Daniel's story from depression to bliss

—  Hi, who are you?

My name's Daniel Müller Gonzalez. I'm a co-founder & head teacher at hale.

 

—  For how long have you been working with hale?

Since the beginning. Before that too, it feels like, but we started hale three years and four months ago.

 

—  How can you, with the briefest version, tell us how that happened for you? How did hale actually appear in your life? You know, why are we here?

I was in a really shitty place about eight years ago, I moved to Sweden for love and it didn't work out.

And I went down into a spiral of drinking and partying. I was running away from myself, chasing instant gratification. And at a certain point, I was so much in suffering and misery that I decided that I don't want this no more.

I was searching for things I could do about my situation. And that's where the Wim Hof Method came into my life. I watched this documentary with him where he helped two Vice magazine reporters climb the highest mountain in Poland in the middle of winter. In shorts.

I thought; Whatever that man has. I want that too. So I started training.

It was breathwork & ice based. Cold exposure and mindset training. In just three, four months, most of my depression and other things that were there was just blown away.

I found a way to go into delayed gratification, which means going into sometimes discomfort, pain, and suffering to get the bigger gains along the time. And I follow that path over and over and over that brought me closer to breathwork and multiple modality is how to help myself and then help other people help themselves.

This is where Johnny Oduya then found me. He was searching for someone doing and practicing multiple breathing techniques in Stockholm. He found me then through a friend and we met up and decided that we're gonna start testing the base on how we can bring breathwork to the people because it works on the mental, emotional, and on the physical plane.

In other words, it's psychophysiological, it's combined with physiology and psychology and here we can use one tool to change the whole system. There's nothing like it.

That's why Johnny was also searching for how we can bring this to our friends, our families, and people in the world. We came together to change the way people breathe.

 

How did you start moving from Wim Hof and other modalities into exploring the breathwork and breathing modalities hale is delivering now? How did that start to appear or develop in your own life, and then in between you & Johnny?

It started actually really funny because for over a year, one and a half, I was fully unaware that there were other breathing techniques. So I just did Wim Hof breathing over and over and over every day, sometimes two times. And it really worked for me initially.

Then slowly after about a year of breathing the same way, fast tense and hard too, I noticed that if I would breathe slower and more calmly, I would actually get more benefits.

I would invest less energy and get more output. I started thinking maybe the way that he's showing me is not maybe ultimately the right one for my body and my physiology.

This led me down to explore more. and ask: What else is there?

I discovered that there were breathwork techniques everywhere. At that time I was still quite in my ego. So I was like, but Wim Hof breathing is the best breathing of all, right? I was trying to internally defend it against other techniques that were way more powerful. Yeah. And, but my ego was like in that moment and the way until it finally just dropped and I was realizing that this is, is what all of these people are doing. They're being in their ego about their breathing techniques.