The Nervous System And Its Role In Inner Transformation (Jonny Miller)

Foreign.

FM Uplift yourself to uplift others. It's time to evolve. The nervous system is the lens through which you experience the world. This quote hit me like a ton of bricks, and it is from this episode with one of my newer friends, Johnny Miller. Johnny is the founder of Nervous System Mastery. He's a somatic expert. He also hosts an amazing podcast called Curious Humans. And for me, I have been fascinated by the nervous system even before I got into consciousness and spirituality. And as I've gone deeper down this path, I've started to notice an increasing linkage between nervous system function and consciousness evolution. And I have to say I have encountered a lot of misinformation out there. There was a lot of things that I was doing in terms of breathwork and somatic experiences that it wasn't that they were wrong, it's just that they were missing pivotal parts of the process for my nervous system to heal and more harmoniously deal with all types of emotions and the world. And these oversights really just made it uncomfortable to be in my body for years. And if you're uncomfortable in your body, you're not going to be in as good a mood, you're not going to be as loving, you're not going to be as excited about doing whatever it is you're doing. Which is why the quote at the beginning of the episode really stuck with me. I think this episode is amazing because Johnny knows more about the nervous system than anybody that I've ever encountered. And there's so much nuance in this work and somatic practice that really understanding these things in a nuanced way can create big unlocks in your personal growth and your nervous system health. And so we get into some of these things that I wish I would have known years earlier. Things like concentration is actually different than relaxing when you're experiencing a sensation in your body. Or the importance of a 30 minute period of total relaxation so that the body can integrate any type of big, energetic releases and repattern in a way that actually maintains that change in positive state moving forward. And so there's lots of little nuggets in this episode. And guess what? Johnny's also got an amazing British accent. So I think this is a really good one. And for anybody out there that is interested in learning more, Johnny has a whole program on this called Nervous System Mastery, which I cannot recommend enough. You can check it out in the episode show links, but let's just get into it and hear what Johnny has to say about the nervous system and, and somatics. Johnny, what's up, man?

It's great to be here, Scott.

It's great to have you here, man. I have been voraciously consuming your content and frankly, having many ahas in my own experience about my own body, my own nervous system. And, you know, the nervous system to me is. It's just one of the most fascinating topics and maybe just to kind of frame things up. When did all of this become a passion for you?

Yeah, good question. I mean, I think I've always been interested in the question of, like, what does it mean to live well? And I think in my early years I approached that very, very intellectually and philosophically. Kind of studied philosophy at university and, you know, read Plato and Aristotle and these kinds of things. But I think that the nervous system stuff, specifically for me, it came through loss and it came through the journey of grief, essentially, and realizing through that how disconnected I'd been from my body and how I'd been kind of like numb from the neck down. I don't know if that resonates at all.

Immensely.

Yeah, right. Me too. I mean, I came from, you know, had a startup for five years, was kind of like a very, very heady kid, I think. And for me that the journey through the different modalities and experiences that I've had, the nervous system seemed to be like the unifying thread in many ways. It's like it all seemed to come back to that in some way, and it became a lens through which I started to understand my own experience and also, you know, learn about, like, what the hell is going on when we're having these altered states of consciousness or experiencing intense emotions or different oppression, you know, all these things. So it's just become a. A really powerful lens that I've started to try and understand the human experience, I guess.

Yeah, it's so fascinating because, you know, I myself, you know, was like, was an athlete, was very into working out and my body and eating. And it wasn't really until after I did. Did psychedelics that I actually started to feel the subtle parts of my body. You know, it was actually like I could feel what was going on inside. And it's funny, I. I was just having a conversation about how it's kind of like going through, like, feeling or energetic puberty where you have all of these unfamiliar sensations. And at first it can be kind of alarming and scary, and I don't know if you had that experience, but it's just very interesting that you can kind of go through your whole life being numb and not Even knowing it. And, yeah, there's this whole world of experience that awaits you.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And that does resonate a lot. And for me, I think there have almost been specific emotions that I was resisting or afraid to feel until, you know, the last five years or so. And I remember the first time that I, like, really expressed anger and rage in this was in a breath web journey or learning to feel the sensations that come with shame. For me, it's like this swampy feeling down in my hips and my pelvis, as opposed to just the stories that used to come online. And so I kind of see it as exploring this inner landscape or. I don't know if you played Zelda, but, like, as you start to move around the territory, I've just bought a switch, so I'm, like, ready to dive back in.

But Ocarina of time.

Yeah, I love that game. And it's like more of the territory opens up. It's been like this adventure, really, of, like, finding new. Not only new subtleties, but, like, new sensations. Finding out where I've chronically held tension in parts of my body that I wasn't even aware of until these experiences.

I resonate with the anger thing. I think we're programmed, from a society perspective that to be angry is to kind of be uncivilized or to be inappropriate. And it's fascinating. And, you know, the repression of all these things can just manifest in immense physical health problems. And we can talk more about that. But maybe more fundamentally, what is your understanding as someone who has, you know, spend a lot of time in the science and research of how does the nervous system connect to emotion?

That's a great question. So there's one kind of theory of emotion by Lisa Feldman Barrett, and she talks about how emotion is essentially just sensation plus context or sensation plus story. I like to focus on the sensation side of things, which is, you know, very connected to the nervous system. And all humans have what's known as a window of tolerance. So this is like the window in which we feel safe, we're comfortable, we're regulated. We can have conversations like this. We can go outside of that window. When we go outside in the kind of what's known as the sympathetic side, like the overwhelm, then we experience anxiety, maybe frustration, maybe rage. It's like the intense reactivity side of things. And then on the other end of the window is known as dorsal, and that's where we go into, like, collapse. So it can be, you know, shame, depression, deep lethargy, withdrawal, the Art of working with our nervous systems is both staying in that window of tolerance, being aware when we're out of it, knowing how to come back in, and over time, expanding the window, essentially, which is our. Our capacity and our resilience in life.

It's really fascinating. And one of the things I heard you said that I thought was very interesting is when we don't allow these emotions to complete effectively, it's kind of like they get stored. They get stored in. It's actually, you know, people love to cite the body keeps the score, but it's actually not in the tissues, it's in the brain. Correct.

It's. So the memories are stored in the lower brainstem, which basically has what's known as a cortical map of the entire body. So it can seem as if you have, you know, anger stored in your shoulders or grief stored in your hips, but the actual. The limbic memories are stored in the lower brainstem. But what you mentioned about completing these emotions, I think that might be worth unpacking for listeners because it was, you know, it's certainly new to me when I first came across it. And it's this idea that completing emotions, this was new when I first came across it. And it's this idea that we have these incomplete reflexes in our body, you know, ever since early childhood, even like pre verbal, the first three years of life. And there were times when we went through some kind of experience and the body wasn't able to respond or in kind of move through that mobilization charge. And so it gets stored as like an incomplete reflex. And over time, if we have enough of these reflexes, it causes what's what I call emotional debt or essentially fragility in the nervous system. And. And this can be as simple as when a need wasn't met or when we wanted to defend ourselves but we weren't able to, or when we froze in a certain situation or even things like surgeries, when people go under general anesthetic, there are things that the body would do if it was able to that kind of get stuck. And so in the context of things like breathwork journeys, I've seen people relive drowning experiences or sexual assaults or. Or surgeries, but it's the body's way of completing these experiences that it wasn't able to previously.

Yeah, and it's so fascinating. Like you see people that are. That are hunched over, or you see people that are out of alignment or, you know, whatever it is. And it's just amazing how that actually is just kind of A, a reaction to an experience that never completed. In my own experience, one of the things that I've been thinking about is it's, it feels like I've been on this consciousness journey where the consciousness in the head and the mind has almost evolved faster than the body. And now my body and my gut is like rapidly like undoing knots, you know, and like lots of physical pain and, and so yeah, I'd be curious to get your perspective on like, you know, this just massive unwinding process that often goes in conjunction with the expansion of consciousness and the somatic work and all of these things.

So the, the way that I think about it is our sense of, of like embodied safety kind of dictates whatever is ready to be surfaced, to unwind. So if we imagine the image of like a clenched fist and we imagine there are these like clenched fists all over our body that have been accumulating over time as we begin to, let's say like expand our awareness and also feel safe in our environment, safe in our body, you know, we have our basic needs met. Then these clenched fists, these incomplete reflexes begin to surf. It's almost like layers of an onion. I think of it like the, like when one completes, then the next one will kind of arise. And that often does happen almost in a top down way. And in my experience a lot of the more deeply held kind of foundational clenchings do seem to be in the gut and like the pelvic floor area. And there's also, you know, there's no predicting what will come up. And I liked what you said earlier around like, you know, if you see someone who's hunched over or whatever that is, you can often tell at least my teacher Ed Dangerfield, he was almost like Sherlock Holmes in that he could see someone. He could, judging by their posture, their breath, their tone of voice, he could basically tell like what type of childhood experiences that person had had based on how they were showing up in that way. And based on that he was then able to do certain facilitations or give certain verbal cues that would elicit that like incomplete reflex. And it's, it's fascinating. I'm learning this myself, but it's such a, you know, when you see it done in real time, it's like, it's like magic.

That's amazing. Can we talk about. I heard you tell a story of like someone losing their laugh, which honestly I resonate with. And I think the listeners would find this just very exemplary of like the type of impact that this can have.

Yeah, so this was after one of my. One of my first plant medicine ceremonies. And I had this very profound kind of healing experience. And at the end of it, I felt this, like, grounded, like, warrior belly laugh that just erupted through me and it completely took me by surprise. And I was, you know, fully sober at this point. We were kind of sitting around the fire. It was so beautiful, honestly. And I ended up writing a short story that I called the Boy who Lost His Laugh and Journeyed into His Belly to Find it. You know, I'd love to publish it one day as a little. A little children's story, but I think it is illustrative of. The depth of our laugh is almost a mirror for how much tension we're holding in our lower and upper diaphragm. So we actually have three diaphragms in the body. There's the one around the ribcage, and then there's the diaphragm around the pelvic floor, and then there's the diaphragm of the throat. And the more tension we're chronically holding, the. Generally, the higher pitched the laugh is. And, you know, you can hear it in people's voices as well. I mean, I think that my. If I listen to my early podcast episodes three years ago, I think my voice sounds different today than it did back then. And I think that's because there is just less lower diaphragm tension that's in my body.

My first ayahuasca experience, my intention was to reconnect with my childlike joy classic. Four years into my startup, stressed out as all hell, just like kind of a miserable human. And, dude, I laughed my ass off for like 30 minutes. And years before that, I had almost became one of these people that hissed like, the. Like, I would, like, gyrate but not laugh with sound, if that makes sense. And yeah, it does. And it's almost like I just, like, thought that's how I laughed. And, like, I didn't really understand that I had lost my capacity to belly laugh due to effectively probably lots of imprinting, like, lots of experiences of basically being restricted, trying to be the nice guy, trying to be polite, trying to, like, keep my place. Like all of these type of programming that we're subject to and don't even know it. I mean, it was just so freaking profound. And that expanded laugh persisted and then went away. And now it's coming back as I have been having lots of somatic experiences over the past couple years. But it's. It really is. It really is pretty wild.

Man, I feel like goosebumps hearing you say that because it really resonates with my journey as well. And, like, what a fantastic, like, fucking metric for, like.

Yeah.

You know how much. How much, like, inner work you're doing, like, how deep is your laugh. I love that. And you can tell when someone has this, like, it's almost like an authentic raw. They're not holding back and they don't. They're not impacted by what other people might think. And it's. Yeah, I just think it's beautiful.

It's funny. I was thinking about Mark Manson's book, like, the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. I'm like, yeah, well, you kind of got to, like, do a lot of work somatically and on your consciousness to truly, you know, have that freedom. Yeah, I think that's like. It's like, why are we even talking about this? Like, why is this work even relevant? It's really just about freedom, man. And part of freedom is being safe to just be whoever the frick you want to be, you know, in a given moment.

Yeah.

And so, you know, it's really. It's so exciting to me that we have access to these tools. And I want to kind of change gears a little bit. And in terms of. So, you know, people that are listening, they might be seeing a little bit of themselves in these stories. They might acknowledge that, like, wow, I actually have some stuff going on with my body and some creeks and some hinges. And what is the mechanism for which the body starts to move into a healing state? What are the practices that you do and work with people on and teach?

Yeah, beautiful question. I think first I want to just touch on the freedom piece because I think it's so crucial. And there's a beautiful quote by Gurdjieff. He basically says, before you're able to escape prison, you first have to realize that you're behind bars. And it's this idea that we don't even realize the prisons that we've created or that we're living in. It's like the water that we're swimming in. And that was me for 25 years. I'm sure it was you as well for a period of time. And so I think the first piece is really that, like, somatic self awareness and, like, getting curious about this. There's this being, this body, and the experiences that have shaped it. So in terms of how people come to the healing path, part of me wishes this wasn't true. But I think most of the time it's through Some form of crisis or heartbreak. Like it's usually a health crisis, startup goes under or you lose someone that you love, a breakup, it's one of these moments where your current way of being gets shattered in some way. And there's like an opening in that. And some people, many people I think do unfortunately get stuck there. They get stuck in like the tragic. And if you're fortunate enough to discover one of these somatic based modalities, or maybe it's plant medicine, maybe it's breath work, maybe it's forms of somatic meditation, then it's a beautiful opening and it's almost a gift. And it allows you to surface these, you know, deeply held, sometimes emotional memories. Sometimes it's just in the body and they surface to be completed. And for me, you know, maybe it'd be helpful to share a bit of my experience with this. I lost my fiance. This was about five and a half years ago. She was a doctor and she had bipolar. And one day when I was away she had an anxiety attack at work and she came home and overdosed on a medication and she took her own life. And pretty much up until that point I'd had a pretty easy ride, you know, like I'd had a decent education, I had like no big challenges in my life. And this, this just completely like shattered my world. I mean, really kind of broke who I thought I was going to be at that time. And I remember seeing adults and seeing particularly older people who'd lost loved ones but felt like they hadn't grieved. And there was something that was almost like dead. It was almost like a shell of a human in some ways. And I, yeah, I remember seeing one man in particular and just being so afraid of becoming that that I think I kind of turned in the opposite direction and kind of went fully. I was like, I'm gonna fucking feel this grief so hard. Like classic, like young macho, like I'm just gonna feel this shit. And that kind of sent me on a, you know, on a road through initially vipassana meditation and from there then freediving and breathwork experiences, many plant medicine ceremonies. And that was really my initiation of sorts. But I think, you know, for people listening who are maybe wondering about how to approach this and you know, maybe they have a sense that there's, there's things that are stored in them that they're not fully aware of. I would essentially recommend trauma aware. Yeah, ideally one on one somatic based therapy. And that can look like somatic experiencing. It can look like conscious, connected Breath work. There's plant medicine done in a kind of responsible container with appropriate set and setting. There's many different ways in, but essentially it's like you have to find a way in to create some kind of generally altered state in the body where these subconscious pieces can arise and then welcome them in without trying to change them, fix them, push them away. Like, there needs to be this. This genuine sense of, like, welcoming present.

Yeah, that's awesome, man. And I deeply resonate with your, you know, kind of like that intense doer paradigm of once you discover this stuff, of, okay, I'm gonna be the best somatic releaser ever, and I'm gonna somatic release my freaking ass off. And I gotta tell you, man, I like blew out my nervous system, which has still been something I've been recovering with, and just years of physical discomfort because I overextended myself outside of my window of tolerance, which I think people don't talk about the implications of, like, going too hard on your nervous system with this stuff and applying that type of intensity and determination to the inner work. And it's my experience that we can really overload our nervous systems with, you know, trying to treat these type of practices like you would be training for a marathon, for example, versus just really learning to listen to your body and treat your kind of like awareness, awakening, healing, journey, whatever you want to call it, with grace and ease. And so I don't know if you've encountered that a lot with any of your clients or anything, but for me, it's been a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of, like, not being able to touch certain types of substances, like all types of crazy sensitivities because the nervous system has just been out of whack.

Yeah, thank you for sharing that, and I'm really glad you brought this up. And it's something that I actually feel pretty passionate about. So I was also, I think, like, gung ho in the beginning of my journey. And I remember I had my first one on one session with Ed, who became my breathwork teacher and mentor. And he doesn't really mince words. And he basically diagnosed me with an overachiever breathwork pattern. He was like classic type A overachiever. Like, big inflated upper chest, holding at the top and like, really challenged. Exhale was basically like my breathing pattern that really took me years to kind of to work through. And I mean, there's so much that can be said here, but for me, a lot of the work was it wasn't like accessing these altered states because that was easy for me. I could just breathe intensely and have these profound experiences. But it wasn't actually serving me because, as you said, I was just overloading my nervous system. And the real work was actually training the. What's known as the vent central break in polyvagal theory, which is basically, it's like our capacity to relax into safety. I've been working on, like, really having a completely effortless exhale is how it shows up in the context of breathwork with no holding at the top and the neck or the kind of top diaphragm also correlates to holding down in the. In the belly and the lower diaphragm. Why this is really relevant, I think, is because so many forms of breath work, in particular Wim hof, certain forms of holotropic breathwork, they're basically, you know, getting 2, 300 people in a room blasting music, banging drums, and getting people to hyperventilate. And, you know, people have powerful experiences, but as you say, it's really not serving their nervous systems. And I know people who've been retraumatized, people who've been sent into pretty intense dysregulation for months and sometimes years, and these risks really aren't being talked about. And I think the antidote is, you know, it's maybe less sexy. It maybe doesn't look as good on Instagram, but it's essentially learning how to be regulated. It's learning how to exhale, it's learning how to surrender and let go. And this is also, for me, where a lot of the richness and the most profound experiences have come from states of, like, deep surrender, where it almost looks as if I've stopped breathing. In fact, sometimes there is this spontaneous, like, breath retention that I'm not doing. It just happens. And that's where the most profound and healing experiences have been. But you can't effort your way there. And I think that's the fundamental, like, unlearning that needs to happen is we've been conditioned for doing, for trying, for pushing. Like, that's how we've been rewarded. That will get you to a certain place. And it's beautiful to go in with courage and to have the intention to feel things, but at the same time, it ultimately has to be let go of. And at a certain point, if you push too hard, it becomes very just challenging. And it can really mess up people's nervous systems, as you said.

I couldn't agree more. And I think there's, like, a couple of really important things that I've observed. And so one, I think there was for me, in my own experience, you know, the ego loves progress. It loves to feel like it's improving. And there was this imprint and thought form of, if I shake, oh, I'm letting go of stuff. Stuff is being shaken out of me and I'm growing and I'm getting rid of it. And it took me a long time to realize that the actual healing occurs in rest. You know, you see on Instagram, like somatic breath work and people like gyrating and. And it's like it kind of is like that's not where all the healing occurs. And I didn't realize this for a long time, and I had this basically false association of what an effective practice looked like. And it caused me to just basically overload myself and think that I was actually doing myself a favor. And I think you're exactly right that there's a lot of not telling the whole story of these practices that is being advertised out there. The second thing that I realized rather recently, there was a mistaken kind of a misconstruence of concentration and relaxation. What that looks like is I would feel a sensation in my body somatically either induced or just because I had a still mind, and I would shift my focus to that. And it was almost like there was this intensity of focus on that because that was what I thought would allow that to unwind. And there was the concentration and thoughtless focus on the thing without the ability to truly allow, like, be more allowing. Right. Like, it was almost like a hypervigilance of concentration that was actually blocking the healing. One of the things I appreciate a lot about what you talk about is there really is just so many subtleties with this work to really arrive at, I would say, like, sustainable and effective healing. Even within something that's just as easy as breathing. Right. There's lots of nuance for the practices to actually, you know, really serve the nervous system.

Yeah, that's beautifully put. And the way that I think about it is often the thing that that's healing is generally feeling the thing that we don't want to feel. So many people will have their, like, default emotional responses. And usually, usually people are comfortable in either sadness or anger, as kind of a rule of thumb. And so some people's default might be like, you just to kind of like, shake things and feel like that's making progress. But the kind of the radical move is the softening, the allowing and the like, surrendering into the deeper peace for other people kind of sadness and softness might be easy, but actually the shaking, or maybe even anger might be their edge. Like, that might be the place for them to go. That unlocks something new. And this is why, you know, having a teacher who can see when you might be what's known as either flooding or emotionally looping and to kind of, like, give you constructive feedback. Because otherwise we can be in these emotional loops and fool ourselves that we're making progress, when really we're just, like, reaffirming the same grooves that we've been locked in for most of our lives.

One thing that I heard that was really interesting is there's this advice about anger specifically. I was reading this book of. Yeah, like, you should let your anger out. Like, go punch a pillow, know, go into the woods and chop wood and scream and, like, let all that anger out. And what this person was talking about is, I'm sure there are some potential context and benefits where that makes sense, but that can also serve as a rehearsal. And I think when I heard you talking about kind of like, some of these loops, it's like, a lot of times we think we might be releasing and we're rehearsing, and that actually is just maintaining or deepening the groove, as you put it, which is, you know, just can be tricky. It can be really, really tricky.

Yeah. So to kind of dive into anger specifically, I like to have the metaphor, the image of, like, a hose. So, like, emotion is like energy in motion. It's running down a hose. And the hose can be kinked, usually in one of two ways. It can be kinked so that it's repressed. And in the case of anger, this is like passive aggressive behavior. It's like, I'm not angry. You're angry. You know, it's like the classic kind of like someone pushing down or the other end, which looks like, you know, it might be the person going to the woods in rage. And you can be angry at someone. You can be, you know, in rage, but still not really feeling the anger itself. The rage can be a way of kinked in the other way again, to avoid feeling the actual anger energy of anger. And often not. This isn't always the case. But often beneath anger is like protecting something. And there's usually some kind of hurt or heartbreak that is underneath the anger, which we are, like, deeply afraid to feel into. At least that's been my experience.

That's been my experience as well. I know you lost your fiance. I lost my dad to suicide. And I was basically afraid to be angry about it because I thought that would make me a bad son. You know, my mom, I thought, needed me to kind of be the, like, the man of the house and the stoic one. And, you know, I was the spiritual person and like, everything happens for a reason. And my dad's eternal and all this stuff. And basically there are all these kind of unconscious rationalizations of why I couldn't be angry. And yeah, man, I gotta say, like, once I finally allowed myself to feel anger and recognize that it was essentially suppressed, thanks to the work of John Sarno, who has a great book called Healing Back Pain.

Fantastic.

There was just like, mountains of rage that, like, I didn't end up, like, expressing them, like yelling, but they were just witnessed. It's like you witness the energy and like, sometimes that can be accompanied by, you know, thoughts that are like, you, like, like all this, like, type of stuff. But, like, I think it's an important nuance for people to realize that, like, experiencing and acknowledging the emotion doesn't necessarily mean that you're projecting it. And so there was, like, lots of that. And then underneath all that was this, like, immense reservoir of sadness that didn't know that was there also. And so it's really fascinating. And, you know, the reason why this stuff gets suppressed if you, at least theoretically from people like John Sarno, is we have this survival mechanism that says if you act out your rage, you will potentially put yourself in harm. Right. What are we going to do? We're going to hide it, we're going to tuck it away and not make it readily available to you so that you have a higher chance of survival.

Yeah, I fully agree. And I've worked with a number of breathwork clients and particularly in men, actually. I've seen that. I'm not saying this is always the case, but men who've come depressed, with very low sex drive, very low motivation and will going into and feeling healthy anger and like you said, not only expressing it, but actually feeling into the sensations associated and the emotional content there, it really unlocks this life force for them. I mean, I saw this in my life. You mentioned earlier that I think this was maybe before we hit record, but, you know, feeling like you were like a nice guy, like maybe people pleasing, not setting great boundaries, like that was entirely me as well. I came to understand the difference between being nice versus being kind and how being kind it means that you have a healthy relationship with anger, which is essentially the capacity to say no and to set healthy boundaries and to protect that, that you love to kind of stand for your Principles. It's that like warrior archetype is how I think of it. And I've seen in less than a week someone who has been pretty depressed just turn around and have this aliveness come back online. And I really do think it is connected to. There's many different ways in which repressed emotions can show up. But I think that's a particularly prevalent pattern, particularly I think in young men who learned that at some point it wasn't okay to be angry or they would have had to sacrifice their love and belonging in order to express the anger. And we'll always choose connection over authenticity, especially when we're kids.

I think it's just really unfortunate that right now we seem to be living in a culture that is promoting more censorship, more restriction, more. More unability to express themselves, yourselves, freely. And I agree, man, I had the same exact revelation of like, there's a difference between being a good person and being a loving person or being a kind person. And one of the biggest differences is that being a kind person or being a loving person means that you love yourself and you love yourself enough to maintain boundaries, do things like, say no, say what you really think, like all of the things that are emblematic of love, which also can be. Can incorporate, you know, things like mutual respect for others. And I just, I mean, I don't worry, it just is what it is. But like, I think the direction of lots of kind of ways of being in our society and the way that our culture is going to. I do think there's going to be a pretty big backlash for people's health with just the emotional regulation that is currently required to avoid being canceled or to just be accepted or whatever you want to call it.

I mean, I think we're already starting to see it to some degree with the increase in mental health, like disorders, suicide rates, all these things. I mean, whilst the world is supposedly getting richer and healthier in some metrics, like the amount of addiction and depression and just lack of. I think it comes back to lack of connection. For me. It's like lack of connection to self and connection to others. And I mean, I think you're right. I think we're in for a really challenging decade ahead. And that's why I think, you know, these practices that we've been talking about, whether it's breath work or forms of somatic exploration, are. They are essential if people are going to survive, you know, like, or just. Or completely lose their minds.

Totally. I completely agree. What does that look like for you? Like, what is this Going mainstream look like, because right now this is kind of how I feel and I'd love to hear how you feel. I. I basically am feeling somatic stuff all day and I love it. And it's a huge part of my life. I mean, it's my primary purpose is my evolution, which, you know, makes me more loving, makes me a better fiance, a better son, a better everything. And so it's the number one thing. And yet I feel like people kind of are like tourists of this stuff. Many who are not like, you know, you do a breath work class, you're like, oh, that was cool. But that's kind of it. And you got to pay for it out of pocket. And you know, there's not a lot of teachers. It's like, what is normalization of somatic work look and feel like to you?

It's challenging. I think the things that I'm drawn to are the practices which are self empowering. Like there are certain things you can do, you know, maybe even going to the jungle to take plant medicine, where people are externalizing their capacity to heal to someone else. They're basically giving away their power to the teacher, the facilitator, the therapist, whoever it is. And I think that in order for this to truly stick, that power has to be given back to the individual. And yes, it's amazing to have guides, teachers, mentors, but ultimately it's that essence of self responsibility that I think is key. The question of how will this go mainstream? I think is a very good one. I've been thinking about what I teach with the nervous system mastery course. There's almost this like Trojan horse approach where it's framed as, you know, cultivating calm, cultivating resilience, being more productive potentially if you're well regulated. I think there's a certain degree that you have to frame these practices through the lens that people are already seeing the world or seeing their life through. Yeah. And that's why I feel conflicted about things like WIM HOF or holotropic breathwork. Like, it's definitely getting more media attention, which is great. And the shadow side is the way that it's being shared and practiced is in some cases causing even more dysregulation. And so what I'd love to see is some form of nervous system literacy that is just ultimately included in school educations. I think that's where it has to begin. But just have this stuff taken, particularly things like polyvagal theory that I think is just foundational knowledge for any human being really. And have that.