How To HEAL YOUR MIND & Find Yourself In You Feel LOST In Life! | Lewis Howes

We all develop this personality now. The personality, we think that's us, but it's not us. Right. The personality is the traits that we took on to survive our childhoods. But we identify with it.

Yes.

So we think we're the personality. I wouldn't say kill that part of you. I'd say let's make friends with you. Let's find out what it's really trying to do for you. What it's trying to do for you.

What are the main, I guess, mental health? Are they diseases or are they not considered a disease like depression, add, adhd? What are the main mental health symptoms out in the world right now, would you say?

Yeah, so depression and anxiety are fast growing and, and they're major challenges. More and more kids are being diagnosed with adhd. More and more kids are being diagnosed with something called oppositional defiant disorder, which, what is that? Opposition? That's when a kid is defiant and oppositional and goes against adult values and adult expectations. But we think there's something wrong with the kid. Instead of looking at the context of what makes the kids the environment. No, all these diseases, well, you can talk about them as diseases to some degree and certainly, you know, I've had depression and I've taken medication for it in my 40s and it really made a difference for me. You might call it a disease, but actually that's a shallow way of looking at it because actually what does it go back to? It goes back to being a one year old infant or being a three month old infant. In the book the Myth of Normal, the first chapter has a painting in it. The painting is by my wife, based on a photograph of me and my mother. This is Budapest, Hungary, 1944, and I'm three months of age and my mother in a photograph is wearing a yellow star that Jews had to wear. My father was away in forced labor and within two months her parents would be killed in Auschwitz. That was my first year of life.

Oh my gosh.

And the look on my face is full of, is full of terror. I was absorbing my mother's fear and.

My mother's anxiety because she had terror in her face. And you're mimicking and. And she had it in her body. Body. You're connected to her eating ten times a day.

Exactly.

And you're feeling the stress.

Exactly.

There's probably now no calm in her.

There's no calm there and. But she's already so stressed and she's just trying to make sure that we survive. She's not there to really receive my Feelings. And then when I'm a year old or 11 months old, she hands me to a complete stranger in the street to save my life because she didn't think we were staying. I would survive for a day and probably I wouldn't have. Wow. So I didn't see her for six weeks. Five or six weeks.

And you're one?

I was one then, yeah.

Oh my gosh.

And now what could I do as a one year old? I could do two things. Or as an infant going through all that. First of all, how do I deal with all that stress? I tune out. I tune out. I become absent minded as an adopt, as an adaptive mechanism, a coping mechanism. Exactly 55 years later, I'm diagnosed with ADHD, which is characterized by tuning out. Is it a disease? The heck it's a disease. It started as a coping mechanism. I'm also diagnosed with depression. Why? Because in an environment I had to push my feelings down in order to not to burden my mother who was already burdened enough.

Create more peace and more.

Yeah. So I took that on. So I pushed on my feelings, I depressed my feelings. Then I have this depression. So I had the diseases. Well, you can talk about them that way. But I say they began as coping mechanisms. And I'll tell you another story. I'm 78 now. So six, seven years ago, I'm in San Francisco with a therapist and I've taken mushrooms. She works with mushrooms. And I worked with psychedelics. And it's one of the things I write about and that. But this time I'm the patient, I'm the client. And I'm lying there on the mat under the influence of the psilocybin. And I know exactly who I am. I'm 71 years old. I'm a medical doctor, I'm a writer, I'm a speaker, I'm married to such, you know, my wife Ray. This is a therapist. So I'm not like hallucinating. I know exactly where I am, but at the same time I'm experiencing myself as a one year old infant.

Oh my goodness.

And this therapist is my mom. Is my mom. And I start crying and I say, I'm so sorry I've made your life so difficult. Wow. That's my one year old self all of a sudden under the influence, speaking up. I took it on that early that I'm responsible now. You talked about, oh my gosh, in our conversation before, you told me about how you were in this relationship and you, you couldn't leave it even long after you realized it Wasn't right for you because you took on the responsibility of how the other person would feel if you let them down. I'm telling you, that's your one year old speaking. That you took responsibility for the suffering of your parents and how you mustn't let anybody down because it's your responsibility. We take this stuff on so early without words, actually. They just become ingrained and then we, then we live our lives out of it until something happens. As it did for you.

Your body rebelled, you have a breakdown or something happens, right. And you're like, you either keep breaking down or you, wakes you up and say, okay, why is this happening? What is. What is off? What is out of alignment? What is, you know, where am I out of integrity, whatever it might be.

Exactly.

And I feel the challenge is I was like, I want to end this suffering. You know, I've repeated this pattern many times. I'm sick and tired of the suffering. I'll do whatever. You know, I think when you, for me, I was like, I've felt enough of this. I don't want it anymore. But it took so much courage to face these things for me. And I know other people have deeper traumas or different traumas and it's. It just seems so challenging.

I wouldn't go there. I would not compare your trauma to anybody else's.

Well, we all have our unique traumas, right. Different experiences that we face. Why is it so challenging for people to face it and start addressing it? I was telling you, you know, I've been doing pretty intensive therapy for about a year and a half now. Every two weeks.

Yeah.

Not because I feel like something's wrong with me anymore. I'm stressed more because I want to maintain a level of peace.

Yeah.

And I want to continue to maintain peace.

Good for you.

So once I realized and started healing, I didn't say I'm good.

Yeah.

I was like, I want to go to the next level of exactly. Peace, love, you know, an environment of beauty inside of my emotions. But why is it so hard for so many people to face it and actually speak the shame, guilt, insecurity, you know, imperfection about them?

Well, I think in your own work you've touched upon very accurately on why it's so difficult. For one thing, if you just, just the words that you just use, peace and love and connection. If you had played that to your 20 year old self, how would he have responded?

He'd really suck it up. Or he'd been like, what are you talking about? You're fine. Like yeah. Don't be a little wuss or, you know, just work harder, you know.

Yeah, but where would that have come from?

I mean, just my entire conditioning growing up from sports and.

Yeah.

You know.

Okay, so that, so does that. So that's one of the factors, is the conditioning in this culture. Okay. I. I also say it would have come from intense fear.

Oh.

Because if you'd Actually, it's very fearful to look at all that pain inside oneself.

It's terrifying.

Yeah, it's terrifying. So there's intense fear. So there's the conditioning, as you say. Then there's the fear. It really is painful. Nobody wants to have pain, but that's called growing pains. And the third factor is we all develop this personality. Now, the personality, we think that's us, but it's not us. The personality is the traits that we took on to survive our childhoods, along with some genuine traits. So the personality is kind of a. An amalgam of. Of childhood coping mechanisms and genuine qualities.

Yeah, some good stuff, but that's also coping. Yeah. Yeah. I remember I used to be like, I was a fun loving guy. I was like a kind, generous. But then when there was a trigger, like I was angry and, you know, defensive and guarded and things like that.

Or you talk about the various masks, the sexual mask or the, or the material mask, you know, the aggressive mask. You know, when I started reading your chapter on the sexual mask, you wrote about some guy whose name I forget, but who's sort of the champion picking up women. I wouldn't want to be in his shoes for one split second. Poor bastard. I was thinking that this is what he has to do, but what's that? It's having to prove to himself that he's lovable. Where does that come from? So. But we identify with it. So we think we're the personality. I'm this sexually attractive guy, or I'm this aggressive guy. I'm this material guy who's going to make it in the world, you know. And so we think that we are a personality. So it comes from, I say, three sources. One is the conditioning, the other is the fear for the pain. And thirdly, the identification with the personality. We think that's who we are and we don't know who would be without it. All of which is all based on trauma.

Yeah, it's the identity, you know, building this identity that you know. And I talk about how the identity supported you to accomplishing certain things.

Right.

Or protecting you from certain things by having this identity. Yeah, but it's Also not serving us to hold on to that identity if we want the next level of peace and freedom.

Exactly.

So it's. But it's so hard to kill an identity. It's like you've had this thing for decades maybe, and you've got to let go of this thing.

As you really see, I wouldn't even talk about killing. I mean, in my healing chapters of this book, I talk about, let's make friends with it. Like, for example, by the way, I have to be honest, I said that I wouldn't be in this guy's shoes for a minute. That's not true. Part of me was envying him. Right. You know, Even here I'm 78 and married 53 years. But I read about this guy who slept with all these women. Why couldn't I be that guy? You know, I don't want to go there, and I wouldn't. I've long ago chosen not to. But there's still something that. Who doesn't want to be wanted that much, right?

You know, something with the ego or the desire. Yeah.

Yeah. So. But if we didn't kill those parts, but made friends with them, if somebody came to me with that kind of pattern of I'm that sexual guy, but they don't want to, but they realize that it's not. They might feel high for a moment, like any addict will.

It's not fulfilling.

It's not fulfilling. I wouldn't say kill that part of you. I'd say, let's make friends with it. Let's find out what it's really trying to do for you. What it's trying to do for you is trying to make you feel wanted, making you feel valuable, making you feel desirable, making you feel loved, temporarily making you feel powerful. What happened to you that you don't feel lovable, that you don't feel desirable, that you don't feel powerful. You know, in other words, it's not a matter of getting rid of these parts or these aspects of ourselves. It's a question of actually getting to know them. And they all began as coping mechanisms. That man that you describe in your book, I guarantee he's a highly traumatized human being.

So when we start to ask ourselves this question that you're asking is, what happened to you? Or when, you know, when did you feel not powerful or not lovable or not wanted? Yeah, and let's say we're able to. Someone watching or listening is able to assess themselves and actually be present, really reflect on the painful moments of the past, which a Lot of people aren't even willing to talk about it to themselves. Right?

That's right.

For 25 years, I had a memory of being sexually abused and thought about it almost every day, like for. For a moment, you know, it would come, you know, at least weekly, maybe not every day. But it was like a memory. Yeah, that's there, you know, But I never told anyone for 25 years because it was so shameful. And, yeah, I didn't want to be, you know, made fun of or all these things. And so someone's able to self assess and say, okay, I had this pain, this trauma I felt not powerful or whatever it might be. What's the next step for them once they start to journal about it and be aware of it and they're like, I really want to heal. You know, what would be that next step in the process?

Well, I mean, it's not that I can prescribe, but sure, what it should be for everybody. And there's many different ways of working, but one of the things I would address, first of all, is the shame. Like, one of the impacts of trauma is shame because children are narcissists by nature. When I say narcissist, I don't mean in a pathological, negative sense. I mean they think it's all about them.

The world just revolves around me.

Exactly. So if bad things are happening to me, it must be a. Must be a bad person. You know, number one. Number two, I didn't fight back.

I couldn't defend myself.

So that makes me weak. And, you know, so I'm ashamed of that now. Actually, when you look at it, the not fighting back is nature's coping mechanism. Part of your nervous system just freezes. Because if you fought back, what would happen?

Just depends what age you are.

No, but as a young child, if.

You fight, if I back on against the sexual abuser. Oh, right.

What would happen to you?

Who knows? I mean, it could have been even worse.

And. And were you in a position to run?

No.

No. Okay, so the part of your nervous system that would have you fight or run away gets inactivated.

It's protecting yourself.

You're protecting yourself. And the part of the nervous system that freezes you just be still and you get through this.

Wait till it passes.

Yeah, that takes over. So it's actually what you're ashamed about is actually the brilliance of your nervous system that protected you, but you're beating.

Yourself up in retrospect, saying, I should have ran, I should have fought back, I should have done this.

Exactly. That's the first point, man. The second point is if I can ask you, how old were you when this happened to you?

5.

And how long did it go on for?

It's probably 10, 15 minutes.

Yeah. No, but it was only one time.

One time.

Okay. Who did you speak to about it?

No one.

Okay. Now you don't have kids yet. No. But if you did have a child 5 years old and this happened to, who would you want them to speak to? Me. Yeah. Now, if you found out that this happened to your child and your child never told you, how would you explain that?

How would I explain it to.

How would you explain to yourself why my child is not talking to me about this terrible thing that happened?

I would explain it by saying it's something I'm not doing. I'm not creating a safe environment to allow this child to speak up.

And that was your primary trauma. Yeah. So the sexual abuse is a secondary trauma. As a matter of fact, the abuser, like you were bullied in school, you said, and the bullies can always sense the vulnerability.

The bullies have like a weakness in your.

They have a laser.

Like there's an insecure, weak person. Yeah.

Which, by the way, speaks to their own trauma. Right. But they have laser like the physicians who abuse their patients, the spiritual leaders who do that to their followers. They see a weakness, they laser like, they sense it, and that's who they pick on. And the bullies do the same thing. Now, that weakness, as we call it, comes from not having the solid support and protection and confidence and security in your family of origin. So that's the primary trauma? That's the first thing that happened?

Yeah, I mean, that's the case for sure.

So to answer your question, then if somebody comes to me with those issues. Well, first of all, if somebody realizes those things, I'd say don't try and do this on your own. It's so hard. Talk to somebody.

It's so hard.

Yeah. Well, look, people with addictions, at least they have the 12 step groups where they can actually talk about it. And people ideally will not judge them.

It's a safe space to.

Safe space. Or you might have friends, or you might reach out to a professional, or you might have an intimate partner. That relationship is close enough where you can actually share this, you know, but you have to bring it out of you. By the way, that just reminds me, this is one of the ancient gospels, written around the same time as the other gospels is the Gospel of Thomas in which Jesus says that what you shall bring out of you will Save you. And what you don't bring out of yourself will doom you. He says something like that.

Right, right.

He was a supreme psychologist.

Wow.

And so you got to bring it up.

Yeah. What you suppress becomes more depressed, right? It's like.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's got to start with that somewhere.

You've got to bring it out. If and if someone has a. What if they say, well, it wasn't that big of a deal. This thing that happened back in the day. I was a kid and it only happened a few times. Whether it's sexual abuse or okay, someone's screaming at you or you were neglected or put in the corner.

You know, I hear that all the time.

It wasn't that big of a deal.

I hear that all the time.

I shouldn't be that concerned about it. It was five, who cares? You know, it's like, what do we.

Okay, then that's a very simple way to answer that.

Then why are we so messed up right now?

No, no, no, no, no, not at all. If a 5 year old kid came to you and you were the uncle, Uncle Lewis, this guy did such and such to me and I'm really scared and hurt, would you say to them, oh, no big deal.

No.

Think of all the other kids that worse things have happened to, would you say that? Why wouldn't you say that?

Because I'd want to be there for my nephew and make sure he felt supported and seen and loved.

And what would be the impact if you did say that?

I feel like it probably affect him for a long time if that was a pattern of. Yeah, that was the response that he got.

But you see, that's what you're saying to yourself, right. When you say that it's no big deal, you're saying to the five year old that was hurt, it doesn't matter. There's no self compassion there. Right. What is, you know, what you would never say to anybody else, you're saying to yourself, and one of the impacts of trauma is lack of self compassion. And again, if I may mention my book, the Myth of Normal, I talk about that, about how this idea of self compassion, and I see it all the time. And so when somebody says to me, no big deal, you know, I say, okay, take any other child in your position, plug them into that situation and tell them it's no big deal. Of course I wouldn't.

But people do, they do say these things to their kids or to their nephews or nieces. They're saying like, ah, be all right, you know, And I think it's because they don't have the emotional courage to handle the wide range of emotions, because they probably suppress the emotions.

I mean, that's the whole point, right. Is that they're not comfortable with the child's pain.

Someone crying, they're like, I can't handle it.

Right, they can't handle it. Yeah.

You know, my dad used to be like, stop crying. You know, just stop. There was no, like, hugging and like, he had a lot of love and affection in other ways, but he couldn't handle the crying and the scream. Yeah, the emotions.

Well, one of the. In the book, I talk about the essential needs of children, and one of them is that they're given the freedom to feel all their emotions, particularly sadness and grief and pain, also joy and everything else.

Is it a symptom of trauma or unresolved healing that causes this disorder? And if we heal the trauma, will we be able to eliminate these symptoms or these disorders?

I think we'll be able to get rid of a lot of stuff, a lot of it. Some of it, as I mentioned, because there is that genetic loading. And we got to think of the genetics that we talked about already, right. Like, we're talking about lineages of genetic loadings. So if we start doing the work now, maybe we'll see a lot less of these disorders happening within our families and our communities. So there is a lot that we can do to actually rectify the abundance of mental illness that's out there.

Right.

I believe that there is a lot of the mental illness that exists in the world that has an undercurrent of trauma, and we just haven't talked about that undercurrent or that possibility as much. But I don't know if we'll be able to absolve ourselves of 100% of the mental illness in the world. But I think that we can do a really good job in this generation to break cycles.

Could an individual eliminate these mental health issues on an individual level? If they are willing to do the deep healing work? Because essentially, because I feel like, correct me if I'm wrong, these are like symptoms of trauma. You didn't grow up depressed. Certain things happened. An event happened. An environment continued to foster the feelings of depression, the state of depression. And if we can heal the memory, the trauma, the event, and reconnect to our purest self, our whole human self, wouldn't those things start to go away?

That's precisely the goal. So where we started off with psychology and psychiatry is we started off with symptom. Management. A lot of psychiatry, we're still kind of there a little bit, which is.

Like, here's the drug to manage the symptoms, Band aid. But that's not healing. Yeah, that's not resolving. That's just managing it precisely. But that doesn't do anything to bring back to wholeness.

Yes. And integrate the person.

Integrating the healing.

Right, exactly. And that's the goal. That's the goal for me. That's the goal in my practice. I want full integration of that person. I want them to see, really see their authentic self. Some people have never even had an opportunity to see, like, who they could be at their true core self because it's been masked by so much of the trauma and the symptomatology that's associated with the trauma, like the depression, anxiety.

And all those things.

Yeah.

So you believe that people can heal these mental health challenges as well if they integrate fully?

Many of them, especially the ones that, you know, because I think we have, like, bipolar disorder and we have, you know, schizophrenia that have a different mechanism to them. But many of them, absolutely.

But many of the ones that a lot of people are facing, depression, the big ones add adhd, depression especially. Yeah, right. How important is finding a meaningful purpose in life support you in overcoming feeling depressed or depression?

It's, like, so critical.

It's.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, like, when we're talking about what happens after trauma, meaning making is at the center. It's like one of the biggest things, because you have to see your life having some sort of value and that there's meaning associated with your life and with everything that's within your life in order to actually, like, even feel motivated to do the heavy lifting, that is the healing work, to get yourself to the other side. So you have to have meaning in that journey. Meaning making, it's alchemized in that journey. It's created in that journey. Right. But I think at the very least, you have to have hope that meaning making can be possible.

Because what it sounds like to me is a lot of people attach meaning in a more negative, harmful state to events, to words, to actions that happen around them. And therefore, that meaning causes more depression, adhd, or negative thoughts, all these different things that hurt us. But if we created a different meaning around the event or the words or the event, the breakup or the loss of career created a new meaning around it and had a different intention, different purpose moving forward, we wouldn't have those mental challenges as much.

Yeah, I mean, I think people just haven't been trained to Ask themselves the right questions around, meaning making. Right.

And so what's the right questions?

Well, the right questions are, you know.

Well, like someone experiences a traumatic event or big T or little T. What questions should we ask?

Yeah, we should be asking, you know, so questions around, well, let's talk about what was learned in that circumstance. That's a really hard question to ask because sometimes people be like, you really? You think that that needed to happen? No, it didn't need to happen.

It did happen. Can't change it.

You can't. That's in your history. Now, what can we take from that experience? And it doesn't even need to be the traumatic event itself. But your response, your reaction, what can we take from that to learn how to now create a healing protocol for you? And it's about being able to ask questions that get people thinking outside of the box. Because what happens when you're in a state of trauma is that you're. You're frozen in many ways. Your thoughts are frozen. You start thinking a lot of the same things, right? Like, it's a lot of protective functions. Your feelings are frozen in time. Like, people constantly feel worry, anxiety, like a lot of things that are just them being in a protective state. And so we can start asking questions to free some of that up. That's going to be really key. But I like that question, even though I think it can veer us in different directions. But I'm open to that whenever it comes to work with a client, because wherever we go, I'm with them, I'm going with you, and we're following that path.

If someone stays committed to their story of meaning, that it was this horrible event and it ruined my life, the divorce, the job loss, the injury, whatever it might be, what happens if they hold on to the meaning in a negative way as opposed to, that was a traumatic event. I don't wish it upon anyone. But here's what I learned from it. Here's what I gained from it. Here's what I'm going to do with it in a positive way. What happens to those?

Well, the way that I interpret that is that that person is one still in a state of fear. They're not ready to really get curious about what other definitions meaning can have in their life. They're just really stuck on the one definition, that it tarnished their lives, that it got in the way, and they're just stuck there. And so if that's the case, then my role as a clinician or their role as a person that wants to get out of it, hopefully, is to work on the fear. You got to work on where is fear trapped? How is the nervous system operating around fear? Where can we free them up in a bodily sense? Because the nervous system requires a lot of that body based work. And so we have to really get curious about that and go in that direction versus the questions are very mind focused. But we need the body based practices in order to create safety in the.

Body to release, also release the fear, the pain, the trauma, and reconnect to the, the safety of your body. Is that right?

Exactly. And so that when a person can feel that there is safety in their body, they can feel that they can actually go into the depths of their minds in a way that doesn't feel scary and existential.

Right.

Speaking of fear, I saw somewhere recently, I don't know if this is true, but I saw somewhere recently that human beings are born with three fears. The fear of loud noises, the fear of falling, and the fear of abandonment. I don't know if that's true, but if it is, we tend to build, add more fears as time go on. I don't know if that's true, if those are the only three or we don't have fears at all. But it seems like we gather, we collect more fears through childhood and adulthood. Why do you think we gather so many fears and collect them?

Well, I think you're talking about primary fears, right? Like those feel like primary fears to me. Like they're like what you start off with. As a baby, you're gonna have that startle response. As a baby, you're gonna need to feel deeply connected and attuned to a.

Caregiver, otherwise you don't live.

Yeah, basically. Right. And so like it's basically a fear of losing life or a fear of losing safety. So it makes a lot of sense. But the accumulation of it also makes sense because we operate in mental representations in categories, basically. So we have specific categories in our minds that are primarily created in our childhood. And then everything else that happens in life, we put in the different categories in the buckets of our minds and they just start accumulating and growing. So if you have a big fear bucket, then you're going to have a lot of fears that are going to come into your life and stay there because your fear bucket is just so enormous.

What was the process that you broke down to bring it back to more normal levels for yourself of feeling more peace, groundedness, calm?

Okay, so it's the process of the neuropsychical. Excellent question. It's the process of the neuropsychology. It's in the second half of the book. So the neurocycle is five sign.

This is the five steps, right?

Yeah, this is the five steps. This is what I initially developed for people with traumatic brain injury was my first time that I developed it and developed my theory. And then from there I refined it to all the different types of, you know, situations I worked with. And then it's been refined over the years. This is the most updated research. So a good scientist should keep learning and changing and improving, which is what I've tried to do. So in this book is the updated version of the neuro cycle. The neuro cycle is how you get your mind, which is always working under control. If in the state of acute trauma, like we were, like I was in, in that moment, acute trauma creates a red brain. I showed you that picture of a red brain. That red brain means that I have a tidal wave in my brain going on, or that there is the left and the right brain will be out of harm. Harmony. I'll have a drop of blood and oxygen to the front of my brain. I'm going to have things like that delta. We've heard of things like delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma. All those waves are supposed to flow like waves in the sea. And if you think of the sea, you've got the big swells, which is delta, slightly smaller swells, which is theta. They build, which is beta, the crest, which is high beta, and the gamma, which is the ripple on the beach. And so we want that through the brain in this nice kind of even way that's kind of the Y state. X plus Y. X is what happens to us. Y is that state. So X happens and then that Y state gets thrown off. So in that moment, that's what happened to me. So what we want to do is because mind works through brain and body, and mind is experiencing this trauma, which is a mess, our brain and body just do what the mind's doing. So then there's a mess in our brain and our body. But if I have that kind of chaos, I can't think straight. I'm not going to have any wisdom. I'm going to fall apart. And in this situation, I would have and I have in the past, but now I've learned how to deal with this. I talk about that this neuro cycle can improve how you manage anxiety and depression by 81%. That's a massive claim and I've shown it scientifically. Okay? So what I did was to try and get myself back under control. Now, in that state, you don't know what to do in a tremendously acute traumatic state. But I knew from my science and from my knowledge, so I'm proactive. So I could go into two zones. I went into two modes. The one mode was the mental mess that I was in, which is the pilot, because I'm driving, I'm in this time. Imagine yourself being in a helicopter that's like a time capsule and you flying over this forest, and the forest is your mind with all these trees. And this acute trauma has just grown because it's instant. So here's this terrible. And your helicopter is drawn to this because you are in shock and terror and fear and deep panic and anxiety. That is all the smoke signals. So I. My. My pilot's going like this. The co pilot is also me. But it's my wisdom, because inside of each of us is our survival, and that's our instinct that, you know, when you give someone great advice and you just think, oh, wow, where did that come from? You get that. That depth. Like, we know what we know, we know how much we can handle. We will say, I know this. That kind of thing. That's the co pilot, this wisdom. So what we want to do in those states is to get ourselves into the co pilot. Remember the co pilot and the pilot. And you use the you language. So, so here you flying this plane all over, and the co pilot saying, okay, let's calm down, let's land it at that tree. So you land the plane, you land this time capsule, whatever, and you get out. But you with the co pilot, so you're safe. So you've created a distance. And this is. I'm explaining in detail. And obviously you train. And it's all in the book, and it's all. I've got an app that explains it too. But this is the mindset that I have trained myself to come into. So I can go into an acute trauma in that mind. I'm still crying, I'm still freaking out, right? But I'm freaking out in this zone where I now know, because I know that I need wisdom. I need to be able to tap into that. And I cannot get through this chaos if this chaotic brain and body, if. And mind, unless I've calmed it down. So I have to get through this because I'm stuck in that black tree and I'm stuck in this chaotic brain.

So that would be considered. Would that be considered like fight or flight? Whether it's someone.

Yes.

Cutting you off in front of you in the, on the street, in the car, or someone yelling at you, or someone, whatever an event's happening which is causing you to react in fight or flight, Whether it's a massive T trauma or little T trauma.

Exactly, exactly. Or an acute trauma, which is the blind signing stuff. The stuff we don't expect that just hits us out the blue. Yes, absolutely. So you're going into a level of fight and flight. So everything physiologically, 1400 neurophysiological responses are activated to help you focus. But they can't work for you unless you do what I'm telling you to do, which is to shift your perception. So this is the how to. Because as soon as you shift your perception. Perception in an instant, because I told you within seconds I brought the glucose monitor down and I mean, I didn't expect it to work that fast. I was amazed. And as it cycled through the 12 hours of the, of the trauma, I was able to manage it more and more. So I mean it really. And this is not the first time. I mean, I've done this my whole life, but it was just so interesting seeing it in real time.

Sure.

And seeing the reaction. Okay, so.

So step one is to get the co pilot state of mind to, to land.

That's the preparation. You haven't even gotten to step one. So this preparation.

Land a plane first.

Yeah. So that's it. So recognize that you remember there's a co pilot, which is your wise mind. You, the crazy pilot, going all over the place. Land the plane. Let the co pilot tell you, okay, land the plane. And you land the plane where you need to, which is at the issue. And what drew you in to land the plane to find the issue was your emotional. So this is step one. You're going to gather awareness. And gather means you controlling it. You, you're not sitting under the apple tree and all the apples are hitting you on the head. You are standing back and you're picking the apple. So there's control, there's a sense of autonomy, a sense of agency. So in the midst of chaos, you can create agency mentally because your mind's driving it. So you stand back and you say, okay, I picked that apple. So that's my emotional warning. Signals, terror, despair, utter, totally traumatized, like whatever they are, you pick those apples, you put them in your baskets, you're gathering, then you gather awareness.

So this is gathering kind of your awareness. This is how I, this is how I'm feeling. This is what's happened. This is what's like this is the event.

Yes, this is getting, it's almost, yes it is. But you're getting in very four little distinct packages because the more organized you are, the more, the less chaos we bring. Being very systematic.

So what are those four, what are those four things?

So you gather awareness of your emotional warning signals. So the despair, anxiety, whatever pain, panic attack. Then you gather awareness of your physical bodily response. So here's your copilot saying, okay, how are you feeling? Gather that apple, gather that apple. What is your physical flattering in the heart. Panic attack, tension, gut wrenching adrenaline, flight, whatever flight and fright freeze mode you're in. Then your behaviors. What are you saying? What are you doing? You know, I mean how are you.

How are you responding? How are you responding?

Yeah, action. Yeah. What's what you saying? What are you doing where you're, you know, what is actually happening? And I'm grabbing this, I'm grabbing that, get this, get that, you know, so what is that and is it working? I mean like you. Well just doing this changes how you do things. It's amazing. You immediately go into this different mode. Fourth one is perspective. What's your perspective? This is doomed. This is terrible. This is sucks, this is end or okay, this bad. But you know what, together you gather. Then as soon as you've got those, you then going to reflect. So it's very systematic. And then as you've gathered and done all this preparation thing, you've got the two sides of the brain, you've got coherence again, you've got blood flow back to the brain, you've got oxygen back to the front of the brain. When you've got low oxygen and low blood flow at the front of the brain, which happens in a trauma in an acute situation, in those sudden things, it drops. Then you are impulsive, you're going to make bad decisions, you're going to react incorrectly, you're going to create incoherence. Your alpha wave in the brain drops and, and becomes more active on the right side and that's on the right side, which is not great because that means that we now are not going to have insight. So by doing what I've just said, you change all of that. You bring back coherence, you increase alpha. And it may not be excellent yet, but you've started the process. Then as you move forward through the five steps and I put all this brain stuff in the book and what happens? And so I'm just giving you the overview. So then you start now reflecting. Okay, what have I Got in my basket. So number two, reflect. Reflect is an incredibly beautiful word as is gather awareness. Gathering awareness. I just want to point out in the earlier on I said that we mustn't be frightened of despair and anxiety and trauma and I mean and Denzel depression. Those scary. Don't be scared of them because they are messengers. They're helpful messengers that are telling you something. And if you respond to them in that way, you then control them. But if you respond to them in fear, they control you.

Oh yeah, yeah.

And then you're not going to move forward. You're going to get very stuck and then stuck in rumination and the patterns will just get worse. So get the control. Even though you can, you can be crying, screaming, swearing, I don't care what you're doing, but just get the control. You're at the tree, you're doing the stuff. So gather. Reflect is when you think of light going through a prism. It reflects all the colors of the rainbow. So there's depth, there's that one thing means a lot. And so reflect is this process of being a detective. Okay, well why am I having that reaction? Why am I now? When it's something in the moment, we pretty much know why. I mean, I knew why I was so I didn't have to do too much reflection, but I had to the reflection in terms of why, because I knew the cause. But the difference was I needed to reflect to say, okay, if I react like this, this is going to happen. So it was, it was, it was questioning. What are you doing with that emotion? What are you doing with that behavior? Is that behavior helping? So the reflection reflect in that situation would be different to a reflect for someone who is having a complete and utter imposter syndrome attack. And it's a pattern and they keep doing it. So they're now working sequentially through the process. So they're going to have to start finding why, what does it track back to what level, what sort of self esteem issues are, what is the origin story of it. So the reflect in that case would be, you know, ask, answer, discuss. Why do I feel this? Why, why, why? And so it's a different. So these. But reflect is to just, you know, get meaning, but in a very comprehensive way because there's all these patterns of meaning in that acute trauma. It's quick, I'm doing the five steps quick. If I'm working on a pattern over time, I'm going to spend longer. Third step is you write and the writing step is obviously I was in the midst of a trauma. I couldn't write, so I would visualize. So the quick stuff you can just visualize or if you can write, write, writing. I recommend if you write, write, write in the form of a metacog. I teach you how in the book. And I have a video of a neurocycle app that goes with this.

What's a met? What's a metacog?

A metacog is a pattern form of writing that stimulates. It looks like a tree. You start in the middle and you work on branches and you put words and you don't write whole sentences. You basically just pour information and you literally let it just come out in this pattern format. But each the. One of the key things is to, is to group as you, as a thought. As something comes up, you put it on one area and as something else comes up, you put it wherever. So you have these clusters of information and every words on a line and every line goes out of the previous line. And that format is unbelievable. It just drags the two sides of the brain together, digs deep, and you start getting insight into what you didn't even know was there. And then the fourth step is to then go and sort out that chaos that you've just written down. So the fourth step is to, okay, I've gathered awareness, I've reflected, I'm writing. What does this mean? What's the mental autopsy? What's the, what's the pattern, the activators, the antidotes? How can I reconceptualize this beautiful word? Reconceptualize? And then you end off the cycle with a little action. And that action, if it's in the moment, like in that five seconds or whatever, it's okay, I'm going to actually take a deep breath and I'm going to act like this, or I'm going to say that, or I'm going to do this. So it's a little action that anchors you back in a state where you can function in the next moment in that acute trauma or in that imposter moment and imposter syndrome moment. And you've now got to go into a business meeting. You're feeling like you can't because you're, you know, the imposter syndrome fraud sort of set up. So in doing it in the quick moment by moment, you're going to have a simple quick action in the big stuff where you're working out the pattern each day. You will have you do your work for a limited amount of time. And I say do the Work because it's not a quick fix. If you're looking for a quick fix, nothing related to greatness is a quick fix or mind. It's time. And you know that. You experience that with your horse story. And so essentially you would do it for around 15 to 45 minutes a day when you're fixing up the big stuff. And you would do it, Lewis, the big stuff, you would do for 63 days. So that's why.

63.

Glad you asked that. So we've all been told. 21 days to build a habit. Well, that's a complete myth. I put it in. I wrote about it in the book too. It's not a neurosurgeon, a surgeon, many years ago was talking about the physical cycles of healing that our body goes through. Like if you get a blister, it takes a body about three weeks for the stem cells and everything to form and the immune system to do its job to get rid of the blister. That's assuming that your mind's not a mess. If your mind's a mess, you can chop off 60% of that healing time. It'll take 60% longer, up to 60% longer. If your mind's a mess, you increase healing.

If your mind is right, does it decrease?

It does it on time. It does it on time. And sooner. It depends. It depends on the level of damage. And sometimes you'll need one cycle of three. Sometimes you'll need multiple. Multiple. That's for physical healing. Mind healing, however, needs a minimum of three cycles for behavior.

Really? How, how do we. Is this scientifically proven or is this.

So there's very little research in the 21 day myth. So I decided to research it. And there's a few studies. There's one from University College London. I put them in my book. There's my one that I've just done recently over the. In 2019, over 2020, where I tracked. And we tracked in the brain, what happened. So 21 days, you. You get what we call gamma peaks, which means that you've taken this, you've deconstructed it, and you've reconstructed it into something healthy. So you've changed this thought, but it's xy. So that's in there. But it's in a different. It looks different. It's like if you take an ugly old house that you're going to renovate, you take lots of photos of all the mold and all the ugly carpets and you bash it down, you build a beautiful new house, you still remember how it was but you've reconceptualized it. You're living in that new space. You remember the old. Okay, so that's what I'm talking about. That takes 21 days. So you create to break down and build a thought with memories. Because a thought is a tree made of memories. Memories are what, like a tree is made of branches. Thoughts are made of memories. So to make something that's got a level of sustainability takes about 21 days. And in that 21 days after that, if you stop there, it's a tiny little plant in your forest. It doesn't have enough energy to move from the non conscious mind. N o N. The non conscious mind operates 24, 7. It's where all your experiences are stored in thoughts, all your belief systems, your nurturing, everything about you and that is influencing your conscious mind. Conscious mind is only awake when you're awake. So right now as I'm talking, everything that I'm saying is stimulating thoughts from your non conscious mind to move into your conscious mind to make sense of what I'm saying and to build all this new stuff into thoughts in your trees. So a non conscious mind for a thought to move from the non consciousness to the conscious through the subconscious. So non conscious subconscious is the bridge. Conscious is when you're awake, non conscious 24 7, infinite, huge, massive. And where our wisdom is as well. So the wisdom is through the middle. If you want to imagine a forest, you've got the beautiful dark green strip which is all your instinctive wisdom, survival stuff, wired for love stuff, optimism, bias. And then everything we experience in life is around the edge. Little trees, big trees, dark trees, green trees. The smaller the tree, the newer the experience experience or the newer the memory, the weaker the memory that big established trees are the ones that influence. So those things are powerful. So if it's a big dark tree and it's influencing, it's going to jump into your conscious mind and influence your view. So backtracking to get something that's good that you've rebuilt, to actually influence how you view something, it has to have more energy put into it. Energy is never lost. Energy is transferred. Quantum physics talks about energy. These things are proteins with energy vibrating in the little protein structures. So you want that they're weak, so you've got to strengthen it, you got.

To water it, you got to feed it some fertilizer.

Totally. And all you do is, it's so easy. Oh my gosh, it's so easy. From day 22 to 40 to 63, you simply do step number five, for about a minute a day. That's how simple it is. It's 42 minutes over 42 days. In my NeuroCycle app, I've actually got a active reminder function that you can type it in so it pops up on your phone and you can remind yourself to do this just. And you literally just read it and it keeps, just reading it reminds you to do it. And then you're building your strength and you're turning it into behavior change. So to go around, you know, the theme of your podcast, to get to greatness, requires behavior change. So real behavior change. If you really want to build a good habit into your life, you're going to have to spend the 63 days doing it. So not only is that 63 days, I mean, I've shown it scientifically and so on. Not only is it for detoxing, the patterns, the traumas, the toxic habits, the small T, big T, as you mentioned, the acute stuff, the bad habits we've developed, but it's also to build new habits. So if you, if you know, you identify. This is an area that I want to grow in my life, to go to the next level of greatness, whatever that is, you need 63 days, a day least, and sometimes more. Sometimes the trauma is so embedded and it's blocking your greatness that you might need multiple cycles of 63. There's no cookie cutter design, but the more you do that and the more you practice it in the moment by moment, the more self regulated you become. Which brings us right back to the beginning of the conversation, which was that mind is always in action, so you may as well control it.

I was always a very grateful person, you know, not before the accident. You know, I used to crib a lot because I was too young and I was too naive. But, you know, with time, yes, with time, I realized that, you know, everyone is fighting an unseen battle, Louis. Everyone. And we are so good at the art of concealing the pain that we are in. All of us. You know, the methodology changes. You know, there are certain ways that we conceal pain. Sometimes we share, sometimes we don't. But we all are going through something in life every day, you know, And I realized that if I think that I'm the one who's the most broken one. No. I have traveled around the world. I have met so many people and they had shared their very personal stories of how broken they are. And let me tell you, none of them were in the wheelchair. So there are so many people who are walking around who are Perfectly fine. They are running their businesses. They are so broken from within. All they want is to be understood. They want someone who can understand their pain. You know, and I feel so blessed that when people look at me, when they see me in the wheelchair, maybe, you know, they just think that because she is in pain, we can talk to her because she can understand what.

We are going through.

Why do you think so many people are broken in the world who maybe aren't in a wheelchair, who have able bodied, let's say, don't have a deformed body or something, but they're broken. Where do you think that brokenness is coming from for so many people?

Too many expectations from people. Too many expectations. You know, we want to get into a relationship because we want happiness. We want to feel complete, right? Soulmates. No, you are your own soulmate, period. You know, if you are not in a good relationship with yourself, you will be miserable even if you are in a relationship with someone. That's why people are broken. My happiness cannot be taken by someone because my happiness does not come from someone. Nobody is giving me my joy. I am the reason of my own joy. If we manage to understand this tiny little truth about life, we will heal. And time doesn't heal you. You heal you. You need to sit down with yourself and think, do you love yourself enough? You know, and if you love yourself enough and you believe in self love, no external force will ever be able to break you.

Hmm.

How do we learn to love ourselves if we have been telling ourselves for so long, I'm not lovable, or I had this accident, or, you know, I went through a breakup in a relationship and they left me or they abandoned me or whatever it might be. How do we, how do we not let outside factors dictate our feelings about ourself and not let the fear of abandonment of people or people's love hold us back from loving ourselves?

Yes, the fear of abandonment, we all have that and we need to overcome this fear. I always say when wrong people leave, right things start to happen. And we all are living a life story. You have your own story. I have my story. My brothers have their story. My mother has her own story. And when you find yourself in the wrong story, just leave. If someone is not adding value to your life story, or if you are not adding value to someone's life story, leave. Sometimes it takes letting go to realize we are holding on to nothing. We are too busy clinging on to those relationships which are not meant to be in our journey, you know, and that's why I say that these people are so toxic with time. They become so toxic for you that you know what? Your presence in their life is their only definition. And they will never want you to leave because they are so weak. They want to stay in your shadow. So you need to pick and choose. This person is toxic.

Leave.

Liberate yourself by setting all these extra people free who do not belong to your journey, you know, and these people.

Will always weigh you down.

And if there's something is weighing you down, how will you fly high, you know, and fear of abandonment. If you can manage to overcome this fear again when you are on your own completely, that is where you will understand that. So solitude is very powerful.

So powerful.

It's very powerful, you know, because even in that silence, you're having a conversation. I mean, there is no energy vampire around me. I'm on my own and I'm manifesting the best things for myself. I would never trade my solitude to anything because when I am alone on my own, I am the best version of myself.

Really?

Because I'm kind to myself.

Yes.

You're kind to yourself.

Yes.

How much time did you spend alone after the accident?

So I have this, this really cool habit I switch off. So even when I'm, you know, surrounded by a lot of people, I'm actually not there most of the times.

Really?

Yes. I'm just thinking, you know what? Recently I was thinking about something that, when I was talking about that how, you know, this beautiful balance of strength and vulnerability makes us who we are. I was thinking about it the other day that I experienced this balance on daily basis. You know, when I see my social media, you know, when I read emails and people sending beautiful messages that, you know, how your words have empowered us and you know, because of you, we're not never going to give up. It gives me so much strength, you know, and I say to myself, oh my God, I'm so strong. And then at the nighttime when I'm thirsty, I'm unable to get up and get a glass of water for myself.

Right?

That's my reality and how vulnerable I am at that moment. So this strength and this vulnerability makes us who we are. So I need to have my own moment with myself where I am willing to understand myself better. That if I am vulnerable, that's okay. I'm strong too. And the perfect balance of these two things make me who I am.

I'm so fascinated by your story. And every time I see your content, it makes me smile. Every time I see you post a video Video or photo. I'm always just rooting for you. I'm so excited for you and your life and the impact you make. And you are so much more talented than just an artist. At first you wanted to be an artist, and then you thought you couldn't be. You were like, these don't look good. But now you're, you know, selling your art, your arts and galleries. It's really inspiring. But you're also a massive activist. You're, you know, a TV anchor model. You did modeling, you sing, and you're a speaker, and you motivate millions of people around the world. You could have not done any of it. You could have said, I just want to be an artist and just go after that one thing, but you decided to go for more. When and why did you say, I want to start sharing this story and start putting this message out there in a bigger way and revealing these things about yourself that maybe you were scared to do.

You know, I remember when I gave my very first Talk. That was TedX. And it actually happened when I decided and I manifested that I'm going to overcome the fear of facing people. So ironic that a public speaker was once scared of facing people.

I was for sure.

Yeah, I know. So what happened was I gave my very first TED Talk. And after my TED Talk, a girl from the audience, she came to me and she was crying and she said, can I give you a hug? And I said, sure. So she gave me a hug and she said, Your 10 minute TED talk has solved 10 problems of my life. And she said, today you made me realize that those 10 problems never existed. They were just in my head. And I was overthinking. And because of you, I'm never going to give up. You know, in that moment, in the flashback, I could hear my mother saying, one day God will show you how did he choose you out of so many for this test? And that was the moment of realization that, you know, what if my words can change someone's perspective? Maybe this is my true calling in life, you know, and as they say that in the end, what matters is how many lives you have touched. So art is my comfort zone, Louis. You know, I can sit in the corner of my room in a cozy environment, have a cup of coffee and paint and sell the work, make both ends meet, pay the bills, raise my son and live. But I mean, is that enough? It's not enough, because comfort zone is a good place to be, but nothing ever grows there. So if you really want to grow as a person, if you really want to learn and unlearn. We need to tap on all the abilities that we have. We are so blessed with immense potential which remains untapped because we are too busy doing 9 to 5, we are too busy paying bills, and we live the same routine for so many years, and then we end up calling it life. It's not life. It's not. You know, I realized later that, you know, I was labeled as the first wheelchair bound model, the first wheelchair bound singer, the first wheelchair bound anchor, first wheelchair bound, you know, and it was so much rubbed in my face that I said, you know what? I might be the first one to do all this, but I wouldn't be the last. I had to pave path for so many people who are supremely talented, who are differently abled, who are supremely talented. But maybe, maybe they were just a bit scared to take the first step. I took the first step. I broke those barriers. At least I tried, you know, and now I see a lot of young boys and girls doing amazing work. Why? Because now it's normal. It's normal for a wheelchair user to smile. It's normal for a wheelchair user, may it be a boy or a girl, to look good, to wear lipstick, to look nice, you know, to face the world. It's normal now. And even right now, when being an anchor person, you know, I'm working for the national TV of Pakistan, and when I'm doing my show, I'm always thinking about that little boy or girl, you know, sitting in a far flung village watching my show. And I think about them that, you know, they might be thinking that if a girl or a woman in a wheelchair can do this, we can do that too.

How do you think we heal trauma if we don't have the resources to go to therapy or do workshops or whatever it may be, even if we do have resources, we don't have the courage to put ourselves out there. How do we start to heal trauma within our body?

Excellent question. So we did a whole project for Audible Original called Take Control that was all about the thesis. Was this any area of your life that you're stuck? I am willing to bet everything I have that you have a trauma pattern from your past that you've never healed. You got a boss that is abusive. Guarantee you this has to do with a trauma pattern from your past. You can't succeed in the areas you want. You can't lose the weight. There's some pattern from your past. So the first thing is recognizing that you actually experience trauma. And I am A huge proponent, as so many people are, of widening the definition because I think up until about five years ago, most of us thought that trauma just meant, okay, you were in active duty or you were in a huge accident or incident that was highly traumatic, or you survived some sort of physical, sexual, whatever. Abuse. Trauma is just about any kind of experience that you witness or you absorb that has your nervous system light up on edge and start warning you. So if you've ever had like you could have a critical parent and you just brace for them. You could have a parent that drinks like crazy and you brace at five o' clock because you know they're coming home. You could have been abandoned by a parent or have a parent that was mentally ill, or have a parent that was so on your ass because they wanted you to be a pro football player. And so you were constantly on edge. It's when your nervous system fires up to a state of alert that now gets programmed into your body as a response. There's a reason why so many couples at 5 o' clock at night start bickering. And it has to do with the fact that at 5 o' clock is typically when a lot of parents 20 years ago were coming home from work and that's when the arguing would start. And so what happens when you witness that or you feel it is as a kid, you're now in a state where you're on edge. I see you rocking in your chair.

Wow, that's crazy. Well, I mean, I just remember, you know, it's funny, there's a lot of good things that usually happen to our childhood, but we just seem to remember a lot of the bad stuff.

And it's because it's, you know why? Right?

Because the trauma, just like in your nervous system, I guess.

And also your mind is wired in a way to prioritize the negative as a means to keep your ass safe from not experiencing. Correct. Which is why you got to work on your positive mindset because your mind defaults to negative. So you got to build up the programming deposit. This isn't just woo woo, this is actually science.

I know. So I remember, you know, my, the memories of the past. I always have to remind myself of all the positive stuff that, you know, my parents did all the time and what they were going through and giving them grace and all these different things, things. But I remember, you know, when my dad would get home, it would be, it was, you didn't know what type of day it was going to be for him. You know, it was like either A thunder coming through the wooden floors with his wooden shoes. And, like, being angry and upset, or it was like the loving father that would take me out and play catch in the backyard. So I have to constantly remind myself of, like, the pause, which I'm certain it was 90% of the time was good. But those 10% of the time, you know, creates that clinching mode like you said.

Well, let me explain what happens. So there's really interesting concept called ghosts in the nursery. And so trauma patterns get automated because they're not experienced in your brain, they're felt in your nervous system. And so it's why you can have a pattern from your past, but be completely unaware that it's running your life right now. Because it's stored not in your conscious thought, but in your nervous system. And you feel it in your body before it even gets into your head. And so from there's this concept called ghost in the nursery, which basically means there's all kinds that goes on when you're little that you may or may not remember in your mind, but your body remembers it. So, for example, if you had parents that were just stressed out and they come home and they've been busy, and you're sitting there playing on the floor and there's toys everywhere, and mom or dad's reaction to a mess is to scream, that creates this kind of thing in your nervous system. Now, you may not remember that episode that happened on May 17, 1972, but your nervous system remembers what it's like. So fast forward, you're now 51 years old, and you walk in the house and there's a mess everywhere. And even though you have said, I'm not going to bulldoze and yell at anybody, my body recognizes the situation. So what do you do? You repeat the pattern you saw. And so what I'm working on right now is a pattern that is encoded in my nervous system. I was trying to create a video two days ago for Share the Mic. For Share the Mic now, trying to create a video. And I am, like, doing take after take because I want to get it right. And my daughter comes waltzing into the room and was like, how long are you gonna be doing this? And I was like, you can't do something.

I'm working.

I literally, like, screamed at her, and she looked at me, Lewis, and she goes, you have a real problem.

Wow.

How old's your daughter?

20. And I said, I calmly said, you're right, I do. When I get interrupted, I lose control of the response. And I'm Working so hard. And the way that you. And I'm clearly not mastering this yet, but the way that you do it is as you feel it rise up. You have to. You know, you can use the 5 second rule. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. You can use just take a quick breath. You can notice the pattern. And you've got to create a pause between the emotion rising up and the reaction that gets automated. And for many people, the reaction, Louis, is to run away. It's to leave the room. It's to avoid the confrontation. It was just easy, you know, hold on, let me let the clock go.

Even though you. You hate being interrupted by anything, this is a great interruption.

See, I did. Like I didn't do. I didn't do the bulldoze. I was calm because it wasn't a human being. I'm only mean to human beings. Like, I. A lot of people run away. They avoid conflict. They say it's just easier. But if running away and avoiding conflict continues to create a pattern where you feel invisible and your boundaries are tromped on, that's a pattern. And, you know, here's the other thing about patterns. Running away and being quiet might have saved when you were little, because if you were quiet and out of the room, you didn't get hit, you didn't get yelled at, you were out of harm's way. So when you were little, it was a genius pattern because it protected you. But the issue for adults is that again, we walk around with the patterns that we created when we were 8 years old in different situations than we are in now. And now we are completely a robot to these patterns.

I love that you. You had a great tweet the other day about boundaries. Because as. As individuals, both of us who try to help people break boundaries, try to break their mindset that's holding them back, try to get them to become greater than their past, all these different things. You wrote a post that said your boundaries are there to serve you. As you grow, so will your boundaries. What boundaries do you need to set up in order to help yourself grow? Why are boundaries important when we also have the mindset of, like, you should be breaking your boundaries all the time?

Well, I wouldn't say that breaking your. Like, I don't call the obstacles, or I call them excuses. And so I think the hardest boundaries, honestly, are the ones to set with yourself. To not drink during the week, to not tolerate the bulldozing and immediately apologize and try to do better, to not waste hours on social media. Like all the things that the Small promises you need to make in order to create boundaries with your old patterns and your excuses. To me, the hardest boundaries to set are those with myself. I. What was the question again?

You know, breaking. We encourage people to break boundaries. You know, they feel like they're limited. But you talk about your boundaries are there to serve you. So obviously it's a different type of.

Boundary, but you know, so here's the thing.

What boundaries do you need to help yourself to protect yourself? And which ones do you need to grow past that are holding you back?

I think that the definition with boundaries that has helped me the most is understanding that boundaries are for me, they're not for you. And the single biggest mistake that we make in any relationship, particularly romantic ones, but also work related ones, is we do not express what we need.

That's so true. My girlfriend was telling me this the other day. She's like, I really want you to tell me what you need and when you want it and feel comfortable and confident saying it. And for me, I go back into trauma of past. Like when I used to say what I want, need, and it didn't get met, it would. I'd have get let down my expectations, I'd get hurt. So I was like, screw it, I'll just do everything on my own. Which leads to resentment or whatever else.

Yeah, how's that working out for you? It's like, so Louis, that's an example of 8 year old Louis created a pattern that worked when you were 8, but now that you're in your 30s and in a relationship that you really care about, you've got to identify the pattern and break it and replace it. And the good news is any pattern can be replaced. Change isn't personal, it just feels personal. Change is just about identifying patterns and replacing them with new ones. That's it. And it'll take a little while because they're encoded in your nervous system and your default is to just do it yourself. But you have to, you cannot, as a rule, punish other people for you didn't communicate. So I'll give you the perfect example. So Chris and I have been married for 24 years. And when I was before the talk show and I made my living mostly by, you know, doing 100 speeches a year, I would be on the road 150 days a year. And when I would come home, there was always something that pissed me off.

Like what? Like, oh, the trash isn't taken out, the clothes are here. Or is it something else?

Oh no, I'm way worse than that. Are you kidding? I would walk in after being gone for five or six days. And there on the island in the kitchen was a vase that had dead flowers, the ones that I had bought for myself a week before. And it was as if everybody in my family had been walking around the island for six days, as if there was some dead flower sculpture in the middle of the island. And so I would come home. And first of all, the only person that's really excited to see me is a dog. And my family did sit me down at one point. They said, you know, you realize when you're not here, we have our own lives. So you don't put your lives on hold while, you know, for us. And we're not putting our lives on hold. So it's not that we're not excited to see you, but we're not organizing our whole lives around when mom comes home.

Right. To be like the dog. To be like the dog. Excited and running up and jumping in your arms and kissing you.

Yeah, yeah. No, no, but that, but I think that's cool because that means that they're independent and doing their own thing.

They've set boundaries.

They've set boundaries with me. Perfect. So for probably six months I would get. And I would walk in and put my bags down and I grabbed the flowers and I demonstrate. How many times has everyone done this? Throw them out loudly.

Like everyone hears you.

Communication. Yeah, I'm getting my communication. Just throwing these dead flowers out. Communicate to you that you should buy me flowers. Like, I'm not saying that, but that's what the body language is, right? How dare I have been off. I've been in four cities. And then you become the mart. Like, ugh, I'm disgusting when I tell this story, but this is it. This is like so.

Well, I see you've got some lovely flowers behind you that look alive. So that's good to see.

Aren't they flies? So I do love flowers. So finally I just said to Chris, you know what would make me feel amazing is if when I came home, you had just bought some flowers. Just go to the. Just when you're at the grocery store, you don't have to order. I'm saying, buy the five dollar pack of half dead tulips. Just something. Okay? And then he said, why? And this is the most important part of expressing. And look, you don't have to give an explanation if you're trying to like cut off a toxic person, but if you want to express boundaries with somebody because you want them to understand you more deeply Give them the why? I said, because it makes me think that you are excited for me to come home and that you knew I was coming, because I'm starting to feel forgotten. So underneath the anger, Louis.

Wow.

Was hurt and feeling like I didn't matter. And so I'll be darned. I walk in, and there they are. And I literally feel so seen. We're so funky about asking for what we need. We're so afraid of getting rejected or denied or whatever, or being vulnerable in that moment. But the greatest thing that you can do is ask for what you need. Your friends need to know what you need. Your lover needs to know what you need. Your kids need to know what you need. Because then they can show up in a way where you feel seen, and then you're gonna. And they're gonna feel incredible.

Yeah. And you can't expect people to know what you need or them to know what you need by communicating it through anger and this frustration of, you know, whatever, like you throwing away the flowers. That way of communicating really unhealthy. I'm to blame there as well. And I think it's. That's not a healthy way of creating love within a relationship, whether it's a friend, a family member, or a loved one.

But here's the thing. You want to know why? Let me let everybody off the hook.

Yeah.

Because here's the reason why this happens, and this is what I want everyone to know, what we're up against. So, Louis, as you and I sit here talking about the flower thing. Right. And you got to communicate your boundaries. As we're having this conversation, we are present, and we're using the thinking part of our brain. When I walk into the kitchen, I am not thinking. I am in the emotional, traumatic nervous system, robot part of my body. And that's where your feelings and your triggers take over. And if you can start to identify the bulldozing, the anger, all that stuff, you will literally change your whole life by just changing one or two patterns. The other thing. And you know, you asked me about the talk show. The single greatest gift of the talk show content wise, is something called the word wheel. So I don't have it right here, but if you Google word wheel or wheel of emotions, you will find that if you ask somebody, name as many emotions as you can. Most people can name three. Happy, sad, angry. There's literally like 113 of them, from disgusted to hopeless to. And if you. If you start with a core, this thing allows you to start with a core emotion and go out because back to the flower example, I was expressing anger. That's not what I was feeling. I was feeling invisible and forgotten. And so the word wheel is something that we used several times a week to help people go from the thing that they are expressing to the roots to communicating what you're feeling, which is a lot like the work that you wrote about in your book, wearing masks, getting to the root of the core emotion you're feeling but not expressing. And that goes back to the pause thing. What have I seen that I am busy, that I am so. Have you ever wanted something so bad that you become paralyzed?

Yeah.

I so want to end the mental pain and suffering that people feel. I so want to help people heal their minds and to have the power to create a better future. And I get so overwhelmed by how much I want to see that happen in the world that sometimes I become paralyzed. And what happens for me a lot of the time is I feel insignificant and my ability to move the needle on that.

Yeah. Because there's billions of people who are struggling.

Yeah.

And it's like, what do you do to make the maximum use of your time to make the maximum impact and also create resources to create more impact? I get to feel.

I yell at my husband to buy me flowers. That's what I do.

I get to feel. Is this wheel of emotions? Is this something you created or something.

No, it's in the public domain.

Wow, that's cool. I never heard of.

That's really cool.

Now I've been, I think I mentioned this to you. I've had some. I guess I've had some paralysis or just a lack of focus around completion of my book proposal I've been working on for about a year as well. About exactly about, you know, eliminating self doubt. I think self doubt and mental challenges kind of are cousins, maybe of each other family members in some way. And I think self doubt, I think self doubt is the killer of dreams. I believe when we don't believe in ourselves and our abilities, eventually we're going to sabotage something. And I hear you talk about confidence a lot. A lot of your social media posts are about this. You say it a lot better than I do. But what do you think are the reasons we doubt ourselves or what do you think is the steps to gaining more confidence in ourselves when we doubt?

So I always thought that confidence was a thing that you feel and I have come to prefer that confidence is something that you do. Meaning that, you know, a lot of people like to think, okay, well you're going to feel Confident first and then once you feel confident, then you'll take the action. And that's wrong. It's not a chicken or an egg in my mind. I think what happens is you have to force yourself in a moment of self doubt to do something. And when you see yourself taking action, the confidence follows. So I have created my own definition of confidence, which is confidence is the willingness to try. And you display the willingness to try when you take action. Yeah, it's a lot like the relationship between courage and fear. You can't have courage without fear. Courage isn't the absence of fear, it's acting in the face of it. And confidence isn't the absence of self doubt, it's being willing to try even though you doubt yourself.

Many years ago there was a wonderful psychiatrist in London called Dr. Maudsley and he had a great expression, it's always been my favorite. And it says, the feeling that cannot find its expression in tears may cause other organs to weep. So he knew a hundred years ago, that's beautiful. So beautiful and so true. The feeling that cannot find his expression in tears will cause other organs to weep. So he's sort of saying, if you don't feel the feeling, your body's gonna feel it. If you don't open your mouth and say you hurt me, don't be surprised if you get a screaming. I've got this screaming headache, I've got this angry red rash. I've got this thumping pain. And by the words they're using, angry screaming, they're saying, I have rage that can't come out.

I'm not expressing it, but it's expressed through my body.

Yeah, because the body is very clever at finding something. I worked with someone who couldn't walk and all she said was, I can't stand that. I can't stand my ex, I can't stand my life, I can't stand my kids. And you can't stand up. Isn't that interesting? She had sort of phantom leg pains because she couldn't stand anything. Bulimas would say, well, what makes me sick is my sister in law. Oh, I'm so sick of her. She just makes me sick. I vomit in my mouth every time I hear her voice. And then they wonder why they bulimic. Because our words really affect our reality. Partly because, and it's such an easy thing to say, every word you say is a blueprint that your mind, body and psyche are working to make your reality. So we make our thoughts and our thoughts make us. Then we go out into the world. And we justify our thoughts every day, but our words are a blueprint. And when you know that, you think, well, I better pay attention to that blueprint. I better not say, this kid is killing me. My job is making me want to die. I'm so stressed out. By what? The queue in Hughes Market. Well, go to Zimbabwe, where there is no Hughes Market and there is no queue and there's no money to buy food anyway. Then you can say you're stressed because your problem, the queue in Erewhon and the bill is someone else's fantasy dream come true. This freeway is killing you. You have a car, you have people on four buses. I used to take my daughter to school, and I remember one day thinking that, oh, my God, this commute is hell. And I saw someone at a bus and thought, how lucky am I in my car? I've got the heating, I've got a cup of tea. I've got an hour to listen to. I can talk to my kid. I keep saying I want an hour to myself. Well, here it is. And I learned to stop doing that. But when you said, how are you? Oh, nightmare. It is torture. What, the traffic? Yeah, the traffic, the queue. People keep ringing me, the phone ringing. It's torture. Well, maybe if it didn't ring. That might be worse. Some of my clients or models will say, my life is hell because people look at me. It's like, really? Well, one day they won't, and then you might miss it. Yeah, but I get on a plane and guys hit on me. It's a nightmare. Well, put on a baseball hat and glasses, read a book, then they'll leave you alone. But that's not a nightmare. It's just mildly inconvenient. It's not hell.

Right.

It's not killing you. But we use these incredible words. This is torture. This is killing me. This is. This is a disaster. What is? Well, I went to the bathroom and I forgot to pause my movie. That's not a disaster. But when you use those words because your mind can't differentiate, to feel like it really is a disaster.

The flip side of this, the beautiful part, if we, when we understand and appreciate that our thoughts become reality, we can create the life of our dreams as well. We can start to manifest our thoughts by visualizing, by telling ourselves what we want, who we want to become.

Yeah.

Taking those actions toward it, we can manifest our dreams.

You really can. You can stop being ill. You can change the shape of your body. You can change your digestion. You can have physical things. You can Change the way you interact with your kids. So here's a good example. My kid is a nightmare. Change that to my child as age appropriate.

There you go.

That's. This builder's going to go, oh my God, that's a disaster. But a good builder will go, it's a challenge. When you said talking to girls is terrifying, you just change that. It's challenging. But hey, there's hundreds of girls out there. It's a numbers game. One will say yes, and even if they say no, the only risk in life is not to take the risk. That's the risk. If you don't. When you take the risk and it goes wrong, you learn something.

It gives you feedback for how to show up differently the next time. My girlfriend's a doctor of physical therapy. When she works on people, she would agree with everything you're saying because people's bodies are so tight. Not because of something they tore or something sore, but it's because they're holding on to something emotionally. And she says once they start to talk, their bodies relax and the pain goes away.

Yeah, I know pain where they can't.

Lift their shoulder, they can't turn their neck. Once they let it out, their feelings about their relationship or their insecurities or whatever it may be, that's when they have a pain free body.

Because the body keeps score. The body holds on to pain and stress and tension and grief and we carry around all this stuff and yet we really don't have to. If just more people knew even to say I'm enough every day and to say another of my favorite things is I'm choosing this and I'm choosing to feel great. I'm choosing to work on my website all week and I'm choosing to go to the gym. I don't love it, but I love having a six pack. I'm choosing to say no to Krispy Kreme doughnuts and yes to apples. Love Krispy Kremes, do you?

I could eat 12 of them right now. Oh, so good. But I choose the healthy.

Yeah. And if you say I'm choosing to do this and choosing to feel great about it, your mind has a very clear image. The way you feel about everything is down to two things. The pictures you make in your head and the words you say to yourself. There's nothing else. So if you choose to run, going, I'm running, so I'm raising money for charity. So I'm going to complete this run even though my feet hurt, my knee hurts because I'm going to raise money. But you could run going, oh, I hate this. I could be at home watching Netflix. I haven't uneaten. And then my knee hurts and then you'll have to stop. So when you keep saying, I'm choosing it because. Yeah, so if you're an Olympic athlete, you would choose to get up at 4am and train. If you are a diabetic, you choose to put a needle in your arm. If you wear lenses, you choose to jab your finger in your eye, but you don't go, oh, I hate it.

I don't.

I can't accept it and I can't change it. And when you say, I'm choosing to study, to work, I want to go and talk to this girl I really like, or to put good food in my body. And I'm choosing to feel great about that too. There is no resistance when you go, I want donuts and I can't have them. I got to eat this freaking rabbit food. What your mind does is it increases the desire for donuts. Because you said, I want donuts, but I can't have them. I want pizza. I'm eating kale.

I can't have these. But I choose to do this.

I can eat pizza every day. When I'm 95, I'm going to knock myself out with pizza. But right now I actually want to look really good in my clothes. Maybe out of them too. So I'll save the pizza when I'm 80, because that door is probably shut then anyway. Then you can have loads of pizza every day. But you have to reason with your mind and negotiate. And your mind will always do what it thinks you want. That's its job. And if you can only tell your mind what you want using relevant, up to the minute words, you'll get exactly what you want.

What do you struggle with telling your mind? Is there anything that you practice?

It took me a long time to tell my mind not to eat sugar. I still look at it and go, it looks so nice.

That's me.

But I still look at Canby. The other day I was really tired until I went into a shop to get a coffee and they had jars of jellies and I thought I could eat all of those, all of it, but I'm choosing not to. And I just had the coffee. So working out, you know, we're on a schedule sometimes. Just finding the time to go to the gym or do yoga or making the time. Yeah, that's probably the only two, really. Eating healthy food all the time, even on a Plane, even sometimes where there is no healthy food, then you've got to wait. Choosing to make myself excellent when I don't want to. But other than that, nothing really, because I couldn't do what I do unless I was really good at dialogue. My mind is my best friend. It's the best PA I've ever had and it does what I want because I give it clear instructions.

What do you say yourself on a daily basis? Is there like a process in the morning, afternoon and night or what it would be like?

Actually when I wake up, the first thing I would say is, I love the my life. I love my linen and I love my cup of tea. I always wake up going, I love my life. And then when I make my go, I love this tea, I love the coffee, I love the shower gel in my shower. Because I, I really believe that if you can make your mind get excited by little things, then big things. Every day is like Christmas. And I think when you wake up you should go, oh, what have I got today? Oh, a world of stress. I've got this, this, this, this, this. So you should always wake up and go, I love my life. I'm alive in a free country. I've got all this stuff to make tea and life is great. So I do that. The second thing I do is I tend to stay in bed and do all my emails because then I feel like I'm not working because I'm in bed, propped up, drinking my tea. And I get all of that out of the way. Yes, very relaxed, more relaxed, not stressed. I try not to have to rush to go to races, but sometimes I do. And I mean, I'm very lucky because I love what I do and I do say, you work really hard. I go, I've never worked a day in my life. I don't know what that is. I don't have to go, where's my life is a weekend. People say, oh, the weekend. I go, what's the weekend? I can take time off. I mean, I love my job because I get to make, make such a difference. So I don't really have much to moan about. Maybe communicating with my daughter is sometimes a challenge because I'm so positive that she occasionally wants me to be super negative.

Why is that?

Well, I guess because you have to be the opposite of your parents. So I do all these positive. She's an artist and she does lots of negative statements on her paintings, on her T shirts, because that's the deal. You've got to be the opposite of your parents. But I understand that. But she's great. But really I don't have much to complain about.

You have a positive conversation with yourself pretty much 24 7. What about a nightly routine? Do you have thoughts that you say to yourself?

Well, you see, for me, I really believe that first it's what you do and then it's who you are. So first you're doing it and then it's who you are and, and it's so who you are that it wouldn't occur to you to have to make yourself do it. See, I would never sit on the couch. My case is lost. I just know it. It's all going to go wrong. There's no cabs out there. This is a horrible flight. I now have a belief and it really shoots me that there's no such thing as being bored. If my flight is late, I mean, I just get on my laptop, on my phone, I mean It's, I have 24 hour entertainment, empty out my, my emails, look at something. The days of having to wait and being bored, even waiting in the car, my little phone is like everything. Books, messages, videos. And so I love that. I don't really mind about missing stuff and being late anymore. In fact, when I was last landing here two weeks ago, I was hoping because I was so into this movie, hopefully it's delayed.

Yeah.

When the pilot said we've got to go around to a film that's so great that that's exactly how long is left of this movie. But I think it's important for people to understand that it isn't what you do. It's a bit like people who say, I've done yoga every day and now it's just my soul. Like Meghan Markle said that yoga is in my soul. I don't do yoga. Yoga is part of my life. It's like you don't say, I walk my dog. If you've had a dog for 20, just get up, pick up the lead and it's who you are, not what you do. And so for me, it really isn't what I do because it's so a part of me and I like it. And so I'm quite lucky that I'm pretty happy and positive. But I really do love my life and that's a good thing.

Was there ever something in the last 10 years that questioned everything that you've done or that question your ability to say I love my life?

You know, I did get very sick like a year ago and I thought, wow, how could that happen? You know I'm so happy and positive and eat well. So I was a bit surprised when I got sick, but then I thought the same thing. The thinking, the belief. I decided I'd focus on massive healing. I kept telling my body that it was a cancer fighting machine. I was making all these NK killer cells. And I did actually go home the next day. I was on stage a week later, and my doctor was like, wow, you become the poster girl for just going on with your life. And now I look at one particular YouTuber and think, that's so bizarre. I had like major surgery just a week before that, and you'd never know. But again, it's a belief. I decided I do wellness. I said to the hospital, I need to go home. And I went and I got into my own bed. I watched Ray Donovan. I thought, this is it. I'm doing wellness here. I'm not going to lie in that bed where they keep trying to give you pills. And I didn't feel any pain at all because I just kept telling my body to heal itself. And then later I thought, maybe it's good I got that because I can help other people. And I go, look, you know, life throws stuff at you, but you get to choose how to deal with it. And even then I noticed that I was very positive because I, you know, I had actually got womb cancer. Stroke of luck. To get wound cancer, I don't need a womb. It's done its job. I've had a great kid. I talked to my womb and said, thanks for giving me this great kid, but now I got to get rid of you because I got to stay here and raise this great kid. And I thought, that's good. I mean, imagine if you get brain cancer or bone cancer. I felt very lucky. It was a disposable organ. They'd done a great job. I didn't need it. And so I think once you become like that, it's just who you are. So I never had, oh, my God, I'm gonna die. Because I thought, no, I'm not going anywhere. It is all perspective. I mean, I still, you know, people would say to me, but I thought you were so healthy. How could you get that? As it turns out, I have some. That same gene that Angelina Jolie has. But. But then, of course, Bruce Lipton would tell, you can turn off a gene, you can, you can mentally remove that gene. So even with adversity, because it's quite good in a way, because people think, oh, your life's just. You're like Pollyanna just Tripping along, having a wonderful life. That's not true. I've still had adversity. But your mind will always kick in when it's well trained. This is a blip. Just a blip. Just carry on. And so you got to train your mind like you train a horse.

What's the difference between the traumas that happened to us and the generational trauma that happened to our ancestors?

So the major difference is placed in biology. So there's a genetic component to intergenerational trauma. And so intergenerational trauma has this way in which there is a genetic transmission that happens from parent to child, really. And so it creates a predisposition to vulnerability, to stress.

Give me an example. What's a common example you see in your practice that is a generational story?

Well, I mean, you know, there are people that will come in and say, you know, ever since I was a child, it was, like, difficult to soothe. And I was, you know, I had, like, this hyperactivity. There's a lot of trauma survivors that also, like, believe that their symptoms coincide with adhd, because there's a lot of overlap in the experience experience in the symptomatology. So there's a lot of that. There's, like, people that, you know, reflect back to their childhood, and they say, like, I've always had, like, this experience that felt like I was always anxious. When we dig into the layers and we dig deep, we start noticing, okay, especially because I do a lot of, like, family tree work and, like, really going down the lineage to know, like, well, what are some of the trauma responses or what are some of the responses around also, like, inflammatory responses like depression, depression or anxiety or other kind of, like, mental illness kind of experiences that were held in the family. And when we start going down the family line and we start exploring not only their childhood and how they responded in their childhood, what their attachment patterns were in their childhood, but also how perhaps their mother had an inner child wound and the mother's mother had an.

Inner child, and they never healed it.

Never healed it expressed it as a trauma response. Yelled and screamed in the home, you know, had, like, emotional outbursts. What did that do? That actually created a disruption in the attachment that you could have had, like, in your childhood. It created an insecure attachment. You then went out into the world and experienced bullying, a pandemic, like, all kinds of things. And then that trauma, that trauma, you know, propensity or vulnerability got triggered out. And so now you are continuing the cycle of intergenerational trauma because it was modeled to you genetically, it was passed down.

And then, you know, now is it genetic or is it, let's say the mother breaks a cycle before she heals her trauma, the generational trauma, before she has her child, she can. And she creates an environment of peace, you know.

Yeah.

Is it the environment or is it the biology, the genetic code that is passed down? Because it's like these environments are kind of passed down. You witness your parents doing it. You just follow the pattern and you follow the environment pattern.

Yeah.

Is that genetic? Is that environment? What is both or it's both.

It's like, you know, for as long as psychology has existed, we've had like theories on nature.

Nurture.

Darwinism also kind of just started that. Right. Like way back when. So nature being like the biological aspects of our experiences and then nurture being like the social aspects of our experiences, and intergenerational trauma is really the only trauma that is situated at the intersection of both. So we have the nature side. Yeah. So, you know, on the nature side, the genetic expression, like we're getting a lot of information from like the field of epigenetics, which helps us understand how behavior like impacts genes. And so basically what happens is that let's say a mother, a mother has stress and depression in her life. Let's say that this mother is actually pregnant at five months gestation. So she's pregnant, she has a baby in utero. And because she's at five months gestation, that baby also has all the precursors sex cells that they're going to have for their lifetime, regardless of the whether it's male or female. They already have those. So the mother, she experienced chronic trauma her entire life. And so because that became the status quo, her genes re expressed. So her genes said, okay, this is the way that things are. We are a stressed body. And so because her genes are now saying we are predisposed to stress, that's being handed down to the baby in utero, actually at conception.

Wow.

So the baby is conceived into genes that are predisposed to stress. And because she is already still stressed while she's having this baby, all those stress hormones, namely cortisol, those are being passed down to the baby in utero. And what's happening to the precursor cells, those are also ingesting a lot of that stress environment. So you have three generations in one body genetically being passed down. The stress vulnerability, but also the social piece, the mother stress, you know, like she has all her things going on. She's predisposed to trauma, she's got all these things going while she's still pregnant.

Her environment is still stressful.

Yeah, yeah. And so everybody in that lineage of three generations in one body is experiencing stress.

Is it just three generations or is it like every generation that's had it?

Well, you know, like, I mean, I think it's a little bit of a chicken and egg kind of phenomenon when it comes to intergenerational trauma.

Right.

Like, it's like, who started it? Right. But I think I illustrate that because it's, I think, a little bit easier to see. Like, oh, well, maybe it started with mom. Maybe she was, you know, the person.

That maybe she had an extreme trauma and there was a reaction response.

Exactly right. And so now we at least get to see where the genetic line started from the trauma perspective.

When you think about it that way, you're like, man, I'm carrying the weight of, you know, multiple generations of trauma in my gen. Physical weight, actual weight that could get a little dark and heavy if you really put the emphasis on that. So how do we actually break that cycle once and for all where none of that trauma stays with us and we don't pass it down to our kids?

It definitely has to be a very like, whole system overhaul for most folks. Like, it has to be an integration of holistic practices in our day to day lives. Every single day.

Like a daily practice.

Every day. Can't waver on it because we got to think about what we're undoing. We're not just undoing the decades of.

Trauma that you experience.

Yeah, you're doing, you're undoing all the.

You really need to have a rebirth. It's like a spiritual, psychological, emotional nervous system rebirth, in my opinion. I feel like I've had a couple of them in the last decade. Ten years ago, kind of opening up about my sexual abuse trauma. And then in the last few years just dealing with all relationships in general, like all intimate relationships that I've had. I've never really faced them until a couple years ago. And I felt like I had to re. I had to emotionally, spiritually die in a sense. Psychologically, I guess.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Allow it to burn and then build from the ashes kind of psychologically. And it's a process. I'm not saying I finished it or whatever, but it's like a constant journey of going back to the different stages of childhood, healing each stage and integrating that age with my current self. So there's full integration and healing of every different memory from my life. That was a traumatic response. And it's been a beautiful journey that has allowed me to have peace and harmony on the inside, which I never had that until really 10 years ago. I didn't start feeling it, but until a couple years ago when I started feeling more and more peace on the inside. And it allows me to again see the world differently. I'm not saying I'm like, not triggered by things, but allows me to see it and say, okay, this sucks. How can I consciously communicate what I want to change? Not from a reactive, overwhelmed, stressed, traumatic state, which I feel like you can't really get much done from that state.

No, I mean, you can, you know, you can push things down and numb and still operate, you know, fairly well, but you can survive. All of that will come back because you're in survival mode still. Because numbing is still survival mode.

But you're not thriving, you're not creating an abundant life for yourself when you're in a traumatic response, are we?

No, not at all. I mean, I think, you know, abundance comes from being able to get into the depths of your soul. Right. So I love that you're talking about the more like psychospiritual angle, because that is definitely. I operate from a holistic angle. And so like a lot of the work that I do is very mind, body, spirit. And the spiritual piece is really essential because it's not, you know, just your, your connection to higher power is really just also your connection to yourself. When you're like really disconnected from your true authentic self, you're not living abundantly.

Yes.

And if we want generational abundance and we have to get into the depths of everything that's there, into the, the mud, if you may.

Yeah. And I think if you're, if you're triggered or have a nervous system response to a lot of things, you're constantly in a survival mode.

Right?

Yeah.

And it's hard to create an abundant. It's hard to dream from a place of survival. It's hard to create something beautiful from that place.

I mean, it makes a lot of sense even like, you know, from a biological perspective, like when we're in a nervous system response and that's, you know, survival mode. You're in a chronic nervous system overhaul. Right. So our nervous system is designed to actually make it so that whenever we are in a fight, flight, freeze, or fun, any non essential functions, any non essential, like organ functions, bodily functions, our brain, even like the cortical region of our brain, all of that is mildly shut down. So if you're talking about like alchemizing and creativity. And, like, all these things, those things require a lot of cortical, you know, structure, like, manifestation of, like, you know, all the things that you want, like, really requires for you to get into your creative mind. And if your cortical brain is not fully functioning in the ways that it, because it's in survival mode, then you're not really going to get to that actualization.

When the brain starts functioning in a level of order coherence, more neurons are recruited in bigger communities. And that kind of holism that's created is so important. The other thing we realize is that when people really heal their heart, they heal their mind. I have no doubt about that. You cannot do one without the other. And when there's enough energy in the heart.