Your Breath is the Best Medicine -Harness it’s Magic

Dr. Sharon Stills

Hello ladies, welcome back to Mastering the Menopause Transition Summit. I am your host, Dr. Sharon Stills, and I am excited for today’s talk that we’re gonna have. It is the end of my day here. And we are gonna talk about one of my favorite topics. You’ve heard me say it throughout the summit that breath is the best medicine you have, and we are gonna dive deep. We’re gonna do some demonstrations, which I am super excited about, ’cause it’s a great way to wind down at the end of a long day. So get comfy and get excited, ’cause this is gonna be good. And I’m joined today with my special guest, Jane Hogan. She’s known as the Wellness Engineer. She blends science and spirituality to help people release chronic pain using the mind, the body and the breath. Yay, so they can become empowered creators of their own health. And she’s the host of the Wellness By Design Podcast and her empowering message has been featured on numerous podcasts and summit. She’s been published in Thrive Global and Elephant Journal Magazine, which I love elephant journal. That is super cool that you’ve been published there. So welcome to the summit, Jane. It’s really exciting to have you here.

Jane Hogan

Sharon, I am so happy to be part of this and I just love what you’re doing, what you’re putting together in this summit. So special for us ladies that are at this beautiful stage in our lives and looking forward to this next chapter. So I’m just thrilled to be a part of it.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Great, thank you. And Jane and I met ’cause I was a guest on her summit. She’d put on an amazing summit herself. And so it’s nice to flip it around and be interviewing you this time. So I’ll start where I always start to get to know you a little bit better. What’s your story? How did you end up becoming the wellness engineer? I love that name.

Jane Hogan

Well, I was an actual engineer. I was a structural engineer. I designed like foundations and steel structures for buildings. That was what I was working at. And I always, my little joke is I was a structural engineer until my own structure started to fail. So exactly what I would make sure that steel and concrete didn’t do is what happened to me. The stress was too much. I had a very stressful year. And then I started to get this joint pain and it would migrate all throughout my body. And I just turned 50 when this started and within about three months, I went from being a strong, healthy, vibrant woman to being barely able to walk, hardly able to turn door handles. Couldn’t squeeze like shampoo out of the bottle. It was just awful. It was a terrible time. And I really didn’t know. I knew that stress had to be part of it, but I didn’t really know what was going on and neither did my doctor. And so she made an appointment for me to see a rheumatologist. And I live in Newfoundland, in Canada. It takes about six months to see a rheumatologist. 

So in the meantime she said, “You know, sometimes foods can cause joint pain.” And I thought it was an absolutely ridiculous, crazy notion, but I was like, “I just was ready to try anything.” And so I did, I started with foods, I cut out gluten, dairy and sugar. And within about five days I had so much less pain. So I went from being like, feeling like a victim, afraid for my future, like literally crying in pain, curled up to now there’s something I can do. And I felt like it’s funny. It sounds funny Sharon to think about this now. But I remember when I was like at a rock bottom moment, this was even before I cut out the gluten dairy sugar. It’s like, I got this down low that said you are going to figure this out. I mean, that’s what engineers do, right? We’re problem solvers. You are going to figure this out. Your life was not meant for misery. You’ll figure it out and you’ll share it with people. I didn’t know where that was going. But when I started with food, so it let me see that there was something I can do. And then that led me to learning more about prioritizing sleep and what stress can do to the body. And then that led me to functional medicine and I trained to be a functional medicine health coach, just really wanting to learn more about it. And then I thought, “You know what? I think I really do wanna help people.” 

Maybe this is what that download was all about. And so in 2019, I left my engineering career, started health coaching and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. I just love helping people see that. Actually I think what I do now is I use the pain as a tool for transformation. So the pain is really a wake up call from our body telling us something’s gotta change. It wasn’t just this one stressful year for that was like what the camel that, or the straw that broke the camel’s back. And so really it was a lifetime of stress of being a perfectionist, people pleaser. Like I did engineering. My father wanted me to do it. All of these other things in my life I was a working mom. I had three beautiful kids, but I was the president of the swim club and president of the chess club. And did all of these things and why do we do this as women? Why do we think we have to do all these things to prove that we are a good mother or good daughter, good sister, good friend? All of these things really after a while, our body tells us no more, no more. And so then I trained to be a yoga teacher as well, and really discover the power of the breath, the power of our thoughts, the power of our mind, and how really the mind creates the body. So there we go. It’s kind of a long, long story. Try to compress it a little bit, but that’s how I got to be the wellness engineer.

Dr. Sharon Stills

It’s a great story. I love it, it was such a powerful, inspiring outcome. And I think you brought up when you were talking about how the gluten and the diary and the sugar, and when you stop that, it just made me think about so many patients will say, well, I’ve been fine up to now just like you were fine. And so why should I stop eating it now? And you also said the solution, it’s the straw that breaks the camels back. And so sometimes when we keep pushing and pushing it, things that we’ve been doing that we’re able to get away with, all of a sudden we can’t anymore, because just as you said, the body is screaming, or I like to say, it’s whispering, it’s coming to us with these sacred messages. If we’ll listen, and it’s saying, you’ve gotta pay attention to me. So that’s a very inspiring and very realistic story. And I love that it brought you to yoga and breathwork which we’re gonna talk about tonight because as a physician for over 21 years, I can tell you, those are some of the most powerful medicines, the breath movement. 

And so I’m glad that we’re gonna spend some time really diving deep because a lot of times we just push it off to the side. No, no, gimme the right vitamin or gimme the right diet. Doesn’t matter about breathing. And I’m like, yes, yes, yes, it does. We’re gonna do that first. And then we’ll see what’s left. As a naturopathic position, I don’t like to chase every single symptom. I like to think about the common denominator. And so when we go to the breath and we get that handled, a lot of things don’t need to be chased anymore because these symptoms will just fall away. So I’m there excited for this conversation. And I think a great place to start is just to define what is breath work for the ladies listening?

Jane Hogan

Well, it sounds funny, right? Why should breath be work? Because breathe anyway, we are born breathing. We breathe all the time. We don’t even have to think about it. We just breathe. But a lot of us are breathing dysfunctionally, and there’s so much power in the breath. And really, I don’t know if you know this, but yoga began as breathwork. It was not really all this movement. It started as breathing the pranayama, like these breathing techniques that have been around for thousands of years and have been so powerful. And the reason why they’ve endured is because they are so powerful, they really do work. But through our lives, we stop breathing the way we were meant to breathe and in a way that really serves us well because of our lifestyle, we’re in this chronic state of stress. And so we can start to breathe dysfunctionally. So we might be breathing more through our mouth rather than the nose. We really should be breathing in and out through the nose. It’s like perfectly designed to prepare that breath for our body. And so that’s one of the things we can be doing wrong. And I’ll go over the main ones and then we can talk about each one in detail if you want.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Okay.

Jane Hogan

And then, so another thing that happens is shallow breathing. So instead of breathing into the belly, we breathe more into the chest. And we started off as belly breathers, right? If you look at babies, it’s their belly that moves up and down, not their chest, but if anyone just have one hand on the chest and one hand on the belly, and if I say, take a big breath, notice, does the belly expand or does the chest rise? And if you’re anything like I was, it was the chest. I was breathing totally in my chest before, not in my belly. And that probably comes from posture, right? Sitting down so much, it’s hard to get a good breath into the belly if we’re sitting and not like up straight, if we’re slumped over. And just it becomes a habit then. And then we can also be breathing too quickly. And so it’s just too rapid. And so we’re not getting, it sounds kind of funny, but we don’t get enough oxygen to ourselves if we’re breathing too quickly. And so those are kind of the main ones. Some people may also be breathing like holding their breath. 

I mean, there’s breath holding practices, which can be good. But when people are in pain, they might hold their breath too long and/or just get into not a very good rhythm. So we wanna breathe through the nose. We wanna breathe low into the belly. We want to breathe long. So I say low light and long or low long and light. Long, we wanna have nice long breaths. Another funny thing is that many of us are breathing, we might be breathing too much. And that means we paradoxically not getting enough oxygen to the cells because we want the carbon dioxide to build up a little bit more because the carbon dioxide, it’s almost like you probably know this better than I do. I’m just an engineer, but that the oxygen, in order to shuttle the oxygen into the cells, we need carbon dioxide to do that. So if we’re breathing too much, we have not a good ratio of carbon dioxide and oxygen. So sounds little complicated. We solve that problem by teaching our body that we don’t need to breathe as much as we think we do. So just like people overeat, there’s a lot of be, they eat too much for their metabolic needs. Some of us, most of us are breathing too much for our metabolic needs.

Dr. Sharon Stills

So I know someone listening, probably everyone listening saying, okay, so how do I know if I’m breathing too much? Can you take them through an exercise? Is there a counting that they can go through? So they know that they’re breathing appropriately and not over breathing.

Jane Hogan

Well, I will go through some of that, but first of all, let’s just do a little, really simple evaluation. It’s called the BOLT test, the Body Oxygen Level Test .

Dr. Sharon Stills

Yeah, cool.

Jane Hogan

It’s super simple. Now, it’s kind of a little tricky to do it right the first time. It may take a little bit of practice. So what we wanna do is just be breathing normally. So we just were breathing normally and we just take a normal breath in and a normal breath out. And then hold a breath. You may even wanna plug your nose. It’s just a normal breath in normal breath out. Not like, hold your breath. It’s not that. Normal breath in, normal exhale through the nose, plug the nose and we start to count. So do you wanna do it? Let’s do it together.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Yeah, let’s do it. Some games.

Jane Hogan

Not a big gulp. It’s just normal breath in. So it’s not a test to determine how long we can hold our breath. It’s a test to determine how long until we feel the need to breathe again. So we wanna count until you get that first urge to breathe. You may feel it in your throat. You may feel your diaphragm try to move down. It’s gonna be really, really subtle, Sharon. And everyone that’s watching is really subtle. You may not get it right the first time, may take a little bit of practice. So let’s just do it. So normal breath in, normal breath out, plug the nose. One, 1000, two, 1000, three, 1000, four, 100, five, 1000, six, 1000, seven, 1000, eight 1000. Nine, 1000.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Okay.

Jane Hogan

Okay, so that was your first urge to breathe, right? Now, anything that’s totally normal where you are, anything below 20 is considered dysfunctional. Isn’t that crazy? Isn’t that crazy? I was the same as you Sharon. And I was even teaching breathwork. So what we wanna do is train our body to be able to extend that. We’ll do some other breathwork practices as well, but an easy way to train your body is just do that little practice that we just did. Normal breath in, normal breath out, plug the nose. And instead of taking a breath at your first urge to take a breath, you let yourself build up a little bit of air hunger, just do a moderate level level so that you can resume normal breathing right afterwards. You don’t wanna hold it so long. You’re like, having a gasp. It’s just as long, just a little bit of air hunger, and then resume normal breathing right away. And this is just something you can teach your body, just do it several times a day. You might do it when you’re out for your walk and you can actually train your body to go longer.

Dr. Sharon Stills

I’ve done this at whim half. I’ve taken some whim half trainings, and they’ve had us breathe out to where you’re getting into a psychedelic state. They have exhales, I don’t know if it was a minute or two minutes, but it was a long time. And so this is much gentler and kinder to get to. You said 20 is where we wanna get to.

Jane Hogan

Well, we wanna be above 20. And ideally like, if you’re an athlete, athletes that say are good at altitude training and all that, ’cause this can actually mimic altitude training, like 40 is where they wanna get.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Interesting.

Jane Hogan

But let’s just aim to be above 20. So like this is just something that’s gonna take two, three, four weeks of practice, daily practice several times a day, but you can teach your body just like we can teach ourselves, hey, we don’t need to eat as much as we think we do. Hey, we don’t need to breathe as much as we think we need to. So we’re just teaching the body. That’s all.

Dr. Sharon Stills

So I have a question. So when we’re teaching our body, it’s having an exhale that’s longer. That’s how we’re slowing down and not over breathing.

Jane Hogan

And that’s a great way to slow down.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Okay.

Jane Hogan

But initially what we’re doing is just teaching our body ’cause what drives the need for a breath is the build up of carbon dioxide in the blood. That’s what drives our need to take a breath. So what we wanna do is teach the body to let that build up a little bit longer, and then we can get a better balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood. So just teaching the body, you can hang on a little bit longer, just hang on a little bit longer. We’re not gonna starve here, but just hang on a little bit longer and just teach the body to do that. So that’s kind of the basics of getting that oxygen/carbon dioxide level correct. But we don’t wanna get obsessed about it, okay? We don’t want anyone stressed about breathing. 

The whole thing about breathing is that we want it to be relaxing and not cause stress because if we’re causing stress, we’re doing the opposite of what we wanna do. But the other things to… oh, I just wanted to point out that some signs that you may be breathing more than your metabolic needs, besides that the BOLT test being low, less than 20, you may also sometimes have spontaneous size, so that’s a sign that your body’s trying to catch up a little bit. And then another thing is maybe you could sometimes get tingling in the extremities, right? So in our fingers or in our toes, that can be signs of other things as well. But that’s obviously the body is going to prioritize the core and it’s going to not send as much oxygen to the extremities when we wanna prioritize the core.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Awesome, I love it. Okay, where are we going next?

Jane Hogan

Well, I wanna talk about, come back to the breathing low, light and long. And ’cause I find that that’s just easy to remember, right? So we always wanna breathe through our nose and that’s because even before the low, light and long, we wanna breathe through our nose most of the time. Obviously I’m talking now, I’m not breathing through my nose now. And so we, again, we don’t wanna get obsessed about it, but notice you’ll probably notice in other people, is the mouth open when you’re not talking? Is your mouth open or is it closed? So awareness is the first part. So close the mouth, breathe through the nose. When we breathe through our nose, it’s perfectly pressurized. It gets filtered. The air warms up and we also get a build up of nitrogen oxide, which opens up the airways, opens up all the everything so that we can absorb the oxygen better. So it’s just better absorption. 

So breathing through the nose. During the day, just some awareness is good. At nighttime, if you’re snoring, if you wake up with a dry mouth, then chances are you’re breathing through your mouth when you’re asleep. ‘Cause how can you be aware when you’re asleep? So one thing you can do is just get some tape, and I didn’t tear this off ahead of time, but you can get some tape and just… this is a porous tape. So 3m makes one, a porous type of tape and just cut off like a postage stamp size and place it across your lips. I mean, you’re not gonna tape up your whole mouth. It’s just a little piece across the lips to remind the brain, ’cause part of the brain is always aware. Remind the brain during the night, keep the mouth closed, breathe through the nose.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Is that what mouth taping is?

Jane Hogan

Yeah.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Can you show exactly where you like, can you do it to yourself? ‘Cause I’m not quite near.

Jane Hogan

Let me just grab my scissors. So I’ve just got like a little postage stance. Just like that.

Dr. Sharon Stills

And is it sticking down? You’re actually pressing it down above and below.

Jane Hogan

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Okay, and that’s just to remind you to nose breathe.

Jane Hogan

Yes, yeah.

Dr. Sharon Stills

It looks kind of barbaric, but.

Jane Hogan

Seems kind of silly, but another great thing about doing this is that it’s like preparing your brain for sleep. So it’s letting your brain know, oh, time to sleep. All right, tape goes on. And I don’t do it every night now, but it’s a great practice to do. I am a nose breather so I’m lucky at night. I don’t have to do it. But if anyone is, it’s a great place to start. You don’t have to like tape up the whole mouth and make it feel like it’s crazy situation where you’re getting dragged off or something. It’s just a little reminder. If you had to breathe through your mouth, you still could. You could see that I could still get some air in on the sides, right? So it’s just a great way to start super easy. So it’s called a 3m micro port tape.

Dr. Sharon Stills

So I’m curious. I’m asking a me question. ‘Cause I breathe through my nose. I’ve been trained from years of yoga. If I breathe through my nose during the day, can I safely assume that I am a nose breather at night or is that not necessarily a carryover?

Jane Hogan

Probably you are, probably you are. Do you wake up with dry mouth in the morning?

Dr. Sharon Stills

No.

Jane Hogan

Okay, so that’s a really good sign. If your mouth isn’t dry in the morning, then chances are, you are keeping your mouth closed at night. I mean, if someone else is around and can tell you if you’re snoring right, then probably, that’s a sign that you’re breathing through your mouth at night. So chances are you’re good snoring.

Dr. Sharon Stills

So for women, sorry, I just have to ask people. So for women who snore, if they mouth tape, will that correct the snoring?

Jane Hogan

It may. Now all the other things that we’re talking about will help as well. So when you are a habitual mouth breather, then part of the problem is that our airways actually get smaller. Isn’t that crazy? But the airways will get smaller. And so it’s like you use it or lose it with the nose and breathing, if you start to breathe through your mouth, the palette actually starts to drop down that the roof of the mouth. And so that airway through the nose gets smaller. You can actually help make it bigger by breathing through your nose more, right? That helps to open it up more. Now I do get hear this quite frequently that people say, I just can’t breathe through my nose. Like I can’t get a full enough breath through my nose. 

So here’s a little thing you can do that little practice that we did of a normal breath in, normal breath out, plug your nose. If you plug your nose and you do that and you nod your head, shake it back and forth, like put in a little bit of movement. You could even do it while you’re walking. While you’re holding that breath until you get a moderate air hunger, because that nitric oxide builds up then, it will help to open up the airways. You can do it two or three times if you need to. So if it doesn’t totally clear the first time, do it two or three times, and you’ll notice that it will start to open up more.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Great, great tip. Okay, let’s keep moving.

Jane Hogan

Okay, so the low, light and long, let’s get to that. So low means deep into the belly. So I’ve got a great tip because in the beginning, when people, you say breathe into your belly, I’ll be like, okay, I don’t, how? I just couldn’t like breathe into my belly. I didn’t know where to start. Start with the exhale, start with the exhale. So exhale and bring your belly button back towards the spine. So exhale. Now, when you go to inhale, the belly, push the belly out. You need to exaggerate it in the beginning. So push the belly out as you breathe in. We’re not like breathing into our belly. It’s really the lower part of the lungs and the diaphragm moves down, which makes the belly push out. So I find starting with the exhale really helps because then it gets you started, okay, now I got a place for the air to go into the belly.

Dr. Sharon Stills

I agree.

Jane Hogan

And then start to fill up. So of course, when we’re breathing low into the belly, well really into the lower part of the lungs. Think about the shape of the lungs. There’s more lung tissue near the bottom. So there’s more absorption. Also the parasympathetic state of the nervous system that rest, digest, repair, the non stress state is activated when we breathe into the lower part of the lungs. If you think about like, if we had to run really fast, we’d be like breathing up here, right? That activates the sympathetic state, the fight, flight fear state. So if we’re breathing up here all the time, then we’re constantly keeping ourselves in that state. So breathing into the belly just starts to activate that parasympathetic state, the vagus nerves, all like down there, right? So it activates that. So low is what we wanna do. 

Low, long, I say them in different orders. Sometimes I say low, long, light. The long just means like, start to lengthen out the breath. So you’ve done yoga sharing. So, you know they teach us that all the time, right in yoga, try to lengthen it out. Maybe try to inhale for five and then hold it a little bit. And then exhale slowly for five. Maybe you might wanna play around with letting those exhales get a little bit longer. Like you said, when we exhale a little bit longer, longer than we are normally doing than we are getting a better balance actually of the oxygen and carbon dioxide. And the light just means just, and you’ve probably been told this and I’ve been told, like, take a big breath into the belly. We don’t wanna do that. We want it to be light. So we want it to be long and we want it to be low, but we also want it to be light. So we don’t wanna take in these big amounts of air. We want it just to be smaller. So if you think about kind of constricting your throat, like a straw and just make it like smaller so you’re not like taking big amounts just slowly, like sipping, slowly sipping the air in. So you can make it low, light and long.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Love that, I love that. Yeah, and sipping is the word I always use ’cause it is, you’re just like sipping fine air instead of fine wine. It’ll do your body good.

Jane Hogan

Again, sending the message to the body. Like there’s enough air. I don’t need to like gulp it. I don’t need to rush it. I can take my time. There’s an infinite supply of air for me.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Yes, yes, yes, yes. So connecting breathwork and energy and healing and pain. I’d love to hear you speak to that.

Jane Hogan

Well, I see the breath as spirit in the body. That’s what we’re doing while our spirit is in our body, we’re breathing in between, right? So to me, the breath represents spirit in the body and through the breath we can, well, the breath connects the body like literally we’re filling our body, we’re activating our body or resting our body. And it also connects the mind because we think about this, we focus on it and it stills the mind. I think of meditation as being really the easiest way to start is just start noticing the breath, noticing the breath and slowing it down. And when our mind is focused on the breath, it’s not wandering off on all the other thoughts that it does. Most of us have constantly thinking about the past or thinking about the future. And it’s just go, go, go, go, go with the breath we can get connect the mind and the body all together focused and just still, and come into the present moment, which is really all we have. It’s this whole series of present moments, right? And just give our brain a little bit of a break, give the mind a break, and just let it calm down and find that place of stillness.

Dr. Sharon Stills

I love that. You said stills the mind because that’s my last name.

Jane Hogan

How perfect, how perfect.

Dr. Sharon Stills

I always say still the mind, heal the body, stills the mind. And yes, it’s true. And just a friendly reminder to everyone that it’s a muscle, the mindful muscle. And so your mind will wander. I’ve been meditating for my gosh, probably over 30 years now, and my mind will still wander. And so it’s the practice. It’s the art of gathering your thoughts and kindly and gently without beating yourself up and just bringing them back and sometimes your breath and your meditation, that’s all it will be, will starting to breathe. And then realizing you’re thinking about what you’re gonna watch on Netflix tonight, and then reminding yourself to come back to the breath. And then you’re thinking about when you need to pick up at the grocery store, replaying a conversation. And so it is a practice. I just want everyone to remember that. So I hear it so commonly. I’ve tried it. I can’t meditate. I’m no good at it. Doesn’t work. I can’t focus. And I couldn’t either. It’s something you commit to and give your intention and your love to, and you’re focused to, and it grows just like if you were growing a muscle at the gym.

Jane Hogan

And you said something so important there, Sharon too. And that’s kindness, like being kind to yourself and not beating yourself up over and just like, just being kind. Like how would you speak to a small child who was trying to do something, try learning to walk, for example, you wouldn’t say, ah, dumb, get up, or forget it. You’ll never get this, right? We would never say that to anyone who is learning something, we would say, just keep at it. Don’t get it, just keep at it, look at it. And some days are better than others. Just be kind and patient with yourself, be kind and compassionate. I think that alone is huge because we generally that little voice in our head is not that kind, at least mine wasn’t very kind and compassionate with myself. I’ve had to learn it. And it’s been such a gift actually to become a person that can be loving and kind to myself. And it’s really what we’re meant to do. We weren’t meant to beat ourselves up. I don’t think we’re to be kind and compassionate to ourselves.

Dr. Sharon Stills

I hear you. And I think while you were saying that, I was thinking about that saying that it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. And so when you are learning to walk or learning to be kind to yourself, to be in the moment and be curious and be exploratory, knowing that it’s a journey and how you behave towards yourself on that journey is what’s most important not when you arrive or how you arrive or did you arrive first or are you better than the other ones who arrived? And so when you just really bring it back to the present moment, the journey, the curiosity, the kindness, it just creates so much space in your body, in your energy field, in your mind and your soul. And that is medicine.

Jane Hogan

Yes, so beautiful. We don’t have to create a story about it. If we start saying, oh, that we’re kind of making a story of, well, I was in my meditation today and I couldn’t, just we don’t need to make a story. It’s just the moment, just the moment, the breath, the moment and the breath.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Even if you set aside 10 minutes, and I think this is how we begin. It’s like, we always wanna focus on the negative. So if you had 10 minutes of meditation and you had five seconds of just being really present and blissed out, then focus on that. Instead of what we tend to do is focus on, oh, I wasted 10 minutes and I couldn’t focus instead of really rising up that moment where you did. And it was so beautiful and just inviting, maybe tomorrow I’ll have seven seconds of that. Maybe I won’t, but I’m gonna enjoy the good that I got. And so shifting, I guess it’s like the glass half full, glass half empty kind of deal, right? What are you gonna focus on? And how kind are you gonna be to yourself? And I love what you said about the little child learning to walk. That’s such a great analogy. And we all have these little girls inside us, some more damage than others, and we need to love them up. We need to parent and be kind to ourselves. So maybe the next time you start to think something not so nice about yourself, you can just take a breath and you can remember this conversation. You can honor the little girl in you and shift what’s going on. I actually named my little girl, so I have a name for my inner little girl. I have a name for my inner teenager. And so I have a whole relationship going on with them when they need me.

Jane Hogan

I’ve got on my desk here, I keep this picture of little Jane, and I look at her and I say, I’ve got you now. I’ve got you.

Dr. Sharon Stills

I love. I have my altars in my bedroom, but on my altar, I also have baby pictures and do the same thing. So I love that you have it right there. I guess I could get one of them. I have a pile of them on my altar, so I should bring one in here. That’s a great idea.

Jane Hogan

Yeah, it’s cute. And I think another great idea is to just have the pictures of people who loved you around you and so that you remember, well, how would they speak to me if you’ve got someone, but you know what, in the end, and I learned this. So one of the stressful things that happened before the RA came along was that my mother had died suddenly. And I was very close to her. And so it was totally devastating for me. But in some ways, it was a big gift because I was like, “Well, she’s not around to be my champion anymore. I have to be my own champion.” And so in the beginning I would actually look in the mirror and I would speak to myself the way my mother would speak to me. And I know it may not be easy for people if they didn’t have that kind of relationship with their mother. 

So pick someone else that you’ve had a good relationship or someone that you wish would speak to you like that. And so in the beginning, I would just like literally say the things that I knew, she would say, you’re doing so well, you’re gonna be fine. And just like the I’m so proud of you, like these kinds of things. And that was kind of the beginning of speaking kindly to myself was I imagine that I was my mother speaking to me, but then after a while, it was me speaking to me and it’s a really beautiful place when you can get there. And really just really love yourself because really love comes from within us. It’s even when we’ve got a relationship with other people that is an external relationship of love, it still is just reflecting back the love that’s already inside us. So this love really is in within us.

Dr. Sharon Stills

I love that. I love what you were talking about, how you were talking to yourself as your mother. And if you, lots of us listening have had troubled relationships with parents. So yes, you can find it anywhere. And it just made me think of, I have a really good girlfriend in my life. And I was talking to her like a week ago about her and her boyfriend, and they have this beautiful relationship. And I said, “Don’t forget, I am ordained as a Reverend. So if you guys get married, I would love to marry you.” And she wrote me back, we were texting. And she said, “There’s no one else in the world if we get married that I would want to marry us.” And I said, “Oh my God, that is the nicest thing someone has said to me today.” And she said, “Well, I’m just gonna keep giving you that reminder.” So every day she says that to me, “I just want you to remember, there’s no one else who I would rather have marry us than you.” And it just reminded me what you’re talking about. So we can create that in our relationships with our friends and our sisters and our colleagues. And it’s something that’s available to us. And it lights me up every day. She tells me that I go, oh.

Jane Hogan

So sweet, I love that.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Such a beautiful gift to give to me.

Jane Hogan

It is. And you know what, if someone doesn’t have a person already in their life, maybe make up like a guardian angel, like just make it up someone, or whatever that’s saying these kind things to you, like, what would you want? And then, because you know what, that’s really you. That’s really you. We are at our core love and so it gets blocked in other ways, but we can just let it out. And actually the heart focused breathing that I’m going to talk about and we’ll do it together. That really is just generating that love and feeling it and creating it ourselves.

Dr. Sharon Stills

And if you’re listening now, you could also find a love buddy, right? So you can invite a woman to watch this talk and commit to being loving accountability partners. And you can build that into a relationship where you commit to being supportive and loving and kind to each other, and it just changes you, it ripples out when we behave like this, it ripples out energetically and gives other people permission. And especially for us women for so long women, we’re like cady and nasty to each other and backstabbing. And that is in the past, we are all about sisterhood and loving each other and supporting each other. And especially as we grow and age and step into our crown years and our wisdom, we really realize that supporting each other is a beautiful gift to give. And when you give it, you receive it too.

Jane Hogan

And that feeling inside of fully just wanting the best for other people is really who you are any time any of us. And we’ve all had like moments of maybe jealousy or judgements or criticisms. That’s not who we really are. And they don’t feel good and they don’t feel good because it’s not who we really are. It’s just, that’s a trigger to something that you need to explore a little bit in yourself. Like, well, am I feeling that? So it’s never about the other person. It’s about you and something that, well, it’s a beautiful gift actually. Whenever we have these triggering moments, it’s just things, anything that circumstances, or people that trigger us, they’re beautiful pathways. I kind of see them like, oh, it’s a beautiful pathway. That’s showing me where I need to grow and create more freedom because feeling jealous or feeling judgemental or any of those things, they don’t feel free, right? They feel nasty and holds down. So we wanna create more freedom. And whenever we get triggered, these situations or people are just showing us the pathway for more freedom.

Dr. Sharon Stills

I love where our conversation is flowing too, because I always use, if I get jealous, I look at it as, well, that must be something I want in my life. So what am I gonna do to create that? And I honor the person and I use them as a beacon of hope and light. And if they can have that, I can have that too. And so it’s how we respond and how we interact with our emotions. So I love that you brought that up. So you mentioned heart focused breathing. So I think it’s time. If you can tell us what that is. I’m so excited ’cause I know we’re gonna do a little demo and I’ve been waiting for that.

Jane Hogan

Well, I love so many breathing techniques, but I love the heart focused breathing. First of all, with my engineering background, I love science. I love things that are backed up by science. And there’s so much science behind the benefits of this breathing. People, their immune system functions better. Some health issues like when they practices over time will improve. They have better test scores. People get along better. Like there’s just so many good things about heart focused breathing. So the HeartMath Institute has done a lot of studying on this. So you can go look up in PubMed studies on heart focused breathing, or sometimes it’s called heart resonance breathing. So what we’re doing in this breath, well, the heart, well, you know about the chakras and energy centers, but I think we all know like this is where we are. Like, this is what we touch, right? This is who we are. We don’t say I’m here in my feet, right? 

We’re here. This is where we are. And it’s the most powerful, well, we are energetic beings, right? I think science tells us this as well. We think of ourselves as physical, but we’re really energetic beings that are just, we’re vibrating at a frequency that makes us appear as physical. But we are energetic beings. So the heart though has the highest electromagnetic field in the body. It can be measured outside of the body, like 12 feet away with the instruments that we have now. We kind of know this. You can sense it, right? When you walk into a room with someone and they’re feeling joyful, like without even a word being spoken, we can sense that. Or if someone is not the opposite of that, you can sense that too. We can proceed these fields, this electromagnetic field from our heart. At the heart, it regulates everything that’s going on down below. It regulates everything that’s going on above. It communicates with the brain and tells the brain what to do and how to operate this body. So it’s just so powerful, this heart of ours. And so this breath work that I wanna show you now, this heart focused or heart resonance breathing, we’re going to slow down. We’re going to focus on the heart. And I’m gonna ask you to think of something that brings you where you feel love either in the past or in the future, or just make it up. 

And we’re going to like really feel that feeling of love in our heart. We’re gonna grow it. And then just kind of bathe in it for a while. And when we do that, our heart is going into coherence. The heart and brain go into coherence with each other, the hemisphere of the brain go into coherence. We get ourselves in that beautiful parasympathetic state where healing happens, where everything just runs so much better. And the more we can do that, we can only heal. And I help with a lot of people who are in pain and have inflammation. So that healing state only occurs when we’re in that parasympathetic state. So the more often we can get into it, the better, and it only takes like three minutes. I may go over a little bit, but you can learn to generate this yourself and do it in just three minutes. Like maybe while you’re just standing in a line one day, you can do it or you can just, when you first wake up in the morning, do it, or right before you eat is a great time because we’re getting ourselves into that rest and digest state then, right? Or right before you go to sleep. So let’s get into it now. So I invite you, obviously, if you’re driving, don’t do this. You could though. I mean, you can do it with your eyes open, but I’d say in the beginning to practice it, we wanna do it with our eyes closed. So wherever you are now, just sit with your feet comfortably on the floor. 

Maybe you’re lying down. That’s okay too. And just rest your hands in your lap. They can be palms up or palms down. Whatever’s comfortable for you. So just get comfortable and gently close down your eyes, breathing in and out to the nose. Notice your breath. And anytime your mind starts to wander, just bring it back to my voice and the instructions that I’m giving you. Breathing long breaths in and out through the noses. And now imagine as you’re breathing that you’re breathing into your heart. So the air goes in, fills up your heart and all the space around your heart. And exhale, inhaling and filling up the heart and the area around the heart. A few more breaths like that, filling up the heart space, swirling around the heart. And while you continue to breathe like that, I’d like you to think about a time when you felt love, more joy? 

It could be a person or an event or pet or place. Bring this to your mind now, notice what you’re seeing. What colors do you see? What are you looking at? Notice if there’s any sense. Do you feel anything? Maybe, maybe there’s a breeze on your face. What do you hear? See if you can make this picture bigger, this feeling of love, joy, and notice that you’re feeling this feeling in your heart. Switch from thinking about it, to feeling it in your heart. Make it bigger now with the breath as you inhale. Let it fill up the heart. And on the next inhale, let it double in size. Now let it completely fill your body. And let it get even bigger than the body. Let it get so big that it fills up the room that you’re in and now pull it back. Let it all come back right into your heart again. This is for me. Just enjoy this beautiful feeling for a couple more breaths. And very gently and slowly into open your eyes. Come back into this room, in this space. How do you feel Sharon?

Dr. Sharon Stills

I was like, do I have to open my eyes? Oh yeah, I’m interviewing her. I gotta come back. I think if I was just attending the summit, I’d be out now. I’d be like, okay, I’ll come back and listen to the rest of this later. I feel.

Jane Hogan

It’s so beautiful because this was just generated by thought Shows you the power of your mind to think the thoughts that can change your physiology, literally change your physiology, right? We created a feeling. Feelings are vibrations in the body, every single cell in our body. When we filled up our body with that vibration, every single cell in our body is listening, right? Every single cell in our body is getting the message. This is a good place to be. And then creates new proteins, which are the expression of life, right? Cells create new proteins are turning over all the time. They’re creating a protein, the new expression of life that’s bathed in love, bathed in love. And that’s how we can heal. That’s how we can create the version of the physical version of ourselves. That’s the best version of ourselves. It’s a simple but powerful practice.

Dr. Sharon Stills

I’m glad we did it at the end ’cause I’m just all woohoo now. I’m like wanna just go bathe in my love and grow some proteins. That was beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. What a lovely conversation this was!

Jane Hogan

It’s been beautiful. I love it.

Dr. Sharon Stills

I’m just beaming. I mean you’ve given us so much already. Is there any last words or parting thoughts you’d like to share with the audience?

Jane Hogan

I think I’d just like to say that, as much as we talked about these other practices, like really paying attention to the breath, just anytime you can just notice the breath and just slow down and think about love and feel that love, you are doing a tremendous service to your physical body. You’re honoring yourself. And so just that, that alone is huge. And if you can just remember to do that a few times a day, you can change your life. You can literally change your life with that.

Dr. Sharon Stills

And bringing that, I always hear myself saying, and those of you listening have heard me say it a lot, that these are the real tools of healing and the supplements and the hormones, which are very powerful and important need to be layered on top of this. And so I also like to remind you that when you are taking your supplements or taking a healing shake or applying your hormones, that if you do it from this place, so much that matters, it’s not only what you’re doing, it’s who you are and the energy you’re doing it. And so if you bring this heart centered practice that Jane just so lovingly shared with us and you bring it to your vitamins and you give gratitude and shine love for the physician who helped you prescribe it and love to yourself for being on this path and finding someone to help you, and love to the supplement company and the people who made it and love to the supplement itself and what it’s gonna do for you, that amplifies the effects of that supplement beyond the beyond. I remember being in Switzerland one time and being at one of my companies who makes spagyric herbs. And we went and visited the plant and where they prepared the herbs. I mean, we were in Switzerland, so it’s the hills and it’s gorgeous. But the plant itself factory was all white, all windows and all the workers were not allowed to speak. They were just meditating.

Jane Hogan

Oh my gosh, how beautiful.

Dr. Sharon Stills

And these herbs are quite powerful. And I know part of the power is just because they’re prepared in this meditative state. And so you too can be doing this with your food, with your practices, whatever it is you’re taking or ingesting, and this heart coherence just amplifies it and makes it so much more powerful.

Jane Hogan

So true, the food and the gratitude, I mean, gratitude is another emotion on the love side, right? And so when we feel gratitude for our food, for the people who prepared it, for the truckers who brought it to us, for the farmers who grew it for all of that, then our food is more powerful like you said. So yeah, just feeling gratitude. I think feeling gratitude for everything your vehicle I think is gonna run better, right? You’re putting that loving energy towards it.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Exactly. And we do the whole talk with Holly Bertone about gratitude. So if you haven’t watched that one, yet we dive deep into gratitude because it is such another love, healing frequency. And speaking of gratitude, I know you tell me, you have a free gift to share with the audience that I’m grateful for. Do you just wanna give us a quick peek or talk about just what it is?

Jane Hogan

Yeah. Pretty quick. So I’ve got a course I’d like to give to your audience. It’s a five-day breathing for healing course. So it’s just like a really short, less than 30 minute lesson and a little guidance on different breathwork. So we do one a day for five days, and it’s just very simple, but we’ll teach you the very basics of breathing. So I’d love to gift that to your audience.

Dr. Sharon Stills

Thank you. So just more of what we were doing here. I love it. Well, thank you for fantastic conversation. Thank you for being a part of the summit and for the work you do in the world. And I’m just so grateful that our paths crossed and we know each other now and can support each other. So thank you for being here and thank you to everyone listening. We can go bliss off now, take that hard energy with you. That’s what I’m gonna go do. Remember your breathing practices, and we’ll be back with another talk. So this was a good one. This was important when we’re talking about mastering our menopausal transition. We didn’t mention hormones today, and y’all know how much I love them, but this is the juice. This is the good stuff. So take it to heart, so literally. Bye, everyone for now.

Jane Hogan

Bye.