Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
How We Store Trauma and Emotions in the Body w/Brent Stevenson
175 Plays5 months ago
Do you need help with your health? Would you like to increase your longevity while addressing existing health issues?
Request your FREE Metabolic Function Assessment session with me here: https://www.livelongerformula.com/
During this 45-minute consultation we’ll take a deep dive into critical areas of your metabolism and understand what is out of balance.
From gut health and hormone function to adrenal health and blood sugar regulation, even a small imbalance in any of these (or other) areas can lead to poor health in the future and diminished longevity…but the sad fact is that a large majority of people over 40 have multiple imbalances in multiple areas of their metabolism…
The key is to identify and address these swiftly, so that you can thrive for decades to come without worrying that “something’s brewing under the surface.”
Request your Metabolic Function Assessment session here and let's get you thriving for decades to come: https://www.livelongerformula.com/
---
Brent Stevenson. is a physiotherapist based in Vancouver, Canada and the co-owner of Envision Physiotherapy with two large multi-disciplinary clinics in the heart of the city.
He specializes in helping people with resistant and chronic pain problems overcome their challenges by means of mindful education, IMS dry needling, osteopathic manual therapy and movement training.
His published his first book Why Things Hurt: Life Lessons from an Injury Prone Physical Therapist, after he suffered a serious eye injury and was forced to re-evaluate his "invincible" approach to life.
Today we talk about his latest book, Why We Hurt.
Connect with Brent:
Why We Hurt: https://www.whythingshurt.com/books/why-we-hurt
Why Things Hurt: https://www.whythingshurt.com/books/why-things-hurt
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whythingshurt/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Book Promotion
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey folks, Christian Jornov here connecting minds podcast. Thanks for tuning back in. Quick reminder, my latest book, how to actually live longer volume one is out. If you want to live longer, get the book, you will not be disappointed. I promise you. Now today's
Guest Introduction: Brent Stevenson
00:00:15
Speaker
guest, we're actually, I had this whole segue that I was thinking of earlier and I completely bollocks it up.
00:00:23
Speaker
There's no point in living a long life if you're gonna be creaking and you know being in a lot of pain and suffering and all that stuff, right? Which is very fitting because today's guest is Brent Stevenson who specializes in this and a number of other things. So Brent
Philosophy of Treatment
00:00:42
Speaker
is a physiotherapist in Vancouver, Canada.
00:00:45
Speaker
And he has a nontraditional approach to helping his clients. So he starts by teaching them about how their bodies work and approaches the process of feeling better with the mantra of education before intervention, which is very interesting because my chiropractor also has this sort of mantra that he was really drilling into me constantly, which is amazing.
00:01:07
Speaker
his Brent's first book, Why Things Hurt, life lessons from an injury-prone physical therapist was his cathartic means of helping people make sense of their situations while he continued to process his own challenges.
Understanding Aging and the Body
00:01:22
Speaker
And today we're going to talk about his latest book, Why We Hurt. So Brent, welcome to the show, my friend. Yeah, thank you for having me. As I said, I saw that your book is sort of how to live longer
00:01:37
Speaker
I was commenting with a friend yesterday about sort of, I spend a fair amount of time working with 90 year olds and I'm like, well, talk with them how much longer they want to live or how much I find my in my
00:01:50
Speaker
In my first book, the first section is called Getting Old Sucks, because it's probably the most common thing I hear in the office all day, starting at about 30, people start complaining of their aches and pains in different contexts and changes and alters with every decade. But yeah, my role is trying to help people understand how to feel and live better in their bodies.
Christian's Experience with Inversion Table
00:02:18
Speaker
Yeah, you know, this is actually such a fitting conversation because over the last, I suppose, few weeks, I was just like, I've been grappling with this, okay, I've got the metabolic side of things, the diet supplementation, stress reduction side of things down pat, but I'm like, I've been suffering with this back pain for now, for a couple of years. I had an injury putting my baby in the car a couple of years ago and I'm still,
00:02:44
Speaker
Not 100%. And on top of that, when I was writing my book, I basically spent a thousand hours over five, close to about five months, close to a thousand hours in the chair and did very, very little mobility work to ameliorate that stupidity.
00:03:02
Speaker
And I was thinking to myself, how in the hell, I mean, I'm going to get to 90, but how much quality of life am I going to get unless I get on top of this right now? So what I did was I went to the garage and luckily I had a package coming from Ireland and there was these two missing pieces from my inversion table that I finally found.
00:03:25
Speaker
And I put the inversion table together about four days ago. I used it for like 20 minutes that first day. And then the next morning, I woke up with zero back pain, feeling amazing. My wife was nursing a pretty nasty injury from a few months ago. She used the table, the inversion table for a couple of days. And the whole air in the house is
00:03:48
Speaker
like day and night, all of a sudden, we're so much more happy, cheerful, positive about the future. Like living in pain is horrible. And I wish it on nobody. So what's to start with, what's, why would just using the inversion table have such a dramatic effect on my level of pain, would you say?
How Inversion Tables Work
00:04:14
Speaker
Well, I mean, first off, you took a moment to actually address your issue and kind of did something for yourself. The inversion table does create a bit of sort of a natural sort of traction in the body where a lot of back pain is generally related to tension that you're holding in your body. It's not specifically just that something's structurally wrong in some of the vertebrae in your back.
00:04:42
Speaker
A lot of it is more held into your myofascial system and partly your visceral system that we can get into. With inversion tables, I would say it is just a gentle, natural traction. You have the ability to lie there and sort of try to relax into it and let some things go.
00:05:08
Speaker
with no other thing to do, but sort of pay attention to your body and start try to find areas of where you might be holding onto something and try to help just literally let it go. Most back pain issues are inherently related to some of the tension you're holding in the deep muscles in your butt. All the fascia, the underneath your gluteus maximus, there's all these deep rotator muscles and they are very prone to holding onto a lot of tension.
00:05:34
Speaker
They're like the rotator cuff of your hip. They affect how it sits in the socket and they affect your sciatic nerve and just the general alignment of your pelvis. And if you find things that help you facilitate letting some of that tension go, generally your back will start to feel better.
Brent's Journey to Physiotherapy
00:05:52
Speaker
Love it. Love it. So would that be like the piriformis muscle would be involved in that?
00:05:58
Speaker
That's one of them. A lot gets blamed on the piriformis because that's when your sciatic nerve comes through. So if you are getting any tension or referral of pain or soreness down into your hamstring, calf, or heel, that can be a bit of an irritation of your piriformis. But there's your gluteus medius and gluteum and TFL. There's a whole bunch of muscles in there where they all will be prone to
00:06:23
Speaker
getting tense based partly on postural things like if you're sitting at your desk for a thousand hours and not getting up and moving around.
00:06:31
Speaker
That's part of it. It's also, our bodies tend to hold our day-to-day stresses in and around our muscular system and some of our deeper seated tensions in and around our organs. The day-to-day tensions, the number one and two places from a stress perspective where we hold them is usually your upper trap muscles that kind of connect your shoulder to your neck.
00:06:53
Speaker
and those deep muscles in your butt. Oh, my cat's in here. I didn't know she was in here. So, yeah, as much as sitting around at a computer and not moving them around can tighten them up, also just being generally stressed or anxious about things can create just as bad, if not more, tension into those muscles.
00:07:18
Speaker
Amazing. Amazing. All right. So we're gonna, I always tend to put the card before the horse because I'm super, you know, it's super interesting for me, but let's start. Let's go back a few steps. How did you get started with physiotherapy and the work you do?
00:07:38
Speaker
I've always played a lot of sports from a young age, and I'm a tall, kind of loose-jointed skinny guy that played a lot of contact sports and was quite good at injuring myself. This is where the title of my first book came from, The Life Lessons from an Injury-prone Physical Therapist. So from a young age, spent a fair amount of time myself going through physio. And just
Incorporating Techniques in Physiotherapy
00:08:02
Speaker
as an athlete, you develop a pretty good relationship with your body, for better and for worse.
00:08:09
Speaker
train, learn how to move well, but also the process of getting injured at a younger age gives you an opportunity to stop and learn about how your body actually works. So I started that at a young age, then did a human kinetics degree at the University of British Columbia, where I learned a lot about anatomy and physiology and injury and healing, and then went right on to do a master's in physiotherapy, where
00:08:37
Speaker
Yeah, learned sort of another layer of sort of both the musculoskeletal system, but also learned about about all different aspects of the body and different sort of chronic conditions that can come and helping people in need. And then so I went became a physiotherapist in my early 20s, fairly early. So I've been doing it for 21 years now. And
00:09:03
Speaker
and took all sorts of postgraduate education. Every few years, I started to try to look at the body from a different perspective and kind of see what stuck and what fell away. Initially, I learned a lot of sort of articular manual therapy more towards the chiropractic side of things. And then back in 2008, shifted and learned a technique called IMS dry needling or intramuscular stimulation.
00:09:32
Speaker
from a man named Dr. Chen Gunn, who's actually here in Vancouver, which originates from acupuncture, but is a form of dry needling that is different than traditional acupuncture. That was a real game changer in terms of understanding how our nervous system works and being able to really sort of treat and change people's sort of chronic persistent pains. And I continue to use that to this day, and then after
00:10:01
Speaker
A number of years there I was working with a massage therapist that had a lot of osteopathic training, which opened my eyes to the role of sort of the tension and fascial tension people hold in and around their organs. And so I went down a rabbit hole through the Burrell Institute of learning what he calls visceral manipulation. This comes from the French osteopath Jean-Pierre Burrell.
00:10:28
Speaker
which was really anatomy-based and learning about where all the organs are in your body, what they attach to, how they're supposed to move around, and did like a fresh cadaver dissection course of being able to feel and touch all the muscles or all the organs in the body, and then really learning how the emotional side of what sort of how people tend to hold
00:10:55
Speaker
grief and anxiety and stress in and around their organs and how to physically feel that and help people feel that to help them let it go. So the combination of the more traditional model of it's closer to the medical model of dealing with pain thing I got in my physio degree and then got an aspect of acupuncture from the IMS and then more from the osteopathy side and sort of
00:11:21
Speaker
And did a lot of work with golfers actually and learned a lot, did a lot of movement training, teach people how to twist the move. And I've just integrated all three of them. And in the last number of years, I actually had a really bad eye injury where I, um, ended up having to have seven eye surgeries in the span of the year, lost a lot of the vision in my right eye and a lot of physical and mental trauma with that, which sent me down a path of learning a lot more about the psychology of
Impact of Sports Injuries on Neuroplasticity
00:11:50
Speaker
of trauma and brain and behavior. And I'm working with people in their moments when they need help and more chronic persistent pain things. So understanding the psychological role has become a real baked in part of what I do. Sorry, that was a long answer. When did you have, no it was perfect. Did you have the eye injury? I believe it was in 2014. Right.
00:12:20
Speaker
And when my kids were three, four and six, all of a sudden I got sort of knocked out, had to move out, live with my mother and sort of recover and had four surgeries in two months and then another three over the rest of the year. But what happened? Was it like a sports injury? It was. I was playing, being in Canada, I was playing hockey, being
00:12:47
Speaker
playing ball hockey in the gym and just got a hard orange ball right in my right eye. And it put a hole through my macula. I got orbital floor fracture, my retina detached, and I just had to go through this series of multiple procedures and multiple surgeries trying to save the vision in my eye. And then once they got, they tried to sort of structurally fix it as much as they could, I ended up with a,
00:13:18
Speaker
some of my vision back, but then I had very, very bad double vision and it became a real experience in understanding neuroplasticity of how my brain over time, even though my vision in my right eye,
00:13:34
Speaker
didn't get any better. My visual experience improved and changed a lot by me continuing to do things and challenge it and keep trying to integrate back into life. And my brain slowly learned to use the poor information it was getting from my right eye in conjunction with my
Christian's Vision Challenges
00:13:52
Speaker
left eye. So to a point where I became a lot more functional with it.
00:13:57
Speaker
Wow, see I grew up, I've lived all of my life basically with very limited vision from my right eye because I have astigmatism and I know you're not supposed to label yourself and self-identify but also lazy eye as it were from an early age and it seems to run in my family, my mother has it, my grandmother had it and so on and so forth.
00:14:22
Speaker
So you definitely I think.
00:14:27
Speaker
are able to the body and the brain and the nervous system are very good at adapting to not having something or full function in an organ or whatever else. But when it happens in advance, more advanced stage, it can be fairly sort of traumatic, which kind of kind of brings us to, I suppose, something that is extremely interesting. Now, you've really piqued my interest about how we are holding this.
00:14:57
Speaker
tension and trauma in the body, in the viscera. So just before we, as we segue into that, I just wanna, for the listeners,
00:15:07
Speaker
Gabor Mate, which I'm sure many of you know, he endorses Brent's book and part of what he stated is, this is kind of the second, I won't read the whole thing because it's a bit long, but Gabor Mate states, in plain English, why we heard the book, explains how our minds, memories, brains, muscles, ligaments, viscera,
00:15:32
Speaker
and connective tissue interact in subtle ways to foster suffering, origins and healing of which transcend the narrowly mechanical views of conventional medicine. Stevenson's understanding of these dynamics is keenly insightful. His main case histories are fascinating and his explanations are clear and illuminating.
00:15:53
Speaker
Pretty amazing. I have I think like four or five of Gabor Mate's books. So You know, he's a legend in in this space. So Pretty amazing to get such an incredible endorsement from such an incredible person. So With that, can you sort of give us the I suppose we need to start it at a 30,000 foot view how does
00:16:18
Speaker
How do we store trauma and tension in the viscera?
Emotional Manifestation in the Body
00:16:26
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I would say, I'll start with your heart and lungs. The
00:16:37
Speaker
The reason we call emotions feelings is because we feel them. If you're sad, you might say you have a heavy heart, or if you're anxious, you're going to feel your stomach churning into knots. There's a reason for that. Your body will experience different emotions in and around the tissues of your body. Your heart and lungs are your big emotional center.
00:17:05
Speaker
So I've been, as I say, literally poking and prodding people for 20 years as I get to know them. I get to visit with them for half an hour every week.
00:17:18
Speaker
And while I'm actually feeling their muscle tissues, I'm usually poking some needles into their muscles and can use my hands to feel their bodies. And I'd say I'm sort of standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of this. This is not necessarily me making this up. There's some very established osteopaths like Jean-Pierre Burrell, who he writes a good book called Understanding the Messages of Your Body.
00:17:46
Speaker
It's one of his multiple books. When I first went down the path of learning some of the osteopathic piece, I saw that the higher level class was the emotional connection piece where the first ones were all about just understanding the anatomy of it and learning how to feel it.
00:18:11
Speaker
Take your heart for example. Your heart's a big sort of multi-chambered muscle and it sits in a bag called your pericardium that sits in the inside of your chest under your sternum.
00:18:21
Speaker
And it's held to the inside of your sternum by your pericardial ligaments and into the front of your spine and up above your diaphragm. So, you know, the saying sort of tugging at your heartstrings. Well, those are actual things like here that, and your body will, your tissues are not just this inert structure. They do, your nervous system has, you feel and experience the world through your whole body, not just your brain.
00:18:50
Speaker
If you're really stressed or anxious, you will start to develop a tension or a pull a lot of times in around your heart and lungs. Some of that's your muscular system and some of that's a pull from the inside of you. And if you learn certain levels of manual therapy, you can start to feel how something's either tugging from the outside of you or pulling from the inside of you.
00:19:16
Speaker
And it's usually emotional at its root. In terms of physiologically how it's doing that, that's hard to explain, but from a palpation and being able to help somebody let something go and then seeing how better they feel afterwards and how much
00:19:37
Speaker
sort of objectively joints and things move afterwards. It's reasonably obvious, but there's, as I say, your heart's in the center of you. It's wrapped by your bronchial tubes going either side of it, and then your lungs are wrapped around it. And if you are, say again, you're very nervous or stressed or anxious or something's going on, it will really end up affecting your breathing pattern.
00:20:07
Speaker
tell people regularly like just because you can breathe doesn't mean you do it very well or that you're very aware of it. And you'll usually start breathing fairly shallowly and with a lot of tension and the tissues around it start to hold. The plural membrane between your lungs and your ribs will start to kind of guard and get restricted. And it becomes this positive feedback cycle of
00:20:34
Speaker
You hold tension into around your lungs. The intercostal muscles in between your ribs and some of your pec muscles will tense and push your ribs into your sternum. It gets very restricted and it can get claustrophobic and build all the way up into like a panic attack kind of feeling. And you get those subtle levels of immobility. When something in there doesn't move well, it pulls on your neck
00:21:00
Speaker
holes on your shoulder, you can start irritating some of the nerves that pass through there that are the electrical wiring to your arms and set off sort of even things like tennis elbow and carpal tunnel syndrome. So there's a real means of people converting emotional stress into physical tension that can then manifest as actually sort of inflamed tissues in your body.
00:21:29
Speaker
So I love that. Converting emotional stress into physical tension. That's really well said, man. It also, in terms of just from my work, this is why I sometimes tell people that I like to employ
00:21:48
Speaker
aggressive stress reduction when it comes to my longevity strategy because I now have strategies on literally lowering the stress hormones. And that allows me, even if I've had a very stressful day, to get to this sort of closer to baseline level when you're really kind of relaxed and everything is dandy.
00:22:11
Speaker
So then at least the physical aspect is tweaked and then from because the body the mind are one really it's one thing it's one continuum that allows them the mind
00:22:25
Speaker
and sort of the other things to be taken care of. It's a lot harder to be tensed and stressed in terms of your mental sort of aspect if your body is relaxed and everything is dandy, right? So this is kind of the way I approach it.
00:22:45
Speaker
But okay, so let me just think where to go from here. So converting emotional stress into physical tension. I really need to understand this at a deeper level. What about the role of the fashion, all this? How does this
Understanding Fascia and Pain
00:23:02
Speaker
intertwine with what we've been talking about?
00:23:07
Speaker
Fashion is really a supportive web structure for everything in your body. There's fascial connective tissue around your muscles and around all of your organs. And so it will, again, it's not that like the fascia gets out of place, it just, your body is happier and more content and more comfortable when everything can move freely. And you'll start getting, you'll start getting what I call emotional holding patterns where based on partly
00:23:37
Speaker
They're partly biomechanical and ergonomic how you're holding yourself up, but a lot of times people will hold tension into the loops of their small intestine and into around their colon, and that all attaches to the front of your spine.
00:23:56
Speaker
a lot of, there's a lot of sort of digestive issues and emotional issues people will hold in their guts. And that's responsible for a lot of low back pain, that particularly people that didn't, like, didn't lift something heavy or do something weird, that the tension and pull from all of your digestive tract sitting in your abdomen can throw your pelvis off of alignment, it can be part of what can start
00:24:23
Speaker
Irritating what you call your lumbosacral plexus is all the nerves where your sciatic nerve starts and comes through your pelvis and then through your piriformis and down. Tension in your abdomen can and will affect and generate some of the grippy tension you'll get into your glutes and the muscles in your back.
00:24:45
Speaker
You'll get, there's just an interior abdomen, there's a lot of anatomy stuffed in there. There's your colon, your large intestine, your small intestine, your liver, your stomach, your spleen. There's a lot of, it's a system under pressure and when you're guarding and holding and not breathing well in your upper body, that creates further tension and pressure down on your lower body.
00:25:11
Speaker
and can start to just irritate tissues and throw you off of alignment. I don't remember what your exact question was. It was how the fascia pulled into it.
00:25:20
Speaker
Yeah, I'm guessing if we're tied up here in the lungs or in the upper chest, then that fascia being under tension will exert an effect on the organs in the abdomen. And that will start moving in, let's say, one direction. They could start pulling on the spine. They could maybe tilt the pelvis. Is this kind of the role it plays in the pain side of things?
00:25:51
Speaker
You can be part of it. I mean, there's, you have, people will have like abdominal surgeries and things too. And so you can have scar tissue pulling things off in a,
00:26:02
Speaker
in a different direction. For women, their uterus and their ovaries are again a big emotional center of where they can and will hold tension. And your ovaries sort of sit close to either end of your colon. So like you're around your cecum on the right side of your lower pelvis and around your sigmoid colon on to the left. And a lot of women will start getting either constipation or diarrhea around the time of their period based on
00:26:30
Speaker
sort of what's happening in their cycle, that your ovaries can get adhered to your bowel and get a bit of scar tissue or tension. And they can also come with a lot of back pain. So everything in your abdomen usually works better if it can all slide well on its neighbor to move around.
00:26:51
Speaker
And whether someone's had an abdominal surgery or may have just started to develop something like endometriosis, or which usually comes from people that have been under chronic and persistent stress for a long periods of time. And just things in there start to not move while not get good blood flow. And when you don't have good blood flow in an area, again, that usually is a slippery slope to it starting to get uncomfortable. And that is, again, partly relates to
00:27:22
Speaker
our need to get up and move around regularly and manage our stresses. So it's not purely, like not all pain is a sort of purely an emotional relation. It's the, we're not built to sit at desks all day. We're not built to stand at counters all day.
00:27:40
Speaker
We need to do little micro breaks and move around and do things for our physical body, which is also good for our mental state. And we need to remember to breathe in different ways and move around. And all of that can start to allow both our muscles and our viscera to sort of be in a more free, happy state.
Approach to Pain Management
00:28:04
Speaker
So what's kind of your approach? I suppose in the book you give stories and tips, what would be your approach with someone coming to you? Where do you even start in terms of evaluating the person and then giving them some advice or even maybe some body work to help them start releasing some of this tension that's contributing to these states?
00:28:30
Speaker
A big part of it is the education piece and just having a frank conversation with them first and giving them an opportunity to tell their story to me and ask them starting with open-ended questions and just enabling them to try to pull bits of information out of them and start to see. You can usually tell even just in that I learned a lot watching how a person walks from the waiting room chair in my office into my office to seeing how they're moving and then seeing how they tell their story and
00:29:00
Speaker
sort of how high strung they may be or how they may be really, really pain focused or really sort of diminishing things and sort of undervaluing some aspects of their story.
00:29:17
Speaker
And then even just putting my hands on somebody as I start a physical evaluation and starting to try to move their arms around and asking them to breathe, you can start to see just generally how tense someone is.
00:29:31
Speaker
Um, if they are, like you try to grab someone's arm and move them around and you'll see some people have the ability to just totally relax into it and give you their arm, let them move it around. And some people will subconsciously try to predict every little movement you're going to do and try to do it for you. And just, um, and you can just, they're, you can just see they're quite kind of high, strong or anxious or type A or whatever you want to call it, that they're just very guarded in their bodies.
00:29:57
Speaker
don't necessarily need to see exactly how far they move or it's just you had a sense of how many amps this person has running through the nervous system because that's very variable. So I start with open-ended questions pretty much just like what can I do for you and give a person an opportunity to tell their story and I try to
00:30:23
Speaker
pull that out of them over multiple times, not necessarily try to get it all done in the first session, but we'll transition them from them there telling me why they feel like they're there today. And then we'll objectively look at their posture and movement and move their joints around and try to figure out a bit more of the objective piece of it.
00:30:46
Speaker
And then I've got posters all over my walls in my office that's one's more the musculoskeletal system, one's the nervous system, one's the visceral system, and one looks at the cranial sacral system and the dura and the wrapping. And some people don't really don't want to know a lot of detail and some people want to know an excessive amount of detail.
00:31:09
Speaker
I find either side of those, they need to know something, they have to find a way to make it meaningful for them. So once I get a sense of what's making this person tick, I start by helping them understand a bit of the anatomy behind it to create a bit of objectivity around it and just make them
00:31:31
Speaker
have a good sense of what I'm thinking and help them understand how their body actually works a bit better. That really helps to dissipate a layer of fear that usually comes in with pain. Particularly people who've had pain for a long time, they're usually inherently worried or scared or anxious about something. Some of that may have come
00:31:52
Speaker
From there, some of that might be just genetically baked into them. Some of that's from their childhood. Some of that might be from their negative experiences with their doctors or the medical system to start with or having had all sorts of treatment first. But then I'll explain to them, we're going to go through a process of release, re-educate, rebuild. We're going to find the tight things, the areas where you find tension and just start by loosening some of them and just see how you feel. We'll start with that.
00:32:22
Speaker
and then start to teach you how to move more efficiently. So like how to, that relates to posture and basic movement patterns of what is it that you're doing that's making it worse, that you don't realize? How are you dealing with gravity? Like how are you sitting at your desk all day? How are you standing? How are you lifting and moving things?
00:32:45
Speaker
And just start. And so once I've loosened some key things, I'll start to shift people to pointing out key things about their posture and then give them a few little bits of homework on movement to help them really feel where their hips are, pay attention to how they're breathing a little bit. And then once you get them understanding some of that, then I might give them some things that can help facilitate getting stronger at what they want to do.
00:33:14
Speaker
With that ends up being usually I will start by doing IMS or intramuscular stimulation, which is like an anatomy specific form of acupuncture. It's a little bit more direct and a lot more targeting your muscular and your nervous system.
00:33:31
Speaker
It can have a very profound immediate release of tension for people. You can objectively see how poorly a hip's moving and feel it's pinching and jamming and needle a bunch of muscles around it and immediately feel how much it changes. People get a bit of a love-hate relationship with it, but it really can seem like magic if you loosen the right things in someone. So I usually start with that as my primary form of treatment. And then I slowly start integrating
00:34:02
Speaker
a layer of the visceral piece and helping people understand how they're holding tensions in different internal parts of their body. So I am starting by teaching them, treating them a bit, realizing that what they perceived as normal might not be normal. And if I can create a loose intention, then they realize, oh, that's way better.
00:34:28
Speaker
Then they're motivated to learn how to keep it that way because we're all regenerating sources of tension. I can loosen you all up and send you out in the world and you can come back and deal with a little screaming baby or sort of angry boss and have all sorts of stuff and come back as a ball of tension again. So just identifying some of your biomechanical and emotional triggers. You can learn how to keep yourself in a happier, more content state.
00:34:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's insane how fast we get into those grooves we've built.
Effects of Chronic Pain
00:35:01
Speaker
It's also quite interesting how when your body's working better,
00:35:09
Speaker
It's amazing how fatiguing it is to be moving sub-optimally or being in pain. I noticed after this last week or so of using the inversion table in the evening time by 9, 10, 11 o'clock,
00:35:31
Speaker
I am not as tired as before. And I really think that a lot of that has to do with just feeling better, like having less of the sort of undercurrent of pain. What's your thoughts on that? Oh, absolutely. Pain is exhausting. It really, it lowers your capacity to deal with the world around you. It's sort of, you know, you have a, like,
00:35:56
Speaker
you have a sort of a bucket of energy and it can be filled right up to the brim if you're constantly in a level of pain that's just taking up a lot of your conscious awareness and so which just becomes the self-propagating cycle of tension, anxiety, fear, pain and
00:36:17
Speaker
once pain gets to a certain level, your nervous system gets hypersensitive to it. So it can start misinterpreting that non-noxious stimulus as pain. So like everything can just kind of start to hurt where there's
00:36:33
Speaker
nothing actually objectively wrong with the tissues in there. So you can pass all of the doctor's tests, like they'll start sending you for CT scans and MRIs and the ability to look inside you is not necessarily helpful. A lot of times it's actually distracting or it can start to blame the problem on a structure as opposed to sort of where
00:36:58
Speaker
where you're taking a picture where you need a movie, like it doesn't give you the context of why things hurt. And so, yeah, that's where again, you to, that's why I said you go release, re educate, rebuild when people are in a certain level of pain, if you even get them to be able to have the capacity to listen to you and really learn to do things well for themselves. A lot of times you do have to
00:37:24
Speaker
try to alleviate their pain or create some layer of altered state where they feel different or better to find to create a bit of hope and to create a meaningful goal of where they can be empowered to learn what they have to do differently to keep it that way. If you keep throwing things at them where you just take like the pain pills and medication stuff it can can make you not feel it for a period of time but there's no
00:37:54
Speaker
it's too indirect physiologically to try to really help and doesn't get at it well and it can feed into the problem. When I was writing my book I was
00:38:10
Speaker
I was taking Willow Bark Extract and that has analgesic properties. And of course what happens when you don't feel the pain, you don't feel the signal where you just continue doing stupid things like me being at the computer 10, 12 hours a day. Like I would have periods of time where I'd be three hours at the computer without moving.
00:38:34
Speaker
And the only reason you'd move is to go to the bathroom. But that's kind of the way I am. And I have this intensity about me. When there's a project that has to be done, it will get done. And I know I kind of pay the price later, but then you understand the trade-offs here, you know?
00:38:56
Speaker
because you've been for two decades in the trenches. What is your perspective on what is the biggest or what are the biggest impediments to people resolving their issues? I
Overcoming Health Obstacles
00:39:15
Speaker
would say themselves and their own perception of their own layer of busyness and not making time to
00:39:25
Speaker
realize that they may need to in fact do something different and really an innocent ignorance about how their body actually works. The first three passages in my book are first ones called
00:39:47
Speaker
how your body actually works explained like you're five. And then there's one that says how your body actually works explained like you're 35 and explained like you're 65. So just putting it into context of helping you zoom out a little bit and see, understand your story and how you got to the place that you are right now. Where as yours go by, everybody's getting more and more and more sort of
00:40:16
Speaker
worried or stressed about things, and just a layer of busyness and another layer of existential threat and worrying about things. So that paired with people not really understanding the messages that their body is trying to tell them.
00:40:39
Speaker
Pain is a good thing. It is a signal that your body is trying to talk to you. So you have to learn what it's trying to say. And sometimes this might be saying, get up and go for a walk. Get up, march around, do a squat, take a breath, reach up, then sit back down. That took you 30 seconds. So our bodies are just a big collection of sensory feedback loops that help us experience the world.
00:41:08
Speaker
we by nature have to habituate to a lot of them and not pay attention to them because otherwise you just wouldn't be able to think or do anything. And so a lot of it kind of runs under your conscious perception. And then eventually something might start to kind of rear up or like, Oh, my foot's starting to hurt. Like I didn't, I didn't do anything. Why is my foot starting to hurt? Um, good chance the muscles in your butt are getting really tight and annoying your sciatic nerve and your back's a little bit grumpy and
00:41:37
Speaker
that that nerves the electrical wiring to your foot. So maybe you should get up and move around. And both sort of, and again, part of its ergonomic and sort of just biomechanics and part of its
00:41:54
Speaker
emotional where we are become these sort of systems under pressure and it can be the sort of slow boiling water and you're kind of stuck in it. People have a hard time recognizing that and usually need some type of objective person to help them see it.
00:42:12
Speaker
As a physiotherapist or physical therapist, people come to me when something kind of hurts and they're expecting it to be, okay, well, there's something wrong with this muscle or this joint. And sometimes that's the case, but a lot of times with the more chronic or resistant or persistent things, you start to actually teach them, they're like a few layers back of why things hurt, like understand the context around it.
00:42:44
Speaker
I start becoming part their physiotherapist, part their counsellor a little bit.
00:42:51
Speaker
And some people, I'm totally the best person for them to see for that and some people I have to start to try to convince them to start going to a counselor as well and start to, once they see the pattern of like, I can make them feel way better and it keeps coming back in the same pattern, I'm like, okay, you have to understand your triggers a little bit better. That's
Professional Help in Health Issues
00:43:11
Speaker
really true, I think.
00:43:18
Speaker
Just an example, I was talking to a new client a couple of days ago, and I just told her, look, just tell me what you eat. And she started listing all these grains and vegetables and whatever. And I just let her keep going on and on. And she kept listing vegetables.
00:43:38
Speaker
At one point I just had to stop and say, okay, let me just cut to the chase here. I think a lot of your gut stuff will improve if you remove the vegetables and this other stuff for a while.
00:43:56
Speaker
She was almost like a little bit embarrassed, but she said, it's going to really not go down too well with my partner because he's been telling me that for a long time that all these vegetables are causing my problems. And it seems like we have this sort of resistance when it's the information is perhaps free or someone close to us gives it to us. So we really, I think the benefit to going to a professional like yourself is we need
00:44:26
Speaker
someone to look at us objectively and sometimes all they're doing is just reminding us what we're supposed to do. They're not necessarily giving us all this esoteric hidden knowledge. A lot of us instinctively know, like for example, if you've got back pain and you're getting up every two hours from your chair,
00:44:50
Speaker
You sometimes have to pay an expert to tell you that. Like, yeah, you have to get up more often. And when you invest in yourself, you seem to follow these instructions. You pay more attention to the instructions that your therapist or your counselor or your coach is giving you. So I think a lot of our problems are self-created.
00:45:12
Speaker
And we know to a great extent how to reverse them or get out of them, but we just don't do that for whatever, I don't know, whatever the human nature is such that we don't do that. What's your kind of take on that? Oh, I totally agree. We're all creatures of habit and change is hard. It's harder to learn to do something differently than to learn to do something new.
00:45:40
Speaker
And that's regular, like I just had a client yesterday who, she's an executive, she manages a bunch of people and she's getting sort of a persistent back pain, getting tension in her upper back. And she went, she's at home, she doesn't sleep very well at all and just went away with some friends to a cabin for the weekend by a lake.
00:46:07
Speaker
And she was like, I slept the best. I woke up with all this energy and came back to work the next day and was back to didn't sleep very well at all sort of that night. And she's been very successful because she works very hard and has gotten to a position professionally because she works really hard.
00:46:29
Speaker
And exercise-wise, she likes to do intense kind of HIIT workouts and kind of do strength and conditioning kind of things. And I kind of said to her, I was like, well, your body's already holding on to a lot of tension, which is compressive on you. And if you're taking your extra time for fitness, which is good for you, but you're doing a lot of resistance training, which is also very compressive for you,
00:46:57
Speaker
You might actually, your back might actually get more uncomfortable because by trying to make it stronger when you're already, your body's already just kind of holding on to a lot of stuff. So you'd probably be better off to try for a while, like go swimming or do a bit of sort of just some light Pilates or some one-on-one kind of stuff and a bit of yoga for a while and then start to mix them back in.
Exercise Recommendations for Stress
00:47:20
Speaker
I guess she kind of smirked and was kind of out of sad face at the same time. I guess she got almost the exact same advice from her naturopath. And she's like, you're the second objective person I paid that just told me this. She's like, I'm hearing you.
00:47:41
Speaker
I tell people, if you want to make change, you do have to pick something you enjoy doing. If you hate going to the gym, don't pick going to the gym as your means of making your back feel better. It's not everything solved by making it stronger. People go for physio and end up getting a strengthening or a stretching exercise all the time.
00:48:07
Speaker
People that really, really strong people also get back pains. All of a sudden something got weak and that's why they're sore. Some people need to learn to do less or need to learn to just do something different or create a variety. But yeah, human nature, we people get in their own way. And particularly the people that are really, really hard workers, they've kind of gotten where they are from hard work.
00:48:35
Speaker
they have a really hard time doing less. But you can really get a addition by subtraction. Sometimes the solution is like stop doing something, not start doing something new. Absolutely. How many, because I work mostly with women, how many women I've told six days a week in the gym, let's try to have that. Go for a walk the other times or something like that. And invariably,
00:49:05
Speaker
they are going to feel better just invariably. It's not necessarily like a lot of our problems are not a deficiency of things we're doing. It's perhaps that we're doing too many things it seems, right? It's kind of, damn, I wanted to go another direction, but they're completely freaking forgot what the heck I was going to say there.
00:49:33
Speaker
about the back pain and strong people. Back in 2020, when I started the podcast, I had a lady, she's an MD, she's a trauma expert. During the interview,
00:49:50
Speaker
She asked me i think she was talking about somatic experiencing i think was the technique or whatever the modality is said you have a pain anywhere i'm like i had my back pain is not created maybe a five and she said like push like she instructed me to kind of push with my two hands away from my body.
00:50:08
Speaker
and then to reevaluate the pain and it definitely seems to improve so it definitely seems like back pain can be a lot more than just I think for many people just a weak core but it can also be from what I understand slightly more esoterically could be
00:50:28
Speaker
Money issues it could be like if you feel like you're not getting enough support if you feel like a lot of things if you feel very Overwhelmed with the things you want to do or you know achieve in the world I think there's there's some more esoteric sources of pain you know how they also say if like if you have an injury or pain on a
00:50:47
Speaker
the left side could be more of a feminine nature could be more like your relationship with your mother and then on the right side it could be more like of a paternal nature so i think it does get deep but for me personally at least last year around september when i started writing the second book
Benefits of Pilates for Back Pain
00:51:07
Speaker
About a week or two after that, I started going to Pilates Reformer once a week. And man, I tell you, Brent, in like two weeks, two sessions, immediately my tension and back pain ameliorated really well. And this lady kept me together.
00:51:25
Speaker
throughout this book and I'm still going to her now once a week and this thing was an absolute absolute game changer in terms of how I feel in terms of pain reduction what's your I know you told me before we started that you have pilates in your clinics what's your what's your experience been in terms of using pilates for rehabilitation I found it really really quite important particularly in trying to
00:51:56
Speaker
help. Well, both people, some people just have a very, very poor relationship with their body from a movement perspective, they just they're kind of call like a motor moron, like they just don't kind of get how to move things in certain ways or and having particularly like one on one clinical plot is where they have an hour, we have a bunch of equipment and machine and they have a person with them that can
00:52:22
Speaker
give them, put them in a bunch of different planes, lying down, sitting down, sort of standing, have different resistances to push and pull with no real goal of getting a hard fitness workout out of it. It's like a opportunity to connect to your body, understand how certain things move and work and put some breathing things in there. Both people that have very poor movement patterns to start with or do very well,
00:52:52
Speaker
some people that are the kind of intense ones that just want to do all the crazy workouts and hard thing and having someone there to slow, like, and convincing them to sort of like, okay, we're going to keep you moving, but just in a different context and try to realize that little things, little, if you have all these, if you're very intense and kind of globally brace everything,
00:53:15
Speaker
can give you little kind of minute movements that are really hard, get you kind of sweating, kind of challenge the other systems of your body, not just the big ones that you're good at. Pilates instructors are great at that. Yeah. And people that are very just, just generally very, very anxious. And they there's kind of another section of my book is called your body more than a vehicle to walk your head around. And
00:53:44
Speaker
which is sort of, Pilates helps people connect their head to their body a bit more. You just disappeared. So I've found it very helpful where people can, I spent a lot of time doing movement training with people, but I also hold the capacity to
00:54:07
Speaker
poke needles in people or treat them. And sometimes you do have to try to wean people away from the intervention side of it where you're going to come in and I'm going to physically try to treat you and try to make you feel better. And the Pilates is a good empowering tool to help them kind of like, no, you got to do this without somebody trying to treat you. And or just it could be a means, OK, you've got to go do this for six weeks and then come back and see me and kind of space it out where you
00:54:37
Speaker
it shifts the buck back to the person a bit more, which is generally really quite helpful.
00:54:44
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like, uh, self-responsibility in all things, health, not just diet, of course, like everybody knows that's so important, but also this other stuff, uh, movement and, you know, figuring out your environment at home. One thing I noticed with the Pilates, man. So we have this little playground out here and I'll take my daughter to play. And then I guess three, three, four weeks ago,
00:55:13
Speaker
My wife was out, a bunch of other neighbors' kids were playing soccer, kicking balls around. And the ball came to me. And there was one of the neighbors' dads was there. We were talking with him. And the ball came to me. And I started running circles around these kids. And even I was impressed how sort of nimble and how good my footwork was with the pilates.
00:55:42
Speaker
rather after all this pilates I've done and then I was like thinking man I cannot see why my pilates teacher is telling me like a lot of soccer players a lot of athletes are doing pilates now to get you know just to improve their their performance and I'm like hell yeah I can see why it's so it's so becoming so popular because this core like be having better sort of stability and control over your core that
00:56:10
Speaker
It's like the way your gut is the hub of the body. If your gut is working well, all the other systems are working well. It's like if your core is working well.
00:56:22
Speaker
your limbs are going to neuromuscularly perform a lot better, right? So it was absolutely, I was like, and what I remember the neighbor or the neighbors that we're talking to, he was like, oh, you must have played at a pretty high level when you were young or something. He said something like that.
00:56:41
Speaker
Not at all, not at all. I was just kicking the ball in the field with my friends like, no, no, I can see you definitely, definitely must've. So anyway, what I wanted to, as we wrap up the conversation, I wanted to ask you, is there any sort of deeper nooks and crannies of your book, any topics or themes that you wanted to kind of cover today? Well, one of the ones in this that we haven't touched on is actually the, um,
00:57:10
Speaker
And something that I'm starting to sort of see more in my practice is the role of altered states and psychedelics in helping people with chronic pain.
Psychedelics in Pain and Emotion Management
00:57:24
Speaker
Vancouver, there is a number of
00:57:27
Speaker
clinics and people that are fairly open to the role of sort of understanding and using like psilocybin, both on a micro dose and the macro dose kind of side of things. And I've the experience of going people doing sort of counseling guided psilocybin journeys. I've helped a number of people where I've worked with them for a while and you start to see how
00:57:55
Speaker
The, it really is an emotionally driven thing that keeps getting them physically uncomfortable. Um, and I've seen a number of people and I've, I've helped them appreciate and feel and see that. And they've worked with a counselor and, and, but they keep kind of hold back and holding tension into their bodies and have a really hard time getting ahead of it. They might've tried antidepressants. They may have tried various different medications and counseling.
00:58:24
Speaker
And then they've gone and done a, sat and done like a real psilocybin guided journey with two counselors. And then they've come back and see me shortly thereafter. And I have sort of helped them sort of integrate the experience of how that's sort of held in their body. And I've got to see them in like the week before and the week after and the
00:58:51
Speaker
weeks and months and even kind of a couple in the couple years afterwards and you can like when I talk about holding tension around your heart like this one you can Tangibly feel the difference of people that have had this sort of cathartic letting go of things and and the experience can be very positive for some people some people it can be very kind of dark and uncomfortable and
00:59:16
Speaker
But those people usually actually end up getting the most out of it in the end. And just seeing people change their general outlook on life and in the span of like a six hour thing that they might have tried to spend previously doing 10 or 15 years of therapy with. That's part of a bit of my connection to Gabor. He's in Vancouver here too and I was treating one of his neighbors
00:59:46
Speaker
and a naturopath that does a lot of work in that space where they've been helping a lot of indigenous community here with past traumas. It's a real growing interest for myself. I've personally found, I do write about my experience with it in the book and I'm starting to, I'm not actually the one sort of
01:00:10
Speaker
there with them while they're doing the journey, but I've seen them on either side and a big part of that experience is the integration piece on the other end and having like a counselor or someone that's a body worker, a physio to help me talk about somatic experiences, helping you really can really understand your body in a different way and have very different relationship with your body on the other side of that. Yeah, a little personal story here again.
01:00:40
Speaker
Back when I was 18, we went to Ireland with my sister for college, and I would smoke hash. And all through the last three years of my teens, I had a very crooked spine because all the cool kids were getting stoned and walking hunched over with their caps or their hoodies on. So you just kind of assume you want
01:01:10
Speaker
don't want to stand out. So you want to fit in. So I would have this really crooked posture. And I was having headaches, chronic headaches for like years. And I went to Ireland and then I would smoke hash or cannabis and I would start feeding my body and I would just kind of
01:01:32
Speaker
naturally would start stretching things and this completely, this hump, I had a proper hump here, you know, completely went away, you know. So I think a lot of these more potent and entheogenic medicines, you know, like psilocybin, LSD, and I know, I think MDMA may also be legal in Canada, right? Or not yet.
01:01:59
Speaker
It's technically not, no, it's technically not legal. There is a lot more studies with it where there might be some access to it. It's available, but it's not technically legal here. Yeah, because that one
01:02:16
Speaker
MDMA being more a, it kind of, at least people's reports of it is there's a direct sort of feeling in the chest, like this sort of euphoria, like this love kind of emanating. So I really see that. I think all of the psilocybin, all of these kind of similar molecules, I think they all in small doses have this
01:02:38
Speaker
ability to create that sort of heart. I know how some of the healers are talking about and the shamas about, they help you become more heart centered as opposed to head centered. And then you feel so this feeling, maybe allowing people to kind of relax their chest and all these, the pericardium.
01:03:03
Speaker
that kind of can relax and then maybe the lungs can relax, they can breathe more easily. So I've had some people here on the podcast talking about psychedelics and the various ways they can be used for, you know, for personal development. So I absolutely love this topic. It's a big, let me talk about sort of people getting kind of grumpy or tired with being in chronic pain. And it really, it really
01:03:33
Speaker
creates tunnel vision for your experience of what being you is and what your state of consciousness is. You only resonate with this one uncomfortable level of how you're holding yourself. And as I said, your body is this big series of sensory feedback loops. And you're only really attuning to some of them. And the different altered states, whether it's cannabis or psilocybin or LSD,
01:04:01
Speaker
It opens your ability to pay attention to some of the other ones, which gives you the opportunity to be a bit more objective of what normal can feel like. And again, when I've talked about people that have been in a lot of pain for a long time really start to lose hope that there's a different way you could be.
01:04:25
Speaker
and how that can come with your different mental approach to life in the world a little bit, which at small levels and big levels and different ones in a done in a purposeful way, it can help people develop a different sort of outlook on life and relationship with their body. And I've
01:04:51
Speaker
I write about both my experience micro dosing and macro dosing psilocybin in the book. And one of the first things I felt when I did it was like when I did the macro dose ones, lying there listening to music, my eyes closed.
01:05:06
Speaker
almost felt like my heart was slowly lifting out of my body. And that if you experience what anxiety feels like, it's more of like you're something sitting on your chest and pushing it. It was kind of the opposite of that. And it does become you and felt like it cleared, like I've
01:05:25
Speaker
chronically had sort of a clogged sinuses and things and it's just body physiologically just let some of that go. You can feel your sinuses and your bronchial tubes in your heart a little bit more. And I was aware enough that the anatomy nerd in me was just fascinated with what your nervous system is capable of. And yeah, it can help people that are stuck in a narrow view of what being them is.
01:05:55
Speaker
And again, it can go off the rails if you don't have some level of guidance through that process. But I think it really holds a lot of, I'm really happy that there's so much more research going into it and the process of it being maybe a bit controlled, but also legalized in places and not just sort of pushed down and held back. I think it can hold a lot more potential than a lot of the
01:06:24
Speaker
current medications that people are taking? One million percent, man. I mean, I'm not too well versed with psilocybin, but at least from LSD, I understand that in smaller doses, it's an approximate serotonin antagonist. And actually a lot of these things like pain, migraine, and mood issues, even depression can actually be driven
01:06:52
Speaker
by serotonin contrary to popular dogma perpetrated by pharmaceutical companies. I'm not sure again about psilocybin. Is it an agonist at the serotonin receptors or is it an antagonist? But if it's an antagonist, then the reason I suppose people are getting pain relief could be because of that
01:07:19
Speaker
But again, I'm not quite sure. But definitely, man, these things can completely sort of... I think going back to how we hold this tension and trauma in the visceral. I know Gabo Ormate's work is more about this trauma and stuff like that. A lot of this trauma...
01:07:39
Speaker
If it occurred before we were verbal or being able to properly verbalize whatever experiences contributed to the trauma, I think even with people studying ayahuasca effects in terms of the psycho-neuro-endocrinological mechanisms that contribute to the healing processes, it seems like
01:08:05
Speaker
These medicines allow us to experience trauma that's stored in an imperceptible way. And then that sort of is experienced like the wave of the ocean is around to run its course and merge back with the ocean. And then there's like this clearance of that tension. And that allows the body to gradually restore function to that area, wherever that may be in the organs or wherever else.
01:08:33
Speaker
And then over time that the reduced stress of not holding that tension contributes to a better state of mind, improved sort of could be blood pressure, it could be better sort of immunological status and so on and so forth. So I mean, I can see why they were made illegal and these high schedules were applied to them for so many decades because they would put a lot of these drugs that are on the market out of business essentially.
01:09:03
Speaker
Yeah, I don't get into the real neurophysiology of it as much as the experience of it. I'm happy that some people dive into the chemistry of it. But I think when it comes down to it, when you ask me what's the biggest problems with people is people getting in their own way. And human nature and people
01:09:33
Speaker
having a harder time changing behaviors and sort of doing things differently as opposed to doing new things. And as you said, if something happens to trauma-wise when you're a little kid or before you can verbalize it,
01:09:49
Speaker
And you have these experiences that are rattling around in your nervous system. And if you don't understand them or have a capacity to kind of make some kind of sense of them and put them on a timeline of your understanding of your own being, it affects your nervous system in ways you don't understand. And it can really translate to pain. I think it can translate to all sorts of things going wrong inside your body.
01:10:18
Speaker
That's where Michael Pollan's book is called How to Change Your Mind. It opens the opportunity for your nervous system to get out of the little grooves of only doing things in a certain way.
01:10:36
Speaker
is the saying sort of what fires together wires together and so you get so used to nervous your nervous synapses kind of doing something a certain way. And if you have a chemical that seems to allow your brain to kind of be a little bit more literally open minded and find some new paths and make sense of some things, it allows you to realize there is another experience of you possible.
01:11:05
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know if you know that case study in one of Stanislav Groff's books. He was talking about there was a guy who was doing well in terms of like he was a businessman or something like that.
01:11:21
Speaker
he would just get kicks out of putting himself in extremely dangerous situations where he would find people to basically asphyxiate him and strangle him and he would get kicks out of that and whatever else.
01:11:43
Speaker
he would do the LSD psychotherapy on the guy. I think this was back like in the sixties or fifties or something like that or the sixties. And in the end, the guy sort of, it turned out that when he was born, the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. And the trauma of that, whatever it did to his psyche, it created this pattern
01:12:12
Speaker
of seeking that kind of where he almost got killed in one of these sort of, he would find these people that would want to do this crazy shit to him, which obviously is pretty crazy. So by experiencing his birth trauma, the trauma sort of dissipated and he could then continue his life without necessarily these life-endangering situations.
01:12:39
Speaker
being created by his own sort of psyche. I think we also think you need to have a big heroic dose of LSD or do something crazy or dangerous. I think that's definitely
Christian's Psychedelic Insights
01:12:54
Speaker
a misnomer. I think even these micro doses, because I know I have tried micro dosing some of the stuff and
01:13:02
Speaker
The effects can be really, really profound even with small doses. Like you're there crying just for 20 minutes and then all of this like tension leaves your body. You don't know why you were crying, but all you know is that you feel lighter, not just that day, but in perpetuity after that. And obviously there's layers and layers that we can unravel in our own psyches. There's no need to kind of go crazy with it and go too deep.
01:13:29
Speaker
But I think the power of these medicines, and then especially when you couple that with an experienced body worker, someone who can educate you, because you mentioned neuroplasticity. So these things increase neuroplasticity. So working with practitioners to help you groove new paths in terms of habits, diet, movement. I mean, this is truly lifestyle design and profound change that can
01:13:57
Speaker
profoundly changed the trajectory of one's life and health for forever? Totally. And as much as I found the microdose experience myself to be helpful and positive, I've gotten way more out of the microdosing side of things. And because it's really the only thing I've done that I've found it's been a really a learning experience for me.
01:14:23
Speaker
I think if because you have a one experience on the day that you might take it and you might feel slightly differently or be a bit more engaged and then there's kind of a couple days afterwards where you generally have found it sort of improved in general outlook on life feeling a bit freer and more comfortable and then it kind of it does fade off and
01:14:45
Speaker
the ability of not just trying to mute it all the time and feeling like it gets you a little bit more in touch with say like the messages of your body of kind of understanding you you will kind of come up and down and it's a little bit more in touch with the your just emotional side and understanding the reaction of your body to the world around you and your so your ability to kind of curate that a little bit right doesn't necessarily
01:15:15
Speaker
seem to have a lot of potential negative side effects to it. And you do have to approach it purposefully. And again, I'm not an expert in this. So if I ever talk about it with people, I'm like, well, go learn about it. Read a book about it. Watch a show about it. Read people's experiences about it. And then if you do want to try it, do
01:15:40
Speaker
Be mindful about it. I talk about the set and setting of kind of the context of it. It's not taking a pill, like you have a headache, here's an ad to all the trouble that make you feel better, which can be helpful sometimes. You need to do that. But if you approach it the right way, you can really feel better and learn about yourself in the process. And it leads to you making better, healthier choices. And generally, I'd say feeling a bit happier.
01:16:10
Speaker
And I think everybody's very different with it. So there are different contexts of you can do that and then still have crazy hard work and job and be surrounded by kids and do have all these stresses in your life. But it might be a process that helps you facilitate doing something for yourself. Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely medicine to be revered and respected and you really have to put you put in work. It's not like
01:16:40
Speaker
Like you said, you're not taking a pill and all my problems go away because even with, I've noticed with micro doses, that bubbling up of the undercurrent that you kind of, especially men, we're pushing it down, stuffing it down, repressing it, whatever. When it comes up, it is work to deal with it and you can obviously
01:17:03
Speaker
choose not to, but then that completely defeats the purpose. So if you decide to do the work, it's work at the end of the day. Even if it's mind stuff, let's say you're working with a coach,
01:17:16
Speaker
If you're doing, it seems easy, let's say, oh, we do some sessions and we're just talking with my coach or whatever. It's, it can be that, but to actually get really good results, let's say it's a performance type outcome you're looking for, you got to do some work in between the sessions. Otherwise you're just having a chat with a buddy that you're paying, you know? Yeah, no, exactly. It's, and, um, yeah, just trying to help facilitate people to figure out what, what they need.
01:17:47
Speaker
And be willing, as you say, particularly more guys, but women aren't off the hook on this one. Two people tend to just push things down in order to deal with what's in front of them. And that's part of the business we've created for ourselves. In order to deal with what's in front of you, you have to kind of ignore the fact that you're not feeling very well. And particularly people that are
01:18:12
Speaker
overtly more laid back. Like their experience of them, they don't cognitively experience stress or anxiety. Usually their body's yelling at them otherwise. And they don't always tune into that. The reason their back's really sore is because they're putting on a happy face up here and keep moving. And they're holding on to all this tension in their butt and their jaw and their chest.
01:18:38
Speaker
Um, but they're like, what, I'm fine. Um, I'm like, well, big to differ. Yeah, man. I always, when, when someone, I have a prospective client questionnaire, when someone doesn't share much about whatever issues they're having and, or it's like almost this sort of, how do you say stiff upper lip attitude? No, I'm, I'm, I'm totally fine. I'm just want to see if maybe there's something, check my levels and maybe something.
01:19:07
Speaker
that can be improved. I've noticed those people tend to just not be cognizant of how much of an undercurrent of issues there's going on. And then when they open up,
01:19:20
Speaker
sometimes there's actually quite deep-seated stuff going on. I've definitely noticed that just this week I had a case of that. So I'm always, especially with men, when someone is kind of keeping this sort of air of nonchalantness, if that's even a word, nonchalance. I know, like, I'm always like, okay, what are you not willing to face right now?
01:19:49
Speaker
Could we maybe unpack some of that? And usually it's not easy, it can be painful, but I think doing that work is invariably for the betterment of the person long-term. Totally. And that's the whole section of my book. The one that's called Your Body More Than a Vehicle to Walk Your Head Around is me going through case studies of a series of people that I've kind of gone through that process with from
01:20:19
Speaker
10 year olds to 90 year olds to men to women of sort of contextualizing kind of the root of their problem or how some people can have the very like objective same symptoms the same thing hurts but their story that wraps around it that I worked with this one woman that I that very much had post-traumatic stress disorder from a lot of traumas she had
01:20:44
Speaker
all through her life and I've worked with her for 10 years and you can just think I've seen her that I've seen her body go through various different expressions um of that stress and um and just helping people you're not necessarily just curing them of things but help them develop understand their story better how to
01:21:07
Speaker
where they need to go to if I need to sometimes I just need to treat them and give them a bit of relief and times they're doing a bit better try to help teach them how to learn what they need to do for themselves a little bit more and help them sort of navigate the medical model that they're that they're kind of having to kind of stick handle that sometimes is making them better and sometimes is inadvertently making them worse and so trying to
01:21:34
Speaker
help people make themselves become their own advocate and have people around them to help them and not try to just go in the direction one person told them. Well said, well said. Well Brent, this was a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. Before we wrap up, can you tell the listeners where they can find your work, your books, how they can connect with you and so on?
01:21:59
Speaker
WhyThingsHurt.com is my website that has most of the resources on it. Social media wise, it's usually at WhyThingsHurt. It's most active on Instagram, but I do have a Facebook page that's at WhyThingsHurt. On LinkedIn, I'm just Brett Stevenson. I have a YouTube channel that has a number of videos and movement-based things that's integrated into my WhyThingsHurt website.
01:22:27
Speaker
It's, it's named after my physio clinic. So it's a youtube slash envision physio. Um, but I, why things hurt.com would be the best resource. Awesome. Brent, once again, thank you so much for your time today. This was great. Yeah, it was interesting to happen with you.