What Trauma and Emotional Suppression Are Doing to Your Brain

If you have a threat to your emotions, it sits in your limbic region. This is why when there's pain in the body, our mind spends most of the time in the rear brain, in our fight-or-flight mechanism, and it's hard to get over that.

It also narrows your focus, right? When you're in survival mode, you're, you're focused, and so you're not even relaxed enough to be able to take in and open up your senses.

If your hips are out, you're thinking about walking. If your shoulder's out, you're thinking about lifting and turning. And that draws a massive amount of processing power from your processor.

It frees a lot of mental cognitive energy.

So emotions live in the body. As soon as I touched that button, it was like a flood of emotions came. The things that I hold in my body that I don't want other people to know are the things that keep me sick and dysfunctional. By getting people to focus on physiological fascia health and mental health, Welcome back to the Kwik Brain Podcast.

I am your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. I am joined today by my co-founder, our CEO, Alexis Bank, which many of you are big fans and followers of also as well. We're going to talk about— we're actually in Antigua, so this is a We were having a conversation that we just wanted to get on video because this is brain-changing. This is life-changing. She and I just had an experience here with the Human Garage team, and we're going to share some thoughts on how to release to rise and how to be able to unlock your brain through your body. And so, we're joined here by Gary Lynum.

Hi, everyone.

Co-founder of Human Garage. Thanks for joining us.

What an experience. So, part of, uh, part of the brain and the body's experience is energy and how it flows between us.

Yeah.

So, I'd like to sync us up so that we're in the same bubble.

I would love it.

Yeah. Why don't you take your cross, your right ankle over top of your left? And anybody can do this at home.

Everyone's doing this at home. Yeah. And if you watch this on YouTube, definitely, definitely, uh, it's like this visual.

Yeah. Right hand underneath left armpit and left hand And anybody in the audience can do this if you want.

Yeah, so we have a live audience here too.

Live audience. Turn your head to the left and your body to the right. And what we're going to do is we're going to take 6 breaths in sync together. I'll count them out, 3 through the mouth and 3 through the nose. Breathe in through your mouth. Exhale.

2.

Exhale.

3.

Exhale.

Through your nose 3 times. Exhale. 2. Exhale. 3. Exhale. Okay. Now, I can see the look on your face already. It creates a weird little bubble, like we're in this bubble. And we're closer to each other, but the people seem farther away.

Interesting.

It's a frequency.

That is interesting. I'm still trying to recalibrate from our last session because that was unexpected.

But, um, so what was unexpected about it?

Just the amount of emotions that flew out of me.

Yeah, absolutely.

In that instant moment. Instant moment. I was not— yeah, it was instant. So I'm trying to process, but it's powerful.

So emotions live in the body, and when we touch the body, it's— think of the body like a fluid adaptive biological computing system, like an iPad. So it has a display screen which I can read. I can see what your body, your computer's saying, and I can touch it and enter things. And that's a lot of our stuff is touching, reprogramming the body. And there's a lot of things around this, but you particularly were holding a lot of self-judgment. And that self-judgment was based around your feelings and your emotions. And so as soon as I touched that button, it was like a flood of emotions came. And that's where emotions come from. They come from the body and our brain observes us and tells them about them.

And it's interesting, the memory training we do, we talk about remembering things in our brain or hippocampus, but a lot of those memories are stored in our body.

Think about it this way. Think about the body being a computer and the brain being a processor.

Like a CPU?

CPU.

Yeah.

And it runs programs. So it brings up into RAM memory, runs a program. But think about the word remember and think about the opposite of that, which is dismember. So in the body, we use dismember to take the body apart in pieces. When we remember, we take the pieces that are stored in the body and the brain reassembles it for a running program. That's why sometimes we can get a piece and we can't. And that's why you do brain training. And that's why you do hand movements or you walk when you want to remember things. Because the memory itself, the way I feel it, is stored in the body, but more specifically the fascia, because the fascia has its own brain.

So for people listening who aren't familiar with fascia, why don't we start there? What is it and why is it important?

Okay, so you can look at it a couple of ways. We typically have been taught it's a tissue, it's an organic tissue which holds everything together. We used to think of it as wrapping around muscles and organs, but we know it's more than that. It's actually the structure of the body. And, but we now know it has an interstitium. It's got a brain, and that brain is super highly intelligent. It's more intelligent, has more processing power than the physical brain. So it's part out there sensing things. Like, for example, when somebody walks into a room and you feel that they're angry, what part of your brain told you that? Something had to feel it, and then your brain told you that you had the feeling. So that your body is the instrument of feeling. So you have 5 senses that are attached to the brain: sight, sound, touch, taste, hearing, smell. The other 10— clairaudience, clairvoyance, those gut instincts, those feelings— they come to us through the body and our brain interprets them. We all have them, but we just don't use them a lot. It's like, like you always say, we don't— it's, it's a, it's a, it's a training issue. So we're not trained to use it. So we see the fascia as the conduit. It's, um, it's made of water, our body, and And it's made of silica, basically sand and water and bacteria. And if that's actually like a lot like a quartz crystal. So we say that the fascia is like this crystalline structure that's sending and receiving signals. And the res— and another thing that people don't think about is calcium is a metal.

Hmm.

So your bones are highly metallic actually. And, and so the The bones are metallic. They're sending and receiving things all the time. And the fascia is the conduit, like in your cell phone. You have a metal antenna that wraps and goes like that, it's flattened, and there's a crystal on top that projects that signal.

Wow.

And—

That's fascinating.

I say it's fascinating.

Fascinating.

Fascinating.

You already hear that. That would make a great t-shirt. So tell us about the Human Garage. What is it in relation to—

what's the mission and how are you going to go about We see a world where a billion people are taking care of their bodies, self-care. And we're the largest self-care movement on the planet today. We do a billion views, well, right now, currently every 80 days. So, we're touching a billion people every 80 days, but we're getting them to encourage them to do something for self-care. And just like you, it's a billion brains.

Right.

Well, we have a billion bodies and we're going to hit those billion bodies actually mechanically doing something in the next 2 years. At the rate we're going, so what we do is train people how to take care of themselves. Traditionally, healthcare was thought of as something that a hospital or a doctor or something that happens. Now we're moving into biohacking where I can kind of figure it out myself. Well, there's a step which goes beyond that, which is how do I care for my own body? And that's emotional, physical, perceptual. Because biohacking will take care of the physicality, but I still have to. Have an emotional response, like like Alexis, you just went through emotional response. So it's a holistic caring of the body, and we're teaching people how to access that holistic caring. And 95% of what we do is free; it's accessible to everybody anywhere at any time.

Kind of like it because there's agency, right? You're empowering an individual, showing them what to do and how to do it so they can do it themselves. You're not dependent on. On, on something outside of themselves.

So that was my, my origin story because I spent $2.5 million and 300 practitioners trying to fix myself and it didn't work. So I became a practitioner. I ended up fixing myself 5 days a week. So I had to do it for a business. I'm an entrepreneur. And then the, the foundation, even when I had my clinic in, in Venice Beach, California, my wife and I started that and that clinic, we, I had care all the time and I was doing really good. But when I left during the pandemic, I'm no longer good again. And that feeling, even when I would go home sometimes at the end of a day and I'd have something go off and my neck was out or something, and I, I'd feel helpless. I didn't want to have to rely upon somebody else to help me feel good. And that made me angry and it made me sad. And what I wanted to do is I wanted to be self-sufficient. And that's what this movement is about.

It's like, it's like giving a person a fish. You, you feed them for the day, teach them how to fish. We have the same thing with ours. We tell people, give someone an idea, you enrich their life, teach someone how to learn. they can enrich their own lives.

Right.

So they could be the hero of their— that they've been waiting for.

And I believe, like, I mean, I think we all believe that we— everyone, we all have the capacity to learn, heal, grow. Everything is within us. We just have to open up the channels with the mind-body. It's that alignment that, you know, you were talking about before we started filming. I would love for you to share more about that because it's how much the brain is holding when the body is not aligned. When body's putting tension, your nervous system is locked up, how much energy your brain spends, um, that's blocking other creativity and energy that can go to—

So let me give you a, like, some really good examples. When we're young and we're babies, we don't know how to move. We don't know how to make things work. Like babies can sign language before they can speak. And because they don't have the vocal cords aren't quite developed, they haven't patterned it yet. And these patterns that we learn to do things like one of the toughest ones actually is to drink. Is to grab a glass, pick it up, and turn it. And because it takes years and years to do it right, at first they get the little handles and they like this and they get stuff all over them. Well, it takes years to pattern that action because the homunculus and cerebellum— cerebellum is elegant motion, the homunculus is like that strength, that mechanics.

Mm-hmm.

And you have to learn how far is that glass, how hard do you squeeze it, because at first it's like squeeze box. Then you gotta bring it up. And then not only do you bring it to your mouth, you actually have to tilt back your head, adjusting your balance. At the same time to get elegant drinking. Now, once you do it, your body goes through all the steps and you literally talk yourself through it. Like, I reach my hand out, grab not too hard, lift it up, bring it closer to my mouth. Those are all programming statements. And eventually, once we get an activity that we're going to do that's fundamental to our life, they become a synaptic optimized program in the brain. So, that program is there. Now, it's all great that it's sitting there like this. And some people, like for me, you think drinking is easy. I still get water on me every time I drink. So somehow I screwed up that program as a kid. And what happens is this synaptic optimized program, well, if I hurt my arm and I can't lift it like this, then I have to pull my shoulder in, protect it, lift like this and go like this. Now, that is That the brain has to do a lot of work around that program because once that program, synaptic optimized program, is set, it like hardwires it. You never think about it again. You don't tell yourself the story again. It just runs in the background. And then everything that you do that's out of that synaptic optimized program— crawling, walking, breathing, lifting— anytime you have a malfunction in your body, your brain has to think about it. So when we reprogram people's bodies, when they To heal the program, they'll say stuff like, oh, I don't have to think about walking anymore. And the joke is, were you thinking about walking? Well, they actually were because their hips were out. If your hips are out, you're thinking about walking. If your shoulder's out, you're thinking about lifting and turning. And that draws a massive amount of processing power from your processor.

I feel like there's a big unlock. You know, we talk about how the brain doesn't come with an owner's manual, and the brain's part of the body, and the body doesn't either, at least Taught in a way that's functional where people could use it. And I like that. I like the term garage because you think about all the innovation that was created in the garage, everything from Apple to Harley-Davidson, you know, had an origin point in a garage. And we get to work on ourselves.

We're rebuilding humans, our relationship with our humanity in the garage.

Right. And even when you're talking about the drinking the water, you know how difficult it is to program a robot, like an AI robot, to do something simple task like that even now?

You know, there's all these little things we don't think about. Ayo, the first robot in Japan, For years they couldn't get it to walk properly, you know, and they took this— they had this young junior engineer came in and for years there's a program and the thing would fall over. It was unstable. And they go, the robot doesn't have any toes. And these are little things that— what is technology? Technology is an expansion of a human being. It does something for a human. So all technology technically is is derived from a human, even an iPad, an Apple. It's derived from the function of how a human works. And they closely mirror a function that a human does so that a human can do something better in the world. So we're, we are the technology. We're the, we're the OEM. And, and there will never be a copy, even AI, as good as a human. 'Cause AI can think, but it cannot perceive.

Mm-hmm.

It has to use logic. Which I have a feeling that the AI doesn't. I have this ability, this intuition. I can feel into your life.

You're so good because, you know, during the trip, you were just pinpointing just by looking at somebody, their posture, even by birthdays too. We were just blown away. I was like, how does he know this?

See, I say I feel everything. And then the birthday gives me a place in that big database where to direct that feeling.

It's fascinating.

Fascinating. Fascinating.

And I think that's what human intelligence is. We often think about human intelligence as data processing, just remembering things. But I, you know, we were talking, I'm like, I think there's way more to this. I think it's our human intelligence is really sensing. It's being able to sense.

Yes.

But when your body, your brain-body is out of alignment, and also we often numb ourselves. And we distract our minds and you don't feel anything. You can't process the information that's around.

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Also, when there's trauma and there's incidents, or if you're locked up, you're in that survival mode, holds you hostage from your executive function, your creativity, your problem solving, your innovation. It also narrows your focus, right? When you're in survival mode, your focus, and so you're not even relaxed enough to be able to take in and open up your senses.

That goes to what we were talking about earlier. Where does the mind exist? So in the optimum state, if you take psilocybin, your mind exists out here observing yourself. If you're completely, uh, serotonin is flooding through your system, you're out of stress, your mind goes, whoa, and you can observe yourself and the patterns. Now, if you have a threat to your intellect, your mind sits into your frontal cortex to defend it. If you have a threat to your emotions, it sits in your limbic region. If you have a threat to your physical body, your mind sits in your rear, your rear brain in the, in that fight or flight. And this is why when there's pain in the body, Our mind spends most of the time in the rear brain, in our fight-or-flight mechanism. And it's hard to get over that. And that we can do it. We can use techniques to do it. But those techniques are work that the body shouldn't have to do. And what I found in my own life is that when I freed the body, all the aches and pains and mechanical issues of the body, then my mind started observing more. And I actually have Evidence of it scientifically in brain scans, because I've been doing brain scans since 2020. And instead of having a naturally formed brain where all the layers go front to back, all of my colored layers are in my right frontal hemisphere, which means that I'm like I'm on psilocybin all day long. I just see patterns.

Hmm.

And that's actually what I want. I want to see the pattern rather than have to remember something to feel safe. Because if I can see a pattern anytime at any time, then I use less cognition to memorize things. If that makes sense.

And it frees a lot of mental, uh, cognitive energy. 'Cause there's a big cognitive load, you know, when you're focused on survival or how to be able to walk or injuries. Like we talked about my traumatic brain injury as a, when I was a child. And so what, what would you—

And I had, I had one at 6 and I had 8 of them.

Concussions and— Concussions.

Wow.

8 significant ones.

So what's going on there?

Like when I, when I—

And by the way, also too, I had, I had epilepsy. I actually had car accidents because of epilepsy, and I didn't even know I had epilepsy because no one had ever seen me have a seizure. I just woke up on the floor.

So many people have had accidents or some kind of physical trauma. Maybe they remember it, maybe they don't remember it. In my incidence, you know, when I was 5, I had the brain injury. What— and then I was on your table for just even a little bit. And what I love is you balance everything out with, this is how you do it yourself. Right? Because I, I'm very big on taking personal responsibility, not being reliant on something outside, you know, to best my ability. So what, what's— can you describe what happened when I had this accident in my body and related to the release that we had with the—

So I had one of 5 too. I got hit by a bat.

Okay.

Just clocked in the head.

Oh my gosh.

And it was, it was an accident. It was kids playing, but I got fully clocked in the head. And so, when you hit the body, and this is like, I work with a lot of really super elite pro athletes, like some of the top athletes in the world, boxers, athletes, you name the athlete. If they're the elite in the world, they've probably seen me or close to it. And what I've noticed is, is in my own case, so I'll just dissect what happened for me and then what I've noticed on other people. I've noticed that when you have a concussion or a hit to the head, The fascia around there, because there's layers of fascia muscle, it contracts. And then that contraction, until we release the fascia, never goes away. So somebody who's had a brain injury or a hit to the head when they were 5, like you, that was still there. And what I was doing was opening that up. So now what happens is that restricts blood flow inside the head and the brain in that area. So then the brain has to build mechanisms around that to function. And whatever part of the brain it restricted blood flow, it could be the frontal, it could be the left side, the right side. And you'll see this quite often. You'll see somebody who has their right side brain injury and they're very focused on details and structure and details and numbers. And then when you release the right side, it's like, whoa, this creativity opens up. So we open up the flow in the fascia and that flow allows the brain and all the cranial bones and everything to start moving better. And this is something you do yourself, like twisting. We have, we have an entire upper body reset. We've got a non-surgical facelift. But they— and we appeal to beauty quite often because that's where—

We're gonna get a lot of comments on YouTube about non-surgical facelift.

Well, it's cool because the very first time you do it, um, you see a difference. Take a before and after. You do a non-surgical facelift on yourself You take a before and after photo, and I encourage people to do this. It changes the face right away. And if you do that over and over again, it continues to change it.

That could disrupt some industries. We'll definitely put a link also to, in our show notes at jimkwik.com/notes to, I'm sure, to your YouTube.

Yeah, we can put it in. Yeah, YouTube. And, you know, there's a couple of things that we would recommend that people do to start off with.

I would love that. I want to just talk about just the feelings because I think some people have had the experience where they've had work done and they have this release of those emotions.

Like Alexis.

Yes, just a few minutes ago.

I'm still processing, by the way. That's why I'm a little like, I'm here, but I'm like, okay, there's a lot just flowing through me and, you know, from our session and just allowing that to just be here.

Alexis, say this. Say, I'm letting go of the resentment.

I'm letting go of the resentment.

For holding all this grief in my body.

For holding all of this grief in my body.

For my father.

For my father.

I no longer want to hold it.

I no longer want to hold it.

It's not mine.

It's not mine.

I feel safe to let it go.

I feel safe to let it go.

Yeah, it feels— you feel that, huh?

I feel it. I feel it. I, I even feel the, the energy here also as well, because it does, it does go outside of us, right? It's not just what you could, what you could see with those 5, with your sense of sight, right? In terms of what, what you could process, right? The other dimension, the other senses, the other 10 that, um, that, that people don't really focus on.

Yeah, they're there. We, we, we have them in extreme circumstances. The things that I hold in my body that I don't want other people to know are the things that keep me sick and dysfunctional.

Yeah.

That is the greatest thing that I've learned in my journey. So I wrote a thing called Privacy, an article called Privacy Is My Disease. And when I told people the things that I didn't want them to know, all of a sudden I had more capacity in my life again. It was crazy.

Yeah.

And the best way to do it is just release it. Probably the most—

Pull the bandaid off.

Yes, pull the bandaid off.

But it's interesting, like, for people just to talk about it, it doesn't have the effect because that's not how it was installed, right? And then so I always think the fastest way to be able to change your brain is to be able to change— is work with the body. Because the body is like almost the expression of— it's like the body is like your subconscious, right? It's like your mind.

And also even just talking, just speaking out loud the second time, Already feels.

You feel different, right?

Lighter.

Yeah.

Than the first time.

So one more. Say, "I feel safe to speak my truth." I I feel safe to speak my truth. The truth from my heart.

The truth from my heart.

Even when it's inconvenient for others.

Even when it's inconvenient for others.

See, you can feel that. And what what what happened was is we opened up the fascia so that the brain, the emotions, the energy in her body is flowing. Now words make a difference. They really do, because the body is in what I call programming mode. After we do a fascial maneuver, a single maneuver, we will enter a mode called programming mode. So we then can say stuff to affect the programming of our fluid adaptive biological computing system. And then the brain hears that, and the reticular activating lobe of the brain, when we're in programming mode, lights up 100%. You can actually see it on an MRI.

Wow.

You can actually see when, when you do a fascial maneuver, you see the neurons moving all through the brain and, and building new connections. And then you say something and your reticular activation, uh, activating lobe lights up to 100% and it goes, okay, and it wants to prove whatever you say true now. So this is the hack that I know for reprogramming the fluid adaptive biological computing system our human is, is to put the body into programming mode. So basically what I found is a programming Hack. And that's what I do. That's my background.

How can people go deeper in your work, stay connected to, to you and your, your team?

Let's, let's give everybody a challenge.

Okay.

Yeah. People like challenges, right? I mean, you did the forward-backward challenge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm like, oh, we are in the car trying to do that. Aaron's trying to do that while he's driving. And I'm like, stop it. So let's give everybody a challenge because a lot of people in your community are used to doing things to enhance their cognitive function.

They're, they're doing speed reading drills, memory drills, testing themselves. Maybe they can do before and after.

Yes.

They could do one of our remembering names or numbers or words, test their reading speed, and then do a reset with you and then test again. Yeah.

So, I'm going to give them 2 things to do.

Okay.

Okay. I'm going to give them a 15-minute stress reset that will neurologically and physiologically take the stress out of their body. Now, when you remove the stress, you have more mental or processing capability. So, 15-Minute Stress Reset, it's on our YouTube. We can link it in the show notes. And there's one other one specifically for the brain, and we'll do it together. I'll show you really quickly. Take your hands, put it out like this.

Everyone do this with us.

I'm going to do one finger. I'm going to do your right hand. Okay, grab your right hand ring finger. Turn it away from you. Pull your left elbow around. Turn your head to the right and breathe through your mouth 3 times. Through your nose 3 times. Okay, come on back. Now feel something that happens inside your head. You feel it, right?

Yeah.

So your fingers— these are 10 organs, 10 fingers— your fingers highly impact your brain's ability to perform. So there's a, there's a finger release that I'm going to put in the show notes with you guys. So for all the Brainiacs, you do these 2 things and do whatever brain function cognitive test you want and report the results. It'll be crazy. People will have amazing transformations that they couldn't even imagine to be possible. It'll be the—

10 fingers, 10 organs. Oh my God, I love it. We weren't taught that in, in, in anatomy back in high school.

We weren't taught everything. The basic fundamentals of how our body works, we weren't Yeah. And what we're doing here is we— 95% of what we do is free of charge. We curate programs to people to support us. We have some supplements. But what we ask is when you— our primary ask is if this benefits you, share it with 3 people. That's it. And if you do that, you've done all that you need to to support us. And if you want to support us in another way, buy a supplement, take a 7-day reset, 28-day reset, join a coaching program, Those are all benefits that you can do, but our primary thing is help yourself and help 3 other people.

And can people connect also with your team on social media? Absolutely.

Just type in Human Growth. I mean, we're everywhere. Yeah, you really are.

All right, Gary, um, thank you so much, buddy. I really appreciate you and your entire team. Thank you so much for working with us. Uh, to building, uh, better, better brains and better bodies, you know, real, real mission we could get behind.

Appreciate what you guys are doing and The crazy part is this conversation needed to happen for a long time because what you do and what we do is they're just hand in hand. It's right hand, left hand.

Yeah.

And by getting people to focus on physiological fascial health and mental health, cognitive health at the same time, you actually create a new human. And like you, you feel like a new human.

I do.

I feel—

I can't even explain this.

It's such a great alignment. It just feels so good. And thank you so much for being with us today.

Thank you.

Helping us get through, you know, our blockages.

It was amazing to see you and your team work the past few days here, you know, at this event. So I want to thank everyone for tuning in again. Maybe we'll put a link if you want to take a screenshot of wherever you're consuming this right now. You can tag Gary and The Human Garage, Alexis, myself, share one thing. Share your feedback, you know, your before and after also as well. We'll put a link again to everything that Gary mentioned in our show notes at jimkwik.com/notes. Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube to see extended version and then the video of this as well. And until our next episode, remember to be limitless.

Limitless.