Speaker 1: Simple breathing exercises is a wonderful, free and a zero
Speaker 1: cost way of changing your state and regulating your nervous
Speaker 1: system really effectively without relying on substances that tend to
Speaker 1: have downstream consequences if they're abused. Welcome to the one
Speaker 1: you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance
Speaker 1: of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
Speaker 1: or you are what you think ring true, and yet
Speaker 1: for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
Speaker 1: episode is Johnny Miller, perhaps best known as the host
Speaker 1: of the Curious Humans podcast and for his ted X
Speaker 1: talk on the Gifts of grief. Johnny also coaches ambitious
Speaker 1: founders to scale themselves and runs a five week boot
Speaker 1: camp for nervous System mastery, and is the co founder
Speaker 1: of Maptia, a global visual storytelling platform. Hi Johnny, Welcome
Speaker 1: to the show. It's great to be here. I'm excited
Speaker 1: to have you on. I've been following your work for
Speaker 1: a while, particularly some work you've done around nervous system,
Speaker 1: you know, really working with our nervous system more skillfully.
Speaker 1: You've got a great podcast called Curious Humans that I
Speaker 1: also really like, So jump into all that. But let's start,
Speaker 1: like we always do, with the parable. In the parable,
Speaker 1: there is a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild. They say,
Speaker 1: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 1: are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 1: other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
Speaker 1: and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks
Speaker 1: about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says, well,
Speaker 1: which one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. So I've heard a lot
Speaker 1: of your guests contemplate and answer that question, and I
Speaker 1: was thinking about this last night, and what came up
Speaker 1: for me It was that I think, for the first
Speaker 1: kind of chapter of my life, let's say, I was
Speaker 1: really curious and obsessed with feeding the good wolf and
Speaker 1: kind of asking how can I become a virtuous person
Speaker 1: and essentially live a good life. But what feels like
Speaker 1: has been a more recent chapter in the last four
Speaker 1: or five years has been this exploration of feeding the
Speaker 1: bad wolf and of kind of cultivating a sense of
Speaker 1: courageous curiosity towards the things inside of myself that I
Speaker 1: label as as being bad. This could be for example,
Speaker 1: when I was younger, I um I had an experience
Speaker 1: where I got really angry at someone and actually caused
Speaker 1: them caused them some pain. And in kind of more
Speaker 1: recent years, I've been trying to cultivate a more healthy
Speaker 1: relationship with anger, for example, and realizing that in there
Speaker 1: is my capacity to set boundaries and to kind of
Speaker 1: have a deep determination. And so I guess I've been
Speaker 1: on this journey to try and integrate these parts of
Speaker 1: myself that I've labeled like bad wolves and kind of
Speaker 1: coming to understand what their needs are, kind of what
Speaker 1: they're asking for. And yeah, that's kind of the theme
Speaker 1: that's been alive in my life recently. That makes a
Speaker 1: lot of sense. I was talking with a guest recently
Speaker 1: and we were looking at the Buddhist tradition, which, you know,
Speaker 1: very early Buddhism was very much you know, there's wholesome
Speaker 1: and unwholesome states, and you want to cultivate the wholesome
Speaker 1: ones and you want to get rid of the unwholesome ones.
Speaker 1: And it was it was very much sort of good wolf,
Speaker 1: bad wolf kind of thing. And then later Buddhism is
Speaker 1: sort of evolved into much more of a hey, it's
Speaker 1: all part of you. You want to be kind to
Speaker 1: all parts of it. It's all different energies expressing themselves,
Speaker 1: and so it's kind of transformed over time. And the
Speaker 1: question I have found that I'm very interested in lately
Speaker 1: is when is one of those approaches the better approach
Speaker 1: versus the other, because I actually think they both have
Speaker 1: a place. You know, there are times in my life
Speaker 1: where it's like negative thought patterns that are just habitual
Speaker 1: and they're just running. It's like, okay, you know what,
Speaker 1: enough like I'm going to try and sort of work
Speaker 1: on not feeding those and what can I cultivate instead,
Speaker 1: And then there are lots of other times where exactly
Speaker 1: as you're saying, I think that the more skillful strategy
Speaker 1: is to like investigate what's going on here, you know,
Speaker 1: what's what's at the root of this? Is there something
Speaker 1: to be learned here? And so I'm kind of interested
Speaker 1: in when we do each of these things because I
Speaker 1: think they both have a place, and I think we
Speaker 1: probably as people also may have a default way of
Speaker 1: dealing with it. I have a default mechanism towards get perspective,
Speaker 1: realize it's all going to be okay, shut down the feeling.
Speaker 1: So I need to air a little bit more on
Speaker 1: all right, let me just give these emotions a little
Speaker 1: bit more space. And so I think we all have
Speaker 1: an habitual direction of overcorrection that's really well put. And
Speaker 1: what comes to mind for me is that we need
Speaker 1: to have a really healthy, strong, good wolf in place
Speaker 1: in order to then have a conversation with a bad wolf.
Speaker 1: And if if, if if the good wolf is kind
Speaker 1: of just out of control or there's a sense of
Speaker 1: depression that it's the focus is definitely on bringing a
Speaker 1: liveness back to that. But then when you feel hold,
Speaker 1: you feel kind of ready, you feel well, will read sourced,
Speaker 1: you have a you know, a large capacity, that's the
Speaker 1: time when you can kind of go into some of
Speaker 1: the more shadowy, kind of painful aspects of experience. That's
Speaker 1: that's however you Yeah, that's a really great insight. Actually,
Speaker 1: I think that's right on. I mean I think early
Speaker 1: on for me, I talked about my recovery often, and
Speaker 1: I want to get to sort of a seminal moment
Speaker 1: in your life here in a moment, and when I
Speaker 1: talk about recovery, I talk about how, you know, the
Speaker 1: bad wolf was kind of eating me in that early
Speaker 1: days of recovery. It was all about like I have
Speaker 1: got to feed the good wolf, and this bad wolf
Speaker 1: just I need to be like stay down there in
Speaker 1: the corner please for a little while until I'm a
Speaker 1: little bit stronger. So I think that's a really good point.
Speaker 1: So you've done a ted talk about this, and you
Speaker 1: talk about kind of what really led you deep into
Speaker 1: the type of work that you're doing right now, and
Speaker 1: it's a pretty tragic experience. I was wondering if you
Speaker 1: could maybe share it with listeners, just for people to
Speaker 1: get a sense of kind of where you're coming from
Speaker 1: and how all this work is really grounded in your
Speaker 1: own life. Yeah, sure, sure, thank you for asking. So
Speaker 1: the story begins, I guess about almost five years ago now,
Speaker 1: and I was living in the UK, in Brighton at
Speaker 1: the time, and I had a fiance. Her name was Sophie,
Speaker 1: and she was working as a doctor. She was kind
Speaker 1: of working in hospitals, and she had had bipolar all
Speaker 1: of her life, and I was away on this particular
Speaker 1: occasion and she went back to work. It was a
Speaker 1: Monday morning, and she had an anxiety attack at work,
Speaker 1: and she ended up coming home to an empty house
Speaker 1: and overdosing on her own medication and ultimately taking her
Speaker 1: own life. And this, as one might imagine, just really
Speaker 1: kind of completely turned my life upside down. It was
Speaker 1: initially too much too begin to digest, to kind of comprehend.
Speaker 1: But over the following months, I think I'd seen people,
Speaker 1: particularly older people, who had lost someone in their life
Speaker 1: and they hadn't fully digested their grief and it had
Speaker 1: turned them into these kind of bitter, almost like a
Speaker 1: shell of a human essentially, And I think honestly, that
Speaker 1: scared me, and I think that I made this decision
Speaker 1: to almost kind of turn the other way into face
Speaker 1: this grief head on. And this this led to a
Speaker 1: kind of multi year journey to explore my inner landscape, essentially,
Speaker 1: and this started off with the passing and meditation retreats,
Speaker 1: learning meditation, plant medicine, ceremonies, breathwork, this kind of whole
Speaker 1: different exploration of different modalities to understand what it was
Speaker 1: that I was feeling, and ultimately to learn how to
Speaker 1: surrender to the pain that was there and to almost
Speaker 1: allow myself to be to be obliterated by it in
Speaker 1: some ways. And that in itself was then kind of
Speaker 1: a journey into realizing how disconnected I'd been from my
Speaker 1: own body and particularly my emotions. Growing up in in
Speaker 1: England as a guy, you know, it's it's pretty common
Speaker 1: to just live in your head and to be rewarded
Speaker 1: for that and to be just kind of numb from
Speaker 1: the neck down. And so for the years before, I've
Speaker 1: had this kind of fascination for travel, for the outside world,
Speaker 1: for seeing new places, and it was almost like that
Speaker 1: curiosity was turned inwards and I started really kind of
Speaker 1: mapping my own inner landscape initially through this kind of
Speaker 1: very harrowing at times experience of grief and loss. And
Speaker 1: I think this was the surprising thing for me, was
Speaker 1: that there was this deep joy and this deep beauty
Speaker 1: on the other side of of grief, and that when
Speaker 1: you kind of invited in, it's almost like it just
Speaker 1: opens up your heart and you just feel so alive
Speaker 1: and you feel raw, and it's painful, but it's also exquisite,
Speaker 1: like there's a kind of really rich beauty to it
Speaker 1: as well. And it was just this unfolding invitation to
Speaker 1: surrender and to kind of surrendering into what it came
Speaker 1: up into these different waves of grief that would emerge
Speaker 1: when I went back to places that were meaningful to us,
Speaker 1: or going back to the memorial bench, and then on
Speaker 1: her birthdays and years the comment it was just this
Speaker 1: kind of like progressive initiation almost into that world. So
Speaker 1: before that sounds like you would say, you're not somebody
Speaker 1: who was very interested in your internal world. I think
Speaker 1: I was interested intellectually, Okay, I think I was. I
Speaker 1: studied philosophy at university, and so I was very interested
Speaker 1: in what it meant to live a good life. And
Speaker 1: you know, reading Aristotle, et cetera. But I don't think
Speaker 1: that I had an embodied sense what that meant makes sense.
Speaker 1: So a lot of your work seems to have come
Speaker 1: together in a recent program you've developed called Nervous System Mastery.
Speaker 1: As I looked at some other things you've done in
Speaker 1: the past, as I looked at your TED talk, as
Speaker 1: I looked at some research that you published around leadership
Speaker 1: and burnout and resiliency, and I looked at all that,
Speaker 1: I sort of saw it all kind of wrapped up
Speaker 1: in Nervous System Mastery kind of, you know, I could
Speaker 1: see threads of it all in there. So I thought
Speaker 1: we would sort of just jump in there as the
Speaker 1: place to get started. First. Just tell me a little
Speaker 1: bit about what do you mean by nervous system mastery. Yes,
Speaker 1: so it's a combination of skills. I guess the two
Speaker 1: primary ones are interception and self regulation. And what I
Speaker 1: mean by interception, it's a term from the neuroscience, is
Speaker 1: essentially how in tune are we with our in a landscape.
Speaker 1: How able are we to kind of sense, track and
Speaker 1: feel and taste the sensations that we're feeling. Whether that's
Speaker 1: a heartbeating, whether that's how our breath is, tension in
Speaker 1: our belly. And then the second part is the self
Speaker 1: regulation protocols, so reclaiming agency over our internal state. And
Speaker 1: there are various levers in the body, in the nervous
Speaker 1: system that allows us to pretty effectively change how we're
Speaker 1: feeling in a few minutes. And what I've found is
Speaker 1: that a lot of people who particularly kind of live
Speaker 1: in the head, they try and change their thought patterns,
Speaker 1: they try and change their beliefs these things, And in
Speaker 1: the neuroscience, this is like top down principles. And what
Speaker 1: I found is that bottom up principles, which you may
Speaker 1: have heard of, are just much more effective for changing
Speaker 1: the state of our nervous system, for dropping us into
Speaker 1: this kind of high tone parasympathetic state. And so a
Speaker 1: lot of the training and the work I do is
Speaker 1: focused on teaching these bottom up protocols for either upregulating,
Speaker 1: which is kind of activating or kind of increasing alertness,
Speaker 1: or down regulating which is calming, kind of being able
Speaker 1: to sleep at night, all those things. So that's kind
Speaker 1: of the gist of it. Yeah, I like that idea
Speaker 1: of delinea in between pop down and bottom up approaches
Speaker 1: and recognizing that they both have a place right, there
Speaker 1: is a place for both of them, and that bottom
Speaker 1: up I think it's starting to become something we hear
Speaker 1: a lot more about. I think top down dominated the
Speaker 1: self help spirituality marketplace for a long time, and I
Speaker 1: would say it seems to me, as somebody who's kind
Speaker 1: of closer to the pulse of this, having done this
Speaker 1: for for years, I see more and more focus on
Speaker 1: the bottom up slash somatic elements of this, right working
Speaker 1: with the body in very skillful ways. I want to
Speaker 1: ask you about the first part of this, which is
Speaker 1: in teroception. You did Vipasna meditation, you studied that, and
Speaker 1: I don't know how much you've studied Buddhism around that,
Speaker 1: but there's a concept in Buddhism of the five scandas, right,
Speaker 1: these five things that make up what we are as humans.
Speaker 1: And ever since I learned about in ter reception, I've
Speaker 1: often thought it's very close to what in traditional Buddhism
Speaker 1: would be called the donna or sensations, you know, which
Speaker 1: is sort of a described most basically as a sense
Speaker 1: of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. But it's the first contact
Speaker 1: with what's going on inside of us? And I'm curious
Speaker 1: if you could just elaborate a little bit more about
Speaker 1: from your perspective, what inter reception contains or what are
Speaker 1: the various aspects of it are. Yeah, it's it's a
Speaker 1: great question. And in the neuroscience literature it's often measured
Speaker 1: by how accurately can someone count their their heartbeat and
Speaker 1: so kind of how aware of that, because that's like
Speaker 1: a very it's an easy thing to measure. But I
Speaker 1: think from my perspective, and this is slightly more poetic answer,
Speaker 1: but I've almost been seeing it as a journey to
Speaker 1: learn how to like taste myself and to increase the
Speaker 1: definition in which I can be aware of all of
Speaker 1: the different kind of multi contextual things that are arising
Speaker 1: passing within my body and not necessarily moving my attention
Speaker 1: there all the time, but just being aware of that.
Speaker 1: And the ones which are particularly practical and useful are
Speaker 1: the breath for example. I mean, if you start to
Speaker 1: notice that you're maybe holding your breath when you're checking email,
Speaker 1: or if breath is shallow and it's kind of in
Speaker 1: the upper lungs, it's a pretty immediate sign that's you're
Speaker 1: going to in a sympathetic state and that you're going
Speaker 1: to be not as relaxed as you might be. And
Speaker 1: so I think I've been viewing interception as a way
Speaker 1: of becoming increasingly embodied, and I think crucially treating what
Speaker 1: we sent as feedback from the body. So in the
Speaker 1: same way that I'm wearing an or ring right now,
Speaker 1: and this is one way to get, you know, really
Speaker 1: good feedback on how is my sleep, how is my
Speaker 1: heart rate variability? But I think that for me, it's
Speaker 1: almost like a proxy to confirm how it is that
Speaker 1: I'm actually feeling in my body. You know, if I
Speaker 1: I worke up this morning with like a score of ninety,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, do I feel like in ninety? Like?
Speaker 1: Does that? Does that feel about right? Like? And so
Speaker 1: it's it's almost um for me. These these wearable texts great,
Speaker 1: but I think that ultimately it's only a tool to
Speaker 1: help you to trust the feedback that's coming from your body,
Speaker 1: you know, the entire time throughout the day. And so
Speaker 1: in terro reception then is really just tuning into what
Speaker 1: it feels like to be in my body, yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: And it's distinguished from the reception which we can also
Speaker 1: talk about, but that's more about how our nervous system
Speaker 1: is being impacted by the stimulus around us, be that
Speaker 1: loud noises, be that cats fighting in the background, all
Speaker 1: the kind of external stimulus and interception is about the
Speaker 1: internal stimulus. I assume they're connected. Yeah, for sure. I
Speaker 1: think that in order to have a strong sense of
Speaker 1: exto reception, you actually need to have inter reception first,
Speaker 1: because you need to be able to discern how different
Speaker 1: environments change your state. For example, if you have bright
Speaker 1: lights on in the evening, if you have a good
Speaker 1: sense of inter reception, you'll be able to tell that
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of keeping your alert, keeping your awake,
Speaker 1: and it's probably going to be trickier to sleep if
Speaker 1: you're if you're going to try and go to bed.
Speaker 1: So what are some ways of improving our inter reception?
Speaker 1: I mean, I can tell you right away that I
Speaker 1: would not accurately probably give you my my heart rate,
Speaker 1: like how often my heart is beating, which I've known
Speaker 1: about that test for a while, and I've known for
Speaker 1: a while I wouldn't sit very well. How do you
Speaker 1: improve this? There's a couple of approaches. One is just
Speaker 1: knowing that if you have a high level of cortisol
Speaker 1: present in your body, then that acts as kind of
Speaker 1: numbing our capacity for interception. Um, so if you're in
Speaker 1: a kind of like a mild state of stress or alert,
Speaker 1: then it will be harder to kind of go inwards
Speaker 1: and to track that. So that's kind of one piece,
Speaker 1: And then I like to have kind of just a
Speaker 1: morning practice of just checking in with myself and kind
Speaker 1: of doing a body scan, kind of placing my attention
Speaker 1: in different areas and noticing how my posture is, noticing
Speaker 1: how my if there's tension in my shoulders, how my
Speaker 1: belly is, then bring it down into my belly area
Speaker 1: just kind of consciously softening, and from there just honestly
Speaker 1: just kind of noticing. It's similar to in the kind
Speaker 1: of zen tradition of meditation, where you just kind of
Speaker 1: sit back into the witness and you don't try and
Speaker 1: do anything, but you just pay attention to what is arising,
Speaker 1: and you kind of step out of the doing mentality
Speaker 1: and just kind of tune in with a sense of curiosity.
Speaker 1: I use the metaphor yes today with a friend where
Speaker 1: it's like if you're a chef and you're learning to
Speaker 1: taste food, you kind of want to like like really
Speaker 1: kind of try and taste the flavors and like really
Speaker 1: notice and pay deep attention to what is coming alive.
Speaker 1: And so it's kind of the same in your body.
Speaker 1: If you notice, like say, there's a there's a tightness,
Speaker 1: and I feel something my sterning right now, and I
Speaker 1: just kind of like tune into that and almost amplify
Speaker 1: what's there sometimes as well, just to kind of get
Speaker 1: curious about the sensations that are present. One of the
Speaker 1: things that I think is so interesting about paying attention
Speaker 1: to bodily sensations, at least my experience with them, is
Speaker 1: often when I start tuning into them, you realize how,
Speaker 1: I guess, for lack of a better word, nebulous, they
Speaker 1: are so for example, like if I have pain, it
Speaker 1: seems like I've got pain, like it's like it's a thing, right,
Speaker 1: But when I go to investigate and I'm like, my goodness,
Speaker 1: it is just shifting and moving and it's you know,
Speaker 1: this size and it's that size, and it leads like
Speaker 1: precise sort of definition. I think, yeah, that's beautiful. And
Speaker 1: I experienced very much the same. And the other thing
Speaker 1: that I've been noticing, and some of my students have
Speaker 1: commented on as well, is how tension in certain parts
Speaker 1: of the body also correlates to certain thought patterns, and
Speaker 1: how when certain thoughts are kind of or people who
Speaker 1: in thought loops, they also they're also aware of certain
Speaker 1: tensions maybe in their shoulder or in their side. And
Speaker 1: this is something that I've been exploring through the modality
Speaker 1: of breathwork and kind of mapping how certain emotions tend
Speaker 1: to be located in certain areas of the body. It
Speaker 1: can also be a really interesting sign that, for example,
Speaker 1: if I feel something in my stern and that's normally
Speaker 1: connected to some kind of like anxiousness or energy, or
Speaker 1: it's it's known as the fear belt in breathwork training,
Speaker 1: so it can also provide indications to emotional qualities that
Speaker 1: could be present as well. You've just kind of walked
Speaker 1: your way right into another of my things I'm really
Speaker 1: interested in, which is this idea of how thoughts and
Speaker 1: emotions and also behavior interact and influence each other. There
Speaker 1: are simplistic notions out there like that you know what
Speaker 1: we think causes what we feel, which is I think
Speaker 1: a vast oversimplification right. There are times that, yes, I
Speaker 1: can think of thought like if I have a thought
Speaker 1: like I don't know, my mom hates me, Right, I
Speaker 1: might have a bodily reaction to that. Right, But as
Speaker 1: you're saying conversely, there are ways in which our body
Speaker 1: or our emotions then drive our thoughts. And so, you know,
Speaker 1: I've started to wonder on some level, we talk about
Speaker 1: thought and emotion and bodily sensations as if they are
Speaker 1: discrete things, but they seems to me always co arise.
Speaker 1: You don't get one usually without the other. Right, there's
Speaker 1: this co arising. Now, we may be more aware of
Speaker 1: one than the other, we may have a default way
Speaker 1: of tuning into one more than the other. But the
Speaker 1: connection is so deep that sometimes I wonder is it
Speaker 1: even useful to distinguish him? I think the answer is yes.
Speaker 1: But I've just a more and more recognizing the bi
Speaker 1: directional nature of all these things. Yeah, that's a It's
Speaker 1: a really powerful insight. And what I've been noticing for
Speaker 1: myself is often the sensation is primary to the emotion
Speaker 1: and then the thoughts. And something that my colleagues and
Speaker 1: I hear here and Barley have been exploring we call
Speaker 1: it breath lab and we've basically been correlating breathing patterns
Speaker 1: to difference incomplete reflexes or expressions of emotion and what
Speaker 1: the theory is and we're hoping to run some studies
Speaker 1: in the coming months. But the theory is that when
Speaker 1: we have experiences that are say traumatic or safe immobilization
Speaker 1: reflex that we're unable to complete, then that gets stored
Speaker 1: in our nervous system at some point, and when you
Speaker 1: drop into this trance state through constius connected breathing, these
Speaker 1: different breathing rhythms, as we kind of pulse into them
Speaker 1: with a sense of safety, they elicit that incomplete reflex,
Speaker 1: which will often have a strong emotional component attached as well.
Speaker 1: And so it's really interesting to see how, say, when
Speaker 1: someone's breath starts to go down into their belly or
Speaker 1: their pelvic floor, that might be kind of feelings of
Speaker 1: shame being associated it, or if there's if there's tightness
Speaker 1: around the neck and around the kind of jaw area,
Speaker 1: then maybe some anger kind of comes through. And as
Speaker 1: someone increases the dynamism of their of their breath, then
Speaker 1: they also increase their dynamism of their kind of emotional capacity.
Speaker 1: And expression, and this is something that I'm really really
Speaker 1: curious about as well. And it also ties into when
Speaker 1: people go through these experiences, there's often also a story
Speaker 1: or a thought pattern associated as well, which kind of
Speaker 1: comes through in their share at the end. And so
Speaker 1: as you say, like, all of these things are kind
Speaker 1: of care rising and at the same time, often it's
Speaker 1: almost like the body is just doing it itself, like
Speaker 1: we're just kind of we're helping to facilitate the breath
Speaker 1: using body work and nerve lossing in these things, but
Speaker 1: really it's just witnessing the body complete this reflex and
Speaker 1: it can be incredible to watch. Sometimes there's movement, limbs flailing,
Speaker 1: all kinds of sounds, and it's a really fascinating process
Speaker 1: to witness. So when you see an incomplete reef, say
Speaker 1: more about that. I know what you mean, but say
Speaker 1: more for other people who may not understand what you
Speaker 1: mean by that. Yeah. So if people are familiar with
Speaker 1: the work of Peter Levin, he kind of talks about
Speaker 1: how and and this is really interesting to look at
Speaker 1: in the animal world. There's some videos online of I
Speaker 1: think it's a imparlor that's just been chased by a
Speaker 1: lion and it survived, and the lion kind of walks away,
Speaker 1: and you just see the imparlor shaking kind of pretty
Speaker 1: violently shaking on the floor afterwards for several minutes afterwards.
Speaker 1: And that's the impartier's way of discharging that mobilization reflex,
Speaker 1: that kind of mobilization energy. But the challenge is that
Speaker 1: we as humans where it's not kind of social acceptable,
Speaker 1: like if you get in a fight, you don't just
Speaker 1: lie down and shake on the floor. That would it
Speaker 1: would look weird, like we suppress it um And it's
Speaker 1: also the same interestingly with surgeries when often when people
Speaker 1: are an ethicized, that also suppresses the completion of that
Speaker 1: mobilization reflex. And so what happens is that energy gets
Speaker 1: stored in the nervous system for a future time. And
Speaker 1: the nervous system is amazing like it. We can store
Speaker 1: a lot of these kind of incomplete reflexes throughout our life,
Speaker 1: but at a certain point we reach a threshold where
Speaker 1: we start to have so much tension in our body
Speaker 1: that it causes sin as allostatic load or I call
Speaker 1: it emotional debt, where it's like we've had so many
Speaker 1: of these experiences in our life that our bodies are
Speaker 1: just holding so much that needs to be kind of
Speaker 1: let go of and released. And so this completion of
Speaker 1: the mobilization reflex. And it could be I've had somewhere
Speaker 1: in my arm just kind of flails. My right arm
Speaker 1: will just be flailing for like five minutes or um.
Speaker 1: Sometimes will be full body shakes, sometimes will be a
Speaker 1: sound wants to come to. And it's basically the memory
Speaker 1: from that experience is coming from the lower brains them
Speaker 1: it's being relived and then it's being stored and integrated
Speaker 1: in the in the midbrain. Yeah, that's essentially the process.
Speaker 1: So emotional debt, say a little bit more about that.
Speaker 1: That's a really interesting term. Yes, So this is a
Speaker 1: term that my research partner and I kind of came
Speaker 1: up with to some degree. We were studying burnout in
Speaker 1: executives and the start up founders. It was pretty common
Speaker 1: when we kind of looked at the trajectory of someone
Speaker 1: going through burnout, and often there would be a series
Speaker 1: of kind of events, maybe like you fights or getting angry,
Speaker 1: or moments of just kind of pushing themselves too hard.
Speaker 1: And people have different levels of capacity and often these
Speaker 1: kind of high performers type A. Type A individuals had
Speaker 1: enormous capacity, so they could hold an enormous amount of
Speaker 1: this emotional debt and like effectively kind of continue using
Speaker 1: their minds to run their bodies for for long periods
Speaker 1: of time. But ultimately there was almost always a point
Speaker 1: where that debt caught up to them, as financial debt might,
Speaker 1: and there was this kind of crash and this burnout
Speaker 1: kind of through the lens of the nervous system. This
Speaker 1: is known as a dorsal shutdown. The dorsal vegel branches
Speaker 1: is one of the branches the nervous system, and it's
Speaker 1: almost like a fuse switching, like when there's too much
Speaker 1: charge in the system. The dorsal fuse just kicks in
Speaker 1: and you shut down. And that's when someone will realize
Speaker 1: that the burnout hits them. It's like being hit by
Speaker 1: by a ton of bricks um and it's that kind
Speaker 1: of rock bottom moment where they realize, oh ship, like
Speaker 1: I'm my body is fried, like I'm done, And it's
Speaker 1: when that emotional debt from months, maybe years has kind
Speaker 1: of finally caught up with them and their bodies like, right,
Speaker 1: we just need to rest now. So earlier you were
Speaker 1: describing after your fiance's suicide, you were describing seeing people
Speaker 1: who had lost someone who became bitter. Would you say
Speaker 1: that the consequence of them not working through grief in
Speaker 1: a full way is causing an emotional debt which is
Speaker 1: then translating later into a sense of bitterness. Is that
Speaker 1: kind of what we're talking about here? That's my sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what I believe, And I'm hoping to kind of
Speaker 1: contribute to two studies which will I guess back this
Speaker 1: up with data. But yeah, that's that's certainly my my theory. Yep. Well,
Speaker 1: I certainly know in my life, I've had a sense
Speaker 1: of at a certain point in my life where I
Speaker 1: felt like I had a lot of emotional debt, and
Speaker 1: my tip off was my reaction to something that's happening
Speaker 1: seems all out of proportion to what's happening. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: I love the term emotional debt, I would have said
Speaker 1: more like, it's like I've got a bucket of sadness
Speaker 1: here that never got emptied, right, and every time something
Speaker 1: sad happens, I experienced that whole bucket, and so I
Speaker 1: need to be like draining that thing out you know,
Speaker 1: and I did a lot of work. It's been decades
Speaker 1: at this, well has it been. Yeah, it's been a
Speaker 1: couple of decades where I really, you know, went deep
Speaker 1: into a lot of that type of going into childhood experiences,
Speaker 1: trying to sort of re experience and re feel, you know,
Speaker 1: a variety of things that that were not felt at
Speaker 1: the time that we're suppressed. But I love that term
Speaker 1: emotional debt because I think it speaks very clearly to
Speaker 1: what this is. As a former technology guy, it reminds
Speaker 1: me of the term technical debt, right, like we you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: technical debt is for those who don't know. It's like
Speaker 1: when you're developing software, you're taking all kinds of shortcut
Speaker 1: and you're like, I know that's not a good idea
Speaker 1: right now, but I gotta get this thing done, and
Speaker 1: it's necessary. At the time, it's necessary to it, that's right.
Speaker 1: But over time it accumulates and at a certain point
Speaker 1: you're like, well, this thing is gonna break. Every every
Speaker 1: time I was involved in developing software, um and I
Speaker 1: wasn't a developer. I was always like a managing developers
Speaker 1: or product management. My main thought was always like, somebody
Speaker 1: is going to look back in five or ten years
Speaker 1: and be like, who is the idiot that designed this?
Speaker 1: Like it's inevitable. It's just inevitable that like it's gonna
Speaker 1: look bad in retrospect because they won't see the pressures
Speaker 1: and the things that we're happening at the time. In
Speaker 1: nervous system mastery, you're talking about these two core components
Speaker 1: we've talked about in ter reception, right, the ability to
Speaker 1: sort of know and feel what's going on inside me.
Speaker 1: And then you talked about self regulation protocols, and this
Speaker 1: is really the ability to upregulate or down regulate our system.
Speaker 1: One of the things that you say is really worth
Speaker 1: paying attention to though in this process, is recognizing the
Speaker 1: dangers of our auto pilot self regulation strategies. Say a
Speaker 1: little bit more about that. Yeah, sure, Actually, just before
Speaker 1: we go there, I just made a connection to the
Speaker 1: emotional debt and interception as well. And the connection is
Speaker 1: that I think the more interception that we have, the
Speaker 1: more inter receptive capacity, the more we can notice that
Speaker 1: emotional debt early on. I think when people have very
Speaker 1: low interception, instead of it being like a feather or
Speaker 1: maybe you know, a brick moment, where they kind of
Speaker 1: get slapped. It takes like a dump truck for them
Speaker 1: to realize that they have this pile up of emotional debt.
Speaker 1: And so in some ways, cultivating interception helps you to
Speaker 1: recognize some of the emotional debt that's that's already under
Speaker 1: the surface. Makes sense, But yeah, so so so coming
Speaker 1: to also regulation strategies, So it's something that we all
Speaker 1: have kind of habitual ways of either up regulating or
Speaker 1: down regulating during the day, depending on what time of
Speaker 1: data is. So an example might be in the evening,
Speaker 1: so you've had a busy day of work, you come home,
Speaker 1: you drink a beer, kind of watch Netflix. That's effectively
Speaker 1: a way of using external stimulus to downregulate your nervous
Speaker 1: system before sleep. But the challenges I think for a
Speaker 1: lot of people that they're not conscious that this is
Speaker 1: actually what's going on, so they don't they don't necessarily
Speaker 1: realize that they have this habit of watching Netflix in
Speaker 1: order to to kind of unwind at the end of
Speaker 1: the day. And not that there's anything wrong with that,
Speaker 1: but I think it can be helpful to almost kind
Speaker 1: of doing do an audit of what are the different
Speaker 1: ways in which you either increase your sense of alertness,
Speaker 1: you know, coffee things like that in the morning and
Speaker 1: then unwind and during the day as well. And I
Speaker 1: found it really helpful in my life to replace some
Speaker 1: of these with more conscious strategies and simple breathing exercises
Speaker 1: is a wonderful, free, kind of zero cost way of
Speaker 1: changing your state and regulating your nervous system really effectively
Speaker 1: without relying on substances that and to have kind of
Speaker 1: down and stream consequences if they're abused. And so when
Speaker 1: you're talking about up regulating and down regulating, you're basically
Speaker 1: talking about, you know, one of the purposes of inter reception,
Speaker 1: even when it's the non conscious part of it. Right
Speaker 1: to hear neuroscientists talk, is that your body is always
Speaker 1: trying to sort of Lisa Felm embarrass says, like balance
Speaker 1: out your body budget. Right, Internally, it's trying to say, look,
Speaker 1: there's a zone that I need to be in here, right,
Speaker 1: it's always doing this temperature, I've got to stay in
Speaker 1: this temperature. I've got to increase decrease, right, And so
Speaker 1: our nervous system has something similar. So what we're talking
Speaker 1: about is if I am overstimulated stressed out, anxious, you know,
Speaker 1: high arousal. Then I want to I want to be
Speaker 1: able to downregulate that back into a zone that my
Speaker 1: body is like, okay, I can work with this. Right. Conversely,
Speaker 1: we may be too low energy, right, sluggish, and in
Speaker 1: this case we're trying to upregulate, and we've developed methods
Speaker 1: of doing this thing that has to happen and without
Speaker 1: really thinking about it. And what you're proposing in the
Speaker 1: program and what you're teaching in the program is that
Speaker 1: primarily this is not the only tool that you use,
Speaker 1: but a main tool that you use is the breath.
Speaker 1: That breathing in different ways can either downregulate or upregulate us,
Speaker 1: and it's a very powerful tool for doing that that's
Speaker 1: really well put. That zone is known as the window
Speaker 1: of tolerance in the neuroscience, and generally speaking, a lot
Speaker 1: of the people that certainly come through the program there
Speaker 1: their challenges are with the down regulations. So sometimes people
Speaker 1: can get stuck in that kind of high tone sympathetic
Speaker 1: state where their mind is racing, where you know, they're
Speaker 1: easily angered, frustrated, etcetera. And so a lot of people
Speaker 1: are trying to find more effective strategies for coming back
Speaker 1: down instead of being stuck there, coming back down into
Speaker 1: kind of the healthy zone, which is the kind of
Speaker 1: where the ventual vegas nerve is online. And some of
Speaker 1: the most effective practice that I've come across are in
Speaker 1: the moment just doing either alternate noster breathing or box breathing,
Speaker 1: or actually humming can be really effective as well. Humming
Speaker 1: or kind of making a sound and belly and then
Speaker 1: like a hum releases nigric oxide which acts as a
Speaker 1: vacid dilator, and that helps to kick in the parasympathetic
Speaker 1: system and then for a slightly longer reset. There's a
Speaker 1: branch of protocols known as non sleep depressed, which are
Speaker 1: primarily drawing from the yoga ninja tradition, and these are
Speaker 1: kind of thirty minute guided power napps essentially where someone
Speaker 1: can kind of go through a visualization where they stay aware,
Speaker 1: they stay awake, but their body rests. And so there
Speaker 1: are kind of various protocols for down regulating when we're
Speaker 1: kind of slightly stuck in that just outside our window
Speaker 1: of tolerance and we want to kind of come back
Speaker 1: down into rest or maybe we would kind of want
Speaker 1: to be more creative or it's just not suiting the environment,
Speaker 1: and we decide that we want to come back down again.
Speaker 1: It's interesting, is I looked at your course. The part
Speaker 1: that interested me was I sort of need more of
Speaker 1: the upregulation. Like I'm I'm pretty down regulated. You know,
Speaker 1: when you're talking about like high cortisol makes it hard
Speaker 1: to do in ter reception. My cortisol is always like
Speaker 1: just sort of like the bottom of what's sort of
Speaker 1: an acceptable level. I know, I don't know if that's
Speaker 1: because it was too high for too long or what
Speaker 1: what the what the what the cause of that is.
Speaker 1: But let's talk about energizing. What are ways that we
Speaker 1: energize our nervous system. Yes, So to kind of prepare
Speaker 1: for this this conversation, I set my alarm early at
Speaker 1: about five am, and I went down the road to
Speaker 1: a sawndom and cold blunch that we have access to
Speaker 1: and that if you're lucky enough to have access, is
Speaker 1: an incredibly effective way of stimulating your nervous system and
Speaker 1: kind of activating the hot cold combination. But more and
Speaker 1: more simply, there's a practice known as bellows breathing or
Speaker 1: Kabbalah batty in yoga, which is essentially a series of
Speaker 1: rapid excels through the nose and the belly, and usually
Speaker 1: kind of thirty or forty forced exhales will also stimulate
Speaker 1: the sympathetic nervous system in a similar way, and I
Speaker 1: usually like to combine something that's activating like that wim
Speaker 1: Hoff is an even more kind of intense example, and
Speaker 1: then have a kind of an equal duration of a
Speaker 1: relaxation breathing, so it could be cadence breathing or box
Speaker 1: breathing afterwards, to just kind of settle down the nervous
Speaker 1: system so you're not left in kind of slightly like
Speaker 1: you know, tingly kind of overcharged state. In what ways
Speaker 1: is bellows breathing different than what wim Hoff advocates. It's
Speaker 1: a little bit less intense. And have a number of
Speaker 1: friends who've been through wim Hoff kind of workshops, and
Speaker 1: some people have been kind of like retraumatized through kind
Speaker 1: of breathing that intensely. It can kind of create these
Speaker 1: very powerful alter states of consciousness and big emotions can surface,
Speaker 1: and it can also leave people stuck in that heightened
Speaker 1: sympathetic state that we talked about earlier, and some people
Speaker 1: really struggle to come back down from that. So bellows
Speaker 1: breathing is more gentle. It's kind of just through the nose,
Speaker 1: which is less intense than breathing through the mouth. And
Speaker 1: so for me, it's something that um I would recommend
Speaker 1: over something like wim Hoff, which can be very It's
Speaker 1: it's great for some people, but I think for five
Speaker 1: tempers end of the population that do have that tendency
Speaker 1: to get stuck in that high turned state, it's not helpful.
Speaker 1: We had whim half on the podcast and he basically
Speaker 1: yells like he's not a calm talker in any way,
Speaker 1: shape or form. Like everything's yelling. So I'm like my
Speaker 1: normal sort of like, well, how are you doing? And
Speaker 1: he's yelling. You know, there's one court where he's like
Speaker 1: everybody loves a good wolf, you know, screaming it. It's
Speaker 1: just it's a hysterical sounding interview. The guy is so
Speaker 1: wound up. He's also amazing. I think what he comates
Speaker 1: a kind of popularized breathing is phenomenal, but I do
Speaker 1: think that there should be some caution or just kind
Speaker 1: of more I guess nervous system literacy kind of shared
Speaker 1: alongside the practices. That's right, that's right, yep. I thought
Speaker 1: James Nestra did a nice job in his book also
Speaker 1: sort of laying some of that out, you know, about
Speaker 1: how there's a role for both these to use your terminology,
Speaker 1: these up and down regulating types of breathing. When you
Speaker 1: do a cold plunge, how long are you doing it for?
Speaker 1: Typically the cold plums that we have here is very cold.
Speaker 1: It's about three or four degrees centigrade. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: what that is in fahrenheit, freaking cold, but I typically
Speaker 1: to fifteen minutes in the sauna and then about three
Speaker 1: or four minutes at that temperature. But if it's warmerth
Speaker 1: and you know, maybe four or five minutes, you want
Speaker 1: to get to the point where you're not shivering, but
Speaker 1: there's usually initially there's a shock. And that is a
Speaker 1: really good way to kind of practice, is associating the
Speaker 1: fear response from the kind of mental stories, because you
Speaker 1: can kind of sit with that. And if you sit
Speaker 1: with that, as with motions, actually, like when you sit
Speaker 1: with that, it kind of changes and it becomes easier
Speaker 1: to sit with. And I initially when I was in Brighton,
Speaker 1: actually in the months after losing Sophie, I would swim
Speaker 1: in the ocean around the pier during the winter when
Speaker 1: the water was freezing cold, and it was a similar sensation.
Speaker 1: If there is that initial shock and like I don't
Speaker 1: want to be here, I don't want to go in.
Speaker 1: I like what hell am I doing? And then once
Speaker 1: you're in there for kind of a few minutes, it
Speaker 1: does start to kind of settle and your body gets
Speaker 1: used to it, and there's this beautiful, just like profound
Speaker 1: feeling of sometimes like joy or ecstasy that can kind
Speaker 1: of come through. And so, yeah, it's interesting how it
Speaker 1: does change. But if you're just starting out, you can
Speaker 1: even start with cold showers and that kind of gets
Speaker 1: you into it, and then buying chest freezers is a
Speaker 1: is a great way you can kind of d I
Speaker 1: y your own cold plans that some of the people
Speaker 1: in my course did for not very much money, So
Speaker 1: you don't need to have access to a fancy gym necessarily.
Speaker 1: I am in the cold shower camp and have been
Speaker 1: for years, basically because I live in a small place.
Speaker 1: There's no room for an ice chest or jim. But
Speaker 1: it helps, you know, I don't I don't do it
Speaker 1: as long or but it does wake me up and
Speaker 1: energize me. It's also just primarily a way of sort
Speaker 1: of as you describe a little bit like intentionally wading
Speaker 1: into discomfort and going you know, I can handle being uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: I've been thinking lately about how as we get older
Speaker 1: what I see with a lot of people as we
Speaker 1: get older. I don't think it's conscious, but we begin
Speaker 1: to subconsciously really over prioritize comfort. You know. It seems
Speaker 1: to be something that happens as people age. I think
Speaker 1: there's some natural part of that, but it's a thing
Speaker 1: that I certainly am like, Well, I don't want to
Speaker 1: over prioritize that, you know, I don't want that to
Speaker 1: be the defining value. You know, it's just am I comfortable?
Speaker 1: Which is what a lot of us do. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a really important point. And in the neuroscience, the concept
Speaker 1: you might be familiar with men's US which is essentially
Speaker 1: the kind of a little small amounts of stress for
Speaker 1: short periods of time are really really good for us
Speaker 1: um And you can think of the astronauts on the
Speaker 1: I S S Like if they stay there for too
Speaker 1: long because the lack of gravity, they lose bone density,
Speaker 1: and there's there's so many examples in life where if
Speaker 1: we don't have some stress or some stresses, then our
Speaker 1: capacity just gets diminished. And there's a really really strong
Speaker 1: case for as long as you have a relatively well
Speaker 1: regulated nervous system for deliberately introducing stresses into your life
Speaker 1: and then followed by a recovery period and then your
Speaker 1: capacity grows. I mean, and this is intuitive when it
Speaker 1: comes to say, lifting weights in the gym, but it
Speaker 1: applies to our nervous system in general. And our nervous
Speaker 1: system as well is very neuroplastic, and people think of
Speaker 1: just you know, your brain is neuroplastic and you can learn,
Speaker 1: but our nervous systems and neuroplastic two, and we can
Speaker 1: increase or decrease our kind of window of tolerance and capacity,
Speaker 1: and thing practices like could plunging saunas also kind of
Speaker 1: walking breath holds is a really effective way to increase
Speaker 1: your pacity and your your CEO two tolerance, which has
Speaker 1: a bunch of health benefits down the line as well.
Speaker 1: Um So some people will like drink a big sip
Speaker 1: of water when I'm walking a dog on the beach
Speaker 1: and just hold the water in my mouth while I'm
Speaker 1: walking and hold my breath for like maybe thirty or
Speaker 1: forty paces and then let it out and then kind
Speaker 1: of do the same thing again. And having a healthy
Speaker 1: CEO two tolerance is very helpful for mitigating like when
Speaker 1: you do get really stressed in life, you can handle it.
Speaker 1: Like when something a huge curvell comes your way, you
Speaker 1: don't get knocked off center. So I think it's a
Speaker 1: it's a really important thing to emphasize. So if you're
Speaker 1: going to do a breath hold like that, say more
Speaker 1: about how you do it and what the benefit is.
Speaker 1: I'm going to make that question a little bit more specific.
Speaker 1: Do you breathe all the way out before you start it,
Speaker 1: or do you breathe take a deep breath in before
Speaker 1: you started or neither. So I came to this through
Speaker 1: free diving, and so I kind of practiced much longer
Speaker 1: breath holds with the intention of then diving down underwater.
Speaker 1: But for someone just starting out, and this is actually
Speaker 1: comes from Patrick McEwen who wrote a book called The
Speaker 1: Oxygen Advantage that I really recommend. The idea is you
Speaker 1: inhale and then you just exhale to a comfortable amount
Speaker 1: and on that exhale retention then you begin walking, and
Speaker 1: he recommends at minimum of kind of fifteen paces, can
Speaker 1: go up to forty or fifty until you start to
Speaker 1: feel what he describes as mild air hunger. So you
Speaker 1: don't want to be like gasping for breath, but you
Speaker 1: also want to wait a little bit kind of after
Speaker 1: you feel that first need to breathe. And for a
Speaker 1: lot of people that kind of managed maybe fifteen to
Speaker 1: twenty in the beginning, then pretty quickly you can work
Speaker 1: way up to fifty even even longer. So it's a
Speaker 1: pretty trainable thing. And what's the benefit of training it?
Speaker 1: You mentioned if you get a big curve bark on
Speaker 1: where you handle it better. What's the mechanism that causes
Speaker 1: there to happen. Yes, so you're increasing your body's capacity
Speaker 1: for c O two, and when you have high levels
Speaker 1: of c O two in the body, your pH becomes
Speaker 1: more acidic, which is basically a stress on the body.
Speaker 1: And in extreme cases, if you hold your breath for
Speaker 1: four or five six minutes, as free divers do, it's
Speaker 1: simulating the fear of death, kind of the death reflex,
Speaker 1: and so you're basically sitting in this very primal kind
Speaker 1: of reflexive need to breathe, but at the same time,
Speaker 1: in your mind you're like, I'm okay, I have enough
Speaker 1: oxygen in my body. Nothing is going to happen. But
Speaker 1: it's the increase in CEO two and the corresponding blood
Speaker 1: acidity which creates this like this deep need to breathe,
Speaker 1: which can be kind of overridden to a certain point.
Speaker 1: So it's also a way of training your mind as well.
Speaker 1: So I want to talk a little bit about emotional resilience.
Speaker 1: We've talked about emotional debt, talked about you know, being overwhelmed,
Speaker 1: but you describe four main barriers to resilience. What are
Speaker 1: the barriers to resilience? And then let's talk about how
Speaker 1: do we actually increase it. So I think there's two
Speaker 1: approaches here, right, ones reducing barrier as the other is
Speaker 1: increasing our ability. I think I are like twelve barriers
Speaker 1: to resilience in in one of the posts. But some
Speaker 1: of the main ones I think are the ones that
Speaker 1: come to mind immediately are One is what I call
Speaker 1: like lone wolf syndrome, which is kind of an inability
Speaker 1: to ask for help and a kind of belief that
Speaker 1: you can get through everything on your own. And this
Speaker 1: was certainly true for me kind of up until the
Speaker 1: grief experience, to be honest, that I kind of felt
Speaker 1: like I could do everything myself, and in that experience
Speaker 1: I realized I had to lean on friends, family, people
Speaker 1: to kind of get through it. So that's that's certainly
Speaker 1: one big one. Another barrier. I think fixed mindset versus
Speaker 1: kind of growth mindset is definitely one. And people you know,
Speaker 1: thinking that they are a certain way and that they
Speaker 1: can't change, they can't adapt, they can't grow. Which were
Speaker 1: the ones that you were referring to, You sort of
Speaker 1: hit one with which was insufficient support structures. I think
Speaker 1: I pulled this out of your paper you did with
Speaker 1: your colleague, But we've talked about one of these, which
Speaker 1: is lack of emotional and physical awareness, right, lack of
Speaker 1: inter reception and perceived vulnerability. Talk about what that means,
Speaker 1: because I don't think you're using vulnerability in the sense
Speaker 1: that it's often used as a positive thing these days. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I think it can be a very scary thing, particularly men,
Speaker 1: particularly kind of men in tech and British men in tech,
Speaker 1: to talk about and have conversations about their emotions. And
Speaker 1: that was kind of certainly true for me for a
Speaker 1: good of time. And I think just normalizing kind of
Speaker 1: having conversations about emotions without judgment, without kind of making
Speaker 1: things right or wrong, but just you know, this is
Speaker 1: what is arising. I'm noticing and coming up in my
Speaker 1: body like and then getting curious about it. And I
Speaker 1: think that is emotional literacy. And I think it's something
Speaker 1: that is in part down to the individual and also
Speaker 1: the culture in which the individual is embedded, and so
Speaker 1: ways of increasing our emotional resilience. You've got two primary
Speaker 1: practices of protocols that you describe in this section. One
Speaker 1: is conscious connected breathing. The other is self enquiry general
Speaker 1: I do you want to just briefly tell us about
Speaker 1: both those perhaps for some context. It always recommends if
Speaker 1: someone's going into this work that they do it with
Speaker 1: someone else or ideally with some professional support in the beginning,
Speaker 1: because having a professional to help corregulate your nervous system
Speaker 1: with if something intense does come up, it's really helpful
Speaker 1: to have a guide. Once you kind of have some
Speaker 1: practice under your belt, then it's much easier to kind
Speaker 1: of go into the more self guided practices. But um,
Speaker 1: I kind of preface with in the beginning, having support
Speaker 1: from a semantic experiencing therapist or or a breath worker
Speaker 1: or someone that can help you go to these places
Speaker 1: it is really helpful. But to speak to those practices specifically,
Speaker 1: the conscious connected breathing is essentially a breath work practice
Speaker 1: where you're inhaling a full vibrant inhale and then a
Speaker 1: relaxed excel and if you begin to loop your breath
Speaker 1: in this way, you will enter kind of an altered
Speaker 1: state of consciousness in which subconscious material can arise, including
Speaker 1: these incomplete reflexes that we mentioned. And it's it's usually
Speaker 1: done to music, to a journey where a follows a
Speaker 1: bell curve with a intense peak in there a long
Speaker 1: period for integration and relaxation. And this is a very
Speaker 1: efficient way of surfacing emotional debt emotional material and having
Speaker 1: it be completed as long as there's an embodied felt
Speaker 1: sense of safety. Again, this is best done with a facilitator.
Speaker 1: Is that a broad category in which certain things like
Speaker 1: say holo tropic breathwork fit up under tropic breathwork a
Speaker 1: type of this. It's a very it's a very kind
Speaker 1: of complex map, but essentially there's the breath work at
Speaker 1: the top, and then within that there is a holo
Speaker 1: tropic is a modality pineed by Stanard Stangrof. And then
Speaker 1: there's also there's rebirth thing, there's transformational breathing, there's some
Speaker 1: other ones and contus connected fits under that, and then
Speaker 1: actually within conscious connected what we're practicing here we ball
Speaker 1: FBR or facilitated breath repatterning, which kind of speaks to
Speaker 1: the fact that there is guided facilitation to use bodywork,
Speaker 1: verbal cues and things to facilitate to ease in the breath.
Speaker 1: And is this the sort of thing that you do
Speaker 1: with people virtually or is it more something you really
Speaker 1: want to do when you say with a guide that
Speaker 1: you want to do in person or you can get
Speaker 1: your support virtually, what's your recommendation. So there are people
Speaker 1: offering this virtually on a kind of one to one basis,
Speaker 1: which certainly can work. I've chosen to work in person
Speaker 1: um just because there is access to the community here
Speaker 1: and for me being able to have kind of human
Speaker 1: connection and literally coregulate your nervous system with someone and
Speaker 1: be able to read their breath and then make facilitations
Speaker 1: based on what I'm seeing for me, is just a
Speaker 1: much more effective way of working compared to if you're
Speaker 1: just mitigated through zoom or something, which I know can
Speaker 1: still have effects as with whim Hof. My fear is
Speaker 1: that there is a kind of small percentage of the
Speaker 1: population who whom something big will arise and they won't
Speaker 1: have another person there to help them to downshift, and
Speaker 1: they'll be kind of stuck in that state. And then
Speaker 1: self enquiry journaling talk a little bit about. I mean,
Speaker 1: everybody's going to know what journaling is, but there's a
Speaker 1: specificity to this. Describe that process. Yeah, So I'll sometimes
Speaker 1: combine this with kind of a somatic inquiry meditation as well,
Speaker 1: where I'm kind of using my interception to kind of
Speaker 1: track these sensations that are alive and then inquiring into
Speaker 1: what emotions or what you know, thoughts memories might be
Speaker 1: underneath that. So I'll usually do that first and then
Speaker 1: afterwards I have a journaling practice which is built on
Speaker 1: internal family systems, which I imagine some of your listeners
Speaker 1: are probably familiar with. But it's this idea of um
Speaker 1: working with different parts within myself and there might be
Speaker 1: a kind of like an inner trials within me that
Speaker 1: fuels hurt by something that might be the kind of
Speaker 1: warrior that wants to defend me and you know, get angry.
Speaker 1: Everyone else there's maybe the king who has more of
Speaker 1: a discernment and more of a sense of like courage
Speaker 1: to look at something that might be comfortable. And so
Speaker 1: I'll use these different characters, and I think it's a
Speaker 1: fun creative process for people to almost like come up
Speaker 1: with who are the characters inside themselves they've noticed that
Speaker 1: maybe they associated with certain thought patterns, you know, certain
Speaker 1: moments that nervous system states, and then to kind of
Speaker 1: facilitate dialogue between these parts and just to ask, you know,
Speaker 1: what is it that this like hurt part of myself
Speaker 1: actually wants or what is underneath this story that I'm
Speaker 1: telling myself. And maybe it's not about story, but it's
Speaker 1: about something beneath that, and it's about, you know, something
Speaker 1: that happened earlier. So it's almost this kind of excavation process.
Speaker 1: And and usually what I find is like, it's not
Speaker 1: about the thing. It's not about the thing I think
Speaker 1: it is. It's like I go into that and then
Speaker 1: once I start journaling, or once I start feeling into
Speaker 1: my body it's like, oh, there was this thing that
Speaker 1: happened five years ago and I'm still piste off about now.
Speaker 1: That's now, that's surfacing, but you have to start with
Speaker 1: what to life. Awesome, Well, Johnny, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for coming on the show. I've really enjoyed this. You
Speaker 1: and I are going to continue in the post show
Speaker 1: conversation where I want to talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: the foreigners of a system archetypes, and also just some
Speaker 1: riffing on kind of like what's next for you. I'm
Speaker 1: really really kind of curious about where your work is going,
Speaker 1: so we'll be talking about that in the post show conversation. Listeners,
Speaker 1: you can get access to add free episodes, post show
Speaker 1: conversations with great guests, and all sorts of other goodies
Speaker 1: at when you Feed dot net slash join. So again, Johnny,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for coming on. It's been such a pleasure.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. Yeah, this has been so much fun.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate it. If what you just heard was
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