16: Stacy Sims on Somatics — Why How You Sit Might Cause Stress

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. Toyotathon is on so stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry, the Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more Toyota let's go Places.

Hi, I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of the book Turn what's Working for your into what's Next, which comes out with Portfolio Penguin in September of 2016.

In this podcast I talk with peak performers to reverse engineer their most successful career. Pivots interview experts on what it takes to be agile in a rapidly evolving economy and open the kimono on what happens behind the scenes of my book and business. You can learn to capitalize on risk, fear and uncertainty as the doorways of opportunity. My promise is that you will leave every episode with practical tips, tools and tactics. For show notes from this episode, visit JennyBlake Me podcast.

If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

I am so excited to have Stacy Sims on the line today.

Stacy and I met when we were.

Both traveling through Bali at the beginning of 2013 and have been in touch ever since. Stacy, welcome.

Oh, I'm so excited to be here and to hear your voice from afar.

Stacey was one of these great serendipitous meetings where I was staying in a little Bali hotel right near the yoga.

Barn and I saw a workshop that.

Was, I think, Healing the Body, Healing Trauma through the Body or something along those lines. Stacey, we even met the day prior to your workshop and I remember just being blown away by everything that you shared and I'm so excited to share your knowledge and wisdom with everyone.

Thank you.

Can you give everyone a brief background.

As to who you are and what you do? Yes. So DC Sims, I golly, it's always hard to come up with the short story version of it. I'll just start with my professional life. I started out as a writer, advertising, marketing, etc. Moved into working for museums in the visual arts and just really kind of had what looked like a really super great life and a lot of it was super great. But I was also courting with alcoholism and addiction and panic disorders.

And so then I ended up getting sober in my late 30s and also discovered Pilates literally in the same week. So I'm now in my early 50s. So luckily I've been sober for 17 years. And.

Then I was just doing the math in my head to make sure that worked out. Still, I think it does. So and since my late 30s, since I found my way back to my body and wellness and reoriented my way of understanding my place in the world, my identity, which gets really messed up if you're an addict, it becomes very narcissistic and confused. Since then, I've gotten to do extraordinary things. I've been able to write and publish a novel with Viking and then Plume and then on my own produce plays, start and grow a Pilates business later sold. But perhaps most important, I started a program called the True Body Project, which works with principally girls and women, sometimes men and boys. And it really is a.

It's a curriculum that helps us re.

Examine our relationship with ourselves. And sometimes we use techniques, writing techniques, things that you might find in a drama class or a journaling class. But we also really focus on both a cognitive and an experiential understanding of how a lot of our ideas and our relationship about the world are also being hardwired into our body.

I always like to say we bring the body along for the ride. And I really think that oftentimes we try to make change, but we don't think about how to restore and bring our bodies along for the change we want to make.

So now I do work in schools, I get to do some work internationally. Sometimes I end up in cool places like Bali and get to do a work and meet people like you. So that's the short longish story of it. I love your story.

And it's so interesting how, as you said, becoming sober and taking your first.

Pilates class happened in the same week.

How did reconnecting with your body physically help you on your journey toward becoming sober?

Well, a part of my.

So when I was using, what I was doing every day was I would.

I had so abused, starting to abuse my body. So my diet, if you will, would be. I'd get up in the morning, I would drink a lot of caffeine, I would probably not eat until my blood sugar was plummeting in some crazy way. And then I would eat a little bit of food and then kind of endure the afternoon until I could start drinking again around 5. And I'm still trying to be the kind of alcoholic that can pass in, you know, society as someone who's just drinking fancy wine. So what started to happen if you just look at it from a, like, just like nutrition Biology standpoint, my blood sugar starts skyrocketing all over the place. I'm not actually getting any kind of real fuel. So what starts to happen is that I start having pretty tremendous panic attacks. And those. If you think about just my body starting to almost like starve itself, except being jacked up with caffeine and then pulling from the adrenal glands to try to fuel itself, a panic attack makes sense. So then we start to assign narratives to what we're afraid of. So I became afraid of driving in a car. I became afraid of being in a store. I became afraid of sitting still in a theater. So then I started taking a lot of anti anxiety medication, which is exactly the same medication they give you if you're trying to not drink. So basically I would take medication in the morning to not have a panic attack. I would drink at night. So I started to feel betrayed by my body. Really deeply uncomfortable in my own skin because it was either craving or I was perceiving that I was having like a heart attack or going crazy. So once I got sober, what started to. And started doing Pilates is Pilates is this awesome way of just working on.

Breathing, centering, alignment, becoming fascinated with. Are your feet in the same position? Are you lifting your heels? Are you lowering your heels? So it was, I've heard that kind of movement referred to as co ordination. So I was ordin. It was an ordination almost like a celebration of my body, my functional body.

And it just. For me, it made so much sense. And with the 12 step program is very much a prescribed program of action. Not just contemplation, but prescribed sensible action. And I put my body into a very wild similar program of.

Good, orderly direction. And those two things came together to allow me to not just intellectually understand how to be different in the world, but I felt different. You know, our feelings come out of how we experience our body and how our body is experiencing the world. So it was just this super amazing.

Luxury moment of both body and change.

I love what you said about sometimes.

We try and muscle change through our.

Mind almost and really. And we drag the body along or ignore it altogether.

And you were one of the first.

People that taught me the idea of somatics. And I remember in your workshop you.

Said if your body is holding stress.

Or trauma, even just sitting in positions that mimic those of tension or fear, your emotions and thoughts will create a story to match.

Precisely.

And I. Yeah, yeah, I was just.

Going to say, I mean that's mind.

Blowing to me that we assign so much Meaning to our thoughts and emotions. And yet if we get our body in order first and actually physically change our body or the way we're even sitting in the moment, that that can change our mindset and how we feel.

Yeah, exactly. And I do think it is mind blowing.

And it's. That place is really crazy making. And I really understand it and to have. And it can feel very out of control. And when you. When one starts to understand and practice, that's the tricky part is creating the practice of a daily ritual of just honoring. Kind of like a body cleansing, moving, rejuvenating. It's the easiest way to move into epiphany or just kind of a logical action step is always in our control. What are some quick daily practices that help you with that? Well, I am. There's this funny thing that I think that creative people have creative people and dreamers is that we can. Part of how we create and dream and innovate is to go into this really sort of trippy, almost out of body space in which a whole other world is evident to us. And so I kind of call that a sort of out of body space, a dissociated space. So for me it is a place where I need to. That's where I create. It's really happy land for me out there, but it's also a dangerous land just to live in the life of the mind. So oftentimes what I need to do every day are simple. When I get up in the morning, it is very easy for me to go to luxury dream space into either this life of the mind or the Internet where I do a lot of my work, which becomes its own sort of virtual unbodied space. So I really need to do some grounding, centering, orienting, breathing rituals every morning. And sometimes that is as simple as getting up. And then rather than mindlessly walking into my kitchen and starting my coffee while I'm already churning back into whatever it is I'm thinking about, I really have to be, you know, stand at the counter and bend my knees, drop into my feet, feel my feet, feel my knees, feel my joints, feel my shoulders, look around my kitchen, appreciate my surroundings. I just need to get into the day, you know, even walking to my.

Back door where I look out and.

I have this gorgeous view of downtown Cincinnati or some trees in the summer and just look at the things on my mindfulness appreciation awareness orientation. Where am I taking gratitude for my day? That's really important to me and it can go a long way. Even better is at Least five minutes of meditation. For me, that means sitting in a chair, feet on the floor. Feet on the floor, give me a way to ground. Sitting up tall reminds me of my spine. I find my belly, close my eyes. And I have a variety of practices, meditation practices I use. And then I also have a pretty rigorous, joyous, rigorous. I dance a couple times a week. I teach a movement class a couple times a week. So it's really important for me to clean in my body. It's like I always think of like cleaning the slate. And now I'm really trying hard because I feel like I can be really awesomely in like when I move, when I breathe, when I teach. I'm so in my body, loving every single joint, every single cell. And then.

I can really get into the life of the mind. But I'm trying to practice every day the sort of in betweenness.

So meaning when I walk to my car, when I'm the threshold spaces trying to create mindfulness in the in betweens, I feel like that's my next, my next big challenge. Staying present and not just being, doing body work when I do body work, mind work when I do mind work. Finding the links in my day to day. I'll let you know when I get there.

Yes, please do.

Yeah, I love your philosophy that people who have dynamic lives have dynamic motion, that you can actually. It's so important to have dynamic motion and balance in the body in order to enter modes.

Yeah. And then there's also, you know, there's the thing that's so great about a life of the body. And anybody who's done started to take yoga or Pilates or Tai Chi or anything that is functional and requires both a physical practice where you start to understand change over time. Those are amazing. And then you start to. So once you're in that space of studying the body, the breath, there's so many ways to go with it. Right now I'm super turned on by the para yogis who understand both Ayurveda and Tantric yoga. And I've taken several workshops with amazing teachers who really then help you understand how particular breath sequences are really great for different things. So when you really need to be in assimilation mode and integration mode, even breathing is really called for. When you're really trying to ground, rest, digest, even get rid of, you want to extend the time of the exhales. When you're trying to enliven, when you're trying to move energy up and out, that is a different breath pattern, different, often as different exercises. How you move your spine.

Can really enhance very specific goals. And there's just, I mean, there's just a thousand different things to study. That's what's so fun about it. And I think that you and I came together in many ways is that we, you know, we live in the world of writing and trying to help others create a really full life. But we also really bonded on this idea that of the life of the body. And like this, like now, I think both of us are sort of these. We get to teach ish and we'll never not be a student. I think becoming a devoted student of.

It's not just self understanding. Our self is critical to the work because we have to have the practice. But it really helps you re understand the world. I want to go back to something.

That you said earlier where you talked.

About the creative mode, creative cave, where.

We'Re sort of in another world. What's happening to people's bodies when they're sitting at the computer hunched over, thinking.

Or trying to think? Well, I think they're sort of. Well, for me, I can. If I sort of drop in and think about what is happening in my body when I'm actually creating something, I'm going to keep that separate, but I'm going to talk about what happens in the body when we're. Let's say you sit down at your computer and you sort of round your spine a little bit, chin to chest, shoulders forward, and you dive into, let's say it hardly matters what it is. Facebook, cnn, whatever are your ritual things you go into in your computer. There's a couple things that are happening simultaneously. Sitting is the, like, probably the. I mean, there's been articles now that talk about, you know, just sitting every day, eight hours a day is probably as bad for you as I'm kind of maybe making it up, but smoking. I mean, again, I don't have the data right in front of me, but it's really bad on our whole somatic system. So what's happening is that our spine is rounding, we're hunched forward, and basically it's the posture of fear. It's the posture of depression. And.

If you're sitting right now somewhere and you sort of exaggerate and you kind of roll forward, chin to chest, shoulders. What's also happening is that your diaphragm is getting all jammed up so that your breath is not fully moving into your body. Both the parts of the spine, basically the top of the spine, the base of the spine, which really signify sort of our rest and digest motions are pulling forward, which can be great if you're doing it mindfully, but it's not really enlivening anything, right. And then if in our current contemporary society.

I will speak to what can happen to me. So just a minute ago I looked at my top line of how many tabs I had open.

First of all, I had like five Facebook tabs, all the same thing, which makes no sense, plus Gmail, plus the New York Times, plus something else.

And I'm bouncing, I'm bouncing between email, I'm looking at my phone, I'm bouncing back. And what's happening is that dopamine is building up in our body like crazy. And dopamine is the addicts like seek, seek, seek. I want more, I want more. And the body is unable to discern that anticipation from fear. So we are, for all intents and purposes, we're ramping up all of the internal sensations of a full on addict. And our craving is just for more and more tidbits of information, most of which are not that thrilling. Right. I'm not getting the announcement that I won the Nobel Prize, right? And I'm not getting any synthesis. I'm not getting any. Even though I'm like right now, if I spend an hour on the computer poking around and not even fully reading a thoughtful article because my concentration is now agitated and can't. That's not super useful. I'm going to shift to. Well, one of the things I do is that I've got, I have a stand up desk now so I don't sit all day long. Most people will tell you that if you do need to sit at a computer that you should definitely realign yourself. Get a chair, ball, chair. Get a really good chair and. Or stand up every 20 minutes and walk around. It's just so bad for the spine. Head falls forward. And when I say bad for the spine, it doesn't just mean that you're going to have a sore back and neck, which you probably will just having the head forward, dropping the head forward over time. The skull weighs like as much as a bowling ball and it should be stacked up on the spine. If it drops forward, you know the little knob in the back that becomes the dowager's hump like at the base of the right at the top of the thoracic spine, bottom of the cervical spine when the head goes forward. Think of a bowling ball on a broomstick. It's like that guy really has to build up a lot of cartilage to hold the weight of the head. And there are studies that show that just by an Inc3 forward it takes years off of the life because you really can't get all the information from the mind to the body with the same amount of ease. So good alignment allows the body to do the work of the body with the least amount of effort. And that means thought, digestion, respiration. Once things start to get out of alignment, it just is way more work, which takes way more energy, which means that we probably can't comprehend. Innovate, activate. If you've ever been in pain, if you've ever had any chronic or even situational pain, it is so demanding of our attention. That's all you can think about. When the body is dysregulated and we ignore it long enough.

It'S almost like the pain becomes. It's like a body that's in pain. It's demanding all the attention, but we're just not even aware of it. It's fat, agitated.

So fascinating the way we set effects.

Not just how we physically feel the.

Chemicals that are being produced in our body, the demand on resources of our body that are pulling from other places where we may rather use them instead.

When you start to become worried and agitated, the cortisol starts to build up and then the endorphins try to rush in to override the cortisol. Cortisol is just this intense stress drug that's really causing so many of our contemporary diseases. The body's just run amok. And if we treated our bodies.

Like when you are, when you have to care for a child, think of all of the rigor you go through to make sure that the sleep cycle makes sense. And you know, you wouldn't try and put a baby to bed after you'd given it some a whole bunch of sugar and agitated it, you know, through sound, light and emotion. It would be awesome if we took the same senseful care of our, our somatic systems in the same way. Most of us wouldn't consider caring for an infant. Right. I love the way that you connect.

Our bodies and almost evolutionary history. So some of the things that you've shared with me are getting up and walking around, seeing the horizon helps. That's a long time survival instinct or scanning the horizon.

Can you talk about how those types.

Of things translate to daily life and where you see the connection from our evolutionary biological history?

Yes, yes. And this all comes out of really beautiful work that's being done by lots of super smart people, Pat Ogden, Peter Levine and others who really understand how stress and trauma habituate in the body and how once you've experienced trauma or chronic stress, it really has the same profile in the body that you really, you know, struggle to have meaningful lives and thoughts that make sense. So the idea is that if we. We've sort of forgotten, as you said, our more primal evolutionary instincts, they're still. Still very much intact. And without them, we would not have survived as a species for as many years as we have. So one of the ideas is if you think about an animal in the wild, so let's perceive perhaps a deer, and the deer is grazing, and all of a sudden it perceives a possible predator. So perceiving means that it hasn't seen because it's smelling, tasting. All the animal instincts are at work. See that deer's head lift and start to survey the horizon for a possible predator. So one thing to remember is that we're only. We take in a lot of information through our eyes, but our full sensory system is taking in information about our environment, our auditory system, et cetera. But what's happening from a bodily standpoint, besides all the chemical, hormonal and sensory input, is that the deer is basically swiftly rotating its head, it's swiftly rotating its spine, it's spinal rotation orientation to understand where it is in space and time. And is it safe in space and time? So what happened then? Well, I'll skip over kind of the next parts of the fight, flight or freeze instincts. We might talk about those later, But I'm going to then move forward to just a human being with our rotating vertebrae.

Theoretically.

Moving cervical spine, which is basically the neck. Being able to move the neck and look all the way behind you and then rotate the other way. And then bringing the movements of the spine, Spinal rotation.

Should be calming to the central nervous system. Calming meaning that we can look around us and see, oh, here I am. I look up, I look down. I've surveyed my surroundings. No current threat. Therefore, I feel safe and secure.

Sometimes if you have, it's a good thing. Just try to experiment with. If you sit quietly and you start to do slow movements, looking around you, perhaps you try this in a space that isn't familiar and survey how you feel. You might find that you don't feel particularly calmed. You might feel that it creates more agitation. What that probably could be a sign of is of hypervigilance. Hypervigilance would mean that basically there's a dysregulation in the one's system. If you grew up and.

Lived in a household where there's A phrase we often use is like walking on eggshells. So in your developmental life, or maybe it's your current work life, if you are not quite sure of what's going to happen next because things are unpredictable, you will start to become hyper vigilant. You might be more hyper vigilant. You might only perceive it in your mind. Like, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know if my boss is going to be mad at me. So what if I did this today in order for them to not be mad at me? That is a hypervigilance. It tends to also reflect itself in our physical body, which might mean that we quit moving our spine. Or if we're looking behind us, we like look back and then look forward. We're anxious, right?

So learning to have, learning to have a practice of orientation.

Means moving the spine forward, folding, arching back, lateral bends and rotations. Just by having a daily practice of spinal rotation.

Ease of breath starts to restore a sense of wellness to the central nervous system.

Then it hopefully allows for more freedom of movement and orientation to the rest of the world.

So there's ways we can, you know, there's practices people have that naturally do these things that give them great joy beyond what even makes sense. So I'm not a bird watcher, but my guess is that people who, let's say a bird watcher, they go outside, what are they doing? They're looking down at their book to figure out what the bird is. They're looking up, they're looking around, they're embracing all of these natural ways of orientation with nature. And then they feel awesome.

So there's, I mean, I would say there's a million ways to think about orientation.

Sometimes in our contemporary society, we get them because we go to a Pilates class or a Tai chi class or a dance class or a yoga class. Other people get them because they have a relationship with the natural world. But many of us just quit moving our spine, locking down, looking into a phone, and we feel anxious. So one more quick example. When we go into, let's say we're back in a business setting and we come into a conference, maybe we know some people, maybe we don't.

Most of the time, or often what you might find is a lack of sort of comfort, personal comfort. And so what's the easiest thing to do? Look at your phone. Sometimes you don't even have anything to do on your phone. You're just not really ready to orient. It's a safe space to hide. So Often if I'm leading a group, what I'll do is bring everybody into the room and then have them get up and orient to the room. Think of like a little kid, you know, you get down on the floor, you're touching, you're reaching, you're seeing, you're making eye contact with others. You're really orienting yourself to the space most of the time. That's going to create more ability to be truly present in the here and now.

That's so interesting. And you're so right. Like just even being in New York, watching people now everyone walks while looking at their phone. And that seems to take away this opportunity to scan the horizon and see.

Other people and really see the environment. The only good thing about being a body person is even injury becomes awesome because you learn so much from it. So I had this sort of awesome injury that I didn't know I had. I started to feel this weird, like pressure kind of in my head and I felt I was going a little. My vision wasn't quite right. I felt very turned in and like I lost. I felt like I felt like I lost my bearings emotionally and spiritually. So I went to all my people. I have all these awesome bodyworkers and I did all my stuff and I still couldn't figure it out. So I went to a chiropractor who had been suggested. He was great, but what after an X ray? Because I'm now of the age where they have to make sure I don't have tumors and stuff. But the X ray was really cool because I got to see my vertebrae, which was. I love vertebrae. I got to see my spine and it's mainly in good shape, but my top vertebrae, a C1, was basically jammed and it's called the atlas and it sits on top of the axis.

So there was no movement between those vertebraes, which means to me that my whole GPS system, my whole way of orienting in the world was locked down. And the minute they opened it up with the startling and weird, but still it worked. Chiropractic adjustment. My breath returned. My whole. My atlas and my axis were both back on board.

So interesting. I love what you said, that even injury can be a teacher.

What about.

I don't know if I'm making this up, but I think I remember you saying that not just scanning, but even fixing our gaze on a point on the horizon can calm the nervous system.

Is that true? So how. Why? Well, it kind of goes back to alignment and how our body is really hungry for alignment and how it's trying to orient to the physical, the complexities of the physical world all the time. And we just pay no attention to that because we just are so used to it being functional. So the eyes. What the. So the optic nerve is taking in a vast amount of information all the time. So the eyes are always going to want to try and orient to the horizon line. So let's say if you're sitting in a chair, let's say that you're looking, you're on your cell phone, and your head is, like, leaning to whatever side you're on, your cell phone. So right now I'm on my cell phone, so my head often leans a little bit to the left. So what's going to try to happen? So, see, then your eyes are at an angle to the horizon. Right, Right. Well, over time, what's going to happen is the body's going to move. So if you kind of are practicing this, you sort of move your body until the eyes can get to the horizon.

So the whole body ends up whacked out because the eyes are trying to find the horizon line. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

The rest of your body kind of torques and goes weird. So if we honor that our eyes are trying to find the horizon in order to make sense of the rest of the world in, you know, our body is real, our mind, body complex is still basically trying to do things like, you know, stay upright, navigate through gravity, keep all of our organs and our breath and our muscles and synapses firing, keep us out of harm's way from predators, whatever that means in your contemporary society. And that in every time we honor these more base needs and desires and try to get ourselves back into alignment and use the breath to suppose, you know, to nourish.

Our system.

Your body is going to be, you know, singing you great praises rather than thinking like, oh, my God, we have to orient to this now. All right, here I go. Right? Yeah.

Right.

I loved, even in the workshop how you talked about women or men, but carrying a bag on one side even.

Pulls our body out of whack.

And our body has to compensate for that.

Yeah. And, you know, high heels and all kinds of things. And I think that what is always a struggle for me is that, you know.

Never have we had more information at our fingertips to understand how we feel and how we exist in the world and our body. And I was a late, late studier of the body. The body is. So it's not. There's many complexities and mysteries of how brilliant the design is. But most of it is like super kind of easy physics, a lot of it. Weight bearing, alignment. And so many of us just refuse to understand. We know more about how our car works and is aligned or a building works or is aligned. But we seem to want to be like, let's say you carry a heavy bag, you wear high heels, you.

Whatever else might be going on, and then you're super mad that your ankle won't get any better or this thing won't get any better. And often we're mad at the surgeon or we're after, you know, we're mad at. Not only are we not making. Being sensible about our own ability to shift how we feel in our body, but we're also just being annoyed at someone who it's not even in their scope of practice.

Right.

To fix us.

Right.

That's just why I love, love, love this, you know, all of this work and all the people who are starting to really understand that a little bit of attention to the life of the body can just go such a long way. Absolutely. And I want to go back to.

What you said about. You quickly mentioned trauma. And in the deer example, freeze, fight or flight.

Can you just.

I know these are huge topics that we could spend days talking about each.

And of themselves, but can you talk a little bit about what, what is.

Trauma, broadly, how it shows up in the body and how that dear example and our human instinct of freeze, fight or flight, how that tends to show.

Up in the body? Yes. So we'll go back to our deer in the wild. And the deer this time looks around and perceives that there's a lion that's about to run up and.

Make that deer its meal. So the deer obviously does not have cognitive process like we have. So the deer is making 100% instinctual primal choices about how to survive. So those primal choices in any animal.

Is going to be the first response is to flee. So flight. The. If one can get away, that would be the best.

Choice. And in order to gear up to flee, what happens in the body is tremendous. So like all of a sudden, like adrenaline is coursing through the body. And that's where like super, super animal, superhuman strength comes up to just get the heck out of there. So in the case of the deer, so the deer is running away and then the lion catches up. So the next kind of line of defense is to fight. So still lots of energy. Fighting, fighting, fighting, trying to win. And in this case, it would be an unwinnable battle. A lion and a deer, no matter what circumstances? So the third.

Survival choice or survival mechanism. It's not really even a choice. It's just what activates in our mind body complex to keep us alive would be essentially freeze or surrender. And in the case of the deer, and if you've ever watched one of the Animal Planet kind of shows, what they will do is they'll just go dead. And again, think of the deer. The deer is not like in this moment, I better play dead.

Its primal animal instincts are to just.

Slow everything down to the point of just like appearing to be dead. Here's what happens is that a predator like a lion isn't going to want to In a way, it's not like fair game. And it's also if a dead animal is not good meat, so it's likely to move away all that energy that gets revved up in the case of a possible violent assault. If the deer ran and got away, all that energy is going to be used up in the run itself. In a fight, you're going to use up all that energy and you might feel a little shaky afterwards. Deer or human, in a surrender scenario or a free scenario, if you've watched those animal shows when the deer to the lion finally leaves, thank goodness, and the deer gets up and starts shaking like crazy, maybe even, you know, a little bit of whales or vomiting or, you know, there's just this release of all that energy and then goes back to daily life like nothing ever happened.

In large part because there's been the shaking or the trauma has been released, but also in large part because there isn't most likely in deer world the ability to attach narrative and meaning to what just happened. Right. The deer is not going to go, boy, I really shouldn't have been by this water hole. I mean, maybe it'll figure that out and move to a different waterhole, but it isn't going to create an identity conflict around it. The deer is probably not going to assign motives or start to decide that, you know, the deer's husband is perhaps also a predator. When we've had trauma with our awesome conscious minds, we tend to want to create a narrative. So if you go to the animal human realm now, the same instincts apply in.

Human'S ability to move away from possible danger. And most of the time when I think one thinks of this scenario with a human, you're thinking of a violent assault. So if someone's coming at you and surprises you, our first instinct would be to run. We can't. We, we might be fighting them and then we're not making. Humans are not making a conscious choice, ooh, I better just chill out so I don't die. It's likely a response that's happening deep in the body in order to survive. So I think victims of violent assault, and especially sexual assault often feel as though that to give in, to surrender is somehow a really horrific thing they did, when in fact it's a survival choice. It is the same. Survival choice or.

Choice always feels so cognitive. So it's not exactly the right word, but it's the same survival mechanism that comes into gear when.

It'S hard for people to understand. Victims of ongoing domestic violence.

You know, when you stay, what does that mean? It just means do not know any other way but to survive. It also goes hand in hand with developmental trauma. And developmental trauma is that which happens basically over time when you're in a situation where you should be.

It's, you know, usually youth in a situation where the lay of the land is not consistent and you feel unsafe, that takes 10 times longer to recover from than situational trauma. But it's still the same scenario, you know, often with young kids. I work with a lot of young kids. And as hard as it is that they're so full of fight, they're still fighting, right?

You know, or, you know, you might try to flee, you might try to fight. And when you be. When you end up in submission or surrender, it means that the energy is still revving in the body. You're still revved up, but.

You'Re still traumatized. But there's not as much affect around it.

With the deer example, you mentioned that the deer shakes after escaping an attack if they survive. And. And one thing I find interesting in people and that trauma can be, even, as you said, chronic stress. It could be a car accident, it could be violent attack. But that often the reason trauma stays in our body is because we don't literally shake it off.

Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. And trauma is. It's basically something you couldn't prepare for, something that you were unaware was going to happen and you were not able to process. So a car wreck, even just a rear ending for one person, may be a trauma. It also depends on your developmental situation. So if you had, like, if you had a really easy childhood, nothing really weird happened. Like, a lot can happen to you and you may not feel trauma. So everybody is different, and we really can't judge what sets off a trauma response. Does that make sense? Yeah. But when. When something happens, you lose a job, you get a Divorce, you're in a car wreck, you have an illness, you have a loss, someone dies that you care about. The.

We, we like to sort of like buck up, you know, and we might go to grief groups. Awesome. We might go to therapy. Awesome. But the body is also.

Needing to.

Release the energy and start to be able to have.

Sense of itself again. And the words they use in this somatic body practices is restoring the felt sense.

And that really means being able to tolerate and enjoy and appreciate what it feels like to be in the body. So many of us have sort of moved. We navigate our felt sense through how we think.

Reallowing energy to move through the body, which is through gross motor movement and meditation and all kinds of other practices. Being able to perceive that I have breath moving in the belly, to be able to feel the pelvic floor both contract and release, to be able to experience my toes, my hands, my feet. When I work with people, I'm aware especially I work every year in Cambodia with survivors of sex trafficking, which is a very particular and heinous part of the spectrum.

And in that population as well as the general population through the rest of the world, we tend to have different body profiles. So post trauma, and one of them is again that kind of hyper vigilant where all the muscles are really taut and rigid and that doesn't allow for. It's almost like the fear response is hardwired in interestingly some of our contemporary ways in which I think about women in particular, but guys too hard bodies, a lot of front body muscular work. That's sort of exaggerating a particular body type which doesn't allow for full wellness. Exaggerating thinness. If thinness as a goal doesn't make any biological sense, as a goal in and of itself, does that make sense? Yeah, when you're only trying to get thin, that. That just doesn't make any sense. The body's already dysregulated. But another profile of the body is when there's sort of no there there. It's when if you go to shake someone's hand and it's sort of slack, if you're watching people who just sort of. They don't really have. They're not in their bodies, but they're still dysregulated on the inside. The other sort of cue and I definitely fit into this profile is hyper intellectual rationalizing. I could talk my way around my feelings, but there was sort of no affect to them. And the hyper intellectual can be sort of in both body profiles, rigid or not there. It's not like you need to have a practice of shaking necessarily, but a practice of movement, of breathing, of coming to re celebrate the life of the body is really, really important.

Right. One thing I'm exploring deeply is career change and even entrepreneurship. And I'm really interested in how the body can aid in that process. And I think that career change can bring in people's primal fears because on Maslow's hierarchy, if their food, clothing, shelter are threatened by this idea that they might lose their job or be at a time where they're not earning income, it seems like that can manifest in the body somehow, or that our bodies hold the fear we have when trying.

To go through a major life change. So what advice would you give from.

A somatic perspective for people who are about to undergo major career change?

Well, I think it's an amazing time to pick up a regular body practice. And I, again, I'm not exact. I'm not a runner, I'm not a cycler. I'm not saying that those things aren't really cool things to do, but I think for this kind of exploration it has to be something that demands mindfulness. So that's going to be like a Pilates, a yoga, a Tai chi, maybe a dance kind of practice and commit to it. It's really easy. And it's sometimes true that you're just worried about money. There's free studios, there's community classes, trade somebody. I feel like it's really super important and it can make a really difficult journey. Awesome. When I turned 50, I had changed. I had sold my business. I didn't end up with much money. I didn't know what was going to happen. I actually ended up.

Filing for bankruptcy later in the year. So it was a year of huge transition and I really didn't know where my next. I didn't have any savings. It was scary. But I chose to do a year of dance because I figured if I kept moving and dancing and studying movement, then only good could come of it. So I wasn't working. I had a lot of time at home. I could easily isolate, I could spin. But rather than I went and I, I mean, I took really like legit classes and you know, with people who, you know like. I took super fun dance classes and I took serious dance classes and it was amazing. So that's one thing you can do is just fortify yourself. Your mind is going to want to spin out, so you give yourself the benefit of practice. And for me, what I find is that I, I Don't think I've ever had any kind of meaningful epiphany or made a really meaningful connection that was driven out of three hours sitting on the computer. Not once.

So true. Oh my gosh, I mean, but laying on a yoga mat after working for an hour and a half.

You know, that's when I know that's when I can find my truth. But on a more practical at home way, I think that you can kind of ground, center, orient, connect are some key things that, like phrases that I use with the true body work and they have body principles. But in terms of job searching, job career rethinking, I often have to reevaluate and create almost like a personal manifesto or a mission statement so that I have a clear idea of what it is I'm looking for and what I'm not looking for. So it's a tool to evaluate even like who I'm emailing. Because it can get, you can feel like the more one does the better, but it allows me to be choiceful. So it's centering by some sort of personal manifesto or mission and then grounding. What I did when I was trying to figure out how to make a career a living is that I just had.

An expectation of myself that I would do.

Maybe it was two things a day that had to do with my short term needs and one term, one thing a day that had to do one meaningful connection day, networking kind of thing that had to do with a longer, bigger vision piece. And then I didn't sit at the computer for three hours.

In terms of orienting, I really do think that, you know, the old school networking, I really don't think networking is sitting at your computer. You know, that means that you know you. So you get out, you look around, you listen, you orient. Networking is both orienting and connecting.

It also just saves our human souls to sit with someone to ask questions. I just find that, you know, the best place I can be is just when I go in with a heavy duty mission of selling myself. I lose the opportunity of listening and considering and expanding my horizon because these moments and again I go back to like the computer and brand and all this stuff, which is all super neat and important, but it's almost like we're all being asked to be like celebrity versions of ourselves. We're asked to create platforms and most of us are being asked to create these celebrity versions of ourselves and platforms before we maybe even know exactly.

Who we are and what we value.

So I just think that these body rituals, either when you have awareness. And you're just tending to them every day in your home and you're creating these celebrations elsewhere really can be. It's almost like somebody holding your hand the whole time. Do these transitions, these pivots, where it's just like you're holding your own hand, basically. Like, you're awesome, you're awesome. It's cool. We're still breathing, we're moving. Woohoo. You know, right?

I love that. I love that. Give me a huge smile to think about that. And you're absolutely right. Just that sense of routine, ritual and community is the hand holding both from ourselves and from others that gets us through those big changes.

And I just think too, that, you know, those of us who get to practice that more than not, what starts to happen is all of the stuff that sounds like a bunch of dopey words. You start to experience it. Abundance, flow, ease. You sleep better, you make better choices in all ways because you're in alignment, you are orienting. You can see, you will know how to pivot without falling down. You know, it'll be an elegant, gorgeous, fluid move.

I love that.

Oh, thank you so much.

I love that. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch with you and your work?

They can look@truebodyproject.org t r u e bodyproject.org and the emails and things that you'll find on there come directly to me, Stacy Sims. I'm also@stacysims.net and that's a little bit more about me as a writer and a collaborator.

So either of those.

Amazing.

Stacy, thank you so much.

I can talk to you about this for days and weeks and hopefully there's much more to follow. Thank you so much.

Hopefully I want to find you somewhere in the world and, you know, hang out and do yoga and talk about all this stuff.

Absolutely. Yay.

All right, honey, I'll talk to you soon.

Foreign.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. To learn more and get in touch, visit jennyblake Me, where I blog about systems at the intersection of mind, body and business. Or find me on Twitter @jennyblake. And remember, build first. Then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.