20: How Stress, Breathwork & Sleep Affect Your Energy with Sachin Patel

[00:00:00] And to benefit from anything that the medical system has to offer. You have to get sick first, right? So to benefit from the cure for cancer, you have to have cancer first to benefit for the cure for heart disease. You have to have heart disease first. And so what we want to try to do, and I think you’re in the same boat here.

What if right, what if we could just dream for a moment and we could help people from the moment they’re born realized their wholeness realized their humanness realized the potential, at least dormant within all of us and actualize that from the very beginning, not waiting 40, 50, 60 years for them to unknowingly abuse their bodies and unknowing.

Allow this potential to lay dormant. What if we could unleash it from the very moment they’re born and show them what their potential is.

Hi there. Welcome to the field better now, podcast. I’m your host, [00:01:00] Jackie Balca. And if you’ve arrived here, no, there is something in here to spark yourself to create a bit of future in your health in your company. In your relationships, both yourself. And for those around you, just one small action step at a time with so much love and gratitude to be your guide.

Let’s get started.

Jackie back. Hey everyone. Jackie Belker here today. We have an incredible guest, the intelligent, generous, talented, and my own personal mentor, Sachin Patel. I am such a fan. Satin is an international speaker bestselling author. Breathwork facilitator, superstar functional medicine practitioner. Two companies, the living proof Institute, as well as a perfect practice mentorship program to upskill functional medicine practitioners.

[00:02:00] And guess what? He’s also building hospitals and orphanages on the side. What a guy, we chat about our trillion dollar body that nobody has taught us how to use. Just let that sink in for a moment such and shares really life-changing and super practical strategies on how to breathe, how to sleep. And so, so much more.

You really don’t want to miss this, that we have so much fun. Enjoy. Welcome, welcome, welcome, such. So honored and privileged. You’re so special, especially to me. So we’re grateful to have you on the podcast today. Thank you for being so generous with your time. Hey Jackie, thank you for having me. I’m excited for our conversation.

Me too. So I want to start, you are such a beautiful. Person inside and out and you talk so eloquently on so many subjects that we’re going to dig into today and get super practical. The first one though, is an astounding statistic that we’ve seen coming through with people talking [00:03:00] about their energy. So we’ve surveyed over 11,000 people now and holistically around.

The energy is like, and what contributes to it. And people are telling us 58% of people are responding. That they’re feeling stressed. They’re feeling overworked. They’re feeling worried. I mean, it’s, um, it’s, it’s, it’s not a good situation. Let’s put it that way. So I love your quote where you send flow is where you send function.

Can you explain how being in a stress state affects your entity? Yeah, that’s a great question. So, you know, a big thing about stress is that when we’re in this chronically sympathetic dominant state, it impairs our ability to get into deep states of recovery and restoration. And in most developed countries, especially Western countries, we view rest as a form of laziness and it only takes.

An entrepreneur achieving extreme levels of success to realize how important rest actually is for them to take it to that whole next [00:04:00] level that they want to go to. And the same thing happens. Unfortunately, it happens for some people, a little too late. And for other people, it happens at a time where they have the wisdom, but they may not have the circumstances to actually be able to get into those deep restful states.

So one of the things that we find is that when we are constantly in this sympathetic dominant state, we are sending blood flow away from the areas of our body that are essential for us to be able to heal adequately and to rest deeply and to get restorative sleep. For example, Um, in a sympathetic dominant state, we’re producing chemicals in our body like adrenaline and noradrenaline and cortisol.

And these are things that keep us wired and some people feel wired and tired because they’re kind of burning the candle at both ends. What happens when we’re in a sympathetic state, as well as we’re sending blood flow to the periphery. So we’re sending it to our arms legs because we’re producing a fight or flight response.

And the other thing that happens when we’re in a fight or [00:05:00] flight state is because we’re making so much cortisol. Cortisol is main function and physiology is actually to raise blood sugar. So our primary fuel becomes glucose. And when that happens, we burn out a glucose pretty quickly. We only have, you know, a limited amount of glucose in our bloodstream.

And when we are a glucose burning machine, it means that we’re not a fat burning machine. And so it’s in those restorative states in those parasympathetic states, when we have the access to our fat stores in fat, for most people, even those people who are thin like yourself and myself represent basically an unlimited reservoir of energy.

So by switching that metabolic switch from a sympathetic dominant state to a parasympathetic state. And really it’s not about just being always parasympathetic cause you can’t sleep all day, but it’s finding that balance. You know, the average person before we invented the light bulb used to sleep 10 hours a night.

And now the average. Sleeps a little less than seven hours a night. And those three hours [00:06:00] aren’t hours of meditation and drum circles and yoga and chanting and saunas and red light therapy. It’s the exact opposite, right? It’s usually things that are toxic to our health, not things that are restorative to our health that are replacing that deep sleep that we need to be getting on a daily basis.

And sleep is one of those things. You can’t as much as we try to make up for it on the weekend. Right. And play catch up. I mean, I’m sure there’s some benefit to that, but we can’t live our entire lives that way. And that’s what most people end up doing. And the unfortunate consequence of this go go go society is that we impart that on our children.

So if in our minds success. Hard work. And these types of things are represented by, you know, just constantly working and burning the candle at both ends. Well, our kids want to be seen as, you know, hard workers. They want to be seen as being successful in their parents’ eyes. So they’re going to feel that they have to do the same thing in order to achieve success as well.

So I think, [00:07:00] you know, dance to your question, we really need to reframe where we send energy in our lives. And then that will reframe how we use energy in our body. And I love your response to that questions such in my mind is going in so many places. But one thing that you said, which I think is so critical is the rise and fall of the sun.

Let’s chat about. Ancestrally what we did, that’s different to now. And let’s dig a little bit deeper into that light. Cause I know your clients have really benefited from some really practical solutions about, you know, lights off challenge, for example. Yeah. So every single biological creature and plant on this planet actually.

Sets its biology in accordance to the rising and setting of the sun except human beings. So, you know, we invented things like the light bulb, which can be very disruptive to our natural [00:08:00] circadian rhythm and this circadian rhythm. It doesn’t just regulate our hormones. It regulates our entire life in many ways.

And so when we’re not exposed to adequate amounts of sunlight, And we’re overly exposed to artificial sources of light than our brain really has a difficult time keeping track of what hormones it needs to be producing at what times of the day. So, for example, in the morning, when we’re exposed to natural sunlight, our brain increases the production of dopamine and dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps us stay focused that helps us get stuff done and see things through.

And it also helps us feel a sense of reward and accomplish. And if we don’t get adequate amounts of sunlight in the morning, we don’t make adequate amounts of dopamine, but we are a dopamine craving machines. So we will turn to things like social media, which increases our dopamine. We will turn things like sugary foods or fatty foods because we need that dopamine.

They feel a sense of accomplishment. Dopamine makes us feel good. So morning sunlight is [00:09:00] critical in raising our dopamine levels. Another neurotransmitter that’s important to serotonin, which we’ve all heard of. Serotonin its function in our body is widespread, has many benefits, including bowel motility and serotonin.

The majority of our serotonin is actually produced in the lining of our intestinal. Now what’s really interesting. And I found this really fascinating is that we produce the most amount of serotonin when we’re exposed to midday, sun midday, sun when the sun is in the tightest position. So that doesn’t mean noon because that time changes every day by a few minutes.

So anywhere between 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM, when the sun is at its highest position, being outside will actually increase our serotonin. And so serotonin later in the day, I have a process called methylation turns into melatonin. So without adequate amounts of serotonin production during the day, we’re not going to be able to make adequate amounts of melatonin in the evening, which as we are quickly learning, is that.

Important immunomodulating hormone. [00:10:00] So the reason they call the gut, the solar plexus is because of the dependency that it has on proper exposure to sunlight. So we want to make sure we’re trying to get midday sun whenever possible. And it doesn’t mean that it has to be sunlight where you’re getting full skin exposure.

So for example, I live in Canada and people will always push back and they’ll say, well, it’s super cold outside. It’s not necessarily just about exposing your skin. It’s about exposing your eyes to the sun because the positioning of the sun will signal to our brain because of where the sun and the light hits our retina, what time of day it is.

So it gives our brain that biological signal that Hey, it’s mid day, right? Yeah. This is when I’m going to have my biggest meal. This is what I need to be producing the most about a serotonin and serotonin, as we know, also makes us feel good. Serotonin helps us reduce pain. So if somebody is experiencing pain, you know, one of the things that we want them to do is find ways to increase their serotonin production.

Now, another way to increase serotonin production [00:11:00] is through eating carbohydrates. So people who don’t get enough sun during the day are going to crave carbohydrates. So that’s important for us to know as well. When we put ourselves in the sun, we’re actually also increasing a process called sulfation sulfation is a process that I won’t get too technical here, but within our blood vessels, the process of sulfation creates some that called an exclusion zone and an exclusion zone is where we create basically what’s called the fourth phase of water.

And the fourth phase of water is where an exclusive Joan is created, which creates a positive and negative charge and interface. So literally our blood, as it flows through our blood vessels is creating a charge in our body. So we literally are recharged whenever we’re exposed to sunlight through this.

So we increase our energy production as well. So then we’re not looking for carbohydrates as an energy source because now we’re making enough serotonin on our own. And we’re also [00:12:00] being re-energized by that mid day sun exposure. And then in the evening, if we’re exposed to bright overhead lighting, then the problem with that is.

It’s telling our brain that it’s still the middle of the day, even though it quite isn’t right. Even though that indoor lighting pales in comparison to sunlight, we get the disruptive effects of that overhead lighting on our production of hormones, like melatonin, which helps us on wind in the evening.

And when we have too much light exposure in the evening, it also increases our cortisol, which then obviously doesn’t allow us to make adequate amounts of melatonin. Now, interestingly, when we are exposed to candlelight fire or Moonlight, it only decreases our melatonin about two to 5%. So pretty negligible compared to artificial lighting.

Which decreases our melatonin by up to 40%. Yeah. It’s so true. Isn’t it? And I love that you brought up the candlelight or the fire because it just takes me back to our ancestral roots when we were cooking our food around the fire. So [00:13:00] it just seems like there’s so much to glean from the activities that we were doing when we were ancestors that we have somehow really moved away from.

Yeah. And another thing that’s important is also the angle of the lighting. So in the day, like the sun is constantly moving, right? Our light bulbs, our overhead lights in our home. Don’t move from one hour to the next. So they’re always in that same position. So just like a clock, right? When we look at a clock, if the clock just stayed in the same position, we would think it’s the same time.

Just like the sun, if the sun stayed in the same position and you just kept going out in the sun was in the same position, you would think it’s the same time of the day. Right? So we have to also realize that just like a sundial as the sun positions changes the time on the sundial changes, right? So our perception of time changes, but also at an unconscious level, our perception of time is changing based on where the sun is positioned.

So after the sun goes below the horizon, Then, you know, the source of lighting, fire and [00:14:00] candlelight would be coming from below the horizon. It would be coming from the ground up. So one of the things that we suggest to people is if you are going to have lighting in your home after the sun goes down, make sure it’s the right temperature bulb.

So we use a about a 640 nanometre bulb. And what that does is basically a red light. And we have red lights that are on the ground. And so these red lights will hit the top of the retina producing a wavelength, similar to a fire or a candlelight. And then that tells our brain it’s time to wind down within the next couple of hours.

You’re ready to go. Oh, it’s just brilliant. Actually, I read, I don’t know if he’s still doing this, but I read you get some bulbs from Australia. Is that right? That’s right. Yeah. We get the blue blocks Lummi bulbs. So those are great bulbs, flicker free LEDs. So they’re very, very friendly to our neurological systems and they’re relatively inexpensive.

It’s not like you’re going to fill your whole house with these bulbs. So. [00:15:00] You know, for 2030 bucks, you can put them in specific rooms in your house where you spend time in the evenings and you can put them by your nightlight as well. So we have one in my son’s room, a couple of my room and my wife’s room.

And then I keep them at my desk. Sometimes if I have late night webinars or something that I’m doing, then I’ll keep them by my desk as well. And those bulbs are actually good during the day as well. Believe it or not because. Most of our lighting, indoor lighting and lighting that we get from our computer screens is devoid of red light.

Sunlight has blue light green light, red, orange, yellow. It’s it’s got the full spectrum. Whereas artificial lighting overly represents blue light and underrepresented. Hmm. So interesting. I just want to go back to dopamine quickly because it’s something I’m so passionate about, you know, especially when you see people on like this, on their phones and for people listening, I was just tapping randomly if you’re not watching on YouTube.

So we talked about. [00:16:00] Dopamine from the sun. And we talked about, you know, doing that in place of dopamine from a device or something like that, what are some practical tips that people can use to get their dopamine hit? Just like, you know, checking things off a list, always feel so good. Like there’s a reason it feels so good.

What are some other things people can do so they can see the impact of not needing that craving from somewhere that’s not. Yeah. So a couple of things that they can do. I love what you said about having a checklist. So this idea of, and this sense of accomplishment is really important. So feeling like we’ve actually accomplished something kind of fills that dopamine loop.

So with dopamine, it does a few things. It motivates us. Literally you need dopamine, like people who have Parkinson’s have basically. Very low dopamine production. So they can’t even initiate movement. Right. So you need dopamine to actually initiate movement. So when we take an extreme case, like Parkinson’s people can’t actually start that movement process.[00:17:00] 

Right. So dopamine helps us do that. It helps. Puts us into action. Credible thing to open me does is helps us stay focused. So we want to actually practice focusing everything in our society helps us practice, not focusing. Right. If you watch TV, you’ll see scenes in a show change very quickly, right?

You’ll be hard pressed to find a TV show that has a scene that’s more than eight seconds. Right. And what this does is it trains our brain to think that every eight seconds, the scene should change right in real life. Isn’t that? What. So, yeah, if we’re on our computers and we’re trying to do work, I mean, it’s sometimes hard to do work for extended periods of time because our brain has been trained on how not to focus.

Our children are trained on how not to focus. Adults are trained on how not to focus right now. If you look at things like Tik TOK, even if you look at YouTube commercials, they’re like 15 seconds. Right. I remember when we were young and commercials used to be so much longer right now they’re [00:18:00] super short because people’s attention spans are so short and the more we cater to this, the more we create it, the more advertisers and marketers and TV shows, shorten these bits of information and data that we’re getting the worse.

It makes it for our children. So our children are being conditioned and trained on how not to focus. So we need to. Cultivate that that’s where meditation can be very practical. Even if it’s just a minute or a couple of minutes. I have a meditation that I do every night before I go to bed where I light a candle and I stare with a soft gaze at the candle for about three to five minutes.

So I put on a relaxing soundtrack or song, and then I just stare at the candle. I knew nothing else. And that allows me to build up that ability to focus saying a mantra can help you focus. Another way to increase dopamine is getting morning sunlight. So even if it’s five to 10 minutes, but there’s actually a difference between sitting in the sun and [00:19:00] walking in this.

So as we approach, let’s say you set a target. One way to increase dopamine is to actually set goals. So if you’re out in the sun in the morning, or even if you’re on a regular walk, instead of just walking aimlessly, set your gaze or a set your focus on a tree, that’s in the distance. And what’ll happen is as you walk closer to that tree, your dopamine increases incrementally as you walk closer to that goal.

And then once you hit that goal, you get that hit and then you find another tree or you find another landmark and you walk towards it. So these are little subtle things that you can do to increase dopamine levels now in order to make dopamine, because we can’t just make it out of thin air, we have to have.

Necessary precursors. So we need to make sure we’re getting enough iron in our diet. And as you probably know, we have an epidemic of anemia. So low iron will cause low dopamine levels. You need adequate amounts of B6, and we also need adequate amounts of tyrasine or fennel [00:20:00] alanine. And these are the amino acid precursors.

And co-factors that we need to make adequate amounts of dopamine. Now what’s interesting about dopamine is that it’s also known as a catecholamine. And so the other catacholamines are adrenaline and noradrenaline. So adrenaline noradrenaline are made from dopamine, which means that if our stress levels are high, Then we’re going to take that dopamine and we’re going to turn it into stress neuro-transmitters wow.

And then that depletes our dopamine. So chronic stress will deplete our dopamine levels. And so of course, when we’re stressed out, it’s hard to initiate action. That’s why, when we’re under extreme stress, we just kind of freeze here in the headlights. We can’t focus because we can’t focus. We can’t accomplish our goals and feel satiated.

But because we need to replete that dopamine or get that dopamine fix. We’re not going to start craving and choosing the wrong foods. So it is like a vicious cycle. But once you understand how that dopamine cycle [00:21:00] works, then you can start finishing it. A sign of, or dopamine function for a lot of people is starting projects and never finishing them.

So if you’re the type of person that starts a button, not you necessarily Jackie, but our listeners, if somebody is, is somebody who starts a lot of projects, It has a bunch of stuff that they started never finished. They probably have a dopamine problem. We’ve seen so many people who’ve come to us. They joined our program in the process of discussing with them that we look at all the different things that they’ve done, all the different products or programs or practitioners that they’ve worked with.

And we start to realize that this person doesn’t have a problem with their protocol or their practitioner. They have a problem with dopamine, they start stuff and they never follow through it. They never finish it. And because that problem was never addressed, they never feel a sense of reward. They never stay focused on what they want to do.

And because they never feel a sense of reward, they never actually feel like what they’re doing is. Hmm. Sometimes what’ll happen. You know, [00:22:00] this may have happened to someone that, you know, or maybe clients that you’ve worked with where you’re more excited about their results than they are. And they’re like, you know, they lost 10, 15 pounds or their pain is gone and they’re not even excited one bit about it.

And it’s because their dopamine system is broken their sense of reward, their sense of joy. That they get from a feeling accomplishment is, is broken. And so another sign of people with low dopamine is people who participate in self-sabotaging behaviors. So for example, if somebody maintains a healthy diet, let’s say they maintain their healthy diet and lifestyle and they lose 10 pounds.

But then in order for them to feel like they accomplished something, they’ll go to cheesecake factory or they’ll eat unhealthy fatty sugary foods. To reward themselves because they didn’t get enough reward from actually accomplishing their goal because their dopamine systems broken. So these are telltale signs and then other signs of low dopamine or dopamine related issues are going to be people who [00:23:00] are addicted to things like smoking gambling.

Pornography chocolate has a compound in it called E. Which molecularly resembles dopamine. So that’s why chocolate is literally addictive for people because of that. And then we’ll see people participating in behaviors that are self-sabotaging. In fact, a interesting fun fact is that donating money actually spikes people’s dopamine as well.

So sometimes people who have issues in this area will give it all away. Right. They’ll, there’ll be overly generous because that gives them a hit and a feeling of, of reward when they, when they need that dopamine hit. Oh my goodness. And I think you’ve just described every behavior that I used to display before.

You know, dug deeper and, and got myself well, really digging into the root cause of why I was displaying these behaviors in the first place, which is just the beauty of functional medicine and really exploring what’s going on with you and why, and taking [00:24:00] ownership and action to rectify. Which leads me to a brilliant quote of yours.

We have a trillion dollar body and nobody taught us how to use it. Why such and are we constantly fighting our own biology? Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great one. You know, I think that without getting, or sounding too much like a conspiracy theorist, you know, one of the things that I’ll tell people is no one’s coming to see.

Right. And so we have to really understand that, that pharmaceutical companies that not coming to save you, your doctors can’t save you from yourself. There’s no supplement that can save you from yourself. And ultimately we have to be our own stewards of health. We have to be our own advocates. And one of the things that we say is that the doctor of the future is a patient it’s it’s actually us individually.

We are, you know, meant to be our own doctors and create this amazing body that has been doing something for us. All the scientists in the world have no capability of doing, which is [00:25:00] actually creating life. And our body is a hologram of cells that are constantly dying and being reborn silently in every single moment.

And so we’ve got this amazing piece of machinery, the spiritual machinery that we have, and nobody teaches us how to use. You know, we’ve been conditioned and trained to think we’re broken from the moment we’re born. Right? So when children are born, they’re immediately vaccinated, they’re circumcised, or, you know, they have all these things done to them, to unconsciously send a message to them that they’re not whole, that there’s something wrong with them that they’re broken and they need to be fixed.

And God didn’t make them the way they were supposed to be made. And somehow humans are going to try to correct that. So there’s this deep, psychological wound that takes place from the very moment, you know, most people’s children are born and so that wholeness is taken away from them. And then you have, you know, a, a medical system which doesn’t teach you anything about being held.

Right. There is really nothing in that [00:26:00] system that makes you healthier. You could take all the drugs on the planet and none of them would make you healthier. You could have any surgical procedure and none of them would make you healthier. And that isn’t to say they might not save your life, or they.

Improve the quality of your life, but do they actually make you healthier? And, you know, in most cases the answer is no, right. I mean, they might make you healthier from a very low baseline, but for somebody who’s perfectly healthy, is there an opportunity for anything in the medical system to take them to a whole new level?

You know, I think we would mostly agree that the answer is no, and there might be some nuances and there’s always an exception, like. We’re finding now, Metformin can be powerful at helping people with longevity, but guess what? It’s soaking berberine berberine acts on the side of the pathway. So there’s already a plant-based solution for this issue that affects the same pathway.

So we already have a solution for that. So this idea that nobody’s here to really save us, comes from the fact that nobody’s going to save us and nothing can [00:27:00] save us from ourselves and to benefit from anything that the medical system has to offer. You have to get sick from. Right. So to benefit from the cure for cancer, you have to have cancer first to benefit for the cure for heart disease.

You have to have heart disease first. And so what we want to try to do, and I think you’re in the same boat here is what if right? What if we could just dream for a moment and we could help people from the moment they’re born realized their wholeness, realize their humanness realized the potential that these dormant within all that.

And actualize that from the very beginning, not waiting 40, 50, 60 years for them to unknowingly abuse their bodies and unknowingly allow this potential to lay dormant. What if we could unleash it from the very moment they’re born and show them what their potential is? What if being sick with. Not part of life.

Right. But if it was, I mean, it’s totally optional as Nevine Jane would say, right. Illness is an option that doesn’t have to be our destiny. [00:28:00] What if we got rid of the word prevention, right? This idea of prevention is ludicrous. When you think about it, right? Think about if you were driving somewhere and I were to ask you, Jackie, where are you going?

You wouldn’t tell me all the places you weren’t going. You wouldn’t say, well, Saatchi, I’m not going there. I’m not going there. I’m not going there. I’m not going there. You tell me where you were with. Right. So a preventive health strategy is trying not to go to the places you don’t want to go to, as opposed to focusing on the place you do want to go.

So I try to reword and remap my mindset and my client’s mindset. And, you know, through conversations like this, help people see a different way of life. And so we want that for people. We want them to take this trillion-dollar body, this piece of spiritual machinery that we have and fully act. And we have that potential within all of us.

If somebody takes the time to teach us the simple things that we can do, you know, it doesn’t have to be complicated. Being healthy is actually very [00:29:00] simple. Leonardo da Vinci said that the greatest sign of sophistication is simplicity and Steve jobs echo that with everything he did with apple. And I’ll echo that when it comes to our health, you know, our body is the most sophisticated piece of equipment that I’ve ever encountered.

Therefore, it should be simple to take care of. Whereas in medicine, we’re trying to match its complexity in order to understand it. And that makes no sense to me. If you go to pub med and you just look at all the research that’s taking place, you know, this sounds like a silly question, but Jackie, is there more research taking place this year than last year or less research or research?

And what does research research means? We have more questions and the more questions we have, it actually implies the less. So each year, the more research we do, it’s an implication that we know less and less and less, not more and more and more. And this is what Bruce Lipton calls a cosmic joke. So this idea that we’re going to eventually understand everything [00:30:00] that our body does and try to match that level of complexity in order for us to be able to then manipulate it is absolutely ridiculed.

Right. And we have all this technology with all these scientists. We have all these things that are at our disposal, and yet we still haven’t figured it out. So, you know, to me, it’s, let’s keep it simple. Let’s keep us sustainable. Let’s keep it practical and let’s make it accessible. And that I believe is the only solution to solving our current healthcare crisis.

It’s not more complexity. We’ve tried that approach. We’ve tried the approach of complexity. Nobody’s tried the approach of simplicity. Absolutely. And you know, talking about the research, there’s so much research going on to mirror the effects of sleep and of hydration and of exercise. And it’s so true, isn’t it?

Which brings me to something that you specialize in, that I’ve learnt so much from you about, which is something that is potentially one of those. Underwhelming [00:31:00] leasing pool, baby, which is breathwork. Let’s talk about breath work and its importance. Well, we all breathe, right? Whether we, whether we like it or not.

And when we are born, when we leave our mother’s womb, our first breath is one of the most important milestones that we accomplish. Right. It’s a sign that things are working the way they’re supposed to. And so we’ll read about 23,000 times each. And it’s one of the most important functions that we undergo now, breath work specifically is a conscientious and conscious approach to breathing.

Right? All of us are breathing passively and many of us are breathing unconsciously like I did for the first 40 years of my life. You know, I was an unconscious breather. Yeah, I was breathing. I was alive and well, but I didn’t have that awareness. I didn’t have that. Self-awareness of reading with intention.

And to me, it was almost too simple for it [00:32:00] to be real. How could this actually have any effect on me until I actually got trained in breath work or I went to a training, had an experience. And then I never looked back and then I became a breath work facilitator. And with breath, we can change where we send blood flow in our body.

We can start moving lymph from our trunk organs, which that’s the only way to do that is through our abdominal muscles and our diaphragm. We can lower our blood pressure by. Correctly, our diaphragm is known as our second heart. So if we don’t breathe correctly, then our heart has to work harder using breath, work and blocking specific nasal passages.

I can actually increase blood flow to the right side of my brain, the left side of my brain. I can increase blood flow to my trunk. Oregon’s I can increase blood flow to my peripheral organs. I can raise and control my body temperature or lower my body temperature. I can change my states of consciousness.

And literally leave my body if I wanted to using breath work. So there’s so many things that we can do using breathing when we [00:33:00] breathe consciously. Now what’s really interesting about breathing and this could be a whole interview. I’ll keep it short is a couple of simple things. So there’s a few check-ins that I ask people to do.

And if you write this down on a post-it note and keep it on your computer, it’s just a simple, gentle reminder. So if we do a quick scan, whenever we raise awareness around this, the first thing I want to ask people is where is your tongue? Is your tongue in the correct position? So the correct positioning of our tongue is the roof of our mouth.

Believe it or not, our tongue pound for pound is the strongest muscle in our body. And so it’s a very powerful muscle and it actually serves as a postural muscle. So it keeps the front of our head. It prevents it from falling forward. Now, if our tongue is not positioned correctly, then we end up overusing our cervical muscles in the back of our head.

So that’s where a lot of people will get tension and strain and stress in their neck because their tongue is incorrectly positioned. When our tongue is correctly positioned, it’s at the roof of her mouth gently. And the tip of our tongue [00:34:00] is gently positioned at the back of our front teeth. Now, what this does is it positions our tongue in such a way that it closes RMS.

And it prevents us from being able to breathe from our mouth. So if you try that for a moment, it almost creates a seal. And then the next thing you want to do. So my tongue is in the right position. The next thing I want to know is am I breathing through my nose? Right. And that’s really simple, just a simple way to check in.

Am I breathing in and out through my nose? And then the next thing we want to check in. How I’m breathing. So the best breathing technique is something called samurai breathing. So samurai breathing is where you’re breathing so slow. And so subtly that if I were to put a feather under your nose, the feather wouldn’t move.

So it’s a very subtle form of breathing. And so those are three things that we can check in on. And I love that. Uh, we can also use breath. The breath is the bridge between our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. So I know at the top of the hour, we talked about switching gears and going into a [00:35:00] more parasympathetic state.

Well, interestingly enough, if we use correct breathing patterns, We can actually go from a sympathetic dominant state, into a parasympathetic state. So we can do that through different breathing techniques. One of them is called box breathing. So box breathing is where you breathe in for four seconds.

Hold for four seconds. Breathe out for four seconds. Hold on the exhale for four seconds and then breathe in for four seconds. And you just kind of repeat that. And what that’ll do is it’ll shift gears and put you into a more parasympathetic state. Another breathing pattern that James nester talks about is the cadence of about five and a half seconds in five and a half seconds out.

That’s a great breathing pattern that helps us again, shift gears and go into that parasympathetic state and other breathing pattern that I like to use. And this is more of a breathing exercise. Is to take our diaphragm through its full range of motion. And most people don’t actually do this. So this idea when people say, take a deep breath, right?

Well, they kind of only tell you [00:36:00] half the tale because what most people will do is they’ll take a deep breath in. But they won’t take a full exhale all the way out. So a way to do that is to take that full, deep breath in. Right? So fill up the belly, fill up the lungs chest to fill up the APCs of the lungs.

And then what you do is as you breathe out, you would repeat the alphabet or repeat a mantra or repeat counting to 10 over and over again, until you fully exhale all the air out of your lungs and then your diaphragm then sits in its highest position. And the diaphragm can move anywhere from four to six inches.

And so what happens is now where fully, fully exhaling getting all that air out of our lungs, all that toxic air out of our lungs, and then we’re then fully inhaling again. And what that’s going to do is it’s going to create a piston, like. So your diaphragm will go through its full range of motion. And what happens when you do that is that now starts pumping all the lymph out of our organs.

So [00:37:00] our muscles in our arms and legs have the lymphatic system woven into them. But our trunk organs don’t, this is why most cancers start in the trunk. Oregon’s right. The pancreas, the liver, the kidneys, the bladder, the large and small intestine, because. We don’t have adequate lymphatic function in these organs.

The biggest lymph nodes in our body are located underneath our diaphragm. So if we, if we don’t breathe correctly or for shallow breathers, like most people are, if they’re sympathetic dominant, then what’s going to happen is they’re not going to get proper lymphatic drainage. And that inadequate lymphatic drainage leads to live stagnation, which then leads to a myriad of chronic illnesses, including cancer.

So proper breathing helps our heart function better. Because the heart literally sits on top of the diaphragm. So as the diaphragm moves up and down, it actually physically assist the heart in pumping blood. And then as the diaphragm was up and down, it starts moving that lymph that accumulates in our organs, [00:38:00] another breathing technique that is also really powerful is something called bhramari breath.

And this is something simple. We’ve all done it in some way, shape or form. And this is basically, you know, the closest equivalent I would say is to how. So if you take a deep breath in and you let it out with a long drawn out, hum and you just kind of let your whole face vibrate through that process, you’re going to increase nitric oxide, production, nitric oxide production.

We’re finding now it’s funny with COVID they’re saying that you can take Viagra and it’ll lower your risk of developing COVID, but what does Viagra do? Viagra increases nitric oxide. By dilating blood vessels. Well guess what? You can increase nitric oxide production, 1500%. By using this buzz breath or this bhramari breath that I just described.

So there’s ways that we can use breathing to create medicine in our body. And nitric oxide is a vasodilator it’s antiviral, it’s antibacterial. It has a whole myriad of benefits. And when the molecule is discovered and [00:39:00] isolated, the person who found, I can’t remember his name, but he got a Nobel prize for it.

Wow. So our nose makes it for us. How cool is that? Oh, so cool. And you’re the one that taught me. I remember popping up at, you know, in a lecture we were in and you were saying that in Canada, that was starting to sell nitric oxide spray in the pharmacies to help reduce COVID or prevent COVID. So. It’s amazing.

Isn’t it another example about trillion dollar machine and we have an epidemic of mouth Ravens. Yeah, we certainly do. You know, another simple tip for people, you know, during the day we can be conscious of how we’re breathing, but as soon as we lay down at night and we fall asleep, then we don’t know what’s happened.

So we don’t have that awareness. So another thing that we’ll have our clients do is put a small piece of tape. It’s actually, I have some right here. So this is a piece of 3m tape. Sorry. My little screen is doing something funny so I can see it. So really simple. You can get this on, on [00:40:00] Amazon, or you can get it at a pharmacy it’s 3m micropore tape, and just put about a inch and a half piece over your mouth.

We’re not trying to hermetically seal the mouth. We’re just trying to. You know, just keep it there. So unconsciously, our mouth stays closed when we’re sleeping and for me it eliminated my snoring. So I have, you can probably tell a bit of a deviated septum. And so I would snore at night and during the day I’m naturally an nose breather, but at night when I’m sleeping, if I’m sleeping on my back, my mouth would come open and I would start seeing.

And for the last three years, I’ve been mouth taping and it’s pretty rare for me to snore now. So your nose is one of those organs. If you don’t use it, you lose it for some people. If, if they’re not a habitual nose breathers at first, it’s going to feel a little funny breathing through their nose all the time, but your nose actually has erectile tissue in it.

And so what you’ll find is that it’ll accommodate, as you start breathing through your nose, more frequent. Yes, [00:41:00] so important. And the other thing you taught me such in which now I actually put my daughter’s Teddy on her. Hang on. I’ve gotta get my, my sides, right? When you sleep on your right side. So you can breathe through your left nostril to activate the parasympathetic system.

So I noticed after you taught me that, that her Teddy was on her other side. So I just put it on, on that side and said, we’re going to sleep on this side now, what are your thoughts on that? And my strategy. Yeah, what a great student you are. So, as I mentioned earlier, we can alternate what nostril we breathe through in order to induce a sympathetic or parasympathetic state.

So the easy way to remember this is if I breathe through my right nostril and I’m pretty sure it’s the same in Australia, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but the gas pedal in your car is that on the right side or left? So the accelerator yet is that’s what you mean? Isn’t it is on the right side. Yes.

And I said, okay. Yeah. So, so the right side breathing through your right nostril is like putting your foot on the gas. Yes. So [00:42:00] if you want to go, go, go, then we breathe through our right nostril. If we want to slow things down, which is hitting the brake that’s on the left side. So we would cover our right nostril.

In and out through our left nostril and that’s going to help us get into a state of relaxation. And so when we’re sleeping, when we’re laying on our side, the side that is facing the ceiling is going to be the nostril that opens up. So for example, if I want to breathe through my left nostril, I’m going to sleep with my left side up right side down, and that’s going to open up my left nasal passage, making it easier to breathe.

And then that’s going to put me in a more relaxed parasympathetic state. So what I have people do is if they have a hard time falling asleep at night and make sure that they’re laying on the correct side, and unless that, of course it bothers them in some way, if they ones they don’t have pain, but lay on their right side, that’s going to help them fall asleep faster.

And if they wake up tired in the morning or have a general tendency to do that, you know, let’s [00:43:00] say they hit snooze. As they’re waiting for the next news around to go for them to lay on their left side with their right side up. And if they’re ambitious enough, they can just cover their left nostril and breathe only through their right nostril.

And that’ll, that’ll wake them up in the morning and charge their charge their engine, if you will, such a practical tip. And I was thinking about, cause I think when you pregnant, I remember you told to sleep on your left side. Yeah. I’m pretty sure that’s right. I’m trying to remember what I did. And then that makes me think, well, I wonder if some of the sleeping issues women have when they’re pregnant apart from, you know, it gets a little bit uncomfortable as the baby gets bigger, uh, connected to them being in a more, more of a sympathetic state.

How fascinating. I wonder if there are any studies on that? Yeah. I’m going to have to look into that. I don’t know the answer, but. So interesting. Isn’t it? My gosh, I could talk to you all day on breath work, but we’re going to have to get you back for that because I need to get to some of these other amazing questions.

So such starts, you are [00:44:00] so knowledgeable in so many areas, and I know that through so much deep work on yourself, what are you personally working on now to help you feel better? Ooh, that’s a tough one. Simple truth is detachment and really trying to detach from my senses and detach from the material world as woo as that might sound.

I think all of our suffering comes from this material world and when we can go inward. And we can detach from in Sanskrit. The word is Maya, the illusion of this external world. And we can actually focus on what’s real, which is our Optima, which is our soul is, is the true self that we are. So that’s what I’m working on right now.

Not an easy task by one of the hardest things for us to do. Especially, we live in, as Madonna said, right. We live in a material world. And so was that Madonna? It was Madonna. I love that. You’ve worked with daughter into this conversation. Some of my, we live in a material world, right. And interestingly, [00:45:00] Madonna was a Hindu at one point.

Maybe she still is, but you know, in our Hindu culture, one of the things that we talk about is that the only thing that’s real is something that never changes. And the material world around us is constantly changing. I visited the grand canyon recently and it’s not real. And the reason it’s not real is because it’s constantly changing.

I could go back the next day and it’ll be a little bit different. I could go back a year from now and it will be very. So things that are constantly changing are not real. And so it’s hard to grasp for a lot of people. It was hard for me to grasp until I realized that this is the case, right. People are changing.

If I go outside the leaves and the trees and the grass and the snow is constantly changing. So it’s not real. Now we assign things with certain titles, but. If I go back the next day and it’s changed, its title has changed. Right. So [00:46:00] it’s not real. And so this idea of detaching from the outside world and going to the essence and the core of who we are, which is real and never changing.

That’s the quest that I’m on right now. So, and we can, we can get there through a variety of ways meditation. We can get there through breath work. You can get there through plant medicines. We can get there through self observation. Metacognition, right. The thinking behind our thinking and reading scripture.

I mean, those are the ways that I’m trying to accomplish that. Even yoga is a way of doing that. And you know, this concept of yoga, yoga is not the exercise portion that we think of it as. Right. That’s the kind of bastardized version of yoga, right? It’s, it’s a component of yoga, but yoga is a way of life.

And so there’s eight limbs to yoga and, you know, practicing those more and more is also important to me as well. Wow. Thank you so much for sharing something so personal and such. And what I love about you has [00:47:00] always been you’re so courageous to be really. Honest with so much integrity. Who is someone special?

That’s made a difference, a mentor, a coach, or a family member, someone special that’s really helped shape you because clearly you’ve been on a journey. Yeah. You know what? That is probably one of the hardest questions to concisely answer, because there’s been so many people that have helped shape the people that have.

Wrong to me, or what felt like wrong to me at the time have shaped me into who I am. People who have poured into me have shaped me into who I am. You know, I feel like many of the things that I didn’t appreciate about my parents when I was young and growing up, I’m starting to really appreciate now, you know, my dad is very humble and non materialistic, and when you’re growing up, you want material things, right?

You see your friends have these things and you want those things. And, you know, I think part of it was. Not realizing that he was much more evolved than I thought he was at the time. It’s a really [00:48:00] appreciating that my mom, her equanimity, and just being able to see the good in things all the time.

Sometimes that would annoy me because something really bad would be happening. Yeah. I almost felt like she was ignoring what was happening to me or the circumstances that I was in, the challenges that I was facing, because she was unreactive to it. But now I realize it’s because of the work that she’s done on herself, she’s able to detach emotionally from a situation and able to see the good in a situation.

My wife, I mean, there are so many things, beautiful things I can say about her. She’s poured into me. I’ve had many mentors, one of our mutual mentors, like JJ, Virgin called . Dr. Peter Osborne, Dr. Matthew loop Bhagwan dos was the most people may not know who he is, but he was the person that introduced rom Doss to his guru named corroding.

So I’ve become friends over the past year or so, and actually met him in Maui. I don’t know if you were in Maui when we went there a couple of years ago with Mindshare. I think this may have [00:49:00] been before you joined, but in Maui is when I met him. And since then we’ve become. You know, good friends through this whole pandemic.

And he’s been one of my spiritual mentors as well. So, you know, I’ve had people pouring into me from different areas of life, right? Financial advisors, spiritual advisors, business advisors, Stan. Michelle’s a great advisor and mentor of mine. Joe Polish is a great friend and mentor of mine. Michael fishermen.

So lots of people have been there along the way, and I’m certain, I forgot many people, so I apologize if you’re listening and I forgot to mention you. My brother has been there alongside with me. So I would say, you know, it’s a community, it takes a community. And you know, as much as people have tried to pour it in to me, I’ve tried to pour into others and paid forward and that.

And that you do in more ways that you could even begin to imagine such and so beautiful. If I was your daughter, what would you teach me? One thing, uh, one thing I’ll tell you a lesson that I got, which was probably the [00:50:00] most powerful lesson that I’ve ever received was actually during a plant medicine journey.

My first, you know, hero’s journey that I went on. And for those of you that are unfamiliar hero’s journey, when you’re using psilocybin, which is magic mushrooms is three to five. So it is a out of body experience that you basically have, and your ego is basically destroyed in that process. So you don’t have a sense of body anymore, right?

The physical sense of your body and the separateness that you have from all things basically dissolves. So within 20 minutes of my journey, I was, uh, having a visual of me being at my son’s funeral, which was really weird and cryptic. Right. So my son was eight at the time and he’s in his lane, they’re in his coffin and he’s got his little suit on and he’s, he’s not alive.

Right. He obviously in his, in his coffin, I’m like, what the heck? Like, w what’s going on over a year and I’m trying to shake this image, you know, he’s an only child of ours. So [00:51:00] I love him to do. And so I asked the medicine, what’s the lesson I’m supposed to learn from this. And the medicine said, stopped, loving him to death.

I love him to life. And then the whole image just kind of turned into this golden spiral and spun out and disappeared. And so that’s, if you were my daughter, that’s what I’d tell you is to love yourself to life as much as you can to live each moment each day, each week, each month, each year to its fullest, by loving yourself.

And when we do that individually on an individual basis, then I feel like the magic of life unfolds in front of us. And I feel like that’s what it’s really going to take to create the transformation that I know you want to see happen in our lifetime, that I want to see happen in our lifetime. And that’s, what’s going to raise human consciousness so that we can collectively reach our full potential because.

We’re all connected, right? In some significant and sometimes seemingly insignificant way, but we’re all connected to one another and it’s love that brings us together [00:52:00] and everything else besides love, separates us from one another. So if we can all learn to love ourselves to life, then together we rise and we ascend to that next level of human.

That is one of the most beautiful stories I’ve ever heard. Thank you so much. And I love that we’ve come back to love as a way to end this conversation because it is the vibrational frequency that we need to be at. And I suppose what I’m mastering is helping people to love themselves first. So I’m so glad that we came back to that.

Thank you for sharing. You are incredible. Tell me what adventure. There’s always something is I ambitious. Uh, you embarking on next? Where can we find. Yeah. Uh, well answer the first question for, so the big adventure that’s coming up for me is our company’s in the process of being publicly listed on the Canadian securities exchange.

So that’s like a new, totally new unfamiliar territory for me. I’m glad I have amazing people supporting me along the way. [00:53:00] But thankfully we have a powerful message and we’ve got a great team that’s gonna spearhead this initiative. And our goal is to, you know, make lifestyle medicine and you know, this kind of self-actualization process available to as many people as we possibly can.

And thankfully we have. Financial backing the spiritual, the emotional and the tactical backing to make that a reality. So I’m excited about that. That’s happening in the next few weeks here. So wish me luck. I’m hoping, and I’m trusting that this is exactly what the world needs right now. And we’re going to usher in a new reality and make it accessible to more people.

And where can people find us? Well, I love sending people to. A really simple opt-in that we have, which is called 30 ways in 30 days. And they can go to www.in 30. So three zero I N three zero.org. And basically my goal is to keep people out of my practice and we do that by sharing our 30 best tips. So each day they’ll get a short, simple, [00:54:00] strategic tip that they can implement in their life.

Some of these things they might already be doing. So it’s going to reinforce a behavior pattern and others might be new or unfamiliar to. And they’re going to be able to learn a few new things and we cover all kinds of things. We cover, you know, how to poop in the morning we cover gratitude. We cover a proper dental routine in the morning and the evening to maintain good dental health.

So it kind of covers the gamut of, you know, whole health and wellness. And it’s a great place for people to get started. And what we find is. 80% of people who go through that program, it’s absolutely free. Don’t end up needing us. And the 20% that do end up meeting us or needing services like yours, they come in as better patients.

They come in already having a foundation that us practitioners can build off of and they see results so much faster. So that’s where I would send people. I love that. And of course, we’ll put that in there. And you are an absolute pleasure, what you give to the world. You can see you’re receiving [00:55:00] back again.

So love, light and blessings for your upcoming initiative. I know the universe will be looking after you and guiding you. And thank you again for coming on the show today. We so appreciate you. Thank you. Jackie was blessings to you, and I’m so grateful for this opportunity. Thanks for sharing me with your community and love and light to you.

If you made it to the end of this episode, celebrate yourself because it means you are truly dedicated to feeling better in your health, in your career, in your relationships. And I am so proud of you. And if you want more, Feel better now. So tuning every Monday for new episodes and join our community on Instagram at Jackie Belper for all the behind the scenes action and more.

Hey, why don’t you sign up for a chance to have your question answered@fieldphyticinstitute.com slash signup. That’s feel better. institute.com/the sign up, but most. Please keep [00:56:00] reaching to feel better because the world needs you to feel good. So you can share that very special gift that only you have.

So with that said, see you soon here’s to feeling better now. Bye-bye

Jackie.