Welcome to this week’s episode of the Vitally You® podcast where we speak to Francisco Kaiut about the restorative benefits of chronic pain and injuries, general aches and stiffness, as well as the effects of aging on the body. He shares with us how to restore your body's innate capacity to heal through the therapeutic yoga practice he created, “The Kaiut Method.” After opening his first studio in Curitiba Brazil, his technique gained popularity among yogis and is now renowned for its incorporation of the body and mind in his practice. Moreover, his work has been featured in The Yoga Journal and Huffington Post. Join us on this week’s episode as we learn how to decompress the nervous system so it can release the issues that get stuck in our tissues through Francisco’s unique yoga method!
The growing tensions and precautions surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic have led to an inevitable lack of focus on our breathing. At this moment, observe how you are breathing. Is it shallow? Is it from the belly? Is it intentional? Most of us have become accustomed to shallow breathing, as a result of our innate flight-or-fight response that becomes triggered amidst dangerous situations. Join us on this week’s episode as we speak to Francisco Kaiut about the restorative benefits of chronic pain and injuries, general aches and stiffness, as well as the aging body. He shares his method The Kaiut Method which he coined and discovered after conducting thorough research on health and wellness modalities.
The Kaiut Method was born from Francisco’s experience managing chronic pain from a shooting accident that occurred at the age of five. The experience changed his entire life trajectory, leading him to conduct a rigorous search for a treatment that could encourage individuals to move their joints whilst stimulating the mind-body connection. He is now a certified chiropractor and yoga master and has studied Cranial Sacral Therapy, Deep Tissue Massage Therapy as well as Polarity Theory in the UK. Join us on this week’s episode as we harness our breath, learn how to decompress after a stressful day, and employ Francisco’s unique yoga method!
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[00:00:00] Dana Frost: So I want to welcome everybody to Vitally You®, and I'm delighted to have Francisco Kaiut with us today. Francisco has dedicated his life to find a more effective way to deal with discomfort, chronic pain, and anxiety. using yoga. He is the creator of the Kaiut Yoga Method. Kaiut Yoga is a therapeutic yoga method that restores health and well-being due to the challenges of modern life. He trained yoga teachers across the globe. And I can say I've been training with Francisco since 2018, and it is a pleasure to have you here with me today, Francisco, thank you.
[00:00:47] Francisco Kaiut: Thanks for the invitation. And it's definitely a great pleasure for me as well.
[00:00:53] Dana Frost: Well, we are really delighted and Francisco, as you know, I was introduced to Kaiut Yoga in Boulder, when I was visiting a friend. And I've been really amazed at how it has impacted my life. And when I think about the idea of feeling younger, growing older, Kaiut Yoga, it truly is one of my practices that has reversed the feeling of how I'm growing older.
As you know, I had a shoulder restriction. I had some other little joint issues, and my Kaiut Yoga practice really has freed my body. I would really just love to hear from you, since you are the creator of the method, what is Kaiut Yoga? How do you like to talk about Kaiut Yoga.
[00:01:41] Francisco Kaiut: I like to define Kaiut Yoga as the absolutely ancient version of yoga, so that's my main thing. Not to recreate what yoga was before the Vedas, but to apply what it was to today's life.
[00:02:05] Dana Frost: And what are some of the challenges of today's life?
[00:02:09] Francisco Kaiut: The lack of variety for the most part.
[00:02:13] Dana Frost: Can you speak into that a little bit, Francisco?
[00:02:16] Francisco Kaiut: Yeah. So if you are a piano player, and the more you play the piano, the better you get at that. Also our bodies, they need to be fed to be full of more. Is there's a specific skill that most of the time comes in conflict with our basic nature. So we are talking about not to specialize. We were talking about not to go that far in this type of behavior.
I think there's a [Inaudible 00:02:49] book lately on that. And I think this is absolutely right. When it comes to our health, it's mandatory not to specialize. I mean, if you want to be professionally engaged with sports, it's a different thing. Although if you're trying to reach that level, you definitely are probably aware that your health in the long-term will be compromised.
There is no such a thing as a lifetime in a certain career that is sports-related that does not come with injuries and pains and aches that are related to that. And a tremendous respectable amount of depression and anxiety as well.
So I think it's very hard to explain to a person today, a person that runs 10 K easily on regular basis. It's very hard to explain to this person, when they feel as MDs, as executives, or lawyers. And as they feel that they are in a point of peak performance in their lives, because they run those 10 Ks easily and also they perform well in their careers. It's very hard to explain to them that they are nurturing a quite fragile state inside. That is expending silently. And eventually that will be the main burden in their bodies and lives.
So the problem today, the main challenge today, is to explain to people that they are definitely not nearly as healthy or as resilient as we've been designed by nature to be.
[00:04:35] Dana Frost: Well, that's really interesting because what we are seeing with young, as a mom to five children, when we think about feeling younger, growing older, we think, "Oh, well, the young people it's a long time before they need to think about feeling younger, growing older." But what we are seeing is the repetitive, the specialization in sports, even for young people. The injuries at very young ages that we didn't see before. It's an interesting modern-day challenge for the injuries that are happening for younger, even younger people.
[00:05:07] Francisco Kaiut: Two things have happened to your kids. Two main things. One they've learned how to focus with a inactive body and we haven't seen that before in our history, that's one. So we're learning and we're teaching our minds how to be focused without the activation of our bodies. That is almost a superpower because we haven't been designed to do that. So at the same time, it leads to a tremendous mind development. It also leads to a major shutdown of the body, that's one.
Two, we are even truly growing bones nowadays without moving muscles. The amount of time our kids are spending at school, from kindergarten to PhD is tremendous. And it's a tremendous amount of time that represents time that their bones have actually literally grown without the movement and without the muscles being involved. So there is a discrepancy exactly there.
For me, even if you have a supposedly perfect lifestyle. What's happening is you are in a way experiencing and nurturing a quiet silence and comfortable type of trauma. That is for me, even if you have no exposure to another major trauma, in life, that is for me, sort of the ground floor for everything else that will be experienced, and it's unavoidable.
So the problem is not what you do, but the fact that your hamstrings, for example, they've been, I will use a strong word, but I think it expresses specifically the point, your hamstrings, they've been crippled due to the lack of use.
And then the fact that you use them in sports, does not diminish the harsh consequences of the lack of use on a chair. It's definitely better to use them in the sports field, but it does not erase the harmful effects. And we tend to consider that the sports will be the balance point and they are not, they are a much better option. But they are not a way for you to erase. Because there is no balance between extremes balance.
There's always close to the middle line. And if you sit for so long, and now your kids, they're not only in that position at school, but they are also with their computer, and then are not being used as they're supposed to be used mainly as we grow.
[00:08:18] Dana Frost: So what I hear you saying Francisco, it is specialization, it's the extreme between specialization and inactivity.
[00:08:29] Francisco Kaiut: It's almost that. But for me, it's this extreme between specialization and excessive comfort.
[00:08:39] Dana Frost: Okay. That's a really good distinction, excessive comfort.
[00:08:43] Francisco Kaiut: Yeah.
[00:08:44] Dana Frost: That we have in modern life because we're not exposed. We've become increasingly sedentary, especially as technology has taken over.
[00:08:55] Francisco Kaiut: Yes. And even if you go for a hike, in your backpack, you would have tons of tools and nuts. So everything for us, it's about developing community more safety. Safety to a level that most of our diseases are based on comfort.
[00:09:15] Dana Frost: So in a Kaiut Yoga class, because I recognize my experience has been when you're introduced to Kaiut Yoga, there is the conditions of safety are created in the context of the class.
[00:09:30] Francisco Kaiut: Because we are, as teachers, always dealing with traumatized bodies. They've been traumatized by a lifetime lack of proper exposure that demands that they should be. And they've been traumatized for growing in super-safe environments, considering the type of exposure to the environment will been designed to have.
And we cannot just have the word trauma embracing everything. We have to differentiate everything. So what does that mean? That means I'm not talking about we should be exposed to sexual abuse, and some types of trauma. Our society has been developing itself so much, that we can, we definitely can and we should get rid of some of the traumas we've been facing. Because now we can read them, we can see them, and we can face them properly.
Also, our feet need to be consistently traumatized by the way we use that. It's not a bad trauma, it's like stress. You can have good stress and bad stress. You can have those distinctions. And if you have the type of stress that it's aligned with nature, that leads to adaptability and health. You should have a type of stress that has no sense in regards to nature that is just waste of time and it leads to disease.
Let's break it down to the joints, first, let's talk about the knees, for example, we've been rolling in chairs. Our hamstrings have traumatized and depleted in a totally inadequate manner, becoming more and more dysfunctional. Then because we think it's efficient we start stretching or hamstrings. We don't face the basic problem. We just try to compensate the consequences of the problem, that is the rigidity. And then that creates more complexity.
For me, the baseline is the fact that our hips and knees, they just have not been exposed to the floor. We have not been squatting, and kneeling, and sitting cross-legged. And even if we perform well in sports, even if we are temporarily pain-free, that will be unsustainable. Because our knees have been designed by nature to be exposed to enormous amount of pressure, stress, demand. So we, in a way, expose that joint to a positive aspect of stress.
And some people would say the positive aspects of even a traumatic event of stressing that joint, in a way, that at first it doesn't sound appropriate. But actually even nowadays, if you analyze the few nomad tribes that we have around the globe. The few tribes that haven't been exposed to our Western civilization, they live at a very old age. They keep squatting, they keep kneeling, they're highly functional, they go to the floor, and away from the floor, and they show almost no signs of joint degeneration. So that is a positive stress intelligently applied in alignment with nature. And this is what we haven't had in our super-comfortable lifestyles.
[00:13:14] Dana Frost: And so is this what the Kaiut method is about? Is positive forms of stress, bringing people to the floor, moving their joints. Maybe you can speak into that, so that you've defined the challenges of our modern society and Kaiut is an anecdote to that. And so do you want to just speak into how Kaiut helps us deal with modern challenges?
[00:13:41] Francisco Kaiut: The first time I was analyzing a nomad tribe, I was in Tibet. I went there to a pilgrimage, and to see this tribe. And it was my goal for me, because everything that I thought would be right in regards to the method, is super elderly people having a level of availability in their bodies that we've been deprived from.
And then I just went more and more in that direction. And nowadays the more I follow the modern science, the more science in research and information is proofing the point. That the excessive comfort and the excessive amount of safety, mainly in regards to food around the kids we raise nowadays is one of the reasons why we've, first, developed so many allergies. And then it's one of the reasons why our nervous system leads towards a sympathetic mode, leading to lots of modern diseases.
So, and it traces this line through comfort, safety, and food, that leads to that. And the way we actually we behave today as we are at the very beginning of last century. Meaning, we behave today as if some types of risk are knocking on the door and they are not, and they will not, and that is a big mistake.
So for him the lack of understanding that we are, today, in a much better place is a big issue. And his research is remarkable because he comes to a point where he's proofing that the chronic stress is actually compromising our immune system, compromising our response to stress our resilience. And then he actually links it objectively to types of cancer and autoimmune disease.
So there is a lot being proofed around the fact that yes, we need stress, the stress has to be diligently applied. And at the same time, we need to be able to swim back and forth.
[00:16:05] Dana Frost: When we think about Kaiut Yoga and Kaiut Yoga's response to the challenges of our modern conveniences and in exposure to natural, I think what you're saying are more natural traumas.
[00:16:23] Francisco Kaiut: Exactly. Exactly. That is a very good way of telling it
[00:16:27] Dana Frost: Because we're protected. We're protected behind walls. We're protected in terms of temperatures; our feet aren't receiving the kinds of stimulation they can receive when they're just naturally out in nature. And so, I'll bring us back to the practice of Kaiut Yoga; how is Kaiut Yoga addressing it? I know it's addressing it, because I feel it in my own body, but maybe you can speak into that.
[00:16:55] Francisco Kaiut: Let me get started with your feet. The feet they have maybe around 20,000 more nerve endings if you compare them with your hands. So the feet are a lot more connected to the brain. Having a lot more access to information that goes to the feet, it'll have a lot more capacity to communicate back to the brain, and that is not by chance. That is because the feet they have a super important role, in regards to our balance. We've been designed to be balanced as we move.
So our brain was designed in regards to the balance-center, to operate on top of two highly functional feet. When you don't have those feet, you cripple your brain's capacity to keep you in balance.
[00:18:00] Dana Frost: Wow.
[00:18:00] Francisco Kaiut: Balance does not come by training. The balance is a faculty that toddlers master, and that's a goals and that elder needs. And you cannot regain balance if you should don't have those feet. So it's the opposite, if you can play with yoga poses for balance forever, your balance will not necessarily improve. It's temporary, and you will gain a certain improvement by efforts, but eventually it's going to fade away.
[00:18:38] Dana Frost: So in terms of balance and Kaiut Yoga, can you speak into that? Because I think that if we just look at how people age, for example, somebody ages, they fall. It's just super typical of how when you're older, you go downhill rapidly because you take a fall, and you break a bone, and you're not as resilient. And I do see and experience Kaiut Yoga to retrain, it's like retraining the nervous system for greater balance.
[00:19:12] Francisco Kaiut: If you lose the mobility in your feet, that means your brain moves many of the main tools for balance. When that happens, lots of compensatory routes will be created. And most of the compensatory routes will be based on excessive rigidity or inadequate mobility in other areas to balance it out.
The body becomes more rigid and fragile in some areas; more flexible and fragile in other areas. Everything is off-balance.
There is only way to work with it, and the way is to re-establishing the basic principles of our innate capacity. We need our feet, we need our knees, we need our hips, we need to sit on the floor, we need to come off the floor easily. We need to kneel. The problem is not the fact that your knees are hurting. The problem is the fact that you haven't kneeled on the floor for decades. So the knee is absolutely fragile, because you've been under-using it. And it doesn't really matter because our ancestor, our first ancestor, out of the first group of sapiens, they were walking thousands of miles every year. Sleeping body, lots of times today for lots of reasons.
Their spines we're super capable of bending forward. Their bones were resilient. They were walking those thousands of miles a year and they were squatting every day. We need everything to be complete. And so this is what the method is about. This is about the fact that you should be running and walking, also you should get to kneel. In a way, again, I like this intense analysis; if you can run, if you can walk, if you can hike and you cannot kneel comfortably for a long period of time, that means you were almost no human, because that is what humans were designed to have.
[00:21:39] Dana Frost: I like that, you know what I'm thinking about? I had just an aha moment. You know how food-wise, we've gone back to ancestral ways of eating the paleo diet, maybe Kaiut is ancestral movements?
[00:21:56] Francisco Kaiut: I think I've worked on a book finally, very slow-paced and as I usually move with everything, but I was writing about that. I was writing about the only real yoga we've been exposed to is what we've seen carried from the Vedas, and that is messy. Because with the Vedas we also saw the birth of Hinduism. And then yoga gets sort of intermingled within Hinduism. And then with the Yoga Sutras we have this powerful influence of religion. And the powers that used to come from knowledge and the control of the knowledge as a strong source of power.
I can see small chunks of the Vedas as well as small, very small churns of the Sutras as being highly-reliable and knowledgeable. For the most part, I think it is not that's my feeling. Because to be in the Vedas, the yoga has to be preinvented. It has to come from a moment when we were not organized as society, but at the maximum we were organized as a tribe. So for me, yoga is from before that type of influence and it's from before this type of mind control type of institution. So for me, yoga is more primal, it's more central, and it just has to be translated for today's social development.
[00:23:46] Dana Frost: Mh-hmm. So I like the word primal. I think primal movements gives a little more clarity, primal movements. It's really what you're doing in Kaiut Yoga?
[00:23:56] Francisco Kaiut: Yes. I was practicing this morning. It takes so long for one to move beyond that line.
We have so much to do in regards to the re-establishment of our primal capacities. So once you reach that point, once your primal capacities have been re-established, then you can move beyond and you can talk about what I call, "A evolutionary side of things" but not before that.
And you might decide that you have so much to do, in regards to your family and your kids, that having primal as your target is a lot. And you might be harvesting benefits from that invention for a lifetime, with no need for extra challenges and for extra risks.
And this is one of the main mistakes that the yoga field has been making, they've been misunderstanding the goal. They haven't understood that people need a lot less to be highly functional. And they've been incorporating very harmful concepts from the sports field, and the [Inaudible 00:25:16] field, in a way that yoga was never intended to be connected with.
[00:25:23] Dana Frost: Tell me what the original intent of yoga is?
[00:25:25] Francisco Kaiut: There is a quote in the Vedas that I think it's very clarifying. It said, "This is about to give back to human kind the nature they've lost." So for me, there is one thing that is remarkable around the Vedas. The fact that they can foresee the losses that the Agricultural Revolution would be leading us to. And they clearly say this is about giving back. So yoga is about the reestablishment and the expansion of that.
[00:26:04] Dana Frost: Well, I really love that. And one of the things I have appreciated, Francisco, we could talk on forever, and I know people's attention spans are limited. But one of the things I have appreciated in watching in Kaiut Yoga are some of the amazing stories of your students and how they have restored their nature, they've restored function. So maybe you could share one story with us of one of your students. I know there are thousands, but it would be really nice to hear one story.
[00:26:39] Francisco Kaiut: Yeah. It's totally sort of a very nice way of preaching and sharing something. I used to, when I was still just super young chiropractor, this man came to me. And he was at the time, I think he was in his early sixties. He was a former bank manager and now he was starting a company, nice man, nicely married. His wife who was also a student of mine super sweet person. They had two adults at that time, and some grandchildren in the way. His main thing was soccer, but from a very young age, he was always as dealing with hamstring issues, extreme tightness.
So his doctor told him he should go for one hip replacement and probably two years later he would go for the second one. And the doctors said, "Well, you shouldn't reconsider the soccer, because this is not a nice hobby with your body." So anyways, I gave him quite nice chiropractic most of my techniques were different, and my sessions were always around 45 minutes to an hour and it was highly effective.
So what I did was I gave him lots of relief, and then I told him, "You know what? I have this group of students that get connected two or three times a week. And I think if you joined those guys, you might have more results." Because some of his peers from the soccer, Sundays, were there, he came and he joined. Long story short, now this guy is a little bit over 85. For many, many years now he has no bouts of pain, cramps or hip pain, no hip replacement or surgery. Believe it or not, once a week they still play field soccer. And he was, at the age of 85, talking to his grandson over text messages. His step got his rope, fell back rolling over his back, down the stairs at home. He fell on the floor, kneeled in the just to check that everything was fine. Basically, everything was really fine.
[00:29:13] Dana Frost: Okay. That is a great story on so many levels. One, it challenges the perspective that when a doctor tells you, you need a joint replacement that you need it. And because we tend to receive what the medical community says, we tend to receive it as it's the truth, and there are no other possibilities. And so-
[00:29:39] Francisco Kaiut: I have no doubt our doctors have a tremendously good intention. I do have no doubt because I work-
[00:29:44] Dana Frost: Certainly.
[00:29:45] Francisco Kaiut: ...with them and I have so many MDs that are teachers of mine, and I would never question that for many reasons. But we do have other possibilities and the amount of stories around [Audio warbled 00:30:03] spontaneous remissions around the planet is just enormous, I'll say that that is not for us. Because sometimes, as we all know, most of these spontaneous remissions are no as spontaneous at all. They come from a change in lifestyle and mindset, and that is absolutely available to every single person on earth.
Sometimes the guy is bigger than change for sometimes it's exactly the opposite, the fact is clear it's a change in something.
[00:30:39] Dana Frost: Mh-hmm. Very true. Yes. So Francisco, how can people find you. find Kaiut Yoga, learn more about the method?
[00:30:49] Francisco Kaiut: They can do it through you.
[00:30:51] Dana Frost: Yes, that's one way, yes. Thank you so much.
[00:30:54] Francisco Kaiut: And then I think then, and I'm not the best person for that, but I think it's www.kaiutyoga.com
[00:31:04] Dana Frost: You have Francisco Kaiut site too, but it links together.
[00:31:09] Francisco Kaiut: Yeah, there's Francisco Kaiut, we've been trying different ways to give people more access to this information. We have stories about everyone, young people, elderly people, on community assistance, so many things that we'll respond tremendously well to positive stress. Positive stress not being a comfort.
[00:31:34] Dana Frost: Yes. And I also want to mention Instagram is also a really great place, Francisco, because your team does such a great job of sharing the method and it's super visual. People can get an idea of the different studios around the world. The different teachers that get highlighted. So website and Instagram are two great ways to connect and learn more about Kaiut Yoga. And I would love to ask you our final question on this podcast, and that is what does feeling younger, growing older mean to you?
[00:32:11] Francisco Kaiut: It means the world to me. I was shot at the age of six in my hip and I grew up with lots of pain. I've never seen a life without pain, but now. So for the last 10 years, I live better than I ever before and there is no muscle spasm, there's no practically this and that. There's no chronic pain. There is no headache, there's no nothing. And there is the sense that the amount of energy is absolutely unlimited.
So for me, growing older with no pain means leaving with a unlimited amount of energy, and a quality of life that people rarely experience. I mean, I drink no wine, and I have less food and do more yoga, and at the same time work more than most of the people that I know, and I can't feel myself complete without an enormous amount of work. I love it. So for me, growing older and feeling younger it's about having more access to that fountain of youth.
[00:33:27] Dana Frost: Well, that was beautifully said. And on that we will close the show. Francisco, thank you so much for joining me.
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