219 - Boundaries, Breath, and Belonging - Foundations for Recovery

I'm joined by Bal Matharu to talk about how breathing links the nervous system, stress biology, and Long Covid symptoms, and why recovery often begins with creating a genuine felt sense of safety. We share practical ways to assess and change breathing patterns, plus the role of co-regulation, boundaries, and carefully held breathwork support. 

• Bal’s path from advanced respiratory physiotherapy and ICU work to lifestyle medicine and PhD breathwork research 
• The six pillars of lifestyle medicine and why stress management often underpins the rest 
• Acute stress versus chronic stress and how the body shifts blood flow, hormones, and immune function 
• Cell danger theory, mitochondria, ATP, and why fatigue can be a protection signal 
• Safety as a felt sense through neuroception rather than a purely cognitive idea 
• Breath assessment basics, posture, high chest breathing, diaphragm use, and longer exhales 
• Overstimulation, silence avoidance, and letting emotions move through the body in short windows 
• Co-regulation, practitioner capacity, and building safe spaces for nervous system work 
• Boundaries, people pleasing patterns, and choosing relationships that support regulation 
• Selecting credible breathwork practitioners and avoiding unsafe cathartic methods 

Links:

Bal's Website: https://www.bodymind-iq.com
Embody Ecosystem: https://go.bodymind-iq.com/embody-ecosystem

For more information about Long Covid Breathing courses & workshops, please check out LongCovidBreathing.com

(music credit - Brock Hewitt, Rule of Life)

Transcript

Welcome And What We Are Exploring

Jackie Baxter 0:00

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Long COVID podcast. I am delighted to be joined today by Bal Matharu, who is joining me today to talk about the nervous system and breathing, and I'm sure we're going to get into a whole load of other things. Let's do this. So I am really excited to get into all of this today. So a very warm welcome. It's lovely to meet you and thank you for being here.

Bal Matharu 0:26

Thank you, Jackie, for having me. It's a pleasure to be on the podcast with you.

Jackie Baxter 0:30

Oh, it's it's uh it's absolutely my pleasure. Um, so can you just say a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Bal Matharu 0:39

Yeah, sure. Well, you pronounce my name very well. And I am through background, I'm a trained physiotherapist. I've been an advanced respiratory physiotherapist now going on 25 years. Um, I was working in the NHS

ICU Burnout To Breathwork Research

Bal Matharu 0:56

uh for within respiratory departments, whether it was respiratory wards, whether it was medical surgical wards, uh, intensive care units throughout the whole of COVID. I was also posted in to head up the intensive care unit and also um working in the community. We stretched ourselves quite thin during this time and elective surgery as well. Um, and it was a period of stretching ourselves so thin that we were working ridiculous hours across many departments and many, many hospitals as well, um, just to ensure that there was cover on the ground level. And um two years after COVID had started in 2022, due to the extensive work, I burnt out, and uh after the burnout, I basically um wanted to have a look at what why were people coming into hospital um with long COVID in their 20s, in their 30s, in their 40s, and really sick with it on double ventilator support and needing a lot of um support just to wean themselves off the ventilators, um, whilst there were people with comorbidities out in the community who had got the virus and not very unwell with it. So, what constitutes the difference here? So that led me down the route of lifestyle medicine, and I really engaged in lifestyle medicine and then started a PhD with uh looking at how a very structured breathwork protocol over one month can actually change the metrics or the biometrics on um inflammatory conditions, so somatic symptom disorders, and um it's looking at heart rate, bearability, heart rate, blood pressure, etc., but also health-related quality of life markers as well over a one-month period. And I've just finished the um uh the I've done the clinical trials and I've finished the results section, and the results have come out really well in the sense that you know it's it's showing really beneficial in even having a a small change, but a very positive change in people's health-related quality of life. Um, so just got the last part right up, and then I'll be submitting that in, and that thesis is uh done. So, yeah, looking forward to finishing.

Jackie Baxter 3:18

Wow, that is exciting, and uh and congratulations on on uh getting that kind of um sewn up. That sounds like quite a big, a big thing. Yeah, and um I mean I I love that you're saying that you know it is showing that it's helping people because you know, in a I see this day in, day out with the work that I do, and you know, we hear from so many people that there are things that help. Um, I mean, it's important that we find the right things in the right way. Um, but it is just it's it's so validating to hear that, which I love. Um, and I really want to get into talking about all of everything that you just said. Um, you mentioned lifestyle medicine, and could you just explain what that is for people who aren't quite clear?

Bal Matharu 4:08

Yeah, it's a discipline of medicine which has um which was formed around about 30 odd years ago, and they had a look at what constitutes good health, and lifestyle medicine is based on on those principles. So the six principles and the six um sorry, six pillars, and the six pillars are nutrition, good nutrition, it's movement, not necessarily exercise, but movement. Um, the third pillar is stress management, the fourth pillar is sleep management, so good restorative, hygienic sleep, um, and the fifth pillar is community and also um connection, connection with yourself, connection with others, and then the sixth pillar is substance abuse and just ensuring that we

Lifestyle Medicine Pillars That Matter

Bal Matharu 4:53

are minimizing substance abuse, and that can be not just inhaled or um consumed, but also the media, the uh the screens that we're looking at, etc. So then they uh they formed this, and there's a British Society of Lifestyle Medicine, there's an American Association of Lifestyle Medicine, Global One, and also World Health Organization recognizes it as well. And um they then study, went on to study people living in blue zones, and there's six zones across the world, and these in these zones people live up to centuries, a century centurions, and uh they they live very healthy, very healthy lives, and they're very mobile, very purpose-driven, they live off the land, they move every day, and it again confounded well or just gave us more evidence that these six principles actually do really constitute good health. So many people, or uh I should say many GPs, many health practitioners are training up in in lifestyle medicine because it forms the basis of uh good health, what constitutes good health, because it's not just about um medication or um how can we manage a disease, it's how can we actually reverse the the disease, get to the root cause and reverse it. So, for example, diabetes, they've done this study in in America where they took men um with type 2 diabetes um very heavily dependent on insulin, some for years and years, and they took them. And you wouldn't believe, Jackie, how quickly, just by changing their nutrition, how quickly half the men came off insulin completely. It was 16 days, which is phenomenal. So just by changing certain metrics, you can actually change the trajectory on your on your health.

Jackie Baxter 6:47

That that is staggering, isn't it? Um, you know, and and it's obviously one very specific cohort of people, but you know, it kind of I think if you can make that much difference in one specific sort of group, there must be benefits to other other groups as well.

Bal Matharu 7:08

Absolutely. There's there's been benefits to like cardiovascular disease, uh, type 2 diabetes, hypertension. There's been again many groups of people. And over here, I'm just in Mauritius at the moment, where we've just submitted a pilot project to the government, um, which is all based on how we can utilize the six principles of lifestyle medicine uh with a cohort of uh patients with type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and chronic fatigue syndrome to start reversing through the trajectory of a disease at um a larger level.

Jackie Baxter 7:48

Yeah, I think I mean what's what's kind of striking me as well, I just as you listed all of those six pillars, was that you know, it they are our survival needs, aren't they? Like if we are meeting our needs, then our nervous system is already going to have a level of safety that it wouldn't if you weren't meeting those needs. But I think you know it it it comes back to what can we do and where can we start? Because we we can't fix everything all at once. It would be beautifully wonderful if we could, but it's very difficult to fix everything all at once. And if we try, we become overwhelmed usually. I think if we try to do that, but there's something quite nice about having a list where you can look at it and think, okay, where are the biggest gains to be had? And let's start there, and then kind of work your way through that list, and and then you sort of have a foundation almost, I'm kind of thinking, and and you can then build upon that. But it it seems to me that it's it's a sort of foundation of well, health and and wellness, I suppose, or the foundation of recovery. Yeah, it is absolutely so right.

Bal Matharu 9:09

And um just on that, it's like if the one of the papers that I wrote was on out of all these pillars, which is the one that you really want to concentrate on, which is the one that you really want to maybe bring bring to the front, like you say, you don't want overwhelm either. So for me, it was stress management looking at the studies around and how stress is the underpinning one below all the others. So if you're stressed, if you're highly stressed, you won't make the right food choices, you won't exercise, you won't um, you won't have should I say, you won't have you bring your best to a relationship, you'll probably go for substance abuse and you won't sleep very well. So stress seems to be the underlying pillar in some of the, like I say, some of the evidence that I picked. Um so for stress management, things like breathing would come into that because breathing is the lever for stress management. Um, so breathing comes very comfortably into that, and I'd say it's the foundation of good health is when you can take a breath and also pause and pause before you make any decision.

Jackie Baxter 10:19

Yes, yeah, there's a beautiful quote.

Stress As The Hidden Driver

Jackie Baxter 10:22

I can't remember who said it, otherwise I would attribute it to them. Uh, but it's something along the lines of the best response to anything is to take a breath. Yeah. So it gives us that kind of you know, instant pause um or moment of kind of regulation before you even think about how you're going to respond. And honestly, there are some emails that I have sent in my past that I wish I'd taken that breath before sending. And uh I imagine everyone's probably got a similar story along those lines that they're uh kind of going, yep.

Bal Matharu 11:00

Yeah, I think so. Absolutely. If we could all just take a pause before we reacted, we would respond as opposed to react.

Jackie Baxter 11:09

Yeah. Absolutely. Yes. And I think, you know, I I I think you're right about you know, stress, because if we are stressed, our body doesn't feel safe. And therefore, you know, if we're exercising or moving, we may be doing it in a way that isn't supportive of our body. You know, as you say, we may not be making the wisest choices in terms of food and other things, and we're not able to really socially connect when we're in that activated state, are we? So, you know, it's it's kind of yeah, as you say, you know, stress management or nervous system regulations is that kind of foundation. And I would love, because I think the the word stress has connotations attached to it. And uh, you know, possibly because people have just been told in the past, oh, you're just stressed, you just need to calm down and chill out, which has got to be one of the most patronizing things anyone can ever be told. Um, and I think possibly because of that, the word stress is sort of misunderstood. So I would love if you could kind of clarify sort of different types of stress or what what you might mean by stress or what that might encompass.

Bal Matharu 12:27

Yeah, yeah, sure. So stress in itself isn't bad, it's required. We need stress, otherwise, we wouldn't get off the off the sofa when we're watching Netflix to go and make our make our dinner or anything. So we do need that level of stress to get up and go, get out of bed and get moving. And that stress is usually called youth stress, and it's when we actually do push ourselves into the stress mode to do things. Um, historically, if we didn't have stress, our prehistoric ancestors they would have died by uh a saber-toothed tiger or something like that. They need a level of stress to move, however, so acute stress isn't a bad thing. You get into stress mode, um, you do the thing that you need to do. So basically, during stress, we have our blood flow move away from our digestive system, our pre-productive system, and our immune system, and it goes out into the muscles, it goes into the head for us to start

Chronic Stress And Cellular Energy Loss

Bal Matharu 13:23

looking at how we can fight or flight and respond to what it is that is in front of us. Um, and that's where cognitively you you know your attention becomes acute, you basically bring all of your focus into one thing, you're ready to literally fight or you're ready to run. Um, and then once the threat is over, your cortisol level and your adrenaline level, which usually is quite peaked at these points, they come down, your blood flow moves away from your peripheries and it goes back into your stomach area, so your digestive system can come back on, your reproductive system can come back on, your immune system can come back on. Um, with today's stresses, we're just not going into back into the parasympathetic rest and digest, and we're finding ourselves in chronic stressed uh states. And what that meat looks like is that when adrenaline switches off, but cortisol is still running high and noradrenaline runs high, and noradrenaline is a pro-inflammatory chemical which actually does break down tissues in our own body, but it does it to actually protect us because it knows no better. Um but what we're meant to do is come back into a relaxed state which we don't give our bodies a chance to. So, in that really chronic stress state, our tissues are breaking down, we our nervous systems are consistently off, so we've got now not just physical stress, but we've got physiological cellular stress going on. And in cellular stress, this is where conditions like long COVID, where the cells get stuck in stress mode, and especially the mitochondria, which is Dr. Robert Naviot's theory, uh the cell danger theory, which actually suggests that at a cellular level the mitochondria they have a function in normal uh in normal day-to-day, and that is in a healthy body, what they do is they produce ATP, which is energy. However, when you have any physiological stress, they stop producing ATP extracellularly, and intracellularly in the cell, they go into defense mode, and that is to protect the cell from the um the stressful biochemical behavior going on around that area. And so when it goes into that mode, it is then protecting that cell, and it also lets the other cells know as well in the area that let your mitochondria go into the function of cellular protection and not energy production. So once the um once you've come back out of that stress mode, it usually is a case that your biology will change. But if you're not coming out of the stress mode, then your cells are still in that kind of protection mode and you're not producing any cellular energy, which is why you feel so fatigued, because at a cellular level, your cells aren't functioning for you to have energy, they're functioning for you to be safe. So that's where we get stuck in a chronic fatigue type syndrome.

Jackie Baxter 16:40

So the sort of the argument of nervous system versus mitochondria is actually not an argument because they are one and the same thing.

Bal Matharu 16:50

Yeah, absolutely. So the nervous system is the system that helps determine whether we're safe or not. And if we're not safe, then shut down or get ready to run. And if we are safe, bring everything back on. So if the nervous system is working at such a on a such a basic level, working in those two modes, then yes, um, everything within the body is actually listening to is it safe or is it not safe? And they're the two commands, but that's at a very, very basic, basic level, and there's a lot more nuances there.

Jackie Baxter 17:27

Yes. I think we can be guilty of oversimplifying, but also overcomplicating things because at its heart, it is a incredibly simple theory. Am I safe? Am I not? If you are safe, the body will function. If you're not safe, the body won't, or it will function in the protective mode. Um, so on the face of it, it's like, okay, well, this is really easy. I just need to feel safe. But the actuality of achieving that in each individual person with everyone's individual life experiences and what is currently going on in their life, that is where it becomes much more complicated, much more nuanced. And it's, you know, very much, you know, pieces of your own individual puzzle to work through. So yeah, I guess it's it's this kind of like balance of very simple concept. So then we get into the nuances of okay, all right then. So how do we achieve this then? So um, there we go. That's my next question. How would you approach this with somebody? Um, where you say, Oh, this is what's going on in the body. Now, what do we do?

Bal Matharu 18:39

So if we just have a maybe take a step back and say that stress isn't just what happens today, it's an accumulation. If you just mentioned that, it's an accumulation of what's happened to that individual throughout their life course, not just through their life course, also epigenetically through previous generations as well, because we carry that thread in our DNA. And it's that response that they have of learnt behavior, identity behavior, of how quickly they respond to a stressful situation, how quickly is their amygdala being fired off because they recognize an email as being more threatening than someone else would if they didn't have the same response, basically. So two people have different reactions to the same stressor, is what I'm trying to say. Um, and that is, like I say,

Creating Safety With Breath And Senses

Bal Matharu 19:29

how much how much they've carried over a life course. So, how much accumulation they've had. So, basically, the way I'd address this is have a look at a person how stressed or how stimulated they are in that moment, how quickly they're getting to that point, how and how that affects their physical health, their mental health. And it's about providing safety in the first instance. How can we provide safety to them? And safety comes in different guises. One of the ways is through regulating your own system, but another way is through co-regulating with someone else because we're co-regulatory beings. Then also nurturing safety from our neuroceptive field, so from things like our five senses, um, even the sense of touch, and bringing a level of safety into the body through those mechanisms, through those organisms, through you know, sound therapy, through smelling certain smells, through seeing certain things, through tasting the foods that they love, through I'm going through the five senses here, through the sense of touch, you know, with a loved one that you feel that connection and that safety with. So it is basically how can you nurture that level of safety and make it a felt sense and then to use the breath because the breath is the lever in our um in our nervous system, so we can use the breath to really accelerate ourselves and go into the stress mode, or we can use the breath to de-accelerate ourselves and go into the calm rest and digest system. So, you know, how are we using the breath? But alongside that, the other thing I would do, Jackie, is always do a breath assessment for me being a respiratory background, looking at the way people are breathing. So a lot of people these days they're breathing right up here in their apices, like in their accessory using the accessory respiratory muscles. By using them and breathing up here, their shoulders are elevated, and when the shoulders are elevated, they've got shortening of these muscles on the side of their neck called your scalenes and sterlocomastoid. When they shorten, they're pressing on the vagus nerve. So they're dampening down the function of the nerve that is helping us to relax. So the first thing to do is actually have a look at the posture and where are they actually holding themselves? So relax your shoulders down, relax your chest area, where are they breathing into? Are they breathing into their chest or are they breathing into their diaphragm? Because, or should I say, into their belly, because it's the diaphragm that's the respiratory muscle. Are they using it at all? And these days, because we're so hyped up like this, automatically we're using our chest muscles as opposed to our our diaphragm muscle. So we're not really belly breathing. So the first thing for me would always be to correct their breathing. Second is that that whole kind of safety element, bringing the safety in, and then the third is just really getting them to do diaphragmatic breathing with a longer exhale to bring them back down into the parasympathetic rest and digest mode so their own immune system, which is their own body's innate intelligence, can help them actually start feeling the sense of safety and coming back online to help them heal.

Jackie Baxter 22:53

Yes, yeah, I love that. And um, you know, I think you know, this the sense of safety is so important. And one of the things that I try to get across to people a lot is that you mentioned the word no reception earlier. Um, and you know, this this concept that safety is felt. Safety is not a cognitive exercise. It's not whether you think you're safe, it's whether the body feels that it's safe. And as someone who has spent up until more recently, a lot of their life stuck in their head to escape their body, that was a really bizarre kind of concept to me. The idea that I had to feel and I didn't really want to feel, and uh, you know, sort of fought against that quite a lot. And um, you know, realizing that actually, yeah, that safety was felt in the body was like a bit of a light bulb moment for me.

Bal Matharu 23:55

Absolutely, and you know, we cognitively we think we try and rationalise everything, but only 5% is actually up here, 95% is in the body, 95% of our intelligence is in the body, and our bodies are so intelligent when we eat something, we don't have to think about how are we going to assimilate this piece of food. Our body does it naturally and it extracts all the nutrients, it gets rid of all the waste, and it's such an automated process because it is such an intelligent system that we're living in. But we think our intelligences are in our head, but it's really not. It's like how many times do we actually stop to really listen into the body because the body actually has intuition, it will guide us through anything as well, and because we're now even more so with our phones, etc., and the distractions as gym trolling, we're so much now blind to or or um mute to whatever you want to say, or completely cut off from head down. We are are so not in touch with what's going on in the felt sense, we're so up here um that we're constantly burning this out a lot. It's it's uh in overdrive.

Jackie Baxter 25:12

Yeah, you're so right. And I think something that I have noticed as well, and I don't I imagine quite a lot of people can relate to this from what I have heard from conversations, is you know, you you mentioned over-stimulation, and the world we live in is so incredibly overstimulating. You know, we you mentioned phones, you know, we're very rarely just you know disconnected from our phones. You know, when in our lives do we actually have stillness and silence in space? And I think for many people we don't. And certainly in my experience, I would do anything to avoid silence and stillness in space. I would, you know, ramp up the stimulation. You know, if I'm sitting in my house, I will try and invent tasks to do. I'll put music on to avoid silence. I'll continue to work myself in the

Stillness And Letting Feelings Move

Jackie Baxter 26:08

ground in order to avoid actually feeling things that are uncomfortable in my body. And these were all things that I had no awareness of at all. And then once I did start to notice them, it was definitely a kind of okay, well, I understand that, but I don't want to, because you know, it's it's like it's that reconnecting with yourself, isn't it? Which you know is a beautiful thing to do, but it's not always comfortable. I don't is is this something that you see as well? Because I see it a lot.

Bal Matharu 26:42

Yeah, absolutely. You're so so right. People don't necessarily want to do that work because they don't necessarily want to revisit some of the old stories. Um, and you can understand that, but there's a level of breath work that you can do also, which is without stories, that you can just go into the felt sense of whatever it is that you're feeling. And you know, Dr. David Hawkins' work was all about you just need to sit with the feeling, whatever it is that you're feeling, sit with the feeling for 90 seconds without judgment, and that feeling usually moves through you, and the more you're able to really go in and connect with these feelings and allow them to transmute, allow them to alchemize and move through you, the more you're able to really get in touch and connect with your authenticity and who you are before you were given all those labels and identities. Um, who are you at the core level and connect with that person in a way that you your life value is now different, you're coming from a different place, you're more authentic, your conversations are more heartfelt, you know, you're just your joyful life is on a different level because you're so heart-connected and heart-centered. So I think as much as the work is hard to do at times, there are ways of doing it with, like I say, bypassing the story and just connecting into the feeling. Because the the other thing is that the more that we have these feelings and don't allow ourselves to really feel them, the more we're pressing them down and pressing them down, and we're suppressing and repressing until the point we become depressed because we've pressed them down so much. When are we allowing ourselves to really express them and really let them go? We're not, and I think that's the work that needs to be done is allow the feeling we are human at the end of the day, we're here for every single human emotion that we could experience. Um, so let us feel it completely. If it's grief, feel it fully. 90 seconds is all it takes to work through you. So if it's you know, if it's fear, feel it fully, if it's anger, feel it fully in a safe space and allow it to go through your system. Like I say, when we hold on, that's when we run into problems. When we say no, no, no, I can't express this because it's not it's not right, I shouldn't be doing this, that's when we actually start feeling or facing the problems, and that's what's being mapped out now in the energy medicine to be associated with certain physical manifestations of these diseases in your body. So, for example, anger that's held on as a child, and I'll give you my own example actually. So, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism 23 years ago, and I was put on the highest amount of medication and told that I would only ever my medication would only ever be supplemented with other things, you won't ever come off it. So, when I did this work after burnout and really looked at breath work and did the breath work to really try and see how I can actually help myself, um, I reversed my own hypothyroid, and that was because I let go of the stories and the anger that I'd stored in my throat. Because as a girl, I was or young girl, I was always told to be seen and not heard, so I always kind of you know kept the voice in my throat and not express myself and got angry at it, even when I was angry, I'd just suppress it. If I was fearful, I'd suppress it, and it all got caught up in my throat area, and then when I did eventually express it and let those emotions go, and it didn't happen overnight, believe me, it was some work that needed to be done to really let go of them. But when I started and all these emotions were coming up for me, you know, there were screams, there was fear, there was anger, there was all sorts coming up. But when I finally let it go, and then, like I say, supplemented it with lifestyle medicine as well. When I went back to the doctor, there is no issue with my my thyroid. Well, that's incredible. Yeah, yeah. I was so, so happy because that was after 23 years of being on high stose and medication.

Jackie Baxter 31:03

Yeah. That that is, yeah, it's amazing. And I think, you know, it's all very well reading some of these stories in research papers and things like that. And you know, that that's important that they exist. But I think hearing it from a real human in a real situation, I think, makes it seem a lot more well, real and believable. I think, you know, that that these stories aren't just faceless quotes on a on a paper. This is a a real person in a real conversation who's had this experience. And I think that's why recovery stories are so powerful, isn't it?

Bal Matharu 31:39

Oh, they are. You're right. You're absolutely right.

Jackie Baxter 31:42

It's that that human connection, I suppose, isn't it, which we were talking about earlier. Um and um coming coming back to what you said a moment ago about you said 90 seconds can be enough. And you know, that that sounds a little bit more doable, doesn't it? If you think, right, this is gonna feel potentially really uncomfortable, but it's only for 90 seconds rather than you could potentially be feeling this for years. Um the the payoff sounds a little bit more like I could be invested in that. Um, but I think what you also said about doing it in a safe space is so important. Um, you know, it's got to be done in a way that does feel safe enough. And I would be interested to hear how you would approach um working with someone to feel safe enough to experience some of these emotions that can feel really uncomfortable.

Bal Matharu 32:43

So it's and let me give you you you'll you'll know this. So we are, like I mentioned, co-regulatory beings. We feel safe in the presence of someone who's actually quite regulated themselves. And um, if you walk into a room and you sometimes get this shiver, oh my god, I've just walked into a room and it doesn't feel good to me, and you'll just know automatically, you know, you know before you've even said a word that you don't want to be there, and you actually exit that room quite quickly, and that is because you feel the energy of the room. Like I say, when neurosceptive field or neurosceptive field, I should say, it actually picks up those cues because it has got so many um motor nerve endings around us, sorry, sensory nerve endings around us, and they pick up the sensory cue from around us. Um, and then if you go

Co-Regulation And Holding Safe Space

Bal Matharu 33:39

into a room where you know it might be family, it might be grandparents, etc., and you can feel the warmth and the love, and you just feel the hug and the embrace before you've even gone in. So that's the difference, and so for a person to actually feel safety, they need to feel the safety from you. So the way I approach it is that I do the work myself. So if I didn't do the work myself, I wouldn't be able to hold safe space either. So I need to know that I'm well regulated before I jump onto a breath work coaching session. I've got one tonight, and I'll be doing a pranayama, a breath work session prior to me jumping on to the call, and that is to actually ground myself in my energy, knowing that I'm going to now hold space that I've got capacity in my vessel to actually hold space for the people that will be joining me. And you can only do that, like I say, from capacity, and if you don't have capacity, then it was quite kind of you're quite dysregulated, you're you're from a place of reacting to situations, not to responding to them. So there's uh those things that I do look into, making sure that I'm in a good space, that I'm regulated prior to actually holding space for someone else.

Jackie Baxter 34:54

Yeah, and I think this is so powerful as well, isn't it? I mean, if we think about um recovery, I mean, if you're working with a coach or a breathwork, a practitioner or anyone in this space, you would hope that they understand that and that they do have capacity and that they are taking the time to be able to hold that space for somebody. And you know, it's it's a completely different situation when it's someone who is trained, but then the people who might be around you day to day. So it might be family members or children or parents, or it might be work colleagues if someone is working, or doctors, and you know, some doctors have a wonderful caring bedside manner, and some maybe less so. Um, so it's it's um it's really interesting. I I often have this conversation with people where I say, you know, what are the people who are around you and how do they make you feel? And you know, you once you start thinking about it, it's like, okay, that person does make me just drop my shoulders as soon as they walk into the room. Whereas that person, that's the chaos person. And they can be really fun when I'm feeling well enough, but when I'm not like you just dread seeing them because you just know that you can't handle their level of kind of chaos, um, that kind of dysregulation. And I think it's it's amazing when we start thinking about it. Who are the people that help you that co-regulate that safety, and who are the people that actually dysregulate you? And we don't have control over everything, but how can we be mindful of of where where we're spending our time, where we're co-regulating from, and maybe which relationships we need to maybe spend a little bit less time in at the moment. And uh and it's it's amazing when we start understanding that, isn't it? And how that role in recovery is.

Bal Matharu 36:58

It's so true, you're so right, Jackie. And I think this also gives rise to boundaries and how are we protecting our boundaries? And I think the more you become aware of this work and know that um I need to be in the presence of someone who's not going to be dysregulating to me, but more kind of a regulatory, kind of warm, safety. Um, that's that's the that's what the essence I feel of them, then it's also important for you to then start recognizing, well, I can actually say no, and I'm saying no because I'm protecting myself and putting yourself first, because again, we're so good at pleasing others, but that again is a dysregulated pattern as well. People pleasing and not putting yourself first. Um, that's a dysregulation in itself.

Jackie Baxter 37:48

Yes, it is, and I guess this is particularly challenging for people who are in caring roles, whether they're caring for children or parents or indeed anybody else, um, where that kind of where you have people relying on you for care. And I guess this is where boundaries and maybe the ability to ask for help, which we're often not very good at as well, maybe come in as as well in that situation. But even even people without caring roles, it's very difficult to say no. Um, because I I really struggled with that as well. And uh I I guess it's those kind of um the people who are a bit dysregulating, it's that ability to limit your time with them when you're not feeling up to it, or even to just tell them to just just can we can we have a bit of a pause for a moment, um, kind of thing. And and that that is difficult to do, isn't it? Especially if it's not something that you have done in the past, which often isn't.

Bal Matharu 38:54

Absolutely agree, absolutely, and you know, we're not very good at it because on a fundamental level, we only ever want to be accepted and loved, and you know, that's that's the core of of who we are, even as children. Yeah, the two primary keys are just love and safety. Um, and then when they're compromised, that's when a pattern forms, and the pattern usually, if we haven't had that love or safety, it's like, well, we've got to be we've got to be saying yes to everything for us to get that love, which is why you grow up to start saying yes to everyone and everything everything of their needs as opposed to your needs. But the more you do this work, and I found this the more you do this work and really start unlaying those identity layers that you you've put on yourself over the years as a child, um, into your teens, into adulthood, um, the more you do that, and like I say, the more you get in touch with your authenticity, the more you realize that actually I need to maintain that boundary, and people would rather you say no to them um up front and not be awkward with them just because you said yes and now you feel really awkward around them. You you know it's it's protecting them as well, it's protecting yourself, but it's protecting them, and that level of honesty is actually appreciated, so you're not doing a disservice to anyone except yourself when you don't create that boundary.

Jackie Baxter 40:24

Yeah, I I think you're right there, and I think the um it it we we don't like to show vulnerability, do we, a lot of the time? And I think there's that element of if we say no, we feel like we are letting people down, possibly, or um that we're failing, or that we're showing weakness, um, or possibly a whole load of other things that I haven't just thought of. And and I think you know, the way that you framed it just there was really nice, you know, that that saying no to things is protecting everybody. And uh I I think certainly what I have experienced with most people, but particularly my partner, is that this experience has given us an ability to communicate that we didn't have before. So I am able to say what I think rather than what I think he wants to hear. And, you know, and and he is able to do the same for me. And we fight, like, but it's coming from a place of I feel safe enough to be honest with you, rather than I don't feel good enough. So therefore I'm trying to be what I think you want me to be, which is what I had spent quite a lot of my life doing is trying to be what I thought other people wanted me to be, whether it was, you know, people I'd grown up with or society or um, you know, whatever it was. And I think it's when we are able to feel safe enough to be ourselves. I think that's a really powerful thing. But it it's a difficult place to get to, and and I definitely am not 100% there. Um, but it's it's it is, it's that feeling safe enough, isn't it?

Bal Matharu 42:07

It is, absolutely. It's it's having the space to create that safety as well. When do we actually and going back to the beginning of this conversation, when do we give ourselves time to actually pause? When do we give ourselves time to actually get bored and say, I'm not going to reach for my device, I'm not going to reach for um Netflix or anything like that, or get into a conversation with someone over the phone. I'm actually going to sit with me and my thoughts, and not even sometimes thought, I'm just going to sit with me and my breath and just give space. And when we give that level of space to ourselves, then we nurture a better relationship with ourselves, first and foremost, and then from that we can actually nurture better relationships with others because it all starts with the self.

Jackie Baxter 42:54

Yes, yeah. There's the again quote that goes something like, If you know no one else will love you if you don't love yourself. Um, it's a kind of tweak of that, isn't it?

Bal Matharu 43:05

Yeah, it is, it is, and you know, it's it's there's so many analogies of this. It's like you know, putting your own flight mask on before you put a child's on on a flight. Um, all those help yourself before you help anyone else, you know, be there for you. You're gonna be your biggest advocate. Love yourself the most before you love anyone else. Because you know, you don't if you go to give love to someone else before you love yourself, to someone else before you love yourself, it's conditional. It's like you're you're hoping to get that level of love back from them. Um, but what if you invest all that in yourself first? You become completely full, knowing that you don't need that from someone else. But when it does come, it's a bonus.

Jackie Baxter 43:49

Yes, yes. It's like you are validating yourself rather than needing somebody else to validate you. Yeah, absolutely. Yes, I love this, and you know. Making this a nice circular conversation, you know, isn't the breath a wonderful tool to work through all of this? Um, you know, it's it's just so incredibly powerful. And, you know, for me, it was the first thing that I found that helped, but it was actually the foundation that saw me all the way through the rest of my recovery, and I now see it day in, day out with other people. Um, that the breath is such a great way of influencing every part of your body, which sounds dramatic and like a really grand claim, but it's also true.

Bal Matharu 44:37

And you know, breath there's breath, and then there's breath work, and using both in a way where you use the breath to actually um navigate your nervous system in the way that we've just mentioned, using some breath work, breath types

Practical Tools And Breathwork Safety

Bal Matharu 44:54

to accelerate and some breath types to de-accelerate, and then using breath work to do the deeper work with someone who can actually hold space for you. Um together, they make a profound effect or difference on both your mental and your physical health, and that's the that's the work basically.

Jackie Baxter 45:14

Yes, yeah, exactly. Because we're not either or, you know, we're we're well holistic beings, aren't we? And that includes our mental health, our physical health, our emotional health, um, you know, every aspect of ourselves. And uh, yes, I I feel the breath has a beautiful way of tying all of those things together.

Bal Matharu 45:36

Absolutely, it does. I mean, it's the only lever we have, and it's freely available for us as well. So it's not as if we've got to pay someone to actually access it and it's it's there all the time. You could be standing in a queue, um, and all you need to do, you know, if you're feeling like anxious or you're feeling stressed because you're in a queue and you need to get somewhere, just do the box breathing, and the box breathing will just help you calm down and just come out of uh the kind of in your head and just come back down into a relaxed state for you to then move on into the queue. You could even do like light, light somatic touches, like just the touching your arms, and that in itself gives your kind of nervous system that um set felt sense of safety. There's so many things that you can do that, just small little things work within seconds just to help your system feel the sense of safety to come back down, and like I say, somatic work, breath work, it all very much is a way of communicating with a body to say, Okay, you know, you can come down. This isn't a dysfunction of any type, you can actually settle down, it's all good.

Jackie Baxter 46:44

Yeah, yes, it's that feeling of letting go, isn't it? That it's it's okay. You you don't have to protect me anymore, it's it's okay. And uh, and as you say, there's so many different ways of doing it, and uh it's it's finding what works for each individual person that is in some ways it's the frustration, isn't it? Because it would be so easy if everyone was the same.

Bal Matharu 47:07

But I think it's also the beauty of us all being different is that we can find what resonates with each of us as individuals, and and then we can, as we were saying earlier, co-regulate with each other, which is super cool, and that is so important that one person isn't going to heal everyone, it's a case that people find who they resonate with, who they feel that safety with, and they will then heal with those people. So we are it doesn't mean that there's the market is full of people who do breath work and that's not good. It is brilliant, it is brilliant because there's so many others, and there's so much work that we can help with uh collectively. Um, so the more people that know how to do this work that can hold space safely, the better. My only concern is, and I do work on the International Breath Work Foundation's scientific board as well, that we are trying to ensure that people can hold space safely because there have been some certain um breath work types that take people into a cathartic experience without being able to hold them safely, and that then induces PTSD or it stimulates the person's own PTSD, um, and they go away kind of more flinchy than they did coming into the breathwork in the first place. So it's about finding someone credible who can hold space for you and you feel comfortable with them and feel safe with them to be able to let go and be held in that way so you can do the work yourself.

Jackie Baxter 48:40

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, and I I love that you said that it's safe for both the practitioner and for the person that's working with them as well. Because I think again, that's what's so important, isn't it? It's uh you know that that we are co-regulatory beings and that safety for everyone is important. Um, so yeah, yeah, I love that you said that as well. Yeah, amazing. Well, well, that sounds like it might be a nice place to hit pause. Thank you so much. Um, this has been such a cool conversation. I've loved chatting with you, and um, I feel like we should maybe do this again sometime if you would be open to that. So thank you so much. Sure.

Bal Matharu 49:23

Thank you so much, Jackie. Really appreciated the conversation as well. It's been really good, and I hope your listeners listeners do get something out of this. Absolutely.