Somatic Breathwork: The Most Efficient Method for Trauma Healing?

Your breath is the only body rhythm that you do both consciously and unconsciously. It is the bridge between your subconscious and your conscious mind and body because it controls your nervous system. We have to heal on a somatic level, on a body centered level, on a nervous system level, to become clear mentally, because your body is an antenna. Most of our wounds happen from another person, whether it's our mom or a dad. And so most of our healing happens in the presence of another person. Because when you're by yourself, you probably aren't getting triggered. As soon as you get into a relationship, all of your own shit comes up. No doubt because you look at something like trauma. It's in the body. It's a response. It's not the thing that's happening to you. It's what's happening inside of you based on what's happening to you. Trauma is not the event. Stress isn't the event. And what's happening inside of you is based off that ancestral lineage, both your nature and the instinctual and emotional memories that were passed on to you. It's also your experiences and what you've been through, what you've overcome, how much resilience you've had. Because what's traumatic to me might not be traumatic to you.

Steven, we're here. We made it. Thank you for being on the show. It's been three plus years. We have a mutual friend, Anahata, and I got to drop in with you in Sedona, and now it's pretty cool timing. Three years later, we get to connect and just so grateful you're here, man. We marinated on this for a minute, so I'm stoked to have you here.

It's a perfect timing, brother, and it's an honor. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Yeah, you. You were one of those people along my journey that just gave me a little nudge that was like, keep going. You know, you've been in the game for a while.

Whoa. I just got a full chill. Yesterday I recorded a podcast. I told my story about the vision quest where God told me to keep going. My guest, God had told him to keep going. Now you're telling me. I mean, this is like a cool moment. You're telling me that just me being in your life in some way was fuel to keep you going. This is the coolest part about the fact that we're all one, and we have this understanding that we've maybe learned for so long that we're separate, and it's just absolute fucking bullshit. So maybe in the pod Today, we can explore how breath can. Can give us that freedom. But I know, for me, like, in 2016, when I found the breath, it absolutely revolutionized my life. And, you know, people know you as somatic breath work, and you've been leading workshops across the world. I think you've been traveling, man.

We have over 700 practitioners worldwide right now, on every continent, and doing sessions in a multitude of different languages, and it's spread so fast, and I'm just. It doesn't even. I don't even fully understand, but I'm. I'm so blessed to be a vessel for this work. Well, you're very.

I've always known you as a very regulated, calm man.

Yeah.

But in order for you to get there, there's probably some work that you had to do.

Right.

That you got to do. And I. I wonder. I remember even in a conversation we had in Sedona about, like, the. The challenge of this life and. And how we respond to it, and I don't think we talked about our D point, but at that time, I was really struggling with, you know, how do I access my breath? And what does it mean to actually be in the somatic experience of life?

Yeah.

What does that actually mean for us to be actually in our bodies, out of our heads, and in the world and in our environment? And I was really struggling with that. And. And I remember at that dinner party, we were eating dinner, we were conversating, like, we were hanging out. And it wasn't maybe a month or two that went by before I got to be in a breathwork ceremony with you. You were one of the facilitators, and everybody was wearing white. And it was that night that actually rocked my world so deeply that it sent me on a journey of going down to Costa Rica a couple times and then making the Breathe Breath and wellness program. And it was from that culmination of, like, you and I and Anahata and that. That kind of swirling vortex that was coming online then. But it knew something that. That you and I, and especially you, with 700 practitioners. 7,000.

700.

7,000 soon are making an impact in the world. When we don't breathe, we could never be free. If we're not breathing, we have no freedom from our thoughts, from the projections of others, or from the lineage that God imprinted to us. Let's start there.

Absolutely, brother. Well, first off, thank you for saying that. And you're 100% spot on. Your breath is the only body rhythm that you do both consciously and unconsciously. It's like, try to stop beating your heart right now. Can't do that.

I don't want to.

Try to. You don't want to, obviously, but try. Try to stop it. Try to stop digesting your food. Right. Try to stop repairing yourself on a cellular level. Your breath is the only body rhythm that you can. We can right now. We could take a breath in or we don't have to think about it. During this podcast, we're going to continue to breathe. It is the bridge between your subconscious and your conscious mind and body. It's the bridge between. Because it controls your nervous system and it controls the electrical system of your body. A lot of people are like, well, you know, is it the energetic system, your chakra system or your nervous system? My job has been to bridge the gap in between those. You have nerve bundles, nerve plexi, nerve ganglia, if you want to get clinical about it, you have nerve bundles at all of those different seven centers that are basically conducting electricity and commanding your glandular function, your musculoskeletal function on all those different seven centers. And as a body worker, as a neuromuscular therapist, I was working with people on a postural level and helping people align their bodies over and over and over again. And they would continue to come back with the same thing. And so I'm like, well, what's controlling the musculoskeletal system? Well, it's a nervous system. Well, what's the main thing controlling your electrical or your energy system is your breath. And in 2017, I had volunteered for a non profit organization called MAPS. If for those of you that are aware of that, it's a psychedelic science.

Business that's multidisciplinary association. Psychedelic science.

Yeah, exactly that.

Ten times quickly.

Yep, exactly. I was hoping I wouldn't have, but in 2017, I was, I was volunteering at a psychedelic science conference and I was offering, I was helping, running like the healing tent there. We had all different types of healers from all over the world. But I had this person say, you need to go do this holotropic breathwork session with a man named Stan Grof. And I was like, okay. Like, I've never really heard. I've done Wim Hof. I've done Kundalini, like. And I was like, all right. So I went and did this session with him and I had more release in my physical body than I had had from all of the body work, acupuncture, talk therapy, all of those different things. And when I was 18 years old, I Would I had some back pain and I went to the doctor and they're like, you have some scoliosis in your thoracic spine, in your solar plexus center. Really now that I understand as my solar plexus center. My parents were meth addicts like they were addicted to hard street drugs. And when people are addicted to stimulants like that, it is a false sense of fire. It burns out your fire center. And so I have had plenty of journeys realizing that it was kind of something that was passed down to me, this, this blockage in my, in my thoracic spine. Well, in that breath work session I had such a powerful release of emotions. It first started out with anger. I was yelling, screaming. I was flashback to seeing both of my parents and kind of their own struggles and my felt sensation of why they weren't able to show up for me or why was my childhood different than my friends. All of these feelings that I had shoved down for so long. I felt this pop in my thoracic spine and I ended up releasing and I felt this clearing on a somatic body level. And once I cleared I became so clear. And what that clarity was is that I'm actually a breath worker first, a body worker second. We're all breath workers whether we know it or not, because we attune to each other. And if you are someone that is working with another person, you were probably a breath worker first. Because if someone's not breathing or if their nervous system is in a defense state, whatever you're doing with them, it's probably not landing because their nervous system is in a state of defense. And so I started taking that shift and, and really working with people from okay, I'm a breath worker first. Let's work with their life force energy, their breath first, before I start doing physical bodywork stuff, before I start doing coaching. Open them up on a nervous system level, allow them to feel safe enough within themselves. And then I would find that all this repatterning, all this secondary stuff that I'm doing actually landed and lasted for so much longer.

It's not secondary though. It's actually like maybe tertiary secondary and firsts all together. It's like it's all weave together. But unless we're like, unless we really are doing that and not because we think we should or we're doing it because we know the benefits when it literally becomes a habitual state of being that there's just this check in process with the body. And I, and I remember back so much in my Life when I was young, I was overweight as a kid. I was like, actually in high school. At the end of high school, I was almost 280 pounds. And so I trained my front panel to just lock in the corset and to never, like, let my. Like to never let my belly out. And I. I've had this conversation with a lot of people. I'm curious how you feel about this. When we are trained to posture up, not just physically, but also, you know, on a energetic kind of peripheral level where we want people to see us in a certain way, and we learn that from mom and dad, from grandparents, from society, we literally tighten up. We stand up straight, or as Jordan Peterson says, stand up straight with your shoulders back. But nowhere during that process would mom, dad, grandmother, grandfather, society say, hey, also when you stand up straight with your shoulders back, take some deep belly breaths when you do it. Because we're so addicted to that posturing of having our shit together, both on, like, a visual level, but also on an energetic level, especially for men. Let's expand on that a little bit. The physical representation of what happens when we don't breathe because we're hypervigilant, hyper focused on posturing. And then the other part of it is what's going on with our physiology when we're upper chest breathing, we're not actually breathing through our diaphragm.

There's a lot there, my friend. Even I think the understanding of posture is. Most of us, we wrap our head around it. We think it's like some static thing. It's like there is no perfect posture because you can't measure yourself without the environment, without the positions that you're moving through. And so you're never going to have, like, perfect posture. Like, and so when people are holding themselves in this position, you're really putting yourself in a holding pattern. And so it can become. I mean, the defense systems that we develop usually are an intelligent system, and they help us in the moment to cope or to deal or to. They're usually helping us in some sort of way. But the things that help us in the moment usually become the thing that blocks us later on down the line. And so you take, for example, like, you standing up tall with your shoulders back, sucking in your belly to, you know, appear a certain way or to feel good about yourself probably helped you in the moment. But if it's left unchecked, like, if the deeper thing is left unprocessed, that thing will become the thing that probably keeps you in a holding pattern and probably is causing more damage than good. Does that make sense?

It's clear, because anytime that I have a complacency about what's really going on, and I have some kind of coping strategy for me to hold a position, I can't ever relax into the healthy pattern or into the healthy groove.

Yeah.

In other words, if I'm constantly posturing, then I don't really have a true resting posture. Like, I have a kyphotic T span, so I have kyphosis a little bit. And so I'm always reminding myself to just make this little adjustment, you know, just to stick my chest out a little bit. But when I do that, I let my belly out too.

Yeah.

But I've had to learn and train myself to do that since 2016. Otherwise, I would just be, like, posturing on people, and they feel that, like, we have this subtle energy system. And maybe you could go more into the physiology and the biology of it. Like, your nerves in your body, all those afferent efferent signals that are coming from your enteric nervous system to your hypothalamus and that are regulating all kinds of processes, they all start with that belly expanding, belly contracting, they're literally pushing on those nerve endings. So we get not only a physical touch, we breathe, but then we get an energetic touch to the brain when we breathe. So expand on that a little bit and maybe even how you found out about what's going on with our physiology. Like, there's something that continues to fascinate you about the breath, specifically somatic breathing, or your somatic style. Go into both of those.

Yeah. I think that we become a culture that's mentally dominant, and we've forgotten the intelligence of our bodies. We've forgotten that we're animals. We're an animal. Yeah. And we do a lot of cool. Like, we talk in microphones and. And fly in airplanes and do all these things, but we are animals. And whatever age you are, like, for example, I just turned 31, and whatever age you are, you are actually not that age. You're actually ancient. Because your nervous system, it's taken thousands of years for it to develop through evolutionary biology. And you can't bypass the nature of your being. Like, because you came out of your mom and she came out of her mom, and there's memories and patterns that are passed down. And our nervous systems are an intelligent system. It's like it's cultivated all of these different, like, patterns so that we can stay alive, so that we can thrive. Right. And so we can't bypass the nature of our being. And I think a lot of us are doing that. We look at the body as something. We just have to. I gotta put food in it, I gotta take it to the shower. I gotta do all these different things. Well, your mind can't even fathom repairing yourself on a cellular level. Like all of these autonomic functions. Like your mind can't even fathom the digestion of your food. Like, if your mind had to be respons responsible of all that, we'd be.

Yeah.

And so there's this innate intelligence that's moving through you that it knows exactly what it's doing that we've gone against. And so my fascination is like, okay, how do we work with nature? There's a lot of people that do the similar thing by studying regenerative farming or whatever it is.

Yeah.

My fascination is within the body. And so that being said, it's like, what is the primary function of your nervous system? A lot of people ask that. They're like, okay, well, is it keeping you safe? Is it to send and receive messages? Is it to. It is. In my personal opinion, it is to communicate. And we are constantly communicating with everything that's going around. Because your nervous system isn't just inside of your body. It extends outside of your body is the electrical system. You have an electrical bubble around you. And us together right now, we are communicating, like beyond. It is the communication beyond words. Not all of us speak Spanish, not all of us speak English, but all of us speak the language of the nervous system. And so it's another. It's a. It's a separate language. And you can always feel when you are in a contracted state, like if you walk into a room, your nervous system is surveying everything for threats. And especially if you're stuck in a state of fear, guilt, shame, which the powers that be understand this very well because. Keeps people from being able to think rationally and logically.

It also allows people to be monetized much easier.

100%. 100%. But notice when you walk into a room, if you are surveying the room for threats, and maybe it's not like life or death threats, but maybe it's just like, are you. Are you worried about people judging you? You can always tell. Your nervous system either feels safe or it doesn't. It's either in a contracted state or it's in an open state and receptive state. And so it is. Not only are we communicating with our external environment, what you are being is being communicated. And that happens on a somatic Level first, beyond words and specifically when it comes to working with another person. I'm fascinated on this, like this energetic communication that goes on, this nervous system communication that goes on. Which you know, in, in, in the modern world we call this like co regulation in a ways which we actually learn how to co regulate with each other before we learn how to self regulate. And it's such an important part of our developmental stages. Like I use the example and especially if you had parents that were disregulated all the time and you were co regulating to this very stressful environment. I use the example like say you're on an airplane and it's the, it's like the first time you've ever been on an airplane, never been on an airplane before. And you're sitting in your seat and all of a sudden the airplane starts like having so much turbulence and you're like what the fuck's going on? You know, you're like oh, this is, we're going down. You know, like you're freaking out but you look around and you see everyone else and everyone else is calm, everyone else is chilling, like nothing's going on. And you're like well okay, well they're not freaking out so maybe everything's okay. And that allows you to regulate back into yourself. And so we learn how to co regulate to other people first as a child before we actually learn self regulation.

Yeah.

And it's so important to realize, especially if, if we were young, a lot of us become addicted to stress in our older age because we were co regulating to these stressful environments.

It goes deeper than that too. Like what you're saying is 100% truth. And also I was thinking about some of the work from Mark Wolin. He wrote a book called It Didn't Start with youh. He's the founder, I think, or CEO, the head honcho at Family Constellations, which is where you know, this science of how things get imprinted in our nervous system from our lineage. And he was citing some of the research that said you are an egg three generations back. So when your grandmother was born, you were already within her. So whatever she's going through, like I think about my grandparents, World War II, that was literally instilled in my mother. And I was an egg in my mother when she was born.

Yeah.

And then also in utero, what are we learning about co regulation? Like you mentioned, when we're in utero, we can hear I think at three or four months maybe before it's very early that we can start to sense and feel and understand what's going on. We don't need to know the words. We can feel the vibration. We can feel the fear or the love. And our parents communicating to each other. And the mother's nervous system. Yeah, I remember Paul Check was sharing about this too once, where mothers that had lots and lots of stress in their system, their offspring reborn and they would literally be wired for stress. And then when I went deeper into the research on emotional epigenetics, I found that there were multiple studies. One in particular where a mouse was really radically abused. Like loss of trauma. Five generations of mating with non traumatized female mice. And that one father who was heavily traumatized, his predisposition for sympathetic dominance was still inside of the fifth generation offspring. Five generations deeper, they were able to measure how this, this fifth generation rat from the traumatized great, great, great great grandfather was still set up for hyper vigilance, still set up to be in their sympathetic nervous system. So everything you're saying is true. And it's also such a fucking fractal. There's so much depth, there's so much. Because you're talking about the 3D, you're giving us the 3D explanation, but there's also this wild spiritual essence, this esoteric essence as to how we even come into the world.

Yeah.

That we also address. Have you, have you addressed that for yourself? Like your father, your mother, your grandparents? Like, how far back did you go in the Jaegers line to really clear out whatever needed to be cleared so that you could lead all these practitioners around the world?

I'm still clearing, brother.

Okay.

You know, like it's, it's a, it's a process. And I think it doesn't, I think that, you know, I see a lot of people too that like, I want to be fully healed, you know, especially when they go through a practitioner training. And it actually brings up a lot more stuff for them and they're like, well, I actually, there's a lot there. Like, I didn't realize all this was there. Like, I don't think I can start showing up for people until I, you know, start to work on this. And I would, I agree with that to a certain extent, but I would also challenge that because you'll never reach a place where you're fully healed. It's a, it's, it's a facade because you are healing. Your body is always, it's always in a state of healing and you're accumulating more as you're moving through the world and, and as fast as you're working on stuff. And so, like, just because you are in, you know, elementary school, as far as your spiritual or healing development, doesn't mean that there's not people underneath you that you can. You can help. And for me, in my own healing journey, it didn't even really start, I don't think, until I started working with other people, because we can do a lot of. We can do a lot by ourselves. We can do a little. I honestly think we can do a little bit by ourselves, like. But as soon as you start to show up for other people, as soon as you get into a relationship, all of your own comes up. No doubt because you look at something like trauma. Trauma is. Yes. It's. It's in the body. It's a response. It's not the thing that's happening to you. It's what's happening inside of you based on what's happening to you. So it's. It's not necessarily. It's. Trauma is not the event. Stress isn't the event. It's what's happening inside of you. And what's happening inside of you is based off that ancestral lineage, both your nature and the. And the instinctual and emotional memories that were passed on to you, and also your nurture as well. So it's not bull. It's not one or the other. It's nature and nurture. It's also your experiences and what you've been through, what you've overcome, how much resilience you've had. Because what's traumatic to me might not traumatic to you. Sure.

This is why Navy SEALs can go to war and come back. Kind of.

Okay, exactly.

Because they've trained.

They've trained. They've trained the nervous system to be resilient as hell. But what's fascinating to me is that those defense systems are, in the relational energy. They're not just within you, because when you're by yourself, you probably aren't getting triggered. It's. It's. Most of our wounds happen from another person, whether it's our mom or a dad. And so most of our healing happens in the presence of another person. And you look at a legend such as Bessel Van der Kolk, body keeps a score. His quote is, healing happens in the presence of an empathetic witness. And so I'm very fascinated on the relational energy, because I see this time and time, I see more healing happen in these practitioner trainings than I do people doing their own daily breathwork practice. Because as soon as you start to show up for another person, like all your own starts to come up. And especially through all the different dynamics, whether you're a male and this person's female, whether you're a female and this person's female, all the different styles of relational energy, those are where those defense systems are held. And you don't have a chance to really work on those until you're in those situations of relational energy.

Yeah.

And so it's. It's. I think that like, my own healing journey started when I started to show up for other people, because it brought up all my own shit.

Who's one of the people that maybe a mentor? Maybe it was that session with Grof when you're with Maps, or maybe it was an amalgam of things. Who's somebody that came along that really gently hit you in the ass and allowed you to look at something that maybe you had no idea was even there.

Anahata was one. She was. She's a dear friend. And also great fiery energy that has really helped me. Also, there's a man named Gary Strauss who runs Life Force Energy Institute out of Topanga, California. It's probably one of my greatest mentors. He's a polarity therapist and polarity therapist. Polarity therapy.

Is that what it seems like it is?

Or it's a combination. It's like an amalgamation of a lot of different things, but it's a. It's a body work centered modality. It's looking at the body as like an energetic system, almost like a battery. Like, you have a positive pole at the top of your head, you have a negative pole, and you're. You basically have an energetic pulsation that's controlled by your breath, but it's also pulsating your cerebral spinal fluid. So your cerebral spinal fluid is that sort of. It bathes all of the sutures in between your cranial bones, and it goes down your vertebrae all the way down to your sacrum and kind of comes back up. There's a pulsation, just like breathing, just like heart, just like your heartbeat. And when you're working with another person, if you attune yourself to sensitivity, like, my hands are like jumper cables. I have a positive hand, a negative hand. When I plug it, When I put my hands on your body, I'm plugging into you. And I can help you be kind of become aware of certain aspects where you're not running electricity or life force into. Through bodywork techniques, through guided verbal coaching.

But is that where you touch certain points, like on the meridian pathways where you'll know is like acupressure or is it a meridian energy transport where you touch two places at the same time.

It's a combination of those different things. So the thought in polarity therapy is there's three different types of touch. And this goes with like positive, negative and neutral. You know, there's protons, electrons, neutrons. It goes with the, the polarity of life. But there's positive style of touch which is in Ayurvedic medicine considered rajasic touch, which is a fiery type. Like it's like shaking, rocking someone's body. It's more of a fast movement style of touch and it's can be physical. On the body there is the, the negative poll of that which is considered thomasic and a lot of it's based on ayurvedic studies. That is a deep pinpoint like pressure like trigger point style. Like I'm in your. So as deep into your soul, you're having an emotional release. Maybe some people respond better to different types of touch. And so there's the middle which is, is a soft fic or an energetic touch that can be like holding two points that can be off body, that can be working in the field. And so a comment, some people, everybody digests information differently. Everybody responds better to different types of touch. And so this concept of energy work, people think it's like something outside the body. Everything is energy work. I could be squeezing your SEM very tightly and that's, that's a form of energy work.

Yeah.

And so it's, it's looking at the body through that lens and working through emotional release and energetic balancing. But to answer your question, he, it was probably my third class with him. He needed an example in class. So he brought me up in front of the class. And this was before, this was right after I was having those spinal issues, before I did the maps thing. He came over to me and just put his hand on my back like right where that, right where my scoliosis was. And he was just. And pushed me up a little bit. He's like, I feel like you need a little bit of support right here and just push my spine up. And then he asked me, do you want a little bit more? And then he ended up like hugging me from behind and I ended up just falling in the middle of class into a pool of tears. And he talked to me afterwards and he's like, he's kind of, he's a quirky old man. Like he's, he's probably in the 70s, but he's like, you have turtle medicine? And I was like. I had no idea what that meant. I, like, was not spiritually inclined or animal totems, whatever it is. He's like, you got turtle medicine? I'm like, what the. What the hell does that mean? He's like, you. You carry your home on your back. It's like, you never felt safe at home, did you? And I was like, you know what? I was always the kid outside playing in the streets. I was always a kid outside doing sports. Whatever it was, I was always the person. Like, my parents were so emotionally dysregulated that I developed this sort of avoidant attachment style. Like, as soon as I felt anything going on at home, I'm outside, I'm leaving, doing something that got me in my body. And I didn't realize that later. It's like, why was I addicted to doing a skateboarding? I was an amateur skateboarder when I was young. I threw my body down staircases. I trashed my body, which is a whole different other thing. But I'm like, why did I do all these things? And it's because when you're in your body like that, you're not thinking about what's going on at home. You're not thinking about the past. You're not thinking about the future. You're thinking about what, like, the moment. You're in the moment. And so there's been lots of processing around, like, my parental stuff. And I worked with him for a little bit longer, and he's like, you know, like, I think it's actually your gift. It is your gift. This blockage that you think you have. The scoliosis. The turtle. The turtle, Right. Because I'm. I'm. I'm definitely, like, hunched over, and I have. You could look at my back. It's. It's still there. I've worked on a lot on it, but, you know, I've come to terms that if I didn't have that thing, like, I probably wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. I probably wouldn't be, you know, helping and dedicating my life to this. And, you know, it's. It's. It's powerful. I mean, I'm still working through it, man. The other day. I'll say one other thing. The other day, I got a call from my mom, and she's up. She's, like, on pills and. And combining because she got clean from. Out from those hard drugs, switched to prescription medications, which is a whole big pharma, whole different thing. She Called me from the hospital and she made me talk to the doctor and I was talking to the doctor and I talked with her and she's like, the first thing that the doctor asked me was like, it's like your blood pressure is that of someone who's dead. Like, are you even breathing? Like, my mom doesn't even breathe. And so the thing, I have a deep feeling that the thing that I probably am ushering into the world is probably the thing that my parents need the most. And probably they might never do it. And so there's been a lot of processing inside myself that maybe they never do it and I probably have to be okay with that and love them anyways. And that's a day in and day out struggle.

Yeah. And that's like, you know, people talk about spiritual work. There's no way that you could meet yourself on a spiritual threshold unless you are carrying your home on your back or unless you've been through something severe. I have a lot of interviews, you know, like almost 600 people now. And there has not been one human being that I've learned from or that we've garnered wisdom from that hasn't shared their own turtle esque story. Yeah, like you said. And, and really, like, you know, even to reflect on John Wineland when he, he shared that, you know, the wound is where you serve from. You serve from the wound. But I added my own wisdom on it and I said, well, okay, I can serve from my wound, but, you know, God, grant me the courage to look at the things that block the wisdom from coming through so that I'm not serving from my wound, but my wisdom is blocked because of that wound. Yeah, like, that's the thing that I think we really need to emphasize here is like, dude, I don't know the first thing about what that is. Maybe there's people watching or listening that have dealt with drug addiction in their family lineage or their parents or brother, sister, grandparents. Like that is just a well and such a vacuum that's created in a child's existence that you could have chosen one of two ways. You could have said, cool, I'll just do what they did.

Yeah.

Or I'll just go get some corporate job, or I'll just go fill in the blank. I'll go live a life of comfort and have a tick of the box life. But you chose something different and you even share with me before we recorded, I mean, I'm just like, I'm fired up about this because you said, I almost went and got a corporate job. In 2016, 2017, I almost took that path. And I wonder, dude, if you'd even be leading people in the way you're leading now. And even the spiritual awareness that you have now, that would have never come online. If you would have chosen that path of comfort. Take us there, because that is exactly where so many people are in this human experience. Should I do the thing that scares me or should I do what my parents modeled for me on an unconscious level and just follow that path?

Yeah. Thank you for that, brother. One of my. I can't remember who said this, but one of my favorite understandings. And there's a choice, right? There's a choice when it's a fork in the road. It's a fork in the road. And this happens under every stressful circumstance. If you look at yourself as a biological entity, you are a biological being. We'll take spirituality because we'll take spirituality out of it. But I think biology and spirituality is synonymous. And until we understand that, we're going to have issues, but we'll look at you as a biological entity. Something traumatic happens to you, something stressful happens to you. It's a question to you, it's a question to your organism. And a question. You can either answer that question or you. You suppress the question. You don't answer it. You don't look at it. And the question answered is finding a new adaptive pattern. Answering the question is find how do I grow from this? Because stress or trauma, those are synonymous. They are the number one killer. Stress is the number one killer. It weakens your body to where you can't fight things off, but it's also the number one thing that causes growth. You put barbell plates on you. You're stressing your body to create growth. The same thing that the number one is, the number one killer is the number one thing that causes growth. It's all a choice. And finding a new adaptive pattern. Being able to recover from that, being able to lift that weight. We are communal beings. We are designed to live in community. And a lot of the times, the. A lot of the times the thing that you find the most purpose in is the shit that you over. You've overcome. You found a way to grow from it. Now you can go back and share that with your community because you've been there, you've walked it, you understand it. I love etymology. Understanding it means that I can stand underneath it and I can lift it up because I've been there, I've walked it. And so most of us find our greatest Purpose in the traumatic things that we've gone through, the stressful things that we've gone through, and we found a way to overcome it. Now we can go share that with our community. The question not answered creates symptoms. The question not looked at, not process, not digest. It gets suppressed, repressed, maybe even deep, maybe even to the point where it's depressed till it densifies, calcifies into a dis. Ease of energy flowing through your system. Because we are expression vessels, energy, emotion wants to move through us. Energy wants to move through us. And those symptoms are the different cries and yells of your body. Your organs will cry, the tears that your eyes never wept. And so we have a choice in that. And for myself, like, I remember I started when I first went to school. I couldn't decide if I wanted to go the mind route or the body route. Like, I wanted to study addiction psychology because of my parents, you know.

Yeah.

And I also was very fascinated on the body. So I started going to school for physical therapy. I was taking classes in both and I was like, which way do I go? I ended up dropping both of them because I did not. I could not do the book thing. The book thing. I was. I found a school that was a holistic health school. Body work, coaching, holistic nutrition, a lot of energy, somatic understanding, body works as well. Soon as I got my hands on some. Someone's body, it started to make sense for me. All the people I went to school with, parents were like, you're gonna go to school for touching someone? Like, are you okay? Like, are you gay? Like, what. What the are you doing? You're never gonna. You're never gonna. Yeah, you're never gonna make any money, you're never gonna be successful. Those sorts of things. And there was a knowing inside of me that I actually, actually want to help people. Like, and I feel like there's a I. At some point in time, people will find this value. And throughout that journey, five years later, I'm. I'm teaching body work. I fell in love with teaching. I kind of followed that. You know, I started getting into maps and, and also breath work. And now combining all these different things and Covid happened. Lost my job, lost my place in Sedona. I got a couple thousand dollars in my name and I got offered a job to. To be a physio body worker on the PGA Tour and, and to basically work for this like, corporation that goes in there and helps golfers. I was this close to taking it. I was this close. And there was a set There was a I'm thankful that I had enough awareness to listen inside to. That was not for me. And at that point I started I A friend let me move in with them. I started seeing clients again. I started combining all of the different things that I had studied and just like letting my creative intuition, if you will, and the studies that I had done for a long time all come through. And I was working with a woman and she was like, when are you going to teach what you do? And that light bulb came on. I was like, you know what? Like, I miss teaching. I was a teacher before. That's what really lights me up. I went into a cave for like two months, created a protocol, a curriculum that is basically the same curriculum that I use today.

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There was more to that Cave. I mean, I moved to Sedona. I lived there for two years, and it was a point in time where Sedona, there's not a lot of distractions there. It's transient people with a portal of.

A vortex inside of it. I know exactly what you mean. The first two days I got there, I had to lay on the couch.

Right.

It's a powerful place.

And so anything that you are getting distracted from is usually yourself. And a lot of the times it amplifies the good and the bad all within you. And so I took a break. When I moved to Sedona, before, I was studying, doing all these different things. I needed two years to not take in podcast, to not read books, to. Not all of us are information obese. We're constantly taking in information. Even like we look at our phones, we're taking in more information in a day that our grandparents probably took in years. And so I needed two years to digest, to absorb all of the things that I had taken on and assimilate that into nutrients that have been, become who I am. Right. And there was a dark night of the soul at that point, for sure. But if I. I mean, I don't know exactly what your question was, but if I didn't go through that, like, I wouldn't. And I'm. I'm so thankful for, like, and this sounds kind of awful, but I'm very thankful for Covid kind of happening because it gave me time and space, it gave me a mission, it made sense of all of the things that. That I've done, because I truly. I truly believe that it is. If you look at Covid, that is a global trauma that's happening, and it's asking our human organism to grow from this experience. It's asking a question, how do we grow from this experience? How do we find a new adaptive pattern? If we don't answer the question, we're going to continue to have symptoms. And the symptoms are the cries, the.

Yells from these different populations encapsulated in Covid. I call it CV19 theater. That way Google won't flag us. But now that you've said it, I'll just say, I'm sorry, bro. No, it's all good.

It's all right. So.

So now that Covid has come and gone, and even now we know that it came from Wuhan, there's multiple studies. Just a few days ago, the U.S. department of Energy.

Yeah.

States. Oh, yeah, it most likely happened at the Wuhan Coronavirus lab, where the coronavirus leaked from. It's funny because a comedian was being interviewed and he said, three years. I think it was two, three years ago. Hey, don't you guys think it's from the coronavirus lab? And he was labeled a conspiracy theorist. Why am I saying this? I'm saying this because there's a war on. Two things, I think. The first war that we're really looking at right now that you're helping to dissolve with somatic Experience. Breathwork is the first war is on the mind, and then the second war is on the fucking soul. So the first war is how do I capture your amygdala? How do I make you completely fear, despondent, and respondent on whatever's you're looking at in your. In your phone, in your hand? And then also, how do I make you live like that when you're out in the world when your phone is off so that I can track where you are on your phone and monetize your behavior and make you feel shame and guilt about the ways that you don't look sexy enough, don't have big enough dick, don't have enough friends, aren't cool enough, don't have a great face, and how can I sell you products? Yeah, that'll monetize your entire life. And these companies are licking their chops. And nobody wants to talk about this. I do, because I see it. I feel it. I feel it in my own existence. The war on the mind. So that's the first war I want to jam with you about. And then how breath addresses that. The second war is the war for the soul. So we'll. We'll sidebar that. Let's go into the war on the mind, because this is happening every day, multiple times a day. You said, you know, we look at the phone. Our grandparents would have looked at that much information in a year, but we see it in a day. How do you see it? Especially with the students that come in for the somatic breathing, how do you see it coming on to people, coming into people? And then how does becoming a practitioner and really like a breath worker, which we all are, how does that help to heal that? So. So two part question.

Yeah, there was a. There was a moment where this sort of global impact, like, really hit me. Where we started kind of putting things out on social media maybe about a year ago. Like, we haven't been on the social media for a while. As far as somatic breath work goes. I posted and I was completely against this, but we posted someone having an emotional release on. On Instagram. And you Know, for a while I was like, I don't think I want to put that out there. I don't, you know, this is sacred. Like, I don't, you know, I don't think people are going to understand. Right.

Yeah.

And, you know, I had. I had some kickback from, like, my team, and they were like, well, you need to show what. What. What's going on. You need to actually show what's going on. And overnight, we had probably a thousand messages come in. A couple of these posts went viral. 10, 20 million views off a reel on Instagram, thousands of messages. And the thing that hit me was most of these messages were in different languages. And so I was sitting there on Google Translate transfer trans, like, looking at all these messages and just seeing, like, how the world craves to feel, how the world really craves to be alive. And because the opposite of. The opposite of feeling is numbness. And Peter Levine, you know, says, although humans rarely die from trauma, if we do not do not diminish its effects, our lives can. Our lives can be severely diminished by its effects. And we call this a living death, where so many people are alive. They're alive, but they're actually not alive. They've cut themselves off from feeling lows, and a lot of it's because of societal impression. Yeah, they've cut themselves off from feeling the lows, therefore they've cut themselves off from feeling the highs. And they're left in this very narrow window of existence, which would be a flatline, which is a living death. And so first realization. The world is craving to feel because our somatic sensation, our felt sensations, it's how we're born into the world. It's our birthright. It takes more energy from our system to push things down than it does to feel. I use this example. Numbness is an active process. Takes more energy from your system to maintain a state of numb. Takes more energy for you to push it down. Because your natural state, you're born into the world as a child. You feel everything. Everything. You feel everything. And so I was really hit by this sort of global, like, cry for this sort of work. The suppression of entities and different things. Sure. But as I continue this work, it's. I'm realizing that this is about nervous system sovereignty. This is about you being able to reclaim your own sovereignty within your own system. To. Most people are not even occupying themselves. And a lot of that is because of. We've been taught that, like, we're trained to dissociate. And you can look at technology there's a trauma that happens with technology. We, if you look at your phone right now, you can see, you can see what's happening on the other side of the world. You can see a tragedy that's happening on the other side of the world. Australia, whatever it was, people were being completely just. There was a civil war going on.

Over there and so camps in China.

Yeah, exactly. All over the world you can see what's going on on the other side of the world. Your body, your biological body knows that you are intrinsically, intrinsically connected to all living things. Your cells in your body know that if you dump toxins in a river 100 miles away from you, eventually that water will make up the water in the body of your children. Your biology knows this. But our mind, the war on our mind, we're trained to dissociate. We're trained to feel like, okay, that's happening over there and it's not affecting me here, so I guess there's nothing that I can do about it.

Hence the phrase out of sight, out of mind.

Exactly. But your body is carrying the weight of the world. And so we're trained. And the same dissociation that's happening on this global massive level is the same dissociation or disconnect that's happening inside of you. The disconnect from your mind to your body, the disconnect to the intelligence of your body. And really what this is, is helping people occupy their body, occupy the intelligence of your body. And when you want to take care of your body, when you want to occupy your body, you usually want to take care of the people around you. You usually want to take care of your relational energy, your environment, the people, your family. When you want to take care of your family, you usually want to take care of your community. When you want to take care of your community, you usually want to take care of the soil, all the, all the other. You want to take care of food, you want to take care of the planet. And so we live in a world that everything is looked at, especially modern psychology, from a top down perspective. You know, I get so many people that come to me that it's like, I can't stop these limiting thoughts. Right? I can't stop these troublesome thoughts. Well, people don't wake up in the morning and choose to think limitedly. A lot of the times your, your, your thoughts are happening based on the state of your body. A lot of people want to expand their consciousness. You want to think, you want to have this expansive consciousness. Well, if your body is stuck in a contracted state, you're going to be picking up on contracted ideas. Hence, if I hijack your amygdala and I keep you in a fear state, then you are going to be in a contracted state. Physically, you're probably not going to be able to think clearly. You're probably not going to be able to think expansively. You're probably going to run to the store and buy all the toilet paper. Like that has anything to do with your physical survival whatsoever. And so nervous system sovereignty coming back to their body, being able to use the breath to move out of these contracted fear states, because it's all a choice. A lot of people ask me, what's the best daily breathwork practice? Well, it's not just a practice. Your breath is the only thing that you can do consciously and unconsciously. And can you become conscious of your breath to change your state when you're starting to be in that fear state? When you start to feel in your body that you are in a contracted state? And a lot of the times we take it out on the people that.

We'Re the closest to unconsciously.

Unconsciously.

Very unconsciously, you hit the nail on the head. So here's a good example. Someone sees a title on Instagram, or hopefully you don't watch CNN or any of these major news channels, but, like, if you do, please rethink that. And the first thing that happens when we look at it is we get that visual cortex response. It then floods us with some kind of a compression, like there's a catecholamine response. Then we. The first thing we do.

Yeah.

Like when people get scared, People see, you know, they're speeding in their car, they see a cop. It's a short, deep chest, neck breath. But it's not like a, I'm okay. It's a. It's a trained response. And I remember Dan Brulee was telling me this at the Bel Air Treehouse. He said, you ever watch a baby breathe? They all naturally breathe, completely, beautifully through their nose.

Yeah.

And I tried this when Nova was first born. I just. I didn't. I didn't choke him out. I just covered his nose and he started to choke.

Yeah.

And I thought, my God, we come into the world, perfect breathers. Perfect.

Yeah.

And then we adapt, right? These adaptive mechanisms you're talking about. We learn how to disconnect ourselves from what's really going on. We disconnect ourselves from the somatic experience, and we allow the mind to take over. And then all the mind does is say, Be on alert. So the mind tells the body to be on alert. But regardless of like, who cares if the cop is there? Who cares if there's a headline on the phone to be an observer of that, the answer is clear. There's no need for a crazy breath. But why do we do that though? Because this is what has been trained. So it's not about actually learning something new. Like, I'm sure when people come to you, they have a remembrance process.

It's all a remembrance.

They have a remembering process of like, oh, Steven just actually taught me how to access this beautiful compartment of healing and of self regulation inside of me that I had honestly just forgotten. And it's not to shame our parents, it's not to make our, it's not to make anyone wrong or to shame anyone. But go into that a little bit because that's what I've felt when I facilitate breath for people. Being a facilitator who trains facilitators, it's in my opinion probably a deeper level of work. People come to a two hour breath session. You know, we had one at Paleo and we did one with John Froman at Front Row Dads and people had beautiful cathartic experiences. But to go real deep, how long are the trainings there? Three, four, five.

Four days? Nine to five.

Okay.

And there's online integration and stuff in between those.

So when people go that deep, there's going to be this remembrance process. But really, maybe you can talk about what are all the ways that, that the shadow of the mind has been covering up the part of them that they then remember?

Yeah, well, the word remit, you hit it on, on the head with even the word remember is to, to remember is to put, to remember yourself is to put all the pieces back together that are already there. And so I'm not teaching anything new. It's all a remembering and it's all. And I, you know, especially living in Sedona and being in kind of the spiritual area, it's like people say, oh, you're a healer. And I'm like, like, I don't really, like, I don't really like that term necessarily because I. It's putting your power on someone else where it's like, we're not, I'm not a healer. I don't heal anybody. But we are all healers, we're all healing ourselves. Like if you go to a doctor, you have a cut on your arm, like, he's not going to heal your arm, he's going to stitch it up and Put you in position for you to heal yourself. And so there's the same understanding. And the thing that I see with breath work is that all healing modalities should be a self inquiry process. They should all be a self inquiry process. They should all get you to go inside and to look inside. What have I not been letting myself feel? And I'll give you an example. The same as body, the same thing for body work. Like for me, I go get regular like full body body work once a, once a month. Not because I want this person to fix all my injuries, because I want to become aware of myself. We've all had it probably where somebody is working on you. They press on your hip or your lower back or something. You're like, oh, that's tender back there. Well, you actually didn't know what's going on in your body over there. You actually needed that, you needed that other person's hands to bring awareness to that area, to become aware of yourself. And so a lot of us aren't even occupying our body. We don't even know what's happening in our feet, our legs, our hips, all these different areas. And we need help from another person to kind of provide that mirror. In a way. The same thing happens in breath work, but on an emotional level. It's like when you go into that state, a lot of the times you will become aware of a lot of the unprocessed, undigested emotions, unprocessed, undigested, instinctual defenses in your nerves, nervous system. And you know, you talked about your, the nose. And obviously there's, there's a lot of dogma in the breath work space. Like, oh, you should, you know, plug one nostril and only breathe in for four and then do your left nostril for seven and then squeeze your sphincter and let it out on Tuesday. You know, it's like, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of complexity or you know, only nose breathing, only mouth breathing. And you know, you have a nose for a reason. You should be breathing through your nose almost all the time. There's one basic rule within breathwork that's like when you are elongating your exhales, you are sending yourself into a regulated state. When you are elongating your inhales, you are sending yourself into a sympathetic state. Your nose naturally elongates your breath. It naturally keeps you in that regulated state and you should be breathing like that almost your whole life. With mouth breathing, you can utilize that to take yourself into a Sympathetic state. Now, why would that be beneficial? What happens is that when you are breathing for an extended period of time through your mouth, you are mimicking, you are mimicking a trauma response. A lot of people don't realize that people out there doing breath work sessions, they're saying it's hyper oxygen, your system. Well, it's actually not. You're actually depriving yourself of oxygen and you're actually taking yourself into a, quite a, quite a stress state. But what happens is that you can, you can utilize that in a safe container with a practitioner. My sessions, the first half is mouth breathing and it is designed to be intense. We are mimicking a stressful state. We're turning the sympathetic nervous system on completely, which gives someone's biology an opportunity to discharge. And this is the somatic understanding is that you are a bottom up process. You are a bottom up, you are, you are an animal first, you are a mental creature second. And for people to deeply understand this is that if someone broke into your house right now, you would have an instinctual response first. You'd want to fight them, you'd want to run from them, you'd probably freeze. You'd have that instinctual first. And that's not happening in your mind, it's happening in your body. Because if it happened in your mind, it would be too late. It's a pattern, right? And, and then you would feel an emotion, then you would have this powerful chemical glandular secretion of adrenaline cores, all these things that would cause you to feel either fear or courage. Only after that whole scenario goes down does the mind come in and start to cement kind of a perception. And our psyche, our mind cements a perception based on what happened on an instinctual and emotional level. So if someone broke in here right now, you know, Josh, you went over there, your instinct was to take this person down. You know, you felt, you know, maybe some fear, some courage. Well, only after that thing went down, the perception in your head is probably cementing that, okay, I'm, I'm a badass, you know, or I'm a hero or whatever it is, right? If we say we ran and we had fear in our system and you know, after that went down, maybe the, the, the story, the perception, the lens that I start to view the world from is that the world is not safe, I'm not safe in the world. So understanding that we are this bottom up process, this somatic being first, psyche centered second. When you're doing a breathwork session, or I'll back up for a second, when something stressful happens to you and you look at animals, the first thing that they usually do is have this sort of instinctual discharge. Shaking, crying, yelling, screaming. Whatever it is, the emotions coming through, that movement of energy through your system is the signal to your nervous system that you're not in the presence of a stressor anymore. You see, children do this so well. Something happens to them, they throw a temper tantrum because their body innately knows that they don't want to harbor that. They need a way to move it through them so that they can go back to normal everyday life. If an animal never discharged, never shook it off, never, like, breathed through it, there's lots of YouTube videos out there on this. If it never did that, it would constantly move through life as it. As if it was still in the presence of a tiger. And so we're this mentally dominated creature, have forgotten the intelligence of our body, have bred out our natural discharging processes of seeing, singing, dancing, moving our body, community, all of these different things that we naturally move this energy through us. We've bred those out of our culture. We've told people to sit down, shut up, suck it up. And so everyone sucks it up. They rationalize whatever happened to them. And their body never had that discharge. It still thinks it's in the presence of a stressor. It's walking around with this tiger still there next to him all the time. And they wonder why they're constantly in this state of chronic stress and fight or flight.

I can tell this about people.

Yeah.

When I'm with them, all of a sudden when I'm with somebody and I know that they're in that kind of like fight and flight stuckness.

Yeah.

All of a sudden the room will be quiet and somebody will go like their body's been crying out for that deep breath for like three hours.

Yeah.

Because they've just been harboring and ruminating and marinating on whatever that is ailing them. They haven't shaken it off. So it's almost like in that moment, they're. I see that when I used to be in corporate.

Yeah.

When I used to be in corporate, I would. I would see it in meetings a lot where even the person who was leading, they. They would be listening to someone and they would just go. It was like the first nourishing, like first life they had felt in hours. And, and. And you brought up such a good point there. So we'll go right back to it. But I had to say that because making this practical, to know that we're Stuck in these, like fight, flight, freeze or even. Even fawn. There's some new data on the fawning aspect of trauma response. It's. It's not that we're wrong, it's just that we're doing the best we can with how we've been conditioned and how we have really just adapted to the environment. So go back to what you were saying. But like, man, to make it practical, we all see that. We all can start watching for that when in a room or when in an interaction, is somebody taking this massive breath when really they could have been giving themselves that breath slowly, calmly, the whole time.

Yeah. And I'll challenge that because the last thing you're going to tell this person is to chill out. The last thing you want to tell this person is just take a deep breath. Right.

Or honestly, for the men out there, tell your woman to calm down when she's upset about something.

Right.

See how that works?

When people are in that state, it's the hardest thing for them to do is shut it off.

Yeah.

Because there's. That's dysregulation. You get stuck easily in. In. In. In. In, like stimulation or you get stuck easily in like lethargy.

Yes.

And you don't have choice. Health is the ability to choose. I can turn it on now. I can shut it off and relax. And so my point being is that when someone's stuck in that state. So we'll go back to breath work and why it's so powerful at working through this. Specifically when it comes to like the sympathetic breathing or, or in, in and out through the mouth, which is not a daily practice for any means, especially the longer style breathworks, breathwork, journeys, getting into an hour long. But it can be very powerful for a hard nervous system reset.

Yeah.

Most of societies, like most of our modern, like diseases such as insomnia, depression, anxiety, all of these things are largely due to a nervous system that hasn't been able to do a deep reset. And so what you're doing is like you're mimicking. If I was being chased by a tiger, like, how would I be breathing? Probably through my mouth and get more in and more out. And so what happens is you're mimicking that stress response while in a safe container with a practitioner there by you. It usually will bring up a lot of the unprocessed things in the body because it's hard to work on those things. In your normal, everyday waking state you are. When you're doing a breath work session like that, you're Taking yourself into an altered state of consciousness, but you're mimicking a sympathetic state. And so it gives this organism an opportunity to discharge. That's why a lot of the times these emotions come up, up because the, the, when something stressful happened, they sucked it up, they suppressed it. And so you're, you're mimicking that same state. We don't need to go back and like what happened to you when you were 12 and all like go through the story. We don't need to go through the story because the body holds all the memory. And so we can mimic that state. And a lot of the times they will naturally have a discharge. They will naturally express whether and whatever the movement of energy is. Energy is expressed through crying, yelling, singing, laughing, moving your body in ways you haven't been let yourself move. Those are all movements of energy through your system. And they're probably coming up probably because you push it down for a very long time.

I always tell people, just trust, like literally trust whatever is coming.

And from that, and I see this when people clear and when people release these, these from these fear centered states, from these holding pattern states, when you clear somatically, a lot of times you become clear mentally. When you are in like for example, if you are in pain, try to think clearly. If someone just broke your heart, like, try to think clearly. You're not going to be able to think clearly. Your mind is spinning. When you're being impressed upon by fear, guilt and shame, try to think clearly. And so this is this war on the mind part. We, we, we have to heal on a somatic level, on a body centered level, on a nervous system level to become clear mentally. Because your body is an antenna. You take a practice like yoga. Yoga understands this. You're putting your body in different positions to be able to tune into different things. Your mind is not in your head. Your mind is what's the quality of my nervous system? What's the quality? And if I'm in a relaxed, expansive state, I'm probably going to be able to tune in and pick up on, on expansive ideologies. And so a lot of the times there's this moment where people release, they become clear, they see clearly, they see well, this is actually what I came here to do in this lifetime. This is actually how I want to show up for my family. I've had guys halfway through a session say I got to stop, I got to call my family, I got to call my kids and tell them I love them. I'm like, go do it bro. You Got what you needed? Like, yeah. And so the second half of this, in a lot of breathwork sessions, they stay in the sympathetic thing. It's so important to bring people back down to show the nervous system. Okay, let's ramp this nervous system up. Let's take someone into a state of stress. Let's give them the opportunity to discharge, to release, and now to clear. A lot of time they have realizations. Okay, now let's show the nervous system how, when it's in a stress state, how to come back down into a regulated state. And so I usually have people shift into nostril breathing, elongating the exhales and breathing in how you want to feel. What do you want to embody? What do you want other people to feel from you? And this is. I mean, Joe Dispenza does a really good job of this, like firing and wiring new patterns, a clear intention and creating an elevated emotion. When people have allowed themselves to feel a lot of the things that they haven't let themselves feel, they have access to the highs so much more.

Oh, man. Whenever we feel an intense emotion, this is why people chase peak states.

Yeah.

Because they. So they're craving that freedom that comes from being in the body. That's really what a peak state is. Peak state is like being in the body has nothing to do. When a big wave surfer is sliding down the face of Jaws, he's not thinking about. And he's actually not thinking.

He's not thinking.

He's in his instinctual body. Yeah, he's in 100% full instinctual somatic experience. And same thing for any kind of peak state. And you brought up so many nuggets, man. I hope this is like the third time somebody has rewinded and they're watching this again because there's so much gold there. But at the core of it, you know, we. We are this organism. We have this adaptation response where it doesn't always come from the mind, it comes from the body. Like pure instinctual response.

Yeah.

It's funny, my. My partner, Carrie Michelle, she's making a course for women called Instinctual Living. And it's about women instinctually birthing and how the response of birth has been robbed from women. That instinctual, somatic response because of the mind of medicine. I'm not here to. To take away medicine. If we break a leg, medicine's needed. But what you're talking about with, you know, the example of the phone and the war on the mind and the amygdala and just all this kind of encapsulation of like fear, guilt, shaming you for. You should be this way or you should be acting this way. All of this has a come home. And the come home starts when we can actually start to feel ourselves again. Yeah, and there's so much beauty in that. Like, it makes me, I can feel it right now with you. Like, there's so much beauty and like just feeling that I'm in a body. Like we're in a body. We're in a fucking body, you know?

Greatest gift.

It's such a gift. So amazing. What are the ways that you see the soul attack happening? Because, you know, we went pretty deep into the science and the physiology of the somatics of breath. And by the way, you guys, if you're already in, which I am absolutely in, I think everybody should get this training. If you want to get a practitioner training, like, like an actual deep immersive experience, I would 100% recommend you work with Steva. You can go to joshtrent.com forward/somatic and use the code Josh. 15. He's given us 15 off, which is amazing. So the link is right here because before we go into the spiritual, we really have to kind of close the gap on the war on the mind. I do think that it's here. I'm not saying we need to like focus on it, but we do need to fucking talk about it. We do need to actually admit what's going on. How it works in the channels, which you did amazing job of describing. Is there anything else you need to say about the war on the mind before we go to the, the war on the spirit?

I mean, I think we, I think we covered it. I, I covered the bottom up process. You know, like understand that we are somatic, centered beings and it's like we need to clear on a somatic level first to be able to make clear decisions, to be able to see clearly. And then it's like, okay, now we can start this top down approach where it's like, okay, now we want to develop, we, we see clearly, we know how we want to show up in the world. Now it's like we can start to use the mind to develop new skills, to develop new patterns this day to day, in and out, choosing. Because to actually create long term physical change in your body, it takes repetitive choosing of the mind. Like I use this example. It's like your body changes slowly, your mind changes quickly. Your body's nature, nature changes slowly. Like I got plants all over my house. Like they change really slowly. Yeah, when you change your body quickly, it's probably traumatic. Like, if I were to make a quick change to your body, it's probably like a broken bone or something. Well, your mind, we can change it at the top, at the drop of a pin, your mind can change like that. But it takes repetitive, clear choosing of the mind to create sustained, like, physical change. And I think that that's really, like, the answer to creating, like, physical, sustainable change within our body. But not only that, it's going to take repetitive choosing of our clear mental sight from a community standpoint.

One thing that I've been struggling with personally, with what you just said and, you know, even with my. My 10 years in fitness and training, 10,000 hours of clients and knowing the body and knowing about nutrition and the responsibility that I'm holding with, you know, a child and providing and another child on the way and growing the podcast and, you know, the landscape can be competitive at times. Right. So. So just me as a being in, I guess you could say, whatever spotlight we're in. Me as a being in the spotlight, I'm here to say, like. Like, it's okay if you fall off the path. Like, I'm off the path right fucking now. I'm plus. I'm plus 10, £15 off the path. And like, that's okay because I've had to adapt.

Yeah.

I've had to respond to my environment. And so I feel like we go through these peaks and valleys, Stephen, of like, you know, for 10 years, my health was my primary focus, my physical health. And along with that came mental changes. But then anytime an organism is responsible on an energetic demand for other organisms, that organism is going to bear the burden, much like you bear the turtle.

Yeah.

And so a father, a mother, a guardian of any kind is going to have to go through a new adaptation process. Thank God I have the breath. What in the hell would I do if I didn't have my sauna space in the room or my floor or my deck to go and sit and breathe and put my feet up on? I don't know how I would make it. I really don't. And so what the breath gives me are these access points to, okay, what. What can I let go of? Yeah, what way of being can I let go of? And honestly, for me, a little story in my mind that I've noticed that actually feels cathartic to share with all of us here is like, I can't take care of my training, my physical training, unless I've taken care of my family. That's what's been coming through for me over the past year. And so now I'm in this readaptation process with my mind where I'm like, I don't negotiate. I don't negotiate with you. I. I go out in the sauna in the morning, I go to the cold, and if I am tired, I go for a walk. I don't have to train hard every day. I can do something because it's that something that moves the needle from being dis eased to at ease. And so that's what I'm in the process. So I just want to give everybody the permission through my own life story. Being a new father, like, you are going to go off the straight and narrow. It's going to happen. You know, it may show up physically with extra weight. It may show up with a disease or cancer or relationships falling apart. Whatever it is just, it's okay, man. Like, it's all right to have compassion for yourself and go, all right, well, what is the adult in me willing to take care of the child that's screaming inside of me? What does the child actually want? Typically, the child wants rest, the child wants to be held, the child wants to be nourished or supported in some way. So I had to presence that because the war on the mind thrives when we don't share what we're experiencing. So it's a permission slip, y', all, like, feel whatever you're feeling and just be honest with your community about it. That is how we stop the war on the mind. That is how the war on the mind doesn't exist anymore.

And yeah, man, I mean, I can't even imagine I'm not a father yet. I do hope to be one. One point. It's. It's.

Your kids are going to be good breathers.

I hope so. I hope so. Yeah, they. They will. We get to change the paradigm to honor people's slow, gradual change. We live in a world where we look at Instagram, we see everyone killing it, and it's like, actually, that's not. That's not sustainable. That's not nature's weight. Nature changes slowly.

Yeah.

And so even when I'm working with people, like, people want the. We. We want the quick fix. And it's like, well, that's actually not what is, like, sustainable and long term. Like, a little bit at a time is okay. And when you don't honor that part in yourself or with your clients, like, like healing doesn't operate on time. And we all operate on time. We want it now, but we get to usher in this new way of being that we're honoring your own slow, gradual change. Okay? Because that is nature's way.

It's beautiful, man. It's beautiful because it's a relief for, I think, all of us who.

You take the pressure off yourself because.

It'S your own pressure valve, because you'll.

End up putting more pressure on yourself, which then will further the suppression and further the repression. Like, a lot of times, we are the ones that put the most pressure on ourselves on top of societal impression. And so it's like the. The last thing you want to do is then get hard on yourself for not doing things, because then you're putting more stress on yourself.

Yeah. The false paradigm that I've watched in my own life and that I'm very aware of now, I actually don't struggle with this now, but I used to struggle with this a lot, was writing the shame spiral all the way to the bottom and then shaming myself for being in the shame spiral. That was like. And I want to press presence that. Because, you know, if you. You can look at Hawkins work in the. The frequency scale, the lowest human emotion. We don't need to look at the scale. I mean, he's taught us well. But the absolute lowest thing we could ever feel on a vibrational level is shame. There's nothing lower in our human experience. And then there's apathy and all the anger, and you go up the ladder. But. But at some point, we. We have to choose. Just like you chose in that fork in the road to, like, I'm either gonna be what the unconscious model of my parents was for me, or I'm going to lead people across the world through breath because I'm leading myself. Like, we come to this choice point, and we have to leave room for mystery there, dude. Because sometimes it's people's dharma. You might have been afforded the exact same choices as a twin brother or twin sister. And that twin brother or twin sister, they might have chosen drugs.

I see the same thing happen where people, like, get so caught up in trying to find their purpose. Like, for me, I put so much pressure on myself. Like, what's my purpose? When I met you in Sedona, like, I was in that place of, like, what am I doing in my life? Like, what this pressure that I was constantly putting on myself. Like, I. And most of the time, we take a mental snapshot of, like, what do I want my life to look like when I'm living my purpose?

Yes.

And I. And I What will I have? What will I have? Yeah. And it had this profound shift of, like, well, life changes quickly and the outside world fluctuates, and, like, it doesn't always look like how you thought it would look like.

Yeah.

But I started to focus around, okay, well, how do I want to feel when I'm living it? How do I want to feel? And that became such a compass for me. As I move through life, I know, like, as I'm going through different things, things, like, is this more of how I want to feel? I'm living my, like, living from alignment, or is this less like. And that became a compass for me versus the pressure of, like, this is what I want my life to look like. This is what I'm going to be doing. This is the exact thing that I'm going to be doing.

Oh, yeah.

Because I never would have thought that this I'd be doing.

Thank you for sharing that. Like, we have to be open to the mystery of life, as to even why our questions aren't answered or what our purpose is. They both can be equally mysterious. Like, oh, my purpose is this, and I'm gonna. And then you get there and you realize that wasn't your purpose. That was just your ego driving you to. To look cool, especially in the influencer world of Instagram. It's really interesting. Let's shift, man. Let's shift to the spiritual, because we could do an entire podcast series on the war on the mind. We, like, scratch the surface. So y' all are gonna have to go to the show notes on this one. But. But the spiritual war is interesting. I. I interviewed a guy that was an introduction from. From Paul, and his name was Paul Levy, and he wrote a book called Watiko. And Watiko is this virus of the mind, but it's really a spiritual war that attaches to the mind first. So it hooks into the mind, and then it feeds its spiritual darkness into the physical body, which then that gets blasted out into the world. To quote your antenna analogy, the body's an antenna. So with Watiko, it's interesting because just like a parasite, it draws enough blood from the host, but it doesn't allow them to know that it's there unless there's a conscious inventory, like a somatic inventory. And I wonder for your perspective, with all the healing that you've been seeing in the workshops and even in your own life and in your own relationship with, you know, your partner and, like, everything you're striving for in life, how can you be honest with us here? How have you seen the spiritual war, the dark energy, the dark matter, spiritual war in your own life? How have you cleared that? How do you see it in the world around us?

It's this. It feels like a felt sense of scarcity. It's this constant felt sensation that I'm not doing enough, that I don't have enough, that she's not enough. It's this constant felt sensation of not enoughness. I mean, that's really. It's scarcity on a cellular level, which Zach Bush like, it's that one home. I would absolutely go listen to that. But.

Yeah. Yeah.

What I found I. Something that's very interesting is that. So I did a podcast not that long ago with a woman from Sultara Healing Center, Ayahuasca Center, Melissa Stangle. She's a great friend of mine. Cool.

And I heard good things about the center as well.

Oh, yeah? Yeah, They're. They're great. I asked her a question, and this was like, in the Heights of COVID if you will, I said, are people getting different messages, like, from Ayahuasca pre Covid versus after Covid? And she's like, oh, that's a really good. That's a really interesting question. Well, one thing that the shamans there told me is that early 2020, before Covenant had kind of, like, expanded, is that they witnessed this kind of dark cloud descend upon the world, and they called it a sickness of the air. And at that point in time, there were fires all over the world burning there. The lungs of the planet were burning. And then we have this respiratory virus that's all over the world that's attacking people's ability to breathe. People are put on respirators. Then we got this whole racial thing go on. This man being choked, yelling, well, I can't breathe. Then we're forced to wear masks. Then it's like it's. We are isolated from each other, and we are isolated from our own respiration. To respire is to re. Spirit. Every time you take a breath in you re spirit, you breathe spirit, life force energy back into your body so you can show up right here, right now, connected to yourself so that I can connect to others. And so you got to look at the signs. Like, there is a. There is a spiritual war going on right now. I mean, I don't go too deep into this necessarily, but for myself, I. The signs are very clear.

Why don't you go too deep into it?

What do you.

Are you afraid?

There's a. I. I think there is a fear inside of myself that I'm not going to be taken seriously. Okay. Because I have a lot of clinicians come to me that learn. And I would say that I probably fall on the scale of a little bit more of a. A clinical perspective on things. Okay. But for myself, like, I do see both sides, and my job is to bridge the gap in between those. And so I try to do that in a tactful way. But if you look at, from an eastern standpoint, like all of these modalities around breath, they look at it like it's your chi, your life force, your prana. And so you are pumping the, the battery, the soul, the soul rhythm, the spiritual rhythm, the animating force that's animating you with your breath. And there's so many things going on that's trying to stop that. And I think that it's. It's deeper than that. It's a. It's a war on your connection to yourself and your own spirit. And also a war in the connection between everyone else, our connection, our community, the nuclear family. Why do we do this work to begin with? I asked myself this question all the time, and I think it's important. If you're doing anything, you should ask yourself, why are you doing this? No doubt I'm doing specifically this type of breath work, or this technology, if you will, so that I can be deeply connected to myself, so that I can reconnect, I can remember myself. But why do that? So that I can connect to others. Because if I'm not connected to myself and my spirit and what is my truth and my alignment? I actually can't connect to others. And if I'm connecting to others, it's actually not me in connection to these other people. It's, it's. It's a representative of me. It's a disconnected version of me that's in relate. If, like my partner, if I'm not deeply connected to me in my spirit and my alignment, then I'm actually not connected to her. Or the part of me that's connected to her isn't actually me. It's a facade of, of me. And so if you look at all of the different connections in your life, this spiritual web that we weave, if you are not connected to your own soul, your own spiritual life force, energy, all of your other connections are actually not real connections. They are a facade. They are all representatives of you and they are, they are based on the disconnected version of yourself.

And we have an entire society, we have an entire society that is built upon that, that is built upon that.

It'S a web of disconnection.

And also in this web that was. That just lit me up. Like I felt like a jolt in my body when you were talking. Because in the past, when I say in the past, I mean, maybe we could say pre podcast, like 2013, 2014. I was that person that you described. I literally was fucking him. I was exactly like that. People saw this representation of what I wanted them to see, but, like, I wasn't connected to who I was. I was in this three, four year journey of like, who the fuck am I? What the fuck am I doing here? What is this all about? Maybe even you felt that in Sedona.

Absolutely.

We met. So, like, there is that Chris Chrysalis process where, you know, we turn into a butterfly and we actually fly to our purpose. That shit's necessary. I don't want to circumvent that. I don't want to say that the war on the mind or the war on the spirit are truly bad things because, you know, encapsulated in their evil is the love that we can protect ourselves with. In other words, we wouldn't be able to know ourselves or know how strong we are or know our courage.

Yeah.

Or be able to. To feel ourselves if these war of mind and spirit weren't coming here. So I know you have the. The clinicians that come in and they want to take the somatic experiencing and they want to be spoken to in a certain way. But we have to recognize that we. We are. We are in a grand mystery here, dude.

We are.

We don't exactly know.

We don't know what's going on or.

Exactly how it's going to work or even how it's supposed to work. We just kind of flail forward at times and.

Yeah.

You know, like the, The. The concept of controlled folly. I'm going through Miguel Ruiz's work again. Like the Toltec controlled folly, where we just kind of laugh at ourselves as we move forward in life. And. And I think that's an important part of how we can disconnect from the story of the spiritual war being so serious. I totally understand why you don't want to go into it. At times, I like going into it to remind myself that that's not all that there is.

The spiritual war is the war on the body, because the spirit is known through the flesh. All of your experiences, all. Every spiritual experience you have had through your body, every experience of love, it's through your body. We experience everything through the body. And so you look at the spirit. The spiritual war, it is a war on the body. All the toxins that were thrown at us, all the fear, guilt, and shame, all the things that are keeping us in a contracted state, keeping us disconnected from our body. It's keeping us from being able to be that clear channel, that clear antenna, to have that sort of spiritual connection. And so it's. It's. It's not like. I don't necessarily see it as some sort of, like, metaphysical thing going on, necessarily, because it is. It is. But it's also very physical. It's a war on the body, because the body is the temple. We've all heard that. And the temple is where you worship God. The temple is where you worship spirit. And so I think it's. It's more the war on the body, because the body is how you get to know your spirit.

And when the body's dirty, it's like the conduit can't receive electricity.

100.

If there was dirt and that's in the soundboard, we wouldn't be able to be recorded.

And that's why my mission is somatic. It's to reconnect people to their body. Because when they're connected to their body and then when they clear their body and when they move out of these contracted fear center states, they're able to connect to a deeper sense of electricity, a deeper sense of aliveness through their biology. And I true, like I said, I believe that biology and spirituality is synonymous. And when we work together with biology, we're able to conduct a lot more spirit through our. Through our vessel.

Well, thank you for honoring the mystery with me here.

Absolutely. We can keep going.

We really could keep going, but y' all have a day to get to. And hopefully these nuggets seeped in. And I really want to. To inspire everyone to respire better so that they can actually learn how to breathe. I mean, it's changed my life. It's. It's on my arm in Italian, which means if I can breathe, I can choose. Yeah. Because if I can breathe with you here, if I can breathe with my part. If I can breathe my family with my. If I can breathe with people.

Yeah.

Then I can choose love with people. But when I'm holding my breath, I can't choose shit. There's nothing I. There's no choice point that comes from holding your breath. The only thing that comes from holding our breath is. Is more stillness and uncomfortability. And eventually we're going to have to let it go anyways. So we may as well just learn how to let it go properly. So thank you, man, for being here. And the link is right below. It's joshtrend.com forward slash, somatic, and the code is Josh15. So if you've been looking for how to add this to your coaching practice or even just to become like a very skilled breathwork facilitator, this is the training. Like, this is the one that I've been hearing about. I, I trust you. I know you. So who's it exactly for? Like, who's it really for?

So we have a lot of different, we have a lot of people in the sort of mental side of things. Coaches, psychologists all over the spectrum from that side.

I had an NLP coach, a friend of mine, reach out and she said, hey, who could I go to to become trauma informed in my breath work practice?

Absolutely.

And obviously I'm sending her this podcast.

And we have a lot of body centered people, chiropractors, bodywork, yoga teachers, because your breath is the connection between your mind and your body. And so this is, it is working with the nervous system. So it allows people to have both sides of things. And we also get people that are mothers, that are fathers, that want to be able to utilize this with their families. And so it's honestly, for anybody that.

Breathes, well, that's everyone, unless you're underground. And in a way, your body's still decomposing, so it's still breathing. There's a noodle baker. So go there, you guys, and you know, as parting guidance with the parental example you had and with teaching 700 about to be 7,000 people across the world. Not yet, but you'll get there.

Yeah.

This mystery that we've talked about and all the ways that we've explored, the spiritual war, the mental war, the physiology of breath, we covered so much ground. But at the end of all of that, and maybe in the center point of all of that, there's this concept of wellness, of living. Well, that's been my question, man, since 2015. It's like, what started this podcast, you know, how do I, how do I live my life? Well, how do I really live my life? Well, how do you do that? And what is wellness to you? How would you encapsulate or how would you define wellness?

Yeah, it's a good question. And it's, it really lands for me. Health, wellness, it's the ability to choose. It's choice. And specifically with your breath is the only body rhythm that you have choice over. You can do it right now, you can be conscious of it, or you don't have to. It's all a choice. And there's a choice that we are faced with as a. As a. As a culture right now. And that choice is that we can. We can close ourselves off. We can be in a contracted state. We can succumb to fear, guilt, shame. We can live in that state in our body, and we can be stuck in that. Or we can choose to be open, to be receptive, to be in a state of love. And it's been hidden under our nose the whole time. It's all you have a choice right now between fear, love, and all it takes is your breath.

Oh, great spirit, that was one for the record books. Steven Jaggers, thank you for coming on the show. Tell people where they can connect with you on the IG and all the 3D stuff.

Yeah, you can connect with us at Somatic Release on Instagram or myself, my personal page@Jaggers JR. You can check us out. Somatic breathwork.com. got YouTube, basically any platform. You can check us out. Somatic Breathwork.

Amazing. It's linked in the notes. And until I see you again, until we see you again, Steven and I are both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon. Hey, thanks for watching this video. If you love this video, hit subscribe. That way you'll be automatically notified when new videos come out, new episodes. And also share this video with a friend. If you loved it, they're gonna love it, too. Check out some of the videos on this screen that are perfectly curated based on the video you just saw. Make sure you follow me and I'll see you in the next video.