Breathing A Unifying Medium

Jessica Dibb is a pioneering teacher of breathwork, consciousness, and human development. For more than thirty years, she’s guided people through integrative practices that blend somatic awareness, psychological insight, and spiritual growth. She’s the founder of the Inspiration Consciousness School and a longtime leader in the Enneagram community, known for helping people access deeper embodiment, authentic connection, and their fullest human potential. Today, she joins us to explore what it really means to awaken and live from the heart.

Virtual Breathwork Sessions 
guided by Jessica Dibb
https://leadingedgeseminars.org/blog/

These very potent online group Breathwork sessions are an opportunity for deeply personalized inner self-healing and growth, while feeling held in a community of unconditional support, respect, and care. 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:02

Hi everybody, it's Mimi from Be Heard, Empower Yourself. And I had a lot of empowering to do the last couple weeks. I had malled to my house and had to get out, and it's crazy. But everybody has crazy, no matter what. And today we have someone that's going to help us handle that crazy with a good process called her breath work, and she'll talk about it. Um, Jessica Dib. She's a pioneering teacher of breath work and consciousness and human development. And for more than 30 years, she's guided people through practices of plant somatic awareness, psychological insight, and spiritual growth. And she's the founder of Inspiration Consciousness School and a longtime leader in the Enneagram community, known for helping people access deeper embodiment, authentic connection, and their fullest human potential. And today she joins us to explore what it really means to awaken and live from the heart. So welcome, Jessica.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Well, thank you, Mimi. It's actually an honor to be with you and joyful. I am it's it's really great.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

I'm so glad to have you on. And you know, usually we have people, everybody had something in their lifetime that caused them pain. And um with you, uh, if you just want to share with us the uh amount of loss that you had at an ear, well, an early time in your life and not just one person.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Yeah, yeah. Um yeah, you know, so first of all, I my my husband died. Um, and so I had several losses within like a 10-year period. My husband, then a boyfriend that I started uh dating, and then uh my sister, who was my baby sister and who I loved so much, and she lived with me for the last three years of her life, and my brother. So all of those people, it was um quite a lot of loss in a short period of time.

SPEAKER_02 2:17

And close people that you're very close to. Yeah, and um the grieving process is not you know, people think, oh, somebody died, you're grieving. But like I'm in a grieving process because my husband has stage four Parkinson's, and I've been going through the last couple of years like denial and anger, and the same things that you go through when you die. Of course.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

I think what somebody, you know, because my sister did have cancer, and so did my brother, uh, whereas with my husband it was a sudden death, and my boyfriend too, it was an accident.

SPEAKER_02 2:54

So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Um, but I think that when it's a long, when it's an illness like Parkinson's or cancer or something like that, you go through stages of grieving because you know, you're losing things along the way. I remember my sister actually wrote a poem once when, you know, she she talked about because there came a day when she knew she was gonna not be able to ever drive a car again. And then there came a day, and I I remember when she was in bed in the last like maybe couple of months of her life, and she wrote this beautiful poem. And one of the lines of it was, I can't believe that I denied myself just the joy of knowing of being able to walk for so long, you know, because she was watching, now I can't drive, now I'll never, you know, have a relationship, make love again, now I'll never walk again, now I'll never this again. And I think the caregivers like you, we go through the same thing because we're losing those parts of the relationship with the people that we love.

SPEAKER_02 4:03

Yeah, and it's like my husband, he insisted on driving at a stage where we he really should have not. And um, I I went into counseling because it was taking a big effect on me psychologically. I was getting very depressed. And she said, you know what? You don't have to say you are you can't drive, but you can't say, I'm not gonna be a passenger. Right. Wow, that that opened it up for me because then he only did like little things, like went to the store on the corner, and eventually, you know, he had a couple of little fender benders, but they were like not even, they they weren't on the street. It was like in a parking lot. So the second time that that happened, he came home and I just put my hand out like this, just like that, and he put the keys right in my hand. But see, he got to make the decision. Right. And some people would disagree with the way I did it, but when you have a strong personality of a person and now they're losing it, it's not easy.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

And you know, and your your podcast is called Be Empowered. So I think you understand and know that uh, and there have been studies that have shown this that in a company, for instance, if people are given agency to make their own decisions as employees, they're gonna be much more motivated than if somebody tells them what to do. That's actually like science, there's science behind that. Oh, yeah. So, of course, you don't want to have somebody in an unsafe position. But we did something similar with my dad. He lived with me for the last nine years of his life, and we knew the point was coming where he couldn't drive anymore. But rather than just take the keys away, we sort of like had limited how far he'd go. And then it just eventually fell away, you know.

SPEAKER_02 6:01

And I, you know, and every time he would just go to publics, I'd say, now you know if you get in an accident, they're gonna know you have Parkinson's, and let's take your license away. So, you know, if you want to go chance it, go ahead. The other thing, and then we'll get into the breathler, is I bought him a walker and it sat in the corner for two years. And while it sat in the corner, he would continue to fall. And we have tile floors, so I was always worried. And every time he would fall, it would take him a horrible length of time to get off the floor, you know, and um as long as 20 minutes, because then his legs would freeze and all this. Sometimes I had to call an ambulance to get just to get him up, which you have to do. I'm I was told you you are not supposed to help him, you're gonna hurt yourself. And I made a big mistake. I was helping him get in bed at night. I all I was doing was pushing his legs in because he couldn't seem to get into the bed fully, and I ended up tearing my bicep and needing a shoulder replacement. Oh my! But this is what happens with caretakers, they they keep wanting to do things we're not supposed to do, yeah, but at least um I do have spiritual things that I can fall back on when I get anxious or angry, not at him, but at the disease. And one of them is breath work.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

Oh, beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

And meditation. Yes, so that's why I wanted to have you on. So let me ask you, what do you think the most misunderstood aspect of breath work in as far as therapeutic settings is?

SPEAKER_00 7:52

As far as therapeutic settings, do you mean like for instance in hospitals and healthcare?

SPEAKER_02 7:58

Yeah, what do they not understand about?

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Okay. I would say that one of the things that to me really um is so sad that they don't understand is they still think of breath work as a kind of adjunctive modality, like, you know, like it's it's a tool that you can use to help with other things. And I don't think that the full power of what breath work can actually do for a body and a heart and a mind and a spirit is really understood completely. And um how empowering it is if somebody can actually get to the point where they can see that it is the fastest way that a human being can change their brain state. You can start to change your brain state in literally one conscious breath. And if you really can uh which can have an impact physically, emotionally, cognitively, spiritually. So if we really understood the depth of this medicine of what breath work really could do for physical ailments to spiritual ailments, it would change medicine.

SPEAKER_02 9:13

Yeah. Now I do traditional talk therapy, I've done it for years. Um psychology is not something that I dismiss. I I really believe in a lot of the things, not everything, but I do like talking to another person. And so that's why I've done that for a long time. And I stopped, and then, you know, COVID hit, and that got everybody depressed and anxious. But then I had the other things flying in. So I had to learn how to have other things too, like breathing, just breathing. Yeah. And what do you think breath work does when there are there's like trauma just stored up in the in your body? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:59

Well, the first thing is that we know that, you know, trauma uh causes, you know, when when we are traumatized, we're going to be in a state where we have a kind of continual fight, flight, freeze, you know, fawn or faint. We're kind of in a high alert emergency state, but it's maybe become chronic if it's been there for many years. But um, so there's an acute phase and a and a and a chronic phase. And we know that when the body is in flight, fight, or freeze, or fainter, fawn, we now say that there's other pieces too, that um our brains are not fully present. You know, we've we've hijacked the amygdala and the limbic brain, we're in a state of fear. That's going to affect our flexibility and our strength in our muscles.

SPEAKER_02 10:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

It's going to affect our ability to respond to situations with creativity rather than with fear. I mean, it's going to affect our health. You know, to have that much uh cortisol running through your body all the time can affect your blood sugar, can affect your insulin, uh, can affect your ability to sleep, can increase anxiety. So, yeah, I think that the effects, the effects are very impactful. And especially if it goes on for a long period of time, it can really affect the quality of your life.

SPEAKER_02 11:33

My minister calls that the lizard brain, that we go to the, you know, almost like uh a caveman type thing, a survival mode type thing. And uh instead he says, when you get into, like, especially with me, I can get anxiety attacks. And when that happens, I have to remember what he told me. Go down, get out of your head, go down to your heart and breathe. Breathe, you know, and that's something that um we do in our spiritual community. So let me ask you this what does embodied awareness mean, trio? I've heard that term, embodied awareness.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

Okay, that's a lovely question. And as I go into it, I just want to really acknowledge that your community, your spiritual community is doing that practice. You know, when I wrote the book about breath work, breath work and psychotherapy, I for healing and transformation, I studied, I went and kind of looked up like all the major religions and some of the more minor religions, and I found references to breathing practices in every single religion. It's sort of like at the heart of the religion, they know two things that are kind of universal. One is that we we we are meant to love each other, and the other one is that breathing is a is a connecting point to God. I mean, it's literally a connecting point to life force.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

So I just want to really acknowledge that your your pat your minister is having you guys do that. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 13:18

Well, he starts our service um with a meditation. He starts our service that way. I love that. You know, everybody gets quiet and you breathe and you're quiet for a couple of seconds. And yeah, there's no other church that does that. In fact, we don't like to call ourselves a church, we call ourselves a spiritual community.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

I love that.

SPEAKER_02 13:37

Welcome everybody.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

Yeah, I mean, really, I I mean, I'm not a a religious scholar, so I don't want to be arrogant, but you know, just kind of common sense when you think about it. Religions are man-made, which doesn't make them wrong, but there are people, you know, creating rituals around these things. Spirituality is the direct contact with the thing, you know. When you think about the great spiritual figures throughout our history, they were having mystical experiences with the divine. You know, they weren't calling themselves a particular religion, they were relating directly to God. And so it's it's it's lovely that human beings have come along and said, well, why don't we make a religion? But it it can also be um it can be constricting rather than than opening. So I love that you that you're calling this.

SPEAKER_02 14:34

Oh yes. Well, I I I am a recovering Catholic. Yes. So I know all about it. Yes, so I understand that.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

Um so embodied awareness. So that's so important, Mimi, because I often, you know, I'm sure people have heard this example from other lecturers and teachers and stuff, but I think it's apt to just uh it's very graphic representation is that when this the big tsunami was coming into Indonesia all those years ago that wiped out so many people, you know, the animals all sought higher ground. There, in fact, that was part of why we should have figured out that there was a problem because animals were just moving to higher ground. I think that we have uh a real crisis in humanity, which is that, and it's unfortunately probably being accentuated by the digital, you know, the technological advancements too, that can also really help, but you know, can hinder with this process that we actually have somatic intelligence and wisdom, emotional intelligence and wisdom, and cognitive intelligence and wisdom. We could say we have spiritual too, but just in terms of the body, it's easy to see that we have we we are filled with sensations. You know, we have we have the five senses, and these sensations are intelligence, they're energy and information that our body has. And some of it is extraceptive on the outside of our body, but some of it is what science calls interoceptive awareness, which is where your body's actually listening to different things that's going on and it's making adjustments all the time. And the same thing, and and we know now that people even describe the enteric brain, which is the brain in the gut, that there's intelligence in in our microbiome, and that there's communication going on between the neural brain and the and the gut brain, and then there's also the cardiac brain, and there's emotion, and you know that's what psychology teaches us: that there's a lot of information and intelligence and wisdom and valuing that those emotions can bring to us. So for me, and this is where breath work is just it excels in terms of helping us to become more whole and integrate and have more potential, actuate, actualized, is that embodied awareness is when we have greater access to our somatic wisdom, our emotional wisdom, and our cognitive wisdom. And we're not just relating to life through what we think or what we perceive or you know, what we see, or even just through how our emotions are kind of unconsciously reacting. We're getting a deeper level of information, like those animals did, you know, like we better go up to higher ground because we're feeling something going on here, you know. And I think that humanity could really benefit if human beings from birth were supported in experiencing the intelligence of their bodies, hearts, and minds and spirits. And I think it would help us be individually more whole, but also collectively much more whole.

SPEAKER_02 18:18

I am a very uh great example of what you're talking about because uh I did not have any of that kind of thinking until I was 41 years old. And I had a lot of trauma and dysfunction and abuse and alcoholism, and um so then you know, when I was 41, I decided to stop drinking, and when I did that, the doctors told me you have chronic depression, not situational, chronic, and anxiety disorder. They could tell that from chemically testing me. And they said all those years you were drinking, you were self-medicating, you were medicating, I was self-medicating, and then when that was not helping anymore, and I was getting depressed, I don't know, spirit, whoever, universe, I don't know, God, whatever, whoever, someone intervened, and I went on my own. It wasn't an intervention, it was like I made a decision and after that, when my mind was clear, you know, um, first I went the therapy route, you know, for a while, and AA, of course. And then when I moved to Florida 22 years ago, that's when I started getting more spiritual, motivated more spiritually, and the breath work. And it does, it keeps me from a lot of meltdowns. Yes. And what I what I don't understand is most people walking around, they're not thinking about um actualizing their deeper potential or you know, um, trying to find an alternative way to problems. And I I can understand, I mean, a lot of them just said, hey, I gotta feed my family, I have to make money, I don't have time for that. But you can make five minutes a day. And am I right that that really is all you need?

SPEAKER_00 20:35

You know, I I could not agree more with one little modification. I have found experientially that it's seven minutes a day. Yeah, and there's some evidence, science evidence to back that up. So I used to observe, Mimi, that when I my students would do about five minutes of breathing, they would definitely feel different, better, more present, more capable of engaging, uh, more open to growth. But it wouldn't last as long as I hoped for. And then if I found if I had them, if I said to them, well, why don't you do 10 minutes a day? Their minds would sometimes say, I don't have 10 minutes, I don't have 10 minutes. And then I observed that if they did seven minutes, it was like it lasted longer. Well, guess what? A study just came out of sometime in the last few months where they were studying the brain scans of meditators, and guess what they found out? Seven minutes. Seven minutes was when the pain state happened.

SPEAKER_02 21:45

Well, you you found it out by trial and error.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:48

No. But that that's very interesting because um my mind is too busy all the time. I have so much in my head. Um, you know, people always say, Oh, you're you're so smart. You know so much. Yeah, but it's also hard to quiet that mind of mine. You know, um since COVID, I wrote four books. Four. And I had I started the podcast and I have a YouTube channel. And a lot of that is because I don't have the communication I used to have with my husband. You know, and I'm a talker and I want to talk to people. And we all have our gifts and we all have our blind spots. And I realized uh through the therapy, the talk therapy, and my minister and people in my spiritual community that I had a mission, I just wasn't acting on it. And once it came to me, because I had to really think about it, I knew it was to help people that had gone through things like I had gone through, which you know, in every family you'll find that stuff. You'll find addiction, you'll find domestic abuse, you know, all these little depression, yes, and um unfortunately I experienced them all. But that's okay. I thought I'm the that's why. That's why, because I'm supposed to help people, and that's why you know, be heard, empower yourself. That's what we talked about earlier. And um you spoke too before about uh fragility and sensitivity of human beings, and I can relate to that because as strong and powerful as I appear to the world, sometimes I do feel very fragile. So, how does that understanding of fragility and sensitivity shape your work?

SPEAKER_00 23:57

What a great question. So um, you know, I like to think, I like to say that fragility and vulnerability are not um they're not an affliction. They're actually one of our greatest gifts. I think that human beings have capacities that we may not be living into our full potential about that. I think the fragility and the vulnerability are these deep uh knowings in a in a lot of ways. You know, like some people are just canaries in a cold mine, you know, they they said that. Yeah, they're kind of picking up on their that there's a problem before other people are, but I think we all have that capacity. So for me, what is so beautiful, one of the things that is so beautiful about breath work and learning how to breathe consciously and um and have do breath work and have your breath with you as a friend and a companion and a you know, all the time, is that that fragility and sensitivity instead of being a liability is supported by the the physical life force strength of the breathing. And you discover that you can be in the presence of, let's say, somebody else's hatred of you or somebody else's uh disappointment with you or somebody else's uh rejection of you. You can be in the presence of your own heartbreak about something that happened in your life, like a beloved that's sick or dies. You can be in the presence of the heartbreak that you have about the world and the world situation. And you find that with the breathing, you're so connected to your essential life force and whatever it is that creates everything, that instead of the fragility breaking you down, it gives you a kind of intelligence, a kind of wisdom about how to be with these particular situations. And you feel a strength coming from literally physically from all the oxygenation and the breathing, it's very uh very enlivening, but also that deeper spiritual part where the breathing is this practice that reminds us that what brings us into the world is a breath. You know, the Reverend L. Sharpton says that's why nobody has the right to take away anybody else's breath because it's God given, you know, and if we don't breathe, we don't live. So it's this connection point between the larger thing of what we all are and the individual body. And so yeah, I think that fragility transforms into sensitivity that is an intelligence.

SPEAKER_02 26:58

Yes, I am going through everything you just said betrayal and disappointment and with other people. And um, you know, it's a lot of it has to do with our, you know, I'm gonna be 78 years old next, not well, October, 78 in October, and my husband's 77. And all of a sudden we're finding a shift in the family in how we're treated. And I just feel maybe it's because they're afraid that they think we want them to take care of us in the future, which is not what we want. I'm in the process of setting us both up in a program where no one has to help us. Okay. And um, but it hurts me that they just assume that. Yeah, yeah. And that their way of coping with it is to push us away. To push us away.

SPEAKER_00 28:00

It's so sad. I mean, you know, my father uh lived with me for the n last nine years of his life. He lived to be 99. So and I I tell you, the I I saw he was a very vibrant man who was an intellectual who had people knew about him around the globe because he had done an enormous amount of work around um how we could bring about a world without war, uh, how we could, you know, look towards disarmament, that kind of stuff. So he was very highly respected. Even with him, I noticed how at a certain level, maybe by the time he was like 97, I could just there there were still a lot of people that respected him, but it's like people are afraid or something about about getting older, about dying. And I am I feel so sad that we don't realize that our elders are one of our greatest treasures. They have so much wisdom in them. They have they have so much experience. We should be asking them a lot of questions, you know. Yeah, yeah. I'm so sorry that's happened, but it's I'm glad that you're finding uh a place that can support you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

Well, the first thing I did, which I was uh guided to do, I wrote my memoir, and it was called Raised by Wolves, Trapped by Demons. And it encompassed, well, my my parents were the wolves, they just wanted me to be a worker bee and never leave and just bring money into the house. And then the demons were when I finally escaped that the saying going from the pot into the fire. Yeah. And of course, men, and I was too young to pick good men, so that was not good. And why I'm bringing this up is that book went from the darkest part of my life to how I changed along the way and how I finally got through the darkness and found the light. And my grandson, a couple years ago when the book first came out, he said he had a friend, 16 years old, and he said, Nana, he read your book and he follows you on Instagram.

SPEAKER_00 30:26

Oh, I was like so beautiful. You know, I am seeing that in some of the younger, the younger generation, that they're not, they don't have as much ageism. They I think they they really are interested in people of many different ages, and I'm and I'm it's heartening to me. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:45

So I mean, you know, he's a little uh star now among his friends because when I found that out, I did meet him in person. And he was just, you could tell he was so amazed to meet me. He was really, you know, happy to meet me. And um my second book, I dedicated it to him because up till then I was putting all my perspective and all my uh work towards women, empowering women. And he changed, he had an effect on me because he was a 16-year-old boy, and I actually changed the name of my podcast because it was Be Heard Empowering Women. Ah, and I changed it to Be Heard, Empower Yourself, and I made it, I included all genders, and so the second book I dedicated to him because he changed my percep perspective. Well, maybe he's listening to this podcast. Well, you never know because you know, my grandson was he's your biggest band, Nana. But um the the last book I wrote, Anatomy of an Alien, which has to do with all my medical stuff. Um, I was able to be at the kids up there, they all had pizza parties for the graduation party. And they went from one house to another, you know. So I ended up being at his house, and I gave as a I have a present for you for graduation, and I gave him that fourth book and I signed it. Well, you would think I gave him a diamond. I mean, he was so thrilled with that, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:22

That's so beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 32:24

So he's been part of my journey, you know, really touching it, and it just shows you, and that's the next thing we're gonna talk about kindness and compassion, and how that causes transformation in people that's so important to be kind, and it's so important to be compassionate. So, what do you think?

SPEAKER_00 32:50

I think that absolutely I want I 183% agree with you, and I think this is a place where, again, here's something very powerful that I I would like to say is that when we're born, physiologically, the whole drive of the first few minutes is to breathe. Like that's our our entire body is just like that's what's gotta happen. Emotionally and spiritually, our directive is to connect, to love. We will love our parents even when they can't love us back. Yeah, and I think that what I like to call the twinned immediacy of that, that the the drive physiologically to breathe and the drive emotionally and spiritually to love or connect, that what I have discovered is that when we breathe fully, deeply as we can, we feel less defended, more open. We feel our common humanity. We might not even be thinking this, but we feel our common humanity with other people. And we naturally become kinder because our orientation has just shifted to be more open and less defended, and because our breathing deeply oxygenates us and supports us in being able to be present even in difficult and challenging situations, so that rather than seeing somebody as an enemy that isn't, or rather than being afraid of something when we don't need to, we're able to be more flexible, more creative, more connective. Another powerful thing to understand about that is that the primitive brain, uh, the brain stem, the most primitive part of our brain, uh, has this natural mechanism where it identifies who's safe and who's not safe, or who's the in-group, my group, and who's the out group. And it's stimulated by fear and by cortisol. Nowadays, we're living in so much constant cortisol, adrenaline, you know, anxiety, so much happening all the time that I think it's part of what, not the only thing by a long shot, but part of what has contributed to the polarization where you've got this group and this group, and they're so different, and they won't listen to each other, and you know what we call othering. So here's it's beautiful, this thing of breathing and kindness, because you can create an in-group and an out-group about anything. You can say, Well, you live in Florida, I live here. You're this age, I'm that age. Your skin is this color, mine's that, you're this, you know, spiritual path, I'm that. You went to, you know, this college. I mean, you can create it about anything. You speak a different language, you have a different gender. There's only one, and so your brain can feel a kind of like resistance and fear about almost anybody unless you kind of override it through thinking clearly and generating love. When we're breathing together, what happens to the brain is there's only one group that I can think of where you can't create anothering about, and that's the group of breathers. Everybody is a breather. All eight billion plus people are breathers. So, what I've seen experientially is that you can have enemies breathing together, you can have couples on the brink of divorce and arguing about whatever. And when people breathe together, that part of their brain that's doing that in-group out group thing relaxes. They feel the connection of kindness, exactly and they're able to work through their problems much better.

SPEAKER_02 37:06

Well, yeah, you're going, you're leaving the brain and you're going into your heart, you're going down because you to breathe, your lungs are right next to your heart. Yes, that area. You know, so uh my minister would always, I was a prayer chaplain at one time, and he'd say, Okay, now you're gonna call your people, and before you call them, I want you to breathe and go down from your mind to your heart and breathe, and then make your calls.

SPEAKER_00 37:36

Oh, how beautiful!

SPEAKER_02 37:37

Yeah, oh I'm I'm very blessed that I call that community, very blessed. Yes. So, like you said, it you know, the world does feel a little overwhelming and fragmented, and I'm being like generous because it's really fragmented. But um how how can people stay open-hearted in a world like this?

SPEAKER_00 38:02

Yeah, yeah. You know, I often say to myself, Mimi, they're but for the grace of God go I.

SPEAKER_02 38:11

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 38:11

You know, you can look at at any almost anybody in life. I know it's hard sometimes because some people are just so cruel and so insensitive and so controlling and domineering and you know, violent. But with many things in life, just the ordinary, you know, somebody else is very irritated, they're yet, they snap at you, they're annoyed, they have a different belief system than you. Um, you know, many things that happen, you can often just like really think about it, you know, if I'd had a different set of experiences, who knows? I might be like that person too. You know? Yeah. And so then to just feel fortunate, to feel lucky, and then to breathe deeply with that gratitude will stimulate the thymus gland. When the thymus gland stimulates, we know you get better digestion. You get uh you the thymus gland is right next to the heart. Um, and it just tends to relax your body so that you can feel grateful for what you have and not so much uh looking at the differences between you and other people, and then you can begin to understand why they might be the way that they are.

SPEAKER_01 39:34

Right.

SPEAKER_00 39:34

So, you know, the the the breathing, you know, we've been talking a lot about the spiritual and emotional parts of it, but it's actually physiologically regulating, you know, the fat again, fastest way to change your brain state. We know that when you breathe slower, you activate parasympathetic activity. So we have this nervous system, it has the sympathetic nervous system, which is about doing and initiating and making things happen. Then we have parasympathetic that's about resting and being and digesting. And um, in our world today, because of the amount of stimulation, the amount of overwhelm, the pace that people are living at, the isolation. You know, you if you if you were living maybe 100, 200, 500, or if you were just in a different area of the world, even, you might not be as alone with your husband anyway. You would be part of a greater extended family, but we're living in more isolated units. We're overwhelmed, digital information, you know, we see the violence that comes in on our screens. And so we we have an overabundance of cortisol, an overabundance of the sympathetic uh nervous system being activated. When we breathe deeply, the parasympathetic begins to be activated, which brings balance, it calms us down, it's regulating, uh, it stimulates what we call now the vagus nerve. And that's the the nerve that helps all of us feel more peaceful. And so, yeah, I think that that part of how we stay more open-hearted is through recognizing that we want to be the kind of people that are making a contribution and not contributing to the chaos. And if we breathe deeply, we will recognize our common humanity, we'll remember that we our nature is love, and we will make better choices and do better actions that way. It doesn't have to be some great esoteric difficult thing to do. Honestly, like your minister told you, just breathe. And it's amazing how the physiology and the emotions and the spirituality come together so that you're just more present and less defensive and you're more kind and you're more open-hearted.

SPEAKER_02 42:10

And I and I really think too um that everybody does have uh a reason to be here. They don't always know it and they don't look for it, they don't care, but some people, like you and I, we go, okay, what's my purpose? What's my purpose? And it doesn't have to be a big thing. Like with you, it's the breath work, which is great, and with me, it's getting the message out about different things that are affecting people. So thank you for being with us. This was a very powerful conversation, Miss Jessica, and your insights into breath and presence and human potential. Should remind everyone listening that transformation isn't something abstract, it's something we could feel, we can practice in real time. And I hope if my listeners, if anything sparked you today, let it move you into action. Take a deeper breath. Yes, yes, breathe deeply and try something new or something, simply just meet the moment with more awareness, you know, because we talked about that. So we're grateful that you joined us and we hope you carry this energy forward into whatever comes next. You know, um, I don't there's a quote, I don't know, I think the author's unknown. Inhale the future and exhale the past. Beautiful. It is, it is, and that's what we were talking about. So again, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 43:52

Thank you, Mimi. It's been, as I said at the beginning, an honor to be with you. And I I'm really grateful that you have decided to devote so much of your energy and life to helping other people navigate the challenging times and to be a role model of how you can do that.

unknown 44:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:12

All right, everyone. I hope you enjoyed the show. I know I did.