Developing Meaning
A podcast about healing trauma and finding meaning.
Have you ever wondered what your therapist has figured out about life's big questions?
Join psychiatrist Dr. Dirk Winter as he speaks with colleagues, therapists, and other healers about what they have learned from their clinical work about how to heal trauma and build more meaning and purpose into our lives.
Developing Meaning is NOT CLINICAL ADVICE and is NOT AFFILIATED WITH ANY INSTITUTIONS. It is intended to play with ideas that are emerging, fringe, and outside of the mainstream in order to discover the meaning of life.
Produced by Dirk Winter and Violet Chernoff
Developing Meaning
#12: Dr. Richard Brown, Co-Creator of Breath Body Mind, on How Ancient Breathing Techniques Can Heal Trauma, Optimize Health, and Create Joy
For thousands of years breathing has been used to heal trauma, optimize health, and build connection. Dr. Richard Brown has spent his life mastering these techniques, and is also an expert in integrative psychiatry, and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia. He has co-authored over 100 scientific articles, chapters, and award winning books on applying these techniques to heal anxiety, trauma, and optimize health. Together with his wife, Dr. Patricia Gerbarg, he has co-created the Breath-Body-Mind organization, which trains health care providers in using breathing techniques to heal health workers and trauma survivors all over the world, including places like Ukraine, Rawanda, Sudan, and Turkey. In this episode you will learn how childhood bullying led him to pursue martial arts, and learn techniques that we all can use to heal, optimize health, and find joy.
For more information visit:
www.Breath-Body-Mind.com and
www.breathbodymindfoundation.org.
Timestamps
00:00:18 - Breath Techniques With Dr. Brown
00:14:06 - Martial Arts Journey Through Life
00:27:06 - Breathing Techniques in Spiritual Practices
00:41:18 - Global Healing Through Breath Practices
00:55:14 - Optimizing Breathing Techniques for Wellness
01:08:58 - Global Impact of Breath Practices
01:15:53 - Transformative Power of Breathing Practices
01:21:09 - Healing Trauma Through Breathing Techniques
01:27:49 - Exploring Breath Practices and Global Impact
Produced by Dirk Winter and Violet Chernoff
Theme Music by The Thrashing Skumz
Hi, welcome back to Developing Meaning, the show, where I your host, dr Dirk Winter, board-certified child and adult psychiatrist at Columbia and in private practice, take you along my own personal journey, looking for meaning and purpose, as I travel through various healing communities and introduce you to fascinating people that I have met along the way in order to learn their insights, what they have learned from their clinical work about meaning and how to create it in the lives of themselves and their clients. Today, I am very excited to introduce you to an amazing teacher of mine, dr Richard Brown, world expert in integrative medicine and especially in healing breath techniques. Together with his wife, dr Patricia Gerbarg, he is the co-creator of the Breath Body Mind Institute, which has created a system of breathing that has now been used to treat over 100,000 people all over the world and to train hundreds of various types of mental health professionals, including doctors, psychologists, therapists, to use breath to heal trauma in places like Rwanda, sudan, ukraine, turkey, northern Ireland, all over the world. These are ancient breathing techniques that he has simplified into a secular toolkit that is extremely powerful and that he has studied and is effective in healing trauma, optimizing our health, optimizing our performance.
Speaker 1:I know there are some of you who are thinking yeah, breathing shmeething. Why are people talking about breathing so much? I have been breathing my whole life, but you are going to want to listen to this episode because most of us actually do not breathe correctly, and this can affect our facial structures and, more importantly, our internal states and our stress system. If we don't breathe correctly through our nose, our sinuses are affected, and learning how to breathe correctly can change our facial structures within several months, making us more attractive and making us sleep better and feel better overall, but probably more important is the effect on our stress system. So breathing is a powerful tool because it is one of the only systems in our body that is both automatic it happens without thinking about it and under conscious control, and also our lungs wire directly into the fear center of our brain, and that makes sense, because if we don't breathe for a few minutes, we can die, and so anything that interferes with breathing will trigger intense fear reactions. But because our lungs are under voluntary control, we can use conscious breathing to shut off our stress system, and if we practice these breathing techniques, which you are going to hear about now, we can turn down our baseline stress level. We can shut off anxiety reactions, we can become healthier and we can shift and optimize our internal states. In our last episode, you heard from Deb Dana about internal states and how certain internal states are optimal for health, longevity, connection, and optimizing our breathing is a very powerful way to optimize our states.
Speaker 1:So Dr Brown is an amazing storyteller and you're going to hear a bunch of great stories today, starting with Dr Brown as a little boy being bullied by neo-Nazis and that turning into him learning martial arts, which turned into a lifelong endeavor of learning many different breathing practices. That then he simplified and secularized and turned into this toolkit that we all can use now. Also during this interview, he does a six-minute coherent breathing demo, which I pulled out and am adding as a separate download so that people who are driving and are not ready to do the experiential breathing exercise can pick a time when they're ready to do it. So go ahead and download that episode and listen to that whenever you want to have a way to relax. I have done his training. I have sent clients to his training and also family members to his training, to his training and also family members to his training. I find these approaches powerful. They work. I'm not getting any kickbacks in promoting these approaches. I just think they're important healing tools. So I am very pleased to have you get to know Dr Richard Brown in this interview.
Speaker 1:So without further ado, I present to you my conversation with Dr Richard Brown. Welcome, and can you, for people who don't know so, really like Breath Body Mind? I did the basic training. I did the level one instructor training. I've recommended it to people. My sister did it. I have an assistant who works on this podcast. She did it. I've had many of my clients do your training but I'm sure lots of people who listen have no idea what is breath body mind. Can you maybe paint a picture of what this practice is that you built Sure?
Speaker 2:And shall I give you some of the factors? I can't remember how much we talked about the things that led up to it happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just however, makes sense to tell this story.
Speaker 2:So there are so many threads. I, like other people, do things for many reasons. I find there's almost never one thing that makes people do something. It has to be multiple factors coming together. But a big factor for me was when I was a boy about 10, getting beaten up by white supremacists, and I was saved because an older guy who was a friend had been doing martial arts and he saved me. But I realized he wasn't always going to be around so I better learn how to do that stuff for myself.
Speaker 2:And I began studying with a teacher who was originally from Cuba but had been trained by very advanced Japanese teachers in both jiu-jitsu and judo.
Speaker 2:Karate really hadn't come into the US very much at that point and also since I was in a military family, I ended up choosing to go into the club, which was largely made up of military, both adults and dependents of military families, and so a lot of the people I worked out with after the first year or so were Marines and Green Berets, and this was at the time of Vietnam, so many of them had already been there for one or more tours of duty and that changed the whole thing and the teacher was teaching practical things for military, for wartime, and I wanted things to protect myself because I really felt that I could have been killed and that it's that continued. And since my friends were not all white and came from many different backgrounds in the military, whether Hispanic or Black or Latino, asian, filipino, whatever American, indian, eastern European immigrant who got their citizenship, joining the military, so I want to quickly hear the white supremacy story, just a bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, it's so interesting to me now looking back At the time it was terrifying. But I was living in Northern Virginia, which is kind of where the I frankly think kind of the hotbed of the Confederacy was, which was in Richmond, and there were many people, and to me this was the first lie that a lot of people learned to accept. And the lie would go something like the South didn't really lose, the North just had more factories and armaments and we were better and not that slavery was an evil thing, that was gradually being disavowed in many other developed countries in the world, and that even though I was white, it wasn't just kind of Confederate neo-Nazi white sympathizers, it was people who felt that white, christian, protestant nationalism of certain sets were the key and were what everybody should be and that if you were friends with black people you were bad. And I was being raised Catholic, I was going to Catholic school. I had to walk three miles home from school wearing a uniform that identified me as being Catholic.
Speaker 1:What year was this?
Speaker 2:This was around 58 to 60. Okay, and you know it's interesting because of course a good bit of my life was one side of my family was from New York City and I went to Columbia in New York City to do medical school and then stayed and did my residency and then was on the faculty at Cornell and then Columbia. And so many people I met there had no idea what I was talking about if I talked about this stuff. People I met there had no idea what I was talking about if I talked about this stuff. And one of the colleagues I was doing research with later on was a social worker who had grown up in Tennessee and she, like me, had seen crosses burned because my father was from Kentucky, so we'd seen Ku Klux Klan burning crosses on people's front yards or to burn down churches and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:And I remember when the movie Brother when Art Thou came out that was one of George Clooney's early movies and she and I watched it and we heard the Northerners talking about whoa, what a fantasy that is. And she and I looked at each other and we said no, that's really the way it was. You don't understand this. And in my school there were people who were neo-Nazi white supremacists and I was on the speech team and you were 10 and they targeted you.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, oh boy. And I remember one guy. He won in the senior year of high school. In the high school I was in, he won number one in the country for speech and he was a great speaker and the reason was he admired Hitler and he watched Hitler's speeches and learned to talk like Hitler emotionally. And so what we're talking about with dictatorships is swaying people with emotion, not reason that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:So also around the same time I was getting to speak to my aunt so my uncle was in Patton's army in World War II and had liberated my aunt from a concentration camp, brought her home and married her and she sat me down and there were many kids in, married her and she sat me down and there were many kids in my family. She specifically sat me down alone and over the course of four years she taught me how Hitler came to power. And she started out by saying Americans think we Germans were evil or ignorant or stupid. She said no one intelligent could imagine that Hitler was going to come to power because he was so stupid and crazy. And it can happen to you in your country in your lifetime and this is what you have to watch out for. And she taught me the steps by which Hitler came to power over many years and understand that the Republicans have accomplished the first five of those important steps at this point. So anyway, my teacher who was Cuban, but it was like I was being also inducted into Japanese culture because every Friday night we had a Japanese party and we did singing and dancing and telling jokes and other stuff this was long before karaoke and eating Japanese food and that kind of thing and I was required to do breathing and meditation and that was my first exposure to breathing and I thought, oh, this helps calm me down some, but it wasn't very in-depth, it was helpful, especially when you were fighting in competition or just in class.
Speaker 2:And then I went to university and I went to the University of Virginia. I was a Virginia resident. They had a special program. They were trying to keep a brain drain from happening in Virginia to the northern Ivies and I had a great time and I was in a service fraternity and we decided in my pledge class to do a project. We found there was a one-room schoolhouse for black farmers' children near the university. It was a one-room schoolhouse. Honestly, it was like it was the mid-1800s and at that point Head Start was being dismantled. It was the end of the Great Society and there was a Head Start playground that was going to be dismantled and destroyed and we decided we were going to basically uproot it and move it to the one-room schoolhouse in the yard right by it and put this up for the kids. And we did it. And a lot of the brothers in the fraternity were construction workers and you know we got a moving van donated so we could take it there and we had such a great time bringing it to the kids there. And I still remember my shop this was 1972, and these people were still living like it was the mid-1800s and being treated the same way.
Speaker 2:Basically, in many ways there wasn't much martial arts where I was at that time but I kept working out to be in shape for when I could and I came to New York that time. But I kept working out to be in shape for when I could and I came to New York and as soon as I arrived at the dorm I met a doorman and somehow we got talking to martial arts and he said you know, I have a car and I go to all these dojos to work out around New York City and Brooklyn and Queens, manhattan. You know you can come with me and work out, and I did. You know I did judo, I did karate and this is now med school.
Speaker 1:You're in med school.
Speaker 2:Right and it was such a blessing because it was so good for stress and I met so many amazing people and ended up spending more time with a judo club that was just for Marines basically, and so it was very serious and I was at that time I had just had a little growth spurt, so I'd gone from about 5'2 to 5'7. And I was this little Irish runt and most of the guys who were Marines are huge and they couldn't throw me. I had such good training, they couldn't throw me. They'd get so angry and at a certain point I realized where I was living in medical school in Columbia. At that time it was the height of the crack epidemic and many of my friends were mugged, some were stabbed, one was shot and killed, leaving three kids behind. And I said you know, I think I need some more serious martial arts.
Speaker 2:And I looked around and began doing a style of karate and it's best known in Japan, but it's known around the world. Now it wasn't that well known then. It's called Masayama's Kyokushinkai Karate and it was so, let's say, serious. And I found one of his top teachers had moved to New York and been teaching for some years and one of his top students, who was an amazing black guy from Brooklyn, was teaching under him in a separate space that was much easier for me to get to and afford, and began training with him and once again breathing, and when you were more than just at the beginning, you were required to do Zen meditation. Now, the Zen meditation a lot of Americans know is called Rinzai Zen, but the Zen that most Japanese do is called Soto Zen and that's what we did. But we preceded it or the master, who was also a karate master, preceded it with candle concentration meditation, which is one of the limbs of yoga that's generally left out in America, but when I started doing yoga at nine, the teacher on PBS from California required that. So it was quite comfortable for me to do and it's something that is very important. And I find so many people, especially young people's minds today are so scattered and in Asia they didn't usually start to teach you meditation until you first did concentration for a couple of years concentration and visualization.
Speaker 2:So I did that and found the karate really interesting, and we also had Japanese parties every Friday night. One of the guys in our group was a drummer at the Copacabana, so he did the most amazing drumming for us. So it was very interesting being in medical school because most everybody was kind of white upper-class people. But I had this nightlife working out with people from all over the globe, including Japanese and gosh. One of the guys who I really enjoyed working out with was a pimp in Harlem. That was what he needed to do to take care of his family. So I so learned from everybody, I feel. But medical school came to an end and around that point the guy who was the drummer from the Copacabana who had to worry about his hands, he said you know, we end up at the end of a karate class. We're beaten up worse than if we'd been mobbed on the street.
Speaker 2:And he said you know maybe we should find something that will protect our hands. He said you need your hands. As a doctor, you know you got to do all these sticking needles into people and stuff. You want good hands. And I thought you know he's right and I began to look around. But it was a while and I went into residency training and you know all that, and I was just totally like involved in that for years. And then when that ended I joined the faculty at Cornell and was doing research. I had great mentors, I had so much fun, it was so interesting.
Speaker 2:But I said to myself you know, I'm really missing the martial arts and I'm missing that spiritual part of my life that it brought me. And my first teacher from Cuba had said if you find an Aikido master, study with him. And when I came to New York I went to all these Aikido schools and the problem with a lot of martial arts is a lot of the teachers are close to being thugs and there isn't a spiritual part of it. There are some, of course. And I kept looking and I kept looking and I walked into a bookstore that's now gone. It was around Fifth Avenue and 14th Street called Himalayan Books or East West Books. It changed names over time and I walked in and I was looking around, as I did periodically every six months or so, and I saw this book on Aikido with Ki so Ki means life, energy. In a sense it's kind of you might say it's not exactly the same, but kind of the Japanese equivalent of prana in yoga. And I opened it up and it opened to inside the back cover and it had the names of four Aikido masters of that style of yoga which is very spiritual, and one of them was in New York and I thought, wow, okay.
Speaker 2:So I went home and I called up the number and I get someone speaking in a heavy Japanese accent, which I was used to, saying yes, and I said, I'd like to come to your dojo, wherever it is, and see how you teach. And so he gave me the address and within about two days I went down there and I walked in and I sat down to watch and it's funny because I didn't say anything about my background. But when I walked in he looked at me and he said now, this is how we do the throw in Aikido. And he demonstrated a throw. This is how it's done in Judo, and let me show you again how it's done in Aikido. I looked down and thought this is so much beyond just the leverage and strength and speed and this is a whole spiritual thing.
Speaker 2:And I began to study with him and breathing started out and often ended every class and in the winter when you would do what's called winter training. It was just done in a lot of Japanese martial arts where you work out a bit and then you either run outside in the snow that's a lot of styles of karate and you work out barefoot in the snow just with your gi on. In Aikido typically and in some martial arts you would go to a cold pool on the coldest night in January and go into it, submerge yourself and come out, and you have to do breathing properly to be able to do that.
Speaker 1:What were these? More the Wim Hof kind of, or what are his? Or fast breathing technique. What kind of breathing techniques? Well, it's interesting.
Speaker 2:No, it's actually more balanced breathing and I didn't fully understand it at the time, but it's the core of what I teach now. I mean, wim Hof discovered interesting things. But the problem with the Wim Hof breathing is it's not for everybody and it can undo certain people's nervous systems. It may be good for him, it may be good for him, it may be good for me. Do I like that kind of breathing? Sure, and is it valuable to know?
Speaker 2:Sometimes rarely, but the Japanese teacher taught us this simple, powerful breathing and I didn't fully understand it. And he'd only make us do it for about five minutes at a time, and most people are just beginning to have a shift in their brainwaves. At five minutes you kind of got to go usually to eight minutes in the beginning. After you get it, one breath can take you to the right zone for doing a lot of things. And years later I asked him what is the purpose of this breathing Sensei? He said it's development breathing. Of this breathing Sensei, he said it's development breathing, meaning it helps you develop many capacities. And I was at that time able to understand it because I'd learned it from various Qigong masters. By that point and understand, I'd also been exposed to Native American teaching and really they migrated from. Can you do?
Speaker 1:like a breath or two right now to demonstrate it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely yeah, we can do a little bit. So very often, if I'm with a patient in the office, we just go right into breathing. Or especially working with military first responders or like people in Ukraine who are severely traumatized and undergoing a genocide or post-genocide in Rwanda, we will do some gentle movement first and then we'll begin to combine the breathing with a movement, because the pace is very different from how we ordinarily breathe and the way you do breathe is very much more relaxed and more aware of what you're doing. But anyway, so what I'll do is I'd say, before we start, let's first take two deep breaths in and let them out with a sigh, and then we'll do a muscle relaxation from the end of the feet and then I'll pace you in the breathing. So let's take a long, deep breath in and we'll let it out with a really even longer thought. So breath in, I'm breathing out, I'm breathing in, I'm breathing out. Relax the muscles around your eye, relax your mouth and jaw.
Speaker 1:Feel your jaw drop a little bit so here, dr Richard Brown leadsa six minute coherent breathing exercise, which I encourage you to do. I have pulled that out and am putting it as a separate download that you can experience when you have a quiet moment and are ready to do some relaxation breathing, ready to do some relaxation breathing. I don't want people to be interrupted if they're driving or not ready to do this breathing exercise, so I will now return you to our interview.
Speaker 2:So that's the start. That's really important. It's still more than what most people get around the world, but yet there are several more advanced things that we can easily add to it to enhance it even further. But you have to walk before you run. And it's interesting because I got exposed to a style of Qigong that had fused with yoga in China 3,000 years ago at least and went to Taiwan around 1900. So it was undamaged by the Cultural Revolution and they would spend the first month making you do breathing like this for like 20 minutes or an hour a day, and then you could learn all kinds of advanced stuff very quickly. That would normally take many years.
Speaker 1:What is that Qigong style called take?
Speaker 2:many years. What is that Qigong style called Tiao Tien Qigong T-A-O, first word Tao Tien T-I-E-N? Yeah, and it was so advanced in many ways I didn't understand it, and I had to come back to it after studying with several other Qigong masters and doing more breathing. So then what happened was, as I was on the faculty at Cornell and going to go back to Columbia where I'd been a medical student— yeah, so back to the story.
Speaker 1:I feel like this is kind of the core of your present, or a big piece of it, and so now, looping back to where we were in this story, you were with the spiritual Aikido person and you were doing the breathing at the beginning and the end and the cold.
Speaker 2:And I wrote a book with a colleague about a more natural, holistic approach to the worldwide epidemic of stress, depression, aggression, and a big part of the book was about breathing yoga, zen.
Speaker 1:What is this book called?
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, it was Stop Depression Now. Okay yeah, Stop Depression Now. And there was quite a surprising response to the book mail. And there was quite a surprising response to the book and part of that response was people from a worldwide yoga organization contacted me and said you should learn the kind of breathing we teach.
Speaker 1:What year is this now?
Speaker 2:It's around 2000. Okay, yeah, and people were always calling me and asking me to help lend legitimacy to their organization and so I looked at them first and I've traveled all over the world. I accept people for how they are. And I read about it. I thought, ok, they seem good. And I'd been doing yoga a long time. I'd seen a lot of different styles of yoga. And they said after a while, since I wasn't eagerly coming to learn their breathing, they said, well, maybe you might find it interesting to send patients to the course and see how they like it. And I thought, okay, I like breathing, but the breathing I do is way too strenuous for the average person, so their breathing sounds like it's kind of something everybody can do. So I began to send patients and they were transformed and they'd come back and they'd go. Oh my God, dr Brown, I feel so much better. You got to learn about this breathing. I said I'm glad you love the breathing. Keep doing the breathing. I have my own breathing. It's okay.
Speaker 2:They actually had to send a very senior teacher to New York City to teach all the people I was sending. They had to send her from Boston. She kept coming down to Boston and she kept trying to convince me to learn the breathing. And finally she said to me you know you send all these patients and they really benefit, but you don't really know what we're teaching and you don't know what it's like compared to what you're doing and maybe you should try a course and see if you're going to help patients. She had been a psychologist so she knew what it was like to make that transition. I said you know, that's pretty good reasoning. Okay, you're right, I should know if I'm sending all these patients.
Speaker 2:So I set up a course with my wife, who's a doctor, and a bunch of friends who are psychiatrists I knew, and nurses and that kind of thing. And they sent a very, very experienced teacher to our house and we did their breathing and part of it's a lot like Wim Hof breathing. And as soon as I did that, well understand, because I'd been doing Zen meditation many years. So when I meditated I felt like I had become a bottomless ocean that's the best way I could describe it. And then when I did the breathing, I felt like, oh, I'm a bottomless ocean of joy. And I said to the teacher I said I've got to meet the guy who figured this out. He said well, maybe you can't. He's coming to Canada, north of Montreal, in two months, in October, and I can arrange it so you meet him.
Speaker 1:Okay, what's his?
Speaker 2:name. His name is Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. So with my wife we went up there and we met him and it was quite an experience. I mean, I knew about India, I'd read a lot about India when I was a boy and I was learning about yoga and Tibetan Buddhism and so on, but it's a whole different thing to be immersed in that culture which he brought with him around the world and I love Canada in the fall especially. And he said to me you know, he's always surrounded by hundreds, if not a couple thousand people wherever he is in the world. He said you and I really need to talk pretty privately, so let's take a raft out on the lake and you and your wife and a couple of my closest students will go with us and let's talk. And he said what do you want? What do you really want to do? He said, well, I want to study the scientific foundation of breathing and bring it to people around the world. And he said, okay.
Speaker 2:So I didn't see him and a few weeks goes by and he sends me an invitation to come and give a scientific lecture on the science of breathing in New Delhi in January, late January in the new year, and I talked to my wife and we proceeded to read about 600 articles related to breathing and yoga breathing and so on and so on, and we wrote up my speech and I went to India and traveled with him for several weeks and got to go with him and many amazing things happened in those travels and I had to come back.
Speaker 2:Actually, I already had a lecture scheduled to teach about yoga breathing at St Luke's Hospital what was then called St Luke's Hospital in Manhattan and he wanted me to travel with him for weeks more. And I said, listen, I'm a doctor. If I don't show up for a lecture that's planned, I'll never be able to give another one on this topic ever. And so I flew back and within a short time we wrote up what we had proposed as the theory of effects of yoga breathing. And the journals the regular journals had no interest in it, but there was an alternative medicine journal that was interested and they were so difficult about accepting it they finally did and that article has had so many millions of hits over all these years. I mean it probably upped their impact factor incredibly.
Speaker 1:What is the article called?
Speaker 2:impact factor. Incredibly, what is the article called oh gosh? Oh, you know, I forget.
Speaker 1:It got published around 2004 or so I'll look it up and I'll put it in the show notes later. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it was actually a two-part series. One was about the science and the other was about effects on physiology and medicine and the idea of doing service for people who are subjected to war or disasters, doing interventions rare time where I was separated from him, because usually when he brings especially American but other countries' prospective teachers, he likes to make sure they don't get lost in India. It's such a different culture and I was in a part of the plane where there was no one who could speak English and I didn't speak any Hindi and I pulled out the Air India magazine and it opened to the horoscope for that month, which was my birthday month, and there was this three-page single-spaced horoscope and I'm reading it and it says you are going to have a spiritual transformation very soon and you are going to travel many thousands of times around the world. And I thought, oh my God, I can't believe very soon and you were going to travel many thousands of times around the world.
Speaker 2:And I thought, oh my God, I can't believe that everybody who can read English traveling in India this January is reading and has the same horoscope. And I pulled it out I actually have it stored somewhere in a scrapbook from that time period of being so involved with that style of yoga. But that's what happened is, I became known, I traveled with the guru, I gave lectures, we wrote articles, I set up many service projects to help people using breathing to help all kinds of children. A school in Harlem where all the kids in the fifth grade had had a neighbor or friend or relative killed in front of them in the last two years and the boys were severely violent. And we set up a program there and the boys, their violence, stopped totally and they really began to change. And we did it in a charter school in Kansas City where the kids had had a friend or relative shot not necessarily dead in front of them in the last two years, pretty similar same thing happened and I said you know, this is the most amazing thing, and this doesn't have the side effects of psychotropic drugs which I was very good at prescribing and really interested in doing a lot of research on.
Speaker 2:And so four years went by. I was teaching a thousand people a year in the breathing myself and while doing research, while teaching, while being married, while having kids and that kind of stuff. And at a certain point I realized there was one other doctor who I was friends with and he had been the chairman of a department in a VA hospital and ended up dropping all that to become a yoga breathing teacher going around the world and now he had a pension that he could rely on and his wife had been a nurse, so they had that support. But it was just so much more fun and exciting and wonderful meeting people from everywhere and he and I talked about. You know, it kind of turned a lot of people off to use Sanskrit words and to use things that to Americans or to Westerners, to people in modern countries, felt like religion. In India it doesn't feel like religion because it's intertwined with everything, and if you're Hindu it doesn't feel like a religion. In India it doesn't feel like religion because it's intertwined with everything, and if you're Hindu it doesn't feel like a religion. Now if you're Muslim that's a whole different ballgame.
Speaker 2:But I realized we had to get rid of, we had to really bring it down to the pure science and get rid of all the foreign stuff and make it something that was for anybody of any religion and no religion. And I was doing research with a really great research group in Canada, in Toronto, that dealt with the most treatment-resistant anxiety disorders, with comorbid disorders like OCD, depression, ptsd, substance abuse, kind of everything. And after a couple of years of working with them and they were very skeptical at first but they heard me lecture at the American Psychiatric Association After a couple of years they said you know, the only thing that comes close to working as well as what you do is when we give people really high dose Seroquel for extreme anxiety. It works, but two years later they all have diabetes. And they said what you need to do is you need to get rid of anything.
Speaker 2:And I also was bringing in stuff I learned from my teachers around the world, whether Native American or Japanese or Siberian or whatever, and they said you've got to bring something that works for people in about 15 to 20 minutes a day, because that's all most people will do. Like my Japanese Aikido master, for the whole many years I've known him since 1986, he spends three hours every morning doing breathing and meditation, but that's his job. In a way he's a teacher of the spiritual martial art For most of us. We got to get that done in a short time and that's when we really changed everything and I said goodbye to the guru and thanked him and I think you know he really wanted me to stay and keep teaching because it made a lot of people feel much safer that it was a doctor teaching and that I understood the physiology as well. And, of course, as much as we did, we've continued to do research with researchers around the world and around that time there was an explosion of interest in breathing.
Speaker 1:What year would this have been when you started the own?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was really around 2008. Okay, yeah, and we'd been working with veterans US veterans and right around that time a social worker who'd known me invited me to work with a military unit in New York State that had seen a lot of combat in the Middle East and that was really so much fun and so rewarding working with them for about five years. And the head of psychiatry there, colonel Paul Morrissey he's retired now, but he had the vision to bring it in and see just out of surgery with joint replacements on triple opioids four times a day In two hours, get them off the painkillers and you know stuff like that and also philanthropists started to train with me and one of them took me to South Sudan. That was in 2011. And I worked both with women who had been slaves for 10 to 20 years in North Sudan and tortured horribly every day in unimaginable ways, and their children and worked with them. And a bunch of them spontaneously the first 19 I taught. They spontaneously said you have to teach us how to teach this. We want to help other people who've been brought back out of slavery, recover from their trauma, and so that began my going there and teaching teachers to work with them there and I mean I went back again, but in between I would get videos of how they were teaching and I'd been training with Master Robert Peng, who's a wonderful, phenomenal Qigong teacher. People can go to robertpengcom and he taught me such amazing group healing techniques that I was using. And they said we not only want to help all the other women who've been brought out of slavery, but go to the orphanages who've lost their parents and teach them this to help them recover. And it began to grow and grow gradually.
Speaker 2:And each country, each place we've been to we learn from, because each group of people and each moment in our lives is unique, and so we find we often have to slightly modify how we're teaching. So what I learned in Rwanda, which is a wonderful place and we have such wonderful people there, the work there was started by Gretchen Wallace Steidel, who started Global Grassroots, and she was a yoga breathing teacher and a Harvard MBA who had brought mindfulness to help women in Rwanda recover from the genocide there, which was horrible. And she saw one of our papers in a scientific journal working with using the breathing in India after the tsunami that devastated Indonesia around 2004 and hit India too and devastated parts of India and Sri Lanka and she saw. She called me the night before flying to Haiti after the earthquake in Haiti and she said I work with people individually but I had no idea how to work with a large group. Can you teach me? And I spent two hours on the phone she's really smart and she's an amazing teacher and she got the basics that she needed. She took it there and then, after she got back, she said it was so amazing. I didn't even imagine you could do something like that with a large group of people at the same time. And she said I want to go back, but I want to bring 10 of my girlfriend yoga instructors and train with you. So my wife and I had them come to our house for three days on the weekend and train them. She went back there and then she brought it to Rwanda.
Speaker 2:I ended up going to Rwanda and we have now several teams of people. There's a doctor there, jean Bosco Nianzima. He's amazing. He has a healing center. He integrated what we teach with storytelling and narratives and dancing from Rwanda and he's shown. In the last couple of years, 3,000 people have gone through the training. It doesn't take long and 60% decrease in ratings on anxiety, depression, PTSD, substance abuse, absenteeism from work, and the most astounding thing for us is that the rate of intimate partner violence went down 60% too. I know of nothing else that's ever been shown to do anything like that, so we're going to be presenting that at the APA.
Speaker 1:Amazing. So 3,000 people in Rwanda, you said.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, You've done this.
Speaker 1:Statistics on depression, anxiety and partner violence, and all these things Right.
Speaker 2:And I've also seen a bunch of the people there, and a lot of them were suicidal before they I mean really acutely suicidal, and the problem for many countries, whether it's South Sudan or Rwanda, like in South Sudan last time I was there there's one psychiatrist for 12 and a half million people in the country, all of whom have PTSD, and so it's like, and if you are psychotic there, if you're schizophrenic, if you're seriously manic, depressive, your family chains you to a tree the rest of your life depressive, your family chains you to a tree the rest of your life, or you're likely to get killed.
Speaker 2:So it's like you know, we try to get helpful medicines donated to them, which helps. But so you know, and we have other so many wonderful teachers in Rwanda.
Speaker 1:And I'm curious about this is such a cool story. And so you're Sudan to Rwanda, and then many other places Ukraine, now Turkey.
Speaker 2:We're actually we have more teachers and we're better known in Turkey than any other place in the world. Ireland, Northern Ireland how?
Speaker 1:big are you in Turkey? How many people do you have there?
Speaker 2:Oh my, my God, there's hundreds, and in Ukraine we've trained 350 psychologists and they're so smart, they're so loving, they're so amazing, wow. But in Turkey it's funny we started there several years ago. So my father, when he was in the US Army, he was tasked with helping to bring Turkey into NATO and he said to me if you can ever go to Turkey, go there. It's the most interesting country I've ever been to. And so when we came out with our book, the Healing Power of the Breath, with audio tracks in about 2014,.
Speaker 2:Some years went by. The first two years we got more emails and letters from women in South Africa saying the audio tracks had healed them from their sexual PTSD. It was the only access to any kind of mental health help they had. But then a yoga teacher who's famous in Turkey she's such an amazing, wonderful yoga teacher. Her name is Zeyna Baksoy and she saw a book. A yoga teacher her name is Zaina Baksoy and she saw our book.
Speaker 2:This is about three or four years ago and she called us and she said I've been using your teaching in my yoga lessons and people really respond to it. Can I and some of my teachers come and train with you? And so we started training them online, just like we had trained Bangladeshi therapists and doctors in Bangladesh and in the US how to work with the Rohingya children that escaped from Myanmar and the genocide there, and they set up an online resource to help mothers and non-profit workers with traumatized children teach in little like three-minute modules how to do different things with children, like how do you get them to sleep, how do you get them to come out of their PTSD and actually talk, and things like that.
Speaker 1:So how would people find these kinds of resources? Is this all breathbodymindcom? Yeah, it's accessible from breathbodymindcom website.
Speaker 2:And also, what's for me so wonderful is to hear. Every year, the last three years, we have a celebration and as part of that celebration, we have teachers from around the world present what they're doing with it and hear where it goes, because it goes where it's needed. So in Turkey, after Zeynep began doing courses with us online most people don't know it's about two years ago there was a minor earthquake in the eastern Mediterranean and a sizable tsunami wave hit the coast of Turkey and thousands of children were too afraid to go to sleep for weeks. And when I heard that, I said to my wife we've got to do some. You know we don't take money for these things, but we have to set up some courses for mothers in Turkey of how to teach their children and themselves to go to sleep. And we did that and that really exploded the number of people who were interested in what we were doing.
Speaker 2:And you know there's a big thing about, you know, islam versus secularism there and you know what's so satisfying to me is we have so many women in burqas who train with us online and women who are totally sophisticated, worldly, totally fluent in English you wouldn't know they're from Turkey Training with us online and they especially want to use it to help women and children, but everybody benefits. So when the earthquake happened, we immediately ramped up our teacher training there, and that's so. They're so smart and it's culturally very comfortable because the breathing and the way I teach it just like the guru in India it's been developed in Middle Eastern countries through the Sufi style of Islam, which is a mystical branch, a very spiritual branch of Islam. Every religion has a mystical kind of wanting to have more transcendental experiences in everyday life and for Americans who think they can't do it, people used to say to me well, I can't learn your breathing because it comes from pagans in India or China, and what I say is you don't understand.
Speaker 2:Christian Orthodox monks have been doing this kind of breathing for several thousand years. People all over the world used to do this as part of a spiritual practice and it will enhance your prayer, your meditation or just generally having beautiful experiences with other people in your everyday life. You do have to practice. I can't do that for you. I can show you, but you've got to put the time in.
Speaker 2:After that, it doesn't take much. We made it so. When we combine things from different cultures that were ordinarily never combined before. You get a much quicker response and the nervous system we know from research done in the US and in Italy by wonderful teams of people. The New Jersey team worked with Japanese researchers in Tokyo that advanced monks after 20 years of doing eight or more hours a day of meditation. Their body naturally falls into this breathing because it helps improve the quality of their meditation and their spiritual practice and the fact is it's smarter to do what that style of Qigong that I got exposed to was, which is first teach people the breathing and it retrains their whole system to work much better and it's a lot faster than having to spend eight hours a day for 20 years, before your body figures it out.
Speaker 1:I remember feeling, after your intro course, a huge difference in my sleep, my energy, and it was an immediate impact. So, yeah, I'm a believer, I'm a fan. What about mechanism? What do you know about how it works, or how do you think it works? What do you know? What do you-.
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's quite complicated and of course there's still so much more research to be done. But I'd say what's fascinating is in the old days in India and China, when people came for emotional or physical help, and they're usually intertwined. We are a mind-body-spirit complex that you can't separate and tease out. In the old days in those countries they would start with slow breathing, very slow, often teaching you to breathe around three to five breaths per minute, and then, after you did that. First of all, like a Yengor's book, light on Pranayama says, you don't teach people breathing for 10 years. It's too powerful. You just have them do postures very carefully for 10 years. My feeling is our brains and our emotions are so messed up and we've so messed up the world, we can't afford that time. And the fact is, yes, you can learn the breathing right away. If you're taught properly and you select people and you don't teach them breathing, that can make them crazy. So what it looks like is that it's not just carbon dioxide exchange although that is important in its effects and fascinating in itself. And knowing how to breathe means you can adapt to high altitude much more easily. You can stop mountain sickness within an hour.
Speaker 2:I had two colleagues. They for years were doing Tibetan Buddhist meditation and so after Red China took over, they were going to Nepal and they were both psychiatrists. And they were going to go going to Nepal and they were both psychiatrists and they were going to go on another trip. And they heard me lecture about the breathing and said you know, we're going to be at really high altitude again this trip and do you think it's worth our learning the breathing first? I said yeah, because you never know when you're going to get mountain sickness.
Speaker 2:You may think you're not vulnerable, but everybody is vulnerable. And so they were up at 18,000 feet and stuck in a blizzard for three days in their tent, hunkered down, and the wife realized she was having mental sickness symptoms and it was three days by yak to the nearest hospital and you couldn't go anywhere in the blizzard. And you couldn't go anywhere in the blizzard and she thought, oh my God. And I told her this was back in the days of CD, before things on everybody's phone, and she pulled her CD out and in an hour she had gotten rid of her mountain sickness, which researchers in Italy have shown you could do.
Speaker 1:Do you think that's because you're changing the level of CO2, or you're shifting the body into a more relaxed state, or what do you think happened to cure the mountain?
Speaker 2:It's so fascinating it looks like. So we have two branches to the autonomic nervous system, which is the foundation of everything we think, feel, say and do, and doctors generally know nothing about it and are not taught about it. We're given this piecemeal thing about transmitters. What's more important is the integrated functioning of our nervous system, and ordinarily we're breathing about 15 to 22 breaths per minute approximately when we're relaxed, when we think we're relaxed, and when you do this breathing you breathe at. About the person of average height breathes about four and a half to six breaths per minute. If you're six feet and over which I run into a lot teaching military around the world then you want to go down. You first start around five or six breaths, then you go down to around three breaths per minute and that also means you release nitric oxide. Maximum means you release nitric oxide maximum.
Speaker 1:You're taller, so you have bigger lungs, or why would you go to a slower breath if you're taller?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's more blood to fill, bigger lungs needed, and so it takes longer to do that, in a sense to really bring it in, because you slow your breathing down and when you slow. But in the old days what they did first they taught real slow breathing and then they taught it might take you five or 10 years doing the slow breathing. Then they teach you fast breathing, a lot like Wim Hof, for like two years. Then they would teach you this breathing that we call coherent breathing. The researcher Dr Bernardi in Italy calls it resonant breathing. Then you would do that breathing and that's what the masters do.
Speaker 1:Okay coherent breathing is kind of what we did in that exercise that you just showed us even in an out-breathing slow piece, Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2:And the thing is it takes about five to eight minutes in the beginning for your brain to actually be able to leave the stress zone and go into the flow zone. And the great thing about coherent breathing is that you have enough energy to solve problems in your daily life, but you're more or less in meditation and you don't have to do it all the time. You do have to do it every day.
Speaker 2:But a round will make your system in two different laboratories. Anything you can measure in the brain and the body becomes optimal and it lasts for hours. After you do a round of the breathing and you can learn to slip in and out of it when you need to. And also you'll know when your breathing is dysregulated, which means your thoughts and feelings and decision-making will be dysregulated too.
Speaker 1:Can you say what becomes optimal? Is this your alpha waves, or what are the optimal things?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you get total cortical alpha waves of high amplitude, which means you're in a relaxed state of attention, lax state of attention, and it also means you can more easily, without effort, shift into other styles of attention and thinking needed. In other words, it's like neutral in a standard gear shift car. You don't have to shift into neutral to get to something else, you just automatically kind of can do it. No-transcript. It optimizes both branches, both sympathetic and parasympathetic. Now you can do fast breathing and you can optimize your sympathetic real fast. But it also may make you crazy and it also part of our problem is we're so much in the stress zone, which is high sympathetic, and too low in the loving connection zone, flow zone, which is the parasympathetic. And what happens is when you do this breathing, both of them become optimal and balanced. Now, when you do really slow breathing, the parasympathetic dominates over the sympathetic, which is cool. And sometimes when teaching people as they get more advanced, I teach them to experience, okay, what happens when now you go from your center of coherent breathing and go to real slow breathing, let's see what happens, what happens to your thoughts, what happens to your body and that kind of thing. But you see, it's not that one or the other is bad. There are capacities you want to have working for you most of the time. And the great thing is let's say, like some people say well, if I do that with soldiers, then they're not going to be able to fight right. No, they fight better. And when I get back with them, they say the breathing you taught us saves our lives on the battlefield. And when they go home, instead of not being able to turn off being in the kill zone, which they have to be to survive, they can more lovingly cooperate with their children and spouse. It's a whole different thing.
Speaker 2:One of our best teachers. She was in the army in Iraq and developed PTSD. And she came home she had a child and she realized she had no feelings for him. She was in this kind of perpetual state of disconnection from people. I mean, she felt more connected to people who'd been in combat if she met them. But you don't meet them that often in your daily life. It's about 0.5% of the population that is in the military these days, with the volunteer military. And she took the course and she began to practice and suddenly she remembered how to feel and she felt love again for her child. She felt love again for her husband and she said I'm going to learn to teach this to veterans. They're all having trouble with this, the guys I meet or the women I meet. So anyway.
Speaker 1:But from a mechanism perspective, you're doing a lot of things right Because you're shifting. You can shift into a ventral, vagal, relaxed, connected state and you can shift out of dissociation where you have cortex and right brain body running, cortex and right brain body running, so you're promoting brain integration. And so I'm curious what you think? What heals the trauma? What is the Right? Yeah, that's really important. You're doing a lot of different things, and which pieces of this?
Speaker 2:Well, part of that comes from scientific clues and then ancient knowledge clues. So Sri Sri Avashankar said to me the breathing somehow breaks the link between the memory of the traumatic event and the emotion that goes with it. And as I did it I realized he's right. It somehow breaks them. And as I saw people, recovering from their trauma.
Speaker 1:It looked like that was happening. We strengthen the memory by getting flooded and so if we can touch the memory but then trigger a relaxed state that integrates those trauma memories in a very different way, right.
Speaker 2:And we think that the speed of the breathing is crucial. The balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic is crucial. Also, we know now from research I predicted that this would be shown from my own experience of it is that when you're doing the breathing properly, you release a lot of oxytocin and prolactin, which are anti-stress, social bonding hormones, which further increase the capacity of the parasympathetic system, which not only is your loving connection bonding system, but reduces inflammation throughout your body as well.
Speaker 2:Now the breathing, as I say, it's got many effects. It's affecting chemoreceptors, it's affecting baroreceptors, so it lowers your blood pressure, it makes you more able to have less oxygen. So when I do cardio I'm coasting at that aerobic, anaerobic place because I can tolerate having a somewhat lower oxygen level than most people would feel comfortable at doing that level of physical activity. So you know, as I say, if you like going in the mountains, it makes that difference, but more importantly is it changes your relationships.
Speaker 2:It really does and I remember you people's energy and it's hard to put these things into words. You feel people's energy and the other thing is you begin to feel where people are not in harmony and kind of how their energy needs to be balanced more and how to teach them to change it. But it takes time and work. I tell people in the course I'm giving you spinach, I'm not giving you Twinkies or Yodels. Okay, this is not a fast sugar rush that you're going to get. You will get better and better over time and it usually for most people you know it takes people. It's the same as biofeedback, where you feel like it takes about nine months. You feel something right away. Most people do. There's a few people that don't, mainly because they don't want to do it, and for people with ADD it really helps to do it in a group and have cues. With all of this, one thing we changed from the ancient traditions is giving people audio cues so they didn't have to count, they didn't have to think, and it's funny.
Speaker 2:I've been privileged to teach monks from many different religious traditions around the world so it would enhance their religious practice and they're like oh my God, this is so much easier than the way I was trained and I'm like, yes, we don't have the time to waste anymore. We are really messed up and we're messing everybody else up, and when you come back in balance, you not only have compassion for yourself, you have compassion for others. You make better decisions. Some of the best researchers in the area of the autonomic nervous system have been led by Thera and Bershot in Norway. They worked with Norwegian Navy recruits and what they found was when you improved heart rate variability and breathing is the simplest way heart rate variability is one of the best predictors of health and longevity. What they found when they improved heart rate variability, they could solve much more difficult problems more quickly, more often than people who didn't have better heart rate variability.
Speaker 1:And several research groups Because you're in a different brain state. You're in a ventral vagal state. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and is it surprising that we think better when we feel more loving and better? I don't think so, but people don't know how to get there. It's interesting because one of my English teachers in high school made us read a lot of writings from early America and they came over trying to escape from rigid religions and they wanted spiritual experiences in everyday life. And they were working at it and they felt there was something bigger than themselves. But they had a hard time putting it into words and essentially at this point, the young people I meet in many countries 80% of them do not want an organized religion, but they do want to have more connection to the people they care about and work with in their life, and that gets into cooperating in teams, whether you're in the military or whether you're in business. And the other thing is what people have been missing.
Speaker 2:The idea is that the children of the world, and especially in America, are really messed up. We have an amazing suicide epidemic, and that's leaving out opioids and drug abuse and gun violence, and so the fact is is that children in America and most other countries are really very disturbed and what we find is whether they're quote normal kids or kids with special needs, with PTSD, adhd, autism spectrum. They respond more quickly and easily to the breathing than adults do. They get it faster, and it's just so wonderful for me. We also, some years ago, started working with an amazing yoga teacher from London named Jyoti Manuel, and she specialized in doing yoga for special needs children around the world in Africa and many places in Eastern Europe, like we do and she just found that the breathing made her feel so different, and so we work a lot together.
Speaker 1:I did a course, an online course, with her.
Speaker 2:A brief one through Breath, Body, Mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the week before Putin did this last full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, we did a week before because I have Russian friends in New York, I have Russian friends in Russia and you know there are many people, wonderful people I know all over the world. We did a special program for Russian mothers with special needs children and by the end of that program they were almost all crying because the children had responded so well and for some of them it was the first time their children had ever hugged them in their lives.
Speaker 1:And yeah, so, yeah, so this is really exciting and I just want to be mindful of our time too. And yeah so, yeah, so this is really exciting and I just want to be mindful of our time too, and I think that this has been really great and gives me a lot, gives people a lot to follow up on. How big is Breath, body, mind right now as an organization?
Speaker 2:Right, well, we haven't done counting recently, but we know like just in Ukraine alone, there are 350 well-trained psychologists. In Rwanda, gosh, there must be like 100. And we know that often just one of those teachers can heal 500 people in the next year, in the next year. And I have one amazing teacher in South Africa who works helping women recover from the trauma of apartheid. We've started work with Brazil. We have an amazing teacher who has an online teaching platform in Brazil and our book was translated into Portuguese like 10 years ago.
Speaker 2:So let's say I don't know how many teachers, but before we got working so much in the last year with Turkey and Ukraine, we knew we had helped several hundred thousand people around the world from reports from our teachers. Yeah, so to me, I mean I love doing psychopharmacology, I love helping people that otherwise thought they couldn't be helped, but this is the most important thing I've done in my life. I mean helping so many people so effortlessly and generally we do our best to make it fun and the kids especially love it when it's fun and mothers prefer it when it's fun and that's different. But they both, you know, just like.
Speaker 2:My feeling is all of the medications we use in psychiatry are very valuable for people, but I would also say most of the world can't afford it and the cost of the medications and the fact is we urinate most of them out into the environment and making them pollutes the environment. Urinating them out pollutes the environment. The other thing which I wrote about years ago but nobody was paying attention to is there's evidence that just the effects of the SSRIs getting into the water table in the Mississippi is making it hard for reptiles and amphibians and fish to reproduce. A lot of them. They don't know whether they're male or female anymore, and I say often you know all this transgender thing is.
Speaker 2:Maybe the Republicans ought to beef up the EPA to change, because my feeling is those people they are the way they are. It's part of their biology and we're living in an environment that's very different than the one we evolved in over the last depending on where you want to count us as the hominid the last 300,000 to a million years, and we're not paying attention. The Institute of Medicine came out with a paper maybe eight years ago saying basically all the chemicals in the environment are leading to an increase in cancer and ADHD and other things. And, oh my God, so many people got upset, heavens.
Speaker 1:So this is really a beautiful intervention tapping into. So this is a question I ask guests is what are you most excited about in mental health now? What are some old dogmas that maybe you'd like to see fall away. How would you answer that? I mean, I guess you've answered it.
Speaker 2:Well, what I feel is so different about our culture than some of the ones I go to is people are so much in their heads to is people are so much in their heads and all the ancient spiritual traditions and religions worked on joining the head and the heart together that that was the more advanced part of the process and my feeling is, with the breath it becomes much easier to do that sooner, with less work, and we need to bring our head and our heart together and it turns out when we do that we make much better decisions when you test people and we need to do that.
Speaker 2:And the other thing is, it's a matter of are we going to care and share about everybody else on earth or are we going to be grasping and greedy and try to take more, Especially when our country in a sense greedy, and try to take more, especially when our country in a sense, has taken more because of our level of energy use and we're like the worst plastic polluter on earth, which is really a problem.
Speaker 2:So my feeling is I meet so many amazing young people, especially young women, but young people around the world. They know we can't go on like this. They just don't know on like this. They just don't know what to do, and my feeling is we have some tough problems to solve, but if you tune up your mind, body, spirit so that you can solve problems in a caring way and considering other people and the earth, we have a good chance of making it Nice. Yeah, I've reached the point in life where I know I'm not going to be here nearly as long as I have been and I want to help young people make better decisions, to really change the course of things. And I feel like it comes down to our attention, and the state of your attention determines the quality of your life, and breathing is the most important single thing that determines your attention. Very few people intend to make a mistake.
Speaker 1:They make a mistake because they're not paying attention or they don't know something that they never heard that they never heard and we interact with each other very differently if we're in a socially connected internal state versus a sort of a fear reactive internal state.
Speaker 2:Exactly yeah, when you're in fear, you got to protect yourself and you don't think about anybody else and their motivations and their needs. So I think, most parents understand this, because you have to think so much for your children.
Speaker 1:And so I am sort of playing with the idea of looking at mental health from a Viktor Frankl meaning perspective that you know, instead of psychiatric symptoms that need to be treated or eliminated, to sort of treat our anxiety or mood as a signal that maybe we lack meaning and purpose or there's sort of an internal compass. And I've been very curious about Viktor Frankl's idea that meaning is kind of the main human drive. I wonder what you think about meaning and for you, how you conceptualize it. And then I'm just going to want to ask you some just rapid questions.
Speaker 2:Well, I had to read Victor Franklin High School and it was very meaningful, but my working with a psychologist in Ukraine renewed my reading his work and also a woman survivor of the Holocaust camps, like my aunt. And what's interesting is, in Ukraine, the group that most gravitated right away to what we were teaching is in the International Association of Positive Therapy. In other words, it's a movement started in West Germany, interestingly, where, instead of thinking about what are people's deficits, it's more like what are their strengths and how can we enhance their strengths to help them feel better. And so they all have. And, of course, I feel that intuitively from all of this.
Speaker 2:And so it was like I was talking to people who understood what I was saying right away, and the breathing helped them come back to being themselves again, and they were so upset they'd lost it.
Speaker 2:They felt like they were dead, because that's what being killed, or on the verge of being killed all the time, and your friends being killed anytime. That's what it typically does to human beings. And so it brought them out of that shock phase within usually three weeks. And then they said oh my God, I have to teach this to other people, because when you're in a better state and you see your colleagues in the angry, defensive mode and how they don't solve problems very well and they can't help many people at a time and it's hard to help one-on-one in that state. When you see that you are different and you understand why because you felt it happening it's great. So they are very much into Viktor Frankl and the search for meaning and it's funny. In my life it feels like there are these cycles and it's coming back to a cycle of excitement and idealism to help people in the world again, like I had at the end of high school and going into college.
Speaker 1:Let me ask you some sort of rapid questions, and if this doesn't work, we can edit things out or not. But one question is this is a sentence completion question. So according to me, Richard Brown, the meaning of life is we're here to learn about love. Nice, and can you elaborate a little bit?
Speaker 2:Yeah, when I was younger, I thought it was really important to be very smart and discover new things, and I feel like right now although I'm sure many people will continue to do that, and I feel like right now, although I'm sure many people will continue to do that what we really need to do is come back to being who we really are naturally and be ourselves, which is very loving. When you're in deep meditation, you realize masculine, feminine, culture. All that stuff are more superficial parts important parts, but superficial parts of who we are, and at the core of ourselves is a loving awareness that you want to keep a light. It's like a flame. You can keep a light all the time and what you see is it's all about love. Everything is love. It may be distortions of love. So, for example, you say well, what about Putin? Well, that's self-love. He wants to be the biggest emperor. Russia, the appropriate loving way, which may include punishment for war crimes, for example, Nice.
Speaker 1:So next question is the most meaningful thing that I did yesterday was Gosh, I'm so in the moment it's hard to remember yesterday.
Speaker 2:What did I do yesterday, gosh? Oh, I practiced some of my Ukrainian because the Ukrainian students love it when I speak Ukrainian. So I've been learning Ukrainian and it's always interesting, because when you learn another language it always teaches you a slightly different way of looking at things. And the people there, all the ones I meet, they're so loving, the family is so core and they love nature. And you know, it's like to me. I show how I care about them when I speak Ukrainian and that's how they feel. That's not a fiction, that's not a fantasy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Nice and after I am dead and gone, the thing I most want people to remember me for, or what I'd most like to be remembered for, is, yes, making breathing something that transformed people's lives, not just helped heal many psychiatric symptoms, but really transformed who they were, with a scientific basis to it so people could understand why it happened.
Speaker 1:Nice, and if I come to you, or a client or patient comes to you and says I feel like my life has meaning, lacks meaning, I'm sort of in this existential dread state, how would you approach being helpful to this kind of a situation?
Speaker 2:Well, first I would need to know a lot more about the person and why they felt that way. I find often when people present themselves in that way it means there's been trauma and sometimes they don't even remember it. I'll give you an example A colleague of mine for some years. I trained her when she was a resident at Cornell and she went into practice and was a very good psychiatrist and had exposure to spiritual things. Growing up. She was seeing, like so many of us psychiatrists, seeing some patients with treatment-resistant depression. And she had a patient you know she felt she had treatment-resistant depression but no medication had any impact on, and so she asked the patient to come and see me and a short way into the interview I realized it wasn't just that she had depression. Her depression came from post-traumatic stress disorder and I felt she had been traumatized as a very young child so that there were no verbal kind of scripted memories of it. But it had changed the course of her life and her job was doing art therapy for traumatized children. And I said you know, I think I know this may be hard for you to imagine, but I think you had some significant trauma. I felt it would likely be sexual trauma, but I didn't say that. I said I think you had significant trauma as a child. She said oh no, nothing like that. I had a really good family. I said well, I don't know, just keep your mind open, but why don't you come and learn the breathing that I teach? Now, this was back when I was teaching breathing, taught by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, art of Living Breathing, and for someone with that kind of trauma it can release it very fast, that style of how the breathing is taught. And at that time we had a lot of people from 9-11 who had severe trauma and when they would do the fast breathing that's a lot like when Mohawk teaches they would begin screaming and sometimes scream for a half hour or more at the top of their lungs, which can be difficult in a Manhattan building because the police can be called to find out what's going on. So she came to the course and she said well, I guess I've read it. She said you know I read about it. I guess the breathing might help me, but I don't have trauma, I've read it. She said you know I read about it. I guess the breathing might help me, but I don't have trauma.
Speaker 2:And she started doing the breathing and she began to scream and we did for her what we did with a lot of 9-11 residents and responders we wrapped her in like three thick wool blankets so her screams were muffled enough that the police weren't going to be called and we also let her know we were right there. And we did that two days in a row. And she said to me after the second day, after the breathing, she said, as I was doing that, breathing, I felt like I went into this whirlpool in a river and I was spinning and spinning and spinning and when it came out of the whirlpool it was all gone. And I realized I did have sexual trauma and I don't have to describe it to you. But because it's gone now, she said, even if I were to see it again, it doesn't have the feeling Again, getting to the idea of it's like you're reformatting the cortex.
Speaker 2:It's like reformatting a disc or turning your phone off so it works again when it's stuck, okay, and and you've just transformed the circuitry, uh, basically, and she said thank you so much. And then, a couple months later, she was also an artist and she developed a 3d artwork that she did, showing herself spinning and spinning and spinning down into the whirlpool and the trauma being thrown off into the river and it was the most beautiful, amazing thing. And I said to her now you understand why you are so good helping the children you work with and it helped her kind of complete how things had happened in her life. So anyway, that may get away from your original question.
Speaker 1:No, I think it gets to it because I do feel like the existential dread relates to a lack of connectedness, and trauma and dissociation block connectedness. So healing that, I think, makes sense. I've already sort of asked this, but if you had a big billboard or could get a big message out, do you have? A message that you would like to get out on a big level.
Speaker 2:Share a long, deep breath with somebody, every chance you get.
Speaker 1:Nice. I really like it. So anything else. Before we finish, I want to sort of loop back to the beginning, and I never thought I would say this, but thank goodness for those neo-Nazi hoodlums who got you breathing.
Speaker 2:Well, that's one of the fascinating things, because at the time those events happened it felt like the worst thing in the world that people would hate you so much just for being who you are and try to kill you basically or, you know, really damage you badly. And so in our courses we often, after people do breathing, you know, we do certain processes, and one simple one I ask people to do occasionally when it feels right is is there something that happened to you in life that at the time it happened you thought was horrible, and then it turned out to have the most amazing good things that came with it later on. And so, in a sense, those people who I know are damaged because of how they were raised, they couldn't help what they were doing, in a sense that they could result in my eventually doing something that's helping hundreds of thousands of people around the world and saving money at the same time in doing so, Should I go back and thank them? I don't think I'd be able to find them, and I'm not sure how many of them are alive at this point. Them, I don't think I'd be able to find them and I'm not sure how many of them are alive at this point.
Speaker 2:But we need to take a breath and step back from the most horrible things, because there's good and bad contained within everything and it's a matter of I'd. Much. Rather we all begin to respond with awareness instead of overreact reflexively, and really think about the consequences of what we do. And that applies to America has had a bunch of stupid wars. That my feeling is and I think many Americans' feeling is we didn't have to do. And how do you tell that to another country that's feeling traumatized and reacting in a survival mode? How do you shape that? And my feeling is we realized after 9-11 that, with the mass disasters we're having and are going to have, everybody needs to know how to manage their mind, body, spirit. And it's easiest when you learn it around the time you're 8 to 12 years old, and so a big thrust of what we do is working with children and working with their caretakers or their mothers. Uh, you know to do that well, this has been really fun.
Speaker 1:I really appreciate you taking the time and, yeah, I look forward to keeping on learning from you and seeing how this all continues to develop. This is a neat story and a big impact on me and so many other people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and it's a fun adventure. People yeah, absolutely, and it's a fun adventure. And I feel in the next couple of years things are really going to turn more positively again and I encourage people to keep the faith that we humans can actually do that. But you have to have the right tools to do it, and so these are the tools I use. Are there other people teaching other things that can do it? I'm sure no question. Are there other people teaching other things that can do it? I'm sure no question, but we really tried to make it something that anybody anywhere, of any background, found that it worked for them, because it goes to the deepest levels of our nervous system.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so yeah, I definitely encourage people to check out breathbodymindcom and do your basic training or higher level trainings.
Speaker 2:And yeah, thanks so much for talking with me about this. Yeah, absolutely, and I would say and you can always edit this out part of the fun is which needs especially more research is. Doing it online means you're doing it in a large group and there's something about a group of people coming together to do something as simple as being natural and getting rid of layers of garbage instead of having to add stuff, and it has such a profoundly healing effect on us. And that's what we're missing all around the world is that sense of community and connection in the country and with other countries and seeing people experience that.
Speaker 2:I was trying to explain it to a friend of mine who is a Russian man who I helped, but the breathing had changed the course of his life and his vision and he wanted to become a psychologist to help the children in Russia. And he wanted to become a psychologist to help the children in Russia and I was trying to explain to him working with large groups and what it's like and he said, well, why does a group work like that? I said, well, you know, we don't know enough right now. We know it releases oxytocin, prolactin it's good for the parasympathetic system and he said, oh, I get it. It's kind of like being at a rock concert.
Speaker 2:I said yeah, I think you're right about that, yeah.
Speaker 1:And live versus online Live is amazing.
Speaker 2:Live is amazing and I've been in huge online spiritual gatherings around the world. I'd say we're not quite ready to do such huge things in person. Again, it's a little dangerous because many people are disturbed and if large groups come together they want to hurt the people, but we can do it online and be safe. So one of the goals worth thinking about some of our teachers and I for some years have been thinking about having certain times where certain major cities in the world and other people in rural areas come together online and do the breathing at the exact same time at different times of the day and night, and let's see how that changes the energy with which we work together.
Speaker 1:It's a neat idea Great.
Speaker 2:All right Well thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening. I really enjoyed that. I hope you did too. Check out the bonus breathing track. Check out breath, body, mind. I recommend doing some of these training programs and hit subscribe. We have a lot of interesting stuff coming up. We have a whole series on meaning from a parts internal family systems therapy perspective. We have a whole series on meaning and hypnosis. And until next time, I hope you have a meaningful, meaningful month.
Speaker 2:And, as always, if you figure out the meaning of life, let me know. Smurfs, Pop-Tarts.
Speaker 1:Pomegranates. Dance the way the girls turn to the bread chest. Maslow Pumpkins. Tico Peanuts across her jittery chest Moscow pumpkins. Take your food on the loose, but my petrified desire.
Speaker 2:And what should you do? She says as she turns on the canvas, maybe to hear her tone of voice. So what are you doing on the surface? But no eternal gold from no turtle goal.