69. Using Breath to Transform Your Life with Aaron Alexander
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January 14, 2025
TLDR: Emily Fletcher interviews Aaron Alexander, founder of Align Method, exploring the connection between body alignment, breathwork, and emotional well-being. Discussing how stored trauma and parasitic tension hinder creativity and joy, simple adjustments in breath and posture are suggested for improved life.

In the latest episode of Why Isn’t Everyone Doing This?, host Emily Fletcher speaks with Aaron Alexander, the founder of the Align Method, about the essential relationship between breath, body alignment, and emotional well-being. This insightful discussion highlights how optimizing our physical state can unlock new levels of creativity, resilience, and joy.
Key Concepts Discussed
The Body as an Antenna for Manifestation
- Body Alignment: Aaron emphasizes the importance of body alignment and breathwork. He posits that the body acts as an antenna for manifestation and communication, essential in reaching our highest potential.
- Creating Safety: Establishing safety in the body is fundamental for personal transformation, allowing individuals to navigate life more fluidly and authentically.
Stored Trauma and Its Impact
- Stored Trauma: Aaron identifies that unexpressed emotions and trauma can become stored in the body, inhibiting creativity and joy. Simple adjustments to breath and posture can help release this tension.
- Empathetic Communication: He discusses how rigid body language can inhibit our ability to establish rapport and empathy with others, highlighting the role of physical expression in communication.
How to Create Safety in Your Body
Breathwork Techniques
- Vagal Tone: Emphasizing the vagus nerve’s role in calming the body, Aaron suggests techniques for elongating exhales to promote relaxation and regulate heart rate.
- Breathing Practices: Incorporate breathing exercises daily. For instance, use the two-for-one technique where the exhale is longer than the inhale to quickly down-regulate anxiety and stress.
Movement and Expression Through Dance
- To enhance emotional expression and mental clarity, engaging in movement practices such as dancing can significantly help enhance cognitive function and emotional health.
- Social Connection: Partner dancing, in particular, not only promotes physical health but also contributes to the sense of belonging and connection critically needed in today's society.
Practical Applications of Breath and Body Alignment
- Daily Practices: Integrating breathwork into daily routines can foster a state of safety and openness, allowing individuals to express emotions and creativity fully.
- Physical Awareness: Understanding how one’s physical state affects emotional and psychological well-being is vital. Aaron encourages listeners to explore their breathing patterns and body alignments to enhance overall health.
Specific Tips for Immediate Improvement
- Rule of Exhalation: Practice long exhales. If you feel anxious, aim for an extended exhale to calm your system.
- Body Awareness Exercise: Lay a hand on your ribs and feel how they expand during an inhale. This awareness can improve your breathing mechanics and emotional state.
- Mirror Technique: In social situations, mirror the energy and posture of those around you to establish rapport and connection.
Conclusion: Opting for Authenticity and Connection
Aaron Alexander’s teachings remind us that true transformation involves not just mental acknowledgment but embodying safety through breath, posture, and movement. By incorporating these practices into daily life, we foster a deeper connection with ourselves, our potential, and those around us.
If you find yourself struggling with feelings of unworthiness or disconnection, remember that taking small, actionable steps toward breath and body awareness can lead to profound changes. As Aaron states, “Let go of any resentment, shame, or guilt; life is too limited to hold onto grudges.”
This episode is a powerful reminder to fully embrace our human experience, encouraging us to breathe deeply, live authentically, and connect wholeheartedly. Tune into this enriching conversation to explore how aligning your body through breath can facilitate lasting transformation.
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Sweet friends, welcome to today's episode of why isn't everyone doing this? The show brought to you by Ziva, where we want to help you solve the big challenges that we're facing as a species and have a great time doing it. I'm your host, Emily Fletcher, Broadway performer, turned meditation teacher, turned magic maker. And today's episode is with Erin Alexander. And we are talking about why isn't everyone feeling safe in their bodies?
Aaron Alexander has over two decades of professional coaching experience and his clients range from A-list Hollywood celebrities to professional athletes and everyone in between. Aaron has been on movie sets working with people on set. He has worked with Aaron Rodgers when he was recovering from his injury. Truly, the world's most elite people look to Aaron to help him with manual therapy and he's a movement coach.
He's a top podcaster. He's interviewed over 400 of the world's preeminent thought leaders on physical and psychological well-being on his podcast called the Align Podcast, which I was also a guest on. So Aaron has distilled what he has found to be the bedrock of human health into the Align Method.
So get ready. This podcast is fascinating. We go into the mechanics, into the spirit, into the body, and we're going to give you tools you can start to use right now to feel safe in your body and to make sure that when you're doing breathwork or even if you're just breathing on a day to day basis that the mechanics are setting you up for safety and evolution. I love you and enjoy this episode with Aaron Alexander.
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Aaron Alexander, I'm really happy to have you on the show. It's been a long time coming. You were just talking about, I was on your podcast. Maybe when the book came out, 2019, and you flew me, we did Acryl Yoga before you interviewed me for your show, The Align Podcast. And I just want anyone who's just tuning in on audio only to understand that you are an Alexander.
I'm really happy, happy to have you on the show. It's been a long time coming. You were just talking about, I was on your podcast, maybe when the book came out, 2019, and you flew me, we did acro yoga before you interviewed me for your show, the Align podcast. And I just want anyone who's just tuning in on audio only to understand that you are in fact, iconically handsome.
Very nice. Yeah, those of you who are watching on video, you'll know that for yourselves. I receive. So you've dedicated much of your life to, I feel like aligning people's bodies, allowing them to really, I'm honestly like treating the body as a temple. I know that's probably a little woo-woo for you. No, that's fine. It's exactly correct.
But I mean, between breath, mechanics, aligning, working out, light, psychedelics. I mean, you've trained some of the most high-performing people on the planet. You've been on set movement coach for movie stars, for fighters, for quarterbacks, as they're playing at the Super Bowl. This is really profound what you've done to help people's bodies. And if you believe that the body is, in fact,
a temple or like a home for spirit to animate us. If the body is out of alignment, if we're not breathing correctly, if we're not strong, then how can we fully have this human experience? And so I'm just curious, like I know that a lot of your attention is on the 3D, but can you speak to the spiritual side of your work?
Like, how do you see the 3D realm and the 5D realm merging through the physical body?
Thank you for saying all that. I see the way that I would approach that would be that the body is a vehicle that carries the spirit and it acts as an antenna for communication and words that I wouldn't use so much in my world depending upon who I was with, but would be like manifestation. It's an antenna for creation. It's an antenna for communication. It's an antenna for manifestation. It's an antenna for attraction.
And the very 3D response that would be just very clearly, you know, body language. When we're communicating to each other, that's how we send signals of trust, signals of connection, signals of rapport, signals of like, oh, like, I get you. Like I see you're like a part of my tribe. You know, if you're a person that's very stiff and rigid, and you, and so you did dancing and acting in such a broad way. So like theaters are really a big part of your life.
So you understand this better than most people. To be able to take on the form, to have the fluidity and also stability, to be able to hold the form, but the fluidity and flexibility, to be able to take on the form of multiple different personalities or emotions or feelings or expressions or groups. Like that allows you to weave your way through the world more efficaciously, like more fluidly and seamlessly.
If you're a person that's stuck in your body, you have resting bitch face. I do sometimes. You have one face. I don't see that, but you just have one face that you hold on to. That face fits some puzzle perfectly, and you could find your specialized niche, and it could work out well for you.
And you might want to be able to fit your piece into other places in the cosmic universal puzzle of life. And for you to be able to do that, your vehicle has to be intelligent enough to be able to navigate different terrain, just in the form of creating attunement and rapport with other groups of people.
Hmm. And how do you, like what I'm hearing is adaptation, right? Like I want to be able to adapt to whatever tribe, whatever community, whatever partner or whatever company I want to join. I want to be able to have the dexterity and have empathy. Oh, that's how the body is too physically rigid. You couldn't empathize. That's what Botox does. Like that's what actually I just was with someone this weekend and she's had so much Botox. Like her face was 100% frozen. Creates a disconnection.
and I found myself not wanting to talk to her because I couldn't feel any feelings. I couldn't get a read on that. She feels it too. It's changing her emotional mind. So says science and just feel into it. If you want to express a smile, I've actually had this experience with
an ex-girlfriend who we were having some kind of something. I think we were actually using MDMA. We were having an MDMA ceremony together. It was incredibly beautiful, but a lot of emotions were arising, and things were processing. It was incredibly beautiful, like a really five-star experience. Five-star semi-help, and I would recommend.
But with the sensitivity of the addition of the MDMA, something that she, I remember her being able to notice, she was like apologizing that she wasn't actually able to connect with me to like a certain degree because her face was frozen. And so she in that sensitized state could feel, which like a sober kind of more like dull type person, like with their senses, they might be like, Oh, no, it's fine.
But she in that state, just as a, you know, N of one example, she could actually feel and was like actually apologetic. Like I want to connect with you in this way, but I'm almost blocked a little bit because I can't really attune my facial features, which is the main way that we communicate to each other to that specific frequency of emotion.
And was she being aware of your perception of her emotions? Or she was saying it was affecting her emotional experience. Yeah. But Botox also, if you are a person with like the resting bitch face, like there's, there's a lot of research around this embodied cognition would be the fancy unnecessary term for it. But there's, I mentioned this in my book, there's, there's studies they did where they put erasers on the eyebrows and they have you like squint against the erasers. And then they, you know, give you images of things or
Like pencil erasers. Yeah. So put different situations in front of you and like, how do you perceive this situation? You're like, I'm bothered by this situation because you have this resting bitch face, bothered face on. So more thing, if you bite onto like a pencil or something, it forces a smile. Suddenly you start to have this more like uplifting type sensation. And you're like, Oh my God, like, do I having this mechanical smile? Like it's weird, but things seem a little bit more delightful.
Yeah. And so Botox could be helpful to temporarily relieve oneself of a, like a squint. You're scowling all the time. Yeah. Because then the scowl is telling you to be worried. Yeah. So if they've got the RBF going, a little Botox could suddenly actually make them feel a little bit more uplifted and it could block them from having the full gamut of emotion, at least expression of emotion and attunement and empathy with another person themselves.
I have a friend who has that, but she says, actually, since I get Botox in my brow, I worry less because my face won't go into the worried position. Correct, which is great. But you want to be able to fully express and feel the full gamut of emotions as you know. So you want to be able to feel the depths of the pain and the sorrow and the RBF and all of that in order to reciprocally feel the opposite side, which is the joy.
Amen. And this is something I really want to go into of this idea that trauma, emotions, if unexpressed can get stored in the body. And and really this idea of, and I think that that would be a result of us not feeling safe in our bodies. Yeah. So can you speak to that of like, with your work with
private clients with your work with celebrities, athletes, movie stars, like how do you create a sense of safety in their bodies so that they can come into alignment so that they can have that dexterity of expressing the full range of human emotions through the body?
That's such an interesting question. I think the first thing would probably be the same thing that you would do if you were teaching meditation or teaching breath work or anything. You're on a first date with someone. The first thing is creating rapport with the person. The way that you create rapport with a person is to be kind of like that person.
So you don't want to like push into boundaries too much. You want to kind of like mirror, but not like too much a person's body language or person's breeding cadence. These are the things that you're consciously doing. It's probably going to be weird as things that you're just organically naturally will do. Typically we'll do that around like whoever's like the alpha. All right.
or the person who has the highest heart rate variability. I find this fascinating, the person who basically is the most adaptive. Which probably would be the most stable, like alpha person. Like, oh, they're the safest person. Right, because if a tiger comes in, they're going to go into fight or flight. If it's resting time, they can rest. So we just naturally to resonate at their frequency. Our hearts will mirror their hearts even subconsciously. So things that you could
Pay attention to things and write books about them, things like that and call it like NLP, you know, in their linguistic programming or different things like that, but paying attention to like the way a person communicates. Does a person communicate really fast, really high pitch? Does a person communicate really?
slow, deep, they take lots of pauses. So finding like resonance with the person that you are in the room with is going to be the first thing that's going to be really important. If you're not able to find resonance with someone, it's going to feel like there's a little bit of like a conflict of sorts.
Hmm. Well, this even feels like already and a way to advocate for this work because if you don't feel safe in your body, if you don't have that dexterity, if you don't have that ability to have range, then you can't meet everyone. You can't create that sense of safety or a rapport.
Yeah. If you feel the safest, typically most things track towards that. So if someone's feeling really anxious and whatever and you're a person that you're like, I'm pretty well down regulated. I'm pretty, you know, I'm pretty deep in the whole like rest, I just situation. Stay in play. I like to call it.
Yeah, I'm in the stand play. You know, my language is kind of a little bit like slow and melodic and my voice is, you know, deep and it's almost like like rhythmic and soothing to listen to. If a person's wigging out, that will, that'll be nice. It's not like you, like you would need to put yourself into like a wig out state.
But it could be supportive for that person to also feel like I don't have all of my stuff together either. And I actually have a lot of vulnerable chinks in my armor. And just so you know, like we're in this together. So that's something I think that happens in like the spiritual community is it's almost like we're using spirituality as a way to bypass use a word that gets used a lot our problems and are like humanity.
because we're like transcend, it's like, oh, I'm not a human. I'm like this like goddess, god figure. It's like, yeah, but you also take shits in the morning and you also have B.O. and you know, you fart and you make mistakes and you have all sorts of weird things that, oh, we got tunes.
Nice, that was cool. See, you're like, I'm a goddess, angels are singing. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if that was a universal gringer, disagree with what I was saying, but I think agreeing. Yeah, but I think coming back to that humanity part is a really valuable thing. So coming back to authenticity and vulnerability and being willing to share the parts of yourself that are not perfect, that helps people around you to also feel safe, to disarm a little bit. And now you can start to drop in and start to create even like a greater depth of rapport.
So the sooner a person, I believe, can come into a place of not forcing a vulnerable share, but organically coming into a place of vulnerability and creating the safety and permission for another person, if they choose to elect the option to come into that, that will create deeper connection quicker.
And will you do that consciously with your clients when you're first working with them? No, not consciously. But I read about these things and I'm interested in it. And if I were to write a book about how to do a podcast interviews for the last while. And so it's a thing that's an organic happening.
But you could write a book about it and like break it down like, oh, these are some of the factors that you'd pay attention to. And so it would be more just like I'm putting it into language, but I think those are really important things to be able to create connection first. And then also it's like meeting a person where they're at with are they more type A personality or they more kind of free flow, you know, do they have a bunch of crystals in their house?
You know, they have affirmations up on the walls. You know, all of that stuff is really important information, which is for me, a lot of the clients that I've worked with, I've like, you know, well, one in particular, I like lived with the person for half a year. Well, six months.
Something like that, a little less. And this is Aaron Rodgers? Yeah. So that was during the last season. And this is part of his rehab, because he had a really intense injury. Yeah, towards Achilles. So that was a cool experience, a really helpful experience to be able to see how the person lives, because that's a big part of
My lens on fitness and training is it's not just something that you do in a gym or a studio, but it's like, it's actually the fabric of who you are. So the way that you breathe, the way that you use your eyes, the visual cues that you have in your house reminding you to do or not do certain things, you know, the air fresheners that you have or don't have the perfumes you're putting on or putting on the deodorants, like the pans you're using, the, you know, the spatulas, like all these, the amount of light or lack thereof that you're allowing into your house, the windows that are open or not open.
amount of time that you're spending outside or not outside. All of that stuff is what's the building blocks of your connective tissue and your posture and all of that.
Okay. So when you go in, are you doing like a holistic assessment of all those things? Like, are you giving feedback on that? Or do you wait for consent? In a gentle way. Okay. Yeah. You don't want to go too much because you could get into like, it's like changing someone's diet can be kind of like changing someone's religion in a way, depending upon the person. Yeah. One day. So far to tell like Paul Saladino, he needs to eat more, you know, broccoli. I don't know who Paul Saladino is. He's like carnivore guy. Okay. You know, he's a buddy. I love him. Um, but if I was to suddenly tell Paul Saladino, he needs to have more chlorella in his life. He'd be like,
Oh boy, here we go. Even if I had a great point, it's like I'm nudging against something that's almost like- Become a doctrine. Yes. Okay. So the way a person lives their life, it just depends on who they are and what they desire. If they want- If it's telling me to stop meditating, I'd be like, no thanks. Yeah, exactly. So it's just paying, I'll shut up after this, because I feel like I'm not allowing too much, but it's paying attention. Everything is, so I do body work, manual therapy, hands on body work.
And so what that is, is it's a conversation with another person's nervous system through tone, communication, and pressure. So tone communication with words I'm using and body language and all that stuff and the environment that you're in, whether it's safe or not safe, as well as my physical pressure. And so what's happening within that is,
I, nervous system A, is presenting information to nervous system B with the invitation and opening to create change. And I can nudge enough to create signal for you to be like, oh, interesting. That while my shoulders in that position, that actually feels really, really good. And suddenly I can open up my breath and when my voice changes a little bit, like,
Okay, nervous system A. Nervous system B accepts your invitation. I received. This feels good. I like this feeling. I like this. Okay. But if nervous system A, me, you know, therapist guy is like too aggressive, too pushy, too forceful. Nervous system B says, I thought maybe you had some good ideas, but this is a little bit too much too fast. I feel scared. I'm going to shut the doors and now you're out.
Yeah. So that's what you're always doing. Right now we're doing it. Come back to safety, right? Like if you're creating pain, if the invitation or the adjustment is creating pain, and the brain doesn't really speak in language, the parts of the brain that do not understand language, they just understand pleasure and pain. And so if the invitation is now painful, it's creating resistance, it's something I have to get over versus something that feels charming and inviting. Like, oh, my body wants to accept this.
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Um, okay. So how would you, cause I know you work one on one like manual adjustment with some people, but not everyone in the world. You have a big podcast following Instagram following a book. How do you create safety in someone's body that you're not physically in the room with? Or how do people create safety in their own bodies?
That's a cool question. So, so breath, you know, it's like the, it's like the connection between the mind and body. It's literally like the, the deepest part of the brainstem, the medulla, the breath. Yeah. Yeah. That's why. So breath is processed through the medulla. Yeah. That's like the, that's why, that's why alligators get Arneri as well. So far, not far, I'm sorry. It's a happy Gilmore reference.
What's so sad is how much I love Billy Madison and how many times I've watched Billy Madison and I've never seen Happy Gilmore. It's not Happy Gilmore. That's why it's it's it's when Adam Sandler Giles who what's what's the what's the Adam Sandler movie with the with the we're just playing football water boy.
That's what it is. I know, I just, I'm just like just Billy Madison all the time. It's my main Adam Sandler window. And so it's, it's the literal and, and like it's the literal anatomical and figurative bridge between the mind and body. So if a person is breathing in such a way where they're maybe stuck in their inhalation, right? So you exhale. How do you feel?
more relaxed, more drops. In real time, it's like one to one, it's immediate. You can change your blood pressure, you can change your HRV, you can change everything, like real quick. And so that would be a real, that's something I do before every podcast that I do, unless the person actively says, I don't want to do that, then I'm like, that's fine.
I mean, you let us through. So we just, I was just on your podcast and you let us through a beautiful breathwork exercise. It was like less than five minutes. Yeah, it's quick. Fully changed the stage. Change the whole vibe. It's crazy. Came back to my body. It's so good. Do you do that before sex?
Propped me a short half, but no, would. Sex is a breath practice. It is, but if you do intentional breath back is beforehand, it's just like you're off to the races. Like you're in a hole in another echelon of consciousness before you even start. I've definitely done that. I've done things like, you know, have the gal sit on you. I'm like, cross like it. Yeah, I'll be like, breath work and do it. I really used to enjoy doing meditations in that position. That'd be a really nice thing. We'd like sit up, sit my buns up, sit my hips are up in a good position, and then she'd sit.
a top and then we just do sit there for like a 20 minute meditation. Beautiful. That's a nice thing. So I've done a little bit about the movie. Let me do Ziva offering. I like it. I'm like merging Ziva magic and Ziva meditation. Time trick breathing. Yeah. It's nice. Great. But no, not all the time. It's a good idea. Okay. So we're talking about how do someone create safety in their bodies and you're saying through breath, through the middle oblongata. Yeah.
Yeah, not necessarily to know or say, but yeah, breath. Which is the bridge between the brain and the body. It's the base of the brainstem. And so that's like, it's literal bridge. It's interesting when you actually look at the anatomy of it. And when a person is exhaling more anatomical stuff, it's called respiratory sinus arrhythmia is the term for what happens in the heart when you exhale.
So when you're exhaling, you are augmenting the blood vessels in the heart because the diaphragm is starting to ascend. And so you're adding pressure into the heart during the exhale. And so you get a stimulus in the heart to slow things down. So the heart rate gets a little bit slower. So you're going more into that parasympathetic calm rest digestate. And then when you inhale the diaphragm,
As descending, it's stretching out the bags of the lungs. It's also stretching out the blood vessels around the heart. And it's sending the signal to the neurons in the heart that regulate the, it's kind of like the pacemaker of the heart saying, oh, okay, we got to speed things up a little bit. All these tubes are getting a lot bigger. We're going to pump it a little faster. And that's sending the signal to activate that sympathetic side. So heart rate goes faster.
So in real time, a person is able to modulate the way that they state, like their felt state and actually the pace of their heart just through controlling their breath. So if you're feeling stressed out, the first thing to do would be have a long exhalation.
If you're feeling really stressed out, you've seen people breathing into a paper bag, so they're recirculating CO2. All of these are mechanical, actionable, bottom-up ways to augment your state in seconds. So that would be the offering that I would have to folks to start is just, I think it's really important with breathing for people to actually understand the foundational principles of what's happening when we breathe and why we breathe.
Instead of just saying, do this five, seven, eight breathing thing, or do box breathing thing, or do Wim Hof breathing thing, or do a holotropper breathing. I'm more interested in teaching people and myself like how to fish instead of like providing fish. And so you can create your own breathing recipe of whatever you want. You want to hype yourself up a little bit, emphasize that.
If you want to like down-regulate and calm, do long exhalation, maybe even add a breath hold. Start building up your tolerance to CO2 because CO2 is going to start to build up a little bit. That's going to actually cause, and then again, I realize I'm talking a lot, but that's actually going to cause the physiology and chemistry of your blood to change, to become more acidic, raising in that CO2. It causes the hemoglobin.
with in the red blood cells to liberate oxygen so it makes your body more efficiently release oxygen to your muscles into your brain and to everywhere when you amp it up me know when the opposite when you slow it down so. So breath hold. So you two levels start to rise sitting at the bottom of the exhale.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do just do breath holds throughout the day. It's going to make you a more robust breather, a more robust respiration. And I just want to make sure, because I think when most people think about holding their breath, they think about holding at the top of the inhale. You could do that too. But when you're saying it's like holding at the bottom of the exhale. Yeah. So that the body has less oxygen, more CO2. And at this point, they're saying that the red blood cells, the hemoglobin changes in the blood. Changes shape to liberate oxygen. It's freaking cool. So bring more oxygen into the blood and that fuels the muscle.
Yeah, it's called the boar effect. And so that- How do you spell boar? B-O-H-R. Okay. Yeah. What's, is that a person's name? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. White dude. It's a white dude. Damn patriarchy. My favorite is the G-spot. We like named the G-spot after a German man.
But this is cool because if we want to create safety in the body, a lot of people, so I actually have a breathing archetype quiz. We have a breathing program that's all based around mechanics, educating people around the mechanics, and then also practices as well. And we create an archetype quiz. People can go through where they do what's called a bolt score, where they measure their CO2 tolerance, and then they also measure their exhalation test, and then a few subjective questions.
And within that, the baseline, like, ooh, you know, you could use some help. We call that archetype the stress survivor. Most people are in the stress survivor state where they realize they're not. I mean, look around a planet Earth. That makes sense. Yeah. And so your, your breathing pattern is the foundation for augmenting your state. It's so powerful. It's so, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like the biggest, ripest, fattest apple just sitting there. Mm. Apple for what? Like,
of consciousness, of- Apple for regulation of yourself. And we're reaching out to energy drinks and coffees and supplements and all these things. It's like you have access to God and feeling whatever, really, whatever you want to feel, for the most part, just by leveraging the power of your breath. Arrows, orgasm, you can do all of that through breath. And what I was going to say with the Borafec stuff is with feeling safe, if your body is liberating oxygen,
in a more ready way, a more easy, easy, efficient way, then your body, you don't need to exacerbate yourself with
a lot more breaths to try like, oh my God, I gotta get more, I gotta get more, I gotta get more. You're not in this rapacious breathing state because like, oh, bro, like we're good. We can fast on air. We're so efficient with our liberation. We're so open that we don't need to be in this greedy, reaching, contractive, gotta get more air state. Ooh, this is exciting because I believe that a lot of the challenges that we're facing as a species right now are a direct result of
you know, they'll all be happy when syndrome or like the acquisitive approach to happiness that we can somehow consume our way to bliss and fulfillment. And I had never put those two things together of like, oh, let me consume more food, more money, more sex, more porn, more shopping, more whatever. I had never connected that to breath. Oh, let me breathe more because my body's not actually being efficient with the oxygen. But if I could slow things down, recognize even cellularly and with my oxygen and CO2 levels that I have enough,
that that could change the way that I am interacting with everything. And you feel more interdependent or independent because you're like, oh, yeah, I don't really need so much. And I would almost guarantee, sorry for an opportunity, but I would almost guarantee if there was some way to do some study, which there never will be, but of people that are subjectively more in that state of like, give me take, take, take, I need more anymore. I feel unsafe anymore.
I would bet their breathing rate would be comparable to their state. I bet we can do that. I mean, with body, with wearables and body-dated monitoring devices. Yeah, with good ones to be the greedy asshole guy. You know, like, oh, yeah, I'm like, that's me. Well, I mean... I'm a big, big, tight guy. You could probably just look at like income or like hoarding levels or, you know,
But maybe hoarding possibly, but income wouldn't be associated, I don't think. You can make lots of money and be totally at ease. Or not, it could be, you know, if money is not the issue. Well, it's not about the making of it. It's about like, is it flowing or not? Like, is there a sense of lack and then hoarding from a place of fear? Yeah, it would just be very hard. But I bet just, you know, intuitively, you probably get it. Just be around people that feel like they're in like this place of like, take, you know, greed. Like, I got to survive. I got to look out for me.
And would you say that the extreme opposite of this would be like an Aretarian or breath-etarian, someone who could live only on breath and or maybe actually a better question would be, is the opposite of this people who can take their breathing rate down to almost dead for weeks at a time? You know, you hear these stories of yogis, these advanced meditators that are basically like in an almost comatose state for weeks at a time. Is that like an extreme version of this?
I haven't been around that, but I've read about it. And yes, I would say that would have to be extreme, but I don't know those people subjectively enough to have a meaningful perspective on it, but yeah, I would say that would have to be that.
Right, because I mean, you're slowing down, you're breathing, your heart rate, your metabolic rate, so slow that there's very little consumption of anything. Yeah, or like the fella. What's the fella who lit himself on fire in Vietnam? It's like one of the most famous photos ever. It wasn't Tich Nhat Hanh, was it? No, no, no, no, no. It was... I don't remember what his name is.
Anyways, but it's like one of the most famous iconic photos in the history of ever and it was in the Addis of protest. Yeah, it was protest. It was in the something something square. I don't know why it was. Oh, Tianan square. Tianan square, yeah. So that would be kind of an example. I bet you that person would probably have pretty good breath control. Yeah. For him to be able to be, hold himself in the state of such high level of, you know, not attachment to all of the pain and all the sensations that would be arising as a product of
lighting himself on fire. That would be a person who has probably a wildly regulated nervous system. Do you know Lee Holden? Have you heard of him? He's a Qigong teacher and we're friends through Mindvalley. And he did a documentary where he went around the world studying and interviewing all kinds of masters, Tibetan masters, Qigong masters. And it's called the Search for Superhuman or something.
I mean, the stuff that he saw is, he showed me photos. I mean, it's wild, like people that could make their bodies invisible, people could set their bodies on fire, like stuff that you're like, no effing way is this real. And then it's like, well, I don't know that it's not real. But it's just, it's this fun sort of like, I like to challenge my assumptions of what I believe is possible.
Yeah, right. And I think that there's so many technologies that have died with the, you know, murdering of all the witches and the, like the lineages that have been lost. So it's like fast, just like with the rainforest, you just make one rainforest. How many millions of different medicines are lost with that? I think similarly when you, when you eradicate an entire population of consciousness that has spells and breathwork and potions and ideas, like what, what, what have we lost? We don't even know is gone.
There's, I think something that's interesting is you have obviously heard of the gal who gets in some situation and their daughter or son is in trouble and they can suddenly reach upon the strength. Yeah, lift the car off the baby.
So we are our nervous systems limit ourselves all the time. The amount of motor units that actually recruit to engage our muscles is a very small percentage of what actually could be recruited because we don't want to hurt ourselves. So it's kind of an interesting metaphor for some of the stuff that I think that you're talking about, where it's like we limit ourselves based off of the barriers. Conservation. Yeah, based off of the barriers that we create to conserve ourselves because we're afraid of where I am now,
at this level of wealth, at this level of health, at this level of relationship, at this level of home and all of my environmental situations, I'm not dead. I know that this hasn't killed me, like this is safe, to push outside of that into another realm of what if I got a nicer house? What if I got a nicer car? What if I was in a relationship that wasn't a dumpster fire?
Like, do I deserve that? Yes, you do. Like this dumpster by a relationship hasn't. It feels familiar. It's familiar. It feels safe. Right. So this feels like my mom. This feels like my dad. This feels like what I know will not kill me because I've survived it for the last 30 years. Yeah. Or whatever, however older person is since their childhood. And so the nervous system is doing the same thing. It's like, I know that if I give you access to this much power, you're not going to blow a tendon. So this is what you get.
And do you think that the more people feel safe in their bodies, the more powerful they become? And do you think that they then?
will allow themselves to receive something that may have otherwise felt unsafe. Like you hear this all the time in manifesting, like even if you want a million dollars, if lack feels familiar to you and therefore safe, you're not gonna let yourself manifest a million dollars. If you want a healthy relationship, but abuse feels familiar to you and therefore safe. So have you found people be able to manifest more in their lives once they're able to create that safety in their body through alignment, through breath? I don't know, probably.
I mean, I don't have like, it's stuff like that's really hard for me to say like intuitively like for sure. And I, as you already know, I have a tendency of like trying to draw back to, could this be like measurable? And I also, you know, have done ayahuasca 20 plus times and love meditation and breath work and, you know, fan of all the different things. I was asking like in your direct experience, forget about like scientific studies, but like with your clients, with people who read your book in your own life.
I just, I think that I wouldn't be able to say like, yes, for sure, because so much happens in a person's life to say it would be like, oh, suddenly, you know, you don't have to. It was getting rid of Teflon. Yeah, exactly. So it's hard to be like, ah, like this is me and it was definitely me, you know, so pretty cool. But I think like very clearly if a person is experiencing tension and dis-ease in their body with regularity and inflammation and
There's a guy Moshe Feldenkrais, the Feldenkrais. I used to study that in college. It's so good. All of his books, I'm a big fan of. He has a term that I like called parasitic tension, and so parasitic tension would be like, think of your body as a house, and you have all of these lights, all these circuits on through that the house, bunch of light bulbs on. You have a person's
if they're stressed, you know, or they're commiserating about the past or they're predicting themselves into the future or they're like, not just like, like at ease with like, whatever, like this is good. I don't need anything else. I'm not tripping about yesterday. You know, tomorrow will come if it comes like, this is perfect. That like, it like turns the lights off.
And now suddenly we have all this extra bandwidth to start to create from the nail. And so that's a metaphysical and also physical, as you know, I like, you know, to like ground things in the physical, if I can, but it's a very physical thing where suddenly I literally have access to more energy because my traps release a little bit because the stress was a little bit. Yeah. It's chomping all your energy.
It's taking energy from the lights in your home, which is your body. Yes, you're pulling the light from yourself. Light in the form of electricity for this metaphor. And also your body is light, so that too.
Yeah, it's so interesting. Just, I did a podcast when we're talking about how like fear is the first suck. And if you can calm down the fear, then you can put that energy into the food and you can digest your food. And then if you can handle your digestion, that energy goes into fucking or like the creation, the pro creation energy, that sexual energy, that life force, and then open to fuck, to fuck well.
open where, how? Like your heart energy. Everyone, ideally your heart. The heart opens the, you know, all the other parts. And then if you can regulate that energy, then it's like it cascades and waterfalls into forgiveness and then from their friendship. So it was just, I would never thought about, but if you don't know how to down regulate, if you don't know how to get out of fight or flight, if you don't have a regular meditation practice or you're breathing incorrectly,
Then that fear is going to be so parasitic that you have very little energy to digest your food to make love, to make friends for forgiveness. That's why this stuff is so important. Obviously, I'm a big fan of meditation. You're a big fan of helping people bring their bodies into alignment and breath work. When I was asking you about the show, what do you want to talk about?
I was actually on a boat in Croatia with some hilarious friends of ours, and we played a game to see who could give the most convincing faux scientific pseudo science explanation of why butthole signing was a thing.
a real one. I mean, no, it's not real. Sunny anywhere in your body is great. Okay, but can you give me like a deep pseudoscience on butthole? No, because there's not a lot of deep pseudoscience. You know, it's just real science. I mean, sunning any part of your body is healthy. And I mean, there's a very high incidence of prostate cancer. So I'd imagine exposing sun to those areas, like infrared light penetrates. I don't remember the exact number, but like a couple of centimeters in. So you got your butthole up in the sauna.
I'm not in Fred's honor. I'm just on the red light. No, I'm not a butthole son or I'm joking, but setting anywhere. I think probably honestly, I think what would happen where there could actually be value in butthole setting. One, just being in a happy baby pose is very relieving for the lower back and the hips and all of that. Two, many people carry a tremendous amount of shame in and around even the wild concept of having an anus. You have one?
Exactly. I don't talk about it, but yeah. I am a Barbie doll. I am a Barbie doll. Yeah, seriously. A lot of people think they are or afraid to not be one. So in that, even if it's a solo experience, this isn't a scientific, this is a metaphysical thing, slash psychosomatic, emotional thing.
but I would, I think be able to convincingly argue somebody that just being able to express that part and like show it and feel sensation and don't feel photons and just be like, oh yeah, like this is a part of me, baby, like show it to the line. Even the warmth, like even just the sensation of the warmth. All of that be like, oh, you kind of walked around like, oh yeah, I got a little, a little, a little pep in my step. A little sunshine in my pocket. Yeah, exactly.
So I think that would actually be very valuable. Staying with some friends at this priestess temple this week here in Austin, and we did this morning practice. We were doing breath work outside, and we were naked. And we were just like, yep. And we just like did some yoni-sounding. And I actually felt like I was being penetrated by the sun. I'm so beautiful. Like not in my ass, but in my pussy. And it was so awesome.
It is penetrating you. That's what infrared light does. I mean, all the frequencies do. Infrared penetrates the deepest. It's stirring up your mitochondria. Is it light, or do that in a sauna? Either way. The sauna is just emitting that, depending upon the sauna, just emitting those specific frequencies, but the light, the sun is emitting all of them. More of that's coming in dusk and dawn, and it goes more blue during the day. I think we found the title of the podcast. Why is it everyone butthole sunning?
Yeah, that'd be great. That'd be catchy. I don't think anyone needs to do it, but if you did it, it wouldn't be bad. Testicles is different. Testicles that the lighting cells exist in the testicles, which is by far and away most of the testosterone is produced in the male body. With that, there's some research done with rats. I haven't seen anything with humans, but I think that intuitively to me would make sense that
having infrared light specifically because it penetrates so deep with all the different type of light, actually penetrating and interacting with the cells that produce testosterone in the body. I would just intuitively think that would have effect. Cool.
how he got here when I am into it. Okay, so let's go back to breathwork. You were very passionate about why is everyone breathing wrong. You go into breathwork classes, you go to yoga classes, you see people meditating, and you had like a decent amount of like more than 10% amount of rage about people breathing incorrectly. You can tell I'm angry.
What are people doing wrong? I leave breath work. I'm not trained. And magic is happening in that room. But what are people doing wrong when they're breathing?
The mechanics of breath would just potentiate so much more from the breathing and most people. What does that mean? If you had the correct, if you were breathing correctly, you could get more out of it. Yes. All right. So example, we talked about on my podcast before this, a line podcast. We talked about like that little plug. I did. Check it out. Alignpodcast.com. Keep winking at me.
I can't agree handsome. It was seven weeks and we might be getting close to an energy concentration, everybody. I received that. What was I talking about? Who knows? Once you said I can't agree handsome, I got those. We're talking about breath work and how you have the, if you have the correct mechanics. Oh yeah. All right. Okay. So hear me up. So we talked about Amy Cuddy, you know, super. Ted talk. Yeah. All that, all that stuff on my podcast, the line podcast episode, whatever.
And in that one of the things that she does in her power power when poses, how she calls it, that is actually a little bit of skew that would actually end up potentiating or recreating stress is it's a flaring of the ribs. And so it's like, I'm a winner, like I feel good. Yes, like that, that is an indication that I won.
and an even stronger, more powerful version of a winner would be someone who has the ribs in a position that's not chronically flexing the diaphragm. And this is like ubiquitous because most people are a little bit insecure and want to fit in and want to be perceived as being strong and confident. A girl wants to have big tits and a big butt and like be like sexually viable. A guy wants to have a big chest, you know, and, you know, seem like strong. He can protect. What we'll do with that is we will end up
cocking our shoulders back, you know, and projecting our chest forward and putting our lumbar spine in hyper lordosis, pretty like maladaptive positions. Which is like, but out, like tailbone. Yeah, but out spine dumping forward, pouring our pelvic, like, you know, like the energetic bowl of our pelvis forward and splaying all of the energy of our done Tien and all that stuff for is like, like open channel like a hose.
So that's Eastern esoteric language. Also, just you're taking away the neutrality of the spine. You're putting your spine in actually a compromised position where your central nervous system is saying like, this is dangerous. I shouldn't give you access to too much power from here because we might blow out a disk. We need to lock it down a little bit and send some stress in the body and compensate and hold.
Yeah, we're not safe, so we need to conserve energy. We're not safe. We're projecting to be safe in the present moment because we want to be loved, we want to seem strong, we want to seem like we can attack and kill if we had to. If you're a guy, if you're a girl, it's typically not that so much. And so temporarily, we're pulling these gears and saying like, oh yeah, like I'm so safe and I'm so strong, but we're compromising ourselves and doing that because it's the front.
And so what will happen with a person that's chronically in that position, when the ribs come up like that, that would be what would naturally happen on an inhalation of your breath. The ribs would start to externally rotate a little bit and like almost like flare a little bit. So you could just feel your ribs instead of me just talking about it. Put your hands in your ribs and just take a breath in through the nose. And then take a breath out.
So you feel when you're breathing in, the ribs kind of flare up a little bit. All right. So that's a flexion of the diaphragm. When a person, many people are walking around stuck in a flexed diaphragmatic position stuck in rib flare.
And so they're stuck in the inhale, the inhale sympathetic. And so they can't even like structurally get a full exhalation. They can't structurally completely release their nervous system.
It's like interesting, you know, when you start saying, I'm actually stuck here, and I'm going to this breathing class, or I'm going to this yoga class, or I'm going to this whatever, and I'm actually, I'm not addressing the foundation of what holds the breath. Ideally, I come to a point where- Which is the body, the diaphragm. Yeah, yeah. Ideally, I can come to a point, a person can come to a point where the orientation of their body is aligned in such a way that like, I am just breathed.
So now you get into like Uway and effortless action. It's like, oh no, no, like, no, I just I'm just breathed, baby. You know, it's not there's no doing in this. And you feel like that happens from the physical alignment. And once that happens, the breath is just flowing in and out like the waves of the ocean.
Yeah, it could happen from the physical, it also could happen top-down, and suddenly you feel safe enough to not flare, and you feel safe enough to not pop your ass out and not shut your shoulders forward and like that. So you can change the physical body which would change the consciousness, or you can change the consciousness which will soften the physical body, which you find is most effective.
It depends on the person. It doesn't matter. So ideally, you're able to work from both sides. So if you're a person that cares about this or a practitioner or anything, you're able to come from the side of, okay, how do I make myself or whoever I care about feel safer? Okay, they're insecure about this. They're worried about this. They have guilt about this. They have shame about this.
All of it shuts the body down, shuts the diaphragm down, shuts their vocal cords down, your throat to chakra, shuts the pelvic floor down. This is like your womb and your energy centers and feeling like safe in the world, like the root chakra. It all goes, so the body is a there's a guy Buckminster Fuller that created things called tensegrity models.
And so with a 10-segrity model, when you pull, when you press on any part of the, the tension network of these models, it's kind of like those things that you see at like a dentist office, you know, it's like a bunch of sticks held together with elastic bands. And it's like you, you press it together, it gets small, you open it up, it gets big. That'd be an example of a 10-segrity model.
The body is like that, where if I press, if I create tension anywhere in the body, it's equally distributed through the whole entire system to hold that tension. So that's one tension that arises. Now this is a parasitic tension. Now everybody's holding that tension if I didn't release it.
You know, so I need to release it and I say, oh my God, like I just felt some shame come up and I'm holding into my diaphragm. I'm holding my throat. I'm holding my stomach like, I don't want to hold that. That's going to become baggage. So we're going to feel into it. We're going to allow it to like move. We're going to allow it to manifest in language and words. We're allowed to manifest in tears.
The organs cry, the tears, the eyes weren't able to or didn't feel safe to release. That's paraphrasing and totally pillaging. What's his name? William Oslo, I referenced him in the last podcast. The organs are crying, the tears that we don't allow ourselves to.
It's a really powerful thing when you're like, okay, interesting. That moment, I can feel like a motion coming up in me right now, just even the idea because I'm aware of how much emotion I still store in my body. We all have that.
And it's feeling safe enough within yourself, within your community, within your home, within your relationships, within your relationship with yourself, within your body, within your body. Yeah, it's to say like, Oh, yeah, like, yeah, and it not be something where it's a victim thing where I learned that if I have heavy emotions and I express my trauma and my shames and my guilt and all that stuff, I get prizes for it because, you know, like, like, like the victim card, I think can be a powerful thing as well.
But expressing the emotions is not victim card. If you feel them fully and let them move through you, that is the opposite of victim mentality. Yeah, but it can be an act. Like there can be something I see on like social media, for example, where I think it's sometimes it's like putting, it's like, oh, emotions are trending. I'm going to like do emotions like us like it like that's lying. And that's like full vulnerability, which is the opposite of feeling emotions in real time.
for sure. I just think there can be a shadow version of like vulnerability and expression as well where it's almost like I learn that I get valued and I get accepted and I get validated by expressing my emotions. Yeah. You know, so I think there's like even a higher echelon where it's just like
I just am and what comes through comes through. I recently heard that the path to enlightenment is feeling your emotions in real time. Because then if you do that, then there's no time for it to get stored in the body and how much of our
therapy, and our massage, and our meditation, and our breathwork, and our psychedelics are unwinding all of the tears that we did not cry, all the rage that we did not express, all the conflict that we did not go into. I've had DMT experiences just one recently, actually, in Peru, as one would. Are you even doing drugs if you don't go to Peru? Yeah, exactly.
But what was so powerful about it was I had an ex-girlfriend with me, and then two facilitators. And they cleared out the whole meloca for me specifically, which is something very rare. I very rarely am even open to that. I feel is very uncomfortable for people to inconvenience themselves for me. And so that was a part of the medicine of the experience.
They did it preemptively, or because something was moving through that needed space. Preemptively. Okay. Why? Just because they wanted me to have a nice experience. Okay. It was giving you private meloca time because they wanted you to have a nice DMT experience. Yeah. And was it DMT like you were smoking it, or was 5MEO DMT? 5MEO smoking it. It was 5MEO. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So anyways, the reason I mentioned that was because that was a part of like the medicine of the experience of like me taking space, taking space.
Yeah. And it's like, I'll probably cry, actually, as I'm talking about it. I can feel tears coming up. I'll have you as welcome here. I appreciate this. I don't want to go too deep into it because I don't really feel like having a full emotional purge right now. But that was one of the aspects of the healing component of it.
And another part of it was, you know, the actual DMT itself. And what happened for me in that experience ended up being like a 45 minute processor or so. I actually filmed it in, in like hyper speed, whatever that's called time-lapse.
But I went through the whole gamut of these sensations of sadness. And for me, it's a lot of sadness. That's a big thing that I hold on to more than a lot of things. And feeling like unable to express my voice was one of the things that came up. And all this just like deep, held, parasitic stuff that I've had my body for since probably like I was a fetus. Yeah.
and there's more like it doesn't stop like we don't do ayahuasca for a weekend suddenly like we've done it and if someone seems that way like be careful you know so but after that the reason i'm sharing all this is i experienced more release in my thoracic spine and my shoulders and my neck and my throat like
the levity of my entire body. I also did a few ayahuasca ceremonies and another DMT ceremony. That wasn't just that, but that was like, whoa, that was crazy. But after that, I was able to, this is like an actual objective thing. I was able to hold a handstand, like a perfect, super perfect upright handstand and go into like deep thoracic extension from the handstand.
with greater ease than I've ever been able to, from smoking a little bit at DMT and feeling like cared for for 45 minutes. And what that was was when we have tension, we all have it, I still have it now, when we have tension of feeling that feeling of fear, guilt, shame, resistance, bracing, much of it will arise in the thoracic spine. It's like your shell, right? So if you... And which part is the thoracic?
mid middle 12th vertebra underneath the neck. I'm protecting the heart. Yeah. So think if you were to get beat up and you're like, Oh crap. Like I'm just getting my ass kicked. There's five guys. They got me. There's nothing I can do. You will curl up into a fetal position and hope to God they're just kicking you in like the shell.
That shell is where you store the shit. That shell, you're energetically, literally and figuratively holding your stuff within that space for most of your life. Protection. It's your protection. If you can feel safe enough to be cared for and feel safe enough to be loved and feel safe enough to be
expressed, then suddenly that shell, it's like maybe the shell doesn't need to be as thick as I've thought it has. Maybe some of that hypertonicity or tension, hyper rigidity that I've had in my nervous system and my thoracic spine and my ribs and my neck and my throat and my pelvic floor. I never trusted it before, but I think I'm willing to trust.
Suddenly, you're like, wow, my breathing completely changes and I can get my arms up over my head and I can like, I'm like stronger. I've access to more energy in my body because there's less friction and I have more creative energy because my factory, my like biological human suit factory isn't just running on putting fires out all day. It's actually running like it's running itself.
And that parasite of fear and stress and protection is not zapping you of that energy. And that parasite of fear, you know, anxiety and tension, all that stuff is a physical manifestation. There's no way out of it. It's one who wants the same thing. It's not like woo, woo, hoo.
This is what I wish people understood about meditation and now around sacred sexuality is that like people think that meditation is just like a cute bubble bath for your brain. And like, oh, something I'll get around to when I have extra time. I'm like, no, if you are not handling a stress response in your body, it is manifesting physically. It is manifesting in your skin, in your organs, in your spine, in your fascia, in all of you, in your hands, in your hands, like if tension, think if you're like,
I'm so mad. If you were acting anger, you could actually put yourself into anger to the point that you feel angry. I was an actress for me. One of the things you would do is put a clincher hands up.
Your hands are how you feed your child and how you like make love and how you massage and how you make food and how you make art. It's like these things are like they're literally like magical wands of manifestation and creation. If you're holding fear and anger in yourself, like good luck being a creator.
And I think this is also why I'm so drawn to your work and why I've spent the past like four years working on Ziva Magic is that it's not just about the pleasure, right? Like the pleasure is the byproduct that happens from you having the bravery of expressing all the unexpressed emotions. It's like before I even let people touch pleasure. I mean, obviously they can do whatever they want in their own time, but like,
In this modality before we ever go into the magnetize we make sure that they have the tools to feel safe enough to feel the sorrow to feel the rage because it's like if you can move that it comes up and out of the body and you're making more space for the creation you're making more space for the pleasure.
And what I find is that most people have spent so many decades numbing their pain that they don't know how to feel the full capacity of their pleasure. And so if you want to teach someone to use their pleasure to pray, you must first equip them with the safety to feel the intensity of the sorrow and the rage. Yeah, and a great starting point would just be come back to the breath.
Yeah. And so you mentioned, you know, why isn't everyone, when we talked about like how we create safety in the body, we talked a little bit about the mechanics of breath. You know, the show is called, why isn't everyone doing this? So like, why isn't everyone feeling safe in their body? It's probably different for everybody. It's such like an individual thing, but, um,
the root of that for me and for, I guess I can only speak for myself. I think it would be, you know, so for me, my experience growing up, I like, I was referred to as mumbles for like the first like 12 years, 11 years of my life or so. And I like wouldn't talk. I was like, I was like practically mute in public situations. And
Thankfully, I had, like, my parents, they would, like, stick up for me a little bit, like, oh, he's just, like, observing. He's, like, taking it in. And in that time, I think I felt a little bit, like,
alienated from like the world. It was kind of like a feeling of like feeling like a guest in the world in a way. And like, like, who am I? Do I deserve to be here? They call you bumbles because of the way that you spoke or because I was listening. I just wouldn't talk much, you know? And so if I talked, it was kind of funny that now I'm like a professional communicator.
Yeah, the top top podcast. So it's like an interesting, you know, like irony and twist. But yeah, so I have a lot of like love for that boy. It's very like, you know, like looking back at him. But so I think for me, it was like a sensation of like,
not like non-deserving. Do I deserve to take up space here? Do I deserve to be here if I'm not providing something like a role? I think that's kind of a thing because we live in a capitalistic society, which I'm a big fan of capitalism, I think it makes sense. And it's something where it's kind of this trading of currency value for value type thing. And I feel like that probably has an effect.
It's like the medium is the message is an interesting concept or book where it's like the medium of what we're engaging in actually is a thing that's providing the information to us more than the books that we're reading and the actual information itself. It's like the culture that you exist in, the socioeconomic culture or the religious culture, the parental structure and all that stuff is informing us so much more than the actual information that we're learning.
So I think that that's a feeling that I have pretty regularly is like, if I'm not providing you something, I probably don't deserve to be here. And so I think that probably a part of that would be like an economic thing. But yeah, for me, I think that like early on, it was a sensation of like, do I belong here? And am I deserving to be here? And like, what's the value that I have to bring is just my beingness enough. And I don't think so.
Yeah, because it's like a baseline worthiness. Is my existence enough or do I need to be contributing in order to have value? Yeah, I need to do something. I think that's the beauty of relationship with yourself and with an intimate partner or friendships or whatever. But to be able to practice those interactions and be able to me with an intimate partner for me, it's like,
I don't need a girl to do anything for me. If she gets me a gift, I'm surprised. I'm like, oh my god, that's so moving that you're thoughtful of me. That's amazing. But it's more just her beauty and her magic and her expression and her dancing and her laughing and all that. That is the gift.
And so, you know, I think being able to, like, engage in that, like, relearn some of those things, but it's a lot easier for me to do that with somebody else still than it is for me, I'd say. And it's probably common with a lot of people. Maybe more men, I don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure if it'll be a guy-girl thing. I think it just manifests differently. Worthiness, I think, is pretty universal across all genders. Yeah, the worthiness is different for guys and girls, I think. I get different flavors. And so, you talked a bit about, so if we wanted to,
Find a pathway into that worthiness, into that enoughness, into that safety through the body, through the breath, through the mechanics of the body. Is there anything you could share with people that they can do right now as they're listening to this next time they go into meditation, next time they go into breath work that could create that sense of safety or enoughness or worthiness in their body?
Yeah, using your voice. So, um, exhale, you know, it depends on what you want to do. If you want to calm, chill, down, regulate, like create space, you don't want to like sharpen the knife. You kind of want to like put the knife down for a moment. Um, emphasizing the exhalation, as I already mentioned, that's going to slow the, like elongating the exhalation. Yeah.
Yeah, that's what we do actually in Ziva Online. Like the first three days, we do the two X breath is what I call it. We're just real simple, just like doubling the length of the exhale from the inhale, just like get that, you know, vagus nerve online. Yeah, anything that comes about is going to be supportive with with vagal tone. You know, so the vagus nerve, you know, it's like a vagus, like vagabond. It's like wonders the organs. Innovates almost all the organs.
80% of the information from the vagus is actually coming from the organs to the brain. They're afferent nerve pathways. So if it was a highway, four out of five of the lanes would actually be going up to the brain, sending all this amazing precious information from the organs.
Your organs are known as the second brain. They have as much last I've read. They have as many neurons. It's like the brain of a cat. It probably depends on the cat, depends on the person. But your organs have as many neurons as the brain of a cat. Yeah, that's something I've read. I don't know. But not as many as a human brain.
Not as many as a human brain, but a lot of neurons in there. Which is like billions. We have like billions of neurons in our brain. Probably trillions, but yeah, like a lot. Okay. And it's very interesting if you think of that, that big old wandering vagus nerve, four out of five of the lanes on that highway are actually coming from your body up into your brain.
And so just kind of like reworking that concept of like, where are my thoughts? You know, like, like, I believe, you know, there's like the skin brain connection and there's the gut brain connection. And I think it's just that it's just your body is your brain. There's no, there's no differentiation or disassociation from it. It's all just, just models for education that actually your body is like,
Cool, bro, don't know what you're talking about, but, you know, continue on with your 2D textbook. That's fine. But I either feel good or not. Yeah. That's why I believe in embodied manifestation that you can't just manifest with your thoughts. Yeah. You can. It's just way more effective to get your whole body, head, heart and hoo-ha and pleasure on board as well. And so that's why, that's why like dance is the, is the, so it says, I just posted something else on the Instagram like yesterday, but, but, uh,
Dance is, there's research done at Albert Einstein School of Medicine, where they were studying different activities to stave off cognitive decline, so dimension, things of the like. They found that partner dance to music was the longest lever or highest leverage tool or technique or activity in order to actually improve cognitive function.
Wow. I'm glad we partnered asked before the podcast, which completely makes sense because you're incorporating a motion into it. You're incorporating rhythm. You're tying also yourself to music, which is a motive in and of itself community, community connection. You're feeling a little nervous with the person. You're like having like a breakthrough experience like, Oh my God, I did it.
And you're moving, you're circulating all lymphatic fluids, and just all the different things. It's like this electrical storm through your whole entire system. So that would be a great thing if you're able to get a little wiggle. Hardner dance, but even not partnered, they're saying now that dance is great for as effective as SSRI is for our depression. Yeah, exercise as well.
Yeah, major. But partner is interesting because you're also incorporating touch. It's not just touch, but it's also care from another person and physical touch. I wrote a chapter in my book, The Align Method, all around the value of touch, like how it affects your physiology.
And one of the things in there, a reference woman called Tiffany Field from University of Miami, and some research she did was with babies that were born prematurely, so they're in incubators. Typically it would be like keep them sterile, keep them untouched, you know, when we get sick. They introduced 15 minutes of touch, like little baby massage twice a day. They found that just introducing that little bit of care and love and safety in the form of physical contact
actually allowed the babies to digest more efficiently and repair and grow two times as fast and be released from ink bears live faster. Yeah, it does not make any sense to keep them separated from their parents. A touch deprived friend recession right now. I learned the term friend recession article a couple days. Maybe a sex recession as well. All of it. People in their 20s are having less sex than any other generation.
And so that's really, really major. I think there's a lot of quiet suffering happening. I experience it myself, not to the same degree that I'm sure many people do. I have a lot of good vibes too, but there's definitely moments where I'm kind of like, oh, is it safe to express my suffering? Because if I express my suffering, that could potentially make me be unattractive.
Because ideally, the person is suffering. So the medium is the message stuff. The medium that we exist in is this nuclear family lookout for yourself. Women can take care of themselves. Men can take care of themselves. We'll keep it separate. We'll have one dog picket fence, 1.5 kids. It's very nuclear separate. It's not working.
So there's so much separation infused into that. And what you see is you see people starting to harm themselves. You see people starting to ideate around ending their lives. You see depression increasing, you see anxiety increasing, you see people becoming really fat. What is eating mimic? Eating is almost like this like sensual sexual experience in a way.
So what I want is human connection, like I want tribe and I want touch and I want to feel loved and I want to feel safe because it causes my body to go into regulation and safety and I can rest and I can digest and I can repair and I can create when I feel disconnected.
old, old, like millennia old systems in the body are like, you're probably not safe. So we probably need to put you into a little bit of like a, like a panic response. Yeah. And so that would be something that I think it's, it's kind of like the, like we need to buck the system in a way, because the culture that we live in within that is inherently a bit isolating.
Yeah, so it feels like we can create that safety in our bodies through our structure, through our breath, then it's safer to connect to others, it's safer to connect to our community, and then we can, you know, create heaven on earth, which is what I'm really here for. Yeah, heaven or hell. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like right there.
Oh, I like that. Like we could create hell with our breath. We could have him with our breath right here, right now. I love breath. It'd be hard to create hell with breath. You can create, you can, you can recapitulate trauma with breath. Like you can, you can bring yourself into panic states with breath.
For sure. But it's not so much the breath as much as the setting that you're at. So if you start to bring yourself into a panic response with hyperventilation with breathing, but you're in a safe place, it actually could be a really great way to bring some of those deep held sensations up to the surface and be able to process them in a safe container. Like BDSM.
And it's what happens in our retreats. It's wild. It's like, I'm sure you see this in breath work, which is like the amount of healing that can happen through the breath is really such a miracle. Yeah, it's what it's. Yeah, I don't know how it works. Exactly. I don't think anybody really does.
No, no, I can take stabs at it that like, again, like intuitively makes sense. Like I feel like, like, you know, a lot of things are hard to cut with the scalpel of science and like lay out perfectly and be able to like explain, which means to flatten, you know, play to create plane. Something is just aren't planar in nature.
And so sometimes we have like the wrong tool to describe. And so it's like we were talking before on mind about pre-verbal times. Like probably a lot of things, we were probably better communicators in some ways pre-verbal because our communication would probably be like incredibly honest.
I also think we might be going there again, like some people hypothesize that with AI, we won't need our brains to store or process information anymore. And so all of that cognition, all of that consciousness will be available for extra-sensorial communication. So it's almost like all of us could be on mushrooms all the time and communicating telepathically, like feeling each other like this giant mycelial network.
My friend Jerry hypothesis is that it will be similar to the surgeon consciousness that we have when we discovered fire. So all of that energy that was needed to pre-digest our food before fire. I guess fire is pre-digesting the food. So all that energy and blood that we needed to digest food before fire then went up into our brains with this huge surgeon consciousness language, cave drawing, we could like build on top of previous generations knowledge.
that we're going to be facing a similar surge in consciousness now with AI, which I think is very fascinating and very hope-inducing. Well, Erin Alexander, I could talk to you all day long, but I know you're moving. I'm going to the airport, so let's start to wrap this up. Is there anything you wish that I had asked you that I didn't?
No, no, I enjoyed that. I did too. Okay, last question. If you could install one code into the species, like wave of magic wand over the whole planet, everyone just immediately starts like believing something, doing something, understanding something, what would it be?
Let go of any resentment, shame, guilt, like life is way too limited to hold onto grudges towards yourself, towards, you know, anything. And so it is. So where can people find you?
Um, well, people are interested in the breathing related stuff. So we have a, I don't know when this will go out, but we're launching this program that focuses heavily on the mechanics. So teaching like downloading the information of like, here's how to mechanic. Well, um, that comes out on like a day to day breathing or like I'm going into breath work breathing or.
All of it, but yeah. So figuring out the basic fundamental mechanics of how to inhale, exhale well. And it's, you know, starting with the pelvic floor and the respiratory diaphragm and the shoulders and the rib cage and all of that stuff. And then it goes into breathing practices as well, but it's really focused on the principles of how to do that. So the whole intention is like teaching people how to, how to fish instead of providing them a bunch of fishes. Do this exercise, do this exercise, but like,
I don't really know why I'm doing this. My very strong preference would be for people to become like breath alchemists and so it's where you're like, oh no, like I can create magic with my breath. I can augment my nervous system in whichever direction I choose and I can teach other people how to do that.
Yes. Beautiful. So that's the purpose of that. If people would like to check that out, that's at alignpodcast.com slash breathe. There's a seven day trial of it. And then if you want to take the archetype, the breathing archetype to see where they land in that, that's alignpodcast.com slash quiz. So you go through like a short little quiz and find out if you're a stress survivor or an air alchemist is like the two types. Those three.
Three. What's the other one? Yeah. We're actually going through the potentials with that. I think it was regular respirator. It was the middle. So regular respirator would be like a person that's like, you know, they're like doing all right. You know, they're not really trying that hard. They're just kind of like naturally pretty decent, but they could do a lot better.
I think I kind of fall into that category now with breathing. I'd be higher on the breathing scale, but just in general, I'm like, I think you do better, bro. I kind of have that, like, I'm like Aubrey Marcus in that way a little mix. He's just more successful than I am, but in that sensation of like, you could always do better. Come on, bro. All of us. All of us. Yeah, but it can be a little haunting. I think there's like a light and a shadow side to that. Ideally, we're in the light side of that where it's actually like,
a wind underneath our sail, as opposed to something like a lake torture. I'm kind of more in between with that. But yeah, landpodcast.com slash breathe. If they want to start the semi trial, landpodcast.com slash quiz. If they want to do the archetype quiz, which would then eventually take you into the actual trial program.
Okay, beautiful. So we'll put those links in the show notes. And you're also really generous on our Instagram. What's your Instagram? Aaron Alexander. And Alexander. Yeah. I'm gonna line podcast YouTube. And I think that's pretty much what we do TikTok too. But I'm not. TikTok's just a perpetuation of the shorts on YouTube.
Okay, cool. So sweet friends, if you enjoyed this show, if you learned something, which I certainly did from this iconically handsome human, I would say screenshot this posted on Instagram, tag us at Aaron Alexander at Ziva Meditation. Let us know what were your ahas? We make this to be media as medicine to get these ideas out into the world. And so I really appreciate your time and your attention.
If you want to share this with friends, give it a five star review. Let us know in the comments what you learned. It really goes a long way to create the reciprocity and to get this media out into the world. So I love you. I love you. I love you. And I will see you next week on why isn't.
So this is a crazy time of year because nature is asking us to slow down, to get still, and society is asking us to speed up, travel, throw parties, buy gifts, decorate the house, do year-end reports, and so it can feel like there's this internal struggle. And then on top of it, we're expected to make all of our resolutions and design some amazing year to come. And I get that this can feel a little overwhelming, a little stressful when you're like, you know what I want? It's a nap.
But here's the good news. You can actually design a year with more rest in it. You could design a year with breaks that honors the cycles of nature and the cycles of your body. And that is exactly what we've created inside of design your dream year. So this is an exercise I've been doing with my students in Ziva for over a decade. And I love it because it's gonna take you into deep rest. It's gonna take you into a guided meditation where I have you play the highlight reel of the previous year so that we can celebrate all of your successes. And by the way,
If no one has told you that you are doing a great job, you are doing a great job. It is challenging being a human right now. So you're doing great. And once you have celebrated all of your successes and even the learnings, then we get to design your dream year for the coming year. So if you would like to join me in this, just click the link below or go to zivameditation.com slash dream and I will send you this free exercise. It has changed my life year after year after year.
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