Speaker 1: Oh hello, welcome to Healthy Ish. Thanks for joining us
Speaker 1: on the daily podcast from Body and Soul. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Felicity Harley. Now, if you're a regular listener of this podcast,
Speaker 1: you will know that I recently went to Eden Health
Speaker 1: Retreat in crumb And Valley in Queensland and it was amazing.
Speaker 1: I came across a guy there. His name is Rich Muha.
Speaker 1: Actually Eden refers to him as a joy someone who
Speaker 1: is there throughout their guests entire stay. He is also
Speaker 1: a meditation and breathwork expert and he was pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: He is pretty amazing, and he joins me today to
Speaker 1: discuss the transformative power of breath work in managing your
Speaker 1: stressful day. Yes, listeners, I had to get him on
Speaker 1: the podcast to share his wisdom with you. Make sure
Speaker 1: you're listening to extra health Ish where he talks about
Speaker 1: finding the right breathwork technique for you. Yes, that one
Speaker 1: you might have got from TikTok might actually be raising
Speaker 1: your stress levels rather than lowering them. Anyway, you can
Speaker 1: grab that episode where we get your podcasts. Rich, thank
Speaker 1: you for joining us on Healthy Today. Oh as much
Speaker 1: as I wish we were still at Eden, we are not.
Speaker 2: Pleasure. Thanks for having.
Speaker 1: Now I want to talk to you about well breath
Speaker 1: work to implement into our chaotic days. I mean, it
Speaker 1: really is the secret to finding calm in the chaos.
Speaker 1: Talk to us about how we can use breath to
Speaker 1: counteract stress.
Speaker 2: The one of thinking about breath is it something that
Speaker 2: we've got at our disposal at really any moment of
Speaker 2: the day, a lot of it. In the times, I
Speaker 2: might try to schedule so much timicide the train, I
Speaker 2: need to go and do that for fifteen minutes, or
Speaker 2: do that for twenty minutes to calm down. But now
Speaker 2: by virtue as simply how we're using the inhal and
Speaker 2: xt how I can really radically start to induce the
Speaker 2: state of arm is basically driving the sympathy which that
Speaker 2: flight flying and also the rest and digest that path
Speaker 2: sympathetic ape by virtue of the inhale and the exhale,
Speaker 2: by ship those energy elements into how much we bring
Speaker 2: into my inhale or how much we bring to my
Speaker 2: exhale can really just in a very fast period of
Speaker 2: time have an immediate impact on the body. So we
Speaker 2: can really start to induce they can't. And if we
Speaker 2: want to do that we have longer exhalation and shorter inhalations,
Speaker 2: which is kind of the opposite to what we've often
Speaker 2: been told the past. Okay, it takes some deep breaths
Speaker 2: you stress, deep breathed breathe. I was working with a
Speaker 2: lady recently and she was telling about her when the
Speaker 2: kids are watching that, and she's feeling that heightened the
Speaker 2: sticking and feeling the stress building and the kids going
Speaker 2: on his mum about to explow, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: she just breathing. It's really and it sends you a
Speaker 2: way out of the edge versus what we should be
Speaker 2: doing is trying to soften the breath and have those deeper, longer, slower,
Speaker 2: gentler exiles, and that can really just the signals straight
Speaker 2: to the brain. We're okay because it's quite fast, and
Speaker 2: when we think about it, when we kind of heighten
Speaker 2: our stress, our breath patent will emulate that. And when
Speaker 2: we look back to your biological evolution, no one has
Speaker 2: ever run from the line going no. It could be
Speaker 2: a really fast way to calibrate the nervous system.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's when you were talking about it, I
Speaker 1: was just thinking like, this is almost like a magic pill.
Speaker 1: I mean, how has it taken so long to appreciate
Speaker 1: and understand that we can change our state with the
Speaker 1: simple breadth.
Speaker 2: I think we've been spending like one hundred years looking
Speaker 2: for a magic pill. Yeah, but a lot of the
Speaker 2: science it's not in a lot of the studies. Breath.
Speaker 2: This stuff has been taught for thousands of years, and unfortunately,
Speaker 2: I think it's kind of been tainted in a lot
Speaker 2: of our conceptual frameworks with that that no called a
Speaker 2: spiritual element, which won't deter people from approaching it, and
Speaker 2: then before they've looked at it from or can you
Speaker 2: give me something from a medicine route that can calm me?
Speaker 2: But after one hundred years of the Western model medicine,
Speaker 2: which I deep livery as well, and I study in
Speaker 2: that state. But yet by virtue of getting greater understanding
Speaker 2: of the nervous system, we've gone, oh wow, inhalation sympathetic,
Speaker 2: exhalation parasympathetic, And there in lies a really radical thing.
Speaker 2: But our challenge rop and calumns when we're in that
Speaker 2: heightened state to go, oh, hold on, I can do
Speaker 2: something quickly rather than learning that carry us on. So
Speaker 2: it's very much in the essence of magic pill, because
Speaker 2: we can start to escalate downregulate just by virtue of
Speaker 2: doing that. But it's a mat of tune our awareness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's the question. How do we do that
Speaker 1: when we're all riled up, or we're you know, reading
Speaker 1: all the emails coming in, or our kids are nagging
Speaker 1: at us, and we're trying to get a door, and
Speaker 1: how can we get better at going okay, I just
Speaker 1: need to take a few breaths.
Speaker 2: Initially, it's going to be one of those things you
Speaker 2: might start trying to tune into that where you're not
Speaker 2: in such a heightened state. So you might be going
Speaker 2: down the road and you're seeing a few cars piling
Speaker 2: up and rather than okay, this in the past might
Speaker 2: have irritated me, maybe if I just starting slowing my
Speaker 2: breath right down and some slightly longer exhalation starting to
Speaker 2: bring some awarenes for that. So therefore we start practicing
Speaker 2: that for where we are in those highly escalated moments,
Speaker 2: we can go, ah, I know what to do now
Speaker 2: because they have been practicing. But it's pretty you know,
Speaker 2: we can't really consider that I'm going to be also,
Speaker 2: I know this now, and therefore when I am going nuclear.
Speaker 2: I can automatically stop and switch that. But it's not
Speaker 2: just state it. After a short period of time, the
Speaker 2: brain goes, now, I've got something I can do. So
Speaker 2: it's really just tuning the awareness and just practice.
Speaker 1: What sort of breath sequence do you do when you're
Speaker 1: in the midst of I mean, you're pretty chill that guy,
Speaker 1: so I'm not sure you actually get chaotic. But is
Speaker 1: there anything that as sequence that you go to that.
Speaker 2: That Here's the funny thing there, because when we look
Speaker 2: at some of the scientific studies that there's a well
Speaker 2: known breadth of the mark call the physiological skye which
Speaker 2: Stanford was studying, which is saying that five minutes of
Speaker 2: this the equivalent of a twenty minute monthful his meditation
Speaker 2: and so on, And that's where you're basically taken in
Speaker 2: helm another little sit followed by a really soft, spiced,
Speaker 2: really long, gentle sigh, and for me, that works. I've
Speaker 2: done this. I often when I'm working people is a
Speaker 2: pulse oximeter reading where I'm checking their heart rate, their
Speaker 2: block oxygen saturation. But for some people that's actually I found,
Speaker 2: oh my gosh, that's actually increasing their heart rate. That
Speaker 2: should be decreasing it. So this is where it gets
Speaker 2: a little bit learning our own nervous systems. So I
Speaker 2: did have a situation the other day where I had
Speaker 2: a phone call, and it was a confronted, confrontational phone call,
Speaker 2: and I'm going, oh my god, I can feel my
Speaker 2: heart spiked right up. I remember that feeling, and by chance,
Speaker 2: I had my pulse oximeter plug it on my finger,
Speaker 2: and my heart rates spiked up to over eighty, which
Speaker 2: for me simulating a stressous bodies and sympathetic of ours
Speaker 2: or there's a line just behind me, I'm thinking. And
Speaker 2: so by awareness to that, I just did two of
Speaker 2: those breath patterns of the.
Speaker 1: So that's just one. So a breath in and then
Speaker 1: a sip and then a long out so.
Speaker 2: Along there and followed by a little top up followed
Speaker 2: by a really soft and again with think two breaths.
Speaker 2: My heart rate dropped down to sixty. Wow, that's miraculous,
Speaker 2: straight into oh my god. And if I didn't let
Speaker 2: bring myself down, I know those tools I'm now doing
Speaker 2: in those one and that heightened state, But there's no
Speaker 2: line here I can downregulate, de escalate, so I don't
Speaker 2: continue to carry on and stresses. But for others, as
Speaker 2: I said, that might you know that breath might be
Speaker 2: a bit of a spiker. Found there's the other ones
Speaker 2: or seven eight where you breathe in for four whole
Speaker 2: for seven out for eight, which is really just that longer,
Speaker 2: slower exhalation. That's also a nice one, and there there's
Speaker 2: a few different ones, but again it's really not because
Speaker 2: it's just if you've got a heart rate monitor, just
Speaker 2: to start going with like the infra four hole the
Speaker 2: seven out eight and does it work for you? Try
Speaker 2: that physiological side? Does that work for you? Because depending
Speaker 2: on what's called someone's sensibity carbon dioxide that might influence
Speaker 2: doing a hold, might like that seventh holding for seven
Speaker 2: mone just a bit of a thing a panic as well.
Speaker 2: So despite knowing that these work for some people, they're
Speaker 2: not ideal. And this is the complicated of our individual
Speaker 2: nervous systems. There's techniques. But even if you're just sitting
Speaker 2: there and those two feel like they're triggering, you just
Speaker 2: stop in and really just letting air softly fall out.
Speaker 2: Just longer exhalations, gentle inhalations, gentle exhalations that's slightly longer
Speaker 2: on the XR and that can work better than the
Speaker 2: others for certain people. So there's no one specific answer
Speaker 2: that I can provide, and that's just through work with
Speaker 2: one hundreds of people and going no, that didn't work
Speaker 2: for them, that worked for that, which has been really interesting.
Speaker 2: She went side this is the breath everyone. Jambillings just like, yeah.
Speaker 1: That's actually a really good point. I haven't really heard
Speaker 1: of that before. But I suppose you know how you've
Speaker 1: been working Eden for a while and no doubt, have
Speaker 1: come across many people's struggles. What have you learned? What
Speaker 1: has it kind of taught you being that amazing breath
Speaker 1: work guy at Eden.
Speaker 2: Well, what's funny is what led me to breathwork was
Speaker 2: I've primarily been teaching meditation full time for seventy years
Speaker 2: that my businesses came down this route, and then I
Speaker 2: was working that state of finding some people still they're
Speaker 2: meditating good, good, but they're going out with or breath patterns,
Speaker 2: and I just start to identify this sort of blending
Speaker 2: mix that hold on. I'm teaching them how to chill,
Speaker 2: but then they're going out breathing poorly. And then so
Speaker 2: that's in fresh response because how we're breathing does simulate
Speaker 2: stress in the modern world, and that's what led me
Speaker 2: to go deeper down these channels and working with the
Speaker 2: buying people having it's just really fascinate s what can
Speaker 2: set up our environment and even though there's sometimes no
Speaker 2: logic there, we're not feeling I didn't have a specific
Speaker 2: all this and that, but different nervous systems just remarkable.
Speaker 2: The different currents are therefore the different outcomes. Despite everything
Speaker 2: on the outside lining up perfectly, the insides of out
Speaker 2: of alignment and therefore we're going to get physiological states
Speaker 2: which reflect that. So it's been really beautiful just to
Speaker 2: work people from all walks of life and just to
Speaker 2: have them go, oh my god, like I didn't realize
Speaker 2: I've been My year leader has been jammed towards sympathetic
Speaker 2: quite flight response because we've normalized that, especially in the
Speaker 2: world we're living in, and by virtue of just some
Speaker 2: really beautiful practices are orientating around breath to be able
Speaker 2: to pull that back to that parasympathetic state unsafe. So
Speaker 2: that's kind of the one thing that's really taught me
Speaker 2: is that a lot of our nervous systems don't feel safe,
Speaker 2: and despite the fact that we've got Okay, I'm sitting
Speaker 2: at here, and of course I feel safe. That slight
Speaker 2: pattern that we've always been living in, we're just been
Speaker 2: normalizing it and so by down regularly amount people go.
Speaker 2: I didn't know I could feel that way. I'm like God,
Speaker 2: and so that's been really beautiful to watch him with us.
Speaker 1: Well, Rich, thank you for joining us on healthy Ish.
Speaker 2: That's a pleaders. Thanks you for having me.
Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for listening to this a chat with Hich.
Speaker 1: Hopefully he gave you some breathwork tools to implement into
Speaker 1: your day. And also if you do want to train
Speaker 1: out in person, you can find him at Eden. Oh
Speaker 1: such a magnificent place. Anyway, I won't give it any
Speaker 1: more plugs, but I love my time there. I will
Speaker 1: leave the link to well Eden and Rich in the
Speaker 1: show notes. Anything else, head to Body and Soul dot
Speaker 1: com dot you follow us on socials, grab our print
Speaker 1: edition which is out in your local Sunday paper, and
Speaker 1: until tomorrow, we happy breathing and stay healthy ish