Breathing Your Way Home — A Conversation with Jon Paul Crimi

0:01 This program is designed to provide general information with regards to the subject matters covered. This information is given with the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial, legal counseling, professional service, or any advice. You should seek the services of competent professionals before applying or trying any suggested ideas. At the end of the day, it's not about what you have or even what you've accomplished. It's about what you've done with those accomplishments. It's about who you've lifted up, who you've made better. It's about what you've given back.

0:44 Denzel Washington, Welcome to inspire Vision. Our sole purpose is to elevate the lives of others and to inspire you to do the same. John Paul welcome. Thanks for having me. Doctor DoD Hey, I'm looking forward to this conversation. You know, it's so fascinating what you do, and thank you for the opportunity. You actually allowed me to take one of your classes and it was fascinating. So anyway, share with the audience who you are, a little bit about your background and what brought you to this point sure. My name's John Paul Crime. I'm originally from Boston, Massachusetts, and it's you know, it's wild to me that I became a breathwork teacher because that didn't even exist where I grew up. I never heard of a breathwork teacher. I never saw any wasn't even on my radar. And so here I am today doing this thing that in a million years I could have never pictured. And I found it because of my friend, my late friend, Matthew Perry. He kind of introduced me to breathwork through this gentleman that he had got done a session with, and I had this really powerful experience.

1:54 You know. Matthew went and did this session with. This guy and then he told me about it, and I said, that sounds that's weird, dude. That sounds like he's asphyxiating you or something strange as going on in that. And he said, well, you're my only friend with an open enough mind to try this, So I bought you a session with the guy, and I went and tried it. And it was a different style of you know, breathwork than what I teach today. That the class that you did, it wasn't that it was something else entirely, But I had an experience that was very profound, and from that experience, I went down a rabbit hole of trying all these different types of breath works that were out there, all these different methods. I mean, that's one of the things we should probably clarify right off the bat, is that breathwork is an umbrella term.

2:35 It's like saying. Fitness, right, If I said I do fitness, doctor Doug, you go, yeah, what do you do? Do you do soul cycle? Do you do CrossFit? Like? What is it? And so this type of breath work that I teach in my class on Sundays on Zoom, that you did, that's circular breathwork, right, But I hadn't done that yet. I went and did all these different types of breath work and I found that specific method and it was life changing for me. It was incredible, and I couldn't understand why everybody didn't know about it, Like, why doesn't the whole world know about this? And I had a realization that had been kept in these sort of small New Age wo woo circles, and that if somebody did it, like I just met Tony Robbins and done his seminar, and that was incredible for me. Somebody did it like Tony Robbins or they had that they put in the science.

3:20 Behind it, and they made it. Funny and they explained some things way better that were going to happen, and they used cool music that they'd probably have two hundred three hundred people in the room, maybe even thousands. Like That's how incredible I thought it would be. And I was right. It just took a couple of years for me to get there, But it turned out I was right that that was the case, that it just needed someone to do it in a way that was more accessible to the everyday person. Okay, And you know, and I appreciate the fact that you talked about there's so many different types of breath work. Now. I happened to study originally entered job to Spenza and his breathwork is somewhat similar in fact. And when I was doing your class and I needed to relax a bit, you know, as you say, sometimes you just stop and just breathe in, I would do that and I would go back to that methodology. But one of the things that I found interesting and describe briefly the breathwork, the type that you do, because I want to get into the science of that.

4:27 Sure that it's called circular breathwork. It's also known as conscious connected breathing. And so most breath work out there, most breathwork styles and methods are done through the nose, which is great because that's what we want. We want to calmer parasympathetic nervous system down. When we breathe through the nose, we're breathing parasympathetic, right. This style is different in that you use the mouth. You breathe through the mouth. And people sometimes freak out because they read James Nestor's book called Breath and they go, oh, my god, You're. Never supposed to breathe through the mouth. It's so bad. What they miss is that in the book James Nester actually kind of found his way into breathwork by doing a class similar to mine, where he did a circular breathwork class and he had this profound experience that a lot of people have, and then he went down a rabbit hole himself, and so he wanted to understand the differences between mouth breathing.

5:20 And nose breathing. So what I tell people is like, yes, you're not supposed to breathe through the mouth most of the time, Right, You're supposed to be breathing through the nose when you're sleeping, when you're walking, when you're exercising. But thirty minutes of circular breath work through the mouth to clear out your stress, your anxiety, your generational trauma is totally worth it well. And so there's also that combination of breathing in through your nose and breathing out through your mouth. And that's how in the past I have done it when I go on my walk, and I usually will do that, you know, at least three times a week, and it's my meditation walk where I'll go for at least an hour and I'm breathing in through my nose, I'm breathing out through my mouth. Is that kind of a different combination, And so are you dealing with both persympathetic and sympathetic.

6:11 When you do that sometimes yes, But like so, every little way you do it changes, it changes the result, changes the purpose of it. Right, you breathe through. Your mouth sometimes when you're intensely exercising, right, and some sports you start breathing through your mouth, and so you go like, well, why doesn't the same thing happen that happens when I do this breath work. Well, because you're using that oxygen for the muscles when you're doing the exercise, right, and so that's what's going on. But when you're laying down and you're doing this breath work through the mouth, there's something else that's happening there. You know, you're setting in the intention and breathing into the sympathetic nervous system. You're setting those intentions, and there's something really powerful in that.

6:53 I believe. My theory is that this stuff, your stuff, your trauma, whatever you want to call it, is stored in the sympathetic nervous system as opposed to parasympathetic. But what you were talking about is doing I like to call that the transformer breath where you breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth, and that is actually a technique that you can use to calm your nervous system. I use that all the time. You know, when I'm on a flight that hits turbulence, when I'm in traffic and I start to get stressed out in the traffic, I'll do that technique. When I'm going to say something stupid to my wife that I'm going to regret for the rest of the day. I'll do that technique as well. Don't say it, don't say you dummy.

7:36 Yeah, so, you know, that's a really good technique. There's another one similar to that, very close to that, that Andrew Euberman talks about on his podcast, which is you breathe in through the nose and then you take a second, quick little inhale and then you exil through the mouth right, And that's a really powerful technique too. There's a name for that. I think it's called cyclical breathing in through the nose, And there's some studies that he has that show that, you know, five minutes a day of cyclical breathing is better than half an hour meditation.

8:20 Well, and then also you have not only do you have it like you're blowing up a balloon. And that's that's what I find interesting too. Sometimes they'll do both. But I think for the audience, what's important to realize is that you know, there are different things, and it affects different things. Different types affect different things, and you know, you use parasympathetic, use sympathetic for the audience. I guarantee you a lot of them don't understand what that is and the difference. So could you just very briefly explain what is the parasympathetic what is more sympathetic. Yeah, And that's a great point to bring up, because the first thing is that people can't wrap their brain around the idea that you know, something I've been doing my whole life unconsciously. Breathing can be so massive, can be so transformational. It can change your health, can change your life. Right, That's the hardest thing I have to overcome in people. I'm like, you know this breath work.

9:17 The most common statement after my class is holy shit, that felt like twenty years of therapy without saying a word, right, Like, people just they're blown away by how intense it is. And so that's the first thing, is like breathing in different ways can create amazing rapid results. And so the difference between parasympathetic and sympathetic is parasympathetic use is done in and out through the nose, or in through the nose and out through the mouth. It's rest in digest It breathes into your parasympathetic nervous system and puts you in a relaxed mode. It's rest digest It helps with digestion, it helps with rest, it helps with relaxing your body. It helps with the wandering nerve, the vagus nerve in the back of the neck, mulating that which will relax your body. Sympathetic is fight or flight, and sympathetic is done through the mouth fight or flight. So if I get in like chased by a tiger, I'm going to be going in my sympathetic right away. I'm going to be breathing through my mouth really intensely right I believe that the trauma that we experience in life gets stored in the sympathetic as well, and so I believe this technique is a way to access that and help integrate it.

10:29 And you know, I use the example of the bunny all the time. If a bunny gets chased in the forest by a fox and it gets away, it shakes afterwards to clear out that trauma of almost just getting killed by the fox. So I believe this is one of our ways of accessing that and clearing that stuff that we've stored in there. You know. And as originally as I was listening and participating in your class, one of the things that I do because I have found on social media, Yeah, I hear people talk on this and that, and it's like, okay, I'm going to check this out. So I always go to AI and I say, all right, here's what is said.

11:09 Verify or discount what was said. Is it true or is it not? And sometimes I'll get well, parts of it's true, parts of it's not, or it's totally false or it's absolutely true. So what I did is I went to AI and said, all right, I want to know this sympathetic, this parasympathetic. Here's here's what I got. Okay, okay. Those practices contemporarily activate the sympathetic nervous system rather than Coleman, and strangely enough interesting that activation can sometimes help certain people really stored emotion fear, brieftension, or emotional suppression. It's not that it's peaceful, but that intentionality entering and moving through activation in a controlled setting may loose emotional patterns the body has been holding on too. And you know, as I read that, I'm going, wow, that is that is so far beyond anything that I've ever really understood, and yet here it is. And you know what's interesting too, is It talks about those emotions that we store in our body. And I know one thing that you mentioned in the class, which I found interesting, is you talked about the fact that it's generational. The fact is sometimes those emotions, the grief, the fear, all of that is generational and is in our DNA, which then somehow we

12:40 pick up in that subconscious level. Sure a little bit about your thoughts on that. Sure, when I first found all this stuff, you know, there was no science like this. That's I'm so glad you found that. Read that because you know, I'm not a woo wu kind of new ag guy. You know, I came from a p trainer background, more of a scientific background. And you know, the hands would cramp up. It's called tetany went sometimes and I would ask all these teachers out there what's going on, and they go, oh, it's the moon and it's the stars, and like they'd say, all this stuff that didn't make sense for me. And I had a theory where people's hands were cramping up.

13:20 And I brought in a science researcher from Harvard, a health and science researcher that I knew from Harvard, and I said, I think it's because people are pushing the exhale too hard. I think they're throwing off too much CO two, And that was actually the case. So because I could see the commonalities of people in the room that were getting the tetany, they were pushing the exhale way too hard and that throws off more CO two, and the CO two binds to the oxygen. And when you're throwing off CO two, it's cramping up your hands. It's causing this thing called tetany. So there's science behind this stuff. That's the first thing I want to say. John Hopkins Hospital and Massachusetts did a study on this particular type of breath work with veterans with PTSD and they found tremendous results from it, incredible results in the generational trauma. There's great books on this called The Body Keeps the Score. It didn't start with you, where you know, trauma is passed on to us through the DNA, through our parents. I like to joke, I say, you know, you thought you were screwed up because of your parents, and you were right.

14:23 It is their fault, but it's their parents' fault and their. Parents, grandparents, grandparents don't call them up after class to be like, I know it was your fault, but so, you know, it's heavy stuff that we're talking about generational trauma. But there's studies that are done. You know, mothers that were pregnant at nine to eleven, the babies were born with higher cortisol level levels, right, And you know Holocaust survivors, their grandchildren and great grandchildren are born with higher rates of depression, anxiety, all these different things. And they did this one particular study that I found fascinating on mice and what they did was they sprayed cherry blossom spray and they electrocuted it when they spray the cherry blossom spray and then so it had a reaction from the cherry blossom spray. It associated that with the electrocution. Then they did that the next generation of that mice that they did that to, they would just spray the cherry blossom spray. It had never been electrocuted, and that generation would have a reaction and this went up to fifteen generations.

15:23 Wow. Yeah, So and the other mice that weren't electrocuted had no reaction to the cherry blossom spray. And there you know, offspring had no reaction to it. So it's fascinating some of this stuff. Yeah, and what's interesting, you know there are times that and I'm sure other people have experienced this, but this is my own personal experience. There have been times where I'm thinking to myself, why do I have this particular situation going on? Why this you know response, why this emotion? Why this? And because I look back and I had a decent child. Obviously we all have challenges in our childhood, and I keep thinking why why, And then all of a sudden, as I've talked, you know, as I've listened to you and others, it's like, you know, this could be generational. So this and here's the interesting thing. When you start to understand that and realize that, you know what, this could be generational, that changes your whole concept of what you're doing and how it affects you. At least it has for me. What are your thoughts on that?

16:31 Yeah, you know, it's like I may not be responsible for how it's came into me, why I have it, but now that I'm aware of it, I'm responsible to do something about it. That's the way I look at it. Like I don't want to pass the stuff onto my kids, that's that's the lever I use on myself. That's the leverage I used to do the work on myself. It's like, I don't want my kids to have these things that I have that I grew up with. And I definitely can see some of the things that I've been challenged with that you know, my father had and I wasn't aware of them until later in life. He didn't tell me about them until later in life. I'm like, oh, so that makes sense for me now, right, Like you can get these things unconsciously from your parents, you can also it could be something that happened in your childhood you don't even remember. I had something come up in a breath work session, you know, where my arm was doing something really strange, and I was like, what is going on with my arm this spot? And then I remember, Oh, I broke it there when I was a little kid.

17:29 And there was like a weird healing that was going on in that breathwork session around breaking my arm there when I was young, but I had completely forgotten about it. It was gone. You know, you mentioned you're following you you had an interesting young life, and I'd love for you to kind of share your personal story. Sure, I think I glazed over that too quickly in the beginning, I got excited about the breath work, So I apologize for that. No, no, no, I purposely wanted you to briefly because I wanted to spend a little bit more time on it. Okay. Yeah. So I grew up in Boston, and I grew up in you know, the South Shore, Massachusetts. It's the fifth most. Irish town in America, surrounded by the thirteen most Irish towns in America. They call it the Irish Riviera, and I didn't know back then it was the Irish Riviera.

18:17 I just thought it was a lot of people that like to get drunk and beat the shit out of each other, and you know, kids would steal your bike and different things like that. And it was a nice neighborhood. But everyone kind of came from the city, from South Boston, so it was like the city mentality in a suburban neighborhood. It was really weird, and I it was a rough childhood. I got stabbed when I was nineteen years old and left for dead. I got beat up and when I was a teenager about fifteen years old by five guys in their twenties and put in the hospital. So I had a lot of abuse, not at home but by people out in the world around me, and I just, you know, learned that it wasn't a safe place. I think Freud says, the most important decision you'll ever make is whether you live in a hostile universe or a friendly one. And I lived in a hostile universe for a long time, and so I just wanted to get out of there, and I was trying every which way to get out of there. I tried to go and sign up for the Air Force, and I got a DUI.

19:18 I got arrested for drinking and driving, and they said, no thanks, we don't want you. So I ended up just moving to California to become an actor. I had acted when I was younger, and I really enjoyed it, so I thought, Okay, maybe I can be an actor. And I moved out to California when I was twenty three and put myself through a method acting school program, a three year program, and that's when my hair started falling out. I have this thing called alopecia, which is hair loss, sudden hair loss. So I had these patches on my head and they put me on prednizone, which is a catabolic steroid. It's the opposite of anabolic, which is what bodybuilders take. Right. But I was working at Gold's Gym in Venice, which is the mecca of bodybuilding. So I was a trainer there and I was working for the gym, and I'm taking these fat stories, like I'm getting all bloated and fat, and everyone around me's taking anabolic steroids, so I'm like the opposite.

20:12 It's like not good for business. And I'm going to auditions and you know, I'm penciling in my eyebrows because my eyebrows are falling out, and I've got these bald spots on my head and I'm kind of covering those over, like painting those over. It was bad. And I was taking vico In when I go to the doctors, and I'd get one hundred two hundred cortison shots in my eyebrows and in my head to try and keep my hair. And that was really painful. So I started eating vicotin, taking vico in before I go to the doctors, and then I just started eating it all the time. Because it's also an emotional pain blocker. It's not just a you know, pain physical pain blocker, it's emotional and that I didn't have the tools to deal with what was going on with me. I was losing my self identity, my whole self worth, self esteem, self identity was rap up in my looks. I was trying to be an actor and a fitness model at the time, and my looks were falling apart. My hair was falling out at twenty five years old in a really awkward way.

21:10 Not normal, you know, male pattern baldness. So I ended up, you know, drinking and doing all this painkillers, and it just it was a disaster. And I went to a therapist and she suggested that I go to a recovery program, and I finally I did. I went into a twelve step recovery program and got sober, and that was a life changing experience for me, and I just went off the PREMI zone. I went off the court of zone. The doctor's like, you're going to lose your hair, You're gonna lose your eyebrows, and I was like, Yeah, that's how it's supposed to be for me. That's how it's going to be, because I just I can't live like this. It was giving me an ulcer and it was miserable and I changed in that. In that first year of sobriety, I looked completely different. I almost I didn't even recognize myself, you know it. It was a pretty hard thing to go through. And it's weird because it's mainly aesthetic and the alopecia, so it's kind of like, well, I don't have cancer, I don't have any real health issues. It's just aesthetic. But for me that meant a lot, and it was difficult, and bottoming out and getting sober was really instrumental in my life. I look at it as a gift now because it changed the course of my life for the better. I started, I took that year and I just focused on like spirituality, working on myself, all these different things. I started doing meditation and helping other people and getting out of myself. I did Big Brothers of America, which is a mentor program where you take on a younger kid, and I really like changed the course of my life for the better because I

22:40 realized it's like, you know, this can't be my life, can't be about how I look. That's so ridiculous, you know, And it just put me on a different path, and I got sober, and I started helping other guys get sober, and that was huge for me. I ended up becoming what they call a sober coach or a sober companion pretty quickly because I was really good at it, and they dragged me into the world of celebrity sober companioning. So I was helping some of these big celebrities out there get sober. I went on tours with rock bands all over the world, and then I went on movie sets and all this kind of stuff and got to see that life that I thought I wanted. You know, I think that now in hindsight, God, higher power, or whatever you want to call it. Like I said, you want to be rich and famous, I'm not going to make you rich and famous. I'm going to show you what that life looks like inside. And I was living with some of these some of the biggest stars in the world and helping them and just watching how you know, awful their existence was, because it's like they didn't trust anybody.

23:41 They were isolated, they were miserable. They thought when they'd get the statue that that was going to complete them. When they got the Oscar, they got the Grammy and they weren't. They were just empty and miserable. Well, and as you talk about sober, you know you mentioned the drug situation. For you, it was alcohol also as you use that. Word, Yes, alcoholism was always involved. Drugs and alcohol together were like sort of the final the end for me. But so yeah, I identify as an alcoholic, recovered alcoholic. I've been sober for twenty six years now, so it's been great for me. I've been fortunate.

24:22 I haven't relapsed. I've really put a lot of time and energy into that work and I still do. I think it's important, you know, I think a lot of people get sober and then they drift away from the thing that got them sober in the first place, and then it's like, you know, it's a clicking it's a ticking time bomb, it's a clock that's sticking of. Like you know, you can go to yoga. Yoga's great, but they don't talk about alcoholism and yoga. They don't talk about alcoholism and down dog, you know what I mean, Like I need to hear the language of recovery. So I'm still in recovery. And here's the other thing I think about it is, you know, if everybody came and got what they needed, got sober, and got an amazing life, and then left, it wouldn't be anybody there to pass it on to the new guys that come in.

25:08 It wouldn't keep going. Yeah. Yeah, So here's the question that I have. And you know, as you talk about the twelve set program, and I understand that that can be a tremendous, tremendous program for people, what about your breath work? And so when someone is dealing with the drug addiction, with alcoholism, it's always interesting to me that at least in my mind, there's some ulterior cause, there's some subconscious level cause of what they're trying to do to eliminate through the alcohol, through the drugs. Have you found that using your breathwork technique has actually helped people who were experiencing alcoholism or drug abuse?

25:56 Yes, but I think, well, I'll say this so Gabor Mate, I think is the foremost expert on alcoholism and addiction these days, and he says, it's more about the trauma. You know, He's like, where, you tell me about the addiction, but tell me about the trauma, because that's really with the addiction, that's the root of the addiction is the trauma, and I think breath work is the best tool I've ever found to help with the trauma. Right, And so the question maybe that you're presenting is like, can you just cure alcoholism and addiction with breathwork? I don't know because I don't have that experience, but it definitely can make an impact and a difference. I think the two of them together, you know, the twelve step and the breath work are the way to go. And all these rehabs and places are starting to put breath work in the rehab and in the sober livings because I also think one of the key elements of getting sober is having a network around you, having a connection, because we isolate ourselves and that's one of the big problems. There's this incredible video on YouTube called rat Park where it talks about the isolation.

27:06 Right. They gave this rat cocaine water, and it just drank the cocaine water all day because it was by itself in the cage. But then they put it in a cage with a bunch of other rats and a bunch of different fun things to do, and it didn't touch the cocaine water. So what we do with addics and alcoholics is we stick them in jail. We isolate them in jail. It's like, no, that's not the solution. The solution is connection. So you need a support system around you. You need connections with real people who understand. Hey, I have this crazy thought in my head that like, this is what's going on, Like you need to be able to talk to people. Breath work, though, we'll get in there and work on the trauma. Breath work. We'll get in there when you feel like, you know, going out and drinking or going out and using drugs, you can do breath work instead and it'll take that away.

27:50 I've experienced that. It's incredible, and I've watched it with other people. Well, and that was my point. It wasn't the breathwork alone is going to do it. But yeah, I I kind of love the both and versus the either or concept and to be able. As you say, I think the people that we surround ourselves with is so important. And I don't know that people really recognize. You know, as you're talking about alcoholism, drug abuse. You know, it's interesting that you talk about how important it is for that support system. But as we take that a little bit further as we see what's going on right now in the world and all the anger and all the stuff that's going on, and you know, in my mind, I you know, and I talk about this a bit in some of the articles I write or so forth, But it's like, what about starting to surround yourself with people that are at different emotional level, Because when you keep surrounding yourself with people who emotionally are stuck in anger and frustration or even victimhood, that affects you and you end up kind of paralleling that and going into that direction, versus when you work with people at a higher emotional level and a higher emotional intelligence, all of a sudden that starts to change.

29:15 Your own energy one thousand percent. I mean, my buddy used to sum it up like this. He'd say, you know, how are you going to soar like an eagle when you hang around with a bunch of turkeys? You know? But I think you're you said it in a much more beautiful way, which is your vibration. So if I'm with people all the time, I think, you know, I grew up in an area too where it's like negativity and complaining is the way people sort of connect and relate. In Boston, I actually have a sweatshirt that says, I'm not negative. I'm from New. England and you know, it's just, oh my god, can you believe this weather today? Oh yeah, we got going on. It's terrible and you know, I know you wouldn't have believed this. Lady backed into my cat and you know.

29:59 And so the that's how people connect and relate. But if you're always looking at that, whatever you focus on expands, right, So if I'm focused on what's bad in my life, what's not working, what's bothering me, that's going to expand. I mean, if I'm focusing on what's good and what is working and what's beautiful in the world, and that's going to expand. And if you're hanging around people who are going to bring that vibration I bring that energy up, that's going to change. That's going to shift things for you. I think I've experienced it, like so many times. I go back East and I'm surrounded by that and I feel like crap and I'm eating bad food. And then I go to a different thing. I go to a Tony Robbins conference or a Joe despends a conference or something like that, and I'm teaching a class there and I get to meet all these amazing people who are so excited to be there, and that vibration raises me up. So that energy is a palatable thing. It's a real thing. Energy is measurable now.

30:55 Well, and I think that's so important for people to understand. Now, you have a lot of stories, and I know that one of the stories you mentioned is we were, you know, looking at what we're going to talk about. You talk about a woman who really experienced a mass shooting. Can you kind of share a couple of stories with the audience of people who have experienced this tremendous trauma and how with you working with them through this breath work has literally changed their life experience. Yeah, so it's that story is interesting because you know, when my daughter was a baby, my wife sent me to go get this CD or DVD. It's a long time ago, and it was you listen to the.

31:36 Baby's cries and when you hear this cry means that the baby's hungry. But this cry is a little different, and this cry means that the baby needs to be changed, and this cry is a little different and the baby needs to be. Burped or whatever. And I was like, now, this can't be real. And I listened to it. I watched it with her, and there are distinctions and the interesting thing that I have picked up on in my classes. I've been doing this for fifteen years now and teaching these classes with hundreds of people, and I can go around the room and I can be like, that. Is grief right there. I can hear that person's got some heavy grief and I have a really interesting story about that. And that person's going through a breakup. And that's old trauma story, you know. And I know the different sounds. And this woman came to see me and I heard her cry and I thought, wow, what is that, Like, that's a very different cry. I don't recognize that.

32:24 She didn't tell me. Usually I get a like a intake and I would learn this in the front end. But she came in with her husband and another teacher friend of mine, and they didn't really want to go do They didn't want to talk. They just wanted to do the breath work, which I was like, all right, we did it. So afterwards she told me that she had been involved in a mass shooting and she'd been shot a couple times. And I was like, oh, that makes total sense, Like. That's what that was. You know. She was healing that fear from being out in the world. She was afraid to go anywhere. She was like a shut in at that point. And through the breath work we were able to get to clear that fear out of her system. She was able to start to integrate back into the world again, you know. And I have so many stories like that.

33:07 You know. I had this woman who came to a class and. Oh God, so she went to she came to see me, and she told me that she had accidentally hit somebody, a child on who ran in front of her car, and a bike rode in front of her car on a bicycle, and she killed this teenage boy. And then she went to stay with her friend after that happened, and her friend's husband sexually assaulted her. He raped her, and so it was trauma on top of trauma. There was so much there. And we worked together. We did the breath work, and we did some writing and the writing and the breath work and all these different things that I do. And she came to classes, she came to sessions and she was so angry in the beginning, But anger is really often just the mask that sadness wears.

33:52 You know, it's easier to be angry, it's more comfortable to be angry, it's more sometimes more acceptable in society to be angry, especially for men. Right, men were like succeptable for a man to be angry, But it's not acceptable for a man to be sad about something. But if I can get past the. Anger, and I can allow the sadness to be felt, and I can allow the sadness of like this happening to me and my friend doing this, and this situation, and the heartbreak for the boy, and the guilt and the shame around that and all these things to be felt, because the feelings need to be felt. And if I'm pushing them down and I'm just allowing anger, I'm not expressing those feelings, and that stuff will start to eat away your health. This is what I've discovered, you know.

34:34 That's I joke with people, like if you don't think your emotions and your unprocessed traumas and feelings can affect your health and go fround my eyebrows right because they're gone, Because that's that's a physical manifestation. That's a physical result of an emotional thing of my emotions, you know, affecting my health, affecting my body. So long story short, she did all this work and then I didn't see her for a while and I got a letter and she said, thank you so much for doing that work with me. I was going to kill myself, and because we did the breath work together, I was able to allow all that stuff and get back to a better place. And you say, my life, and I was, you know, I'm getting emotional because I didn't save her life.

35:19 The breathwork saved her life. I was just a person who was there and available, and to tell you the truth, at first, I was like, I don't know if I'm qualified for this, but we're going to do the breath work. And I think the breath work is really the thing that does the work. And I'm really specific about that. And I'm with my students too that I teach. You know, it's like, I'm not the thing. The breath work is the thing. I'm just a guy showing you how to do it, how to heal yourself, how to process these emotions. I don't want to be some big egomaniac guru with you know, that's not my jam. That's not what I want to do. I want to help people, and I want to teach other people how to help people. And so I can create this, you know, this pyramid scheme for on the planet where we help all these people with this incredible breath work.

36:03 Well, and it's interesting I just put together, you know, I went back into a lot of research and there's you know, two to three really amazing emotional guidance type of programs out there, and so I put one together called the behavioral transformation Ladder. And what's interesting about it, and you hit on it when we look at that ladder and if you're at the bottom, that's where the grief, the fear, the guilt, all that is way down at the bottom, and anger is shame is shame, and anger is above that. And so I think sometimes and I think you've hit on it. Sometimes when we find ourselves so completely in anger or frustration or overwhelmer, whatever that happens to be, we don't recognize that that's actually a positive step going out that ladder. But the reality is is that there's something below that that is still not dealt with and actually last week on one of the podcasts, we were talking about grief and the individual I was working with and talking to talked about how important it is to overcome and to work through, not to overcome, but to be able to work through that grief. And you mentioned grief as as you were sharing what are your thoughts about that? How does someone who has experienced that grief work through that? And I know that breath

37:35 work is a part of it, but have you found that as you're working with people, and you actually mentioned that you do other things. So as you're working with people who are experiencing that grief, who are experiencing that fear, what is the methodology that you use in addition to the breath work for them to be able to move forward? You know, it was this thing that happened. I was sponsoring this guy in twelve Step for eleven years and he was close to me as like a brother, like a son to me, and he took his own life and it crushed me and I felt in some way responsible for him. And the grief was immense, and I've lost a lot of people. I lost a lot of friends growing up when I was young and just I've had a tremendous amount of grief, and this was just too much for me because I felt in some way like I should have known, I should have stopped, I should have done something. There's all these things right around suicide to make it more challenging. And I found this process, which was I wrote a letter to him saying everything I wanted to say, everything I wasn't able to say and I couldn't say because he's not with us anymore. And everyone's like, yeah, I've done the letter, and then I'm like, not on a hold on. Then I wrote a letter back from him to me, saying everything I wanted him to say, everything I needed him to say in that moment. Then I did the breath work, and I called this the transformational letter process.

38:58 It's in one of my courses. I have a course called the Five Day Emotional Detoks and this is in that course. And I used to do workshops in LA with this, just this thing, where I'd have the people write the two letters. And it could be someone that's alive, it could be I've done it around my father. He's alive. He's never going to own the shit he did. He's never gonna say sorry. If we have to wait for people to like own their stuff and apologize, we're screwed. So you can do it around people like that. You do the two letters and then you lay down and you do the breath work. What the two letters do is they bring all that stuff up to the surface and they show you what you're trying to get, what you need to get for yourself. And then the breath work brings the healing in, It clears it out, it brings it like we don't have to go to the other people because you know, we can't some people we don't want to go to them.

39:43 And so that's a really beautiful process that I use. In Chinese medicine, they. Say that grief gets stuck in the lungs, and a lot of people are just holding on to their grief and sometimes I don't think you fully let go of it. I heard on the podcast the other day where is a clip of a podcast where the guy said, if you can't talk about it, then you haven't healed it. And or if you can't talk about it, why without getting upset, you haven't healed it. I don't know if I believe or agree with that, Like, you know, I lost my good friend Matthew Perry a couple of years ago, and sometimes I talk about it and I still get upset, and I think. I think I'm of the school that grief is love with no place to go, and I, you know, I miss him, I love him. I want to like reach out to him and tell him about this thing that's going on or a song that he used to send me all this music for my classes, and you know, he really pushed it, you know, he came to my first class and was like, this is your gift, this is what you're supposed to do. And I was like, I don't know, you know.

40:41 And so I think that we. Learned to walk with our grief, but we learned to walk with it in a healthy way instead of it just coming up and overwhelming us or never never owning it, never processing it, never allowing it to be felt. And I love what you just said there, to walk with it, because you know, I bring this up quite often. You know, there's a saying that which we resist persists, and to be able to recognize that it's okay to feel that grief, it's okay to cry. I remember a couple of months ago, I was watching a movie and I don't know what it reminded me of totally, but all of a sudden, I just started bawling, and it's like, Holy cow, what on earth? And yet to be able to recognize that it's okay to have that grief, it's okay to experience it because as you walk with it, it's an entirely different process than when you try to resist it.

41:44 So we're getting close to our time, and I think we could go on for another hour with this stuff. But first of all, how do people find you? And I guess one of the questions I have real quickly is you know, I took your class. So if I just sit back now and try to reiterate that regularly, is that okay? Or is there a value in doing those classes each week live? That's entirely up to you. Some people come. I have regulars that come every week. They love to be on the live call, connected with people all over the planet, and they. Love to have me. When you're on the live call, I shout out names. I'm like, come on, doctor.

42:27 Doug, You've done harder shit in your life than lay on the floor and breathe. Let's go, you know, So they need that motivation. It's like a trainer, right. They want somebody there to push them, and they want the connection and the community. So some people come for the live You could just come and do my class one time and make your own playlists and do it, you know, by yourself. After that you don't need me. And I sell that to people all the time, and or you know, I suggest to some people, you know, get the five day Emotional Detox course because it has downloadable tracks in there that you can download onto your phone or whatever and do it whenever you want. And there's different lengths, but it has the exercises in there that I combined with breath work, like I was talking about the Transformasional letter and that you know, that will take you to another level if you if you go through that, because I think it's there are different levels to the breath work, you know, the first time, for a lot of people, they just come and they're kind of overwhelmed.

43:21 They're like a lot of people are so caught up. You've done a lot of work before obviously, so you weren't caught up in the physicality of it, but a lot of people are so even though I spend ten minutes at the beginning, telling you like, this is going to happen to your body, and that's going to happen, You're gonna get emotional. I do my best to prepare people. They still are shocked by the things that happen in the session, so they need to come a couple of times. I think to really let go and process and like allow the emotions to come up and be processed. So I tell people that come three or four times and then make a decision what you want to do from there. But because a lot of people are just the first time, they're just caught up in the physicality of it all. I love that I did the question the five day class because that adds another dimension that I think is so it goes back to the both and again. So I think that that's so important. So how do people find you?

44:12 Yeah, my website is Breathe with JP dot com b r E A t H E w I t h JP. People make it breath with JP. It's Breathe with JP dot com and you can find everything there. I do a class on Sunday mornings on Zoom. It's a nine am Pacific time at California time nine am twelve pm East Coast time, and then you figure it out if you're all over the world, I say, and uh, there's a five day replay in case you are all over the world, because I have people who come from Germany and Switzerland and Thailand all over the world. So there's a five day replay if the time doesn't work for you. So a lot of people sign up and just do the replay. So that's kind of the first first way in is to do my class online and then decide do I want to dive deeper and do the five day detok score, do I want to do a training?

45:01 You know, I teach other people how to teach this work, and I have these trainings online and I have them once or twice in person a year. And so I've certified over three thousand people and my method of leading this breath work so that they can help others. Oll and that's great. So kind of as a final thought, what would you want to share with the audience. I'd like to say, work hard on yourself, but don't be hard on yourself. I think people are too hard on themselves these days. You're going to keep making mistakes. I know I'm going to make a mistake after this podcast, the shift for me is like, can I stop? Can I stop being so hard on myself when I make these mistakes? Can I learn how to like just love myself? And it sounds so corny to say that, but it's true.

45:44 It's like the self love is showing up and doing the work that I don't want to do. It's being willing to be uncomfortable, right, and showing up for myself, be uncomfortable and doing the work that I don't want to do, or having an open mind and trying something different like a breath work a class that I think, oh, that's ridiculous. But let me try it anyways and see if it helps me. I think that's fantastic, And thank you, doctor Doug. Well, thank you and I appreciate it. Folks, thanks for listening and hope you've enjoyed it. We look forward to having you to join us again. Is doctor Doug saying I'm mistay, I'm mistay,