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Love Your Love Muscle - How To Stimulate Your Vagus Nerve · Transformational Meditation Podcast

• 0:29
  Hello everyone.
• 0:31
  Welcome back to Love Your Love Muscle, a biweekly podcast
• 0:35
  about living from the heart, heart-focused meditation,
• 0:38
  heart focused self-regulation techniques.
• 0:42
  We should reconnect our heart to our brain, right?
• 0:44
  And the other way around.
• 0:46
  Uh, I'm sep, I'm your host for today.
• 0:49
  I'm the founder of the Transformational Meditation Group,
• 0:52
  A group for people that want to transform their lives
• 0:55
  by using meditation and self-regulation techniques,
• 0:58
  and of course, people that want to transform the lives
• 1:01
  of others as well, which you do automatically
• 1:04
  when you do heart-focused living.
• 1:07
  Um, last week
• 1:12
  I was on a podcast by Jody
• 1:14
  Albert Moss from Canada.
• 1:18
  I've had a podcast with him before
• 1:20
  and then he was on my podcast, and now I was on his podcast.
• 1:25
  It was great fun. It's a great guy.
• 1:27
  And he interviewed me about my work,
• 1:30
  the Transformation Meditation Group.
• 1:32
  And we had special focus on living from the heart.
• 1:36
  What is it when we reconnect our heart to our brain?
• 1:41
  And I explained that in the West, especially,
• 1:46
  uh, and I sometimes I hear people have the same experience
• 1:50
  when they grow up, go to school.
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  Uh, they notice that, uh, especially for the guys
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  amongst us, that, uh, now times sometimes have heard like,
• 2:02
  uh, sentences like, big boys don't cry, right?
• 2:06
  They have to be strong. And our whole society is
• 2:11
  going in a direction or went into a direction.
• 2:15
  It's not going in a direction so much anymore,
• 2:18
  but it's still a thing our society is, uh,
• 2:22
  very up in our head.
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  And by saying to children,
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  especially like a big boy, don't cry.
• 2:29
  Um, suppress your feelings, right?
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  That's what we are saying
• 2:33
  to our get children, suppress your feelings.
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  By suppressing our feelings, we actually
• 2:38
  are disconnecting our feeling, part of our being,
• 2:42
  which is our heart and our gut.
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  So everything up above the heart
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  and below, below, uh,
• 2:50
  gets cut off from our logical thinking from our brain
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  and which what is,
• 2:58
  what is connecting our heart to our brain?
• 2:59
  Well, that's our nervous system, especially the vagus nerve.
• 3:03
  So in a sense, by, um,
• 3:08
  living in our heads, being there focusing on everything
• 3:11
  that we, in logic and analyst analysis
• 3:16
  and leaving our feelings behind, we actually separating.
• 3:20
  We cutting our vagus nerve, especially, which is one
• 3:24
  of the 12 major cranial nerves coming from the brain, uh,
• 3:29
  straight to, uh, connecting us straight to our organs.
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  We, we actually cut that off.
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  So it's not only the, the heart we, uh,
• 3:37
  we cut from the brain, but also our other organs.
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  And isn't strange that when that happens,
• 3:43
  then we are only living in the head that we lose contact
• 3:45
  with our body and especially our feelings and emotions
• 3:49
  and things get dysregulated.
• 3:52
  In countries where I'm living, for example, in Norway, uh,
• 3:57
  there's an increase of people having psychological problems.
• 4:01
  Mental health is a big issue in, uh, in countries where
• 4:07
  apparently it's very nice to live.
• 4:09
  People seem to be happy,
• 4:11
  but it's only based on the amount of money that is going
• 4:14
  around and how the government, um, uh, deals with money and,
• 4:19
  and, and, uh, um, divides money amongst the people.
• 4:23
  Uh, but mental health is still a problem
• 4:27
  if you really look at how a country is doing.
• 4:30
  Uh, and on the Happiness Index, we shouldn't look at
• 4:34
  what a FN or the UN has as a, as a happiness index.
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  We should look at other organizations
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  that have a happiness index based on really feeling not on
• 4:45
  the money that is being spent, but on how they feel.
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  And there we see that countries
• 4:51
  where people are the happiest are the countries
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  that don't have much money.
• 4:54
  But where there is a connection between people still, uh,
• 4:58
  a connection between, uh, communities,
• 5:01
  people in certain communities
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  and they don't need much money,
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  but as long as they have each other
• 5:07
  and help each other, uh, people are happy.
• 5:11
  People survive, people dealing collaboratively
• 5:15
  with their issues
• 5:16
  and with everyday life, which makes people more happy.
• 5:20
  When you go to the richer countries, like
• 5:22
  what the UN says are the happiest countries in the world,
• 5:24
  we see a increase of loneliness and mental health problems.
• 5:29
  Um, because people aren't connected to each other anymore,
• 5:34
  they are more on themselves.
• 5:37
  It's the government that's relying
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  or they rely on the government funding, uh,
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  and not on each other so much anymore.
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  Um, so the connection between people gets lost
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  and the same is happening inside of us in these countries
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  where we have big problems with mental health.
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  It's not only because we're not talking
• 5:56
  to each other anymore or keeping our distance
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  or can be bothered with other people.
• 6:01
  It is because we also miss the connection between our brain
• 6:05
  and the rest of our body.
• 6:06
  Our feelings, our brain
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  and our feelings, our logical thinking
• 6:10
  and our feelings, they're not connected anymore.
• 6:13
  Once you focus on your heart,
• 6:19
  it means you automatically are using your brain
• 6:23
  and focus on your heart.
• 6:25
  You listen to your heart. What am I feeling?
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  You listen to your gut, your heart, everything
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  above the heart and below you start to listen to you start
• 6:32
  to focus on what does this mean to me?
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  How do I feel about this?
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  Uh, is this a good situation to be in?
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  And you also learn to solve issues.
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  That way you become more resilient,
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  which means you can cope better
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  with not having the connection with other people maybe,
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  or you can cope better in social situations
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  because you let your feelings speak your become whole again
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  by reconnecting your heart to your brain.
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  So that's what we were talking about in that podcast
• 7:10
  with your Albert mos.
• 7:12
  I will put the link below.
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  I want you to watch it and of course, also, uh, watch
• 7:17
  and listen to his other podcast as well.
• 7:20
  Um, so please do that
• 7:22
  because he is inviting very interesting
• 7:25
  casters, uh, to every podcast.
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  I want to focus today on reconnecting
• 7:33
  the brain to the heart, of course,
• 7:36
  and using the vagus nerve.
• 7:37
  And how can we stimulate the vagus nerve, which I said is
• 7:42
  one of the most important nerve nerves in our system.
• 7:46
  It recon, it connects the brain to all our major organs, uh,
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  and information is going back and forth.
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  And I've said it many times that when we focus on our heart
• 7:57
  and do heart-focused breathing, we create
• 8:00
  so much energy in our heart
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  and focus in our heart that we optimize the information flow
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  through that nerve to the vagus nerve
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  and the nervous system as a whole.
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  Uh, and just remember
• 8:16
  that there's five times more information going from the
• 8:20
  heart to the brain to
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  that vagus nerve than the other way around.
• 8:24
  So you can imagine that when we cut that off,
• 8:29
  we're missing as all of a sudden lots of information
• 8:35
  and it doesn't feel strange then that we feel lonely,
• 8:38
  even lonely with ourselves.
• 8:41
  And that, I have to say was one thing I noticed when I
• 8:44
  reconnected my heart to my brain
• 8:47
  is I was very comfortable being alone.
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  Uh, I didn't feel alone
• 8:53
  because I was interacting as a whole being
• 8:56
  with my environment.
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  And it didn't have to be people in it.
• 8:59
  It could be animals, it could be nature, plants, whatever.
• 9:03
  So the whole community becomes larger.
• 9:08
  Not only people, but everything that lives around you.
• 9:11
  Everything that happens around you,
• 9:13
  you become more connected with it.
• 9:16
  You can deal better with it as well.
• 9:18
  So, um, a couple of weeks ago for work, I did a exercise
• 9:23
  with some people, which was, uh,
• 9:26
  stimulating the vagus nerves by breathing in
• 9:28
  through the nose and out through the nose.
• 9:30
  But when you breathe out, you hum.
• 9:33
  So we can do that together very shortly.
• 9:35
  Just try it in, try it out together with me.
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  Just sit straight, relax your shoulders
• 9:41
  and breathe in through your nose very deeply,
• 9:43
  just slowly and good.
• 9:46
  And then you pause a little bit
• 9:48
  and then you breathe out through your nose,
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  but you hum at the same time.
• 9:59
  All the way out, all the way out.
• 10:02
  Make that outre longer than you inhale, Right?
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  So that's the trick. So let's do
• 10:07
  that together a couple of more times.
• 10:10
  Inhale through your nose in an okay tempo, not too quick,
• 10:13
  just normal, a little bit slower maybe than usual.
• 10:18
  Then you breathe out when your lungs are filled with air
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  and hum at the same time.
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  And make it a long exhale while you hum
• 10:25
  to make it as long as possible.
• 10:28
  All right? There we go. Breathe in out through your nose,
• 10:41
  just go on yourself and continue doing this.
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  After your out breath, just breathe in again
• 10:48
  through your nose, out through your nose and humming.
• 10:53
  And the humming stimulates the vagus nerve as well.
• 10:58
  So the two things stimulating the nerve vagus nerve in this
• 11:02
  exercise, it's the long exhale
• 11:06
  and it's the sound of the vibrations, the sound,
• 11:10
  and the vibrations of the humming.
• 11:13
  All right? So I can try to catch up with you email
• 11:18
  through your,
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  Just do that.
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  And you don't have to do it high or low.
• 11:39
  Just feel something that is comfortable for you.
• 11:41
  When you hum feel the vibration, right?
• 11:46
  And if you're thinking like, oh, this is a lot like what,
• 11:49
  uh, people say about meditators, right?
• 11:52
  They sit in a lotus position with their hands like this
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  and they're like, oh,
• 11:58
  oh, it's the same.
• 12:02
  It's the sound, the vibration that works for them. Alright?
• 12:08
  You can do that a couple of times.
• 12:13
  So that's how that works.
• 12:19
  And I think we'll leave it at that, a very short
• 12:23
  podcast this time.
• 12:25
  I know people are busy and podcasts at half an hour or more.
• 12:31
  People don't listen to that anymore.
• 12:33
  We are living in a fast paced world.
• 12:34
  We want quick results and quick tips and tricks, right?
• 12:40
  So please continue yourself if you want to do that.
• 12:44
  Uh, and uh, yeah, thank you for joining today.
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  Hope you enjoyed this short session.
• 12:51
  Please click on the link below in the podcast subscription
• 12:55
  or podcast description, uh, where you go
• 13:00
  to the podcast of, uh, Jody Albert Moss.
• 13:04
  And, uh, see my interview there. It was a lot of fun.
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  So take care everyone.
• 13:10
  Have a wonderful rest of your day and evening.
• 13:13
  Be safe and namaste.