Episode 12: Pushing Prana - The man behind SOMA breathwork with Niraj Naik

Ha. Sitting down with my new friend Niraj Naik today from Soma Breathwork. And he has quite the story that he's going to share with us. Starting as pharmacist, becoming the renegade pharmacist, and now the co founder of Soma Breathwork. As Niraj and I have been hanging out the last couple weeks, getting to know each other, we've discovered that we have a lot in common. Going back to our old nightlife days. So we've, you know, now that we kind of got to know each other on a deeper level, I can see there's a lot of parallels between your life and your journey and what brought you to Ibiza and, and mine as well. So I'm looking forward to having you share your journey and just telling us about, you know, way, way back, you know. Well, I guess maybe a good place to start is.

Yeah.

So you're also a music producer and you come from the events background, having, having hosted raves and drum and bass parties back in the day. So why don't we start there? I think that's a fun place to begin.

Yeah, yeah. So when I was about 14, 15, my dad bought me a keyboard the first time and I figured out like playing around with it that you can make loops. So I started making little loops and riffs. And then I got into all this underground hardcore, old school hardcore music, like jungle drum and bass and all this stuff. So I started to like emulate that. And so I was really into making music quite a young age. And then the whole DJ thing started to take off and. But I didn't want to dj. I wanted to play live. I wanted to play like live with my little band that was forming. But you couldn't get gigs in London. This was in, in the uk, near London.

Okay.

But you couldn't get gigs very easy. It was a very like mafia type thing where you, you have to be super cool to get a gig at, you know, the clubs and parties. So I was, I'm just gonna throw my own parties. So me and a few friends, like in order to get gigs, we put on our own parties. And then that eventually led to a 2,000 people rave for like three years, drum and bass night called Bass Heads. And it was, it was amazing, like amazing experience. First business, you know, that I had. But through that hedonistic lifestyle, you know, there's a lot of late nights, a lot of partying, a lot of wild, crazy experiences. I had a bit of a burnout and I also made a few bad mistakes, business wise. Trusting the wrong people. And then also there was a shooting event that happened at one of the events, not my event, but another one at the club because this UK garage music would attract quite a dodgy crowd. So that ended up getting the club shut down and I had to salvage the night. I had to move it either to another venue or find something else. So I was also doing my finals in pharmacy at the same time. I had no intention to be a pharmacist, but it was something to fall back on. But I ended up under a bit of pressure from my parents because they're very academic, going and finishing my pharmacy degree. And in that time it became too late to salvage his event. Things moved very quickly in the club world, as you know, so that kind of made me fall out as well with my partner at the time who couldn't understand why I'd want to go and finish pharmacy. But you know, academics is very, very important in Indian families. So I couldn't do anything like sack off my degree. So, so I just went and ended up becoming a pharmacist. Seven years I worked in community pharmacy, but this is where I actually got a taste of my own medicine. So I knew for a long time working as a pharmacist, there's something really wrong with the system because you see people going away, literally shopping bags full of drugs every day and most people just don't seem to be getting better. Right. So it just didn't make sense. I was like, I don't feel like we're actually in the healthcare business. We're more like we're in the maintain the sickness business. So I was just devoid of any kind of job satisfaction and I tried many different ways to get out of this job. I was working, I actually got in the music industry and I was working with quite a high profile music manager at one point and doing that on the side and doing all these different things to try and get out. I, I went back into making music, but nothing was working. And I kept getting pushed towards what I'm doing now. Actually, in a funny way, life just kept pushing me towards what I'm doing now. So what happened was I ended up going to, after becoming really depressed, a Tony Robbins event. And that's the first time I heard anybody talk about health, diet, nutrition, things like that.

I was like, wow, and you're a pharmacist?

Yeah.

Working in medical health.

Exactly. And like we don't get any of this knowledge at all. So also that makes you skeptical. It's like, well, why aren't we learning this stuff, maybe he's full of. So I was like, okay, I've got pharmacy full of sick patients. If what he's telling me is true, then I can put it to test pretty quickly, right? So that's what I did. So I devised my own method and this is where it started to become more fun of giving health information to the patients who are willing to do it in the quickest way possible. So you literally have like two or three minutes with a patient. That's all because it's like a conveyor belt factory machine of just dishing out pills all day long. So with the two or three minutes I had, I had to really quickly give inspiration, education and motivation. So I came up with a system of giving people healthy shopping lists based on the conditions. And literally those who took my advice, who went to the grocery store, bought the things I recommended, had a massive impact in their health. So, you know, a lot of people take a lot of medications. So I'll just simply say, do you really want to be taking all these medications? Most people don't want to because they're on, they're getting side effects. So I'm like, well, have a think about this. You have a car, right? And if you put the wrong fuel into the car, like a diesel into a petrol, petrol into diesel, what happens? Has that ever happened to you? They're like, yeah, I've done it before. I made that mistake. I'm like, so how's it feel? Right? And they're like, oh yeah, the car breaks down or you, it chugs along or you have to go and get mechanic and you have to clean the engine out. So I'm like, well, think of yourself as a super efficient bio engine and you've been putting the wrong fuel into your engine all this time and that's why you're on this list of medications. So that would like wake them up a bit. So I say, well, do you want to. Do you know what the right fuel is? They're like, yeah, yeah, tell me. So I would say it's very simple. It's a no factory diet. So what I do is I'd ask them to list what do they normally eat on a given day. And you'd be shocked that from the people I spoke to who were on loads of pills, 80% of what they consumed in a day was processed, came in a packet with ingredients they couldn't pronounce. So I said to them, a very simple thing, no factory diet. From now on, we're going to create a Recipe so that you can replace the foods that you normally make in a microwave with actual real foods. Right? So you're gonna have the same food, it's just you're gonna make it yourself, give it a go for a week. So like, oh my God, I can't make my food. And I'm like, yes, you can. Is a video. YouTube was just starting then actually YouTube was kind of getting popular and I was like, every recipe you can think of that's healthy is on here. So just use watch YouTube videos. So I sent him some links and quick, like very quickly actually, people started to get transformations. Within a week, two weeks, people are coming off all their meds. Some of them like, some of them had like just a reduction of what they needed to take. Diabetic patients, type 2 were coming off their meds. I was like, wow, this is incredible. So I even had doctors calling me up going like, you know, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm just telling them to eat normal food. What?

Really?

Wow. I was like, yeah. And they're like, keep doing it, keep doing this, it's great. So, yeah. So eventually this got me promoted to the head office of one of the biggest supermarket chains in the uk and they were quite excited about this healthy shopping, this concept I created. And we're going to make a website where people could create their own lifestyle plans and all this. And it was going to be amazing. But six months into it, for some reason they, they cancelled the idea. I couldn't understand why. Very little explanation. It seemed like shenanigans. So that's. I was. Well, first I was so internally frustrated and angry, like I couldn't understand why would they not allow this information to reach the masses? Right.

So as you reflect on that experience, why do you think they didn't want that information to reach the master?

Well, it's quite obvious. I don't want to say it, but there is a. There's profit to be made by selling junk food. And most of these big supermarket chains, they don't make their money off the real foods, they make their money off the fake foods.

And there's also a lot of profit in people buying pharmaceutical medication.

Exactly, yes.

Because sick people are profitable.

Very profitable.

Yeah.

Yes. So, yeah, so, you know, it wasn't going to work with this big brand, you know, so I was siding with the wrong brand, basically, you know, the wrong values. Big corporate companies, machines, they have a psychopathic tendency because they're so profit driven. They treat human beings as numbers, digits that they can make Money out of. So with that said, the values morality goes. And a lot of people have this uniform syndrome where they can put on a uniform and forget about ethics, morality, and all these things, because they're just doing their job. And as soon as they go home, they start becoming activists, right? They start, you know, having this belief and this belief and this value and this. But as soon as they get to work, well, that's forgotten. And they're still pushing, you know, whatever they need to. To. To make money. So this is the way of the world. You know, there's a lot of people suffer from this uniform syndrome. And I realized that me wearing that farmer's uniform was. It just wasn't my values, wasn't my integrity. And that. That job dissatisfaction was really what was making me sick. And it took its toll one day, and boom, I had the symptoms of ulcerative colitis, which horrible disease that you basically get colons in your ulcers in your colon. And I was shitting blood then for almost a year. Well, yeah, yeah. 40 times a day you're going to the toilet. 40, 50 times a day. It's horrible. So I'd lost like a third of body weight. I remember speaking to the consultant, who's this huge, obese, overweight lady, and I asked her, like, because I had that experience in the pharmacy, what about diet, right? Nope. No evidence about diet. What about stress? I knew that stress was a big deal for a lot of patients. No, just shut up and take the pills. No evidence of stress or diet impacts this disease. I was like, okay. So I kind of. I was like, actually I had lost faith in humanity. So I was okay with, like, if I died, it was okay. Like, I just surrendered to the medical system. And I was so weak and so depressed until, well, they say. So there was one point where it was like a judgment day where she gave me two options, like, either be a guinea pig for drug hasn't been tested before, or you have your colon removed, right? So that was the lowest point. And luckily, at that point, somebody came. They say God stands for gift of desperation, but somebody came to the rescue. Swamiyamkananda, a yoga teacher in the uk. She runs an amazing traditional yoga school. And she said to me, look, you've got a gift here. If you can reverse this with your tenacity and passion, you could be an amazing role model. And she gave me that ray of hope and said, look, I can't guarantee anything, but, you know, there's some techniques you can try. So she taught me the foundations of Pranayama traditional yoga, which is very different to mainstream yoga that you see today, which is very wrong, actually, the way they teach things. And we can talk about why in a bit, but. So I took the basic breathing techniques she taught me from Pranayama, and I got such relief from that that it just woke me up and made me realize there's so much more to healing than I thought. It's way beyond diet. And actually the most important thing actually is the breath. The breath is it. It's all in the breathing. We've been breathing wrong. So. So I went down this rabbit hole of research and within a few months, after creating my own little protocol based on these practices, I healed myself completely. Blew everyone's minds that doctors couldn't understand.

They were like shocked by practicing this breath work.

Yeah. Breathing techniques, Ayurvedic lifestyle adjustments, certain supplements I discovered, but all based on the ayurvedic traditional yoga system. Everything natural, nothing artificial at all, and most of it is just breathing control. So that led me to then and going back to my passion for music. I'm gonna put this back. So actually, music was a big catalyst for me because I came from the rave world, right. The rave scene, which is full on hedonistic. Okay. The music has moments where it really brings people together. People celebrate life and it's like everyone's going to this holy communion with something beyond themselves and it's amazing celebration. So I love that aspect of it. But there was also a lot of angry, depressed, militant music coming out at that time, which I was also into. But that actually can have negative consequences physiologically. They've done studies on music is very angry and violent and very noisy. Can actually just that have a negative effect. Cortisol levels. Yeah. Whereas more pleasing, pleasant, well produced harmonic music that has harmony and melody to it, that touches the soul, that can increase dhea, longevity hormone, you know, natural serotonin, dopamine boosts, and it can balance and control blood pressure. Right. Like harmonize your physiology. So I'd kind of fallen out of love with that type of music. And also then through the working within the mainstream music industry, I realized how corrupted music had become. Right. In terms of, like, the way it creates a culture. Right. You know, you can see how music creates cultures, for sure. And a big part of why I think society had started to break down and devolve was the type of music that was being pushed by the mainstream record labels, like gangster, ghetto rap, UK garage, which attracted this crazy crowd that created a shooting event. That stuff never used to happen in clubs. People used to go party and celebrate, not like go and shoot each other. That was just not existing. But that music stood for that, it was a symbol of that. So when I started to research about all these healing techniques, I realized in the Vedic system, which Ayurveda is one of the components, there is an entire book dedicated to music. Right. And the healing power of music. And that ragas and certain Indian riffs and melodies actually invoke healing responses of the body just with the melodies and notes. So I started to compose a whole new style of music. And the other thing I discovered was brainwave entrainment music which actually at that time was not very well produced. So. So if.

Is that like binaural beat?

Yeah. So what it can do is it changes your brainwave state to make it more lower brainwave states. So you can, you can control delta or theta, you can program your unconscious mind in those states. Right. It's like hypnosis, self hypnosis. So you can use music to get into these trance states, these very soothing, receptive, you know, self reflective trance states. So with the music at that time, it wasn't very good and I couldn't bear listening to that stuff. So I was like, I'm going to make my own music like this. So I made my own, I started to make my own and it was actually pretty cool. So I was like, okay. And I found this kid actually in California who made his amazing Tibetan tantric breath based meditations and stuff as well. So mantras. So he was like a 17 year old kid but he had like 10 million views already on YouTube. Right. He had a huge following but he was like a, like a child prodigy. And so I reached out to him, I was like, you know, do you want to collaborate? You do the voice and I'll put the music behind your tracks. So I actually did and that became our first little project. I started uploading my tracks with his voice on that started taking off and I got a bit of a following. One thing led to another. I ended up with a music therapy business, a meditation music site. This was like in 2012. And then I started attracting like some pretty successful therapists. I, Marisa Peer started using my music and this allowed me this to have automated income. So it became a digital nomad without realizing it. So that allowed me to travel and have free time. So I started to explore and I'd made a pact to myself that I'm going to put science to all this stuff. I'm going to do whatever I can to validate this because still at this time, all the doctors, all the pharmacists, all the my mum's friends and our relatives were so skeptical. They were all like saying things like, oh, it's going to come back, it's just a fluke, it's going to come back. So I was alright, I'm going to prove you wrong that this disease won't come back. And by, in order to do that, I had to have the science. So through all this crazy adventures, I went on living with tantricas in Koh Phangan and then eventually me and Wim Hof, the superhuman amazing guru, we hit it off and I ended up making the soundtracks of the Wim Hof method. And he had some good science behind what he was doing. So and he had the physical like proof of what's possible. Right. So he had it more in terms of peak performance. I had it through the healing, but I hadn't validated it myself. So it was when I then discovered after whim I met this guy called. So back in 2011 I discovered a research paper and it was by this guy. Prakash Marshall is a doctor, Himalayan doctor, and he has a clinic where he does yoga and traditional like, well, modern medicine combined, like he uses that as an emergency. The majority of the healing is done through yoga pranayama techniques. And he'd written this paper about this revered breathing technique called Nishesa ra chak or Nishes ra chak, which is what it means is to hold your breath to maximum effort after full exhale. And he decoded as yoga sutras and realized actually that yoga and pranayama is a system of breath control techniques with a strong emphasis on breath retention and breath holding in order to normalize the balances of gases in the body of oxygen, CO2, nitric oxide. And through this you can become extremely efficient at using oxygen. And what that does, the net effect of this is it slows your breathing rate down, increases your breath hold time, which are two measures of your quality of health. And people who live a long time tend to breathe slower, have a reduced need to breathe, reduced depth of breath. The breath tends to be silent. Right. And they can hold their breath for long periods of time, way beyond average. Like Wim Hof, for example, you can hold his breath like eight minutes.

Wow.

So yeah.

And what would be the average person's breath hold retention for somebody who doesn't do breath work? What would that normally be like?

So it depends on if you do any breathing beforehand. So there's ways to Hack it. Sure. Which are so to talk to you about. But on the whole, we use the breath hold time test, actually, which you do first thing in the morning. Right. And you measure it before you've done any techniques. You just sit comfortably. When you wake up, within the first 10 minutes, you just bring your breath to normal, relaxed breath. You don't. Don't do any kind of intense technique before anything. Don't manipulate. Just. Just be relaxed. You take a normal inhale, normal exhale, hold your nose, and then you time how long you can hold your breath to the first sign of stress. So distress, where you're feeling like an urge to breathe. When you get to that point, it shouldn't be your first urge to breathe. It usually is the second or third where you feel in the stress that you can't hold it any longer. And then you measure that time and you know you've held it the right time as long as when you take an inhale, you're not gasping for air. If you're gasping for air, you held it too long.

Okay.

So you got to do it before that point. And that gives you a scale. Right. Of. And what it measures is your body tissue oxygenation levels, measures your capacity in your body for oxygen, measures your myoglobin, creatinine levels of your muscle tissues. It measures your CO2 tolerance as well as your capacity to handle CO2. And basically it's an overall measure of your health. So. So there's a scale. Most people on average, hold their breath 20 to 40 seconds.

Okay, well, right, that's not very long.

Yeah. So if you can hold it 40 seconds and above, then you're at that yogic levels, you know. So when I say Wim holds it for eight minutes.

Yeah. That's.

He'll be manipulating it first, which we can do as well. But the normal test should be done the morning breath all time with no manipulation beforehand. And if it's below 20 seconds, like 15 to 20 seconds, it usually is sign you're unfit. You need to do a bit of exercise, you know, take care of your lifestyle, and you can fix it. But if it starts becoming less than 15 seconds, then there's something wrong with you physiologically. You might need to have a look at that. You know, it might be some disease you're trying to fight, you know, but less than 10 seconds, around 5 seconds actually, is that person's probably gonna have a heart attack and die.

Wow.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Most people who are on their deathbed breathe like they're just panting, pantsing and, yeah, their breath becomes very weak. Mouth. They usually breathe their mouth and into the chest, upper chest, and that's a sign that they're on their way out, near death. Yeah, yeah. So. So the entire system of what we do, okay, is all about correcting your breathing, your default state, okay, to being one where your breath is silent, right? Subtle, smooth and slow, all right? That's the foundations of a healthy breath. So this is when you're not doing anything, like right now, where you're just chilling, right? This is what your quality should be. And then also, it should be relaxed, it should be rhythmic, and it should be in your diaphragm, okay?

And that's the problem. Most people breathe into their chest, they're not filling up their belly.

Yeah. And so. So the breath can be a measure of your overall health, okay. Because your breath is the first thing that goes wrong, right, when you're unhealthy. So you think about this. You can go without food for a few weeks, you can go without water for a few days, but breath oxygen, you can only go without for a few minutes. But we give it the least importance when it's actually the first thing that goes wrong. So you can actually, just by observing someone, how they breathe, you can tell a lot about their state of health and their state of mind, because your mind is also very linked to your breathing, right? So and your breathing kind of influence the mind. So somebody has very still, calm, clear thoughts. They will present that kind of breathing that I told you, right? But somebody who's got an erratic, very busy mind that's full of thoughts, racing thoughts, they're going to have erratic breathing that matches those thoughts, right? But somebody who has very calm, harmonic, pleasant, clear thoughts will have a breath that reflects that. So it will be rhythmic, it will be subtle. It wouldn't really look like you're breathing. They'll be at ease, at peace, hardly breathing at all. And so the reason why this is important as well is humans have an ongoing battle against oxygen, right? So there's the father of oxidative stress, a guy called Helmut sees, right? And he studied all the redox chemistry and all this stuff and coined that kind of phrase of oxidative stress, which you might have heard about. So oxidative stress is basically the problem of oxygen reacting with things, and it kind of combusts things, right? So oxygen is highly reactive, so it causes things to burn, right? You know, like a fire, a forest fire, it takes off and goes wild when there's a lot of oxygen blowing into that Fire, right? So the oxygen is required to make the engine like, drive, right? So but the problem with that is that it can also cause things to over react, right? It can cause corrosion and rusting. You've seen a metal rusting like your car. If you leave it out, the oxygen causes it to rust, right? So same thing can go on internally. We have a lot of metals in our system and iron, right, Hemoglobin, So we get this internal rusting effect. And oxygen actually causes blood vessels to narrow and constrict. CO2, on the other hand, the other gas that we're familiar with causes blood vessels to dilate. All right? Now, Helmut C. Said that although it's very difficult to live without oxygen, it's also very difficult to live with oxygen because of this problem, oxidous stress. So that's why we need antioxidants. So we tend to get antioxidants in our diets, okay? But we actually produce the most potent antioxidant of all. We produce it two of them. There's two of them which are the most potent of all. First one we're quite familiar with, melatonin. Produce it when we're going to go to sleep, usually when the lights go down, start producing melatonin, extremely potent antioxidant. In fact, there's many studies now showing that melatonin supplements can help with even fighting quite a variety of cancers. And cancers is quite often an issue of oxidative stress causing mutations in cells. Right. So then the other one is nitric oxide. And nitric oxide is integral to the whole process of producing energy in the body. Nitric oxide is only produced through nasal breathing, but it's also produced reduced breathing when you reduce breathing or hold your breath at certain points, when you raise the CO2 levels high enough and you create a slight deficit in oxygen, you produce nitric oxide, sulfates, sulfurase, which is the enzyme that will turn, will basically lead to the production of nitric oxide. Right? So nitric oxide is antiviral, antimicrobial, antibacterial. It's an antioxidant. It's vasodilator, bronchodilator, dilates and relaxes all your blood vessels. It's amazing. It's magic. Right? And we produce on command when we nasal breathe and when we hum. If we go. If we hum, yeah. Aum. If you chant aum. Right, right.

Is it also called the Brahmani? Brahmani.

Brahmariyama, yeah. So you can do that as well. So that produces as well. So if you look at yoga. Many of the yoga techniques, they work with slowing your breathing down, making it more subtle, diaphragmatic, right? And working with asanas and different breath control techniques to modulate these gases. Raising CO2, CO2 is essential because without CO2, you can't get oxygen to where it needs to go. That CO2 is the prana in Pranayama, actually, right? By raising CO2, you actually increase oxygenation of your body tissue cells. We have been told that CO2 is a toxic gas. They must be got rid of at all costs. Actually, it's bullshit. CO2 is our friend and we need to look after our CO2 levels, okay? So CO2, nitric oxide also works with helping oxygen go to where it needs to go off your red blood cells to your actual body tissue cells. And then the thing is that most disease, chronic disease, inflammatory disease, cancers are the result of low body tissue oxygenation. So when you modulate these gases and you become very efficient learning how to use them, you can actually oxygenate very efficiently your body tissue cells, and then that prevents disease from happening. So we actually have our own pharmacy, right? We can make all of the things that we use drugs to manipulate, right, that we find in nature that we turn into pills, right? We can actually produce a lot of this stuff ourselves. So we can actually switch off stress, we can lower our blood pressure, we can turn on parasympathetic nervous system, we can turn on sympathetic nervous system, we can raise dopamine levels on command, we can increase serotonin, oxytocin, we can make our own endorphins, we can increase our antioxidants and vasodilators, bronchodilators, all through very simple breathing techniques. And there's this one thing. If you just did this one thing every morning, you would prevent a lot of health problems. It's a very simple thing. If you just had a few principles, I'll give you some now. You can prevent and reverse majority of like, health issues. And then you can start thinking about your diet, your food, your lifestyle, exercise. But first, just focus on the breath. Once you saw that and you become a believer of the breath, then you'll be like more keen to explore other things, you know. So the principles of this, right, so your breath, if you, if you think of this five values, okay, that you want to put into a simple routine that you can do, even if it's just 5, 10 minutes in the morning, every single day, make a big impact. That is, first you want to decrease the amount of air coming into your System.

Okay, Right. So is that what would you do.

That through breath holds or so decrease. Could be through simply using your nose instead of your mouth.

Okay.

So when you breathe through your mouth, you get large volumes of air coming in. System, when you breathe through your nose, you get a much smaller volume because it's much smaller. So your nose is what's you're supposed to breathe through. Okay. And nasal breathing, also, it produces nitric oxide, as I said, but it also conditions the air for absorption. And if you like, I'll show you do a little test here. I want you to breathe like we're gonna hyperventilate.

Okay.

We're gonna go like this for like 30 seconds. All right.

Just for the.

Yeah.

Okay.

We'll just in and out for your mouth. Five, four, three, two, one. All right, stop. How do you feel?

Lightheaded.

Feel lightheaded. Right. So the reason why you're feeling lightheaded spaced out. Right. That's. That's not a good state to be in if you want to get stuff done. Right?

Yeah.

So what's going on there? You're increasing the volume of air considerably. Okay. So usually we breathe in in a minute, around six liters of air. That's like average, normal amount of air we should breathe in, right? About six liters of it. What you just did, using your mouth and hyperventilating like that, you probably breathed in around 30 to 40 liters.

Okay.

Right. But what you're doing, actually, you're breathing out the CO2.

Okay.

So you don't really affect oxygen levels much. Just a little of air will fully saturate you with oxygen. What you're really doing when you hyperventilate like that is you're letting go of CO2. CO2 is this amazing gas that's essential for actually oxygenation. Without the CO2, you can't get oxygen off your blood cells into the body tissue cells. So that's why you feel lightheaded there, because your CO2 is gone, your oxygen going around your blood cells. Right. But it's not getting into your brain. So you're feeling lightheaded. Now, what people are doing unconsciously is they're chronically hyperventilating throughout the day. And it's a mild hyperventilation. So Instead of doing six liters of air a minute, they're now suddenly doing 20, 30. Just by breathing in and out through their mouth, they're not realizing they're doing it. Another thing that can cause that is talking a lot. Okay, so I'm talking a lot I'm even feeling lightheaded. Okay, so if you talk a lot, what you're doing is you're generally doing that without even realizing. Okay, so if you talk a lot, you want to decrease your volume of air, you take in for at least 10 minutes every 30 minutes, you're talking a lot. Right? To recalibrate and balance, that will change your life completely. One of the reasons why people get asthma quite often is because of this. So what the asthma symptoms is, is your natural body symptom trying to narrow your airways to prevent you from over breathing. Okay, do you get it? Is this over breathing hyperventilation that causes all the problems? Because if you get lots of oxygen, but not CO2 because you're hyperventilating, your blood vessels narrow. What does that cause? Hypertension. Hypertension leads to. That's elevated blood pressure, causes injury in the blood vessels. Heart disease. What's the number one killer in the world? Heart attacks. Right. So the number three killer in the world actually is adverse drug reactions. All right, well, number two, let's say, is cancer. Okay, Cancer is caused by poor low body tissue oxygenation. So with this simple thing that I'm telling you, you're preventing heart attacks, you're fixing cancer at the root cause because you're getting oxygenation fully, efficiently. And. And the third thing is adverse drug reactions. So we're stopping people needing to get onto the pills in the first place. Therefore, the three biggest killers in the world, we're going to prevent by this one simple routine that they can do every day or mindful breathing they can do every day. So decreasing the volume. Right now what I want you to do is just see are you still feeling a little bit lightheaded or how do you feel?

I'm feeling back to normal now.

Yeah, because you've just stopped now. You're just breathing through your mouth. Right. So just see how you feel if you just slow your breathing down even more. Because the next D is diaphragmatic. So when you breathe through your nose, you then automatically breathe into the diaphragm pretty much. But bring your awareness to the diaphragm expanding. Right. Because now what we're going to do is we're going to. Yeah, we're going to now make your breath slower. So the depth is going to become slow. And you're going to just do it subtly, slow and subtle into the diaphragm. Your chest shouldn't rise at all. You're going to breathe in for around five seconds, out for around five seconds, And the next quality is a deficit. So I want you to have a slight feeling of air hunger. A slight feeling. So that means you have a slight urge to breathe. Not too much. Alright. And you're just going to try and maintain your breath that rhythm with that slight urge to breathe and just see how you feel from that. Do that for like 30 seconds. All right? How do you feel?

Very relaxed. Very like I was almost like feeling like I could just like doze off right there. Yeah, yeah. Like super, like could be your voice as well. You've got a very soothing, relaxing voice. I'm slowly just like. Yeah, yeah. No, I feel super calm. Calm. Yeah.

You feel a bit more clear headed now.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So slow breathing, man, that, that will get. Now what? You'll feel the effects if you just do that for like five minutes. You'll feel the effects later on. Throughout your rest of the hour or so is you're going to start getting the oxygen back into all the cells that it's been deprived of, right? And then you'll start to feel like you actually have more energy, you have more mental clarity because you're getting oxygen back into the brain. You might feel sleepy because it may be that you need to sleep. You know what I mean? It may be giving you what you actually need and it's de stressing you because we're so full power all the time and our mind's so active that we don't get enough rest sometimes. And your body might be telling you you need to rest a bit. So. So then it gives you ability to even rejuvenate even further, right? So I recommend people do this, right? And we have a breath based track with music where you can time the breath to that for around 10 minutes. You can do it every single morning, right? It's like a guided breath journey, but you're just breathing in a rhythm like that and you can just do that, that you can repeat several times a day. You'll feel your life changes. If you have anything like asthma, that will go away. And if you have like nasal congestion, you try and do what I just said, nasal congestion will go away. But we can also add to this then is the holds. So what we teach people is how to do the holds in a safe way, right? And the holds creates another very important phenomenon which is. This is what I was talking about. Nishesha Rechak. The breath retention after full exhale with maximum effort. Okay? What that does, it creates a state of intermittent hypoxia which is lower than normal oxygen level.

Okay.

So when you take something away from the body for a brief period, it freaks the body out and the body adapts in response to that stress. So if we take away a little bit of oxygen, your body adapts to having less oxygen in the system. So what it does is it becomes more efficient using the oxygen that it's got, so increases reserves of energy in your muscles and other areas of your body. Myoglobin, creatine, phosphate, and other molecules associated with storing oxygen. But then what you do is you get vasoconstriction, dilation. So you get actual like, like more blood flow going to every area because you've taken away oxygen a little bit and you get even more capillaries forming. And if you do the intermittent hypoxia long enough, we're talking 60 to 90 seconds, and you actually create a real state of intermittent hypoxia. You can wake up endogenous stem cells out of the system. Stem cells have the ability to heal, rejuvenate, even grow new tissues, cartilage and reduce inflammation, regenerate. So with the therapeutic protocol and a protocol of giving a dose of intermittent hypoxia in the right way, safe way, and we have tracks and sessions exactly designed for that, you can then actually accelerate your body's ability to becoming very efficient using oxygen. And then dramatically, your morning breath hold time will go up. Just your general feeling of energy, enthusiasm, motivation will go up and you'll release tension and pain from the system and your breathing rate will slow down. And the whole point of all of this, what I'm talking about, the technique I just told you about slow rhythmic breathing and then this intermittent hypoxic technique is to make your default state better. Is. So when you're not doing any techniques, how do you, how do you breathe in that state? Right? So that's the idea is your default state. When you're on your own, you don't need anything, you're not having anything else influence you. What's your default state like? And the whole point of every practice is to make that better. And then once you've got the basics of the breath mastered, it's very simple, as I've just told you. You can then bring in the yoga asana. There's special ways to do yoga with the breath. The diet, lifestyle, very simple, I just say the no factory diet. Chew your food right 30 times at least every spoonful, and know thyself. So know the food that's right for your body, right? And small portions, you don't need a lot. So the Other three principles are consume less, breathe less. Right. And exercise more. And if you have those principles, you, you, you'll live your optimum age. You don't need loads of fancy gadgets. You don't need these things you wear in the morning that freak you out because they told you HRV is not right. Sleep properly. You don't need any of that. You don't need like a whole crate of supplements where you're rattling when you walk. You don't need any of that. You can throw away. Most of this stuff is nuts.

Just from the.

Just have those same principles. Yeah, I mean, this is what I've been teaching people. So simple humans want to complicate everything, make everything complicated. What I've given you is as complicated the science needs to be. It really doesn't need to be any more complicated. So. Because otherwise people don't understand it, they get scared by it. Right? And we give up our power to people who know and understanding, can pronounce long words. That's all they can do more than you. That's all they. That's it. But what I've just given you here is more profound than almost everything I learned in pharmacy school and I studied for six years doing that degree. And just from this, what you just learned in this one interview is more profound than anything I've ever heard.

Wow. Simple, yet very powerful. And a reminder that we have all the tools, all the medicine that we need within us. Like you said earlier, we have a pharmacy within us. And Dr. Joe Dispenza speaks about this a lot. That when we can change our state, when we can slow down our breath, when we can be present, when we can connect to those memories or emotions that stimulate those happy hormones, that we can bring more cohesiveness within the body, more coherence in the body, the mind and the heart, and that's when we're able to heal ourselves. And, you know, to your point about, you know, the pharmacies and just them pumping out pills that have all these side effects, it's like people would rather just take the easy pill, even though taking these pills aren't really that easy most of the time than having the discipline to practice a slow breath a few times a day. Which is unfortunate, but, you know, it takes consistency, it takes the discipline and commitment to and the belief that, yeah, we don't need what the pharmacist is telling us, that we have all the medicine that we need within us. And yeah, that's a beautiful explanation. And, you know, thank you for sharing that because being able to explain the science behind it will also help people to understand that. Oh, okay. So that's how it works. And it's that simple. And it's not a new concept. This is something that's been around for thousands of years. Right. So it's.

Yeah. To make it even more simple, just remember nose, Nitric oxide. No, knows nitric oxide. If all you did, if all you did, if all you took away from this one interview was, from now on, just breathe through your nose. You're gonna, you're gonna dramatically increase your well being and your state of health and longevity just by being a mindful nose breather. And one of the times when we, we actually lose our conscious control is obviously when we're sleeping.

Yeah. So I've heard of mouth taping.

Yeah. So that's one thing you can do is see, see, nasal breathing. So important that if you don't do it even when you sleep, you. And in fact that can be the time that you get the most disruption is if you're mouth breathing in your sleep. And that's if you snore, if you have sleep apnea, things like that.

Yeah, I actually have sleep apnea.

Right. So you, you need to use a tape.

Yeah. So I, I have a CPAP machine and the mask is just to the nose. I can't even open my mouth at night because there's so much pressure going in. The air pressure through my nose is so strong that it creates a vacuum with my mouth. So I can't even open my mouth if I want. So it's. So it's putting oxygen up my nose.

The entire night just focusing on nasal breathing.

That's it. Yeah.

And how do you feel from that?

Well, huge difference between using a CPAP machine and not because before I would sleep eight or nine hours, but wake up feeling groggy, feeling tired. I'd literally fall asleep at my desk in the afternoon. And when I use my CPAP machine often, I can wake up just six to seven hours of sleep without my alarm going off. Like, I actually wake up before my alarm and I wake up and I'm not feeling groggy, I wake up and I'm actually sharp. And it's a night and day difference between, you know, five years ago when I didn't use the CPAP machine to now using it. And I needed to because now that I'm 48, like, you know, as we hit, as we get past our 40s, we need our sleep so much. It's absolutely essential, especially when you're training and working out when we sleep is when our body heals and repairs. And if we don't have that sleep, it's just not going to happen. We're going to have breakdown, we're going to have injuries. Right? Yeah.

So if you do all the things I said about slow, the keeping your default state, mindful breathing into your nose, slow, subtle. You know the, the technique. I showed you the two techniques, you will actually reduce your need to sleep even more and actually can that alone by. During the day taking care of your. Your breath can actually reduce the issues by itself. So what I recommend for a lot of people do is, is to use a mouth tape or a machine like we're talking about, but be really mindful of their breathing all day long and then observe the change. Right. But really just having a tape can solve a lot of people's problems. Putting a tape around the mouth.

And James Nestor talks about that in the book Breath.

Yeah.

The importance of Mouth Taping.

And the other thing is with sleep is if you sleep on your left like this, right. You activate the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the alert, cognitive like part of the mind.

Okay.

So this will mean you have a lighter sleep. If you sleep on the right, you go into a deeper sleep. The right side of the brain, right hemisphere is more dreamy, creative. It's to deal with long term memory and.

Okay, I've never heard that before.

Yes. So that can be a really useful thing.

That's a great hack for sure.

So sleep on the right tape on your mouth, making sure it's not too hot. So when it's too hot, you start sweating and hyperventilating to cool you down and that can make people stop breathing through.

Got it. Yeah. There's a ideal temperature to sleep at. I think it's like something 18 degrees or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I remember one of my ex girlfriends, she liked to keep the room super cold and I could never understand why. And then I started reading up more about it. I think they even talked about that in the book Breath. About keeping the room a certain temperature so that, that you don't start sweating at night. Yeah. So in discovering the Pranayama breathwork techniques, you were able to heal yourself and you were able to discover that, you know, our body and our breath has incredible healing capabilities now. Then you start producing music. Start producing music for Wim Hof. So how or when and how was Soma Breath work born? When. When did that get created?

Yeah, it was out of, it was out of demand.

Okay.

It wasn't like something I set out to do. So. So what I, I got really good at doing was creating these ceremonies, breath ceremonies, with our music and like live music as well. It was epic. Like, like full immersive, psychedelic, almost supernatural experiences with the breath. Because through my experience I realized and talking to Prakash Marsh, that when you get to a breath hold time, a certain breath hold time, you can create the soma within. The soma within is when you hold your breath beyond 6:60 to 90 seconds, you create a burst in dopamine endorphins and then also tryptamines, like endogenous versions of dmt. And this when you do the right sequence of it. And also a combination of like energy locks, like moving the life force energy through the pelvic floor. Right. This is a tantric technique that combined with faster rhythms, faster rhythms of the breath can lead people into this ecstatic bliss state. And in this ecstatic bliss state, the power of visualization intention is amplified. So I firstly in Kopung and just got really into doing these powerful breath experiences for people that brought people together. It was like a rave lying down, but a spiritual rave lying down. So it got so popular that people kept coming up to me asking me like, how do I get certified in what you do? Wow. So I was like, I don't know, never thought about that. And then one thing led to another. In the end I got quite involved with the mindvalley community and I was also working with the HOFS then, but they didn't want to go down that whole spiritual shamanic vibe. And also I wanted to go beyond just one breathing technique. I wanted to expand into a whole pharmacy. And I wanted to teach the system that helped me, which is a much more holistic approach. It's taking into account every factor from health, diet, sleep, to the way you think. And a real true soul path program, like really understanding know thyself, who you are, your truth, and then creating alignment and a strategy for getting what you want. Basically the system I use, from being a burnt out, depressed pharmacist to what I'm doing now, you know, so complete night and day difference. But I wanted to replicate that system for other people they could follow. And it was really like, actually it was like, look, I've been conned by the pharmaceutical industry with this education I spent so long studying. I felt like it's my knowledge I've got. It was a disservice to humanity if I didn't put this information out there in a system that people can replicate. So it went from first having this one experience, this, I call it the Soma Breath Awakening Journeys. From having that to then eventually we create an entire school with full on certification of different degrees and basically the whole holistic pharmacy of breathing techniques with all science. So what happened was I ended up partnering with Prakash Marsh, the one who'd written this amazing research and the one I trained with in the Himalayas. We've got a book coming out soon together.

Oh great.

And I formed the curriculum. So. So the thing with the original summer breath journeys I created, you can go much deeper into them and the experience of ecstasy and bliss and oneness and connection. If you've got your stuff in order, like if you're optimized with your health, your breathing, your food, your lifestyle, you know, yourself, then this experience can go to a whole nother level. Okay, so our system is all about helping people, training people to enter in the most ecstatic, blissful, euphoric Samadhi states. But in order to get there, there's a few simple life changes you need to make. And then, then this experience becomes way more profound. But the result of this, the reward of doing all this is that your energy levels improve, your risk of disease goes down, your well being improves, your relationship to yourself, other people improves, you become attractive, suddenly magnetic. So yeah, so it's like a system of like creating magical results that revolves around this amazing experience that is more fun than going to a raven doing drugs. Right? And it's just breathing to music and doing it with a group, you know, know, it's even better. But a whole lifestyle transformational system of knowing thyself first, creating a customized life plan for yourself so that then you can really enjoy this experience even more.

Got it. And so from what you're sharing, it sounds like, you know, the Soma breathwork training, it doesn't have to be just for people who want to become a breathwork facilitator. Sounds like it's a real holistic program that teaches many different fundamental tools that are going to increase the quality of your life and health.

Yeah, I'm thinking of calling my book Breath Pharma because. Okay, because it really is a. We're pharmacists. Yes, we are. We are like pharma breath. We're dispensing breath.

Might sound weird. Pharma breath.

Breath farming instead of Big Pharma.

Oh, breath.

Okay. So it's like we are the new professional healthcare professionals in my opinion. You know, so, so, you know, there's a serious problem in the world, man. Like if Adverse drug reactions are the number three killer in the world. We've got big problems.

That's crazy. I didn't know that.

Yeah.

And heart attacks being number one. And heart attacks, majority caused by stress.

And if you go into medical bills. Right. You can be bankrupted in America, for example, for sure. So if you get like the wrong illness, it's game over.

And we have the most powerful drug in us, which is our breath.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah, the most powerful. I say drug, but like tool or modality.

Medicine.

Yeah, it's a medicine. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's. Yeah. And thank you for sharing that because, you know, I as, you know, like I'm a breathwork facilitator as well. And I'm always sharing with people, you know, when I start working with a new client. And you know, they tend to be successful guys who are stressed, who are just constantly go, go, go. They don't even give themselves five minutes in the morning to stop, pause and breathe. You know, the first thing I ask them is like, are you doing any breath work? And for most the guys I talk to, they don't even know what breath work is. I think breath works meditation, you know, and oh yeah, I meditate sometimes, but it doesn't work for me. And even a five minute breathwork session, you know, whether it be through an app like Othership or one of your recordings on YouTube or the WIM Hof app is great. You know, even just a five minute breathwork practice will change your day. You do it enough, it'll change your week, change your month, change your life. And it's just five minutes. But, you know, you gotta, you gotta have the intention, of course. And that's why, you know, I'm grateful for what you're sharing because for the skeptics out there, for the guys who maybe, you know, are reluctant to try something new, you know, women are often much more open to exploring holistic modalities. You know, for a lot of the guys, you know, they need science, they need data, they want to know, like the hard numbers, how is this going to work? You know, so what you've shared, definitely I've learned a lot from, you know, the process by what you've shared. And you know, I know that stuff is going to make a difference for people. And you know, if somebody wanted to get into breathwork, they wanted to start practicing this. I know you have a lot of resources online, but where could people go? Like, what would be a good place for people to start if this is something that they want to introduce into their life, but they don't. They just don't know how.

Yeah, great. So breath work has many different styles to it. Right. But one of the big problems I see with breath work is there's a lot of focus on this conscious connected breathing, which is a form of hyperventilation. Right. And then there's these breath schools because, you know, I don't want to say anything bad, but a lot of them are just people who have no scientific understanding of what they're teaching. And, and there's this big problem that I'm seeing is that people are labeling their technique of conscious connected breathing, which is hyperventilation as a panacea and a cure for everything.

Yeah.

And what the problem with that is if you don't give the right context of that method, because that's an advanced yogic practice that you'd use for emotional releases, psychedelic experiences and things like that. But it's like a, that's the most like a drug. Yeah, right. Where you're really manipulating the gases. Hyperventilate. And I've already told you the problem of hyperventilation. But controlled hyperventilation like that can have some benefits, but it can also be harmful. Right. So if you're gonna go to a school, you need somebody really understands that and is responsible with the way they teach it, given the full spectrum of knowledge and techniques as well. So that's why we created a pharmacy. So we do have these conscious connected breathing techniques. We have like the faster rhythms, we have the trauma release practices, all of that, which is what breath work is more famous for, like holotropic rebirthing. Right. However, there's a place for them. It's got to be done in the right context. But what we have is a whole pharmacy. So, you know, if you want to unblock your nose, you can do that. If you want to fix constipation, you can do that. If you've got pain in your head, headache, you can do that. If you've got tension, can release the tension. If you have a chronic disease, you know, you can lower that inflammation, lower that.

So there's breath work for all of you.

So there's a breath work technique for all different situations. Right. But then there's the lifestyle modifications, like because what you eat, overeating, for example, affects your breathing, you know, then there's the exercise, the type of exercise, the Soma breath yoga, which is the traditional yoga with the breath combined, you know, so that leads to much faster results than the modern day yoga where you're going in and basically doing aerobics. Right. And gymnastics. That's not what traditional yoga is about. So what we've built with Soma Breath, which you can find somabreath.com is an entire library and a system and pharmacy of different techniques. Most of them are breath based, but there's lots of other techniques. And then we have very fun, enjoyable practices like the ecstatic dance, the. The Soma Breath journeys I was telling you about. We have like shaking techniques come from tantra, like releasing stress. And so we have the recreational side, which is also healthy and fun. And we have the lifestyle modification side and the breath pharmacy side. So it really is a holistic system. We've even got Cambridge University studying us now.

It's amazing.

So they're doing studies on us, which is fantastic. And so somabreath.com sign up for the masterclass. I go into this a lot deeper there. We also have Summer Breath YouTube channel, where I've got loads of free tracks. We have some Soma Breath journeys. They're like daily doses of interim hypoxia. Okay. So I explain everything there and why we do the technique like that.

Also your Instagram, Instagram, you share a lot of content tips.

I have a tagline for that which is a real A day. A real A day?

Yeah.

Keeps the doctor away. If you go to my Instagram, that's my mission. Nice. A real. Not an apple. An apple a day. That's misleading misinformation. There's no way an apple a day is going to keep the doctor away. Right. So. But a real A day on my site.

Yeah.

On my Instagram will guarantee if you apply what I teach you.

Yeah. That's awesome.

Cool. And that's near Archneck Official or.

Yeah. I'll share it down in the show notes below. Below. So people could check it out. And I'm super excited to do the Soma Breathwork teacher training when I'm back here in May because I want to expand my repertoire of breathwork techniques and. Yeah. Also looking to just discover the different intentions, the different formats and the processes that you use, because we got to. You led us through some breath work in your sauna and in the pool.

Yeah.

Did some cold exposure last weekend and yeah, that was amazing. And to your point about it being a different type of breath work, because most people, when they are introduced to breathwork, it's like the Wim Hof style. It's that holotropic connected breathing. And not everybody wants a deep psychedelic experience, you know, because if you do that and you don't know what the. Where it could take you that could freak you out. And you could be like that breathwork stuff. That's not for me.

And that happens a lot.

And. Yeah. Whereas if it's a slower, more chill, 10, 15 minute breathwork experience that has you feeling energized, has you feeling calm, grounded and clear, I think that's what most people would relate to and want.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And actually I find like quite often that the one. The people who do the. My more slow, rhythmic breathing tracks have more profound effects from that than the really intense stuff. Yeah. Finding now there's a. Because we're as human beings been severely traumatized over the last three years, four years. We've been lied to, we've been cheated, we've been had our freedom stolen away, been isolated, we've been confused. You know, we've been. We've lost trust, faith, censored. So there's a collective trauma going on in the world right now. Right. And so we have a big opportunity which is the unity and opportunities to bring people together. Yeah. So like a lot of people, firstly, they're already very stressed, so they don't want to get more stressed by doing intense, stressful breathing techniques. So we're finding a lot of people coming for that. But also the community, we have this epic high vibe community. People are so supportive of each other. And that's my passion is like when I ran the raves, it was all about bringing people together and celebrating life together. So now we're doing it in a healthy, sustainable way. So that's another beautiful bonus of what we got now is that. And we really do. We like very well known for our slower breath journeys. Like with the music, they're super stress releasing.

Nice.

Which is something that's so important right now is letting go that.

Yeah. And you can do it all through the breath.

Yeah.

So I'm gonna put some links down below to some of the. Some of the tracks that you're talking about on YouTube because I'm sure people watching me super curious to give it a try for themselves. And yeah, you know, I'm excited to continue learning about Soma and spending more time with you when I'm back here in May. You know, I'm grateful for this connection. Our good friend Alex Z, who introduced us and yeah, it was cool because, you know, part of my intention of being at Ibiza is to, you know, to be here to learn to share what I do with other people. And I'm excited to see what. What the future holds for. You're very welcome for us to collaborate together and. Yeah. And see what magic we can make happen here at Cast a Flow as well.

Yes. Cool.

Well, thank you for your time. Thank you for being a part of it. I appreciate it, my man. And, yeah, thank you for sharing your journey. It's a beautiful, inspiring story and just another amazing reminder that we have everything we need inside us. And it all starts with the breath. It's the first thing we do when we arrive here. It's the last thing we do on a way out. We just gotta remember how important it is to pause, take some time and just. Just breathe. Right? That's it. That's it. Tap into that medicine. Yeah.

Good job, brother.

Okay. Thank you, brother.

Peace.

That's it.