Ep 289 - Will Rezin | Somatics, Trauma & the Body as Living Process

Coming up in this episode. I hear this all the time. I went to this plant medicine ceremony, and I'm healed. I healed all my trauma a day later, just like I have to recover for two weeks from that man it wiped me out. I'm processing all the deep stuff right no you're depressed because your body couldn't handle the intensity that you put it through and now you're suffering the consequences, which is a complete and total system collapse.

And if we don't understand where to apply the different tools to the different people in the different context, we end up blundering an experience for people causing them to become more sick.

You are now listening to the Hear for the Truth Podcast hosted by Joel Rafiti and you're awesomeos.

What's up everybody welcome back to the Hear for the Truth Podcast. I'm Joel Rafiti, I've got my co-host Yadassimos with me as always.

You said it like a true Greek, you know, I oscillate between these things. I've got some very exciting news. So yesterday my brother did an ancestry DNA says we didn't do it yesterday, but he got his results yesterday.

And assuming that I have the same DNA as my brother, if you are to believe in DNA or genetics or whatever this might be.

And I understand obviously there's pitfalls with these tests and you know, potential risks, etc. to consider. Anyway, if you can remove that from the perfume of this discussion for the moment in time.

In 2016, my wife, Alissa and I visited the Play O del Carmen for the first time without kids by ourselves. And we were there observing the beach standing, feeling the breeze.

And we're like this place feels special. I felt a deep, we both felt a deep connection through that place. And we planted the seed then and there that one day we were going to live there.

And then fast forward seven years in 2023. We packed our bags. We moved to Mexico. And in a few months time, we ended up living in Play O del Carmen for two years, being immersed in the Mexican culture, the Mayan history, all the rest of it. And we loved it. We felt great.

Fast forward to yesterday. My brother sends me his ancestry DNA test results. And it's number one, the Levant area, the Arab area, you know, Eastern Mediterranean, as we know.

Number two, Egyptian, you know, I didn't know there was that much Egyptian, but it's there. Number three, specifically within Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, which can turn a room, Play O del Carmen is in.

So ladies and gentlemen, I am part Mexican. I actually did move to one of my lands of origin. What I decided to carve Mexico beads. That was a three percent, three percent.

Me and me. Hey, Brian, we're not giving percentages here. All right. No, no need to enclose the disclos the details of my exact DNA makeup.

But what it means is that one of my ancestors, four or five generations removed, it was 100% native to this region, probably Mayan.

So I just want to share that story with you all. Thank you for listening. I appreciate it.

Today, we have Will the reason joining us and Will is a friend of your ass months is my first time meeting Will, but what an incredible conversation.

Diving into the nuance of what the Soma really is of what the entire field of semantics really is. And he's just an incredibly brilliant man.

And the reason I love this discussion also so much is that it really sits at the foundation and the core of here for the truth.

And there's the key reasons, one of the key reasons that we even exist because, you know, back in 2021 for the first time, I listened to the voice of Yorasamos in my ears as I was driving to a factory in barrel, New South Wales, Australia.

And he's beautiful wife Sophie as they were guests on the unslave podcast talking about the body as the shadow and based on that conversation without knowing Yorasamos, I seeked him out on Instagram and I sent him a message.

And here for the truth exists because of the roots of this conversation. So I love us so much, bro. I know you have a massive, massive history in this field yourself.

Well, yeah, I mean, it's definitely been something that has had a huge impact on me, you know, starting off reading books and studying and learning about psychology and getting to more psychospiritual things.

But I think for me things really shifted when I brought the body into an obviously again as when we get into this conversation, you'll see like we love to use these words to.

To delineate like mine and body, but ultimately like there's a living body that, you know, we're experiencing this reality with.

But yeah, like getting into body work and getting into nervous system work and understanding physiology at a much more subtle level.

And it and that's also a deeper level really impacted me and my sense of self and my behavior and my relationship to my environment and my relationship to the people in my life.

And so I'm very grateful that this work is getting more popular and that comes with its own pitfalls, which we discuss in the episode.

But will is someone from the moment I met him and you'll hear about an episode I deeply respect him and I love the work that he's doing.

And yeah, what a what a joy, a pleasure and an honor to have this conversation with him.

Yeah, well said man, I just want to be sure we dive into this episode on a kind of like give those listening whether new or existing we appreciate your wall, but just to kind of give you like a flow of here for the truth at this point in time and how you can connect deeper if you wanted to.

So we have our membership community friends of the truth, which is going to be capped at 200 members and we're currently sitting at around 150 members and this is an incredible space where if you resonate with these conversations, if you resonate with us, then you're going to find friends and deep connections within that space and a constant source of support for you in your life.

And we connect multiple times a month over zoom on topics all connected to the here for the truth ecosystem and then further than that, we have our program called rise above the herd.

So from 2021 to 2025, we were in 12 live cohorts of rise above the herd, which was an eight week program and then a 10 week program encompassing the incredible work of Sophie Fletcher, your atmosphere's wife and the nervous system piece as well.

And this program is ultimately designed to de-condition you from yourself limiting the leaves from the ways in which you view yourself and the world that aren't leading to ideal results in your life and to give you the tools, the groundwork, the framework, the inspiration, the mythological and the mystical connotations to lead you to a life well lived to rewire your baseline into I like who I am.

I like who I'm becoming let me now move towards that with clarity and that's now a self study program, which is available to you as well, which you can find are here for the truth.com under the offerings tab is friends of the truth and rise above the herd.

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Guys again on a repeat if you're listening to this podcast we consider you a rare individual you know because it means that you're able to engage with complexity with ideas with the the yearning of understanding what it means to become more whole and how truth can really be deeper in deeper integrated in one's own life because my personal philosophy is that self development is simply increasing your capacity to hold truth.

Right within the one ecosystem that is you you're living body you're living so much as we get into right here.

We'll reason is a semantic experiencing practitioner and the founder of trauma and sematics a global training organization dedicated to advancing professional practice and trauma recovery and attachment repair through embodied capacity building approaches.

We'll hold over 350 hours of training and supervision in semantic experiencing and a served as a training assistant for SE international he's a certified professional coach and maintains an active clinical practice alongside his teaching currently will is developing formative sematics a comprehensive methodology integrating

semantic trauma recovery with attachment focused relational work in collaboration with Kate Appleton will thanks for being here for the truth man.

Sure we asked you are some of thanks for having me absolute pleasure dude one way we always like to kick off these conversations is we kind of really want to explore your personal journey a little bit diving into some of the major rights of passage and there's main catalyzing moments that you feel led you down this path.

Of which now on hindsight has the benefit of being twenty twenty and so I can look back over my life and say wow I can see the ways that life organized.

And set me up to be the kind of man that might be pursuing the things I'm pursuing but I could tell you at the time I had no idea that that setup was occurring or that those things would shape me in a way that would lead me towards where I find myself today.

So I think I'll fire back with a question before I get into narrating story.

Where do you want me to start because I could start by giving you an overview of childhood adolescence early adulthood or we can pick key pivotal moments of just what it sounded like you were asking for you let me start there maybe with a couple key pivotal first of all first of all I just start off the day you were born in any trauma that you experienced.

During the nine months in utero and then during the birth process of yeah I would say just kind of the main pivotal moments like some things that occurred in childhood and moving on their life you know I mean we I know we could talk for 17 hours but we could yeah great yeah well I was born into a family that valued art intellect history.

History spirituality creativity and that I believe really shaped the foundation of who I am in essence my mother was an art teacher and my father studied history and law and architecture he went on to work in sales and financial planning my mother went on to become a psychotherapist.

But in my early life my imagination my understanding of our place in history my creativity these were all things that were fostered and enriched early early on in my life I went to a water of school school during the first couple years of school and that I believe also shaped some of some of Steiner's way of doing what he does teaching what he teach.

And helping to form young minds really heavily influenced me I can say that looking back on things I wouldn't have said that looking at it.

And in my teens I had some pretty traumatic experiences living in group homes and my family was going through a really intense period and I was going through the intense period of moving from being a boy to being a young man puberty.

And as a result of the friction that that created both in my body and in the family I ended up living outside the home for a couple of years and that significantly impacted me.

And so I'd say that if we were kind of asking this question what was maybe what were maybe some of those rights of passage in those pivotal moments something I've written a little bit about is time at an outdoor boot camp it was for boys like a boys home.

That really shaped me and I'd say that was right a right a passage but it wasn't a right a passage in a traditional sense it was having to experience suffering and having no way out but to be with myself through it.

And in that I really learned how to be with myself without losing myself in the pain and suffering along the way.

I'd say that what very easily could have happened is I could have ended up on a different path one where I wasn't helping people one where I wasn't integrated into society one or maybe I was living in jail or prison or something really awful or addicted to drugs or alcohol.

But I didn't I managed to maintain connection to myself and to some sense of I'm going to get through this I'm going to make the best of whatever the days are that I have while a minute when I remember reading Victor Frankl's book

man said it would have been a 19 yeah 1998 and I thought wow I didn't I didn't live in a concentration camp at my goodness the experiences that I had were horrific physical abuse sexual abuse emotional psychological abuse and repetitive and that had a pretty significant impact on me in my body yet even in the midst of all of that I managed to maintain a positive outlook on the world.

And I have regularly reflected and contemplated on this like what is it about me that made that possible whereas for other people they fell apart they contracted they imploded they formed a cynical view of the world.

I just don't have that cynical view I still believe in the goodness in people even while living through atrocities and by comparison it's nothing like living in Auschwitz you know like that would have been a terrible awful experience.

And for my body I didn't know any different and it was I get I'm not trying to make comparison here but I would say yeah.

After that experience I ended up turning towards psychedelics drugs alcohol and I use the term drugs broadly here but mostly smoking weed and drinking alcohol and taking psychedelics I think that that really had a positive and that positive impact on me as an individual because I got to work through some of the

psychological components and the emotional components of what I'd lived through.

During that time I became fascinated with psychology physiology and spirituality.

And I thought oh yeah I want to pursue a life of learning spirituality. The stories I was drawn to were the stories of the you know adventure that goes out and finds a teacher and immerses himself inside of that teacher studying.

So the story of the kind of money Christos a great example of a story that really resonated with me you know somebody that was imprisoned love that wrongly.

Love that movie love that book I mean the movies okay the book the book is maybe it's classic.

Yeah yeah.

They did a recent I think there was a French TV show there was and I watched like I don't know a year ago two years ago when I read that that was one of my favorites anyways.

Well was it more true to the story.

I mean it felt like it but then again I read this I read the kind of money Christo in 2002 so I feel like I'm due for a reread.

Yeah yeah my girlfriend just reread that read that book she just loves it so much and we watch the movie together afterwards she's like this is not accurate this is not what it that's not what happened in the book.

None of this character is a real or this didn't have that was like you know I get it.

There's something about like that story but even like one of my favorite movies the OG with Charles Heston has been her there's something about like someone who's like wrongfully imprisoned and then like finds his way back and then like redeems himself that I really just love I love that story.

Yeah I absolutely love it as well there's something that rings true for me in my own life my own lived experience about overcoming really significant adversity and somehow finding a way through and creating something beautiful out of it.

And you know when I discovered Joseph Campbell's work in 2000 I'm saying there it is here is journey there there is repeating across time with various different fairy tales or mythologies that we have had with us as people for as long as we can go.

Back in history. So I became fascinated with these things and I thought I was going to go you know join a meditation community in India for a while either you know I pursued various different practices and set us on for a little while meditation for quite a while.

But I didn't have a functional integration in my life into the world of of our culture.

I was very much like withdrawn from culture and I think that was a response from my my traumatic experiences.

And so fast forward through lots of wild experiences I met some teachers who were astrologers but they were psychologists and hypnotists first.

So Linda and Michael Brady were their names and Linda's no longer living she passed couple years ago.

But she was a youngian psychologist and educator who found astrology and just loved it and so she was integrating young in analysis into astrological work.

And she was very avidly against predictive astrology so she used it as a tool to it was almost like a coaching tool she formulated open-ended questions and ways to work with the various different symbols or archetypes to help to draw out of somebody.

And then her husband Michael, he studied Milton Ericson's work pretty extensively and practiced hypnosis and regression and pass life regression.

So I started with them for about two and a half years and I lived with them for 45 days during that time and I did an immersive study in both astrology, depth psychology, dream analysis and hypnosis and regression.

That catalyzed me before that I was working in production.

So I did some audio production, sound engineering, theater production and then that transitioned into me working backstage in opera companies, small opera and then pretty large opera companies as well.

And I loved to that work because it connected me to music which is I've played guitar pretty much my whole life and her instruments and so I was six or seven.

But it didn't really enrich the other part of me, the part of me that is just fascinated with human nature and was really, really good with people highly attuned to what was going on with them and just had a natural knack for that.

So when I met Linda and Michael, this would have been to 2012 they were doing session work over the phone with people all over the world. I thought, you can make $150 an hour talking to a person on the phone.

I want that.

At the time, I think I was maxing out at like $45 maybe $50 an hour. There wasn't a lot of money. I mean, not that it's bad, but it was hard work for that money.

And I thought, well, okay, there's a different kind of hard work, but I can use a different skill and I just, I just immersed myself and I found that it came really naturally to me.

And so when I was done with that, I started working with some of my mother's therapy clients. I came in and did hypnosis with them and regression work with them. I started to get some really good results.

And she encouraged me to go get a formal certification as a coach since I didn't want to go through all the school to become a psychotherapist. So I did and started running my coaching practice in 2015.

I went and lived in Peru for almost a year. I immersed myself in various different cultural contexts there and that that heavily influenced me and then discovered somatic experiencing immediately after and dove headlong into that world.

And when I found Dr. Levine's work, I realized, oh my gosh, there's here we have language for the things that I've discovered that have been maybe shrouded in mystery or shared in ways that kept them attached to a cultural context or spirituality.

But what he taught and still teaches really is an integration of esoteric shamanism and science and it helped me to see the bridge between science and spirituality.

And I don't think there's actually any difference between those two things. I think it's just that we are using language in a different way to describe them.

So that gave me that opened me up to a field, the field of somatics and I dove headlong into that field and I read as much as I could find.

And so over the past maybe decade now, I've been accumulating books and I'll read a book and the author will reference five or six different people or maybe 15 and I'll go out and I'll buy all the books that those people have written and then I'll consume components of those and just sort of following the rabbit trail as far as I can.

And that's how I discovered Stanley Kellerman's work and Ron Kurtz's work and mostly fell in Christ and a lot of the pioneers of the field of somatics and sort of doing a deep dive on the history of that field and kind of how did the field emerge out of what did it emerge, how did it shape the field of psychotherapy or bodywork or other fields.

And along the way, practitioners and coaches started asking me for mentorship or for guidance or for supervision and so eventually I created a training program around that, which is something I launched in 2021 with my ex fiance Ariana Joy.

Awesome, bro.

Um, got so many directions, say that again, I said a bridge version.

Yeah, of course.

Of course, man.

I mean, I remember when we met at the coaching conference in right outside of Vegas and it was 2019. I think it was right around this time, maybe.

No, no, no.

Well, it's close to around this time.

Really close.

And I just remember it just came up on social media for me. I was like three days ago.

Yeah, yeah.

I remember, um, yeah, just remember connecting with you, man.

I remember conversations that I also remember that you were a fellow Gemini, if my memory serves me correctly.

So we're sitting there chatting and getting deep.

Um, and also I want to say too, like I remember in during that experience, there was a major.

I would say, how would you explain an individual that had an episode to like.

Yeah, well, somebody had an overwhelming experience that caused their body to go into a state of shock.

And, um, I stepped into support.

Yeah, I remember that.

I knew exactly what to do.

Well, I was the thing.

I just remember at that time that, you know, the people who were hosting it, like this was a world that they knew nothing about.

You know, and it's a conversation that we've had over the last however many years.

Just in terms of like the coaching industry and like, okay, the gifts and the benefits of certain areas of it.

And then what's missing and what's lacking?

And, um, you know, there definitely is that somatic piece and that level of attunement that is necessary in a one-on-one setting or even in a group setting.

Just to be able to be, and I know this word is like everyone's using it these days, but trauma informed or even more specifically actually trauma trained to actually have proper training to be able to navigate situations like you did back then.

And so I remember just initially beyond our conversations, just the respect I had for you, how you were able to just step right in and handle something that could have, you know, went in a whole different direction.

Yeah, and I know Sophie had had her because she was getting her pH finishing up her PhD at that time.

So I know she had heard about somatic experiencing and wanted to do that at some point.

And so connecting with you because you had you were in it at that time or you were going through it.

What's your timeline?

I had just completed it.

You just finished it.

Yeah.

And so yeah, that sea was planted in terms of like that level of work.

Anyways, I digress a bit, but I wanted to kind of share that like our history there a week connected in that experience.

But okay, somatics, soma, somatic, that word is just like everyone on their mother uses it this day, these days.

And so I feel like I remember a while ago you writing this long definition on Facebook or something.

It's just coming to me, it's popping into my contest right now around your view of somatics and what that means.

And I'd love to get the will reason definition of somatics for our audience because we've, you know, we've had different people on this podcast, different nervous system specialists, you know, people I deeply respect.

And we just love continuing to explore this subject from different angles.

And yeah, I just appreciate your engagement with, with this field.

Can I extend your question a little bit?

Yes.

And also if you can dive into like what makes Peter Levine like a pioneer because like somatic experiencing this kind of a new thing.

I think waking the tiger was 1997.

So like, you know, this work is groundbreaking in a sense.

So if you can kind of wield in what we're missing on that as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I think to answer your question, what I'll do is I'll give a brief overview of what I've learned about the field.

And I'll start with the person who coined that term here in the United States, his name is Thomas Hannah.

Thomas Hannah was a philosopher and theologian who eventually turned like it didn't follow that as a long term path in his life and started.

He discovered Moshe felt in crisis work and it really inspired him.

And he began working with humans in their bodies to alleviate their their chronic.

Bracing patterns.

I don't know if he was considered a physical therapist or something of that nature, but he ended up working in the with with bodies, so bodywork of sorts.

But before Thomas Hannah came along, it was the human potential movement.

And so 60s and 70s had this big wave of human potential focus.

Esselin and Kropalu became two hubs, one on either coast of the United States, where there's a huge focus around exploring human potential.

Consciousness, exploration, psychotherapy techniques of unguarded emotional processing.

We had this sort of milieu of wrecking and therapy being influenced by Alexander Lone's bioenergetics, being influenced by Ron Kurtz's exploration that eventually turned into Hacomeech training.

And Dr. Levine was experimenting or you know, writing his thesis around animal physiology and stress physiology, collaborating with Dr. Porjusis, he was writing the polyvagal theory.

And all of this was sort of happening simultaneously within this cultural context.

When Hannah coined the term somatics, he did so because the word Soma is a Greek word that references the body as a living process.

So component one is that it recognizes the body is process. It's not a machine.

And through Hannah's research into this, feelably discovered is that around the time of the Cartesian era, we started conceptualizing our body as a machine that had parts that we could take out or put in or tinker with.

And that removes the living element from the body. Even though we recognize the body's living, there's this concept or a way that we hold our understanding of the body that imagines it as something that's been created like a machine's created and something that we can tinker with.

It also underbises the inner self sensing experience of the individual.

So in Western medicine, there's not a lot of bias put on what the individual senses inside their body. A lot more bias is put on what we can observe from the outside in.

So we have this observational approach that's been applied and we're underbising the process component of the human body.

Stanley Kellman created form of psychology. Kellman heavily influenced the therapeutic industry as well, although I think his work didn't take off the way that others did because he didn't want to create a training system for it.

He wanted to help people discover themselves.

He and body members, Cohen were pretty, they were from what I understand of the field, they were collaborating on ideas and Bonnie's work then focused more on the embryological pulsatory rhythm that the human body has.

So I digress into into lots of history here, but to answer the question, Soma in its original understanding or definition comes out of referencing the body as a living process.

Which is not the parts, it is the whole.

We think of mind body, right, or body mind or mental emotional physical.

And our left hemisphere of our brain does a really great job of creating categories so that we can understand reality.

But the way that we create category is also sometimes compartmentalized as our understanding of the whole being a process that's interconnected with no separation.

So thinking or thoughts are what the body does.

It's a product of being body, not having a body, having a body would imply that a body is a vehicle.

The body is not the vehicle. We are body.

Alan Watt said, you know, the apple tree apples and the earth peoples.

And I really like that analogy because the body thinks or feels it's what it does.

It's a byproduct of being bodied.

It's just what the organic nature of our process is.

Now, we've shaped that over thousands of years with the use of language and writing and memory and various different techniques or practices.

And you can see this reflected in Soma Gurgius writing where he talks about the difference between indigenous people and people that are highly westernized or educated.

And we have a bias towards intellect and remembering the arc of ourselves across time versus present moment awareness and intuition that's just naturally guiding us through the world.

These things become ends of a poll unfortunately because we over bias one or under bias another over bias one and then bias another.

But really as humans in organic process, we are all of that.

So the field of semantics began to form around this understanding that the body is process and the body is self organizing, self referencing, self adjusting.

And if we can create the right conditions under most circumstances, not all because there are abnormalities in the way a body grows.

If we can create the right conditions for most bodies, the body will change automatically on its own.

And in Levine's research round, animal physiology and stress physiology, among lots of other things, he was heavily influenced by lots of other disciplines at the time.

He discovered that there were ways to use, maybe we could say a mindfulness approach, Jenlin's focusing felt sense approach and various different movement techniques to help the body to work through different residue from experiences.

We started calling trauma.

I love how Gabor puts it into words, you know, trauma comes from the word wound.

And that's the thing that's being carried in response to what happened.

And Dr. Levine says, trauma is what happens in the absence of an empathetic witness.

In context in his book, he was talking about having a person with him during a car accident when a car hit him, that person there made it possible for him to do what he otherwise wouldn't have been able to do.

That sense of relational safety is a core piece of us getting through difficulty or suffering without it lingering on in our body.

And so in my diving deep into this field, what I discovered is there are people, many people in many, many cultural contexts who have discovered ways of working and it ends up being their fixation and their sort of narrow understanding of working with the body that all seem to effectively work.

And they're all going towards the same thing, which is helping the body to resolve what's stuck.

So that we can have more vitality and more flexibility.

We also, there's, you know, nervous system physiology just boomed during COVID.

Like people are talking about nervous systems now. They're talking about somatics now.

Everybody's sort of, you know, co-opting these terms.

I'm trauma informed and I'm a somatic practitioner but many people don't know what they mean.

I'm really happy that these terms are more widely known or heard now. I think it's phenomenal.

What happens when that happens unfortunately is a lot of people jump into the way of popularity without actually understanding what they mean or where they come from,

which we claim to be trauma informed and we're not can unfortunately create some significant difficulties for the person that we're supporting.

I'll pause there and so we looked at reverberate for you all for a moment.

Yeah, no, I love a man. I love the depth. I already appreciate it.

I want to dive a little bit deeper into, you know, the idea that we are bodied.

And so like when you're saying that, it's like obviously like thinking the brain, et cetera,

it's all part of this whole living process of the body.

Is that kind of like what you'll get? Like none of it is like we are bodied in compasses the entire process of being a human.

Yeah, so it encompasses our gross body, physical form, subtle body, the way that our body interacts with the space directly around us,

and then even further out the way that our body is interacting with all of life around us from an ecological sense.

So we are bodied being all of the organic processes that are functioning in a way that's interconnected.

If I place my hand here and I move gently on my arm, that is being sensed by every little piece of my body in some way or another.

That's impacting, let's say it that way, maybe not sensed, but it's impacting my body all over the place.

Well, that's not happening in isolation on my arm in this one little area.

The brain's involved, the tissues involved, the fasces involved, and if I pull really hard, the organs notice it.

Because we're all one process.

And so we will often segment these things to think about them in sections.

We've got our brain. We've got our body as if the brain's not the body.

But the brain is the body.

Yep. It's an essential component. The spinal column is a body, the nervous system is the body, the organ system is the body,

the facial system is the body. Our thoughts that seem to emerge out of nowhere, that's the body.

Yeah. When people are, for example, like, how does consciousness fit into the picture for you?

Because we've had guests in the past that describe consciousness as like non-local, for example.

Some just curious from your perspective how this goes into the framework.

I think consciousness is what organic living matter does.

And my opinion around this is that we don't know enough to assert it with absolute certainty.

And if anybody that does is doing so out of their own belief rather than the ability to assert it wholeheartedly.

I can assert that I feel things, I sense things, I have ideas about things and that there are thousands of years of literature and ideas about this that we're talking about.

But I don't know is the best answer I could possibly give to that.

I mean, I've read some wonderful ideas and suggestions around these things.

If you haven't read Julian James, the breakdown of consciousness in the bicample or mine, that's a phenomenal book.

And if you're not afraid to go or violence, pair that with Westworld and read the chapters as you go through the first six episodes of that TV show,

it's phenomenal, it just tracks right along with the TV show.

But take, for instance, integral theory.

Ken Wilbur's work.

Amazing work.

Amazing.

And am I connected to my living process?

Or am I just in the thinking about it?

We are humans, biological process moving through our ecosystem.

I believe most of us are living mostly dissociated from the natural world and from ourselves.

I believe that most of us don't recognize our place within the natural world that we live and we don't even know the land where we live most of the time.

And that, I believe, is the cause of the suffering that humanity faces right now.

I believe that our fracturing from both ourselves and the world is the problem if we were to call it such.

It is a natural byproduct of our sort of evolving and developing ourselves and certain skills, but it also causes difficulty.

If I'm not sensitive to myself, I can't be sensitive to the world and I definitely can't be sensitive to you.

If I'm sensitive enough to myself and I don't mean in a narcissistic way, I mean sensitive, I'm feeling myself and I can feel the world.

I can respond to you in a way that is attuned and empathetic and I'm not going to want to hurt you.

It's not going to be any part of me that wants to do that because I recognize myself within you.

And when I say I recognize myself within you, I don't mean me, but I mean the way that you are also human, the way I am.

You're also living the way I'm living.

And I think the fundamental tenets of a lot of mystic traditions that recognize the livingness of all of the world,

there's some real brilliance in that.

And unfortunately some people miss out on the brilliance because they get caught in maybe the dogma or the context or the cultural context that's there.

And so one of the things I attempt to do in my writing and in my teaching is bridge that gap by using more scientific language to explain sort of the mystical things.

That's all a response to your question about consciousness, which is I don't have an answer about consciousness.

I just love the fact that you have the capacity to say, wow, I've read all these books.

I've gone down all these deep rabbit holes.

I've contemplated, I've spent time in the mountains, whatever the case may be.

And yet you have the ability to be like, I don't know.

And anyone who claims they know is operating from a belief.

And I think that's a big issue we have in general.

And these are conversations that we have on this podcast and within our community is like the level of certainty that people communicate on, you know, like insert any subject that's going around in the world.

And it's like, I know.

And it's like, but you don't.

So how about you learn a process of human incation where you can share your beliefs and still hold space for the fact that you don't fucking know.

And yes, well, you're talking about complexity and paradox.

And paradox is really difficult for us to hold because we have to acknowledge that both things are true.

And they contradict each other.

That's hard.

And to be able to say, I don't know.

For some people that that sounds, yeah, it's well in an awful lot.

Also, I think sounds an awful lot like, I'm inferior.

They might take that as a personal front on themselves or an implication that that means something about them.

I don't.

If you really read ancient mystic teachings or any sort of esoteric spirituality, you get to the place where they all sort of converge at the same thing.

We've got to learn to hold complexity.

And the paradox is in everything.

And then also, at a certain point, our learning or fantasizing or imagining becomes the barrier to us living and being present in the world.

Yeah.

And so the answer really is to just live and be.

But it's not at the same time.

It's a paradox.

Let everything go.

But first before you let it go, you got to take it all in or some of it in.

Go.

I'm a musician.

I play guitar.

So learn all of the styles so that you can forget them and they can come out of you naturally.

I didn't do all of that when I learned.

So I can be rather inhibited sometimes when I go to play.

I can't play all the things that I'm imagining.

But when I'm taking lessons right now and I'm learning technique, as I learn technique, I abandon the technique.

But the technique has to be learned so I can let it go.

Yeah.

So when a mystic says, drop it and people hear spiritual bypass, they did just spiritually bypass.

Oh, yeah, I just need to let everything go.

No.

We've got to feel it to heal it.

Yeah, we do.

And no.

Because it's not that we need to go headlong into big emoting and expressing.

I mean, for some people who've been really rigidly contained, they might need to have a little bit of catharsis.

But that catharsis is only the doorway to feeling again.

We want subtlety is actually where we live as humans.

And the capacity to have that fluid movement between states is what's essential.

So it's not feel it to heal it, but it is.

It's a paradox.

And it's not learn all the things and focus on learning.

But it also is.

We want to learn.

But we want to be able to make our own, create our own synthesis, have our own ideas emerge.

And this is a place where I see people get stuck all the time.

Well, this is the way it is because I learned it here.

Yeah.

Well, that's the way it was for that one person.

They found something that really worked.

It was amazing for them.

Does it work for you?

Yeah.

What's your way of adopting that and synthesizing that into what naturally emerges from you?

That's where the real magic is, I think.

Spoken like a wise Gemini about the integration of opposites.

Speaking about paradox.

Well, I mean, symbolically, like the way I always see like a role, you know, I think of like the lemnus gate, the infinity symbol.

And like as human beings, we're just in that liminal point in the middle, you know.

And it's literally sitting and standing in between the in and out, the tension of opposites.

And let's say a role.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I agree.

What, what, what have you found like within trauma on the nervous system impacts a person's capacity to do that to hold complexity?

To, to be with themselves in that way and to, to be with another.

Because I, because when I, I feel like, well, this is something I talk about often is you have to build the capacity to hold space for this tension of opposites to be able to even sit with it.

But if you can, how does that impact sense of self, how does the impact interpersonal dynamics, you know, especially within communication?

Well, so I think it's a multi-layered response here to that, that question at least from my perspective.

What in trauma nervous system work has influenced our, our capacity to hold complexity if I were to just take that and then riff around it.

What I'd say is, one, I'm not smart enough to know the full answer to that question.

But, but I'm going to take a, a page out of Stephen Jenkins in his book and say, I'm going to find the answer as I speak.

And I watched him do this.

It was brilliant.

It was really beautiful.

So if we take and we look at the words here, right, trauma.

I think rather than focusing on the nervous system, because it's just one component of our biological process, I can focus more on trauma and say, well, disruption.

So what influences a person's capacity to hold complexity? Well, it is the amount of unresolved trauma that their body's carrying.

And it's how their body goes about adapting to that.

So it's the all the adaptive strategies that have formed around it.

Some of that psychological, some of it's physiological.

I mean, I'm compartmentalizing those two more just for category sake, because it's all body.

But in our developing process, we're getting feedback from our environment.

We figure out, oh, this particular something works.

There's no cognition to this.

It's just figuring out this particular adaptation works for me.

Well, as that stacks up, so do our triggers.

And when I say trigger, I mean the sensory response or the threat reaction to various different input.

I can't hold complexity if my body's saying there's danger and there's a threat right now.

This is just like all those other times.

If that's happening, my instinct to survive is taking over and making choices for me.

It's creating my perception and intelligently so attempting to keep me safe.

So on one layer, our ability to hold complexities influenced by how much our triggers are getting in the way of us being able to do that.

But in another, I'd say it's training.

So I like to hold loosely the belief that things that we think are really complicated are actually pretty simple.

So trauma resolution, healing trauma is restoring flexibility.

Emotional, like EQ, right? Emotional capacity.

Capacity to be with really big emotions without it tipping us off into a fight or flight or freeze response.

We can just use those as an analogy here.

That is also a skill that can be learned.

We don't have a culture that teaches us that skill for the most part.

We don't grow in families that have that skill passed to them usually.

There are outliers for sure, but it's not the critical mass number of our population as a species.

So that also influences our capacity to hold complexity.

If we're also at the same time not interested, that affects our capacity to hold complexity.

I have over many years of my life challenged and challenged again and challenged again and challenged again some of the things that end up becoming that work or beliefs of mine.

But to do that, I had to really work with the content of physical biases, like physiological biases that were there that were present in my body.

And that happened gradually over a long period of time.

So I had to learn skills that would help me to hold more to be present within more or bigger experiences, emotional, physiological, et cetera.

So trauma being this something that happened that's creating a reaction where our body's still living that that becomes the barrier.

And most people don't have resources and I don't mean financial resources, I mean wisdom keepers.

They don't have elders that are teaching them how to do these things. They don't have good models.

We don't even have good myth models anymore. Television, stories, movies, music, people that are idolized.

These people are not living. They're not the living myths of what I think would support us to actually get through difficulty.

They're instead off in the inverse of that.

So I think all of that has an influence on that.

How does that land to the question?

Land's great, man. I loved everything that you said.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah.

I want to ask you something.

I'm currently exploring the work of Saka's Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz.

Have you read this book?

Years ago now.

Yeah. And it's interesting the way that he talks about, you know, I know you mentioned you studied hypnosis to some degree.

And he talks about the nervous system and the subconscious and the relationship in terms of like the nervous system doesn't understand the difference between imagination and reality.

And he talks about our subconscious as kind of intertwined with our nervous system in the sense that we all have these in our creative mechanism or machines.

So to be so to speak that when programmed correctly is designed to automatically move towards the goal that it's programmed with.

Right. So if you're feeding yourself negative programming, vague goals, vague ideas of what you want.

Even the subconscious believes that I'm not good enough. I'm not worthy of love, et cetera.

We're going to naturally move towards that because that's the baseline.

He uses, for example, the metaphor of like a thermostat, right?

Like you set the thermostat where you want it, you're going to move towards it.

So can you speak on this idea because even like you talk about examples of people being under hypnosis, where if they hypnotize the leader to believe that they can do incredible specific skills or things, they end up being able to perform and do these things.

So I want to hear your perspective on the relationship between yeah, nervous system subconscious and some of these ideas.

Oh man, I love that question.

I think when Malz talks about the subconscious, that's his word for describing that which we don't really have words for.

Yes, the part of us that is mostly instinct driven.

And an entry point that can sometimes be effective is working with belief structure because belief structure can adjust behavior.

And at the same time, when we work beneath that behavior automatically changes.

So we can do things that create context like this that in a way remove some of the psychological barriers which make it, we could say more possible for a person to not be have that barrier of belief.

But we can also create conditions where we don't have to do that at all.

And now when I began studying all of these things, I went, I came at it from the we are going to add a new program sort of perspective.

Like I need to program my body, I need to program my mind, I need to program my unconscious beliefs because my body is like a computer, I need to set it in program it some way.

And that can be effective up to a point, but we hit a point where it isn't effective and that point is when the body in its wonderful intelligence has survival adaptations that say, no, no amount of programming is going to change me.

I need, I need new experiences because when those new experiences happen, my body updates its response and that update becomes permanent.

And so I think it can be really useful to work with belief systems and also get underneath by helping the body to remove some of those associations, but the mind has a real significant limit where getting underneath it isn't possible.

So again, I'm dancing in that paradox with you around this because I think both are true. It's just a matter of the circumstance, the context and so on and so forth.

Yeah, and it's also a paradox because the body is the mind or at exactly you're working with the entire same thing based on the context of this conversation.

And it's curious, we need to talk about experience because one thing that Maltz advocates for is coming back to a visceral remembrance of an experience where you felt as though you accomplished something and you were in that kind of zone and then bringing that trying to bring that back into the, you know, the upper limits of what you're experiencing now to motivate, you know, the program.

Yeah, well, association, right? So we're talking about association and imagination is one of those layers of association that can be incredibly powerful because as soon as if I were to guide you to imagine, say, for instance, picking up a lemon and taking a bite of it, but do it in a really slow, methodical way, your mouth will start watering.

That's just a, I mean, and that's used in NLP training and in coach training and in leadership training as an example of the power that our mind has.

So our imagination definitely holds a lot of weight and in chronic anxiety, oftentimes the imagination is generating a somatosensory feedback loop where we're imagining a scenario that's absolutely terrifying on the body goes, yeah, that's terrifying. I'm terrified right now.

And then we're terrified and so we imagine more terrifying things and then we get more terrified and we imagine more terrifying things. It's like putting a microphone up to a speaker and it just feeds back in cycles.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, 100% and so it is important that we understand how we think what we think affects how we feel, but also how we feel affects what we think.

And it's stronger. There are 85% or more nerve endings moving from the body up towards the brain and there are from the brain back into the body.

So cognition is very limited in its impact on our sense of ourselves in the world, but it does have a place. It is very strong in certain ways.

And so again, like I'm dancing in that paradox of both are true because we're in a system that functions together. It's just what's the entry point that we want to use in certain circumstances, especially when it comes to leadership or productivity, it's highly effective to use these techniques you're talking about.

Hypnosis techniques or programming techniques or association techniques or what Tony Robinson of calling anchoring. I think Bandlar and Grindr also called it anchoring. You're creating a shape of your body or an association with a smell.

I've done this. Most of the people I work with in private coaching are incredibly high achievers. They're wildly successful and they are coming to me because they want help getting that extra 5% that makes 95% of the difference we could say.

I think that's probably on the leadership poster somewhere in a corporate headquarters. But that'll be the focus. And we use those techniques because that's going to give you a real quick sense of wow, I had a change.

And then underneath that, we got to really work with the automatic reactionary processes that have formed throughout life if the person is going to make that additional difference.

We can only get so far with that top layer.

It's the entry point. Most of the time is a case by case basis. You know, it is.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, because it's interesting to think about success. When you say I work with a lot of high achievers and success and it's like, well, what does that mean?

And then what is the state of maybe their relationship to their partners? What is the state of the relationship to their children and their emotional life and how they want to connect and be successful in that way?

And I find that like the bottom up approach definitely can impact those layers of relating in a deeper way in my opinion.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I categorize these people as such because I think that's how they would self identify.

I don't think of success as financial. I think of finance as one layer of the complex web of our lives. But success, I believe, is living a life that we're proud of when we die.

One where we feel like we enriched our lives and we can remember it and go, wow, yeah, I'm really proud of like I'm glad that I did what I did.

And to your point, these these deeper layers tend to be the thing that moves the needle and it tends to be an area where a person maybe hasn't gone deep.

We become highly fixated and focused, like an inch wide and five miles deep is I think an analogy that's used sometimes in entrepreneurial circles.

Well, people that that are highly focused and highly driven in a direction tend to be like that, which means that everything else might get omitted.

Yeah, oftentimes it's a compensation pattern because of certain trauma imprints too.

So unlearning that can be fearful or can be frightening for an individual like, well, I don't want to lose my skill.

I want to be able to continue to perform at the highest peak that I can perform.

I want to continue to be able to output like I'm outputting and when and to be challenged and hear somebody say, well, is that outputting actually what's generative for you?

Or is it destroying you?

Yeah.

Well, it doesn't mean our output has to diminish. It just means that our relationship to that might need to change so that we're not redlining our body and then end up with some sort of disease at 50 or 65.

Which I think happens chronically back to Thomas Hannah one of the things that I think is interesting about his work and anybody that's listening can read his book is called somatics by Thomas Hannah.

He lays out a lot of his ideas really well. He calls it sensory motor amnesia.

You hit about 45 between 40 and 50 and you start to notice that they're chronic muscular contraction patterns in your body.

I think there's there are jokes out there in the world. Yes, I went to sleep and I woke up and I'm stuck like this.

Hello, 40s, right?

Well, that's not because we're hitting our 40s is because our brain has forgotten what the muscles are doing. It's no longer getting the input.

25% of contraction is considered zero.

So since three motor amnesia, the motor cortex is not aware that it's contracting certain muscular systems that bracing often forms in response to injuries, trauma patterns,

unexpressed emotions and on and on and on. So when we have flexibility in our body, in all of our systems where they're collaborating together, that flexibility creates longevity and vitality.

But the absence of that flexibility creates rigidness and that rigidity creates disease or injury.

We think about a tree in a storm that survives a massive hurricane hurricane is the one that bends. It's not the one that's rigid.

But our system becomes more rigid in time without, you know, when the brain forgets what it's doing, we could say.

Yeah, the body process forgets.

Now, a beautiful man. I really, really appreciate the nuance and the context for sure.

One of my favorite definitions of success by Old Nightingale, he says success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.

You know, so it's the process of moving towards something that you perceive as more elastic, you know, which I think is beautiful.

And I think you're 100% right. Like the imagination and the mindset stuff when applied without the baseline, without, you know, a baseline of regulation, capacity, self esteem, like a friendly relationship with self, a friendly, like non rigid relationship with self.

When you're at that place and then you apply the imagination, the mindset, what can I dream of now? What can I vision now? What can I move towards now?

It is way more potent than applying that on top of this regulation and some of like just the unaddressed world, you know.

Well, I think that's when like the secret came out and other people jump on a lot of this like manifestation stuff without having done maybe more foundational work.

Like it's just, yeah, I agree with you, Joel, you know, like there needs to be some foundational work that has to be done in order for that.

I think to take off and to come into your life in a much more grounded way.

I mean, just like personal experience.

The potency of that work from a baseline of wow, I really like who I am.

I'm not doing it because I'm trying to become someone I like. I already like who I am. And now let me see how much further I can go.

Yeah, well said, Joel, well said.

Tony Robbins discovered in his work something that I've heard him say a number of times.

And there are things I like about what he does and things I disagree with, but this is one of those things that I really enjoy.

It's that he discovered that usually they're oftentimes two things motivate people.

Some people are motivated by moving towards possibility. Some people are moved by moving out of pain.

My assessment of that is that intense trauma patterns and trauma physiology makes it impossible for us to move towards possibility because we're so caught in the discomfort and the suffering and the pain.

So to alleviate the suffering means to make possible orienting towards possibility in our lives.

We can't orient to goodness if we don't have enough capacity to be with the intensity that's still stuck within.

And so for some people, and so I say it's context dependent, for some people we really have to work with that physiological reaction of contraction that's happening in the body or in the thinking or in the system before an individual can even imagine a better future or a better right now.

But once but by being able to be in that state of gratitude for right now, which is sometimes very difficult.

But by being there, we then can start to imagine something in that ability to imagine creates momentum which moves us in a direction.

Mosheh Feldenkrais once said, health is measured by the amount of stress an individual can take without their normal way of life being compromised.

And I love this quote because think about a cat, a healthy cat, a healthy house cat even better.

Complete trust in its environment.

It's muscle tone and his body is fascist, super loose, it's floppy, it's asleep.

A book falls off the shelf.

The cat springs into action, looks around, it's a book, settles, looks at stuff, goes right back to sleep.

There's no disruption to that cat's normal way of life.

When we have stress upon stress upon stress upon stress upon stress that is unresolved that isn't supported in a context where we don't have help.

Our body contracts and contracts and contracts and then there's a noise and our body reacts as though all that compounded stuff is continuing to happen and reverberates and we stay in a heightened state for days, weeks, months or years.

We can't come back to baseline, that's not health.

But vitality is not the absence of disease either.

Vitality is this flexibility to move between states.

So we have various different therapies and practices that involve moving from happy to sad or moving from joyful to angry and back to joyful.

What I think a lot of techniques get wrong is that they focus on the book just going to lump it into a bad category here, the bad feelings and getting making them really big without the movement between.

The movement is what we need.

We need to be able to tolerate moving between and everybody has a different capacity or different tolerance for that love.

So when we have these group cathartic experiences, unfortunately, what happens is the facilitator will often be somebody that has enormous capacity and they'll facilitate some sort of exercise that is perfect for them where they're not overwhelmed at all.

But somebody there can't keep up because of the social context and because of the way the body organizes itself and the way the nervous system functions they'll attempt to and they walk away from that experience traumatized.

They walk away overwhelmed too muchness collapsed for two weeks.

When people say that Dave, I hear this all the time, I went to this plant medicine ceremony and I came back and I'm healed. I healed all my trauma.

A day later, they're collapsed.

I just like, I have to recover for two weeks from that man, it wiped me out. I'm processing all the deep stuff.

No, you're depressed because your body couldn't handle the intensity that you put it through and now you're suffering the consequences which is a complete and total system collapse.

That should not be what's happening.

For us to actually create generative healing, we have more energy following that because we've liberated the places inside of ourselves where it's bound.

And when the binding becomes open, it's like a hose that's been opened, there's flow again.

Well, that can look like a big expression or something but it doesn't always.

And so we have models, whole models that are built around the discovery of this, there has to be a cathartic thing.

TRE is a great example of this. There has to be a trembling or a shaking in order for a person to heal because during this one animal model we discovered when an animal comes out of this hypertonic state that it starts to tremble.

Well, in that one context, tremoling is really useful because it's the reestablishing a flow in the body.

But outside that context, the body doesn't need to do that.

It actually causes more stress for a body that might have too much stress.

Now, I'm not saying Terry's not useful.

Just saying context matters an awful lot when we use different therapies and different approaches.

And if we don't understand where to apply the different tools to the different people and the different context,

we end up blundering an experience for people and causing them to have just not good experiences causing them to become more sick.

Yeah, for sure, man. I know Sophie has worked with a bunch of people one-on-one that have come out of the plant medicine.

We're all hundreds of ceremonies and yet disconnected from their body or shut down or just completely overstressed.

And then also just like the growth of the breathwork movement as well.

You have people leading 50% and 100% intense cathartic breathwork.

You can't monitor for that level of individuality.

You're just doing your thing and crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

Well, and I think the thing that often happens is that the facilitator of the leader really truly believes

that it would be helpful if everybody did like they did.

And unfortunately, percentage-wise, it's probably only maybe 15% of the attendees that really can do what they're doing and get a generative experience from it.

One of the things about being trauma-informed, and this has become a buzz word that's been co-opted by various different groups and turned into a political thing,

which is it's not. One more trauma-informed, we are attuned to the needs of the individual,

but we're also attuned to the needs of the group, which means that we're able to observe the group and recognize

who has the least capacity and make modifications for that individual for them so they don't have to make the decision for themselves.

If we understand nervous system physiology and especially Dr. Porto's contribution to understanding the various different mechanisms that are stimulated in us,

we'll understand that the fond mechanism, the social adaptation strategy, is pretty strong.

In a context where there's hierarchy of leadership or power, the person that's being led will often defer to the person leading even when their body says don't,

because it means that they're going to belong.

Not belonging to the group is more fearful or more of a threat than actually honoring what their own needs are.

So you can say only go as far as your body says, but the individual, when they're in a group, will go further.

So we want to be able to modify, which means we need to be able to attend to or notice or be sensitive to what everybody is experiencing.

And I've seen phenomenal facilitators do that, and then I've seen facilitators that are just not aware, not do that.

And the difference in experience of the group is staggering.

And I want to make something pretty explicit here and what I'm saying.

I believe that this isn't a matter of somebody trying to hurt others.

I think it's a matter of a lack of awareness, ignorance being the lack of awareness.

And that absence of knowing and absence of sensitivity accidentally leads to situations where these things happen and they're preventable

with the rate understanding and the rate practice.

Thank you so much, man.

No, I love that.

Group dynamics also operate on the inverse as well, right?

You're asked, wasn't I run a program called Ryzen of the Heard based on helping people overcome herd psychology and crowd psychology so they can become more of who they were meant to be?

Yeah, what we witness in the master is that people plateau at a baseline because they fear rising above everyone else.

They fear becoming more than their family, more than their friendship group, more than what the status quo has conditioned them to become.

And so we don't push ourselves.

We don't we don't strive for possibility or potential out of that fear, that condition fear.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

I agree.

There's, and it's also a conditioned need to belong.

Yeah.

And I, in my reading and research and study and training with various different people, I've discovered, or maybe I've come to the, like, holding loosely the belief that most of this is instinct.

Some of it is conscious, but most of it is instinct, so non-conscious, never be conscious, kind of thing.

The instinct is to belong.

It's a way of self-preservation.

It's a way of guaranteeing safety.

If I don't belong to the group, how will I survive?

That's an, that's an old instinct pattern.

So if I rise above the group, we can use that as the analogy here.

I leave them behind.

And also everything that I know.

And also, what about me?

What happens to me?

It's frightening.

And so that transition, how we do that transition really matters.

It affects how, like, whether we can actually do it or not.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What do you think is the biggest issue with the coaching industry?

You know, and then you've been involved in it.

Obviously, you've come at it from a certain angle with all your education and your focus on semantics.

But like, what is missing when you see people out there doing what they do?

And what is your, like, what did you strive to provide as a solution?

Well, if you'd asked me this question six years ago, or seven years ago, even,

what has said, understanding trauma and understanding psychology.

Today, I think it's, maybe to answer that question, I'd like to name a couple of other categories that I've discovered along the way.

One of the bigger issues with the coaching industries, we don't have a set of standards that everyone abides to.

So we don't have agreed upon standards.

I say, we, because I'm a professional coach, but I mean, the industry as a whole doesn't have a set of agreed upon standards by everybody within it.

There are agreed upon standards, sort of like ICF and BCC have agreed upon standards.

It's just not everybody that calls themselves a coach abides by those.

But I think that is problematic because when a person goes seeking a coach, they don't actually have a standard that they can expect from a person that they work with.

You go, you go seek a therapist, you have a certain expectation of very specific standards.

Not every therapist meets these standards, yet they are, they are bound legally to abide by very specific rules.

Now, I think there's a benefit to that. I think there's a cost to that.

So I'm not advocating that we need that. I'd say that having some agreed upon standard is definitely something that becomes problematic.

So maybe that's the what's missing.

The biggest issue I think the coaching industry is that they're working with a partial map.

It's a faulty map.

And there's so much that's left out and there's so much emboldening that's happening for people.

And I'm pausing to really just can let my thoughts organize because there are a lot that I could say here.

And for some individuals, they jump into that industry because it seems like an easy way to make money.

For others, they jump into it because they genuinely care about people.

You might hear some dogs barking in the background. Zoom might filter them out. That'd be great.

You're good.

So not having a complete map makes it difficult for us to serve people and help them if we don't understand the territory that we're in.

So I think a solve for that would be for there to be a bit more comprehensive training within the industry as a whole.

And again, I come back to certain standards.

I think missing out on ethics, missing out on base level human biophysiology.

I think missing out on understanding attachment dynamics.

These are all things that are really big deal.

And we get mental frameworks inside of coaching and then there are somatic coaching programs that go a little deeper than that.

And in the model that I'm developing, we're covering all of these bases.

So you get more of a complete image of the human.

Because human organism, when we can recognize that we are living process with all these different ways of working with it, here's a way, here's a way, here's a way, here's a way, here's a way, here's what context to use this in, what context to use this in.

Then we're less likely to have, maybe we could say errors, we're more likely to have success, we're working with the individual.

I think there's probably more I could say on that, but do you have a follow up maybe from what I said?

No, I don't think so.

Yeah, I was curious.

I mean, I tend to agree with you there.

I definitely think there's, there are things that are left out.

And of course, you know, bringing you on with your history and somatics that is important, you know, we run our program.

So if it runs a nervous system component and somatics component of our program, because we just feel like that is valuable, that is necessary.

And especially if things are coming up, like how do you build capacity to navigate that?

How do you build capacity like you spoke before or to hold, to continue to move closer towards being able to hold more and more and more within yourself, especially even when you think about it in the positive, you know, a part of you dreams of this big life that you want.

And this relationship that you want, but then do you even have the capacity to hold that big life and that relationship that a part of you is dreaming about.

And so yeah, like I just, I just love the different, I know we're compartmentalizing, but I love the different elements of like the psychological and philosophical, you know, with the somatic, because again, it's like you can do the somatic work, but what is your foundational philosophy about life, you know, you know,

have you been absorbed, have you been indoctrinated with more disempowering philosophies versus empowering philosophies.

And I think like the shadow side of even like the trauma somatic world is like, I just like, I just need to keep healing and keep healing and keep healing and keep healing and I'm not ready and I can't do this and I can't do that.

And like, oh my god, someone just clap their hands next to me and I'm I'm losing my shit. I can't function anymore.

And it's like, where is that like, okay, I get it. You've been through some stuff and we need to build the baseline resilience so you can fucking deal with life.

Yeah. And resilience is the ability to tolerate stress. And I'm with you on that, you know, even like working in the trauma informed field, I over the past two years, I've become really disappointed with the field as a whole.

And people, there are two things here. One is the disappointment with the field and the way that these terms are being misused and misunderstood.

And the other is, you know, I lost the other while I talk about that one first.

So terminology is being misused and mislabeled and misunderstood because we to have to be trauma informed means that we're sensitive to others, but it doesn't mean that we're caretaking people and protecting them from their feelings.

That's not being trauma informed at all. That's enabling somebody to say stuck in a really awful suffering pattern.

It's to alleviate suffering. So to alleviate suffering, we have to help a person tolerate discomfort.

You know, it's a magic experiencing as a model. You're not supposed to go through that.

I did. I went through all the advanced training. I just didn't continue on to actually get the SCP certification. I have my own reasons for that.

It's okay, but you understand the model. So as a model, it's designed to help people to tolerate more stress. It's not designed to protect them from their feelings.

Now, what ends up happening, and I think has happened in the therapeutic industries, everything needs to be therapist, everything needs to be fixed out of us.

We become highly focused on, I've got to clear this, then this, then this, then this, then this, then this. And that's not it either.

That becomes actually a distraction from living life.

And so the capacity building means that I can tolerate stress. Now, back to your question about the issue with coaching industry, I think the absence of sensitivity.

Now, I don't mean sensitivity, and I'm protecting you from feeling bad. I mean sensitivity, and I recognize something just happened.

I recognize it. I'm not just lasting my way through. I'm not overpowering you and trying to force you to do something that you're not ready to do.

I'm responding to where you are. I'm attuned to where you are.

That level of attunement is, I believe, trauma-informed. Oh, wow, you just feel really triggered right now.

I can respond to that and be with you in it, and let's help build capacity so that that doesn't knock you off balance next time.

Let's help you to have both an understanding, but also the ability to work through and develop the skills to tolerate when that stress load increases in your body.

Yeah, well said, because I think anyone entering into a therapeutic environment or wanting to grow and what is the end goal? Do you want to be triggered all the time?

Do you want to be offended all the time? Do you want to live in this space where you can only survive if there's a bubble around you?

I just don't think that my opinion should be the ultimate goal. Sure, come to it from where you're at. Let's meet where you're at.

It's the responsibility of the person that's facilitating the work to understand what's necessary in order for this person to get the things that if you were to ask them, they want in life.

That means that we as practitioners need to have the skill to hold the complexity of that and to recognize which technique might be useful now.

I think that's one of the things that sometimes is missing from training programs. They're not comprehensive. They're narrow and they're focused, which is great.

And the individual needs to broaden a little bit. I need to have options, I need the option to be able to work with the emotion, I need the option to be able to work with stress physiology.

And need the option to be able to work with linguistics and need the option to be able to work with belief patterns, I need the option to be able to work with a sensory motor system because it's all part of the SOMA.

I mean, the living process organizes and disorganizes in various different ways, and

in order to create vitality, flexibility, resilience, and I believe Mosheh's quote,

the one I shared is really a marker of resilience.

Can I handle stress without falling apart and breaking under the pressure?

Many people cannot.

Well, it makes sense that they can't, and let's help them so that they can.

Because when they can, then they're not knocked off balance by all the things that are

going on in the world, and they don't feel as stressful.

They may still be just as bad, but the badness doesn't impact us in the same way.

And to your point, we don't want to isolate from the world just because the world stresses

us out.

We need to develop the capacity to be under stress.

Because as we do, just like with exercise, an exercise is probably the greatest analogy

in the world for healing.

As I exercise, I might not be able to curl 10 pounds.

Maybe I can't do two and a half.

So I start without any weight and I gradually increase.

Every time I increase, it's painful.

There's discomfort.

And that discomfort is the muscle growing because the muscle has to because it's under stress.

But over time that two and a half pounds feels like nothing.

I increased to 20.

I increased to 30.

I increased to 50 if I'm really nurturing my body and I have the kind of body that can

do that.

But when I get there, yes, it feels difficult and stressful, but it isn't overwhelming

and it isn't impossible anymore.

That is the marker of developing the ability to just be in the world.

And when we're success driven, there are all these different things that we're going

to need to develop capacity or skill inside of that help to make success and inevitable

outcome.

And interpersonal relationships, understanding how to do that, that's essential for

us as humans.

That can be sometimes the most triggering.

A question I often ask cohorts or what I'm facilitating is, once I put your hand up,

how many of you feel exhausted after social engagement?

After you went out and you spent the night out and so many practitioners in this report,

yeah, I feel super tired.

And they think, then when I'll ask a question before that, how many of you think you have

a really good ability, flexible nervous system in many of them?

I'm like, yeah, I do.

I can tolerate a lot.

And then when they recognize that they're stressed or they're tired after social engagement,

I say, well, actually, no, you don't.

Engagement requires the ventral vagal complex and that is the brake pedal or the modulator

for the sympathetic system.

If you are exhausted after social engagement is because your body quite literally cannot

handle it.

It's redlining and it's not using the mode of modulation that it could use because it's

underdeveloped, under-skilled.

And that flips things on its head for people that are like, whoa, I don't have the capacity

I thought I did.

I'm actually just ignoring my body and pushing through and just redlining.

Oh, my God.

Well, how do I develop that so that I don't have to ignore it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well said, bro.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah, as I was pondering what was being shared and pondering your asthma says initial

question about, you know, what's missing in the coaching industry or what does it go

wrong?

Like, I think false ideals is a big pivot, you know, like it's not about being perfectly

healed and it's not about having 50 K months and just completely redlining and burning

out, you know.

So from the outset, like, properly directing the correct ideals and the correct goals,

which is wholeness, right, it's not perfection.

It's becoming more attuned to who you uniquely are in this process and the pace that is

right for you.

It's not everyone that operates the same and everyone needs to get to the same point

by the end of this thing, you know, if I may real quick, there's another piece that's

cultural for us as people who live in the United States or that are touched by Western culture.

It's that everything needs to be bigger and this is capitalism is spread.

So it's this drive towards being biggest, best having more and I'm lumping it into

the United States, but I think it exists elsewhere, but there is this bias towards what you're

talking about.

We're going to sell an ideal of hitting this epic thing.

It's incredible.

We got to dream enormously, dream big.

And I've been guilty of this and early on in my career, I was, that was what I was trying

to drive people towards, but what I've realized is that being moderate actually gets us

further and getting, getting to know our own capacity actually makes so much more possible.

It's just the come froms different and we're not driven by some need to stand out.

I gotta be famous.

I need to be an influencer.

That's legitimately considered a career now, which is bizarre to me because it's, it's

oftentimes not being influential.

It's having people that follow, there was a huge difference though.

Yep.

And again, against both, you know, like you should dream big and you should understand

that you have a unique pace, which I think needs to be on a dream big, but how do you

go about going after your dreams?

What is the motivation?

What's happening inside of you like that's going to be a big difference, I think, you

know?

And it's like the, I don't know why I just can't be, but like the story of like the

tortoise and the hare, you know, like it's just, it's the hare, the tortoise wins the

race, you know?

And so it's like, and I know Sophie says this a lot from a nervous system standpoint,

I don't know if she got it from either a sea or somewhere else or other a teacher, like

slow as fast.

And so yeah, so like, you know, being with yourself and building that capacity, like who

knows what your life will turn out in five years or ten years, if you honor this more

organic, natural process, as opposed to just trying to like, you know, beat yourself

into submission to achieve something.

Yeah.

You know, I had, um, I had someone hire me, and when we started working together, they

were like, yeah, I just don't, I don't know, and you know, I've had all these big visions

and I've had them like wanted to do something really big in life.

I don't know if that's what I want.

I'm really like, I want to feel fulfilled in my life as it is right now.

And something a teacher once said to me a long time ago is the perfect expression of a

human takes many shapes.

It could be doing something that influences humanity on, on a global scale, but it could

also be just being a good parent.

Yeah.

That is a life well lived.

Yeah.

And so how our biases and how we measure this something as people who support others

definitely can have an impact on others.

And I tend to, to default nowadays to being in the discovery process with people of like,

what is the thing that would make your life meaningful and worth living when you look

back?

It might be small.

Let it be small because the smallness of that might actually be enormous in your life.

Right.

And so, but that again is about inhabiting ourselves where we are, yeah.

Being in our lives, being engaged in process.

Exactly.

And that's the reason I love that night and gale definition of success so much like the

realization of a worthy ideal that can be becoming a better parent or it can be, you

know, building this incredible business and innovating and creating something that really

impacts the world, like you're successful either way.

It requires you to know yourself, really know what you value in that regards and go and

go after your, your, your, yeah, just go after your values in a certain way and get out

of the compare and contrast game like your life is unique.

Your history is unique.

And we could get it so Derek too and talk about astrology and human design and all this

stuff.

Like we have these different blueprints and it's like the more you can build self-esteem,

the more that you can really come to this place of self-acceptance and self-love.

And you're like, I like who I am and I like the life I'm leaving.

I don't need to be a celebrity.

I mean, I acted for years.

I moved out to LA in order to be an actor.

At some point in my life, I thought I was going to be famous and make all this money

and then have all this clout and then help people and then I woke up one day and I was

like, well, I could just live my life and help people and in the way that I do.

And, you know, and it's like, my life now, it's like, if you told me 15 years ago, now

I want to like do my work with Joel and be with my wife and, you know, maybe bring life

into this world and hang out with my cats and my garden.

Yeah.

Like, I don't care, but like my values have shifted, my priorities have shifted.

And I think I relate a lot back to my own inner work and building more capacity in myself,

years and years of bodywork, doing the nervous system work to the level that I have.

Obviously, there's, you know, there's so much room to grow and work through my own

little idiosyncratic behavior and triggers.

But generally speaking, like, when I look in the mirror, I like the path I've taken.

I like who I am and, and I don't feel this need to prove as much.

I don't feel this need to even, you know, in social media, like be people over the

head with knowledge, like, you need to believe what I believe or this is what I know.

Why don't you know things the way I know things, you know, it doesn't mean you can't

inspire them.

You can't educate, but again, it's up to each person, you know, like Joel may want

to do things differently.

And so it's like, how do people connect and dance in a way where it's like you and who

you are, what you value in the life that you want is honored and vice versa?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well said, man.

Love, man.

Hey, I want to ask you a question.

And that is, has there been a cost or a downside to too much discovery and it's too much

knowledge, particularly in this field?

Like, are we, are some people overwhelmed and overthinking it all waves too much, whereas

maybe 100, 120 years ago, like we would have just like regulated and came back to baselines

because we didn't have the knowledge, but because we're just living our lives and being

biological and engaging without all the inputs of, I'm not this yet or I'm not that

yet.

I should do this or I shouldn't do that.

You know, you asked me that question, I do have an answer, but I also have a suggestion

for a guest.

His name is Mark Croning, he's phenomenal and he can talk about living systems theory,

which is something he's been working on that answers this question in a way I can't,

but I'll answer it from my particular perspective.

What's the cost to learning and to going deep maybe into my understanding of human nature?

Is one part of the question I hear and what's the cost to becoming maybe immersed for us

as a culture and knowledge?

So I take those as two separate ideas.

The cost for me has been that having somebody to relate with in the depth of my understanding,

the chasm grows.

So the cost is that there are fewer people that I can go really be really deep in my relating

about this.

The benefit is that I can meet most people where they are and I don't feel like I'm alone,

so I can still feel connected, but the cost is the being able to really dance in the depth.

Some people talk about this as though they feel completely isolated in the one and I don't

personally feel that way and it's been something I've heard from many people that they go

deeper and deeper and deeper and then there's the condom so lonely, there's nobody else around me,

there's nobody else that knows these things.

For me, it's not like that, I can connect with just about anybody and I love it and I do.

When I'm out, I know how to be relationally open and connected to somebody at the checkout,

out of store and people just start telling me their life stories.

I love it, it's amazing.

And to be in the depth of it, there are fewer people.

But for us as a culture or species, maybe we could say, the cost is that

we're living in an abstract reality.

It's an all-abstraction.

I'm not living interconnected with the natural world.

I'm in thoughts, I'm in ideas, I'm in concepts, I'm debating concepts and thoughts and ideas.

And I'm saying, I as if I'm the one that is the culture.

So if I were the personification of culture, there it would be.

So that sets us up to be in many ways a little disconnected.

And to your point, Joel, I do believe that our lack of resilience and flexibility

is in part due to the advancement of a lot of these conceptual frameworks

and our fixation on concept and abstraction over tangible experience.

And so engaging with the Soma,

being our living process re-engages us with tactile, like physical reality.

It doesn't mean that we have to sever our development and abstraction.

We can have that, but that can also correlate to tangible.

Anthony Namello in his lecture that became a book later called Awareness

said, and he was making this argument about the word God and about,

but he's talking about abstraction, a word is a concept.

A concept is a frame that we carry, but I don't go into a restaurant and imagine that I can

eat the word steak on the menu. I recognize that word references a tangible physical

something that I'm going to put into my mouth and I'm only eating digest.

So, if we can remember that the intangible and the abstractions are not actual reality,

they're a way of attempting to measure and catch it, then we can still be within the world.

And I think that when we are and we're engaged in being in the world,

our body naturally adjusts to that and we can develop more flexibility.

I will also say I want to poke a hole in our imagination here that a hundred years ago,

we were more flexible. I don't think we were. I think that critical mass of humanity has been

absent of this from most of our species history. I think that there are pockets where there are

good examples of us not holding on to the kind of extreme stress that we do today,

but we had other strategies for moving through it and many of them did not involve helping

our body to be more flexible and fluid. It just meant greeting and bearing and just continuing on

because that's what we had to do. We're at a really interesting point in history where we have

this little deep understanding of ourselves as species. We have this sort of hovering above

ourselves of conscious awareness of ourselves, but we're not really applying it to making it

like to helping the future generations in the way that I think we could.

This is something I'm writing my book about right now. It's a declaration I've made for myself

for my life and it's also an impossible task. The mission I've declared for myself and sort of

emerged from a lot of inner exploration is that my mission is to end trauma. Why? Because I believe

that fundamentally for us as humans, trauma being the word of the thing that interrupts our ability

to be flexible and to be living in a part of life, that seems to be the greatest barrier between

us and our potential as a species. It seems to influence everything else that influences and

recreates it. From a culture standpoint, every culture has embedded within it, within religion,

within cultural value systems, within family structures, the very thing that makes trauma continue.

Trauma isn't the pain. It's not injury. It is the lingering on of that in our body, in our process.

And so it's the freezing or the stagnation of the process or the pulsatory rhythm of life.

If we understood that on a species level, if we even had a critical mass of what is it, a 3%

of species adopting this, that would change humanity's future permanently.

Because how we tell our stories, how we build our culture, how we reference our religions,

how we train our young and how we treat each other could fundamentally change in three generations.

But we have to apply our intelligence and our ability to abstract to actually doing something about

it. Not in the sense of treating the symptoms, which is what we do right now. We have complex

ways of treating the symptoms. But the complexity that we've created for ourselves for treating the

symptoms completely misses the mark of preventing it from happening. It does not prevent it.

We're just continuously treating symptoms. And we have so many amazing, fascinating ways of doing that.

But I think that we as a species need to understand this well enough that we get ahead of it and

begin attending to preventing it. And that would prevent war. It would prevent a massive genocide.

It would prevent our relationship with our planet from degrading further than it already has.

It would prevent us from killing ourselves off.

So anyway, that's a long answer to your question, Joel. But it's a great answer, man.

And it's the perfect closing segment and the perfect closing sentiment as well.

Dude, it's been such an honor to share this time and space with you.

And I've got no doubt that people are going to derive so much value from this conversation.

They're so grounded. They're so real. They're so nuanced. No bullshit. I think that's what we need.

Well, thank you, too. Both for having me.

Yeah, well, do you want to share with our audience like what you have going on, what your offerings are,

if people want to get to know you more or work with you, how can they find you?

Yeah. So first layer, we have a free community where I share my writing insights.

And in the next couple of months, we'll be doing free gatherings on Zoom.

It's, uh, you can find all of this on the trauma and somatics.com website.

We called it somara because soma is our living process.

Mara is that which interrupts and forts it. And so we're in the exploration of the thing that makes

resilience and vitality possible and that which gets in the way.

So it's a community for practitioners and explorers of of everything human.

And then we have a membership which is a monthly place where we practice somatics.

That's all we do. And you're asked most you and Sophie and even you Joe come in and guess teach

some time. We have guest presenters once a month and then we have three other workshops a month.

So it's four times a month that we meet. It's only $57 a month.

It's unbelievable value. My team keeps wanting me to charge when I'm like, I'm not, not.

It's a place for us to gather and practice. We're practicing dealing. So you think of it like a dojo.

When you go to a dojo, you go to practice the same thing over and over and over again in

variety of different ways. So we, I'm teaching this thread of here is how the somatic here are how

the principles of somatics apply to hundreds of different entry points. But the undercurrent is

the theme of being with our living process. Every one of our our workshops is experiential with

a little bit of teaching. So that's layer two. Layer three would be to take one of our trainings.

So we have our trauma and somatics training which teaches trauma, trauma physiology,

nervous system science and somatic practices to just to be trauma informed. And then we have an

advanced training that teaches how to work with attachment disruptions. That's taught by myself and

my mother who's a psychotherapist. And then next year, I'm going to be fingers crossed. Everything

is finished launching a full scale somatic practitioner training. And so it's it'll be a three-year

long certification program. And we've been, I've been developing this for the past five, six years

slowly behind the surface. And every once in a while, I have openings for private clients so

people can find me. We're on social media at trauma and somatics and at will reason or EZIN.

And I'll give you all a couple of freebies that you can give to people in your audience. So

a guided meditation and a journal that you can that you listen to a concurrent and follow along

with yourself for developing somatic literacy and you know a practice of sensing your body and

checking in with your body. And we have a little masterclass on what our nervous system is and

how to engage with it. Amazing, bro. It's so nice to reconnect. Same. Like I just really appreciate

you and it's it's just nice to have this conversation and just talk about things that really matter

in my opinion and things that you know I'm interested in fascinating by and I know our audiences.

And so I'm happy you you've been you've been in the back of my mind for a while to get you on.

And it just this is a great timing. So appreciate you, brother.

Thank you. Totally, man. Thank you so much, everyone else. Thank you for listening.

I love this podcast. I love the conversations that we get to have you. I love the diversity

that we get to explore and the nuance that we get to dive into man and just the incredible

human beings that exist on this planet. The incredible minds that have lived their lives,

lived their journeys have come to know themselves and have come to give their gift in the world

as an ongoing and ever-expanding expression. Like this is what it's about, man. I love

human potential. I love considering the possibilities of what each and every single one of us

was born to do. What we're capable of and our unique gifts. And that's what this podcast

ultimately is about is to point the finger back at you and remind you you are one of one.

You are a unique soul. You have a unique blueprint. Your passions, your interest, your curiosities.

None of that is a random. I think we need to honor that as really sacred. So if you guys enjoyed

this conversation down the road, we already spoke to Will. We love what he's about. We're going to

get him as a special guest inside friends of the truth. And we'd love for you to join in,

connect with us and just connect with us on these incredible topics because this entire like

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Come be our friend. We want to connect here for the truth.com forward slash F O T T.