Will Rezin | Trauma & Somatics: How To Heal Without Getting Stuck | Wellness Force #Podcast

Trauma is just the word that we're using right now to describe this phenomenon. But the phenomenon has been happening as far back as we can trace recorded history. The mystics in India had a different name for it. I truly think that when they're speaking about attachment, they're talking about trauma. Our attachment to something, our attachment to the memory of the past, our attachment to the memory of the future, our inability to be with ourselves, to sit in stillness, to experience our bodies. Right. It's all the same thing. So what. What do we have to do? Slowly and methodically address the body's memory and help it to create a new form, a new shape, help it to discover itself. As soon as I notice that I'm out of balance, my body will bring me back into balance because it's natural.

Will. Welcome to Wellness Force, man.

Thanks, Josh.

It has been a minute. We've been planning this for about six months and the universe provided today. I'm so excited to be your friend, to get to know you and to share your voice with this Wellness Forest community. We have a lot to explore.

We've got a lot to get into.

We got a lot to talk about, man. So people know you on online and social, you know, your Persona in this 3 3D world, in your meat suit, with your psyche. Now, as somebody who's really specialized in trauma and. And something I experienced yesterday, which in real time, we're going to process a little bit today. And that is somatic experiencing, which is amazing because we're all experiencing it, but we may not know it.

That's right.

So this is the perfect jumping off point. Trauma is something that we all experience.

That's right.

It's capital T. It's lowercase T. That's right. But I think people get the definition mixed up and confused for some reason. So as we unpack all the layers of trauma and all the ways that you serve, how do you define trauma now? And has that definition changed since you began the journey?

Yeah, you know, I'll start with has it changed? And then I'll define it 100%. My definition has changed over the years. When I first came into this work, how I saw trauma was what happened to somebody. I saw it as a category of events, all these different categories, different experiences. Car accidents, rape, abuse, alcoholism. I saw it as those particular things, and I thought that if somebody had those experiences, then that equaled trauma. Right. An if, then equation. Very simple, black and white. And what I've learned is that that is not the case at all. So my current definition of trauma is this. And it's widely accepted in science now. Well, still becoming adopted in many circles. But what we understand is that trauma is the living memory of something that's overwhelming. It's like a reflex. It's like a reflex. Right. So my body responds because of a memory, just from something stressful or overwhelming. Right. And usually that lingering happens, that memory, that imprint, happens because of a lack of the right support and care during the difficult experience. This is why two people can go to war. One of them comes home fine, unaffected, relatively. The other one comes home with ptsd. These symptoms, the lingering symptoms of the stress, essentially, is what we're talking about. This living memory influences us. It influences our behavior, which is where my fascination with human development really began to open. I came into this work with a fascination with the mind, with our stories, with the myth about us as humans, cultures, and what made us who we are through the mental sphere. And what I've come to realize is that the mind sits on top of everything that we are. It's like the interpreter of sorts. But it is not us. We think it is, but what's us and what. What really influences the mind is the living organism underneath it all. The mind's an expression of all of that. So my thoughts are expressions of what's happening inside of me. They tell me about my story, my history, but my lived experience. They tell me about how connected to my aliveness I am or how disconnected I am. They tell me about what's going on inside.

So the mind is really a metaphor for a looking glass.

Yeah.

And depending on the trauma that's occurred, and it's a philosophical conversation, did it happen for me or did it happen to me? I mean, that's a whole podcast in itself.

Well, that's how we make meaning.

But that lens is cracked big or cracked small. So we could see fractals or we could see clarity. How do you unpack that kind of a metaphor?

Well, it's an adaptation, it's intelligent. And I think this is something we're going to get into today. It's because of how we domesticate ourselves. And as far as I can see, there's no origin point that I can point to. But what I do see clearly is the problem that we all face as a species. And this is everywhere where domestication exists. We, aside from domesticated animals, we are the only creature that experiences this phenomenon of lingering memory, of attached, reflexive memory from stress. Right. And that stress physiology living on the inside of us. The only other place we see this in nature is domesticated animals. It's the process of domestication, the inhibiting our experience of aliveness, the inhibiting our most natural responses that leads to this. Now, I don't have a solution, but what I have is a spotlight on the problem that we're all facing as a species and a call to action for us.

And it's probably, I think, most likely the biggest problem that we have because the trauma that's unprocessed is what is kind of embedded or imbued in adult behavior. And then we have politicians who are literally walking around with unprocessed trauma and projecting it to so many people because of their, I guess you could say, broken lens of their mind, how they grew up, how they experience life. That trauma is by far, and I'm curious how you feel potentially the most number one threat to human evolution, human consciousness and the wisdom of the heart being heard.

Yeah. I'd say that there's not a brokenness, there's an adaptation because of the environment that the organism lives in. Right. The tree is not broken because it grows in a twisted way, simply because it has to twist around its environment.

It adapted.

It adapted. And so what we have are adaptations. And what we also see is the. Literally the largest problem that humanity has ever faced, ever, in its history. The cause of all other problems is our unprocessed trauma because it prevents us from experiencing our aliveness and it desensitizes us to life, to other humans, to our environment. So we walk around disconnected, not really feeling our aliveness, not feeling the world, not feeling ourselves, not feeling each other. What does that lead to? Destruction of the environment, destruction of ourselves. Torture, war. And we can point to all of the characteristics that might spring up out of that. But all of this is symptoms. These are all symptoms. And we're running around trying to address the symptoms, trying to put out the fire, but we're not addressing the volcano that's causing the fire.

Yeah.

So to speak. And maybe that metaphor is not the best metaphor for this.

No. I mean, I think sometimes for the nervous system, it feels like a volcano.

Right.

Fight, flight, freeze, actually. And is there a fourth? There is Fawn and Fawn.

Yeah.

What is that one all about? I remember you told me that in the sauna once. What's the fourth one? Because when you said it, I was like, yup. But I didn't. I hadn't heard it before.

Yeah. So fawn is our first line of defense. So if the fawn response is roughly 80 million years old, since the development of the ventral vagal complex. You hear a lot of talk in biohacking communities about the vagus nerve and the importance of the vagus nerve and.

Vagal tone and things like that, especially in breath work. It's like the number one talking point, which I feel it, I believe it.

Well, it's our regulator, so to speak. It helps us to regulate. So the fawn response is essentially the tendon befriend, my first line of defense in a social situation. I'm a social creature. You're a social creature. Humans are social creatures. We have this inherent need for social harmony because without that we don't survive. So what we've, what has happened is we've adapted to these circumstances in life across time. And our systems have grown in such a way that we now need this social connection. It's also a way that we modulate the intensity of the sympathetic charge in our body. So the fawn response is I perceive a potential threat to my safety, dignity or belonging in a situation. My body perceives that potential threat, not the mind. There's no mind involved. What happens? I pacify the situation to maintain social harmony and connection.

How do you mean pacify? Like what's an example of that?

An example of that might be if you were getting somewhat emotionally charged. I might apologize. I might look away, I might soften my eyes. An over explanation might be like doe eyes. It might seem like I'm being kind of flirtatious with the situation. I might say something that's totally incongruent with how I'm feeling on the inside. I might also say yes to what you're asking me to do when it doesn't feel safe. But by saying yes, what I do is I prevent the bigger thing that I'm afraid of happening.

It's a self abandonment really, sort of.

But not because it serves the self to stay connected and safe. So it's a survival mechanism. But I'm trying to prevent having to fight you or having to run away. And if I can't engage with you socially and minimize what I perceive to be the threat, the next line of defense will be whatever my dominant stress response is. So it might be to run away or to move my attention away. It might be to back up. It might mean to lean back in my chair. Or it might be to lean forward to engage in conflict with you. It might mean to get more intense verbally. It might mean to like raise my voice and get intense in my body to try to overwhelm the threat. And if none of those things Work. I might become silent. I might drift away in my mind, or I might be completely vacant and frozen. Right. So these are the ways that the organism is intelligently working to stay alive. We are far more animal than we are psyche, Dude.

I have seen so many videos where animals almost die. Like a zebra getting hunted by a tiger or lion. Guess what the zebra does? He shakes.

Yeah.

That's why I think we've employed dancing as people. It's a way to get out our trauma from the day dancing.

I don't know that I'd say it gets our trauma out, though, Josh. What I'd say is that it discharges the extra energy that we're carrying. And because it prevents any trauma from happening, trauma is the lingering of it. Right. So trauma is that living memory. And we can prevent any memory from living on by allowing our body to do what it needs to do instead of inhibiting it. Right. If I stop myself from expressing an emotion, what happens to that emotion? It's energy in motion. What happens to that energy?

It gets stored.

It's stored inward. It's returned inward onto myself. And over time, if I suppress anger for long enough, I become depressed. Depression is anger turned inward. It's unexpressed, an unprocessed survival response.

So then when does that stuck energy become trauma?

That's a great question. There is no one size fits all answer for that.

Yeah.

So it's different. It depends on the strength of the organism, the support that the organism has epigenetically. Epigenetics, how you're aware, the history of the family, all of those things. Yeah. How did my father process his emotions?

Or not.

Or not. Right. And how did his parents do that? And then back on down the lineage, on both sides of the family, what does my organism have as a memory that's imprinted in it, that's intelligent so that it can be prepared for the new environment? All of this is intelligent. It's just that we are not at the cause of the direction that our organism is developing. We are at the effect of thousands of years of the organism adapting. But we're not. We're not intentionally creating the adaptations. We are not driving the car. We're just in it, riding along, going, hey, shit's kind of fucked up. We need to fix this. But we're not actually doing anything about it. We're addressing the symptoms all over the world. The problem is within us.

And that problem is chaos. I know we've heard many contemporary ancient masters say this in their own way. Chaos is trying to Find order. Otherwise the dualism of love and fear wouldn't fucking exist. In my journey I had yesterday, I saw it so profoundly. I mean, I just got a big charge in my hands just sitting here talking to you about it. I haven't done a deep journey in two years. And I thought it was perfect timing that you came here today, because I had some beautiful healing and beautiful release, and it was through this medicine of ketamine. And I'm not saying that you guys should go run out and do ketamine. That's not what I'm saying. Because a lot of what we'll also unpack today are the myths around psychedelic healing, which I know you're very well versed in. But what I experienced was I was actually physically moving my organs. Like, I was feeling hot air inside of my organs, and I was pushing them down. And the sitter who was with me, she was writing notes, and she was like, you were doing somatic work on yourself. Are you trained in somatics? And I was like, no, but I'm doing a podcast with someone that is tomorrow. You know, so what. What is it about our somatic experience? We'll talk about psychedelics later. The actual somatic experience of trauma, of trapped energy, whatever you want to call it, because I think they are individualistic. What is your definition of somatic experiencing? It's kind of a buzzword that I think a lot of people hear. You know, so somatics or the somatic self, what is that?

So two. There are two things that I can speak to here. So somatic experiencing is a psychobiological approach to treating trauma that was created by Peter Levine. It's trademarked, right? So we can talk about having a somatic experience. But somatic experiencing as a technique, as a very specific technique used to help the body resolve the trauma, right? This distressed physiology, working with the stress physiology and things like that. Now, what. What are somatics? What's somatics? What does this mean? Soma? Somatic this, somatic that. We hear this all over the place. What are we. What are we saying? From my perspective and from all the research that I've done, somatics, it's pointing to our living wholeness, the wholeness of our being. The Greeks had wonderful ways of describing things. Soma was our living wholeness. Now, that includes the thoughts, I think. That includes the emotions that I experience. That includes the sensations within my body. That includes any movement patterns and musculature patterns, the metoric movements of the way that I move in the world. That includes the shape that I hold in every given moment in all these different situations. And it also includes what we might call the soul or my sense of purpose and direction in the world. Right. So all of these things are this beautiful constellation of parts of a whole. Somatics is that living wholeness of us, the way I define it. And from everything that I can see that from everything that I've read, it's bringing together the parts that are so fragmented of us into one whole constellation. Right. You are this unique constellation of. We might compartmentalize them and say pieces, but there is no separation between any of those things. And so somatics, the way that I work is I take into consideration all of those things. We bring those all together to get the whole picture of you. And then through understanding that whole picture of you, we can understand what to stimulate to create change, how to support new shape and new patterns, new musculature to take, to take form new thoughts, and the structuring of a new environment so that your organism begins to take the shape that you're growing into. Each new experience requires a new shape. Each transition from one to the next requires us to let go of some shape in order to become a new shape. The transition from child to adolescence, the letting go of the shape of being a child, which means letting go of the shape of the thoughts, the pictures we hold inside of ourselves, the muscle patterns, the very real structural components of our body from adolescent to early adulthood, from early adulthood to midlife, from midlife to later life.

Right.

And from later life to that period where we're really in reflection, looking backwards.

A big one is being a bachelor to a parent.

That's a big one.

I mean, wow, talk about a shape change.

That's right.

It's like a triangle to a square.

That's right.

Whatever shape you resonate with, you know that intimately.

You're living through that transition. Right.

I mean, Nova's five years old or five months old. It's cool because I see him as. It's so fascinating from a child developmental standpoint. Like, I can see how he'll be when he's five. But he's also changing so quickly that it reminds me, however I hold him is a representation of how I hold myself.

Absolutely.

When I was in the journey, I was literally holding myself and shaking myself the same way that I do for him. And the huge revelation I had was like, why is it so challenging for me at times to hold myself the same way that I hold my son? Like, what's up with that what is the limiters? What is the governors in our psyche or in our way of being from. From learned behaviors that we show up like that. Like, what do you. What do you think that's all about?

Well, I think that just has to do with how you learned to be that way. Where did you learn that that was how to care for yourself? Because somewhere that is what you learned. That's what you were taught. That's what you were instructed.

Yeah.

At some point, that's what you saw, modeled. That's how someone in your life cared for themselves. That's how you might have been cared for.

Yeah, it was my father.

There you go.

For sure.

Father, mother, uncles, you know, grandparents, men in school, parental figures, but authority figures. All of the humans in your life that represent that masculine have imparted on you ways of relating with yourself. Right. And then that emerges from the shape that you. That you carry. Most of our. Most of this for us, is unconscious. We are unaware because we don't become curious. We don't investigate it. And we don't have teachers that know how to lead us towards these insights, these awarenesses of ourselves, these experiences of ourselves.

Why are you so curious about trauma? Like what. What is the. The vacuum that was created? As Alan Watts, one of my most loved philosophers, he says, nature hates a vacuum. So there was a vacuum that your soul stepped into. What was that vacuum? What was the interest that that came from?

That there was an unfoldment, a process of unfoldment. I think some of this was just the experience that I lived through in my life. Many challenging and difficult experiences. And I wouldn't have realized that at the time. I can look back on it now as an adult and see these many experiences that began to shape me as long as I can remember. Josh, I've been curious.

Me too.

I've wanted to understand culture.

Did you ever take things apart physically?

I did some of that. I was less with the physical and more with the stories about culture and humanity. I would always ask, why about everything. And I know that this is something that drove my parents. It's totally crazy. But I was relentless with this. It didn't stop. At a certain point, I just dug in deeper to understand, like, what is it that makes us who we are? Where have we come from? What can I learn about the cultures in the world? And so I was just fascinated with these things, fascinated with animals, fascinated with people, fascinated with cultures, fascinated with religions. And I was raised conservative Christian up until I was a teenager, late teens, and then I began exploring the religions and the traditions of my lineage. Nordic, Celtic, Druidic magic rituals. And that led me into a discovery of more esoteric traditions. Alchemy and then occult ritual. And it's interesting because the deeper I got into those things, the more I saw that that is everywhere in all religious practices. These subtle ways that we connect with our environment, with each other, and with this something, that we have many names for this something. We might call it God, we might call it the universe, we might call it spirit, we might call it soul, but it's a something. There's a phenomenon that we all experience and give a different name. And so in this inquiry about this something, I learned a ton about obscure, obscure practices from all over the world. Different Persian practices, different Abrahamic religions. Like, I dove deep into a bunch of the different Abrahamic religions.

And by practices, by practices you mean ways to understand the something, ways to make sense, ways to connect with the something.

Yeah, ways to commune with spirit, we might say, but ways to connect with ourselves. Like, and so many of these different practices, they all in the inner, in the inner workings of these, or in the inner circles, maybe we might say the acolytes or the initiates, they all share similar practices. Abstinence, removal of stimulating experiences, fasting, isolation for periods of time, movement, stillness, sound, and then ritual. We can practice these things no matter what cosmological or dogmatic perspective we're bringing to a situation, but we can practice these things. And if we remove the barriers to sensing ourselves and our environment, we will arrive at almost the same place.

So what I heard from you is this connection with the something, the connection with God and that term. I mean, we've done a deep dive. Will the all is God series with Paul check. It was like four hours of like unpacking God and in real time on that podcast. This is why I love podcasting, because I consider it to be my union with the something, with God. Because there's God in you.

That's right.

I mean, you, not to be facetious, like, you are God. You're made in the image of God and so am I. But we are not God. God's self. Right, because we didn't create us, but we were created by the something.

If, if, if we believe that we were created, it didn't grow out of something. Yes. And what I like to posit is taking a zoomed out perspective, stripping away any ideology about us and looking at us as an organism. Not because what you're saying is wrong, simply to bring more curiosity to the way that we grow. If we adopt the concept that we grow in relationship with our environment, then the way that we adapt is logical. Right. And the way that we respond is logical. But if we take the concept that we are created, then we have to look to a creator for why we do what we do. Right. For answers. All of the answers make sense if we're an organism that grows out of the earth. Right. That doesn't mean that there isn't something else, that there isn't interconnectivity. We have words for this. And where I was going with the story is when we strip away the barriers to awareness and to aliveness, we connect to this thing that language attempts to name.

Yes.

But by giving it a name, we miss the thing. So it doesn't matter whether the name is God. It doesn't matter whether the name is the universe or the self or the Atman. It doesn't matter what the name is, because the name takes us away from the experiencing of our aliveness in this moment. Anthony Nomela has this saying that he quotes. I don't know where it came from. The mystic points to the moon and all the idiot sees is the finger. Words are the finger, not the moon. What we're attempting to connect with is the moon God, the divine pure presence and awareness and aliveness. And we have so many different avenues and conduits, psychedelics being one of them. Right. Awareness, when we get rid of all the noise, is all we need because it's all right here in the present moment, and it's all accessible through the conduit of our liveness, which is our body. Right. So regardless of how we construct a worldview around that and make meaning about what we're experiencing, all of that complexity gets in the way of us arriving.

Exactly where we are, which is now in infinity. Yeah.

The only thing that we can, that we can, that we know of, that never ends, is the present moment. This present moment is a continuation that's ever evolving and we're in it. Right? Biblical quotes. The kingdom of heaven is here on Earth, and it's right now. All of existence exists in this one moment. There is no past. All that is is sensory input stored so that we can avoid danger, move towards food, predict behavior so that we can survive. But if we remove the need for any of those things, we would have no need for memory. We'd have no perception of time. Our perception of time is just a byproduct of our evolution. It's a byproduct of our adaptation to. For situational Awareness for survival. But if we strip all that away, it's a different question we find ourselves in.

But the question I asked you was for us Here in the 3D with the prefrontal cortex, with the amygdala, you know, with the animals around. So I love where you brought us, because I'm just like, wow, I would love to live in that space as much as I can. Yet I deal with. We all deal with the challenges, the thresholds of the 3D world. And so I think what pulls us out of the current moment is depression and anxiety. Right. I loved how you define depression. I've been saying this for a long time. Depression is the opposite of expression. So when I'm depressed, I'm not expressing. I love that anxiety is when I focus on the future. I'm worried about, you know, how's my hair look during the podcast or whatever. Some silly little thought that we all have. You're like, should I wear my hat or not? It's like, we're fucking human, dude. We're human. You know, we have these thoughts, and so is the quality of our life and is the aliveness, which you had described about depression. Is that a barometer for how much we can train over time to be in the moment without anxiety and depression, or would you describe it in a different way?

I don't know if I'd say it's a barometer, but I'd say that we absolutely can train that into ourselves across time.

How do we do that?

How do we do that?

How do you teach your students to do that? Yeah, especially somebody with large amounts of trauma.

I remove the expectation that any change is going to happen quickly. Right. We are sold a myth that there's a silver bullet, that something can happen and we can change fast. We've been sold this myth for so long that we believe in quick fixes and we chase it. And in the chasing of that, we miss the opportunity to stimulate change slowly and methodically, which is how we grow. So again, if we come back to how the organism grows, the organism grows slowly and adapts and adjusts itself to stimulus from the environment. Right. So what do we have to do? Slowly and methodically address the body's memory and help it to create a new form, a new shape, help it to discover itself. As soon as I notice that I'm out of balance, my body will bring me back into balance because it's natural. One of the things we teach in. In. In traumatics, Ariana and I, is the body's self writing mechanism is Always working to keep us balanced. And sometimes that looks like significant dysfunction because so many things are out of balance that it's working overtime and it can't, it just can't bring us into balance. It's doing its best. So what are the pieces we can address now and then we set realistic expectations and we work across time and it's removing the barriers. It's so that I can become aware and as I become aware of myself, my body automatically changes.

I love that because, gosh, my mom struggled with bipolar for a long time. And I love you, mom. And I, and I know that all of our parents, they truly, without a shadow of a doubt, with whatever level of consciousness that they have, with whatever level of awareness that they have. People are always doing the best that they can, yet sometimes will the best that parents can do. It's not enough. It's not enough because, you know, when I look at the wisdom of the cat. So Cleo the cat just joined us in the interview and this cat, it doesn't have the prefrontal cortex, it doesn't have the awareness, the consciousness that you and I have. So it leads to this big question with everything that I mentioned about bipolar. Bipolar is just a. I don't know if it's an injury, I don't know how you describe it.

I can describe it for you in a moment when you're done.

But it's definitely something that. It's a self soothing. It is a coping mechanism to the onslaught of something that we can't handle. Right. Which I've heard you describe trauma as in the first place. So two questions when we look at what creates bipolar and how you would help someone with that. And then also. Well, let's just start there actually. Yeah, that's a big enough question.

Let's just talk about first what bipolar is. Yeah. And I'm not making this as a statement across the board. I'm going to make a generality here. And that generality is bipolar is a movement in the nervous system between a sympathetic state and a parasympathetic state. A highly charged state, mania, lots of sympathetic activity and a highly depressed state. Right. Crash, collapse, depression. And it's these swings back and forth and it's the body is having a difficulty or an inability to regulate itself. There's no modulation. I don't have access to the brake pedal. I've got an emergency brake and a gas pedal that's always on. So I'm standing on the gas pedal and I'm driving around town and. Oh, shit. Here comes a corner and I just pull on the emergency brake and the engine's working extra hard because it's trying to make the car go. But eventually the engine just gives out and I'm stuck. And then I can't hold it anymore. And what happens? The car takes off again. Right. And we see the psychological reflection of that in the way that the thoughts represent the state of the body. They mirror it. But the thoughts are not the cause. They are the emergent property of the state of the organism. So something happens, or something happened. A series of events happened. And the way that the organism adapted to that was by having to move back and forth between these different states. And it couldn't bring more regulation to itself over time, in some circumstances, individuals that are living with these symptoms can begin to bring greater regulation into their system by working with a somatic experiencing practitioner. That's one way that I know that can be really effective. Now, it takes time, and it depends on how deeply the neural grooves are. It depends on the age of the individual. It depends on the support system. It depends on the circumstances of their life. It depends on their epigenetic history.

It also depends on when they have the courage to seek help.

Because, I mean, with support.

Yeah, I would assume that. And tell me how you feel about this. I would assume that the earlier that one can admit, hey, there's something I'm noticing, there's something I'm aware of going on that I would like to have peace with, that I would like to have more presence and more peace with. The timing of that is also important because when I was meeting with a therapist yesterday, he talked about glutamate in the brain. And what happens is a lot of times why psychedelics are so powerful. And again, I'm not condoning, if you have bipolar to go run to psychedelics, I know we're going to chat about that. Glutamate is this key neurotransmitter that when it's shunted, when it's blocked, the new pathways of joy, of peace, of the ability to regulate oneself, to regulate our nervous system so that we're not just like gas and break all day long. That seems like it's a pretty large piece.

It can be the way that I would use caution with putting responsibility onto the individual, because what can happen is the individual can feel ashamed of not having the strength or the awareness to ask for help. Sometimes we are so dysregulated that we are not even aware that we need help.

Yeah.

And so that's where having the right supportive environment creates the experience of safety. Enough safety that the individual can begin to notice themselves. Most of the time when we're in that kind of an overwhelmed state, we aren't aware of ourselves. And there's no fault involved in that. It's a lack of blood flow to the right parts of the brain to help us to be aware of ourselves.

I definitely wasn't pointing towards shaming or giving people a hard time.

Not at all.

It was more like. But I see where you're coming from 100%. I think what we're experiencing as a society is we really at times live in a bipolar society. You need to grind your ass off and work as hard as you can. Look at the Grant Cardone and the Gary Vee's and all these people that are literally preaching this lifestyle of work hard, play hard. I mean, it's just. It's insanity. It reminds me of Krishnamurti's quote that I love that's all over our website. It is no degree of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

That's right.

Yeah. And we're in a profoundly sick society. So extrapolate from there as to how do we navigate the road ahead from that place. Because once we're aware of that being real. And I'm not saying the world is just only dark. There's light and dark. But we are veering right now, Will.

Yeah.

I am aware that we are veering towards even more profound sickness.

We are, which is why I began our conversation the way that I did. You know, effectively, we have to be able to name the problem together.

Yeah.

Like that is the solution that I see for now. And we need to bring all cultures into the. Into the equation. So all I can see is the viewpoint as a white man from the United States, certain parts of the United States, and I don't have insight into the domestication process for different kinds of cultural norms, even in the United States. What I see is that we all as a species need to come together in the question, what do we do? We need to come together and acknowledge the problem. This is a problem for us. This is destroying us. How do we solve it? Because every religion needs to adjust the way that it conditions its young. Every culture and every subpart of every culture on this planet needs to adjust how it conditions its young. Every school, every political sphere, every law enforcement sphere, every last human being on this planet has to be a participant in the changing of the way that we condition ourselves to be human. That's gonna take us A long time. But it is the only solution that I see to the plight that we as a species are living in right now.

How have you processed through the sadness that that solution may not be seen in your lifetime?

I haven't. I'm not even sad about it. It's going to take thousands of years. What I'm basically saying is that we need to change. Like, let's just take the Grand Canyon, for instance, right? The grand canyon has the Colorado river running through the middle of it. What I'm saying effectively is we need to move the Colorado river six miles to the left. We need to move it six miles to the left. Well, where do we even begin with that? It is so deeply grooved. How many thousands of years has it been running in that same direction? Well, where do we even start? That's the question that we need to be in. And there's no possible way it's gonna happen in my lifetime. If I'm lucky, the foundation that I've created will raise enough money to live on and inspire enough people that they will get involved in having an idea about where to begin.

I have to go back. I get to go back to this point we were talking about, where we were discussing tribes, and there was definitely this point where I was thinking, okay, back in the day when we tried to explore something different, like a different awareness than the tribe would deem as normal, we could have been ostracized. And so I've heard Jason silva talk about this, that we actually have structures in the brain that are wired for empathy. Psychopaths don't. Psychopaths don't have it. But the majority of us have these neural connections where we actually want to serve the tribe next to us. We want to engage in conversation that the tribe is engaging in. But I think the number one thing that I do see changing, but also there's still massive resistance to it, that is the exploration of what happened when we were children. And I see it placated. I see these platitudes of like, oh, well, you know, ages 0 through 7, whatever happened, you know, you really need to explore that. And people kind of go, oh, yeah, it must be. They make fun of it. It must be what happened in childhood. But it's like, yes, it is what happened in childhood. How do you carry that conversation on a loving, high consciousness level? And really, what the question is, how do we help the people that truly want to be helped? Because the people that are going to make fun of what happened for us, how we got these lessons, either projected by our parents or how we got these lessons not taught to us by our parents. A lot of the times we find ourselves, if we're not careful, making fun of the healing that we need, actually pushing it aside, making it not something serious. So it's a serious topic. But how do you approach it? Like, how do you begin that conversation with the people that actually want to be healed?

I use science. That's where I begin. Everyone adapts to the surroundings. You take a shark, you put it in a small fish tank, it stays the size of the fish tank. You change the size of the environment, the shark changes size, you put it in the ocean, it'll grow exponentially, right? All I'm pointing to with that is the way that an organism adapts and adjusts itself to its surroundings. Humans are absolutely no different. Everything that we experience before the development of our hippocampus and beyond early in life is implicit memory. It's all body based, it's reflexes, reflexes to situations. So for us to unwind our reflexes, the reflexes that are generally not useful to us now, we've got to become aware of them. Somebody has to help us. And that takes time. And what we need most when we're young is connection, safe, social connection. So early childhood attachment is what points to this. But we're relational creatures. Healing happens in relationship, and healing happens across time. And when I say the word healing, what I'm talking about is change, the change of the organism. And it happens in connection, it happens across time and physical contact. That is one of the things that can be really supportive for our systems. We all have trauma because of how we domesticate ourselves, because of how we live, essentially. And the beginning of healing is working with practitioners that can really. They know how to support it, right? Peter Levine's work is just the beginning of a revolution of understanding the inner workings of the physiology of the human organism. Stephen Porges his work as well. My mom's beginning to work with him and they're offering some incredible trainings. And I mean, it's unreal what they're doing in the field of neuroscience right now. Absolutely unreal. As we understand these things, we can bring the support necessary to the organism. When the organism has that support, it no longer has the stress. When it doesn't have the stress, the behavior changes.

The cure is community. I mean, and that can be placated too. But I'm being very, very open about this. Without community, without this podcast, without these conversations, I don't know if I would be mentally sound I think my soul guided me to do this show for six plus years because I need these conversations so that I can be honest about where I am with myself. And I think that's what really we've built over these past six years is like this fundamental question of how do I listen to and honor the intelligence inside of myself?

That's it, man. That's it.

How do we, how do we do it? So let's, let's begin that conversation.

Yeah. How do I listen to an honor the intelligence with myself? I need to be able to be aware of it.

Yes. Like know thyself, know thyself, know thyself.

Literally the temple.

We have to start the temple in Apollo.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm going to quote Anthony Noello again. There's this, and it's not his, it's a Sufi he quote. I think when the eye is unobstructed, the result is sight. When the ear is unobstructed, the result is hearing. When the nose is unobstructed, the result is smell. When the mouth is unobstructed, the result is taste. When the heart is unobstructed, the result is love. When the mind is unobstructed, the result is wisdom. When we take these things and we put them together, when our experience of our aliveness has no barriers, is unobstructed. When we remove the barriers to our experience of aliveness, we can begin. Most of my work with people is getting to the beginning. If we can get to the beginning, they don't need me. I don't need anyone. When I get to the beginning, when I can come into contact with myself, that's all I need. Because now I'm aware that something's happening, environment provides a stimulus. I experience the response.

That's such a beautiful quote. I love that so much. Our society is aware of this question, but I believe there's a sinister answer that they give to it. And that is drugs, porn, pharmaceuticals, even Tony Robbins concerts where he gets people in high vibe state and then upsells them, but doesn't necessarily give them this kind of somatic trauma, informed experience. And I think we've all experienced this, right? We go and do a weekend workshop. We're like, yes, fuck yeah, I feel so good. Or we go to a psychedelic ceremony and we come home and we're like, oh my God, Will. You know, I'm in that high vibration state right now, yet I know that my work and the real ceremony is right here. It's with you right now. It's with Kerry Michelle, it's with my son. It's with the way I approach my business. Can I breathe? Can I allow myself to de stress? It's so nuanced, and there's so much to unpack at times that I think, and I'm curious how you feel. I think where we also need to talk about the subject is the ways in which society preys upon our trauma, because it makes us at times want to believe that we're not enough, and it sells us things as if then we'll be enough. And that is rampant. And so please, give people some guidance on that part. And then let's go deeper into that conversation about the awareness of where to begin, which is the start.

Yeah, well, to your point, we have a world of traumatized people, and the sentence ends there. So we can see it in sales, we can see it in marketing, we can see it in politics, we can see it in law enforcement, we can see it in education. We can see it in every facet of every human. No one is exempt. We make up these images or these perceptions in our minds that government is this entity. It's not. It's an amalgamation of thousands if not millions of human beings that are traumatized, that are indoctrinated, and that are sleeping of no fault of their own. They're scared. They just want to survive. And most of them just want to go home and be with their families at the end of the day. So if we consider that it's a large number of many individuals, there is no one entity. There is no one conspiratorial entity. Yeah, it's many individuals that are traumatized, that are scared, that want to belong, and that will do anything to survive. Tony Robbins has these six basic human needs. I have three in my cosmology. Safety, dignity, and belonging. If any of these three are threatened, what happens? I will use any means necessary to stay alive because all of these threaten my aliveness. My dignity is my connection to my tribe, my belonging, my connection to my tribe. My connection to my tribe is survival, is safety. All of this is a my animal response. There is no logic to it. There's no thinking to it. And I overlay a meaning and a story about this as it's occurring because I'm unaware that it's even happening. And I blame the other, and I blame my environment. And I'm in it, living out this fantastical fantasy of sorts, disconnected from reality. Right. And that's where awareness again comes back to, like, I want to become aware of myself, because in that, I can Be aware of you. Right? In our work, one of the things that Ariana and I train practitioners to become more aware of, I suppose I'm just using this word again and again right now to define the thing feels true, but is themselves. What I say is, it is infinitely more important that I'm aware of me while I'm with you. Because if I'm aware of me, I can be aware of you. Right? As a practitioner, when I'm working with someone else, I need to be aware of my body.

Does that also include. Because I had an experience with this yesterday with ketamine at field trip, she actually stated, hey, Josh, I'm feeling something right now.

That's right.

I'm going to be aware of it and I'm not going to put it on you. And I was like, fuck, yes, that's a beautiful person. How do you teach people to do that? Because there's vulnerability in being a practitioner, especially when it comes to trauma and somatics that I think is so much more delicate and so much more. It needs so much more care to be unpacked slowly. Because trauma can be almost like Pandora's box. I mean, if you do it the wrong way and you start going into someone's psyche, I've experienced it with breath work. Talk about the skillful unpacking of trauma.

So there's a word that Peter Levine uses to describe this process of sorts, and it's used in chemistry. And the word is titration. And I really need to memorize the two chemicals that he references because I use this analogy so often, but I don't have them in my mind right now. But basically, in chemistry, what we can do is we can mix chemicals together. Some of these chemicals are really caustic, and they can cause pretty significant reactions to each other. So if I take these two chemicals and mix them together really fast, there's an explosion. That explosion will rock my world, might even harm me or kill me. But I can take this one chemical and I can drop by drop by drop, mix it into the other. Now, if I do it drop by drop, each drop waiting for the fizzle to stop, drop another drop, it fizzles again and it stops. Eventually, I can mix all of the two together. And what ends up happening is it renders them both inert. And so we see water and salt crystals, right? So they become neutralized. When we're working with the bound energy inside of the body, if we experience that energy too fast, it becomes traumatic, becomes too much for the system. Let me put it that way maybe not traumatic, but too much for the system. Trauma is anything that's too much or too fast for the system to process or too much for too long or too little for too long. Right. Like neglect. So if, like with breath work, for instance, if I'm leading you in breathwork and I stimulate this state in your body and I keep stimulating it and stimulating it, and I don't recognize that your system, not your mind, your body, is beginning to become overwhelmed, I may continue to stimulate you. I may think, ooh, yes, he's in the zone. I got him. Now the thing's getting ready to happen.

He's falling out of that catharsis.

He's going to start shaking, he's going to start crying. I need to do more. If I do that, I just fucked up. Healing, you're not going to have a healing experience. What you're going to have is an experience of catharsis. And what you'll feel afterwards is relief. What you'll feel instead of healing is the rush of hormones that come afterwards. You may have a day, three days, a week, feeling pretty good. But then you know what? After that time, you got to go right back because you're not solving anything. You're just creating a feel good experience. But if instead I can recognize the changes in your body and I can slow you down at the right moments, you can experience little speed bumps instead of fucking mountains.

Yeah.

What ends up happening is your system integrates a new experience of itself. So next time you have more capacity to be with more of yourself and then more of yourself. And eventually that charge becomes neutralized and it's no more. It's reintegrated into your system. And what does that mean? I don't need to go back for breath work. That's what we want. We don't want to have to keep chasing these things. I met a guy that told me he was doing combo daily. And I'm like, why are you doing that? He's like, I'm so healed. I'm healed. I'm like, you're not healed? No, healed means I don't need the thing. The thing is the conduit to help to stimulate the healing in my body. But my body has the capacity to do it. All I'm using is an external force to stimulate it. But if I keep returning to the thing, I'm not chasing healing at all. There's something else that's going on.

But it can be, especially in our world where there's a lot of people that go into Medicine, ceremonies, and they're quote, looking like they're doing the work. What I was watching as you were speaking was if trauma was the roots of a tree, the ceremonies, if they're not done consciously, is almost like trying to grab the tree and rip it out all at once. You're going to damage the soil, you're going to actually damage the human by trying to rip it out all at once. And what I felt about what you were saying was you were actually going in and brushing away the dirt and pulling the roots out carefully, one by one, checking with the tree or the organism and making sure that it's okay. So that as you slowly and tactfully extract the tree, extract the trauma that you're not hurting the organism as you extract it.

That's right.

I mean, I myself have experienced this two years ago in a ceremony where the tree was ripped out. I was fucked up for a while, Will. It was crazy.

Yeah. And I might even say it's even more. There's an integration of the energy, right? So in shamanic culture, we would say there's soul retrieval, right? The fragmentation of the soul, right? So there's a peace left behind when we experience something hard. And if from my perspective on this, it's some sort of bound energy, right? The electrical impulse, the motoric movement inside the body.

What does that mean? Metoric, I've heard you say, right?

So when my body goes to move itself, there's the motor movement, right? There's the mobilizing energy that's moving the muscles in the bones and like the ligaments and like my body is mobilizing, right? So like there's, there's blood flow, there's oxygenation, there's movement. When I am unable to complete some sort of movement, the impulse to move lives on and it shows up as muscle constrictions and like thwarted patterns of movement.

Got it.

Right. So when I resolve that stored energy, that energy redisperses into my body. I now have more energy. So imagine it like this, let's say driving to the grocery store. And there's one route that you usually take because it's the easiest and most direct route. There's another route that you can take, but it would take you 45 minutes. This one route takes you nine. Let's say that on your nine minute route, one day you're driving and you hit a traffic jam, there's an accident, you're like, okay, well I guess I gotta go around. So you go around. That accident never gets cleaned up, ever. So now every Time you go to the grocery store, it takes you 45 minutes instead of nine. Let's say another accident happens on that 45 minute drive. Now it takes you three hours to get to the grocery store instead of nine. None of those accidents get cleaned up. That's what happens in our body, the sensory channels, the information that travels from one place to another gets stuck. And it takes all that extra energy, all that extra resource for us to travel. What we're doing is we're unblocking that roadblock, we're removing the cars so that you can move again, so that the information can travel from one place to the next, so the body can communicate with itself, so neurological patterning can exist. And when that happens, we have this surge of energy. There's like an upward movement of the energy in our body moving towards the crown. And then there'll be a settling that'll take place. And sometimes we'll see the color purple. And it's like clockwork, man. I can predict the sequencing when we get it right with a person, when the person has enough resource and they have enough capacity to be with that fullness of that experience. But that reintegration is like I actually now have access to more of my life force energy. Like we're not actually removing anything. What stimulated this is like the concept of removing the tree, right. As if we want to remove the trauma. But it's not that there's anything that needs to be removed or added or taken away. It's that what we need is access to that, to the highway, so to speak, or to that road. And so what we do is we're just helping to remove the cars, remove the barriers, remove the obstacles.

Yeah.

And little by little, the system has more energy.

No matter what explanation I hear, and I loved yours so much, it's always about this middle way where anytime, I mean, Paul chek, Tim Kakorin, Dr. Tim Brown, who's a World Surf League chiropractor and medical practitioner, they've all sat on this show and said the same thing. It's this middle way. And I'm hearing it from you too, because I do believe that entheogens, plant medicines, ketamine, they're so powerful, will and done the right way, you can clear the accident, you can, in maybe a lot less time than if you weren't doing it in a skillful way. But that's the key, the skillful way. And this is what I love about you and your work, man. I mean, the little session we did well, the big session we did in the sauna. You have a skillfulness to you, which is why I wanted to have you on this show. That is much different than many people that say they're integrative specialists or they're trained in somatics. I've had somatic healing in Encinitas and I've had a lot of experience with practitioners. So what is it about you? What is it about your character, who you are as a being, how you want to express yourself that makes you continue to do this work in a skillful way? Because you could make a hell of a lot more money doing it in a different way. Right. You can so called get people the results faster. But what is it about you that makes you do it in the way you do it?

I could get them to feel good.

Faster, you can get them to feel good faster, but it's temporary.

It's temporary, Yeah. I think it's this, you know, it's kind of like the Hippocratic oath, you know, do no harm and help where I can. Right. I'm not in this for money. I'm not in this for fame. I'm in this because someone's got to do it. It's an accident that I am the way I am.

How do you mean?

I'm not doing it on purpose. My nature is just a byproduct of my learning and developing myself. But it's not that I have a target that I'm aiming for. I get a lot of feedback from people that they feel really safe and really held with me, that they feel a stillness inside themselves that they don't normally feel when they're around others. And I think a normal or an average person might say thank you. Though my response isn't really a thank you because I don't take ownership of that. It's just. It's an accident. There's this. Alan Watts talks about this. There's a Zen commit a genuine act. But you can't commit a genuine act unless it's something that happens accidentally. It's because of who you've become that it's a byproduct of your being. Right. So, like, I continue to be in this question, right? Like, what is it about me? How is it that this is happening? I have no idea. And I don't think about it. It's more just a continuation of my curiosity to learn and to understand, to experiment and to be present with people. Right. I see it so clearly, Josh. And the more I do this work, the clearer it becomes and the way that I get that reflected from the world continues to reaffirm that I'm on the right path.

The origin, though, for many of the healers, because you're a healer, whether you go with that nomenclature or not, I call myself a mystic, but that's fine. But the origin for many of us comes from pain, comes from contrast.

So there's a. There's something I'll share with you that you may find interesting. In my research about culture, especially really esoteric mystery schools, ritual and how to become. I don't know. I mean, we might say enlightened, but I don't know that it would have been framed that way. And some of the cultures that I was. I was learning about in the deep inner circles of the initiates. To become initiated into those inner circles, one must experience the full range of experience. The Egyptians had these elaborate systems, for it would be considered testing. But I don't consider it testing. It's a setup to give an individual the experience of pain, of fear, of suffering, of overcoming, of experiencing life. Full range of sexual experience, full range of physical pain, full range of emotional difficulty. Right. So that's the full range, really being in the living rather than above it or moving away from it or towards. Right. Like being in the experiencing of life, the testing of our conviction for it. So to your question, the reason I tell that story is because I've lived through and endured enormous amounts of pain and suffering and fear and difficulty and frankly, just confusing experiences in life as well as, you know, the people that I think of when I think of my peers in my psychedelic exploration are people like Leary, Timothy Leary, people like Terence McKenna, Hunters Thompson, even Alistair Crowley's work with. When he went off the deep. And now he got lost in the deep end. But he wrote a book called Diary of a Drug Fiend. And he was experimenting with drugs and he just. He just diary his experience with these things and his exploration of human existence.

Lilly did the same thing with ketamine and float tanks.

Right. There you go. Right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I identify with these humans because I went to the depths with psychedelics. Extreme doses of these things, research chemicals, extreme periods of time with these things. And it's. None of it's necessary. None of it all confuses us, right? It becomes this confusing. Like we mistake that for what it shows us and we don't need it to be shown. And I think that a byproduct of some of those experiences is who I've become. And a lot of people, I don't know anybody that lived through Those experiences with me that hasn't had mental, emotional, psychological difficulties as a result of some of those experiences. So what is it about me? I have no clue, man. I ask myself that question.

I think it's your seeking. You come across me since day one as a truth seeker. You want to know the truth. And I don't mean the subjective truth. I mean the objective, the one that the seer sees. And to most people that have been with us for a few years, they know what the observer is. But I am genuinely curious, when we look at the observer, the 30,000 foot view, the watcher, how do you integrate that in your training for people? Because I would assume that if somebody isn't researched in the esoteric arts, maybe they've never listened to Eckhart Tolle. Maybe they're just exploring this, but they have this fire inside of them that wants to heal. How do you educate people and students about the, the watcher, the observer, without using so much esoteric language that it may scare them or turn them off?

Yeah, I mean, I think I'm still figuring out how to do that in a way that's simple. Because even as, as you, as we, you know, the listener, you listening, you can hear how complex I can speak, how intellectual I can be about these things. One of the ways that I talk about this is it's in phases. Like, I want to become aware of myself. I do that through becoming aware of my body. I do that by becoming aware of my emotional states and creating distinction between these two phenomena. Right? The sensations, the emotions, my thoughts, my movements. So I begin with that. Then we can pose the question, who's the one that's noticing? Can I zoom out? Can I be in the experience of myself? Like even right now? Let's say we do a little, a little thing and take us maybe a minute and a half, right? So in this present moment, wherever we are, notice what we notice around us. So begin outside of us, we can look around again. I'm in your office and I'm noticing the books and certain colors jump out at me. I notice the scarf hanging behind you and this painting beside you and the colors. So from there bring my awareness inside myself. And you can bring your awareness inside of yourself. What do you notice inside of you? What kind of sensations do you notice?

I notice that the chair feels really good on my lower back. I love having my arms supported. It feels really good.

Can you, can you notice the texture of the chair underneath your arms?

It's very soft.

Soft. There you go. Right. So there's a sensation based word. So I noticed soft. I can notice cold in my fingertips. I can notice warmth in my feet. Now from there, can I notice the emotion that's present? I'm experiencing curiosity, joy, a little bit of anxiety if I really dig in some other emotion that I don't have a word for. So now I have distinction between these three states. So then I can ask, can I notice the softness while I notice the warmth, while I notice myself noticing them, can you notice yourself the weight of you in the chair, the way that you like the chair. And then can you also notice yourself noticing those things? Now we're zooming out once. So the conceptual framework that we're working with here is there's me, and then we're saying there's I. But as soon as I now notice me, it's me noticing me, it's no longer I. And so we get into this Buddhist question. The question that the Buddhists ask, who is I? So that's the question I ask myself. Somebody says, who are you? I say, yeah, who am I? That's the question I'm living day to day. Who is I? Who is the watcher? Who's the noticer of experience? Because my cells are different every seven years. My body's different every seven years. I am not the me that once was. Yet I identify as me. And then we get into the mystic part of me, like the more philosophical question. But we're in a question that doesn't have an answer and that drives most people insane.

Absolutely.

I love being in the question without an answer. Because what happens is I discover new things. I'm just in a process of discovery. There's a potential that I learned something new.

I think that space can be so terrifying for people that are in highly analytical careers. So for example, if someone's a stockbroker or they're in a job that actually will feeds off of their trauma. Trauma can be a guiding light for CEOs. I think a lot of our world and the buildings that are downtown were built from the fuel of trauma, from an addiction to a nervous system that's constantly sympathetic.

Yeah.

And the movement that I see you creating that's so fucking profound is asking that deep question of who is the eye? But also how is the eye showing up and what is the eye noticing and what is the I willing to change? What message is the eye willing to plant from that space of curiosity in the unknown where it can be terrifying? That's living. That's living, man.

Yeah, man. Yeah. Yeah. And this the Discovery of me. So this question, for us to get into this question inside of ourselves, we must develop a strong me. I need a healthy ego development, because what I'm saying is I'm dissolving it. Right. But both have to be true. Right. It's like when I step into a psychedelic experience, if I don't have a strong sense of myself, I have nowhere to return when I destroy that. And I need somewhere to return. Otherwise, I become what anyone tells me. I become the cosmology that I've stepped into. I become the visions that I see and I get lost within that.

Or you can potentially be instructed to become whatever energies are in the ceremony space that some people might call this entity attachment. Right. And so I can profoundly say that occurred for me and it was for my highest good. It really was. It didn't feel like it at the time.

Yeah.

But it truly was for my highest good. And as we. I don't even want to say we're rounding out the conversation because I could sit here and jam with you for a long time. But as we go practical to this, we look at this intersection of I just got back from field trip health, which is a really well done ketamine center. I think I'll probably have them on the podcast. I've had many psychedelic practitioners and I myself now take a very middle way approach to psychedelics. I'm neither for nor against. I'm only for the utility of it when it's called.

Yeah, you and I have talked a lot about this.

We've talked a lot about this. So how do you. How do you direct students and actually, how do you direct yourself to psychedelics and maybe start with some of the myths or some of the misconceptions of how to utilize psychedelics when we look at trauma and healing.

Well, I think the first myth is take more psychedelics. That's the first myth. The second myth is psychedelics are for everyone all the time. Yes, that's totally fucking math. And psychedelics can sometimes be really helpful for some people in some circumstances. Right. It's just a matter of are we going to have fun or are we going to heal?

There's a difference, no doubt.

So if we're going to get high and have fun, I'm all for that. Go get high, have fun, explore yourself. But don't call it a ceremony, don't call it a ceremony, don't call it healing. It's not healing. But for us to really, truly stimulate healing. Now, healing may be a byproduct of some of the insights or integration that comes from some of those, you know, wild and fun experiences. But let's call it what it is, right? People going and getting high, and that's great, cool. Enjoy yourself. Experience life in that way. It can be really educational. It's not healing. If we want to stimulate healing, work with a trained practitioner, do it across time, do it in small doses and set yourself up through preparation and integration. Our brain is so malleable. Our body, our psyche, all of us is so malleable. Immediately after psychedelics, we need to create a window of time after we have that malleability stimulated within us so that we're not regrouping into our body the exact stress that led to us needing to use the substance, right? So there's this really unique way of us modulating ourselves into these things and out of these experiences which creates that significant change. These things would have existed in tribal cultures, and in a lot of tribal cultures, it was only the shaman that drank the psychedelic wasn't the actual person that was getting worked on. Shaman used it as a means to see what plants, what was going on psychologically. And they knew the family, they knew the friends, they knew the community. They knew everything that was going on with the individual. We were connected inside of a community that had an ecosystem and a structure and a dogmatic framework for processing and integrating these really big and profound experiences. But now we don't. And so it's essential that we create those things for ourselves or we call it something else. And what we end up with is a people that are super fragmented. So practical, practical steps are. Let's evaluate where we are first. Is it a need? Is it a want? What's going on? What else have I tried? What else have I really tried? Or am I looking for a quick fix? Have I really done a lot of other things and stuck with it? I'm not talking about five or six sessions with somebody. I'm talking about two or three years of consistent work, right? Ongoing support from the right helpers. Have I done that first? If I have, where am I going? I need to research those people. I need to talk to those people. I need to ask questions. What's their process? Will I be supported when I come back? Do I have the right structure in place to help me? Will it be too hard on me to take time off of work? If it is, it's probably the wrong time. My personal opinion now, we can integrate these experiences, but what I'm suggesting is that we slow down, move at the pace of nature, not at the pace of capitalism, if we move at that pace, well, we might wait a year, might wait two years. We might do the integrative work leading up to it. We might discover that actually it's not necessary yet. It's something we want to do because we think it'll be fun and it'll be really useful for us. But we put a lot of our faith into something, whether that be a. Whether that be a drug. So we put a lot of faith into something, whether that be a drug, whether that be an experience, whether that be working with a certain kind of practitioner, assuming that that's going to be the thing and after that thing, we're going to arrive somewhere. No, Life is an ongoing journey of unfolding and rearranging and growing. There is no place to arrive. There's a continuous movement of change. If we let go, well, it might give us the opportunity to actually change.

A lot of what I was feeling, what I was experiencing when you were talking about that was. We have been sold this lie of the golden ticket, you know, like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory, where he's like, if I just get the chocolate, and then look at what happened with Willy Wonka, he actually went into the factory and saw all these parts of himself to then understand that he had it all along. And that's the hero's journey that we're all walking. We all actually have it. Like you said, there's no place to arrive. I'm not arriving at wisdom. I'm just, as you quoted the gentleman before, I'm removing the blockages from the wisdom that I already had. And that can be so explained in an egotistical way, like, I'm so spiritual, or, you know, I'm so this, I'm so that. But it's actually not true. Like, what I've learned is that in the beginning with my psychedelic journey, I would kind of sprint to a ceremony because I had so much profound information come in. But I've heard this from multiple sources. Beware of unearned wisdom.

Yeah.

Because when you get wisdom that you haven't earned, that you're not ready to first of all hold or integrate or embody, look the fuck out. Yeah, look out. Because that can be really, really dangerous. So in your program, do you deal with people that have had psychic injury from psychedelics, or do you have some kind of framework that you guide people through?

In the training program, we're teaching practitioners to work with individuals in a new way. We do address working with altered states of consciousness, whether that be through Psychedelics or breath work or an assortment of different things. And the format and the formula is the same as what I've been talking about here. It's. It's. Regardless of what it is that's going on, we've got to assess where the individual is. And we want to move slowly. We want to work with the signs that the body is giving us. And there's a distinction that we make. Right. So it's a training that teaches practitioners to be trauma informed. And the distinction that we make is there's trauma aware, which is, I'm aware that trauma exists in the world. I don't know much about it. I don't know much about where it is. Most of the world lives there. Then there's trauma informed, which is. I understand the psychobiological influence of trauma. I mean, the way that trauma shows up in the body. Like, I know about it. I know about the nervous system. I understand when I look at somebody, I can see that their body's activated or not so activated. I can track it, and I know where to send them for support. I also know how to do my work with them and to recognize when I'm stimulating something and to move away from that stimulating thing. Right. Because I'm not trained to work on that thing. And then the third layer is working on trauma. So trauma informed, trauma aware, trauma informed, trauma trained. So I'm trained to work with it, like, on it. I can work with an individual who's had trauma and not direct myself towards it. Yeah, right. So this, this conceptual framework is really helpful for practitioners because so many of us think, I've lived through something, I can help somebody with it. No, I was there, and you know what happened? I caused more harm. I stimulated something that I didn't know how to support. I thought I did. And I was proud of myself. I was so proud of myself. I was excited. I'm like, I did the thing. No, I didn't do the thing. I overwhelmed somebody with themselves. I didn't know when to stop. And they had to live with the impact of that. And I didn't realize until many months later when I got lots of feedback from my mentors and my supervisors about how dangerous it can be to overly stimulate somebody. I was proud. I'm like, these are the things we're looking for, right? No, no, that's overwhelming the body. We're not looking for overwhelm. We're looking for integration. Integration is not big and flashy. It's not wowy. It's not Tony Robbins. Integration is Subtle, it's gentle, it's integrative. That's what healing is, though. So we are teaching people to get out of this, you know, heavily capitalistically driven mindset around helping, bringing them into connection with the real nature of biology of a human being and helping them to help these people in all the different ways that they work. Whether they're educators or doctors or whether they're coaches or therapists, everybody has a different domain that they're working in. But the one thing that's consistent is human nature. The way that we grow and the way that we respond to stress and the way that we respond to relationship. And if we can keep those things in mind, our work can be unbelievably helpful. It doesn't matter whether we're focusing on the trauma or not. What matters is that we're treating the human like an actual human being and we're understanding the humanity of them.

I think this can be so easy to intellectualize because I've had the five personality patterns, Steven Kessler on the podcast, and I know there's the polyvagal theory, and there's. I mean, look at how many different theories are out there. Even. Even Peter Levine's and trauma Informed. I see this coming more online. All of these systems or all of these lenses to view trauma or to view how we show up in the world. You know, different personality types, different archetypes. They're all doing the best that they can. And what I love is that when one of them admits that theirs isn't the only way. So what is unique about your approach with trauma and somatics? And who did you pull from? And how do you also leave room for the mystery? There's phenomenal mystery in this.

There's so much mystery. We're pulling From Porges work, Dr. Dan Siegel's work, Dr. Peter Levine's work, Deb Dana, an assortment of others, Diane Pull Heller's work on attachment, a number of different people, and the science that really backs stress physiology. And then we're also pulling from mysticism and meditation and an assortment of other different traditions from around the world. And we bring these things together into a synthesis that's our unique lens, so to speak, of synthesizing these things. And what I'll say here is this, Josh. Trauma is just the word that we're using right now to describe this phenomenon. But the phenomenon has been happening as far back as we can trace recorded history. The mystics in India had a different name for it. I truly think that when they're speaking about Attachment. They're talking about trauma, Our attachment to something, our attachment to the memory of the past, our attachment to the memory of the future, our inability to be with ourselves, to sit in stillness, to experience our bodies. Right. It's all the same thing again, the finger pointing to the moon. And so what we're doing is we're saying, hey, listen, there are many ways, but let's understand at least how the organism functions so that we can best help the individual. Whether that's through spirituality, whether that's through massage, whether that's through medical science, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that we understand what's cutting edge in the world, and these things are going to be refined. Stephen Porges has been refining the polyvagal theory for the past, what, 40 years or something like that. This is ongoing in experimentation and studies and measuring the human organism. But man, once that begins, once that's widely accepted. Yeah. The way that we treat ourselves will change because we start to understand. Oh, oh, that's why. Oh, well, all of the behavior makes sense now. To me. It all makes so much sense. Somebody's like, well, yeah, aren't you angry at that person? I'm like, I may feel triggered inside, and that triggers about me and my lived experience in the world, but what I see is an individual doing what they can to survive in a situation where they feel threatened in some way, shape or form. And everything that's happening on the outside is a result of that.

The human nature aspect, you mentioned that earlier. Human nature, let's move and let's operate. Let's heal at the speed of nature. Nowhere in nature. And my audience is like, okay, we've heard this before, but I'll say it again. Nowhere in nature is there always consistent, year over year over year, growth without death of a single organism.

That's right.

Everything in nature, including humans, because we are nature, has a birth, a life, and a death. Yes, we come back in a different form. And that's a whole nother podcast, too. But. But it's this fight, Will. It's this fight. Like, we are so afraid of death that I really believe there's many different ways. I did a vision quest this year. Ketamine, breathwork, psychedelics of any kind, in a safe way. So many ways to get us to this mirror of, like, death not actually being what we're so afraid of. I believe in my knowing and in my body. It's not that I'm afraid of death anymore. It's that I'm sad. I'm sad to leave, because then I won't get to have these amazing podcasts anymore. I won't get to hold my son. I won't get to make love with my partner. I won't get to eat an orange in the sun shirtless, you know, like, all these amazing things. So I think that's also included in the conversation is how do we look at trauma in the various stages of carefully unpacking trauma for real healing? And also how do we befriend death? Let's bring death back into the conversation. That's cool. Let's bring birth back in the home. Let's bring death back in the conversation. Let's stop being so afraid of death and actually honor the sadness of death.

Yeah. You know, you talking about death, it just makes me think of Stephen Jenkinson, and he'd be a really great person for you to have as a guest. He's done so much work on death, and listening to him talk is like listening to a sweet melody. His vernacular is incredible. But we do live in a culture here in the States or in the North American region. It's spread into more of the industrialized world where we are terrified of our dying, we're terrified to let go. And so we cling to life and we cling to our experiences in a way that prevents us from experiencing life. Right. Here we are again in that loop of resistance to living because we're afraid of dying. When dying is happening, it's a natural byproduct. The organism is doing that. It's part of it. There is a lifespan. Right. So, you know, those are my thoughts on death. And how do we unpack? The beginning of working on managing, like, working with trauma, and it's that word titration again, you know, little steps towards wholeness, towards integration. And that's a process of coming home to ourselves. We really. I want to live within me, because when I'm within me, I can be with you.

Only.

It'S impossible for me to be with you really. For me to really be with you if I'm not with me.

It's one hell of a podcast, Will. I knew it was going to be good, man. And in divine timing, we covered so much ground. So before we tell people where they can start this incredible journey of true learning at the pace of nature, which I love, this is not some weekend program where you're going to stuff it down their mouth. But before we go there, what did we miss? You know, we talked about the many ways that trauma shows up, what somatics are. We Talked about the myths around psychedelics. One of the ways I love that you teach is this is about actually not fearing the emotions we have. It's about not having fear of getting stuck, which I think is really huge. But what do we miss? Man, you've done a lot of interviews. You've done a lot of shows. Like, what's a question? What's a topic? What's something really juicy that you think is really beneficial to cover?

That's a good question, Josh. What have we missed? It's probably just more of the same. More of the same in a different way. You know, we talked about what not to do and some of these. These perspectives I have on psychedelics. But maybe we could talk about. We could say, what do we do to make that more effective? Did we go there? A little bit of that. But also I want to leave you the listener, with hope. It's not so complicated. It's actually quite simple. And there's this cliche, this. Every journey begins with a single step, right? And this process of coming home, be patient, gentle. One step every day is 365 steps in a day. I mean, a year, rather, right? One step every day. We just need small incremental movement. It doesn't have to be big. In fact, it's more sustainable if it's small. What do you think we missed? What do you want to know that we haven't gotten into?

Well, I get the pleasure of being your friend, so I've picked your brain a few times. But I really feel like we did a beautiful job of peeling the layers back. And we did it in a great way, too, because we didn't just dive into a subject and move to the next subject. There's a carefulness of which you speak because these are such tender topics and they need that carefulness. And so I think the best step now is to direct someone who's feeling that call. And that's the thing, too. Trust your feelings. Because sometimes your feelings are just a guidepost to explore what's really real. I don't think that all feelings are real. I think we experience feelings, but I'm not the feeling. I experienced that. So if somebody is experiencing this feeling of trauma within themselves and also experiencing a sense of curiosity about what they might learn from the training. You gave us a really special bonus, so thank you for that. It's wellnessforce.com TraumaInformed so you guys go to wellnessforce.com TraumaInFormed I think that's a beautiful place to start. So tell people what this experience is all about.

Yeah. Well, there's two parts to what you just posed here. And so if someone is looking for support, working through what they've identified, the living memory of things, those triggers, I would suggest going to traumahealing.org or directory.traumahealing.org and finding a Somatic Experiencing practitioner in their local area. That would be my first step to begin to work on exploring your aliveness. Right. I take on a very small number of clients every year, so people can reach out to me via social media or via email to talk to me about potentially working with me. But to get a practitioner in your local area, like the Somatic Experiencing Institute is global. They're in so many different countries.

It doesn't have to be in person, virtual, it's just powerful.

Yeah, it can be just as powerful virtually. Yeah. So that's, that's part one and part two, Trauma and Somatics, the training program that I run with my previous partner and business partner, current business partner, Ariana.

That's what we didn't cover Will. Ah. That we didn't, we didn't cover Will's story about the transition and how you in a mature way handled that. So maybe we talk about that in 2022 more.

We can do that. I can give you an abridged version of that right now if this feels important.

Important. Let's save it. Let's save it for.

Yeah, beautiful. Yeah. So the story about that will be in for another time.

Yes.

So yeah. So Ariana and I run this training three times a year. It happens in January, May. It begins in January, May and September. It's a three month training and it's a deep dive into the things that we've been talking about today. It's a deep dive into the nervous system. It's a deep dive into stress physiology. It's a deep dive into attachment theory and its practical application. The first part of what we do with everyone is get them connected to themselves. For me to help anyone, I have to be connected to me. So part one and it's an embodied experience. So we have layered bit by bit, a deepening of practices. And these practices begin to change you. Each step of the way you become more and more changed, more and more awakened to yourself. And as that happens, it's right. Like the embodied becoming takes place. Right. So my behaviors, your behaviors start to change and your insight around yourself and your clients change. So first us, then information, then practical application, and then we have exercises and breakout rooms and the virtual container and all sorts of assignments for the embodied experience of playing with these techniques and leading and guiding your clients through these experiences. We offer supervision, which means essentially, if you have a case or a client or somebody you're working with that you want help working through, you bring it to us and we help you to pull it apart and to use somatic based interventions. We teach you how to bring more stabilization to the people in your life.

The combo of people that are in there, there's some that are. Well, I would assume that everyone's doing deep work on themselves in this program, but it's for practitioners of what type?

Yeah, so helping professionals. So educators, doctors, therapists, coaches, People that.

Work with other people.

That's right. If you work with another person, this will help you.

It's a lot of people.

It's a lot of people. Yeah.

And it's training that we all need, man.

We've had people from six different countries almost every single time, all different parts of the world and all different walks of practitioners, you know, many different kinds, even working with psychedelics, working at body workers, you name it. Like, we've got practitioners coming through. And what we see time after time is a significant change in the individual and in how they work. Their effectiveness is just night and day different. It's incredible. So if you're. You're listening to me talk about this and you're interested, the next one begins in January.

Excellent. And this will. This interview is. I think it's just a few weeks out, so if you're feeling this, probably the spots are few, so you'll definitely want to take inspired action on this. So we'll. Let's say goodbye, man. For now.

For now.

And we'll see each other later, of course, on this podcast and in life. But as we say goodbye, give us this last wisdom. And it's my favorite question in the world. This is my ultimate. It's the question I ask myself every day. It's why I have this podcast. How do you live your life well? What is well being to you? How do you define wellness?

That's such a good question, Josh. How do I define wellness? What is well being to me? Well, being is my ability to listen, to hear myself, to feel myself. When I know that I'm off track, it's when I'm disconnected from myself, when I'm cloudy, when I'm emotionally reactive. So it's making space to be with me. It's that practice of coming home, of experiencing my aliveness and the richness, the rapture of being alive, as Joseph Campbell called it. It's that joy, it's that curiosity, that emptiness, yet that fullness.

Ultimate Mic drop. Thank you for coming on the show. I have so much appreciation and love for you, brother. Thank you for welcoming to welcoming me to this community when I first got here. I appreciate that.

Thanks for having me here, brother.

The cure is in community. So I resonate with so many things that you said. And your last name is Reason, which I think is so cool. You're the reason for all this resonation. You guys check out Will's work. Go to wellnessforce.com trauma informed. And we're talking about Will and the Wellness Force group. So it's wellnessforce.com group. So until will and I see you again, we're wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon.

It.