[00:00] Valerie: Rise, renew, reconnect. Welcome to from the Ashes, a podcast where every story ignites hope and healing. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to give you a quick heads up. My guest, Reid and I recorded this episode outdoors, so you might notice some sound distortion at times. Despite this, I encourage you to stick with it because this conversation is truly worth the listen. Reid is a remarkable individual and a friend of mine. He's the owner of Human Eon, a wellness facility in Long beach, and is not only a fellow caporista, but also a dedicated psychonaut and entrepreneur. And his journey into wellness is both inspiring and transformative. I really enjoyed recording this episode, so I hope that you stay tuned for this insightful conversation with reed Wasser.
[00:57] Valerie: Reed Wasser, thanks for being here today.
[01:02] Reed: A pleasure.
[01:03] Valerie: Yeah. So we're going to dive pretty deep today into the story of your you're from the ashes moment. And let's just start by telling the audience a little bit about yourself. So what I know about you is probably only a small segment of who you are. I met you through Capoeira. So you do martial arts. You also have done Wim Hof workshops, and you have trained with Wim Hof himself. I know that you are the founder of Human Aeon, where we are right now, and you have your own philosophy on wellness and consciousness and how to spread that, and you do events and so much more. So tell. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself. What do you want the world to know about you?
[01:50] Reed: What do I want the world to know about me? Yeah. Let's see. I'm porting bays in Long Beach, California. I came to age in the nineties. Guatemalan beach was a very different place and witnessed a lot of really wonderful things. We had great art, great music at the time. A lot of really tragic events occurred in Long beach just due to the climate of sort of where the city was at and where the world was at, the riots and all that. And, you know, everything that happened in the nineties. I'm a seeker. I've always sought to find meaning in this existence and in being here in this life, like you and I were talking about before we started recording. You know, life is composed of a lot of experiences that are, that are difficult, that cause suffering, and also, obviously, lots of experiences that bring joy. And for me, I'm someone that looks for. I'm always looking for meaning, for deeper meaning into why or here. And that has always brought me a level of understanding and comfort and resonance and integration with the world. And so for me, that's where all of my art, all of my business, what I want to create in the world is coming from.
[03:15] Valerie: Amazing. So I would like to ask you then, since you've always been a seeker. And I feel like I have been, too. I feel like in my childhood, there were already kind of tendencies that I had that indicated, like I was thinking differently. Do you remember any moments in your life early on that indicated that for you?
[03:35] Reed: Yeah, several moments. I remember when I was nine years old, it was. It was during summer break and just felt like days on, days of nothing to do. We didn't have the Internet. We had a couple channels of the tv and the streets to play with our friends in. And I remember sitting on the couch, and I don't know how long I was there, but my mind went to this place of. I asked myself the question, who am I and why am I here? And it just. I remember having this experience where, like, I remember everything, like, visually went into a void. And I shocked myself with this question. And I had no idea why I was asking it. I had no idea what was happening in my experience, but it felt like the entire world dissolved. And I don't remember how long I was there on the couch in this quasi meditative experience. And I had never heard of any of my friends or nobody told me that they've had an experience like that. It was years later that I read other accounts of meditators and psychonauts and experimenters in consciousness who had similar. So I remember early on, I've always had this questioning, this inquisitive nature, and I've always been suspicious that there's something beyond our 3d physical planning systems.
[05:11] Valerie: Got it. Great. I want to put in a little context because I did not grow up in Long beach. So I grew up in Long island, another side of the country in the nineties. And so, obviously, so I grew up in a very different place and where there was a lot of peace, but then also 911 happened to us.
[05:30] Reed: Right.
[05:31] Valerie: And so there was a lot in my environment that shaped the way that I see things, the way that I question things and all of that. Can you give us a little bit of context of what Long beach was like and why that was formative for you?
[05:44] Reed: Yeah. So, Long beach, we had this crucible of music, punk rock and pop and reggae music, or like they call it, third wave ska. But we also like, people really loved reggae music along the time between. So I was born in 1980, so I was ten in 1990 and 20 in 2000. So it was my teens, basically. Yeah. So we had this great musical sort of, like, confluence of energies that really sort of shree. Like, we were from long. Like, Long beach was a thing because of music and. But it was also a wild place. It was filled with gang violence everywhere. We had five major high schools, and everyone got bust everywhere. Everyone got put in different high schools. Not necessarily. You didn't necessarily get put in the high school of your neighborhood. So, because the city at the time or the school district wanted the high schools to be very diverse and represent all the different sides of Long beach. And with that came a wonderful amount of culture and diversity. And also violence just seemed to, like, sort of seep into everywhere. There were drive bys. I was in a class at Wilson High School. The teacher was named Eric, grew up, and they made a movie about this class called the freedom Writers with Henry Swing. Okay. Yeah, I was in that class, and that movie is actually pretty true. Like, it's. I was expecting it to be, like Hollywood hype, but if you watch that movie, it was exactly like how that movie portrayed it.
[07:23] Valerie: Okay.
[07:24] Reed: Shootings on campus. We had race riots a couple times where people were, like, trying to bring down the school. People just had to get out of school. It was crazy. It was. We loved it. Me and my friends loved it. It was an adventure. Yeah. But definitely there was a lot of intense time to Long beach. Things have changed since then. Gentrification, real estate markets, politics. Culture has changed in Long beach. And it's most. It's mostly safer.
[07:59] Valerie: Mostly.
[08:00] Reed: Mostly because of the way, like, gang violence has shifted. It was pretty wild back in the day. There was Snoop Dogg came from Long Beach. I came from Long beach. Lots of great punk bands came from Long beach. And it was just a very interesting place.
[08:19] Valerie: You wouldn't know. Yeah, I've only been here for, like, four years, maybe. And so, like, when I walked past Wilson High School, I'm like, wow, this looks like a really nice place.
[08:32] Reed: They've since put uniforms on the kids and gated everything. Yeah. Okay. It's different. It was different now, but it's still. I mean, we still have elements of the past. Yeah. Just not quite like before. For better or for worse.
[08:49] Valerie: Would you say that that experience growing up provided you with a special type of resilience or way of thinking?
[08:57] Reed: Yeah.
[08:58] Valerie: What would it be like? What would. What would that mindset be?
[09:04] Reed: I would like to in a poetic way, to me, it bred a little bit of what the capoeirista, the capoeira practitioner, calls malandragem, which is sort of the street philosophy, and it's born from survival. And I will in no way assume that the malandragem that develops here is. I mean, I don't know. I know that, for example, my capo de master, who I've studied under for a long time, he comes from Salvador, Bahia, decades ago. He grew up and hes in this mid or late sixties now. And it was a very wild place with lots of street violence and all sorts of things happening. The capoeirista, from the experience of survival, cultivates a type of, like, awareness that's born from survival, but it goes deeper than that. Yeah. And I think that when you get through difficult situations or wild situations like Long beach or, I'm not trying to make comparison, or Salvador, Bahia, in the seventies or whatever, it breeds a sort of, like, street wise kind of mentality, you know?
[10:23] Valerie: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So then that brings me to the main topic of today is rising from the ashes. So from what I understand and what you've told us in your stories, especially through, like, the Wim Hof workshops and stuff, there was a period of life where you went through some really rough internal struggles. And it's really interesting to contrast our early lives, where it seems like we were able to survive a lot and not be dragged down by the internal dialogue. So I want you to tell your from the ashes story, and I also want you to tell it from the perspective of maybe that journey, from this, like, malandragem mindset when that you felt like that no longer worked or there was a moment of deceit.
[11:17] Reed: Well, the malandragem mindset still works, okay. And there's many iterations of it. I've had a few, like, rising from the ashes moments of my life. I'm actually going through one right now, honest. I tell my Wim Hof story, how I found Wim Hof method, and why I started practicing it when I teach those workshops. And that was in 2016. All three of my grandparents had died. I'd been through divorce, a bunch of difficult loss in my life, and so I had a business that was. It was stressful. Being an entrepreneur is stressful that. I started with a business partner in Seattle. I was living in Long beach for the first three years of the business. My partner and our employees were up there, and I was here, and I would go back and forth. I also had a couple other businesses that I was working on. So in 2016, I decided to move from Long beach to Seattle, sort of to change my environment and also to focus on the business. Yeah. And me and my dog and Wolfie, who at the time was seven and moved up there. And it was dark and dismal, which I liked, but my body wasn't used to just, like, long, like, months of darkness and cold. I had very few friends, if any. And I'm a very social person. I'm a hamburger, so I need time alone. But also, like, I get charged in community with the right people and people that I connect to it. So I didn't really have that. I had capoeira, but, like, I wasn't close to anybody at the time. I had a very stressful business, employees and money things. And so it was like stress. No sunshine, no friends, isolated. And I thought I was just kind of, like, grieving over a lot of loss. I was very close to my grandparents, and so things were different. I started to get depressed, and I started to show, like, psychosomatic symptoms of, like, mild autoimmune things like allergies and inflammation and just, you know, I was in a serious struggle. My, my regular meditation practice, which I've had since I was a youngster, I mean, meditator wasn't. It was there, but it wasn't working. My calf point of practice helps, but it wasn't enough. Movement, it's not enough. I mean, I believe that movement is crucial to physical and emotional and psychological health as well as stillness. But I knew that I needed more. So I saw Wim Hof advertisements in his story or whatever on social media, and I tried it because I had always wanted to learn dumo, which is an ancient Tibetan practice that has some influence on the Wim HoF method. It's different, but there's similarities. Cold exposure, breathing, meditation, and started doing the Wim Hof method practice, and things just cleared up immediately. I wasn't at rock bottom, but I certainly was really in a state of, you know, there was a continuity to my suffering that I needed to shock out. And the exposure to cold, exposure to long periods of deep breathing, it cultivated like a renaissance in my inner life, in my meditative life, things start to become clear again, and I attribute that to cleaning out inflammation. I attribute it to cultivating alkalinity in my blood for consistent periods of time. And just the shock of the cold really helped. That's one of my, you know, I don't know if I was at rock bottom, but I can. I can definitely say that my experience is that most ascents in life and in levels states of consciousness are preceded by descents. You descend generally before you ascend, and whether intentionally or unintentionally, you know, like, if you want to get in shape, what do you do? You go into the place where you need to work out. You descend into, you intentionally suffer. It feels good, you know, when you do it long enough, like, you get past the suffering when you work out consistently, whatever you're doing. But there's always a, you have to get your *** out of bed, get to the plate, you know, the gym or the movement space or the cupboard of class. And you have to, like, break out of the cycles of. Of, like, feeling the resistance and then getting sore in your body or whatever it is. You have to descend before you ascend, before you get into shape. You have to work on yourself. And that's a very basic, I think that's a very basic example. I mean, I've done it several times in my life.
[16:14] Valerie: Yeah.
[16:14] Reed: I mean, I sought for meaning and started looking at esoteric traditions in my early teens because my household fell apart. Right. I grew up in a middle class family, you would think, with all of the privileges that you can assume. But in that household, and in many households, we suffer from psychological issues and mental unwellness and divorce and strife and whatever it may be. I moved out of my house when I was 15 and traveled the countryside. And I did it because I wanted to get out of the situation in school, which was like wild, dangerous, boring. Like, there was no point for me to be in school. You know, I. So I left school, I left my home, and I traveled and studied a lot and joined different schools, esoteric sort of mystical schools, looking for answers so I could figure out how to change my state. Yeah. And my environment. Right. That was the same. Essentially the same reason I went to Wim Hof method. Essentially the same reason I started studying capoeira. The same reason I started studying meditation is because I believe that we are endowed, that human beings are endowed with the ability to naturally shift their experience and their state of consciousness through efforts, through practices. I'm okay with medicine. I think medicine is great. Western medicine, eastern medicine, everything has its place. But there's so much that we have. We have so much ability to shift our state of consciousness to choose. Right. And to use our suffering to propel us into higher states of wellness. Right. When I say state of consciousness, like, I'm referring to mental, emotional, physical, physical and the unexplained things that we can experience that are difficult to explain, which, I mean, we could call spiritual or the mystical or metaphysical, whatever. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
[18:28] Valerie: Okay. I have a lot of questions, so I'm going to try to. I'll just grab the one that is sticking out to me right now is that you say that you've done this many times in your life?
[18:37] Reed: Yeah.
[18:38] Valerie: And I feel like I've done the.
[18:39] Reed: Same doing it right now.
[18:40] Valerie: Yeah. The thing is, the people who do this, they know that they can do it again, but there was always the first one. Right. And some people never get to the first one. So I want to ask you. Okay. First one thing that I want to ask you is, what was your first one, would you say? And what was the shift, and was it sudden? Do you remember having a conversation with yourself?
[19:09] Reed: Hmm? What was the first one? Well, it's hard to say. I've always had this as long as I can remember. I've always had a yearning to go deeper and to understand life in a deeper way. I think it's why I've always been attracted to art and music. I've always felt like since I was a kid, there's always been something about music, an art, where I'm like, whoever made that gets it, they understand what I'm feeling. And I don't know about the first one. Maybe when I was 15 and I left home, maybe that was the first one, because that's when I first took the small level of control that I realized I had over my life, and I made arrangements with the world around me and decided to walk on my own and to do my own thing. It was dangerous. It's like the path of the razor's edge.
[20:10] Valerie: Yeah.
[20:10] Reed: I think when we talk, I think when we use that term, and I still walk my. I still conduct myself in that way in my life. I think that was probably the first time, and it was very difficult and a great adventure. And, you know, it's what made my. I won't say it's what made me who I am. I don't like to define who I am based on just external experiences, but it definitely created the character that I carry. Yeah, you know? Yes. But, you know, I'm going through a period right now where I'm struggling and ready to rise from my ashes. My dog died in September, and my life has shifted a lot in the last couple of years. Externally, since the pandemic, I lost one business. I started like a few more. Startups are wonderful, but not easy. It's an adventure and a great. And it's a great story. But it's like when you get down to the nuts and books of it, it's like, quote, what are we doing? You know?
[21:21] Valerie: Yeah.
[21:22] Reed: I mean, you have profit and loss statements and balance sheets and employees and insurance and all the different things that you don't talk about on Instagram.
[21:31] Valerie: Right.
[21:32] Reed: And investors and bankers and expectations and everybody needs something. And, you know, being an entrepreneur is, is, generally comes with its discomforts and stressors. So juggling that with the loss of the sentient, being my dog, that was the closest to me by far in the last 15 years. Right. He's my family, my familiar companion. Every day we slept in the same week, you know, and, I mean, he took me on walks every day. I didn't take Kendall logs, you know, and so my routine, everything is just like, whoa. Like he saw me through the death of my grandparents divorce, you know, highs and lows, the loss of my business, the pandemic, all of these things. It's been me and Wolfie. And so I haven't experienced, like, grief isn't great teacher, Liefeld Moss. And that's, I went to an AA meeting with some friends for the first time a couple weeks ago because I'd never, I've, I've heard of it, I've read about it, but I'd never gone to, like, see how it operates. Yeah. And so they're all talking about rock bottom. I've never experienced the type of rock bottom that would bring someone to aa. I mean, I enjoy my drinks and I've had my times. I'm a psychonaut. I love psychedelics, and I definitely abused those substances in my life before, but I've always also just had a solid handle and a healthy relationship for the most part, with drugs, alcohol, all those things. A lot of my friends that I grew up with have not had healthy relationships. And so I wanted to, like, understand the technology in twelve steps. And I'm actually going to read a little bit more. And I think it's a very interesting psychological technology. I want to understand. I've had, I have a lot of friends that, that has helped. Yeah. Right. And I like to understand all of the different techniques and methods out there. That's one that I've never, I never studied. So I was there and they're all talking about rock bottom, rock bottom. I'm like, I don't think I've experienced it quite like that. I don't want to. I don't think I need to. I suffer. I don't, you know, I don't like to talk about it, because every, like Bob Marley said, every man thinks that his birdie is the heaviest. And I assume, you know, having spent 15 years in the cupboard world and having grown up and seeing people who really suffer, right, who don't have a pot to **** in, I know we're desperate. I don't like to. I feel like my suffering is best told through art, because I'm very grateful for all of the opportunities in the community. And, you know, everything that I've been able to rely on, ancestrals, parents, friends, teachers, that, like, really, what do I have to complain about? Does that make sense? It does, but I still own my sufferings. And, for example, like, it may sound silly to some people who never had a dog, but the loss of my dog, it's the shattering of a universe. And the pain and loss that I walk away is really intense. And I'm at a place right now in my life where I'm more. I'm, I'm actually struggling to work with that energy. It's become. It's, it's, it's a difficult. Grieving is, no matter who you are or where you live or where you come from, grieving and loss is an unavoidable, like, teacher. It's a teacher in life. Yeah.
[25:44] Valerie: I think one thing to really understand is that the greatest suffering you will ever experience is the one this year is the one that you own. It's the one that you have. You will never have another person's burden. And there are so many people in this world and so many ways to experience the world.
[26:06] Reed: It's, like, hard.
[26:07] Valerie: I feel like it's actually hard to compare.
[26:11] Reed: Yeah.
[26:12] Valerie: Because at the end of the day, it is an internal experience.
[26:16] Reed: Well, I mean, there's different types of suffering.
[26:19] Valerie: Well, there's pain.
[26:20] Reed: There's physical suffering, emotional suffering, mental suffering, spiritual suffering. Yeah, yeah. Physical pain. It's hard to compare. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to compare. But I've certainly, I've traveled the world. I've had the blessing of being able to travel the world a lot. And in a conventional way, in a physical way, there's a lot of people that suffer more than I do in it. Just like a conventional, like, you can't deny it. And also, there's a lot of people that I feel like I suffer more there. And, yeah, I think comparing detract, no matter what comparing is going to detract from compassion. And if compassion is important to you, then, then comparison doesn't have much of a place in that relationship with the world. And I. For me, compassion is important. Yeah. Having compassion, very important. Yeah. Considering others before, at least maybe not before. I consider myself before or after time has nothing to do with it. Just remembering to consider others and that I don't necessarily know what they're going through or how they're suffering, you know, and respecting that. I mean, it's the first noble truth of Buddha first. Yeah. That everyone that lives is going to experience self awakening. I think it's important to remember that and also to, like, there's an opportunity there. I think that we're all going to suffer and we could suffer intentionally or consciously or unintentionally, you know, when we choose. When we choose suffering or greater purpose. I mean, going back to just the metaphor of movement and exercise. Yeah. And you choose to suffer in that way because there will be suffering through long periods of practice. And there's something on the other side of that that's really amazing. You know, feeling healthy, feeling endorphins, feeling like you're at home and your physical body, feeling like you could move in any direction.
[28:28] Valerie: That's empowerment.
[28:29] Reed: It's empowerment. Yeah. So, I mean, for me, I have to remember that, like, this place, human eon, which is place to practice breath work, meditation, movement contrast therapy, which is called exposure, and any technique for the elevation of causes. Five parts that right now I'm trying to run it as a business. I'm trying to make it a viable business and update the city and the politics, the money and the battle that actually it's safe for me to practice. And that that's like. I don't think that it's a cure to my grief. I don't think that it can cure it or to. I don't think that it can cure those practices, can cure, you know, old traumas or old pain, but I think that it can put us in a state to where we can work with that energy that we carry and work with the pain and the suffering, whether it's emotional. I mean, it can definitely cure some physical ailments.
[29:34] Valerie: Yeah.
[29:35] Reed: Just going in ice water every day can cure some physical, certain physical ailments. I don't think it's a cure all, but I think that it can do a lot for the body. Yeah. But when it comes to grieving and when it comes to the inner pain that we all take to some degree, whether it's the loss of a loved one or a difficult upbringing or whatever it might be, these practices that I have to remember to do every day, no matter how we're feeling, to some degree, cultivate states where we are free enough to work with the pain or the suffering that we're carrying in a more conscious way, I would say definitely.
[30:16] Valerie: For me, that has been true.
[30:18] Reed: Yeah.
[30:18] Valerie: Coming here and doing the ice bath in the morning, because I suffer from a lot of anxiety and low self esteem, self doubt, and I'm trying to do some big things. And, you know, those types of beliefs can really get in the way of my day to day functioning. And this is a really good reset to. There's just a clearing. It doesn't mean that I don't feel bad about myself sometimes. It just means that the baseline for me is elevated, and I can. There's a way of operating. I can access words like, I don't have to be bogged down by my own stories. If I can reset my nervous system a little bit each day.
[31:04] Reed: Yeah.
[31:05] Valerie: Yeah.
[31:06] Reed: I think that when we're in states of physical suffering, the blood is a little acidic. We're carrying a little extra lactate, lactic acid, CO2 in the body. When the body is not free to move in different directions because of block training, movement and injury and whatever, when we're in physical suffering with carrying, wearing that type of pain, it's very difficult to tell ourselves in our psyche, in our subconscious, any other story other than suffering. When you go into the room within your mind, when you're in a suffering state, you hear this ticker tick or this broken record of old stories that are sad, painful *** stories that everybody has. But when you shift your chemistry, it's so simple, because nature has so many of the ways that we can just naturally shift our chemistry. Then there's a different hormonal cocktail, different hormonal matrix. The nervous system is not stuck in just some low lying, sympathetic, butterflied state. The cytokine storms or the small amounts of cytokines and cortisol and the stress hormones and the inflammatory responses are down regulated. In that state, we can start to choose what story we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves a different story.
[32:38] Valerie: Yeah.
[32:39] Reed: You know, we literally choose a different lens in that moment, right, to experience the world and our inner world, the moment. And I think from there, from that state, we can choose the level of consciousness that we want to reside in. And there's a story that comes with that. There's a story that we tell ourselves with every state of consciousness that we experience. If you listen in, in any moment, there is some story that we are telling ourselves about the world and about our past, about our future. You know what I mean?
[33:21] Valerie: Yeah.
[33:22] Reed: And, like, it's when you first get to sit down to meditate, and it's. You're uncomfortable and you're moving, and your mind won't stop thinking. You can't concentrate. If you listen in, in that moment, if you observe deep enough, you'll. You'll hear a story. And at the end of your meditation, after your breath work, after you've done all the things and you've experienced, like, some freedom from it. In concentration absorption states, there's, like, a different story that's happening. Does that make sense?
[33:47] Valerie: Oh, absolutely. It sounds to me on day to day basis, because I do meditate and I do these things.
[33:52] Reed: Right. Yeah.
[33:53] Valerie: And it's cultivating the awareness is the important thing, because otherwise, you. You would just default to your default. Yeah.
[34:02] Reed: Your default story.
[34:03] Valerie: Yeah. The one that runs your entire life most of the time.
[34:06] Reed: Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the stories, I think the program is so much of it, and I don't think that we can just, like, like, stronger on the story and change it, like, through force. It doesn't work that way. I think effort, it takes effort. It takes continuity, practice. But like you said, the core of it is being aware of it. It's like quantum science has proven that when, that particles react differently when they're being observed in an experiment, consciousness awareness changes things. Just being aware of something changes things. We may not know exactly how or why. Right. I think science and spirituality will converge at that question at some point, but certainly through continuity of observation, self observation, continuity of awareness changes everything and gives us a. It opens a door to a higher level of consciousness or to a deeper state of one being. Yeah.
[35:21] Valerie: All right. So I want to ask, to wrap up this conversation, I want to ask because part of what I feel like you are trying to do, especially with human aon, is to encourage an environment where we do cultivate awareness so that we can start to shift the collective consciousness, which is a part of what I also am trying to do with everything that I do with Phoenix and on that. And it's proving to be, you know, it's a challenge, huge undertaking because of this. It's the internal dialogue that, at the end of the day, is up to the one person to change. Right. We can't force another person to shift to their mind. So where do you, in your work? Where is your starting point in helping someone do that? What conditions are you creating?
[36:22] Reed: Yeah. So first thing I have to do to myself, and that just that, I notice, influences the anti around me. I'm not always there, I struggle. But this place, having this environment definitely contributes to cultivating a community where people could be inspired to practice and then obviously sharing the practices with people without definite believe in forcing people at all. I think it's just like you create the environment, you share the practices and try to do it in a way and do it in a language that is attractive to people and inviting and is clear and simple. I think breath work is a great way to really introduce people to it because if you do, if you lead the breath work correctly, then on the first practice people can experience a lot of relief. When your blood goes alkaline from mild respiratory alkalosis and you have shifted your nervous system into a literal flow state somewhere between parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. Yeah, somewhere in the. I think in polyvagal theory they call it the dorsal vagal. I don't remember.
[37:47] Valerie: I'd have to go back to my notes.
[37:48] Reed: But when people experience that chemical state naturally, right, I mean they're high on their own supply, that will not affects to say, yeah, and it's very inspiring to experience that, even if it's just for a couple hours. I like to give people breath work as the gateway into that because you can't really deny that feeling, you know. And it's easy to get there through breathwork, through breathing air is very easy, you know, like the old elements theory. Air, fire, water, air is very like easy, but it gets everywhere. It's very similar to space. It's not space, it fills space, but it's very subtle and very powerful. We sustain ourselves on it. And when you shift the way that, you know, when you shift the way you eat over time, over a couple weeks or whatever, if you've really radically changed your diet, starting a minute, fasting, whatever you, whatever you do or start eating like **** for just a couple weeks, you're going to experience a very, you're going to have a very different experience of the world, right?
[38:55] Valerie: Yeah.
[38:56] Reed: We nourish ourselves two, three times a day unless you stack right with food. Air is nourishing ourselves all the time. You could go without food for weeks, without water for days. Air, you can't go without air for minutes before you expire. Yes. And alone, when you change, even if just for a few hundred breaths, the way that you and we change, the way you nourish your body and the way you nourish your psyche, your state changes rapidly. The only thing most subtle in air when it comes to nourishment are impressions. So three types of nourishment for the human being. Yeah. Food and water is the most dense, and it takes the most time to break down and digest it. Right. Air is the second. It's just. It's less dense, obviously. Thank. And food, we nourish ourselves on it constantly. 20,000, 25,000 baths a day. More subtle, less dense than air. The most subtle form of nourishment is the type of nourishment that we receive through our five senses, light and sound. And it is constantly impressing itself upon our psyches to affect senses, even while we're sleeping. From moment to moment, we don't go for one moment without impressions, and that's another form of nourishment. So the environment that we're in, anything that we experience, smell, taste, touch, see, hear, is going to shift our mistake whether we like it or not. Turn on a heavy metal album, see how it makes you feel. The hip hop album. See how it makes you feel. Classical music. See how it makes you feel. Papa music, see how it makes. That's just one type of impression, right? Change your entire environment and you're in a completely different environment. Your psyche is nourishing itself off of different impressions, and that influences your psychological state. Impressions are food. So when you're, like, scrolling all day, you know, that's good. That's one type of nourishment. Yeah. When you're in, like, a temple space, like, human era, it's a different type of nurture. I'm on a nice tangent, but a great way to introduce people to other states of consciousness. I'd like to say higher states of consciousness, but we could just say states of consciousness that seem to have with it, like more well being, less suffering, more inspiration, more deeper connection, deeper integration. I think that I don't talk like, I don't teach or, like, offer workshops or advice when it comes to diet. I think there's a lot of people that are better at that than I. I mean, I barely know what works for me. I also like to enjoy myself in food as well. But that's very important, though, and that will change your life if you change the way you eat, change the way you breathe. Right. It will also greatly change your life. Learn how to breathe your nervous system into different states for different reasons and change your mind. And then when you understand how impressions and your environment and the people that you're around and the type of art that you consume shifts will shift your psyche, your psychological state, rapidly. Right. It's like it is.
[42:26] Valerie: And it's not really tangent because that's exactly what I teach at Ayurveda as well, is there, it's diet, lifestyle, five sense therapies, and there's a reason for that. And then we have the yoga Carnegie and whatever. What else, you know, but it's, it's very true, is that everything that we take in is going to shape us, which is why there's, there is you at the core, but you, as soon as you're conceived in this universe, are subject to, and there's no separation, really.
[43:02] Reed: And we mimic the environment that we're in and people all around, whether we like it or not. You know, like memetics, you know, we, our psyches mirror our environments and it's, you know, it's important to, like, consider that when we choose who we're allowed, where we go, what we do, because everything deposits itself in our psyches and in ourselves, in our cells carry the memory of our experiences, our genes. Epigenetics carries the memories of our parents and our ancestors, and all of the impressions and all of their memories and all of their experiences get deposited into our genetic code. I think that we can free ourselves from, I mean, science and the studies of epigenetics, like we can turn on and off different genes, right?
[43:50] Valerie: Yeah.
[43:51] Reed: It takes work, though.
[43:52] Valerie: Oh, absolutely.
[43:53] Reed: And we get lucky or anything. It takes a while. I think it really takes some effort and be able to be an intention, right? Yeah.
[44:01] Valerie: So let's wrap up on here. If you could speak to, speak directly to the person that you want to address with your work, what would you say to them now?
[44:19] Reed: The person that I would like to address, like through human ear, through human.
[44:23] Valerie: In what is a message you want them to hear?
[44:28] Reed: That most of our ailments and most of our suffering can be addressed by consistent, simple, feel good practices that come from ancestral traditions all around the world. Ancient ancestral traditions, very simple, that come built into the human machine like breathing, movement, stillness, hot and cold, consciousness, awareness. Those practices which have been studied by modern scientists for the last couple decades that have been verified without a bunch of, like, mysticizing, without a bunch of like, you know, making things more than what they are.
[45:10] Valerie: You.
[45:10] Reed: Yeah. Which if that's what people want to do, that's cool, but that's not what I'm doing. Right. I try to keep things in a very simple language. We can do very simple practices that are fun and that feel good by ourselves or in groups that can address a lot of the ailments that face us today, autoimmune disorders, depression, anxiety, whatever it might be, you know, weakening, insistence, weak bodies. Right. And I think it's okay to ebb and flow. I think it's all right to, like, a lot of people get down on themselves for where they're at. It's natural. Yeah, it's. It's natural. Especially, like, in this strange, disconnected, you know, society that we find ourselves in. It's absurd. We live in an absurd world of straight lines and strange hierarchies and weird laws and weird politics and weird stories that get manipulated by media vultures and business interests to pit people against each other. And the stories don't even make sense. Some of them make sense. You know, oppression, we should not tolerate, and that's happening today. We shouldn't tolerate genocide. We shouldn't. There are things that we should not tolerate, but, like, the inability for people to communicate right now nonviolently. You know, there's, like, physical violence, but there's also that violence just in communication.
[46:39] Valerie: Oh, absolutely.
[46:40] Reed: Making people get defensive, playing with mind games, and it's, like, really absurd. And we don't have to participate in that. We can participate in a different form of dialogue with ourselves and with others, but not if we're, like, spinning on a broken record in a loop, in an angry, suffering loop. We have to free ourselves from that first, at least for a moment.
[47:08] Valerie: Yeah.
[47:08] Reed: So I think that shocking the body through breathing, shocking the body through cold and detoxing, through sauna and sitting in stillness till it hurts, and then past the pain, moving for long periods of time, exercise. These are, like, basics. Spending community time with just the people you may or may not know who are doing the same things without a framework of, like, people telling you what to believe or what to think. Like, I don't really tolerate that here. I may share my beliefs about the universe, but I certainly don't expect or want anyone to take it on just because that's my experience. That's silly to me. I think that we should share things with each other that we have used to feel better and to feel higher stakes of consciousness and clarity and integration. And if they work for your friends, cool. And if they don't? Cool. Everybody has a different temperament. We don't take all the same medicine. We don't all have the same diet. We don't fall in love with the same person. We all have our own individual lives to live. So **** what someone else thinks.
[48:15] Valerie: Yeah.
[48:16] Reed: You know, let's figure out what works. To feel better in the moment and to feel connected. And then it's choose your own adventure story. You know what I mean?
[48:26] Valerie: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That's perfectly said. We could probably talk on and on, but we'll wrap it up today. I'll probably have to interview you again at some.
[48:37] Reed: Sure. Anytime. Yeah. It's a pleasure.
[48:39] Valerie: Thank you, Reed.
[48:40] Reed: Pleasure. Thank you for. For having me on the show.
