Siamon Emery | Reclaiming Safety One Breath at a Time

When you're ready, you'll allow the fears to come. The fears will come. This is the thing. But we have to create capacity first to allow the fear to be there. And the capacity is what, as a society, we do not have anymore. We have disassociation, we have screens on our telephones. Whatever dopamine you can put your finger on, we have. So they're actually the capacity to sit and build resiliency, build robustness. Even robustness is where I like to lie. More so than resiliency, because robustness says you're whole, you're really beautiful. Let's put ourselves in dysregulating places consciously. Let's go. Let's put ourself on the edge. Let's build that capacity in our nervous system to hold more and more fearful states. And we don't do that anymore as a society.

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What if the key to healing isn't just in your mind, but stored deep in your body's memory? In this powerful episode I sit down with Simon Emery, an internationally respected mental strength coach and somatic regression practitioner. Simon shares his remarkable journey from a childhood steeped in instability and addiction to becoming a guide for high performance and trauma survivors. Seeking true resilience and wholeness, we explore how trauma lives in the body, how moments of safety can be reclaimed and embodied, and why somatic work is essential for lasting transformation. If you're ready to explore healing through a deeper connection to your body and inner safety, this conversation is one you won't want to miss. Let's dive in. My name is Dr. Fleet Mall, the founder of Heart Mind Institute and your co host for this interview. And I'm very happy to be here today with Simon Emery. Welcome, Simon.

Thanks for having me, Fleet. It's a pleasure to be here.

Oh, yes. Well, it's my joy to get to have this conversation. Your work is very interesting, so maybe we can start with something personal. Even your bio referenced the difficulties you experienced growing up. But I'm wondering in particular maybe something about that and also how maybe there was a moment when you felt profoundly disconnected from your body, or maybe there was a moment when you felt profoundly reconnected and that influenced the trajectory of your work. But anyway, something about how your work grew out of your experiences.

Well, you know, growing up in Australia, I was a child of two intravenous drug users. So whilst my mother was pregnant with me, she wasn't quite using at that stage. My father was. But when I was born and the stress of a young child in the household and not having, you know, a partner who was willing to take the load of a young child, my mother also being only 19 years of age, she also chose to step out and start to, you know, use heavily as well. So I became a commodity for them as a way that they could use me to influence people around them and to, you know, get their needs met through disassociating their own experience. And then I was just the kid tagged along, you know, through that whole experience. And I think my needs were never put first, ever. Not once. My needs were supplementary to the needs of my parents. Ability to, you know, regulate and soothe their own internal spaces. And, you know, obviously from their experience, it was just what was best for them was heroin.

Wow. So how did that show up for you as you found your way into adolescence and, you know, beginning trying to navigate life yourself? How did that, the impact of that show up in your life?

No one was safe in my experience. You know, my primary caregivers, who were meant to keep me in a Safe co regulating. Saying that this world is safe is like nothing for me in that younger years was safe. So it was filled with disassociation and self and soothing. And that soothing looked a lot like things and chocolates and sweets and bad behavior because I always played in because everybody felt so bad for me and so much sympathy for me. I always kind of was given a lot of things for free and it's like, oh, here's the poor junkie kid, he have some money, have some sweets, have some things. So I was never really held accountable for my, you know, and understandable, let's be honest here. But I wasn't really held accountable for my own actions, for taking responsibility for me. So I was almost given carte blanche to just be that person, fully identify as this child or adolescent who was the child of junkies and in a really dysfunctional world. And so my whole childhood said to me that I had a dysfunctional experience. And so then I am justified in my behavior and in my belief system about who I am in a way that I show up in the world.

So when and how did that begin to turn around for you? When did you begin your own healing journey that led to the work you do now?

I think it was by my late twenties. I'd been through two very distinctly painful experiences. One was the breakdown of a relationship I was in, I was engaged. And the other one was the business, you know, the work I was doing. So, you know, up until my 20s, I'd kind of managed to fumble along and you know, I managed to get myself to a contracting job. Yeah, I managed to become, actually do an apprenticeship and become a carpenter and sort of with the resiliency of youth, you know, because youth, you can just, you've got so much energy and so much capacity to actually do a lot of things. So I, for me at that time I wasn't personally, I didn't really see too much wrong being I thought, oh yeah, that was just my childhood. But you know, now I've got a job and I've got a girlfriend and now I'm doing this. And so realistically, when we separated, when I was about 28, 29 is when. And you know, I'd been sort of up until that point I'd also been, you know, indulging in alcohol. Never really touched any hard drugs because obviously I was first hand experienced about what the effects of what those drugs would do to people. So I was always just drinking a little bit and a little bit of recreational drugs. So nothing but what really flicked the switch for me was the breakdown of this relationship at 2028-29. And then I started to really look at myself and think about maybe it wasn't the world that was the problem, it might be me. And now saying that doesn't mean that. Then all of a sudden the switch flicked and I was. Everything was going in the right direction. It was just the ability to take ownership of some behavior. Well, it's not even behavior, but just some circumstances in my life that were showing up. And as I did that, you know, then I went down the whole sort of rabbit hole of talking to counselors, you know, and doing some neurofeedback work and doing a whole bunch of studying this long process of going through different modalities and different therapists and different, you know, and just each time just getting a little nugget of experience or a little nugget of reflection, but really not fundamentally changing anything as such. In my internal experience, whilst it was good for the moment, it wasn't really shifting anything. I was still having those same urges and those same dark thoughts about my ability to actually show up for myself. It was always like, you know, I'm the kid who's had this experience as a child. That means I'm therefore tarred with the. And feathered with this childhood. So we always. Even though I could have all of this self awareness and this experience and this reflection, you know, going to India and studying, doing yogic studies in India, living in an ashram and in Australia and really focusing as much as I could, there was just. It wasn't shifting at all. So that was about 10 years. 10 years work.

Yeah, yeah.

And it sounds like there was a strong identification with your past, which can be something that can really be an obstacle even when people are doing their work. So what finally did shift things for you?

Well, what finally shifted for me was when I started listening to some really beautiful thought leaders in the space, you know, and one of them first up was Gabor Mate. Because Gabor Mate had really deep experience with addiction. And so I was looking at it through the lens of what he was presenting and for me, my parents behavior, because I always couldn't reconcile my parents behavior. It was really tough why they would choose this experience and not choose me. So it was like I was the one who was not chosen. And so. But then listening to him and talking about how addiction shows up and how it's present and how people use it as a way to soothe and then listening to him and go, okay, that makes a lot of Sense that really give me a bit of a direction. Okay. It's kind of like disassociating, but reassociating with the body from a really comfortable place because we've got this kind of uncomfortableness in our body all the time that, you know, I was experiencing that would shift when I would have a few beers or, you know, or have, you know, have a little bit of this or that, nothing in particular, you know, drastic or, you know, have a bit of a chat with someone who could see me for wholeness. But it would always, this other experience would always creep back that, you know, I'm not good enough, I'm not worthy, I feel like crap, I'm really anxious all the time. My anxiety is actually getting worse. And so then I started also listening to Dr. Peter Levine and Wessel van der Kolkolt and Wessel van der Kolt was really amazing because his the Body Keeps the Score. That book of his the Body Keeps the school was a fundamental, you know, paradigm shift for me. Listening to how your ability to process trauma and hold trauma in your body was so fundamentally profound that actually it would create disease and chronic illness through it. You know, that was me looking at my experience going, well, that's going to be my future if I don't actually learn because to how to actually deal with all of this trauma that's stored in my body. And so leading up to this too, I'd also spent a period of time in India and studying yogic and I ended up doing lines of plenary of yogic studies there as well. And we did that whole and it's deep meditation and deep processing in yogic spaces now whilst that was beautiful in the time, it didn't really give me any relevancy to moving forward and holding myself, you know, every time. I used to have this with a friend of mine who was a long time yogi. It's like, how do I keep doing the practice when I start to feel good again? Because what I would do is I would use it as a way. I would use the practices, the yoga and the meditation and all of these things to stop myself feeling so bad when I was having a really dysregulating moment. And then once I'd process that and went away, I'd stopped doing the work as well. And then it was just this nonstop process of like, you know, as something would show up, I'd do a bunch of yoga, make it feel better and then it go away and then I'd just drop it. So it wasn't a process that I was continually developing. And then finally I was reading this book and it was talking about childhood experiences. And I think the book was from memory, it might have been the ifs so the internal family systems I was looking at as well. It pretty much will ask me what periods in your childhood were you able to feel safe? And then understanding from the yogic perspective. For me, when I would do a yoga nidra. So yoga nidra is a body scanning, basically it's a body scanning meditation where we close the eyes down, you lie still, I usually lie still. And then we go through the hands, you know, right hand, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinky finger, thumb, and we just go through process putting the consciousness in each individual body part, getting it out of the head, getting it into the body. And then I would use that process to calm my internal state. And then I just asked myself this question. When was the very first time that I can remember feeling safe? And what instantly come to me in that moment was I was four or five years old, I was at my grandmother's house, who I didn't live with all the time, but I would go there on occasion. And I was sitting on the sofa, the couch on a Saturday morning, it was about 6:30, 7:00 o', clock, nobody else was up, it was just myself and my grandmother. And she had just brought to me the biggest bowl of cocoa pops you could imagine. Chocolate cocoa pops with chocolate milk on top, with a pound of sugar on top of it as well, like any five year old boy would love. And then a big chocolate milk to drink as well. And she wrapped me up in discomforter in this beautiful dinner and she turned the Saturday morning cartoons on for me. And in that moment that visceral memory as a 40 year old man came flooding back to my body experience. And my whole experience in that moment.

Just come right out of that hypervigilant.

Super unsafe experience that I was continually having in my body because I was.

Unable to shut it down.

And finally I felt my nervous system start to turn down just to dial. All of a sudden that little boy who didn't feel safe all of a sudden had a memory from his childhood of feeling connected, loved, safe, seen, warm, held all of the things that he had desired his whole life.

Wow. A very powerful experience. Yes. So you've integrated a lot of different things for your own healing process. And then as you developed into offering the work and one of your integrations I think you call it, I believe you trained in somatic experiencing, Peter Levine's work, at least you're influenced by that. But you've developed this model you call somatic regression. And that term is new to me, so you could talk about that.

Sure. So I really wanted to come up with a term that was really relevant for the work that I did. And so if we think about, like, somatic experiencing, when we coin phrases or when we bring up sort of experiences in the body, we usually turn them around or we focus them around. In my experience, when I was doing it anyway, it was like, go to my happy place or go to the place that makes me feel wonderful. You know, go to the beach or go to the forest or go to the ocean. Although it felt amazing, it wasn't really relevant to my personal experience. And so what I was able to fundamentally understand once I developed this process for myself is like, this is really a really unique experience for me. And it's my experience that I get to hold onto. It's actually an experience of my childhood, of feeling deeply connected and safe. And so in my processing of that experience, I realized the somatic part of myself. So the, you know, the body basically is still, in a lot of ways, is still that little boy who feels so scared. So then through that process, I took also to other experiences in my childhood. You know, to my uncle rescuing me one day and to, you know, the first day I learned to surf when I was 7, you know, and it was in Byron Bay, and it was in this beautiful place. So I continually. From that understanding, I started to do the meditations, which was basically the yoga nidra meditations, which would calm my body, which would get my mind into my body, you know, get my experience or, you know, look my attention into my body and out of my thinking brain. And then I would pull. Once I got my attention into my body, I was really easily able to bring up experiences from my childhood where I was able to reframe a lot of the experience. So the reframing was about where I was safe, where I was connected, where I was loved. And then when I would experience that, then I would ask myself, where do I feel this love in the body? And then I would think it with my eyes closed, and I would say, well, I feel it in my stomach, for instance. And so then I would take my left hand and I would place it over my stomach. And then I would hold myself in that experience of that little boy who feels so safe and loved. And so somatic regression basically means taking your body back to a time from your childhood or from your adolescence or even from your recently from being an Adult, it doesn't really matter actually at the end of the day where we get to experience what it, because we don't sometimes allow ourselves to do this, but we get to experience what it's life like again. To feel safe, to feel connected, to feel wanted, to feel loved, to realize everything always works out to pull ourselves outside of that experience of unloved and unsafe. And that's where the somatic regression term basically was coined. It's like it's specific to each individual's experience. You will never ever not have that experience ever again. It will actually totally change your child. It can actually reframe a lot of people's childhoods as well because as you can imagine through and you know, you being yourself a doctor through. So basically if we're always in a dysregulated fearful state, we're actually going to upregulate all of those neurons of fear and unsafety. So we're always going to be wired for cortisol and for adrenaline. And so if we're always got those synapses, you know, basically ready for to receive all of those hormones, then we're going to be constantly looking for those and then you know, add into that specter as well a fear conditioned amygdala which is always looking for fearful stuff because we had to be safe. It was always something, it had to be on alert, high alert, always. Once we can turn those systems off in the brain and we can upregulate some oxytocin and some serotonin, we can actually start to balance out those neural pathways. And it's a feeling process Fleet. It's a really, it's what's. I understood. It's like the bottom up approach is to change a brain state. It's not a bloody well thinking process, it's actually a feeling process. And if we can feel connected and love to our body and allow our body to feel that it pretty much will instantly changes our brain state.

So yeah, and I think the bottom up work is so important. I mean, you know, not thinking your way to healing, not in a process of healing, but I know you integrate mindfulness into your work. So there is sometimes just general mindfulness, just awareness, like being present is considered part of the prefrontal lobe cognitive, you know, top down awareness in a positive way. It's not necessarily cognitive work or changing your thought patterns, but it's just that general mindfulness. So I wonder if there's an integration or a marriage there, if you will, of the bottom up with some top down awareness. That really helps cement these experiences and really ultimately rewire our nervous system for safety.

It's gotta start from the bottom up though. Once we can actually get ourselves out of that hyper vigilant state, once we create some capacity in our nervous system, we can then actually upregulate the prefrontal cortex, which gives us some rational thought, which then we can keep ourselves, it's safe, we can keep ourself present, we can keep ourself connected to. So it's still both. We don't isolate one from the other. It's still an interconnected process. It's still beautifully. You want the brain on board. But where we've got that wrong for so long, I believe, is we've pathologized the human experience too much. And we've given it all diagnoses and we've given it all validation and thinking processes. When in actual fact, all we needed to really do is to validate someone's human experience, say yes, that was tough. Connect with them in a really beautiful, authentic way, and then teach them how to pull themselves out through fear. Feeling connected and loved.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a beautiful process. I would imagine that almost anyone has, you know, some experience that they can find where they felt safe, connected, loved. You know, there may be some folks that are highly traumatized or came from really horrific backgrounds that just might not be able to, and they might have to recreate that in a therapeutic situation, but they could be created and then they could begin to use that as a reference point. But I imagine most people, even those of us with, you know, some really challenging backgrounds and so forth, if we go through that process with patients, there are moments where we have experienced that quality of safety and connectedness and so forth. Is that your experience in working with people?

Yes. So most of the time, when most of my clients, when we first come on, when I onboard new clients, one of the first things they'll say to me is, I don't have a memory of safety. I do not have a memory of safety at all. I can't. I've thought about it and I haven't been able to think about anything. When they say, I say, well, of course, if you think about how you've lived your life for the last 20, 30, 40 years years, if you've always been in a fear condition state, it's actually really not safe for you to remember a time when it was safe. You've actually had to be hypervigilant your whole life because that's actually what's kept you Safe is being hyper vigilant. And so this is why this process, this somatic process, this yoga nidra process that I use was through the computer here is quite easy as well, is we just get them to have an internal experience. I get them, we can really just through this yoga nidra, close the eyes down, take you through individually through the body, a simple breathing process. And then I just instigate some really simple words of just when was the.

First time you felt safe?

I make sure that when I work with people I'm really safe in my body. So I get to co regulate through the screen. I talk really softly and calmly. I get people to feel in a really calm, connected state.

And then all of a sudden a.

Memory that they haven't thought of in.

35 years drops in and they're like, oh my God, I haven't thought about that in 30 years.

I remember sitting in the garden with.

My mother picking flowers and she was.

Telling me how beautiful every flower I.

Ever picked for her was.

And I felt so love and connected and we were laughing and the sun was out and I haven't thought about that since I was a six year old girl. And then you see the shoulders drop, you see the breath start to come down out of the upper thoracic. It actually starts, you know, because everybody's breathing up in here. We pull that breath down into the stomach, into actually engaging that vagus nerve. The vagal response. Yeah, like a ventral vagal response. And then they yawn and then they feel really sleepy. After a first or second session, everybody feels really sleepy. They're finally starting to understand what a connected safe feeling in the body actually is feels like. And because we're reframing, it is reframing, yes. But through the reframing and through the experiencing of, through the reframing, we're changing the brain state fleet instantly in that moment, changing it from one of a fear conditioned amygdala to a connected, safe, downregulated hippocampus, downregulated amygdala, upregulated prefrontal cortex, serotonin, oxytocin, starting actually to be produced in the neural pathways, you know.

Yeah. So rather than reframing it purely from a cognitive angle, it's really an experiential reframing that then could lead to a cognitive reframing. But essentially you're having an organic experience that's actually reframing, which is specific to the client.

So then that memory will stay rigidly with you for the rest of your life. You get to call on that. So it's what I call, that's a resource that you use for the rest of your life. And so when my clients, when we come to an end of the process that I use that people are like, oh my God, I'm really scared. This is not going to stay with me. And I'm like, no, this is yours. This is specific to your human experience. This never leaves you now. You will always have this as a resource.

Yeah, I thought it was also interesting what you said. I do a lot of work with corrections professionals and other public safety and first responders, police. And they live in a hyper vigilant state and they don't know how to turn it off ever. And they're because of that they're experiencing all the chronic illnesses and you know, terrible health consequences. And so I use all kinds of different self regulation, body mind techniques that I try to give them a window in the beginning to shift that and But I have one process that I lead often with them, not just with those folks, but with them in particular that I call safe, resource and connected. And so contemplation, where I actually ask them to contemplate feeling safe and then contemplating feeling resourced and contemplate feeling connected to their loved ones and others. But even bringing up safety initially, I really have to, I frame it and help them, ease them into being even willing to acknowledge a moment of safety, even relative safety, even for just this moment. Because for someone who's lived in that hyper vigilant state, even the notion of safety feels unsafe. Kind of like you were pointing before, it's like vulnerable. Being safe is being vulnerable and I can't be vulnerable. That's not safe to be safe, right?

Yeah, absolutely. It's totally not safe. In their experience, the moment they let their guard down, the moment they become vulnerable, that's when you get that visceral nervous system response, you know that basically that survival drive response that says if I feel safe, I'm going to die.

Yeah, that's really fascinating. So you talked about once someone can contact this one of these experiences and then it's their own, they have it, they're not going to lose touch with it. And you called it an inner resource. So I know you emphasize the importance of building inner resources for resilience. I wonder if you could talk more about some of the maybe perhaps other practices or techniques where you help people build that more resourced inner architecture so that they have that resilience once we.

Find that resource and then we hold that we find that resource I ask them, where do they feel in the body? If it's in the stomach or in the chest or in the back of the shoulders or wherever it's in their hands, wherever. Top of the legs. I then get them to hold themselves there. I either get the right hand to hold over the chest or left hand, wherever it is. And then we get to anchor that experience in the body, right? So then there's the resource, then the anchor. Okay, so that anchor. So the moment we start to feel overwhelmed, sometime, we can actually combine the two. We combine the memory and the anchor. So we hold ourselves, we feel the warmth of our hand. We feel the connection of the experience. We feel the warmth, the softness in our body. We start to identify and pull that out. And I go, and that's fine. This. And this is how I speak to people about it. So basically, you are now the mother and the father to that little version.

Of yourself that is terrified in this moment.

And so that version of yourself, that little boy or little girl, what do they really want? And so when I think about it from my personal experience, all I wanted from my childhood was consistency of emotional output and always to be there when I felt unsafe, right? And so now when I start to feel that unsafe space or when I start to, you know, go, oh, this is not, you know, emotionally, I'm not really in the right space at the moment. I understand that that's actually still an experience from my childhood that's still unprocessed in my body. And so the way that I process it is and the way that I help my clients to process this is we then, through building capacity in our nervous system, we actually start to allow some of the grief from those really dysregulating experiences to come in. We allow the sadness. And it usually comes once we start to feel really safe, once we start to have a capacity. Now, the nervous system, once we bring that down, once we bring that allostatic load down to like a 3 out of 10 or 2 out of 10, rather than a 7 or 8 out of 10 consistently. And we're trying to hold everything down because if we go into a 10 out of 10, that's, you know, nervous. Remember the old saying, nervous breakdown? And that's nervous breakdown territory. So we always just could keep ourselves contained, which means we can't allow ourselves to feel sad, and we can't allow ourselves. We've got to be rigid and we've got to be stoic, and we've got to be all these things for everybody, right? The moment we Create capacity. The tears come, which is beautiful. The processing comes. The fear comes, the sadness, all of it comes. It all just naturally starts to come through. And we just hold, hold it.

We allow it to be there.

It's so welcome, that human experience of you feeling sad, feeling lonely, feeling disconnected, feeling scared. So welcome here. That's that little version of yourself that wants to say, hey, don't suppress me. Don't run away from me. Help me feel safe. You're the one who has to help me feel safe.

Now.

That experience, for me, that's how profound it was for me, that's all that I ever wanted. And so now, me being the adult, I'm the adult. I made it. Hey, I'm here. I'm now the parent to that experience, to that little boy, the mother and the father to that little bit. Now sometimes I've got to call bullshit. When bullshit has to be called about that experience go, hey, that's ridiculous. Stop thinking that. And then other days I've got to stop and go, ah, okay, yeah, I feel it. Yeah, no problem. And so I get to be that capacity to have that internal dialogue with myself now. And now here's the rub. I don't have to do it very often anymore, if at all, because all of a sudden, that internal. I've managed to process that experience, that internal experience from my childhood, that aspect of. And this is how I frame it with my clients, that aspect of myself now feels really safe with me. And so rarely will I try. And rarely will that little boy try and get my attention anymore. He'll just go, oh, no, Simon's. You know, my dad's got it. He's fine. And this is how I help people to understand how they can integrate more of their experiences. Like, yes, you get to, you know, even though you didn't get the experience that you wanted, say, in childhood. And, you know, and that's what I want to tell it say to you here. It's not. It's not always a childhood experience that we can go through. It can be an adolescent experience. It can be a deeply traumatic relationship breakdown. It can be the death of our parents in adulthood. They're all still human experiences, and no one experience trumps the other. Yeah, it's all just, you know, your ability to process pain, trauma, you know, extreme events, we really haven't been taught. And I think what I've introduced and what I've been able to process myself is really fundamental to changing my human experience and fundamentally changing everyone I work with loves.

Wonderful. Yeah, you referenced Having shifted that relationship to that young boy, that part of you, and that sort of brings to mind the internal family systems. In this process of integration, you're developing what in ifs they call self energy with a capital S. So all those parts are feeling safe and. But they're not struggling to grab your attention or you don't have managers and PI. All that jumping in. And because you're developing this inner resourcefulness and this sense of integrated self structure.

Yes. From a lived experience. So what I found really difficult with IFS was it was really complicated. It was really so many terminologies and it was like I was losing a lot of it. And I was like, oh, crap. All I have to be. I just need to be the father to the boy here who wants to be a little rat bag, or I need to be the mother here to the little boy who feels really scared. That's it. And then I just create that capacity. And like I said, we have that experience and it's always relevant to me. And this is what the beauty is. Everyone I work with, everyone's experience is their own. It's their relevancy to their own.

Yeah, I think that's really important. I love that one framework for this kind of work that I like, Dan Siegel's framework, the window of tolerance. Some of us like to call it the window of resilience. And it's not the comfort zone, it's that bandwidth of life. Even challenges that we can handle in a relational way from our best self. In other words. And when we get triggered out of that window of tolerance, we're either getting triggered into shutting down, disassociating or hypoarousal, or getting triggered into acting out or various rigidity behaviors. When we get triggered to upregulated, Right? And basically for all of us, that shrinks over the lifetime. All of us with all the bumps and bruises of life, we get into all kinds of avoidant mechanisms and things we avoid because we got shame for it. It was embarrassing or it was fear, whatever. But with trauma, it can really shrink. It can get really small. So a lot of times, one framework for understanding this work is we're gradually reclaiming our life, we're gradually broadening, amplifying that window of tolerance or Arizona resilience. And one way to do that is to gently lean into the discomforts, to lean into the fears. And again, Peter Levine's work, who you referenced with Somatic Experience, an idea of pendulating, you lean in a little bit and come back to that anchor of Safety that you discover through your somatic regression, right? You find that anchor, then you can lean into the edges, lean back, and gradually we can expand that and reclaim the work. So I know you talk about working with fear and work with our fears, so I wonder if you could talk about that part of your work, how you help people once they have that anchor, once they have more inner resources that they can continue the work of working with various fears and things that come up.

You know, fear is going to be the limiter in anything that we do.

Right.

And so the way that I actually talk to people about sitting with their fears and holding with their fears, it's still virtually the same process. So, yes, mild titration and mild pendulation is actually a beautiful experience. Sometimes the client really doesn't know how.

To approach it from that space.

And I'll just reference a client recently who was using high dose SSRIs and sleeping medication and all of these things. And she was really fearful about actually, you know, timing off all of it. She knew that she had to stop. She knew that was. That had come to, you know, she'd been on them for 20 years and she was getting into her latter years. She knew that was not going to be the ability for her to use them going forward was really limited. But her fear was so deep. And so the way that we worked together is we kept developing more deeply the anchor. We kept developing more deeply the resource. We kept looking and as we developed a deeper connection to safety and a deeper resource of connection to the body. Now, this woman had lost her husband to cancer five years previously. She had two children. It was a sudden loss. And she'd also lost her dream job in that moment as well. So not only had she lost her husband of 40 years, you know, her closest confidant, her everything, she'd also lost the job where she had lots of friends and everything at the same time. So she then shut everything down, become super. She had to be the matriarch of the family. She never cried, she never processed, she never did any of the things. It was so fearful, all of that fear. She thought that if she allowed herself to feel that grief and go into that fearful state, that it would never end. That, that's it. Once we go, once we allow those fears and that grief and that trauma to come on, to allow it to come in, then that's my life going.

Forward from now on.

So she suppressed it, pushed it down.

Wouldn'T go near the fear.

And then as she suppressed it down, and as more and More her human experience was saying, hey, we need to feel this fear and allow this to come up. She would suppress it more with higher doses and higher doses. So when we started working together, her first experience was, I feel really scared. I don't know where to sit. I don't know what's going on. I can't. I just can't be here. I can't do anything. And then just getting her to sit still just in the moment was really tough. And she said, I need to get off these drugs. I need to do this, I need to do that. She placed all of these expectations and conditions on her healing. And she was like, but I can't go near the fear, and I can't go here. So she, as you said before, with trauma, it gets that lane of tolerancy, that area of tolerancy, that allostatic load becomes smaller and smaller to the point where you can barely get out of bed. And so I just explained to her, the first talk I sped to her, I said, there's nothing wrong with you. There never was anything wrong with you. You're beautifully whole. You've just had an experience where you believe that you're not. And this is where we started. And then we went back systematically through some of her experiences with her husband. She felt connected. And so. And then five years, she hadn't cried, this woman. She didn't even cry at the death of her husband's funeral. The tears for two hours streamed down her face. And then as I just held her through that and said, all of her experiences are welcome here. All of you is welcome here.

Every version of you is welcome.

The tears came, the tears came. More tears. Now, we worked together pretty intensively for 12 weeks. As we developed more and more internal resources and more and more anchoring. She kept saying to me, I need to take the medicine down. I need to come off the Medina. And this is what I said to her. I said, the moment that you allow yourself to feel safe and connected, you will not need to use those drugs.

As a disassociation anymore.

And literally three weeks later, the more connected she felt to her body, she'd come off all of her SSRIs. Three weeks. After 20 years on SSRIs, she'd come off all of them in a really holistic way with, you know, simply just coming down slowly on her own volition. And then three weeks after that, she'd stop all of her pain meds and all of her sleeping meds.

Wow. Amazing.

So deepening. So the process of fear doesn't look like titration. Exposure therapy, in my experience, actually can. When you're ready, you'll allow the fears to come. The fears will come. This is the thing. But we have to create capacity first to allow the fear to be there. And the capacity is what, as a society, we do not have anymore. We have disassociation. We have screens on our telephones. We have, you know, whatever dopamine you can put your finger on, we have. So they're actually the capacity to sit and build resiliency, build robustness, even. Robustness is where I like to lie. More so than resiliency, because robustness says you're whole, you're really beautiful. Let's put ourselves in dysregulating places consciously. Let's go. Let's put ourselves on the edge. Let's build that capacity in our nervous system to hold more and more fearful states. And we don't do that anymore as a society.

No, quite the opposite. And there's also a lot about trying to create kind of bubbles of safety for people where they won't have to deal with any challenges at all. It's like going completely in a reverse direction.

It's completely the opposite direction. Yeah.

And so I really love what you're sharing, you know, this ability. And I agree we're not talking about exposure therapy here. That may be effective in some cases, but I think pendulating and Steve and Levine's model and other similar work is doing it from a place of resourceness. And, you know, as I was listening to you, I really got that our ability to lean in, if you will, to what may be fearful or uncomfortable is really has to do with the depth of the anchor. The deeper the anchor, the more we can lean in. Right. And so by. In your work of somatic regression, by finding these anchors that are really personal to that person, they are that person's particular experience. They go back and experience it in a fully embodied way. So they're experiencing it through the body, and they have that and building those kind of inner resources, I think, and building on those and building on those. That is what gives us the ability to lean in further and do the work. You're deciding develop robustness. I also like that term, robustness. Also, I would think this gives someone begins to give one access to, at least in my experience, in the depth of our. And I love what you were communicating to that client there, that you're not broken, there's nothing wrong with you, which is absolutely the truth with all of us. There is a lot of stuff on the surface. But some level we've been hurt, we've been damaged, we've been, you know. But there is a deeper level of our being that has never been touched by trauma. In my view. It is really the depth of resource and the deeper we can go into through inner means and embodiment practices. And there's a depth down there which is really connecting with Source on some level. And the pathway through the body, for me is the best way to get there. There may be other experiences that allow us to connect with that. But when we go through the body, we're connecting with Source. And now the body and the nervous system remembers how to get there. It's getting rewired for access to Source. And that Source will then allow. It gives us. Maybe that could be the ultimate anchor. Really, the more experience we have with that can be the ultimate anchor which we can then relate with the challenges of our lives and continue to grow and evolve.

We've just been given an experience from people who don't know any any better themselves about their human experience as well. So when we say if we just say, okay, I was giving this experience from my parents who were also severely traumatized from their parents, who are also really traumatized from their parents, you know, so on and so forth down the line. Who does that trauma belong to then? Doesn't belong to me. It's not mine. I'm actually perfect. I'm actually absolutely connected to Source, you know, and the divine always, never was. I'm always whole. Always was whole. Cannot never not be whole. The deeper I connect into my bodily experience of safety and connection, the deeper I connect to Source, the deeper I. And the more resiliency and the more robustness and the more love and connection I feel to everything else around me as well. It really isn't. It isn't mutually exclusive, you know, healing and connection. Connection to everything. You know, you don't just heal and then, oh, look, and then there's connection over here. It's like, no. All of a sudden it all comes together. And then when you can, you know, not identify with the trauma, not identify with your experience because it was only just, you know, something that happened to you from something from somebody who didn't know better themselves who were acting out of their own trauma, that actually. Then you don't read those like, this had got nothing to do with me. This is everything for them. With love. I'm actually whole. I'm actually loved. I'm actually safe.

So connected.

Yeah.

How do you then help people I mean, once the more deeply we can connect. And I think maybe what I'm about to ask you just becomes natural and organic. But at the same time, are there practices you give people to kind of bring this kind of deeper somatic awareness and embodiment and wholeness into their daily life? Just kind of practices to begin to integrate into their daily life, to bring it back to their relationships, back to their work life or whatever it might, might be.

So, yes, everybody gets homework. And so the homework really is in the beginning. It's not putting too much pressure on yourself to always feel safe. Because what will happen sometimes in our first experience of feeling safety is then we'll use that as another disassociation.

Right, right.

And so it's a really slow process of like, okay, so this week, tomorrow morning, for the rest of this week, when you have your morning coffee or your morning routine or whatever, I just want you to remember about that memory we just had. I just want you to remember about that time, you know, that you sat in the garden with your mother and picked flowers. That's what I want you to wake up with every morning. Because, you know, I know myself that when I wake up, you know, we get a cortisol spike. And if we've got a nervous system that's trained to be running on cortisol and adrenaline, let's just. As we wake up with that cortisol spike, let's just have sit back down and let's just have that memory of that experience with our mother in the garden for three minutes. Only three minutes. I want you to set the climb the timer on your watch or on your phone, and I want you to sit there quietly with your eyes closed and just sit there with your anchor. Where do we fall? In the chest? Have your coffee in your right hand if you want to drink your coffee. Don't put any pressure on yourself. Enjoy the moment. Let's have all of it, whatever, have your tea. 3 minutes only connect in every morning. Right? Okay. Because it's like, if you think about it from a child's point of view, you're the parent. You haven't been there for that child for 35, 40, 50, 60 years. All of a sudden you come in and go, hi, let's. I'm going to help you here to help you feel safe. That aspect of yourself, that childhood, you know, that bodily experience, that childhood is going to go, yeah, I don't believe you. We've got to start slowly but surely show up consistently every day, and we do it in really Small increments, just. And then the following week, it's five minutes. And then the following week after that, I give you. I record the meditation, and I get you to do the meditation every morning or every three mornings. And then the following week we do a longer meditation with the connection with the resources in it as well. And I get you to listen to that, and then I get you to listen to that five times. And so it's a slowly but surely consistently showing up for yourself every morning in a really easy way. The meditation, the body. It's not a body. Stillness meditation. We don't even have to sit there in lotus and be perfectly still and perfectly upright. No, the body's fully welcome here. If you want to scratch and move and stretch and do all of this stuff, just. But just making sure you keep your eyes closed, all aspects of you are really welcome. Just show up every morning for three minutes, then for five minutes, and then, you know, and then we'll have one of. And so when I do two different weeks, we will also roll through like, safe love when everything works out, you know, love again. And so we'll just roll through all of those experiences, you know, as we start to work, as we develop more and more that connection to ourselves.

Well, in a moment, if you're willing, I'd love to invite you to lead us in a brief practice of some kind. Maybe five minutes or so. But before that, one final question. So you had this experience practicing yoga nidra, basically this kind of body scan work, very kind of particular, like really working with the fingers and so very kind of detailed body scan. And then you spontaneously had this memory. Right. And that kind of created all this for you and changed the game for you. So when you're coaching people and leading them through this process, I assume you're using yoga nidra with them in some form. And then are you just hoping they will spontaneously have that memory or do prime it in some way? Is there something in the guidance you're offering that you're guiding them to be more likely to rediscover a memory like that?

A lot of people have active aversion in the initial part. They'll actually resist knowing that. And so if they can't, if they sit there and go, I can't remember anything. I can't remember anything. I'm like, okay, that's fine. That's totally okay. We don't need to go there. What about from your adolescence, from your teenage years? Nothing there. And then finally, if we can't get somewhere, then I'll say when was the.

Last time you felt safe?

And then we'll go to the last time and it might only be two weeks ago with their husband or wife or whoever it was they felt. And then we expand out then. And as we expand so any. It doesn't have to be from your and this is the experience, it doesn't have to be from your childhood. It could literally be from a week ago. And then if we have a visceral experience of understanding and then once I get you to drop in finally to the connection and then bam, we'll get one from your childhood, it'll come in.

So they are doing yoga. Nidra with that kind of question, with that inquiry, when did I feel centered? Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. It'll be a leading and we can do it right now. We'll do a seven minute one now if you like. I'll just do a really quick one with you and I'll show you actually the process, the abbreved version process. You know, obviously when I work with online we go to a much deeper space. So if you'd like to, I'd be more than happy to lead you through it. This. Yep, seven minute one.

Perfect. Let's do it.

Perfect.

Okay, Fleet, I'll get you just to close your eyes down for me please now my friend. And I'll just allow myself just to give myself a few breaths because I've talk, been talking a lot. So just allow me to connect into.

My body in this moment as well.

Now whilst I'm doing that, I'll just get you to take your awareness now.

Just to the body, just to the whole body.

Just witnessing in this moment, if there's.

Any stiffness or any softness, not labeling it, not giving it a reason, just witnessing it and just allowing it to be there.

No experience is better than the other.

Stiff or soft, both are welcome.

And just letting go of the body for the moment now taking your awareness.

To the breath, to that wonderful easy inhalation and exhalation at the nasal passage. Life giving requires zero effort. Happens all on its own. Inhalation and exhalation.

Witnessing the coolness of the air being.

Drawn in through the nasal passage and the warmth of the exhalation on that same nasal passage. Witnessing the contrast of experiences and just paying attention to where the air is rising, where it's accumulating in the body. Is it in the chest, is it in the stomach or is it somewhere in between? Just witnessing that rise and fall of the breath. And now we're just going to do a very Short body rotation. I'm going to ask you just to bring to mind the best you can visualize the best you can behind the closed eyes, each individual body part that I call out, visualizing it as best you can, as I said, and dropping it the moment I call out the next individual body part. Starting with the right hand, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinky finger, thumb, back of the hand, palm of the hand, wrist, elbow, forearm, upper arm, pit, right side of the rib cage, the right waist, the right hip, sitting bone, thigh, hamstring, back of the knee, front of the knee, the kneecap, chin, calf muscle, ankle heel, arch of the right foot, top of the right foot, ball of the right foot, big toe, second toe, third toe, fourth toe, and the right foot, pinky toe. Awareness in the whole right side of the body. Awareness in the whole right side of the body. Dropping the right side and coming over to the left hand, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinky finger, thumb, back of the hand, palm of the hand, wrist, forearm, elbow, upper arm, armpit, left side of the ribcage, the left waist, hip, sitting bone, thigh, hamstring, back of the knee, front of the knee, the kneecap, shin, calf muscle, ankle heel, arch of the left foot, top of the left foot, ball of the left foot, pinky toe, fourth toe, third toe, second toe and the left foot, big toe. Awareness in the whole left side of the body. Inflate the whole left side of the body. Taking your awareness now to the base of the neck, the shoulders, the upper back, the collarbones, the chest, shoulder blades, the solar plexus, middle of the back, lower back, stomach, pelvis and the coccyx bone at the base of the spine. Awareness in the whole torso. Fleet the whole torso. Awareness in the whole right side, the whole left side, the whole torso. And now the whole body.

Fleet.

Awareness at the whole body. You're keeping your awareness at the body and just witnessing the breath again now. Witnessing in the body the rise and the fall, the wonderful inhalation and exhalation. Witnessing the softness of the breath, coolness of the inhalation, warmth of the exhalation.

Now in this moment, Fleet, I just.

Want you to bring to mind in.

This moment and in this moment, last.

Time, you can recall feeling loved.

Feeling loved with your eyes closed now.

Just recalling the very first time you felt loved. And now if you think you have an experience whilst keeping your eyes closed and keeping your awareness on your body, can you share that experience of love with me in this moment?

The last experience was in the embrace of my wife. Just Today, the earliest experience that came up for me was just in the presence, really of my grandfather. In the presence of my grandfather. It was just something about a feeling of total acceptance. It wasn't so much like a warm embraced love. It's just a total acceptance for who I was and whatever I am. There was just no agenda about me being anyone other than who I was. So just this feeling of total acceptance.

You weren't required to be anyone other than Fleet Maul as a little boy and the love of that man. And now, as you think of your grandfather in this moment, is there somewhere in your body right now that you can feel that love from your grandfather? Feel that warmth of the love of just the acceptance? Can you feel that acceptance?

Yeah, I think I feel it primarily in the heart area.

And so now I want you to.

Take your right hand for me, please, and place it directly over your heart. Thank you. Holding it to your heart. And now I just want you to.

Bring to mind the memory of your grandfather.

I want you to start to witness the warmth of the hand as it starts to enter that heart space into the chest cavity. Feeling the whole chest now starting to expand with the warmth and the memory of the acceptance of your grandfather and the love of your grandfather. In that moment, you weren't required to be anything more than who you are. And that felt so loving. And now I just want you to feel that warmth. Now start to radiate into the back, to the middle of the back. Now start to radiate to the left side of the chest, left side of the rib cage now. And now feel the right side of that ribcage. You start to feel it start to rise up to the upper chest into the bottom of the collarbones. Now to the armpits and to the shoulder blades, whole upper part of your torso. Warmth and connected to the memory of your loving grandfather, to the safety and love of that experience. And now I'm just going to leave you quietly for one minute, Fleet, to allow any other memories to arise in this moment, knowing full well, too, that there's no other memories that need to be here. Starting now. One minute. Okay, Fleet, I'd like you just to remove your hand now for me, please.

Placing it back down onto your body, letting go of the memory of your.

Grandfather in this moment.

Holding the warmth in your body, though, and in your own time, and take.

As long as you need. You can open your eyes and join us back on the podcast.

Thank you. Thank you very much. It was wonderful.

That is a very abbreviated version of.

What we would take, I would take you much. I would take that experience right around your body. We would deepen into the experience. I would ask you more questions. It was a really quickly yoga Nidra style. There's a lot, much more of a breast side. That was a very short version.

So.

Yeah, no, I get that. But it's a good introduction. I really get it. Yeah. That's wonderful. Thank you so much for offering that.

That's okay. How did you feel? How do you feel? I could see the slight smile start to arise on your felt wonderful.

I've known my entire life. That relationship with my grandfather was really a resource for me and I spent a lot of time with him when I was very young. He had a farm and he worked in the city where I lived, but he also had a farm he went to on weekends. So I spent a lot of my weekends with him. And you know, unlike, you know, your parents were trying to get you grow up, right? So my parents were, it was all, you know, but he was just like so non judgmental and he would, you know, he taught me to. He'd put me on his lap, have me drive the car the last couple miles to the farm. You know, he'd talk, drive a tractor, ride a horse, do all these things. And always he would just show, here, try this. And he'd go away and I, he'd let me, you know, he had such a gentle way of introducing me to things and helping me learn skills that. But it's always been a tremendous resource in my life. Yeah.

What a wonderful experience. So you can call on that memory and see how. And this is where we change it up in this experience is we actually.

Recall how it feels. You feel it in your heart.

Hey, sit with that. And now when you have a cup of tea or whatever you do this afternoon or tomorrow morning when you go and hang out with your grandfather in the shed, in the workshop, you know, in the barn, an afternoon or back on the trap, you know. And these are the things that start to really bring us back into our body and connect us back to our human experience. Connect us back to source is these memories of connection and love.

Wow. Beautiful work. Beautiful work. Simon Emery, thank you so much for the amazing work that you do.

Oh, no, you're more than welcome, Fleet, please. I'm very, very honored to be a part of your process and thank you so much for inviting me on. Yeah, thank you.

Where can people find out more about your work?

So you can just go to my webpage, simonemory.com that's S I A for Adam M O N e M for mark E-R-Y.com and you can just book a scroll down to the bottom of the page and you can book a.

Free 30 minute call. We can have a longer form chat about your experience.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. Be well.

Thank you Flip. Bye now.

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

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