Tonka Talk Community and Connection
Welcome to Tonka Talk, the podcast that explores community and connection around Lake Minnetonka.
Nestled near the serene shores of Lake Minnetonka in the Twin Cities, our show is your guide to discovering the inspiring stories of individuals and groups who are crafting vibrant, meaningful community and connection in this picturesque setting.
From lakeside gatherings to community events, from stories of local heroes to heartwarming tales of collaboration, we dive into the ways people are coming together to create a strong sense of belonging.
Whether you're a longtime resident, a newcomer to the area, or simply interested in the power of community, Tonka Talk has something for you.
Do you know of someone creating community and connection in a unique or big way? Share it with us. We would love to hear from you.
Learn more and connect with us at https://www.tonkatalk.com
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Tonka Talk Community and Connection
Unlocking Confidence Through Hypnosis: Joshua Peters Unveils the Science of Subconscious Rewiring
Ever wondered how the power of hypnosis could unlock a more confident you? My guest Joshua Peters from X Factor Hypnosis joins us to unravel the science of hypnosis, showing it's not all about swinging pendulums but rather about tapping into the subconscious to rewire the brain.
This episode is a deep dive into the profound personal changes that can occur when we harness this focused state of relaxation to interrupt anxiety and fear, developing the kind of confidence that once felt out of reach.
Join us, as we share not only knowledge but also the power of personal anecdotes, reminding us that change is always within reach.
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https://xfactorhypnosis.com/tonkatalk
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Hello.
Speaker 2:Hi, natalie. I'm excited to be here. I am so excited to have you everyone. Welcome my guest today. This is going to be exciting. He takes people from self-doubt to unstoppable by helping them to reduce anxiety, build confidence and overcome fears in a very unique way. If you've not been here before, I'm Natalie Webster and this is Tonka Talk, where we share the ways people create community and create connection. My guest today is Joshua Peters from X Factor Hypnosis.
Speaker 1:I love it. Thank you, Natalie. I'm really, like I said, I'm happy to be here and speak with you and your peeps.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if anybody. While we're doing this, we decided to go ahead and do this live today. If you have any questions, go ahead and just throw them up in the chat. I have a million questions myself about this. I know very little about hypnosis beyond what I see in the movies and television. I think of the stereotypical watch my watch swing while you are getting sleepy and something tells me that is not what you do.
Speaker 1:No, I don't even own a stop or a pocket watch.
Speaker 2:How would you describe what it is that you do?
Speaker 1:I think of myself as a coach first and foremost. I kind of approach my work in basically in a three-step process. One of the things that I do, and one of the most important things, is I'm going to teach my clients a bunch of different tools. The thing is that they can do really consciously to interrupt whatever those patterns are, that is, are getting in their way. A lot of times I'm working with somebody with anxiety or with some different types of specific fears or phobias that are getting in their way. These tools are designed, then, to help them interrupt those automatic responses, kind of take you out of I think of it like a fight-or-flight response into a calm response. That's one of the things that I do. But then, if you talk about hypnosis, that's what we're talking about here.
Speaker 1:The next step is really to get at what's the unconscious programs that are running, what is underneath here that is driving the behaviors, the beliefs or the habits that's happening the way that hypnosis does that. We use words, we use visualizations, we use directly speaking to the unconscious mind, metaphors, storytelling there's lots of ways to do that. It's mostly just through my language, speaking to my clients, and they're giving feedback. I'm not taking over their mind. I'm guiding them and getting some more like a coaching process. In the end, it's really very, very simple. There's neuroscience behind it. Can you touch?
Speaker 2:a little bit on that in a way that I can track and understand.
Speaker 1:This track we talk about the problem that alone activates the neurons that are connected to that problem. Think of it like this If you're having tell me about one of your most happy childhood memories.
Speaker 2:That would probably be on the beach at my grandma's house in Hawaii, where she lived. She lived on an awesome beach when I was little and I just loved going there. That's where I learned how to swim in the ocean.
Speaker 1:I can see in your response you're connecting with that moment. You're connecting with those feelings. That's activating the neurons related to that particular time. It brings up the feelings. We talk about the problem which activates the neurons in the problem state Not what I just did with you, but a similar process. Then we use all these different hypnotic techniques to send those neurons down a new pathway, pathway of calm, a confidence of peace of mind. That's how you rewire the brain. That's the neuroscience behind how all types of change work, actually work.
Speaker 2:What is it that adds that step of hypnosis, like you're saying when you're having this conversation and I'm tracking with you on how then that rewires the brain. If you're talking about things, if you're with a client and you're discussing things that are troubling or upsetting things from their past, are you saying that as you address those things and go through it, would you call that in a hypnotic state, or what does that look like?
Speaker 1:It helps, I think, to consider it, to take the word hypnosis away, because that has both positive and negative connotations to it. It's really what we're talking about here is a trance state. We're going in and out of trance states all of the time. In fact, you're probably in a little bit of a trance state doing this recording because you're on. When you just pop back to that moment at your grandma's at the beam, it took you into a particular state of consciousness. That's what we're talking about your different states of consciousness.
Speaker 1:A hypnotic state of consciousness tends to feel pretty relaxed. It's a focused state of relaxation is how it's often described where you now have access to this deeper part of you. Call it the subconscious mind or the unconscious mind. We don't even really know what it is. We know it works. Exactly how it works is a little bit different of a question.
Speaker 1:What it seems to me is it takes you into a more focused, relaxed state where I can say positive things to you now and you're going to really hear them at your core. You're going to maybe have an experience connecting with a younger version of you. That's going to make a huge impact on you. You're going to see yourself going through a situation where, in the past, it used to show up with the challenge, but now it shows up where you're showing up the way you want to, thinking the way you want to think, feeling the way you want to feel. We're building up this pathway. We're thinking of it like a future memory. We're building up how you're going to be Now, when you're in the situation. The pathway is already there and it becomes the default.
Speaker 2:Wow, it really is not this hocus pocus kind of thing. This is actual science. Yeah, we're learning more about building these neural pathways and different treatments and therapies that people do in order to do that. It seems and correct me if I'm wrong that that is really kind of the new cutting edge way of addressing things like trauma, but even what you're talking about with anxiety and those types of issues that rewiring our brains. Wasn't it before? We didn't even know that that was possible.
Speaker 1:There's been so much advances in neuroscience even in just the past, in the past 10 years, but even in the past five years we haven't even really been able to measure how the brain is working until very recently. So now we can see in the brain what's happening in a meditation, what's happening in hypnosis, what's happening in all these different states, like physically. What are the what are, what's firing in the brain where before we couldn't, we couldn't measure that, we were making guesses. So now these things that you could see results happening but nobody really knew how it was working or why it was working, but it worked. Now we're able to measure that and have a much better ability to really pinpoint these things.
Speaker 2:So when you're working with someone and if they're looking at something you know, like when you ask me a question, that was a very pleasant thing to go ahead and remember and recall. If someone dealing with something like anxiety that they know is, you know, tied back to something previously in childhood, the way that you guide them when you're in that trance state, is it easier for that person to connect with those memories.
Speaker 1:So, first of all, if they have a really traumatic memory, I am not going to go back and make them relive it, because there's lots of ways to actually to do this.
Speaker 1:So if I think of somebody that has a say they had a traumatic experience, or I like to think of them as past experiences, just because that's what it really is and we're labeling it as a traumatic experience, but it's really just a past experience. So somebody has this past experience that left an impact and now they're feeling anxious when they're in situations that are sort of similar to that. Yeah, because this pathway is there, what I would do, rather than going back to that memory like we don't have to go back to the memory to activate the neurons All we have to do is talk about the last time that the anxiety happened, and that's enough to light those up, so we don't actually have to go into traumatic events and relive them. I don't want you to have to do that. There's a lot of ways to go through these kinds of processes that don't require us to fully activate a hugely traumatic experience. There's no need to go through that again if we don't have to.
Speaker 2:That makes a lot of sense, especially given how much science and things have changed with what we've learned about how the brain works and how you can actually rewire these neural pathways. It kind of reminds me a little bit of cognitive behavioral therapy with the reframing In other ways too. I was talking with my sister the other day who's doing ketamine infusion therapy and rewiring the brains. Can you tell me? I was looking on your website and it was, of course. Now I'm forgetting what it was called psychedelic integration. Of course that got my attention. Psychedelic integration. Tell me more.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So psychedelic experiences can be very life-changing. That's why people are doing the ketamine. That's why psilocybin is becoming a very much looked at therapy, because what psychedelics do is they create this huge ability of neuroplasticity in the brain. Your brain starts to make all of these different connections in ways that it hasn't done before. It makes it very, very flexible. A similar thing that hypnosis does, too, is it opens you up to a neuroplastic type of experience where things can start to make new connections conform. Yeah, with psychedelics that can last for quite a while after you have the initial medicine.
Speaker 2:I've heard of that People with PTSD even doing these studies with mushrooms and having the benefits way after taking the actual medication slash drug itself Right.
Speaker 1:It's not a medicine that you take every day to a typical anti-anxiety medicine. It's kind of like shutting down emotions and feelings so that you don't feel the anxiety. Sure, if you have psilocybin or magic mushrooms, it's going to create new pathways so that those old pathways have anxiety. They just aren't even working anymore. It's a very different idea, very different way of doing the healing. That's kind of what that does.
Speaker 1:Psychedelic integration. What I've noticed is a lot of people will have these really powerful psychedelic experiences. It's almost like they put them in a box. Okay, well, that was there Over. Here is life. Then, when you're done with this, you kind of go back to life and fall back into the same patterns and things. You may have had some amazing ideas and inspirations and wisdoms that came out of this, but they're not getting applied into life.
Speaker 1:What psychedelic, what hypnotic, psychedelic integration is, is just using hypnosis. We're not using the medicines. This is for somebody who's already had an experience. We're using hypnosis to take you back to that moment, to slow it down, because a psychedelic experience can feel like all this stuff has happened and just soot too fast to really be able to catch it all. So we go back, we slow the experience down, we just pull out what is the learnings, what were the lessons? And then we take those lessons and we apply them in your life.
Speaker 1:Now, what I've noticed doing this with clients is they might have some other kind of challenge in their life that has nothing to do with this, but as we apply this over here, it has everything to do with it. Wow, and they're getting insights, they're getting wisdom from this thing that might have happened years ago and they're getting it now and utilizing it now in their experiences now. So it's just, I'm very interested in trance of all types, including psychedelics and hypnosis and breath work, all the different ways that you can create a trance state, and I'm just fascinated with how we can use these different trances to really empower ourselves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, can you talk a little bit about how using these type of techniques and what you do relates to you know? When you talk about anxiety, let's just kind of start there with anxiety how maybe this type of treatment or hypnosis not necessarily psychedelic integration but the idea of you know doing what you do and working with the people that you work with. It's so amazing to me and I've seen this happen, like I've seen, like I said, my sister's doing ketamine infusion therapy for her PTSD from growing up and being an occult that we were both in and left in adulthood, and she's had a lot of struggles, and especially with anxiety, to the point where it was even hard for her to leave the house.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And she tried. She had done so many different forms of therapy and though it helped her, it didn't seem to really kind of get on top of this anxiety. And she tried different medications and some she still takes too. But this ketamine infusion therapy I don't even fully understand how it works but along with what you're saying, with it rewiring and opening up those pathways, her anxiety level went down tremendously and I was shocked at how quickly it happened.
Speaker 2:It just seems like this is really the way to. You know so much of it. So many people. We deal with anxiety and these fears and it gets in the way in daily life with what we want to do, what we want to be, what we want to create. Can you kind of give some examples of you know kind of how the all my examples go back to? I was in a cult. How can you help me deal with that? But if we get a little more general right in terms of anxiety, how that can help somebody that may be struggling with anxiety because of their past or where they came from.
Speaker 1:I'll give you a couple of different examples of clients that I've worked with. One of them is he's a comedian and he was having trouble going on stage and giving trying new material. That was his anxiety, was he would? He wanted to try new material and so he would plan to do it. He'd have it all written out and he'd go up on the stage and he'd go back to the old stuff that he knew was going to get laughs, that he knew was going to work, and he kept. He was getting really frustrated with himself.
Speaker 1:As we started to work together, it got really clear that this wasn't just anxiety showing up on stage yes, that was kind of where he was really noticing it, but he was dealing with anxiety in a lot of areas of life. So we taught him these tools. We start with the tools. That's the best place to start, because now you have something you can do and the tools they're interrupting the pattern, but they're also helping to create the new pattern. So we start with those tools.
Speaker 1:But then there's things that happen in life that you know it's kicking in the balls, exactly, and then we make something up about it, like we make up about make something up about ourself or we make something up about life, and then we why that happened?
Speaker 1:Yeah, then we act like it's true, and a lot of times this happens when we're kids. And so we are living now for the rest of our life with the belief that something is true, based on what a four year old had, with the resources of four year old had at the time. And we can go, our people go their whole lives holding on to those you know, not those false beliefs, as if they're true. So with the hypnotic work you can, you can release that stuff, you can let that go, you can revisit a moment in life and give that version of you everything that they actually needed in that moment so they can go through it differently. Now, it doesn't mean that we can, obviously can't change the past, but when you do that, it removes all the charge from that situation. It just made, it just was now, it just becomes something that happened. It becomes like he said.
Speaker 2:I'm meaning to it. Yeah, a past memory versus a traumatic experience.
Speaker 1:And in fact, it can become an empowering memory, Well framed in the right way and when you and when you re experience it in a new way, right.
Speaker 2:I got to wrap my head around that one, so it's fascinating. So you're saying, like these decisions that we make about ourselves, who we are or how something is based on things that happen to us, like your example of the four-year-old, and in that moment you make decisions and you have feelings about who you are. We carry those throughout our lives, still kind of stuck in that, through that four-year-old eyes. What you're saying, with this type of hypnosis therapy, with coaching and how you do it, you're opening up the pathways but then also giving people tools to have another way to look at it. But by going through the process you're saying then they could look at these things and it wouldn't be just such this heavy thing, because sometimes they're really hard to look at and it's amazing to me to think that it can't. You know, like what you said, that hit me hard, like when we're children going through these things, how they stick with us. I'm going to just read a comment here. Jennifer says hey, y'all how you. Hey y'all how you. Darlings, oh, I love that Doing today. This subject has always been fascinating to me. I'm surprised there isn't more folks here. You'll get a lot of plays after people get home from work. I bet. I bet too.
Speaker 2:Thank you, jennifer, and for everyone who is with us, if you have any questions, go ahead and put them in the chat, cause while we have Joshua, we may as well ask and get all those questions going. So by all means, send in your questions. Rio for life, this is fantastic information. Thank you, we hope you enjoy it. Nancy, working and lurking that's my favorite thing to do. That would be multitasking. What else can you share in terms of? Are there any type of tools, anything that you can share now or that people can utilize to kind of, you know like, put a toe into this to learn more about it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, there are a couple of really simple things, and you know I'll usually one of the tools I usually teach my clients is a type of breath work that can take you marketing wise. I call it the two minute breathing exercise. That eliminates overthinking, cause it can really do that. It literally will take two minutes to do this process and it can change your life if you make it into a practice. It's a. Can you show it to me now? Yeah, I mean it's simple.
Speaker 1:I'll give you as a gift for your listeners. I've got two gifts, and this isn't. If you go to this website right now, it's not gonna work. But give me an hour and it will be working for you. So just go to xfactorhypnosiscom, slash, talka, talk and it will take you to a place where you put in an email and then it'll give you these two free gifts.
Speaker 1:So one of them, it's a breathing exercise. I'll tell you what it is right now. It's called the four, seven, eight breath and it's essential of it is it's a four count inhale, a seven count hold and then an eight count exhale. So if you think about it, it's really like a quick, deep inhale and then a really long exhale. Now there's some things that make it best practice, but that's the essential. That's the opposite of anxiety. Breath right. Anxiety breath is usually short, shallow up in the top of our lungs, yeah right. And this is the opposite of that. This is a technique that will calm your mind and it'll take you out of a fight or flight response, which is what an anxiety response is down to, kind of an into an alpha state. So an alpha state is like a light meditation or like a daydreamy kind of state Between awake and asleep flow, kind of a state. That's about what an alpha state is and that's the best place to come from when you're dealing with any kind of challenge in your life.
Speaker 2:So you're saying even something that simple if we find ourselves in a fight or flight and really anxious, can kind of help to bring the noise down, yeah, and quiet things, and is there a way? I'm curious about this I don't want to get too technical because I want to be able to understand it, yeah, but I'm curious as to what is that correlation between, you know, breathing and slowing down our breathing and slowing down our mind at the same time, Because they definitely seem to go together. And I know when I've experienced anxiety and I've had a couple of panic attacks and it just that I mean you hit the nail on the head the way you breathe is so different. It's almost like you can't get air. Just this, ah, ah, ah kind of a thing.
Speaker 1:Breath is the only automatic part of our body, an automatic part of our nervous system, that we have any control over. We can't control our heart rate, we can't control our sweating, our temperature. I know that Right, but you can control your breath. Now what people forget is that they can control their breath and what tends to happen is our emotional state shifts our physical state. But our physical state can also shift our emotional state. So by slowing down your breath, that starts to slow down your heart rate, that starts to get you out of your head back into your body where you're present, because when you're in an anxiety state, you're not present.
Speaker 1:You're spinning down made-up stuff, what-ifs, worries, all those things, making up stories about what's about to happen or what might happen or what did happen, and digging into it and really feeling into it. And I'm just feeling it and forgetting that we have some control over all of that, because you were able to access that positive memory, just like that. We can do that in those moments too. If we can interrupt the pattern, if we can interrupt the automatic response we can take out that's a great way to make a change is, when you find yourself in a spiral, interrupt it, use the breath technique and then think of a moment when you were just happy and go into it so that you can really feel it in your body. That alone is going to rewire those neurons. Because, if you think about it, what we did was we activated the neurons, we changed state and we sent the neurons on a new pathway.
Speaker 2:That's the change work right there, that makes sense. Nancy Alley has a question. During this therapy, is there a chemical response when you bring people back to an event from the past?
Speaker 1:So well, I'm not measuring that in my office and I don't know how much of a chemical response there would be when I'm taking, when I want people to kind of bring up that memory, I'm only doing it enough to get those neurons activated. So I'm not going to take somebody deep into a traumatic experience. If we did and they got thrown into fight or flight, yes, they're going to have adrenaline flowing through them. They're going to have the stress hormone cortisol is going to be flowing through them. They're going to be filled with the cocktail of chemicals which is what happens when you're in an anxious response. So I'm not trying to get that deep. I want to bring you just enough to get the neurons activated, but not to go into that fight or flight response.
Speaker 2:Which is so amazing because in the past traditional therapy has really been that kind of let's go dive into these and relive these memories. I know that when I started learning about neuroplasticity and being able to rewire your brain, I found it so fascinating and helpful and I actually had neurologists two neurologists at the University of Minnesota not suggest but tell me that they now know these things can be done, and especially with people with trauma in their past PTSD, a lot of anxiety and depression and it just blew my mind because it was a little overwhelming at first. Because at first they're like therapy and really feeling your feelings and processing these things. Because in my situation they'd asked me if I'd ever been in the military because what was going on with me and the way it was physically affecting me. They often see in veterans people who've done multiple tours of duty and I hadn't said anything about growing up in a cult yet or anything like that Usually my opening with a new doctor. So then I told them a little bit about it and they're like, yeah, and those things need to be processed.
Speaker 2:And the first thing I thought it was I don't have the time or the energy to go back and relive these things Cause I wasn't understanding exactly what they were saying. But they were basically saying what you're saying here. The science behind it has more to do with activating the neurons and giving them new pathways when it's not necessary to heal from this to have to go relive the whole thing. Well, that got me super excited. Jennifer says I suffer from chronic pain and I have fibromyalgia and CRPS and I use color therapy literally coloring Me too, girl. I use pencils and other things like breathing techniques. What do you recommend for pain? Ooh, that's a great question, jennifer.
Speaker 1:So there are what I would suggest. As far as pain is a couple of things. If you don't have a meditation practice, I would start some kind of mindfulness practice. First of all, Something else that's been really helpful for some of the pain clients that I've worked with, and you know, this is this doesn't work for everybody. I don't know if this will work for Jennifer or not, but consider calling it instead of pain oh, I just lost my word Call it.
Speaker 2:Kind of like how you were talking about too, with these past traumatic experiences and referring to them as past experiences.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because you, as you work through it and you rewire and you send these neurons somewhere else, that there's truth in that, Because there's things that I can even look at in my past, where some not so much, but there are some that definitely at the time and later I thought, oh my gosh, that's massively traumatic, I don't want to look at that, and then, through different work, was able to look at it and then talk about it, and I think sometimes that's why I'll.
Speaker 2:The more people that I got to know outside of my cult I grew up in Scientology and left. As I got to know people outside of that I would share, not in a way of like, oh, here's this traumatic experience. I would just be like, oh yeah, well, this, this, this happened, but, very matter of fact, and the look on their face told me this is not normal. I almost had the opposite problem, in a way of not recognizing certain things as being undesirable or traumatic because I was so used to staying in a ride or flight, yeah, yeah, so do you think with pain? It's similar in those ways of how we're framing it.
Speaker 1:Well, if you think of it as how much pain am I feeling today, your brain is going to go towards okay, look for the pain, how heavy is it? So, if you shame I can't think of the word I was trying to come up with, but I've got a different one instead. So, instead of how much pain am I feeling, ask yourself okay, what's my level of comfort today? Ooh, I'd be a one, and that's okay. But just by doing that, you're shifting. What are you focusing on? Are you focusing on the pain or are you focusing on the comfort? Whether or not it's, at, you know, a one or a 10, doesn't even really matter. It's the, it's the reference, the frame of reference that you're using or the lens that you're looking through in that moment.
Speaker 2:Is that because because I definitely believe we get what we focus on, but does it follow that type of universal truth of we get more of where we put our attention, to our attention only on the pain, very much like that, yeah.
Speaker 1:And also, if you're like, for instance, don't think of a pink elephant, what's the very first thing you do Think of a pink elephant, think of a pink elephant? You first have to think of a pink elephant to put it away. So if you're like saying I don't want to feel pain First, your, your mind goes okay, what's pain? Okay, let's not feel that, but you first had to grab it to figure out what it was before you could let it go when. If you're like, I'd like to feel some more comfort today, what's comfort? Like, yeah, that's what I want more of. Right, so it is. It is, yes, what you focus on is what you get more of, but it's also like how the brain actually works to with language. So let's use language to our benefit.
Speaker 2:Can you give me some examples of that? What you mean by that?
Speaker 1:Well, that was an example right there. Another example I see from a lot of people is they talk about like if I was a client and I'm talking about my anxiety or my pain or my OCD or whatever it is, they they're. It's almost like they they're owning it, they're claiming it as theirs. But it doesn't have to be theirs, doesn't have? You don't have to claim it, you don't have to like hold on to this thing you don't want so tightly. So it doesn't mean now I'm not saying that you're not experiencing that, but if you start to just shift it from my pain to the discomfort I experience, or my anxiety to the anxiety that I'm feeling, it is do you see the difference in how that, how that, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's kind of like how we you know people used to refer to autistic children versus children with autism, like just kind of switching the wording there. So you're saying going from saying my pain and the and all of the anxiety, all of my anxiety, switching that to the pain I experienced or the anxiety that I've experienced.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, language is powerful.
Speaker 2:That is really interesting. Is that a large part do you find of what you do, really kind of reworking the language around it?
Speaker 1:It comes up with nearly everyone, and sometimes it's around that Sometimes there's some words that we use. I think of them as disempowering words like have, to need to, should, would, could, even wants to. All of those are implying that you can't have the thing, yeah. And you know, or you're going to rebel against it, or somebody's telling you you need to do this, and I always think. I always say well, you know that's what your dad says. And how well does that work?
Speaker 2:But how's that working for you?
Speaker 1:So you'll always say so, ultimately, really, we make choices and everything that we do is a choice that we make.
Speaker 2:Now Jennifer says yes, you frame it different. Thank you, I get what you're saying. Well, it's hard to do when your doctor wants you to do pain scoring in a pain journal. I understand that. I think the pain journal is making it worse.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, tell them. Uh, I'm not going to do a pain journal but I'll do a comfort journal, right, yeah, I would say one of the biggest that that pain scale thing that doctors give is, in my opinion, a very bad way to help somebody move past pain. It's a hypnotic suggestion. Doctors are not going to have anything against doctors. But I don't think they understand the power of their words. I don't think they understand how deep of an impact the things that they say can actually mean to their patients.
Speaker 2:I think you're really right. Do you think that science is catching up today and medicine is catching up more with that concept of that? The words that we use are very powerful Because I feel like I've heard these concepts in you know, in other, when you learn about meditation and other types of work, but I'm hearing it in the medical community now. That's what really blows my mind is everything that you're saying. I've heard from at least three different neurologists and every single one encouraged meditation, which really made me take another look at it, because these are neurologists, I mean, who are really good neurologists too, and a part of this, their healing process with neurological issues and what was going on with me is that type of thing.
Speaker 2:And what you're saying about the words is so interesting because the whole system and, as Jennifer was sharing too, it's so set up to reinforce those things and I know often I've, luckily, fortunately, I found a really good primary and I like my neurologist now too, and they really kind of have more this point of view and I found I got dramatically better in going going along that route and doing that reframing work and realizing and recognizing basically what you're saying, that these aren't things that I have to hold on to or that I even necessarily need to experience that it doesn't. You know, I think this was a question I had. As you go through the process, do you see with your clients, does it get easier to work that muscle of being able to control, you know, kind of get these emotions back under control and manage the anxiety? Is this something that over time gets better?
Speaker 1:It both of those things. So typically I'll give you an example of I mean, this is a relatively simple one, but say fear of flying. So that's an anxiety, yeah, and a lot of times the way that it shows up is for weeks ahead of the flight. The person with that fear is thinking about it, is worried about all their checking the weather. Is this going to be a? Is there going to be a storm? Like how am I going to manage this? Figuring out how they're going to take some medication? Maybe they're going to fly a day, a day ahead of their meeting, so that they'll be clearheaded when they actually meet people. But now they've got to add a couple of days on the like. There's a lot that goes into this and they're right. So what? And so let's say we've done this work and I always I require somebody with a fear of flying to have a flight before we're done working together to make sure that we've cleared it up so that if there's anything else we need to deal with, we have the opportunity to still do that. But what typically happens is they they're getting closer to the date they're noticing okay, that's interesting, I'm not feeling that anxiety that I used to feel I'm kind of excited about this trip. Okay, and they're, and they're almost they're like waiting for the anxiety to show up. They go to the airport, they are in the line, they're, they get to their, all the things that used to happen just don't happen and they come out of it completely surprised. So that that can. That's a good example of kind of in the moment, but a lot of times anxiety because it's a little bit more like that's a, that's an on-off kind of a of an anxiety.
Speaker 1:Either I have the fear of flying or I don't have the fear of flying. In a more generalized sense, what tends to happen is you might go through an experience where in the past you had the old anxious feeling and you get through it. You don't even realize until hindsight that you got that you showed up differently. So sometimes it's just, it just happens. Usually, through the time that I'm working with somebody from week to week, they're going through experiences where in the past they they didn't show up the way they wanted to and now they are yeah, or it's halfway there. They did pretty good, it was less of a challenge, and every one of those, the way I like to approach this is finding those specific moments in time, right?
Speaker 1:So that's how you access the neurons by a moment in time. So if you tell me I am always anxious, there's nothing to hold on to that. That's a nebulous cloud and I think about it kind of like a tabletop. So anxiety is this tabletop and if we try to just smash the tabletop we're going to break our hand. But the legs are what's holding this thing together, and the legs are. Last week when I went to the store and that person said that thing and it triggered me. That's a leg, that's a moment that we can now reframe, go through like literally shift. How do you want to be going through this and make that new experience real, bringing up the neurons, sending them down a new pathway and chop down that leg. We do that enough times and the whole table just falls apart and then it doesn't affect you anymore.
Speaker 2:So it's like karate, kid swipe the leg.
Speaker 1:Something like that.
Speaker 2:Now can you? One thing I'm wondering about too, because I don't have a, if there's kind of a simple answer to this what are neurons? You know, I've used the word neurons and all this stuff, but I realized like I don't really. I don't really kind of know exactly what that is. Is there like a?
Speaker 1:lot of impulses. Okay, so they're like a brain and they're connected through what's called synapses, which are like spaces between them. So that's how that's. A pathway is neurons connected to neurons through synapses in the brain. So when you say pathway, or a rut or pattern, or however you want to describe it, that's what we're talking about. Is these neurons in the brain.
Speaker 1:There's tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of neurons in the brain, but they're also are only a certain amount, which is why the brain looks for those pathways, strengthens the ones that are getting used, weakens the ones that aren't getting used. It's always trying to recycle and trying to be efficient, trying to be effective, but it gets. The problem is it doesn't know. Is this pathway letting you thrive or not? It doesn't really care, it's just trying to be efficient. So, is the pathway getting used? Well, let's strengthen that. So what tends to happen is anxiety, whatever or whatever right fear, whatever it is. It starts in a maybe a very specific area and over time, because it's getting used, it's getting stronger, it starts to spread across life in different ways.
Speaker 2:That makes so much sense. It just really seems so much more simple than it is, but I think that's kind of the truth of it. But I'm so thankful that modern medicine and scientists catching up to how our brains work and how we can actually do this, because you're saying the brain doesn't know the difference. It's just looking for a clear path and one that's strong, and it'll make it stronger. So if you're using a path, the results in behavior, actions or an outcome that you don't want but that's what you're focused on the brain will reinforce by putting those neurons on that path Correct, and then the other one that might be the more desirable one. So now it makes more sense to me, too, with what you're saying in terms of how words matter.
Speaker 2:The words that we use currently do make a difference, and that's something that I've thought. I've learned a lot about that more lately and I've been fascinated with it, because you hear like well, you know, you shouldn't say I have this or that, as if that's like you know, I'm holding on to all these things that I don't want, but change your wording around it, which gets funny because when we're kids, sometimes you know, teachers would say well, you know, just try to refocus you on something. Refocus you on something, something that's different. It's absolutely fascinating to me. I'm going to make sure I put that link in the show notes after where people can go to get those those two items. Can you share about that again?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the link is xfactorhypnosiscom slash TonkaTalk and there's going to be two free gifts in there.
Speaker 2:I'll do it now, but it will be in a little bit.
Speaker 1:I'll do it. As soon as we get off this call I'll set it up. So the first one is that relaxation breath, that relaxed breath that I talked about early on, and I've got a video that walks you through it. I've got written instructions that walk you through it, give you some of the best practices and kind of let you have the experience, tell you it, tells you how to best use this in your day. That's one of the gifts. The second one is a hypnotic guided meditation. It's 10 minutes long and it takes you into a relaxed state in just about 10 minutes. The idea behind that is the relaxation response. Just going into a relaxed response starts to activate healing in the body.
Speaker 2:So is that why we feel so much better often when we're on vacation or you go up to a cabin, you go to a beach, you go to a lake, you change your environment and I think with most people we immediately just kind of melt.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you just get into where you relax. Is that why?
Speaker 1:And then that's certainly one of the reasons for sure. Like, the nervous system has two parts. It has the sympathetic, which is fight or flight, and then it has rest and digest. That's parasympathetic, and this rest and digest. That is where we want to be. That is going to let you function at your highest level. It's going to give you the most resilience so that when you're even in a high stress situation, if you're coming from here, you're just going to just be able to respond the way you want to, in a calm, relaxed way. That's going to be functional, instead of the automatic reaction where you're anxious and you're not even really functioning anymore. That's fight or flight, that's just survival. I got to get through this or I'm going to die.
Speaker 2:It really puts so much power. It empowers people. That's what I like about it and the type of work that you're doing, because it just gives people an opportunity to, like you said, just even with that simple thing those breathing techniques to just lower that fight or flight and be able to be more in control of the situation and be more present about it. Because, you're right, when we're in that fight or flight, we're not being present. We're actually over here thinking of all the reasons why this is happening and what an idiot I am, or this is all the knowing, all the things that are your way is, yeah, wow, absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1:I spent a lot of years of my life feeling disempowered and I've made it a high priority to be empowered and to help other people find their own empowerment. That's my jam.
Speaker 2:I like it. I like it. That's absolutely amazing. I'm going to again. In the show notes I'll share where to be able to reach you and learn more and that link as well where people can go to get two free gifts. If you're listening to this on the podcast for Tonka Talk, you can go ahead and watch the video over on Facebook on the Tonka Talk Community and Connection Facebook page. If you're watching this on Facebook and you want to listen to it later, you can always go to the Tonka Talk podcast.
Speaker 2:Again, we share the ways people create community and connection. Oftentimes that starts with taking care of ourselves, because I feel, at least in my experience, the more I could be in a better place, the better I can show up for other people, and the happier that I was, the calmer that I can be, the better I can be in my community. I think these conversations are really so important and there's so many people that are struggling with these things that we all do. I love having the conversation about it. Thank you so much, joshua, for joining. Thank you everybody for joining us who joined us over in the live on Facebook. If you haven't already, please make sure you like and subscribe to the channel Really appreciate it. It helps out a ton. Always bring your questions, joshua, thank you, hold tight, and everyone else. I will talk to you later.
