Somatic Healing from Trauma with Irene Lyon! | How Humans Heal Podcast

Hi, and welcome to how humans heal. I'm Dr. Donni Wilson, and today I'm so excited to introduce you to Irene Lyon. She is a specialist and expert in trauma and helping us heal from stress and trauma. She has her master's degree in biomedical and health science and really specializes in various ways of helping our bodies recover from stress and trauma. Thank you so much for joining me today, Irene. I'm so glad you're here.

Yes, thank you, Donni. Thanks for having me.

So what got you heading in this direction with your interest in your research and your work?

It all started, really, in my high school years. I was big into skiing, so downhill skiing, snow skiing. And I got an injury, a torn ACL cruciate ligament. Had surgery and got really interested in the rehab process. So that was around grade 12, you would probably say, your senior year. And I decided to study what we call here as kinesiology, but you would know it as exercise science, fitness rehab. So that was my first entry point. And then I ended up having more injuries, more surgeries, again through my sport. I was a bit crazy when I was younger with adrenaline and speed, and one thing led to another, and I had a really, really nasty fracture of my patella spontaneously one day. Yeah, it's very painful. It is as bad as people say. And that. That surgery was a big one. The rehab was very intense. And the classic stuff I had learned in university and as a personal trainer and rehab specialist, none of it was working with my own body. So I was seeing physical therapy, massage. I was super religious with my exercises and stretching and core work and all.

That, and it wasn't working on the body level. So you were focused on, like, everything.

On the body level, physical and, and. And physical therapist was like, I'm not sure what's wrong here. You look really fine. You're in symmetry, you're strong. You. You actually have flexibility. Had a lot of chronic tension. And he led me to someone who did more what we would call mind body work. What it was was something called the Feldenkrais method, which is a very sophisticated form of relearning movement. I did that for about a month, and I'm really speeding up the story, but I did that for about a month, and it was like a miracle.

You opened your eyes to this whole other realm of healing.

Yes. And getting back to the basics. Like, a lot of Dr. Feldenkrais work was reteaching people how to move like babies, crawling, rolling, learning how to really use the ground and not your muscles for support. So just the way that a kiddo would. They're not thinking about contracting their core or any of those things when they crawl and walk. They're just maneuvering with their skeleton right in gravity. So I did that. That was like 2000. And then got really interested in it to the point where I decided to study because I figured I can't work with humans if what I have wasn't what helped me. So I studied the Feldenkrais work for about four years, Was in private practice for quite a while, and then. And getting really good results with my students. And then there was a summer in 08, Donnie, where I saw like five or so people whom came to see me. Kind of classic tension pain, frozen shoulder back pain. And everything that I did with them that had worked for me and a lot of other of my clients wasn't working for them. And so I kind of scratched my head.

I'm like, what's missing?

What's missing? And then that led me to discover the work of Peter Levine, Somatic Experiencing. And this whole concept of how things that happen to us that aren't very nice and scary doesn't have to be abuse. It could be a surgical intervention, that kind of thing. That they get trapped in our physiology, not just in our brain and not just in the nervous system per se, but in the tissues, in the way that our posture is, in the way that we think and connect with people. And so that was in 08. And I kind of just went down a rabbit hole and just studied and studied with. Within that work. Did a lot of classes with Peter, did more studying in different realms with early trauma in utero, developmental surgical anesthesia, like all of it. And got into private practice and realized after about four years of consistent private practice that it wasn't enough for someone just to see me for one hour a week if they had the ability to pay out of pocket. Because this is not covered by anything governmental or federal or provincial here in Canada at least. And I realized I need to create tools and homework and assignments and learning for my. On their own. And so I started doing that. And one thing led to another, and now I am not in private practice anymore, but I have two online programs that people have been doing for years. We've got folks in over 90 countries who've gone through them, close to 10,000 people. And so we're really. Now I'm helping people learn, I like to say, how to become their own medicine and really get into their physiology and reteach themselves how to be with their body, how to be with their organs and their stress response and all those sorts of things. So that's a very quick way of saying how I got into the work and where I'm at now.

Oh my gosh, thank you. Because I always feel like that's so helpful for me and I think listeners to understand like where you know and for you to be able to really share your. This is really your research to be putting this together and to realize, wow, this can be done not just one on one with a person in person. This can be done on a. Where we can teach people to do this for themselves from home, wherever they are in the world. And this you were doing even before the pandemic. I mean, I know the pandemic kind of pushed people to more doing more online healing or healing from home, but you were already creating this before that.

Like it's been about seven years. I lose track of the date. But yeah, we've run my 12 week program. We just ran it for the 11th time.

So it's nothing new. It's been tried and true.

Yes, it has. And excuse me, we just did an intervention trial actually with the neuroscience lab. You're probably familiar with research. Research takes a long time. So last year, 2021, we ran a group of people through my 12.

And of course you start with big numbers and it dwindles over the course.

And I can't speak to the specifics because they're still in the midst of writing the paper. But we saw, as I had seen anecdotally for years and years, shifts in people's capacity to be more self confident, have higher self worth, to not feel as isolated by doing these nervous system practices. Some had more. We would classify, I don't like the term, but psychiatric troubles. Others had more chronic autoimmune, fibromyalgia, pain clusters of syndromes.

For the most part, people found that their sense of agency, empowerment and of course shifts in symptoms changed, but it was giving it back to them. I remember being in university in one of my first level courses and there's this great picture in one of our books where it had two pictures of a man or a person, I don't remember, in a ditch, far down in a ditch. And.

One cartoon was a guy throwing pills down saying, just take these, take these, you'll be fine. Stay down there. And then the other was a guy with a ladder trying to get him out. And this would have been in like 94. I knew nothing at that point in my life about healing and health other than just the Little bits I had done. But that image really stuck in my mind. And while I believe in parts of medical world, like I want to have a surgery if I have a broken bone, as I have in the past, those sorts of things, I've come to see that so much of what we struggle with and have problems with, really, when we come back to learning about ourselves and working with these traumas and our system, a lot can be healed with the person.

Oh, my gosh. It's so like you're basically saying to us that trauma can get stuck, stored in our bodies and that there's methods that people have figured out and that you are actually offering on in online programs to help people to shift that trauma so their body can heal, so they can get out of physical and emotional pain.

You got it?

That's not something that people are going to hear in the regular doctor's appointment or if they go to the pain management person, they're going to get the pill version. Here's your pill. If you're a picture pain or if you go to a surgeon, here's a surgery for your pain, which sometimes those things are necessary or a surgery is necessary, but sometimes that it doesn't actually remove the real issue. You end up still. And I can. I'm happy to share a little bit of my, my story because I think that this, that it can be a good example is that. And you don't, you don't. I don't think you know my health story, but over the. I have joint hypermobility, essentially Ehlers, Danlos, Syndro, which some of what you were describing about yourself makes me think you may have hypermobility also, by the way, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, probably skiing some of the same places as you. I'm assuming, as you were in Vancouver.

I'm in Vancouver, so I was Whistler, Blackcomb.

Yeah.

Vernon. Yeah.

So I skied in those same places. I grew up skiing also in Washington State, in Oregon. Skiing is so much fun. And especially when you're in Whistler and you can see from the mountaintop all the way to the ocean, it's the most beautiful view. And so I get it, like, it's so like to be in nature and to experience that is such a rush. And at the same time, when with our hypermobile bodies, it's quite likely we're going to eventually have some sort of injury happen, either from falling or just from overuse. Anyway. So for me, I ended up a couple years ago developing on my neck a. What turns out to be the doctors really don't have a word for it or a name for it, but essentially I think about it as an inflammatory, encapsulated. Encapsulated inflammatory growth on my neck that eventually was diagnosed as associated with my sternoclavicular joint, the joint between them in my clavicle. And of course, because it's a growth on the body, then we had to rule out cancer, and I had to go through a whole diagnostic process to do that. I knew that it was from the joint, so I wasn't so afraid of it being cancer. But in the end, the part of the growth was removed. So I had surgery to have it, to have the growth partially removed.

At the same time, I knew going into it that that wasn't going to solve the whole issue. Because what caused it? Right. If we're always asking the question of what caused this situation to begin with, why did my body create this inflammatory, encapsulated growth? Well, because there was inflammation in a hypermobile joint, and there still is, you know, for my body. That's what I continue to need to address is, is that, you know, really what is inflammation caused by is stress. There's a. There's a stress on the joint, maybe from overuse. But what I think you also bring to the equation is sometimes what we think is even simply because of a overuse or an injury may actually have a deeper relationship from our life experience. And what I ended up realizing is that. And we could look at. Right. Like say, chakras that are different understandings of the body.

Yeah.

But this area, the sternum and the, and the clavicular area is very much connected to what's considered our heart center. And I realized at some point that, that really the. Some of the inflammation in my sternum was caused by not just physical stress on my sternum, but also emotional stress in my heart center. And the more that I can help heal that on a. Like you're saying. So when we use the word somatic, we mean it's. It's in the. It's in the soma. It's in the, in the body, but not just on the physical body. Right. Maybe you can explain that a little bit for listeners. How would you just define somatic?

Yeah, there's so many layers. So thanks for sharing that story. We've actually had. I'm thinking of one student who healed her EDS and fibromyalgia within a year. And I don't claim that that's going to happen with everyone, but.

Her system was in what we would call a Very. And this is more somatic experiencing terms, but an under coupled state where the system wasn't cont. Contained for whatever reason. And then some people, it's the opposite, they're over coupled and they have too much tension and there's no mobility and no flexibility. But when it comes to somatic, you know, a lot of times people, oh, it's the body, it's the body. And they might think, well, physical activity or yoga or breath work. And that's all true, right? Being someone from exercise science. Yes, exercise, essential activity, breathing, et cetera, all very important. But then we get into how does the overall physiology, how does it respond to not just stress? Because exercise is a positive stress. For example. Right, right now we're talking. I'm a little more alert and activated than I would be if I was chilling, listening to some music or something like that that was calm but threat. So when the system feels that it cannot fight, flee, it could be all sorts of reasons and I can give some examples in a second. But when we sense something's not right, I don't feel safe. I cannot express, I cannot act, I cannot get out of here. The system will then go into what we would call a freeze response, which is part of this protection. We need it. The trouble with us humans is that because we're not out in the wild doing the wild things that animals do where there's either you, if you are hunted, you're probably not going to survive, or if you're the predator, you're going to get and then you're fine and something might get you. But with humans we have all these stressors and traumas and bad things that happen to us. And because of this higher brain and because of our world, we can maintain function but still be in a freeze state. But the trouble with that is that under that freeze is this fight and flight that hasn't been able to release, that hasn't been able to activate. And that could be a shaking response, it could be a running response, it could be tears, it could be anger, it could be joy. If you were never allowed as a kid to experience joy because your parents were so miserable.

You'Re bottling in all of this exuberance and energy and life force that kids are meant to have. And this is where often it starts very young is this. I'm, I'm fine. Suppression, don't cry. You know, if you cry, go to your room, all these sorts of things. Don't be excited. Da da da da da.

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So when we think of soma, to go back to your question, in the body it is the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system that governs the fight, flight, freeze. But then that when that is trapped, it then impacts the other systems that the ans, the autonomic nervous system governs which is our everything else, our digestion, our cardiovascular, our lymph, our immune, our hormones, our, you know, the cleaning mechanisms in our cells. All of it gets impacted. And so this is where this is a very unique work in that there's no one set list of what to do. Because depending on your predisposition to certain things, depending on your history, you may have had a really bad thing happen to you when you were young or when you were 20 or whenever. But it's going to express differently. Some people might have a phobia, whereas others might get IBS or another person might get migraine headaches or autoimmune or more what we would call psychiatric representation. But when you trace these things back.

Often you will find that there's this underlying dysregulation that was set from something that occurred or many things that occurred even from in utero or even past generations. And you go, oh, the system's body was never safe. And it has been in protection mode or fight mode or a bit of both since this little one was incepted. And now we're 30, 40 and some. It's getting younger, kids are getting these troubles. I'm sure you know that just because there's so many stresses, not just the trauma, there's the world, the food, all that stuff. And so the SOMA will represent express based on, we could Say the weakest link. But then it also gets into the memories, right? We, we can have memories, we can have sensations that are trapped. So that's a very long way of saying soma is a big one because it's not just physical, postural and it isn't even just emotional. A lot of my clients and students, they will have no memory of anything. And it's not because it's so repressed, it's because it happened pre verbal. When you're having something happen to you pre verbal, whether it's birth trauma, surgical when you're young, or if it was actual abuse, that kind of thing, there's no formed memory. It's all in the body. And that's where people will be like, I just have this panic that makes no sense or why am I so afraid of enclosed spaces or all these sorts of things. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes so much sense to me and I'm so glad for you to have your words around it. I mean, I, the way I think about it is, you know, we, we normally think of our memory as what we remember in our brain. You know, like our short term or our long term memory. We don't always realize that what we've experienced in our life gets stored in a, in this, in our body on a. Not just neurological, but like you're saying, literally in our system in a layered. Almost like I almost imagine like if we could have a visual time of your life, we could see where it's going to make little memories in your whole system. And that if we don't allow the body to come into safety, like you said, if we're constantly under stress and we never have, and many people have this, they've lived their lives with these major stress exposures that set this system into a stress mode that maybe never really had a chance to reset from stress, then that's going to continue to affect our health or their health into the future. And I talk about this in my book Master your Stretch Reset your Health. So I'm so glad to have you, you describing it from your experience and your background to say, yeah, this is, we can actually, we've documented this. We see it happening to people and we see it creating long term health issues. But not only that, but you're saying there's something we can do about it. So once, because I think a lot of times people feel like, well, I went through this trauma or issue something in my life and now I have this long term situation that I'm dealing with and they feel stuck because the conventional medical system is saying all you can do is take pain meds and anti inflammatories and you can't do anything else. But actually you're saying, no, we're not stuck with this. There's things we can do to help release these restrictions, resolve these traumas from the past so that the body can heal. And I hope that really helps listeners feel a sense of hope of like. Like, I know that the more that the work I'm already doing to heal the trauma that occurred in this area of my body already is making huge differences. The. The mass that's behind my sternum is shrinking and I. And I don't have pain. And I. I know that what I'm doing is healing it. And it's so just giving people hope that it's. Just because something happens to you doesn't mean that it has. You have to be stuck without the rest of your life that. That our bodies can heal. I wonder if you can share. I mean, I know you have your. Your whole program and people can go to your website and so on to learn more about all of this, but give us a sense of, like, what if someone wanted to just experience for a moment in their body what it would be like to start to see that this healing can happen? Is there something you can teach us today that just helps them to experience that?

I can definitely do a few things, but then it comes with a disclaimer, which is that because each person is so different.

And my one example, not my only one, but one of the examples I often give is what's so interesting about humans is that. And this is our uniqueness, and its fault in some ways is that we were all raised very differently. Yeah, right. You have a mom, I have a mom. Maybe yours is not around, mine is. Doesn't matter. But I can guarantee you that how she raised me as an infant was probably different than yours, even though we're both humans.

Whereas if our nervous system was trained from the very beginning, it all depends.

On that primary relationship. It doesn't have to be a mother. It could be a nanny. You know, it could be a grandma, grandpa, an older sibling, which is. Many kids are raised by their siblings. It just depends. But if we think about. We were talking about the ski hills that we skied on, you know, on Whistler, there are lots of bears, right, Having their cubs. And I'm sure at Mount Baker, where you would have skied, also bears and lots of cubs. How a mama bear on Whistler Mountain raises her cub is going to be exactly the same. I'm pointing because it's there and over there. And how a mama bear raises her little cubs on Mount Baker, her it's going to be exactly the same, right? There's a genetic innate knowing I have to protect these little ones. I mean, they're darn cute too, but they don't know that, right? And I have to provide food, shelter, safety, and teach them how to be in the wild, how to survive and survive. The only instance where this might go wrong is if the mother bear, for whatever reason, gets an injury or is taken out by some reason, right? And then the babies won't survive, the cubs won't survive if mom is not there. Unless, of course, conservationists come in and all that. But the reason I say that in lead up to what we can play with is that each person has an imprint on how they were taught to be in the world. And for some, we had that secure, juicy, yummy attachment the way mama bear would have. But chances are, if you're here listening to this podcast and you're interested in healing because you have a condition, a chronic problem, whatever it might be, chances are that early nurture or something that went wrong happened. And so for some people, they might be terrified of sensing their bodies.

For others, they might love going in and sensing. For some people, they might really do well, seeing the vista, the vista of around them. And for others, when I teach them that, because these are the things I teach, they will for the first time look outside of themselves and feel terrified because the environment is what harm them.

So it's so individualized of your experience.

But some of the main tenants, I would say there's four of them, they don't need to come in this order. I'm also going to qualify that. But education is actually so important. Many of my students have been to the therapist, as I once was working with people, or they've been to the class and they're going through the motions and they're being guided to notice things, but they haven't been given the apprenticeship of learning what a tightness might be in the gut or in the throat. That heat might be this, that shivers, might actually not be a trauma response. It just might be a shift in circulation, Right? And so by learning the deeper education, a person is more equipped to go into that wilderness, if you will, of healing their nervous system. So I'll start with that.

The second thing, because it's like to say, like there's some preparation involved, it's not that you just dive in, it's that we want to, you know, help you feel safe in the process of healing. Because if you're not safe in the process of healing, we might just re. Trigger the same stress all over again.

You got it. And you know, it's like you would never ask someone to go to base camp at Everest who has never walked up a flight of stairs. You know, you would have to prepare and train and teach all the things, rope, skill, weather, or else the person probably isn't going to do very well going up, you know, to the top. It wouldn't happen. So it's the same with this nervous system healing work, the somatic work, education, education, education and then more education. The interesting thing, Donnie, is that when a person is really interested and you have to be interested to do this work, I'm sure you see that with your people there has a desire to soak up the information for the purpose of healing. So that's the first thing and then the second thing. And again, not order of importance, but can a person connect with how they sense their body in relationship to the world around them? And by that I mean, as I even say, that are. Are you. Are the people listening, aware of how their pelvis maybe is against the chair? Can you feel the pressure? Can you feel the feet either if they're on the ground or if they're crossed, if you're standing up, can you actually sense that contact? It's not about grounding or anything like that. It's just that sensory contact. Can you sense that you're touching your hands, is the way you are and can you feel the temperature and can you sense the nodding of your head? All these things are an entry point into getting to know how the body is in relationship with the environment. The reason why that we could say is a very general but important awareness exercise of the nervous system is when we've had a trauma or a bad, scary thing happen to us, we get pulled out of sensing ourselves in relationship to the environment and for good reason. And you'll hear people say the attack was happening. And I was like floating above myself watching. That's a real thing. That's a dissociation from the physical because it's too much to be in the body.

And so, you know, can you feel the table? Can you sense in. And sometimes we might even have someone say it out loud. I can feel my feet. Ah, I can feel that foot a bit more. Isn't that it? So it's an inquiry, like a curiosity of noticing these things. It's very similar to Vipassana meditation, which is the meditation that isn't about focus but is about just noticing what is.

Just being there and kind of having more awareness. I love that because that is something people could do right now. When you're listening, just kind of raise your awareness of your body in space and what, what it feels, feels like to be in your body.

And then what I'll say is for a certain group of people, they will be like, I don't know what you mean. They literally will not feel that. And I want to say that because that doesn't mean that you're broken or that you're not getting it. It could be that the experiences you've survived and lived through have been so intense that you really have no connection with that sensory aspect of your system. So then we might say, well, what can you, can you squeeze a little bit your, your skin? You know, can you actually feel your shoulders? Can you press your hands into your thighs? If you've ever been with someone who's a bit nervous, sometimes they'll start to rub their thighs.

Yeah, right.

Or they'll squeeze their hands even without thinking about it.

Yeah.

And that is them connecting, trying to stay contained, not leave the building, so to speak. Right. And so you can start to see these things naturally, spontaneously, automatically happen as a way. It's like they're, it's like, yeah, good, good. You know, you do that. When you do that next time, really feel it. What would it be like to do that before you're stressed? Like, ah, I'm just going to have a break and feel my arms. I'm going to put my head on my chest or on my belly, or I'm going to touch my face or my scalp and just actively look for the sensory awareness. So that's one thing, and then the other would be connecting with the environment. The word we use for this in our world is orienting.

So to exploratory look and see somewhere out there. And that out there could be as close as this glass of water that I have in my hand to look at it, to see the clearness. Or it could be, I have a big window in front of me, the trees over there moving.

Now what that is doing or what we want it to do is to connect us, to see there's no bad, scary thing happening around us. Now this is where it gets tricky because someone I was to say, I would never say that to a client. I would never say, see, there's nothing bad around here. Because if their physiology had traumas and bad things, from early, early, early pre verbal, they're going to say, how do we not know a man's going to come through that door with a gun? Or how do we know a plane isn't just going to crash into my deck right now? This is what happened. When someone has unresolved early, early trauma, that is their narrative. They are expecting something bad to happen. And so with this orienting, for some, it might create a settling of the nervous system. And then that's information. Okay, great. You're able to connect to the environment, sense it. The breath changes. I want to stretch. It's like this settling into that low tone of the parasympathetic. That's good, versus the shutdown response, which is also the parasympathetic. But if someone is like, no, I'm not looking, then I go, okay, that's fine. We're not going to do that right now. What we're going to do is we're going to do a little more containment, which is maybe touch, which then leads me into another element that I might work with with my folks is to work directly with what I call the stress organs. The kidneys and adrenals, the gut, the brain stem. In my line of work, we would call it the diaphragms, which is not just the true diaphragm, but osteopathic diaphragms line up with the chakras. If we just think about the kidneys and adrenals, I might say, okay, it's not safe out there. Let's just talk to your kidneys and adrenals. And those adrenals on top of the kidneys, as you know, they emit the cortisol and the adrenaline when there's threat. For many of these folks, those adrenals have been working a lot overtime. Overtime. For some, they might be completely fatigued and pooped out and there's no more juice. For others, they might be still on guard. This is where we would guide someone through a very intentional attention based. I don't like to use the word meditation. I call them neurosensory exercise, where we're guiding. But we might say, just tune into these little organs. I might explain what they look like, where they are. I might even get them to just touch. But then to actually have a conversation with them, Donnie, and be like, these little ones, you've been working very hard, just like you would with a child that was really frightened.

You can actually talk to our body parts.

We talk to our body parts. And it's not crazy. It's the same way that we know that folks who are neurologically recovering will imagine, you know, there's counts of like little people. Not that there's little people in there, but, you know, the tissues being stitched up and things regenerating and growing and imagery. Yeah, all of that. And so it's this imagining of. Yes. These little kidneys of yours and the adrenals on top have been working so hard and even just that mention can bring emotion to a person. Right.

Amazing. It really is. And I. Yeah, I mean, and yeah, with my, with my training also in craniosacral therapy. I know what you're referring to and I want to share with anyone listening just because we haven't said the word vagus nerve. But when you were talking about the parasympathetic.

I just did.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, you know, helping the. Helping that. Because it's our stress response system, our sympathetic parasympathetic, the vagus nerve and then the adrenal glands that you're referring to, these are our stress responders that help protect us from the stress that occurred. And what you're saying is you guide people step by step to, in a very gentle way, help them to reconnect with themselves and resolve those, those stress experiences. And I just, I'm so excited by it because I think it's, you know, I know it's from, you know, from my experience, both personal and clinical and from all the research I've read that that you know, what a difference that could make. So it doesn't surprise me at all that you had thousands of people go through your online program and benefit from it. Tell listeners where. I mean, I know your website is under your name. Irene.

Yeah, just my name. When you go there, there is a plethora of stuff. There is obviously little tabs that you drop down and my courses and programs are there. There's all the links to my YouTube channel, for example, that has hundreds. Now there's hundreds of videos and lectures and topics and Q&As that are long form that a person can geek out on and just get that education on board. And then we have so many resources, whether it's audio samplers where someone can download a 20 minute, 30 minute freebie that is just to guide them through some of these basics that I mentioned. These don't go into the stress organs because that takes time to build up to. We don't want to usually dive into those right away. We need to lay those foundations. But everything is there. Courses, classes, my Bio, my credentials, obviously testimony from all of our students. Just really good, beautiful stories of change and transformation. When often people will say a how come I didn't know about this in my 20s? And I say, well, we didn't know about this when you were in your 20s. I wasn't born when you were in your 20s. It's just, we just didn't know. Right. And also people will say this has been life changing because they're learning how their physiology works. And in many ways it's not a reparenting. I don't like that term. But they're relearning or maybe for the first time, Donnie. Learning how to regulate their nervous system. Because it never happened ever, growing up.

Well, I think that besides the fact that our parents didn't know and this is not what we learned in school, we don't learn how to regulate our nervous system or what I say, tame our vagus nerve and our stress response system. We don't know. We don't learn these things. And so we can only learn them once we come across the information. And I'm so glad for, for, you know, you as well and for what I'm, you know, that's why I do what I do to try to get this information out there. Because I, I just so much want people to know that it's. If you're struggling and you're stuck and you're in physical or, and or emotional pain, that there's these, you know, solutions that have, that can help. And it's, and it's not just about starting diving in deep from the beginning. It's a process is needed like you've been explaining. We have to. Because to me, the best way I think about it is like, you know, if stress created this, we have to do it in a way that doesn't create more stress. We have to do it in a way that your body and your nervous system learns that what it feels like to feel safe. And so we can start to. And it's very individualized. It's not like we've heard you say that too. It's not the same for everybody. We need to individualize it. And you can still individualize it even in a program. We can, we can. You have that opportunity to help people in an individual way.

For sure. 100%, yes. All. Yes.

Amazing. Well, thank you again so much for joining me. I mean, I could talk with you for days. I'm sure that's definitely, definitely talk some more. But I'm so glad to share this with listeners. So they can know where to go and gather more information and be able to learn more from you and benefit from your approach. So thank you again.

You're welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks for listening to how humans heal. If you liked this episode, leave a rating and a review and for more resources, visit drdonnie.com.