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Can+Did, a TN Voices Podcast
Can+Did, a TN Voices Podcast
Tommy Aceto
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In this episode Tommy tells his unique story of traumatic experiences and his journey to find mental wellness. Tommy was a Navy SEAL serviceman and trauma medic. His background in sports, military, and fitness, alongside his creativity with music, songwriting, and being an outdoorsman comes together in a unique path toward healing. Now Tommy is working in TN to bring more awareness and advocacy for plant-based medicine in clinical settings as well as offer free ways to improve your mental health.
Link to you tube video for this episode:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VfT1-1WsVvQ
Disclaimer: This is not medical advice. Tommy is not a TN Voices client. TN Voices does not offer the interventions Tommy discusses in the episode.
What's in a name? We could start there.
SPEAKER_01Is it a what I am or who I am? That's a good question.
SPEAKER_03Oh gosh. We could go down that road, but this podcast might be three hours long. Oh man. Oh. Well, I'm so glad we met. First of all, we have multiple mutual friends, and we just figured that out within the last month. So, Root, a company that supported Tennessee voices for years now. Uh, you know, the founders, Dr. Christina Roman, her husband, Clayton Thomas. So, so that was a mutual connection. And then Brian Hubbard, who is working on Americans for Ibogaine, working on this uh effort to get Ibigaine in clinical trials in the U.S. We we both knew Brian.
SPEAKER_01So that's Brian connects a lot of people.
SPEAKER_03I know. He's the, you know, what it who's the guy that you have to be connected to in Hollywood. I can't there's a saying. There's a saying. What's this thing? Oh, yeah. I'll get it'll come. Kevin Bacon. There it is.
SPEAKER_01Kevin Bacon. Oh, yeah. Yes. Kevin Bacon.
SPEAKER_03He's the Ryan Hubbard's the Kevin Bacon of this this effort.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01He is.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So, Tommy, tell me about your journey. First of all, you have an impressive resume. You've done a lot. Starting with what impressed me the most uh was just your your own grit, your own ability to lead yourself, which is something I talk about a lot in a book that I'm writing. It's just how you can lead yourself. Because really, if we depend on other people to do it, we might not end up sitting and living in our purpose. So you've you've been an athlete, you've been a seal, you've done a ton of stuff in between. Oh my gosh, I was reading all the things. Uh you you seem to have a lot of drive and grit. And I wanna I want to get to that in the podcast, but looking back through it, there it seems like a lot of pivot points. And I want to get to sort of where that journey took you. But start us off by giving us a little background, uh, a little insight into you and how you ended up where you are now.
SPEAKER_01Well, thanks for the kind words. Uh if you ever seen the movie Forrest Gump, there's a feather in the beginning of that movie. And the older I get, I start looking at these synchronicities in my life. Like walking into the producer of Forrest Gump's house in Manhattan right before I swam around the Statue of Liberty for a fundraiser. Two weeks after I wrote my final paper for my master's program of fine arts for directing and writing, I wrote it on the archetype of Forrest Gump.
SPEAKER_03Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_01And two weeks later, I'm in her apartment holding on to the Academy Award that she saved one of the most Americanic movies of all time. She saved it for nine years, Wendy Feinerman, who was friends with my master chief from SEAL Team 2s. That's how I got into her house. Me and him are doing the swim. And he's like, I he goes, What I heard you're doing film. And I'm like, No, I'm just getting my money from the GI Bill. And I wanted to learn storytelling because I think my mind works off story. I think all of our minds work off story. And I think we're, I think that's how we heal the mind is you got to change the story. And no one's doing it for you. Yeah. And uh, and I also learned along my way of medicine healing, what people call trauma, which it's a very overused word. These words have become very toxic and polarized in our society. You know, narcissist, trauma, God, this, all that stuff. It's I I I learned that I think in my life as a driven and a creator, that it is in experiences that we find meaning. And in my healing journey when I did the Ibigain and the Five Meod and the psilocybin and the LSD and the cannabis and the ayahuasca, I learned that the medicine becomes the experience, and that experience truly is the medicine. And that is neuroplasticity, and we have a language for it now. And I think that's why for me, after you know, 16 years as a Navy SEAL combat trauma medic, intelligence guy, explosives guy, I think we're finally understanding how to heal the trauma of the mind, which is the nervous system.
SPEAKER_03Man. That's so true. And I can't wait to talk about your healing journey and the the path that you took. I want to go back to something you said that I think is really, really important for the moment we're in is the language that we use around our mental health. I said this on a podcast last year, and I still believe that we have put a language out into the world, and it's especially impacting young people, that they're using words that we def we we put out there for them to use, but we didn't really define them and we blurred the line between a clinical issue and a experience, a life experience that is in some cases normal life experience and not traumatic. But kids really misunderstood and blurred the lines. So now a bad grade is traumatic. And I'm not saying that for all kids, but I see it a lot more in the language. A teacher didn't do what I wanted, and now they don't like me and they're targeting me. Or, and of course, those things happen, but still we're we're really blurring some lines. Tell me more about how you see that impacting treatment and and what you're trying to do with your life to help people. This language is getting somewhat in the way.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I my mom always tells a story. Um, she says, when you were six and there was a science experiment, you brought in the nine-month development of a feet a fetus, and you told people you want to be a pediatrician since I was six. That's where like my passion for healing comes from. Which is interesting because it took me all the way around to this crazy world of what is trauma. I was a trauma medic, right? So I knew trauma, but I knew it from the neck down.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And it took me all along this way to be actually working with people like you who specialize and I believe treating the root cause of our societal issues is our future, our children. And the problem I see is that it's not so much the words, it's the energy around the word that gives it its potency. And so in the mind, I feel, well, let's the mind, in my opinion, is the thinking brain and the feeling body or the feeling heart. So it's we're trying to fix this feeling problem with a thinking organ or processor, but it's truly the feeler that needs to be fixed. We don't walk around saying, I thought like crap all week.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01Give me a drug so I can think better. Yeah. No, yeah, it's feel better. So let's just start there. And I think the words have potency by design. And I think people, not that everybody, it's not all conspiracy. As a Navy SEAL, people probably like this guy is, you know, the typical guy. And I go, well, in order for all change to happen, there's going to be conflict. And as a storyteller, I know that conflict drives the narrative forward. And that is actually programmable and it can lure you in. And what I'm seeing with our youth is their minds are developing, their neocortex is absorbing. Now, let's just be realistic. How many of these children in our country are in what I call good soil family where the father respects and loves the wife, and the wife respects and loves the father, and the father's leading the way he's supposed to. And the wife's there's enough room for the everybody to grow and kind of be in that good soil of nurturing household. Yeah. So I I think I've met like there's a couple families that I've observed because I didn't come from that. And so for me, my reality was conflict. That's why I have grit, is because I've came from conflict. And I'm working with psychologists, that author of the book driven, uh, Doug Breckman, and he runs an I am driven um program. And he he likes to focus on these uh DRD2, DRD4 gene uh variant. And I I don't I don't have that training. And uh I go, okay, well, you're trying to justify the 10% of the population that just sees things a little different. The ones that sign up for violence, the ones that are attracted to the storm. I can see where this is going. And I think what happens is it's we're those words that are being used uh in our society that kids are going, okay, what is this? Oh, this is the this must be trauma because I'm feeling this. But it's actually not that that I'm feeling. It's the thing that happened a couple days ago, you know, that really got my ego hurt.
SPEAKER_03I do want to go back to the six-year-old who wanted to be a pediatrician. So interesting because you you said from early stage you wanted to help people. You you had this bent toward feeling the need to help people heal. And then you experienced some things in your life, conflict, things that led you to some pivot points, obviously. What was the next pivot point for you from that six-year-old who wanted to be a pediatrician? What where did you go from there? Because your journey has taken to you, taken you to a really unique place in being a helper and a healer. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um, it went from I say I was a musician trapped in an athlete's body. Okay. Or an athlete's home. My mom could throw a spiral farther than my friends in sixth grade, and she turned that ring over and gave us a good one. We needed it because we needed it. And um my dad was an athlete gym teacher, his head teacher, and I I wasn't strong enough to test the box that they my family put me in. So I I had an older brother, he was great at everything, and I was the kid playing soccer and defense with the tulips or the daisies and just not really. So I had to learn to compete. And I felt that was the only way I could get my dad's affirmation is to compete. And uh I got real good at sports, uh wrestling, soccer, basketball, football, all of them. Like I played everything. Oh gosh. Yeah, I was built to be uh the next chapter. Everything in my life was that feather. It was always that feather. And I didn't realize it at the time, you know, when after two state titles as a wrestler and two-time all-state soccer player, and we went to the NCAA uh finals, this division three, 1999. I was a I was started as a freshman. I did all this competing, looking for affirmation, looking for validation. And you asked me the question, which I got off. Where did it go from being a pediatrician to SEAL? And I think it was in the trauma of the divorce and the conflict in the home. And you know, I track this stuff. Who doesn't track their own trauma? Really? Come on. Yeah, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Most psychologists became psychologists because of that, right? Or a lot of them. Yeah. A lot of us. I think we do that. I think I think the empathy part is a big one.
SPEAKER_03And a deep understanding. It's huge. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Like if you if you have some kind of pain and you can help other people pay, there's a drug there. There's an affirmation there, right? Um, but for me, it was being raised by the product of a father who was a good man. He just his drug was anger, control and anger. And he he wasn't a womanizer, he wasn't a um, you know, drug addict or a drunk, but he was a product of a father who was a World War II D-Day uh um veteran. He got his lung ripped out on a piece of shrapnel hit his ship in Japan. Um he was a professional boxer, two-time golden glove champ from New York. They were also in the family thing. Yeah. And my dad tried to do the 180 and do like that family thing, all this. He was trying to break the mold. But what happened was he wasn't allowed to process never tell it to Felt. So I had a very toxic, egocentric father who meant well, but it was his own it was the inability to see the the trauma in his own life. And that was a whole generation.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, that's what I was gonna say. Probably at a time when there wasn't a lot to offer him to break that generational cycle or to do that 180 turn on his own. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I can it makes it makes it easier to want more palatable when when a guy says, you know, that state type state title m medal that you won is that's half of it's mine. And you're like 18, like what F.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01And uh, you know, or he he was violent, he hit my mom a couple times, and you know, I called him on it later on in life. We're driving to a Van Morsen concert at Hollywood Bowl, and I was treat I was trying to salvage our relationship after a long mm military like kind of and uh you know he couldn't see it, he couldn't admit it. And that rage I had in that car, like I thought I was gonna deck him. But I just brat breathed because I was, you know, doing my own therapies at the time. And you know, I just need I need time to to respond, not to react. So I started breathing, and and I just when he got out of the car, I just saw this guy that I felt so bad. I felt like this weak individual that scared the hell out of me and a lot of people. It was this man, it was like I saw the first time, it was like Jesus' words were like, forgive them, father, they know what they do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And then that led me down the road of kind of understanding why I wasn't the way I was I I was. But the that was this is all reflection. Yeah. When I was going through it, it was just like build your ego, win, win, win, because people like you when you win. And you're a middle child, so you really are living in lack. You know, you're like, and then you got the brother who's great at everything. And I just became a worker. Yeah, that built my grit. Yeah. And so I can look back at all my my life and go, everything was there for a lesson. No matter what it was, I can turn that story into it didn't happen to me, it happened for me. And you now you're now you're doing like in a wrestling world, that's a reversal. Right. You're just swipping it on its head, you're you're flipping the trauma on its head, and that's part of the narrative design, but it's also turning pain into passion.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I study this equation called love equals pain minus fear. And there is no fear in the present moment.
SPEAKER_03Break that down. Love equals pain minus fear.
SPEAKER_01And there's no f fear in the present moment.
SPEAKER_03Okay.
SPEAKER_01When you strip it all down.
SPEAKER_03Mm-hmm. Yeah. Fear is an illusion.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a false evidence appearing real because the program, the nervous system, the thinking brain, and the feeling heart, what this is what goes back to where those kids are being kinda programmed uh in toxic levels um is because they don't have the grit. They you don't they're not the brain is not developing the way it ought to with like roots. It doesn't have the grit, the creativity one would say, you know, most of these singer songwriters, they don't they don't even know how to play guitar. They don't know how they don't know how to sing. And I'm like, what? And they're like, yeah, it's bad. And I'm like, what?
SPEAKER_03And the AI Right, because the sensation is, oh, I just picked up a guitar and started playing on YouTube, and now I'm famous.
SPEAKER_01I can write an award-winning song in 2.3 seconds with Chris Stapleton's voice, written by Johnny Cash with a flair of Reba. You know what I mean? All chat GPT in 2.3 seconds and the chord structure, and not, you know, and so there the the the what I see and why I'm here today is to talk about some of these breakthrough therapies, not for our children, but the benefits of an individual that goes through these processes and these modalities in a safe setting with intention and does the work to change themselves. That's the only way I feel we have a chance in this world of sixth generation warfare.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I I agree. I think we do have to own our own healing journey and we have to figure out what that needs to look like. And it may be different. There's not a one size fits all because our experiences are all so different. But but it really is in the meaning of the experience, I think is what you're saying, in terms of how you rewrite the story. And if you don't do that work, then the story owns you and the experience happened to you and you had no control. Trauma. And that's true, but it also leaves you without your agency over the story.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I say trauma is the stain of shame. It's the thing that leaves a mark. You remember someone hugging you or someone slapping you more. If you see that person 10 years from now, you're probably not gonna remember all the hugs, but you're gonna remember that slap. Yep. And I think that's a good analogy of why trauma leaves a mark in the nervous system, inflammation. And so you have all this stored energy. If you want to kind of give us, this is the Navy SEAL combat medic, um, give me my blueprint of what I think the human mind is, and I think it's the nervous system, it's the energy, it's a system of energy. And we downplay the word energy because you can't mechanize it. You have to put it into a chemical form, you have to make these all these mechanisms in science. But when you leave it open to energy, it's a little bit more vague. And I think a lot of people, I think if they understand like chiropractors have a good understanding of, I think, energy. They study the nervous system.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01And uh one of the best chiropractors, I've been to a lot of doctors, not sure, chiropractor psychiatrists and psychology, you know, we're kind of guinea pigs. And I've like I'm a guinea pig now for this work and all that. Um and I and I we have a a chiropractor's name is Dr. Rusty Cross. He's Amy Grant's and Vince Gill's miracle worker. He understands things differently. He told me about the chiropractors, how they kind of got shut down in the 70s because they were stepping on people's toes. And I can see, I can foresee this coming with this emergence of these technologies or these um neuroscience that were there all along and these plants and funguses. What that does is it's gonna change the intention. Like people are gonna go, well, I can just do it myself. And that's the problem with the psychedelics and everything else. It's not all good because the minute we give awareness to the society, which Fox News has already done the documentary, there's many of them. I'm in one with Maha right now. Um and and Bobby's in it, and it we're linking trauma to addiction, you know, and all this. But the reality is once you get the awareness out, we still don't have like we can't take all these gears out of society that are money-making real like this is how our society works. Right. And if you take these out this way and you put try to put this one new one in, we don't that that infrastructure is not gonna be set up anytime. I don't care if we pass Ibigain in every state, it doesn't matter because there's not enough infrastructure to do this, and there's not enough facilities that are valid, that are credible. Right. And this is the problem in the future, and we need to address this as the people in each state looking at this. And I see the only mechanism is creating a network of wellness farms and people that can we can validate within a city to say, hey, here's our tools. It's the only way we're gonna kind of leave the mainstream system is if we give a solution. We cannot just say. The system is broke and sick and this and that and the pills don't work. So this is a big problem. And this is why I'm so I have such a hungry appetite for it because all the things I did is a seal. If we can tackle some of these things, but also give solutions that are organic in nature, like a lot of the stuff we're doing, it's been done before. We're just rediscovering it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And our Native American population, I think, is the most undertreated, traumatic uh communities we have. And there's groups of military guys, veterans that are bringing this work that we started reignited and bringing it back to the people that originally this is their home.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting the pivot then to become a SEAL and then what you did in terms of the the trauma exposure in the course of that service, right? The challenges you faced led you to a point of needing to address yourself and heal yourself. So you end up on this now healing journey with you set out to help heal other people, but now here you are needing to heal yourself. And I just think I wonder if that six-year-old knew something that I need to be able to heal somebody, something. Yeah. But maybe, maybe it was you in order to put a cap on the story and and then move forward. Um so then so that takes you to where you are now where you really do have an approach of your own to help other people. Is it mostly veterans that that you're helping, or is it is it? It exploded.
SPEAKER_01It exploded. Um, you know, it started off. Obviously, my background with this Ibogaine and five MEO DMT primarily, uh, I trained under Dr. Martin Polanco at the Mission Within. He was the first uh doctor to help heal the SEALs. Um and uh as a SEAL medic, I said, well, that's kind of my identity, right? I've always kind of been that guy. That's why uh it's important people realize that our identity is not what we do, is it's what it's who we are, but it's also like what we are in terms of what energy we bring. And the hard part for a lot of the guys in my demographic, they're driven, they're fighters, they're you know, um, have a lot of abuse. And one of the admiral's wives who I got to meet and become really good friends with, the SEAL admiral's wife, who was the only woman taking the women down that had sexual traumas, the w wives of the husbands who unfortunately ended their lives. We were helping them, and I was the one there with a lot of these wives. And um, she said to me, you know, these wounded warriors, they're like broken boys. And I looked at her and said, We are.
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01And I said, I teach warriors how to surrender. That's not something that a lot of people are are probably able to do. Yeah. Like, because they don't have the the experience or the energy or the trust.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01And that's my secret weapon. Every mission I went on in Iraq or Afghanistan or Africa or Thailand or wherever I went, they always needed these three things a communicator, comms, an officer, and a medic. If you uh if you're lucky, you get a sniper and you get all the other stuff. But you needed those three. And as a medic, I started they wanted me to get into the Intel stuff, and I hated it. I was like, I'm a door kicker, I'm a good clearer, you know, I'm a seal, blah, blah, blah. Ego is just full in effect. And uh that made me realize that when I walked into a village and I brought that med bag out and I started treating them, I got information because they trusted me. And I see now what God gave me in terms of the trust. Because in the nervous system, if you don't have trust, you don't got a hope in hell because you're not in the parasympathetic.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Right.
SPEAKER_01And that's like, come on, try to take down that wall. Time's up, come back next week. Let's try to take that wall down. These medicines, if we teach, if we heal our healers, our psychologists, our doctors, our our healers, if we can heal them and then show them, we're going to. Well, I think we're on the road to a Nobel Peace Prize if we can heal some of these things. And that's not talking about Parkinson's early dementia or Alzheimer's. That's what that's where I said it's getting bigger.
SPEAKER_03Yes. We were reading so much about the potential. I read recently about the potential to help repair the brain from a stroke. It's pretty fascinating stuff through plant-based medicine. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Do you know Drake? What? Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03He did he did our first or second fundraiser uh called Songwriter's Night. Second year, I think I worked for Tennessee Voices, which is now probably a dozen years ago. The best show. The best show. So shout out, Drake. So Drake.
SPEAKER_01Drake and Riley Green and a bunch of other uh singers who were doing our second concert at the Ryman called Benefit for the Brain.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01We're gonna do a town, it's gonna be a town hall discussion. I think this is the format to which we can bring out these networks, you know, like get our all of our nonprofits together, you know, and um uh hopefully uh, you know, Ed Drake will have me on stage giving a little short testimony of this. Um, but uh, you know, it it has to be awareness, but then you gotta, we have to give solutions. And I think what I feel is there's not gonna be a lot of, not everybody needs to do these treatments. Let's just make that real clear.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01You can do this with your breath. You can you can you can manufacture an internal pharmacy of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and dimethyltryptamine and basodiazepines and all these which we have inside us. So it these are for people that could be fatal. It could destroy the family. Now, I would be lying to say if I haven't seen families heal from this, kids get their fathers back and their mothers back, addicts who wake up after one treatment saying, I'm not an addict anymore.
SPEAKER_03That's powerful.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but it is. But what I see is the limiting factor is when they get out of that environment of homeostasis and trust and love, and they feel for the first time, if they don't have an environment to go back to, if you don't have a community to sustain change, which is developing the frontal lobe of awareness, intention, creativity, and grit. If you don't have these things, it's real hard to keep going. And I think that's really where I feel like I've gotten to where I've gotten is I just figured out how to do the work. And that work is in a lot of it's in creativity.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Which is why I got my master's and wrote a song with the creative vets and did all this stuff. It's because creativity, you need creativity. If you don't have that program, there's no change possible. You have to create.
SPEAKER_03Yep. Is that what you're focused on now? And your work is the integration piece for people. So they maybe they maybe they choose. And let maybe I'll back up for the audience to say what we're talking about. We're talking about psychedelic assisted treatments uh in particular. One of the focus areas that Tennessee Voices is looking at is the potential of Ibogaine. So we're really interested in how we could study ibogaine in the U.S. and bring it uh if we find that it's as powerful as we are learning, it is. Stanford's already done some studies. There are 15 states or more now looking at this. Texas said, yes, we're all in on studying this, put a $50 million appropriation into the state. So we're we're on the path with all those folks who are interested specifically. But with psychedelic assistive treatment growing so quickly, what you're saying is if we don't really have integration plans for people, we're gonna be in a little bit of trouble because they won't, they're gonna come back this different person or this have this new feeling of love. That's what I hear from most of them when they tell me about this. But but then the support system's not there and how vulnerable they are in that moment without support. So what are you doing for folks? What's what's the name of the organization? What's the what's the what's the purpose? What are you doing?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, after seven years of in this space of which I'm like, God couldn't pick a better group of people who can come up with solutions than the special special forces guys, right? So what I saw is that these organizations that are facilitating the medicine, they're nonprofits. So they're literally asking for free money. And that's not sustainable. It's not, you cannot grow. And I'd be lying, like part of the reason why I'm so passionate about this is because I believe in a model called paying it forward. Like, there's people out there with a lot more trauma than I had. Right. Or than most of my guys have. But the reality is people want to heal SEALs. They think it's sexy and shiny and they write their checks. And I get it. I'm grateful, trust me. But it will never move forward past where it needs to go to the prisons, to the Native American lands, to the, to the lower, you know, economical battered women who have been abused. It's never going to make it there. And the reason I know this is because how is the system going to fund this when an MDMA pill that costs $10 on the black market is $2,000 when it goes through big pharma? And I'm good friends with Bob Kaufman, Dr. Bob Kaufman. So he's coming here. We're speaking at another uh event in the 30th. But it's like, how are we gonna get around Ibogaine? As soon as people see its potential, that's gonna increase the money. And I'm going, how so who's getting these treatments? Like, when, how, how long is that gonna take? The reality is, unless that system, we really work on that, the only thing we can do in the meantime is to do the work of integration. And that word integration, people don't understand what it means. Well, integration from our perspective, after a reset, and I think this is what psychedelics offer, is a neurological reset. Some of them, like five Meod, which comes from a toad that are healing frogmen. Now, if you told me that, I'd say that's the story God made, not no man coming up with that story. But like these, there's loud, there's there's all kinds of tools here. Um, and what I think is happening is like let's just take LSD microdose when it comes about, because I can say that because it has breakthrough therapy status from the FDA three years ago. Yet they're Sue's running the first, you know, anxiety treatment resistant uh anxiety uh using LSD. She's coming up with this uh this uh clinical trial. These LSD, it drops your default mode network. What does that mean? Default mode network? It's the state to which your default set. That means your brain waves are in beta, high beta, which is not coherent.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01Right? If you if anybody studies heart rate variability, we do the breath work, we bear down on the vagal, and don't get me started on the vagal, because when you start talking about the wire that innervates the face that surrounds the heart, you go, oh, that's why the person is de-aged 10 years on their face after these five MU treatments, is because the vagal nerve has been cleaned, reset. Where in big pharma do they have anything remotely to this?
SPEAKER_03I couldn't answer that question.
SPEAKER_01I think you can.
SPEAKER_03You know, I think you have such a point about what's next for treatment and mental health and substance use recovery. We we were talking a minute ago about the system sort of set and maybe it's fear, maybe it's driven by other factors, I don't know, but we just have a resistance to change the system, right? But we have to. I think we're in a moment where we're being shown some opportunity to change. And if if those of us who believe in those opportunities to change don't act upon that, well, then we've missed our moment, our purpose, our ability to impact change and help people change their lives. But also, why have we been ordained in this moment to hear about these opportunities to sync up with a group of people all over the country? I don't know, but here we are. Here we are.
SPEAKER_01I'm blessed. I'm like, I for an for a driven who somebody's been fiending and snorting dopamine for the last, you know, right, 40 years of my life, which is the drug that it gets us in a lot of trouble.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It's it's a very highly associated with conflict. And I go, well, maybe, just maybe, that theory of that God uses our experiences to get us to be in a position so that we can actually do some damn good in this world. Yeah. I think that justifies all the wars, all the traumas, all my friends losing their lives, uh and dragged out wars for profit, all the guys that come back home and eventually, you know, fall victim to the invisible wounds in their mind, all these families that have been shattered generation after generation after generation. Maybe we're here for to do this, you know, to change. But it's uh, I always say there's no expectation, there's no finish line. It's just how much work we're gonna do while we're here.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah. Where I want to go next is to talk about what the system could look like if we changed it. There are a lot of people who know mental health who've never heard words like vagal.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03That have never heard parasympathetic, who don't understand the nervous system disruption. And that's really a passion for me to help integrate these not new ideas, by the way. We we've known these things for a long time, but they've not been integrated into the system of mental health treatment or substance use treatment. We don't teach people how to understand their nervous system.
SPEAKER_01So not even in med school.
SPEAKER_03Not even in med school. No, I I agree. And therapists who go into the work and um have to go really do their own training around understanding what even breath work does for the body and and the mind.
SPEAKER_01Okay. I'll try to dial the I'll get it simplified.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So I want to do that as like a just educational opportunity for our listeners. One of the things that I really want you to help our audience understand, because it's not something in the current treatment, the world of treatment around mental health and addiction, is understanding the nervous system. And you have a deep understanding of this. You have done a lot of work around this, you've helped people. So break it down for our audience just to understand the connection between the nervous system and their mental health.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think the nervous system is the mind. I think they're one and the same. I think we have a thinking brain and a feeling body, which is the feeling heart. Which is why our heart hurts when we get emotional, right? Where's our pain at in the body when when it's nausea? Yeah. You know, it's nerve system, it's the uh computer program, but it's also the like the system to keep us alive. And I think there's a snowball cascade that happens. The program kind of is not being programmed by the person, it's being programmed by the environment, which leads us to the trauma and the all the addictions. And I think that I can look at someone's behavior, and I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a medical doctor, but just from learning, I think you can really see that the symptoms are the drug addictions, they are the behavioral modifications that we try to change. It's the golden triangle of psychology: thoughts, actions, and feelings. So if we can allow people to understand that for every thought, there is a feeling. For every memory, it is an emotion. For every stimulus, it is a response. I I think uh Dr. Joe Dispenza, who I studied under, I'm sure you heard of him, um, he'll sell out the Opera Land and arenas all over the world. And I think he does a great job of painting a picture of this association. And um, you know, they say that a memory is this environment, and in that environment, we take a snapshot, and that snapshot is the feelings associated with that time and space. So it takes a picture and it sears it into this database of our narrow uh neocortex, but also it still soars it in the body in form of a feeling. So that's why I keep saying the body is a feeler, the brain is the thinker. The body keeps score. And so all these little feelings we have, which it goes back to the kids and why they're so sensitive, oversensitive, is because they're their nervous system is completely like absorbing, learning. It's very uh neuroplastic. So that environment is it is most really important because they're developing. But we don't just stop developing. That's the the fallacy is that the we're always changing. We're always we're we're always being affected by our environment. No matter how strong we are, how strong our faith tells us we are, we have to be real with that. And um that I think that's the link between the nervous system and the mind is um they're the same. One feels, one thinks. And it's this connection uh that we need to kind of dissociate. And the way I think the best way to do it is we have to slow down these brain waves. We need to slow down the um the hormones that are being pumped through our blood. And so the best way to do that is to breathe. And we talk about the breath while we sit in the sauna and uh the ice plunge and all these things that we might I can hit on some of those as massively uh efficient ways that we can do some of this work. Sure. Um, but it's the breath that is the first and the last thing that we ever do. Yet many are so unaware of the programmed neurological programming for the stress breathing in the upper part of the chest stimulates those intercostals to get ready to run from that bear that might be someone that just insulted your shoes. Because I say rebels. Because the nervous system in the body has no, it doesn't see all the things that we've processed and made into our reality. It's only reading the chemicals, which are the thoughts that become the feelings. So, like we're we can we can slow this down and start to understand this. And I think what it is is over time we can start to have people activate the awareness part, the intention, the creativity, and the grit. And then we explain to them this is what these are. You got to train them and you gotta be aware of your environment and um protect your healing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And ultimately, as a writer, it's address the universal flaw, inner flaw in all characters, our self-worth. Which man. Yes. Yeah. See? Yeah. So so we have to realize we are the protagonists. Ain't nobody else but us in our story. And that is so important because you don't get stories, they don't get made in the films by a boring protagonist that's not driven. They have to drive, they can have a person along the way to help them, but that protagonist has to have something inside them and that they have to address their inner flaw.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. They have to. I want to get I really want to get back to that because I want to talk about this because I think self-worth equals your assignment of value to yourself, right? So I I want to go there, but I want to say this for the audience because I think they'll understand. When you're talking about the nervous system, you're really talking about what a lot of people understand as fight or flight, and then add to that later understanding freeze, but we won't we won't go down that. I would imagine in your work as a SEAL, you were stuck in fight for a long time. Which probably put you in a position of having to do, would you say, more work than than the average person to repair your nervous system?
SPEAKER_01Well, that's the beauty of the five Meod. It is the strongest neurochemical we ever come across yet. And for guys that have the neurological programming of the job of uh anyone, again, because the body is 100% objective to the outside, it's just reading the chemicals. So in a fire, that firefighter's body doesn't know the difference between him and a SEAL or someone getting, you know, molested. The nervous system does not know the environment. It only reads the nervous system. The body only reads the nervous system. Right. So the reality is we as Navy SEALs live in an environment where we're constantly training. We're expected to be better and tougher and faster and all this BS. But the reality is that's that was the job. And so we do have, I would say on paper, and my good friend Andrew Huberman over at Stanford can probably concur that if you have more neurological programming based on the environment and the degree to which the mind is engaged in a state of fight, flight, and freeze, because they don't, people don't associate that. That is the number one mechanism. Right. Because that's how I explain the letting go. If you're freezing, that means there is sympathetic energy running through those veins. And if you think you can just go, oh yeah, I want that one new one. Right. You can't. That's why the breath comes in. You have to slow it down and you got to find safety and trust and you got to feel like this so that nervous system goes like this, and then it reassociates, which is your neuroplasticity.
SPEAKER_03The same reason you cannot just say to someone who's struggling with their self-worth, hey, just know your value. And that's supposed to work. That doesn't work. That doesn't work. So there has to be a lot of work that goes into this.
SPEAKER_01Reps, quality reps. That's why I, again, the like, you know, people think of our community as the guys that I mean, hell, I was there in Buds when when CrossFit got emerged, or Jim Jones, or all these things. And before I was a SEAL, I was a personal trainer, but I had a kinesiology bachelor's, so I was pre-med. So I I knew a lot about movement and training because I was an NCAA, all that stuff. And I went into the SEAL teams and I'm like, these guys are not like they don't, they're getting hurt and they don't really know how they're just tough. They're just right, really tough. Like tough, tough, tough. And then we saw the whole emergence of this functional fitness, which besides the mental thing, as you you know me now, I know that the full picture of this is mind, body, soul. And I know that if I can train my body, which is the feeler, which now we have fascia. Now people are going, oh, there's nerve endings in the fascia. And the fascia actually controls the muscles. Whoa. Maybe I should train this thing called the fascia. And I'm like, that's the feeler.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01So when I'm rolling out and I'm feeling pain, most people they feel pain for 20 seconds. Oh, it's time to switch. Simon's time to stop stretching. Time to switch. Because they're being hijacked by the thing they're trying to change. And that's when you said it's so important for people to understand that there's no one coming to save you, that you have to do the work. You have to feel valued enough. And the problem is they don't have the experience that was seared into their well-being as a child.
SPEAKER_03Yep. There it is.
SPEAKER_01Or as combat, or when you take some a lot of the my friends that I work with, you know, they did things. And then they did and I wish we didn't have they didn't have to. Yep. And uh none of that shit's free. Yeah. You don't I don't care if it's a if you're in the military or if you're trying to make a bunch of money being a celebrity, none of that stuff is free. It will come back. Yeah. And it's important to play that tape all the way through.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah. Can I ask you a question? As your experience, as you've outlined, and not that you're speaking for everyone, but just from what you know, does a person who has grown up in a loving home and has that nature, nurture, balance and has, you know, felt supported and affirmed, did they sign up to be a Navy SEAL?
SPEAKER_01Very rare. And some of them well, those are the some of those guys aren't here anymore. Like Mike Murphy, like Michael Monsur. And then none of these, we all have a little bit of like you have to be acclimated, but the guy that ran the the psychology uh at the Naval Special Warfare back about uh 15 years ago, Dr. Eric Potteret, who is now the the Los Angeles Dodgers uh psychologist, Eric Potteret had uh really incredible studies with uh cortisol reuptake. And he studied SEALs and green uh Wall Street, and uh I think those are the two he studied, but real high risk of failure jobs, huge amounts of cortisol, uh, high addictions, high animalistic behavior, sex, drugs, and drinking, like just those things that we see all over, even the guys and the girls, mostly the guys that we look to as the leaders and go, why can't we just have more guys that are just like, you know, keep it together? Right. That's because they're animalistic behaviors. And uh, and uh I think when I look around these kind of environments that are very um like that, you see the same damn behaviors in the guys, whether it's a PGA golfer or the Navy SEAL or the you're like, they're all the same, they're all the same behaviors. So there must be something there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But the the um to answer your question, um it just brings you back to the environment, really, I think.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah. There's so many things I want to ask about that, but I think with the time we have left, where I'll where I'll take us is what can people do? What are simple practices that you've used in your healing journey that people could do now? They that they don't have to go to a specialist for or go see a professional for, because you you've already mentioned breath work, and I think breath work is misunderstood. We've simplified it, but there's some really strong practices out there if you deeply understand. You you mentioned sauna, you mentioned ice plunge. The these are things people think about as physical health, but you're sort of saying, no, these have a lot to do with mental health. What are things people can do?
SPEAKER_01Get outside into nature and learn how to breathe. If it's the first and the last thing we ever do, surely we could take a couple minutes to start becoming aware, intentional, and create uh a practice. And the reason why meditation, I'm a Christian, but I'm a psychedelic, experienced Christian, and that puts me in a little different category because I get a lot of questions from people that have really like rooted in belief systems, and I go just really pay attention to those things, and you got to really, you know, people I I say, I don't think people should be scared if they're a believer to do these things. I think it's gonna help their faith, to be honest with you, because there's a difference between knowing something and feeling something, and I think that difference is experience. So it I I challenge those things. Um, you don't get change without uncomfortability, whether that's your thoughts, your beliefs, anything. It's you have to go through that. That is the grit comes in, and that's the programming of a seal. Like I have that on a lot of people. Not that I'm better, it's just that my experiences have allowed me to be who I am.
SPEAKER_03Well, you you yourself said you removed the fear and you just went through it. You you took the fear out. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But it's also goes really back to the faith. And I would say if anybody kind of the you know, you said you asked me the question of what can someone do? It's it really is to get outside of what what you're trying to change. You cannot change a system within the system. If you try to change it with known things, you're kind of you're not out, you're not outside of it enough to get a perspective that allows you to go, oh, oh, this possible. Without that knowledge or experience or the risk, you're never gonna get there. So I think that's one of the things is like start to reset this um the relationship between um what we're comfortable in and what we base everything on and and challenge it a little bit. Because that's how we grow with our faith, with our physique, with our mental health, anything, business, it's you you have to take these things. Nature, breath, and oh the awareness of our fear of failure.
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01That one's a big one.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I think that one is probably if we can address that one, we can start to look at attachments.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. But doesn't that ultimately just take us back to our value? Like a fear of failure is a fear of being imperfect, and being imperfect is the fear that we aren't worthy. Sure. And if we're not worthy, then what is our value?
SPEAKER_01Oh, 100%. That's why with the middle child trying to get daddy's affirmation by winning and being like older brother, like, you know, that we we have to just l become aware. And if anybody's that's on their healing journey, like I know we're all doing this, like everybody's looking at how to track this down, but I you gotta go to gratitude. You have to change that, flip that script, and you have to bring gratitude into this. Because I always joke and say there's these vitamins I take. One's vitamin G, gratitude, one's vitamin G12, grit, you know, one's vitamin C, creativity. Like I treat these things that I'm trying to develop as if like I'm bringing awareness to them.
SPEAKER_03I think that's so valuable and so doable for so many people. I mean, what you're offering here to people is not unattainable in in many ways. You're really using your own resources within your body and your home environment to to heal. It's just knowing what to bring in. You mentioned, and and I want to, I want to end on this. You mentioned uh being a person of faith, but also you believe in psychedelics, obviously indicating there that there might be some uh differences between those two beliefs or that there's a value differences. So for people who, because this is your healing journey, this is your story, for people who might be like, oh, I don't know, might the the limiting beliefs around psychedelics that they're bad, they're wrong, they're whatever that is, I don't know. But for people who are kind of questioning should someone be thinking about this, how did you get there?
SPEAKER_01Intention.
SPEAKER_03Interesting. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I would say, because you brought it up, this one's for Brian. It was not the medicine that saved me or healed me. The medicine was a gift, it was a tool given to me, but it was my faith that saved me because without my faith and that rosary in my hand when I'm on this crazy ass journey, it was my ability to allow, to receive. And that faith was the mechanism to which I got all this change, all this creation, all this healing. It was my ability to allow, and that's a state of receivership. And we can teach this. We can teach this through the sauna, through the ice plunge, through the feeling of what you all the work you do. We can teach this through creativity of expression. I think art is the means to which we teach the next generation. It's our expression, it's how we store truth, it's how we hide truth, and it's how we kind of express things. And with the music, you know, you take the alchemy of a songwriting and you go, This is a lesson that was something painful, and I transform it into a medicine that millions of people hear, and in it and inspires people. That's alchemy, that's energy, right? And it's intention.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Your story is really, really unique. I have to say, of all the guests that have come on in seasons past, we've talked about, you know, their journeys. Yours is unique. And we've learned a lot about what's out there. I think we've we've busted open a door. There's been some limits on what we've what we've seen people express in terms of how they heal. You've you've just opened a door into some new ideas that I think our audience and even our our own organization, we haven't heard before. And as we do this work, I just appreciate you being willing to sort of, you know, carve that path uh for yourself and for others, because this is this is something that we have to learn more about in our society quickly.
SPEAKER_01I I'm surprised I haven't cried this podcast, but I you know, I think I thank you for those words. I I just I say gratitude can make you superhuman in times of tribulation. But it's service to another that makes you a superhero.
SPEAKER_03Boy, that is a perfect spot to end on and may mean so much to the people who work at Tennessee Voices because we call them heroes every day. It's very, very relevant.
SPEAKER_01We gotta heal the service minded hearts out there. Yeah. Because those are the ones that are gonna heal society.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. Tommy, thank you.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
SPEAKER_03I really enjoyed this conversation.
SPEAKER_01I'm sure it won't be the last.
SPEAKER_03I hope not.