Raising Wild Hearts: Conscious Parenting, Mindful Motherhood & Happiness Habits for Trailblazing Women
"Raising Wild Hearts by Ryann Watkin" is an intimate look at the messy intersection of psychology, spirituality, and relationships. Known for her insightful questions, honest reflection, and engaging wit, Ryann Watkin leads conversations with a dash of sarcasm and a whole lotta love. For the cycle-breakers, the change-makers, and the revolutionaries envisioning a more beautiful way to live, work, and play, Raising Wild Hearts dives headfirst into the heart of the matter with the world's leading experts and authors. Oh, and get ready to grow your book list because around here, there can never be enough books.
Raising Wild Hearts: Conscious Parenting, Mindful Motherhood & Happiness Habits for Trailblazing Women
The Brain, Breath and Body Connection with Brooke McPoyle
What if everything we've been taught about wellness wasn't the whole story? Founder of Musical Breathwork, Brooke McPoyle is here to teach us about the connections innate to our bodies and how to create harmony inside and out. Watch and listen to the Gamma Seeker Broadcast with Brooke McPoyle here and Follow Brooke on Instagram here.
If you feel inspired please consider sharing this episode with a friend, writing a 5⭐️ review or becoming a Raising Wild Hearts Member here!
The circulation of those tissues requires the breath. But when we start to experience how when the tissues are open and flowing, when the nerves are firing, when the breath is slow, the biofield, like what our what our body is actually emitting out and around us, becomes stronger. And when it becomes stronger, I think we have an opportunity to really see how much interaction is happening with our loved ones without words.
SPEAKER_01:Hey friends, welcome back to the Raising Wild Hearts podcast. That was Brooke McBoyle, founder of Musical Breath Work. I am so excited to introduce Brooke to you today. She has come across my path a few different times. And now finally she is on the podcast, and we are talking about so much. We're talking about brainwaves and breath and stress and fascia. If you don't know what fascia is, you're about to find out. And this conversation has such depth and meaning. Brooke really shows through her work in the world that yes, everything from our bodies to our families to the bigger meta picture is, and I don't mean meta like Facebook, that everything is really connected. And I can't wait for you guys to hear her wisdom. So Brooke developed a unique method that uses fascia release, breath science, and frequency to help individuals regulate their bodies. Her brain breath equation is utilized by professionals and high performers to manage stress, enhance flow, and stimulate gamma brain waves. Through her mighty breath and fascia flow techniques, she aims to foster resilience and rhythm in her clients. If you are not following along yet in this journey, hit follow wherever you're listening, whether it's on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I can't wait to show up here every week with these amazing interviews. I am truly learning alongside of you, and it is the ride of my life. The whole entire premise of the show is that we can change the world by starting at home. So somehow, some way, every single person I'm talking to on the show is bringing it back to that. And it's funny because it's been very organic, like we land the plane in this episode that you're about to hear. So if you're not following me on Instagram, go ahead and do it. If you haven't signed up for my email list, become an insider at raisingwildhearts.com slash books. I am so excited to welcome you in to my community to show you what's going on behind the scenes, to talk about different events I have coming up and ways to work with me outside of just this podcast. So without further ado, let's get into my conversation today with the brilliant Brooke McPoyle. Brooke, welcome to the Raising Wild Arts Podcast.
SPEAKER_02:What an honor to be here, Ryan. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my gosh, you're so welcome. I am so flipping excited. I heard you first on Alex Zach's podcast, The Way Forward. And then we met in January, and I didn't even know it was you. And then we met at the podcast studio that I do some consulting at. And I was like, God, how do I know you, Brooke? And I noticed the little uh skeleton foot that you had hanging out of your bag. And I was like, oh my gosh, you're the fascia woman. I don't, and I so all these connections, it all came full circle. And I cannot wait to dive into everything with you today. But I want to start with breathing in for seven seconds, breathing out for eight, like getting your heart rate to a slower pace to stay calm, be present. Uh, you will phrase it the way that you want to phrase it. But so I'm doing it this morning as I'm getting my kids ready for school and I'm like, get your socks on. Okay, wait, I gotta breathe. Okay, seven and eight out. And I like kept forgetting. I was like, how much am I forgetting like to do this in like a you know, 45-minute time frame? And I felt, you know, busy and I felt a little frantic and I felt a little pressurized. My husband's out of town, and so I'm juggling all the things and all the children by myself, and there's various tantrums and arguments and all the things going on at one time. And I'm just like, breathe in seven, breathe out eight, and you won't lose your shit. And so, speaking from the context of a busy ass parent who's just trying their best to be present for their kids, to also get done the things that need to get done and like logistically be on top of things, but still be like calm, present, loving mama. How would you say that we should be breathing? Is the seven in, eight out good for that, that context, or is it something different that I should have been doing?
SPEAKER_02:No, it's a beautiful context. And, you know, we're a bit controlled by time. Kronos is the god that we all follow. So those numbers that I give, those second counts, are really just a barometer for somebody on the outside. But on the inside, the way that I really like to teach the breath is a shaping of the breath so that we don't have to count. We don't have to keep our mind busy doing something. It's more of drawing the awareness back internal. And that's the whole point of the breath is to slow down the present moment. So our nervous system is operating at 268 miles an hour, which divides itself into eight seconds or eight times per second, we're moving internally to externally, just like your kids are. So your kids are hearing mama, but they're also having this entire internal visceral experience of, you know, getting their shoes on. So we might be frantic, but anytime that we have frantic energy, the the kids, and I'm not a mom, so I get to experience this as an ant. Um so I, you know, I want to just make that as a key indicator, do as I theorize because I'm I'm not in that yet, right? Um, but the goal of breathing to that count is really just about getting into the breath. So if if you can do this exercise with me, this is actually, I think, a more foundational way to experience that slow breath rate. If you slow motion swallow and lock the back third of your tongue into the back part of your throat, often when we think of tongue position, we can be aware of the tip of our tongue, but I want you to bring your awareness to the back third of your tongue and then just slow motion swallow. And I want you to feel how that tongue kind of sticks to the roof of your mouth. And then do it one more time and then hold, if you can, the back third of your tongue against the roof of the mouth, inhale slowly through the nose and fill up the low belly. When we're slowing the breath rate, you have a choice to count. And that's how a lot of breath teachers teach. The Boudicco teachers teach. For me, it's about a shape. So, again, if we kind of like lift that the back third of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, and then we inhale slowly and we fill the nose and then draw the breath all the way into your belly, pushing the belly out. When the belly gets full, inhale more and move the air to the back of the back belly. Then inhale more through the side of your body and your back. Then inhale more into your chest. This should feel like you're at maximum capacity of air. Then as you exhale, I want you to be as slow as you can, and I want you to push the air down as if you're releasing the chest first, then the sides, then the back, and then at the very end the belly. And we're emptying until we touch that space of like empty, empty, and then inhale again slow. So when we make it less about account and more about the feelings, we start to pull our awareness back into the body, and that's where the freedom is gonna be. So I like to say breathing at this rate for four minutes is what really pulls us back because four minutes is what our body needs to rev down. We can rev up in a half a second, an explosion goes off outside, and you have no control over the biology that is going to answer to danger. And stress is gonna trigger that same danger response. So often we have to recalibrate what we call danger. So anytime we get in the car, you know, we're gonna be a little bit more on alert. And then if somebody cuts us off, that's full danger. So our nervous system is always gonna be in this state of stress. Stress is needed for us to grow. It's a matter of how quickly we can recover from that stress. And it's all about the breath. So, so many anti-stress rituals, you know, that people have that are bad habits, like drinking or smoking, um, those often all do the same thing. They slow your breath rate down. And you can see a smoker, they'll pull a cigarette out, and even before the first drag, you can see them take a deep sigh. And it's because that ritual has become paired with something that's going to relax them. But all of the relaxing rituals calm our breath. Taking a bubble bath, lighting a candle, and sitting on your favorite chair in your slippers. You know, there's so many things that we can do to create that sense of ease, but it's all found within the body in that slowness. So instead of counting, there's a number of things we can do. We can hum. If you have young kids that are kind of frantic, and emotion is something that needs to come out of the body. And I fear that we have been groomed to repress, repress, repress. Totally. So when a kid has a tantrum to, you know, have them vocalize, like, why are you mad at mommy? Are you mad that mommy turned off the show? Okay, do you want to stomp it out for a few minutes? We can stomp. Stomping's a healthy way to get the energy out. Do you want to yell for a second? If yelling's okay in your house, I know it's not okay in everybody's.
SPEAKER_00:It is.
SPEAKER_02:Right? So having that expression, then once the expression comes out, it's like, okay, are you ready to shift now? Because we can do what you want on and at another time. Can you say thank you for the experience that you had? So I even feel like when we get upset and frustrated in our nervous system, if we kind of bash ourselves with the nervous system tools, we don't also give us that opportunity to breathe into the stress and to just feel it, you know, because some stress is there for us to be like, okay, you know what? Let's not do this again.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:This is something that I don't want to do. And maybe I need to just sit with how uncomfortable this is and organize the fact that this is a boundary I'm not willing to have anymore. So instead of just reorienting the feelings so quickly, I think even just talking to a kid in the discomfort and teaching them how to vocalize. I think so many of um, you know, 40-year-old men are starting to vocalize things that they have repressed. And it comes from how we were raised in our childhood, you know. I was told, you know, your feelings don't matter and you can cry all you want, but your emotions, you know, need to be shoved in a corner. And any great athlete will tell you that, you know, you the form of discipline you have to be amazing is by putting your feelings in the corner. So there is a give and take there, but learning how to at least vocalize them and then come back into the steadiness of our body, I think is part of us learning how to resonate cleaner.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So one of the things that amazes me about you is that you've taken all of these seemingly different or separate ideas, and you've figured out a way to put them all together. Like from the experience in your life to the fashion, the brain, and the breath, and everything that you talk about, it amazes me. It was one of the things that when I was like really amping up to talk to you, I was like, oh my God, she's like taken D1 athletics with, you know, this and paired it with this. And you found this like connection between everything. And it takes this kind of new agey, you know, thing that we say of like, we're all one. Like, you know, we we say that in some people say that, whatever, but you make it in a practical and tangible way. And the thing I could think of when I was like really listening to your work was it's all related. The way we're showing up for our kids, the way we're breathing, the way that they are coming at us, the way that we're all like cohabitating in this little house of ours, like, you know, just to keep it in the family context, like it's all one and it's all related. Somebody has a meltdown, the the ripples of like this kind of frustration start to like spread in the house. How do we receive that, process that, and then you know, come back to center multiple dozens, hundreds of times a day, right? So, how did you in your life like figure out that all these things are related? Has this always been you, or have you just like had an epiphany where you brought all these things together?
SPEAKER_02:Uh, lots of failure. You know, I wanted to be a rock star. And so like I learned instruments when I was like 16. Um and learning guitar was fascinating for your brain because you have to become like you have to build your dexterity. And I remember having conversations with my pinky, like, come on, baby, move. Yeah, push a little harder. It's just a pinky. Um, and you know, learning how to classically sing when I was a young age, that is core memories for me for sure. Learning how to resonate off of um other people that are singing, and then you know, moving from alto to soprano. And I really think that if somebody's interested in singing at a young age, joining a choir is a beautiful way to not have too much pressure on your voice and learn how to sing with a group of people. And I really don't recommend voice lessons to kids younger than 12 because there's so much changing in the voice. You really don't want to have like a lot of hyper training as the body and the tissues are still opening. You just want to have exploration and curiosity. Um, and then when I learned how to play golf, I took it way too seriously because my dad's amazing, and my brother's my brother is amazing. Um, my dad has shot 62 twice, and any golfer would know that's you know so good.
SPEAKER_01:I'm a golfer, I'm not a golfer like you, but I'm a golfer. So I get that.
SPEAKER_02:It's uh to be raised around that, my dad had definitely a different uh way of looking at sports psychology and putting and um, in a sense, a little bit of telepathy controlling something outside of your body. And because of all of the sports psychology books that I read, and then with music in my body, I always saw the golf ball as this like trajectory, as this thing that you were controlling through space and time, a lot like your voice, because a voice has to be blasted, you know, in a similar way to a golf shot. It's a full body thing. And um a foot injury in my late 20s after I had run a chiropractic clinic, run a couple skincare offices, uh, really the foot injury blended all of these things I had learned over the last 15 years. And um, I really woke up two years ago trying to fix my own problem and ended up fixing a way bigger problem. And when I tied that with the breath sequence that I had been teaching for a decade, um, there was a brainwave shift that I noticed in my clients. So when I added my new fascia flow sequence that I built to heal my body, to heal my foot injury and my hip injury, when that worked for me, I introduced it to my parents and both of their knee pain went away within a couple weeks, and I was like, all right, I'm on to something. So I introduced it to my breathwork clients. And at the end of my breath work session, about 50% of people would always get to that close, like theta delta state, which is my goal. Um, you know, clean the tissue, double the lung capacity, and then drop the brainwaves that way we can leave in a state of peace. But I always had like a 50%. You know, 50% of my clients would get there. The other 50% were still kind of in their head, they'd be a little itchy, they'd be a little, you know, moving. When I added the fascia flow, it was like 100% after that. And it still is. And it blows my mind because I, you know, teaching breath work for 10 years, you can see the pattern. You can see that, like, okay, statistically, 50% of people are gonna get into this relaxed state by the time we're done. So to have it be a hundred percent of people, I was like, wow, the fascia is holding a lot more nervous tension than we previously thought. And as cool as the results have been on joints, I am still kind of blown away at this brain breath fascia connection that we can train. I mean, the two biggest inputs for stress is your heart rate and your brain wave tension. And those two are controlled by your fascia tension and your breath rate. So by training the two outer inputs, we can change how the inside is coping with everything that life throws at us. And as a professional athlete, um, I don't gamble as much as I used to anymore. But after uh playing D1 golf, I I turned pro and um I gambled heavily because that's how you pretend you're in tournament. You know, you create pressure by, you know, putting money on the line that you really don't want to lose. And um through error, through really caving to adrenaline, I learned how, you know, the yawns would come and then there'd be this like pop of you know, everything in your body would dilate, and then you'd have to learn how to play with that adrenaline. And in golf, you actually measure it. Like when the adrenaline dump hits, you go up two clubs because everything is flowing faster. So it becomes very sequential. And then um, you know, after I quit the game and I started working again, and I was just, you know, I started a band, and then I'd get on stage and I'd have this same adrenaline dump. And I could converse with it a little differently because of golf, I had metriced how my body handled the norepinephrine and and how it would hit my system and you know, this process that I would go through. Um, and learning the fascia flow and the mighty breath, when I started teaching that to the clients, I could see it was creating a sports performance psychology. So my you know, professional speaker clients, we could come up with a sequence for them before they would hit the mic, you know, about an hour before this is what they would do, 15 minutes before this is what they would do, and then 30 seconds before this is how you ground back into your feet. Drop into that slow breath rate so that when you step up on stage, you are in your full power instead of frozen in that fear.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Wow. So you said music is your soul speaking and a chance to hear what's on your mind and heart. And I was just like, whoa, you said something like you just it's an exploration, like it's kind of hearing, feeling, sensing. And I look at my kids when they do music, and one of them plays the violin, they're just starting to do kind of like the flute thing, one of them has a keyboard, and one of them in particular is just very musical. She always wants music on, she's always singing, humming, kind of like making a tune. And I am dancing this line between like, let's get her into classes and get her serious about this and that, and like let's just let her bang around on her keyboard and come up with some sounds, right? And I'm always really mindful not to say, like, oh, that sounds so good. Because to me, is that sounding good? Like, what's what's it sounding like to her versus to me? Is it sounding the same in her little mind? Or is it sounding like you know what I'm saying? And so I'm really trying not to put her in a box. So, what would you tell somebody whose kid or who's who their cell like themselves is interested in music, but they don't want to put themselves in a box? Do they take classes or do they just have fun? Like, how do you actually learn how to do it as an adult and as a kid?
SPEAKER_02:Well, to learn how to do it takes it takes a bit of consistency because you're learning patterns. So just like when we learn how to draw or write for the first time, we have to, you know, if if you want to get better at drawing, what I was taught was you draw a hundred circles the same exact size and a hundred triangles the same exact size and a hundred squares. And then you get better at the repet repeating pattern. Um, if I wanted to restart learning instruments, I would start with the piano. Um, the piano to me is is the most it's the most friendly instrument to learn from because everything is kind of binary and it's right in front of you. You can learn a chord progression in like 20 minutes. Um, but I actually painted my piano a few years ago. And I made like all the C's are yellow, you know, you can do whatever order for me. This was the order that felt right. So I started A red and then um B is orange, C is yellow, G is blue, then I got a couple variants of blues, and then I end on purple. Um, purple is G. And every musician that sits down converts chord progressions into colors, and they're like, oh, I'm gonna play the yellow chord. And I'm like, I know exactly what you mean. And I think that there's something about taking a piano and making it colorful that makes everybody a little more privy to play because chords are just, you know, you're placing your hands in a similar pattern over the color progression. Um, when we get into strings, you know, you have to be willing to sit for 10 minutes, five days a week, to teach your body how to hold it. Violin's the toughest instrument I've ever picked up. I make it sound like a dying cat. So good on you for struggling through those sounds. It's the school. Oh, yes, I am listening. I am having to listen to it.
SPEAKER_00:That's intense.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it is. It is. I I think learning instruments can be started at any age, and it's just a matter of keeping the kids' joy in it because a lot of people will learn an instrument young and then they quit when they're an adult. So I feel like um for me, when I learned how to play guitar and I learned on this brutal squire with like no action, so like my fingers would bleed, and my dad said if I wanted a teacher, I had to practice five days a week for at least 45 minutes from a book. And I thought that was really good because it proved to me how much I actually wanted to play. Yeah. And it also proved to my parents that I had the discipline to learn. And so I learned from a book. And the book actually, when by the time I got my teacher, I had actually known a little bit of the basics. So we had we were able to kind of skip the first four lessons because I had proven myself to that point. But then the minutiae and the nuance of learning to transition, I was able to have someone there. So um, I have a personal goal of learning learning a new instrument each year. By the time I'm 80, I'd like to play 80, 80 instruments, and there's so many pattern overlaps that when you learn one, like if you learned piano, it's way easier to pick up a ukulele, you know, or if you love Indian instruments, you can go piano to harmonium very easily. Um, once you have ukulele, it's very easy to transition to guitar. It's it's not as simple. Um, but ukulele to me is a lot easier to start on because it's nylon strings, there's only four patterns. Um, and then you know, once you have guitar and your blood, you know, transitioning to like a tampora or a harp becomes a lot easier or a bass, you know, like those things kind of feed on top of each other. Violin, I think, is kind of the next level. Yeah. Because it's a bowed instruments, but it's microtonal, so there's no frets there for you. And that's the amazing thing about exotic instruments, is you realize that us Americans are are teaching in a very small octave pattern. So our ear is capable of perceiving almost 1400 tones, but we're only like a classical piano only has 78 keys. Um so our ear is incredibly bored, and particularly in the compressed music that we listen to, I mean, we're listening to three octaves a day.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_02:You know, between the bass and the high notes, and like occasionally if you listen to like somebody that hits whistle notes, you know, good on you, you're in a five-octave range, but it's a fraction of what our ear is actually capable of doing. And the cool thing about the voice is the voice is microtonal. So I'm always really big on listen to everything. Yeah. You know, uh West Indian music, Turkish music, Bulgarian music, weird gu chang, Chinese lullaby music. The Gu Chang is that horizontal harp. Um, very easy to play if you play the harp, actually. The pattern's almost set up the same. Um, so the Chinese gu chang is it's just different sounds and frequencies, you know, Celtic music um with you know, the Greek bazookie. It's all of those things can kind of pepper our brain with more information. And so, like if I had a kid, I would definitely have a piano in my house with painted keys that they could hit up on, and I would really insist no control until they want they express desire to get lessons. Lessons are amazing. I really feel like progressing with a coach happens a hundred times more than progressing by yourself.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Um, because you get to learn how map like the the nuance of posture and the nuance of breathing, the nuance of feeling. Um, but it's it's really about sound. If sound is important to you, if you're around live music, like I really love an upright piano way more than a keyboard because it's a harp and it plays the frequencies back to you. And um, I'm a kind of a stickler. I'm on my third upright piano, and they're very affordable locally because most people can't move them. Right. So you can get like a spinster for free and it's 125 bucks to tune it if you shop around. Um, as long as it, you know, I can help you like shop for a month because if you buy one when the harp is cracked, you know, you're kind of screwed. But um, I really think that having real instruments around that are tuned is like uh the way for someone to really experience, you know, is is the artist alive in them? And art is something that we can keep with us forever. Yeah. I I hate um singing like cover songs. So when I say like music is I'm more of a bard. I like to make up songs. I'm like a queen of, you know, that's just pick a chord progression, go around the room and make up something that feels real. Because to me, that's real music. It's when it lives and die in that moment, just like a you know, piece of food or a piece of, you know, you hit a golf shot, it lives and dies then. You know, you can't capture that or redo it. You can never hit the same shot twice. I think music has lost that magic because they're so much recorded. So um having that in somebody's field, I think is kind of important.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I don't consider myself a musical person, but the fact that my kids are really into it, I'm like, okay, well, I want to keep that door open for them without like shoving them into a box. And that's what they do. They go around making up stuff all day long. I'll make up little silly songs, like about everything. Like there's like everything can be a song. I'm like good with words. So I just like all of a sudden I'll start like rapping or just like making up a little tune to like get our shoes on or whatever. Um, and so I do that, but they really like are making like these different sounds with these different instruments. Some of them are just homemade instruments, some of them are actually instruments that we have, you know, like these little wooden things with the uh bells and the drums and you know, the keyboard and whatever. But so yeah, I was really curious about that. Are you really good at math? And how did you get so ambitious? Like you strike me as somebody who is like, I see something that I want, I'm gonna get that, and I'm gonna do it to like a thousand percent of my ability.
SPEAKER_02:Um, I I think I came out that way.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I um I definitely was I had a younger brother. A lot of us mistaken us as twins. He's three years younger than me. So there was a definitely a competitive nature that was bred in my family. My dad's a a a CEO, my mom's a CEO. They both played college sports. Um my dad was quite a pro. Um, he went, he turned pro when I was a kid again and then like came back to be a businessman again. And so I think my brother, my dad always instilled competition between me and my brother for the little things.
SPEAKER_00:Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_02:Um, but also I'm just so small that I think I was so used to people telling me that I can't do things because I'm a girl and I'm, you know, too little. Um, so I I think part of me always pushed back it, like back on, you know, I am a woman, but I am mighty. Yeah. You know, I was the shortest person on my team by like a foot. It's a bunch of like six-foot European women. Wow.
SPEAKER_00:Um I can't do it. Like, watch me. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I could hit the ball as far as them. Um so I think that part of me just, you know, I think I came in a little bit of a spitfire.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And the ambition um probably was nurtured at a young age. And I I, you know, I was the leader of me and my cousin. So like I remember tromping along the garden and like I was the one making up the games, and yeah, we're gonna balance on the fence because the floor is lava.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so fun. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_01:I have one of those. Our oldest is the leader of five cousins. And then also her three siblings. And she's a Capricorn. And so she's just very like my way or the highway. And everybody's like, okay. Mostly. There's some pushback though, you know, naturally. But I think birth order has a lot to do with it too. You're older, there's a younger boy who like you're now competing with because you're like, I can do this. So like I think that's a really cool spin on like sibling relationships, how to like level up with each other and how to like really because sometimes I view competition as bad, but you know, of like, oh, we can't compare our kids to each other. We don't want them competing. But there is that element of like that it's healthy.
SPEAKER_02:We were okay. So like here's some things that my dad would do at a young age. My brother and I, we never wanted to clean dishes, but it was our job to clean dishes. And my dad would set up a glass like eight feet away from us, like a tiny, just a drinking glass, whatever he was drinking water out of. And we would get two shots and we'd have to curl up our napkin and then try to throw it. And if we made it into the glass, we were, we did not have to do the dishes. Oh my god. Um, another thing my dad did for like jump training, I don't know when he started this, he glued or like taped a dollar bill, or it was a dollar, I think it was like wasn't even a lot of dollar to um like our highest point that we could jump in the hallway. Uh-huh. And so every time we would like walk through the hallway, we would, you know, lift off to try to hit it. Yep. Um things like throwing a football at us um when we were jumping into the pool. I was I was quarter, I was quarterback for the powder puff team in high school. Like I actually had a pretty wicked arm. And my mom was a softball player um in college. So I I don't know. I think that they did a lot of stuff for us where we had to throw and we had to like kind of precision throw. They made all of these little exercise games. Like I could throw a rocket baseball by the time I was nine because my mom was determined that like I could throw a you know a 60-yard pitch or like I could wing a frisbee. Um, so there was always these games that my parents set up for us to compete against each other where it was a playful reward. It wasn't, you know, something ridiculous or we couldn't hold it over each other's head, but it was something that encouraged greatness. My dad talked about greatness a lot and how greatness is your ability to kind of distill your consciousness into a moment.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So um, you know, growing up watching golf, you would see these great tournaments come down to a four-foot putt. And you're, you know, here's a man that's hit a million four-footers. Is he gonna make it with a half million dollars on the line? And so we would watch these things with my dad and the sports psychology of, you know, you've hit this putt 10,000 times and you've made it. Can you do it actually under pressure?
SPEAKER_01:Did you see the ending of the US Open? You know what? I did not. My I was actually on a boat. Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_02:Well, that sounds lovely. My dad like it totally gave me a hard time. He was like, This is the best one ever. None of my kids were here. My brother was at Bonneroo. It was Father's Day.
unknown:That's hilarious.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, it was it was a great ending. It was really good. And um, yeah, that made me think of that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, the sports psychology of golf is is kind of on ending, you know. It is when you learn it with your kids, you know, you teach your kids what's the difference between making a three-footer under pressure and missing a three-footer under pressure. Yeah, there's a lot to unbox just in that psychology alone.
SPEAKER_01:A ton. That's so cool. Okay, so you said fascia, and for those of us who don't know what fascia is yet, I know a little bit because I've learned from you. But can you tell somebody who's like complete brand new beginner, going, like, what the hell is fascia? And do I even have that?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, okay, so we can picture the skeleton, right? We can picture our organs, we can picture our muscles, but what is the webbing that holds that all in place? Because none of our bones actually touch each other, none of the muscles actually touch the bone. So everything is being held together by fascia, and it's a triple helix collagen fiber network. That's a long word for connective tissue. And I was taught never about fascia as an athlete, which is wild because in golf I've now realized that your your fascia's ability to glide is what gives you counter rotation. And um, it's wild to me that we're not training it even in high-end athletics because it is what's gonna allow the muscles to fire in complex movements. So, unless you're classical weightlifting, where you're, you know, picking up heavy moves and you're trying to get into perfect positions, every other sport is a full body mechanism. You're pushing off of your toes in order to guide your hips somewhere, and then you're rotating the upper body off of that. So fascia is the orchestrating mechanism that holds everything in place. So if we picture it like a sponge, it's my favorite. The way that a lot of diagrams um teach it, and a lot of the textbook teaches it, we look at it like sheets of paper or plastic because it's a sheer-like material. And in some areas of the body, it's very thin. So if you put your tongue on the side of your mouth here, like on the inside of your cheek, there's a muscle in there, but it's actually mostly collagen that's holding. We have 44 muscles in the face, and what's holding those muscles to our skull plates is the fascia, right? And the fascia itself, because it's sponge-like, there's areas where it's a little shallow, like our cheek. We can kind of like, you know, blow our cheeks out and suck our cheeks in. And then there's areas where the fascia is braided together with other fascia bands and becomes a lot more rigid, like a rubber band. And if you touch the bottom of your foot, that is the planter fascia. That's what's holding up the arch. That's what's holding the foot together. Well, the planter fascia is one of the densest fascia bands in the body. And we actually have eight major fascia bands that are like this rubber band. I call it the industrial strength rubber band because it's really, really strong, but there's a viscoelastic property to it, right? And our skeleton is supported by these eight major fascia bands, but the tension on one leg can be a little bit different than the tension on the other leg. And what I have found, like people, you know, they'll be like, my right, I have a bad right knee or I have a bad, you know, left hip or something. And why is it that our joints are wearing out at different differently from the left to the right, even though we're doing the same exact training or running the same exact miles on both legs? Well, what I found was during college, I had had three um like kind of serious scar tissue issues on my right hand side. And after training on top of those tears, like because I didn't know how to recover it properly, I just followed what every PT says, you know, ice, rest, take anti-inflammatories, you know, be respectful to the pain. Um, and then I wouldn't think anything about it. So, you know, scar tissue or no scar tissue, I'm just gonna keep training as soon as the PTs give me instruction to do so. But after three serious injuries, I had a chronic hip tilt. And no matter how much I saw the chiropractor, as soon as I would get back up and walk around for a month, that hip tilt would come back and it would create inflammation in my right side. So I had found a way through a lot of reading and a lot of experimentation to reset the tension in the major fascia bands, which are to me, all of the fascia in the body is a concern. We have horizontal bands that hold our eyes and our brain in place, all of it needs flow. But the ones that I'm the most concerned about, the ones that I made the course for, is our skeletal fascia bands. So if we were to look at the cross section of like a loofah, right? So if uh a sponge is a cool material to think of for the fascia because it holds water, it um it changes, if it dehydrates, it's like brittle and dry and stiff, just like how we feel, you know, after a night of drinking, if somebody wakes up and they're like, ah, everything in their body feels like dry, stiff, and creaky. I like to imagine that as the fascia in your body is a dehydrated sponge because you poured alcohol into it. And like our urine comes from our blood, right? So, like whatever we're putting in our body goes through the intestinal tract and then it's absorbed into the bloodstream. And then depending on the quality of fluids that we have within the body, our blood is gonna be kind of like clean and like light, or it's gonna be kind of like full of sediment and a little more cruddy. And our fascia is the one that's going to tell us if we're dry and stiff or if we're really hydrated and feeling clean. The confusing part about fascia and why medical doctors are terrified to talk about it still, and I completely understand, and I'm like, I'm happy to be an athlete, you know, because I'm just I like feel like I'm here reporting information. Like, here's the new stuff on the fascia. Right. The issue about it is inside of the fascia, right? So we know that the fascia is the sponge, we know it holds things in place. There's a liquid outside of the fascia called hyaluronic acid that we're familiar with because it's in a lot of skincare products. But our body makes hyaluronic acid. It's in our tears and our saliva and the fluid that comes out of us when we're turned on. It's inside of our joints, what we call synovial joint fluid. It's super dense within our joints. But our body makes it. And there's a cell hidden within the deep fascia called a fibrocyte. We didn't discover it till 2018. And we used to say, like, oh, your collagen is just gonna deplete after you're 30. And the discovery of this cell made me like, whoa, this means hold on, guys, hold on, everybody pump the brakes. Because like, if we can make more of this stuff internally, we just change the game on recovery. So we know all of that about fascia, right? And my fascia flow course is built to activate these fibrocytes. That's the whole point of what I built is like, how do we turn on these little cells that are hidden within the deep fascia in order to remake this acid? What we don't know about fascia is that inside of these little triple helix structures, inside of the collagen itself, there is a fluid that's being transmitted. It's a plasmatic fluid that is carrying electrons, that is emulating properties that we don't quite understand. And I'm gonna try to just explain it in the best way that I know how of. Um, depending on the literature that you read, some around the world, people are saying it's lymphatic tissue, some people are saying it is um fourth phase water, some people are saying it's life force energy. Whatever it is, it's pretty bioluminescent. It's pretty plans plasmatic. And when I sit with doctors who have opened a lot of bodies and opened the brains, like the neuroscientists are just like, man, people are gonna realize here soon that it's all connected, it's all one. That's actually something that Dr. Zapatera said to me, like repetitively. He's like, when we start to get into the fascia, it's really hard to see the beginning and end of things. There are structures made of cartilage, but the body is it's polymorphic, viscoelastic, it's it's metaphasic, it's piezoelectric. This fluid that's being housed inside of the fascia can change from solid to liquid. And I think that it's easiest to see that in children. When children fall, there's this like almost, you know, they look like a rubber ball, like they just kind of like bounce off the ground and they get up and they giggle, and you're like, wow, that would almost been a disaster. Yeah. Um, and it's this if you think of a sponge, you know, that's fully hydrated, and you know, it has this ability to kind of be a watery form, that's the part of the fascia that's confusing doctors. Um, but I mean, it it's all gonna start coming out here. The pathologists, pathologists are doctors that look at tissue slide samples. So they're the ones that see, you know, the breast tissue sample, the liver samples, the gallbladder samples, say, oh, you know, there's cancer in here, whatever. The pathologists have seen now uh there's something that they call artifact, and it's when you put the glass slide slider on top of the tissue sample, there's a little bit of a break in the tissue. That's what they've called artifact for all these years. And there's these people that are coming forward, and they're like, you guys, we thought this was artifact, and it's fascia. The fascia is not only like myofascia massage is some a word that a lot of people are familiar with. Myofascia just means the fascia outside of the muscle. That's that was the first context I heard it in.
SPEAKER_01:It was like myofascial release.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:And um, that is often like a pretty lightweight massage, and they just kind of like move the skin around on top of the muscle, which does nothing for a performance athlete that has like, you know, torn a couple things at the same time.
SPEAKER_01:It's like putting balm on like a third-degree burn or something.
SPEAKER_02:It could help some people, it's not gonna help, you know, people that have you know ripped their hamstring apart. Um what we have found is that these pathologists, it's not just fascia outside of the muscle, it's fascia between every single muscle fiber. And then it's fascia in between the cells, and then the fascia is going into the cells through something called integrins, wrapping around the mitochondria, which is why, you know, when we do certain wellness and biohacking things, our mitochondria and our ability to burn energy changes. Like cold plunging is so popular right now because you can increase your mitochondria, your brown fat, which is just a count of how much mitochondria you have. Um, but the reason why mitochondria could split, divide, and move outside of the cell is because of the fascia. So a lot in medical science literally has to be rethought about because of this plasmatic, basically fourth state of matter that is existing within us that's constantly in flux based on how we're training it. Um so, with all of that kind of watery, wishy-washy stuff, what we do know about fascia is that it's responsible for the tensile strength, balance, and symmetry within the body. And, you know, what I'm more focused on with people is that's get the skeletal part of our major fascia bands balanced and symmetrical so that our joint pain goes away and our skeleton can rebalance from the ground up. But I'm so excited to see what is all gonna come from this because it's incredibly meditative. When we start to think about the body as a river of waters that is being pumped by the breath rate, and this cerebral spinal fluid that we have today could be from the lymphatic fluid that existed in our toes two days ago, it creates more of a holistic dialogue with how everything is interconnecting. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_01:So wow, that's a lot, very science-y, but I'm I'm following. I I'm mostly following. And I'm just curious because I feel like the question that people are thinking was is like, okay, well, how do I take care of my fascia then? Like, what do I do? And so what are some things we can do at home to take care of our fascia?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I think the first step is seeing ourselves more like a sponge, is a really good kind of like mental concept because if you think of a moldy sponge that's full of stagnant water, right? Bad things are gonna happen inside of that moldy sponge.
SPEAKER_03:Yes.
SPEAKER_02:So often when I see people, um the first thing that I say to do is like, you know, what kind of water are you drinking? And that's increase the quality of that water. Um, if you know they're drinking tap water, let's let's filter it, let's do that. Um, ideally, the the highest quality water if somebody really wanted to change their fascia is spring water that's only touched glass, ceramic, or steel. Um there's a lot of like Mountain Valley, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I mean Yes.
SPEAKER_02:Mountain Valley is honestly the um for Florida, unfortunately, we have to ship it so far, but all of our crystal rivers down here are bottled in plastic. Plastic. Yep. Yep. So there's also a Canadian company I found called uh Vicus Water. I really like their product, and they've found a way to stabilize the structure of water by they throw it through this um instrument, this crystal instrument that hums. Wow. And the water is holding structure. So um, first it's it's realizing the importance of water and hydration. Then it's really allowing us to sweat. Because if we think about, you know, if somebody has drank soda a whole bunch, when I tell them to go and do a sauna, they're so stiff the next day. Yeah. It's like, okay, we need to A, we need to get all of that stiffness out by replenishing it with hydration. And then we need to get all of that old stagnant water um removed from the body. Sweating is the easiest way, and it could be a hot bath. Yeah, you know, a sauna, a sweat. Um, sitting outside in the sunshine.
SPEAKER_01:Walk outside right now in Florida, it's freaking 95 degrees with 101% humidity.
SPEAKER_02:And um, that is a really good, like, two-step thing that we can do to start to really clean the periphery of the body.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Um, but I mean, I always in my course that I built is for everybody. It's exactly what I did to rehab my fascia. Um, and what we use is eight rules. The first one is hydration. Um, and then the second one is there's a warm-up sequence, and we start with our feet. And I think a lot of people can kind of tell their health of their fascia by looking at their feet. Yeah. So if somebody tries to spread their toes and they can't move their pinky toes, I already know that structurally there's an imbalance in the outside lateral band, and there's probably some more tension on that one side compared to the other.
SPEAKER_01:Everybody's trying to move their pinky toe right now. I'm trying to I'm I'm moving them, they're moving back and forth, like in and out. So that's good, right?
SPEAKER_02:Yes. We want um, we want the toes to be as open as possible. Now, this would be the next question is if you stand up, it's a little bit easier. But if you put your toes on the ground, okay, spread them out all the way, and then keeping your baby toes on the ground, just lift your big toe. Wow. Okay. Something to learn. Okay.
SPEAKER_01:I can do it.
SPEAKER_02:It's okay if you have to use your hands a little bit, but having some strength here is really good. And people that have weak toes, even if they can do it, the big toe will kind of come in towards the little toes.
SPEAKER_00:Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_02:And that's the beginning of like a bad walking gait. So, like, learning, like, I've been trying to work on like rotating my big toe a little bit. It's not the same joint as like the finger, but like there's a lot more movement and control we can have with our toes. And then the next one would be peep keep your big toe on the ground, then only lift your baby toes.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's way harder for me. Okay. Okay, well, it's kind of hard because I'm sitting down, but I actually am doing it though. Okay, so there's muscles on top of the footnier.
SPEAKER_02:The our balance, our walking gait, our junk jumping ability, all of that is going to be determined by how healthy and how much feeling we have in our feet. So the feet often, like if somebody has a wear out mark on the outside of their shoe, that's a pretty good indicator that like there's either a nip, a knee, or a hip problem. Um, you know, there's there's a lot of things that the feet can tell us, just as simple as that.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so moving around my feet right now, I'm noticing how much I don't move around my feet. Like how much I don't pay attention to my toes and my feet. Because just moving them right now, I'm like, I feel like I'm like, my feet are lifting weights. Like I feel like my feet are at the gym, like right now. They're like just moving them around. And so it's a funny thing to go like there, my feet are.
SPEAKER_02:When I you learn how to play an instrument, you have these weird conversations with your fingers, and you're like, come on, finger move, you know? Yeah. And what you're doing is you're rewiring your brain to control your body. Dexterity is this very, you know, even articulation with our tongue, learning how to speak specifically is like it's it's a learned technique, learning how to play an instrument. Learning that our toes should be involved in our walking, right? Is an unlearned thing. In order for us to learn how to walk, we have to control our big toe, our pelvic floor, and our diaphragm. That's the only way we learn how to stand.
SPEAKER_00:Whoa.
SPEAKER_02:And then somewhere along the lines, we get in these big fat shoes and we start to heel strike and we start feeling separate from the ground in these fluffy shoes because we don't have a lot, none of our bones are being activated, right? So I like to get people a outside of the earth, get the toes activated, and then we wake the feet up. So I use a ball in my sequences, and the first place that we start every day is with the feet. And it's because that planter fascia, that major fascia band on the bottom of the foot, is so hard to open up. And it's the foot has been closed down on us since we started wearing shoes.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So our pinky toes have gone offline. So a lot of the issues, in my opinion, that's happening structurally are happening from our walking gait and from how we've learned to use our feet. So if somebody can't move any of their toes, and you know, they barely have a little bit of wiggle room, I would love to get them started on the fascia flow because we first have to soften that planetar fascia and wake up all of the nerves that are down there. So, like our brain is connected to our foot by these nerves, which are like in a fiber optic cable through the center of our spine, then they branch out, they divide through our legs, they go down to our feet, and they end in four different types of mechanoreceptors. That's what relays information from our feet back to our brain. So if we step in dog poop, there's multiple mechanoreceptors that are like, this is warm, this is slimy, it's poop. Oh shit. Yes, shit, not again. So if our foot goes offline, we end up losing all of that awareness, all of that conscious ability. So turning the foot on, if the foot is off, we really just we need to wake that up again. So the warm-up that I have is, you know, people take that ball and they move in alignment with the planter fascia for 60 seconds to wake up the bottom of the foot. And then we find I have a vocabulary that I define in my course because we are going to experience tension and we want to map out where that tension is, and then we want to prioritize it because we're talking about unbraiding a spider web. And most fascia release techniques, like I've studied pretty thoroughly 28 different techniques. And out of the 28, including my own, 27 of them find tension and release tension by just ripping it apart. So they find those 10 spots and then they massage them until the tension is gone. And often there's, you know, there's soreness, there's a bit of bruising. And it doesn't work for an elite athlete. Like rolfers, you know, rolfing is a type of fascia release that was invented in the early 1900s by Dr. Ida Rolfe, and it's the most intense deep tissue massage that you can get. And they go from the ground up and they find the densifications and they rip them apart. Um, the reason why it's not good for athletes is because you can't train on top of ripp tissue, it's not healthy. So I wanted to find a faster way to get the release by inciting this acid. So instead of ripping the fibers apart and then, you know, kind of letting loose whatever fluid is in there that we don't really know about at and like waiting for it to reconnect, it was how can we just spring everything back into um into its proper shape? So I started treating it more like a sponge. Um and then by defining these tension points, so I have five different words: electrical, radiating, dull, tender, and achy. The electrical, radiating, and the dull spots are the ones that are creating issues within our nerves. The tender and achy always kind of shift in and out depending on what you did the day before. But if there's an electrical spot, if you roll your foot on top of that tennis ball and you feel something that is like a little bit like lightning, that can lead to neuropathy. I don't have science to prove that yet, but what I have found with all of my clients is if there's an electrical issue, usually farther down that chain or near that chain, there's the nerves are offline. And when the nerves go offline in the feet, it's becomes dangerous because we our muscles start to atrophy, and then you end up with drop foot. And by the time people get to me with drop foot, there's a lot of rehab we have to do to get those muscles awake.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Um, so this is preventative. This is this is preventative and repairing, yes? Like both at the same time.
SPEAKER_02:For sure. I mean, I repaired myself, so I always like I take in clients that have serious issues, and you know, they're not given a lot of hope with the route, like surgery. When they find me, they're like, all I've been told is surgery, what can I do? And I know that for me, I would exercise every option before surgery.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Um, but best if we can just teach our kids to do this, yeah. And then they don't have to have that issue. Like I at 20 from 28 to 30, I had such severe hip infl inflammation that I basically had to work out um with no weights, very chill. I was kind of doing everything to keep my hip not spastic. And then as soon as I took care of the underlying scar tissue, I train harder than ever now. So I was just, you know, repetitively told from 28 to 32 my only options were cortisone or surgery. You know, don't train too hard to inflame it. And I know there's so many athletes out there that resonate with it. You know, they're 40, they used to be a high performer, and now they're just like, what am I gonna do? You know, I can't train like I used to. And for me, like to be able to do gymnastics at 34 after, you know, four years of really not being able to train hard because I was always working around an injury, um, it feels like a gift, like a true gift.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So that's amazing. Thank you so much for explaining to us what fascia is. I have a question personally. How do I, as a podcaster, optimize my voice and my breath? I was recording something the other day, and I was noticing I was kind of like getting to the end of a sentence and kind of getting out of breath. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is so funny. And I've done breath work and I'm pretty aware, I mean, pretty aware, like as in not completely unaware of my breath. And so, but what could somebody like me who talks a lot do?
SPEAKER_02:I actually love this one uh vocal warm-up routine. It's called the Mickey Mouse routine. Um, Melissa Cross, who's like a metal metal teacher, she's actually like the biggest metal singer coach in the world. Um like heavy metal? Yeah, like to teach you how to fry like that weird metal scream without blowing your vocal cords out. Like she's she's that girl. Cool. Okay. She's got like fire red hair, and I think she's in our like uh early 70s now. She's oh, that's awesome. But she teaches this um warm-up exercise for talking. Okay. And we're gonna do it together. It sounds like you're gonna start an engine. So you start at the lowest, like mmm, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. And so when you do it, you start at your lowest range. Yeah, yeah. And you're trying to feel the sound right behind your nose. So you're not like talking from the throat, you're talking from inside of the middle of the head.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So big deep breath. So when you get a little familiar with it, you go me one, me two, and you count to ten. Okay. And in doing so, you're teaching yourself how to hold the tone in the back of your skull. So I'll do it and then I'll make you do it. I feel it right back here. Yes. So in often when we over speak, we start to pull from our throat. We start to use our throat muscles instead of the bottom of our body to just throw the air through it. Yep. So the bigger the breath is, more relaxed the throat is. I'm like losing it when I'm saying the word. So I have to like kind of come back to that guttural space.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, I have to take another breath. Okay.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm already at two at my throat.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, so that's just something to kind of calibrate.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. So it's supposed to be up here, like nose, like nasal talking.
SPEAKER_02:When we're talking, we particularly actually like if you're yelling at your kids across a soccer field, yeah. Like being a little nasally actually helps project.
SPEAKER_01:Uh huh. Uh okay.
SPEAKER_02:That that tracks.
SPEAKER_01:And actually, I was screaming. Okay, so one of My kids is having a meltdown yesterday and she was screaming, and she has this like this, it's like otherworldly scream. I mean, everybody in the house is like, ah, like it's so high pitched. There's something about it that is just so powerful. Anyway, she was screaming and I was like, I got out a pillow. She was really, really mad. Turns out there was sad under the mad, which I knew there was. So I was like, I gotta get her from the sad, from the mad to the sad. So I took a pillow off the couch and I was like holding the pillow. I was like, here it punch me. And she's like, you know, kind of flipping out. She's like, you know, so she's pushing the pillow and I'm like, look, you can scream into it. Because at this point I'm getting a little frustrated too. So I screamed into the pillow, and like an hour later, I noticed like my throat hurt. I was like, shit, now my throat hurts. Like it was like scratchy. So I don't think I'm screaming right. I I think I need to be screaming more up here then.
SPEAKER_02:Well, okay, so let's actually talk about that. That's a great thing you mentioned. There is something that I think is incredibly powerful to teach everybody, and it's called a monkey call. Um, we just my opera teacher named it a monkey call, so that's what it is now. Okay. Great. And it's all about getting your breath into your lumbar position, so your low back belly. Okay. The way that I like to set up for this is I actually lean against a wall with my hips forward so that like my my low back is open. Uh-huh. So what powers our breath is is two muscle groups. The diaphragm, which is a U-shaped muscle that separates our lung field from our in our our intestines, right? And in order for us to take a big deep breath, this diaphragm muscle has to come all the way flat. So often if we're standing and we have like a little sway back, we fill up our front part of the belly, but that back part doesn't move. So when you lean against a wall, it's about getting that lumbar, that mid-back kind of forward press so the diaphragm can drop all the way down. You're leaning against it on your back. Yeah, but like my shoulders are a little forward. It's almost like I'm a little rounded. Like the middle of my back is pressed against the wall. Uh-huh. Right? Yep, yep. Then you take a breath into that space into your belly. So it becomes, as you start to get comfortable breathing from there, yeah. And it's like when I'm making the who's, I'm using it all from my diaphragm, not from my throat. So the diaphragm, like the belly button is like the diaphragm's pulling that breath.
SPEAKER_01:Is it like almost going in? Almost like breath of fire. Like it's almost like whipping in when you make a noise. Yes, exactly. Okay.
SPEAKER_02:So the more, you know, the biggest singers I've ever been around, the biggest belters, the biggest opera singers, they talk about the sound being a full-body experience. And it's because the breath is a full body thing. So the the deeper the breath can come into your body, the more space you give for it. Uh-huh. The voice can just project out. It we really tax our throats and we tax our vocal cords when we're out of breath, or we have taken a big breath, but we've let it all go in our belly instead of pushing it down. So that I picture the the intercostals, which are the muscles that control the rib cage, are like an accordion. And so if you do go and you let it all out from the belly, you don't have any more air. But if we learn how to push the air down during a belt, we have a lot more that can sustain us. So if you do those monkey calls and you set kind of a little bit of a timer, you do a few, you get comfortable, and then you just hit one and you clock how long you can hold it, it will kind of help. You have to feel how your body's using the air. So you have to play. You have to be willing to make some ugly sounds. I'm willing.
SPEAKER_01:Clearly, as everybody just heard.
SPEAKER_02:But it's it's about getting the belly, the diaphragm, it's not the belly, it's the diaphragm to support the power of the breath. And then on your inhales, giving the air back to the diaphragm because you can do it right, and then you take an inhale and you fill up your upper chest, and you have no power. So it's really training the breath shape.
SPEAKER_01:So is the diaphragm right like solar plexus height? I'm trying to like, you know, feel it in my body of where that is, like physically.
SPEAKER_02:We can actually burn it out right now if you want to feel it. We can do like a breath of fire. I can, you know, and you can literally, okay. So it's gonna take 45 seconds probably for you to feel it. So let's go for a minute. I'll get my timer. And then we're gonna lock that tongue into that position again. So slow motion swallow, lifting the back third of the tongue against the top of the mouth, top of the heart palate. We're gonna inhale through the nose, fill up the belly. Okay, and then try to stay with me. We're gonna exhale rapidly for a minute through the nose. Okay, you're gonna suck your tongue in. So I just want you to focus the inhales will be natural, the exhales are forceful. You're blowing out a candle at your feet. Ready? Three. Inhale, fill your belly all the way. Fill your back, sides, and chest. Just kind of hang out here on the top and kind of stretch out all of the muscles that you just worked. And now, Ryan, tell me where did you feel the tension build up?
SPEAKER_01:Right in that space that I was pointing to, like right just above my solar plexus, like right below my boobs.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. So the diaphragm is um such a weird shape. It's almost like our tongue and our pelvic floor. It's a like this giant muscle that touches the lower part of your rib cage all the way around and then to your spine. And then it reaches down near your spine three times and hooks into your hips. What?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So it's like this, like it's like an upside down U? Because you said U earlier, so it's like kind of an arch?
SPEAKER_02:It's an upside down U, and it's almost like this bell shape. Okay. That is so our we have two lungs and a heart that sits behind our rib cage. And the lung tissue is only like an inch and a half underneath your ribs. So to puncture your lung, I just gotta stab you with like a two-inch, you know, nail or whatever. Yeah. Um, so it's it's very the lung tissue is right up against the rib cage. Uh-huh. And when we're learning to double our capacity, we have to learn how to make more space for the lungs. The lungs are not two cute little symmetrical things that open and close, they are asymmetrical and bulbous, and they have these things that the bronchial tubes can like open and flare out. So the standard untrained lung capacity is five to seven cubic liters. The world record holders are closer to 22 cubic liters. They are not built genetically different. They have trained the ribcage to open. So most people have never, you know, learned to open the side of their rib cage and then contract it, to open it two inches and then contract it. But as a singer, you learn how to use the intercostals like an accordion. So the diaphragm and the intercostals are the two muscle groups that we need to control to create more space for the air.
SPEAKER_01:So it's pushing the ribcage out when you do like when I'm breathing and you're saying breathe into your belly, it's actually like pushing against that rib cage and pushing it out.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah? Yes. The diaphragm is pushing down and out. It actually has three ridges along it, never looking a dissection of the diaphragm. It is is not from the three ridges on the diaphragm. There's one that allows us to push the diaphragm on the sternum, then there's one that allows us to push on the lumbar, and then there's one that allows us to push on both of the outside rib cage. Belly dancers are the masters at controlling this. They're not like using their abs to create that flow, they are using their diaphragm to create that flow.
SPEAKER_01:Really?
SPEAKER_02:Isn't that fascinating?
SPEAKER_01:So they're breathing. How do you imagine they're breathing? Like the belly dancers. They are breathing just very deeply. Like they're they're like they're holding it.
SPEAKER_02:You make me want to interview a belly dancer. Right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that would be so good. I'm trying to picture like how they would be holding that breath, you know?
SPEAKER_02:I wow, okay. You just opened up a lot of questions for me. Thanks for that inspiration. Super welcome.
SPEAKER_01:Sounds like I need to have a conversation with a belly dancer. Sounds like you do. Okay, so we're gonna start to land the plane. I am feeling super relaxed, first of all. Like I'm feeling in flow. I'm feeling relaxed. I think it's because of all these like breath and humming and exercises that I've been doing. What is, I just want to like touch quickly on like what is all of this doing to our brains when we are really focusing on deepening that breath, like stretching our capacity, what are we doing to the brain?
SPEAKER_02:I don't know really know an easy way to answer this, but the brain, okay, so it's like the whole body is a is an instrument, right? And the breath rate sets our heart rate. So, like if we just sat here and breathed like that for two straight minutes, that hyperventilating, we would start to pull the body into a state of stress. I really only like to max out on a hyperventilation breath pattern like that for 90 seconds because it's not enough to throw us into a state. Some people will actually have like a little bit of a panic just breathing like that. Yeah. And I always just tell them, you know, take a break and join us back in because that flush is really good for detoxing. But if there's a lot of tension around the low neck, it could just be lymphatic, you know, tension that's stuck. There's a lot of ways through that. But when we breathe fast, we are elevating the brain levels. When we breathe slow, we are taking the brain levels down. And that's not because of how the breath is directly relating to the brain, it's how the breath relates to the heart and how the heart relates to the nervous system, and how the nervous system is going to relate to the brain. So at the very bottom of our brain stem, we have you know the brain stem is divided into three: the the ponds, the mids, and um oh my god, the other name for it. And at the very bottom is the medulla omligata. There you go. And those are repon are responsible for a lot of different actions within us, including our breath rate. So when we start to tailor our breath rate to be slow, we are pulling all of our systems back into that slowness. The the real correlation that I see is that the standard resting breath rate, resting, so just sitting here, is 15 to 25 breaths a minute. And our beta wave brain pattern, so like our when we're doing what we're doing right now, we're somewhere between 16 and 30 hertz.
SPEAKER_00:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:So there's a lot of overlap between our breath rate and where our brain is functioning. When we go to sleep and our breath rate drops, our brain waves drop. When we're in delta, we're really low. I think that there is an absolute magic sauce to be able to hang out in something called theta brain waves. Now, most meditations happen in alpha brain waves, and that's anytime you're being instructed by someone. So anytime you plug something in and somebody's telling you what to think, you're in alpha brain waves. Alpha happens at the back of the brain in our occipital lobe, and we're keeping our brainwave patterns between eight and 15 hertz. Really good brain wave for planning, for projecting into the future. Um, but it keeps our neural pathways, like so what's already built in our brain, we're gonna stay on the same roads and highways, right? Which is cool, but it's not where new creative thought comes. We're not inventive thoughts, not okay, you know, the miraculous, you know, thing that you know we're looking for that's never been invented.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:But when we drop into theta brain waves, our neurons can off-road. It's where your children are living, it's where we are in a new state of mind where you know things can be fused separately. And now theta brainwave pattern is four to seven hertz. So when I sit down into a meditation, or you know, even if I'm just really stressed out and I need to just sit and brainstorm for something, I do not want to be told by a meditation teacher what to think about.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I want to let my brain be an etch and sketch of nothing but, you know, genius ideas. Yeah. So I have found by studying great adventures that there is a bit of a sequence that they would all follow because a lot of them were loners and they didn't feel seen by cohorts. And so many of them report the same sequence. They would go to their favorite, like chair or you know, day bed, whatever, and they would bring the problem to their mind. Okay, then they would release the problem. So they weren't, they were not trying to consciously come up with a solution. They were just trying to relax. And some of them would have something in their hand, some of them would tip their chair back, and they would drop themselves into this theta brainwave pattern because they would always say, like, I'm, you know, it's like they're trying to fall asleep, but not quite, right into that in-between dream state. And they would have different ways of waking themselves up from it. So if they would drop the ball, if the chair would tip, or you know, a lot of them have things about it. And it's in this state of theta that our brain can bridge to the gamma brainwaves. And gamma is 31 to 100 hertz. It's when our brain is operating like an orchestra. So when we look at, like, in my opinion, the best thinkers in the world and the best meditators of the world, it's they're not hyperventilating to get to their creative ideas, they're relaxing deeply.
SPEAKER_01:So like falling asleep or not quite, not quite like just before sleep.
SPEAKER_02:It's that conscious awakeness. It's like every all of the systems in you are chill, like so. There's no input. Like I think this is difficult to do if we're interacting together, right? This is more of an internal state of mind. Yeah. Where you're bringing a problem to your brain, and then you are slowing your systems down enough where you're no longer in a state of stress or tension, and you're witnessing. And you know, the imagination to me is the most amazing thing about being human. Our ability to like sing and make all of these sounds to me is like what makes us hu like us different than most animals. Um, but this imagination thought, and instead of brainstorming on a whiteboard and you know, kicking against creative ideas, if we for 10 minutes allowed ourselves to just lay out on the grass and to slow our breath rate down, you know, there are new ideas that come. They might not be the perfect one that lands, but this is uh the way that we can toggle switch consciously the brain waves into more creative spaces, which as an artist, you know, I know that there's bajillion writers out there that have a very intense ritual of like you waking up having that, you know, cigarette and that cup of coffee, and then they get into it. But the getting into it is this flow state of mind. So like the best painters, um, they often say you want to paint in the mindset of prayer. And it's like, how do you embody prayer during an activity? Well, you know, you are you are conscious with every moment, you're breathing, you're feeling, you're listening to you're listening to the sketch. I I think often, you know, we're looking for ideas in our mind, as if ideas come from our mind. And I think ideas are we're a radio tower for ideas. So creating that space and that juncture for new things to spawn is essential.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I love that. It makes me want to lay down right now after we finish this interview, of course, and just like let my brain run wild because I feel like so often we're just, I can speak for myself, we're running and we're pushing and we're going and we're hustling and we're kind of I've been disembodied, you know, and kind of forgetting the breath, forgetting to just sit, forgetting just to be with a problem instead of mentally trying to solve it 65 different ways that aren't actually helping at all. It's just like increasing that cortisol and that, you know, reaction in the body that's really not helping anything, which then leads to short temper, which then leads to, you know, disconnected relationships, which then kind of keeps this cycle back going. So this conversation is so much more than like fascia and brain and body connection. Like it is that, and it's also like, how are we choosing to live our lives? Like, how are we choosing to show up every single day for the ones that we love first for ourselves, though, you know, and this is this is how we do it, and this is like this is the start, and these are the small things every day we can choose to show up the best us, you know?
SPEAKER_02:You know, Ryan, I I really think that over the next 50 years, people are gonna start relaxing into the idea that like thoughts are non-local and that our memories are non-local, that they exist in this field around us, and like them the more stuff that's coming out about neurology, the more kind of questionable are the way that we think our brain actually works. Our our brain is potentially more active in this electromagnetic field, and when we need creative ideas, even just stepping outside of your normal office and going under a cluster of old trees, um, seeing ourselves more like an antenna, less like just the biology. Um I it will be the future. I know that a lot of people, it's still like, you know, we're a body and we have tissues and there's water in it, and like, yeah, we should clean the water, we should make sure there's no tension in the tissues. And, you know, the the circulation of those tissues requires the breath. But when we start to experience how when the tissues are open and flowing, when the nerves are firing, when the breath is slow, the biofield, like what our what our body is actually emitting out and around us, becomes stronger. And when it becomes stronger, I think we have an opportunity to really see how much interaction is happening with our loved ones without words, and how we can change a field, like change a family dynamic by staying in our like healthy, resonant, low breath breath rate, low frequency brain waves, and then other people tune off of you because I think that we are frequencies interacting in this, you know, air, the interstitium between us. And if I'm jacked up and stressed, you're gonna empathically resonate off of that. And if I'm relaxed, you're gonna empathically resonate off of that. But your children are the same. You know, when your husband comes home from work and he's stressed, he's gonna be hoping that you're holding that reality of home so that he can tune back to that. And when we think of ourselves more like a tune, like a we're a channel for something moving through us, I think it could give us more responsibility for how important our health really is. Because our health is that center column of everything that emits from us. So the stronger we are in our own health, the more mighty is the word I love. Because health oscillates, you know what I mean, all the time. Our health is you're gonna be a little taxed, it's gonna be really great, it's never, you know, it's never solid. Um, but our feeling of mightiness, that awareness of consciousness that we can pull back into ourselves and then admit to others, I think is it's the real concern. The real priority.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I agree with you. And way to bring it full circle back to everything's connected, and you know, that we kind of we have this choice. And really what I'm hearing you say, really what I'm hearing you say is like we are this vessel, and that there is perhaps like a collective consciousness, and there are high vibration, you know, things coming at us and mid coming at us and low, and what we are tuned to is what will come into our fields, and then what comes into our fields is what we are tuned to, and it's like this kind of cycle. And so if we stay tuned to a high vibration, which I think people have heard that, you know, that phrase by now. When we stay tuned to a high vibration, that's when we are able to feel joy. That's when we are able to calm down the toddler just by our presence, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and it's funny because high vibration almost comes from low frequency breast. Is it?
SPEAKER_01:Is it isn't that funny? Okay, so it's like right, it's kind of a misnomer.
SPEAKER_02:Well, it you want to be you want to be at a high vibration, but do we do that by like always being active and always being tense, or do we do that from um, you know, sitting on our throne and allowing and laughing at what is. Yeah. Um I've been working on my own awareness of um my jaw tension. I've been noticing that when I, you know, get a little intense with something, that my jaw will clamp. And as someone who pays attention to my tongue posture so much, if you hold that tongue posture I I taught you against the roof of your mouth, it actually holds tension in your face different. And as much as I focus on tongue posture, I'm realizing that like, wow, the whole point is to get my chin over my sternum. Because as I watch clients, you know, they get the tongue position right, but their neck is forward pressed. It's like, oh, you actually don't, you know, you're not relaxed. Your breathing muscle, you're like your your breathing aperture is a little constricted. So this internal awareness of am I can I I need to do this, right? You you know you need to do something. Can I do this same thing with ease and with joy? Or do I just need to do this with like tension in my jaw? And I think those conversations I think can can change our life. Like, okay, you have to make dinner, but you can make dinner with jazz music on, and you can put your lipstick on and you can make it in 45 minutes, or you can push through it and make it in 30, and there's no vibe, and you're just getting something done. Um, you know, you can wash your dishes and you know, practice your tongue position and breathe and think about all of the grateful things. It's like we have such an opportunity to carve out our life with our tiny habits and making our tiny habits life-giving or life-depleting, depending on how we internally feel about washing the dishes that night.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I'm gonna take that question with me this week. Um can I do this with ease and joy? You know, it's a simple, it's a simple shift. And it's a really good reminder for me this week and always really. Um when there are a lot of plates spinning in the air for me, I do push through and I find myself like, you know, in this like, you know, frustrated martyrdom, like this this position that nobody needs me to be in, including myself. You know, it's not um definitely tension building, you know, in the body and in the family unit. Um, so yeah, such a great reminder for me. You are a gift. We could talk for three more hours. Um, I'm going to ask you to tell everybody where we can take your class, where can we find you, where can we follow you?
SPEAKER_02:Um, well, my name is Brooke, and my website is musicalbreathwork.com. It's an education company that I really built sequences for, you know, singers and artists and performing athletes in order to, you know, recover their body quick and easy in a way that they can do it on tour or on the road. But I found that everybody needs this. Breathing in fascia recovery is part of being a healthy human and feeling mighty in our own way. So even though these are great training programs for people who are experiencing adrenaline and high stress and ways to manage those, these are also great for learning efficient ways to build the awareness within our body. So, mighty breath is not like a standard breathwork course. I'm not just gonna give you something that you do. I'm gonna teach you about the physiology of the body, how we can feel our nasal glands, what we need to do if we wake up with that dry, drippy feeling in the back of our throat, how to aware, make ourselves more aware of the tension that builds up when we travel, what we can do to clean the lung field after you know you've smoked or been in a smoky environment. And the fascia flow course is four hours. Um, I cover the physiology of fascia, the history of fascia, and then the eight rules that we need to do, and then I provide a walkthrough. Um, my initial flagship course with was brain and breath connection. I thought that was going to be my only offering. Um, and that's where I really talk about why the brain waves are changed by the breath input and the fascia input. So if somebody just wanted to kind of explore that philosophy, it's a$30 offer and it's on my um webpage as long along with a free breath and fascia test. So if this was just interesting to you and you kind of want to see what your your lung capacity is and where your fascia tension is, it's listed for free on my website, musicalbreathwork.com. Um and then I do two uh certifications a year getting ready for my one in fall. And I have uh a bunch of teachers around the world now, which is a little trippy to say. But I'm excited that people are learning how to increase their awareness of what's happening inside of the body and finding easy ways to you know detox the lungs to reset how our joints are being used. And I'm just happy to be here, Ryan, because you know, I really think that our humanity is at a crux, um, a tipping point of tension. And, you know, we are women raised in a masculine world, and you know, we've learned a lot of push. And I don't for one second think that humanity needs more push. I think we need more silence and stillness. I think a lot of the truth that we already need to see is here. I think a lot of solutions exist, but in order to see the solutions, we have to take a step back. We have to stop panicking about what's outside of our control, and we have to get back into ourselves because everything around us is going to be shaped from our own relationship to self. So it starts within ourselves. Um, and when we can find that stillness and that calmness and that freedom within ourselves, a lot can change from there. And that's where the revolutions happen. It, you know, it's it's all internal. It's us coming back to us, and then in our relationships, we can still maintain that peaceful edge. And um, it's it's what we need. And I would love to say that there's gonna be some easy solution for what we're seeing in humanity, and it it's all in the cell of a family, everything stems from our clan. All of government came from you know what was originally just clans living together and taking care of each other. So the solutions are gonna come from that. It's gonna come from you know the gardens in our backyard, it's gonna come from conversations like this. So thanks for the opportunity. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_01:I feel that so deeply. Just what a gift, what a way to end this, and um, yeah, I'm Gonna ask you the three questions. I ask everybody at the end to okay officially wrap it up. And the first one is what's bringing you joy today?
SPEAKER_02:Music. Always always it's my music in my garden and my animals. Um those are great sources of joy for me. I'm currently um obsessed with Melody Gardot's greatest hits. Uh, she's a jazz singer, and every time I put on her stuff, I feel like I'm transported to Paris. And it doesn't matter what I'm doing if I'm putting laundry away. I am gonna do it to the sounds of her sweetness. Um, and with instruments, I've just been sitting at the piano for 10 minutes and playing something that feels lovely for me and taking that time.
SPEAKER_01:Amazing.
SPEAKER_02:What if anything are you reading? Oh, I am reading four books right now. Um, Cells, Gels, and the Engines of Life by Gerald Pollock, blowing my mind. Um, I just finished reading The Descent of the Goddess. I'm actually excited you asked that because um that has to do with being a female and being raised in a man's world, um, particularly for women who are raised uh with you know close relationships to their father. Um, I think there's a lot of confusion about what it means to be a woman in today's age. And this speaks to like the Jungian analysis of the archetypal strong woman and how we can seek balance between our female counterparts and our male counterparts. And that book, it's you know, a hundred and it's a hundred pages, but it was a good reminder of the how the feminine is so wild and how the feminine needs um particular balances in order to kind of come back to peace. Um, and then the other one I'm reading is Simon Sinek's Eater's Lee Eat Last. He has like a neuroscience section about dopamine. Um, and it's just such a good book as a as a business owner and to realize like what makes me a best leader is by caring about my people. It's just like such a good reminder. Like, it's important to know your employees, like their kids' names and you know, when their birthdays are and what's stressing them out and um giving them the half day when they need it, and you know, the fact that they're reset the next day when they show up for work. I I think that book has been um very helpful. And then the last one, um I don't remember right now, but I'm I got I got a three by a bit.
SPEAKER_01:Three's good. I'm not surprised that you're a three at a time book kind of girl. Like I, you know, you've got a lot going on in that brain of yours and that mind and that heart. So that's amazing. Those are three great recommendations. And then the last question I have for you is who or what has taught you the most?
SPEAKER_02:Ooh, um, I think pain. I think, you know, like I I love both of my parents, I love the medicine men that I've been able to interact with, I love my coaches, but pain has being conscious of pain and not numbing it, working with it, listening to it, allowing it to dive me into the subjects matters. And like my ex-husband was an upper cervical chiropractor, and what brought me to him was pain. You know, like all of these things that I've learned through the way was me just trying to solve a problem. And anybody that's like, you know, I I wish I could grow up and do all of these things, and it's like, you just keep learning, just keep moving through it and paying attention to what's happening to you. Because often when people say, like, you know, this has been my biggest life lesson, I'm like, well, that's it. Like when you get through that, you're gonna have really something to say for others. Um, so whatever our biggest pain point, I think is that's the lesson that we're meant to learn, you know. Yeah, beautiful.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much for being here, Brooke. Thank you, Ryan.
SPEAKER_02:This has been a delight. I there's a thousand there's a two more hours we could do this for sure. Hands down,
