045 - Rediscovering True Freedom: One Man's Unique Path

Are you feeling stressed out and overwhelmed? Do you find yourself suppressing emotions and putting on a brave face, even when you're struggling? If so, you're not alone. In today's fast-paced world, it can be hard to find the time and space to truly connect with our emotions and process what we're feeling.

This week On This Walk, my walking partner is Fish Fischer, co-founder of Somatic Breathwork™️, an emotional wellness modality designed specifically to help people clear out suppressed emotions, trauma, stress, and anxiety.

We discuss Fish’s journey from being a caddy in the PGA to discovering the benefits of somatic breathwork in helping him overcome stress and anxiety. We also explore the use of breathwork and somatic practices in helping men move through deeper blocks and feelings of being stuck. Furthermore, we emphasize the importance of emotional intelligence and embracing our emotions to become more grounded and powerful leaders.

In This Episode

  • (03:02) - The benefits of somatic breathwork

  • (06:02) - The repression and suppression found in the golf world

  • (08:54) - Fish’s journey as a former caddy in the PGA and how a sudden end to a relationship led him to his discovery.

  • (12:14) - The importance of allowing emotional cycles to fully complete and how to support this process.

  • (15:19) - Conforming to expectations

  • (17:44) - How to overcome stress and anxiety by releasing pressure and expressing one’s self

  • (21:10) -The importance of somatic literacy and getting into the body

  • (27:47) - The benefits of emotional release 

  • (31:43) - The distinction between somatic breathwork and other types and styles

  • (34:06) - The importance of re-patterning the emotional body after clearing out blocks 

  • (39:01) - How breathwork allows us to tune into what's going on in our body and connect to our inner space.

  • (43:21) - The importance of turning toward our emotions

  • (46:07) - How our bodies have a unique relationship with trauma and emotions

  • (52:03) - The importance of connecting with our bodies

  • (53:59) - The movement of Somatic Breathwork

Notable Quote

  • “To feel your life is like a living death. To feel your life is to actually be alive. Once you start to feel emotions, maybe a little bit of sadness, maybe a little bit of tears, maybe a little bit of anger, that is to truly feel alive. It's not to repress it. It's to know that it's there. See that is an actual feeling that's coming up in your actual body and then recognizing that there's a story with that. And really what that is, reading your body is the ability to actually understand somatic literacy. Can you be fluent in your own body sensations, feelings, and emotions, and can you know the story behind those? If you can do that, you can become fluent in your own body and the vessel that you have had your entire life is the vessel that has moved you.” – Fish

  • [00:00:00] Luke: You're listening to on this Walk, the show that helps men rediscover their unique path to true freedom. My name is Luke Iorio. It's my mission to reawaken and reconnect men to the joy, purpose, and peace that will help them become who it is they aspire to be. From the outside looking in, I had the good life.

    [00:00:19] I was a young CEO of a renowned training institute, a successful entrepreneur. I had a happy wife, healthy kids, two dogs, a fenced in yard, and at the same time, I was nearing burnout, no longer excited about my path and struggling to understand what was missing. After nearly 19 years in the human potential industry, thousands of students and clients in even eight plus years of picking myself up for my own burnout and uncovering a whole new path.

    [00:00:44] I'm sharing the teachings, practices, proven techniques, insights, experts, colleagues, and more. That have helped me create a more fulfilling, deeply aligned life. I'm more at peace, feeling more alive and connected than ever. And I want the same for any man willing to lean in for themselves, those they love, and those they lead.

    [00:01:03] So now turning into today's episode, I want you to imagine for a moment, a young man with a vision to be part of the sport that he has absolutely loved his entire life at the most elite level. And then you get there, you become the trusted caddy. To one of the most well-known golfers in the world, and that's when you realized you're trapped.

    [00:01:26] You're trapped by conformity, you're trapped by repression, you're trapped by what's expected of you. So you step back, you reinvent how you're going about everything, to find a way to still support the game, to support your game, that you've so much, but that's not it either. And you realize while having another man hold space for you, And take you into a profound experience that starts to reopen and release all the pent up stuck and bound energy and emotions that you've been carrying for years.

    [00:01:57] Well, what was that practice? What was that experience? So there's been a major upswing in the use of breath work by men. You even myself personally, relatively recently. I've dove into using breath work and if you're a listener, you know, for even just a, a bit, you know that I'm also a big proponent of somatic work.

    [00:02:17] I've noticed really big shifts quickly in me as well as in my clients. So I wanted to share more directly about what's the deal with breath work and specifically somatic breath work. Why is it becoming such a key and essential practice to help men move through these deeper blocks and feelings of being stuck?

    [00:02:34] You know, we don't realize just how much these inner patterns keep us bound up. And now they're re, they're really actually truly impacting us. And yet, once we are aware and we're armed with practices that help us to unwind them, we start to see just how much energy starts to get freed up within ourselves.

    [00:02:50] And so I've invited on one of the co-founders of Somatic Breath work, Phish Fisher, who had quite a journey of stress and pressure all upon himself as a caddy in the PGA to one of the top golfers in the past decade. It is

    [00:03:02] Fish: our birth right to express ourselves. To actually move through the world with our own uniqueness, and we can't do that when we actually have so much of a load

    [00:03:16] Luke: on top of us.

    [00:03:17] On today's episode, you're gonna hear pretty quickly how any of us can feel trapped by our surroundings and the expectations that others have of us. Regardless of how it may seem from the outside looking in, we're gonna ask questions such as, how do we break this cycle? What is it that breath work and, and specifically somatic breath work at that can do to help us to break these patterns that have kept us stuck?

    [00:03:39] What is it that seems to release and what seems to come back online as a result of these practices? We're gonna dive into all of that and more today. Just before we do, I also wanted to put out a tool for any of you as listeners to be able to download. And so part of what gets us out of sorts inside of our lives is that we get out of alignment with what matters most in our lives.

    [00:04:02] So I put together a workbook from exercises that I've been doing by private clients for the past decade to support you with a process that brings life back into alignment. I'm gonna share more on that and how to get it at the end of the show. It's my thank you for being a listener. So now let's dive in with Fish Fisher and using somatic breathwork to get unstuck.

    [00:04:22] Becoming freer and more alive. Hey there, fish. I want to thank you for coming on on this walk. It's so glad to have you here, man.

    [00:04:30] Fish: Thanks, Luke. I appreciate it. I'm excited to kind of dive in a little bit and just have a little chat, a little fireside chat for your audience. Exactly,

    [00:04:37] Luke: exactly. Fantastic. You know, I shared a, uh, a little bit of your background as, as we kinda lead in the episode, and certainly the work you're doing now is one of the co-founders of, of somatic breath work is a big piece of it.

    [00:04:47] But I was hoping you could share a little bit more of the journey behind that. Meaning, you know, what, what was it that even led you to breath work? What was going on in your life that made it. Kind of the experience that that obviously became, if it, it led to the work that you're doing today. Yeah. I

    [00:05:02] Fish: appreciate the question.

    [00:05:03] First and foremost, thank you so little background. I. Just shy of a decade on the PGA tour, I was caddying and I was also doing performance coaching for one of the top players in the world at the time, uh, Bubba Watson, who was ranked number two. So some high stress situations for sure. Caddying. Well, that whole profession in itself is you're one shot away from losing your job.

    [00:05:32] Yeah. There are no contracts. There's just. Sort of pseudo handshakes. And so you live a lot of your life just on the cusp of wondering what tomorrow holds. So there's no security. So if you like adventure, it's a good career. If you, uh, if you crave stability in some kind of consistency in your life, maybe not so much.

    [00:05:57] But golf is a unique sport in the sense that the majority of the game is a very suppressed game. It's very traditional. And you don't really express yourself like you do in other sports. Mm-hmm. Other sports, it's pretty acceptable for you to have outright just yelling and screaming and let's just say football for example.

    [00:06:18] It's all about, you know, your expression and how you wanna show up. And that kind of aggression is celebrated. And I mean, golfers can say the wrong things and they're chastised by the media. Yeah. So it's just a different situation and that trickles down from the top all the way down to everyone within that organization.

    [00:06:39] So the PGA Tour is a golf, essentially is a sport that doesn't really allow for a lot of expression. It kind really just promotes repression and suppression, right? And eventually can come depression. And a lot of the golfers on the PGA tour suffer for from anxiety and, uh, Whole bunch of different diseases and diagnosises that, uh, go hand in hand with depression.

    [00:07:05] So that being said, I came out of that sport and I saw a whole new wave that was coming up, and that was YouTube. And YouTube golf was this place where you could express yourself. You could say what you wanted to say within the confines of the sport that I loved so much because YouTube didn't have those parameters.

    [00:07:26] You could film yourself. You could record yourself playing around a golf. You could say whatever you want. Whatever came to your mind, you could say it. So, What essentially happened is YouTube golf popped off. It become wildly, wildly popular, and there's just this incredible like indoctrination of YouTube, I guess I would say, just audience or, or kids that maybe desired and looked to YouTube stars more so than being a PGA tour star.

    [00:07:58] Yeah. And I was right at the cusp of that and I was starting a channel with a young guy named Gabriel Writer who had the number one channel in the United States, and it was a very exciting time. Very exciting. The channel was going off. Everybody, hundreds of emails and messages were coming in. It was a fun, exciting time.

    [00:08:18] It was like the wild, wild west. I had spent so much time in the sport I loved, but not being able to really say what I wanted to say, had to be like. Policed on my social media, you know, all these things that came with that. And, uh, I went down this route and I did that for quite some time. But just a little fast forward on that, I had found that this kind of lifestyle allowed me to travel, pick my own schedule, play the golf tournaments in the golf, like events that I wanted to showcase it.

    [00:08:49] You almost had the ability to create your own golf tour, right? Play the courses you wanted to play, and I loved it. And I got to travel the world and I saw a lot of, lot of really cool places. And I happened to, um, be in a relationship and I was in a relationship with, uh, one of the top amateur female golfers in the country.

    [00:09:08] And I was a relationship with her for quite some time. And that relationship ended very abruptly. It like, And here's a guy who's probably suppressed so many things. Yeah. Because of golf. And you know, I'd seen, seen my father suppress a, a ton of things in his divorce. And honestly, my father had up having a stroke and he was paralyzed.

    [00:09:31] He had a bilateral paralysis. So I knew like keeping stuff inside wasn't the answer. You had to move it through. And I guess, That was, you know, that relationship coming to that, that, that quick end outta the blue without me even kinda realizing it. It was just that straw that broke, that Campbell's back, as they say.

    [00:09:51] It just was, it was the final nerve of my nervous system and that nervous system finally had a breakdown. Mm-hmm. And so I didn't get outta bed. I didn't know what to do. I actually. Couldn't function in life, and I was thinking, my life is on this Cloud nine. And here in a matter of seconds, it's turned on its head and a lot of things happen in that kinda environment.

    [00:10:17] You start to even question your own identity and what you're here to do and why you're doing what you do. And I happened to reconnect with that old friend Gabriel Reer, who had gone on his own healing path after some ayahuasca ceremonies. He had left the golfing world completely, but he was like, Hey, have you ever heard of just kind of breath work?

    [00:10:38] It's kind of emotional release breath work? I said, no, I never have. And I'm here. I am a performance coach on the PGA Tour, so I've done almost every modality you can ever dream of. Sure. And so I, I went cuz I was desperate and I went to participate in this, this breath work. Gabe was really trying to get me there cuz he got half off if he brought a friend.

    [00:11:01] That's the real truth. But I didn't mind so I went, it worked. Boy. Talk about expression just ye first time in my forget I was gonna say adult life. My first time in my entire life where I actually had someone give me permission to complete an emotional cycle in its own self, never had it. And all the places I went to, all the countries I saw, all the cultures I got to witness.

    [00:11:31] Never had someone say, it's okay. Let yourself feel that fully all the way to completion. Yeah. And so I yelled, I cried, and I was held. And I completed the loop. Mm-hmm. And I went to see, and his name was Steven Jaggers. I went to go see Steven for probably like six more sessions. Mm-hmm. And ultimately, I went from being in the lowest place of my life to the most confident, the highest, all my cells, everything felt free.

    [00:12:06] And I was like, What in the hell

    [00:12:09] Luke: is this? Right? How did, how did this

    [00:12:13] Fish: work and how is it not known by everyone? How is this not the one of the most traditional ways of. Inward journeying. How's yoga more popular? This How's meditation More popular Because you know, meditation is, you know, using your breath stillness.

    [00:12:33] Yoga is your breath in motion. Mm-hmm. Breath. That ability between those two. So how come it wasn't more popularized?

    [00:12:48] Luke: Just wanna add a point of emphasis to something Phish just touched on. He said, I completed the loop as he was talking about all the emotions that were coming up for him. So a big piece of what keeps us stuck is that we don't allow the emotional cycles to actually run their full course. We cut them off because they're uncomfortable.

    [00:13:06] We may not wanna feel the pain, the hurt, the loss, the anger that's associated with whatever it is that's there. And so we stop what is actually a naturally occurring process of emotion, and that energy becomes stuck. It becomes bound up. It's quite literally incomplete. And the type of work that Phish is speaking about with breath work, as well as other somatic approaches that can support this as well, is about supporting those cycles so that they can fully complete.

    [00:13:32] So that whatever it is that needs to be seen, felt, acknowledged, experience can be, we allow that full experience instead of fighting it or resisting it. We do this in a healthy setting. We do this in a way that creates balance within us in a way that also feels safe. These cycles are gonna continue to repeat if we do not allow them to resolve to finish.

    [00:13:55] But once we show that, you know, to our minds, to our consciousness, even to our bodies, that we're willing to be with it, we're willing to be with the experience in whatever it is that's there, and it doesn't need to keep coming back up over and over and over again. We actually start to bring it to resolution, and this is one of the key elements of this work, this somatic breath work, and why it can be so incredibly effective.

    [00:14:28] We're gonna get into all of that. I think the piece I just wanted to pull out of there before we get into the depth of, of everything here with breathwork is what you describe with the P g A tour where that is such a potentially a wonderful metaphor for so much of what we see across society right now.

    [00:14:47] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And maybe not just right now, maybe for a very long period of time where. You feel like if you say the wrong thing, you've stepped out of line. If you act the wrong way, it's the wrong behavior. It's the wrong list, the wrong that. Meaning, if you are not into conforming, To exactly what those expectations are, then you feel the pressure of that.

    [00:15:09] You feel like you're either the outcast or you get reprimanded and you learn to just start repressing and holding back more and more and more. And for me, as you were describing that, I mean, I immediately start. Picturing stuff. I've gone through stuff I've, I've taken clients through of, you know, those times where you feel like, because I'm in this role at work, I don't have the right to be able to show up that way because I've gotta keep it all calm, cool, and collected.

    [00:15:36] That's, that's the role I must play, or, you know, I, I can't do that as a father. I can't do that as a husband. And so we've got all of these like rules, mostly unspoken norms that we need to abide by. And of course, what do we see? We see this extraordinary amount of pressure and stress that's building up on everybody.

    [00:15:56] They're getting depressed, they're unfulfilled, they're not satisfied. They've just blatant unhappiness across their life, or let me say, that's not always the case. Or they hit a malaise like this, almost like this state of like apathy in their life, or that you can tell they're just not really fully living.

    [00:16:16] In the way that they possibly could because they're trying to maintain just this even keel kind of of approach so that they conform. Right. I see so much of the parallel of what you've described with the PGA of how it just is consistently running in different parts of our lives. And I guess, and that's why I'm calling it out, is to.

    [00:16:33] Make that clear to everybody is to take a look at right, where is it that you are conforming to the expectations, conforming to the norms that you know have been set for you, and where is it that you're beginning to hold yourself back? That's something I want everybody to actually, to keep in mind as we have this conversation about breath work.

    [00:16:52] Because I've gotta imagine even from my own experience and I, I will tell everybody, you know, I do not have a tremendous amount of experience with breath work. It is something that's relatively new to me over the last year, and what I have found in it has been incredible, incredible types of results. And that piece, Around the way in which you start to release that pressure so you can lean in more to the truth of who you are and show up that way has been amazing to me.

    [00:17:18] And I was wondering if maybe you could, you could maybe begin as we move into breath work. I wanna talk about like specifically why somatic breath work? Why do you pair those things together? What the point is that you're making there, but just from your own personal expression, your own personal experience.

    [00:17:32] You know, what have you found in the way that you now are able to show up in life, and what does it feel like you've been able to lay down as a result of the personal work that you've done for yourself? Yeah, I

    [00:17:45] Fish: think I wanna preface that like everyone has their own version of the PGA Tour. We use stories and we tell stories because they're so relatable and everyone has their own version of that.

    [00:17:56] Oftentimes we can say, well, I wasn't a golfer. I can't relate to that story. Yeah. But in some way, you have been around an individual that hasn't actually let you reach your fullest potential. So if we talk about stress and we understand stress is actually a pressure. I am a massage therapist and by nature, my job was to put pressure onto somebody.

    [00:18:18] To put pressure onto their physical body. If you think about stress, stress is usually the outside stressors, probably usually from our psyche that we've put upon ourselves. But there are some societal pressures, but their weight that's pushing down on us, and it is our life's right. It is our birth right to express ourselves.

    [00:18:44] It is our birthright. To actually move through the world with our own uniqueness, and we can't do that when we actually have so much of a load on top of us. It just weighs us down. And so really what breath work is about. Breath work is about finding a way to X that pressure. To X. The pressure is to express yourself.

    [00:19:10] You're pressurizing yourself if you'll, you know, just like an analogy of like going to the gym. If the weight is too heavy, you can't lift it and hopefully there's someone around you who can be a spotter who can help you move that weight cuz it's heavy. Sometimes things are really heavy in life, sometimes they've been there a long time.

    [00:19:29] Yeah. And so that's why breath work is really special. Somatic in particular is cause it's not just done with breath, it's done with actually another person. Mm. There's always someone there with you. Mm-hmm. In person. Mm-hmm. And usually a multitude of different people, more than one. Mm. And there's an ability to be there with that person to, to help them with that extra maybe heaviness.

    [00:19:54] Mm. Someone there to give them permission to actually say it's okay. To feel what you're feeling, to feel your life as you talked about people living in that, like that minutia, you know, and that like a living death. To feel your life is to actually be alive. Yeah. Once you start to feel emotions, maybe a little bit of sadness, maybe a little bit of tears, maybe a little bit of anger.

    [00:20:22] That is to truly feel alive. It's not to repress it. Mm-hmm. It's to know that it's there. See that that is an actual feeling that's coming up in your actual body. And then recognizing that there's a story with that. And really what that is, is that's reading your body reading it is the ability to actually understand somatic literacy.

    [00:20:47] Can you be fluent in your own body's sensations, feelings, emotions, and can you know the story behind those? If you can do that, you can become in your own body and this is the vessel that actually you have. Is the vessel that has moved you. It's the thing that has been there with you through every single

    [00:21:10] Luke: experience.

    [00:21:11] Something I'm sure everybody's heard me talk about in some way, shape, or form, but maybe this being more direct, is that through all the experiences and all the work that I've done through decades now, one of the things I've talked about for years is that desire to touch life directly. And as we talk about the somatic side of this, getting into the body with the breath, and you talk about being able to experience those feelings, those emotions, more directly.

    [00:21:38] What we're doing is that for so much of our life, we view life, not directly, but we view it through the buffer of our mind first. Right. So all of those experiences, all of those perceptions, all those past beliefs, everything that we have been through creates that filter, but it also creates a buffer so that we're experiencing something.

    [00:22:00] But before we allow ourselves to feel it, we kick it into the mind. What does this mean? What's the story behind this? What did that person mean by that? Right? And we go into this different place. And so I, I'm intentionally drawing this out because I wanted to make this distinction. As we get that, I, I love that phrase, somatic literacy.

    [00:22:20] Something I did not understand, which everybody does know on this show of having lived from the neck up for so long as it did, is being able to get into our bodies to be able to actually understand and feel, to experience what's coming through and not needing to move that to the mind. And that all of a sudden gives us a completely different level of processing and experiencing and expressing that we can now have with life that doesn't have to go through all these filters.

    [00:22:50] Right. Yeah. That to me, before you mentioned, to have somebody hold space and support you in having a complete emotional cycle. I was hoping you could speak to that, cuz that, that to me has been, what has broken down that buffer is being able to actually go through the experience. Number one, realizing I'm still alive afterwards.

    [00:23:17] I didn't have to, I didn't have to fear going through all the feelings. It wasn't something to worry about. As a matter of fact, even those really deep, painful, grieving, angry, even emotions. Very often resulted in extraordinary joy. Mm-hmm. You can't get there without the full cycle. So I was wondering if you could speak to what you mean of going through that complete emotional cycle and what you've seen it do for you as well as for the people you support.

    [00:23:43] Fish: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I wanna make a distinction real quick on what actually holding space is. Um, the term is thrown around quite a bit, but to hold space is to actually, is to allow someone else to take up space. It is when you sit with someone in such neutrality, when you sit with them and you observe them, you don't try to fix them.

    [00:24:12] You observe them in their full humanness and rather than react what's happening, you respond and that is really what it's to hold space to be responsible. Able to be able to respond to someone rather than to react. Oh, no, no, no. Don't cry. Don't cry. It's ok. Well, you know what? It actually probably might not be okay.

    [00:24:41] Something really heavy might have happened and words aren't going to do anything. But how about you sit there with them? Witnessing them in their rawness, allowing them to go through their actual cycle, because the innate intelligence of the body, the same, incredible, vibrant energy that beats your heart, that moves all of your blood through all of your vessels, veins, back to your heart, all your 72 trillion cells that are allowing our themselves to kinda just die off and regrow and regenerate.

    [00:25:20] There's this life force that's within you and you best believe it knows how to actually move emotions through if you let it. If you let it. We live in the psyche and the psyche is outside of the body. It is something that takes us in other places past, usually future, very rarely present. Yeah. It's usually the, the breath, like actually the body.

    [00:25:43] If you are fully with your breath, if you're fully with your body, you are actually in the present moment and that's where life exists. Yeah. And so just speaking to that, the full cycle, that full cycle, it's a fascinating thing because as a practitioner of this work, you get to see actually how fast emotions move through.

    [00:26:02] People think they're this journey that you're really go through some deep stuff, surprised at how fleeting it is and how quickly the body. Moves it through. Yeah. So you, we fear something that really maybe takes one, two, maybe three minutes to cycle through. There's no exact number

    [00:26:29] knee.

    [00:26:33] It's already turned to laughter, so you find yourself a of many different emotions within a breathwork session, especially if you're holding it for

    [00:26:50] entire. For the entire group to expand so that they can actually take

    [00:26:58] Luke: space number one. Very much appreciate you connecting specifically to that defining way of holding space for others, of allowing others to be able to take up space in a manner. You can be objective, you can be fully present to their experience and what needs to come through for them is a really, really important part of this process.

    [00:27:16] But, Honestly, a different way of relating for most of us, but a very important one to the other point you're making that, you know, emotions do have the ability to move through us very quickly. It's when we attach the meaning, we attach the story, we are effectively retriggering that emotion over and over and over again.

    [00:27:34] That's what makes it arduous. It's not the emotion, it's the story. Right. It's everything. We connect to the emotion that happens to be there. And as I mentioned as well, I'm just, I'm always amazed at when we can actually just be with what's there to allow ourselves to experience it, to allow ourselves not to cut it off with mental chatter and to keep coming back to the body, keep coming back to the feelings, keep coming back to the sensations, so it, it will allow itself to run through.

    [00:28:02] It's amazing that even in those experiences where, Maybe something that had not been grieved before, needed to be grieved, and that sorrow has come up and those tears have come up. How often that process ends with peace and with joy and with, right, there's this, this underlying current of joy when we have allowed ourselves to fully go through this way.

    [00:28:26] And then to me, and feel free to share from your perspective or, or correct me if it's in a different direction. What I've also found in that. Having been somebody who has meditated for well over a decade, 12, 15 years or whatever it's been now teaching meditation to to clients, the more that I've done some of the breath work and other forms of that emotional release experiences, the mind quiets.

    [00:28:52] Hmm. Because you can just be more present with where you are. And so even on a waking basis, like even when you've gotten off the cushion, so to speak, or you've gotten outta the breathwork session, you find that your mind's quieter. Because you no longer find the same need to attach to story, you no longer feel the need to run away from the experience that you're having.

    [00:29:14] You're okay allowing it and actually letting it work through. And I'm just curious from your perspective, how, how, how have you found that? How true does that ring to you?

    [00:29:23] Fish: Well, the body, all life actually strives for growth. It strives for growth and it strives for balance. And so when the story. Isn't completed and you haven't lived in the present moment and really like, sat with it.

    [00:29:41] Your body, well there's a, a concept called reenactment. You actually relive it and you might do it cuz of a, an internal pattern. You haven't even really understood. You might end up finding yourself dating the same person. Right. Different person, but but the same kinda scenario. Yep. Cause your body is like, hey, something wasn't completed.

    [00:30:02] You need to do this because it's striving for growth. In the breathwork session, you can actually have reenactment. You can play it in your mind. There are plenty of people who have come through and they've had very traumatic experiences. And in the breathwork session they have gone through it, gone through to the other side.

    [00:30:23] I remember I was working with a woman one time and you know, I was just kneeling next to her, encouraging her and you know, kinda like. Go through it and I could see like something was coming up and she just, you know, pushed, she created space for herself and she pushed and happened to push me away definitely as a practitioner.

    [00:30:42] Oh, shoot. Afterwards, she just, and listened to share and her share actually to complete what she wanted to, she say what she needed to in that moment, pushing and. Was extremely powerful for her and that was her own reenactment. Mm-hmm. It can play out in breath work just as much as it can play out in life.

    [00:31:11] Luke: Yeah. I'm glad you, you connected it to that as well because it's, uh, through any of these specific type of practices, specifically somatically based, we're allowing ourselves to experience something to completion and therefore our bodies, our souls, our consciousness, whatever you want to. Associate it with no longer needs to recreate that experience to reenact it.

    [00:31:34] It's like, Hey you, you got it. You were with it. That's cool. Yeah. Now we can move on to the next one. Right? Correct. As opposed to, we're gonna bring this back to you for the next 20 years cuz you're not getting it. Yeah. It is growth and it's because when we actually allow the full experience of it that, you know, we talk about it, but that's the difference between knowing something in your mind and knowing it with your whole being.

    [00:31:54] Gotta go through the whole experience to know it that way. That's the actual growth. That's when you actually have gotten it. I did wanna come back because specifically you, you refer to this, you and your, your co-founder refer to this as somatic breath work. And so if you could just give us a little bit of clarity as to the distinction that you're making the somatic breath work from.

    [00:32:09] What might be some of the other. Types and styles or traditions of breath work that are out there. There's

    [00:32:14] Fish: plenty of styles and different types out there and you know, everybody ends up starting their own, their own unique. This is enlightened breath work and that's good. You know, it kinda gets a little bit confusing, I think.

    [00:32:25] Yeah. Somatic essentially just means body. Mm-hmm. Our actual company is actually body intelligence, that's the name of our company. Mm. And really it is somatic breath work, but it really is more than anything, it's body intelligence. How can you tap into the innate intelligence of the actual body? Breath is only just one of many things.

    [00:32:45] There is the ability to have that verbal queuing, you know, to give someone permission verbally. There's the opportunity to do light, hands on touch for guided discovery to bring the breath into the diaphragm. A lot of people don't even know how to actually even bring air all the way down to their diaphragm and in somatic breath work, it's essentially about the depth of the breath.

    [00:33:10] Not necessarily the frequency. It's not about breathing so quickly. It's not a, a very strict kinda way to breathe because that one size doesn't fit everyone. Somatic breath work is the ability for you to go deeply into your own self and find your own unique cadence, your own unique way you breathe.

    [00:33:31] Mm-hmm. Your own depth because you know, you might not want to go deep, you might want to stay shallow, and that's okay. We're just there to help, be there to observe you and your experience and help in any way we can, but it's really about pulling the breath deeply and where I. As I did a lot of, uh, things in the physiotherapy world, uh, you know, on the PGA to athletes, if I was doing something like a r t, which is like an active release soft tissue modality, we would then want to like repa the neuromuscular facilitation of that area.

    [00:34:06] And so really what's happening on is on an emotional body. There's not a lot of bringing back in, there's not a lot of re-patterning. I can take this cup and I can pour it out and the liquid will disappear, but now I'm left with actually space. Hmm. So now I can fill this cup up with the things that I want, the liquid that I want.

    [00:34:28] You know, some people might have like booze can mm-hmm. Can pour that out. You can fill it up with like, Coconut water can fill it up with whatever you want. And so really the first half is actually designed for clearing, you know, to clear out anything that's been in the way, any blocks, anything that's been holding you back.

    [00:34:47] And that clearing creates space. And with that, now there's a re patterning aspect of the emotional body. The second half is about re patterning. Mm-hmm. The second half is about what do you wanna bring back in, how do you wanna feel? This actually used to be somatic release breath work that when we first started it, but we, we quickly understood very quickly.

    [00:35:10] That's only half of the battle, you know, and, and really the emotional body needs that full cycle, just like we talked about the emotion come to us full cycle. So does the nervous system have to go through a sympathetic and also para sympathetic completion? Right.

    [00:35:26] Luke: Can you talk a little bit, actually to expand a little bit on the emotional body?

    [00:35:30] Because mm-hmm. You know, for, for me, most of why some of this was so new to me, and I, and by most of this, I mean, not just breath work, but a lot of the somatic work that I've gotten into and, and tested and experimented, explored with for seven, eight years now mm-hmm. Was that I came out of a much more cognitively based model.

    [00:35:48] Right? Hmm. So that a lot of things were, okay, well, let's go change our thoughts, we're gonna change our thoughts, that's gonna change the emotion and. A lot of that's gotten reversed for me through the years learning about different things like neuroception that, that Dr. Steven Porridges talks about, of the different ways in which our body is actually receiving and connecting to its intelligence.

    [00:36:08] That usually is actually at times even ahead of our minds, if not way ahead of our minds. It are. In some instances, if you could expand on emotional body and, and anything that you, you know, anything else from just what I've brought up? Sure.

    [00:36:18] Fish: I think there's a lot there. You know, the emotional body. I mean, emotions are the language of our body, right?

    [00:36:25] Just like thoughts, the language of our minds. And we have to like understand that distinction and where do you wanna live, is really the question we have. We focus so much on iq, very few tests, eq no one knows what an e a good EQ score is, right? They just know if you have some type of like emotional etiquette, you know, maybe even sometimes energetic etiquette.

    [00:36:46] Yeah. Are you sensitive enough? You know, to really be sensitive is to be full of all these sensations, to be full of all of your senses. And your senses are, are the things that help you feel alive. Whether it's, whether it's into. Can you really allow yourself to feel fully alive? That's really what this existence is all about.

    [00:37:08] Mm-hmm. And you find that through your emotional body. We spend way too much time focusing on iq, and that's within our schooling system. No one ever. Is going to teach really, and hasn't ever taught really the emotional quadrant or uh, quotient, you know, and it's so, so important. I think that you have this incredible ability to know when someone is standing behind you, you can feel them.

    [00:37:35] You know, we have that innate ability when we were probably hunters and gatherers and we were, we were hunting. There was probably a lot of sensitivity to what branches were broken. Like any little noise that we heard, we were so heightened, we were so aware of our senses. We lived with the land, not on the land.

    [00:37:58] And you know, things have changed for us. Mm-hmm. And we sit at a computer all the time, you know, we just don't tap into our emotional body. But it still exists and it's still there. And there's a lot of practices like breath work that allow you to go inward. And that's where we find these things. I was saying the other day is that's, we spend a lot of time, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna preface this with iq.

    [00:38:25] Mm-hmm. We spend a lot of time building rockets and space shuttles and using our cognitive mind, which is such a gift to fly ourselves into orbit to discover a new frontier of powder space, but our own space shuttle. Exists and it's our breath and it is sent and descended down to explore our inner space and our emotional body.

    [00:38:56] We just have to give it the time to do that cause it's right there waiting for us always.

    [00:39:01] Luke: It's amazing to me as we do follow that and follow the breath into the inner space, and maybe I'll just describe it this way and see what this brings up, is that that breath. Allows me to then tune into what's actually going on in my body.

    [00:39:18] Where is it that I feel pockets of energy that need attention? Could be tension, it could be stress, it could be joy, it could be sorrow, it could be any number, right? It doesn't always have to be the, you know, the so-called challenging stuff. Uh, it can be any number of things, but it begins to introduce to me or bring to my awareness what's actually going on in my body.

    [00:39:41] And then gives you the space to be in relationship with what you're finding. Yeah. So that if something needs more breath, if it needs to be felt more meaning to be seen. To be acknowledged. Yeah. To be heard even. And that to me, there's something about this type of work that feels like it connects you to this expanded level of consciousness.

    [00:40:04] At times, and from my experience where I say that is that when all of a sudden it was almost as if my body was talking back to me. Yeah. Meaning you'd, you'd bright, you'd bring your attention to something and you do, you actually start to receive messages. Sometimes it was kind enough to be clear. Other times it was not.

    [00:40:23] Other times it was symbols or other things going on. Right? Mm-hmm. But there's so much. That our body can offer us in that intelligence, in that wisdom that's there. And we've disregarded that very much. We got caught up in the world of the mind because of all of the incredible innovation and ingenuity they can offer.

    [00:40:42] But for our personal journeys, it's that connection. That actually is offering us that much more, and I think is, is something that may offer us a tremendous amount for the coming centuries. I'm curious just Yeah. What that brings up for you.

    [00:40:55] Fish: Well, yeah, I think that, uh, you, you made a, a great distinction there and we've talked about somatic literacy.

    [00:41:03] Yeah. And what you're really referring to as like a somatic relating your ability to relate to actually your own unique emotions. They're this ethereal, un like lack. They're not tangible. They're outside of our scope. They're invisible forces, right? But of like all the invisible forces, whether it be gravity, radiation, you know, emotions are the ones that move us.

    [00:41:30] They start wars, they create peace, they keep the species going. We fall in love, but we have the ability. To relate to each and every emotion uniquely, we have the ability to actually build a relationship so when sorrow does come knock on the door, you don't just leave sorrow on the porch. Mm-hmm. You just don't distract yourself and not answer.

    [00:41:56] You actually open the door and you actually greet sorrow. Maybe you can give it a hug. They become acquaintances and, and possibly even friends. Do have the ability to actually recognize each emotion, and the more you've gone through each one, the less it's a stranger to you.

    [00:42:22] Luke: You know, especially as men, we've made our emotions the enemy, or we've allowed them to become strangers. We disconnect from the felt experience of life because all too often we pick up and buy into these stereotypes of what it means to be stoic. Now for me it was this calm, cool, collected persona. Even though internally I was just a, a bound up, wound up mess.

    [00:42:44] And when we don't become familiar with our emotions, the true gifts, the messages, and even the beautiful experiences that they open us up to, then we end up repressing and we end up trapping them in our unconscious instead. And that's where they're gonna end up having an impact on us. But now we aren't even aware of them and how they're affecting us.

    [00:43:03] So the more that we can turn towards our emotions, our emotional experiences in states, whereas my past guessed from just a few episodes ago, David Mailer would say to face and feel, the more we can do this, the more familiar we become with them, the less uncomfortable we become in feeling and expressing these emotions.

    [00:43:21] The less bottled up we become and the easier it is for us to return to our centeredness and our calm, but in a more authentic way. As we become more comfortable in this process, we also greatly expand our ability to hold this type of space for others because we're becoming more centered and grounded, even when others are going through their experiences and maybe even their emotions might be overwhelming to them.

    [00:43:43] Even at those times, our presence and our comfort with whatever's unfolding at that moment can be felt by others as safe, as accepting, as a grounding space. Everyone wins in that situation, we become more grounded, genuinely powerful leaders. We become more expressive, we feel and project greater safety and acceptance, and others are receiving all of those benefits as well.

    [00:44:07] But it begins with turning towards the emotions and creating relationship with them, getting familiar and connecting to them instead of holding them at arm's length as too many of us have done for most of our lives.

    [00:44:29] Yeah, you know, it's amazing cuz the number of times that sadness or grief or anger would show up at my door and I would leave it on the doorstep, right? Because there is that belief from the way that we have been conditioned or whatever our experiences may have been, that we could get lost in the emotion of it.

    [00:44:55] Meaning that if we allow it in, is this gonna take over? Are we now going to be sad all the time? Are we going to be angry all the time? And it's part of that story that because we haven't been with it, We haven't seen it through to the other side. We don't realize actually what this, this offers to us and the beauty of what our emotions are.

    [00:45:17] You know, we have them for a reason, all of them, even the ones that may feel painful or uncomfortable, we have 'em for a reason. I appreciate the analogy you gave of it being on the doorstep. Because when you look at it from a place of welcoming and inviting and stop fighting what it is that's actually there, you do begin to change the nature of your relationship.

    [00:45:37] You no longer have to be afraid of these different emotions as they arise. You can meet them for what they are. And I think the last piece that I just wanted to comment further on is I really like the way that you described it as unique. And so if I go off of, and I'm gonna kind of take a little tangent to come back to this, but.

    [00:45:58] There's a lot of recent research, and this just got released actually in a recent book called Unbroken. I think I've mentioned it now a few times in the show because I, I deeply appreciate the work and it's how the trauma response is never wrong, and what part of the distinctions that are there is that we have at times categorized this is what trauma is supposed to look like.

    [00:46:18] This is big trauma. This is little trauma. This counts as trauma. This doesn't count as trauma when in actuality our bodies have a unique relationship to whatever it is that we've encountered, and the body does exactly what the body needs in response to whatever that event was. And so when you talk about unique in terms of unique relationship with our emotions, I think that's really important for people to understand just because.

    [00:46:42] To me, this situation may evoke grief and you look at it and go, well, why are you grieving over the loss of your dog? Right? Why is that grief to you? You know, that wasn't a kid. It wasn't a this, it wasn't a that. It's like, it's no, it's my personal relationship with grief in relation to this experience.

    [00:46:58] It's my experience. It's gonna be unique. Right. So I, I really appreciate that distinction that you offer up around that.

    [00:47:05] Fish: Yeah. Once we start to realize that we have our own unique relationships with these emotions, let's just say grief, in this case, it gives us permission to allow other people to grieve how they need to.

    [00:47:17] Luke: Yeah,

    [00:47:18] Fish: absolutely. We are moving into a generation that is actually putting IQ at the top of the pedestal. Yeah. Even to the point where it's called ai. Yeah. How we would differentiate ourselves and how we will actually showcase our own uniqueness in humanity is our eq. Yeah. And we will need to learn to build that.

    [00:47:45] Yeah. That will be our true separation. Yeah. Because from a cognitive standpoint, I don't know if we can keep up with ai, but from an emotional standpoint, nobody has created AI that can feel like we feel. Mm-hmm. We are so unique in that, right? True. And emotions are this a powerful force that we neglect, we suppress, we've forgotten how important they are when we realize that, when we come back to that, when we return home for that, yeah, we'll find our own power again and we'll see actually humanity will have a bigger, fresh breath of air, realizing that right

    [00:48:23] Luke: there if I use that to bring us around to.

    [00:48:27] Something that actually just came up with a client and might be a very good way for us to begin to wrap some of this up was that a client of mine was struggling with a given situation and recognizing, well, if I get into that conversation, it may bring up tears. I may actually cry in that moment, or This is what my struggle's gonna be, and he was expressing how I can feel.

    [00:48:51] The part of me that wants to shut that down, the part of me that says That's not strong. I've gotta project strength. And I was wondering from your perspective and for your commentary on this, of how, actually when we repress, we're quite literally saying, there's fear here. I'm gonna hide. So to me, strength is actually the ability to be completely honest with ourselves and forthright with where it is that we are and what we're experiencing.

    [00:49:22] To me, that is extraordinary strength. The strength of vulnerability as opposed to the perceived weakness of vulnerability. And I'm curious, you know, just from, from your perspective or just to even hear you, you comment on that because to me that's part of the power of somatic breath work of, of these types of practices is it allows us to actually start to own more of the truth of who it is that we are and stop hiding it.

    [00:49:47] Fish: Yeah. When someone says that vulnerability is a weakness, it only shows me where they're at. Right. It only shows me how far they've gone within them, their own self. Yeah. If you watch a lot of our superhero movies, let's just take Spider-Man. Right. He's full of all his senses. Yeah. Yeah. Superheroes within comic books are actually very sensitive.

    [00:50:10] Yeah. That's their superpower. Yet we neglect to even think that we are our own superheroes. We turn to the movies to find that, but it actually is within us. Yeah. You know, and so it really truthfully is a reeducation of emotion, an emotional reeducation of society. In fact, maybe it's not even a re, I don't even know if there was an education on this.

    [00:50:38] You know, we spend time with math and science and history and all those things are important. But history is in the past, science is in the head. You know? Mm-hmm. How often do we spend time with actually our body, the very thing that we have until the day we die? How much do we explore it? How much do we know about it?

    [00:51:04] So very little. I was fortunate to actually get a degree in exercise physiology. Like I, I took an anatomy physiology as all these courses related to the body, and I. We studied something, we studied the, the neuro connection to, you know, from the brain to the muscle and how a muscle would actually reach an action potential threshold where it would actually be able to contract and like this sliding ment theory would happen anyways.

    [00:51:36] Took a month to learn this. And so what that did for me is it showcased how much reverence I have for this. Thing we call a body. Mm. The thing we really just neglect truthfully with food and supplements and, you know, lack of sleep and the overworking and the postural damage we do. I mean, my goodness.

    [00:51:59] Right. You know, it's the one thing we probably should take the most care of. Mm.

    [00:52:03] Luke: It is actually amazing to me how much our physical nature, our bodies are gateways. And right it, it can bring us into so much wisdom. It can bring us into the present moment as we described before, like nothing else can, and it truly is.

    [00:52:21] The more that we connect, the more that we begin to understand just how much the body can offer us. And what it can guide us on, and it is truly miraculous. We joke around of everything in terms of the, the priority we've placed on the mind for the times that, you know, we have said, oh, we're, you know, we're actually spiritual beings just having this physical experience and at times it actually dismisses the fact we are embodied.

    [00:52:46] And there's a reason. There is a gift in this process. There is a gift in these bodies and they are extraordinary, and there are ways that we can relate to them and work with them and learn from them that are going to help us have a much richer, more fulfilled, more enjoyable life.

    [00:53:02] Fish: Yeah. It's the lack of connection to our own body that has caused most of our suffering.

    [00:53:10] It is what? Starts disease within our body. It's what spreads disease. It's why we feel very unfulfilled when we follow the social norms of getting the house and you know, the car and all the things we want. The big bank account. And only defined that. Wow. That actually, boy, you know, Jim Carey says it best when he is like, I hope everyone is able to get a tremendous amount of money and actually even acquire some fame in their life.

    [00:53:39] Just to find out that it's not the answer right yet. We still seek it. Yeah. We are constantly seeking outside of ourselves and seekers never find, yeah, it's our job and I think we. We go through this, you know, this, this been happening on a collective level. You wanna talk just for a second on the actual movement of somatic breath work?

    [00:54:01] It is of not me or Stephen. It was also a gift, said, would you mind shepherding this in? And I was like, it'd be my greatest honor of my life to do that. And it moves through Stephen and I. And it's a gift that is given to someone else and to all of our practitioners, and they give it to others. And that's something that can spread in such a beautiful way because it's a gift.

    [00:54:27] It has no ownership. Yeah. It's just moving through because the world asked for it. The world wanted that. The world wanted it to be somatic breath work.

    [00:54:38] Luke: Well, Phish, I wanna thank you for being on this walk. For joining us here for sharing all that you have with the audience, with everybody tuning in, for those that wanna reach out, what's the best way for them to connect for them to to follow along with everything that you're up to?

    [00:54:52] Fish: You can check us out. Somatic release's our Instagram and then somatic our website. For me, I'm not as attracted to the forward facing aspects of social media. I love the backend, so feel free to DM me, message me. I get back to every single message. So that's Fisher and Fishers with a So Fish Fisher on Instagram.

    [00:55:16] And then I have a website, but that's unimportant. It's, it, it's really somatic breath work that, uh, is really good. My love

    [00:55:22] Luke: affair, Phish. I appreciate that. I encourage everybody to check out the, the work that, that Phish is up to, to check out somatic breath work. And once again, I wanna thank you for being on this walk.

    [00:55:32] Fish: It was my pleasure. I love good walks. I'm a golfer, so I, I enjoy good walks, you know?

    [00:55:38] Luke: Yeah. For me, I am also a golfer, but more often than not, it's a good walk. Ruined, but that's a different story.

    [00:55:45] Fish: Very true. Very true. Thank you,

    [00:55:47] Luke: fish. Just to thank you again to Fish Fisher for coming on this walk today. And again, don't hesitate to check out his work@somaticbreathwork.com or Fish Fisher.

    [00:55:59] That's with a C in the fisher.com as well. Also, as I told you at the top of the show is I had a tool for you to be able to download to support you in getting into greater and deeper alignment. So if you want to get more deeply aligned so that you can tap into more fulfillment and aliveness. Then you're gonna want to download the Alignment workbook.

    [00:56:19] And this was previously only available to my private clients, but now if you really, truly are looking to be and live more as the man, the husband, the father, the leader that you aspire to be, and really do this just over the next few months of applying, implementing these insights and changes that come from this work booking process.

    [00:56:37] Then all you've gotta do is go to on this walk.com/alignment. That's on this walk.com/alignment, and I've also dropped that link in the show notes below. Thanks once again for coming on this walk.

Feliz Borja