Danielle Griffin┃Why High Achievement Without Nervous System Safety Leads to Burnout

If you just take those few moments and you get your body and mind in alignment, you're actually able to be more productive. You know, you're not carrying around, like I said, so much of that stress and tension that, that might be actually slowing you down throughout the day.

What if burnout isn't a sign that you're doing too much, but that your nervous system no longer feels safe? Today I sit down with somatic educator Dr. Danielle Griffin to explore why high achievement can sometimes be a trauma response. We also discuss how stress becomes stored in the body and why lasting transformation begins by creating safety in your nervous system, not just changing your mindset. Hi, welcome to another episode of the Radical Responsibility Podcast. My name is Dr. Fleet Maull, your host, And I'm really happy to be here today with Danielle Griffin. Welcome, Danielle.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's great to have you. And we have a lot of crossover between our work and the embodiment field. And so I'm really looking forward to this conversation and exploring your book, Somatic Exercise Made Simple, with you and just this whole world of how we can really transform and optimize our lives on so many different levels by returning home to the body. So let's get right into it. So I'm gonna share background a little bit with our audience, and then we'll jump right in.

Okay, sounds great.

Okay, so Dr. Danielle Griffin is the expert high achievers call when mindset work stops working. As a somatic educator with a doctorate in organizational leadership, she exposes, exposes the physiological cost of ambition, proving, proving that you cannot think your way out of burnout if your nervous system is stuck in survival mode. Dr. Griffin bridges the gap between the boardroom and the body. She is a TEDx speaker, certified hypnotherapist, and author of the Somatic Exercise Made Simple series. Her work challenges the hustle harder narrative by teaching leaders how to release the chronic pain, trauma, and stress stored in their tissues. She doesn't just teach resilience, she teaches the physiology of safety, giving world-class performers the tools to achieve peak success Without physical sacrifice. You know, we like to start our conversations off here on the Radical Responsibility Podcast with a little bit of a personal note and a little bit of your backstory. So I'm curious how you got into this and just your, you know, your whole focus. What I find myself talking about a lot these days in all the work I do is that any kind of healing and transformational work and life optimization work has to begin with the, really the bottom-up felt experience of nervous system safety. And I don't necessarily mean cognitively top-down telling ourselves or trying to convince ourselves that we're safe, but actually the experience of the nervous system feeling safe, that bottom-up felt experience. And it sounds like that's what you're pointing to as well. So at what point in your life Did you realize that and that become important to you? Because in Western culture, we've all been pretty enculturated to be pretty disembodied, right? So, you know, I think it's part of the human condition 'cause we all have these supercomputers on our shoulders. So I think we naturally get fascinated with all that cognitive brilliance and activity. And of course we're very visually and auditorily oriented to the outside world to get our needs met and so forth. Maybe in earlier times when we lived out in the natural world without the protection of all the modern conveniences or even homes or cars and so forth, you kind of had to be more grounded, more in touch with the world, more in your body. But we can walk around pretty disembodied these days, get— and get away with it. And most people kind of ignore the, the real home from the neck down, except when there's some kind of pain or discomfort. So when did it become evident for you that this was so important?

Right, it really wasn't evident to me until my husband pointed it out to me. And at that time, we both had lost our fathers. This was just after the COVID pandemic, you know, kind of coming out of things. I was working a job at the university. I had a business. I was teaching yoga as well. So doing all these things, plus we just had another child, so compounding my grief with busy work and on this go, go, go path where I was burnt out and not giving myself the moments to breathe, to really realize I was burnt out. I was getting about 3 hours of sleep each night, you know, going from here, there, everywhere, bringing my kids places, you know, like I said, working a full-time job plus my business. And it wasn't until he said, like, Hey, you're starting to look old. It's starting to wear on you. You're not getting the proper rest. I also had high blood pressure, some other chronic pain, as well as some mental health issues. And it wasn't until that moment where I was able to push pause and just reflect, like, what's really going on in my life right now? This isn't the dream that I thought I'd be living. This isn't how I thought my life should be. I've worked this hard to get to a certain point in my life, but I thought things would be a little bit different, you know, be happier, you know, I'd feel better. Um, and none of those things were, were true.

Wow. Well, wonderful that, um, circumstances kind of conspired to bring you to that point, with your husband helping to point that out. So You know, this idea of being achievers, high achievers, many of us probably think of ourselves that way. And hopefully there is some healthy way to challenge ourselves to keep evolving and, you know, accomplish things, challenge ourselves to grow and fly. Personally, I think all as beings, even as life forms, we're designed to evolve and grow and thrive and so forth. Unfortunately, we often do that from a place of lack, right? I'm not enough, so I gotta prove myself to myself in the world somehow. And so underlying the high achievers thing, right? I think you point out that this could actually be a trauma response. So what we think of as maybe a positive thing of being, I'm a higher achiever, could actually be a response to unresolved trauma.

Yeah, exactly. You know, for me, it wasn't necessarily just the loss and the grief that we experienced. That was definitely part of it. You know, we also relocated my mother during that period. But I also had some workplace trauma that I was dealing with, and which contributed to my work-related high achievement, feeling like, like you mentioned, that I'm not enough or I'm having to prove myself constantly, having to get into alignment what my real goals were. What do I want for my life personally and professionally? And I never— taken the opportunity to assess how the work that I was doing was actually impacting me mentally and physically. And it wasn't until I learned about, you know, somatic therapy, the hypnotherapy, where I was able to take that step back, really start to embody, you know, see how these, um, external factors were physically impacting me and really start to visualize how I wanted to move forward and what was actually going to make me feel good and how I could present myself in a way for my family as well as my work and my business that was truly good for me holistically.

So you pointed to your experience of loss and your need to grieve and the whole impact of the grieving process. I've had some very significant losses in my life, including losing my son. So I don't know what you've been through, but I have a sense. And you also point to workplace traumas. And of course, almost none of us escape childhood without some kind of what they sometimes call small T or big T trauma or both, right? None of us get through childhood unscathed really, especially in this modern culture. And also, I mean, this need to prove ourselves, I would imagine there's kind of a gender and racial element to that in terms of being a woman in this society, being a Black woman in this society of maybe feeling, and possibly unconsciously internalizing, that I have to work harder, I have to prove myself.

Yeah, yeah, that definitely goes back to the, the workplace trauma, you know. Pretty much ever since I was in a professional setting, you know, after college, which for me was back in, uh, 2006 when I finished my undergraduate, um, there had always been things that had made me feel like, you know, oh, you don't have enough education, you need more degrees in order to move up, especially working in the field of higher education. You're not able to be in a leadership role unless you have a doctorate. So that being a goal of mine, which I have obtained, and then still, oh, well, you know, you still don't have this, or, oh, we're going to give it to this person, or, you know, the the mistreatment, lack of trust, even though I'm one of the people with the most experience or the most years experience, things of that nature, and constantly trying to pivot and figure out, well, how do I get to a point where I can actually move up? And it was when I was working on my doctorate degree where I did the research. I literally did research so that I could figure out how to get in a, a place where I could feel successful. And, you know, this was before I learned about somatics and like what my definition of success was, and interviewing people, you know, understanding what their definitions of success was and how they actually got there. Um, and it wasn't until I finished that research and, um, my degree where I realized that, you know, what I think is success or what I want, you know, at least in higher education, isn't for me. You know, that the way that they got there isn't necessarily how I want to get to my version of success. And it wasn't until I actually started talking to people and I started to expand how I see my life in that way professionally, and then, you know, kind of going through more, you know, the personal traumas where those things, my work and personal life, started to become into more alignment.

So at some point you realized that things weren't working, the path you were on wasn't really working for you the way it had hoped— you'd hoped it would, and you began exploring somatic therapies and hypnotherapy and so forth. And, um, so I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about, as I mentioned, I think in modern culture, I would say the West, but I think it's pretty global these days, in modern culture we lead pretty disembodied lives. In fact, I have a friend who has said that in Western culture, or I think you could say the same about modern culture altogether, the body has been relegated to being nothing more than a brain taxi, something to carry around this supercomputer on our shoulders, right? And so the need to come,, to come back into the body. But before we talk about all the ways that we can do that, what are some of the costs of being disconnected from our bodies?

Yeah, I mean, some of the initial things that we start to see, which are things that people often ignore, you know, like I mentioned, the high— I had high blood pressure, um, you know, I started to develop some chronic pain, like my in my neck and shoulder, my back, I often would attribute it to other things as well as just ignoring and, oh, it will go away. I just need some more rest, right? Eventually it can transition into emotional reactivity. You're carrying around this weight, this mental and physical pain, stress, and it starts manifesting itself as negativity or being overly emotional, crying about things that we may not normally cry about, or angry about things, or lashing out on other people when what we're angry about isn't even related to them. So those are some of the initial things. And especially in the workplace, I've seen all of it. Yelling at other people, um, you know, treating people in ways that, you know, we necessarily wouldn't want to be treated. Um, but we use the excuse, oh well, I'm just stressed, I'm just burnt out, you know. But there's things that we can do to manage that.

Yeah, you know, there's something in psychology— you're probably familiar with the idea of the pain paradox. You know, we, we, we kind of instinctively want to move away from pain, avoid pain, push it away, not experience it. And we're We have a big preference for comfort and pleasure and so forth. But actually, real healing and transformation is on the other side of being willing to feel pain. And so again, we generally ignore— most of us, until we do differently— ignore the body, except when there's some pain there. And then we don't want to feel that, right? So we want to numb it out, take a pill. And the society and the culture and the marketplace is saying, don't feel pain. Feel discomfort, just take a pill, do this, do that, distract yourself, whatever. And so we tend to ignore that and we see pain as a problem. And I think you've said that pain's not really a problem, it's just a signal. And I've often said similar things myself that first of all, if we're experiencing pain, it's good news, means we're alive. And it's just data, it's our body communicating to us.

Right.

And we ignore that, uh, that communication at our own peril. I make the analogy like, uh, in our car, if we keep ignoring all, you know, these little noises start happening and then the worst noises, and we keep ignoring it, ignoring and ignoring it, well, pretty soon we find ourselves on the side of the road calling a pickup truck, right? Well, for us as human beings, that might be an ambulance on the way to the hospital, right? So, so we really need to listen to the body and the body knows. And, and the other aspect of it is, you know, in terms of all the lifestyle issues of what do we eat, how much do we eat, when do we exercise, whether we do this, how much rest. The body has the answer for all this stuff if we'll listen to it. Right. But when we're disembodied, we end up making a lot of decisions up here in the head that are really not in our own interest. Often not in the interest of others, and collectively we're making a lot of decisions that aren't in the interest of our home, the, you know, Mother Earth, right? So this whole thing of being disembodied has cascading costs that extrapolate out. I mean, I think you could almost look at a lot of our individual, community, social ills, global problems as stemming from this issue of disembodiment. So, yeah, so how do we shift that and begin listening to the body and then, you know, come back into relationship with the body in such a way that we can do our healing work and really develop a new basis from which to live our lives.

Yeah, I think mostly it takes us slowing down. You know, we live in such a fast-paced world. You know, we move from one thing to another so quickly. We might have noticed, you know, oh, I have a slight pain in my shoulder, maybe it's from sitting at my desk for 5 hours straight and not moving and typing, but oh, I got to get this work done, so I'm just going to keep going. I'm just going to push through it. And once I stop, it'll go away. But we don't realize how much time we actually waste throughout the day and how little time it actually takes to release some of that tension, to start to embody how we feel, understand where some of that pain, discomfort, emotions are coming from. And if we just breathe and look within, we can release it. And it takes less time than it would if we wait and end up in the hospital or the doctor's office because we ignored it. The more we continue to ignore it, like you said, the worse it gets. But once our body starts to send those signals, it's best for us to individually, holistically treat it on our own when we start to feel it. If we push pause, take a moment. OK, I have back-to-back meetings, but let me find just a few moments between those meetings. I encourage people to start off what I call a 90-second pause, even if it's just 90 90 seconds so I can decompress, breathe, release some of the stress, and mentally focus on what my next step is, how I want to move forward. That is transformational in itself. And starting to train our minds and bodies to do that consistently throughout the day, whether it's, you know, first thing in the morning when we wake up or in the evening before we go to sleep, so we can get full restful night's sleep, that can save lives.

I know that you've spoken about in relating with our body and when we experience discomfort or pain of any kind, rather than just falling into the usual avoidance or suppressing problem, to actually just get curious. I love that because I think curiosity is such an antidote to so many things in life, right? Because we're kind of, I don't know, it's kind of the human condition that we develop our opinions and our biases and this is the way it is and I know this is the way it is. And we all become a little bit closed-minded in one or another area of our lives until we don't, right? And some of us more than others, but it's something in the human condition. And so anytime we just stop and get curious, oh, I don't know what's going on, what is going on? I mean, it's such an antidote to so many of the, of our ills, right? And in terms of the body, that can be the pathway into an incredible journey of coming home and being in relationship. Well, I mean, this is our, for better or worse, this is our home for our, this entire lifespan, right? And, you know, we don't know what's going to happen after death. We have different ideas, different religions and philosophies. And, but we know at least for this lifetime, this is our home. And how many people go through their entire life and really never get to know their own body?

Yeah, quite a few people. And I believe, you know, like you said, people have, you know, either their biases or misconceptions, but I think it's a lot of it is out of fear. You know, if I, if I take the moment to feel and, you know, breathe into the space and have awareness of how I'm physically feeling what's going to happen? Am I going to run into something more serious? Right. And people are afraid of the more serious. But if we start to address it and start to understand our bodies and how we feel and notice the difference. After my father had passed, my best client, if you will, is my mother. She's like, and she dealt with a lot of that, you know, physical pain and stress because she did a lot of the caretaking for my dad when he had cancer. And so she had to learn, and is still learning, or unlearning, if you will, in some ways, the difference in how certain pain versus discomfort feels. You know, even sometimes people— when people are just doing a simple stretch, oh, that hurts. Like, does it hurt, or is it just a little uncomfortable because you haven't released the tension? Like, starting to identify, you know, even the doctor's office, like, what's the pain scale, right? You know, similar concept, but really starting to identify the level of discomfort versus when is something is in pain and versus How does this feel in this moment? When don't you feel that way? When do you feel that way? And starting to really understand that so you can know, and also having better relationships with our physicians in that way so that we can clearly communicate what's going on when we do need to see a doctor versus saying, oh, just everything hurts. Well, it's really hard to diagnose somebody that just says everything hurts. And really starting to understand how it feels and knowing, you know, if we're practicing these things on a regular basis, knowing, okay, I felt this way this day, but now it feels completely different. I know something isn't right because I usually feel this way.

Yeah, I think not only are so many of us really disconnected from our bodies, maybe without really realizing it, But to the extent that we have a relationship with our body, as you were mentioning, it's often fear-based. We're kind of afraid, like if I pay attention more there, maybe there's something going on, maybe I have an illness, maybe, you know, we're all afraid, you know, the big C and all that kind of thing. And so we tend to have this, which is really, you know, doesn't make sense at all. I mean, we need to have a fear-based relationship with our own body, right? I can see how we get there, but it's just that, you know, You mentioned earlier in our conversation, you just very briefly kind of alluded to a connection between physical pain and then emotional energy. And so that's, if we start paying more attention to our body and tune into physical discomfort, we get curious about it, there might be some underlying, not always, some things can be purely physical in a sense, but sometimes there's a connection between our emotions and physical symptoms and physical pain and discomfort. And of course, our emotional body, physical body are completely interconnected and we experience emotion in the body, right? So I wonder if you could explain, you know, not only do we have a tendency and our culture has kind of encouraged us to avoid physical discomfort, right? But boy, have we been encouraged to avoid emotional discomfort.

Oh yes, definitely. Unfortunately, especially men are, you know.

Absolutely, yeah. We have two emotions, right? Pissed off and beer.

Right.

Beer an emotion?

Maybe sleep too, if that's an emotion. Um, but yeah, if again, it goes back to slowing down, and when we start to have that awareness, we can say, okay, when I had this conversation with this person, or I was preparing for this meeting, I felt the tension build up. I felt the nervousness in my stomach or the, you know, the sweat beating. I felt the back pain, you know, or, you know, I had an argument with somebody and I felt muscle cramping in my forearms. But if we don't take the time to have that awareness, we can continue to carry that, that stress and the, the tension or whatever the symptoms are that we had from those emotions forward. We never actually release it. It continues to bind up in various parts of our body wherever we're holding it until we start to say, oh, you know what, my shoulders have been in my ears for the last month. Let me start to relax. Let me start to breathe. Like, do I notice a shift, you know, when I look at myself in the mirror in the morning? Hey, I woke up and my shoulders are a little bit lower, you know, because I did some breathing exercises and some mobility-based movement and observed how I felt instead of just grabbing my phone and hopping out the bed immediately. Learning how our bodies work, learning how our bodies move and react to our environment. I'm a big proponent of ergonomics as well, having an ergonomic workspace especially, so that we can support our physical being and not carry so much of that that tension around day to day. We can— it's another way of helping our bodies to release some of the tension.

What if transformation isn't just about thinking differently but feeling differently? Science shows us that true change happens when we align not just our minds but also the neural networks in our hearts and guts. This heart-mind connection is the key to deeper healing, resilience, and expanded awareness. That's why I created the HeartMind All Access Membership and Community, a space designed to help you rewire your nervous system, cultivate heart intelligence, and live with greater clarity and purpose. With over 1,000 hours of transformational teachings specifically curated to meet your needs, you'll learn from world-renowned meditation teachers, neuroscientists, and experts in neuroplasticity, all sharing powerful tools to help you shift your mindset and heartset, regulate your emotions, and unlock your full potential. You'll also gain unlimited access to every summit and course we've ever produced, a treasure trove of wisdom worth over $10,000 and growing, plus live gatherings and an inspiring global community to support your journey. If you're ready to step into a more heart-centered, connected, and conscious life, I invite you to join us. Click the link to learn more and start your journey today. So several times you've, um, said that really the, the answer, or the answer begins with slowing down. Now there may be a lot of people on this, I, I don't want to hear that. I mean, gee, what can I do while I keep going? I gotta charge it. I slow down, I'm going to get behind, I won't be competitive, I won't keep up, right? Life is going faster and faster now with artificial intelligence. It seems like it's spinning out of control. So slow down. And I think also some of us have had the experience, and it's probably our own personal mythology, but we think, you know, we started to feel cold, but we just pushed through and we just kept charging hard and somehow we got through it. See, I'm bulletproof, you know. But the few times we stopped and slowed down, then we actually got sick, right? So you're telling me to slow down. I'm I'm going to fall apart if I slow down, right? It's kind of scary.

Yeah. But I challenge people to recognize that if you just take those few moments and you get your body and mind in alignment, you're actually able to be more productive. You know, you're not carrying around, like I said, so much of that stress and tension. That that might be actually slowing you down throughout the day. You know, how many times do we hit a wall, you know, when we're trying to be productive and work and like, oh, I'm so distracted. I've, you know, jumped back and forth to TikTok and Instagram 10 times while I was trying to work on this project, but I need to keep going. I need to finish it. Well, how much has going on those websites or apps distracted you? How much time have we actually taken to do that when you could have did a reset, you know, a physical reset and refresh your mind and body to finish the work and be productive and get things done? You know, people are afraid also that this work will take too much time out of their day, especially when they hear the word exercise, we immediately think of the gym and, oh, I need to spend an hour doing this. But short stints, like I said, a 90-second pause between meetings, 3, 5 minutes, 10 minutes in the morning, if you're really zealous, 30 minutes. But we don't necessarily need that to release some of the tension. That we're carrying or get in touch with our physical and emotional being, it doesn't take that long. And we'd be surprised. Sometimes it feels like, oh, I've been here for an hour and you really haven't. So it's also, in a way, an exercise of time awareness.

Yeah. So Danielle, this is the Radical Responsibility Podcast. So we have this perspective on ownership, sovereignty, personal agency and so forth. And so I wonder if we could look at that a little bit, even in terms of our own nervous system, our body altogether, but as well as our nervous system. So one major part of our nervous system is the autonomic nervous system, as I know you're well aware, and it has these two branches, the upregulating sympathetic branch and a downregulating relaxation or parasympathetic branch. They're both happening all the time. And a lot of us spend too much time with too much sympathetic activation. We need it for alertness, but then it goes into stress and overwhelm and all that, right? And so, you know, we all kind of live in this interface between our childhood conditioning and programming, and our brains are highly programmed by our early childhood experience, and then the world around us. And so if our childhoods were perfect, and that's probably not true for most of us, and if the world was just this bubble of benevolence and ease, you know, then maybe we could just live in there without taking much ownership and things might work out. But that's not the case, right? For most of us, our childhood conditioning is a mixed bag. Hopefully there's some really good stuff there, but some, maybe some stuff that kind of can get in our way. And the world is certainly not a bubble of benevolence. It's very challenging and ever more so. So we're often in there just kind of getting, you know, battered around.

Battered around.

Until we figure out how to take ownership for navigating that space to actually regulate our own nervous system. So I wonder if you could talk about that, about the fact that we can actually have more personal agency in what's going on with our nervous system.

Yeah, I think through doing the exercises, you know, breathwork, meditation, and movement, you know, instilling that practice into our lives we start to learn how to downregulate. We start to learn how, you know, learn when we're reacting, when we're in that stress response state, because now we have that comparison. We know what it feels like to be relaxed. We know what it feels like to decompress, to relieve tension. So we know immediately what it feels like when we start to wind up again. And until we start to practice how that feels, whether it's, you know, through a guided session or doing it on our own, you know, we're all in different places and our needs are different. You know, I hear a lot like, oh, I don't know how to, you know, meditate. I get distracted so easily. Those might be people that need, you know, a recording or a guide where other people may be able to just listen to their bodies and start to relax. It's a process. We have to learn how to do it. It's our innate ability has been deactivated because of all of the electronics and things around us. We stopped, stopped listening to our own bodies and mind. And until we take a moment to start to listen and start to relax and release we don't know that we're in that constant stress state. You know, I've had so many conversations with people and they, they forgot what it feels like to not be stressed, to not be in that go, go, go state that is life for them. And so they forget that they are stressed, that they are burnt out, that they are in that fight or flight state because they've been in it so long. They don't even have a good frame of reference to the last time they felt, you know, normal. And really, for— that's where I come in, you know, with the hypnotherapy, so that they can start to, you know, turn back the hands of time, if you will, to reflect on when life felt like that. What is it feel to be in that relaxed state. And then once you feel it, the body doesn't want to go back to that stress state, not willingly, you know. It wants to feel that goodness, the good endorphins, you know. It's pleasing mentally and physically. And so once you have that baseline and you've reprogrammed your mind and body as to like, this is how I should feel. We want to start to do it more. We want to start to build a pattern to allow ourselves to feel that way.

Yeah, Danielle, as you've been describing, if, if we are in the body and relationship with the body, we're, we're going to feel what's going on. But we kind of learn to not feel, or we normalize. We're amazingly good at just normalizing things and adapting to things, right? So I do a lot of work with first responders, law enforcement, corrections professionals, And you know, they live in a world and work in a world with just super high stress exposure, barely, usually insufficiently managed, and thus chronic stress and trauma exposure, both primary and secondary. And you know, when they get tested, they get a cortisol saliva test or any other blood test or any markers. I mean, every indication is that they're living way up in that stress zone. But unless it's an off-the-charts crazy day, if you ask them, "Are you stressed out?" No, I feel fine. And yet if you test them, you realize their heart rate variability is way down and cortisol levels are super high and adrenaline, noradrenaline, other markers of stress are way up there. But they get used to it. And not only do we get used to it, it becomes our new normal. We almost get addicted to it because whatever neurochemical mixes in our brain most of the time, we adapt to that. We get used to that, right? And so, Yeah, so it really— that's why I like what you're pointing to with a tool like hypnotherapy, or you mentioned meditation, breathwork, anything that can help us rediscover the experience of what we're meant to feel like. Oh, oh, I forgot. And then if we can have enough of that, that can become the new normal, the new baseline. And then as you're describing, then when we start to get all wound up and stressed out, we go, okay, well, I got to do something here, right? And stop, take that 90-minute reset pause or whatever it might be. So as we begin to work with Barry's somatic practices, you know, in the world of personal growth, personal development work, and even ostensibly somatic work, it's often still very mentally focused, you know, um, and, and the mind stuff can be really good. I mean, just working on mindset, affirmations, um, um, uh, you know, reframing, cognitive reframing. There's lots of things we can do with our mind that can be very helpful. But if we're only doing that, and if we're trying to direct what we think is somatic work mostly from the mind, I think we're, we're missing something there. And so I wonder if you could talk about how do we actually bring the work into the body and work a little more bottom up than so much top down, which is kind of where we inevitably start because that's where we've been living, right?

Yeah. Well, from your example with the first responders, I often challenge people that, you know, feel like they're not stressed but are, are constantly in stress states. Oftentimes there's you know, a signal or something that we're carrying with us that wasn't happening before that is happening now. You know, one example for me, I years ago used to lifeguard and being in that constant stress state, you know, watching my water, you know, doing rescuing, I developed a nervous tic. And it was there even when I wasn't watching my water. It was because I would constantly scan. I would notice if I was kind of feeling stressed or, you know, just in stressful situation, my head would tick this way like I was scanning my water. And I did that for years after, you know, going through college, you know, being in that college environment, stressful exams, my head would tick. I didn't associate it with it for a long time with the work that I did. I just like, oh, this— I guess it's just my life now. I just have this movement. But until I finished school and out of that stress state, then that tick response stopped. Later on, once I was in a professional environment, I developed an eye twitch from stress. The eye twitch didn't stop for several years. Also a stress response. So oftentimes we will have small stress responses like that that we just, you know, disassociate. But until we start to do some of the, the body work, the movement— okay, I'm feeling the stress in and behind my eyes, how do I release it? What movement, you know, is it, you know, even though it's related to, you know, the stress that I'm feeling, can I do some mobility-based exercises in my jaw, my neck, to decompress, release some of the tension, let go of some of that that I'm feeling? And we start to feel a shift, you know, we start— the response may not go away immediately, it might— maybe it will stop for a few minutes, few days, hours, you know, it will grow as we continue to do the body work. But if we ignore it, it will maintain and it just becomes a part of our daily lives, if you will. But those aren't normal responses or normal parts of our physical being, their stress response, their tension responses, muscle, you know, aching and, you know, like carrying that emotional and physical tension in parts of our body. You know, it might be cramping in our arms. It might be restless leg syndrome at night. You know, it can vary for everybody. And finding the movement the, um, extra, you know, the specific exercises to target those areas to help relieve some of those symptoms.

You know, and again, by paying attention to those signals, you know, like you said, you developed that tick from life-giving scanning. I mean, that's so familiar. The first responders I work with, you know, they develop hypervigilance and they can't even be on vacation without, you know, constantly scanning, right? And also you get Gave me a little bit of a flashback as well because many, many decades ago when I was younger and I was in a pretty high stress situation, I developed an eye twitch for a while. Yeah. Yeah, I had for about a year. And so if we pay attention to these signals though, this is the body communicating with us as you've said. And this can, I think, begin to, you know, if we get curious about that, then the body has all the wisdom, everything we know. I mean, there's so many wonderful body-mind disciplines out there and all the energy work and the things from the martial arts, qigong and tai chi. There's so many different beautiful kinds of body work. I think it's helpful to remember that they were all developed by people who got curious about their body. I mean, going back thousands of years, we have all these amazing disciplines. They were all developed by people who just got curious about the body and the body basically taught them. Them, these skills, right? So I wonder how you think of that. What do you think of the body as the teacher for how to learn to rebalance our lives?

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. That was essentially how I fell into the practice initially of yoga, being able to stop to listen to my body after I had my second son. You know, like many women, our instincts are, you know, oh, I need to start working out, try to get back in shape, get my, my body back. But anytime I would do any other activity, I literally felt like a train wreck. You know, my— it didn't— it did not feel like I was making a positive impact on my physical being. And so it it took some time to realize I, I needed something a little different, something more gentle that would allow me to, you know, get my flexibility back as well as build strength and, you know, some inner peace as well. Um, and that's how I, you know, became a yoga instructor. I had practiced yoga prior to that, but that's brought me back to yoga versus doing some high-intensity interval training or things of that nature. But it's, you know, those, like you mentioned, those types of practices that allow us the opportunity to slow down and not just going through the motions, not just a physical exercise where you're doing 10 reps, you know, 3 sets, you know, all of those things. So listen to your body to tell it what this practice will say. How much do I actually need? How long do I actually need to sit here with it?

Yeah, we've all been in— because even in the world of exercise, you know, the performance ambition creeps in, and there's a tendency to want to override the body, right? One more rep, another set, right? When the body is saying, no, I think we're good there, you know?

Right.

Yeah. So let's talk just a little bit for a moment about the issue of identity. So I think one of the biggest barriers to change can be our present identity. And I, you know, we all kind of have a pretty strong need for having an identity until we don't. I mean, it's a process growing up when we're little kids, we have to develop some sense of identity to navigate this world. And hopefully we can hold that a little lighter as we go forward in our lives. But, you know, I've heard so many people say, "Well, that's just the way I am. I've always been that way. I can't imagine being any different. That's just who I am. You're asking me to change who I am." And I usually tell people, "No, none of that stuff is really who you are. It's all just conditioning." You know, who you are is something much more profound than that.

Who somebody else told you you should be, really.

So I wonder, you know, what your experience has been of working with clients as they begin to embrace this work, do this work, how their identity actually shifts and then how that can— just to give you an example, I know I smoked in my 20s and 30s and I struggled trying to quit. I knew it wasn't good for me. I was trying to quit and I'd quit for 6 months, start up again. And it wasn't really until I shifted my identity from being someone who liked to smoke but was quitting because I knew it was bad for me to really shifting my identity to where I'm a nonsmoker and actually smoking is kind of like a little disgusting, right? So, um, you know, then that— no problem. It would then, you know, it was no problem after that. So identity can be really powerful.

Yeah, I think that can be a big thing to overcome for some people initially before they want try it, right? And when they feel like they're going to be changing who they are, that's where that fear comes in, right? And part of it is the misconception of the practice or the direction that they're taking, that they want to take with their lives, where they think that they're going to be versus who they actually are and will be on the other side. And part of that is that, that shift as well. You know, I've seen it time and time again. And that was one of the main reasons why I got into this practice and why— well, at least why I wanted to share the practice, not necessarily got into it, but why I wrote the book, because of all the people, especially women like me, who are like, oh, well, I, I'm not a yogi. I'm not flexible. I'm not. You know, I'm not this, you know, super holistic, you know, hippie-dippie type person, you know, and I don't want to be those things, right? You know, they have these preconceived notions about what that person is, what they look like, their lifestyle. But I wrote the book and shared the knowledge to challenge people's perceptions their biases on what that is, what this practice is, what it looks like, as well as the person who does this work. And so that's kind of one of my main goals and, you know, getting out there and educating people because everybody, everybody needs it. Everybody needs to get in touch with their inner selves, their physical being, And we all deserve that opportunity. We all deserve the opportunity to push pause and recognize how we're feeling, how our environment is making us feel, how we can release some of it, and what we can do on our own to make ourselves feel better. We all deserve that. And it's not relegated to specific types of people. We all have that power and capability. We all can have control, ownership of our minds and bodies.

I love what you said there about— I don't know if I can quote you exactly, but you said something about getting in touch with our physical body and our inner being, something like that. And so for me, in the work I do and teach in a way, I teach meditation and so forth, I see the body as really the vehicle for going into the very depths of our being. Right? And, you know, a lot of us tend to separate, well, being and spirit is out there somewhere in the body that's physical. And yeah, I think that's part of the Western, more sky god culture, you know, that spirit and God is out there somewhere and the earth and the body is kind of denigrated almost. And traditional feminine culture and indigenous culture has really had a different view of that. And obviously I think anybody that studies cross-culturally and philosophy, it's all interconnected. It's not like above and below, it's all interconnected. But I think the body, the thing about taking the body as a portal into going into the— because what we start with the experience of the gross physical body and we tap into the inner sensate experience of the body, we're going from gross physical sensation to subtler and subtler and subtler sensation. We get into what the Eastern traditions call subtle body, subtle mind. Pretty soon we're getting into the depths of being and spirit. But when we take the body as the pathway instead of something that can kind of leapfrog us into some transpersonal experience like a psychedelic or some spontaneous spiritual experience— nothing wrong with those experiences— but when we take the body as the vehicle to go into the depths of our being, along the way we're literally transforming our neural architecture so that now we have direct access to that. It really becomes who we are. It's not just some extraordinary experience we had one time, but it really becomes something that's accessible to us all the time. So I love that you made that connection. We're getting kind of towards the end of our time here, but one, you know, I think a lot of people in our audience, Danielle, are, you know, are probably kind of high achievers, high performers, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of leaders. And I know you work with entrepreneurs and leaders and business leaders. So what might be just a couple of, maybe brief practices or practical strategies that people could get started with, just to take that 90-second pause or however long? What might some simple steps somebody might take in the midst of their very busy life to at least begin opening to this kind of work?

Yeah, well, like you mentioned, the 90-second pause is where I encourage people. The 3 pieces: breathwork, meditation, and movement. You know, start to breathe into the body, and we don't even need a timer per se. Again, it's about awareness. When you're framing it in those 3 pieces, right, essentially it's about 30 seconds for each aspect, um, but do it as much as your body tells you to it needs, you know, taking some deep breaths. You don't have to be a breathwork expert to breathe, right? Just learning to breathe in and out. You know, you can practice different techniques, you know, the box breath or 4-7-8, whatever makes you feel good in that moment, whatever your body is telling you it needs. And then start to release. Let the muscles relax. You know, we call it progressive relaxation. You know, you can start from the top down. You know, what does it feel like when my jaw starts to relax and my shoulders, you know, my release in my chest and my back, you know, all the way flowing all the way down to our toes, right? And then where do you see us feel a shift? You know, did you feel your shoulders fall or did you not feel a shift in certain areas that you were hoping? Do you— are you still feeling some discomfort or tension in certain areas? And doing some movement in that space. Maybe it's your shoulders, maybe it's some gentle twists of your back and spine to the left and right. And then once you've done some of that and it starts to feel good, you feel that release, you know, just taking a few moments to sit with it, you know, being aware of that shift. Where did you start and how did you finish? How do you feel? When do you want to do it again?

Wonderful, absolutely wonderful. And that's just so pragmatic. And as you said, any of us can, but we actually do waste quite a bit of time usually, even high achievers would be surprised how much. But regardless, we can all find 90 seconds to begin and begin exploring some of these. So thank you so much for this. This has been really, really pragmatic and insightful. And, uh, so, uh, Danielle Griffin, the author of Somatic Exercise Made Simple. Where can people find out more about your work, about you and your work?

Yeah, you can check out my website, drdaniellegriff.com. My books are on my website as well as on amazon.com, as well as on pretty much every social media platform at Dr. Danielle Griff.

Great. And we'll have all that information in the show notes for our listeners and So thank you so much for being on the Radical Responsibility Podcast.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Okay, you take good care. 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. Until next time, stay grounded, stay present, and stay true to yourself. Take care.