#117 Ephraim Herschmann / Breath Work Experiences

0:01 All right, we are live. Cheers. Got my double espresso second video podcast like this kind of vibe over here going. I'm working now on a microphone, maybe a stand to put my phone and start upgrading quality of the podcast. Really, really interesting. I have a couple of things I wanted to talk about. Number one is why I'm doing a solo episode. And generally speaking, what's been going on. I know the podcast has been a little bit slower than it has been, you know, in the last year, I would say.

0:44 And that's pretty much because again, I've, I've talked about this, but I'm shifting my focus on getting guests that are more outside my circle. I'm not going to say more or less reputable, but more outside my circle, more outside the immediate group of people that I'm part of. And to really expand and to really grow and to really turn this into something that is bigger, more fun and just really, really, really great. So I've got a lot of people that I'm reaching out to. I'm doing a lot of more cold reaching out and you know, making our way got a couple of calls, got a couple introductions, got to keep on following up. Things have been a little crazy, you know, not complaining. It's all it's all amazing things to be what to be dealing with, but a lot of a lot of hands on participation required in my life at this point.

1:43 So I'm totally cool with it. I love it, but it just, it just, I have, I have to work on balancing better and now that I'm not focusing on necessarily putting out fresh content every single day or a bunch of times a week, rather than focusing on who I'm talking to and what that's going to be like. It's, I think we'll be seeing a little bit of a slower pace for now until I could really work a lot of people into the pipeline and then, you know, knock a bunch out. So yeah, there's, there's I guess two or three main things I wanted to talk about today. I wanted to start bringing up.

2:25 It's fun to do video. I don't usually do it. I got my kid this ball. And I know if you grew up with this or if it's like an early 90s, mid 90s, early 2000s thing to grow up with, but these are all like science balls. Reminds me of atoms. I feel like lying around. It's good to be hanging out in this. It's good to hang out in the house with a lot of creativity and a lot of things around to spark your, your creativity. You know, I forgot, you know, there was something about the, you know, having a little bit of a not necessarily messy because I think order is good, but something to having a lot of stuff around your house apparently is very good for your creativity because it just keeps your brain firing and creating associations between things that don't necessarily associate with one another. So I had, I went to my first breath work class. I've done breath different variations of breath work. I've done breath work to kind of find stillness and comfort, to be able to slow down what's going on in my life and to take that pace of responding to so many things that were calling me at one time and pulling me in all different directions that I needed to just settle down.

3:57 And breath work had definitely helped with that. And then I learned and then I came across Huberman's 10 and 20 minute non sleep, deep rest, respiratory breathing, an STR I think is what it's called. And that was amazing too. And that's also to kind of help re ground you, recenter you. And when you feel like your life is just all over the place and it's hard to keep track of everything and you feel like your head is just in a million different directions at one time that I from my experience, you can do as many times in the day as you want. You can do as many times in a row as you want. You can do it almost wherever you are pretty much, and it's an incredible tool.

4:41 But this type of breathing that I did was a little bit more about this was this was a little bit more psychedelic, a type of breath work exercise. And by that I mean, most of the breath work that I've done in the past had been a strong, had had a stronger emphasis on breathing in through your nose and breathing out through your mouth. Deep inhales, deep exhales. So, you know, and just kind of resetting yourself and letting the clean, new fresh air soak into your, I guess brain and into your body and into your lungs and just breathe out all the bad air and breathe out all the stale air. But this this type of exercise was different. This was mouth breathing specifically. So the way that the teacher had explained it was by breathing in through your gut and again through your chest and then out and do that for about 45 minutes to an hour straight. And I don't understand exactly how it works. I'm actually going to try to get some breath work professionals on the podcast and see if someone could explain that to me.

6:06 But my very, very limited understanding is that it has to do with actually depleting yourself of oxygen to a certain extent. And as a consequence, your fingers get a little crampy and they kind of tend to curl. You get pins and needles, you get a lot of very similar of this similar sensations to the type of sensations you get when you're taking psychedelics. And there is really a very tangible kind of like moment of take off, I guess you'd call it, where you're, you're in one place and then you end up in another. And this is actually, so I want, I wanted to kind of walk through the whole experience and kind of explain what happened and the benefits and what I was able to see and what I was able to kind of draw back into.

7:05 And I think it's really, I think it's really important. I think it's really cool. And I, it's definitely, you know, two thoughts coming out of the class. Number one was that was incredible. I got to do that again. And #2 was, this is definitely, absolutely not for everyone. And you know, I, I think it's true. I think it's not for everyone. So it's, it was on this ranch in, in, in Florida, in South Florida, big backyard, big, you know, you walk on the back and it's calm, it's quiet. It's a little warm, a little muggy. And in the backyard of this place there's a huge kind of gazebo, I guess gazebo type structure. And but I mean, it's way bigger than any gazebo. There's I mean, there's probably room for 50 people to walk around and fit in pretty comfortably. I'd say that the ceiling, you know, kind of it was triangular, right?

8:10 I guess had it was pointed kind of like a TB and that was probably 1520 feet in the air, maybe even more, maybe 25 feet. It was really tall and there were beautiful speakers and lights along the walls and everything was wood and and then there were sheets or mattresses rather on the floor. And and so you know, there was there's two parts to the class. Number one was kind of having honest open interactions with your walls down. And I think that that initial purpose, at least my experience of it, was to kind of prepare yourself mentally, prepare myself rather mentally for what was about to happen. So group of 20 people say 20 guys and walk around, get loose in the place, come familiar with the place, which I think is also important physically.

9:10 And then that kind of translates over into our head is to kind of feel comfortable with the space that we're in and to kind of actually walk around, get to place ourselves, understand where we are, understand what what what you know, the the setting and what the floor feels like. I was, I was, I personally went barefoot, actually, I took off my shoes and and then it was basically look around, don't speak, just make eye contact and show people that you're, that you're friendly and that you're not an enemy. And so you're walking around and you're looking at people and you're kind of giving them head nods or smiles. If they smile at you or you can tell it's someone's eyes, whether they're looking like they want to, you know, smile and talk or whether they feel like they're just in their head and want to do their own thing. And then he made a stop and look at a person that would the instructor rather made a stop.

10:01 Look at a person next to us and speak honestly, you know, you switch off who's speaking. One happy childhood memory that you have and one burden of responsibility that's weighing on you. And I immediately, you know, I mean, So what I've learned, especially over the course of the many years of creative writing that I've been doing and the course of the, you know, lyrics and poetry and, and even the psychedelics that I've done, one thing that I've noticed and one thing that I've learned about is that a lot of times it's really fun to, and it's really healthy and important, especially to, especially to understand yourself and create and to be creative, to kind of learn how to follow a train of thought rather than think it's weird and try to pull back from it. See where it goes, see why you're thinking, what you're thinking, articulate maybe what it could be, even if you're not 100% sure, right.

11:00 So for example, my happy memory that came up was a memory of and I was probably my son's age around that age because I, I know because this I have a picture and the jacket that I'm wearing, the picture I still have and my son actually still wears. It's like this little bomber jacket. It's very cute. And so I have, I don't think I have memories of that age, right? And So what I'm fascinated by is A, why I think I have this memory, B, where is this memory coming from? And C, what made me think of it now, right. And I didn't even know going into this breath work. There are people that go in.

11:47 I know a bunch of people that have gone in with a particular intention. They're trying to understand themselves better. They're trying to work through, you know, an addiction that they have. They're working through a relationship problem that they're having either with themselves or with people around the people that are important to them. And I didn't have any goal. My goal was kind of just to recalibrate and kind of just check under the hood and see what was going on and see what I was, you know, what's what's going on in my mind. Because I haven't been writing as much recently as I typically do. Again, pretty much because of a shortage of time and because my head hasn't been in the space to really be blunt and honest to myself and really right in that raw way that I like to.

12:34 So I didn't really know what I was going there for. I just knew that I wanted to try it and I knew that it was that I was a proponent of it because I knew that, you know, I've heard enough. I've heard enough stories and experiences about what was about, about what it's been like that I wanted, I knew that I wanted to try it myself. So I didn't have a particular goal, but I was also open to kind of seeing anything and experiencing anything, which I think is actually probably a better way to go into a lot of these things. I think it's also good to have an agenda. I think it's, I think both mindsets are really important and I think that it's important to kind of dive into both intentionality and unintentionality and kind of just or meandering is the other way to put it and kind of see where it is that you end up and explore and see, you know, why am I ending up here?

13:23 So I don't really know what it was that I was going to be experiencing or even focusing on thinking about it. So when the guy asked me about a happy childhood memory, I thought back at this picture and this experience that I've had. And I, I, I had, I'm going to try to do the best job I can about articulating this. I've had. And I had a vision, probably predicated on the picture that I'm used to seeing because it's a picture of my grandmother's house that I see quite a bit every couple of years, certainly. And so, but I kind of feel like I remember the experience of being on the horse and buggy and and then I remember this feeling of warmth and love and safeness.

14:20 And this was already, and I'd already said this out loud without even meaning to. This was just my train of thought rambling, I guess, my auditory version of what I do when I write. And I was explaining to the guy, you know, that I was talking to, who I'd not talked to about anything in the past. You know, he's essentially a stranger. I've seen him around once or twice, but a couple of times in my life, but he and I have never really spoken. And I'm talking to him. I'm trying to figure out why I'm talking to him, why I'm feeling this. I'm like, I don't even know if this is a real memory or there's just a picture, but I just, I'm just connecting very strongly at the moment to this particular memory that I have. And this feeling, this feeling is not a familiar feeling to anything that I have had in my conscious memory that I can remember.

15:16 But what I did realize was I felt that very primal, protective, loving feeling of fatherhood while holding my son recently. And I felt coming from him that love and security and safety in me. And I believe could be wrong. I don't know. I don't really know how this stuff works. I don't think anyone really knows how this stuff works, but I believe that by me having that experience with my 2 1/2 year old or two two my 2 year old son, that I was able to recognize a feeling or an experience that I haven't had since I was about that age as well.

16:19 You know, the best way that I could describe it is when you go to a concert or you're going to a live event and their music's playing and the music hits a peak and there's a climax to the music and you're with the whole crowd. And then there's just something that like engulfs you and you don't know what how to put that experience into words necessarily. And you don't. And most people don't know how to describe that experience. But most people know that experience and then they know that they want it again and they but they won't be even familiar enough to even tell you what it is or how they achieve it until they're in that place again at another point in their lives.

16:59 And the feeling I think was so primal of, you know, being a father and loving and protecting my son, that I think that it probably had triggered an associative memory in my head, an association in my head of the last time that I was in one of those type of scenarios, being so young and essentially unconscious, pretty much, right? Being so young and life was so simple and being feeling so safe and protected and loving of my father. I felt the same way. I, I, I felt that that experience from my son.

17:40 And I think I was able to share in that. And I know that all of this kind of sounds much, but I think that it's got to be true. Meaning these are discernible, tangible emotions and experiences that may be the projections of my own bias and cognitive structures, right? But I don't know, I mean, they, they, they, they seem real. They seem relevant. They are refreshing to me. They recharge my batteries. They give me a deeper understanding into myself and into how to be a father and how to, and what I was like as a son.

18:26 And that stuff is real. And that stuff is as crucial or important as almost anything else in the parenting journey, you know, which is the ability to relate, the ability to recall what it's like to be in your kids shoes and the ability to understand that. So that was already just, you know, already just so I'm walking around, you're outdoors. It's evening. It's about 8:00 PM. You know, the sun's set or setting, and you're lowering your guards. You're an unfamiliar new place, but that place that's already designed to kind of feel like it is returning you to your roots. And after a couple more conversations, a little bit more sharing, you sit down, you start doing the breathing and there is music blasting, blasting.

19:16 And the music, obviously, especially in conjunction with your breathing and with your thoughts, helps create a picture and a narrative. I don't know why what I experienced, I experienced. I mean, I do know. So I'm, so I think I'm already setting the stage in my own head, checking under the hood. What seems to be coming to my mind is this experience of parenthood and fatherhood. And that's something that really has been on my mind a lot recently of obviously being a father to a three month old and a 2 1/2 year old. There's, you know, so much my life evolves around that. But I somehow got, you know.

19:59 So I start breathing, we start doing the breathing and. And you feel that you're slipping from being in this world and being in your present cognitive conscious, responsive to the stimulus around you. You feel that slipping away one breath at a time. And every breath that you take, you're get you, you're kind of pulling yourself into another little world, another little dimension of what's whatever is going on in your head, I guess. And I mean, you know, it's so funny because I spent so much of my life denying the potential authenticity of these experiences.

20:41 But then once I experienced it, I have a very difficult time pushing back or fighting it because it is so real and so true that I don't even know what it means. I don't know what the consequences are. I just know that it felt and seemed unimagine, just as true as any other aspect of life that I'm part of. And I was deeply connected at the, you know, and you know, the first experience that I had, I was deeply connected with my grandfather, my mom's father's soul, which sounds crazy to even say. But once you're already kind of like pulling away from the world of what's immediately present to your senses around you, I don't know what's going to happen.

21:31 I don't know where I'm going to go and I don't, I didn't know what was pulling me to 1, One Direction or the next. So I am connected. So I feel my grandfather's soul around me. And my grandfather and I were very close. My grandfather was actually probably the the most old school father figure and like quote UN quote proper father figure in my life. My father and I are very close. My father doesn't never really loved the notion, excuse me, the traditional notion of being a dad because his I think that his father was pretty tough on him growing up and he wanted and it felt it made I think his childhood a little harder. He wanted to do right by his kids and kind of abandoned that kind of sense of strict authoritarian father fatherhood and the consequence of that and was amazing because I'm me and I love me and I love my life and I've got happy relationships with myself and my family and my siblings and my kids and I I I owe that all to but but, and rather, I think that there was a different type of fatherhood that my grandfather embodied and encompassed, and that was put your head down, get to work. Life is tough, life is pain.

22:59 To be fair, the man was a is a Holocaust survivor was a Holocaust survivor. Rather, he passed away a couple years ago and he spent World War 2IN Soviet labor camps. And I'm actually going to, I have his book and I have to reread it for the first time in or maybe even read it all the way through for the first time in my life. But now that I kind of know more about my family and now I know more about that part of the world, I want to kind of start, I want to do more homework on that. But he was old school, Eastern European, a teacher, professor, valued education, valued hard work, valued family more than anything. So he loved hard work and he let and he thought money was really, really obviously crucial.

23:45 But he always had his values straight in the sense that he knew that money did not replace relationships or family or exceed them. And my grandfather would get angry as his method for getting for, to, to to be heard. It's actually really funny because everyone has their own methods of ways to figure out how to get attention, how to be validated, right? Some people try to be funny, some people try to be condescending, some people get angry, some people laugh a lot. Some people are intellectual, some people are emotionally eloquent.

24:26 You know, some people turn to spiritual and, and metaphysical kind of stuff to, you know, kind of create this world that they could feel that, you know, that they not to, to, I guess, find themselves and, and find the world that they're comfortable in. My grandfather, who was very, very grounded in a very, very harsh and real and tough world. And I, I, I, and I knew all this stuff. It's so funny. I knew all these things, but I never put them all together as like a formative or as a sequential series of events or story or narrative that embodied my grandfather's life. I never really thought of things like that until I'm in this. So I'm in this and I'm actually being brought back to while I'm breathing, while I'm doing this breathing. And it takes a couple of minutes of the breath again. You breathe in through your gut, through your chest and out of your mouth again.

25:21 And you just keep on doing that. And there's music blasting. And then he's letting a certain kind of like scent, I forgot what you're called, but an incense or whatever. And I'm brought back to my grandfather. And it's so funny because I don't see images as much as I feel his feelings of feeling lost and scared in New York when he first came to New York after after leaving the refugee camps in I think it was it was one of the stands Kazakhstan maybe I have to check. I have to check the book. But after leaving Eastern Europe, when he came to New York and he came with nothing. He came with no money.

26:06 He came in and speak any English. He put himself through school. He went to what was at the time what I guess what still is a huge Jewish institution called Yeshiva University in the in Washington Heights in New York. And he had told me stories that my life and I didn't really know what he was in trying to tell me when he was telling me this. He used to tell me these stories about these rabbis that would that who you know, he'd say your job as a rabbi is to lead. Your job as a rabbi is to create leaders. Your job as a rabbi is to look at the downtrodden and to help them out. And he's like, I never got any of that. I never got an ounce of that. And all the people that were supposed to all these great men.

26:48 And he'd tell me about these great rabbi, you know, rabbis names. And he would say, and that guy didn't, didn't say 2 words to me. And I asked that guy for help and he just wasn't able to. He just said, I'm sorry, I can't do anything for you. And and so my Saba and so at the time I thought my grandfather was telling me a Saba, that's the Hebrew word for grandfather was telling me about why he disdains formal, bureaucratic, I guess you could call it Judaism and structure and the, and the, and the and the and the structures of Orthodox Judaism. And even though he was always Orthodox and he always believed in God despite what he went through, and, you know, I couldn't blame him one way or the other after what he went after, what him and his family went through, I couldn't blame him one way or the other for being religious, you know, anyway, but he wasn't mad at God.

27:40 He was mad at man. He was mad at, he was mad at the rejection of the world around him. And he was scared and he was lost and he didn't know how to get heard. And the only way for him to be heard was to get angry. And when he would use an angry tone or when he would use angry rhetoric, then that was that. That was a effective way for him to get attention from anyone. He was talking to his friends, his family, the rabbi in his community, his grandkids, whoever it was. And then there was always a line where he would, he would try to where he would use anger to be heard.

28:24 But if the anger can turned into him hurting someone, then he would pull back completely and he would just like tug back, you know? Oh no, I did my goal with anger. The expression of anger is not to hurt other people around me. It's to protect myself and to let myself be hurt. And I had this intense understanding of that and it gave me in that moment in particular. And these and time does not feel like it's happening the same time, the same way. Obviously, when you're in that state as when it's just regular, like me talking to Mike into a camera right now, you know, time feels different.

29:08 And so I'm soaking in this and I'm understanding and I'm like, this was his. This was my grandfather's fatherhood journey. This was his journey through life. And, and so and, and I, and one of the things that I think that I was able to relate to and I think one of the things that I found under the hood, under my own hood, was that I too AM and was scared. I'm a lot less scared now than I used to be about life, but especially as a kid, I was scared. And especially as a kid, I was rejected. And especially as a kid, I was definitely not heard and I was able to connect with him and his soul in that same sense.

30:01 I don't know what soul means, whether that means that like the conscious energy of his of, of who my grandfather was was with me, or whether that soul is the soul of his experience, that that rooted itself in my consciousness and in my brain and in my in the back of my head and in my experiences. But it almost felt like we were both like, like, I felt like he never had really that opportunity to figure that and sort that stuff out. And I was kind of doing it with him and for him together. I thought that was, you know, so, so that was the first part of this experience, this breathwork experience that was truly, truly profound and completely spontaneous, completely sporadic.

30:52 I also had a very, very weird, I mean, it wasn't weird now that you know, but at the time it was weird when I was thinking about it, the music kind of moved to Middle Eastern prior type of music. It almost sounded Arabic actually. And and I and I found myself in a prison. So, and again, it was interesting because the way that a lot of this was happening in my head was first there would be like the music would change, a setting would appear in my head and the setting was white sand. I was just in a white world of desert and sand. And then and then a, a prison cell appeared and it was made of white Middle Eastern Mediterranean style brick and or stone rather. And I'm in this prison cell by myself, and there's no guard and there's no lock on the door.

31:51 And I'm sitting in the cell, I'm sitting on the floor, and I know that there's something outside because I know I'm in the desert. I don't know where I am. I don't know which desert I'm in. And I don't know what prison cell I'm in. I don't know where I am. But I just know that I'm free to go if I want, but I don't know that I want to go. You know, I don't know that I'm ready to leave this cell and see what's outside of it and what's now. I'm going to just like pull aside for a second from that narrative and just explain that one of the interesting things about breathwork versus psychedelics is that psychedelics completely will hijack your system.

32:32 And you don't have a choice as to whether or not you're tripping and whether you like it or not. Once you take those mushrooms or once you take the psilocybin or once you take the MDMA or the LSD, there's no other, there's no going back. There's no, there's no, oh, nevermind. I don't feel like doing this anymore when you're doing breath work, because a lot of this is based on your performing your own voluntary performance by doing that breath, by doing the breathing exercise, you kind of have to keep a little bit of consciousness tucked away to make sure that you're breathing right. And, and then as and then, and then, but, and so the more that you breathe correctly, the more vivid the journey is or the experience is. And, but the more vivid and the experience is, the less likely it is that you're going to be focusing on your own breathing because you're soaking on the experience. So I thought so at that point, while I'm in this cell, I'm trying, I'm, I'm, I'm pushing them and I'm like, and one of the big things that I've recently started asking myself a lot when I'm feeling scared is why are you scared? What are you afraid of?

33:46 There's nothing I what, what can't you handle? I've talked about this a little bit. When it came to having my second kid, one of the first things that I was afraid of was, I know how to handle this. But I'm like, wait a minute, I do know how to handle this. OK, so I had a boy and I have a girl. OK, So obviously there's going to be something, there's going to be some things that are different. But I know what it's like to wake up every day. I know what it's like to change a diaper. I know what it's like to put to to put food on the table and to be able and, and what it cost to, you know, be able to afford a kid right now. And I think I'm OK and I know I've done this all before. So it's not anything new, which is the question of putting the effort in again. But there's nothing to be afraid of. There's nothing that I can't handle, you know, And so I was trying to go into this whole experience with that same perspective, which is I know I'm just in my head.

34:31 I know I'm just checking under the roof. So go wherever you go, follow that line of that, follow that line of thinking, follow that images, follow those images. Rather follow that scene and see where it takes you. So I'm going down, but because I already have this natural desire to kind of pull away my breathing, my breathing started to slow down. So I had to pick it up. And I never did find out what was on the outside of that prison cell. Yeah, I'm going to have to go back and check it out. But yeah, I mean, and then and then and then there were other experiences and other thoughts that were kind of coming, coming and going along the way, like the certainty and the experience that just physical life is not all that there is that. And it it felt particularly weird because at this point my hands are are are to my side.

35:27 I put my hands on my stomach and like just touching my skin felt like the weirdest thing in the entire world. It just felt like a totally foreign, it didn't feel like it was even my own body and my own skin and that was that was an amazing, amazing experience. It's not always pleasant. There are physical, again, physical symptoms that occur like your body feeling like it's clamping, getting clamping. I kind of clamping up pins and needles. It took me, you know, I felt a little nauseous, not nauseous, but a little dizzy at the end. And it takes about 20-30 minutes to kind of just like, come down and get your brain back to, you know, to recenter yourself and kind of get back to itself.

36:16 But, you know, this whole thing actually made me think. So I'm reading a book. I'm hopefully doing an interview with the author. This book is called The Great The Last Great Dream and how bohemians created became hippies and created the 60s right down my aisle. I know but one particular line from that that the that the author captured. I don't want to say the author's name yet because I want to 1st get him on the podcast and we can talk about it. But but he quotes Aldous Huxley in the book. Aldous Huxley is famous for writing Brave New World. The Doors of Perception was in English. I think he was a writer that had moved to San Francisco. And at the time there's actually quite a there, there was quite a quite, quite a few people that were moving like intellectuals and writers and and creatives and humanitarians, I guess people that are part of the arts that are moving to San Francisco.

37:18 And so he wrote a great line after he took his first psychedelic dose, but I felt this really applied to breath work as well. And he wrote the survival need, the survival needs of evolution. He came to understand had imposed A reduct, A reducing valve on the brain's sensory intake. The drug loosened the valve. So in other words, what that quote means is in order for us to survive, we need to be able to focus on. We have to, we have to ignore a lot of what we perceive and we have to be able to focus on one thing at a time.

37:58 That is billions of years of evolution speaking with psychedelics, that intrinsic need, which is almost like combative to like only zone, zone in on one particular thing and to kind of, and, and again, as it, as it says, the reducing valve for the brain of the brain sensory intake. We have a valve in our brain and we could only take in X amount of sensory of sensory stimulus around us. Psychedelics allow us to explore a lot more than that.

38:38 And just following that particular line of thinking and line of thought I could, I would definitely make the argument that if we'd evolved to own to, to have a reduced ability to process our senses, then we're definitely missing a ton. Then we're definitely missing a a ton of what else is going on in the world, What else is going out in going out in the universe. And I'm really excited to check it all out. I'm really, I'm really excited to see it. I wanted to kind of end out end off this video episode on a on another note.

39:23 It's not, I guess, such a happy note, but I think it's a little more meaningful, a little bit more thought provoking and thoughtful. And that is that there's a Jewish holiday coming up called Teshaba of which is actually Hebrew for the 9th day of of is the Hebrew month, So the 9th of of 9th of the month. And it is a, it's basically a Jewish version of or a religious version of Memorial Day. Of all the terrible things that have happened to the Jewish people throughout history. You're all commemorated on one day. It's a fast day. You, you fast for 25 hours. No eating, no drinking, no brushing your teeth, nothing going into your mouth.

40:06 A lot of people don't speak a lot of people, they call it a, a, a word fast, a tiny D board, a fast of actual speech and like to make sure that we're just kind of focused on like ourselves and, and our lives and our thoughts and not focused on, on what's going on around us, Which I guess is also part of the same kind of the same kind of conversation that we've been having until now. But one the, I guess the thought that I will leave you with is that an enormous aspect of Tishab of the 9th of, of, as part of the observance is to look inwards at not just what the world has done to us has not what the world has done to Jewish people throughout history, but what have the Jewish people done to ourselves to 'cause that to happen, you know, what do we do?

41:08 And sometimes the answer is nothing. And sometimes the answer is, well, we could have been a little bit more accommodating. We could have been a little bit more thoughtful. We could have been a little bit more kind to one another. We could have been a little bit more focused on our emotional and mental needs as opposed to our physical needs, you know, and not necessarily what's everyone's problem and why is as well such a bad place, but what's our problem? And how could we get better? And how could we not only be better, but make the world a better place? How could we make our world a better place? How can the consequences of our actions have a widespread rippling effect on the rest of the world around us? And I think and you know, and there's a Jewish concept that the reason, one of the reasons why we still have these fast so today is because we haven't address the root of the issue. And if we had addressed the root of the issue, then we wouldn't need to commemorate anymore.

42:04 And one of the hardest issues I think that are to really come to terms with is our, is our own flaws. One of the biggest issues is our own fears, our own insecurities. To even discover it about ourselves is hard and scary. And there's particular practices that don't take place in the 9 days leading up to the 9th of Ave. to Shab Ave. And some of those practices are no, not listening to music, not going to the movies, not eating meat and not indulging in food that you love, not really drinking, not drinking wine for sure. And a lot of this stuff is because what is, what is that what, what are you trying to focus on? Are you trying to focus on the externals? What's going to distract you from yourself? You're going to try to focus internally on what can make you better.

42:56 And I think that's that's something pretty happy we're pretty comfortable leaving you with. So thanks for listening more, more episodes coming out this week. Got our first Australian guest, I hope coming up in a couple of days. And I'm really excited to see what's coming up next. So thank you all and love you all. Bye.