Speaker 1: 1:25

All right, welcome to the show, everybody. This is the Next Level Human Podcast. I am your host, dr Jade Tita, and today I have my guest, dr Andrew Block. And am I saying that right, andrew? Is that Block? B-l-o-c-h.

Speaker 2: 1:39

Okay, you did it right.

Speaker 1: 1:40

Absolutely Well. Let me tell them, andrew, how I found you and why I was interested in having this conversation with you. So, those of you who don't do podcasts one of the things that happens when you have a podcast that has a viewership you oftentimes get people sending you different people all the time saying, hey, I have an expert for you, would you be interested in interviewing them? And you can be inundated with these messages. One of my things is that I have been interested in both for my own self turning 52, feeling achy and feeling a different way in my body than I had in the past and also entering into this area of quantum biology, or what I might call quantum metabolism, and how the fascia is involved. In. That made me sort of peak up my ears when I saw Dr Block's information come across.

Speaker 1: 2:32

Andrew, when I saw you sort of doing this work, I was very interested in having you discuss what it is you're doing.

Speaker 1: 2:40

Now I know that you do things a little bit differently.

Speaker 1: 2:44

We were talking just briefly before I hit record and I'm always interested in hearing from practitioners in the way that they see things and the way that they do things, and I was telling you that about a third of my listenership are other practitioners and you were saying that you're definitely getting into the space where you're training other practitioners so that you practitioners who are on the line listening, you may be interested in getting some of Andrew's information.

Speaker 1: 3:10

You may be interested in getting some of Andrew's information, but what I would love to get started with, I mean I selfishly, andrew, am very interested in fascia and how this might be contributing to pain and all the magical things about fascia that we didn't know before. But I don't want to hijack sort of where you like to start, because I do know as a practitioner, if you start too advanced you can lose some people. So what I want you to do is just maybe tell a little bit about your story or how you got here and also just get us started where you would need us to start to understand the basics of what you do, and then you and I can get to know each other and have sort of a more in-depth conversation. But I want you to just start right where you think we need to begin.

Speaker 2: 3:50

Well, I appreciate the introduction, Thanks so much. And you know the whole I think. I like to always start by what I usually say to almost every client that comes in the door that's in pain, because most people are suffering in pain that come to see me, and I always say that we've been somewhat indoctrinated into a philosophy of how we treat pain. So if you walked into a room and the light bulb wasn't on or wasn't working, you wouldn't play with the light bulb, you'd hit the switch. But in medicine we've all been trained to say well, there's a problem, that there's no light, so it must be at the bulb. So if you had, say, a neck bulb issue, the doctor would say you have an itis, tendonitis, bursitis you get a little older, like me arthritis. Pt says you're weak or tight, chiropractor says your alignment is poor, subluxation, and the massage therapist says you have a bunch of knots or myofascial restrictions. And everyone is touching the bulb. And so for my first I'd say, starting out as my career, I understood that philosophy as a, as an athletic trainer and as a physical therapist and as an acupuncturist, say, okay, if there's a problem at the bulb. I want to really get good at what my specialty was. So back then it was athletic training and physical therapy. So I just became really good at exercise and stretching. And then I started to realize, well, I really wasn't getting the results that I wanted. People are in pain, they want quick results, just like if you'd hit a switch. Quick results, um, just like if you'd hit a switch, you know. And so what I? I I started to then dive into said, well, if my bulb that I learned isn't my solution is not working, I better learn other people's bulbs. So then I I went on. I took a whole certification in manipulation and mobilization, almost became like I'd say, a pseudo chiropractor, because I'm like, well, they must have the answer. Come to find out that, yes, I became more knowledgeable and I did help more people, but I really didn't answer really the question that I wanted, like how do I make immediate results? So I said, okay, it's got to be more the fascia, it's got to be more the you know more what massage therapist, because people love when you touch them and when you move them. People are getting great results. I became a structural integration, almost like a rolfer. I took a whole certification in that. I became very, very good at that In the meantime I also understood what doctors understood about surgeries and tendonitis, tried to understand that aspect, and what I really come to realize is that nobody hit the switches, nobody really taught me about the switches, and that's why I started to use those two together, of utilizing Eastern as well as Western medicine to kind of come up with a new paradigm, a new philosophy, which doesn't exclude whatever you're doing.

Speaker 2: 7:01

So if you're a chiropractor, a PT, massage therapist, I don't want that to come across like those aren't great things. There's a lot of tremendous value of doing, say, myofascial release and that aspect. But if you really ask questions like electron microscope, you start to really wonder like it must have been incredibly advanced of how they figured it out and what I believe, something that is somewhat obvious is that they were really keen in observation. They were students of observing, they had the time we don't really have the time as much now. We got to do notes, we got to do the whole aspect of it. So, to be a healer, I really believe a lot really came from being keen in observation.

Speaker 2: 8:07

And so the goal of when you talk just about myofascial, the Chinese, in my opinion, already have come up with the myofascial system and it's called acupuncture meridians. And you know, I know right now we have this big push in Western medicine because we're kind of proving things and looking at different tissue, because we don't really understand the eastern velocity of of just heat and cold and chi and blood, the wave and phlegm and other aspects of eastern medicine. But when you really come down to it, almost everything that I see in the mild fashion world we're actually we've already done in the eastern medicine practice. And so again, not to be like one's better than the other, because I think we actually can learn a lot more, you know, because we have different technologies now we have, you know, but I don't think we can forget what has already been kind of taught to us and unfortunately not to all of us because it's an Eastern philosophy. So while I'm fascinated what I see, what's coming out in the myofascial world, I chuckle a little bit, you know, as some of the mentors and gurus that I met that you know can do that in minutes. What takes someone maybe a few days or maybe weeks of treatment, and that always kind of blew my mind. So I always searched out for people, mentors and gurus.

Speaker 2: 9:37

For me that was always after my first, I'd say, 10 years of practice, of learning about the bold aspect, I started to really look at it and say okay, okay, like I really wanted to serve for mentors that I that I would say got the results that I wasn't getting in traditional western practicing. And I really came to find three people that dramatically changed my life in, in showing me things that I was. It was almost like a magic trick, like how did you do that? How did something become painful in one minute and not painful in another minute? And that, to me, was like my, was my, um, my road, my journey, I'd say for the next, I'd say, 15 years of of practicing, and so the whole goal for me is, and what I started my journey, I'd say for the next I'd say 15 years of practicing, and so the whole goal for me is and what I started to say is like I only want to know about the switches, so much so that when I was developing my stuff, I almost alienate and I didn't do such a good job because I was alienating people that were still on the bold, and that's not fair either. I was alienating people that were still on the bulb, and that's not fair either.

Speaker 2: 13:27

There was a lot of great stuff that's happening at the I call the bulb level, that I would call more the somatic, more of the voluntary nervous system. But really where the magic is is in the involuntary, and that's why I think the switches come into play, just like if you would come in a room and you hit the light switch the light comes on. Well, if you knew nothing about electricity, you'd be blown away. You'd be like, oh my God, how the heck did you put that bulb on? You know, by not even touching it you'd be completely blown away. And I think that's you know, in medicine, those are things that are capable every day, with a new paradigm, a new understanding of how we can treat pain.

Speaker 1: 14:14

Yeah, I love this and you're freezing up a little bit on your end, but don't worry, because it's being locally recorded. So, regardless if you see me a little bit hiccup-y, or you're being recorded on your end, so no worries about that.

Speaker 1: 14:28

Okay, cool, it's not on my end, but thank you okay, but I followed you, uh, perfectly, and let me just say a couple things here, uh. And now I remember why I wanted to have this conversation with you. Because, as a practitioner, like you, I also am obsessed with a root cause and it sounds like, ultimately, that's what you also are obsessed with, and also the fact that you studied lots and lots of different places and things and arrived at something that you feel is more fundamental, more root cause agent than what most people are doing so to me. Now I'm remembering why I really wanted to have this conversation with you.

Speaker 1: 15:11

Because, to me, practitioners who really understand the box that they're working from are the only real ones that I feel like can adequately think outside of the box. Right, we hear this idea of, like you got to think outside the box. Well, if you don't know what's in the box, I don't know how you think outside of it. So I'm always interested in practitioners who learn their craft in the way that it's taught in the universities and everywhere else and then begin from that understanding to go outside and find the real sort of causes or what they believe are the real causes. And so what I want to know from you is obviously, I'm hearing that you went all the way around on this sort of adventure and came back to some of the Eastern sort of medicine that you had been studying as well, and I want to know what you found Like. What do you feel like now, to the best of of your understanding, is the actual cause, or the light switch rather than the bulb to use your analogy of why people are in pain, what is actually happening?

Speaker 2: 16:17

there's a lot to unpack there. So, and I love, I love the, the question in that aspect, because I think this is where a lot of people do converse at this idea of root cause and somewhat the holy grail. And I think in reality, for both those I would say I don't necessarily believe in either one of those. And I'll explain a little bit more of it, and it's not to be insulting in the sense of the root aspect, because I do believe that a lot of times people journey for the why. You know, why am I in pain in that aspect? And when you really understand pain from what?

Speaker 2: 16:58

My description, which how I describe pain as pain, is your body's way of expressing protection. So pain in and of itself is not a structure, it's a sensation, it's a feeling just like happiness, just like fear, just like courage, just like any other sensation. And so if you are smiling and happy, you're not just happy in your teeth, right, you're happy everywhere. So one big thing I started to realize is that when you're in pain and protecting and what I call overprotection, so everybody in pain is in a state of overprotection, okay, and when we look at protection and we look at it from the fact of that, the whole body is protected. There's no thing of just the neck or the shoulder or just these muscles or just these ligaments. The whole body is protecting because you are in pain. So if you're not in pain, those areas might be protecting locally, but once you have the sensation of pain it's everywhere.

Speaker 2: 18:14

And when you have pain everywhere, it involves both of your nervous systems your voluntary, what is called a somatic nervous system, and your're involuntary or what's called the autonomic. I call it automatic so that everyone can kind of understand. I try to get it so that everyone can kind of grasp, because when you get these big terms in medicine it's almost like I'm smart and you're not. I really like to talk with people, not at people, so while we can talk deep on it. So to me, automatic I don't know autonomic why don't they just call it automatic? It just seems so. So the automatic for people that are not as familiar with the nervous system is all your organ system and that system works 24-7, 365, whether you think about it or not. The voluntary or somatic system that works when you tell it to move. So if you don't tell yourself to move, you don't move. The voluntary nervous system is kind of like a nice system. It's a needed system. But when you look at both systems the involuntary nervous system, the automatic nervous system is magical and if I put an F-bomb there, that's where I put it. It's so miraculous, it's unbelievable Just one of those organs that it's working all the time state of protection or overprotection and pain. Both those systems are working.

Speaker 2: 19:45

In our philosophy as chiropractors, pts, massage therapists, athletic trainers, yoga it doesn't matter if you're a personal trainer We've been really trained really well on the voluntary and we really have no idea how to access the involuntary. Now there's heart rate variability and there's other stuff. I would tell you those are really I think they really fail in comparison of a moment-to-moment aspect. So when we talk about pain and a root cause, the one thing that I believe very powerfully is we need to reset that nervous system. We need to decrease this protective overprotection that we have. So one of the systems I developed is called reflexive pattern therapy is to identify these patterns of autonomic automatic overprotection that affects the whole body and resetting those. But when the cool part about it is because obviously not everyone can come and see me and and I wanted to kind of when I developed a system which we can talk about too. It's kind of interesting how that came about. But is I? I want you to look.

Speaker 2: 21:03

When I'm resetting the involuntary nervous system, I kind of ask myself a question is okay? There's in this involuntary nervous system, this automatic system, there's only one organ that we have voluntary control of in this involuntary system. So if you think of how our creator made us like, he gave us an access to this magical system. So if I said, you know, doc, eat some food and go ahead and digest that food, you'd be like, well, I can't digest it. It either works or it doesn't. Right If I say, okay, now I want you to process in the liver, I want your kidneys to, I can't do any of that. But the lungs and breathing we do have access. We can breathe a certain way, and that started to lead me to what people can actually do for themselves of resetting this automatic system so that you can actually decrease the protection which I think is fundamental for your overall health and well-being is not only to learn how to control your breathing, but the frequency, the duration.

Speaker 2: 22:18

I call the who, what, where, when and then eventually the why. So all those other functions will determine your why's. And that system, I call, is true breath. And if you take away the E, the B, the R, the A, you put those together, you find your truth and that's the whole idea of that aspect. And so when we come back to talking about, the root aspect for me is, I believe that you have to take away the pain, you have to reset the system first before you can start to look at the whys. Because when you're suffering, it's not the best time to figure out why you're broken.

Speaker 2: 23:01

And if I give the example, someone was drowning right and you have a brother or sister, two brothers and a sister, pick one of them. They're out there drowning right. You're like, oh my god, something's gonna happen. You swim out there to save them. They will drown you to save themselves. That's an automatic protective response, not because they don't love you or anything like that. It's the same idea as like when you're in the state of overprotection, you're not in the best state to make decisions. It's like you don't really know what to do.

Speaker 2: 23:39

And the reality is, when you look at protection from pain as a standpoint of overprotection, there are too many variables, no matter who you are. There are too many variables to say, oh, it's due to your teeth, it's due to your hormones, it's due to your function. Those all definitely can play an aspect. And don't get me wrong, those are things that we use every day and makes tremendous successes with. But I'm just talking about the cases that are not making success. So I don't want to alienate people that are already doing stuff that is working. If you're doing stuff that's working, keep doing it. But I know that everybody has cases that they just didn't work and unfortunately it could be a lot or it takes too long. You know it takes weeks and months, sometimes years, for people to actually get relief.

Speaker 2: 24:32

So, on the two aspects of understanding root cause and your question about pain is one is a greater understanding of the automatic nervous system and then two, resetting that system so that you can now investigate. So now, once you feel better. Now you went to sleep at night and say, damn, I woke up in the morning, I have terrible neck pain. Okay, maybe it's your mattress, maybe it's the way you sleep, maybe you're stressed out from work and decisions, maybe it's more of a mental, emotional side, right. Or now it's like hey, I got pain when I went to work or I was lifting boxes. Okay, now it's maybe more of a structural aspect. Maybe it's coming and going all the time. Maybe now it's an endocrine function. You know it's more of a hormonal aspect, so you can actually dive in a lot more when it comes back and usually it doesn't usually come back the same way. If you've done right, it might not come back at the same intensity.

Speaker 2: 28:36

That's the overall goal is to kind of flick the switch so that you can actually see something completely different than what you saw before. Which is kind of funny because the book is called the unseen science of overcoming stress, because this whole idea is like for me it's the unseen aspect that's way more powerful than the scene, like anyone could see, like you know the scene. But this unseen aspect, that's what I was talking about with the ancient, you know gurus and masters, like they saw stuff that wasn't apparent for everyone else. It's like how did you see that? Wow't apparent for everyone else. It's like, how did you see that? Wow, now I see it, and now that's really cool. And then things can happen from there.

Speaker 1: 29:18

Yeah, tell us the name of the book again, so you have a book.

Speaker 2: 29:21

It's called. It's called the unseen science of overcoming stress.

Speaker 1: 29:25

Okay, the unseen science of overcoming stress. Now, if I'm hearing you correctly, Andrew, so it sounds like a couple of things you said there. Number one is you know you believe in this idea of pain as protection, and you also said that it's really about resetting this automatic nervous system is where the goal you know, sort of, is for you, if I'm hearing you correctly. And then one of the things that I heard you say is that there's one way to access control over this automatic nervous system that is oftentimes the cause or major contributor to our pain. And you mentioned breath, and this is something that I am very familiar with as well, because I do a lot of breath-related things to get people into different psychological states.

Speaker 1: 30:17

And I have seen, interestingly enough, without knowing your work, I have seen people at my retreats go into deep breath work or some of these deep meditative responses, and one person I'm thinking about in particular who had chronic back pain. She had about chronic back pain for close to a decade and after one deep meditation that chronic back pain went away. And it's cases like this, that and it stayed away. It's cases like this that have kind of blown my mind with this whole thing. I know I'm not saying you're saying that's what we're talking about here with breath, but it did pique my interest because I certainly have seen some things that I can't medically explain with some of the work that I have done in the psychological realm, which is also dealing with beneath the surface of what we would both call the automatic nervous system. So do you want to unpack that for us a little bit Like how is breath getting involved here?

Speaker 2: 31:17

Yeah, I think it's awesome and cause obviously there's a lot of stuff around breath work and and it's all great stuff, and I kind of kind of developed it with a little bit different, a different angle, which definitely can explain, and I wanted to make sure I answered your other. Just remind me after about you had another question there and I was thinking of it. I was waiting for you to stop. It'll come back to me. So when we look at breath work and we look at meditation, I like to look at the analogy of of the buddha and so when I say to you you know, buddha, what, what, what representation of buddha do you think of?

Speaker 1: 32:00

yeah, basically cross-legged sage sitting beneath the bodhi tree, basically yeah, and is he thin and and, uh, you know, like a thin presentation uh, normally the one that you see is not, it's kind of this jolly happy fat fellow but, like in my thought, I would think he was thin. But yeah, we always see the Buddha depicted as this sort of heavyset jolly fellow.

Speaker 2: 32:22

Well, you know, it's funny, I think you hit on it exactly right, I think those are the two images.

Speaker 2: 32:29

So the one image is the thin Buddha there's. Those are the two images. So the one image is is the thin buddha that's sitting under the tree and he's looking, and both of them are the ideas to find enlightenment, and the other depiction is the buddha, which is a 10th century chinese monk. That is, uh, it is. Is is also representation of the buddha, but they're really two different ones and a lot of people ever ask like, like, how come there's two representations? So for me, I believe that that it's a really a reflection of where we are today. The Buddha, I'd say the original one, that's thin underneath the tree, is sitting there for hours and hours and hours of meditating and silence and going inside to find enlightenment. The Buddha is this big, jolly, heavy set, big features right, big lips, big ears, big eyes, but what's the biggest is the belly, and I believe that the buddha is actually a representation to find enlightenment, and it's not necessarily sitting, being reflective in one position, but also can be generated by actually breathing through the belly. Hmm, and this idea is not only through the belly, but also being able to what I, what are able to use, what I call reflexes. So when you look at ways to involve the automatic nervous system, to involve the automatic nervous system, it's reflexive, it responds no matter what. It somewhat bypasses the brain. It kind of tells the brain what's going on. So for people that know about reflexes you've been to the doctor, you know you hit on a reflex. What happens physiologically is that that signal goes to the spinal cord and straight back from the spinal cord goes right back to the muscles that are involved. So one side will contract, the other side will relax. Then, secondarily, you will get an afferent fiber, a communication that goes up to the brain to say, hey, what's going on down there. Communication that goes up to the brain to say, hey, what's going on down there.

Speaker 2: 37:42

And what I've come to find out is that reflexes is the fastest way to somewhat bypass the brain, because what we need to do in resetting is we got to change the past. The brain is a big computer that will only function really from the past. It develops it the filing system. So it's saying, okay, I'm going to keep doing what you're doing until we make changes. Now with normal treatment that can take a long time.

Speaker 2: 38:05

And how to bypass that quickly is to use reflexes. So true breath is all about breathing through the belly, using what I believe is the symbolization of the Buddha to breathe through the belly belly and then using what I call the belly brain reflex to immediately make changes, what I call moment by moment. And I took that from a woman named Diana Faustia, so I'll give her certainly credit. She's more of the psychologist that I learned a lot from, because what I've come to truly find out and this is a truth for me and it might eventually be for others is there's no such thing as working on the mental motion and working on the physical.

Speaker 1: 38:49

When you're in pain.

Speaker 2: 38:51

they're always together and we cannot separate them. Now a lot in the psychology world have learned to utilize what I body, body um responses uh, I forget peter levine's work, a lot of different stuff of we're actually using, utilizing the body to heal mental, emotional trauma yeah, somatic therapy I.

Speaker 1: 39:13

I dealt a lot beautiful work.

Speaker 2: 39:16

Uh, what I believe is kind of missing is more, I would say, physical medicine practitioners being able to use more, I would say, the mental, emotional side. And I believe my work is kind of like a bridge of being able to use reflexes, because we're working on more of the unseen, more of the mental, emotional trauma as where it's stored. We're kind of telling the brain kind of forget where that is. And so I kind of went back and I remember that's the thing I wanted to talk about is the feel that pain is really always both mental and emotional. But when we talk about breathing a lot of different stuff, whether it be transcendental meditation or other deep breathing practices, I think they're all incredible, but the one thing I think they miss on is the speed and the applicability to them.

Speaker 2: 40:10

So if I sit there for 20 minutes, which I do in the morning, I go try to watch sunrise, I do nice meditation, breathing is beautiful work.

Speaker 2: 40:18

But you know, by the time I get home I'm thinking about my podcast and I want to make sure I'm all good and someone's calling me a client and I got it and all of a sudden I could be kind of off my meditative state and true breath is all about a moment by moment ability to access your involuntary nervous system, to reset it moment by moment. So it's a practice that you can do anywhere. In fact it's encouraged to do it very frequently, but not with such great duration as you would do in meditation. So it's the opposite of transcendental meditation or the breath work is that we want the duration to be very, very small but the frequency to be very, very large. That's the opposite of usually what we get in medicine. We always increase the dosage, increase how many times we do it, how long we do it, but we decrease the frequency. So the magic, I believe, is actually the opposite. And I'll just ask you a question Like homeopathy, are you familiar with homeopathy?

Speaker 1: 41:24

Yeah, I am.

Speaker 2: 41:26

Yeah, and so it's a beautiful practice, 200 years old. I mean it's really fascinating. And I'm a homeopathic physician, but I wouldn't consider myself. It's not really where I focus in. But I've one principle that I think is mind-blowing. It's called the Arndt-Schultz principle. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, I'm not. Yeah, I just asked you, do you know how they make homeopathic medication? They'll say like 6X or 20X or 50X.

Speaker 1: 41:58

Yeah, it's a diluted substance, sometimes diluted so much that there's no physical agent left. The idea is that the water memory is essentially holding the memory of that compound. And yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2: 42:11

Exactly. So what they do is they take, say, arnica, which is good for pain. They'll take one drop of Arnica and nine drops of distilled water. They mix that together 50 times and they call that Arnica, which is good for pain. They'll take one drop of Arnica and nine drops of distilled water. They mix that together 50 times and they call that Arnica 1X. Then they take the diluted 1X with another nine drops of water and now it becomes 2X. They do that six times until there's no known properties of Arnica, just the energetic properties, and 6X is considered homeopathic the energetic properties and 6x is considered homeopathic. But what's very interesting about the arm schultz principle is that 200x is much more potent than 6x.

Speaker 2: 42:46

Yeah, and to me that's mind blowing that's mind blowing that the more you dilute it, the more powerful it becomes. The small the atom is much more powerful split than a huge boulder. So if that blew my mind so I take that same principle when I look at breathing is that the more you do it with the least duration, the more powerful becomes. It's like your body then learns when information comes in stress, whether it be good stress or bad stress, you now develop a new filter for yourself. So when you start to look at the root cause, which is kind of like the first thing we started talking about, you start actually to develop a new foundation for yourself. What are potential root causes? Because maybe now the things that used to bother you don't really bother you anymore. Now the physicalness of what you're doing doesn't really bother you anymore because you've actually reset the nervous system and based off this philosophy of increase the frequency, decrease the duration and and it's kind of, it goes, I guess, in a different paradigm than what's somewhat being taught in breathwork, teasing, and again, I love all that stuff.

Speaker 2: 44:07

If you have time for it, it's great. If you can be like the Buddha and you have time for it, certainly it's incredibly valuable, but most of us are like the Buddha. We're happy, we just want to enjoy life. You know life is on the move. We've got a lot of stuff going on. You know life has to fit into me, not the other way around. So that's kind of like the different paradigm with that.

Speaker 1: 44:34

Yeah, I want to say a couple of things here because I want to understand how you're doing this breath work. But one of the things that I have found in my work which I have dovetailed mainly into more therapeutic coaching now so I mainly work in the realm of psychology and helping people beat their stuck patterns in health and wealth and relationships but one of the things that I have found is let's take anxiety, for example we were often told if you're feeling anxious to do slow breathing, exhale focused, right, so four, seven, eight breath or Bramari breath, where there's a long exhale and a humming focus to get you in the parasympathetic state and that can work. But one of the things that I've found is that people who are really in a really strong anxious state, that oftentimes I will use more of a holotropic breath, which is more inhale focus, so think double inhale, kind of hyperventilation, to reset that. Now I don't know if this is what you're saying, but certainly just a few breaths on either side of that. You know 10 breaths of you know sort of the exhale focused breath or 10 breaths of the inhale focused breath.

Speaker 1: 45:36

I have seen this make big changes in the way people perceive basically pain, emotional duress, including anxiety and things like this, and so I've oftentimes seen this as, like you know, you've heard of exercise snacking. It's almost like breath snacking in a sense, and it sounds like you might be saying something similar to this, where it's like, rather than sitting down for a 20 minute, 30 minute, you know, breath work session, there's this very brief practice that's done frequently throughout the day. Now, I don't know if you want to say anything about that, but I'm curious on this particular practice and obviously what we're talking about is somehow this is resetting the nervous system. So how are you doing this breath and this infrequent sounds like? Perhaps you know breathing, you know bursts of breathing or just a particular type of breathing. What are we talking about here and how is it resetting the nervous system?

Speaker 2: 46:38

That's cool, I love. I love the curiosity and you know the journey utilizing reflexes on patients to make immediate shifts in their nervous system, which literally people. And when we look at acute versus chronic pain, most of us as clinicians are really really good at acute pain because we can all agree that there's some type of issue going on. So when we look at someone that is in pain, I like to differentiate between acute and chronic pain and my differentiation is not time-based, it's observation-based. So acute pain or pain or inflammation is, or signs, which is swelling, redness, dysformity or pain. But out of all of those, only one of them is subjective, one you have to tell me. All the other ones anyone could observe. You don't have to be a doctor or a medical practitioner to observe someone that has swelling, dysformity or redness. So I believe that someone say, sprains their ankle, if they have no redness, swelling or dysformity, it's chronic and so there's a miscommunication. So there's basically a wiring issue. So pain is a wiring issue. The signals are not getting there right. So when we look at reflexes, you can't do a reflex on yourself. This hand knows it's coming, so it doesn't work. You say, well, how does it work? Because you were already protecting. We already know, like there know, it can't happen, so you need someone to do that to you.

Speaker 2: 48:30

So when I was working on people and I was using reflexive pattern therapy, I was getting results. I didn't necessarily want them to go back to what they were doing right away, because the brain has to kind of catch up, catch up. So I I had to go back and say, okay, well, how can I give them something to do? That's not necessarily exercise or stretch based or massage based, because I I didn't want to do that just right away. And so I said, okay, let me look at breath, because I hear breath so powerful. And so then I started to investigate okay, what you know, where are we? Well, the lungs, and again this, this idea of this involuntary automatic system. And we start to look and say, ok, now, which is somewhat, we already said, is where you know and not to get too technical, but part of that system is a is a sympathetic and parasympathetic system is divided in that in that automatic system, one is, you know, fight or flight, one is more rest, relax and digest. So obviously, when we're in a state of upregulation, we want to be in a state of rest, relax and digest allows our body to reset itself. So when we breathe through our chest which I see a lot of times people are teaching, which again is totally fine in a setting for 20 or 30 minutes, because eventually your body is going to learn to say, okay, I need to, now, I can't keep doing this, like running a marathon, you know, after a while you get tired. So now you on you, you'll convert to a parasympathetic because you have to. I start to look at it. Okay, how can we get there quicker?

Speaker 2: 50:08

So everything involved is breathing through the belly. And when you look at babies, you don't have to look at a baby. You know the babies can't communicate with you, right? When the baby is breathing through their belly, they're not crying, they're relaxed, right? What happens when they're hungry or they got a dirty diaper or whatever? Bring breath in through their sigh and they start crying. They start to communicate.

Speaker 2: 50:31

So we know that breathing through your belly is going to create a state of parasympathetic. It's going to put a state of relaxation, no matter what you're doing. So you're lying to your body Like you're trying to tell your brain look, you're not driving the truck anymore. I am Like you're not taking me the path. This moment, right now, no matter what my brain is saying, I'm anxious, I'm thinking about other stuff. I want to be in a state of relaxation.

Speaker 2: 51:02

So we start by breathing through the belly, but we add in a couple of components. One is we close the mouth because the first immune system is our nose as babies. So babies, if their baby is breathing through their mouth, they're usually in distress. A baby that's relaxed is going to be breathing through their nose. So we breathe through the nose. Close the mouth. The other thing is tongue on the roof of your mouth is because that's also been shown, to reset from not an Eastern practice but also Western Mass is to kind of put. A state of relaxation Probably has to do with swallowing, because when the tongue is in the roof of your mouth you can't swallow. So you're really just concentrating on breathing.

Speaker 2: 51:44

And the last component is your eyes are open and the one aspect I always see in meditation what most people do is they close their eyes immediately. This goes a little bit in the face of what you're saying. Well, don't you want to be relaxed? But it's kind of like life happens with your eyes open. Life happens with your eyes open. So when you do close your eyes, believe, even though there is a state of relaxation, you're also thinking what's going on around you, because you have a state of protection. So when your eyes are open, you can see. Which is our greatest defense mechanism is what we see? Vision is so important, and so I would say life happens with your eyes open. And what's crazy is when people start to do true breath, they'll almost automatically close their eyes. So you almost have to say no, no, keep your eyes open.

Speaker 2: 52:32

Okay, then you want to take a deep breath through your belly, no chest at all. This is something that has to be practiced a little bit. Once you get the maximum amount of breath out, there's no more. You have a physiological change that's going on in your body. Oxygen is now converted to CO2. And the reason that we breathe is not from lack of oxygen, it's from CO2 buildup. So once the CO2 builds up, it starts to tell the brain okay, good, let's breathe out that CO2 because I want to get more oxygen.

Speaker 2: 53:08

And this is where you say to your brain I'm in control, it's my life, I'm taking hold of the wheel. Again, it's not going to be automatic, it's going to be when I choose it and what you do, like a stubborn child, is you try to get more into the belly even though nothing is there. It's almost like you're drowning. It's almost like that last like try to get that breath in and nothing is there. And then you hold it again and then you breathe out when you choose to breathe out and you do that two times and I would promise you, you know it is incredible the shift. It's all of a sudden your brain says, oh man, I've never felt that Like. You're taking back what I call the truth.

Speaker 2: 54:01

Like you know, we develop these truths in our lives. Most of them are lies that we tell ourselves and this probably goes into a lot of your coaching. You know of people that you know all the lies that we tell ourselves, good books about us. Really, that's nothing new that I'm saying. But the whole idea is like, how do we reset that moment by moment, because it's not just one time. I do it, okay, there now, all of a sudden. So I always tell people to do that twice.

Speaker 2: 54:28

I always tell people start practicing lying down, because it's the easiest way to learn it, and then do it standing and then sitting. Sitting is the hardest because you have to distend your belly and people are not. It's it seems very easy, but people have a lot of time, they have a lot of problems. Just you know, because breathing through their belly because of the way that they look, you know they don't want to look distended, but also too, is like you'd be very, very surprised. We are so, I will say, upregulated as a society that we rarely breathe through their belly. And so after you do that two times, you just want to take around five or ten breaths, just like a baby, like old times, just breathe in through your belly. I always tell you, put your hand on your navel, just kind of breathe into your hand, nice and easy, like very, very, almost like 20 breaths a minute, not fast, but definitely not slow, so not a meditative breath at all, just more like a relaxed state.

Speaker 2: 55:29

And I have saying is like you know, you know how, when and where you breathe like really determines your life, like it's really that, it's that powerful of of the way that you integrate in life. And I would say you know a life lived and I would say you know a life lived like below the diaphragm is a life worth living, like that's really what I call the Garden of Eden. This is where your Garden of Eden is. It's almost it's like God made only something as magical as that can be created. It's like it's so incredible, it's like like. So it's almost like getting back to your truth, getting back to your soul.

Speaker 2: 56:09

You know, it can get really philosophical. I don't want to get too deep, but it get really philosophical. But the key is is that you're doing this moment by moment. So what you know, like what I tell people when they first do it, and they'll be like you know that 50, 100, 200 times a day, if you're telling me that you're still anxious, you're just not doing it enough. It works. It's a system. It's not a maybe or anything. It works. You're just not doing it enough and that's fine, because sometimes it takes practice, because it's hard to do something 200 times in the day, but it dramatically shifts your state of being.

Speaker 1: 56:53

Yeah, I'm loving this and I think I'm getting the point now. So this is talking about a reset. This is resetting the reflexive automatic nervous system, and it's genius. I get exactly what you're doing here from a physiological perspective. Now we're getting ready to run up on time here, but before I let you go, let's just briefly talk about how this connects to pain, and then we can begin to wrap up. How does this then fit into your? Obviously I'm seeing it. If you can reset this automatic nervous system, you know, and pain is a pattern and it's a protective pattern, perhaps we're interrupting that pattern right away. Is there anything else to it?

Speaker 2: 57:36

Well, so there's, there's three systems, and so two of the systems you know we talked about. The other one is the switches, which is what I call reflexive point therapy, which is this idea that it, you know, we talked about. The other one is the switches, which is what I call reflexive point therapy, which is this idea that you know, going back to the observation of these ancient healers, is that they understood that everything in the body is connected. So when you look at it, from a sperm and I call it an embryological model, you know a sperm and egg come together form one cell. From there it's two cells, four, then eight, then 16. But those are all identical cells, but we're not identical. So, about into gestation, early on, we go through what's called cell differentiation. We split, we become a baby. Our hands split from our feet, five fingers, five toes they're very similar our ankles and our wrists, our elbows and our knees, our hips and our shoulders, just to get an idea that everything in the body has a connection. Everything has a switch and a bolt. So the one key point I would always tell people in pain is and this is where we could get a little bit again. I don't want to alienate anyone. But I never tell someone to roll out where they're in pain, massage where they're in pain, adjust where they're in pain, because you don't know if that could make them worse. So a whole philosophical change is to actually learn where these switches are. And so this is some of the work of reflexive point therapy, of understanding that you need to work in other areas first before you actually start working on the bulb. And just to give you an idea, like if you had, say, knee pain, you would find the switches in the elbow and once you work on those, you'd make immediate shifts along with breath work. And then, obviously, if someone understood how to reset your reflexive pattern therapy, you would make tremendous differences.

Speaker 2: 59:45

But the idea for clients out there, whether they be practitioners that want to learn something I always say it's kind of like if you're a chiropractor, you have all these tools, whatever you do manipulation, myofascial just put your tools on the side. I'm going to give you a new belt so you can put all those tools back on. So I don't want people to think like those things aren't valuable, incredibly valuable. It's kind of like, but you need, you just want to do this first so that works much better your adjustments hold, better your myofascial release will hold better your strengthening your exercise they all hold better.

Speaker 2: 1:00:21

So the goal for people early on is for clients. The best way is to actually teach them how they can do this for themselves with true breath it's that powerful. And by resetting them without knowing reflexive point therapy, or what I call painless dry needling. For people that are dry needlers without knowing that, they can still do whatever their tools are, and they will get much better results because they are resetting the automatic nervous system prior to doing it. And what they might find which I found is that when you do that, so if you're looking at someone in their myofascial system, you say, wow, they have a lot of restriction here.

Speaker 2: 1:01:08

When they do that, for whatever it is, two, three, four minutes, you go back, you might find that man, their fascia is not there anymore. It's actually better that. It's actually somewhere else. It's actually more in the ankle, more in the hip. It's somewhere else. And this is what always blew my mind is that what I thought I knew is not what I come to find out and that was really mind-blowing to me and what made it so magical and helpful for clients that are suffering in pain.

Speaker 1: 1:01:39

So does that?

Speaker 2: 1:01:41

answer your question.

Speaker 1: 1:01:42

Yeah, that answers it. Let's just kind of wrap it up. If we were going to give someone a three-step sort of process to follow, that goes along with sort of your mechanism. Obviously, get Andrew's book. Are you the developer of Reflexive Dry Needling?

Speaker 2: 1:01:59

Yeah, I'm the developer of all those three systems. Okay.

Speaker 1: 1:02:02

But if we were going to, if we were going to leave the, you know, the listener with, you know sort of a one, two, three step process that they could do, what would you say are the major takeaways?

Speaker 2: 1:02:14

Well, for for clients out there, the major one, two and three, is really understanding breath work. Like you know, it's because it takes that much like if you try to think about something else you'll miss really the whole key for practitioners that are actually treating other clients. I think there's other things that can be learned. You know, uh, you know, which is, like I said, you know, reflexive pattern therapy, reflexive point therapy and painless dry needling, and I'm kind of working on those aspects is, you know, I have coursework for you know, to teach other practitioners. My email is andrewatihatepainorg, because I started also a nonprofit to help people that can't afford care. You know, in my mission, you know people that are, you know, underserved, that are in pain, so people can reach out to me there to learn about, I would say, what would be. Step two and step three is really learning a different paradigm of how you treat pain, from an avenue of not treating the bulb, of really looking at okay, how can I make really magical differences by treating these switches Nice?

Speaker 1: 1:03:28

Well, I appreciate you, andrew. So, just so, just want to repeat where can people find you? So it's Andrew at. I hate painorg.

Speaker 2: 1:03:36

This is my email and then I hate painorg is. Is is my, is, you know, website they can look at at, which is more like a local website. Uh, also, I have I hate pain dot solutions. Uh, so people can reach out and then I'll you know from there I can, I can direct them to uh, to the site for reflexive point therapy nice, and are you uh on any of the social medias? I I'm at dr d-o-c-t-o-r andR Andrew Block is my handle for pretty much everything.

Speaker 1: 1:04:07

At Dr. Spelled out Andrew Block.

Speaker 2: 1:04:10

Yeah, D-O-C-T-O-R, Andrew Block.

Speaker 1: 1:04:13

Well, I appreciate you so much, andrew. Thank you so much for the education. Do me a favor stay on the line just so we can kill this and make sure everything uploads, but really appreciate you being here and educating all of us and for all of you listeners. We'll see you at the next show.

Speaker 2: 1:04:27

Thank you so much, I appreciate it.