Descriptions:
Video Description
Why does ordinary life keep sharpening into anxiety? Lyam Christopher opens this lesson from the Golden Dawn with a stern phrase spoken in its initiation ceremony: fear is failure. The warning is not that fear is shameful, but that when fear flares up, it narrows the mind down to fight or flee. In that cramped state there is no room for truth, for virtue, or for the calm that lets a person act wisely.
He asks us to look closely at what a thought really is. Nearly every sentence has a subject and an object, one thing acting on another, and our nervous system quietly reads that shape as a threat. Even wanting something can trigger the same alarm, because wanting whispers that I am not enough as I am. Thoughts, then, are not evil, but they are naturally stressful, and the goal is not to stop them. The goal is to grow spacious enough to hold them and say, thank you, but I do not have to follow you.
Then he offers gentle, practical remedies. The finest secret is longer exhales, because the in-breath gently revs the body while the out-breath lets it settle. A simple four-count in and eight-count out, or a slow, belly-soft breath, teaches the body to return to rest. Nutrition, movement, and even choosing to step away from the endless news feed all support the same work. Beneath every technique is a comforting idea: your natural state is already calm, and anxiety is only a current passing across it.
Full Video Transcript
Okay, this microphone is somewhat sensitive and I do have the washer running in the background. So hope it’s not too loud. Some people have fussed about the quality of the microphone. And dude, you breathe too loud. And it got me thinking about pet peeves, like little things that people do that annoy you, cause anxiety.
Um, for instance, if somebody is on the phone with you and they’re eating potato chips and, you know, naturally quite loud or they’re fumbling with a plastic wrapper and the microphone and they don’t realize how, how rude that can be or, um, they, the triggers for anxiety are essentially what you’re up against there.
And so, for example, if you can hear someone breathing, which you can actually hear all the time when you’re talking to them, then it might be triggering an anxiety demon of probably suffocation or something like that.
And it’s really cool because these things can be dealt with and made to stop bothering you.
There are techniques to go after these things so that they leave you alone and don’t bother you again.
and then you can tolerate people breathing in the microphone.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to start eating potato chips.
This week’s video is about, if I can get the slides to work here,
Fear is Failure, How to Cure Anxiety.
So Fear is Failure is a quote from a Golden Dawn initiation ceremony.
This channel is about magic, of course.
and in this initiation ceremony it’s the
Hyrus who says child of earth fear is
failure therefore be thou without fear
for in the heart of the coward virtue
abideth not. Hyrus is a very severe
temple officer in this zero equals zero
initiation ritual. This is the neophyte
initiation ritual. He represents
Skabura or Mars among other things and
darkness and so he’s prone to saying things like this and uh it’s a warning to somebody who is
pursuing enlightenment through magic that uh every time you feel fear that is failure in the attempt
to transform yourself and reach this state of enlightenment okay so um for in the heart of a
coward, virtue abideth not. I would say also when you are afraid, there’s also no truth going on
because the fear response triggers a false version of the world, okay? When the stress
response kicks in or anxiety kicks in, it provokes your nervous system to simplify
the world around you, okay? Super simplify it, actually, in terms of fight or flight, okay?
It gears up your nervous system to be very simple, either fight or run away, and there really isn’t
any more room for more complex type thinking allowed, okay, when the stress response kicks in,
okay? Just as an example, if you’re in a monster movie and the monster’s chasing you,
The stress response can dumb you down so much that you can’t figure out which key opens the car door.
So you can jump in the car and get away.
And this is back when we used to use keys to get into cars.
And that’s how much the stress response can shut down your higher brain function.
Now the tragedy of that is the stress response nowadays gets triggered so much
that we habituate into relying on the stress response to solve all of our problems.
So everything starts to look like a problem that is bothering us and needs to go away.
We even wake up in the morning, another day of one damn thing after another
because we have habituated into the stress response mode.
And of course, this takes its toll on our health.
It’s basically what we can, what’s to blame for the unenlightened mind, okay?
But the unenlightened mind isn’t really necessarily one that never gets stressed out.
That’s part of it.
I mean, did I say unenlightened?
The enlightened mind is not really a mind that never gets stressed out.
It’s, that’s part of it.
But another part is that it can contain the stress response and to not let it take over
the higher brain function.
In other words, when the mind becomes enlightened, it becomes sort of big enough to handle this
little stress response that’s flaring up and say, oh, look, stressed.
Yeah, OK, right.
Yes, but you don’t need to take over all of my higher brain functions.
Thank you for sharing.
If this were a real stressful situation, then maybe we could fight and run away.
but we’re not going to do that right now okay so um yeah so the the the mind of the very deep
initiate is one that’s sort of large enough or vast enough or spacious enough to accommodate
all kinds of stress responses and not get flustered okay and obviously when you’re on a
spiritual path the goal is to reach that sort of expanded state of mind expand is not a very good
word necessarily because ego inflation can become a problem, but that the enlightened mind is
somehow spacious enough to accommodate various stressful scenarios that your mind creates.
They’re not real, by the way. We’ll talk about that in a second. It can accommodate those and
see through them and not be, you know, bothered by them too much. So we will throw out something
challenging. All thoughts are stressful. They are inherently stressful, okay? But to get to the root
of that, we really have to discuss what is a thought, and this could be very helpful too
for those who practice meditation, and the goal of meditation supposedly is, oh, I need to stop
thinking. Thinking’s bad. My thoughts are obsessive. I can’t seem to stop them. No,
thoughts are not inherently bad you don’t you don’t need to stop them but you do need to
acknowledge that all thoughts are inherently stressful okay if you remember when you were
studying grammar and sentence structure the definition of a sentence a series of words
that expresses a complete thought so in order for something to be a complete thought it has to have
subject and a verb and usually an object very often an object subject verb object okay to be
clear it’s subject subject verb complement okay but normally like in buddhist circles we basically
talk about the duality of subject and object okay but there we’ll get to that in a second
now remember when when a stressed response kicks in it’s because i am threatened i overhear
and threatened by that over there, okay, that is now triggering me and telling me that there’s a
problem and that I’m in danger or something like that, right, and so that subject-object relationship
is what triggers it off, okay, and of course thoughts themselves conjure up imagery of
subject-object scenarios because subjects and objects are built right into the language,
okay also a stress response it’s not just something threatening you it’s also something
you are lacking I over here am really not good enough without that over there once again subject
and object relationship okay that’s also a stressful scenario like when you’re hungry
that’s stress okay it’s mild minor but it is it is stress and it kicks in the cortisol stress
hormone possibly some adrenaline to get you moving to go grab some food you know okay
a stress response is not necessarily a bad thing but when it’s chronically triggered and you have
habituated into relying on it then it becomes a toxic way of living and you die relatively young
and your life is hell yeah and you wonder why you know people are you know complaining about
this and that all the time subject object in the language itself okay the subject object
relationship and so we look at the grammar so it’s built into our very thoughts okay so the
very basic sentence from basic grammar from first grade the man hit the ball so we have the subject
is the man he’s what’s doing the action hitting is what he’s doing and he’s hitting something the
object the ball what did the ball ever do to him so but anyway um he’s trying to do something and
when we’re trying to do something is because our current state is not satisfactory and now we’re
like a little bit antsy, a little bit riled up, and we want to try to do something to make it
better. Okay. So even if we’re playing sports, even if we’re playing baseball, okay. Ooh, I got
to win, got to win, got to get around those bases, got to get teamwork. We don’t have enough teamwork.
There’s always a sort of playful stress response going on. Play is actually quite stressful.
and uh the the sort of um you know harmful effects from stress they come from positive stress too so
in other words um stress reduces immunity your immune response okay and that stress uh it doesn’t
matter whether it’s good stress like playing baseball or bad stress like you’re worried about
a bill coming due they’re both the same they both they both will dampen down the immune response and
you’re more likely to get sick yeah interesting and notice how nowadays everybody always seems
to want to be busy all the time and now so no matter what you’re doing whether you’re working
or playing both of those are stress response scenarios okay and the only thing that you can do
to not engage in stress response scenarios is nothing okay we i’d like to say meditation
but even meditation becomes like oh i’m not enlightened i need to get i have to get to
i have to be enlightened now okay okay how do we get there okay we have to do every single day we
have to sit down it becomes another stressful i need to get there and i’m not good enough
situation so um yes so meditation itself can then become a problem and magic i must do these
magical rituals every day otherwise it’s not going to work oh my god like yeah well now um i’m
exaggerating just to show you the stress okay even if it’s minor like i need to get somewhere okay
let’s go that’s stressful too okay i need food another example um i must become an artist i must
get away from my parents i must get i must move out of the house you know um i’m such a loser
okay I’m not good enough that’s a very strong one it’s a very special type of stress response
stress induction there yeah I think we’re going to go into that those kinds of statements later
when we talk about in another video about maybe depression yeah and dark night of the soul things
like that I win okay notice how I win it’s just a subject and a verb there’s no object so therefore
this is not a stressful situation so even when there is just a subject in a verb there’s still
an implied object or an implied predicate nominative or an implied compliment okay
so I win the game what did you win oh and what did you get you got something so you tried really
hard and you got something oh I guess I should do that oh so in other words there’s there’s always
some kind of implied duality going on between the subject and the object or the subject and
the complement. Now, here’s the bad news. How do we kick anxiety’s ass? Well, you can’t, okay? So
if you make a problem out of anxiety, that’s just more anxiety, okay? And it’s even worse than that,
okay? The stress response or anxiety or fear does not have an off switch. It only has
an on switch okay it only has an activation button okay so when something triggers you
there’s just one there’s just one button trigger trigger trigger and then the stress response
flares to life and in order to turn it off it just has to run its course and then simmer down again
there isn’t really an off okay so like even if you do like oh i’m gonna in my imagination i’m
gonna enter my safe space and i’m going to like go to the beach in my mind or something like that
you have to do that for a while, if it even works at all. So that while you’re imagining yourself at
the beach, the stress response simmers down by itself as it normally would do anyway. Okay,
once the stressor has disappeared, okay, once once the trigger is gone, it doesn’t just turn
the stress off, the stress response now has to simmer down by itself, it just simply levels out
again. Now the good news about this is that the relaxation response is not something that you need
to turn on. It’s always on, okay? That’s one way of looking at it, okay? So your state of being okay
is always on, and then sort of the stress response sort of gets layered on top of that, and then it
does things to the body to redirect your resources, okay? So you might view your relaxation response
is just that your default state of being that’s just the way you are you’re not troubled by
anything okay i was trying to find a picture of a cat because cats do this amazing thing
that i call resplendent they sit there like a king or a queen they’re relaxed but they’re
radiant and their eyes are are like you know sort of half closed and they’re just kind of like oh
it’s so awesome being a cat and funny thing is i couldn’t really find any pictures of that and
cats do that all the time i tried to enter like a cat relaxed glowing cat um cat chilling out
and it’s all pictures of zombie cats like they’re asleep or their tongue is hanging out or they’re
doing funny things it’s almost like um i don’t know like nobody notices how awesome they are
when they’re just sitting there like nothing in the world is bothering me right now i’m just so
awesome being a cat and when they do that it’s a good teacher for us so it’s like you are you’re
like this too your normal state is resplendent untroubled by anything okay but people get
habituated into being triggered and annoyed by every little thing it’s this mainly because we
get conditioned into relying on the stress response to get us moving and get us you know
knocking down some doors and being aggressive and things like that because the stress response will
do that but if we rely on it to get us moving like that then we then we kind of stress ourselves out
I don’t have this I got to get it okay that and that’s how you motivate yourself got to stop that
but not like that I just said you have to stop that stop if you try to stop doing that then
still that’s a stressful situation i need to stop it but there it is again because you now are
inadequate because you’re doing this thing and now you have to get somehow i need to get from being
inadequate to being over here where i’m not where i’m okay again and then now you have what i have
to do something to get over there that’s still a stress scenario so we’re kind of trapped aren’t
we or that’s what the way it seems and we get in this mode where i have to do something special
to stop the suffering i have to do i don’t know ritual meditation invocations prayers something’s
going to help me right and this is that cycle of addiction the addiction is a constant reliance
on the stress response especially the stress response of i’m not good enough just the way i am
and the best thing is you know um you don’t have to get a cat i don’t have a cat i have friends
with cats and i just marvel at them sometimes and the cat is the cat is is settled down because it’s
it’s happy to see you and that now that settles down and starts relaxing again and that it does
that resplendent cat thing and it’s like that’s what we’re all like inherently we’re all like that
just we’re so awesome just being us when we’re not being triggered by this or that all right
some long-term remedies for chronic anxiety chronic stress okay naturally um there are many
things that go on with the thoughts that continuously trigger stressful scenarios,
subject-object relationships, okay? And meditation and spiritual practice can help you deal with that
stuff, okay? But let’s go into some of the biohacks, okay? So things you can do biologically
or physically to reduce stress in your life or anxiety, okay? Nutrition. If you don’t get
adequate nutrition, your body will eventually get suddenly stressed out. I need something,
but I don’t know what it is. I feel hungry in a strange way. And very often we reach for the
wrong things when that happens. We’ll reach for sugar or caffeine. Oh, now I’m better again. No,
you’re not. There’s some other nutrient that you are lacking. And the nutrients that tend to be
lacking are magnesium. There tends to be not enough minerals in the soil. Among other minerals,
an electrolyte blend would probably be pretty useful because even if you eat a salad every day
the soil that this that the salad is grown from is probably pretty denatured pretty leached of
minerals because it gets used over and over again here so but you can good news you can get those
electrolytes through a supplement okay and magnesium is one of the more important ones also
So magnesium, calcium, potassium.
Yeah, potassium is another important one, okay?
Got to be careful with potassium in your supplementation, though, okay?
But you can also supplement with potassium.
Potassium is regulated because it’s quite dangerous.
It can actually kill you.
And the amounts that they put in nutritional supplements are not enough to make any difference.
So don’t bother supplementing with potassium.
it’s best to get potassium rich foods or you can get um a brand out there called no salt
it’s also a brand called low salt i think um uh yeah that has a good amount of potassium in it
okay be careful though don’t take too much because it does cause some trouble if you take too much
for nutrition um believe it or not carbon dioxide is a nutrient okay that doesn’t mean you’re going
to go out there and buy some dry ice and try to breathe in the carbon dioxide. Well, try that to
see what happens. It’s actually very interesting. But for the carbon dioxide, the key to reestablishing
that as something very important to your body is to allow your body to generate enough carbon
dioxide internally. It’s not a waste of gas, or it’s not a poison gas, unless it’s the only gas
your breathing, and then you’ll quickly find out how unpleasant that is. But if the body builds up
enough carbon dioxide, the whole body relaxes. Okay. What that means is, in order to allow the
carbon dioxide to build up, it’s important to breathe less. Okay. And it means if you’re if
you’re talking like me right now, it’s kind of hard to do that. So if you’re talking all day,
that can be a problem because you’re breathing probably too much. And I guess I’ll do a video
eventually about reducing breathing. Most people in a sedentary lifestyle hyperventilate, and that
doesn’t mean you’re going, hyperventilating simply means you are breathing too much. And when you do
that, it causes problems with your alkalinity, gives you respiratory alkalosis on a very subtle
level. Not only that, but over time, it makes you less tolerant to carbon dioxide. There’s a big
problem with if you habitually over breathe, if you habitually breathe too much, you will
eventually reduce your body’s tolerance to carbon dioxide. And then you’re stuck because you’re
constantly breathing too much because when you do hold your breath or when you do keep your
breathing to a minimum, you can’t seem to keep it low enough because when the carbon dioxide
begins to rise to a healthy level, it already makes you uncomfortable, and then you’re stuck,
okay? And you can notice this. As people get older, they tend to breathe more, yeah, especially if
they get overweight, okay? That is not inevitable. That simply comes from being sedentary and
over-breathing all the time. So eventually, I think I’ll do a video on breathing less,
and we’ll go into the mechanics of that.
It’s quite interesting.
So it’s important to allow the carbon dioxide
to accumulate in the body enough, okay?
And that does mean breathing less,
talking less, probably too.
Vitamin B1, do some research into that, okay?
To supplement with vitamin B1,
the best thing is you could probably get
some nutritional yeast,
the kind that is not fortified
with artificial vitamin B stuff,
just the nutritional yeast,
which you probably have to get online because if you go to the store,
it’s going to be fortified with synthetic forms of vitamin B, like folic acid.
Folic acid can be harmful to some people.
Yeah, you might want to look into folic acid too because it’s in most multivitamins.
B1 is kind of what they administer for people who have trouble with alcoholism,
things like that, or headaches.
But apparently it’s a huge soothing thing going on there.
testosterone stress hormones tend to lower testosterone okay it would be better to take
care of any chronic stress really and then for for men and women both the testosterone will
probably go up on its own okay but it’s possible to supplement with testosterone okay and you don’t
need a prescription for it i don’t know what people are thinking like you’re spending tons
and tons of money or making their insurance company spend tons and tons of money on
bizarre testosterone creams and patches and whatever all you need is pine pollen which is
very abundant very cheap you make a tincture out of it okay or you can buy the tincture which is a
little bit a little bit more expensive administer that twice a day and you’re getting a relatively
high level of testosterone it can give you enough testosterone enough to make men’s gonads shrink
if you’re not careful okay and a high level of testosterone that doesn’t give you roid rage
all right um we have testosterone all wrong um guys who have higher testosterone than average
tend to be super confident super chill okay and that sort of coolness and calmness in a crisis
is what makes them more i don’t know masculine seeming okay uh and it’s that confidence is like
i don’t need to be all riled up i know i’m good enough strong enough whatever so um yeah
testosterone at a high enough level also for women too uh for pine pollen be careful for women that
women women are very um sensitive to testosterone okay but pine pollen can benefit women in small
doses as well uh make them very randy too so it’s a pretty strong um aphrodisiac for women okay but
don’t overdo it because you might start growing okay magnesium is one of those supplements okay
i already mentioned that also for testosterone boron is a type of mineral that can dramatically
raise help raise testosterone as well as zinc okay it might not be necessarily necessary to
get pine pollen supplementing with zinc and boron might be just plenty enough and not being stressed
out all the time because stress, stress, um, stress reduces testosterone levels. Uh, being
in ketosis, that is probably the number one stress reducing thing you can do. But true
nutritional ketosis is, uh, I don’t want to say it’s difficult. It’s quite easy. Um, I’m almost
always in ketosis and, uh, and I know other people who have claimed to be, but then you go out to eat
with them and you see what they’re eating and you’re like so being in nutritional ketosis
it calms down the brain it raises the GABA levels so you can look into that
it’s used to treat epilepsy because it calms the brain so much and so if you want to be
chill all the time ketosis is one of the best ways of doing that it makes you a better meditator
better a magician it keeps you awake most of the time so that you are you don’t get sleepy
after eating so yeah it’s basically a healthy ketogenic diet keeps the sugar out of your
body now but if you just try to keep your sugar in your diet low that’s not going to do it because
that’s going to stress you out you’re going to get so hungry and so deprived and like oh i need
something so bad. I need food so bad. You have to kick your body’s addiction to sugar and it has to
start burning fat. Okay. So simply reducing sugar in the diet, it can be helpful, but it’s probably
going to stress you out because you’re going to be hungry for more sugar. Your body is going to
crave it. And so, so for a while, like if you try to get into ketosis by raising fat in your diet
and doing it in a healthy way and cutting out almost all carbs and sugar at first, you’re going
to be majorly stressed out. Yeah, you go through probably a period of a slight hell for
three or more days of being really deprived of food and feeling your body saying, you can’t keep
this up. You’re going to die. You really need to eat some Snickers bar or a donut or some rice or
something like that. Anyway, but ketosis is either all or nothing. You can’t just say I’m sort of
doing keto okay so if you want to do a ketogenic diet it’s got to be all it’s got to be really low
carb and high fat and it’s got to be done in a healthy way there’s lots of um youtubes out there
about that that can show you how to do it uh but remember most people can’t seem to change their
lifestyle to do it i find it fascinating can’t and they’ll say they’re doing ketosis and no no
they’re not, and you can tell by their behavior, they’re stressed out. Vitamin D, vitamin D is
really good for regulating the immune system, which means it has to, the immune system and
the stress response are kind of part of the same thing, okay, so if you get adequate vitamin D,
say about 4,000 international units to 10,000 per day, not only will you not get sick anymore,
most likely like cold having you know having a cold three times a year uh but your your immune
your immune system will respond in a more sane way and autoimmune conditions will calm down most
likely they were probably caused by vitamin d deficiency to begin with okay you’re not getting
enough sun because when you go out in the sun your skin makes vitamin d makes a lot of it too
All right, nutrition, HIIT training. This is a long-term fix for anxiety. We’re going to get to
a short-term fix real soon, okay, in a few minutes. A long-term fix for anxiety, HIIT training.
Free diving. I remember at one point, I was in the ocean on a boat with two other guys.
We saw a pod of dolphins off the starboard bow, and so we killed the engine as we got near them,
and we wanted to go swimming with them and the funny thing is I was the first one in the water
the water was very deep I was the first one in the water and I began to swim towards them with
my fins and my diving mask and then I dove down to about 30 feet and just sort of hovered there
and I could there was it was completely blue all around it was very deep water that I couldn’t see
the bottom. And it occurred to me suddenly, it’s like, what have I just done? I was new to
freediving at the time. And I just went into the water by myself. And I’m completely out in the
open. This is a perfect trigger scenario for agoraphobia, which we all sort of suffer from a
little bit. If you are in, like if you’re in the ocean, if you’re in the ocean swimming,
and you don’t have people around you, you’re all by yourself, you can start to feel a little
anxious because um maybe instinctively we know that if we’re by ourselves um that’s a signal
for a predator to you know come in and you know bite us or something like that and um so i think
that stress response came up a bit because i was by myself and completely surrounded by nothing but
blue and i could see the the you know surface of water overhead i could hear the dolphins talking
in the distance but they did not approach i think i approached them too directly to kind of scared
them off but um just ever since then i was like what why was i not afraid uh it was only maybe
six months before that would have i never would have done something like that getting in the water
like that by myself the other guys joined me eventually but it was uh getting in deep water
like that that was that was something i was really afraid of before and that fear went away really
fast, I attributed it to, um, to the reading exercises. Okay. So things like HIIT training
as part of that. Okay. So, um, that’s stands for high, high intensity interval training.
And what, what that does essentially is, um, you get on, let’s say you there’s ways of doing it.
Uh, the easiest way to do it is to get on a treadmill and, uh, rev up the treadmill and
you go maybe about 3.5 to 4 miles per hour. Okay. And after about 30 seconds, then you rev it up to
about 10 miles per hour. So you’re running pretty fast. I go 10.5. I’m 56 years old. So if you’re
younger, you can go faster. And that’s like sprinting now. And I only do that sprinting for
like 30 seconds to get the heart rate up. Okay. Which amounts to about 45 seconds because it
takes 15 seconds for this treadmill to get up to the high speed right and then at that point I
turn off the treadmill and I sit down immediately or lie down and the most important part about HIIT
training is that so after the heart rate is elevated you sit down or lie down and don’t move
just completely relax and until the heart rate returns to normal and the main thing you are
exercising there is not um stressing out the heart it’s actually um conditioning the heart so that it
knows how to return to a normal speed faster okay so the actual exercise is kind of the opposite of
exercise you are you’re letting your know you’re letting your heart know that it it um it needs to
calm down now and you do this on a regular basis let’s say three times a week um your your body
knows how to calm down quickly and the funny thing is as we get older it your body gets worse and
worse at calming down from the stress response to the point where it might stay revved up in
stress response all the time and you become a type a personality who’s grumpy and you know
extremely freaked out by politics all the time and always offended i wonder how that happens
and if you practice it training you’re training your body to get out of the stress response
quickly simmer down okay so the way you do this is like maybe three times a week
you do that twice so you get on the treadmill take it up to four miles per hour let’s say or
3.5 miles per hour and then let’s say at the 30 second mark you rev it up to about 10 miles per
hour or 10.5 or 11 and run like that for 30 seconds which amounts for 45 seconds okay and
then um after that 30 or 45 seconds is done you turn off the treadmill get off it okay and uh
immediately sit down or lie down and you can just feel your heart rate you know feel it on your
wrist whatever uh some some of you wear fitbits that’s fine um and just let it get back down to
normal to at least like you know 85 or something like that um depends how high your heart rate is
normally um 85 or even 90 is good enough and then you can get back on the treadmill do it one more
time and then you’re done and HIIT training is proving to be much more effective at creating
states of health than steady state cardio where you’re just walking for an hour on the treadmill
or you’re trying to burn calories you know it’s really hard to burn calories on the treadmill
or well no it’s really hard to burn fat on the treadmill for most people because most people are
on a carbohydrate-rich diet. So running on the treadmill or walking on the treadmill for long
periods of time, yes, it does burn some fat, but it’s mostly just burning carbs. So I still marvel
at that. Anyway, so training the body to calm down. Yeah, what a concept. It’s not that there
is a switch that makes it calm down, but your body gets relatively good at returning to normal again.
so the stress response gets revved up and then it lets go relatively quickly okay hit training
i’ve talked about this before abstaining from news or gossip that means social media i recommend
deleting um all but one or two social media accounts okay and there might be some you need
for like one or two you need for work fine whatever just use it for that and that only
this is very serious by the way um the if you’ve watched a news feed on social media
every single thing is prompting you to do something because you need something or something’s
threatening you almost always it’s almost always like that okay even the things that are funny
become stress scenarios because i need something funny to cheer me up right now because i’m so
stressed so let me go through my news feed it’s even even little entertaining things do that okay
remember there’s no such thing as entertainment okay entertainment always has something else
going on if you don’t believe that watch the watch the video called entertainment does not exist
so stay away from we have two instincts we have the FOMO instinct fear of missing out and we have
the gossip instinct these are normal instincts that we have and then the people who do the news
they sort of know this and they know that they, if they keep hammering you with gossip and this
just in, you’re going to pay attention. And then you’re like, okay, what do I need to worry about
now? Oh, okay. Hurricane or way over there. Right. I’ll keep an eye on that next. Oh my God,
that happened. I can’t believe, well, how tragic, you know, turn it off. Okay. No news ever get rid
of it don’t watch the news ever again if there’s something important happening you will you’ll find
out okay and if you do want to tune in once in a while just do it once a week something like that
but mainly out of curiosity just to see what other people are of you know going to be stressed out
about you don’t have to be stressed out about this stuff if something requires your attention
you you will deal with it you don’t need news reporters breathing down your neck trying to
make a buck off of your anxiety sorry news reporters but yeah sorry and the same thing
goes for gossip that gossip at work is like talking about people who are potentially harmful
to the company or to your love life or who knows right um all right even when they say word to the
wise it’s like they’re giving you a warning right something bad right uh seeing through the rat race
okay well that’s you know anybody on a spiritual path that’s a pretty much a challenge um finding
ways to do that and meditation whatever um uh or finding ways to not play the game to begin with
because it’s a stressful game and it’s not even a game that um we have to engage with uh or it’s
not a game that we have to take as a life and death scenario you know uh and if you if you do
take the rat race seriously and and what i just said sounds kind of crazy like in other words if
you think that no what else what other purpose is there other than trying to survive that’s a
warning sign to you that this stress response is kind of running your life okay it was this thing
called civilization is making survival easy breezy okay but somehow the narrative around us is
keeping us deprived keeping us in a state of i don’t have enough i’m not good enough i’m being
threatened by things that are trying to come get my stuff okay most of this is not real sometimes
it’s real and then you deal with that the Wim Hof method I think this is the main one that’s that
started to reduce my fear the reason I got in the water was not only because of you know the
HIIT training I was doing and the breathing exercises or the breathe the breathe breathing
reduction techniques I was doing for free diving but also the Wim Hof method and this is very
interesting too because the Wim Hof method deliberately triggers stress it’s not like a
calm down breathing thing it’s a it’s a stress me out breathing thing and I think the really
interesting thing about it is if you practice it it stimulates the adrenals to basically
produce adrenaline and you get an adrenaline response in the body really interesting too
because when you get that shot of adrenaline it’s like jabbing yourself with an epi pen so if you
have autoimmune conditions, they will very likely settle down almost immediately. They’ll get less
almost immediately after doing the Wim Hof method and EpiPen would be faster. Okay. And if so, if
you do the Wim Hof method, maybe two, three times a week, mild allergies will disappear. That’s at
least that’s my experience. You might want to try it. Okay. If you suffer from allergies, I have a
very mild allergy to pet dander. And when I don’t do the Wim Hof method for a couple of weeks,
it starts to come back. And when I do it just once, it goes away. It’s like a little irritation
in the eyes, like red eyes, you know. Pretty cool. And it’s a way of breathing. It’s pretty intense.
Okay. It’s something that you do not do in the water ever because it’s dangerous. You can possibly
pass out it’s pretty serious okay anything i’m suggesting to you you need to take complete
responsibility for practicing it okay people who have done the wim hof method have died okay not
because they have a heart attack or something like that um but because they do it in the water as
free divers and that you can black out and then drown okay that’s not something you do in the car
either it’s more like something you do on a bed or on a couch or just lying on a yoga mat something
like that uh easy to find out how to do it you can schedule a consultation with me i can show
you how to do it very effectively um if you do go online to a youtube uh see if you can catch
wim hof himself doing it okay he’s got a there’s a couple of different videos out there of him
demonstrating it uh he’s kind of insane too he’s quite a character but um it’s a way of deliberately
triggering the stress response um so that the body knows what stress really is it’s like oh
that’s what stress is it’s not some i don’t know how to explain this it’s like um when you trigger
the the the acute stress response the body is like okay that’s that’s what stress is like okay good
because it keeps getting this um chronic stress from your you know environment from the work and
from the people people’s paranoia all around you because everybody’s sort of unenlightened
and suffering you know um and so the wim hof method is a way of reminding your body what
But real stress is like, it’s pretty cool because then all the chronic stress gets less and less.
It’s like it doesn’t bother you anymore because the body’s like, I know what stress is.
That was stress.
This other stuff, this is not stress.
Okay, pretty cool.
So it also tends to make you less afraid.
Yeah, so if you want fear to go away to some degree, right?
This one I’m not going to talk about today, but I think the next video next week,
I will give a description on how to do demon summoning.
Okay, so in other words, all the little things that trigger you like phobias, okay, fear of snakes, let’s say fear of spiders, or if Liam’s breathing too loud, and it triggers some kind of ancient primordial memory of memory of suffocation, and that’s why it annoys you.
Okay. Anything, any little thing that triggers any kind of anxiety or annoyance at all. Okay.
Any kind of suffering at all can be dealt with. Okay. Some of these demons are very deep seated,
like the I’m not good enough demon that can also be dealt with. Okay. These are all, all,
all demons dealt with in magic are trauma created. Okay. This is not to say that they
are merely psychological okay um to say they’re that’s a loaded statement to say something is
merely psychological misunderstands what psychology actually is okay so uh the kinds of demons that
humans have the kind of fears that we have are shared not only between each other as in the
collective unconscious but in uh the collective unconscious of all life on the planet as well as
all natural forces everywhere. Okay, the whole universe has these things going on. As you can
tell, all kinds of stuff, all kinds of karma is being worked out all around you, not just in
living things, but also in supposedly inanimate things. Okay, so everything is working out karma.
And you can participate in that by deliberately conjuring the various complexes that have been
embedded let’s say in the collective unconscious and these demons do take on various frightening
forms okay because of the kinds of predators that have troubled us in the in our evolutionary past
not only predators but natural phenomena as well anyway we will talk about that next week i will
give two methods for conjuring demons which are very powerful a little dangerous okay but
But so any techniques you use that I convey on this channel, you bear the responsibility for the results you get.
OK, so if you are unwilling to take responsibility for the results you get for any any of the techniques that I share, then do not do them.
I will say that again next week. All right. Quick remedies for anxiety.
Naturally, if you want a quick remedy for anxiety, you’re having you’re feeling anxious right now or even if you’re having a panic attack.
the breath is is the fastest way to get at it to get in there and somehow see if you you can’t turn
it off but you can keep it from self-triggering okay so the way so the way the breath works and
this is quite simple okay when you breathe in it slightly stimulates the stress response
always if you don’t believe it monitor your pulse and when you breathe in you’re going to see your
pulse speeds up and when you breathe out you’re going to see that your pulse rate diminishes
okay especially if you’re younger okay because because in other words your heart responds
to your stress response quickly when you’re young and it also lets go of the stress response
more quickly when you’re young if you’re older it might take longer to settle down but it will
settle down when you so at every exhale the um the stress response goes away and then the heart
rate settles down again okay what that means is um if you spend more time exhaling than inhaling
then you’re mathematically speaking by the ratio you are spending more time triggering that um
letting go response okay so you can’t really trigger the relaxation response you can just
trigger the letting go of the stress response okay so um which means if i breathe in for four
then i then i probably want to breathe out for eight seconds i breathe in for four seconds i
probably want to breathe out for something like eight seconds or longer and then breathe in for
four breathe out for 10 seconds a nice long exhale okay it even helps to make a sound okay
or to push the lips and just blow in through the nose out through the mouth it’s usually best
because the nose has nitric oxide it has a very important function in calming you down okay
reduced breathing also help because remember if so the first of all just not breathing so much
because if you’re going to if you get stressed out you might start hyperventilating that’s going
to drive your carbon dioxide down because your body will expel too much carbon dioxide and
remember carbon dioxide when it builds up to a high enough level in your blood it makes everything
relax it makes all your vessels dilate okay you can even um uh lessen like if you have um asthma
asthma very often is um uh the result of hyperventilation or too much breathing and the
The problem with an asthma attack is what do you feel like doing when you’re having an asthma attack?
You breathe even more, which makes it even worse.
Okay, same thing for a panic attack.
You will start breathing even more and more and more.
And if you persist, you might even pass out.
And then the body will return to normal once you’ve passed out because then the stress response is over
and your body is relaxing, blacked out, and then you return to normal again.
All right, so the trick is to have the long exhale.
But the problem is, if you are engaging in some kind of breathing technique, you will have a tendency to breathe too much.
Because normally, nice shallow breaths are fine.
Your body doesn’t need to breathe a lot in order to maintain healthy oxygenation and CO2.
Unless you have emphysema or something, unless it’s your health condition.
And so I like to use what I call the witchy breath, which is breathe in for three seconds.
hold the breath for seven seconds exhale for nine seconds and then hold the breath out just let the
lungs hang empty for 13 seconds so once again it’s you breathe you’re as you breathe in you’re
counting slowly breathing in and to the count of three holding the breath in for seven seconds
slowly breathing out for nine seconds and then holding the breath out just letting the lungs
hang empty for 13 seconds, and then you can repeat the cycle. If you just sit down to do this,
it’s going to induce too much air hunger and stress you out, okay? So if you’re just sitting
down to do it, it’s better just to do 3, 7, 9, and then start over at 3 again, okay? And just
leave out that 13 for the first few breaths, maybe the first 5 or 6 breaths, okay? Until the body
settles down and then eventually do the 13 second hold out okay the most important part for inducing
relaxation is that nine second out breath and the reason we hold the breath for 13 seconds
and seven seconds is simply to keep from breathing too much so we want to keep that that co2 we want
that CO2 to build up in the blood enough to relax the body. Okay. If you already have breathing
issues, so let’s say you’re a smoker or something like that, or you have some lung damage,
you might not be able to do it for 13 seconds. That’s fine. Okay. What you could do is you could
count faster throughout the whole thing, or you could reduce that 13 to maybe 10, something like
that. Find something that works for you. The most important thing is that long exhale. Okay. And
also don’t breathe too much. I know it feels good to breathe more when you’re stressed out,
okay, but the benefit you get from that is only temporary. It’s going to get worse if you breathe
more when you’re stressed, okay. It’ll eventually make the chemistry, it’ll make you, it’ll cause
respiratory alkalosis, which will tighten up everything, okay. All right, you do this for
about 20 minutes, 15 minutes might be good enough, okay? This can be done in the car. It’s perfectly
fine to do it in the car, okay? Make sure you don’t experience too much air hunger, okay?
You can do it while lying down in bed, okay? And the most ideal thing, if you really want to get
the benefit, okay, is you, let’s say you’re lying down, you can put one hand on your chest and one
hand on your belly, and do not let any chest breathing happen, all belly breathing, okay? So
the chest is not going to rise while you’re breathing in, only the belly rises, all right?
If you chest breathe, that tends to stimulate the stress response a little bit, and if you belly
breathe, that tends to stimulate the, or let go of the stress response, okay? A vagus nerve, I think
it’s just triggering the vagus nerve okay so um so that’s that’s that’s the real game changer um i
was out free diving and a woman was asking me how do you hold your breath so long i said well you do
the long exhales just you know breathe in uh briefly and then breathe out you can do that in
your snorkel um with an s sound in your snorkel and um she said i was doing that it doesn’t work
and so I said okay so here’s what you do you want to only breathe with your belly okay so you’re not
going to let yourself do any chest breathing it’s fairly easy to do that actually you can just
monitor you know the chest make sure it doesn’t expand while you’re breathing and only the belly
and nice big pregnant belly to like let’s let that thing blow up to really work that diaphragm
only only the diaphragm okay and then lo and behold she was doing that she did it for about
four minutes and suddenly she was holding her breath for like two minutes underwater she was
good to go she was she was now suddenly she was a free diver it’s simply because the um the uh
the stress response completely subsided she was completely relaxed and so her body was using a lot
less oxygen uh and not accumulating as much co2 as and um she was able to hold her breath longer
underwater because of the relaxation and her heart rate was much lower obviously that’s what it does
it tends to lower your heart rate when you do this exercise okay so use only the belly and you’re
going to be tempted probably to use the chest breathing again okay and that what that indicates
okay so if you i really would like to use my chest it feels better when i use my chest don’t do it
use the belly that’s that um using the chest um yes that can feel good because you probably you
have some addiction to being a little stressed out to feeling motivated okay this is not necessary
for functioning um sort of like in that resplendent mode where everything’s just you’re perfectly fine
perfectly okay you don’t need to be stressed out to be motivated not really just a little bit like
When you wake up in the morning and you see the blue light of the sky, that stimulates a little bit of cortisol, a little bit of adrenaline, just enough to get you to want to go get up, work, and play.
You don’t need any more than that.
You don’t need to start worrying about that bill that you have to pay two days from now and losing your job or things like that.
These are all worrisome thoughts that are intruding upon you.
what you’ll notice is that if you if you suffer from thoughts that go round and round
inducing anxiety doing this breathing technique can help those thoughts go away to some degree
okay someday we’ll do a video soon about the monkey mind and how to deal with that okay because
one of the worst things about meditation is it only has you focusing on your thoughts
okay um that’s not really that’s the least effective form of meditation so maybe we should
talk about like um how to how to deal with the monkey mind for real once and for all okay but
next week we’re going to talk about uh demon summoning okay as a way of making your triggers
go away so nothing ever bothers you again such a thing actually is possible okay all right so uh
until next time
Source: Lyam Christopher