterns and cyclings. It can tell you, you know, if someone hits you hard, like in a romantic situation, and you have those hormones pumping, you literally can't speak. Your tongue swells up. Right. So we know this in our personal relationships, how the tongue is connected to these things. So one is a diagnostic tool. The second is as a way, as I was mentioning before, neurophonetics. Yes. You can change what you say to change your mindset and then therefore Change your relationship to something. But it's not only that, it's how you say something matters too. And let's take cortisol, for example. So cortisol gets triggered by somebody being in a stuck state. You know, looking at the past, they're, they're stuck, they can't move forward in, in life. That's when cortisol is pumping in. Cortisol will stop being produced when that person is in a forward momentum, positive frame mindset. Right. So if, what are their, what are the sounds? There's tongue postures, there's tongue sounds and breath work that you can do. So not just breathing. We all know there's lots of breathwork experts who teach about how if you breathe in a certain way, you can release cortisol. There's lots of people who can do word therapy and spoken, you know, word therapy with somebody, conversational therapy to get them out of a stuck mindset and moving forward using cognitive behavioral therapy or other modalities. But I'm saying. So all these are true and it's all validation for my work with the tongue. But I'm saying because of this I've been able to dial into such a deeper level that yes, it's connected to all these things, but you can do very simple, simple things, very simple word sounds, very simple things that affect the same pattern. So it's not just what you say, it's how you say it. So there's a lot of science in, in sound healing, cymatics and how soul physio frequencies. So it's not just the frequencies, it's literally the tongue shape. Tongue shapes are associated to hormone patterns. So by you saying something in a different way, you can release cortisol, you can stop cortisol, you can effectuate love hormones, you can effectuate oxytocin by simply saying I love you. Right. So something like that. The tongue can affect hormones not only as a diagnostic tool to show you where you at, what are you feeling. It can also be seen as a way that you can modulate your hormones through position, posture, tonality, through specific word patterns, and then moving that up into linguistics and saying different things to yourself in different ways to elicit specific hormones patterns. This is just as true of sounds as it is of breath work. We know this is true about breath work. We can prove that breath work and movement, these kinds of things will change your neuro hormonal chemistry. What I'm saying is all that's still doing using the tongue, so we can just use the tongue so it's a back door in for lazy people because you don't have to do as much. When you bring more awareness to the tongue, what you're already doing is amplified. That's why I'm so passionate for it because all it takes is a little bit of awareness of what's already going on. The magic of what's happening here and everything you're doing is, is it can be changed. And one example of that that I like to give is a number of studies that showed that tongue posture is immediately connected, related to a 30% increase in strength. So a bodybuilder, someone who's lifting weights.

What do you mean by tongue? What's tongue posture?

So tongue posture is where's your tongue sit in your mouth? Just like we're familiar with our back posture and our body posture. Where's your tongue sit? Is the, is the back of. Here's the top of your mouth? Is the, is your tongue here, here? Does your tongue fall back? Is your mouth open? And so you're a mouth breather and so you're getting reduced oxygenation. Your oral biome is changing. Everything is changing. You. You know, there's lots of people who talk about how challenging mouth breathing is and it's an epidemic. And this is why hostage tape is becoming so popular, or mouth tapes some people call it. Right? So it put over their mouth to stop them to, from breathing with their mouth open while they sleep for snoring and a number of other things. But you can still snore with your mouth closed. And that doesn't necessarily fix the issue. The issue is that your tongue is down here when it should be up here. So how do we get our tongue to where it's supposed to be so we can breathe correctly? And this changes not only how we breathe correctly, it changes the shape of our face. So for beauty, the tongue is actually the number one tool you could use for beautification. The symmetry of your face and the.

I'm sure a lot of people are going to be very interested now.

Well, think of, it's all about blood flow and your smile, the shape of your smile, the shape of your face changes as we age and as does your typical tongue posture and your tongue fitness. This is why mewing is so big, right? So John Mew was the one who pointed out that when he went and looked at indigenous cultures, they used to have very straight aligned teeth. And once they started eating, you know, foods that were cooked and, and more in those types of diets where they didn't have to chew as Much their teeth got all super wonky and that's what we see pictures of indigenous cultures. And their teeth are all jacked up. It's because they started eating soft cooked foods when before they used to have to chew thousands of times to where now they only have to chew 5 or 10 or 20 times or 100 times. So because they weren't chewing, they weren't getting the tongue posture and the tongue fitness to keep the shape of the roof of their mouth where it's supposed to be, to keep the palate separated, to keep the spatial density there, to keep everything where it's supposed to be. So now all of a sudden the roof starts, the mouth starts collapsing in and there's no room for the teeth anymore. And so Dr. John Muse noted this and so he came up with different exercises.

We're not seeing that in modern day, are we? Because people are eating soft cooked food in Western society. I mean, I don't see people's mouths.

Yeah, it's because. It's because. It's because we've adapted. Our face shape has changed over time to this. We didn't all of a sudden have a fresh introduction of going from hard foods to all of a sudden this in a generation. Right. That's the difference. And that's what I talk a lot about in bioplasticity. So we're familiar with neuroplasticity. And I was billed as a neuroplasticity coach before I was, I would just tell people about neuroplasticity and then tell them about the tongue for a long time. Now I'm just coming out and telling everybody it's the tongue. I used to save this until they were in session and it's like, look, you want to deal with neuroplasticity, you got to start with your tongue. And so it. But I moved from neuroplasticity coaching in the early mid 2000s. By about 2012, 2013, I started at 15. I started picking at thinking about this word bioplasticity because it's not just neurons that change. Cell turnover rate changes, hormone relationships change. Everything's constantly adapting. And sickness is just a maladaption because there's not enough energy in the body on a molecular cellular level that. And that creates all these cascade problems of communication failures. And so what we find is that that tongue in relationship to all these things, there's a lot of Eastern practices that use it as a diagnostic tool. They'll look at the tongue to see if somebody's healthy or not. You know, they have A map of it. Just like they have a map of the feet, there's a map of the tongue, of where it's connected. So this isn't something necessarily relatively new. But yeah, we, those of us who've been in cultures where we've been eating soft foods for a long time, we for the most part adapted, you know, but those who were not there, the rate of change was so fast that their bodies couldn't adapt over generation. And generation and generation had just this one collapse time frame. And so it created this wild and distinguishing effect that the people who first found these indigenous cultures, the photos, they had all straight line teeth. You started looking and within a number of years you start seeing, wow, they have really wonky teeth. What's going on here? And so John Mew developed this technique called mewing, where you use different tools to like chew on or just do different exercises to reproduce the effect of chewing on food without having to wear down and grind down on your teeth. Because, yeah, their teeth were straight, but they're also really ground down. They. They were just chewing so much on hard foods. And so I see. So he created that exercise. And what that does is there's all these before and after shots of people on the Internet who started doing mewing. And you can change your face shape with it, you know, and. And it doesn't work for everybody. Why doesn't work for everybody? Because it's not just that one exercise motion. Nobody's talking. It's about that with the proper tongue posture over time, tongue awareness, tongue dexterity, and how we move that to sensory motor coordination, you know, and so this is why, you know, for example, there was a study that showed how there's actually now a number of tongue stimulators out on the market. It was quite a few years ago that they found out that if you could apply gentle electrical stimulation to the tongue while someone was doing vestibular system training, doing balance and coordination exercises, that you could dramatically improve the rate of neuroplasticity in the vestibular system, creating more balance because you applied to gentle electrical stimulation to the tongue. So it's connected to literally everything in that way. So more science is now coming out. So there's more science out now than ever. And so we can use this as a bioplasticity tool for beauty. So talk on the beauty subject. Face shape, smile, the alignment of your teeth, oxygenation for your nasal cavity, so your sinuses aren't just collapsing in, but you can get all that vasodilation. You can open up Your sinus cavities. By breathing in the right way, you can get. There's breathing exercises for nitric oxide therapy. How many people are taking nitric oxide pills when there's literally a 30 second breathing mechanic that you can do to increase nitric oxide right now, anytime you want, without, without disrupting the people around you. You could be in the middle of a meeting getting nitric oxide therapy if you know how to use your tongue appropriately. And so how do you do it? Oh, you want the secret sauce, do you? Yeah.

So that's right.

So there is for that one, there's actually a couple steps to have to teach somebody how to do it incognito. But it starts off with you pitch your nose. You first breathe out of all the air you have. Then you pinch your nose and you, and you nod your head like this and you go. Until you feel what I call air hunger. Air hunger is just like with hunger, there's a, there's a hormone, ghrelin, when you get hungry, that, that's the hormone that's signaling eat something. Well, that's also a growth hormone, right? That's why when you start going through fasting, if you can change again the resonance of how do you relate to ghrelin? Have a conversation with ghrelin. Say thank you. Because I know by you being present, even though you want me to eat something, I know in your presence that you're helping to build muscle mass. You're helping to do this, you're doing all these other things so I don't waste away while I'm fasting. Thank you. How many people are lamenting the hunger pain in the same way? We'd have that same conversation with our oxygen uptakes our lungs and our body that's looking for oxygen. And we're simply saying, I get it. You're hungry for air. Totally get it. You can have some now. So you just pinch, do this and go until you feel that air hunger. And when the air hunger comes in, just have a brief moment of self dialogue in your mind and say, I get it, you're hungry. We can have some and pause and say, now in that moment, you're actually developing a part of the brain that is directly related to. In the, in the anterior part of your brain that is connected to how to say no when you're doing something you don't want to do, or you're saying no to something you want to do. There's an actual part of the brain that develops and grows and, and that's why some People who. It's like, how do you keep going? How do you do this? Because they literally develop the brain matter for how to do hard things that they don't want to do. They've developed the ability to say no in the face of temptation. They've built that yes and no muscle. They flexed it. And so when you're feeling that air hunger, that's all you're saying. You're just giving this little pause. And so it may sound like a small little thing, just pause. But no, if you really bring your attention into that pause and speak in your mind, even if you're not saying it out loud, your tongue is still articulating. I get it, you're hungry. You can have some air now when that happens. So you're pitched, you're dotting, breathe out, pitch, nod, go until you feel the air hunger. Say what? Say, can I have some now? And that's what you unpinch and breathe in. Sharp, long, as deep of an inhale as you possibly can. And you hold it. You. You will feel your sinus cavities burning, all that nitric oxide opening up all those capillaries. You will feel it there. And you can see the immediate effectiveness of this in balancing the nasal cavities by simply doing a test beforehand. So when I'm on stage and I'm doing this, or I'm leading workshops or I'm with clients, I'm doing this one on one. I have them start off with a nasal test. So if you're going to do this exercise, you're watching this. Go back and follow the exercise. But before you do, put a finger to one nostril and breathe in and out just a couple times and. And then switch nostrils and get a sense of how different the air exchange rate is on both sides. A sense of moisture. Is one side more dry than the other. Get a sense of constriction, not only because it's stuffed up, but maybe you have more of a deviated septum on one side than another, right? So when you're breathing in and out of one each nostril, getting a sense of that, then you do this exercise, you breathe in, and even just after doing it one time, you check, you do a nostril check again every single time. Maybe there's some slight moments where somebody didn't get much of an effect, but you know, it works. They. They immediately see that both sinus cavities are much more balanced in that moment. And so that's one simple thing. So after you've learned to do this for a while. So you do that set of that like three, four times, four times in a row. And you'll see a big. This is very helpful for allergies. If you have allergies, do the, do the, do do this exercise. But what you'll see is that over time you start to develop tongue and nasal locks where I don't have to pinch my nose to lock off my sinus cavities. So I can get kind of the same effect. And so I'm in a meeting, I'm sitting here kind of gently nodding while them. And they have no idea that I'm actually doing this exercise because I'm just gently nodding at them. Doing a nasal and throat lock to keep the air inside and then waiting for their right moment to go and just hold it, feel the burn, be with the room, be with the group. And they have no idea that I'm actually doing this. And it's all because I've learned to work with my tongue in this mechanic. So for all kinds of hormones, it's at.

You said nasal and throat.

And throat locks. Yeah, yeah. So using your tongue, you can lock up the back.

What is the lock?

So a lock is. So if you, if you notice like. So if you just breathe in and you move your tongue backwards at a point, you can't breathe into your nose anymore, it'll stop you. Right. You may not have the tongue dexterity, get all the way back there, but your tongue, your ability to breathe, your tongue can slide back over that soft palate, kind of like blocking it off. You can also use the back of your tongue, so that's more using the mid of your tongue to slide back that way. And you can also do tongue locks or throat locks more from the back down here. You can also kind of lock up in your larynx here. You can also do it in your diaphragm. So this is what we do and we. I do deeper dives of breath work where it's much more about seeing the bodies as series of channels and gates and how the tongue is connected to all of this. So we actually. My breath work patterns start with the toes and go all the way to the top of the fascia. There's a fascial knot on the top of our heads. So all these people doing fascia work and rolfing, if you don't unlock this knot up here, it's like the central like processor. So think of the fascial knot up here as long term memory. And all the rest of the fascia down Here is short term, immediate, more flexible dynamic liquid matrix memory. That's what the fascia in our body is. But the fascial knot at the top of our head, our body's like a big tube sock, you know, so the fascia web goes all the way down and back up to the top. But at the top of our head is where we have this fascial knot. And so it's the long term memory holding this. And so we can go to a Rolfing session, get a massage, do this, do that. But if we're not ourselves being conscious of this knot and working it, then all that, that long term memory is going to come right back into the body over time. The short term will get overridden and the long term will over time. This is why sometimes we see effects with yoga lymphatic drainage. We see effects with all these things over time because you keep doing them enough and you build up a habit and a pattern that the long term memory of the fascial knot on top of your head and all the bioplasticity, all the cell turnover rate all conspires to basically create a new terrain where your body's like, yeah, you just change over time. But if you work directly with that.

This is the first time I heard this.

Yeah, so if you work directly with this.

First time I heard this fascial knot.

Yeah, it's where our fascia comes together.

How do you activate?

Touch it, rub it. Okay. Touch it, rub it. Love it. Hum to it. In, in my users group, there's actually asmr. ASMR is a wonderful way of doing this, you know, so when you do ASMR and you get those tingles that come up your head and tingle through your scalp, you're, that's fascia release for that, for, for that fascial knot. So you can do ASMR release, you can do manual, you can do internal humming. So as opposed to listening to external ASMR again, I'm a big fan. One of the reasons why I'm all about the tongue is because what good is a tool, Joy, without a tool, without the hand of a master. Now think about this. You know, we, we, we are almost outsourcing our authority to not just doctors and medical providers and gurus and experts and coaches. We're outsourcing our authority to tools that are really teachers. They can teach us how our body works. And what good is a tool anyways without the hand of a master? A hammer sitting there is not a tool until someone picks it up. How Good of a tool, it becomes, is dependent on the skillfulness of the master. And we in the, in the marketing side of our world and the business development side of our world, it's just commonly said that people don't want the skill, they want the pill. And people kind of laugh about it and they market to that because they're trying to get people into their funnels with the Middle east amount of resistance, meet them where they're at. I totally get it. But Dr. Joy, there. There's no pill without a skill. What time of day? How regular? What's in your gut? Are you fasted or are you just not full? You know what's in your gut? There are some foods that can have a bigger contraindication with some medications than other medications. You know, you eat broccoli with some medications, you. You eat high amounts of certain anything. And it can create these complex contraindications in the body, complex interactions in the body creating all of these contraindications that your medical provider is not asking you about with this supplement telling you or this prescription telling you don't eat these kinds of foods along with don't take these kinds of medicines. You know, don't. You know, so you don't want to pair this with this. But our foods do the same thing too. We can tune into these effects the more we tune into our tongue because our tongue is the tuning fork for our body. When you take a. So there's no way of getting outside of the skill of taking a pill. The skill is then becoming aware of how your body's already trying to adapt and utilize this supplement, this nutrient, this thing. And what is the effect of that on me? As we learn to create neuroplasticity for sensing and feeling our own body, things that were once abstract. And it's like, what do you mean by this? It's like they're like, oh, I get it. Because you literally have to develop neurological networks for what's called interoception, which is the ability, as opposed to perception, where you're perceiving the outside world coming in. Interoception is your ability to perceive your own body's bodily processes. What's going on in here right now. And it just so happens that the tongue is a simplified way that is already engaged in all this activity anyways. But I don't see it integrated into biohacking modalities. And I'd like to change that.

Okay, and how does the tongue enhance.

Neuroplasticity through data exchange rate, meaning how much data is Being passed if you want something to be, to create new neural networks. So now we're not just talking about plasticity, because plasticity is generally changing things, but neurogenesis is when we're actually now developing new neurons as well. So not only for plasticity, but for Genesis, you need something that's highly stimulating, you know, and so if life is just dull and boring, that brain's just gonna die. So the brain needs stimulus like any other muscle. If you don't use it, you lose it kind of thing. So it's already involved in neuroplasticity from the get go already. But you can use it now with your awareness of that. You can use it because you can actually, you know, not only for sensory perception, where to get to the point to where you don't have to be reminded to stop and smell the roses. You'll smell those roses from 30ft away, and you'll instinctually walk over to them and just take a moment and huff those flowers, because you can actually smell it again. That sunset that you see someone crying over, and you're looking at them going, are you okay? You're now all of a sudden crying over too, because the fidelity of life gets richer. So we can use neuroplasticity of the tongue through neuroplasticity to enhance our senses. That's the first and foremost thing. And that's what I found. Not only getting out of addiction for myself, but getting lots of other people out of addiction Came down to one simple thing, that when life is rich, a cigarette's just a cigarette. Alcohol is just alcohol. It's really hard to do the right thing when you don't feel well. But likewise, when you feel good, you're in your embodied in your body. You have a great relationship with your body. Tobacco is not an enemy. Alcohol is not an enemy. Alcohol is just alcohol. It just. It is what it is. And you're free to use, to not use. And if you do, to do so wisely with anything and everything that comes into your sphere. And so the neuroplasticity of how we sense and perceive, so we stop this high risk reward behavior and pleasure seeking because we need something wild to make the crap of life worthwhile. All of a sudden, just literally walking by a rose bush becomes a wild experience, you know, so that's one way. The second way is through the vestibular system and balance, training and coordination. So falling is one of the leading causes of death. And as a matter of fact, there's a study that found that I'm Getting ready to launch this in a little mini course that I'll be offering for free to people. And the title of the headline of the, of the report says if you fail this simple 30 second test, you're 85% more likely to die in the next 10 years from all causes. And that test is, can you stand on one leg? You get three consecutive attempts to stand on one leg for 10 seconds. If you fail that test, you are 85% more likely to die from any reason. So they studied 1700 people over the course of a long period of time. And when they factored in all other issues, smoking, diet, everything else, exercise, when removing all other factors, the inability to stand on one leg predicated that they were 85% more likely to die from any reason. And the reason wasn't just that they would necessarily their balance is so off that they're going to have a fall or that it's because the, that shows that the level of data exchange rate between your toes, your body, your tongue, your brain and your entire system is so low already that there's a lot of other things really going on. So listeners, right now, you could do this test right now, simple 30 second test, try to stand on one leg, you know, for 10 seconds, you get three attempts, do it again on the other leg, you get three attempts. If you can't do it on both legs, you need to be developing your vestibular system and your sense of balance and coordination. And like I mentioned earlier, the tongue is directly involved in that to the point to where they are people that have been building devices that are thousands of dollars to apply electrical stimulation to the tongue for people with advanced neurodegenerative diseases to help them get some semblance of movement life back in their body by using this tongue stimulator for this. And my point is simple. Why do you have to go spend $2,000 on a tongue stimulator to get that effect? The tongue is electric. When you roll your Rs, when you roll your Ts and your Ss, when you learn how to use your tongue, anytime you're using that tongue, it's electric. So why outsource our authority to another freaking device? And now if somebody's in a really bad situation and that device can be really helpful, cool. But what that tells us, that's a teacher. That device, once again, is a teacher of the fact that our body can do this. So when I do balance training with my clients and I do neuroplasticity with my clients, I do one legged Exercises. I do all kinds of things and I have them doing phonetic exercises, tongue rolling exercises, while doing other things inside their brain. So we're basically pulling in multi sensory integration. Anybody who's an expert in neuroplasticity will agree you need multi sensory integration. You need lots of things coming in from different signals to curate that cross hemispherical action in the brain, to create that novelty and create those new connections. And my point is really simple. The tongue is involved in all of that. So why not use the tongue and the awareness of this? And I don't see any other neuroplasticity experts saying this either, that like, look, because it's not just connected, we can use it, it's a rudder on a ship.

So is there a proper tongue posture that can enhance everything?

Absolutely. Absolutely there is. They call it the spot. And it's actually becoming so popular. I just googled tongue fitness, the or tongue posture the other day and I saw that Colgate had an ad up. Colgate's running ads for tongue posture now. That's pretty interesting. I didn't see that before. So it's become popular enough. So there's all kinds of people on the Internet that can, that, that, that talk about it. But I found, and it's actually a big issue, it's surprisingly difficult to articulate to somebody where your tongue should be. It's like really trying to describe what does an orange taste like? You know, like how do you articulate using words or using models or using this or that, how does it look? But generally speaking, where it's supposed to be is what myofunctional therapists call the spot. The spot is where the base of your tongue is more pushed up towards the roof of your mouth and the tip of your tongue. So if this is, so if this is your gums here, this is your palate, this is where your gums become your teeth. Your tongue should be just here, where the tip of your tongue is just back from your teeth, not touching it. And your tongue is. The back of your tongue is up towards the, the back of your mouth. That's proper tongue posture. You can see diagrams online. And there's actually, you know, the, there's a lot of exercises and a lot of things that people can do to try to develop it. And when you go see a myofunctional therapist, this is what they do. They spend a lot of time and there's all these different tools to try to help people find their own spot, figure it out, develop it, whatnot. But there is one exercise that I found that works across the board to get people started in the journey. And even once they, you know, it will help them not just find it, it'll help them develop it along with all the other mechanics and serve as a foundation for all other things. So that exercise is pretty simple. I call it tongue push ups. So you want to do some tongue push ups with me, Dr. Joy?

Yes, sounds great.

So we're going to breathe out and after we breathe out, for tongue push ups, all you have to do is swallow and feel where did your tongue go in your mouth and in what order. It's just a game of awareness. You don't have to say, you don't have to articulate it. You're just sitting with, where did this tongue go when I did this? So after you take your tongue, after you swallow, you're going to just gently and you can just breathe normally out throughout this exercise, you're going to gently smile. And now try swallowing again. And notice it got a little bit harder, didn't it? Yes, it's a little bit harder.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

Yeah, I got it done.

Got it done. Okay, now I'm going to up you to the next level and I want you to gently smile with enough teeth showing. Just a little bit of teeth. Show a little bit of teeth. Now try to swallow. It's a little different. Even harder. Now the final test is getting choked on myself grin. Yeah, you almost choke on yourself. Yes. Get. Get a cup of water, folks. You might choke on yourself trying to do this. And then the final test is if you can get to the point to where you can do tongue push ups with a full big grin.

Oh, my God. Wow. I. I can't do it.

Yeah. So this is a diagnostic for your current level of fitness when it comes to your tongue.

Oh, wow.

And so what you're going to do, Dr. Joy, and we'll start working on this. You know, we can do this. All you're going to do is find where can you go to? And, and it's not just. I gave you three different examples. Really? Four. No smile, light smile, little bit of teeth showing, full grin. So see, where can you get to? To where it's. It's a little bit of a chore, but it's not, it's not straining. You don't want to strain. You just want to feel like it's a little. A little hard. So find what phase that you get to in these four or somewhere in between. Feel that. And then do at least five to 10 swallows. Or push ups as a set rest, drink some water for 10 to 15 to 30 seconds and do another set of 5 to 10. Do that. Three sets of 5 to 10 should take you no more than a minute and a half to two minutes if you do that at least once a day. But if you do that three to four times a day, you'll start noticing that your ability to swallow at bigger grins continues to change. That shows you that not only are you finding the spot, you're developing the spot and you're developing the tongue posture, dexterity and coordination to get your tongue up there. And that will improve your breathing, oxygenation. The. Your face shape will retain its youthful shape over time because it won't start caving in on itself. You will notice better.

Really, just from the tongue. It's like internal exercise.

Absolutely.

Of the tongue?

Absolutely. Think about this. Is your brain weightless?

No.

Is water weightless?

No.

Is that fluid weightless? No. So we have a tremendous amount of weight pushing down on the roof of our mouth and our C1 and C2 all day long. So without your tongue there to hold the roof of your mouth up, what is stopping that brain from basically collapsing in through? Basically, it's a cranial prolapse into the oral cavity and it can basically stretch the brain. Now your brain is literally comes apart the way a building comes apart due to a crumbling foundation. Now that's a big example. But when it comes to your brain, your brain is electric. These neurons are so close together and they're electric, electrochemical.

Right.

So for a spark in your car to run, for your spark plug to work, it had to has a certain amount of gap. If it's too close, it won't work. If it's too far, it won't work. And that gap doesn't has to be very, very tight. And so all it takes is for your brain to kind of shift position inside your skull a little bit. And now that neural connection that was there is gone and you don't remember that person's face anymore. That food doesn't taste the same. You forgot the lyrics to that song. Some part of some connectedness to yourself just got detached in this offline. The neurons are still there. They're just not close enough to actually do anything. Or they got compacted in, they got folded in as this part of the brain's doing this over here and it's adjusting to a oral cavity that is not being maintained.

Wow. So have there been experiments done on people who were doing these exercises and actually looking at what changes in their face have occurred and or change in their mood, their cognitive capacity.

There are luckily the world of myofunctional therapy and the work of Dr. John Mew has been out long enough now that there's a lot of work there. And that's in like the tongue. That's on the anatomical side of things. There's also a lot of research into the word that I coined in the, in the mid 2000s. Neuro phonetics. So how you say, what you say has a direct neuro hormonal compa, you know, expression to immediate, you know, literally if you say ugh, why did I do that? That's going to create that symptom of that emotion. If you say why did I do that? It's the same thing, but you're creating completely different neurohormonal. Again, we didn't change the linguistics, we just changed the neurofenetics. Not the neuro linguistics, the neurofenetics. Lastly, you could say instead of saying oh, why did I do that? I could say why did I do that? I can also say, huh, why did I do that? And that hard sibilance on the T does something to the nervous system. It tells my body, my brain, I'm not going anywhere until I get an answer. I'm not beating myself up and I'm not laughing it off. I'm sitting right here right now with why did I do that? Exact same linguistics, different neurophonetics. And as you say things in certain ways, it will immediately change how you feel. And this is how I got my clients unstuck, so to speak. Trying on emotions and perceptions of reality the same way you might try on different outfits, you know, you try on a different outfit and it makes you clothes make the man or they make the woman, so to speak. You try on an outfit and it makes you feel a certain way. In that same way you can take the same things you've been saying about yourself or you say about other people and you can literally role play different ways of saying that same thing and create new neural hormonal chemistry. And if you keep doing that, you literally change neuroplasticity not only in real time, you change the network of the brain and your relationship to that individual, to that addiction to that thing, to yourself by using neuro phonetics. So yes, on the anatomical side, there are studies on mood and all these things from increased oxygenation, bodily awareness, movement, coordination, gait. But also on, on, on the, on the spoken communication side of it, there's a, there's A shocking amount of research that's coming out from. That's come out in the past 15 years from that as well.

Mm. And the tongue can change our posture, correct?

Yeah. I mean, you literally cannot have a properly aligned neck and back without proper tongue posture. It's connected to all of those, to the nerve endings that come from the, from. From the brain stem that goes into here, but also muscularly. The tongue doesn't just stop at the back of our throat, it goes down our throat down and it's connected to. So the tongue is like floating, like a, Like a. It's. The tongue is the only muscle that doesn't require an attachment on both ends to move. Right. Every muscle in our body needs an attachment point to contract or contract, pull and push off of. And the tongue doesn't. The tongue is the only organ that just sits freely floating, doing this. But it is connected through the fascia, through to, to our spine and to our neck and going down our neck. And so that innervates all of that down there. So you proper tongue posture and position can help keep your neck where it's supposed to be. Keep your, your. Your neck vertebrae aligned where they're supposed to be. And that information just doesn't stop there. It signals all the way down the spinal column.

Yeah. So I want to ask you about what the tongue can do. The tongue health have to do with vagal tone or nervous system healing, because you did mention that it's a very special muscle that goes down your central alignment. So what does it do to vagal tone? Exactly.

So the tongue's relationship to vagal tone is directly connected to its ability and it's both its anatomy, but also in how it helps us receive, perceive, and then communicate ourselves into the world. We all know how you can't hold your tongue and you say something you shouldn't, you just escalated that situation, which makes your nervous system go more haywire. Right. So in a communications, you know, feedback loop process, being able to literally hold your tongue and doing tongue push ups and all these exercises, yes, it can help you just hold your tongue. Doing breath pauses can help you hold your tongue. You're developing the connection points to make this happen. And so it will help you to. On that side of things in communications and in relationships to not to de. Escalate situations or to appropriately escalate where it should be escalated. So you can affect the nervous systems of others by how you communicate what you communicate. Then internally, it can affect our vagal tone by. By both direct connect, innervation. So a Child, a baby, for example, there's no cognitive behavioral therapy with an infant. But if a kid's having a hard time, baby's having a hard time, they're panicking. What do you give them? A pacifier. You give them a pacifier and then they're going ha, ha, ha, and they calm down. Because that pacifier, that suction on the tongue, the vagal nerve, when they're baby, when we're babies, that vagal nerve is so close to the tongue that just simple light suction will push against it, soothing them, saying, you're safe, you're safe, it's okay. As we grow, the anatomy, proportions change just enough that we lose contact with that. But you can develop through these exercises I just gave you and other ones, you can develop enough power, enough tongue fitness to actually directly innervate your vagal nerve through tongue brushing, tongue pulling, basically as if you were still an infant. So you can directly innervate it through manual manipulation of the tongue itself, the other thing. And, and that.

So just through the, the tongue push ups, you can achieve those results as far as stimulating vagal tone.

Correct? Correct. And again, we're talking about something that takes place over time. That's why it's fitness. Right? We're not talking about the miracle carrier. This is. Your tongue is where it's at now by adapting to your body over time. So how do we take charge of this adaption process is really my message. And so, and so vagal tone is your ability to switch between sympathetic and parasympathetic. The gas and the break of your body. So it's almost like heart rate variability. Right. What's your ability to vary between these things? And so your ability to learn how to. What does it feel like to not need a vagal stimulation device, to not need a guided meditation, to not need something external to get you into parasympathetic. Over time, you learn to create the actual neuro physical anatomy for sensing where your nervous system is at. You know what parasympathetic feels like, you know what sympathetic feels like. And now you actually have the means of directly going into one or the other. And you're not afraid of sympathetic. You're. You use sympathetic. We use that to drive us into powerful states of performance, and then we use the parasympathetic to pull ourselves back how we want. That's what I mean by saying the tongue is the one tool that can access all of these things. It already is. But if we become aware of it and we do the proper fitness, we can really really turn the table on our ability to receive, resonate with, and transmit new energy and performance into the world around us.

Okay, this would be a funny question. Do you think an adult with a pacifier that's going to do something good?

There's actually quite a few myofunctional therapy tools that are basically adult pacifiers without making them feel like pacifiers, oddly enough, because adults don't want to feel like that. They don't want to feel like they're sucking on a binky. They don't want to do it, but you don't have to. The good news is with proper tongue fitness exercises, you don't need a pacifier. Ladies and gentlemen. I could show you how and all good myofunctional therapists out there, and I'm not a myofunctional therapist. I'm focused on the fitness, you know, so myofunctional therapists are fantastic. They're advanced forms of speech pathologists who really know about the tongue and the entire cavity and how to deal with tongue ties, how to deal with issues. So really, really support your local myofunctional therapist. Find them. They're amazing people that you can learn a lot about the tongue from. My focus is on the application and the applied science of it into self ownership. So it's not as much about fixing an issue as it is about, about, you know, neuro and biogenesis, creating a structure of who are we? You know, that's why the fitness matters. And so, yeah, that might include some people who are having challenges and issues, but it's about, you know, improving the relationship and the rate of personal invention.

One thing that's interesting about the tongue that I became aware of it was when I first started doing meditation, I was in China. So one of the methods they have is to put your tongue on the, the roof of your mouth. And so the rationale is that it's creating this electric circuit, right? It's, it's forming this, this, this, they call it like a small, small orb. So I know a lot of people do meditation without doing that. But what are your takes on, on why that can be helpful?

Well, because the body is electric. You know, everything, every cell creates bioelectromagnetic frequencies. Every organ emits bioelectromagnetic frequencies. The heart is obviously the most famous one. You can measure the electromagnetic field pulse of the heart, you know, eight plus feet away. You know, so we understand that every organ is an electromagnetic, receives, processes and emits electromagnetic frequencies down to the DNA level. And so the tongue's relationship to, to that is that it is, has its own distinct unique signature and it's a signature of signatures. And it, by being, representing, having all these different senses, having all these different organs, having all these different parts of the brain, parts of the nervous system, parts of our skeletal system, all feeding data into it, creates this wonderful bridge where we can, where we can really do something to create a strong electromagnetic sphere around ourself. And that includes our identity and our ability to now interact with the world around us. And so a lot of, there's a lot of talk about, you know, EMF toxicity and I hope this answers your question. But for example, EMF toxicity is a big issue right now. And the. I like to use the Earth as an example. When the Earth having a strong electromagnetic sphere allows the sun's radiation which would otherwise this electromagnetic field frequencies coming from the sun would obliterate us, eviscerate us, were not for our electromagnetic sphere. But not only does our, the earth's electromagnetic sphere protect us, it conditions the light coming through it to make it life giving. So if the electromagnetic field of your cell, of your organ, of your entire being is weak, it's the, the same energy that could actually be life giving to you becomes toxic. And even if there are toxic things, what is the power of my ability to literally change the waveform of everyone else's energy signature? Whether it's coming from a radio antenna, it's coming from a 5G tower, whether it's coming from a cell phone, whether it's coming from a human next to me, My body is simply receiving this. And what is my ability to take it and convert it into life giving light? And that's how we can interact with all these modalities. Does that answer your question?

Yeah. And what are some of the most dramatic transformations you've seen because you've taught.

A lot of people, you know, following up on that last bit, it's like the dramatic transformations happen in, in the most wild ways. So for example, I had a client who came in and he had come to see me for stress, as he had said. And I didn't want to talk about his problems. I don't care to talk about your problems, you know, because if your problems didn't exist, which they most likely won't here in this next little bit, why would we talk about them? Don't need to. So I don't care what his stress is, what the issues. I'm like, look, just stick with me, you know, go through this. We're not Going to talk about your problem. We're going to talk about your body, how it works, and how to use it. And in 28 days, if that problem that you came to me for is still there, I'll give you a free session, and we'll do something more traditional. How does that sound? So the gentleman, he leaves my office and he sends me this text, and he says, you know, Ryan, I didn't believe you, to be honest, when I was in your office and you said you didn't need to talk about my problem. But it's been eight weeks since I've left your office, and I haven't had a drink in six weeks. I forgot that I quit drinking. What did you do? And so I pick up the phone, I call him, and I just remind him, like, look, I didn't do anything. Your body's innate intelligence made all the difference. And we didn't need to talk about your problem because your body is so much more brilliant than you know. And just simply by doing these tongue exercises and working with your nervous system in this way, talking to yourself in this way, using it in this way, put you in a situation. And he went on to tell me about how big of a deal that was to him, because he had. For 20 years, he'd been an alcoholic, and he'd hid it from everybody, and it was really affecting his life. And that's why he had come to me for stress, was because he would get home from work and he'd want to be with his kids, want to be a dad. But the stress of everything, he needed to have a drink so he could feel comfortable being a dad. Being around his kids stressed him out. There was such an expectation of being a dad that he needed on top of work that he had to go have a drink to feel comfortable around his kids. But then he needed to take time to clear the alcohol off his breath and do all this. And so he missed all of this time with his kids and sometimes would end up staying out all night long drinking, because once he starts, he couldn't stop. And so he missed out on all this time with his kids. And that was the one thing you noticed that he had realized that he had forgotten that he had stopped drinking. And it had been six weeks since he'd had a drink. And he realized because he had spent so much time with his kids and he was so happy, and. And a friend asked him out to drink, and he'd forgotten that he had even quit drinking. So that's why I'm so excited about the Tongue and sharing this, because the truth is that you can come at a specific goal, a specific target, a specific thing, but once you start working with tongue fitness, it affects so much of everything that the goals, the challenges, the hopes and the issues that you have right now will most likely just disappear in the next 15, 28, 30, 90 days. They will change on their own because the body's innate intelligence has a chance to actually start speaking up. And your body can start speaking louder than your mind.

Yeah, I love it. It sounds like, like a realignment, right? That's really what you provided is through the tongue exercises, instead of focusing on the problem, you just realigned him.

That's exactly it. And then the problems resolve themselves and. And that's. And that's the beauty of the work and how it's connected to everything. And so that's why I love what I do so much. I got the coolest job in the world. Instead of asking my clients or the people I work with, did you hit your goal? They just coming to me telling me all these crazy things that happened to them. And that's so much more rewarding than checking a box. Yes or no?

That's awesome. Yeah. So, so the bottom line, some. Maybe tongue push ups, you said do what, five, six of those swallows per round, Right. And then how many rounds?

Yep. Yeah. So 5 to 10, just depending on your level of fitness. And then go three to five rounds. Three to five rounds, doing five to ten exercises each time. And then you even just keep like a little journal, if you will, like, you know, of your progress, you know, and note that, you know, wherever you're at in your level of fitness, it's just fine, just keep going. But you'll note that slowly you're able to smile a little bit bigger until, you know, you know, not to say like, like me, but you can give a big cheesy grin smile and still swallow. And you don't have to contort your face and everything that's. That increases and that increases the communication between my brain to my enteric brain to my nervous system to my fascia to all of me. So that's the beauty here is when we focus on increasing this, everything else just starts to bloom and healing becomes more of a joyful, playful thing than a drudgerous journey.

Yeah. So interesting. Yeah. Who knew the swallowing is so therapeutic. Yeah. So, Ryan, where can people find you and keep learning from you?

TongueFitness.com is one of the first places you can go to if this resonated with you as a Matter of fact, you can on there if you tell me that, hey, I came from Dr. Joy. There's a phone number on there. Just shoot me a text, say, hey, I found out about you from Dr. Joy. I am going to be offering a follow up to anybody who reaches out to me. I'm going to have a specific section on that stem cell work because if they're following you, they're obviously invested in stem cells and biologics and biological intelligence and all the things that you touch base on. So I'm going to create that document. I'm going to put that into my community users group. So just reach out to me, say, hey, I found out about you from Dr. Joy and I will get you access to that free training. It'll be a live Q and A when I do it. If you miss it, you'll get the replay, but it'll be in an evergreen space where you can ask questions and I'll be able to follow up because this is, this isn't just a practice, a static practice of mine. This is called a research. This is not me coming to the table saying I've got all the solutions. This is me coming to the table saying, look, I found out that all these solutions are tied to this one thing. Can we all work together in collaborating and how we can use the tongue to improve stem cell therapies, to improve all these different biohacking modalities, medical treatments and everything else. I'm even doing research with one of the world's most preeminent pre and post operative trauma recovery centers there in the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills where we're looking at doing a study about using tongue fitness pre and post operation to improve outcomes.

Yeah. So thank you for bringing that joy to the world and offering tools for others to achieve something. That's wonderful.

Yeah. And RyanToday.com is another way if you want to reach out to me. I didn't mention that, but ryantoday.com my name, you'll see. Just links to all the different projects and stuff that I'm up to there. But check out Tongue Fitness. Tell me you came from Dr. Joy Kong and I'm excited to unpack this conversation. Especially if you're anybody that's in practice and you want to do case studies, if you want to do actual research, whether it's IRB level controlled environments or just anecdotal or just turn yourself into a living laboratory and figure out just how good life can be when you can drink it all in.

What a beautiful message. Thank you Ryan, it's been a pleasure.

What a pleasure indeed. Thanks so much, Josh.