290 Dan Brulé: 40 Years of Breath Mastery For Body, Mind, & Soul

If you want to get back in touch with your creativity, you have to get back in touch with your body. The only way to get back in touch with your body is to breathe. But when you breathe, you activate all the feelings that frightened you out of your body as an infant. As a two year old child.

Yes.

So to get back to that original creative juice, we need to peel away or burn through these layers of shocks and traumas and programming and conditioning and limiting beliefs and, you know, low self esteem or whatever it is that we've gotten piled onto us. It's. We can't express our potential. And the breath is a great tool for burning away all that stuff.

That's Dan Brulee, and this is episode 290 of Wellness Force Radio. Wellness Force Radio, where we discover the physical and emotional intelligence to live life.

Well. You can have the same brain states as someone who's done an hour of meditation every day for 40 years.

There's a lot of losses that we go through. So the ability to be able to cope with those losses is very important.

To build skill in it, because loss will happen. You know, you have to have spiritual courage to really grow spiritually. Because if you really want to take guidance from your soul, you have to be ready to realize that many of the things that you're asking for guidance on your ego has some kind of an addiction to or an investment in.

Welcome back to the podcast. This is Josh Trent. Today we're taking a deep breath together. Actually, let's do that right now. Take a deep breath. Put your hands on your belly. If you're driving, hold onto the steering wheel with one hand. Don't get an accident. Be safe. Pull over if you need to do this. Pull all that air, fill your belly right now. Take that deep breath, hold it in for a second and then let it go. Breathe out. Now notice, take as many of those as you need to right now. Maybe that's the first time this entire day that you reminded yourself to breathe. So just one breath. Notice how it can change your state. Now imagine if you did six deep inhales through your nose, out through your mouth. How that would impact your physiology, your next decision, the way you treat someone else in your life that you care about. Well, this is no surprise. Breath work is rising in our industry. Industry. It's become a very high Google search trend. And it's the only autonomic lever we can pull for our entire body to adjust our stress. In other words, something's breathing us and we can also adjust our breath. No understanding and exploring this power of breath. It is a lifelong practice. This is why today I'm beyond thrilled to bring you Dan Brulee. This is a 40 year breathwork veteran. He's taught around the world with Olympic athletes, elite warriors, martial artists, medical experts, corporate executives and Tony Robbins. Mark Devine from Unbeatable mind and seal fit. No matter who you are though, where you play, if you're a parent, if you're just a everyday human being, Dan's story that he's sharing on the show today, of his breathwork journey and also overcoming loss and still being of service, this is what Dan truly represents. He is of service to us here on planet Earth and he does it through a vehicle called breath mastery. Now, Dan Brule, he is a healer, obviously, but he's also the author of Just Breathe. He's a modern day teacher, world renowned pioneer in the field of breath work, and he's one of the creators of breath therapy. He was actually among the original group of internationally certified rebirthers. He's a master of Prana yoga, the Hindu science of breath and qigong, a Chinese medical breathing exercise specialist, and then he also travels the world. He's leading this breathwork spiritual movement. And since 1970, he has trained over 150,000 students in 60 countries to use breath for self improvement, self healing and spiritual awakening. And this podcast is going to be a deep dive into all the gifts and skills that Dan brings to the world. I got to record this actual podcast in the Bel Air Treehouse in Los Angeles with Dan in the middle of his tour. Make sure you go to Instagram and look at the photo of Dan and I where we recorded. This place was epic to say the least. It was a tree house in the middle of Bel Air. And I've been feeling this a lot when I travel to LA or to anywhere else. Almost a sense of general fatigue. I think it's really the airplanes. I don't know if our bodies were designed to be in these steel tubes flying through outer space and through the sky. But I also know that I have an arsenal of tools. I can take care of my body the best when I travel by getting micronutrients in it. So let me ask you a question. Have you been feeling sluggish or fatigued lately? The number one solution that I found in my life to get out of sluggishness and fatigue is micronutrients, specifically these plant adaptogens. Now, you've heard me talk about Organifi, our show sponsor over the past year and a half, but Today I'm gonna ask you for something special. Today I'm gonna plant a seed in your garden. I'm gonna challenge you to give Organifi green juice a test drive. It's actually not a challenge. It's really easy. Just go to Organifi.com WellnessForce use code WellnessForce. You get 20% off. And this is really special because Wellness Force was one of the early podcast partnerships with Organifi, so you will not find a bigger discount code anywhere else online than here. It's really special. Organifi has been supporting this show, this podcast, and as you know, it takes a significant financial investment to do video and audio and publishing and editing. And Organifi has been such a close supporter of our mission, and this means a lot to me for you so that all of us can discover this physical and emotional intelligence. So today I'm asking for your support to our sponsor and support this podcast. If this show has meant something to you in the past couple of years or if you're just tuning in and you're getting value, it would mean a lot to our entire team for you to purchase these Organifi products, because first off, they're amazing. They yield better health, and by purchasing Organifi for just a few bucks a day, you're helping to fuel future episodes of Wellness Force and that you can feel ownership. So thank you, my friend, for supporting your own wellness and supporting Wellness Force by heading over to Organifi.com WellnessForce and use the code WellnessForce to get 20% off your entire order and also share with the people that you care about. You know, breathwork is this massive reset. For me, it's been a massive reset over the past couple years, especially with all the trauma and clearing and the honestly, spiritual path that I'm walking that I know you are too. Dan is going to share today how his breathwork style clears emotions and trauma and negative energy. Specifically, we'll talk with Dan about why breath work is a door for greater emotional intelligence and the connection behind these childhood layers of stored trauma that we can use breath to peel back. As we explore this power of breath, remind yourself to take deep belly breaths. Breath is the ultimate reset for the nervous system. And Dan is going to explain to us both the science and the spirituality behind breath and how he's used breath work and his decades of training to help guide him through the loss of his son and so that he can still be here with us of service on planet Earth. We're discovering this physical and emotional intelligence right here, right now. With Dan Brulee, 40 year veteran of Breathwork on Wellness Force, the community of our youth. It makes such a difference in the arts that we choose as an adult, doesn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

The kind of people we hang out with.

Be careful who you hang around with.

Those first seven years. Our brain is so malleable. Did anything happen in those first seven years for you to actually be drawn to breath work? I'm curious, in the childhood, did you.

Experience as a child, you know, Catholic upbringing and the original indoctrination, you know, in kindergarten where the pastor of the church. You know, first of all, you know, when you're a four or five year old kid and you come in at the time the nuns wore these. I mean, they were dressed in black. They had this huge, like white pie plate thing over their head and this giant starched white bib with a gigantic stainless steel heart with thorns around it and rosary beads, you know, down to the floor. And like, you know, for a little kid, it was like, oh my God, who are these people? Yeah, yeah. Wild, you know, And I think I was nine years old. I think we were in the fourth grade before we figured out that the nuns actually went to the toilet. Like real people, we thought they were above that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I remember the first time that the pastor came to the class and he made every Friday, he would visit all the classes and when he walked in, she came and she sat with the kids and it just like shattered, went, whoa, wait a minute. She's like one of us. Who is this guy? You know, so, you know, you're in this primed kind of state. And he was wearing his red robe and gold trim Bible and like very, you know, like. And he talked about, you know, God breathing into the nostrils of man. And like, wow, that was like God.

Breathing into the nostrils of man and.

Man became a living soul. You know, like that was the more as a five year old kid, that was the most exciting things, like God's breathing into us. Oh my God, why isn't everybody excited?

This is so cool. Before we recorded, I was asking you, do you think we breathe us or do you think something breathes us? And you're like, well, Josh, it's a dance. Yeah, it is kind of a dance between what are we dancing with? What are we dancing with?

The life force. You know, the. The breath is a thread. You follow it. It takes you to the source of your, you know, your lifestream, you know, the fountainhead of our lifestream. So it's literally breathing is the flow of life through us, and we can cooperate with it.

You know, this is the path of mastery. You're walking. It's no. It's no shock that your site is called breath mastery.

Yeah.

Was it always breath mastery or was it something else?

No, no. I decided I wanted to master something. Yeah. And breathing seemed really easy. Being lazy, I thought I would start. And I'm still. I'm a big believer in the basics, you know, and so I'll get on to more advanced human activities. Walking, talking later. But I'm still pounding on the basics because, you know, we learn them just enough to go forward, but we don't really, especially breathing. You know, we're slapped into breathing at birth. And as soon as you're breathing, that's the end of the story. But so we don't have a chance to really learn to breathe, get comfortable with the breath, play with the breath, because it's breathe or die at that moment of birth. And so for me, going back to the breath and starting from the beginning and what does it feel like to breathe and what's happening and can I fight it? Can I cooperate with it? Can I, you know, play? So even from a child, I was, you know, I was in charge of the breath holding contests in the school yacht, you know, like, it's always been an obsession.

And we're going to talk about your time in the service as well. I know that you used to do boxing and you have a unique story about something that happened there. So we'll get there because I've done some. Some research on you. But I want to go back to the very beginning because I can think about when I was a young child, the times where I felt least safe. I can see as an adult now that's when I was holding my breath as a child, when I would feel. Or all of us, anyone here on the show with us, like, when we operate from a place of holding the breath and being in that fight or flight, any kind of interactions or connections with human beings from the breath hold in that stress position, they're not going to come from a place of love. And I think about the power of breath work. It's something that I had learned in 2016, 2017, is when I first met you. I met you at Mark Devine's event. And that year was my 37th birthday. And this is the tattoo I got on my arm, and it says, si poso respirare, poso seguere, which in Italian means, if I can breathe, I can choose. And so Looking back on this time, I can understand, like, wow. At the time, I didn't really even know why I got the tattoo, other than just a reminder that if I just remember to take a deep breath before something that I'm afraid of, before opening my heart, before doing it, going on a stage. This breath is so powerful, yet it doesn't receive in our society the attention that it deserves. What do you think people get wrong about breath work? People hear the word breath work, what do they get wrong about that?

They jump right into controlling the breath. It's like, if you're on a first date, do you stop making your. Do tricks for you and controlling and manipulating? You wait till you're married, then you. I think the mistake people make is that they. They don't take the time to learn to breathe from the breath itself. They start applying artificial formulas onto it. And so they never really connect to the essence of the breath, to the intelligence in the breath, to the life in the breath. They start right off, manipulating, controlling. But if I'm neurotic and I do something, who's doing it? Me or my neurosis? And so when we decide to do something, that question is, who's deciding to do it? And. And the breath is a way to come back to who we really are. And so I use the breath, and I. And I think one of the things. Another thing people do wrong with the breath is they don't use the breath. They kind of practice exercises because they learned it in a book in yoga or something, but they don't integrate it into their life as a strategy like brushing your teeth or taking a shower or eating. It's. It's. It's on the level of those things that needs to be done every day, consciously. And it's also. It's an art. I mean, we all walk. We can cook, we can sing, we can dance.

Some of us better than others, right?

And some people elevate that to, you know, to the level of a genuine art. And breathing is the same thing. And I think one of the things people are missing is that it has that potential.

Breathwork is literally a Jedi skill. So people that watch Star wars, right? Yoda, when he was working with his young apprentice, it typically was about stillness and presence. And there's this term that you have, and it's different than what I actually heard before. This breath therapy. Therapy is different than coaching because there's high performance breathing that's built for, like, athletes that want to have a bigger jump or a faster run or whatever it is. That's a strategic breath work. But breath therapy is totally different. How would you define breath therapy?

Well, two ideas. The first is that we're basing the assumption is that the breathing mechanism has been inhibited or injured. It's not performing at its full potential because of emotional shocks, traumas that we've had, psychological shocks, Every one of those laid a little inhibition on the breathing. Anything that's made us go, you know, we may recover 90%, but there's a little residue and all those residues build up around the breathing and. And people get. The breath gets narrower and narrower.

So can you tell us more about the residue?

Yeah, energetic residue. So let's say, you know, I. I'm a small child and I see a dog for the first time and the dog attacks me. The next time I see a dog, I'm not going to see that dog. I'm going to relive the first dog. And. And maybe I'll never ever approach a dog in that original, innocent way again because of the trauma of it. Maybe I recover. But even as an adult, if people are honest, if they've had an experience like that as a child and so.

Kind of weirds them out a little.

Bit, they're, you know, they're a little leery still. And that's that residue, emotional, psychological, and call an energetic residue left over from the system. And that's where the breath gets. It burns away that stuff. So you can clear the emotional stuff, the psychological stuff, but there's this leftover energy.

It's almost like a trauma, trauma residue in a way. Yeah, like cleaning out. A lot of people do talk therapy, and I'm not dissing talk therapy at all, but I've experienced psychedelic states at rhythmia from breath work. And I've done the transformational breath. I haven't done your style yet, which I'm really looking forward to coming to your workshops. How would you define your style of breath work? What is that?

It's learning to use the breath as a tool, as a force, as a bridge for health, for growth, for change. And so it's like if you suddenly discovered you had an arm growing out of your back, you never knew was there, and now you realize, wow, all the new things you can do with it, you know, so it's like discovering a capacity that we have, discovering an ability that we have that's been latent and we've tapped it enough to survive, but we haven't. We haven't entered a creative process with it. And so for me, that that's that second part of breath therapy. So the first part of breath therapy is that the breathing mechanism, the respiratory system, is not functioning as full potential. We need to heal it. We need to bring it up to speed. And once it's healed, then we can use breath as a therapeutic tool. So the breath in the mind can heal the body. The body and the breath can heal the mind. And that breath is essential piece in the healer. So for me, that's breath therapy. It's integrating conscious breathing or breath awareness. And that's how I teach what I understand as breath mastery. What I teach is two aspects. You have breath awareness, which is passive, not doing anything to the breath and not breathing in any special way. We're just observing it, becoming intimate with it, tracking it, following it. It's mindfulness practice. It's meditative awareness. And then the second branch is conscious breathing. So you have breath awareness, which is the passive part, and conscious breathing, which is active. This is where we come in. We do the breathing. We breathe in a certain way. We give the breath a certain pattern, certain quality. We breathe within a certain tension. We're doing the breath. So there's those two things and we go. And those are like two wings. You go back and forth. Because sometimes you don't need to breathe any special way. You just need to observe how breathing in certain situations. And that is enough to make a huge difference.

Let's pause there. Because there was weight in what you just said, like, awareness of the breath. Am I breathing through my belly? Am I breathing through my upper chest? As I breathe, do I feel like I'm slouching forward or my pecs pulling me so that my lungs can't even open? Like, what is my physiology doing? And then there's this other one where it's the conscious breathing. I feel like it's almost like we're on a ride and we're pulling a lever. It's the only breath work is the only autonomic response for the nervous system that we can actually pull a lever on.

That's not a coincidence. That's not an act.

Right. Doesn't that fascinate you about breath work?

Absolutely. That's an invitation. That's an opportunity for us to take part in our own nature, our own evolution. And it's not an accident, that coincidence that. That's exactly it. It's totally under our control and it's totally automatic. You can't say that about any other system, you know, in the body. So that's an invitation.

What is it an invitation to?

To Take part in our own nature, to accelerate our own evolution, to clear away our own programming and conditioning and come back to we. We mentioned earlier about, you know, the first few years of life, you know, that even the Jesuits bragged about it. Give me the boy and I'll give you the man. Right. So let me program the kid and for the rest of his life, he'll be the way. So. And we all do that. We, we've all, for the first few years of our life, we received programs that limit who we are.

Yeah.

And by the time we start to think for ourselves, three, four years old, we were already thinking with stuff other people had put us. And so how do you remove those early programs that, you know, it seems like it's part of you? You don't even recognize it as a, as a block or an inhibition or a limitation, but that's what it is. And how do you break free of that?

I just got a download about you. This breath work is really a Trojan horse. And it goes, and it goes to your mission because I was looking on the site. So you train people around the world, use power breath to relax and energize the body. Key focus and expand their mind, calm and balance their emotions and nourish and uplift their soul. We can't have a heavy soul if we're trying to breathe properly. And we're letting go of the past, we're letting go of the childhood imprints.

So do you, It's a catch 22 actually.

Do you have a sense that, that what you do is a Trojan horse for people, for consciousness?

Yeah, I was, I was actually. It's funny you mentioned that exactly. Because my mentor UMass actually gave me permission. He said it is a Trojan horse. He said, look, dress how you need to dress, say what you need to say, and once you get in the room, just do what you do. And I was like, like, of course. Okay. So, you know, it's like permission to, to come in under whatever it takes. If I'm working with Buddhists, we talk Buddhist language. If we're talking peak performers, we talk sports and fitness language. Whatever it takes to get them to breathe and to actually create an experience for themselves.

This is such a wide range of people you work with. So. Mark Devine, Special ops. I'm sure you've worked with athletes then everyday, moms and dads or just people that are into wellness, that want to live their life well, this is what we explore on wellness for physical and emotional intelligence. So we can live our life well. And that's the kind of people that we're here with on the show with us right now. That's who's here with us. For somebody that is just hearing about breathwork for the first time, what kind of a tool is it for them to have better stress management in their life? What does that mean?

Yeah, well, breathing awakens body intelligence. Breathing awakens heart intelligence. Instead of trying to just go through the world, you know, with your head leading the way, when you breathe, you awaken emotional iq, you awaken heart intelligence, and you awaken intuition and gut feelings so you can show up better prepared for every moment in life. And there are certain things that we can't think through, you know, we have to feel our way through, like creativity. I have a good friend, Barnett Bain, I have a chapter about him in my book on creativity that, you know, he says creativity is born in the body. It's not a head thing.

Ye.

And so the. But the only way to get back in touch with your body is to breathe. But when, if you want to get back in touch with your creativity, you have to get back in touch with your body. The only way to get back in touch with your body is to breathe. But when you breathe, you activate all the feelings that frightened you out of your body as an infant. As a two year old child. Yes. So to get back to that original creative juice, we need to peel away or burn through these layers of shocks and traumas and programming and conditioning and limiting beliefs and, you know, low self esteem or whatever it is that we've gotten piled onto us that's we can't express our potential. And that is a great tool for burning away all that stuff.

At some point as an adult, we look down in the well and we're like, hold on, that stuff at the bottom, that ain't really me. And some people call it awakening, some people call it spiritual growth, whatever you want to call it, however you want to label it. I sense right now, and I'd love your thoughts on this. I sense in wellness because I'm, I'm highly connected in the wellness sphere. Health, wellness, nutrition, personal development. I sense in wellness, especially with my time in Thailand, that breath work is perfect timing for 2019, 2020.

It's the tool of our day.

It's the tool of our day. But, but why now do you think breath work is having such a resurgence? I mean, it's, it's literally on everyone's mouth.

Breath work, it's, it's time, it's reaching a critical mass and you know, 40 years ago, I felt like a voice crying out in the desert, you know, breathing. Smee. Meditation, schmed, meditation.

Did you go through judgment in the first couple years of doing your practice?

Yeah. Yeah.

What were they saying?

Well, weird new age, you know, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it was. It took waiting. You know, people are waiting for the science to catch up. Wow. You know, if you do that, you might get left behind. Better to be our own scientist, you know?

Yes.

And nothing. Nothing is better than your own personal experience, unarguable experience. And then it's up to us to try to make sense of it, but. And the people try to make sense of it. You got to reach into spiritual kind of traditions to really grok, you know, everything that's happening in a way.

I love that word grok. It's such an ancient word. So something I heard on one of your interviews, you talked about breathing awakens heart and body intelligence. And I've heard about this from HeartMath Institute. One of my friends is connected to that company, and I've used the app. And I love what they say about coherence. But from Your vantage point, 40 years, 150,000 people you've trained or more, what is your sense on what that actually means? True coherence with this heart and body's intelligence. How would you define that? It's a big concept.

You know, we have biorhythms. We have certain. You know, we have rhythms. And because of our social conditioning and jobs and alarm clocks and artificial lifestyle, we're kind of out of sync with our natural rhythms. And when you get your breathing back into a natural rhythm, all the other. It's like a flywheel on the engine. All the other things start to turn more smoothly when you get that. The breathing rhythm down. So when I am breathing in a way, that's exactly the way my body would have me breathe in that moment. I've just locked into my intuition. I've come into harmony with my nature. So getting intimate with the breath and find, you know, it's like on a first date, you know, when you're learning about somebody, you know, everything is amazing about them. You know, when you fall in love and we need to approach the breath like that, we need to be just almost passionate about it, and then it. It unlocks its secrets to us, you.

Know, I love the way you explain that. I think about this too, because I'm just recently dating someone new, and I've noticed, like, whoa, this woman kind of takes my breath away. It's like an Indicator. Right. The way that we interact with one another, if can. Like you and I dropped in for just three minutes before we recorded this show and it immediately connected me to you in presence. And it makes such a difference. It's such a simple yet overlooked thing. How do we start instilling for everyday people that power of a two minute, a three minute, a five minute check in? What does that look like?

Practically tangibly for people, it's coming into the present moment. Moment. It's kind of letting go of the past, letting the future sit out there and just use any present moment thing, heartbeat, breathing, and make that the focus so that we gather our energy, we gather our attention and we put it on the here and now. And without that, you know, we're. And like I get up in the morning and I take a few breaths and I can feel, you know, how's everything going in there? Is it easy? Is it hard? Do I have an urge to take bigger breaths? Is it difficult to exhale? So just I know what my pure full breathing feels like. And so I can always match or compare how the breath is moving to how I know when it's really when I'm in the zone. And so, you know, that's the, the breath becomes kind of a gauge. And I'm always looking out at the world through an awareness of my breath because everything causes reactions in me and, and through the breath we kind of manage all that stuff. So we're not projecting, we're not getting activated or triggered or reacting emotionally. The breath keeps us on a kind of a central point and it keeps bringing us back to, to a real central point point.

Someone's getting up first thing in the morning and they're noticing that those first couple of breaths, like it's how we wake up, it's how we're activating the nervous system. And I've noticed even when I wake up, my first couple breaths, they're a little heavy because I've been soft and kind of just breathing slow. My hrv, my heart rate's low. Do you have a specific time or style of breath first thing in the morning that you do to really awaken you, you know, to awaken you to the possibilities of the day, to get you tuned in to rest and digest, to start your day on the right positive foot?

Yeah, when we, when we inhale, we're charging ourselves with energy and so taking the time to actually breathe in and take your time and very consciously, you're not breathing in air, you're breathing in energy. And then when you let it go. You can check. Okay. Am I holding on anywhere? Is there any knots of tension? And so then we just play with. I play with the breath in the morning to feel like I can penetrate every part of me with the breath. So if my back is a little stiff, I might have to, like, play while wiggling my spine and my hips. And then I'm breathing into that area if I slept wrong on the pillow. And my neck feels a little stiff. So when I'm sitting on the edge of the bed, I'm breathing into these places that call my attention. So one of the principles, even during a breathing session, one of the models, methods we use, is to you focus on the strongest feeling and you track the subtle changes in your energy. So you focus on the strongest feeling, whatever that is in your body, and you breathe into it, and you breathe with it and you relax with it until it kind of doesn't stand out anymore. And then you go to the next strongest feeling. And so in the morning, I'll do that. You know, I'm just looking for what's. What's the obvious feeling in my body. And then I send it breath, send it attention, send it love, send it relaxation. And maybe I just prevented some illness. Maybe it would have developed into some big, huge problem. But because I caught it early and I got the energy moving, then, hey, may I warded something off?

This is cool to hear you say this from a body intelligence attunement perspective. Yesterday I was in Los Angeles. I interviewed a woman named Sandra Biskind. And she talks about this thing psychoneuroimmunology. Psychoneuroimmunology, which is literally, literally the science of how we can make ourselves sick or well with our thoughts. And I think about the way that I actually feel. I noticed when I do my deep breaths and when I'm with someone, I keep my mouth closed if I'm not talking. Because I felt that when I breathe through my nose. And I'm so grateful because I just had sinus surgery, so now I can actually, like, breathe through my nose again. It's so beautiful. So everything works out in divine timing. But I think about what's going on from a physiological perspective. You've mentioned that the nose has spiral dynamics inside of it where the wind actually goes up and it shoots the air up into us as we breathe it in. Now, why else would the nose be designed like that? We are not built to be mouth breathers. Can you talk about this?

Yeah. Yeah, right. The nose is meant to breathe through as hairs that filter Dust and mucous memories that trap microscopic particles. It has turbinates to spiral the air.

It turbinates. That's what it is.

It warms the air if the air is too cold. It cools the air if the air is too warm. So, yeah, the nose is meant to breathe through, but we can't speak through our nose. We can't laugh or cry through our nose. And, and actually, you know, it's really kind of fun, kind of cute. If you ever get with a newborn baby and you pinch their nose, they. They don't know how to breathe through their mouth. And that's the only time they breathe through the mouth is when they're at the end of their rope. And so for most people, mouth breathing triggers the whole sympathetic stuff, the stress and fight or flight. And they can't even breathe through their mouth without their throat getting dry, without feeling uncomfortable. Those are what Barnett Bain talks about. Those are the feelings that are blocking us from our creativity. We're trying to avoid those feelings, and we need to go through them to get back into our, our body. And most people are kind of just, they're driven away by them, and they don't have that kind of warrior approach. Look, you know, we have to, I, like Mark Devine says, you have to push yourself through your fears, but you got to lean into them. And certainly avoiding them can never help.

Yes, Take us to the belly then, Dan, like, what's going on? If you could walk us through the inhale, the exhale, the whole, like, bring us to physiologically what's going on when we breathe.

Yeah, when the diaphragm contracts, an inhale occurs, and when the diaphragm relaxes, an exhale occurs. So that's why when I teach breath, we teach active inhale and passive exhale, because that's kind of what's already happening. Diaphragm contracts, flattens, creates this vacuum in the chest, sucks the breath in, and when the diaphragm flatten, it pops the belly out. And so now if we do that consciously and deliberately doing diaphragmatic breathing, belly pops out on the inhale and on the exhale, belly button towards the spine. So now we're harmonizing with how the body wants to move when it breathes. So again, we're coming into harmony with our nature. So a lot of people develop breathing habits that actually make their body think it's in danger without realizing it. We develop certain breathing habits, and to the lizard brain in us, that's like breath holding, for example. Example is an Emergency signal. And if I get up from a chair and I hold my breath or I try to remember something and I hold my breath, or I put a key in a door and I hold my breath, that lizard brain doesn't care. We're just getting from a chair or putting a key. That's an emergency signal. And so if you're sending a hundred, a thousand emergency signals to your brain every day, maybe you want to. To get conscious of that, send a different signal. So I'm, you know, I encourage people take long inhale and a big sigh of relief.

Does the audible sound truly make a difference? Because I've experienced this in different trainings, and again, I haven't been through one of your trainings yet, but I'm curious why you focus on. I've noticed you mentioned this in a few interviews. You really focus on the ah, that audible exhale. Is that in addition to how our nervous system is wired with letting go of the breath? Why do you combine the voice, the.

Ah, sound, you know, we're expressing and reflecting what's already happening, and it just makes it that much more effective. And I'm also doing it to trigger, you know, it's a teaching device to remind people the sound reminds people to breathe, and you can demonstrate certain qualities through the sound. So it's a good teaching device. But we're also always communicating to our own brain. So. So taking our time on the inhale already, that ancient lizard brain says, whoa, I must have time to smell the coffee. Everything must be okay. You know, the take to my time on the inhale, and then the sigh of relief then that, you know, the body, the brain, the psyche, the subconscious, that registers all. There's no way that we could give ourselves that breath unless we were safe, unless we felt good. So even if you're not safe and you don't feel good and you make yourself breathe, that way you can hack into your nervous system, you can hack into your brain, and you can trick. You are already tricking our nervous system, whether we know it or not. You might as well do it consciously and have it work for you.

This is such a great point. And I think about the road that took you to here. I mean, military service, boxing, different things that happen for you as an adolescent. Can you give us a quick snapshot of how you even got to being 1970? Dan Brulee, leading breath work, teaching people about this ancient art form. It's really an art form, right? It's a healing modality, but it's an art form. What's the quick snapshot of you actually coming to the breath.

Near drowning a couple of times made me so acutely aware and appreciative when I got breathing again, you know, it's almost like life was just kept making me pay attention, you know. And then my first job was as an X ray technician. And one of the easiest X rays to take is a chest X ray. And when you take a chest X ray, you tell the person taking a deep breath hold it, click, and you take their picture and usually take two views, a front view and a side view. And so when I started giving those same instructions to everybody, I started realizing everybody's doing something different. What they call a full breath, what they go through to accomplish it, the expression on their face, the muscles they use, their posture, the sound of the breath, how they hold was like, wow. The breath has all this information started speaking to me and I realized, wow. People's breathing patterns reveal their emotional state, their psychological state. It's a pure reflection of how we actually are in each moment. And the breath is like very honestly and accurately reflecting and expressing that. So once I realized, ah, okay, I can even feel when people, you know, telling the truth or, you know, they say, how are you? Fine. Really fine.

They say it like with a half breath.

Yeah, yeah. And so people's personalities are revealed in their breathing patterns. Their relationship to their body is revealed in their relationship to the breath. Their relationship to life, to themselves is reflected in their relationship to the breath. And when you make changes in your relationship to the breath, those changes trickle down and, and carry over onto other levels. And that's why there's so much emotional and psychological and spiritual healing feeling connected to breath work.

Why do you think now, specifically with your training in the military? I believe it was oceanic, it was diving.

Correct. Deep sea divers. Medical deep sea dive.

Medical deep sea diver. By the way, did you ever know that you'd be doing what you're doing now, like when you're in the Navy going through breath exercises and being underwater, did you ever think, hey, one day I'm going to teach people how to breathe? Like, did that ever come into your consciousness?

It didn't occur to me that you could actually there was a system or a way of teaching breathing. We would just. Just coping okay in a way. Right. And we were practicing breath holding, hyperventilating on oxygen and kind of contests and stuff. But there was a couple of times when, thank God, I could hold my breath a little longer because I got out of a situation, smoke filled building, you know, Underwater surfing, body surfing, and being stuck. Just when I thought I could come up and take a breath, I had to go back down. And. And those moments that the breath control and the ability to breathe, hold the breath, like, saved my life.

Yeah.

And so then when I got out of the military, I didn't think about teaching breathing, but I ended up developing a stress program for the American Red Cross. And breathing. I applied breathing for that.

How did that happen? How did you work with the American?

Three years. That took me three years. As soon as I got out of the military in 76, I went to the Red Cross and said, hey, you know, there's all this stuff about PTSD and all that. You have disaster relief workers, and, you know, they're a housewife, they're an accountant, and they get called up and they go to some disaster, and maybe all they're doing is passing out coffee and donuts, but they're seeing blood and guts and gore and horrible. And then they have to go home and make dinner or go back to their office. And I'm going, you know, these people need something to help them. They just experience what they witnessed is going to give them nightmares, for God's sakes. And nobody is taking care of them. Nobody's looking at that. And so. And if you're going to be a disaster relief worker, you want to be able to function in difficult situations. And I learned in the military, the way to function a difficult situation is get a handle on your emotional state, Get a handle on your mental. Mental state, manager, arousal, manager, impulses. And the breath is the central way to do all that. So for me, it was a matter of making them better and also helping them so that they don't suffer afterwards because of what they experience. So the breath is this very beautiful tool. It's like the Swiss army knife of life. You know, you can use it in so many ways that each of us finds a way that we can apply the breath.

One of the reasons why I was so looking forward to this is because you strike me as a very spiritual man, but you're also grounded in the science. You know, you wouldn't be teaching workshops across the world if you didn't have one foot in academia, one foot in practical spirituality. And I'd like to go to a place with respect, because you shared this in a newsletter and on a podcast that you lost your son. And I'm curious with that happening. He was at such a young age. I think it was 40 or 41. And very recently, for people that deal with that Kind of trauma. I mean, I can't even imagine where that would take somebody. Yet you seem to have used the breath, I'm thinking, I'm feeling, to get through that.

And actually, the breath just came to my rescue. I didn't even have to do anything consciously as soon as that the news hit me, you know, I mean, just. My breath just came right in to handle the emotions that come up to handle it. And so it was like. It's like training, right? In an emergency, your training kicks in.

Yeah.

And so I had practiced breathing so often that when that horrible thing happened, I could feel my breath working for me. And I was processing the emotions, the sadness. You know, you can't bury stuff and put on a nice face on top of the sadness. You gotta feel it, you know? So I. I mean, I cried through four airports between Moscow and in Fort Lauderdale on that. That trip. When I got the news, I spent the next 24 hours basically just making my way to Florida. And by the time I got there, I mean, I. I'm. I'm already quite skilled, and I deliberately channel emotions through my breath to take the stress off the body whenever I get triggered or activated, you know, like, the breath comes in. In and vents that stress or that tension. So it was just working for me by itself. And. And it was a true rescue. It was a rescue because, you know, you never really recover fully from something like, you know, people. I got lots of beautiful letters and calls and beautiful words from people. I mean, nothing really helps in those moments. It helps. It all helps to know that people care, but it's just, you know, you gotta navigate that stuff. And I. It was more difficult for his mother, I think, you know, and I. I think. I know it was more difficult for her and for his brother. They were very close. But now it's like I. I think of him in the. In the. The sweet moments come, there's not that heavy charge anymore, you know, and so I've pretty much recovered.

Yeah.

Really.

I love that you said those things never really go away because, you know, for people that are listening, that have dealt with loss, I mean, really what we're understanding is that breath can be such an incredibly powerful tool for trauma, for loss, you know, and we all have. Whether it's micro trauma, major trauma. And thank you for sharing that, Dan, because I know how many people have gone through this situation of losing somebody, you know, like, it's. It's just something we all deal with. And I think it's part of the story. It's part of the lesson, we're going there eventually. We're all going to this place, right where we're reunited. But while we're here, if we're going to live life the most connected with one another the most, well, it has to come from a strong breath work practice. And I think this is why I'm curious how you feel about this unfolding more in the professional sector, in the sports sector. In Silicon Valley, there are breath workshops. You know, Brian McKenzie has the art of Breath. I mean, I was doing research and digging. I got over 15 different breathworks that are out there, you know, so Wim Hof and State and Holotropic and rebirthing and shamanic and soma and we do the Wellness Warrior Breath with Wellness Force, which I'm so excited to attend one of your workshops. I truly want to bring some of our community to the next one. I don't know when you're doing it here in Southern California. Is that coming soon?

Yeah, we don't have anything scheduled for California at the moment.

We'll figure it out. What's your, what's your sense on the different tactics and the different categories that this breath work can be applied to? Is this style that you use, can it be drawn to all of them or do you adjust it?

We've, you know, we've identified what we call paths, right, that you can take breath work paths. One is for physical healing, well being, you know, another is for emotional, psychological, well being. So breath work is just a perfect for those areas for fitness and performance. For creativity is another path. And also I hope we do a lot with breath work and healing healers and helping helpers. Right. People who are real givers and they get burnt out, you know, hello everyone.

I'm raising my hand.

Exactly.

I'm sure you feel that way sometimes too, right? You're not on the map mountain with the white robe, you're down with the people.

Yeah, I'm the guru at the bottom of the mountain.

But you're helping people breathe. Yeah. And so these specified categories, I mean, can you adjust your style to fit into each one?

Yeah, of course. Because when you breathe consciously, you're getting a handle on your attention, your, your awareness and your energy. And when you control those two things, your awareness and your energy, you're in control of yourself and you're in control of situations and you're in control of your physiology and your emotional state. So if I need to wake myself up, we focus on the inhale, we breathe a certain way. If I need to calm myself Down. We focus on the exhale. We breathe a certain way. And so once you learn how to manage your own states with your breath, then you don't have to protect yourself anymore. You don't have to set things up. You know, you can just drop in. Boom. And like, I never prepare for anything anymore. You know, just when we get in the moment and the situation is real and you take a few breaths.

And.

Then everything starts to flow. When the breath is flowing, your creativity flows, your blood flow. I mean, everything flows. And so that's the first. That's the first thing to get a handle on is our breath.

When you were on stage, when I saw you in 2017, you did zero prep. You just walked up there.

Yeah, yeah. Sweet.

Now, is that because you've done so many lectures? Because there was so many some, you know, guidance? It wasn't just like, you're going up there and free flowing, or at least it didn't seem like it?

Yeah, no, it was free flowing.

It was free flowing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So this is something to be said for the artists, the musicians, the singers, the people that maybe work in the creative or. Or even the healing arts is how powerful breath work as a base, as a foundation for presence can be so that people can be more connected with their clients. Do you work in the clinical settings? Have you done, like, therapy, partnered with any medical institutions or psychological medical institutions?

Years ago, I was at Tufts University at the chronic pain clinic, and it was like lost, hopeless cases, right, that they created the special department. Okay. They had a chiropractor, they had a dentist, they had an acupuncturists, and they had me. And they. And here's these. All these people with nothing else that helped in chronic pain and that send it to that weird group of acupuncturists and this chiropractor, dentist, he made this prosthesis that people wore when they slept. And I was just breathing. People, it's. It's rude and it's hard for people to hear, but we create our own problems. You know, it's nice. It's kind of an escape thing. Well, it just happened to me, and there's nothing I can do about it. But when you start to see what it is you doing to actually attract the problems or cause the problems, then you got to be ruthlessly truthful with yourself. And sometimes you got to let go of a way of thinking, let go of a way of being given a different posture. And so breathing starts to guide us. That way we, you know, when something's not aligned with who you really are.

There's a catharsis, there's a massive catharsis when it comes to certain styles of breathing. That same event, I believe we did 45 minutes or something, something of inhale, exhale, continuous rolling, connected breathing. And I'm on the floor and I'm like, why am I crying right now? I wasn't crying crying, but like there was a tear coming out of my eye. I mean that's when my breath work. I guess you could say case got cracked, Dan, because I thought I've done all these hard things, so I thought I've done CrossFit and I ended up doing Mark Devine's 20x, you know, the 14 Hour Crucible and, but, but to go to that place where I was crying just from me being in my body, whatever was in there, you know. Bruce Lipton talks about issues in our physical tissues. What's happening from a cathartic standpoint, Right, because there's the daily maintenance, there's the performance breathing. But for emotional catharsis, what does that look like for emotional catharsis and breathing?

Well, hyperventilation lowers the emotional threshold. I mean medical scientists have known that for a long time.

What do you mean by emotional threshold? Threshold?

Well, what does it take to have somebody burst out with emotions? Okay, right. So if you hyperventilate, that threshold is, gets lower and lower. So almost anything will bring it up. And so I think what's happening or feel, you know what's happening. So when we connect the breath, no pauses or gaps, and you're breathing continuously, you're not giving yourself a chance to take any solid position on anything thing and you're not stopping along the way to get tangled up and stuff. And so very quickly a lot happens and, and so before you know it, you soften the barriers around your subconscious mind and things start bubbling up. The continuous flow and the present moment, awareness and the relaxation allows memories that are in the cells to release. And it's quite beautiful, beautiful to see. And people are very surprised. We never know what's going to come up in the session. So it's an adventure, it's kind of a journey lots of times. And that's for the first few sessions because I think in the first few sessions we're clearing away all the accumulated stuff and then it gets to be maintenance after that.

How long is this window of sessions to get to the deep down?

When, when I first started training and practicing, we had a rule of 10. 10 sessions?

10 sessions.

But I'm seeing People get to either I've gotten better or people are more ready. They've gotten better because what used to take us 10 sections, sessions, we're getting to two or three sessions.

Why is that?

Why does it shorten? Maybe I'm better at the work I do. I can catch things earlier and I think people are more ready. You mentioned it earlier that like breathing is just, it's in the mass consciousness, it's popping up everywhere. So people are really ready. And, and maybe it's just the, the people are coming maybe more prepared or more ready. And you know, when you're ready, whatever you do is going to work. If you're not ready, you could practice. You could get a teacher, you could read every book. But if you're not ready, but if you're ready, the next book you read, the next teacher you meet, the next technique you practice, boom. Is going to work for you because you're, you're ready.

When you began working intern with Tony Robbins, do you felt like you were ready for that?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, that is a great. You know, he called me up and like he.

Oh, he called you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He says, is this Emberly? Yeah, this is Tony Robbins. Get the out of here. Come on.

Tony Robbins not calling me on the phone right now.

Right? Come on, come on. Yeah. But yeah, I had worked with the son, Jarek, and, and Jarrick went home and told his dad, hey, I met this guy. He's been like practicing breathing for 40 years. And that's what Tony said. He says, you've been like studying and practicing breathing for 40 years. I need to pick your brain. You could. Sounds like you could save me a lot of time and trouble. And so that's how, that's how we started. We started with Skype sessions and then I met him in New York and I met him in his home.

And what did you teach Tony? Like, what did you teach him?

The first time when we did our Skype call, I figured I should watch one of his clothes clips just with the intention of studying his breathing. I love listening to him. And I had his unlimited power.

When they were on cassettes, you'd already had his stuff.

Okay. Yeah. And you know, I had done firewalking. I snuck into one of his firewalk trainings one time.

You told him that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, but when we started on, on Skype, I figured, well, I watched a 30 minute clip of him and I watched really carefully. I was counting his breaths. I was noticing he goes a long time on an Exhale, That's a very good healthy sign. People who have very weak breathing systems, it's like I say one or two or three words and I already have to breathe to finish the sentence, right? So we see that as a sign of weakness and just there's no power in their breathing. And he has a lot of power in his breath and he's conscious of his breathing. But when I watched that one 30 minute clip, I think he didn't take one breath through his nose the entire time. Time. And for public speakers, that's very common. You know, I'm speaking, I'm speaking, I'm breathing into my mouth. I'm breathing. And so unconsciously you become a mouth breather unless you very consciously stop, take a breath through the nose and then continue speaking. And radio DJs and public speakers, they're not focusing on their breath and so they can develop some breathing habits that will do them in later on. So, so I thought, wow, he didn't take one breath through his nose. I better watch it again. And I did. I found one time he took a breath through his nose and I pointed that out to him. And so he immediately started becoming more conscious. But at the time he was also, his issue was blood pressure. And when we first got, I said, where do you want to start? What do we want to tackle? He said, I don't want to have to do blood pressure meditation. And he's got. So what I noticed is every time he inhaled, he tensed his jaw. So even on Skype, I could see his temple muscles and his jaw muscles. When he inhaled, I could see him tensing his jaw and tensing his temples. So every time he inhaled, he was creating tension in the system. So I said, man, next time let's stop practicing inhaling but focus on relaxing your jaw when you breathe in. And he lowered his blood pressure by 15 points within a week. And it's never gone back up.

That's so tactical and tangible. I love this.

Just a little thing, just a little thing like that.

Let's, let's talk about this one aspect then. So the physiological response. I, I'm curious if anybody's ever done like a breath work, life change. And then they did a breath work panel maybe with like their lipids or their cholesterol. Have you ever heard of, in any of your time or in your research, someone doing a n equals 1, which is essentially, I'm going to do a lifestyle modification. I'm going to do my blood work in my biometrics beforehand. I'm going to do breath work for three months or six months, whatever it is, and then I'm going to retest. I'm not. That's the only variable I'm going to change is just the breath. Have you heard of something like that?

The Russians did back in the 90s and they were into HRV.

The Russians do everything first. I feel like.

Yeah, they were. They were really ahead on the HRV curve for sure. That when I, for my first trip there in 1990, you mentioned breathing. Breathing. And people come out of the woodwork. They were really. Certain people were really into it there.

Yeah.

So, yeah, they hooked me up. We did biofeedback stuff. They were measuring heart rate variability, eeg, EKG and stuff. And. But I don't know any. There's a lot of studies on coherent breathing. The five seconds in, five seconds out, the heart, math people and Pat Gerberg and Rich Brown and David O' Hare's book 365, they're all into this. Between four and a half and six breaths a minute. You know, coherent breathing is one way of looking at it. Five seconds in, five seconds out, five seconds in five. And there's a lot of research around that. But, you know, breathing is so subjective. You know, it's like say. Say we want to study a breathing pattern of six breaths a minute, but what are they doing? What muscles are they using? Are they forcing, are they straining, are they stressing? That's all that's more important than the actual rate of the breathing. Right. And so there's a lot of stuff you just can't measure because it's so subjective.

Yeah.

And even what are you focusing on while you breathe? If I'm focusing on something horrible and scary, whatever breathing technique I'm doing. Right. So, you know, our consciousness, that's the key.

I think you just blew my mind because the question I asked you, I got more clarity hearing your answer. Because if we were to only address. Adjust the breath and we didn't actually monitor our thoughts or have someone guiding us through it or whatever it is, the variable of change would be completely not in context.

Oh yeah.

It's the way that we're all wired together like.

And I've seen, I've seen. And for most of my breathing career, two people practice the same exact breathing technique and they get opposite results and they practice opposite breathing techniques and they get the same result.

Was this just their thoughts?

Something else happening? Well, when I. You mentioned breath therapy. So I, I developed a model called breath Therapy when I was at UMass and Lesley University, my master's program. And there are five elements, what I call five elements of breath therapy. The first is the technique itself. You know, if I do a certain thing, you're going to get a certain result. You know, a knee reflex with a little rubber hammer. Boing. You can, if you have any normal physiology, if you breathe in certain ways, you, very predictable changes are going to occur.

Yeah.

And so that's the first principle, let's say a breath therapy. The second is the atmosphere in which you practice the technique, which can be more powerful than the technique itself.

If there's EMF there, if there's loud.

Noises, you're laying in the middle of a highway and trucks are coming versus laying in a comfortable bed with protection around you. The atmosphere and the psychic atmosphere, the emotional atmosphere, atmosphere, those things make a difference in the power of the technique we practice. And the third element is the presence of the teacher. You know, that we, we absorb from each other. We catch things from each other. When I was in China with my, my Hu Bin, my teacher Hu Bin, practicing qigong, I did things in his presence that I've never been able to do. And I know it was because I was in his presence in his field. And so that's something we bring to breath work, right? My presence, my certainty, my faith, my confidence, my experience. That's that. That maybe does more of the teaching than the actual technique descriptions of the exercises. Right? That's a big part of it. And then the fourth element, so that you have the technique, the atmosphere, the presence of the teacher, and then you have the mind of the breath, either what are you willing to experience, what do you believe is possible, what are you focusing on that can be more powerful than the technique, the teacher, the atmosphere, anything. And so we play with those elements because they're all part of what the final result is going to be.

What's the final result? Is that number five is there. Is there a fifth Element?

The fifth element would be. It's called will. Willingness is enough. It's called. It's a grace, it's a mystical factor, it's a magical factor because you could do the technique wrong in a terrible place with a crappy teacher, and you could be doing it for all the wrong reasons, and still something amazing and beautiful happens. That means there's something else at work here. I don't know what it is. I just call it something else.

This goes back to what we talked about, right? Where you were like, what's breathing us? Well, it's a damn between us and the thing that's breathing us. So that might be part of that fifth element, in a way. Yes.

Yeah. It's a magical, mystical grace. You know, I like the biblical notion of grace. It's just some gifted to it. We can't earn it, we can't do it. But there is something else at work, something magical, mystical factor. I don't know what it is, but I know there must be working something else there. And I. I trust it, I depend on it, just like I do the things I'm aware of.

I don't know if you're familiar with him, but 30 years in wellness. He's the founder of the Czech Institute. His name is Paul. Check. Have you heard this name before?

I've heard the name.

So I'm gonna link you and him up. I just got a massive lightning bolt moment to do that because one of the things that he shared on the podcast was if you went to a shaman in the old, olden days, and you were to ask the shaman, like, why am I sick? What's going on with me? Why do I not feel well in my body? One of the things he would say. What? He would say, when was the last time you stopped singing? When did you stop dancing? When did you stop honoring the mystery of life? And when did you stop spending time by yourself? This mystery of life, it to me sounds like a mirror of your fifth element that you've created, right? This kind of honoring of the mystery. Like, are you kidding me? You travel the world and teach people to breathe. Did you. Did you ever think, like, when you came out of the military at the Red Cross, then when did you actually know? Like, you know what? This is my path.

I was using up. I majored in using up VA benefits after the Vietnam era. I had 10 years of VA educational benefits, and I was just set on using up every ounce of those benefits. So I lived at the University of Massachusetts basically for 10 years. And every time I had enough credits to graduate, I changed my major because I still had some VA benefits coming. And then when they finally kicked me out, so I have multidisciplinary degree in education and business. Business. And so then they get. They kicked me out because I got my bachelor's and I still had a year left of my VA benefits. And so I did a master's program called the Breath as a Tool for Health, Growth and Change. And so I just. It was an independent study, Matt. They assigned me a couple faculty advisors.

This is when it started to click for you that this was a life path?

You could actually teach it. And I, my teacher, my mentor at University of Massachusetts, his name was Milton Young, and he knew I was into breathing. I mean, everybody who knows me know I was into breathing. And I met him in the parking lot one morning at the university on the way to class. And he was like floating and he was giddy and he was radiant. And I'm going, wow, Milt, you look a little weird today. He goes, oh, I was just rebirthed. He said, it's a breathing thing. You'll probably like it. So sure enough, I said, wow. He said, well, I'll tell you what, go do a session, write a paper, and I'll give you six credits. So for me, that's half of a semester. Yeah, to get my full time check, I'll do some breathing time soon. Yeah, for six credits, I'll go break. So that was the. I had introduced to a form of coaching breathing that I had never occurred to me. And the particular technique, the rebirthing technique was just so mind blowing, so therapeutic, so life changing. You just got to give it to somebody else. When something beautiful happens, happens, you're looking for the first person you can share it with. Right.

When did you get the spark to write Just Breathe? Which, by the way, we know that the book is about breathing. Mastering breathwork, Success in Life, Love, Business and beyond. Yes, breath transitions to all those things. But was there a certain moment, I asked many guests about when they got the download to write their book and they said that it, it kind of nudged them for a long time. And then eventually they were like, I can't not write the book. This is something I've heard from a lot of guests. But when, when did the book come through?

I was, you know, I've written a monthly report on breathing. Since June of 1976, I published a report about breathing. So I've missed a month since 1976. And some of those things got collected and put into like little ebooks and stuff. So I, I, we, you know, self published a lot of those over the years. And Simon and Schuster, actually my publicist. You're in her house.

We're here at the treehouse.

Yep. And so she was, she had done some work for Simon Schuster's independent. She knew the chief editor and she just put a bug in her ear about me. And so Judith Kerr at the time was the editor. She downloaded my ebook called Shut up and Breathe and then called me and said, hey, why? We'd like you to write a book. So they gave me a very generous advance. An unknown Unknown, tested author and, you know, 35 grand, which I thought was, like, really cool, you know, like. Yeah, but you know what? I didn't write a word for three months.

Did you cash the check? Yeah. You cash the check?

Just went into paralysis, you know, and so they put a team of midwives on my case. At Simon Shoes, I had a story editor, a line editor, a copy editor, had a supervising editor. And then I didn't know about contracts with publishers. I mean, there's like, 39 pages in this contract with, you know, she. Simon Schuster is like the Queen Mary of. Publishes a gigantic, big lunging organization.

It's literally sh.

And authors and stuff. And so they have. Everything's in their system. You know, you're just in their system. So. Well, I. I'm happy to surrender to it. And so when I finally. It started pouring out of me down in the Baja, actually. I was sitting in my truck, plugged into the cigarette lighter with my laptop, and the book started pouring out all by itself. When I just kind of. Just when it was ready, it came.

Yeah.

But then I wrote 120,000 words and 35 chapters. And then when I sent it in, my editor sent me back goes, you know, we can't even look at this. I said, what do you mean? You have to edit that. Your contract is between 60,000 and 75,000 words. Words. I said, well, that's what editors are for. Go ahead, edit the heck out of it. I'll. You know. They go, no, we can't even look at it till you get it down. So I went to paralysis for three months again. I. I can't edit my own stuff. It gets bigger. Every time I sit down to edit stuff out, I get new ideas, and the pile gets bigger. I'm not the one to do it. So they brought in Emily Hahn, and Emily Han is just brilliant.

Who's Emily Han?

Emily Han's an editor, independent freelance editor. She was on the team for the Secret. She was on the team for Omoto's water book. So she's a heavy hitter.

Yeah.

And she took my 120,000 words in 35 chapters, and she brought it down to 40,000 words and said, go ahead and add in the rest from what I left out. And she structured the book in a very logical way. And I thought, well, this is beautiful. I'm. You know, and so. So I have tremendous respect for editors. Wow.

I mean, such a insight into how the book world operates.

Everything is word count. At a certain point, we, you know, I needed. I had no chapter on the question of nose breathing or mouth breathing. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. My God, this. I've never been at a seminar where somebody didn't ask that question. I can't publish the book without answering the most asked question out there. They said, yeah, but everything is typeset. It's going to upset the page count and the things and the references and blah, blah, blah. We're going to have to startle. Well, I don't know what to do. So we had a chapter on detoxing, and they specifically asked me for a chapter on detoxing, and I had a little bit to say, but they wanted me to go into it more. So I had this big chapter on detoxing, which I only needed to say a little bit. So I took out 55 words from there. There. I put in a new chapter on the nose nose. And it didn't upset any page count. And everybody lived happily ever after. But yeah, they're. They have departments, and so when you make a change, it has to go all the way back to the first department and go back through all the departments. So, yeah, working with them was a real challenge.

It's so interesting because breathing is an intelligence. It's. It's a form of intelligence. And intelligence doesn't just mean you're smart. Intelligence actually is like the gathering, the applying, the embodiment, the acknowledgment of we're not actually in control, we're just kind of dancing with all these things. The ego is something that comes up literally in probably almost every podcast, Dan, like the element of the ego here. So what do you think breathing, conscious breathing, does for ego? Dissolving ego, ego tending in a way?

Well, I mean, my understanding of the ego is it's our greatest fear, fear, together with our strategy for coping with that fear, and that forms the basic structure of the ego. So breathing takes care of both of those things. It washes away the fear, right? And it gives you a new strategy to deal with reactions in your own system. And. And because we're. The breath kind of starts to dissolve ego borders, right? You're. You're coming into the breath and you're in this flow of the breath, and before you know it, you've transcended your ego and you're in this kind of present moment state with clarity and clearness, and you're not being distracted by feelings and sensations and emotions. You're not being pushed and pulled by all the stuff that drives people, and you get a little space of freedom. And in that space, Something new can emerge. And so in one way, the breathing's a trick because if you train yourself to, to breathe in certain moments, you're not doing what you would usually do in that moment. And so something new is possible. And so it's even just a trick. It's like what you're not when you're breathing. You're not doing that other self talk or those other reactions. And so you've just cleared a space where something higher from you can come through or deeper.

And isn't that really the trick? I guess you could say we're tricking our body, that it's okay to be safe, but if we don't trick our body, our body, this world, I talked about this before recorded. It's designed, especially here in Los Angeles, it's designed to be always in comparison. How good do you look? How's your body for the beach? How much money do you have? What kind of car do you drive? I mean, we are literally, Dan, living in an environment that is consistently reminding us to stay in, lack to stay in fear, to be the opposite of a warrior. As we wrap this show, which, by the way, I want to have another podcast with you again at some point, some point at your live event. I think that'd be incredibly fun. Have you ever done a live podcast at an event?

Yeah.

Yeah, we'll do that at some point in the future. The, the question I want to ask you is about this warrior mindset. Yes, you've worked with Mark Devine. Yes, you've worked with Special forces for a mom, for a dad, for just any, any of us that are this archetype of a warrior. I feel like we're all wellness warriors in this world of distraction gain. Katie Hendrix call it weapons of mask distraction. I feel like we, we need to be a warrior. We get to be a warrior to fight off all these distractions and all these things. Could you give parting guidance to someone about using breathwork to be a modern day warrior?

Yeah, we never react to the situations around us. We react to our internal reactions. Right. So if I say I like you, what I really mean is I like how I feel when I'm with you. Or so it's our internal reactions to the external situations that we end up dealing with. We're not really dealing with the external situation as much as our internal reactions to them. And so taking care of all those internal reactions and choosing conscious responses. Wow. It makes dealing with the external situation so much easier. And so, you know, we have emotional habits, we have behavioral habits, we have habits of thinking. And those things drive us in moments when we're just in the flow. So you reprogram, you change those things and you flow better and. And just remember to take a breath before you say something that you might wish you could take back later, but you can't because you didn't take a breath first. And so, you know, how many times have we said something, something, or done something that we later or sooner regretted? And in every one of those situations, in those moments when we did something or said something that we. We later regretted, how are we feeling? We're feeling angry or frustrated or afraid or anxious, blah, blah, blah. We were. We were hijacked by some emotional force or some physical pain or fear or whatever. Something.

We were hijacked by a thought or a thought.

Right. And so breathing is a way we just keep coming. We can unhook from that stuff and come back into our center again and again.

It's taken me 10 years to sit here and actually have this conversation. I started personal training over 10 years ago. I was seeking peace, I was seeking the truth. I was seeking answers as to what the hell was going on with my life, how I could help other people, how I could do something here on the planet that actually served one another. And I've had some serious pitfalls and lessons along the way. And I gotta be honest with you, man, right now, in this moment, I'm feeling so grateful that you and I got to connect. Like this has been such a profound conversation. I've really enjoyed all of it. I know the people listening are feeling connected too. I just want to take a deep breath and honor the work that you're doing in our wellness world. And my final question for you is this intersection of the physical and the emotional? Of course, there's the spiritual as well. We sit in the middle, man. And after 40 years of this work. How do you define wellness? If you wanted to say wellness means something to me, what does wellness mean to Danville?

The ability to be clear and loving and creative and effective, no matter what's happening around us and no matter what's happening inside of us. I mean, that's. To me, that's freedom. If I can be loving and clear and creative and productive, regardless of what I'm dealing with inside of me and regardless of the stuff around me, I think that's freedom. I think that's. That's what freedom is. And the moment I feel I'm lacking that, it's like the freedom I can do anything I want or I don't have to do anything. It's that kind of freedom and when. And I think we've been trained out of honoring that in ourselves. You know, I get up in the morning, I know I'm not feeling myself, but I go to work anyway. I go to school anyway. I cook anyway way then, you know, the food and the job and the school, it ain't gonna be coming. It's not going to be showing up at the level I would like it to. And so the breath, through the breath, we make sure that what's coming from us is coming from who we really are.

Yes.

And that's.

And that's pretty damn liberating, isn't it?

Wow. You don't have to plan things. You don't have to make excuses. You don't have to explain things. You don't have to. And because you're in a flow and you know, you end up saying the right thing at the right time and doing the right thing without trying because you've. You're surrendering to something higher. I don't know how to beat my own heart. I don't know how to manufacture chemicals in my brain. Thank God I don't have to, like, manage that stuff. Some part of me knows that. And so breathing gives us a chance to very consciously and very deliberately connect to that intelligence, intelligent part of us and then begin to really trust it and rely on it and allow it to express through us.

Breathmastery.com is the website justbreathebook.com Instagram Dan Brulee with one E. Yes. Right.

Yeah.

Dan Brulee, official, thank you so much for coming on the show. We covered a lot of ground. Dan, is there anything you think we missed when we addressed this topic of breathing for life, breathing for work, breathing for relationship?

Yeah. You know, I think Eckhart Tolle said something. If you watch a child play, they don't get joy out of what they do. They put joy into what they do. So what we get from the breathing depends on what we put into it. So you put passion into it, you put consciousness into it, you put relaxation into it, and miracles happen.

Well, this conversation was a miracle of its own. Listen to this show at least twice. Go through and as you listen, listen to Dan breathe and Q and everything else. Breathe with us. This is also going to be linked@wellnessforce.com group. We're going to be talking more about Dan's work there. And make sure you give Dan some love on social. Dan Brulee, breath mastery on Facebook. Dan, we're out from the treehouse.

Thank you, Josh.

Thanks man. Hey, thanks for listening to the show, my friend. Everything you learned on this podcast starts with your morning practices. So from over 300 world class guests, we pulled together six simple yet powerful morning practices down into a 21 minute system guaranteed to increase your vibration and the way that you feel every day. Get this free powerful guide over@wellnessforce.com M21 and if you love this show, share it with somebody. Share it with somebody that you love or that you care about. You can support the show easily by leaving us a five star review on iTunes. Just go to wellnessforce.com review or or if you're on your phone, just tap it. Hit the link in purple that says review this podcast. And the journey does not stop here. We're continuing this discovering process in our private Facebook group over@wellnessforce.com group. You can be a part of it. You already are. All you have to do is join us@wellnessforce.com group and I will welcome you at the door. Now go out into your life and live your life well. And until I see you again real soon, I'm wishing you love and wellness.