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Translator: Tanya Cushman
Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
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What if I told you doctors have discovered
a miraculous medicine
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that would allow you
to catch yourself in times of stress,
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sadness, anger, anxiety or pain,
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and within moments,
regain control of yourself,
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bring yourself together,
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stopping the suffering
right in its tracks,
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all-natural, laboratory-tested
and no side effects?
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You'd probably say, "Hmm how much is it?"
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Free.
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Most of you'd probably think,
"Hey, sign me up."
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And the more inquisitive might ask:
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"Can it even help insomnia,
digestive problems, arthritis pain,
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lower my blood pressure?"
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Yes.
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You're probably thinking,
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"It sounds too good to be true.
Let me get this straight.
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So, it will make every aspect
of my life better,
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and I don't have to do anything
but take this pill?"
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Wait just a minute.
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I didn't say you
didn't have to do anything.
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You have to do one thing every day.
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"But you said it was just a medicine."
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It is, but it's not in a pill form.
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This medicine is yoga,
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breath control,
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aka "pranayama" in Sanskrit.
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The gurus believe if there is
any physical, mental or spiritual disease
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that yoga cannot cure,
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than it cannot be cured.
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It is that powerful.
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And do not fear:
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it is a proven science, not a religion,
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and anyone can do it,
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"except for," as my teacher
in India always says,
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"a lazy person."
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(Laughter)
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Now, at this point
in the hypothetical situation,
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I would predict,
if you are anything like me,
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you're thinking,
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"You mean I have to do yoga?
I can't just take a pill?"
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Well, that is exactly
what I thought until one day,
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when I was hopelessly desperate
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and no longer able
to stand on my left leg.
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I was convinced by the Western doctors
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who had done my knee surgeries
ten years earlier,
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that the only way
I could walk into old age
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was to get a complete knee replacement.
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Now, I didn't feel this way at the time,
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but I was sure lucky to be so desperate
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because changing ourselves
is so difficult,
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and there are only two ways
we can really do it.
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One: be miserably desperate,
have no other options,
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and two: being inspired.
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So, as I look out in the audience today,
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I sincerely hope that many of you
are miserably desperate
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and the other lot of you are inspired
by some part of this story
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to consider adding meditation,
yoga, conscious breathing
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into your daily routine.
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Now, I didn't always feel this way.
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Here's me in high school:
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football player,
wrestler, 20 pounds heavier,
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and if you would have told me
that in another 20 years,
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I'd be spending most of my time
dreaming about my next trip to India
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and doing yoga every single day,
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I'd have said you were completely crazy.
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So how did it come to this?
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Well, let's rewind the tape eight years,
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living in Poland,
slowly losing my ability to walk,
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when I went to see a Ukrainian
physical therapist who'd studied in India.
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He pressed on some points on my knee
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to get the right muscles
and tendons to relax,
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thoroughly examined it,
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and, to my surprise,
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for the first time in a month,
I was able to stand on my knee.
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He said, "There's nothing
wrong with your knee
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except that you are hurting your knee.
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You are walking wrong,
eating wrong, standing wrong.
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Your body is out of alignment,
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and if you want to walk,
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you need to start doing yoga
every single day -
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lengthening your hamstrings,
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imprinting the proper alignment
onto your body with this practice -
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right away."
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Thinking about what he said
on the tram home,
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I was really confused.
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Because this went against
all of my core beliefs about my health.
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I'd been convinced that
because my parents had knee problems,
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then I would have knee problems.
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That every day a person gets older,
their health just gets worse and worse.
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That my knee was destroyed
from years of sports
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and that the only way
that I could ever heal
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was to cut out my knee,
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and I was seriously planning that.
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To accept that I was
unknowingly injuring myself
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would mean that I would have to be
responsible for my own healing.
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And if I couldn't walk in the future,
it was only because I was lazy.
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For the next two days,
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grumpy but scared,
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I did yoga first thing every morning,
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imprinting that proper muscle alignment
on my body, and I could walk.
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Woah! First time in a month, I'm walking.
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So the third day: "Hey, I'm healed.
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This is great. This yoga was awesome,
two days, healed me. I'm done."
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I started walking, and I was great,
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saying, "Yeah, it's really true.
I don't need to do this."
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By the end of the day,
knee started locking up,
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my old muscle memory returned,
and I couldn't walk.
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At this moment, I was livid.
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I said, "You mean I have to do yoga
every day if I want to walk?
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Aaagh."
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Not happy, but desperate, I did my yoga.
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I started out with sun salutations,
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about 30 minutes of Vinyasa yoga,
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and that's just flow -
just means you flow with every breath.
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After a few weeks,
I wanted more; I needed more.
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So I started doing half
of the Ashtanga yoga primary series.
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Ashtanga yoga is
a really beautiful form of yoga
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where you turn your whole body
into a breathing machine,
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and you do that for about 90 minutes
through a series of poses,
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and at the end, you are in bliss
for the rest of the day.
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Nobody, not even the taxi drivers
in Warsaw, can make you angry.
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(Laughter)
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And at that point, I had to admit
the Ukrainian was right.
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And that was when I got inspired
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because not only did my knee heal,
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but all these other changes
started happening.
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I was never a morning person,
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but all of a sudden, I'm waking up
at the crack of noon to do my yoga.
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(Laughter)
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My asthma, that I'd struggled
with all my life, completely disappeared.
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My stomach pain - gone.
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I had chronic stomach pain, nonstop;
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I was always walking around like this.
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and most baffling of all,
I remembered where I put my keys.
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(Laughter)
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So I started studying
everything I could about yoga,
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and I wanted to know more,
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which led me to all
the deeper things behind yoga.
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I needed more than just
the physical practice.
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So, we call the positions
in yoga "asanas."
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And I had to go beyond the asanas.
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Before, you see, I used to think
yoga was just these physical poses
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that you'd get in and
hold your breath in for a while.
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And then I realized,
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wow, the rest of yoga
has all these subtle breathing practices,
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and the only reason
why we do the physical yoga
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is in order to heal our bodies first
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because we can't sit in meditation
and bathe in the bliss of life
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if all we're thinking about
is how bad our back is killing us.
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I started discovering all these practices,
and it was so exciting;
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I was like a kid in a candy store,
just blown away by the simplicity.
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Then you come to the Sanskrit language,
and it's so beautiful too;
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it's so logical and so powerful.
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Let's take the word
"pranayama" for example.
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It describes a lot of different
breathing practices,
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and I feel it really sums up
the essence of yoga and why we do this.
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So let's dissect it.
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First you have "prana,"
which means "the life force."
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Literally, it's in the air we breathe;
it's all around us.
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And then we have "ayama,"
which is "lengthening."
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So literally, "life lengthening
through breathing."
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This ancient yoga practice,
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it's also really proven in science
if you look at what breathing does.
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When you slow your respiratory rate,
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it kicks in the parasympathetic
nervous system, right?
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Lowering your blood pressure,
calming your body down, relieving stress.
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Breathing fast, on the other hand,
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kicks in your fight-or-flight
sympathetic nervous reaction.
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It makes your heart race,
mind race out of control.
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Want to live a long life? Here's a key:
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it's a chart of the average breaths
per minute and then how long they live.
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Mouse: breathing average
of 130 breaths - breathe very, very fast -
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and they only live
to be one to three years old.
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Next we have the dog:
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dog breathes about 30 breaths
on average per minute;
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they live 10 to 20 years old.
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Let's jump to the chimpanzee:
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they breathe about 14 breaths per minute,
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little better,
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and they live 40 years.
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The horse: they breathe
about 12 on average, while at rest,
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and they live to be 50 years; they can't -
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I wouldn't want to ride that one.
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(Laughter)
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And the human, let's just
average it at nine.
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Well, a healthy human,
anywhere from 6 to 12.
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An unhealthy human,
maybe 12 to 24 breaths per minute,
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and that unhealthy human
will probably live less long.
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So, now we have the whale:
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whale breathes 6 breaths a minutes,
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lives to be 100.
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Obviously, there are exceptions,
but the tendency is pretty clear.
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Alright. So there you have it.
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I shared this information, actually,
with a colleague at work -
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he's in his 60s -
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and he said, "Where were you
when I was younger?
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You should have told me
this then. Come on."
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And that is exactly
what my wife and I thought:
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"Why isn't this taught in every school
from preschool until university."
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So my wife and I decided, "Hey,
we're not going to wait for school.
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We're going to teach our baby
from the moment of conception."
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Pregnant - we're off to India,
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doing as much yoga, chanting
and meditation as we possibly can.
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Then once our daughter was born,
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we held her on our chest,
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and we lay down and breathe deep
as much as we could,
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super deep,
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because we wanted to force her
to imitate us, and she would;
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she'd sync up her breath with ours
after we'd done it long enough.
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And if she started crying,
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well then, we'd breathe really loud
and exaggerate our breath in her ear,
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and that calming sound
would calm her down.
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And so it would be something like this:
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(Breathing loudly in and out)
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And that sound is the same sound
you hear in Ashtanga yoga,
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very deep, loud sounds like this:
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(Breathing loudly in and out)
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So the whole time you're doing yoga
for an hour-and-a-half,
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you are physically calming yourself down.
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It's like taking tranquilizers,
but yet you have the energy of coffee.
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Totally amazing.
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So when our baby would cry and
the breathing wouldn't immediately help,
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she wouldn't catch on,
we couldn't snap her out of her crying,
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well, at least it calmed us down.
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(Laughter)
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And eventually, that had
a calming effect on her.
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Think about our normal reaction
when a baby cries:
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breath stopped, brain not getting oxygen,
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"What can I do to make
this baby stop crying?"
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So, holding our breath;
body's lacking oxygen;
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telling brain, "We need oxygen";
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brain starts panicking.
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It's so hard to stop.
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When our daughter was
a little older and started crying,
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we would say, "Breathe."
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As soon as she started crying, we'd get
eye contact, get right in her face,
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and say, "Breathe."
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And then we'd do it with her:
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smiling and breathing.
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And she'd normally jump right on
and breathe super loud.
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If she's still crying,
and we can't stop her,
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then we grab her and hold her.
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Just hug her and breathe with her
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until she breathes
and calms herself down.
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And let's take a look at this breathing.
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(Video) Jim Kambeitz:
Lily, what's the matter?
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Breathe, honey.
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Yeah, breathe.
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(Both breathing deeply)
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Yeah.
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It's okay, don't cry, Lily.
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So that's what it looks like;
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she literally went,
in about seven seconds,
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from screaming like crazy
to (deep breathes),
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and she started smiling.
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Totally amazing.
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So my wife and I, we're thinking,
"Hey, this is really great."
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But then we hit terrible twos
or terrific twos,
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depending on who you are.
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And in the terrific twos,
we have tantrums,
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and tantrums will force you
to learn yoga in a whole new way.
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(Laughter)
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As my friend in Poland said,
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"Yoga is not for the mat.
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You have to practice it
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while changing a diaper with one arm
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and holding a second baby with the other
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on one leg while doing your taxes."
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(Laughter)
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But what do you do?
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Child is tantruming;
you're trying to get her to breathe,
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it won't start breathing -
like a computer, kind of frozen?
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So, the next thing we need to practice
is detached observation without judgment.
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Child starts crying,
make sure they're safe,
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detach and leave the room.
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If they resume tantruming, stay calm;
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eventually it will go away.
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A tantrum, like all our bad emotions
and tough situations in our life,
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they will leave our bodies, with time.
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And research has shown
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that you cannot have an emotion
in your body any longer than seven seconds
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unless you fuel it.
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Remember, anxiety is in our mind,
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and our mind has to give us
the fuel to keep it going.
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Here's a formula for transforming
uncomfortable emotions or experiences,
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with our breath.
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First, we recognize
what we're suffering from:
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"Oh, anger, frustration."
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Next, we start breathing very deeply.
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And next, we release it
and keep breathing.
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It will go away.
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So, speaking of going away,
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I'm going to leave you with one last fact
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my scuba-diving teacher
taught me years ago.
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"It is biologically impossible
to have an anxiety or panic attack
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when you are breathing fully,
deeply, slowly."
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You can't do it.
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Think of how many billions
of dollars are spent each year
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in anxiety, arthritis meds,
supplements, surgeries;
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money and time wasted on the symptom
instead of healing from the root.
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And I confess, I did it too.
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I tried everything from protein shakes
and antidepressants
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to shark-cartilage pills
and knee surgeries.
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Searching for the answer outside
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when all along,
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we have all the tools we need
right here inside us.
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So I invite you
to give permission to yourself
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to control and extend your breath,
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and in so doing,
control and extend your life.
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If a baby can do it, then so can you.
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Thank you.
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
