Dylan Werner - The Illuminated Breath: How To Harness The Science Of Ancient Yoga Breath Practices To Transform Your Well-Being

Full transcript: Dylan Werner on London Real

2:32 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dylan Werner, the former U.S. Marine author, lecturer, and globally renowned yoga teacher. At the age of 18, you joined the U.S. Marine Corps and spent eight years serving as an aircraft firefighter, including a tour in Iraq.

2:55 You then began studying anatomy and emergency medicine, and worked as a paramedic before discovering yoga as part of your martial arts training. In 2009, you made practicing yoga a fundamental part of your daily routine, and spent the last 13 years helping others in their journey towards a more peaceful, harmonious life by teaching workshops and seminars in over 60 countries. Your new book, The Illuminated Breath, explores breathing techniques to help boost athletic performance, improve sleep, relieve anxiety, and promote relaxation.

3:27 You believe that understanding our physiology and learning to breathe properly can help everyone experience life-changing results and create balance in their life. Dylan, welcome back to London Real. Hey Brian, thank you. It’s good to be back. It’s great to have you. I really enjoyed our conversation last time, and I can’t wait to dive into this.

3:48 Before we get started, I just got to say I am a student, or I need to be more of a student of breathing, because I don’t think I have it figured out. I’m definitely better than I used to, but the more I train, the more I realize that I think my limitations are my breathing, and maybe in life as well. Quick example, I swim once a week, and I’ve been practicing the butterfly stroke, and up until last week, my maximum was like 75 meters, which took me a long time to get to, and I’ve been really concentrating on my breath, Dylan, and my instructor’s been saying, Brian, it’s your breathing, it’s your breathing.

4:24 I’m like, no, it’s because this is hard, and I just busted out 120-meter butterfly, and it was all because I just relaxed and got my breathing right. So regardless of all the other aspects of my life, which we can talk about today, I already know that what you’re going to teach me is going to help today. So really looking forward to talking to you about this stuff. Yeah, that’s amazing. One of the things that I’ve really been focusing on for the past few years is actually how to use a breath to increase your athletic performance.

4:55 It’s a super powerful tool to work on your breath during swimming. That’s something that’s super challenging, mostly because it’s so hard to breathe through your nose while you’re swimming because you inhale through your nose, you inhale water. And one of the most fundamental things that you need to do to increase athletic performance or anything having to do with health and well-being is breathe through your nose. Right, and we’re going to get into that.

5:18 I know there’s a ton of good benefits, like you said, in swimming, you can’t. And even like my dance practice, I’ve been doing some breakdancing. I realize that a lot of times I’m holding my breath and that just means I can’t do the moves I need to do, etc. So look, I can’t wait to get into it. I’m so glad you wrote this book and hopefully we can go through some breathing techniques for some people later.

5:38 Before we get there, I wanted just to talk or explain to people a little bit about your journey with yoga because you were here about four years ago. We went deep into it and I watch you go around the world and I love your Instagram. And I love it, maybe not for the reasons that everyone else loves it. Your pictures are incredible. They’re beautiful.

5:59 But I like your blogging just as much as your pictures because you’re always getting really personal and really deep about your own evolution and how yoga is a part of your evolution and your evolution is part of yoga and the breathing has come into it. And I was just wondering if you could talk about the last four years, maybe the last 10 years as you’ve traveled the world with this practice and teaching other people, like what’s been happening with you lately? Well, when the pandemic hit, I was actually in London and that’s where I got locked down.

6:30 That’s when I wrote the book was when I was in London. And I was approached by the publisher to write something and I’d been thinking about writing a few different books. I wanted to write a book on poetry. I wanted to write a philosophy book. I was thinking about calling it like Unveiling the Maya, which is basically understanding what truth is.

6:49 And then some like technical yoga books, but the one that had been really like in the back of my mind was a book on breathing. It was something that I felt that there just wasn’t enough information out there. There’s breathing and especially like breath work has been kind of coming more into the mainstream, which is an amazing thing. But still in that there’s still very little information and it seems to be either one of two schools, either it’s very anatomical or physiological to be like the science part or it’s yoga based through pranayama.

7:24 What I noticed is there’s a lot of correlations between both of them. They’re essentially saying the same thing but using two different maps to describe it. And so I wanted to kind of show how the breath could be useful. So when I was at first, I’ve been teaching breath work around the world for I think almost a decade now. And teaching the style of breathing that I call breath sequencing, which is basically like a vinyasa class or a yoga class where you work towards an intention.

7:56 And what I had been exposed to as far as pranayama was a lot of like, here’s a breath practice and it’s like, it’s good for everything. But it was kind of like, each breath practice was like a Swiss army knife. It didn’t have like one single purpose. It was like kind of everything. And the problem with something or every breath being good for everything is that you don’t know exactly really what it’s doing.

8:21 You know, which ones are the best ones or how it’s going about. And the problem with pranayama, or at least how it’s been taught, it’s been like teacher to guru. And there’s many different teachers and different students that have spread this but every teacher has their own interpretation of what that practice may be. And so as they teach it, you start to hear contradictions or different thoughts. And when you go to the literature and there’s not a lot of literature out there, there’s only been a few modern books that are really expressed pranayama.

8:56 But if you go to the ancient books, it’s very vague on what each one of them do. So I wanted to take the approach to keep the yoga in it while still exploring the physiological part and how does this affect our nervous system, looking at the autonomic nervous system. And the way that I explored it was primarily the polyvagal theory, which is dividing our nervous system up into three different parts, which is mostly having to do with how we interact with other people.

9:24 And so almost on an emotional level because our nervous system is really how we respond to our environment, how we see people, how we see ourselves. It’s not only what our environment is doing, you know, as far as like, if we’re in a safe or unsafe situation, but also how we feel about that being safe or unsafe. And then there’s a balance aspect of that as well. And with that, I mean, we could talk about the nervous system for a really long time because it’s super interesting with breathing.

9:55 But I saw that how that related to these other philosophies in yoga, mainly the gunas, which is kind of how energy is manifested through everything. There’s an upper or lower in the middle with the banadis, which is just like kind of our characteristics or attributes of self and through the bodies, which the bodies have to do with how energy moves through the body. And really how I look at is our relationship to our self and to nature and people. And so when you see all those things, they’re affected directly by the breath.

10:28 If you look at HRV, which is heart rate variability, just something that a lot of athletes use to know how the recovery is, to understand what they’re doing. It’s something that you want to increase. Having a high HRV is a marker for having good health. When you inhale, by looking at your heart rate, your heart rate speeds up. When you exhale, your heart rate slows down.

10:55 So you immediately trigger either your sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system by having a good breath or let’s say like a five and a half second breath that you’re going to increase your HRV. And so you could see how the breath directly changes how you feel or react to your environment or you could use it to control it that way. With the Indian philosophies, you look at it and it’s doing kind of it’s doing exactly the same thing. If I breathe really fast, I’m going to trigger the part that says that I’m energetic.

11:28 In yoga, we call this Rajas. So Rajas is the outward expanding energy. Well, the energy goes out until it reads exhaustion. And then we go into Thomas, which is like condensing, drawing down and grounding. So this is related to our parasympathetic nervous system, really the dorsal vagal, which is the older part of our parasympathetic nervous system.

11:50 And then you have the balanced part of it, which in yoga we call the Satva, which relates to our ventral vagal nervous system. And this is really how, when everything’s balanced, how we deal with like social engagement, how we interact with other people and how we feel about ourselves. So I saw that there’s this direct correlation. It was like each map was laid over each other and I wanted to really help people navigate through these different things. So if you want to change an aspect of your life, whether it’s physically, emotionally, energetically, you know how to navigate that map because if it’s one thing to have a map, it’s another thing to know how to read that map.

12:25 Do you find that most people are shocked that by changing their breathing, they could change their life or their physiology or their performance. I mean, in the Western world, I mean, you and I both were born in America. I mean, I don’t remember anyone ever talking about breath at all, you know, even from an athletic perspective of where we breathe and, you know, I always chest breathe and it was just stress. And do you find that, I know these days, more and more people are talking about breath, but do you find that like 90-some percent of the world are just completely oblivious to their breath?

13:00 Yeah, it’s a really interesting phenomenon because we, you know, when we think about the things that we need to do to be healthy, exercise, obviously, diet and sleep, and these are three pillars that you have to have but the fourth pillar is breath because if the breath isn’t aligned with those other things, you’re not going to have good health or I mean, having poor breath or being a mouth breather versus a nasal breather, over breathing, all these things lead to catastrophic health problems, COPD, emphysema, not really emphysema so much, but just over breathing is going to increase your blood pressure, it’s going to increase your heart rate, it’s going to decrease your lifespan. And having a tool as simple as breathing, being able to directly affect how you feel, either give you more energy, give you less energy or like I said, what I use it primarily for now is increasing my athletic performance is kind of like a no-brainer.

14:00 Here’s a very simple tool and it’s something that we do all the time. You can’t go more than a few minutes without breathing. I’ve had various guests over the years that have talked about breathing, not as many as you would think, but one of them one time said we’re the only mammal that controls our breath, that self-regulates our breath. And it was just an interesting thing to realize that, I don’t know if that’s true, but it would probably make sense. And since we’re always with all these inputs and fears and all this digital technology, a lot of us are breathing and reacting like you said to so many outside forces and it’s not say a natural breath pattern that you might watch an animal do.

14:44 Okay, when they’re active, they’re breathing a lot, but when they’re not, it seems like their breath goes back to the optimal rate. Whereas most humans probably aren’t breathing optimal most of our lives. Well, animals use the breath all the time to like think about a dog panting. It opens its mouth, it breathes and out through its mouth rather fast to cool itself down. Or if it’s relaxed, it’s going to breathe through its nose.

15:07 So it’s, I mean, like that’s on a much more basic level and you look at marine mammals that hold their breath for an hour or I don’t know, but I’m just coming up with stuff. I don’t know how long like a whale could hold its breath, but it’s a pretty long time. So animals do use the breath, but not quite as much as we can, or at least we have the knowledge to be able to use the breath in a certain way. And if we are breathing normal, the body does self-regulate. The problem is how people breathe, sometimes is it beneficial to them?

15:43 Like the biggest thing or the biggest problem I say, like for anybody that is just like, if you were to watch 30 seconds of this video and go, how can I direct use a breath right now to make my life better? Like the obvious no brainer is to breathe through your nose for multiple different reasons. And I think there’s a lot of different books out there that have done a really good job about telling you how to breathe through your nose. One of the best ones out there is Breath by James Nestor, beautiful book and it delivers one point very poignantly, which is breathe through your nose because the nose, well, like for obvious reasons, it’s going to humidify the air.

16:22 The lungs are wet and warm and they want wet, warm air. It doesn’t matter what the outside environment is. I’m in Bali right now. It’s really humid here, but you’re always living in AC. And so I have the AC cranked.

16:34 It’s actually kind of drying me out right now to talk this much in it. But it’s if I’m always breathing through my mouth like that, my lungs are going to suffer from it. The other things that filters, that’s another major purpose of it. I think one of the most important ones is one that goes overlooked and that’s the production of nitric oxide. So nitric oxide is a neurotransmitter.

16:58 It’s produced in the epithelial cells in our paranasal sinuses as well as throughout the whole body. But the majority of it comes into the nose. And so if we breathe through the mouth, we don’t get that. And the nitric oxide does a ton of different things. One is it helps to relax us.

17:16 It calms the nervous system, brings us more into paranasal sinusoid tone. The other thing that it does is it increases the amount of oxygen that your body absorbs into the cells. So if you’re breathing through your mouth, especially if you think if you’re doing exercise and you’re breathing through your mouth, breathing through your nose right away will give you 10 to 20% more oxygen absorption. If we want to go down, I don’t know if you want to go down the athletic performance part of breathing, but that’s something that is just really fun to talk about because like as an athlete, if you want to directly increase your athletic performance, train by breathing through your nose.

17:53 Breathing less, I think, is probably one of the major keys to increasing anything. As you breathe, whatever we do, we get better at doing it, whether it’s exercising or sitting. And so your body is always looking to be at the most optimal level, this least amount of energy. Because if you need more energy, you need more food, which means less of a chance of survival if you take it back. And so we have red blood cells, which are primary mode of carrying.

18:30 Actually, let’s take it back. So I think it’s kind of nice to talk about a little bit of misconceptions with breathing. One of the major misconceptions with breathing is that if you breathe more, you get more oxygen. And this is something that I do with my students. I’ll have them sit down and I’ll have them hyperventilate through their mouth for one minute.

18:48 And at the end of that, I’ll ask them, how do you feel? And it’s like, everyone feels lightheaded and dizzy, which is a normal response to it. And I ask them, well, why do you feel lightheaded and dizzy? And is it because you have too much oxygen in the brain and it’s making your brain extra excited? And a lot of them will actually think that’s the reason why.

19:07 But it’s the opposite. By overbreathing, we get less oxygen to the brain. So there’s something called the Bohr effect. And the Bohr effect has to do with how much oxygen our cells absorb, or how our oxygen absorbs. It has to do with the affinity of oxygen to hemoglobin.

19:26 So as we inhale, the oxygen comes in, it attaches to our red blood cells, and then it goes down. And this has to do with the partial pressure, the amount of oxygen that we have and the pressure in that. But there has to be another mechanism for the oxygen and to get into our cells. This mechanism is CO2 and pH. So if we don’t have a lot of CO2, then the oxygen will stay on the red blood cells and then it goes around and it comes out.

19:55 The Bohr effect says that when you have higher CO2, it’s easier for the oxygen to go into the cells, which is something that you really need, especially if you’re working out. So you’re more efficient. But if you’re overbreathing, what will happen is your oxygen will go through the body and then it’ll come back and the body will recognize or the brain will recognize that, hey, we still have oxygen on these red blood cells because there wasn’t time for it to absorb it.

20:23 We’re making about two to two and a half million red blood cells every single second. And those red blood cells last about three to four months. So it’s constantly being turned over. And the body does this based on our current demand. And current demand is really important in this because if you, the body doesn’t know what’s going to happen in the future.

20:48 So if I’m overbreathing, my body goes, okay, well, we don’t need all these extra red blood cells. And so it’s not going to use it. And then when you go to work out, you go for a run, you feel winded because you don’t have the red blood cells to carry it to the cell. So this is directly affected to your VO2 max, which stands for your maximum volume oxygen maximum, the maximum amount of oxygen that your body could use through exertion. And so if you don’t have enough red blood cells, when you go to work out, then you’re not going to be able to perform at your peak.

21:25 But if you underbreathe, you breathe less, then more red blood cells are going, or yeah, more, you’re going to get more oxygen into the body. Other things that happen too, which is really interesting or fascinating and something that I focus on a lot is breath holding. So when you hold your breath, you lower your SBO2, which is the amount of saturation in your blood. When you lower your blood saturation, the first thing that’s going to happen is after like one breath hold or two breath holds, it increases each time, is your spleen is going to contract and release a lot of red blood cells into the body.

22:05 And so this gives you more red blood cells, which will help meet that oxygen demand. It’s what happens when you’re running and you feel like everything kicked in. So this is what’s known as the steady state. The second thing that’s going to happen is your body’s going to go, okay, well, we’re not producing enough red blood cells because we’re not meeting demand. So your body’s going to start to increase more red blood cells.

22:28 And then when you go to work out, because it’s always based on what your current needs are, not about what your future needs. So if you’re practicing holding your breath, let’s say if you do this every morning, you do, you know, a few breath holds, like practice for like, maybe one or two minutes, do that three or four times, your body’s going to be like, okay, we need to have more red blood cells. And so as you get more red blood cells, you have those, they’re being produced every single second, but they last for three to four months.

22:58 And so when they die, it’s not going to die off as fast of a rate. When I do this with my students, we start practicing every single day when I’m doing my teacher trainings and we start doing breath holds. And I start them out at really easy minute, 30 seconds to a minute. And by the end of the three weeks or the month, depending on the training, I have the students holding their breath for four minutes straight or three minute outer retention followed by a three minute inner retention.

23:25 And what you notice, so we also do the breath holds using an SPO2 monitor, which is just telling you what your blood oxygen is. When they start out, the alarm, because I could hear it in the room, because they all have alarms on it. So the alarm will go off at about 94%, 91% or 94%, depending on the monitor that I have. But you’ll start hearing the alarms go off after like 30 seconds and after two or three weeks into it, you won’t at our like two minute mark or three minute mark, they’ll only be like one or two alarms going off, which is really amazing.

23:59 So it shows you how rapidly the body adapts to a small minor change. And we only do these breath exercises for 30 minutes in the morning. And so this is kind of one of like the major like no brainer benefits if you want to increase your athletic performance, is hold your breath in the morning or at any time, just start working breath holds and train by breathing through your nose. That’s fascinating. This is stuff that we can just go on for forever about, but yeah, the science behind it’s really cool.

24:28 Do you use the finger monitors for monitoring blood oxygen levels? Is that how you track people? Okay. Yeah, just a little thing that clips on top of your finger. Yeah.

24:38 Yeah. So I had Patrick McGowan of the oxygen advantage in here a few years ago and he stuck one of those on my finger. And he actually had me running around the studio holding my breath just to show me what was going on with my oxygen levels. Also, I had had Wim Hof on many times before known for his breathing techniques. And I was under the false assumption that doing Wim Hof breathing raised the oxygen levels in your blood.

25:02 And Patrick was like, no, it lowers the carbon dioxide levels in your blood. And I was like that. Yeah, that’s correct. Again, I had been repeating a wives tale over and over again like many people have probably. And then he showed me that and then I did the running and I started I think a little bit to understand a little bit more about what’s going on in the body.

25:22 But it was really eye opening. And again, the Wim Hof breathing is interesting. It gets a certain effect. I think you’re triggering parasympathetic and we can talk about that. But it’s amazing to see you can get that kind of reactions in your students that quickly.

25:37 And so you’re basically triggering the body into producing more red blood cells. And that’s allowing them also to hold their breath longer. But those are serious times you’re talking about four minutes and three and three. The other part of breath holding breath holding is its own practice in and of itself. Like if you’re really just working for athletic performance breathing less.

25:59 And what I do when I’m when I’m coaching people on breathing and how to increase their athletic performances. We’ll go through an exercise and I’ll make them breathe through their nose to the entire exercise and doing like hit exercise like box jumps or burpees or those kinds of things are perfect for that. Gets your heart rate up really fast increases the oxygen demand. And then what’s making you want to breathe is the CO2. So we have a carbonic drive.

26:27 Carbonic means carbon dioxide. So we have a carbonic drive, meaning the higher that our CO2 levels are than the more that we want to breathe. It’s not on a lot. It’s never on a lack of oxygen. Well, I shouldn’t say it’s never the lack of oxygen is a mechanism, but it’s one that comes very, very late in the game.

26:46 And so we’re breathing based on how much CO2 we build up. And so this is called our CO2 tolerance. If you have a low CO2 tolerance, you’re going to breathe a lot more. So this is kind of compare comparable to diet. So if you imagine you overeat, right people that overeat take in a lot of calories, maybe four or five thousand calories or more a day.

27:07 And so their body gets used to this. And so they need it’s not that they need those calories, but their body craves those calories and it becomes a perpetual cycle. They eat more. They need more and then but it’s not helping them out in any way until you start going on a diet. I don’t know if you do intermittent fasting or anything like that.

27:25 I think you do intermittent fasting, right? Yeah, I do. And so if you notice when you start intermittent fasting, like if you’re used to eating three meals a day or four meals a day or having a lot of snacks that your body craves that food around those times. But when you start going to one or two meals a day or having long periods of it, you only get hungry at those times that you train the body and you see that eating less has the positive beneficial effect on the body.

27:52 Well, it’s the same thing with breathing less. If you are over breathing all the time, your body craves all that extra oxygen because you have a really low CO2 tolerance. Your CO2 levels start to rise up a little bit and the body goes, oh, we need to breathe. And so the only way to do that is to work on breathing slow either through the nose or through holding your breath. And once you start doing that, you notice that you need much less oxygen.

28:15 And so as you breathe less, your CO2 levels get higher. When your CO2 levels are higher, oxygen goes into the cells quicker and so this is a really important thing not only for like athletic performance, what we’ve been talking about, but also for the parasympathetic nervous system. Breathing less or having a more acidic blood is going to trigger the parasympathetic nervous system and calm you down. It’s why breathing slow and holding your breath is so effective for calming you down.

28:42 And vice versa, if you want to have a lot of energy, you breathe really fast and breathing really fast is going to immediately trigger the sympathetic nervous system. One of the things that I like to teach is the breath is a tool. It’s how you use it. There’s not a good or bad. Like the sympathetic nervous system isn’t bad.

28:59 We’ve kind of been taught to demonize it because it’s our fight or flight system and we’re chronically in stress and all that. But if you go out and you go running, you go swimming, you do anything really active, your sympathetic nervous system is in play. You don’t want to go out and play a game of football and then be sleepy and chilled out, ready to take a nap or in like a state of meditation. It’s the wrong part of your nervous system. Or if you’re having a conversation with somebody sitting down, you don’t want to be super amped up and excited, but you also don’t want to be in a slow meditative state.

29:36 It’s the wrong part of your nervous system. So the breath is going to kind of follow automatically where you need to be. But if you are training it in one way, then if you’re over breathing, it’s going to continue to be that. So once you start to under breathe, then your body starts to use oxygen more efficiently, which then helps you to increase your athletic performance and you start to breathe less. And so you will like, let’s say with your, I don’t know, with your butterfly stroke, if you’re breathing every stroke or every two strokes or every three strokes, right, as you could slow that down, you know, you can become more and more efficient in that where you don’t feel the need to breathe because you have the oxygen.

30:19 Like if you sit down right now and or if you put it on a SPO2 monitor right now and just hold your breath, you’ll notice that that doesn’t even start to come down for at least 30 seconds. And if you are doing something more active, it’ll come down a bit quicker than that. But as you increase your blood cells, that goes slower. And so that becomes another positive perpetual cycle to increase your VO2 max. Wow, that’s powerful.

30:45 I’ve never heard of anyone talking about over breathing. I’ve heard of over eating, but never over breathing. And yeah, when I got introduced to exercise, it was just like, breathe more, get the oxygen back in the blood, breathe more, breathe more. And and then you’re saying that’s the opposite of what we want to do. How do you start to practice under breathing?

31:05 And do you condition people to say, look, it’s going to feel a little uncomfortable at first? Breath, CO2 tolerance or like feeling like it’s called air hunger, this need to breathe. And it’s like you’re starving for air. It’s one of the most uncomfortable things in the beginning. Having high level CO2 that makes people panic.

31:26 And so it is a bit challenging, because if you don’t breathe, you feel like you’re going to die. So one of the things is re-associating what that relationship is to what that feeling is. So for me, when I’m sitting and I’m doing my breath hold practices, and I could hold my breath for like right now about four and a half to five minutes, it changes for me depending on how much I’m doing it. And that’s without hyperventilating. So hyperventilating is another tool.

31:53 It’s actually a really great tool to use. I free dive as well. And one of the major nose with freediving is hyperventilating before you do that, because it tricks your body into thinking that you don’t need to breathe. Because again, we breathe based on how much CO2 we have. So if you hyperventilate, you become hypocapnics.

32:15 So your carbon dioxide levels come down as they come down. It takes a much longer for them to build up. This is how the TUMO breath or Wim Hof breathing. Wim Hof breathing is taken from a really ancient practice. So you do this TUMO breathing and you breathe off tons and tons of CO2.

32:34 When you breathe off a lot of CO2, it stimulates your synthetic nervous system. Your blood vessels start to shunt down, especially the ones going to your brain, which is why you feel a little dizzy. Your nervous system becomes overexcited, which is why you start to feel little tingles. And then you get what’s called carpal pedal spasms. If you do it for a really long time, like like an hour or so that where your hands start to cramp up like this.

32:56 But just like in that first little two minutes, you’ll probably feel a little bit of tingling and you’ll feel lightheaded a little euphoric as well. And so that’s having really, really low CO2 levels. And then on an exhale, you would hold your breath. And so that while you’re holding your breath, it allows you to hold your breath much longer. So there’s a really positive benefit to this.

33:17 Well, one for the balancing of your nervous system because you’re working first in the sympathetic and then into the parasympathetic. And so you’re teaching your nervous system how to fluidly move between stress and relaxation without having to like make these big transitions. So you could be in a stressful situation and then immediately calm yourself down just by like a few breaths because you’ve trained yourself to do that. But as you’re if you’re working for athletic performance, the key to VO2 max is having lots of red blood cells.

33:47 So I hyperventilate. I’m able to hold my breath for a really long time. This is also going to help with my CO2 tolerance a little bit as I hold it longer. And then your body sees that the red blood cell or the oxygen saturation is going down. So it says, okay, let’s contract the spleen.

34:04 So it puts out a lot of red blood cells into your system. That’s what the spleen does. It’s kind of like a storage cell for in case you need it. So either if it’s trauma or if you’re working out, you know, it’s going to do that. And then it’s going to be like, okay, well, this is happening all the time.

34:21 So let’s make more red blood cells. So I’m holding my breath. I’m able to get my spO2 down really low and that triggers the body into that effect of breathing. And so that’s really what happens with the tumor breath or the Wim Hof breathing. Great exercise for athletic performance and also great for the nervous system.

34:41 But don’t do it when you’re swimming because you’ll pass out at the bottom of the pool and a lot of people have done that. Yeah, it’s very good. Yeah, don’t do it. Don’t do it when you’re swimming ever. You never want to hyperventilate and then get in the water because again, it’s that your body doesn’t feel like it needs to breathe because it takes a while for your levels to go up.

35:03 So when I’m practicing, I do a lot of different types of breath hold practices. Hyperventilating is one of those. The other things that I like to work into, which is increasing my vital capacity. How much air can my lungs hold? Because obviously, if you have a bigger gas tank, you could hold more fuel and your lungs are your fuel or this is your body needs energy.

35:26 So that energy comes in the form of adenosine triphosphate or ATP, which is a byproduct of glucose. So sugar that we get from our food, oxygen that we get from the air, those combined and it gives us energy and it gives us the output of CO2 and water, which we then breathe out. So I want to have bigger lungs. So one of the things I do is what’s called lung expansion breath. This is similar to free diving, where free divers do like that lung packing, but it’s not about trying to pack in your lungs.

35:56 That’s actually kind of dangerous and it’s been kind of shunned upon by different free divers. Not everybody. Some still do it a lot, but it’s really another really easy practice to do. You take a full inhale, you hold your breath for a few seconds or maybe 30 seconds. Then you take another inhale, hold the breath and I usually only do two of those.

36:19 And so that helps to stretch out my lungs. The average person, you know, like woman is about four and a half liters and a man is around six and a half or six to six and a half liters. And so you say the average person is about five liters a bear. There’s a free diver, world record free diver named Sticks Ferenson. And I think I probably butchered his name, but I think he could hold something like 14 liters of air in his lungs, which is just an incredible amount to be able, he’s a bigger guy, but it shows just what you can do through breath practice and through doing breath holds.

37:03 So you inhale, you hold the breath and then are your lungs kind of like expanding a little bit and stretching? Is that how you’re able to take another breath in? Not just your lungs. So the jury’s kind of out on do the lung stretch. I don’t know if lungs, tissues stretches or not.

37:24 I’m not a doctor. I’ve never done those kinds of studies, but your thoracic cavity does stretch your intercostal muscles, your diaphragm, those all muscles stretch around it. So like think of an illustration of blowing up a balloon inside of a glass jar, even if though the balloon could go bigger, the glass jar limits it. So if I’m able to make the jar bigger, the balloon is able to hold more. So that’s kind of what you’re doing with it.

37:50 Yoga stretches are also really good for increasing your vital capacity, doing side bends and twists, forward folds, back bends, all those things that make your, the muscles around your thoracic cavity more pliable. And then I’ll work into different breath practices. I usually start without doing any kind of hyperventilation because again, being a freediver, I, it’s not a tool that I could use. So I want to know what my static breath hold is. How long can I hold just working on relaxed breathing?

38:20 One of the main keys with freediving and breathing is meditation or being able to slow down the mind. The mind is, the mind’s a battery. It just uses, not a battery, the opposite of a battery. It’s like an engine. It just uses up lots of energy.

38:36 And so as you’re able to calm your mind or the more that you can calm it down, the less energy that your brain is using and the longer you could hold your breath. So it’s really about moving into those meditative states, which also helps you with decreasing stress. And then I’ll do like the hyperventilation ones. I work on both holding on outer retention, which is going to help increase CO2 tolerance. You have less air in the lungs.

39:00 And so when you’re holding your breath, as the CO2 builds up and it’s being brought into the lungs through your circulatory system, there’s less air for the CO2 to diffuse into. So your CO2 levels become higher. So that increases your CO2 tolerance. And then the other one is working on getting the blood oxygen down. And so I’ll do that with a full breath or an inner retention, because that allows you to hold your breath longer because you have less CO2 driving you, or I guess I would say more room for the CO2 to diffuse into so that you don’t hit that air hunger, that CO2 tolerance range so fast.

39:47 So working through those kinds of things. And there’s, I mean, there’s a million different practices, but you could also keep this very simple. And it’s a really easy thing like you just breathe less. Yeah, so let’s talk about breathing less. If you want to start the journey of stopping to overbreathe, like you said, it’s going to be a little uncomfortable at first.

40:07 But just how when you’re overeating, that’s uncomfortable at first. But this one’s a little more primal. But what would be some of those exercises just to start practicing underbreathing? Oh, yeah. So I started talking about it, but then I totally skipped over it, which is good though.

40:24 It was great to hear your practice. I like that. It’s what is your relationship to that feeling? So that’s what’s really important. What is my relationship to this needing to breathe?

40:36 If I feel that, like I need to breathe and I feel very panicky. Hold on, sorry. I need to plug my computer and it was unplugged there. There we go. So if I feel that need to breathe and I feel that it’s like I’m in trouble, then I’m going to think what’s going to increase my sympathetic nervous system.

41:01 I’m going to get that fight or flight response, which then is going to trigger my heart rate to go up and it’s just going to make everything really worse. But what I do is when I feel that breath hunger, one tool that’s really helpful is to practice holding your breath with an SPO2 monitor. I could put it on my finger. I could look down at my finger and go, oh, I really feel the need to breathe, but it’s still saying that I’m 99% oxygen. So I know that’s just my CO2 levels being high that I’m not in any kind of danger.

41:31 And so I think this idea of feeling safe. So as I keep holding my breath and I’m feeling really strong, I look and I’m like, I’m safe. It’s only 98% now. And so then like I kind of, as a general rule of thumb, I all breathe at 70%. So I’ll try to get it down to 70%, which is still, you know, if you’re just holding your breath, it’s well in range.

41:56 Some people might say a little bit higher. I’ve done a lot of research to see like how what’s safe or how low you could get your CO2. And I’ve had a really hard time finding anything that is conclusive or so I don’t really know what the safe number is. It’s kind of more of like a general, you don’t want to go below 70%. But I’ve had it all the way down to 40% before.

42:22 So if I have a monitor like that, I can just try to like breathe normally, but breathe less frequently. And on that exhale, just sit there and just kind of chill. And when I want to take that breath, just look at my monitor or remind myself that I don’t need to breathe right now. I’m just used to breathing right now, just like I used to be snacking, used to snacking every minute and just don’t. And practice build up that tolerance.

42:47 Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And you’ll be really surprised about how quickly that happens. So in the beginning, you’ll see the SBO2 go down. And then I think when I’m working with people, the average, like some people just have a really hard time breathing it or holding their breath for a long time.

43:07 And that’s okay. So I don’t think it should ever be a competition or I need to hold my breath for this long. Just breathing less than normal is always going to be beneficial for you. I’m a competitive person. You’re a competitive person.

43:20 So I really like to see what the body is capable. How far can I push myself? How long can I hold my breath? And it becomes like a challenge that I really enjoy facing every day. Yeah, so as it goes down, you’ll start to notice these changes and then you’ll start to notice how much longer you can hold your breath.

43:40 And if you work kind of practices, like I said, I teach breast sequencing. So the way I teach doing breath work is kind of working through, you do a warm up first. And it depends on what you’re using the breath for. So in this case, since we’re talking about athletic performance, I’m going to do some sort of warm up where my breaths are a little bit deeper, a little bit longer, a little fuller. I’m probably going to do some long expansion holds so that I’m starting to stretch out.

44:08 Just like if you’re going for a run, you kind of want to warm up a little bit just to, I mean, just a little so that your muscles feel good and you don’t get cramped or if you’re working out or lifting weights, you want to warm up. Yeah, so to prevent injury and your body just performs better when it’s warm. So I’ll go through a warm up phase and then I move into what I call like the heat building phase, which this is really targeting more towards the sympathetic nervous system.

44:34 Because what I want to do is create balance into my nervous system, which is has to do with sympathetic and parasympathetic. So I want to work through both of them. So I’ll do some sort of rapid breathing practice and yoga. There’s several different ones, most of them all in fall breathing through the nose, but different ways that you could breathe through the nose, different ways that you could use the diaphragm. And so I’ll do maybe a few minutes of that, maybe 6 to 10 minutes of some sort of rapid breathing.

45:03 And the thing with rapid breathing, even though I’m in that heat building part, if I, let’s say, do like a bastrica, which is a forced inhale, forced exhalation through the nose, kind of like full breaths as fast as you can. It’s very hard breath. It’s an easy breath to do, but it’s very hard to maintain. So I’ll do that kind of breathing for a minute straight. And then after that minute, I’ll still hold my breath.

45:28 One of the things that I’m most focused on is keeping my CO2 tolerance really, really high. And that’s like, I almost guard that. And so I want to make sure that I’m not over breathing at any time, even if I am over breathing. So that’s why like, I do enjoy Wim Hof’s breath because even though it’s over breathing, it’s always followed with holding the breath afterwards so that you get your CO2 back up and you’re challenging your CO2 tolerance. So you could work in over breathing for a short period of time as long as you bring it back to the breath holds.

46:03 And then I’ll work through what I call the vitalizing sequence. And so this is where I’m going to really start to work into my long holds. I’m warm. My lungs are warm. My diaphragm is working really good.

46:14 My sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system are feeling really balanced. And so when I go into my breath holds, I could do a much longer than if I was just to start trying it’s like, let’s say for instance, I was just to hold my breath right now. It’d be nowhere near as long as it would be if I did my warm up in my heat building. And so then after I move through that sequence and I’ll move into like a cool down sequence that brings me down into the state of my nervous system that I want to be at, which doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to be in my dorsal vagal complex or my parasympathetic nervous system.

46:51 I might be doing this breath exercise and then going to the gym after going for a run or something like that. So I’m going to leave myself in a little bit higher state. So my I might do a more balanced breath like box breathing, you know, where you inhale for five, hold to five, exhale for five, hold for five. So something that brings more yeah, not necessarily calm, but not over amped up. And so this is kind of like how I approach my practice and I do the same kind of thing if I’m working for, let’s say I’m going to sleep, I will approach it the same way.

47:28 I’ll do a warm up. I’ll probably do a lot of breaths where I add some humming into it. So if we hum, it vibrates our paranasal sinuses and this increases more nitric oxide. So if I increase more nitric oxide, I get it’ll help relax me a lot of parasympathetic nervous tone. Another thing that’s great with that too is if let’s say if you’re studying or you need to learn or need to focus and concentrate, you could also do this humming breath in yoga.

47:57 It’s called brahmari. It’s very simple. Just like close your mouth and you know, then you take a slow inhale after that. So I take a deep inhale

48:14 On the exhale. And one of the things that you could do is when you’re exhaling, making that humming noise is you could feel the vibrations. And so I’ll choose a tone in my hum that resonates the most in my sinus cavities. And then I’ll take a slow inhale through that. And so that increases my nitric oxide.

48:34 So you could do that for sleep. You could do that for memory and concentration learning. It’s also something to do really good to do before you go to bed because when you sleep, that’s when you convert, you know, your short term memory into long term memory. And so if you do that humming, you’re going to increase the nitric oxide and then your brain is going to work better as you sleep. Also, it helps with sexual performance as well.

49:04 Cialis and Biagra work off of basically the same kind of neurotransmitter as nitric oxide. It’s just a derivative of it. So it’s a very powerful tool in that sense as well. Can you give me your pre-sleep breathing routine? I mean, this is gold potentially because I played around with box breathing.

49:29 One of my former guests was actually Edo Portal mentioned when I was in Israel doing our documentary with him. He’s like, he mentioned box breathing to just slow things down before you go to sleep. And I’m telling you Dylan, when I tried it, I had this, I had the oxygen deprivation feeling for the first time in my life. So I’m in the middle of, one in the morning, I’m trying to get back to sleep and I’m feeling, God, I really need to take some oxygen. And I didn’t know what to do with that feeling.

49:53 So this helps a lot. But what do you do? Before you go to bed, besides that vibrating piece? So, well, that’s kind of how I would start with it. And I start my breath practice first.

50:06 If I’m doing this, if I’m having trouble sleeping. So I would sit up and I would do, I would start with a little bit of alternate nostril breathing. So alternate nostril breathing. If you think your nose, if you’re breathing through your nose, it cuts down the amount of air you take in about 50%. So then if I breathe in through one nostril, then it’s going to cut it down to about breathing in about 25%.

50:33 So I’ll inhale. And another thing that happens just by touching the left and right side of your face like this, you’re bringing attention to the left and right hemisphere of your brain. And so you’re helping to create balance in that. So you have a physical touch, which is bringing awareness here and then bringing awareness here. So you’re starting to create a little bit of balance.

50:53 Sleep is about feeling in harmony. Like if you’re stressed out, if you think you need to do something, you have those to-dos going or whatever that is, then it’s going to be really hard to sleep because the mind hasn’t stopped. And so you need to put yourself into the right headspace. So I’ll start with an inhale. I’ll inhale for five.

51:18 I’ll hold for five, then I’ll switch and I’ll exhale through the other nostril with that humming. And I’ll just count to five, like a slow count. And the count doesn’t need to be five. It’s whatever you feel comfortable with. For me, like five just feels like a very nice relaxing one.

51:40 And I skip the bottom retention. So I don’t do the bottom retention. I only do the inner retention. I only do the inner retention. So I inhale.

51:48 I skip the bottom retention. And then I’ll just like a pause, like a comfortable pause, you know, what you would do naturally. Then I’ll inhale through the same nostril. And it’s really important that that inhale is very soft because you just built up all this nitric oxide in your perinosa sinuses. You don’t want to just suck it in, right?

52:09 You want to be able to extract it out almost. And so I’ll inhale that very slowly for that same five seconds, but with a soft breath. So I’m not trying to do a full breath. I’m not trying to do a deep breath. I’m trying to keep my breath just what it normally is, which is my tidal volume.

52:26 So roughly about half. Yeah, roughly about half a liter. Half a liters. All right. I’m not good with metric, but yeah.

52:34 So you’re inhaling through this nostril. You’re holding for five. You got the one handed thing that you do use. So use one figure there and then use the other one there. That’s what you do.

52:45 Yeah. So like traditionally in yoga, this is called Vishnu mudra, which is the mudra balance. So mudras are hand signals. Okay. Yeah.

52:54 So it’s like you use your ring finger and your thumb. Mudras are hand signals that you give meaning to. Okay. So like when I started learning about mudras, I thought it was like such a weird thing. Like how does this mean this and how does this mean this?

53:12 But we have all kinds of mudras. You know, you have this mudra, you have this mudra, you have this mudra. You know, they’re just hand signals. They don’t mean anything until you give them meaning. So that’s kind of the same thing.

53:24 So you associate some meaning with this one. This one means balance. So I’ll inhale and I’m thinking about balance through one nostril, five seconds, hold for five seconds, then I switch and I exhale throughout the other nostril. And hum. I do that humming breath.

53:42 And then I’ll inhale through the same one. I just exhaled out of it and I switch. So this is a variation of the- And then hum back down that one as well. Yeah. Always humming only on the exhale.

53:54 You could also do that without the humming. It’s effective, but it’s not as effective. Some people like that because they feel shy or embarrassed about humming. Or, you know, maybe you’re in bed with your partner and your partner’s sleeping and you don’t want to make noise. So you could still do it without humming.

54:09 It’s just adding that. You’ll still get, you know, you get six to nine times more nitric oxide just through breathing through the nose. And that’s increased dramatically through humming. Okay. So how many cycles will you do of that to go to sleep?

54:26 You know, it’s the amount of cycles is not really important. What’s important is the effect. And so as you feel like that was enough, that’s enough. You don’t need to go, okay, I should do six cycles or 10 cycles or 20 cycles. You know, maybe it’s two or three cycles that you do.

54:43 And you feel like, oh, that feels really good. And then after I do that a few times, I’ll lay down on my back. And I’ll do just a really like a 10 second inhale. Oh, sorry. A five second inhale.

55:01 A 10 second hold. A 10 second exhale. And so this is focusing more on the exhalation. Or I might start five, five, 10. It kind of depends on my mood and how I’m feeling.

55:16 So I’d say for like some of this beginning with this practice, doing five, 10, 10 is a long breath. So maybe doing five, five, 10 would be a little bit more accessible for most people. And what this does is you’re doubling the exhalation to the inhalation. If we remember back to the beginning of our conversation, inhalation is related to our sympathetic nervous system. So when we work in this two to one ratio to sympathetic parasympathetic, we increase a lot more parasympathetic nervous system, which helps to relax us down.

55:48 That’s why you’ve heard of four, seven, eight breath. No. So four, seven, eight breath is a breath that a lot of therapists use to calm people down. It’s a four second inhale, seven second hold, eight second exhale. And if you look, it has that same two to one ratio that exhales twice the inhale.

56:10 That one’s kind of interesting too, because when you do that one, you do the eight second exhale through your pursed lips. And so exhaling through pursed lips like this increases your vagal tone, your vagus nerve, which is the majority of your parasympathetic nervous system. So if you could do also this four, seven, eight breath, inhale for four, hold for seven, exhale for eight, and just do the slope. And that’s going to help stimulate the vagus nerve, and it’s going to help calm you down.

56:45 And maybe just those two breath practices might be enough. If I say like the third breath practice that you would do, would just be focusing on a soft, relaxed breath and just feeling the breath as more as like the body is breathing. So it becomes less about like how long I’m breathing or how I’m breathing, but just like more of the breathing is a full body experience. And I’m usually asleep. Being a firefighter, you have to get really good at going to sleep fast because you don’t know how much time you have to sleep or when you’re going to wake up.

57:25 So you almost train yourself to like when your head hits the pillow, you go to sleep. So I only do this when I’m having difficulty sleeping, but I find it really, really helpful. Like yeah, those two practices, if you want to keep it simple. Yeah. I’m going to test drive this tonight.

57:41 So it’s sitting up, nostril, and then I’m back down. I’m going to do like a 5-5-10. And then at the end of that, I might just concentrate on just the breathing process of the whole body and just try to just focus on it in all of its nuances and not try to force it. Yeah. What’s really nice too is you put one hand on your chest, one hand on your belly.

58:06 And without putting too much thought onto it, feel as like your belly and chest are rising and falling at the same time. Like again, don’t overanalyze it. You don’t want to be thinking too much. You just want to be feeling into it. So this is really kind of transitioning the mind from the activity of thinking to the sensation of feeling.

58:29 So moving back into the body. As you move into the body, that’s going to bring you into the parasympathetic nervous system. Hopefully, it works wonders. I know with students that I’ve practiced and worked with breathing where I had one student who’s a doctor that was taken Ambien to help him with his sleep and then started working through breath practices. And within three weeks was completely off of the Ambien and was sleeping like a baby.

59:02 But, you know, like all things, results may vary. I think the most important thing is, the other thing with sleep, too, is that I think if you can’t sleep is not to try to sleep, right? Not to try to force yourself to do it. Whenever I feel like I can’t sleep, I’ll be like, okay, I can’t sleep. And so I’ll do something else.

59:24 I’ll read a book or I’ll meditate or I’ll play guitar. I’ll do something that might be a little bit active, but something that I feel relaxed about so that I’m not forcing myself to sleep. And then when I feel tired, I’ll do a little breath practice. Yeah, really, by this time, you just lay on your back. I’m not a back sleeper.

59:45 I’m a side sleeper. But that’s the only time I’ll fall asleep on my back. Okay. You mentioned being a firefighter. And I think you talk about it in the book a little bit about how when you were younger, you went with this mantra of, you know, I’ll sleep when I’m dead type thing, which is what a lot of us youngsters used to do, especially back in the day when nobody was talking about sleep.

1:00:05 But now when you look back at it, you realize how damaging that philosophy is and how a lot of the people, you know, first responders and anybody who asked to really mess with their sleep schedule, doctors, I mean, it’s literally taken decades off their life by not having a good sleep practice. Yeah, like right now, let’s see what time is. It’s 10, 10 here in Nepali. This is kind of getting past my bedtime, which is funny. And I used to try to force myself to get the eight hours of sleep.

1:00:39 And it’s like, I always wanted that eight hours, especially after I read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Yeah. Just brilliant, brilliant book. I highly recommend that to anybody. Yeah, he was here a couple years ago talking about it.

1:00:52 Yeah, really good. Yeah, yeah. So I was always like, I was really trying to get that eight hours. But once I started, like, I don’t wake up with an alarm. And I go to sleep when I’m tired.

1:01:07 And I think that’s like, one of the most simple and easiest things that you can do to your sleep pattern. I worked shift shift work, my pretty much my entire life until I became a full time yoga teacher. And I worked, I used to work in the hospital. And when I worked in the hospital, I worked night shift because you can get paid a little bit more money. And then when I was a firefighter, it’s a 48 hour shift.

1:01:30 So, you know, you might not be sleeping at night. And it wrecks you, wrecks your nervous system, it deteriorates your health, it shortens your life. It’s really important. Like, I feel bad for people that have to do shift work. My stepdad, he works the night shift and has for so many years.

1:01:53 And yeah, it’s a hard thing. So, give it up to anybody that works the night shift. It’s like, if you have an option, you know, not everybody has those options, but if you have an option, I would now, if I were to go back and talk to my 25 year old self that was working in the ER, I would take the, I wouldn’t take that 10% pay increase and I’d work during the day just because I know how bad it is. Yeah. I’ve gotten really sensitive about my sleep.

1:02:24 I got the oral ring, which just helps me track it and their tech’s getting better and better. It’s now got oxygen levels during your sleep. So, I don’t have any issues that I know of with like, what do they call it? Oh apnea. But like, it literally will tell you if your oxygen starved during your sleep.

1:02:42 Obviously got my HRV, it’s telling me my REM and my deep. And so, at least I can track what’s going on and get an idea. And it usually correlates with how I’m feeling in the morning. So, that’s definitely helpful. But these days, if I don’t get my sleep, Dylan, like I’m grumpy.

1:03:01 Like maybe when I was younger, I didn’t have the rest of my lifestyle then. So, it might have been bad nutrition or I’ve been drinking or something these days. Like I will not wake up at 6am or 5am to get a flight. I will just not take that flight. If I’m up past midnight, I’m grumpy.

1:03:18 I got to get my sleep. And when I don’t get my sleep, I feel like I used to be drinking again. It really feels like a hangover and I haven’t had a drink in like five years. And when I feel that, I’m like, man, it just, for me now, the sleep is everything. Yeah, I agree.

1:03:34 On the same page. There’s a couple of things in the book I wanted to touch on. You talk about chest breathing and it’s something that I hadn’t really thought about for a long time. And I think you have an exercise where you have people either sitting down or standing up and you go to breathe. And I think you were saying how your collarbone shouldn’t go up and your chest shouldn’t necessarily go up and it should be your belly expanding.

1:03:55 And I was wondering if you could talk about that and maybe even an exercise that people could do at home to just try to check in on how they’re breathing. And I know that it’s all does even get your parasympathetic or sympathetic nervous system in place as well. If your chest breathing is more of a panic breath versus stomach breath. So I don’t know. Talk about that.

1:04:16 Well, one chest breathing is inefficient. We breathe through our belly as you inhale, the diaphragm pulls down, your lungs expand outward or your ribs expand outward and down and your lungs then fill up with air as you increase like the size of your chest. And so if you’re not allowing your belly to move out, you’re decreasing the efficiency of your breath. Also, one of the things that I used to always do because I was just vain and I wanted my stomach to look good was I always keep my core engaged.

1:04:45 So show off my six pack as I walk around. I don’t do that anymore. But it took me years to break that habit. It was so hard to not do that because your belly is your major muscle for exhalation. And so if you’re keeping that engaged, you can’t inhale properly.

1:05:09 One of the things too is like that here’s a really good exercise that I work with people. Since I read the book, you probably do it right. But if you come, I know you’re sitting those big comfortable chairs, but move to the end of the chair so you’re kind of sitting up straight.

1:05:25 And then I want you to relax the shoulders down. So maybe put your hands, your palms in your lap and then take as deep of an inhale as possible. Inhale through the nose, through the nose, just inhale deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, more. Yeah, so if you notice right there, exhale. If you notice right there, that last little bit, your shoulders came up.

1:05:52 So you’re like, so we do this, and everything comes up. And if you feel your belly, your belly’s kind of hollowed out a little. It’s not really expanding out. So I want you to do that same breath the exact same way that you can. I want you to inhale through your nose and I want you to inhale so the same way.

1:06:13 So breathe up, allow the shoulder blades to come up, breathe into your nose, breathe as deep as you can, as quick as you can. Okay, and allow everything. So start with a full exhale. Yeah, so start with a full exhale. So exhale all the way out and then inhale.

1:06:33 Okay, is that as deep as you can go? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, all right, all right, good. All right, okay, good. That was good.

1:06:40 That was really good. Okay, then relax that breath. So you’re gonna do that same breath now, but instead of breathing upwards like this, I want you to imagine that you have a rubber band that’s right around the area of your diaphragm. So right like where your xiphoid process is or your bottom ribs. And then as you inhale, I want you to think of expanding your ribcage so not upwards, but in the 360.

1:07:10 So it’s like opening up also into your back. So a whole like that rubber band is going to stretch out. So you’re going to take the same breath, but instead expand out in 360 degrees. So start the same way. Exhale, fully out.

1:07:28 And then whenever you’re ready, just inhale, expand. There you go. Do you feel how much more air you’re able to breathe into your lungs quicker? Yeah, I could really feel my midsection expanding, which I never really have. Also, I didn’t feel like when I’m up here, I feel kind of tense a little bit.

1:07:50 And I always feel like there isn’t much left there when I’m doing that, if that makes sense. But here, it felt kind of more natural. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, both a little bit more natural.

1:08:05 So if you think about it, when we’re trying to create space to inhale, our ribs need to go out and down. The space between our ribs, the intercostal muscles expand. And so they pull downwards. So as you exhale, they pull back in. Actually, sorry, they don’t pull downwards, they pull outwards or up.

1:08:30 If you think of a bucket, and you have the handle of the bucket, and it’s down, as you pull it up, it comes forward. And so that’s kind of what the ribs are doing as you inhale. They’re coming out and forward, and they’re expanding. This all raises up. But if you’re breathing up here, you’re shortening around your torso, and you’re not allowing the outer ribs to pull out.

1:08:55 So it’s much harder to get the air in. And then you’re using these much smaller muscles, your scalenes, which these muscles here, to try to pull the collarbones up and get that little extra bit of air into the lungs, which isn’t very effective. We only really use these muscles when we’re in a state of panic. You see people try to catch a breath. They’re breathing here, like this, and it’s very high.

1:09:23 And they can’t exhale out. So this is a very panic breath. And so it’s working in your sympathetic nervous system. It’s inefficient. And even with swimming or exercise or anything like that, if you focus on breathing outwards in this 360 degree, one is you’re going to breathe deeper more efficiently as you need to.

1:09:44 You’re going to use less effort to inhale that way. And also, you’re going to be less stressed about the inhale. It’s not going to trigger that fight or flight, this sympathetic nervous response that you would get by breathing upwards. So it’s just much quicker. And you could practice this in your swimming as well as you’re doing the strokes.

1:10:03 Think of that inhale, because you have just like a brief, less than a second to get that breath in. And so if you’re trying to get in the air and you’re coming up here, and you’re trying to breathe in this way like this to get in the air, you’re not filling in the lungs. But if you come up and you breathe outwards, you’re going to immediately fill up the lungs so much faster and more efficiently. Oh yeah, that’s a bet, man. I’m going to do that.

1:10:27 I already feels good doing that. And I can really feel the air going into my, all my intercostal muscles. And it helps to be able to visualize what’s going on down there, right? With all the ribs expanding and diaphragm going down, because that’ll help you make it happen, right? Yeah, I just think, you know, imagine you have a rubber band and you’re trying to stretch that rubber band out in all the directions.

1:10:50 And that seems to work for some people. Or you could get really physiological into it and think about all the anatomy and what’s actually happening in there, which is actually the way that I like to think about it. Those are really good exercises. If you had to kind of talk about or teach one more, what’s one that you think is highly relevant and obviously the rest they can find in the book. But of those, I mean, I know you have that kind of fire breathing practice, which is more, I don’t know if that’s more type, Wim Hof.

1:11:19 You mentioned Pranayama a few times. I don’t know if it’s worth explaining exactly what that is. Yeah, so Pranayama is a Sanskrit word. Sanskrit’s a really old language that comes from India. It’s kind of the language of the yogis.

1:11:35 The word Prana means life force, vitality, energy, and yama. So there’s two different ways to translate Pranayama. One is Pranayama or Prana Ayama. And I think both are relevant. So Prana is your energy and your life force.

1:11:49 Yama means to control. Ayama means to extend. And so this is a way to like control and extend the breath. It’s basically just breath practices. It’s essentially like if you break it down, Pranayama are types of energetic breath practices.

1:12:06 One of the practices that I like a lot, it’s kind of an interesting one. And one that I came up with while I was getting an MRI, I had messed up my shoulder and I was getting an MRI. And I don’t know if you’ve ever had an MRI before, but you’re in that like loud, noisy machine and it’s like takes forever. You know, whatever. And so I was feeling like just really stressed out and I was thinking about this breath practice and stuff.

1:12:43 I was working through a bunch of different breath practices and I came up with this breath practice that I call the 10-10-2 to 10-10 breath, which is how it works. It’s kind of, it works on both ends of the nervous system. And so if we talk about how the sympathetic nervous system is the inhale, the parasympathetic nervous system is the exhale. And so this is a breath practice that brings you into more equilibrium, more harmony. It balances out both sides.

1:13:16 Like I said, it’s great to be in your sympathetic nervous system when you’re doing active stuff. It’s really good to be in your parasympathetic nervous system when you’re wanting to go to sleep or meditate. But we want to be in this ventral bagel complex, like this place of social engagement most of the time when we’re interacting and stuff. And so this is a way to work on both sides. It’s a breath practice, really quick and easy.

1:13:38 You do about five rounds of it and you feel immediately better and more balanced. And so like I said, it’s 10-10-2 to 10-10. The first part is the inhale, 10 seconds. Then you hold for 10 seconds. Then it’s a really quick exhale, two-second exhale.

1:13:53 So it’s just like you inhale, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10. And then the exhale is just 1-2 and that’s it. And so you want to be like really de-forceful. All of it’s through the nose and then you’re going to take a really quick inhale through the nose. So when the inhale is really quick like that, it’s going to feel like kind of energized.

1:14:17 So real quick inhale, yeah. So just two-second inhale, then you’re going to hold for 10 seconds, exhale for 10 seconds. And then it will repeat again. 10-second inhale, 10-second hold. Or yeah, exhale, two seconds, two seconds.

1:14:35 You kind of catch where I’m going on this one. Yeah, yeah. That’s interesting. Yeah, and with this one, you’re working a five-to-one ratio on the sympathetic nervous system and then a five-to-one ratio on the parasympathetic nervous system. So it’s a really powerful one just to bring you into a state of balance, not too calm.

1:14:56 It’s one that I like to do if I’m feeling like frazzled or if I need to focus, right? So like if I’m sitting down in front of the computer and I’m wanting to go just like check my email insistently and or go to YouTube or whatever, do anything that I’m, except for what I’m supposed to do, then I’ll do this breath practice because it kind of just helps to bring me back into a center place, helps to refocus me. So yeah, it’s the 10-10-2 to 10-10. That’s a nice one.

1:15:31 Really simple practice. And you have quite some cool sound of breath pieces in the book like victorious breath and the skull shining breath. Some good names still in the obviously alternate nostril we talked about, fire essence breath. What are some of these things? Just different combinations of those to activate different parts of the system?

1:15:52 Yeah, I mean, I didn’t come up with any of those names. There’s the translation of the Yogi names that, yeah.

1:16:02 Yeah, they’re just different breath practices. They all, there’s a chart in my book that I break down. I don’t remember what page it is, but it’s kind of like a two page spread and it has, it’s blue and it has like all the different practices and it lifts them from the most energetic to the least energetic. And so like, we would talk about like how breathing faster is going to increase your energetic levels. Well, it’s also going to decrease your CO2.

1:16:31 And then there’s different varying degrees of it. So like if I breathe fast, it’s a difference like if you turn on the hot water, it could be warm, it could be hot, it could be scolding, right? And then you might not want, depends on what you want to use or how intense you want it to be. And so like for like breathing fast, you breathe fast and shallow through the nose. This is called breath and fire.

1:16:57 So it’s just like a, that doesn’t move. It’s a fast moving breath. It helps to increase the sympathetic nervous system, but you’re not blowing off that much CO2 because you’re not moving that much air. You’re moving more of the dead space air in there. So you’re not going to get as lightheaded and dizzy as if you did the other extreme, which is the bostreca, which is the really full inhale and exhale, which you’re moving a lot of air.

1:17:22 This is going to deplete your CO2. Also working the sympathetic nervous system, but a lot more than the breath of fire. So this is like the billows breath would be the English name for it. And then like the one in between that is what’s called kabalabhati, which is the skull shining breath. And with this one, it’s a little bit different because it’s kind of, as far as if you’re talking about how much air you’re moving, it’s in between.

1:17:48 So it’s not going to affect the sympathetic nervous system as much. But the way that it’s done is on a forced exhale. So it’s a passive inhale and a forced exhale. We’re used to breathing as a forced inhale and a passive exhale. So we take a controlled inhale, and then when we exhale, we relax.

1:18:08 So this is working on the other side into your inspiratory reserve volume. So as where you find the bottom of your exhale, you would stop there and then exhale all the way. And then it’s a passive inhale. And while you’re doing this, you’re also pulling your belly in and up, which is like the vacuum breath, the udiyana bandha, which is what we call it in yoga. It’s like, when I was a kid, I used to suck my belly in and I was a skeleton or something, you know, like you pull your belly button to your ribs.

1:18:35 So you do that in really quick succession on the forced exhale. So like, it’s another tool. And so I look at each one of these breaths as a tool. What does this breath do? How do I do it?

1:18:47 What am I looking for? And you know, like if you go and you need to screw something in, you look at it, you go, okay, do I need a Phillips or do I need a Stanley? And then you pick the appropriate screwdriver. It’s kind of like the same thing. Like they’re both screwdrivers, but one does something a little bit different than the other.

1:19:03 And so with like the kebabati one, it’s working to strengthen your diaphragm. It’s working on the forced exhale. So there might be a reason that I want to use that. For me, I probably choose that because I’m working into respiratory dexterity. Respiratory dexterity is another aspect, I think, of athletic performance.

1:19:23 So if you think about, you know, it’s not just about how you do it. Let’s see, how would I say this? It’s kind of like being able to use it in the most efficient way. So if you aren’t breathing efficiently, if you don’t know how to use your breath efficiently, you’re using too much. It’s like someone that has poor form running or poor form swimming, right?

1:19:45 You could gain a lot more benefit if you understand the efficiency of it. With breathing, it’s the same way. If you have inefficient breathing patterns, if you don’t know how to breathe properly, like you’re breathing up or you’re not using your diaphragm, then you’re wasting energy. Another thing is breathing takes energy. And so it’s like if your muscles for breathing aren’t strong enough, you have to work a lot harder.

1:20:11 Then you get more fatigued. But if you exercise your diaphragm, you exercise your excitatory muscles, your abdominis rectus and obliques and all that, and you get them to work both efficiently and effectively, and they’re strong, then you use less energy. So if you’re a runner or a sprinter, you don’t want to dedicate all this extra energy just trying to breathe. So yeah, so by working into that exercise specifically, it’s going to help to build that. So I would choose those different ones.

1:20:45 And then on the other side, I might look, okay, how much nitric oxide do I get from this breath? How much does it increase it? Or how much CO2 does this one breathe off? And so this helps me to choose the tool that’s the most appropriate for what my goal is. Because remember, the breath is a tool, right?

1:21:03 And if you don’t know what the tool, or what you’re doing with it, then how do you know what tool to choose? So you understand like, okay, this is what my goal is. And then you could go, okay, this is the breath that works the best for that goal. There’s that famous part in this movie called Choke. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it where Hicks and Gracie, a mixed martial arts fighter and a Brazilian jiu-jitsu trainer, he’s on the beach and he’s doing that, you know, abdominal cavity suck in.

1:21:31 Well, I think he’s doing the breathing. It’s kind of like a, and this came out like 20 years ago in a documentary. And it was just, everybody was just like, what is he doing? Because no one had ever seen that. What is that?

1:21:44 Everything is that, you just described it, right? That’s the breath practice I’m describing, yeah. And that breath practice has been around for like 5,000 years. Right. Yeah, so, yeah.

1:21:54 It’s kind of fascinating, I was trying to play with it and pulling my muscles in. It’s quite tricky to learn how to do that as well, right? To pull your abdominal muscles in. That’s that respiratory dexterity. So as you get better with that, then you become more efficient at breathing.

1:22:10 So that’s one, it’s just another thing. It’s like one more tool that you could use to help increase your athletic performance. Yeah, I was also having flashbacks. I was supposed to have a boxing match in April of this year at the O2 Arena of all things. And I had never had a boxing match before.

1:22:27 And so I’m training. And Dylan, there’s a lot of, it’s a physical activity, then there’s a lot of fear as well. And breathing has always been something I’ve had to try to focus on because I didn’t start off as an athlete. Man, it was really my limiting factor was that breath. And when I was able to calm then slow that breath down, literally my fighting could get five times better.

1:22:55 And it wasn’t my physical ability. It wasn’t my anaerobic cardio. It was just me controlling my breathing, my fear. It was so related. And so yeah, the biggest single improvement I could make to my boxing was just controlling my breath.

1:23:13 It could make the difference between winning or losing by a long margin, you know? Yeah, definitely. You see it in a lot of martial arts where they’re just trying to calm them down in the corner. And you can see a lot of the commentators talk about someone’s going, now they’re breathing out of their mouth. They must be tired.

1:23:30 And like, there’s just so many aspects here. I wanna ask you a couple of questions because I read a quote from you and I just wanna read it back to you. And you said, what I love about yoga is it doesn’t differentiate the mind, the body, the breath, the spirit. It looks at it all as one thing. It’s this whole complete package.

1:23:48 And I know you’ve been doing yoga for a long time. Obviously you wrote this book about the breath. But could you comment on that? Because you experienced that in yoga and you teach that all the time. But I would say most of the world walks around and thinks of these things as completely separate and sometimes unrelated entities inside their body.

1:24:12 One of my teachers, he says that we’re in life, we’re not looking to be happy, but we’re looking to be whole. And that’s kind of Alan Watts. I like Alan Watts a lot. I don’t know if you’ve ever read any books by him. But it’s this idea that we need to search out to feel like different aspects of the self to realize that everything was already there.

1:24:47 I think that’s one of the big things with yoga that attracted me to yoga is I always felt like something in my life was missing. And if you feel like something is missing from your life, then you go out searching for it. And then as you go out and you collect what’s missing, maybe I need to have more money. Then you get more money. And maybe I need to have more fame or maybe I need to have more friends or more love or more talent.

1:25:12 And each time you go out and you get one of those things, you realize that it didn’t make you any more you. And on the same side, on the other side of that, you go around thinking, I need less of this. Maybe I need less body fat or less anxiety

1:25:32 Or whatever it is, the aspects about yourself that you go and then you work in fixing yourself and you realize that, well, I’m still not happier. I’m still not any more or any less me. Because anything that you take away from you was never you and anything that you add to you can’t be you. Like you came into this world whole. So we’re just trying to find this understanding that I’m whole.

1:26:02 And yoga is that saying that it’s all there. It’s all connected. We separate it so that we could understand it. That’s science. Science looks at something that’s whole and then it breaks it down into its parts so that it could be this is this, this and this.

1:26:19 But it’s always been the holistic thing. Yoga talks about the world as being Maya. So Maya is this word for illusion. It’s the way that you can think about is, I used to think that yoga thought that this philosophy thought that the world wasn’t real.

1:26:44 Because that’s what I thought allusions were. Oh, you go see a magician and he makes a girl disappear on stage or saw someone in half. And you go, that’s not real. But what he did was real. It just was appearing as something else.

1:27:00 And so this life that we live, this Maya or whatever that we’re seeing is real. There’s nothing that’s not real about it but it appears as something else. And the illusion is that we’re separate. And it’s not even like we’re separate within ourselves that we’re separate from each other. And it’s a really good illusion because we come from this place of looking and so you see yourself as separate.

1:27:26 You see yourself as different because you have this unique perspective. And yoga says that it’s only one aspect of the entire reality. How much I believe that we’re all one or whatever, I don’t think is really important to like buy into that, that we’re all one thing. But what I think is important is to understand that we are all together, we’re all whole. It’s a perspective.

1:27:55 And the more that you are standing in the place of yourself seeing out from yourself as yourself, the less you understand the truth because your viewpoint is narrow. It’s like those magic eye things or when you’re holding something and you’re looking really close to it, you can’t see the big picture. And so to see the big picture, you move back. And as you stop seeing yourself as like everything around and you start seeing as how everything works together as a holistic thing, society, community, the planet and all this, then you understand the truth a little bit more and it becomes less about you and then your problems that you have aren’t as big and your successes that you have aren’t as important.

1:28:43 And so the things that you need to be happy are less because you realize that whatever it was that you were looking for, you’ve always had. But I think people need to look for that to understand it. And that’s kind of the journey of life is to go out looking for the things that you don’t have to realize that you’ve had it the whole time. Why is yoga? When I think about…

1:29:08 Go ahead. To pre-answer your question, yoga is a philosophy. And yoga is a word, right? So we have subjective words, objective words, intersubjective words. And I think when we communicate a lot of times we’re communicating with these words that we think everybody else understands our definition of it.

1:29:40 So like an objective word is something like earth, table, lamp. These are things that we all agree on. We could talk about it. If I say, if I talk about this glass of water here I don’t need to explain what the glass of water is or whatever, but if I start talking about concepts like fear, love, anxiety, history, you know, these are all subjective words. They only have meaning because of the experiences that we’ve had.

1:30:09 You know, my experience with love is gonna be very different than your experience with love because we’ve, or my definition of love is gonna be very different than yours because we’ve had different experiences to it. It doesn’t make my definition of it any better or any worse. It’s just, it’s subjective to me. It doesn’t mean it’s not true. It just means it’s my truth.

1:30:30 Yoga is another one of these subjective words. And so a lot of people, like when I started practicing, when I started putting my practice out there on Instagram and YouTube and making it public, one of the things I got all the time was that’s not yoga, you know? And I felt like always, yeah, what do you mean it’s not yoga? I have to defend myself that, you know, what I’m doing is yoga just because my asana, which is asana means pose, doesn’t look like your pose or doesn’t look like the traditional poses.

1:31:02 Like, I felt like I needed to defend yoga, but yoga doesn’t need defense from me, right? And also them saying that what I’m doing is not yoga is also true, you know, because it’s their experience to it. And so what I do doesn’t match up to what they do. And so who’s right in that situation? And when you start looking at it as like, we’re both right.

1:31:29 So yoga is a philosophy that for me, you know, so this is my subjective opinion to what it is. It’s a holistic practice. It’s like in the asana or the poses, the handstands, all that, that’s the body, right? And the body doesn’t function without the mind. And then you’re just, you’re a vegetable.

1:31:50 And the mind doesn’t work without the emotions. And the breath becomes this unifying factor that works through the body, the mind and the emotions or the spirit or, because it links them all together. It’s always moving and it kind of creates that, yeah, that holistic feeling that it’s not separate. And so it’s, being whole is a perspective, I think. And so you’re gonna be not whole for as long as you have the perspective that you’re not whole.

1:32:30 But as soon as you change that way that you think and you see yourself as a part of something greater. And in the book I talk about, like we have, you know, however many cells that we have in our body, like a hundred trillion cells. And there’s a lot of, since then, since I wrote that, there’s been a lot of different articles about how many cells, I don’t know who’s out there counting the cells. Or we have like 30 trillion cells and we have a hundred trillion cells that are bacteria, which is, you know, like we have almost three times the amount of bacterial cells.

1:33:04 And again, like there’s a lot of dispute on this. So I hope I don’t get all the haters be like, no, we only have this many, but that’s not important. We have all these cells in us. Bacteria is vital to us living, but it’s not us. But yet it is us, right?

1:33:21 And we think that all these cells are us, but they’re also all different. And so if you think of like, if you go to like separate from that thing, then you take the perspective of being a single cell, then you’re gonna see the illusion of, you know, the self, whatever is not whole. And it’s just a separate thing. But if you look at society as kind of that same different thing, even those things that aren’t us, are you,

1:33:50 Then it kind of softens your outlook towards people. And I think that’s what’s important about philosophy. It’s not necessarily about agreeing with every aspect of it or buying into it, drinking the Kool-Aid, but it’s about understanding how does this philosophy become useful for me? How can I use it to live a more equanimous life or feel better about how I treat myself, feel better about how I treat other people? And for me, yoga has really been that.

1:34:21 And what that is, that word that I use for that is yoga. I don’t know. No, that’s a really good explanation. Something. You tried so many different things.

1:34:32 You know, you had many physical practices throughout your life. You know, being on deployment would have been one in wrestling and rock climbing and all these others. And we see people in life that swim or fight and all these things, but yoga seems to be somehow the one that connects people to their spirit more. And first of all, would you agree with that? And second of all, why would you say that?

1:34:56 Is it because there’s not an outside metric? Like I ran this fast or I did 120 meter butterfly and ultimately I’m with only myself and competing with myself? Or why would you say that is true? Well, like in India, they have yoga competitions. Like you could go to college and then yeah.

1:35:15 So I mean, even in that like yoga is still competitive. And I can say somebody that runs or swims, they kick or does whatever martial arts, they get the same exact thing as someone who does yoga. You know, it’s that meditative state. It’s all about, I think with yoga, what makes it a little bit different is there’s just an intention around that. And so it doesn’t matter what the movement looks like, it just doesn’t matter what your intention is.

1:35:48 There’s a term in yoga called spadyaya, which means self-study. And I think the big part of the practice of doing the movement is to understand yourself better. It doesn’t mean that you can’t do that through running or through jiu-jitsu or anything else. Of course you can, but you have to come with that intention. I think that’s really the only thing is the intention behind what you’re doing with it.

1:36:16 So like when I say I practice yoga, I’m usually not talking about my physical practice. I mean, my physical practice that I do is an awesome practice, but I find a lot of health benefits with that practice as far as mobility and joint health and strength. But a lot of my practice looks like hand balancing or calisthenics or skateboarding or, you know. But it’s only when I come to whatever I’m doing with the intention of understanding myself better that I feel like I’m practicing yoga.

1:36:55 That’s helpful. I had Dr. Joe Dispenza here a few months ago and then he invited me to his retreat. And I’ve been talking to him for like five years, but I’d never been to one of his retreats in London. And he does these walking meditations and I’ve been doing them every morning since they’re like these hour long.

1:37:10 And it’s funny, Dylan, he says the word whole. You know, he says that, you know, he’s trying to make every, he just says, you know, we want you to feel whole because when you’re whole, you don’t desire all these things that a lot of the hymns, these external things may be related with Maya a lot. And it’s just been a word I’ve been focusing on lately and it’s, you know, maybe strange or not strange that you mentioned it. Because I do believe a lot of my own journeys in life have been, yeah, me looking to be whole.

1:37:40 And when I feel whole, I don’t feel like I need all of these things that I was taught I needed. And for a brief moment, I don’t need a lot of these things. So yeah, it’s a beautiful state to kind of be aware of, to appreciate and to aspire to. And I felt that way sometimes via martial arts, via running, via whatever. But sometimes it wasn’t the intention, but I found out later that was a great way of having an intention for that practice.

1:38:09 So yeah, yeah, it’s just interesting you said that. Curious about you and your practice. First of all, you settle down, you’re in Bali, you were moving all around before. So it seems like you’re more in one location. And just curious where you think you are in your journey of yoga, whatever that word means, and like where you’re gonna go the next 10 years.

1:38:31 Yeah, just a touch real quick on what you just said, which is very beautiful. The truth has a way of repeating itself. And so I often notice when I’m hearing the same thing over and over like that, that sometimes the not truth

1:38:52 Is repeating itself, like crazy conspiracies on Facebook or whatever, but that’s not what I mean about it. Like when you feel something that comes in and it speaks to your soul and then you just feel it over and over, it’s a good indicator that you’re on the right path, that what you’re feeling, what is speaking to you is the truth. And now to answer your next question. Yeah, so from around 2013, 2014, I started traveling and gave up my home and just traveled all around the world.

1:39:28 Then the pandemic hit, got locked down in London. It was the first time I spent any extended amount of time in one place. And I felt, it was really like I told myself, I’m gonna travel and teach and do this until I feel like it’s time not to. And kind of just being in one place made me feel like, yeah, maybe it’s time to like settle down and grow roots a little bit more. Not thinking one is better than the other.

1:39:58 I always, one of the questions I ask myself often whenever I make any kind of move or changes am I moving towards something or if I’m moving away from something? Because that really affects your attitude and your attention and your energy moving into it. And so I always wanted to make sure that I’m moving towards something rather than trying to escape something. And so I felt like it was time to move towards a little bit more stability. So I actually bought a home here in Bali and right now it’s being renovated.

1:40:34 So I’m looking forward to moving into it. But yeah, just kind of like my plans now moving forward is to be a little bit more grounded. I’ll still travel and teach, but teach less. I’m working on my own online platform currently at the moment creating content for it. So that will keep me a little bit more stationary because I’m not gonna be out teaching live as much.

1:40:58 It’ll be more online stuff. So yeah, that’s kind of what my plan is moving forward. I don’t really set big goals for myself ever. I just like my only goal is to try to do my best every single day. I work in the philosophy of contentment while still pushing myself hard.

1:41:22 And so I wanna push myself as hard as I can, but I wanna be happy with how that feels every single day. And I think that’s another part of being whole. Like when you push yourself towards a goal and you think that goal is gonna make you more complete or more happy, then you’re always gonna find yourself lacking or missing or in deficit. But if you push yourself as hard as you can with the idea that where you are right now is already the best place that you can be, then all the growth that comes from it just feels like an amazing benefit.

1:41:53 Yeah, it’s a really easy way to stay happy and to stay fulfilled rather than fulfillment and happiness being somewhere in the future. Yeah, I like that. So you push yourself hard every day, but it’s not to get to a place that’ll make you happier than where you are now. You just do it because you wanna improve and you like to see where you can go, but the destination isn’t necessarily as important. Yeah, this whole proverb that goes, it’s better to travel well than to arrive.

1:42:31 And that’s kind of like where I like to live my life. Dylan, why do you think you’re so popular? Because you are? I think it’s probably because I’m extremely good-looking and tall. No, okay.

1:42:53 You are good-looking, but you’re not tall. No, I’m not tall at all. Thank you for, you’re very easy on the eyes also. No, that’s, yeah, when I teach my students to be teachers,

1:43:10 Because I lead a lot of teacher trainings, I tell them, I ask them, what makes you a good teacher? Yeah, and it’s not how well you can cue or how much knowledge you have or any of that, but it’s if people like you, right? You have students. And yeah, I’ve been blessed with having a lot of students. And I think, like, if I were to think about, like, what my best qualities were and kind of like toot my own horn in a way, I think I’m transparent.

1:43:47 I’m not pretending to be something that I’m not. I’m okay being vulnerable. I’m happy to admit my flaws. I’m human. I’m not any better or any worse than anyone else.

1:44:01 And so when you meet people at the place that they are, they’re able to open and grow a little bit better. And I like to help people grow. So I kind of just share the same path that I was on and recognize people where they are. You know, I’m still growing. I’m not, you know, I haven’t figured out anything more, I haven’t figured out anything new that wasn’t already figured out by someone else.

1:44:30 There’s a couple quotes out there, probably when you’re teaching people. And you said, if you’re teaching yoga to make money, you’ll never be successful. And then you said a career as a yoga teacher isn’t measured by the size of your paycheck or anything that you receive. Yeah. Being a teacher is about being a servant.

1:44:52 And when I think about some of the greatest people that’s ever walked this planet, you know, your mother Teresa, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, these were people that served the people. You know, it wasn’t about what they could get from the people. And I think I always remind myself that every single time I go and sit down in front of, you know, a big audience of people that all flew in or whatever to come see me, that I remind myself that as much as they’re here for me, I’m here for them.

1:45:33 And yeah, I tried it, it’s easy to get a big head. And I don’t think anybody likes that, you know? So staying humble, but staying humble is a very easy practice, but also, you know, I’m the most humble person. Like, I don’t really think I’m a very humble person. I’m just me, you know?

1:46:02 And so I just have little philosophies that I like to live by. One of it’s not about me. Two is I’m here to serve. Yeah, just a few of the other things I talked about. Yeah.

1:46:14 It’s simple. It’s simple and complicated at the same time. I try. Well, Dylan, I always like watching your stuff and I’m so glad we had this conversation four years ago when you were in the studio. I still remember you saying to me before we went live, you’re like, I don’t really know why I’m here.

1:46:30 And I was just like, come on. And that probably says a lot about your personality. And the reason I like you is because it’s all very real and it’s all very congruent. And for me, it’s something I can really sense. And I know we don’t talk all the time, but I see your posts and I read your micro blogs and I know about your history, but I also know that that’s just your history and it’s not your presence.

1:46:55 It’s just all part of who you are. And it always seems congruent whenever you post. And I like the fact that you were early known for these very athletic moves and you were just like, you know what, this is just what I feel like doing and I’m gonna do it. And you have this earlier life of you as a wrestler and a Marine and now you have this life which is now and one doesn’t define the other and it all works really well. So just wanna say, appreciate you expressing all of that and it’s noticed by me and by everybody else, I think.

1:47:28 And so really appreciate this new book. When I heard you wrote this book, I was really excited to have you back on because I wanted to talk about it and I really appreciate it. It’s called The Illuminated Breath. I recommend everyone pick up a copy and really start examining your breath because it could lead you to a lot of realizations about yourself. I’m gonna be trying the sleep stuff tonight and I’m gonna really just be working on a lot of these new breath practices in everything I do.

1:47:54 So yeah, thank you, Dylan. And next time, let’s do this in person somewhere. Maybe I’ll come to Bali. Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate this and I am, yeah, I didn’t want us to come on here and say like, yeah, I don’t deserve or whatever or yeah, I can’t believe that you’re having me on again, especially when you talk about all your other very amazing and famous guests.

1:48:22 And I was like, you know, I’m just some little yoga teacher guy, but I really appreciate you and thank you. It’s always a pleasure to have these conversations. I always feel very heard and I appreciate your style and your attentiveness and yeah, it’s always a nice conversation with you. So I hope we have more. Yeah, let’s do that, man.

1:48:49 They’re also great to look back on, man. You should go watch that one from four years ago because you get to see what he was like back then. Sometimes I get to see what I was like. They’re nice place markers. So excellent, Dylan.

1:49:00 Thank you so much. I appreciate it. People should pick up the book, follow you on Instagram, your website for teacher trainings. Is that the best way they can get ahold of you? Yeah, and look forward to my online Dylan Werner Studio platform, which will also be on Dylan Werner, yoyoga.com.

1:49:17 That’s gonna be hype, man. That’s gonna be super hype. So, all right, great stuff. Thank you so much. Next time we’ll do this in person and lots of love.

1:49:26 All right, take care.