#10 - Aakrist Dongol - Every breath we take: functional breathing for peak performance

Breath is happening all day long, yet most of us never learn how to use it on purpose. We sit with breath coach and Peak Breathing Academy founder Aakrist Dongol to explore why functional breathing is one of the most overlooked tools for mental clarity, emotional resilience, and real-world performance. His lens is grounded in physiology, but he’s not afraid to name the deeper side of the work: when the breath gets quieter, life often gets bigger. 

Aakrist shares the turning points that pulled him in, from a meditation retreat that cracked open a new relationship with sensation and awareness, to a cycle of sports injuries that forced him to recover without his usual training identity. That constraint became the experiment: could a seated breathing practice rebuild endurance and speed up healing? What he found reshaped how he thinks about athletes, recovery, and the grind mindset that rewards “huffing and puffing” as proof of effort. 

Then we get technical in the best way. We break down CO2 tolerance, why carbon dioxide is the main driver of breathing, and how oxygen uptake isn’t the same as oxygen delivery to the brain, muscles, and organs. If you’ve ever felt winded and assumed you just needed “more oxygen,” the analogies in this conversation will change how you think about cardio, nasal breathing, and training adaptations. Aakrist also explains what he listens for in a new client’s speech and breathing patterns, why he avoids the catch-all label “breathwork,” and how breath cultivation builds a better baseline rather than chasing a quick state change. 

We close with a short guided practice you can do anywhere, plus clear guardrails around discomfort versus distress. If this helps you, subscribe, share it with a friend who’s stressed or training hard, and leave a review so more people can find the episode.

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Transcript

Why Breath Changes Everything

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone, and welcome back to My Best Life, the podcast where we explore the habits, mindsets, and modalities that allow us to step into our fullest potential. Today's episode explores a topic that is so fundamental we often forget its happening. The breath. We're joined by a man who has turned this involuntary survival mechanism into a masterful art form for healing and high performance. On today's episode, it is my distinct pleasure to speak with Akhrist Dongle. Acrist is a dedicated breathwork coach and the founder of the Peak Breathing Academy, a platform born from a singular, powerful mission to help individuals reclaim their health, mental clarity, and emotional resilience through the power of conscious breathing. In a world that is increasingly fast-paced, digital, and disconnected, Acris serves as a vital bridge, reconnecting people to the most primal and potent tool they possess. His journey into this work began with a deep-seated curiosity about human potential. Akris recognized early on that while we spend thousands of dollars on gym memberships, organic food, and biohacking gadgets, we often overlook the twenty five thousand breaths we take every single day. He saw a world starving for air, not because oxygen was scarce, but because our functional breathing had been degraded by chronic stress, sedentary lifestyles, and unprocessed trauma. Akrist's philosophy at peak breathing is grounded in respiratory intelligence. He teaches that the breath is not just about gas exchange, it is the remote control for the human nervous system. Through his coaching, he demonstrates how we can intentionally use our inhales and exhales to toggle between the fight or flight sympathetic state and the rest and digest parasympathetic state. His work is a sophisticated blend of modern physiology, focusing on CO2 tolerance and nasal health, and the spiritual depth of ancient pranayama. Through his Peak Breathing Academy, Akrist has worked with a diverse range of clients, from high-level athletes seeking a competitive edge to professionals looking to dissolve anxiety and find a sense of center in the middle of a chaotic workday. His approach is remarkably simple yet scientifically profound, making the complex world of breath work accessible to everyone. He doesn't just want you to breathe, he wants you to use your breath as a catalyst for a total life transformation. Beyond the technicalities of the perfect breath, Acrist is a storyteller and a guide. He encourages his students to view the breath as a mirror of their internal world. If the breath is shallow and restricted, the life usually is too. By expanding the breath, Acrist helps people expand their capacity for joy, presence, and vitality. Today we're going to peel back the layers of Acrist's story, discuss the aha moments that led him to this path, and learn practical tools you can use immediately to shift your state of being. If you enjoy this episode, please like it, share it, and please subscribe. And now please enjoy my conversation with Akris Dongle. As always, thanks for listening. Akhrist Dongle, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to speak with you, brother. Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Two Quotes And A Science Lens

SPEAKER_00 4:11

I'm going to start as I often do with a quote, a famous quote from in this case, the individual's name is Krishna Macharya. In fact, I'm going to start with two quotes. Let's do that. The first is from Krishna Macharya, the second from Tiknadhan. Krishna Macharya, for those that don't know, for anyone that's involved in the yoga community, they they've probably heard the name. He was a revered Indian yoga teacher, an Ayurvedic healer, and widely considered, you know, the father of modern yoga, at least as it's practiced in the West. And then Tiknat Han, who I believe passed away a few years ago, was a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk. He was a peace activist, and generally recognized as the father of mindfulness, and he established his famous plum village monastery in France some years ago. So I'll start with Krishna Macharya on the breath. So this is what Krishna Macharya says. Inhale and God approaches you. Exhale, and you approach God. That's one perspective. Second perspective, Tiknathan. Breathing in, I calm the body and mind. Breathing out, I smile. Two different perspectives on the breath, on the power of the breath. To me, when I look at these, they're almost saying the same thing, but in in different ways. But I'm curious, as a breath cultivation coach, what are your thoughts?

SPEAKER_02 6:13

Those are honestly seem pretty abstract to me. I don't really know what they're what they're pointing towards. Maybe maybe they're like pointing to the moon and I'm looking at the finger, kind of thing. And I can see what they're trying to get at. Although my approach is more on the physiology side, and so you know, the both the inhale and the exhale can be leveraged for both relaxation and or activation. And I find both of them are just as just equally as functional to create either outcome, which is, you know, to get closer to God, you can either take your inhale or the exhale. And I forgot the other quote. What was the next one?

SPEAKER_00 6:56

The other one was breathing in, I calm body and mind, breathing out, I smile.

SPEAKER_02 7:04

Yes. And I feel like both inhale and exhale can be leveraged for either one of those. Sure. I uh yeah, I think I don't think they're mutually uh exclusive.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Okay. Well, how so how long have you been a breath coach?

Vipassana And The Injury Turning Point

SPEAKER_02 7:21

Professionally for the last four years. For my own personal practice for 11 years now.

SPEAKER_00 7:26

For 11 years, okay. And and so what was it like was there a specific moment in your life? Was there a particular threshold where you realized that your relationship with your breath needed to change or needed to evolve in some way?

SPEAKER_02 7:44

When I first realized the power of this work was when I came out of my first Vipassana retreat. I was in there day eight, and I've just been watching my breath and my sensation for the eight days, and you know, at that point my mind is pretty sharp. And so I go into one of the sits, and it's probably like 40 minutes in, and suddenly I just leave my body. I didn't intend to do it, it just hit me out of nowhere, and I became the room. And coming out of that experience out of that 10 days, I was like, huh, if my breath can do that for me, what else can it do for me? So I got my hands on as many things as I could regarding breath Wim Hof, yoga, podcasts, courses, YouTube videos, just to learn more about it. So that was really the catalyst of there's something here in the invisible that I have not explored before. And being an athlete all my life, I played soccer all my life, I immediately saw an improvement in my performance just by building a relationship with my breath, right? Not even doing any specific practice, but just the curiosity was like, huh, yeah, okay, now I'm watching my breath as I'm playing, I'm starting to cultivate it in certain areas of my life, and I saw an immediate perform in improvement in my performance. But I noticed I kept getting injured, and that was the pattern was overwork injury, overwork injury. To get to the next level, as athletes, you we think that you have to bash your head through this wall of hard work to get to your next level. You have to puke, you have to run until you puke. And that's kind of the culture I was I grew up in as an athlete. So I kept getting injured, and I hurt my knee. And it was my first game back from a knee injury. And you know, if you've been sidelined for three three to six months, you know how devastating that is. So when you get back on the field with all your teammates with a ball at your feet, you're like, oh my god, I life again. So my spirits roaring. I'm calling for every ball, having such a blast in the game. And it's the 90th minute, we're down two goals. There's no way we're coming back. But I'm still just flying into every tackle, my spirits roaring. But my body's really just catching up, and yet I'm still flying into tackle. So I see this 50-50 challenge. Anyone can win the ball. I go running in, I shoulder check the other guy on the other team, I land on my foot, and my knee goes pop. Oh no. First game, last few minutes of the game, I get injured again. And that's when I knew you know I wouldn't be playing the rest of the season again. So at that point, I had to hurt it three, four more times just to be like, you know what, I'm gonna get surgery. So another six months, sidelined, couldn't do anything, couldn't run, could barely walk for the first couple weeks, and very limited, but I could still breathe. And that really gave devastated at the time, but it gave me a beautiful opportunity to dive even deeper with my breath. And that's probably, you know, four to six years after the initial Vipassana experience. And that's when I started the found that's when I started practicing the foundation of what I teach today, which is the oxygen advantage system. There's a lot of other things I do now, but that's the foundation of what really got me started into this inquiry of breath cultivation. And that's when I realized I could actually accelerate my recovery, like get back on the field faster, and improve my endurance with a seated practice. I didn't actually have to be running. Right. And when I got back on the field, I was like, whoa, I had a brand new baseline of endurance I'd never experienced before. Ever. And I hadn't run for the last six months. I just receded. So that's when it clicked, I was like, huh. No one taught me how to breathe.

unknown 11:53

Right.

SPEAKER_02 11:53

Not my coaches, not my doctors, not my physios, not my teachers at school, not my parents. It's like no one taught me how to breathe. And you know, they don't, they probably don't know how to breathe either, so it's not their fault. It's just at the very foundation, at the very core of our society, not just in general, but like specifically in sports, most of the things we do don't even cultivate or nourish the breath. If anything, they damage our breath. You know, run another lap full speed, huffing and puffing. And if you're huffing and puffing, that's a sign of pride. So that was really what shifted my perspective. And now I'll never look at breathing or performance the same way. It's like recovery is the most important thing. It's not performance, it's not that extra one inch. You know, unless you're in a World Cup final and it's like, right, okay, you'll take a you'll take a boot to the face to win the scoring goal, sure. Yeah. But in general, if you're training, it's like recovery is always the most important thing. Because if you can get back tomorrow, 1% stronger, then exponentially how that compounds into three months, six months. You're gonna develop a really superhuman capacity and a physiology to outperform most people on the field. So that's a roundabout answer about like how I came about this working really like what completely changed my paradigm on performance and and breathing in general.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

Okay. So yeah, I just wanted to mention, because you had referred to participating in a vipassana retreat, and for listeners who are not familiar with with that term, just you know, it's it's a Buddhist, Buddhist-inspired meditation retreat, usually done over 10 days. It's something that I've also done, and and and it's a wonderful experience. I did want to ask you, because you know, you mentioned that this this your your first kind of experience, realizing just how profound the breath was, was about 11 years ago, and then you started teaching about four years ago. So in those early years of your practice, what are some of the, you know, more surprising things that you're learning about yourself just by working with your breath?

SPEAKER_02 14:11

That the breath is the core of all there is. When I would do my yoga poses, my yoga postures, my yoga practice, I realized that if I was in a position that I didn't own and it was really hard for me to maintain, if I just shift my awareness to my breath, I would be able to not only maintain it for longer, but I'd actually be able to build a relationship to it that would make me stronger from the inside out. So less less tension of the muscles and more pressure management of you know the pressure on my fascia, on my mind, on my emotions, and just being able to manage pressure better in general. And the first few practices in like the first three, three, four years, I'd say was mostly the Wim Hof practice. So I probably do that like two, three times a week. And which looking back now, I don't recommend that for people. It's like that's one of the more uh detrimental things one can do for their breathing function when it's overused. We can touch more on that later. But that practice just had me feeling so euphoric. It's like, wow, I can change my state in a matter of minutes. I don't need any drugs, I don't need a cigarette drag, I don't need any cannabis, no nothing. It's like I can just sit down, breathe, and it instantly clears my mind, instantly changes my state for me to be to feel more empowered. And so that was one of the biggest things. It's like, whoa, this little thing, not little thing, this this invisible thing that we have neglected for so long is one of the most powerful things we can use because of how delicate it is. Respiration is this delicate balance of inhale, exhale, balancing pH, balancing blood chemistry. So if we can consciously disrupt that balance, it doesn't take long. Like a minute of changing that balance, because it's so delicate, can have such radical effects on our physiology.

SPEAKER_00 16:17

Okay. So you you were also talking about, you know, some of the maybe unhelpful kind or the uh the unhelpful approach to performance that you know is often stressed in in modern sports, pushing through, for example. So, what other things did you have to unlearn about health and performance to become a breath coach?

Health As A Personal Revolution

SPEAKER_02 16:46

That's a really good question. I think that's one of the biggest things that shifted is like health is the next revolution. It's it's not necessarily political, you know. Yes, there's aspects of that that radiate out, of course, but being healthy is one of the most revolutionary things you can do. Period. To refuse this allopathic model of medicine that has been you know really running rampant for the last hundred years. I I I know a little bit about the history, not I'm not well versed in it, but you know, erasing the history books of medicine where you know naturopath, naturopathic medicine used to be the norm. It wasn't alternative, it was native. Right. And so that's just been taken so far away from us from our society that the access to actual, true, real health care now most of the time comes in the form of coaching and the coaching industry. And it's yeah, in a way it's beautiful because that is kind of the new model of education because adults are learning to educate themselves through other means. But that's the biggest thing, is like health is the next revolution, and it really starts with one's own health.

SPEAKER_00 18:09

Okay, very good.

Why Peak Breathing Academy Exists

SPEAKER_00 18:11

So as you as you were alluding to earlier, about four years ago, you decided to, you know, to to make this the focus of your life with your I I believe it's called Peak Breathing Academy, if I'm not mistaken. So what's the story behind that name?

SPEAKER_02 18:27

Why, why peak breathing? So peak breathing used to be the impeccable breath. And the impeccable breath, the name really came about, I mean, I I was like, what do I what do I name my business? I don't know. And so I just named the, I just named it the name of my first cohort that I ever ran, which was the impeccable breath. And the way I got that was through Taoist philosophy. So there's three stages of mastery, of breath mastery in Taust philosophy. The first stage is others do not hear you breathing. Hear or see you breathing, so percept perception. Stage one is others do not hear you breathing. A lot of people fail that already. And stage two is you do not hear yourself breathing. And stage three is to breathe as if you're not even breathing. So the impeccable breath, it's imperceptible, it's deep, it's like the bottom of the ocean. We're still yet to find it. And so that was initially the name. And then I wanted to shift my focus to more high performers and athletes. Uh, because of my background, that's really where my heart is is serving athletes and high performers. And so just I don't I don't really know how it came about necessarily, but my background being Nepalese, you know, I come from the Himalays, I come from the mountains. So I feel like it's deep in my DNA and and deeply a part of my life's work and my soul's mission in this life is to share this work. And so the peaks are really, you know, the Himalayas where I come from. And if you know, are you familiar with the Sherpa?

SPEAKER_01 20:15

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:17

So they are known to be one of the most resilient people on the planet, you know. Leading tourists to summit Mount Everest and carrying everyone's backpack. That's right. And then stopping for smoke breaks in between while everyone else is huffing and puffing. Yeah. They don't work out. They don't train for this. You know, they just live at such high altitudes that their body that the environment demands their body to be so resilient, so strong and superhuman that they can just do it at the snap of a finger. And high athletes, elite athletes, will call this high-altitude training, where they'll go up into high altitudes to prepare for competition because there's not as much oxygen in the environment. So the body has to make really these really rare adaptations to increase red blood cell count and improve cardiovascular health through respiratory health. For the Sherpa, it's just a walk in the village, you know, it's just morning grabbing breakfast. And so that's really what inspired is peak breathing, is breathing at the top of the world so that you can't reach your human potential that you maybe never even realized was there. And doing it in a way that is effortless, you know, not pushing past your limits and grinding and bashing your head through this wall of hard work, but rather creating an environment for yourself, not only outside yourself, but also in your bloodstream through your breath, so that you can be superhuman effortlessly.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

Interesting. You know, you mentioned the Sherpas and and Mount Everest, and you of course. You know, in the West, it is regarded that uh Sir Edmund Hillary was the first person to quote unquote conquer Mount Everest. Of course, he had a Sherpa as his guide. I I forget the Sherpa's name, it was Ten Tenzing Orge. Tenzingorge, thank you. And, you know, I I remember just thinking the thought years ago that could Hillary have done it without the Sherpa? Probably not. Could Tenzing have done it without Hillary? Probably. So who really was the first person to get up there to the summit? Yeah, just just uh an interesting uh perspective, perhaps.

The Soul Of Breath And Prana

SPEAKER_00 22:46

So I was going to ask you, because I've seen references I think on your website or in your Instagram profile about the soul of a breath. So how do you define that? What what is the soul of a breath? What are you referring to there?

SPEAKER_02 23:05

Depends what you define as soul. In my cosmology, the soul is really I guess it's it's like your your purest essence. It's it's your psyche before any conditioning, and it's like your purest essence of who you actually are. And so when it comes to the soul of your breath, and of course there's like so many different definitions of that. Mine isn't even like complete because I don't necessarily work in that realm so much, but I do believe in a soul. As I'm tuning in right now, what I'm getting is life force. And when a breath is really true and nourishing, then it effortlessly harnesses the life force that surrounds us. There's this notion of zero point. Are you familiar with the zero point field? No, I'm not. So it's basically like the scientific term for God. Is that real? The zero point it exists in every single point in space-time. It's omnipresent, omniscient, all-powerful, right? So there's enough energy in a cubic centimeter of space to boil dry all the oceans on the planet when it's harnessed. Right now, our technology is like bashing atoms together to create energy, nuclear fission, fusion. But really, like there's so much power in the invisible threads that we don't even see and perceive. And when scientists begin to like tickle that zero point, there's enough power in that little space to boil dry all the oceans on the planet to probably power Earth for a thousand years, you know. And so that's the energy that the mystics also call qi or prana. And prana is like it's limitless. It's it we're bathing in it, and there's so much of it. And so, when someone can really take a true nourishing breath, they can start to tap into this zero point. And I I believe that's essentially where what like Qi Gong and Tai Chi principles are pointing towards is how can we cultivate this energy that surrounds us, bring it inside of us to fuel our physiology. And the subtler a breath becomes, right? So the three stages of Taoist philosophy are of breath mastery. Stage one, others can hear your breathing. Well, you're probably not necessarily connected to your soul because it's loud. You're like, you're in your psyche, you're in your ego. Okay, stage two, you can still hear yourself breathing. Okay, it's you have a deeper connection to yourself, but maybe there are still stories in your head that are telling you you're not good enough. And I'm just riffing, you know. But then if if the breath is as if you're not even breathing, then there's this pure stillness. There's nothing else except you and God. And so when you're in that place of stillness, you've probably been in that space in Vipassana meditation where the body is just not breathing. You're just in the still point, and the body doesn't even need to breathe. And that's essentially that third stage of mastery, where now you're not just breathing through your respiratory system, you're breathing through your soul in a way and through your entire energy body, through the pores of your skin, that you're just flooding your bones with energy, life force that's surrounding you. And so, in a nutshell, I'd say the the true breath of the soul is a nourishing, truly nourishing breath that nourishes beyond just the physical body and is able to create still point. Just like that.

SPEAKER_00 26:54

That's a very profound answer. Thank you, Akris. It leads me to wonder, though, you know, with all this energy around us, why are so many people in modern society, you know, almost starving for air, it seems. Yeah, great question.

CO2 Tolerance And Oxygen Delivery

SPEAKER_02 27:17

I'll I'll share a bit, we'll get a little bit technical here. Okay. And we'll uh we'll go through the physiology of like simple respiratory physiology first and what it means for starving from air. So, carbon dioxide is the neural drive to breathe. So we don't actually like humans don't actually breathe to breathe in. We breathe to breathe out because the primary stimulus to breathe is carbon dioxide, which is we exhale it out. When carbon dioxide rises too high, the brain gets a signal saying, I'm suffocating, let it go. So just to give you a rule of thumb, you know, when you're jogging or you're playing sports, and you know, first minute of your jog, first two minutes, you're you're fine breathing through your nose, and the third minute hits, you start, ugh, mouth opens, huffing and puffing, you start breathing more. Most people think that you're breathing more to get in more oxygen, that's not the case. You're breathing more to exhale, let go of carbon dioxide. So to release waste. So that's really what's happening. And carbon dioxide is a waste gas, but CO2 is actually the only molecule, the only molecule in the body that allows for oxygen delivery. Now I'll make a distinction here between oxygen uptake and oxygen delivery. Oxygen uptake is you inhale oxygen from the air outside of you, comes inside of your lungs and then into your bloodstream. That's uptake of oxygen. I'll repeat, so oxygen uptake is when you inhale the air outside of you, comes into your lungs and then into your bloodstream. You've just successfully uptaked oxygen. Oxygen delivery is a whole different story. Oxygen delivery is when the oxygen that's in your bloodstream gets into your tissues. So your brain, your muscles, your organs, where they're actually needed the most. So, my favorite analogy to explain this is a school. Okay, doors of the school open at 9 a.m. Kids come flooding in, they pack the hallways, and all the classroom doors are locked. They can't actually get into the classroom where you go to school for the first in the first place, right? To get to learn, to study. The classroom doors are locked. So the classroom is your brain, your muscles, your organs. The hallways imagine as the bloodstream. Okay, so the hallways are the bloodstream. The classroom is your brain, your muscles, your organs, where you actually need to get the oxygen. The kids can't get into the classrooms until the teacher comes along with a key to open the door. That key is carbon dioxide. When the door opens, kids from the hallways finally are able to get into the classroom, aka the oxygen in your blood, is finally able to get into your brain, your muscles, your organs, only when carbon dioxide signals it to release. So if that's not clear, I'll share another analogy. So think of a river. On the river, we have a boat. Each boat holds four humans. Okay? And the river is the bloodstream, the boat is a red blood cell which carries four oxygen molecules.

SPEAKER_01 30:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 30:48

So here so it's just flowing down the river. Cool, cool, cool. The shore is your brain, let's say, or your tissues, your muscles, your organs. In order for the people, the oxygen on the boat to get onto the shore, they have to land, right? And in order to land, they must come in contact with carbon dioxide to stop and unload the oxygen onto the shore. Kind of like a delivery man, you know, it's like you get to the door, it's like, okay, now what? It's like, does my package just stay in the car, or are you gonna come deliver it to my door? So that delivery man essentially is carbon dioxide that allows oxygen on the boat, in the hallways, in the truck, allows this nourishment, the thing you ordered, finally into your home where you're actually gonna use it the most. So that's the basic principle of carbon dioxide and respiratory physiology. Yes, CO2 is a waste gas, and it's the only molecule that allows for oxygen delivery. Now, the reason most people are starving for oxygen is because they're wasting this waste gas. Most people are breathing too much, especially athletes. You'll they'll be huffing and puffing, and every time you huff and puff, you're literally throwing away that key. It's like, oh, I don't need to get into the classroom. It's like, no, you actually do. So the goal is not to like car CO2 is not the bad guy. We just need to increase our tolerance to carbon dioxide. Just like cultivating tolerance and patience during meditation, that's what we're doing, is we want to cultivate a tolerance to the gas, carbon dioxide, because that's the only thing that's gonna increase oxygen delivery. So most people are breathing too much, wasting this gas. How we can actually nourish ourselves and stop starving for oxygen is to actually feel that feeling of discomfort and suffocation that comes when you're feeling uncomfortable and you know when you start opening your mouth to breathe.

SPEAKER_00 33:01

Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Two two very helpful analogies. Thank you for that. Which leads me to my next question. So, you know, you're a breath coach. Breathing, of course, is it's an internal process, it's something that's going on inside of us. So I'm wondering, you know, when a new student walks through your door, what are you listening for beyond their words? Like what is it in the way that they're breathing? What are the signs that you're looking for to diagnose, you know, less than ideal breathing and and then helping them to correct that?

How A Breath Coach Assesses You

SPEAKER_02 33:45

So I do a series of six assessments on the first on the first phase. So those can look like a you know a lot of things, and it's quite technical. We look at bolt score, heart rate, their nostril dominance, we look at their HRV, their swallow, and then we do an assessment called just your relationship with your breath, where you you write, you just literally write down your relationship with your breath. And that's that last one is actually one of my favorites because there's no instrument that can take that measurement for you. You know, there's no EEG, there's no heart rate minor, there's no like CO2 pressure meter, whatever. It's just gotta be you, piece of paper, and a pen, four minutes, write down your relationship with your breath. And the most some of the most beautiful poetry comes out, and it's not even intentional sometimes, you know. It's like if someone has had a really bad relationship with their breath for you know, since birth, maybe they had birth trauma, maybe they're they almost drowned, they will write something so profound at times because that event has essentially shaped the rest of their life and how they breathe. That is one of my favorite assessments. And it underneath that, you know, through all the physiology, which is really important to address, you know, the CO2, the nitric oxide, like how are you, where are you breathing into? Underneath all of that is the emotions, the the somatic side of like okay, what's holding this pattern? And until we actually get to the root of that, the physiology stuff, it's really hard to budge someone's breathing function until we address the emotions of that. Um, so there's a lot of things, and one another thing, like one of the first things I notice, even just on like a discovery call when I'm first meeting someone, is the space between their words. So their rate of speech. How fast are they speaking? Are they talking a lot? Oh my god, I'm so stressed. Oh my god, no one listens to me all day. So oh my god, you're finally listening to me. Let me just dump my whole life on you, you know? And they're speaking really fast. There's rate of speech, tonality. So, do I really believe what I'm saying? Confident. I believe it. Or I'm confident. So the intonality in their speech tells me a lot about their psyche, where they're at on the day, and maybe just in general. Sure. So there's rate of speech, tonality, and just the words they're using, their vocabulary as well. So the space between the words gives me a lot of information. And also, you know, the spoken word is simply audible breath. As we're speaking right now, we're extending our exhales, and so when someone speaks really fast, they're breathing really fast. But when someone's speaking really steady and slow and grounded, then they're also breathing really slow, particularly on the exhale. If someone in between their speech, if they take a big mouth gasp to breathe, then it's you know, it's more of a sympathetic dominance, they're more reactive, but if they really just pause, take that steady nasal in before they speak, that's a really good sign. And speakers, a lot of speakers are, you know, the the the profession of speaking or teaching, it's it's not actually all too great for breathing function because you're off-casting so much carbon dioxide. Getting a little bit technical here, but also you know, it's it's a big demand on your breathing system. So another thing I teach is like also using your speech and your language as a leverage to make sure you're improving your breathing function throughout the day. Because your your spoken word is simply audible breath.

SPEAKER_00 37:39

Do you do any work with singers at all? Because I imagine that you know, for for a singer, it's very important to have mastery over the breath.

SPEAKER_02 37:48

Absolutely, yeah. I get all types of people walking through the door. I've I've worked with a few singers, and I don't know too much about like singing or you know, the mechanics of that, but I just I just share what I share, and it it definitely does impact their singing massively. Uh one of my clients came to me, it's like week two or three, and she's like, Oh, I just hit this like there's like this metric. Yeah, I was like, I don't know, some pitch, blah blah blah. And she's like, Oh, I I haven't been training, and like usually she would need to train to specifically prolong that note or something, and she hadn't been training for years, but then two, three weeks working together, she was able to like basically reach the peak of what she was able to when she was specifically training for that. Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 38:40

I wanna I wanna go back to something that you mentioned a bit earlier. You were talking about, I guess you would call it emotional blocks. And I'm just wondering, do you see like common emotional blocks that uh people release through breath work? Is are are there commonalities, are there themes?

SPEAKER_02 39:03

So my work isn't necessarily breathwork, and I I don't even like the word breathwork to be honest. I think it it gets overused these days and it gets conflated because there's so many types of breath work or pranayama. You know, breath work is really just conscious breathing, or pranayama, the control of respiration. So I don't necessarily work in the emotional release breathwork space. I work in the functional breathing space, and the the tool mainly I use for emotional release is a method called the inlifted method. So it's it's more like a narrative, narrative coaching, narrative therapy. So so the link between breath work and breath cultivation. I think breath work is really powerful. Any emotional release breath work is powerful and at times it's necessary. And what I'm noticing is that the same culture of hard work and progress is slow, it has invisibly crept into this industry of breath work where it's breathe harder, breathe more, power through the cold exposure, or like, yeah, breathe more and it's it's good for you. It's it's couldn't be further away from the truth. A lot of breath work, intense breath work release modalities are just re-traumatizing the body because they're activating a charge, and a lot of them they're lying down while they're doing it. So the charge doesn't even have a chance to like express itself somatically, and that's really where it is. You know, we want to activate through the breath, and it and then it gets to be expressed somatically. So I find in a lot of these breathwork modalities that becoming really popular right now, they're useful, but they're actually very limited in what what it what they're capable of experiencing. And through the breath patterns used in breathwork classes, which is usually fast breathing, sharp breathing, and shallow breathing, which is necessary to create that physiological response. Because you know, it's it's hard to do that with a slow breath. You have to activate the breath to create that charge. Those breathing patterns, the fast, sharp, shallow breathing, the body learns that. The brain learns that. So every time you're huffing and puffing, the brain's like, oh, familiar. Let me store this in my memory bank of motor functions so I can replicate this throughout my day so you don't have to think about it. So it starts to become an automatic behavior, and and that's one of my biggest concerns in the breath work space is breath work damages breathing function. So that's why I I completely refuse that word and I call it breath cultivation because we don't want to work the breath, we want to cultivate the breath and build the power build our internal power invisibly, not by like forcing or through this like ah big thing, but rather silently, just like the Sherpa.

SPEAKER_00 42:13

Okay.

Breath Cultivation Versus Breathwork Trends

SPEAKER_00 42:14

So you you referred a few times to, you know, uh other breath modalities. I think you referred earlier to Wim Hof, for example. Uh so what is it that makes your peak breathing method unique compared to those other modalities?

SPEAKER_02 42:35

My priority is to establish breathing function. So I use breath as a means to cultivate breathing function. That's my primary focus. It's not breath work to create some state change, it's not breath work to create an acute release or anything like that. My priority is how can when you come in, how can we make sure that when you leave this room, you're going to be a better breather for the rest of your life? So that's the biggest difference with breath work and really what I do.

SPEAKER_00 43:14

Okay, and if someone is a better breather for the rest of their life, what are the benefits of that potentially? In in other aspects of their lives?

SPEAKER_02 43:25

Yeah, that's a great question. Universal, honestly, there's endless benefits because when the body comes out of stress and finally comes into safety, possibilities, doors open up, we start to notice these invisible threads. For example, relationships. If someone is reactive, if someone is tends to get angry or you know, it tends to react and not be able to have a civil conversation in general. Maybe there's some road rage. That will immediately decrease because now they're getting more blood flow to the brain for higher level thinking rather than just amygdala hijack stress response. So this stress stress response will significantly diminish, which means less cortisol activation in their body. So when you have less cortisol in your body, which is the stress hormone, that in itself does magic in your life, whether it's for weight loss, whether it's for your relationships, whether it's for your performance at work. If you're stressed, then you can't necessarily be creative or focus on a task, right? So just that itself, the that one thing, managing cortisol is massive, among other things, for your health, which is like it's so central to your lymphatic system, it's central to your athleticism. Endless, endless possibilities. And when people come in to work with me, they really come in with a whole variety of things. You know, someone might just want to be a better husband, be a better partner. Others might want to improve their performance in soccer, in their sport. Others just might want to manage their stress better and be more productive at work and be more present for their family. So there's really endless, endless possibilities.

SPEAKER_00 45:26

Okay.

Real World Benefits For Life And Sport

SPEAKER_00 45:27

And and for athletes in particular, because you said you work quite a bit with athletes, what are the potential benefits to breathing better, to cultivating one's breath?

SPEAKER_02 45:43

I'll start by sharing my definition of an athlete. So Okay. A lot of people don't necessarily identify as an athlete, you know, if they've never played a sport or you know, you just rock a desk job, and it's like, oh, I've never picked up a ball in my life. It's okay. My definition of an athlete is the is the essentially the capacity to unlock human potential. It's like you wouldn't be here today if your ancestors weren't running in the wild, hunting game, foraging. So you have it deep in your deep, everybody's an athlete. It's just, is that capacity awakened or not? So when I say athletes, like it's simply the urge to activate your human potential. And if we talk about athlete in the in the general sense of things, you know, like physical fitness, health. It's really hard to be an athlete if the quality of your blood is not high. Right? So we which is basically a cardiovascular system. Cardiovascular, a lot of people think, oh, cardio is just running. No, cardiovascular is your cardiovascular system. It's your heart and your blood system, right? And what dictates your cardiovascular system's health is also your there's other things, but it's your respiration. So by enhancing your respiration, you improve the quality of your blood to be essentially have more cellular resources at any given moment. For example, Lance Armstrong, seven Tour de France titles. Not one, not two, not three, not even five, seven Tour de France titles. Crazy. And at the end of his massively successful career, he was stripped of all of them because he was found to be blood doping his entire career. EPO. And EPO, what it does for listeners is it increases red blood cell count. So it improves, for example, in our analogy of the hallway and the kids, red blood cells makes it so that you can stuff more kids in the hallway, so that you can have more boats on the river. And so you can have a truck like a clown truck, you know, it's like you have 50 clowns in a tiny little car. That's what EPO does for you, is it gives you massive cellular resources in the form of red blood cells. And red blood cells is what carries oxygen through your body. If your blood is not high quality, it cannot carry oxygen throughout your body and deliver it to your muscles, your brain, your organs, etc. So for athletes, it's really about how can we enhance your blood through your respiration so that you're recovering faster, not only between training, but between efforts. So that 50-yard sprint on the pitch, you're recovered within 10 seconds, ready to sprint again. So there's recovery, there's also cardiovascular health, which is stamina endurance. Like to be able to win seven Tortefrance titles, that is absolutely wild. EPO gave Lance Armstrong the ability to have superhuman endurance. And through this breath practice, we're actually able to stimulate EPO naturally. So if Lance Armstrong knew what we could do with our breath, he could have potentially retained all seven of his titles. And that's the power of breath, breath training for athletes. Breath cultivation. Yes. Breath cultivation.

SPEAKER_00 49:37

Okay, so Lance Armstrong, you know, world-famous athlete. I'm sure many people are already familiar with him, but you know, many of the people. Did he really? Neil Armstrong. You you had me there for a second. You know, most of us are not high-performing athletes. Perhaps we could be if we if we train more, but is there like a simple practice that, you know, someone who is not a high-performing athlete and you know might be curious about breath work, breath cultivation, and you know, maybe take someone might want to take some first baby steps towards improving their breath, improving their health. Is there a particular practice that you would recommend to someone that they could do in like, you know, a minute or five minutes every day?

SPEAKER_02 50:32

Yeah, absolutely.

Breathe Light Practice You Can Use

SPEAKER_02 50:34

Okay. So this practice is called breathe light. All you need for this is a finger. You place your finger underneath your nose like a mustache, close your eyes, engage the flow of your normal breath coming in and out. This is baseline. This is unconscious respiration. In a moment, we're gonna slow down the flow of your breath so that you hardly feel any airflow on your finger or in your nose. And we're gonna continue this for two minutes. We'll begin in five, four. Actually, before we begin, I just want to establish some ground rules. So two things, actually, three things. You're seated upright, spine is supporting itself, your hips are stacked underneath your ribcage, and then underneath and above your ribcage is your skull. So you want to be supporting your spine, not leaning on anything. Number two is strict nasal breathing as best as you can. So when I say strict, it's like, have you ever had a terrible coach that's really hard on you? It's like, don't cut corners or you're running 10 more laps. Like that's strict, strict nasal breathing. Okay. That alone, that alone, strict nasal breathing. When you're running, when you're exercising, when you're on the road, maybe you have road rage, instead of screaming and cursing at someone, take a slow nasal breath. That itself is gonna increase your capacity to be superhuman and or you know, activate your potential to be more of an athlete, quote unquote. So, spine is upright, strict nasal breathing, and the third is tongue posture. So I like you to just notice where your tongue is right now. Is it up, is it down, pressing up against teeth? Just take a mental note. Now I want you to swallow. Notice if your tongue position changes. And now I want you to click your tongue. Click your tongue, and now slow motion click. When the tip of your tongue reaches that little ridge behind your teeth, it's about a centimeter and a half behind your teeth. It's like a perfect little pocket made for the tip of your tongue. You'll know when you find it. Close your lips. Now swallow again and press your tongue up and back into the roof of your mouth. So this is ideal resting tongue posture. In traditional Chinese medicine, this completes the microcosmic orbit that connects the central vessel and the governing vessel. So when your tongue is in this position, you are physiologically more connected. Your fascia is finally connected, and your energy your energetic body is also complete. So these are the three things you want to maintain throughout this breath practice. Throughout the day, 24-7, if you can, especially if you're an endurance athlete, because when the tip of your tongue is on the roof of your mouth, you're now circulating and recycling energy. Which, if you're gonna be running for an hour, you need as much energy as you can get to be recycled. If it's not touching, there's no seal, and the energy is then leaked. So these are the three things sitting upright, not tight, strict nasal breathing, and ideal tongue posture. Is that clear? Yeah, that's very clear. Cool. So we'll do a quick, we'll do like a quick uh three to four minute breath practice. We just have two practices. First is gonna be a breathe light, we'll go for two minutes, and then we'll close with a simple cadence of four seconds in, four seconds out. Now, at any moment, if you feel discomfort, that's normal. If you feel like a subtle degree of suffocation, that is actually exactly what we're looking for. What I don't want you to do is feel distress. We want discomfort, but not distress. Okay, if at any point you need to rest, just rest, normal breathing through your nose if you can, and then come back to your practice when you're ready. But I do not want you to be pushing so hard that you know you can't recover in time. And last principle that kind of anchors everything home and is one of the main philosophies behind my work is the principle of hormesis. So hormesis is it's basically the principle of diminishing returns. So you have a bell curve. If for the viewers listening, you can just search hormesis. And if you don't have access to that right now, think of a bell curve. Okay, so at the top of the bell curve, you have like majority of the curve, right? And so there's a lowest point where actually there's a there's a peak, right? At the bell curve, there's a peak. That peak is when you get the optimal returns for the dosage of stress that you offer. So if you have too much stress that you offer, like if you work out for too long, you're gonna be very, very, very, very, very sore for the next few days, maybe even a week. If you don't work out enough, you're not gonna feel anything. There's not gonna be any stimulus. So essentially, this is the sweet spot for growth. It's not too easy, it's also not too stressful, it's your rhythm for basically gauging where's my sweet spot. That's what I want you to look for during this breathe light practice because it can get really uncomfortable. All right. Enough philosophy, let's jump right into the practice. So place a finger under your nose like a mustache, and then we're gonna slow it down for two minutes in five, four, three, two, one, slowing down your breath as it enters and leaves your nose. Gently in and gently out. Breathing so softly you hardly feel any airflow on your finger or in your nose. And you'll know you're doing it correctly when you feel a degree of air hunger. It's a subtle degree of suffocation. You're not too worried, this is not oxygen dropping, this is carbon dioxide rising in your blood. As CO2 rises, it dilates your blood vessels, opening you up from the insides, and floods your brain, your muscles, your organs with more oxygen. And as that discomfort arises and lingers, simply embracing it. Not looking away, not looking to distract yourself, rather zero in. Become fully enamored with it. Become familiar with its edges, its corners, its textures, its sounds, its smells. Only 30 seconds remained. If at this point you have not felt air hunger yet, you can block off one nostril and maintain the same rhythm of breathing. If you do feel air hunger, stay exactly where you are. And see if you can just go a little bit deeper in the discomfort by slowing down your breath. Finishing strong nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two. First breath is soft, steady, and silent through your nose and rest. Normal breathing. Let your body do its thing. Notice how your body wants to express your breathing after that experience. And also recognizing the grace of a full, complete, uninhibited, free breath. And also recognizing you can actually do more with less, and actually you thrive with less. So, what we've just done there is to a degree we've mimicked high altitude by reducing the amount of available oxygen to your respiration. What happened there is CO2 rises, and as it does, it floods your cells with oxygen from your bloodstream. And because you're still breathing, your oxygen saturation is always replenishing itself. So you're never actually dropping too much unless you're like actually suffocating, which is why the principle of hormesis is so important. So we'll close with a simple cadence of four seconds in, four seconds out for 90 minutes. And humming is optional on the exhale. We'll begin in five, four, three, two, one gently in, two, three, four gently out, two, three, four, gently in, two, three, four gently out, two, three, four, gently in, two, three, four gently out, two, three, four, softly in, two, three, four, softly out, two, three, four, silent in, two, three, four, silent out, two, three, four, silent in, two, three, four, silent out, two, three, four. Continue at your own pace. In for four, out for four. You might notice your breath rhythm will tend to change automatically. Let it happen. But maintain a soft, steady, silent breath. Keep the tongue on the roof of your mouth. At the top of your next inhale, find your swallow before you exhale. And at the base of your next exhale, so at the end of your exhale, find your swallow again. And in a moment, softening the surface of your skin. And at the speed of thought, breathing through your pores, not thinking about it, simply doing it. And visualizing, imagining liquid light from your atmosphere, flooding the pores of your skin down to the marrows of your bones. As you inhale, you gather, gather, gather. As you exhale, you condense this light and preserve it in the very core of your being, the marrows of your bones. We'll continue for two more breaths. And after your second breath, we'll close this practice with a hum as loud as you can, as long as you can, at your own rhythm. And after you hum, find your swallow at the base of your breath. When you're ready, at your own rhythm, you can gently open your eyes. Welcome back, Peter.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:59

Thank you. That was that was amazing. Thank you, Akra, so much. I wasn't I wasn't anticipating that we would actually get into a practice during this conversation, but I'm so glad that you you led us here. That was wonderful. Thank you. My pleasure. Yeah, well, I I I hope the listeners at at home are also practicing along because it's a wonderful, and it was a very short practice, but like I can already feel the the difference. Not that I was, you know, all that nervous before starting. I I I do a lot of breath cultivation myself through my yoga practice, but you know, even that short, what was it, five-minute practice was was beautiful. Thank you. Yeah, you're very welcome. And uh very fitting way to end our conversation as well, as as I see that we've we've come to the end of our time together.

Living Your Best Life Through Service

SPEAKER_00 1:04:51

I do have one last question to ask you though, Akhrist, and it's it's a question that I ask pretty much all of my guests. Since the theme of this podcast is you know living your best life, I'd just like to get your perspective on that. What does that mean to you? What does living your best life mean to Akhrist?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:11

Living my best life to me is is really living a life of fulfillment. And I and I think to be truly fulfilled, one has to be in service. And for me, what that looks like is continuing to develop my life's work. And really, I've been journaling this past week, and I'm like, I'm s I've been writing, I'm so grateful for my life and my life's work. And I don't like those two are so inseparable to be at this point. It's like it's just one more word than life, right? Life, life's work. Life, life's work. So for me, it's it's really continuing to develop this work and continuing to serve people because I feel like if I'm not to do that, I'm doing myself a disservice, I'm doing the world a disservice because I there's something in me that like calls me, that compels me to share this work. And for me it's my living my best life is really continuing to develop this work and and help more people with this work. So that I can I can feel fulfilled and feel like I came feel like I've completed the work I've come here to do.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:26

Beautiful answer. Well I feel like I have a thousand more questions that I'd love to ask you about your life's work. I feel like we barely scratched the surface here during this conversation, but I guess that means you'll have to come back at some point in the future and uh and do it all over again Akris this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your life's work with with me and and and with uh all of our listeners. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you again.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:00

My pleasure Peter thank you for having me on. I had a lot of fun