This episode features Niraj Naik, the founder of SOMA Breath, a global breathwork community. Niraj shares his path from being a pharmacist to discovering the healing effects of breathwork. His own health challenges led him to explore and eventually master the art of using breath for healing and wellness. SOMA Breath, his creation, combines ancient techniques with modern science to help others heal and grow.
Niraj talks about how breathwork not only helped him overcome his health issues but also transformed his life. He explains how controlling your breath can lead to better health, peace, and personal power. The episode is packed with insights on how Soma Breath works, its benefits, and Niraj's vision for a healthier world through the power of breathing.
Don't miss this powerful episode. Dive into Niraj Naik's story and discover how you can use breathwork to change your life. Check out Soma Breath to start your journey and find more peace and health.
Key Highlights:
Links and Resources Mentioned:
This episode features Niraj Naik, the founder of SOMA Breath, a global breathwork community. Niraj shares his path from being a pharmacist to discovering the healing effects of breathwork. His own health challenges led him to explore and eventually master the art of using breath for healing and wellness. SOMA Breath, his creation, combines ancient techniques with modern science to help others heal and grow.
Niraj talks about how breathwork not only helped him overcome his health issues but also transformed his life. He explains how controlling your breath can lead to better health, peace, and personal power. The episode is packed with insights on how Soma Breath works, its benefits, and Niraj's vision for a healthier world through the power of breathing.
Don't miss this powerful episode. Dive into Niraj Naik's story and discover how you can use breathwork to change your life. Check out Soma Breath to start your journey and find more peace and health.
Key Highlights:
Links and Resources Mentioned:
All right. Good morning, everybody. I'm having the pleasure to sit down today with Niraj Naik , he's in Ibiza, Spain and I'm in Boulder, Colorado, as always. And Niraj is the founder of Soma Breath, which is an international breathwork, facilitation school and community. And he has a fascinating background having formerly been a community pharmacist and then, having sort of his own, powerful story of getting interested in alternative health, partly for his own healing, as well as with others. And he under the banner of the renegade pharmacist, he started providing, important health information. Around looking at health and from a holistic perspective, and I've had the fortune of connecting with the Raj through my Norwegian colleague, Siv Jøssang Shields and she's a Soma Breath certified facilitator. And she connected me to Soma Breath, because Siv and I are working together on a project involving neurogenic tremoring. And we've been in conversations with Niraj about how we might bring some of that information in combination with breath work, so it's part of an ongoing dialogue. We'll talk a little bit about that in the episode as well, but Niraj, big welcome to the show and big pleasure having you here. Great to be here. Great. Awesome. Yeah. So I always like to start with kind of backstory a little bit. And what led you into the work you're doing in the world today and your expertise in breath and holistic health in general, and take as much time as you, need. We like hearing the backstory that led you into this work. Yeah, sure. So many years ago, I was a community pharmacist in the UK, and that's where I got like a taste of my own medicine. I saw so many people going away with shopping bags full of drugs every month, didn't seem to be getting much better. And this is when I just got very disillusioned with the whole profession. I didn't feel like I was doing anyone any real good. And when your soul is not in what you want to do. It will try and escape, so I tried many different ways, to quit my job, but also, down my sorrows every weekend. And and I got really into a crazy lifestyle. And in the end, I had a bit of a nervous breakdown and it was there where I actually went to a Tony Robbins event. Back then, like I had no idea who he was and a friend of mine took me kicking and screaming and bought me a ticket. And said, you have to go to this. And so I let my disbelief down and went to it and then it was amazing. And the last day was when he talked about diet, nutrition and just lifestyle interventions disease and health. It was the first time I ever heard anyone talk about anything like this, before. Because you don't get taught anything in pharmacy school, anything holistic. okay. I was alright, I've got a pharmacy full of sick patients, so let's put Tony Robbins to the test, see if he's full of shit or not. So I started to write healthy shopping lists, because you don't have much time. And I learned, at the Tony Robbins event, the whole power of NLP to motivate people into action. I started to create my own way of motivating patients to go out and buy things that I recommended on a shopping list, and made it as simple, stupid, and easy to follow as possible. And I got really amazing results. I was, like, blown away. I actually had doctors calling me up. I remember like the first few phone calls, I was like, pretty scared. Like I'm doing something wrong, but they were like really encouraging me. They're like, no, this is working really well. Keep going. So in the end, I actually got fired from my first job Okay. mismanaging the pharmacy. But then I got promoted to head office of one of the biggest supermarket chains in the UK. And here I was, I basically came up with this healthy shopping list service for their website. It's the early days of the internet, but it would have been like a home shopping delivery service of healthy foods to diabetic patients, heart disease patients, blood pressure patients, so on. It was revolutionary. It was genius. But six months into that, idea got shelved. And the middle management, like if you want to know how the world works, really works, it's the middle management who control everything. I not the people right at the top and it's not the people at the bottom. It's the ones in the middle who do all the, bureaucracy, the red tape, the checking day and numbers, facts, figures. And I remember like very clearly this one moment, where was getting in a lot of like pushbacks from the middle management and I had teacher's pet treatment from the director because he really loved my idea. The director really wanted me to do this thing. He unfortunately left. But before he left, I remember going to knock on his head office door, to ask him. It's like the student going to the headmaster, right? So I went there to say, look I'm having loads of challenges and he goes, welcome to my life. He says like to succeed in the corporate world. You have to be able to deal with that. You have to be able to handle that and those ideas are cut through this like bunch of idiots most of them. You, they're the ones that will succeed and this is what I have to do with every day. So he gave me like a bit of insight of how corporates work and that makes me realize that's exactly how the world works right. It's not this small percentage of people at the top and it's not this massive percentage of people at the bottom. It's this red tape pen pushes in the middle. They're the real deep state, you control everything. So anyway, so I pushed back, profit went over benevolence. And I ended up like getting very sick, very disillusioned. And I lost my faith in humanity, to be honest. I was like, there's no, if this is how it is, there's no hope for humanity because good ideas can never get pushed forward. This was around like, 2010 or something, right? In that era. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is how misinformation is broadcasted to the world by all the people that we're supposed to trust right so Corporations, you know meant to, they're like literally making billions of dollars. They have so much power. They could do so much good with it, but they don't anyway. So I at that point, went into a bit of a depression and I got hit with a chronic autoimmune disease at the same time, the same moment, called ulcerative colitis. So I was like, it can't get much worse than this. And I was like, now shitting blood 40 times a day. I lost three, three stone, which is like 30 percent of my body weight. And I remember going to the consultant doctor and said, look does stress have an impact? I'm very stressed out. She goes, no, it's nothing to do with stress. Does diet have an impact? Cause I had some success getting people off certain foods. And does that, she goes, nope, no evidence of that. Basically shut up, take the pills. That's all that there's evidence for. Or have your colon removed, or you can try and be a guinea pig for this drug that hasn't been tested before, I can put you on the list. Okay. My god, this is it. So I thought that was gonna, I was gonna die, like I was ready to just waste away anyway. I lost all my hope. And then there was this moment where I had a real judgment day like experience like crazy flashes of lights and wild lucid vivid dreams. And I don't know what happened. But anyway, they say God stands for gift of desperation. This was really my most desperate moment. And I wasn't quite consciously aware of what was going on, but then the next day and the next following days. Some miracles started happening, and a dear friend of our family, Swami Ambikananda, she's a yoga teacher in the UK. She said to me, you've got a gift. If you can change your perception of this disease into more of a opportunity, a gift, with your tenacity, and your insights and your intelligence. You could really be a role model, inspire a lot of people if you were to heal from this. Rather than make it into some kind of burden and be in evicting mode. So I was like, okay this actually makes sense. She said, look I can teach you some fundamentals from your own culture, yoga, pranayama, Ayurveda, and you can give it a go and see if it helps. So I'm from an Indian background, right? So you would think that this, would just be an automatic part of my life, but it's most of these immigrants who come to, the West. They lose their culture. They don't think that the Indian culture is cool and Western culture is cooler. So we end up taking on a lot of these habits, especially when it comes to science and how we perceive the way the body works and health and disease. So I was indoctrinated by Western paradigm. reductionist system. And so I had to let go of my disbelief and put some trust. Into what she was saying because there wasn't much evidence. So I was like Okay, let's try this out. So I tried some very simple breathing techniques And boom, within a few days, I got such relief. Actually, it was instant. The moment I started to do this breathing technique, it felt like stress was just evaporating off my body, right? And I started to feel actually really, a higher vibe than I was, because I was in a lot of pain. So I was like, okay, this simple extended exhalation rhythmic breathing technique is pretty simple and seems to work. And then I learned about holding your breath in various ways. So I started to use this, is called Kumbaka in Pranayama. And then I started to create my own sequences, so I went down the rabbit hole of these traditional techniques. I went down the Ayurvedic rabbit hole and I learned so much about bio individuality and how we're all unique and individual. And that there's no one size fits all and that I was eating completely the wrong food for ulcerative colitis and even in the Ayurvedic system. It says that the worst thing for my energy type, when it goes off balance is to eat lots of raw foods and fruits and uncooked foods. Because it makes the gas and bloating and cramping so much worse. All this wisdom is already in the book. So I changed my diet to actually what's not a holy diet in more dogmatic. Hindu culture, which is a beef based diet, right? Because beef cows are considered holy in India. But if you look back in history, actually it's all dogmatic, because all the Brahmin priests and the kings were only in meat. The peasants started to have less meat, because Buddhism started to creep in and they had this no harm to animals culture, but the priests and all that, the work, the kings were We're all, eating all different types of meats, right? And the thing is, if you look in the Indian population, the further up north you go, the up north is where all the royalty live. Okay. And then you go up to the Himalayas. That's where a lot of the secret yoga practices. Spirituality and up in the, mountains. Yeah, hidden almost in secret. And all the kings, the royal class are up north and down south is where the more peasant farming class was, right? That's changed and evolved but you'll see, the difference between northern Indians, they're much bigger, stronger, more like warriors. And the southern Indians were like very meditative and skinny and scrawny, much shorter. So there's definitely like something happened with the diet and culture over the years. A lot of dogmatic Hindu practices got embedded ingrained in, May I interrupt for a second? Cause I'd never heard that sort of history, but what would the reason, what's funny about it is so the namesake, Redbeard is the name of Redbeard Somatic Therapy is the name of my company. And it's a reference to Bodhidharma who was the founding patriarch of Zen Buddhism, which is my own backgrounds in Zen. But what I'm interested in your story is he was from india. And then, and it was said to have a red beard, blue eyes and a red beard or something. And then he traveled over the mountains and landed in China, which was the beginning of seeding Buddhist, teachings into China. And he was also supposedly the founder of Shaolin monastery and kung fu and all of this and that, it's a legendary historical figure, but there's good history behind him as well. But anyways, I'm just thinking about how he was in that kind of a little bit more of that warrior mindset, as he headed over the mountains. So yeah, super interesting to hear that. Yeah, it's definitely something interesting going on there. So I had to change my dogmatic beliefs. So I come from a Hindu culture, so eating beef is a big no, but I got cured by all beef diet colostrum, which is the first milk the cow produces. I did everything that is thousands of years ago traditionally would have been medicine that Ayurvedic doctors would have used, but has now been suppressed and dogmatized, over time, right? So I went back to very ancient principles of healing. And so the combination of beef, bone broth, colostrum, getting rid of lots of plants and, leafy vegetables and raw foods, completely eliminating that. And focusing a lot on the breathing techniques for rewiring, re patterning the unconscious mind where, which goes haywire when you're under a lot of stress. And autoimmune diseases, you could say are triggered by what we call UDIN moments. So UDIN stands for, is a checklist. U stands for unexpected, so suddenly out of the blue. And you can have many UDIN moments in your life, but so they all layer on top of each other. But the U stands for unexpected. Where it comes out of the blue. I had no idea, not even a slight inclination that they were going to shelve my idea. And I was going to have to go back to be a pharmacist. So that was a big shock and I've had several of those over my life. Dramatic, so it's like very dramatic. think about it, I'm like the face of health of a big corporation and a huge project with a, it's involving millions of dollars of goods, boom. So it's very dramatic, a lot of emotions associated. And then the I stands for isolating, so it's just you, right? It just only you, it feels like it's just you involved. It's all on you. And that, and it was all just, it was me. I was a single person. And then the N sounds with no strategies. There's no way to deal with it, to resolve it. There was nothing I could do to resolve it or change it. It's like poop. So I definitely take that box. But if I look back in my life since childhood, since the first seven years of my life, where most of this programming happens beyond our control, because we're children, and infants and babies. I had many layers of these over my life, autoimmune disease for me was a tick and time bomb. I just needed one more UDIN moment tip me over the edge, which is what happened. Gotcha. So what I had to do was use these meditation techniques. Which, if you look at hypnotherapy and a lot of this, reprogrammed techniques, a lot of it comes from these ancient yoga practices of yoga nidra, guided meditation, using imagery, mantra, which is just simply affirmations, So a lot of what we know now. And more what we use now Western models. Hypnotherapy, NLP has roots in I think it all comes from Tantra yoga. Yeah. Which is all been hidden in the Himalaya, the true versions of it. So I went on this crazy rabbit hole of learning as much as I could about my culture, all these practices to learn as much science as I could. Because when I got better within a few months, I was back to full health. I made like a pact to God. I was like, Hey I'm going to dedicate my entire life to spreading this as far as I can. We need an alternative to the pharmaceutical industry. And I need to undogmatize my own culture to make it more legit, scientific, and based on the truth. Rather than what priests have covered up with many layers of stuff. So in that crazy journey, I met many people, amazing people. I learned a lot about hypnotic mind programming through Marissa Peer, who's a top famous hypnotherapist. One of my best friends, John Vinson, he trained with Richard Bandler. So I really learned a lot of hypnotic programming techniques, hypnosis, and NLP from that. But then I wanted to learn a lot about the science of yoga. And I met this guy called Prakash Marsh, who invited me to be his student and he lives in the Himalayas. He's got a, he's a yogi doctor, he has a medical center in the Himalayas, where he uses yogic techniques for patients. And he wrote a book called The Medical Understanding of Yoga. And I read his research papers as part of my research. And I was so blown away by it. I was like, this is the first guy I've met who seems to have actually translated the Sanskrit text in something meaningful that we can apply to our modern healthcare system. So I trained with him and then we decided we're going to make a curriculum together. And so Soma Breath is based a lot on his research and my own personal research of what I've done with all my other people I met. I also obviously I met Wim Hof the Iceman, and I became his right hand man for a bit. And we were doing a lot of cool stuff together. I made all the music to the Wim Hof method. I went really back into making music, cause that was my first love. So an UDIN moment I had back in, before I even became a pharmacist was, I used to run massive raves. For three years, my biggest passion was running these big raves, 2000 people, I used to DJ. I thought that's all I was going to do, I didn't ever intentionally be a pharmacist. Then one thing led to another, a lot of things fell apart. There was a shooting that happened at the club that I was doing my events in, not my event, but another event, and I lost everything overnight. And then I had to go and become a pharmacist. So that was So traumatic for me, but I was trying to hold it in and be strong about it. But obviously it impacted me and that many layers of this, affected me throughout my life since that point. And, it was going back to music, which was a big part of the healing because for seven years I gave up and really making music, my passion. And it was then becoming a pharmacist, and then getting sick and then learning that I can use music as part of the healing journey. It changed everything, because I got a lot of benefits from listening to meditative music on, online, on YouTube, on the internet. I found a lot of brainwave entrainment music at the time, and music for hypnotherapy. And I was like, actually, you know what? I'm gonna try and make my own music like this, because I didn't really, I wasn't drawn to the kind of music that was being made. There's too many pan pipes and dodgy flutes and stuff, so I was like, no, I'm gonna do my own cooler versions for myself. So I was like, actually, this is actually quite good, so let me put this up on YouTube. So I started to put it up on YouTube and I got a following. I was like, wow, this is it! I'm going to do this. So then I create a music therapy business where I would put the breathing to the music, because music has a natural rhythm to it. And you can time the breath to the music and you can create very powerful, slow diaphragmatic breathing sessions through it. And when you breathe out twice the length of time as you breathe in, double exhale, it's called Slow Rechaka. This is an amazing technique for switching off stress response, turning on the healing state. And also oxygenating the body, getting the oxygen to your body tissue cells. So I created my own system based on this, and it took off, I call it TripNormal Meditation. There's a trippy version of binaural beats, right? Trip normal. It creates trip, triptamines in the brain. So I started to do that and that became my first business. And I got out of my shitty existence in England and lived in my dream location, Thailand for many years. Where I got really deep into the tantra back into it because I really want to learn tantra because tantric yoga is where I derived everything from. And where I lived in Koh Phangan it was considered like tantra town. So here, I went really deep in the whole tantra community and I learned a lot about using orgasmic energy, life force energy, cultivating this for higher power. And then, I'll tell you a crazy story. I got taken to do this seven days, seven nights in complete darkness, retreat. And this was the first time I have had a relapse of the colitis. I was about to go into the dark, and suddenly I start shitting myself again, with blood. So I'm like, what's going on? So I tell the teacher, I don't think I'm allowed to do this. And she goes, this is a goat, it's my friend Shashi Solluna, one of the best tantric priests in the world. She says, You have a ghost apparition of this disease, so you can cure it karmically once and for all in the dark. Got it. She said it's so straight without any hesitation. I was like, okay, I believe you. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna do this. But you're shitting blood like 30 times a day, and you're in the dark, and you have to find your way around with ropes and little markings on the floor. And if you get lost, it's completely pitch black. Even just slightly coming off the road, you're lost. And you're in darkness and you're really alone or with other participants. it was like a group. It was a group. Group led thing. But, by this functional doctor who's famous for gut healing. By, they say that the soul's finding the dark. She kept finding me and taking me to the toilet. She just intuitively knew where the toilet was. When you're under a lot of fear, it's hard to think clearly. Because it shuts off your, prefrontal lobes. So your prefrontal cortex, so you can't think at all, you're in panic mode. So she kept leading me to, the toilet, because she intuited me. She's calm, she knew where to take me. So that saved my life, funny, in the dark. But anyway, what happened was, this is where, just before that, I had learned. TRE, like a basic version of the TRE practices. Yep. Yep. The neuro, the neurogenic tremoring of TRE. Neurogenic tremoring. So I started to, what happens is as your DMT starts to get produced, the melatonin, big doses of it, life starts unfolding, unrolling. Yeah. You literally go mad. You go insane and your life starts to unfold as visions in front of you. All the UDIN moments you've ever had, you start to see them as visions. And this is true, it's your chance to karmically cure these moments, to transform them, to heal them, right? Yeah. Yeah. So now she's teaching me this Tibetan tantric practices, which there are similarities to neurogenic tremoring, and then I'd already learnt some of this, so I start to do very heavy doses of tantric yoga, breathwork, and TRE tremoring. All in the darkness. In the dark, pitch black, screaming, crazy releases, like going wild in the dark. And within seven days come out and I'm a whole new human being. And from that point onwards, been in the most divine flow ever. Like anything I want to manifest starts to manifest. It's incredible. It's incredible. The flow I've been on it's, we do have some challenges, but everything has been in miraculous divine flow. Situation. Yeah. To before, even before the darkness retreat, I was like. Up and down a bit because I was figuring things out after the darkness retreat, everything clicked and that's when I got really into the breath work. And stepping up as a facilitator myself, I suddenly got this power to lead and I started to do sessions. Shashi really gave me a lot of confidence. So I started to test them out in Koh Phangan. And that evolved into doing festivals. I ran like about six different big conscious music festivals in Koh Phangan. So instead of the raves, turn into breath raves. No, I love that. I am just interrupting for a moment, when I've, when Siv first turned me on to Soma breath, and then I looked on the website and I followed the social media accounts and whatnot. And I saw that, actually I think it was at the, was it at the mind valley conference when, and Steve went and she pretend presented on neurogenic tremoring and you were there. And doing, And so I saw that you were doing basically like these breathwork raves, where there's music and you're DJing, but you're providing the breathwork guidance and, hundreds, maybe thousands of people are doing. I thought, wow! What a cool integration of sort of a rave dance music culture, but with a breathwork practice, just totally innovative to me. and it's such yeah. Yeah. Because breathwork is a pharmacy. So think about it. There's a drug, for almost everything, right. But there's also a breath technique for almost anything you can think of, from constipation, to sleep, to blood pressure, to chronic pain, tension, right? But there's also the whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. There's a recreational drug. There's cocaine, there's cannabis, there's psilocybin, there's LSD, right? Ayahuasca. There are breathing techniques that can mimic, model the effects. Maybe not as intense as that, but it can get you there. MDMA, for example. oxytocin. And dopamine, serotonin are like the chemicals of MDMA. But with certain rhythmic breathing techniques and music, we can elicit, and especially with the guided meditations I do, in a rave like experience. I can bring people into a peak ecstasy type feeling just through my words and the The music and the breath work. somatic breathing techniques. Yeah. So I create my own recreational experiences that get you high off your own supply, Yeah. so people can have a more sustainable, much cheaper. Yeah. Yeah. instead of getting wasted and all that. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, so that eventually led to You know what we have today now. We have a big school center of breath. With over two and a half thousand instructors now we've had we've got cambridge university. I've done a study on my protocol because I created a 21 day awakening protocol Which is really awakens you to your true power your true potential in various ways from spiritually emotionally physically Cambridge University have studied this protocol and now they've just told me that they've got pre clinical approval for trial on PTSD using the same protocol, which is massive. Is this through the same, is this the Cambridge study or a different group? Yeah, the next level of that. So they're doing, I've already done one study that's coming out soon in the next month, but now this is the next stage, clinical study. So University of California have done, are doing a study too. They're about to do a study. So that's happening as well. So science is coming. This is great. they're just catching up on what we already know. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, And we've now got an app coming out and the app will have some amazing different breathing techniques for different situations. I call it Breath Pharma, right? So pharmacy of different techniques, there'll be a collaboration with you, as well on there. So the whole point is it's to get people back in touch with the body because in Tantra yoga, the philosophy is foolish. To control the mind through the mind, Yeah. it's very difficult to do. Yeah. It's much easier to control the mind through the body. The Soma, means body in Greek, right? Yep. Yep. Because the body is the breath and the body combined Yeah. Control the mind through the physiology or, yeah. Yeah, so with breath control, conscious breath control. We can various functions of the autonomic nervous system. So when we get symptoms of disease, we can use breathing techniques to adjust and get restore balance. So then that way we don't let symptoms go on for too long, we don't suppress them with drugs. We actually get to the root cause. We fix the root cause, we make adjustments to the lifestyle. We let go of tension, we, fix chronic pain, the source of it, which is often these UDIN moments, traumas from the past, we use breath techniques to do that, plus what I call neurosomatic programming, which is the use of language, words, symbols, colors, and the breath to use the body to control the mind, and clear the operating system of thought viruses that hold us back. So this is what we've turned into a system, where our transformational artists are so incredibly trained to deliver. Yeah. So I, what part of what I think is so cool about soma breath is it's such a broad yet deep integration. Because if I understand correctly, it's like you've brought breathwork applications from so many different things, whether it's health, whether it's about relaxation, whether it's about supporting meditation or spirituality. That there's the broad range because, the breathwork in general within the somatic. industry now is becoming more popular, but there's different flavors of it. Some people are using breath work to manage their anxiety. So they're doing box breathing or something like that. Other people are using something like holotropic breath work, Stanislav Grof's work for, in place of a psychedelic, rather than use LSD or psilocybin. They're, going through a transformational experience. other people are, so there's like these different uses of breath work. And what I'm hearing from you, please correct me if I'm wrong, is that's all encompassed within with the Soma breath program, framework contains all of that. Is that correct? Yeah, but with the root from all the pranayama techniques. Yeah. So there are, all these modern styles that we know about, rebirthing, holotropic. Yeah. Yeah. Buteyko, all of this stuff. There are pranayama techniques that are the same thing, right? So I've just gone to the roots and scientifically, laid them out and given them context, but certain techniques are powered by the music. The music really enhances some of these practices, especially the more, meditative stuff. Breath techniques, which restore balance, harmony, give you a positive stress response, all that stuff. the music really makes it more fun and engaging and therapeutic., because music also has many different benefits. So this is, now what we deliver and so that's why music is a core part of what we do. Totally! And I've done a few of Siv's, and Siv is a kind of a somewhat new Soma Breath practitioner, but she shared with me. I've done some of her, programs and something that's cool about Soma Breath is once you become a facilitator, everybody records their own voice, you in terms of the guided breath work. And so she shared some of her ones with me and it was just amazing. The sort of the integration of the rhythm. The selection of music, her own voice, just even the prosodic quality. She's got a great voice and it's just it's it's amazing how those things can work together. yes. Cool bringing in the world's most transformational practices into one modality. Super cool. Can you tell us just a little bit because you mentioned the there's a phase two of the cambridge study, but like what did they study in the first one because they studied soma breath methods specifically and I read somewhere some of what they found, and it was pretty awesome. But just share a little bit of what that first study indicated, Yeah, so it's called the phenomenological underpinnings of breathwork. So the idea is more of a study to see what's going on in the brain. Right? Under breathwork practices and then compare it to ketamine. MDMA, psilocybin, and so on. So Jeff Tarrant is a neuroscientist who did a first study with a small group on our protocol and he found in 22 minutes that we create the same changes in the brain as a dose of psilocybin or MDMA used to treat severe depression. So it was very interesting. To To treat depression. Severe depression. Yeah, so he was like, this is really interesting and if this was expanded upon with our longer sessions that we have in our 21 days, for example. It could be a very interesting future study. So then that actually inspired Cambridge university scientists and they reached out to me and then they did that. I see. Expanded study on what he started. So what we're going to show is how bliss is created by the breath. And how it's associated to certain breathing patterns, right? But then how that also compares to the kind of levels of bliss, oneness, connection created by psychedelics. So it's not going to prove clinically that it fixes depression or anything like that. That's not the point of the study. That's phase two. Yeah. Study, right? Which is to prove the power for treating something like PTSD. Which is a huge problem right now. The biggest UDIN moment ever just happened four years ago. And it's happening even more now because of the wars. The world just went through on a collective scale trauma that we've never seen before, right? You unexpected, we had no idea that was gonna come so I did because I'm a renegade pharmacist. So I seen them doing this shit for years. But yeah, boom unexpected for most people. Dramatic extremely dramatic two weeks to flatten the curve turned into two years right with death counts, posted every single day, right? I mean people were really scared, right? Isolating for most people, they have no idea what's going on and they're all isolated in their house social distancing. It's come on, they wanted to traumatize our planet, you think about what they did the strategy, and then no strategy, no one knew what to trust. It was such a polarity going on. So there has been mass global trauma on a scale inflicted. By people we're supposed to trust that we've never seen before. And meanwhile, they were all partying and having secret parties and their own groups while other, everyone else was literally shitting themselves in their homes. And so there's a lot of work that needs to be done now to fix all of this. I wish I didn't have such a big opportunity now with Soma Breath. You know what I mean? But we do. Right. That's why I'm really looking, that's why I'm so glad we're joining forces. And I want to, reach out to more people to bring this stuff because it can fix these problems. And what will happen as a result is, because I believe that whenever anything turns really dark. There's an equal and opposite light, inevitably, that's gonna, Arise. Yeah. This darkness is gonna wake people up to what it really means to be naturally high, healthy, happy. On a level that's never been experienced on a global scale before. And people are gonna go back to what's natural to them. What nature intended us to have to make us healthy and happy, alright? We go to the light, it's gonna be incredible. Totally. Let's preview a little bit about what cause you, had your connection to neurogenic tremor and you learned TRE that sort of. That was a part of one of the practices that you used in the darkness meditation thing that was so transformational for you. Let's just preview a little bit about cause of the exploration that Siv and I, and are working with you on is to find out. Are there ways to take the neurogenic tremoring process. And some of the trauma awareness around it, and integrate that with breath work, as a supportive piece. Do you wanna share a little bit about how you see that fitting together and, so people can stay tuned to how that's working? Yeah. Yeah, I like protocols, prescriptions. If there's one thing pharmacy is good at is giving an instruction, Right. Do this many times a day and get this result, right? That's TRE in itself, it's a, it's its own thing, which releases a lot of unresolved emotion. Breathwork techniques can do that too. What you do is you create a protocol. Where you take people for a course of a breathwork practice, but included will be in the same session or set in connection. Yeah. TRE techniques too. So it'll be part of a sequence, right? But a lot of the work is done from identifying your UDIN moments. If you can identify these UDIN moments in your life, it's easier to clear them, can resolve them. So once you know this, through the awareness, you can go back into your own life and see all the UDIN moments you've had. And you can ref Because all of this works by reframing perception. Changing the somatic intelligence. How we store emotion and the perception we have of that past event. So every feeling has a meaning, so by understanding your feelings, when you go back in time to a memory that triggers, that maybe you go back and relive an UDIN moment in your mind, you make it into a movie, it's going to create a somatic reaction. You're going to feel that pain somewhere. And if you can know where it is in your body, you can release it, right? And you can reformat it. You can change the meaning behind that story. Because UDIN moments are just there for a reason. To keep you status quo, to stop you from going into any other dangerous situations, but really is designed to keep you at one level to stay safe. Because anything new, especially if you've been traumatized a lot is deemed unsafe. So the idea is to change your perception filters of how you see reality. So you become more open to new things so you can start taking action. You don't get so triggered by things that remind you of the past. Yeah. And TRE is part of that protocol, I think, of fixing the trapped emotions in the autonomic nervous system. Very cool. we're, super excited for the collaboration. A note to Redbeard listeners. So within the next month or two, Siv is going to start doing some SOMA Breath facilitation through, our Redbeard platform. she's going to be on the podcast in a couple of weeks, talking about that. And we're, already experimenting. I have, I run this group on Fridays, it's a free class. I started at the very beginning of the pandemic. And it was every day and it was initially just pure TRE, just TRE every day, just as an opportunity online to, go through the shaking process. What I've evolved towards this year is now I'm calling it the Neurogenic Tremoring Lab. And the word lab is specific because it's meant to be experimental. It's a free class. It's Fridays, 10 a. m. Mountain Standard Time. But the, experimental part is that we're working with different methods in combination with neurogenic tremoring. So for example, I've been, I have a background with Feldenkrais, Somatic movement work. We've been bringing that into with neurogenic tremoring and the next phase we're going to do with Siv is we're going to start bringing in Soma Breath. And we're going to use that Friday class as a bit of a laboratory for, breath practices and tremoring just to, really refine our understanding of how those things can support one another. So it's a super alive for me as a project right now. Amazing. I love it. What are the chances, man? Yeah. What are the chances that in the Darkness Retreat, I'd be teaming up with something that I was doing in there religiously? That Very cool. Niraj, I really appreciate. Yeah. That was in 2016, I think. Okay. All right. So what, so eight years ago, eight. Yes. Is that seven, eight years ago? Yeah. Very cool. I really appreciate, taking the time this morning and just hearing that your whole story. I've read some of it, but you filled in a lot of details today that were just, they're really, just show where this work is coming from, the depth of it. And I encourage anybody to check out the Soma Breath website. There's a lot of free resources, that Niraj has generously put out there and it's an amazing platform. That's so cool, man. I appreciate it. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. And there's a saying, which is that knowledge moves forward or science moves forward, right? Not by repeating known facts. No, not by repeating false dogmas, but by refuting known facts. I think that's it. I might have completely butchered that saying, but the idea is that, we have to question what we've been taught in the past and not just accept. Don't accept everything I'm even saying as gospel truth. We must. We must take personal responsibility, all right, for our own knowledge and to not trust everything that you read on the newspapers that comes out of the government's mouth or scientists lips. We need to be really curious about getting to going deeper. People don't go deep enough these days. They read headlines and that's it and make opinions based on that need to go deeper. We need to assess everything that's out there that everyone's telling us all the opinions and start to listen to our own gut because a lot of the times our gut is telling us One thing on our head, which is being programmed by society, is telling us something else, and then we get confused. And there's these confusions over time that causes a lot of chronic stress in people, right? It all takes personal responsibility, because anything that happened to you in the past, that holds you back now is not your fault. It's not really, mostly not your fault. But it is your responsibility to get rid of those things that hold you back. It's your responsibility. Great. I appreciate this, the words of wisdom and, and, the powerful shares. yeah. Niraj, thank you so much. Cool. Cool. Nice one, my friend.