Richard & Dr. ED Show 2025 #1

Summary

In this episode, Richard Aceves and Dr. Ed discuss the integration of movement and breathwork into scientific practices, the challenges of addressing complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), and the importance of understanding trauma and authenticity. They explore the journey of Moved Academy, the significance of building resilience, and the future plans for their initiatives in health and wellness.

Takeaways

The importance of integrating movement and breathwork into scientific research.
Understanding the body's ecosystem is crucial for holistic health.
A 96% success rate in assessments indicates effective long-term solutions.
Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) requires a multifaceted approach.
Finding one's authentic self is a complex feedback loop influenced by trauma.
Building resilience is more important than merely understanding triggers.
The impact of modern media on children's anxiety and alertness.
Movement and expression are essential for emotional and physical health.
Future plans include workshops and retreats to enhance learning and practice.
Collaboration between different health disciplines can improve patient outcomes.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to 2025 and New Beginnings
02:56 Integrating Movement and Breathwork into Science
06:09 The Journey of Moved Academy and Personal Growth
08:51 Understanding Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS)
11:59 Navigating Trauma and Authenticity
18:06 Building Resilience and Understanding Triggers
23:01 Future Plans and Closing Thoughts

Transcript

Richard Aceves (00:01.614)
and we are here, first episode of 2025. Dr. Ed, how are you doing today,

Dr Ed (00:08.619)
I am fantastic. I'm just waiting for an IT problem to show up as is customary for whenever we start a podcast. Hopefully we're rocking and rolling. It's 2025. I think we haven't done an episode in 2025. Did we do more than one in 2024?

Richard Aceves (00:23.694)
No, it was our first one.

Richard Aceves (00:28.674)
Yes, we did a few in 2024. 2024 was good. I think we did like five or six. We're going to try to stay consistent. Life gets ahead of us, but we have lots of shit going on. Excuse my language, but there is a lot going on. One of us, one of which is we are, well, you wrote a paper and you are submitting it. Correct. Trying to.

Dr Ed (00:42.399)
Yeah.

Richard Aceves (00:55.726)
slowly introduce what we do at Movement Ayahuasca and what we do at Moved Academy into the academic world. Do want to talk a little bit about that?

Dr Ed (01:04.851)
Yeah, so we had, in fact, we know we had Guy on the podcast last year and he's still working here and trying to disrupt the conventional scientific avenues of funding and the Institute and create a breathwork lab here. And obviously in creating a breathwork lab means that I introduced him to the Swami and movement and he's now carrying sandbags and doing all sorts of training sessions and enjoying himself and realizing that there's more to

breath work than just breathing and there is a movement and intensity component to it that we can access through proper tension created in muscles. And we've gone back and forward for a long time in terms of realizing that the torque chains, for example, which we probably haven't even done a podcast on in itself, but these two chains of muscles that are

involved in developing tension towards the midline and away from the midline of the body. One more parasympathetic dominant and the other more sympathetic dominant in this kind binary system, which allows us and you, which you use a lot to access states of the nervous system through movement, but also improving movement through accessing states of the nervous system. So it goes both ways, vice versa.

And that concept hasn't been very well documented in the scientific literature. And we had this opportunity to publish a paper and we thought, well, if we're going to kind of expand this field and create our own field of being movement specialists in science, then we should go ahead and kind of give people an introduction to that. So we've written a paper on the torque chains and how we position those in the rest of

Richard Aceves (02:54.359)
Yeah.

Dr Ed (02:56.927)
the literature, whether it's fascia, breathwork, psychedelics, biomechanics, yogis, manual therapists, somatic therapy. It's a common language that needs to be understood and including people in the medical world, orthopedic surgeons, radiologists, people that deal with aches and pains. The goal being that those people can start to have conversations between each other that are...

Richard Aceves (03:16.375)
Right.

Dr Ed (03:24.715)
benefiting the patients in the end because that's the most important thing. And the problem with the conventional scientific world is the siloing of information into individual specialties and what you've taught me and how I've taken my career is that we have to look at the body as an ecosystem and bring it all together. So that's the main point.

Richard Aceves (03:29.098)
Right.

Richard Aceves (03:43.5)
Yeah. Yeah, I'm so I'm excited because it'll start to slowly bring, you know, the credibility to move to Academy and to the coaches that we're educating and how we're approaching things. Which, you know, credibility, I think it brings a sense of confidence of what you're saying, because right now, we talk about this stuff. But, you know, and again, we shouldn't really care about what people care what people think all that much. But I think it still creates an impact of like, well, where do we have

sort of the backup of what we're doing. But the cool thing is like we're at, you know, we have a shit ton of assessments that have been documented and we're at a 90, it went up to 96 % success rate. And it's not a success rate of just walking into the, you know, the gym getting the assessment done and being successful, but it's a six week to eight week process. So means that the longterm solution is being identified, which is kind of cool.

So I'm really excited having this sort of research hub coming from, you know, a new research from Moved Academy and what we're, you the practicality of everything that we're doing being put into the theoretical objective science side of things. It's a busy year. So we have Movement Diawasa coming up in Portugal, and that's, you know, going to be cool. We're waiting on the final.

Good to go, but more than likely this will be documented with a crew, which will be really cool to kind of start to put that out there. We're going to have the one in Bali in August. For Move Academy, we started the Emerging Week. just kind of having, giving people the experience to be hands on and teaching them how to coach and how to work with people. Being in California has been a, a kind of interesting road because it's coming back to my hometown, but it's it's trippy.

I moved away for eight years and then coming back, like you're in the same environment, but you're not the same person. So you have like a different perspective to the environment. And it's been pretty, pretty cool. I feel a lot more confident in going to network with other coaches and gym owners and being able to speak up about what I do. Whereas before, even though I had my CrossFit gym and you know, I was doing my thing, I was always kind of boxed into my, my little

Richard Aceves (06:09.12)
gym. was a big fish in my gym, but not going out. But it's a it's crazy being back here, dude. Like it's a you you realize how saturated this market is and how many big players I would say are out there. Especially in Southern California, like dude, it's crazy. Like the gym that I go to, there's probably another 20 gyms within a three kilometer radius. I mean, it's just so saturated with health.

Dr Ed (06:36.906)
and

Richard Aceves (06:38.958)
So it does make it a little bit overwhelming, but it's fun.

Dr Ed (06:43.221)
Do think there's a possibility of having a retreat there to then kind of bring a bit of exposure to that side of it?

Richard Aceves (06:51.158)
Yeah, so what I'm trying to do right now is, you know, find the right, I think you're always going to attract the right type of clients. So, you know, I have a few people that are well connected here, and they get to open the doors to clients that haven't found solutions. So one of them is a lady that has a CRPS syndrome, you know, has had it now for four years.

has had no long-term solution and they really don't have anything for her. She's just undergone a ketamine treatment, but that didn't go well. So she's really just kind of running at the end of her road of just trying to accept the pain and essentially being medicated for the rest of her life to diminish the discomfort that she has, the intensity that goes to her feet. And so we did...

Swami session we did so as racist and it was the best night sleep she's ever had the discomfort went down You know, so now we're gonna kind of do a condensed version sort of movement ayahuasca esque, right? But we're gonna go for six weeks doing two times a week and then having very specific homework To bring the discomfort down, but I really think that you know, there is a long-term solution all we need to do is just Reclaim the safety in the body and then build confidence that can that it can tolerate stress

I always forget what CRPS means, so if you want to talk about what CRPS is.

Dr Ed (08:21.835)
Yeah, so I mean, it's always been a fascinating diagnosis to me because it's complex regional pain syndrome. And it's diagnosed last. So you've ruled everything out first, and then you come to, okay, well, we think it's none of these things. So it must be complex regional pain syndrome, which is basically you have pain that's out of proportion with the original trigger. So like if you

don't know, broke a wrist, but your wrist hurts way more than it ever did in the first place. And then you have various symptoms that go alongside with that. So usually you have like a sensory issue. So you're used to this, hypersthesia. So you feel very sensitive on the skin. You might have vasomotor symptoms. like temperature changes, skin changes, and then swelling. And then you can also have

changes, so like hair, skin and nails will change as well. You might have tremors and weakness, but it's defined as an inflammatory and or dysautonomic condition and autonomic being the autonomic nervous system. So if there was ever going to be a solution for complex regional pain syndrome, it would be what we're offering. It would be breathing and movement done in a coherent way with the rest of the body systems.

and then taking care of systemic inflammation as well, may involve optimizing nutrition, optimizing your light, optimizing exposure to environmental stress from other things and building your capacity to handle that stress so you can reduce the intensity of the symptoms in terms of pain.

Richard Aceves (10:05.55)
Right. Yeah, and that was, mean, you again, it's, it's always a bit overwhelming and daunting because I had no clue what it was. But I just started to listen to her story. And again, it comes down to there is a massive lack of safety in her environment. And the body is to be constantly hyper vigilant. And it's interesting because the pain always stems from the ankles and goes to the feet from and from the emotional standpoint.

which is like kind of like the guilt and shame. then, you know, we kind of start to talk about different events in life and it all just kind of start to stack up to going back to, hey, we're going to look at the torque chains. Where is it that we're seeing the root cause of missing connection? And during the Swami session, I was able to see it, identify it. We had the discussion and you know, don't want to, I'm not going to go into big details in it because it's very personal. And it gives away a of the golden nuggets that

I've spent years trying to find it. But it was spot on. So everything that I did on that Swami session, we then had a discussion after the experience. And essentially we found this sort root cause issue from an environmental perspective, which caused a whole lot of physical intensity. But as you start to move on in life, you start to mask and mask and mask and mask in order to survive society. And so what we're doing with the Swami and with the moving,

is we're creating neural output into the right muscles, which allow the inflammation to go down, because you're allowing the body to create safety in the internal environment, which allows confidence to feel safe in the external environment. And that forces the lack of, you know, then now you don't need to be having the symptom of the discomfort trying to speak to you to change something about your life, right, which is changing the internal environment and the expression towards the external environment.

Dr Ed (11:59.231)
have a kind of a question popped into my head and it was a question somebody asked me the other day, I'd be interested for your response, is how do know the difference between something being

Richard Aceves (12:07.864)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Ed (12:18.151)
your trauma programming or ego versus your authentic self wanting to do something in particular for example or having a certain action that it wants to do.

Richard Aceves (12:35.33)
I think that they're all feedback loops and I'm starting to realize that more and more there's a false, there's a pedestal being put on finding your authentic self. And I think that finding that authentic self

is this sort of

Richard Aceves (12:59.606)
I think it's the newest way to find a sense of belonging and being because we've lost, again, I'm not religious, but we've lost that spiritual, that religious, that culture side of things. And so everybody wants to be this authentic self because they don't have a sense of belonging in society. So I think that we have to understand that...

the trauma events that happen in our lives to change how we behave are just a facet of learned behaviors in order to best survive in the society and being. Now, obviously, if you are a major introvert, you know, and you are able to want to behave a certain way internally, but externally, you don't have the confidence, that's where we can sort of see the mismatch of communication.

So that was a bit of a, I had another assessment, but you know, how you want to act primally versus how you're acting with the super ego, right? With how you want society to view you or what the morals around your community, your society dictate how you should behave are mismatching. That's where we can kind of have this sort of buffer or sort of reconnection of what needs to be.

it out or express in what needs to be conserved internally. And so, you know, how much of it is based on trauma factors and conditioning versus not, I think, is the line between entropy and chaos. Because then you're saying that all the crazy homeless people that are out there throwing shit at people are being their authentic selves. You know what I mean?

Dr Ed (14:42.218)
Yeah.

Richard Aceves (14:49.72)
But it is in a sense because they're going straight back to their primal needs. whenever I talk to veterans and people that have been in war-torn countries, they're like, the further and further you go away from this entropy, which for most of the world is some sort of religious belief or some sort of very instilled

principles and values, the more you go away from that, the more there is chaos, the more the primal being is there, the more it's normalized to have killings and beatings and physical intensity being brought up very quickly. So there is this need for balance between the sort of trauma-enforced behaviors and your authentic self or your primal self. And then obviously now if you're having different traumas that are coming in, as far as like

verbal and physical abuse and things like that, you know, then we can start to have these conversations of like, you don't need to have this.

you know, these sort of coping mechanisms, we can change the coping mechanisms once we understand that root cause and we can create a new predictive model for how we view those triggers or those environments. Does that make sense?

Dr Ed (16:09.771)
Yeah, I think so. I also think the answer to that question is a difficult one. Full stop.

Richard Aceves (16:17.977)
Yeah, I mean, it's we're on this timeline. It's what do you want to do with the timeline that you're on? You know what I mean?

Dr Ed (16:25.119)
Yeah, there was a study where they, I think they got people to look back at a specific event, traumatic event, and then they gave them the option, would they want to remove that event from their life, knowing that everything that happened between then and now was dependent on that event happening and all of the good things potentially. And most people said they would rather have still experienced it, yeah, because of the learning.

Richard Aceves (16:45.837)
Right.

Richard Aceves (16:50.614)
that happen. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think, you know, again, it's a the whole point of what we do with training and movement is to give ourselves the capacity to behave.

the best way possible should this stressor, this trigger comes up, right? And if you are able to have the safety and the confidence in the body, then rather than having, let's say three different options, which your body kind of automatically goes to because of past events and traumas or whatever, you can now have 10 and you can choose maybe better options as to how to behave to this stress.

So, you know, if it's something like a social anxiety issue because you get triggered from a scent or from an environment being too busy or overwhelming, right, you have the lack of capacity to adhere to the stimulus. So you'd rather just stay inward. So if we can teach the body that it doesn't need to be so overwhelmed, then we can actually start to go out and be more social. It was a simple example. So it just depends on what are the triggers that overwhelm

the system and how can we better teach the body to adhere to that stimulus and overcome that stimulus to not see it as stressful.

Dr Ed (18:16.437)
And do you think it's important for people to understand their triggers or just be able to build resilience to them?

Richard Aceves (18:26.156)
I think when you're constantly wanting to understand and validate your triggers, that is a quitting mechanism through mental anxiety. I think that once you overcome the triggers, you're no longer faced by them because you see it completely different.

It's a hard thing to explain because it's an experience. It's not just information, but there's this sort of feeling when the trigger happens or, you the change of environment or your perception changes. We're like, and then you realize after it's like, that doesn't bother me anymore. And you can move on. And so I think the faster you can sort of express how you feel about the event and change that perception, the easier it is to have acceptance towards it.

But if you're still talking about that trigger, it means that you're still not over it. Right? It's kind of like, I always use like the, the fight with a, with a significant other. If you're still bringing up issues that you forgave somebody for three, five years ago, then you're not, you're, maybe you rationalize and accept it, falsify, accept it cognitively. But when the trigger happens so aggressively and that still comes up, that means that that change in learned behavior hasn't happened physically.

there's still something in the system that's holding on tight because it doesn't want to let go of that protective mechanism.

Dr Ed (19:55.701)
Yeah, I had some people do, after an acute event that was stressful, get them to recount it and write it down and then get rid of that and then recount it and write it down and get rid of that and just keep writing it until there was no physiological response to the writing about the event. I think for certain types of people it works well.

Richard Aceves (20:08.44)
With him?

Dr Ed (20:25.331)
I guess it's a similar concept to MDMA assisted therapy where you extinguish the emotional physiological response to the trauma while you're talking.

Richard Aceves (20:35.094)
right. Yeah. And again, for me, think it's you

Sometimes we do need to hold on to a little bit of that trigger or that event because that's it allows you to adequately look at the environment and go, hey, this isn't safe. But it's interesting because like I'm having this sort of error in communication being a father now, because I think of like I had wonderful parents. Don't get me wrong. They didn't neglect me, but I was a free child, meaning like I would go run in the park by myself like

I was young and I was doing like, you know, going on the trampolines and playing with the kids and going to run off and play with the goats and stuff. And now I look at my kids and I think that watching so much YouTube and like all these failed videos creates a false sense of alertness that doesn't necessarily need to be there. And so I see my kids, was like, and I'm trying to like not be like, what do they call like a helicopter parent where I'm just constantly watching them like having them learn their lessons.

Dr Ed (21:39.403)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Aceves (21:39.704)
But I've seen so much stuff now, because you have such a massive abundance of information coming in when you're scrolling or watching videos, especially for things that you care about, like how do you protect your kid? And because I'm a dad, I watch all the stupid kid fail videos. But now you start to watch and you're like, my God. And so you you like almost flinch because you've seen the fail video and the body like immediately reacts to it. I was like, dude, I was climbing trees and doing all this stuff at their age. Like they need to also learn by themselves. And so I think that that's also what's causing a lot of

anxiety and know, sort of lack of action and a lot of the kids today is that they're just watching all these videos that creates a hyper sense of alertness without ever experiencing that intensity. It's a falsified sense of intensity. And so I think you get that as well as an adult is like you just if you're you're experiencing things without actually experiencing them because you're watching them. So you're having that input without the true physical experience of it.

Dr Ed (22:20.863)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Aceves (22:39.126)
We need to express, need to move, we need to be able to change it actively.

Dr Ed (22:45.099)
It's almost as well, it's it's noise without the signal. So it's like tuning into different radio stations but never choosing a radio station.

Richard Aceves (22:57.42)
Right. Yeah, that's for sure. So things to ponder about. Anywho.

Dr Ed (23:01.099)
Hmm.

Yeah.

So what's next? It's February.

Richard Aceves (23:10.668)
Yes, we have the immersion week coming up in March. So for movie Academy, I'm doing the in-person stuff so people can come and do either a two hour kind of free entry to my guiding principle. We do a weekend long workshop to teach people how to assess coach and look at movement. And then we do a full week immersion where I go into the emotional mapping. go into the nervous system. go into basically everything that you could.

want to know about how I implement all of the methods and principles that we use with Moved Academy and what I use with my clients. We have Movement Ayahuasca in Portugal, we have Bali coming up. We have all kinds of things that are happening. And we're going to be more consistent on this podcast. I feel like I'm finally settled in. It was a chaotic, I think from October.

of last year when we decided to make the move back to California to now. I feel like I just blinked my eyes and we are in February. So now I feel like I'm finally starting to find structure, the house here. Although the house is like fully, we're fully settled and they told us that have to move out in four months and then move back in in four months because they're going to redo all of the piping and the roofing. So that kind of sucks. But yeah, if you guys want to work with me.

I'm doing one on ones now here working with clients in the physical presence moment in Southern California, taking on assessments, online work. I would like to develop and we're still kind of have this sort of doctor at Richard team up where you can go get tested for all of your biomarkers, optimize your health. And then we focus on movement. So the physical, the chemical, the emotional, the spiritual, the mental, all of it all in one.

I think that's all happening right now, man. I'm ready to go train.

Dr Ed (25:07.989)
Yeah. That's fine. That's all we need. I'm going to go eat and we'll try and tune in this time, Wednesday or Thursday next week for everybody. If you have questions, comments, want us to cover anything in particular, you want to come on the podcast and ask us questions or have us ask you questions, if you like that, come do it. And...

Richard Aceves (25:15.928)
Let's do it up.

Richard Aceves (25:21.612)
Yes.

Dr Ed (25:36.765)
I'm busy working on scientific papers and also seeing clients. So if you're in the London or the UK area or in Europe, reach out for help. We can always help.

Richard Aceves (25:49.582)
Have a good one guys, we'll catch you guys in the next episode. Peace.

Dr Ed (25:54.954)
Bye!