Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Super Normalize. Today we actually have a really interesting interview with Elijah Nisenbaum.
He's the founder of Effigy Breathwork, and Elijah has dedicated over three decades to helping individuals connect with their true selves through healing practices involving breath and Taoist movement. Now, this is a really good conversation because Elijah goes into detail around how blockages in life are trauma, which is inexperienced experiences, or I should say that another way, it's experiences which are entangled without understanding. And Elijah discovered a method for himself that allowed him to break through those blockages and become more of a whole being in the flow of life. So today's episode is about his understanding from that discovery for himself, and then how he helps others work with that to move their trauma on and become more whole selves. I'm sure you'll enjoy today's episode. I certainly did. So on with the show.
Welcome to Super Normalized. Elijah Nisenboim. Is that the right way to say your name?
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Pretty good, Nissenbaum.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Yeah, Nissenboim. Okay.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: Elijah, you discovered that you had a life of trauma through various events, but you actually found a way through it, thankfully to some friends that help you to discover a new way to be. Do you want to actually go through your process about how that all happened? I mean, you grew up, you know, in a normal sort of. Would you say like a Western sort of culture, where we were taught not to be certain ways in rather brutal sort of methods. I mean, like you said in your book that you've written about being wrapped over the knuckles of making piano sounds, which is disturbing to some people, which is very odd. But, I mean, God, why wouldn't you encourage your child to make music? Seek.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: Well, first I'll just say, you know, I've written the book that you read, the Trauma code. I've written two books since 2020 and Bozeman, Tell some of my personal story. But I didn't, like, try to write a story about, like, this dramatic, terrible thing that happened to me because I feel in some way like garden variety trauma is bad enough. Like, and I wasn't trying to write a book about how special I was or how special my trauma was. So. Because I want to discuss a universal thing which everybody has trauma. So I wasn't like, I grew up in a war zone. I mean, I definitely. I have my share of traumas, and I just picked. I picked the piano teachers who used to wrap me on the hand with their pens and pencils and stuff like that because, well, it fit well into the story of my breath work. Yeah, I grew up in a classic Canadian middle class Jewish house. And there was no overt trauma happening. You know, like all. I mean, there's trauma in this conditioning. So let me just back up. Trauma, as I would define it, is anything that you haven't processed. So it doesn't have to, firstly, you don't have to remember it. Second of all, doesn't have to be big. It doesn't even mean that people did bad things to you. It's all about how you received and processed your experience. And so if you couldn't process things, which of course all of us can't, that energy gets stuck inside you. And then you spend your life trying to move, move yourself, move your own energy. And I would say, as I said in the book, like if we're, we're all an acorn with an oak tree in it, we all have a potential, a design that's meant to happen. But when you have these experiences you can't process, the energy gets stuck. The trajectory of where, of what wants to happen stops happening. So that's trauma and then conditioning, which in some ways is worse because it's like a daily drip of trauma. Like trauma is events. But if you grow up in an environment where for better or worse, maybe people are trying to protect you and make sure you survive, you're trained to be a certain way so that you will, you'll fit in either by positive reason than the adult did that or not. But conditioning, tribally, culturally, I mean, we're really struggling with this globally because we're all so connected now and people are really questioning what do I believe? Right. Because conditioning tells you what to believe. So I had my sort of garden variety middle class Canadian, Jewish conditioning. And I was a sensitive kid and a musician and a mystic that didn't know that he was a mystic. So I didn't really finish it at all. And so some of it in my family. But when I went to go, you know, music was my first spirituality, my first love. And like I took piano lessons of these piano teachers and they used to, you know, wrap my hands with rulers and pencils because I didn't practice. And I didn't practice because I hated classical music and I didn't like the lessons and all this that led up to what you brought up. When I was in my 20s, like everybody in their 20s, and I was trying to be a musician, get a record deal, whatever, all that I was grappling with my father having an affair with the fact that when I got up in front of people. I was scared. My hands turned to ice. And that's when I. I was exposed to this breath work technique. And that changed my life. I mean, I knew it at the time by the way. It changed my life. But, like, to sit and talk to you, like, 35 years later and I'm still talking about breath work.
It's really like, I couldn't have imagined that that would be what my life would be about. And trauma wasn't the word at any point we didn't have. Trauma is a current thing that people are talking about. Even I didn't use the word trauma till the last two or three years.
I mean, I spoke about it, but it wasn't the central focus of the subject. The name of the subject. It is now.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I think in the past, we could have actually thought of trauma as points of confusion in history that we experienced. I. I've been through those myself. I've had events where I put it plainly, I was confused. And so that caused tension. That played out in different ways in my life.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: And I think confusion is like.
We use our mind to understand things, but, like, if we're all sentient beings connected to the ocean of existence here to fulfill something that we are naturally are and we're in confusion, then there's a bridge between where we are and who we really are. And that's as a result of trauma and conditioning. That's just my experience with myself and working with people. Like, that's what confusion is, is that you've lost connection to that intrinsic knowing of who you are and how to live it.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: Yes. Yes. So you've found a way through breath work to change. Can you describe what happened to you to discover this breath work method?
[00:07:17] Speaker B: Sure. Well, it was interesting because at the time, when I was in my 20s, I'm 61, and. And I was 25 at the time. I had studied singing and breathing, and I was actually maybe even like on the side tuning a little, like vocal coaching or teaching. And so I knew about the power of the breath for. For the arts and diaphragmatic breathing. But this guy, he was. His name's Tom Lodge. He was a Osho Sanyasin. And he. I knew his wife, and they were moving to California from Canada, and she just. She was a masseuse. I went to her and she said, you know, help me put stuff in storage and I'll give you a massage. I'm like, sure. Broke musician. And it was like, well, why don't you try husband's breath work? And I just heard the word work and I was like, nah, I don't think so.
I'm a lazy musician. But I agreed to it. And basically, you know, his technique and mine, I mean, I was with him for 10 years. So in 2001, I branded my own technique. But what they share is it's a practice that comes From India, it's 5,000 years old. Breathing through the mouth really intensely. You're basically hyperventilating, focused on the inhale. If I turn off my echo cancellation, I can show it to you. But basically you're breathing like that for an hour, and within 20 breaths you are on the boat from your conscious self to your unconscious, where all your trauma is. And I was. I was shocked and terrified and I did not want to do it. And I kept trying to talk to him about it and I was sweating and my hands were curling over, they were in so much pain. My hands wrapped on the knuckles, so I didn't make any association. Neither did my teacher at the time. But at one point in the breath, I opened my eyes and I thought he had his hand over my mouth. And I opened my eyes, my hands were stuck to my face. And it was the most excruciating, painful experience, but it was also coming out of, like, exalting. And I felt clear and relaxed. And it changed me as a person. It changed me as much as I could change at 25 without really knowing what was going on. Because also he left. He went to California and I didn't see him for a year. He had a training, and then I went and trained with him. But he was a real kind of independent.
His grandfather invented the radio and the telegraph. Sir Oliver Lodge, he had gone to the British government, but they wouldn't give him the patent because he was at war with something. So they gave it to Marconi. But Tom, he, in the early 19 BBC, wouldn't play the rock groups of the day, and he was the lead DJ on this pirate radio station off the coast of the British of England, playing the rock music of the day. So I can go on and on. He had a kind of a history of being like a real sort of maverick. So even the way he taught me the breathwork, there was just a lot of like, just go out and do it, you'll be fine. And. And then I followed him to California and I sort of ran his little empire for a while and then fell out and. And branded my. You know, I'd experimented with all different kinds of breathwork. And last thing to say, let Me know if I'm talking too much.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: No, no, that's fine.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: Well, breath work is a very generic term. It's just breath and work. And the lungs are the only organ that you can operate manually. So the conscious use of the lungs, because you can't make your liver do something. So the conscious use of breathing is breath work. And if you have nose breathing, mouth breathing, left side, right side, holding the breath, that's it. You've got all the breathwork technique possibilities, but this and pranayama. There's a lot of well known breathwork techniques, but this particular kind of breath work really is for clearing trauma. And you're breathing really full through the mouth. So the point of it is to release trauma. But over those 10 years that I was with him, I had a center in San Francisco and I just tried every teacher, every breathwork technique. And when I left him, I just found what I thought was the optimal way to be free. Like, I don't use breath work to like, calm down and be balanced. Like, I use it to clear the shit out and get connected to who you really are. And that's really the guts of the technique that I.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: By your description of it, it actually made me think of fire breath, which I've heard of as a technique as well. That sounds similar.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: Yeah, the breath of fire. Well, breath of fire is like, like rapid breath through the nose. A lot of these. You know, all breath work is good because breath is life, it is consciousness, because you are born, because you take a breath. When you take that breath, consciousness, you come here. So inside breath is qi. It's the prana of the universe. So all breath work is great, but a lot of techniques. The purpose of effigy breathwork, which is my technique, E F F I J I, is to go beyond the power that the mind has to control the flow of your life force. So the fire and pranayama and other practices, they have a certain hack to them because you have to use your mind to do these techniques and you're gaining some control in some way or gaining some mastery over yourself. And that's important. But the breath work that I do is about losing control fully so that the self created out of trauma dies. And there's no other way to get. You can't release trauma because, I mean, this may be a little technical, but trauma is protected. It's on purpose because some part of your system is saying, I don't want you to feel the pain of this experience. So we're going to bury it and make it Unavailable. And then you will assess threats every moment of the day. And anytime you come in contact with that threat, we will send you a message saying, don't do that. And this is how people live a life of limitation. So when you're trying to free yourself of trauma, it's very hard to do consciously because you have the programming in place and the conditioning to not go there. So in my particular technique, you cannot keep control. If you do 10 breaths, 20 breaths, you can see. Would you like to do 10 breaths with me?
[00:14:14] Speaker A: Yeah, sure, let's do it.
[00:14:15] Speaker B: Okay, so I'm going to turn on my off my echo cancellation because otherwise you won't be able to hear me breathing. I don't know how to do this.
It was up here before. All right, well, we'll just do it. And you're probably not going to hear me because the microphone's going to. Going to take. Take it away. So for our listeners, for all of us, there's three things. There's center of the chest, there's mouth, and there's inhale. So you're going to focus on the inhale and then just let the breath go. On the exhale, you're going to breathe into the center of the chest with your mouth open and you want to breathe. We're just going to do 10. So as full as you can on the inhale for the 10 breaths. Are you ready? Here we go. And just let it go and just close your eyes for a minute so you can kind of get a little grounded before we get back into conversation. About what? What?
[00:15:08] Speaker A: That I'm not really thinking that I'm feeling more grounded. My face is already feeling on fire. So I. Yeah. I should tell you that yesterday I actually did a breath work session with some people down in the Gold coast and that was great. And my wife is a breath work practitioner, which.
[00:15:21] Speaker B: Okay, so you've done breath like this.
[00:15:23] Speaker A: I've done breath work like this. So I'd like to hear your version. And it's interesting as well.
[00:15:28] Speaker B: So for the people watching or listening, that's 10 bre breaths. But we do it for an hour without stopping. And laying on your back. That's just. Yeah, that first flush is the. That joyful like, woo, here we go.
[00:15:42] Speaker A: Yeah, it does. It really happens quickly.
[00:15:44] Speaker B: A dissolution of material world.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: So you're, you're hiding in plain sight. You're like. Yeah, you're.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: You could see.
[00:15:56] Speaker B: You already know this. Yeah, right.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: Why? Yeah, but that's why I like to interview people to Hear their story too.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: So I was on a Breathwork podcast for People. All she does is breathworkers. But the thing is, when I talk to Breathwork people or hear about them or whatever, like, I don't find that I'm saying things that everybody else is saying. I think there is an exalting thing that we all kind of know about in it, but everybody's got a different philosophy and take on it. And breathwork, in my world, in the effigy world, like, breathwork is half of my work. It's not all of it. I mean, it's part of the system I use.
[00:16:38] Speaker A: I'm gonna ask you a question about the word effigy. I mean, did you pick that word for a reason? Cause, you know, the definition of an effigy is a sculpture or model of a person often used to represent someone in a symbolic or ritualistic manner. So I'm guessing that's what you were doing, Right?
[00:16:54] Speaker B: Um, well, first of all, you're the first person to actually ask the question with some like that. Already figured it out. Nobody. Yes, I took. First of all, I make up words, and that was maybe one of the first times I was doing that before I realized that, so. But G J, I. In India, it's like a term of respect or endearment. Papaji or guruji. I was like, the loving way we dissolve the masks. Like, it wasn't that linear what I thought of, but that was basically it. Like that mask that represents something else, like you burning an effigy. It's like we're always representing falsely.
[00:17:34] Speaker A: So this is effectively a conscious sacrifice of the ineffective self towards authenticity.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: You go to the head of the class.
Very good. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we wonder what your work is. I mean, those of us. I mean, first of all, you. I think there's two parts of the work for our viewers. One is to understand the work, and the other is to do it. But the understand, like. And I. I think I. I kind of covered this in my book in a way. It's like, if you don't understand and don't see the process correctly, you can't really do the work correctly. So you understand. Like, that was so beautifully put, what you just said. Can we just say it again and I'll finish what I'm saying?
[00:18:18] Speaker A: Oh, well, that was off the cuff, so. Okay, there you go.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: You're a fellow off the cuff. I mean, people watching. If you do breath work, that's what happens. You get into the slippery slope and you become somewhat of a channeler because that's what breath does. Like, breath makes you. You can't be a river hanging onto the rocks. And I'm the same way. If I come up with something, I will not remember it five seconds later because it's just flooding through. But what I do remember, I do remember my subject, though. So one part is understanding the work, but then the other is like, to do the breath work, you don't need to be smart because all you need to do, you have to have courage and willingness. You don't even need experience. And that's sort of what I love about it, is that it's incredibly democratic in the sense that you don't need to be healthy or young or smart or spiritual. If you just lay down there and are willing to breathe when you don't want to, you're going to have a profound experience.
[00:19:20] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. I've done breath work quite a number of times. And, yeah, the experiences I've had, when it comes to changing of the self, it's fantastic, to put it plainly and totally unexpected. I mean, I went through the, you, you were describing, you know, the feeling of things on your hand. Yeah. Technique.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:38] Speaker A: So getting the techni. And then I found that when that released, bizarrely one time, my hands and my arms were just flopping back and forth, and I didn't know I was doing it until I stopped.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: This is this, this, you know, I mean, I told the story in my book, but that's why I told that story, is because it, it allowed me a device to talk about the transformation of breath work. But the thing is, it's very common for your hands to close up, and that's, it's a function of resistance. So you have energy outlets. Like if you study Chinese medicine, you know, like, it's all. You're breathing in the heart center and the energy's going out and trying to clear out the blocked energy, the debris. And if it can't get out fast enough, it dams up at the end of the hands. But if you. And I used to have my center next to the whole area where the doctor's area in San Francisco, and doctors would come in and argue with me about tetany, and it's because of this ratio of oxygen, all this stuff. But the thing is, if you breathe a bunch of times, you won't get it anymore.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:20:42] Speaker B: And, and I, I, I, I, you know, I couldn't get it if I tried. I, I love it when I get even a little tingling in my fingers. But this is just when you get any cramping? It's hands, feet and mouth. It's just a function of the blocked energy trying to clear like. Like moving water through a dry riverbed. It'll just pick up all the debris on the bottom of the river and make a dam at the end of the.
[00:21:07] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:08] Speaker B: It's pretty joyous when it. When it all of a sudden just pops open. Right. And then all of a sudden, like, it's gone.
[00:21:14] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's gone. Like I. As you said, it's gone forever for me too. So. Yeah, I find that fascinating. So how does trauma impact a person's life purpose? And why do you see it as compost for growth?
[00:21:28] Speaker B: Well, the name of my book is the Trauma Code. Because I'm not saying that trauma is bad and we should just get rid of it because otherwise, like, what's your life for? I see.
I've always seen whether I was been able to embrace this, but always seen that the problem is the solution. I mean, we all know that when bad things happen to us, let's say you have a terrible breakup, that you grow and you learn something and you become wiser, hopefully then do the same thing again.
But what I put forth in the book is to say that trauma is necessary because you have it in order to learn certain lessons that when you learn them, will unlock your life purpose. So it's like your phone. If you swipe the code, it opens the phone up and then you get access to everything inside. So when a person doesn't unlock the code from trauma, meaning they haven't gotten the lesson, then they just live in the adverse effects of trauma. They see everything as abandonment or rejection, or they're always angry or they're living in confusion or worry or all these different false states.
When you are able to unlock the code, you realize that trauma has a purpose like compost, in that it is the very fuel or the very fertilizer that you need in order to fulfill your life purpose. So I see. I see the work in two parts. The trauma code book is really mostly about part one, but part one is release trauma, unlock the code, and reconnect to Woku and what you really are. Because without knowing who you really are, there's no way to live your life, your life purpose as you're meant to be. But part two, which is in a book that I'm not gonna. I. It was the other half of the book that I didn't put it out there. I'm just. I mean, right now I'm using it in My upcoming program with people. But then later I will release it publicly. But anyway, it's taking the realization and manifesting it. So what I notice is, is that you can do all this breath work, but it doesn't mean that you're going to know how to live your life purpose. So I am saying two things. One is that you need to unlock the code so that you can start to accept that everything that's ever happened to you and all the energy that's available to help you fulfill your life purpose. But then there's a secondary step with how to manifest your life purpose that requires some learning. And I say that breathwork doesn't really train anything. You don't really. You don't learn anything. You more unlearn things, you more reconnect and let go of what is not the truth. But I've learned over the years, and I did start in an era where transcendence and new age and stuff like people like the transcendent experience, and still people love getting high. But I quickly realized that it doesn't mean you're going to fulfill your life purpose just because you're clear trauma or you're going to remain clear because you have a bajillion patterns and programmings that are still inside aspects of the self that you need to untrain those too. And for that, I use Taoist movements.
Okay, new subject. Yeah, okay, we can, but I won't. I won't get ahead of myself.
[00:25:07] Speaker A: Okay, sure, sure. No, I'm very interested to know. So you actually then move into Taoist movements. What sort of movements do you do to actually help people manifest their best path?
[00:25:17] Speaker B: Yeah, well, so I studied internal martial arts for, I guess, 25 years. I mean, my first teacher, Tai Chi teacher George Xu, lived in San Francisco. I eventually went to China in 2014, and I went 21 times. Between 20, I studied with many. George, brought over many masters from China, but it was all about fighting. Even Tai chi is only 400 years old. Tai Chi, but it comes from Taoist movements that are animal movements that are a thousand years old. And by Taoism, I just mean Taoism is like God is the natural world. It's physics, its elements and its animals, and it's how you become natural. And so internal martial arts is the practice of those animal movement forms. And I studied with many masters. And I went to China all those times, eventually learned Mandarin, spent a lot of time. And during the pandemic, I just had this incredible epiphany. I also had a Chinese friend who helped me with some of the understanding Taoist language and just. Anyway, I realized that you could use these movements. What came to me was what I call the four levels of mind and the four regions of self. This was completely channeled. But there's, there's some, I mean, certainly in my compost of my teachers, everything kind of comes from somewhere. But we live on two planes. A vertical plane, which is how we're grounded. It's how you put your feet on the ground. But also not just I'm grounded, but also how you're connected and clear to the truth. So that's an internal process between you and spirit and you and the earth. And breathwork definitely clears that channel. But I say that in that vertical plane is four minds, not one. Four levels of the mind. One of them is the linear mind, the one that we all know and love. So I have an animal for each level of the mind that when you practice them, you can clear up the well, because of trauma, we're ungrounded.
You don't have your feet on the ground. The animal for being grounded is the chicken because the chickens descended from dinosaurs 250 million years ago. And that's the animal mind, like the body mind. And then there's a horizontal plane which is between you and the world. And that's your center, what they call the Dan tien or the hara or second chakra. And you have four centers of self that start from you to the world that you want to manifest in. So I use movements and sort of, forgive me for being complicated. It's never easy for me. People love the breath work because it's just like, just breathe and you're going to feel better. But this requires a little more explanation. But essentially, after people have done the breathwork, I use the movements to work on the internal process of being clear and grounded and the horizontal process of manifesting your center to the like. Right now we're in the fourth region of the self, a shared matrix. It's not your center, it's not my center. We're both here. You're in Australia and I'm in California. We're sharing something, right? The calling to manifest out into the world. It's a big hard to figure out how to get what you want because the moment you start to leave your center to get something, your aura thin, you thin out because you start going into other people's centers. So that's my long ass explanation of the second part of my work. And that's why I, you know, I'm doing a program this Year starts in February.
I only. It's the first time I've done this. Only 12 spots, because I have to teach each person. Like, it's a very personalized process. Nine months, and it's breath, work, and movement together. And we really. I get in, I give them this other book that I didn't put in the trauma code. You. You told me just before we got on the podcast that you liked my book because it was simple. Well, originally, I wrote a book that was three times as long. It only took me three weeks to write it, but it took me a year and a half to make the book this thick, only a hundred pages. So the other part of the book is what I am giving to people who are actually working with people, because I thought it would be disingenuous to, like, talk about a system. It has to be taught with a teacher. You can't get it out of a book, so.
[00:29:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. But you can do your best to transmit that and generate interest for people to even start trying it themselves, which is what you've done, I'm sure.
[00:30:05] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, at the end of the trauma code, they're the last chapters about being grounded and centered. So it's the beginning of it. But I just kept it simple.
[00:30:14] Speaker A: Well, that's for book two.
[00:30:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: So, okay. So getting grounded and finding your way in the world, I mean, I. I know from doing a lot of these practices myself that. And like you said, when you're in the flow, life is in accord with you, and pretty much anything is just a part of the story of your experience from that point forward. But you said that with some people, they need a bit of direction, and you do that through movement. Now, is there. Are there any movements that people, you know, should know about that are nice and simple they could do just to. To help them ground and find focus and direction?
[00:30:50] Speaker B: Well, let me just back up for a second. You said for some people, I would say for everybody, we. Part of what I would like to say to anybody who's listening is, like, there's a simple. There are simple things and there's. That are kind of, like basic principles, and they applied everything. But the challenge of life is it's not as simple, in a way, as, like, what you said. You said, because when you go out into your life, like, you have a. Like, why. Why do we have trauma? Well, I'm saying because it's part of fulfilling our life purpose. But where does it come from? Like, our consciousness brings to life the lessons we need to learn. It's never Ending. So even as you get clear, when you go back out into life, you might have more problems when. And this is why I have to remind people, like, I'm not necessarily that much fun to work with. And I will say that when I was 25, I thought I was doing therapy because my father had an affair and I was trying to figure some stuff out. And then I did the breath. I was like, well, fuck this. I'm just going to do the breath work. And I click therapy. Like, here I am, 61. It's like, oh, wow. It was only. So my point, I want to say, is that the work begins after you clear trauma. Because your soul, your consciousness is going to. Once the resistance is removed, when you start to clear trauma, you can have a lot more stuff coming up. You know, they say the better the surfer, the bigger the wave. So everybody. The point of the movement practices to get to answering your question. But the point of the movement practices is to help you to be grounded and centered so that you learn how to live your life. Because it's not just like, you just do the breath work, you clear trauma and then you're fine. And then because you're clear, you live your life purpose. You will get thrown the biggest curveballs continually. And I think that, you know, this man with a little bit of gray hair, like, it never ends.
The better you get at it, the more complex it becomes. So I would say, number one, we just launched this program called the Trauma Code Experience. And it's inexpensive. And my partner, my business partner, Sarah, like, was like, you need to have something that people can do more than just reading this book. I'm not, in a way, the best for a beginner, but the program actually allows you to take everything in the book and apply it to yourself. There's breathwork in it. There's practices for grounding and centering, and, like, it's it. It. And it lets you kind of go through a process so you can identify what your trauma code is. So that's number one. You can find it on our website. It's called the Trauma Code Experience. But I would say that there are two things you should never, ever, ever forget, particularly when you're upset, because that's all we're really talking about. Anytime you're thrown off your center or you're feeling ungrounded, go back to your breath. Because the reason why you don't breathe is because you don't want to feel.
So when you breathe, you're going to feel. And if you're willing to feel Your feelings, you will naturally come back to your own internal rhythm and sense of self. And I don't mean, like, breathing like we did before. I just mean breathe through your nose slow. And just like, that's one thing you never forget because it's in and out. Like, the second you breathe in, you're going into the inner world, you're going into the unconscious, you're going into your inner life. You're going the taking in of life. And when you breathe out, you're going to the outer world. And, like, it balances. It harmonizes life and death, conscious and unconscious, inner world and outer world. And the second thing I would say is feel your feet, because there's no ego in the feet. And if your feet are on the ground, like a chicken, like a rooster stalking its territory. I mean, chickens. I had chickens and, you know, they sleep standing up on a perch, sometimes with one leg up. They're so hard to catch because they can change directions. They can go really slow or really fast. And they're descended from dinosaurs. Like, be in your feet. The feet are.
There are chakras in the feet. Like, so you want to have this sense. I went through the. I don't know what they call it in Australia, but the tsa, when you go through the airport and you're going through security. And I saw this woman, it wasn't that long ago, and she was blind, and I was watching her go through the tsa, and I was, like, watching that her eyes were in her feet. She was not looking where she was going. She was feeling where she was going from her feet. And I think that we all could benefit from realizing that awareness, the eyes, is the weakest part of the levels of who we are, because the eyes are connected to the linear mind. And the animal, really, that is the snake, a head with a skeletal body. It's like, it's about coordination and skill and is flexibility but stability. So put your eyes and your feet, and you're good. So breathe and feet.
[00:36:22] Speaker A: Those are my key elements.
[00:36:25] Speaker B: Definitely key free elements.
Yeah. And your breath is free every day of the week. Like, that's the amazing thing about it is, like, your breath is happening 24 hours a day, and, like, it's never not there. So you can always access. It's just better than supplements.
[00:36:45] Speaker A: Well, and also, nearly every practice in the world does send you back to focusing on your breath to give you a greater connection to life.
[00:36:55] Speaker B: So it's interesting, though, internal martial arts does not have any. Like, qigong definitely has a lot of focus on breath. But the animals are about unlocking the intelligence of the qi of the animal's energy. And when I realized, because it was, for me, like a big revelation, that this had nothing to do with breathing. Nothing.
So when you can separate energy from matter, meaning your energy from your body, and separate the energy from your breath, you. It becomes this free. It's a free potential that you can use. So doing qigong or doing things related to breathing can definitely help you get in touch with that qi. But once you unlock it, it's not regulated by the breath.
[00:37:49] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:37:49] Speaker B: A little bit of an advanced concept, but yeah, yeah.
[00:37:54] Speaker A: Why is music an important part of your breath? Work practice? And how do the volumes of music that you compose enhance the experience? Because you're a composer as well. Yeah, you didn't mention that.
[00:38:05] Speaker B: Yes, Well, I think at the end of the day, I'm still a musician. I mean, that's what I was doing today before I got in the thing. I have a recording studio in my house, and it's probably worth more than my house, but. Well, one, I would say that in my system in Effigy, I say that there's six stages of the breathwork. I don't think every single breath is the same. There's a journey in there. In each of the stages is a different. You know, in a way, it's a little bit like the hero's journey, like, because you go through a lot doing the breath work as, you know. So, you know, I mentioned about Tom, like, we had this great musical connection, and he would. He was a British guy, would love British music. So he was playing like, Pink Floyd and all kinds of stuff. When we first started doing the Breathwork, and I. I found film scores. I remember finding 1492 by Vangelis and, like, and always looking for music. But what I noticed was that I was one playing music that people knew, so then they would go, oh, you know, you could have an emotional connection to it. But I'm trying to take away memory so that people can be free from conditioning. So in some ways, using music that people were familiar with wasn't helping me after a while. And the second thing is that after many years, this is 2012, so 94 to, you know, almost 20 years, I wasn't. I was hearing things that I couldn't find music for, and I just decided to make that music. And Once I started 2012, I made my first volume, like a one hour since breathwork. Effigy is an hour. I made an hour album. And then I just started doing that over time. And so I got up to 18 volumes of music over which has only been 12 years. But in 2023, I.
It doesn't matter. But I ended up making a lot of pieces of music. I sold half of it to a company in China. And then I ended up putting out six albums, one for each stage of the breathwork. So if you're a breathwork facilitator or you're a breather and you want to try breathing to something, I name the stages in the book, I describe them. You can even particularly the second album, rhythm. It's just a lot of drums, you know, little short four minute drum tracks. If people want to lay down and breathe to any of those pieces, they could probably do it on their own. So I feel like music is the fastest path to God. It always was for me. Like it transcends all languages and cultures and religions. And when you're in that music comes from silence. So to me, when you're doing breath work, music is one of my. There are many facilitators in my work, but my. Everyone has their own thing. Music is definitely one of my big tools when I'm working with people is using music to move the thing along, to open things up or whatever I need to do. So I love it and I love making the music and I love using it.
[00:41:13] Speaker A: It sounds like the reason why you've made your music and use your music is because it's more of a pattern interrupt for people that helps to break through almost.
[00:41:22] Speaker B: Not to be contrarian, but in a way what I real. I don't know if I created my own genre, but what I. What my music is is not to interrupt. It's meant to take you into yourself without calling attention to the music itself. Which is. Most music is a form of entertainment or a performance. And in some ways I found that that was. I found music to be interrupting the experience. Because if you go, oh God, I love that piece of music, it's not about you, it's about the music. And in a way, like I love rock and roll because crunchy guitars and pounding drums. And it came from a culture in the 60s that was about transcendence in a way. So I love the power of it. But if you play that music and I'm paying attention to it, that's an interruption. But I started to find myself liking things like Philip Glass where there's a pattern and it's not like it's the same thing repeating. It's like getting in a river that's slightly changing as you go. And I feel like his music feels like what the breathwork feels like an underground stream or something. And so also, I studied Tangent, studied Indian music with a guy named Terry Riley. Terry was my music teacher. And Terry's a famous American jazz musician. He started minimalist classical music, which is what Philip Glass is meaning. He had this piece called In C, which is basically like. It's just this piece of music that's one thing that keeps changing over an hour. And I feel like different time signatures over it doesn't really matter, but. But I find that I'm trying to make music that draw that you can't. Like, it's like you can't hang on to the ledge because all it does is force you to go inside yourself. So.
[00:43:24] Speaker A: Nice. Yeah, No, I totally understand.
[00:43:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:43:27] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. So you've made your own genre. What would you call that genre?
[00:43:31] Speaker B: Music for Breath Work? I don't. What do you call it?
Maybe you can give it a name after.
[00:43:37] Speaker A: I'd have to hear it. Is there any way that people can.
[00:43:40] Speaker B: Hear some samples of it somewhere or subterranean subconscious music?
It's not like yoga music, and it's not music for meditation because some of it's super evocative and intense, but it's meant to be slightly subterranean.
[00:43:58] Speaker A: Okay. Is there any way that people can have a listen to some samples on.
[00:44:02] Speaker B: Every streaming service across the planet?
[00:44:04] Speaker A: I'll bring it in every country.
[00:44:06] Speaker B: Yeah. If you have Apple music or Spotify, those are in. Even YouTube. There's a lot to go through there. You know, there's lots of music. But yeah. And I will say on Spotify, for whatever reason, I made an album in 2004, Sufi Chance, and that's my most popular album. So no matter what happens, that always ends up. If you go to my page, you see that album, and it doesn't look like I have any music for breathing.
And someone said, just delete that off of Spotify and then re. Put it back on. And I. I'm actually really popular in Turkey, so I can't get away from that Sufi album.
[00:44:45] Speaker A: Just fly with it.
[00:44:46] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what I'm doing.
[00:44:50] Speaker A: After working with tens of thousands of people, are there common themes or shared experiences that you've noticed regarding trauma's effects.
[00:44:56] Speaker B: Limitation, being averse to feeling? I mean, at the bottom of everybody's problems, they don't want to feel. Just don't want to feel their feelings. So that's problem number one. And problem number two is you perceive through a filter that you don't know, is there. So you actually see things wrong and believe you see them right. Like, you don't. You have a blind spot. A blind spot and a filter. I mean, if you think about religious fanatics, the more.
The more conditioned they are, the more fanatical they are about what they believe. So the more invisible the lens, the more full of belief you'll have. A person who doesn't have trauma or conditioning tends to feel like they don't know anything. So because they're aware that the possibility of a filter or blind spot is really strong. So the two biggest things are effects of traumas. One is that you do things to get more of the good experiences and less of the bad. Okay, that's all right. But you're averse to feeling things that are uncomfortable. And the second is you don't believe that you're not seeing clearly, but you are. You're not seeing clearly. None of us are. We're all filtering all the time. And the purpose of all spiritual work, of breath work, even the retraining that I do with movement, is to help you to see what you can't see. Because if you can do that, then you really do get to be the creator of your own life.
[00:46:34] Speaker A: For those struggling with their own trauma, what advice would you give them on starting their healing journey?
[00:46:40] Speaker B: Start. Start somewhere. And don't think that there's a. You don't wait for a better time because it's never convenient and it's always messy. So start. And it's like anything, you know, I play music, whatever. Like, sometimes I get up and it's like, okay, I gotta go in and do this thing. It's like, I think I'll clean the house first. You know, we all have kind of like, sometimes it's hard to get started, right? Oh, I know that sometimes cleaning the house is the way that I get started. But other times getting started just do it wrong. Make a mess, just start somewhere. And because you know it's true when the. When the student's ready, the teacher appears. But it's. It's like when you just initiate an action towards getting there. And I. I'm going to exclude unpopular opinion, but, you know, I wrote. I've written three books. But like, reading is the most beginner. It's not the work. That's why I didn't put this second part of my book out, because you can't do the work by yourself. You can't do it out of a book because you're filtering. You're going to just take what you think is true and get rid of what you don't agree with, and you're not going to get any feedback and nobody telling you how wrong you are. The power of the work is the human engine, the relationship between guide and guided. And when I say start, I mean start.
Create a relationship somewhere where you can get in the feedback loop because that alone will bring up stuff and will help you to move forward. I still have a teacher. I have teachers. Like, I love being a student more than I love being a teacher. Teachers like sharing stuff for me and I of course, get intoxicated just like I am with you right now. Like, I get excited, but it's a lot of narrowing and trying to focus. And it's like, it's very. It's hard. It's a certain kind of hard work. But being a student is just being an idiot who doesn't know any better. Trying your best. Like, I don't get to do that as much as a teacher because the expectation on me is greater. But being a student is wonderful. Like, everybody should be a student because you get to discover. You get to be in the discovery all the time.
[00:49:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:49:07] Speaker B: My favorite. Not favorite student, but my longest running student. He's been with me nine years. This morning we've taken up. He's not ne. He's in my programs and stuff, but this morning he's trying to learn a tai chi form from me. And he lives in Boston. So we were on video and we were laughing so hard because it's been three years and we were on the first movement for like three days on the first movement of the forum. And like, he just trying to understand, like, a certain principle and he was so wobbly and wrong. But what made him laugh is like, he's in the joy of being stupid. Like, you find that. It's like, oh, wow. Like, it's not like, oh, God, why am I not getting this? It's like, I can't believe it's so interesting, you know?
[00:49:55] Speaker A: So, yeah, that's an excellent place to be. Definitely. So, Elijah, we've come towards the end of the podcast. So how can people find you and your book?
[00:50:04] Speaker B: Well, how can they find me? You will never find me. No, I'm. If you go to effigy breath.come f f I j I com. I think effigy.com even works.
There is. There's a free three minute tutorial doing the breathing. I write a newsletter five times a week if you don't want to hear me yabbering on about stuff don't do that. But it's free, so those are free things. There's a community forum that's free, and then we have, you know, this. The trauma Code experience program, and it sort of goes out from there. So if somebody wants to reach me specifically to ask me something, you can just hit the contact link and my partner will eventually send something to me. But, yeah.
[00:50:47] Speaker A: Excellent. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking all about your process with trauma and your understanding of trauma and the explanation of your breathwork method. That's. That's been very well explained and understood, and I appreciate all that you've shared here today.
[00:51:03] Speaker B: Elijah, thank you so much. I enjoyed it. You have a. I fail when I'm really intoxicated and excited because it's because of the host. Like, it's your energy that did that. You're just very relaxed and kind of open and. And you let me talk. So. Yeah.
[00:51:19] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, I'll just say goodbye to the listeners.
That was a fun episode with Elijah. I've enjoyed our conversation. His understanding of his methods of breath work and then working with the space that once opened, then to fill it with a new way of being is really clear in his understanding and the way he explained that. I really enjoyed his understanding of breath work and trauma and how you don't have to be stuck. You can move through it and find a new way of being. So if you've enjoyed today's episode and you're on YouTube, like, and subscribe, it's free. And if you're on a podcast app, it's also free to get on the podcast app and hit that five stars and say something nice to me because I'd really appreciate it. And thank you so much for listening. And until next episode, it's bye for now.
Stupid baby.
