Speaker 1: 1:26

Welcome to the podcast everybody. I'm your host, dr Jade Tita, and today I have a special guest, someone who I have been stalking her Instagram feed for a while which I tend to do because I'm always wanting to learn and this is Brooke McPoyle, and you can find her at musicalbreathwork on Instagram. And what I want to do real quick, brooke, is just tell them how I found you and then we'll kind of get into your story. And so for the last I would say five years to seven years, especially in the last, heavily in the last three years I have been very interested in the study of quantum metabolism, or what people might call quantum biology, and this has gotten me into the realm of fascia and got me into the realm of the altered states of consciousness that we can achieve through breath work, and it has gotten me into the realm of frequencies and music and healing in that regard. And so, lo and behold, here comes this amazing person online, brooke, who essentially does all of these things. So she kind of intertwines the brain with the breath and the body, and so she kind of showed up just at the right time. You know that whole saying when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Well, brooke sort of showed up for me and is explaining things in a way that really has resonated with me, and so I wanted to share her with all of you.

Speaker 1: 2:59

And so, brooke, welcome to the show. And why don't we just start with wherever you want to get started in terms of telling us your story and what you really want us all to know? And just so everyone knows, this is the first time Brooke and I have ever met. I just messaged her a few days ago and she was like I would love to come on, and so this is us getting to know each other as well. And so why don't you just walk us through how you even got into this work wherever you want to start, and I'm just eager to have this conversation. So thanks for being here.

Speaker 2: 3:27

Yeah, happy to be here. It's kind of a long story. The short version of it would be I was a classically trained singer at 12. I fell in love with singing. It was kind of my therapy. I would come home from school, climb up on the top of this huge oak tree and then sing songs to the wind, full Pocahontas style oak tree. And then sing songs to the wind, full Pocahontas style, and my parents were like, wow, I really think she likes singing, because I was like Disney princess style doing it all the time. So I ended up getting lessons.

Speaker 2: 4:04

I've had this amazing choir teacher just in my public school. He took us to the nationals. We competed against high school, so I had the opportunity to sing super loud in these huge stone churches and that was an experience that I don't think ever left me, because when you're in a stone building you get to experience resonance and when you're a trained singer there is a feeling that you're always reaching for, so pure tone comes from the center of your body. So I love teaching people how to sing, not based on your ear right, because as we sing our bones vibrate, so our ears never perceive sound. As we say it, there's always a little bit of an interruption. So, as a singer, you're taught to warm up into a corner, that way you can like hear the frequencies coming off of the sidewalls. Well, in these old stone churches, things are built for resonance. They're built for acoustical performances without a microphone. The preachers used to be up there non-mic'd, and the buildings were for the sound to hit everyone, and I think that experiencing my voice in those structures really changed my perception of sound and how sound can move through the body.

Speaker 2: 5:19

Fast forward five years. I became absolutely obsessed with golf, partially because my dad said I wasn't allowed to play it. He baited me. He was like you're a woman, you can't play golf. And I, like devoted myself to wanting to play on the LPGA and seven years of my life were sunk into getting my 10,000 hours in. I played D1 golf. I basically talked myself onto a D1 team through absolute persistence. I feel like this coach just knew.

Speaker 2: 5:47

Coach Joan Joyce she just passed away, like five years ago. She's in the hall of fame for four different sports and it was a world record holder. Her world record just got beat.

Speaker 2: 5:58

And I was like I just need to play for you. Like I could have gone academically. I kind of gone anywhere and I wanted to play for this coach. I only applied to that college. My parents were like what are you doing you doing? And I was like I want to play for her and she took my game to a different level and I believe in such like I believe in coaching.

Speaker 2: 6:17

Coaching has brought me to new heights in my own psyche and spirituality that I feel like people are gifted in seeing your potential and then drawing you to a new potential that you didn't know. And from there I was just heavily trained and as a five-foot-tall woman who needed to hit the ball 250 yards, I trained acrobatically, which was very different than golf. Golf is still in this pull push, biomechanical tension. There's a little bit of fast, twitch muscle training going on, but it's structure. You're kind of trained similar to a ballerina, where you're holding segments and postures very specifically. So I was in a gym and as a D1 athlete, there's other professionals that are around you and you know the NFL player called the freak.

Speaker 1: 7:13

Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2: 7:14

So he would work out in this gym adjacent to me, which was such a cool thing to experience because, like you think you work out hard and then you work out next to the freak. And I remember like, after having my first session just near him, just like like in his presence it's like 7 pm at night, we're the only two idiots still in the gym I like added a weighted vest and I was doing weighted vest squats on top of a yoga ball and I remember people being like what is happening? I worked out with the freak and now I feel like everything I do needs to be like with a weighted chest or vest on Um. And then I had the chance to train adjacent in this other gym with a UFC fighters and that was a whole mind change. And then I started looking at how the acrobatics were changing, because in golf my power comes from the ground. So how I push against the ground, based on the percentage difference between my hips and my upper body, is where I build torque from. So I got kind of into how can I push against the ground harder. That got me into studying hockey players, baseball players, sprinters. I had the opportunity to work with the guy who invented the PETAR system, and the PETAR system measures your weight transfer as your foot, and he saw a pattern overlap between home run hitters, heavy duty sprinters, kind of the best golf hitters out there, being around him, and then with this combination of training it kind of took me down a rabbit hole.

Speaker 2: 8:51

Five years later I ended up marrying um and then divorcing a beautiful doctor, um, dr Kevin Davin, and he was obsessed with the nervous system and golf. I ended up not being a professional because of my adrenaline spikes. So I had all the shots in the bag. I I could, you know, know everything in my game, statistically lined up to the heavy duty pros that are out there middle of the pack lpga pros, you know, so top 0.5 of the world.

Speaker 2: 9:20

And when I would get under pressure and you had 16 holes and you got two more holes to play, I would fall apart. And this falling apart would happen so frequently that I could feel the adrenaline dump. So I'd get on hole 15 playing around in my life, like totally in the heat of it, and I'd hit the ball to two feet Like my adrenaline was amazing for my golf swing. I could crush, I could all of a sudden I remember having to regulate to the ball flying 30 yards farther and you see this in like the major league championships. All of a sudden they start to send it and it's like, oh, everything just links up. You're just, you're more capable, but when you putt, putting is such a little tiny minutiae that to miss or make a putt is just. You know you're off by a degree and it's all mental at this point. And um, I just fell apart so much that I ended up feeling like, okay, maybe I'm I'm not meant to be a pro, like maybe I just don't have that edge that it takes to make the three footer under pressure.

Speaker 2: 10:27

And um, and when I married this doctor, he was obsessed with the nervous system and it kind of was solving some riddles for me. Like, wow, you know, when there's this adrenaline dump, when the energy hits your body under pressure, how do you regulate your tissues? Because the tissues are now responding differently and depending on how you train, like this. This is why athletes train is like to handle the adrenaline dumps and still have control.

Speaker 2: 10:54

There was a lot of things that started to make sense and I started to teach breath work more seriously at the clinic that we opened together and I just started to see this pattern between the breath, the fascia and the brainwaves. And man do. I wish I had this information as an athlete. When I have college athletes reach out to me, I'm always like do it, do the thing, because this is what this was. My crux, this is what held me back, was realizing that as my adrenaline hit, my breath per minute would elevate and in that elevation it sends a whole battle cry to the body that says we are preparing for battle or we are in battle. And when that happens, the fascia tissues clench. And when the fascia tissues clenches, we've lost a little bit of our control.

Speaker 2: 14:35

So, all I had to do and if I could do it again was learn how to slow my breath rate down to about four breaths a minute for four minutes. So it's not just like, okay, I'm woosahing, you know, and exhaling deeply for one minute, no, it's a four minute. You got to pull the system back into a state of chill, or as much chill as you can muster in that moment. So when I watch um, like the olympics right now, my parents are watching it with me and I'm like that's a mouth breather, that's a mouth breather. Oh, that's a nose.

Speaker 2: 15:12

So you can see the athletes that take that extra second to stabilize before they execute. And it's almost, it's just a rhythm. You know, executing perfection, like a pure golf shot, a pure sounding note, is the subtlety is infinitesimal, you know, just like the gymnastic girls, it's. It's infinitesimal to execute it perfect or a little off. And that infinitesimal thing to me is the balance of the brainwaves, of our breath rate and of our fascia tension in that pocket of time. It's how we're regulating that adrenaline dump in that moment of execution.

Speaker 1: 15:52

So this is really interesting, because I don't think a lot of people would necessarily. Well, first of all, I don't think a whole lot of people quite look at the fascia and the nervous system as being so tightly linked, based on what you're saying. So I want to just repeat back what I'm hearing and then you just correct me, brooke, if I get this wrong. But what I'm essentially hearing is that you're pointing us to this idea that you, through your music background, through your athletic background, through being exposed to some of your success and failures on the golf course, through meeting your husband and then learning more about the nervous system, began to see this connection between the breath and how that regulated the nervous system and how the nervous system regulated the fascial holding patterns, which then allowed you to be able to do certain things. And it sounds like what you're saying to us is that the nervous system and the fascia and the breath are linked, completely linked, and you figured out a way to turn these dials to get the outcomes that are needed.

Speaker 1: 17:04

Now, if that's correct, the only other thing I'm wondering about is does your music background come into this? Because they talk a lot about things like Bramari breath or humming breath or using different frequencies in the way that you might say OM or this kind of stuff. Does this also factor into this? Because I know when we you know, and again forgive my ignorance and correct me here, but my understanding is when we accentuate an exhale right, when we do this longer exhale we can regulate the nervous system down. Regulate the nervous system, move into more of a parasympathetic, relaxed state. Sounds like what you're saying is we also can adjust the fascia and then a little bit of background. On music, are you aware of and in how that, might you know? Adding maybe a hum to a long exhale may essentially add to this. So I'm just curious about that part, music wise, just because it's an interest of mine.

Speaker 2: 18:06

Yeah, what a beautiful question. I love to show people the nervous system diagram of how the brain connects to the body, because we know it's a relay system, right, that our mechanoreceptors are just unencapsulated nerve endings that are telling us the temperature If we stepped in something questionable. You know if we're sweating, there's that relay system. But then we have that on-off switch between the stress and the pleasure. I like to call the sympathetic the stress and the parasympathetic. The pleasure Simplifies the language.

Speaker 1: 18:36

Much easier yeah.

Speaker 2: 18:38

And if you're not in the parasympathetic, you are not experiencing pleasure. I really like to create that dichotomy. But the parasympathetic system most people don't realize it's coming off mostly the upper cervical spine, wrapped and encased in something we call the vagus nerve. The vagus Vagus is the famous one, but we also have a couple more nerves down at the base of our spine. Which is why, to me, breath training is so essential, because when we're properly breath training, with the diaphragm coming all the way down, and then we're exhaling properly, the pelvic floor naturally gets toned.

Speaker 2: 19:15

So there's so many I think it's like 60% of women have issues with their pelvic floor and controlling it, and to me that all clears up when we're naturally breathing.

Speaker 2: 19:26

So, when we add humming, which is exactly what I teach all my clients with high anxiety to do is the fastest way to pull the body from a state of stress, which happens in two seconds you can come out of a 10 hour massage, get cut off on the highway and your body is flooded with stress. Now the fastest way that we recover is by lengthening our exhales, and that's because at the base of our brain is the brainstem, at the bottom of the brainstem, the medulla oblongata. That's regulating our heart rate and our breath rate, along with some other things. So when we start to change our breath rate, we actually start to change the heart rate. So to me, those are like two little volume switches, right? So as a as a recording musician, you're dealing with software engineer. Sound engineering software is what I meant to say. Sound engineering software shows you frequencies layered on top of each other. So you're kind of clipping and editing and adding and compressing these files, right? So I like to imagine the body. I feel like my approach with the body is engineer related instead of medical related. So I like to imagine the body. I feel like my approach with the body is engineer related instead of medical related. So I'm looking at the bones of the body as the brick and mortar and then these bones are held in place by the fascia.

Speaker 2: 20:43

And the fascia has been talked about like saran wrap and to me that is not a really good artistic illustration of what's happening. So the fascia is a collagen structure right, and collagen is a triple helix structure, so it's actually a little tube. So if we had one straw right, we could bend the straw in 100 different directions. But if we took 50 straws and attach them together they would all of a sudden become really strong and hard to move and bend. Well, our fascia is the same. We have places where there's only one little straw and we have places that are called the major fascia bands that are like 50 of these straws and these straws are moving liquids through it and around it and our nervous system is floated in place by the fascia. So the fascia is the scaffolding structure.

Speaker 2: 25:25

So when we get scared, that's like if we just close our eyes right now and think of like a tragic, traumatic, horrible moment in our life, our body is going to minutely replicate that feeling because of the relationship from the brain and our brainwaves to the body. So if we think of an old injury right or a time where we hurt our leg. We can almost recreate part of that feeling. We can like feel the tension build up in the body. Or if we think about someone that we love or like a fancy like I'm going to a fancy dinner tonight and I'm going to be able to put on my cute little high heels and a dress I haven't worn and even thinking about it makes me want to, like, move my hips a little bit.

Speaker 2: 26:09

And I think that that's the relationship between the nervous system and the body. Like our thoughts influence how our body feels, so there's that dynamic relationship. So imagine it like frequency Our breath rate right would be shown on a sound engineer software program as a consistent rhythm right, with an inhale being the amplitude and the exhale being the bottom right. So this oscillation would measure our inhales and our exhales. Now our brainwaves are heavily correlated. So the standard beta brainwave pattern, which is where most people are spending most of their life, is 16 to 30 hertz. The standard resting breath rate, so when people are just sitting, is 15 to 25 hertz.

Speaker 2: 27:01

Interesting so if they're moving around. They're basically at that 16 to 30, right Now the fascia tension doesn't have a quantifier but our heart rate has a quantifier and the heart rate and the breath rate to me are heavily correlated. Same with heart rate to brainwaves. So as soon as we start to play with slow breathing patterns, we start to toggle, switch, like we're turning the level down on our heart rate and we're turning our brainwaves down. So to me when I'm teaching breath work, I want to have people at a four breath a minute sequence or less, because that's where we're going to activate that theta brainwave pattern, which is the place of imagination.

Speaker 2: 27:47

Now, when we add humming, full circle, there's a big circle. When we add humming to the four breaths a minute cycle, we actually resonate and vibrate the vagus nerve which comes off the upper cervical. So we start to activate these nerves more consciously when you add a tone change, like singing itself. To me, breath is a gateway drug to singing, and when we add singing, we start to vibrate the empty chambers of the body, the empty chambers being the lung field, the nasal glands and like a little bit of space around the brain.

Speaker 2: 28:32

So, as an opera singer, there's actually this very Star Wars-like analogy that we use the front of the face is called the light side and the back of the head is called the dark side, and what you're trying to do always is resonate the tone off of the between, so you have equal amounts of light and equal amounts of dark. So when you start to add humming, what I tell people to do is try to feel where your body's vibrating and the low tones will vibrate your chest. The high tones, like when our dogs squeal or that you hear a dolphin, that sounds come, comes right through the skull. That's not, has nothing to do with our mouth. So as we play with how this frequency moves through the body, we actually start to tone open and create fluidity, not only for our fascia system but in our electrical system.

Speaker 1: 29:24

That is really cool, and did I understand this right that you were saying the frequency of getting up and moving around matches to a degree this beta frequency based on breath? A frequency based on breath.

Speaker 2: 29:39

Now, if we think about this, okay, when we're experiencing stress, stress is often 26 to 30 Hertz in the brain, right? So if someone's breaths per minute is 26 to 30 breaths a minute, when you're just walking around your house, you're going to be accidentally maintaining a stress frequency in the body.

Speaker 1: 30:04

So when.

Speaker 2: 30:05

I work with the breath, with people. What I want to do is double your capacity. I don't really care about the sequences that trip you out or give you a good moment. I want to train your natural and automatic breath pattern to drop in half because, the standard capacity in the lung field is five to seven cubic liters.

Speaker 2: 30:24

So if you can hold your breath for one minute, you have five cubic liters of space. If you can hold your breath for 90 seconds, you have about seven cubic liters of space. The world record holders are at 22 cubic liters of air in their body. So to double your capacity is just a matter of understanding the physiology of how to get the diaphragm and the intercostals out of the way and then train them to control the gas flow so that you're dumping more oxygen particles into the lower alveoli, because there's so much more lung tissue at the bottom of the lung field, not the upper lung field. So just by kind of switching how people are breathing, their capacity increases, which drops their breaths per minute down when they're not training, and that changes the brainwave frequency that gives us that cool, calm, collected state of mind amidst chaos.

Speaker 1: 31:17

Yeah, that's really, really interesting. So it sounds like what you're saying is that we have the ability, if we learn to do this, to control our nervous system holding pattern by adjusting our breath, and there's other things that we can. That also obviously controls heart rate and rhythm and also brain rhythm and brain state, and so we have a direct sort of access into this place. But not everyone knows how to turn these dials. So now it's really interesting because we also have now learned from you that the fascia represent also what I would call, I guess, a holding pattern that is related to this as well.

Speaker 1: 32:02

So, if I'm hearing you correctly, it's not just that we can change the nervous system, we can change the fascial holding pattern. And does it work in reverse as well? If we change the fascial holding pattern, can we go back the other direction where it's sort of like change the fascia, change the brain, change the heart rate, change the breath also change the brain, change the heart rate, change the breath also change the breath, change the heart rate, change the brain, change the fascia. Does it work like this?

Speaker 2: 32:27

Yeah, you're seeing it very clear right now. It's beautiful the equation that I built that. It has four components and my goal personally is to find a sequence in order to maintain and stay in gamma brainwaves. Gamma brainwaves is 31 to 100. So I'm playing with metrics and components that we can control in order to find a way to have the body handle the voltage.

Speaker 2: 32:55

Gamma is where our untapped discoveries lie. Like the brain is working sub optimally, we have the ability to handle a hundred Hertz and we're all operating less than 30 Hertz all of the time. When we live outside of that, it's for a half second to one second. So when people find me right, they're at different places. Some people's breath holds are already at two and a half minutes, but they're. They've experienced so much chronic stress that their fascia is stuck. So what I want to do is start to create flow within the fascia again, and when we make the fascia flowing, to me this is like learning to brush your teeth. If you've never brushed your teeth before, we got to take some tartar off, it's going to take some time, you know. So we think we take care of our bodies because our skin looks okay, but when we start to experience what's one to two inches underneath the skin. We start to experience more awareness and you know the brain, the brain hates being in pain. So we don't realize we have all of these little tensions that have built up that we've trained over that, we've exercised over that. We've never really massaged, or if the massage therapist hits it, they hit it for 30 seconds. There's no flow established. We just feel good for that pocket.

Speaker 2: 34:16

When we use my sequence, there's eight rules to my sequence and we're working with the grain of the fascia and how the fascia actually restores its shape. So instead of finding the tension and kind of messing up that tension which is out of you know the 24 that I've studied very deeply, 22 of them basically find these adhesions and create movement, and movement is better than stagnation. So all due respect to all of the other preceding practitioners that have built their sequence, to me what I see as an artist right is that the fascia has a geometric shape that collapses on top of each other and instead of ripping this apart and anybody that has rave bracelets can actually understand this or like lots of jewelry that gets stuck, like, if you just rip it apart you got to go fix it. But if we could just find a way to create like, if you have a bunch of necklaces tangled together, what you do is you find it and then you shake them together and you kind of wait for the little pockets and then you can untie them. That's essentially.

Speaker 2: 35:18

We're not adding shaking, but in my eight start part sequence what we're doing is we're working with the fascia to take these areas that are stuck where there's no movement. We activate the electrostatic component, the piezoelectric channel of the fascia, and then we give it everything that it needs in order for the body to recreate hyaluronic acid. And instead of ripping it, we just kind of prompt this flow to be reestablished. And to do that there's eight different rules that we follow. But when we release the fascia tension, the breath becomes significantly easier. Does that make sense? It's almost-.

Speaker 1: 35:58

It's making a lot of sense.

Speaker 2: 36:00

The brainwaves get trapped in a certain frequency, right, that's just saying an elevated, stressed out, like take the standard business owner in America over caffeinated, underslept, overstimulated, lots going on. They wake up every day. They get right out of bed. There's no meditation time, they're just in it. So a high beta wave pattern. And then let's do that for a decade or 15 years.

Speaker 2: 40:03

So the fascia has learned this tension state for so long. So they come to me and they're like I'm ready for breath work, I'm ready to calm my brain down and their body is stuck. Their body is like I want to bring them to theta, but their body has been locked into the stash. So when we take care of the fascia, we make that flowing. All of a sudden the brainwaves have space because it's a rhythm. It's a rhythm between I call it the three spheres the brain, the breath and the fascia. We could call it the body.

Speaker 2: 40:37

My strategist says we should call it the body, but it's the fascia. The fascia is holding the nerves and as we train the breath, if somebody has if I work with a kid who's an athlete right and their breath pattern is awful they can only hold their breath for 30 seconds. They've smoked too many vapes, but their body is pretty okay. I'm going to start them on the breath. We're going to get their lungs detoxing. So it kind of depends on where people find me, but it's a component of the same equation. So if we want to have a slow brainwave pattern, we got to start breathing at a slower state and then we have to remove the tension from the fascia.

Speaker 1: 41:21

That's going to give us the opportunity to play with the body like a sound engineer. Yeah, this is so fascinating, brooke, and I want to just cover a couple other things because it's just fascinating to me and I apologize to you all, the listeners, if it's getting too technical, but this is just stuff that I just really want to learn from Brooke and hopefully you're following this. But so one of the interesting things and, by the way, brooke mentioned the piezoelectric effect. A piezoelectric effect this basically, for those of you who haven't heard that term, it just basically means that when you apply pressure correct me if I'm wrong on this, but when you apply pressure to something, this would be something that when you apply that pressure, it creates an electric, electric electricity is generated, basically so that our fascia has this piezoelectric pressure electricity effect, which tells us a little bit something about that. This is a way that we move energy through us. And one of the things that I was reminded of and and maybe I'm getting this wrong, but you know they talk about this about this idea of the Kundalini breath, right, and like awakening your Kundalini, and I've always kind of seen this as, again, beta, high beta brain state, right, it's sort of like where we are when we're kind of stressed Beta brain state is where we're maybe focused, but not necessarily overly stressed. Alpha. Now we're getting a little bit more calm right and we go deeper. Gamma is interesting.

Speaker 1: 42:39

My understanding and this is the question I know it will sound like a statement, but the question is, when I think of gamma, I think of also a. It feels to me, or like my understanding of it, is that it's also like a high beta state. It's a lot of energy, but it's not. It's it's different. Right mentioned. It sounds like that many people couldn't handle this because of this. You know restrictive holding pattern in the body and the lungs, and am I getting that right? Is that what you are saying? And are you saying that when you begin to practice the way that you practice and teach, that this now becomes a place that you can access more readily? And when I think of gamma, right brainwave states, I think of mystical experiences and, like you know, I don't know orgasmic mystical experiences. You know what I mean. It's like this blissed out state of spirituality that we oftentimes hear about. So is that what you're talking about?

Speaker 2: 43:54

Yeah, except I think that there's a huge confusion. One second I love your question.

Speaker 1: 44:04

I'm ready for it? Yeah, take your time. Take your time. Yeah, why she goes and lets her dog out. I'll just reiterate some of the question here for you listeners.

Speaker 1: 44:17

So what I'm interested in here is I'm interested in how we get into altered states of consciousness, almost like in psychedelic states, that can give us access to emotional states, past memories or mystical experiences that open us up to be able to restructure our identity. Right? Because from my perspective, one of the things that we want to do when we're working on change is we want to realize that we store some of these memories and these experiences and these emotions in our bodies. At least, this is what I'm interested in and this is what I am really interested in talking to Brooke about. So that's one of the reasons why I'm asking Brooke about this, because from my perspective, I want to understand perhaps is there a pattern here that we can tap into that allows us to begin to address some of the stuck emotional states in our body and some of the old traumatic memories and stuff like that. So that's why I'm asking Brooke these questions, just for all of you to know. So, now that you're back, brooke, I was just basically explaining to them my interest in this question and I'll briefly just share with you what I was explaining.

Speaker 1: 45:34

One of the reasons I'm very interested in this question about gamma states is because a lot of the work that I do with the breath work that I do, and the journaling stuff that I do and the coaching that I do is all about this hypothesis that our memories, our emotional states, our identity is very much attached to what I would call misguided, unconscious decisions. They're these mud, mud that gets stuck in our physiology, our nervous system and in our body. These are misguided because these memories and these emotional states happen at times where we didn't have the maturity, the wisdom to know how to deal with them. They're unconscious because we're obviously not aware of them and they follow us around like a shadow. And they're decisions in my mind because, whether we're aware of it or not, when we encounter stress, struggles, trauma, tribulations, all of these kinds of things, we do make a choice and write a story about what this means about the world and ourselves, and these oftentimes get stuck in our body. And so I was explaining to the listener that my interest in talking to you is how better to unlock this in people, because I've seen it unlocked in people with breath work and with journaling and some of the stuff I do with psychedelics.

Speaker 1: 46:45

However, when I stumbled across you, I was like, oh, she's doing something incredibly interesting because she's tying in the breath the body, the nervous system all in one go, and I wanted to understand how you're doing that. And that brought me to sort of the major question I want to ask which is this one? Is there a way, then, that is, is that what you're saying and do you see this where people are now able to access these more gamma brainwave states and become, you know, from my perspective, like adjust the stories they tell about themselves? So it's not just about the physical movement but the energetic, spiritual body becoming free in a sense, and I know that gets a little woo-woo, but I'm just curious if you have any thoughts about that and if you think I'm way off. A little woo-woo, but I'm just curious if you have any thoughts about that and if you think I'm way off with this, or do you think I'm onto something here?

Speaker 2: 47:38

I do. I love that you have your hypothesis around it. There's a lot that you asked and I kind of want to give a little bit of context, because the brain is woo-woo. How we create our neuron clusters, right? So the brain is made of two cells the Khalil cells and the neuron clusters, each neuron capable of making 10,000 to 75,000 different connections. That's why we need repetition to learn something new, because that neuron, that new idea, needs to like find its place amongst the madness in our brain. New idea needs to like find its place amongst the madness in our brain, and I think what happens is we aren't trained very well to go through endings and beginnings healthy.

Speaker 2: 48:22

So I have this phrase that I use and it's we have to cover our endings with bittersweet chocolate. So we we both have been divorced. Did I get that right? We're both divorced.

Speaker 1: 48:32

Yeah, so in the divorce right.

Speaker 2: 48:34

you have an opportunity to shame every moment you've ever had with that human being that you committed part of your life to right, or you can have the same exact ending and only take the good with you. So many people have these triggers within their system and to me it's because they had an irresponsible language and dialogue internally as they were going through an ending. And an ending could be the job ending. It could be your children moving out of the house. It could be your dog passing away. It could be someone that you loved that passed away. Grief is the same ending as a breakup.

Speaker 2: 49:16

And it's how we organize. When we cry about something, we are releasing cerebral fluid. It's hyaluronic acid just pouring over our face as our neurons are moving someone from short-term to long-term memory. So when we start to look at the brain, to me the neurology is the connection between the woo-woo and the scientific how we store information in our neurons and what we allow to become attached to that.

Speaker 2: 49:44

So, like, when we fall in love with someone, I have this love potion and I very consciously tell it to the men that I'm going on a date with. I'm like I want to learn all of the things that you love and then I'm going to associate myself with all of those things that you love. So, like, if you love this kind of music, when you come to my house, that music's going to be playing. If you love this kind of snack, that snack's going to just be in my fridge because I want them to associate me with their favorite things. And that's what courting is. You're filling your life and your time with somebody else's like loves and wishes so that you get associated with badass moments, you know really good concerts, really fancy dinners, really fun stuff.

Speaker 2: 50:27

I mean, that's how you build a relationship with someone and the best friendships are made on that. Best friendships are often made of like pajama times and desserts and like venting your feelings out, you know.

Speaker 2: 50:39

But it's how we communicate during endings that really make up what I think our experience of reality is. Because if you're irresponsible and you go through an ending and all you take away is the bad, if you protecting yourself with I'm only going to you know she did this and I'm never going to forgive her again. Right, every time something triggers you to think of that person, you're going to lose a little bit of energy, you're going to feel a little bit sad, and that person no longer gets stored in a beautiful place. If you do, if you cover the endings with bittersweet chocolate, every time you get triggered of that person's memory, you're going to experience gratitude. You're going to experience the flow of how life is like.

Speaker 2: 51:26

Life is full of endings. Everything we love will die. None of us are going to make it out of here alive. So even just communicating with people about the reaper, about the grief grief is an inevitable part of being a human, of having the opportunity to be alive. One of the songs I wrote that I've played at a number of funerals now is called the Reaper, and it's always so brutal to try to sing it without saying it with crying.

Speaker 2: 51:55

You know it has to do with understanding that the reaper teaches us to experience more gratitude for what we have. So when we're talking about gamma right, we're actually talking about the brain's capacity to handle the present moment.

Speaker 2: 52:09

It's a voltage of symphony, instead of having just 20 layers of bandwidth on the song, now you're dealing with 80 layers of bandwidth on the same song. The textures that we're capable of experiencing are so much deeper. And when we start to understand that our brain is housing our experience, it's housing bits of information and we can associate the good or the bad to that information. So bittersweet chocolate is the word that I use to kind of blanket these endings. Right, because this is why mantras work too. If we're moving away from an addiction. Right, and that addiction could be anything. It could be sex, it could be porn, it could be a person, it could be a drug, anything.

Speaker 2: 52:53

The way that we get through it. Right, which is why psychedelics work so often and breathwork works so often, because we're creating a pattern. Disrupt. But when we have, when we start to reach for something higher. Let's say, if I want to stop smoking weed, right. The way that I did that was I don't smoke weed, I'm a singer. So I grabbed on to a higher elevation of choice, so that every time I had that stress and I wanted to go to my drug, right, because these neurons are infinite. We get triggered by something. Right, if we don't have, if we didn't coat it with bittersweet chocolate. Now I want to avoid that feeling by doing something that makes me feel good, and that could be a hundred different things for people, right? So how do?

Speaker 2: 53:38

we start to dialogue with this shift in the brain, and to me. First, we have to be responsible and tidy with how we end filling our mind with the gratitude. Like in a divorce, I took away what was good and I left what was not good in the past. That's that I choose to forget. I take with me what is good. You know, that was part of my adventure.

Speaker 2: 54:01

Now, if something triggers something painful and I want to grab, let's just say, you know, a bong to like, fight the feeling or cloak the feeling. Instead of doing that, I say I don't smoke, I'm a singer. And then I reach for another thing that's comforting, that's a little more healthy. It could just be a walk outside with my dog. It could just be a 10 minute power nap. I'm a big believer in the power nap. Most of us adults are walking around in need for nap time. When we talk about gamma right, cause like most of us are not functioning super optimally just in their brain waves, so we got to do some cleaning right. And then, when we drop into these meditative states, to me there's a huge disconnect between what we know of meditation in the American world versus the Eastern world, and so when I like to study something. I'm just like who's the expert? I like to study something. I'm just like who's the expert. Who is living?

Speaker 2: 54:55

in gamma for the longest periods of time, maintain and actually doing stuff, not just meditating, but like maintaining it, walking around. And those are the monks, the monks that are in Nepal and in India, the high priests that when they, you know, flew them over and hooked them up to an EEG. They're the ones maintaining gamma, and when they're in gamma there is no voltage response in the body. The body is relaxed, the body is fluid, the breath is slow and deep right, it's a rhythm. And when they are in this state, what they say repetitively is that they feel wide, open and ready for everything. So relax with me into this concept. We are electromagnetic frequencies moving through the three spheres of influence. We are a lightning bolt that moves at 268 miles an hour. And then we get to experience this lightning bolt because of this great, amazing body that we have that regulates it through a rhythm. So this lightning bolt is like shooting out, hitting our brain. It's hitting our feet, it's hitting our breath right, it's hitting the heart, it's flying around the person. When we're stressed, that lightning bolt is hitting the brain and it's spastic, and it's hitting the heart and it's spastic and it's hitting the fascia tissues and it's clenched. When we are relaxed, that same lightning bolt can harmonize, literally harmonize into a rhythm, and to me this is the bridge to gamma, isn't more elevation. So I watched some of these hyperventilating breath teachers out there and they're like, oh you know, you get to gamma. And then everybody is having basically a seizure on the floor and screaming. And to me it's like, well, the masters aren't doing that. So what's happening in the body? I think that we're, because the brain waves and the breath rate are connected. If we start to hyperventilate breathe, if we start to breathe at 50 breaths a minute, right, ideally we would just be able to take that little elevator up to gamma. However, because of the sympathetic, the stress response, we actually start.

Speaker 2: 57:15

Breathwork at some point has tapped into this state where the hands get tense and your body starts to shake a little bit. You know, you're 45 minutes into a holotropic routine. You're like, what's happening to my body? Well, we're kind of tripping on the breath. But to me that isn't the way that we're going to maintain gamma. There is something called the theta, gamma sink and that's what I'm obsessed about, and theta is four to seven hertz in the brain. So to me, when we drop the breath, wave down our breaths per minute to three breaths a minute. Two breaths a minute and we maintain there, right, that's the fascia tension is going to be relaxed. The nervous system is going to be deeply relaxed, not into a stress rate. The heart rate is going to be relaxed. We're harmonizing the brain, the breath, the heart and the fascia tension to be open. So if we think of voltage right, if we start dialing up the voltage of our brain, it's going to have an easier way to maintain in a body that has fluid fascia and a breath that's slow and dynamic. That's closer to what the monks are doing.

Speaker 2: 58:25

You know the monks are heavily grounded. They're taking in electrons from the earth. They are chanting in resonant temples with a super slow. They're not like hyperventilating breathing. They are chanting and exhaling until they are entirely out of air with perfect spinal posture. Posture you know. So, like I, my version of gamma to me.

Speaker 2: 59:00

There are mystical clans around the world that are by locating, doing telepathic things, that are remote viewing, that are living until they're in their hundreds and hundreds of years old. And in my research it's even hard to find a map to these areas because these people want to be secluded, they want to be separated. So when I read it I was just like man, if I can't cite it or if I can't travel to it, is it real? But after reading 50 of the same situations, you're like, wow, there are little villages in the mountains of Tibet that are full on experiencing reality completely different than us, and they're connected to the earth. Their electron field is awesome, they know how to breathe and their flesh is not tight from all the dehydrating habits that we have. So what are we actually doing?

Speaker 1: 59:48

Brooke, let's go there. I want to go there. Let's go get some reindeer here we can retrace.

Speaker 2: 59:59

I've been like I've been reaching out to the editors Like come on, you guys have to have something, like I know you have something.

Speaker 1: 1:00:05

I promise I won't take hillbillies with me All of this is so interesting and for my, for my purposes, if we could begin to wrap it up, but for my purposes, I'm so interested in getting people to, as they regulate the nervous system in the ways that you are speaking about, through breath and through fascia, both vice versa, regardless of the direction. It sounds like you assess people to see which direction they should start with. I'm interested in how that then releases some of the stored information, stories you know, traumas that, uh, that we hold in, uh, the body and the brain. And so, to wrap up, um, I just want to let you essentially walk us through what you know, cause we obviously covered a ton. Uh, people are gonna sort of be in this place where they're like, well, how do I get more of this? Where do I start? And just to let you all know, Brooke has provided me with a ton of resources for all of you, which is incredibly sweet, brooke, she obviously does this a lot and knows that people are going to want to have some resources, so those will be included in the show notes to this podcast.

Speaker 1: 1:01:22

But if someone wanted to begin this process, or what would you recommend at this point, now that they've kind of had this, you know, sort of dipping their toe into the waters of this. Obviously, all of you are going to want to reach out to Brooke and begin to see how you can work with her, but what else could people do? Where do you recommend people go from here, or what do you want to leave us with? Because I kind of did pull you in several different directions and I apologize about that. I was just very interested to learn from you. But how would you sum all this up and where do you want to take us? To bring us to a conclusion?

Speaker 2: 1:02:01

Before I direct people to my website, which on my website there is actually a place that you can test your breath and your fascia, so you can do a little self-assessment. I walk, I send you a couple of videos and in those videos I walk you through how to do the breath properly and then we time you. That gives us an idea of your baseline hold, how many cubic liters of air you have capacity for, what your average is and what I would recommend, as well as the fascia assessment test, which is similar to a toe dexterity exercise, and I kind of can point you in the right direction based on your results. From that it's very easy. It takes about five minutes to do and when you give me your answers I can send you an immediate. If I were you, this is how I would start training, and I have lots of different offerings with my digital courses and then my new Gamma Seeker library about the tension that happens in the body.

Speaker 2: 1:02:57

We are electromagnetic frequency beings encased in a liquid gas structure with a skin, and the skin is made of the same tissue as our brain is, so we are walking floating consciousness and consciousness is such a woo-woo, overused, faded term. What I'm talking about is awareness and perception. So our awareness moves at 268 miles an hour through the body, the piezoelectric channel, when we squish ourselves. It's that pressure that creates a movement, a relay system back to the brain. It's actually the same way microphones work. So our sound waves put pressure on the mic and the mic picks up that charge. That's why you don't have to plug a microphone in unless you're on it like a large diaphragm. I have phantom power to it.

Speaker 2: 1:03:47

We are electromagnetic frequency beings that exist inside of this body but also outside of the body, and when you start to experience sound like, I urge everyone to go and sing in a stairwell. And when you hit a low note, just acknowledge that the frequencies are coming off the lower part of the stairwell. When you hit a high note, it'll come off the upper part of the stairwell. So if you're in a 30-story building and you stand on floor 15, you can experience the dynamic potential of sound waves. Our body's the same way. When we're in love with someone, I feel like love is the state of being willing to be outside of your body. When we're relaxed, our electromagnetic current actually expands outside of our field and people feel this all the time. We are communicating electrically and energetically to each other at all times and it gets noted as woo-woo, but brainwaves are far higher and actually the HeartMath Institute has.

Speaker 1: 1:04:52

for those of you who are interested in the evidence base, the HeartMath Institute has actually shown this, has actually shown that you can have. The electromagnetic field of the heart extends three to six feet off the body and it also influences other people around you. So what Brooke is telling us is actually. There's actually evidence there to show that that is true.

Speaker 2: 1:05:12

So in 30% of people. They say that 30% of people are super sensitive, meaning they can feel in this electromagnetic field without the body being touched. I actually feel like all of us have that ability, but it's just about your fascia being fluid. So the more tense and the more insulated your body is, the more fat we have on our system, the more tense the body is, the less aware of this electromagnetic field. The more we like trim down and the more the fascia flows. Just like we were as children. We can perceive greatly outside of the body. So when an angry person walks in the room, we feel it. When a happy, joyful, skipping person walks through the room, we feel it.

Speaker 2: 1:05:53

So it's a matter of to me. We are electromagnetic frequency beings moving through the rhythms of the brain, breath and body, and as we start to consciously harmonize these rhythms, I think our brain is infinitely more powerful than we are currently experiencing it. And when we're in the power of our brain, I don't think there's spastic motion in the rhythms. I think that is a calm, cool, collected, peaceful state that the monks are experiencing.

Speaker 1: 1:06:28

Wow, brooke, you're just absolutely amazing. I just want to thank you so much for your time for educating all of us, all of you. So you can find Brooke online at Musical Breath Work, at Musical Breath Work on Instagram. She's constantly there teaching. That's how I uh, you know, connected with her and met with her um, find her there. Go to the show notes of this podcast. Um, she gave us a bunch of different resources for you. Definitely check out her um musical breath workcom, her website, and get access to everything there. Brooke, thank you so much for your work, for educating all of us and do me a favor, stay on the line. Just want to make sure everything gets uploaded on our end. But for all of you, thank you for hanging out on the Next Level Human podcast and we will see you at the next show.