The Wellness Industry Always Gets This Wrong

Do you think women should cold plunge? Oh, I love this question. The first thing I would like to say is that anyone who's going to tell you something that's like absolutist thinking, they can kind of go. Breathing question for you. It's something that I've been curious about for like 15 years. OK, cool. I hope I know the answer. What makes someone win versus come in second is one pull of a breath. Shit's gonna happen in life. So if we're going to train for the game of life, then I want to learn how to be down regulated. I want to. Able to learn how to re-regulate. So I think the future of like wellness is this connection of our biology, our psychology, and then our consciousness. I feel like with Texas because it's so hot, we got to get a cold plunge because just go on an hour-long walk in the middle of the day in Texas and then get in the cold plunge afterwards would be so exciting. If I didn't go through one of the hardest times of my life, I wouldn't be able to do this work as effectively or have as much empathy or. Connection to the people that I work with, people walking around Austin being like, I did my 42nd Ayahuasca journey. I've done MDMA 52 times this year. But if you don't do any integration work, you just stay in the doorway with everybody would just be exactly who they are and everyone would get exactly what they want and need. If anyone's ever worried about Red Bull, and I've drank like 8000 or more cans of Red Bull in my life. So if anyone's going to die, so you're fine. You're fine.

Do you think women should cold plunge? Oh, I love this question. Um, I think women should go plunge, yeah, because I get asked, because I've been a trainer for 21, 21 years, and I get asked this all the time, and I think it's because there was a Stacey Simms episode somewhere probably on Huberman saying that, you know, it may not be good for hormones and whatnot, but people take things so literally, and it's either like eat eggs, don't eat eggs. It's like That's what I want you like, you're an expert on this, so I want all the information you can give so we educate women because I think, you know, I have one friend who's Finnish and she's like, we grew up cold plunging as children our whole lives and to this day we still do it. Yeah, especially the Finnish, right? They would like to take um. They'd like to say they led the charge. Um, I, this is such a, it's a question that's like swirling around that I think is the first thing all I would like to say is that anyone who's going to tell you something that's like absolutist thinking is like they can kind of go scratch. I don't ever really have buy-in on anyone that's like for 100% of the people, 100% of the bodies, 100% of context, women shouldn't cold plunge or women should cold plunge. So I'm not here to say you have to.

But I think that um it's something that in many ways like helped save my life or reregulate my, my nervous system in a way that I could navigate really big challenges. Um, it was a Stacy Sims episode that like swirled around, um, was on Mel Robbin's podcast, I think, and then Huberman, she's been on a bunch of shows. She's been on my show actually. She's great and she's like, she's very knowledgeable researcher. She was a, you know, triathlete trainer, like coach and, and, and an athlete of her in her own right, right? And The big challenge, and I've kind of dug deep on this with, um, some of the master trainers in my program. So Sherpa Breath and Cold is my program. I do a certification program for breath work, cold exposure and contrast therapy for coaches, and one of my master trainers is like a Chinese medicine practitioner. And so that's the other place where people go kind of mad is they're like, oh my God, women in cold womb and all these things and I'm not here to take away from anybody like a cultural norm or a decision. I think everyone should be autonomously choosing for their bodies what they want to do. But what I don't love is that there's this notion of women shouldn't cold plunge or the conversations and specifically the soundbites that were pulled from that podcast. They're just scaring people off or females off, physiological females, let's say, off from doing this practice and No one on this planet that's alive right now is the first person in the world to ever cold plunge, right? It's been going on for thousands of years. And women do have, you know, different physiological, we have different surprise, we have different things going on in our body than you do in yours. Um, but there's men. I know exactly, exactly. Um, I, uh, Yeah, I, I, I see there's so many differences in us and then the, the thing that I see the most. I think I'm just losing my train of thought because I went a lot, this is a sidebar quickly. I went to an interview with Under Armour many, many years ago, and the women's division for clothing was being run by a man, and he's like, we decided we really just can't shrink it and pink it anymore. So they were just taking men's clothes, making them smaller and making them all pink and being like, there's a women's division.

So like it's just a funny notion of like we've come around and we've gotten to this place where like there's female empowerment and then there's all these things and then there's like women actually deterring us from making choice for what we want to do with our own bodies. And what I say in the program is that context is king and safety is queen. So even with men, it's like who's the person who's in front of you, right? If it's someone who has a Really big fear or a lot of trauma or, you know, um, a professional athlete or is 250 pounds overweight or whatever, whoever that physiological female, whatever version of that human is in front of you, I'm going to cold plunge them differently or maybe I won't at all. Someone called me yesterday and left a message like, oh, that my friend is pregnant. She has a cold plunging practice. We hear, you know, one of the contraindications of cold plunging is being pregnant. But the truth is, you know, Women who are pregnant have been doing it since the dawn of time. And yeah, maybe there should be some notion of like checking in with yourself that's like, uh, am I maybe over 40 or IVF? Was it really hard to get pregnant? Like what kind of chance or risk do you want to take? Are you going to like crush your soul and get in the cold at like 36 degrees for 10 minutes? Um, there's a woman who runs Birth fit here and when she was pregnant, I know it's Texas, so the river's not that cold, but she would check the temperature of like the local bodies of water and do like a 2 minute cold plunge in that.

50 degrees or whatever the local temperature was, you know, during the course of the arc of her pregnancy. So it's it's such an interesting question because it's like, I want to be like, fuck yeah, women should be cold plunging. I've seen so much transformation putting females in the water who are just uh at their wits' end about something in life or stressed to the max or Uh, depressed and there's so many positive benefits that come, come from dipping. Yeah, before we get into the benefits, in the way I try to explain it to clients, it's like, it's like exercise. It's a stress that can produce a benefit and you just have to find the stress that is slightly out of your comfort zone. So if 36 degrees is unbearable and, you know, your hair feels like your skin's going to rip off, don't do that. Like, Pick a higher temperature and just get in for 5 seconds. Funny thing is, a lot of times I've taken clients who were deeply afraid and then their first time going in. Did several minutes easily and I never pressure. I'm just like, look, we'll just try 30 seconds. Every 30 seconds you can decide to get out anytime. And then they're like way better than I can do it and I've been doing it for years. So like you just don't even know like your own physiology, like your body may actually really take to it really well. Sometimes I do a cold plunge at a higher temperature, sometimes colder, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. It just depends on like, I think you use it as a tool based on Like listening to your body, sometimes pushing it, sometimes just using it to cool down a little bit from a workout or something. Yeah, for sure, right? Yeah. And as a man, like for a male, typically we see like you guys can cold plunge every day with a little bit more ease just from the hormonal regulation profile, yours are turning your hormones every 24 hours, you're getting like a Big awake experience in the morning till like 12 noon. You're like, I'm ready. I can go longer. I can go stronger. So men seem to tolerate cold better at a daily cold punch practice. So I am, I do say for females, listen, if you're getting in 3 times a week, you're winning. Like it's like that's plenty. It's plenty for most humans. Um, and I tend

be a little bit more conservative with, you know, some of the things during the different times of women's cycle, but there's also a contingency of females that shows up and says, well, when I have my period, I can't go in the cold. Now if that's a cultural or religious choice, then cool. Like again, you do you. And also there is not enough research to dictate or say that that's like a bad idea. And depending on how you respond to having your period or having PMS right before your period, it may actually be helpful. It's going to be typically more challenging before you get your period. The last two weeks, so like we break down the women's cycle, first two weeks, we have, um, we lead up, our estrogen is rising, we go into ovulation, we're a bit more like robust feeling. Again, I'm totally generalizing. Some women may not feel that way. Um, but just from a hormonal perspective, we can kind of conquer the cold and conquer stress a bit more. And then the back half of our cycle, we have a number of things going on. We have a little bit more, we're getting less sleep generally, we're feeling a little bit more disconnected from our pelvic floor. We actually uptake oxygen less well, the last up to 25% less oxygen uptake in the last 1012 days of the cycle, um, based on some of Patrick McEwan's research and If you're, you know, if you're huffing and puffing and you're less connected to your pelvic floor and you're not breathing as easefully, it's going to be a little more challenging in the cold and all of this is still available to Builds your window of tolerance by, you said the most, the perfect thing that I always talk about in training, which is like the goal of the game when I have someone coaching someone else through the cold is what's their current practice, where is their edge, and how do we stretch it just a little, right? And that's the game the whole entire time. And although I would say don't just get in for 5 seconds because the money is right after that like 45 to 60, 62nd mark when you have this like turnover in your system and like the physiological body.

I have people get up to their neck, so I don't know how you always plunge them, but I want mammalian dive response to happen. I want their heart rate to naturally slow, and then they realize they're doing this hard thing, and then you can physically see, like I'm sure you've seen this a ton, you can physically see people's body. Have to surrender and that's just, it's like why it's such an honor to do this work. I know everyone's like, it's fucking Instagram, let's go ice plunge, whatever, but it's like, I get to see, we get to see when we plunge people, some like someone in there. 10 year old self, you know, it's like you default to the level at which you handle stress the least well. And so you sort of go back to your younger self when you get into something that's deliberately so stressful and it's just a beautiful way to see how people handle stress and you can really see how they do. I think it's like for job interviews, you'd be putting people in the cold and being like, OK, I could see who can hang and who cannot, you know. Yeah, and it can be, yeah, there's some incredibly blissful moments that you can experience, so. Oh, the way I have people do it is just depends on how freaked out they are, which a lot of people are super freaked out. So I just try to get them in it. I just try to get them in it. I tell them if you can get up to your shoulders, great. Some do incredible, some just like.

Whatever they can do and get in and out, right? Just, I'm just trying to get them not afraid usually. How did you, how did cold plunging enter your life and how has it changed yours? Yeah, uh, it entered my life. It's like 8 years ago now, probably. I was, it's like I have old highlight reels on my Instagram where you can see I did like a 30 day challenge. It ended up being like 35 days because people kept coming over to my rooftop in LA, be like, do one more day. I'll go cold lunch with you. Um, back when people were not doing that, it wasn't a thing to do days in a row of cold, and I was experimenting to feel like what it was about, but I, um, I had And a little bit of an affinity for cold. I knew that there was something up with it. I was curious about it. I was reading about it. I was talking to someone like a Rolfing structural integration therapist about it a lot, and he's like, Oh, I heard that like Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reece are doing something around cold, and I was like, Oh, cool. And just after that conversation went home and like researched it. Wrote them, did all these things, submitted an application, was like, please let me in. They're like, it's only a waitlist. And I was like, just wrote the woman every day who was their assistant and finally got into their, um, their like activation weekend and It wasn't just cold water. This is what was interesting for me is it was like, um, weights under the pool, under the water in the pool, like, and I mean 11 ft, 40 pound weights, dive master. I am not, I'm working on becoming a better swimmer all the time. I'm not a great strong swimmer. There's a shit ton of professional like surf crew there. There's probably only 3 or 4 women and Gabby, everyone else is.

You know, surfed with Laird or just like super pro athlete style and, and cut up and just could hang underwater for, I don't know, lots of minutes, right? And I was like, how is this going to go down? And Laird's like a 14 year old boy, like in the best way and he's just like in the sauna and crazy and standing on top of the saunas and you know, it's like sauna life and cold plunging and breathwork and Patrick McEwen's around for the whole thing, which is how I first got introduced to him. So he's the guy who founded Oxygen Advantage. And we all are in the pool. It's the two big days. The first day is this pool and weights work, and I'm like literally crying. I'm like thankful that there's water in the pool because then no one could tell that I'm like crying in the pool trying to navigate some of this. And listen, they're keeping me safe. I'm in there of my choice, but it's hard. It's, it's like there's a fear. There's like a scariness to it that I just couldn't be doing that's difficult. Well, you're like doing, um, you're doing like Squat jumps with a 40 pound weight from 11 ft or 6 ft or like high enough that you have to get above the water. So every time that you, you jump up above the water, you're like, you're just getting, trying to get the water you can and then letting it drive you down. Yeah, so it's like the training.

It's all of their training from XPT is what it's called, and they don't do all of this exactly anymore like this, but, um, all of the training was based off of like surfers who would train with big weighted rocks. So they're training to hold their breath underwater while there's all this surf going on, all this, um, undertow. And whatnot so that they could when because you wouldn't get when you get barreled by a wave, you could be under there 5 to 7 minutes, like worst case scenario, right? And so you've got to be able to be calm, conserve oxygen and just hold your breath, right? So you don't die. So these surfers in Hawaii and various places around the world training with these rocks and so it's mimicking that a bit and it was a really beautiful like learning for stress tolerance, for understanding panic, for water. You know, working in water with weights, and it really gave me a lot of perspective, but I would say this, and I'm getting to how I got into cold is I was the weakest one. I was the weakest link for sure in the group, right? And so I, I kind of went home after day one and I was, as you do, like I'm in the shower, I'm like kind of disappointed in myself. I'm like, how could I have done it better? I'm like kind of, you know, negative Nancy talking to myself in my head and I'm, I'm like, This is the biggest, one of the biggest life lessons I ever learned. I was like, I'm not doing this tomorrow. I'm not going to, I know we have heat and cold and breath training and stuff tomorrow. I'm not, I'm going to show up and I'm going to like visualize that I'm showing up stronger than anyone else. And I know that there's cold punching tomorrow and I'd only ever done it in like Korean saunas or Korean spas where they have like sauna and little cold pools and I'd go in for like 10 seconds and like, oh, you know, like I had no idea.

Um, and I was like, so I kind of know what cold's like, and I'm just going to go. I'm going to head dunk. I knew we were going to be able to be in for 3 minutes was like the max. So I was like, I'm going to head dunk on the way in. I'm going to do 3 full minutes and I'm going to head dunk at the end and I'm going to handle it like a Zen master. Like, I don't care what it takes. Like I'm going to regulate myself and figure this out. And I like visualize it a lot that night. And there's a thing like if you're training in the gym or you watch like Olympic lifting on on television, you can kind of tell how well the lift's going to go by the approach, like just by looking at how they walk up, how they approach the bar, you can kind of feel when the lift's going bad. You saw it beforehand. You saw it happening, you know, as they're approaching the bar. And so I just like visualized a lot and try to stay out of the disappointment in myself and really thought about it. Like I would say that night relatively obsessively. And then when we got to cold plunging the next day, and when I decided I was going to go first, whatever it took. So we got the next day all around the tub during the cold plunge part and that Mark was leading my tub. I was like standing and I must have just had that energy so much that he's like, well, I think Kristen's going first, so they could just tell. And then I did and then remember it's like all these beefcake athlete guys are gathered around the tub being like, Here's the weakest link. You know, this is my story. Here's the weakest link chick from yesterday. I was having such a tough time and I just, Mark was like, OK. And I took a few breaths by the tub and I got in and I had dunked and I came up and I stayed in 3 minutes and I had dunked at the end and little by little over the course of that time, I opened my eyes and I watched all the mostly men around the tub being like, Oh, like recognizing that I had a skill set there, recognizing that I was managing, regulating myself, recognizing like, oh shit, um, she was the weakest link yesterday. I have to do at least as well as she is. And many of these men hadn't cold punched before. So it was just really for me a really big life lesson in like what's your approach to it all. And there was something in that moment that just solidified for me like this is my practice, you know, and so it's cool.

What, what was your experience like towards the end and then getting out? Like what did you feel? I felt, um, I mean, I felt proud of myself, I think in in such a strong way. I felt really capable. I felt, I talk a lot about people being able to expand their capacity. Um, I knew that there was like enough safety that if anything happened, someone would like pull me out. So I wasn't worried about any of that. But just getting in, you definitely have the shock of the cold water and the ice, shit tons of ice they use, you know, to make it even more dramatic in that environment. And there was also something really, um, I liked having all the ice because it was weighty. And so I just sort of really tried to connect with my breath. I could feel how much I could control my system by using my breath and after the initial like shock, and I didn't have a, I didn't have a response that you, we see this quite often when people are like. Oh. Or people get real quiet and they just look up at you like you're, they're a little kid in a candy store, like they don't, Mom, can I leave? Yeah, exactly. Um, I didn't have any of that. I like, I didn't.

Like I would like to, in some ways I'm like, oh, I'm built for this, but I think I really just set myself up for success and it's like the power of belief. You flip some switch in your mind. Yeah, and then just like the ability to stay in. I think, listen, my competitive spirit inside of me is like, fuck yeah, I sucked yesterday and today I'm showing you all up. Like there, of course there's like some of that alpha in there, but that's the navigation of being a human and saying, OK, I, I know I have some ego and I know I have some things going on, but how do I How do I feel really good about this progression or this choice? What was the experience like the like neurochemical, like how did you feel? Yeah, I mean, I felt, it feels spicy and it feels kind of like I'm cutting, you know, to your system, but also When something like hits you at that level of um like let's just call it stress and you can breathe through it and you can literally, there's nothing, the thing I felt the most is present. There's nowhere else you can be. So you're so present somatically, you're so present with your body that you're breathing yourself down into a space where you can literally feel like the initial cold shock hit. You can feel all the tingling in your system, you can feel the like wash of it all over your whole body, and then as you breathe, you can feel yourself come back into real, real hyperpresence and that It's like there's a level of clarity there that you just don't, I don't get anywhere else, right? I don't maybe psychedelics, but I don't get anywhere else. And so to have that for 3 minutes and it's coming back home to my body and for anyone who's listening, it's like when you get in the cold water for me and for many, many people, I think it's the time that we can really say, How am I doing right now? Like, how am I treating myself? Where am I falling short? Where am I really excelling? Where am I not giving myself enough credit? Like I always kind of prompt myself to say like, how are you really? And I can tell myself the right answers and that level of presence. And then as the cascade happens and you settle in, I find like a 30 to 62nd mark that turnover happens, you settle in, you can stay in for longer.

And then it's just elation. Then it's, it's like, wow, I'm doing this thing. People will be like, well, I guess I just numbed out, but it's not that, right? It's like some people might disassociate in there, but for me it's not that. And then getting out, it's exhilarating. It's, you know, 30, 60 seconds after you have this whole neurochemical cascade. The cascade is happening the entire time. You're getting hits of like norepinephrine and adrenaline and all this, but then you get out and you have this bliss cascade that's like your oxytocin when you're doing it with other people and all these chemistry, all this chemistry in the body that is. Literally shifting your state. It's the greatest feeling too, yeah, yeah, yeah. What would you say are the main pillars of regulating your nervous system, whether you're in the cold plunge or out of the cold plunge? Yeah, the main pillars of regulating your nervous system, I think understanding how your breath controls the entire mechanism. Um, You know, there's like a case to be made specifically with the breath that's like, We think that like our thoughts are happening all the time and they are, right? You can't stop your thoughts from coming, just like you can't stop your heart from beating, but our thoughts, I think are really a byproduct of when you look at sort of the science, it's sort of a chicken and an egg thing, right? Our breath is controlling our nervous system specifically is checking in with its environment every 200 of a millisecond. So even as we're sitting here right now and we're like listening to each other and being present and being connected, our nervous system is ahead of the game.

It's just checking in and checking in and checking in. And every time we have a thought or a feeling or a notion or something, that's like an aggregation of 50 to 100 of those moments. And so how do I understand that like actually what my when my nervous system is checking in, it's moving my breath in my body, my breath in my body, depending on how deeply I breathe or how uptight I am or whatever is happening if I'm holding, is then going to send some specific wiring signal to my brain so that my brain can make decisions about what it wants to think and feel. And so I think the biggest thing in nervous system regulation is understanding that we do have the capacity to kind of control our breath, to come back home, to ground ourselves. And it's the thing that we like are consistently navigating because automatically we're breathing. People are like, why am I doing breathwork class? I already know how to breathe, or why are we talking about performance breathing with my athletes because I'm already breathing when I'm working out, training, swimming, fighting, whatever. Navigating the breath and being able to come back and come back and come back in a way that isn't meditation, but is a physiological check-in is the number one way to get ourselves back to who we are, really.

Do you have certain ways you like to coach people before they get in, while they get in, and then what they do afterwards? Yeah, so that's, that's a really interesting question. I'm glad you asked it. It's um Because everybody knows Wim Hof, right? We're like, none of us would be here half naked, flip flops on the top of a mountain or in ice baths as prevalently as we are without Wim. And so he's got, you know, he's, he has a ton of different breathwork styles, but he's very known for that super ventilated style breathing where people are going. Or nose mouth and they're pumping their whole system up, which like works, right? It works because you are sympathetically charging your system before you get into something that is a, a freezing cold body of water or an ice bath where you're going to be sympathetically charged. So one would think, I am setting my system up to the parallel that I'm about to get in, that's going to make that easier. And you know what? That works. It's awesome. But my question to, um, especially with new plungers, is like, I first want to train people in the opposite direction. Because shit's going to happen in life. Like, are we training to be like good at getting, taking an ice bath? We're really not. We're getting good at life. So if we're going to train for the game of life, then I want to learn how to be down regulated in a normal state as connected to myself as I can be.

I want to have this hit of stress and then I want to be able to learn how to re-regulate because guaranteed some shit's going to hit the fan. There's going to be a technological problem and some guy's going to come running in here. You're going to like delete, delete, whatever you want to say, like your wife's going to divorce you, your boss is going to fire you, you're going to get in. I was in a gnarly car accident in LA. I didn't see it coming. I actually like took a big exhale right before I got hit by this car like 40 miles an hour and I'm stopped and I took a big exhale because I had almost hit the car in front of me in the stop short scenario and I was like, I didn't hit the white car. Boom, right? So it's like, how, if we're going to have life hit us in all these ways that are unexpected, then how can we train for that? Well, I'm going to down regulate someone typically, easeful breathing, get them rooted into the earth, really in touch with their system as best as they can because as you know, sometimes people are anticipating and all that, and then I'm going to have them get in the water, experience that cold shock response, and then breed themselves back down to regulation. Like after a while and you become an intermediate or advanced plunger, you can start to mess around and like do whim and face down on the ground and breathe all crazy and try to exacerbate your system and make it even harder for yourself in a number of ways. But before that, I want people to get good at at regulation, right? It's like the, if we're looking at like, I just, I think the future of like wellness is this connection of our biology, our psychology, and then our consciousness, right? You guys talk so much about that in the world on the show. It's like, Those three things together and then one big piece of our, our, our biology and even our psychology, if you're thinking about how our thoughts arise, is how we regulate the nervous system, how we regulate and use our breath. And there's a number of other things, right? If someone's like freaking out, having a big anxiety attack or something, there's other ways that we can by doing like a quadrant wake wake up exercise or orienting ourselves to the space because we're in a really heightened state.

So there's so many ways that we can actually use like visuals or sensation to regulate. Is there a certain breath count or protocol you do while in the cold to regulate? Yeah, great. Um, I, I typically tell people at the side of the tub, like I'll start them with a 3/6 breath. I sort of think anything more than that, it's really hard for someone who's not new, who's newer at cold to try to do like a 4.8 or something, but like 22 inhale, 4 exhale, 3 inhale, 6 exhale. It's really nice, starting at the side of the tub, getting in the tub, and then, and then reconnecting to that. And also having people like take in the full spicy moment, that is the first time you climb into the water, right? Like letting people, I always say like, let it be what it is, like how can you live with what is happening? Let it be what it is, that, that cold moment or that car accident or that bad phone call, like, have your feelings, have your, ah, have your f-bomb, have your whatever happens in the in the cold, and then begin to reregulate yourself, you know. Do you combine sauna a lot with cold or do you like to use them separate, or how do you? I use cold more often than I use heat and cold. I also like went to two big training.

I got my advanced sauna master certification. So I'm like, that, that's, I know it's so interesting. I went to the first one in London and the second one was in the Carolinas. Like someone came over from the German organization and worked with a gentleman here to run an advanced sauna master. What is, what is to be a sauna master? What's so interesting. So people asked someone asked me at a party the other day and I was like, well, basically, I can like wave a towel to circulate the heat and ventilate a sauna. I can use oils and I can drag out a passed out body, you know what I mean like that's like you're a sauna lifeguard and when you graduate, you get a crown and it's made of a wool sauna hat. Yeah, you do, you do. You get a wool sauna hat when you graduate. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, listen, I'm definitely not as wildly entertaining as some people who like practice towel waving every day. I really do get into the oils and I've, I have a question on towel waving. Is there like, is there like a particular, what is towel waving? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I've seen, I've done it, right, but I imagine there's some kind of particular method for it if they're teaching it in a mastery course. Yeah, is there like, what's the strategy for towel?

There's some people who are like are so advanced and they're like spinning two towels and it looks like they're spinning pizzas and they're just getting everything circulated. I'm still a one towel girl. Right now, but we'll get there. I'll get there. Yeah, whirling sh. What is it? whirling dervish dervish in the sauna. It's kind of that vibe. That's like a pretty great reference. It's kind of that vibe. Yeah, I mean, it's like circulating. You're wanting to bring like the heat that billows up at the top of the sauna down and circulate it throughout the whole entire room or the sauna, you know, whatever type of sauna that you're in. It's harder to do in barrel saunas. I was working at Cuya last year quite a bit doing it there, um, and it's super beautiful practice and it's, it's an opportunity for people to really Uh, like Alfguos is what it's called, which is mean in German word for infusion. And so it's infusion of the oils in the snowballs that go on top of the rocks or sometimes people use beads that like soak up oils. Yeah, so I would make crank hand crank snowballs and put oil and spin a towel and dance around and play. Different styles of music or, you know, it's a, it's a, it's like entertainment 15 minute sessions and then people are like, OK, cool, and then they go do their cold or whatnot, but you mostly prefer doing cold. I mean, I just like cold like I have an ice barrel at home and I like to go in it and just, yeah, what's your daily.

My daily, uh, I'm not doing cold every single day, and I just transitioned from this gig in LA and LA I was doing it 3 or 4 times a week. It's great when you have something in your backyard, right? So I had an ice barrel set up in the backyard. I could go out. It's a chiller. I don't even have to buy ice. Back in the day, it was like I had a trough on my roof with a chest freezer. First, the chest freezer was there to hold ice cubes because I felt irresponsible to make the chest freezer freezer a cold plunge and then be online plunging because I felt like electricity and water and people were still, it was very, the jury was still out. Um, but eventually that chest freezer then became my cold plunge, so I didn't have to go. They would deliver ice to, I was on the 3rd floor, walk up and they would deliver ice to the ground floor and it'd be like my work, my, my workout of the day. I'd be like carrying, you know, 250 pounds, 300 pounds plus of ice up twice a week when they delivered it and then using it for cold plunging. Um, but yeah, I mean 3 or 4 times a week is, is my ideal, and I don't have a sauna at my house. So if I'm doing saunas maybe a couple times a month, it's a sauna at the gym and, you know, other places I go. But if I had a sauna at my house, if I had a sauna at my house, anyone out there who has a sauna company that's listening, if I had a sauna at my house, I would promote the shit out of it and be in it all the time. Um, I feel like with Texas because it's so hot, this is what I tell Tony, I'm like, we got to get a cold plunge because Just go on an hour long walk in the middle of the day in Texas in the summer and then get in the cold plunge afterwards would be so exciting, right, right after as soon as you get home. I mean, and then you get the actual.

Sun benefits and being outside benefits. I'm curious. I want to switch to like athlete breathing. Like what are some of the ways individuals are not breathing well when they work out or athletes, they're exhausting them faster? Yeah, yeah, great question. Performance breathing for athletics is, um, I've worked with an MMA fighter and an Olympic skater and, um, a university swim team. Swim team for 3 years in breath and cold. It was very beautiful to watch the expansion of that happen, like how people changed. Um, I think like the first when I got my first professional athlete was an MMA fighter, um, up in the Dallas group, and I drove up there and was like, I'm going to walk into this like grappling session of 38 people, and I have one client right there, but like, I might as well have a lollipop and pigtails. Like, look at me, like I'm not anything close to an MMA fighter. Like I don't understand. And of course I did my research to understand it fully, but this is what's interesting about getting hired. I was hired to work with a woman fighter and to work with her cut coach and to talk about nutrition as well, which is another part of my background as well as breath and cold. And as I got up there and I walked into the space, I was like, oh, actually, no one in this room really knows how to breathe at all for what they're doing, except like one guy and just coincidentally that guy had the best record.

So that was like really interesting for me to to watch and witness. And I will say like the the head coach of the whole team was super respectful about me being there and like ask kind of including me and asking me questions in the first session or so I was there. But then just like really watching and learning and understanding that like if you watch, let's just use wrestling or boxing or fighting as an example. If you watch a good match and you see this more with like um Gracie and stuff, but like these people are all potentiating their work with breath. They know that it's in the industry now. Um, but if you see, if you're watching like amateur or pro fight or something, you can kind of see that the person who like drops their mouth and starts mouth breathing first is probably the person who's going to lose or go down first or like take the next big hit. And it's just like it's the beginning of like the sympathetic sympathetic drive. Of course you're going to be in a flow state in sympathetic fighting, but it's like how long can you nasal breathe? How long can you keep yourself collected? How long can you be in some state of regulation more than your opponent? And um so it's interesting to watch that and there's ways that you can practice. There's ways that you can train for that with like respiratory muscle training devices and then specific breathing style techniques that help an athlete be better, faster, stronger. It's like when you get to that level of athletics, like if you look at the swim team.

What makes someone win versus come in second is like one pull of a breath, right? One turn to the side and pull of a breath in the water and one, you know, it's going to be adding strokes, it's going to slow down their time, it's breaking the water plane. So, That the difference is that much. If you train someone enough that they can take one less breath across the water, if you train someone that their panic response when the gun goes off off the swimming blocks is less or they've practiced enough, like this is where cold exposure comes in so well, is you're practicing and running breath and then you're teaching people to be like, go into shock and then still regulate and go into Shock and they still regulate when the gun goes off, they're like, OK, cool, I've done this 100,000 times before and I get it. And that saving and shaving of a second off of time makes a difference between like a W or an L on the board, right? And so the women's Dennison swim team after 23 years won their first women's championship in their division. Just, you know, of course there's lots of coaches and lots of practice, and I'm not taking all the credit, but just 5 minutes a day on the deck required by the coaches to do and you can see people's like getting swimmers getting better and better and better and better at breathing techniques and understanding and you can see in the beginning what's also really interesting about athletes when you work with a team is some of the athletes are like, This is bullshit. We're doing 5 minutes of breathing or whatever. I'm just going to like think about my homework assignment or blow this off or just I'm going to lay down and look like I'm doing it, but no one can tell if you're doing it or not. But then they start to notice that the other swimmers are getting better and there's change happening in the physiology, and then they're like, wait, what are we doing again in the morning? And so it's this really interesting turn of events that can happen and performance breathing is At that level, like whether it's swimming or fighting or skating or whatever it's going to be, like that's that makes all the difference in how long you can go and how you can feel. And uh like we were just talking before we recorded about, I was working with Ariana Grande's World Tour dancers. If you want to get on stage and do like the best iteration of choreography that's been given to you and just fully like land it and and look amazing and and do all that, you can.

But when you breathe yourself back into some level of flow state and you can actually like put your flavor, your style, your personality into that choreography, it just translates energetically to an audience in a very different way. It lands differently. There's like ownership, there's joy in it, there's like less, oh my God, what's the next step? I don't know what is happening. And if shit hits the fan in the middle of like, let's say a riser doesn't come up with someone on it or something happens to the musician or someone falls, like if you're training for that stress tolerance, whether it's cold or breath, you just, you land the number so much more effectively and so much, it's just a deeper level of entertainment. I noticed this just even for the regular individual like clients is they finish a set, some things like hard, but they can exacerbate how overwhelming it is by not regulate their regulating their breathing. Not slowing down and intentionally trying to like slow the exhales, take full breaths and slow the exhales. It just like keep that and it's almost like if you just bring your awareness to just even slowing your breath, you're also giving your mind a place to focus and not be in the overwhelm.

So that you also know your mind's not freaking out, your breath, your mind follows your breath, right? And so it gives you kind of like a place to anchor. I try like when I do zone 2 or go higher, like aerobic intervals to try to only nasal breathe, to like challenge myself to like lengthen the inhale and exhales, and I'll tell clients too like, You can regulate your system like before you go to bed, go on walks and start to play around with how long you can make your inhale, exhale through your nose, because then your body will stay breathing through your nose when you go to sleep, right? Like it's an easy way to just practice your nasal breathing. Yeah, you're just training your system to be better and better and better at it, yeah, and like I know the nose knows and we talk about nose breathing a lot, but it's important. It's important. Do you have any breathing techniques for when like you're at that peak, you know, like MMA fighters, they're at that last round, they can probably barely breathe, right? You can barely get any air. Is there any techniques to just stay in just a little bit longer?

Yeah, I mean, dumping CO2 is like a technique. It's not going to work forever, right? Like over and over and over again, I will like do this, talk about this with any athlete, any human, the dancers specifically, when the lights go down and you have a moment and no one can really see. Or you go to the side stage wings for 30 seconds or something, you can do like what I call candlestick breathing with the dancers specifically is like just breathing out. Right? You're dumping the CO2, which is like actually moving the needle down, because the thing that makes us take a bigger breath or need to breathe more is the levels of CO2 that have risen in the body. So while you can't beat the system forever, you can dump CO2, so you can buy some time back. You can buy a little bit more regulation back, you can buy at least less breathiness to be able to collect yourself a little bit for those few moments. It's like when I'm in a spin class right before the instructor is like, oh, we're going to do a sprint, a sprint effort or sprints or something in a row, whatever they say, right before they do that, I like to take 3 to 5 big candlestick breaths where I like dump CO2. So that I know that I can make it through the sprint even further, even longer, because this is like the interesting thing about sprinting too with the energy systems, not to like be boring in science. It's like you can't really sprint more than like a real full out sprint isn't going to be more than 30 seconds. Like it's just not. And then you go to a class and like we're doing a 45 2nd sprint, and I'm like, well, are we? But I'll dump, I'll dump CO2 and like a fighter can do that, a skater could do that before they're going to do like a, you know, a big power move into a jump turn or something and There's, there's a lot of ways to, to utilize that kind of breathing. Just it won't work forever, right? You can't do it over and over again. Eventually you're spent. Yeah, you're gonna run out. Yeah, I have a, uh, breathing question for you, and it's wrapped in a story, and it's something that I've been curious about for like 15 years.

OK, cool. I hope I know the answer. OK, let's find out. I feel, I feel like you will. When I was in high school, I was on the rowing team, and we did a lot of running and a lot of conditioning work. And every time we would run, I would get intense like side aches, like those, like the pain you get in your side when you're running and kind of out of breath. And my coach told me, Just breathe, like inhale every time, like pick a foot and with whichever foot you pick, breathe, uh, inhale every time it hits the ground, and then exhale every time, uh, the other the other foot hits the ground and Or something like that. But basically I did that and my side pains just went away. I'd feel a side pain. I would do the breathing, it would be gone within like 20 steps. And so I'm curious, what's the mechanism that's going on there. Obviously I'm controlling my breath more than I was previously, but why would that make side pain go away? Yeah, I mean, like it's a great question, and I'm not sure that I know 100% the full physiological answer except to say that when we overbreathe, we have a calcium shift in the body. It's like why when people go into a class that's like a DMT breathing, which is debatable, but um like, you know, or just like breakthrough transformational breath work when people are breathing really heavily that they get tetany. So like you'll get cramps in the fingers, the hands, the feet, the jaw, yeah, it looks like, yeah, lobster claws and I'm like people are always like, you're doing it right, and it's like, OK, people get that in like shamanic experiences too sometimes, totally.

And there's like this is like it's a, it's a really, this is like a fun question for this show specifically because Um, I think you have a swath of listeners on like both sides of the fence, right? There's like the science piece that's like, it's tetany, it's a calcium shift in the cells at a cellular level, and then as you breathe yourself back to normal, it reregulates in the system and all the tetani kind of goes away. And then you have a faction of people that's like, this is trauma moving through the body, this is energy, this is, and I'm not making fun of it because like actually we don't fucking know, like the 5D and consciousness and You know, dispenses work and like aliens and AI. I mean, like all of that, right? There's so, there's so much of that there in the world. So we don't fully know and like, are you moving energy? Like I'm moving a lot of energy when I'm doing big styles of breath and whether I don't get a lot of techni anymore because my system is quite used to that, but like it, as it's moving through you, there are going to be, there will be releases from things that I think like your body's holding on to over time. So, I imagine it has a little bit to do with the way you were breathing, maybe overbreathing through your mouth a bit, and I imagine it has some correlate there. And also getting yourself on like a pace and cadence where you're oxygenating the tissues in a way that feels as optimal as possible for running. It's like, and I imagine that he was saying, like you're, if you're pacing at a run, that there's like an exhale happening on the right foot every 4th strike or something. I'm just guessing.

Um, and what I like for runners is that there's like a two-part inhale. Nose mouth And then like blowing out. That's like how I like to run, but with the, the proper pacing, so you're not overbreathing when you do that. Um, good coach though that he went right to breath to help you with cramps. My, when I ran cross country, not just like drink Gatorade. Yeah, magnesium, which I also got a lot of too. Yeah, yeah, when I ran cross country high school coach, um, this is like a random thing. I've never even spoken the story. I think probably, but when I ran cross country, there was, there was. And note, I know the silliest exclusive you've ever heard. There was a notion amongst the girls on the team that if you had cramps and you did a forward roll that they would go away. So we'd literally be in cross country races. It's like you're, no, they, you know, you're up in the hills or you're running through things and you'd see some of the girls on the team. We do like, we'd go down and do a little forward roll and then get up and keep running somehow. I don't know what, you know, who knows what was going on. I like it could have been a stomach cramp, like a stomach cramp. We just do like a forward roll really quickly and get back up and keep running and I'm talking about high school, like we had no idea, but Um, there's some mechanism of action that felt like it worked. I don't know if it was like placebo or it was like forcing a long exhale, re-regulating your breath. I mean, who knows, but um, we should try that at festivals when people are 100% when people are tripping out, we're like, do a roll, do a roll if you just do 3 rolls.

You won't be true. And then they take 3, they take 3 pills no, no, you got to take a whippet now. Yeah, but the other thing I would say, I think that's like an important piece that I want to like shout out is in the world of like if we're going to talk a little bit about some of the thematics of your show, whether it's, you know. Mycology, mushrooms, MDMA, uh, ayahuasca, whatever people are talking about in the world and landscape of traditional and non-traditional psychedelics, that there's like a notion of like for their breath is a really big component of tapping into the state that you are creating, the alter state that you're wanting to be in or the the discoveries to follow the threads to see what's happening. I think also in the moments where you feel like it's pretty intense, right? There's a level of either like stress or color or things are melting or whatever's going on or your, your amygdala is dropping offline a bit or whatever's, you know, happening in your journey that you can actually like follow the threads and keep more clarity and feel into your nervous system in a way that that just brings you back or at least gets you clarity.

Um, a couple weeks ago with my friend Julianne, who's an amazing shout out to Julianne. Um, she's an amazing therapist. Uh, I did a 3 g journey and she was, I had a whole hour of like nervous system. Just shaking like in a way that she was like, are you cold? She's checking in on me and she's doing all the right things, but it was like it was pretty. It was a pretty heightened experience for me in the sense that I like couldn't stop, right? It's like it's actually just, I would say the nervous system like reprocessing and closing the loop on a lot of stressors and a lot of challenges and a lot of things, whether that be like traumas in my life, whatever we want to call them, um, hypervigilance, things I'm holding on to in my system, and it was a uh it was like, I only knew that I was OK because there was someone there who was very experienced at like sitting, um, and Julianne Chapman is her name, sitting with me and And because I knew that I had a tether to my breath. It was scary and I was also like, OK, you're fine. Like there's a breath, there's a body, there's a person. I was having a lot of notions around like, oh, I don't want to, I don't want the mess, the mess medicine to make me disappear was like a lot of the notion that I was having. And so being able to just like breathe through that. I was like inhaling, exhaling long straw, like breathing through a straw. I was having moments of like big gasps of air, but I just, it kept me enough in touch with my body throughout that whole process that I could feel safe.

And so, yeah, I think it's so important for practitioners to layer breathwork in for people to utilize breath and just like many different areas of their life. And even if it's someone who's like 3 pills at a concert or whatever, like has to go over on the corner, like just connecting back with your system by using your breath. Yeah, exactly. You really shouldn't dabble in psychedelics if you don't have some awareness of breath or You know, a meditation on your breath awareness. It's your best tool because that's the only thing that no one's going to be able to pull you out other than, you know, in those deep moments yourself with your breath. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's a couple of years now I've been working, um, yeah, I mean, we're talking about a podcast, but, um, I've been working in sort of the space of IFS parts work, NLP. Hypnotherapy using MDMA and psilocybin with people. It's a really like process, like very therapeutic sense, and I it took me a long time, 7 or 8 years of doing this work before I felt like, am I going to actually dose people? I'm I actually going to like, I don't think I'll ever be that person. I was working in like ayahuasca circles and doing breath and cold. People like, you're doing cold exposure in ayahuasca circle. No, in between the two days of a weekend, I do cold exposure for everyone, which is like this really Massive opening for people because you'd notice the night after everyone is so connected because they've been through this monumental second experience, um, and breathing them down and being in service and then, yeah, a couple of years ago I went through like a dark night of the soul and Super thankful for that experience. It's hard to even imagine that I can say that now, but it brought me to much deeper into the world of psychedelics and then, and then I just knew in like the first journey where my eyes opened and I was like, oh, there's a light at the end of the tunnel for my depression and my anxiety. I know that I can take all the tools that I have had for the last 8+ years and health coaching and health optimization and bring it into a portal that is medicine space for for people who want like therapeutic activation and release of things in their life and help people work through their shit.

And there's just the breath comes in so powerfully handy and I don't put them in cold until their integration period, but it's a really beautiful gift to be able to just give people like the 3 or 4 things that they can do and then, yeah, put my hands on their body with consent, of course, um, and make sure that they're feeling like there's a through line there. So I like, I love that you guys continue to also like uncap the bottle and all this conversation on your show. Totally. Yeah. Do you now, do you? Dose psychedelics for people and incorporate that with cold as well, or do you always wait until integration time? I always, I don't have anyone in cold water when they're in an altered state because I believe cold is its own altered state. And um there's also some dangers with people um and medicine and cold. Um, I've I've microdosed in cold plunge for sure. I think that there's like a cap capability there. I also would say like, personal practice advanced. Yeah, exactly. Um, don't try this at home, kids. This is coming from the guy that ripped the DMT pen in the float tank. I know, and that's like, but we just, we just heard a story about someone who was doing, uh, I don't know if it was Iboga or DMT and, and drowned.

Like went out for a swim and a boga is a horrible idea because it basically paralyzes you. It'd be like doing a high dose of ketamine and be like, let's go swimming by myself. When we were doing, I began recently, they're like, they're the day after they're like, stay away from the fucking pool because we don't, luckily they're like doctor's quarters like looks right at it, but you're like, Oh, I for sure would drown if I fell in that right. Your body's already liquid. Yeah, you're like it would be. Very peaceful, but yeah, bad idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You were down there for 7 days, right? You went for the full stint. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, amazing, yeah, amazing place. This is our first real-time meeting and I already know that you were down there. Like I hear all the tea about all the centers and stuff. It's so beautiful. Yeah, Beyond is an incredible place. I look forward to going back. They have a second place they just opened up. It's like a mansion they put on the water. It's kind of like for alumni-ish, high profile, whatever, smaller, but They're starting to play around with a protocol that's more of a, it's called, it's like a fragmented dose. So instead of like a bolus, like a huge and then two like boosters.

You separate, you actually do more and you separate them between 33 different like do 1, rest, do 1. And from what I understand, it's not till like the 2nd time, 2nd dosing that you start to even get visions and it's much more smooth supposedly. So interesting new protocol. How's your integration going? You're still in your neuroplastic metaplastic. Supposedly I probably pushed myself out a little faster. But Yeah, the like core things I went for for sure were resolved, but I'm like damn, there's still a lot of shit to work on. But it's incredible what it just does for Like regenerating the system. I don't think I've ever done a psychedelic that hits your nervous system and your brain just like you feel so reset. Like I could see how if you were an athlete doing that, maybe like 11 to 2 months prior, you would be fucking on fire, on absolute on fire. Oh yeah, just like everything when I was lifting weights for the first couple of weeks, it was like.

I felt like I was 20 years old again. Everything, there's no kinks, there was no inflammation, there was no Just everything felt like smooth in the movements and connection to it. It was just wild. It's interesting like, OK, if you go back and you plan a little more, say you want to like, OK, I want to come back and learn specific things because you have that new open window and also just going down for creative insights and processing. I think it'll be a forever thing I practice just like Ayahuasca, but very different. It's like more of the earth plane, earth story. Stuff you do here and I feel like Ayahuasca is the telecommunication into the universe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so cool. Yeah, these medicines are, I think, a big part of the future. I'm so glad that there's a renaissance going on and that, um, yeah, that people are finding them and using them in all the ways, of course, right? People should do what they want in some way, but I just the therapeutic use of these substances is so.

It's like this speaks to how we expand our consciousness, especially at a time when everything is moving so fast, you know, I don't think we're going, any of us could even guess what it's going to feel like 10 years from now in the world. No, no, not at all. Hopefully there are centers like beyond in places where it's just end to end really taken care of, where you can drop your grandmother off who's never had an interest and she's totally taken care of. And I think it's going to change. If that happens and it's practiced by, you know, our culture across the whole culture, how that will change just the way people are to each other in general because I think a lot of the just Irritation with one's like people in society on the news and all this comes from just unprocessed shit. That's like where it all stems. I mean, it's like, listen, when I'm sitting, I say in the hole, I always I'm like I'm in the hole for 6 hours, but when I'm sitting in a container with someone and I'm asking to speak to their subconscious and they are in an altered state because they're, they're in MDMA or psilocybin.

I don't say tell me what happened to you when you were 10, tell me what happened to you when you were 5, tell me what happened to you when you were 16, and 90% of what people speak to is things that happen like I'd say at least 18, if not 16 and younger. It's just what comes up and it's what colors our entire perspective. Like as you both know, it's just so. Beautiful when people are open enough to say, what are the patterns that I've created with a mind that wasn't fully formed so that I can unpack them now and and maybe pull off the things and pull out the things that I don't want to be doing and utilizing anymore, or at least integrate the why. This is why integration is so important. I think it's, we don't give it enough credit. We're like walking around, people walking around Austin being like, um, I did my 42nd Ayahuasca journey. I've done MDMA 52 times this year. It's like, I think. We can stand. Paul Austin is like, you stand in the doorway of psychedelics and you get to see the landscape that's in front of you. But if you don't do any integration work, you like, you don't ever walk into that plane at that level. You just like close the door and and you're back in the door, you just stay in the doorway. So it's like, how do we get to a space where we can say, OK, here's the shit I'm actually learning, and this is why like I'm, I, I, I love the work that I'm doing with people because I With their consent, take, uh, put an AI recorder on. I take copious notes, 18 pages of notes on my last client. I put together a whole integration plan. At the very least I'm saying, here are all the parts of your subconscious that came up because we forget like 90% of what happens when we're like under the influence. And so here's all the parts of you that came up.

Just through an IFS, you know, internal family systems lens. Here are the, the things that like your subconscious is kind of shouting that it wants, right, which is like you telling you, you telling me so I can tell you back what you actually want and need in life and, and then really being what I always say like I'm a firm but fair integration coach, right? Since it's like sometimes people are like, oh, I don't want to do another integration call and it's like we just got to sit on the phone and have some conversation around what You're working on unpacking, and I'll, I'll work with couples, and it's really interesting too to just see how they They navigate that space like couples that have been together for 20 years and they're like, they don't ever tell each other like, how do you like to be loved? It's like, oh, actually, uh, or like, tell me how Herman likes to be loved and like Mary doesn't know how Herman, but they've been together forever. And it's, it's an opportunity, I think for empathy, an opportunity for Putting your fucking cards on the table. That's what I hope is going to happen in the future is that people become more self-aware, then they become less scared and then they can say like, this is all my shit, this is my cards on the table. This is what's real for me. This what's true for me. Can you receive it in a way that isn't in a heightened nervous system state that goes all into your little hearty poos and childhood wounding and actually can you just receive it? Because like I wanna, I want to tell you I love you and I want to tell you this part isn't working and I want to tell you this thing that makes me really angry, but I don't want, I want you to be able to receive it.

So you can hear it and let it land and not self blame and figure that this is my story and your story together. Have you guys been to Burning Man? I have not. Oh my God, you have to go. I know we're going to Shambala this year. OK, great. Well, next year is the best year for Burning Man if you go. Why is it the best? Because you guys are going. Um, very nice. They've been waiting. There was a sculpture at Burning Man a number of years ago, I forget the name of it, that's like, it's a wire frame massive sculpture that's built of like two adults that are like slumping over and facing. opposite directions back to back and inside two little children and they're touching hands. And it's just like it it gets me choked up every time I see it. I talk about it a lot with clients because this is like, this is humanity. This is what we're doing, especially when we're like our best friends, our colleagues, our coworkers, our lovers, our our our partner for life or what have you, the closest people to us. This is like what we're doing all the time. So it's like, how do we just get to like be friends with our little inner inner kids, inner child, and then and how do we sort of share play. And recognize like in regulation we can actually speak our truth to each other and be so human and like, You know, in the words of Peter Crone, it's like, how can you be with what is, right, which is like the hardest thing to do in the world because we want what we want when we want it. And I think there's just a lot of, um, I'm excited for the future in the sense of people getting to be more connected with like the, the essence of who they are so they can be with the essence of all the right people in their world, you know, then we can all play together more often. Do you, you have your clients or even yourself use AI?

With themselves for integration in any certain way? Surely they are and in the precursor to it as well, like in an intention and they use like the four eyes from the Condor approach, so like the intake process is the first eye and so in the intake process when I'm setting up intake and then intention setting, they're using AI. For sure. I can tell by some of the things they turn in M and also like why not, it's that. Yeah, and why exactly unlock the future. It's like, yeah, there's so it's so funny, but it's, it's also, it's a beautiful way for them to, I encourage them like get whisper flow, talking to the machines, see what they, they aggregate for you. And then sometimes for me as a coach, it's helpful because it does a better job of summarizing when someone's in a hot emotional space, especially the AI is just going to summarize in a better way and say, oh, here's some things that are That are going on in the in in the system. Yeah, I just did what I've been doing real quick is when I got back from beyond I created a project folder and it's 90 days post I began or whatever, and I'll just, I don't read anything. I just tell it like, look, I'm just gonna brain dump and I'll just keep logs of just insights, thoughts, feelings, and I'll just voice to text and just dump, dump, dump, and I imagine later I can kind of Look back and connect with it, but I noticed just the process of sitting there and speaking out loud and talking into it, and then I could kind of like go through it really quickly and pull stuff, and sometimes I'll even just log my workouts and stuff in there too or whatever. It's just like it's just complete free form in that thing. Yeah, and it's just tracking you. It's like a great how it's how easy is this technology made it for us. It's so beautiful and it can probably aggregate things and tell you some like main key themes and What you need to work on, it's going to have its own opinions depending on what, what AI you're using. I'm sure.

Sometimes I yell at it because it's like, you shouldn't be doing that. And I was like, don't tell me what to do. Don't tell me what to do. I just was in a ceremony. I'm the boss. You're not the boss of me. I was in a ceremony recently with a bunch of women and in the middle of the night, um, you know, in the middle of the medicine, one of the women was just said really loudly across the room, if everybody would just be exactly who they are, then everyone would get exactly what they want and need. And I just thought, And the simplicity of that, you know, there's just such truth, you know, if we fully are expressed and we fully integrate all the pieces that we learned, then we can, then we get what we need, we get what we want, you know, like the right things show up for us in the right times, the right opportunities come. It's an interesting place to split to play. Before we go, is there like, what's the most Where is your curiosity taking you right now? Like, where are you kind of dabbling in going? Where's your interest taking you, like right in this moment or like moving into the future? Yeah, I mean, I, I think like 8 or 9 years ago when I started breath work training I was with a man named Casper Van der Mullen in Amsterdam, who's always been doing uh different types of medicine work. And in the early years, he came up to me, very practical, like ex-science teacher, like musician, very, uh, just very science driven.

And came up to me and just setting the picture so you're not like, OK, there's this like kook kooky guy, but came up to me in in the first couple of years working with him and was like, I just want, when you get to the place where you recognize that you're a medicine woman, let me know. And I was like, this guy's, this that's like a woo comment. I'm like all about sports performance. I'm all this stuff. I know. Well, and not, and he's like a brother of another mother and I love his wife. But yeah, yeah, classic, classic conscious community. When you, when he's like, when you're telling me you get to the point, you know, you're a medicine woman, let me know you're a medicine woman. And I was like, OK, that's like silly and woo, and that's not me and whatever. But I just, I think like there's a lot of different type of medicine in this world and Breath is one of them, and it was like a very big gateway to me getting into cold exposure and contrast therapy. I've always been into biohacking. I was one of the first females in the biohacking space to go speak at the conference and all of that. And it's like every single transferable skill that I've built in my life, even from the days when I like launched Red Bull in the United States and all of that has like gotten me to this place now where I have the underpinnings to do this work in medicine and working with psychedelics, and while I don't have to work with traditional psychedelics and I can work with breath and take people to like other planes of existence for a shorter period of time, shorter periods of time.

And help people in sports performance and in being out of anxiety and depression and all of that, like this culmination of me working in the medicine space and regulating nervous systems is, is really what I say is like my peak expression, and I don't know what will happen with regulation in the United States. I don't know what will happen with people as this whole expansion occurs, but Even I know you interviewed Mike Plano and he and I am his co-founder and vessel, which is really beautiful. So the things that I begin to work on like supplementation for pre-entry and post psychedelic experiences like that and bringing my Mary Poppins bag along with me to do travel work with clients who want me to come to their space or their city and work with them in and out of medicine, in and out of breath and cold. It's just, it's lighting my fire in a way that I, I never could have imagined. And I called Casper like last week and I was like, You know what, fuck you, buddy. Like, I feel like I've landed in the space, like I'm a medicine woman, I'm letting you know, and he just like laughed and was like, I told you so, you know, and it's just years and years later and, and only with like walking the path, and I think I mean, if I didn't go through one of the hardest times of my life where I didn't know if I was going to make it through the other side a couple of years ago, I wouldn't be able to do this work as effectively or have as much empathy or connection to the people that I work with. So thank you for asking, but that's, that's the direction I'm headed. Well, this is fantastic. Thank you for coming to hang out. Hopefully you come out and hang out again with us.

Yeah, there's so many directions we could have gone to, like your previous life as a Fortune 500 branding expert. Red Bull thing I'd want to ask more questions about and then how you got into this from there. So yeah, there's maybe an episode too. Well, just for everyone out there who's listening, if anyone's ever worried about Red Bull, I'm always, I posted on a story like a few weeks back that we did the math and I've drank like 8000 or more cans of Red Bull in my life. So if anyone's going to die, so you're fine. You're fine. You're totally fine. That's all you need to know. All right, before we go, we have, uh, we got something for you. You got to pick one of these colors. What color red, tan, or pink? Definitely red, red. Definitely red. Is that the top one? Can I open it? OK, I'm gonna open it and see what it is. Oh, is it hot? It is a hat, yeah. Now you'll be the coolest certified, coolest little psychedelic sauna girl oils. I'm ready. Look at this. That is Amanita. Oh my God, I love it. I love it. I can tell. I can tell the trippit girl in the I'll be the trippit girl in the sauna. Guys, thank you so much. It's so nice. The most unique ever. I love it. Look, a little logo.

Thank you so much for my gifts and thanks for spending time with me and asking all the great, greatest questions. Anybody who wants to talk to you, thinks they want to learn more about integration, psychedelics, breathwork, any of this, how do they do so? At Kristen Weitzel official on Instagram, I answer all of my own DMs, much to my dismay some days when I get those pictures, but um, otherwise. I know, it's just like, it's time to stop. Um, Sherpa Breathanc.com. Um, all my work is on there and I even just launched the journey a page called Journeys that talks a bit more about um people who want to go into altered states working with me, whether that's breath, cold or otherwise, um, Sherpa Breathandc.com. And then anyone who's coaching out there, any facilitators, anyone who's listening to this and loves doing this work, um, I have a training upcoming and a couple online trainings a year that are for breathwork and cold, and I love when Psychedelic facilitators show up for those because we can really like dive in and talk about how to shift people's nervous systems and and open up their portal and podcast too and wellpower podcasts. That's what I'm gonna need to drag you guys in and make you do all the talking.

We'll do it. Tell us anytime. Where do you record? Uh, lots of different places. I used to record out of my house, but then I like finished my lease. So maybe here, maybe just come back here and we'll flip the script. Yeah, let's do it. I love it. Thanks. Well, thank you, Chris. Thanks, absolutely.