Full podcast transctript:

Patrick McKeown 
0:00

Hello. Many of you know this person that I'm going to be
talking to, and his name is Tom Myers. He's absolutely no stranger to
breathing. He has brought a lot of unique insights into the whole world of
breathing and the body. Tom, you're very welcome. So you're joining us from
Maine. You're telling us there's a blizzard. So hopefully we can get through
the next hour without too much interruption. Great.

Tom Myers  0:21

I certainly hope so. The snow is just beginning and the wind
is just beginning. And we don't usually lose power around here until things get
very hairy and so,

Patrick McKeown 
0:30

okay, it's not like Ireland. We lose power at the slightest
kind of couple of snowflakes coming down. The whole world, the whole country
goes into crisis mode. You're a long time doing what you're doing. I'd love to
get your backstory just a little bit, you know, because you've seemed to have
come from a number of different backgrounds. Brought it together and came up
with a unique insight.

Tom Myers  0:52

Well, I've also just been at it for a very long time. This
is, this is, I think, my 50 something year in practice. And in fact, I have not
had a practice for the last 10 years. I've been running a school, but still
doing a lot of work. So the insights have been gained over a long period of
time. I grew up right here in Maine, in the nature, and I think that was really
important for me. I was a lonely kid and an awkward kid in what they called in
the 50s, a sissy, because I didn't have interest in either internal combustion
engines or baseball, and if you didn't, if you weren't interested in internal
combustion engines and baseball, you weren't a man. In the 1910 I was not a
man. I'm so I'm really glad that all the has come forward, because it's
loosened me up a great deal to enjoy the feminine inside of myself. I'm still a
sissy at 76 i Six.

Patrick McKeown 
1:43

Well, you look great for 76 well done. So obviously, you're
doing something, right?

Tom Myers  1:47

Yeah, I don't know, good genes, whatever, but I just
haven't, I recommend being interested in what you're doing, because that as I
still feel middle I still feel middle aged. I can feel my age coming, but, but
I still feel middle aged. And anyway, I was slated for the Ivy League. I ended
up at Harvard University, and dropped out of that after two years. We're
talking about the time when Martin Luther King was shot and Robert Kennedy was
shot, and the whole revolution was in the air in a big way. In the 1960s I came
down on the side of environmental stuff, and I went to study with Buckminster
Fuller. And Buckminster Fuller was my first big teacher in in science, I
suppose. And he taught me to think in holes. We're going to actually use an
idea of his when we start talking about the rib cage here, because this is a
tensegrity. Let me get far enough away so you can see it. It's a tensegrity
structure, and all the sticks are floating, and they're all held in place by
the rubber bands. This is called tensegrity engineering, and it's my
suggestion, especially for the breath and the rib cage and the biomechanics,
that if you try to do the biomechanics of breathing in terms of leverage, and
we'll do it today, but if you try to do it in terms of leverage, it doesn't really
work. The idea is more of a box. The box is held in place by a bunch of
ligaments, muscles and fascia and membranes, and that box expands and
contracts. Expands and contracts from the moment you come forth, from your
mother to you know, everybody dies on the exhale, so in between, cannot have
the heart pump can't stop for more than a second or two, and the breathing pump
can't stop for more than a few minutes without great danger to the nervous
system, which is by far the most sensitive little mice of the system in there.
And I guess we'll talk about a lot of ways in which the breathing and the
nervous system are connected, some totally mine.

Patrick McKeown 
3:42

And the other thing is, like your 50 years of experience,
have you seen changes in breathing patterns? In other words, are you seeing
things today or things are being reported today that didn't exist to the same
extent 50 years ago, respiratory rate and the prevalence of dysfunctional
breathing, the prevalence of oral breathing. Do you think things are getting
worse?

Tom Myers  4:03

Yes, I do think things are getting worse. Yes, I think there
are. I don't know how far afield from breathing you want to go, but there are a
lot of forces in the world that are moving us toward anxiety, and the main one
of that is a mismatch in our genes between the world that we've created. I call
it. We made a zoo, and now we live in it. Yeah. So most of the effects on the
breath are from making the zoo and then living in it. And we've been living in
that Zoo. If you want to mark that zoo from the beginning of the agricultural
era 1000 years ago. Before that, we were really Paleolithic. Our genes were
made for better or for worse. I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying
our genes were forged in that paleo environment, and now then we lived in an
agricultural environment, and then we lived in an industrial environment,
certainly an urban environment, and now we're living in an electronic
environment. I live out here in Maine, in a tiny farm that you. Know, got
something from Sears, Roebuck once a year, but otherwise, lived on their own.
And I'm as addicted to my phone, email, and, you know, the world of
electronics, as anybody way, way out here in the country, we now live in a
different kind of zoo than we've ever lived in before. And yes, that's affecting
breathing, that's affecting anxiety, and thereby affecting breathing. And so we
have a mismatch between the genes that grew us up in the Paleolithic era, where
you let me just give one example. A common one that we understand is we have
genes that say, eat. Everything in sight eat and all the sugar you can find.
That's That's what our genes say. Because there wasn't a time only if you were
the chief did you have enough food all the time for eating? But now we live in
a food abundance. It's not good to have genes that say, eat everything in
sight. And we're dealing with that as a society, okay, and it's okay. And this
is the thing that relates to breathing and biomechanics. It's okay to have
genes that say, be lazy, don't move, don't expend extra energy, and those are
good genes to have when life requires you to be energetic from dawn to dusk.
Yeah, everybody sat around. They say sitting is the new smoking, but people
have been sitting around since the Paleolithic times. It's the sitting in
chairs and sitting for so many hours a day without a stop. Ancient people could
never do. So we have genes that say, be lazy, and now we're in a time where you
can be lazy. Life doesn't require that you pick up your suitcase and carry it
through the airport. Instead, your suitcase is carrying you through the
airport. I don't know if you've seen these have luggage with an electric motor
in it, and you can sit on, you know, kids sit on the suitcase and go scooting
down the

Patrick McKeown 
6:39

haven't came across them? Yes, so, yeah,

Tom Myers  6:42

it just is the epitome, to me, of lack of progress. Progress
is making it possible for us not to move. Us not moving is changing our
breathing pattern. Us not feeling meaning. Is changing our breathing pattern
that we make a difference in

Patrick McKeown 
7:01

the world. Do you think there's a greater awareness? I know
when I stepped into breathing, back just in the late 1990s and 2002 I started
teaching full time breathing was something that was seen so left a field. You
know, it was very much, woo, woo. Nobody was looking at functional breathing.
Nobody was looking at the connection between breathing and different states of
health, such as, my focus was asthma, opening up airways, opening up the nose,
sleep, etc. Do you think the Penny has finally dropped? People are getting it
now,

Tom Myers  7:28

yes, I think the Penny has finally dropped. But I think
there's another larger reason for the penny dropping. I started to talk about,
we made a zoo and we live in it. Another way of saying that is among the
animals that we domesticated are humans. You know, we domesticated horses, we
domesticated dogs, we domesticated chickens, more or less, etc, and in that
process, we domesticated ourselves into the agricultural era. And that all
animals that are domesticated, it has to do with the neural crest genes that
form in the front of the head. I don't want to go into all the nerdiness of it.
But every animal that's domesticated gets a narrower jaw, gets a narrower face,
gets a narrower breathing pattern. We'll go into this in the conchai of the
nose. You know, a wild cat has a big jaw. A domesticated cat has a small jaw.
Wild wolf has a large jaw. All those little yappy dogs have tiny jaws, and the
same thing has happened to us, that our jaws are getting demonstrably smaller,
and therefore we need so much orthodonture, which really wasn't necessary in
the Paleolithic era. Whether that's harder food, that's one theory you know,
that they were eating harder food. Therefore the epigenetics of our gnawing on
wheat that hasn't been ground to the finest flour, so you're chewing on harder
stuff, all of that has made a difference in our jaws. That's one theory, and
another theory is just this genetic one that we're doing the same thing that
animals do. So if that's true, it crowds our teeth, it makes breathing harder,
cause airway things, then we start thinking about, why is there head forward
posture everywhere? And I can say that with confidence. I've been all around
the world, and head forward posture is everywhere. There are some people who
don't have it, but it's ubiquitous across the culture. I think it's an urban
effect on breathing has been to curl in around the top of the lung. Yeah, maybe
you have some more insights into how that came. Who inspired you first in the
90s to get into breathing.

Patrick McKeown 
9:28

I had my own issues, so I would never have got into this
business, unless, of unless I had asthma, if he knows sleep, and they never put
it all together. And I'd terrible concentration, you know, and that they
normally go hand in hand. Anyway, you've looked at this. You looked at the
connection between the emotions and the breath, but also, like I've got a huge
interest in the whole area of everyday breathing and how it impacts sleep. And
you pointed I wasn't aware that you were aware of Of course, I should have been
aware that the human face has got smaller. Here, and the airways have got
smaller and narrower to the point that nine, 936 million people are estimated
to have sleep apnea on this planet. And this is a, this is a train wreck ready
to happen. You know, whenever this takes place, we can't mess with this airway
here. This is key. And if this is getting smaller, that's a big problem for the
human species. But I don't want to, I don't want to kind of be too negative
here. But, yeah, I came into it. I learned how to breathe through my nose,
decongest my nose. It was the work of Dr Buteyko, Ukrainian physician, 1950s
Correct? That's where I started. Um, that's, you know, from that. But I think
he had a phenomenal observation, like you said that stress changes breathing,
and breathing changes stress well. He said that people who are sick don't
breathe well. And he asked, Is it their sickness that is causing them not to
breathe well, or is it their poor breathing pattern which is feeding back into
their sickness? And that was it, so, you know. And he looked at it from the
point of view of the biochemical dimension, hyperventilation, faster breathing,
harder breathing. You're looking at it primarily from the biomechanical point
of view. Where is that person breathing? Are they using good recruitment, or
optimal recruitment of the diaphragm, or are the upper chest? However, there's
a correlation. There is a link between the two. When one is off, the other
tends to be off, even though research says the correlation isn't that strong.
But if you look at people with poor breathing of the diet from breathing upper
chest, they typically breathe faster, harder, regular. They have a short breath
hold time. They often feel that they can't take a deep breath. Is that a biochemical
problem or a biomechanical problem, or both? Breathing is just complex, isn't
it?

Tom Myers 
11:36

Yes, breathing is complex because it hovers on the fulcrum
of so many things, if I can go off, I actually want to get back to how I got
into this and how you got it. But this thing about breathing as being the
fulcrum, we can take a conscious breath or an unconscious breath in order to
get out of the unconscious breath pattern that you had when you first
discovered this, you had to take conscious control of your breath and change
the pattern. Yes, and you can do that. And generally, a lot of mammals can't do
that. A lot of land mammals don't control their breathing consciously. It is
controlled for them unconsciously. Now, as soon as you sleep, you breathe
unconsciously. As soon as you're listening to me and not thinking about your
breathing, you breathe unconsciously. But now I made you think about your
breathing, so maybe you're breathing consciously, right? So we hover right on
that thing between, right on that edge between a conscious and an unconscious
breath. And interestingly, the conscious breath is a characteristic of sea
creatures, sea mammals. A hippo has to be able to breathe this thing because
putting a hand in there, because I'm doing I'm actually just saying one they
they have to do conscious breathing all the time. A seal can't take an unconscious
breath. A whale can't take an unconscious breath. It will die because it would
be underwater. They had to consciously come up. Dolphins famously sleep on one
half of the brain while the other half keeps them alive. And then sleep on the
other half of their brain, while the first half keeps them coming up to breathe
when they have to. But you can't teach a dog to talk. It's really hard to get a
dog to be able to talk, but you can teach a seal to talk. There was a famous
seal in Boston Harbor here that would shout greetings from the water at people
in boats, and he knew particular people and all of that. Why? Because it, you
know, and a seal is a Sea Hunt. In German, they are a sea dog, so they're very
much like a dog. And yet, you can teach a seal to talk, but you can't teach a
dog to talk because a dog never consciously does its breath the way a seal has
to consciously do the breath. So voice control that we humans have may have
come from a from our time on the seashore, being a person who lives on the seashore,
I like this idea very much that humans grew up on the seashore and learned
their breath control on the seashore, because not even baboons and monkeys have
that kind of breath control. So the fact that we got to get to the seashore
that that happened early in human development, that we got the protein, and
therefore the bigger brain, the proteins and the fats that came from the omegas
of the fish and the shellfish on the side of the sea, and that by going in the
water, we learned breath control that allowed us to have a voice in a way that
other monkeys, they don't have a voice the way we

Patrick McKeown 
14:22

have a voice. It's amazing because we have some of the
features as well of a diving response that a seal has, we have a spleen, and
when blood oxygen saturation drops, the body senses that, and the spleen starts
releasing red blood cells into circulation, and also the heart will slow down
when we do a long breath hold, blood is diverted from the peripheries to the
heart and brain. So, yeah, it's amazing that we did spend some time foraging
for food and the bottom of the sea floor, huh?

Tom Myers 
14:47

Yeah, I think so. I think so. And the and that that may have
a key to why human breath is so different, number one and two, why it's so
subject to all these different aberrations that you were talking about. It
affect 10% of the people on the planet. And yes, if these tendencies towards
our electronic era and separation from nature and long periods of sitting, and
you know, not, the same dedication to movement that we've had in previous
generations, people need to learn how to think of the list of things that
people animals need to learn how to do right now, how to sleep, how to breathe,
how to walk, how to stand, to eat. All of these things have been so disrupted
in our system that none of them come naturally. We're all you're an early one.
James Nester came out with that book on breath, which I'm sure helped you

Patrick McKeown 
15:41

definitely, definitely put an awareness. There's an awful
lot of crossover between both our worlds, James nesters world, and our own in
terms of what we speak about, which was great finally getting it out there. You
know, I needed James's book to to give us that bit of a helping hand.

Tom Myers 
15:56

I just got back from a conference on tongue tie, which is a
new medical sort of phenomenon, but it's an old problem of the tongue frenulum
being too tied to the bottom of the mouth that the baby can't latch. Yes, and
so that causes all kinds of nursing problems, and it goes all away from
midwives who would keep a long 15th century in France and just cut that thing
so the baby could latch right away. Now there are people claiming all kinds of
things for this. I think it's part of this same narrowing of the jaw that the
central line here there's fascia almost all the way up the whole body. Where
your tongue touches the top of your mouth is the only place there isn't a
central frenulum and there isn't a central skin. Right down through the middle
of your brain comes a big piece of canvas called the fox Cerebri, which is a
piece of fascia that divides the right hemisphere from the left hemisphere and
goes all around the brain to the back. Then there's a tube that goes down. Why
was I saying this? Oh, this down through the head, down through the nose, as
you know, there's the nasal septum that's a continuation right from that folks
and down through the tongue is a septum that is continuous with the fascia
right down through the voice box, right down to the heart. So this whole thing
right in here that forms embryologically, it's it's an amazing feat to make a
face. And there are obviously differences in anatomy from person to person, but
there are changes in the physiology which are just due to the fact that we live
in a zoo. Where do you want to go from here?

Patrick McKeown 
17:26

What to do, to fix it? What you're doing? Where even to
start? You know, like, if we think of the most fundamental basics of breathing,
which I often feel was overlooked, breathing through the nose in comparison to
breathing through an open mouth. And it doesn't take rocket science. If you
have your mouth open, if you look into it, there's nothing inside the mouth
that does anything for breathing. What is in your mouth, your teeth, your
tongue, your heart, palates, your soft palate, your gums, nothing there for
respiration. But yet, 25% of kids studied children are persistently mouth
breathing. 50% of the adult population during sleep her mouth breathing, and
there's no real figures for adults during wakefulness. Number one is there's no
definition of what mouth breathing is. But say, for example, when we're
thinking about to die from here, and you're thinking about forward head
posture, if the mouth is open, the tongue isn't able to rest in the roof of the
mouth, and as a result, and the tongue is in the low resting posture, it's
going to encroach the airway, so that it makes the airway narrow. So in order
to get the tongue out of the airway, you push your head forward. But the other
aspect of that's so simple, but mouth breathing that's been overlooked, if you
look down at your chest Tom, if you look down at your chest and take the breath
through your mouth, and I'd love to know your take in this as to what might be
happening if you're if you take a breath through your mouth. What do you see in
terms of the engagement? Is it more upper chest and less recruitment of the
diaphragm, or is it the other way around? What do you see? Take a big breath
through your mouth?

Tom Myers 
18:49

Yeah, it's it's lower when you breathe through the nose.
It's higher when you breathe.

Patrick McKeown 
18:55

And do you know Tom this has hardly ever been studied. Very
few researchers have looked at the connection between the nose and the
diaphragm versus the mouth and the upper chest, and yet I often feel then that
the biomechanics of breathing is going to be impacted if one is allowed to
persistently mouth breathe. But based on your knowledge, what do you think
might be happening there? One has their mouth open and we tend to breathe
towards the upper chest. How is mouth breathing, causing of her chest breathing.
How is nose breathing having better recruitment of the diaphragm? It's pretty
amazing.

Tom Myers 
19:26

Yeah, there are so many reflexes involved. I can't even
speculate as to how many. That's this. This is connected on massive numbers of
things. As far as I'm concerned, the mouth breathing is there in case you have
a really bad cold or something that's stopping your nose from breathing, as you
say, I'm thinking of maybe we take this journey so people can look at what
we're able to think about easily, which is what's happening to the air in the
nose versus what's happening to the air in the mouth. Shall I put a few slides
up? Yeah, absolutely. Are you able to share there? I'm looking for where the
Share button is. Yeah. Oh, I don't know what this thing is. Asked this, I'm not
used to your let's see if I can get to a place where we could see this. I can
see it there. Yeah, good. So let me go back as far as the rib cage. Now I'm
going back for the whole thing, because this Are you now able to see a video?

Patrick McKeown 
20:23

Yeah, perfect. Great. So

Tom Myers 
20:26

pretty interesting mechanics of breathing is that you have a
piston going on. Let's just be simple about this, and you feel free to
complicate me whenever you want to. There's over 100 joints in the rib cage,
and all of those 100 joints are moved by the motion of breathing. You can't see
the diaphragm in this film because it's so thin. What you're seeing is the
liver and the spleen and the stomach and the heart beating. And you might
notice that the heart is not pulled down very far, so there are really two
domes in the diaphragm, and they're moving down. And that moving down is moving
the lungs down, not the heart very much, but both lungs, which you can hardly
see, they're black in this thing. And then the whole organs are moving down and
moving up. Your kidneys are moving a half a kilometer a day with the breath.
Your kidneys are riding an elevator up and down the psoas muscle, and it's five
centimeters of breath, and that's 17,000 times a day. 119 joints are being
moved. Your breath is so central to your body, and we pay no attention to it,
and it works pretty well on its own, but not that well. The last thing I want
to say about this is think of it as a piston. The organs are a piston that are
going down in the body on the inhale, back up. And the rib cage and the belly
wall and the spine are the cylinder around the piston, and that's going up. You
can see the ribs going up on the starts again. See the ribs going up on the
inhale, down on the inhale, and then see the ribs coming back. Now, people, as
you know, there are many people arguing whether they're you know, how much
should the ribs move? And we'll talk more about diaphragmatic breath versus rib
breathing as we move on. These are things that your audience already knows. I
call breath as the essential element in vitamin M, which is vitamin movement.
Because you're doing this 17,000 times a day, there's no other movement that
you repeat 17,000 times a day that we know.

Patrick McKeown 
22:38

And you know what's fascinating as well, when you were
talking about, as well, the movement of the liver, that every time the
diaphragm is moving, it's massaging the internal organs. It's helping with
lymph drainage, etc, as well. There's a lot going on there.

Tom Myers 
22:49

Lot going on there. So that whole idea of the organs moving
down as a piston and back up, and the rib cage moving up as a cylinder and then
moving back down on the exhale, to have that be a really smooth gliding
operation, is what I'm looking at for the biomechanics of breathing. And if you
hold yourself in a funny place, in any place, either because of unexpressed
anger, for instance, in the left hand picture by Kellerman, or in depression,
as in the middle picture, or in the startled response, which is a famous
photograph from an Alexander teacher taken in London of a guy just before and
just after they fired a blank pistol behind his head. And so you see the start
there, and you see what it would do to breath, and the startle response is
usually resolved within the first few months of the baby being born, sort of
dissolved into the rest of the neural soup. But for some people who got really
scared early on and stayed that way, didn't, didn't come out of the threat,
then you see this kind of pattern starting, that head forward posture, the
airway thing that you were talking about restriction from a very, very early
age, and it stuck into fear, and it stuck into the breathing pattern. And in my
world, it's a shortening of what I call the superficial front line, which is
the fascia and muscle that run up the front of the body. We said talked about
the rib cage. I work on a nine chakra system with different things in it, but
my bio mechanics of breath are very much you're thinking nose down and I'm
thinking pelvis up a lot. So what kind of support is the pelvis offering the
diaphragm? Is the pelvic diaphragm offering to the respiratory diaphragm. And
you see the very many, you know, a few of the very many patterns that are out
there that don't support it. Wilhelm Reich talked about the way that those
patterns Express. In the body are expressive of different emotions. I don't
know how far I want to rely on such typologies things, but clearly you have
this whole column there. You can see the piston of the organs in the middle,
and that's going to move down. That whole set of cavities is going to move
down, and the rib cage around it is going to move up. Now let's start with your
area here, the air comes through the nose, comes into this mucousy passage, and
there are openings into the sinuses and into the Eustachian tube that you can
see there. And you can see that they've cut the two conci that come down
through the middle. So this is probably a picture that you use. It's certainly
a picture that I use. And I was thinking of when I said there's a division all
the way down, if we start at the top of the head. There, you can see the fabric
going down between the two halves of the brain that becomes part of septum, and
as you said, Only where the tongue touches the roof of the mouth is that cycle
broken of a division down through the middle of the body. It puts me in my Tai
Chi, my Tai Chi teachers, who always said, Put your tongue on your roof of your
mouth when you're practicing in order to complete that circuit. That's the
Yeah.

Patrick McKeown 
26:18

That was the question I was just I was just going to ask you

Tom Myers 
26:22

the Conception Vessel and the Governing Vessel. Yes, I would
certainly prefer that the tongue is resting on the top of the mouth. And what
seems to produce those straight teeth that people had in the Paleolithic era
and that they need $10,000 worth of braces to have now is that the pressure
moving in from the cheeks, the buccinator muscles out here, or buccinator
muscle, however you pronounce it, and the tongue pushing out from the beanie,
should equal each other, and then your teeth, which are actually the bones of
your head, are softer when you're first suckling than the muscles are. It's not
quite true, but there's still a lot of change available in the bones. So how
the baby sucks and swallows and breathes very early on is going to set the
teeth in motion. But you can see that septum going right down through the
middle of the tongue all the way to the bottom of the chin there, and then that
continues down through the heart. So what you know big the sinuses are there.

Patrick McKeown 
27:17

What you're saying is, if the tongue is not in the correct
resting posture, you don't have that development of the maxilla. And as a
result, then the top jaw is going to be it's going to be high and it's going to
be very high palate. And then what's happening is that the high palate, then is
infringing on the nasal septum and contributing to the deviated septum. In
other words, as the palate of the mouth isn't flat enough, but goes too high,
it's going to push the septum off. So now you're dealing with a smaller nasal
cavity because, of course, the floor of the nose is the roof of the mouth, but
also because of the high palate, causing the deviated septum, and that's
probably why so many of us have a deviated septum, or at least part of it?

Tom Myers 
28:00

Yes, yes, that is contributing to it. So if you look in the
nose portion of that, you'll see that the septum is going right down through
the middle, and then the two Concha are hanging down, and that divides it into
three, divides the air. The ends of the very ends of those Concha are called
turbinate because they bind the air. And so the air should be going through
three passageways, the one in the bottom, the one in the middle and the one
that goes all the way up to the top, there, almost to the nose. Two little
white dots right above the nose, there are the nose brain, the olfactory bulb,
and so the more the jaw closes, the more the face narrows, the more these conci
are pushed towards the midline, and all the air ends up going through the
bottom passage, and very little air going through the other two they get
essentially unused. So one of the things that we're looking for when we want to
widen the face is to widen it all the way up. And not only to have the teeth
widen and the floor of the mouth widen, but the whole maxillary structure
widened. And as you say, the vomer, which is the bone, the plow bone behind the
nasal septum, gets to unwind itself because it gets squoze between the sphenoid
and the maxilla

Patrick McKeown 
29:14

when you when you're talking about widening the maxilla here
is this in the situation of an adult, or are you saying that with childhood, we
want to make sure that children are breathing through their nose with the
tongue resting in the roof the mouth. To assist with this,

Tom Myers 
29:27

I'm saying both. The latter certainly is what we need to do
prophylactically, going forward what I do with adults. Now, it's quite amazing
to me how much adults can change in some of these deviations at the top of the
of the palate. You know some people have ridges and you're from the mouth, from
doing intra oral work, and we also do intra nasal work going up into the nasal
passage. See if I have the skull here. That's the idea that air and food get
confused in the human being, right? Air is going to go down the front to your
lungs, and foods going to go down the back to your stomach. It's for those of
us who like to talk and eat at the same time. It's not good. No, I don't have
the thing, but the

Patrick McKeown 
30:16

let's, let's go back to that time because I was at a
conference in the States. And, God, I can't remember his surname, Glen. He was
a physical therapist, but he had put his thumbs into my palate, helping to
expand the palette, but also his little pinky, his small finger, into my nasal
airway, just pushing up, just gently working on it. And I could really feel the
difference to the septum. And, you know, I wasn't aware that this could be
possible, you know, because normally when people talk about opening up the nose
for better, breathing in the natural the nose, anatomically, they're thinking
about surgery. But this was a non invasive approach, and that's what you're
talking about here.

Tom Myers 
30:55

So there are two, two non invasive approaches. One is with a
finger, and the other is with a small balloon, and this is a more chiropractic
approach, and it's more sudden, but they kind of put the balloon up into each
of these passages and then suddenly blow it up. So it's a little more violent,
but it it can do some really good things, to open up people's noses who have
been closed for a very long time. I do what I can with adults, it would be a
whole lot better, and you can get more changes in adults than you think, but it
still would be better if we started with the children, because they're much
more malleable at that age. If we had good mouth hygiene and breathing hygiene
for our kids as they started nursery school, where we, you know, actually
educated the parents or daycare workers, that kind of thing. But I, you know,
that's as you as you know, you started the 1990s this is just coming in. It's
going to take a long time before this becomes part of regular schooling.

Patrick McKeown 
31:57

Totally, we've been kind of shouting it from the rooftops
for the last 20 years, because we know the impact that mouth breathing is
having on childhood development, both on academia, physical development, their
sleep, their mood, and also brain development. You know, child who is mouth
breathing is more prone to snoring. They're more prone to stopping breathing.
They're not getting adequate stage three sleep because they're being taken out
of it to have fragmentation of sleep, and as a result, then they don't have
adequate brain development, which increases the risk of special education
needs. You know, this is so simple when you break it down, the stuff that we're
talking about here, but yet, we've some way to go with that. So I would love
more physical therapists and physiotherapists to be able to do this with their
hands in terms of opening up the space in the nose anatomically. Because here's
the thing, if one feels that they are not getting enough air through their
nose, they're not going to breathe through it. And this could be a combination
of rhinitis, or it could be a combination. It could be, say, for example,
anatomical. But certainly, being able to help open up the space from an
anatomical point of view, is is huge.

Tom Myers 
33:02

Yes, we and and that can be done. And getting back to your
original question, it can only be done in limited way in adults compared to the
way that it could be done in children. You know how that gets into the
educational system, how that becomes part of the national set of health
concerns, just time will do it. And the unfortunate thing is, it's getting
worse. So time will do it, because it's getting worse. More people are having
apnea. You know, I've been in business for 50 years now, and people were not having
these problems when I first started out, there are more diseases of stress in
general, and it's up for grabs, whether that's what's affecting breathing, or
breathing is affecting that, or both. It's, it's a circle, so we all enter that
circle somewhere.

Patrick McKeown 
33:56

Yeah, yeah. Totally appreciate yours as you appreciate mine.
Yeah, yeah, the connection then between the nose and the diaphragm. So you
spoke that during rest to die from I didn't realize. I always thought that the
diaphragm moved down by about two to three centimeters during rest and about 10
to 15 centimeters during physical exercise. You said that the liver is moving
five centimeters.

Tom Myers 
34:17

So kidneys, kidneys are in the kidneys, yep, and the kidneys
are underneath the liver. So the liver is moving more. The kidneys are moving
less than that. The center of the diaphragm under the heart in quiet breathing,
only moves a half an inch, okay. And the center under the domes moves 567,
centimeters, depending on what kind of breath you're taking, but the it's
essentially two domes. Let me, let me get down to the diaphragm here. I'll just
get there. By the means of this, everybody talks about the axial skeleton and
the appendicular skeleton, but I think there's also a visceral skeleton. This
is an idea I borrow. From John zahorik, and if you look at everything from your
eyes down, it's an arch. You've got the zygomatic arch, you've got the
maxillary arch, you've got your mandibular arch, you've got the hyoid and the
cricoid and the laryngeal and all the cartilages, tracheal cartilages down. And
that that's not usually represented in the skeleton, but that that represents
the skeleton of our viscera, the skeleton, particularly of the breathing
system, and that it is a series of arches. It's left over from the gill arches
and the tissue that can get the oxygen out of the medium. In this case, the air
is done down into these two little pouches, and you need an upside down tree to
get there.

Patrick McKeown 
35:42

So, three beautiful structure. When you see there was a cast
probably done on that image of the left of a human lungs, and you can see, you
can see the extent of it, like, it's pretty amazing, isn't it, all of the
different bronchioles, and they would be running into the small air sacs in the
lungs. Yeah, it's an amazing

Tom Myers 
36:01

small air packs. It's a small air sacs take up a tremendous
amount of area, like the leaves on a tree. I love this idea that our that our
lungs actually are, are our leaves. If we thought of ourselves as a plant, the
lungs are the leaves out to the sunshine, but in this case, out to the oxygen,
and therefore they need the maximum amount of space they can get. So it's
amazing how much area is packed into those things up at the top of your chest,
yeah, but to get and they're surrounded by bags. I get very excited about these
bags, the visceral pleura and the parietal pleura, but I'll not get excited
about them this morning. There's all these joints in this and here's the
diaphragm. So the diaphragm is, let's see what's next. On that note, the
diaphragm is two domes, not one, in my conceptioning, and not just mine, other
people's, and it's the only muscle that changes its origin and insertion
halfway through the motion. And a lot of people don't understand this, and they
talk about diaphragmatic breath and a chest breath, and a chest breath is still
a diaphragmatic breath. So stay with me here for the left picture. The origin
of the diaphragm is all around your ribs, starting from the point of dagger at
the bottom of your sternum, all the way around the edge of the ribs, all the
way around to the back. And what you can't touch is on the front of the spine
there. And that's the origin the muscles of the diaphragm. The muscle fibers of
the diaphragm start to contract. Now look at the muscle fibers of the diaphragm.
They're mostly vertical. They're not horizontal. They're mostly vertical.
What's horizontal is the fascial stretch in the middle. It's called the central
tendon of the diaphragm, and I've made it a little diagrammatic there, because
there are some muscle fibers in it, but essentially what's under the lungs is
fascia and the diaphragm pulls down the ribs, stay static, and that pulls air
into the lungs. But as we just said, it's not coming down onto nothing. It's
coming down onto your liver. It's coming down onto your lunch. It's coming down
onto whatever. And so pretty soon that pressure equals, you know, pressure
pulling down equals the pressure pushing up. And then what happens? Then you go
to the right side of the picture, that central tendon, those two domes of the
central tendon that are marked with O now become the origin, because they're
the fixed point, and the ribs lift up in the familiar bucket handle, and then
at the top pump handle. Motion, all the motions of your body in breathing are
made by the diaphragm. Very little is made by the intercostals. Very a very
little bit more. Very little is made by the intercostals. A little bit more is
made by the anterior scalenes muscles, or the scalenes themselves. Otherwise
it's all diaphragm. And people don't realize that the diaphragm is moving the
ribs, and so in the first half, the ribs are the origin, and the diaphragm
pulls down on the lungs as the insertion. The second half, the domes are the
origin, and the diaphragm continues to contract. But instead of being able to
pull down the domes because they're pressing down on your gut, it lifts up the
ribs in the Venetian line, bucket, handle, whatever name you'd like to give it.
I would love people to be more familiar with that idea in the So, okay, yeah. Anyway,
let's get to I can't see you. So how do I stop sharing something like that?
There we go.

Patrick McKeown 
39:39

That's really good, though I was, I was looking at that. So
you talked about, okay, the diaphragm is the main breathing muscle. The
intercostal muscles don't do a whole lot. The scalenes don't do a whole lot.
But in the case of somebody with faulty breathing, from a biomechanical point
of view, how might that be recognized? Because normally, if one was to do, say,
the high low test, which is a visual observation. To know whether the person is
breathing high or low. It's quite a crew. It's quite to determine if there's
free movement of the diaphragm. Is there a better way? Would it be helpful if
the hands are either side of the lower ribs, that you push your ribs outwards
as an indication of degeneration of intra abdominal pressure? You know, simple
things that that our listeners will be able to take away if they look at their
breathing. How might they get an idea without, of course, going to a physical
therapist, a physiotherapist, one thing, but just getting an insight as they're
sitting listening to this?

Tom Myers 
40:32

Yes, so you want to measure two types of breath, so called
tidal breath, which is about a half a liter, which is observing their
breathing. It's helpful to observe with fewer clothes. Those of us who are body
workers, if you don't, I'm a body worker, so people take off their clothes in
my presence, so I get to see them breathing without their clothes. It is easier
to see things if you have the body open to you, but if you can get down to a T
shirt, you can see a lot that you wouldn't see. You know, with both of us on
these cold days, you in Ireland that we would have two shirts on that makes it
a little harder to see the breathing. Okay, so saying that, then there's your
tidal breath. So we've just been well, we're doing the thing that we do all the
time, which is to take short inhales and then long exhales, because we're
talking all the time for a living. So our own which

Patrick McKeown 
41:21

is not good for breathing. Tom talking,

Tom Myers 
41:23

this is not good for breathing. No, I've shortened my life
by my egotistical desire to put my idea in the world we are, we are fraught
with contradictions. Patrick, and that's it, well, but the and then you want to
look at what does their big breath look like. So I'm talking about sitting. The
difference between sitting and standing. More goes into my domain, which is, as
soon as you stand up, I don't think I can get far enough away from the camera
here, but as soon as you stand up, the position of the pelvis is going to have
to do with your breathing, right? If you shove the pelvis forward and the rib
cage falls back, you can do what you want with the breath. It needs to get up
on top of the pelvis. In my world, yes, that that working with this person's breathing
is going to be a child if they don't also have the support of the intra
abdominal pressure and a relatively neutral pelvis, people get hyper excited
about a neutral pelvis, but neutral is a range. But I want to get people in
that neutral range so their breath is supported, so the head could be supported
on top of that. It really is a venture of everything from the feet up to the
head on that. So that's the idea that I shout to the world is you can't take
these things on an individual basis, that that sciatica is not just one thing
that went wonky in everything was going right, but that instead, is the one
signal of the everything going to hell that you're getting. And pay attention
to that signal in terms of the whole not just in terms of trying to suppress
that symptom.

Patrick McKeown 
43:04

So the free movement of the die from, you know, so during
inspiration, the diaphragm is moving downwards, and during expiration, the
diaphragm is moving back up to its resting position. You talked a lot about the
emotions, and I know you've got a, I think, a fascinating interest into the
connection between the emotions and the breath, the mind breath. Mind Body,
sorry, mind diaphragm. Connection. Can you talk a little bit about the lack of
free movement of the diaphragm and how it may affect the emotions, and in terms
of, is it trauma that has has resulted in this? But are other things. And what
does it mean long term, when the person is stuck there with reduced movement or
mobility of the diaphragm?

Tom Myers 
43:47

Okay, if that has happened because of an emotional event, I
would suggest that we have emotional events all the time, that our emotions are
how we balance our feelings inside with the reports that are coming in from
outside, and as long as the reports from outside and the reports from the
inside are jiving together, then we feel calm. We're either alert or we're not
so alert, but we're calm and our breathing takes care of itself. Other things
being equal, as soon as there's a change that we have to adapt to coming in
from the outside, a demand coming in from the outside, or we perceive the
demand coming in from the outside. Then we mobilize on the inside to meet it.
Mobilizing on the inside to meet it is getting ready for movement. To get ready
for movement, we open the bronchioles. We turn on the chemistry of uptake of
oxygen. We get ready to move. If we don't move, we've built up all that
chemistry. We've built up all that anticipation psychologically, but
chemically, we've built it up, and then we don't disperse it. So executives, if
they get that, go smash the crap out of a. Squash ball rather than hitting
their employees, because that's a better way of getting rid of that energy. But
getting rid of that, you know, if you're prepped for movement and then you
don't move, that chemistry goes into your body and tends to suppress breathing,
among other things, because it lifts up the cortisol. So how does breathing get
suppressed? Breathing gets suppressed in two ways, you don't get a full inhale
and you don't get or you don't get a full exhale, or both. So the things that
prevent a full inhale are things like depression. The ribs are held down so we
don't get a good inhale. Or the diaphragm is in a crappy relationship to the
guts and really can't push down against it. So what you're talking about in
terms of the free movement of the diaphragm. Let me give the your listeners
something to do. Get if you're sitting down right now, sit on your chair like a
stool. So don't use the back of your chair, and you'll notice your sit spans
depending on how soft the thing that you're sitting on. It might be harder or
easier, but imagine that you can feel the very point that you're sitting on, on
your two sits bones, and wiggle back and forth to make sure you're on both of them
and rock forward, meaning putting your pubic bone closer to the chair and rock
backwards, putting your tailbone closer to the chair. Now, if you really walk
back and put your tailbone closer there, you're going to slump, yes, that is
going to affect your breathing. It's going to stop the front of your diaphragm
and push all of the work into the back of your diaphragm. That's what happens
when the front collapses. Now come back up onto top and go forward so your
pubic bone goes down and your back arches. If your back arches enough, you will
be have such a sway in your back that you will have now cut off the back of the
diaphragm. So now try taking a deep breath. That's all going to happen in the
front you you have demobilized or used up, used up the slack in the back of the
domes, and you can only use the front of the domes. Fall like this. You can
only use the back of the domes. You can't use from the dome. So where in the
middle are you in a poise place? And that's something you can do with yourself
when you're disgruntled. And something you can do with your clients to get
started on a nice breathing pattern for them, is to make sure that they're on
top of their sitz bones, presuming that they're sitting when you lie them, for
those of you who are body workers, when you lie them on your back, on their
back, you're going to see them breathing in the front better, because the back
is immobilized against the table. When you put them on their front, better put
them in child's pose, where their knees are up under their belly, you're going
to see the breathing expand in the back. It's a great way to for those people
who are like this, where their back is arched and they're see how open I am in
front. Yeah, you're so open in front, but you closed your back to open yourself
in front. And these people, well, we know, you know, they are protecting their
front, and that will have an effect on breathing and that has an effect on the
mind in the circular kind of thing. So I don't know which comes first. I
certainly, in my own case, would see my self image coming first and kind of
shrinking to not be noticed or not to be told off. Something like that would
have been the start of of psycho emotional thing that affected my breathing
pattern. We all have them. That's a question of how easily can they be undone,
and the more emotional they are, the more they're connected with love or faith
or passion or something that is dear to your heart, the harder they are to find
and take out. But it's the connection between emotion and breath is so much
there almost every emotional release is accompanied by big changes in breath,
temporarily as they're going through it like a catharsis, and then more
permanently afterwards, people so frequently say, Oh, my God, I had no idea
that it was possible to breathe so much and so easily because the emotions were
holding them into a pattern every every traumatic event Patrick is accompanied
by a movement that didn't happen. Trauma is undigested experience. What does
the digestion of experience look like? Well, it starts as it comes into your
body as a sensation that produces a feeling. The feeling produces a thought or
a concept of how it fits in your worldview. And then you result in a movement.
You do something to escape, freeze or fight. You know, this is the fight, fight
or freeze idea. You do something to leave. Well, sometimes you can't. If you
cut off the sensation, then it doesn't make it through to a movement, if it
doesn't fit in your worldview, and you just deny that a you know, never get past
denial. You don't get to a movement. You get through all of those things, but
the person is too powerful for you, or it was an automobile accident. You had
no control over it. You didn't get to do the movement. So in every trapped
breath is a sob, a sigh, scream, something waiting to happen, a movement
undone. How do you find that movement come to classes and we we teach that
thing or lots of people. Like Gabor Mate and Bessel van der Kolk and Peter
Levine teach this kind of way into the somatic psychology, and it will have an
effect on the breath. I'm not going to answer your question as to whether the
breath does the emotions or the emotions do the breath, because I think they
both just No.

Patrick McKeown 
50:17

It sounds fascinating. I was listening to gabrimati. I was
at integrative medicine for mental health in San Diego there last year. I was
speaking at it, but he was speaking at it too. Of course, I wanted to hear him
talk, and he talked about exactly that, in terms of, you know, the stored up
emotion. Even he went as far as saying that asthma is stored up emotion. I, you
know, Tom three, it's really, yeah,

Tom Myers 
50:40

I think it's something fair to say some asthma is set up
emotion. Yeah, yes. I mean, there's so many environmental things out there now.
Patrick, you know, plastics in our brains and all of that that we I am not I'm
not comfortable saying all asthma is just emotional or all breath problems that
we see are all emotionally based. Some of them have emotional components to
them. All of them have emotional components to them. Some of them big, but some
of them it's in mental or it's genetic, or it's something else.

Patrick McKeown 
51:12

But you know, Tom everything that you said, I'm just sitting
here and I'm thinking the stuff that you're saying resonates with me, and I'm
coming at it from a little bit of a different angle. I worked only with people
with asthma at 600 clients a year, from, say, 2002 until 2008 I was only
working with asthma that's time, because it was my personal interest. So I was
teaching what I knew best from a personal experience. I addressed
hyperventilation only. I didn't look at the biomechanics. I looked at, how is
this person breathing? How fast were they breathing? What's their tolerance to
see you,

Unknown Speaker  51:45

and we're using you. Were using capnography for

Patrick McKeown 
51:47

that, no, just, it's observation breath Tool Time Brazil,
from questionnaires. Now, making questionnaire just different assessments tools
that you can look at. Now, no assessment tool is perfect, but you're also going
to use your own, your own observation as a as a breathing coach, and I would
see asthmatics, people with asthma coming in, and they're often caught for
breath, and they feel air hunger, and they breathe relatively fast. They're
breathing shallow. And of course, Asthma is a condition that involves a
narrowing of the airways, which is going to generate that feeling of air
hunger, but that feeling of air hunger, then is going to cause you to breathe
harder, faster, upper chest and often mouth breathing to try and compensate,
which only feeds back into asthma. So there's a little bit of a cycle going on
there. So we would use breath hold exercises. We would expose them to reduced
volume breathing. You know, a person with asthma would say, Well, I just feel
that I can't get enough air. And our approach, using the Buteyko method, was
actually have these people breathe less air. So you would have them breathe
less air. They're feeling air hunger, and this is about increasing CO two in
the lungs and blood to change the breathing center. So that you know, one
theory is that, then there's you're reducing the chemo sensitivity to carbon
dioxide, that the brain is less sensitive to the accumulation and as a result,
then the drive to breathe from the brain is going to be less but we've seen
phenomenal progress, and even with 20 clinical trials, there's about 50%
reduction in the need of asthma medication, just looking at it from a
biochemical point of view. But I think what was fascinating with what you said
was you said, we get into trauma, we have a very stressful event or a challenge
hits us, it activates a fight or flight response and breathing is that one
thing that really is affected when we go into that fight or flight response,
it's probably the fastest function that's impacted. And the theory behind this
is that it's mobilizing us, either for fight, flight or for freeze. Well,
freeze, we wouldn't be doing anything, but that then becomes a behavior. So
it's not just the biomechanics that's affected, but it's also the biochemistry.

Tom Myers 
53:48

Yeah, Freeze. Freeze is a little different as we as we see
it now, but the mobilization for action, fight or flight, in the case of us,
men, tend and befriend. In the case of the feminine, I think maybe some
different instincts, come forward in in the feminine, then come come forth in
the masculine. But all of them require muscular action. So you open up the
bronchial you prepare the body for more things. The muscles get ready for
action in 100 different ways. Your body turns on, turns off your digestive system
and turns on your neuromuscular system. Now, if you never resolve that fear,
three things can happen. You can resolve the issue in your favor. You can
change the world so you're happy in it again. Or you can adjust yourself to
your to being happy with the new world that is happening. Yes, God grant me the
serenity to accept the things I cannot change, or you can be stuck in the
middle where you still want it, but it's not there. I watched my mother like a
hawk the year after my father died, they had been together for 60 something
years, and nothing like the death of a spouse stresses anybody divorces, death
of a spouse, death of a child. But. But I watch my mom, because in that year,
very often health fails because Edward should be in the world. Edward is not in
the world. That's an unresolvable thing in her and unresolvable stress becomes
distress, becomes ill health. And my mother was prepared for my father's death,
I guess, and lived another 18 years after that very long and happy life, but
the watching her resolve that, you know, yep, Edwards gone, yep, I have to
function my by myself in the world. All of that process is a process of
eustress. If you successfully mount the challenge that's offered to you, that's
usually physiologically good for the body. It builds resilience in the body.
That's why you want to give your child challenges. But give your child
challenges that they can meet. You know, sometimes they don't, yes, but I don't
know about how things are in Ireland, but in America, we've come to this habit
of giving everybody a gold star for showing up. And there's not really the

Patrick McKeown 
56:03

preparation for their pitfalls. They don't

Tom Myers 
56:05

hurt themselves on the playground, and we're very defensive
about anything that goes on between the kids that might be bullying, and the
result is the children don't meet and resolve challenges in a way that prepares
them for adulthood. That's at least my feeling about it. But I'm an old fogy
now, so I don't know whether I'm saying anything other than what old people say
all the time about young people.

Patrick McKeown 
56:29

Now, I agree with you. It totally makes sense, you know, but
coming back to that, then say, for example, I'm just conscious of time, and I
don't want to take too much of your time. Somebody who gets into a really
difficult situation. Okay, their breathing pattern changes. Now that becomes
their behavioral breathing pattern. So we would say, from a biomechanical point
of view, they're breathing more in the upper chest. They've got reduced
recruitment of the diaphragm. From a biochemical point of view, they're
breathing too hard and too fast, causing a lowering of CO two. And it's not
that their CO two is low all the time. It's just that it's easily triggered
that they go from, say, normal CO two into low CO two. From a
psychophysiological point of view, they're in that increased stress response.
Can you fix that other than breathing? And I just have a feeling that we if I
say, for example, I look, I work, I have a class later on today with 20 people
with anxiety and panic disorder. You know how these people will breathe even
before you know I know what I'm going to face when I when I meet this class
today, are going to see faster breathing. The ratio of the breath out to the
breath in is one to one. You're not having that nice, soft breath in and that
slow, relaxed, gentle breath out. There's no natural pause at the end of
exhale. The person will be sighing frequently because they feel that they're
not getting enough air. So they have a buildup of air hunger. Because of the
air hunger, they're going to be breathing upper chest. Now, if I did give all
of the if I did all of the counseling in the world with these people, I don't
think it's going to change their breathing. If we want to change a breathing
pattern, we have to target specifically that dimension of breathing. So if it's
a biochemical, biomechanical, psychophysiological, and this is the issue in
terms of mental health. 75% of people with mental health issues are reported to
have dysfunctional breathing. 75% but very few of them are receiving breathing
training. And the question about breathing training is not all breathing is the
same. You know, what's your take in that? Because you kind of hinted on that
from a psychological point of view, if you deal with the trauma, does it
naturally change your breathing pattern, or does the poor breathing pattern
continue?

Tom Myers 
58:31

I've seen, let me answer that. I've seen both. But okay,
very often, if you get at the trauma, if you they have a cognitive
understanding, some suddenly of something that they didn't that was below
before, but they didn't understand, and suddenly those are both on stage at the
same time. Then the breathing usually changes. That bad pattern usually
resolves. And then you have to watch and see whether it's still resolved in two
weeks, because they went back into the same shoes, the same car, the same marriage,
the same job. So is that going to force them back into the same breathing
pattern? That would be a real mistake. When somebody has one of these emotional
breakthroughs where they have tears, or they have a memory, or it manifests
shaking, it manifests in different ways, but when they have a breakthrough like
that, they really need support to have that be the jump that carries them into
a different physiology. So do they need your reinforcement of your exercises?
And actually, because of you, I have started assigning my clients a pause at
the bottom of their breath, which is something I hadn't done before. And a
student of yours, Brian, Mirabella, caught up with me and gave me, I think, two
sessions. And then I always have wanted to get back to New York and get more
but I don't go to New York very often anyway. The but that just that thing was
very valuable for me, was something that I found such value in that I was also
assigning it to my clients of just pause at the bottom and. Wait until that
urge to breathe comes in, because that urge to breathe is a natural one, and
even if you wait for that one, you can get a second one. I don't you've
probably been into this way more than I have, but I found that exercise so
useful to me in making me aware of my breathing, but not in a way that I was
imposing breathing on on my physiology. I have a lot of trouble with that. The
people who start doing pranayama training in Yoga very early on in their career
do not have the bodies that are ready for what pranayama is going to bring
them. I do think that a movement practice that involves the whole body, not
just the breath, is really important. A teacher of mine said that the breath is
just another food. And so if you're going to adjust how you're breathing, you'd
better adjust your diet and your mental diet and your movement diet as well,
because you're changing the whole bread making formula inside yourself. And so
I approach changing people's breathing gingerly. I tried to change their body
about their breath, watching their breaths carefully to see whether it gets
better. I realize that that's a different way from how you're going about it,
but I do not work directly on the diaphragm. For instance, let's have everybody
feel that. Put your hands around your ribs, right out at the edge of the rectus
abdominis, where it's easy the liver is on the right side and your stomach's on
the left side, so it's a little easier on the left, you have to get an Irish
inch, or a European three centimeters under your ribs before you're touching
the diaphragm, and it has a short, sharp shock feeling when you hit that
diaphragm. So I don't work on the diaphragm, because it hurts and people feel
panicked when you actually touch it. So I don't touch the diaphragm. Don't
intend to touch the diaphragm. I intend to touch the psoas, the obliques, the
quadratus lumborum, the scalenes, the shoulders, all the muscles that would
allow the diaphragm to be the jellyfish that it is in the middle of the body,
doing its jellyfish thing for your entire life.

Patrick McKeown 
1:01:57

Well, I'm so conscious of time. I love the conversation, and
I think our work is going to cross over again. I think there's a lot of
similarities, a lot of crossover. Final point with yourself, if anybody, any of
our listeners, are looking have, do you have more than one book?

Tom Myers 
1:02:12

Tom, no, I'm a one book wonder. I have Anatomy Trains, which
is my book on how the muscles are connected up in the body. We have a technique
book, which include a lot of techniques around the accessory muscles of
breathing that are the ones that get in the way, called fascial release for
structural balance, that I co wrote with James Earl. And we have a number of
books on body reading that we sell off our web, I guess they're on Amazon now
or off our website. And we have a new app, I'm sure my people would love it if
I prompted our app Anatomy Trains for all, which has just tons and tons of
video in it, you can get a 10 day look at it for free. So maybe folks will find
the video stuff in there helpful. There's certainly a lot on breathing there,
but not on your physiology and the control of the chemistry of breathing. I
find that work really fascinating. Thank you for

Patrick McKeown 
1:03:02

your work. Yes, it's always I'm like you. I found something
that really resonates with me. I think it's an amazing contribution that we can
bring to the world. And God knows, I think the world absolutely needs it. I
think things are changing. Everything is changing.

Tom Myers 
1:03:16

I'm doing these things on the tongue tie, and I'm doing a
thing with birth workers, doulas, shortly, I call this spatial medicine. And I
think you and I are both in spatial medicine. We have lived in a world of
material medicine, or chemical medicine that tries to change our chemistry by
going in all our various orifices and changing things into the circulatory
system. And we have psychiatry and psychology, which is trying to unravel the
knots in this system. And there's a third system, which is your movement
system. We've called it the musculoskeletal system. I'd rather call it the
neuro myofascial web, because it's all those things together. But how that how
your body gets shaped in the embryo, how, how you come to standing in that
first year? What are your movement relations and your touch relations in that
first year? What happens in school when they put you in a little metal desk?
What happens? How many people's breathing is interrupted when they're forced to
sit six hours a day, you know, and scribble at a desk and then hello, and you
get that thing set into your neck. And so right now, it's yoga and it's Pilates
and it's physiotherapy and it's orthodontics, and all of these things are in
their different houses. But I do believe that over the next 50 years, that
there will be a body crisis, and that that body crisis will bring all these
professions together, and your work, and my work, and all these other works
together to be a kind of spatial medicine. I don't know what it'll be called.
That's what I'm calling it, that will bring together all these fields in an
understanding of how our movement body works, from,

Patrick McKeown 
1:04:42

from, yeah, yeah, no, I agree. I think there's a huge
connect between it. So many things that you talked about, your final words is
so I suppose they could be your final words. That's a nice way to end actually.
And your website just for, I'm assuming,

Tom Myers 
1:04:58

www, anatomy trains.com, It's not hard to find us, like
Anatomy Trains, and you got a lot bunch of stuff on YouTube, so we welcome
people aboard. We also do, I will, yes, I'll give one final plug is, is we do
dissections. A lot of my work with the fascial system is based on what we have
seen in these dissections. So we do them in two ways. One is that you can sign
up for them on the web. So then you're looking, it's a video thing. You can
come in from anywhere, and you're looking over the shoulder of an expert
Dissector, while myself, or one of our teachers, is commenting on what's going
on. I'm sure that we have things on the breath, but we're not able to take
those dissections and put them as products on it's not allowed by the rules, so
you kind of have to sign up for those live as they occur. And then we do these
dissections in Boulder. I'm off to one in a couple of weeks, where we where you
actually dissect on a body that does not have formaldehyde, that does not have
any chemistry in it, so they move as a normal human being moves. You can see
the joints, you can see the muscles, you can see the fascia. You can see the
fat, you can see the brain and the organs. And you do it for yourself. That is
an amazing experience. Anything else I would try to advertise you are you? I'd
just be some American trying to advertise something. But these dissections are
practice changing. Have been practice changing for almost everybody who's come
to see them. So they're always full. Again. I'm not trying to advertise them, but
I am saying, if you have the wherewithal and you can get to where you can
actually touch the body in question, you will speak with an authority that you
will not have if all you have is book learning under your hands.

Patrick McKeown 
1:06:33

Yeah, great stuff. Great stuff. Tom pleasure to talk to you,
and thanks so much.

Tom Myers 
1:06:39

Yeah, it's a pleasure to talk with you. Maybe we'll do a
return thing on our channel when we get there. And thank you so much for your
work. It's really a pleasure. Bye.