This is the Empowered Caregiver show.
If you are a caregiver or know someone who is, this show is meant to uplift you through education and support, while also lifting up every caregiver's invaluable role in society.
Now, here is the Empowered Caregiver and your host, Liza Helen Brand.
You are listening to The Empowered Caregiver and I am your host, Liza Hellenbrand.
Today I will be talking with Alex Green from Red Beard Sematic Therapy, which was launched in 2012 by Alex Green with his initial focus on structural integration body work.
As a body worker and a longtime Zen meditation practitioner, Alex has had a keen interest in understanding how the human body, mind,
and nervous system intersect to form the basis of our physical comfort, psycho-emotional health, and overall sense of well-being.
Today, they have an entire team of body work practitioners, movement therapists, nervous system specialists, can't wait to learn more about that, and mental health experts offering work in person in Madison, Wisconsin.
They also have a location in Boulder, Colorado, and
offer offerings online to people worldwide.
There is so much that we can learn from Alex.
So I just want to jump right in.
Alex, thank you so much for joining me today.
Thank you, Lisa.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Yes.
So somatic therapy.
This is something new to me.
And it's like,
It's like once you're a pregnant woman, all you see is pregnant women.
And so I feel like it's gaining a lot of traction.
But what is somatic therapy and how does it work?
Yeah.
Well, so somatic therapies in general really very much are having a moment.
I mean, of course, my Instagram feed is a little bit biased because of my work, but I see more and more things popping up every day.
So in some ways, the term somatic has become certainly more used and mainstream over the last decade, I would say.
When we talk about the word somatic is a Greek word, and it refers to the body.
But in the field of somatics or somatic therapy, we tend to use it in a little bit of a specific way, which means sort of not the body as simply as a biomechanical physiological unit, but a little bit.
includes the idea of the subjective sense of, it's not that you have a body, you are a body, you're an embodied human being and your thoughts, feelings and actions arise from a body state.
So it's a movement that a little bit is
pushing against the sort of historical Cartesian split between the mind and the body, and trying to bring those together to improve mental health and just general well-being in general.
When we talk about the term somatic therapies, there's certainly how I use it in our practice, red beard somatic therapy.
It's actually a collection of modalities or approaches to working with the mind and body that can support anything from nervous system regulation, physical well-being, et cetera, et cetera.
And it can show up in different ways.
Some of our work is hands-on body work, sort of manual therapy approaches.
Some of our work is movement, movement education like yoga therapy or...
field increase method of somatic education.
Some of our work is nervous system awareness focused things like somatic experiencing and TRE and
several even beyond that.
So it's a big category, but what ties it all together is it's people who are engaged in somatic therapies, they're in some way trying to have a increase their embodied self-awareness and apply that in meaningful and useful ways in their lives.
That makes a lot of sense, but you're right.
There's a lot there.
A lot of different modalities, a lot of different ways to heal the body.
And I love that.
Can you repeat that again?
You're not just a body.
You're- You
don't have a body.
You are a body.
You
have a body.
I like that.
I'm gonna have to write that down so I remember that.
And would you feel comfortable just sharing a little bit of your story and what brought you to this type of work?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's been a little bit of a winding road, so I don't always know exactly where to start.
But for me personally, I got interested in, I wouldn't have called it somatic work, or even nervous system work at the time, but if I go back about 20 or so years, I was a college student.
and pretty interested in science and I was kind of one of those sort of in-your-head kind of guys doing math and physics and philosophy and at some point I ran into that classic early college existential crisis of one sort or another and I felt that I was not very well connected to
other parts of myself other than sort of my thinking self so I wasn't that well connected to my feeling self and and other things and I was lucky I got connected to I was I spent a summer living in Honolulu Hawaii and I got started with meditation at a Zen dojo a Zen temple outside of Honolulu
And in which I then became a practitioner in for many years, I'm still a part of that sort of community and activity.
But for me, what was so important about that entry point was the basic practice was meditation, sitting meditation, which has become, many people have a sitting practice.
And in our style, it was very...
body, breath oriented.
We didn't talk about nervous system, but it was very much a practice about regulating the mind and the body sort of through breath and also through some movement activities like martial arts and things.
And it was a big doorway opening for me that I was, again, more than just my thinking self.
Somehow that connected me to sensation in my body.
It was as though more
I became more familiar with a, I guess I would say a more, a fuller version of myself.
And I also started to feel a little bit more comfortable in my own skin and in my body.
Well, I was just going to say, you know, hats off to you.
at a college age to make those those connections you know but just between the mind body I'm sure it took some discomfort to to get you there but that's still a fairly young age I feel like I'm a few decades behind you
but I'm
getting there.
Well don't worry there's lots of layers so I'm working on my own other you know you know I'm still working on other layers of things but um
But so it went interestingly after I, so that was kind of my original interest.
And there was a, at the dojo at the school in Honolulu that I was connected to, there was a body work therapist who was of quite some renown and reputation who had retired to Hawaii.
And he, this name is doubly, L-E-I-G-H.
And he had trained with some of who I would now consider some of the pioneers of the somatic movement in the Western world, people like Ida Rolf who developed Rolfing Structural Tegration, Moshe Feldenkrais who was a Israeli scientist who developed an important movement therapy based on the nervous system.
So he had studied with both of them and others.
and then had was living in Honolulu and connect to the same Zen group.
And he had kind of combined some things together, these, these several approaches.
And, and he and students were offering some of this hands on body work to, you know, it's just students.
And I had a problem where I, in my meditation practice, where I kept having this nagging, persistent problem in my hip and low back.
And so I kind of raised
my hand and said, hey, I think I need some of this body work therapy.
And I'm glad I did because then I went through what's sort of there's a classical sequence of body work called the 10 series.
It's comes from the Rolfing structural integration tradition.
So I went through that 10 series progression.
And it was really life changing in a lot of different ways.
In addition to the hip and low back thing, that sort of resolved.
But in some ways, that was the least of it.
More than that, I had a number of transitions where I connected to
a grief that I hadn't acknowledged that I experienced and then was able to sort of integrate.
I had a very pivotal experience in my third session where my body started shaking and vibrating in a way that was very, I had no idea what that was.
Is this voodoo?
Is this magic?
But then, you know, they explained that this is a common form of discharge at the nervous system level, although they didn't have a lot of language around the nervous system.
But so after I had gone through this over about 10, 12 weeks of going through this weekly body work process, I felt a lot different body and mind.
I felt more open, psycho-emotionally.
I felt, even though I already kind of had a sitting practice, it kind of anchored even more.
I felt that I had grasped a little bit more clearly about
what were the reasons why I had a little bit disconnected from my body growing up and things like that.
So it was still another decade before I began my own therapeutic work, but that really planted a strong seed because it was such a transformational experience for me.
And so later on,
after I was living in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and I met one of the students of that person living in Chicago, and he was offering a training in the style of body work, and I remembered how powerful it was.
And so on my weekends, in my free time, I started going down to Chicago and training with this gentleman named Everett Ogawa.
And ended up, I didn't think I would do this as a vocation, but it was sort of like,
I just, once I started, it was like, this is what I need to be doing.
It was a very clear sense.
And so I kind of, eventually I was running a small woodworking company and I had a couple of employees and collaborators and they finally said, Alex, maybe you should just switch over to doing body work because it sort of seems like every waking moment, that's what you're thinking about and doing.
I said, you guys are right.
Okay.
I think it's time for a life transition here.
So that was around 20.
2010 or so I made that shift and and then start soon thereafter started the company.
Well, you know it sounds like a
Divine intervention or you are at the right place at the right time and I am so glad that it all came together for you and You've done all of this work and all of this training and now you're out helping so many other people when we come back We're gonna talk about mental health and your nervous system.
They go together In bigger ways than I think one could even ever imagine you're listening to the empowered caregiver.
We'll be back
in just a
second.
You are listening to The Empowered Caregiver and I am your host, Liza Hallenbrand.
Today I am joined with Alex Green from Red Beard Somatic Therapy.
And there is so much I want to learn.
I am just going to keep her, keep her moving as we say here in Wisconsin.
So thank you, Alex, so much for sharing your story and what brought you into this fascinating story and at a young age.
And I just want to say hats off to you because I think it takes most of us a long time to get anywhere close to, to where
you're at, but I really want to spend some time talking about your mental health and your nervous system.
Can you tell me how does your nervous system play a role in your mental health?
Yeah, wonderful question.
Yeah, so what's being talked a lot about these days, and I would say the work of Bessel Bander Koch in his popular book, The Body Keeps the Score, is what really in some ways brought this on the radar at a more popular mainstream level.
And it's this idea of thinking about the nervous system.
When we say nervous system, we're usually talking about the autonomic nervous system, which is that part of us that governs things like our
our heart rate, our respiration, sweating, salivation, digestion, elimination.
So it's the parts of our nervous system that we don't consciously control, but of course is happening all the time as part of regulating our biological activity.
And what Vanderkoek and others sort of came to the conclusion is that in stress related or
trauma related situations.
Very often the most disruptive symptoms aren't only the thoughts, feelings and memories connected to stress or traumatic events, but actually the imprints or the impact of that, those high stress are on changes at the autonomic nervous system so that it's not functioning as smoothly anymore.
So we can a little bit think about the autonomic nervous system as sort of like our gas pedal.
sort of kind of revving us up.
Our heart rate gets a little higher.
We have more energy to sort of do something that's more in the direct, that's called the sympathetic nervous system or the fight or flight nervous system.
And then there's the opposite.
We might call it the break pedal or the parasympathetic nervous system where we start to become more relaxed and grounded.
Our breathing rate would slow.
Our heart rate would slow down.
Our digestive activity would increase.
That's the
rest and digest parasympathetic nervous system.
And so what was starting to be understood was that in some ways the biggest long-term effects from traumatic events and things was changes at the autonomic nervous system so that we can become stuck.
in what's either called hyperarousal, meaning we're stuck on, on, like our, even though there's no threat around, where, you know, our heart rate's a little high, our vigilance system is a bit high, we're kind of always ready for the next threat, even though it's, it's, there's nothing like that going on.
That's one form of imprint of stress.
And,
The other option would be hypoarousal where we're stuck on off, where we, in some ways, we can't rev up enough when we need to.
So these are some ways that we're getting those kind of impact.
Yeah.
And do you find in today's society that it's easy for us to be stuck in this kind of fight or flight?
I mean, I feel like it's information overload wherever we go, right?
And so much to do, so much to do.
And I don't, I wake up feeling stuck and I go to bad feeling justice stuck.
And I feel like I can't be alone in this.
I don't think you're alone in the least.
I think this is a, you know, we, we just had the COVID-19 pandemic.
And I think, I think stress and, and is another, is another.
epidemic in the pace of today's modern world.
I mean maybe it's always been like that to some degree but certainly we're seeing a lot of that now.
I fight the same things.
I wake up with the same pressures coming at me and I think now more than ever it's really useful and practical to become aware of how your nervous system is functioning because that can help influence how we respond to stress.
And you know, I'm doing some of this EMDR work right now and we're talking a lot about the nervous system and how it's common for you to go in and out of these different stages, what would you call it?
Throughout the different nervous, you
help me out.
Different nervous system states throughout the day.
Of course we cycle.
Our nervous system is intended to go through different cycles throughout the day.
So what happens, what are the long terms of facts
Do you know when we're stuck in this fight or flight anxious mode all the time?
Absolutely.
Well, I mean, I'm not a I'm not a medical doctor and so but but there is ample evidence that that that stress related.
that stresses a big component of almost all disease processes, things from heart disease and diabetes to the development of all kinds of things that can show up as chronic disease later in life.
In the 1990s, there was a really important study conducted by Kaiser Permanente.
known as the ACES study.
ACES stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences, and it was specifically studying the long-term health outcome over decades of children who had more disruptions in their developmental period, and showed very clearly that the very clear correlation with long-term health challenges, of course, not everybody, but that was a tendency
that we see.
And the other person, so Gabbermonte, is a Canadian physician who writes very well about the connection between trauma and health.
And his most recent book, The Myth of Normal, does a very good job of looking at some of these kinds of health consequences that tend to show up.
The short version is that if we're living in a chronically
up-regulated nervous system, so we're always in a state of fight or flight, then we're more than certain.
We don't have as much time in the rest and digest nervous system where cellular repair is happening and some of these other health benefits.
So almost any disease process is going to be kind of accelerated by not having enough time in the rest and digest part of our nervous system.
Well, that makes perfect sense because I feel like, and you can correct me if I'm wrong in this, but I feel like we're living longer.
because of
the
advancements, but we're not healthier.
A lot of people are living with multiple chronic conditions and I think it would be fair to kind of make the assumption that when you're living every day in this high stress mode that yes, things are going to start breaking down and that kind of goes back exactly what you said about the book that was
release your body keeps score.
I'm sure that that's
what
he's referring to.
Now you made this connection, I would say fairly early in life about feeling this dysregulation or you know, something's not right, you're not at your best self.
Not all of us have that level of awareness.
What are some tips that you can give to help people notice when they're dysregulated?
Yeah, I think the beginning point is what we call embodied self-awareness.
There's a fancy word inter-reception, which just means our ability to sense and feel.
So my first stage of work with most clients is just to develop their own reference to when they are entering a stress kind of a state.
I want to learn more about this.
When we come back, you're listening to The Empowered Caregiver.
I'm here today with Alex Green from Red Beer Sematic Therapy.
When we come back, we're going to talk more about the nervous system, stress, and trauma in your body.
You are listening to The Empowered Caregiver and I am your host, Eliza Helen Brand.
Today I am talking with Alex Green from Redbeard Somatic Therapy.
Redbeard was launched in 2020, excuse me, 2020.
12 if I'm saying the right by founder Alex Green with the initial focus on structural integration body work as a body worker and a longtime Zen meditation practice practitioner Alex has been keen or has a keen interest on understanding the human body mind and nervous system and how they intersect to form the basis of our physical comfort cycle emotional help
and sense of well-being.
Today, they have a full team of body work practitioners, movement therapists, nervous system specialists, and mental health experts offering services in Madison, Boulder, Colorado, and online.
I'm so excited to keep talking about this, Alex.
My nervous system is a 10 out of 10, and I'm barely able to speak.
So thank you so much for being with me today.
So before the break, I had asked about
noticing when you're dysregulated and how I don't think a lot of people even realize that they're there.
Are there any other thoughts that you want to share that would help people notice when they are dysregulated and maybe what are some things you can do right there in the moment?
Yeah, really really good question.
So and I'm gonna a little bit challenge the word dysregulated because I mean that's a word we use a lot but it implies that there's sort of this on-off switch between perfectly regulated and Completely dysregulated and I think it's a little bit more like a spectrum.
So I might use the language Okay, could I be more regulated?
Could I be a little or could I be a little bit more grounded and a bit more regulated right now and
But a lot of it, so as I was saying, the starting point is kind of embodied self-awareness.
I think most people already know some of the main cues for themselves.
They may know that their thoughts feel pressured, that they're starting to have racing thoughts.
Some people notice that their heart rate is elevated.
Other people don't notice it.
Other people might notice it as my shoulders are really stressed.
That's their sort of...
clue that they're in a heightened, other people might notice that they're feeling more reactive to the circumstances around that, that they're speaking quickly or they're getting angry or or or shutting down or something like that.
So many people are aware of kind of the psychological state of, yeah, I'm stressed.
I'm not feeling relaxed right now.
Almost everybody can become aware of that pretty readily.
And what we try to do is, traumatic work is brought in their awareness a little bit.
So it's like, not only are you sort of feeling anxious or racing thoughts at the mind level, but let's bring a little bit of attention to the body for a minute.
When you're in that state, how well can you feel your
pelvis sitting on the chair.
How well do you feel the way your feet are touching the floor?
Very often, if we're in an accelerated nervous system state and we ask a question about the body, there's ways in which we don't feel it all that clearly or we may not feel our sense of connection to the ground.
Similarly, if we ask, to what degree are you sort of aware of your surroundings?
So we use visual awareness sometimes.
as a way to broaden our attention.
When we're in a stress state, it's a lot that we get into sort of a tunnel vision mode, not only mentally, but even our vision does that too.
So one easy strategy we use is around pausing and letting our visual attention start to take in a sense of our physical surroundings or even using our hearing to do the same thing.
What are the sounds we can hear?
What are the, maybe if there's smells, what smells are there?
that can reconnect us to the present moment, which has an influence on our autonomic nervous system.
The last one I might mention is sort of a low hanging fruit in terms of connecting to the nervous system is about the breath.
If somebody's in an up-regulated state, chances are the breathing is fast, probably a little bit shallow, not as expansive as it could be.
So if people start to recognize
that the breathing feels a certain way, and they can start to learn a practice where they pause for a minute.
Take a deep breath.
I'm a big fan of what's called a physiological sigh, where you exhale audibly, making a sighing sound.
Doing that a few times can be a very down-regulating.
That's actually the first homework I have for almost any client.
As I say,
If you have lost your ability to authentically sigh regularly throughout the day, then when you're driving or you're alone and nobody's listening to you, you need to practice your ability, even if it's a little forced, to sigh again.
And that actually will retrain your nervous system as one of its self-regulation mechanisms.
I love that.
That's great advice.
I have really been incorporating this
When I feel the sense of the stress and anxiety, which is almost always stopping, pausing, noticing what's going on in my body and then using my other senses to calm myself down.
And I love the audible side.
The only thing I would add to that is if you live with a partner, maybe let them know that's what you're doing because I walk around the house.
Oh, my husband's like, what's wrong?
What's going
on
now?
And I'm just like, just retraining my nervous system.
No worries.
Go watch your way.
Yes, good point.
Great, great advice.
I want to talk a little bit about stress and trauma.
What are the physical manifestations of stress and trauma?
in the body long term.
But you know what, actually, before we go down that path, because we've said the word trauma now a couple different times, and another thing that's big out there are gaining some traction is this big T trauma and little T trauma.
And I will have you explain that a little further.
I'm sure you could do it much better than I.
Yeah, good point.
So, um,
just like the word somatic, you know, trauma awareness, the trauma informed movement is really something that's gained a lot of traction very usefully from my point of view.
And when we, and so we started to talk about
You know, in the previously, when, you know, if we go back a decade or two, and maybe even, you know, in some circles, this would still be the idea.
If we're talking about trauma, we would mostly be thinking about the capital T traumas or the kinds of things that anybody would think of as traumatic.
I was assaulted.
I was in a car accident and almost died.
um these kinds of things that that uh almost anybody you know I experienced war um these would be what may be considered um uh big tea traumas and those are common and need attention and support but what I think there's also a growing awareness around is that is what we've started what sometimes call little tea traumas which are much much more common and uh
aren't going to necessarily lead to the...
PTSD in the clinical sense of the term, yet they have an influence on our nervous system and then can stay with us in ways that we're not necessarily aware of.
So, I think of them as very personal, like what might be a little tea trauma to you, might not have any influence on me and vice versa, but there's a lot of things could be included in.
One big category is things that go back to, especially
childhood years, the idea that let's say you didn't receive the kind of support or emotional attunement or you grew up in a family where we're expressing, you had to suck up, if you were hurt or sad, you had to kind of suck up that emotion.
It wasn't sort of allowed in the family system or anger or some other kind of emotional response.
Then
That's one example of what might be called a little T trauma.
Other examples are injuries that end up resolving okay, or health procedures that go well, yet at the nervous system level, there's some guarding at the body level, or there's some fear or anxiety that can show up as a response to it.
So I think of little T traumas as very personal.
I don't think there's a single human being on the planet that doesn't have
trauma from that perspective of these little things that have shaped our nervous system over the years.
That makes sense.
And I remember sharing with somebody the other day and they just kind of laughed and said, oh, that's true that I think as adults, we spent a lot of our adulthood trying to recover from what was done in childhood.
And it's not to mean that we had
bad parents or bad intentions.
It's just that life is, is stressful.
There's a lot of generational, you know, patterns that are passed along that even our parents didn't know might have been harmful.
And then, you know, and it's, it's what we do with it.
It's how we show up.
And you're right.
I think little T trauma is a big, huge spectrum.
And I don't think that there's one person on the face of the earth that isn't impacted by it in some way.
You know, it could be the, the bully on the.
playground that called you fat when you were eight and it's stuck with you and it totally changed your life and that kid would have never remembered ever saying it to you and probably would have felt terrible if you brought it to their attention now, but damage is done.
And so these kind of emotions get, you know, kind of literally, I guess, stuck in us, right?
How does that play out long
term?
Yeah, so let's use your example of the bully.
So creating a shame response.
So shame, I really like that example because I was thinking of a very similar example earlier this morning.
So in that example, the shame response is not just a thought, like, oh, I'm feeling embarrassed, but there's a whole physiology connected to it.
So our nervous system actually shifts gears.
When we're in a shame process, shift gears, we go into what's technically called a bit of a dorsal state.
We don't need to get into the details there, but it recruits a protective branch of our nervous system that shuts things down a little bit.
I bet most people can recognize that if they're feeling ashamed or they remember experience where they felt shame, that they may have felt physically smaller.
Their breathing might have changed.
Some people might even feel a sensation in their skin connected to shame, like the skin crawling kind of a feeling.
And so those are part of the
physiology of shame.
So any emotion, anger, shame, joy, grief, there's a there's a clear bodily or physiological aspect.
And what when we talk about
a situation that can come up is when we don't have enough support, like using your example, if somebody had, if a teacher or a parent had helped you through, I'm not saying this is you in your example, your bully example, but let's say it was for a minute, if somebody supported you during that, you might be able to complete
the process of shame, come back to a feeling of safety and connection and then leave that behind you and then it wouldn't stay with you as a little tea trauma particularly.
But if you just sort of internalized it, you didn't really get help or support, you didn't process it, then it could be that that remains as an unresolved physiological response and then later similar situations.
bring in a similar feeling of insecurity or a little bit of that shame response and that almost then becomes a part of your personality that you're carrying with you even into your adult life.
And so somatic approaches in general are seeing if we can
find those unresolved physiological processes and create the conditions that help them complete and restore to homeostasis again.
So I want to add though, because I think a lot of people, you know, using the example, if you were bullied by your weight or had it had a comment, and it's three decades later and it's still impacting you, you're you've long since made.
that connection.
If it's regarding weight, I don't, as a 50-year-old woman, go into a restaurant and think about what an eight-year-old boy said to me when I make my dining decisions, right?
But it's still very much there, and I'm very much impacted.
Now, if you can't make that connection, if you don't know where this feeling is coming from, is that necessary?
Do you learn that through somatic therapy, or does it not even matter?
It's just about healing.
That's a great question.
Sometimes it's useful to make the connection, oh yeah, this traces back to this particular memory.
Sometimes that's helpful and that can come up.
Oftentimes it doesn't.
The connection isn't there.
We're not so much working in the past, but we're more working in the present moment.
And if somebody's aware that they have a shame response that's habitual, we can work with that somatically without even necessarily connecting back to the earlier experiences.
I'm here today speaking with Alex Green from Red Beard Somatic Therapy.
When we come back, we are going to talk more about mental health, trauma, your nervous system, and how you can support yourself to live your best life.
are listening to The Empowered Caregiver and I am your host, Liza Hellenbrand.
Today I'm talking with Alex Green from Red Beard Somatic Therapy.
So we have been speaking about stress and trauma in your nervous system and how they all kind of go together and how little tea trauma or...
Things that have happened in your past can kind of have an imprint on your body and be stuck and can have some negative results years and decades later and you may not even make the connection or realizing that it's happening.
So it's really about gaining this awareness so that you can live in a more calm and peaceful state.
And I want to talk a little bit about, I read on your website, TRE.
And I'm not sure exactly what that one is.
That one's a new to me, new to me.
What exactly Alex is TRE and how does it work and how can it help people?
Yeah, great question.
So TRE stands for attention and trauma releasing exercises.
And to me, it's one of the more innovative and interesting methods that we include in our approach to somatic therapy.
I'll describe it a little bit.
It's a strange process, but can be really, really helpful.
So do you remember when I shared one of that early experience and I went through the 10 sessions of body work and in my third session I had had kind of a shaking response, trembling in a shaking process?
Well, what I later learned is that that process of trembling and discharge, and you mentioned EMDR earlier, sometimes people in EMDR would have a vibration or a trembling as their processing and their physiology.
So what TRE is, is it's a method of intentionally
inviting what's called the neurogenic tremor reflex or which basically is a trembling similar to if you got a little shaky before you were giving a public speech or you were a little rattled by something and your hands were shaky or the way that our dog might get frightened in a thunderstorm and be a bit quivery and shaky.
Well it turns out that the reason that humans and animals have that shaking process
is as a biological way to, it's an attempt to help re-regulate the nervous system.
So the reason that that happens is to sort of dump the adrenaline that's in the system with a high stress arousal.
And actually, it's rather than just being a side effect or a sign that we're scared, it's actually a process that if we allow that to happen within a feeling of safety, it's actually gonna lead us
to a more relaxed, down-regulated nervous system state.
So the practice of TRE is a process using first relaxation and breath and then some movements where you can learn how to lay on the floor and literally stimulate this vibration in your legs and later the rest of your body and work with it consciously, often for 15 or 20 minutes at a time or sometimes less.
and the effect of it is feeling much more relaxed in your body and your nervous system.
It's a key cornerstone of our work at Redbeard partly because what we often do is we get somebody started with that method or we include it with some of the other approaches that we use.
We love it because it's something people can learn to do independently and it's a powerful nervous system self-regulation tool that people can do all by themselves.
So I did that once with Redbeard online on one of your online offerings.
And it is hard to explain on the radio format what that looks like, but it didn't take long.
I'm not a physically super fit person.
And I was able to able to go along with the steps.
And I did have that, that tremoring and kind of shaking in my, in my legs.
And I thought, Oh, this is super weird.
How is this even helpful in the slightest?
And then when I was done, I've never felt so relaxed in my life.
It was amazing.
Yeah.
So I definitely encourage people to check that out and to go to your website.
What is, uh, what is your, uh, web address?
What website is redbeardseumatictherapy.com redbeardseumatictherapy.com
classes and services are all sort of listed there.
And that is a very easy way to help release that trauma, that stress in your body you will feel absolutely great after.
And I kind of want to end on that, the after.
When you gain this level of awareness, when you incorporate, you know, the techniques and offerings that you have and
I guess do some of the work, right?
You have to do some of the work if you want to get to this more calm and peaceful state.
I had said during the commercial break, I'm not sure I even know what that feels like.
I'm just jacked up all the time and I'm learning, I'm trying, but what does it feel like, Alex, when you do the work and you get to the place that you want to be?
I can't even imagine.
Tell me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
Well, I'm going to use the language that I hear from, from a lot of clients who embark upon this work.
So, so one thing I want to dispel the myth that doing somatic work will turn you into sort of this permanently blissed out, always relaxed Zen master.
That's not even the goal of somatic work.
But what I consider the goal is we can discover that we have a new home base.
And what I mean by home base
is that instead of our default state being kind of in a go, go, go tense body, active mind, high heart rate, stress response, we can learn that actually we can, although that'll happen, life comes at us in lots of different ways.
It's actually more accessible than we realize to come into what we often would call a more grounded state.
where our muscles are more relaxed, our mind is calmer, our breath is more available to us.
People often describe it as like I'm in my body or I feel comfortable or my baseline is more relaxed.
When something comes at me, I'm more even keel or even after I got a little bit worked up by something, but it was easier to get back to my
home, my new, my embodied home base.
So that's kind of the way that I would describe the direction of progress in this, in this work.
Well, I like that you mentioned that that's a great point because
Very few of us are going to become Zen, Zen masters and life is going to continue to throw us curveballs.
So it's natural to go in and out of these states.
But when you create the awareness, you know, you're in a state that's not good.
You have the tools and the resources to bring yourself back.
And, you know, not only would you feel more calm and relaxed, present in the moment.
I think, you know, one thing we didn't even really touch on and now we don't have time.
is just the frontal cortex, how your mind can literally just shut down when you're in these states.
And so it reduces the opportunity to think outside the box and to make some of these connections, like you said, the tunnel vision.
Alex, I wish I had about a million more hours to talk to you.
You are such
a
well-known knowledge.
And thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for sharing with us today.
Thank you so much, Lisa.
This has been a real pleasure.
Yeah, you bet.
Take care.
