Increase your Capacity for Change: Let your Body Lead

Your life can look fine on paper and still feel unbearable in your body. That disconnect sits at the heart of our conversation with Shannon Eastman, founder of the HOSA Institute and co-architect of Human Operating System Architecture (HOSA). 

We talk candidly about what happens when years of personal development, mindset training and “doing all the right things” still do not create change that holds, and why that is often a capacity problem rather than a character flaw.

We unpack capacity as biological and physiological bandwidth: the internal space that lets you take a hit, process it, and carry on without collapsing into shutdown or burning everything down in defence. Shannon shares the HOSA governing equation for recovery capacity (total energy minus (biological load plus threat load)) and explains why the body’s top priorities are survival and safety, not your goals and thriving. That framing makes burnout, chronic stress, anxiety, brain fog and trauma responses easier to understand, because they are often the system reallocating energy towards protection.

We also get practical. We discuss chronobiology and circadian rhythm as overlooked levers for nervous system regulation, why light and darkness shape serotonin and melatonin, and how simple breath patterns with a longer exhale can signal safety and bring repair back online. 

If you’ve felt stuck despite insight, this will give you a clearer map and a kinder next step. Subscribe for more conversations like this, share with someone who’s running on empty, and leave a review with the one idea you’re taking into your week.

You can find out more at:
NB3: Forensic Clarity for Persistent Problems

 HOSA: Training in System Design for Change That Holds

https://www.shannoneastman.com/

Podcast: Who Turned The Lights On?

and connect with Shannon on LinkedIn

Thank you for listening and taking the time to explore our podcast.

Earthaconter: Connection, Exploration and Expansion
www.earthaconter.org

Transcript

Opening And Introducing Shannon

Lyn Man 0:01

Welcome to I Am Enough, the space where we explore journeys back to our forgotten birthright of enoughness, to draw a natural wisdom along with awareness, acceptance, and compassion, to support each of us on that journey and embrace our wholeness. Despite what society tells us, each one of us is enough exactly as we are. My name is Lyn Man, and I'd like to welcome you to this space where we explore enoughness, people's journeys along the path to feeling I am enough, and look at what can support each of us on that journey. Hello and welcome to another episode of I Am Enough, the space where we embrace our wholeness. So today I have with me Shannon Eastman, and I'm really excited to actually have this conversation. I have no idea where it'll go, but Shannon has created a lot of work around the nervous system intelligence, and I know it's got a different name now, which I'll come to, but her interest in human behavior began around the age of 12 when her father offered her 10 Canadian dollars to write a summary of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. A hundred dollars later, she'd written summaries of a number of other personal development books, and her interest in this area continued to evolve. Over time, Shannon noticed that insight and mindset work did not really produce a change that holds. This led her to study complex trauma and nervous system regulation and a whole pile of other things as well. She then expanded her focus to understand the design of the whole system. Her work today is grounded in lived experience and science, having applied the same principles to create the kind of change in her own life to resolve patterns at their root, restore capacity, and build a system that can hold growth without collapse. Shannon is co-architect of the Human Operating System Architecture, HOSA, and founder of the HOSA Institute, which trains practitioners in HOSA. She's also host of the podcast Who Turned the Lights Off and author of Nervous System Intelligence, the Science of Growth. You can find out more at mb3.io and hosat hinstitute.com. You can also connect with Shannon on LynkedIn. So thank you for joining me today, Shannon. It's really great to have you here.

Shannon Eastman 2:49

Thank you. That was a lovely introduction. I had forgotten some of those parts, so it was nice to be reminded. Thank you for that. I'm so looking forward to this. It's been a long time coming, and thank you for your patience in allowing this time and space to evolve organically instead of what I think we planned a couple months ago and then we moved it. So yeah. Happy to do that.

Lyn Man 3:15

Oh no, you're welcome. And yes, it has been a while in coming, but you know, it's it happens in the timing it's supposed to. And I know you've you've had you've actually run your first training of this. And we can we'll get back to that later on, because I'd love to hear what came out of it. But at the moment, I just want to start with, and this is something you have written on your website, behavior change depends on the available capacity. When capacity becomes constrained, it reorganizes around protection, efficiency, and survival rather than growth. And it's interesting, it's that word capacity that really jumps out at me. And I would love to understand from your own experience in your life how you started to realize that, and going back to what we said, that insight and mindset work alone doesn't create that change. But how did you start to understand in your own life how key capacity was, and actually what capacity

Why Capacity Beats Mindset Alone

Lyn Man 4:30

was?

Shannon Eastman 4:33

Well, what a question. We don't typically appreciate it in the moment, but of course, as we look back, we're like, oh, that's why. That's why. Capacity, it's the next zeitgeist. Nervous system regulation zeitgeist is probably 80% through its course.

Lyn Man 5:01

Yeah.

Shannon Eastman 5:02

Capacity will definitely start popping up everywhere. So I want to acknowledge that there is foundational grand zero capacity. And then there's all sorts of other capacities that emerge from that ground zero. And if we call the grand zero biological capacity, physiological capacity, it is the part of the body that has the capacity to sustain the thinking self, the emotional capacity, the leadership capacity. But it really does start with physiological capacity.

A Public Breakdown And Wake Up

Shannon Eastman 5:45

And I guess for me, the it's a pretty typical story, I'd imagine many of your guests would have, probably the person listening right now, mindset was my thing, neuroscience, behavioral science, until about 2018. I had been studying under Dr. John Dimartini for years, years and years, and was a very good student and had many extraordinary experiences, which led to an invitation to open for Dr. Dimartini at the Westbury Hotel in Dublin, which I should have said no to, but I didn't. And I went and opened for Dr. Dimartini. I walked from Rathmines into the city center and had a few whiskies and smoked a pack of fags and did not care. I didn't care who knew. I didn't care that I wasn't able to hide it anymore. But I was entirely coming apart at the seams and couldn't explain why. I had done everything I was told to the degree that I am a sounds crazy, but I am a global case study that John tells from the stage around the world and has done for years. And yet I had never been more suicidal or desperate to not be here as I am knocking back whiskies on my way to the Westbury Hotel to open for. I mean, it was it was crazy. I don't know what I was thinking, but I wasn't thinking. I was still, you know, mind over matter. If you just focus, focus is everything. It's it's so I humiliated myself. And I left the Dimartini world that week. And I shipped all my books off to a charity shop, and I was looking online for a property in Portugal on top of a mountain, preferably, because the only thing that I would find comforting in those moments was entirely self-isolating spaces. I could no longer cope being around with people. And any stress from or any interaction with people would cause so much strain on my body at that point that I would need up to three days of bed rest to recover from the stress. I just couldn't move anymore. The backdrop to that is uterine cancer conversations and adrenal failure conversations a couple years prior. So I was definitely headed in that direction. So I'm finding places in Portugal. I had a mate who just got a bought a house there with his girlfriend. I was very much making my move. And someone said, Will you come to this webinar with me? And I was like, No, I won't. I am so done. I'm so over it. Because for me, that week leaving the Dimartini world was me sitting on my couch, talking to myself, and giving my percep myself permission for the first time in my life to stop. Just stop. It's stop. I couldn't go further, and I needed to be okay, that I had done everything I could to fix and change my life to the best of my ability. And it wasn't, it's it wasn't working. So I had no interest going to this webinar, and yet here I am in another webinar, this time with Dr. Gabor Mate. And two brain scans went up on the screen. They were five-year-olds. There's a very famous image, actually. I didn't realize that at the time. But the two five-year-olds, one was from a loving home, and one was from a home of neglect. And the child from the neglected home had up to 40% less access to function and up to 35% smaller in size. And I remember thinking, oh my God, how do I grow my brain back? And I it was my first term that I put into Google, Google back in the day, it's not Google anymore. And to fast forward, it would be 2020 when I would leave corporate officially and go on this journey of getting my master's in same. And researching full-time as a student, unemployed. And I would reach this intersection of capacity and go, what is that? What is that? And capacity, biological, physiological capacity, which is the godfather of all other capacities, in my opinion, is the physiological space that allows you to experience a knock in life. And instead of collapsing into a heap in the corner or burying yourself in a bottle of whiskey, you go, oh, that's interesting. And you carry

Brain Scans Trauma And Turning To Science

Shannon Eastman 11:15

on. The stressor, if we can call it a stressor, it doesn't penetrate your personal life in any significant way. Because there is so much internal biological capacity that it's just information. It's a data point. And there's no distortion or friction created inside you that causes you to, I will use the word recoil in my case, only to spring back with a fist in defense and protection and survival to further jeopardize your relationships and your position in life. So that's the capacity story, the first time I've ever told it. But that's the gist of it.

Lyn Man 12:07

Well, thank you so much for sharing that and is an incredible story. And I think it it there's so much that you shared in there. And and to you know, I think if we go back to that, actually we just keep going and keep thinking, i it's that searching for a fix, isn't it? As in the next thing will fix us, it's that magic pill. I have to just keep going, I have to just keep doing. And what you shared was actually, and I think it's really important, that stopping and giving yourself permission, because so often we don't give ourselves permission. And I know for myself, I got a diagnosis of fibromyalgia back in 2020, which again is nervous system and came from just years of pushing, having to go and putting pressure on myself, which is what you're describing. It's that pressure to just keep keep going and thinking and and that that image, you know, what you're describing is being held up there, an image of being the the poster girl, and inside you're and you're feeling like you're anything but and so I Shannon, I so appreciate you sharing that because I think it's a story that a lot of people can relate to and that keeping going. But coming back to capacity and and having that capacity to to be able to move on. And so just again coming back to your realization of how important this is, and what you're describing is that it's the biological capacity. So if we don't have that in place, then the rest of it we struggle. And I I remember one time having a conversation with someone I was working with at that point in time in a startup, and realizing that actually what was happening was if you looked at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we were doing it in reverse. We were ignoring the absolute baseline needs and focusing on the very top layers of it. And and I think it it's interesting how life in a way times encourages us to do this, or there's something in us, I guess, that encourages us to do it. So coming back to biological capacity, what like what is it when it comes So you've described it high level, but what does it really come down to?

Shannon Eastman 15:46

Well, I'd have to borrow from HOSA, if I may, human operating system architecture, a name that this work carries today because, and and this is part of the story of why biological, physiological, I'm trying to put the body front and center. How we got here, um when I saw those two brain scans, which I have a poster of them right there, printed them, I've taken them to conferences and workshops, I just hold up these brains. I was like, oh my goodness, CPTSD, that is it, that is everything, and off I went in, let's say, 2020. And then as you move your way through the CPTSD field, you're like, oh, trauma-informed. And so then we all get trauma-informed. And I went and trained in polyvagal theory, and I uh you do the thing, right? And then trauma-informed became I can't talk about uh nervous system regulation and not mention Roseanne Riley. Uh, she's an Irish woman in New York, and she is probably one of the most formidable, competent, extraordinary master practitioners of individuals, adults with CPTSD in the background that I've ever met. And I've interviewed 453 therapists and doctors over the years, Roseanne Riley. And so Roseanne and I hung out for a good few months. My goodness, what an extraordinary woman. And in one of our conversations, I think she said something just off-handed, and I was like, oh my God, nervous system informed. What did you just say? Because that felt bigger than trauma-informed. CPTSD is a subcategory. Trauma-informed is a subcategory. Nervous system informed felt like the next layer up. And it is, and it was. And so nervous system informed, I was like, Roseanne, that is, that is everything. And so off I went into nervous system regulation and autonomic this and parasympathetic this and all over it. And then what I was looking for was the edges of this work. I was like, I have to feel the edges in my hands. I have

HOSA And The Whole Human System

Shannon Eastman 18:10

to get to the edge of what this is. Because I felt like I was climbing this staircase. And so nervous system intelligence, as far as I'm aware, with the exception of a mobile app, I came up with that about a year later. And I was like, oh my God, nervous system intelligence, it makes so much sense. Daniel Goldman's emotional intelligence. And so I was like, it must be nervous system intelligence. So off I went. I wrote the book, Nervous System Intelligence, The Science of Growth. And I was continuing to do my research. And I am getting to capacity, but this is the work. This is what happened to get me there. Nervous system intelligence became too small very quick. And I was like, what is going on? How like how? Where how much how much bigger does this get? So then I thought to myself, you know, every science kind of has truth. But then I was like, what they have is a piece of the truth. They have a fraction of the truth. And then I started looking at how the science and academic industry was set up and how it operates and what its goal is. And I was like, okay, so we have and now I'm starting to understand conventional science. And everything else is kind of shoved over into emerging science. And pharma and insurance companies largely fund conventional science and don't fund emerging science. So I was like, okay, this is interesting. So then I started looking at pieces of truth that reflect a piece of the human. And I was like, but we're whole humans. Like we're whole. How does neuroscience feel so confident in what they share with us? Well, it's truth. What they offer us is powerful and extraordinary. But it applies to one of our biological systems. Now that happens to influence a lot, but it's typically our CNN, our central nervous system, prediction models, if you will. So at one point a couple years ago, I went, all right, let's throw all the science pieces on the table and let's separate them all out and piece them together like a tapestry and see what happens. And so nine different fields of science put on the table. This is why it's taken me years. And no working and no doing anything else, just piecing all these things together. And now I'm coming back into HOSA. And that's important to distinguish because HOSA was developed first through academic and scientific papers. I am a co-architect with Dr. Joshua Rosenthal. He is a physicist, a physician, a surgeon in New York, and Dr. Abrar Hussein is one of the first doctors I interviewed years ago. He is a consultant psychiatrist in the NHS in Berkshire. So we respect and appreciate deeply conventional science. And it's almost like the pillars we get to stand on top of. They gave us so much value, but we also respect and appreciate their limitations and how they're designed. And narrow specificity focus is super important to advancing science. And so it doesn't make sense for them to go broad in general when it comes to advancing things like DNA marker or. Genetic manipulation with CRISPR, I don't want to start using acronyms, but cellular biology-related materials. And so you're like, okay, I understand and appreciate that conventional science is very narrow and focused for very good reason, but that also provides limitations for people like you and I. So then when we look at the emerging science, we can see that there are clinicians and doctors who are in real-world lived experience seeing the limitations of conventional science and looking for solutions. And those solutions don't tend to go through the same process, empirical process, as maybe conventional science would. So it's we need to hold them in different categories. You need to recognize what is conceptual and clinical versus empirical, et cetera, and understand the weighting. So I'll stop talking about the differences there. HOSA emerges from both. And so HOSA brings a very particular lens, which is supporting the human condition to reliably create change that holds. I think I did Dr. Dimartini's program 17 times.

Lyn Man 23:18

Wow.

Shannon Eastman 23:19

And I had extraordinary results. In 2015, I ran out of people to do the Dimartini method on. And I said to John, I've run out of people, but I am so out of balance with the situation in the Middle East. I said, can I do the method on the Middle East? He said, You can't do it on a situation. You have to do it on a person that represents the injustice in the Middle East. And I said, okay, well, I was living in London. I've been in London 15 years, mate. I was like, well, the British Prime Minister. And he's like, perfect. Do the Dimartini method on the Middle East, but use the British Prime Minister as your, I'll call it a surrogate. And I did. Man, did I ever do that. So I spent the entire weekend working with the British Prime Minister and seeing the situation through his lens and owning everything that I've judged in the British Prime Minister. I had to find in myself and own it. And that's hard because I'm Canadian and we're very nice people. But I did it. And Monday morning, I used to live in St. John's Wood, right on Regents Park. There's a cafe inside Regents Park that I would be at every morning, start my day. And you cannot drive here. You have to walk to it.

Lyn Man 24:40

Yeah.

Shannon Eastman 24:42

And it's 10 o'clock, and I'm sat in the cafe, got my laptop, door opens, and in walks the British Prime Minister. And I immediately emailed John and I was like, oh my God. This was really fast. And he replied something about entanglement or whatever, well done for doing the work. And I was like, so I had tea with the Prime Minister. Now it was only about 90 seconds. And I got a picture because I didn't think John would believe me. But those are the type of experiences that I would consistently have. And I shared them to show the discrepancy between being able to do the work and create some sort of powerful shift, but not have it change your life. Like a Tuesday, I'm like, I need to have a whiskey before I can go meet this person to steady my nerves. It's 11 o'clock in the morning. How am I able to facilitate change like that with the British Prime Minister? Who I felt grateful for? Because I scanned him up and now I was like, how do I feel about this? I would have called him a murderous genocidal something or other on the Fry Day. But now I was like, I feel grateful for him. And I genuinely felt that for him. But it didn't change my life. I was still very dark, highly functioning, but absolutely suicidal and had been for 20 years. So I was like, what is going on? So this was pushing me. I needed to find it. I needed to figure out what the F was going on. So fast forward to HOSA. We appreciate and respect conventional science, emerging science, and HOSA exists specifically to support change that holds. And that matters because when you're looking at a whole bunch of pieces on the table through that particular lens, you can extrapolate differently than if you're exploring fibromyalgia, for example. You would pull a different extrapolation. So capacity. Well, here are the highlights. HOSA is over 1700 pages. We've published 40. And we've just spent, I think, 24 hours taking doctors, coaches, practitioners through it. And that was level one HOSA. So it's a big body of work. But if I were to distill it right down, I would present this. Your human, and I want to talk about a distinction between what is your thinking self and what is your human operating system, which I affectionately refer to now as your HOS. Human HOS. So you have your HOS and you have your thinking self. And they operate in two very different worlds. The thinking self is very fast, very efficient. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. Let's move on, let's go. And then you have your HOS, which works on a very different everything. Now, when we wake up to the idea that we're actually meant to co-partner, when we're co-create life together, everything changes. But it's very hard for the thinking self in your 40s to go, okay, wait, I don't get to make unilateral decisions. Wait, I have to pay attention to my what? And for many of us, we learned about the five senses in kindergarten. Your whole human operating system has one approximately negative, take 20,000 out of this number. You have one septillion senses. That is the same number of senses that are the stars in the observable universe. There's about one septillion stars in the observable universe, minus 20,000. We have senses on our body. And that's a one with 24 zeros. I can't do that math. It's a lot. The star analogy is good. So your biology, your human operating system biology, the whole unit is a system of systems. And your biology co-regulates each other. So if we were to identify and work with just 12 biological systems that are fundamentally and directly related with change that holds, those 12 systems co-regulate each other and support each other and adapt to compensate for and with each other. So our human operating system has distributed the load that it's carrying across all 12 systems. But those 12 systems, through HOSA, for specifically designing change that holds, there's three levels of influence. And the highest lever, the highest level of influence is not the nervous system. Go figure. Who would have known that? I certainly didn't. So you have level one systems, level two systems, and level three systems. Level one and level two offer the highest leverage in level three, which is functional biology, your respiratory cardiology, endocrine, waste elimination, respiratory cardio waste elimination, musculoskeletal. Those are functional systems and they produce symptoms and states and behavior. Everything that we can see on the surface, they

The Recovery Capacity Equation

Shannon Eastman 30:20

show us as an indicator of what's happening upstream. And so when we look at capacity specifically, HOSA has a governing equation. And the governing equation for capacity is this recovery capacity equals, and there's three variables, total energy minus, and put them in brackets now, biological load plus threat load, close bracket. So recovery capacity equals the total energy available to your HOS, which is finite, say it's a hundred measurements. If you have a hundred possible measurements of energy that you can create and produce as your human operating system, well your HOS has two priorities. Only two. Number one, keep you alive. Number two, keep you safe while doing it. That's it. Your quality of life is a like a total distant second priority. It does not give a monkeys about your quality of life. So change? No. That is not important to your HOS, which is very important to hold in your mind's eye when you think about capacity, because if your HOS exists to keep you alive and keep you safe, according to your HAS, not your thinking self, and it only has a hundred meas uh units of energy in this example. And it has to first pay biological load, getting you out of bed in the morning, getting you to the bus stop, getting you on the Zoom call, and then it has to pay threat load. Well, what's left over? Because whatever's left over, that's what you get to use to create a quality of life. And for most of us, we're in the net we're in a deficit. We are in an absolute deficit. So our tank has been empty for years, and we're still like, come on, come on. This car needs to keep going. And we're wondering why are we having problems? So recovery capacity equals 100 units of energy minus the cost of keeping you alive and keeping you safe. So you want to increase your recovery capacity. The easiest, most effective, most reliable way of doing that is looking first and foremost at your total energy. If you've only got 100 units of energy possible that you can create and you're only generating 70, well, how do we support you to get that extra 30? And typically what we'll do is we'll look at, because we look at the whole human system as a dynamic system, it's body of work that makes physics legible. So we use words like friction and distortion. If you're, if the person sat in the chair in front of you has got a lot of friction, like, oh, I've got brain fog, I can't get out of bed in the morning, I'm so exhausted, even though I had eight hours sleep, there's just so much friction and drag in the body. Well, then you need to look at biological levers. If the person in front of you is telling stories, anxiety, trauma, well, that's distortion. And you want to look at the threat levers. So you got three ways of supporting your whole human to increase its recovery capacity. And pending the person in front of you. And I again, I'm I'm fluent in the 40 plus population. I wouldn't be as fluent if someone said, Well, my 15-year-old, it that would be different for me. I'd have to go do some research. But if you're in your over 40s, yeah, friction will point you in this direction, and distortion and stories and trauma will point you to a different one. But eventually they will meet like they do in a spiral that never ends. And you will find that working with your human operating system in this way reliably creates change that holds. And we, I every time I say this, because I used to be corporate and we have to asterisk and smell print everything. And now I'm like, are we allowed to say this? But it's true. 50% more effective outcomes with HOSA, and you'll do it in 50% less time, consistently and reliably and repeatedly. Because HOSA is not my opinion, it's not Abrar's opinion, it's not Josh's opinion. It is multiple nine fields of science piece together and looked at through, we call it fractals. Fractals is the language of nature, it's the universal language. And all that means is you can take HOSA and squish it down and stick it in the nucleus of a cell, and it holds. But you could stretch it into the atmosphere and apply it to our cosmos, planetary systems, and it will hold. The same rules apply. Which takes me back to my 12-year-old story, and then I'll stop here. I grew up in an environment where most parents didn't want their kids to play with me because my neighborhood was too dangerous, and my family was a bit seedy. When I got those books at age 12, I believed every single word in them. And I knew that I knew that I knew that I alone was strong enough to change the entire direction of my family. Trailer Park family. And I did everything I could for three years. Dr. Joseph Murphy, the power of the subconscious mind, Zig Ziggler, I will see you at the talk, Augmandino, the greatest cells. I can recite all these books. And by the time I was going on my 16th birthday, I ended up in a psychiatric ward for three months for a suicide attempt. And when I got out, I left Canada. I've been abroad ever since. But when I left Canada, I was so angry at the opinion of man for the lies in those books. Outright lies. I believed it, they tricked me, nothing worked. And I carried that into my future wherever I was going and made nature the most important thing. Because nature wouldn't lie to me. Now I have come full circle and appreciate greatly Dr. Joseph Murphy's work. All of them, I appreciate them greatly. I can see them quite differently than I did when I was 15. But someone pointed out to me recently, it was Dr. Joshua Rosenthal. He's like, do you see that what we have here with HOSA is actually entirely free of man's opinion. That it's just based on how the principles of the universe work. And I was like, oh my God. I did not see that until he pointed it out. So HOSA, it's funny how that works, isn't it? How our past is continually in our present, whether we can see it or not. But HOSA exists as a model to support, I guess, people like me, circa 2018, humiliating themselves at the Westbury Hotel in front of, I don't know, 500 people who've tried everything, who've done everything they were told to do, and it it hasn't worked. Then HOSA is probably a really good place to look because it's great for people like that.

Lyn Man 38:35

It's it's kind of, you know, there's there's so much in there, and I when you described like the the size of of HOSA, it's it's just incredible. But I what I really love, and I'm in it, and I think it connects so much back to to nature in a way, is that what you're doing is that you're you're looking at everything as a whole. So if we just look at how we exist, we don't exist in isolation, we exist within an ecosystem, within an ecosystem, you know, everything interconnects. And what I'm hearing you say is that we have our mind busy telling us something and it's keeping us going and it's believing it has to keep moving forward, and our body, what you're calling our hosts, is actually then running on negative and never getting any time to catch up. And the two are just so not talking with each other. And as you say, uh, you know, when we're when we're younger, we can work like that, but we get to a stage where we can't. But just coming back to the the energy that running on our tank empty and not being able to produce enough. So the example you were giving was that the maximum we can create is hundred, but maybe we're only all just creating 70. And you talked about some some levers that influence it. But can you just give a very simple example of how when somebody feels like they're running on empty, simple things that they can actually do to start to increase, and I and I know it's, you know, obviously our bodies are way more complex. They're absolute miracles, you know, what they they do every day and keep us going. But just some simple things that people can do or just even be aware of, like where they're draining, because yes, it's going to the biological body, but we're obviously leaking energy as

The Change Ladder And Right Sequence

Lyn Man 41:05

well.

Shannon Eastman 41:07

Yes. So I want to take one step backwards and point to the HOSA ladder. And I want you to, in your mind's eye, just imagine that the first rung on the ladder is red in color, and the next one is yellow. Now, these are not chakra, they're not rainbow colors, they're totally different. Red and yellow are the bottom two rungs on the ladder. And then there's this midpoint, which is a threshold. It is a state change, like liquid becoming ice, okay, plasma. It's a state change. So you have red, yellow, this state change threshold, and then in the upper half of the ladder, you'll have a blue and then a green rung. So if we just focus on the bottom half of the ladder, red is pretty close to collapse. It was probably the week I opened for John. Yep. I'm now planning my permanent exit. I'm gonna do it discreetly in Portugal. That was a pretty dark, deep red place to be in. And yellow is typically the 40 plus high-functioning professional who not not okay. Not okay, and it's starting to show. So any skin condition will indicate significantly more about what's going on upstream than the actual condition itself. So why do I bring this out? Because orienting an individual to where are they right now. Change subordinates to the same laws of physics like everything else. Change has laws. I did not know that. Change has a particular sequence that you must follow. And when you're inside that sequence, there's four phases that you must follow. Again, it's fractal, which means it's everywhere. So when you squish it down, you'll have those four phases. Let's use the abbreviation Suri, S-U-R-I, stabilize, unravel, reorganize, integrate. Suri. In any given moment, you will find some version of Suri. And when you're changing your life, you will see it as well. So if you're red, then what you're going to do to support your total energy is going to be different than someone in yellow, and it's going to be different for someone in blue and green. That was my biggest holy crap moment in 2021, 2022, 22. I was sat actually at this table looking out the window of beautiful. And I was like, oh my God, Dimartini's work is blue. And I was Red Biology chasing blue solutions, skipping yellow and purple. I was like, oh, what that did for me in that moment. I I emailed Sean actually. John, we have to talk. What I saw in that moment is that there's no wrong modality. There's no wrong therapy. There's no wrong tool. There is out-of-sequence tools. And that matters so much. Oh my God, my mind just went, that was me suggesting my brain was exploding. There's 1,100 modalities and transformational bodies of work. There's actually more than 1,100. The more into emerging science you go, the more fringe they are and the less they're counted. And they should be. There's some very extraordinary work happening over there. So 1,100 modalities and different bodies of work. Why? Why? We keep bringing something new out because that didn't work. And what your friend just recommended to you, and you went and tried, and it didn't work for you, it's not because of the tool or the modality. In most instances, we can assume practitioners are very capable and operate in good faith. What we can more reliably see is sequence. We have a biology that is red, and we're being treated with purple and blue modalities, and we're wondering why it doesn't work. It is because change is subordinate to laws. That's my first thing I want to put out there. Now, let's say you're yellow, you and you're 40 plus, you're high functioning, you are not okay. So, what is there's there's a good few things that are really important to note. And my God, if you're listening to this, if you're like, Shannon, your life is my life. Please listen to me. Please hear this. Your human operating system, your biology in the lower half of the ladder is organized around survival. That means 12 biological systems, because we're using a HOSA lens, have configurated themselves in such a way and settled in that state, that configuration around survival. You have 37 trillion cells in your body. 37 trillion cells in your body. Every single one of them is part of this configuration for survival. So your one-off little effort for a week to try and change that distributed survival load across your entire human operating system, not going to work. Now, hear me when I say this. You are animated with the same life force that has kept species here for millennia. The same life force animates your human. And that life force insists on your survival and your safety. Now, do you think that it's gonna let one of your notions, one of your like, oh, I'm gonna try this out for a week and see how it goes, change its trajectory? No, it's not going to do that. Change, let me let me keep to the answer, but I need to say pad this out a bit more. Your biology is predisposed to survival. When your biology, 37 trillion cells with more than, well, let's use the septilion number, with just under one septillion senses, exposed to an environment that is constantly communicating with, your biology is your environment. Your environment is your biology. The visible, the invisible, and the informational is constantly feeding your 37 trillion cells information to keep it tightly wrapped around survival. Fact. Now, in the upper half of the ladder, when you pass that threshold, your biology has reconfigured, it has unraveled, it has reorganized, and it is supported to integrate around regeneration. It is regenerative biology. And if you don't know what a torus is, I would like you to go look up the torus because it moves in the same space and shape as a torus in the upper half of the ladder. Now it doesn't the lower, but it's it's kind of like twisted and broken because it's survival. So what do you have to do? You have to get that. That is where you start. And I can tell you a whole bunch of things, and I'll do so right now, to support you with your total energy. But you first need to understand that the same life force that is kept species here for millennia animates your human. And that life force is wise and powerful, and it is not taking your thinking self seriously. It doesn't trust you. And it overrides you all the time until you prove differently. And as long as you keep ignoring your hosts, your thinking self can come up with all the great ideas and plans that it wants, but it isn't going nowhere because your human operating system is like if we listen to you, we would have died 17,000 times already. So, no, we're not listening to you. Get on board, work with me, and your HOS will give you a quality of life that you can't even fathom right now. I have gone from dumpster fire after dumpster fire after dumpster fire. John D. Martin, that was the last dumpster fire of my life. They were relentless. Oh, she's just so dramatic. Oh, she's a bit crazy. She's a bit, we don't know what to do with her. That was me. An absolute train wreck. And doing my best with the biology that I had at the time and the very limited information that we have access to because we're fed like neuroscience. I have this joke. I was like, neuroscience is the only science that got a marketing budget. Chronobiology, never heard of it. Yet it's one of the most important levers on your entire everything. Everything is there. Epigenetics, mitochondria. So I'm gonna tell you what you can do to support your total energy, but I want you to hear it in the context of who you be and what you are and where your thinking self is in this pecking order. Otherwise, you're gonna try something out for a week and be like, oh, it doesn't work, and dismiss it. Ask me how I know.

Practical Energy Levers Sunlight And Breath

Shannon Eastman 51:15

I was like, yeah, yeah, I know all that already. It doesn't work. Really? Really? Do you know? So the three most important biological systems on your horse is chronobiology, king chronos, Greek, mythology, the king of time. Rhythm. Rhythm, it's one of the seven hermetic laws. Rhythm is so fundamentally important. You want to know why it's important? If we look at the top of your endocrine system, the pineal gland, right at the very tip. By day, sunlight, it produces serotonin. By night, darkness, it produces melatonin. Like we could stop right there. Those are fundamentally, hugely important parts of your system. You know how they work? Sunlight comes into your eyeball and it hits your pineal gland, and it's like serotonin is required. And then darkness happens, and your pineal gland is like, it's dark. We need to release melatonin. But we have houses full of LED light bulbs and blue light on our digital devices choking, choking our biology. And we don't know. So we have three digital devices, and we scroll in our beds until two in the morning, and your serotonin and melatonin are banjaxed, absolutely banjaxed. And you wake up in the morning and you don't feel like you've slept. But here's another really important thing about your pineal gland and these two hormones. When light kicks off serotonin and darkness kicks off melatonin, that has a knock-on cascade effect with 37 trillion cells in your body that are elbowed and said, okay, it's dark. It's time to repair stuff. Let's go out, boys. Let's start, you know, repairing our cellular debris. Oh, but you're not sleeping? Oh, well, then that's not happening. Oh, but cellular repair, if it doesn't happen, it accumulates? Wait, what? What if I haven't slept in 10 years? Well, you might also find yourself in Harley Street Clinic talking about uterine cancer and adrenal failure. I don't know. That's what happened to me. So when we say rhythm is really important, we're not talking about music, although frequency is also super important. We're talking about the basics. Your human operating system, the circadian, if there's one thing you might go, oh, I know circadian, great, grab that. That's the 24-hour clock of your body. Get that right. Get up in the morning, put sun in your eyeballs in the first 30 minutes of waking, and allow your pineal gland to just bathe in it for 10 minutes. That's it. If you can put yourself in the sun for, let's say, 30 minutes throughout the day, arms and face exposed at least, wonderful. Sunlight, sunlight, sunlight is the most important thing. Take your socks off, put your feet on the ground. The bottoms of your feet, put it on the ground. Be there for 10 minutes. Oxygen. So your body converts, your body takes in nutrition and oxygen and converts it into human fuel. So you want to take proper, conscious, deep breaths. If you're not consciously breathing, let's say at least two minutes now, hear me, because it's two minutes. Two minutes, three times a day. And I would, if you're new to it, find a breath work worker if this appeals to you. But take an inhale through the nose, count to four or five, and exhale, twice as long. That's it. It's a lingering exhale. It is parasympathetic activating. When your parasympathetic is activated, your body flicks all the gears and goes, oh my God, rest. Okay, we can repair. Okay, turn digestion back on. But as long as you're not doing that, your body is like, we are in danger. There's a reason why we're not breathing properly, and that's because something bad is happening. So anything that is not essential to keeping you alive, it's turned off. It's turned off. You're enteric. You're sorry, your digestion is just, we don't need it. That's not essential to life. So now we have Crohn's disease and leaky gut. Like these things are all downstream of messed up rhythm and flow chronobiology. And Dr. Joshua, I'll stop after I give you this one story because this blew my mind. Dr. Joshua Rosenthal is a physicist, a surgeon, a doctor out in New York. He studied functional health medicine for a few years and left it and was like, oh no, that's not it. And I was like, wait, tell me more about that, because that's what I used after I left Harvey Street. And he said this to me. He said, look, food's important, but it doesn't even come close to the sun. He said, if someone gave me the choice of eating Kentucky fried chicken, which is a greasy fast food takeaway in the US, of eating Kentucky fried chicken for the rest of my life, but I could have access to really good sunlight year-round, or the inverse, I have to live in a house with LED light bulbs, not much sunshine, but I can have the most organic produce on the planet shipped in from New Zealand. He said, I will live on KFC for the rest of my life. There is nothing that will support our total energy more than quality sunlight exposure. I would get rid of every LED light bulb, and he wears blue light blockers. We all do now. When it gets dusk, and you're working on your computer, you just snap them on your glasses. They're a bit orangey yellow, but they block blue light. Reasonably so. There's different qualities and proportions, but the ones he recommends is about 80% blocked. And he said that matters more than anything else because that directly supports the mitochondria energy factories inside your cells times 37 trillion cells. The end.

Lyn Man 57:34

Wow. So what I'm hearing is actually the huge importance of our sun sunlight, but being outside in that and letting just actually, you know, while you're outside just being and letting so ten minutes, just standing and allowing yourself to be in the moment, and actually you could and breathe deeply.

Shannon Eastman 58:13

Lingering exhales are perfect for yellow. Box breathing is not. Most of those types of breathing exercises are perfect for purple and blue, but not yellow. You will overwhelm your HOS, but lingering exhales are very supportive, very safe, perfect to sequence and phase the change that you're bringing about for your life through your HOS by recognizing that your human biology moves at the pacing of plasticity. So neuroplasticity, we all know about. Your whole human is plastic, not just neuro, not just the neurology, all of it. Everything is plastic. And plastic moves at a particular pace, like the tortoise. But if you give your HOS exposure to quality sunlight for two minutes three times a day with lingering exhales, about six, eight weeks from now, you'll wake up one morning and someone will be like, oh my god, who turned the lights on? It's everything is different. What just happened? Wow. Yeah.

Biology Over Mind Triggers And Farewell

Lyn Man 59:30

Thank you. I've just got one final question. I'm conscious of time, but I appreciate everything you've shared today. If you could change one societal belief that would benefit humanity as a whole, what would it be?

Shannon Eastman 59:47

The thinking self is not actually the partner of your biology, it is the emergent from your biology. Your biology is the boss of everything. And there's a way to communicate with it. And when that happens, I can't even describe. I used to think that people who had lives like I have right now, I thought you had to be born into it. Thriving didn't apply to people like me. And it turns out that when you move into the space of biology being the king of everything, thriving in quality of life are reliably and consistently available.

Lyn Man 1:00:48

Thank you. So really learning to listen within and be aware. And I think that's one thing is that we don't listen to our bodies. We're never taught today, yeah.

Shannon Eastman 1:01:07

We are heads on a stick.

Lyn Man 1:01:09

Yeah.

Shannon Eastman 1:01:10

We're mind over matter. Literally, mind over matter, matter being the body. It's institutionalized. Totally. Language just it's institutional uh at some point, no, Descartes in 1645 separated mind from body to appease the church. He wanted to do some research, and he had to jump through all this red tape, and he was like, oh fine, I'll separate mind and body. But it was to appease the church back then. And then Newton came along with Newtonian mechanics, and it was like, we're just parts, just parts, pieces of pieces. And then, of course, Einstein came around shortly after and said, no, no, no, no. Energy is who you are. But we've never been allowed to really sit with that and go, well, what does that mean? It's very hard to, it's very hard to imagine in the mind's eye, what does that mean? Well, what it means is what you eat, what you breathe, and the amount and quality of sunlight you get produces energy in your HOS that will pay your biological bills to keep you alive, but all the rest of it's going to survival and threat mode. And if I may, just one thing. And I want to give Roseanne Riley credit because she describes a trigger as the grip. She's like, you can feel in your body the moment you feel this grip sensation. Well, in HOSA, the moment you feel gripped in your body where you're triggered, you want to know what's happening. Your level two systems have just classified some incoming signal as threatening. And everything in your body is now mobilizing around protecting you. All your energy is going to protect, defend, and keep you safe. And it will burn through it very fast, and you'll be left so depleted. Energy is taken from your quality of life and used to, in my case, when I was gripped and triggered, fight ghosts. Imaginary, fictitious, made-up scenarios that were never real. And yet I would act as if I was ready to scorch the earth to protect me and right myself in some way. And that is that that we can recognize as your energy. Do you want your energy to go there, or do you want to interrupt the grip and create something different and protect your energy? Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure.

Lyn Man 1:03:50

Oh, thank you. And I could just listen to you talking about this all day because there's so much in it. So thank you. I really appreciate your sharing and and your real personal stories as well, because that's what people relate to. But just the depth of your work is incredible. So thank you so much for coming and having this conversation.

Shannon Eastman 1:04:14

That which you seek is also seeking you. Turns out.

Lyn Man 1:04:22

Thank you for listening to this episode of I Am Enough. We hope you enjoyed it and are inspired to see yourself as enough and create possibilities. If you would like to discover more, please visit earthconter.org.