Restoring Your Gut Health, One Breath at a Time

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is your host, Lindsey Parsons, and today I'm talking with Niraj Nayak, who left his service as a community pharmacist when he was diagnosed with a severe case of ulcerative colitis. Rejecting his choices of a colectomy or untested pharmaceutical drugs, he started his own route of healing using diet, breathwork practices, and natural supplementation, including bovine colostrum powder. It was not a quick journey, but after 2 years, he was completely symptom-free. And he has since founded a school of breathwork practices called Soma Breath. He also created a step-by-step treatment plan for fixing and even reversing leaky gut and other digestive issues. But before I get started, if you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, be sure to do so. And if you wanna get transcripts of the podcast, pop over to my website, highdeserthealthcoaching.com, and sign up for my newsletter. You'll also get my free ebooklet called Finding Your Root Cause through stool and organic acids testing when you sign up. Now on to the show.

Welcome, Viraj.

Uh, absolute pleasure to be here, Lindsey Parsons.

Yeah, thank you so much for coming on.

That's great. Fantastic.

So tell us about your gut healing journey.

Sure. I'll try and, um, put it as concise as possible cuz there's so many different twists and turns to the whole thing. Well, I actually started off as a community pharmacist years ago in the UK. Well, I literally worked for 7 years in this profession, and it's actually where I really got an insight into the healthcare profession and how it is and how it operates. And it just wasn't aligned to who I am and my values, and I could feel it. I could really feel that disturbance inside, that spiritual disturbance, and In the end, it actually took its toll on me because I tried very hard to get out of that career and into something more empowering. I actually had a bit of a burnout and went to a Tony Robbins event, and it was through that where I first discovered anyone talking about diet and nutrition and, and sleep and, and lifestyle things for health, and I was like, well, I'm going to test this out in the pharmacy, right? Because if this stuff works, I'm going to try it out. And the simple thing was that I started to do was just to change people's diets from a factory-based diet, which most people are on, to a natural whole food diet. And I just got amazing results just doing that. So I started to get actually even like doctors calling me up and things like that and telling me like, this is amazing, keep going. Then one thing led to another and I ended up actually getting promoted to the head office of one of the biggest corporations in the UK where I was going to come up with this healthy shopping list service that would have helped a lot of people. But in the end, for some reason, they decided to stop the idea. And 6 months into it, I was facing having to go back to this career as a pharmacist. You know, it's literally like working in a cubicle. Dishing out pills all day long. And it was so disheartening, disillusioned. I was so disillusioned. I'd lost my faith in spirit, everything. And boom, that's when I got hit with an autoimmune disease myself. I went from being the, you know, the pharmacist to now being the patient. And I ended up being housebound for almost a year. I was literally going to the toilet 40 times a day, bleeding. You know, I was like, I remember one time the doctor said, you're going to have to wear a nappy because you get so much social anxiety about soiling your pants when you're out. And it's horrible. And then I lost like a third of my body weight and it got so bad that the consultant in the end, who actually initially told me that diet doesn't make an impact, stress doesn't make an impact, just basically shut up and take the pills or have your colon removed. She then said, you could be a guinea pig on a drug that hasn't even been tested before as a last resort. So she really was encouraging me to sign up for this, and this is when I had my big kind of real dark night of the soul moment. And luckily, a dear friend of our family now, Swami Ambikananda, came to the rescue. And she basically said, look, you've got a gift here. If you can change your perception of this and see it as a gift, you could actually really help a lot of people. And, you know, the first thing is to get better yourself without taking all this stuff. So I learned the basics of yoga, pranayama, which is the breathing system from India, and then basically the Ayurvedic approach of fixing your health. And finding the right diet based on you, like really focusing on the mantra of know thyself, really understanding who you truly are. And then also understanding the kind of career that you should be going for as well. And through that, I realized that I was in the wrong— I'm the wrong personality for a profession that's very left-brained and analytical. I'm very creative. And I ended up going back into my passion for music. And I started to combine music with these ancient practices I was learning and started to get really, really compelling results using breathing techniques combined with the special brainwave music. And I started to compose again, and that was like really healing in itself and cathartic in itself. But I also, through the Ayurvedic system, discovered that most of the disease begins in the gut. So you'll get these symptoms. If you ignore them, that's your gut instinct telling you there's something wrong. You'll get irritable bowel, you'll get constipation, you'll get bouts of constipation, diarrhea, usually when you're in the wrong place and you know it, but you're not listening to it. And you know, when you suppress it, you'll shut off those symptoms, those feelings in different ways. Eventually it's too late. Boom. That's when you get autoimmune disease. And it's often emotions that are unresolved where you're not listening to your whole body intelligence that manifests as an illness. They're kind of like— it's like a cop-out, the system that you're in, to tell you wake up and do something else. Follow your soul instinct.

So, so, so let me, let me stop you for just a sec and just make it clear. So your diagnosis was ulcerative colitis. Right?

Yes, that's what I had.

And did you know right away when, when things started happening that that was a likely scenario given your profession, or did it take a while to get to the diagnosis?

To be honest, like, at first the doctor said it was hemorrhoids, and then they— I went 3 times, the doctor kept saying it's piles, so I just ignored it. I just thought, okay, I've just been sitting down for too long. In the end, it got really bad, the symptoms. I knew this was something else, and I started looking on you know, on the internet and it is like cancer, it's this, it's that, you start freaking out, you know, what could it be? Eventually, you have to wait a long time for the, in the UK to get appointments. So eventually I got an appointment. This was actually 6 months of suffering later where they did an actual endoscopy and showed that I had ulcers in the colon. She said, 'Oh, you've got ulcerative colitis.' And I had a moderate case of it, which then started to get more severe over time. And so that's when I was confirmed. Before that, I had no idea what it could be, apart from it could be one of those things like colitis, it could be bacterial infection or something, it could be cancer. That was the worst, and that was the thing playing on my mind the most, because it could be, you know, actual cancer.

Oh yeah, no, every single time I get something, I go straight to cancer and then I work my way back.

Yeah, exactly. And like, you know, usually isn't that— yeah, so yeah, so that was, um, crazy because I, I could— if I knew about this, what it was earlier, and I knew how to fix it, I wouldn't have gone anywhere near down the, the pain that I did, you know, the anguish that I did, and You know, you get suicidal when you're going to the toilet that many times a day and you can't go out and you, like, maybe you go on, you know, I remember going on a date once when I finally plucked up the courage and I actually ended up soiling my pants during that and I had to leave early. It was so embarrassing. Luckily they understood. So, you know, stuff like that you have to deal with and it's horrible, horrible. So yeah. So yeah, that was my big wake-up call to get out of that career as well and do some— follow my real heart. And I was lucky because I managed to combine my passion for music with healing. You know, when I was in the music industry, it's a really brutal industry. It's very, very challenging. It's a bad culture. There's a lot of sharks involved. And I knew that that wasn't me either, but I kept trying to make something out of it. But it was when I actually finally woke up to the power of music for healing, that's when I realized actually that there's a whole new world out there where I could actually combine music and make it into a practice for wellness.

Yeah.

And that's when things has changed.

You mentioned brainwave music. Tell me a little bit about that.

So you see, most people spend their day in a high alert state, a beta brainwave state. And this beta brainwave state is associated with like active thought, but it can also be associated with stress. And most— if you don't have enough of the lower brainwave states like the alpha, theta, and delta, which is sleep, What will happen is that you will end up getting chronically stressed because you need those lower brainwaves, which are associated with relaxation, to heal and rejuvenate. Now, the reason why we stay in these higher brainwave states is because it could be because we take a lot of stimulants. It could be that we're doing a job that's very stressful. It could be that we're just— our mind is just constantly active and we're constantly mulling over thoughts over and over and over again. And when you switch that off and you calm down the monkey mind, the part of the brain that worries about the future and the past, it's the ego part of the mind that gets caught up in thinking, thinking, thinking all the time. When you can calm that down, and music is a very amazing way of doing that, especially Brainwave music that has special frequencies that can help train your brain to those lower brainwave states. And also breath, when you breathe in a certain pattern, it also takes you out of this beta waking state into more relaxing healing states. So I started to experiment with this music. I found it all on YouTube first and then started to compose my own and started to create my own guided meditations with it. And I then eventually created my own library of meditation brainwave tracks myself that I composed. And I noticed as well that a lot of that music that was out there was kind of a bit dated sound, like sounded like it'd been made in the '70s with panpipes, you know. So I was like, right, let's revamp all of this. And this would make it more accessible as well to more of a, you know, a younger, more mainstream audience. So that's what I decided to do, and it really took off. I ended up making the soundtracks for like people like Marissa Peer, who's a hypnotherapist, is quite well known, and then healing centers around the world. Uh, now it's used by like top spa brands like Rituals use it. It's used— I'm actually— there's a place called Six Senses where I'm facilitating tomorrow. They're going to be using it. There's all these different locations around the world which use this therapeutic music I developed, which is amazing. But it started off with my own healing, you know, first that was the inspiration, and then combining breathing with it. So that's actually what got me also connected to Wim Hof. He's a famous guy. I produced all the soundtrack to the Wim Hof Method. He's known for the breathwork and ice baths techniques. He's an amazing inspiration. So I did all that, that really got me to really understand the power of the breathing and music combined even further. And then eventually I developed a protocol of my own which I started to teach people for healing their own guts and optimizing their health. And then I also developed techniques for getting into altered states where you can have this deeper spiritual experience, like using higher yogic ritual practices which are very powerful when you do it with an instructor in a nice safe space. You can go really deep and have like real powerful awakening-like experiences, really like heightened states of inspiration. And this is where you activate the gamma brainwave state. The gamma is the frequency which is associated with heightened inspiration, and it's like what meditators try and strive to achieve in long meditation sessions, but with the breath combined with music, rhythmic music, special music, you can activate these states actually pretty quickly. We've actually had studies done showing this, and this has actually sparked the interest of Cambridge University who are now doing a trial with our sessions. So this is really cool, like breakthroughs that's coming.

So I've been working on a new exciting idea for a while. It's a quiz I've been putting together to help you determine which gut or functional medicine tests would help you get to the root of your gut health and other issues. It may seem simple when you take it, but underneath it's actually very complex, and there's like 100+ questions and many different branching options based on your answers. Honestly, it's taken me months to put it together. So anyway, I hope it will help you find out what the perfect set of tests would be, assuming you had all the money you wanted to spend on testing, given your symptoms and diagnoses. If you'd like to take this quiz and see what you get, you can find the link in the show notes. Of course, it's just for fun and educational purposes. If If you're really serious about getting some help and want to talk to me more in depth about what you've been dealing with and how to move forward given what the quiz says, you can set up a free 30-minute breakthrough session. I can let you know if I think I can help you and tell you about my 5-Appointment Gut Healing Program, and you can decide if that seems like a good fit for you. So check it out.

But when it comes to healing the gut, it was a combination of that, but— and there's a special breathing technique in that in pranayama called kumbhaka, breath retention. When you hold your breath beyond a certain point, which you can create through fast breathing followed by— or fast rhythmic breathing followed by breath retentions— you activate a state called intermittent hypoxia. Intermittent hypoxia lowers your oxygen levels for a short period in your blood, and this creates an adaptive change where your body adapts to a low oxygen environment producing more red blood cells, you get better blood flow around the body, and you actually wake up blood flow to your heart, to your brain. It's like an awakening, a physiological awakening that happens, and you actually strengthen your entire nervous system and physiology over time when you practice as part of a protocol. They actually do this with machines called intermittent hypoxic therapy, which simulates high-altitude training when people go up to mountains and go into low oxygen environments and they come back down, they get these benefits with their health and they're trying to figure out why this is. It's because they get this state of intermittent hypoxia, lower than normal oxygen, and your body adapts. And what it does is it naturally brings your breathing rate down, it slows it down, and it raises your ability to handle carbon dioxide more, higher amounts of it. Carbon dioxide is what tells your brain to breathe again. And when you actually can increase your carbon dioxide tolerance and slow your breathing rate down, you actually will find you can hold your breath for longer periods of time and your breath rate slows down. And there's a strong correlation between breathing rates. The slower and calmer and more rhythmical your breathing is and the longer your breath retention times are, the better you are at getting oxygen to actually where it needs to go, not being stuck to your red blood cells, but getting them off the blood cells into the oxygen, into your body tissue cells. That's where healing happens. But if you—

Can I stop you for a second though?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I imagine then if you are getting an increase in red blood cells and oxygen going where it needs to go, you probably feel a lot more energy.

You get more energy, you get better blood flow to the gut. Remember, your intestines as well is filled with blood vessels. But when you're stressed, these blood vessels shrink. Okay? Oxygen as well. You overbreathe, right? When you overbreathe, you're getting too much oxygen, you take out too much carbon dioxide. You need the right balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide to get blood flow where the oxygen goes into the blood cell, from your blood cells to the cells. And if you don't have enough carbon dioxide and you have too much oxygen, your blood vessels narrow. It causes constriction and hypertension. It actually increases your blood pressure. What happens is when you're stressed and if you're not listening to your gut, the blood flow to that area, it really diminishes and you will then get disease happening in those areas. The cells start to degenerate basically. And also what happens is you get tension in that area, you feel that pain in your gut. And if you get diminished blood flow, it messes up your gut flora as well. Your microbiome goes out of sync, out of whack. So just by learning to slow your breathing down, to use techniques like kumbhaka, breath retention, you can actually dramatically improve blood flow back to the gut. And what happens as well, you actually wake up the natural intelligence of your gut and you can actually start to resolve emotions that get trapped there, like anger, frustration causes your gut to like, like kind of get paralyzed and you lose that energy, like in the Ayurvedic system. Your gut is your driver. It's your force, your life force. It's what drives you, produces energy. It makes sense because that's where you digest your food from, right? Produce energy from digesting food. So if you don't listen to your gut instinct, eventually you'll paralyze and you will not move and you'll become apathetic. You'll become depressed. You won't be able to get out of bed. You'll have no drive for life. Your gut literally stops, you know, stops you from doing things. But when you follow your gut instinct, you get courage, you become like really able to take on the stresses of life without fear. So with me, because I'd stopped listening to my gut and I had lost my courage to leave my job and I became apathetic, turned into a robot, you know, and I was just repeating the same cycles and patterns. But when I started to tune back in to my gut instinct and when I went through that healing journey, I had this unstoppable energy and drive to succeed in doing what I really want to do. And through that came my real passion. And our truth really is, for everybody, I think, the true will, not the conditioned will. The conditioned will is what society tells you to do. The true will is we want to be healthy, we want to be happy, and we need to surround ourselves with people who make us feel healthy and happy. We want that to rub off, and we want to be around community that we like, we trust, and makes us feel safe. And we want to give that back to others and we want to create a world that's harmonious. But society has made us polarized and split us apart from each other. And my job, what I'm trying to do is bring back the community. One of the most amazing actual things that happened to me when I was going through my healing journey, because Tony Robbins always says it's like study success, model success. And what I was doing at the time, which was really bad, was I was going on all the forums and reading all the horror stories. And reading all the horror stories made me feel even more lonely and scared. And then everyone in my environment is telling me, "You're not going to get cured unless you take the pills." And I felt even more trapped. What I did was I actually started to look at people who had healed themselves. And then I started to find communities of people that were like-minded through Facebook. Thank God for that community that you could create on Facebook. And then That in itself was part of the healing process, finding people that I connect with and sharing my, my, my truth with people and how I feel, and people listening and acknowledging. That was a huge part of it. So what I've done with Silent Breath is we've created this amazing thriving community of 1,000+ instructors now around the world. It's growing really fast, and everyone feels safe, and everyone has a place to share, and and connect. And we, we have instructors who become like community leaders, bringing together people who are like-minded and building that, that cool sense of friendship and trust, which was what we really desperately need.

Great. So is that, is that all online or is that in person as well?

Well, that's the cool thing is because we have instructors around the world who are real people in real life, they build their communities around them. Wherever they are, you know, whether it's in a yoga studio or a community center or a fitness center or a gym, wherever they can do sessions, they tend to bring together people, right? In Koh Phangan, we had an amazing community there, and I'm now— I'm in Ibiza. So yeah, it's like in person and online. Online we have a really thriving Facebook community as well.

Got it. Okay, so backing up a little bit about your healing journey, did you try various diets and what ultimately helped you the most diet-wise?

Okay, so what I said about in Ayurveda is know thyself. And with know thyself, what that means is like really understanding who you are and that we're all individual. So in the Ayurvedic system, we are all composed of different energy types. So vata, pitta, kapha. Vata is air, pitta is fire, kapha is earth. For me, the Ayurvedic system is the most powerful and wise system has developed. And it really, it focuses on this whole mantra of there's no one-size-fits-all. So what works for one person may not work for another. And you can get somewhat a guide of a lifestyle to follow based on your energy types, which you can figure out through simple profiling of 2 questions that you ask about how you think, how you, your likes, interests, and also down to your, how you look, you appear. There's a bunch of different questions you ask. You find out your energy type. Through that, you can determine who you are. Now, at the time I was very sick, I had not heard about— I hadn't really got into Ayurveda or known much about it. And I got caught up on this whole raw vegan diet movement thing, and I thought that was a cure to everything. So I went down this whole— even actually, believe it or not, actually, I was on that kind of vegan raw diet prior to getting sick. In the last— the first few months leading up to being sick, I was on that raw diet, and then I got sick. I don't know, maybe it had something to do with it, but everything was just going through me. The food just goes through you, boom, and you're going to toilet so many times. And then I tried fruit-only diet, tried all of that. That was even worse. I gasped beyond belief. It was horrible. It was so painful, cramping, like it was the worst thing ever, especially things like lettuce and salads was just a nightmare for me. And I thought all this time this was good, this was meant to be doing good. Then when I read The Ayurvedic System, I discovered that actually the completely raw diet is terrible for vata types. Vata pitta doshas is what causes ulcerative colitis, and I'm a vata-pitta mix. And it's the worst thing to go on a raw cold food diet. So what I had to do was actually go for grounding, nourishing, warming foods. And also it says the meat is okay for people who have a vata disturbance, which is what I had. I had a vata imbalance. So I started to use bone broth because the people who had healed themselves They went on to paleo diets. They went completely on paleo diets, or they went on to complete beef diets and things like that. I was like, this goes totally against the whole Hindu culture. My parents would go crazy, you know, but I thought I have to do this for my own health. I had no other choice. And, and then that's when I also discovered colostrum. Colostrum is the first milk that comes from a cow. It's a bovine colostrum. We actually all consume colostrum. The first thing we consume as a, as a baby when we're born is the mother's colostrum. And it gives you your immune system. It actually heals your gut, allows your gut to actually digest adult food. Without it, babies, children suffer in childhood. They get allergies and all these health issues. And look, there's a huge movement of mothers moving off natural breastfeeding onto powdered milks and all sorts of other nonsense. And kids are suffering as a result. It's obvious. I've seen the link myself.

We are moving the opposite direction, back to breast milk.

Yeah, we need to be moving back to that. So, colostrum is super essential. And then, what I realized was that actually, we don't have to go and find pregnant mothers. Cows produce 1,000 times more potent colostrum than humans. It's the same translation to humans, but it also, thankfully to nature and how— and this is why cows are worshiped in India and considered holy is they produce 4 times the amount of the colostrum than the calf needs. So it's actually the excess of the excess because they also use colostrum in banks for calves that maybe the cow didn't produce enough. So they will give excess to the calf to make sure the calf always has enough. But the excess of the excess is given to humans for human consumption. Because of its powerful healing benefits. So I discovered that, and you get in a powdered form, you have to get a certain type. It has to be whole fat, full, whole colostrum, none of the fat removed, otherwise it loses a lot of its power. And so I started using that, and I literally went on a colostrum fast for like a week, um, and just had some bone broth with it, and the healing benefits were just so fast, night and day fast. So that and a combination of the lifestyle changes and the breathing techniques and changing to a paleo diet is what got me back into full health within a few months. Then I started to teach other people that, and I've now had hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands now, plus success stories over the years of people with things like ulcerative colitis, leaky gut issues, Crohn's, any autoimmune issue usually resides quite often from spiritual disturbance and also issues with digestion, which is often a result of spiritual disturbance in the first place, not listening to the gut instinct. So I help people rehabilitate that, get back onto the right path, follow their life passion, and we train instructors on delivering these techniques through our Soma Breath community.

Yeah.

Right. So tell me a little bit more about the colostrum because I have tended towards recommending something like Mega IgG, which is just the Ig, the immunoglobulins coming out of colostrum.

Nice.

Because of people being lactose intolerant. So I'm just curious, how do, how do people react to a full colostrum who are lactose intolerant?

So colostrum doesn't really contain enough lactose in it to cause any of the symptoms. It's it's not even the lactose in the form that you find in milk. It's very different because children actually, before they consume colostrum, cannot really digest— babies can't digest lactose. So the colostrum actually helps them. It seals, it helps the lining of the gut form properly so that then they can actually digest mother's milk, which contains lactose in it. And Same thing with the calf. The calf won't be able to drink the full milk. They need the colostrum first. That helps the digestive process to be able to consume larger particles like lactose. Now, quite often lactose intolerance is a result of the fact that maybe they didn't get enough colostrum as a child or, or over the years they've had abuse to the bodies, to their guts through processed foods and prescription meds is one of the big culprits. Lindsey Parsons and stress in general is a culprit for rupturing that. And then we lose this lactose digestive ability. What I found is that when you seal the gut and you fix it with colostrum, people are now able to digest things like gluten and lactose again. Although I still recommend don't have dairy milk because it, it can be contaminated with so much other stuff, they can start eating things like bread in small doses again, which is a lifesaver for a lot of people because they, they love bread and they can't do without it. But I, I always say like, go on a Clostridium fast, do our protocol and see how you go, and then slowly, slowly over— once you're confident, bring in little bits of the things that you really love and you'll be okay.

Yeah, yeah. No, I find too that I, I, you know, now that I've— now that I've mostly healed my gut, I can I can eat gluten every now and then, but it's not going to be an everyday thing. Never.

And staple. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And IgG, what that— what you're talking about is one of the active ingredients.

Yeah.

What I love about colostrum is that it's a very broad spectrum. It has so many other things. That's why I don't like to meddle with nature too much, because it has everything symbiotically working together in harmony. So you have the immunoglobulins, you have growth factors, you have all the vitamins and minerals that you need. You have all the whole fats that aids the absorption. So that's why I really— I just stick with what Mother Nature— Mother Nature is the most intelligent thing that we— that is, that exists. So let's trust in nature's intelligence.

Yeah. And what about transfer factors? Is that in there?

Yeah, yeah. Everything's in colostrum because all of these things come from— they actually use bovine colostrum medicinally, actually, in drug development. Well, they'll create immunoglobulins from concentrating them from colostrum, and they can also make it targets. This is actually a new field of drug development. They're using colostrum to create targets for specific diseases. But the thing is, colostrum itself is quite potent, and maybe the drugs will help one day. And there are people who get very good benefits of this being injected with these immunoglobulins and lactoferrin is also a very, very important ingredient in, in colostrum, extremely important. So that, I don't know if you get in other things, but it works in harmony with everything else. But people get a lot of benefits from these injections, but these injections, like one injection, they have to have a month, costs the patient, right? On the NHS, where it costs the NHS taxpayer, £1,000 per shot.

We're talking about IV immunoglobulins, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is insane.

Yeah, yeah, no, I know that's, that's one of the treatments I think they use for PANS and PANDAS in the traditional medical community, and I can imagine it's, uh, pretty tough.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, expensive, right?

Yeah, expensive and hard to deal with getting injections for a kid. Yeah, all of that. So tell me about any other supplements you use. Is it just the colostrum or what else do you recommend for people?

Oh yeah. So in my protocol I also use— so what happens under, you know, in these sorts of issues like osteoporosis, the gut microbiome gets messed up. So there is this amazing probiotic I discovered called VisiBiome. It also was BSL-3, but somehow the company split into two. I don't know, there's some controversy over who actually invented it and owns it. I think each— I think what they've done is they— one's claiming that the other one is the origin. They're still making the same thing. They're just trying to create still customers of each other, whether or not—

the one that was the VSL3 that all the studies were done on is now called VisiBiome, right?

Yes, apparently. So I basically recommend that now. I think that's that. I think they're both probably still the same, but I I recommend that because I took VSL3 and this mega doses of probiotic is really high, like, like hundreds of thousands, right?

So billions.

No, billions. I'm talking about billions.

Yeah, things like 300, 450 billion or something.

It's insane in a packet or something. Yeah, yeah. So that's combined with the Clostridium and then all the other. So I recommend that going on a protocol. You don't— it's expensive. You don't have to do it forever. It's just a course you take. So I actually put this all in my guidelines. So I recommend that as part of the course if you're healing. But I don't think that you need like large doses of probiotics for long because colostrum in itself propagates— it acts like a prebiotic. It propagates a good microbiome and natural flora. Also, just Listening to your gut, trusting your gut, finding your dharma, your life path, following your instincts and doing breathing techniques where you're switching off stress aids the gut. Getting rid of sugar out of your diet, getting rid of processed foods, getting rid of like factory foods and all that stuff and eating a whole food diet will actually improve your— naturally your gut microbiome. So there's other ways of doing it. There's billions of bacteria around you all the time that we have. Literally, we're in a suit of bacteria wherever we go. The bacteria is not the problem. It's whether they want to reside in your gut. That's the problem. And, you know, there's a lot of people who just take probiotics and don't do anything else and think that that's going to help them alone. But we need to think holistically. And you got to think that these are like Entities that have a choice whether to live with you symbiotically or not. And if they're not choosing to live symbiotically with you, there must be some reason. It's because you're toxic. So you need to clear that out. And it's not just the physical body, it's the mind. If the mind becomes toxic, we need to clear that too. So my whole system is all about helping heal the mind, heal the body, connect with the spirit. And through that, the bacteria naturally comes to you and wants to live with you. This is the laws of nature.

So I love the story of you being able to leave this profession that didn't suit you and go do this other great thing. But I kind of feel like this is sort of like the privilege of the upper middle class to be able to just leave their job and go found a breathwork business.

Yes.

You know what I'm saying? How does the average Joe who really cannot, who's really sick and cannot afford to leave their job and branch out as an entrepreneur, how do they implement things in their life like this?

Fantastic.

I love—

that's a really, really good question. Let me just tell you about my story though. I didn't come from money and I actually was quite a lot in debt at the time. And my dad was completely depressed and my mom as well. Like, you know, they never had any money. I also had no job and I had no, very little, I had no financial support actually at all. And I had no idea when the next income was going to come. I had sick pay for a bit, for about 6 months, but then that was stopped. But I literally had to do it. It was a do or die situation for me. I had to make this work. Now, what I had, okay, was, you know, I was smart enough to be able to study a course that taught me how to build an online business and do all that and get off my ass and focus on that. And I had an ability to put it all together and make something successful out of it. But it really was a do or die situation. And I know a lot of people may not have the means of access to a computer or be tech savvy or even be able to understand what it takes to start a business or anything like that. I totally get that. So there is other ways of doing this, okay? And it all comes down to changing the perception of your situation, okay? So for a lot of people, let's say the circumstance, and I've helped a lot of everyday people as well, I believe that when you believe first and think small, like first think in terms of just one goal. The one goal that I've got to put into my mind is I want to heal this illness. Don't even think about, oh, I need to get a new career or I need to quit my job. I know this job is stressing me out. What you're going to look at is that the healing journey is a game. And here is a system. If I follow this system and I do a little bit every day, the end result, the reward of that is I'm going to be healed and I'm going to have more energy. I'm going to have a better sense of well-being, and I'm going to then have more ability to do work, do the kind of work I need to pay the bills and all that. And through that, you can then start to ease the stress a bit. So what I give people is like a plan of action where First, do this. All right, first do this, do this. You'll get benefits from this. Get yourself healed. That's the first goal. And that— and you can actually do that with just the colostrum, the probiotics, and the breathing techniques. I really believe that, that you can get even—

you can get—

you may not completely be cured, but you can get close to it. And I hate using the word cure because we don't cure people, we transform people, because a cure basically means bringing people back to who they were before they got sick. That's not what we do. We take people, we make, we change people at a spiritual level, right at the point of the ego, and from a cellular level. They become a totally different person and they have a new set of habits, new lifestyles, new aspirations. All right. And what happens is you actually vibrate without sounding too woo-woo at a higher level. You when you are feeling like healthy and happy, your vibe goes up. You start to attract things into your life. And when you trust that, what could happen is that you could turn a job that you don't like into something that you start to enjoy. And what happens as well is that because you've got this story now, you just healed yourself from chronic illness. And when you focus on that as your first thing, like I want to tell a story where I'm now healed and I can inspire other people. When you start inspiring people, you watch, it becomes like a domino, like a butterfly effect. That one small change will start to impact other things in your life, and you will naturally start to attract things that will get— create more abundance in your life, more sense of well-being. Or you may naturally move from one part of your career that you hate into a part of the career, a company that you're working for where you enjoy it more. Right. And through the Ayurvedic system, actually, you can find out what you're really good at. Like, actually. So with me, I was doing a left brain job and I'm a right brain, very creative person, totally the wrong type of job for me. And I find a lot of people who get autoimmune issues are in the wrong job, that they're spending 8, 9 hours a day doing a kind of task super repetitive, very robotic, that isn't suited to them. And they may be more creative and more into doing roles where maybe it's about talking to people, connecting with people. And when you start to know who you are and you can communicate that to whoever employer is, actually employers also want the best for their, for their employees. Usually they want their company to thrive. They don't want it to stifles. So quite often when you find the right person to speak to, they will start helping you transition to a better role, or you can— you'll get the courage. You start listening to your gut to apply for another job or a company that you want. You'll be surprised at how many amazing stories we've had of people manifesting what they want, going through our 21-day awakening journey, which lays this out, a roadmap for you, and is led by an instructor as well. Uh, the breakthroughs people have, you know, it's amazing. Like like the money thing, I understand, I get it. I didn't have as many responsibilities. Okay, I didn't have kids, I didn't have a mortgage, but I didn't have any money and I didn't have a job. So I made it work. I had youth on my side and tenacity, things like that. But people can develop that, and it comes from getting one little result first. When you start to see some results, you start to trust yourself a bit more, and then it, you know, it grows from there. Yeah, yeah.

I listen to the One Thing podcast a lot, and their whole philosophy is, you know, just keep, keep breaking it down to what would make this step in my life easier or unnecessary until you get down to, well, maybe just stopping and taking a deep breath, you know, when I'm feeling stressed out would be the one thing that I can do that would then get me to the next goal. And so it's just really starting super small.

Yeah, I think I've been on that podcast.

It's great.

Probably.

Really cool. Yeah, I was on that one. Yeah.

Okay. So I want to have, where we have maybe 12 more minutes, do we have time to maybe hear about a healing story of somebody who's gone through your program and then do like a quick demo of the Soma Breath?

Sure, sure. So for the demo, it may be better that I can play an audio because we're very audio driven.

Okay.

And I could give you a session which you could, you know, you could play to your listeners. What do you think? Sure.

Yeah.

So you can slice that in. And what I actually did recently was I interviewed a remarkable client that we had. She basically was one of these people you're talking about who tried everything. She was, you know, struggling for money and all of this stuff. She didn't— she had lost all hope. She's got kids, got family. She was on 36 pills a day. She had fibromyalgia. She was so sick, she was puking up her own feces, right? That's how bad it was. They were— she was ruled out. She was like written off by all the doctors. She basically found us. She started doing my free online meditations, and she started doing our protocol and literally just did that. Every day to a tee. And she wrote an amazing story in our group about how she had managed to come off all the pills. She had regained a lot of her body weight, but she was almost back to full normal body weight. She had lost a third of her— like me, she had lost like a third or more of her body weight, and all of the diarrhea had stopped. She wasn't getting all those symptoms anymore. And she hadn't even at this point taken colostrum yet. She had just done the breathing techniques.

Wow.

So I was like blown away by this. I was like, this is amazing. But just with breathing techniques. That's one recently. Then there was another one who's a stunt actress who actually happens to be in the same studio at the moment where Alec Baldwin killed her. One of the directors or something of this movie. She's like a stunt actress in Hollywood at the moment. She also suffered immensely from leaky gut issues, kind of autoimmune-like symptoms, really burnt out, really grueling schedule training to be a stuntwoman. You can imagine, very busy. She even owned, like, part-owned a gym, very, very busy gym and all this. And she started doing the Clostridium Protocol. So she hadn't done the breathing yet, she just did the Clostridium, and she has had remarkable benefits just from that, from the Leaky Gut Protocol. So, you know, that's two different stories. But then we have— so there's just so many. You can go on our website, you can see we get new ones every, every week, you know.

Great, great. Yeah, I'm sure people love to see that, and I'll put a link on the in the show notes to the website. So I've got the affiliate link. So if people can follow that, they'll be supporting the show.

Fantastic. For sure.

Okay.

Beautiful.

So anything, final thing you'd like to say to my audience before we get off?

So I love this mantra, which I got from an amazing doctor. If you want to get an inspiring doctor who really understands health. Check out Dr. BM Hegde. I want to give him a shout out on YouTube. He's India's top doctor. He's won loads of awards and all this stuff, but he's a real renegade. Dr. BM Hegde. H-E-G-D-E. Hegde.

Okay.

He's a real renegade. Basically, he says this one mantra, which is I is the first letter of ill, right?

I.

We is the first two letters of well. And the more I we become, the more I-centered we become, selfish we become, you know, the more egotistic we become, that's when we start to get ill. But the more we-focused we are, the more community-driven we are, the more we actually realize that actually we're part of a whole, and the more we give back selflessly, and this is karma yoga. Karma yoga is healing through giving, by just giving, giving, giving, and through that you reach a state of enlightenment or healing where you heal yourself of all past karma. And you look at disease and it's just a result of karmic things, actions you've taken that have resulted in that illness. And what we like to do is we like to go a layer deep to where the results in your life come from. And that comes from how you think, the quality of your thoughts. And if we can take charge of our thoughts at a cellular level, at the nervous system level, that's where thinking comes from. We can actually improve the decisions we make, increase, improve the actions we make, and increase our results, the quality of our results, and heal ourselves from things. And get back to our best. So with the breath, you have a tool where you can consciously actually get control, gain control of the entire consciousness of the entire body, because every cell has a consciousness, has a brain, has a mind, it thinks, each one breathes. And when we bring that into harmony with just a few simple rhythmic breaths, which you can do every day, okay, we bring balance back to the body. And then what that allows us to do is to start thinking less about just us, but the entire community of our entire planet, and tap into then the super consciousness of our planet. Imagine that there's a whole mind, there's a collective consciousness of everyone that exists on this planet. And when we start to become refocused and we become harmonious within, in our inner world, we have a better connection with the outer world, and that's when abundance flows effortlessly and easily to each and one of us. So there you go.

Wonderful. That sounds, sounds like a good plan.

Yes, let's do it.

Okay, well, thank you so much for sharing about this with us, and I look forward to sharing the demo with my listeners. You take care.

You too. Really great talking to you. Thank you so much.

Lie down on your back. In a comfortable position with your arms by your side where you'll not be disturbed. Bring your awareness to the area in your body that needs healing and give this area a color, maybe dull, dark color. And as you breathe in a rhythm, imagine you're breathing out this color and turning it into a bright white light.

That's right.

Now bring your awareness to your breath. And get ready to breathe in a rhythm. And as you breathe in and out, imagine every single cell of your body is becoming aligned with the highest power of the healing white lights. That's right.

In 2, out 2, 3, 4. In 2, out 2, 3, 4. In 2, out 2, 3, 4. In 2, out 2, 3, 4. In, 2, out, 2, 3, 4. In, 2, out, 2, 3, 4.

Imagine that you are bringing in this healing white light to heal, nourish, rejuvenate, and elevate the health of every single cell in your body.

2, out.

And you can direct this light as you breathe it in, in, 2, out, to remove any blockage, any limiting belief, any negative trapped emotion you may be experiencing right now that's holding you back from getting exactly what it is that you want in your life.

In, 2, out, 2, 3. Out. 2, 3, 4.

Imagining in, 2, out. As you breathe, you're channeling this light in to heal and nourish and rejuvenate.

2, 3, 4. In, 2, out.

Turning any darkness into light.

In, 2, out.

That's right.

2, 3, 4. In 2, out 2, 3, 4. In 2, out 2, 3, 4. In 2, out 2, 3, 4.

That's right, keep breathing, keep connecting to that rhythm. Feeling yourself getting more and more relaxed with every breath.

Take 3, 4. In, 2, out, 2, 3, 4. In, 2, out, 2, 3, 4.

This breathing pattern has been shown scientifically to switch off the stress in the body and to bring you into a deep healing bliss state. This is known as your rest and digest or the parasympathetic nervous system. This is where the magic lies, the realms of your subconscious mind. In this state of deep meditation, you can reprogram your thoughts, you can elevate the health of your cells by commanding them to grow stronger, healthier, more life.

Out, 2, 3, 4. In, 2. Out, 2, 3, 4. In, 2. Out, 2, 3, 4. In, 2. In 2 out— In 2 out! Out 1, in 2 out to breathe for it. And then I'm going back up again into my plank position here on top of this block or whatever you're using there at home if that's not working well enough. So we go down onto our knees like so now just holding your core nice tight because what happens when people do planks they tend to arch their lower spine but try keeping those abs pulled together all right? Let me know how many more reps you can get done before stopping today guys. We've got one minute left let's keep pushing through these last ones come on push yourself forward squeeze them glutes lift from your hips inhale exhaling press hard hold strong stay focused focus stays locked straight ahead look forwards good work very much needed yeah see ya later boys bye-bye thank you everybody have fun playing around with some yoga blocks too check him out he does amazing stuff over his channel Yoga With Benji be sure to subscribe give us thumbs ups comments below share away thanks everyone take care ciao! 3-4-in 2-out—1... 2-3-4—in 2-out—2-3-4-in 2-out—2-3-4-in 2-out—2-3-4-in to breathe out! In-to-breathe-out! Breathe it all away from you now! You're doing great guys! That's fantastic work for today! Thank you so much everybody who joined us on this evening here at our home studio of The Yoga Room UK. I'm your host Simon Peggott, thank you very much again everyone watching live or later online. Have an amazing day, enjoy yourself, take care. Bye bye! Namaste! Out 2-3... In— to! Out 2-3-4... In—to! Out 2-3-4... In-to! Out 2-3-4... In-to! Out 2-3-4... In 2 out 2-3-4. In 2 out 2-3-4. In 2 out 2-3-4. In 2 out 2-3-4. In 2 out— In 2 out— In 2 out— Out to me for it too! Out to three four in two out two three four in two out two three pour into our toothbrushes! 3-4-in 2-out—2... 3-4—in 2-out—2... 3-4-in 2-out—2... 3-4-in 2-out—2... 3-4-in 2 out! Inhale to exhale through your nose. Exhalation sounds like "ha." And now inhaling again from your mouth. So you're breathing into this space between each of those notes that we've just played together. You can also do it by yourself if you want. I'm going to show you how to play along at home too so let's get started right away. Let me start off on my left hand side here for myself because then when everyone else plays they'll be able to see what I'm doing better than them playing against one another. Okay? Now remember these chords were G major minor . We have C sharp Minor or Dm Major Out, 2, 3, 4. In, 2. Out, 2, 3, 4. In, 2. Out, 2, 3, 4. Now fully in.

Hold. Squeeze.

And make a toe.

And hold your breath. And hold it as long as it feels comfortable.

When you can't hold any longer, fully in, squeeze.

And let out a tone. Ah.

Hold your breath.

So as you hold your breath, repeat these words in your mind as a mantra so that they reprogram your unconscious mind and DNA of your architecture to a heightened, elevated state of health and well-being. I am whole, perfect, strong, loving, harmonious and happy. I am whole, perfect, strong, loving, harmonious and happy.

I am whole, perfect, strong, loving, harmonious and happy. When you can't hold your breath any longer, just fully in Squeeze and gently let go with a sigh of good feelings that rise. Much love and positive energy for the day ahead. Peace.

Well, that was awesome. I hope it will be useful to you. I definitely am going to try to do more often myself. If you'd like to connect with me online, you can follow my High Desert Health Facebook page, join my gut healing Facebook group, or join my newsletter list at highdeserthealthcoaching.com. And while I'm not terribly active in other forms of social media, you can also find me on Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, and you can look for those in the show notes. And if you are inspired to support me on Patreon, you can also find a link for that in the show notes, especially for my regular listeners who have benefited from what I've taught you in the show and my guests. And I think that's it. So thank you all for joining me today, and here's wishing you all the perfect stool.