67: Aging Gracefully, Breathing Well, and Long COVID Recovery (with Jan Sultan)
Episode Transcript
Summary: Til talks with Jan Sultan (one of the first Rolfers trained by Ida Rolf to teach her work), about his life and work; about aging well; and about his take-aways from his ongoing COVID recovery process.
- Whitney Lowe’s online Clinical & Orthopedic Massage Courses
- Til Luchau’s courses at Advanced-Trainings.com
Resources mentioned
- Til’s ‘Cytokine Storm’ article
- Dr. Ida Rolf Institute®
- Jan Sultan’s email: [email protected]
Til Luchau:
Welcome to the Thinking Practitioner. Hi, this is Til, and the Thinking Practitioner Podcast is supported by ABMP, the Associated BodyWork and Massage Professionals. ABMP membership gives professional practitioners like you a package including individual liability insurance, free continuing education, and quick reference apps, legislative advocacy, and much more. ABMP’s CD courses, podcast, and Massage and BodyWork Magazine always feature expert voices and new perspectives in the profession, including Whitney Lowe who’s not here with us today, and articles by myself Til Luchau. Thinking practitioner listeners can save on joining ABMP at abmp.com/thinking. And I am very pleased, Jan Sultan, to have you here as my guest today. I really appreciate you taking time to talk with me. Welcome.
Jan Sultan:
Hey, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Til Luchau:
I asked you how to introduce you and you said you are a student of Ida Rolf. You are an advanced rolfing instructor at the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute, formerly known as the Rolf Institute. And last but not least, you were a mentor and teacher of mine at the Rolf Institute and influenced me in quite a few ways. And I have had a whole wishlist of things that I’ve wanted to catch up with you about, your background, getting older, if you’re willing to talk about that, because that’s happening to me for sure. And then I heard about your recent COVID experiences and wanted to hear about that as well.
Jan Sultan:
Well, let me do the age part first because-
Til Luchau:
Good.
Jan Sultan:
It’s the context from which I’m speaking. I had my 80th birthday last month, March 9th, and it feels like a landmark. At the same time, I look around and I realize, oh, I know I’m this old because my kids are in their fifties. I know I’m this old because I don’t have as much energy as I used to have. I was probably obsessed before, and now I’m merely interested.
Til Luchau:
So you’ve kind of like the level has gone down to a what others consider normal or something in terms of your passion and interest. That’s funny. You reminded me of what Art [inaudible 00:02:45] said when I asked him about that. He said something like that, too. He said, “Now I’m feeling like I’m going speed the rest of the world is going at.
Jan Sultan:
It’s like that. And of course I see my peers in terms of age, and I see some mighty old people at 80. It feels like their perimeter has closed in. Their area of interest is really right there in front of them and they’re kind of moving at a certain cadence. The big thing that changed for me is I started driving slower. And I’ve always been a fast guy, rode motorcycles, had hopped up cars, just part of growing up in Southern California. You know, it was like culture. But all of a sudden it’s like, I like my little Toyota Prius and I have contests to see how good a mileage I can get. I got nowhere to go that’s in a hurry. Everything can wait. Anyway, so up until I got COVID-
Til Luchau:
So you’re recalibrating, but it was me turning 60 that started this question really rolling for me. And that’s been a little while back now. But I really wanted to talk to people about getting older. I was trying to figure it out. And now that I look back a little while ago, I was trying to figure out, I think, how to get older without suffering around it. And it was basically this question, like is there a way to age and have it be anything other than just something that sucks? So what do you think?
Jan Sultan:
Well, there’s the old saying you hear, aging is not for wimps, and things like that. But I want to say that COVID taught me some lessons about this question. And I like to say that COVID for me was like the gift that came wrapped in thorns.
Til Luchau:
Wow.
Jan Sultan:
And as I unpacked it, I realized that there was a lot of stuff about aging gracefully hiding in there. And the main thing was to… This sounds so simple. You can’t avoid aging. You can’t avoid some of the slow down, maybe the aches and pains that come, some physical things, but what you can influence is your attitude. And what I got out of COVID was I did not previously know how to be really grateful.
Jan Sultan:
I might have said, “Oh yeah. I know how to be grateful. And I give thanks when I pray”, and all this stuff. And no, no, no. There was a layer of grateful in there that I had not plumbed before, but when COVID took me up to death’s door and sort of said, “Your living much longer is not a sure thing”, the shift that happened was I did an internal inventory and I thought I need to get a little bit more grateful about how many gifts I’ve been given, how my life has gone, my vitality. And so I had a moment where I was. It was the fifth day I was in the hospital. I was in intensive care in isolation. Everybody who came was double masked and in disposable gowns and I had oxygen and things in my arms.
Jan Sultan:
And I thought there’s a thing called a cytokine storm, which is a part of having this kind of an infection or an in whatever they call it that is unfamiliar to your body, so your immune system goes into high gear. And that cytokine storm then generates inflammation almost as a byproduct of its activity. So there is a kind of autoimmune response that is not consistent with the nature of the disease. So I started thinking about that, and I thought, oh, my immune system is driving too hard. And so I thought about, vagal tone, the dorsal ventral vagal, and-
Til Luchau:
Yeah. Let me just stick in a couple of thoughts here. I mean, we got… I’ll put in a reference to the cytokine storm idea, a whole writeup I did for Massage and Body Work on that and what might be going on. We learned about that pretty early on in the COVID story. And you’ve given us a couple… I mean, I’m so sorry to interrupt you because it’s… I mean, I’m just right with you on the edge of my seat, but you’ve given us a couple of good punchlines already. You’ve let us know where this journey went. You survived. You’re more grateful. I bet there’s a lot of other things you brought away from that. But I wonder if you would allow me to get a little context for our listeners, too, before we get to the rest of the takeaways?
Jan Sultan:
Shoot. Shoot. Interview me.
Til Luchau:
Right. So, okay, thank you. So in your bio, you said you’re a student of Ida Rolf. Jan even before this, and we’ll get to the COVID thing, I’ve been wanting to ask you about that because I was at Esalen in the early eighties, Esalen Institute in California, studying with students of Ida Rolf. And if you don’t know, she was the originator of rolfing structural integration that has given rise to many different forms of structural integration and influenced the field as a whole in a somewhat inordinate way. So there I was at Esalen the early eighties and hearing stories about Ida and learning from her next generation students who stayed there in that context, and then left, went to Boulder, studied at the Rolf Institute, and met you. So, anyway, I’m wondering if you could… because some of the stories I heard at Esalen were by you at Esalen. I remember Peggy Moran, who was apparently your practitioning model, telling me about those experiences there with the baths.
Til Luchau:
So anyway, that’s a long way of saying, let’s get a little context. How did you get into this? How did you get to Esalen? What happened? What’s the deal there?
Jan Sultan:
Okay. I’ll keep it straight and simple because we have a time limit. I was in the merchant Marine, which is commercial shipping. I got lucky and scored a job on an oceanographic survey, and as a result, I got my Coast Guard certification as a merchant seaman, which you have to have to work in the US as a sailor.
Til Luchau:
Growing up in Southern California, is this Long Beach or something? Is this-
Jan Sultan:
Well, I graduated from high school in ’60, out of Westchester High School in LA. And so my mother is a Jewish mother and she expected me to become a medical doctor or a lawyer or something. But I was like a restless boy and I wanted to get out of school and literally into the workforce. I wanted to work for a living. I wanted to get up against it. And because there was kind of… we were in a place where there were boatyards and stuff, that’s where I went. I went down and said, “Hey, can I clean boats? Scrape paint? Caulk seams? Lots of wooden boats around in those days.
Jan Sultan:
So I was fooling around in boatyards. I was a surfer, so I spent all my free time in the ocean. I always had snorkel and fins in the back of the car so we could dive on fish, spearfish, abalone. I was like a water guy. Well, one day my buddy comes over and he says, “Hey, they’re hiring for a crew on this oceanographic survey that’s based in Monterey, and it works off of this big old schooner.” And so literally, at the end of my work day, we jumped in my car, and we drove most of the night. And we were at Monterey in the morning and went out to see the captain and the mate on the boat. And he looked us over and said, all right, you know, we can probably teach these guys how to work a sailboat. Bingo, I got hired. So then they sent us up to San Francisco to the Coast Guard and we got our merchant seamen license, which entailed a small training program about how to be a sailor.
Jan Sultan:
And so I was on… The ship was called the Tay Vega, and I was ordinary seaman crew. So we sailed oceanography students from Frisco to Mazatlan following the whale migrations. So we would pick up the whales as they went south. We’d go into Scammon’s lagoon, Gray’s lagoon. We did a bunch of diving. But we were the crew, and the students were all young people interested in oceanography and blah, blah, blah, blah. So anyway, Stanford eventually reached the end of their contract with the Defense Department because we also had some spooky stuff that we were researching for them. And so I went to the union hall up in San Francisco and joined the sailors union because I had my papers.
Til Luchau:
You had the skillset, yeah, right.
Jan Sultan:
So I joined the union and started shipping as an ordinary seaman, which meant-
Til Luchau:
You got into the Merchant Marines through that oceanographic, scientific, almost tour guide or support for people doing some kind of investigation. I pictured you out there like operating a crane, loading like pallets onto ships, and doing something like that.
Jan Sultan:
Well, the second half, when I was an ordinary seaman on freighters, we did more of that. And so anyway, to consolidate that, when I was on this Tay Vega, which was the ship that was based in Monterey, I rented a cabin in big Sur. And so that was my home. That was where I had all my gear stashed. So between trips or between whatever, I’d always go back to Big Sur. And some of my old buddies from the South Bay, LA, had moved up to Big Sur, and so I had a community already. And this is-
Til Luchau:
So Big Sur is where you went from LA if you really wanted to get out there and go investigate, find out about yourself or get out in this amazing nature kind of scene. That’s where Esalen Institute was, and there you were?
Jan Sultan:
Time at sea, and other cultures and stuff like that. So I had a girlfriend who was not like my mate, but a woman who I hung out with when I was in Big Sur, and she had met Ida Rolf at Esalen. She was housekeeper at Esalen, and so she knew about Rolf because she cleaned Rolf’s room when Rolf was in town. And she said, “Hey Jan, there’s this old lady who comes there who teaches this kind of body work and you ought to check it out.” So I went to see Ida Rolf. I had never been touched therapeutically. Nothing. I’d never had an acupuncture treatment, a massage, nothing. I wasn’t that sort of… My culture didn’t include that. Being a sailor and being a blue collar guy, it was like I just didn’t even think about it. So when I got my first-
Til Luchau:
I love your Zoom background, by the way. Is that like a factory floor or something?
Jan Sultan:
Oh, I pulled it off the internet, yeah.
Til Luchau:
It’s nice.
Jan Sultan:
Yes, it’s a warehouse.
Til Luchau:
It gives us that blue collar context. Okay. So there you are. Is this probably like 1970 or something? ’69 or something?
Jan Sultan:
This was 68.
Til Luchau:
’68?. Okay.
Jan Sultan:
So I’m-
Til Luchau:
[inaudible 00:14:57] there in the beginning, yeah.
Jan Sultan:
So I was still in the merchant room, but when Ida Rolf would come to Big Sur because she had been contracted to work on Fritz Perls, because Fritz Perls was suffering angina. And we know Fritz Perls was a student of Sigmund Freud, one of that original gang with Wilhelm Reich and Carl Jung, and Bruno Bettelheim. And so-
Til Luchau:
He was teaching there at the Rolf Institute and brought in Ida to work on him.
Jan Sultan:
Yeah. And Ida came down to work on Perls, and Perls said, “Oh, my God, everybody who goes through psychotherapy should get some of this rolfing because it releases the body memories. And so at that moment, rolfing and the human potential movement found each other, and it was a marriage of pretty diverse backgrounds. Right? And so there was a sudden demand for rolfers. And so I sort of knew that, peripherally because if you live in Big Sur, you know what happens at Esalen. So I asked Rolf. I said, “Hey, can you train me?” I’d probably had maybe six or seven sessions from her, and literally she rolled her eyes back and she shook her head. And she said, “You’re a blue collar guy. How could you get into this kind of work?” This is more professional and-
Til Luchau:
She [inaudible 00:16:28] East coast, blue blood versus blue collar, Ivy League, Columbia, PhD, et cetera.
Jan Sultan:
All of the above. So her, her answer to me was, “Oh, man.” And so being myself, I said, “Well, okay. I’m pretty good at fixing things. I have some natural ability at fixing things.” I said, “But what do you want me to do?” And she said, “Well, get a massage license so you can legally touch people and write me a little paper, like the interaction of five body systems so I know you can think.” Okay, oo I came down to LA and I went to the Pomona School of Massage.
Til Luchau:
I’m sorry. I just got to say that sounds like the prototype for the entrance requirements the rest of us based our life around. [inaudible 00:17:23] time to go to the Rolf Institute. That’s the kind of things we did in expanded form, perhaps. So you went to Pomona?
Jan Sultan:
Pomona School of Massage. Little old ladies and guys, elderly guys teaching Swedish massage, you know, hot packs, effleurage, [inaudible 00:17:40], the classic Swedish. But anyway, I finished the course and there was a California license that you needed to have education to get. So I got my California massage license. And I showed up probably a year after that, when Rolf was next in town. And I said, “Here’s your paper, five body systems. Here’s my license to practice. I can legally touch people. What do you think?” And she said, “Okay, I’m starting a class in October-November this year. You be there. That will be your auditing phase.” So I went auditing. I had 10 weeks off, and then I did practitioning.
Til Luchau:
If you don’t know, auditing is where you basically observe her giving the training. You don’t get to do much. Right?
Jan Sultan:
You got to sit and watch other people learn and listen to her lectures. But there’s a unique part of rolfing which is that it depends on being able to see. And the auditing was to heighten our ability to actually look at bodies and see what was going on even before you touched them.
Til Luchau:
Yeah.
Jan Sultan:
And you know, still, this is a marker for rolfing and for structural integration is this contour-based diagnosis. It isn’t the only thing but, by God, how people are shaped tells you a lot about what the nature of the structure is underlying the shape. How do they generate the shapes? So, okay. So I went through six weeks of auditing. Emmett Hutchins was in that class practitioning. Mary Bond was there. Golly, who else? Giovanna D’Angelo. Anyway, these are some of the old timers. So Christmas came. Ida went back East to see her family. She came back in end of January and we did the second six weeks in which I did practitioner training. So I had two models and we exchanged treatments with each other as part of the training. You know, she introduced session one. We’d do it to each other, the practitioners. The next day, in came people from the community and we worked under her supervision. And I think there were eight of us in the class, and Rolf did it without an assistant of any kind. It was just that was it.
Jan Sultan:
And this is a side note. Because I was handy, quote/unquote, she always assigned me to fix things that were broken around the house she was living in. So I would get a flat of flowers from the nursery and put flowers by the garden paths, and fix the Venetian blinds, and get a snake and run the plumbing. And so I was her handyman.
Til Luchau:
That was your pitch. “I can fix things” you said, and took that role.
Jan Sultan:
I can fix things. And she said, “Oh, fix this. Fix that.”, which was a pretty much a consistent part of our relationship. Over the years when I would show up, she would say, “Oh, come to my house. The table rocks, can you shim it up?”, all that small stuff.
Til Luchau:
Do you think that gave you a different perspective on the work? Because I’m just thinking about there’s this emphasis on we’re not about fixing things and yet that was your pitch and you had this different perspective that she saw something in and says, “Let’s try this.”
Jan Sultan:
It’s a good question Til, and it really centers around, like I think I was the only blue collar guy who came to that training. The rest of these guys were all psychologists, a couple of medical doctors who were phasing out of being doctors and wanted more personal… like Jack Downing, Hector Prestera.
Til Luchau:
People with heavy duty, psychology, body psychology backgrounds, things like that.
Jan Sultan:
Medical doctors, PhD psychologists, the people who were hanging around Esalen who were inspired to train in rolfing. And here I came and I still had grease under my fingernails. You know this. So it wasn’t just the culture difference, which is that because I came out of… When I was a sailor, I was both a deck and engine department, so I was familiar with the way things fit together. Hell, we’d have these big diesel engines. The pistons were so big that you could get inside the cylinder and squat and take up… But I had a sense of the mechanics of things when I got there.
Jan Sultan:
And so I was always curious, if the structure is organized this way and you want to move it over there, what are the elements you’re going to have to deal with? So it wasn’t so much fix it as, how does it work? And how do I make… Why does rolfing work? Why did the first hour just do that? It wasn’t enough to say, “Follow the recipe and you’ll get the change.” I always wanted to know why it worked. I always wanted to open the hood and look under it and go, “How does this baby run?”
Til Luchau:
Well, I want to take out my mental highlighter and color that one green, let’s say, or something, because when I heard about… I didn’t audit or practition with you, but as I was doing that, and we’re talking about the different teachers, Jan Sultan was the guy you went to understand the, “If you see this, then you do that.” If you want the clearest, most tangible ways to do the work, Jan was the guy you studied with. And so there was maybe elsewhere you were emphasizing the whole picture or the value of intuition or getting your rational mind out of the way and letting the relationships emerge. Jan was the guy you went to if you wanted the real tangible kind of nuts and bolt stuff.
Jan Sultan:
I think that’s true. And it put me at odds with some other people who were my contemporaries in the training who were more interested in the somatic and psychological unfolding, which is what Fritz Perls had pointed to. There were other people who were interested in some kind of metaphysical, the sanctity of the one through 10, the recipe itself, had a metaphysical structure that would open certain experiential doorways. And I said, “How do you get the foundation in? And what are the building blocks that you use?” Somebody once said… There were three of us who Ida… were her first advanced teachers, Peter [inaudible 00:24:44], Emmett Hutchins, and me. And she brought Peter and Emmett forward first and I was the next one. And she said, Jan, you’re going to be my mason.
Til Luchau:
A mason. Emmett was the mystic mathematician. Peter was the poet humanness, and you were the mason.
Jan Sultan:
That’s the way it structured, and the three of us talked about that. And that was like, okay, cool. You do that. You do this. We respected each other. We worked together.
Til Luchau:
Well, I don’t know what this is like to listen to if you’re not in the structural integration world, but that, really what you’ve just described there, is a tension, you could say, or a dialectic, or just a paradox within the field of how do we get really specific and tangible about things and still make room for the big picture and the larger relationships? And oftentimes you’re talking about personality differences. Oftentimes, it comes out as either one or the other and there’s camps that have divided and big divisions in our field that have happened around these questions in some ways.
Jan Sultan:
They’re going on today. So the answer is, yes, that’s exactly right. But at the time that when we were in that formation, we didn’t have a lot of internal conflict about that. We were actually happy to be three minds looking at Ida’s work and having been essentially chosen and said, “Here you carry this forward.” And we looked at each other and said, “Okay, we’re a team.” And that held for many years until, well, there began to be tensions. And I’ll skip all that. It was just the normal, the strong founder dies and the students kind of get to pulling on the thing and chewing at it, and divisions happen, you know?
Til Luchau:
That’s right. Yeah, we’ll skip all that. That’s right. Just as we do, that was when I was assisting my first class with Tom Myers, all this was coming down, a lot of blood on the tracks in ways and just difficult times. And fortunately, a lot of healing in the decades since, but yeah, it led to some difficult divisions and probably philosophical differences that make up the diversity of the field. So in a good way, there’s that whole breadth going on still.
Jan Sultan:
Yeah. And when I finished training, Esalen Institute was running what was called their residential program where people would come for several months and attend psychology and spiritual development, and they’d learn massage. And part of that was they would go through a 10 series of rolfing. So Peter [inaudible 00:27:24] and I were the rolfers for the Esalen residential program.
Til Luchau:
Nice.
Jan Sultan:
And so I had a-
Til Luchau:
Probably room 23 on the rolf row or something like that. Yeah. You did that. I was there. I didn’t know this about you, Jan. I’m sorry to interrupt. But I was there. I was the resident rolfer in the late eighties, early nineties, following a decade or half later in your footsteps in way.
Jan Sultan:
Well, I left there in the spring of ’71.
Til Luchau:
Okay. So this is like a decade-and-a-half, almost two decades later.
Jan Sultan:
Yeah. But anyway, Peter and I decided we would alternate sessions on these people. So he would do one, I’d do two, back and forth. And in between we… And this was by agreement. This was was completely transparent. We’d get to talk about the cases and, what did you see about that person? And they had that fourth hour, where did you see that it went? And were there any difficulties? Were there emergent themes with different clients? So it was a unique and wonderful moment to step into a full practice with… I mean, Peter had trained the year before me, so he had a little bit more experience, so he’d taken a few people through a 10 series. And it was utterly wonderful. I got respected for being a rolfer. I didn’t have to worry. I was like part of the team. So that was really wonderful and-
Til Luchau:
I just want to catch us up a little bit, but before I do, what do you think about… What was Ida doing, or what were the group of you doing, that had such a lasting impression, you think, on the field? Because there’s dozens of derivatives now. There’s a bunch of us who went through the Ralph Institute either just studied there, or taught there like myself, Eric Dalton, Tom Meyers, Art Riggs, Judith Aston, who all have our… one of our core branches being right there in that world with Ida Rolf. What was she doing, or what were you guys doing that ended up making this so influential and persistent?
Jan Sultan:
Okay. So this is my opinion. I don’t want to represent this as fact, for sure.
Til Luchau:
Okay. All right.
Jan Sultan:
I think that at the time that Rolf came into human potential movement, A, the human potential movement was in its very nascent beginning. It had just formed, but it did have spiritual elements and psychological elements, and even physical through yoga and conditioning, things like this. But there was only… Neo-Reichian work was the major way that rolfing… Or, excuse me, that psychology and body work intersected. And so Rolf gave this very… We were new. We were potent. It was hands on. And so in terms of American culture, it was dramatic because most of us were virgin in terms of body work anyway. So people would see rolfing and go, “You can actually improve your function by going through a series of treatments.”
Jan Sultan:
And it might be spiritual if you were a meditator or a seeker. It might be psychological if you were trying to resolve personal conflicts and historic bits. And people showed who were deeply disabled, post traumatic injuries, blunt trauma, the Vietnam War was going on. We were getting veterans coming out of the service who were in what we now know was PTSD. And it was just shock and high arousal, helping people get back into their skins, like, okay, okay. I made it. So I think it was a matter of the perfect storm in a weird way. You know, Rolf arrived at a moment where she was needed and her work had been gestating already 20 or 25 years out in the boonies teaching her stuff to chiropractors and osteopaths. And she’d been to Japan and was interacting with, let’s say, traditional Oriental medicine. I don’t know what she was doing in Japan, actually. I never found out, but it was partly connected to how manual therapy and acupuncture fit together and Oriental theory, somehow. So I think she was just the right place, right time, beautiful confluence of elements, and bam.
Til Luchau:
And ended up catalyzing or gathering people around her who were really interesting people as well and carried the work forward. And then I certainly counted as one of my biggest blessings to later have been involved in that and benefit from all that association as well.
Jan Sultan:
Yeah. So I think there isn’t a real easy answer to that. I’ve heard… I want to say a couple things about Rolf’s background and then we can move on.
Til Luchau:
Yeah.
Jan Sultan:
She was fairly closed mouths about her origins.
Til Luchau:
Sources? Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jan Sultan:
Well, how did you figure this out?
Til Luchau:
She wouldn’t say anything, yeah?
Jan Sultan:
She was reluctant. And there was some stuff with Mabel Todd who was an osteopath who had developed a movement kind of work. There was… Oh, heck I’m forgetting some names. Anyway, she said in class, and I have it in my notes… She said, “I originally developed rolfing as an orthopedic adjunct.”
Til Luchau:
Fascinating.
Jan Sultan:
That this is a way to help people rehabilitate or to put themselves back together after healing from orthopedic needed-
Til Luchau:
Injuries, problems, something like that, yeah?
Jan Sultan:
Yeah, or developmental problems with kids. She loved to work with kids with spinal curvatures and those sort of things. So orthopedic adjunct was her… that’s what she put out there. Later, we hear that she was… she had a mystical vision where she was back in ancient Egypt and came upon some ritual preparation for entering a temple as an acolyte. And those rumors went around.
Til Luchau:
You got your hands on your heads, by the way, for the listeners.
Jan Sultan:
I was, mind you, being a blue collar guy, basically a sailor. I just listened to that stuff and just went, “Oh, yeah? Okay. Well, I’m interested in orthopedic adjunct actually. And I’m interested in an adjunct to psychotherapy, that if you’re bound up with rage or fear and you’ve been traumatized, we can help by getting the body organized.” But in terms of this initiation into mystical orders and things like that, I just wasn’t that interested, honestly. I mean, I wasn’t… I didn’t put everybody down. It was just like, I don’t get it.
Til Luchau:
You know, I keep remembering this. I got to ask you now that I got the chance. I remember in one of my advanced trainings you said, “The most important move in rolfing was this, looking at your watch.” I mean, do you remember saying anything like that? Is my memory accurate?
Jan Sultan:
Yes. And I’ll tell you why, because there is… especially if you’re going into these, let’s say less clear realms, psychology, spiritual experiences, trance induction, then it’s very easy to find that your booked time, which in those days would be like an hour-and-a-half, was burned up and you were not done with the work you were doing, but you had to kick the client out because your next person was waiting in the waiting room. And so part of my training was to say, “Divide the work into three segments, your opening, you get your middle part where you’re doing all that stuff, and your closure.” And you have to start the closure 15 minutes before the time of the session is up or you’re forever going to be running behind, and that’s not a good feeling.
Jan Sultan:
So I basically collared them and said… And when practitioners were working on each other, I said, “You guys can take, as long as you want. We can be here till six or seven, but I want you to take the time you need.” But when the models are here, when the class clients are coming, you are going to have them out the door on time and I’m going to crack the whip. And that was the-
Til Luchau:
That was the pointing at the watch thing. I remember that clearly. That was just the thing I needed to hear because coming from the Esalen background that I did, we were taking… we were trying to stop time. We were trying to make time disappear, which sometimes took a while on the clock. And yet your point of staying grounded in ordinary consciousness in some part of me, to have at least a perspective and understanding what was left to do, where I wanted to go, was just the thing I needed to hear at that time and it was actually really influential.
Jan Sultan:
It was systematic. Like you’re going to open, you’re going to do the basic stuff that you’ve identified, then you’re going to close and integrate. And every session has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the end was the hardest part. It was easy to jump in and swim, but all of a sudden, how do you stop?
Til Luchau:
How do you stop? And how do you bring something back that’s useful from that little adventure? That’s great.
Jan Sultan:
Yeah. So-
Til Luchau:
One more thing that’s just on my wishlist. I just wanted to acknowledge you as an early adopter of online education, whether you think about that for yourself or not. You joined me in an experiment on teaching teleconference classes. This was like 2000. I probably proposed it to you in 1999. I was trying to figure out how to do this distance learning thing in our field and the only technology, the best technology we had then, was conference calls. So you ended up teaching two really masterful and popular classes on conference calls and through crackly recordings and all sorts of [inaudible 00:38:05].
Jan Sultan:
And each one of those was like five or six meetings.
Til Luchau:
That’s right.
Jan Sultan:
Yeah. That was good. It helped me a lot too, to organize my thinking, to teach without a group of people there, like just speak into the room I was sitting in.
Til Luchau:
Right. No, it’s so different. And you were right there when we were figuring a lot of that stuff out. I remember all sorts of faux pas. And I remember the guy who was in the Pakistani networking group kind of calling in the middle of our conference call. He had the wrong number or something and we had to like get him off the call. Eric Dalton reminded me of that not too long ago. He says he listened to his old recordings and he heard this guy come in, “This isn’t the Pakistan networking group? Okay. Sorry, everybody.” But we figured it out and it was great in the end. Okay. Jan, you got COVID?
Jan Sultan:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
And we should get that out of the way. I believe you were vaccinated. Is that right?
Jan Sultan:
Double vaccinated the February before I got it. I worked during the pandemic because my wife is a chiropractor and we share an office. And so as soon as vaccination was available, boom, we both got it because we were allowed to keep the office open. And we kept masks on and cleaned the surfaces and the doorknobs. And we had air purifiers running. And we ran our practice full bore for that five months until that November. And I have business up in New Mexico. I live now in LA, but I own real estate and some other stuff up there. So I had to make a trip to New Mexico. The first time I went, I drove because I didn’t want to touch anything, and I had my food box in the car. I had my pickup truck so I could sleep in the back, and up there and back.
Til Luchau:
Moving lockdown.
Jan Sultan:
But this time I decided to fly. And so I flew up to Albuquerque, and five days after I was on that airplane, I broke a cold, kind of weird sweat. And I thought, oh, shit. And boom, down I went. And I know I got it off the ventilation system in the airplane, even as I was masked, and I had on an industrial safety glass to protect my eyes from saliva or airborne stuff. And the boosters weren’t available yet. And so man, 1st of November, I was at the ER. I was having trouble breathing. They admitted me. I was two weeks in the hospital. I was getting worse by the fifth day I was in the hospital. The doc was saying, “If you don’t begin to oxygenate better, we’re going to have to intubate you. We’re going to put you into sedation. We’re going intubate you and breathe for you.” And I had a very strong intuition that if I ended up being intubated, I wasn’t coming back.
Til Luchau:
And the statistics support that. Yeah.
Jan Sultan:
Yeah, they do. But I felt it like, oh, geez. So that’s when I had my epiphany with my immune system. And it’s worth telling because it’s very germane to other questions about this. I’ll keep it short. It was on the border of being a mystical experience, but I’ve aged so I accept that kind of stuff better now.
Til Luchau:
That means a lot coming from me. I was going to say, that’s great. We’re ready.
Jan Sultan:
So one evening, fifth day, I’ve been told, “We’re going to intubate you, probably tomorrow.” My blood oxygen was hanging in the low eighties even though I had oxygen here and steroids in the arm and antibiotics and, oh, man. So I started thinking about the immune system and I thought, okay, the immune system is basically binary. It’s either on or it’s off. It’s either me or it’s not me. And it goes from micro to macro. It’s interpersonal. You meet somebody. You go, “Not me, baby.”
Til Luchau:
I’m allergic to that.
Jan Sultan:
“I can be polite but I don’t want to get to know you.” It can be the common cold. Your body whiffs something that’s not right and the immune system goes, “That’s not us.” So this was the first layer. The next layer was the cytokine storm which was going full bore with me. My right lung was full of fluid. And I knew my immune system was kicked on, like, boom, boom. And so I realized this was… my immune system was driven by not me, goddammit. And it was humping up as much energy as it could to meet this challenge. And I realized that, and I thought back to the poly vagal theory and Stanley Rosenberg’s popularized version of it, Steven [inaudible 00:43:22] complexity. But the essence was the vagus has two primary layers of response, dorsal vagal, which is fight and flight, and ventral vagal, which is feed and breed, comfort, digestion.
Til Luchau:
Connect.
Jan Sultan:
Et cetera. So I thought to myself, oh, dorsal vagal is on full bore here, tied with this immune response. Now this is me just laying in bed. Okay. I don’t have any science and I’m not googling anything. I’m just laying there and going, “How am I going to get through this?” And so I put myself into a kind of meditative state. Finally, the staff split and I pulled the blankets up to my chin, and the monitor was up here where I could see it. And I started bringing my pulse down. And when my pulse hit about 50, I went kind of into this deep altered state, and I relaxed. I mean, I felt it go through me like, okay, okay, this is cool. And the nurse popped in. She was out in the hall and she came in and she said, “Are you okay? You know, we monitor your pulse is pretty low.” And I said, “I’m good. I have the button here. If I get scared or something, I’ll hit it, but I’m relaxing.”
Til Luchau:
Nice.
Jan Sultan:
So I got down in there, she left, and I just kept going, and I watched my pulse drop into the high forties. And then you know how on a cloudy day, if you’re looking at the sea, when the sun comes… just hits the horizon, it opens like that?
Til Luchau:
Yeah. That open [inaudible 00:44:59], yeah.
Jan Sultan:
Well, this was like the doorway that I stood in and it was this amazing pink color.
Til Luchau:
Wow.
Jan Sultan:
And I was kind of shocked, but I was grooving. So what came with the pink was this huge wave of gratitude and joy. And it was strong enough that even I had a reflective part of my… I was watching it happen, and I thought I’ve never felt this thankful in my life. I have never been here before. And then the next part of it was, oh, you’re a death’s door. That’s why that feeling. Other people report this.
Til Luchau:
This is not the gratitude of getting better. This is at the trough of your symptoms.
Jan Sultan:
Right, right. At the bottom. And then it was just like, go with it, go with it, go with it. Don’t hold out nothing. And so I was in there for a while. I don’t know how long. Finally, somebody came in the room to take blood and brought me back out of the trance. So for the next four days, I went into this place every time I was alone.
Til Luchau:
Nice.
Jan Sultan:
Because once I knew how to do it was like, oh, I know how to go there. So the fifth day, I think, or the fourth day, I was in it. It was 3:30 in the morning, because I did glance up at the monitor and it… Pop, it broke. And all of a sudden I could hear, like all the way down the hall. I could hear people talking like way out there. And all these smells, like I pulled a mask aside and I could smell the room and I realized, I’m over it. I’m going to get, well.
Til Luchau:
The tide turned.
Jan Sultan:
And what had happened was my immune system had backed down because I had managed the fear by going into this place and I was not in that fight flight zone. So I had reinforcement. After that, the next couple days, one of the nurses said, “You know, it’s really great to work with you because you’re easy. We have people we have to sedate because when they start getting oxygen deficient, they begin to panic and they try to get out of bed, and they’re yelling.”
Til Luchau:
Anxiety goes up. Right, absolutely.
Jan Sultan:
And she said, “You’re pretty mellow, you know?”
Til Luchau:
You were going into the pink. You were going into the gratitude zone [inaudible 00:47:34].
Jan Sultan:
I was in the pink, in the gratitude. And this is why I say it was the gift wrapped in thorns, Til. I don’t know that I ever would’ve found this on my own. But what’s emerging now five months down the road from that November, I am way kinder than I’ve ever been, and I can tell. My wife says, “Wow, Jan, you’re easy.” And I see it. I’m driving and some jerk passes me on the right and cuts off, and it was the kind of thing that would arouse me before. Now it’s just like, “Oh good. We didn’t hit. He didn’t clip my fender. That’s fine.”
Til Luchau:
All right. Everybody who knew Jan Sultan before heard it right here. He’s nicer. That’s amazing.
Jan Sultan:
I can tell.
Til Luchau:
That’s awesome, yeah.
Jan Sultan:
Yeah. You know, just some attitudinal part of me just packed the bags and left, and left me, in a way, a little bit stunned. Like, well, now I got to reform. I mean reform my-
Til Luchau:
Yeah.
Jan Sultan:
Stuff like that.
Til Luchau:
Reform your what? Your identity? Your way of being? Your what?
Jan Sultan:
Yeah, way of being, you know? Okay, so now we’re in this COVID story. So at the end of two weeks, at this point I’m on an oxygen cannula, five liters per hour. I’m not on the thermo vent, which was a full face mask that was hydrating the water and 100% oxygen. So this is less. And they basically said, “Look, you can go home now. We’ve done what we can do for you. You’re going to be on oxygen for a while but, theoretically, you should recover.” Okay, so they dismissed me from the hospital. They send me home with the oxygen. And I’m not even home 24 hours and I have my first episode of tachycardia. I had not had it in the hospital.
Til Luchau:
Which is an elevated uncontrolled heartbeat. Your heart pulses rate just goes up?
Jan Sultan:
High heartbeat and with very little stimulus. I mean, I could have it if I simply sat up in the bed, and I began to sit up really slow, but I couldn’t get away from it. And if I had to get up to pee, it was like a safari because my pulse would go high, high, and my oxygen would plummet. And so-
Til Luchau:
I’m still getting over the safari analogy. So is this like a big adventure or what? Just getting a major-
Jan Sultan:
Yes.
Til Luchau:
Okay. Gotcha.
Jan Sultan:
And I finally… Well, not finally. Soon I said, “I need 50-60 feet of tubing to go from this oxygen generator to my cannula so that I could finally make my way out to the back porch.” But I’d have to literally hold onto the furniture as I went because I had disequilibrium, I had high pulse, and my oxygen was low. I was on the edge of syncope. And so, oh, wow. Anyway, I asked my providers. I asked my pulmonologist, “What do you do here? How do I get out of this? When am I going to be able to get rid of the cannula? Why is my heart going crazy?” And the pulmonologist said, “That’s because your lung has water in it and your heart thinks that it’s not getting enough air.” And I thought, no.
Til Luchau:
Didn’t sound right?
Jan Sultan:
That’s not right. Instinctively. I felt that. Now, mind you, I’m at the pulmonologist in a wheelchair because I can’t walk from the car to the office. I run out of air. So my wife is wheeling me in the wheelchair. And so I realize you’re on your own, dude. If you’re going to get through this, it’s you.
Til Luchau:
Their explanations didn’t make sense to you? They didn’t have things to offer you? You’re on your own?
Jan Sultan:
Nothing to offer. So this was my thinking til… You and I talked a little bit about this anaerobic question, and I’m going to use the word but I understand it’s not the common use of the word. I began to think that tachycardia was not about a high oxygen demand which would make your pulse go up. The tachycardia is not aerobic. Like if I were lifting some weights, I would begin to get out of breath and I would start to breathe harder. That’s aerobic, high demand, pulse goes up. But tachycardia is characterized as.. this is how I experienced it, by lower stroke volume and higher speed. So normal pulses squish fill, squish fill. Tachycardia is… But it wasn’t an arrhythmia. The timing was correct. It just wasn’t-
Til Luchau:
Super fast?
Jan Sultan:
Emptying and filling correctly.
Til Luchau:
Yeah, right.
Jan Sultan:
So I began to say, “That’s anaerobic and it’s different from the pulse of an exercise which is aerobic.” Okay? This is just for my own understanding. So I began to do these exercises where I would sit and stand up from my chair, and then sit down again. And I had it on my little oximeter, which is pulse and blood oxygen.
Til Luchau:
On your finger there to monitor your blood oxygen?
Jan Sultan:
Right. Well, I’d pop up and down out of this chair. Meanwhile, my pulse is going ski, up here to 120, but I said, “No, I’m going to do 15 sit-stands here, goddammit, and then I will sit here and let my pulse normalize.” So I’d sit there for two-three minutes and then the pulse would begin to come down. Anaerobic, tachycardia pulse is still up here, but it’s fluttering. So this is one piece of it that’s really important is that I figured out how to get my aerobic pulse to come up under the tachycardia and gradually and train with it and bring them down together. And this was like discovering a new kind of yoga, because nobody instructed me how to do this. I figured, okay, so that was that’s one whole piece of it.
Jan Sultan:
The second piece is that I found a site on Google, a YouTube, a guy named Patrick McKeown, and you and I had a little talk about this. McKeown took the work of this Russian physiologist, whose name is Buteyko, and brought it into contemporary use. And he found Buteyko because he was an asthmatic and he was having a lot of trouble breathing, and eventually ended up with this Russian guy who taught him how to breathe differently, conquered his asthma. So McKeown took that basic work and built a site called Oxygen Advantage, which is a YouTube site. And so the first time I opened oxygen advantage, here is Patrick McKeown, and he is a very mellow, soft spoken guy, gray eyes, very easy countenance, probably in his middle forties,
Til Luchau:
Nice Irish lilt to his-
Jan Sultan:
And a nice cadence to his speech. And turns out, he’s talked to Wim Hoff, the Iceman. He’s talked to that other guy who wrote the book on breathing, Nelson. Or, I can’t think of his name.
Til Luchau:
I know you’re talking about it. I can’t think of it either. Yeah, mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jan Sultan:
So the first time I found him was 2:30 in the morning. I had been having a hell of a time breathing and I couldn’t sleep. And I got McKeown on the screen and he described a simple breathing exercise, which I did. And, oh, in about 20 minutes, I got my… I began to settle and my blood oxygen went up. My pulse came down and I went, “Oh, thank God.” But there’s a fundamental part of McKeown’s work that we have got to understand.
Til Luchau:
Tell us.
Jan Sultan:
It is counterintuitive that every other person who works with breathing tries to make you breathe deep, exercise your diaphragm.
Til Luchau:
Maximize capacity [inaudible 00:56:16]-
Jan Sultan:
Yep, get your VO max jacked up and exhale the carbon dioxide, blah, blah, blah. McKeown’s method, and Buteyko’s before him, was to breathe so lightly that there was almost no air exchange.
Til Luchau:
[inaudible 00:56:32]/
Jan Sultan:
And he used the analogy of putting a feather at your nose, and you want to breathe so softly that the feather doesn’t move well. The outcome of that is that after a moment or two, and I say moment, not even minute, you begin to get [inaudible 00:56:47]. And so your body wants to take a big breath. And McKeown says, “No, what happens is you breathe just enough to ride that oxygen demand.”
Jan Sultan:
And what happens is, in your saliva you start to generate NO, nitric oxide, and the NO goes into the bronchi and the bronchi dilate under the NO. And NO is a very interesting transitory compound that we make when we’re younger, like all the other things, and it’s its control is over smooth muscle activity. So digestive, peristalsis, heart rate, the literal rhythm of the heart contracting. So this breathing method helped the body generate NO, which relaxed the bronchi eye and made them dilate, which increased the capacity to breathe. So I got to say, this is genius. It was so beautiful.
Til Luchau:
And it helped? You felt better?
Jan Sultan:
Well, here’s what happened was I put together my sit-stand and my trying to bring my aerobic pulse up underneath the tachycardia in order to bring them down together. One of the features of the oxygen advantage breathing is that you only breathe through your nose not through your mouth. So when you get a oxygen demand, you don’t shift and go [inaudible 00:58:29]. You keep nose breathing. And so they’ve been able to prove that if you do this restricted breathing, that you get this NO dump, which increases… which is bronchodilators, so your lungs dilate. You got more surface area for the blood to transfer the gases. So your efficiency goes way up. But the other part was that he did some experiments, this is years before, with Olympic-level athletes. And they found that after it took five to six weeks of doing this breathing where they got 20% more volume. This is in already highly competent, well-trained athletes, 20%. Oh my God.
Til Luchau:
And if I remember, I got to put in the other side of the conversation, which is we need to be careful about recommending certain protocols or approaches or things like that, just in being responsible as public speakers here, so I got to put in that disclaimer.
Jan Sultan:
Okay, go ahead.
Til Luchau:
Yeah. And then there’s-
Jan Sultan:
Don’t try this without your doctor’s permission.
Til Luchau:
It’s something like that, right. And then who knows what’s going on, but there’s some interesting explanations for the thing you experienced, which was an improvement in your tachycardia and a big change in your ability to move and stand and do things. But through that graded exposure approach of just increasing the amount of load you had, but keeping your breath at a fairly low level, NO being Patrick McKeown’s, one of his mechanisms. But it seems that it does, for whatever reason, he has a spacial… Again, I’m cursorily familiar with it. I’m not an expert at all in his approach, but he has a spatial explanation saying that it nose breathing is intrinsically more efficient and does all kinds of other benefits. And yet, as I read into it, it seems like one of the primary mechanisms, too, is just increased efficiency of using what you get. You get your body, your lungs, et cetera, your bloodstream gets much more efficient at scavenging oxygen from the breath you got. And so you don’t need to breathe this hard. You end up being much more efficient no matter what circumstances you’re in.
Jan Sultan:
It completely fits because, among other things… We have to stay with this for a few minutes, Til, because there’s some gold in here. One of the things that Buteyko developed this for was asthma, COPD, which is chronic obstructive pulmonary disorders, people who had worked in the mines and had had their breath shortened up because of exposure to toxic gases, and panic disorders. And so when I heard panic disorders, I realized how I felt when my I would get tachycardia was my first thing was, I’m scared. Oh, goddamn, this is not easy. It doesn’t hurt. It’s frightening not to be able to breathe. It’s like somebody put a pillow over your face and you start kicking and trying to get out from under, which is the thing I had to defeat in the hospital in order to get into the pink.
Til Luchau:
That’s right.
Jan Sultan:
So this is important because that’s an oxygen deficiency. This is why I called it anaerobic, because this has got to be vagal. This is not blood CO and CO2. This is a different mechanism that kicks this tachycardia off, and it’s tied into this arousal about this oxygen deficiency, which brings us into a panic state. And this isn’t rational. This is down in the basement somewhere. This is lizard level stuff.
Til Luchau:
When you don’t get oxygen, your physiology takes over in many ways.
Jan Sultan:
Yeah, you kick in. So it was the panic disorders that helped me link this to the COVID, and Patrick is wonderful. He said, “I did all this groundwork before COVID was here, but it turns out that the work I did is exactly right for helping people recover from post COVID long haul particularly, that it was a perfect fit.”
Til Luchau:
There’s a common element in which you’re describing there that fits with so many other approaches to difficulty too, which is tolerating discomfort, tolerating difficulty, being willing to hang out with that moment of like, “I’m standing up, my heart is racing. I’m not going to let myself suck air. I’m going to slow it down and stay with that difficult moment.” And that’s what shifts the capacity.
Jan Sultan:
Well, if people are interested, when you get into this site Oxygen Advantage, there are probably 25 or 30 clips of Patrick taking people in different exercises. And one of the things he says is… Interestingly enough, he said, “This actually teaches you how to meditate”, and it has none of the trappings of Hindu philosophy or connecting the Ida Pingala, the balancing. He said, “But when you start regulating your breathing like this, you enter yogic states.” And I thought, God, is this ever true? I would sit there at four o’clock in the morning cross-legged, and I’d just set the timer on my phone for 20 minutes. And then I’d go and breathe for 20 minutes just sitting there in the dark. And I’d get into these wonderful, deep, quiet… My wife is laying there beside me. She’s breathing, the door’s cracked open. I can hear the traffic on the road down there, and I’m in a blissful state.
Jan Sultan:
And the bliss is a healing energy, and it also de-tunes the survival stuff, the dorsal vagal, which is jacked when you’re sick like this, because indeed, you’ve got a mortal illness, you can die from this, and the body doesn’t forget that for a minute. So, anyhow-
Til Luchau:
Well thank you, Jan. I mean, that’s quite a story and you found the method, you found the explanations for yourself that made sense. You trusted your experience and really cultivated that. And I think you kind of did full circle with this. You got to the place where… I mean, one of the things that’s helping me get older is this idea of tolerating discomfort just a little more, not going into my instinctual panic around whatever the discomfort is and just hanging out and slowing my breath, perhaps relaxing into it.
Jan Sultan:
So this is aging gracefully from that original question. Like, how are we going to do this? You’re on the off ramp at this point. I mean, you’re what now, 64?
Til Luchau:
Off ramp here we are. No, I’m 60… What am I? 61. But still-
Jan Sultan:
So when you’re 80 you’re already just looking over the fence and looking around and going, “I might have 10 or 12 more years. I can’t count on that.” So, let’s see. I had some notes. Can we close on this piece for now?
Til Luchau:
Absolutely.
Jan Sultan:
This is about long haul COVID
Til Luchau:
Okay.
Jan Sultan:
A couple things here. Okay, so we know that now the CDC has officially labeled long haul COVID as a disability, which means that you can get government assistance if you’re diagnosed and all that. A couple of things this means. One is, it means millions of people have this. This is not just a few of us. This is a lot of people who have had it. Apparently the research that’s gradually catching up now, because now we’re in the third year of this horror, is it doesn’t matter how bad you had it when you were sick, you can still have very strong post long haul symptoms. So they made a list of the symptoms, which I jotted down just for fun.
Til Luchau:
Just for fun, yeah.
Jan Sultan:
And the first one was taste and smell. So this is olfactory and I want to say glossopharyngeal cranial nerves primarily, and spinal accessory, cranial 11 and cranial one, which is olfactory. So what that told us is that this disease affects the brain, both functionally and in terms of volume, because now they’re starting to do I don’t know what kind of study where… EKG, I guess it would be. But the brain is actually changing shape as well as losing functions, so taste and smell. So I got some essences like eucalyptus, cinnamon, mint, and I’ve been sniffing them. And I just sniff the thing for five minutes, split between each nostril. And I don’t do them all at the same time. I do cinnamon. An hour later, I do eucalyptus. An hour later, I do mint. And you know what? I’m starting to smell better.
Til Luchau:
You’re giving yourself an olfactory workout? Is that what you’re doing?
Jan Sultan:
Just like that. Like taking my olfactory nerve to the gym and breathing strong enough smells that you know, that they burn through in a way. And I noticed this morning when I got my coffee and I got here and I went, “Well, that’s some good coffee.” And then I went, “I haven’t been smelling my coffee.”
Til Luchau:
Wow.
Jan Sultan:
So I hope that everybody hears this. I can’t say that because it was true for me it would be true for everybody. It’s got to be a fool’s errand. But I want to say that I have been getting real functional change by breathing these highly concentrated tincture smells, and you can get these at any health food store.
Til Luchau:
You’re talking about the in of one effect where, just because it worked with you, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to work with everybody, but it’s been so important for you. And having been sick myself at different times, I get that, the feeling of being compelled to share this and really let people know there’s some tools out there to make themselves better.
Jan Sultan:
Yeah. So there’s that. And then let’s see here, concentration and brain fog.
Til Luchau:
Yeah.
Jan Sultan:
This is real. This is not just a metaphor. This leaves people with it being very difficult to think. And this tied into aging. As I’ve aged, I’ve also had a little more trouble thinking.
Til Luchau:
You don’t say, yeah?
Jan Sultan:
And they say, “Oh, if you’re aging, you should take up a foreign language, also brain gym, you know?” So I found a site on YouTube that teaches you how to play boogie woogie, piano. And it’s real simple stuff. You know, left hand plays three chords, right hand does a little riff. So I got… I went on YouTube and I downloaded some lessons and I got an electric piano, which I’ve had around here for a while. And I’m starting to play these tunes for my brain, my effing brain.
Til Luchau:
Yes.
Jan Sultan:
And my son studied… speaks Spanish pretty well. He’s at college. So we made a deal to do all our texting in Spanish as a second way to help dad’s brain search for words and get more exercise.
Til Luchau:
To get up out of the chair and sit back down?
Jan Sultan:
Same thing. So, music and language.
Til Luchau:
Yeah.
Jan Sultan:
Which would say basically to a long haul victim, “Quit looking for the doctors to fix you, buddy. Get your ass out of bed. Start working. Smell some smells. Study a language.” You can actually regain a lot if you do some work.
Til Luchau:
Take some action. Find something that stretches you. Hang with it. Those sound like enjoyable things too. I don’t mind [inaudible 01:11:48] coffee.
Jan Sultan:
So, speaking of coffee-
Til Luchau:
[inaudible 01:11:56], right? Yeah.
Jan Sultan:
Speaking of coffee. So one of the things that happens is very disruptive sleep patterns, and everybody reports it, sleep for two hours, I have to get up. So I decided, well, when I’m that kind of awake, I get up. I just get up and I put on my sweats and I go and I make a cup of coffee.
Til Luchau:
There you go.
Jan Sultan:
And I sit down at my computer or I’m writing an article or something I want to study, or I go in the garage and mess around with my piano until I begin to get actually tired from being up, not laying in bed tossing and turning and trying and trying and [inaudible 01:12:30], but, bam, get up. Stop that. Do something. And what happens is that I recycle pretty fast. Then I can go back to bed, pull the covers over my ears, and gone, and I get two or three more hours now.
Til Luchau:
Well, you take the energy up, you follow the energy, use the energy, and then it can resolve.
Jan Sultan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what’s happening now is that I am getting longer sleep. Like I wake up at 4:30, I take a leak. I may take one round of the house and go, well, I turned on the kettle. It’s an electric kettle to make my coffee. And then I go, “No, go back to bed.” And I get back in bed and, bang, I’m out. So I’m getting it to work better. And I can see that in another month or two, I’ll be sleeping four and five hours at a stretch and I’ll probably be getting six or seven hours total. And I do have to nap midday, almost like you either lie down or you’re going to fall down kind of I got to sleep.
Til Luchau:
You’re telling my story by the way of dealing with chronic Lyme. That’s one thing that totally disrupted my sleep, but being able to follow the rhythm like that to go for activity when I was awake and then let myself go tired and have the freedom to go for the tiredness when I felt that been profound. And my sleep patterns are still like nobody else’s. And you wouldn’t believe my schedule if I told you too, but I get enough sleep, and it’s awesome.
Jan Sultan:
Well, we probably are doing something similar in that way.
Til Luchau:
Yes, yes.
Jan Sultan:
One other piece of the sleep regulation is that sometimes that fatigue would hit when I was driving. And one time I had pulled up in a line of cars at a light and I was sitting there waiting. And, all of a sudden, I opened my eyes and the cars had left, and I had fallen asleep waiting at the light. And I went, “Oh, this is dangerous because you didn’t catch yourself going, ‘Oh, I need to take some deep breaths and move my body.'” I missed it. So I made a rule which is that if I begin to get that kind of drowsy, I pull over. I set it in park and drop the seat back and let myself go out. And what happens is, I’m uncomfortable. It’s not a great place to sleep. And typically in about 10 or 15 minutes, I sort of come back up out of it and then I’m reset. And then I have hours when I’m not sleepy. So this is survival stuff. You cannot drive drowsy. It is deadly.
Jan Sultan:
So I just want to say that for whoever happens to hear this, if you’re one of them, it’s more important that you do this than it is to get to your destination when you think you’re supposed to be there. [inaudible 01:15:33].
Til Luchau:
That’s that profound reorientation to following what your body’s doing, as opposed to pushing through to some pre-planned agenda you had. That’s so much a part of recovery or living with chronic conditions, all those are there.
Jan Sultan:
Let’s see. I’m almost there.
Til Luchau:
Anything else. Jan?
Jan Sultan:
One last thing, which is that there is consistent reports of loss of coordination and equilibrium. People’s balance gets rough and so I do things like stand on one foot and bend at the hip and like do a swan, one-legged, come back up, [inaudible 01:16:14] other leg. I walk around my living room. There’s a rug that has a pattern. And I put my feet like this rather than walking, like a usual split load. I walk like I’m walking a line, and this helps my balance
Til Luchau:
Spatial vestibular workouts, as well. Yeah.
Jan Sultan:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
Beautiful.
Jan Sultan:
So those are the things that go with my sort of recovering from long haul COVID. This is how I’ve been tackling it.
Til Luchau:
I mean, you’re following so many principles there that work at the cutting edge of what helps people get over difficult situations there, pacing, titrating, grading the exposure, tolerating discomfort, jacking or hacking, you say, your physiology to slow the breathing down, et cetera, and then following the fatigue cycle or the wakefulness cycle, rather than trying to impose one.
Jan Sultan:
Yeah.
Til Luchau:
There’s a lot of pieces there.
Jan Sultan:
Yeah. And like you just alluded to, all these things were also features of aging, which makes me think, because there was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle or Examiner the last couple of days talking about long haul COVID and how the government is pounding on the drug companies, “Find drugs that are going to help these things.” And as I’m reading it, of course, I’ve already got a list of these things in my notebook and I’ve taken notes. And I’m thinking, no, no, no. In this case it ain’t the drugs that are going to do it. It is actually your self-discipline, self-regulation. It’s called grow the fuck up.
Til Luchau:
Isn’t there a pill for that? Can I take a pill for that? You’re right. That fits so much with my experience of getting over a chronic condition where I realized no, there was no medical remedy at all that was going to help. But eventually taking a hold of it myself and finding my ways through, being systematic, and supporting myself when I needed to, that eventually worked out for me, too. So it’s so it’s so validating, in a way, to hear you in this… your super life-threatening situation to find your way back and to come to this place of both the gratitude and the empowerment, and be able to tell us these stories and share these things with us.
Jan Sultan:
And I’m able to work now half-time. I have a Rolfing practice, which is hands-on, manual therapy, education, work with individual people. I was typically working 22 to 25 people a week. I am now holding it at 12, and I do it all in the morning because my mornings are energetically better. I’ve gotten up, and typically I’m up early anyway, before it’s light. But I’m good until about two o’clock usually 2:30 in the afternoon. And then that fatigue stuff starts arriving, and so I’m done work by that time. I start at eight o’clock. I’m 10 minutes from my office and I drive over and, bam.
Til Luchau:
I’m nodding my head. It’s just been so important for me to design my day around those cycles of wakefulness and give myself permission not to be in that state if it’s not the right time. Over decades actually, it’s been that process of refining that. All right, so our rollout… Thank you, Jan. I just want to thank you again for taking the time and sharing in so many ways. Just what I’d hoped for, just the conversation I wanted to have with you.
Jan Sultan:
Great. Well a pleasure to play and to see you again and be able to actually have a conversation [inaudible 01:20:14] years. And yeah, if you ever want to talk shop about other things like the body?
Til Luchau:
Yeah, exactly. No, we got plenty of stuff to talk about. All right, thank you, Jan. Let me do the closing sponsor announcement.
Jan Sultan:
Okay, go.
Til Luchau:
The closing sponsor announcement, Books of Discovery has been part of massage and body work education for over 20 years. Thousands of schools around the world teach with their textbooks, e-textbooks, and digital resources. In these trying times, this beloved publisher is dedicated to helping educators with online friendly digital resources that make instruction easier and more effective in the classroom or virtually. Books of Discovery likes to say, “Learning adventures start here, and they see that same spirit here on the Thinking Practitioner podcasts, and they’re proud to support our work knowing we share the mission to bring the bodywork and massage community enlivening content that advances our profession.” Check out their collection of e-textbooks and digital learning resources for pathology, kinesiology, anatomy, and physiology at booksofdiscovery.com where Thinking Practitioner listeners save 15% by entering, “thinking”, at checkout. Thanks to all of our sponsors. Stop by our site, Whitney’s site, my site, for show notes, the transcripts, and extras. Whitney’s site, academyofclinicalmassage.com. My site, advanced-trainings.com. You can find us either place there.
Til Luchau:
Jan, if people want to know more about you or give some feedback our conversation, what’s the best way for them to do that? And we can put all the details in their show notes, but what do you want to say now about getting in touch with you?
Jan Sultan:
Well, I want to say first off that I am way behind in managing my website. My admin, I just have been slack about that, but it’s jansultan.com. And that can get you into a bunch of my lectures and stuff, which have been… are floating around in inner space somewhere.
Til Luchau:
Nice. You’ve been busy hanging out in the pink and getting in and out of the chair, so, yeah. Great, so you have a website, jansultan.com. Any other contact information you want to mention here?
Jan Sultan:
Well, my email is [email protected]. All right. And you can email me and ask me questions. I do online tutorials sometimes where people will send me photographs of people that are in their practice and want to ask questions about procedure and tactics in terms of working. And I charge my hourly fee for that, which is 200 bucks an hour, which is what I charge for my practice time. So I’m up to do tutorials like that one-on-one, where it’s-
Til Luchau:
Distance tutorials with Jan Sultan, you heard it here.
Jan Sultan:
Yeah, had good success with this. I currently have a couple people, one lady who’s Japanese, who’s working on her mother and sends me clips of her mom walking and stills. And then we get on the phone and both look at the clip and talk back and forth.
Til Luchau:
Well, do you realize it was 23 years ago we were doing that conference call course, which is kind of the model we were doing then. So no, there’s so much usefulness, that’s there and there’s so many more tools available to us now. I want to give you a plug there. If there are questions or things you want to hear me or Whitney talk about, email us at [email protected], or look for us on social media just under our names, Til Luchau or Whitney Lowe. Rate us on Apple Podcasts as it helps other people find this show. And you can also hear us, of course, on Spotify, [inaudible 01:23:56], or Google Podcasts, or wherever else you listen. And please do share the word and tell a friend. That’s how we are able to keep doing what we do. Thanks everybody. Thanks again, Jen.
Jan Sultan:
Okay, Til. Take care. Bye now.
Til Luchau:
Bye-bye.
