Can something as simple as our breath have a massive impact on our health and productivity?

Breathwork is a superpower that I’ve only recently become fully aware of. But, it’s something that has truly made a difference and given me incredible clarity during times of chaos and calm.

But I’m no expert, so I’m honored to welcome Chris Davies to the show. He’s a veteran of the Royal Marines and Founder of OMM (AUM) Breathwork Community

Learn more about:

1. A simple strategy that will help you gain control over your breath in just a couple of minutes

2. How breathwork can help us live longer and heal quicker from injury and illness

3. One simple breathing strategy that can dramatically increase performance over a short period of time

4. Why short periods of breathwork several times a day can have a far greater benefit than long breathing sessions

The more I learn about this subject, the more fascinated I become. If you want to unlock your true potential and improve your health I highly suggest following Chris and begin practicing in just a small way.

Follow Chris on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/freebreathworkgroup

Learn more at https://www.adamliette.com

Discover how to work with me: https://www.adamliette.com/work-with-me

Transcript

Adam Liette
Welcome smooth operators, this is the Friday episode, you know what that means. We got another amazing interview. This one is very different from what we've had in the past. But it's, it's something that I'm particularly passionate about, because I know what this type of work has done for me on a personal level and a professional level. You know, I was in the military for a long time, I left the military with a ton of baggage. And then I jumped into a high, you know, high stressful job, that only increased the baggage, I mean, it just it there was a lot of weight on me. And a lot of the work we're going to talk about in this episode has just helped me release past demons move forward with a greater sense of just fullness of heart, and all anxiety is gone. And I'm able to just focus on the things that matter and be the best person I can be. So that's why I can't wait to bring this to you all, if you think that this doesn't apply to you, because you think this is all about business. No, yet. self care is about business. When we work on our self care, we are improving ourselves, we can be the best person, for the people on our team for the people that we're serving for everyone around us. And my gosh, it makes such a big difference. So I've already talked way too much. And I'm not the expert to talk about this stuff anyway, which is why I'm bringing on Chris Davies. Chris is a Royal Marines veteran, and he's the founder of the armed breathwork community. And I just can't wait to hear his story and everything that he's doing in this world. Chris, thank you so much for joining me. Welcome to smooth operator.

Chris Davies
Adam, thanks for having me. So I'm really excited to talk about this. We had a minor chat before, of course, so I can't wait to get deeper into that my story, how I got to where I am, and to be able to share breath with everyone else. Everybody breathes all day, of course. So as you said, if you don't think it's for you, as long as you're breathing is definitely for you.

Adam Liette
Absolutely 100%. So I get a lot of questions on my end of wait, you went from Army Special Ops to what you're doing now? You gotta get the same kind of question. So I'm, I can't wait to hear the story. How did you go from being a Royal Marine, to being an expert in breathwork?

Chris Davies
Wow. So this is a long ish story. So bear with me, I'll condense it as much as I can and keep all the pertinent points in. So I joined a during the Roman Marines when I was 27. I joined after my father died. But going back very slightly before that, I was into Iran bars and nightclubs. And I was in sales. So I was the youngest youngest nightclub manager for the company I worked for in the country. And then I became the top three salesperson in the country straight afterwards. And I put that down to NLP. So if people have heard of it, or read a book called The Game by Neil Strauss, which people seem to think is basically about picking up women, which is wild radix interested me. But I've read the book six times, and it's all about personal improvement. So I got into NLP into hypnosis, read lots of books became very, very good at sales at the time, prided myself on never lying, never manipulating people, it was all positive influence. And then shortly afterwards, my father died in 2008 and joined the Marines. So that's of course a massive culture shock having all of the the ego all of the big personality, all the sales in the nightclub side of me almost beaten out of me to be this robotic type of hardcore soldier, which I really enjoyed. But of course, for 10 years, that's a very different type of existence than it would have been before. And during those 10 years, of course, I went through lots of different things as you know, lots of stresses, you see things you hear things you're around things, you lose people. And one of the things that really made me move towards this was my family are seem to be a bunch of psychics, all of them, right. So they all seem to be able to see. see dead people see ghosts, they have this a lot, right? And this was never really my thing. I was always very pragmatic. When I joined the Marines, the first thing I did when I went to Afghanistan was I became point man, and as a point, man, I had a valen which was looking for IEDs and mines. I was the guy at the front first man and every room first man out of every room, first man in the line of fire, etc. And little did I know, after I left the Marines, I found out that the American government at some point, we're doing tests on people who had been point man in Vietnam. Because the heightened awareness needed change their consciousness to a certain level in which they would experience different things outside of what would appear to be normal reality. I had those things happen to me in Afghanistan, but didn't fully understand it until I learned this. So I had what I would describe as prophetic dreams, I would feel the air clear out of an area, I would feel danger. And I would, I would go into these crazy, almost modes where I knew something would happen, I'd tell somebody, and instantly we'd get shot up, or something would go off. And that set me on the path towards a minor level of spirituality. Looking into those types of things, so you can't do it too much. Of course, as a Royal Marine, seven things to a nutter so fast for 10 years, I'm leaving the Marines four years ago. And as I'm leaving, I know, I need to calm down, I've had 10 years of extremely long, arduous carrying heavy weights going faster, heavier, longer, less sleep, less food. And again, I'm sure you know about all of that being in the military itself. And I needed to slow down. So I went straight into having my own surveillance and private investigation company, which didn't slow me down at all. So in between this, I was doing yoga, to slow myself down and happen to come across randomly, some breathwork. On my first breathwork experience, I had such a profound literal out of body experience that I was, I went inside myself for weeks afterwards, at the end of that session, I was called back to sit up and open my eyes. And when I opened my eyes and saw myself in a physical room with physical people, I jumped. Because I was so far out of my own body, I felt like I was in space. I felt like I was just energy. I had no concept of time. There was no ego, there was no past future, it was just now and it was just the most beautiful thing I've ever had in my life. And that pointed me towards breathwork in a way that I've never been pointed towards anything, I needed to know what it was I needed to do it for myself and needed to teach other people this so I just have delved into it. For the last four years, I've probably spent, I'd say 10 12,000 pounds on courses on learning on books on mentors. I've I'm currently taking four courses on it right now, including my 200 hour Kundalini Yoga, teacher training. And I've just become obsessed with it. Because there's, I found there's nothing It doesn't do for you. And before I kind of stopped talking so much, I'll, I'll just point people towards whenever something happens to you. If you always step out into the road and a car whizzes past, you'll go. So your breath changes. And when you sit down and you want to calm down, you go. Before you go into, for example, cold water, you'll go. Right, so all these different breath work types are so natural, that change your inner state. And it's the most natural thing in the world. And it gets us to do all these incredible things. But this way, we're letting ourselves take control of the breath rather than breath take control of us, and just being one step ahead of it to choose our state rather than letting the state choose us. And that's my story in a nutshell.

Adam Liette
Dude, I love it so much. My gosh, just out of sheer curiosity. You joined the Marines in oh eight. When did you first go to Afghanistan?

Chris Davies
straight afterwards. So I I actually joined in 2009. So my father died in 2008. In November, I was in the Africa, which is the Armed Forces Korea's office three months later passed the test. I was in CTC, which is the commando Training Center. About six months after that. Training is eight months long, which I passed first time and then within six months, I was in Afghanistan. So it was pretty much from I'd say from decision from decision of joining to stepping foot in the desert was about a year and two months.

Adam Liette
Because I left Afghanistan, my one two where I left in like April of 2010.

Chris Davies
Now okay, yeah, so I would have I'd have been there at that point.

Adam Liette
Oh my gosh, that's crazy. I would have been at where are you by the way just to Oh, I was split between Cabo and Bagram.

Chris Davies
Okay, cool. Yeah. So I was in. I was in Helmand Province, and I was not the only north. So it was, it's an insane experience for anyone that's done it. It's indescribable to people who haven't been strangely, even though I always learned to go back. It's such a profound experience that every single thing you do is so important, the way you the way you crush your rubbish to putting the black bag, the way you clean things. They've got so much effect on everybody around you that there's nothing you do that isn't what doesn't feel like life or death. Everything is so important. And it's, it gives you this feeling of life. That doesn't happen in your everyday life. So it's, it's crazy, but I'm sure you know that.

Adam Liette
Oh, yeah. I mean, people ask me all the time. Well, would you do it all again? I'm like, Absolutely. Like, I miss it. In many ways. I'm I mean, I'm glad I'm done. But I still miss it. There's a part of me that yearns for it, because it's, it becomes a part of you.

Chris Davies
It does. And for me, that's, that's why I left I was trying to join other parts of the military that were out in those places. I only joined to fight the Taliban. Once I watched the these different things on the TV, I joined to be part of the fighting to protect the country and the things that we believe in, and we love the people I love. And as soon as we stopped going over so much, I was just, you know, polishing boots, cleaning weapons, being on the range every day, teaching people how to throw grenades, and jump out helicopters and things. And as much as that sounds amazing. There's only so many times you can go over and over and do that and never do the real thing. So I ended up leaving because of that reason. But same

Adam Liette
was the same career point where I'm like, I'm done. Okay, your operator times over. You got to pull staff time now, Mike. Nope, I'm out. Yeah, not gonna do that.

Chris Davies
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's, I mean, lucky for me, I got to be on a training team. So I helped create 250 Commandos, again. So being part of that team, creating these, these really high performing teams, being a part of very high performing team and creating people that can work together in the most inhospitable environments, with no food, no sleep, no energy. That's probably one of the best things if not the best thing I've ever done and being a part of. But again, as soon as I realized that I wasn't going anywhere, to these places that I was training people to go to, I thought this is this doesn't feel real for me now. So I've got a, I gotta go.

Adam Liette
For sure, man. Good. Brothers from another mother. I love it. This is audio. So obviously, we have the same amazing haircut guy. So you can visualize that as you're listening to the podcast. It's great. So before we dive in too far, for the for the audience, it's never heard of breathwork. Like, what can you say about it? And kind of, what do I know you alluded to it a little bit in the intro, but what exactly is breathwork

Chris Davies
so in a nutshell, in its most simple form, it's it's conscious breathing. And breathing is the only automatic part of our system that is also controllable. So we can't control our, our heartbeat by by just thinking about it, you can do that using breathwork. We can't control our heat. But that's all done inside the body. The breath does those things for you. So we've been given control of the breath. And because the because the breath is basically a thermostat for your emotions for your states, we have the opportunity at any time to change the way in which we breathe, to breathe consciously, to bring about different states that are more desirable than the one we would usually be in or one that we are currently in. And it's it's the most simple but the most powerful thing I've ever come across. And it's it's, of course, if you go back to like the Vedic texts, etc. It's about 5000 years old. It's the original form of yoga and pranayama and was practiced by Yogi's and was said to have kept Yogi's alive beyond 100 150 200 years. And the reason is because if you look at animals that have certain breath cycles, the animals with the fastest breath cycles die the soonest. The animals with the slowest breath cycles live the longest. So ideally, the less breaths we take, the longer we live, because we sit more in a parasympathetic state become our system down and we just completely dissolve chronic stress and can live far longer and can rest and digest quicker can heal quicker. And it's just it's just that as conscious breathing to to choose what you need to do with the breath.

Adam Liette
That is fascinating that I mean just breathwork enabled longevity of life. Not not in Yogi's what we're seeing in animals too, because I mean, biology is biology, and we're all living organic organ organisms. Like that's crazy.

Chris Davies
It is. And one of the craziest things and and I'm, I'm getting round to believe in this part. Because of I've seen and read of a few people doing this, there are people called breath a Tyrians. And these are people that survive on oxygen, and water alone. And as crazy as that sounds, there are people who have apparently proved it. As you know, if you need to burn it or burn anything, you need oxygen. So if you need to, for example, burn off energy in your body, you need the oxygen to burn those things off. So there are people who who just use that they only breathe and they're full of energy, the full of life. They live to a ripe old ages, because funnily enough, as your body digests food, it stops rest in digesting it in the sense of calm. And that actually ages you quicker, because it's not thinking about healing. So so the more you take your body away from processes that aren't, for example, just breathing and pumping blood, the sooner you start to get ill, the sooner you start to age, and the sooner you die. So it's a really interesting area to work in, in that sense.

Adam Liette
Oh, my gosh, well, that can take us down a rabbit hole, I'd say Yeah, cuz that's amazing. And, like, I just started practicing intermittent fasting recently, with like, the same idea of like, having radical control over what I eat, when I eat. And I tell you what, when I break the fast, and I do it with a super healthy meal, it's like the most delicious thing I've ever eaten in my entire life, as I'm breaking that fat. So it's, it's kind of similar to that where our body has been deprived of that. And now we're nourishing ourselves. And, like, it's, it's like an experience with our food that we don't have if we're just gorging ourselves all day. Yeah,

Chris Davies
and it's exactly that it's the state of, if you notice, if you've got a dog or a cat, if you've got any animals, when they are ill, they don't eat. And they don't eat, because they know that they don't want their bodily functions, paying attention to things that aren't the illness. So they, they will then stop eating so that the body focuses solely on the immune system to fight off illness to burn off the illness. And they get better, quicker. So you're going into a state of autophagy, in order to feel better. And that's what we should do. Of course, when doctors say to go home, drink lots of water. That's what we should do. And that's why these you know, 1020 3040 day fasts, not only bring us into a state of hyper health, but hyper awareness, higher consciousness, and just a state that we can't be in specifically with modern day processed foods. That changed us in a fundamentally awful way sadly.

Adam Liette
Oh, okay, I'm gonna have to rethink a lot of things. Now, you got my mind going in different directions, I can take this for my own health because there's so much we can do that. It's just amazing, the the physical, logical changes we can cause in our bodies, which then have an external effect and what we're able to do in the world, and it's, it's by what we're putting in so and like you said, like oxygen is this most critical thing, and we're able to control it. And I find that just so fascinating. And when I think of breath work, and let's just dive down this for a second, because, like, there's different types of breath exercises there that we can do, right? There's more of the intentional long form, exercise, but also, if if you need to calm yourself down before a meeting, you can do something in a very short period of time, correct?

Chris Davies
Yes, so. So this is the rabbit hole, there are so many different types. The breath, just the same as moving in certain ways will strengthen your body in certain ways. Just the same as lifting overhead will give you strong shoulders, lifting for time lifting short, but heavy, has a different physiological effect, the breath does the exact same thing. So what we look at is, as a breathwork, practitioner, teacher or facilitator, we'd want to look at what is the desired outcome I want, and then you choose the type of breath to practice in order to bring that about so. For example, the sexier side of breath work is the shade Manik deeper trauma release. These are the types you'll see people screaming, crying, dancing. And going into these profoundly weird states even having full body orgasms. These are the ones you'll often see online in groups. And these can be 6092 hour long breathwork sessions, a very deep breath into the belly, often through the mouth, because that's parasympathetic, that sympathetic rather than parasympathetic. That particular thing helps you, for example, release trauma and emotions and energy from the past without the context in which you were traumatized. Because you you move blood to certain parts of the brain or remove blood from certain parts of the brain so that you can process it in a certain way, which is more healthy. Now on the far other end of the scale, and strangely enough, this is the first thing I learned. But what, to me has become the most profound and important part of breath is what we'd call breathing light. So if you were to do let's say, a 60 minute breathing, shamanic breathing session, or Wim Hof breathing session for 20 minutes, for example, these types of things are what everyone's into this is the sexy end of breath. Because it gives you this tingly hands tingly feet, and this this different altered state. Now for the other 23 and a half hours a day, you're still breathing. So if you get that bit wrong, technically, the 20 minutes you took don't do a great deal, right? It's just, it's the same as the gym, if you've got a gym for 20 minutes, but then you are mouth breathing, breathing heavy, you're breathing fast, you're breathing shallow for the rest of the day. And with the gym, if you lift loads of weights for 20 minutes, and then you sit on your ass and watch TV for the rest of the day, you know, almost all of your day is still wrong, right or at least inefficient. So the best thing that people can do, and you would not believe the amount of things this will fix in your life, it is unbelievably powerful is to breathe for heart coherence, which would mean five and a half to six breaths per minute in total breathing nasally all of the time. And to breathe in a way that would look imperceptible to the viewer. So you'd breathe in for five seconds, and out for five seconds to the nose. And if someone's to watch you breathe, ideally, they shouldn't be able to see you breathing. This is called breathing light. And what this does is it brings heart coherence for the heart and mind to sync up. It improves your HRV to no end, which will keep you alive. Again, way longer, most of the things and a girl in fact, I've got a call within about an hour. I gave this to her for free about a month and a half ago. And since giving that to her, she sleeps full nights, which he hasn't done in years. She stopped sweating. She doesn't eat so much. She's exercising more. Her sex drive has gone back up. She's more focused on business, she's more present. She has lost weight, every single marker of her life that was down improved by changing her breath to focusing solely on breathing light for only 40 minutes a day.

Adam Liette
Wow. So that five seconds and five seconds out, just focusing on it for 40 minutes a day.

Chris Davies
Yes. And ideally you can you so you can work for 40 minutes solid, but I prefer for example eight lots of five minutes because what that does is it because you're It's sporadic through the day, in between those five minutes, you'll focus on your breath the other times too. So you will end up doing it between that anyway. Because if you've done it for five minutes, and then in 10 minutes time, you'll just remember your breath again and you'll go back to it. So the idea is to consistently breathe in this consciously connected, slow way that just improves all physical systems. Stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system improves carbon dioxide tolerance by breathing deep into the belly improves your oxygen uptake by about 40%. And it genuinely just improves as far as I can see that haven't been scientific testing. Absolutely every marker I can possibly think of bar none. The people are giving it to experience growth gains and changes in every area that they can possibly come back to me with from the most simple practice.

Adam Liette
Oh my gosh, and that's it's so crazy because like we're all taking breath breaks every day right? If you Most most people in this audience, you're running teams, you're running companies. You know, you're taking your five minutes here, your five minutes there, I try to take five minutes at the top of every hour. And I do I like to just sit in silence. And just, you know, that's kind of my happy place. I just get back in myself. But if I incorporate the breath work into that, because I'm already using that time, well, I'm gonna see a lot of additional benefits. And it's that repetition, it's going to, because like you said, you're going to remember your breath about 10 minutes later. Yeah,

Chris Davies
yeah. And the things that you're talking about there is we one of the most interesting things is that inside our body, of course, we've got we've got chemical, chemical system, we've basically gotten in a pharmacy, and the pharmacy reacts in a certain way to release the specific chemicals, we'd need to fight flight, phone or freeze at any point of the day. And that changes the way we think it changes the way we act. And most importantly, the body cannot tell the difference between being chased by a lion inside or having a deadline in five minutes of an extremely important meeting with your boss. Because the inner pharmacy, the inner chemistry, is the same thing. It's It's danger. So because we constantly got these external inputs that are, for example, an email every couple of minutes, a text every couple of minutes, staring at our screens, constant blue light into the eyes, traffic jams, alarms, going off work, finishing at certain times, something to do for the kids, something to do for the friends, this stacks up, like RAM in your computer in your Mac, and sits in your secondary attention in a way that causes chronic stress. And that chronic stress does not leave you. And that's why we get ulcers. It's why we get stressed is where we get gray here is why we get old quick is why we have crazy enough. It's why we have things like arthritis. So we have inflammation in the body. It's why we gain weight. And once you start to help that dissipate by coming back to the breath, and letting your body know that the external world is safe. By breathing in such a way that once the mind starts to check on the body, which will do the mind checks in the body all the time checks and the physiology checks in the way you're breathing. If you breathe in a consciously connected way, for five seconds in a five seconds out through the nose, the mind will say well, it must be safe, because I wouldn't be breathing this way if it wasn't right. So it will then say if it was dangerous, we'd be breathing through the mouth, we'd be breathing hard and heavy we'd be we'd be releasing adrenaline. And with a heart would be pumping, we'd be stood up we'd be tight, right. So when those things don't happen, the mind says okay, we're safe, and it can then all of a sudden focus on right now and not be scared of the future for anxiety. And then not think about the past for depression. And once you come into the now everything changes, that's when we start to release all anxieties or traumas, all issues. And focus goes up, energy goes up. Everything improves, it's, I honestly can't I really can't tell you how impressed I am with the breadth and known as much as I do still learning new things every day.

Adam Liette
I just find this. I mean, I've heard a lot of this stuff before but to hear it connected the way you're connecting it. It's it's really profound. And I'm like sitting here brainstorming the different ways I can incorporate this into my life. Because it's it's crazy the amount of natural tools that are like right there in front of us to fix all of these ailments that we think we have, or that we're actually putting onto ourselves through the way we're constantly reacting to stimuli. Right?

Chris Davies
100% and this this is where this is one of the other reasons I went down this breathwork rabbit hole is because if you believe in God, if you believe in the anthropomorphize version of God, if you believe in the ultimate high intelligence of creation, whichever way you want to look at it. So you may be religious and believe in a God, more than one God right. So we were created by somebody are of high importance of the highest power. If you don't believe in that you must probably believe at least in evolution, which would be the intelligence of an evolving universe to get us to where we are now. Either way we were created in in tests and trials and and images of our former selves and only until about 100 years ago to be started to have what we'd call Western illnesses. Until about 100. to 200 years ago do we start to have these things that we seem to be causing for ourselves through poor lifestyle choices. So for example, we're constantly I'm currently sat in front of three monitors to three cameras, a light, a keyboard, a mouse, an iPad, and all these things are given off electromagnetic frequencies. And as an electromagnetic being, right, I've got a positive charge that comes out of my head, I've got a negative charge that comes out on my feet, all of these charges are affecting me all of the time. And then when I eat food, if it's not grass fed, if it's not, if it didn't have a mother, and it wasn't picked from the ground is basically not food, right. So all those things affect us in negative ways, too. So the way I see it from what I've learned over this time, which goes back to Ayurvedic practices from yogic practices, is that we have everything we need to heal, and to be as healthy as possible, if you go to parts of the Amazon, which are still relatively untouched tribes. And they live basically, in mud huts, and probably less, they pretty much only eat meat, you would struggle to find an illness between all of them, you'd struggle. And they'd live, what we would call them worse conditions, you know, as a apparently civilized world. And we might call them barbaric, the way they live, but they're healthier, they're faster, they actually live longer than this, you know, people wouldn't like to say that, but they live longer than we do. And they are still, for example, having sex and their couples 2345 times a night, every night up until their 70s. And they're still hunting in the 60s and 70s. And this is because the body and the mind has everything, it needs to be perfectly healthy and to survive everything it needs to. But all the things we put in externally are what's making us ill, and then we go into pills and potions and, and injections and things to make us feel better in a different way. And, and in my opinion, we just don't need it. We don't need any of it. I just think we have everything we need from whether you want to call it God or the ultimate intelligence of creation. We wouldn't have gotten this far. For this long for hundreds of 1000s of years. If we needed outside intervention, we'd be dead by now. And we're not.

Adam Liette
That's incredible. And yeah, I'm personally I'm Catholic, but I don't 100% believe in all this stuff. And when people are like, wait, what you do, I'm like, well, like the most fundamental prayer in the Catholic faith is the rosary, which, when you break it down is a meditation. That's what it is. And it's it's slowing everything down. It's controlling everything, you're actually breathing together with the community of people praying it together. And it just connects exactly to everything you're saying. And like, I'm connecting the dots in my head, as we're talking going, oh my gosh, this is great. I love everything about this. And what I've noticed professionally, like three years ago, we get ready to do something major, and I pound a monster and I think that's gonna give me all the energy I need. And now I take breaths, and I drink water. And it's just the amount of energy I have the amount of clarity I have the way I can lead a team and, and just show up with this presents. It's not even comparable to the junk that we think we need to actually perform at a high level.

Chris Davies
It really, really isn't. I mean, there are things there the old outside interventions you can have for specific things, right. So let's say for example, you wanted to, let's say you wanted to run a race, let's say it's a 1600 meter race, you might want to put in some extra carbs, something like that, right? So you've fast acting carbs. So you've got to in your muscles right now, in order to run that race. I mean, just for example, some people live their life like they're going to be doing a racist six times a day, you know, so they constantly eat and drink and these things, having these crazy insulin spikes, being full of all this energy, but not living in a way that gets rid of the energy, so that their bodies in a constantly energetic stress state thinking is about to do something crazy and nothing ever happens. And it's just just like you said, you know, I have breathwork practices that you can do. For example, This blew my mind when I first learned that your spleen contains 80% more red blood cells and oxygen in the blood contained within the spleen and the rest of the body. That the reason that is is if you happen to be about to drown if you've noticed you start to get this sound like this for listeners at home and you start to feel yourself jump a little if you hold your breath long enough. That is your diaphragm banging on your spleen to release the blood from your spleen that has extra oxygen in so you can survive for longer. Oh my gosh. So so what that does in terms of training, is there are certain breathwork practices that you can release that blood from the spleen before a training session, to give you the the feeling of having either doing blood doping, and having outside blood injected in with extra red blood cells, or from having trained at high altitude for six months to have created the extra blood cells needed to live at a higher altitude. So what that means is that, rather than having to do that type of training, you can live at a low altitude, your body has already prepared itself in case it needs to do these things, and you breathe in a certain way. That would give you an almost steroidal advantage over other endurance athletes, just from things that are already in your body that they don't know how to use.

Adam Liette
I need to know this one, I need to find this exercise out. That'd be awesome. That is so cool. Oh my gosh, Chris, I'm having so much fun going down these rabbit holes. And it's just given me so many ideas. I hope the listeners are enjoying this as well, if you're not taking notes yet, my goodness, this is this is amazing. Before we run out of time, I want to I want I want to divert a little bit and talk about not just doing this for ourselves. But most of us have teams, we have people we're leading. And I've been a part of organizations that have had breathwork as part of them. And I'd love to hear some of the things that you've seen and some of the best practices that we as leaders can do with the people around us even in this virtual zoom environment, we can still breathe together and be connected.

Chris Davies
100% I'm glad you asked that question because for anybody that's a anybody that's a leader, or anybody that has done neuro linguistic programming, or hypnosis, or any of the influential arts in that way, one of the things that they will ask you to do is to match and mirror people in order to gain their trust. And to be able to help influence them better in a positive way. One of the deepest and hardest things they'll ask you to do is to breathe in the same time as somebody so that your bodies sync up in the right way. And then you will automatically have more trust with each other. So a good hypnotist will blink at the same time as somebody else and breathe at the same time with somebody else in order to gain their trust in such a way that it feels like they're looking in the mirror. So for those that have teams on Zoom, for those that have teams, just in person, having somebody leave lead a breathwork practice, in which they all breathe in and out at the same time. While whilst looking at each other for an extended period of five minutes or more, they will start to gain a trust in each other and a shared experience from each other that you can't get anywhere else. And doing it this way. Again, if you are only physically minded, it is the looking at somebody that breeds the same as you, meaning you're looking for someone that is similar to you. So you'll start to see them as your tribe as your kin. And those are the people that you will connect with the most physically on that level. But if you're more of a spiritual type, what you're doing is you are connecting heart and mind coherence across space and time to match those things up. So that you vibrate at the same frequency and match those parts of yourself up. That's what creates this coherence and togetherness. So the next time you have a zoom call, for example, you're sat in a room with a team. Before you say much at all, have a practice of either box breathing, which is in for four, hold for four out for four, hold for four. And, as a leader lead that for five minutes or so. Or even just infer for and out for for lead that yourself at the beginning and the end of every session. And you'll find that people just start to sync up far easier, it will calm them down before and after the meeting. And there'll be in just a far better headspace to listen to focus to have clarity, and then to leave the meeting with the same sort of focus and clarity just from having the physical effects of the breathwork

Adam Liette
Whoa, okay. So I I've done it in a short is like 10 in 10 breasts and like Exactly. We're talking about box breathing, but you're saying like five minutes. That's really where the magic starts to happen. It's that point,

Chris Davies
honestly, the longer the better. So there's the famous story and I don't know how accurate the person who was in the story is but the story was something like somebody asked, I think is Abraham Lincoln if they if they had an hour to chop a tree down you know how Do it. And he said he'd spent 14 minutes sharpening his axe, right. And so excuse me if I butchered that story. But the idea would be the sharpening of the axe is to breathe together for five minutes before you start the messaging and the communication between each other. And to do at the end to do the same thing. And the reason being the reason that you're sharpening the axe is you have something called residual attention. And residual attention is about 15% of anything that you are thinking in any given moment, is carried over into the next task, whether you like it or not. So if you are looking at your phone before the boss turns up before the leader turns up, if you have a chat with somebody else about what's for lunch, or what you did last night, when he or she sits down starts to communicate, the 15% of you just is not paying attention. And it just doesn't want to pay attention. So by consciously breathing together, ideally, either closing your eyes or doing what the Buddhists called Wall gazing, just staring at a white space, a blank wall, and doing this for, say, five minutes, you will remove all residual attention by focusing on nothing. So you'll clear out that space to have 100% Focus on what comes next. If you're gonna do that, as an individual binaural beats help. So having binaural beats play with a set of earphones, one in each year, of course. And that type of thing can really help that focus to remove that 15% of residual attention. Now, the reason you do that at the end, of course, also is that you don't want residual attention on the meeting when you're going back into work. Right? So you don't want to be thinking about that. So you wanna go straight back into work 100% focused on what you're about to do. Not thinking about God, I should have said this, when he said that I should have come back with this. Or, you know, man, it's such a good idea. I didn't say in front of my boss dammit. So the idea was to completely remove all those ideas and go back and fully focused. And that same practice works for, as you said, the top of every hour, five minutes, wall gazing, eyes, closed, conscious, connected, breath, foreign for out those types of things to clear the residual attention of your past 55 minutes of work, to go into the next 55 minutes or work in tasks. And again, so to throw this in, I get excited about this stuff. If you're going home from work, you're driving home to your wife, your partner. Do that in the car before you go into the house do not take work Adam into the house to see, you know to be husband, Adam, right? Because 15% of us still work out and whether you like it or not.

Adam Liette
So rather than 15 Usually, yeah, exactly

Chris Davies
that right. So depends how stressful the day was. So ideally, remove all stresses from that time, from the drive home, the traffic, the traffic jams, the stressful work, and remove it all to become husband, father, and family, Adam, the moment you walk through the door and use the crossing of the threshold as a change of state by using the conscious breath so that you bring nothing home.

Adam Liette
Dude, I'm putting that into place today. Like they're not waiting one more second. Because most of us work from home, right? But you can do this in your little home office. And then your door outside of your home office is that threshold Chris was talking about it's, it's centering yourself again, and oh, I knew I was gonna love this episode, it was a great conversation. Because this stuff just fires me up so much. Because every time I practice it, I just feel it again. And I'm like, reminded, Oh, yeah. And like anything, we fall off of it. And we, if you're busy, you know that life happens. That's why you need constant reminders. You need people like Chris in your life to constantly be be talking about it. And that's why we surround ourselves with people like this. And just from the pure managerial perspective, I mean, putting that five minutes at the front of the call, I can hear my students and my clients say, Adam, that's wasting time. Nope, because, like, you just sold it to me right there like that 50 percents gone, and you're gonna lose it unless you put that in front. And, wow.

Chris Davies
Yeah, the mindful side of it is that if somebody thinks that they have something so important to do in that five minutes that it's wasting time, then they're already thinking too far ahead. They're already distracted and already not paying attention. So so if they think that five minutes is that important to be going straight into informational stuff to pile onto more of informational stuff and more informational stuff, that's where it gets jumbled. We can't think we get foggy headed, because what we're doing is are piling constant information on and not having breaks. We're not processing any of it. We're just trying to cram so much into such a short space that it's impossible to process in such a way that That becomes effective. So there's that saying that if you can't, or if you don't have the time to meditate for 10 minutes, you should meditate for 20. And it's the same thing with breath work, right. So just to just take those few minutes to breathe, start with two minutes, move it up to three, move up to five, because people will see the differences in the way they think the way they see the world, the way they act and the way they feel 100% They will.

Adam Liette
Oh my gosh, yeah, cuz whenever you hear someone say they're taking a break, what they end up doing is not taking a break. Like they just get more information in their head and becomes more jumbled. And we wonder why everything feels harder.

Chris Davies
Yes, so they will go from data entry, for example, they'd be looking at a spreadsheet for the last 45 minutes. And then to take a break from that they'll have a coffee and look at their phone. So they'll raise their heart rate, their caffeine will send them nuts, and they're scrolling on the phone and messaging people, which is, you know, more stressful, more, more things to process and then time, they could have chilled out and focused and come back into work to be more productive. They come back in with extra things to think about more residual attention on the phone, on the coffee on the conversations, and bring that back into to the data entry, which then makes it worse. And these practices have shown unequivocally that using these flow, state type Breathworks and practices that people can be up to 500% more efficient in their work. And can even fully half their working day by getting into what's called Deep Work, a great book by Cal Newport if nobody's read it, and get it to flow states, but by doing these things just exponentially increases the workload and happiness of every person you work with.

Adam Liette
Dude, I'm inspired. I really am like this. Yeah, you guys, you all need to hook up with Chris. He's doing some amazing things. And I've been doing this kind of work for a couple of years now. But it's every time I revisit it, and Chris gave me some more ideas that I hadn't thought about before. And it I am so happy we came into into contact with each other. This is a blessing for me, personally, and I hope for the audience as well. Chris. Before we jump here, I do want to I want to talk about this moment that you're working on 1 million meditations. Yes. Like what can we what can you tell us about that? Because I'm joining up straight up. It's amazing. Sure. So

Chris Davies
1 million meditations is I guess this is my what we call an MTP my massive transformational purpose. And the whole point in this is to get 1 million people to breathe or meditate together, at the same time, either every week or every month. Now there's a couple of reasons for that. It has nothing to do whatsoever with making me money, it would, it would be optional to pay, and all of the money will go towards the charities and ideally back towards the community. So for example, the split would be for example, 8020 80% would go to charities and 20% would sit in a pot in case someone from the community would need perhaps their houses, you know, they're losing the house, they've lost their job, perhaps their kid needs some, some work and they can't afford a heart surgery. So it's the money goes straight back in for those reasons. On a more spiritual level, if that if you believe in this kind of thing, the connectivity of people breathing and meditating together, has been actually scientifically proven to change the state. across the whole world, the more people that do at the same time, the bigger the changes are because of these almost like radio waves, right? They stretch across the world. And this has been proven more than once. So the idea would be that one person can turn up for just one hour and spend just $1, one pound one, whatever it is, whatever country you're in, of that currency. And that one small act of kindness, generosity and time, individually. But on matters a group can fundamentally change the world we live in, in so many different ways. So for example, if we were to get together, let's just say once a month, and we had 1 million people and they all paid $1 That would be $12 million a year that will go straight back to charities straight back to the community. And each person would out of that get breathwork that will also change their lives. And if you believe in it or not, the breathwork will definitely change your physical and mental health and the spiritual side of things will help to put more positive thoughts out into the world from us all men Just eating and breathing at the same time to help change the frequency of how we think and how we act, the collective consciousness as Carl Jung would call it. So that's the that's the goal. It's it's a lofty goal. It's a big one. But I'm hoping we can get there

Adam Liette
for that reason. Fantastic. I love everything about that. And I'll get the link from your mom. Amen. You already sold me on it. So Amen, for sure. And for listeners out there, we'll have a link in the show notes, you can check that out. And, Chris, if anyone is interested in connecting with you and working with you, where can they find out more about the various programs that you do.

Chris Davies
Also, as you mentioned, I've got the arm breathwork community, which is our Facebook group, where I just constantly give out free information on what the breath does, how it works for the body, for the individual, for groups for leadership, and different techniques. So that's on Facebook, again, I'll give you the links, you can put that down below if they want to join. And of course Tiktok and Instagram, as we usually do, I'll give you those links to on a few different social medias. And they all give slightly different information but all lead back to the same point, which is the breath. So whichever is their preferred social media platform, I'll probably be on one of those and they can find me on their favorite one.

Adam Liette
Fantastic, well, we'll have all the links in the show notes to make it super easy, because I need to go subscribe to you everywhere. I think I find you on Facebook already, but I'm gonna go on the other platforms now. Truly amazing, Chris, um, and I just gotta say, from the bottom of my heart, like thank you for the work you're doing. This is tremendous. And it it has such an impact on the world. And I'm so happy that people like you are out there that have found these things and are bringing it to us all helping us become better leaders, better husbands better employees better. Everything healthier, better humans. Yeah, it's it's Yeah. Frequently like the world's not going to solve itself from our politicians it has to start with us. And we can be the change agents

Chris Davies
100% The the individual sovereignty the power of one is, again, which is what 1 million meditations about the power of one person doing one thing but doing it collectively is all we need it we've survived on it since since the dawn of time. And it's only things like you said politicians etc have started to ruin things. All we need is ourselves. We need our breath. And we just need some sovereignty and personal power and everything that people want is literally a breath or two away.