You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson.
For more, visit themodelhealthshow.com.
How does the way that you breathe affect your experience of pain, affect your sexual function and even affect your ability to handle stress?
Well, we are going to cover this and so much more today.
Now, you might be like, well, Shawn, I already know how to breathe.
Let me stop you right there.
All right, there are many forms and fashions of breathing.
Just because we can breathe doesn't mean that we know how to breathe.
And, as a matter of fact, you're gonna learn that The world that we're living in today has even altered the way that we are breathing for the most part, for the majority of people.
And so we have to intentionally retrain ourselves to breathe in a way that is life affirming, that is supportive of this switch over that you're going to hear about, from this kind of sympathetic fight or flight dominance that can be toxic to our bodies if left in a chronic state, to our parasympathetic rest and digest and relaxation response that is very transformative and again, health affirming, helping to accelerate healing, helping to improve blood flow and to improve cognitive function and to improve our hormone health.
The list goes on and on and on.
We've got a world leading expert in the subject of breath.
And this information is incredibly powerful.
This is fundamental to our experience of life here on this planet.
So tune in and enjoy.
And with that said, let's get to our special guest and topic of the day.
Jill Miller is on a mission to democratize self-care and provide education and tools to bring self-treatment everywhere you go.
She's been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal Shape, Women's Health and countless major media outlets.
And she's developed fitness and wellness programs for Equinox, 24-Hour Fitness Amazon, Google and many other world-leading organizations.
She's here today to teach you how to transform your relationship with stress, reduce your pain and experience greater health with a body by breath.
Let's dive in this conversation with the one and only Jill Miller.
You feeling good?
Yes.
Of course you are.
You're here with me.
I'm here with you.
And immediately, as soon as you got here, then we ended up on the floor.
Rolling on the floor.
With balls in our back.
Yes.
Paws.
And your neck.
Yeah, the neck.
So what are these therapy balls called that you use?
So those were the Alpha Twins.
The alpha twins.
Yeah, so the alpha twins.
Sounds like me.
Well, you know, they're like big boy balls.
They're like larger than life.
You know, they're larger than small.
So the yoga tuna balls are, they're smaller.
And when a single yoga tuna ball presses into it, it feels like a thumb.
And then the therapy ball plus, which you say you use, they're a little bit larger.
It feels like an elbow.
And then a single alpha, it feels like a fist.
But then when you, double them up, you increase the surface area that it's contacting.
And I mean they all feel delicious whether single or double, but you double them up, they're really.
It's like a mini foam roller, but it's squishy and grippy.
Yeah, that was exactly my sentiment.
Like I get down on this like a foam roller, but this is different.
And, like I mentioned to you, I have the tools that I got from you are sitting right next to my couch.
I'm so honored.
That I utilize multiple times a week.
And today more than ever, it's having some more physical literacy, because our bodies are subjected to just so much chaos today.
And I wanted to talk to you specifically about this relationship with stress.
And so, and everybody that's watching the video version of this episode, they'll see this study come up on the screen, but this was published in JAMA about a decade ago.
This information has been out and compiled.
And this was a huge physician survey and meta-analysis.
And The research has found that upwards of 80 of all physician visits today have a primary stress-related component.
And so, whether this is autoimmune conditions, whether this is an issue with pain, whether this is a cognitive issue, whether this is a metabolic issue and weight gain, stress is impacting our biology.
And most people have no idea about that.
And to have you here is such a gift because...
One of the fastest ways to get into stress and out of stress has to do with how we breathe.
True.
So can you talk about that relationship between our breathing and stress?
Well, your breathing is an... ever present reflection of your autonomic state.
And that is your breathing changes millisecond to millisecond depending on the stressors that your body is experiencing internally and externally.
So we're taking in inputs all the time, our environment, sounds, smells.
If you smell something noxious, immediately your breathing changes to prevent you from breathing deeply, right.
So there are so many different ways that our brain is interpreting external stimuli that are going to change the way we breathe.
Like, for example Oh, I walked out of the gym this morning and the clouds were this cotton candy pink that only January knows in Los Angeles.
We have these crazy skies in the morning.
And I just went, oh.
I let out this involuntary exhale, my whole body relaxed.
And that was this combination of sensory input, and then this emotional adjustment, that changed my breath.
So you have the external inputs that end up, Unbeknownst to you, affecting your respiratory rate, and then there's also the stuff going on inside of you, your own emotions or pain or surfaces that You know as you walk about or that your body is feeling, Your body is going to adjust based on, it's going to adjust its breathing based on these external and internal inputs.
And Those are the unconscious things.
But what's so cool about breathing is it's not just on automatic.
You can adjust your breathing rate anytime, any place, in any position that you're in physically, and that will affect your brain in reverse.
So we can take control of how we're breathing.
And typically that is longer and slower and deeper than you're breathing already.
That's gonna be the calm switch effect.
I love where this is going already.
We already talked about some stuff I didn't expect to talk about.
So, with this being said and understanding this relationship again, our breathing is part of our autonomic nervous system.
Breathing is not a sympathetic or parasympathetic function.
It's under a combination of regulatory with some autonomic aspects.
So it's got an asterisk next to it.
Yeah, it's not.
Just it impacts the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, but this, you know, sympathetic and parasympathetic is affecting smooth muscle and glands.
The diaphragm, which is your primary breathing muscle, is a skeletal muscle.
Your intercostals are skeletal muscles.
These are meat that you would eat, right?
You'd eat ribs.
You'd eat a skirt steak.
You're probably not going to like, I'm going to eat some blood vessels today, right?
We're not really seeking out, unless some people like to eat glands.
This is going in a direction I didn't expect it to go either in terms of our dining preferences.
But the breathing is not.
It can affect your autonomic nervous system, but it is not exclusively an autonomic thing.
This is a regulatory function of the body.
And it is a bridge though.
It is a bridge into your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system.
I love this clarity because autonomic means essentially kind of automatic.
And so we can unconsciously breathe.
Yes.
Totally.
Most of the day we do.
But the asterisk is we can jump in and take conscious control of it and access all these other forms or expressions of our biology in doing so.
And so this is really powerful because our breathing is...
I mean, it's the number one connection that we have to life.
And if we're talking about dealing with stress and helping us to metabolize stress better, associate with stress first of all, can you tell us how breathing I'm not going to say wrong, but how does breathing in a typical unconscious way contribute to us feeling more stress, anxiety and things like that?
Oh, okay.
So shallow breathing or mouth breathing?
Well, these are two different things.
But when we're breathing at a fast rate and at a very low depth, we're typically in a more excitable, sympathetically aroused state, and that it's not optimal for decision-making.
It makes us be much more impulsive reactive, unable to connect with other people because we're just in a state of fight or flight or flee right.
So that state of constant, chronic shallow breathing and that shallow breathing is often physically we're often not using all of the muscles of respiration in their optimal way design.
So one of the ways that I find it easier to talk about this is going to the anatomy.
So, if I can take you through what I call the zones of respiration, I think it'll illuminate what I'm talking about right now, which is right now I'm talking about what I call zone three or zone two, breathing.
So we have three different primary zones where our breathing muscles are functioning, and And then backtracking even more than that your main muscle, which I mentioned a moment ago, your skirt steak, your respiratory diaphragm.
Is this actually two different muscles fused together?
So we have a left and a right and they live inside of the rib cage, but they're sewn together.
So it looks like a trampoline in there and it's lining the lower six ribs.
So if you just even touch the sides of your rib cage right now, you're touching the area that the diaphragm is living in.
And you can touch this diaphragm in a difficult way.
You can bend forward, take your hands and run it underneath the bottom of your ribs.
So people who are watching on video can see me.
If you're listening, you can just lean forward wherever you are, put your hands in your abdomen and just shape it around the costal margin.
And if you have a lot of rigidity in your rectus abdominis, it's going to be hard to get in there.
It's easier if you go from the side.
So if you're in a slump position, you're going to be more apt to get in there.
And so your fingers can actually curl around the underside of the rib cage.
You can like kind of, you got the diaphragm by its, by its neck here.
And then, if you take a breath into your hand, you'll feel the hand get pushed out by the action of the diaphragm.
So the diaphragm typically, when you breathe in this manner, when you breathe low, everything that's below the diaphragm is going to distend, it's gonna expand.
And that is the diaphragm has a lot of force.
So when we're breathing low in what I call zone one, as the diaphragm contracts, it makes all of the guts distend because of the pressure of the diaphragm.
Also your pelvic floor will stretch, also your low back, your waist.
So we have this, ballooning quality.
And when we're breathing like this, where the diaphragm is truly descending, it's not inhibited by the descent and that inhibition is part of that sympathetic tense, stressed person persona that we'll discuss in a moment.
But when we're breathing low in this zone one, we are in a more calm state.
We're in a more relaxed state, more parasympathetic dominant state.
So that's really important to know.
Like, can you breathe in a way that allows your belly to balloon?
Don't get worried about looking chunky or anything.
This is normal.
Like we should have stretch occurring there when we breathe.
And if we don't, if we're holding it in all the time because we want to look a certain way, or maybe we've over-trained our abs, or maybe we have a scar from a C-section or liver surgery or whatever multiple laparoscopic surgeries like within the guts, we may have some wild tension patterns in the abdomen that don't really allow the diaphragm to move down that well.
And if the diaphragm is inhibited from scar tissue or from, you know, a desire for aesthetics, like an emotional drive to look a logged ourself with exercise and we've created such stiffness in there that those tissues don't glide very well, then we're going to be more of a zone two breather.
And the zone two breather is a breather that the dominant style of breathing is of the rib cage.
And so the rib cage is designed to open and close.
We have this pump handle effect of the bones raising and lowering.
When we breathe, and this is very important the ribs should move out and in.
They move out on inhale, they move in on exhale and that's a collaboration between the intercostals and the diaphragm.
But when we're breathing in this way, we actually don't get as much depth into the lungs as we would if we're combining the zone two with our zone one to fill completely into the lung sacs.
So zone two is going to be a little bit more of a shallower breath altogether and we're going to be more upregulated, more stimulated, more sympathetic energy.
And this is great for exercise, right?
When you're exercising, you must brace or you'll be injured, right?
You don't want to deadlift your PR without having abdominal tension.
So we have to be able to breathe somewhere, and so we'll use breathing into the lungs exclusively into that zone two, to get this going.
But often what happens when we become a chronic zone two breather is it will more readily slip us into what I call zone three breathing, which is using muscles of the face jaw, neck and shoulders to And you see this all the time in shock, in fright, in a fear state, but also in high delight, or even in that that awe that I saw this morning.
So, but that would be a very short-lived feeling. moment of zone three.
But typically when I'm referring to zone three, like this is the asthma breath.
This is the COPD breath.
This is the, you know, sports induced asthma breath.
You see people just on the field with their shoulders way up and they're just hanging over trying to get breath in.
The shoulders are really inefficient at bringing breath into the depth of the lung tissue.
You're going to kind of be hovering in the upper portion of the lungs to get your oxygen and CO2 exchange.
And so it's metabolically very costly.
And it's metabolically very costly on the muscles of the head, neck, and shoulders.
And so those folks who are stuck in a more zone, three zone, two type of breathing, are gonna have the jaw pain, the neck pain, the shoulder pain.
And then this will, because of the way your fascial tissues intertwine, you may have problems in your elbow, your forearm, your hand, carpal tunnel-like symptoms, this whole chain all the way through from hand to eye.
How on earth can our breathing essentially create pain in our bodies?
Because it's a muscular event and you're doing it 20 to 22000 times a day.
So just like you wouldn't want to do 20, you know, 200 poorly executed pushups.
We probably want to try to improve the way we're breathing throughout the day and not veer into 19000 of those breaths being like bad emails coming in type of breaths.
This is an important relationship.
So skeletal muscle.
So the diaphragm being a skeletal muscle, obviously it's inherently deeply connected to the rest of our skeletal muscle, which is where we see so much of our pain symptoms manifest.
So this is like a huge aha moment in the relationship with our breath and pain.
Your diaphragm is a node.
It is a muscular node that has fascial connections all over the body.
I mean, that's really the premise of Body by Breath is I wanted people to be able to learn these interconnections of the diaphragm to all these other tissues and the consequences of that throughout the body.
Because breathing is not just a nose to lung pathway, it's body-wide.
And the way the diaphragm moves has a ripple effect on tissues far, far away from the diaphragm, as well as systems far, far away from the diaphragm.
So it's really an important integral tissue, muscular tissue of the body.
And so learning to train it or doing specific diaphragm exercise is helpful for so much of your body and being.
What are those?
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That contact with your foot to the ground is literally informing everything up the chain how to move and respond in our world.
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It starts with our feet.
Truly, our functionality is built from the ground up and our modern shoes essentially mute or disrupt thousands of data signals that would normally be transmitted from your feet up through your kinetic chain and modulate appropriate movement.
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And now back to the show.
All right, you mentioned some of the things that, especially in our culture, that can kind of hamper us, which is, you know, always keeping those abs turned on.
You know, just always 20 on right.
And not normalizing like your belly, being able to be distended, you know, while you're breathing.
And with that said, and also the training as well, and just having the rock hard abs and you know, but also, and again, you can have a very aesthetically pleasing in our culture waistline and still have core and abdominal muscles and tissues that glide well.
Right, and that's what you said earlier.
You said glide glide, well.
And so is this where this art or this practice of gut smashing comes in at, as far as like helping to, helping us to activate the parasympathetic, helping us to relax, kind of like digging in and onto those tissues.
It's all the things.
Yes.
So it's so funny.
So, like 2011, I was up in Northern California teaching and a mutual friend introduced me to Kelly Sturette, who you know from the Ready State, formerly MobilityWOD.
And he was in the middle of that MobilityWOD project.
And I was like, I have some things I want to show you what I do with my gut and with my diaphragm.
And so I brought a gorgeous ball over to his gym and I showed him this abdominal massage that I do on myself, that I teach to my students.
And he was like, oh man, gut smash.
And he called it the gut smash.
And that took off versus abdominal massage.
So people refer to the gut smash.
I still call it abdominal massage.
I like that better.
Or, you know, or self myofascial manipulation of the respiratory muscles, it's just too long.
So gut smash, just it sounds better hashtag.
But yes, the point of there's so many reasons to do this for one's force production.
Sure.
Like we want to get stronger abs.
People want a stronger core.
Hopefully it's not just the front that they're working on, but they're also working on, you know, all aspects of of that area.
Um, and doing self myofascial release using a tool like a gushy pliable rubber ball.
Mine, the one I make is called the gorgeous ball, helps to create some frictiony stretch between these layers within the abdominal musculature.
So from the rectus, which is embedded in a sheath of fascia called the rectus sheath, right?
You may be familiar with the rectus sheath.
If you're into bodybuilding and the obliques insert there, the transversus abdominis or the back wall of this rectus sheath.
But it can get inappropriately stiff, so stiff that when you stretch it it hurts.
When we stretch tissue, it shouldn't fight us.
It should yield.
And so the ball is a really helpful tool to induce that, so that we improve the length and tension, like the God-given or the biologically given length tension relationship of those tissues that you might have adapted to have a very or a tight adapted tissue, because you're going for an aesthetic.
But that doesn't necessarily mean those tissues are strong.
They're just very much bound up, they're tissue bound, they're fascial bound.
And so we wanna try to restore proper glide so that we can optimize the length and tension, the contractile elements within those tissues.
But it's not just superficial, it's much deeper than that too.
If we're talking about breathing, The diaphragm is sewn into the same fascial layer as the transversus abdominis.
And so the reciprocal motion of the breathing muscle upon your abdominal canister also needs to have this elasticity for it, for you, to be able to do zone one breathing.
But the diaphragm is also has a massive fascial link to stuff in the back of your body, the quadratus lumborum, which is a really big low back muscle that connects your ribs, the bottom of your rib cage, to the top of your pelvic bone.
So now we're talking about the low back, but the diaphragm is also fascially seamed to the psoas.
And the psoas is really why we're primates and why we walk upright.
This amazing long cable that starts on the thoracic spine and then inserts into your upper inner thigh.
So when we're doing this abdominal smashing or gut smashing with a gorgeous ball or a soft ball, we're able to affect, glide in and amongst all of these tissues that support this area.
And then you think of the ripple effect of that.
Oh, wait, the psoas starts in my thoracic spine and it attaches below my pelvis into my femur.
So we're talking about the hips.
We're talking about the pelvis and that's gait, that's walking.
So-
All of this is, it's body wide.
And then, to state the obvious, when you're rolling in your midsection, you're also manipulating all your digestive organs.
So we're jostling these organs of digestion.
And what that might help with is that gentle coaxing of moving food along the colon, especially if people are chronically constipated, maybe because they're so tightly wound.
This is a way to help induce a vagal dominant state, right?
So we're stimulating the vagus nerve inside of those organs and giving feedback to the brain through this pressure.
Who knew?
Like, it's just, it's access to your biology.
And you know the gorgeous ball, as you mentioned which again, I have one sitting right next to my couch.
It's akin to I'm just gonna.
This is not exactly like this, but you designed it okay.
The gorgeous ball.
But for me, it's akin to like a kickball that's slightly deflated.
But again, you designed it especially for this.
And if you could, can you describe the abdominal massage, like how does one actually do it?
And we'll put up some video for people to see that are watching the video version.
But for those listening, what do you mean by abdominal massage and using a cord, just ball, to get access to your biology like this?
How does that work?
Oh, it's my favorite thing to talk about.
So The gorgeous ball is this grippy pliable, air-filled ball that shouldn't be blown up like a basketball or soccer ball to tension right.
It should have some a lot of squish to it and that it can conform to your form when you lay on it, so that it doesn't keep sort of like punching into you, which a harder ball will.
So what I recommend for people is they start by laying on their side, and specifically on their left side, when they're first learning this right into the side of your waist.
And the reason we lay on the left side is because your descending colon is there and that will help whatever gas might be there to pass, because gas is very painful.
So sometimes if you start on the right and there's a lot of gas, you might have visceral pain and you really won't like the gorgeous ball, although your friends in the room might not like you because you're laying on your left side and doing what needs to happen there.
But if you lay on your left side, we put a pillow or a block underneath your head so you have your heads not just getting all crunched up with your shoulder.
And you know the first moment you feel what you feel, which is this interruption, this very strange pressure into your waist.
Now, the waist has substantial musculature.
And so, because ultimately we're going to be plunging towards the organs and probably towards the spine over time, as you acclimate to this pressure, we want to probably tease some of the initial muscles, resistance to the ball away.
And what I mean by that is anytime you have something that's putting stress into the body, like a ball or a massage therapist moving their hand into your body.
If you're not ready for it, if your brain doesn't really know how to predict that, you'll have what's called the muscle bracing response.
So your body is naturally gonna armor itself against something it thinks might injure it.
And so when you lay down, really with any ball anywhere on your body or a foam roller and it hurts often, it's not that that hurts, it's that you're essentially creating a muscle shield right away.
And the sympathetic nervous system is saying, no, go there, get out.
But we can work with that by doing something called contract relax.
So we can actually force contractions into that area.
So typically, what I like to have my students do is take a big breath in, hold your breath, contract your abdominal muscles and then exhale and let go.
And then you do that again you breathe in, hold the breath contract, especially where the ball is, and then exhale let go.
And that contrasting of all on, all off, all on, all off, basically lulls that muscle guarding response into a placid complacent state.
And then the ball is able to increase its stretch into your tissue.
Your body allows it, you start to merge with it.
So we do that, and that's great because you're also getting some breathing reps in while you're doing that.
You're starting to entrain breath as a tool with the ball.
And then once the ball just feels good, it just feels good in you, we'll start to do movements.
So movements might be like pelvic tuck on tucks or tiny rotation movements, either the pelvis moving or the upper body moving, just to get the ball to start to nuzzle into the guts on the anterior side and then nuzzle around towards the backside.
And then eventually, once that side feels, it feels good, it feels compliant, then you go to the other side, you're going to repeat the same steps.
And then with permission, with your body's permission maybe, just maybe, you can go across the center.
And then if the center is always uncomfortable because your organs, you know, I mean, like organs typically don't want to be restricted.
And also as soon as a ball goes into your belly button, you think of that as a pressure blockade for your diaphragm.
So the diaphragm can't really move down well when you have all this central pressure going in.
And so that can also set people off or create pain.
That's not really there.
It's just this interference.
And so we train our students to work with that.
And then you can work around that, also by creating a little bit of tension and preventing it from going deeper.
But this is some of the basic steps of how to work into an abdominal massage that can be quite total.
I mean, with our...
Students who've done this a lot, and especially you know myself.
You know we'll be twisting our body all over the ball, and so the ball will be ringing into the tissues.
And this is how to create the most dramatic levels of glide, just like a really skilled massage therapist or a rolfer would do on your tissue to create a tremendous amount of intratissue stretch.
So not just pressure, but... trying to create traction between layers.
And there's so many benefits to this on a fascial tissue level, because what you and I haven't even talked about is the insane amount of neural net within all the fascial layers that are being deformed and informed by the pressure of the ball.
And that's a whole other language that's being spoken to different areas of your brain.
That helps to really rearrange one's perception of their body and pain.
Wow.
It's all connected.
All connected.
Wow.
Can you share, by the way, where can people get a gorgeous ball from?
Oh, my company is Tune Up Fitness.
So you can find it on our website.
And of course, you know, we have an Amazon shop.
But yeah, tuneupfitness.com.
Tune Up Fitness.
Beware of the imposters.
All right.
Get the original gorgeous ball.
Thank you.
Yes.
Of course.
And you know we're talking about accessing our ability to modulate stress in our bodies, help to kind of be able to release and let go and to get more into that parasympathetic.
On the other side though, a big part of stress management which you know even I use that word loosely, but thriving amid stress, which we all are going to be exposed to is having more stress resilience or capacity, and so is there a way that we can actually utilize our breathing to help to make us more resilient in the face of stress?
Well, We can train our breathing, in slow breathing.
We can train our breathing in fast breathing, like kind of in a Petri dish, right?
So if you're sitting in a room or sitting in a nice quiet space, you can be the sample.
You can be you in a Petri dish trying out different experiments and seeing what effects that has on you personally.
You know there are a lot of.
There's so many different breathing strategies out there that combine, you know all, slow breathing, or resonant breathing, or fast breathing, hyperventilation breathing, combinations of all of these things.
My friend Tonya Bentley and the HHP Foundation, that's the Health and Human Performance Foundation.
They did an index or a systematic review of all of the breath literature that shared breath practices geared towards anxiety reduction.
And so this paper came out in 2023, I believe late 2023.
And they had.
They were over 300 papers that they looked at and then they had to rule out a lot of exclusion criteria.
And they came down to think like 74, 76 papers.
But the summary of what was included in breathing practices that definitely reduced anxiety over the long term are the breathing practices need to be, need to include slow paced breathing and they need to be at least five minutes.
So continuous breath practice, that is, include some slow-paced breathing, or you can have a fast-slow mix, but it needs to be at least five minutes and you need to do this at least five days a week to get long-term benefits.
So when I look at that, I can say, oh, sure.
It looks like you can do both slow and fast breathing, as long as you have the slow breathing in there.
Because I think some people may just want to do fast breathing and think that that's all they need to do.
And that's going to like pump you up.
It's going to get you really excited, but it's not going to give you the type of focus, like clarity, that the slow pace breathing will do, which ultimately is has a connection with improving your heart rate variability, just helping you to be more organized as an organism, with your the synchrony of your heart rate, the way your brain patterns work with breathing and this other complicated systems of the body that, if I start talking about it, we'll go into the weeds.
Can you talk about specifically when you say fast breathing, because somebody might be like well, why would I want to do that?
If I'm trying to?
You know, I found that And there's different names for it.
Chaotic breathing, breath of fire, but having a fast paced breathing intentionally and then going to slow breathing.
I relax so much faster than anything else that I've ever done.
That's amazing.
And so can you specifically like tell people what that is and describe what do you mean by fast paced breathing?
Yeah.
So it would be just taking as fast an inhale and as fast an exhale as you can muster.
The most voluminous, both on the in and on the out.
And so that might look like an inhale that go less than a second in and less than a second out.
And it's going to be very metabolically taxing.
And I actually think that the exhaustion of it's, you know, it's like a hit class.
Yeah, but for your breath like super hit, for your breath in a short timeframe and then contrasting it with the slow paced breathing, that really slams on the vagal break.
So you get to really feel this contrast of all on, all off, all on, all off, just like the contract relax does for your musculature.
So I think these is, in a way, like it's a contrast therapy for breathing, like contrast therapy for contractions.
We really get to feel the ends of our resilience when we do things like that.
I, for one, I'm not a huge fan of doing fast paced breathing as a practice.
I've certainly done it.
I like to get my fast pace in other ways.
Yeah.
Wait, are you talking about sex?
I mean like just efforting at the airdyne bike.
The way you look though, you was like in other ways, you know, with the side eye.
So like exercise.
I keep the sex low and then the breathing fast in other realms.
Okay.
Okay.
Got it.
Got it.
It was the side eye for me.
But again, many different, there's a relationship there, obviously.
We just made a turn.
Who knew he was gonna turn into this little pathway?
But is there any insight you could share on the relationship with breathing and our sexual health?
Oh my goodness.
Well, now I'm flushed.
So Orgasm is a parasympathetic.
So if we can do breathing exercise, and especially breathing exercise that builds awareness all the way to the basement of our body right,
So when I'm talking about zone one breathing, the pelvis isn't not included.
The pelvic floor is a reciprocal elastic region that is going to receive pressures from the diaphragm.
So this can help our body to feel really like, totally included in the physical event, the physical effects of breathing.
That can help us get towards orgasm.
I mean look, I'm not an orgasm expert, so I'm sure you have a lot of other people in your space, but it is a parasympathetic event.
And so if you can... build more tolerance capacity for being in a parasympathetic state.
And we do that with the types of things that I've been describing, the breathing, the massage.
We can do pelvic floor massage with the gorgeous balls, with the yoga tuna balls.
This is in the book, it's in Body by Breath.
Really smart stuff to do so that there's less muscular tension in those areas.
This all helps with blood flow.
And I think it all helps with the coordination, the neural control of orgasm.
Thank you.
Thank you for that insight.
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You know again, I think it's very superficial the way that we view breathing in relationship to sex and orgasm.
You know, very like cinematic, you know perspective, but it's deeply related.
Our breathing orgasm.
You know, even the act of all of it itself can be more, dare I say, controlled If we're tuning in to our breath and breathing a certain way.
I mean, it's hard to get off if you're just trying, right?
So that efforting, that tension-based, that's not really helpful for letting go.
Dang, you just wrote it out for us.
Hopefully.
So let's get back to the main road again.
And I want to ask you now about obviously, when we think about breath in the context of relaxation, a lot of it is tied to meditation, right especially in our, in our culture today, which is which is great.
Now, with this being said, body by breath and our bodies are just so dynamic and we have all this movement capacity, can it be possible for us to access a lot of those meditative qualities through movement?
Basically like movement-based meditations, I'm asking about.
I love this question.
I think stillness meditation can be very intimidating for many bodies, especially many bodies that are like highly charged, like more sympathetically aroused.
And one of the things I came across when I was researching the book is this called relaxation induced anxiety.
So relaxation induced anxiety is that for some bodies, when they are still, they end up getting neural rushes or feeling very fidgety.
They have an inability to stay still.
Or they feel like they must they get very nervous, right?
So it's this anxiety of being still.
And I saw this when I was teaching.
So my background is yoga teaching and then massage.
And I would see this in a very small segment of the my students, like some of them, just they, just they would fidget the whole time.
You know they'd move their fingers, or I eyeball here or there, or just you know squirm.
And when I came across this relaxation induced anxiety term, I realized that's probably what's happening for a lot of these people.
And then I started.
I came across the work of Stephen Porges and polyvagal theory, and his work on polyvagal theory really helped to explain.
People, especially who have had a trauma history, can find stillness extremely threatening because they were forced to be still in some of the traumatic events that happened to them.
And if you think about in a yoga space, you're laying with your genitals, your mouth facing the sky.
You're completely vulnerable in a dark room, right?
Everybody's eyes are closed.
And so that made a lot of sense to me in terms of I mean, I don't know what's going on inside of people's minds and bodies, but stillness can be a threat to certain bodies.
So how do you help those people to gain the benefits of relaxation?
For those folks.
Their bodies should be assisted to move, they should be allowed to do slow, gentle movement, and we can do slow, gentle movements that induce deeper relaxation or deeper concentration or calm or going approaching meditative states.
Meditation doesn't always have to be this complete, static stillness, Um.
So some of the things I teach in the body by breath work are these slow motion, dynamic movements such as, um like rolling over in bed.
I know that sounds crazy, but there's an exercise I teach where you're just laying on the ground in an like an X like shape and in super slow motion.
And I mean super slow motion, so that it's like you can feel one filament move at a time.
And I'll do it fast now.
But basically you let your hand cross over to your chest and then it reaches over to the opposite hand and your whole body ends up rolling over, and then you unwind that and you roll back.
And allowing yourself to really let go enough.
It feels like an external force is moving you and that whole event becomes the focus of your meditation.
The slow movement becomes the focus.
So your mind and your attention and your body really glom together, and so that becomes a very meditative experience.
There's another meditation I teach.
It's called the hand dance meditation that I learned from my studies in Butoh.
So Butoh is a form of Japanese dance that came out of Japan after the Second World War, after the devastation of the atomic bombs there.
And it's a very elemental, primal form of dance.
But sometimes the dances would... And I've studied this, and I've attended Butoh concerts.
You know, you'll see somebody go from standing down to the ground, and that will take 60 minutes.
So it'll be one gesture and you'll see them progressively melt all the way down to the ground.
It's incredibly powerful, like with cool lighting and stuff, or I've just seen it done in a dance space.
But this hand dance meditation is an homage to that.
And what that is is you can sit anywhere or you can lay down and you set a timer, and Five minutes is probably a good amount of time.
And over that timeframe, the hand that's in a fist ends up opening and the hand that's open goes into a fist.
And so you do this, and it's only one rep.
So you've got one hand in a fist, one hand open.
Close your eyes or have them partially open, and make sure your hands are rested.
And then over that five minute time period, no, just once.
Yeah.
And when I do this for my students and I set the timer, a lot of times they're nowhere near ready.
One hand is barely open, one hand is barely closed.
And so this is also this experience of interoception, because time is an interoceptive experience in our body.
So interoception, I just jumped like four pages of your questions there.
Interoception is our body's experience of its physiology.
It's our ability to sense our physiology, like our heart rate, our breath pace, our sexual urges hunger, satiety.
But time is also an interoceptive concept.
And so it's really interesting to see folks have this Dissociation of of their body and time and space.
But it doesn't like that's just a like a little factoid on the side.
But all this is designed to help those students with relaxation induced anxiety Find ways of focusing that don't spin them out or send them into a higher stress or threat response.
So yes, slow motion movement, extra slow motion, can be so helpful for so many different bodies and temperaments.
This is wonderful.
I wanted to cover at least one more thing with you, which this awareness of interoception and our body's awareness of itself.
This is also our awareness of pain.
Yes.
Obviously just part of being human and going through life.
You're going to experience pain, whether this is injuries or just hurts.
And my question is, can we utilize our breath?
Can breathing help us to recover, to heal faster?
Is this something that is well-established?
Whether again, somebody is working to recover from an injury.
Would the state that our breathing can put our bodies in help us create an environment to where healing can happen more gracefully and swiftly?
I just saw a paper. last week that was by Yosef Taschl out of Germany and some other folks.
And it was about chronic pain and PTSD and biofeedback resonance breathing, which is basically resonance breathing.
You need some tools to be able to see that you're in a synchronous frequency with your heart rate, the baroreceptors and your breath pace.
And typically, this is in the five to seven breaths per minute zone.
But these people had had tech so they had the biofeedback about this breath pace for their own bodies.
And I don't remember all the details, but the group that used resonance breathing, who had chronic pain along with PTSD, had a remarkable, had a significant ability to not have the catastrophizing around their pain to the degree that they had prior to the study.
So the controls still had the same relationship to their pain, but the people who had done the breathing practice, their relationship to their pain had transformed, which is incredible.
And the PTSD
So these are like compounding variables.
And then I would.
If it were my study, what I would have done is I would have wanted to also see can we give these people some self myofascial release intervention that actually deliberately addresses some of the pain points that they might have?
That's a lot of variables.
But I'm so encouraged by this study and I wish I could remember the name of it, but if you just look up Joseph Tashel and those other keywords, you'll find it.
Amazing.
So obviously, no two people are the same.
Any injury or any type of condition that somebody's dealing with they're working to recover from, it's always just gonna be an estimation on how long it's supposed to take to heal, right.
And so it's something that's difficult to track to see, like is somebody healing faster with this protocol, including breathing, versus not, because it's situation dependent?
However, it's such a huge component of catastrophizing, as you just mentioned, how we make it mentally like this is so bad, this is gonna take so long.
Whatever negative thing we could add to the mix, I'll never be the same, I'll never recover.
The quicker we can shift out of that, the more available we are to feeling better and to healing.
And so just that change alone is probably the biggest change possible.
Yeah, I think with pain, because there's so many different things that are impacting the pain, right.
It could be the tissues.
It could be your brain's memory of the pain.
It could be the salsa that you ate that was unfortunate, right?
It could be how your kid yelled at you.
There's so many things that impact pain that the beauty of that something so simple as breathing can be a window that gives you a reprieve into how your mind has arranged itself around its belief about your pain.
It's huge.
And I think that those, those of us or people who live in chronic pain, you really you want to stay positive and optimistic, that there can be other things that can help with your perspective, because when the perspective changes, it can change the physical engagement that you have with the pain.
And we need those windows in order to feel hopeful about living in this body.
Obviously, there are so many different paths to the goal, so many different modalities of accessing our breathing, but are there any kind of tried and true breathing exercises or strategies that you can give people, if they're dealing with pain, to help them to relax, to reduce the pain or just to even feel a little bit better?
I think the simple answer is slow down your breathing.
Whatever you're doing now, make it slower than it is normal and try to make your exhale last longer than your inhale.
So that's like the simplest strategy, because slow, deep breathing is really what's shown to help with symptoms of anxiety.
But pain specifically, I'm not so sure, because sometimes what happens is when we relax deeply we actually start to really feel our pain right.
The more in touch we get with ourselves.
So when we're sympathetically aroused, our muscles are bracing for us and our mind is spinning, and that can inoculate us to some of the screams that are coming from our interoception, from some of the ale of pain.
In fact, movement blunts pain.
So as soon as I'm still and I'm breathing slowly, what might happen is I might start to have more emotional processing and that can lead me to more catastrophizing.
So it's one of the reasons why, okay.
So also the way you're breathing could compound the pain, because you might have a paradoxical breathing pattern or you might already be a chronic zone two, zone three breather.
You might naturally Breathe like that when someone tells you to breathe deep, because you don't know there's another alternative.
You have trained your body away from a baby's breath.
Life has not been kind to you and you've tried to look skinny or not feel the feelings in your gut or whatever it is, and we're offloading our breathing into areas that compound our pain over time.
So this is one of the reasons why I include body awareness in the context of breathing, because also sometimes you just tell somebody to breathe and they have breath induced anxiety.
Forget about relaxation induced anxiety.
When I'm working with beginners and I ask them to breathe, that first breath is an assessment.
Some people have such a difficult time decoupling the need to control their breathing From letting it be an effortless full, deep experience.
And so that's one of the reasons why, like especially in Body by Breath, I introduced self-myofascial release into the body in gentle ways, because it can actually trick people into a more appropriate, healthy breathing pattern and get it out of this chronic over-breathing, using the neck, the shoulders, the ribs as the primary drivers of breathing.
So I think it's a lot more complicated.
I'm telling you the simple answer, which is take a longer breath than you normally would and make your exhale last longer than your inhale.
But that can have other consequences.
One of the things like I'll tell some people is let's blow out candles on the birthday cake and the next blowout is gonna be one more candle, right?
So you breathe in and then blow out four candles.
Good, take another slow breath in, now blow out five candles and so on, right?
So you can increase the duration of their exhale by giving them an external target, because sometimes the internal target really creates that anxiety.
So it's not simple.
I'm sorry, Sean.
No, I wasn't expecting it to be, because you're telling the truth.
And there's an overarching principle which is again accessing our breathing, according to what you just shared making that exhale longer.
But for some people, it's just finding the tools that work for you right now.
Oh, totally.
And one of those things you're really providing and has been now a staple in my life is putting pressure on parts and just interacting with those parts that might be holding tension right.
So, whether this is like that knot in your shoulder, whatever the case might be but utilizing these different tools that you give people access to,
And we were just doing some of that before the show started.
But that knot in your shoulder and putting the right amount of pressure into it and breathing, breathing into it.
Pressure on parts.
And I can literally feel like that tension melting away when I do those kinds of things.
And also like putting that pressure and then changing my body, rotating different ways, turning my head right.
Just being able to get in there and to move around and to again.
It's creating more physical literacy even around that tension.
And so pressure on parts combined with breathing can really help to relieve a lot of the symptoms and manifestation of pain.
But that's just one access point, that's one strategy.
This is incredibly complex.
And this is why you have such a phenomenal stacked book.
It is a hefty book, but it's beautiful.
So visually pleasing as well.
Tons of photos.
Can I flash it?
Yeah, of course, please show.
I'll take out my stacks of notes too.
So this is Body by Breath.
Yes.
And this is a book that and I haven't shared this with you I see your book every day because it's just kind of right there, prominent on my bookshelf.
It's 480 pages and more than seven years of writing.
Plus, you know, the...
30, 40 years of life prior to the writing.
Yeah, this is like a manual for so many different practitioners.
Sometimes I might randomly visit a colleague who's doing, whether they're a massage therapist, physical therapist, And I've seen your book out there in the wild.
Oh, that's so great.
Oh my God.
That makes me so happy.
So can you tell people where they can pick up a copy of the book and also share where they can pick up those tools?
Yes.
Oh my gosh.
I'm so honored.
Yes.
So body by breath, I don't carry it cause it's too heavy.
So get it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or wherever you buy, wherever you buy books, and it is available electronically like Kindle.
Um, a hard cop.
I'm a paper person, so i love that.
And then there's another book called the role model.
That's my first book and that's all about the self myofascial release basic self myofascial release strategies and that's available on tune up fitness, my website, as well as amazon.
So my the therapy balls.
There are different sizes, like we discussed earlier, and they work great on all different parts of your body to help you live better in your body and transform your pain, And they're available on Tune Up Fitness as well as Amazon.
And there's a lot of independent clinics that also sell them.
So you can find them.
And you can find teachers who work in person with you on my website.
You can do that by zip code.
And then I teach, of course, all over the world.
And I also have a platform on Tune Up Fitness where I teach weekly classes in a library called Move, Breathe, Roll.
But all the exercises in Body by Breath, they...
You know they're written in the book, but they're also filmed on video because a lot of people are not necessarily wanting to learn an exercise from a book.
So I recorded every single exercise that's in this book.
And that's also on my platform in the Move, Breathe, Roll platform.
Amazing.
Thank you so much for putting so much energy and effort into creating this.
It's truly special.
And thank you again for making the trip to come and hang out with me today.
I appreciate it.
It's easy.
You're down the street.
I love it.
Well, thank you again so much for, for everything that you do.
It really does mean a lot.
Thank you.
The one and only Jill Miller.
The one and only Shawn Stevenson.
Come on.
Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today.
I hope that you got a lot of value out of this.
The real value comes in utilizing it.
All right.
Again, this has been transformative for so many people.
Putting pressure on parts.
PLP.
Pop that.
Pop that.
All right.
Pressure on parts.
And couple that with being intentional about our breathing.
Incredibly intentional. powerful for relaxation.
Before this episode even started today, I was in there minding taking a nap.
I'm not a nappy type guy but just doing a couple of these exercises with Jill here at our studio in the lobby, like it's just so relaxing for my body.
And I found little parts of pressure like oh, I didn't know that was.
That's a little junky, you know, and just being able to work on those parts and also just to feel that tension to leave the body, And it's an incredibly valuable practice.
But most of us don't realize that we have access to treating and supporting our own bodies and having more physical literacy.
That's the key.
And so just the awareness that we can do things like this is so powerful, but our ancestors have known this for thousands of years.
We're just beginning to remember.
So I appreciate you remembering for checking out this episode today.
And please share this out with somebody that you care about.
You can send this directly from the podcast app that you're listening on or share it on social media with your friends and followers.
Make sure to tag me.
I'm at Sean Model on Instagram.
And I appreciate you so much.
We've got epic masterclasses and world-class guests coming your way very, very soon.
So make sure to stay tuned.
Take care.
Have an amazing day.
And I'll talk with you soon.
