486: Why Breathwork is the Missing Piece in Your Midlife Wellness Journey with Samantha Skelly

I sort of woke up from that experience and I was like, why does the whole world not know that we have the ability to do this? Like, why are we suffering so much emotionally when we have our breath that knows how to heal our body?

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Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here and I'm so excited to pour into you guys for the for the next little while here. So I grew up as a dancer and a child act, worked on a show called Smallville for four years and so my entire life was either on a camera, on a stage and so during that process, especially as like a young kid, I developed a lot of body dysmorphia, disordered eating, body image issues, the whole gamut. And I had tried absolutely everything to, yeah, like, heal myself from it.

Talk therapy, normal therapy, coaching, cognitive behavioral change, 47 Tony Robbins events. Like, I had, you name it, I had done it all. And there was this part of me that knew that the energy, the trauma was actually in the body. And for me to heal through my disordered eating and my body image issues and my chronic anxiety, I had to actually go into the body to do that. And so about 15 years ago now, I was living in Vancouver, Canada, where I'm originally from. And I was reading the book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, for those who are familiar. And in the section where she talks about going to Bali and having a spiritual awakening, she talked about this healer who she went to go see and really radically changed her life. And you know those moments in life where you're like, I don't know what it is about that story, that moment, that, that experience, but like, I need, I need to go do that. Like, there's something about that that I need to go do. So I remember just calling my mom in that moment, just being like, I need to go to Bali and find this guy and have this experience. Because no matter how much work I'm doing with personal development and mindset work and all this, all this sort of stuff, it's not really working. Like, I still feel anxious every single day. I still feel disconnected from my body. I still feel like I can't hear my intuition. I still feel either super anxious or super numb. Like there's not much in between. And so I boarded the plane to Bali, taking a one way ticket to go find this guy. And I was sitting at a cafe and Elizabeth Gilbert made Bali, like, super popular back in the day through this book. So I'm at this cafe and I just asked the waiter, I'm like, hey, where's that dude that Elizabeth Gilbert talked about in the book? And he's like, oh, his name's Catat. He lives down here. This is how you get there. And he gave me the directions to go down there. So I got, I got there and there was this big lineup because everyone obviously had the same idea as me, like, go solve your problems in Bali. And by the time I had my session, he took out these big long sticks and he's grabbing my feet and he just like poking my feet with these sticks. And then he just looked at me and he says, you need to go meditate. You think way too much. And I'm like, so someone who has adhd, body image issues, a healthy amount of anxiety, the last thing that you want to do is just sit there and feel your feelings, right? I was like, oh, my gosh. But I'm like, you know what? I came all the way to Bali. I should go listen to this guy. So I hopped on my scooter and I drove to the nearest meditation school. And there was actually no meditation class at the time, but there was a breathwork class. Mind you, breathwork is popular now. People are catching, you know, wave of it now. But 15 years ago, I had no idea what it was. I had no idea what the heck it was. So anyways, I again followed that intuitive yes in my body. I went to go to the breathwork class. I walk in, everyone's lying down with pillows and blankets. I'm like, what am I getting myself into? And this guy comes up and he's dressed all in white and he has this big long beard. He looks a little bit like Jesus. And he just goes, are you ready to go on the ride of your life? And I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, you are going to experience the entire range of human emotion. You are going to feel the highest states of joy, bliss, ecstasy, and you are going to shed release and let go of everything that you're holding on to. And I was like, I don't know about that.

I'm like a big promise.

I was like, I can feel anxious and I can feel numb, but like, I can't really. I don't. I don't know. So anyways, I just trusted the process. I started breathing in this way, and within three to five minutes, I felt this full body electric feeling in my body. My hands were vibrating, my mind was clear, my heart was open. And then I began just like sobbing and releasing and letting go of all of this pain and like processing pain I didn't even know was in there. And it was a three hour session. It felt like 15 minutes. And I sort of woke up from that experience. And I was like, why does the whole world not know that we have the ability to do this? Like, why are we suffering so much emotionally when we have our breath that knows how to heal our body? And so within three months, I healed my eating disorder and I just became like, I was like a student of breathwork for eight years. I didn't had no intention of teaching it, no intention of starting pause breathwork and Then after I saw how profoundly impactful it was for myself and my clients then started pause about seven years ago.

So Sam, you had this profound experience there in the right setting, in the right place. But I feel like if someone had introduced that to you in a normal, you were in the city, you were like in your normal hustle and bustle, you might not have dropped in like that. And, and I think a lot of us, me included, when we think of things like breath work, we put it in that same category as meditation or like, like it's one of the things we should do, but we just don't because it feels like uncomfortable or it feels a little woo woo or can help us understand that connection because that is your personality where you would have thought that before, but in this right situation you transformed with it.

Yeah, you'd be surprised. I mean yesterday I was teaching breathwork at this event called Human and Tech, which a bunch of super techie heady people. And it was like, it was busy, there's people all over the place. But I ran a breathwork session and I was shocked on how people broke open. Right. So, so by all, like, we don't need to take a one way ticket to Bali and go find this dude. Like this is available moment by moment in any situation, right? When we close our eyes, when we get into our bodies and we use our breath. I've taught breathwork in, you know, boardrooms to people who've never done a lick of personal development in prisons. I think that the beautiful thing about breath work is you don't need a prerequisite, you don't need to have done a bunch of personal development to have it work. And because it's so efficient and people feel differently so quickly, it's, it's easy for people to adapt breath work into their rituals.

Makes sense.

Yeah.

Can you help us? I'm going to ask you a little bit of kind of sciency stuff behind because I know I've got a lot of different listeners and some people for I want to. Can you speak into just like what does the data, the research say, why this is important and what happens if we don't embrace it? Yeah.

So when we're doing breath work and when I say breath work, it is work because it is continual conscious breathing. Right. So it sounds like this.

That's an example. Right. So what I'm doing there is, I am, I am stimulating the amygdala. Okay. So the amygdala is our center for emotional control. It's where all of our survival Strategies live. When I do that, I'm actually mitigating the response of the amygdala. So the part of us that is always on hyper vigilance, hyper, hyper alert, don't do this, don't do this. Go over here. Don't. It like our sort of like controllers, you know, people pleasers, all of those parts of us, the response of that, that function mitigates so it's not as intense. So when that happens, we're able to drop deeper into our bodies. We're able to change our perception and perspective of reality. And what we're doing there is we're stimulating our parasympathetic nervous system. So we have two sides of the nervous system, right? We have our sympathetic nervous system, which is our fight or flight, which unfortunately most people live in that. Right. I kind of explain it as like we're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. It's like the hyper vigilance, the anxiety, the like something bad's about to happen sort of vibe. And then we have our parasympathetic nervous system, which is our rest and digest system. This is where we can be creative and embodied and our nervous systems are regulated. So when we do breath work, we allow ourselves to sink deeper into our parasympathetic nervous system, which changes the way, which changes our perception of reality.

Makes sense. Okay, so what if someone's listening to this and they don't fully understand that when we, when we live in that stress state, which half your friends do. I know, me included, right. We live in the stress state. What does that. What do you see that doing to people versus the people that learn to embrace and get out of it?

Yeah, that's a great question. So our emotions are driving our physicality all the time, right? Our bot. Our, our emotionality is always like. Our physicality is always responding to our emotionality. So when we are constantly in a state of gripping and white knuckling and stressing, we are, we are communicating to our body. We're not safe. We're not safe. Be on guard, Be on guard, Be on guard. And what that's doing is it's shooting up our inflammation in our body. We're becoming inflamed. We're not able to actually process emotion correctly because we're emotionally constipated. We're not allowing ourselves to process emotion because we're not feeling safe enough to process our emotion. And just like that constant state of being in a stress response is very unhealthy. It's the, it's the root of so many physical ailments and diseases and sicknesses and all that kind of stuff. It's very unhealthy for our body to be in that. And so if we can teach the body how to feel safe through the breath, then slowly over time we can down regulate and take ourselves from that over like that over performing sympathetic back into a parasympathetic. And then we use the sympathetic nervous system when we need it. Right. It's like if, if, if we need that stress response. It's a beautiful intelligent system. You know, it's like when I'm, I'm an avid snowboarder, I'm obsessed with snowboarding. It's like the greatest love that I have other than my husband. And when I'm at the top of like a black diamond and I'm about to go down, you. I have to be in my sympathetic nervous system because I have to be so presence, right. I have to be so focused because like one false move and I'm, I'm out the window, right? Yeah, like I need that. But if I'm in that state 247 sending signals to my body 24 7, that's very unhealthy.

And then I think we add, you know, people that live, live in that state tend to want to self soothe because they know that state doesn't feel amazing. So which can create other issues. And I don't even mean self soothing with things to take them out of the state. I mean in that state, wanting to concentrate more, adding caffeine, adding stimulants, like all of that I would imagine heightens that even more. It's like the opposite. It's going to create a bigger problem.

Yeah, 100%. So we, we, we put band aids on bullet wounds right through satiating ourself and soothing ourself with things like marijuana and alcohol and even things like social media, things like that. Like we're not adding to the, the healing of our body and the regulation of our body. Our, our nervous system is like the quality of our life comes down to the quality of our nervous system. And we can shift the way our nervous. We can shift the health of our nervous system through our breath. And we just weren't, we haven't been taught this before.

I have. You kind of teach us and you're going to walk us through some quadrants and like how to even get started on something like this.

I, you get, you're surrounded now by people that want to learn breath work. Like that's what you do. That's Who What? Who you attract now. But I'm surrounded by a bunch of people that don't want to learn it or don't. Don't know it or don't know that they need it.

Yeah.

What do you want those people to know? Because I think it's like. It's kind of like when they were trying to tell you to meditate before and you're like, what?

Totally.

What do you want them to know?

Yeah. Well, so my mom. I've been trying to get my mom to do breath work for 15 years, you guys.

Okay.

Like, 15 freaking years. And every single time I would bring it up to her, she. She would just sort of like, be sipping her glass somerlo, and she's like, that's nice, honey. Good for you. Like, that's so cute. And here's the thing about my mom, right? She doesn't care about the science. She doesn't care about releasing anxiety. She doesn't care about her nervous system. But what she does care about is looking fabulous like that. That's her come from, right?

Yep.

And so there's a lot of research out now that breath work slows down the rate of aging by making our mitochondria health healthier. Like, it makes our body work better. Like, when we. When we have more oxygen in our body, when we increase our lung capacity, there's more energy to fight off things. There's more. Like, it doesn't make our body, like, fatigue and break down. And so most people are operating at 30% lung capacity. They're only using 30% of their lung capacity. Right. Like, it's very rare for someone to.

Take a deep breath. Right. I probably have about 80% of my lung capacity there. But when we. When we charge our body up by bringing in more oxygen, we're improving our health. We're improve. We're making the energy factories of our body, which takes oxygen and put it into energy. Right. Our mitochondria. We're. We're improving that function. So it's making our body work better. And so I went up to my mom and I was like, mom, like, like, breath work will help you look hotter. Okay. Have more of a snatched jawline. It'll make your eyes brighter. It'll, like, just, come on, let's go. She's like, why didn't you tell me that 15 years ago? Yeah, I don't know. I didn't know the research 15 years ago. So. So from. So what's cool. What's cool to know about that is it's like, when it comes to breath work. And I'll go into the quadrant in a second. But breathwork really has an impact on our physical health, our emotional health, our mental health, and our spiritual health. If you don't care about anything other than, like. Like, my mom. Right. If you don't care about anything other than looking fabulous, let that be your door in. Right.

Yeah.

I'm just gonna do it because, like, it's gonna help me with my, like, skin brightness or whatever, whatever it is. And then from there, people begin to see the benefits emotionally and there. Then they see the benefits mentally, and then from there, they feel the benefits spiritually. So, no.

Now, does it have to be hard? Is there a certain amount of time that needs to be? And how often do you actually do this?

So I do it every single day for 20 minutes, and I have since I started.

Wow.

Yeah. Every single day. Unless I'm, like, deathly sick. But other than that, every single day for 20 minutes. That's sort of like my minimum.

Like, first thing in the morning, later in the day. When do you.

It doesn't matter. Like, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evening, sometimes throughout the day. But, like, I just pick a time slot. I do my breath work. I have a mat out there in my loft. I just lie down. I put my red light on. I do breath work for 20 minutes. And that's, like, my. My thing.

But is your husband do it too?

No, not every day. He'll do it, like, with me sometimes, but he's not, like, religious with the practice like I am. But he'll. He'll do it every now and then with me. He kind of like. He's like, I do breath work at Jiu Jitsu. I'm like, fair enough.

Okay.

But here's the thing. Breath work, right? Breath work. It is hard for the first three to five minutes. I tell every single class that I teach, every single student that I have, I'm like, hey, you're gonna hate this. You might even hate me for three to five minutes. If you can get past that threshold. The breath. The body begins to breathe itself.

Yeah. So it's like that first three to five minutes where we're like.

We're like, oh, man, it's uncomfortable. I'm. I'm like, charging up and working muscles I haven't worked before. Bringing all that oxygen in and feels weird. Like, we. It's like. It's not fun for the first three to five minutes, but then you barely feel like you're breathing at all. The body begins to breathe itself.

Okay. Do you find that. That you have to do it 20 minutes to have benefits, or is this something that people can start gradual and do a little bit? How do they start?

I would say if you have never done it before, start with, like, the moment you wake up in the morning, roll on your back, place your left hand on your belly, your right hand on your chest, and just do one minute. Like the breath that I've been doing on this podcast, and there's many, but this is the one that, that I love. It's called the tri active breath. So the breath is into the belly, up into the chest, and out through the mouth. So it sounds like this.

And if you just do that for one minute, when you wake up, you're gonna feel amazing. And then when you go to bed, do that same thing. Like when I wake up, the intention that I set as I'm doing my breath work is clearing out anything from that I picked up in my dreamland that I don't want to take into my day. And then when I go to bed, I'm like, release any energy that I've picked up during the day that I don't want to take into the night.

Does it matter if we do through our nose or our mouth?

Yeah. So great question. So breathwork done through the mouth.

It increases the amount of oxygen we can breathe into the belly. So a breath pattern like that that I just taught you is going to be naturally more energizing, and it's going to be more intense. We can do breath work just through the nose, like breathing in.

And breathing out through the nose, or breathing in through the nose, breathing out through the mouth.

And depending on the type of breathwork journey that you want to have, you can choose what breath pattern that you do. If you're someone who's like, naturally quite anxious and maybe a little bit dysregulated, doing something slower through the nose is going to be easier on your body. If you feel quite regulated, like, you can bring in a lot of energy to your body, and that's going to be fine for you, then doing one through the mouth is great.

So the health benefits make sense. You're getting your. You're getting out of that stress state. You're slowing down things. And, you know, it goes with things that people say anyway. You know, say take a deep breath or take a. Like, that's something we all know. And when we're nervous or stressed, we tend to speed our breath up so that. That all logically make sense. But what about these Things where people talk about they have these like spiritual experiences or any of that. Is there any truth to that? And why is that happening?

Yeah, we kind of call that the eight minute threshold. So after eight minutes of doing continual conscious breath work, you are still very much in control because you're in control the entire time. It's not like a psychedelic or ayahuasca where it's like you're like, I have no control, I just need to ride this out. You are always in control when you do breath work, and you're your highest authority when you do breath work constantly. But the reason why we have those spiritual experiences or people see their past lives is because again, it's that amygdala, that, that conscious mind, that thinking mind, that logical brain. It's almost like we flick the switch off and flick the switch off, then we have more access to our. So there's three different bodies, right? There's our mental body, our emotional body, and then our spiritual body. Now when our mental body, when our mind is going, going, going, going, going all day long, thinking, logical, rational, go, go, go. Protect me from this. Don't say this. Da, da, da, da, da. It's so hard to access those that intuitive, like spiritual, like otherworldly energy. But when we do the breath and this brain quiets down, then we can actually begin to feel through all of the emotion that we've suppressed. And when we do that, then we can actually get to this intuitive part of us, this, this part of us where we know that we're connected to.

The same way we feel. If we're like in nature and we don't have our cell phone or we're not working or like when you're, or you're in a flow state of something else, I'd imagine.

Yeah, it's like, it's so, it's so easy to feel like you're just a basic human on the planet with no point, not connected to anything. When you're in front of your computer and you're on your phone and you're busy in your email, but once you take some time and like shut down the world, get off the screens, get into your body, you realize how powerful you are. You realize that you are the drug. Like for every point of suffering that you have in your body, for every point of pain, anxiety, shame, guilt, anything, you have the antidote, you've got the answer. And it's not outside of you, it's inside of you. And the breath is that access point from the, the, the mind and the body. It just, like, reconnects.

What would you say to people? I. I sometimes when I bring on topics like, not. I haven't done this specific topic, but topics like this, I sometimes will have people almost get mad. They'll say, well, God is my source for that. That's my only. And I just want to share. I definitely believe in God and have my own personal relationship with God. So I don't. To me, I like using tools that God created. But what do you. I know you've heard this before, so what do you. How do you. What do you say to them? What do you say to them?

It was interesting, actually. About a year ago, the largest Christian podcast reached out to me, and they were like, hey, we would love to bring you on the show. We think that breath work would be amazing for our listeners, but here's our hesitation. People think it's witchcraft. People think it's this. People think it's that.

Yeah.

Like, can we. Can. Can we meet with you? And can you just kind of, like, give us a briefing before we go live? And I was like, absolutely.

Okay.

And what I explained to them is, what's the first thing that we do when we are born?

You cry.

You cry, right? Exactly.

It's like, we're breathing, we're crying. There's nothing to believe. That's a natural function of how God created us. Right. What's the last thing that we do when we die? We take our last breath. Right. And then we're gone. Right. It is the most natural thing to us. In fact, there is nothing to believe with breathwork. It's not like, it's not. I'm not asking people to believe in anything.

That's not the job of it. Breathwork doesn't replace religion. It's not in conflict with religion. In fact, before I pray, I breathe. Why do I do that? So that I can get out of my mind and open my heart and have a direct connection to God. I'm also. I also believe in God. I also have a very strong faith, and so when I breathe, it helps me reconnect to God. In fact, like, one of my visions and one of my missions is to bring breathwork into the churches and, like, and, like, breathe congregations, like, whenever we're sitting at church. And I'm like, man, this was so much better with a little bit of breathwork to get people out of their minds and reconnected to God on a. On a deeper level. That's definitely one of my visions for this. But I think breath work got a little bit Wrapped up in, like, the new age.

Yeah.

You know what?

I saw that.

Yeah. And so it's like the, like, tarot card things. Like, I think breathwork kind of like, got wrapped up in that. And it's not like it's. We're not praising anything.

Right.

God. Yeah. So.

Okay.

Anything, actually.

So I guess if I'm hearing you correct, it's the context that is being used.

So.

Yes, there's some times that people on their journeys or whatever, they're using it in. In that. That way. But you could say the same thing about having a pretty crystal rock. Like, some people just have the pretty rock and some people are praying to the rock. So it's like we.

Things are just neutral, right? Like, this is a neutral object. I give this meaning, this phone.

Right.

It's like every. Like, humans are meaning making machines. We can make meaning over. Over anything. Right. Like, I remember when I used to put crystals because I. I grew up in a Christian family. I remember when I used to put crystals in my bra back in the day, and my mom back in the day was like, that's not good. That's demonic. And I was like, mom, like, what do you. Like, where'd you learn that? It's like we are just giving things meaning. Yeah.

Anyway, talk about the quadrants. You mentioned that you got some quadrants of breathwork. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, so. So when I was healing my disordered eating and body image issues and the whole thing, I realized that, like, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, I was just really, really shut down. And I, I. What I realized through, like, a conscious quest to reheal my body is that breath work really supports our physical health, as I already mentioned. Right. It supports our mental health. It helps us go from the fear mind back into the clear mind. Right. So often we are. We're second fear. Right. You just. You can turn on the news and just be afraid of. Yeah, right. It's like we're so stuck in fear. And fear is an illusion. We know this, and we are in fear. We are less powerful. And so breath work helps us move the fear through the body so we can actually be in our clear mind. Also has an impact on our emotions. We are like. Breathwork is the most efficient way for us to clear the stress, the trauma, the tension, the. Just like the stuckness that lives in our body. It is so efficient in clearing that. And then what we talked about spiritually is like being reconnected to God, reconnected to life form, reconnected to, like, the essence of life. And again, like, a short session can have an impact on every single quadrant.

So I have mostly midlife women that listen to my show and in my community. So these are women, 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond.

And.

And what they typically are navigating is learning how to be their own health detective. Like, how do I up level my health? And I feel that they. They learn. Like, let's dial in nutrition.

Let's.

Let's look at our workouts, let's look at our mindset. And then through my communities, especially if they're listening to my show, we go deeper on, like, gut and all these, like, physical things. Right. Gut and hormones and that. And I think we have not talked enough about this. This piece. What do you want them to know? Because I want. Because this is kind of like you're not. You're talking to a lot of midlife women right now that are in this position of they're figuring out aging, they're feeling on what's going on in their body. How can this support them? And why is this something they need to take seriously?

Yeah, I think one of the beautiful things about breath work that I love so much is it creates such clear dialogue between me and my body. Right.

When I'm. When the years that I spent, disconnected from my body, disconnected from my intuition, disconnected from, like, all of the cues my body was giving me. It was sort of like a guessing game. Like, I don't know. I don't know what I need. Breath work is that bridge of communication, right? Like. Like our body is actually communicating to us what it needs every single moment.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like, it really is, right? Need more rest? Do we need more of this? Do we need more of that? Do we need less of this? Like, how do I feel with this? Like, when we eat something, if we're disconnected from our body and we're all up on our head and we eat something, it's really hard to be in touch with how that food is landing in our body. When we are. When we are open, when we are connected, we can eat. I mean, sometimes we don't even have to eat it. We can just like, intuit. We can just feel it, like, oh, I'm. That's not going to be good for me right now. So as women are navigating this, like, physically, it's such a beautiful way to just like, open up the communication portals from us in our body, you know, and just take back a little bit of our power by not constantly looking out here for what I should do, but like coming into, into here and that even, even just that of just like the priority of listening to the body over external, external stuff as a starting point is incredible. I mean, how not many people are doing that. And then on the contrary, on the, on the opposite side of that, it's like learning to reclaim our power in the sense of like not overextending ourselves, not people pleasing. Right? It's like, like a woman in her like 40s and 50s. Well, there's so many responsibility. It's like you've got like children that are sort of like getting older and doing their thing and then you have your parents that are getting older and like there's so many things to navigate in that transition that sometimes we forget about us and we forget about like what do I need right now? Yeah, what, how do I get to be nourished and nurtured right now? How can I take a moment for me to actually check in and go like, what does this body need? What is this being need right now? And I think that's one of the greatest things that we can do as women is like pull back the nurturing from everyone and everything else a little bit, A little bit and give it to ourselves.

I want to speak into the type A personality for a moment because I know people that are not type A probably really resonate with you. And then people that are type A, me included, get resistant to things like this because we hear it, it makes logical sense. It's just a harder thing to drop into. There's an interview I did a while back that really resonated with me. I had interviewed my friend Maria, who has stage four cancer and she has always been that type A super driven person. And when she learned that she had stage four cancer, she immediately originally went into the I'm going to fix it, I'm going to stop it, I'm going to control it. Which is what I see any of my type A friends do when they get diagnosed with something like I'm going to fix, I'm going to control. And what she said, her real profound experience after meditating and doing breath work and like really getting there, her big aha moment was that she felt that she had this epiphany that what caused her cancer, the same personality that caused her cancer was not going to be the one that fixes it. So that type A driven that she believed for her caused it. She was trying to fix it with that same personality. So she had shared that breath work and meditation and doing, was able to kind of reset and that's where she was beginning to heal because she could literally undo a lot of that. So I thought that I wanted to bring that up because that ties in a lot to what you're saying. And I am, look, I am so far from a breath of a breath expert. This is so. I've done it like four times in my life and I think twice are with you. So this is not something that I have currently practiced or I'm doing. I would like to be the kind of person that does. So help us get started. Like what, what do you want us to do tonight? What do you want us to do tomorrow? Like, tell. Help us go.

Well, let, let's break down the Type A personality. Type A personalities are so amazing in so many ways. Like in work and stuff, it's so efficient, right? Everyone, everyone needs a Type A on their team at work. But when it comes to how we live outside of that, we gotta downregulate because if we're in Type A again, it goes back down to that chronic sympathetic nervous system of the hyper vigilance all the time. It's gotta be like this. It's gotta be like there's an emotional cost to that of being on like that all the time. But let's break it down even more. It's like, well, why is that? Why didn't you show up that way? Right? And if we break it down, it always, always, always comes back down to safety. Okay, well, why are we controlling our environment? Well, we don't feel safe. That it's not that it's, it's gonna be okay, right? Why are we controlling this or doing this or food or even with myself with like controlling my body, controlling food, controlling my workouts, controlling everything. Like everything was so dialed, everything was so controlled because I genuinely, genuinely believe if I gain weight, I'm not going to be loved. I'm going to be ostracized from the tribe. No one's going to love me. And it came from this very like, lack place. And so to answer your question of like, what can we do? It's about doing small breathwork experiences every single day. Like, it can be three minutes. Like I talked about waking up and doing one minute, one minute, three minutes, whatever it is, and reteaching the body and this is going to take some time. It's not like a quick fix, it's not a pill. It is, but it's like reteaching the body that it's actually safe to feel.

And it's safe to be present and it's Safe to slow down, like, really reteaching the body. And the more that we can be present and taking those like honest moments with ourselves and putting our hands on our heart and just going like, how are you doing? Like, what is it that you need right now? You know, it's like, that's. I, I built an app around that. I'm like, how can we just get this on demand for people?

So I think I need to download your app, like right now.

What's your.

Wait, your app is called Pause Breath.

Pause Breathwork. Yeah. There's a free 14 day trial. It's on Android and iOS, but it, there's, there's tracks that are 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, you know, and the whole purpose of that is, is, is helping people feel safe. Because when we feel safety, we feel aliveness, we feel intuitive, we feel creative, we feel innovative. When we are constantly in a stress response, we're creating havoc on our bodies.

Do you think. Because do you do both? Do you meditate now too? Or do you have.

You. It's more so I don't meditate unless I do breath work first. Because going from ADHD brain hyper, like, like, go, go, go, go, go. Hyper, creative. Like if I was to go from this state to go sitting in that chair behind me and just go meditate, my brain would be like, bing, bing, bing. Yeah.

Which is my. What mine does.

Yeah. Right. So, so like, in order to make your meditation practices juicier, deeper, more profound, do three to five minutes of breath work first and then go into a meditation. So what that will do is it will quiet down the mind so that we can. Our meditation. Meditations can be longer, more present, more, more energized.

Do you feel that you like you personally, do you even need to meditate if you're doing breath work and you've got that so dialed in?

Well, breath work is meditation. It's just, it's just an active form of meditation. Right.

Wow.

So the reason why I still love meditating is because. Okay, so when we're, when we're doing breath work, things are moving quite quickly, right? It's like.

We'Re getting downloads, we're releasing. There's emotion going. There's like a lot. It's like a very.

Active practice. There's a lot going on for me. I love meditating with a clear mind because that's when I have those whispers of like, go reach out to this person or let go of that or fire that person. Or it's like those moments where I'm like yeah, really hearing, you know, I'm really hearing how God is speaking to me and moving through me. And when I'm doing breath work, it's more of like a somatic which for those of you who don't know somatic, the root word means soma. It's, it's, it's like a very body based energizing practice typically. And with meditation there's just something about the stillness and the quiet that, that I just absolutely love.

Makes sense. Okay, so kind of like to dos for anyone listening to this right now you would say start with what? Let's kind of go over like the five to do's like so number one, you said the morning or the night. Can you reiterate, you said in through your mouth. Can you do that again? Share what that was?

Yeah. So the first thing that you want to do when you wake up, we open your eyes, roll onto your back, place your left hand on your belly, your right hand on your chest and just do the three part breath which is into the belly, up into the chest, out through the mouth. So three part first about this speed, like.

Making sure that that exhale is longer than the inhales because that will stimulate our parasympathetic nervous system and get us in that like really juicy, beautiful state. So do that in the morning when you get up and then do it in the evening when you go to bed just to release any energy that you've.

So that's the first thing we can do. The second thing is. Well, you mentioned you have an app pause breath work and you have a 15, a 15 day free trial.

You said two weeks.

Yeah, two week trial. And then is that what does that prompt us through different levels of it or what does that do?

Yeah, so. So every breath pattern will have a different outcome. I shared a little bit already. Some of them are more energizing, some of them are calmer. So the ones for instance, sleep, for those of you who struggle with sleep, definitely go in there and just like Google or not Google search, search sleep and you'll get like a whole bunch of sleep ones. That one is not going to be energizing. That's going to be more of a grounding and help your body really regulate so that you'll sleep better. Like for those of you guys who have an aura ring, it's fascinating to see the aura stats go through the roof when you add breath work in like how you're sleeping, where it goes through the groove. It's fascinating.

It's amazing.

It is Amazing because it helps us get out of our mind. It helps us get into our body. We just sleep deeper.

So I would say go on there and choose, like, how do I want to feel? What's the experience that I want? And then whatever time that you have, whether it's three minutes, five minutes, whatever it is. So you choose your time, you choose your outcome, and then the tracks there for you.

And do you actually. Are you, like, talking on the tracks? Is it you? Oh, cool. Okay. So what I like about Sam is she's a real person. As you guys can hear. I know her, and she. I. I gravitate towards wanting to learn this from her. Because you're not like the traditional yogi.

Calm.

I feel like you understand that stress, personality, you understand that more. So it's a little bit more relatable to me to hear it from you versus some, you know, some yogi in Bali, because I wouldn't. I just wouldn't relate. Right. So that's. That's what I think. Any words of wisdom for women that are going to try to do this but find themselves not being able to do it, like. Or getting stuck in their head? Anything you want to tell them? Yeah.

As long as you're creating the space to do it, you can't do it wrong. And listen, you will get stuck in your head. Of course you will. It's a. A. It's a new thing. It's an awkward thing at first. People are like, what am I doing? What is happening? You know? So just be with yourself in the awkwardness and just have the courage to just try something new. Because I can guarantee you, when you stick with it and you start doing, you know, your one minute in the morning, and then you're like, oh, that felt good. Let me do three. And then you kind of like build up to five. When you start doing it consistently, you are going to see a massive change in the way that you just show up in life. Life.

Right.

Because it's like, if we can process some of that stuck emotion every single day and let go a little bit, your body's gonna feel lighter, your mind's gonna feel more clear, you're gonna feel more connected, you're gonna feel more intuitive. It has. It has such a. A beautiful impact. But start slow and don't judge yourself and just know that you can't do it wrong as long as you're breathing. Yeah.

Sam, where can people find. Obviously, they can go find your app in the app store. Pause, breath, work. Where else can they find you? Are you so are you on social media a lot? Do you have a podcast? Tell us where they can find you.

Yeah, so my podcast is called Can't Be Contained. So we talk about all things spiritual development, personal development, all the all the geeky things around, how to just like live lives on fire. And then my Instagram @samanthaskelly is where you can find me. So feel free to come say hi and let me know you found me from here.

Thanks so much Sam. Thank you.

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