Dr. Belisa Vranich: Breathing For Warriors | Wellness Force #Podcast

Make it an exercise that's good for releasing tension. We have so much tension. We're suffering so much because of it, saying, okay, five minutes a day, I have to jump up and down and make sure that I inhale and exhale with the jumping or I have to do my meditation. We'd all be so much better. We'd all be so much more tolerant, more flexible, more loving. Sam.

Our guest today is Dr. Belisa Branich, a renowned clinical psychologist. She's a public speaker with a very, very powerful TEDx video about breathing, how we can breathe naturally and well. And she's the author of a phenomenal book that I've gone through, Breathing for Warriors. This is how to master your breath to unlock more strength, greater endurance, sharper precision, faster recovery, and an unshakable inner game. Belisa, welcome to Wellness Force.

Thank you. You got through that title really well, much better than I usually do. I stumble.

There's a lot of syllables in there. You know, it's is we're at this phenomenal nexus right now of people having emotional intelligence and physical intelligence when it comes to our society. But I think a lot of people right now, specifically in this time of stress, are just disconnected from their body. And I look at this phrase, you have breathing for warriors, which is so powerful for athletes and for weekend warriors and things like this. But as we dig into this really cool conversation about breath, you know, we're so passionate about breath and breath work here at Wellness Force. Can you explain what it means to even be a warrior in today's landscape? Like that word, breathing for warriors, it's not just for athletes.

Well, I gotta tell you, I got pushback when I said I wanted to call it Breathing for Warriors, because there were folks that said, you know, this sounds too military, this sounds too niche, like it's only for law enforcement or whatever. And I said, absolutely not. I mean, there are moments where we all have to kind of dig deep and get into the warrior part of us and organize and prioritize and execute, and we may not, you know, be a traditional warrior at all.

Yeah, we all have some of the warrior essence inside of us though, right? Whether you're a mom, a dad. It takes a modern day warrior, like a wellness warrior to be able to meet the demands of this modern world and all this stress. Don't you agree?

Absolutely. And you have to juggle all kinds of priorities and all kinds of things happening at the same time. And especially now in a situation and in a world where things are less than happy and less than calm. And it does feel like a bit of a war zone. At least a good. Not the entire day for some of us. So, yes, we are warriors.

Yeah. And to be a warrior, you know, to talk about Lao Tzu and a lot of the ancient masters they describe, like, yes, we have the ability to fight. We have the ability to reach conflict and meet conflict. But a true warrior, whether man or woman, knows how to sit in the middle of that and knows when to strike and knows when to sit back and breathe. And your path is just totally a mirror of that. Because I think about the way that you heal people. You know, you heal people by teaching them how to breathe properly, how to activate their diaphragm, how to breathe through their entire diaphragmatic system. But you yourself, in high school, you had asthma. And I'm thinking, wow, this is a perfect entryway into life where a woman who teaches people across the world how to breathe literally had trouble breathing in high school. Can you take us to that moment?

Well, it's interesting because it was my co author that had asthma. So I got very lucky. I had a co author with asthma and I ended up looking at breathing because I had a panic attack. So with my co author, a guy named Brian Sabin, and I, we were like, at the perfect storm for this book. Because he had asthma, I had panic. So between the two of us, we kind of covered most of the general population. People have one or the other, and sometimes you have both. But I actually came to breathing because I had a panic attack. I was rollerblading and I had a panic attack. And I don't know. Have you ever had one?

I have, yeah.

Oh, well, they're, you know. You know what they're like? It just feels like your world feels.

Like you're gonna die.

Yeah, you totally feel like you're gonna die. And I'm on rollerblades on the west side highway in New York City, which is like a really bad place to think you're gonna die on rollerblades as well, by the side of a highway. And. And I had to take off my rollerblades and I walked home in my socks because I had no idea what had happened. I knew I wasn't going to die, but everything around me felt that way. So that's when I started to look for, hey, what can I do for myself? And what can I do for my patients? I was a psychologist at the time who have other types of anxiety disorders, maybe generalized anxiety or OCD or ptsd. So that was kind of the beginning of the story.

Wow, thank you for that correction too, because your co author's name was Brian.

Still is Brian Saban.

Brian had trouble breathing, but then also, when any of us have a panic attack, breath is the last thing we're thinking about. So that's what led you into helping others in a clinical setting and getting the MD or not the MD but the doctor next to your name. Is it MD or doctor? It's the same thing, right?

Well, an MD is a physician and I'm a psychologist, so I have a doctorate, but it's actually a psy D P S Y D. It still was eight years of school.

So you don't do that unless you have a fire. You don't do that unless you have a fire in yourself to help people. So was it just that moment with the Rollerblades, or was there something else that actually fueled you to that path in that career?

Well, I was already. I mean, I don't like to say I was healing people because I think people heal themselves and I provided a place for them to be able to do that or information for them to be able to do that. But I had been a psychologist for about 20 years, and then I had a panic attack. It was after 9, 11, and a really crummy boyfriend and relationship, and I have the panic attack. And sometimes. Well, often you don't have the panic attack at the moment of stress. It's the day after, the week after, maybe the year after. So I had to sort of backpedal and see where did the stress come from, because, and this happens a lot with folks is that I thought I was handling things really well. I figured, you know, I'm a type A, I can deal with stress. And I obviously did not, because when your body starts having reactions and they're related to your stress, that's a big message that you are not handling your stress and it's starting to affect you physically.

At what point did you find the breath? Was it during your training and working with patients that you found breath, or when did it come into your life more?

So once I had the panic attack. So once I had the panic attack, I knew I had to do something. I also found out I was grinding my teeth for. I don't know if you grind your teeth. I feel like a lot of people grind their teeth. Please use your bite plate. Oh, hey. So small, little practical piece of advice is you do not have to go to your dentist to get like a really expensive fancy bite plate. You can go and get the plastic ones at any pharmacy that you put in boiling water and then you kind of mold to your teeth, they're just as good. So if you are grinding your teeth, please get yourself a bite plate because it's very expensive. Later on if you don't, that's a good thing. Grinding my teeth. Yeah. I found out I was grinding my teeth and I was just trying to figure out what do I do for my stress. I should probably, you know, go to yoga or get a drink or do something that's going to make me feel better. And so I did have a drink and that wasn't the, that wasn't the long term solution. But then I went to yoga, not on the same day. And the yoga class, it took a while to find a class I really liked. And if you're looking for a yoga class or you're looking for a sport or some kind of, kind of internal martial art that's going to help you with stress, keep looking. Because it took me about two years to find a yoga class I liked. And then we would do breathing and yoga. We would do all kinds of interesting breaths with all kinds of complicated names. And I wanted more of that. I wanted to know where they came from and what they did and what happened to your brain and your nervous system. And I wasn't getting answers in yoga, even though there is some good research since then with yoga breathing. So I went to Sports science and I just started reading everything I possibly could about breathing in sports and there was a good chunk of literature there. So that kept me happy for a while.

Yeah. And it's interesting because most people are breathing wrong. In your videos and your media, you talk about the vertical breathing versus the horizontal breathing, which I want to unpack. You know, we've had Dan Brulee and Neeraj Naik and Pavel Stuchlick on the show, so we've gone deep into breathing. But sometimes it takes someone like you who's at the epoch, you know, to come down the mountain and say these two specific terms that are so, so easy to understand. Am I a vertical breather? Am I a horizontal breather? Let's dig into that because I've never heard that before.

Thank you so much for saying that. Because being able to explain things in a way that's super practical and really functional was what I wanted to do. And what really gets me going.

It's also the mark of intelligence. Can you explain it to a child and can they get it right?

Well, that's where that came from is that my degree is in child psychology. So I would always, when I had a child that wasn't learning or couldn't learn, is that I would always, like, run circles around them to see how I could explain it so that they would get it. And if you just try a little harder and you just change the words or you position the information in an interesting way for them is they get it. They want to get it. They want to be right. And so I took that same sort of stance with breathing. And I was trying to figure out, well, how do I explain something that everybody. It's weird because if you were to ask a group, like, who hear things, breathing is important. Like, there's not going to be one person not raising their hand. However, here we had something that everybody thinks is important, but everybody's doing it wrong. So I had to figure out why, like, what is. What has happened between the caring about something and the doing it right, that there's this huge gap between this information and the execution. And what I realized is that there wasn't good practical information. We had this really intense gap in take a deep breath and then what the deep breath looked like. And it's gotten worse in the last, say, 50 years because of technology and sitting and all kinds of other things. So now we have to teach people how to go back and fix these things. And it's a lot like posture, is that your posture gets worse and worse and worse until you go to someone who actually puts you back as you straighten up.

I see I had a tiny little slant there, so you reminded me. Thank you.

So, you know, you have to go back and relearn how you're supposed to move and how you're supposed to be standing and how you're supposed to walk. And breathing is a movement, and we have to do the same thing with it.

Yeah. This vertical and horizontal. In the TEDx, you had everybody in the audience take a breath, and it was like if you saw their chest rise first, you know, they were a vertical breather. Right. If somebody's totally shut off from their diaphragm and disconnected, can you talk about that?

Sure. And you use the word shut off, and I love that. And it is really that our diaphragms are kind of locked up. It's almost like. Think of, like, if you have tight hamstrings. Right. Is that your diaphragm, if you haven't been using it, is locked up in your body. So you may think you're taking a deep breath, but it's been so tight for so long that you're not taking a Deep breath. So it's really that you're sort of forced to because of the muscles in your posture and all the rigidity in the middle of your body, and that doesn't matter what your weight is, is that you're now forced to breathe with your shoulders. And this is an auxiliary muscle driven breath. So if you breathe and you go up, you're using your shoulders, you're using your traps to get air into your body. And these neck and shoulder muscles were never meant to be breathing muscles, never meant to be primary breathing muscles. You should be breathing like every animal on the planet. So if you think about any animal at all, on the inhale they widen and on the exhale they narrow. Easy peasy, right? So you look at yourself and you're breathing up and down. Doesn't make any sense at all. We were not built to breathe up and down. We were meant to be able to expand, kind of puff up and then exhale. Narrow. And we're not doing it.

Yeah. The constriction, the contraction of the diaphragm. Walk us through what happens there, because we've talked about this in many ways, but from a child psychologist, I'm curious how you might explain this. When we take a breath in, what's happening, what's going on?

So I'm going to give it to you in all different ways. And this is how you learn. You learn by watching, by watching yourself, by feeling. So I want you first to think about what your diaphragm looks like. Because most of us don't know. We're like, yeah, diaphragm. It's kind of in the middle. I think I've seen it. It's a little red line. So that's one of the reasons we don't understand the diaphragm. In most pictures, you see it, you're like, oh, it's this red line often. And I've been looking at children's toys and anatomy figures. It's not present at all. There's lungs and then there's digestive organs. And like, the diaphragm actually isn't even in the picture. And if it is in the picture, it's this line which you're like, I don't even know what that line is or what it does. It can't be important because it's just a line. So I want you to visualize a skirt stake the size of a Frisbee. Okay? Because the diaphragm is actually, if it was a steak, it would be a skirt steak. And the size of a Frisbee is a pretty decent sized piece of muscle, right? So that's what your diaphragm is. So that's the first thing you have to think about is like, that's kind of a big thing and it's in the middle of my body. So I want you to take your fingers and put them right at where your ribs meet in the front of your body and poke them in there. All right? And now walk your fingers around your ribs in the front of your body. Walk them around slowly, all your fingers and stop halfway. So your hands should be right underneath, in front of you and actually give your ribs a little tug. Now that's what should be happening is on the inhale, your ribs should actually be flaring a little bit on the exhale. They should be squeezing into your body. So keep walking your fingers around, around. You're going to hit that floating rib, maybe some muscle. I hit some fat. It's okay. It's keeping me warm. And I want your fingers to hit in the back, so see wherever they hit in the back. And I want you to flatten your hands out on your back so your lungs go all the way to there. So just sense right now where your palms are. You have lungs all the way down there. Now, that circumference where you went all the way around your body, that's where your diaphragm is attached. So that's where it is. It's huge and it's there. So I want you to put your hands in front of you like this. Okay? So on the inhale, your diaphragm flattens and it tries to push your ribs open. And on the exhale, it tries to pull your ribs together so your body narrows. Inhale, it flattens out and pushes, tries to push your ribs open. Exhale, squeezes your body and you exhale. Okay, so now you actually have a sense of the diaphragm. Now you have a visual. This is what it looks like, here's where it is, and this is what it does when you're breathing. Well, most of us, the muscles around the outside of our body are so tight, and our understanding of what a deep breath is, that we don't actually use the diaphragm.

A lot of times when I've helped people breathe in the past, I'll place a bottle of water in their belly, which I learned from my mentor, Paul Check, who's a colleague of yours as well. And it was just a nice cue, a nice psychological cue for people to watch their belly rise and fall with a bottle of water on their stomach. And it clicked in for me a year and a half ago. I was like, wait. The reason why people aren't breathing through their belly, aren't really using their diaphragm, is because they have spent 10, 20, 30 years breathing from their scalenes, their pecs, and being rounded and kyphotic, sitting at a desk, driving a car, being on a phone. Everything we do, Dr. Bellisa, is forward flexion. Can you talk about that a little bit so people can really understand this concept?

Well, not with the beautiful, precise vocabulary you have, because I don't have the background in fitness and anatomy that you do. So I'll prob use more simple terms because you have way more experience in fitness and anatomy than I do. But I can definitely speak to the fact that we are rotated forwards. And if you rotate forwards, and especially if you have forward head posture, is that all that is going to affect your being able to inhale and expand and then exhale and squeeze. And I want to remind you that our not being able to inhale and expand comes from muscular core sets or emotional core sets. So maybe you're ripped and you have abs and like your obliques are so, like beautiful and striated and unfortunately keeping your body really tight. But it might be an emotional corset and that's actually more common. So I want you to do this right now, is that you're all relaxed, you're fine. And now you're going to go in to an important meeting where you're asking for a raise and you want to be powerful and convincing and it's important. Okay? So stand up straight, tighten your middle and let's go. So I want you to notice right now what that tighten your middle feels like. Now inhale, relax it on the inhale. Now tighten it back up again. So the tightness should be right in the middle of your gut. Right in the middle, so a couple inches above your belly button. So most of us walk around with that part of our body tight all day long. And it's a preparedness stance. It's part of our power pose. Right. Unfortunately, we're not meant to wake up in the morning. Squeeze that and hold that tension there all day long. We're meant to do that when we need it, but we're also supposed to, okay, relax, inhale, expand and then exhale, squeeze, get all that air out.

There's such a subtle cue for people on a psychological level where it's shifting them to sympathetic all day long. And people know about the Parasympathetic and sympathetic. The rest and digest or the fight or flights. We've talked about that many times. But what I hear from you, and actually in your Manhattan Beach TEDx, it was Manhattan beach, right, that you spoke at, you talked about how people are holding their abs, bracing their abs. And I can totally relate to this. And so many people watching can relate to this. We're all trying to look our best. We're trying to pull in our belly all day long so that no one will see if we have any extra fat. It is such an illusion, it's such a psychological illusion of why we're not relaxed. We think that there's something outside of us that's not making us relaxed. We hold the power to be relaxed. We hold the power to use our diaphragm and breathe correctly, if we know, if we're aware. Can you talk about the awareness of bracing the abs all day long? I used to be 280 pounds, so I was always trying to pull in my stomach because I was. I was get my feelings hurt if people saw my belly. You talk about the emotional connection to bracing the abs all day long and how that impacts breathing.

Sure. I mean, if you're bracing or if you're just. You also can be guarding, that's another thing that you can be doing is that. And most people are doing a combination of bracing because they're stressed. They also have this impression that this is an isometric. That's really good for them. Like, I do this because it makes me strong. So, for instance, I just had a patient and she. She does Pilates. So when I saw her, I said, can you unbrace your body? She said, oh, no, this is good for me. This makes me strong. If I'm bracing all day. And you know, it doesn't. It affects digestion, it affects your lower back, and you can't take a deep breath. So a lot of us think that, oh, if I'm bracing my middle all the time, this is actually making me stronger. And I want you to think about it is that if you have a weight and you're just doing this with the weight back and forth in a tiny little movement that's actually not making you stronger. You have to actually extend completely, then flex, extend. And that's what I want you to do with the breath. Inhale, expand, and then exhale narrow. So I understand that the inhaling and letting yourself expand feels weird. And I understand that it makes a lot of people feel vulnerable. However, once you exhale and realize, ooh, that's, you know, that's a lot of muscle. And you realize how much stronger your core is when you actually can inhale, expand and exhale, contract and narrow your body. It gets a little addictive. And then you're like, okay, I'm going to look maybe a little heavy for half a second, but then I'll be able to squeeze and really work my abs. So anyway, the guarding is something else that people do. So think about when you're a kid and you either fall down or you get in a tussle and you get maybe, maybe punched or in the, in the middle of the body or just have an injury that's rib or middle of the body related is that you guard that part of your body. So you try to not have people get near it and you try not to move it. And this also happens with C sections is that, you know, trying to breathe after a C section is really tough because you're in pain. And then you get into the routine of breathing upper body and you never go back to the lower body breath. So the emotional part in staying in that sympathetic state is because you're breathing through the top of your body, the chemistry in your body is disrupted. It feels better to be bracing to you because you're stressed out. And then you're in a constant sympathetic state, which is the one. It's fight, flight or freeze. And a lot of us are in freeze. We don't realize that actually freezing is, is a reaction as well. And we stay there and we live in that place of being in a sympathetically dominant state. And we feel like, well, this is normal and it's not.

And then the stress cascades upon cascades where the bathtub gets full and eventually the water leaks out. And this is, you know, Hans Selye, when he looks at the stress model, the third phase is exhaustion, right? So people, they go through like adaptation where they can be with stress for a couple years. And I love that you said this too. You're like, you know, I actually had the panic attack way later. And people have attacks and stress symptoms way later than actually experiencing the stress. I can't help but make the connection here to capital T, lowercase T, trauma that happens with young men and young women, even young boys and young girls, that then carries on into adult life. And then that, you know, as Bruce Lipton talks about the literally biology of emotion, these emotions get trapped inside of our tissues. The issues are in the tissues and then we have this efferent and afferent activity that's Telling our brain that we're in panic, we should be scared, we should brace, as you say. But there's actually no more threat anymore. How do people get clear on that aspect of what's blocking their breathing?

So that's where I teach a meditation and the meditation I teach is a trance breath led meditation, which is not something that I have developed or come up with. Certainly it's within the context of what I teach, but it's something that has been developed years ago, in the 60s, in the 50s. Stan Grof is, is the leader of holotropic, the leader, the thought leader behind holotropic breathing, which he's a brilliant, brilliant person. Rebirthing and that sort of thing that's happened that was popular in the 60s and now has made kind of a comeback. I put it in a different framework in that I'm a psychologist, so I put it within a framework of healing, therapeutic healing, but sort of more psychology driven. And Stan Grof is a psychiatrist. So doing the breath led meditation carefully, carefully and with help and with intention and with support can help you work through all those things. So it is an amazing addition to being in therapy as well, in that you can join the mind and the body and work through some of the issues that you have that sometimes you don't even know are still bothering you. And that's sometimes what happens in doing a breath led meditation is that you might choke up or you might cry or you might giggle and it's just old trauma and old stress that's kind of eking out and you know, you want to let it go and you want to work on it as well, not just, you know, have that cry and giggle and walk away. You want to actually work on it. So when it's done well, that trance breath led meditation can be really powerful.

And how long when you say it's done really well? Because I've had experiences in Costa Rica and in Thailand where I was doing it for almost two hours at a time and there was tears, there were shaking, there was laughing, there was crying. How long do you think for a beginner when they're with the right kind of facilitator and it's a very safe space and they're knowledgeable and the facilitator has proper training. Can it be done in 30 minutes or does it always have to be these longer journeys for catharsis?

Oh, I mean, for some people it's two minutes or three minutes. It depends how ready you are, how much you trust the space and the person that's with you, how much, you know, how much you're holding on to, how full that bathtub is. It really depends on the person. I don't think you have to do it. And a lot of people can't tolerate two hours because it's exhausting and you're working your breathing muscles. And you have to be a certain type of person to commit to two hours. That's not necessarily a strong person. It's just you have to want to commit two hours to it. And for a lot of folks, they don't have two hours of a babysitter right now, and they'd like to start and they can't go somewhere to do it, so, you know, somewhere beautiful to do it. They might have to just be in the bathroom with a shower on. So, no, I don't think you have to commit a whole two hours to it, but you do have to go in with intention, thoughtfully, with a support system, you know, depending on what you're carrying, depending on what you're hanging on to.

Yeah. And also, too, I want to make a caveat here. I would never recommend that somebody does a cathartic journey on their own. They have to be with a skilled practitioner. Do you agree, or do you think some people, once they get trained enough, they can just do it on their own?

Once you get trained enough, you can certainly do things on your own. But I think that most of us have more stress and have more kind of residual trauma than we know. So you need someone who's holding space for you and that just has a high level of ethics. You need to feel like if you're in a. You can be in a room with people, with other people doing it, but you have to know that there are several people that are there. There are people I can ask questions to, There are people that will let me follow up with them, that things are explained to me. So you need to feel taken care of. Too often I've been seeing folks just kind of get thrown into a room and, you know, want this cathartic experience. And certainly the leader of the class wants to see a cathartic experience with the people that he's with. But sometimes what happens can just be that you put two thoughts together that you hadn't before. So sometimes the successes is a quiet one where you're doing the breathing, which is a controlled hyperventilation. And then when you quiet down, you just make a connection between two memories or between how you feel and something that happened. And that can be really tremendous. It doesn't have to Be very dramatic.

Yeah. It can be so incredibly healing. And I've experienced it too, where it can be very jarring, because I've had, like, memories that have come up during these long journeys, and I've put them together at the end of it all. I'm so grateful, though, because, look, whatever is in there is in there, y'. All. Like, whatever is in the body. Like, it's there to be let go of. Like, you know, there's. There's a phrase in many contemporary healing modalities. And, like, what's coming is going. So what's coming up is actually there to go. And from a psychological perspective, with your training on human behavior and the brain in these long journeys, what is the biology of what's actually happening? It's controlled hyperventilation, but what's happening on a psychosomatic level during these longer cathartic sessions?

So what happens when you do. When you do the breathing is. It's complex and there's not a lot of research yet. Even though I can see in the next five years, with the brain research we have, we're going to get some great stuff. But think about it. You are in a very vulnerable position where you're on your back. So I know that sounds super simple, but think about psychoanalysis, Freudian therapy is that you're on your back because it's vulnerable. You don't have anything in front of you. You're looking at a ceiling. So also, whatever's happening is coming from the inside. You're unbracing your body, and this may be the first time in 10, 20 years that you're getting told to breathe in a way that you're unbracing your body, because think about it. Standing up, somebody takes you to take, tells you to take a deep breath. You're probably still going to brace and you're not going to take an expansive breath, partially because your diaphragm is also a muscle of stability and balance. So it's hard to take the deepest breath you can when you're standing because your diaphragm does both. So if you're on your back, you can actually take a really deep, expansive breath and not feel shame about your belly in that place. And you're in a neutral place on your back. So already the setup is for you to feel safe, comfortable and uninhibited. So the controlled hyperventilation changes your body chemistry. And certainly if you're breathing with a lower body breath, you are getting yourself into a more parasympathetic state. And all of A sudden, your coping mechanisms that are about controlling and pushing down either start to break or you start to let things come out. And again, we're going to see more research into exactly what happens when. With the brain in these sessions. But it's just. It's almost. I liken it to. Have you ever gone to get a massage and you just feel like you have a tear or two come out when you're getting the massage? And it's. It's a moment after. Usually you're getting the massage and then you take a deep breath and you're like, oh, you know, I'm so grateful to be here. And sometimes you'll shed a tear and it'll kind of be odd, but your massage therapist sees it all the time. So it's this moment where you're relieved, where you're calm, where you feel taken care of, and all of a sudden you can let go. And you're being told, this time is for you. You need to let go. Because often we're trying not to cry or trying not to emote too much or trying to keep control because we're juggling all the things we're supposed to be taking care of. But this is a time where we're allowed to. In fact, we're being instructed to let go. If you want to giggle, if you want to cry, it's fine. You don't have to understand it. There's no judgment. Just let it go. And this is exactly, sort of what I talk about. Exactly what I'm saying right now is what I say when I do a meditation is that there's no judgment and you don't have to understand why. And I remember when I first started teaching, I was at the DEA working with drug enforcement agents and border patrol and first responders. And I remember telling them before, you might giggle, you might cry. You don't have to tell me why. And that's odd because you usually think a psychologist wants to know exactly why.

Sure.

When did this happen? When in your childhood? How did you feel about it? And I said, I don't need to know. In fact, you don't need to know either. But just let it out, whatever it is, just let it out. And you don't have to diagnose it or take it apart. Just enjoy the fact that you have let go of some tension.

Wow, it's. There's so much to unpack there. So first thing I was thinking of, I was visualizing when you were saying this was laying on our back and how freeing that is, how we can let go of, quote, the shame of having a belly or whatever it is. I feel like really what you're describing is when we lay on our back, we give ourselves ultimate permission to just feel whatever's there. And that's actually what's coming out through the breath. But the cyclical breathing, you know, I've done Wim Hof and I did Mark Devine's event in 2017. And what you're saying is so true when you reference the massage therapist and the tear coming out. I'm 36 years old, 37 years old. I'm laying on the floor. It's the first time I'd ever done like a really unique cathartic journey. And we're at the Carlsbad place, the Omni, and I'm laying on the floor and we're doing the warrior breathing. And all of a sudden I start like, water's coming out of my eyes and I'm like, what the hell's going on? I was so just tripped out. And I realized later on that night I was feeling kind of sad. I was feeling like some stuff was coming up. And I had mentioned it to Mark Devine when we had a podcast a couple of months later. And he's like, yeah, that's totally normal. Like, you know, it was the first time in my life where it was ever like, okay for like a tough guy to cry or like a man to cry or like anyone to just feel their emotions. Because I came from an environment where it's like, like, you know, if I was playing football, it's like you get hurt, like, put some dirt on it and get back out there. Men only show two emotions. It's anger and frustration. Like, that's basically all of our skills. So what I love from this and what I'm curious how you feel is for this new paradigm of like how men and women to relate to one another, how we actually engage with one another. Don't you feel that if we learn to breathe as a collective, if we learn to breathe together as a society, we're going to get to more love? This isn't just hippies around a fire. We're going to be able to use breath to access more love. That allows men to feel greater pallets of emotions and connect with women on a whole new level?

Absolutely. I mean, I just taught a few days ago, correction officers in Washington and again, a very forward thinking bunch of people. Fantastic, fantastic people with pride in what they do and with, you know, just amazing folks. And I thought if all stressful Jobs did breathing. Wouldn't it be better at. Wouldn't they be better at their jobs? Wouldn't they be better at communicating with each other? I mean, think of the days when you're frustrated and how much that person who's walking too slow or driving too slow annoys you. And then the days when you're kind of happy or fine. That person driving slow in front of you, you think, my mom drives just like that. Or, you know, gosh, I wonder what it's like not to have to be rushed. That must be great. Or you just kind of blow it off and you keep moving. And that's just a tiny little description of what we could feel if we had a breath routine that we did every day just for our souls and our brains is here. I'm going to do my. I'm going to make sure my breathing is a good, deep breath and work on that if it's not. And then I'm going to do a five or 10 minutes of a breathing meditation just to let off steam. And I. I usually talk about things in a very physical way, very physiological, very practical, is that you get stressed throughout the day. So we don't growl at each other. We don't shake it off. Like, we don't have these things animals have. We just push it down, push it down. So all the annoyance of all day long, you push it down, you push it down. It's terrible for you. I wish we could growl and just shake it off or do what animals do, but we don't.

We can. If we have a rebounder, we can go jump on the trampoline.

In the trampoline, the research shows that repetitive motion that's jarring in that way.

Up and down, is my favorite. I've actually been cueing my inhales to the bounce. So I'll go while I'm on the trampoline for three minutes, and I'm like, wow, I just changed my whole physiology. But I digress.

No, no, but that's perfect. So point here, and let's make that a practical takeaway, is that if you can bounce on a trampoline, it's great for you. Five minutes a day, that's it. Even less if you want to start with less and make it so that your breath goes along with the movement and then switch it. Maybe your inhale is up. Go exhale on the up and make it an exercise that's good for releasing tension. We have so much tension. We're suffering so much because of it. Saying, okay, five minutes a Day, I have to jump up and down and make sure that I inhale and exhale with the jumping or I have to do my meditation. We'd all be so much better. We'd all be so much more tolerant, more flexible, more loving. Yeah.

Wow. This is like emotional intelligence at its finest. But just like always, it's fed through a lens of physical intelligence and somatic awareness. If we're aware of what's going on our body, then we can be more aware of how we're treating other people. And I mentioned to this mention you this. This tattoo that I have on my arm before we recorded, and it says, se poso resperare, poso seguere. And that means if I can breathe, I can choose. It's on my arm here. So I got this before I did the 20x with Mark because I had been struggling with severe anxiety. Even when I started this podcast, it was like I'd wake up in the morning, I'd be stressed for no reason. My jaw would hurt. I was uncomfortable. I was gaining weight. And so I did all this training for the 20x and I just wanted an anchor for myself. Of course, now looking back three, four years later, I'm like, oh, my God. My subconscious knew that breath was going to set me free. My subconscious knew that it was actually the breath that was going to be my best friend, my greatest ally in the world is my breath. And when I got that on my arm, I didn't understand it at the time. It was just something that I, you know, looking back is always 2020. Yeah, now I get it. And my question to you is, what has the breath done for you? Physically, emotionally, and even spiritually? Like, what is that anchor for you? You know, you love what you do. It's. It's written all over you. Right. So what is that anchor for you?

Can I just tell you? Your story gave me goosebumps. I'm, like, all emotional because I thought that's. That was really, like. That was really so great.

Thank you.

Yeah. And that, you know, the breath does give you choices, because sometimes you feel like I don't have a choice. I mean, especially nowadays, we just don't feel like we have choices in anything. Oh, man, look at you. You really hit. You really hit a nerve there.

That's good. We're being humans here on the show. Yeah.

So nice. But when you breathe, you actually. And again, going back to kind of like the physical part of it is that you have a choice as far as your arousal. Right. So most of us right now we either. We just want to get to sleep, just, like, just dope us up so we can get to sleep, you know, or the opposite of like, please, like, give me a little bit more caffeine because I got to get through this. I want to be wired. I've got to work out, so we don't have choices in the middle. And there's the fact that there's all these different places you could be where you're alert but in control. I was thinking about this. This whole idea of choices and arousal. And I did. I did a show with Cesar Millan. I did the Dog whisper with him. He's awesome. He's not too far away from. But. And he talks a lot about the breath, and he talks about how you need to be in this certain place where you're alert, but you're also calm. And most of us don't know how to be there. We know the extremes, but we don't know that, like, 4, 5, 6, 7, type of spectrum of the middle, where we're like, yes, paying attention, but not necessarily energetically committed in a way that can tip us off and get us too far over to the right. So now I've forgotten your question, so you gotta ask me again.

I got it. Yeah. The question was, and thank you for your kind words, too. Like, you know, people see you and your rap sheet hits the floor. You've been on, like, every TV show imaginable, and you're still human like us. And I think that's why people connect with you so deeply. My question to you was when I shared my story about how the breath has impacted my life and how it's given me this ability, say, posto to respiratory, to choose what's it done for you? You know, what is. What is accessing your breath done for your. Your physical, your psychological, and even your spiritual connection to higher power? Like, how has it gifted you?

I. It has to do with career in that when you start to learn how to breathe and when you actually kind of connect to it. And most people that feel. Have a calling of, like, I know I can't breathe. So they know something is wrong intuitively, and they start figuring it out and start realizing, oh, the biggest part of my lungs is down here. Oh, I am sort of tight around here, or I haven't taken a deep breath in so long. So that intuitive nature about it, when I tapped into loving teaching breathing, it just became overwhelming in that it's all I wanted to do, is that, you know, talk about, I'm working on my Work life balance, because I could just read and teach and not have a work life balance. I should probably go out. Not now, of course, but. But when we're allowed to go out and have a little bit more of a social life. But it got. It was overwhelming for me because there was so much amazing information and people would get better in ways that I never imagined. Is that just letting them breathe and just coaching them to breathe like they used to got them feeling better and healing? You know, I didn't know anything about digestion. Well, you know, I knew the basics about digestion and lower back. I was a psychologist, and I'd have people come in and say, you know what? I've had acid reflux, or I've been constipated for so long, and all of a sudden, now breathing diaphragmatically, my digestion's gotten so much better. That was a surprise to me. I wasn't trained in that. So I actually had to go and do a lot of reading and seek some supervision in that all of a sudden, people's digestion was getting better. And same thing with lower back pain, which now I understand why, because your diaphragm is actually connected to your lower back. But it made such a huge change in physical and emotional health that I realized that I need to teach as many people as possible as quickly as possible in my lifetime. Because it works and you own it. It's right under your nose. So that's how it changed my life.

Wow. I look at this component of fatigue, like, we get decision fatigue. We all get tired. It's like part of being a human is that we sometimes get tired. But I love the quote in your book from Vince Lombardi, and it was, fatigue makes cowards of us all. It's so eloquent, right? Because people look at him and they're like, oh, he was one of the greatest football coaches of all time, but he had these unique little wisdom bomb drops. And the fact that you both quoted this in your book Breathing for Warriors, when we look at fatigue, yes, there's physical fatigue, but most people forget, like, there's cognitive fatigue as well. If we're not breathing properly, not only do we get physically fatigued, but we get cognitively fatigued. Can you talk about this fatigue component and how breathing actually gives us more of a bandwidth for energy?

Well, think about the days that you're in front of your computer all day long. And there's plenty of us that work in front of a computer all day long the end of the day.

But I Got my trampoline. So I jump on the trampoline, I breathe and I do my push ups and I do my yoga.

Well, the being exhausted that you get at the end of the day and sometimes it's puzzling. I've been sitting on my ass all day long.

Why am I so tired?

Why am I so tired? And that's brain tired. But a lot of what that tired is is that you're sitting and you're not moving. Okay, so you're sitting and you're probably not sitting in a good posture, but you're not breathing. So you get energy from your breath just from oxygen. Oxygen is cell fuel. So if you're not breathing between the work where you're sitting is that you're going to get tired. So there's that kind of tired. There's the tired of I haven't moved and I haven't been breathing because I'm not moving. And then there's the tired that has to do with your breathing muscles not being strong. And that's a different kind of tired. That's the tired that Vince Lombardi was talking about. That's the tired that. I also have a quote from Sam Sheridan's book. I think it's a fighter's mind where you have an athlete that's an incredibly well trained athlete, that's young and strong and they get fatigued and it's puzzling, like why. And everyone who coaches has this person on their team where they're like, you know, he or she is so talented, they're so driven, they're so this and they're so that. But I don't know why their cardio is so bad or, you know, what, what happens that they give up. You know, maybe they don't have heart and what it is is that they might have good cardio. But if your breathing muscles aren't strong just like any other muscle in your body, you're going to get tired. But since there's no burn like the burn of fatigue in the rest of your body is that you're not going to know why you're tired and you're just probably going to think, oh, I don't want it enough, or gosh, I'm such a punk, I'm such a wuss that I, that I'm not pushing myself harder. And it could simply be that your breathing muscles are just not trained and they're not as strong as they should be.

That's profound because I think about the breathing muscles. Most people think, oh, it's my lungs I got to strengthen my lungs. No, there's a lot of cast of characters, right? Intercostals, diaphragm, tva. There's a lot that goes on there. So can you talk about the biology of the breathing musculature that makes us strong so that we can be less fatigued?

Sure. So it's interesting because people think, oh, I need stronger lungs. Or they say like I'm working out my lungs. Or they actually think that the lungs are a muscle. And you know, it's not your fault if you think that because usually when you see an image for respiration, for breathing, you only have the little lungs. You have those like, you know, have some clip art of little lungs. You never show the diaphragm or if you do, it's just a little line. So your lungs are pretty much like slabs of cake. So if you were to make like a little slab of cake, that's your lung, it does nothing on its own, Nothing. So what happens is that it's in your thoracic cavity, it's in your rib cage and your rib cage expands with muscles that pull it apart. And now air goes in and that's how it gets into your lungs. And then the rib cage squeezes together if it's working well. And your lungs, the air comes out of your lungs. So that's how you breathe. So your breathing, your ventilating is actually powered by the little muscles that are between your ribs, which are called your intercostals, the diaphragm that's below and all your core muscles. And if those aren't strong, then you're going to get, they're going to fatigue and they're actually going to take up more oxygen than you want them to.

How so how do they take up more?

So what happens is that there's priority. So your muscles have, it's called blood stealing, is that your breathing muscles take priority. So think about when you're doing your sport and your arms and legs start feeling heavy. That's the blood deciding. I'm going to go more towards the breathing muscles, not the extremities, because these muscles need them more. And you know that a muscle that's not worked out, that's not strong, needs more oxygen. So if you actually work out your breathing muscles, they need less oxygen, which means you have more oxygen for your extremities. So if you have a sport. I was just working with someone the other day who is an Olympic sailor. So it's a team of two women and they have a boat and They're Olympic athletes. And I thought, you know, when she first called me, I thought, oh, well, sailing, you know, you think of, you know, someone in a cute white outfit in a drink on a boat, a.

Little sailor cap and a martini involved.

And usually a scarf. But no, it wasn't that way at all. So these two rock star women who are again in the Olympics sailing, bound from one side of the ship to the other while it's moving, pump the boat, which is something you do when you hang off the side. They go very quickly. There's other people that are also doing the same thing and often may yell at each other. It's a very, it's a much more aggressive sport than you'd think. And then in the middle of all that, they have to do a lot of things that are fine motor. So here's where it gets really kind of mind blowing, is that you understand the large movements, okay? So you're, you're jumping from one side to the other, you're holding things. But now in the middle of all this, you have to get something really tiny and put it into and pull really fine motor skills. So think about for them is that if their breathing muscles aren't strong, all of a sudden, you don't have the blood to your fingers. You don't have the fine motor coordination that you need. And that happens, you know, all the time in other sports that might need fine motor. Or you, if you need fine motor in your daily life and your breathing muscles aren't strong. So, you know, pretty fascinating when you start going down that sports science trek. Wow.

I'm thinking about the intercostals, this musculature I think I even saw on your Instagram a while back, you had a cadaver and it almost looked like it was honeycomb material. Like people forget, like the muscle spindles they get fed blood and nutrients. Everything we eat actually can impact our breathing. I think about a guy that I used to follow a long time ago. His name was Robert Yang. And he talked about when we eat the right foods, we can actually breathe better because we're less inflamed, there's less histamine. Do you follow a certain diet or do you recommend to athletes and people you work with, like sweet certain foods for optimal breathing?

You know what? There are so many great people out there that know nutrition well, that I am smart enough to know when I don't. You know, I'm not an expert at something to send it out to people that are amazing, amazing at that, because I don't think enough people do that is that I can't be everything. So I'm not even going to pretend with nutrition because it's such a complicated and, you know, interesting and complicated theme. So I do. I'll do basics. But for instance, I will talk about digestion and why the diaphragm is important in digestion. So I'll sort of keep it to things I know. And I can tell you that you remember that little hand motion that you made before, right. Is that your gut sort of pumps and it needs the massage of the diaphragm that's above it. So it's called peristalsis. It's this wave, like motion of digestion. And if your diaphragm is working well, it flattens out and it pushes all these organs. It really does massage your digestive organs. Right. If you are a horizontal breather. Now, if you're a vertical breather, what's your diaphragm doing to your intestine?

Nothing.

Exactly. Absolutely nothing. So if you're breathing, and I need you to imagine that this is a body right here, here's the diaphragm. If this is not massaging your organs, you're breathing from the top of your lungs, which are here. This is not getting massaged. So what happens? Irritable bowel constipation, acid reflux. But seldom will you have a doctor who will actually know who to send their patient to to learn how to breathe diaphragmatically. Often they will say, you need to learn how to breathe diaphragmatically. And the person will say, but I do.

Right. And you watch their whole body rise up and drop.

Their whole bodies go up and drop. So, yeah.

Well, I love this because in your book, there's subtle cues and awareness practices that you can have people go through whether they're an athlete or not. One thing that I love, and I'm curious how you feel about this, is foam rolling with a soft foam roller, you know, massaging the internal organs and just actually opening up the stomach area and the diaphragm and the solar plexus before doing any breathing. If somebody's super bound up, do you recommend that they use the right kind of tension foam roller to just release the front panel a little bit?

So I don't. And I'll tell you why is because to be able to release the muscles that we need for breathing, we have to do it from the inside out. It can't be from the outside in. So that's why. Let's take a Particular exercise, and one having to do with intercostals is that I remember. So first think about your intercostals. If you eat ribs or if you know someone who eats rib meat, is that the intercostals are actually rib meat. So between every single ribbon, you have muscle. So you have internal intercostals and external intercostals. The external pulls the rib open, the internal pulls it closed. I know you know this. So what happens is, because we're so tight, is that these muscles now tighten up and they don't move, so you don't have flexibility in your thoracic cavity. Okay. And if you take a foam roller and put it on from the outside, well, that's not really doing very much to the internal intercostal. So what I want you to do is inhale. So you're taking that compartment that is your thoracic cavity. Inhaling. Now stretch it. Now you're stretching all those muscles on the inside. So it's more about taking a breath and then being able to stretch your body to get those muscles to let go. Because with a lot of us, it's not that we need to compress ourselves more. Some people do, though. Some people. I will go back to this in a second. But a lot of it is inhaling and then stretching because you want things to stretch from the inside out.

That's so powerful. I'm thinking about, like a upward dog or certain positions in yoga that has people doing breathing while being in an open, extended position. Is that what you're talking about for increasing that area?

Yes. So, for instance, with the intercostal stretch, and I'm actually going to ask you to do this right now. You might mess up your hair, but I want you to put your bicep on your ear, okay? So make sure it stays on your ear. Your forearms on the top of your head. Take your hand and turn it up towards the ceiling. And the reason I do that is because often folks are down here, their elbow is this way, and I actually want it going up towards the ceiling. Now you're going to inhale and push your side open. So I almost want you to take your ribs at and push them open on the side. And now when you exhale, squeeze and try to bring your ribs back into your body. Okay, Try that again. Inhale, push your ribs open, and really push your side as if it's going into the middle of the room. And take that bicep, put it back on your ear. Aha, Shigami. Exhale, come up. And now squeeze. Circumferentially so that's you really stretching out very important breathing muscles from the inside out. So I said that there are times when I would use. I really like the courageous ball that Jill Miller has because it's. It's kind of a. Has this tacky outside that you can kind of grip your skin. Is that if I have someone who's not a good exhaler, you have to teach your body to exhale. So most people will say, well, I don't even feel. I don't even have a sensation of muscle on my rib cage. And you have to get your body to feel the ribs and feel the muscles there. And I'll have them lean on the ball and have the ball push their ribs into their body on the exhale so they can start having the sensation of exhale is narrow.

That is so powerful. I noticed my arm going away from my head. Why do you think that was?

You're tight.

I'm tight. I've been sitting with you on this podcast.

Exactly.

I love this because everybody can do that exercise at home. There's so many exercise in breathing for warriors. This is not just for the athletes. I want to say it again. How many years have you been practicing the breath with people? It's been over two decades now.

Yeah, exactly. It's about one and a half. Yeah. One and a half decades.

One and a half decades. So in this time, I'm sure you've seen so many people get their lives transformed by the breath. We covered so much ground in this conversation. We have to have you back again. Like, I just really love your soul. I love your personality. I love your art. I love this art of breathing that you teach. If we look at all the things we've talked about, you know, we talked about the inhales and the exhales, the traumatic release, the catharsis, the biology of breathing. You talked about the skirt steak with the breath going up and down. So much value in this podcast for people that are interested in the breath transforming their life.

Life.

What did we miss? What ground can we talk about before we say goodbye here?

Oh, you know what? I can tell you what we'll talk about next time.

What's that?

So we'll talk about kids and why the breath changes. We can talk about the pelvic floor and how that's related to breathing. Yeah, those two are pretty hot ones. And then we can always talk about different sports. And it can be any sport from, hey, my son plays football to I play golf to billiards to all the different sports I run, mini marathon, any sport you want to, or tactical combat sports as well. You know, I'm a firefighter. My husband's a firefighter. Yeah, there's all kinds of good stuff.

Amazing. Well, it's thebreathingclass.com for people that actually want to learn it. Breathing for warriors is the book. We covered a lot of physical aspects. We also talked about the emotional component of breath. But I do believe that in the nexus of wellness, there is the spiritual component. Do you have a connection to somewhat of a higher power, however you want to define it?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, love. It's love. You know, it's pretty simple.

That is pretty simple. Simple does not always mean easy, right? We're in this time right now, where just because we know that love is all there is and love is most important, we're challenged. We're challenged as a society, as men and women, as human beings. Do you have any parting guidance on how the breath can allow us to love more?

Letting yourself expand and inhale means you're going to be able to connect better. And being able to exhale and really exhale well means you're going to be able to let go of things and forgive. And we all need to be more intuitive, more creative, more flexible, and more forgiving. And the breath can give you that.

I'm thinking about, like, inhaling the stress and then exhaling, squeezing it out, letting it go.

Exactly.

Like, literally almost visualize the little particles of blackness, like, coming out of my mouth, like I'm letting go of the stress. But first, and most importantly, we have to breathe it in to know that it's there. Otherwise, it's just running in the background. We're not ever breathing in or breathing out. Last question for you, Dr. Belleza. I think about the wellness component in all of our lives. And I shared with you before we started this podcast, like, 10 years of fitness, I realized that everybody just wanted to be. Well, everybody wanted wellness. How would you define that? You know, what does wellness mean to you? What's your definition of wellness?

It's when your body is completely in sync. So, for instance, I posted something a while ago, which is that the breath is the mind, body, connection. And if we can stop compartmentalizing things, so much is that wellness has to do with your body being happy, but also your brain being happy. Thankfully, we're talking a lot more about mental health this year, so that everything be in sync. And I think that's why I love the breath so much, because your heart is in the middle Your diaphragm is right below your heart. Your lungs are massaging your heart, and right below it is your second brain. So the whole system is coordinated when you can start breathing well.

So profoundly put. I love your wisdom. I love the real gems, the gifts that you've given us today. So thank you for coming on the show. Where can people connect with you besides thebreathingclass.com how do they reach out to you? How do they get to know you more online?

Sure. Instagram. Although I'm trying to not go on it as much as I do, but Instagram is my name, Dr. Belisa. And Facebook. I'm up on Facebook as well. And thebreathingclass.com and I do answer questions all the time. I do a teacher training as well because I can't do all this work myself.

Yeah.

I need people to teach as well. And like I said, I may not answer immediately, but I do answer everyone, so please reach out.

Well, deep breath. Thank you for coming on the show, and thank you for all the ways that you've just followed your heart. Heart's calling. You know, you said before we recorded, like I love. I'm most grateful for this work. I'm most grateful for what I do. It's. It's. It radiates from you. And if we can all learn to breathe more, we can choose more. And when we choose more, we can come from that place of love. So thanks for coming on the show.

Thank you, Sam.