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Hello and welcome to this next episode of Courageous Leaders Connected Teams. I'm your host, Stephanie Freeth, and I am so excited to have Mark Gerow with us here today.
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Mark is an amazing person who has studied a lot of trauma-informed practices and modalities to help with nervous system regulation. And so I want to welcome Mark. Mark, good to see you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for the invitation and I appreciate it. Look forward to talking to you. Oh absolutely. Well so
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let's let everybody know how we met.
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I was at Miraval. It's a resort and spa in the Berkshires. It's one of my, it's my happy place. I love going to Miraval. And, Mark was there offering a session called TRE, which stands for Trauma or Tension Release Exercise, and my friend had told me about it. She said, you've got to go do this thing.
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This is amazing. And I didn't really know what I was getting into. And I went to Mark's session, and it was transformative. And I'm going to let Mark describe what TRE is
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and I've worked with Mark, you know, one-on-one since our session. We've done some breathwork sessions. So every time I go to Miraval, I go to see Mark.
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And I'm amazed by his vast knowledge, both from a lived experience but also all the modalities. That Mark has pursued and has this deep knowledge. So I'm really excited to have Mark tell us about how really applied to, applying this to leadership. How can leaders learn techniques and tools to regulate their nervous systems, and how important that is, and also how accessible it can be.
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That's really what I want to share and spotlight with Mark today.
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Well, let's start with Miraval. I was kind of recruited there as a specialist, and the wonderful thing about being a specialist at Miraval is you bring your specialty. And what is that for me? Basically, the tools that I've been using in my own life as someone who has experienced some early childhood trauma. I was in the military for 12 years.
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I started using certain tools and techniques as a ten-year-old, drinking and drugging to try to help myself sleep and lower anxiety. And, you know, the crazy thing is, it worked. And it helped me survive those early years. And then at some point, I got sober about 14, almost 15 years ago. And from there, I realized I'm harboring a lot inside, you know, compartmentalizing.
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And I think as an adjunct to some of the talk therapy I'm doing, I think I need to do some somatic work. I need to work with the, what we call the issues in our tissues. Right. And working with triggers, emotions, learning to lean in, learning to do hard things, sit with emotions. And I came across TRE.
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It was a lifesaver for me because I had tried to work with my own physical pain for many, many years doing very common modalities. Getting a massage, acupuncture, reiki, chiropractic, physical therapy, and all these modalities.
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It resulted in temporary relief, right? So let's be honest, when you get a massage, how long does it take before you're tired again?
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You know, if you're lucky, maybe a day or two. Some people even say 20 minutes. When I leave the office and get in my car, I'm tired again. So it was temporary, and I was really in a very desperate place. And someone, one of my colleagues, actually, in a rehab that I worked at, had asked me if I tried TRE.
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And it's the one thing I hadn't heard of yet. The work has reached over 7 million people in 90 different countries. I had not heard of it. TRE, I know, right? And so I found a provider and in my first session I thought, this is amazing. What my body is doing, and there's hope for me yet. I feel my body is processing something and releasing.
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But after my third session, I woke up the next morning, and my 12-year back pain was gone and it never returned. More importantly, never returned. So what this is. It was created by a doctor named David Berceli, and he has a doctorate in clinical social work. Master's in Theology, Arabic. He's a bioenergetic therapist. He's a massage therapist who knows the body well, and his work led him to warzones.
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And from there he started to notice some interesting things. Every time a bomb would go off, he gives the example of being in the basement of a building in Lebanon where there were children and adults, that every time a bomb would go off and the building would shutter, everyone's body would contract and protect. And he started to theorize, well, if there's a genetically encoded mechanism that protects the body, just someone sitting at a desk for 12 hours a day, highly contracted, rounded, hunched over, that's what happens naturally.
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Then there must be this genetically encoded mechanism to unwind the body, to move the body from a fight/flight state into the parasympathetic or rest/digest. Recover back to social interaction and cues. So, in there is, and it's called neurogenic tremoring. So that's what TRE is. It's inducing after seven exercises to prepare the body, inducing this neurogenic tremor.
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And you know at first it seems crazy, seems weird. It's what is my body doing? I'm not good at letting go. I need to control this. That kind of thing. This is what we work with. So we really, emphasize holding space, creating ways to self-regulate, to rest, to, you know, stop doing what we're doing in order to feel safe, and if your animal body, your reptilian brain, and your animal body feels safe, guess what?
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Processing of information can happen. And de-stressing, releasing and letting go. So for me, it was a lifesaver. 12 years of back pain gone. Wow. Yeah. Wow. And
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it's fascinating to hear where that came from. And
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I'll describe my experience of trying to
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is kind of a normal exercise class. You're fatiguing
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the muscles in the lower body with wall sits and, you know, different ways of getting those legs.
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Because my understanding is that our body holds a lot of tension in the psoas muscle in that lower, kind of the lower body. And then you had us lie on the ground with
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our knees apart. And then that tremor event started.
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And but the way you walked us into it, it was like my whole upper body was calm.
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And there's all this. You know, shaking going on. And I'm not doing this movement. My body is bringing forth this movement. And, I'm a dancer. So I'm used to telling my body what to do. I'm used to, you know, conducting movement, and then to experience the tremor and for you to hold that container of this is safe.
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This is the body's intelligence. This is letting go.
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You know what it needs to process. It wasn't a mental thing whatsoever. It was the body's own intelligence releasing. And, I've got to say after that,
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you know, it took some getting used to. I'm just going to. I'm going to be present while this happens and just let it flow.
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I mean, that was probably 30-45 minutes. And then it did kind of come to a stop. And after I left Miraval, you know, usually I'm kind of jumpy in the front seat of a car when my husband's driving. And it was, my whole nervous system has this [release]. It was just this.
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It had come down, the reactivity of my nervous system, and
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I could just feel,
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It had come down a level. It's hard to describe what that was like.
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Now I know how to do that for myself. When the shaking starts,
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I just know how to let it run through my body.
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And it's such
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a gift and a skill, and I just want more people to know about it because it's so powerful. Yeah, it is a gift. It really is a gift from David Baceli. And I just want to touch upon, a couple of the points that you mentioned. So, yes, we're working with the
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Psoas as it attaches to the head of your femur bone, it goes through the pelvic bowl. It connects to the lumbar region, and it's up against your diaphragm muscle. Now this is your center. So we tend to, when we repress things and hold things in, it can feel very tight in the psoas is a difficult place to reach even with the massage.
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And then when we do some activation. So the preparation is the exercise. Is doing some mild, fatiguing, and some stretching that only lasts for, you know, a few minutes. And then we lie down, and we do an activation phase of it. And we don't tremor any more than 20 minutes with a minimum of ten. So 10 to 20 minutes is the optimal window of tremoring.
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And so once we get in, then we observe. I connect with people, talk to them about, you know, what are you noticing? Do you feel safe? If we don't feel safe or we feel weird. We feel, I don't know what's going on. Let's rest. Let's straighten the legs on the ground and let's rest. Let's allow the nervous system to settle, to downshift.
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And when you feel safe again, when you feel open, then let's reactivate. And these tremors. Just to be clear, sometimes, yes, what you experience is very, very common. Where just down from the diaphragm, lower down through the legs, you feel trembling. The upper body can feel so relaxed and chill. The mind starts to go blank. And sometimes, though the tremors do go up, they do go up the spine into the cranium.
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Shoulders, fingers flicker. Chin, eyelids. So it really is quite unusual. But once you, you know, take some deep breaths, settle in. And like you said, I'm just going to surrender to this and let my animal body kind of show me what it can do. Trust the process. And for a lot of the modalities that I do like cold plunging, Holotropic breathing, that requires a certain amount of trust about what this process is.
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And so that's why we often encourage people to get to work with a provider, you know, 3, 4 or 5 times. So you start to feel safe. You get to know the exercises, and you get to know the activation. How my body processes things from day to day, and then the integration and aftercare is important. And then you can do it again, you know, a couple times a week is sufficient.
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No more than that, normally 2 to 3 times a week. So yeah, it's great to be supervised, get to know the work. And then yes, you can start doing it on your own for sure. Yeah, thanks for those specifics. And I imagine, you know, having worked with so many people coming through Miraval, I'm just curious, kind of what you see in terms of people, you know, I
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talk a lot about,
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whole body leadership, meaning we're leading from our head and our heart
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Our gut and noticing body sensations as wisdom is really part of
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practice that I talk about.
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So what do you notice as people you know
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are having emotions run through them. And I'm just curious, things that you've heard through the years, and, you know, I don't want to have any confidentiality, you know, not maintained but just trends that you see as people have that experience. What's that like? Some of the trends that I see are that people, there's always a percentage in the room of people that are skeptical that their bodies will shake and tremor, that they think it's no way I'm shaking and trembling today.
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And, you know, I've worked with some pretty highly, intense people, you know, type A folks and everyone tremors. Everyone tremors. So once we get in, as long as you know, I could rest at any time, I can self-regulate at any time. And people start to say, okay, well, let me give this a try. Using the breath.
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But at first, yeah, it's there's a battle going on between the ego and the body and trying to control the experience. Because think about it. When I was a child going through some of my early childhood trauma, which it varied in different stages of my childhood and what the trauma was. So it was complex. And the one thing that I knew as a child that I needed to try to create, even if it was an illusion, was the idea of safety.
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So if I can feel like I'm in a safe environment and that's part of my job in a group setting, is to make people feel safe and to hold space and to give them options and choices. And as you do feel you have these options to rest at any time and self-regulate, then you start to trust the process and then the work begins.
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So any animal, even in the wild, must feel safe first. So when we talk about this, you know it can set people off a little bit, you know, and say, oh, this doesn't sound great, that I'm going to be shaking and trembling for 15 minutes or something. But we lay it out on the table, we talk about it and, you know, think about it for me, one of the things that I think I know from the addiction recovery field is that most of us, we just want relief.
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We want to feel good. So we will utilize anything like having some sugar or shopping or, you know, scrolling. We think, you know, doom scrolling. We think we're going to feel better, and we want that dopamine release. So, for me, one of the practices in my kind of daily dose methodology that I came up with is I don't want to stress my nervous system out.
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I don't want to take on too much, which is very common in the workplace, taking on too much. And I don't want to do that in my practices as well. I don't need to practice yoga for 90 minutes and then do an eight minute cold plunge and go for an hour hike. You know, I can do a five-minute meditation.
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I could do two minutes of qigong, I can do a 90-second cold shower, and that's fine. It's enough. It's enough to create a shift. And so what I'm training myself to do now is to lean into those difficult feelings, taking a cold shower or sitting in a yoga pose. I might do two poses on each side, and can I stay in this pose for a couple of minutes?
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Like let's say, a chair pose? So I'm in that chair pose for two minutes. Do I know how to regulate? Do I know how to come out of the pose just enough to stay at my edge? And at that edge, there is feeling and sensation and information coming through. And as long as I'm not pushing myself past my own designated threshold, then good things begin to process and integrate and release from the body.
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And so that's the way it is for TRE as well. It's feel safe, know that you can come in and out of this, and let's see what the body is going to process today. Yeah. Makes it beautiful. Totally. And I think for our listeners, just having the sense of the range of possibilities of what they can practice, because I imagine, you know, if somebody's going to give a presentation or they're nervous before a big meeting.
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Do you have favorite practices on the Daily Dose? You know, what do you recommend that people can bring into their day when they've got a lot going on? Yeah. Some people know tapping, EFT tapping. That's good. I don't do a lot of that anymore. But I used to tap. I do a lot of breathwork now. I will do some qigong, a little bit where I stand and do a little bit of bouncing on the floor to move my energy and ground my side, tapping my heels and do what's called shaking the pillar.
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And I do some tapping and let my whole body bounce and shake. But breathwork is one of the most probably accessible things that you can do. You carry it around with you all day. So let's say I know, like today, I knew I was coming on to this podcast, and there were some wonderful kind of anxious nerves. It is in the anxiety where you feel dread.
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It was the anxiety, excitement that I was coming, but I don't want it to overwhelm. I don't want to get a dry mouth. I don't want. I needed that, right? So I sat here before I actually, hit the start button, and came to you. I did some box breathing. It's box breathing I learned in the military.
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And so let's back up a little bit. Animals in the wild, they don't change the way they're breathing. Their breathing changes because of their environment. So if I feel nervous about, a little anxious, I might start to notice within myself. I'm sweating a little bit. I can feel my heart beating, a little more rapidly, or I feel that kind of like that elephant on my chest, or I begin to ruminate a bit too much.
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So I think, oh, things are building, things are shifting. What can I do? So box breathing. It's used when I was in the military, and it's used now in the category of just prior to a stressful event. That's when we do box breathing just prior to going online, giving that talk, talking to a family member about a difficult subject, talking to a lawyer, a doctor or whatever it is.
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But, you know, you were like these leaders, maybe they're leading a meeting or going into a kind of a highly stressful event. So then you can put your feet flat on the floor and you exhale first. And then just like a box that is an even lined square box. You inhale for about four seconds. Then you hold your breath for four, you exhale for four, and then you hold again for four.
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So the inhale and the exhale are even and they're not deep and they're not long. So just balanced. And even they're not going to send you into too much of an inhale stimulus, heart rate going up, too much of an exhale getting too sleepy. We want just even breath. And then there's this holding pattern. So animals hold their breath.
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Let's say a deer is eating wildflowers in a meadow, and it senses a mountain lion over there. It will hold its breath, tense the muscles, assess the danger. Oh, that's not a mountain lion. That was just a limb falling from a tree. Right? So then it goes back into that parasympathetic response. So animals will hold their breath when they're assessing a stressor,
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danger. So we are animals too. We're primates. We're mammals. We've got that reptilian brain we talked about. So if I'm going to hold my breath in a breath, practice, it's mostly about assessing something. And so in terms of going into a meeting, I can remind myself this isn't the end of the world. This isn't the end-all be-all.
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I just have to say what I know. And going into the meeting in a very centered and balanced way. So I'll do any of the breaths I might talk about today. Usually, I do 6 to 8 rounds, which is not all that long, but it gives a chance for the chemistry, maybe a little bit of adrenaline or cortisol that's been released into the bloodstream,
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neurotransmitters to dissolve. And we need about 90 seconds. And that's the same for when I'm doing cold plunges to I step in. It's, oh my God, I'm going to die. You know, I'm going to die so that I get into the tub, you know, or into the shower, up to my shoulders, maybe my face, you know, in the shower, and I catch my breath.
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And I just need to be there for about 90 seconds. This is the time limit of adaptability. This is when I start noticing chemistry is changing. But blood pressure, things are dissolving in my bloodstream, and I feel in control again in 90 seconds. And that's really for any big emotion. If I'm angry and let's say anger, another big emotion if I'm angry, I don't want that to hijack me, to overtake me, to debilitate me in some way.
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I don't want to go into the red zone. So I might acknowledge my anger or my feeling and then do something like breath work. And now I can kind of moderately experience it, harness something else, and communicate about my anger or in terms of going on the podcast this morning, you know, doing the box breathing 6 to 8 rounds and then something shifted and I realized, this is exciting, but not so much that I'm feeling like, I'm not going to be able to speak, you know, so I regulated myself to just 6 or 8 rounds.
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Yeah. So when do you want to do some box breathing? Sure. Just to give people an experience of that. It's like, yeah, it's such a great tool to have in your tool belt. So your feet are flat on the ground and your spine is long and you feel you have a little space in your diaphragm to breathe. And so we'll just exhale first. Just let the breath out and then follow me breathing through your nose.
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Inhale for 321. Hold for 321. Exhale for 321. Hold for 321. Inhale for 321. Hold for 321. Exhale for 321. Hold for 321. And it's as simple as that. You do that 6 or 8 rounds, and you'll feel a shift. Something has shifted. It doesn't mean that everything's going to go away. The anxiety that I feel, it's not going to necessarily go away, it's just manageable.
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I'm now in a place that I feel centered and grounded. And this is also true for another breath that I teach people called coherent breathing. It's a breath that was studied by the Institute of HeartMath, and they studied this breath. It's basically five seconds in, five seconds out, and I use a track called Two Bells that the bells are timed exactly for coherent breathing if I don't like counting.
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And what this amounts to is that you're breathing six breaths per minute, that the average human being is told by nurses and doctors that you should be breathing 16 to 20 breaths per minute. To me, that seems very fast. But it's normal. For most people, that is normal. And some people even breathe much faster than that. So 16 to 20 might be an improvement.
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But for this, it's six breaths per minute. And what the Institute of HeartMath noticed was that when you are in there a few minutes, six breaths per minute, five seconds in, five seconds out, your brainwaves, your heart rate and your emotional state all come into an optimal state. We call it coherence. Engineers use the word coherence when they make a machine that's in its optimal state of maneuvering, right of processing.
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And so we want our physiology to also be in an optimal state. So I think we have a track here. There's our producer in the background, your producer. And so we can play just 30 seconds of that just to show you the sound, possibly. If not we can just count. Can you hear the sounds tapping? I can, yeah.
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Can we bring that up a little bit higher volume?
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That higher bell you just heard I use for the inhale.
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The lower one for the exhale. Feel free to breathe in through your nose and even out through pursed lips if it helps.
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Here comes the inhale.
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And the exhale. So it's two bells. It's five seconds in five, four, three, two, 15432154321. And it's recommended that you do this five minutes in the morning, maybe midday. Get out of your chair. Go someplace else. Put on your iPods, sit in practice for five minutes. Some coherent breathing, and then maybe again five minutes before bedtime. It's so simple.
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And yet I could feel it in my physiology. There, there again, it's just a settling. There's, I'm getting in contact with the now moment I'm present. I'm available. I'm here. That's what's really both simple and profound. And it's a manipulating of your breathing pattern to change the messaging to the brain. Maybe before you were feeling off center, a little out of whack.
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And what we're sending the message maybe that I feel balanced, but I feel here, centered and nothing is pushing or pulling at me right now. And I feel that just after a couple of minutes, sometimes I'll be working with a client, on their trauma, and sometimes we would try. We don't tell our stories because the body knows the story, right?
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It knows everything. Great. But sometimes I'll work in other ways and someone will be telling me a story, and it'll trigger something within me. An old experience, a memory and an emotional response. And sometimes I have this tendency to dissociate. I've been using that tool since I was a child. We had to just disappear from my body as a way to feel safe, and it'll happen in the middle of a session.
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And when I notice that I'm doing that, the client doesn't know it. But I have come back to coherent breathing, and I know what it feels like five seconds in, five seconds out. I don't even have to count anymore. I don't have to hear the bells. I just know how it feels. And I'll get into this. And it's a little difficult at first, as you'll find if you practice to get that breathing kind of open and it's like the Tin Man, you have to apply some of the lubricant in there and get that diaphragm moving.
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But then within probably now within 30 seconds of doing that and back centered, as you said, centered. I'm grounded. I'm here. I'm present again. I'm beautiful. And, I want to take a slightly different, turn. I work with the Enneagram, and I know that you were talking about. Hey, I felt a little nervous before coming on the podcast, and you had shared with me that you identify with Enneagram Type five, which is the Quiet Specialist, and oftentimes when I'm working with fives, they want that deep knowledge, but they also can get overwhelmed by other people's emotions.
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And so they can guard their time, their resources. And they also that stimulation that's coming at them, they can feel like, oh, you know, too much. So I can imagine as a five, these tools have been really helpful. I'm also just curious to hear how being in an Enneagram type five shows up for you and your day-to-day work and practices.
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Yeah, I always think of the totem animal of a five as an owl. Right. And I remember as a child sitting in the back of the classroom, not because I didn't want to learn, I really wanted to learn, but I needed to be back there. Not front and center, not being watched, not being called upon. But I just want to take in the information.
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And then when I left the military, I realized some of the trauma there had made me even more vigilant and even more of a processor of information. So facial expressions, information and just you saying to me today, you know, we have a parameter that we're going to try not to go over, we're going to do it for x amount of time.
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That was helpful for me to know that we're not going to go over this amount of time. We have a boundary. You know, I feel safe now. So thank you for that. And so that helps me a lot. And I'm also what you might consider an introvert, and I'm really comfortable with speaking to other people in public and leading a workshop.
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But I need to recharge. So I need to guard my resources. I need to have my time alone. And so after this, I'm just going to go, you know, get some tea, sit still for a bit, you know, maybe go out into nature in my backyard and just regroup, resettle, recenter after giving a lot of energy right now.
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So these tools, yes, have been very, very helpful because as you might know from a five, we're very mental, very heady. I want to do research. I'm watching podcasts all the time. I'm well, I'm reading articles. I'm reading books. I've got 17 books on my bookcase next to my bed. You know, that's half read because my mind just goes from here to here to this resource.
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And I love it. Some people say Mark, how can you do that? Not finish a book from the beginning to the end. That's just the way I am. I'm a researcher. I love having all kinds of information coming at me, but there is a time when I have to remind myself. As of five, Mark, you've had three cups of coffee.
00:32:36:09 - 00:33:01:09
You have not stopped. You forgot to eat. And I need you to eat. I need you to get grounded, do a little bit of meditation. And when I say meditation, I mean five minutes, right? That's it. And it might be coherent breathing. It might be another meditation, but that's what I need to do to create balance, because I can go the whole day without eating.
00:33:01:11 - 00:33:38:04
Wow. But good for me because I'm just in my head practicing information. And it's helpful for the things that I need to do in life. But I need to really watch and balance myself, knowing my own tendencies. Right. So I got to follow up on that, knowing also that you love all these different books and resources. What are your favorite, books or authors that you want to recommend to this group of leaders who want to learn about their nervous system, who want to learn about how to lead, from their whole body self.
00:33:38:06 - 00:33:59:08
I know you and I had talked about "The Body Keeps The Score" by Bessel van der Kolk has been really influential. I know Peter Levine's work has been influential in this whole field of Somatics. Any other others you want to really highlight that people should check out? Yeah. Let me go through a couple of them.
00:33:59:08 - 00:34:24:00
So, trying to think Gabor Mate. He has a number of books. One that's for addiction, the one that it's called, "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts," there's one that and trauma. He just came out with a new book, "The Myth of [Normal]." Now I'm going to have to try to find that.
00:34:24:04 - 00:34:39:19
Yeah. There are books. Yeah. Peter Levine, "Waking the Tiger." "The Body Keeps The Score," we mentioned.
00:34:39:21 - 00:35:02:01
There are so many. And we should have a list. We'll put it in the show notes, so bookmarks, favorites in the show notes. There's a book that I want to mention that I've given to people. Some of my clients that are in the corporate world that have many, many employees and have meetings and talk about things, emotions, actually, and practices.
00:35:02:01 - 00:35:41:16
And that was one of the reasons why I met this gentleman. And we did breathwork meditation. We did a number of things, and I gave him a book called "The Object is the Way," and it's by Ryan Holiday, and it's about stoicism. It's about this idea that can we understand what's out of my control, which is most everything, and then understand what's in my control, which you know, if you're, with any luck at all, it'll be how you're processing the information that's coming at you, the experiences in life, how am I processing that?
00:35:41:16 - 00:36:09:28
How am I maneuvering through life? Because we I don't think a good intention is to look for a life of no stress, because that's not realistic at all. There is stress every day. There's going to be problems and stressors and trauma. It's going to happen. And so if we, you know, the analogy is there's always going to be stormy seas.
00:36:10:00 - 00:37:00:06
We're not going to find a lifestyle for that. There's no waves in the ocean. So it's better to build, a sturdy ship. Right. Meaning your container. Right. Your body. And so the object is the way is a great book on, you know, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and all these great Stoics that really talked about these practices of meditation, of observation, and doing these tools in order to work with the storms that they're I'm currently experiencing in my life right now, a storm and I'm trying on a day to day basis to allow myself to acknowledge what I'm experiencing, to know that because of what I'm experiencing right now, I have a very
00:37:00:06 - 00:37:26:04
busy day. There is a chance that I'm going to be impatient with some of the clients, some of the people that I'm going to run into. There's a good chance I might be a little heightened in my emotion, a little less patient. And so knowing that I can work with today, I know that I've got X, Y, and Z on my calendar.
00:37:26:06 - 00:37:51:10
I've got these sessions, these classes, these workshops. And if I know that, you know, I'm already at a heightened level, well, I'm going to need throughout the day to really check in, do some of my of own practices, and know when I'm interacting with someone. The possibility is that I'm either not listening, or I could be a little impatient.
00:37:51:12 - 00:38:17:25
And that's just what happened to me yesterday. So, you know, in my office, in between my classes and my private work, I'll do some practices just, you know, it could be just two minutes. And that's been very helpful to me, to know what you're working with. The intention is not to have no storms, no choppy seas. But I'm continuing to build this sturdy ship.
00:38:17:27 - 00:39:05:06
It's going to be able to navigate through these storms from day to day. Then I really appreciate and be grateful for the calm. You know, there's the beautiful sunset and the calm seas when it happened. But I'm not expecting it every day because I'm a practitioner. That's an unrealistic goal, right? And then building that boat through your body, through these practices, TRE, and breathwork. You're making sure your container is strong and that when you meet other people, that in relationship with them and because we are we dance together with each other's nervous systems and so that awareness of your own self-regulatory practices come in contact with people doing this work.
00:39:05:08 - 00:39:31:11
It's beautiful. It's not perfect. It. And yet it is, the dance of life that we're here to do. So I love your examples of how you've navigated. I love how you just put that as a dancer yourself and really working intertwined with other people's nervous systems. That's exactly right. Is that you have no idea what this person is working with, what their how they're living in their bodies and their nervous system.
00:39:31:14 - 00:39:57:07
So if I can create a little more bandwidth in my own mind and body, then I can be a receiver of that information instead of coming into, which we all do, where we come into a meeting, we come into a session and we're already up to here choking on our stress, and we have no bandwidth. We have our muscles that are tight, and it's just probably not going to go as well as you'd like.
00:39:57:10 - 00:40:20:15
Yeah. And that awareness, I often say the inner game runs the outer game. So the more we can be in touch with that inner game, we can work with it through physical practices, through emotional practices. It just elevates our capacity to stay regulated or for dysregulated know how to work with that. Know that, hey, this storm is out running.
00:40:20:20 - 00:40:47:29
I'm not going to make myself bad for being dysregulated. My body is wise. Trusting the body, and being able to draw from it, I think is so important. Well, self-compassion, right. Because we know we're going to be dysregulated. We know we're going to say something that, you know, some time that we regret. You know, I should have kept my mouth closed, but you need to be more compassionate to ourselves because we are these beings, these animals that have been through things.
00:40:47:29 - 00:41:05:11
And they will show up. And have you heard of the book, "It's an inside job"? I don't think I've heard of that one. No, it's a meditation book. It's about meditation. But that, you know what you were just saying? It is an inside job. We need to really tune in. What's going on in my inner landscape?
00:41:05:13 - 00:41:31:25
Yeah. Beautiful. And I want to, I always ask all of my guests, what does courageous leadership mean to you? Or what's courage in your life? And so I'm just curious, what does courageous leadership mean to you? Well, for me, I mean, this is just purely from my perspective, my point of view, which is the only one I have.
00:41:31:27 - 00:41:53:25
And that is what being courageous is, let's say, even in the 12-step program that I participated in, there was this anonymity. Right? You don't want to share someone, that someone else is in the program. You know where they need to share that themselves. But when I was in the 12-step program, I found that there was not a lot of sharing outside of the meeting.
00:41:53:27 - 00:42:41:21
There wasn't this idea that I can talk to my friends, family, that I'm struggling, that I'm in recovery, that I'm in active recovery. And so for me, I think part of being courageous is being slightly vulnerable, knowing that we're all human and that we have our weaknesses, we have our challenges. And if I can tell a little bit of my story in a way that helps someone else open up or realize that I'm human too, and I'm working with my issues, then I find there's a strength that comes through and there's a deeper connection that happens between people in their nervous systems when, you know, hey, this person is being very vulnerable and open
00:42:41:21 - 00:43:02:25
right now about their challenges. And then that's where I'm coming from with these teachings, with my own lessons that I've learned in my life. I've been very challenged. And I chose, you know, for one, you know, because I had two boys. I had, you know, dad and other men in my family, alcoholics. I've chosen to break the cycle.
00:43:02:27 - 00:43:29:14
And in doing so, talking to other men and other people about my own challenges. And one of them, just for instance, and maybe a little TMI, but I experienced sexual abuse as a child and when I started at least sharing a little bit of that in the rehab that I worked at, other men would come forth and say, oh my God, I'm so glad you said that.
00:43:29:14 - 00:44:01:15
I, too, have experienced something similar to that. And I've never told anyone that. Never worked with it before. And it's affecting my relationships, it's affecting my sleep, my health. And so that repression of emotion and those experiences is what some of the trauma-informed work that I do kind of addresses without having to necessarily share the stories. So I think courage is partly about that for me.
00:44:01:17 - 00:44:25:02
Is being vulnerable, opening up. Thank you for your willingness to share that. I'm sorry that you had to go through that. And I marvel at how you are, as you said, choosing to use that experience as a way to connect with people. You could choose to have it make you bitter, which I'm sure there have been episodes of that.
00:44:25:02 - 00:44:57:22
And yet at this stage, you're choosing to connect, and that vulnerability is your doorway. And I do think it's kind of that contagious in a good way. As you said, if you share that with someone, you're vulnerable. They're like, hey, I've never shared this with anyone, and that you start to create that compassionate, those connections. And often I do find that vulnerability, that the thing that we're most scared to say because, it feels scary.
00:44:57:24 - 00:45:28:10
It's what connects us with other human beings. Right. And I think that's, you know, not to get into politics or anything, but that's I think part of the issue is, are we talking to everyone? Are we talking to your neighbor and folks that you might not talk to? And I see people all the time that I might not meeting them on the street, you know, share what I'm sharing or listen to their story.
00:45:28:12 - 00:46:07:21
But I'm glad that I run into people of all walks of life and hear their stories. And what you realize is that we're all the same. We're all the same, and we're all walking around with wounds that have come through our lived experience. And I recently wrote a couple things on LinkedIn about when we make decisions from our wounds that haven't been healed, they come out as judgment, blame, criticism, projection, all these things that we're seening as very reactive in our culture.
00:46:07:24 - 00:46:39:09
And I fundamentally believe that it's in turning towards our own wounds rather than running away from them that we heal ourselves and often how we have support to do that. We have people guiding us through these types of exercises, right? That's how we change our world by attending to the wounds that we're carrying, so that then we don't show up from that wounded place and start, you know, having those wounds get sprayed onto other people.
00:46:39:09 - 00:47:06:28
I really feel what's happening right now is a call for care and compassion towards our wounds and being with others to know that they've been wounded, too, and any number of ways. And think about that. I think we know that intuitively that we can turn towards those things and lean into the hard places. But doing it is a whole other story.
00:47:06:28 - 00:47:31:28
And so we need a support system. As you said, of teachers and providers and people that have gone through this type of exploration and investigation, excavating inside. And so sometimes I write as well as you. I like writing because I can excavate, and I can start with just putting my shovel in the soil there and then start to dig a hole.
00:47:32:04 - 00:47:56:08
And then ultimately that leads to a tunnel over here to a whole other set of things. And so I can just let myself work through the sensations in feeling breath by breath. And so I do writing and breathing and meditating and then writing. And sometimes, I have on my phone and on my watch, I have a little app that I just speak into and record.
00:47:56:08 - 00:48:33:16
And then it sends to my email and it's an AI app that gathers all of what I've said, formalizes it, and gives it a title, and then it's in a file. It's called it's called speak something, speak easy or speak but it's a great app. But anyway, so I'll get an idea. And it used to be like I'll be listening to music in the car, or I'm listening to a podcast where someone is talking about that excavation process and those emotions and trauma or whatever it might be, and then something comes up for full feeling comes up in me, and then I just hit the app, talk
00:48:33:16 - 00:48:58:28
about it. Then I'll write about it and go a little bit deeper. And so for us, we may need help with guidance, with prompts, with meditations. And so, you know, I've made a few recordings on the Insight Timer app just to help people through some of that, or, you know, guiding someone and try or hold the topic of breathing or cold cleansing, you know, that kind of thing where we need support, especially at first.
00:48:59:01 - 00:49:18:29
As we get better, we can start to support ourselves as we build our container. So I got to tell a story myself since you brought up all the Holotropic breathing. So I did a session with Mark, and I mentioned I'm a dancer earlier. And so sometimes when I do these types of sessions, I don't have words come through.
00:49:18:29 - 00:49:40:04
It comes through my body, it comes through as movement. And I remember, I was moving around. And I remember you saying later, that was the craziest session. I wanted to keep you safe. And here you are moving and, okay, there's other people in the room. This definitely happened to me, my husband at the time, so that was good.
00:49:40:04 - 00:50:03:10
But so you get right. Still my husband! But that's just great that you allowed yourself to actually move around and allow the energy to be expressed that way. And that's where when we do Holotropic breathing, which, by the way, used to be with LSD, takes you into an altered state. You go into the subconscious, and a lot of times people will experience things physically, emotionally.
00:50:03:10 - 00:50:24:20
They get downloads of information, they release things. And so a lot of times my instruction is let out primal sounds and move your body because we don't move like animals anymore. We don't let out primal sounds. So it can be very challenging. And even though I remind people too it's time to give you this.
00:50:24:22 - 00:50:41:26
Ultimately, you get someone doing the breathing. They have the eye mask on the headset, and no one is moving. No one's letting out a sound at all. And then stuff starts happening where the body starts getting tense, and I've got to go over to them and you know, and guide them and say, okay, it's time for movement and sound.
00:50:41:26 - 00:51:08:19
Let's do it. And ultimately, bam, energies are shifting right at that point. It's amazing. Yeah, movement and sound are so crucial for emotional healing and having people who can walk you through that experience, it matters. And I think these effects are cumulative, whether we're doing a daily dose practice, whether we did a TRE session, having been able to do these things.
00:51:08:19 - 00:51:36:05
It really, to me, is a long-term caretaking of our nervous system so that when I'm in that storm, I'm not getting as dysregulated as I used to. I have the capacity to hold more. And if I am getting dysregulated, I know how to kind of come out of it. So I'm just so grateful to you for what you've brought to me, what you bring to others, and I want to make sure people can find you.
00:51:36:05 - 00:52:02:14
So where if people want to learn more about your work, where should they come find you? Yeah. The website is the Daily Dose Wellness, and I've got another one that's attached, my daily dose practices, which is going to be eventually a YouTube channel with a lot of these practices and little bites. And I was going to say, you know, there's a book called Tiny Habits or Atomic Habits, and that's kind of the premise around this.
00:52:02:14 - 00:52:21:28
But it happened to me naturally during a state when I was in a very deep, dark place where I realized I can't do anything. I could just, you know, maybe hold a chair pose for 15 seconds. And then I broke down and it was crying, and they realized, I'm in a very sensitive place. I can only do small doses of things, so I'm not overwhelmed.
00:52:22:01 - 00:52:46:02
And then it dawned on me, hey, this is kind of the way I can work in light. So the Daily Dose wellness or my daily dose practices and, I'm on the Insight Timer. I have a few meditations. One, Yoga Nidra is going to be dropped soon, which is called non-sleep. Deep rest. Non-sleep deep rest is the new term that people have for Yoga Nidra now.
00:52:46:09 - 00:53:08:24
Andrew Huberman of the Huberman lab came up with that term I think. So that's going to be something that there's a science behind it. And whether you're still awake and aware consciously, but your body goes into a deep state of rest and relaxation, very regenerative. So that's the Insight Timer. The website. I do a lot of my work on Zoom, so feel free to reach out.
00:53:08:26 - 00:53:31:01
Yeah, I did a session with Mark, a couple sessions, I think on Zoom after we had done TRE in person and the Zoom session was really supportive as well. So for people who are not close to the Berkshires, I encourage you to reach out to Mark for support in that way. So is there anything you want to say to feel complete for today?
00:53:31:01 - 00:53:51:03
I am so grateful to you. This has been so enlightening that we're going to have to do another episode in the future because there's so much more we could keep going into. But anything you want to add? To feel complete for today? Yeah. You all have the ability to self-regulate, to send new messages to the brain and from the brain back to the body.
00:53:51:05 - 00:54:14:16
And just having a couple of tools. Don't overwhelm yourself. Just have a couple of go-to breath techniques, meditation, and apply them. And that's the thing. It takes about 90 days or more to create a new neural pathway. So we want that positive feedback loop of doing a two-minute meditation. Oh good. I did it again today and then tomorrow I could do another two minutes.
00:54:14:22 - 00:54:38:26
So we have this positive feedback loop that sends us back to our practice. And then from there, we start to build that neural pathway. So give it time, be patient, be compassionate, and just pick up a couple of new tools, and you'll really benefit and find that your boat and your vehicle is getting stronger. Thank you. That is a beautiful way to sum up.
00:54:38:29 - 00:55:00:20
Thank you to our listeners. It's good to be with you. I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode. And until next time, stay courageous. Stay connected. Thank you, Stephanie. Appreciate you. Thank you, Mark.
00:55:00:20 - 00:55:15:25
