337: Power of the Breath with Niraj Naik

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Code Shake Every time you breathe, you're aging a little bit. Like just listen to this podcast. Right now, everyone's aging a little bit because when you breathe that oxidative reaction that happens of oxygen burning is just like the reaction going on in your car engine that drives your car engine forward. It's a combustion reaction which creates heat and it creates a bit of wear and tear. That's oxidative stress. So oxidative stress is an ongoing battle we have that we're fighting every single day. And it's oxidative stress that causes like damage to cells, degeneration of cells.

You are here for a reason, but navigating this human life can be challenging. How do you care for your body, mind and spirit? To make the most of your time here on how can you harness your incredible human potential? In this podcast we explore these questions and more to help you craft your best life yet. Welcome to I Am Human.

Hello humans. Thank you so much for joining me today. I am your host Dr. Yami and it is my pleasure to bring you another fabulous episode of I Am Human. Please take a moment to subscribe, rate, review and share this podcast. To be human means to breathe. Breathing is required for life, but can we improve our breathing in order to optimize our well being and our joy? Our guest today is passionate about the breath and is here to enlighten us on this topic. Neeraj Naik is a professional musician and pharmacist turned holistic health and breath work expert. He started his path in healing others as a community pharmacist, yet after several years he found himself a patient with stress related depression and ulcerative colitis. This was a wake up call that made him embark on a journey of profound self healing and education. He created a global community of heart centered change makers by founding SOMA Breath, the global breathwork and wellness movement with over 2000 certified instructors and hundreds of thousands of students around the globe. Known internationally as a renegade pharmacist, Neeraj is dedicated to educating others on topics of holistic health, breathwork, meditation and more. Neeraj's breath work is advocated by some of the top names in wellness and his techniques are currently being studied by leading neuroscientists at Cambridge University. And in this podcast episode we talked about his journey from chronic illness to self healing. We talk about his opinion on the biggest problems with modern medicine, how modern living affects our well being, leads to stress, and we talk about the breath. We talk about oxygen and breath work, we talk about the SOMA Breath program specifically, and we talk about how improving our breath and our breathing can help us with athletic performance. He also tells us some specifics about what's the best time of day to practice breath work and some of those issues as well. So this is a fantastic episode. I actually learned a lot. There's a lot of things I didn't know about breathing and breath work, so I was definitely excited to hear more about this and to practice some of these techniques. I really have enjoyed doing the SOMA program and I was probably not doing it the way he said to do it because he said we're supposed to do it on an empty stomach. But one of the things I found is that I have had this routine of meditating after lunch, but I would fall asleep. So I ended up probably sleeping the majority of the meditation because it was after lunch. I would do my walk, I would walk, I would eat, do my walk and then I would meditate and I would pretty much like take a nap before I went back to see patients for the afternoon. But I started doing the SOMA program and it was actually very energizing.

So.

So I would go back to the afternoon feeling energized and refreshed and ready to go see my afternoon patient. So that's how I've been using it, but I think that I'm going to change it to do it in the morning and see what effects I get that way. So I hope that you enjoy this interview and this episode and then maybe you try out the SOMA Breath program and see how you like it. So thank you so much for being here with me today. I hope you have a plantastic day. And now let's welcome Neeraj Naik. The information on this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not meant to replace careful evaluation and treatment. If you have concerns about your health or well being, please consult a healthcare professional. This podcast episode contains sensitive topics that may be triggering to certain people. Listener discretion is advised.

Niraj Naik, welcome to I Am Human. Thank you so much for being a guest today.

It's an absolute pleasure to be here.

Well, I'm very interested in hearing your story, but first of all, happy belated birthday. I know that you are a fellow Leo like me. I'm August 4th. So nice to have the Leo birthdays to celebrate. But before we get into the SOMA Breath program and all of that, I'd love to hear about your journey from chronic illness to self healing, because I know that that's kind of what prompted your transition into this line of work.

Indeed. You want the long story or the condensed version?

Whichever you feel like giving us today.

Because there's a lot to it. So. But in a nutshell, I used to be a pharmacist. Didn't really have a passion for my job. I actually wanted a career in the music world. I. I was pretty successful in that in the early days, but got caught up in a crazy lifestyle and lost everything and then ended up doing a job I didn't want to do. And it was trying to get out of that. I got myself into a lot of debt and spiraled down and had a big disillusionment with the job. But in that spiral down, I got taken to a Tony Robbins event. And that was the first time I heard anyone talk about diet, nutrition, different lifestyle techniques, you know, biohacks basically, or prevention. So I was like, okay, I've got a pharmacy full of sick Patients, let's put Tony Robbins to test. So maybe it'll make my job a bit more fun as well. And I started to get people off the drugs. I got really good at it. That got me promoted to head office of one of the big corporations in the uk and I came up with a healthy shopping list service for them. But then six months into it, they shelved that idea and again, boom. Had a huge like just shock to systems, like why would they not want project that could help millions of people. And now I'm facing going back to my old job, which I really didn't want to do because it's just sucking the soul out of me. But that's when I got a blessing in disguise that ended up being like quite a serious problem because I got an autoimmune disease called ulcerative colitis. And now I'm housebound for almost a year and I become my own patient. And it's going through that where I realize conventional medicine only gets you so far. I knew this now firsthand, not just seeing my patients, but seeing myself suffering from the side effects of medications and so on. And then eventually I'm going to have to either have my colon removed or be a guinea pig for a drug hasn't been tested. These are my two choices left from the consultant. And then like a third path by sheer fate opens up where a friend of our family, Swamiyamba Kananda, she is now close friend of family. She basically said, look, you got a gift here with your tenacity and your passion to help people and your background. If you can reverse this, you're going to have an amazing story. It became a self fulfilling prophecy. She taught me the foundations of Ayurveda, Pranayama, his yogic practices. And within a few months I was back to full health. And breathwork breathing techniques was a big part of that transformation. And also going back to my passion for music where I devised a system of special breathing techniques with rhythmic music, really cool music that takes you into these altered brainwave states where if you use guided meditation techniques, you can actually reprogram the unconscious mind, which is the source of a lot of problems. And you can also reframe the past, change a perception of the past. You know, a lot of my issues were based on past failures. Hate, blame, anger, rage, frustration against the system which I knew was broken. And that frustration, that anger burns up inside. And it's that which usually triggers some disease eventually. But with breathwork techniques you can actually reverse that issue. You can, you can actually completely wipe the slate clean of the operating system, refresh the ins and install a new operating system basically, and change the hardware. You can upgrade the hardware so you go from PC to a Mac. And that's basically what happened.

So I love that, I love that I'm a Mac girl. So, yeah, that was perfect.

Most people are. Yeah. If you don't want viruses, go with the bat. They're not as good as when Steve Jobs is around, but they don't get viruses as often like they do a bit now, but nowhere near like what they used to. Whereas PCs are full of them. And viruses are just malfunctions in the programming. Right. They're all. They're designed to create malicious harm to your computer. And it's the same thing as thoughts. Thoughts from other people can be designed to create harm to your operating system, but just engaging in negative thoughts from your environment, which is very hard to avoid. The media, TV advertising, constant bombardment and. But then also the environmental pressure of your friends, family telling you, you can't do this or can't do that, you're not good enough or you can't have that. All of that creates a toxic environment which breeds viruses. And it's those viruses that then cause malfunctions in your operating system. And that leads to autoimmune diseases, which is your health, your auto normal nervous system getting confused at what's healthy and what's not, and it starts attacking healthy cells, thinking it's, you know, they're invaders. So the whole part of my therapy is a lot about rewiring your cells back into peace, love, trust and harmony. And the breath is an amazing tool for restoring that peace and harmony, which.

Should really be our default setting. But in the modern world, things change a bit. I want to go back a little bit. Seemed like the timing was pretty significant. And just looking at it from a spiritual standpoint, how much of it of your illness and developing this autoimmune disease, do you think it was just a defiance of, I don't want to go back to that job. There's no way I can do that again.

It was probably all to do that. It was my unconscious mind giving me a gift, you know, and often that's what diseases are. Diseases are like a cop out of the system. Quite often when they come suddenly, especially at a young age like that, it's usually your, you know, your somatic intelligence basically saying, like, you can't stay in this environment, otherwise you really will die. So I'll give you a disease and then you have an excuse to get out of it. So, yeah, so I'm sure a big part of it's to do with that. And I do believe you become your environment. So if you're not meant to be in an environment, you'll get sick. If you don't want to get out of bed to go to work, that's the first sign of chronic disease. And that's the first question you ask yourself every morning. Like, am I enthusiastic? Get out of bed, do a hard day's work? Or am I doing this because I feel like I have to? Are you waking up with enthusiasm to be kind and compassionate to people? If not, why not? And. Or do you feel like you just have to be nice? You're faking it. So that fakery, that lie that you tell yourself every morning will eventually lead to chronic disease. Now, not everyone's fortunate, privileged enough as I am to be able to. Being in this environment where you get support, friends, family and all that, and you have a roof in your head. Not a lot of people have big bills to pay, mortgages. They can't just quit their jobs suddenly. And I totally get that. So we can't control the whole world that's going on around us, but what we can control is how it reacts. So with the tools I've got now, like, I wouldn't change anything that happened in the past because it's amazing for my story, right? But if I was to go back to that corporate world, I know now tools I can use to stay, retrain my harmony and not get so stressed with. The stress really affects you physiologically. And, you know, I run a company now. We've got over three and a half thousand instructors. We have a whole core team with, you know, many employees. So that takes a lot of stressful. It's like running a corporation. And, you know, there's always ups and downs and there's moments, sometimes you feel like this is too stressful, like it starts to affect your mood. So these tools that I've learned are really good. Getting in check with yourself in the moment to restore balance. But a lot of people, they go and find their passion. They do what they. They love to do, you know, finally. And then they get caught up in the whole world of running a business and realize it's actually quite difficult and challenging. And maybe they don't create the best team or they're working with people who aren't as, you know, competent as they wish and so on, or they're not as competent in certain areas and then end up getting really stressed out. And burnt out. But with breath you can use as a tool to kind of as an intervention to, to have a really good way to reset, defrag the nervous system and then you can start seeing clearly. This is basically the most powerful meditation tool. We all know what benefits of meditation are, right? We all know that don't need to go into that. But with the breath we can get into these meditative states very fast and it can be very soothing for the nervous system. And from that you can start making better decisions because ultimately how you feel affects how you think, your quality of thoughts make quality decisions and then actions and results. So we have to really control how we feel every day. And the breath is another amazing tool for changing our state. Staying high vibe I really, I really believe like the more high vibe we can remain. I'm not talking about faking it, but staying at your best every day. You know, physically, fitness wise, health wise, but just your vibe, your emotional state is so important if you want to be successful. And you know, I found that by far breathwork is the best tool for that because it's so fast and doesn't cost anything and it's right there.

Well, I want to get more into that in a second, but first I'd love to hear, especially given your own journey through chronic disease, what you see as the biggest problems with modern medicine.

Biggest problems with modern medicine is the business model itself. Because the business model, if you think about it, it just takes two seconds to figure this out, is that the business of pharmacy means that each customer is only a customer when they're sick. So if pharmacists cure people, meaning they take away all of their symptoms and the cause of the disease, they're not going to have any customers anymore. So by design, the pharmacy business is all about retaining customers by masking symptoms and keeping them customs for life where they're dependent on the medication. That's just the nature of the business. It's unfortunate that's how it is, but it's the truth. And so if you're the head of the marketing of the top pharma companies and as your job is to increase profits, what are you going to do? You're not going to go for cures because that's bad for business. You're going to go for subscription plans. You want people on medication forever for the rest of their life. So if you think of it like that also you'll see that big pharma owns all the free healthcare systems in the world. They're not really free because you don't have a choice in what you're given. You have to do what the government gives you and you pay them a subscription. You know, Medicare or whatever it is is a subscription. Medical insurance is a subscription. But you're paying quite a lot of money in some cases. Some people pay like a thousand bucks a month every month. And you're handing over and now you're told you're dictated to what you can use as treatment. There's not much freedom of choice, especially in the uk. So that's the whole business. It's unfortunate that's how it is. It could be so much better. It could be, it could be a revolution. I mean it is changing, it's changing. There's definitely a lot more awareness now and people don't trust that system as much as they used to. So more people, more and more people are seeking, you know, other information. But if you just look at Covid like who controls information? Again, it's the pharma companies because who is censoring doctors, who is funding the media? They're all pharma, indirectly or directly pharma driven decisions. Because in America alone, the pharmaceutical industry are the ones who fund most of the commercials, right? Especially on the news channels. So everything's brought to you by Pfizer these days, right? So, so then who's paying for the information, who's controlling information? It's quite obvious. You don't have to think too hard. You'd have to be like a rocket scientist to figure all this stuff out, how you're being scammed. So therefore you have to find your own source of information. You have to find other people you can trust. So I mean the way to break free of that is you've got to do whatever you can do to not get into that system as much as possible. So that means taking care of yourself, being responsible for your health, not thinking the government's going to save you. You know, being like mindful when you go to a pub Instead of drinking 10, you know, shots or pints to lose your mind, have a think that each one of those drinks is taking you closer towards that hospital bill. So every bad choice you may health choice you make is getting you closer and closer to more debt, more pain, more adverse drug reactions and more of a burden you're going to be on other people. So you know, we have to take personal responsibility of our health first. That system is not going to give you health care, it'll give you health scare and it will manage your disease and keep your disease going as long as Possible without fixing the cure because that's the business model. But if you really want it healthy, if you want to get healthy, you need to go and find and look at examples of healthy people. Who do you admire that's really healthy, successful. Go and get their, you know, plan, get their routine, follow that. Don't go and find the doctor who's overweight, who you know is an alcoholic, who's got a secret stash of whiskey under the counter, he's like knocking his own pills back in the cupboard and you know that's very common, trust me, because I'm a pharmacist, I saw them all doing that. So. And some of them would just drop dead like suddenly like in their 40s, 50s, you know, because it's so stressful. They don't want to do that job. Most of them did it because their mum told them to do it. So they don't really want to do that. And then what happens? They get like in a spiral of well they get into debt, they have to pay a lot of fees for university, you know, like in america it's like 250 grand or something, half a million to be a medical doctor and so on. And then you, so if you've got mortgage, you got bills, you've got student loans and debts and it's really hard to get out of the job now. You can't just suddenly go oh I hate this system or let's do something else. It's really hard because you got all these bills to pay so in the end you end up just conceding and you do whatever pharma tells you, big pharma tells you and you just sign the papers and you end up becoming a bureaucrat. Like most doctors these days, they're not even thinking, they're just doing paperwork. That's the problem. Majority of doctors these days are spending their time doing paperwork and admin than actually seeing patients. This is the fact. That's why there's more doctors now in America, in England for sure leaving the profession enjoying pharmacists are leaving than joining because it's so soul destroying as a job in America it's a bit difficult because of the big cost to be a doctor. So, so this is how you suck people in, it's how you make people pawns in your game and keep them, you know, doing what you want and the system just stays as it is, you know, it doesn't change and, and if you speak out you get struck off the register. So it's another, it's really it's really hard. So, so my, my advice is just find people who are really like you, admire you, trust they look healthy, copy their patterns of like, you know, what they, what's their habits, do what they do, you'll probably get the same result. And that's what I did. You know, I started to look for other examples. My swami being one of them. She cured herself of cancer. So she just told me what she did because she got into yoga, because she had heart problems and cancer, she fixed that. So I was like, okay, this is a great role model. So she just showed me other examples and that opened my eyes. It's like, oh, actually a lot of people get better without drugs. So I started to copy what they do. The ones who had ulcera colitis, what do they do? Well, they eat a very different diet to, to what doctors telling me to do. Right. So there is something to diet, lifestyle. And the doctor told me there's no stress doesn't make a difference. Diet doesn't make a difference. The stress levels doesn't make difference. Just shut up and take the pills. There's no evidence. No evidence, but there's loads of evidence. If you look out there, there's tons of anecdotal evidence, people who healed themselves of colitis, all kinds of diseases, and you'll see there's like some patterns to that. Big part of that is, you know, eating a more normal meals, real food, like, rather than what comes in cardboard boxes, you know, that's just one simple switch we can do. This is what I was doing in the pharmacy, actually. Just, I was showing people the correlation between the amount of processed foods they eat and the amount of pills they're taking is, it's astonishing. So I would just say, look, maybe if you could make at least 70% of your meals yourself, rather than going to get the cheap option, would you do that? And a lot of people wanted to make their own food, actually. They just, they become lazy. So I said, well, if you start making your own food just for a week, do it for a week, just see what happens. Just see what happens, see how you feel. And that's when I started to get the testimonials because people just gave it a go for a week and it doesn't take long. One week, you can see huge shifts just by getting off a plastic diet, you know, the factory diet. Switch to a normal healthy diet. It doesn't have to be vegan, doesn't have to be vegetarian, doesn't have to be carnival or anything like that. Just switch from drinking Coca Cola, eating McDonald's, to just having some normal food, like real food, and see the difference. And, yeah, that's all I was doing. Very simple stuff, and it works.

Yeah, I agree with you. I think we can simplify the diet so much just by eating more whole foods.

Yeah.

Really? That's the only rule. Just eat more whole foods. Try to get more fruits and vegetables in. There doesn't have to be all or nothing, but just eat more whole foods. I want to go back to something you said, how in the UK you're seeing a lot of physicians leaving. It's happening a lot here in the United States, too. And then you mentioned how, you know, the system's different here. You know, we do have to. Most people are paying for medical school, and you're right, a lot of people are leaving medical school with between 300 and $500,000 in debt. So one of the phenomenons that we see here in the United States that most people do not know is that we lose about 400 physicians per year from suicide.

Wow.

So these are people that feel like they can't leave. Right. They feel so trapped that their only choice is to end their own lives. So I think that awareness needs to be raised that there's a lot of people. And, you know, obviously, medicine's not the only profession where people are feeling trapped and jaded and cynical, and they want something different, but they feel like they can't. So they may end their life. But, you know, that's one of those things that a lot of people aren't aware of, that there's a lot of physicians that are suffering. They don't want to practice this way. They don't want to just write prescriptions and make referrals all day long. They really want to help people. And that's why I'm so passionate about lifestyle medicine, because a lot of physicians, once they find lifestyle medicine, they find that they can actually help people through diet and lifestyle choices. It's so gratifying that it gives them this, like, second wind, this, you know, refreshed approach to life, and they just become happier. So there are different ways that people that they're feeling so burnt out because they actually went to medical school because they wanted to help people, and they don't feel like they're doing that. You know, there's a percentage that's a big problem.

There's a percentage that went there generally because they really want to help. And then they got. They realized that it wasn't the right choice. But there's Also a big percentage that did it because their mum told them to do it.

Exactly, yes.

And then they get, they're the ones who get a real shock because they, they realize that actually this most soul destroying thing to follow in a parent's footsteps and being forced into something you don't want to do and they're the ones who really die inside their soul gets crushed. And I know quite a few people like that.

Oh yeah, it's very common, especially in certain cultures. I'm Latin American so that happens a lot in Latin American culture.

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Let's talk now about breathwork. Just take us through the basics. What is breath work? How is the different from meditation or yoga specifically? Tell us more about that.

So breath work is, is just a modern name for breathwork breathing exercises. So the original school of the most oldest one that's really recorded and made into a system is pranayama, which means energy control. Pranayama. And that comes from yoga. Yoga has eight different branches like steps to it, eight limbs of yoga it's called and right. The beginning is asana. And the breath pranayama. And the breath is how we produce energy in the body. So the ancients knew that it's how we produce energy in the body, Pranayama. So also when we breathe in, the oxygen comes in, goes into your body through the red blood cells that transports it to your body tissue cells. And in your cells you have the mitochondria. And here's where the magic happens. Where oxygen burns glucose to create CO2 water and ATP, the life force energy that drives life. Right? So breath is extremely important to all functions of your body because it's how we produce ATP energy. Now here's the thing. The problem with it is that every time you breathe, you're aging a little bit. Like, just listen to this podcast. Right now, everyone's aging a little bit. Because when you breathe, that oxidative reaction that happens of oxygen burning is just like the reaction going on in your car engine that drives your car engine forward. It's a combustion reaction which creates heat and it creates a bit of wear and tear. That's oxidative stress. So oxidative stress is an ongoing battle we have that we're fighting every single day. And it's oxidative stress that causes like damage to cells, degeneration of cells. Now your body will produce antioxidants. You'll also get antioxidants from your diet. That's why we need antioxidants, because it protects against, that, prevents it. However, the ancient yogis figured out that because oxygen stress is so toxic to the system, that the best thing to do is to become as efficient using oxygen as possible. So you breathe less, not more. The less oxygen you need to create energy is the goal of Pranayama. The whole system's designed to make you as efficient using oxygen as possible. This then will slow your breathing rate down. And it also raises a gas in the body called carbon dioxide, which is, we've been told is a toxic waste gas, was actually really important because CO2 is what allows oxygen to be absorbed into your cells, your body. It's like the signal, the gatekeeper. And without CO2, which can also happen from hyperventilation, over breathing, excessive breathing from stress, being too excited, nervous, anxious, bad breathing habits in your sleep, especially overeating, the wrong type of exercise, that kind of stuff will mean you get less CO2 in your system. CO2 is amazing for your body because it relaxes your muscles, it balances your blood pressure, it calms the mind, and it has a calming effect on the nervous system. So without CO2, you get high blood pressure, you get hypertension, because oxygen actually causes vasoconstriction, CO2 causes vasodilation. So you need the right balance of CO2. Now that's also one of the reasons if you over breathe while we get less oxygen going to the cells in the body and you get degeneration of your tissue cells. So by slowing your breathing down, becoming very efficient oxygen, not only do you prevent oxidative stress, but you also increase oxygenation of your body tissue cells, not the, the cells of your bloodstream that's easier to get saturated. And just a little sniff, you're fully saturated oxygen. But if you don't have enough CO2 because you hyperventilate, you don't get the oxygen from your blood cells go into your body tissue cells and you get poor oxygenation of your body to cells, your muscles, organs, joints. So on your brain, your heart, that will lead to wear and tear and disease, right? So the entire system of pranayama is about reduced breathing, efficient breathing, slowing your breathing down. Make yourself so efficient using oxygen that your mitochondria running the optimum, that you need less oxygen to live. And because we have this toxic codependent relationship with oxygen, you can't live with it and you can't live without it. That's the weird nature of human beings. So it's one of the reasons why yogis, if you read autobiography, yogi, they talk about superhuman yogis in that book. And they go and live in the Himalayas at the top of those mountains. The oxygen level is very low, right? So you actually are living in a more low oxygen environment. And in that low oxygen environment, if you meditate, because you can retain a lot of CO2 because you've optimized using these yogic techniques, you go into these bliss states, these samadhi nirvana meditation states. So some breath work techniques are also used to get you into these samadhi nirvana bliss states. These like states we feel like in absolute divine connection. And that's why yogis go and train in the Himalayas where oxygen is very low and they live in caves and they go into these like nirvana like states for hours, days, even weeks and months. And that's where they have the supernatural connection with the divine. So that's part of, that's like if you look at it, yoga from a physiological level, that's what's going on with yoga. It's like all about slowing your breathing rate down, even extending your ability to hold your breath. When you can hold your breath 60, 90 seconds or more is when we release the soma from within, which is this chemical concoction is a bit like psilocybin or dmt. And it has this like psychedelic like quality, a full body bliss like quality to it. And you can get that quite quickly in just, you know, learning how to train your breath attention to go from 69 seconds. But some yogis are going to go for two, three, four, five minutes, holding their breath, retaining their breath. And there's some famous legends where they can hold their breath for hours at a time or slow the breathing rate down so much that it's almost a zero, hardly any breath at all. And they can retain that for long periods of time because they go into these low oxygen environments and they're so optimized at using oxygen, they don't need to breathe. And Lao Tzu says the perfect human breathes don't breathe at all. Right. And actually, if you look at the animal kingdom, it's kind of makes sense because animals, you'll see the relationship between breathing rates and longevity very clearly. Elephants, turtles, whales, they breathe very slowly. Elephants like less than two breaths a minute. They live, you know, very long time. Like whales live over 200 years and they hold their breath for like two hours at a time. And on the other end of spectrum, rats, mice, they have very fast breathing rates, like 300 breasts per minute, and they live only like one or two years, right? But there's a weird creature, the naked mole rat, which breaks some of the rules. It's a rodent and it should, shouldn't live very long, but it lives 30 times longer than rats. Reason why is it lives underground in a low oxygen environment and can hold its breath for 18 minutes at a time. So it's like a super yogi rat. Right? But I'm not saying you're going to go and live in the Himalayas. I'm not saying you're going to go and be a naked mole rat if you want to live longer and have nirvana like states. What I'm saying is with yogic practices, what we've developed with stone breath techniques, anyone can do anywhere where they can become adapted to oxygen, where they slow their breathing rate right down. And then there's so much benefits that come from that to your life. Like your life change when you can hold your breath. We do a breath hold time test, morning breath hold time test in the morning. You do it from like when you can hold your breath for 40 seconds or more, just with a normal hold your breath, time it for 40 seconds, your first big urge to breathe. That's when life starts to change. It becomes magical. Like if you used to be somebody who's easily anxious and triggered, you start to calm down, you're like chill, right? If you're somebody who had like chronic pain and maybe hypertension after 40 seconds, when you start to train yourself to get that level, those symptoms go away. So a lot of what we do in stone Breath is revolves around your morning breath hold time. We use that as A gamification tool to check in with your breath every morning because it's a great fitness tracker, is way better than the Oura rings. Okay. More accurate probably. And, and then you can do your practice and then you can see every day, doing a little bit every day how your breath hold times improves and then how that correlates to your mood, your well being, symptoms you might be suffering from and so on. And, and we have a program called Breath Fit which teaches you all of this. We have an app now, Soma breath app, that has these courses on there and it trains you to increase your breath hold time. And if you can do this consistently, you can say goodbye to a lot of problems in your life, especially health related issues.

I've been doing triathlons and I had to learn how to swim over the past year, which was one of the hardest things I've ever done. But I realized that part of my difficulty with swimming is probably my inability to hold my breath very long. So my question to you is, for those of us that can't hold our breath very long, is this some sort of genetic just the way our physiology works or is it because we've had some bad breathing habits or a combination? I'm just curious if you have an answer to this.

Yeah. So the low breath hold times, there's a few reasons. Quite often it's psychological, so there's a fear holding the breath, you could probably hold it longer, but maybe there's some fear around breath retention and that actually can be due to stuff happened in the past. Maybe you had a near death experience in the pool or something, or there's just some natural anxiety about holding breath. But that can be fixed quite easily just with practice because you can go minutes and minutes without holding, needing to breathe. The world record is like 24 minutes or something like that. So you can hold your breath a lot longer than you think. So that's one reason. But the other reasons are generally like, it could be like you have an infection, it could be low levels of physical fitness. It can be. We haven't been trained to hold our breath like we, we live in a very busy, frantic world where we're huffing and puffing all day long. And a lot of people suffer from chronic hyperventilation, especially if you work in a very busy environment. You may be hyperventilating, losing CO2, and it's your CO2 tolerance that determines how long you can hold your breath as well, because your carbon dioxide is what tells your brain when you need to inhale. So if you got very low carbon monoxide tolerance. You won't be able to hold your breath very long. But with regular daily practice, there's a few exercises you can do, which is all in our Breath fit course. You will quickly be able to improve that score. Like we, we take people from 20 seconds to 40 seconds in a couple of weeks.

Okay.

So I just have to keep practicing.

But it has to be consistent. It has to be consistent. You have to do the other exercises.

I feel too that I'm a shallow breather, so I catch myself just like breathing very shallowly throughout the day, almost like that low level, like barely breathing sort of thing.

But okay, but that's not. That's not a problem. That's not the problem. There's a lot of misconceptions around breathing, like, especially shallow breathing. Actually, if you look at yogis, they're always shallow breathing. They hardly look like they breathe at all. That's what Lao Tzu says. Because you don't. The more adapted you are using oxygen, the less oxygen you need. Right. If you can do a triathlon, you probably have got a good breath hold time. You just haven't trained for it and there may be some anxiety there. Right. But shallow breathing isn't the issue. It's actually. It means you're concentrating. Usually our breath stills when we're focusing on something especially. But if you breathe in and gasp like that and hold your breath, you're going to actually raise your blood pressure. When you breathe in and hold, your heart rate goes up a little bit. So if you do one thing you can do is just breathe through your nose and hold your breath after the exhale. If you're going to concentrate on something right after the exhale, keeps you more calm and doesn't cause any adrenaline to be released, actually calms you down. So, yeah, that's interesting things to be mindful of.

You said something earlier about overeating and CO2. Can you talk about that link?

Yeah. Well, more to do with hyperventilation. So when you overeat your belly, especially if you eat in a hurry, like a lot of people rush, guzzle food down, right? So, you know, I used to have five minutes for my lunch break, so I'd just smash the food down in five minutes. And therefore you don't use your teeth, a big part of digestion is actually your saliva in your mouth. So if you bypass that and you got all this food in your belly, then your belly has to do a lot of work, extra work to digest the food. And that is going to lead to hyperventilation. Because now your body is actually increasing its demand for energy and you might start to breathe out excess CO2 that you don't want. And every time you have a belly full of food, your breath naturally deepens. It becomes a bigger volume of air going in and out. That heavy breathing will cause hyperventilation. So you should always chew your food until it's like a liquid in your mouth 30 times, then swallow. But you should always also eat to your 80% full, like, because it takes at least 20 minutes to register that you're full up. So if you guzzle food down in five minutes, you can end up eating double what you actually can eat. So you got to slow it down. So food needs a lot of dedication to. Should be a meditation. You know, a lot of people eat in an environment where they're talking really loud and, you know, they're hyperventilating, breathing through their mouth at the same time. If you look at Japanese cultures, they have it a very different culture. They, they take a while to eat their food, and they eat very peacefully and meditatively and, you know, they savor every taste. It's a different way of eating compared to the American and British culture, which where food is fuel. If you look at the Spanish culture, they actually drink wine, they have fun, they, it's very social, but they'll take two, two or three hours to have a meal. Right. They don't work as hard in America, like, as America. They work much less in Spain and these Mediterranean countries. So their culture is all about love and social connection. And food is love, it's a social thing. So they take a long time to eat. And therefore, if you look at the Spanish longevity compared to Americans, it's a whole nother level. It's like, I think they live 10 years more in places like Spain, even though they, they eat a lot of, you know, meats, they drink a lot of wine, they smoke a lot. You know, they're so truth. So forget about all, you know, all these, like, these health scares, risk factors that they go on about, right. They have all the risk factors, but they don't get the disease because there's something about social eating and eating slowly and not caring so much about the future.

Yeah, super interesting being in a hurry.

Hurry, hurry all the time.

Tell me a little bit about how the Soma Breath program works. I know for a lot of people who have never done something like this, like, the first time I did it, I was like, wow, this is amazing. It's really cool. It Felt like going to breath aerobics is what it felt like. I was like, I'm in a breath aerobics class. It was really fun, I really enjoyed it, but I had never done something like that before ever. So if maybe you can explain to my audience a little bit about how it works and the different phases that you're going through whenever you're doing one of these sessions.

Yeah, so we have a whole pharmacy of breath work techniques. So we have the more psychedelic altered states consciousness techniques that take you into these real blissful Samadhi like states. And we, we have a course called the 21 Day Awakening Journey, which is a real awakening course. It's a powerful meditation course. It takes you into real deeper connection to yourself and the outside world and universe, God, whatever you want to call it. And it's done over 21 days and it builds you up gradually, 20 minutes, then 40 minutes each week, then 60 minutes every day each week. And each track is more and more powerful and it, you know, so we do it gradually and you have an instructor that leads you through it. So that's our most powerful flagship course that the Cambridge University have done a trial on. They found some amazing results, just been peer reviewed. Showed how our course, the protocol works very much like a psychedelic wood that's used in treatment of severe depression and showed like a nice similarity. So especially in the bliss level of bliss, the predictive level of bliss on command. So we have this amazing life transformation course called 21 Day Awakening Journey. But then we have a pre course called Breath Fit which is an amazing course. Everyone should do it, every doctor in the world should train in it because it really teaches you the fundamentals of healthy breathing and how to normalize your breathing if it's gone out of balance and how to catch yourself in the moment and to use different techniques like a pharmacy. So this is our flagship course for retraining your breath to be more efficient. And so we always recommend people to do that first, then the 21 days and then we have the instructor training course where you can use this to build a career. But we have an app now my suggestion is get the app. There's a whole pharmacy, different techniques on there, it's really cool content and on there we're going to add the courses and everything. It's going to be really easy to use and navigate through that. But it also means that you've got everything on your phone and you can listen to the music and the content. The music is what really drives the techniques, it's what Makes it sticky. It makes you look forward to doing it. I'm a music producer myself and we have amazing world class musicians. And every track features like rhythmic breathing, breathing in a certain rhythm that has different effects, and also holding your breath in various ways for different effects. And the music kind of guides the rhythm of the breath and it becomes like a breath dance in itself. It's like a breath rave, I call it. So we have like a whole different pharmacy of techniques. It's hard to say what is Soma Breath because it's really a pharmacy. You know, in the pharmacy you have all these different prescriptions with different indications, the different situations. And same thing with Soma Breath.

What I like about it, just like you were saying with the rhythmic breathing, when you go into one of these programs, it guides you through very specifically on what to do along with the music. So that's why I feel like it feels like breath aerobics because you have the music, it's time to the music, the instructor is telling you what to do, and then you just allow yourself to do it and go from there, which I like it. It's not just like you're doing a guided meditation where you're kind of just walking through the forest and da, da, da, you know, it's like you're doing what they tell you to do and you're very active in this process. So it is very different than what a lot of people have done. So I suggest to listeners to just try it out because you don't know what it's like until you just try it. You said a little bit earlier that it's best to do it in the morning. So talk about time of day. Are there different ones that you can do different times of day or should you always do it in the morning? What about timing?

The best time to do any kind of meditative spiritual practice really is in the morning on an empty stomach, right? That's the time when we're correcting the problems that happen in our sleep. In sleep, we're unconscious of our breath. And here we can end up hyperventilating, causing stress. And, you know, sometimes we wake up feeling rigid and stiff. In the morning it's hard to like warm up, right? This is because of usually bad breathing and hyperventilation of sleep letting go of that CO2. So the morning is a time when we want to bring the CO2 back in the system. And then you'll have an amazing start to your day. So we have morning practices, morning routines, energized breath meditations. We Call them they're great wake up routines but they can be done also at other times in the day. But it should be an empty stomach. That's the golden rule. You're not going to do breath work on a full summit. There are certain techniques to help your digestion if you are full up. But they're different techniques. They're more in the moment. Right. For digestion. But nighttime also there's breath work techniques for the night to help you go to sleep as well.

And can practicing breath work help you with athletic performance?

Oh yeah, 100% because the whole point is oxygen efficiency. So if you become really efficient using oxygen, you're generally going to have mitochondria that function at a top level. And your mitochondrial function dictates your fitness and stamina. If you don't have healthy mitochondria, you're not going to be fit, you're not going to have stamina.

You kind of mentioned this before, just about how long it takes for someone to learn to hold their breath a little bit longer. But how quickly can someone learn to do these breath techniques? And are you recommending that it be done daily?

Yeah, so as I said, there's a pharmacy of different techniques. So some techniques you should do daily. The more full power like psychedelic like techniques you should reserve them for like ceremonial experiences. Like they're not should be done every day because they involve hyperventilation. Hyperventilation is something you shouldn't do many times a day because it will cause these problems I'm talking about. But the reduced breathing, slow breathing exercises are really good. In fact, breath work should be done throughout the day, all the time. Breath awareness should be your default state where you always aware your breath.

Well Neeraj, this has been fabulous. I'd love to do the wrap up questions before I give you some time to tell the audience where we can find all these resources. What do you wish more people knew?

I wish more people knew how to critically assess information, not just read the headlines and think that that's the truth. I really look to both sides of the story. And also not get kind of caught up your own ass as well, thinking that you know everything and getting kind of brainwashed by yourself. You know, because it's easy to fall into these echo chambers and think that you know everything when actually you may be completely wrong and deluded. So it's. This is a. It's hard. It's really hard. It's. This is the game of enlightenment is to wake up, realize that there's always two sides to every story and that you may think you're right, but someone else in the world is going to think you're wrong. And you may think they're wrong, but they're going to have their own case as to why they're right. And ultimately we've all been programmed and brainwashed from a young age and therefore whatever we've done in the past is not really our fault because we've been created this way. It's like whether there's free will or not is a debate. So I always look to the past without blame, hates, rage, envy, anger, resentment, and to just see it as a stepping stone. Every right leads to a wrong and a wrong leads to a right. It's inevitable is how it's going to go. So therefore I always have try and have forgiveness and compassion as a default, especially for myself. But not to forget that ultimately we've all been programmed. So it's your responsibility to wake up and realize that if there's someone out there who keeps hurting you, unless they do a lot of work to change, like you wake up and do a lot of inner work, they're probably going to keep making the same mistakes. They're robots, they're carrying out programs. So same goes to the government, same goes for the media, same goes to the lawyers. The same goes for anyone you interact with. You know, they're just carrying out functions and programs and robots and they're like robotic behaviors. And so you have to take responsibility. You know, if you've been constantly let down by the government, don't suddenly think, oh, there's a pandemic, they're going to come and come to the rescue now. No, they're not. They're going to screw you even harder in that time because that's what they do. Because they're not governments anymore, they're corporations. So your responsibility to wake up. So I wish most more people knew that process of waking up to what's actually going on.

How do you define success in this lifetime?

Success? Success is again, very subjective. But I think ultimately finding your bliss, which is a lasting state of happiness, not just a fleeting state of happiness, is the quest. And the more you genuinely have that where you're really honest and you. And you're happy and blissful because of the right reasons based on your own core values and the people you surround yourself with and the kind of work you're doing. And you know, so for me, that's how I define success, you know, and you know, I've got a way to go for that, but I'VE achieved a level of happiness and bliss that is significant change from who I was when I was stuck as a pharmacist.

Yeah. An evolution.

So. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just checking in every day and seeing that you're making progress that's successful.

Is there a goal or a dream that has evaded you or something that you have left on your bucket list that you'd be willing to share with us?

A lot of things I want to do are, like, manifesting anyway, so there's always going to be some kind of something else I wish I could have done, you know, like travel to some location that nobody's been for, you know, somewhere in the world. I definitely want to do a tree up in the Himalayas that I haven't done yet, so. And there's some Kailash. Mount Kailash has some beautiful, very spiritual locations, places in, like, near Shimla. So something like that is still not there yet that I want to do.

Awesome. And what does it mean to be human?

To be infallible. So is to be imperfectly perfect, as is the universe too. Imperfectly perfect. When you let go of the control of everything being perfect, you realize it's imperfectly perfect. It's just how it should be. Then it brings a lot of ease to someone's life.

Well, Neeraj, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and giving us all of this information about our breath and how important it is. If you can just tell listeners where we can connect with you and what products and services you offer, how we can find those resources, that would be fantastic.

Yeah. So get our summer breath app from all the app stores, Android and Apple. You can go to somabreath.com, sign up for some free goodies. But go to my Instagram and DM me the word breath and there you'll get access to some lots of free training from me, like all on breath work.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for everything that you've done. Thank you for sharing this revelation and all your experience and wisdom with the world. We really appreciate you and I hope that you have a very plantastic day.

Thank you so much. Much love. Hi, my name's Neeraj and I'm Human.

Thank you for listening to another episode of I Am Human. I would be so honored if you subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. We love our listeners and take your feedback seriously. If you have questions or constructive feedback, you can email us@podcastoctor yami.com that's podcast at D O C T-O-R Y-A-M I.com I am your host, Dr. Yami Casorla Lancaster. I Am Human is produced by myself and Alejandra Parra Graphics designed by Alejandra Parra, music by Angela Sof with Globox Productions and edited by the Kastos production team. Remember Human, you are here for a reason. Have fun, explore and live your life to the fullest.

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