Transcript #416 Relaxing The Default Mode Network via Conscious Breath Awareness with Josh Trent
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- Find out what’s in store on this Myers Detox Podcast with Josh Trent, who joins the show to talk about breathe work, and relaxing the default mode network via conscious breath awareness. We go over different types of breath work, the benefits of having more conscious awareness through breath work, and using breath work to increase vagal tone.
- Learn about Josh’s amazing story to becoming a leading voice on health and wellness and breath work.
- Find out what made Josh so passionate about breath work.
- Learn about the default mode network, and the different ways breath work can influence you health and body.
- Learn more about the vagus nerve, why it is so essential for your health, and how you can tone it using breath work.
- Find out about the three phases of breath work that you can use to address stress.
- Learn about Vision Quest, where Josh goes out in nature for 10 days to fast, and how doing breath work out in nature can be so beneficial.
- Find out Josh’s take on believing in some sort of higher power, and why he feels it is necessary to believe in something.
- Learn about the difference between box breathing and circle breathing and what each type of breath work can help you address.
- Learn what inspired Josh to make his program Breathe, Breath and Wellness, what the program teaches you, and how it helps you address underlying trauma.
- Find out more about transgenerational trauma and how you can use breath work to heal it.
- Go to breathwork.io and use code WENDY for 20% off of Josh’s Breathe, Breath and Wellness program.
Wendy Myers: Hi, everyone. How are you doing? My name is Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. On this show, we talk about everything related to heavy metal detoxification, chemical detoxification and things that can improve your health as well. Today, we’re talking about breath work and the transformative power of breath work with my friend, Josh Trent. He’s the host of Wellness Force Radio and I just love his work so much. He comes from the heart and he’s just so authentic and spiritual. I love every conversation I’ve had with him. We’re going to be talking about relaxing the default mode network via conscious breath awareness. We talk about all different aspects of breath work, different types of breath work and the benefits of having more conscious awareness through breath work like improving vagal tone, vagus nerve tone, which is really important because it enervates so many different organs.
Wendy Myers: A lot of people have different health issues because of poor vagal tone. A lot of people are just so stressed today. They’re so stressed. Josh talks about taking back control of your nervous system, of your stress levels and turning inward using breath work. He’s created an amazing course that we’ll talk about called Breath Work. It is a really, really interesting conversation today. I know you guys listening are concerned about heavy metal toxicity and how to detox your body. Josh talks about how the lungs are one of your primary detox organs to release toxins. I know you guys want to know what your toxic load is in your body. I created a quiz at heavymetalsquiz.com, where after you take that quiz, you can get your results and learn what your relative body burden of toxins is.
Wendy Myers: You also get a free video series about where to begin. How do you start detoxing? What’s the best place to start? What kind of testing you should do, etc? Go take that at heavymetalsquiz.com. It takes two seconds. Our guest today, Josh, is the founder of Wellness Force Media. He’s host of the Wellness Force Podcast and the creator of the Breathe Breath and Wellness Program. He’s spent the last 19 years as a trainer, researcher and facilitator discovering the physical and emotional intelligence for humans to thrive in our modern world. The Wellness Force mission is to help humans heal mental, emotional and physical health through podcast programs and a global community that believes in optimizing their true potential to live life well. Josh’s life is dedicated to supporting humanity coming together as one. You can learn more about Josh and his work at wellnessforce.com. Josh, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Josh Trent: Thank you for having me back. It’s been a minute. We’re both in different places physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally.
Wendy Myers: Yes, and as we were catching up, I haven’t had you on the show for about four years. That was the last time I was living in Los Angeles. Wow, I’m really happy I’m not there anymore. I moved to Mexico. What’s going on with you?
Josh Trent: Well as you know, we have a new child. He’s five months old, so that’s the biggest change in my life. We also moved out to Austin, Texas because of health freedom, personal sovereignty and because we wanted a really great place to raise our son, be healthy and well ourselves. We found that Austin was a really good place for that.
Wendy Myers: That’s my home state. I’m from Texas. I’m from there.
Josh Trent: Oh cool.
Wendy Myers: My dad lived in Austin for a long time and I love Austin. I love visiting there.
Josh Trent: Yes, me too. I really enjoy it here. The community is rich, not just financially rich. I mean rich in interaction, there’s a lot of events going on out here and people are really coming together in Texas, which is not the case for our country right now, in many other states. There’s a real coming together, I feel, here.
Wendy Myers: I love going to visit my mom in Houston. I want to hear about your work and why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Josh Trent: Well to pull the curtain way back, it was 2011 that I actually bought the URL wellnessforce.com but I really didn’t take action on it until 2015. We all have our challenges, right? You had a physical process you went through. So have I, but I had more of a spiritual and emotional process that I went through to actually garner the courage to launch Wellness Force, to be a podcast host, to have full faith that my voice means something that I can actually help people with. It took quite a while. It took from 2011 all the way to 2015 for me to really gather up the courage in myself, so that I could lead other people based on my own experiences and my own learning. Way before that, I was born 4 pounds, 11 and a half ounces.
Josh Trent: I was premature. So I came into the world with some pretty big contrasts, I guess you could say, which is a case I think for most of us that are the archetype of the wounded healer. You and I fall into that category. We go through our own challenges and we help other people with what we’ve learned. So, to no surprise, I was born with a lot of antibiotics in my system, a lot of digestive issues and a lot of just fallout from a microbiome standpoint. I got to this place when I was young, I think I was maybe 9 or 10. I had these chronic ear infections and really bad sinus infections. I love my parents. They did the absolute best they could, Wendy, with the knowledge they had, but they didn’t know the ramifications of heavy, heavy antibiotic use.
Josh Trent: Because of that, I put on a lot of weight, it really shifted my microbiome incredibly. Then without the right physical intelligence, without the right emotional intelligence, I got to the point where I was 21 years old and I was about 280 pounds, working at a job I hated and in a relationship I didn’t want to be in. I was ripe for transformation. I was drinking at the time, 21 years old, who doesn’t drink when they’re 21? I was using it as a way to cope, a way to escape from life. I’ll never forget this. I was drinking from a little red party cup and playing beer pong by San Diego State in 2001. I slammed the cup down, I looked down and I had a belly. I felt gross and I wasn’t with the right person. I didn’t like what I was doing for work.
Josh Trent: It was like health and wealth relationships were all jacked, nothing was working. It was the first time in my life that I had actually felt a higher power. I was so frustrated with myself, with the choices that I made, with the lack of intelligence that I had, that I got to this point where I was like, “I don’t know what to do but I know I don’t want to do this”. When that happened, I felt this wave of deep sadness that I think I finally allowed myself to feel. Then I slammed the cup down and I ran home drunk, like three miles. I got home drunk, and I think I typed into my old HP computer. How do I be healthy? That took me on the journey of losing 100 pounds, gaining 60 back, back and forth. I sold everything I owned, quit my job, burned the boats and moved to Hawaii. In Hawaii, I really found fitness. I really found health because of the ocean, because of the feminine power of the ocean.
Wendy Myers: Hawaii is such a healing place. I love Hawaii. It’s an incredible energy there.
Josh Trent: It is very cool there. The islands are, as you know, they’re volcanoes that have lifted out of the ocean floor, so it’s surrounded by this beautiful crystal aquamarine water. I loved it. I found hiking, surfing, fishing and fitness out there. I became a personal trainer. That was my career for 10 years, a fitness professional. After 10,000 plus hours of clients, I moved back home. Right around 2011, I was done with fitness, but I didn’t know it yet. I didn’t know how to leave. It wasn’t up until 2013 or 2014, right around that 10 year mark where I was like, I can’t do this anymore so I committed spiritual suicide. I left the gym. I went to corporate America for like two years and sat in a cube. By the beginning of 2015, I got this beautiful gift of being fired, actually.
Josh Trent: I’ll never forget this. I haven’t thought about this in so long. This is really cool to even feel with you right now. When I got fired, I looked at my boss at the time and I said, “What do you think I should be doing”? He’s like, “Every time I look at you, I just think of wellness.” He’s like, “You need to do something around wellness.” He didn’t know this, but I had been sitting on that URL for three years.
Wendy Myers: It was a sign from the universe.
Josh Trent: The podcast was formed. It was like little guideposts, sometimes big guideposts, both terrifying and liberating. Here we are six years later and millions of downloads later and it’s like, I did the right thing for my soul.
Wendy Myers: It’s nice when you’re in alignment and it takes a while to get there. It took me until I was like 38 or 39 to kind of figure out what I was doing. Let’s talk about breath work. You talk a lot about that on your podcasts and are very focused on that. Tell us what it is and how you got really passionate about that?
Josh Trent: Well we all do it but none of us really know how to do it properly. We learn it from our parents. Think about it from a science perspective, it’s the controlled lever that we’re pulling in the autonomic nervous system, as you know from all the programs that you help people with, and from fatigue. When we are completely taxed all the time, we’re constantly in sympathetic mode for our automatic or autonomic nervous system. We really need a lever to pull, but the only lever that we can pull that’s both voluntary and involuntary is breath. It’s the only thing we have. You and I can’t digest our food faster or sit and think about making our heartbeat faster, or make our skin grow faster. We can’t do these things. Our body does that. Our body’s so intelligent, but breath is really powerful. It’s the most powerful thing because we can actually use it and it can breathe us.
Josh Trent: It’s the only thing that exists like that in our entire nervous system, which is phenomenal. Through this controlled respiration, what we can do is we can start to learn how to modulate our stress and increase our vagal tone, which is really the most exciting thing about breath. The most exciting thing about breath is becoming more adaptive and more resilient to stress over time. That for me has always been a cue of, how do I be in the present moment? Early in my life, when I was sharing my story, I was depressed. As you know depression is of rumination or focus on the past. When I’m depressed, I’m literally having energy in me being pushed down. Lack of expression is depression. I wasn’t expressing, I wasn’t having conversations with you. I wasn’t doing my thing. I wasn’t living life.
Josh Trent: So anxiety I’ve experienced and depression I’ve experienced, but you and I both understand that anxiety is a focus on the future, it’s a worry about the future. How do we get out of the future, out of the past and just right here right now? The only way we do it is by using this vagal tone and using our breath, so that we can deal with the challenges that come, that pull us out of the present moment. In other words, sadness, capital T trauma, lower case T trauma from our past, performance anxiety, focus on financial goals for the future, things like this. Now, because of what’s happening in our world, especially if you look at Australia and Canada, oh my God. I can’t think of a more potent and powerful time for people to use the breath so they can actually return to the present moment.
Josh Trent: Really, Wendy, have the courage to see what’s going on. A lot of people right now are focused on apathy and kind of burying their head in the sand. I get it. I’m not here to shame people, but it’s happening. Everything that’s happening around us is happening for us to notice it. Unless we’re breathing, then we’re not going to be able to notice it because we’re going to be disconnected from our body and we’re going to be disconnected from the present moment. That’s a really high level of the breath.
Josh Trent: Of course, there’s a ton of physiological processes, health benefits and all these other things that come from a biological standpoint that support us. Just looking at breath from a 30,000 foot view, it brings us to the moment. It’s the only thing we have in our nervous system that we can pull physically, and it’s also the only thing that we tend to learn from our parents how to do wrong. Not the only thing, actually, I guess you could say the way that we eat, the way that we interact, the way that we treat ourselves and the way that we breathe. Those are the big ones that we learn from our parents. We spend the rest of our lives figuring out how to come back to our homeostasis. I think the breath can really help us do that.
Wendy Myers: I think people always think that if something is going on with their health or emotion-wise, it is complicated. Like there’s a complicated solution. You really have to go back to the basics; food, water, stress relief and deep breathing can have transformative effects just by doing something so simple. I also think, right now, there’s this fear in the mass consciousness that’s causing people to feel stress that maybe is not their stress. They still feel it and they’re impacted by and fearful of it, especially if they live in a country where their borders are closed, they can’t leave and they don’t know what’s happening. It’s a very weird, scary time. Can you talk a little about that, taking control of your nervous system and not letting it be influenced by all these outside forces?
Josh Trent: What you’re talking about is the ancient part of our brain. It’s called the amygdala and the amygdala is somewhere towards the center of our brain and part of the three parts of what is known as the default mode network. This is really what’s happening to people. Essentially the default mode network is this access that when you’re doing a myopic task or when you’re doing a singular task, it is supposed to be off, right? The default mode network is like this scanning mechanism in our brain for danger, for fear. It’s the posterior cingulate, the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. There’s other structures but those are the big three that really speak to each other. Science has shown this on PET scans, which is where they put people in this George Jetson type thing, but science and medicine can see what parts of the brain are active in this PET scan.
Josh Trent: A lot of the things that we see on PubMed and many different studies out there show that for the average person, when they’re trying to meditate, or when they’re trying to do their best with breath work, the default mode network that is supposed to be down is actually up. It’s up-regulated because we become victims of our thoughts. We just do. We become victims of our behaviors and we become victims of our thoughts. The only way that we can turn down the volume of this default mode network and really it’s electrical, because we’re all electrical beings, it’s electrical supply, is to take conscious, connected breaths and start to increase our vagal tone.
Josh Trent: There’s radical science behind this. When I was creating the Breathe, Breath and Wellness Program, this is our three week program that we have to teach people how to breathe. I started to really geek out on science. It started to make even more sense because whenever I would breathe, I would always have tears, especially when I would do long term cathartic breathing and then I would always feel so much better. I didn’t know why. It actually sparked me to go down the research rabbit hole and what science is showing is that when you are doing breath hold retention and when you’re doing box breathing or circle breathing, you actually are increasing not only your oxygen levels, but you’re increasing your nitric oxide and you’re decreasing oxidative stress. As you know if you cut an apple and the apple turns brown, that’s oxidative stress. You and I both have that here on earth, because oxygen is corrosive. When we learn how to do breath hold retention, we decrease that browning effect within ourselves, that oxidative stress.
Wendy Myers: I look like an avocado on the inside.
Josh Trent: Like an avocado, yes. Those are just a few of them. First is the default mode network. It’s the part that’s supposed to be at rest when we’re doing a singular task like writing, podcasting or a meditation. With podcasting, I think it’d be a little more active because I’m listening to you but whenever we really want to do a task in life that is predetermined by us being in the present moment, a clear way to see if breath work would be a fantastic tool for you is just to notice,” Do I have a hard time doing one thing at a time? Do I have a really hard time doing one thing at a time”? Maybe it’s sitting still. Maybe it’s just a conversation. A lot of us are fed by too much caffeine, too much stimulants and also too much stimulation, too much monkey mind. When we start to do the breath, there’s posture, there’s efficacy and there’s styles of breath we can dive into but once you start doing the breath properly and really breathing through your nose, Wendy, that’s the main thing using our nose, our mouth and our belly. We start to really see the physiology come back online and then everything else gets easier. I’m not saying that the breath is like this golden ticket, but wow, it really allows you to take a deeper inventory of what’s making you unwell.
Wendy Myers: Yes. My business partner, his name is Randall. He’s been doing an hour of breathwork every day and he’s having transformative experiences. I mean he’s not having a lot of fun doing it but he is doing it for an hour. He’s committed to doing that. He said, he cannot believe how much better he feels, the releases he’s having, stress release and stuff that’s coming up, coming up and out. He was really taken aback by how powerful the breath work was that he was doing.
Josh Trent: That’s commitment. An hour a day is commitment. I feel like people have maybe 20 minutes. Most students in the breathe program, it’s about 7 minutes or 10 minutes.
Wendy Myers: That’s enough. That’s enough. He’s just going overboard.
Josh Trent: That’s enough, right. It makes me think about, like right now I’m sitting in a chair, it’s a lotus style chair. I flip the pad in front and I sit in a Lotus position. So as we’re doing this show, my spine, my shoulders and my neck, they’re all really straight. When we do our breath work, if we’re breathing through our belly and if our posture is straight, then we can actually get the benefits. If we’re hunched over or if we’re uncomfortable, and this is the big one, if our knees are above our hips, you’re not going to be able to get the benefits of breathwork, because you have to have room for your abdomen to travel. You have to open up your hips so your belly can actually go in and out. I learned this from Dr. Belisa Vranich, Wendy. She wrote a book called Breathing for Warriors and it was a fascinating book. I went and took some of her training. I’ve taken lots of training in the past five years, but hers was really profound because she said this phrase that I think everyone can understand. Human beings are meant to be horizontal breathers, in and out, not vertical breathers, up and down.
Josh Trent: And many of us, when we breathe, we’re breathing from our sternocleidomastoid, we’re breathing through our clavicles and we’re really just shutting off all the benefits of breath. It is as simple as tuning into your posture and making sure that you’re breathing through your belly because on the backside, our vagus nerve runs all the way from the back of the cranium all the way down the spine and then it enervates like a tree and it wraps around the diaphragm and then it enervates into the enteric nervous system. As you know, that’s our second brain. When we are doing breath work properly and we’re doing this focused breathing, this conscious, connected breathing, we’re actually getting a physical press on those nerve endings and we’re getting more vagal tone by doing the diaphragmatic breathing.
Josh Trent: And another thing I have to mention too, is that the diaphragm is a 360 degree muscle. Some people think the diaphragm just sits right here in the front of your sternum. That’s actually just like 20% of it. The diaphragm goes all the way around your body. It’s this dome shaped muscle. That’s what we need to start getting more awareness of, is diaphragmatic breathing. Most of us, through stress, breathe up instead of out.
Josh Trent: When we start breathing out, we can actually press on those nerve bundles and we can start getting that vagal tone. Lo and behold, three weeks a month later from doing this practice, I’ve had a pediatrician write to me and I’ve had people across the world write in, and they’re finally getting it. I think for me, that means the most because when we learn how to breathe, we can choose. It’s written on my arm. It’s in Italian, I know you’re in Mexico and that’s a beautiful language, but I love the Italian language and it’s on my arm, because I needed a reminder for myself that if I can breathe, I can choose. That’s what that means in Italian. If I can breathe, I can be here with you and not think about anything else. If I can breathe, I can choose to show up for my son to be more patient. If I can breathe properly, I can not get so stressed out when I’m having an argument with someone. These are all the things that I think we’re being directed towards by the breath.
Wendy Myers: Of course you are not arguing with anybody.
Josh Trent: I’m not perfect, sometimes.
Wendy Myers: Well let’s talk about the vagus nerve because that is something a lot of people are talking about now, the vagus nerve innervates all your different organs. A lot of people have health issues because they have poor vagal tone. Can you talk a little bit about that and the benefits you get from working on vagal tone?
Josh Trent: We all know that when we go to the gym or when we exercise that our muscles become more dense, there’s those actin and myosin fibers and they tear. That’s what creates the Krebs cycle. That’s where you get ATP and all these different scientific things. Essentially, when we work out physically, when we train physically, we sleep and then we wake up, we’re stronger. We’re more toned physically. Well, the same thing happens for the breath because when we’re using our intercostals and when we’re using our TVA, our transverse abdominis, when we’re using all these muscles to help our body breathe, we’re getting so many benefits and we’re actually toning the sensitivity of that vagus nerve, and the vagus nerve is ancient. It’s a heart wired system so it has a direct connection with the amygdala, which is our fight or flight organ.
Josh Trent: It’s actually fight, flight or freeze. It’s three of them. That’s a whole other podcast because some people say there’s five functions. It’s like fight, flight, freeze and then I’ve heard someone else describe this as almost like where you’re connecting with someone else. I think it’s like a surrender or something like that. I don’t know but you guys Google that. Well don’t Google that actually, use Brave. Back to the vagus nerve, when we’re toning the vagus nerve, when we’re physically toning the nerve, it increases its sensitivity and it’s tone. One of the major functions of the vagus nerve is that it helps us control the parasympathetic side of our autonomic nervous system, which is like how we digest our food. Can we relax? Can we have all the different processes in our body that are supposed to be functioning?
Wendy Myers: Detox.
Josh Trent: Our adrenals and detoxification and everything else. If we’re constantly shifted into this sympathetic state because of a low vagal tone or improper breathing, it can be really, really bad and it can show up in 10 years or 20 years. I had a client that came to the house recently. He actually is in our field. He’s in the wellness world and he was dealing with a lot of stress, relationship stress. When he got here, we did the sauna and we got some really great heat shock proteins going, and then we did the cold therapy and then we did breath work right afterwards. Then we did the healing mat, which is the higher dose mat that we were texting about, which I love with the PEMF. Then we did our cathartic breathing, but there was an on ramp because honestly, Wendy, he needed that much time first, to learn how to breathe properly.
Josh Trent: He was a reverse breathing pattern person, which we can do a test real quick and I can teach everyone what that is, but he just needed time for his nervous system to relax. It took like about an hour for his nervous system to really, really, really relax. Then from that place, you start to get more vagal tone. It’s almost like if you have tight muscles, you need to foam roll them before you do yoga or before you exercise. It’s the same thing for our emotions and our nervous system, when it comes to the breath.
Wendy Myers: They’re so stressed right now. I mean even if they’re not aware of it, so many people are living and dealing with so many different types of stress like EMF, all the news going on, their financial stress, poor health and poor absorption of nutrients. It just goes on and on and on. I think people don’t realize how stressed they are. Especially if they’re unwell, you can’t heal when you’re in a chronic state of stress. It’s really important to do everything you can to bring down that stress set-point to a point where you can heal.
Josh Trent: For example, the first thing that I do if I’m upset is I go like this, I hold my breath, whether I’m in traffic, whether I’m arguing, whatever it is. When I do that, if I do that for too long, my heart rate starts to elevate. I increase my cortisol. That’s fine because you stress, like intermittent hormesis is great. There’s nothing wrong with a little bit of stress here and there. We actually need it. But this long kind of dripping stress that we all experience in this world, that’s not needed. We learn how to adapt to that. I don’t know how you feel about this. I’m curious how you feel about Selye’s model, where you have the alarm and then you have the adaptation and then the exhaustion? A lot of different, I guess you can say, behavioral scientists are saying that that’s not true anymore, which I’m always open to learning.
Josh Trent: I do think that we have an alarm phase, in some way, to stress. We go through an adaptation where maybe it’s extra coffee, extra stimulants or whatever it is. Eventually the nervous system waves the white flag and it says enough. I can’t stack these stimulants anymore, I’m suffering here. What the breath does is it brings you to this current moment, and from that moment you can have the courage to start being honest with yourself about what’s not working, right? Your business partner does an hour a day. I mean that’s advanced training. If he’s doing an hour a day, I assume he’s probably doing some catharsis breathing, maybe more like the emotional release breath. Is that what he’s doing?
Wendy Myers: Yes. He’s doing emotional release stuff, but he’s been meditating for 25 years. He’s advanced, for sure.
Josh Trent: He’s advanced, but for everyone here with us, there’s three ways that you can gently, and I say gently go into the breath. There’s the acute style of breathing. This is what we talk about in the Breathe, Breath and Wellness Program. In the first week, you just learn how to do acute style breathing. It’s breathing for stress. It’s breathing for sleep. It’s breathing to be still and to meditate. That’s about 7 to 10 minutes. Then in the next week, you go through these longer meditations, maybe 20 minutes, increasing your awareness about how to be in the present moment and whatever’s coming up in that present moment, whatever you’re aware of in that present moment. That is actually your body speaking to you. Your soul is speaking to you and saying, “Hey, you really need to pay attention to this thing, because I’ve been yelling at you for three years now and you haven’t listened to me”.
Josh Trent: When I’m breathing, when I’m in that open parasympathetic state, all these awarenesses come in. It’s spiritual, but it’s actually biological too. Then what your business partner’s doing is this catharsis breathing. That’s the third phase of breath work, catharsis breathing, you said he’s a seasoned meditator. I would not and I do not direct students to go and run to that right away. I think it’s really good to have the one, two, three approach. Learn how to breathe like a circle, learn how to breathe like a box, then do your meditative breathing and your proactive breathing and then do the catharsis breathing. Wim Hof made it really popular. He’s wonderful. He’s doing a great service to the world, but unfortunately there’s so much garbage out there, not from him but just people trying to imitate him. Somebody can go and do a quick search on YouTube for breath work and they can traumatize themselves.
Josh Trent: They can really hurt themselves if they’re doing this the wrong way. Those three phases are what I teach, it’s what I do for myself. I maybe only do a catharsis breathing session once a month, if that, because they’re very, very demanding on the nervous system and to the degree that I’m processing my trauma, I have to have someone there. I have to have a support system. I have to be working with a skilled professional because you know the breath, it’s not like psychedelics, but it can bring up some stuff where if you’re not ready to deal with it, it can be re-traumatizing.
Wendy Myers: Yes it is. When you’re doing, should I say like ascension work or emotional trauma work, it’s very stimulating to the nervous system. Very stimulating. It can be, and it can bring on stress or can have stress come up and out, which is a release, which is good but some people may not have awareness of what’s going on and not feel good.
Josh Trent: Yes, 100%. I experienced this when I did plant medicine about two and a half years ago, I went way too far with ayahuasca. Way too far. I could just quote Jordan Peterson on this. He said be careful of unearned wisdom. That’s exactly what happened for me. I wasn’t ready for wisdom. I was trying to sprint to my healing. Any time we’re trying to sprint to our healing and take shortcuts, I found that doesn’t always work out great. I think that shortcuts turn into long cuts when it comes to our health, our detox, our wellness and all the things that we’re doing. It’s a lot to unpack there.
Wendy Myers: I’ve been cautious about the ayahuasca. I want to try it, but I’ve had people here in Mexico like, “Hey, do ayahuasca, do combo medicine.” I’ve just been really cautious about trying it.
Josh Trent: Good. It’s not like you’re drinking. You’re not just going to the bar to get vodka and tonic. I mean, this is profound medicine that deserves a slower conversation, much more pre-work, much more integration work than you sitting in a ceremony. Granted it can be incredibly profound. I mean my life has changed so much from plant medicine in such a beautiful way, but also I wouldn’t wish my path on anyone because it was really, really challenging.
Wendy Myers: I saw a post on Facebook about you going into the woods and I think it was an Indian shaman.
Josh Trent: Oh, that was actually the Vision Quest.
Josh Trent: Vision Quest. So vision questing, we didn’t use any plant medicine at all. That was this year before my son was born. This was June of this year, 2021, and it was 10 days in north Idaho. It wasn’t a traditional native American quest, but it was done in that tradition but I want to be really clear to respect the tradition. It was not a traditional native American quest, but it was done in that same light. For 10 days you go out into nature, you’re completely disconnected, no phone. I mean, think about this you guys, when was the last time that for a week you didn’t touch your phone? I mean just that in itself is healing to your nervous system.
Wendy Myers: I feel a little bit of anxiety thinking about it.
Josh Trent: We went out there, Wendy, and for four days, I fasted. 100 hours fasting in nature by myself, on the top of a hill, already an hour away from town and then another 30 minutes away from camp. If anything happened, you’re two hours from getting any care, medically. All we had was water, literally four gallons of water, a tarp, a sleeping pad and a sleeping bag and four gallons of water. No food, no fire, no cell phone, nothing. I mean that was the most potent medicine I’ve ever received, more than any ayahuasca ceremony, more than any plant medicine ceremony, and that was with zero drugs. That itself, I was doing breath work every day and I was crying. I was having all these realizations, letting a lot of trauma from honestly, from past life and inherited family trauma as well.
Josh Trent: So we don’t always need medicine. Sometimes the medicine’s actually just in us, breath and nature, stacking those two things together. So potent, look behind you, all the trees, all the nature out in front of my home here, we have it all around us. We just forget about it but it’s literally there for us at all times. It’s hard work, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. If we can all learn how to be in nature, be with ourselves and do breath work properly, our life can really shift. Your interest will change, the people you hang out with will change. From a detox standpoint, breathing is 70% of how we detoxify our body, by breath.
Wendy Myers: The lungs.
Josh Trent: The rest of it is bladder and bowels. But 70% of how we detox is through our breath. Now why is that? It’s because when we’re respiring, we’re actually off-gassing all the things that our system has absorbed. Imagine what would happen from a detox perspective if you learned how to breathe properly. I mean it’s profound.
Wendy Myers: From a perspective like inner-peace, spiritual awareness and spiritual connection, I think it’s really important to take some time out every morning to focus. You don’t even have to meditate, but I like breathing to guided meditations, not even where I’m sitting in stillness and I feel like doing that. I get messages from the universe, downloads, inspirations, insights or things. You have to get still to really access your connection to spirit, your connection to source or God, or what have you. To get direction on your life purpose. I think breath work too, is a really important place even spiritually. Can you talk about that?
Josh Trent: I’m not here to share that my God or my beliefs are the right ones, but I will say that at least I believe in something and I think that’s what everyone really, really needs to pay attention to right now in their life. I don’t believe that God is a bearded man in the sky, but I do believe that there is a higher intelligence that creates all things. As we talked about, you don’t always breathe yourself. Something breathes you. You don’t digest your own food. You don’t know exactly why trees grow. Science tries to unpack and understand all these things. We know that the SA node in the heart is why the electrical pulse allows our heart to beat. You take a heart out of someone, you put it in someone else, we don’t really know what’s going on. We have to leave room for mystery in this life.
Josh Trent: When we always try to figure everything out or put definitions on everything or have science be the new God, which is what we’re seeing right now with what’s happening in our world, science has become a God, which is so repulsive to me. Science is a tool that’s made by imagination where we try to understand our human condition. Science is not God. In science, there is no room for mystery because the Socratic method, the scientific method is always about proving that you’re right. So I think from a spiritual perspective, we all have to connect with something. It’s funny because even if you’re an atheist, Wendy, do you ever feel this? I had a conversation this weekend that reminds me of what we’re talking about. To be an atheist is to have full certainty that there is nothing higher, that there is nothing out there, which is so ridiculous because no one knows. That’s the whole point. No one actually knows. So I would much rather for my overall health, for my spiritual health, for my longevity, for my physicality, I would much rather believe in something that makes me feel better than to believe there’s nothing out there. This is actually a false dichotomy because no one knows. To be an atheist, you’ve made up your mind that there’s nothing out there, but you don’t actually know. It’s so ridiculous.
Wendy Myers: I agree. It’s a really nice way to look at it.
Josh Trent: The argument from atheists is like, there is no God. It’s like, how do you know? Well, I made up that decision. Well, how do you feel? How do you feel when you make that decision? Do you feel good? Because I’ve had moments in my life that are completely unexplainable by science. They’re just awarenesses that I have, and that is God, because you and I are made in the image of God. I’m not here to be a biblical orator, but look, there’s so much profound wisdom in the Bible and I don’t follow the Christian faith. I think all religions have some gems we can pull from. But when we really get still, when anybody goes into a church, what is the first thing they do?
Josh Trent: They pause, they kneel, they do some kind of sacrament, but they’re doing one thing and they’re doing it in a calm state. If you look at the blue zones in the world, a friend of ours, Jason Prall, he did the Human Longevity Project and he found that in all the blue zones across the entire planet, it wasn’t just their food, it wasn’t just their water, it wasn’t just their exercise that made them live longer. It was their connection to a higher power. It was actually faith that was a nutrient that made them have more longevity. Well, why is that? It’s because they believe in something that gives them peace. It’s a respect, an honor and a humility to the planet and to nature herself. It’s that we don’t have it figured out. We have our scientific mind, we have our intellectual mind and we were gifted with these things. I think they have a place, but to deny that we’re spiritual beings and to deny spirituality, how’s that feeling? How’s that working out for you? That would be my question for anyone that has a resistance to spirituality.
Wendy Myers: I think as I’ve been on my detox journey, I think I know I have decalcified my pineal gland. People have calcifications, they have fluoride that’s been purposely added to the water to disconnect people from their spirituality. There’s other things that I think are happening to try to disconnect people from their spirituality and their intuition so they aren’t as powerful, because humans are very powerful manifestors and creator beings and they need their pineal gland to be functioning. They need to be connected to the mass consciousness, your pineal has to be working to have spiritual awareness and your connection. There’s a lot of scientific evidence for people praying and affecting other people, healing other people and their thoughts affecting others. I forget my original point but as I’ve gone on this journey and then was introduced to bioenergetics and whatnot, I have felt much more in connection with the universe, the creator being, source or whatever you want to call it. It’s a journey that we’re all on.
Josh Trent: How do you define bioenergetics? What’s that mean to you?
Wendy Myers: So bioenergetics is just where we have an energy field. We have an energy field where a lot of our communication takes place in our body. That’s where Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about how your thoughts control your body. What your thoughts or intentions are can be sent out to other people. That’s why you can feel people’s negative energy or their positive energy.
Josh Trent: Quantum entanglement.
Wendy Myers: Yes. Quantum entanglement. We have all this communication that happens in our body and that’s where most of the magic happens in our body. All these trillions of things that are happening every second in our body, and our physical body takes instructions from this energy field. You can negatively or positively impact this energy field through bioenergetic modalities, software or there’s a lot of different devices out there but also other people can impact you as well. You can positively or negatively impact other people with your thoughts and your intentions. It’s very powerful. You have to have an awareness of that. I think people are much more intuitive than they think and doing breathwork can help you to access that more. Your intuition and being are still receiving messages that you’re meant to receive.
Josh Trent: You reminded me, one of the practices that I do for myself and that we have in the breathe program is a box-style meditation breath. For people that don’t know, and we haven’t talked about this yet, either when you breathe like a circle, you’re doing conscious, connected breathing. An example might be, it might feel and look something like this. There’s no stopping in my breath. That’s a circular breath. That’s really good for bringing energy up into the pineal gland to the crown chakra. But when you breathe like a square, it’s really good for grounding you so if you’re excited or if you’re anxious, when you breathe like a square.
Josh Trent: I could actually trace my inhale, my hold, my exhale, my hold, like a square. It’s everything that you just talked about with the bioenergetics because it happens especially when you stack in a conscious breath hold retention, and I always do the breath hold retention on the exhale, because it allows us to pull the abdomen in. It allows us to pull the perineum in and it allows us to do what’s called a bandha lock or an energy lock. When we do that, whatever stress, whatever thoughts, whatever kind of rambling is going on in our system, whether it’s about someone else or ourselves, that comes up. I found that that comes up and this is the thing that we all need to know about not just the circular breathing, but the box breathing specifically. When you’re doing box breathing with breath hold retention, it really calms you down.
Josh Trent: It really calms you down because you’re pushing on that vagus nerve, you’re exciting all those nerve bundles in the enteric nervous system and on the diaphragm. On a metaphysical level, what you’re talking about with the bioenergetics, what’s really happening there is whatever’s running in the background, whatever’s like the record player in the subconscious mind, it’s going to come out at that time because it finally has a little window for you to hear it, for you to see it. If I’m holding resentment towards a previous business partner, a previous boyfriend or girlfriend, if I’m holding resentment, it’s going to come through there and then I have to have the courage to make those changes in my life, to forgive people, to forgive myself. I can’t tell you how many times, especially in the past month, I’ll be thinking about someone.
Josh Trent: I’ve tested this. I have to be very careful about who I think about because they’ll text me or they’ll reach out. I’ve had certain situations where I’m like, I really don’t want to talk to this person, and then they’ll text me. Be careful what I meditate on because it shows up, but it works the other way too. Right? If we’re decalcified and by the way, I’m thinking about this, what happens at restaurants now in Los Angeles, they put frickin laser guns, right at people’s pineal gland. I’m like, what is that doing to our pineal gland?
Wendy Myers: I refuse to do that. I will not do that.
Josh Trent: Aperture laser, put it on my wrist. Anyways, that’s a side podcast. What we’re talking about is quantum entanglement, bioenergetics, it’s all etymology, it’s all scientific words that we use to understand our human experience. We need to leave room for mystery that we don’t have it all figured out, and there’s certain slower paces of life and slower paces of being that we all must embody.
Wendy Myers: There’s too many miracles happening on the planet through all different types of means, energy work, breath work and shamans around the world. There’s so many amazing things happening. There’s so much amazing mystery in the world. Talk about a little bit more about your program, Breathe, and where people can learn more about it.
Josh Trent: Actually, Wendy, it came through two and a half years ago, almost three years ago now, after a plant medicine ceremony, it was 3:00 in the morning. I jolted out of bed and I made this connection where I could actually feel, we were doing breath work in Costa Rica and I was coming down from the ceremony and I had this immediate awareness. I thought, I don’t think this is for me anymore. This plant medicine, this hardcore ayahuasca, like sitting in ceremonies with 70 other people. It can be very harmful. I got so traumatized by that, that I had this awareness and I really do now think, looking back, it was a message from a higher intelligence and it was a message from God. Essentially that my path was not to be doing ceremonies all the time anymore. I got such a profound experience from doing the breath work that I immediately woke up.
Josh Trent: I went on namecheap.com and I bought breathwork.io, which I couldn’t believe wasn’t taken. I was like, how is this not taken? How is that URL not taken? I made a promise to myself that in a year or less I would travel the world, I would do as much as I possibly could for my own healing, for my own anxiety and depression, and then I would just share that with people. That’s how the program was born. It was me going to Costa Rica and Sedona and different workshops in California, I also spent 30 days in Thailand. That was an interesting moment, 30 days in Ko Pha-ngan, which is an amazing island, doing some deep intensive breath work there. I just thought, okay, from all these six or seven world-class breathwork practitioners, what are the gems that we can use for practical people? Where somebody who may not be esoteric or may not be very hardcore spiritually, that they could actually use for their life?
Josh Trent: That’s where the program was born. It’s Breathe, Breath and Wellness. It’s at breathwork.io and the program’s three weeks. I feel like if you look at behavior change studies and also just anecdotally from all the different students across the world, it takes about three weeks for you to really have something click. In the first week you’re going to start learning, in the second week you’re going to start integrating and then in the third week you’re going to have more mastery about how to use some of these practices that we’ve talked about today, whenever you want. It’s an app through Kajabi. That’s where we host the program. You can just download your Kajabi app and you have all your meditations, you have all your breath work practices right there in the palm of your hand. I made it really affordable so that people could give themselves this gift, especially during this time, I’d love to give your audience a gift too. I’d love to give them even more of a discount if you’re open to that.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, absolutely. We’ll have a link in the show notes down below for a discount, and I highly recommend you guys try Josh’s program because I think so many people today are living in such a stressed environment. We had stress before, but with the whole pandemic and everything that’s going on around, the constant fear porn that’s going on in the media. People, they’re terrified, and not to mention that people are going to be born with a really high stress set point because of emotional trauma, the transgenerational trauma that you mentioned. Can you talk about that a little bit about using your program to change your stress set point?
Josh Trent: One of the guys I’ve had on my show twice, his name is Mark Wolynn and he wrote a book called It Didn’t Start With You. I’m curious if I have it here on the desk. Anyways, it’s about generational trauma. I believe he’s the co-founder of Family Constellations. We also see this with Dr. Richard Schwartz and Internal Family Systems. There’s a lot of different healing companies that are coming online now because we’re all seeing that from an epigenetic standpoint. We literally inherit our mother’s microbiome and our mother’s adaptation to stress, but this is what’s so powerful that I want everyone to hear. If physically, epigenetically, we inherit things from our parents, why would you ever argue that emotionally, we don’t inherit those exact same qualities? How could you ever argue with that?
Wendy Myers: There’s research to prove it, that we inherit trauma in our energy field from our parents. There is.
Josh Trent: Of course. So how do we heal that? Well, before we heal anything, we have to be aware of it and if we’re aware of it, then we can start to use our breath to clear the stress. That’s really what we do in this breathe, breath and wellness program, because it’s not just about breath work. Yes, breath work is a powerful tool, but when you start pairing breath work with some safe vape cannabidiol, or some longer meditations and different tools that we have in the extra study module, these are the things that allow people to really go even deeper but in a safe way. Where they’re not doing the cathartic journey, it’s not like that. What happens is when you breathe properly, you feel better. When you feel better, you have more homeostasis. I know when you have more homeostasis, you have more energy, and then you have the capacity to explore greater levels of healing.
Josh Trent: You have the energy, the time and the bandwidth emotionally and physically to look into Mark Wolynn’s work, or to look into family constellations. You can then, from that place, start to piece together your own recipe for your own healing. When you have your own unique recipe for your own healing, I would probably say 9 times out of 10, if not 10 times out of 10, that we all inherit emotional and physical epigenetics from our moms and dads who inherit it from their moms and dads. By the way, it even goes deeper. It’s great, great grandparents it’s even great, great, great grandparents. In Mark’s work, in Wolynn’s work, he talks about when our grandmother is born, our mother is already an egg inside of her, and of course, we come from her. In World War II, that stress response that everyone was going through in the Great Depression, that lives in you and I, it lives in all of us that scarcity, that fear.
Josh Trent: It’s our work to use breath to clear that, and also it’s not just breath. Breath is the access point, but once we have that access, then we can start doing the real work of cultivating the courage. This is what it really is. We do the breath work, we clear things away. A breath as the bridge to the conscious and unconscious mind, and then from that place, we have to really cultivate courage to deal with what comes up. I’ve never been, at least to my knowledge, I’ve never had sexual trauma. I’ve never had intense physical trauma, but many people have. Millions and millions, hundreds of millions of people unfortunately have gone through sexual and physical trauma. For them, their journey is going to be even harder, right? It makes me sad just to feel that it’s like, I can’t believe that happens in our world, but it does.
Josh Trent: If it happens to our grandparents and that unfortunately gets passed down to our mother or father, that gets passed down to us. Alan Watts said this quote that I think you’ll love. He said, a lot of times when it comes to parents and children, it’s “all retching and no vomit.” Everyone’s teaching their children to raise their children who will raise their children, just like all the children were raised. That includes all the unconscious relationships, all the ways that we make fun of each other and the ways that we don’t support our qualities in each other. It makes me sad that parents don’t have the skillset to encourage their children, because they themselves are broken. The child inside of them is completely broken and they don’t have the awareness, the tools or the intelligence to heal themselves.
Josh Trent: It’s not about making them wrong. It’s not about beating our parents up. I mean, gosh, they did the best they could, but here it is for us, it’s our opportunity to heal it. If we’re not taking an honest look on a regular basis, then we’re really dishonoring our ancestors. I’m not saying that from shame, I’m not shaming anyone. I’m just saying it’s dishonoring our ancestors to heal what they didn’t have the intelligence to heal because they just quite simply didn’t know. Now we’re in this world and we’re connecting through a podcast that goes into outer space and is sent back down to the world. Are you kidding me? We owe it to our ancestors to do all this work because we’re here, because we have this gift of being alive now.
Josh Trent: Take it upon yourself to learn how to do your conscious breathing, to learn how to detoxify your body, to learn how to detox emotionally, physically, spiritually and epigenetically. Get rid of all the shit, get rid of all the gunk that’s blocking you from having a great life, because that’s how the next wave of children come into the world. My goal with that vision quest we talked about, I went and my only prayer was, “God helped me to release all the things that I don’t know that would be projected onto my so”n. That was my prayer. Help me release everything that I don’t know about, that I would project onto my son that wouldn’t be loving, that wouldn’t be good for him.
Wendy Myers: I love that because what you ask for, you manifest. You do, Absolutely. I think that with everything that’s going on on the planet right now, all of this fear that’s going on and people having to be locked in their homes, doing that voluntarily or involuntarily, it’s an opportunity to turn inward. Do work on yourself to release a lot of negative emotions, get in touch with yourself, get in touch with your spirituality or start an ascension process if you will, to overcome this. I think the dark is working for the light right now. A lot of these things that the negative elite are doing or however you want to frame it, is backfiring. People are waking up and becoming more aware. It starts with programs like Breathe, like breathwork.io. I really encourage people to go check that out and learn how to breathe properly. Where can we find out more about it again?
Josh Trent: Breathwork.io and we’ll make the code “Wendy”. The code is Wendy. You guys get 20% off the program. It’s already way cheaper than taking your family to dinner by the way. It’s a tool you can use for the rest of your life, literally for the rest of your life. You can download them all either to your phone or to your computer or you can use the app. It’s breathwork.io and the code is Wendy. Also, if you’re in a really, really challenging financial place, you can also head over to wellnessforce.com/m21. There’s a three minute practice and a wellness guide that I built there. You can get more comfortable with it. You can see if it’s for you. Those are the two options for people to learn more and people to start doing this breath. I mean if you’re feeling it, if you’re feeling inspired, trust that inspiration. If something that Wendy mentioned today or if something I mentioned today sparked curiosity in you or you felt a little tug, if you feel pulled to something, do it. If you feel pushed to something, don’t do it. But if you feel pulled, that’s a guidepost.
Wendy Myers: Also, you have an amazing podcast, Wellness Force Radio. You have amazing guests. I just love your energy, your attitude and your inspiration. You’re really, very importantly leading in a positive way, a lot of young men are listening to you and looking up to you. I just really commend the work that you’re doing.
Josh Trent: It’s good to receive that from you. Thanks.
Wendy Myers: Yes. Well, everyone one, thanks so much for tuning in to the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Wendy Myers. I love doing the show and bringing you inspiring thought leaders and experts from around the world, to help you dramatically improve your life because you deserve to feel good. You really do. I know that you’re looking for answers and I’m happy to be able to serve you in that way. Thanks for tuning in and I’ll talk to you guys next week.
