#89 Unlocking Secrets of Graceful Aging: How to Breathe, Eat, Sleep, Exercise – Melvin Hart

Today we have a conversation with Melvin Hart about holistic well-being, delving into the often-neglected realm of physical health. Let’s explore the crucial aspects of food, breathing techniques, and the underestimated importance of quality sleep. In a world focused on anti-aging trends, Melvin shares insights on aging gracefully and the interconnectedness of physical, mental, and spiritual wellness. Discover practical tips and personalized approaches to nourish your body and mind for optimal vitality.

Discussion Topics: Unlocking Secrets of Graceful Aging

• Is your physical well-being only about your looks?
• Which type of diet can help with your physical well-being?
• Don’t jump into the trend bandwagon – do your own research
• Be conscious of how you’re breathing
• A breathing technique for proper eating & digesting
• Is breathwork dangerous for your body?
• A lack of proper sleep is destroying your body
• Gym may not be for everybody – but everybody has to move
• Closing

Transcript: Unlocking Secrets of Graceful Aging

Yana Fry: Welcome to Timeless Teachings, everyone. Thank you for coming, Melvin. I’m truly looking forward to our conversation today.

Melvin Hart: Thank you for the invite.

Yana Fry: Today the overall umbrella, what we’re going to talk about is physical well being. And I just want to elaborate a little bit for our audience. Why did we choose this particular topic?

There’s so much conversation about mental health and emotional wellness, especially since 2020. people are becoming more aware of the importance of that and they have been programs, speakers, even in the companies, we can see how companies are just pouring more and more money into that which is again. Wonderful to see. And at the same time, this is a very important part, which I feel has not been talked about enough and it is physical well being. So our physical body, our vessel that we were born into.

And so I, you are one of those people who have been experimenting with longevity and anti ageing and vitality and Capping and tapping into the capacity of a physical body for many years now, and you also guide people to do that. So I’m just very curious how this conversation is going to unfold.

So when we talk about physical well being, I think it comes to most people’s minds would be things like food, sleep, exercise, how do you look, right? Do you look your age or do you look younger than your age?

Is your physical well-being only about your looks?

Melvin Hart: Right.

Yana Fry: So what are your thoughts on that?

Melvin Hart: I think you really hit on a major note that I see is something that’s really endemic within the last 20 years. that people are obsessed and have become obsessed with looking young.

I was speaking yesterday to somebody and they’re just turning 40 and they were like, I love it. I love turning 40. And I was like, like I’m good at 44. And for me and for them and for most people that I work with and speak with, it’s not necessarily about anti-aging. It’s about ageing gracefully.

Being able to embrace that aspect of us ageing and me getting graze in my beard and certain physiological changes and shifts that I go through as more of a coming of age and a maturation of my body.

Now my awareness of my body is directly correlated to how I treat myself. And for me, physical wellness is right in alignment with mental wellness, spiritual or energetic wellness, or whatever else. It’s not separate fields of awareness of yourself, it’s one unified field and it’s up to us as the operator of the avatar to actually take advantage of accountability and responsibility for how we treat ourselves and how we really honour ourselves and you hit on three major components of overall wellness when you speak on diet, you speak on movement or physical exercise, and we speak on sleep.

There’s another aspect that is only coming more into vogue and into the mainstream awareness, but it’s breathing. It’s more how you breathe and just how you conduct your body. It’s more something that’s done consistently, not taking the 15 minutes a day or the half an hour a day to practise a quote unquote breathwork session. Breathing?

Yana Fry: And we’re going to dive into this today, right? So I feel it’s important that we dive into each of those components. So maybe let’s start with food because that sort of seems to be, everyone can relate to this when we talk about diet. So let’s just start and just dive deep and we go to the next.

Which type of diet can help with your physical well-being?

Yana Fry: So there’s different philosophies surrounding diets. We have vegans, vegetarians, pesco vegetarians, carnivores, omnivores, herbivores, all of these different kinds of people and different philosophies attached to food and what we put into our bodies. But the baseline thing that I tell all of my clients and people that I work with is first, everything is organic.

Melvin Hart: Everything is organic. Very few, if not none, nothing out of a can or a box or a bag.

Yana Fry: Grow your own food, basically, if you can.

Melvin Hart: Or get in touch with CSAs and farms and try to get it directly from the source. And if not, we have Whole Foods, we have many other places where we can get real organic old school food. So first off, all organic. The Second thing is sugar and sugar is a very interesting compound because it’s something that’s like interwoven into our diets.

Yana Fry: Into everything, pretty much, these days.

Melvin Hart: Exactly because of industry, right? But because sugar, and white sugar in particular, is in most of the things that we take in, it’s just a given now. So what I try to show people is, look at the labels and look at the different kinds of sugars and look at the suffixes of words, right?

Dextrose, Maltose, Fructose, OSE. All of those are molecules of different sugars. Now, naturally, occurring sugar is good for us, right? From fruits, from vegetables, those kinds of things. So I try to show people to just exercise a little bit more awareness into what they’re putting into their body. And also, how they feel, what is the quality of their thoughts when they’re finished eating? Are they sluggish? Are they mentally slow? Or do you feel like, oh, I feel good. I feel strong. I still feel clear and sharp. I’m not foggy or tired or lazy thinking.

Yana Fry: Bloating after eating without having a distended stomach, let’s say like we could eat a lot of food and just be full, but there’s a different feeling that we have when we’re bloated. And when we’re bloated, what happens is that we have microfibers in our intestines, they’re called cilia, and they help through peristalsis to move the food along.

Melvin Hart: And they also absorb the nutrients. But when we become bloated, the cilia become inflamed. And we stop absorbing any nutrients and that’s when we have digestive issues, acid reflux, diarrhoea, constipation, all of those things because we’ve eaten something essentially that we’re allergic to or sensitive to at the very least.

So what I try to have people do is be very mindful when they’re eating exactly how they’re feeling. Now there’s a lot of different philosophies, of course, surrounding food. You have lectins. Or the plant paradox by Dr. Stephen Gundry, when he speaks about lectins being present in vegetables.

And those lectins are a naturally occurring defence mechanism for the plant, since everything on the planet is designed to proliferate. So once the plants let off lectins, or those kinds of proteins, into our system, we no longer digest them. And it acts as some kind of fibre, but more often than not, we end up feeling bloated and slow mentally and foggy in our brain because we’re not getting the right minerals and nutrients into our body.

Yana Fry: So what do we do? Because I know it’s a little bit similar and I might be mistaken here, but it is at this theatre that I know it’s about kosher food. So at least what I heard, especially kosher meat, the main difference between sort of non kosher and kosher meat, is that when the animal is killed in the kosher meat, then it’s done, in a more humane way.

So I’m not sure how exactly it is done, whether it is bled slowly, which sounds probably horrible, but the way how it is approached, that they try as much as they can not to create fear. In the animal who is dying, because when the animal is dying and feeling fear, it’s the same thing. It’s producing all of those chemicals that are actually poison for our body.

There are so many nuances to this. From your physical body to your blood type to your mental state to your age to everything else in your body so it’s really much deeper conversation for each person and it’s a personal choice But we’re just talking about what happens when you eat different types of food, right?

So again if for meat we know but then for plants, like you approach a carrot in your garden and you try to pull it out and the carrot gets scared and then you can’t eat it. So what do you do?

Melvin Hart: right. So humans have this very interesting tendency to anthropomorphize everything. And we believe that a plant or something that is seemingly an inanimate object, even though we know that it’s alive, experiences its own reality from a sense of sentience, very similar to a human. And that’s not necessarily the case.

But plants let off their own sense to notify other plants in the area that something’s wrong. It’s just like when we cut grass. The smell of the cut grass that we smell, the other plants pick up on those terpenes and monoterpenes and everything else, the oils and stuff in the air. And they react accordingly through more of a natural, not necessarily neocortex stuff like a human. But in its own way to produce certain things as a defence mechanism.

Yana Fry: When it comes to me working with people and speaking to them about diets, there’s a few things I like to monitor. First, we look at blood work and all the seemingly three dimensional stuff, right?

Melvin Hart: Their blood type, their blood work. But I also look at what their physical demand is, right? They call the Queen’s Guards in England beef eaters. for a reason, right? Because they feed them beef because it’s thought that eating meat and especially more red meat and rarer meat makes us more intense.

Yana Fry: wow.

Melvin Hart: In India, the old school yogis in India who are vegetarians and everything else, their energy, their attitude, everything else about them down to their musculature and sinew is a little bit smoother and lighter.

When we look at genetics, Certain ethnicities have a predisposition to not be able to absorb certain things. I think only northern Europeans can digest dairy and milk products.

Very simply there’s no issues at all, while most other people suffer from some kind of digestive distress as a result of it. When we look at, when I speak to people about their diets and those kinds of things, I look at performance. What they’re trying to do with their bodies. What’s their body composition?

Are they trying to build muscle and lose fat? Or gain weight? Or whatever it is. So we look at, we look towards goals. And then we also look at sensitivities in general, and blood types. I’m a negative blood type for whatever crazy reason.

Maybe it’s my Indian genetics, but I’m a negative blood type, so I’m allergic to a lot of foods, a lot of different things.

So we need to be aware of each person’s own physiology, because like you said before, diet, supplementation, those things are highly individualised. And that stretches far beyond just a person’s philosophy. It’s actually down to physiology.

Yana Fry: Exactly, and I think it’s very important to understand and I just want to say it once again because I feel it is so important When we choose our diet It’s important that we consult people who understand all of those things, or at least do your own research. And I think us as individuals just have to keep it in mind. And exercise our, common sense

We go and learn from people, especially with food, and do not rush in adopting someone else’s lifestyle. And you really have to, like, you have to analyse and check all kinds of other things about this person because food is just one of the aspects. Just wanted to add that.

Don’t jump into the trend bandwagon – do your own research

Melvin Hart: Yeah, for sure. There’s the bandwagon mentality where I believe that the people sometimes who have the voice to actually influence people’s food choices know just enough information to perpetuate their own agenda and philosophy and to just enough information to make themselves dangerous. They don’t bring the person on a further journey to say, do your own research, because honestly, the same research or quote unquote research that the people who have sway over the masses do is on Instagram, YouTube, rumble, television. They’re not reading like the PubMed articles or learning exactly how the body works, what mitochondria actually do.

THey don’t know the deeper scientific aspects of it as well. So I try to lead people to their own resources to study the information and to make an educated decision based upon not only their philosophy, but also their physiology and goals.

Yana Fry: Exactly. Basically, don’t trust anyone, question everything, do your own research and whatever is fashionable these days and society constantly goes through those trends in food and don’t fall for that. So you need to know your body and you need to know what is good for you. And this is where the mental practices come in when you need to be mentally strong enough not to give in to the social propaganda, especially if everyone around you is doing it.

You really need to know what is good for you and stay true to that. So we in a way covered that next one you were saying sleep exercise and breathing. So let’s choose one, which one are we going to go next to? What do you fancy?

Melvin Hart: Okay breathing.

Yana Fry: Breathing. Okay. Let’s talk about breathing.

Be conscious of how you’re breathing

Yana Fry: Breathing is a very interesting idea, right? Because breathing is part of our autonomic nervous system. Our body’s going to breathe whether we are conscious of it or not.

Melvin Hart: That’s what it’s designed to do. So it’s one of the few functions that our conscious mind can become aware of and work with. It can’t control it a hundred percent, but we could definitely, through our conscious mind, work with the unconscious activities within our body. And breathing, especially in this day and age, you’ll notice it with people, just through their tone of voice, that they are breathing consistently through their mouth.

So when we are breathing through our mouths consistently, what happens is Our blood pressure changes. It increases, right? Because it’s telling our body that we need to be ready for some kind of danger or a threat, and we need to be in a reactive state. Because generally you have the two states of being. You have rest and digest, and you have the reactive mode.

And now there’s time for us to actually hyperventilate and breathe through our mouths, and those are in intense, dangerous situations when we need to recruit high amounts of adrenaline to escape a burning building or to do something like that.

But generally, we should be breathing through our noses. And when we’re not, what’s happening is that all those other autonomic systems or autonomic system functions are heightened. So we’re not digesting our food properly. Our blood isn’t circulating through our body properly. Our muscle tension, our posture, our vision, our thoughts, all of those things are affected just by not getting enough oxygen into the body. Or, more importantly, the oxygen and CO2 levels adjusting them.

Melvin Hart: But what we can do is teach our body and teach our mind to interact with our breathe and that function. On an even level to reassure our bodies and ourselves in the space that we’re in, that we are calm, that we are at peace, that it’s okay to let our food digest. We don’t need to be alert and anxious and tense and ready for action because that’s not necessary for us.

Yana Fry: I heard from several yogis, actually, that even things like meditation, which also very often involves a calm breathing through the nose, that if you do it, let’s say after food, after you ate something, it could create indigestion.

Because you slow down the processes in your body, including in your digestive system. And that’s actually one of the reasons why they say they meditate on an empty stomach. Don’t try to meditate, after food. Let your blood and your energy go for digestion. So what do you think about that?

Melvin Hart: Yeah, I agree. 100 percent with that. And it’s finding that happy point because I’m sure there’s times that you’ve sat down to meditate and you were starving.

A breathing technique for proper eating & digesting

Yana Fry: And one of the techniques that I actually teach people and my clients that I work with is that there is a digestive breathe and there’s an eating breathe and there’s a cadence to our eating.

Melvin Hart: So if you and I sat down for lunch. And our foods in front of us before I pick up my fork or spoon or whatever else. I take six clear breaths.

Yana Fry: How long? Do you count like to four to eight or just conscious

Melvin Hart: Yeah, I try to do between four and five,

Yana Fry: Okay.

Melvin Hart: Four on the inhale, four on the exhale through my nose with my tongue on the roof of my mouth, slightly pressing against my front teeth.

Melvin Hart: for every spoonful of food that I have and that I’m chewing, I have three even breaths for each mouthful of food.

Yana Fry: Okay, let me get it right. So I do six breaths before I start my food and then I take, let’s say, the first spoon and I put the food in my mouth. And while I’m chewing, I’m calmly taking three full in and outs from my nose.

Melvin Hart: Exactly. Exactly. And the three is arbitrary, but what I’ve found is that within the time that it takes you to take three full even breaths, You’ve chewed your food enough as well to produce the digestive enzymes and to macerate it enough that you can actually digest it easier.

Yana Fry: Okay, so this is the eating breathing. So then you said there is also after food, digestive breathing.

Melvin Hart: So with the digestive breathing, if I’m bloated after I eat something that I may have been sensitive to or whatever else, that’s when I step into it, actually a little bit more forceful breathing and I’m churning my stomach muscles by using my diaphragm more and more. So my, my bloat breath, let’s say, or to help with the digestive. Aspect of it is more of a forceful inhalation and a forceful exhalation all through my nose. Still.

Yana Fry: Do you use your abdominal muscles for this or no, or just focusing on your nostril?

Melvin Hart: No I try to use my abdominal muscles without forcing the breathe like a if we were doing like a plank or doing like a colour, a Kabbalah body breathe or something

Yana Fry: It’s more of a 30 to 50 percent compression in those muscles in my transversus abdominis and in my diaphragm to promote peristalsis to help my body digest that food a little bit faster.

Melvin Hart: So is it inhalation, stomach in or out? Okay, so you inhale stomach out, you exhale stomach in, inhale stomach out, exhale stomach in again. And I guess it’s rooted in this very traditional yogic Kapalapati breathing technique. So just by resting your hands on your abdominal muscles, you create more of a mind, a mindful connection to that area and promotes more blood flow to that area, which in turn helps with the nutrient diffusion and all of that.

Yana Fry: Yes, there are some beautiful things. Thank you for sharing, Melvin. I’m gonna, I’m gonna ask a tricky question. So when we talk about breathing, there are things like what are now called breathworks and there are all kinds of different types of breathworks, right? And maybe if we talk about breathing, sometimes people might assume that we’re actually talking about breathwork. So what is your experience and understanding of the breath work? And particularly are there any dangers doing that? And if yes, then what people should pay attention to.

Is breathwork dangerous for your body?

Melvin Hart: Right. So breath work. I’m not the biggest proponent of breath work. I’m a huge proponent of breathing. Let’s say and eat a near death experience to get the drop of DMT and to stimulate all of those functions of the body. I’m against that.

I believe that it’s traumatising to a person who’s already traumatised because typically if a person is going into breath work, they’ve exhausted other remedies. And they’re trying to release some kind of trauma. And what happens, and this is more specific to like holotropic breathwork, or those kinds of breathings where we’re moving yourself into hyperventilation. What happens is that when you’re like, Oh, I saw all of these colours, and I felt my body shaking, and I started to release and cry.

That’s because your body thinks that it’s dying and what you’re doing is starving your body of oxygen and building up co2 that you’re producing a false death experience in your body and Traumatising yourself all over again in hopes of I don’t know releasing trauma when you’re doing those kinds of breathwork where what’s happening is that you’re building up CO2 because when people hyperventilate, it’s not necessarily about not getting enough air in your body.

It’s really about getting enough air exhalations. to adjust the oxygen and CO2 levels in your body. So when it comes to these breathwork sessions and people doing these things for a half an hour and they’re shaking and they’re crying and they’re screaming and all of those things, it can very well be a cathartic experience and I’m not negating that.

But what I am bringing awareness to is the trauma that you’re doing to your body by falsely inducing these fight, freeze, near death experience responses, because those responses are almost sacred responses of our body to where it trumps the brain and the mind and the body goes on to autopilot in order to survive.

So we stop digesting food. We stop all of the functions that keep normal baseline homeostatic operations in order and it puts us into this fight response.

It affects the things that we don’t really have conscious control of. So when we say we’ve been traumatised and we can’t remember this trauma or whatever else, there’s a very particular reason for that. Your body and your brain doesn’t want to remember it, so it stores it and hides it away, because if you had it in the forefront of your mind, it would further inhibit your ability to interact with the world from a baseline, level headed mindset.

You’d always be reacting to the world from a deficit, from a victim mode, or a traumatised mode, or a fear based mode. There are other breathwork practices, like when we’re doing yoga, right, and we do Ujjayi breathe breathing from the back of

Yana Fry: Huh.

Melvin Hart: That practice, in tandem with the movement, is designed to keep our body solid and safe.

Because when we do the Ujjayi breath, we’re contracting our transverse abdominis. which helps to support our spine so it doesn’t shift. Or we don’t herniate a disc or something else like that.That when we do the alternate nostril breathing,

Yana Fry: Huh.

Melvin Hart: That’s helping to stimulate our brain for focus and for clarity. Which in turn makes us calmer and more aware of our body. And those particular practices I’m all for because it’s for a specific purpose. It’s preparing us for movement. Or the Ujjayi breathe is movement in tandem with our breathing to build more of a unification of the mind and the body.

And more symmetry. But when we look at some of these breath work practices that even go on here in Bali, or… I See oh, get your breathwork certification from somebody else who did it. Those guys don’t even know baseline human biology and physiology. They don’t understand VO2 max, blood oxygenation levels, what optimal blood oxygenation is depending on your age and weight, all of those things.

They don’t understand that.

Because I’ve worked with many people who’ve contacted me after doing breathwork sessions with people. And I’ve helped guide them back into being more grounded and centred because they were jumpy and jittery and shaky and anxious and couldn’t think straight. And so I practices to them to help ground them back in after that.

Yana Fry: Yes, and probably the practices you introduced to them again are more from a traditional yogic school, I would assume, because also that, you know that I spent a lot of time, especially in Tibetan lineage with monks and lamas, and I lived in the monastery, and I I practised and also observed very closely practitioners, and it’s interesting, especially practices that require either intense physical movements, or intense level of breathing, which may be in a modern society, is called breathwork.

Actually, there are elements of those in a traditional school, but you get access to them only after you spend a year or two stabilising your mind, your emotions, and clearing the energy channels in your body. So no one, like in a traditional school, will actually… Just allow you to do that because how dangerous it could be

I just feel that, again, it’s important to question everything and exercise your just fair judgement about things and don’t Don’t fall for marketing.

Melvin Hart: Exactly.

Yana Fry: This is maybe the bottom line here.

Melvin Hart: Yeah. And I always say, learn how to ask the right questions.

Yana Fry: Exactly. Exactly.

Melvin Hart: it’s a very triggering question to a breathwork practitioner, like a person

Yana Fry: I know.

Melvin Hart: a workshop

Yana Fry: Sorry. Sorry guys.

Melvin Hart: And then when you do the research about the practices, it’s always, how does this affect me physiologically? What does this do to my body? What does it do to my blood pressure?

What does it do to my hormones? What’s actually happening inside this vessel? Because when they’re able to actually articulate an answer and explain to you exactly what’s going on, it builds a different sense of trust. Because now this is more information that you have to make a more informed decision to whether to engage or not.

Yana Fry: absolutely.

So we covered food, We talked, extensively and slightly provocatively about breathing. And so the next two you said would be let’s say either sleep or movement.

So where would you like to go?

A lack of proper sleep is destroying your body

Melvin Hart: Sleep.

Yana Fry: Okay. Let’s go to sleep.

Melvin Hart: Because I can tell you this with 100 percent honesty, Yana. If you had the option to either sleep or work out, you couldn’t do both. You either had to sleep or you had to work out.

Yana Fry: I would

Melvin Hart: go to sleep.

Yana Fry: would sleep.

Melvin Hart: Yes, because rest is very important for the body to reboot itself. And we need those hours of REM sleep and we need those hours of deep sleep in order for our hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenal axis to reboot itself. And in this day and age with blue light exposure, with more and more mental hygiene issues, poor diet, so we’re drinking more caffeine, eating more sugar and chasing this of this energy to keep working or doing whatever it is that we do, our sleep suffers. And as a result of our sleep suffering, we physically degenerate ourselves, right?

If we’re not getting enough sleep, our body is eating itself. It’s destroying ourselves. We’re creating more inflammatory responses, um, more oxidative stress, more toxins flowing through our body, more stress hormones and the inability to actually think clearly because we’re constantly running off of a deficit.

Yana Fry: Okay, sleep when we say enough. How do we know what is enough sleep? There are some common known numbers for adults.

But is this what it is? Or is the game based on the person? If I’m sleepy, it means I didn’t sleep enough.

Melvin Hart: Baseline you have Michael Bruce, who speaks about the different chronotypes, the bear, the wolf, the dolphin, those kinds of chronotypes, so people who only need 5 hours of sleep. while other people need 8 to 10 hours of sleep. That varies from person and chronotype, person to person, job, home environment, all of those things.

However, baseline, in another book called Sleep, Sugar, and Death, I believe is the title of

He explains that we need a baseline of about seven and a half hours.

Yana Fry: For an adult.

There is a difference at the time we go to sleep. So if we say that seven and a half hours, if you go to sleep again at 9pm your time and you sleep seven and a half hours, versus if you go at 3am and you sleep seven and a half hours, it’s actually not the same seven and a half hours.

Melvin Hart: No, you’re exactly right. It isn’t, because our circadian rhythm is off, because humans are designed to wake up when the sun rises, and to start shutting down and going to bed as the sun sets. That’s why they show, like studies show, this has been for years now, that people who work at night suffer from higher incidences of cancer and of early death and of other diseases and issues with the body.

Even if they get seven and a half hours during the day. Because in the daytime, we get our vitamin D. We produce other neurotransmitters and hormones just from the sunlight coming into our eyes. And Dr. Andrew Huberman speaks about getting outside as soon as possible from when you wake up. Just to get the sunlight and onto our skin and our body because that helps with the adenosine.

It helps to actually awaken our body in a natural kind of way. So for the people I work with when we work on their sleep hygiene and sleep routines and sleep schedules, I have one professional musician now who we started a wind down program at 10pm.

So at 10 o’clock, it’s a hard stop. If you’re watching a movie, hard stop, brush your teeth, take your book out, start doing these things, dim the lights at 8 p.

m. Even if you’re eating dinner, still turn the dimmer down, light a candle, those kinds of things to start adjusting our bodies. Because just with light alone, it adjusts our internal rhythm. That’s why we don’t turn the bright overhead lights on in the middle of the night when we go pee, right?

Yana Fry: Blue blocking glasses on right.

Melvin Hart: Help to block the blue light after you can’t wear the blue blockers all day because then we don’t produce the right kinds of neurotransmitters. But at nighttime, if you’re watching television in front of a screen, put the blue blockers on because that helps to adjust our body’s natural circadian rhythm to get back in tune with the planet.

We have departed far from our natural rhythm as humans in general and the way that we operate in this world. And it’s not like we can go back. Nobody wants to go back to caveman times. I love having the internet. I love having accessibility. I love having all of these options for pursuits and for things.

But there needs to be some accountability and balance that comes with that. So Now I’ve actually started to take my own medicine because I do take supplements at night time to help with sleep, ashwagandha, lemon balm, tart cherry juice for melatonin production, kidney health, all of those things.

And now I have a hard stop, again, to where when it’s time to go to bed, everything’s off, open up my book, and I read. And I read something that inspires something in me, a softness, an openness to start prepping my brain. For that kind of thing, if I am blessed with dreams that I would have dreams based upon philosophy or poetry or prose or something like that.

Yana Fry: Clearly you don’t read about murder cases or news around the world just before you go to sleep.

There are all of those people who say don’t explain, they don’t explain why but there’s Don’t touch your phone or your computer for the first half an hour or for the first hour. And I guess the biggest reason here is because of the blue screen.

So if the first thing you put in your face when you open your eyes is your phone, it’s not good for your sleep later that day.

Melvin Hart: No, it takes us from our natural state right and at times I do wake up and I get right on my phone because I have clients who are overseas who may have messaged me in the Middle of the night and I need to answer them but in a perfect world At least 30 minutes. Get up, go to the bathroom, drink your trace minerals or your salt, a little bit of salt water to get all those electrolytes things back into your system.

Don’t drink the coffee, don’t drink the green tea yet. Wait at least 90 minutes to 120 minutes so the adenosine dumps out of your body. Get outside, get into the sun a little bit. Get those things going. Because what happens also… When we wake up first thing in the morning and we get on our phone, we’re checking messages.

So we’re immediately outsourcing our mind space to perceived responsibilities, to other people, to the get up and go aspect of the world, and not necessarily taking at least a minute just to honour and express gratitude that you have another chance. You have another chance this morning, another chance today.

Yana Fry: You woke up.

Melvin Hart: And those little things, that little bit of gratitude just saying that Oh, I’m grateful that I woke up today, because there’s at least a million people who didn’t wake up this morning who would give, who would have given anything to have one more day. So have a little bit of gratitude and take that time to actually warm up your avatar and honour that honour your body.

I don’t expect everybody to be able to follow a schedule like how I do or because we design our lifestyles to suit who we are and what we want out of life. There’s people who have to get up, they have kids, they have these things. I get it. So what I try to do is to weave in a couple minutes here of just some kind of mindfulness practice to build that unity with yourself and to remember what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

Yana Fry: yes, the pauses. The pauses are so important and especially gratitude pauses. Absolutely. And I know the time just flies so quickly with you. So I still want to make sure we do talk about everything we’ve wanted to talk about. So let’s move to the Force pillow, right? So that’s what we can cover today.

So let’s go to the force pillow and that was movement. So let’s talk about movement.

Gym may not be for everybody – but everybody has to move

Melvin Hart: Okay, movement. Movement is a tricky component because whenever I used to say exercise. People hate that word.

Because the gym isn’t for everybody. I would love for everybody to lift weights, because it helps build bone density and strength and all of those things, but everybody doesn’t like it and that’s fine.

But everybody has to move. And it doesn’t have to look like you are in the gym. It could be you putting on music and dancing. It could be you taking the time to take the stairs instead of the elevator somewhere. pEople have those pedometers to where they count their 10, 000 steps a day. Do the 10, 000 steps and maybe do another 1, 000 more. for yourself. The movement component not only helps us to flush toxins out of our bodies, it also helps us on a deeper level to honour this human experience that we’re given. WE’re designed to run, jump, lift things up, dance, climb, all of those things.

So to use our bodies efficiently and effectively for ourselves. Take the time to walk on the beach, or to run, or to jump, or go to the gym, take a Pilates class, do yoga, dance, box, play catch, go for a walk in the park.

But you need to do something every single day. Especially when people talk about this whole anti-aging thing, right? Because people who can move freely and clearly and all of that at 80 and 90 years old will live longer than the 40, the 50 year old who doesn’t do anything. Because it’s about the quality of life.

So when it comes to movement, and like when I design programs for my clients and I work with people, I always, what do you like to do? What’s reasonable for you? Because if you went to the gym every day and lifted weights and did all that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. So clearly that’s unreasonable.

So I’m here to set you up for success. So now it’s Mel, you know what? I don’t have a gym membership. I don’t like going to the gym. I don’t like lifting weights. Cool. How about dancing? Yeah, I like to dance. Cool. Alright. Let’s create some playlists. Let’s create some 15 minute long playlists. And you just do that for 15 minutes, right?

Because one, dancing obviously starts to move around our blood and our toxins, but it also opens up our energetic pathways. If we study traditional Chinese medicine, right? And we’re stretching our arm, opening up the heart and the lungs and the large intestine meridians. It also helps us to become more in tune with our own energetic flow and our chakras in our body.

So when you’re doing like the Kundalini and the grind with the hips that are stirring and circulating in our root and our sacral chakras to bring that energy up and out. So dancing is a big one. I tell people to go hiking, going for a walk at sunset in their minds today. I was like, I’m going to get a baseball or a football or something because I’m right by the beach, and I’m going to throw the baseball or the football around because I like that we lose touch with those things that actually give us joy just for the sake of doing it. Because immediately now, like with people as we’ve gotten older, exercise and movement is almost like a punishment. It’s Oh, God, I got to go to the gym. All right, now I have to work out. And there’s this resentful energy coming from that.

Yana Fry: I had a client in Ubud. So I had to drive at 7: 30 in the morning to Ubud. Then drive back to Seminyak, which is about an hour and change, eat, and then get ready for the podcast. And as I was sitting outside, I was like, as tired as I am, and achy, I could work out, like I could do some jumping jacks or something, because for me, there’s an excitement, there’s That’s completing my self honouring and self care and what I do in a day.

Melvin Hart: I move every day, right? So it’s part of what makes me.

Yana Fry: Beautiful,

Melvin Hart: Yeah, when people start to attach a deeper meaning and purpose behind what they do, it’s like you charge it up with energy. So to bring it back to when you spoke about the food and saying yeah, sometimes these animals are slaughtered in a fashion that scares them.

Yeah, you’re right. And you are what you eat, right? But I don’t know sometimes how the animals were dispatched. I really don’t. But I know that every plate of food I have, I just don’t, as soon as it comes to me, I’m not like ah. I take a second, the same way when I work with people with plant medicine, I take a second to pray with the medicine.

And it’s not praying to a god, it’s just sending some kind of energy towards it to adjust the relationship and adjust the molecules of it. Masaru Emoto has studies that show what he did to water that translates into everything that comes in front of us. So even with the food, even with my movement, I send this directed energy towards it.

This is awesome. This cup of coffee is going to give me energy. It’s going to taste so good. It’s amazing. 

Closing

Yana Fry: But that’s what they talk about the placebo effect pretty much, right? This is so it’s some things are logical and very clear and we understand well, we should be doing that, but it’s also not the mechanical act of doing it, but meaning you are attached to this in your mind. And I would love the conversation that you and I are having today inspires people who are listening.

Not only to take action because you have shared Melvin’s great tips.

So my encouragement to everyone who is listening to us today, so please, at least, take one action in each area. So we talked today about food and nutrition, we talked about breathing, we talked about sleep and rest, and we talked about movement and exercises, right? So those four pillars, the basic pillars for physical well being.

So please, listen over again to this podcast, because Melvin… Shared a lot of information and maybe it’s not always easy for people to retain everything at once. So please really listen and then find those. Things that you can do with it. You can implement I strongly encourage you to do that. But then also the second part is you have to attach meaning in your mind because you have to tell yourself why you are doing this is what you said.

So when I eat this food, it gives me energy and it gives me health and it gives me everything. I want my body to be the same for all other aspects. Melvin. You have been amazing and I would love for us to record and now the episode and we want to talk about plant medicine and all kinds of other things, including your life story, which I feel deserves the episode itself.

So this is just the beginning. So thank you for showing up today on the Timeless Teachings podcast. We appreciate you. We love you. Thank you for your wisdom and to everyone who is listening to us, feel free to share this episode with friends. I feel it’s a very important conversation, especially about our physical health and our physical wellbeing.

And I just wish everyone to live as long as they want in their body in terms of the state of the mind and energy and vitality and health that you want to have. Take care of yourself guys. Bye.

Melvin Hart: Take care, guys.

Our Guest: Melvin Hart

Melvin Hart is a multifaceted healer and spiritual guide with a vast array of experience in consciousness development, shamanism, and integration. As a Neuromuscular Therapist, LMT, and CPT, Melvin combines his physical and spiritual knowledge to help people reach the apex of their being, bridging the gap between science and spirit.

Beyond his formal training, Melvin has mentored countless people in shamanism and is a co-founder of the Yin of Yang Academy. He creates courses about health and integrated wellness, sharing his unique perspective on how to achieve optimal mental, spiritual, and physical health.