Following Your Gut Podcast #17, Bridging Ancient Wisdom with Modern Science with Jeff Essen

In this insightful episode of the “Following Your Gut” podcast, host Roland Pankewich is joined by Dr. Jeff Essen, an expert in combining Eastern and Western health philosophies. They delve into the unexpected intersections of Eastern medicine with Western scientific approaches, elucidating how ancient practices can enrich modern naturopathy. Dr. Essen shares his transformative journey from massage therapy to becoming a leading naturopathic doctor and how an enduring curiosity led him to meld diverse healing methodologies.

Listeners will gain an in-depth understanding of how Eastern concepts like energy channels and meridians can harmonize with Western clinical practices to provide robust health solutions. The episode explores topics like biofeedback loops, the role of breathwork in restoring hormonal balance, and the effects of modern-day frequencies on human health. Through engaging discussions and real-world applications, Roland and Dr. Essen demystify many complexities of integrating holistic approaches into conventional medicine, offering practical insights for practitioners and health enthusiasts alike.

About the Guest:

Dr. Jeff Essen is a distinguished naturopathic doctor with significant expertise in integrating Eastern medicine philosophies with Western medical practices. A Minnesota native, Dr. Essen is known for his deep understanding of various medical disciplines, and his innovative approach to holistic health and natural healing. With a practice spanning over 25 years, he also contributes to educational advancements as an instructor for the International Holistic Health Alliance.

Key Takeaways:

Integration of East and West: Dr. Essen explains how Western medicine can be enhanced through Eastern philosophy by understanding the body’s energetic pathways and their physiological relevance.

Role of Breathwork: Learn how specific breathing techniques can influence hormone regulation and overall energy balance in the body.

Impact of Modern Frequencies: The discussion highlights how artificial frequencies, like 5G, affect human health and strategies for mitigating these effects.

Holistic Health Strategies: Emphasizing the necessity of treating the whole person, integrating various diagnostics to obtain a complete picture of health.

Practical Applications: The podcast explores actionable strategies for incorporating Eastern practices into everyday health routines, emphasizing energy flow and balance.

“The microbiome of our digestive tract is like the soil of our body." 

Transcript

0:00:02 Roland Pankewich: Welcome back to the following your Gut podcast, where health science meets clinical wisdom. As always, I’m your host, Roland. It’s great to be with you again today and I want to ask you guys something. Has there ever been an inkling, an interest in Eastern medicine or you’ve heard things that don’t sound at all familiar, logical or easily understood, but you’ve had a knowing and intuition that there’s something more that you like to dive into but you don’t know where to start?

0:00:29 Roland Pankewich: That was me many years ago and it’s overtaken me to the point where it’s become a dominant worldview of mine when it is dealing with health of myself and other people. And today I have an amazing guest. His name is Jeff. So it’s already a good omen because he’s like the fifth one who’s been on the podcast. But I have Dr. Jeff Essen. He’s also a Minnesota native and he is one of the foremost experts as a naturopathic doctor on Eastern practices being merged with Western philosophy and perspective.

0:00:57 Roland Pankewich: So, Dr. Jeff, thank you for being here today.

0:01:00 Jeff Essen: Oh, it’s a pleasure, Roland, as always. Just, you know, the idea of talking about this is sort of a fun play thing for me because it’s, you know, it’s how I have to practice every day. But this is a little bit more of the intellectual side of things.

0:01:15 Roland Pankewich: Well, we like intellectual things on this podcast and play, if we can interject it, is also fun. Before we get into the topic at hand, I’d love to know a little bit more about your story and your background.

0:01:26 Jeff Essen: Sure. About 27 years ago, I was practicing massage. I was loosening people up for chiropractic adjustments and I was oh so happy and I could listen to Enya all day and everything was stress free. And then a car accident happened that would not allow me to continue to do massage. And so the chiropractor, one of the chiropractors I was working with, suggested to become a naturopath, which at that point I had never heard that term.

0:01:55 Jeff Essen: I then checked it out, dove right in, leapt off the cliff and had no idea what I was doing and ended up getting my naturopathic degree and I’ve been doing nothing ever since. I’ve just been completely immersed in the idea of the naturopathic philosophy and on a day to day basis bringing that to my patient care.

0:02:15 Roland Pankewich: I’m going to make an Enya joke, and you might be surprised that I have one, but I’m going to say that that massage therapy profession Just sailed away for something better. Yeah, just brought back the childhood Sunday nights of Enya playing in my house in Canada. So you have been someone who I guess was called into duty, so to speak, in terms of how your profession developed. But you yourself are not, as I would see it, a typical naturopath. You’ve expanded your philosophy and your perspectives, almost kind of merging some maybe ideations of massage therapy. Because a lot of massage is not based just in anatomy and physiology. There’s different traditions, long held traditional approaches to massage that are unique around the world.

0:03:01 Roland Pankewich: What is it that made you blend some of the health and science of naturopathic medicine with an eastern philosophy? What drew you in there?

0:03:10 Jeff Essen: Well, you know, even as just, I shouldn’t say just a massage therapist, as a massage therapist I was still a little bit restricted by the boundaries of practice, let’s say, and had huge amounts of interest in other things concerning it. And you know, in the massage world there are the, I call the woo woo people. The people are kind of way off in the la la land as far as energy, medicine and everything else. And this is all Reiki and all this other kinds of things that doesn’t have as much of a foundation in Western science.

0:03:41 Jeff Essen: And then there’s the people who are, you know, getting down to the very tendon, the that’s sore and they’re doing all this kinesiology to try to. I was interested in both worlds. Both things fascinated me, fascinated me equally. But I always wondered about, well then what was the joining of those two things? How did those two things merge together? And that’s where I gained my interest in then one thing leading to another of well, if this energetic description from say an eastern point of view has its language and then the Western point of view has its more medical language language applied to it, aren’t they just saying the same thing? And I began to realize that. So then as I walked down that road, I discovered that there’s so much of the entire world’s worth of information.

0:04:29 Jeff Essen: Why are we limiting ourselves to just our local, you know, why, why, why, why would I only want one thing when I can have 10?

0:04:39 Roland Pankewich: It’s a wonderful perspective and I think a lot of people who may be a little hesitant in the regards of wanting to dive into the eastern approach is because it’s overwhelming. You know, the Western system has a nice linear progression through learning anatomy, physiology, then you learn biochemistry, then you learn the practical applications of such depending upon the route you choose. Eastern is more like here’s everything all at once.

0:05:06 Roland Pankewich: You Know there’s not the same linear scaffolding of understanding. So I think a lot of people may turn their nose up at it. Just from a perspective of it seems like such a bear to take on and become an owner of the information and a steward in addition to maintaining the western philosophy. When people ask you where do I start? Where do you generally point them in the direction of when it comes to getting a grounding in Eastern medicine?

0:05:34 Jeff Essen: Actually I point them to somebody from the western point of view. Dr. James Oshman, O S C H M A N Brilliant physio guy. He’s into physics. This guy understood from a physics point of view how the body worked. And by virtue of examination of how the electrical, I call it electrical, which isn’t exactly accurate, but in taking a look at the message sending systems that the body has, inevitably this led him to, well, gee, Western medicine has our electrical.

0:06:11 Jeff Essen: We can measure it in AC and DC and voltage and all this. Guess what? Somebody else described this 5,000 years ago and it’s just a different language that they use. So Oschman was brilliant at trying to merge those two worlds together. I had the privilege in Naturopathic school of having dinner at a large table of students and our teacher with James Oshman, just interesting casual conversation. Brilliant man, I would say he kind of started me down that road of trying to blend those two worlds.

0:06:39 Roland Pankewich: So if he is kind of the ideation point of seeing the connection between those two and I’m assuming he has a, a book, a resource that you can reference in terms of where you got his information.

0:06:50 Jeff Essen: Yeah, in my, in my course that I teach for the Naturopathic school. His Energy Medicine is one of the textbooks that I refer the students to, based a huge chunk of the information based on his research studies videos. And then again you move into somebody like Ted Kapchuk who is again a Westerner who went to China and dove in deeply into the traditional Chinese medicine, not only methodology but also philosophy.

0:07:22 Jeff Essen: And this is where again a Westerner who doesn’t grow up with a certain language of context and understanding of something can still look at this and say, well, you know, like an anthropologist studying a tribe that nobody’s visited before, have a different viewpoint than the people who are living it, but still maybe better understand it from a different point of view, the anthropological view. And so that’s where you know, there’s again these, there’s these people who are trying to bridge those worlds and be interpreters of the language that I think then once we would better understand that and Cross the cultures and interpret the language.

0:07:58 Jeff Essen: They’re all saying the same thing. You know, everyone’s saying the same thing over and over again, just in their own language and way.

0:08:04 Roland Pankewich: Well, there’s an old saying, nothing new under the sun, right? It’s just a rehashing of information. And I’m not going to even attempt to spell his name because I’ll butcher it. But it’s Dr. Pischinger, he wrote the book the Ground Matrix. I believe that’s one that really helped me because it, it was, it helped me square away the unknown intangibles of things that didn’t quite make sense with what a meridian is.

0:08:30 Roland Pankewich: And it actually gave a context of understanding and a description of something that you assume, you know, an acupuncturist just puts a needle in or, you know, you go to a physio and they just stimulate a certain thing. It’s really a fiber optic cable network in the body of electrically different, in terms of its measurement points of contact on the body that connect those energetic lines to the different organs. And there’s a relationship. So it really was the same kind of understanding for me where someone of the west described something of the east so my bias could get into it. And then it dropped my resistances of saying, well, because I don’t understand, therefore there’s nothing else to explore here. Then it opened up the Pandora’s box of oh, there’s a lot to explore here.

0:09:22 Roland Pankewich: So from that point, what you just said with those two references, you had the connection of the east and the west through a Western mind. Where did you go next? Or where do you encourage people to go next to better understand things? Is it going to a meridian or is it going to a chakra or is it going to understanding frequency and vibration?

0:09:44 Jeff Essen: Well, if you indulge me, I could tell a brief little historical anecdote here that really kind of puts an emphasis on how many people have attempted this. World War II happened. In World War II there was the Axis powers and that was Italy, Germany, very Western minded, and that also included Japan. Now, oddly enough, one of the medical doctors who was working for the Nazi regime in Germany, then when the war ended, he said, well, hey, we’ve been experimenting with all these things and I’ve been studying bioelectricity.

0:10:20 Jeff Essen: When I studied bioelectricity, I was sent to Japan to study these meridians and they actually did cadaver, you know, bisections. They found out that the meridian pathways as laid out by the Japanese practitioners sure enough had different electrical conductivity. Than those tissues surrounding. There was then also a matchup in terms of at that point, you know, 1943, 44, when Dr. Vol was there, was able to then make a device that would measure the voltage on the circuit. Now that was the, that was the progenitor of what we know as the electroacupuncture according to Volt, eav, Meridian stress analysis, electrodermal screening, that’s all the same thing, just different names.

0:11:05 Jeff Essen: But effectively speaking, all we’re doing is measuring the electrical conductivity and voltage change on a electrical circuit using an OHM meter. And that’s really all that electrodermal screening really is, is measuring that. So you had somebody as western, logical, left brained as possible, a German Nazi doctor going over to study the esoteric sciences in Japan where they’re studying all this again, different language, different context, more of an art form in Japan in their system and, and yet they blended beautifully and are still existent now today as a major branch of evaluation for the body.

0:11:50 Roland Pankewich: And it’s incredible, effectively speaking, there’s a little pause.

0:11:54 Jeff Essen: I was just going to say because as Vol described it, this is nothing more than a feedback loop. And so in his study of bioelectricity, he was studying why does the body have all this electricity running through it? What’s the purpose of it? Now what ended up happening when he made these discoveries in Japan was that he understood that the energy went out from a central source, the brain, out to different organs and glands via pathways. Again these electrical conductive pathways, you call that the fiber optic communication network?

0:12:28 Jeff Essen: Indeed it is. So as these messages went out, there are instructions for the body to perform tasks. It’s a brain regulation and stimulation of body function. Now as is with every electrical circuit. And this is where his knowledge of electricity came into play. You can’t just send electricity out and it just ends. There has to be a loop where it goes back, there’s always a feedback. So what he discovered then is that the Schwann cells on the outside of the nervous system were then running electricity the opposite direction.

0:13:03 Jeff Essen: So there’s, what we have is a return circuit of information. This is the organs, glands, tissues that the original message went out to. Now giving a feedback of. Here’s our status, here is the needs that we may have. Now here comes this electricity running the outside of the nerve up to the tailbone where it gathers into what’s known as then the governing vessel, which we would know as our spinal cord.

0:13:27 Jeff Essen: That message runs up to C1 and then goes into the jaw and teeth. Now every Tooth is connected to an acupuncture meridian. So a tooth becomes a note played by an orchestra. Your jawbone is then the harmonic resonance board, or a sound board like you’d have in the bottom of a piano that generates the entire. All the teeth individually contribute each note and then that’s a harmonic that’s in broadcast into the brain.

0:13:58 Jeff Essen: So the brain understands what is the harmonic and specific not coming from the body. So this is our feedback loop. Our brain sends messages to our body, our body sends feedback back to the brain. And everybody’s in constant communication and effectively it’s all music. So this music has a mathematics to it. The music can be broken down to be a Western science, here’s the numbers kind of thing. But you know, also as music is, it’s an art form.

0:14:29 Jeff Essen: So there’s a physics to it, there’s also an art to it that are both overlaid with one another depending on your point of view.

0:14:38 Roland Pankewich: Well, that’s kind of, that’s a wonderful thing that you just said because it gives justification to why I always introduce this podcast saying where health science meets clinical wisdom. Because there is an art and science to patient care, there’s an art and science to client practice. And that pattern fractally exists on all aspects, I think of this industry if it’s what you’re into. Because eventually you go so deep into things, you can’t know the one thing anymore. You just see where it fits into the bigger picture.

0:15:11 Roland Pankewich: So it’s not focusing on the single note that you’re choosing, it’s actually examining the symphony and how that note relates to the symphony. So if I back up from your, the start of your story, basically what you said is there was a gentleman who is very Western, Western minded sent to the East. They cross referenced, they matched up what was being said in different language, but describing the same things.

0:15:37 Roland Pankewich: And now this has kind of been the catalyst to allow you to develop your own philosophical framework and understanding about how all of these things are interrelated and how they fit together. So let me pose you this question then. I’m someone who knows a lot about biochemistry. I’m someone who knows a lot about functional lab testing, a lot about organs and organ pathology. How do I use this Eastern medicine, this Eastern understanding, to make me a better practitioner with what I just said as an aforementioned skill set.

0:16:16 Jeff Essen: So one of the courses I also teach in a naturopathic school is the blood test evaluation. And so in describing each individual biomarker that’s measured in blood, we understand that that is one thing, but one of the things that has to be done when describing these things in class is, well, here’s this one number, but it relates to other numbers. So if you have hemoglobin as one measurement, well, you have to also relate that to the MCHC and the MPV and there’s about eight or other markers that you’d say, well, the hemoglobin may be a number and it may be probably the most important of those numbers. Where you’re considering anemia.

0:16:57 Jeff Essen: You don’t want to draw a conclusion based on the hemoglobin alone. You have to have correlating things that then would say, here’s an overall larger picture view or a multiple angle point of view on the same subject. That then is a better confirmation of how we feel about any given, you know, status of the body. If you expand that to all different versions of evaluation, you don’t want to go, you know, jump off the cliff of any one thing without being able to relate it to all things of the body. And so very often when I’m seeing a patient, I’ll have numerous different things popping up. There’s, you know, massive amounts of information.

0:17:37 Jeff Essen: What I’m looking for is what is the connection between those things and what is the repetition. Connection and repetition are how you become a good practitioner. Don’t go based on any one score, go based on the cumulative mass that seems to head in a direction and have a concurrent theme to it. So if I see somebody and their hormones are what they complained about, come in and my hormones are completely out of whack, whichever hormone you want to name.

0:18:00 Jeff Essen: And then when you’re testing, there’s all these things about intestinal bacteria and sibo and lacto probiotic microculture and all these things saying digestion is really your problem. Well, guess what? The small intestine and the hormones are on the same electrical circuits combination called the fire element of Chinese medicine. And so if I’m saying that there’s a bunch of physiological problems in the digestion and we can measure hormones as being off balance, there may be an energetic relationship between them that’s better described by Chinese medicine than it would be by Western medicine.

0:18:39 Jeff Essen: So integrating all of it together is the ultimate tool to be able to grab things from this place, this place in this place, and put them together as a larger picture. Remember, in naturopathic medicine, one of the second edict of natural medicine is treat the whole person. We can’t reduce a person down to.

0:18:56 Roland Pankewich: A number, which is what’s been, I don’t want to say happening, but there’s definitely a push. And narrative might not be the right way to describe it, but there’s an intention to adapt Western medicine reductionism with testing and various things, to take the sum of the person’s test results and make that the picture of the absolute, of everything that that person is. And I always say it’s a. It’s a moment in time, it’s a snapshot, and it gives you patterns.

0:19:28 Roland Pankewich: And that might be a fun thing to explore really quickly here with you, because if you mention hormones, the average person who is on the Western medical side of practice will give the person the hormones that their body is deficient in. For example, they’ll do endocrine balancing, you know, trt, hormone replacement therapy, what have you. But I’m going to gather that that is not the approach that would be framed on the Eastern side. So maybe you can explain how the Eastern philosophy would take a Western problem, and rather than just bolster up the weaknesses and fill in the gaps, what would that approach be and what would it look like?

0:20:08 Jeff Essen: Oh, certainly. Yeah. And, you know, where hormones are concerned, from the, you know, Eastern point of view, you’re looking at they divided up into three different sections, TH12 and 3. So TH1 would be the adrenals and gonads, either ovaries or testicles. We have the Th2, which is the thyroid, and Thymus, Th3, which is the pituitary pineal. Now, when we understand each one of those three different segments has its own relationship and own emotional set, own reactivity set, that each of them are in different places as far as what is the.

0:20:41 Jeff Essen: Remember that hormone. The word hormone means messenger.

0:20:45 Roland Pankewich: And when you say th, we’re not talking about immune.

0:20:49 Jeff Essen: Yeah, it’s not that. It’s.

0:20:50 Roland Pankewich: This is the triple warmer, Triple heater.

0:20:53 Jeff Essen: Triple warmer. Yeah. So, yeah, that’s. That’s their terminology for it, because our hormones give us inner heat in that model. And so therefore, triple warmer, triple heater is their terminology. So th1. Yeah, refers to that now, but, you know, the point of it is, is that when you’re talking about the adrenals and gonads, that is our most basic foundational survival mechanisms. Survival and reproduction are what TH1 is all about.

0:21:20 Jeff Essen: The TH2 is more regulatory systems, which is the thymus, producer of antibodies, the thyroid producer of the metabol, metabolism, stimulation, and even the parathyroid, which is relative to our ability to incorporate nutrients into our cells, especially calcium, into bones. The TH3, though, is all about regulation and response to the environment and direction of the rest of the body. Now that may go into higher realms of, you know, what you consider to be survival is adrenal, but what do you consider to be adaptation would be more pituitary.

0:21:55 Jeff Essen: So you have different purposes and needs for even each of these divisions of the hormonal system. So just to say that one is off is a complete misnomer. There’s no such thing as any one hormone that operates independently of any of the others.

0:22:09 Roland Pankewich: They are networked.

0:22:10 Jeff Essen: Yeah, well, it’s actually a three dimensional ball. You’re trying to. If you move the bottom of the ball to the top on that and then you displace the top down to the bottom. So what’s going to happen is that then as you put one additional hormone in that was lacking, you’re going to off balance another one as well. And so realistically speaking, every adjustment that is made to hormones has to go through a negative feedback loop mechanism. And this is a very western point of view on it, is there is a negative feedback loop for every hormonal need.

0:22:42 Jeff Essen: The cells produce a messenger protein that says, hey, can you please give us more down here? Or maybe less. There’s a regulatory peptide that goes from the cells to the hypothalamus of the brain, which then turns around using that negative feedback stimulus to then measure what there is in the bloodstream. Say, oh gee, I guess we are low in that. Let’s produce a hormone to stimulate the gland that’s then responsible for the production of that hormone.

0:23:06 Jeff Essen: There’s no such thing as a single, just glandular, just plopping stuff out. All of these glands have a stimulus response mechanism and all that is to regulate how much hormone messaging we’re doing. Because over messaging is as much of a problem as under messaging. And so if one says that, then blood sugar is out of control, blood sugar is completely out of whack, and there’s a constant stimulation for more insulin production to bring blood sugar down, that’s going to imbalance the adrenals, which will in turn imbalance the reproductive hormones, which may in turn affect the thyroid.

0:23:45 Jeff Essen: So just simply say you’re low in this. Here, take more. You’re, you’re. There’s no possible way to balance that and to throw a little bit of a negative attitude towards this. Measurement of hormones in the blood is highly inaccurate because we’re measuring only those hormones that are globulin bound. What does that mean? That means these are hormones that first of all, when they take the blood, they spin it out Meaning that the red blood cell portion goes to the top and the serum goes to the bottom.

0:24:13 Jeff Essen: They actually throw the red, red blood cell portion out. Once they’ve measured it, they measure the hormones that are in the serum. These are globulin bound or bound for excretion. So yeah, my analogy for this is you’re going to shove a sensor up the tailpipe to see how much gas you have in your tank. It’s a related thing. It’s not exactly accurate. And so even just measurement of hormones via blood is questionable in and of itself.

0:24:38 Jeff Essen: But then again, like you said, this is a snapshot of a moment in time when you know, what time of day was it, what did you eat, where was your blood sugar, where was your stress? Can all determine whether or not that hormone was in an amount or not. If you wanted to measure hormones and blood, you have to measure the whole blood. It’s called free fraction. It’s extremely expensive. You’re never going to get your insurance company to pay for it. You’re never going to get a script from a doc to do it.

0:25:03 Jeff Essen: And then in addition to that, you’d have to measure about four to six times a day over the course of an entire week to understand where is your hormone on average and what is it responsive to? And it’s just not practical. So one measurement for any one hormone in a blood test is, you know, maybe a 20% chance that it’s accurate.

0:25:25 Roland Pankewich: And that is due to the fact that there’s a natural fluctuation and a cycle of production levels, lows, levels being volatile. This is why I have always aligned with, and the longer I practice, the less I rely upon objective diagnostics to be a measure of anything other than that context of that person in a moment in time. And if you base your entirety of decision making process on it, unfortunately, you know, it’s going to the casino and betting on black may happen, but it also may be absolutely nothing for you.

0:26:00 Roland Pankewich: So then in that context what you’re saying is the western side of giving what’s deficient is actually going to create a potential negative feedback problem. Is that the same reason why someone who has been on, say testosterone replacement for years, when they go off their body doesn’t make any, so the body has to somehow become educated and stimulated again to start making its own or else there’s long term detriment to that person’s balance?

0:26:25 Jeff Essen: Yeah, that’s correct. With a lot of different versions of. There’s a lot of people out there on thyroid replacement therapy, they’ve had thyroid cancer, they’ve had thyroid nodules or hypothyroidism and they’ll give them a replacement therapy over time. You know, just like a muscle, if you don’t use it, it’s going to atrophy. The glands will also atrophy, but also the feedback loop like you said, that there’s, there’s hormone adjusting peptides within the brain, the pituitary hypothalamus that will then say because it’s being supplied from the outside source, we constantly perce that there’s adequate amounts in the system. Therefore we are not going to send out the stimulatory hormones to engage that to be made by the gland.

0:27:04 Jeff Essen: Now from a, let’s just say an autoimmune source, somebody has hyperthyroidism, sometimes known as Graves disease. Now in that case, you might be saving that person’s life by supplying that artificial source. Because now, because their own gland is no longer manufacturing, it’s no longer a target for autoimmune attack. There’s a certain strategy that that’s not a bad idea, right? It can be life saving.

0:27:27 Jeff Essen: But the problem in say testosterone therapy like you mentioned is that means that now the testicles will shrink, they’ll atrophy, and then they lack also the communication pathway with the hypothalamus to produce FSH and LH to stimulate production on their own. It would take a considerable amount of time to re engage the communication system much less than regrow the testicles to be able to produce adequate hormone.

0:27:53 Roland Pankewich: And there seems to be a hierarchy to that communication that is considered by the east in a way it’s not considered by the West. So let’s go back to that original proposal to you. How does the east identify, rationalize and intervene with hormone problems?

0:28:11 Jeff Essen: Well again, the, the th 1, 2, 3 thing. The, the. Let’s, let’s just say this is testosterone replacement therapy. Using this as an example, the TH one would be relative to the battery of storage of energy called the Lower Dantian. This Lower Dantian is where if you are properly managed, this is where all your energy goes once it’s manufactured to be then used according to its need distributions. In other words, this is a battery that’s going to take care of survival first and reproduction first.

0:28:42 Jeff Essen: So now with proper energy stored there in that Lower Dan Tien, which is often breathing exercises can really load that up. That’s why they show the Buddha with the big belly, that’s not fat, that’s.

0:28:54 Roland Pankewich: His energy store, wasn’t a food addict, he Wasn’t a diabetic. You’re saying he was actually just storing lots of energy, Right?

0:29:01 Jeff Essen: Exactly. So in that case, now what you need to tap into is the energetic relationship of the storage of energy battery, the lower dantian, to route that then to the testicles in order to, you know, kind of fortify the communication of, hey, we’re really important here. We’re going to drive more energy through this. And by driving more energy through it, it then creates a greater stimulus now in the regulatory glands of the pituitary, pineal, hypothalamus.

0:29:27 Jeff Essen: So you kind of have to draw. Is it a push or is it a pull? Well, it’s actually both. In other words, you push energy through one channel, you pull it through another channel, and now you get this circulating energy that then ups its ampage, it gets higher voltage, it has a more sort of urgent pathway, and then that can then drive the physiological, nutritional, metabolic, you know, chemical structures of the body to follow the energy that’s being driven through.

0:29:58 Jeff Essen: To try to simply pump chemistry into the body and make this happen, it’ll have a very slow, unspecific response.

0:30:05 Roland Pankewich: Okay, so when you say pump energy through move, are we talking breath work? Are we talking the use of specific supplements? Are we talking exercise practices? I want to make it, if we can, as practical as possible, to take out any ambiguity from strategies and aspects of execution.

0:30:26 Jeff Essen: Certainly. I mean, and from the chemical point of view, what you’re doing is you’re putting in resources that would fortify hormones. So fats are a big chunk of that. You know, all hormones are based on a molecule of fat, you know, usually cholesterol, making sure that the liver is good at the enzymatic breakdown of the mother hormones like pregnenolone and andreasanadione. You want to have all the resources there. That would be blood sugar managing. There’s no such thing as a balanced hormone without.

0:30:56 Jeff Essen: With blood sugar out of balance, stress would be the same thing. Can we use adaptogens to modify stress responses? Even just basic things like for the pituitary, Manganese is a tris mineral that’s very often in short supply in our food. So manganese shortages, manganese malnutrition, can mean you simply can’t produce a hormone of stimulation. Now all of that then is more the biochemical western point of view. You pump a bunch of nutrients and raw material into the system, but it is undirected unless you do something like breathing exercises, which is probably the primary and probably the most important and oldest system of medicine in the world is that breath work drives the energy down to the Dan Tien, which again, the lower Dan Tien will add as the major energy source and battery of the body, will drive the energy through the system.

0:31:49 Jeff Essen: Now, again, concentrated meditation, where we’re working with the pituitary pineal gland, then also would then have the opposite pole. I mean, everything has polarity, everything has rhythm, everything has vibration. So if we’re talking about the lower energy centers of the body, we want to pair that with a corresponding, you know, energy of the upper center of the body. So we have a, let’s just say a negative polarity in the top, a positive polarity in the bottom that will then lead to a discharge of energy and a circulation between those two. It’s an electrical circuit. It’s always a feedback loop. Everything in our body is a feedback loop chemically and energetically.

0:32:32 Roland Pankewich: What would some of those breathing exercises look like to engage the feedback loop communication within the body and also to potentially bring energy into areas that are the initiation site of restoring balance?

0:32:48 Jeff Essen: Well, I mean, there’s literally unlimited levels of how one can participate.

0:32:54 Roland Pankewich: But maybe some very basic introductory things, maybe people can try this at the end of this episode if they follow.

0:33:00 Jeff Essen: The easiest one is what’s called the square breath, which means that you’re going to inhale through your nose down to your belly button. You need to breathe way down into the system. You can’t just breathe into your upper lungs. That’s very poor breathing practice. So you want to do that, what’s called the deep diaphragmatic breath. Expand your belly muscles, pull that air way down. You’re going to count in for four of an in breath through your nose.

0:33:24 Jeff Essen: Then you’re going to hold that breath for a count of four. Then you’re going to breathe it out through the mouth, through a count of four, and then again hold the breath for four seconds. So that’s the most basic, fundamental, and has been proven to be very effective at stress reduction. There’s many, many other breath works. If I’m going to want to, though, engage, say my lower Dan Tien, I’m going to actually focus on breathing all the way down to, you know, as a male, you’d breathe into your testicles. As a woman, you’d breathe into your ovaries.

0:33:55 Jeff Essen: Now, this is a visualization exercise. I mean, you’re literally not breathing the air in there, but you are trying to visualize I am breathing so low it’s going to hit my ankles.

0:34:05 Roland Pankewich: It’s intentional.

0:34:06 Jeff Essen: Yeah. I mean, it literally is the idea that your creative mind is going to drive the energy of that breath down farther than the actual physical breath can go. And then at that point, I’m also going to breathe out in such a way that I’m going to do it in two exhalations, a short one and a second one that’s much stronger. Now, that stronger one is something that sort of breaks through barriers, opens doors that were shut.

0:34:37 Jeff Essen: So a mild breath out followed by a very strong rest of the breath output is a more invigorating, more stimulatory kind of breath as an exhale. So again, and there’s quite limited, unlimited numbers of breathing techniques. I’m learning new ones all the time. There’s plenty of them. Some of them would be the, what’s called the little death exercise of breathing in, holding it and while holding you nasal pant.

0:35:11 Jeff Essen: Now, while you’re nasal panting, this mimics a hyperventilation that would be a stressful thing to the body. Now you’re purposely inducing stress. Why would you do that? Because now your body has to respond and adapt and, you know, survive. Now then after that, you’re going to hold, you’re going to breathe out all the breath you have. You’re going to have empty lungs completely. And now you’re going to hold.

0:35:32 Jeff Essen: And while you do that, you’re going to do effectively what people call a Kegel exercise or that contraction of that space between the anus and the, the genitals of whichever type you have. Now, in that case, now you are pulling energy up into the system of a system that’s desperately crying out for air. Now you’re going to pull energy in instead. Now that energy goes into that lower Dan Tien. Now that’s going to really build a massive battery full of energy for you to do.

0:36:00 Jeff Essen: And then you’re going to breathe out and you’re going to do a nice deep breath in again, three deep breaths. Then you do the nasal panting again. So this, and it’s a repetitious cycle of threes that when you do that little death, you are literally causing the body to respond to. I’m drowning, I’m not able to breathe, and I’m going to do everything I can do to survive. You think that doesn’t jazz up a system?

0:36:22 Jeff Essen: Now your hormones are going to respond and say, wow, I can now build energy while deplete, you know, while in this breathing cycle that mimics death. Now I’m going to actually die in order to be reborn in more energy. There’s just. And there’s dozens of them out there of all kinds of breathing exercises. I think that would be a course in and of itself.

0:36:46 Roland Pankewich: Thank you for walking us through that. Just because again, to the Western mind, for the Western person, these are novel concepts, but practiced regularly, they do induce a catalyzation effect of something that is really close to my heart as a philosophy. And that’s the body is what restores balance to itself. So rather than forcibly put things in or try to flush things out, which there is obviously a place for given circumstances, but what you’re trying to do with these strategies in addition to some other things, is stimulate the body’s own homeostasis from a place of being out of balance, allostasis. And then when the body is able to regulate itself on those three levels, then coherence as I describe it, or harmony within the physiology is restored.

0:37:42 Roland Pankewich: And ideally the experience of the symptoms that that person is presenting that may be connecting to their hormone irregularities or abnormalities starts to evaporate away and the person finds themselves in a better state of health. I think that’s just remarkably cool as a perspective. But it also comes back to where I think functional medicine is going, or alternative medicine, whatever term you want to call it, I don’t like. You know, it’s just healthcare and practice that we realize that you’re not going to get people better by hyper focusing on small little things. You have to consider the whole person.

0:38:21 Roland Pankewich: So to think that breathing can regulate the hormones as chemical messengers is a novel and amazing idea. And it also opens up an avenue that I want to ask you about in my mind. Because those are non physical things affecting physical things that we can experience. You know, the movement of air in and out of the body, the direction of intention of where you’re moving, that energy in the body has a physiologic effect.

0:38:48 Roland Pankewich: You mentioned the idea that things vibrate in life. What about aspects of modern life that may be destabilizing us? Things like electromagnetic fields, artificial light. Again, this is not necessarily an Eastern versus Western thing. There’s aspects that could be parsed out here. But how do you relate to the concept of vibration as it pertains to health?

0:39:14 Jeff Essen: Well, you know, everything in medicine seems to be this sort of. It’s a. It’s a range from A to B that there’s a certain range, you know, there’s certain part of that that’s very good for you. In other words, the frequency of the earth that was called the schumann resonance is 7.82, 7.83. It varies a little bit. That is the native frequency that you were born into when you came out of your mother and you adapted to say that this is my baseline here is the constant through which I can then base everything else as a variable.

0:39:49 Jeff Essen: Now, that frequency our body is innately attuned to, and when we experience it, this is extremely beneficial and grounding for us. Now that’s a 7.82 hertz. That’s relatively low. In other words, 7.82 times per second you get an up and down wave as comparison to say, for instance, 5G, which is 5 billion Hertz.

0:40:15 Roland Pankewich: In one second, it alternates 5 billion billion times.

0:40:19 Jeff Essen: Correct.

0:40:19 Roland Pankewich: I think people understand what a Hertzian frequency is. It’s cycles per second.

0:40:24 Jeff Essen: Correct? Yeah.

0:40:25 Roland Pankewich: It hits the top and bottom of that wave up and away.

0:40:29 Jeff Essen: Measure the up and down and then the amplitude is how high it goes up and down. But that’s point about it is, is we are made for a certain set. Our bodies, our systems, our cells, everything about us is made for a certain range of those things that are beneficial, slightly below the, the 7.82 and significant, you know, a little ways away. So 20 to 2,000 is, I’m sorry, 20 to 20,000 is our range of hearing, for example.

0:40:56 Jeff Essen: Those things are beneficial to us because we’re sort of given a blueprint pattern of these things are okay. They may be variables, but they’re okay. Once we go beyond those, this is where we induce harm. So a good example is infrared and ultraviolet. So infrared can be very beneficial to us for a short period of time to warm ourselves up. There’s all kinds of these infrared red light. You know, you can have a pat, or you can have a, you know, face mask or whatever it is, and it stimulates more circulation.

0:41:26 Jeff Essen: But increase the diet, you know, increase the, the voltage of that infrared and suddenly you’re burning yourself as opposed to ultra ultraviolet. Again, ultraviolet can be enormously beneficial for somebody stimulating, for example, vitamin D production in the skin. But at some point when it’s too intense or for too long a period of time, it can also cause free radical damage to this, those same skin cells.

0:41:51 Jeff Essen: So everything has this context of here. It is within range and it’s beneficial and it’s variable and we have to live with variability is always change. There’s always a pulse and a rhythm to everything that happens, but it has to be within a certain range. Now, again, you take this 5 billion. What is the body? The body literally doesn’t even have a context to what that is. The electrical reception antenna that you are doesn’t have a concept of identification of what is 5 billion.

0:42:18 Jeff Essen: So it has to be something foreign, abnormal, out of context to our body’s health. And so the body will say, I’m going to do my best job I can to react to this. And what happens is the amygdala area of the brain. This is the area of the brain that is emergency response.

0:42:34 Roland Pankewich: If the lizard brain, if you will.

0:42:36 Jeff Essen: Yeah, I mean if you’re, if you hear a noise coming at you from the right side, you will automatically look to the right. Why do you automatically look to the right? That’s for your survival. You’re trying to get out of the way of something coming at you. And those people who didn’t respond like that aren’t your ancestors because they didn’t survive. Right. So we have, we have this idea that then if you are experiencing 5G, you, that 5 billion is making the amygdala constantly look over there, look over there, look over there, look over there.

0:43:05 Jeff Essen: Now that kind of emergency response is not good over a long term. A one time incident. It might save your life 24 hours a day. This is extremely detrimental. And I give the, you know, the metaphor of, you know, can you run a hospital only out of the emergency room. Eventually that emergency room staff is going to fail and they’re not going to be adept at all the things that a hospital can do. Your brain is the same way. You cannot constantly be in an emergency state.

0:43:31 Roland Pankewich: And what you’re saying is, although not perceptive danger in an acute sense, not like a predator lurking in the shadows. The chronic stress response the brain is putting out unconsciously is stressing out the physiology and potentially catalyzing a pathway to accelerate illness or dis ease or imbalance.

0:43:54 Jeff Essen: Yeah, and even our discussion earlier about the hormones, the constant signaling of adren, adrenocorticotropic hormone act is elevated times 10 in people who are sensitive to this kind of frequency. So you’re constantly sending messages from your pituitary down to your adrenals. Hey, we’re being attacked by the lion. You cannot sustain that without wearing out your adrenals and your pituitary.

0:44:18 Roland Pankewich: So this is why certain information sources suggest being mindful of things like exposure to WI fi or how much time you spend on a bi direction bi directional microwave emitting device like a phone, like a computer, or even the kinds of light frequencies you’re exposing your body to. Because again, it’s a non physical thing in terms of you can’t grab a light photon. Well, I mean you are made of light photons, but you can’t hold onto them like you can, you know, a solid appearing object, nor can you hear.

0:44:49 Roland Pankewich: And I say here with air quotes, the 5 billion 5G. Like you can say music coming out of a speaker because it’s not in the range that our senses can pick up as one of the five. But just because you’re not consciously perceiving it does not mean that it’s not potentially negatively influencing the overall health status of your body.

0:45:10 Jeff Essen: Correct? Yeah. And, you know, we can’t see or hold gravity, but we sure know it affects us. And so this is just, you know, we have to acknowledge the idea that anything affects the body and we are nothing but antennas. Going back to James Oshman, he spends a huge amount of time explaining how even our fascia, the connective tissue of our body, is nothing more than a big antenna and information relay.

0:45:35 Jeff Essen: So it’s just every bit of information that comes into your system is analyzed and dealt with. Now, the body is very good at saying, well, gee, I don’t like that. So I’m going to build up a barrier to it. So, for example, there’s a number of electrical devices out there that, like these infrared pads or whatever, that are proposing the idea of leaving something on the body for an extended period of time, magnets, you know, that are in people’s insoles and things like this.

0:46:01 Jeff Essen: The body will build up an electrical barrier to that, that, you know, to the electricity that’s out of normal range, something that has been determined to be detrimental to the body. The body built up an ionic barrier of negative ions to say, no, we’re not going to let that in anymore. So, for example, that magnet on your skin might be beneficial for the first, say, 10, 20 minutes. After that, it actually causes the body to have to shift its electricity to defend itself against it.

0:46:28 Jeff Essen: So, you know, the idea of this is you have to be able to understand that, you know, what is a human being geared for. We’re out to be, you know, work to be in nature. We’re supposed to be walking around with natural materials that we’re walking on. Either are just our bare feet or some version of like, leather. And that’s supposed to be touching the ground, which is constantly diffusing out the electricity. It’s draining the static off of us.

0:46:51 Jeff Essen: And. And it sounds really corny. It’s. So one of my therapies for people is to have them go hug a tree. If you, though, examine a tree, it has very deep roots that go way down to the ground. There’s nothing better at discharging static electricity out of your body than being in contact with the tree. It’s like, you know, in the wintertime, you rub your feet on the carpet and you go touch a doorknob and it goes.

0:47:14 Jeff Essen: Well, that’s effectively what this tree disengagement is. I mean, it’s literally capable. But how many people actually touch the ground on a daily basis? How many people can say that their bare feet touch the ground every day? It’s actually becoming a rarity.

0:47:29 Roland Pankewich: I’m putting my hand up. No one can see because I’ve actually tried to construct my life where if I have to wear shoes, that’s a potentially bad day for me because I’m literally. But this is. It’s funny, you know, I. I’ve got into the idea of the kinds of clothing that I wear. The natural fibers have an energetically amplifying effect in the biofield of the body versus the average person walking around in their lululemon things with these Lycra and. But, you know, you’re laughing. It’s.

0:47:56 Roland Pankewich: These fabrics do not help the body operate more beneficially. They’re actually detrimental to the body. Natural fibers have been long held tradition for two reasons. One, they’ve always been available, and two, there was a knowledge of things. And the other aspect is, yes, we’re supposed to be negatively charged beings. So when you ground out, you’re grounding out the positive accumulation of charge, which, you know, I know it’s a little simplistic, but to me, inflammation is an accumulation of positive charge in the body.

0:48:26 Roland Pankewich: You need to ground that stuff out so you can actually become in the positive contacts, negative again. Right. You want to be negatively charged is good in this. The only time we’re negative is actually a. A positive connotation. And you are so correct. So many people live an insulated indoor life. You know, they’re kind of like a zoo animal. And this is why that layered with the accumulation of exposure to electronic devices, to WI Fi. I mean, all you have to do is, if you live in a condo, pull up your phone, open your WI Fi settings on your phone, look at how many routers you can connect to.

0:49:00 Roland Pankewich: And that is bombarding you all hours of the day. And I do have my own anecdotal experience where when I have to be on electronics more, I have shorter attention span. I want to distract myself more readily. It’s like there’s a program that my body’s taken on which is, I think its way of helping to manage and discharge the, the excitatory accumulation of energy by just engaging a stress response all the time and playing with the neurochemistry in the brain.

0:49:27 Roland Pankewich: So I, I want to thank you for going into that stuff because a lot of people in the west still kind of turn up their nose at the idea of, oh, yeah, you’re mitigating WI fi, or you’re blocking light frequencies, or you have a device in your house that helps to harmonize the energy of the homes. Like. Well, yeah, because everything we’re doing, we’re trying to replicate nature. And to your point about touching a tree, to me all I have to think about was the interconnected relationship of a human and a tree. One breathes out the exhale of the other.

0:49:58 Roland Pankewich: It’s a cycle. Like they’re here to be part of this whole interconnected existence with us. So there’s no reason as to say if I have too much accumulated electricity, if I can ground it out to the tree, its roots, bring it back into the earth, or the earth can transmute it, then the cycle is complete and my health is better. The tree’s health hopefully is better. They may be thanklessly doing this job for us just like pets do.

0:50:21 Roland Pankewich: But I want to. Yeah, I’m so grateful that we got to go into this stuff when we explained it from a very science first, yet open perspective of just discussing things that are still being elucidated day by day. Like, we know far less than we think we do, but we feel like we have ownership of far more than has ever been contextually disproven, if that makes sense.

0:50:47 Jeff Essen: Yeah, well, and just one quick note. Here we sit on our computers in a zoom meeting.

0:50:53 Roland Pankewich: I know the irony is not lost.

0:50:54 Jeff Essen: On me indoors irony there. But there’s actually, there was a decision made effectively by one person that the screens that we’re looking at are as acknowledged that these are harmful to us. But this was. There was a choice otherwise. And I would direct people to Dr. Jack Cruz K. Ruse, who has done a huge amount of information. He’s got lots of videos online how there was a decision making process that went into, well, what frequency are we going to have these screens operate at?

0:51:26 Jeff Essen: And the most harmful one was chosen. Yep. It could have been otherwise. So it’s as if there’s a, you know, and I hate to get, I don’t, you know, go down the conspiracy pathway, but it’s almost as if somebody wants us to not be well by all the choices that are made that affect the masses of people. So there’s, there’s things that could be done that you, the individual, to avoid those circumstances or mitigate those circumstances.

0:51:52 Jeff Essen: And yes, you might seem like the cuckoo nut job who’s, you know, wearing a tinfoil hat to some people. But you know what, you’re going to live longer than they will.

0:52:00 Roland Pankewich: You know, you can just simply line your baseball hat with tin foil so it’s invisible to the eye, but you’re feeling protected. But in all seriousness, that’s, that’s why Master Supplements is partnered with a brand like Hedron. We have circadian rhythm optimizing glasses. So the blue light on the screen that you talked about is only a problem if it actually is received by the eye and processed by the brain. So you can wear eye protection to block the absorption of said frequencies.

0:52:25 Roland Pankewich: Same thing with the harmonization and mitigation of electromagnetic smog. Sustaining your body’s own energy field with different crystals and various things. It sounds crazy, but crystals have their own consciousness. They emit frequency all times. As you know, you create pressure and a crystal, it creates a piezoelectric effect. So there’s something happening simply by applying force to a seemingly inanimate structure. So I’m glad we got to talk about that. So hopefully we can open some people’s eyes and hearts to thinking about things outside simply the world of biochemistry.

0:53:05 Roland Pankewich: Jeff, we could do this for hours. I so appreciate the opportunity to talk to you, but I do have to round out today’s episode. The last thing I do want to ask you is I’m sure people listening are very interested in everything you’ve had to say and more. Where can people find more about you or maybe some of the courses that you reference or some of the resources that you were talking about?

0:53:25 Jeff Essen: Sure. Well, yeah, I run Whole Life Clinic in Rosemount, Minnesota, so WholeLifeClinic.com, been doing that for 25 years now. So I’m a practitioner as far as that goes. But more recently over the last seven years, running an organization called the International Holistic Health alliance, the ihha. We do offer a naturopathic doctor degree. We also offer non degree certification courses in herbs, oils, essential herbs, essential oils, nutrition and homeopathy.

0:54:01 Jeff Essen: And we also have just some good, you know, courses that are more CEU type courses for the professional who do does need their continuing education hours. So you could find that@my IHHA.org and we do have our spring event coming up at the Mall of America of all places in April 10th and 11th. I’m teaching on the 9th. I’m also teaching a course for practitioners known as the Autoimmune Checklist, how to evaluate, treat and maintain the health of an autoimmune patient. So there’s a lot of stuff I’m doing there. The ihha, though, is kind of the more recent. Fun, exciting, cool stuff.

0:54:42 Jeff Essen: Yes.

0:54:42 Roland Pankewich: And I can say that’s something I’m also part of, graciously invited by you and the other founding members. And it’s something I’m very much in support of because I’ve seen what you guys are doing and I incredibly believe in what it’s going to do for the health industry as a whole.

0:54:58 Jeff Essen: Very good. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Roland. We need to talk. We could talk daily if we really wanted to. We could keep on getting farther and farther and into cool stuff. So.

0:55:09 Roland Pankewich: Not on recordings, but it’s been absolutely great.

0:55:12 Jeff Essen: Yeah, some stuff not for public consumption exactly.

0:55:15 Roland Pankewich: Not yet at least, but yes. Jeff, thank you very much. And to all who listen today, I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your continued support, and we’ll see you next time on the following your Gut podcast.