EP 147: Moving Through Suffering Into Your Greatest Potential | Alex Howard

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 the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Maul. And today I'm having a conversation with longtime friend and colleague Alex Howard, founder of the Optimum Health Clinic, the the Conscious Life platform and the Trauma Super Conference. Alex and I had a really deep conversation about the nature of trauma, pain and human suffering and how we can leverage suffering for post traumatic growth and how just knowing that gives us the hope and clarity we need to deal with the challenges we all face in life. So give it a listen. It's a fabulous conversation.

Welcome, Alex Lee. Thank you for having me. I always really enjoy our conversations. I'm looking forward to getting into this together.

I'm sure this is going to be a great one. So I'm going to tell our audience a little bit about your work and then we'll jump right into the conversation.

All right, sounds great.

Okay. So Alex Howard is the creator of Therapeutic Coaching, the founder and chairman of the Optimum Health Clinic, or ohc, one of the world's leading integrative medicine clinics specializing in fatigue and its related conditions. He's the author of why me? My journey from me to health and Happiness and decode your fatigue, a clinically proven 12 step plan to increase your energy, heal your body and transform your life. He's the creator of the YouTube series In Therapy with Alex Howard. Alex's OHC team of 20 full time practitioners has worked with thousands of patients in 40 plus countries as a randomized controlled trial on a groundbreaking approach to treating fatigue currently underway. He is also host of the Fatigue Super Conference and the creator of the 12 week reset program. And his theoretical papers appear in journals such as British Medical Journal Open and Psychology and Health. And you know, you've not only done the fatigue work, but you've done these incredible conferences around trauma and relationship and anxiety and sleep, really all the fundamental human issues and bringing some of the most brilliant minds into the world for everybody's benefit. So thank you so much for the work you've been doing.

Like you flee. I like talking to people. I find I learned a lot in the process. So it's absolutely.

Yeah, it's a complete win, win to being able to do this work and have all these wonderful conversations with brilliant people. I think. Where to start with your, you know, your personal experience kind of what inspired what inspired you to go into this work, really into therapy and creating a large company that could, you know, address at scale this really kind of endemic human condition around anxiety and chronic fatigue and things like that. And I know there's some relationship to your own journey, so why don't you start wherever you'd like and just kind of let us know who you are and how you got into this path and how that unfolded for you.

Yeah, sure. Well, when I was a teenager, I wanted to be a rock star, and that failed. My parents wanted me to be an accountant, and that also failed. Like a lot of people that end up doing this kind of work, I ended up doing it not through choice, but through necessity. And for me, that was suffering from me, otherwise known as chronic fatigue syndrome, for seven years from my mid teens. And, you know, it seemed to me at the time that it came out of nowhere. Of course, in hindsight, these things rarely come out of nowhere. Often there's a whole story and history behind them. But it felt like almost overnight I went from loving sport, playing music in bands and having a typically kind of active teenage life to barely being able to get out of bed and hardly be able to get out of the house for initially to two years. And beginning of that journey, of course, I thought, well, I'm just going to go and see my doctor. I'm going to get given a pill that's going to make me better. And that didn't happen. And the fact that didn't happen was incredibly scary. Although I had a very real physical condition, the inevitable result of not being able to do the things you want to be able to do in life and also not knowing what's wrong with you, why it's wrong with you. Are you ever going to recover? Was. I also developed significant anxiety, intense depression at times. And after a couple of years of this, it wasn't that I was actively planning how I was going to end my life, but I certainly was struggling to see how I was going to live a future which was just filled with this constant physical symptoms, but also the complete sense of stuckness and hopelessness. And I had a conversation with my uncle on the phone. My uncle was a little bit like. And if you've seen the Lord of the Rings films, like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, didn't have a bed, but he. He would turn up the right moment and have the right words of wisdom, and then he'd sort of disappear for a time. And in this conversation, I said, look, I hate my life. I hate everything in My life. I don't want to live my life. And he could have very easily have gone to a place of sympathy and empathy. And I'm sure he had empathy and sympathy for my situation. But he also realized that that wasn't going to change what was happening. And so he asked me a series of questions. And actually, there are a series of questions that I've now asked in different ways to thousands of people over the years. And I think they're actually a really interesting set of reflections given the focus of this summit. He said to me, on a scale of 0 to 10, how badly do you want to get better? And I thought about it, and I was being very Sincere. I was 18 years old, and he was kind of my hero that I looked up to. And I thought, well, I wouldn't kill somebody, and I wouldn't chop off a limb. But I couldn't think of many other things I wasn't willing to do to change around the situation. So I decided that was a 9.5 out of 10. He said, okay, Sid, I want you to come up with a list of all of the things that you think you could do to change the situation that you're in. And I want to come up with the list of all the things you think make your situation worse. And so I put the phone down and I wrote down. I'd read a few. I think I'd read Louise Hay's you can heal your life and Dan Millman's Way of a peaceful Warrior. But I was very early in my journey, and I wrote down things like learning more about nutrition. I'd been to see many different practitioners at this point. I wrote down meditation, qigong.

And the list of things that made me feel worse was just life. It felt like getting up and trying to get through each day was impossible. So I phoned him back, and I was sort of enthusiastic that I'd done something. He said, okay, how many hours a day do you spend doing the things that you yourself believe could make a difference? And I thought about it, and the answer was pretty much nothing. I had this list of things to do, but I wasn't doing it. And then said, okay, how many hours a day do you spend watching television? And you've got to remember, this was 1996. So we're not talking about the days of good television. We're talking about crappy soap operas that are repeated. Like they're on at lunchtime, they're on in the evening, and then they're repeated again on a Sunday. But I didn't have energy. So I was lying on the sofa, and this was obviously way pre social media, so I was just watching about seven hours of TV a day. So he said, okay, help me understand this. You're a nine and a half out of ten. You want to get better more than anything. You've got a list of things that you think you could do. You're not doing any of those, but you're spending seven hours a day watching tv. Help me square the equation. And it was that conversation and really the realization that I could wait for somebody else to find the answers, but I probably. And I think I'd still be waiting now, 25 years later, 24 years later, or I could make my recovery journey the most important thing in my life. And on the back of that, I started meditating every day. I started doing very gentle yoga, which was really just lying in Shavasana and then doing a few stretches.

I read over in the subsequent five years, over 500 books, I saw dozens of different practitioners. At one point, I was taking 70 supplements a day, which is not something I recommend. And I didn't find one answer. What I found was many answers. But at the core of it was really this change in. From being the victim of something to realizing that if I wanted things to change, I was going to have to change them. And so there's lots of sleep we could get into in terms of pieces. It was that conversation, really, that changed everything for me.

Well, I really want to dig into that with you, Alex, because I think this is really at the heart of what the best year of your life is all about. And, you know, I mean, we're really trying to address all kinds of areas in the summit, because some of us just haven't gotten clear enough about who we are and what we want in life. So we have a day focused on life, vision and purpose, because you got to get clear about that. And then, you know, understanding some of the science of habit change and different things and. But one thing that I think is universal, relatively universal, that I'm sure our audience can resonate with, is very often we kind of know what we need to do and we're not doing it right. And of course, if somebody's suffering with me or chronic fatigue or suffering with depression.

I'm sure that can be incredibly frustrating because, yeah, you've heard all this stuff. You know what you need to do, and yet you just can't seem to get yourself to do it. You can't seem to.

You just can't seem to make that shift so, and before we talk into how, you know, how that shifted for you and how, you know, it could shift for others, also thinking back when you were going through this, there probably wasn't much social affirmation around suffering from chronic fatigue or me. I mean people just thought it was psychological or you were faking or it was a kind of laziness. And so that had to be kind of a double whammy there to be suffering something that was very real, very physical, that was very debilitating for you and making you actually hate your life at the time, and yet not having it be the kind of diagnosis that you can say, see, I have this thing, there's a reason why I'm suffering the way I'm suffering. So I wonder if you could address that person. Then I want to really dig into this journey of how, how we make that shift from being victimized by whatever it is in life, our conditioning, our history, our genetics, the circumstances of our life, and then beginning to take ownership for what are the steps that are going to move us forward. But first of all, I'm curious about that because I think one of the reasons I'm bringing this up is because I think part of the equation of getting out of any kind of victim position in our lives and moving forward is certainly a certain kind of insight and will and maybe some mental toughness and inspiration. But part of it is it's got to be grounded in self compassion. And so, you know, you were in a tough situation back there with where you know, the world was probably looking at you like, you know, maybe just kind of a loser, I don't know.

You know, it's interesting as you was, I was just reflecting as you were talking there. I think it took me years after I recovered to really get past that trauma in of itself. You know, it's like because you've got the trauma of physically being unwell, but then you've got the trauma of effectively being rejected for the fact that you're physically unwell. And things are a lot better now, you know, 20 something years later, there's a lot more cultural understanding and there's less isolation because the Internet means that you can find other people in the same situation. Back in those days, you know, there was no Amazon, there was no, you know, I remember going to the local library to request them to order in books on kind of some of those early books on mind body medicine. And then looking at me like I was a, I was an alien. Like, who's this like skinny 18 year old kid that's trying to. Trying to order these books. The.

Was particularly difficult was around my peers. I remember at school, people saying things like, oh, my God, you're so lucky. You get to lie in bed and watch TV all day. And all I wanted to do was get out of bed and do the things that I love to do.

And that really, the only word that I think truly captures it is rage. I mean, the rage that I felt at both the frustration of my physical limitations, but also the lack of. And it wasn't just friends. It was even close family members that thought that they were kind of questioning the physicality and the reality of my experience. That rage, I mean, it drove me for the first decade of my career. I look at the first 10 years of my career, that was basically just a massive fu. To the medical population that I felt hadn't helped me and the people in my life that hadn't understood me. And of course, that's not a very healthy and sustainable motivation, but that was certainly what was there for many years. So I think anyone that's watching this suffering from any kind of particularly medically unexplained illnesses, the illnesses that science had, I think that particularly. The problem is that there's an arrogance in the medical world, which is that if we don't know what's wrong with you, there's nothing wrong with you.

Yeah, exactly.

When you really think about that's crazy. Like the idea that modern science knows everything there is to know about the human body. And, you know, that. That just deep sense of trauma that one gets from the isolation of knowing that their experience is real but not having that, that. That validation. Thankfully, I was. I was able to turn that isolation and that anger and that rage into something positive.

But it was very, very difficult. A lot of years.

Yeah, I bet. So there you were. You had this conversation with. I'm sorry, was it your uncle?

Yeah, my uncle.

Yeah, your uncle Gandalf. Right.

His name was the Wizard.

And, you know, he led you through this questioning and you saw there was a big disconnect between what you said, that kind of, you know, scale of 1 to 10. 9.5. You do anything to change your situation. And a big disconnect from that between that and the fact that you weren't doing the things that could create a change. And you knew what some of those things were. You didn't know everything, but you had some inklings of some things that would help move things for you. So you saw that big disconnect and that was motivating for you. That seems like you saw that clearly enough that that was a big motivator for you. And yet, you know, I think some of us even get that and some of us even, you know, read the books where somebody's making that very clear. Right. And there can still be a lot of obstacles. And I'm wondering if this one resonates for you at all. Because, you know, you wanted to get back and lead your life. You would have liked to have just been a normal 18 year old out there, you know, doing all things 18 year olds love to do and enjoying your life. And that should have just been easy. That should have been your life. But it wasn't. So I'm wondering if there's some kind of like, you know, resentment and also a sense kind of like entitlement sometimes in our lives. Like it shouldn't be this hard. I shouldn't have to go through this struggle. I shouldn't have to do all this stuff. This should just be easy. Why am I being singled out? You know, why am I being persecuted? You know, and building up some mixture of entitlement and resentment that ends up being debilitating and getting in the way of that clear channel. Okay, I've got a challenge here. Here's a possible solution. Let's get to work. Right? It gets clouded up with all this other stuff.

I think it does. And you know, I was just thinking as you were talking that was it the conversation that was the change or the motivation, or was it the pain actually of the frustration and the suffering was the motivation. The conversation was the thing that gave me a signpost of what to do with it. And so I think sometimes what, what's difficult is we're suffering, but we normalize to the suffering that, that we experience. And because we normalize to it, it's like it's almost better the devil you know than it can. I don't think it is better, but it can feel like it's better the devil that you know than the devil that you don't know. I think sometimes the gift feels like a gift when it happens, but I think sometimes the gift is the pain is so severe that we're suddenly willing to do whatever it takes to do something about it. Or the sense of hopelessness is so intense that it's almost like a pendulum that's pulled so far in one direction that you let it go and it just absolutely goes off like a rocket. And I, I think the.

It'S like I was given a tiny glimpse of something that could be possible. And it Wasn't that I necessarily even believed I could change it. I think I sometimes push back when people say, you've just got to believe it's possible to make it possible, because I think it's very hard to believe something so far away from where you are when you have little evidence that you can get there. I think what you need is a tiny seed of hope and enough pain and frustration of where you are that that little bit of hope is better than the alternative. And then, of course, if you start to take steps in a new direction and you get. It's almost like the belief is the top of the table and the legs are the evidence that holds the table up and you start to gather little bits of evidence. I think that what's particularly difficult is when you're on a journey where those legs don't come quickly like that early evidence doesn't come quickly. And really, in my situation, I think it was probably a year before I noticed anything where I could go, this is starting to do something. And that was a. It felt like a very long time to keep going with a plan that wasn't obviously, you know, giving the legs to the belief that I can change this.

It is a long time. And I like what you said about, you know, the devil we know is better than the one we don't, you know, and, you know, this summit is really all about.

Not settling. And, you know, so many of us in our lives, we do settle for. Exactly, because change is scary. And I'm wondering if for you, even as you, you know, got clear about your motivation and started taking steps, if you were hampered at all, or if you somehow had to deal with the fear that maybe you would fail at it.

Even believing you could change was setting you up for just more disappointment, more pain.

Well, I think that's a really good point, Philippe, because I think one of the things that I often notice over the years working with people with complex chronic illnesses is that the people around them can start saying, oh, they're just really negative. They just don't believe anything's going to work. And my observation is that's not where they started. Often they started really optimistic with the first few things that they tried, but then the negativity is actually a form of self protection. They don't want to have the pain of investing the hope that then gets disappointed again and again. So that's definitely part of that. But again, it kind of goes back to this point of what's the alternative? And the alternative was so horrific that it was like, I'D already spent several, you know, two years when you're 18 is, is, is, you know, what's that is 10% of your life and it's kind of 20, 30% of your kind of conscious life. The time that you've been self reflective. And so it feels like an eternity.

Absolutely.

You get a bit older and two years passes quite quickly. But it's like the alternative felt very difficult. But I would also say going to go back to this point around normalizing that. I think part of our job as clinicians and teachers and practitioners is to firstly point to when someone is normalized to something that's not normal and to help them or at least not their greatest potential and to be able to show people what is actually possible for them, not in an overinflated way. I'm not a particularly big fan of inflated positive thinking. I think often it just results in frustration and disappointment. But most people are unrealistic in how negative their perspective is because they've got a kind of confirmation bias. They've gone out and, and half heartedly tried things that haven't really had an impact and followed through. And so I think part of how I see my job working with people is to help unlock what their actual potential is. And for a lot of us, I don't know the origin of this, I first heard this phrase, I think it was from Tony Robbins actually, that said that many of us overestimate what we can achieve in a year and we underestimate what we can achieve in a decade. And I think that's very true on a healing journey. And it doesn't have to be a year and a decade. It could be a month and a year that people start a practice and it doesn't work immediately. So they give up.

And for some people they start practicing, they get big results. Some people meditate for the first time and it's like almost immediately they get a powerful experience of quite a quiet and spaciousness. Other people have to practice for months, sometimes, sometimes a few years to really start to get tastes of that. And so it's also, it's cultivating a self discipline that we're willing to stay with things even if we don't get that early gratification and even if they feel difficult. And I think that muscle in us does grow the more we practice using it.

Well, I think that again we're getting right to the heart of things and with this summit, because I think our hope of this summit is that in whatever way it can be small, large anyway, everyone, all the wonderful people here joining us for this summit are getting some inkling of other possibilities, some greater possibilities or different possibilities in their life, things that they've probably always dreamed about that are really connected to their heart. Not somebody else's possibilities, but, but our own possibilities that we maybe haven't dared to dream or gave up on. And in some way to be able to move back into awareness of that and awareness of that gap between where we are, what we're currently doing and what we could be doing and what those possibilities are that really do resonate with our own heart. And there's some pain in experiencing that gap. But then have people be able to experience that pain with some hope in there and with some skills and with some underscientific understanding about how you do move forward with some tools and skills and with this ground of self compassion and, you know, so I think that's where we're going with this. And I know part of your journey, your own healing journey, what you brought into the world, is developing a much deeper understanding of the whole body mind system spectrum that we all live within and that if we don't begin to, you know, I like that you mentioned Tony Robbins. He's inspired me in many ways and as he has millions and.

He often has said, you know, you don't need to have a PhD in psychology to move forward in your life. But, but my goal with my trainings is to help everyone become what he calls a practical psychologist. You understand enough about the workings of your own body, mind, heart system to get so, you know, kind of at least get in sync with, at least get in a co pilot seat with it rather than being victimized by it and being dragged around, you know, back in a caboose somewhere. So we need at least some understanding of how all this works so we can strategically begin to do the things that will move us forward, whether we're just trying to reach out for greater possibilities in our life or whether we're dealing with something like chronic fatigue or something like how do we get started and how we move forward. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, you know, the basic understanding from, you know, all the body mind disciplines and integrative medicine. And you know, we've learned so much in the last several decades as well as there being the ancient wisdom, the yogic wisdom and for many traditions, the martial arts that's been around for a long time, like what are the basics that we need to kind of begin to know to get a little bit in the driver's seat or at least the co pilot seat with our own life in our own future.

So just before I answer that Fleet, I just want to go back to something we just said you were saying there. But I think it's also an important piece that.

One of the most I forgot a piece that I think is important. One of the things that really helped me early in that path as well was discovering stories of people that had been through similar situations and found a way out. And I think that's why summits like this can be so helpful because people can, can, can be inspired by those different stories. And in those that time I couldn't find any stories of people that recovered from me chronic fatigue. But what I did find was people that had dealt with things like physical injuries or cancer or There was a book that had a massive impact on me by a guy called Mayor Schneider. There's a book called My Life and Vision. And just very briefly, his story was that he was declared blind and he decided that he didn't want to spend his life blind and he was going to do whatever it took to turn it around. And I don't remember all the details, but one of the things was he came across an exercise from the Bates method called Palming where you'd look at the sun with closed eyes and you'd cover your, you keep covering your eyes and so on. And he would do this for literally hours a day, every single day. I mean, incredibly boring, repetitive thing. And he eventually recovered his sight to the point that he was granted a driving license. So from being declared blind to having eyesight. And it was stories like that that showed me what's possible when we wholeheartedly show up to our path and journey. So just before I come to your question, I just wanted to remind people that as alone as we might feel, and going back to your question around the isolation of being misunderstood, if we can go out and find stories, doesn't have to be the same story as our story, but people doing really hard things and showing up to that process and creating change, I found that incredibly helpful. Absolutely.

Finding those exemplars. And you know, I think if you kind of alluded to this before in talking about self discipline and you know, it's, it's not even just that, you know, really hard work and self discipline, what doing whatever it takes, right, to recover from an illness or to move forward in our lives, that that's just this horrible hard thing I'm going to suffer through in order to get to some end point that I'll Be happy. It's actually we can learn that being in that hard work and discipline is where the joy and thriving is in life. That's where the energy in life is stepping into that challenge. That's when we feel most, really most alive. At some point it becomes not so much about the end goal, but, but that's like, that's. You're alive when you're, when you're doing that.

Yeah. You know, I, I haven't forgotten your question, so I will come back to it. You know, I, I have three daughters, two of which are, are neurodiverse, and particularly my eldest daughter who is, who's 11, who has very severe dyslexia to the point that it's a massive inhibition to learning. And the previous she's been for a number of different schools to find the right environment for her, but there was a point where she just simply in a sense learned its helplessness. She just gave up attempting to learn because it was so impossible. And she was two, three years behind her peers. But now being in an environment that celebrates neurodiversity, they name the classrooms after famous dyslexics. One in three entrepreneurs are dyslexic, by the way, it shows what a superpower that it can be. The being in an environment that celebrates neurodiversity and diversity and celebrates the unique brilliance that we all have is suddenly the journey of learning. For her, although it's still a very difficult journey, is she comes home every day with a smile on her face and it's been very touching to my wife and I just these last few months willingly spending half an hour, 45 minutes in the evening doing homework on her own, something which was utterly impossible for her even a year or two ago. So it's not about being in that instance, top of the class or being, you know, she's several academic years behind her age. But she has self esteem, she has self worth, she has pride, she has happiness. And that's so much more important. And I don't just mean that in like a kind of touchy feely, happy, clappy, like it genuinely, you look at the data and the research on happiness, it's not the destinations that we get to, it's the way that we show up along the way and the community and the purpose and the sense of connections that we feel.

Well, very interestingly, we have two amazing presenters on this summit. One who's an incredibly successful entrepreneur who overcame dyslexia on his journey to being that and in some ways that dealing with his Dyslexia fueled his journey to becoming an incredibly successful entrepreneur. And we have another person who struggled with eyesight problems that really got in the way of their learning and became an optometrist and ended up completely healing his own eyesight and went on to heal, bring healing to tens of thousands of. Of others, having to actually heal their insight and understanding the nature of light altogether and becoming this profound spiritual teacher. So, you know, these journeys are so fascinating. They almost always begin with some challenge that we face. You know, it's that test. It's the hero's journey. Right? It's that test. And it's amazing what you've done with your own. So let's go back to this question you asked me. Oh, now, now we got people inspired. They're ready to take the journey. So how do you start? What do you need to know to just begin, you know, get a chance of not having life, just keep knocking us down. But how can I, you know, get a sense of, okay, you know, I can't understand enough about how this works to move forward?

Yeah. So there's obviously lots of pieces to a healing journey, but I want to focus on one particular piece, which is a key part of my work. But it's also, I find a central theme in a lot of different healing journeys, whether it's a physical healing journey, an emotional healing journey, a relationship healing journey, which is that one of the significant things that tends to happen when we are out of, when. When we're in a difficult place, when we get overloaded, maybe that we have trauma and maybe have a medically unexplained illness that may be that we have a heartbreak, a relationship breakup is a sympathetic nervous system becomes activated. We go into a survival response. And I'm sure many, many of people watching this will be familiar with, for example, fight, flight, or freeze, that we go into a response to deal with the threat. And that response is entirely appropriate to acute stressors. If you and I are walking down the street in London and there's a big red London bus coming, charging towards us, we haven't seen it leaping out the way onto the pavement or sidewalk, as it would be called, is entirely appropriate. And we need a hit of adrenaline, cortisol, those stress hormones to fuel our response. And reflecting on our life purpose, or digesting what we had for lunch, or having emotional.

Connection between us is all irrelevant. We need to go into survival state. The problem is when that state becomes normalized, going back to what we were saying a bit earlier about we normally normalized to whatever becomes our consistent reality. And so when our new homeostatic balance, like the place that we come home to in ourselves, is one of dysregulated, the impact of that is almost unimaginable in our lives. I call that shift in our nervous system a maladaptive stress response. It's where a healthy stress response has become maladaptive. It has significant impacts on our capacity to physically heal. There's fascinating research by Dr. Robert Navio on cell danger response, which looks at our mitochondria, which is our cellular energy production. The way that we are making energy in our cells and our mitochondria have basically two functions. Making energy and danger, signaling that there's a threat in the environment. When they're in a danger signaling mode, because we're in a maladaptive stress response, we are directly impacting our capacity to make energy. But being in a maladaptive stress response also has all kinds of impacts in relationships. When our nervous system is dysregulated, we misread the cues in the environment. We're unable to be present and connected to someone else because we're defensive and guarded. Because we're in this stress response, it impacts upon our capacity for emotional healing. If we have experienced trauma, our emotional body has an amazing capacity towards healing, just like our physical body does. You know, if we get a cut or we break a bone or whatever, as long as we keep it clean or we keep like a broken arm, we keep the bone together, it will naturally heal itself. There's no drug that we give someone that makes a bone heal. We just set it and the body does it itself.

But if that break is not set or that cut gets infected, that healing process doesn't happen. The same is true to our emotional healing when we're in a maladaptive stress response. So a lot of my work over the last 20 or so years has been teaching folks how to firstly recognize that then that their nervous system has become dysregulated, they are in a maladaptive stress response and then have pathways towards resetting that and bringing that back to balance. That doesn't necessarily fix everything in someone's life. Sometimes it does fix the things because they suddenly respond from a different place. But what it does do is it allows us then to meet the world in a way that is true to being in the present and not just a kind of echo and a reverberation of the triggers of the past.

So what you were describing becomes a non virtuous vicious cycle. Right.

And I wonder if we could go back to what you were describing as homeostasis. Because what we understand about trauma today, which is that fight or flight response is getting triggered by something in our life, at some point in our life, wherever it happens, how it happens. And it gets lost. Locked on. It gets locked on, and then we build, we. We adapt around that, and we develop. We are. Our neurophysiology reorganizes itself in a maladaptive way. But it becomes a new normal. And, and. And our homeostasis. I wonder if you could describe what homeostasis actually means. Because in a sense, you know, it becomes that new normal that homeostasis becomes almost like a strange attractor for illness and dysfunctionality. And you could also say we're addicted to it because, you know, once we get used to whatever kind of neurochemical mixed balance, you know, that's in our brain and what's going on physiologically, it becomes the normal. That's what we're used to, and that's what we. We need to be there. That's what. That's home. And. And, you know, people can understand that. They realize, you know, if I present in the right way, I think they can understand, you know, there's nothing wrong with me. You know, it's like for whatever reason, my nervous system got locked on by some experiences, and that's created this whole maladaptive structure. And I just need to do the work to change it. It has nothing to do with my character, who I am as a human being or my potential or anything else. It's just a matter. It's almost like fixing your car, if we actually understand the science of it.

Yeah. Well, firstly, your question around homeostasis. Effectively, homeostasis is. Is where something is the same and consistent. And so we have all kinds of things, you know, be it our blood pressure, our blood sugar, our. Our mood. All kinds of things have these balances because we can't learn how to redo things all of the time. We have to have a kind of baseline that we settle back to. The problem is that if you spend too long in a dysregulated state, your system learns that as the new baseline. But I think particularly this is a key piece of the work that I've been doing over the years, working with emotional trauma is that it's not just the shift in our nervous system which is important to understand much of the suffering we experience in life. It's not the events that happened. It's not even what's happening in our nervous system. It's the coping strategies that we've developed to try to manage what's happened in our nervous system. That could be addiction. It could be that we're self medicating with drugs or alcohol or sex or food, whatever it may be to try and deal with this dysregulated nervous system. It may be that we suffer from chronic anxiety, that we're effectively trying to constantly think our way to a feeling of safety. The world doesn't feel like a safe place. But if I think about if this happens, I'll do that. And I'm replaying that conversation and I've got this. If we're constantly in our mind, we're trying to think our way to a place of calmness in our nervous system. Or it may be that we are in toxic relationships because the place that our nervous system settles or feels safe is when we're with someone that has control. And even if they have control over us, it's familiar and therefore we feel safe.

So realizing this, how do we begin to, you know, we all suffer from this to a degree. And so, you know, realizing that, you know, I mean, really. And this dysregulated in terms of physical diseases, just this dysregulated nervous system also increases inflammation at every level and even has epigenetic impacts on the mitochondria and so forth. So it can, you know, lead to dementia, can, you know, shorten our lifespan. There's, there's, you know, inflammation at every level. So realizing this, what are some of the things we be we can begin to do to learn to regulate our own nervous system and put ourselves in situations that are, you know, learn how we we've developed this whole maladaptive way and then coping with the result of that and that's making things worse. How do we begin turning things the other way? How do we begin creating a virtuous cycle for ourselves around self regulation and then maybe even co regulation with others in healthy ways instead of being caught up in dysfunctional relationships and the rest of it.

Yeah. So I have.

A kind of acronym that I use a lot which is resets. Because effectively what we're talking about here is resetting the nervous system. So the R is we have to recognize what's happening. And hopefully just by you and I having this conversation, there are people that are watching that are starting to reflect on their own nervous system right now and they're recognizing that they can feel that activation or that sense of maybe they're tired but wired or maybe there's just a sense of things Being held on. So we have to recognize that it's happening in the first place. We then want to examine, so the e is examined, how and why it's happening, what are our triggers, what is our baseline, what are the, you know, in a sense, rating how our system is data today, what's some of the history, what some of the underlying factors behind it. Then s is we need to stop, we need to break those habits and those patterns. And there's lots of pieces to that. But two of the key ones for a lot of people will find some sort of mindfulness or meditation practice will be incredibly helpful. If people have significant trauma, they might need some additional elements to that. They might need to do some trauma processing alongside. They may need some kind of moving meditation may be easier than just sitting still. We then have to have ways of stopping the habits and the patterns that again, that we've normalized to be able to recognize those and catch those and stop those. But what I find is once we've done that initial work, we have the awareness, we have some understanding of what's happening. We're calming our system, we're stopping the pattern. The we often then make a move from being a lot in our mind and in our heads to landing more and coming more into our body. And that's where often some of the underlying traumas. So the E, second e of reset is emotions. Those emotions start to come up. And if we don't work with those emotions, what tends to happen is we just go back into our mind. It's almost like we dip into our body. We have all these triggers and all these feelings that are difficult. Then we kind of run away again. So we have to have ways of processing and metabolizing our emotions and our feelings. And then as we do that, then the T of reset is transforming our relationship with ourselves. Because often one of the outcomes of this state and these patterns is we've learned to be harsh, to be cruel, to be critical towards ourselves. Like that inner critic voice has often got a lot of momentum. And so resetting and re establishing not just our relationships with other people, but also our relationship with ourselves. So ultimately, it's a combination of awareness of practices and strategies to calm the mind, come more into the body, then to work with our emotions, and then to look at our relationships with ourselves and the world around us.

Well, you know, there's. There's so much information available today around working with the mind. All the various body mind disciplines and forms of meditation, breath work, all kinds of embodiment work, and it's all fabulous and all, and all wonderful. And I think if we get started anywhere with any of it, it can really begin to, to make a, a difference for us. And, and at the same time, some, you know, especially, you know, we may be undoing decades and decades of, you know, maladaptive, you know, dysregulated nervous system and all the, all the, you know, the, the ways of handling our life that have been maladaptive to deal with that. And we're kind of having to, you know, gradually undo all that and create a new, you know, healthier approach to living. And, you know, boy, that seems like, it just seems like such a big task as we get into it. Is there any help along the way? And what I mean by this is.

You know, maybe more the spiritual grounding of this, that when we do start to, you know, develop that awareness and have moments of free of that dysregulation or more regulated moments, is there some positive momentum that we can begin to tap into either in terms of our internal resources or in community.

In the sense of inner being, community with others, or even our connection to the divine or whatever that might be for us? Because it just seems like this all sounds really complicated, but I got to get in there and figure it all out myself and do it all myself. So I'm curious, how do you work with thousands of people? What keeps them going?

Yeah, it's a great question. Please. A couple of things. Firstly, our wounds and our traumas don't happen in isolation, which means that I don't think our healing can fully happen in isolation. And I do think what sometimes happens in a way is that because of our traumas and negative impacts on other people, we can be very reluctant to trust. And we can find that, particularly like you asked some very articulate questions around kind of the isolation of, for example, suffering from a chronic illness. And when we've had those negative experiences, when we perhaps start to question and maybe we live in a very close knit community and family and we start to question certain things and we get ostracized, we get rejected for the fact that we're starting to do that. And I think it's very important to find ways to reach out and find community which can meet us where we are. And that's one of the great gifts of doing things like this online, that people all over the world can find your event and they can find other people that are connected to it. But I think that sense of holding and support from community is incredibly important. And we can have to Be brave. Sometimes we can have to take some brave steps to reach out and to let people in. The second thing I would say is that.

I'm quite careful.

In my work to not impose my own sort of spiritual beliefs onto other people. I try to be relatively agnostic in my public voice because I want to make my work accessible to people. As many different sort of belief structures as possible. But I think there's a central theme.

Within all kind of spiritual pursuit and discipline, which is that there is a wisdom and a guidance which is more than us and knows more than us. And I certainly know that in my deepest and darkest and most difficult moments, really the thing that held me and the thing that held me definitely wasn't me, let's put it like that, because my capacity to hold myself was fully gone in those moments. And sometimes it was a loving other person. I gave the story of my uncle that was a very important supporter, a certain chapter in my life. But I think it's sometimes when we're truly on our knees in life that we are able to surrender to that deeper guidance and wisdom. And what I'm about to say, I know is going to irritate some people, and I say it knowing that and apologizing for that along the way. But.

Many of the things that I value most in my life now are the products of having to address and deal the things that I found most difficult in my life in the past. And I know that isn't always the case for people. And I know we can go through things in life that are incredibly painful and it really is very difficult to find any kind of positive kind of meaning from them. And yet.

What'S been true for me, and there's a very, very famous book by Viktor Frankl called Man's Search for Meaning around his experience in the concentration camps. I think it was in Auschwitz. But if we choose to look for that positive meaning, we can find it. And I did a piece of research many years ago interviewing people that had been through the same illness that I had, me chronic fatigue syndrome. And one of the themes that came out in those that had recovered was this idea of post traumatic growth. That you can go through something which is genuinely horrendous and traumatic, but there's also the possibility that we have growth from that. And I think that there is sometimes a divine wisdom and guidance that doesn't make sense at the time. And with the benefit of hindsight, we can look back and we can realize the importance of the path that we were led down.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean just the timing of your uncle coming into, interacting with you in that way at that time. Just maybe in an effort to preserve your public stance of agnosticism in terms of making everything available.

You mentioned sometimes it feels like we're receiving some guidance or some energy or some strength or something, some support. And we know it's not me, it's something coming, you know, from somewhere else. Part of that, I'm curious, this resonates you. Part of that is because we tend to identify me like I am all my problems, I'm all my traumas, I'm all my problems, I'm all this, this crazy racing mind has been going on for however many decades. And you know, when we drop beneath all that, using various techniques of meditation, yoga, different, different body mind disciplines, that we get beneath all that noise. At least in my own experience and I've had my share of traumas in my life from childhood going forward, there's a level of our being that's never been touched by any of that, that was never damaged, that was never traumatized. And when we're in touch with that level of our being, we may not, you know, we may want to externalize that as that's the divine, it's out there somewhere. But that may actually really be closer to me than the me I've been identifying with. So I'm just curious as your thoughts about our ability to access that place where it can be really a sense of ultimate confidence and sense of our own personal wholeness and well being and that really maybe whether we think of that as internal or external, it is an incredible source of possibility and hope for us.

Exactly what you just said, Fleet. I think it's sometimes when we're, we are in those darkest, most difficult places, but we also feel that there is a guidance, that there is an inner strength and there is a sense of.

Truthfulness and.

Deep sense of purpose and aliveness that is often not there for people when we're so caught up in being normalized, in the busyness of life and the kind of trying to achieve this and do that and do whatever when we get really sometimes the darkest places, the deepest places and the quietest places. It's the place where we truly discover who we are and we discover our power and our potential. And you know, one of the blessings in my life has been that firstly my capacity to sit with people who are in very difficult places and really see and meet them in those places and not need to leap in and try and fix and rescue, but to meet them in A really, truly heartfelt way, but also a sense that.

Of course I will fight to protect the things I've worked hard to build in my life. But my true sense of happiness and purpose and kind of value in life is not tied to those things. Because when you get to know who you are without those things, that's also. There's a deep relief in that because there's less of an attachment and a fixation and a need to be something other than just who we actually are.

And then we can actually really enjoy the rest of it because it's not like this desperate thing I have to cling to. Right. So in some ways.

Yeah.

You could really make the case that even though none of us want the really tough things to happen to us or anyone else we love or anybody for that matter, it's those really tough things that take us into the depths where we really discover who we are and what's possible with our lives and give us the freedom to maybe be more successful with kind of how we arrange the external circumstances of our life, but not have who we are be dependent on what that looks like at any moment, which is some kind of genuine freedom.

Sometimes when you think something, you've got to say it out loud to work out if it's right or not. But the thing that comes to my mind as you say that is that what we wish for the people we love is to have a happy, good life. But if you're going to have a shit life, if you're going to have shit experiences in life, let them be properly shit, force you to do something about it. I think what's really sad is when we normalize to a life of suffering and pain, but the suffering and pain doesn't motivate us to do something about it. And we don't get that wake up call from someone that says, hey, this could be different. You could do this differently, because otherwise that's a life that we're just asleep. And what kind of life is that?

Yeah, well, we're all very grateful to your uncle. And, you know, you really exemplify Henri Nguyen's expression. The wounded healer came through your own journey, and now you've been able to bring healing to so many people around the world. And you're just continuing to bring tremendous value with all of your summits and all the rest of it, and just thank you so much for who you are and what you do. And again, we're all just grateful that your uncle stepped in at the right time with the right questions. And here you are today. And we can all. We can all benefit.

Thank you, Flea. I always enjoy our conversations, and likewise to you as well.

Absolutely. And we'll be looking forward to your next. To your next big conference, because I love the way you focus. You know, you. It's probably. You know, I just think it's so on point. You know, your conferences are about anxiety, about trauma, about sleep, about relationship. Just let's get. Let's get right down to the core things that are important to us as human beings and the core challenges we're dealing with.

And.

And so really looking forward to more of your work.

Thank you, Fleet. Well, I'm looking forward to having you on our next event. So we'll continue. Continue our back.

All right, well, we'll keep this dialogue going. Take care.

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