Gina Bria:   Well, I am here with john Ayo. He’ll tell you later why those initials matter. And he is our travel expert and boy, are we pleased at the Hydration Foundation to find someone of his quality, who can really shift your concept of what that dehydration experience of travel can be like and how we can get brand new solutions in there through hydration.

So, we are so pleased to welcome John. He’s a colleague. He’s one of those colleagues that you just want in your life. We circled around a number of projects and interest together and we’re really grateful to present him and present his work. He can talk a little bit about his book that he’s written and his work. And, John, please, Hydration Foundation welcomes you. And we’d love to know a little bit about how you got to where you are in travel and being a travel expert. Tell us.

John Ayo:   Thank you, Gina. And thank you to the Hydration Foundation. I’m excited to be a part of this amazing team that you have put together here. This wasn’t on my agenda when I started out long ago. I was a Bachelor’s in Engineering and I’m graduating semester and I’m like “I don’t want to be an engineer. What am I going to do?” So, I went and got an MBA and I joined IBM and I went into sales, 19 years, and had a very successful career but just wasn’t feeling fulfilled, ended up closing this deal that was the largest in the history of IBM for a billion dollars. I’m like “I think after the billion-dollar deal, I’d be fulfilled” but inside I wasn’t feeling fulfilled. So, I’m praying “What am I supposed to do?” and the answer was I got sick. And I felt like I had 102 fever and I was in pain and miserable, couldn’t sleep. So, I went to the doctors and thousands of dollars, scans and scopes and tests. And they said “It’s all in your head.”

Gina Bria:   Oh no!

John Ayo:   Yeah. My engineering brain kicked into problem solving on the body. I got fascinated with natural health, started going to chiropractors and acupuncturists and they became my teachers and friends. I went and got a Doctorate in Natural Health in 2006.

Gina Bria:   Awesome.

John Ayo:   Throughout that whole thing, I’m still working in IBM but I had moved to a new job in 2006, where I was a leading a sales class. It was a five-day class and we had anywhere from 80 to 200 students and a team of 10 instructors. And we did that class in 26 countries. So, I learned the hard way as a naturopath how to stay healthy when you travel. Not easy, Gina.

Gina Bria:   Right, yeah.

John Ayo:   So, I learned the hard way about that. And then I wrote my book a few years ago before anybody could tell me “What do you know about writing a book?” And so, I knocked it out. And I thought we all read a lot of emails [inaudible][02:49] how hard can it be. So, let me just write something up here. So, I wrote my book called Travel Balance that really is about helping business travelers primarily. I also work with leisure travelers but for business travelers it’s especially hard, because a lot of times you’re asked to fly halfway around the world and get off the plane to go have a meeting and cross seven time zones. And, yeah, there’s things we can do to trick the body but it’s really not in the best interest to do that. So, that’s my passion is really to focus on wellness in general but, specifically, how do I help travelers because it’s tough.

Gina Bria:   It’s tough and it’s frequent.

John Ayo:   Yeah.

Gina Bria:   And it’s where it’s happening. We have to travel for business now. It because we’re a global world and that kind of travel is required. And it’s also the professionalism you have to show up after having put your body through that stress is a sort of unrecognized fallout feature that we really want to address in this talk with you to help people understand. Traveling is a super hit on the body. People are aware of that. They’re experiencing that. They may try to tinker with jetlag or they may even call it jetlag. What I want to land for us in this interview and so well is it’s a hydration issue.

John Ayo:   It’s a hydration issue. We have that problem. As you know, chronically everybody’s dehydrated. And then when you step on an airplane in this little metal tube flying at 30,000 feet with Wi-Fi bouncing around, it is incredibly dehydrating. So, it takes us from bad to worse. And we’ve got to do everything we can to hydrate up before we step on that plane, do it while we’re on the plane and then when we get off because, as you alluded to, jetlag is a big part of dehydration. I’ll talk about some of my other secrets. And, as you know, in the world of health it’s not just one thing that we do. “John, what’s your secret to stay healthy when you travel?” There’s not one thing. I’m going to give you a bunch. And the more of them you do, the better results you’ll get but we’re still tricking the body when we play the jetlag game. We’re not meant to fly halfway around the planet and just pop out and be perfect. I’ve learned how to do it for the most part. I still run into challenges every now and then but it’s tricky but we can do it. Our bodies are amazing.

Gina Bria:   So, just before we get into the conversation of what you do, can we have a conversation about what you don’t? And by that, I mean, where do you plug in, of course, the recovery conversation? Where do you do the don’ts – “I don’t do this, I don’t do that because I’m using that time for rest, for replenishment after having gone through this mobile bus in the sky.” I’m just curious about that because usually we’re all busy saying “Well, I do this, I do this, I do this” but sometimes it’s …

John Ayo:   What are we not doing?

Gina Bria:   Yeah.

John Ayo:   I am not drinking things that are dehydrating for my body. I’m not putting in things that are going to make my body have to fight and work harder. The key to all this in the travel health world is how do I boost my immune system and help it so that it can do what it is supposed to do because I can’t stop the person that’s coughing when you’re sitting in the little lounge getting ready to board the plane, they always sit right next to you. I can’t stop that but all we can do is boost up our immune system to fight it off, of course, wash your hands, do all that kind of stuff. So, the main thing that I don’t do is push myself too hard because that’s the biggest thing is it just knocks out stress, it’s what knocks down your immune system. And the stressors come in the form of … It could be the things that we’re eating like sugar and dairy and things like that. It could come in the form of just pushing yourself too hard, getting at the airport too late. So, I don’t get there … I used to when I flew domestically for IBM, I was proud of getting on the plane when the door would close and I got in. Today, especially with international travel, you do not want to be that person. So, reducing stress. So, anything I can do to reduce stress, that’s where we’re going.

Gina Bria:   I love it. So, then tell us some of your do’s. Wait, wait. Any other don’ts?

John Ayo:   The other don’t is on your return, a lot of people, ask me “Do you get sick when you travel?” – “I don’t have any problem with that” but then they’ll say “But when I get home, I get sick.” So, now you’re taking yourself out two or three days on the other side of your trip and again, lost productivity, you’re not working, so it costs you and the company money. So, the big downside is don’t go right back to work. If you get in at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. at night, you need to schedule that next morning off and really take it off like go do yoga, go do whatever you need to do to just calm down because we need that break but we don’t. We usually get in and schedule that meeting right away the next day like we just drove home from 30 minutes away, like you said, the big bus in the sky.

Gina Bria:   Right, yes. I know one of our other physicians on the summit, Dr. Linda Lancaster, always recommends a salt bath and baking soda bath as one of the don’ts. That’s one of the things that you do after a flight to just relax, draw out, make the transition.

John Ayo:   Absolutely. It’s even okay to bring that with you. I’m a huge fan of Epson salt baths. Magnesium sulfate is so needed in the body. Magnesium we’re so deficient of. Much like water, we’re deficient of magnesium. So, to get in that tub with Epsom salt and baking soda, maybe even a handful of sea salt, that’s pretty easy to travel with. So, when you get to a hotel that has a bathtub that you might want to get in, you’re set, right? So that’s a pretty good thing. I’m a huge fan of that as well. It really helps calm us down.

Gina Bria:   I have found that you can call downstairs in a hotel and surprisingly they often will have it.

John Ayo:   That’s awesome. I have not thought of that. I haven’t tried that one. I know there’s some places where you can get a humidifier like in Vegas. I guess the thing is just asking. You never know, right? On that kind of note, one of the things that’s one of my travel secrets around staying well, which is a big deal, is when you’re going to be gone for like 10 or 11 days and on day two you start feeling the scratchy throat, “I’m getting sick. What am I going to do?” So, it starts with a don’t. The first don’t is avoid sugar, dairy, and wheat. So, those three things will knock down your immune system faster than just about anything. Clearly, you want to hydrate up. You want to take supplements, essential oils, whatever you can to boost your immune system help your body but the big deal is when you forget all that stuff and you’re sitting there, and when you always get sick, it’s not at 6 p.m., it’s usually about 10, 10:30, right before you go to bed, is you can always go to the hotel restaurant and ask them for a clove of garlic. Suck on that clove of garlic or chew it. You won’t be the most popular person at the event but it will help your immune system dramatically and knock out some pretty bad critters. So, that’s another. Call down and ask for it. I didn’t know you could do that.

Gina Bria:   The garlic, can you like chew it at night and then come in the morning before your business?

John Ayo:   It’s not going to help with rapport but at least you’re going to the meeting now as opposed to you’re lying in the bed going “Oh, I don’t feel good and I’m halfway around the world.” And I’ve been there. Not fun.

Gina Bria:   That’s a lousy feeling. Okay, I love that. So, now let’s go to your do’s.

John Ayo:   So, the do’s around which one?

Gina Bria:   Let’s return to this conversation a little bit earlier about our immunity is our travel cloak. It is everything and it is our future, it’s our past, it’s where we get the youth and our youthfulness, right? So, that travel cloak, the immunity, keeping that stress issues out, taking time on either side of travel, when you’re near someone who’s coughing. Give us an immune idea.

John Ayo:   Okay. So, first off, you have to know that most of our immune system resides in the gut. So, that’s why the sugar, dairy, and wheat and the things that we eat are so important because we’ve got to take care of that digestive system. For a lot of people, when they travel, they have issues like constipation. That’s where the magnesium might come in and taking some internally in supplement form but boosting that immune system through the foods that we’re eating and, of course, hydration, believe it or not, right? Hydration is huge.

Gina Bria:   John, before we get to the hydration conversation, can we talk about airport food?

John Ayo:   Airport food, surprisingly, is much better than it used to be. I think it was in New York but I can’t remember, they have a salad bar. How awesome is that? You have more and more choices. More and more of these airports are moving to what look like malls. So, if we can just go in there and just make … First, you have to understand “what is good for me and what’s not” and then you have to actually act on that, two different things. In the past it used to be “I know what I want to eat but it’s not here” and that’s a challenge. That means you got to bring it with you. So, I always have bars with me that is my emergency because things happen and you get stuck on a plane, flights get delayed or you’re stuck in another airport. So, you got to have your emergency stuff with you but in airports today, it’s much easier to get healthy food. You just have to know what it is and then make that choice to opt into it.

Gina Bria:   Something I’ve been attempting and working more and more into my travel life has been on the days I travel, I fast.

John Ayo:   Yeah. Well, absolutely. I’ve been doing intermittent fasting now for a couple of months and I really, really love that. I didn’t think I could because I do this hot Vinyasa Yoga in the mornings and I thought “Okay, I haven’t eaten in like 14 hours. I think I’m going to die in this class” but it turns out you have more energy. And so, it’s fascinating and I love doing that. So, I’m with you. If you can do that, it’s just, again, you better really hydrate up because, as you know, so much of the hydration we get is from the food or it can be. So, if you’re not eating anything, you better at least do that magic chia seed trick.

Gina Bria:   Yeah. So, talk about hydration now. I can’t wait.

John Ayo:   Hydration, first, we have to get purified water. And the good news is that some airports are now putting in filtered water systems, which is great because now you can bring an empty bottle and fill it up, which you can count on that. So, for me, step one, as soon as I get through security, after I wash my hands because one of the germiest things you’ll encounter is that security tray, so wash your hands and then I go buy a bottle of water. And then I’ll mix, I have some powdered mixes, chia seeds, and maybe a little sea salt in that thing, and I have my bottle water. And that bottle stays with me the whole trip, like 14 days it’s with me. Here’s one of the key things. You’ve got to have it with you on the plane, especially on long flights because the flight attendants don’t come by all that often. And it’s not up to them to do that. When they do, you get two cups of water with no ice and you fill up your water bottle and then you drink throughout the flight. And that’s the key. People don’t – “I don’t like water, doesn’t taste right. So, I’ll just drink a whole bunch in the morning and be done.” Well, the body doesn’t work that way. The cells want water and hydration throughout their day because they’re always doing their thing and reproducing. So, on that flight, got to have water. So, drinking tons throughout the flight. Are you going to be going to the bathroom? Yes, you are, a lot. And you need that because we need the movement too, you got to move. I’ve been on a 15-hour flight and I move up and down at least once an hour. And I look and I notice that probably 90% of the people never leave their seat.

Gina Bria:   They don’t move.14:47

John Ayo:   It’s important to get up move around. Now, of course, what I’m saying would be chaos for the airplane if everybody decided “We’ll all get up move and I’ll blame Gina and John.” If we get chaos on the flights, now we’ve got to put laws in place to keep everybody in their seat but it really is important for so many reasons. That lymphatic system needs you to move in order for it to move and that’s a part of the hydration cycle, right? On the other side it’s the lymphatics moving it through. So, having that bottle of water with you.

And then the other part that I would highlight for folks is when you get to your hotel room, so you got your bottle with you, usually sometimes you’ll arrive, it’s 10, 10:30 at night and you go to the hotel room and there may or may not be water in the room. Where’s the one secret place you can always get water? I have found this hotel yet anywhere in the world. Where can you get filtered water at 11:30 at night?

Gina Bria:   Maybe the ice bin at the end of the hall?

John Ayo:   The workout room. You go to the hotel gym, that little gym. You may not ever visit that thing. And I’m not a huge fan of working out there because I’d be rather off to meet people for breakfast and stuff. So, I started with the best of intentions but that never happened. So, I just gave up but I do go visit. They’re all like walking in my suit, my work costume and just bring my bottle and just fill up with water. And so, it’s good to know but after that you have to move into, I call, survival mode. It’s like if we dropped you somewhere in the middle of an island, first thing you’d want to do is find water. Same thing when you land in a big city. Go find a local convenience store and buy big bottles of water. So, I’m walking down the streets of Istanbul carrying my five days’ worth of water with me, got to have it. And so, I manage it, monitor it. Again, I’m so excited to see at these events, I speak at a lot of events, and these big shows now have, the hotels have filtered water, they have purified water everywhere. Now, is it structured? Probably not but that’s where the chia seeds come in. When I talk to these groups, almost always when I talk about chia seeds, they’re like “I hadn’t thought of that.” Awesome food, very inexpensive, easy for meeting professionals to put this into the itinerary and talk about it and help out their folks because if they’re not hydrated, they’re not feeling good. And then they’re getting sleepy. And then they’re not getting what they’re supposed to get. So, it’s a pretty cheap, easy thing to do.

Gina Bria:   Well, we’d love to get you to Delta and help them. What we want to do is have these airlines start having hydration education programs for their customers because it’s a beautiful thing to do as part of the overall “How do we help you fly well” and then, I think, airline employees. And I don’t get out of a plane without …

John Ayo:   I’ve tried. I’ve tried to get to these airlines and I have a couple here in Dallas that I’d love to go talk to, to get into their training program because they have so many new flight attendants coming on and they have no idea what they’re in for, and just to talk to them about some of these things around natural health, how do you stay healthy. So, I hope that we can get in there one day. I would love to go talk to them.

Gina Bria:   Me too. Well, we’re going to invite Delta to be one of our sponsors for the Hydration Foundation. So, everybody would look and see if we actually accomplish that. If not, get up there sooner or later, somebody’s out there we need to connect with the airlines and it’ll help us, we really want to share how important hydration is under these flight conditions.

John Ayo:   Yeah, it’s a big deal. The other thing that people need to know about, this is a much trickier one, I don’t know if we want to go down this path but one of the other big things that I talk about in the world of health is electromagnetic fields. Our bodies are just under stress all the time from Wi-Fi. We want better and better and “Oh my god, let’s get 5G out there” now for the cell networks. Great for downloading things. Not so great for our little energy field. And what it does is it locks down the calcium sites in the cells that allow things in and outside of that cell because the key is not just water in your body because, as Gina says, flesh and blood and will drink it and it goes right out. How do we get it in the cells? So, when you have your cells here and these electromagnetic fields are impacting the ability of that water to actually get into the cell, not a great thing. So, you’re sitting on a plane with Wi-Fi. There are some things you can do for protection, different things that you can wear, maybe different gemstones or certain things to help with that. I really advise people to look into it. I definitely wear a necklace all the time that helps with protecting that but just be aware and at least have your stuff away from you.

Gina Bria:   Right.

John Ayo:   And try and manage it when you’re not on the plane because when you travel, that’s the hard part is so much is outside your control. We can only do what we can do. So, you got to know where that is and when to do it.

Gina Bria:   I heard some very interesting work lately that’s got me very curious and I’m attempting to practice this in my own life which is using sound. So, when you’re on the plane, you can put in a recording of maybe Tibetan bells or some kind of tunnels, that those frequencies are playing through sound but they are interacting with the electromagnetic frequencies, that they do help bring down the stress. And it makes sense from a chemical point of view, which is how do we bring our cortisol down and now, I think, we can start to have the conversation about it and it makes sense on the electromagnetic field conversation too. So, we know it’s successful in one place in our life. For example, it does bring down stress.

John Ayo:   Absolutely. That’s one of the other things that I talk about is usually when I do my presentations, I talk about the three things I’d never travel without and one of them is noise-cancelling headphones. Even if you just put it on and turn them on and just don’t listen to music, just turn them on, it will help balance that engine noise, that frequency, that jet engine is just not biocompatible with us. It stresses us. So, just putting on the noise cancelling will help reduce your stress. And if you listen to peaceful music, reducing stress even more. Again, more of these things you do, the better. Good to know on the EMFs. I didn’t know about that but that makes sense because our body is way more electrical than it is biochemical, which is pretty fascinating. There’s a doctor here in Dallas, I don’t know if you know him, Jerry Tennant.

Gina Bria:   Yeah, I’ve [inaudible] about Dr. tenant.

John Ayo:   Love Dr. tenant. He’s a really amazing ophthalmologist. I think he’s almost 80 now. He has taught some amazing things. He wrote a book called Healing Is Voltage that I just love. And, again, it’s just talking about how the body is just way more energetic. We are energy, electrical energy as well as other kinds. And so, the way that you keep these cells going is you’ve got to have hydration, you’ve got to have water, and then you’ve got to have movement. And there’s a bunch of other factors that play in but, yeah, fascinating. For those that are interested in what I just said, find his book Healing Is Voltage.

Gina Bria:   Yes, it’s very important work in helping us to understand that we’re only talking about chemical bodies up until now that’s been the medical paradigm and the “how do we get well” paradigm. And that may have been sufficient enough, as limited as it was, for the kinds of environments that we’ve lived into up until now but we no longer live in a world in which a chemical understanding of ourselves is sufficient to keep us healthy.

John Ayo:   Well, that’s exactly right. I mean, it’s definitely changed. I mean, technology is good and bad, as we know, in so many different ways. And so, the ability to have that understanding and use energy, different forms, scalar energy is a huge one that I’ve been exploring, that is just fascinating how we boost the energy field of our bodies. And the more we boost our energy field and knock down the stressors, the healthier and happier we’re going to be. I’m 102. So …

Gina Bria:   Oh, I love it.

John Ayo:   Yeah. No, that’s what we want to do is spend this stuff around, how do we increase those telomeres so we have anti-aging and all the things we’re talking about are the ways to make that happen. Another quick plug, for my friend Dan Buettner from Blue Zones, I don’t know if you’ve heard about that, when we look at the places in the world that have the highest longevity, there’s so many factors that play, it’s pretty basic. Most of this stuff is like if you go back a hundred years, you can find the answers to a lot of the problems we have today. And boy, we have spun up this hamster wheel and I’m not so sure that it’s a great thing.

Gina Bria:   Well, I think your point of living well is going to look pretty much the same anywhere but why we’re having the conversation about travel is that’s one of the most stressful environments we have but we know how to do it well there, it leaks back into our life everywhere. So, the reason why travel is such an important topic, John, as you know, it is the place where we discover that we have this problem the most. So, suddenly we’re sitting in the problem in a way that actually is part of our whole life but we haven’t really recognized because now we’re at the extreme end of it.

John Ayo:   That’s exactly right.

Gina Bria:   It’s a great place to discover “Wow, I’m a water being. I’m an electrical being. And I’m feeling it. This plane is making me notice that I have these features to myself. And now, I can start leaking those wellness practices back into my daily life.”

John Ayo:   Absolutely. So, yeah, when I talk to people and tell them I’m a travel wellness expert – “Oh, people don’t travel that much” – and I’m like “Well, I’m a wellness expert too.” It’s harder. If you can get the travel part down, the general wellness part, as you just said, is easier because travel just puts us in a box. I can’t change when the flight gets canceled, delayed, you’re sitting on the tarmac, you lose your luggage. All these things happen to you and you can’t do anything about them other than learn to breathe, which I teach, as well. So, that’s really important, like you said. And the cool part is that we get to experience these cultures and there are some that are still out there, not so many left anymore, but there are a few all these blue zones where people are demonstrating for us how we have longevity and how do we have anti-aging and how do we reverse that

Gina Bria:   Well, why can’t we make travel a Blue Zone? I mean, I’m saying that facetiously but not really. It’s like, look, we have new information. We can activate systems in our bodies that we were not even aware that we have. For example, the connective tissue turns out to be an entire hydration and information system we didn’t even know existed. We didn’t know it had those functions until quite recently. So, now we can activate whole new systems that are already within us in new environments adaptively to get ourselves back into really powerful healing and balance.

John Ayo:   Yeah. The trick is to bring in the money side of it and that’s the hard part, right? As you said, the connective tissue, the fascia that houses the energy channels, the meridians for acupuncture, that’s where they live in the fascia. When you see the videos that show the hydration going on through the fascia, if we looked at that and said “Okay, how can we figure out how to do this on a plane? Can I figure out a way to get sound all around me?,” I know a lady that has a chair that you sit in that’s called ‘So Sound’ when you feel it all over your body. What if airplane seats look like that? Well, at some point, you got to bring in the financial model that says “Where’s the ROI in that? Can I help my people to be healthier on the other end of this flight than when they got here?”, what’s the value in that?” There’s a pretty big value in that but I don’t know, that’s a different problem.

Gina Bria:   I like it. I like the noise cancelling headphones for our interim step. And you said two other things that you never travel without. I didn’t want to lose those two.

John Ayo:   Well, one of them is definitely water, bottled water specifically. So, bringing my bottle with me is one. Noise-canceling headphones is two. And then the third one, of course, is supplements and oils. I would never leave home without my supplements and oils and have them with me. It can’t just be in your bag that’s checked. If you check bags, it’s got to be in your bag like a few feet away from you because I got on a flight, I got upgraded on a flight from Argentina to Dallas, Buenos Aires to Dallas, and I ate something in the executive lounge and afterward I’m getting on the plane going “Wow! Is it just me or is it really hot?” and I got food poisoning. And for an 11-hour flight, that’s not pleasant. So, I’m glad I had stuff with me. It still wasn’t pleasant but at least it was better than it could have been. I was able to get through food poisoning in a few days and not have to go to a hospital because of all the supplements and herbs. That’s the trick. You got to have this stuff with you when you get sick, which, again, is usually 11:30 at night or something. You wake up “I don’t feel good” and be on Amazon ordering stuff.

Gina Bria:   Do you travel with charcoal?

John Ayo:   I have some bentonite clay and other things that have charcoal in it but I have certain supplements that I use, absolutely, and I carry those with me and they’ve saved me so many times.

Gina Bria:   Yeah, tell us your supplements.

John Ayo:   Well, I use a variety of Young Living essential oils. So I have oil blends, thieves and diarize.

Gina Bria:   You still don’t travel without essential oils.

John Ayo:   Thieves and diarize, never travel without them because thieves is the immune system booster, diarize for any digestive issues that you might have. I use a lot of standard process products. I was telling you about a company that’s been around for 90 years. They’ve got just fabulous whole food supplements and herbs that I carry with me. As an example, one of them that people don’t know about, when you travel on long flights, you can have issues with circulation. So, like deep vein thrombosis, it’s a thing. It’s a dangerous thing. And there’s an herb called Collinsonia Root. So, they have a product Collinsonia Root. If you take that on these long flights every couple of hours, it will help with circulation. So, you only get that once or you only get close to it. I got on a flight once and my calves started getting tight and I felt down there and they felt like bricks and it was scary. So, I’m moving, I’m walking, I’m drinking. And ever since then, any long flight I get on, I’m taking that. Compression socks can help but, anyway, good to have these things with you. So, I talk about all of this stuff in my book because you don’t know what you don’t know.

Gina Bria:   I actually have a checklist I keep right in my suitcase. So, whenever I open it up, I know what’s missing, what’s not. On movement front and keep making sure your circulation keeps going, you may be in a situation where you can’t get up either because you might have an ankle issue or whatever. My sister is in a wheelchair. So, she’s often not able to move. I’m very alert to that but I’ve always told her “Make sure you drop your chin to your chest and bring your head back. Do it often. You can just look like you’re nodding off. You don’t even care what people think about you anymore but I’m sure you’re flushing that synovial fluid, so you’re keeping yourself in motion.” And then I also like to really roll my head from side to side, just whatever kind of micro movements I can give myself. I don’t fool around anymore. And I don’t care if I have to ask the guy next to me to get up. I don’t for some reason, they don’t stick me in the middle. I just say “That guy doesn’t know I’m saving his butt.” – “Get another seat. Get up.”

John Ayo:   “Get up. I’m coming out again.” That’s right, exactly.

Well, the other thing that plays in that’s fascinating is EFT. So, a lot of people may not be familiar with the Emotional Freedom Technique, tapping on certain points. So, I talked about this, I have a little highlight in my book about it but it’s one of the other tricks that I use for jetlag. And, basically, what I’m doing is I’m tapping into the time zone that I’m going to.

Gina Bria:   I love that.

John Ayo:   When we here at 6 p.m. and I arrive in London at 1 a.m., as soon as I get on that plane, I just go “You know, it’s 1 a.m.” My body clock is set and I reset it by tapping these points that energetically just helps my body.

Gina Bria:   And then coming up with the meridian line.

John Ayo:   Absolutely. So, you do that. You drink your water. A couple other jetlag tips for folks is when you land at your place, of course, you’re hydrating, get bare feet on Earth, earthing. If you can get out there for 20 minutes with your bare feet on the ground, grass or dirt, it’s going to help sink you into that time zone, dump a bunch of static electricity from the plane and sync you in. So, you’ve tapped, you’ve done that. Stay up until 9 p.m. the first two nights, wherever you’re going. Whatever you have to do, stay awake till 9 p.m. and then out you go. I use melatonin, especially on those multiple time zone things, to help my body sync in. And, of course, we know that the pineal gland is what makes melatonin. So, the way we fill up the tank is by looking at the sun. So, when you land, if you’re there at noon, look up at the sun and get the tank filling up and then at night, keep it dark so the melatonin can release and you have a better shot at sleep because that’s another big thing I talk about – How do you sleep in hotel rooms? Not easy.

Gina Bria:   No but I really love your suggestion that we go and look at the sun at the place we’ve landed because we’re really reorganizing by virtue of the angle of that sun. Even the microbes inside of us have molecular clocks. That’s the work of Laura Cooper. Amazing stuff we’re finding out. And that sun gaze, that moment where you’re actually receiving into your body, that’s an information system that’s resetting your clock. It’s an excellent tip. I’m really glad you brought that up.

John Ayo:   Cleanse the microbes. I don’t know if this will make it into our interview or not but I’ll mention this because I thought it was fascinating. You probably know more about this because you’re in San Francisco but I don’t remember who did this study but they basically looked at the microbial kind of layout of sourdough bread and the sourdough culture in San Francisco. Big Blue flew to Boston and did the microbial culture with that same sample and it was different. It had changed based on the environment. Have you heard of that?

Gina Bria:   I haven’t heard of that and I’m very excited to hear about it because it makes sense to me that they shift, they’re shifting. From the anthropology point of view, we know that the microbes in certain populations are obviously different but what we didn’t know is that they’re seasonally different.

John Ayo:   If you pick those people and you put them on a plane, it’ll change. I think the microbiome changes based on where we are. And, again, the microbiome is a huge part of the immune system and what we’re talking about here.

Gina Bria:   It’s such an interesting point, John. And, again, those are living creatures in there. What they need is us to be grounded, peaceful. We need to be like an inner ocean in there for our microbe field to do the work to support us to have consciousness, to have a mind to have thoughts, to be an essence, a collected cohesive essence. So, I love the idea of we’re traveling with our microbes. They might need a little travel attention too.

John Ayo:   And they change. And they outnumber us 10 to 1, at least. So, we better take good care of them. So, we take probiotics and that’s good but, as we had talked about earlier, the diversity is key and you can only get so much in a probiotic pill. So, you get certain strains that are very powerful and effective but it’s how do we nurture this microbiome that is us and how does it change when we travel. I know you need one more thing to do, Gina. So, maybe you can work on that one.

Gina Bria:   Looking at the microbes in travel, I know. Well, I think microbes are our future. I believe in them. I believe they’re going to be where, I believe, in well hydrated microbes. And I believe that they are so vast compared to us and our cellular structure that surely we can regain new adjustments, adaptations to these very difficult environments that we live in called indoors at offices and schools and buses and planes and trains and all of that that those microbes can help us adjust, accumulate much quicker adjustments then we realize. So, looking at them as part of our strategy for traveling is a great thought, a great idea.

John Ayo:   Sounds good. I’m going to add them to my list. Normally, when I speak to people and I tell them most the information you get on the media, you have to look at who’s sponsoring it. So, look at the commercials in between. So, I’m here representing the carrot and spinach lobby which don’t get a lot of things. So, now I’m going to start representing the microbe lobby because they don’t get a lot of airtime either but I applaud you and I’ll join you in helping support our microbe friends because it’s everything. When I first started down this path as a naturopath, my personal issue was around fungus and imbalances with fungi because I had too many antibiotics as a kid growing up. And so, my thought was “How do we get rid of them? We got to get rid of them. We got to get rid of all the fungi.” It’s not about get rid of. It’s about balancing them. When they’re in balance, things are good. When Candida and other fungi get out of balance, bad things happen. How do we get them down where they need to be because we need them and they need us? And so, it’s about the balance. And can we all just live together, Gina?

Gina Bria:   We will. We are. We’re doing it. I mean, the Hydration Summit now has an extraordinary array of speakers who are bringing specific kinds of expertise but, overall, what I’m really loving, John, is that we’re more and more spiraling in cohesion. We’re saying very simple, straightforward, similar things in each different specialty. And one of my favorite interviews so far has been with Dr. Sarah [inaudible] who is a psychiatrist and she’s just simply saying “Look, even if you take your meds, they don’t work well unless you’re hydrated. So, let’s just start with hydration.” And I think that’s a beautiful starting place. I love that we can start the conversation on traveling with the conversation on hydration. And I just want to thank you for all this work you’re doing to get business travelers in health and flourishing because so much of what we’re doing in the world requires travel. To have impact in the world today, you have to travel.

John Ayo:   Yeah, we do. And I’m also thankful to work with the leisure travelers because as our baby boomers are retiring now, there’s wellness travel which is huge and people are going places, they want to experience new things and they want to go and learn about different wellness techniques. So, I love that. And I love talking to those folks as well. So, I appreciate all the work that you’re doing,

Gina Bria:   Right. We don’t want them trashed on the way home, right? They go to a wellness spa and recover and then die on the way home.

John Ayo:   Exactly, exactly. I appreciate you, Gina, and all that you do.

Gina Bria:   I appreciate you too. Bless you show us your book one more time so we can actually get that title on – Travel Balance: Healthy Travel, Business Profitability.

John Ayo:   Where Healthy Travel Drives Greater Business Profitability. There you go. It’s on my site TravelBalance.net and you can go up there. I actually have a sample packing list up there along with some other goodies and articles and a blog with a bunch of travel video tips and things like that. So, I’m happy to share however I can.

Gina Bria:   John Ayo, thank you.

Gina Bria:   The Hydration Foundation is so pleased to bring you Ken Diehl. He’s the real deal. We’re really happy that he’s going to share his knowledge about what happens after you drink a glass of water inside in your tissue system. He’s here as a tissue expert. And we’ll share a little movement as well to get you more fluid that can help us do that.

And, Ken, again, we are so grateful for your time and your knowledge here at the Hydration Foundation and spreading your fantastic practices. What’s unusual is that most people don’t think of hydration as a part of the movement chain. And so, we are excited to share your expertise on why movement is the other half of hydration, not just drinking that water, which is the message we get over and over again but actually where does that water go and then what happens to that water and what can we do about distributing hydration through all of our tissues.

So, Ken, just to open that conversation, tell us a little bit about your clinical experience, how you came to be where you are and why water showed up as such an important feature of what you do.

Ken Diehl:  Well, I am a physical therapist by license here for over 25 years and early in my career I specialized in orthopedic rehabilitation and also manual therapy. So, that study and all of the joint structures of the body and taking a look at posture and movement in terms of mechanics and is the body mechanically available to do certain motions or posturally or because of traumas and dramas that get stuck in the body is that not available? So, that was really my career. And then in the mid-2000s, I went through Feldenkrais Practitioner training which is a kind of a different animal because we’re looking at the body and movement through the nervous system largely and through the long bones of the body and through patterns that get stored in terms of movement in the brain as I look at it as kind of software programs. And so, it’s all the how does our body move itself in the background. Well, our brain is thinking about something else and while we’re paying attention to something else. And so, oftentimes those patterns are helpful and they’re functional. And then sometimes if there’s trauma or drama in the body from accidents or falls or things like that, then the body takes secured routes and some kind of compensation starts to happen. So, that’s all information. And I’m an Aquarian by nature, which is the water bearer. And so, most of my life I have been fascinated with water. And I also have a degree in Chemistry. And so, the molecule of water always fascinated me because of the style of bonding that it does with the H₂O and now you’re describing the H₃O₂ which is the structured water is fantastic. And it’s a covalent style of bonding as opposed to ionic, which right there we’re describing movement because the electrons are being shared between the hydrogen and the oxygen. So, the electrons are not fixed in space. They’re constantly in motion and they have probability fields where they’re going to be and according to the hydrogen and the oxygen. So, water itself, you hear all these things like water is life. And that’s the truth. The earth is 60%, 70% water and our bodies are 60%, 70% water. So, water is what we’re basically made of. And the tissues in the body require the water to conduct information. The water is electrochemical. So, it can conduct the information. The fascial network is built with water and responds to all kinds of information. I’m sure we’re going to find out that the fascial network is yet another nervous system that works inside the body to stabilize parts of the body and help with movement in other parts of the body. And so, one of the things I was going to talk about today was the cartilage in the body, because everybody understands that we do have cartilage, it’s the kind of the slick lining of the joint structures so that there’s a surface there that the bones can easily hinge or rotate or whatever the joint is doing. And cartilage does not have blood supply. So, it’s not fed its nutrition and its oxygen and things like that via blood supply. It’s fed via kind of a pumping action. So, there’s a compression and then a relaxation and that’s what gets the nutrition out of the cartilage that’s been utilized and then fresh nutrition back into the cartilage.

Gina Bria:   This is great information, Ken. This 9s exactly why we connected hydration and our hydraulic systems as part of the hydration story, the full story of hydration that we want to be investigating. So, continue. I love this. This is great.

Ken Diehl:  Sure. So, without movement, the cartilage dies and that’s a lot of what we’re seeing in today’s kind of world is becoming less and less mobile for a lot of people, people are doing way too much sitting and lounging around, is the cartilage doesn’t get its nutrition and it doesn’t pump out the old products and bring in the new. It’s like a sponge. If you squeeze a sponge, you squeeze the water out of it. If you let the sponge soak up, it soaks the water back up. And so, it does require movement and it requires the compression-relaxation throughout the joints. And so, the information you have about the micro-movements in your book is fantastic because, yes, if someone does have a sitting job, then we absolutely need to be doing things in addition to just sitting there because, otherwise, the body begins to sag and it kind of loses that flow of information, that flow of structural stability.

Gina Bria:   The point I want to land at that you’re saying, Ken, to help people really get this, hydration isn’t getting flushing out toxins, for example, in our joints and drawing new fresh water. It’s actual information. This is such a surprise for people. What we’re really talking now is the body is a digital information system. So, just helping to land the idea that when you’re sitting a lot, what you’re really cutting off is information flow along with all the other multilevel functions that happen during hydration and happen in our bodies. There are many layers going on. There is the nervous system. There’s the fascial system which we didn’t even know is doing all this fantastic work but if you’re sitting, it isn’t just that you’re losing the flow to flush you and keep you clean. You’re losing the mobility in your joints and the capacity to keep them fluid and you’re also losing information about … We are in an information age. And all of this incoming information that’s coming in through our digital use, the amount of noise information that’s coming in and just think information and that must flow through us too. We have to make sure we’re flowing that information.

Ken Diehl:  Absolutely. And, personally, I think that’s what the Aquarian Age is all about. It is about us learning to communicate with one another across great distances, which we now have the internet. And within our bodies too, I think, the communication and flow are what the water element does. It carries information. And when water is in harmony, then there’s an alignment of the molecules such that, I would call this peace, I would call it harmony, you could call it love, you could call it whatever you like. And if we’re functioning well inside of our body and our water is doing well inside of us and we are hydrated, then we are in a higher state of peace and alignment and certainly more available for subtle energy and subtle thinking and, if you want to call that the spiritual realms and whatnot, we become more available. And you think of what’s the opposite of that. It would be congestion, which is what I’m talking about in the joints, in the fascial network is if the water is not flowing, the information is not moving and the connectivity is not happening, then what we have is we have stagnation. And the stagnation is what leads to things like arthritis and everybody’s becoming more and more aware of inflammatory processes in the body and really inflammatory process is to a large extent, in terms of looking at it from the movement point of view, is the opposite of movement. It’s stagnation and the flow of information stops, the flow of this harmony, of this peace throughout all of the systems of the body that are supporting, from my point of view, movement, that begins to degrade. And the force of gravity, it’s a constant. We live on earth and all of us are subject to the force of gravity and that is an impressive force. For a lot of us, it’s pulling us toward the ground. And all you have to do is look around at people who are all moving and everyone is subject to the force of gravity. And it’s not just physical gravity. It’s the weight. It’s the gravity of the emotional world and field. It’s the gravity of our thinking mind and our list of things to do. It’s the phone sitting in front of us and how many connections are stuck in the phone. And so, our world is sort of drawing us into this position and it it’s kind of antithetical for movement in the body and for good posture. So, there’s something that I like to think of as celestial gravity, which is there’s an equal and opposite force pulling us up from here to pull us up into this open supported field that is equal and opposite to gravity. And if we allow for that in ourselves and allow for that subtleness, all of a sudden, the part of what the core musculature of the body throughout the whole body is designed to do is to stabilize us in the field of gravity. And so, part of along the spine, when the core systems are working and we’re free everywhere else for movement, then the body of the spine actually tractions itself. It pulls itself up. I call it self-traction because I’m being pulled up by this higher nature and this field. We hear this term ‘Lightness of Being’ This is where Lightness of Being comes from. It’s from that place. And so, we get slumped and I call this the ‘rat on the wheel’ because we get here and the computer could be in front of me, my toothbrush could be in front of me, my steering wheel could be in front of me, my phone could be in front of me, my to-do list could be in front of me and we’re running as fast as we can to try and keep up but what we need to do is take a bit of a step back and say “Wait a min, I can still do all of these things but I can do it from this position. So, I can un-weight my spine and the traction.” The traction creates a negative pressure space where the discs are to draw water in the midst of the spine and all those joints that have been compressed when I’m like the rat on the wheel. All of those joints get opened up and water is drawn in there so now information can flow. So, this is really important because, I think, it’s different than a lot of us were taught as kids, which is from our parents “Sit up straight.” There’s a like a command that comes along with it and “Stand up straight” and “Put your chin in” and things like that. And there’s a kind of rigidity with that and it comes with fear and trauma in a certain way too. And that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about becoming available and allowing ourselves to be supported by this celestial gravity so that we can open our field for this type of communication within our own system and also from person to person and with the environments. We’re a communal species and we’re gaining some parts of community and we’re losing other parts. So, this is an important part is to have a body, it’s important to understand what are some of the rules of the road and what are the guidelines to maintain and sustain a body just like a car.

Gina Bria:   I love that you’re talking about this.

Ken Diehl:  We need that empathy.

Gina Bria:   Yeah. The hydration, the buoyancy of water within us, and describe a little bit about when we drink that glass of water, what happens. How do we help that hydration to get this buoyancy that you’re talking about?

Ken Diehl:  Yeah, sure. It’s interesting because I spent some time down in the Yucatan and down in Peru and I was taught one of the ways to drink water is to gargle it for a little bit in your throat. And so much of our mucous membranes and our tongue and all that is in the throat. So, that’s one of the best places for hydration right there. And I have a feeling, I’ve never done a scientific study, but I have a feeling that gargling of the water probably structuralizes it right there on the spot. And so, I think that’s where structuring our water comes from is from when we imbibe it, and then this process I’m talking about, about Lightness of Being, that’s introducing the core stability of the body. That’s also a form of structuring. It’s creating harmony. It’s creating a Lightness of Being. And so, that is going to resonate with the water. And I think that kind of thing with lifting ourselves up probably is a way to bring higher vibrational energy even into the water inside of our body. So, our thoughts are going to be a little bit different. Our chest and our emotional field are a little bit more open and a little bit more available. My body and my shoulders are now open and available for movement. So, as I get open and available, the availability for information to flow inside of my nervous system is going to be upgraded. That’s a software upgrade. And so, the water also is going to upgrade. So, I think that the water is who we are and the water is what supports us and it is what supports the planet. And people talk a little bit about the warming of the planet. And that’s exactly what our system does. If we get viruses on board, we get a temperature and the temperature is there for the body’s defense mechanism to cook off the virus or the parasite or whatever’s inside of us. And so, you think “Well, mother is doing a very intelligent thing, very much like we are, is to heat up a little bit and get a little bit inflamed.” So, this is something we kind of need to learn for ourselves.

Gina Bria:   I like that you’re talking about now the physics of stress in a way versus the way we often will talk about the chemistry of stress. So, when we talk about the chemicals that are released, the cortisol that create disharmonies in our systems. And the chemicals, obviously, the serotonin is a molecule that touches the water and these have a relationship back and forth. And what I love in this conversation is we know that way of talking about it, you’re introducing a sort of coherent physics way to talk about it, which is also still body based. So, us ourselves as a vessel of water, literally like we’re a ceramic pot of water, if you just think about it that way for a minute, and then that water comes into us. There are so many things it’s doing a once. It isn’t just having one function. We just normally used to think about hydration is getting moist. The idea that you gargle, I love this. This great. If you’re going to go back to the chemistry and say “Oh, well, that’s just creating more surface area exposure, literally creating more surface area exposure to oxygen and movement in the water” and, of course, that’s going to have an effect on the molecule. You talked about covalent molecules, how the molecule sits and how it connects. It’s a living relationship. And water isn’t just water. It’s a sliding relationship of the how the molecules are interacting with itself and with other molecules. So, the important part about having a conversation around molecules and movement is it isn’t just a chemical story anymore. It’s about that relationship and those fields between those molecules and what their information is bringing. We now have the capacity to understand digital. If we tried to have this conversation even 15 years ago, it couldn’t have been as popular. People wouldn’t get it. It’s really because of our digital age that we understand information transfer at self-conducting or molecule-conducting superconducting ways that’s going inside of us. That’s really cool. And movement, these are the levers that do it, right?

I’m so happy to have you, Ken. And if you can help us sort of trace what a glass of water does, where it goes and what happens and just help us think about that a little bit more broadly.

Ken Diehl:  Sure. I’m definitely not an expert in digestion per se, on that level of metabolism and things like that but osmosis is a term that that means flowing from a higher-density region to a lower-density region. So, I imagine that’s what water does in the body too is it moves through the body according to where it needs to go. And so, it has its own intelligence that way and it’s bringing information as it goes. It’s bringing information. And a lot of information in the body is electrochemical transmission and a lot of the nature of cells and the membranes that surround cells and the way water works like say in the fascial network is it sort of has the intelligence to determine what it’s going to keep on one side of the boundary layer and what it’s going to let flow through to the other side of the boundary there. So, in some ways, it’s almost like our guardian in a way like it is the intelligence that is organizing the essential biochemical nature of who we are. And so, I’m sure you got your filtration processes with the kidneys and the liver and the gallbladder and these things but at some level water is even behind the scenes of informing those systems. And so, I think we’re on the very beginning thresholds of truly understanding the nature of water and how to help ourselves with this organization of the water. I mean, I know several different toning systems that I’ve been taught from sort of indigenous wisdom keepers and the part of the whole idea of toning is it can activate chakras with a certain sound and a certain vibration but you can also use toning to clarify the body and systems inside the body so that we’re bringing harmony and balance and communication throughout the whole of the body. And so, what you have there is you have vibration and if a person gets into even over toning, then you can carry a couple of tones that is going to inform this water and help this water to understand what our wishes are and how we want to clarify ourselves. And so, we’re in the beginning stages of really understanding, I think, the true nature of water and the true intelligence of water and probably the way that water is connecting all of us through the air and the moisture in the air through the water on the earth, through the water in ourselves.

I had an interesting conversation the other day. I’m studying Rudolf Steiner a little bit and he was talking about the butterfly effect which is infinitesimal change reverberates through the universe. Well, how does that reverberate? It’s reverberating via the water. And so, I had a nice example this weekend. I was at a wetland and the wetland was completely still, and I took this little gourd and I threw it out into the middle of the pond and it went clunk. And then you could see the wave action going from there and it touched every molecule of water in that pond and everything that was in the vicinity of that pond was changed by that gourd going into the pond. That’s water and that’s doing what water does. And so, toning can do that. Lifting ourselves up into a higher vibrational sense of awareness, that can do that. So, we all need these tools of reminding ourselves, remembering. If we think of what does remembering me. It’s probably remembering in the field of water, remember like water remembers. I think water is the storage device of information.

Gina Bria:   Yes, some people are calling … I’m about to attend the 13th Annual Conference on the Physics Chemistry and Biology of Water in Germany with about 200 scientists there. And they come from all over. They’re from Korea. They’re from Italy. They’re from Japan. They’re from Russia. There’s a lot of Russians looking at water. Thank god they have really kept alive the lineage of science. And what they’re talking about … you get the get them in huddles in the corner, they you go over and you’re like “What are you guys talking about?” and they’re all like “Water is a computer. Water is the most sophisticated computer that we have. Water is the most sensitive receptor we possibly can have.” And so, I was recently with some investors who wanted to talk about investing in water and water revolution. And a young man stood up and he said “Well, I only do tech. So, I don’t know if this is a relevant conversation.” And one of the scientists stood up and said “Excuse me, water is the most sophisticated tech that anyone has ever seen or we won’t even get close. We’re not going to get close for a hundred million years yet. So, why not understand ourselves as water computing systems?” And “Wow! That is a brand-new way to sort of break open thinking about how we conduct ourselves in this room.”

Ken Diehl:  Yeah, That’s it.

Gina Bria:   Love it. And I love your idea, the downplay and the up-play. And if we’re a vessel of water and we’re tilted over all the time, the weight of that water is going to be experienced differently in our body. And if we tilt the vessel back up, now it’s got a whole kind of stability and buoyancy. And I think that’s partly what you’re going to demonstrate for us, right? You’re going to give us some motion, a little exercise that we can start to have our own experience of this.

Ken Diehl:  Yeah, exactly. And there’s a lot of ways that this gets taught. We see it taught from many different directions. And so, it’s not a new concept to sit up and bring yourself up but rather than it being kind of a command, it’s nice to bring it in as a conscious choice and something that we know that we become familiar with and it becomes part of our innate background sensing of things – “How am I? Where am I? Am I conducting myself and available to my world in the way I want to be?” So, ultimately, we want to turn that into a habit. So, that positioning and that style … You think of words like ‘regal’ and you think of ‘poise’ and you think of when you see a model moving down a runway, they’ve got that inside of them, partially because they’ve been taught and partially, they have some sense for it. I’m going to get into this a little bit. The opposite of that is, I call it the rat on the wheel, because at times we feel like a rat on the wheel like the game of making money and the game of preparing for retirement, “I can never get through my to-do list.” And so, I say the rat on the wheel looks like this and it’s a very contracted state of being. A lot of people will say “That’s excessive” but if you look around, it’s close to the way some people end up looking in themselves. And the problem is that it throws us … We have the two nervous systems of the fight or flight, which is the sympathetic and we have the nervous system of deep peace which is the parasympathetic. If we go into the rat on the wheel, we’re pushing our body into the fight or flight mechanism, fear begins to dominate our thinking, closed down emotions begin to dominate us and the cortisol and these different chemicals, from the hormonal point of view, our posture can drive us into that point of view because of where we’re at, okay? This is a lower form of humaneness in a lower part of our brain that allows us to get into this mode. So, the way out is to put this helium balloon here and a string like a puppet at the very back of the head and bring the back of the head up. And naturally the chin is going to come in a little bit because the head tilts around the axis of the ears. So, if the back of the head goes up, the chin is going to come in. Then you want to think “Okay, I want to bring a little upward lift in my clavicles, okay?” It’s not sticking the chest out and it’s not pulling the shoulders back. It’s kind of letting the shoulders come into relationship to the spine, the scapula, lifting at the clavicles. This naturally goes along with that position. Now, the core musculature of the thoracic and cervical spine is engaged. They’re stabilizing me and I’ve traction to my body up in this direction. Now, you get to that position and then you say “Well, what can I let go of?” and you can pretty much let go of everything. The shoulders can be free. The eyes are free. The head is free. I call this a bobblehead when I work with some of my clients, is get into that position and then start to ask yourself “What doesn’t need to be working?” And so, now I’m giving myself lots of freedom because I have this head up here with all this sensory apparatus and where the computer is stored. And now I’m free to follow what is intriguing to me and observe and be part of the field around me. And so, this is the thing that I’m most interested in helping people find in themselves because if they can repetitively come back to this place, it starts to become a software program in the background and it becomes habitual. Now that person has changed their vibrational frequency, they’ve changed their thinking a little bit, they’ve opened themselves emotionally to allow feeling world to come in and out of their chest. So, now that person is closer to being in harmony and connectivity in this field of water that we’re talking about, the information flow, the ins and the out, the giving and the taking, the sensory level of things. So, that would be my ‘rat on the wheel’ description.

Gina Bria:   In practicing this, I realized what was happening for me is I was literally, by changing my body position, getting this sense of celestial gravity, I was literally putting myself in a new informational pathway. And that was that was a new insight for me right away. The second I got it, I was like “Oh, I see. I’m not thinking these old things anymore. I now have available to me a different information pathway by virtue of the cohesive field.” Let’s just call it the flow of information becomes more harmonic. That’s beautiful.

Ken Diehl:  That’s great. And the last thing that I saw times get to if a person’s interested and if they’re available for it is to actually kind of get into this Lightness of Being position. And then you find out if you take a nice deep breath in and you allow the breath to lift here at the clavicles and allow the breath actually to come through to the back of your head, we can actually use our own breathing to lift our head up because then, the term in in pulmonary rehab is ‘inspiration’. That’s what breathing in means. The word is ‘inspiration’. So, what if we want to bring in inspiration and let that inspiration come all the way up into this Lightness of Being. Then we’re absolutely in a different field. We’re in a more inspired, a more open and a more subtle form of awareness.

Gina Bria:   And the fluidity, the longevity, the longevity with purpose and interest, curiosity, all of those things, we’ve moved ourselves into that informational pathway. I just love this, Ken. I can’t wait to share the gargling. We’re definitely going to share that as one of the new hydration techniques that I haven’t heard of before but it makes perfect sense to me. And as we start to stack all these new ways to get the hydration, who knew that posture, and posture, we want to use in the most beautiful way when we talk about posture towards the world, that sense of controlled curious openness, I love that we’re stacking all these ideas into the hydration bank, understanding ourselves as water beings in a new way and how we move that water inside of us. So, we’re really delighted to have these techniques from you, the movement, the posture, the getting out of the rat crouch, and gargling. Who knew? It’s so fun. I love it.

Ken Diehl:  Yeah, it’s fun. Well, I think this is the back of the Aquarian, that we are in the Aquarian Age. So, I believe this is what is going to emerge with the Aquarian Age is this connectivity of information, this harmony, this kind of moving things in the direction of peacefulness and ease and support and supporting one another, supporting ourselves in our own being. So, I really feel like you’re right on the cutting edge, I believe.

Gina Bria:   I think we all are. So, what we’ve been through right now, just speaking as an ethnographer now, the amount of information that people are experiencing every day is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. It’s astounding. And what we need is a way to make all that vast information come in and have a kind of coherence so it isn’t chaotic. And that coherence, I think, really, we get that help from the way the water molecule can begin to beam it and channel it. And we can use that concept even in our own body stance and our body fluidity and your point about the hydraulics of the joint system and how important it is to be in motion to make those ongoing, living and information processing points in our body. So, this has been a really wonderful interview. We thank you so much.

Ken Diehl:  Thank you, Gina, for inviting me. It’s been fun to put a few of my thoughts together and I love what you’re doing and I think it’s vastly important. So, I’m happy to share my perspective.

Gina Bria:   Yeah. Our conversations, I think, are much more interesting than expert interviews that we can be talking of but why not be in coherence together over topics? It’s a lot more fun and I think it does [inaudible] in the world.

So, Ken Diehl, the Hydration Foundation thanks you. I thank you and I look forward to sharing this interview with so many people. So, thanks again.

Ken Diehl:  Thank you, Gina.

Gina Bria:   Okay, bye, bye.

 

Ken Diehl:  Take care. Bye.

Gina:               The Hydration Foundation and the Hydration Solution Summit is very happy to have Deanna here. She is our athlete. We are thrilled that she’s occupying this space on our story arc of people who through athletics have found a profound need for hydration. And besides being a Division One Volleyball Queen, team player, amazing coach, really important coach because when you get those coaches who are looking at the whole picture, then you really see teams fly, her website is BeTheWinningElement.com. Isn’t that a great name – Be The Winning Element? I just thought that was beautiful.

So, Deanna, please explain what the winning element is and how hydration became so central to your story as an athlete and as a coach.

Deanna:          All right. Well, hello! Good morning. I’m so excited to be here, so excited to occupy space and be able to share a little bit about my story and, hopefully, inspire and empower others with that.

So, the background of The Winning Elements, the first question was about the winning element. And in my process and my evolution as an athlete and in developing my philosophy as a coach and just really trying to understand what contributes to anybody’s ability to really show up in life, hydration is a big part of that but what I was really seeing in my story is this evolution and this need that everything is multifaceted, right? We always want to go to the silver bullet, the one thing, the pill, the program, the workout, the fill in the blanks, right? And as humans, we’re looking for that one thing, the thing that’s going to make the difference, but the truth of this is that performance and health and vitality is really multifaceted and everything is intimately interconnected. And as I was transitioning from being a Division One athlete, becoming an endurance athlete and then transitioning into the corporate workspace and then transitioning into coaching and serving in that way, what I was really noticing in especially the youth space is that there was nothing that was speaking to the holistic athlete, right? In performance everything is so segregated, right? So, we have strength and conditioning and then we have sports nutrition and performance and then we have the mental side, if it’s even there, right? That’s the thing that’s starting to come into play a little bit more but for the most part, that’s the forgotten aspect of sport. And what I was really seeing with these youth athletes and, again, in myself is that there wasn’t a framework and there wasn’t something that kind of brought everything together. So, as I was training and working with athletes, I really saw myself in them. So, I was working with athletes that were 12 to 18 and at this time I was probably about 2526. And I’d go to practice with them and I’d ask them like “What are you working on today? What’s your goal?” And they would give me the blank stare like “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And I was like “Oh, you’re a passer. So, you’re working on passing. What aspect? What are we working on?” So, we would like drill down into these little things. And what I was really noticing was that I was exactly like them. I had that lack of clarity, that lack of focus. I didn’t understand how hydration and nutrition played into my performance. I didn’t understand that I need to be working on reaction time. These are just things that youth athletes, we don’t understand because we haven’t been taught to understand that and most adults as well, right? And what I was really seeing was that what I struggled with, they were still struggling with and that in helping them achieve their goals and their dreams, I was able to really realize mine. And that’s when I started developing my framework around mental and physical performance.

So, The Winning Element is really your unique gifts and talents. Everybody is their own winning element. And the thing that comprises that is our mental and physical performance which, I have got this really cool diagram, I’m sure you’ve seen it, other people go can go see it, it’s super helpful framework but it combines four aspects of mental performance and four aspects of physical performance. So, these are all the things that help contribute to us showing up as our best self and we can use this framework to troubleshoot on the daily, we can do this periodically to see what strategies and winning habits we can implement in our life to really move the needle. So, those elements in The Winning Element is Hydration, Nutrition, Movement, Recovery. Those are all the physical. And then on the mental side we have Confidence, Energy Management, Visualization and Self-Talk is kind of like in one and then Resilience. So, this framework really helps to give us that holistic vision and really framework for athlete development. And everybody’s going to be different at different times. Balance is unsustainable and it’s very short lived. So, if we can understand on the daily or at periodic times during our life, if we can understand where we are or where we are in our relation to how we’re applying strategies in these areas, we can really start to shift and we can make adjustments so that we can have more vitality, so that we can see better performance and, more importantly, show up for the people in our life and serve with our gifts. So, for athletes, that’s the gift of entertainment and development. And for people who are in high performing spots, whether they’re mothers, whether they’re doctors, all of the things that anybody can be, if we’re not taking care of our own mental and physical capacities, we are truly not able to show up and give our gifts. And hydration is one of the biggest facets of this, if not the biggest. And that’s the one that, of course, we’re going to focus on because that’s why we’re here.

Gina:               I think, this is such a beautiful resource to offer athletes because where do they go to have a sense of what actually is an athlete, what are the qualities, what am I trying to embody. And I know we’re going to get to the embodied conversation because that’s really important for both of us but you’ve said something that, I think, I’d like to draw attention to, which is hydration is also unique. Just as you are gifted uniquely as an athlete and that’s where our real value is that, we’re irreplaceably distinct from everyone else. So, we’re already the star of our own cosmic place. And understanding how unique each one of us is, that’s what we’re bringing to the table, to be our full selves and not worry about what we do when we’re next to someone else. And hydration is the same way. When we say eight glasses a day for everybody, it just drives me crazy. How can that prescription be right for each individual?

Deanna:          Oh, yeah.

Gina:               And then you identify in your wheel such important points that are also linked to hydration, including nutrition, that most of the good hydration comes from high plant beautiful fresh veggies and even cooked vegetables are full of the best kind of hydration. And movement, the movement part of delivering water to your tissues through movement. That’s the plan of nature too, actually the irrigation system for the whole body is a series locks and canals that allow any movement that’s now going to start driving water through our organs, our tissue system. And, of course, that’s going to buffer and add your tissues as you go into contact sports.

Deanna:          Absolutely.

Gina:               So, we want to cover while I make sure I’m telling you so you can tell me and we can remember we want to talk about this.

Deanna:          Absolutely.

Gina:               And concussion protection through hydration, tissue protection through hydration. So, make sure we’re going to move in that direction.

What I’d love to do now is hear your story of why hydration became a focus for you and how you wanted to upgrade your hydration, what happened to you, how did you decide to go about that process because that’s where we’re all starting like “Wait, I hear hydration is important. How do I get better at hydrating?” How did you do it?

Deanna:          Well, I think that everything is a journey, right? Everything is this journey in evolution and everybody’s got a different start point and everybody’s kind of on a different path. So, for me, mine started as a kid, and I still suppose now, I was very optimistic and my mom used to get really mad at me for eating berries like in the grocery store without washing them – “No, Deanna, no!” – but I’m like “I’m eating this. Sorry” Like “I’m hungry, mom. I’m doing it.” And she would always say stuff about … she’s trying to gross me out and say “fecal matter.” And my thought as a kid, and I clearly remember pushing the cart in the grocery store and I thought to myself “There’s no way that the grocery store and the government would make this legal or sell it like that” like “What are you talking about, mom?” Right. And then this continued into college and I grew up drinking tap water, I grew up drinking the sparkletts that was in the gallon that we put in the refrigerator. So, I didn’t have the awareness of … I understood the importance of hydration but it also wasn’t a huge focus for me. It was just an afterthought. It’s like “Yeah, I’m thirsty. I’m going to have some … take a drink,” right? And when I went to college and I was playing Division One volleyball and everybody wants to think like “These athletes at the highest Level who are competing, man, they absolutely get it.” Guess what, we don’t. we don’t always get it, which is like super strange because you think like this is paramount, this is foundational to performance and your ability to show up cognitively as well as physically but we don’t always get that. There’s a lot going on, we got a lot to manage and depending on how we grew up and especially how I grew up, it just wasn’t a topic of conversation or just a point of awareness, right? So, I remember that when I finished playing Division One volleyball and I started doing endurance sports, so of course my hydration was really important because number one, I was in South Texas and I’m talking like very tip of South Texas, it’s hot as hell all the time and I absolutely loved it and my favorite thing was training between 11 and 2 like that was my favorite thing was to train in the hottest part of the day. So, hydration was important for me. And the partner that I was living with at the time would always give me a really hard time about tap water. She’s like “Deanna, do not drink tap water. The tap water here in the Rio Grande Valley is not good.” And, again, that little voice, that optimistic voice in my head is saying “There’s no way that the government or our city would allow us to drink things that wouldn’t support our health,” which is, we look back and it’s like “Of course, they would, right?” like we can see that in studies over and over and over but, for me, at that time, I’d finished playing Division One volleyball, I started competing in endurance sports, triathlons, half marathons. And also, at that time, I got hit by a car while I was running. And it wasn’t till later that I realized that I had a concussion until like years later. I was like “Oh,” after I learned about concussions and the importance of concussions and hydration. I really looked at the symptoms and I was like “Oh, man, I was concussed.” I was also suffering from adrenal fatigue at that time. Again, I didn’t know about it later because it wasn’t a point of awareness for me. And for years, and especially during my graduate program when I was getting my MBA, I also had a ridiculous amount of yeast infections. And that’s like personal information but it’s part of the health conversation. And during that time, I was working, I was getting my MBA, I was working three part-time jobs and I was really diving into everything health and wellness. And the first piece that came together for me was the nutrition piece because I was really suffering from all of these different things. And once I had kind of learned about all the different inflammatory things that I was doing and things that I was adding into my diet, they were supportive to other people but they weren’t supportive to me. And I think that that’s an important part to mention too in any of our journeys is that what works for other people don’t necessarily serve us and everybody is incredibly unique. And part of being a human and part of your journey is understanding and exploring what works best for you.

Gina:               I just wanted to comment on that because most people then hear that as “Oh my God, that’s such unknown territory. Can I just get the program?” And what I’d love to lay out for people, possibly the awareness of coming into the investigation of your own self, your own function and your own uniqueness turns out to be the ultimate land of joy. I mean, this is the territory of why you’re even here. Your complete, uniquely irreducible replaceable self both to yourself and to your tribe and to all creatures on earth that this is it. This is the moment that matters when we find out. You don’t want to do it like somebody else. You want to find out about your glorious self in all the horizons that that’s going to entail for you. And that is when you really land as an Olympian.

Deanna:          Oh, yeah. And we can do this as a youth athlete, we can do this in our youth or sometimes it takes us a little longer because we have to go through our own unique process. And there’s beauty in having these accidents and these injuries. There’s beauty and there’s growth and there’s a huge gift. If I hadn’t been hit by a car, if I hadn’t had adrenal fatigue, if I didn’t have the need to solve my own problems or really have the interest or awareness, I think that I would be in in a bad place or in a suffering place. And this beautiful life that we’ve been given is so much more fun when we have our health and we when we have vitality. And a lot of times we don’t know what we don’t know until we know that we didn’t know, in my case, where it takes these small points of awareness and these small little upgrades in what we’re doing in our life, right? So, for me, in the hydration space, I started learning about the importance of spring water and the energetic and the electrical aspects that that really come into hydration and that was such an eye opener for me. And it seems like such a no-brainer. And then I reflected back on all of the tap water that I drank, I reflected back on all the times that that I ate the berries and or that I was buying the GMO stuff and I was just like “Oh man, I’ve got some work to do.” So, really looking at how hydration and how water can really heal your body and even the spiritual aspects of setting positive intentions with water and really bringing the sun-charged water, that’s one of my favorite things is having sun-charged water, and really bringing that into our bodies because our bodies are upwards of 99% water. Our blood, our tissues, everything, they’re always vibrating. So, the more energy, the more electrical charge that we can add to that, the more vitality, the more energy and the more that we can really flow into our gifts.

I know we want to get to the upgrading, the practices, and also the concussions, right? That’s kind of where we want to take that next is the concussions in athletics. And since 2010, we’re seeing an upwards of 500% increase in concussions. And that’s just the concussions that are reported. One of the other things that I do is I officiate volleyball at a high level and I can tell you how many boys and girls, mostly men because they are hitting that ball very fast, I can’t tell you, this weekend, I swear, I saw at least 10 concussions. None of those boys went to the trainer. I know I saw 10 concussions happen this weekend. They were great players but at the same time I’m thinking, I’m like “Oh man, I should’ve really stopped playing, double checked this guy’s pupils because he is rocked.” And it’s so interesting to see it happen, right? And every year we’re looking at anywhere between 1.5 and upwards of 4 million that are getting reported. And these are incidents of concussions in all the different sports. And this is just youth athletics. And with the increase in concussions, researchers are doing their best to make correlations but the difficulty with research in concussions and hydration in concussion is that you’d have to test all of their hydration levels before and then they would get concussed and then you test it. So, it’s really difficult to do the research on that.

There was a study that was out of the University of Windsor and they did a study about how dehydration was heightening or potentially heightening the risk of concussion. And they hypothesized that dehydration in mild cases causes a reduction of cerebral spinal fluid in the brain. This fluid plays an incredibly critical role in protecting our brain. So, inside the skull, this fluid helps cushion the brain against hard hits and blows. And, in the study, they looked at data on about 420 concussions that were suffered during NCAA football season. And, unfortunately, the findings were inconclusive. And when we look at the statistical and what the correlation looks like, what they were able to suggest, it is a no-brainer that athletes, in fact, face a greater risk of concussion when they’re dehydrated. And, of course, there’s always more studies needed. And concussions are not always easy to predict or prevent but what we can do for youth athletes and athletes in general and people in general because we talked about athletes but we really mean everybody because we’re all at risk for concussion at some point, like I was literally running across the street and I got hit by a car and got a concussion. And you don’t always have to be hit by something. Just jarring movements can be enough to cause mild concussion. So, we can talk statistics all day and those are depressing and unsexy but the cool thing that we can talk about is how we can protect against that by really upgrading our water. Electrolytes are really important and structured water obviously, spring water, we want to get high quality water but just having electrolytes. And there’s a ton like you can do your own electrolyte thing, you can buy them at the store if you’re feeling lazy and you’re an athlete. This is as easy as getting chia seeds into your water, getting lemon. Even a little bit of kombucha can really help to guard against this. And when we look at dehydration in general, even if we’re not protecting against concussions, this is protecting against mild strains, sprains, and any other injuries that can really occur. And this is brain health. This is literally helping us to stay sharp, to cognitively perform, and to physically take care of our body. So, it goes so much further than the concussion story but as far as what we can do for athletes, as coaches, as trainers, it’s to really be providing higher quality water, be providing these electrolytes and educating them on the importance of this.

Gina:               One of the dangers that we try to alert athletes to is that if they’re hydrating with unstructured or water that has minerals in it, they’re actually creating a flow in their body where you’re pouring in water that now your body has to go and charge. Water inside of you has to go. So, it’s a form of diluting, actually, the hydration, not adding hydration. It’s such a surprise when people hear that because water isn’t just moist. It’s really a fuel. And if you’re adding the kind that dilutes the very fuel you need, that then decreases the amount of buffering and padding that water itself can do. It’s a brilliant strategy to package us in water, right?

Deanna:          Yes.

Gina:               And then on top of that, to use that water to run our electrical system, to conduct all our cell information, the quickness of our reflexes, the capacity to think or see, when you’re walking down the field and you’re making all these decisions about where that ball, all the physics, all that is run on your brain’s capacity for all that perception. All of that is run by water but we’re talking to everyone about water, water, water but we haven’t changed the conversation, I mean, to a certain kind of water.

Deanna:          Absolutely. I can’t tell you how many schools I show up at and even in my own experience, I’m watching the athletic trainers hose water into that and I’m just like “Oh, no!” And then even worse, they’re putting Gatorade and then they’re putting powders and Gatorade and I’m like “Oh, no, please stop. No! There’s better ways to do that!”

Gina:               What do you tell coaches when you see them? They fill up those barrels on the field with a hose of water. What would a smart coach would do in that moment?

Deanna:          It’s kind of interesting because when I do have these conversations and I am able to really have these conversations, a lot of the coaches and the trainers are at the mercy of liability with school, right? So, it’s the opposite of what it should be and somebody should really look into this, but there’s always the fear because we’re such a litigious country, especially anytime you’re dealing with youth athletes and you’re dealing with schools, right? There’s always the fear that altering something chemically, even for the better like we know better than this but that alteration, when I give this feedback, I’m like “Hey, you could really do this and this” and I’m just saying “Put some lemon in it,” this is this is a lemon and salt, this is not rocket science – lemon, Himalayan salt, Celtic salt. This is not rocket science, it’s not but at the same time, it’s “I don’t really know if I can do that. And I don’t know how the school would feel and the parents and then a liability and then firing.” It all comes down to that and it’s so silly because what they’re actually giving them is worse than the healthy alternatives that are being suggested. So, I think that this speaks to the bigger shift in culture, that we have to be aiming to shift culture and get this out there in the higher levels.

Gina:               This is what the interview is about.

Deanna:          This is what the summit is about is bringing this information in and being able to change and shift culture because the old system is broken and it’s no longer working for us.

Gina:               It’s truly harming us. It’s not working. I have a word that may help when you talk to coaches because I also have to speak in schools.

Deanna:          Absolutely.

Gina:               I remind them to put a pinch of salt in or if you’re preparing a large thing to put some salt in, and I don’t know what the proportions would be with a big barrel, and I’m talking sea salt or rock salt because they’re just making saline.

Deanna:          So, it’s easy-peasy.

Gina:               Oh, you need to make that saline. You just need to make that, just not crazy like they’re using in IV which you would put if you’re going to end up in the hospital, what are they giving you. You’re just doing a pre-saline mix. And, for some reason, people can hear that and go “Oh, that’s okay then.”

Deanna:          Okay. I think that’ll help with the shift. I’m excited to use this because every time I have this conversation, I have some coaches, some programs that get it and they’re like “Oh yeah, absolutely.” And even if it’s not approved, all you got to do is dump that right in. It’s not that hard. Nobody has to know, right? Nobody has to know.

Gina:               I think, as a professional coach or a school coach, you’re sitting there, you know that that is going to enhance concussion protection and injury protection for your tissues and organs by … I don’t know, this is an exponential number. I will find a number because I think that would really help you but we’re not kidding here. You are creating a saline which has an immediate impact on the body’s ability to protect itself, especially the brain.

Deanna:          Wow!

Gina:               So, in other words, there’s a motivation for overcoming the liability clutch. That’s a release. It’s like “Oh yeah, I’m going towards that. I’m going towards that.”

Deanna:          And it’s enhancing, right? Anytime that you are in a system and you can put statistics and we can have case studies and we can really put hard numbers to this and really show, which they exist, they’re out there like this is increasing, this is protecting, and this is doing like … the negative effects of this are little to none.

Gina:               A little salt in your water is not … it doesn’t taste salty, by the way.

Deanna:          Exactly, exactly.

Gina:               It can be saving you from the detriments of our crazy culture, which is interfered with water and made it artificial. That’s how our conversation happens now as we get into public city water and oh my god … because now we’re going to go to an even more beautiful conversation or a more elevated conversation. And I want to ask you about what embodying is. So, when we talked about you coming on to the summit, one of the things you said, Deanne, that was so touching to me is you just said straight out “Yeah, my goal is to embody flow. That’s what I really want to coach. That’s where I want to get people to. That’s what I want to get myself to.” And I was so touched by that phrase “embody flow.” So, I really wanted you to have an opportunity to share what that goal means to you or what that idea means to you.

Deanna:          Absolutely. Well, thank you for this. Every year I really craft a different mission statement or a focus or an intention. And for the last couple of years, mine has been pretty much the same but this year I really felt this need for an internal shift. And I was feeling it and in my prayers, in my meditations and really in my journaling, I started to feel this like “What do I want to accomplish this year?” And just everything that I want to do in my personal life and my coaching and just the way that I show up for other people is I really want to be living at the highest frequency possible and embodying flow. And, for me, the mission this year is to embody flow. And I was looking back on the decade and I was really noticing that there was a lot of masculine push energy. There was a lot of work hard, fight, struggle, push, make it happen, max effort, all or nothing, sacrificing, right? And this philosophy and this strategy has a ton of merit and it has its place but it’s also unsustainable and it’s fundamentally imbalanced. And I think that this really speaks to the old philosophy or culture and also to where we’re shifting and where I’d like us to shift to in the future is we have this old philosophy in athletics, and I’m sure this is relevant for you as well, we’re two different generations or sort of close enough but there’s this rocky mentality of any sport cliché movie of sacrifice it all, push it all, push to the brink of injury, right? And it’s glorified in our culture to get less sleep. It is a badge of honor when we’ve worked all night. It’s something we’ve created in our culture this importance of productivity. And that trickles down especially into the youth where parents, coaches, athletes, we’re like “Oh yeah, I got five hours of sleep” or even being in the victim mentality of sharing that with others “You should feel bad for me because I got four hours of sleep,” whatever, whatever it is but this old philosophy of push hard, make it happen, sacrifice, what we’re really seeing in that old philosophy and what we’re seeing that manifest into now is adrenal fatigue, injury, in youth athletics in general we’re seeing a rapid decrease in participation rates, we’re seeing a ton of injuries. We explored some of the concussion stuff but those are people who are still playing. At a ridiculous amount we’re seeing people drop out of sport and really when we have these traumatic whether they’re injuries or just negative experiences as a youth sometimes, that can scar us or can be a wound for having a healthy relationship with movement later in life or we associate the need to exercise with losing weight, where that’s not even in our culture. That’s what it’s been but we’re moving towards like this is a movement practice, this is us moving, this is vitality, this is exploring our bodies in different ways but the old philosophy, it’s no longer serving us. And in looking at my own stuff this year, I’m looking at “Okay, what are the old strategies?” or “Where am I stuck and what’s not working anymore?” And that push hard, give it all, sacrifice, everything, it’s just not in alignment anymore for me. And, yes, there’s the need to push and, yes, you have to have that balance. I’m not saying that that’s completely gone but I think that the balance of bringing the ability to receive, being able to be in the energy of alignment and flow instead of take the bull by the horns and do the thing and really like push and that egoic push. And in this new philosophy of learning how to work smart, learning how to understand and coach ourselves, and have a curious attitude towards health and fitness and performance and really just longevity and vitality, like there so many things in culture, there are so many things that that are telling us what to do and how to do it but the real truth of this is that we have to figure it out for ourselves, that it’s an individual journey, and that it’s a gift and it’s rewarding. And even the things that have caused harm or caused wounds, that these things can be healed and these things can be reinterpreted as gifts and can be incredible points of awareness in our life that really expands our ability to not only show up for other people but really give our gifts and serve in the way that we’re supposed to serve. So, for me, I’m really excited, and I have been coaching people obviously on bringing this holistic vision to how we’re developing ourselves, how we’re showing up for other people and really trying to find out what’s going to work best for us, how do we coach ourselves and how do we get curious about how to do this. And we bring that in with modern science and ancestral living and we do that in a loving way where we get curious and we try to figure out what’s going to be the best thing for us and put my personal practices for embodying flow or daily meditation. I really enjoy float tanks weekly. This morning I did some shaking outside in the sun to some like shamanic drumming, so kind of fun stuff there. Obviously, earthing, sauna, journal, anything that’s going to really connect me to inner brilliance and inner guidance. And that’s something that I’m really able to impart on youth athletes because that’s also something that is not as celebrated in media, as we’re starting to see. And, again, it’s people like you and it’s people like everybody who is involved with this summit, who are making changes, and media is changing where we have the ability to broadcast, we have the ability to touch people in so many different ways and the world is really ready for this stuff. We are ready to see the things that are really going on and we’re able to make those changes, we’re able to impart this wisdom, and we’re able to have these conversations and really talk about things that have historically been suppressed or just not given a lot of airtime.

Gina:               And we’re doing it together. So, there’s actually a party quality about our lives now. Instead of being the one who has to go away and do the push, push, push, we’re now being pulled into the dance arena to be together, to laugh and move, to be encouraged to be athletes no matter where you’re starting, even if you’re just the athlete who likes to wiggle your toes and nod your head. That’s a kind of athleticism. Reshape it so that it means way more to us than the kind of constrictions. And I’m just so happy for this conversation. I’m dying to ask you.

Deanna:          Yes.

Gina:               Oh my God, tell me about sun water.

Deanna:          I do sun water a little bit differently than I used to in South Texas. So, I am no longer doing the tea. It’s just not something that I enjoy although my mother does because tea is something that she enjoys or iced tea but. for me, for my sun water, what I like to do is I love lemon, I love just a little bit of salt, and I love charging it up and what I do is, of course, it’s got to be in glass, right? I actually put it in my grass. So, I put it in my grass so it’s getting that extra earthing effect. I like to put it in my grass.

Gina:               What’s the container?

Deanna:          So, the container?

Gina:               Is it glass bottle, glass jar?

Deanna:          Depends on how much I want to make. Most of the time, it’s a glass jar. My brother actually just brought home this really big crystal thing and I’m really excited. It’s in our bathroom right now. So, I’m really excited to use that because it’s going to provide even more but, yeah, it’s so simple. You just put it out there. A lot of times I like to hold it and do a little bit of positive intention for nourishment and for energy and for clarity or whatever I’m feeling drawn to whether its vitality or happiness or joy or just sometimes it’s cognitive function.

Gina:               Please help me think. Please help me think. I love it.

Deanna:          Simple.

Gina:               Yeah. So, you put in a pinch of salt, some squeeze of lemon, and you sit it in the grass and you put your hands on it or wish to it. And I think this formula is about your diagram that you were talking about. It’s really like the whole package right there. It’s a visual picture and a profound act of the kind of rituals we need today that will call us back to being biological creatures on our planet and being at one with it. I love that you do it. And I’m just so grateful for this time we’ve had.

Deanna, I wish you such joy in your journey, in your work as you become embodiment of flow. BeTheWinningElement.com to share your strategies, your charts for people to get them started on, thinking about this. And I would [inaudible][41:59] I’m picturing you putting your bottle or your jar of water onto the grass. And I love that water blesses us but I’m going to ask something of our audience which is when you do these practices like Deanna suggested, don’t forget to not only let water bless you but to bless water to really just give it love back. It needs our love and our relationship with it too. So, when we receive, make sure to thank water, bless water back.

So, thank you for this interview. Thank you for helping young athletes. Oh my gosh, we’re so glad you’re out there doing the work you’re doing, Deanna. And thank you for being on the Hydration Solution Summit.

Deanna:          Thank you so much. I am so incredibly grateful and I know that the work that you’re doing and the work that I’m doing and this conversation, the summit in general, is really going to speak to a lot of hearts, it’s going to speak to a lot of minds, it’s going to cause that cultural shift, and it’s really going to help a lot of people. So, thank you so much.

For people who are wanting to know how they measure up on this, I’ve got a really cool assessment.

Gina:               Great.

Deanna:          And it’s absolutely free. It’s a cool assessment. Athletes and people really like quizzes because it gives us a number and then we can say “Oh, how do I get better?” and this especially athletes, right? We always want to get better. And that’s available at BeTheWinningElement.com/Assessment absolutely free. And you can find out about all that stuff there.

So grateful. So thankful. Thank you.

Gina:               Embody flow.

Deanna:          You know it.

Gina:               Take care. Bye, bye.