21 Jan Ayurveda Breath Science
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🎙️ Summary Description
In this episode, Dr. John Douillard explores the integration of ancient Ayurvedic wisdom, modern science, and practical lifestyle tools for optimal health, longevity, and spiritual awareness. He begins by explaining how meditation, breathwork, and “gap therapy” create an “eye of the storm” state—restful alertness that enhances performance, reduces stress, and aligns the nervous system even during intense activity. Douillard then delves into Ayurveda’s perspective on the root cause of disease: a disconnect between consciousness and physiology, and how practices like meditation, mindful breathing, intention, and selfless giving restore coherence across the body, mind, and subtle energy, potentially influencing phenomena like biophotons, distance healing, and quantum-level health. In the final segment, he highlights the critical role of the diaphragm and lymphatic system in detoxification, immunity, and energy delivery, while connecting gut health, hormetic stress, and seasonal eating to robust longevity. Listeners will discover practical tools for strengthening digestion, breathing, and resilience, supporting vitality, spiritual perception, and the natural thinning of the veil between the physical and spiritual as we age.
🌟 Chapters
00:00 Dr. Douillard’s Journey into Ayurveda
03:44 Meditation is Being Restfully Alert
05:42 Maintaining Calm during Chaos
07:19 Nose Breathing vs. Mouth Breathing
08:59 The Coexistence of Opposites
12:40 Gap Therapy: The space between Breaths
14:45 The Eye of the Storm
16:53 Meditation is a Biohack
18:10 Pranayama and the Benefits of Breath Pauses
18:36 The Cause of Disease
21:05 Gap Therapy and Healing at the Quantum Level
23:11 Tapping into the Field of Intention
29:28 Biophotons: Coherence and Communication
31:12 The Impact of Intention and Giving
32:03 Kindness Thins the Veil between Body and Spirit
32:40 Quantum Entanglement and Healing
35:22 Breathwork, the Diaphragm, and Healing
35:34 Longevity, Aging, and Spiritual Perception
39:42 The Hormetic Effect and Diet
41:09 Gut Health and Digestive Strength: The Missing Link
45:13 The Amish Immune System Study Explained
47:16 The best Diaphragmatic Breathing Exercises for Healing
48:55 Ayurveda tools and Resources for Health and Longevity
49:14 Why Seasonal Eating Supports Gut Health and Immunity
🎥 Watch on YouTube
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👉 View the full video on YouTube Episode #5 – Ayurveda Breath Science with Dr. John Douillard
👤 About the Guest
Dr. John Douillard, DC, CAP is a globally recognized Ayurvedic + sports medicine educator with 40 years of experience. He is the author of seven health books, including bestsellers Eat Wheat and The 3-Season Diet. In his mission to provide free Ayurvedic knowledge to the public, he created LifeSpa.com, where he connects ancient Ayurvedic wisdom with modern science.
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📜 Full Transcript
Lois (00:00)
Before we start, I want to do an opening meditation. Let’s take a few breaths and ground ourselves and clear the mind, open our hearts and transition into the space of learning.
Take a deep inhale…and slowly exhale and settle into this space.
I want to honor this ancient tradition of Ayurveda. It’s a science rooted in balance, nature, and inner harmony. I have deep respect for the teachers, the healers, and the knowledge keepers who came before us and open this space with gratitude.
Today I’m thrilled to welcome Dr. John Douillard a doctor of chiropractic medicine and certified Ayurvedic practitioner. Dr. John is a globally recognized leader in Ayurveda, natural health, nutrition, and sports medicine. With over 40 years of experience, he has guided more than 100,000 patients towards optimal health. He’s a renowned Ayurvedic educator, the host of Ayurveda Meets Modern Science podcast, and the bestselling author of seven health books, including: Eat Wheat and Three Season Diet. Dr. John is also the founder of LifeSpa.com, the leading online Ayurvedic resource with thousands of free educational articles, videos, and a community of over a half million social followers and newsletter readers. Welcome, Dr. John.
John Douillard (01:48)
You know, it’s great to be here.
Lois (01:49)
So nice to have you on the podcast. I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time and I am always on LifeSpa.com checking out the articles. They’re so informative, well researched and have links to scientific studies so anyone can go and follow up with the research.
Let’s start off with your background because it’s rich. There’s so much experience that you have. It looks like you started off as a chiropractor. You also have experience in acupuncture and then got into Ayurveda? Can you elaborate on that?
John Douillard (02:25)
Yeah, when I was in chiropractic college in the early 1980s, I was also taking a 500-hour acupuncture class. And that’s actually where I first heard the word Ayurveda. It was during that time, and I was like, wow, there’s a whole system of medicine that’s really ancient in addition to Chinese medicine, and it’s Vedic, and I heard stories about Kayakalpa where people would live to be 150 or 60 or 70 or 80. And there were all these like really crazy stories and I was just fascinated by these monks living in caves and doing these amazing things.
So that’s when I heard about a lecture somewhere in California in Santa Monica, I think it was, and I went to the lecture, it was about yoga and Ayurveda and breathing and all this. And I went up to the Ayurvedic doctor afterwards and I said, hey, I’m doing an Ironman training for an Ironman triathlon. What do you think about doing that from the Ayurvedic perspective? And he looked at me and he said, what is that? And I said, well, it’s you know, it’s a, what is it? 112 mile bike ride, a 26 mile run and a two and a half mile ocean swim. And he looked at me and he said, why do you do that? And I was like, ugh.
No one ever really asked me that before. So I didn’t have an answer and I was sort of like hemming and hawing and I didn’t know what to say. And then he said, do you meditate? And I said, yeah, I do meditate actually. And he goes, “do you sleep while you meditate?” Yeah, deeply. And I thought that was really good, you know, getting rid of all the stress.
And he said, “Meditation is different than sleep. Sleep is you’re out and meditation is you’re restfully alert. Like you’re alert and resting at the same time.” I was like, “that’s not me.” I was like completely out. And he said, “You’re exhausted and you’re probably doing way too much and you should probably stop.”
And I said, “But what if I was able to do all this stuff, exercise, whatever, and not fall asleep when I meditate? Would that be okay?” And he was like, “Yeah, that’d be okay, somewhat better.”
And then he was just trying to, I think, get rid of me at that point. But I ended up doing that, and started going into meditation retreats on a regular basis, once a month or so, like on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, meditate, yoga, breathe, meditate, yoga, breathe, meditate, do these rounding courses, And then I went for a two week meditation retreat up in the Sierra somewhere.
And I came out of that and you couldn’t like exercise at all. It just, again, yoga breathe, meditate, sleep. Yoga breathe, meditate, sleep. Eat here and there. And I came out of that sort of somewhat shot out of a cannon. I got this three month, runners high experience where I was like competing at a significantly higher level, winning medals, you know, placing in my age group, doing things that I wasn’t doing before.
All my friends in the South Bay at that point who were professional triathletes, I was treating them and working with them a lot. They thought I was on steroids for sure. They didn’t believe I was just meditating. And some of my friends learned how to meditate.
And it was not only just in my sports that I had this like constant runner’s high zone experience. It was in my clinical internship and my academic intellectual bandwidth like blew up. Like I was all of a sudden able to handle so much stress and so much work with, still staying totally calm on the inside.
And I called that the eye of the hurricane effect, that ability to be calm in the midst of all the winds. But you’re not in the winds, you’re in the calm. So you’re doing all this stuff like crazy, but you’re also this incredibly calm on the inside. And that was what the runner’s high was defined as. It was my best race, it was my easiest race. When Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile, running faster than any man alive, he literally said, I felt like I was standing still, like I was going slow.
And that’s sort of what I was feeling. I felt like I was just like, you know, got this like charge of deep rejuvenation where I didn’t have to come out of my calm to do all the activity and handle all the stress in my life. I was able to stay in the calm. Then three months later, it disappeared. And I was like, where did that go? And that’s what really got me motivated into Ayurveda and yoga and meditation. I wanted to know more.
So I ended up going to India in 1986 for like a four to six week vacation. I ended up getting invited to stay there permanently by my ayurvedic doctor / teacher. Then I stayed there and that’s where I met Deepak Chopra and I came back and he invited me to, after about a year and a half, co-direct his new center he was opening up in Massachusetts, which I did for eight years.
And then I was thrown into the arena of training medical doctors, because that’s what he was doing at that time.
So I started training medical doctors, but to do that well, and particularly as a chiropractor, it was probably really good idea to speak their language. So I started bringing in all the science, and that’s where the science and ancient wisdom started, was back in 1986. And I’ve been doing really that ever since.
And because of my runner’s high experience, I wrote the book Body, Mind and Sport, but before I wrote that, I started doing research on the difference between mouth breathing and nose breathing exercise, which I learned in India, the difference of nose breathing and pranayama and all that. And we found that when you, and this is really cool, anybody can do this, go for a walk or a run or a bike, and there’s a little more to it, but really simply put, just breathe through your nose.
And try to take long, slow breaths in and out through your nose…and notice that there’s a space at the top and the bottom of each breath when you’re going slow. It’s like a natural, sort of relaxed, you know, linking of one breath to the other. And as soon as the breath gets short, you’re going in the direction of a mouth open emergency breath. So that’s not where you want to go. So as soon as you lose the space between the breath, you want to slow down and go and reset. Go stop, go slower, reset that space between your breath and then go faster.
So we did that. We did a published study on that with high school athletes and we had about 25 people in the study. And when we had them breathe through their mouth, their brains went into a full-blown stressed out beta brainwave state.
We measured their brainwaves. But when they came back the next day, breathing through their nose, their brains did the exact same work – vigorous exercise, 200 watts of resistance on an exercise bike, which is significant — and their brain went into a meditative alpha state. So it was like, imagine running as fast as you could or riding your bike as fast as hard as you could, but your brain responding to that exertion as if you were in a meditation.
That’s what we proved and just published out in the International Journal of Neuroscience, which was really cool. And we also measured their breath rates. Their breath rates were like 48 breaths per minute when their mouths were open, 14 breaths per minute when their mouths were closed, same kids, same workout. Their perception of the exertion, how it felt, was a 10 out of 10 when their mouths were open and a four out of 10 when their mouths were closed.
And my favorite, and there many other parts of that study, but my favorite part was that we measured the fight or flight nervous system versus parasympathetic, sympathetic versus parasympathetic. And when you normally when you exercise, their mouths are open, their sympathetic went to 100 % and their parasympathetic zeroed out, went to zero. So they were like in full blown fight or flight. And that’s the model of exercise still to this day… you know, “stress and recovery”. Stress your body to the max and then recover. Stress your body to the max, recover.
You will get stronger in your 20s, but after you’re 28 and 29 or 30, they put you out to pasture because you’re not competitive anymore. So we’re limited by how much stress we can all endure. And that happens in every aspect of our lives. It’s not just about exercise. So when they came back the next day and did the nose breathing, their sympathetic system only went up 50% and the parasympathetic didn’t disappear. It stayed at 50%. So we had the two opposite nervous systems coexisting. And that to me, in addition to the brainwave with the alpha, this brainwave coherence in the brain during nose breathing, was the proof that we actually replicated what I experienced back in the early 1980s, which was the coexistence of opposites.
I felt the winds of the storm, the sympathetic was there, but the calm was there at the same time. They were coexisting. And this is a model of nature. I mean, hurricanes have the coexistence of opposites.
Atoms have nucleotides sit in the middle with electrons spinning around it. Our solar system is a planet that’s relatively still with things spinning around it. It’s a law of nature and that’s the beauty of our full potential will start to happen to us spontaneously if we just mimic what we’re actually seeing in nature in its most powerful forms. And that’s the beauty of what we actually discovered.
Lois (10:41)
Amazing so I got the book and I’ve been playing around with it… so this morning I went for a walk. I do the ashtanga yoga where we practice the ujjayi breathing which you mentioned in the book –that “Darth Vader” or “Ocean” breath so I can do that in my yoga practice, but to walk and do it like I have to go really slow. It almost feels like you’re stretching the breath, like my yoga teacher would say
John Douillard (11:03)
I think it is stretching the breath. You know, it’s funny, when the book first came out in 1986, I think it was, I started teaching a class in North Boulder Park outside every week. And we had people come for free to just learn how to nose breathe. And it kind of became like a little culty thing where we had 30, 40 people would come.
The Denver Fire Department came up with their gas masks on because one of their young firemen came up to my class and started becoming a nose breather. And they have competitions of how who can run up hills with their tanks on and how long the tank can last. And I think the record was like 26 minutes and this kid did like 34 minutes. And they were like, that can save lives, multiple lives if the tank can last that much longer. So a bunch of fire trucks came up to my class from Denver and they got all gas masked up and we taught them the course and ended up doing in-service in Denver at their big fire department down there.
But the point is that, and then I was invited to do this indoors by some health clubs. I started, so I did that for almost 10 years every week for free, everybody, and people would come. So I had this really great kind of pilot study of people coming and coming back two years later, three years later, and say, I thought you were crazy and this doesn’t work. I can’t breathe through my nose. But then all of a sudden it got better.
And I also noticed that, A lot of the yoga students, they didn’t do so well off the mat. They were really good at breathing when they’re on the mat, but they didn’t do so well off the mat.
And we had this treadmill workout where you would just get on a treadmill, two miles an hour, really slow, and breathe through your nose and notice the space between your breath. Just really deep in, really deep out, and notice a natural link between each breath, not fast. Do that for five minutes, 10 minutes or so. And then after you do that, you increase the elevation of the treadmill one degree every 15 seconds. So every 15 seconds, go up a little bit of hill, a little more of a hill. By four degrees, you’re gonna feel this breath, the breaths get a little short. At that point, go back to zero degrees, really easy. And this can be on an exercise bike, we’ll only have a level one, two, three, four, five, and you can just play with that.
And then when you reset this breath, go back up one degree every 15 seconds, increase the elevation, and now you go to eight degrees. And you’re still doing the same breath. And then that gets a little short. You go back to zero degrees, reset the breath, and now you go to 12 degrees. Then you go back down, increase the speed a little bit, and do it again. I did this for 10 years. We had a bank of 15 treadmills… had them all every Thursday morning.
Everybody saw themselves doing more work with the same breath, as long as they respected the limit to where their body went from calm, from the calm to the winds of the storm, to the stress, where the body started going more into the stress response.
So with you, I would say, yeah, stick with it. Keep asking yourself to notice the space between the breath, because most people who do this, they don’t notice that they went from a nice kind of a sine wave breath with a nice space between it to a faster breath where they’ve lost the space.
We don’t pick that up until we have to open our mouth. We’re conditioned to only know the emergency. It’s called the blood lactate threshold. So anyway, that’s a really great thing. And I think for you, when you even just go for a walk, counting your steps, one, two, three, four on the inhale, one, two, three, four on the exhale. Doesn’t matter how fast, just use your base speed as you’re kind of measuring speed… try to get 10 on the end, 10 steps for your inhalation through the nose, and 15 to 20 for your exhalation through the nose.
Doing that Ujjayi Pranayama will activate abdominal contraction. And what that does, creates an abdominal diaphragmatic cardiac massage, which activates the vagus nerve on your heart, which triggers a vagal response, and that’s one of the major components of telling the body, ‘This is not an emergency; I can stay in the eye of the storm here as I slowly build the winds of the storm’.
And that’s the idea is that you create the eye and you slowly build the winds of the storm. You spin out into the winds, you feel a little stressed out, breath rates get short, you go back into the eye, recapture that, but then tell your body, we want more. It’s not about living in a bubble like a lot of people think, oh, yoga, breathing, meditation, you have to live in like a little delicate life. No, so hurricanes are not delicate. Those solar systems are not delicate. This is about full human potential.
And you’re not gonna get there in the winds of the storm. You’re gonna get clobbered out there. But if you can create that calm and function from that place, it’s game changing on every level because our culture, right, that is constant stimulus, this constant incoming, the constant stress, the constant going like this, stressing, stressing, stressing, go here, go there, even driving 60 miles an hour. Think about that our hunter gathers every even go 60 miles an hour. I mean, it’s not even possible.
But the point is like, we have so much stimulus and we’re chronically under emergency stress. Even though the bear is far enough away not to be life threatening, you can still see it and you have to keep moving all the time, you know. And when that happens, the body says, life is a full blown chronic emergency that I have to respond from. So the body is going to put more, sugar in the blood chronically, gonna put more cholesterol into the blood chronically to make more stress hormone, which is made of cholesterol, to get you up a tree faster, because there’s a bear chasing you. It’s gonna raise your blood pressure, it’s gonna take any reserve fuel you have and stick it under the mattress, you’re gonna gain weight.
All the metabolic syndrome epidemic things of our time today are 100 % caused by, according to the studies, and I’ve written an article about the science behind that, to this chronic incoming stress. Then when you say, what if I look at, if that’s true, then meditation should cure all that because meditation is a big time de-stressor and study after study after study after study, meditation will lower your obesity, lower your blood pressure, lower your blood sugar, lower your cholesterol. Everything is there. The only thing we’re not doing is we’re not dipping the cloth or our lifestyle into the dye of the eye of the storm. We’re not doing that.
We’re just chronically living in the winds. And that’s why we need to be out in the woods and be out in the forest. Meditation was really a biohack, historically, thousands of years ago. Think about hunter-gatherers living in the wilderness, How peaceful and calm the lifestyle was. Think about Native American cultures in there, just living so beautifully in rhythm with nature. Once in while they’d invade each other, but it wasn’t like, that wasn’t the theme. The theme was peace and calm.
Then all of a sudden cities and civilizations started happening and then people would come in there and how gross they must have been, how bad they must have smelled and how much hustle and bustle and all that must have been terrible. So somebody smart said, what if we meditate and we can actually experience the calm of the wilderness, the peace and calm of nature, the eye of the storm in the city? And that is nothing more than a biohack to do what our ancestors did, quite naturally.
Which is why they went into caves… because they wanted that calm, that deep stillness, so they can train and resonance with that peace and calm. That’s the well-documented cure for what ails us today. But we have a culture that says, no, no, no, no, no, you need to buy more stuff first, And that’s the problem.
Lois (18:10)
External stimuli. One other question you talked about the space between the breath. So I remember my yoga teacher would describe that gap in the breath, the gap between the inhale and the exhale as being the meditative state. So is that like equivalent to the runner’s high, that gap then? Like then you’re just running in that state? To me seems like you wouldn’t be breathing at all.
John Douillard (18:37)
Yeah, I think what your teacher was talking about, the gap was a little bit more profound, even than the runner’s high. So let’s leave the runner’s high alone for a second and go into something more important, which is the cause of disease.
In Ayurveda, the cause of disease is something called Prajna paradha which means the mistake of the intellect. And what that really means is that the intellect made a mistake.
It started thinking it as separate from that underlying field of intelligence or consciousness from which we come. So if the field of consciousness becomes matter or the physiology and the physiology forgets that it’s a field. That’s a problem. That’s what Ayurveda said is the cause of disease.
So Ayurveda also said that at the junction point between consciousness and matter or field and physiology, that’s the place …if you put your attention there…that’s where the block takes place. That’s where the wall…they call it the great barrier sheath…that’s the block between the field and the physiology. So if you were to put your attention at that gap between consciousness and matter, putting like a lamp at a doorway, it would shine into both rooms.
So what’s happening in Ayurveda with an understanding of the gap between the breath, the gap between sunrise and sunset, the gap between the seasons, the gap between solstice, equinoxes, all that. Even the mantra is designed to take you down through thoughts and then you let go of the mantra and you’re in this gap of no thinking. You’re in between thoughts, right? So between thoughts, between breaths, all these gap therapies were like totally an Ayurvedic thing. I don’t know any other system that talks about it like this. So here’s the really cool part.
So if you were trying to heal disease at a quantum level, fundamental like Vedic level, you would want to find something that would help you put your attention at the junction point between consciousness and matter. Well, meditation does that, you know. In yoga, you want to get something that is both silent and dynamic at the same time, because the field is silent and the physiology is dynamic, right?
So you want meditation. It’s restful alertness. You’re dynamically active and calm at the same time, so you’re there. So the runner’s high is another really just an experience of meditation and action. That’s all it is, right? So again, another beautiful way of scrubbing the clarity of the coexistence of opposites that takes place in all these gap therapies, the sunrise, sunset, seasonal changes, all these little gaps that nature provides for us.
But taking it down into a quantum level, you wanna then try to find something that functions and lives as both a particle, which is manifest, and a frequency more consciousness-based turns out there are things that function as both particles and field at the same time, and they’re called photons.
And it turns out that we, as human beings, produce photons. They’re called ultra-weak photon emissions, thousands of them per second out of your DNA. That we’re constantly pushing light out of our body all the time. A lot of the light of the DNA is what’s called incoherent photon emissions, and they’re due to DNA damage. DNA damage is a problem.
As we age, we don’t clean up the DNA damage that’s taking place naturally as a result of energy production. Whenever you make energy, there’s waste. And like nuclear energy, there is a big problem with all the waste, right? That’s the big deterrent.
Well, in our body it’s the same thing. And as we age, we don’t clean up that waste as well as we should. So what happens is the waste builds up, that’s free radical damage, creates degeneration, we age, problems happen. And then all the photon emissions are incoherent and damaging.
There’s something called the bystander phenomena where they took a monkey that was irradiated with
cancer and very sick…they put a healthy monkey next to it… and within, I think 48 hours, it was that… the healthy monkey started getting sick and they measured the mechanism of how that monkey got sick and it was because of these photon emissions (which were now so loaded with free radical damage) started damaging the healthy monkey as well. I think we all know that, right? We walk into a room and it’s like weird or stressful. It doesn’t feel good. You know better and get out hopefully.
Lois (22:47)
Don’t hang out with toxic people? Is that what you’re saying?
John Douillard (22:49)
Exactly, I think we all tend to know what that feeling’s like. So here’s the really cool part, is that these photons of light, which function at the junction between conscious and matter, or field and physiology, they carry our intention. They carry thoughts in our body. Well studied now, we now know that our thinking isn’t fast enough to go from nerve firing to a nerve firing to a nerve firing. It’s not fast enough.
So we are actually doing it at the speed of light on the back of these photons. And emerging research is suggesting that these photons will carry intention, but not when they’re incoherent, which is what most of them are. But here’s the best part. When you do yoga and breathing and meditate, studies show that those incoherent photon emissions become coherent.
So all of a sudden your photon emissions become more coherent and now they are more amenable to the intention to carry thoughts, to carry intention. And because photons don’t stop at this glass, they don’t care about that, they go right through everything. They go at great distances at the speed of light.
And so when you walk into a room, there’s all this photon emissions blasting from everybody in that room (and probably overwhelmingly incoherence), and as a result of that, you can feel it. Because if you’re meditating and doing yoga breathing, you’ve created a space inside of your body, which is more coherent, then you’re going to feel that contrast and feel the toxicity in the room.
But it also explains potentially why prayer could work. People get into deep prayer, they have an intention to heal, and prayer has been studied and studied and studied to be incredibly effective as a healing agent. Yet there are studies showing it doesn’t work, but there are some studies that are just so overwhelmingly positive. And maybe it has a lot to do with the coherence or incoherence of the photon emissions which carry that intention…whether they’re actually carrying them well or not, right?
So meditation and prayer would be… kind of the deep state that people in deep prayer would get to… would have a profound effect. And I’m sure you know in India, distance healers are very common. They’re gonna heal you and your relatives (you show them a picture), they’ll take your pulse, something, and they’ll heal you.
It’s just a well-known thing that we function at a subtle level, at the level of the field, and we can tap into that field and then have an effect somewhere else, some other manifestation of that field by having an intention which is carried by those photons, and that begins to happen.
So, how does it really work? Is that when you have a meditation and you get into that deep state and you have an intention for self-healing, it’s very, very powerful. And the Sutra that Patanjali talked about for self-healing, your own body is navel or nabhi which is… that’s the access to your inside self. And if you have an intention and repeat that…that works really well.
And the mantra for distance healing is called inner light…which happened to be photons, by the way. And that’s the sutra that was used, talked about thousands of years ago for distance healing. Pretty cool.
And I’ve written some articles about this. Just go to LifeSpa.com type in biophotons, and you’ll get all the science and all the mantras and all that stuff as well. But it even gets better than that OK Lois.
What’s really cool about that, so now we have sort of some logical explanation of why all these gap therapies exist in nature and why it’s all about the gap between the breaths and of course that’s pranayam. Pranayam means breath, yam means hold, pause, or extend the breath. And when you do pranayam breathing techniques, which you do when you do nose breathing, by definition, you slow the breath down.
We had 48 breaths per minute to 14 breaths per minute for the same workload, clearly slowing the breath down, clearly doing pranayam, which is the extension of the breath. And even kumbhak, or breath retention, has been well studied to be like a really powerful thing. And they first discovered this with freedivers when they would dive, dive deep. If they didn’t die down there, hold their breath for 11 or 12 minutes, they had all these like amazing benefits.
And they actually called those amazing benefits intermittent hypoxia, where you’re for a short period of time, allowing the body to become hypoxic. And that hypoxia creates almost like a hermetic stress where if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. Just like autophagy, right? You don’t eat, you’re in calorie restriction without starvation, the body thinks, ‘whoa, this could be bad… I might not get food. I better do cellular repair and cellular recycling’. And we have this autophagy benefit, which is what fasting and that kind of thing’s about. But holding your breath does a very similar thing.
The body thinks you better start breathing soon. So let’s say you’re holding your breath, right? And your oxygen saturation when you start is 98 % saturation…and then all of a sudden you hold your breath and it starts going down, down, down, down. And when it goes below 90, you’re in intermittent hypoxia. In intermittent hypoxia, if you’re doing a breath hold or a breath extension, which you’d only do gently over time under some supervision, because you need to kind of gradually build up to that.
Studies show that when you do that, it boosts stem cells, were the molecule that won the Nobel Prize, the research on the molecule won the Nobel Prize in 1998 as a panacea. It increases endothelial growth factors, which protect the lining of your arteries. It increases transcription factors that have been shown to protect your genetic code.
About 2,000 of our genes are protected from these transcription factors, from expressing negative traits, which is like really cool because we all have negative traits. And as we get older, they express, unfortunately, mostly because of accelerated aging due to DNA damage, which is due to endocrine photon emissions, that whole chain. And also like what Lance Armstrong got busted for injecting, EPO, Erythropoietin you make your own when you hold your breath. Also neuroplasticity, which means that, you know, we all have emotional patterns of behavior we hold onto for like, life. Do the same dumb stuff again and again.
We all experience that when we go home for the holidays and we start dealing with our relatives and it’s like, you know, that’s old patterns of behavior exposing themselves.
Low blood pressure, blood sugar, the list of that goes on and on, but the point of pranayama has been studied and what pranayama really originally meant was to learn how to slow the breath down and extend the breath. And that’s what we’re doing here.
All right, so you probably have some questions, but there’s also a little bit more that I want to share with you that takes it even another more quantum level. So we’ll go there, but I want to give you a chance to maybe clarify a few things if I blew by some stuff too fast.
Lois (29:28)
We all need to meditate, sounds like. So it sounds like if you’re meditating, you’re naturally, you call it the photons are increasing. And so that’s gonna sort of like detoxify you and make you seem less toxic to other people.
John Douillard (29:43)
Well, I think what’s going to happen is that when you meditate, you are therefore creating more coherent photon emissions. So what’s going to be coming out of you is going to be coherent. It’s going to be more calm. Like when you’re around someone that’s really calm, it’s like they’re just comfortably calm in their skin versus someone who’s, uncomfortably not calm in their skin.
It’s a different kind of person to be around. You want to be around that easygoing, calm kind of person. The person is just simply more like the calm, lake versus a turbulent lake. And when you have the calm lake, you can see clearly to the bottom. So there’s no secrets. There’s no hidden anything. When someone’s really stressed out and you don’t know, we don’t trust that.
There was a really cool study that was done on that particular point. It was done with two types of giving. One was giving in a hedonistic way. So let’s say I give you a gift, but I want you to like it so bad, I want you to call me up and say, John, I love it, it’s the perfect color, it’s the perfect fit. And I go, yeah, I’m so cool, I did that. Versus me giving you a gift and having no expectation from any return on an investment, I just thought about you, I thought it would be great, and I gave it to you from the goodness of my heart.
When they gave in a hedonistic way, had a negative effect on the genetic code of the people I was giving it to, so you could tell that I was basically doing it for my own self-aggrandizement. And it had a negative effect on me too. Where when I gave it what’s called eudaemonic way, where I gave with no expectation to get anything in return, it had a positive effect on you, on your epinetic genetic code, and on me as well. So when we give in a way that’s coherent from a clean calm lake, with no expectation of anything in return.
In contrast, when we’re stressed out, we kind of are more into that, ‘I want that reward’ chemistry. If I give you, we need to be transactional. If I give you something, I need something in return. And that’s our culture, which unfortunately is not how nature works. It’s you know, drifting further into that, incoherent pattern of functioning as a culture. But we have these tools, yoga, breathing, meditation, prayer.
Giving, caring, being kind, helping others, being in the forest, being in nature, all these tools create the longevity hormone, oxytocin, well studied, you know, and that’s part of the coherent emissions of biophotons.
There’s many things happening when you give and you’re caring, you’re loving and kind. Your microbiome changes to be more positive. Your epigenetics change. Your oxytocin is produced. Your biophotons are changing. I mean, it’s not like just one thing. The whole physiology becomes more healthy, more coherent, more functional.
Functional as a whole, where you’re starting to thin the veil between the physical and the spiritual, where the consciousness is naturally becoming more infused into the physical body. And you’re beginning to naturally heal the cause of disease, which is the mistake of the intellect, where the physiology forgot that it came from an underlying field of intelligence.
And that takes me to the final step, at least the final step that I know about, I mean there’s a little more to it, but it’s called quantum entanglement, which is what Einstein called spooky action at a distance, where quantum entanglement means, let’s say that a photon that I have here is entangled, but that photon, because it travels at great distances, it could end up on the other side of some galaxy somewhere, literally. And if I were to observe the photon here, it would instantaneously change the photon over there.
Instantaneously means faster than the speed of light, which is not possible, which is why Einstein called it spooky action at a distance. He knew it existed, he didn’t understand it, didn’t go there, but since then, they’ve done many, many studies on entanglement. In fact, that’s the future of quantum computing.
So as a thing, and as these photons exist at the junction between consciousness and matter, field and physiology, and you put your attention at that level and have an intention at that level, for with practice of yoga, breathing, meditation, meditating at sunrise or sunset, or doing breaths retention, all these gap therapies we talked about, right? And you put your attention there because these photons are entangled with the ones in your body that might have become more particulate and lost their consciousness base, when you observe them at the level of that gap, they will instantaneously affect the spin of the photons that have may have become more particular, lost the memory of consciousness in the physiology and create an instant awakening of consciousness at that physiological level and elicit a spontaneous healing effect.
That’s the Vedic understanding of what quantum healing and Vedic healing was really all about. And why all these kind of cool, like you said, gap therapies.
Lois (35:20)
So are you saying we heal ourselves with the breath?
John Douillard (35:23)
I’m saying that the breath, ⁓ gosh yeah, mean the breath, okay that’s another thing.
The breath is the diaphragm, right? That’s the breath. And in a recent study with elite athletes, 91 % of them did not have a diaphragm relaxing and contracting fully, but none of us do. So, and the diaphragm is not just a breathing muscle, it’s a pump for your lymphatic system.
It’s the number one pump of your entire lymphatic system. And your lymphatic system is trying to do three major things. One, carry the trash out of your body, detoxify you, carry your immune system, which is like huge, and deliver fat as energy, so to give you energy to every cell of your body. And in Ayurveda, the study of the lymph is called the study of rasa, which is called rasayana, and rasayana.
And Ayurveda is the study of longevity. So from the Ayurvedic perspective, the study of the lymphatic system was literally the study of longevity.
And the point of longevity from the Ayurvedic perspective wasn’t just to say, I live to be 100, yay, I’m cool. It was more like we have this potential to live longer, and as we get older, we are more inclined and more hardwired to be able, weirdly, to perceive subtle energy and thin the veil between the physical and spiritual better than we are in the middle ages, the pitta time of our life when we’re making a living, raising our children, or the kapha time of our life when we’re still a child. Studies at UCLA say we’re not only wanting to find God before it’s too late when we get older, we’re actually hardwired to perceive that spiritual realm better as a wise old age individual.
And that’s kind of a really, really cool thing as well. So we need a long life to really reach that number one desire and have the capacity to thin the veil between the physical and spiritual. So we don’t have to just die to find out we are spirit, we can actually start having that become a much more part of our life as a spiritual being in a physical body as we get older because we’re literally hardwired to be able to pull that off, people just think, oh, you’re old, that’s it, you’re done, you have no value.
Well, it turns out you kind of do according to the more recent research, And Ayurveda said that in the last part of your life, the last third, the Vata time, that you are more air and akasha and space-based. We do thin out a little bit, we lose some muscle mass, we become more air, not so muscular and solid, even though that’s important to maintain. We become way more able to perceive subtle energy. So that all starts with your diaphragm, by the way, because your diaphragm is the pump of your whole lymphatic system. And if the diaphragm is not functional, your lymphatic system, which is your immune system, your detox system, energy delivery system, is compromised. And most of us, as we get older, we start breathing really shallow, the rib cage gets tight, diaphragm can’t work.
91 % of athletes didn’t have a diaphragm relaxing and contracting fully, so like none of us do. So we have to learn how to do these pranayama breathing techniques and I actually teach what I like to call calis- yoga is one of the things. As long as you’re doing yoga postures and breathing slowly, long and deep into that posture, you’re going to create a level of breathing elasticity. But if you’re just in the yoga posture, just doing your normal breathing, it’s not going to actually reverse the stress-based, gravity-based rigidity of our rib cage and spinal cord and the compromised pump of cerebral spinal fluid into your brain chemistry, which is the lymphatic and glymphatic systems of your brain.
And if you don’t have that breathing pump working, the three pounds of trash we pump out of our brain every year while we sleep doesn’t get dumped out. And that is an accelerant to the aging process, which is another problem. And you’re like, I’m sorry to bring all these problems, but they’re all like connected and they’re simply fixed by creating the eye of the storm, using your diaphragm, know, strengthening your digestion. I mean, there’s like three simple things, you know, one is your lifestyle, one is your diaphragm, make sure that’s working so you can create a functional lymphatic pump. And the other one is of course, learning how to, create that eye of the storm.
Lois (39:29)
Like when you hear about someone’s grandmother who smoked the Camel cigarettes until she was 90 years old and drank her cordials a couple times throughout the evening and lived a happy life. No stress.
John Douillard (39:42)
There is, I think there is, mean, there’s genetics involved there too, but I do think there’s something to that. I think some of those things are hormetic. Little people doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I mean, there’s studies that show that if you take a little bit of pesticide, makes you live longer. I wrote an article about this, and that’s why diving into digestion for a minute, our culture is being told, if you wanna live a long life, don’t eat wheat, don’t eat bread, don’t eat dairy, don’t eat nuts, seeds, beans, lectins, nitrates, goitrogens, phytic acids, oxalates, night shades, don’t eat any of that because it’s hard to digest and you’re not gonna feel good. And of course, that’s really a dumb idea, if that’s all you do. If you eat the food and feel bad, for sure don’t eat it. But that… taking that food out of the diet didn’t fix anything. It just took the stressor out of the diet. And those foods that are harder to digest would have been eaten for millions of years.
They found gluten in the teeth of ancient humans three and a half million years ago. So gluten is not like some poison. It’s a harder to digest protein which requires strong digestion. And if you don’t have strong digestion, which our culture doesn’t, then, the studies show that the protein and the fat, if it’s not completely digested, will get into the intestinal tract not digested completely. And because those proteins and fats are not digesting, and by fats I mean environmental pollutant fats are bad fats, there’s also good fats, but either way, if they’re not broken down properly, they’re going to get into, they’re going be too big to get into your bloodstream.
That’s the quote from the actual study. They’re going to go into the garbage can, which we all wish was just the toilet, but it’s not. It’s the collecting ducts of your lymphatic system. And when those toxins get into your lymph, they get into the fat around your belly. They get into your skin lymph, make your skin look less than healthy. They get into your brain lymph, creating cognitive decline, inflammation, infection, autoimmune concerns, which is hard science now. So all that stuff that we have, it’s problematic. It’s back… if you take it to its source… it’s digestive strength.
So we want to make sure that we break those proteins and fats down the way we were designed. So we actually deliver them as opposed to break them down. But our culture says, eat, don’t eat, don’t eat. And those foods that are hard to digest have a hormetic effect. They irritate the lining just enough to create gut immunity, which is your 70 % of your immune response. And there are studies to prove that.
Studies show that people eat wheat compared to people who are gluten-free but don’t have to be. They’re not celiac, but they don’t eat wheat because they don’t feel good eating it. People who eat the wheat have four times less mercury in their blood than people who are gluten-free but don’t have to be. They have significantly more good bugs, less bad bugs, and more killer T cells than the people who are gluten-free but don’t have to be, right? So that’s pretty cool. And then there was the…
Lois (41:37)
It’s hard to compare two different people. Like if you compare me with my next door neighbor. Very different diets. You know. I just want to say that I have an issue with wheat. Like I can’t eat it anymore. I did get tested for celiac, my dad has it. And when they tested me, I it was like inconclusive
I have done Pancha Karma where I’ve done these cleanses and I feel great. I live down the street from a French bakery and I started eating croissants a couple times a week and then all the symptoms came back again. So I feel like it’s the pesticides in the US that they’re putting on these foods.
Like when I eat blueberries, if they’re not organic my tongue will itch. I’m assuming that’s pesticide I can eat blueberries that are organic… do you know what mean?
And I did try some sourdough bread from a local farmer’s market. They said, this is artisanal, ancient grain organic and the sourdough is gonna eat 90 % of the gluten. You should have no problem. I took a bite and I’m like, oh, it’s delicious. And at the end of the week, I was sick. I was very, very sick. So.
John Douillard (42:47)
Well, you might in fact be celiac and don’t know it and having a little bit of an autoimmune reaction to it. And of course, like I said, if you don’t feel good eating it, don’t eat it. But that the follow up to me is the most critical part. I’m not trying to get everybody to eat wheat, even though wrote a book called Eat Wheat. That wasn’t the point. The point was that a lot of these food sensitivities are canaries in the coal mine telling your body something’s actually wrong.
But we just take the food out and then we kind of bubble wrap our diet and don’t eat, don’t eat, don’t eat. And a lot of people now eat meat and rice and vegetables, that’s it. And that’s really limited compared to our ancestors when they ate everything and they tried everything.
So we have an article called the Digestive Health Quiz and you can take that quiz and… find out what part of your digestion is broken based on the symptoms that are specific to a stomach issue or a liver issue or a gallbladder issue or a pancreatic duodenal issue or intestinal issue or a microbiome issue or a lymph issue. And then we have a lymph quiz as well. And you can begin to kind of troubleshoot where the problem might be and try to boost that.
Because even if you are a little bit of a kind of a subclinical celiac, which it sounds like you might be, people who have celiac…Taking the wheat out of diet doesn’t solve their problem. Actually, they still have long-term nutritional deficiency issues for a lifetime. So it’s not like wheat was the culprit. It was a food that was hard to digest, that was overeating.
And yes, pesticides kill the microbes in your mouth that make the enzymes to help us digest the wheat. So it is an issue. But you got to find clean wheat and clean everything. And you’re probably like that to make sure that you’re getting foods that have bugs on it that naturally create the enzymes to help you digest a more robust diet, which is really important.
So the key there is to keep looking and say, want to be like I was when I was 18 maybe. I had a wider variety of foods that I could tolerate and now I don’t want to see my life going down the road where I’m having to eat less and less and bubble wrapping my diet. And then there’s nothing left to eat. And as we get older, we need…good digestion to stay strong, because we tend to thin out as we get older anyway, right? So that’s a piece of the longevity puzzle.
And there was that Amish study, which was my favorite study of all, which is where they took Amish kids who have the lowest rates of asthma on the planet, the lowest rates. And their genetic cousins, the Hutterites from the same valley in Switzerland, they came here and they became sterile dairy farmers, and they have the highest rates of asthma on the planet. And the Amish kids run barefoot in the barn, and they breathe all the barn dust constantly and they have the lowest rates. So they measured the dust in the barn of the Amish kids and they found it was the dust that was irritating the respiratory tract just enough to create an immune response against asthma. And it was a hormetic effect. So we don’t want to bubble wrap our life, our lifestyle or our diet. We want to be robust and diverse and have a wide variety of things that we can tolerate.
So that’s what I would suggest with you is so let’s troubleshoot this a little bit. I mean, you look beautiful, you’re healthy, look great, but I want that kind of robust energy and vitality in your 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s. And I think having a restricted diet, doesn’t mean you should eat bad food, but you should be able to as sort of like an acid test. Like, can I go eat some fried food and be okay. Sure, don’t eat it on a regular basis, obviously. Should I be able to eat anything and be okay? Yes. You don’t have to worry about a hormetic effect of pesticides. You’re getting it even if you eat the cleanest diet possible, you’re going to get it. But that means that it’s, ⁓ go ahead. Yeah, go ahead.
Lois (47:15)
A friend of mine’s wife was an organic farmer and the farm next to hers was not organic and should be livid because his chemicals are spraying onto her organic produce. So I know that I’m still getting pesticides if I eat organic but I like to think I’m getting less and I know that I’m pretty sensitive.
And so I seek out the highest quality food. The only thing that I really eliminate is the wheat. And I’d be happy to eat it if I didn’t get sick. But I can’t, unfortunately.
John Douillard (47:52)
It sounds like you have some celiac tendencies which means that there’s some irritation, hypersensitivity to certain proteins in your gut. And that’s usually stomach acid. That’s who breaks down those proteins.
So looking at strength of your stomach acid and your diaphragm is intimately connected to that, your breathing is, because the diaphragm has been shown in at least 15 studies. If you strengthen your diaphragm, do maximum. diaphragmatic breathing or what’s called inspiratory breathing, maximum inhales, it’ll reverse the heartburn, GERD reflux in about 15 different studies. Your doctor doesn’t tell you that when you go for your heartburn checkup. He just gives you pills. But studies show that your diaphragm is intimately connected to the strength of your stomach acid. So that would be like a simple low-hanging fruit for you to look into.
And I’ve got a couple articles. You will go to what is called the best diaphragmatic breathing exercises, which are the calisthenics for the diaphragm. There’s three videos there. There’s one called lateral breathing, which gets you deep breathing down low and breathing out to the side versus just up and down. And then there’s also an article on the science for breathing for your heartburn. So that’s important as well. If you have that, tendency you want to read about those studies.
Yeah, I’m talking about more of the audience. Some people in the audience might have it. Yeah.
Lois (49:11)
yeah, this isn’t just about me. Lol! This is great though. I’ll find those articles and I’ll link to them in the show notes
John Douillard (49:13)
Yeah.
Lois (49:26)
Is there anything else that you want to go over?
John Douillard (49:31)
I think we, I mean, we did a really cool job. We went from the, from the runner’s high to quantum healing, to breathing, to digestion. I mean, that covers a lot.
Lois (49:40)
I think we covered a lot of territory. It super interesting for me. Do you want to talk a little bit about how people can learn more and connect with you?
John Douillard (49:50)
Yeah, my website at LifeSpot.com, L-I-F-E-S-P-A.com. That’s where you can get access to, like 1,500 articles all Ayurveda and science based, so you can type in your health concern and figure out what’s going on and get free information.
Also, one of my other books was called The Three Season Diet, which is all about eating seasonally, which is a huge piece of the puzzle. Sort of demystifies diet, which is hard to demystify everybody historically on this planet ate seasonally, they didn’t have a choice. And so what we did was we put together grocery lists for winter, summer and spring. And you can take these grocery lists. You can actually just go to our home page and there’s like a little link there where you can just type in and get all this like some of all these articles that I talk about today on that home page. And but you basically get the grocery list and you just print them out. One for winter, which is this harvest. And the ones for summer harvest one for a spring harvest, the green one, and one for a winter harvest, which is a fall harvest for winter eating. There’s three harvests in nature.
There’s four seasons, obviously, but there’s three harvests. And we should eat according to those harvests to get the right bugs from the soil in your gut at the right time, because your bugs in the soil change from season to season. The bugs in the hunter-gatherer guts change from season to season, and that is a hard science, Stanford research. So we should inoculate our gut with the right bugs for the right season.
And all you really have to do is when we go into the season, like this is the summer diet, the red one, circle the foods on here that you like and shop and eat more of those foods that you like. And then at the same time, the ones with the asterisk are the superfoods. So don’t have to like eat only seasonal food, but you definitely want to get sort of medicinal dosages of seasonal food for sure.
And so that’s one thing. And then of course at LifeSupply.com we have…
Lots of free articles. You can sign up for our newsletter I write articles constantly and am publishing three times a week on lifestyle to talk about new, ancient, wisdom, modern science connections, which are really cool. We also have an Ayurvedic store. That’s how we pay the bills. All of our knowledge is for free, but at our store, I’ve been formulating Ayurvedic herbs for decades and decades. And so that’s all there. Our skincare there, all our books are there, our stuff like that’s there as well.
And I’m also on all the social media channels. You can follow me there as well and get little snippets about kind of latest cutting edge research that we’re talking about or writing about at LifeSpa. LifeSpa is like a library for you to go and get a deep dive if you want a deep dive knowledge. The shorts that we all do is sort of like little snippets, know, and, but if you want to go deep, this is a great library for you guys and libraries for free.
Lois (52:28)
I was on your website for a while doing research for this show and got very distracted. So there’s a lot of super cool articles. I’m like, oh, let me get back. What am I going to ask them? But really a lot of very interesting articles. So thank you for sharing that knowledge to everyone for free.
John Douillard (52:31)
Yeah.
Lois (52:43)
Thank you so much.
John Douillard (52:47)
Yeah, thank you, Lois. Great to be here.
📚 Resources & Mentions
📖 Books/Articles:
Dr. John Douillard’s books can be found here: https://store.lifespa.com/product-category/education-books-ecourses-etc/books/
- Body Mind & Sport – The mind-body Guide to Lifelong Health, Fitness and Your Personal Best
- Eat Wheat – A Scientifically and Clinically-Proven Approach to Safely Bring Wheat and Dairy Back into Your Diet
- The Three Season Diet, Eat the Way Nature Intended
- Perfect Health for Kids, Ten Ayurvedic Health Secrets Every Parent Must Know
- Encyclopedia of Ayurvedic Massage
- Colorado Cleanse – Guide to the 14-Day Colorado Cleanse and Seasonal Cookbook
- Short Home Cleanse – Guide to the 4-Day Short Home Cleanse
🌐 Website and research links mentioned in the show:
26:12 The Healing Power of Prana, Intention and biophotons – https://lifespa.com/intro-ayurveda/vedic-healing/healing-prana-intention-biophotons/
26: 12 Using Intentional Meditation for Distance healing – https://lifespa.com/intro-ayurveda/intentional-meditation-for-distance-healing/
44:29 The Digestive Health Quiz – https://lifespa.com/health-topics/digestion/take-our-digestive-health-quiz/
44:31 The lymph quiz – https://lifespa.com/health-topics/lymphatic-system/cleanse-lymphatic-system/
49:00 A Breathing Practice for Occasional Heartburn – https://lifespa.com/ayurvedic-lifestyle/breathwork/breathing-practice-heartburn-2/
53:00 The Best Diaphragmatic Exercises: Breath Training for Better Health – https://lifespa.com/ayurvedic-lifestyle/breathwork/best-diaphragmatic-exercises/
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