SHOW NOTES

In this episode of Habits for Humans with Kim Flynn, we discuss that instead of making ourselves crazy with all the wellness activities, Bob Gardner teaches us in this episode of Habits for Humans how to let life itself be the healing. Learn how to go from looking for the exact path to learning how to ditch the happiness rules so you can actually be happy.

Welcome to Habits for Humans, the show that explores how to build a life beyond “fine”–something spectacular, joyful, and deeply satisfying.

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OUR GUEST

Bob Gardner’s body-based, no-nonsense approach to mental, physical, and emotional freedom came from his decades-long struggle with depression, addiction, anxiety, and never feeling good enough.

His sometimes-goofy-but-always-practical method has since helped thousands of people make their own struggles a thing of the past — to include suicidal ideation, PTSD, OCD, childhood abuse, and even chronic pain.

As he often says, “Freedom is a skill, not a pill. Once you’ve trained your body and mind how to do it, it will begin to happen all by itself while you continue to enjoy all the other bits of your life.”

Social Media:

Website Link: www.thefreedomspecialist.com

builtforfreedom.org (for $5 they can get the book plus the audio version and some bonuses as well as a discount to the other course)

SPONSORED BY RETREAT.WORKS

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OUR HOST

Kim Flynn is a best-selling author, podcaster and serial entrepreneur and has built multiple seven and eight-figure businesses. Her company made the Inc 5000 list of the fastest growing companies in the country. She splits her time living in Costa Rica and Salt lake City, teaching business owners how to run profitable retreats through her company Retreat Works. Kim has one husband, four kids, and a dog and loves spreadsheets.

Do you have expertise and a unique solution to a specific health and wellness problem? If you would like to be a guest on the show, apply here: https://habitsforhumans.com/contact/

TRANSCRIPTION

 Hi, and welcome to Habits for Humans, the podcast that explores what makes people tick and how to program this brain of ours. And today, actually, we’re gonna talk about programming this body of ours to do what we want it to do. Today’s topic. I’ve been super excited about this. It’s Bob Gardner. He’s gonna talk to us about happiness on autopilot, how to train the. To do it for you. Come on. That’s not interesting. I don’t know what is. I’m super excited about the content today. We have giveaways from our listeners today. We’ve got an offer from Bob. We’ve got an offer from our sponsor. So if you like free stuff, stay tuned all the way to the end. And first of all, word from our sponsor habits for Humans is brought to you by Retreat Works. We train coaches, business coaches, life coaches, wellness business owners how to build a retreat in five days. And we do. At a retreat. You can double your sales earn 50 k per retreat by adding a retreat model to your existing business and having deeper client impact than you’ve ever had before. So stay tuned to the end and we’ll tell you how you can participate in that. I’m so excited to introduce Bob. Bob Gardner’s, body-based, no nonsense approach to mental, physical, and emotional freedom came from his decades long struggle with depression, addiction, anxiety, and never feeling good enough. It’s so interesting to me because the people who are really good at those principles never have an easy story. It seems it seems like they have a grueling story and overcoming that is how they got to be really good at what they do. So I’m excited to talk to Bob about. His sometimes goofy, but always practical method has since helped thousands of people make their own struggles a thing of the past, to include suicidal ideation, P T S D O C D, childhood abuse, and even chronic pain as he often says, freedom is a skill, not a pill. That sounds like a. That sounds like a logo to go on a shirt. Freedom is a skill, not a pill. Once you’ve trained your body and your mind how to do it, it will begin to happen by itself while you continue to, Jo, enjoy all the other bits of your life. Bob, I’m dying to get into this. Let’s just jump straight in and let’s start out with the first question we always ask, which is, what is the number one habit that you have in your life for positive mental wellness? What do you. I don’t have a number one habit. I live in wonder. That’s a, I don’t I don’t really, because I do all kinds of things all the time and I have some practices that come and go, but the core thing for me is to just live in this place of wonder where I keep asking myself. What’s actually happening right now, and when that happens, like a whole new world opens up not to start with a Latin and Jasmine or anything. All right. Will you please break into song? Is that something No. A whole new world there. It’s there. It’s, I like it. All right, so let’s jump into it then. So it sounds like you’re less about prescriptive, like here’s the recipe for happiness and you’re more principal based. Talk to us about your journey, how you got there. Not a big question At. What’s your entire journey and how did you get there? Sure. In a sound bite? Yeah. Go. Bad then. Good. There’s your sound bite. There it is there. It’s. It wasn’t. What’s crazy about it is that I didn’t have what most people would consider to be a traumatic upbringing. I wasn’t abused as a child. Bullied. I went through junior high. That’s pretty much what bullying is, right? But I wasn’t picked on necessarily. I was a little bit of a nerdy kid. I wasn’t an athlete. Most of the bullying that happened to me was in my own head, not necessarily by other. And my parents were committed, devoted I had a traumatic birth, but I didn’t have anything that people would call trauma. And when as I grew up all of this feeling starting, I remember having some depressive feelings at age, like five or six in the desert down in New Mexico. And then I remember at 8, 9, 10 not feeling like I belonged anywhere. And in the middle of that place, this feeling of I messed up. There’s something wrong with me. Started to show up. Maybe that just came from how I internalized how my parents tried to correct some things and maybe they didn’t praise me when I wanted to. Like it wasn’t trauma. And then all of a sudden, by the time I hit 14, I’m got into pornography, and that became a roller coaster ride of its own. And I couldn’t quit. So I felt like there was something dreadfully wrong with me at that point in time because I’m the only one struggling with this, and everyone else seems to be living their life just perfectly happy. Yeah. You are the only 14 year old boy that that struggles with that, by the way. You’re the only human on the planet, so I’m just kidding. Keep going. Thank you for confirming my suspicion. Yeah. Apparently I can’t be happy anymore. Thanks, Kim. And so I. Then I got into psychedelic drugs at a certain point and started chasing those to try and figure things out. I was massively depressed. I was wandering the streets at 3:00 AM wanting to a car to hit me, but not wanting to kill myself. Cause I didn’t wanna leave a mess for somebody else. And we, I almost got divorced a couple times. All of this kind of came to a head when my wife was like, Hey, we got four kids. I know, but I can’t handle this. And so then I was facing like all the stuff I was dealing with and the rest of my life, I was gonna have to be alone and I needed to just, I didn’t wanna kill myself at that point in time, but I needed to find a solution. And so I buckled down. And forced myself into being a good little boy for a while. And all along the way, I had been learning in body-based methods of healing and I had chased all kinds of things and traveled the globe looking for solutions and masters and teachers and all this kind of stuff. What did forcing yourself into that mold look like? I just imagine that’s like the happiness diet. Like I will do these 17 prescriptive things to force myself. Is that what you’re talking? Yeah. Yeah. So at the time it was like, okay, I’m gonna read scriptures every day. And I’m gonna pray and I’m gonna get up in the morning and I’m gonna do this type of exercise and before I go to work, I’ll have this much stuff. And then I was doing mindfulness based practices that I had studied for several years with a mindfulness guru. And so I was doing one of those every day. And it was just this massively, growing list. It was like a list of rabbits. They just kept multiplying all the things that I had to do. In order to be like, now I will be happy, but by the time I was done, there was no time left to actually enjoy being alive. Wow. That’s powerful. I think a lot of people in the wellness space end up in that space of, I, I remember one year I was reading like, Eight wellness books all at the same time, all with different methods, trying to follow all of them. And you get into this ugh, like box where you feel like you’re bound and gagged, honestly. So anyway, that’s where you continue on in your journey. Bound and gagged. Bound and gagged. And I think that’s a great, that’s, I think a lot of people run into this that. And that’s why they don’t continue, is they feel like they have to do more in order to be happy and they don’t have the bandwidth to do more because they’re already doing more. They’re already doing their best, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing something different. And So it got to a point where one night, one afternoon my wife left to go pick up the kids from school. I’m standing in my office watching her leave cuz I was running my own martial arts school at the time and I, the computer’s in the corner and she leaves and the used car salesman in my head’s ah, no, Bob. You have the chance, it’ll only be five minutes. No, it’ll be wiser. You’ve done a thousand and so I’m standing. My feet are rooted to the carpet. My heart is thumping. There’s that metallic taste in my mouth. My hands are shaking, and this cold wave washes over me. And then I have a vision, and I wish I could say it was a vision of God, but it was a vision of myself at 90 years old, still in the same spot, struggling with the same thing, where the only thing that I could say for my life was. At least I didn’t go back, like my only merit badge in heaven was You didn’t go back to the thing. And something in that was like, no, I can’t I don’t wanna die, but I don’t wanna live that life. And so despite all the 12 step meetings and all the counseling and all the therapy and all the books and everything else, I had been trying, I just recognized none of it was working. So I flipped the bird to the whole industry and I was like, I gotta go figure it out on my own. And so then I took all these other stuff that I’ve been learning about the body and within literally a week, Massive changes had started to happen within me to where the cravings disappeared, the angry responses started to vanish. And I like the addiction piece. The uncontrollable just barely keep it together. All the struggle of that just evaporated. And I was in this place of now what do I do? I don’t know where to go from here, but yeah. Yep. So what I’m hearing is so you’re talking about a porn addiction? Is that what you’re talking about? At that time. Okay. At that time. Okay. So you were like, Baggo I’m just gonna walk away from all my wellness principles and walk towards other wellness principles. I’m a little, you lost me a little bit there. I was like, I am going to, I didn’t, I felt like I had a lot to offer on the planet. There was a lot within me and I didn’t wanna spend my lifetime having a career of healing. Constantly going to meetings, constantly having to have a wellness practice. What if life is a wellness practice? What if I don’t have to have a separate wellness practice? And so it was like, I’m not gonna sit here and try to fix myself anymore. What I’m gonna do is just look, stare straight down the barrel of this like thing that I’m figuring out. And while I’m sorting out all the stuff that comes up, all the rest of my focus was how can I live well? And it just to turns out that over time, Living well, learning how to work with my mind and my body, made all the other stuff go away on its own. Wow. To the point where, you know, oh, I used to be triggered by this thing and then I would, it would, something would happen and later the day I was like, wow. I used to get triggered by that, but it happened by itself. I wasn’t busy going oh no, I’m gonna handle my trigger. It was just because the more, all of our thoughts, all of our feelings, everything is built. Brain’s not in touch with the. At all. So the only thing, it’s in ti, it’s the little security guard in the corner, like looking at all the screens going, okay, what’s going on outside, with the twin key or whatever else he’s doing. Or she. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s in there and the only thing it has access to is what’s happening in the body. And so as the body starts to become better and better instinctively on its own, the brain, like you’ve changed the building blocks. So rather than having the Lego pieces it was building with before was like Harry Potter and the Baskin, the basement of the castle and Voldemort coming out of everywhere. And now all of a sudden it’s like Bob the builder, whatever else, because it, you changed the Lego said the brain can. Stuff out of what the body is giving it. And so working with the body and helping it to live better automatically starts to settle all the mental stuff that is downstream. Wow. Okay. So this is so interesting. I filmed a podcast yesterday with a woman who had lost 140 pounds. Over six years, which I love, and she’d kept it off for 20 years and she’s super, super healthy. And her principal was similar to yours. It was as soon as I dropped the diet and started paying attention to taking care of me really well. Things just naturally fell into place. And I’m hearing this again for the second time. As soon as I dropped the diet of all these wellness principles and all these, spiritual, I must follow these rules, and you started doing something differently, it all fell into place. So what did you actually do differently? So I I started I made a, the first thing I did was I made like a playlist, which was like, let me just 50 things. 50 is a big number for me at the time that just make me feel like I come a lot and that could have been a favorite food because, okay, cool. People are like yeah, you can’t just eat yourself. But at the time I felt miserable. I might as well feel better, eat, pray, love. Eat, pray, love. Sure. So so it was like I used to stick my head in the freezer. I don’t, that was from when I was a kid in the grocery store, like the smell of stale ice and the sound of the worrying generat. I don’t know what it is but I was like, oh yeah. People are like, what are you doing? I’m like, oh, I’m feeling a little hotheaded. And Walking through the grass barefoot. I loved sitting on the roof and just watching the sun set. It was like 20 minutes a day. It was my appointment with myself where I was just like, I need more light in my life. I’m just gonna sit here and watch the light, and over the course of months watching it go across the horizon and back and like things just started to settle. As my body got, I was giving myself permiss. To do things that helped me feel more and more alive. So that was the first place that I started. Okay. I’ve got a comment on this cause I feel this. So probably about five or six months ago, I spent a lot of time in Costa Rica. I was there for two months, and then I’ve been coming back for about, I don’t know, three or four weeks at a time ever since then. And what is it about Costa R. That I love. It’s not like this resort town. It’s not that it’s carrying my groceries on my back. It’s walking and navigating mud puddles. It’s like these so simple things that like bring us back to our very human bodies and very human roots, so I’m feeling that wa just watching the sun go up and down, there’s something about being so connected to. I don’t know your body and feeling, so I’m with you on this. Yeah. And the doorstopper, like on the bottom of the door, that little kid. Like any, it can be anything. Like I really gave myself permission to just be like, it might be something that I feel like is stupid, but if at the end of it I come alive, that’s great. And that could have been. Cool conversations with friends. It could have been dancing. I allowed myself to put big things on there that take a little planning and like little tiny things that are like, pick your nose in public, like just to mess with people, not that wasn’t actually on my list, but do you really enjoy that, Bob? You can tell that one. You could give it a whirl right now if you want to. And yeah, there we go. But the idea was like, this is this life that is inside this body. It’s never been here before. It’ll never be here again. There is something incredibly unique and special about each individual life, and I will never see it blossom unless I fertilize it. Unless I nourish it. And so it’s no longer about fixing this. It’s about watering it and making sure there’s sunlight so that it sprouts. I love that and I get to witness it because I don’t want to go another day and miss the life that I am because I’m too busy trying to be what other people expect. I’m loving your plant analogy. I’m just thinking about when I get into those habits of okay, I have to work out every day and I have to do this and I have to do that, and it’s this is for my happiness. And you get into the bound and gagged space, I imagine a tree, what is it called? Is it called as spier or something? It’s like where they tie, that’s limbs up in these like perfect little, positions. It’s living a life like that versus giving yourself like just what you. Fertilizer, sun, water, and Jess letting it breathe. That sounds really nice. Yeah, and I, it’s, you imagine a carrot trying to be a potato. That’s what we’re all. Doing. And if you look at all the wellness gurus there’s people that are writing books, and I wrote a book, people write books. And a lot of the people writing books are gonna tell you like the 17 laws of success and the 47, do hickeys of, wisdom and the, whatever it is. And they’re gonna tell you all of these patterns that make people healthy and make, and there is something to that for sure. But if you looked at any person who was genuinely. In life that is genuinely happy, their life would not look like any other life. They would not fit all the categories that everybody says you have to do. And so all of those suggestions they sound like, no, I have to do this, and then I gotta do this. And if I’m not meditating 15 minutes a week a week. Yeah. But some people’s meditation is the way that they read a book, or the way that they, the way they eat their food. Some people does, they naturally meditate that way, but they think no, I need to have the headspace. And then I need to do this other thing, and that’s not necessarily the case. Every single person on the planet is really a unique being, and what matters is understand your. Your tool set your body, your mind, learn how they’re working, but then also learn how your unique car, what are all its features. That’s fun. One of the things you get to do in that car that are just what your life gets to do. Yeah. So let’s talk about the actual, like connecting to your body. So the title of this is gonna be something like, how to program your body to. Instill happiness naturally. What did you do to start programming your body or listening to your body? Will you walk us through that? Yeah. So the first it is, it’s funny because people who think that they’re really in tune with their body often are only in tune with their emotional states. Or they’re in tune with their thoughts. To be able to just be with what the body is doing is the first step. Like to really get tuned into what is going on in the. Now most people’s triggers trauma, depression, and anxiety and pain. All of that stuff happens when the sympathetic nervous system is really on high alert. So it doesn’t happen when you’re like drinking my ties on the beach or something. It happens when you’re just like, amped up, stressed, you got a deadline and then the kid threw up in the backseat. Like it happens when there is this need to fix life and most healing method. They happen only when the person is like calm and collected and they feel safe. And so that’s why it takes so long. So what I did was I was like, I wanna get into a place where I can amplify my nervous system consciously. And then re give it another option. Cause the person only ever feels stuck when they don’t like the options in front of ’em. They can have 400 options. If they hate all of ’em, they’ll feel stuck. But if they only have one option and they love it, they won’t feel. And so what I had to do was give my instincts more than one option for how to respond to any given circumstance. Okay? So I first could figure out what that was like. And a lot of this came back to martial arts training for me because, Ultimately what I was dealing with was conflict with life, and so I went to places that trained conflict, not typical martial arts training. This is from like old Russian, like cossack training way back in the day. It’s an old tradition with all kinds of deep, intense work that, that I worked with people and I learned we’re taking like, okay, someone pulls a knife on you. Okay. What does that do in your system? And then I notice how my body tenses up and it freezes and how my breathing changed and whatnot. And in that moment, I train it to have another option. And then all of a sudden when somebody pulls a sharp word on me when my body reacts like it does a knife, it then also recognizes, oh, there’s another way out. And so then it automatically does the one that feels best. Wow. Okay. So slow down here because this is like a dense, meaty steak. So this is not, this is night not light. We’re not in fruit here. We’re like in density. So I wanna slow down and really get this. And so what you’re trying to do then is you’re trying to. Purposely trigger your nervous system. You may or may not be pulling knives on your client. That’s what I’m hearing. And then you’re training yourself to say, I don’t have to freak out, or something like that. We’re go back and fix what? What? I’m misunderstanding on that. No, you’re good. Like I, we use knives, we use whatever else because the knife represents everything that comes, that is cutting remarks and sharp things and things that stab you from behind him when you get stabbed in the back. So we work with the edge of a person’s ability. So if just having a knife in my hand is enough to make a person freak out, that’s all we have to work with. Yeah, because that’s where their freakout is. And so we just, how about a butter knife? I think that’d be safe with a butter knife. That’s totally fine. If a butter knife works. But remember that if you’re playing with only where you’re safe, then you haven’t retrained the places where you feel unsafe. And it’s the places where people feel unsafe. Struggle. Woo. I can already feel that. I can feel myself getting pushed into even thinking about someone having a knife, like just hanging out with you and you’re like, Ugh. Okay. All right. So you work with your, and that’s wait. Yeah. What’s happening in your body? What exactly is happening? Just thinking about it like a little bit of like in my stomach, like it’s like a gurgling in my stomach. Okay. And a little bit tightness. Tightness my throat too. There you go. Tightness in the throat and the gurgling in the stomach. So now breathe. Let that happen, but breathe and unhook yourself from that. Ah. How do I do that? There you go. Shug the shoulders. Okay. Wiggle your throat. Maybe massage your throat. Okay. All right. Push your belly a little. Okay. Relaxed again. Yeah, make a big time. Okay, cool. So now we now think about it again. Think about somebody pulling an eye on him. It still tightens my throat a little bit. Yep. Is it tightening the same way? It’s your belly. Gurgling. My stomach is better, but my throat still, it’s as tight. Yep. So notice that, okay. You in just like 20 seconds, you literally changed your body’s reaction to a thought. Now, what if that is this deadline coming up? What if that is, oh, I gotta have a hard conversation with my spouse. What if that is my son just is constantly disrespectful. What if that is the house that’s dirty or a new bill that showed up in the mail and thinking about it causes your body to do that? Hold on a second. Okay, let me help my body. It’s showing me that I have a thought that it believes is real. See, a belief is only a thought that your body is making Feel. And so all you’re doing is you’re teaching your body to open its eyes again and go, is it really real? Is it really happening right now? Oh, it’s not actually happening right now. Cool. I don’t have to react to a thought that way. And then as your body ceases to respond to whatever the quote unquote trigger is, then all of a sudden now creativity opens up. Possibilities open up and you’re like, somebody holds a knife all the time. You hold knives when you’re going to cut vegetables. You walk around the kitchen with a knife. What’s wrong with a knife? Knives are used in surgery. Knives are used for whittling wood and making presents for people and soak carb bangs and, but we only think, oh, it’s dangerous and it’s only the thought that’s making our body. Okay. So what I’m hearing then is you feel the trigger in your body, you name it, and really feel it. Try to figure out what’s going on there. And then you ask yourself to release it. Just you whatever you need to do, just let it go a little bit, and then you bring it up again and ask your body. If it’s scared or what’s that next step? I’m looking for a step by step here. Yeah. No. That’s perfect. This is what I did because I was like the super skeptical, I did this with pornographic imagery, like when I was like, I don’t want to have that in my head all the time, so can I delete it? And then I was like, okay, cool. Now I want to try and think of, again, if it’s still coming up or I’m still having a reaction, then okay, it didn’t work. So I was always a skeptic. So you’re testing, all you’re doing is testing. Does this have a reaction? So you have the thought in your mind. And you just watch, how is my body reacting to it? If it’s reacting at all, then on some level it believes that it’s still really happening in this moment, even though it’s a thought. And so all you’re doing is you accept the reaction. There’s nothing wrong with it. And then you work with that reaction. You massage it out. You breathe differently. You move differently. And then as it goes away, then you test again. Bring the thought up. Is my body still reaction? Oh, the reaction’s changed. Cool. I did that. That wasn’t something else. I was doing both the damage to myself and now I’m doing the cure to myself. Congratulations me. That’s interesting. Okay. And then you work with the next reaction and then you test it again. And maybe, big things in life like grief, someone dying or divorce, those take time. There’s a lot of layers to. But having a bodily experience of watching your body let go of pain and let go of struggle and tension and worry gives your body like tools now to deal with all the other stuff that shows up. Because in the end, how do you know you’re having an emotion? Your body is doing something. How do you know you’re being tempted? How do you know you’re, you are depressed? How do you know you’re anxious? How do you know that things are painful? The only way you’ll ever know is that your body is making it feel that way. And it, that’s the same way as if someone had walked up to you and squeezed those spots. So you re you release it in the same way you would as if it were a real knife. Okay. So just to recap, I’m a num, I’m a step-by-step bulleted kind of person We let go in your journey, you let go of all the prescriptive do this cuz that was just binding you, right? And you just started paying attention to the one tool that you really wanna pay attention to, which is your body. How am I reacting when something comes up? And then just being hyper-focused and doing a scan and saying, what do I feel right now? And then, Gently trying to release it through, and I’d love to hear it in a second, methods to release that, but gently trying to release that, then checking back in and saying, has it changed? And if so, awesome. Look what I did, and if not, awesome. Also I get to keep checking on that and see if it wants to shift. Is that, am I on the right track on that one? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So let’s talk about the basic levers because, pe A lot of people will talk like when we take prescriptions, medications for, not that they’re bad, but when we take them for our wellbeing, our mental health and stuff, all we’re doing is managing chemistry. We’re taking chemicals from the outside and we’re trying to change the chemistry from the inside and. We can do that. There’s nothing wrong with it, but what, the only reason we’re doing that is cause we haven’t learned to manage the chemistry from the inside. The difficulty is, I don’t know anybody who has seen a molecule with their naked eye or knows what a cell is, or okay. Let me just go ahead and produce some more, nitric oxide in my body real quick. Let me just go ahead and do that and will that happen? Okay. Yeah. I think I should release some, adrenaline right now. Let’s go. I don’t know anybody who knows how to do that, and so I had to find. The most practical levers that are in a normal everyday experie. That you can toggle to start to change what the building blocks your brain has in order to make a new experience. And those boil down to grieving fastest way to change your internal chemistry is thinking, but that it’s also unreliable. Cuz if your brain’s like mine, it’s like squirrel and then it’s gone again. And every fluctuation of thought changes chemistry, so you have to be really focused. In order and hold that thought for a good period of time, really intensively in order for it to work. But the second fastest way is breathing. When you breathe, there are so many different ways to breathe that I’ve covered with clients, and that just depends on what’s going on. But when you breathe, You change up the oxygen CO2 ratio in the chemo receptors, in the brain and in the body, and you can start to normalize the pH in the blood. Most people’s blood is running a little bit too acidic because of all the stress hormones and everything else, which is breaking down things that’s causing the bones to dump bicarbonate into the bloodstream. And so now you’re leeching chemistry off of other parts of the body in order to balance things. And that’s a big toll on the body. So people are like, I don’t know why I don’t have any energy. You don’t have any energy cuz your body’s doing a whole lot of extra squirrel races that it doesn’t need to do. So if you breathe, however, you can prime the body and it will hold that state for longer periods of time than just changing your thoughts about something so you can change your thoughts. That’s one thing. You change your breathing patterns. That means maybe holding a breath on purpose. On empty. Does one thing unfold, does something else? Maybe you take more inhale, more air in, then you take it out. Or maybe you exhale more than you breathe it in. Maybe you inhale and exhale only through your nose, or maybe you gotta do it through your mouth. There’s a lot of different ways to work with breath, and I do have a couple of them on my YouTube channel. One for anxiety, one for depression, things like that that people can find or we consent to them or something. But there’s just a lot of different ways to do it. So move the breathing, then there’s tension in the. So just places where you’re tense. How many times have you been there in a day where you’re sitting there and you realize your arms are near your shoulders for no reason? And then you’re like, why am I doing that? Just releasing, that changes what’s going on in the brain. It’s giving different information to the mind, and now it’s gotta produce a different experience of reality. Then there’s movement. Are your movement sharp and jerky, or are they calm and smooth and. Are your movements of your eyes sharp and jerky and they’re jumping around like somebody who’s anxious or paranoid or having a panic attack? Or do you go to cuz that’s like the Jason Bourne movies where it’s all shaky camera work and you kinda get sick in the middle of it. If you were to watch the fight scene, nothing’s actually happening, but some dude jerking around a camera, then it just looks like a whole lot’s going on, which is what it feels like in a fight. But instead, if you were to back out and have a panoramic vision, Relax your eyes and take in the scene just like you do when you’re driving on an open road. People do this all the time, and then you just focus them as needed. But if you keep a panoramic vision with your eyes, that changes what goes on in the mind. And then with then you have posture. A lot of people are like hunched over, they’re slouching and whatnot. There’s a TED Talks. You can find all kinds of things around power poses and what simple changes in body position do to change your internal chemistry and to put your body into a different state. This is kinda what yoga is based on, right? That there are certain positions you put the body in that when you can really relax into those positions, a whole different world of experience can open. And so you have movement, you have posture, you have muscle relaxation, and you have breathing. You can change your nutrition. That, that is, that takes a little bit more willpower. But these are the things that happen that you can deal with, on the fly all the time. So here’s an example. One time I’m in my bedroom, in my like standing desk closet working on my website cuz it broke. So I’m feeling the jitters, right? We’re not gonna have any money, but we’re gonna die. We’re gonna be on food stamps, whatever’s, all the thoughts going in. So I’m sitting there working on this stuff coming up and I’m trying to. Breathe and calm him down. And then my wife walks in and she’s Hey Bob, do you wanna go fishing this weekend with my brother? I just need to know, cuz he wants to make sure he wants. And my internally, my, my head is French Jam, I’m busy here, and now I’m gonna get, gotta give up my weekend. I never get time to be myself and sure, fine, whatever. If I had to really let that go, I would’ve been seething for several weeks. Instead, what I did was I dropped to the floor and did snow angels on the carpet breathing in, ah, So my wife’s looking at me and she’s are you all right? You need me to punch in the chest or something? And I was like no, I’m just, I said, I’m really frustrated that the website’s broken and down and I’m having a really rough time at the moment, and can you give me like a couple hours before I have to respond? I don’t think it’s probably a good time for me to respond right now. And she was like, sure. And she walked out and everything about how I was feeling had changed. I had breathed differently. I had changed my body position. I had changed my elevation for crying and out loud I had moved differently. Maybe that’s not something you can do in the grocery store, although it’s worth it to try. But it’s something you can do in the car. When my kids are freaking out in the backseat, sometimes it’s just too much noise. So I just start going. And they know what comes next. So they’re like, oh, dad, breathe in again. And that helps too. But I’m changing things on the ends inside. Just by moving, breathing, relaxing, changing my body position. Wow. I love it. This is a masterclass here. This is this is some good dense stuff you’re giving us. This is really helpful. We have to move on because we’re out of time, but I could talk to you or listen to you for another seven hours. So if our listeners are anything like me and they’re wanting more, where would you point them to? Okay. There’s a couple places. The free, the freedom specialist.com is a website where you can find online courses, you can find that you can do from home. You can find access to, to get signed up for our retreats, we do run retreats. Congratulations. Retreat works and there are five days and they are intensive where I have stacked a whole lot of physiological experiences. One after the other to build a way to open up the body from years and years of baggage and trauma and all that stuff. We’ve had people with chronic pain, people with childhood abuse for 50 years that they’ve struggled with and all these kinds of things come and in five days just really clean the decks. And find a level of freedom that they didn’t even think was possible. It, we have men, we have ’em for women. We have ’em for couples. There are retreats there available and you can schedule a call. It’s a free call and just talk through your situation with one of me or the guides that are on the call and see if it’ll work. But there’s other stuff. There’s the free podcast is on the website that’s at the freedom specialist.com. If you want a copy of my book, built for Freedom Adventures through stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, trauma, pain, and our body’s innate ability to leave them all behind. You can go to built for freedom.org and there you can buy it for five bucks. You can get a digital version actually. And it also comes with the audio version. I did it along with all the voices and things inside the book and stuff. You can read that romping adventure that way. And so it comes with some bonuses and some options there as well as a discount to some of our other programs. And so that’s a really inexpensive way to, to get ahold. This material and to start following along with the stories in the book and start to feel experiences that way. So built for freedom.org if you wanna catch the book or the freedom specialist.com if you wanna find any of our online programs and stuff. And there’s the Alive and Free podcast if you just wanna jump on and listen to me Jabber. I love it. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much for that. I’m curious about your retreats. How often do you do your. We are we usually, the past few years we’ve had six or seven. We usually do that many. We’re trying to work to where we can do more. But they are here in Utah, we cover all of the housing and the food and everything. We pick everybody up at the airport on a bus. It starts on the bus guys, and And then we take ’em out to whatever place we’ve managed to rent to, usually out in Heber or someplace like that. And and we just run you through like first day is really getting your system aware that it is possible to change and cleaning the decks of all the old stories, all the diagnoses, everything else, ripping off all the labels so that we can see what’s really going on in each person’s individual. And then the next couple of days we work with vocalization and posture and showing you how to tease your brain into producing your own endocannabinoids, which is like getting high on your own supply. So you don’t need opioid stuff as well as more B D N F, which is your neuroplasticity. You have the ability to make changes in your habits and your patterns and to do that on autopilot on its own. So like you train your system how to do that. Then we spend mid-morning doing movement practices really subtly at first, for the first day or so, and then we move into it to where we’re teaching you how to move in a way that stops disturbing and creating extra stress in your life. So that all you’re dealing with is whatever’s on the outside, the afternoons, we do big breath work stuff. Evening we have time for deep tissue body work that I and a couple of my assistants, my son included do with each individual person. So it’s one-on-one attention along with time and space to just relax as well as be with the coaches. The nutrition is covered to be really dialed in, so it’s very healthy. We cover all the dietary stuff that we can so that nobody needs to feel like they have to be an outsider. We try to do what we can there, and then we spend a day with darkness. We do some cold water stuff, like we really stack them in a very particular way so that everybody’s all the places that they think they can’t handle life, their deep fears, their inner worries, their old memories, everything else they get to. And discover that it’s not actually something that has to control them anymore, and they find that they’re okay in the middle of it. They leave in a such a different place. Do you know that I, I love hearing about this. I love the idea of you probably take ’em out to a river and experience the cold water or whatever else. Like just those kind of experiential things are what, I don’t know, make retreats magic as you very well know, because you can experience things in that setting. Can’t in any other setting, so you can’t experience I’m loving it. That’s the retreat, that’s the body. That’s the body They. Yeah, so the retreats come with three to four months of support on either side where you’re doing all the online stuff and learning and whatnot. The retreats specifically are the place where I’m taking people through experiences that they just can’t create on their own, cuz you need a group or you need a guide, or you need something else, agreed. Agreed. I love it. Bob, as we wrap things up, a reminder that the goal of this podcast is to instill wellness habits into your daily life. To build a life beyond. It’s fine. Let’s achieve spectacular, joyful, and deeply satisfying and do some snow angels on the ground. So the giveaway from your sponsor or from our sponsors retreat works. We’re doing free live masterclass. I do these it’s me that does them. I do ’em live. About every once a month to every other week. So once or twice a month. And I train you the system to add a high-end retreat if you wanna be like Bob. We ran in my company, 200 retreats a year. And I love retreats. I love going to people’s retreats. I love training retreats. For me, there’s nothing like, just like what Bob said, that magical connection that you get of being able to take those clients through that experience. You can’t get that any other way. So if you want to add a retreat like Bob to your business come join me. Go to retreat.works. It’s not.com, it’s dot works. And learn how. Add a high end retreat to your business. So Bob, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. This has been a feast of knowledge and I bet people rewind this and like back in the day when you used to hit the rewind button and watch it twice because it was so good, I took notes like mad. So thank you so much for your time. Thanks for your guidance, and thanks for joining us and thanks to our listeners. Have a wonderful day and thank you to our listeners for, in advance for giving us a positive review. Thanks everyone.