Adapted from episode 61 of The Perfect Stool podcast and edited for readability.
Niraj Naik left his service as a community pharmacist when he was diagnosed with a severe case of Ulcerative Colitis. Rejecting his choices of a colectomy or untested pharmaceutical drugs, he started his own route of healing using diet, breathwork practices and natural supplementation, including bovine colostrum powder*. It was not a quick journey, but after about 2 years, he was completely symptom free. He has since founded a school of breathwork practices called Soma Breath*. He also created a step-by-step treatment plan for fixing and even reversing leaky gut and other digestive issues.
Lindsey:
So tell us about your gut healing journey.
Niraj Naik:
Sure, I’ll try and put it as concisely as possible because there’s so many different twists and turns of the whole thing. Well, I actually started off as a community pharmacist years ago, in the UK, where I actually worked for seven years in this profession. And it’s actually where I really got an insight into the healthcare profession and how it is and how it operates. And it just wasn’t aligned to who I am, my values and I could feel it. I can freely feel that disturbance inside, that spiritual disturbance. And in the end, it actually took its toll on me. Because I tried very hard to get out of that career and into something more empowering.
I actually had a bit of burnout and went to a Tony Robbins event. And it was through that where I first discovered anyone talking about diet and nutrition and sleep and lifestyle things for health. And I was going to test this out in the pharmacy, right, because if this stuff works and they try it out, and the simple thing that I started to do was just to change people’s diets from a factory based diet, which most people are on, to a natural whole food diet. And I just got amazing results just doing that.
So I started to get actually even doctors calling me up and things like that, and telling me “this is amazing, keep going.” But then one thing led to another. I ended up actually getting promoted to the head office of one of the biggest corporations in the UK, where I was going to come up with this healthy shopping this service that would help a lot of people. In the end, for some reason, they decided to stop the idea and six months into it I was facing having to go back to this career as a pharmacist. It’s literally like working in a cubicle dishing out pills all day long. And it was so disheartening, disillusioned. I was so disillusioned, I’d lost my faith in spirit, everything and boom, that’s when I got a hit with an autoimmune disease myself.
I went from being the pharmacist to being the patient. And I ended up being housebound for almost a year. I was literally going to toilet 40 times a day, bleeding. I remember one time, the doctor said, “You’re going to have to wear a nappy”, because you get some social anxiety about soiling your pants when you’re out. And it’s horrible, horrible. And then I lost like a third of my body weight and it got so bad that the consultant and in the end, who actually initially told me that diet doesn’t make an impact, stress doesn’t make an impact, just basically said shut up and take the pills or have your colon removed. She then said you could be a guinea pig on a drug that hasn’t even been tested before, as a last resort. So she really was encouraging me to sign up for this and this is when I had my big kind of dark night of the soul moment.
And luckily, a dear friend of our family came to the rescue. And she basically said “Look, you’ve got a gift here. If you can change your perception of this and see it as a gift, you could actually really help a lot of people. And you know, first thing is to get better yourself without taking all this stuff.” So, I learned the basics of yoga, pranayama, which is the breathing system from India and then basically the Ayurvedic approach of fixing your health, and then finding the right diet based on you, really focusing on the mantra of know thyself, really understanding who you truly are, and then also understanding the kind of career that you should be going for as well.
And through that I realized that I’m the wrong personality for a profession that’s very left brained and analytical. I’m very creative. And I ended up going back into my passion for music. I decided to combine music with these ancient practices I was learning and started to get really, really compelling results using breathing techniques combined with this special brainwave music. And I started to compose again and that was really healing itself and cathartic.
But also through the Ayurvedic system, I discovered that most of disease begins in the gut. So you’ll get these symptoms. If you ignore them, that’s your gut instinct telling you there’s something wrong. You’ll get irritable bowel, you’ll get constipation, you’ll get bouts of constant diarrhea, usually when you’re in the wrong place, and you know it, but you’re not listening to it. And you know, when you suppress it, you shut off those symptoms, those feelings in different ways. Eventually it’s too late, boom, that’s when you get autoimmune disease. And it’s often emotions that are unresolved, where you’re not listening to your whole body intelligence that manifests as an illness, that kind of is like a cop out of the system that you’re in to tell you, “Wake up and do something else. Follow your soul instinct.”
Lindsey:
So let me let me stop you for just a sec. And just make it clear. So your diagnosis was ulcerative colitis, right?
Niraj Naik:
Yes, that’s what I had.
Lindsey:
And did you know right away when things started happening, that that was a likely scenario given your profession? Or did it take a while to get to the diagnosis?
Niraj Naik:
So be honest, first, the doctor said it’s hemorrhoids. Then I went three times, the doctor kept saying its pyles, so I just ignored it. I thought, “Okay, I’ve just been sitting around for too long.” In the end, it got really bad, the symptoms, I knew this was something else. And I started looking on the internet, and it is like, it’s cancer, it’s this, it’s that, you start freaking out. What could it be? Eventually, you have to wait a long time in the UK to get an appointment. And so eventually I got an appointment. This was after six months of suffering. They did an actual endoscopy and showed that I had ulcers in the colon. She said, “You’ve got ulcerative colitis”, and I had a moderate case of it, which then started to get more severe over time. And so that’s when it was confirmed. Before that I had no idea what it could be. It could be one of those things like colitis, it could be a bacterial infection or something. It could be cancer. That was worse, that was the thing playing on my mind the most was it could be actual cancer.
Lindsey:
Oh, yeah. No, I when get something, I go straight to cancer. And I work my way back.
Niraj Naik:
Yeah, exactly. And it usually isn’t that.
Lindsey:
Yeah.
Niraj Naik:
So yeah. So that was crazy. Because I if I knew about this, what it was early on, I knew how to fix it. I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near down the pain that I did you know, the anguish that I did, and you get suicidal when you’re going to the toilet that many times a day and you can’t go out. I remember going on a date once when I finally plucked up the courage, and I actually ended up soiling my pants during that. And I had to leave early. Luckily they understood. So you know, stuff like that you have to deal with this. Horrible, horrible.
So yeah, that was my big wake up call to get out of that career as well and follow my real heart. And I was lucky because I managed to combine my passion for music with healing. You know, when I was in the music industry, it’s a really brutal industry. It’s very, very challenging. It’s a bad culture. There’s a lot of sharks involved. And I knew that that wasn’t me either. But I kept trying to make something out of it. But it was when I actually finally woke up to the power of music for healing. That’s when I realized actually that there’s a whole new world out there where I could actually combine it and make it into a practice for wellness.
Lindsey:
You mentioned brainwave music. Tell me a little about that.
Niraj Naik:
So you see most people spend their day in a high alert state, a Beta brainwave state. And this Beta brainwave state is associated with active thought, but it can also be associated with stress. And if you don’t have enough of the lower brainwave states, like the Alpha, Theta and Delta, which is sleep, what will happen is that you will end up getting chronic stress because you need those lower brain muscles, which are associated with relaxation, to better heal and rejuvenate. Now, the reason why we say in these high alert brainwave states is because, it could be because we take a lot of stimulants, it could be that we’re doing a job that’s very stressful. It could be that our mind is constantly active, and we’re constantly mulling over thoughts over and over and over again. And when you switch that off, and you you calm down the monkey mind, the part of the brain that worries about the future, the past, it’s the ego part of the mind. It gets caught up in thinking thinking thinking. When you can calm that down and music is a very amazing way of doing that, especially brainwave music that has special frequencies that can help train your brain to those lower brainwave states. And also breath. When you breathe in a certain pattern. It also takes you out of this Beta awakened state into more relaxing healing states.
So I started to experiment with this music. I found it all on YouTube first and then started to compose my own and started to create my own guided meditations with it. And I then eventually created my own library of meditation, brainwave tracks myself, that I could compose. And I noticed as well that a lot of the music that was out there was kind of a bit dated, sounded like it had been made in the 70s with panpipes, you know. So I was like, right, let’s revamp all of this. And, and this would make it more accessible as well to more of a younger, more mainstream audience. So, that’s why I started to do and it really took off, I ended up making the soundtracks for like, people Anil Sapere(?), who’s a hypnotherapist. He’s quite well known, and then healing centers around the world. Now it’s used by like top spa brands, like Rituals. And actually, there’s a place called Six Senses where I’m facilitating tomorrow; they’re going to be using it. There’s all these different locations around the world which use this therapeutic music I developed, which is amazing.
But it started after my own view first, that was the inspiration and then combining breathing with it. So that’s actually what got me also connected to Wim Hof, who’s a famous guy. I produced all the soundtracks to the Wim Hof Method. He’s known for the breath work and ice baths techniques; he’s an amazing inspiration. So I did all that. That got me to really understand the power of the breathing and music combined even further. And then eventually, I developed a protocol of my own, which is to teach people for healing their own guts and optimizing their health.
And then I also developed techniques for getting into altered states where you can have this deeper spiritual experience like using higher yogic ritual practices, which are very powerful. When you do it with an instructor in a nice safe space, you can go really deep and have real powerful awakening experiences, really heightened states of inspiration. And this is where you activate the Gamma brainwave state, the Gamma is the frequency which is associated with heightened inspiration. And it’s like what meditators are trying to strive to achieve in long meditation sessions, but with the breath combined with music, with special music, you can activate these states actually pretty quickly. We’ve actually had studies done showing this and this has actually sparked the interest of Cambridge University, who are now doing a trial with our sessions. So these are really cool breakthroughs that are coming.
But when it comes to healing the gut, there’s a combination of that. And there’s a special breathing technique in pranayama, called kumbhaka, breath retention. When you hold your breath beyond a certain point, which you can create through fast breathing followed by fast rhythmic breathing, followed by breath retentions, you activate a state called intermittent hypoxia. Intermittent hypoxia lowers your oxygen levels for a short period in your blood. And this creates an adaptive change where your body adapts to a low oxygen environment, producing more red blood cells. You get better blood flow around the body, and you actually wake up blood flow to your heart, your brain. It’s like an awakening, a physiological awakening happens. And you actually strengthen your entire nervous system and physiology over time when you practice it as part of a protocol.
They actually do this with machines, called intimate hypoxic therapy, which simulates high altitude training, when people go up to mountains and go into low oxygen environments and they come back down. They get these benefits with their health and they’re trying to figure out why this is because they get the state of internet hypoxia, lower than normal oxygen, and your body adapts. And what it does is it naturally brings your breathing rate down, it slows it down. And it raises your ability to handle carbon dioxide. Higher amounts of carbon dioxide is what tells your brain to breathe again. And when you actually can increase your carbon dioxide tolerance and slow your breathing rate down, you actually will find you can hold your breath for longer periods of time and your breath rate slows down and there’s a strong correlation between breathing rates. The slower and calmer and more rhythmical your breathing is and the longer your breath retention times are, the better you are at getting oxygen to where it actually needs to go. Not being stuck to your red blood cells but getting them off the blood cells, the oxygen into your body tissue cells. That’s where healing happens.
Lindsey:
So I imagine then if you are getting an increase in red blood cells and oxygen going where it needs to go, you probably feel a lot more energy.
Niraj Naik:
More energy, you get better blood flow to the gut, remember your intestines as well are filled with blood vessels. But when you’re stressed, these blood vessels shrink. Oxygen as well, you overbreathe, right? When you over breathe, you get in too much oxygen, you take out too much carbon dioxide. You need the right balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide to get blood flow where the oxygen goes from your blood cells to the cells. And if you don’t have enough carbon dioxide, you have too much oxygen, your blood vessels narrow; it causes constriction and hypertension; it actually increase your blood pressure. What happens is when you’re stressed, and if you’re not listening to your gut, the blood flow to that area, it really diminishes. And you will then get disease happening in those areas, they cells start to, to degenerate basically.
And also what happens is you get tension in that area, you feel that pain in your gut. And if you get diminished blood flow, it messes up your gut flora as well, your microbiome goes out sink out of whack. So just by learning to slow your breathing down, to use techniques like kumbhaka, breath retention, you can actually dramatically improve blood flow back to the gut. And what happens as well, you actually wake up the natural intelligence of your gut, and you can actually start to resolve emotions. They get trapped there like anger, frustration, causes your gut to kind of get paralyzed, and you lose that energy like in the Ayurvedic system. Your gut is your driver, it’s your force, your lifeforce, it’s what drives you, produces energy. It makes sense, because that’s where you digest your food from, produce energy from digesting food.
So if you don’t listen to your gut instinct, eventually you’ll paralyze, and you will not move and you’ll become apathetic, you’ll become depressed, you would be able to get out of bed You’ll have no drive for life, your gut essentially stops you from doing things. But when you follow your gut instinct, you get courage, you become really able to take on the stresses of life without fear. So with me, because I’d stopped listening to my gut, and I had, I lost my courage to leave my job. And I became apathetic, turned into a robot, and I was just repeating the same cycles and patterns. When I started to tune back in, it’s my gut instinct. And when I went into the healing journey, I had this unstoppable energy and drive to succeed in doing what I really want to do. And through that came a real passion.
And our truth really is for everybody, I think, the true will, not the conditioned, the conditioned will is what society tells us to do, the true will is we want to be healthy, we want to be happy, when you surround ourselves with people who make us feel healthy and happy. We want that to rub off. And we want to be around community that we trust and makes us feel safe. And we want to give that back to others. And we want to create a world that’s harmonious. But society has made us polarized and split us apart from each other. And my job, what I’m trying to do is bring back the community.
One of the most amazing, actual things that happened to me when I was going through my healing journey, because Tony Robbins always says is study success, model success. And what I was doing at the time, which is really bad, was I was going on all the forums, and reading all the horror stories. And reading all the horror stories made me feel even more lonely and scared. And then everyone in my environment’s telling me you’re not going to get cured unless you take the pills. And I felt even more trapped. What I did was I actually started to look at people who had healed themselves. And then I started to find communities of people that are like mine through Facebook. Thank God for their community, that you can prey off Facebook. And then that in itself was part of the healing process, finding people to connect with and sharing my truth with people, and how I feel, and people listening and acknowledging. That was a huge part of it. So what I’ve done with Soma Breath* is we’ve created this amazing, thriving community of 1000 plus instructors now and the world is growing really fast, and everyone feels safe and everyone has a place to share and connect. And we have instructors who become like community leaders, bringing together people who are like-minded and building that cool sense of friendship and trust, which was what we were really desperately need.
Lindsey:
Right. So is that is that all online? Or is that in person as well?
Niraj Naik:
Well, that’s the cool thing, because we have instructors around the world who are real people in real life, they build their communities around them, wherever they are, you know, whether it’s in a yoga studio or a community center or fitness center or gym, wherever they can do sessions, they tend to bring together people. In Copenhagen there’s an amazing community there. And I’m now I’m in Ibiza. So yeah, it’s like in person and online. Online, we have a really thriving Facebook community as well.
Lindsey:
Okay, so backing up a little bit about your healing journey, did you try various diets and what ultimately helped you the most diet-wise?
Niraj Naik:
Okay, so what I said about in Ayurveda is know thyself, and with know thyself, what that means is really understanding who you are, and we’re all individual. So, in the Ayurveda system, we are all composed of different energy types. So Vata, Pitta, Kapha. Vata is air, Pitta’s fire, Kapha is Earth. For me, the Ayurveda system is the most powerful and wise system that has developed. And it focuses on this whole mantra of there’s no one size fits all. So what works for one person may not work for another and but you can get somewhat of a guide of a lifestyle to follow based on your energy type, which you can figure out through simple profiling of two questions that you ask about how you think, your likes, interests, and also down to your how you look, you appear, there’s a bunch of different questions you’re asked, and you find out your energy. So through that you can determine who you are.
Now, at the time, I was very sick, I had not really got into Ayurveda or known much about it. And I got caught up in this whole raw vegan diet movement thing. And I thought that was a cure to everything. So I went down this hole, even actually, believe it or not, I was on that kind of vegan raw diet prior to getting sick. And the last the first few months leading up to being sick, I was on that raw diet. And then I got sick. I don’t know, maybe it had something to do with that. But everything was just going through me; the food just goes through, boom, you’re going to toilet so many times. And then I tried a fruit only diet, tried all of that. That was even worse, the gas beyond belief; it was horrible. It was so painful, cramping, like it’s the worst thing ever, especially things like lettuce and salads were just a nightmare for me. And I thought all this time this was good. This is meant to be doing good.
Then when I read the Ayurveda system, I discovered that actually, the completely raw diet is terrible for Vata types. Vata-Pitta disorders is what causes ulcerative colitis. And I’m a Vata-Pitta mix. And it’s the worst thing to go on a raw, cold food diet. So what I had to do was actually go for grounding, nourishing warming foods. And also it says the meat is okay for people who have a Vata disturbance, which is what I had, I had a Vata imbalance. So I started to use bone broth, because the people who had healed themselves, they went on paleo diets, they went completely on paleo diets, or they went on to complete beef diets and things like that. And I was like, this goes totally against the whole Hindu culture and my parents would go crazy, you know, but I thought I have to do this for my own health. I had no no other choice.
And that’s when I also discovered colostrum* . Colostrum is the first milk that comes from a cow, it’s a bovine colostrum. We actually all consume colostrum. The first thing we consume as a baby, when we’re born, is the mother’s colostrum. And it gives you your immune system, it actually heals your gut, allows your gut to actually digest adult food. Without it babies, children suffer in childhood, they get allergies and all these health issues. And look, there’s a huge movement of mothers moving off natural breastfeeding onto powdered milks and all sorts of other nonsense. And kids are suffering as a result. It’s obvious, I’ve seen the link myself.
Lindsey:
I thought we were moving in the opposite direction, back to breastmilk.
Niraj Naik:
Yeah, we need to be moving back to that. So colostrum, super essential. And then what I realized was that actually, we don’t have to go and find pregnant mothers. Cows produce 1000 times more potent colostrum in humans, the same translation to humans. But also, thankfully to nature, and this is why cows are worshipped in India and considered holy, is they produce four times the amount of the colostrum the calf needs. So it’s actually the excess of the excess because they also use colostrum in the banks for calves where maybe the cow didn’t produce enough. So they’ll give excess to the calf to make sure the calf always has enough, but the excess of the excess is given to humans for human consumption, because of its powerful healing benefits.
So I discovered that and you get it in a powdered form, you have to get certain type, it has to be whole fat, full, whole colostrum, none of the fat removed. Otherwise, it loses a lot of its power. And so I started using that. And I literally went on a colostrum fast for like a week and just had some bone broth with it. And the healing benefits were just so fast – nine day fast. So that and a combination of the lifestyle changes and the breathing techniques and changing to a paleo diet is what got me back into full health within a few months. Then I started to teach other people that and I’ve now had hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands plus success stories over the years. People with things like ulcerative colitis, leaky gut issues, Crohn’s. Any autoimmune issue usually resides quite often from spiritual disturbance and also issues with digestion, which is often a result of spiritual disturbance in the first place, not listening to the gut instinct. So I help people rehabilitate that, get back onto the right path, follow their life passion. And we train instructors on delivering these techniques through our Soma Breath Community.
Lindsey:
Great. So tell me a little bit more about the colostrum because I have tended towards recommending something like MegaIgG (from Microbiome Labs* or buy from my Fullscript Dispensary*) , which is just the IgG. The immunoglobulins coming out of colostrum because of people being lactose intolerant. So I’m just curious, how do how do people react to a full colostrum who are lactose intolerant?
Niraj Naik:
So colostrum doesn’t really contain enough lactose in it to cause any of the symptoms. It’s not even the lactose in the form that you find in milk, it’s very different. Because children actually, before they consume colostrum, cannot really digest, babies can’t digest lactose. So the colostrum actually helps them. It seals, it helps the lining of the gut form properly, so that they can actually digest mother’s milk, right, which contains lactose in it. And same thing with a calf. The calf won’t be able to drink the full milk, they need the colostrum first, that helps the digestive process to be able to consume larger particles like lactose. Now, quite often, lactose intolerance is a result of the fact that maybe they didn’t get enough colostrum as a child or, or over the years they’ve done abuse to their bodies, to their guts through processed foods. And prescription meds is one of the big culprits, and stress in general is a culprit for rupturing that, and then we lose this lactose digestive ability. What I found is that when you seal the gut, and you fix it with colostrum, people are now able to digest things like gluten, and lactose again, although I still recommend, don’t have dairy milk because it can be contaminated with so much other stuff. They can start eating things like bread in small doses again, which is a lifesaver for a lot of people. They love bread, and can’t do without, but I always say, go on a colostrum fast, do our protocol and see how you go and then slowly, slowly, once you’re confident, bring in little bits of the things you really love. And you’ll be okay.
Lindsey:
Yeah, yeah, no, I find too that now that I’ve mostly healed my gut I can eat gluten every now and then. But it’s not going to be an everyday thing. Never.
Niraj Naik:
A staple. Yeah, an IgG, that, what you’re talking about, is one of the active ingredients. But what I love about colostrum is that it’s very broad spectrum. It has so many other things. That’s why I don’t like to meddle with nature too much because it has everything symbiotically working together in harmony. So you have the immunoglobulins, you have cofactors, you have all the vitamins and minerals that you need, you have all the whole fats that aids the absorption, so that’s why I really I just stick with Mother Nature. Mother Nature’s the most intelligent thing that is, that exists. So let’s trust in nature’s intelligence.
Lindsey:
Yeah. Transfer factors. Is that in there?
Niraj Naik:
Yeah, everything’s in colostrum, because all of these things come from, they actually use bovine colostrum medicinally actually, in drug development, where they’ll create immunoglobulins from concentration then from colostrum. And they can also make it targets. This is actually a new field. They’re using colostrum to create targets for specific diseases but the thing is, colostrum itself is quite potent, and maybe the drugs will help one day. And there are people who get very good benefits from being injected with these immunoglobulins. And lactoferrin is also a very, very important ingredient in colostrum, extremely important. So, that I don’t know if you get in other things, but it works in harmony with everything else. But people get a lot of benefits from these injections. But these injections are one injection and they have to have a month, costs the patient right on the NHS, it costs the NHS taxpayer 1000 pounds per shot.
Lindsey:
We’re talking about IV immunoglobulins, right?
Niraj Naik:
Yeah, which is insane.
Lindsey:
Yeah, no, I know. That’s, that’s one of the treatments I think they use for PANS and PANDAs in the traditional medical community. And I can imagine that’s pretty tough.
Niraj Naik:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Lindsey:
Yeah. Expensive and hard to deal with getting injections for a kid. Yeah, all of that. So tell me about any other supplements you use? Is it just the colostrum? Or what else do you recommend for people?
Niraj Naik:
Oh, yeah. So my protocol. So what happens in these sorts of issues, I suppose the gut microbiome gets messed up. So there is this amazing probiotic I discovered called Visbiome* . It also was VSL3, but somehow the company split into two, I don’t know. There’s some controversy over who actually invented and owns it. I think what they’ve done is each one’s claiming that the other one is your original origin. They’re still making the same thing. They’re trying to steal customers off each other or whatever.
Lindsey:
The one that was the VSL3 that all the studies were done on is now called Visbiome*, right?
Niraj Naik:
Yes, apparently. So I basically recommend that now. I think that’s that. I think they’re both probably still the same, but I recommend that because I took VSL3, and this megadose of probiotic is really high like, like hundreds of 1000s. Right?
Lindsey:
Billions. It’s like 450 billion or something a packet.
Niraj Naik:
It’s insane. Yeah. Yeah. So that combined with the colostrum and all that, so I recommend that on our protocol. It’s expensive. You don’t have to do it forever. It’s just a cost you take. So I actually put this all in my guidelines. So I recommend that as part of the course if you’re healing. But I don’t think that you need large doses of probiotics for long. Because colostrum in itself propagates, it acts like a prebiotic, it propagates a good microbiome, and natural flora.
Also, just listening to your gut, trusting your gut, finding your dharma, your life path, following your instincts, and doing breathing techniques where you’re switching off stress, aids the gut. Getting rid of sugar in your diet, getting rid of processed foods, getting rid of factory foods, and all that stuff. And eating a whole food diet will actually improve naturally your gut microbiome. So there’s other ways you’re doing it. There’s billions of bacteria around you all the time that we have. We’re literally wearing a suit of bacteria wherever we go. The bacteria is not the problem, it’s whether they want to reside in your gut. That’s the problem. And you know that there’s a lot of people who just take probiotics and don’t do anything else and think that that’s going to help them alone. But we need to think holistically. And you’re going to think that these are like entities that have a choice whether to live with you symbiotically or not. And if they’re not choosing to live somewhere, symbiotically, there must be some reason. It’s because you’re toxic. So you need to clear that out, you need to and it’s not just our physical body, it’s the mind. If the mind becomes toxic, we need to clear that too. So my whole system is all about helping heal the mind, heal the body, connect with the Spirit. And through that, the bacteria naturally comes to you and wants to live with you. This is the laws of nature.
Lindsey:
So I love the story of you being able to leave this profession that didn’t suit you and go do this other great thing. But I kind of feel like this is sort of like the privilege of the upper middle class to be able to just leave their job and go found a breathwork program. You know what I’m saying like, how does the average Joe who’s really sick and cannot afford to leave their job and branch out as an entrepreneur, how do they implement things in their life like this?
Niraj Naik:
Fantastic. I love, that’s a really, really good question. Let me just tell you about my story. I didn’t come from money. I actually was quite a lot in debt at the time. And my dad was completely depressed. And my mom as well, you know, they never had any money. I also had no job. And I had no financial support, actually at all. And I had no idea when the next income was going to come. I had sick pay for a bit, for about six months, but then that was stopped. But I literally had to do it. It was a do or die situation for me, I had to make this work.
Now what I had, I was smart enough to be able to study a course that taught me how to build an online business and do all that, and get off my ass and focus on that. And I had an ability to put it all together and make something successful out of it. But it really was a do or die situation. And I know, a lot of people may not have the means of access to a computer or, you know, be tech savvy, or even be able to understand what it takes to start a business and all that. I totally get that.
So there’s other ways of doing this, okay. And it all comes down to changing the perception of your situation. Okay. So, for a lot of people, let’s say the circumstance, and because I’ve helped a lot of everyday people as well, I believe that when you believe first and think small. Like first think in terms of just one goal. One goal that I’ve got to put into my mind is, I want to heal this illness. Don’t even think about oh, I need to get a new career or I need to quit my job. I know this job is stressing me out. We’re going to look at this healing journey as a game. And here is a system, if I follow this system, I do a little bit every day, the end result, the reward of that is I’m going to be healed, and I’m going to have more energy, I’m going to have a better sense of well-being and I’m going to then have more ability to do work, do the kind of work I need to pay the bills and all that. And through that, you can then start to ease the stress of it.
So what I give people is like a plan of action where first do this, alright, first do this, do this, you’ll get benefits from this. Get yourself here. That’s the first goal. And up. And you can actually do that with just the colostrum, the probiotics, and the breathing techniques. I really believe that. You may not completely be cured. But you can get close to it. And I hate using the word cure, because we don’t cure people, we transform people because a cure basically means bringing people back to who they were before they got sick. That’s not what we do. We take people, we change people at a spiritual level, right at that point of the ego. And from a cellular level, they become a totally different person. And they have a new set of habits, new lifestyles, new aspirations.
What happens is, you actually vibrate, without sounding too woowoo, at a higher level when you are feeling healthy and happy. Your vibe goes up so you start to attract things into your life. And when you trust that, what could happen is that you could turn a job that you don’t like into something that you start to enjoy. And what happens as well is because you’ve got the story now, you just healed yourself from chronic illness. And when you focus on that as your first thing, I want to tell a story, where I’m now healed and I can inspire other people. When you start inspiring people, you watch it becomes like a domino, like a butterfly effect, that one small change will start to impact other things in your life. And you will naturally start to attract things that will create more abundance in your life, more sense of well-being or you may naturally move from one career part of your career that you hate into a part of the career or company that you’re working for where you enjoy it more.
Right and through the Ayurvedic system, actually, you can find out what you’re really good at. Like actually so with me, I was doing a left brain job and I’m a right brain, very creative person. Totally the wrong type of job for me, and I find a lot of people who get autoimmune issues are in the wrong job that they’re spending eight, nine hours a day doing a kind of task, super repetitive, very robotic, that isn’t suited to them. And they may be more creative and more into doing roles where maybe it’s about talking to people, connecting with people. And when you start to know who you are, and you can communicate that to whoever your employer is. Actually, also, employers also want the best for their for their employees. Usually they want their company to thrive, they don’t want it to stifle. So quite often when you find the right person to speak to, they will start helping you transition to a better role.
Or you’ll get the courage inside to listen to your gut to apply for another job or company that you want. You’ll be surprised at how many amazing stories we’ve had people manifesting what they want, going through our 21 Day awakening journey, which lays this roadmap out for you, and is led by an instructor as well. The breakthroughs people have, you know, it’s amazing. Like the money thing, I understand, I get it. I didn’t have as many responsibilities. I didn’t have kids, didn’t have a mortgage, but I didn’t have any money. And I didn’t have a job. So I made it work. I had youth on my side and tenacity, things like that. But people can develop that. And it comes from getting one little result first, when you start to see some results, you start to trust yourself a bit more. And then it grows from there.
Lindsey:
Yeah, I listen to the One Thing podcast a lot. And, and their whole philosophy is, just keep breaking it down to what would make this step in my life easier or unnecessary. Until you get down to well, maybe just stopping and taking a deep breath when stressed out would be the one thing that I can do that would then get me to the next goal. And so it’s just really starting super small.
Niraj Naik:
Yeah, I think I’ve been on that podcast. Yeah, I was on that one.
Lindsey:
Okay, so we have maybe 12 more minutes. Do we have time to maybe hear about a healing story of somebody who’s gone through your program and then do a quick demo of the Soma Breath?
Niraj Naik:
Sure, sure. So for the demo, it may be better that I can play an audio because we’re very audio driven. And I could give you a session, which you could play to your listeners, what do you think?
Lindsey:
Sure.
Niraj Naik:
Yeah, so you can slice that in. And what I actually did recently was I interviewed a remarkable client that we had. She basically was one of these people you were talking about who has tried everything. She was struggling for money and all of this stuff. She had lost all hope. She’s got kids, got family. She was on 36 pills a day. She had fibromyalgia. She was so sick. She was puking up her own feces. That’s how bad it was. She was ruled out. She was written off by all the doctors. She basically found us, started on my free online meditations. And she started doing our protocol. And literally just did that every day, to a tee. And she wrote an amazing story in our group, about how she managed come off all the pills. She had regained a lot of body weight, but she was almost back to full, normal body weight. She had lost a third, like me, she had lost like a third or more of her body weight, and all of the diarrhea had stopped, she wasn’t getting all those symptoms anymore. And she hadn’t even at this point taken colostrum yet. She had just done the breathing techniques. Wow. So I was blown away by this. I was like, “This is amazing!” But just with breathing techniques.
That’s one recently, then there was another one who’s a stunt actress, who actually happens to be in the same studio at the moment where Alec Baldwin killed one of the directors or something of this movie. She’s like a stunt actress in Hollywood at the moment. She also suffered immensely from leaky gut issues, kind of autoimmune-like symptoms, really burnt out, really grueling schedule, trainings of a stunt woman, you can imagine, very busy. She even owned like part in the gym, very, very busy gym and all this. And she started doing the colostrum protocol. So she hadn’t done the breathing, actually just did the colostrum. And she has had remarkable benefits just from that, from the leaky gut protocol. So, you know, that’s two different stories, but then we have so many, you can go on our website and see, we’re getting new ones every week.
Lindsey:
Great, yeah, I’m sure people love that. And I’ll put a link in the in the show notes to the website. So I’ve got the affiliate link. So if people can follow that, they’ll be supporting the show.
Niraj Naik:
Fantastic. For sure. Okay. Beautiful.
Lindsey:
So anything final thing you’d like to say to my audience before we get off?
Niraj Naik:
So I love this mantra, which I got from an amazing doctor, if you want to get an inspiring doctor who really understands health, check out Dr. B.M. Hedge and head down and give him a shout out on YouTube. He is India’s top doctor. He’s won loads of awards and all this stuff. He’s a real Renegade. Basically, he says this one mantra, which is I is the first letter of ill, we is the first two letters of well. And the more I we become, the more I-centered and kind of selfish we become, you know, the more egotistic we become, that’s when we start to get ill. But the more we-focused we are, the more community driven we are, the more we actually realize that, actually, we’re part of the whole.
And the more we give back, selflessly, and this is Karma Yoga, Karma Yoga is healing, forgiving by just giving, giving, giving and through that, you reach a state of enlightenment or healing where you heal yourself of all past karma. And you look at disease, and it’s just a result of karmic things, actions you’ve taken, they’ve resulted in that illness. And what we like to do is, we like to go a layer deep to where the results in your life come from. And that comes from how you think, the quality of your thoughts, and if we can take charge of the thoughts at a cellular level, that’s the nervous system. Now, that’s where thinking comes from. We can actually improve the decisions we make, increase, improve the actions we make, and increase our results, the quality of our results, and heal ourselves and things and get back to our best. So with the breath, you have a tool where you can consciously actually gain control the entire consciousness of the entire body. Because every cell has a consciousness, has a brain, has a mind, it thinks, each one breathes. And when we bring that into harmony with just a few simple rhythmic breaths, which you can do every day, okay, we bring balance back to the body. And what that allows us to do is to start thinking less about just us, but the entire community of our entire planet and tap into them. The super consciousness of our planet. Imagine that there’s a whole mind, there’s a collective consciousness of everyone that exists on this planet. And when we start to become refocused, and we become harmonized within, in our inner world, we have a better connection with the outer world and that’s when abundance flows effortlessly and easily to each one of us. So there you go.
Lindsey:
Wonderful. That sounds like a good plan. Well, thank you so much for sharing about this with us. And I look forward to sharing the demo with my listeners. You take care.
Niraj Naik:
You too. Really great talking to you. Thank you so much.
If you’re struggling with ulcerative colitis or any type of gut health problem and are ready to get some professional help, you’re welcome to set up a free, 30-minute breakthrough session with me. We’ll talk about what you’ve been going through and I’ll tell you about my gut health coaching 5-appointment program in which I recommend lab tests, educate you on what the results mean and the protocols used by doctors to fix the problems revealed. Or if you’re ready to jump in right away or can just afford one appointment at a time, you can set up an 1-hour consultation with me.
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