Mind-Body Expert: Your Nervous System Is The Portal to Quantum Reality (Jonny Miller)

The nervous system is the lens through which we experience our life. So the state of our nervous system impacts the predictions that we're making about the people and the world around us. I think we are like human instruments and we get out of tune and we are constantly tuning to the stimuli that are coming towards us in any moment in time.

Johnny Miller is a TEDx speaker and founder of Nervous System Mastery. What is the middle, the homeostatic resting place of the nervous system?

As you improve your vagal tone, your ability to stay grounded in stressful situation situations without collapsing in one way or the other, that increases these beliefs or these identities that we grasp onto kind of get stripped away. And so it feels like a part of us is dying. Because a part of us is dying, it's the part of us that isn't us. And then on the other side, we feel more ourselves, we feel more whole. Nervous system mastery is secure attachment with life, secure attachment with reality. The work is identifying all of the large and small ways in which we subtly don't trust in ourselves or trust in life, and then bring courageous curiosity towards those areas.

So then what does it really feel like to have safe body? And can one even describe that with words? Is it one of the things where you'd only know if you felt it? You say that the biological source code is in our body. What do you mean by that? Biological source code?

The nervous system is the lens through which we experience our life. So the state of our nervous system impacts the predictions that we're making about the people and the world around us. And to the degree that we are grounded in our bodies and feeling safe, is the degree to which we can live intentionally and live in a less reactive state.

And that source code can be the coolest part. It can be manipulated, it can be changed. How do you begin to in your work and maybe give people a super high level lens of who you are and what you do? At least this current version of Johnny.

Yeah. So I was a former startup founder. I ended up teaching entrepreneurship. I then went through a kind of deep grief journey which we can talk about at some point. And that was really my awakening to kind of how numb I'd been from the neck down. And I realized that I'd always asked what it meant to live a good life, but it had always been from my head. And I realized that there was this whole wealth of interoceptive data and information that I'd just been avoiding. And so I went on this kind of multi year journey through, you know, meditation, breath, work, plant Medicine, somatics, studying it is as much like, it's kind of like the stage you're in right now, just like filtering up as much information as I could, as much experiential data as I could. Yeah. And then I was like, this stuff feels just so life changing for me and just important to share that. I was like, I want to try and find a way to teach this to kind of where, where I was at, you know, 10, 10 years ago.

Yeah. And that's where mastery. I think I heard this once, I think it was Jordan Peterson. Takes about 10,000 hours to get mastery over anything but the nervous system. The neural tree, it might be a little more like 10,000 hours is kind of like scratching the surface of it. But to really have nervous system mastery and to be able to change that biological source code that you talk about, that's a life journey. That's not just one code after another. What do you think about that?

Yeah. So I like to frame mastery as reducing the half life of reactivity. So if someone is kind of early on in this path, let's say they get triggered, they get angry. They might be in that state for like hours, days, or maybe even weeks. Right. Maybe. Maybe it doesn't end. And once you learn the skills for like regulating your nervous system coming back into like grounded presence and a sense of embodiment. Yeah. You can shorten that from weeks to days, to hours, to like minutes or seconds. And I think that is like a very tangible, almost like proxy for what this mastery looks like. But I mean, I think about it as almost like going back to the video game analogy. It's like a skill tree. There's like different skills that we can cultivate. And the more that we cultivate those skills, the more mastery we have in different directions. And this gives us deeper relationships, connection to ourselves, self love, and ability to show up for the hard conversations with a sense of, I guess, a sense of grounded confidence.

And then from that place comes curiosity. Curiosity, I believe, and especially playfulness is spiritual warfare against dark emotions or epigenetic transfer of trauma. I think about your work as this, like, necessary thing for all human beings. Yet there are certain human beings that are drawn to nervous system work. Who are those human beings? It's not always capital T trauma. It could be the amalgamation of many lowercase T traumas that bring somebody to the place where they're like, I can't feel my body. Who are those people?

Yeah. So I think what I see is generally it's people who have often had some degree of success in their lives, but who experienced some form of crisis. And so I think about this feather brick dump truck idea. Sometimes it takes a tickling with a feather to realize that something is off. Or maybe it's a brick. The brick could be a breakup, could be you lose your job, could be a small health thing. And then sometimes, and unfortunately more often than not, it's like a dump truck. And the dump truck could be Lyme disease, a health crisis, losing a job, losing a house, grief, losing a loved one. And I think it's in those moments that we get humbled. And this happened to me. And there's a way in which the way that I thought the world worked and the mental models I had, they just broke, they didn't work anymore. And so there was this humility in the sense of like, okay, I need to go back into kind of learning mode again because the way I've been, my operating system isn't working anymore. And so I need to find something else.

I love that you speak in the video game metaphor. That's so good because everybody at some point, I mean, I remember like Sega Genesis and Nintendo. I'm 45. How old are you?

37.

Okay, so you remember video games back in the day. We are potentially, if you look at quantum theory, there is a probability that we're in a simulation. There is a high probability of that. Now, whether that's true or not doesn't really matter because here we are and part and parcel of playing the video game to experience what we all want to experience. Johnny. And that is joy, connectedness, playfulness, groundedness of which you speak. It's not a mental thing. I mean, yes, part it is because we can be top down informed. But really this phrase trauma informed, I think gets a really convoluted rap in your world. What does it actually mean to be trauma informed? What is that?

Trauma is somewhat of a. It's like a suitcase word. It's been used so much now that it's kind of lost. I would say like a core meaning. For me, trauma informed means there is an awareness of the nervous system window of tolerance. So there are certain practices, certain kind of ways of healing that don't honor the nervous system. And you can kind of blow someone outside of their window of tolerance into a essentially like a disembodied like checked out state. And they might have insights or kind of like a powerful experience. But I don't think it's actually rewiring on the level of the nervous system. So I think for me at least being trauma informed means that you are able to kind of be with someone, to co regulate with them, and to bring someone to the edge of their window, because that's kind of where the growth happens, but not blast someone outside.

So. Good. Yeah, yeah. And we see the plant medicine conversation exploding. There's actually, I think in a couple months, a psychedelic conference coming up. And maybe we can go down to that a little bit during the podcast. The blowing out, like you say, where you take somebody off a cliff. It's not like the practitioner has malevolent intent, like they want to do good, but there's a certain way that a facilitator or somebody in nervous system mastery learns how to hold the space by first holding their own space. And this is the part about blowing people out that breath workers, plant medicine facilitators, or even people that are doing parts work may inadvertently damage or further perpetuate the trauma of their student, of their client. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, I mean, definitely. I see that. I think breath work in particular because, you know, there are trainings now where people can become a breath worker in like a week end, which is kind of insane.

Yeah.

And what I see is the. The best practitioners have a sense of. It's like attunement. It's a sense of like, you bring someone, like I said earlier, like to their edge, but not. Not beyond. And if someone does go beyond, you know, how to kind of bring them back in. And that is, I think it's a. It's. It's a really delicate and like, nuanced skill to have.

How long do you feel that someone gets to train in order to actually be a great space holder and a facilitator for somebody else? Is there a window of training there?

I mean, I think it's partly a function of doing the work for yourself. I think that's a big part of it. But anywhere from, you know, minimum like 6 to 12 months and really years. I think it takes years of reps and experience to build up that pattern recognition.

I can attest. I started doing breathwork trainings in 2016, and it wasn't until 2021 that I launched the Breathe program. It took me that long to feel, like, confident in my own self before I could really facilitate a room. Now it doesn't have to take people five years, but I had a lot of wiring when I came in of hypervigilance. My mom was manic bipolar. She still struggles with that. My dad had his own demons. He left home Early. And so I've always had in my life previously. It's getting a lot better as I go deeper into the work. But I had this slight tilt towards sympathetic, and it was like a hyper vigilance where I was always looking. My reticular, activating system was always perceiving threat. Can you go into how that transposed for you based on being in corporate, having a certain model from the mind that obviously didn't work anymore, and then the event with Sophie that really transformed your life. It deserves a lot of respect, a lot of reverence. Can you share that story? Because it's the conditioning of our neural tree, of our nervous system that you describe that allows us to either go deeper into self or to leave our body. And the choice is always there for us.

Yeah, that's really well said. Yeah. So I. This was in 2017. I was engaged to this amazing, amazing woman called Sophie. She also had been diagnosed with bipolar. Like, you know, 90% of the time she was great, but she'd have these really intense anxiety episodes. And one time when I'd been. I was traveling in Portugal, and she went back to work as a junior doctor for the first. First day after taking some time off, and she had an anxiety attack at work, and she came back home. It was an empty house, and she decided to overdose on her own SSRI medication. And I received a phone call from her sister's partner sometime later that day. And it just, like, it just broke me. Like, it completely shattered my world. I'd never been through anything I would say hard or like, any kind of, like, loss like that before. And I mean, I. I think what. What I realized quite early on is I'd met adults who had lost someone close to them, but they hadn't really grieved. And there was this sense of, like, deadness kind of behind the eyes. There wasn't a sense that they were, or like bitterness or pessimism. And I saw those people and I was like, I think I might become that if I don't learn. Like. Like, how do I actually grieve? What does grief look like? And so I kind of made this, like, pact with myself or this choice to. To use your word earlier, to like, get curious about this. And for me, initially, that was through meditation, through vipassana, through going back to the places that were meaningful to us and really learning how to feel, which actually was more about learning how to get out of the way. It's like the waves of grief would come, and to the degree that I resisted, the grief was the degree to which I was, like, suffering. And I have a theory that the five stages of grief that we talk about is actually more like five ways in which we resist the intensity and the, The. The tidal waves of grief. And there was one moment that, like, really stands out for me. Where I was, I was on a beach near her. There was a memorial bench that we'd made. And as I was. As I was getting closer to this bench, this, like, this like, tidal wave of grief started, like, moving through me. And I kind of got down on my hands and knees and was just like, like lamenting and weeping at this bench. But as it. As it was happening to me, I was like. I was like. There was a sense of, like, deep aliveness and like, even. Even joy and love in the grief. And. And had I not had the story of I've just lost the person closest to me in the world, I would have thought that I was like, on MDMA or something. It was like incredibly, maybe even like a spiritual experience is another way to phrase it. And that just, like, it just shifted my mental model of what I thought grief even was, because I thought grief was this. This hard thing that you have to get through and overcome and get on the other side. But I was having this experience of, like, I just feel love. I just feel so much like, raw connection and love. And I had this sense of, like, I haven't really shared this on the podcast before, but she was like my first long term relationship. And I felt like she taught me what it meant to love. And when we cast her ashes into the ocean, it was almost like, now how do I fall in love with the world that she is now a part of? And that was kind of this impulse that then I followed. And I was having this really embodied experience. And I think that honestly was the. The catalyst for the journey that I went down in the. In the years to come.

Thank you for sharing that, man. Yeah, the. The ability to have the movement of grief, which is essentially not to in any way take away from your process. But Jill Taylor, Dr. Jill Taylor, she got into the work of neuroscience because her brother was schizophrenic, and she did a TED talk. And she found through her work scientifically, that we actually only feel an emotion for 90 seconds. Yet the intensity of that emotion to what you were talking about, when we resist it, the energy in motion, the emotion, when we resist the emotion, it just compounds. It's almost like later on we'll talk about the credit score that you have in your nervous system. The More we resist the grief, the more we resist the shame, the more we resist anything. And honestly, people train themselves to resist joy as well, out of worthiness. Can you talk about what's going on? I mean, we all understand from Bessel van der Kolk that the body always keeps the score. We understand how things get stored. Well, maybe we'll go into that, too. I'll make notes of all these things. Because this is such a deep subject. It's so fascinating the way that our body actually works. What's going on physiologically when we resist in energy and motion, what's happening inside of us when we resist it from a mental standpoint.

So I'll share my. My lens on my map of what I think is going on, with the caveat that this is yet to be. You know, we haven't run clinical trials on this. This is like my best theory. And maybe. Maybe I'll say two things. I think one thing is anxiety, which I've been, you know, a lot of my students come in with. Anxiety is like the number one thing they're trying to work through. And I think that, you know, even the Latin word or ango, which is the root of anxiety, that the etymology is to constrict. And I don't think of anxiety as a. It's not an emotion. It's more of, like a defense strategy against feeling the underlying emotion. So, like you said, people resist joy, grief, anger, and on the surface, they experience anxiety, which they want to try and fix or manage. But in the fixing or the managing of the anxiety, it actually increases the constriction. And the best theory that I've come across, which we were kind of talking about earlier, before we hit record, is from this guy, Michael Johnson, and he has a theory that. It's called vasocomputation, if anyone wants to look it up. It's published online. And he believes that there are latches which are stored in the smooth muscle tissue. So when the body doesn't feel safe, when it's making a prediction that something outside of us is unsafe, it will initially clench, which is kind of what we experience when we, you know, when we feel anxiety or when we're resisting, there's like a clenching that happens, a clenching in the body. And if that. That can stay, there's a special property of the smooth muscle tissue where it can latch in place. And this is essentially an efficient prediction being made by the body. But what it does is it causes this tension, which reduces blood flow, reduces sensation, and is, I believe, what we essentially Call trauma. So when people have high degrees of early childhood trauma, they tend to have low interoception, they tend to have a lot of tightness as well, especially in the lower body. And my sense is that these latches, or the latch density that we have, is essentially the biological mechanism for how the body keeps the score, as van der Kolk talks about.

Wow, what an incredible lane of study. So we'll link that in the show notes today for sure, because this is the first time I've ever heard of this theory of the latches. So, yes, it creates the tension. Like you said, if somebody from childhood, they may have a really tight hara section or below their solar plexus, or above their sacral, they might have an actual bundle of stuck energy. Did I hear you correctly?

Yeah. So it's essentially the vascular tissue wraps around the nerves and kind of like compresses. And Mike believes that there are. This is maybe getting too technical, but there are millions and millions of vascular addressable units, and it's the way that the body is making predictions about the world. And so these latches can occur. And what I've seen in my own breath work and kind of my own journeys is that when we have these emotional releases, when we feel safe enough to re. Experience the things that happen to us earlier in life, there is this like a wave of emotion, like you said. And sometimes that only lasts like up to 90 seconds.

Yeah.

And then there's often like a looseness and a feeling of like. Like I've noticed that my breath will sometimes go deeper after some of these releases. I feel like I can breathe down into my. My lower belly or even as my pelvic floor. And so there's more freedom, there's more range of motion.

So then what does it really feel like to have a safe body? What is the sensory?

Yeah.

And can one even describe that with words? Is it one of the things where you'd only know if you felt it?

Yeah, it's a great question. I had a lady, I remember doing a breathwork journey, and at the end of it, I was kind of really helping her breathe down into her lower belly. And afterwards she said, I feel safe in my body for the first time in my life. And I didn't even realize what that meant. And so to your point, I think people can notice the experience of hyper vigilance that you spoke to earlier. Yeah. But it also gets normalized. It's like the water in which we're swimming in. And it's very different to feel safe in the body than to intellectually know I'm not going to get attacked or I'm nothing's going to happen, it's very, very different. And the phrase that I've been working with recently, that is actually another good description of what is nervous system mastery is secure attachment with life, secure attachment with reality. And it's this deep sense of fundamental well being and fundamental safety that I trust in life and I trust in myself. And for me, the work is identifying all of the large and small ways in which we subtly don't trust in ourselves or trust in life and then bring courageous curiosity towards those areas.

I mean, literally on the screen right now, if you're watching on YouTube or Spotify, is the consciousness map, the map of emotions from Dr. Hawkins, incredible mentor. I will go deep in his work for a long time, but I find it really fascinating that it's only courage that unlocks us from pride and like you said, trust. So if we're going to move from trauma to trust, which is a core pillar of emotional epigenetics, then we actually get to train ourselves to be courageous, even when the mind says that we shouldn't be. And this is the fascinating part that's psychosomatic and also spiritual. It's a biological conversation. But it's also, how does one even begin to trust life if they don't have a connection with that which created them, with their creator, with God? You look at the blue zones in the world, it wasn't the food that keeps people living above 100, all five blue zones. They all had a through line of believing in a higher power. And that in a beautiful way coded their nervous system, as you describe it, their biological source code, so that they could actually trust, which then alleviated them of the Radio Flyer wagon with concrete of trauma. Do you find that this the case yourself and with students and with the work you do that there gets to be a through line that they can, yes, trust life. But what does that actually mean, to trust life? Does that mean to trust their creator? To trust life itself? What do you make of that?

I would say. So I grew up an atheist or no, I grew up having, I should say Christianity kind of shoved down my throat and I really resisted it, rejected.

It was like a Pentecostal, like fire and brimstone.

It was believe or you're not quite that intense. It was like the British kind of like repressed version of that.

Yes, yeah.

It was through breathwork and through plant medicine that I again started to realize like, okay, this materialist, rationalist, atheist perspective Doesn't. It doesn't quite explain the experiences that I'm having. And so I. I think that the language that I've started to use is that there is this kind of fundamental underlying intelligence to life and to the world. And that for me, and you know, some people call it God, some people call it source, some people call it divinity. And my experience is that often actually in the moments after opening up some of these latches, after going through a kind of grief process or whatever the stuck emotion is, there is a sense of this happened recently for me, actually. There's like a deep sense of devotion and unbelievable gratitude that doesn't really have a reason. It's almost like there in the background when the layers of conditioning, which again I kind of believe are latches kind of temporarily or permanently get move out of the way. And that we have this background state of just like deep joy. And I experienced this in. When I was living in Mexico with my wife. I did 10 days in a dark room. So like darkness retreat for 10 days.

That's no joke.

I. Yeah, it was a bit crazy.

Did you fast as well or just dark?

I didn't fast. We did 10 day retreat before and then 10 days in the dark room. And around about day five or day six, I had this experience of just like a smile kind of like came to my face and I was like, that's interesting. And it turned into this like, again, just like an unbelievable sense of like joy and gratitude and connection, but for no reason. There was literally like no reason. There was no story, there was no. There was no like nothing happening in my mind. And what I took from that is that that deep joy, which I think is kind of the same as safety as well. That is our. It's like our default state. And we just have a lot of stuff that just gets in the way of that. Yeah. And so it's like, how can we just remember that basically is. I think it's not like. I think a lot of people think they need to earn joy or they need to create it, but it's actually more of a letting go. And where some of the nervous system work comes in is the more that you can be sensitive to your internal state. So I love the analogy of if you imagine a chef who's going through culinary school, you're kind of like refining your taste palette. You're kind of getting more sensitivity to different textures and tastes. And it's the same with our internal landscape. Like the more that we tune inwards, the more that we can get like A refined sense for, like, where there's, like, small contractions, where there's tension, where we're holding. And once. Once that sensitivity builds, then you can basically learn how to relax into and love and sometimes forgive, sometimes surrender into the. Whatever that tension is. And that process just keeps on. Keeps on going.

You know what I was visualizing when you were talking is the truth or the soul expressing itself. Because, you know, we're half beast, half spirit. We're a spirit in a body, and science proves that. If you look at quantums as well, we get dirty, we get sooty. It's like our window to the soul. And our window of just being our authentic self gets dirt and confusion. It just. It needs a pressure wash, if you will. And that's what your breath work does. And all breathworks, I think, are trying to essentially clean the window of the debris. But what exactly is that debris? Yes, it could be capital T, lowercase T. Trauma. But what are your thoughts on it generationally expressing? I showed you some research about the cherry blossom study and the two to seven generations of epigenetic transferred trauma. Have you explored that at all?

Yeah. So this is. I mean, I would love to learn from you around this. I. I've had experiences myself where the emotions that have been coming through, and I don't know how to explain this besides saying they feel. They felt connected to my ancestors as opposed to myself.

Yeah.

So I've had a felt sense experience of that, but I haven't gone deep into the epigenetic side. But I do think that there's almost certainly something there. And I know you've been going deep into it recently.

Yeah, but I'm at the beginning of my journey. I'm just like a year in, really. And the more that I find, the more that I realize there's more caves to enter. It's like Joseph Campbell says, the cave that you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek. I don't want that to be a platitude. Like, that's a real big part of your work. And my work is like, well, what's actually really so scary in the cave? It's there whether we want to look at it or not. The grief process is there, whether we want to move through it or not. The process of being embodied and joyful is there whether we want to look at it or not. What do you think stops us as a human being from going into the cave itself? Because all the magic, all the treasure is there. The life we want is in the cave. But we're so scared of going in there. Why do we fear the cave so much?

Mean, that's beautifully said. And I think if I could. If I could communicate one message, it is like, walk lovingly and curiously into the cave. Yeah.

Don't sprint into the cave with like, a blindfold on.

Yeah. Like walk with trepidation.

Yeah. Yeah.

I would say a few things come to mind. 1. One is actually lack of education and, like, lack of just nervousness and literacy. And I think there is, like, these things aren't talked about in schools when we're growing up. I only discovered it in my late 20s. I wish someone had told me more about this kind of stuff when I was younger. So I think just like, education is one piece, but more than that, it's fear, but it's also that we have these identities that we cling to and these beliefs that are related to who we think we are. And actually what happens in these processes is that these beliefs or these identities that we grasp onto kind of get stripped away. And so it feels like a part of us is dying because a part of us is dying. It's the part of us that isn't us. And then on the other side, we feel more ourselves, we feel more whole. But the resistance is there because these protective mechanisms were put in place, likely for good reason, when we were young. They. They served us to a point. They're not bad. They were useful protective parts that served their purpose. And at some point, they reduce our freedom and agency in life. And so I think for me, it's. It's actually not about. It's not about shunning them. It's much more about, like, loving, welcoming, and like, turning towards, again, curiosity being, like, the key.

The key here in your work. You go very deep into vagal tone, which I love. And this is another part of the education. Like, people just don't know that. They don't know. Be so cool in college, if there was, like, ego death 101 on a door, I take that that'd be like, at a spiritual university. But on the screen right now is a strong and weak vagal tone. So the Hypomethylation of the NR3C1 gene, this is when you're strong in your vagal tone. So it's allowing cortisol regulation and reduced HPA axis hyperactivity. But then on the other side, the weak vagal tone is the hypermethylation, and that's NR3C1, and specifically this one, FKBP5, creating heightened emotional reactivity, anxiety and trauma. Loop activation. I mention that because it's almost like vagal tone could be the tension of a guitar string. If it's too tight, the moment you play it, it's going to break. But if it's just right, you know, the Goldilocks zone. What is the Goldilocks zone of vagal tone?

Yeah. So firstly I want to learn more about that myself. That's fascinating.

And it's just a scientific explanation of spiritually what you already know.

Yeah, but it's. But I think it's important that we understand the mechanisms too because there's, there's a lot to be learned from that as well. Yes. So going back to the window of tolerance, there are two modes of reactivity. When we are in our kind of sympathetic fight flight state, but we don't have the vagal tone or grounding to match it. That creates anxiety, it creates overwhelm, it creates sometimes frustration outbursts. That's hyperarousal. And then at the other end, when we're kind of in the parasympathetic side, again, it's like a protection mechanism. It's a sense of maybe collapse, withdrawal. In extreme cases, depression, numbness is a big one as well. And they're basically. Maybe I can send you the visual to put on the screen as well. But it's essentially like there's two bands which are outside of the window of tolerance. And in either case what is missing is just a sense of grounded safety. And so in those states there are certain practices you can do to either up or down regulate your nervous system to come back into that window. So if you're in the hypoarousal, which is maybe like a functional freeze state, you can do some kind of gentle breathing, practice some stretching coming back into the body. Some people kind of do like self havening or humming is actually a really good practice as well. And that will kind of thaw that hyperarousal state. And then sometimes what happens is people ping back up into the hyper arousal. So whatever the emotion that this, this state was protecting from, well then they'll start to feel it. So maybe it's anger, maybe it's whatever the thing is. And then feeling that and then you kind of come back into this band of like, okay, I feel like myself again, I'm kind of back. So it's actually quite a. There's almost like various protocols that you can do depending on what your kind of tendency for reactivity is, which is again why it's so important to learn this stuff. And over time that Window of tolerance can expand. So as you improve your vagal tone, your ability to stay grounded in stressful situations without collapsing in one way or the other, that increases. And that I think is. So I think of the three core skills of nervous system mastery as being interoception, which we just talked about, and then nervous system capacity, which is this increasing the size of your window of tolerance, increasing the vagal tone, your HRV is highly correlated to vagal tone. And then emotional fluidity, which is welcoming and not resisting or tensing against the underlying emotions. Like, to what degree can you welcome the full spectrum of your human experience?

How does the capacity bleed into the third one, which is the emotional fluidity? It seems like they're similar, but what's the difference between those two?

Yeah, that's a great question. So the capacity is. I, I would say the nuance here is some people will have like maybe a high capacity for grief, but a low capacity for anger. Like, like that was me, for example. So I was, I was able to be with really intense grief, but I, I had an underlying belief that I was a bad person when I was angry. I didn't realize that, but that that's what turned out to be true. And so it took me time in practice to. It was actually a mentor of mine, he said, you are loved in your anger. As I was expressing anger and kind of like looked me in the eye. And when he said that, I just like, I just like burst down into tears because I realized that every time I'd experienced anger I thought that I was like a bad person. So I was like shutting it down. And so I think we have, I've not thought about this specifically, but I think we have different windows of tolerances for different emotional experiences.

And what's the proclivity? What creates that ability to feel one thing but yet not have the capacity to feel another? Is that, is that a combination of the environment, the emotional patterns and the, the passed on trauma or what is it specifically that deadens our capacity in a way?

Yeah, it's a great question. Part of it is the stories that we learned about the emotions. So part of that is cultural. Right? I mean, I grew up in the uk, very, I would say emotionally repressed culture in general, but certainly for a lot of guys, like you don't cry in public, like you're like, anger is, is okay, but sadness, tears is like, you know, you kind of push that away.

Yeah.

And women typically stereotypically the opposite, although it can change. And so I think there's, you know, it's partly societal that we don't have places. We don't see it modeled to us. Not many of us were lucky enough to have parents who modeled healthy emotional expression. We saw the kinked versions. And when you see, when you see anger being expressed in a kinked way, let's say someone is being aggressive or they're being passive aggressive, you're like, I don't want to do that shit. So you think anger's bad, but that's actually not anger. That's anger that is not being felt, but it's being projected onto someone else. Yeah. And so it makes sense that you see that you're like, oh, I don't like, fuck anger. Maybe not explicit, but that's kind of what happened. And that happens with all of the emotions like women often use. They learn how to use sadness to manipulate the situation. That can be a thing as well. Again, it gets projected because they don't want to feel it within themselves.

Oh, I really love this. If you look at the Asian culture, so our friend John Wang, who was on the podcast and he talked about the. I think it was called the Tiger Tail Mother, that really, in that culture there's such a focus on productivity and achievement that there's really no room to process any other emotions instead of go. And then if you look at the Canadians, obviously I'm blanketing statementing here. Like, there's lots of nuance. I'm not saying that this is all the cultures, but in the Canadian, it's like, oh, very passive, very nice. You know that phrase, nice guys finish last. So we really outsource our capacity. You know, you had the three phases of nervous system mastery. The capacity one seems like we outsource it based on societal conditioning, but it's just simply because we don't know. We don't know. Am I getting you right?

Yeah, I love that. And, and with the, you know, with the sorry to any Canadians listening. But the people pleasing tendency is typically repressed anger. Like, that's what I noticed for myself is, yeah, I was a chronic people pleaser. And when I got more in touch with my anger, I was able to set more effective boundaries to say no to, like, honor my needs in a relationship especially. And so I think you're spot on. I think, I think there are these, like, cultural ways that we get kinked. Well, kind of just like compressed in certain ways.

There was a woman on my show named Deborah Silverman, and she's a very famous astrologer. And she's like, you know, I Just got to this truth that we're all fucked up, but I'm still worthy of love, which I think is so divine, it's so true. Like, we're all fucked up, AKA we all have emotional dysregulation. And then when we get to relationship, man, this is the ultimate crucible. So I'm a father of two. I've been with Kerry Michelle, my fiance now for six years, and I have never been pushed to my limits or my capacity to use your verbiage, as I have been being a father and in relationship. Do you believe that our nervous system, our neural tree, gets to a place where we reach an edge and then we are with a woman or we're with a man, or we're parenting and you stack in sleep deprivation and stress and overwhelm and all these things. We can essentially, to quote Hans Selye, we can become adapted to stress, but then we can actually become owned by it. If you look at his model, the GAS model, how do we know when our edge is there for us to learn from versus this person that I'm with is actually not healthy for me? In other words, how have you learned that in relationship with your now wife? When is the edge of human dynamics actually healthy for us and for our neural tree? Or when is it actually a toxic relationship? What's the intelligence to know the difference between the two that you've learned?

That's a great question.

I like to figure this out because I'm living it. This is my work, right? Like I'm a student of my own work.

I think you're right. The relationships are. They are often the crucible or one of the main arenas for which. And actually, honestly, what, like one of the biggest mirrors of how far you come in nervous system work. Oh yeah, so. So I mean, relationships too, like the last five years of the last three years of marriage with my wife Kelly, have been hugely, let's say, like a catalyst for growth. But to come back to a question of like, if I heard it correctly, it's like, when is something toxic and when is it an edge that you can grow from? So I think that any conflict is a potential edge to grow from for you personally. And when it comes to the relationship, my view is that is there some kind of agreement or commitment that you've both made that explicitly that the relationship is there in part to serve as a catalyst for your growth? And if that's there, then my sense is that any degree of conflicts or any degree of trauma, bonding or patterns can be worked through yeah, if, if both sides are willing to, to take response, like full responsibility for how they're showing up in, in the dynamic. I, I, and if that's the case, then I think intimate relationships are almost like a fast track to nervous system mastery, let's say. Because it's often in relational spaces or dynamics that a lot of these wounds are created in the first place. So. And it's hard at times.

Scientifically sad. Yeah, it's hard.

Yeah. So, so I kind of say that with, with compassion. And I think there's also a way in which like, like let's say that someone's listening and they're like, I don't know if I'm in a toxic relationship, but it feels like I might be. Well then the learning edge there is like, okay, well to what degree can you advocate for your own needs and maybe set boundaries without creating disconnection? So a way that I learned to do this a few years ago that was really helpful was Kelly and I used to get in a dynamic where she would get angry about something. I would then kind of close up and kind of stonewall and get defensive. And we kind of have this, that was kind of the dynamic. And when I basically learned or practiced saying something along the lines of like, I really care about what you have to say, I care about the content, but the way that you're expressing this is causing me to close down. So can we take a few minutes to just like downregulate and then come back? Because I really want to hear what you have to say. Yeah. And she was like, oh shit. Yeah, like that makes sense. And so that, that, like, that, that one thing where I was just like, I was like, yes, I want to hear what you have to say, but the way that you're expressing it is, is, cause it is, is really, it's making it really hard for me to show up in a place of love. So can we just like, can we just change this?

So that would be a telltale sign if you're in a great relationship, not toxic. If you came to your woman or your man with that type of languaging, which is essentially non violent communication. It's beautiful.

Yeah.

And they still acted outside of the shared agreement. That would essentially be toxic. Yes or no.

So if, if the agreements get broken, you know, more than a handful of times and there's not a significant, I would say like, like, like this is maybe another good metric is like, to what degree is the rupture repair cycle like present? And if you're able, there's always going to be rupture. I think that's inevitable in any relationship.

Yeah.

If there's not, frankly, I'd be skeptical. Sure. It's like, how lovingly can you repair? And again, it's like reducing the half life of reactivity. It's like, how quickly can you go from being in that place of conflict into, okay, we're back in connection. And everyone will have their own threshold for kind of how long they're willing to stick it out. I think. And really only you can know if this. If that relational connection is like, serving you in the long run or if it's ultimately, like, not helping.

This is so good. I had Sylvie Qusquean on the show and she's really good about relational agreements. And she does some nervous system work as well. I think, really the greatest practitioners of relationship are deeply steeped in the nervous system. How could they not be?

Yeah, right. Totally.

And she was saying that I asked her a question based on the new age kind of Instagram informed, where a woman is able to just be whatever she wants, however she wants, say whatever she wants, and the man's just supposed to hold the space. I disagree with that. So does she. Because the more intelligent model that you're bringing is where it's okay for your woman to be angry. It's actually okay. But it's like, I love you. Yes. And the way in which you're bringing your anger into the situation, I can't hear what you're really wanting because your anger is so viscerally absorbed by my neural tree. I just can't even hear the heart of what you're saying. Did I hear you correctly?

Yeah. That's beautifully put. And related to that, I think, is this is another good litmus test, is like, to what degree are you both making generous assumptions about the other? So what you just shared was like, you. You made a generous assumption of like, actually there's some, probably some real deep wisdom in your anger.

Yes.

Likely an underlying need that I want this relationship to try and meet. But the way that it's coming out is again, like slightly kinked. Yeah. Like, how do we get. How do we address the need? Which it sounds like is coming up here.

Yeah. The world does not need any more hyper aggressive, super dogmatic masculine women. Just like the world doesn't need lazy, spineless, dysregulated men that just go into avoidance when there's any conflict. It's meeting in the middle, essentially. But in order for us to have middle, we have to have an awareness of what homeostasis or middle actually is. What is the middle? The homeostatic resting place of the nervous system? What do you think that really is?

I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier with this background sense of underlying joy and safety. And I think it's important to mention that no one can create that feeling for you that is very much an internal piece. And I think often another kind of unhealthy dynamic is like when one partner tries to help the other person feel better or feel differently. But if you're trying to change your partner, that's. It's essentially a sign that there is something within you that you're not willing to feel.

Oh, that's so good. I'm not a fan of everything Ram Dass, just like I'm not a fan of everything Osho. But there's wisdom in all their teachings. And I remember one thing Ram Dass said. He's like, you know, just treat people like they're trees. Just let them be. Because the moment that you try to change someone, or even if I'm holding in my system that I want Johnny to be different or I want my children to be different, they can feel it. People can feel when you're around them that you want them to be something other than they are. But there's a paradox there that I want to ask you about. Because in relationship, who you are at year one versus who you are from a somatic intelligence, from a psychological model, from a beingness, is totally different at year five. So the paradox that I love clarity on is when you're in relationship and you have an agreement that this is for growth and for learning about love, and that there's a. There's an order and there's a. There's a flow to the relationship. Have you found that? I've experienced this on social media, for sure. That when one partner is moving towards growth and the other partner maybe is not in a certain way, the partner might say, well, you're just not accepting me for who I am. As a way for their ego to almost essentially hide from the growth itself. There's this paradox of, like, accepting someone for who they are, having a shared value system and an agreement of what, of where the relationship is going, and then also holding them to that standard. How do you hold those two worlds in your marriage?

You're asking the tough questions, man, this is great.

Well, because I live it. I live it with my fiance.

Yeah. So what comes to mind for me is there's a great distinction that I think is really underappreciated. And it's this idea of self unfoldment versus self development. And I think we are in a world which somewhat worships self development. And there are aspects of life where self development is helpful, particularly in, let's say, skill acquisition. If you want to become a better coder, self development, great. Yeah. But when you're approaching inner work through that lens, it often has this premise of part of me is broken and I need to fix it, so I need to get better to the place where I am worthy of love, belonging, dignity, etc. And self development, on the other hand, starts with the premise of I am already whole and worthy of love. And if I bring loving presence to any situation in the same way that a tree or a sapling of an oak tree is not going on some Tony Robbins self development program, but it's still growing, it still becomes this like magnificent oak tree. I think there is a universal intelligence and drive inside all of us that we cannot help but grow when we are given the proper conditions, which are loving presence and safety. So in the relational context, and this is a very nuanced question, if, let's say one partner is resisting their own inevitable growth in some way, that is maybe something that the partnership can look at. But. And people won't necessarily grow on the same. In the same way. Bamboo might not grow for like at all, for three years and then shoot up.

Yes. It's the same with you, the Chinese bamboo tree.

Yeah. So I think it's the same with. I don't think you can faucet. People have different trajectories and often it's precipitated by something really fucking hard. And so, yeah, I don't think that you can control or the attempt to control or manage even your own personal growth, let alone someone else's, is, I think, ultimately misguided.

Yeah, well said. And there's also a paradox within a paradox. If I'm so focused on making my woman act different, than what am I hiding from in my own development.

Yeah, exactly.

There's such a focus on my person. And so y' all get off Instagram and go to Nervous System Mastery. It's on the screen right now. Joshtrent.com NSM thank you so much for what you do in the world because we're really getting to the part of the conversation that's my ultimate favorite, and that is how do we take the science of the nervous system and how do we make it spiritual and whole within ourselves? And one thing that you talk about which I love is the insular cortex. I did not know this. I thought it was actually just the prefrontal cortex where it loses blood and that takes away our logical functioning brain. But can you go into this because for all the people out there that struggle with being super a type and driven and understanding all the mechanisms of cognitive science, but yet your life still sucks and you're on your fifth marriage or whatever, it's not to shame anyone. It's just like, let's understand the science from your perspective. And then I'd love to bring in my own life learning to this. So the sympathetic activation on the inhale is really interesting. This is why nasal breathing in your work and really in all breath work is so powerful and so important. If you look at James Nestor's work with breathe, when we pull in through the nose versus when we pull in through the mouth, what's going on in the brain in that insular cortex? This is, this is fascinating.

Yeah. So a lot of people, and maybe you can just check yourself while you're listening to this. A lot of people, their default breath is through the mouth and kind of into the upper chest, which is essentially telling the nervous system via the insular cortex, which is like spying on the way we're breathing to make changes to the nervous system. So activates the sympathetic, which then kind of domino effects down into the endocrine system. There are changes in blood chemistry, releases adrenaline, things like that, and then that, then those changes in blood chemistry make their way up to cross the blood brain barrier and it changes the thoughts and feelings that you have. So you maybe you're like 10% more hypervigilant and then that then reinforces or exacerbates the breathing pattern that you have. So that's how we enter these like vicious cycles where someone in some cases can end up with like a panic attack. And I think it's really helpful to distinguish between top down versus bottom up interventions. So let's say in that scenario that's happening, someone thinks, okay, I'm noticing that I'm getting more stressed, I'm going to give myself a positive affirmation or I'm going to do some CBT on myself or something. And you know, maybe that helps a little bit. But I think that there is a far more effective intervention which is using a bottom up practice. Like breathing is a great example where you, you employ it and you're literally the reverse is happening. So let's say instead you consciously breathe down into your lower diaphragm. You can Put kind of your, your hand on either side, breathing in through the nose. And then just like a, just like a relaxed sigh on the exhale. You do that a few times and the opposite happens. So the insular cortex again reads that that's what's going on. It will then send different signals activating the parasympathetic nervous system, which then sends signals to the endocrine system. Different set of blood chemical changes crosses the blood brain barrier. And again. And then we notice that we start to have calmer thoughts and we feel more relaxed than at ease. And it's because we have these levers in our physiology that can up or down regulate our state. And so when I teach nervous system mastery, this is a really kind of like quick win, like foundational practice that you can employ. And there's a number of different bottom up practices. Humming is another really great one. Or forward fold stretches, things like that. There's a whole bunch of them. And you can very quickly go from being in a hijacked state, like, okay, I'm feeling a little bit more grounded and from that place, curiosity, things like that is then accessible.

It's so good. I did an activation last week at the biohacking conference and there's like 50 men in the room. And intuitively I had facilitated a lot of breathwork sessions, but I just felt in the room, I was like, okay, everyone breathe out and relax your jaw.

Yeah.

Breathe out and relax your jaw.

Yeah.

And I find that there can be this focus so much on nasal breathing and breathwork that people can actually clench their teeth and focus. Right. Just breathing through their nose. Have you found this? What are some other cues that you might walk somebody through when they're breathing?

Right? Yeah.

Like for me it's inhale through your nose, belly rises, exhale, belly falls. That's just a simple cue, not too much words. Do you find that people tension their jaw when they're breathing and doing breath work?

People do tension their jaw. And what I've noticed is that jaw tension is also connected to kind of saras and hip tension down here.

What was that?

It's connected to tension in the lower part of the body as well.

Yes, yes.

So if someone's jaw is tense, the breath is likely not going all the way down. And I've noticed I had a, had a body work session recently where the guy kind of went into my mouth and he released some of the tension here. And I felt my breath like fall down into like almost like my pelvic floor. It's really interesting how there are these kind of like kinetic chains, I guess, in the body. And the other piece that I think is interesting is that we have four times more efferent neurons going up the body, from the body to the brain, than afferent, which is from the brain to the body. So in terms of like, if your objective is to change your state, changing your physiology is I believe always going to be more effective than trying to change your thoughts. And then there's a third component as well. So there's like top down, bottom up, and then there's outside, in which I think is somewhat underrated, which is basically this idea that we are designing our environments and then they are designing us in return. So we're co regulating right now. There is a way in which the nervous systems around you are tuning with your own nervous system. I think I love the unit you mentioned. The vagal tone is like a guitar string. I think we are human instruments and we get out of tune and we are constantly tuning to the stimuli that are coming towards us in any moment in time. So to the degree that you can simply changing your environment to maybe a slightly darker, quieter, more relaxing, soft space is also going to help. Like even this podcast studio, I'm like, ah, there's like beautiful soft curtains, there's like dark colors. It's like created for connection. And so I think that's also an underrated piece where you can design environments that are kind of geared towards connection versus the opposite. Might be a, like a hospital bed with like blinking lights and shitty overhead LEDs and. Yeah, all of that stuff.

Wow. I mean, if I were giving advice, which none of this is medical advice, but if I were, I would say that we all get to create peaceful, restful experiences way more, probably 50% more in our homes, if you look at homes. You know, the biohacking conference was interesting because there was so much top down and there really wasn't even with the PEMF conversation. Yes. It's getting, you know, pulse frequency into the body, it's allowing people to rest and that's good. But unless you're wearing a blindfold, unless you're in a controlled environment of peace, then you're just around crappy lighting and people yelling and talking too. So how do you tune your own environment? This is really good. When we talk about mastery, there. There has to be spaces to practice mastery in. How do you create a space for yourself? And when people start to get into this work, what's the advice that you give them on creating spaces in their home? Creating Spaces in their car even, or at work so they can have a place to practice the mastery.

Yeah, that's a great question. So, I mean, a number of directions you could go. I think actually the first piece is it goes back to interoception. Because if you are paying attention to your internal state and just noticing how you feel in different environments, and you will naturally start to make changes. Like, if you're noticing how you're impacted by. I mean, I think probably your bedroom, the sleeping room is like, maybe has the most leverage. Like creating a cool, dark, quiet environment that goes a long way. Not looking at LED screens or blue light after sunset, getting morning light, things like that. Those are, like very easy wins. They're mostly kind of well known at this point. Maybe not. But then you can also extend it to your workspace if you do creative work. Having a higher ceiling has been shown to have a more creative effect. And creativity is a blend of that ventral state with the sympathetic state.

That is so cool. I did not know that.

So there's some arousal, but there's also this sense of expansiveness. And you can even. You can even play with your awareness. So this is another thing that people can try at home is like, notice that you're aware of, like, the space behind you or the space to the sides of you. And particularly when you feel a space behind you, you can breathe into the back of your chest. And usually we breathe into the front, but when you breathe into the back, there's almost like a sense of ease. The shoulders might drop a little bit, and you can also bring your awareness below you, feel your feet on the floor above you. And there's almost this, like, you feel a sense of spaciousness. And if you have some degree of sympathetic activation at the same time, that is great for flow states and for creativity. So it's not that sympathetic is bad. Like, we want that, but we just want it with the vagal tone, which we experience as a sense of, I feel grounded and I feel somewhat expansive.

Wow, that flies in the face of cubicles with low ceilings.

Yeah.

How could you be creative? Well, actually, those spaces, you know what's funny? Cubicles and low ceilings are actually maybe designed to keep people in a constant state of stress from the very companies, unconsciously, that create those spaces for in the sake of productivity. And I find this to be. I didn't know that, by the way. I mean, this is a high ceiling. I work in here all the time. I'll go on walks in nature. And I've been an adult and I've created a space for myself to love that and to cultivate that curiosity. But somebody on their journey, I mean, I remember the very first time I ever did a breathworks process, it was with Mark Devine in 2016. And we were in this massive hotel and I was surrounded by Navy seals and I started having water come out of my eyes, you know, crying. And I was like, what is this? What am I feeling? But I think it was like you were describing. We were in a really big space and there was lots of capacity, there was lots of energy that could be felt. And I wonder, because breath work is such a huge part of what you do when you take people through this, whether it's on zoom or in person, how much intentionality do you put into the space? In other words, what kind of cues are you giving them? Are they sitting up? Are they laying down? What's the space that you create for them?

Yeah. So I don't teach the breathwork journeys online, but when I do them in person.

Why don't you teach them online?

I. It's partly kind of honoring my teacher's beliefs, but the type of breath work that I do, so much of it is around reading someone's breathing pattern and then making hands on adjustments based on what I'm noticing to either kind of like poke and prod, to basically search for a latch and open something up, or if they're on the edge of their window, giving them more safety and helping to contain. And you can't do that over zoom. So I'm not, I wouldn't say like against people who do online breath work. I think if you're able to hold space for yourself, I think there's still value to be had there. Yeah, but I. It's also just more fun for me. Right. Like, I like being in person. I like being able to like poke and prod with people's bodies. And I think it's. That's just been what has been effective for me. But when I'm in a room with someone or with, with a group of people, there are many, many cues. A lot of it is creating permission in the beginning for emotions to be welcome and sharing safety cues. It's essentially kind of like you're building up various cues of safety and then once the journey starts, the music actually does a lot of the work for me. So I'm not making many verbal prompts during the journey, but I am noticing if someone is only breathing down into their belly, I might put my hands on, decide and invite them to breathe more into the upper chest because you don't want. There's no perfect breathing pattern. But what is preferable or optimal is having a dynamic range. So I'm looking to increase someone's range and that includes being able to breathe up here. So going from first gear to fifth gear. And then what most people struggle with is then downshifting. So the resilience piece, which is going from. I'm activated now, how do I downshift into kind of deep rest and relaxation? And there are many different. You can do something called nerve flossing, where you kind of like unweight a limb and often you kind of move it around a little bit and at a certain point it will catch. And I think that catch is where it's noticing a latch. And then sometimes the limb, maybe it's an arm, will start to kind of unwind. And what I think is happening is it's almost finding the position it was in when some kind of traumatic thing happened. Once it finds it, the emotion kind of comes through and there's like a sense of like rest and relaxation on the other side. And so it's almost like kind of in this like dance or this conversation with other people's nervous systems.

It's so funny. If you look at all animals, especially like when a leopard chases a deer, they, they survive, the leopard goes and eats some other deer. And then there's so many shots on YouTube, you can just look it up of animals that are actually bioenergetically letting go. They're shaking, they're moving, the energy is moving through them. Why would we ever think. I know you and I don't believe this, but people that might have a rejection of breath work or rejection of bioenergetics, if you just look, if you just take the time to look at nature and see how these animals process their own trauma, it's so logical and also spiritual for us to do the exact same thing. Whether it's through breath work or dance or shaking or even humming or didgeridoo. And all, all these things that's back to your capacity in, in your three part understanding of, of nervous system mastery and capacity can be really deadened by debt. And you, you talk about this in your work. The emotional debt that really honestly destroys our capacity to be an animal, that shakes it off. Can emotional debt kill us?

It certainly causes us to die sooner, yeah. Could it have killed you eventually? Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's, I mean, I mean in scientific terms, it's correlated with allostatic load, which is basically wear and Tear on the body caused by long term chronic stress. And that the reason that the body builds up emotional debt is we have this remarkable ability to buffer our emotional responses. So there are going to be times in life where actually it might not be safe or it might not be appropriate to express an emotion. Like anger is a good example. Yeah. But if you don't, then revisit that situation ideally, kind of like relatively soon after, in the hours or days afterwards, it, that's when I believe the latch gets created. And once we have this accumulation of latches, the body is using up metabolically a lot of energy to keep those latched in place. So it's actually, it's inefficient for the body to have all of these protective mechanisms in place. And that's where, you know, people eventually, if you, if you keep going down the route, you keep building up debt, burnout will hit to some degree or other because you will be. I mean, if you think back to kind of your history, like if you'd stayed in that hyper vigilant state and it just got worse and worse.

Yeah.

Probably would have ended in some kind of health crisis or burnout or both.

It did. It'd been chronic sinusitis for multiple decades. And if you look at Chinese medicine, the sinuses and the lungs are grief. So it's my ability to process grief. It's interesting. And it, it really begs the deeper question of. It's what Krishnamurti talked about. You know, it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a fundamentally sick society. So what you're experiencing, what I'm, what we're all experiencing is essentially that we're in a very sick society. The society and the way we treat each other, the way we treat the earth, the way that there's not these fundamental nervous system tools taught in school or relational dynamics taught in school. We're really, to quote Alan Watts, we're about to have the wretch and the vomit. You know, Alan Watts talks about, you know, it's all wretch and no vomit. We just raise our children to raise their children, to raise their children to be the same way. Your role is actually a purification, what you're doing in the world for yourself and for others. You're helping to purify the emotional body, the societal body, and really, in your own way, be a ripple. Like I said before we recorded, there needs to be a hundred thousand nervous system mastery practitioners or more before we can actually turn the tide of this thing. What resonates with you about Krishnamurti's quote.

I mean, I think it's spot on. I think it's. I'm friends with Justin Mares, and he talks about this idea like we're in this default sick culture, basically. And I think it actually, unfortunately requires quite a bit of conscious effort to just be default healthy.

No doubt.

You really are swimming upstream with just the way that we have constructed society, in my view. I mean, I'm imagining there will be nervous system clinics. There will be. I think this work is starting to become, I won't say mainstream, but it's starting to become more appreciated, particularly as anxiety, depression, suicide are all going in the wrong direction. And so I think there is. People are waking up to this need to the limits of talk therapy without some kind of somatic component. And I think what we need maybe more than anything are collective spaces where there is a sense of permissioning to feel emotions and to feel the stuff that has been, you know, maybe in your lifetime, maybe like ancestral as well. Yeah, like that kind of comes into this too. And what we've lost are these spaces where those, like, you know, in many indigenous cultures, they will have like three day lamenting kind of rituals. When someone dies in their village in Eastern Europe, the sauna was kind of like the place where maybe during wartime, like, the men would go and they would. They would process the shit that they experienced during the wars, and that would allow them to not build up this emotional debt that otherwise would accumulate. And so we don't have these kind of collective spaces really, where it is safe to let our bodies unwind and experience the pain that most of us are just carrying around. And I think until we do that, we will continue to project that unfelt pain into the organizations we create, into the type of leaders that we become, and into the world that we build. And so it really is, as far as I can see, kind of addressing your own nervous system. Dysregulation is like the highest leverage thing you can do to support the world. And if more people do that, the type of culture and world that we create from that more regulated, grounded, connected, safe place, will reflect our internal state.

It's the world we all know is possible. That that's what's driving you to do your work. That's what inspires me, is ever since I was a little boy, I'm like, you guys know it doesn't have to be like this, right?

Yeah, yeah.

I had that feeling.

Confusion, right. Because it's like, like I had the same thing. It's like, this doesn't feel. This feels off.

Something's off.

But I don't. But you don't have the language for it or the skills at the time.

The phrase that comes to mind for me is interstitial tension. We have this interstitial tension of what we know is possible, all of our hearts. And Charles Eisenstein talks about this and so does Zach Bush and many people on, I guess you could say the leading edge of how we interface with each other in the world. But the part that's so fascinating is like, if we all know this, then can we just get on with it? It's almost like I have this impatience. Do you ever feel this in your. The impatience of knowing the potential of how we can all treat each other, of how we can all be. It's like I see the horizon of what is possible, and I want to scream from the mountain and be like, can everybody hurry up? Can we just get there? Because when we get there, there's no there. But there, I believe, is a place where there's conscious capitalism. There's these spaces, like you talk about, where we can be together again and process and not have so much emotional debt. Because I think, I wonder how you feel the debt. I think it's like hundreds of trillions of dollars in America are our gross debt as a country. Same, same. I'm sure in the UK there's lots of debt there. The financial debt that we all feel, people's spending habits and their relationship with money. That's why I put in the wellness Pentagon, which is essentially our capacitor, financial intelligence. Because the way that I treat my finances or my physical body or my emotional health or my mental or my spiritual, it's actually all one and the same. Do you find this to be the case that the more you tune into your body and the more that you become a really consummate professional in nervous system mastery. And even for your students, do you find that your ability to have a genuine relationship with money and with the other parts of yourself also increase? There's just a more ease there the more you do work on your body?

Yeah, I mean, I have noticed that for myself, money is. It's a beautiful mirror. And I think the story that we project onto money is very reflective of where we're at in our own kind of stage. So let's say for a lot of people, they don't want money. What they want is an experience of I want to feel safe. Often it's safety. Or maybe I want to feel powerful, which is I want to Feel like I matter. I want to feel seen. But generally. So if you're able to kind of like, again, get curious and turn towards like, what is the. What is my money story? Like, If I had $10 million in the bank tomorrow, what do I think I would feel? And interestingly, you meet people that I've met, many who sell their companies, they get $10 million in the bank and they don't feel that right. And it's like there's a special form of heartbreak because no one will give them sympathy because they've made it. But they feel this sense of emptiness because the belief or the promise that they were following, that they worked so hard for, maybe they burnt out in order to get, didn't give them the internal felt sense that they were looking for. And so that then becomes a catalyst for or an existential crisis to then often go to do some of the inner work. So I think it's a beautiful reflection of an unmet need that you might be carrying.

There's so that's so good. Play that back again. Listen to that three times in a row. The law of attraction is really interesting and it's one of the 12 universal spiritual laws. And also it's in the hermetics. The attraction piece that you just described is really just a feeling. It's not that people want to have 10 million in the bank. They want to feel what it's like to have the 10 million in the bank. So practically, the more we do, and I'm just getting more clear on this in our conversation, the more we just commit to feeling it all. I know this is reductionistic to feeling everything. Then paradoxically, we open ourselves up to feeling what it would be like to be wealthy, to have tons of money before it's actually in our hand. Does this resonate?

Yeah, yeah, totally. And. And it's to the degree that you can feel safe in your body. And there's also a way in which money is interesting because I think you can have a lot of money land in your bank account. And this might happen with someone who receives inheritance. But if some part of you is guarded to receiving, and this is often correlated with. So this same person might struggle to feel like they receive love from their partner, which is again, there's some kind of guarding around the heart that's happening. And chances are maybe they'll spend the money in a way, or they'll invest it in a poor way, or it won't be fully received, it won't be let in. And what I notice, especially for A lot of men, frankly, there is this fear to receive. And. And I think whether it's money, whether it's love, whether it's a compliment, like, you can tell really quickly, like, if you give someone a compliment and they're like, yeah, actually, no, like, you know, it wasn't me, or whatever it is. It's like, oh, there's. There's some vulnerability that they're avoiding in that receiving.

Yes.

And so I think that is. You can apply to kind of any area of life that's so good.

Okay, so if we look at. Let's wind it down. If we look at the body as a capacitor, it's on the screen. I mean, there's so much more I want to talk to you about, man. But at some point, we'll have to do another pod. If the body is a capacitor and it's on the screen right now. I found this out when I was creating my slides for emotional epigenetics. It actually mirrors in sacred geometry. The Pentagon is about synergy and wholeness and balance and harmony. And then the electrical system for automobiles and, you know, capacitors and electric boards, it's the same thing. It's a pentagon. And I found that so fascinating because I'm like, well, if the human body is just a. Essentially a battery with a capacitor, then nervous system mastery is about giving us the fullest possible charge that we can feel. Yeah, but that's the key word. Feel.

It's. I think it's a great analogy. And it's almost like, if you imagine in the wiring, there is a bunch of, like, things that are compressing the. They're like rate limiters. It's like limiting the amount of current or energy that is moving through your body.

Yes.

Because it was unsafe to allow that amount of energy previously. And it's all tied. It's tied to metabolic health, it's tied to these latches. It's tied to, I think, like, bioelectrics and Dr. Michael Levin's work. Like, it is all part of, like, a bigger story that we're. We're almost like. Like touching an elephant. And like, oh, it's this, or it's this, or it's this, and it's. There's this vision or this. This story that is emerging that I think is very exciting. And it does feel like we're kind of on a frontier of understanding how our bodies actually work.

Yeah, A lot of it can be intellectual. Even when I look at the epigenetic expressions of turning off and on the, the trauma or the trust DNA, we have got to live it. You have to actually go in there and do the breath work and learn mastery through experience. There's no shortcutting. I wish there was, but then maybe I don't. Because you couldn't embody it if you didn't experience it in your body.

Yeah.

Full stop.

And it's also, I mean, to come back to Alan Watts, I think that this. So when I was younger I loved travel. I was like, I read National Geographic, I went on adventures. I did a stand up paddleboard trip through Scandinavia. And at some point I realized that like the, the new frontier, the unexplored frontier was like my internal landscape. And so I viewed this journey as literally as an inner adventure. Like the Joseph Campbell, like stepping into the cave. Yeah. And without this, you know, I think life would be kind of boring. And I think like we are looking to have an adventure in this and it's. And no, no good adventure is easy and kind of simple and plain sighting the whole way. So I think that frame, at least for me, it kind of get. It helps to give me courage when there are things that are scary to look at or scary to go into or an experience that I'm like, oh shit, I don't, that might be out of my, might be out of my capacity. Like, I don't know. And then there's that, that tension. So I really like that adventure framing that's living.

I mean, do we want the adventure to be easy? Yeah, that would not be very exciting. What's most curious for you now when it comes to mastery, really. Mastery of self, mastery of the body, mastery of nervous system.

Yeah.

What's most curious for you now that something that you didn't even know, you didn't know that you're about to learn about or that you're diving into.

Yeah. So I can answer that in two ways. I think intellectually it's the work of Michael Johnson and Dr. Michael Levin who is researching bioelectrics.

You got me on that one.

I'm going to send you some links after this that'll blow your mind. And then secondly, I think experientially I've been going deeper into a form of meditation called Jhana practice, which is essentially, it's very, very old, like the Buddha taught it back in the day. And it's essentially as I went on a retreat and I had this experience within two days. I was in an MGMA level state of kind of like joy and rapture through this meditation Practice. And I was like. And I'd be meditating for, like, 10 plus years. I was like, holy. Like, like, what. What is this? And what I'm realizing is this jhana practice for myself, it's like giving me greater depths of that secure attachment with reality. It's. It's like. Or giving me more fine tuning around the ways in which I still am, like, subtly tensing or subtly contracting and opening up into. And there's a. I won't go fully into it, but there's a state called the fourth jhana, which I experience is below my pelvic floor. And it's like this deep sense of equanimity and that everything is absolutely perfect. And if I meditate and I access that state in the morning, it just changes the texture of my day. My days are radically different. If I start in that mode, I don't always have time, or sometimes I get jhana blocked, which is just an indication that there is some kind of emotional feeling that I'm, like, not looking at. So it becomes a beautiful mirror as well.

Wow. What an amazing way to tend to your garden. To pull out the weeds of anxiety, if you will, or depression.

Yeah. And it's fun, right. And the bonus is you get to just, like, bask in this, like, beautiful state of being. And what I love about it. And I'm friends with Steven, who is. He started this company called Journey. It's kind of a Trojan horse for nervous system practice, because you're building interoception, you're noticing where the tension is, and then you're sending loving kindness or meta. Or forgiveness to the parts of you that are contracted. And then on the other side, you feel. I'm like, oh, I feel amazing again. And so it's becoming this beautiful. Yeah, I've just. I've been adding it more to my toolkit. And then you can kind of ride it all the way into insight practice and cessation and kind of more traditional awakening practices. So that's the. That's like the thing I've been nerding out on recently.

Well, it sounds like fucking magic. It sounds pretty magic spells.

Yeah.

Well, so in that vein of magic to close us out, what do you believe is the magic that you're bringing to the world? If you had a magic wand and you were able to cast a spell, which essentially you're doing through your work and your words. Right. Everything is spells. If you look at nlp, we're either attuning ourselves to be in trust, or we're tuning ourselves to be in dominance and control and trauma. I think it boils down to love and fear. Again, this reductionism. If you had a magic wand, what do you believe nervous system mastery is casting? What is the spell that you'd like to cast in the next five to 10 years?

What comes to mind is remembering intentionality and agency and the practices, the tools, the perspectives, they are all a pathway to remembering the agency and the aliveness, the agency, aliveness and intentionality that we, we already have. But there's just some shit that gets in the way.

Well said. Well, I support you, man. I mean, I love the work you're doing. It's so good, y'. All. It's on the screen now. Joshtrant.com NSM thank you for the discount, by the way. It's not easy to lead as many people as you lead. You can get $250 off the training. Now, this training is unique. Can you tell people about the training and about the cohort just so they know, like, you're not just going to put them in the garden and lock the gate? Like they're going to be guided because the garden has Venus fly traps, you know, if, if you're not careful, tell them what it is.

Yeah. So I've attempted to, I guess, distill everything that I've been learning and experiencing for the past decade into this five week bootcamp, this five week training. We run it twice a year, so once in spring and once in the fall and the next one's in October. And it's essentially like, what I love is that people come for the tools and the protocols and the practices, but it's also the community and the intimacy and connection that gets created as you do these practices with other humans. And it's that kind of relational arena where the magic really unfolds. And so I also bring in some of the folks who I think are on the frontier of some of this work as well. We have guest masterclasses and then I teach the weekly live sessions every Friday. And we've had people do the cohort five or six times. People seem to want to keep coming back and I just get like, it's so gratifying to see people apply their own creativity to the ways that these skills are kind of practiced. So we do an edge challenge in week four and sometimes they'll initiate a conversation with their dad and they haven't spoken to you for 10 years or they will hit publish on a blog post. They've been. So it's really this kind of like arena for courage and the tools and practices support with that.

Oh, thanks for the work you do in the world, man. What a joy. I'm so glad I met you in Costa Rica. Freaking awesome.

I've really enjoyed this conversation. Yeah. I feel like sense of kindred.

Yeah.

Kindred ship on this path.

Me too. Yeah. And I feel like this is just the beginning because this work is deep, y'. All. Share this podcast is worthy of sharing. Share this podcast with somebody who you can feel is dysregulated. And also I think we all are.

At times with some degree. Yeah.

So the work is very deep, but you don't have to do it alone. And from my heart to yours, thank you for being here. Thank you for spending your time in this conversation of mastery. Because what else are we doing here? What else are we doing here if it's not for this? So share this podcast and make sure you check out the link that's on the screen. In my life, breath work and understanding my emotions has been the biggest game changer above all things. You know, no podcast, no PDF, no intellectual training has ever matched nervous system training and breath work like you do. So we're wishing you love wellness, but most importantly, peace and power. You cannot have power unless it comes from peace. We'll talk with you soon.