Reprogramming Your Brain To Deal With Trauma, Getting Rid Of Cell Danger Response, Why Drugs Don't Work, "Emotional Concussions" & Much More With Dr. Don Wood.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, a teacher making a comment to you that you're not very smart or a coach saying you're never going to make it into the pros. Those kinds of things linger. Your atmospheric conditions that are affecting the way your mind operates. So if you've had a lot of that, it's going to be very dark and stormy. How could you not produce dark, stormy thoughts? Because you've trained your brain to say when you see the ocean or you think about the ocean or feel that touch or hear that statement, you're telling your mind everything's safe.

Help, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Oh goodness gracious me. It feels a little bit odd to be back in front of the microphone. I just returned from a week gone in Mexico with my family. We went to a little island called Holbox Island. I don't know if I should tell people about this because it was kind of like, you know, non touristy and not that busy and you fly into Cancun and drive two hours and then you take a ferry across the island. But it was, it was amazing. Just 10 miles of beaches and you know, no cars or rented bikes and ate good local fresh Mexican food, took cooking classes, did an escape room, spent plenty of time on the beach just refreshing ourselves in the, in the sun, watched lots of sunrises and sunsets and went on lots of beach walks and man, I, it just feels weird to be back in front of the mic. But here I am nonetheless bringing you a wonderful podcast episode with my friend, Dr. Don Wood. Man, in these times my, my heart personally goes out right now at the time this podcast is coming out to all of those in Boulder where a tragic grocery store shooting just take place. We of course have spent the past year, many of us in not quite as high level trauma as that, but low level trauma. Things that leave our subconscious ticking away in so called cell danger response. I've been reading a very interesting book. I'm actually going to get the author of this book on the show too. A guy named Brian Scott, the author of a book called the Reality Revolution, which actually I read after interviewing my guest on today's show, Dr. Don Wood, who flew out to the house and spent four hours with me and my family, show us all sorts of cool tricks to reprogram the subconscious. But this is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. How our brain just operate in the background after events like this during which we've been traumatized after other periods of trauma, after things that might just be uncomfortable for us but that we might not recognize as trauma. And there are some pretty cool techniques that we can use to just take that subconscious and shift it ever so gently back into the mode that allows ourselves to operate properly. And man oh man, my guest today is a real expert in this and we had a wonderful time getting to know him when he came out with me and my family and worked with us, Dr. Don Wood. Alright folks, so today's a cool episode. It's with this really interesting cat named Dr. Don Wood. He's a guy I've been hearing about for years from multiple trusted friends of mine in the whole self improvement and self mastery realm. And I finally decided to connect with him and his work more deeply by hosting him at my house in Spokane, Washington to showcase the special flavor of therapy that he does with trauma. And also for amplifying your performance by working with both me and my family for a four hour session followed by a podcast that you're about to hear. Don founded the Inspired Performance Institute. He developed something called tipp. We're going to talk all about it in today's show and also coined the term emotional concussions. Events and experiences in your life that might have a profound effect on your current behaviors and habits. And he refers to these events and experiences as atmospheric conditions. But if you experience ptsd, like symptoms or health issues related to an overactive sympathetic nervous system or impediments in your progress towards everything from business success to relationship issues to athletic performance, Don believes nothing is wrong with you and you just need a reboot. And so his entire work is based on the idea that events and experiences through our life kind of play a role in how we experience life in the present, meaning past experiences really affect us more deeply than we might realize. And he teaches us how to reprogram events from the past to kind of take our brains out of beta brainwave mode that they're hardwired into. So he's been doing this since about 2015 and it's a really unique approach to trauma. Often we dismiss this idea that trauma is the cause of an issue because we might not recognize an experience as traumatic. And you Yet Don has used this great analogy where he says the high definition memories we have of traumatic events in our past can basically stick with us and just be humming along in the background all the time. And we get into that in this episode. But basically the long story short is that everything Don does does not require drugs, plant medicine, Supplements, anything like that. It's very simple reprogramming of your mind. And we had a fantastic time learning from Don. And I hope you enjoy today's episode that includes my wife, my sons, river and Taren and everything we talk about. You can access the show notes for@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Donwood all right, let's do this. So, Don, I was at Spartan World Championships and this was like two years ago and this guy Robert Killian was racing in that race. He was not favored to win. As a matter of fact, I think the, the two or three guys that he wound up beating by like three or four minutes were indeed heavily favored to win over him. And I was watching the race. I wasn't racing in that event. I raced the day prior. So lucky enough, I get to stand there on sore legs and watch these guys go at it. And Robert just crushed the competition. Now, the day prior, I had been attending an event where you were speaking and it was down there at Spartan World Championships. I didn't have a chance to attend your talk, but I was at a dinner that night and there were a few people at the dinner. I think it was the guys from ATP Science podcast and then also my friend Joe Polish, and they were just singing your praises about this amazing, like four hour session that they'd done with you. It turns out that Robert, prior to the race, had also done a session with you. And so I was admittedly intrigued about what you do. It's taken us a long time, like two years to actually hook up. And for me, and as I'll get to in a moment, my family to experience what you do. But for those of you listening in, Don came all the way out here to our house in Spokane, Washington, although he does some of this work virtually. And he sat with our family yesterday for four hours and did the full program that he has developed at the Inspired Performance Institute, a program called tipp. And I'll let him explain a little bit bit more about what that stands for and what it is. But today we want to really kind of fill you guys in on what we experienced. My wife, Jessa. Say hello, Jessa. Hello. My sons river and Taryn of the world famous Go Greenfields podcast, and of course, Dr. Don Wood. Hello.

Hi there.

And as you guys listen in, everything that we talk about, show notes, links to Don's institute where you can work with him either physically at his location in Orlando or virtually as well as any any books mentioned, including Don's two books, Emotional Concussions and you'd Must Be out of youf Mind. Thick books that I have sitting here in front of me at the kitchen table. I will link to everything so none of you out there in the Internet lands need to take copious notes. I'll link to everything@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Donwood d o n w o o d so BenGreenfieldFitness.com DonWood is where you can access the show notes for today's show. There we go. I think I'm done. Don, welcome. Welcome to the Greenfield home, ma'.

Am. Thank you, Ben. I really appreciate it. I can. I'm gonna give you five stars for Hotel Greenfield. This has been amazing.

Thank you.

It's been great. Accommodations concierge is amazing. Yeah, well.

Well, as we like to do when we. When we host guests here for a podcast, we just, like, get them picked up from the airport, don't give them a car, and just trap them here at our house for two days. And. And so you're basically a captive audience.

Exactly. In the middle of the woods.

In the middle of the woods. You can't get anywhere. You can't even go out to the road and stick out your thumb. So you don't want to forced relaxation at the Greenfield Oasis. So, Don, you have a really interesting story, and as we were talking about before we even started recording, you've shared a little bit about the science and the background of what you do on some other podcasts that I've heard. For example, like that ATP Science one that you recorded down at Spartan World Championships. You have two massive books where you lay out even more of the science behind what you do. And while I in no way would expect you to, over the course of the next little bit, give us the whole nitty gritty on everything, I think you have a really interesting story in terms of how you developed this program that I think would really intrigue a lot of people. So tell me a little bit about how you actually developed what you developed.

Well, the first book that you must be out of your mind is really where I sort of explain a lot about that. And it really came from my experiences as a child. I just assumed everybody was living in my world, and I didn't realize that a lot of my friends were dealing with a lot of trauma. I just didn't have that. I had very, very nurturing, loving, caring parents that never argued, never fought.

Sounds boring.

Yeah, it was actually very. There was no excitement. It was pretty routine. But I just thought everybody lived like that. And if I went to My friends, houses. I never saw any dysfunction because everybody's on their best behavior. And I played hockey so I could fight, so nobody's going to bully me. So I skated through all of that.

Did you have your teeth?

Not all of them, no, unfortunately. But I really started to understand how everybody else lived when I met my wife, because I had a chance to play professional hockey in Sweden. We got close very quickly. So I was around her family a lot and started to see the dysfunction that was going on in her own household with a very, very angry, disturbed father who ran that household with fear. And my wife lived in fear. Now she's high functioning, right? And very quickly I started to see the dynamics of what was going on. I thought that was an anomaly. I didn't realize that that was happening everywhere. And so I thought, okay, well, she's gonna marry me, she's gonna be living in my world and all of that would calm down. And it didn't. And no matter what I did, no matter how calm I tried to be, no matter how I tried to word things, I could get her to cry at nothing. And it kept bothering me, like, why am I making this poor woman cry that I love so much? And I realized that it actually wasn't me. But I didn't realize that until I did all the research into how trauma is affecting our lives and affecting us on a day to day basis. That's when I started to realize that trauma creates inflammation in the body. And that inflammation is going to affect your neurotransmitters, it's going to affect your immune system. I really discovered that when we discovered that my daughter had trauma when she was between 6 and 8 and then got diagnosed with Crohn's at 14. And she didn't tell us about the trauma until she was 16. And we did everything. My wife researched, tried to do everything to try to solve how she could, you know, fix this Crohn's situation. And nothing happened. And that's how my wife then eventually said, you need to figure this out. And so I went back up my PhD and started researching at that point.

What'd you get your PhD in?

Clinical counseling psychology.

Okay, gotcha. Before that, had you, had you done any studies in neuroscience or anything? So this was all new material for you?

Brand new.

How long ago was that?

About 12, 13 years ago.

Wow, what an awesome dad, by the way. Hello. I'm serious.

Something's wrong. I'm gonna get a PhD. I'm gonna get a PhD.

That's true.

And so after you got the PhD. Was it during the time that you were getting it that you developed this program or was it afterwards?

No, it was during it. So I was developing the program at the same time and started to study a lot of the modalities. And what I discovered is a lot of things were teaching people to live and manage and cope with trauma. And I kept saying, well, that's what my wife and daughter have been trying to do and it doesn't work. And so I said, why can't we fix it? And I guess because I came in from such a different background and I've always been an entrepreneur all my life, I came in and said, let's figure out how to fix it, not manage it. And that gave me a unique perspective.

What would be an example of a technique that's used in, in modern days to manage rather than, than fix stress?

Cbt, Cognitive behavioral therapy.

I thought you were talking about cannabidiol.

Oh, no. Okay. Well, there's all kinds of stuff.

I'm like, well, yeah, that actually, all joking aside, I know one, one part is a lot of people just self medicate themselves.

Well, that's enough. Yeah, yep, absolutely. So that's where I think we're seeing a lot of the trauma show up. It's going to show up in addictions, it's going to show up in health problems. Like my daughter. Now my wife never got into drugs or alcohol. She just lived in fear. But she developed Hashimoto's, which is an autoimmune disorder, because she was in a constant state of fight or flight.

Right, the so called cell danger response in which your body's stuck in like a sympathetic fight and flight nervous system state, which I think a lot of the audience understands that the, that can be brought on by trauma, can be brought on by mold, mycotoxin, Lyme, electro hypersensitivity, sometimes all of the above. But essentially when the cells are constantly in this fight and flight mode. Excuse me, or more specifically the immune system or the nervous systems in this fight and flight mode, you simply do not function metabolically, physiologically, biologically, the way that you were designed to. And so you get an issue such as someone who has never been, let's say say allergic to lectins or gluten or dairy or something like that, goes through an experience that might be considered traumatic and all of a sudden these biological symptoms manifest. And that's. I've seen people who are close to me develop severe gut issues and thyroid issues and autoimmune conditions that just sprung up after breaking a relationship or moving to a new location or going through some car accident, things that you wouldn't think would directly cause that issue, but that based on the cells shifting into that cell danger response seem to.

Exactly. And I think that's happening because what happens is when that trauma continues to be active, activating our nervous system, then we're not getting maintenance anymore. So our bodies are getting limited maintenance because if you're being chased by a lion, you're not thinking about what you're going to eat or any injuries, you could injure your knee and you won't feel it until after you get away from the lion. So maintenance goes to a minimum. And that's what I realized is I've been healthy my entire life. My brother and sister and I, my sister and I are adopted. My brother's the natural child. All three of us have never been hospitalized in our life. We're all healthy and none of it's genetic. And I believe that it was because of the upbringing, because we were always, our nervous system was regulated then, we always felt safe and the maintenance gets done.

Interesting. Yeah, we were actually talking about this yesterday during the session. Even with athletes, I've found that one way to track the health of the nervous system is via heart rate variability measurements or the so called HRV measurement, the beat to beat time interval between each beat of the heart. And for the longest time I didn't have access to that data. And so you just like train an athlete until they'd get ill or injured and then back off and give them some rest. And now with hrv, you can start to see a decline in nervous system function that occurs typically three to five days prior to the predictable onset of injury and illness. And I found that when pushing through that low HRV or pushing an asthma or someone I'm training through that low hrv, they inevitably get ill or injured. Yet when you see the nervous system start to decline in function and you back someone off, all of a sudden they don't experience that illness or injury. They hyper compensate, bounce back and are able to just train all year long in a healthy state. And when you look at something like trauma or stress or cell danger response, people always have a lower hrv, they have a lower nervous system score. And so it's essentially the equivalent. You know, someone, for example, who's getting sick frequently because they've been traumatized or they have some kind of a medical condition because they've been traumatized. It's the equivalent of like an athlete who's Constantly overtraining their nervous system.

Yeah. I loved when you explained that yesterday. I think that's so brilliant. Right. To track that. Because that makes so much sense to me that, that why people are getting sick. There's no question. If you're. And I always talk about energy, you know, if we, we wake up in the morning with 100% of our energy, how much of that energy is going to defense?

Yeah.

And if you've got a lot of trauma, your mind's constantly working on that trauma, which is a defensive. So if you think about the United States, how much money do we spend on defense? Right. Well, that drains your budget.

Yeah.

So if I don't have much expenditure on my defense. Right. Most of that's going to go to something else, which is going to be focus, attention, health. Right. And I think that's why I stayed healthy.

Yeah. So. So what'd you wind up doing specifically with. With your daughter or with your wife?

I just really developed the program. What I realized the problem is coming in from memory, and it's the way we store memory. And as we talked about in our program yesterday, we're the only animal that stores explicit details about events and experiences. And because we store so much detail about these events, they keep looping. And so our nervous system is always present in the moment. Right. It's designed to stay present to protect us. So if your system is fully present, just like the animals are fully present all the time, and it looks at or sees some information or is reminded about some information from five or 10 years ago, it automatically. The autonomic nervous system activates because it thinks there's a danger.

Is that what deja vu is? No, seriously, I'm like, when you're going to a place and you see something, like you see it and it just triggers something. And you're like that. I remember that from something. And you don't know where it comes from?

Well, I think that's when I was talking about the time slice theory. I think that's where it comes from. So subconsciously, you're taking in all the. The information 400 millionths of a second before you're consciously aware of it. And so your subconscious sends time slices, pictures.

It hits your subconscious before it hits your conscious.

Yeah. Because it's on the defense. So it looks at it first, analyzes it, and then sends pieces of that information. Because your conscious mind could not handle that much detail. Your subconscious can take it all in. So it sends pieces or time slaps to your consciousness. And about 400 milliseconds later.

Now. Now, you mentioned animals a few moments ago. River and Terran. Do you guys remember how Don was telling us about how humans are unique in that we're really, like, the only species that are wired in this way neurally to actually kind of keep these traumatic experiences or unpleasant memories just, like, spinning away in the subconscious? And do you guys remember what Don was talking about with, like.

He's talking about how, like, a dog, zebras, for example, what he has for breakfast, because he just does. He just remembers that it tasted good.

Yeah.

And that he doesn't remember what it was.

Right. Maybe Don can explain a little bit more. What's the difference between the animals and the humans when it comes to this?

So 95% of our mind works like the animal mind, but we have two memory systems. We have the explicit memory system, which we store all the details about events. They have that procedural or associative memory, which we do as well. And so if you see something over and over, so when your dogs get to know you, they realize that you're the ones that take care of them, love them, and they're safe, but they don't know the details about it. They haven't stored much of that. They just naturally know they're in the present, in the moment. And that's why, remember you said yesterday, why can you leave? And then five minutes later, you come back and they're so excited to see you. Right, because they don't remember the time between you leaving and coming back.

They remember you.

They remember you, and they recognize you as safe.

Yeah. Is that right? Dasher.

Dasher. Somewhere around here, Dasher, our little dog. And comment. Comment somewhere as well. Just having no clue what they had for dinner last night. So we can feed them the same thing over and over again, but we can't do that to us.

Humans try to do that.

You could feed me a ribeye steak every night. I'd be pretty happy, even though I remember I had it the night before. So we're spinning away. We have these memories of traumatic experiences. And before I ask you a little bit about how you actually tackle reprogramming the subconscious so that we're processing these memories differently. You know, I've thought about this before, and I'd love to hear Jessa and the boys take on this as well, but I grew up kind of like you, Don, in that I had a pretty, like, you know, plain Jane, safe childhood. You know, grew up in this Christian, homeschooled household, where, yeah, you know, I'd get Angry with my parents sometimes or, you know, fall down and hurt myself sometimes. You know, things happen that, you know, might be considered, like, mildly traumatic, but I didn't go through, you know, horrific accidents or sexual trauma or any of these things that I think a lot of people would classify as, like, really traumatic experiences. And Jessa and River and Taryn, did you guys have difficulty coming up with trauma initially, like, trying to define what trauma actually is?

I think maybe because I'm still a little bit younger, so I don't have as many. And also kind of like, dad, my life doesn't really have a bunch of, like, traumatic places that I would actually experience those.

Right.

All right. And. And how about. How about you, Jessa? Were you able to come up with this?

I didn't have any, like, family trauma. Like, I have no. Probably the mystery. My main trauma is just having learning. Learning disability. Growing up and struggling with that my entire life and not having any.

Way.

Like, back then, nobody really knew what it was. And I lived in rural Idaho, so even if they did know what it was, they couldn't put me in any special school that would help me with that. So I was kind of stuck in this very difficult situation all the time. Sorry, my bad. Something in my throat. I'm not crying. And so that's probably like, my greatest trauma, that I would say that it lasted from probably age 6 till 19. And that definitely gets embedded in your brain when it's repeated, not just in your subconscious all the time, but, like, in your physical life daily, every day. So that was probably. I don't have any, like, any other trauma that. I grew up in a great family. My parents loved me, and, yeah. Gave me everything they possibly could. Yeah. So I have a great childhood, and. But it was just the school, the academic stuff that really was my. The only trauma, the main trauma that I could really. And I know that that's the deeply seated, rooted one for me.

Yeah. Yeah. I went for the longest time kind of thinking that you had to have, like, a pretty serious incident in your life to have been traumatized and even chuckled sometimes when people are like, oh, I'm traumatized. I've got post traumatic disorder. I'm like, what, did you serve overseas and be in battle? Or did you just have a difficult relationship? Cry me a river. And that's the way I approached trauma for the longest time. I just thought, all these people, what are they complaining about? Come on, grow a pair. And then, you know, I started to study up on, for example, the work of Gabor Mate who we were talking a little bit about yesterday and his idea that, you know, trauma can be something as simple as disconnection from your true self. Like going through your life, for example, not being the person that you know you are at your core, but instead being who you think the world expects you to be, that can be a form of trauma. Or, and I just be curious to hear your take on this, you're an athlete who always seems to crumble at mile 13 of the half marathon in an Ironman triathlon. And you've programmed your subconscious to associate that with just being the time when you get sick and you slow down and you get past or you've had a horrific race multiple times in that scenario. And maybe that's actually a form of trauma. That's a state in which you're system actually goes in that beta brainwave production you were talking to us about yesterday. So what I'm getting at here is in your experience, how often do you find that people who may not even realize that they're traumatized, like the happy go Lucky Greenfield family, actually do have things that they need to work through.

Well, that's why I wrote the book Emotional Concussions. Because if you, if you look at most things and people see, okay, we worked with people from the Boston Marathon bombing, that's obvious what that is. And if you talk to my wife and heard about some of her traumas, those are so obvious. And a lot of people could say, well, I didn't have that, so I guess I haven't been traumatized. But that's why I did emotional concussions, because they could be a teacher saying, making a comment to you that you're not very smart or you're stupid, or a coach saying, you're never going to make it into the pros, you're not good enough. Those kinds of things linger. And I'll give a great example is Marco Ceto. He's a double amputee marathon runner from Kenya. And after he lost his legs, they put the blades on him to run and he sort of plateaued and hadn't been getting better. So they asked me, could I work?

When you say the blades, you mean like those prosthetic blades that you see marathoners running in?

Yep, yep, yep. Those springy blades. Yeah. And so anyway, they wanted to see if he could get better, if it maybe is now just in his mind. So when I met Marco, I took him through this four hour program. And what we found was after he went through it nine days later, he took 15 seconds per mile off his time.

Wow, that's pretty good.

Now, one of the things. And then the next race he ran in, which was the Boston Marathon, he broke the world record, and he became the world record holder and then broke his own record by another five minutes after that, and then got signed by Nike. And here's what he said to me. He goes, it was all in my mind. He said, I knew that at mile. Just what you talked about, Ben, it was great. At mile 20, I knew is when I started to drop in performance. He says, what I found myself doing now is before I used to be thinking, okay, I've got 20 miles to go. I've got 15 miles to go. I got 10. That wasn't staying present. He said, what I found myself doing when I was running is saying, I'm now at the 10 mile marker. I'm now at the 15 mile marker.

I do that all the time.

But he wasn't thinking about where he was going to be running low. He was staying in the moment, and he just passed it and didn't even think about it. It was just the marker. That's what gave him that extra edge. Right. And it could be something that simple. Now, he had a major trauma, but it was also just something simple like that that was affecting him. And in sports, all it would take is I worked with a professional baseball player who just in his first year in the majors, he gets up in a key game as a rookie with runners at first and third, and his coach looks him in the eye and says, we're counting on you here to drive this run in.

Right.

He popped up. Right. And he said every time he got into first and third situations, he could.

Feel his heart from that point on.

From that point on. Yep, yep. And so we had to clear that so that he could. And then he had his best year.

So there's a huge amount of application here for tennis, for golf, for endurance sports, for anyone who actually has some kind of, like a performance breakthrough that they want to get through. Not necessarily someone who's got, say, like, you know, Crohn's, due to trauma like this, can kind of span the gamut and cover a lot of areas.

Yeah. From everywhere. And that's why I said, so. The first book is about the major trauma stuff that I studied and figured out how to help people. But then it's also, I realized so many people are dealing with these little emotional concussions that they're thinking, I'm fine. And then, you know, I described last night at dinner, you know, a lady who had been in church and her grandmother, when she was, she was six and she was taught and her grandmother hit her with a brush and she told me she had no trauma. And her grandmother hit her on the head with the brush and said, stop talking, you're in church. And she started just, the tears were flowing. She goes, I realize I lost my voice that day. I never speak up for myself. I never tell people how I'm feeling. And she connected that day.

So down to the nitty gritty brass tacks here. How do you actually go about taking those, those beta brainwaves that kick in, that are spinning in the subconscious, keeping someone in cell, danger of response or causing someone to lose their performance at a key moment in a race or competition and actually reprogram the brain?

Well, what I discovered is that when we have traumatic memory, whether they're big T trauma or the emotional concussions, those are stored in a beta brainwave state, very active state, taking in tons of information. What we do in our program is. And that's why I like the four hours, because the four hours allows you, as we're going through the education and through the whole program, you're getting into this very restorative alpha brainwave state. So your mind feels so safe. And then when we introduce one of those events, right. Your system doesn't get activated. Right. It can look at it with a little bit of trepidation, but what we find is that the beta brainwave starts to align brainwave state with that memory, with the alpha brainwave state, and it takes all the charge out of it.

Now you had us on Friday night, so we did the session on Saturday. Friday night we had dinner together and you told us to be thinking about some things that we might perceive to be as traumatic occasionally experiences. But then when we began the session you were having us think of also like some really positive experiences. And you know, times I'd have it jotted down in front of me like, you know, how free and flowing I felt when I was like winning the ITU long course world championships or when I got the phone call about my first, you know, New York Times best selling book. And you know another one when it, when I like you know, shot shot my first axis book. And of course I wrote that, I wrote that down like 10 times, babe. When I got married, boys, when I.

Went, boys were born.

Of course. No, but you know, just, just free flowing, I wrote these things down. So you take these positive memories that put you into this state of like alpha flow and you're kind, you're almost like doing, I think of this almost like a computer program. Right. You're taking those off of brainwaves and then reprogramming the traumatic experiences with. With that. Those same feelings of alpha brainwaves that you experience during the positive experiences.

Exactly. So you're feeling very, very safe and positive. And that's why I never called this trauma therapy, because our whole philosophy, there's nothing wrong with anybody, everybody's mind works perfectly fine. What's interfering with your ability to perform at your highest level. And if you've got a lot of that stuff active, it's going to drain a lot of your energy and power. So once you. Once we can get that memory reprocessed and your mind does it very. I mean, how long did we spend on each one? Maybe two or three minutes.

Yeah.

And your brain is brilliant. It's designed to heal. Your body's designed to heal. The only reason it hasn't healed is because it's been stuck in this loop, activating your nervous system. And it feels like it needs to protect you against this threat. But it's just information about a threat.

What I thought was really interesting was how you had us perceive the. The threatening scenario or the traumatic experience as though we were witnessing it in third person, like watching ourselves in a movie theater. Although I was thinking as we were doing that about river and Taran, and, you know, you brought. Like that. Like that. We're up in the projection room watching. Well, first we were watching ourselves, but then we were up in the projection room watching ourselves watching ourselves themselves, which was super interesting. And I thought, geez, do river and Terror know what a projection room is?

I had a really funny thought when we were doing that. Have you ever seen Mystery Science Theater?

Yeah. It was like that.

That's how I envisioned myself. Yeah.

Which is hilarious, by the way. I forgot about those. Have you guys seen those? River and Terror, Mystery Science. We got. Maybe we'll pull those out at dinner tonight. Show. Show you one. So. So that was super interesting for me, being able to kind of like reprogram from that, stepping outside and seeing it in the third person. But by the time we got through it and we combined that with some of the breathwork practices that you gave to us. I want to get Jessa and River and Terrence take on this as well. But for me, it was as though one of the traumatic experiences that I was processing during that time became something that I looked at in that third person perspective. And I thought, oh, jeez, it's normal. It's almost like funny now looking back at it, or oh, now I understand what I was thinking at the time. Even though when we began the process, all I could think about processing that was like shame, confusion, anger, frustration. And it was really weird because those emotions started to be getting replaced by not just acceptance, but almost like being able to laugh at the problem to a certain extent.

Yep. And I have that as really common because when you think about it, when you're in that situation, of course you're going to be activated. The memory keeps it in that. But when you able to pull back and take a look at it, right. Without that emotion tied to it, you can say, oh, that really wasn't that bad, or that's over. What we're trying to make sure is that your mind understands that there's nothing happening now. Because anytime you have that emotion, feeling, sensation or thought, your mind wants you to do something about it. But what do you need to do about an event that happened five years ago? So the emotion is useless.

Yeah.

Right. And, and so what we're teaching people is to manage these emotions. And I'm like, why would you want to manage something that's useless? That makes no sense to be angry about something when somebody hurt you when you were a kid, Right. How is that benefiting you? That's taking away from your ability to spend time with your family and be there present for your children and your spouse. Right. Because you're thinking about the guy that beat you up when you were in fifth grade.

Right. And you're not just thinking, thinking about it when you see that guy. And this is something I didn't really realize until you explained it to us, but you're thinking about that kind of all the time. Your subconscious is still spinning with that. You don't have to be around that person or in that same scenario for yourselves to go into cell danger response. You're just kind of there all the time. Because your subconscious is just like processing that as you navigate through life in general.

Constantly. It's like that undercurrent in the river, right. It's always running. But you don't know it's running because consciously you're out doing something. You're spending time with friends, but it's still there because it's looking for anything similar or same. And as soon as it sees something, you know how people will say somebody will say a name, right? And instantly they'll get their heart beating fast is because when that name was said, your mind does a Google search. What do we know about John.

Or a smell or a taste or like anything that would bring that back.

And then what happens is that Google search brings up all that data and then that data comes flooding in and your mind starts trying to process it and try to stop it from happening.

Right?

But there's nothing to stop, right?

Even, even if, let's say like perhaps you had like an abusive relationship with someone named Kevin and then you met a different person named Kevin at a cocktail party, you might instantly go into a really like protected, like self preservation cell danger response, sympathetic nervous system mode and not sleep that night and be a horrific conversationalist at the party, etc. Just because of that, that name might draw something like that up.

Exactly. Because now your mind is viewing that data thinking there's a danger, there's a lion in the room and we're in danger. And that's why. And people don't even understand why they're experiencing these things. My wife couldn't tell you why she was feeling fear all the time. She just thought that that's just the way she is. That becomes her identity of who she is. I'm just that kind of. I'm an emotional person. And what before I understood this, I met a lady one time who told me, she said, oh, I'm just very emotional. I said, yeah, I can see that. I said, how would you like to stop that? Because if you have an emotion, there better be an action you can do. Otherwise there's no purpose to the emotion. It's going to wear you down, it's going to drain your energy, it's going to make your life much more difficult. So if somebody is coming at you, it makes sense to be angry or fearful, right? But if you think about somebody who came at you 10 years ago, that makes no sense to have that emotion. It's a glitch, what I call a glitch. And that's what we fix.

Now, river and Terran, in terms of your perspective on what you went through yesterday with Don, as we gathered in the basement downstairs and went through those four hours, how do you guys feel that this would equip you to handle something that might be stressful or something even like a horrific car accident or something like that that might be traumatic for you in the future, what kind of things did you learn that might allow you to process that differently or approach that differently?

I think it just gives you more, more knowledge on what to do when you, like, when you have trauma, what hap. Like what you can do and what you can do to manage It. And then it definitely help. It would help you in the future to. To like, kind of like stop it and update your mind because, you know, it's in the past and you can't do anything about it.

How would you use. Would you say like the. Remember how dawn had us basically imagine a time when we were like super relaxed or in the flow and create both a symbol and kind of similar to almost like neuro linguistic programming, an actual anchor, you know, a physical reaction that is associated with that.

Mm.

Yeah.

So you could probably like do that a couple of times and then also do the things where like there was one where you had to think of all the scenes in 10 different like squares and mix them up and after like mixing them up and your brain gets confused. And that one was helpful. That one helped for me too, a lot. I liked the one where Don snapped and then I had to name something in the room because my mind was like, wait, that's not in the story. Wait.

Yeah.

And can you. Can you explain what was going on there, Don? Where you had us take the traumatic experience and like chunk it into 10 different mini scenes. Like, what's the purpose of that exercise.

That basically was taking? If you remember, we went through the scene twice. Right. And then we went backwards and then I started mixing them up. And what that's doing is the brain, just like you said. That was perfect. The brain realizes that's not how it happened. We're not in this scene right now. What's going on? And the same thing when you're saying when I had you snap and open up your eyes and look around the room, I was taking you from a scene into the present. And your mind automatically says, oh, well, we can't be pointing out pictures and chairs and things if we're. It's not part of the story, so that's not real. And then it quickly reprocesses it into an alpha brainwave state. So now you can remember the event, but you're not going to feel the emotion because your mind knows there's no threat.

Yeah, right. Yeah. I thought the 10 scene one where you mix it up, that was probably the most effective for me. Same here. Because I kept trying to like, remember which scene was what happened in each scene.

See, I was trying to like, get the exact scenes. He's like, three. What wasn't three, remember? And I was like, okay, three.

He's like, actually, Jess and I were talking about that as we were. As we were falling asleep last night about how. How you. You can. You can Almost feel as you're reliving that experience and going through these visualization exercises, this, this internal questioning about whether you're visualizing it properly. You know, am I a good visualizer? Am I, am I doing this the right way? And you, you kind of experienced a little bit of that. Jessa.

Well, and I honestly, I think that's part of the trauma that was speaking about before, because I'm all, I grew up my whole life second guessing if I was doing anything right. So it's like, so even, even if I'm in yoga and then they're like, breathe furthest count and then out this count, I'm constant. Like, am I breathing correctly? Am I doing this right? How does this look? You know, is it. I'm always think that's how I, that's just how my mind works.

It's interesting because that's one of the things that we also talk about is when you have trauma, it also, we attach meanings to it. What does it mean about me that this happened? I'm weak, right. I don't assert myself. I allow people to push me around. Right. Or I'm not smart enough. Right. I'm probably not going to do this. Right. I'm going to mess it up and I'm going to get in trouble.

Right?

Right. That's a meaning that gets attached. But when we clear the event, the meaning goes too, because it didn't mean that at all. It just meant that you had a learning disorder, right. And it didn't mean that you couldn't do it. Nobody could have done it under those circumstances. You could have taken Albert Einstein, given your brain, and he would have had the same problem.

Right.

So it was never about you.

Right.

Yeah.

Now what, what is the, what's kind of like the, the success rate with something like this? Like, like, you know the program, the TIPP stands for the Inspired Performance Program. Right? So, so your program tipp, someone comes in, they go through this four hour experience. How often do you have someone who's just like, I don't get it, like, I can't reprogram, I can't visualize, or they just can't seem to get out of that cell. Danger response, like, does that happen?

Very rare. And it's almost embarrassing to say how high the percentage is. It's got to be as close to 99%. I've almost never, the only time I've had people who have struggled if they're heavily medicated because the mind can't process what we're trying to do. I had one guy come in and he was drunk, and I thought, oh, good, I'm going to at least try it and see if I can get it right. And I couldn't get it because he couldn't process what I was trying to take him through.

Of course not.

Yeah.

So.

And then even people who come in, I was telling you about the guy who had crashed his plane, he did not believe it would help him. He didn't want to do it. And then after going through it, it changed his life. So we get that all the time. So whether. And what I say is, people say, well, what if I don't believe this can help me? And I said, it's science. You don't have to believe in science for science to work. Gravity works, whether you believe it or not.

It works within a construct.

And what I think was interesting, and this might be interesting for people listening as well, because I think a lot of people don't want to share the trauma with their therapist because it is embarrassing or it's difficult to talk about. But I don't think at any point yesterday we actually shared with you at any single point what trauma we were actually working through.

Now, that's the greatest part about this. It's not important for me to know. All I need is for your mind to get the update done. Right. And whether it's an incident that I know about or I don't know about. How would that benefit you? It wouldn't. My wife, when I took her through the program, couldn't share some of the details of her childhood with me.

Right.

So you can imagine doing it with a stranger.

Right.

You know, so I'm meeting people for the first time, is the first time I met you guys. That would not be easy to sit there and have to open up and share things. But nobody has to do that.

Right?

Right.

Now, another question that I have is kind of related, what you were talking about earlier, are you working with, like, the drunk guy? And that. That didn't work so well. What about when. When there are other factors at play that might be more, I guess, like neurochemically related or. Or biologically related that are kind of aggravating the issue? Like, have you ever had to work with someone who has severe serotonin imbalances or who might have mold or mycotoxin or lyme or other things that might be contributing to that cell danger response? Have you ever considered the idea that this work could be combined with or approached from almost like a functional medicine angle as well?

Yeah. And here's what's interesting is what I think happens is that even if they're having some of those other issues, like you said, Lyme or things like that, when we get the mind back into balance, it can then help you address that. But if it's in a constant fight or flight state, it's not going to.

Help with maintenance inflammation. Yeah, yeah.

And a lot of times what I'll see is the chemical imbalance are coming from the mind. So people will say, oh, I've got this imbalance or that imbalance. And so I say we do that scan before and after a lot of times and we'll see all these markers change. And I'm looking for cortisol, serotonin, gaba, all that stuff.

Tell us about the scan that you do. This is really interesting.

Yeah, it's a scan that basically scans the entire body for about 700 different biomarkers. Now, I don't need most of those. I'm really only looking, like I said, for sort of the psychological, the cortisol, gaba, serotonin, neuroepinephrine stuff.

What's the scan called and how's it work exactly?

It's called an AO scan and it measures frequencies. So basically everything in your body is a frequency. And if it shows up as red, then it means it's overactive. If it shows up as blue, it's underactive, and if it's green, it's balanced. And so I had a language lady come in and she said, I've been really researching. My daughter has, I believe, a serotonin imbalance. And so I said, okay. She says, can you tell me the level? I said, I can't tell you the level, but I'll tell you whether it's high or low. And so she came in and we did it. We did the scan. And I said, you're absolutely right, she has low serotonin. She goes, that's what I thought. And I said, but it's not the cause. I said, she has a gut issue. Her gut is all out of balance. And I said, that's causing the serotonin.

And the AO scan showed both the gut and the serotonin, all the stuff.

Going on with the parasites, the bacteria, all that stuff going on. And I said, so there's where the problem's coming in. I said, but if you came in and said, give me a serotonin level. And I said, it's low. They put her on a supplement like 5 HTP, right. And as soon as I said that, the daughter says, they tried five HTP with me. It didn't work. And I said, of course not, because it was the problem.

Right. It's the band aid approach. Now, is this like a. Like an MRI scanner that you crawl into or.

No, it's just. You put it on your head, just like these headphones that I'm wearing, and it basically sends, like, a micro current. It was the Russians that developed it, the Russian cosmonaut program. And it said everything in your body is a frequency, and so they know what all the frequencies are. So the brain will send this microcurrent. It's just. And it'll come back as either not in frequency frequency or over the.

Fascinating. Those. Darn Russia. I have a joke that anytime you want to make something sound super, super legit, you just say, basically, they've been using this in Russia for years. Or you say it was developed by NASA, that. That automatically lends legitimacy. Yes. All questions stop there. Exactly. So. So, you know, with. With that. Back to my introduction, I was talking about Spartan World Championships, and I saw you. You. You had worked with this guy, Robert Killian, who wound up just, like, smashing the race. You know, with a guy like that, I don't know how much you can. You can share, but was that a deal where you, like, gave him an anchor that he used during the race, or did you instead, like, deal with some horrific trauma he'd had in the past or, you know, what's a situation like that like, with as much as you can share?

Yeah. I mean, he's a Special Forces Green Beret, so you can imagine he's had some trauma. Right. But the trauma. And he shared this. So I can. I'm open to share this. One of the traumas that he had is he got accused of being a cheater because he picked up a bag that had a hole in it when he was running the race.

Sandbag. That's happened to me before, where you grab the sandbag and you're like, halfway through this horrific sandbag carry, and all of a sudden the bag rips wide open because it's, like, been damaged or they didn't pack it properly.

It's been thrown around a million times.

No. No. Yeah. I like to think I'm one of the first people to get to the.

Sandbag, but they use it in multiple races.

Yeah.

And then you're standing there with the sandbag ripped out, and you're like, well, what do I do now? What's the honorable thing to do? Do I go all the way back up and get Another sandbag. Do I, like, blame this as a race error and just keep going with the sandbag I'm with. And yeah, it's a tricky scenario.

And so what happened for him, though is then one of the other racers started putting online and that he cheated. He knew it had a hole in it and he didn't do anything about it. So, you know, his integrity as a special forces Green beret is now challenged. So every race he's going in after that, that trauma is looping. He's now going out of his way probably to show he's not a cheater. Right. And so that was really an effect on him. So that was part of one of the things that we fixed for him. And then what I believe happens is when we have this unresolved trauma, we affect, and this is what I talked about, the ATP, we affect the energy in the cell. The ATP in the cell. So nothing, when this goes into cell danger response, nothing's getting into the cell, but nothing's getting out of the cell. It's a temporary pause to protect the cell until the dangers passed. But if the danger keeps looping through memory, it stays in an active cell danger response. As soon as we fix that. Right. That was on Friday. I worked with him on Sunday. He ran in the race. So obviously he didn't do anything different training wise. Just more energy freed up.

Yeah, I think it's super interesting, this idea of the cell going to cell danger response, because a big part of. And we were even talking about this at our dinner party last night, this idea of a book like the Body Electric by Robert Becker or Healing is Voltage by Jerry Tennant. And this idea that all of your cells, cells operate based on this precise electrochemical gradient across the membrane of the cell. And one of the things that happens when you're stressed or even when you're pushing yourself hard with exercise. And actually they've even shown. I did a podcast with Dr. Joe Mercola about this. In response, like high levels of EMF or radiation, you see a steep influx of calcium into the cell. That's what makes. It's not lactic acid that makes you sore after workouts, actually. Calcium and calcification, when you get that calcium influx, basically the cell's electrochemical balance is thrown off and it doesn't work properly. You see the same thing with something like rigor mortis, right. When all the muscles are in this tonic tight state. That's because when someone goes into rigor mortis, what happens is there's this calcium influx into the Cells. And we were talking yesterday during our session a little bit about animals and how they deal with stress. And there's another book called Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. And it's about this idea that in the animal kingdom, an animal like a zebra, literally, after it's been stressed, goes into like this tremor, this shaking response in which it's shaking off the stress with a kind of tremor. And there's even a form of therapy based around this now called tremor therapy. But I'm convinced that one part of. Part of the reason that works is the same reason that a nice cool down after a hard workout leaves you less sore the next day because you're working the calcium out of the cells.

I agree. My wife ended up with frozen shoulder. Ever heard of that?

Yeah. Yes. That's where that's used to get that when I played tennis.

Yeah, that calcium builds up right under that shoulder. She thought she was having a heart attack. She couldn't move her arm. She couldn't lift her arm. Right. And she just had to work that calcium out from underneath.

Right.

Yeah.

That would panic me too.

Super interesting. Now, have you ever done any type of like, testing or studies on this to see what's happening at a neurotransmitter level or calcium levels or anything like that, or ever thought about just actually running a study on what you do?

We're actually doing some studies now, so we're doing some cortisol testing. So we're going to show the difference pre and post. We do the AO scan as well and we show a huge change in the biomarkers from that. It's amazing how many things change. So again, what we're looking for again is that cortisol level. I had a lady come in who. It was a friend of mine who was a psychologist and he said, can you see her right away? She wants to attempt suicide and I think you need to get her in. We brought her in. She had about 3, 300 markers that were all red on her skin. And when we were finished, it was down to about 30. Right. And it continued to improve because her nervous system was so dysregulated, her body maintenance was completely off. Now, if you met her, she was young, not young. I mean, she was in her probably 40s, but she was attractive and she looked healthy.

Sure.

But her body was a mess, complete mess, because it was totally out of regulation.

Wow. Now when you do this type of work, what's the largest group that you've actually worked with at a time for something like this.

Generally the biggest one I had done when I first started is I did a group of 10 and it worked really, really well. And then we went up to a bigger group. We ended up doing 40. And then I went to one. I did 140 in one room. I actually didn't know that would be that many people, but. And when I got there, it was like, oh my gosh, this is a massive room. And I took them through the four hour program that we did, and it was amazing. I had people coming up afterwards saying, you've changed my life. Right. I'm calling my mother right now because I realize now, right, what I'd been going through. And so just so many little things like that that people were saying afterwards. It was incredible.

That's so encouraging and so sweet. So you go from one on one all the way down to. So do you do like. You did the family work with us yesterday? Had you done much family work before or with kids?

Sometimes? I've done some with some kids. But family, it's great to do it as a family because now you all have this commonality to share. And so now you know those tools that you can sort of remind each other, you know, hey, you know you're using your tools, right?

And talk to me about the. Because we haven't delved into this yet, but I got an email this morning from your institute, and I guess your people magically know that we've been through the program now and it contained a link. Have you guys checked your email yet? River and Taran. Okay, so we all got an email this morning and it's got this link to this online portal where you have all these audios that we're supposed to go through, like these short audios in the 30 days leading. In the 30 days after the actual session with you. What are the audios? What's the intention of those?

Well, when we do, remember I said that we have the two memory systems, we have the explicit memory system, and then we have the associative procedural memory. So that's the patterns, behaviors that we get into and locked into that we don't even know we're doing anymore. So when we do the four hours, we're really working on an explicit memory. And then the audios are designed to start working on procedural associative memory. The programs or codes that I say get built. Because all of a sudden you just start doing something, you don't even think about it. That's what a habit is. You're not thinking about it anymore. So the audios take you through sort of a meditative, quiet, alpha brainwave state, challenging some of those. For example, it'll say, what qualities do you. Afterwards you answer some questions, but it'll be, what qualities do you admire in people who do you know, who have those qualities? Is that a quality you could say you have. Right. And then you start thinking about, you know what? I don't really have many people that I know that have that quality. Why am I hanging around with these people? Right. Maybe I should be changing who I'm hanging out with or what I'm doing. But it changes the neural pathways and that.

So you just listen to these audios each day for 30 days following the session with you?

Yep.

Okay. How long are they?

About 10 minutes.

Okay.

And it's easier now because you don't have that explicit memory interfering with making changes.

Yeah.

Where most people will say, oh, I'm going to change a habit. I'm going to do this. I'm going to spend 30 days doing this. But if they've got a trauma or an event that is interfering with your ability to make that change, the mind says, you know, you can be saying, I'm going to do this. Your conscious mind saying, I'm going to make this change in your subconscious sitting back there saying, not so fast. That's not safe. We've been hurt when we did that before.

Now, I did a podcast a few years ago on Neuro linguistic programming, and I had an NLP practitioner named Andy Murphy who worked with me prior to a couple of the Ironman races that I did. I was telling you this story yesterday, and part of Neuro linguistic programming is you set an anchor that you have associate with a certain emotion or a certain element of performance or success. And in working with him, I found that the anchor that I set worked fantastically, especially for the bike and for the run, because it was pressing my index finger against my thumb. And that was the anchor that I set. And I kind of painted myself into a corner, though I made a mistake in that. Of course you can't use that anchor while you're swimming because you got to have the hand open while you're. You swim.

And so just do a pole with three fingers.

You can't when you're drafting on someone and every last second counts. If you close one finger, you're screwed. Once they're a foot up, you. You drop off their feet and you're lost. And so, you know, the. I. I get the concept of the anchor just. Did you create an anchor Yesterday.

Yeah.

Okay. What was your anchor?

Fingers to temple.

Fingers. Temple. What about you guys? River and Terry?

Mine was actually kind of similar. I was forehead, so mine's big breath in.

And mine also was a deep nasal breath again, which wouldn't work well for swimming. But I don't plan on doing an Iron man anytime soon, so I think I'll be fine. But the idea of the anchor, how would we actually use that? Would it be when we are going through trauma, when we're beginning to recall trauma, like, where does the anchor fit in?

The anchor? So we use three symbols. We have a visual and an auditory, and then a touch. And so the idea behind it is you use that when you want to perform at your highest level because it calms your nervous system down right away. So the idea behind it is, as you listen to the audios, you're continually to repeating all those tools I gave you. So we're now teaching your brain that when it sees that symbol, hears that statement, or feels that anchor, it automatically goes into alpha brainwave state, the same way you felt that day when you're outdoors and you felt that peace. So it's an automatic response, right, because.

We had three different things that you had us create to bring about that peace. Maybe River Terran could. Could illustrate. But basically we had what? Well, you guys described to me like one of the relaxing scenarios that you came up with in your mind to create your anchor.

Like standing in the sun, basically.

So. So standing in the sun, relaxing. So what was your symbol then?

A sun.

A sun. And then what was your anchor?

My anchor was touching my forehead.

Okay, what about yours, River?

Mine was kind of just like playing in the water and going to, like, the really cool places in the forest, like the tiny waterfalls, stuff like that. And my symbol was water. And then my anchor was big nasal breath in.

Big nasal breath in. What about you, Joe?

My visualization, or my experience, was hiking on a very cold week, and all the ice crystals had grown probably almost an inch on every single needle, fiber, everything. So everything just glittered. And the sun was out, and it was just glittering everywhere, like diamonds everywhere.

Everything looked like a giant spice ball.

And I just thought to myself, God curated this just for me to experience. And that was like a really awesome experience.

And so what symbol did you use?

The sun. Because the sun is what caused everything to sparkle.

And then what was your anchor?

My anchor is to touch my temples.

To touch your temples. So basically we can. We can use that anchor dawn anytime that we want to bring ourselves into the zone. Or into this relaxed alpha brainwave state, it automatically works.

And it's amazing. People who have had panic attacks for years. We had a gentleman, 30 years of panic attacks. His symbol was an ocean. And he said, I can't believe that as soon as I think about my ocean, it just shuts off instantly. Because you've trained your brain to say when you see the ocean or you think about the ocean or feel that touch or hear that statement. Right. You're telling your mind everything's safe. And it associates. There's the associative part of our brain says, I can't be seeing the sun and not be safe.

Interesting. So when people do this, how effective is it if, let's say someone were to go to the show notes. And again, you guys, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com DonWood I'll just link to everything we're talking about, the books, the other podcasts I've mentioned, etc. But how effective is this if someone does it via Skype or via Zoom, can you get the same effect?

It's amazing because one of the other things that we did is we developed an experience, you know, that you can do online. So it's just me taking you through the whole program four hours the same way. And when I first developed it, my wife even said, you know, like, I think you're stretching it here. I don't think you're going to be able to have people do this on their own. It's not true.

After experiencing downstairs, I could see how you could take it to very easily.

Yeah. Because we wanted to feed you chicken.

Yeah.

A lot.

A lot of this is just visualization in your own head. And it's not like, I mean, I mean, it's nice to have you there and discuss. Can ask questions, but I don't think it's totally necessary.

Yeah. Amazing results with the digital experience.

That's called the TIPP digital experience.

Yep. So you just do that and so that I don't have to even be there. And we're getting great results with that.

But then people could also actually fly to Orlando and do it at your institute.

Do it right directly with me.

Okay.

Yep. Or. Or we have the group stuff. So we have three delivery systems and they're all very.

The group stuff, meaning you travel to a group or to a corporation to do something.

Yeah.

Okay.

Everybody through it at the same time.

Gotcha. And. And then also, just, just so you guys know who are listening in. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com DonWood I've got a link to that digital experience and then also to the personalized experience in Orlando. And we have a, we have a code. I think it's Ben 15 gets you 15% off of any of the work that you do with Don. But give me an approximation of how much something like this, let's say somebody's listening in, they feel like they're dealing with trauma. They're an athlete, they want to have a performance breakthrough. Let's say they want to hop on with you with like zoom or schedule Skype. How much does it cost to do something like that?

So directly with me and a personal experience is 5000. And then the digital experience is 1495. But I think our teams have worked together to give everybody a discount.

Yeah, there's discounts. It's Ben 15. And then when somebody does something like that. You said to work directly with you, for example, in Orlando. But do you have other practitioners who you train? Like, let's say a coach or a therapist or a trainer wants to learn how to do this themselves. Do you also certify people.

We're not yet. We're looking at doing that. Well, one of the things we're working on is training people to facilitate the digital experience.

Yeah, I was gonna say you gotta replicate yourself, man. The whole what if I get hit by a bus Scenario.

Exactly. But the idea is that if they take them through the digital experience, it's the same way as of them doing it, but they can facilitate it. Which sometimes when we're dealing with veterans, we just did a big group of 10 veterans with a guy who works with these veterans. So they feel very safe working with him digitally. Right. So it's as good as having me there. And then he just guides them through each module and says, any questions? Anything I can answer. But he doesn't have to learn the whole program because that would take time. It took me a long time to develop it. Like I said, it's language, it's pacing, it's all those things that make a difference.

Yeah, well, when we were down in the living room, it seemed like you, you had it all system. Like we just, we took little 5 minute or 10 minute breaks here and there, but it all just kind of flowed from start to to end, you know, with the first hour, hour and a half or so of you just educating us on how our brains worked and how, how the whole process works. And then we got into the visualization, the breath work, the meditation. We finished with this really cool, like 15, 20 minute meditation. That was one of my favorite parts. And then now we. We'll go into the audios for 30 days, 10 minutes a day doing the audios. And I like it for a couple of reasons. A, because I can see the efficacy and I've seen the testimonials on your website, and I saw what Robert did, and I felt it and experienced it myself. But then I also like the fact because I get a little bit disillusioned with this, honestly, especially. I don't know if it's the health and fitness industry that I'm in or what, but it seems like everybody's turning to, like, plant medicine or 5 HTP or, you know, all these things that. That supposedly release the trauma. Yet I see a lot of people returning that stuff over and over and over again.

Don and I were having interesting conversation about that with holotropic breath. And. And I told him I. My experience with holotropic breath was really like, it was great, but I felt like it was very influenced by the people who were leading the session. The conversations that I had leading up to the sessions, because those were the things that came up in my holotropic breath. Things that I'd never, ever even considered as trauma because I had conversations about it beforehand came up in my holotropic breath, which I was like, this is very odd because I've never, ever even thought of this as traumatic. And so, yeah, and part of it I thought, well, was. And I could be totally off base, but it was because I felt like I had to almost come up with an emotion surrounding something that I didn't really have an emotion around just because I was around people and having those conversations. And that was the whole point of the holotropic breath, was to come up with some kind of trauma. And I just almost felt like I was conjuring up a trauma.

Yeah. There's a host of variables when you. When you introduce either exogenous substances into your body or you. You induce a similar neurotransmitter response via something like holotropic breath work, what happens is that the. The thought patterns or the visualizations or what you experience in a situation like that where you're flooding the receptors with neurotransmitters, is heavily influenced by what you may have experienced in the days leading up to that event. Right. Meaning if you say, like, let's see, you're going to go to, like, an ayahuasca ceremony. Ceremony, and on the plane ride down to Peru, you watch some movie, you know, that was maybe like a horror movie with scary clowns or something like that. All of a sudden, you're processing clowns during your. During your ayahuasca ceremony. Just because it's so. It's so subjectively related to what you might have experienced leading into the time, which is why you have to be very careful with stuff like that.

That's why I like not having to converse with him about my traumas is.

Because he doesn't know.

He is not influenced. Yeah.

My.

My. The way I feel like I should be feeling. Yeah. In this moment. So not having to disclose. I don't. I mean, it's not that I'm. Honestly, all my drums, I'm not. I am not ashamed to talk about. But when you're with a practitioner and I feel like it influences the way you experience the. Like you feel like you need to experience the emotion. Like it needs to be, like, much bigger than maybe you actually really experience it yourself. I liked that.

Yeah. And that's why we call this a performance program, not trauma therapy, because I don't believe there's anything wrong with anybody. You've had your own unique set of what I call your atmospheric conditions that are affecting the way your mind operates. So if you've had a lot of that, it's going to be very dark and stormy. How can you. You not produce dark, stormy thoughts?

Yeah.

Right, Right. So what you have to do and what. What is happening in my estimation is when they're doing the nutraceutic pharmaceuticals and all these kinds of things, they're just blocking that Google search to get into memory, to temporarily pause you from thinking about the trauma, but it's not fixing the problem. And I said this to my daughter the other day, and I said, this was actually about two months ago. We came in from a walk and we walked out and I saw the pool, and I said, here's a great way of explaining what we do if that pool was two feet down in water, right. If we were a water therapist, we would say, oh, we need to fill up the pool. I says, the way we think about it is, why is there a leak? Why is the water down? Let's find out what the problem is. Because we could fill up the water, but we're doing that every month. Let's find out where the leak is and stop it before we try to fill it up.

Right. And I love anything that's not a band aid solution. I mean, that's why I love functional medicine. It's why I love tackling the root Cause of the issue rather than holistic.

It is the whole.

Yeah. And the great part about this is it lasts. So I've had people who've gone through this from years ago who are still telling me, you know, from very horrific trauma. Right. Who are saying they can think about it now and there's no emotion anymore.

It's gone. It's a horrific business model, man.

That's what it is.

Not the Gillette I love my chiropractic therapy I get every week. But it's like, see you next week. See you next week. See you next week. Well, Don, this is fascinating and I know river and Taran, you guys didn't get a chance to talk too, too much on today's show, but anything else you guys want to add before we, we start to get ready to get Don over to the, to the airport so he can go back to beautiful sunny Orlando?

I don't think so. It was really cool though.

Yeah, well, I thought it was cool to do it as a family. It was just really neat also to see river and Taran get equipped with again, non band aid based solutions that they can use to deal with stress and trauma as they go forward in life. And just like I, I think every young person should be taught things like breath work and meditation and body awareness and mindfulness and presence. This is another tool in the toolbox that once you have it and you own it and it's in your head, is free for you to basically use at any time without needing any other tool aside from your own brain to.

Be able to or just knowing that it's available. You know what I mean? Just that you don't have to go. You can, you have this other much more holistic option.

You don't have to suffer with it. And that's the great news. At your age to learn that. Right. That you can fix it. You don't have to manage it.

Yeah.

Because if something ever happens, hopefully nothing ever happens. And you live this beautiful life. But if something happens, you know you're going to realize that you can find a solution to it.

Yeah.

You don't have to live with it. And if you think about something that happened to you five years ago and you're angry, you're going to say, well that's useless.

Hold it. Perspective. Yeah. Well folks, for those of you listening. BenGreenfieldFitness.com DonWood if you wind up on Don's website, you can also use the code BEN15. That'll get you 15% off of any of the experiences with Don. And I'll also link to all of Don's books and everything else again@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Donwood and Don, I know we gotta get you back to. To beautiful Orlando.

I think Jess is going to notice a few snowflakes.

Ride to the airport. There were a few.

It was snowed for a hot second.

Missed your chance. You might. You might get a few as you walk back out to the guest house, catch one, and bring it back to Orlando.

This is so beautiful here. I love where you guys live. I was just saying yesterday when I sat there and I watched the trees and they were just sort of just like a symphony of the movie. And I was like, what a way to wake up every day.

Yeah, we. We like it out there in the trees. We like the little Greenfield forest. Well, Don, thanks so much for making the journey out and for showing us what you do. And I'm really excited to open you up to my audience and let them experience some of your unique flavor of therapy that you do.

I really appreciate the opportunity and meeting your family. What a beautiful family.

Thank you.

Congratulations on all of that.

Thanks. Thanks. I'm pretty proud of you, but we're biased. We're okay. All right, folks. Well. BenGreenfieldFitness.com Donwood and until next time, I'm Ben, along with Jessa river and Taran, the Go Greenfields and. And Don Wood signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.

Sa.