Join the conversation with Dr. Cory Ostroot and Jessica Waala, owners of The Healing Couple, as we discuss what breathwork is, the healing benefits of breathwork, how respiratory patterns are associated with emotions, and so much more. Dr. Cory and Jessica dedicate their time teaching people Reset Breathwork and training others to be breathwork teachers. Breathwork can help us regulate our emotions and nervous system and have better relationship outcomes. Reset Breathwork is a workout for the soul, diving deep inside to help release emotions and let go of all that we store inside.
If you are interested in learning more about Reset Breathwork, The Healing Couple is offering a free virtual course, by visiting: https://thehealingcouple.com/events/ and using promo code: Breath100. Let them know you learned about it on Physician Health Thyself The Podcast. Take the course to help you create transformation in your life today! It’s free and has zero risk!
To get in contact with The Healing Couple, visit Instagram: thehealingcouple_ or their website: https://thehealingcouple.com/
Podcast Episode 38
Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole person approach to your wellbeing, spirit, soul, and body. Join me your host, Dr. Ana Lara, nature pathic, doctor, entrepreneur, and a servant of Jesus Christ. We are not just a body. We are spirit and soul. It’s time to integrate medicine and spirituality into our healing. Let’s get started. Welcome back to Physician Heal Theyself, the podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Alara, and today we’re going to be talking about breathwork and we have Dr. Corey Sru joining us. And Jessica Walla, they’re known as The Healing Couple, so please help me welcome Dr. Corey and Jessica.
Thank you so much. We’re excited to be here.
Yeah, very excited. I’m excited for you guys to be here. This is a topic that has been asked a lot in my practice. What are the different things that I could do with breathwork? Interestingly, during 2020, during Covid, I taught many of my patients how to breathe. And that sounds a little silly sometimes for people who don’t understand breathwork. And so I would get home and my husband would be like, well, how was your day? I say, well, I taught a lot of people how to breathe today. And explaining what that really means. We often hold our breath under moments of stress, frustration, or anger. So I’m excited to have you both here. I see you guys as the experts in this area. Tell us a little about yourself, Dr. Corey and Jessica, and what brought you to do this work?
Oh my gosh, that’s a story and a half. I think we can rewind about eight years, and I had a private practice up in Scottsdale, Arizona. Funny enough, how we connected was her uncle did the build out on one of my medical centers up there. So we got connected through that mutual family member. And it was just one of those things where you meet somebody and you’re like, you’re my person. I don’t know. I felt that way.
I was like, she’s the one, mom. I was doing that phone call. I was like, she’s the one. She’s the one. You weren’t so sure for good reasons, but we essentially developed a relationship around healing and wellness. And there were so many aspects that I can talk to about breathwork itself. But what really blew my mind open is I was experimenting a lot with psychedelics at the time in med school, believe it or not, and getting into the biochemistry, the physiology. Dr. Joe Defor is one of my mentors. At the time, he was running a retreat center in Nwe Rao in Iquitos, Peru, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. And I was just having such a transformational experience with those plant medicines. Fast forward a few years, knowing Jessica, being in a relationship with her, she wanted to become a yoga teacher.
I was like, interesting. Okay. And so we were doing long distance. I was in Phoenix, she was in San Diego, and we’d have those late night chats where it’s like we both had our full days. Let’s just keep the phone on. Sometimes, we’d fall asleep talking just so that we could connect. I was learning about your yoga teacher training at the time, and one of the aspects of it was breathwork. And I was like, oh, I’ve done breathwork before. I’ve done pranayama techniques and even some Wim Hof stuff and I was well versed in it. So she was sharing with me over the phone. I became an eagle, and I was flying through the sky and I was releasing all these emotions and I was like, wait, hold up. You were just breathing. You were just breathing.
My doctor thought that she was taking something that she was not aware of. I don’t know if they’re air freshening over her while she’s breathing, but I need to learn more about this. Fast forward, she wanted to do teacher training, and I was like, sign me up. Sign me up. And so I went and I could talk about a lot of details, but just to really fast forward to the experience, I gave it a hundred percent and I really just breathed my ass off. And at the end of it, I popped up like a deer in headlights, going, what? WTF? What just happened? I’m on plant medicine without the plant medicine. I need to learn more. And that’s what really began my journey in breathwork that you guys see today.
I love that. What about you, Jessica? Yeah, I will even rewind before I met Corey because my breathwork journey started around 2011, and at the time, it was where I was really stressed out. I was high-stricken and wasn’t sleeping much and not taking care of myself because I thought that was just part of the journey to success: you just work hard, you grind, and you do whatever it takes. You completely sacrifice everything and it takes a toll on your health. I was just like, oh, that’s just normal. And that’s what I saw a lot of people around me do. I didn’t think twice about it. Some of my friends started to get into breathwork and they’re like, you should try it. I’m like, I don’t have time for that. I breathe all the time, whatever.
I poo-pooed it for the longest time. But I saw how calm they were, I saw how happy they were. I was like, I could use some of that because here I was just like, go, go, go, go. Hustle, hustle, hustle. And it was to the point where in 2010, the reason why I was even open to it in 2011 was because in 2010, I got diagnosed with epilepsy. I started having grand mal seizures because of high stress and sleep deprivation. And what was interesting is that my doctors, even though they boil it down to my lifestyle, there was no discussion about my lifestyle and how I could improve it. It was take this pill twice a day and off you go. So nothing changed. I just kept going the way that I was going and I was taking a drug. And so then in 2011, a year later after that, I was like, you know what? I’m going to give this a shot. Because I had been hearing about breathwork for my friends. Meditation was starting to become more popular. I grew up in the Midwest, where this stuff is not really very normal and talked about.
But I knew that there was research coming out on meditation and the positive effects on the brain. And so I was like with the epilepsy, I was like, what do I have to lose? I think that’s really key when it comes to practices like this. It might seem a little bit out there. It’s like, well, what do you have to lose? Just try it.
That’s when my whole life changed when I tried breathwork, because one of my very first experiences when I dove into it, I came out and well, during it, I should say, I started laughing and this was a long journey and I just started laughing and I was like, I don’t even how I’m laughing right now. I just kept laughing and laughing and laughing and I heard this voice that said, Jess, this is what true joy feels like. I was like, oh my gosh. Because for the longest time, I thought that the success, the accolades, the grades being at the top of my class, all these things, I thought that that’s what would equal happiness. And I was like, wow, I can access that just inside of me, all of that that I’m looking for and chasing is right here. The breath allowed me to come back to myself and back within, like, oh, I don’t need to look out there.
I can look in here. The breath helps us to do that. It guides us to that place. So then, when I met Corey, I was getting deeper into that with my yoga teacher training and specifically in breathwork. I knew I wanted to do that because it had helped me so much on a physical level with epilepsy to the point where now I am seizure free and medication free and breathwork has been a huge component of my healing journey. It’s also helped me emotionally, mentally, so many things where I’m like, I have to share this. It would be if I kept this to myself and I didn’t help people around me, but there was always this part of me that’s like, well, that’s not a real job. Could you really make a living doing that? That’s where teaching people to breathe.
That was very present for a while. I was like, oh, I’m just going to go into research. My background’s in psychology, just do what’s practical, do what’s logical, but just keep you hear those whispers, we all have those whispers, whatever that might be, and it just kept getting louder and louder and louder. This is what you’re meant to do. You’ve got to share this with people and trust that you’ll find a way to make a living and make a business out of that. So when I met Corey and decided I’m really going to go all in with this, he was the missing piece of the puzzle for me, whereas I didn’t realize back then that we were meant to do this together. Now, here we are as the healing couple, doing this as our full-time work and also having a certification program where we now teach other people how to share it with their communities. That’s been the greatest gift.
Wow, amazing. That’s amazing. Thank you for sharing that. How old were you, Jessica, when you started having the health issues and then went into the breathwork?
Yeah, I was 19 when I had my first grand mal seizure. I was a freshman in college and then I got diagnosed in 2010.
I asked about the age because I want our viewers to know that regardless of your age, it’s important that we start to make wise life decisions. And you’re absolutely right. I can relate to your story regarding how we’re raised in a society that works hard. If you want to succeed, you must sacrifice sleep and keep pushing and pushing and climb the ladder to success. That was one of my eighth grade mottos in school. Climb the ladder to success, try harder, try your best, something like that, that Ryan. And so we do push ourselves to a point at a very young age, especially right now, we see people that’s the modern American lifestyle is drive yourself to the grave at a very young age. And so I still feel as much as we see in social media and a lot more people talking about the effects of stress on the body, but I still feel like there’s so much that’s missing to really allow people to see the correlation of what it actually does and how it manifests.
We always think it’s food and it’s not always the food. It’s our lifestyle. Are we slowing down to find joy in those small moments of life? I want to read this because though this program is designed, it is designed to talk about the spiritual aspect from a Christian perspective. I’m always willing to have other people with different perspectives to come in and for both of us to learn. But in the book of Genesis chapter two, verse seven, it says, then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.
The man became a living being. So this breath, I mean, God created us and some people don’t feel comfortable with God and I get that, but there is a creator of everything, and there was one creator for everything for us, and he created us very intentionally. I always tell my patients, isn’t it amazing that I explain the red blood cell and how there’s iron, iron, a metal inside us. It’s in the elements, but it’s inside of us too, and it’s important to be there. And we know people who are iron deficient. When they’re iron deficient, what do they feel?
They’re dizzy, lightheaded, maybe ringing in their ears. I explained the reason you need iron: because oxygen, which is the halogen, is binding to that iron, and that’s delivering oxygen into the rest of the body. So why is breathing important from a physiological standpoint, Dr. Corey?
So I mean, there’s so many reasons, right? It really comes down to you. The biggest thing to talk about is what you mentioned in the beginning of the podcast is most people aren’t breathing. And what do we actually mean by that? Most people breathe shallowly up in their chest using what your upper respiratory muscles are. This neglects one of the body’s biggest muscles, the diaphragm. And if you ever want to get familiar with your stress levels, really get to know the diaphragm because it is one of the body’s biggest muscles. There’s actually a lot of innervation nerves in the diaphragm that are directly related to your physiological state, essentially your stressed state.
So if you’re not working that muscle, and the diaphragm is amazing too because it activates the lower part of the lungs. It can actually create a very relaxed state within your body. And so we always say the breath and lungs is like a two-way street. Most people are breathing based upon their emotional state, so it’s like, I feel anxious, so I’m going to breathe anxious and do that unconsciously. That’s a two-way street. You can actually breathe as a relaxed, confident, calm person using your diaphragm, breathing with your whole lung field, not just the top of your lungs. And you can create that emotional state. So it doesn’t matter where you’re from, what you’ve done, what kind of emotions or trauma that has impacted you, you can actually come back, use a breathing technique to determine how you want to feel. And if you do that over and over and over again, not only does that become a habit, but that becomes a behavior that becomes an identity that becomes a state of being, and that’s the kind of work that we’re in.
Nice, nice. Anything you want to add to that? Yeah, I mean, to expand on the breadth of our emotions being a two-way street, there was this research study that was done, this two part study where it looked at whether this is true? Can our breath? So when people think like, oh, it’s kind of hokey pokey with breathwork, it’s like, well, let’s really look at it. Let’s do the research and look at different emotions. So they had the first group of participants watch different videos, different images to evoke certain emotions like anger, happiness, sadness, and then they recorded their respiratory patterns.
They’re like, okay. What they found was that there were certain respiratory patterns that were associated with those emotions across the board and among participants. Sadness, there’s a very distinct respiratory pattern with that and so on. Okay, so that’s interesting. We can see that there’s a relationship between our breath and our emotions.
But what got more interesting is the second part of the study where they had brand new participants and then they took the results from study one, those respiratory patterns, and they had these new participants breathe in this way. They didn’t know anything about what was going on in the study; but they just had them breathe with the breathing pattern associated with sadness, and then they asked them how they felt and what happened. They felt sadness or when they had them breathe in the respiratory pattern associated with happiness, they reported that they felt happy. So again, just to really expand on that two way street, so it no longer can we just allow our emotions to run the show, we actually have way more control over how we feel than we realize, and your breath is one of the quickest tools to be able actually to shift your emotional state. We try to think our way through it. I should be happier. I shouldn’t be so mad about this, but that doesn’t really work. We’ve got to go deeper than that.
What I really like about this conversation is the fact that it demonstrates that we have control of our emotional state by being in control of our breathing and breathing is the one thing that we can control, but people don’t acknowledge that cognitively I have control of my breathing. Yes, we’re doing it naturally right now, but we can be mindful of how we’re breathing and our respiratory pattern and so forth, and that can really shift a state of our emotional, of the emotional wellbeing that we’re in that situation instead of walking into an environment that might be highly anxious. I just thought of a thought. I remember in medical, I was all jolly. I studied, I felt very confident about my tests. I was doing breathing, not breathwork the way you guys do it. We’re going to talk about this a little bit later, actually next, but I was doing meditation and breathing exercises.
Some of the doctors had taught me how to do, and so I was very confident going into this classroom of 80, 90 people, and the moment I walked in, I felt like I walked into a fog of anxiety and immediately my physical body, I started to feel palpitations and anxiety and I’m like, what’s going on here? And I put my bag down and I left the room and I continued. I was walking and just breathing, doing my breathing exercises, and then my body just calmed down and I realized that was not me. That’s things anxiety they have. So some of us are big time feelers and we walk into a space and then sometimes we confuse our experience, emotional experience with other people’s emotional experience, thinking that it’s our stuff and it’s not. So I have to teach my patients to learn how to remove themselves from that. But doing the breathwork, I would assume that this would heighten your sense that you wouldn’t even have to leave the room to be able to regulate yourself. It would be ideal to just sit there and start doing some breathwork there that would help your system relax to say, okay, that’s not me, it’s them, and then still be able to be in this environment.
So with what we’re talking about, because there are different breathing techniques, those are short, like the box breathing, four second counts, you breathe in at four count and hold the breath at four seconds, exhale slowly at four counts and hold that exhalation at four counts. There are many of these techniques and they are one-sided. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between those breathing techniques versus breathwork?
Totally, yeah. I mean, my gosh, it’s a wild west with so many different techniques. But the way that we talk about, especially in our teacher training, is thinking about breathwork as an umbrella of techniques and they’re all at your disposal and so on one end of the umbrella are more of like you were talking about the short techniques, the box breathing, maybe even some mini breath holds. Most of those breath practices are meant to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your relax, digest, chill out nervous system. And so they’re good ones to do short in the car. If you’re stressed out, someone cuts you off, it’s like come back to your box breath in the middle of the umbrella, and these are more physiologic, and what I mean is they’re meant to ramp up your nervous system. They are meant to maybe even improve your cardiovascular performance and your VA two max.
Those would be more techniques like Wim Hof, the iceman, which is really popular. It’s really intense, shorter duration, five to 10 minutes of breathing, followed by some sort of meditation. Then on the other end of the umbrella, this is more of what me and Jessica are invested into, which is called transformational or long form breath journeys. There’s a bunch of different names for ’em, but essentially, it’s a conscious connected three-part breath practice. The reason for doing that is twofold: activating the full lung field, activating the diaphragm, also ramping up your nervous system. Most people, and this may be a little controversial, most people are actually chronically stressed, which they’ve heard about before, but you are in a sympathetic state, and so you would think, oh, if I’m in a sympathetic state, I should do the opposite.
That can be helpful, but very often at your nervous system kind of works like a thermometer. And so your set point is here all the time. Do small pranayama practices that may bring you down a little bit, but you’re going to go right back up to your set point because that’s where your nervous system has perceived the most safety. What Jessica and I believe is let’s utilize the power of the sympathetic nervous system. Let’s override what that thermostat says, that nervous system set point, and create an even stronger stimulus of a sympathetic response in a safe setting so that it directly contradicts your stress. What ends up happening is that the parasympathetic nervous system gets activated even stronger than it would ever been activated with a small technique. Then you acclimate to your new set point, and so you lower your stress threshold, or not your stress threshold, but your body’s perceived amount of stress and then you get a reset. So that’s why we call our breathwork reset. We’re really helping people reset their nervous system.
I like that. Having taken part of one of your workshops and experiencing that, I can see that that is true. It’s almost like letting the steam out because we are on a one to 10 scale of stress, 10 being the highest, maybe I’m a seven constantly all day, but I am kind of holding my shit together, just being real, just being real. I’m constantly like, okay, let’s keep the peace here and there, but this is a safe environment that I’m like F this. I’m just going to let it go all out and just release all of that tension that, let’s be honest, I don’t even care if it’s a Christian looking at this show. They feel these emotions and we suppress them. And in many areas of our life and many indoctrinations in our life, we’re taught to just hold it together. As women, we’re told that it’s not ladylike to be aggressive or angry, you should be soft spoken. Listen to my voice. It’s not soft. It’s never been soft. I’ve had people tell me, you sound like you’re very militant and commanding, and I say, thank you.
God gave me that voice. So, I can’t change who I am in that aspect. I can’t change other parts of me, but this is my voice and God gave it to me, so I’m going to use it. But yeah, this is a great opportunity for people just to let go without judgment,
Without being criticized and just feeling safe and letting it go because it’s not bad. Recently, I’ve been learning a lot from reading the Bible and spending time in the presence of Holy Spirit, and he’s guiding me and letting a lot of these emotions out and being okay with that. 20 years ago when I was 20 years old, there’s no way I would’ve been okay with showing emotions. It was more of a just be closed off and be strong. It seems like being strong is just shutting all this down, and that’s not true. We know that in medical school we learn that when we suppress one emotion, we suppress all of them, including the good ones. So how can you feel joy? How can you feel genuine love if you’re suppressing the anger and the sadness and the sorrow? We need to be able to feel them all, but how do we feel them and steward them in a responsible way that’s safe for us and for others? We don’t want to hurt anyone else, but this is a great place. So give kind of a little description of what the breathwork that you guys do. What does it look like when you’re doing them?
Yeah, so Corey said it’s called Reset breathwork, and it is intensive. We tell people ahead of time that this is not just going to be a gentle meditation and we’re going to take it slow. We are intentionally ramping up the sympathetic. I say it’s like a workout for your soul.
People know working out your body, but this is, we’re going to go in and we’re going to work stuff out inside. I love that you said it’s a chance to blow off steam. It’s a chance to release and let go of those things that we store inside. So, reset breathwork. What’s unique about it? Like Corey said, it’s under the umbrella of conscious connected breathwork, and there’s a number of different techniques even within that. But what makes Reset breathwork unique is that we combine affirmations during the practice. So we’re not just breathing, but you’re going to be saying affirmations with whether it’s us or one of our certified facilitators, are going to guide you at different points to say affirmations like, it is safe for me to let go. I am enough. It’s safe for me to be in my body because how many of us live up here in our mind.
So remember like, oh my gosh, okay, I had this body and it’s safe for me to be here. And that can be just saying that affirmation out loud can be really emotional for people, especially if you’ve experienced a lot of trauma or for whatever reason, it hasn’t felt safe to be in your own body or to be who you are. There are affirmations throughout the journey. It’s done lying down, and I intentionally say journey. It’s not just a practice; from start to finish, you go on a journey inward. We combine visualizations during reset breathwork too. So again, you’re not just breathing, but we’re guiding you through certain visuals, whether that’s climbing a mountain or floating in the ocean, but using the power of visualization and especially helping people with visualizing what they desire, visualizing their future. And it gives just enough food for the mind.
What’s so powerful at visualizations is, and with the brain is that our brain doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and imagined. When we close our eyes and see something, we see a vision, we see our most powerful self, the relationship we want, or the amount of money we want to make. Our brain doesn’t know the difference between those two. So bring the visuals with the breath. We’re shifting our emotions, and we bring the visuals. You come out and people come out of the journey. They’re just like, oh my God, I can do this. It’s real. It’s already happened. Now I just get to go do it in my reality, which is so powerful. And then also, we combine somatic release, so we encourage people to move and emote during this. Sometimes we got people to scream, to laugh, to actually blow off that steam and let those emotions out, actually let yourself express them rather than holding on and moving their physical body, moving the energy.
The last thing is that we use very specific music sequencing to build people up on the journey. We start low and slow, but then we build people up, ramp up that sympathetic nerve system to a new peak state. So there’s music throughout that experience to help people along that journey to also kind of help people keep it going. It can be challenging. It’s a workout for your soul. So the breathing itself is very simple. It’s all through the mouth. It’s one breath into the belly, one breath into the chest and out, and you’re doing it over and over and over again to start to bypass this, the monkey mind, the conscious mind, and get deeper into the body, into the subconscious.
Amazing, amazing. I know this is powerful stuff and it works. There are a couple things you said that came to mind: body awareness. How many people are unaware of what’s going on in their body and not even understand how their body works? So much less are they’re going to understand how they’re breathing, but it’s not unusual that we get patients. I get patients that they’re like, I feel tight here. I feel like someone’s strangling me. I feel, and it’s like, yeah, it’s all the stress and tension or the pain that they have in their body. It’s because of the stress that they’re, how they’re breathing or not breathing correctly. So it’s like helping people to understand that it’s okay to feel like the body was designed to feel. One of the trigger things that I hear people from different industries say, is to ignore or suppress the emotions or feelings. I think there’s a fine balance. Emotions and feelings. Yeah, you’re right. Whatever we focus and visualize and feel that can lead us in a positive way and it also can lead us in the other way. So that’s why I’m saying learning how to bring it to the balance and center of what is it we want. I find that too many people focus on what they don’t want.
You’re never going to create what you want. God didn’t say, oh, well, I don’t want earth to look like this. No, he commanded with his words, let there be light, and there was light. We need to focus on the things that we do want. How much more powerful, though, to integrate something like a visual while you are doing breath work. It’s powerful and music is important, not just in breathwork. I tell young people to be careful what they listen to.
Oh yeah.
If you’re listening to hypersexual music, guess what? If you’re listening to violent music, guess what? It’s going to make you angry.
Did you see the recent study that came out?
A recent study came out about the relationship of music to your heartbeat and how your heartbeat actually entrains, meaning that it sinks up to the beat of the music. You’re right, we’re so intimately connected to what we hear, what we feel, what we see, what we listen. And so if you allow that unconsciously to be exposed to that, then it’ll have a physical, emotional or spiritual representation in your body. Absolutely. It mirrors back to you.
Absolutely. I mean, I once saw this document, I don’t remember the name I wish I would’ve remember, but this documentary, all these scientists did all these cool things with music, sound and color as it related to us emotionally. So they wired people up and they would tell ’em to feel, think of something that made them angry and out of the state of anger that they were in, it was able to create a musical melody of what it sounded like. Guess what? It sounded like rock. And then they were also able to see what color would come through on their machines there. And it was intense, like a red, and it was distorted too. Then it was I think of that brought you peace or love and then the music would just be calm. It is related exactly to the kind of music that if you listen to classical music, depends on the classical music. There’s some that’s very stimulating, can get your mind really going and focus and creative. There are some that can really bring you to a calm state. So music greatly influences our emotional state, and people never think twice about that. I’m very careful about being in certain environments and the music they have. And that’s probably why I was never able to go to a nightclub. I can never tolerate the sounds of the music there. And I tell people, our heartbeats, our heart is always beating and it aligns with our environment. It catches onto the beat of something else or to that person. I truly believe that when you met Jessica in your heart, you said, I knew this. She was the one.
I always tell men that it’s men who will know who the one is, and then it’s her job to see if this is the guy for me. This is why genetically and even spiritually, men are the ones who go and hunt. They do. It never works out. If a woman is hunting for the man, it doesn’t. He’ll know in his heart. That’s the one. Then it’s for us, I felt the same way with my husband. It’s for us to say, is he safe? Is he good for me? And we got off subject here for about breath.
That’s all good.
But it’s just going back to the heart will know what it desires in the pure state,
Nothing that’s going to harm us. So in our heart and our minds, when you bring that balance, but if we’re living under so much stress, this is disconnection is right here. There’s just a disconnection right there. The breathwork helps to align us and to connect us all together.
Totally. 1000%.
I don’t think we got off track at all. We’re right on track to be right. I mean, it’s all related. And a lot of people are feeling, especially the last couple of years, feeling lost or feeling disconnected from their heart or how do I know? And that disconnection between our head and our heart is even that distance has gotten even farther. And so if someone is listening and saying, well, how do I know how, if we’re so disconnected from our body, yeah, we probably won’t know. And the breath allows us to turn within to know, to have that deeper connection, to tap into our intuition. We’re all intuitive beings. I mean, look at kids. We come into this world very intuitive, and that often gets dampened over time as we grow older. And so the breath brings us back that intuition into that, that love. Back to our heart. We work with a lot of women,
A lot of our clientele is women. I was just recently working with a client this week, actually, who is moving through a lot in her relationship and feeling very disconnected from her partner. And there’s so much that her body is holding onto. She’s like, wow. She came out, she’s like, I didn’t realize how much I’m holding my breath in life, and I’m realizing how uptight I am, how much stress I’m holding and tension in my neck and in my shoulders. And it’s just keeping her walled off. And so different from where she was in the beginning of her relationship with her partner and now she’s like, okay, I’m booking more sessions. I’m doing this. There’s something to this. Because she’s held onto so much anger and resentment. There’s so many things that can get in the way and block our heart from love. So it’s like we owe it to ourselves to put those things down and give ourselves that outlet to release those things. Because really love is the most, it’s the highest frequency.
It’s the highest frequency, it’s the most powerful. We can always disintegrate anything with love. It’ll offset anything. So a couple of things that you’re mentioning about relationships, I really think that it really comes down to that we look at the food. What are you eating? Are you exercising? All these things, but everything is relational.
Right now, we’re relating to each other. You guys are in a relationship. We’re in a relationship with our clients or patients. Every person that we’re interacting with, there’s a relationship there. When we don’t resonate with things, we start to get uptight about ourselves and the people in the environment that we’re with. And that’s very toxic. If you can’t be, you can’t live freely, then you’re going to be holding your breath.
You’re not going to be breathing freely. Have you noticed how babies breathe? They breathe correctly?
Yes. For the most part, I mean, if they’re healthy, I mean their bellies rise and there’s this natural rhythm because they’re not tainted yet.
They don’t have the stressors of life and they’re just doing their thing. We are very intuitive beings, however people want to refer to that. But God created us with that ability to be in tune, not just with us, but with creator. There’s this force that’s coming through us that we’re able to make those connections with safe. That’s really the bottom of our nervous system. Are you safe or not? Bottom line: are you safe? Yes, I’m safe. And then everything’s flowing with ease and functioning, and there’s order in that. But the moment there’s like, okay, I’m not safe. There’s a danger here. Whether it’s a perceived danger, it might not be a bear running after you, it might be a relationship that there’s friction with that you have some issues with that haven’t been resolved. And so then that creates this tension. Really, that’s the beginning of disease where I see it.
I do too.
It’s not the
There’s always a tension.
It’s always a story that led to poor behaviors and then led to disease. Right?
Right. Yeah. It’s always that. There are multiple factors that then lead to those types of patients being in your office. But there’s always, for me, an emotional component.
Absolutely.
Then you work backward. You fix the diet and some of the inflammatory foods that you’re speaking to, and then maybe you regulate the hormones a little bit. Then it’s like, okay, I’m good, but I still have to do all these things to maintain this state. It’s like, did you fix or address the relationship?
Yeah. So I have a disclosure. Dr. Corey was my doctor when I was in medical school. Did you know that, Jessica? I did not know that. No. Yeah. So when I was diagnosed with thyroid issues, I was about 26, 27 years old. I’m very upfront with my patients about this. I share my story so they can see the human aspect in me and see that what I’m speaking about is because it’s a firsthand experience, not just from my education and what I’ve learned, continue to learn. But when I left my doctor’s office, I think it was like 2006, I walked out of the office asking myself, what did I do that it got me here. It was something I did that got me here, and I was very disconnected from my heart to my mind because I had suppressed so much emotionally. I didn’t want to feel the loss of my brother.
He had died of leukemia in 1999. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. But there was a lot more of emotional suppression in my life from a younger age, and as I worked through things, I realized the root causes from the get-go from childhood. So it’s a journey. Sometimes I went in, I got a lot of help when I got into medical school. I was 95% better than I was before. Otherwise, I would not have been able to go through medical school. But the stress of school, and it was the emotional stress. It wasn’t even the academics. It wasn’t how hard the content was, it was other people.
It was the teachers, policies and rules that they were making at the school. I remember in 2015 that really fired me up, Jessica. I felt like I wanted just to be a lion and attack them. I was trying to protect something. And you know what? I was trying to protect my freedom, my freedom to choose. It makes me emotional right now because I feel so strongly about my freedom to choose. I feel strongly about every person. You have the freedom to make a choice. God made you as a creation of his to be free and make a choice. Why do we give others the freedom to choose for us? I say that in every area of our life, not just in healthcare. I say it for religion, I say it for government, I say it in educational systems and family structures, everything. We don’t have the freedom. When I became a mother, I saw this little girl, this little person in front of me, and I’m like, I’m her mom. I don’t feel like she’s mine. But what I’m saying is I didn’t feel a possession over her. She is not mine.
I am responsible for her care, but she is not an object that belongs to me. Having gone into that mother-daughter relationship without understanding, it allowed me to see her for who she was. What it allowed me to do was to be the mother that I needed to be to her, not the mother I wanted to be to her. Because if I would’ve been the mother that I wanted to be, I would’ve been driving her hard academically being perfect. You got to get straight. I want you to get into the best schools, do the best things because what I wanted, but when I saw my little girl, I’m like, there’s no way. She is so right brain artistic. Joy is the word that comes joy and playful, creative, and intuitive.
I mean, she could send someone’s energy and be like, ah. I taught her to trust that. And so I became a whole different person because I went through my healing journey. And so some of the work that you got to help me as the medical student and me as a patient was, this is one of the people that helped me get through school until he graduated and left me behind. The truth comes out. No, but you got me through a critical point that I was like, I’m good here, along with many other people along that journey. But I always talk about people like you to my patients. There were people in my journey who helped me, and I had to be okay with allowing someone to help me because I had a hard time accepting help. Because when you’re perfect in here, you don’t feel like you need help. There’s so much more to talk about, but there’s a couple of things that I do want I want you to touch on Dr. Corey, that when I did your breath workshop, we talked a little bit about it. I mentioned every time I exercise, I feel like I hear God’s voice clear.
Yeah. It’s not in a church. I mean I hear ’em anywhere, but it’s when I’m moving my body and I’m in nature on top of a mountain. I love the mountains.
I love it. There’s something spiritual about that too, because I’ve just started to learn the Bible really much better the last two years. I don’t want you to think that I am a pro at this. I’m not. I’m learning. I’m a student. But one thing that I’ve realized and acknowledged is that a lot of these Moses and Abraham, they were going out to the mountains to have this communion with God. And that’s where they would hear Elijah go to the mountain on his own and you would hear God’s voice. But you talked about this transient hypofrontality.
That’s word salad right there. I never forgot it. I want to get it tattooed on me. I love science and how it taps into our spiritual side, too.
It does. Yeah.
So, let’s talk a little bit about that.
Oh my gosh. Okay, so this isn’t my work. This is the work of Arnie Dyer, and he is a researcher out of an institute actually in Lebanon of all places. And so I came across as work quite a long time ago. He did a TED talk that you can look up around transient hypofrontality, but all it is is his research was looking at the brain and how can you create altered states of consciousness, meaning getting out of your head, back into your body is what we’re talking about, right? Because the brain, it’s primary role, its most dire role is yes to keep you safe, but it’s a record keeper of the past so that it can keep you safe.
Most people just know the first part, but that’s the whole part. The problem is with modern-day society and modern-day stresses, we can get wrapped up and get in such a sympathetic state that it impacts our health, our emotions, and our spirituality. And so how can you get out of here? Transient hypofrontality, the word salad word is the way to do that. And so what all that means is if you are actively with your physical body doing a repetitive thing over and over and over again, you will down-regulate the hypofrontality, the neocortex, the front of your brain down-regulate it, and so then nervous system energy will go to other parts of your nervous system. Does that make sense?
Yes, it does. Yeah.
The importance of that, I think people think about, oh, our brain works based upon maybe our five senses. I get that. You may have heard that we use 10% of our brain. That’s not really how it works. How our brain works is kind of like the electrical system in a house.
Depending on when you need certain parts of your houses, you’re going to be using more electricity. When you wake up and you’re making your coffee and you got your coffee pot going, and then you make your eggs or whatever you make for breakfast in the morning, a lot of energy is going into the kitchen. But that doesn’t happen all the time. But there are certain parts of our house that use a lot more electricity than others. Like our kitchen, the stove, the furnace, the AC uses a lot more electricity than maybe just your computer or your light bulb.
The brain works in the very same way. So our neocortex, the front part of our brain, it’s like the kitchen. It needs a lot more nervous system or electrical energy compared to the rest of the brain. And so that can make it really difficult. The front of our brain is about being decisive and analytical and making decisions and cutting people off and analyzing. And that only gets you so far in life as far as your happiness and peace. And so if you can do a repetitive task over and over and over again in a safe setting, this breathwork technique, you’re downregulate your frontal cortex, and you’re going to send nervous system and electrical energy tooth places like your amygdala, which processes and regulates your emotions to your hippocampus that stores your emotional memories and hopefully rewrite them, hopefully give you a different context of them. It’s really quite like when people come to our experiences, they’re like, wow. It’s like I unplugged my brain and then I re-plugged it back in a way that makes me feel so much better. So in a nutshell, that’s kind of what transient hypofrontality is.
Do you see this must be experienced in many different ways, even through exercise, right? Because hiking, even when I go to kickboxing, so it’s not kickboxing with other people, there’s a punching bag there and everything’s very repetitive. And when I leave, I feel like I am in a meditative state. I almost have to just wait in my car and just sit for a little bit because I’m so relaxed. This is where I tell people, if you can get into this state, your creativity is going to kick in. A lot of this podcast came through a time I was working out all the ideas, all of this is just, it happens through these kinds of activities. So I really encourage our viewers to consider breathwork activities that get you into the state daily, not once a week or once or once a month. Once in a while, it has to be a daily thing. How often do you, because I remember you guys saying with this kind of breathwork, the reset, you don’t want to do this daily. It’s like once a week.
It depends. I mean, I think when you were asking me after the workshop for most people once a week, once a week, it’s probably a good way to approach this because you are ramping up the nervous system in a really intense way. And so you don’t want to necessarily be doing this every day all day long. But we work with clients in certain particular situations where people maybe have had a lot of emotional trauma or they’re very, very, very stressed out. And so we’re trying to reset that nervous system. So making it a daily practice can be inserted in a medical setting.
Nice. What are the benefits that you see people when they do commit to this breathwork continuously? Oh gosh. Oh my gosh.
I’m sure. So many stories.
Oh my gosh. I mean if I were say one blanket statement is people just completely become a brand new person. They’re like, even we have an eight-week program called the Reset. Even just doing it every week for eight weeks. They’re like, I look back and I don’t even know who that person was eight weeks ago. That person who held onto so much fear, who played small things were okay, things were good, and now I’m just going for it. I’m confident I can do anything. I’m taking action. There’s been things I’ve been sitting on for years like, oh, someday I’ll do that. I’m just doing it now. I don’t even have to think about it.
That’s the beauty of it is that you shift your internal state, you shift your identity, you start taking new action that you don’t even have to think about. It just becomes a part of who you are. It is way more natural. But I mean, there’s real quick rapid fire. I mean, just what we big things we see is huge increase in worth just feeling worthy, feeling worthy, feeling peace. There’s a woman who we worked with who was the ultimate boss, babe, podcast host, business coach, doing all the things, crushing it, but she’s like, I was always just stuck in my head and I didn’t realize how much I was holding onto as far as just anger and sadness, but I didn’t go there. I didn’t want to feel those emotions. I just want to keep going. And she released all that. She’s like, what? It was underneath it all, it was peace. Now she operates her business in a totally new way. It’s like with ease, it’s with flow, it’s with peace, and people are coming to her. She doesn’t have to try so hard. Do you want to speak to any other things that we see?
Has the physical stuff been interesting?
Yes.
Physical pain. A lot of people come with physical pain and not realizing the emotional impact or the identity that they have with that pain. Real short story. We did a workshop. We were doing workshops, breathwork workshops at Sunset Cliffs on the ocean, which were incredible during the sunset.
There was this young woman right up front, and you always know when it’s like, okay, this is going to be a good chair. Just like they’re like, yeah, me, I am ready. And she’s like, long story short, I’m a gymnast. I was a gymnast at a really high level. I completely punished my body to the point where I think she said her right knee was bone on bone and she’s in her early thirties. I’m in pain all the time. I don’t want to have to get a knee replacement. But that’s clearly what’s been on the docket. That’s what the doctors have been saying and why she raised her hand is she’s like, I don’t know what you did to me. I love when they say that, I don’t know what you did to me. Which is not true. It’s like you breathed, your breath, we didn’t do anything. You did the magic.
But I, for the first time in 12 years, don’t feel any pain. I mean just bawling, like I didn’t even remember what this feels like to not be in pain.
Isn’t that interesting?
Yeah.
Sometimes, people just don’t even know what it’s like to be normal.
God too, has been coming through, which has been really interesting in a big way. A lot of people are popping up and being like, I literally had a full conversation with God. I don’t know if we want to say our religious affiliation or anything. We don’t really have one, but it’s just what’s coming through for people and what they really need in that moment. And it, it’s like you were saying, climbing up the hill, breathworks hard,
But once you get to the top of that hill, things are so quiet, so internally quiet in your mind, in your voice, and everything’s just clear. And that’s when something comes through. That’s when the creativity comes through. That’s when God comes through. That’s when the epiphany around pain in my knee and the emotional connection to it comes through. And that’s when all that stuff happens. But you have to allow your body and your mind to have that experience. Otherwise, it’s going to be TikTok and social media and getting to family and friends events. And then you’re going to be looking back at your life and being like, why am I stressed out? Why am I not happy? Why am I feeling this way? And it’s like you didn’t allow your body to heal.
Yeah. Isn’t that the truth? I am in between many different worlds. I feel like the science and the spiritual, and I want to marry these two because God created all of this. We man created religion, but God is God. And when Jesus came, he didn’t come to start a new religion. Did you know that He came to get rid of religion and the law, all the laws and things that were going on? Yeah, God has order. There’s an order to things. There’s a certain process to things. But how can we, and I guess that’s why I so strong about freedom, because God, Jesus came to free people from religion and to be in relationship directly with God, the creator.
So he came and the Pharisees who were very legalistic, they were very critical. You’re not supposed to do this. It’s the Sabbath and you’re not supposed to heal on the Sabbath. Jesus is like the Father heals whenever he wants to tell God. I say this in a confident and humble way. We are like grains of sand in a big beach. We’re nothing. If we really look at it, we humble ourselves, but yet God created us in his image and he gave us power. He gave man power and authority and dominion over all things. And there’s a balance to that. That doesn’t mean be arrogant and be powerful over other people. There’s a balance to that. But I do believe that God is using this kind. I mean breathing. The reason I wanted for you guys to talk about it is because I feel like sometimes in the Christian circle, they look at this as it’s evil.
Right? They do.
Breathing is evil.
Right?
Then stop reading.
So say that again.
Stop breathing is evil. So hold your breath.
Hold your breath and see how long you live. Breathing is the one thing we need to do. How long is it after a minute? If we stop having oxygen, we just die.
Well, it depends, but yeah, I mean two minutes.
I mean, some people can really have a high tolerance to hold their breath, but that’s different. Most people, if we don’t get oxygen into the brain, we’re done,
Done. That’s the critical thing. And we talk about the breath of life in the Bible. It talks a lot about that. But I do feel like I said that there is something very special about breathwork because, and even if it’s through moving my body and releasing the stress and emotions and allowing this breath, this oxygen to come into my body, that I have always felt like that’s when I hear God’s voice. The clearest.
Yeah. It’s the Holy Spirit.
I want people to really take that go and walk. I mean, this is why I think there are things that are happening naturally without people aligning it with God.
Correct.
But he’s always there, whether you believe in him or not, whether you believe in a creator or not, the creator is a creator. He’s there. I always tell people, well, it’s okay if you don’t believe in God. He doesn’t need you to believe in, for him to exist.
The fact that you’re sitting here breathing is enough evidence for me that there is a creator of you and it wasn’t just your mom and your dad. Yeah. Wow. This has been powerful. How can people reach out to you guys, and I’ll make sure I put all your contact information links in the description of this episode so they can reach out to you.
Yeah. Well, we love to hang out on Instagram, so follow us, DM us at The Healing Couple underscore. If you listen to this episode, if there was something that really stuck with you or resonated with you, please say hello in the DMS and let us know what that was. We’d love to hear it. If you’re like, okay, I want to take the next step. I want to take that deep dive. I want to know what this is all about and not just experience deep breathing in a yoga class or Wim Hof like we’ve been talking about, but really go on a deep journey. We’d love to have you. We do monthly virtual reset, breathwork journeys, and we have people that join us from all over the world. It’s really cool. Also we give you the recording too, so you can be able to practice on your own even afterwards. We do this once a month and you can go to the healing couple.com/events and we love to gift to your audience. They’re first class for free. Oh, that’s nice. Come experience it. Right. And you can just use the code. Breathe 100 for any of our monthly workshops and it might just change your life.
It will change your life. Yeah. Change your life. It changed your life. These are examples of what breathing will do. I still think it’s funny to say, yeah, we’re teaching people how to breathe, but being a doctor, being doctors, we know that a lot of people come in and they don’t know how to, I spent 30 minutes, one guy, one time teaching a guy just how to do the box breathing technique.
Amazing.
30 minutes. He just couldn’t get it. And he high cortisol, he was an attorney just running in a hurry all the time. And then when he did get it, he was like, oh, I feel weird.
He doesn’t know what to feel.
People don’t know what calm is. That’s right. They think it’s weird or they think they’re tired.
Chills.
Chills. Yeah.
People need to really experience, and that’s the feedback that we get after our journeys is people actually are able to identify with what that feeling is inside their body. Now you can acclimate to it now when you go throughout your life, oh, this is happiness. Oh, this is peace. Oh, this is surrender. There’s all these varying emotions that we get to identify with, and then we don’t just get to go, oh, that’s weird. And disassociate from it.
Because you’re really saying no to your body.
You’re saying, I am like, oh, this is different. I like this. I want more of this. That’s what we should be saying. Thank you both so much. I really appreciate you. You guys are a beautiful healing couple, a beautiful healing couple guys, thank you for joining us on this episode and we’ll see if we, maybe in the future. Never know. Sure.
Whatever you want.
Thank you guys for joining us in this episode of Learning How Breathwork Works and what are some of the benefits that it can bring to your life. I really encourage you to reach out to The Healing Couple. Take advantage of that promo and take your first class. It doesn’t hurt you to try this for your life and see how it can transform you. Thank you for watching, and until next time, be blessed. Thank you for listening to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please like, share and subscribe, help this message, reach more people who may need to hear it. Leave your comments. I want to know what you think. If you’re interested in learning more about raices, visit our website. Until next time, be blessed.