Episode 160 transcript: Ayurveda Secrets for Energy, Balance & Longevity with Dr. John Douillard
[00:00:00] Dr. John Douillard: So one day, I was taking my pulse and writing it down. I said, You know what? It's interesting. I feel my pulse changing. It's different at different times of day. And he was like, those are the circadian rhythms. I go, what? He goes on, those are the natural cycles of nature. And when you're in balance, and we were living a really peaceful, like no distraction, we're in India, pretty chill lifestyle, where the lake gets really calm, and my body was in rhythm.
And I was like, wait a minute. Are you telling me that in my body, I can actually feel the rhythms of nature that force the birds to fly south? The whales migrate the leaves to turn red and fall off. Is that what I'm actually feeling? And he was, oh yes, that's exactly what you're feeling. And I'm going like, what?
Are you kidding me? Like that, to me, was just so mind-boggling that I could feel something so subtle that none of us even knew existed inside of us.
[00:00:55] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breath depth and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma, and join me weekly as I interview guests who have made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention, gratitude, and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.
Welcome back to Live the Width of Your Life Podcast. My guest today is Dr. John Douillard, and he's a well-known expert in Ayurveda and the founder of life spa.com, a leading authority on evidence-based Ayurvedic healthcare, and he has over 40 years of experience helping people achieve lasting health.
Vitality and longevity. Dr. John's journey began in 1986 in India, after which he collaborated with Deepak Chopra to train doctors in Ayurvedic medicine. As a chiropractor in sports medicine specialist, he used Ayurvedic principles to improve athletic performance and worked with athletes like Billie Jean.
He's also written seven books and over 1500 educational articles, empowering a global audience of more than 11 million to reverse aging and heal naturally. We had the most amazing conversation. I loved hearing about his journey. How, as a young man, he ended up in India and started studying Ayurveda, and it became part of his mission in life, and how he has turned that into a way to really help promote natural healing for so many millions of us.
He is very prolific with his books and also with all of the resources that he provides. I loved our conversation, and I think you will as well take a listen.
Dr. John, I'm so excited to have you on the show today.
[00:02:56] Dr. John Douillard: Great to be here.
[00:02:59] Aneta: It's been quite a warning already. It's so interesting when we start these podcast conversations. You just never know what you're going to walk into. And you and I, I feel like we've warmed up already, dealing with some technical things, more unshakeable. So I am excited for our conversation because you are someone who has just a wealth of knowledge and information about so many different things, but especially around Ayurveda and natural healing. So maybe you could just share for those that aren't as familiar with your work, a little bit more about your background and what got you interested in this specialty in the first place.
[00:03:36] Dr. John Douillard: I went to India in 1986 for a four-week vacation to try to figure out how to learn Ayurvedic medicine and ended up getting invited to stay there and study under an Ayurvedic doctor, which I did. I closed my practice with a scratchy phone that basically neither one of us could actually hear what was going on, but I never came back to that clinic.
I met Deepak Chopra there, who was starting an Ayurvedic center in Massachusetts. I came back and he asked me to come back and co-direct his center for eight years, and I did that, and I'm a chiropractor who is now trained in Ayurvedic medicine, and I was then thrown into the arena of teaching and training medical doctors.
This kind of discipline, and I just had to come up with some science to speak their language. And that's when I started taking this ancient medical wisdom and putting the science behind it. And that's what I do today. Which I really think is critical because science alone cannot prove that everybody isn't confused about what diet they should eat.
Is wheat good? Is wheat bad? Coffee's good? Coffee's bad. Soy is good. Soy is bad. You can't really determine what's really happening or good, or truthful. Based on the science alone. Because you can prove whatever you want, but we have something that's time-tested.
Thousands of years old, still happening today. The all Indian Ayurveda Congress is still today the largest medical organization in the world. So if it didn't work, I mean, it wouldn't be the largest medical organization. So there's something to it. So what I love to do is take that ancient medical wisdom, tie it to modern science. If you have both of those, I feel like that's a great place to start.
[00:05:16] Aneta: Wow, that's amazing. First of all, there's so much to unpack here. Like you casually just said, I went to India, met Deepak Chopra, and he asked me to start teaching. So I want to go back and first of all, tell me how long you were practicing chiropractor before you decided to go on this trip to India for four weeks.
[00:05:36] Dr. John Douillard: I graduated in ‘84, and in ‘86 I went, and what happened was I was actually training for a triathlon, an Ironman triathlon, and I heard about Ayurveda. I was taking a Chinese acupuncture course, and I heard the word, and I was like, I don't know. I was just fascinated by the idea of this ancient wisdom.
And there were these longevity secrets for people who lived 150 years. I was just like so taken up by the miracle of it all, so I went to this lecture and I told this doctor, I said, I wonder if doing an Ironman would be like, okay, according to the Ayurvedic sort of meditation program.
And he looked at me and said, What is that? And I said it's a two-and-a-half-mile swim, a 12-mile bike, a 26-mile run. And he looked at me like, he said, Why do you do that? And I was like. And no one ever asked me that before, so I didn't really have an answer. And he looked at me like I was an idiot.
And he said, Do you meditate? And I was like, yes. Actually, my mom got me and my sister taught in TM meditation, like when I was in high school or something. And so I've been, yeah, I meditate, and he goes, Do you sleep while you meditate? I go deeply. I get this deep sleep. It's amazing.
I love it. And he looked at me again like I was an idiot and said. Meditation is different than sleep. Meditation is when you're in a state of being deeply rested and alert at the same time. I was like, That's not me. I'm like, gone, knocked out, and he said, You're exhausted. And he goes, he's way too much.
And I said What if I, This was like the best question I ever had in my life, really. I said, What if I can meditate and not fall asleep and do all this exercise? Would that be okay? And he looked at me, he said Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can just, he wanted to get rid of me. But the answer was yes.
That's one of the signposts of you not being exhausted. So I started training less. I started going into meditation retreats not every weekend, but like a weekend a month. Then I went on a two-week meditation retreat, and I came out of that true story, actually, in my book, Body and Mind Sport, that last chapter is called Jet Fuel.
It was the runner's high experience that I went into for about three months. And it wasn't just that I competed at a higher level, and all my friends thought I was on steroids or I was on a new bike. Some of them learned how to meditate because who knew what really happened?
In my clinic internship, I had a level of capacity and bandwidth of handling information that was just completely different. And then it disappeared after three months, and I started digging into the runner's high, started reading books like the Psychic Side of Sports, and I was just so fascinated by that, that zone experience that I just stepped into.
And that was what ended up making me want to go to India and figure out what is really going on here. And that's what I ended up going there and learned more about nose breathing versus mouth breathing, which was the source of the basic premise of my first book, which brought me back to the station.
We published studies on nose breathing and mouth breathing in the International Journal of Neuroscience. And launched this whole idea that, for example, when we had athletes come and breathe through their nose, their brain slipped into a meditative alpha state. When they came back the next day and breathed through their mouth, their breath rate was super fast, 48 breaths per minute with their mouth open. 14 brushes per minute with their mouth closed. Same level of vigorous workout.
Their brains were in beta versus alpha, which is like, imagine running as fast as you could, but your mind responding to that as a meditation. So that was like, whoa. That was like, you could create what I call the eye of the storm.
The bigger the calm we create on the inside, the more productive we are on the outside, and most of us are living our lives in the winds of the storm, and it's dangerous out there. But if you can start to pull back the bow and establish being, establish calm, and then act as that inner space of composure and calm silence. That restful alertness that the doctor told me years ago, and that's the hub or the source of your activity, your bulletproof, your weatherproof, you're not going to get beat up by the day's activity. You're not going to finish your day exhausted. You're not going to live for the weekend to recover.
Life becomes like merrily down the stream. It's like your life becomes easier because you're not out there dodging the tree trunks flying around; it can take you out. The stress that just wastes, wipes us out. Most of us.
[00:09:49] Aneta: I know. And so many people are in a state of burnout. So many people are dysregulated and sicker than ever before. So when you decided, maybe I'm going to go to India, learn a little bit more about Ayurveda. So what was your plan, and then what actually happened? If you can go a little bit deeper, because sometimes God always laughs at the plans that we make for ourselves.
[00:10:13] Dr. John Douillard: No one's ever asked me these details, but I'll tell you the whole story is my sister was married to a magician. His name was Doug Henning. Back in the eighties, he had the TV specials. So anyway, he was a really famous magician, and he was really into real magic. And he was in India with my sister.
And they were going to be there at that time. And my friends had signed up, the Chinese government had just opened up the border, so you could actually go to Tibet and ride from Lhasa, Tibet, to Kathmandu. So we had signed up for that. We were going to ride our mountain bikes from Lasa, Tibet, to Kathmandu.
And that was my thing. And then, my sister calls me up and she said, I know you're going to go on this big trip. But Doug, the magician into real magic, had a lucid dream vision that there was an avalanche, and you fell hundreds of feet down, and you were paralyzed from the waist down, and he saw you playing wheelchair basketball. Please don't go. And I was like.
We are crazy that I have people count. I mean, we're, no, we're going, you can't do this. No. Then my mom calls me up, and she's the one who got us into meditation. Very spiritual. She's still here with us now, and she's amazing. Still my spiritual leader. And she said John, I didn't want to say this, but right around the time Doug had that vision, I had a real lucid and I trust her.
And she had this like lucid dream, and she said, a very similar thing, and I didn't know what Doug experienced. It was independent of that. And I saw this major accident, and you're really injured, and please don't go. And I was like, you guys stop. Why did you do this? I said, No.
Anyway, I ended up not canceling my trip. Frustrated my friends. But they said, You have all this time. Why don't you come to India and study Ayurveda? I'm like, sure, okay. I'll go to India and study Ayurveda. So that's where I went. And they said, You can stay with us while you're there, and you can go to Delhi and try to find an Ayurvedic teacher.
I even ended up going there and met an Ayurvedic teacher there and they quickly asked me if I would just stay there permanently and learn. And I was like. Sure, why not at the beginning of my career, and what do I have to lose? So I just dropped everything and checked out of my life in America, and just lived in India for a year and a half.
The funniest thing about that was that all the time I was in India, I never thought for a second that I was going to actually come back and actually practice Ayurveda, that it would be some monetary thing, because nobody knew what the heck Ayurveda was back then anyway.
It was just so much fun and so exciting to be there and learn. And it was just that. And then when I met Deepak Chopra, I saw he was doing all this, really taking it to the West, in a big way. And that's when it became a career for me. Surprised me, actually.
[00:12:55] Aneta: It is so interesting when a door closes. Others open. And it's our choice whether we choose to walk through it or not. And so here you have these, and your mom, you said your mom didn't know that Doug had this dream, right? Okay. God, the divine, someone was trying to get your attention. Okay, listen.
And when you hear from two people, I probably would've done the same thing as you've been like, okay, I'm going to just point my friends, but it's probably enough evidence that I should do something different. So you spent some time. And at the time, was Deepak Chopra, like Deepak Chopra, or was he just starting to read his books? He was a heart doctor. Was he a heart doctor? He knew.
[00:13:33] Dr. John Douillard: Yeah, he was an endocrinologist, and his first book hadn't even come out yet. His first book had come out, which was, didn't do anything. It was a bomb basically. And then, so he was not Deepak Chopra that we know today by any means. He was just beginning his career. Yeah.
[00:13:48] Aneta: Okay. Interesting. So he, too, was like, okay, there's something more here than just Western medicine. So you both are seekers, I guess, if I were to label it. So, Ayurveda at the time, how many thousands of years do we know? 5,000? How old is Ayurveda? Yeah, it's really old. And as you said, it withstood the test of time, and I know a little bit about it enough to get me in danger, but also be so curious about more.
So what was it specifically that you discovered in Ayurveda initially where you were like, I'm going to stay here, I'm going to learn more, I'm going to close the practice, because those are big decisions to make as a young person.
[00:14:30] Dr. John Douillard: The interesting thing was, is that when I was invited to stay there by this Ayurvedic doctor, he was an expert in reading the pulse and taking the pulse. And so what he did was he just had me follow him around, which I did every day. For like almost a year and a half and like a puppy dog.
And I would watch him, it wasn't like, okay, lesson one, this is what you're going to learn. It was like, follow me along. If you have a question, we'll answer it. But if there's no question, and we're not having a discussion today, we're just going to see patients and do all that. And so then he said, but take your pulse like all day long, as much as you can, and write down what you feel.
That was basically it. So one day I was taking my pulse and writing it down. I said, You know what? It's interesting. I feel my pulse changing. It's different at different times of day. And he was like, those are the circadian rhythms. I go, what? He goes on, those are the natural cycles of nature. And when you're in balance, and we were living a really peaceful, like no distraction, we're in India, pretty chill lifestyle, where the lake gets really calm, and my body was in rhythm.
And I was like, wait a minute. Are you telling me that in my body, I can actually feel the rhythms of nature that force the birds to fly south? The whales migrate the leaves to turn red and fall off. Is that what I'm actually feeling? And he was, oh yes, that's exactly what you're feeling. And I'm going like, what?
Are you kidding me? Like that, to me was just so mind-boggling that I could feel something so subtle that none of us even knew existed inside of us. And now we have this Nobel Prize-winning science 40 years later that says that those circadian rhythms in sync with our biological clocks are the game-changing effects for longevity and health, and keeping us from getting sick.
Now we have that science. Ayurveda knew about this thousands of years ago, how to live your life and rhythm, when to eat, when to sleep, when to exercise, when to think; they were all part of your biological clocks. Turning on and turning off. And I was like, whoa, this is like I was in, and I'm not leaving. And that's what got me to stay. Yeah.
[00:16:37] Aneta: Wow. I got chills as you were talking about this, because it's so amazing that when we actually examine and spend time feeling nature, being in nature, looking at nature, so many of the answers are there for us. We just don't pay attention. So, a year and a half. So then what happened? Did you come back?
[00:16:57] Dr. John Douillard: I did come back, an interesting story. I was there, and then my wife came with her family, and they were working with this organization that my sister and Doug were living at. And so I met them and fell in love with her, and then she left, and so I went back to the States to pay my taxes.
Ended up basically being with her for like maybe four weeks in the state. We got married on the beach in quiet and we came back to India together. And then it was really like, yeah, and we now have six kids together. We were married for 35 years, and we knew each other for basically like four weeks, and got married and got pregnant on our honeymoon on the way back to India.
So on the way back to India, she's pregnant now, and we're in India. She's four or five months pregnant, basically feeling really sick in this stinky New Delhi city. She said, We need to get out of there. And that's when I met Deepak Chopra. He happened to be there. And he said, Why don't you come back and co-direct my center with me, and you need to get out of here.
You can't have a baby in India. You need to go, and so that's where it started. I stayed with Ivo for about eight years. That was back in Massachusetts.
[00:18:05] Aneta: I guess you were in sync with nature. I would say, John, with all those things happening so quickly
[00:18:11] Dr. John Douillard: It was a whirlwind for sure.
[00:18:13] Aneta: And so when you guys were building the center in Massachusetts. Sterile early days. I would imagine in terms of what the West was choosing to focus on, but yoga had already, I think, started to make its way in.
So what were those early days like? Who was mostly interested in Ayurveda and medicine that looked a little bit different than maybe what we were used to in the West?
[00:18:37] Dr. John Douillard: It was such a foreign thing, and sadly, even to this day, most people don't even know the word Ayurveda. I would've bet the farm back in the 1980s that in a couple of years, Ayurveda would be the next big thing like yoga. But it didn't really happen, although I feel like it still will happen because the knowledge is so profound.
They had such an insight into the subtlety of nature, and they were so profound in their discoveries. One of the branches of Ayurveda is called rasayana, which is the study of longevity, and rasa means lymph. So the study of longevity for them was the study of the lymphatic system.
Something that we in Western medicine. Only hear about when someone gets cancer and gets lymph nodes cut out. But when you look at the medical journals, which I've done, there are just hundreds upon hundreds of amazing studies about the lymphatic system, but none of it's reached medical practice, where thousands of years ago.
They understood it and they put it into practice. So, taking that ancient wisdom with the modern science buried in the journalism, putting it together becomes a profound piece of the longevity puzzle. And that's something like those kinds of things. And I can go on and on about things like that. We're just beginning to understand today.
Like the microbiome, they talked about the microbiome 5,000 years ago in the Rigveda; they talked about these invisible bacteria, these invisible bugs. And they said some were visible, and some were invisible. And they said they can be good or bad, and they said that you don't want to kill them, and create a better environment for the good ones to proliferate. We are just beginning to figure that out today.
They talked about circadian rhythms. We can't see them, but they totally knew that there were times of day for different activities. This is stuff that, like, when you see that they knew that it was such a profound understanding, and it was really, Ayurveda is really Ayer's life. Veda means truth or knowledge, just the knowledge or the science of life. So they really studied the details of life. They watched the sun rise. They knew that the frequencies of light in the morning were different in the morning hours than they were in midday. And now we have all this red light therapy, infrared light therapy, saying that you should do your exercise in the morning and use that infrared light in red light in the morning to strengthen your body, prepare your skin for the UV radiation of the day.
And you should be, and you're more physically strong and more active. They talked about that thousands of years ago. They understood that the frequencies of light created, turned on, and turned off certain biological clocks, so you can dig dishes and plow fields in the morning before it gets too hot. And the middle of the day, when the UV radiation comes to stimulate metabolic activity or digestion turns on, which is why every culture in the world except for America, still to this day, has their big lunch in the middle of the day.
And we're just beginning to finally realize that, oh, our biological clocks for eating turn on in the middle of the day. And they have been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years, if not more. So it's just that kind of stuff that's just so profound. And then when you kinda take it even further, it just keeps growing.
And that's why, like lifestyle, we have 1500 articles of ancient medical wisdom and modern. I thought I'd write one or two when I first started writing these articles. But there's such a wealth of information buried in medical journals. You have no idea. And so much of that is proving this ancient wisdom, and the research didn't even know they were proving ancient wisdom.
They were just doing kind of digging in some rabbit hole of lymph or digestion or whatever it was, but they were actually proving vet concepts. But unfortunately. Our Western approach is just about putting the symptoms away and putting out the fire and ignoring really the underlying factors, the underlying costs.
But that information is in the medical journals was an amazing find for me to realize how much research has been done, but none of it in medical practice.
[00:22:41] Aneta: It's interesting. We can make some assumptions, right? Because if we're able to heal ourselves through these ancient principles, many of which are free and available to us, then what does that do to the monetization? Of course, in the medical system that we're involved in.
Are there other countries where medical practices or is different in the United States? I'm looking for the word, like socialized medicine, in other countries where it's not privatized. Are they using more Ayurvedic principles, or is this? Yeah.
[00:23:13] Dr. John Douillard: There's the World Health Organization, just really on top of integrating traditional systems of medicine and beginning to treat the individual, not the disease that they have, and really looking upstream at the upstream cause, using herbal medicine and botanicals and things like that.
Most of the rest of the world. And they have these international symposiums, and what they find is that the rest of the world is really on board. And the only country that's not really on board with that is the US
America. It really lags behind that because even though. Herbal medicine and alternative medicine are really big for the general public.
We're doing it on our own. It's not part of the approved medical system of America. It is completely pharmacopia with medical intervention, which is basically a disease model, and that has not budged, and it's sad because the rest of the world is really moving on. And we are not, and probably for reasons like you mentioned, monetary reasons.
[00:24:15] Aneta: Yeah. We can assume, right? That's unfortunately the reason behind it. I do want to talk a little bit more about Lifes Spa because you're so prolific, and you said Oh, maybe I'll write a couple articles. Tell us more about this amazing resource that you offer.
[00:24:30] Dr. John Douillard: So at lifespa.com, we have, like I said, about 1500 articles, and you can just type in your health concern. There are articles like questionnaires. We have a whole lymph questionnaire. You can ask yourself all these questions about the quality and integrity of your lymph, which is the longevity system. We mentioned there's a digestive health quiz to find out which part of your digestion is broken.
So instead of just bubble wrapping your diet and taking food out of your diet, realize that there's a probably good chance of the reason why you have some digestive issue or symptom of some sort. It's probably due to some underlying digestive issue. And if you can fix that, you're fixing the upstream cause versus just fixing the eczema or the brain fog or the joint problem or the swelling or whatever it is that's symptomatic of a digestive issue.
And then, of course, there are stress issues that we all have. And we mentioned that stress is probably the main problem in our culture because we have so much stimulation that is overwhelming us. And the body just feels like life's an emergency 24/7. And when the body's in an emergency state, even though it's subtle, it's chronic, the body's going to put more cholesterol into the blood to make more stress-fighting hormone.
It's going to raise blood pressure, actually, up a tree to save your life. It's going to put more sugar into the blood to get you up that same tree to save your life. It's going to put extra fat around your belly, because that's reserve fuel in case the war never ends. All these metabolic syndrome issues that we have.
You can track it back to the rev, the stimulus simulation that we're so chronically under, and they had meditation tools and breathing tools and pum tools to help create a calm lake so we can function from that calm. So at lifespa.com, I write about all that. Give you all the science behind that.
We have a newsletter you can sign up for and get that information in your inbox. I write three articles a week. We're constantly pumping out really new, cool, juicy information about these different things. And then of course, we have an Ayurvedic store where I've been formulating Ayurvedic herbs for other companies on my own for 30, 40 years now.
So there's that. And of course, I'm on all the social channels. People can find me there as well.
[00:26:41] Aneta: I can't wait to dig in. Especially, I'm going to be a little selfish here, curious about Ayurveda and what it has to say about hormonal changes and menopause because I am at that stage, and my friends and I spend way too much time talking about all the symptoms that we have, and unfortunately, not getting a lot of relief from our traditional doctors.
[00:27:03] Dr. John Douillard: It is interesting. I wrote an article once, and it's called, It May Not Be Hormonal, and it's an interesting article because there's a premenstrual detoxification that takes place from reproduction into the lymphatic system. And when you're having PMS kind of symptoms.
The premenstrual detoxification from ovulation to the cycle is actually trying to take some of the premenstrual detoxification, the onus off reproduction, so you can take it out through your lymph, and that will make your breasts swell. Your skin breakouts make you tired and lethargic.
So many of these symptoms turned out to be not hormonal, but lymphatic. So you treat the lymphatic system, and then by practice, I was like, so many of my female patients were getting so much better. I had to write the article saying, Gosh, you know what? It might not be hormonal. So, before he goes, just giving hormones for something, which is really quite intricate, and you can throw the body way off by doing that, why don't we treat the simple upstream cause, which is a congested detoxification system, and then, if needed, don't give hormones first?
Give hormonal precursors to give the body the ability to make the hormones it was designed to make. Because stress will rob your progesterone, convert that progesterone into a stress hormone. So if you're under a lot of chronic stress, which we just mentioned, most of us are, your progesterone level will naturally go down, and you can give precursors for that to help your body make its own while you handle and mitigate the stress, deal with the lymphatic issue.
And a lot of times, these problems go away quite naturally. We just jump in and say, Oh, the hormonal gas tank says you're low on estrogen, so we're going to fill it up. But no one asks the question, Why did it get low? Why did the progesterone go low? Why is the testosterone low? These are all the questions that are easily answered if you just dig in and ask them.
[00:28:47] Aneta: It's fascinating. If someone's listening and they're feeling tired, they're feeling like they know that their body's changing, maybe they feel disconnected from listening to what the body's telling them. What are just a couple of things that people can start with from an Ayurvedic perspective?
[00:29:05] Dr. John Douillard: I would say first take my digestive health quiz a lifespa.com and make sure your digestion is working right, because that's the upstream cause. And the other piece of the puzzle is your diaphragm. There was a recent study where 91% of athletes who were tested did not have a diaphragm that relaxed and contracted fully.
And guess what? Your diaphragm, yes, it's a breathing muscle, but more importantly, even than that, maybe as important, it's a lymphatic pump. It is the number one pump of your lymphatic system, so the diaphragm is going to pump all the lymph waste out of your belly. Now your lymphatic system is trying to do three major things.
Take out all the trash from your joints, from your skin, from your brain, from everywhere on your body. The actuate around your belly is basically stored fat, and that's pumping that lymph out of there. It's carrying your immune system critically important, and delivering fat as energy to every cell of your body.
So if you're tired, immune, compromised, and you seem to be toxic and tired and lethargic. The things you mentioned, take our lymph qui,z, and you can ask all these questions and go, oh, I've got all these. I'm not taking the trash out symptoms. So that's the more important thing. And the pump for that system is your diaphragm.
And 91% of athletes don't have a pump working properly, and the diaphragm's pumping cerebral spinal fluid into your brain, which is the brainwashing fluid. Pumping the lymph and lymphatic systems out of your head, which was only recently discovered in Western medicine, has been known for thousands of years in Ayurvedic medicine. It pumps three pounds of trash out of your head every year while you sleep.
And if this is congested, you will get brain fog, anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, inflammation, infection, and even autoimmune concerns caused by the master computer not taking its trash out long-term. COVID, very early on, studies showed that it was due to congestion of the brain lymphatic system.
And when you get COVID, what happens? You can't breathe. If you can't breathe, you can't pump the trash out, so the trash stays up in your head. Your brain doesn't know how many fire trucks extended the immune event on Main Street. You get either over his Ls reaction, that's auto. Or an underperforming immune response.
So these are like simple, logical pieces of the puzzle that are never talked about. So breathing becomes a thing. I wrote an article called The Best Diaphragmatic Breathing Exercise is because our ribcage diaphragm wants to squeeze the air out. That's its job. And the only reason why the ribcage would open up is because your diaphragm contracted fully and sucked the air in, pumped it up like a balloon.
And then as soon as you let the air out, the ribcage becomes. A cage again. And for most of us, that rib cage has become very rigid, and this is a big problem. And so it forces us to breathe shallow. So there's a whole bunch of things you can do, but really simply what everybody should do at least once a day, and their computer is see it there.
Take your arms over your head and now breathe through your nose and fill your belly. Only now go to your chest. Now go to your upper chest and reach as high as you can. Really, and sip as much air as you can, and you'll feel a pull under the ribcage. That's your diaphragm going down.
Your ribcage is going up. And by doing that, arms come down. You break up the scar tissue between your rib cage and your diaphragm. You begin to free that rib cage to be the lymphatic pump. That's so critical for all the things I just mentioned. Studies are showing that you to strengthen your diaphragm, at least 15 studies.
It will reverse your heartburn, GERD, reflux pump, and the cerebral spinal fluid in and out of your brain, so you don't get cognitive decline later on as you age. It'll pump all the extra weight around your belly and hips. I'm just saying this is hard science, medical research buried in those journals that I talked about.
So it's really a powerful piece of the puzzle. So that's what we have to remember and breathe through your nose while you go for a walk or while you exercise, which was my first book. Critically important that you have a breathing apparatus that's pumping lymph, of course, oxygen in and waste out, and all that critical, but the lymph piece is something no one's talking about. And then Ayurveda, that study of lymph, was a longevity study.
[00:33:19] Aneta: I love to breathe. I'm a somatic breath work facilitator, one of the things I do. And so I love helping people breathe, and it just makes such a huge difference in just the way you feel. And there's just such power and transformation in breathing. And a lot of folks are teaching breath work right now and different types of breath work. How do you feel about some of the very activating breath patterns, like the Wim Hof method? What would Ayurveda say about that?
[00:33:48] Dr. John Douillard: Well, I think that the Wim Hof method I think it's great. I think what he did for breathing is put it on the map. You know what I mean? I wrote a book on breathing. Started writing that book in 1984, didn't get published until 94, and published studies on how they could actually replicate the runner's high.
It did really well back then, but it was pretty much forgotten until recently, because of Wim H. So I have great gratitude for what he did. The fast breathing has a value, and it really helps open up that rib cage and get it to be freed up. It's almost like calisthenics for the rib cage, and free your rib cage and your diaphragm so they're not stuck together.
That's critically important, and when you do that fast breathing, it creates a sympathetic or a little bit of a fight or flight response, followed by long-standing parasympathetic activation. So his whole thing was to breathe and create this stimulation, and it teaches your body how to handle stress and recover from it better.
What Ayurveda would say is that it is like doing these calisthenics that I talk about doing, which is a similar kind of thing to get the ribcage free from the diaphragm. But over time, it's the more subtle breathing that becomes more powerful. And Ayurveda, the more subtle it is, the more powerful, like the microbiome, you can't see it.
The circadian rhythms, you can't see them. These are really powerful tools. So, as you get the rib cage opened up, pranayam prana means breath, and ya means to pause or hold or extend the breath. So, as you become a more efficient breather, first you have to get it opened up and freed up. Then you can start breathing really longer and slower, and deeper.
Slow the breath down. And that's where some really interesting scientific magic happens. So I think that what Wim Hof is like is a really beginner's training. And then once you take the road all the way into deep, slow breathing, gentle and safe breath retention, the research on that is off the charts.
[00:35:43] Aneta: Yeah, it's so amazing, and I love that there are so many books out there. I know James Nestor's Breathe book is another great one that I enjoy, but I have to read yours. What is the title of that book? The one that you wrote.
[00:35:53] Dr. John Douillard: The title of that book is called Body, Mind and Sport, and interestingly, James Nestor turned out that he's become a dear friend of mine. He actually started his book with my research, and he finished his book with my research because he said it was the first book he read about nose breathing. In my interview with him, he said that was the book that got me started on this whole journey. So I feel super grateful for him, for including my work in there. Yeah.
[00:36:16] Aneta: It's so amazing. What you've been able to do, and I know you've worked with so many athletes as well, so you just have this amazing body of work that you've done. Who would've thought it when you went to India and you're like, I'm just going to ride a motorbike, and then that door closed. And so it's interesting, as you look back on your journey, do you feel like you are living your purpose, your dharma? Is this what you were designed to be doing in this world?
[00:36:41] Dr. John Douillard: It was a mountain bike, not a motorbike, but yes, I absolutely. I feel like you mentioned it earlier on, and when I'm in seminars or teaching, I do tell that story because. A lot of people wouldn't have said yes to dropping their whole practice, and I still had $70,000 in student loans that I had to deal with. It wasn't like I had any logical reason to just say, I'm not leaving India and I'm just going to drop everything. When I got back to the States, somebody I didn't even know was driving my car, and my stuff was in like five different houses all around Boulder, Colorado.
It was like I had to go back and scavenge what I could gather of my stuff, so I really just checked out, but I was willing to say yes to what was trying to happen. And I feel like that's what a lot of us hold on to, what we should do versus what we feel we have the opportunity to do.
And so I was just like lucky to just where that came from. I'm not really sure. But I was guided with my mom and Doug and that whole thing, but at the same time, I just felt like, this is a dream come true, and how could I say no to this? So I just checked out, and it was the best thing I've ever done, and it's been a great run for sure.
I definitely feel like teaching Ayurveda and what I'm hopefully trying to do with these podcasts, just to introduce Ayurveda to folks in a really logical way, like this is science. It's not some weird ancient thing; really, it has science behind it.
It has time-tested wisdom behind it. And we so desperately need something that we can believe in. Like right now, you go on the internet, you don't know who to believe anymore. You just don't know who you can believe, because it could all be AI-generated. But this has been around for thousands of years, and the diet or Terry plan hasn't changed in 5,000 years.
It's not, oh, now we're on a carnivore plan and I'll forget that it's the same one. And it was eating season. Which you had to do if you're on this planet, and the logic and the bugs that change from one season to the next, and you eat seasonal foods, and I made that really simple for folks. You just take out our grocery list for winter, summer, and spring.
Summer lists. Circle the foods you like, and eat them. Take the spring list, eat them. There are three seasons of harvest: spring harvest, summer harvest, and fall harvest. We're eating. It's a great way to start. Take the summer list to the grocery store. Circle the foods you like.
Eat more of them. Doesn't mean you have to eat only this, but you want to get sort of medicinal dosages of what nature organically had in store because you want the bugs on it. You want the microbes because the microbes are changing in your gut from season to season. It's critical. We're designed to burn fat as fuel in the spring because no carbohydrates are being harvested in the spring.
Where are you going to get pasta and pizza out of the ground in the spring? It doesn't exist. And there are bugs in our gut called Actinobacteria that burn fat as fuel. In the spring, we're supposed to do that. That's what the hunter-gatherer gut bugs do. And then in the summer, end of summer, like we're going into now.
The bugs change the bacteria, where you get all the starch and all the fruits and all the grains, and it is more sugary and starchy, and that changes the microbiome to deliver more fuel, to reserve fuel, to store energy and insulation for the winter months to come. We're seasonal beings. Circadian beams and we don't act like them, but we really need to. And that's how eating seasonally is so simple. Just circle the stuff, make a couple of changes in the grocery store when you're buying stuff seasonally, and forget about it. It doesn't have to be that complicated, and it's not restrictive.
[00:40:10] Aneta: It is so interesting because I think in this country we import food from so many different places, different soil. We can get just about anything that we want. And really, this is coming back to the way we were designed, and it's relearning something that maybe our bodies will remember, because it sounds like the body hasn't changed.
It's just that the choices that we're making don't align with our natural design, which was supposed to be where we could heal, or our body is so intelligent and we're able to do that on its own. Curious are the blue zones, the places where people have experienced longevity. And I know many of them have now been adopting more of a Western diet, and they aren't as self-sustaining as they used to be. Were they just naturally using Ayurveda, principles of Ayurveda, maybe without even naming it as such
[00:41:00] Dr. John Douillard: I wrote an article about it because I interviewed Butner on my podcast, and it was cool, and he listed all these things that they do. And then I wrote an article about these ayurvedic principles. These are the Blues zone principles. Eating to your 70% full, relaxing when you eat, and having community around you.
At the end of the day, they drink a little bit of wine, but meditation would be the replacement for that. There were so many things that they didn't work out, and pump iron. They were just very active throughout the day. All these things are just traditional practices that all of our ancestors did for seasonal eating. They didn't seasonally eat; they just ate from the local market, and it was automatically seasonal eating.
[00:41:41] Aneta: Yes. So amazing. I could talk to you for hours. Dr. John, I'm so grateful that you spent time with me today in my audience. We definitely will include the links. I think that I will go and spend a lot of time on lifespa.com and encourage everyone to do the same. But the final question I ask everyone is, what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
[00:42:04] Dr. John Douillard: When I think of the width of my life, I think of there's an old saying in Ayurveda that when you actually treat someone, it's better for you than it is for them. And the message there is that when you actually are treating them, they actually say you're treating them soul to soul and you're giving from the deepest part of yourself.
There's an interesting study that was done where if you give people a gift, a hedonistic way, where I want you to love me and like me and tell me how wonderful I am because I gave you this gift, versus giving in a eudaimonic way, where I give, but I have no expectation to get anything in return.
I've fallen in love with the giving of this gift to you because it's so cool. I'm so excited to give it to you. I don't need anything in return. Not a thank you card, anything. When they gave the gift in a hedonistic way, it hurt the genetic code of the people you were giving it to and yourself. When you gave without any expectation, it had a positive effect on you and their genetic code as well.
So the idea is that we constantly live in this world where we're constantly doing things to get a return on the investment. I want you to like me, approve me, appreciate me, but when you actually begin to really realize that the goal of life is to let something more real, something more beautiful, something more kind out, and Henry James wrote a book in the early 19 hundreds where he wrote about the three most important things that humans can do.
Mr. Rogers picked up on this, and the first one is to be kind. The second most important thing a human can do in their life is to be kind. And the third was to be kind. So when you think about three levels of being kind, it means that at the deepest part of us, we are loving and kind and giving and caring, and no one has the power to take that away.
And that's when you're kind at the ultimate level. And that comes from these Ayurvedic principles, learning how to steal your nervous system so you can see clearly into the bottom of the lake. And realize how unconscious we've become, and how do I let who I really am out through this maze of all this brain saying, I need to be like this.
So they like me. I need to get this stimulation to be happy from the outside world. How do I let something more real and more beautiful out? And that's really the map of Ayurveda, and that's what I feel like I've been so blessed to learn. Because when you talk about the width, it means not about the accomplishments, it's about the journey, the process of living this life, constantly reminding myself to give love to care and do it for the reasons from the inside out, not for the return on investment, and that was how I would interpret the width of your life.
[00:44:51] Aneta: That's beautiful. Dr. John Douillard, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for being such a light in this world, for the amazing work that you are doing. Encourage everybody to spend some time looking at your books, looking at all the resources that you have available. I know I will be doing more of the same, and I just wish you continued success.
[00:45:11] Dr. John Douillard: Aneta, thanks so much for having me. This was an amazing interview. You're really amazing. Thanks a lot.
[00:45:16] Aneta: Thank you.
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