Brian
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Ani, how are you?

Ani
I'm dreading today a little bit, Brian. I'll be honest with you. I've been thinking about it all week.

Brian
You've been dreading our story that we're going to do today?

Ani
I don't look so good. I'm going to have to-

Brian
I'll make you look good.

Ani
I'll have to... I just got to give a little bit of my background, too. 

Brian
Well, yeah, of course. Okay, okay. Yeah, of course. Yeah. That's all a part of the story, right? This is all an important- Yeah, as long as I get to tell a little bit of my side, too.

Ani
Because otherwise, I just sound like a complete a-hole.

Brian
Yeah, I don't want to say. Okay, anyway, welcome to this week's episode. This is episode number 80, and this is part two of our Wellness Coaching for Chronic Pain two-part series.

Ani
I loved last week's episode. I mean, I've heard you talk about this stuff for years and years and years, and it's just so fascinating, Brian. I think so hopeful, too.

Brian
Yeah. Last week, we dove deep into the science. One of the things we talked about last week was, even though sometimes the science feels very complicated, and actually, I think it's exciting because I like to see all the connections, but it can feel very complicated. It's a lot. That does not mean that the practices have to be. I like to say that actually the more complicated and the more interactions that you see within the science actually continues to validate how powerful very simple practices are, in my experience.

Ani
Yeah, I agree.

Brian
That's what we're going to dig into today. We're talking as a wellness coaching professional, therapeutic professional, even a person who's dealing with chronic pain yourself, anybody we listed last week as far as, Hey, who is this podcast for? You're going to be able to use these tools to make a difference in your life or in your client's lives, your friend's, your neighbor's lives around the whole idea of chronic pain.

Ani
Yeah, it's such a gift.

Brian
Yeah. We're going to look at this in three basic parts as far as practices are concerned. The first part is the idea of mindfulness. We've done several podcasts on mindfulness. We did one several weeks ago where we talked about going from mindless to mindful.

Ani
I didn't tell you, I got some really great feedback about how people in the community really liked that episode, by the way. I forgot to tell you.

Brian
That's great. Thanks. After this one, go back and listen to that one for more details on mindfulness, specifically. But let's just do a really quick recap. Why is mindfulness helpful with chronic pain? What we talked about, chronic pain is biopsychosocial. Biopsychosocial. It's never just one of those areas. It's also, remember, pain is output, not input. If the output is... Well, it's output - pain. If the determination that the brain is making about the sensory input, if it has to do with threat, remember that was the keyword, the key theme was threat. If the sensations are threatening, then the brain will create pain. Rather than trying to chase the pain around the body, what if we just do what we can do to help decrease the threat?

Ani
Right. Yeah. Watching this happen is so cool. Yeah.

Brian
It works so amazing, right? Because we have... Remember the equation is sensations + beliefs + memories + emotions. Those are the four parts. If you can just take out one of those parts, then it's no longer a threat.

Ani
Yeah. I'm just thinking working with all of those parts for anybody, even people who know what they're doing, is a lot if you had to work with all of that. But like you said, it can be simple.

Brian
Yeah. We're going to work with each one of them. Mindfulness is a great way to start working on these specifically. Because mindfulness, you actually do get effectiveness in the sensory base itself. But you also get effectiveness in the emotional regions. You also do get in the belief regions also. Memories, well, mindfulness, we're not working with memories necessarily, but we don't have to have an effect, apparently, when you look at mindfulness research. What is mindfulness, first of all? Let's just look at the four tenets of mindfulness just to set it up really quick. They are, we practice moment-to-moment awareness. Mindfulness, like we talked about in past podcasts, can be sitting on a cushion, but it can be taking a walk. It can be... You can be mindful making dinner, mindful eating, any of those things.

Ani
It doesn't have to be sitting there meditating in the typical fashion. Right.

Brian
It's so hard for people. Exactly. But we are focusing on being in the present moment, and we keep bringing our attention back to the present moment. We're also practicing non-judgmental witnessing of our self and our habitual patterns of behavior. That story I told last week about when I noticed that frustration was linked in with every one of my chronic pain episodes, that would be that. I wasn't judging myself for being frustrated. Actually, before I realized, I was judging everyone else. How about that? But when I detached and I became a witness, I was like, Oh, my God, look how frustrated I was. That's a practice of mindfulness. By the way, I was practicing mindfulness before this, and that really helped to crack that open for me.

Ani
That's why you could get to that place because you were practicing.

Brian
Yeah, I was practicing mindfulness. I was making it a practice to witness my thoughts by me, at least my behaviors. That's a tenet of mindfulness. Okay, the next thing we do is we disengage. We disengage from strong attachments to beliefs, thoughts, and emotions. Beliefs, thoughts, and emotions. So think about, those are actually the components that go into a chronic pain formula. So if we're disengaging from attachment to those things, we start to disconnect the pain equation. Then finally, we're practicing non-reactivity. Those are the four tenets of mindfulness. Now, there's been a lot of studies done with pain and mindfulness, by the way. When these studies are done, I'm just going to read for you some of the consistent results that happen. This is what happens. It's more than these things. I pulled these out specifically because they have to do with what we're talking about, but they're actually more demonstrable results of practicing mindfulness than just these things. We have decreased perception of pain. Well, there you go. Okay, so check that box. You want decreased perception of pain, practice of mindfulness. Increased ability to tolerate pain. What that means is that when the sensations get higher, you have an increased ability to actually be with them.

Brian
Okay, that's cool. Reduced stress, anxiety, and depression. We talked last time about the threat-orientation makes us feel tighter, more stressed. Safety orientation helps us feel more relaxed. If we're experiencing more stress, that adds to more pain.

Ani
That informs those loops you were talking about.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. With mindfulness, we reduce that. Okay. Diminished use of medication. Wow, so powerful when we think about that. Then enhanced empathy, compassion, and keyword here that we're going to get to in just a bit, interoception. Enhanced ability to navigate with your interoception. So just put that word on a shelf for a second because we're going to come back to it. I do always want to read one of our favorite authors, Jon Kabat-Zinn, who has written several books on mindfulness. He's the father of mindfulness-based stress reduction. Anyway, so one of the studies they did on pain, this was a quote from him. "The process of pain reduction occurred by an attitude of detached observation toward a sensation when it becomes prominent in the field of awareness. And to observe with similar detachment the accompanying but independent cognitive processes which led to evaluation and labeling of the sensation as painful, as hurt." What he's saying is that when you're practicing mindfulness, one of the key elements of this is like a two-part thing. Number one, you are in a detached way observing the sensations that you're experiencing, number one. Number two, you're also detaching from the accompanying judgment of the sensation.

Brian
That's essentially what he's saying in that statement.

Ani
Yeah, which we've seen all the time with our students.

Brian
Yeah. That's why just mindfulness is so core and so key. We say this a lot here that really mindfulness is one of the foundational elements, of I think, of probably most somatic practices. But definitely what we do here at the Somatic Coaching Academy is all underpinned by mindfulness.

Ani
Underpinned everything.

Brian
At the same time, we're not saying, let's sit down and practice mindfulness. But it's a practice that is built into everything that we do here because it's core to this process that Jon Kabat-Zinn is describing. If you're dealing with chronic pain or you're working with people with chronic pain, then mindfulness is a go-to practice that actually cannot be removed. I mean, you can't get around it. If you want to help someone manage, deal with, transcend their chronic pain non-pharmacologically, then mindfulness is on that road. You got to do it, pretty much. You can't go around it. That's something you really need to have awareness of. The next thing I want to talk about a little bit, just I had a note here and it ran away from me. I don't know where it went.

Brian
Where did it go?

Brian
There it is. When we looked at chronic pain, working with people with chronic pain, well, for a long time, we use things like Tai chi and qigong with people with chronic pain. That's our shtick. A lot of people do yoga and those sorts of things. But I wanted to know is what are the commonalities among all somatic practices? Why are somatic practices so important for helping people with chronic pain? Number one, mindfulness, uber important. You got to do that. Otherwise, you're really not going to be able to work with someone holistically. The next thing is somatic practices, uber important. You've got to be using somatic practices with people from a wellness coaching perspective or a non-pharmacological therapeutic perspective. If you want to help people transcend chronic pain, you have to. I mean, that's a part of this process, right? What are the similarities amongst all somatic practices? That's what I want to know. You know what? Somebody wrote a paper on that. That's Andy. There was a paper in Frontiers in Psychology, and Emma Meehan and Bernie Carter were the authors of this paper. They didn't specifically look at Eastern methodologies. They actually looked at more Western-focused methodology, believe it or not, like Feldenkrais and Alexander technique.

Brian
Oh, interesting. Actually, dance was another thing they included in there. They did pull in Tai Qi, they did pull in QiGong, they did pull in a little yoga. But it wasn't just Eastern. It wasn't just Eastern. They're looking at what are the binding factors with all somatic practices. They came up with three basic categories that you have to... If you're doing somatic practices, these are three categories that you must be included. You're working with interoception, exteroception, and proprioception.

Ani
Neat.

Brian
A lot of ceptions there. Let's dig in each one of those. Inception. Inceptions, right? So we have interoception. So interoception are... Well, I'm going to give you the definitions from this study, then we can talk about them a little bit. What they said is that interoceptors are located in the internal organs and soft tissues receiving sensory information concerning internal visceral body processes. So interoception is what's going on in your guts, basically, in your visceral organs, internal body sensors thing, and picking up the interoceptive information and then bringing that into the brain for processing. On a past podcast, I think we've talked about, and if not, maybe I was imagining I was doing this, how ancient interoception is. How ancient? Ancient, yeah. How much older it actually is than our somatic nervous system, our central nervous system. It's because interoceptive nervous systems are actually in organisms that are very, very old in terms of the way they're processed, because interoception is primarily unmyelinated. It doesn't have the myelin fibers wrapped around it. It's not as fast as myelinated fibers, but it brings with it more ancient and raw data of information. There's something about our interoceptive nervous system that is very ancient and has old wisdom associated with it, if you will, our guts, how we intuitively know things in our guts.

Brian
Anyway, I think we did a past podcast on that, but I don't remember exactly which one we were talking about that in. What about exteroception? Interoception is internal, exteroception is external. Here's the definition of exteroception from the study. Exteroceptors found in the skin and connective tissue are responsible for monitoring the outer environment through touch including several kinds of sensations such as pressure, heat, cold, pain, and vibration. If you think about last week, we talked about the four types of sensors, right? Those are exteroceptors. They're actually picking up environmental information from outside of us and then bringing that to the nervous system so that it can be processed. But these sensors are also inside of our skin, too, because if you're touching your skin, you're actually... It's not just on the surface, it's underneath the surface also. But you also have that in tendons and those kinds of things also. You have that information coming up into the nervous system. Then finally, proprioception. Proprioceptors are found in the joints, ligaments and tendons, muscles, and the inner ear, are responsible, are cumulatively responsible for registering movement, balance, and body position in space. That makes sense. When we're doing somatic practices, whatever somatic practice you're doing, whatever you call it, in some way, it is informing and modifying interoception.

Brian
It's informing and modifying exteroceptors, and it's modifying and informing proprioceptors.

Ani
Which is basically all of them.

Brian
Which is basically all of it, which is basically all of the sensory information that's flowing into our nervous system. Remember, the chronic pain equation is sensations plus thoughts plus, I'm sorry, plus beliefs plus memories, plus emotions. Sensations are one of the things that you actually can change in that framework. When you're doing somatic practices, that's that part of the equation that you're modifying and changing. Because if you can change the sensations that someone's experiencing and teach them to consciously alter and modify and reframe the sensations that they're experiencing, now their brain and nervous system gets different input, which creates a different judgment of what they're experiencing, which oftentimes helps you take the fork of the road towards safety rather than the fork of the road towards threat.

Ani
I noticed you corrected yourself when you went to say thoughts, and you said, no, it is beliefs. I'm making my own assumptions about what I think the difference is there, and I'm just curious for you.

Brian
For me, beliefs are what we've been programmed with. Our thoughts aren't always what we've been programmed with. We can get a thought that's a new thought, and that's not necessarily something we're programmed with. But a belief is something that we've been historically programmed with, that we project back out onto the world as we go through the world, making meaning of it before it actually shows up. When we have a sensory experience come up in, we reflexively get filtered through our history, which is our belief systems. Yeah, cool. Is that the way you're thinking about it?

Ani
Yeah, because I was imagining as you were talking that a part of the belief systems actually is how we feel in our sensations.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. How we feel about our sensations. Exactly. Perfect. That's exactly said it better than I did. Okay. So far, when we talk about the practices that a wellness coach or coaching professional, or a therapeutic professional for that matter, can bring to the work that they're doing with people with chronic pain, mindfulness is core to that work, absolutely. And also somatic practices are core to that work, absolutely. Because when we're doing mindfulness, we're actually engaging with the sensations, the beliefs, and the emotions, primarily. Or actually, we're disengaging with them, which is the idea. When we do somatic practices, we are specifically working with modifying the sensory stuff for sure. That's the primary one. Of course, nothing's ever separate, so that's actually going to trickle into some of those other areas. But really helping people to consciously change their sensory base so that they're not a victim of whatever historically they have going on in the loops that are going on in the sensory motor loops. We got to break those sensory motor loops with a new... Create a new pattern. So somatic practices.

Ani
Yeah. I'm just thinking from a business perspective that as a wellness professional, we get to pick what kinds of somatic practices we want to be bringing to our people based on, for sure, what our interests are and also what's going to meet our client base. So one of the reasons why we've developed the core centering program and teach it like we do is it really meets a vast majority of people. It's so unassuming and anybody can do it, and it's easy. As a wellness practitioner, you get to decide what lights you up, and also what's going to meet your clients so that you can have a thriving practice that you love and makes a big difference. Love it.

Brian
It's great. Okay, last bit here. Is what we call sensation-based coaching. I've heard of that. You heard that before, right? I don't know where. Well, let's talk about it. Maybe it'll ring a bell for you. Okay, so sensation-based coaching. I do want to, before we jump into I do want to quote, though, a year long Australian study of health and wellness coaching showed. Here, this is wellness coaching for chronic pain. So that after 12 months in the program, statistically, clinically significant reductions were observed for pain intensity and pain-related interference. What they did in this group is- Okay, what did they do, Brian? Well, they had a group of people that were experiencing chronic pain, and then two groups. One group was the control group. The other group got health and wellness coaching.

Ani
Oh, so they just got health and wellness coaching?

Brian
Health and wellness coaching was a part of what they did. Got you. They had a- not sensation-based coaching. No, not even specifically sensation-based, but just wellness. Just wellness coaching. Interesting.

Ani
It's like coaching.

Brian
That's coaching. We do know that coaching helps reduce pain.

Ani
Well, that would make sense.

Brian
Coaching helps reduce pain.

Ani
A lot of times, coaching works with beliefs and emotions. Exactly. Not everybody works sensations or the ability to help people with threat.

Brian
That's cool. Yeah, very cool. Right? Neat. Okay. Really, what we need to talk about is this idea of when we do sensation-based coaching, what we're really doing is we're helping people to consciously remodel, consciously remodel their relationship with their interoception, with their exteroception, and with their proprioception. Coaching does something. When we do sensation-based coaching, we're taking the coaching processes specifically into a somatic coaching. Right.

Ani
Into a sensation-based remodeling. Exactly. Not all coaching does that.

Brian
Not all coaching does that. Health and Wellness Coaching will do a lot of behavior change, those kinds of things. That can be successful. Coaching can be successful. But if you really want to get into changing interoception, exteroception, proprioception directly, then you need to be doing that through somatic avenue. Sensation-based avenue.

Ani
Yeah, sensation-based avenue. Because when you were bringing up before about somatic practices, too, we're not saying that somatic practices in and of themselves do that remodeling thing. They help a lot. They're not remodeling. That's what we're doing with the sensation-based coaching.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. Okay. Let's even take that a little further, Ani, and talk about complete coach. If you were doing wellness coaching for chronic pain, and you wanted to say that you were doing complete coaching, then you have to be working on all three of these biopsychosocial frameworks. It's a biopsychosocial phenomenon. You have to be working on all those areas, if you're going to call it complete, that you're doing. We're going to work with modifying, remodeling, all of those. When it comes to the body, what's the body or bio strategies? What we do here at the Somatic Coaching Academy is we are really working to consciously modify those sensory motor pathways. We're working the body. Now, we're doing that somatic practices. People, yes, they're moving their body. Yes, they're moving their body in certain ways. They're coordinating their breath and movement, but they're also paying attention to how they're moving. Then we also have a process that we do with them, cross mapping, where they actually consciously remodel their sensory experience.

Ani
Yeah, and then moving farther into that, the advanced strategies that we do in the Somatic Coach Pro program, where they're actually repatterning and working with more than just the sensations, really working with people's beliefs and going deeper.

Brian
Yeah. So that's the next part. So when we talk about the mental emotional strategies, because there's a psychological, right? So biopsycho, we need to really help people to remodify their beliefs and also give them avenues of releasing and processing repressed emotions. That's got to be a part of it. If you're not doing that, you're not doing a complete program.

Ani
Okay, so pause because repressed emotions. Aren't we talking about therapy? Hang on a second, because when you do it from a sensation base, you're doing it in the present moment, and that's not getting wrapped up in past therapeutic stories. Right.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. Present moment. Yeah. Really, what we're working on in the present moment is helping people to disengage from how they are presently associating with their sensory experience. That's what we're doing with coaching. Then finally, the social part. Well, the social part is all about a shift in relational dynamics.

Ani
Where does relational dynamics start? In you.

Brian
Yeah, in you. Between you and you.

Ani
You and you first.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. If you're going to do a complete coaching, I have all three of those things, biological, psychological, sociological. That's what we do here with our sensation-based motivation coaching pro program at Somatic Coaching Academy. We tick all those boxes. And that's why when I'm working with clients that are dealing with chronic pain, why it's so successful in the way we're working with them and our students as well. Yeah.

Ani
And a lot of our students have had prior education, Brian, and they just feel like there's a piece missing. And when people go through the program, actually, it's funny because people go through the program and they say, This is the missing piece all the time. And I have gone through lengths of conversation with folks to say, what is that missing piece? And it's different for everyone.

Brian
That's interesting. It's a different missing piece.

Ani
Because everybody's missing a little bit different piece of the missing piece puzzle, of the complete puzzle.

Brian
That makes sense. Okay, cool. Now it's time for the story. Well, we've got to, I think, to highlight how does this all come together in a real-world experience thing. Do you want to start telling the story? Or do you want me to start telling the story? I'll start.

Ani
We go for it. I'll start. Brian and I had gotten together fairly recently and were blending a family. We had been living with each other for what? Like six months, a year?

Brian
Yeah, something like that. Under a year.

Ani
It had not been a long time. I had recently found coaching. I didn't know what coaching was as a profession, and I had recently found that coaching was a thing. I had joined my very first coaching program. I hadn't even started yet. I was really excited, but also I was told by the people I was studying with that this is a really big deal for a lot of you. When you change subconscious programming, things can come up that try to prevent you from moving forward because your subconscious is going to try to make you stop changing. I listened, I heard that, and I put it somewhere in the back of my mind, and I was getting ready in the morning to go to my very first day of my very first coaching program. I just want to pause for a moment and say, I had no idea at the time how much I was going to fall in love with coaching. I was actually getting emotional. I love coaching so much. It was like the precipice of finding my purpose and who I am in the world and my whole life starting to make sense going to this thing.

Ani
It was a big deal.

Brian
It was a big deal, yeah. This is a big day for both of us. This is like a Saturday.

Ani
It was a Saturday. It was a Saturday. I was getting ready to go. I was making everybody breakfast. We had three little kids at the time. They were probably around 8, 8, and 5. It was also a huge deal that I was leaving the kids in other people's care because I'm a big mama bear and I like to be involved in everything. Also, talk about this one, the kids were going to their teacher's wedding.

Brian
Yeah, they're going to their teacher's wedding that day, and it was my responsibility to take them to the wedding.

Ani
Yes, you were taking the kids to the wedding.

Brian
I was on to take the kids to the wedding.

Ani
I was trusting my new partner with my kids and our kids, going to this thing I really wanted to go to, to go to the teacher's wedding.

Brian
And by the way, she was a friend. She was amazing. Yeah, amazing person.

Ani
Kids loved her.

Brian
The community loved her. It was going to be a big deal for her.

Ani
This was high stakes all around. High stakes.

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
I'm making breakfast in the kitchen. I've got my bags packed. I believe the kids were still asleep. I hear 'Ani' coming from somewhere, 'Ani'. I come and I peek my head into the bedroom. You were on the ground. I thought you were stretching because that's what you do. Yeah. You wake up and you stretch.

Brian
My back went out, and I was on the ground. I couldn't move. I think I just literally got out of bed and put a sock on, put a sock on or something. I don't know. It was something typically for me, it would happen. Sometimes I would just be walking and picking something up off the driveway, and I'd end up on my hands and knees. I don't remember what I was doing, but I do remember I was on the ground.

Ani
This was the first time that I saw you down in my experience with you as a human. I also had never seen this happen to somebody before. My mom had a back episode when I was really young, and I don't even remember it. So this was not in my frame of reference. In my mind, I'm like, Okay, get up. Your back hurts. Get up. I have no preconceived notion of what's going on. So then you say something, "I can't get up."

Brian
I can't get up. My back is in so much spasm. I literally, I cannot move. I cannot get up off the carpet.

Ani
I walked out of the room and I thought to myself, I can't go to my event. That was the belief system that because this is my responsibility, the kids are my responsibility, to some degree, you're my responsibility, I need to stay. This is my role. And some little angel or devil on my shoulder at the moment was like, this is exactly what they warned you against. Something's going to come up to prevent you from going, and this is it. You have to go for you. And it was the first time I think I ever really consciously made in my, especially mom life, a decision for me. And I knew I had to go. I went back in the room and I said, "I have to go to this", and you're still on the ground.

Brian
I was like, Yeah, I know you have to go to it. We called my ex-wife, actually, and my ex-wife took the kids to the wedding.

Ani
No, it gets better, Brian. We call your ex-wife and we say, "Can you take the kids to the wedding?" She says, Yes. Thank goodness. The kids can still go to the wedding. And then, half an hour later, we got a call from her. She got a flat tire. 

Brian
That's right. Yeah, she got a flat tire. I forgot about that. See, I was on the floor, so I missed all that.

Ani
She got a flat tire. And I'm still saying to myself, I have to go, even if the kids miss their teacher's wedding, I still have to go. Who took them? Did she get my ex's car, I think?

Brian
Something happened anyway.

Ani
Somehow. So I pack the kids. I get busy packing the kids in the car who have not had breakfast, who aren't dressed. We're grabbing clothes and things for them to wear.

Brian
Ani leaves me a glass of water and my phone and leaves. Now I am in the house all by myself, which honestly, I don't mind being by myself most of the time.

Ani
I know, but I feel guilty every time I hear this story.

Brian
But it's got a really amazing ending, right? So it was all really important. So I'm absolving you of feeling any guilt. Oh, my God. There's none coming from me.

Ani
And when I hear the things like, This has happened, like you were talking about last week, this thing happened to me before. I couldn't even help myself get to the bathroom. I had no concept of how bad this was for you. Probably, thank goodness, I probably wouldn't have made the choices that I had made had I had some different concept. But I'm still glad that I did because it was amazing.

Brian
Thank God you made the decision you made. Holy cow. So Ani walks out on me.

Ani
I did put a glass of water on your phone.

Brian
With a glass of water on my phone. So now I'm laying on the floor, by myself in the house thinking, I have about a couple of hours, probably before I'm going to need to go to the bathroom, and I have no idea how I'm going to actually get there. So I remember that experience I had a few months earlier, actually. It was probably wasn't that long before that. It was several months earlier, maybe a year earlier, where I had that experience that happened. I had a couple of experiences actually between that pivotal time when I first noticed that frustration in this episode, where I had been practicing a little bit with paying attention and being mindful and that stuff. That's good. Now, all of a sudden, I'm on the floor, and instead of panicking and getting angry and frustrated, I just decided to just start breathing. I started doing what I now call the First Aid for Backs program. I start doing some deep breathing, and I just start doing some coordinated movement, and then I start doing some other specific movements, and I just start to relax. I start to become very, very quiet, very calm in my system.

Brian
My body's freaking out in terms of a lot of spasm and a lot of what I would call pain at the time. But I'm observing it. I'm being very observational, and I'm just breathing and moving and moving and breathing and trying to relax and opening up and doing these little practices on the floor and becoming very present, very meditative and mindful in the practice. And after a little bit, it didn't really feel like that long. It was maybe within an hour of doing some breathing and movement practices, I surrendered. I just surrendered to the process. And as I surrendered, I had this massive flooding come through me of feeling abandoned. I'm wondering why. But it wasn't because of you, Ani. What flooded back to me was back when I was 14 years old, and my grandmother died. That's what it all went back to. It went back to this deep pain around feeling abandoned when I was 14 from someone who was so important to me because the way that she died, I just wasn't able to... I didn't have the skills, I didn't have the support, I didn't have the whatever to process through all of that.

Brian
I had been holding on to that. I had been holding on to not feeling that pain for 27 years. I had been holding on to not feeling or not re-experiencing exactly what I was re-experiencing in that moment of all of that deep pain of feeling abandoned and alone and lost. I had done a little bit of therapy between then and now, and I had done some pretty intense journaling, story writing about that between then and now, but I'd never experienced this depth because I had never allowed myself to get that deep into my body experience. As I'm on the floor just sobbing and just letting all of this flow, and this wouldn't have happened because, ironically, it's all set up with symbolically Ani leaving me, which symbolically sets up that situation of abandonment, which I never hold you responsible for any of that. But I could see all the pieces. It was like the universe knew that in this moment, that that's what I needed in order to get to the depth to release all this stuff. The universe just coordinates things in magical ways. It coordinated it for you to overcome your own inner resistance and the belief and concept you had about yourself to step into your calling as a coach.

Brian
100%. It helped me overcome my limitations and really let go of that deep, deep pain of feeling abandoned that I had been repressing for so long and been masked with frustration and anger about the situation, all that stuff. It was a perfect storm, a wonderful perfect storm. That's exactly how it worked. That's how it works. But here's the story. As I released all this pain and I went through this cathartic process, which again, didn't seem like it lasted very long, maybe another half an hour or something like that. Anyway, within two hours, I got up off the floor and went and used the bathroom. Then I walked two miles. I went outdoors and I walked up and down our road, two miles. I was like, What the heck just happened? I would ordinarily be in bed for four days, five days a week, maybe, not being able to move. I walked two miles. It had a little bit of something lingering there, but it was nothing problematic. And I was just walking around in this, I don't know, this semi-bewildered state. And so Ani texted me, it's like sometimes during the dance, it's how are you doing?

Brian
I'm like, 'You won't believe it. I just walked two miles.' She's like, 'Well, great.' She didn't have any reference for it.

Ani
That's the context. I'm thinking, okay.

Brian
But for me, this is a miracle. It's a miracle. But even more than that miracle was this fascinating nugget. When Ani came back home and she walks in the door, my pain came back. That was the first time I also noticed a whole other thread of my life around how I used illness to get attention. I want to just literally just curl up in a ball and throw up when I say that, honestly, and not as much as I used to.

Ani
It's very relatable.

Brian
But I recognize now that on a subconscious level, how I was using pain and illness for attention because of the family dynamics I grew up when I was young. We're not going to go into all those right now. But I very clearly see why that pattern was in place the way that it was in place. I noticed, Oh, my God, why did my pain just come back when you walked in that door? There's that social piece. There's that relational piece that also is your environment's always activating, whether you realize it or not, it's there all the time activating it. We can just keep going on about this story, but that's my personal story. That's why I feel so called to this work. That's why I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that when we help people transcend their pain experience, we must meet them on all three planes of this, that bio, psycho, social planes, body, mind, spirit. We need to work on all three planes if we want to completely remit what's going on in people's lives. I have never had a back pain episode again associated with frustration since that time, and that was 12 years ago now.

Ani
That's impressive because we have blended a family and built a business together.

Brian
I've injured my back doing other things, like playing pickleball and skiing and that stuff, but never again around one of those frustration-related episodes. That has been completely healed and relieved and released from my life. I'm so incredibly grateful for that. I love to be able to give that gift to other people. Yeah.

Ani
Thanks for sharing this incredible story. Brian, it's just such an incredible story. The way that it's interwoven with everything, I think, is so fascinating. I really appreciate it. Being self-aware enough and vulnerable enough to be able to talk about all those different things so that other people can learn from your experience. It's just amazing. Cool.

Brian
Thank you. I'm so grateful that you're my partner in this journey and that we have had those kinds of experiences together in our life that have helped me to grow and evolve and become really the person I think I've always been meant to be in the world. And you've been a huge part of that. So I just want to thank you for that.

Ani
Thanks, Brian. Okay. Thanks for listening to this one, folks. And we can't wait to hear your comments and your insights from this episode. So if you're watching or listening someplace where you can leave them below, do that. You can leave us comments and insights on social media, and of course, in our inbox at info@somaticoachingacademy.com

Brian
Thanks so much, everyone. We'll see you next time.

Ani
Bye-bye.