Speaker 1: We'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land
Speaker 1: on which this podcast was produced, the Galligle people of
Speaker 1: the Urination. We pay our respects to Elder's past and present.
Speaker 2: It's twenty fifteen and we're in gray, wintery Amsterdam. It's
Speaker 2: cold outside, but it's even colder in here, the cryotherapy studio,
Speaker 2: where Johannes Egberts is putting on his hat, gloves and boots.
Speaker 2: He's here at the suggestion of his brother. He's working
Speaker 2: in the new health facility alongside a man called whim Hoff.
Speaker 2: Johannes's brother is desperately attempting to make him feel better.
Speaker 3: Johannes is at rock bottom.
Speaker 2: He was recently arrested and detained in Sri Lanka, a
Speaker 2: traumatic experience that also led to the fracture of his
Speaker 2: relationship at just twenty years old. Johannes can't see a
Speaker 2: way out. He's been feeling and empty for months. The
Speaker 2: chamber is minus ninety degrees. He steps in, the rush
Speaker 2: of adrenaline hits him. Johannes is back in his body.
Speaker 2: He feels like himself again. Tears rolled down his face,
Speaker 2: instantly freezing. This is the moment that will change the
Speaker 2: course of you Hannas's life forever. I'm at Middleton and
Speaker 2: this is headgame today, one of the world's leading cold
Speaker 2: therapy experts on the moment that saved him. Johannas, how
Speaker 2: are you, buddy?
Speaker 4: Oh, very well, I'm very happy to be here with you.
Speaker 2: May I love your calming, very soothing approach. I'm sort
Speaker 2: of the opposite. I'm super energetic. I need some of
Speaker 2: that calming aura and energy so I can stay grounded
Speaker 2: in my seat. Now tell me your Hannas, what is
Speaker 2: breath work?
Speaker 4: Breath work so conscious modulation of our respiration and then
Speaker 4: the role that that has to play in human transformation.
Speaker 4: And that is a very fancy way of saying any
Speaker 4: time that you change your breathing in order to change
Speaker 4: your state of mind, your state of being. So, I mean,
Speaker 4: it's something that's all this time itself, right. People have
Speaker 4: always known about the power of the breath, the power
Speaker 4: that resides in the human respiratory system. But I think
Speaker 4: really in the last twenty maybe forty years or so,
Speaker 4: breath work has made its way to the west, and
Speaker 4: we're seeing this convergence of east and west of old
Speaker 4: and contemporary of ancient and science and spirituality can sort
Speaker 4: of meet in this point of the breath. That's how
Speaker 4: I see it. So the breath is a bit of
Speaker 4: a bridge, and that's what breath work, I think also is,
Speaker 4: and I think that's why it's here today. That's the
Speaker 4: role that it has to play in our society now,
Speaker 4: is to sort of reconnect us in a certain way. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, It's something that we take for granted, don't we,
Speaker 2: because we subconsciously just breathe in and out, and you know,
Speaker 2: when we get a bit more tired or a bit
Speaker 2: more active, we breathe a lot heavier, and we don't
Speaker 2: think about controlling it because it almost controls itself, so
Speaker 2: we don't think about it. But when we subconsciously think
Speaker 2: about our breathing techniques and you know, the oxygen and
Speaker 2: the air that we're breathing, that's when it really comes
Speaker 2: into light, isn't it.
Speaker 4: One hundred percent? Yeah, I'm actually curious to also talk
Speaker 4: to you about the career that you've had and the
Speaker 4: role that breath has had to play in that. But
Speaker 4: you're spot on with that. This is what makes breath
Speaker 4: so unique. It's both happening to you moments and moment,
Speaker 4: but you can also step in and control and so
Speaker 4: it is one of the only functions, one of the
Speaker 4: only parts of the autonomic nervous system, if you will,
Speaker 4: that has a bridge also with the somatic nervous system.
Speaker 4: In other words, you can consciously control your breathing, but
Speaker 4: it is also happening to you moments a moment. And
Speaker 4: I like to say sometimes that your breath is there
Speaker 4: for either your best friend if you do have control
Speaker 4: over it, or your worst enemy, because, as you sort
Speaker 4: of alluded to, in the worst moments, your breath is
Speaker 4: taken away from you. When when you lose your breath,
Speaker 4: you are out of control, right and unfortunately the world
Speaker 4: is breathless today. There's a lot of people walking around
Speaker 4: with really poor breathing habits. And yeah, it is in
Speaker 4: that way. It is a little bit like you do
Speaker 4: not have control over your state of being. The flip
Speaker 4: side of that is that when you do learn some
Speaker 4: of these simple techniques, and maybe we get a chance
Speaker 4: to discuss some of them today, it is literally like
Speaker 4: someone has given you the remote control to your body,
Speaker 4: to your nervous system, and you're back in. You're back
Speaker 4: in the player seat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2: Have you always been like this as a youngster or
Speaker 2: have you learnt you know that this is the way,
Speaker 2: This is what life is.
Speaker 3: The essence of life is truly about, is breathing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I can say absolutely not, meaning that I was
Speaker 4: out of control in a really big way, and it
Speaker 4: started very early. I've traced this back all the way
Speaker 4: to my first few years right in this kind of
Speaker 4: game of following back RUMs is to like where did
Speaker 4: this begin? But you know, life was difficult for me
Speaker 4: at a young age. I struggled. I struggled to concentrate,
Speaker 4: I struggled to just be in my body, to be
Speaker 4: in my experience, and it's always felt like things were hard.
Speaker 4: Things were harder for me somehow, is how I used
Speaker 4: to you know, the words I used to speak all
Speaker 4: the time. And I mean this all came to a
Speaker 4: head in my teenage years. To give you a picture
Speaker 4: of being out of control, probably from about you know,
Speaker 4: thirteen onwards. I couldn't quite be in school anymore, and
Speaker 4: so that was a difficult thing for me. I basically
Speaker 4: was set astray right like a ship without a rudder.
Speaker 4: For a number of years. It was a lot of drugs,
Speaker 4: and basically that time feels almost like a bit of
Speaker 4: a black hole to me even thinking back about it now,
Speaker 4: I don't right up to about sixteen years of age
Speaker 4: and working menial jobs night shifts, factories, car factory, I
Speaker 4: did all sorts of things right, just to kind of
Speaker 4: get by. And at this point I really had this
Speaker 4: sense of like, what is the point, right you are
Speaker 4: just a cog in the machine here? I remember showing
Speaker 4: up to some of these jobs, right, and you're wearing
Speaker 4: an overall and you have a number on it and
Speaker 4: people actually call you by your number. I remember things
Speaker 4: like that and thinking this is this is a low point.
Speaker 3: I've been there as well. I've been yeah as well.
Speaker 4: It's drab, isn't it?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Gray? And you I've seeing people there that have been
Speaker 4: doing that. Ah, that possibility of is this going to
Speaker 4: be me for the next twenty thirty years If I
Speaker 4: don't figure this out? You know, the consequences of have
Speaker 4: I missed some of the forks in the road here
Speaker 4: right then? Am I just now on this track to nowhere?
Speaker 4: But I did. I did keep searching, and I was
Speaker 4: quite early to start traveling at that point. So at
Speaker 4: sixteen I figured out that I could actually go. It
Speaker 4: was quite an experience, and so I did you know,
Speaker 4: I kind of roamed around the south of France for
Speaker 4: a while with a bunch of gypsies. We picked grapes,
Speaker 4: We went in all different adventures. The coast of Spain.
Speaker 4: I saw a quite an early age, which was quite
Speaker 4: an experience, as you can imagine. And then I actually
Speaker 4: found way to Thailand, and then I spent six months
Speaker 4: there and that was like a nourishing for the soul.
Speaker 4: At the time, I worked as an English teacher. I volunteered.
Speaker 4: I figured that if you work as a volunteer, you
Speaker 4: can actually travel, you can get a special visa at
Speaker 4: that age, and that was that was like the light
Speaker 4: came back into my eyes. You know. There was a
Speaker 4: real sense of appreciation of belonging, of having purpose, of
Speaker 4: doing something of value, of meaning. It was a very
Speaker 4: healthy environment to be in as well with other people
Speaker 4: my age, you're a little bit older, and and and
Speaker 4: at that point my mission became how do I write,
Speaker 4: how do I how do I keep this going? How
Speaker 4: do I stay on this track?
Speaker 2: It sounds like that that Thailand was a place where
Speaker 2: you could take off all this body arm I sort
Speaker 2: of get rid of all these masks. Did tile Did
Speaker 2: you feel like that that was the start of your
Speaker 2: journey in Thailand where that where all of that could
Speaker 2: come off and you could just be one hundred percent
Speaker 2: yourself and then grow, you know, obviously grow and evolve that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, definitely. At the time, that was definitely like
Speaker 4: a crossroad. I remember going out there and sitting on
Speaker 4: the airplane and just think to myself, nobody is going
Speaker 4: to know me on the other side of the world,
Speaker 4: Like I get to decide here, right, And that also
Speaker 4: is that coming of age moments of course, of you
Speaker 4: know what, if I am none of these things, and
Speaker 4: if I'm none of these masks that I've been wearing,
Speaker 4: I get to play right. And there's such freedom in
Speaker 4: that to just explore and then to basically craft a
Speaker 4: new identity or sorts right and crafted around a new
Speaker 4: set of belief the new set of principles and ideas
Speaker 4: and values, and to also have that environment feed it
Speaker 4: back to you. That that was wonderful and that went
Speaker 4: on for a period of time, which is a really
Speaker 4: beautiful thing. And then eventually the integration of both of
Speaker 4: those worlds and that is probably a chapter that I'm
Speaker 4: only really coming to terms within the last couple of
Speaker 4: years to go what is really underneath all of this?
Speaker 4: I spoke to it earlier, following the bread crumbs all
Speaker 4: the way down to the beginning and figuring out that actually,
Speaker 4: like all of these parts and all of these masks
Speaker 4: and all of these pain points, like they all have
Speaker 4: incredible value, right, and they integrated they become right this
Speaker 4: this new version. I mean, I'm thirty, right, and so
Speaker 4: I'm a little bit probably less ahead on the journey
Speaker 4: as you are, but it is also a really beautiful time.
Speaker 4: It is also the grade in my bed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when did you connect this sort of spiritual journey
Speaker 2: that you were going on with breath work? When did
Speaker 2: that sort of come into fruition? When did or was
Speaker 2: that a natural progress into that of self discovery?
Speaker 3: To school it?
Speaker 4: No, I had to go really low to be open
Speaker 4: enough to really like try on these practices and things.
Speaker 4: And when I say really, I was twenty one years
Speaker 4: of age, right, I spent half a decade at this
Speaker 4: point essentially running away from myself and running towards something new. Also,
Speaker 4: as we discussed, but there was a lot of patterns
Speaker 4: that were building along the way also, and so I
Speaker 4: just took on way too much. In those first couple
Speaker 4: of years in Australia.
Speaker 3: I.
Speaker 4: Wasn't a relationship. I had a number of full time
Speaker 4: jobs and positions sometimes too at the same time. Right,
Speaker 4: I was working as a hedchhev in a cafe. I
Speaker 4: was working as a sculptor. I was making bronze sculptures.
Speaker 4: An apprenticeship is that. And I was having I was
Speaker 4: having a great time, but it was it was a lot, right.
Speaker 4: I was basically living on the precipice of burnout. And
Speaker 4: in the Netherlands we say this, this thing about the
Speaker 4: drip that makes the bucket flow over. I had one
Speaker 4: of those moments, and it is it is not a
Speaker 4: great story, but me and my partner at the time,
Speaker 4: I traveled to Sri Lanka to try and repair our
Speaker 4: relationship and to try and make it work right and
Speaker 4: safe to say that wasn't succeeding. And really at the
Speaker 4: lowest moment, something quite tragic happened. She had a tattoo
Speaker 4: of a Buddhaut. It's quite a quite an odd scenario,
Speaker 4: but that is not it's not just frowned upon. It
Speaker 4: as a crime in Sri Lanka and we were aware
Speaker 4: of that, but we went surfing one day she took
Speaker 4: off her leggings and it was it was spotted, it
Speaker 4: was seen, and went en. Shoot. Were seven of the
Speaker 4: worst days in my life. We were basically assaulted right
Speaker 4: then and there, and we tried to get away from it,
Speaker 4: but it erupted into a big confrontation and we were
Speaker 4: in prisoned. We had much information about what this meant.
Speaker 4: We found a you know, an article, and there was
Speaker 4: a lawyer that was presented to us who told us
Speaker 4: this story about a DJ who had spun at a
Speaker 4: trans party, spawned like a Buddha's head on one of
Speaker 4: his sets, right, and he spent nine months in prison
Speaker 4: in this jail cell and my spiral I went into
Speaker 4: quite a dissociative state, and the maltreated us quite badly
Speaker 4: in this prison. The entire village was very upset. I
Speaker 4: stayed with her the entire time, but I wasn't I
Speaker 4: was physically there, but I was. I was like I
Speaker 4: was living behind myself, right, And very quickly this adopted
Speaker 4: into something out of a movie. You know, we were
Speaker 4: being sped upon, were they were sort of telling us
Speaker 4: all these stories, but are you just come to court
Speaker 4: for one moment and you know tomorrow I will let
Speaker 4: you go and you just hand in your passport and
Speaker 4: then you know you have it back. And it was
Speaker 4: just lives upon lives upon lies, and it turned out
Speaker 4: very quickly, even the lawyer and things, there's nobody we
Speaker 4: could trust, right, And then luckily we had I had
Speaker 4: met this Dutch gentleman on the beach when a couple
Speaker 4: of days before I played the game of backgammon with him,
Speaker 4: and he happened to own half the hotels on this
Speaker 4: side of the island's coast, and so we managed to
Speaker 4: get into contact with him, and he essentially came to
Speaker 4: ourselves like you know, one in the morning or something
Speaker 4: and said, you're coming with me right now. You're speaking
Speaker 4: to this person. When you get to the airport, you're
Speaker 4: getting on this bus. You will never ever come back
Speaker 4: to Sri Lanka. And off we went, and and it
Speaker 4: was quite it was it was intense.
Speaker 3: It's a period of time that you you were.
Speaker 4: As close to a week. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: So you go, you go to the beach surfing, thinking
Speaker 2: that you're going to be back at the hotel, you know,
Speaker 2: you're figuring things out with your.
Speaker 3: With your with your partner.
Speaker 2: You're in a really good place, and then all of
Speaker 2: a sudden, and I can relate to what you said,
Speaker 2: then you were you were there physically, psychologically you were
Speaker 2: just disconnected.
Speaker 3: You were you weren't there.
Speaker 2: Does it feel like a bit of a blur psychologically
Speaker 2: or was it just pure survival in that moment?
Speaker 4: The way I describe it is third person video game.
Speaker 4: You have a character in the movie from that moment on,
Speaker 4: but you were far behind yourself. And the moment this
Speaker 4: was very real was when we landed in Singapore airport.
Speaker 4: Now to describe the state that we were in, we
Speaker 4: were so the shoveled that we immediately got arrested again.
Speaker 4: I thought we had finally gotten to safety, right, so
Speaker 4: we'd we'd been awake like the whole night at this point,
Speaker 4: and we got in there and almost wanted to kiss
Speaker 4: the ground.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: I was like, oh my god, we made it through.
Speaker 4: And they as soon as we walked into the lobby,
Speaker 4: they said, please come with us, right, And the reason
Speaker 4: why is because of how we looked. I mean, my
Speaker 4: clothes were torn, I were sowed the shovel that they
Speaker 4: were convinced that we had swallowed drugs. Because of the
Speaker 4: state that we were in. There were one hundred percent sure,
Speaker 4: and so they told us later, we were convinced that
Speaker 4: you guys were smugglers and that you had you know
Speaker 4: that something had gone wrong, and so we actually were
Speaker 4: wanting to basically give you guys medical attention. And after
Speaker 4: we'd explained what had happened, everything was fine. But the
Speaker 4: moment of that moment when it was like we're safe
Speaker 4: and then we were not, that was when I just
Speaker 4: went up to the ceiling. And it was from then on,
Speaker 4: and this went on for a couple of weeks. It
Speaker 4: was like I was just looking down upon myself from
Speaker 4: behind myself, right, and that was the dissociative state. And
Speaker 4: I recognize this in certain parts of my life that
Speaker 4: perhaps I was not quite present right. And this is
Speaker 4: a nervous system function of freeze. We call it right.
Speaker 4: It's as survival response with the body the sides. I
Speaker 4: can't fight, I can't fly, I can't quite use my
Speaker 4: normal survival mechanisms to make my way out of this day.
Speaker 4: And so the only way that I can make it
Speaker 4: through is to relegate it to the unconscious and to
Speaker 4: choose a more less energy intensive form of coping, right,
Speaker 4: which is this dissociated freeze. And of course it's there
Speaker 4: to protect you, it's there to survive you. It's a
Speaker 4: heroic act, is one of my mentors describes it, right,
Speaker 4: is the body saved the day right there for you.
Speaker 4: But it doesn't feel like that in the moment. And
Speaker 4: to cut the story short, right, it went on for
Speaker 4: a while longer. It was more tragedy, more things. Eventually
Speaker 4: I tried a number of different things to cope, right.
Speaker 4: I did a lot of yogay, did a lot of
Speaker 4: things fasting, you know, float tanks, you name. I read
Speaker 4: all of the possible audiobooks in the world. I meditated.
Speaker 4: Eventually I medicated and the stress had gotten so bad
Speaker 4: that my physical body started to call them come apart.
Speaker 4: I was diagnosed with all sorts at one point, couldn't
Speaker 4: really process my food anymore. When big into this isolated
Speaker 4: state and didn't know how to ask for help, didn't
Speaker 4: know how to tell people about what had happened. At
Speaker 4: the point, there was no empathic witness there for me.
Speaker 4: I went back to the Netherlands after taking the full
Speaker 4: bottle of medication one night and essentially sleeping almost three
Speaker 4: nights and that was the lowest point. So I'm there.
Speaker 4: I hadn't been there in a number of years. My
Speaker 4: life back overseas in Tetters, there's a heaps of things
Speaker 4: for me still to resolve. And this is when I
Speaker 4: was lucky to be taken in by my brother. He
Speaker 4: worked for the first cryotherapy studio in Amsterdam.
Speaker 3: That's that's where the breath work started.
Speaker 4: That's where it started because he was connected to a
Speaker 4: guy got whim Hoff, right, and you've probably he came
Speaker 4: to play a really big part in my life. For
Speaker 4: the five years to follow. He became a close friend
Speaker 4: and mentor. We traveled around the world together. But this
Speaker 4: first encounter was the most significant one. Right. I remember
Speaker 4: stepping into that cryotherapy studio for the first time. I
Speaker 4: wasn't even there again. I was walking behind myself. I
Speaker 4: flat empty, dejected, but it awoke something in me, right,
Speaker 4: it cracked some sort of a layer. And then the
Speaker 4: breathing exercises that we practiced. I was given very little instructions.
Speaker 4: The only thing they said was don't fucking stop breathing.
Speaker 2: So is your brother that recognized that you were in
Speaker 2: a dark, bad place. You you didn't go and ask
Speaker 2: for help. I suppose he was so connected that he
Speaker 2: recognized your disconnection. Was that safe to say?
Speaker 4: Ah, he's an angel. He's been an angel throughout my life.
Speaker 4: He's the one that when I was driving the forklifts
Speaker 4: in the middle of the night, he died through my
Speaker 4: iPod shuffle full of audiobooks by Eckartole and you name it,
Speaker 4: and always giving me the nudges in the right direction
Speaker 4: and planting the seeds ready to be picked up for
Speaker 4: me whenever I was ready. And you're right, he had
Speaker 4: a ten year meditation practice at this point, and he
Speaker 4: had a level of connection and it was beyond words.
Speaker 4: I think again, I could not really express what had
Speaker 4: happened to me, and I didn't have the words. It
Speaker 4: was too much, It was too much for me to process. Right.
Speaker 4: I was dissociating it out of my awareness for a reason,
Speaker 4: and so I didn't want to go back there. I
Speaker 4: was in a state of shell shockness almost right.
Speaker 2: And I love when you said about that first session.
Speaker 2: Put me in your skin well for that very first moment,
Speaker 2: because it's such like you said, within thirty minutes, it
Speaker 2: transformed your life. Just to talk us through how that
Speaker 2: looked and how it felt, and you know, because it's
Speaker 2: such a pivotabal point on you being who you are today.
Speaker 4: Let's begin with the breath work, and that's where it started.
Speaker 4: It was very simple, early morning, laid down a few
Speaker 4: instructions and the process begins. Right, you take deep breaths
Speaker 4: in and again I was a free diver at this
Speaker 4: point already, right, I could do yoga, I could drop
Speaker 4: into the splits right these I had these ideas about
Speaker 4: myself and about what breathing meant, you know, but this
Speaker 4: was completely different. Within five minutes of the rapid breathing,
Speaker 4: I felt my senses come alive, right tingling sensations throughout
Speaker 4: my fingers and arms, pressure in my chest. It was
Speaker 4: almost like all the anxiety that had mounted and built
Speaker 4: was actually intensified first and foremost before it was released. Right. So,
Speaker 4: but I had this voice in my mind of like,
Speaker 4: don't fucking stop breathing, and so I did continue to
Speaker 4: push past. The most remarkable thing happened probably right there
Speaker 4: about between five to ten minutes into this experience. It
Speaker 4: was like I'm still looking down from the ceiling upon
Speaker 4: myself right, and it was almost like we did this
Speaker 4: thing where you you hold your breath, and you could
Speaker 4: hold your breath for minutes at a time, and this
Speaker 4: was really significant for me. It was like a very
Speaker 4: peaceful place. And then I was like someone put a
Speaker 4: defibrillator on my soul, on my chest, and I could
Speaker 4: see myself climb back into my body and I actually
Speaker 4: remember getting up. I stood up in the middle of
Speaker 4: the exercise and I was like looking at my fingers
Speaker 4: and going, I am alive again. And I said, oh
Speaker 4: my god, you know you've you've healed me. And tears
Speaker 4: were coming down my face, which is something that had
Speaker 4: not happened in a long time. And I was sort
Speaker 4: of laughing at the same time, and I got a
Speaker 4: very dry stare saying, idiot, laid back down, We'll only
Speaker 4: just be gone. And then and they were right. And
Speaker 4: this was this was something that would continue for years
Speaker 4: where I would continue the breathing exercises in the morning,
Speaker 4: but towards the end of that experience, I ended in
Speaker 4: this really serene, peaceful state and in that state where
Speaker 4: in my physiology my nervous system had somehow been able
Speaker 4: to complete that truncated survivor. Right, that that energy that
Speaker 4: had mounted but had been relegated to the unconscious, say,
Speaker 4: that had somehow been processed. The tears had been cried
Speaker 4: without much cognition. It wasn't that I was feeling sad
Speaker 4: or griefing. It was more that the body was able
Speaker 4: to move through the motions that it couldn't weeks before that.
Speaker 4: And after that had happened, I could then lay there
Speaker 4: and in some sense of peace, in at least pure
Speaker 4: physical comfort, a states of almost floating inside of my body,
Speaker 4: being extremely present and comfortable, I could see the event's
Speaker 4: processing before me. I could more clearly see what had
Speaker 4: happened and how it wasn't my fault and this story
Speaker 4: if I can't meet the mark and I am a
Speaker 4: black hole and everything is ruined. It was like the
Speaker 4: internalization of the negative emotions which had come to be
Speaker 4: accompanied with the stored survival responses unlocked in the same
Speaker 4: moment through this one breathing exercise. And I mean, this
Speaker 4: is the goal of therapy, right, This is this is
Speaker 4: what people spent years trying to achieve through like a
Speaker 4: dedicated process of real life safety. And I had no
Speaker 4: idea about any of this right, And I'm just laying
Speaker 4: here as a twenty year old going through these breathing
Speaker 4: exercises and having this really profound awakening. And at the
Speaker 4: point I was watching myself again, but this time I
Speaker 4: was watching from a very peaceful place of observation, where
Speaker 4: I was seeing myself with compassion. I was being the
Speaker 4: witness that I didn't had in the worst moment. So
Speaker 4: it was almost like I was now watching myself go
Speaker 4: through the same motions, but with like a loving attention
Speaker 4: and like a real compassion and like crying these tears
Speaker 4: for myself. And all of this took place in like
Speaker 4: a five minute stillness meditation at the end of a
Speaker 4: breathing exercise, so safe to say, I opened my eyes
Speaker 4: and I don't know what it was, and I didn't
Speaker 4: know how it worked, and nobody could really tell me
Speaker 4: at the time. I spent a decade figuring out how
Speaker 4: something so seemingly simple can have such a profun effect.
Speaker 4: And that's been my journey, you know, in the last
Speaker 4: ten years, and studying this like all over the world
Speaker 4: and doing the research and things of that nature, because
Speaker 4: I was dumbfounded that something like could give me that
Speaker 4: profound effect. And mind you, I had been trying a
Speaker 4: lot of other things. So that was the moment and
Speaker 4: I got up and I had this hope, right, and
Speaker 4: I had this commitment, this conviction of like I don't
Speaker 4: care I throw the medication in the bin. I'm going
Speaker 4: to do this breathing exercise. It also then primed me
Speaker 4: for that cryotherapy experience, which was next, right, And that
Speaker 4: was the thing that the breath were cleared out something
Speaker 4: and the cryotherapy put something back in. Right. It was
Speaker 4: like standing there. And so to go back to the picture,
Speaker 4: you have these two freezers, right, there's different ways of
Speaker 4: doing it, and this was in the Amsterdam Arena, and
Speaker 4: they had quite an intense way where you walk into
Speaker 4: a freezer that is about the size of a commercial
Speaker 4: kitchen freezer, and you stand there for about a minute
Speaker 4: and it is minus ninety degrees, right, and then a
Speaker 4: door opens and this this hydrogen myst comes out and
Speaker 4: you walk into it and in his minus one hundred
Speaker 4: and thirty degrees and you stand there for about two
Speaker 4: and a half minutes. And that is the real experience, right.
Speaker 4: And they've played this silly music of like eye size,
Speaker 4: and I'm still feeling a little bit, you know, out
Speaker 4: of it. But something happened where again I actually recall
Speaker 4: this one moment of like, what's happening. I could feel
Speaker 4: that there was a frozen tear on my face, right,
Speaker 4: and so it awoke a part of me, right, It
Speaker 4: brought me back to my senses in quite a powerful way.
Speaker 4: And here's the thing about the cold. When you get
Speaker 4: out of the experience, it really begins, right. You get
Speaker 4: this rush of endorphins. And in recent years they've discovered
Speaker 4: that the dopamine releases two hundred and fifty percent of
Speaker 4: your average numbers for three hours afterwards, and that is
Speaker 4: a massive mood booster, right, It's one of the biggest
Speaker 4: ones I know that you can get as a natural
Speaker 4: hit and natural high. But that is also your neurochemistry,
Speaker 4: of motivation, of initiating new tasks, and of really you know,
Speaker 4: we're just a makeup of neurochemistry, right. So to be
Speaker 4: able to consciously control that, that was what those experience
Speaker 4: together had done for me. First the breath work and
Speaker 4: then this this cold exposure on top of it. I
Speaker 4: was a new man. And the amazing thing about this
Speaker 4: is really, if you ask me, was that I hardly
Speaker 4: even spoke to anybody about this that day ended, and
Speaker 4: I'm still I still didn't quite find the words to
Speaker 4: sort of tell people what happened. It took me years
Speaker 4: to actually learn to speak this story out without sort
Speaker 4: of having that emotional well and and and finding that
Speaker 4: piece within myself. Right. But I went back to Australia
Speaker 4: and there was a lot of loose ends for me
Speaker 4: to tie together, and and I had this new vigor
Speaker 4: in my step, right, And I think I left the
Speaker 4: day after this experience. I got back on a plane
Speaker 4: and I just want to here we go again. We're broke,
Speaker 4: We're in that, we don't have much going for us
Speaker 4: right now. I spent I spent a couple of months
Speaker 4: living in a storage unit. I had a full time job,
Speaker 4: I had a lot of a lot of stuff to
Speaker 4: work out. But every morning I did this simple breathing exercise, right,
Speaker 4: and then I jumped into a cold shower. And it
Speaker 4: was so remarkable because there was hardly anything else that
Speaker 4: I did that would normally be you know, if I
Speaker 4: talk to my therapist now and I explain this process,
Speaker 4: that would go, oh my god, you know, that's not
Speaker 4: how you go about it right. And I would actually
Speaker 4: say the same thing to people if they were coming
Speaker 4: to me to learn how to practice these things. To
Speaker 4: make sure that you are increllibly resourced right, make sure
Speaker 4: that you have a support network, make sure that you
Speaker 4: have safety around you, make sure that you're grounded. Make
Speaker 4: sure that you know you don't put too much pressure
Speaker 4: on myself. But I had burned the boats to a
Speaker 4: certain extent.
Speaker 2: But you'd always done that. It sounds like that you've
Speaker 2: always done that to Johannah, that you've always gone out there.
Speaker 2: You know, you always dived in the deep end and
Speaker 2: figured it out. You know, are you're either tread water
Speaker 2: or you'd you know, you'd start to swim, get somewhere
Speaker 2: and you'd start to go down.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: Talk about a motivation to keep on going and a
Speaker 2: purpose to to to keep on moving forward. And I
Speaker 2: love that in your story. So you mentioned the natural highs.
Speaker 2: So the natural highs for you is the breathing. And
Speaker 2: then you went onto the onto the onto the cryo therapy.
Speaker 2: How important is it to get cryotherapy right? You know
Speaker 2: you mentioned there roughly that you you jumped in the
Speaker 2: deep end to figure it out. But it's important that
Speaker 2: those things are done in the controlled manner, and you're
Speaker 2: lucky enough to have sort of wim Hoff and your
Speaker 2: brother as mentors, so you know you're you're getting it,
Speaker 2: you know. But how important is it is it to
Speaker 2: to really break this process down? And because it's a
Speaker 2: lifelong process, right, it doesn't doesn't really stop.
Speaker 4: One hundred percent. And it's shown up to me in
Speaker 4: so many different ways over the years, and I've experimented
Speaker 4: with it from myself, and I have also spent time
Speaker 4: with someone like wim Hoff and you know, done things
Speaker 4: like climb the mountain without the shorts. We used to
Speaker 4: do these expeditions we still do actually where we take
Speaker 4: people into these extreme environments and there's some amazing lessons
Speaker 4: to be learned in these peak experiences, right, And so
Speaker 4: I would categorize it in that nature is the daily
Speaker 4: thing is probably what makes the biggest impact. Sometimes we
Speaker 4: need the peak experience to get us to the starting line, right.
Speaker 4: We need something that shakes us out of our routine,
Speaker 4: out of our rut and brings that aliveness back in.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: We need to go where we feel most alive. But
Speaker 4: then the question, of course is for the everyday person
Speaker 4: is like, how do you actually translate that into every
Speaker 4: day living with you know, ten fifteen percent more focus,
Speaker 4: more happiness, more energy, And these are the real things
Speaker 4: that move the need a ultimately, And so for me,
Speaker 4: the cold showers are a wonderful place to start. And
Speaker 4: what I'm trying to say here is you don't need
Speaker 4: to go to the extreme to reap the reward, right,
Speaker 4: It's very good to become inspired. I was very inspired
Speaker 4: by some of the things that I was seeing out
Speaker 4: there at the time, but I've had to unlearn a
Speaker 4: lot of that over the years to really figure out
Speaker 4: how do I actually create lasting, sustainable, positive impact on
Speaker 4: myself and the people I work with, right without sort
Speaker 4: of blowing the kennel on both ends and things like that.
Speaker 3: And so.
Speaker 4: Look, it's become very commercially available today as well, the
Speaker 4: ice bathing, which is super powerful. We started a bit
Speaker 4: of a revolution in Australia with people doing it on
Speaker 4: the beach every morning and organizing these community type events,
Speaker 4: and that is really a wonderful thing if you can
Speaker 4: find yourself a weekly opportunity to do an I spot
Speaker 4: and the science has actually shown that you only need
Speaker 4: to do it for about two minutes as well. In fact,
Speaker 4: from about three minutes to five minutes onwards, there's a
Speaker 4: potential for diminishing returns. Oh really, So again, if we
Speaker 4: want to harness the natural high and the positive energy, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's actually important that we do it in a really
Speaker 4: sustainable way. Then maybe you challenge yourself every now and then.
Speaker 4: But I say to people, if you can have a
Speaker 4: cold shower every day right without negotiation, that is such
Speaker 4: a wonderful place to begin, you know, if you can
Speaker 4: turn that and you reckon two minutes, yeah, so you know,
Speaker 4: and if you need to build up, so we often
Speaker 4: say begin with thirty seconds at the end. To be
Speaker 4: totally honest, I found that the less you negotiate, the better.
Speaker 4: And so just learning to spend about a week crossing
Speaker 4: that initial hurdle and yeah, just get right on there
Speaker 4: that just step into it full force and learn to
Speaker 4: control your breath in that situation, and you're gain so
Speaker 4: much more from that than very like dipping the toe
Speaker 4: in the water, is my experience, this is training ground
Speaker 4: for your breath, right, which is really potent and powerful.
Speaker 4: And so learning to control your breath is such a
Speaker 4: powerful thing. And if you give yourself that stimulus to
Speaker 4: learn to like if you intentionally take your breath away,
Speaker 4: like life will on different points, you now are teaching
Speaker 4: yourself to also control it in the moment that it
Speaker 4: is out of your control. Nasal breathing is a really
Speaker 4: key skill here. You would know about this right from
Speaker 4: the performance elements, and nasal breathing has incredible benefits for
Speaker 4: human health, and one of the key factors is for
Speaker 4: emotional and nervous system regulation. Your nasal breathing is signaling
Speaker 4: to your body that you're in a state of safety.
Speaker 4: Another thing that can do that, which is a way
Speaker 4: to trick the brain into a state of relaxation. It's
Speaker 4: a bit of an evolutionary Bypolse is that your brain
Speaker 4: spies on your breathing, and so if you start breathing
Speaker 4: in a manner of relaxation, your brain starts to believe
Speaker 4: that you are in a manner of relaxation, regardless of
Speaker 4: what it is perceiving on the outside. And that's by
Speaker 4: lengthening your exhalations. So if you can breathe in through
Speaker 4: your nose and have a really slow, long exl through
Speaker 4: your mouth to begin with maybe blowing out a candle
Speaker 4: or through a stroll. That is a really good tech.
Speaker 4: Need to start in an overtime learning to count. We
Speaker 4: found that a one two breath, which is an in
Speaker 4: hell for about three seconds or four seconds and an
Speaker 4: exl for double the time, about six or eight is
Speaker 4: a really powerful technique that you can do anywhere, anytime.
Speaker 4: And if you reinforce this in a place like a
Speaker 4: cold shower or an eye bath, or you know, a
Speaker 4: difficult interview or really like whatever it is you're learning,
Speaker 4: you're teaching your system to stay you know, in the
Speaker 4: driver's seat in those situations. Even usually you can extend
Speaker 4: it further then and really learn that breath control and
Speaker 4: learn to I mean the breath is. There are no
Speaker 4: ends to this, right, I'm only ten years into this practice,
Speaker 4: and these tools are very real, and they're very tangible,
Speaker 4: and you can do it on your own. They're relatively free.
Speaker 4: You can find a good instructor. Yeah, yeah, and so
Speaker 4: do it on your freeman. It's the air that you breathe.
Speaker 4: It's your God given right and you know, back to
Speaker 4: the original discussion, it is also your connection with mother nature.
Speaker 4: It is the thing that will bridge your head on
Speaker 4: your heart and ultimately right the trees are exhaling all
Speaker 4: the carbon dioxide and they're taking the air that we
Speaker 4: breathe out and recycling it back to us. And I
Speaker 4: think even that gentle reminder of like, wow, you know
Speaker 4: I am one with nature in this moment. If I
Speaker 4: connect to my breath in a conscious way, is it
Speaker 4: can shift any thought into a more positive one, right,
Speaker 4: It can shift any state into a more optimalm one.
Speaker 2: And you mentioned that when you know, this sort of
Speaker 2: epiphany happened when you realize that you were, you know,
Speaker 2: controlling your breathing, you're doing the choo therapy stuff. How
Speaker 2: did that change your life and what did you go
Speaker 2: on to achieve after Whether that was you know, connecting
Speaker 2: with the pelino, how did that, how did that change
Speaker 2: your journey moving forward?
Speaker 4: Yeah, look, I won't lie. I think in the first
Speaker 4: couple of years there was an element of it bolstering
Speaker 4: my bravado. Right as soon as I got my life
Speaker 4: back on track and the breathing was giving me this
Speaker 4: amazing like it was almost like I was stepping into
Speaker 4: a source that everybody should have had as to this.
Speaker 4: You know, here I am and the disease that I
Speaker 4: had encountered him my God went away without me taking
Speaker 4: any type of medication or intervention. That was the thing
Speaker 4: that really blew my mind. My concentration started to significantly
Speaker 4: improve to the point where I could now execute tasket.
Speaker 4: It seemed insurmountable for me beforehand with little effort, right,
Speaker 4: and I started to get this natural energy, this natural high,
Speaker 4: and you know, and then it was of course I
Speaker 4: started to learn from wim Hoff. I traveled over the
Speaker 4: world to learn from him. Eventually we worked with him,
Speaker 4: and that went very quick. Within six months of me
Speaker 4: being an instructor, we stood on stage in Sydney in
Speaker 4: front of a thousand people and here I am banging
Speaker 4: my chest without my shirt on and getting people to breathe.
Speaker 4: And this was the energy of whim right. And it
Speaker 4: was like that energy that had been stifled for so
Speaker 4: long had now been given a channel, right, and the
Speaker 4: world was listening. Breath work became incredibly popular. Women's largely
Speaker 4: to thank for that in this time, but I wrote
Speaker 4: the wave of it, you know, and there was a
Speaker 4: lot of you know, we did hundreds of workshops. I
Speaker 4: traveled all around the country to teach people, and people
Speaker 4: were listening, you know. Eventually we have a retreat center
Speaker 4: now in the snowy mountains. I know that you're familiar
Speaker 4: with dairy as well. I know back in twenty nineteen
Speaker 4: twenty you were there, when I was also there, we
Speaker 4: would have almost crossed baths, and so yeah, we started
Speaker 4: to train people how to use these methods, and again,
Speaker 4: like the world was listening, you know. And we now
Speaker 4: have clients and major corporations. We teach at government level,
Speaker 4: and we have brought this into high schools and primary
Speaker 4: schools and so it's become a really wonderful, wonderful field
Speaker 4: of work. And the breath work today is what I
Speaker 4: am most passionate about. We've published two research papers now
Speaker 4: and we've got two more in the making. In the
Speaker 4: process and the research that we're doing and that is
Speaker 4: happening around the world is almost revolutionizing our understanding of
Speaker 4: what well being actually means. And we're using a lot
Speaker 4: of different language. It's now physiology is becoming more important
Speaker 4: than psychology. People are starting to recognize that, hey, wait,
Speaker 4: if I can actually learn to listen and read the
Speaker 4: state of my body, that is a bottom up form
Speaker 4: of processing that can bypass the level of cognition. And
Speaker 4: it's almost a shortcut to improving my well being and
Speaker 4: my state of being in that sense, and also in
Speaker 4: the research we found just the state of the world.
Speaker 4: So one of the statistics was that since the pandemic,
Speaker 4: it was already sky high before that, anxiety levels are
Speaker 4: up by about thirty percent and they're only rising right,
Speaker 4: and the traditional forms of treatment are falling short. So
Speaker 4: when people do seek help for their mental health, very
Speaker 4: much like myself, there's three mainstay forms of treatment available
Speaker 4: to them.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: There's psychotherapy often mixed with drug therapy, which is medication,
Speaker 4: and then there's cognitive behavioral therapy, which has become fully
Speaker 4: integrated into clinical care in the last ten years. Only
Speaker 4: ten to twenty percent of people that seek help for
Speaker 4: things like depression, anxiety, the list goes on, are finding
Speaker 4: that their needs are met, and a lot of those people,
Speaker 4: we've got eighty to ninety percent of them simply falling
Speaker 4: through the cracks like myself. Also, and this is where
Speaker 4: we believe in our sort of hypothesis, is that breath
Speaker 4: has a significant role to play here. It is easily scalable, right,
Speaker 4: you can teach it to them asses. We've got a
Speaker 4: research project with Macquarie UNI at the moment where we've
Speaker 4: gone one step further and we've gone can a simple
Speaker 4: breathing recording?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: I do not even need to be there to teach you.
Speaker 4: It's simply a track of half an hour similar to
Speaker 4: the experience that I went through that thousands of people
Speaker 4: are going to listen to without any idea of what
Speaker 4: breathwork is. Will they have similar experience? Meaning can we
Speaker 4: even remove the element of that There's almost no cost here.
Speaker 4: It's incredibly scalable, it's incredibly effective, it works in a
Speaker 4: really short space of time, and I find personally it's
Speaker 4: incredibly empowering. And this is my honest opinion is this
Speaker 4: is for everybody. I know it's not everybody's cup of
Speaker 4: tea the way that it is often delivered, but there
Speaker 4: is a way that everybody can benefit from a conscious
Speaker 4: form of breathing. And again that lights me up to
Speaker 4: think about how do we translate this to people in corporations,
Speaker 4: to you know, high performers, first responders, to school.
Speaker 2: Teacher, everyone the thing about it to bet if you
Speaker 2: want to better your life and better you too, it's
Speaker 2: like everybody. This fits the human race, right, let's call
Speaker 2: it what it is and you've got you're the founder
Speaker 2: of Breathless Expeditions. Just talk to me about that and
Speaker 2: how we can jump on board with yourself. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, and this is you know, this has been the
Speaker 4: beautiful project really the last eight years or so since starting,
Speaker 4: and we essentially open the retreat center and also a
Speaker 4: training center, and we run trips around the world. So
Speaker 4: we do free diving expeditions to some of the most
Speaker 4: beautiful places in the world where people learn how to
Speaker 4: use their breath and how to scale the debts. We
Speaker 4: do mountain expeditions where we take people into these extreme
Speaker 4: environments and it's not only for extreme sports though, in fact,
Speaker 4: most of the people that we get are not usually
Speaker 4: interested in that type of thing, but are looking for
Speaker 4: a challenge that they can learn to surmount right to
Speaker 4: climb that inner peak, if you will. And then the
Speaker 4: training and the corporate work. What we do is what
Speaker 4: I'm very passionate about and what I had and so
Speaker 4: essentially it's a breath for company. We're currently we trent
Speaker 4: five ninred instructors in these methods and we're helping to
Speaker 4: scale that quite rapidly worldwide to really make this work
Speaker 4: available to anyone anywhere and really lift the standard of
Speaker 4: education in this field as well. And that is a
Speaker 4: big journey to be on because it is still new.
Speaker 4: It's a very new space. People have lots of different
Speaker 4: opinions about what breathing exercises mean, how it should work.
Speaker 4: There's still a lot of work to be done before
Speaker 4: this is fully integrated into things like clinical care. But
Speaker 4: we're working on that very hard at the moment, and
Speaker 4: I think some of the research that we do is
Speaker 4: incredibly exciting.
Speaker 2: So mate, listen, we're going to finish up on that
Speaker 2: because that's amazing. Thank you ever so much for joining me.
Speaker 2: I could have listened to you for hours. I can
Speaker 2: relate to what you're saying. I've experienced it on a
Speaker 2: lower scale, on a smaller scale. I'm definitely connected with myself.
Speaker 2: I like to think that I know myself and the
Speaker 2: essence of living is through breathing. And I look forward May.
Speaker 2: I'm really excited to see where you go. You're so
Speaker 2: young still, you're thirty years old, you knowing to see
Speaker 2: how much you're going to develop in another ten years
Speaker 2: and then another twenty years. You know, the world's at
Speaker 2: your feet, and hopefully people will follow you, mate, and
Speaker 2: jump on board because it's something that will change.
Speaker 3: Their lives like it's changed yours. Thank you for coming on, mate, Thanks.
Speaker 4: So much, so Welcome.
Speaker 2: To find out more about Johannes Egberts and his work,
Speaker 2: head to Breathless Expeditions dot com. I'll put the link
Speaker 2: in the show notes. Thanks for listening to this episode
Speaker 2: of Headgame. If you found this conversation as meaningful as
Speaker 2: I did.
Speaker 3: Why not share it with a friend. I'm Att Middleton.
Speaker 3: See you on the next episode.