Episode #201: Primal Trust with Dr. Cathleen King, DPT

Welcome to Better Health Guy Blogcasts. Empowering your better health. And now here's Scott, your Better Health Guy. The content of this show is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any illness or medical condition. Nothing in today's discussion is meant to serve as medical advice or his information to facilitate self treatment. As always, please discuss any potential health related decisions with your own personal medical authority.

Hello everyone and welcome to episode 201 of the Better Health Guy Blogcast series. Today's guest is Dr. Kathleen King and the topic of the show is primal trust. Dr. Kathleen King is a physical therapist who is passionate about teaching neuroscience based practices targeting the brain and nervous system. She is the founder and CEO of the Primal Trust Academy and Community. She weaves together brain retraining, vagus, nerve toning, somatic movement and trauma informed attachment repair techniques in her online worldwide platform. Her focus is to help people with self healing from chronic illness and trauma patterns. She personally found freedom from over a decade of debilitating health challenges and including chronic Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, mold toxicity, PTSD and more and has been presenting as an expert on nervous system healing to both traditional medical providers and mind body healing communities. And now my interview with Dr. Kathleen King. Today we have Dr. Kathleen King, the creator of Primal Trust, a platform for nervous system regulation, brain retraining. She created this program to help those dealing with chronic illness with pain, pain, stress and trauma. Thanks so much for being here today. Dr. Kat.

Thank you Scott. It's really nice to be able to have this interview. I've been listening to you for a long time, so it's an honor to be interviewed finally.

Thanks. That means a lot. So maybe before we dive in, would you like to lead us in a brief exercise to just kind of help regulate our nervous system and help to optimize our ability to really take in the information that we're going to talk about next.

Absolutely. Let's start off with the physiological sigh which is we're going to take a breath in, another breath in and a long exhale. We're going to do one more of those. Breathe in, breathe in again and exhale. And at the bottom of your exhale I want you to pump your belly button in and out. Squeeze that belly and imagine landing in your belly, finding your body. This is how we find and arrive in our body. Now feel your feet on the floor, wiggle and just say I'm here, I am here, I am listening. And then bring to mind some question that you have about Your situation that you're hoping gets answered today. Because when we have an intention and we put that in the field, often we receive. And I hope that you receive that answer.

Love that, Love that. Talk to us about your personal journey with Lyme disease, with mold toxicity, how chronic fatigue and all of these other issues you were dealing with really drove your passion for the work that you're doing today. And how much of a role did working with the nervous system play in your own healing process?

Yes, I was somebody who was sick and had the pile of diagnoses that went from doctor to doctor year after year. I was mostly bedbound a lot of the time just taking a shower was hard, you know, and I felt like my body had betrayed me. I didn't understand how it could be first. Viruses, parasites, Lyme mold, autoimmune, all the things that happen. And it's just like, what is happening. And I really wanted someone to fix me. I really wanted there to be a solution. But I was one of those people, Scott, who couldn't even tolerate the homeopathics. I was in such severe cell danger response. I could even handle Reiki and things. That was that person. And it got to the point where we ran out of money. I couldn't tolerate anything anyways. I was seeing the best doctors in the world and it was this real gut aching moment of like, they're not going to be able to fix me. I, I don't know what to do. And I kind of gave up. I was like, okay, I've got two little kids, they're missing out on their mother. I need to start learning how to live with this situation and make the best of it because nothing is working at that point. I, living in a dark, quiet room, I couldn't handle light, I couldn't handle sound, couldn't drive, couldn't, you know, I was just, you know. And a lot of people, I'm sure, relate and broke. And interestingly, in that moment, I just started to do very simple things. And I had this background as a physical therapist and I worked with mind, body, chronic pain. And I understood that the brain processed chronic pain. Fortunately, I didn't have chronic pain in my journey because I knew how to process pain. And I started thinking, what if my brain has more to do with this infection, this mold toxicity, than I've been told? And what if I could use some of my old tools that I used for my patients, for me? And sure enough, I started to see things shift and I was like, oh my gosh. And so I started Researching how does the brain and the nervous system influence our immune system, our detoxification system? How might my own self regulation help me? And I found a lot of great information out there with other pioneers in the field, like Annie Hopper and the Gupta program and the lightning process. And I had some of my own training with psych K and other memory reconsolidation practices. And I was like, okay, this is it. I can do this. It was something that was, you know, affordable for me. And I realized it was almost like the universe closed the doors on the medical system to force me inside with my own wisdom, on a different path and to learn how to re pattern my nervous system and then to teach it. And so my passion was fueled because I had to find another solution. And fortunately for me, putting, you know, all my efforts into this, I actually did start to heal and get my function back and know to the point where I could work and start a full practice of helping others. And, you know, that wouldn't have happened had that doctor fixed me or that pill fixed me. I wouldn't be offering what I'm offering. And so now, in hindsight, I see a purpose in those 10 years of not getting anywhere with that old paradigm to allow me to do what I'm doing today.

Don't you just love it when the universe sends us those messages? So talk to us a bit about the term primal trust. Where did that come from? What does it mean to resonate with the frequency of safety and connection and how that frequency then can, as you say, ignite the body's innate healing ability? What is primal trust?

Yeah, great question. So I was doing my nervous system work and my nervous system training, and I really started to get into more of trauma processing because I could feel that deep in my body, despite doing the brain retraining and vagus nerve toning and other things, that there was just this shakiness, this. This unease. And I had a mentor. Her name is Dorothy, and she's a sound healer. And she said, you know, I'm learning this new technique for trauma using sound bowls. And she played this sound bowl on my body, and my body was filled with this feeling that was like the most familiar, safe feeling. And I was like, what is that sound? That's the feeling that I need to recreate to heal. And she said, the name of this bowl is called Primal Trust. It's also the Schumann's resonance or the Earth's frequency. I'm like, that, that frequency, that vibration, I want to learn to self generate that. And so all of My efforts after that came to me. On with the thought. How can I create that feeling of innate safety? So primal trust, or the Schumann's resonance, is our connection to life itself. It's the frequency that runs life itself. And it's the frequency that when we are in it, we literally feel trust. Even in uncertainty or even in things that aren't going well, there's still this trust that life is for us. And so I think that this is a journey of remembering that we are supported by life. And so, to me, the antidote of what's happening is to carve what I call primal trust, or innate safety and connection.

Love that. I didn't know that story about the. The bowl.

Yeah.

And I think what. That's 7.83 hertz, if I remember correctly. The Schumann resonance. What are some of the more common factors that lead to limbic impairment to nervous system dysregulation? Are we talking primarily about infections, environmental toxicants, maybe stress or trauma ACEs or adverse childhood events? What are the primary triggers that you see of dysregulation in your clients?

Yeah, all of the above that you just stated. But I would say there's one personality type that tends to dominate this field, and it is the type A perfectionist, workaholic. Me too. Overachiever. It's a type that already is in sympathetic dominance, and it might look very functional. And the world gives you lots of praise for being that type. So it's reinforced to be in this. This functionally dysregulated state where we have actually lost contact with our body. And the cueing in our body, our insula communication with the prefrontal cortex is a little bit offline, meaning we're not paying attention to our body signals. And hearing when we need to rest, hearing when we need to talk slower, hearing when we need to not be researching, but instead just looking at the clouds, We've lost that. And so that is a classic setup, combined with a perfect storm of a pathogen or toxin or massive life change that sets us up to. To trigger off that cell danger response, and then we can get stuck in chronic symptoms.

Yeah, it's funny. I just had this conversation with Dr. Neil Nathan in episode 200 about the type A personality, and he completely agreed. And I used to joke with people that I had never seen a surfer dude that was on the beach that got bit by a tick and developed chronic Lyme disease. And then it did actually happen. And so my story was kind of ruined at that point, but for the most part, it's all Type A perfectionist overachievers that I end up talking with. So that's interesting. You see the same thing. What are some of the conditions where primal trust has been helpful? Are we talking about chronic Lyme mold? Maybe mast cell activation syndrome, pots, other dysautonomias, EMF sensitivity, long Covid. Like, what are the kinds of conditions that people are reaching out to you and your program for? And are there some conditions that you see respond better to primal trust than others?

Yeah. First of all, all of those that you just named are definitely the top conditions that we see. But I've been surprised. I mean, various autoimmune conditions and other types of weird diagnoses I haven't heard about seem to be helped. And when you think about it, it makes sense. Our autonomic nervous system runs the show for our, you know, for our health in general. And targeting the autonomic nervous system, regardless of what's going on, it seems that most people do have a significant improvement when they come into balance with that autonomic nervous system, despite their diagnosis. So I usually tell people, like, look, regardless of what you've been diagnosed with, most likely your nervous system has some influence on that organ cell situation, and you can improve that. Now, the people that I see have a difficult time with this twofold. One is somebody who feels like this kind of work would invalidate their medical diagnoses. They have a hard time getting on board with this, which is why in the very first module, I teach everything through the lens of cell danger response. When I first learned that theory back in 2019, that was like, this is what validates doing nervous system work and is not invalidating in any way. So any of you listening, looking up Robert Navio's research will validate why targeting the autonomic nervous system doesn't mean that this is all in your head. It's a very physiolog biological process that's happening. The second person where I see that these kind of tools are hard for them is if they are still in an environment in some way that's incredibly toxic for them, whether they're truly living in massive black mold or their relationships are so toxic that they can't get an ounce of regulation in them. And so getting into an environment where there is some type of safety, whether it means you're having to clean up the mold because you can't move, or. Or you're having to work on those relationships in some way so that you aren't being constantly triggered. I see. Those are the two things that might limit somebody's progress.

Yeah, no, I think that's great. And we'll talk more about the environment in just a bit, maybe. One of the other questions I would have, just briefly for you is sometimes people are just resistant to doing these kinds of programs. They don't believe that it's going to work. And so usually I feel like the likelihood is that it's not going to work as well as it could. If they come into it with that mindset, I'm wondering if that's true or if you feel like no, it absolutely still will have the same effect.

I think the majority of time you're right. We know the science behind the placebo and nocebo effect. It is proven that our beliefs are actually this one of the strongest indicators on our outcomes. And so having a belief that this won't work, we like to prove our beliefs true. Now, every now and then, I get somebody who said, my doctor sent me, and I just think, this is a load of crap, but I'm going to do it anyway. There was one recently. I've got an interview with her. They were going to remove 80% of her colon. And they said, this is the last thing I want you to try before surgery. And she's like, what? That sounds ridiculous. I'll show you. In four months, her colon completely healed. No medication, completely recovered. Something triggered in her, though. In the process of starting to do this, she started to notice a shift for the first time in years. She's like, oh, my gosh, this is working. And then her belief did shift, and, you know, it was a recovery road from there. So the belief did end up shifting because she did see symptom change.

I saw the testimonial of the naked lady in the wilderness, who ultimately, her doctor was impressed that she could wear clothes to their appointment. That was an interesting one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was Dr. Boslow, who I think you interviewed recently.

I love him. He's great.

Me too.

Mentors such as Dr. Neil Nathan suggests that we need to work on both the limbic system and the vagal nerve, the vagal system, vagal toning simultaneously in order to really optimize our healing. I think there's been a lot of tools that maybe focus on the limbic system. There's lots of emerging tools in the vagal support realm as well, but there aren't very many that actually overlap into both. So does primal trust support both the limbic system and tonification of the vagal system?

Yeah. You know, when I first started researching all of These ideas behind working on the brain to target immune and detoxification, I saw right away holes because I do have a background as a somatic physical therapist and I understand the way that the vagus nerve is constantly communicating to the brain. The vagus nerve, you know, might be sensing cytokines in the body and sending messages back up to the brain saying hey, we need to get an immune response going and vice versa. The brain is constantly sending messages down into the body. I know from working with chronic pain that you've got to do this brain body communication reset. And so it just made sense to me that of course with chronic illness, this brain body communication both needed to be on board, especially if somebody's been dealing with trauma, which most of us are. And so for me it was a no brainer. And I immediately, I never did just brain retraining. I started actually first of all with vagus nerve toning functional neurology exercises, because that was my background. I had learned those to help people stabilize their upper cervical. I knew how important those were to help stimulate the vagus nerve and get blood flow going to the brain. And then I did the brain retraining and then I added a lot more somatic vagus nerve toning right away. And I think that was part of my success. And what's interesting is getting both the brain and the body communicating together. That's how we can actually start dealing with the trauma that's stuck in the body that might be driving that underlying alarm bell to the limbic system in the first place. I find that brain retraining alone. I started off coaching a lot of people that were just doing brain retraining and they were doing self regulation, but it was almost a form of escapism because they could not handle feeling their body. They would feel symptom and immediately go and do the brain retraining and think about rainbows and unicorns. And I'm like, this can't keep triggering you like this or it's going to be hard to live. You're going to be brain retraining all day long and that's just not functional. Or they couldn't handle their partner or their relationship or their job because they couldn't handle the feelings in their body. And so to me, I, I, I saw that this, this was needed and this combined approach was necessary.

So let's talk a little about how primal trust could be helpful for people in a cell danger response where the body has essentially shifted into this protective hypometabolic state. I kind of think of this as being in Florida, hurricanes coming, you pull down the hurricane shutters and then you never become brave enough to open them again. Right. You just constantly leave them down in that overly protective state. So can primal trust support the body in moving out of this protective state and into a state of feeling safer either in our internal world or. Emile, you. Or in our body as well as in our external world. Talk to us a little about how primal trust can help move someone through the stages of the cell danger response and back to the health cycle.

I think that popular phrase as within, so without, as above, so below makes sense here in that if our, if our nervous system, our emotional system is in this hunkered down protective response because we have been either hurt by or whatever, or we're so scared about our diagnoses that we are in a protective danger response, it makes sense to me that our cells are literally doing the same thing. And so it also makes sense that if we're wanting our cells to open up the shutters and breathe and allow nutrient exchange, that we, our consciousness, our nervous system, needs to do the same thing and communicate all the way down to the cellular level. I'm willing to open up to life again, even though it's imperfect. I' to be a little vulnerable. And that vulnerability is the same as the cells opening up and being vulnerable, but also allowing nutrients to go in and out. And, you know, cell danger response has different stages to it. And the same thing is with our nervous system. I see different stages that need to happen to carefully and sequentially learn to trust life again. And so we walk people through different stages in the process.

I like the way you said kind of walking them sequentially through the process, because one of the things that Neil Nathan, which I really liked, as he said, the goal isn't necessarily to feel safe, but the goal is to feel safer and that we live in a world where there's all kinds of things that are happening. We don't necessarily need this huge unattainable goal of feeling completely safe, but to support healing, we need to feel safer. I've actually had some opportunities to listen to Bob Naviaw speak about cell danger response. And my understanding is that he's pretty open to the idea that these kinds of. Of programs can actually influence cell danger response. And so I think that's exciting. Talk to us a little bit about something that you alluded to earlier. When we're in this cell danger response or this heightened stress state, how that might block detoxification, how that might reduce our assimilation of nutrients, our ability to manage or address chronic infections. Do you think that people are better able to detoxify, to respond to chronic infections when they're doing a program like Primal Trust? And if we think of the chronic illness as an overflowing bucket, can Primal Trust be another drain in the bucket, so to speak, so that we can open that drain to create more margin in the bucket and thus reduce our symptoms?

Yeah. So I'm not an expert in cellular biology, but I like to explain it simply. When we're in that cell danger response, our cell walls literally harden. Like I said, you're kind of hunkering down. You described it well. Well, if the cell wall is hardened, it would make sense that we're not able to absorb a lot of the supplements we're taking. Right? It would make sense that if they're hardened, we're not also excreting the toxins that are inside the cell, the molds, the metals, et cetera. So in order to get that nutrient exchange again, we've got to get that hardened response to open up. And so Primal Trust and the tools of toning the vagus nerve, addressing the limbic system, is literally doing that. We're trying to get space in the nervous system, we're trying to get our nervous system to open up to life, and we're trying to establish the sense of purpose and desire to live. And I think that there's something that translates all the way down to the mitochondrial level of, instead of the purpose of the ATP to be to signal protection, what if the purpose becomes to thrive and live, Even with a little bit of substance in the system that might not be ideal, meaning a little bit of pathogen and toxin, etc. It's almost like we have to convince ourselves that despite having substances in our body that may have triggered cell danger response, we're still willing to open up and live. Same thing in our relationships. Despite being in imperfect relationships, we're willing to open up in love. Again, I see this, this, you know, as above, so below that, that, that idea that how we live is mimicked in our cellular biology. And. Yes. So the bucket. You asked about the bucket. Absolutely. You start feeling more open to life, you start improving your heart rate variability, you start improving your heart brain coherence. There is a, literally a signal change in your field, an electromagnetic shift in the field when you are open. And they also describe that cell danger response is triggered when the mitochondria notice a voltage shift. And I have a theory that when our heart brain is incoherence we are creating a voltage shift in our system. Maybe that voltage shift is translating all the way down into the mitochondrial level. Again, this is a theory that as our frequency changes, the mitochondria may be picking up on that shift and saying, oh, it's time to thrive instead of protect.

Another concept that Dr. Nathan talks about that I believe also came from the cell danger response work is this idea that if we've lived with chronic illness for a long period of time, that we kind of habituate to the illness and then any attempt to move us towards healing is in it of itself perceived as threatening and resisted by the body. So wondering if primal trust can create that sense of safety in becoming healthy again so the body is better able to more smoothly switch gears from an illness to a healing type vibration without grinding the clutch, so to speak.

One of the biggest tenets of our educational model is to expect a bumpy ride in healing and I repeat, the science and the understanding behind this a lot because as we start healing there is often a bumpy ride. The system is addicted to the stress chemistry. Our cells, our receptor sites are set up for a ton of cortisol and other sorts of neurotransmitters and hormones that are there because of stress and illness. And as we start to shift away from that, there's a withdrawal, there's a sense of this is not safe. And then on a deep level of our psyche there might be things that are triggering about getting healthy again and going back into the world. Like, what if I have to do it all again? What if I have to work so hard? What if they expect more of me? And so there is often a lot of resistance both cellularly and psychologically to our healing that I like to bring into the awareness so that those on this journey know what to expect. They know why the bumps are happening and they're, they're better suited to handle them from there rather than, you know, just saying, oh yeah, do these tools and you're going to get better, you're going to, it's going to be up and down is what's going to happen and to expect that. And that's normal.

I remember when I was still working in the corporate world and eventually started working more from home to support my recovery. And even then I had this question in my mind of, well, if I start getting comfortable to working at home, is my body then going to keep the illness so I don't have to go back to work? Right. And, and, and those kinds of things obviously really do happen. If we think of the body as a supercomputer and illness as a computer that that's full of viruses and malware. Can something like primal trust essentially remove these factors that are preventing the computer from running optimally and then also essentially reboot, as Dr. Nathan likes to say, reboot the system so that we have a fresh start towards optimal health?

Good question. This was a question that was a real hang up for me in keeping me from doing this work initially. And that that nervous system work isn't directly grabbing those viruses and pathogens and toxins and taking them out. Nervous system work is giving the body space to do that process. So it's an indirect addressing of the toxins and viruses and pathogens, et cetera. And for me, at first, I couldn't get on board with doing this if it wasn't going to directly kill or directly, you know, grab ahold of things. But that indirect pathway of teaching the nervous system that it is safe to come back into detoxification, Regulating the immune response, calming down the signals of distress, yes, you can absolutely address infection and toxin indirectly with nervous system work. As we get more space in the nervous system, as we get our vagus nerve communicating with our brain, as we get our software functioning differently by dialing down the stress of the limbic system. That is is the reboot of the nervous system that I think Dr. Nathan is talking about a different signaling from the autonomic nervous system getting sent to those cells that says, this is different now, Danger is passing or has passed and we can start doing things differently.

You have in the past talked about your own initial resistance to brain retraining in your own healing process. So talk to us about why you were resistant to it. And then what happened that led you to shift your perspective to be being more in resonance with work in this realm?

Yeah. Such a good question. Boy, was I mad when people would tell me to do an urban system work. For years. I remember my therapist saying, I think the majority of your lyme symptoms would decrease if you would work through your trauma and your triggers. And I, I mean, I swore at him, was like, this is real. I've got lab tests to prove this. This is a real infection. And so what that means is I really wanted validation for my suffering. And I think that there's a lot of us who grew up in a lot of trauma that was completely invalidated. And somehow on a deep psychological level, sometimes when we are in this process of we don't know what's wrong and we are being invalidated by the medical system, it can almost re. Traumatize our earlier experiences of not being seen, heard and understood. And until we are seen, heard and understood, it is very difficult for somebody to do this nervous system work. I find that over and over, they need validation, they need understanding, understanding. And so that's part of what we're doing in our program, is to help validate what is happening so that then that part of your psyche can get on board to allow you to take the responsibility that you can to self heal. And so for me, the reason why, like I said at the beginning, all the doors to having somebody else fix me were shut and I really couldn't get anywhere. I. I was just left with me and I had these two kids and I was like, okay, I have to face this. This discomfort inside of me of, you know, working on my nervous system and maybe having my family say, see, it was all in your head, because my kids are missing out on their mother. So it was sort of like I was backed in a corner. And then I started to see shifts. And that's when I started to see shifts. I was like, I don't care if this is in my head. They're getting their mother back. And so that's why I changed course.

I think there is a lot of resistance to these programs because it brings people back to that invalidation. Twenty plus years ago, when I was going from doctor to doctor and the number of doctors that referred me to psychologists or psychiatrists or whatever had no real answers was many, I could have started a referral service, I think. And so when we then say, well, go do some limbic system or brain retraining, I think people kind of jump back to that. Oh, you're telling me that it's all in my head again. And the way that I look at it now is it might all be in your head, but it's in your brain, it's not in your mind. Right. And that's a different thing. Like it can be biochemical. If someone had a brain tumor, we wouldn't necessarily say, oh, well, I feel invalidated because you're telling me it's all in your head. Right. It is a physical thing. And yet a lot of times it seems that people jump to the conclusion that you're telling them that it's a mental, emotional issue, which is not always, always the case. Yeah, yeah. So what is psychoneuroimmunology? And how does the mind affect the physical body? And then what do you mean when you say that the brain becomes addicted to your worry as a way to Establish some level of control. Is surrendering to the unknown better than fighting the known? I feel like that's a deep question.

It is a deep question. That's the existential question. But psychoneuroimmunology, it's a newer neuroscience model that studies the relationship between the immune system, the endocrine system, the central and peripheral nervous system, and how they're always in communication with each other. Like I said earlier, for example, the vagus nerve is going to pick up signals that cytokines are being released in the body from an immune response and send messages back up to the brain. And the brain will also create some cytokines. But stress can affect the brain and literally cause the brain to release cytokines, which then can trigger the vagus nerve to release cytokine. So we know that emotions and stress can trigger this immune response, just like a pathogen. And that's what is just so fascinating. And I, I teach this a lot, that some of your symptoms could be that brain body signaling of stress that's signaling the immune response on replay. And that that understanding was huge for me. And that's why sometimes people will do these brain retraining and nervous system practices, and their fever, flu like symptoms will all of a sudden decrease. And they're like, oh, wow, that's fascinating. And so I think this is why we have really good results with people with chronic infection. In primal Trust, we are not directly targeting these bacteria or whatever. We are targeting that brain body, immune response. The second question, the existential question. Yes, our brain can get addicted to worry. Why? When we worry and we think about what might happen, we create a scenario in our head that is a form of certainty, meaning this is a potential reality that I can think about and even be certain about. And in that certainty, we release dopamine. And the brain wants certainty. It doesn't like not knowing. It needs to make an association. It needs to know where it's going. So the brain automatically worries to help calm, kind of like calm the system in a way. Even though it's not calming, it's an addictive calming. But our consciousness, which is different than the brain replaying these things, this awareness part of us can get the practice of, I'm okay with uncertainty, I don't need to worry and figure out all of the potential scenarios. And it's a little bit of a withdrawal game because again, you're not getting the dopamine of worry, the dopamine of certainty. You're literally sitting in that existential, unknown and primal trust that life has that whatever life brings you, you can and will be able to respond to in some way. And that's the cycle that we need to break. The last part you asked, is surrendering to the unknown better than fighting to the known? I would say that every deep spiritual, philosophical practice of all time is trying to get us to that. Surrender of the unkn unknown is a way to decrease suffering. They say that suffering is literally the resistance to what is the resistance to what is. And if we can get to that point of being non resistant to not only what is, but what will be, our suffering decreases. And when suffering decreases, we make space for love. We make space for the present moment. And we make space for having, having a human experience that even though there might be difficulty, has more peace to it.

I love that. Yeah, that statement about the brain becoming addicted to your own worry. I mean, historically I'm a huge ruminator and you know, it's taken a lot of work over the years to become less of a ruminator. And yet, you know, I think sometimes if that's just how we're wired, we're, we're going to kind of want to default back into that and then have to recognize that, you know, that's, that's not necessarily the healthy response. How, how does a fix it mentality lead to continuous running of these programs that are aligned with or creating stress chemistry? And why is it more important to focus on transformation rather than fixing?

Such A good question. When I first started coaching, I realized that everyone coming to me was doing their practices with a fix it mentality, which is really the same consciousness of taking the pill, the protocol. It's like Albert Einstein said, like you can't solve a problem with the same consciousness that created the problem. And so I started to highlight in the brain retraining community, stop doing this from a fix it mentality. When we are trying to get our symptoms to go away or fix our symptoms versus improving our life, improving our reaction, improving the cells. In other words, when we are trying to fix our symptoms, that is something that we do not have direct control of. We cannot directly control our symptoms. But when we are seeking to grow, to expand beyond that old version of ourself that was maybe stuck in trauma patterning, and we're trying to grow to experience more love, to experience more trust. We're using these tools to affect things that we can, which is our consciousness. I see using these tools as an attempt to return to our true nature versus fix a problem that we cannot directly solve. I think it's super Nuanced, but it's our attempt to expand and experience life differently and grow versus to get away from what we don't like.

Love that. It's interesting, the Einstein quote that you used. I was just listening to a lecture with Jill Christa, who's another big mentor of mine, and she commented, what got you here is not what is going to get you there. Right. Basically the same. The same idea. So it's interesting. That's come up twice for me this week. Better be paying attention. Right? So let's talk more specifically about Primal Trust, the nervous system regulation, neural retraining system that you developed. What are the three levels of Primal Trust? And then there's also five steps in the primal trust trust process as well. So maybe just give us an overview of what's incorporated in those three levels. The five steps, do they overlay on top of each other? And then what's the time frame for how people move through the three levels and the five steps?

When I read Robert Navio's work on the three step of cell danger response, I. I wanted to put together a pattern that is mimicking that through the lens of the nervous system. So, so step one, level one is all about really educating people of what's going on. And the beginning of let's see if it's safe to begin feeling safe. That beginning stage of like, okay, this was the danger. We understand what happened and now how do we understand tools and practices to begin convincing our body that it's safe to start feeling safe? Life. Okay. And so level one is. It's usually about seven weeks long, but a lot of people like to take their time through it. So seven weeks to 14 weeks on average. And you're going to learn a lot of tools. Over 40 different tools. No, you don't do all 40 every day. I want you to have a toolkit to pick what resonates for you. So level one is building your nervous system toolkit to practice feeling safe. Level two, this is where we start getting into the inner work, where we start digging deep into what's been there in the first place. In cell danger response, we're doing deeper detox work. In our work, we are pulling up those trauma patterns that were driving the stress response in the first place. So we call it the inner work or the mentorship, where you're learning to recognize the deep triggers that have probably been there your whole life. That perfectionism, overachieving people, pleasing literally is the underlying alarm bell of your symptoms and then discovering the antidote. What way of living or what perspective of life would unravel a lot of these patterns within you? Who is it that is the highest version of you? In other words, the first level is about calming the nervous system. Level two is about becoming a better version of you. And by better I mean not good or bad, but a more aligned and more true version of who you are are repatterning your trauma responses. Level three, cell danger response. That's about mentoring, where older cells mentor younger cells. It's about communication and community coming back online. Same thing in our level three. It's about community, where I have a lot of people mentoring others. It's about getting back into work in our relationships and supporting each other in that process. I also outline five different stages or steps in the process. First of all, we are building a foundation. That means we're building a foundation for understanding what's happened. We build the foundation through the cell danger response lens, the polyvagal lens, the limbic system impairment lens and the somatic experiencing lens. So we're using all of those education pieces for a full comprehensive understanding of what got you sick in the first place. Also with the perfect spirit Storm, we're giving you tools. That's the second step here. So you're going to get tools to handle these things, you're going to learn the tools, you're going to self master these tools and learn how to apply them. So that's the third stage, the practice of applying them, of knowing which tool to use when, in what sequence, in what order. You're not going to go right into processing your trauma before you even know how to tone your vagus nerve or you'll kind of blow your circuits. And a lot of people do that. I did that for years and I see that as a huge issue in the nervous system healing world. People who are not educated out there teaching nervous system regulation, that have no clinical practice, no understanding, and literally blowing the circuits of people by having them process trauma before they have any resourcing within their nervous system. And so after applying the tools and learning how to do that, that's when we're doing that deeper healing work. That's when we can explore the trauma, when we can feel the attachment wounding because we have enough space and resilience in the system to feel the feels without putting ourselves back into a limbic vigilant response, which is what happens when you do trauma work too early. And then the last stage is reemerging into the world transformed. That's embodying that version of you that has a different pattern than the version of you that was sick. The version of you that's more balanced, that's less of an overworker, perfectionist. The version of you that knows how to live that polyvagal wave through the day of activity, rest, activity, rest. That knows how to respond differently to your trauma patterns.

So give us a little more insight into some of the tools you mentioned. There's 40 or more that people use in the program to regulate their nervous system. I would have said to retrain their brain, but I think now we've learned it's also about the body. So what is the user doing each day? How much time each day do we need to commit to working the program, to making get successful? And, and maybe I'll rephrase that because working sounds like a type A personality. So how much time do we need to enjoy the program each day to be successful? How long do most people actually stay in the program? And is there kind of a point where they graduate and they're done? Or are we ideally using these tools now as part of our daily routine in our lives long term?

So I like to help people think of these tools as lifestyle, self care, body attunement practices that we all should have been taught in kindergarten. So every day, some type of elevation practice, whether that's brain retraining, meditation, mindfulness, some way of working on your conscious perception, every day some type of work focusing on your breath. Breath is one of the number one ways to target the vagus nerve. And it could be very simple practices or it can be more complex. It could be part of the elevation practice. And every day moving your body in some way and getting in touch with the somatic system. So those three tenets to me are important as a daily lifestyle practice and how you do that. There's a lot of ways of doing that. And you can switch it around, you can keep the same thing. How long each day, again, it depends on the person. I really like to give myself an hour in the morning to really attend to me. And I don't see it as something I have to do. It is like it is, it is me time. It's how I love myself. It's how I get to know myself. It's how I get to expand my awareness. It's how I get to work through my triggers. And so I really, I really encourage people to take an hour a day. Now maybe that's 15 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes at lunch, 15, you know, you're spreading it through the day. Some people, when they're first Starting this is a lot for them. And I have them start literally like five or ten minutes a day. Just because targeting the nervous system itself can be triggering, it's not safe to feel safe. So we start them off very slowly. We have a simplified daily practice and we have a comprehensive daily practice and you can, you know, exchange those sorts of things as you go through the program. You could start simplified and then move into the list that's more comprehensive. But I really try to give you education to make it your own. I try to teach you the principles behind what we're doing. So you're not following Kathleen's program. You're learning principles and you're making it your own. Maybe you go off and learn these principles and you do another program or read another book and you, you're doing those practices, but you understand the principles of elevate, breathe, move your body every day. So the length of time, level one, like I said, said, seven weeks to 14 weeks on average. Level two, I would say two, sometimes up to five months, people work on those trauma patterns. Level three, it's really as long as you want to be there or you don't have to be there. So a lot of people stay for six weeks or so and watch the videos and some people stay literally for years because they have community. And it just depends, you know, you can get in and out, like I told you, in under two months. Months. You can take level one and download the workbook and work on that for a while and then come back for level two. It doesn't need to be an expensive journey. You can make this efficient for you. And so we do allow all of the workbooks to be downloaded. And we're actually just about to come out with a whole new quick start guide for level one and level two, which is going to be even more simplified, very visual. You can download those and get examples of daily practices. We're trying to make the program more and more user friendly and more and more affordable and efficient.

How much does our response to our condition further drive the condition to persist? Meaning if our response to our situation is fear, does that fear itself then contribute to the persistence of the chronic illness? And does becoming less fear based and feeling safer then become a prerequisite for healing?

This is such a good question. I like to explain this in terms of a first reaction and a second reaction. Let's say the first reaction is the toxin, the pathogen, et cetera, triggering the brain and the nervous system, causing a symptom. The second reaction is our response to that symptom to that experience. And that second reaction is often the fear and the stress. And that second reaction is going to tell the brain, this is super dangerous, this is not okay. And that puts you back down into even more cell danger response. So what I, meaning the autonomic nervous system is like now sending even more signals to the cells to hunker down. What I see is if you can really focus your consciousness, these tools on that second reaction, what you can control, you can't control that first reaction of how these toxins, pathogens, et cetera, might be targeting your system, system, but your response to it, you can biohack that response. And I see this with thousands of people through addressing the limbic system, the vagus nerve, et cetera, and send a message of safety, despite the cells getting that message of threat. And there's something in that second response that dials down that cell danger response, allowing people to heal. So absolutely, this way of retraining our fear response is what helps to contribute to the healing, healing process.

I love this. This is one of the things that I just enjoy about the podcast is I learned so much from these conversations, and so this is just amazing. Most of our listeners will have heard of the fight or flight and sympathetic dominance, which works against rest, digest, detoxify, and heal. I think listeners may be a little less familiar with the freeze response and the shutdown response. So where do freeze and shutdown come into the chronic illness landscape? How do you these fight, flight, freeze and shutdown responses overlay onto the polyvagal ladder. And once we realize that we're in more of a dorsal vagal, shutdown, overwhelm response, or in a sympathetic dominant state, how do we then climb the ladder and move towards a ventral vagal response, a safe and okay nervous system state?

Yes, good question. So if you think of a ladder with several rungs, the top of the ladder is our safety and connection. A little bit down is our fight and our flight response that you were describing. A little bit down further is our freeze response, which is in between this sympathetic fight flight and our dorsal vagal shutdown. It's actually a mixture of your one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake. So the freeze response. And then below that is your shutdown, meaning you're just. The vagal break is fully on. The nervous system says, I can't even handle the sympathetic energy anymore. We need to just shut down our systems. And so that's. That's a really hard place to be in. That's when you don't have Energy, you feel hopeless. You're just, you know, lost. So when we realize that we are in more of that dorsal vagal shutdown and it doesn't feel good. It's like everything is a threat. You're super overwhelmed, you have no energy. How do you climb back up the ladder? Well, Scott, unfortunately, the only way through is through. So you have to climb back up, up, through sympathetic before we get to the ventral vagal. And that can be uncomfortable. Again, this is the bumpy ride that I teach them. As you start to move out of dorsal, when we usually do this through like very slow movements. Careful orienting to your space to see that your current space is safe, noticing the resources that you have. I have food, I have water. Those are the things that start to pull us out of shutdown. So we have to really show the nervous system in that stage that it is safe to allow ourselves to begin to feel safe. Then we start to mobilize. And as we mobilize energy, we, we work up the ladder a little bit and we start getting into that sympathetic. And that's going to feel maybe like anxiety. It might feel like insomnia, and it might not feel good, it might feel like anger. And now a lot of people don't like those feelings. And they'll actually get that second reaction which is, oh no, this isn't good. And it will slam them back down the ladder into dorsal vagal. And so a lot of education on the polyvagal theory is so important here, Scott, because if they do not understand that they have to feel those feels and find safety in the insomnia, in the anxiety, in the anger, they need to find that safety to climb up the ladder. And that's where learning your nervous system tools really comes into play day so that you can fully move out of that dorsal bagel.

So many people these days are dealing with various gastrointestinal issues. We hear a lot about SIBO and sifo, and it's been my opinion that SIBO is not about killing a bug, that the bug is really the result or the overgrowth is the result and not the cause. We need to look more upstream to the nervous system, to bile flow, to migrating motor complex, all of those things to really bring longer term resolution to many of these GI issues. We know the vagus nerve plays a role as well. So how might primal trust and regulating the nervous system support the either resolution or improvement of various gastrointestinal issues?

Yes, great question. You know, I was one of those people that tried everything for years to heal my Gut being extremely stressed out, and it. It didn't work. And. And I now have seen literally hundreds of testimonials of people with sibo where it went away after targeting their nervous system and specifically their vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is what's regulating all of that motility. You get your vagus nerve online, you get that brain body communication back online. The body's intelligent. It gets the motility more regulated, and the body comes into balance. So, yeah, 100%. These nervous system tools, I feel very confident, can help with sibo. It's one of the things that I see clear up the easiest, actually, as people get regulated.

One of the criticisms, or maybe resistances to some of these types of healing approaches has been the perception that people have that the creators of these systems are saying, if you just do my system, you can live in your moldy house and you will be well. And I don't think. And you alluded to this earlier, I don't think that's what anyone is really saying. That may be what people are hearing, but the question is, is it still important to consider the external environment around us and to optimize and improve that in support of the work that we're doing with Primal Trust? Or does our kryptonite now have no influence over us when we're doing this program?

Yeah. Such a good question. Well, my own personal experience is this. I was living in mo mold. I couldn't afford to move. But what I did was I got a gray air filter and cleaned up what I could, and my function did improve, even though I still had symptoms. In other words, I had no function hardly. And I had symptoms. And initially, with doing the brain retraining and the other nervous system work, my function did start to improve. In other words, that second reaction I was describing, Scott, I was able to start calming down the feedback loop and. And moving me out of at least some level of cell danger response. As that happened, I was able to tolerate binders and saunas and able to handle what I was, what I was doing. We moved into another house that was a little less moldy, but still moldy because I was in the Pacific Northwest. And again, more function came back as I continued with the brain retraining, training. So what I say to people is, I do see. Now, I will say there are some cases where I see people heal in their mold, in their environment. They couldn't move, and they give this everything they've got. I don't know exactly what's happening. Maybe their function, that cell danger Response gets so good that their function is high, their symptom levels are super low, and they're not registering them. Does that mean they're not building up mold in the system? I have no idea. I just know that they become functional and they claim that they feel like they have their life back. I've seen that. I've heard lots of testimonials of that. Even myself, I did get a good amount of function by doing this work religiously because I had to. However, when I moved out of mold, I could feel a difference. Meaning I had my function really high. I'm running Primal Trust. I moved to the desert and I'm like, oh, I feel more clear. I didn't know that there was. You know, you get so used to feeling this way way that it becomes normal to have some lack of clarity. But I had my function, so I was okay. So I do think that ideally we do move out of mold. If now, here's another thing, I'll say some people cannot even afford to do these remediations, etc by getting your function better living in mold, maybe you can get some more work eventually. And as you get more work, you'll have more income so that you can address the mold. You might be able to, you know, be able to afford the treatments or a sauna or whatever that you might need. And so it's not like all hope is lost because you're there. I do see that second reaction response cause significant increase in function, even if some symptoms remain. And with that function, you have more resourcing to help clean up the situation.

That makes total sense to me. And the way that I've heard Neil Nathan, who obviously is one of my biggest mentors, the way that I've heard him talk about this, is that if you're living in mold, obviously there are some things that we can do, air filters and so on. But he would say, you can get better, but you will not get well.

Right? Yeah.

POTS and dysautonomia are common issues these days. I used to think of it more as a Bartonella or Babesia type issue, but now we see it a lot in people with COVID and long Covid. So how has supporting the nervous system regulation side of things improved or even resolved dysautonomia or POTS in the clients that you're working with?

Yeah, it's definitely one of the more common symptoms that we see. And I do see people absolutely resolve it with nervous system work. I think that POTS is complex. There's a lot happening in the brain but there's also a lot happening with our somatic coordination of our vascular pumping mechanisms. And what I mean by that is that I think that nervous system work toning the vagus nerve, things like that, help with the, these vascular pumping mechanisms becoming back online as well as the somatic work and the other things that we're teaching. So I think it's a multifaceted thing. I don't know exactly what mechanism is, you know, triggering the healing, but I do see it happen. I see it happen even better when people are doing somatic work and we teach a lot of these, like various squeeze and contract relaxation exercises to improve the coordination of the system system. So, yeah, 100%, I do see that, that, that situation resolve with, with people doing this work.

I want to come back a little bit to the cell danger response. And we know that in that model that mitochondria release extracellular ATP or ATP that then goes outside the cells, and that then is the danger signal. And that perpetuates this stuck or protective or survival response. We know now that primal trust can shift us out of that survival response, out of a cell danger response, and move us back to a healing response. So what is it that you see in your clients that signals to you that the war is over and that they've moved out of a cell danger response? And if we could measure it, do you suspect that primal trust leads to a reduction in the creation of extracellular ATP?

Yeah, when I again, when I read this whole theory, it's sort of why I saw almost like a download of a sequencing of nervous system work to mimic that stage cell danger response in that if you carefully show the system that it's safer, it can slowly move out of the cell danger response. And I think that there's two things that are happening here. One of them is a theory. The first one is targeting that vagus nerve like we're doing. Robert Navio says that the vagus nerve is affecting the autonomic nervous system, that crucial piece in the CDR game. So we are directly affecting the vagus nerve with our programs. The second piece, and then again, this is more of like, my theory is that we are also directly affecting our bioelectric field, that heart brain coherence that comes online as we resolve trauma and shift our emotions. And if we know that mitochondria are being signaled by a voltage change that might cause them to move in and out of cdr, I wonder if it's also that voltage change of our heart brain coherence coming online. We've seen HeartMath Institute, Dr. Joe Dispenza's work measuring this. I see people who. And it's so crazy, Scott. Like, they will get this deep trauma release. They'll have a moment of like, oh, in this huge release of emotion. And all of a sudden they have energy that they haven't had in years. And it just happens sometimes almost overnight. What happened? I think they've had a massive change in their field, in their signaling, and somehow they. The. The mitochondria, instead of squeezing that ATP outside, outside of the cell, it stays inside. And it says, all right, we can now get back to work. We can get back to business. I don't know. Again, it's a theory, but I see it and it just makes sense to me.

One of the tools that you have in the program is a journaling exercise where you ultimately rip up and throw everything away that you've written down. I've kind of done that for years. On New Year's Eve, writing everything down. I used to put it in the fireplace, but these days they're all covered in glass. So now I just put it in the paper shredder after I write down the things that I kind of want to let go of. So how does journaling help us to identify illness triggers and become more aware of unconscious messaging that may be reaffirming or fortifying nervous system dysregulation?

Great question, and I love this practice and anyone listening, this is one of the best ways to get started with. With releasing stress in the system is this journaling. So what happens? Like I said, we have this alarm bell of symptoms that typically we're fixated on. We're fixated on the symptoms, the diagnosis, etc, but these symptoms underneath there is another, deeper alarm. It's the stuff that's happening in our life, the stuff that's happened in our past, our reactions to people, our. Our things about ourself. And when we start journaling, we're literally bringing this stuff up from our unconscious to our consciousness to see the alarm. This is where we. The true alarm. This is where we start to validate ourselves and what's going on. We start to understand ourselves. And there's something about bringing what's unconscious in us into our awareness where then we rip it up, let it go. That is a symbol, I think, to ourselves, to our psyche that says we see this, this, and we're willing to let it go again and again. It's like a purge to me. It's a detoxification method for our emotions. And our triggers. It's like its own sauna, its own enema, the way that we write it and release.

I love that. Such a good connection there. Let's talk a little bit about practitioners that maybe feel like their functional medicine approaches don't have a place in the healing process when someone's doing a program like Primal Trust. And I know know that there are practitioners that say that their protocols are working better when their patient is also doing Primal Trust or other work in this realm. So are these functional medicine protocols and Primal Trust really synergistic in how they're supporting our ability to heal? And then in your own personal journey with Lyme and parasites and mold and all of those kinds of things, did you combine your Primal Trust work with a functional medicine approach? And it sounds like you already commented that as you did more of the, of the nervous system regulation work that you then were able to tolerate bringing some of those other tools in to support the physical body as well.

Yeah. One of the things I noticed right away when I got into the brain retraining world, it was like an us versus them attitude, which didn't resonate for me, especially being a practitioner and having a lot of respect for the training that these clinicians have went through. And I immediately was like, I'm going to take a collaborative approach here. This isn't. You either choose your nervous system work or your integrative functional protocol. Like that doesn't make sense. Sense. What does make sense is sometimes taking a break from a protocol because you're so vigilant for maybe just a few weeks and focusing on the nervous system piece to retrain your focus out of fix it to self regulation and with that focus allow the practitioner to do the practitioner's job. You do your job, you focus on your job. And when you, when the patients focus on what they are empowered to do and the practitioners who are nervous system informed are focused on what they are empowered to do, that collaboration is beautiful. It really is. And I see people have a true win win now. Some people can't afford the practitioners anymore and so they're just doing the nervous system work. And I want you to know I see those people heal too. I do see both happen. I do see an expedited process. If as your nervous system gets regulated, you can take the binders, you can do the saunas, you can do some of the protocols. For me, yes, as I got, I was, you know, I couldn't do a drop of homeopathic, but several months in I was able to tolerate binders and then I was able to tolerate saunas. I didn't have a lot of money. I did eight ozone treatment treatments because that's all I could afford. But I did do and I tolerated them. And I was like, oh my gosh. So there are things over the years that, that, you know, I was able to take more vitamins and supplements and things like that and, and, and foods and other, you know, things like bip plates, other things that I couldn't do before. So for me, the nervous system work allowed me to combine with detoxification tools to move things out of my system. I never did directly treat Lyme disease and you know, I, my fung. They could be there. But again, my function is what it is, so it's doing well. And, and I'm not against it. Like, maybe someday I'll look and see what's there. But, you know, I do see that the most important thing to me is that you start being able to assist the body in letting go. And some people just want to like, nope, I'm just going to do nervous system work. And if you can tolerate some of these other things that are helpful that not just for chronic illness, we've been doing throughout time. Saunas and breath work and hot cold therapy and binders. These are all things that I think are helpful because we do live in a toxic world. Again, there can be this dogmatic approach, like a badge of honor of I only use nervous system work to heal and that to me is imbalanced. And it's, it's not healthy. It's just not healthy.

Yeah, it's interesting because the timing of when to introduce a program like this. I used to think that if your tiger, your, your real significant threat, maybe your mold or your lyme or whatever had not been addressed, that its ideal heal to address that, to remediate, to move to whatever, and then to use these kinds of tools to reboot or recalibrate the system. Now, your original tiger is a kitten and you want the limbic system, you want the nervous system to see it as a kitten and no longer see something that, that really is much less threatening as the same tiger that it saw before. And yet Neil Nathan over time has really kind of shifted my thought process here because his observation has been. And the way he uses a lot of these kinds of tools is people can't tolerate taking, you know, one capsule of charcoal or one tablet of chlorella. And so by bringing the nervous system regulation piece in, then people can also bring in other adjunct kinds of tools and actually tolerate them much better. So my, my, it's maybe been a little bit of a slow getting there, but, but now it makes sense to me that these tools should and can happen very early. And it's not that if you're still living in mold, it's not that you're then training your body to kind of be okay with it in the way that it then maybe is going to be detrimental to you because your body then is no longer going to do what it needs to do to respond to that environmental issue. Does that make sense?

Yeah, 100%. And I think, I think that there's a shift in general in the collective medical, you know, practitioners where they're seeing that, oh, if you can help get them out of that CDR one with just the nervous system work right away they're going to tell the treatments are going to work better. You get the nervous system on board, the immune system is going to recognize the mold better and things like that as well.

You have a number of tools that you separate into top down and bottom up. You say that both are needed to regulate the nervous system. So are these both ways to send the body, body safety signals? And then talk to us about the difference between top down or brain body versus bottom up or body brain therapies and maybe some examples of each. Why is it not all about retraining or focusing on just the brain?

Like I said, it's that typical type A person that gets themselves into this mess. And so that person really does need to learn how to get that insular feedback back online, which happens to through body based practices. Absolutely. I, if you've had trauma, if you've had a lot of emotional issues, I really see people need both. Now there are certain people that I've seen that have done just brain retraining and have claimed that they are, they are doing well. And I also see a lot of those people who end up in my program saying they had recovered from brain retraining and then they got into a relationship dysfunction or something emotional that really triggered their body and they needed to learn how to be with the feelings and they end up doing some of this bottom up work work. So for the most part, the majority of people, I would say both top down and bottom up are needed. Top down simply means the brain communicating with the body and we do that through mindfulness practices, mental rehearsals practices, creative visualization, using your brain, using your mind to signal safety to the limbic system and dial down that alarm of that amygdala to access your memory structures to access, access your creative mind to, to teach the brain to have new associations with life. That in the past life wasn't all terrible and in the future I don't expect life to be terrible. And that's going to calm down the limbic system and start to re pattern the signals that the brain is sending down into the body. Bottom up practices are just that. Body to brain, body to brain signaling the vagus nerve sending signals back up to the brain the that it's sensing safety down here. Signals from you know, all the way down into our, our felt sense, our sensation, our conscious interpretation of the body feeling, the body feeling its feels and deciding that it is safe to feel these feels helps the vagus nerve to send this signaling back up. It puts us into heart brain coherence. And then you've got a nice two way street of it's safer to feel safe starting to go on. And then as we know that will travel all the way down into the cells and hopefully affect the cdr.

When we talk about the vagus nerve, what are efferent and afferent fibers and what are some of the tools that you incorporate into primal trust that are directly supporting the vagus nerve?

The vagus nerve is 80% afferent fibers, meaning they're fibers that are moving away from the, the, the periphery of the body back up into the brain. In other words, it's signaling from the body to the brain. 80%, there's 20% efferent fibers which is fibers running from the brain back down to the body. So it makes sense that we would target the body, wouldn't it? If we're trying to target the vagus nerve, this is where it made sense that brain retraining alone is not the end all be all. And that that vagus nerve, if 80% is coming from the body back up to the brain, we want to be targeting that. So what are different ways? My favorite way, you know is, is a combination of breath work and functional neurology based eye exercises. The eyes, the extraocular nerve have direct connections to the vagus nerve. Eye movements increase blood flow to the vertebral artery and stimulate that vagus nerve as it passes through the neck. It also helps to stabilize C1, 2, which is a huge issue in our community. As you know, having upper cervical instability. I can't tell you how many people have them. They don't realize it. And thankfully my background as a physical therapist, we were one of the first clinics to really develop an upper cervical stabilization program using eye exercises. 20 years ago. So I understood this, understood how it helped people recover from chronic pain and all sorts of things. And so I started to add them in to help with chronic Lyme symptoms. And it worked. I got driving my brain processing came back online and I think it was one of the things that set primal trust apart. Where one things the of. Of the first to really bring in targeting the vagus nerve using eye exercises along with breath work to really get a. A two packed punch into toning that vagal complex.

So a question that just came to mind that I wasn't planning to ask, but you're talking about how you can use some of those eye movements. I tend to think of Stanley Rosenberg's work a bit with some of the eye movements. And you were talking about how you're using those to help with some of the C1, C2. We see so much Ehlers Danlos these days, these hypermobilities like more than I have ever seen. And so are there people with Ehlers Danlos or hypermobility that are seeing improvements in those symptoms that are doing Primal Trust?

Yeah, and it hits home. My daughter was just diagnosed with that as well last summer. And it is, I will say it's like the new epidemic. It is, is I mean cci, EDS now is it true EDS or is it secondary as a response to I think Covid mixed with past infection that was sort of dormant creating mass cell cause even like a lot of screen time affecting our collagen. So I think that's multifactorial. The fact that I've seen it rise so dramatically literally in the last two years even of people getting this diagnosis and, and, and also say that I think it's a. Is it true EDS or is it a functional EDS presentation? I'm curious about that because I have seen many people in my community heal and reverse that EDS diagnosis. There's a really a friend of mine who didn't take my program, she's taking it now. Her name is, she goes by Ribeye Rach on. On Instagram. She's got an incredible story of healing from EDS with nervous system work and diet and reducing that mast cell overload. And so you know, she did several things and so yes I do see this reverse. I'm watching my own daughter experimenting with her getting more stability by both regulating the nervous system input, electrolyte balance, diet, calming down the inflammatory response. You know, it hit her like this post Covid and so you know, I just watched her literally like fall apart overnight. And so I know that there is something going on here. And I also do see, like I said, people heal, which is exciting. These eye exercises are huge for that. And I want to just give a disclaimer. You've got to be very careful when you're unstable. You do these things slowly and you do small range of motion and you don't just go for it. So yeah, so you want to be careful with them.

So just briefly extending on your, your daughter and incorporating some of these tools, is there a minimum age that you think is appropriate for doing this program?

I think that we should be taught this in kindergarten. And I'll also say this, parents, they learn regulation from you. Don't make your kid feel like they need to be fixed. Model this for them, doing this with them as a lifestyle practice. So I just really want to make that clear because I have a lot of parents, like, I got to fix my kid. Like, do not be sending them that message. And so as you do these practices, you can do that with them. And so 100%, I think these things are lifetime practices for all humans in some way.

You say that rewiring or rebooting the brain is a conscious retraining to change the brain's memorized responses to stress, trauma, and pain, which can help to alleviate symptoms and promote healing. So what does your system of brain retraining look like? How do we turn down our symptomatic response to a number of triggers that maybe made us ill in the past and then turned. Talk to us about your brain retraining sequence or what you also call your ABC dimensional shift method.

First of all, I want to say that again, I had this background of mind body medicine. I had a lot of training with memory reconsolidation. I started learning different brain retraining programs, lightning process DNRs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all great. But I saw a common algorithm, and all of them, they all had the same algorithm, different phrases, different movements. And I was like, okay. And that's one of my gifts, is I'm a pattern recognizer. So I recognize patterns, recognize this pattern. It's like, okay, first of all, there's an awareness process. A, there's some type of pattern interrupt with that awareness. And that pattern interrupt tends to drop us into the present moment. B, be in the body, be in the present moment. For me, I take the body piece a little bit further than other programs because I think the somatic piece is important, important. And then there's the third piece, which is changing your thoughts, perception, and creating a different thought, emotion, behavior, States. So awareness pattern interrupt, present moment change. So I just named it abc. I teach people the principles, the whole algorithm. I say come up with your own brain retraining practice. You know, I mean We've got like 400 programs out there and it's the exact same thing, different words. And so it's important to self empower yourself to understand the principle behind it. If you become aware of what you're triggered by, you pause, you stop the brain from ruminating on that. Come into the present moment, take a breath. So you get your prefrontal cortex online, not your habitual limbic system, your prefrontal cortex online. Now you've got choice back. And Scott, this is the key. We lose our choice to unconscious repetitive habits, habits and reactions. And we need to reclaim choice. So we do that through this rehearsed algorithm of coming to the present moment and then carving a new pathway, which is hard. It's hard to think differently and feel differently and you know, self generate a positive feeling when we have a discomfort in our body. But what happens is the brain is a meaning making machine. It's a game of association. So as you create new associations with old triggers, the brain starts to realize that trigger is not as dangerous as I thought. Might be uncomfortable, but not as dangerous as I thought. And with that sense of safety we're signaling to the body, all the way down to the cell, we can relax. Even though I feel this feeling, even though they're saying what they're saying, even though this has happened, happening, we're literally expanding our consciousness into a realm of more generalized safety, despite still living with different triggers. I hope that answered all of those questions you just asked me.

So you mentioned the word somatic. For those that are not familiar with the term somatic or somatic practices or somatic therapies tell us a little more about that. And how might somatic practices help us to feel, feel safer in our bodies and also support turning off of the cell danger response.

Somatic comes from the word soma, which is the body and it's the body as perceived from within. So somatic practices are how do we perceive our felt sense, how do we perceive the feelings, the emotions that's happening? So a lot of times we have our thinking mind of how we react to the world, but our body has a reaction as well. And so the somatic therapies part is learning how to attune to what is your body doing? For example, are you holding your breath when you are talking to this person? Meaning, oh, I go into kind of a freeze. Is my body feeling sick as I'm about to, you know, do X, Y and Z? Okay, I'm resisting that. How can I regulate my, my body's response in this uncomfortable situation that normally I don't notice? I don't notice because I get too mental. So as we attend to the body, we also start to feel needs that maybe got stuffed a long time ago. Oh, I actually do have a need to sit down and eat lunch and not work and breathe a little bit. I didn't know I had that need because I've been a workaholic for 40 years. Oh, I didn't know that I needed a little bit. I. I need to take a bath. At the end of this day, I need. You'll start to feel a need to even, like, take Clay Bass or Epsom. Like, you'll feel your needs for detoxification. You'll feel your needs for sunshine, you'll feel your needs for walking. And so somatic practices attune you to your body's needs. And the cool thing is, Scott, when we start to meet our needs needs, our limbic system dials down its stress response. It hits us all the way down from when we were an infant. Needs get met. Baby stops crying. Needs get met. Alarm bells dial down.

Feeling safe in our bodies, in the world is so important for healing. What are some of the factors that you see that get in the way of feeling safe or feeling safer in our world and in our bodies?

Well, the media does a great job of keeping us from feeling safe. I could go on and on. Please stop watching the news. It's a program. It's a program to keep us in vigilance. It's so easy to program people if you hit their stress response, if you hit the limbic system, and usually literally use the words unsafe, that is going to target your limbic system to listen and then anything they say right after that, you're going to believe more likely. It's an ancient NLP trick that is used everywhere. So I could go on and on about how we are getting brain retrained by our media to be in threat and vigilance and distrust. And out of primal trust, we're being brain retrained to get our immune response all dysregulated. The other thing I'll say is I wish that the medical system could move into more of Navio's cell eugenicis model versus the pathogenic model model because it's so much more empowering versus getting this result from your doctor saying you've got X, Y and Z diagnosis. And you know, this is the problem with all these bugs in your body. Instead of how can my body unlock its healing cycle, which is more empowering. So it's, it, it, it triggers that unsafety because these are things that feel out of your control. I know that's how it was for me. I, it was out of control to attend to these diagnosis if they would have said, okay, your immune system's a little offline, you can detox. Well, we gotta unlock how your body self heals. And these are things that you can do while I focus on these things. Wow. I would have felt so much safer in my healing process. So those are a couple things that come to mind.

And I'm assuming by media you also mean social media.

Yes. All of our influences.

Talk to us for a moment about movement. You talked a little bit about this earlier, but why is movement such an important part of your program? Why does simple movement, like I like to walk about four miles a day and I just find so many benefits from that. So why does even simple movement help to address stagnation and allow us to have better fluid flows in our body and within our lymphatic system? Why do you feel like it's so important, important to move?

When I was going through physical therapy school, they taught us that the number one indicator of our, our health and our longevity was our exercise and our movement. Maybe I'm biased because I'm a pt, but I believe that, and I believe that all of our systems need flow to heal. Blood flow is essential. Also good, good structural alignment, which we briefly talked about earlier. But the body needs to flow. It needs its nutrient exchange and vascular pumping mechanisms to be moving. And if we've been, been sick and immobile, we are creating a stagnant cesspond. And our vascular and lymphatic coordination can go offline. So the movement is what's going to teach the body how to remember to pump and exchange. And again, you know, it's, it's just the major indicator of longevity and it's essential. And I teach people, you know, a lot of people are bed bound when they see me. I'm like, you can move in your bed, you can squeeze and relax you, you can move your arms slowly. I mean, of course if you're not paralyzed, you can do these things and this is important. And it actually really does start to move, shift the needle, just squeezing and relaxing. Different body parts moving slow. Yin yoga movements, just arm movements, all of these things can really assist and even, you know, if you can only walk down your driveway and back. That was me. Down the driveway and back. That was my big deal today. It was better than nothing.

So talk to us about the Primal Trust community. Some of the tools that you offer to support people's healing journey. And then how are people interacting with the Primal Trust program, with the community, with your platform? Is it web based? Is it mobile app based? What are some of the tools they use to interact with the Primal Trust program?

I want to just say that one of the things I'm most proud of is the community aspect because I think this is what sets our program apart. We have live classes pretty much every day and sometimes multiple times a day. And this is all included, like it's not extra. And these live classes, they range like yesterday we had Somatic Experiencing Inquiry. We have, you know, laughter classes. We have them in Spanish, we have coaching on live topics. We have sound therapy, we have journaling. We have daily drop in classes that are 20 minutes long of just different movement practices or, or whatever. So the community is there for that instant reboot every day, that instant reminder of how to do this work. It's there for that co regulation piece that is essential in the healing process. We are not meant to heal in isolation. We've been in isolation long enough with these chronic illnesses. So in connection in community is where I see a lot more healing. We also have study groups that are free. They're we help put you into cohorts to move through the process together that you can do. And I find people that participate in the study groups have even greater outcomes than those that don't. So the Primal Trust program has the academy, all the courses, many, many hours of training and the community piece. And I think that's just one of the really wonderful things about it. It is web based and we also have an app. So you can use the app, you can use the web web.

And then how long has the program been available? How many people have gone through it? And is there a way for you to give listeners a sense of the success rate of those that have done the program thus far?

Sure. So the Primal Trust Academy and Community started just over two and a half years ago. And just over a year and a half ago we launched our new Level 1 regulate program, which is really what's exploded in the world world. So it's fairly new, but in that time we've taken 10,000 people through the process in over 60 countries. I blown away, you know, it started, this whole thing started. Scott. I taught a group of 15 women, my level two mentorship. And it just, I, I never knew that this was going to be my path. But so, yes, it's exploded. And honestly, it's because I, I, I think the community, it's coed. I have lots of people beside me. I'm not the, the guru, and I don't want to be the guru. I want everybody sharing their wisdom. And because of that, there's a place for everybody. There's a place for everybody to share what they know. And I, and I really love that. The success rate I'm also very proud of. We're about to do another round of data analysis. But last year, a year ago, we did our first round with several hundred people. And we found that after just under three months, the low, the people that came in with function under 30, 33%, they had an improvement rate of 87% in three months on average. That's average. And that's the low function group. That was one of my favorite stats. Another one is that Lyme, out of all of our diagnoses, Lyme disease had the, had about a 51% increase in function in three, three months. Which shows you that infection has that second and first reaction thing going on. Now we were addressing the sec, that second reaction. So your function can improve, you guys. And also those that did the process over six months, they had a higher rate of success than those that just kind of came in and out. So dedicating your time and really moving through the whole process over time, I expect that now here we are a year later, we've had a lot even more support and training. I think that the outcomes are even higher. So I'm looking forward to that. I wasn't sure, like, I don't know if you know, but it took me about three years to put together my new Level 1 program. I studied from an old beta program. What worked, what didn't, what sequencing works, et cetera. I've redone my level two program four times. I'm constantly learning. I'm about to redo it a fifth time based on what I'm learning. Same thing with level one. I'm creating a quick start guide with new main points because, because to me, this is an ongoing learning. Our consciousness is shifting daily about how to treat this whole chronic condition. And so I think that's what's helping our results to be what they are. It's not just a program I created and I let it be. It's always evolving.

So you kept the beneficial aspects of your perfectionism and let go of the negative ones.

Yeah, I'm trying. I'm trying. On a good day, I do that.

And I'm guessing at this point in history that you're also getting a lot of people with long Covid that are doing the program as well. What's their experience been?

Yeah, they're the second best stat. They get 41% rate of improvement in under three months and right there with chronic fatigue as well. So Lyme disease, long Covid and mold was right behind them, I think at like 39% improvement within three months on that study a year ago. So we're doing good. Good.

Yeah. That's absolutely amazing. So you've created a How Healing Happens ebook, which I'll put in the show notes for people as well. That's great. I have taken a look at that and I know you wanted to also offer a discount to our community. So maybe you can tell us about that.

Sure. Yeah. So I created a book that's 127 pages. That's like a mini free, level one program. It's got several tools to get you started. The science behind everything we just talked about, about to help you understand. I really created it to get that consciousness out there, the. The conscious awareness out there of what's possible. So please download that. It's beautiful. It's full of wonderful infographics. It's a program in and of itself and it is free. I'm also offering a 15 discount for Scott's community as a thank you to him for how much he supported me in my healing journey and I'd love to give back. So that link will be down below as well.

Well, thank you so much. My last question is the same for every guest, and that is what are some of the key things that you do on a daily basis in support of your own health?

Great question. I have to have that morning time. I have to have that morning time. I have to get up early and do whatever I need to do. Sometimes I do my own abc. Sometimes I do Joe Dispenza's work. Sometimes I do another meditation, something for my own mind. I do movement. I love doing qigong. I love doing other somatic exercises. I also like to focus on my breath. The other thing that I love is like right before this interview, I told you I was very nervous because I'm a bit of a fan girl of Scott. I turned on music and I just dance and I let myself, that true self, come forward. That is how I find me. I love to turn on music and dance every day and then, then maybe most importantly, the quest of transformation is always on my mind. How can I love more? How can I resist less? What am I holding onto with my partner, my child? What am I holding on to that I need to see and inquire and let go so that I can open up more and more?

I love the dancing part too. I'm not sure it's visually appealing to other people, but I enjoy it. So this was such a great conversation. This is the first opportunity that you and I have had to connect one on one, and I'm certainly hoping that it's not the last. But I just want to thank you for being generous with your information, being generous with your time, but really honor you for what I really view as minimizing the suffering of so many. And there is so much struggle and suffering in the world. And for you to be able to put together a program like this that is is so significantly improving the quality of life for so many, that is a job well done. So thank you so much.

Dr. Kat thank you. Thank you so much.

To learn more about Today's guest, visit primaltrust.org that's primal trust.org primaltrust.org and don't forget to use discount code betterhealth for 15% off your first month of Primal Trust. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave a positive rating or review as doing so will help the show reach a broader audience. To support the show, visit betterhealthguy.com donate to get my newsletter, visit betterhealthguy.com newsletters to follow me on Facebook, Instagram X or TikTok. You can find me there as betterhealthguy. This and other episodes can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, and Odyssey.

Thanks for listening to this Better Health Guy blogcast with Scott, your Better Health Guy. To check out additional shows and learn more about Scott's personal journey to better health, please visit betterhealthguy.com.