Christopher Lee Maher | When Stress Becomes Trauma Without You Noticing

Welcome to the Radical responsibility podcast. I'm Dr. Fleet Mahl, and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insights from leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology, and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness, and life optimization. This is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change, helping you find alignment with the person you were always meant to be. Let's get started. What if the stress you've been carrying isn't just emotional, but living in your body? In this episode, I sit down with Christopher Lee Maher to explore what he calls strama or chronic stress, and how reconnecting with the body's intelligence can become a powerful path to real healing. This conversation may change how you understand fear, anxiety, and what it truly means.

To come back home to yourself. My name is Dr. Philippe Mall, your co host for this session, and I'm really thrilled to be here today with Christopher Maher. Welcome, Christopher.

Hi. So happy to be here.

Oh, we've been looking forward to this and wanting to get this scheduled and make this happen. You know, let's start with your background a little bit. This is all about how we can literally rewire our brain, shift our neural landscape to support our health and well being, optimize our life outcomes, our relationships, our financial life, you know, just improve our lives altogether and in the process, heal any underlying traumas, learn, you know, develop a more regulated nervous system and really be able to kind of be with the inherent uncertainty of life. Right. And I think a lot of us are experiencing, you know, a fair amount of fear and anxiety now just because the times seem very uncertain. Political, economic uncertainty, you know, the speed of change is just accelerating so fast and with artificial intelligence, and there seems to be a lot of global instability. And so I know a lot of us, especially if we watch the news, which it's probably a good idea to really limit the amount of news we watch today, you know, so there's just a lot of fear and anxiety in our lives. And, you know, that can be very debilitating and extremely debilitating for some folks. And at the same time, I think we can leverage that experience for our own healing and personal growth. So I'm wondering if you could. I can only imagine as a Navy seal, you've experienced a lot of intensity of being in situations that would throw most of us right over the edge.

But.

But is there something in your life where it was pivotal in terms of how you moved into the world you're in today? And the teaching you did today, which is very much about self regulation and optimal wellbeing and so forth. So could you share something about your own experiences with fear and anxiety that led you in the direction of your current path?

Yeah. You know, the interesting thing about anxiety is my anxiety started as a young child because I grew up in a household where. Where my mother was suffering from borderline personality disorder, so she could shift from Tinkerbell into Godzilla and then five seconds later move back to being Tinkerbell. So I learned to walk on eggshells when I was around her. And so much so that even as an adult, when there were multiple women in the house, I always caught myself walking on the forefront of my foot without dropping my heel into the ground because I wanted to be quiet and unnoticed. And so until I was rid of anxiety, I didn't even know I had anxiety because it was a perpetual state of internal function that began while I was in my precognitive state of function between womb and seven years old. And so I lived with anxiety until I was out of it. I had no idea that it even existed. And so the contrast of that has really helped me to be able to understand when I'm dysregulated and also when I'm grounded and I'm in alignment. And so I'm uniquely positioned to answer this question from some different positions. And the first position I want to talk about is when you're in the military, you know, and you're amongst men that are alphas, that are clear on what it is they want, have the ability to assert themselves and drive forward. And you're in a platoon, which means that there's 16 of you, so there's 15 other guys like that. You need to figure out where your place is. Right. And how you interrelate, how you communicate, what everyone's sort of triggers are, what their emotional buttons are. Because in the SEAL teams, you're always underneath the pressure of perfection. Because if you make a mistake in the field, the reality is someone dies or someone gets severely injured. It's a little bit different than having the type of anxiety that you would get because you're going in to take your SAT test. Even if you score very low, no one's going to die. Right. It may feel like that's going to happen, but when you're under that kind of pressure, you start to build a certain level of resilience and resistance to it. And you get to the point where you don't even know that you're being affected, even though you are so anxiety and stress, that was unresolved for me. It turned into heaps of physical tension. And the tension is what led me into consistent chronic, deep states of discomfort that I couldn't think my way out of. And when you go through something like SEAL training, or you go to medical school, or you're training for the Olympic trials, when you're doing things like that, the pressure that you're putting on yourself is really great. And so you don't even recognize when you're in trouble because you've grown so used to this internal state of function that you think it's normal. And until you get away from it, you have no idea how toxic it is.

Wow, that's incredibly powerful. And you know, I think there's some parallels all of our lives because I mean, for some of us the level of anxiety we're experiencing has become pronounced and debilitating. But for many of us, we're experiencing a lot of internal stress and tension and even anxiety, but we're repressing it, or we're self medicating or we're just numbing out. And in western culture, we've kind of been inculturated to leave very disembodied lives anyway. So very often we're just not in touch with it until it becomes so pronounced that then we have to pay attention to it because it's really causing problems in our life. So I think even though you're talking about a more extreme circumstance, I think there's some parallel to what everybody's experiencing. I know you talk about where you've coined the word strama and how kind of what you're describing there, like this extreme stress or chronic stress can be internalized and become another, you know, sometimes underlying traumas. It could be childhood traumas or single incident traumas, or even, you know, family legacy and ancestral trauma that gets passed on directly or epigenetically can then be the source of anxiety and stress, but also just constant stress exposure becomes a trauma in of itself. Right, and so I think that's what you mean by the term straw. Can you talk about that a bit more?

Yeah. I mean, strama for me is I look at trauma as sort of like blunt force. It could be like a one time event, right? You're walking across the street, a driver isn't paying attention, hits the brakes at the last minute and he runs into you, right? And you have this blunt force trauma. And then there's an instance you're, let's say you're a football player, you're A skier and you have an accident. But when I looked at myself, I saw, yeah, I had little incidences, but nothing that would account for the amount of pain that I was in. And I had to come up with a term that really made sense. And so I said, well, if I had a low level of stress or medium level of stress over a long period of time, could that eventually add up to blood force trauma? And I realized that that's exactly what happened. And so strama is stress plus time that equates to blunt force trauma. And it may take you 25 years to get there. But then guess what happens? You go down to tie your shoe, okay? You come back up, and halfway up you slip a disc, and now you're laying in your bed for three weeks because you can't move. Well, there has to be something to account for that. And so strama, I like to be inclusive so that people can understand that everyone, regardless of where you're at, regardless of your education level, your financial position, your religious preference, regardless of who you are, you're under heaps of complex stress because stress on one end is really positive, but on the other end. And, you know, as being an American, we like to push the envelope a little bit too far. And we were an industrial culture, and so Americans got used to, let's say Americans were used to working hard because many of our ancestors. My mom is Irish. Many of our ancestors are Polish, Italian. They came from families that didn't have a lot of resources. But what they did have is they had a strong work ethic, because in order to survive in the 1400s and the 1600s, you had to have a solid work ethic if you were European or South American or Asian. And so I think a bit of that has worked against us where we haven't been able to find a new norm, which is putting a priority on relaxation and rest and meditation and quiet. Because, like, success is important to Americans. Turn on the TV during the winter and Summer Olympics, and you'll get to see which country's success is the most important to. And it happens to be the country that wins the Olympics most consistently, and it happens to be the United States. So success is something that's been woven into us. It's been preached at us through various institutions that we've been involved in from the time that we're born, basically, till the time that we die. We want to have connection and we want to feel good about ourselves through the things that we have attained and the things that we've accomplished in the trials and the tribulations that we have traversed successfully. And so that for me was a real driver. And I think that caused a lot of the overwhelming stress that transformed into anxiety that end up driving me more. The challenge was when you go through something like SEAL training SEAL teams. I was in a, I was at a well endowed boarding school for 10 years that was very strict. You just get used to discomfort and discomfort becomes part of your. Part of, I don't want to say you become prideful, but in a certain way when you're SEAL training SEAL teams, there is pride that you've worked diligently and really hard to receive that graduation certificate and know that you are a man. You've gone through a ritualistic sense of growth from boy to man. And my feeling is that myself and most other Americans, we need to dial it back a little bit and begin to understand that there's always a cost for going a little bit too far.

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Click the link to learn more and start your journey today. Absolutely. You know, it's really interesting. Maybe we can circle back to this towards the end of our conversation. But for a lot of people in our culture and both men and women, but there's an absence of rites of passage and there's an absence of the kind of challenges that successfully take people from girlhood or boyhood into womanhood or manhood. Right. In a healthy way. So maybe we can circle back and look at how that might happen in a healthy way and also success. You Know, if we look at success as, you know, any life form, we're designed to evolve and change and kind of flower. And so there's fear, anxiety driven success, like what you're talking about, right, that need. But then there, there can also be just a natural. And I know you work with elite athletes, you work with people who are into high performance, but maybe there's a healthier approach to that. But first I want, I want to talk about, and by the way, I work at your term, strauma. I may borrow that without information and giving out to attribution because I do a lot of work. In fact, I'm headed up this weekend to Canada. I do a lot of work with correctional officers, probation and parole officers, other law enforcement and first responders. Boy, do they suffer from stroma and even a state of chronic stress with both primary and secondary trauma exposure. And after triexity, the research says, at least in North America, that correctional officers that spend 20 years in high security facilities, their life Expectancy is about 59 years, two decades less than the general population. And it's because they suffer from all the chronic stress related ailments and also the impact of unhealthy coping mechanisms and then even suicidality. Right. So it definitely, after 20 years of that trauma exposure and the unmanaged chronic stress, it kicks in with the blunt force of what we think of normally as a traumatic incident for sure.

Thank you for sharing that with me. Me? Yeah. I have a woman in my life who means a lot to me and she's been married to a corrections officer for 20 years. And I've always worried about him. He always looked under stress and always seemed extremely tired, more tired than he should have been for his age. And that gave me a very clear understanding. Thank you.

Yeah, so I know you, you talk about that. We can't just manage stress and anxiety with mindset alone or we can't necessarily think our way out of it. But it's really gotta be embodied work, right. Learning how to rebalance our nervous system and learning self regulation skills and even co regulation skills. So you know, in a lot of the training work I do, I talk about, you know, how to use the trium brain as an example, which is somewhat simplistic but still somewhat accurate functional map of how the brain functions. When we experience that amygdala hijack and you know, the fight or flight mechanism is taking over the autopilot, reptilian brain is the locus of control to whatever degree, then the smart part of our brain, the neocortex is going offline to whatever degree, Right. And so we don't. We do things that aren't so smart.

Right.

When we're really triggered, we often do and say things that are not so smart. Create messes we have to clean up later. And so we need to learn to resource ourselves to get untriggered. I often tell people when we're really emotionally intrigued, we have one and one only job, and that's get untriggered. Because in that moment, we're basically a danger to ourself and others and we don't have access to the smart part of our brain. I was fascinated in reading Jocko Willink's book about his experiences in Fallujah and some of the other accounts I've read from Navy seals and so forth. Somehow they have to be able to. You have, as a Navy seal, you have to be able to train yourself that in, in the kind of situation that would throw most of it to totally over the edge, into a panic attack, to have enough access to the smart part of your brain to assess a situation, make a split second decision, it can be a life or death situation. So the ability to develop that kind of regulation under that kind of stress. Now most of us aren't experiencing that extreme of a situation, but we really do have to learn how to self regulate and navigate the architecture of our brain, navigate our own autonomic nervous system. I know your work has a lot to do with that, so I wonder if you could talk about your path of healing that you introduce people to that deal with this chronic underlying stress and anxiety that so many are living with today in a chronic way without sometimes knowing it, sometimes not knowing it, but really not having any way to work with it.

Yeah. One, thank you for acknowledging Jocko and.

The good work he's doing in the world.

That SEAL teams and going through SEAL training, what they do is they make your nervous system stress resilient, okay. By putting a greater amount of stress on you every day. Right. So when you go to SEAL training and you walk through the corridor off to the left, there's a tall wall there and all the wall, it says, the only easy day was yesterday. And when I read that the first time, the only way that I uploaded and translated that was to mean, oh, they're going to kick the butt out of us more every day. Right. And really, in retrospect, when I look back, I realized that they were informing me every day we're going to put you underneath more stress and more tension and we're Going to see how you respond to that stress and tension. And then we're going to give you half a Friday off, Saturday and Sunday to allow you to get used to that state of function, right? And that goes on for probably about a good solid year and a half until you're in the SEAL teams, qualified as a SEAL team operator. And then the job in of itself does the same kind of thing. Now, when you take that too far, you're going to end up with debilitating states of discomfort. Been a lot of guys that get out of the SEAL teams at very young ages, they're having their cervical spine fused, they're having their lumbar spine fused, their knee replacement, shoulder replacements. All of these things are informing the world and the person that you're under a massive amount of stress, right? Like, if you have pain in your body, you're already well behind the ball curve. And so what I've done is I said, okay, well, what can I do here first to get out of the hell that I'm in? And I ran into some people and I was very lucky to be guided to people that knew more than I did. And they educated me and I took what they gave me and I worked it and worked it until I could squeeze out every drop of transformation out of it. And then I moved on to the next thing. And so in my mind, it never made good sense to me that I woke up on Monday and I felt great. And then four days later, I woke up on Friday and I felt terrible. There must be a way to reverse engineer this state of function. There has to be. Everything else can be reverse engineered. Why can't pain and discomfort and anxiety and fear. They must be able to be reverse engineered as well. And so what I did is I put my aptitude and my effort and my will to figuring out how to reverse engineer these states of function. And I created a new way to be able to create a nervous system that's stress resilient. But you don't have to go through SEAL training or being the SEAL teams in order to be able to be in a high stress situation and maintain a complete state of calm and peace and groundedness.

So I think you're starting to talk about your true body intelligence system, which is my next question. But before we go into that, I wonder if we could maybe just get a sense of, you know, what fear and anxiety mean to you or how you define that. Now, we know today that we have a biological imperative around a threat response. And we now know that there's Actually a direct line between sensory input of various kinds and the amygdala that doesn't even need prefrontal cortex processing. And that's not fear. It's not anxiety.

It's not an emotion yet.

It's not cognitive. We don't have a narrative around it. It's just a threat response. Even bacteria will move away from a threat, Right? It's a direct threat response. But then when it does go through the prefrontal cortex, then we start to. You know, we're always explaining our experience to ourselves, right? We're talking to ourselves about our experience, you know, consciously and unconsciously and creating a narrative around it. And that's where we elaborate the emotions of fear, the emotions of anxiety. And then, of course, that can exacerbate a sit, right? We get anxious about being anxious, and we get. We're suffering about suffering and so forth. And so we can get these whole loops of elaborated anxiety going on. So when you talk about fear and anxiety in your programs, what are you directly pointing to? What, experientially, what do you actually mean by fear and anxiety?

Yeah, so when we look at fear, we have to look at the organs that process fear. So when we break the human body down, there's four worlds. You have physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. When we talk about spiritual, what we're talking about is energetic and an alliance to my values, my morals, my principles, and my ethics. When we look at the emotional world, which is when it's stressed, we're looking at hopefulness, passion, and creativity. We're looking at honesty. We're looking at intimacy, we're looking at willfulness, and we're looking at freedom. These are feelings. So the feeling body, the emotional body, doesn't have access to the analytical mind because there's no thinking in the emotional world. And so then you're going to have the physical world, the instinctual world, and then you're going to have the analytical mental world. Well, each one of these worlds possesses four organs, four systemic organs, okay? And so in any emotional world, you got liver, sexual bladder, and small intestine. In the analytical mental world, which is where you develop fear, you have brain, stomach, gallbladder, and kidney. And so the way that I look at fear and anxiety is this. Every organ in the body is balanced out by another organ. So for every thinking organ, you have a paired emotional organ. So the brain is balanced out by the sexual organs. Now, the sexual organs are where a particular type of anxiety begins, which is all around the ability to process intimacy and attention and Affection. And so when someone has a fear or a distrust of intimate, connected relationships, then they're going to start to develop what? They're going to start to develop an excess amount of heat or an excessive amount of cold. And so when I get into states of fear, I have too much cold running in my system. When I get into states of anxiety, I have too much heat running in my system. Okay, so that just means that at an atomic and subatomic level, the protons and neutrons, all those things are moving too fast or they're moving too slow. And the question is, how do I get myself out of that state? And so when I'm teaching my practitioners how to become stress free facilitators, they have to understand how temperature relates to emotion. So when we look at warmth, what's the emotion we associate with someone? Being warmth. We have a way that we express that that person's warm hearted. We say, okay, so love is associated with warmth. But what happens when we start shifting towards the feeling of anger? Now we're moving towards the temperature of high. How about when we start shifting towards rage? Now we're moving towards the temperature, towards boiling. And if you look at people at a biological level, at a systemic physiological level, you can see they're getting red because the heat is increasing. Well, let's go the other direction towards cold, which is where fear exists. When a person is cool, let's say a quarterback like Tom Brady, okay, from the New England area and the Patriots, what did we always notice about him when he was in the huddle? He was always calm, cool and collected. So cool is associated with being confident. And confidence is in the mental world. When we look at the emotional body, which is where anxiety is, and when we look at the mental body, which is where fear exists. Okay, what we want to do in true body intelligence is we want to teach people how to open up the muscles, okay, Open up, remove the tension that's causing the organization to be excessively hot electromagnetically or excessively cold electromagnetically. And when we do that, then the emotional organs and the mental organs can move back into a state of neutrality. And when you're in a state of neutrality, you're in a state of high homeostasis. And your nervous system is stress resilient. But when you're out of that state, what's going to take over are, well, what will take over is your history. Because people lean on their history when they're in high stress situations and they begin to respond the ways that their parents responded, the ways that their Grandparents responded. You brought up something earlier when you said the generational, the epigenetic generational influence on the ways in which we respond to emotional social dynamics, whether it's professionally familiar or culturally, those are going to always be something that we lean on. When our stress load, when our lifetime accumulated stress load is too high. If you reduce your lifetime accumulated stress load by 50%, you get into the same exact situation that triggered you and you have the exact opposite response. Instead of being closed minded, you're open minded. Instead of feeling disempowered, you're empowered. Instead of closing off your communication and withdrawing, you're communicating clearly. Instead of being depressed, you're passionately engaged in the conversation. And so just on the other side of these negative responses is a positive response. And the question is, how do I get out of the amygdala and how do I stay in the prefrontal cortex? Well, I do that by spiritual practice, right? The things that you're doing, whether it's the breath work that you're doing, whether it's the sound healing that you're doing, whether it's the yoga that you're doing, whether it's the walking that you're doing, whatever you can do to interfere successfully with that historical stress response. And I add a historical to it because it is generational. And then once you've done that successfully, you start to build a new neural pathway. And as you continue to do it again and again and again, well, guess what happens. Those old neural pathways, they start to shrink because they're getting very little electrical signal. And then your brain begins to recognize into this new state of function, this new way of being, this new way of perceiving and analyzing any moating. And now you become free of your historical generational responses that are no longer relevant to the situations that you're in. And all it takes is a little bit of time and a little bit of effort. And once you're there, because guess what? Our nervous system is like a camera. It's taking snapshots constantly of how we're responding. Because our brain's job is to govern our reality and help us achieve and experience the things that we crave at a soul level, at an individual level, at a human level.

So that was such an incredibly elegant description of the rewiring process. And I know that your model evolved out of your own self healing work that you dedicated five, six hours a day to for seven years, which is amazing. But I also very much, when you talk about the four organs and the parallel organs and the balancing one. I'm hearing the Taoist influence there. The Taoist science influence? Yes, very much so. It sounds like you've also been integrating this Taoist science, this traditional daoist science, which is obviously one of the more ancient body mind science traditions on the planet, with current neuroscience and the understandings we have from current neuroscience and all the advances in brain imaging and so forth.

Yeah, like for me, we have to synthesize these systems together because love is science and science has value. Science is spiritual. I mean, it's very difficult for people who don't apply the scientific method to begin to understand the value of science. But once you apply science to spirituality and you start to see the results that you're producing, you can make conscious assumptions about exactly what the person is going to experience because it's been verified again and again. And when I get the opportunity to work with someone, I want to work with them confidently knowing that if I say that I can take you here, you're going to get there. And everything that I do, it has to be repeatable and verifiable by anyone. And if it is, it's spiritual science. And synthesizing Eastern and Western for me is a must.

Absolutely. And we live in an amazing time when we have access to all the incredible ancient Vedic science and Taoist science and current neuroscience and positive psychology and we can all work on being a scientist and using ourselves as guinea pigs. And really the possibilities are endless in terms of how we can integrate this thing.

Yes, you're hitting it. That's exactly the truth. I mean, the possibilities are endless. And when we become our own scientists and our own healer. Because guess what? This is all new, this synthesis that we're going through as a culture. And I love that men and women like you are going into the world and offering these summits that people can pretty much access that don't have a lot of resources can access and be able to get good quality information because they're starting to realize that when I take inspired, heartfelt action to my own benefit, I not only change myself, that change influences everything that's under my sphere of influence. And everything around me becomes greater because of my efforts, my time and my passion and my care for myself.

I love the name of your system, True Body Intelligence. Because one of the things as we begin to do this work, we begin to realize that our body has this innate intelligence. I mean, we even know, we all know, that if we cut a finger or something and if it's not a deep gas that needs stitching, well, even if it needs stitching, it's going to heal. We might get a little bit of a scar, but generally it heals and we don't see anything. Actually, science doesn't really understand that process completely. Western science doesn't understand it completely. But the body has this innate capacity for healing and an innate intelligence. Our immune system, when you really think about it, is intelligent at a profound level and complexity that western science still doesn't completely understand. So I love that term. And as you were describing, kind of getting access to the nervous system and to the body and to the musculature and the soft tissue to open things up. I was wondering, well, okay, what are the actual techniques and modalities that you're using? And I thought, well, maybe he's talking about movement, maybe he's talking about breath work, maybe some hands on body work. So what, you did mention breath work. And a moment ago, what are some of the primary modalities that you teach in your system to help people do this process of self healing and transformation?

Yeah, I mean, for me, the most important, the two most important would be Body of Light, okay, where we have what are called 45 minutes TMMs, which are transmutative meditations, okay. And then we have attunement. So an example of an attunement, it's like I'm a musician, right? So I play the piano, I play the guitar, I've played the drums, I sing. And so we're always tuning our instruments before we play. Because if you don't tune your instrument and you get on stage and start playing, the crowd starts leaving because it doesn't make sense to their nervous system. It agitates. Agitates it and irritates it. But then guess what happens? Humans forget to tune their bodies, they forget to tune their energy fields. And so an attunement or a healing bath that I created will allow you to tune your energy field to the frequency of violet light. Because violet light, as you learned from mantouchia, is that it's the only quality of light that can duplicate itself, right? So as I raise my core vibration and I change my energetic field by using the word, by using my voice, I get to determine what note, what key I want to experience my day in. Do I want to experience my day in a key of E? Do I want to experience in the key of G? Do I want to experience in the key of A? And so these attunements are really profound. And what I love about them is they don't cost money. All they cost is time. So a prime example of that would be I am one with the One. I am one with the divine realms of light. I am one with the 14 solar planes, flames and rays of light. I am one with the love, light, laughter and presence of divine Universal, Supreme Prime Creator, the Creator of all that is. Now, if you sat in a bath and you put a candle on the edge and you looked at the candle while you stated that 36 times when you went to sleep, you'd have the best night of sleep you had in years because you attuned your frequency to the one, the divine realms of light, the 14 solar planes and flames and rays of light and the love, light, laughter and presence of divine, Universal, Supreme Prime Creator, the Creator of all that is. If I'm going to attune my nervous system, I want it aligned to the original essence of creation. And that will help me balance the blueprint and start to shed the epigenetic dysfunctional states of survival that were passed on to me by my parents. Parents. Parents. Parents. Parents. Parents. Parents, Parents, parents. And we could say parents for a couple hours, okay. So that I can be free to make my own choices. Now, that's body of light. That's a basic, simple attunement. You could go even with something more simple. Body feel all of the love in.

The heart of the universe.

If you said that 36 times, by the 36th time you would start to feel the frequency of divine love that's.

In the heart of the universe.

Let's say you want to align to light, Body, feel all of the love in the heart. Body feel all of the light in the heart of the universe. Or you can go body feel all of the divine light in the heart of the universe. Well, now your nervous system is going to attune to light. Let's say you decided you wanted to feel the presence of God. Then you would say body, brain, nervous system, feel all of the presence of God in the heart of the universe. And if you said that 36 times, you're going to tune your nervous system to that presence. And so in the beginning, there was the Word and the word was one with God, and then the word was God. Well, what does that mean? It means that the word vibration has the ability to create our own reality. And so in the body of light, I teach you attunements that you can utilize in order to tune your nervous system to the divine universal, supreme prime creator and all of the love enlightened presence that's in the heart of the universe. And now you have all the energy you need to get through your day. And you're living from an inspired place. The other system is called bestercise. And Bester size stands for bioenergetic self transformational sequences. Okay? They're called best Now, B, E, S, T, S. So when you're doing a Bestercise, you're using the three types of contractions, concentric, isometric, and eccentric contractions. And the reason why you're using all three is because the concentric contraction builds strength. The isometric contraction recruits more energy, more consciousness, more intelligence, but more tissue fiber. And the eccentric contraction removes excessive amounts of physical tension. So I strengthen, I recruit, and I stretch, and I go through these. I go through this cadence in, you know, 75 different positions on the average day. I'm doing like four or five different positions, right? And I might do that for 60 repetitions. Now I'm opening my body and I'm reducing the excessive electromagnetic charge, the excessive heat and the excessive cold that I'm picking up every day and that I've picked up over my lifetime. So the reason why I did five to six hours a day my first seven years is because SEAL training in the SEAL teams was a very dramatic experience. It's at the extremes, it's at the edge of how humans are pushing themselves. So I knew I needed to put in a lot of time. I also knew that it takes seven years to replace every single cell in the human body. And I wanted every bit of that consciousness to be translated into every single cell. All right, now when you're doing a Bestercise, an example of that for someone who's watching, all you need to do is the action of the muscle. So the action of this muscle, bicep, is to shorten. So if I put my hand on my wrist and I give a load of resistance and I shorten and I get to the top and I hold for three seconds and I squeeze as hard as I can, and then I open underneath that load of resistance. I'm basically arm wrestling myself. But what I'm doing scientifically is I'm strengthening, I'm recruiting, and I'm stretching. And now I'm amplifying the intelligence that goes to that muscle, from that muscle to that organ. Now, when that signal hits that organ, that organ is going to let go of the excessive heat or the excessive cold based on how you're feeding yourself and what you're drinking. It's going to move that excessiveness out of my system and I'm going to come into a greater state of homeostasis. And so bester size is great because it's something I can teach someone. It doesn't cost any money, and they can do it in the privacy of their own home. And when they're doing that, they're rewiring their brain. Why? Because I'm engaging my nerves. When I engage my nerves, I engage my nervous system. So let's say I was dysregulated, highly dysregulated. If you had a camera that could go into my body and show you how tense my body is when I'm dysregulated, you would be able to see that the dysregulation of my nervous systems translate and transfers to my skeletal muscular system. And so now, well, if that's true, what it means is what's stuck inside of my body, I can also reverse engineer and take out. And I dysregulate my nervous system from stress and tension and distortion. I dismantle, I disrupt the pattern that I'm used to, and now I create a whole new pattern. So whatever's in my body is in my life. Whatever's in my life that's out of balance is in my body. And so God, the universe source gave us this great opportunity, the dao, to be able to go in and rewire our bodies and rewire our brains through rewiring our bodies back to neutrality.

Would you agree that when we're able to, by moving into what you call homeostasis and optimizing, you know, the innate regulatory systems of the body, heart and mind, such that we're able to drop into deep states or what might be called flow, that in some level, what's happening, all the different organs of the body, there's all these different, different energy emitting organs and different wave frequencies. I mean, we have the rate of our breath, we have our heartbeat, we have our brainwave. But every organ in the body, every gland in the body is emitting energy at different wave frequencies. And as we move into deeper states of regulation, they begin to cohere. And there's a palpable coherence that we might describe as flow. And some of the Vedic traditions at the deepest levels have been described as samadhi. And when we're in those states, there's a profound healing happening. There's the releasing of all that condensed dysregulation that you're talking about and a cleaning and an opening. And would that match with the way you describe your system?

Yeah, exactly. You know, the focus is to be able to get someone to be an amalgamated being is someone who's physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually and environmentally present simultaneously. And now when you're in that state, you're in a perpetual state of what you're speaking of.

Supreme Having also reminds me of, you know, bringing quantum theory into this.

Yes.

At the quantum level, it's the deepest level of that. There's really no mistakes. There's complete harmony. There's complete balance. As you move out towards relative reality and the physical reality, you start to get mistakes and broken circuits and all kinds of dysregulation and stuff. If we can just plug back into Source. I mean, if you can imagine if we all had an umbilical cord and I would just plug ourselves in, which is kind of what happens in good sleep. If we plug back into Source, things just automatically get healed. It's like defragmenting your computer or something. It's a complete reset. So everything you're talking about is a process of resetting our nervous system by tapping into the deeper levels of innate natural homeostasis. And all these systems you're talking about. Yeah.

Well, you know, it's very interesting that you said that. You're the only other person that I've ever heard say. What I. I partially discovered myself is that if humans. If you look at an Auric field, if you look at a human spiritually, you have to realize that there's 13 different layers of density that we're living with. And the most dense would be the bones, right. So the skeletal system. So that would be level one. When we get out to the 13th level, that's our communication, our communion that we're having with Source consciousness. What some people call God, what some people call. They might call that the dao. We're all talking about the same thing. Okay? So at that 13th level, disease. All states of dis ease and disease begin with the fragmentation that we have at the 13th level. And they work their way into the body. The body is the last place that dis ease begins. And so the attunement that I gave you, I'm one with the One. I'm one with the divine realms of light. I'm one with the 14 solar planes, flames, rays of light. I am one with all love, light, laughter and presence of divine, universal, supreme, Prime, Creator, the creator of all that is. That is to get you clarity at the 13th level with source so that you can start defragmenting from Source back to your body and moving it to a greater state of homeostasis. So we are going. So body of light system and those attunements is about going quantum. Because once we heal that fragmentation, the body, the blueprint that was left for us, it will find its own balance and it will start to amplify the inherent intelligence that's inside of us. And the more intelligent we become, the more we can manipulate our environment to produce the inspired actions that we really desire to feel and share with ourselves and with others.

Beautiful. I could go on and on here. There's so much we could explore together. And we'll have to do this again, but we are nearing the end of our time, and I wonder if you'd be willing to lead us in one of your practices. Maybe something you could do five to ten minutes at most. But you know, one of the. Either one of these meditations.

Yeah, that. That would be honor. Let me tune. I'm going to close my eyes and tune in. So you're going to put your fingertips together. Okay. And that's different than the pads. We're actually going to put the tips together. And ladies with long fingernails, you're going to have to figure out how to do that and then place your hand down in your lap. Okay. And what we're going to do is we're going to give the body, the brain, and the nervous system specific instructions. And the body, and the brain, and the nervous system will always follow the word. So all you have to do is repeat after me. Body, brain, nervous system, locate the root of fear and anxiety that lives inside of my body and send it back to the light. Light. To the benefit of myself and to the benefit of all others. Body, brain, nervous system, locate where fear and anxiety live in my body and the root cause and send them back to the light to the benefit of myself and to the benefit of all others. Body, brain, nervous system, locate where the root of the fear and anxiety that I live with are and send them back to the light to the benefit of myself and all others. Now take in a deep breath. Exhale slowly. Sink down into your nervous system. And now we're going to go with the opposite of fear and anxiety. We're going to go with excitement, and we're going to go with confidence. Okay? And we're going to say 36 times this statement. Body, feel all of the confidence and feel all of the excitement that I am. Body, brain, nervous system, feel all of the love and the confidence and excitement that I am. Body, brain, nervous system, feel all of the love and all of the confidence and all of the excitement that I am and Feel what that feels like. And then take in a deep breath. Exhale slowly. Sink down into your nervous system. And now you're going to say I am one with the one. One with the divine realms of light. Body, grain nervous system. I am one with the one. I am one with the divine realms of light. I am one with the one. I am one with the divine realms of light. I am one with the one. I am one with the divine realms of light. Take in a deep breath. Exhale slowly. Sink down into your nervous system. Now you're going to give your body a simple instruction. Body, feel all of the love in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the love in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the love in.

The heart of the universe. Now we're going to switch.

Body, feel all of the light in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the light in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the light in.

The heart of the universe.

Take in a deep breath. Breath, Exhale slowly. Sink down into your nervous system. Body, feel all of the power in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the perfection in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the self expression.

In the heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the clear communication.

In the heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the action in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the passion in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the hope in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the honesty in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the humor in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the openness in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the protection in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the courage in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the freedom in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the grace in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the happiness in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the healing in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the forgiveness in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the transformation in.

The heart of the universe.

Body, feel all of the transfiguration in.

The heart of the universe.

And so it is forevermore. Taking a deep breath, exhale slowly. Sink down into your nervous system. Now feel all of that beautiful love and all that beautiful light and all of that beautiful presence coursing through your nervous system. And gently open your eyes and come back into the field. Join us again.

That was absolutely beautiful. It was amazing. And you would suggest people take some of the core elements of that and repeat them 36 times.

Yeah, take 30. Like, figure out what. Which one resonates with you. Right? Like, which part. Oh, I think I need some more of that. And then you can run that one. For some people, it's going to be power. For some people, it's going to be communication. Like, everyone has had a mom and a dad and a partner and a sibling that's told them, hey, Josh, you're a terrible communicator. Or. Or, Mark, you're not really that funny. Or, God, like, you need to get more serious and passionate about your life. Like, everyone knows their own inner deficiencies. And so they can choose one of those attunements and run those 36 times, or they can go through it the same way that I did, because that took what, about seven minutes. If they did that for 28 days in a row, they would see dramatic shifts and changes in their life and they would start rewiring their brain towards feeling all of the love in the heart of the universe, feeling all of the love of divine, universal, supreme, prime, creator. Like, if you don't give your body the instruction to do something, it won't do it. Because God has set this, this realm up is no one's allowed to interfere with your development. It begins with us. It begins with me. It begins with you. It begins with them. And when they tell their body, brain and nervous system, the body has no choice but to listen. It has to take your commands. And so now we're using the word to choose how we want to create and what we want to connect to.

Incredibly powerful. And I love, you know, in fact, I. In my own work, I've been using this notion of tuning and attunement a lot more because our body, nervous system, brain, is the most complex system in the known universe, an incredibly complex organism. And, you know, most of us weren't given the operating manual when we grew up, but now with the integration that we were talking about before, the ancient yogic sciences, the contemplative sciences, modern neuroscience, positive psychology, and so forth, we really do have an operator's manual. And we can tune this. This is the most. One of the most amazing instruments that there is, and we can learn to become really excellent tuners, we could become master piano tuners or what have you, to tune its own instrument. And you're giving us a way to speak directly into those systems and tune the instrument. It's so powerful. Love it.

Yeah. And, you know, I do these before I go to bed at night. Like for someone who has had poor sleep and wakes up in the morning and they're tired behind their eyes. You know, I always say body, brain, nervous system drop down. It's a fourth stage regenerative sleep to sleep of a newborn baby and repair and restore my body, brain and nervous system to fullness by the time I wake up. And it does it, whether I get two hours or three hours or four hours, I'm ready to go with my eyes open.

Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Yeah. There's actually been a lot of research and shown that, you know, if you go to sleep with kind of an agitated mind and so forth, you could sleep nine hours and wake up exhausted. But even if you only have five, six hours of sleep and you do the kind of attunement you were just talking about, you can wake up fresh and ready to go.

Fresh and ready to go, right?

Absolutely.

Fresh and ready to go. And do what? Love and share and be kind and be generous.

Absolutely. Wonderful. Thank you so much. What a joy. I was really looking forward to this and I'm just thrilled about making this connection, having you be part of our summer.

It.

Christopher Maher. Thank you so much. Founder of the True Body Intelligence System, former Navy seal.

Thank you for having me. You're an awesome host. You are so educated. I love your language. I love how you put things together. We use the same exact language. So this is coming out of your mouth. And I'm like, I didn't train him and how's he? But I just love that you've been off in Western mass, like pulling back the layers and figuring all the things out that you figured out and putting this all together. It's really awesome. I'm grateful to be here. And listeners, you're so lucky to have somebody like this.

Thank you very much. Be well.

Welcome.

Thank you for joining me on the radical responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present, and stay true to you. You take care.

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