EP 120: Deconstructing Fear to Heal Trauma | Peter Levine

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi, welcome to this episode of the Radical Responsibility podcast. I'm your host, Pete Ball, and I'm really thrilled today to share a conversation I had with Conversation Peter Levine, the renowned founder of Somatic Experiencing and one of the world's leading experts on trauma and healing trauma. In this conversation, Peter and I talked about the nature of trauma and how the process of healing trauma often has to do with being willing to feel into our experience, but, but from a place of safety and then being able to return to that place of safety, whether that's physical safety or psychological safety. And in terms of the body, it could be having a way of being in the body or being with someone, or feeling secure or with physical touch, or holding ourselves in a certain way where we feel, that's safety, that's home base. And then perhaps we lean into areas of the body or we lean into memories or experiences which are uncomfortable, but then we're able to return of our own volition and at our own pace back to where it feels safe and workable. So Peter Levine calls this pendulating. So we lean in and lean out and lean in and lean out. And in this way we're able to open up our experience again and really the bandwidth of our life that we can work with and remain in a relational.

Responsive mode with, rather than getting triggered into some kind of fear based reactivity. So we also talked about the three primary components of fear and how we can use that knowledge to deconstruct.

Really the nature of fear and the storylines of fear and so forth. And we really got into his Somatic Experiencing model and he shared a number of stories from his experience of working with clients and so forth. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with really one of the world's leading experts on the nature of trauma and on healing trauma, Dr. Peter Levine.

Welcome, Dr. Levine.

Glad to be here.

I'm going to share a little bit of your bio with our audience. For those who are not familiar with your work, Dr. Peter Levine received his doctorate in medical biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley and another in psychology from International University. Dr. Levine worked for NASA as a stress consultant while the space shuttle program was being developed and has shared his expertise while teaching at various facilities throughout the world, including pain clinics, hospitals and treatment centers. He is particularly interested in the effects of trauma and oppression on indigenous populations. He is a member of the World Psychologist for Social Responsibility, an organization dedicated to forming effective responses to ethnic and political warfare and wide ranging disasters. Dr. Levine is the founder of Somatic Experiencing and he established the foundation for Human Enrichment in Boulder, Colorado, to serve as a training facility for somatic experiencing practitioners. Dr. Levine is a faculty member of the Santa Barbara Graduate institute and his 1997 book on trauma, Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma, was a bestseller. And you're extremely well known, considered one of the pioneers in trauma treatment and therapy for your model, Somatic Experiencing, for that book in particular and for your many decades of work in this field. So again, welcome to the summit and thank you for being here.

When you said well known, I thought this part of life, this maybe I'm wanting to be.

Known. Well.

Yes, I think that's a good expression. Yes, yes. Well, I think our audience is going to have an opportunity to do just that here. So, Dr. Levine, we've been through an incredibly.

Daunting past 14, 15 months with this global coronavirus pandemic that's brought unprecedented disruptions to our lives. At the same time, here in the US We've had the reckoning with race, the protest of Black Lives Matter movement, We've had incredible political divisiveness and instability, and we've seen a lot of that all around the world. So it's been an incredibly challenging time. And I'm curious to begin with what the impact has been for you and perhaps what have you learned in terms of your background with trauma and, and what we've all been going through? I mean, I would, I believe we're all experiencing pretty high levels of traumatic distress, whether we realize it or not.

Yeah, I mean, for sure. I mean, it's not, this is like completely unknown territory, but it's largely unknown. And you know.

Our bodies and our brains were evolved to localize source of threat and to meet that threat either with fleeing or with fighting, fight or flight response. So here we have something that's a virus that you can't see and that it could be coming from anywhere.

And.

We have no effective response to it. We can't flee from it, we can't fight it.

So what happens? Instead of our nervous system mobilizing, we demobilize like whenever we're sick, Even if we have like a flu. You know what we, if we're smart, what we do is we follow our bodies and we just spend the day in bed and drinking lots of fluids because we need to rest. So what happens Then we have the fear of this happening. Then if any illness does happen. Because I've been working with a few people, a number of people who have survived the COVID and some who were hospitalized and on ventilators. And one of the things that's been important is to help them uncouple the fear from their experience in the hospital.

And whatever. The other thing also is, you know, so many. I mean, I'm really lucky. I'm fortunate, you know, I live in a comfortable place, I'm close to the beach.

You know, I don't want for food or warmth, shelter. So, you know, it hasn't affected me the way it's affected millions and millions of other people. So. So.

If I'm saying that I'm doing okay, it's because, in a way, because I'm privileged. You know.

The other thing is we've all, most of us have lost something significant, you know, our way of living. Even if it's something simple like not being able to go to a restaurant or a beer garden with our friends and to laugh and tell stories and so forth, we've lost that. And people, you know, this is not the worst thing in the world, but people do suffer because they're not getting the engagement and contact that they really need socially, because that's again, a part of how our nervous system is wired. You can be talking with Steve Cordage, he's going to have a lot to say about this. So we have this. This lack. And how do we deal with it? How do we deal with not being able to travel, to not be with our friends, to be ill or to know people that were ill? And we don't do well as a country, I would say with grief.

You know, as Americans, we are supposed to be.

Just forward going. You know, nothing gets us down, nothing that feels weak because, you know, we're strong Americans and that helps distance ourselves from the grief that we need to experience to be able to move on, to be able to acknowledge our losses, feel those losses and. And then move forward. And, you know, thankfully, this too shall pass. It will, it shall pass. Who knows when the next situation comes along, but it will, it will pass. And we are probably now in a less acute phase of this epidemic right now, but maybe it gives us a little bit more room to grieve. The other thing that I think.

Most people don't understand.

Is the nature of fear.

And fear is we can deconstruct fear. It has three primary components. The main component of fear is a bodily sensation. So it could be Twisting in the guts, it could be tight chest, it could be clenching of the jaw. Those are all things that are going on in the body. They're bodily sensations. And we can contact them through our interoceptive awareness, our awareness of our internal physiological physical sensations.

So we have this sensation and then we have a thought about it or a picture or an image. So, you know, we feel we have a twisted gut, our gut's feeling distressed or uneasy. And then we have this thought, oh, I'm afraid to go out, I'm afraid to go to the market to shop. And that thought then couples with that sensation and perseverates it, keeps it going when I call it a positive feedback loop. Positive, but with negative consequences. So one of the keys in helping people get unstuck from fear is to locate the physical sensation in the body and to be able to describe that sensation. Because that's really important in interoceptive landscape to open up, okay, I have, you know, I have a tightness in my chest. And then as I experience that, does the tightness increase? Does it now decrease? Does it change to something else or does it somehow disappear? So by being able to do that, we start to be able to move through the stuck sensations and then we have open to the possibility of not being grabbed in fear. And fear in its extreme form is terror and panic. And you know, and again, we tend to displace fear and panic. So, for example, when this stuff first started, I guess about a year ago, you couldn't get toilet paper, you know, because everybody was rushing to buy as much toilet paper as they could possibly have. God knows what they're going to do with it. Or maybe we'll have the cleanest behinds in the world. But what it is is a displacement of the fear. Instead of dealing with the fear, we do this behavior, which has no help to the fear. It's really kind of stupid. And it not only doesn't make sense to us, but it hurts other people. Because, you know, one of the things that we need to do is to be able to share also want to say something about this? You know, people are talking about some social distancing, and when I hear that, I want to pull my hair out. That's a mistake. Even though, you know, I work from bottom up with sensations. Words have importance, words have meanings, specific meanings. And so when you say social isolation, you are cutting yourself off in exactly the way you don't want to be cutting yourself off, because that's what's adding to the stress and anxiety and trauma. So I prefer to call it physical distancing with social.

Connection, with social engagement. There's a wonderful video that I pulled off and it's like a two and a half, three year old girl and she's standing on a couch by the window and the postman is coming down the street and she starts dancing and dancing and dancing. And then you can see the postman starts dancing and dancing. So what they are doing is they're having really deep, intimate, pleasurable social contact. But they were separated by the window and the street. They were not anywhere near each other physically. So please, let's just even not use the term social distancing.

Yeah.

In Stephen Porges work they were co regulating together, right. The young girl and the postman. You know, on last year's summit a year ago, as we were just really moving into the lockdowns, the neuroscientist Richie Davidson was on that summit and he made the same call. He said let's call it physical distancing, not social distancing. Unfortunately, the term social distancing seems to have stuck in the media. But I think you're absolutely right. It's really important and we should really think of it that way. You've been, I know a lot of your work has focused around the impact of aversive childhood circumstances on people, how that carries over in their adult lives. And we have a generation of young kids going through this pandemic and I'm curious as your thoughts about. Of course there's going to be a lot of diversity around that depending on the circumstances of their parents and their families and so forth. But nonetheless, these kids are all going through something. They're not at school socializing. And I'm curious as your thoughts about that and what we might be needing to focus on to make sure that we're not setting these kids up for failure, right?

Well, yeah, I mean, young kids are especially affected and they're also deeply affected by the moods and emotions of their parents. And you know, there's been a sharp uprise in children being abused because parents are anxious and they don't know how to deal with the fear and the anxiety. And so they yell at the kids or even are physical with the kids. Now kids need.

Not only their parents and caregivers, but they need each other, they need their peers to make contact and to play and to learn through play about connection. So one of the things I say when you get the kids back in the classroom, I was doing something, I think for the UK and they wanted to know what do we do when we're back in school, how can we best.

Get them to get back to learning knowledge? Basically.

I said, no, that's a mistake. Because really we're talking about kids who are younger or who would fallen back on earlier sensory motor period of child development, you know, which is what Piaget spoke about. So they need to move, they need to be with each other, they need to play.

And they can still have physical distancing, but they can play together, they can move, they can dance together. Interesting. A few years ago, I was teaching on the Greek island axis. And so we've been there for a number of years doing trainings there, classes there. And so we've kind of been adopted by the community. So we're invited to all of the funerals, to all of the marriages, to all of whatever graduations. And I was talking, they would turn down at the table, there were a couple of school teachers and I asked them if many of the children had adhd and they didn't know what that was. And I explained it and they said no, we've never noticed anything like that, seen anything like that. Well, you know what? Two or three times a day the children learn and practice dancing, Greek dancing. So they're using their bodies, they're in live with their bodies. And I think that's where we need to start. And we can do some of that online. I mean, I've done that with lots of different groups just getting there and moving, putting on some music and not just moving, but moving from your inner impulses, from what's going on in your body. So if you feel anxiety in the chest, you can maybe move from that anxiety and help the anxiety move through into enjoyment, into pleasure. So kids, they are really, really suffering. There's no question about that now. They do. Fortunately, kids are pretty savvy about, you know, this kind of stuff. So they're, you know, they can be with each other at least on, you know, on Zoom or Skype.

But that's limited. You know, it's better than nothing. But it certainly doesn't replace real contact and play and engagement and dealing with conflict, dealing with what goes on in a group, being on the inside and the outside, the pain of being rejected. These are all things that need to deal with and need to be able to process. So I would say, yeah, you know, play with the kids at home again, put on fun music, music that they like and move together, dance together with that. So there's again, so many things people can do. But I think what happens in a situation where there's this panic. We tend to de resource. We lose our basic resource and we compromise our resilience. So, hey, be with their kids, play with their kids, move with our kids. The joy they'll bring will be protecting both your health and your children's health.

Yeah, absolutely. So you were talking there. I mean, you're talking about things that would support resilience. And you gave the example of the community there on the Greek island, the way there was a social support for. Tremendous social support for resilient children there. And previously you were also talking about how recognizing an emotion like fear that we can recognize, where do I feel it in the body, we can identify the physical sensation. We can, you know, enhance our interoceptive awareness, which a lot of people don't have a lot of. We tend to live up in our heads and very distracted auditorially and visually and cognitively. Right. So we're often not very much in our bodies and that ability to then work with it in the body. So all. All these things you're talking about seem to point towards resilience. But I'm curious, how would you define resilience? What does resilience mean to you, even at the individual level?

Probably if you Google resilience, you'll find a godzillion things about what distinguishes resilient people from not so resilient people. And they're mostly cognitive kinds of things. But, you know, when I did my doctoral work in the 70s.

My dissertation was called Accumulated Stress, Reserve Capacity and Dis Ease. So it was really about resilience. That was way before people were talking about it. But this resilience is in the autonomic nervous system, the involuntary parts of our nervous system. So that when we become activated or become frightened, there's a wave of sensations, but we move through those sensations.

Instead of being just terrified of the negative sensations, we can move them into positive. Let me show you something very quickly. When we first experience a sensation of an emotion that. That makes us contract, we contract. But if we're able to follow that, then there's an expansion. There always is. For every contraction, there's another expansion and another contraction and another expansion. And we're able to do that, we wind up having much more internal space and resilience. Because even if we feel something that's scary, we know that if we can just move into it a little bit, not a whole lot, just a little bit, and then out into the expansion. I call this pendulation, contraction and expansion. Probably on my tombstone. That's the one Thing people remember. Peter. Peter Pendulation.

So you seem to be pointing to within our autonomic nervous system that we have a either latent capacity or reserved capacity for resilience. Dan Siegel has talked about a window of tolerance that can be constricted or expanded. Others use the term zone of resilience that can get constricted due to trauma or we can find ways to open it up again. And it seems like one of the primary modalities or strategies for reopening or expanding our window of tolerance, our zone of resilience is that pendulating, that leaning from a safe place, leaning into what's coming back to safety, leaning in. And gradually we can kind of, I don't know what's actually happening in our autonomic nervous system there, that that helps us build that reserve or, you know, the difference between someone whose life has gotten so constricted, maybe even with PTSD versus someone who's able to face life's challenges with more resilience, more responsiveness.

Well, you said state, but I would just. Safe enough.

Safe is relative.

Yes.

So if we feel safe enough, and usually it helps to be with another to each person, not just to co regulate, but for each person to kind of be present for the person while they're experiencing their pendulation, their contraction and expansion and then switching roles. You know, there's a Motown song, I forget the name of the song, but it goes something like. It takes one to stand in the dark alone. It takes two to let the light shine through. The idea really, because again, we are.

What we haven't even talked about yet, which is really kind of the, you know, 800 pound gorilla, is that people who have had trauma and earlier stress, accumulated stress.

Those people are going to be reactivated by the whole Covid situation. I think if you talk to almost any therapist, they will tell you, yes. That the clients that issues they may have been working on a long time ago, they're just, it's like they've never worked on them. They just. Back to square one.

So, you know, again, that's another thing. You know, many people don't have therapists or can't afford therapists, but these are self, quote, self help things that we can do and do with each other that can make a tremendous difference of whether there's going to be suffering, but there doesn't have to be unnecessary suffering piled onto suffering.

I like what you said. Even suggesting as a practice that.

We could, you know, do with a spouse or with our kids or with each other, you know, Just that kind of co regulating with each other and taking turns. Being that place of maybe workability is better than safety. A place of workability so the other person can go through that pendulating and then exchanging back and forth. Because we are really in a time when we all need to support each other to become more resilient.

I like that term. I'm going to write it down. Workability and responsibility. And if you look at responsibility, it's the ability to respond.

Absolutely.

Not to react, because that's what we do when all of a sudden we're in an emotional rage, but to respond to situations as new situations. And meeting, that's meeting those situations with our own responses, our own internal responses. And I think that's what really.

Makes it possible for people to act responsibly.

Absolutely, absolutely. And I like, I think workability, you know, safety can be kind of a triggering word and it's kind of an absolute. So, you know, from a workable place, then we can lean in. And I like what you said about responsibility as well. I kind of like to think that we're kind of set up to either move into a kind of fear and survival based mode when we get triggered into a lack of resourceness and we have a lot of biological setup to do that. And then we also have the capacity to move more into a relational, responsive mode. And it seems to be the determinant on that, given whatever level of challenge we're facing, is some kind of reservoir of resilience. We have something about what we built into our nervous system.

Right. You know, one of the books that I wrote with my co author Maggie Klein is called Trauma proofing your kids A Parent's guide for instilling confidence, joy and resilience. So when our kids fall off the bicycle and they're crying inconsolably, or God forbid, they go through a plate glass.

Window and wind up in the emergency room. There are things that parents can do. First of all, the first thing they need to do is deal with their own fear. Otherwise they're just going to, you know, it'll probably come out as anger to the child. But again, when we help children move through this distress, then they become more confident, they become more resilient, more, more joy in their lives because they've mastered it. I have number of stories of kids, you know, that I've worked with. And then they'll tell me sometimes years later that, you know, somebody, you know, fell off their bicycle and they knew exactly what to do. They came up and stood with them and said, I'm just going to sit here with you in a little bit. Sit here with you a little bit and just basically let the shock move through. So these are things that we can do for each other. And, you know, it may be one person at a time, but if each person then affects another person and they affect another person, you know, you have that lily pad on the pond, two lily pans, lily pods, four, you know, eight, 16, 32, 64, and so forth. So the circle of damage can be reversed into a circle of resilience and a circle of grace.

I think it's fair to say we all have trauma and suffering in our lives. Unfortunately, some of us have much more than others. And there can be a lot of injustices around how people are set up for that. And we've all been going through a tremendous amount of traumatic stress throughout this pandemic. And again, there's diversity around that and some of that with some injustice behind it, for sure.

I'm wondering if you could talk about the difference between how we can perhaps leverage the challenges we face in life, whether we call it trauma or challenges, as opportunities to grow for what's sometimes called post traumatic growth versus our tendency as human beings to be very adaptive. Sometimes I think we're adaptive to a full fault. And it can be kind of like that terrible analogy of the frog slowly boiling to death in the water. And so what's the difference between becoming, you know, adaptive in the face of all these challenges we're going through versus really growing?

Yeah, yeah, right. I mean, yeah. I mean, there's been a lot of literature around post traumatic growth and so forth. And.

It'S true, many people who have experienced trauma are wisened.

From the experience.

And little caveat is that I think it's possible to have post traumatic growth and, for example, also have ptsd.

So you certainly rather have growth than no growth. But you still have to attend to how, from my perspective, how the trauma gets stuck in the body, you know, to really to give more of a foundation for the post traumatic growth.

So.

Again, what I'm wondering if you've seen with your patients and then how maybe extrapolating out to what we're all going through with this pandemic, what might be some less healthy ways that we might adapt or just cope with or.

You know, avoid or.

Some time ago when this thing was starting to really take off and I was at the supermarket shopping and, you know, I was unloading my stuff and somebody came, like, right into my cart with another cart. So I Turned around and said, please, you know, physical distance. And I looked at his shopping cart and the entire large shopping cart was filled with bottles of alcoholic beverages. Oh boy. And you know how he's dealing, you know, with the anxiety, the isolation. Of course anybody who works with addiction knows this only makes things worse. But that is the way that people attempt to fall back on these rather than adaptive responses, these highly maladaptive responses.

So it seems to function in society, for our society as a whole to function well and for us to function well within it. We make certain assumptions of safety. I mean, surely we have our neuroceptive threat systems that are scanning the world for threat. But. But we're not, most of us living in hyper vigilance. Right. We have an assumption of safety and an assumption of workability with people we're generally willing to sometimes approach until we get the signals of danger. And one of the dangers might be, I mean, I remember going into the grocery stores early on in the pandemic, and similar to your experience, somebody's coming a little bit too close to me or I see one of the aisles is full of people. I'm like, you know, I'm looking at people like the enemy. Right. And I'm wondering if, if a kind of conditioned assumption of non safety could really be problematic for us.

Oh yes. Oh yes. Yeah. Because then when you have that.

Lack of safety, you know, you're going to see everybody as threat.

Which is what traumatized people often do. They perceive any and everything as threat. You know, the person that was, you know, at the stop sign, and then somebody rams them from behind and they, you know, and they're high for a while because of the adrenaline, but the next day or so they're having all different kinds of physical symptoms. Who knows, maybe go to the chiropractor. But then they also start experiencing, they may not even be aware of it. So instead of driving the same way where that stop sign was, they'll take a different route. And then maybe after a while, then they'll really not feel like even driving.

So they decide to take the bus, even though it takes a lot longer then with some people, not the majority, of course, but with some people, many people, then the person doesn't even want to leave the house. So they develop what's called agoraphobia. No. So these things kind of build on each other and we may not be aware of it.

But because.

You use the analogy of the frog rate flow increasing the heat, well, you can be that way with trauma symptoms as well. We may not Realize that we're anxious and frightened and depressed, but our behaviors start changing, and hopefully somebody who we have a relationship with brings that up to us and say, is there anything I can help? Any way I can help? Or here's a person that I've worked with has really helped me.

Yeah. Your work is known as somatic experiencing. So very much the focus on the body, and it seems like most of the prevalent trauma treatment modalities out there have to do with the body and becoming more embodied. And it seems to be a shame in our culture that we almost have to get in trouble before we realize that we have a body and we need to live in the body. And I'm curious if you spoke about. With our kids, it'd be great to put on music they like and dance. And you spoke about the example there in the Greek isles. But it just.

Do you see this pandemic possibly is awakening us, possibly awakening us, or a way we could awaken to the need to become more embodied, not to deal with our trauma, but to really fully live our lives?

I would hope so.

I don't know if I can go further than that. I would hope so. I think with some people, that is the case. Again, people who have sufficient support and some relative sense of safety, I think they, you know, they can become. We can become stronger, we can become more resilient and more connected to others. No, I think that's definitely a possibility. It may not be a probability for everyone. But again, you know, if one person is affected in this positive way and then is there for another person and another and another, you know, this can really make a difference. This is not really.

Directly relevant, but it is, in a way, you know, many, many years ago, before the last intifada. Not this one, but the one that was 25 years ago. So I was teaching a class, Jerusalem, and I agreed to do it if they would also bring together.

Palestinian mental health workers. So we had somewhat of a mixed group. And I was working with this one man, Israeli man, and he had had. Somebody often asked me, what happens if you don't know what the person's trauma is? Can you?

Well, the answer is, you don't need to know. All you need to do is have a symptom. It's physical, emotional, or some kind of a haunting that will lead us to where we need to go. And the trauma memories aren't memories in the explicit form that we think about memory. These are so called emotional and procedural or body memories. Because of the lack of understanding and confusion, widespread confusion that was the motivation of Variety. My most recent book, Trauma and Memory. Trauma and Memory, brain and body in the search for the living present. So these memories are played out in our bodies. They happen to us. We may not be aware of any context, but our bodies respond. I'll share a little bit of a personal story.

Long story, but our family was threatened by the Mafia and they could have killed us.

And I didn't have thoughts about it, but when I would walk to school, I would be hyper alert, hyper vigilant. I would be careful not to step on any of the cracks. You know, don't step on the cracks. You break your mother's back is a typical way of dealing with pervasive, internalized threat. But again, it's not. I don't have an image of this, and I don't have the relative safety to be able to understand.

What'S going on. So in that sense, context is important because our bodies keep replaying through these procedural memories. And, you know, and a very common thing that many therapists probably have dealt with in their clients is they have a client and every time their partner goes to touch them, their whole body stiffens and they retract. And they know what happened. They may have even experienced some of the emotions, but still their body keeps doing it because those memories are still, still engaging our whole consciousness. And until we can work with those procedural memories, those body memories, the person continues to react to their partner in a way that just splits them apart and just causes grief on both of their parts. So really understanding how these. These memories are motor memories, they're body memories, and they play out below the level of conscious awareness. But when we can experience those as procedural memories and move through them, then we can connect with narratives about ourselves, about our life, and we can then bring it in, reflect it into. So I can tell you something about my life. I did just a little bit about trauma that happened to me, but I only could do that after I lost, after that charge was taken from it. Otherwise my body would just go into a reaction like this.

You know, as we're talking about resilience, we can talk about our individual sources of resilience and even in our own autonomic nervous system and so forth. And then the other greatest source of our resilience is our connectedness with others. And the relational field is really one of the most powerful sources of our resilience. But it's also often the place where.

We get wounded, right?

And so we've been all cut off from one of the primary sources of resilience during one of the most traumatically stressful times during this pandemic, Isolated from each other, wearing masks and so forth. I'm curious about what your thoughts are about. As we reemerge into reconnecting socially and rebuilding relationships and getting comfortable again, being out in the world and connecting with others, hugging with others, spending time with others, it would seem both that it's really paramount that we do that. But it seems like there might be a lot to learn in the process of kind of feeling our way back into that relational field, somatically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And that is. You said it very, very well. It's like working back into that relational field. Notice the sensations and feelings that emerge when we have the opportunity of making contact with somebody. What it feels like when we're able to hug somebody, even if it's for a moment, the first time in a long while, to.

Be touched by being touched.

You know, those things are so important. You know, when infants.

When they receive, holding, touching, movement, they develop in a. In a. In a good trajectory, you know, so touch is primary, is the primary language. You know, there is another language that doesn't use words.

And that's the language of feelings, of sensation.

So.

Again, so many people have not had adequate physical contact, physical touching as babies, as infants. And so we're more awkwardness, but still the biological imperative to connect is still there. So even if we were lacking, that yearning is still there. And if we feel our yearning and let ourselves move through with that yearning, then we will come again to connection with ourselves and with each other. You know, there's a Sufi saying.

Pilgrim, there is no other path than the one that is created by your own two feet.

So this is all a new experience for us. We've been cut off now for a good part of the year. Things are clearly shifting in a good direction, positive direction. And so many of these things that we've been deprived of will then become possibility. But a lot of times when we feel.

That possibility, our mind takes us to. Oh, but I haven't been able to feel that all year, and it's been terrible. Well, that's okay. That's probably grief. Give room to the grief. Let the grief be there. The key is not to be exposed to it all at once, to just touch into grief or other difficult sensations and emotions one little small amount at a time so we can move into the contraction and out into the expansion. So again, it's absolutely critical of not exposing the person all at once to these difficult sensations and emotions. And different kinds of feelings.

Well, that's such a beautiful part of your somatic experiencing work of kind of empowering and training people to do their own work in that self titrating way of the pendulating right within a sphere of workability, to, to feel empowered that I can start to reopen my own life, you know, with help or with whatever support I need. It's so empowering. Yeah. I'm curious as what.

More of a personal question here, but what do you do yourself to stay resilient and be resourced and.

I do a bunch of different things.

And actually because I had to have a surgery three weeks ago, so that's kind of diminished some of the things I do. But now that it's coming back, you know, I'm bringing my energy.

Opening to my energy, you know, each day a little bit more.

You know, I'll move, I'll dance, I have a. It's like a, a little rebounded trampoline, but it's very special. It's made with bungee cords called Valicon. And I'll gently move on that. But it's not like I just get on it and jump up and down. I'll put on some music, I'll feel the music in my body, I'll feel my legs, just how it contacts that surface and then just letting it build from there. You know, we. And this is one of the things I think really benefits of something like Netflix. That's something you can do together. Unfortunately, a lot of the Netflix stuff that people choose to do.

Are not very.

You know, they're somewhat addictive. You know, people, they binge watch. But there are just so many wonderful things. And to share that with a, with a person, a chosen person, you know, that can be just absolutely wonderful. To share and giggle and just appreciate the wonderful.

Acting and the writing, you know, it's just, it just opens to a whole other world, you know. So, yeah, because, you know, my thing is reading bodies. You know, that's what I've been doing for the last 45 years.

And so I'm actually very interested in acting because that. How the people use their bodies to convey sometimes very, very subtle things about their experience. And I took one long story, how it happened to happen. I took a class with a small class about 25 people with Alan Arkin. You know, they're really very fine actor, amazing actor. I was the only one there. Well, one other person, but I was about the only one there that wasn't an actor that wasn't, you know.

And.

It Scared the bejesus out of me. But when I was able then to kind of play with some of these.

Different exercises and really get to explore a little bit when I see that in an actor or an actress, how it actually feels inside of me and how I can communicate that again. It's another way of embellishing our interceptive landscape.

It's just sharing these things together. You know, maybe we weren't able to go to restaurants, but, you know, a lot of people have talked about how really wonderful it was again, if they were fortunate enough to have somebody there with them in the house. But to cook together, to really do something with lots of different flavors. And again, you're doing something together. And that tends to increase social cohesiveness of the engagement. And social engagement is so important, as Stephen's going to talk about. So, so important in co regulation.

It's really.

My wife Sophie and I have been privileged to do both those things and enjoying wonderful meals together at home instead of going out as much. And also we watch our share of Netflix and Prime 2 minutes. We tend to watch these historical periods, you know, dramas and so forth. And it is a little bit like an addiction time. Well, we're only going to watch one episode tonight, right? Like, I'm only going to have one drink. Yeah. But it is nice to be able to hang out and have that time together.

It's fun. It's sharing a common experience. Like a triangle. There's you, your partner, and then there's the thing that you're observing that you're looking. So by sharing that and you see that, you know, with babies, when they start to be about 9, 10 months old, you point with your finger and then they'll look up where it was. We're apparently the only mammal, the only primate that does that. Where we point and then we'll triangulate. So two people are looking at the same thing and then the baby, you know, the toddler then looks at the same thing and point at the same thing. I actually have a photograph of that with one of my. The teachers of somatic experience with one of our children. So again, is sharing something that's enjoyable and it doesn't have to be light, but that's emotionally rewarding.

You know, and sometimes it just takes, you know, you try this one. This is not going to work. Try another one. Try another one.

Thank you very much. This has been incredibly rich and so helpful.

You know, as just maybe a final. I just want to give you a final opportunity to.

Message anything you would like to Our audience, as we're coming out of this, hopefully coming out, getting on the other side, at least in our country here in the US where we're privileged to have a lot of access to the vaccine.

Possibly getting on the other side of this pandemic, or at least emerging from it. But we still have a lot going on with all kinds of political instability and the reckoning with race in this country. And, you know, the looming, are already present climate emergency, which may be bringing some pretty severe disruptions our way in the coming years. And I'm just wondering, from your experience, your deep work and trauma and with the body, just, you know, what do we really need to be focused on and paying attention to it, both individually and collectively as a society, as we emerge into whatever this new world's going.

To be for us, I think we have to, as a society, we really have to encounter this implicit racism that we see, you know, and that we're all, you know, that we're all in some way victim of. You know, I mean, I can think of times more than I can put on my finger where I really was implicit that this person was not as knowledgeable as a white person. For example, I remember once I was giving a talk, the mayor of LA sponsored this talk. I was doing it to the sheriffs that, for example, that worked with women who had been sex trafficked or children have been sex trafficked. And at the end of this one woman, young, probably in her 20s, black woman, and she came up and she said, Dr. Lee, what book would you recommend? So I took out Waking the Tiger and then we started, we went into a conversation. Well.

She was just completing her doctorate in psychology and also getting a law degree at the same time.

So.

Then I said, keep that book, but this book might interest you more. And I pulled out in an unspoken Voice and handed it to her. But again, it's embarrassing, but it should be embarrassing again. It gives us an opportunity to look at our implicit assumptions.

And I think this is maybe coming to a reckoning that is so overdue with the MeToo first and then with the Black Lives Matter. And you can. I mean, now that people are capturing these things on their phones, the landscape has been changed now, thankfully.

And you're just hoping that Follow through. You mentioned something about working with law enforcement people and people who are in prison.

You know.

That'S what we have to do. I'm just really appreciative that you're. You're doing that. I remember I was doing once a group in San Quentin and this was a group of men who had beaten their wives, or some of them had murdered their wives. And so I was very tense. You can imagine. So you're in this kind of locked in area. And.

I got one guy to start talking about what happened just before he started hitting his wife.

And he felt such rage. And the rage was connected. Nobody's going to ever make me feel this small again. So I had him feel the rage. And instead of hitting, just holding here and breathing into it. Breathing into it. And then he started breaking down in sobs for that little child. And then all of the men in the group started crying and hugging each other.

Beautiful. Really beautiful.

There's just one thing I forgot. Maybe one last. I wanted to give you a chance to express something. I know you've been very concerned about the impact of trauma on our indigenous brothers and sisters and on the.

Historical generational trauma they experienced. And we have a whole day at this summit focused on listening to indigenous voices. We have six indigenous elders and one amazing young indigenous climate activist named Zihei Abbasida. And so I just. I know that's been part of your work, and I wonder if you could just share.

Please send me the link when you're doing that.

Absolutely.

I'd love to see it. I was just thinking two years ago, I was doing a group at Aswen Institute, and it's generally open to the general public. And I'm not sure exactly how this came to be, but there was. Well, there was a young man from the Crow Nation, Montana, and a Navajo woman. And so I worked with them together. So they came up together, the three of us. And.

You know, trauma does get passed on from generation to generation, but so does great wisdom, great gifts also get passed on. And so in the session, the chant of his grandfather came through.

And then the Navajo lady shared, you know, because many of these indigenous.

Tribes, you know, their children were taken away and they were put in these boarding schools. And if they even ever spoke a word of their native language, they washed their mouth with soap so they would never do it again. And so this woman was also using that to set up a school for children where they learned the Navajo language. And it's very complex, very complex language. And so there they are, making this really positive choice, but getting the support from their ancestors.

I think that's really important thing to point out, because we hear a lot about historical and generational trauma, which is completely a reality, and that we need to have a lot of compassion for and address and at the same. And not perpetuate and at the same time, there is these sources of generational ancestral wisdom. And without that, I don't know where we'd be. And I think that's one of the aspirations of this summit is kind of bringing together that ancestral wisdom with current, the best of current neuroscience and psychology and so forth to help us all become more resilient.

And that ancestral lineage, that's true for all of us, not just indigenous people. You know, one of my students, she's actually a Catholic nun, she's from Tanzania and she's very beautiful woman inside and out. And.

She and I just did a class on the ancestors because for her living with her tribe in Tanzania, it's a small tribe, you know, that's their reality. They wouldn't. Anything else other than that would be just ridiculously crazy and just to let her wisdom shine through in that way. So I think we have a lot to learn from the indigenous people. Absolutely, we certainly do. And we should welcome that and be grateful for that. But we also, again, have to see that in many, many areas of the country, the indigenous people were not able to get the vaccines. Why was that?

Now that was choice somewhere that somebody was making.

So, yeah, we have our history, we do have our, we all have our histories. You know, some are bad, some are good. But if we can say, okay, this was good, this was not good, and kind of be able to hold them together.

And become wiser.

By doing this.

I think that's a good note to end on. So thank you so much, Dr. Levine. This has been really incredibly rich and I'm sure going to stimulate all kinds of explorations for our summit audience. And thank you so much for the work you've been doing so long to help so many people and just really encourage everyone in our audience to check out Dr. Levine's amazing work and his amazing books and, and the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Therapy model. So thank you again so much.

Welcome, welcome.

And Doug, here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Ferry Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. Affiliates excludes Massachusetts.

If you're an H Vac technician and a call comes in, Grainger knows that you need a partner that helps you find the right product fast and hassle free. And you know that when the first problem of the day is a clanking blower motor. There's no need to break a sweat. With Grainger's easy to use website and product details, you're confident you'll soon have everything humming right along. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.