How Somatic Retraining Heals The Body

Hello, and a warm welcome to our live event today with myself, Ashok Gupta. I'm founder and CEO of the Gupta Program. And I'm really delighted that you're joining me here today to talk about something which we've had a lot of questions about here at the Gupta Program. And we decided to do a live event, and that is something called somatic retraining. And today, what we're going to be doing is understanding what somatic retraining is, how it's relevant for helping you in healing and recovering from whatever chronic condition that you have, and also some of the neurobiology behind it and what you can expect when you engage in that aspect of brain retraining. Now, as many of you know, the Gupta Program is one of the first brain retraining programs. We were going since 2007. And we incorporate a number of different modalities, such as somatic retraining, brain retraining, neuroplasticity, the accelerator technique, and many different techniques that come together to support healing. We heal many different conditions, so we look at things like neuroimmune conditions, long Covid, mainland and chronic fatigue syndrome, and fibromyalgia, but also sensitivity reactions such as food sensitivities, mold sensitivities, electrical sensitivities, and finally, some of the more autonomic conditions, as well as well as pain conditions. And we know that pain is rife in the Western world in terms of unexplained pain, back pain, and overall bodily pain, such as we experience in fibromyalgia. And we believe that all of these conditions have commonalities, and those commonalities are based around conditioning in the brain. So today we're going to talk about how brain retraining in the respect of somatic retraining works and how that can support your healing from one of these chronic conditions. And of course, we'd love for you to share this on your social media. So please do share this with your friends, your family, perhaps other support groups, because it's so important that we get this message out there and get more and more people aware of this type of condition and this type of approach. And straight after this event, we will be having a live Q and A with myself. So if you want to find out more about the GUPS program, our team will actually put information about the live Q and A in the chat, and then you can join us for that. And if it's not there, you can just download our app at App Store or Play Store. Just search Gupta program, download the app and The Q and A is right there on the homepage, so you'll be able to find us there as well. So somatic retraining. Now, what does the word somatic actually mean? So the word soma comes from the Greek and it means the body. And often in traditional psychotherapy or therapeutic arts, we think of healing in terms of the mind. And often you see a therapist, a cognitive behavioural therapist, a psychotherapist, they'll work mainly with the mind, cognitive and behavioral. And that is based on this idea that the mind sits up here and therefore via the brain, controls the rest of our organs and senses. And yet recently we're understanding more and more about the body. And in the east, the body was always involved in the healing arts, for instance, through yoga, through movement. And it's also been a myth, actually, for the Gupta program. People have thought, oh, perhaps the Gupta program only works at that level. And actually, from when we first launched in 2007, somatic techniques, bodily techniques, were always part of our program. Through the exercises and the meditations that we had, we just didn't necessarily use the word somatic. So it's a bit of a myth that the Gupta program doesn't contain those somatic techniques. And now we're obviously reinforcing that because people asked for that. Okay, so soma means body healing the entire brain and body and mind through the body, through somatic exercises, Somatic retraining, retraining of the brain. And let's just take a step back and try and understand, well, what exactly are we retraining here? We're retraining ultimately the brain. And there's two approaches. The bottom up approach, so using the body to retrain the brain, and then the top down approach, which is the more direct approaches, which is training the brain up here through cognitive and behavioral approaches and through other neural rewiring exercises to then affect the body. And we find in the Gupta program that using both scenarios together simultaneously is super powerful. And let's take a starting point of what an emotion is and how that's related to our body, our soma. So when we have an emotion, let's say it's fear or anger, normally what happens is we experience that emotion. And for that emotion not to last in our body, in the longer term, we process that emotion. You may have heard of that phrase, I've got to process the emotion. Now, what does processing the emotion actually mean? So processing the emotion means when we are first of all aware that we're having an experience of an emotion. Now, often we can't process emotion because we're not aware that we're having an emotion. We're on automatic pilot, or we use social media or other things to distract us from the emotion that we have. So the first point of call is being aware that we have an emotion and then understanding that emotion and then looking to process it, which essentially means to come to a state of understanding and eventually an acceptance of what happened or how it happened. So that emotion is processed, We've learned from it. We've perhaps shifted our awareness, We've perhaps shifted something within us, or we become aware of a belief within us that has triggered that particular emotion. So emotions are energy in motion. They're designed to come give us an experience which is to ensure survival or ensure some other protective role, and then to dissipate and allow us to come back to baseline. But often what happens is that we have an emotion and we don't process it, so it lingers. And where do we tend to feel those lingering emotions? We tend to feel them in the center of our bodies and those energy centers. So if we have fear, we tend to feel fear in the heart, and it sinks down into the stomach. If we have anger, we often might feel anger around the head. A tightness in the head or a band around the head, often around the forehead area. So that's the energy center where we experience and have stored up anger, sadness, and guilt. We tend to have a throat choking, so we tend to experience it around this kind of area. Yeah. And all of those emotions, if they linger, it's because they haven't been fully worked through and processed. And that's where somatic techniques are so powerful. And if we don't process those emotions, then a strong emotion like anger, if it's not processed, can actually turn into rage. And that rage can then turn on itself and can lead to self hatred. Things like worry. If we don't process worry or short bouts of fear, that can turn into chronic anxiety. And that chronic anxiety can then cause the continual fight experience, which is related to anger, Flight experience, which is related to fear, the freeze experience. We can start experiencing ourselves as freezing up and tension and tightness in our bodies. And even another experience called fawn, which we'll talk about actually on our zoom Q and A straight after this. So chronic anxiety is a product of us not processing worry. Let's look at sadness. Sadness, if it's not processed and worked through, can then lead to depression. So processing our emotions is probably one of the most fundamental skills we need to learn as human beings. And yes, it's the one thing that we're not taught at school. People say, oh, don't be angry. Parents might tell their children, stop worrying. Don't show your anger. And in a classroom, we're told that we have to behave, and yet no one has given us the skills to be able to handle those very strong and powerful emotions, especially that come up as children. Now let's take the next stage of that. Let's take the situation where people may experience traumatic memories or traumatic experiences. And we often find in the conditions that we treat, most of the adults have had some kind of trauma, whether it's a mild trauma to a moderate trauma or at least neglect in their past, which has been a risk factor to getting one of these chronic neuroimmune conditions or sensitivity illnesses or even pain. And today I'm going to make the connection and join the dots between all of those different experiences. So when we have an emotion as a child in a similar way, we work through those emotions. And actually, children, if you notice, can be very good at processing emotions and letting things go. You'll see a child be supremely upset, perhaps because the parent didn't buy the child a toy. And they may cry and shout for a little while, but then a few minutes later, they're completely flying and playing as normal, because they often don't necessarily hang on to emotions. However, if a child really experiences an emotion which is deep but also repeated again and again and again, an experience of neglect, an experience of trauma, experience of abuse in some way, then that child at that age doesn't necessarily have the resources to be able to handle such an onslaught. And so the mind very cleverly comes up with a strategy which is to repress those emotions and repress those memories and experiences so they can be processed at a later time when someone has more resources. And that is right, because as a child, can you imagine having to think through and process that when you don't have those resources, you don't have a developed mind or a. A developed prefrontal cortex to be able to work through and manage that. So in a child, often, or even a teenager, those strong emotions can get split off. They get split off to a part of the mind where they get stored almost locked away. And the challenge here is when those emotions are locked away and not processed, they keep the body in a state of tension because it's not a perfect splitting off, a person may dissociate from those emotions. How often have we done that? We have a really difficult emotion and we don't want to handle it or deal with it, so we dissociate from it. And our modern world, with all its screen distractions and social media, is actually fueling that dissociation. Because now it's a lot easier to dissociate from our emotions because we have something in our pocket every moment that can enable us to do that. So let's reflect on that. Do we often use our mobile phones to distract from difficult emotions? And we'll talk about what we can do instead? And so those dissociation strategies and other coping mechanisms are not perfect. Repression or suppression of those emotions. And so little bits of it keep seeping through into our mind, which causes the tightness in our nervous system. So it's almost like the body is storing and holding onto some of those emotions. An example is, let's say, a balloon. So imagine your whole body is like a balloon, and there's a certain amount of air that we pump into that balloon. And if we have a low amount of air, then the body is soft and calm, just like a balloon. If you just put a small amount of air into it, then it's spongy and soft, and that makes us more flexible and able to handle the ups and downs of life. So if you take a soft balloon and it hits an object or you push it, it's flexible, malleable. It's able to be like a tree that is able to wave in the wind versus a oak tree that stays stuck and still. So we're able to handle the ups and downs of life. But if we pump too much air into that balloon, guess what? The balloon now becomes tight. Yeah, if you poke the balloon, you can almost burst it. It's very, very tight. And that's often what happens in our nervous system. Our nervous system becomes tight because there's lots of unprocessed emotions that have got stored up in that balloon. And what then happens is, naturally we learn as a child and a teenager and then as an adult to dissociate from the body because it feels uncomfortable. Who wants to sit with all this tightness in the body? And what that does is we dissociate as one strategy. Or we may use numbing agents, so we may use eating or smoking or drinking to numb ourselves from the pain of that tightness in our nervous system. Many different coping strategies that we employ, and that can cause a continual background nervous system dysregulation and sensitivity, which then means that we want to dissociate even more. So it becomes a vicious cycle because we are not connected to our bodies and our emotions some people describe as vibrating outside of our bodies. Yeah. Rather than being grounded inside of our bodies. And the grounding that we need is to offset that fight, flight, or freeze response that our bodies has that memory of, because it hasn't worked it through. Okay, so let's take that one piece that we have, this tight overinflated balloon that is holding onto that tension. Now, the second point is our hypothesis as to what causes these chronic diseases like long Covid mold illness, fibromyalgia, pain, all of these types of conditions. In our hypothesis, we believe that people go through some kind of stress, and that means chronic stress or mild stress, moderate stress, combined with a physical trigger. And that can be the COVID infection, could be flu, could be mold exposure, could be anything that the body finds it difficult to deal with. And because we're stressed, the body takes a lot longer to fight off that illness. And we often give the analogy, don't we, of the kingdom. And I hope many of you have watched that video of the kingdom analogy where imagine you are the king or queen of your kingdom and your castle, and you have an army and navy that defends that kingdom, and an invading army comes over the hill. And unfortunately, this time your kingdom is weak because there's a drought in the kingdom that represents the stress that you've been experiencing. So now the army and navy are weaker, so they fight off the incoming invader, whether it's mold illness or a virus or bacteria or inoculation or whatever it may be. And because they take a lot longer to fight it off, those soldiers become traumatized by war. And so they keep trying to fight off, even though the original army has been defeated, they aren't sure if it's been defeated. So they keep fighting, keep inflaming the body, keep inflaming the brain. And what then happens is, as we keep experiencing that the more we inflame the body, the more there is symptoms in the body which loop back to a hypersensitive brain that says, ah, we're still in danger. Because look at all these symptoms in the body. That might mean that the original insult, which might be the virus or toxin or whatever, maybe it's still present. So to err on the side of caution, let's keep triggering our immune system and nervous system, which creates that constant dysregulation. And round and round we go, because the brain says we're in danger, triggers the immune system and nervous system causing symptoms in the body, which, via the vagus nerve loop back to the brain telling us we're in danger. And around and around we go in a vicious cycle. Now, let's relate these two concepts. The idea of that tight balloon that may be a legacy of our childhood, and then this hypothesis. Remember back to when you first had your chronic condition, or perhaps if it's not yourself who has it, whoever the person is that you're watching this on behalf of, at that time, you would have had uncomfortable symptoms in your body. And this is the little secret here. If we are used to dissociating from our bodies as a child and teenager from our emotions, we will also be more prone to dissociating from our bodies in terms of physical symptoms caused by a neuroimmune condition. Does that make sense? If you are more likely to dissociate and repress and not process emotions, you'll do the same with physical symptoms in your body. And that gives us a clue, because what that then does is the more we resist our physical symptoms in the body, the more we inform our brain that we are in danger, that these symptoms are dangerous, and therefore the original insult may still be present, the original virus or bacteria. And so it reinforces the loop. And that is the connection between, or part of the connection as to why people who have a background of trauma are more likely to get these types of conditions. And it isn't always so. So we have many patients who haven't had that type of history but have still gone on to getting a chronic neuroimmune condition. So it's not a. An absolute. And of course, it's not just trauma. It can be mild things like neglect or abuse, or even it can be an adult relationship where someone's experienced bullying or abusive tactics by someone else, which can then cause our nervous system to really tighten up. So that is the connection there. And of course, if we have that background, it means that our brain is also overstimulated or prone to overstimulation. Our amygdala and insula can be on a hair trigger, ready to react and respond to the next stress in our lives, just like that tight balloon. So you might say, okay, if that is the case, how do we. Now, if I have a chronic condition, how do we retrain this response? Do I have to have dealt with all of my childhood trauma or background or those difficult memories in order to heal? And the good news is that despite what people may tell you, our experience is that you don't need to have resolved and work through all of your Trauma in order to heal from a chronic illness. In fact, the chronic illness is just a layer that sits on top. And actually we start with dealing with the illness first and some of those vicious cycles. And that's where somatic retraining comes in, where there are specialized techniques that we can do repeatedly and regularly that can train the brain to let go of this internally reinforcing loop, this game of tennis that the brain and body are playing. We want to interrupt that game of tennis. And therefore in our approach, we take both a bottom up approach, which is the somatic retraining that we have symptoms in our body. How can we use our relationship with those symptoms to process that experience? So we train the brain in a different direction. And secondly, we use a top down approach, so we use that neural rewiring approach where we are rewiring the brain to get to a sense of we are no longer under threat like we were when we first got the condition. So we use both approaches and we use a lot of holistic health and lifestyle approaches as well to reinforce this. And this is what we call stacking that you may find other approaches or programs out there and often we find that they just do one thing. But when we're healing from one of these conditions, it is a holistic approach, stacking up all the various components that really matters. I remember we had a client in my clinic many, many years ago and she was using all the tools, she seemed to be really committed, but she just wasn't getting better. And we're thinking through like, what's going on here? Why is she not healing? She's doing everything right, she's talk super committed. And then I started asking her about her diet and she said, yeah, you know, I have a good diet, I'm following your diet. I mean, you know, I have tea, that's the only thing I drink. And I said, okay, how many cups of tea are you drinking a day? Thinking she'll say two or three cups of tea or whatever. She goes, oh, I pretty much throughout the day I'm probably having like 12 to 15 cups of tea a day. And I thought, aha, there we go. We have this misconception that somehow a cup of tea is different to a cup of coffee. But actually, depending on how strong it is, a cup of tea can contain the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee. So of course by drinking those 12 to 15 cups of tea, she was doing all this great work to retrain her nervous system, but at the same time was overstimulating. Her nervous system. So there you can see the importance of approaching it from all layers. So in order for us to heal, whatever program you choose to use, it's important to work at the body level. So that's working with the somatic retraining that's working also in terms of diet and sleep and movement and physical activity, pacing, all of these things at the bodily level all come together. We stack up these different approaches and then of course we work at the mind level. So looking at our emotions and we use a lot of parts coaching, which you find very powerful with these conditions. A sense of connection to the people around you. So having a sense of community that supports you in your healing is, is very important. And then of course, something that we reinforce to our clients is daily Gupta size. So daily Gupta size are daily zoom calls for nervous system regulation and brain retraining. Because the thing about retraining the brain is it's not a once a week thing. It's a bit like if you go to a yoga class once a week, sure you'll have some benefit there, but that isn't going to be the thing that's going to really deep down heal your nervous system. It is a daily engagement, repetition with commitment that makes the difference. So that's working at the mind level. Then there's a mental level. And that's where some of our main seven step brain retraining techniques and the accelerator really hold their own and can make big impact over short periods of time. And finally at the spiritual level, and spiritual doesn't mean you necessarily have any type of belief system. It's really your deeper connection with yourself, people around you and the universe, higher power, whatever you wish to call that, even if it's just love, and that is really understanding some of the deeper reasons for why this condition has come to us at this point in our lives. And working at all four layers, the body, the mind, the mental level, the intellect level, and then the spiritual level, working at all four levels. And when we work at all those four levels, it stacks up the healing and we see profound changes. So whatever work you're doing on yourself, whatever you're doing to heal, please do look at all of those levels of healing. Because mainstream medicine tends to only look at at one small part, which is the body level. And even at the body level tends to work at the reductionist level of at the biochemical level. And looking to heal everything upstream by dealing just at the reductionist biomedical level. And I just think that concept may work for certain diseases, but doesn't work for these types of conditions. So I hope that's given you a flow and an explanation starting with our childhood and some of the challenges that tighten up our nervous system like that balloon, which they make us more prone to nervous system regulate dysregulation as an adult. And that then means we're more prone to getting these types of conditions. And the connection there is our resistance to our emotions also then makes us more prone to resistance to symptoms in our body which reinforces some of these vicious cycles. And therefore bottom up and top down approach can support us in our healing from from so many different conditions. And if you're thinking about brain retraining, you know, there's obviously options. And I hope that you will potentially look at our program as we will be starting a new webinar series with myself. So 12 weeks of coaching with myself starting on Monday 8th July, so very shortly and you can even join after that. And it's something where we know that you may be skeptical, you may think, well this seems quite a bit of investment and you may say, is this really going to work? And we totally understand all of those barriers that you may have. And all we'd like to say is from our side, myself and my team, we're super passionate about healing people from these chronic conditions. That's the number one reason we do this type of work work. And really, you know, our program is the only one that's got randomized control trials, several of them showing efficacy. So it's not just a theory or something you watch on an Instagram video, but it's actually backed by science. And you can see a lot of that stu, all those studies and those medical publications at our website@guptprogram.com research and then you can read through those research studies and show that we have objective evidence behind this, not just the anecdotes. And we're looking to do more studies, large scale studies and we now have a lot of integrative and functional medicine doctors who are also recommending this approach as well, which has been fantastic. So I hope you can join us for that. And obviously if you choose to upgrade to premium, we do offer a one year money back guarantee. So you have nothing to lose by giving this a go and seeing how it can impact on your health and well being. So straight after today's event, now we're going to be having a live Q and A with myself. And this is for people who perhaps don't have the Gupta program, so don't have the premium version and just want to find out more and see if this approach is right for them. And most importantly, we call it Ask Ashok anything. Well, almost where you get the opportunity to ask the questions you've always wanted to ask and get your personal answers and personalised in terms of customizing the program. So I hope that you will actually join us on that Q and A. And please do share this video. So I'd love for you to like and share. Perhaps you can share it on your feed, your Facebook feed, your YouTube feed. Perhaps you can share it on patient groups. Because this type of knowledge is super, super important because not many people are talking about this connection between our past and then these chronic conditions and actually going to the neurobiology of this. So behind everything I've said today, there's a huge amount of neurobiology that supports this. And I would love for you to be able to get this out there far and wide. So, yes, once again, please do share this with the folks around you. And yeah, all I wish to leave you with is that hope and that belief that no matter what anyone else has said, you do have the power to heal. I believe that these conditions come to us as an opportunity for expansion and learning and growth, an opportunity to discover that human spirit within us, that resilience that I know we all have within us. And you have it too. So I want to leave you with a hope that you can heal. So please do Visit us@Gupta Program.com and take our free trial. Or you can go to App Store or Play Store, download the free app and you can start retraining your brain today. And once again, hope you'll join us on our live Q and A. So thank you so much for watching. And I think what I'm going to do is I know that people may have some questions, so just straight after this, I'm going to start another live event on Facebook. And in that live event, you can just ask me any questions that you may have. So if you're not on our Facebook page right now, just come to Facebook and type in Gupta Program and come to the Live events page. And what we'll do is we'll start another live event, a separate one, and I'll just spend a short amount of time answering your questions. And in terms of the live Q and A on Zoom, that'll be starting in half an hour. So in 30 minutes on Zoom, we'll be doing our live events, the Q and A, and taking you through understanding more about the Gupta Program and how it can help you heal from these chronic conditions. So I'll see you in the live portion, just on Facebook and also on the Zoom call, which will start in 30 minutes. Thank you, everyone, and goodbye.