Adding Breath to the Exercise as Medicine Movement [Podcast Series]
[:54] Dr. Bantham introduces her guests, Devin Lebrun and Katrina Maniec
Devin Lebrun is Co-Founder & CEO, Global Breath Network.
Katrina Maniec is Co-Founder, Chief Operating Officer & Chief Wellness Officer, Global Breath Network and is a Physician Assistant in Neurosurgery.
[1:21] Global Breath Network mission
“Our mission is pretty simple. It's to help people resource the power of their breath as a habit. And as we look at the breath work landscape, we see a bunch of really skilled facilitators, healers, see a demand that's growing for breath work and, but there's an infrastructure that doesn't really exist, a link between the supply and the demand.”
[2:20] Global Breath Network inspiration
“Breath training has had a profound impact on my life, personally, and I wanted to share not only the experience, but the science behind it, the science behind the breath work and why it works. So that really kind of drew me into the Global Breath Network.”
[3:12] Breath is medicine
“And just like you, and what a lot of this podcast is about is, I believe that exercise is medicine, and also believe that breath is medicine, and there's a gym inside of all of us here associated with the breath. We have a diaphragm to strengthen. We have a thoracic cavity to mobilize. We have a cardio respiratory system to optimize. And so, yeah, just like exercise is medicine, so is breath.”
[5:12] Science behind breath as medicine
“[Breath] activates your vagus nerve, which I'm sure a lot of listeners have heard of or understand. But this nerve actually allows you to go from sympathetic drive or activation, the fight or flight response, into parasympathetic or the rest and digest, which is beneficial, not only for mental clarity, but also for your health, your health and your well being.”
[6:56] Linking breath and focus
“There's a lot of problems in corporate, in any, in any of our daily lives, of context switching. So you're switching from a different, one thing to the next. One moment you're a mother, the next moment you got to go take care of this HR, issue. Then you're talking about budgets. So it allows you to stop and not worry about where you're going, but just being within yourself and being able to control your own nervous system, which is super powerful.”
[8:47] Breath and holistic well-being
“So spending time in health and fitness and spending time in nutrition, I just kept digging down to what was beneath it all, the foundation of it all, and where people were trying to build on a dysregulated foundation. And that can happen for a period of time, but eventually, if the foundation isn't cared for over and over again, and it isn't strong, then everything that we spent time on, we spent energy on, we spent money on to build on top of that, risk crumbling, and that's where burnout starts to hit.”
[12:26] Breath and context shifting
“The problem with context switching is sometimes we're not able to get out of that prior engagement or that prior meeting, and then you're not paying attention. Then your brain is dysfunctional. It's functioning at a very dysfunctional level, and you're unable to focus and to complete that task. So with breath work and with changing your physiology, you're able to change that in your brain.”
[15:23] Breath and innovation
“Breath became a tool for me to get into a state where I could be more creative and have more divergent thought, and then drop into a more convergent thought, a focused point, so that I could actually produce in a simple manner and share it with others, to where that creativity could actually make an impact on the real world.”
[16:24] Breath and exercise
“From a medical standpoint, you’re talking about, what you're talking about is CO2 tolerance, and you're able to build that over time, so it actually helps with performance and physical activity.”
[19:15] Adding breath to the exercise as medicine movement
“And so we're looking to combine with the exercise as medicine movement, add breath to the conversation, because we know how much it impacts someone's ability to exercise, to get off the couch if they're leading a sedentary life, to get back to moving if something in midlife kind of shut them down or closed them out.”
[23:12] State of the Breath Report
“The main point is to bring all the research together to show there, there's a science-backed community behind breath work, to bring forward all of the different schools of breath work that are utilizing science and physiology and are very accurate presentation of it.”
[25:01] Global Breath Network vision
“So Global Breath Network is meant to catalyze this and make it, like push it past the tipping point to help people understand that this isn't a, just an individual practice. It's not just something that can be used personally or spiritually, but that it's the foundation of everything that we do and that we're here in it together.”
[26:45] Reimbursement for breath training
“My goal is to bring, is to have breath work or breath training be paid for by insurance companies. I want to bridge Western and Eastern medicine more and more.”
[27:54] Call to action
“There's two things happening on the equinox this year, spring equinox in the northern hemisphere and fall in the southern hemisphere, because these events are truly global. One is a summit where there's 25, 30 people, as I described, getting together to figure out how we push this forward. And the other one is a global breath sync.”
