Learning to Live Somatically

In this episode, Steven Jaggers and Adam Carbary explore what it truly means to live somatically and why modern life has pulled people away from their body, emotions, and inner truth. Steven breaks down the tension between constantly trying to become something versus learning to simply be who you already are. Together, they unpack a powerful framework of the head, heart, and body, and how each shapes human experience, relationships, and personal growth. This conversation offers a grounded perspective for anyone feeling stuck in their mind or caught in the endless cycle of self-improvement.

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
00:00 - Introduction to Somatics
03:30 - What “Living Wholeness” Means
07:20 - The Three Centers: Head, Heart, Body
11:00 - The Trap of Becoming
14:15 - Self-Development as Self-Attack
17:10 - Missing Life’s Simple Pleasures
22:00 - Opening the Heart
26:20 - The Parenting Perspective
31:20 - Becoming vs Being in Relationships
35:30 - The Role of a Practitioner
40:30 - Why the Heart is Central
45:00 - The Emotion You Avoid
48:40 - Speaking Your Truth
51:10 - The Truth is a Statement
52:05 - Final Reflections

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The truth is a statement. There's no explanation around it. There's no story around it. There's no reasons why. This is the it's just the truth. And we dance around it so much and it our hearts hurt because we've lost the trust of being able to hear the voice of our heart. And we've lost our true belonging if we're not able to just say how we feel and say what's going on inside of you. This is the Mind Body Mentor podcast, where we explore how to create a life where you are deeply connected to yourself and everything in it. I'm your host, Steven Jaggers, and we are joined by my co-host Adam Carberry. Let's dive in.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Alright, welcome back everyone. Today we are going to be diving into another episode. And Steven and I made the decision that we're going to rewind things a little bit. We've really been focusing these episodes on diving into specific topics, diving into a lot of things that come up for practitioners they move throughout the training. But I'd like for us to like rewind back to what is somatic? What does it even mean to live somatically? And how can we start breaking it apart to understand it more from a foundational standpoint? So, Steven, why don't you just get us started off with like for for you, when you were moving through creating somatic breath work, what what made you land on this concept of living somatically?

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Yeah. Such a journey, Adam. Um, after kind of just throw, like I'm a seeker. I definitely am a seeker, as well as probably everyone that's listening to this is a seeker. And you want to like you get addicted to learning so many different types of frame frameworks. Like my mission was to bridge the gap between like this Eastern understanding, they just had it down, they understood the energetics of the body, whether it's the chakra system or even Chinese medicine, um, or even like the uh, let's see, well, from a Western standpoint, like the nervous system. And my my whole thing was how do I make this accessible for the world? And with my background being in body work, there's so many different types of bodywork out there, and they're all good for different things, but they all have their own frameworks. And I'm like, there has to be an overlap here, there has to be a way that they all integrate, and there has to be a way for people to just for modern people to understand this without having to, you know, learn, you know, going into Chinese medicine, you almost have to learn like Chinese words to be able to understand the system, which is so effective. And even in the chakra system, I don't know about you, but I've gone to yoga classes where they're utilizing all of the Sanskrit terminology. And I'm like, am I doing the right pose? Like, is this um, you know, uh uh samaskar A? I don't know, you know. Um, so I you can alienate yourself by um by the frameworks that you use. And so when I started studying somatics, I realized that, whoa, okay, so the body is affecting the mind. And this just makes so much more sense to me than uh you know what I was studying in addiction psychology when I was in uh college. And what I realized going into somatics is wow, okay. From a Western standpoint, somatic means, okay, the state of my body. If I'm stressed, then my mind is going to be thinking stressed. If I uh haven't let myself feel emotions, well, then my mind is not going to be clear, which is true. But then you go down breaking down the word soma. And, you know, that's a Greek word, soma, and it actually means your living wholeness. They didn't separate the mind from the body, from the emotions, from the spirit. They looked at it all as one thing, and they're all affecting each other. And so through the through the journey of creating somatic breath work, taking this very bottom-up approach, which I think is so effective for the general population, because we live in a world that's very top-down. It's all mind focused. We're stuck in our mind, this voice in our head that you know speaks to us, but it doesn't speak to us as a voice. It speaks to us like it's the truth. Like that's all that there is, right? And our body is something that we just have to uh, you know, take it to the gym and and and shower it and feed it food. When um when I came, when I sat with that word soma is our living wholeness, I realized that throughout history we swing pendulums so much. Because we've swung the pendulum to being such a top-down culture that somatics gaining popularity because we have completely negated the bottom-up understanding of things. We've completely negated our body and our emotions. Now we've seen this pendulum swing to you know, everybody's a somatic coach now. Everybody's talking about nervous system regulation. And we can't forget that it's really about our living wholeness because our mind affects our body and our body affects our mind. It goes both ways. So, as a practitioner, when I'm working with somebody, I might be doing breath work sessions with them, helping them develop more emotional fluidity, helping them express the stuff that's been stored in their body for so long. And at some point, it's like, cool, now we actually have to work with the story in your head as well, because they're all affecting each other. So soma, somatic, it doesn't just mean your emotions and emotional release and what you see on social media of people having these cathartic experiences. Soma actually means the living wholeness of your system. And for me, I look at uh a good framework, the most simple framework for me to understand what is somatic is understanding the head plays a part of it, the heart plays a part of it, and our nervous system or our body plays a part of it. And I think a lot of personal developments or frameworks, they address one like, let's regulate your nervous system. Well, that's great, but we still need to be connected to your heart and your emotional center and your uh your relationships that you have and your sense of belonging, right? Connection is so important in our own development. And we still have to work with the voice in your head because if you have this abusive voice in your head or your story that you're telling yourself about yourself and about the world, well, that's going to affect your nervous system and your emotions too. So I like to look at it as working on all three of those centers. And all three of those centers have a driving force of what they are, what they're looking to fulfill in the world.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

You know, let's dive into that because I've I've heard you speak about this in a couple of different contexts of like all the the mind, the body, the heart, they all have like their own will, their own want, their own like desire of what it means to be living from that place. So, like, can can you dive into and like kind of break that apart? And like maybe we can start with the body first and then move to the heart and then the head?

SPEAKER_00 7:45

Yeah, absolutely. So there's two things that all of life is striving for, and that's balance and growth. Like your body is striving for balance. We are homeostasis machines, we're always striving for equilibrium, right? Our our our body, if you you know, injure one side of your body, you're gonna compensate with the other side. If you, you know, have some sort of defense system that you've developed in your life, well, you're gonna compensate by swinging the pendulum to the other side. We're homeostasis machines. Our body is always striving for balance, but we're not just striving for balance, we're also striving for growth. Like the hair on my face continues to grow, my cells continue to grow. You look outside, life is striving for balance and growth. And each one of those centers is striving for balance and growth in a specific way. And those are our three main desires of our being. And it's our our beingness, we're human beings, that's number one. Our the will, the desire to be able to just be. And that's where the nervous system work comes into. Can I relax into myself? Am I safe? Right? Am I able to just like be? That's a fundamental need and a will that we need. And the second one is of the heart, and that's the will to belong. Like we all feel like we want to belong somewhere. Um, and a lot of us have maybe found ourselves belonging in the wrong place based on who we are being, right? We can talk about the interplay between these two. And the head, we're all very familiar with this one, is to become. Most of us are just stuck in this rat race of becoming. Who am I going to become? What am I going to become? Am I doing enough? Uh where should I be by now? Right. It's this incessant uh will, this driving force to become. And all of life wants to become. So those three centers: the head, the heart, and the body. The head maps to becoming. The heart wants to belong, and the body or the nervous system wants to feel safe to just be. And for me, this framework is the most simple way to look at my life and to see where am I in balance and where am I out of balance.

unknown 10:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

So this, you know, we were talking about this a little bit before we jumped onto the podcast of like early childhood. We are, that's when we're truly being who we actually are, right? Like when we're first born, we don't know not to be anything other than who we actually are. But then as we continue to grow up, it's like the world, the the mind, if we look at the world almost as the collective mind, like starts to influence us of who we actually should become, not who we should be. So, so like, how have you seen that like play out, not only maybe in in your own life, but also just from like a client practitioner standpoint of like, how do you see people coming to sessions where they're very much stuck up here? They're all about how can I become this? How can I not be who I have been and become something different when actually it's remembering who you were in the first place? How can you actually rewind the clock back to who you have always been instead of trying to become someone different?

SPEAKER_00 11:24

Yeah. Yeah. When you are a baby, you your nervous system is literally just wanting to feel safe to be. Like you're plugged into all the nervous systems around you, and you just want to know that it's safe to be. A baby is not focused on who they're becoming, right? Uh, they and then as you continue, um, you start to have needs and desires that you need to fulfill and you want to have fulfilled by the people around you. And that gives you this sense of belonging. And as you continue to develop, you know, you get into school, they ask you, what do you want to be when you grow up, right? And we start to uh we start to get these questions of, oh shit, I got to become something. And what I see is so many people are focused on becoming, but the route to becoming will always feel empty if you're not able to relax into who you are at your core. There is a there is a uh an essence inside of each person. Um, you know, I was I was at a friend's house the other day with his two daughters, and he, you know, they were born in the same hospital, they grew up in the same house. Uh, like all the variables have been the same, but they're so different in their own unique expressions. They're so different. It's like they come into the world with their own agenda, you know, their own desire, their own mark that they want to leave on the world. And I think that that's for all of us. We're all born into the world with our own sort of unique flavor that wants to be expressed, our own unique expression, right? There are no two same Stevens or no two same Adams. And our desire deep inside of us is to become the fullest expression of ourselves, which I think is the probably the hardest journey a person can take is actually becoming the most authentic version of themselves. Because we have all of these outside impressions of what we should become or who we should belong with, what friend groups we should be in, right? We got to keep up with the neighbors or keep up with the Joneses. Yeah. So it all points back to that very beginning piece of are we able to just be? Are we able to be ourselves? Are we relaxed enough into our own nervous system, our own um innate uh uh uh essence, if you will? So, I mean, this is a lot of the work that we do. And it's not about finding who you want to be, or because that gets into the becoming, right? It's about clearing out all of the stuff that's in the way to be able to hear the own voice of your internal expression and who you are being. Because I work with so many people that have spent years becoming something and they realize that this isn't who I am. This isn't who I am in my core. Or there's this incessant drive, even in the self-development community. This is a great example of um someone who's stuck in becoming but is not able to be. There's this almost self-development as self-attack in a way. Like I need to grow, I need to become something. I'm not good enough in just how I am and who I am. I don't feel valued in just my own essence of being able to relax in myself. And therefore, if I'm not connected to who I am in my core and I'm only focused on becoming, well, then I'm gonna find myself belonging in a place where I don't actually feel seen and heard. I don't I don't feel like I'm surrounded by the right people. Right. So, and this is for myself, you know, a lot of the times that that drive to become is a it could be a trauma response. For me, I've I know that I've built, I I've I've built somatic, and everything that I've built has become, has, has come from this incessant drive to almost prove myself in a way, to become something. Um, in the beginning, I look back at some of the videos of me teaching, and I can see and feel how much I wanted to be respected by people and taken seriously because I wanted to become somebody that was respected. I want to become somebody that um knows what they're talking about, right? Um, when in reality you're alienating yourself. And I, you know, I went through a journey of um becoming this teacher of somatics, but feeling like there's always a piece missing because I'm not able to just show myself and how I am in my day-to-day self. I'm not relaxed into my own joy and my pleasure. The body, when we're able to relax into our own being, the goal of the body, and this is based off of you know, one of the people that I've studied deeply, and this is at the heart of a lot of this somatic work. His name is Alexander Loewen, who created uh um uh uh a technique or a body of work called bioenergetics, which was all around catharsis and releasing, and um, but his whole idea around it was um the body is designed to experience pleasure. And if you have all of these emotions or you have all these blockages in your body, you're not actually able to relax into your own, like just the pleasure of being alive. So, you know, when someone's stuck in becoming, I highly doubt that they're able to actually relax into even just a simple moment of um being present with your loved one, being relaxed into um feeling the the subtle sensations of what it's like to kiss you know your your loved ones or to hold each other's hand or to be in rapture of watching a sunset together, right? You miss out on all the little um the the most pleasurable moments that life can have. And then, you know, a lot of people get addicted to more and more stimulation to be able to feel pleasure because they're not actually relaxed into their body to begin with, because they're so focused on becoming.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Right, right. It makes me think of like the adrenaline junkies, right? You know, the the people who continually try to what's the next biggest thing that I can do? What's the next highest achievement I can get to? And it's like that constant striving to go to the next, to go to the next, to go to the next, almost is like this never-ending search to actually just find the person that you've always been. It it's like, you know, you've you've talked about this whole idea of addition through subtraction, right? Where how how can we actually add more value into our life by removing everything that isn't truly in alignment with who we are, not who we want to become, but who we've always been. And I can think back to like the very first in-person training that I attended as a student. And I almost look back at like those early years of somatic of like that was serious, Steven. It was right, like that that that was that was Stephen who's like, I'm I'm up here, this is my podium, I'm teaching this. And yet now to witness you in the in-person training uh being playful, Steven. And and I would go as far as saying that we're actually seeing more of your beingness now than we did in those early years. And and that comes from the ability to have fun, to be playful, to recognize that life isn't meant to be serious, it's meant to be fun, it's meant to be lived, it's meant to be experienced, it's meant to be full of sensation. So how what what has it looked like for you to go from that serious Stephen to playful Steven? Like what what did you have to move through in order to shed those layers of perfection, to shed those layers of needing to show up in a certain way, but instead now give yourself permission to have fun, to drop the F bombs, to just like speak into things however you want to speak into things versus how the world says that you should speak into them.

SPEAKER_00 20:05

Yeah, brother. You know, the the the the heart. It's it's it's always the heart. Um the reason why we do the nervous system regulation stuff or the body uh like a body-based approach is to get the body safe enough for the heart to open. And for me, I look back and I listened to myself talk, and I actually wasn't really connected to my heart. Um, I had all the right things to say. I was so focused on my becoming. I could speak to um and I could put things like I doubled down on my my strengths, which was to be able to teach and to be able to explain things in in so many different ways. But you know, I fell under the same trap of uh there's one thing to be able to explain the whole process, but there's a whole it's a whole different other thing to be able to experience it for yourself. You know, that's why a lot of people can explain all of their patterns. And I'm this person, I can explain all of the patterns that I have, but it's an it's a different thing to be able to actually work on it and to change it. And a lot of that was working through my own armor around my own heart. Um, the grief of uh you know being parentified from a young age and losing out on a lot of my my childhood joy and um my playfulness and you know the grief, probably grief more than anything, I would say, was the thing that was holding me back from being able to um feel my own joy and my own pleasure in what I'm doing. I found myself, look, I've created this entire thing in a community and such beautiful, loving humans. That are all here to deepen their connection to themselves and to others. And um, and I'm holding space for everyone, but at the end of the day, who's holding? Am I letting myself um be held by other people? Am I uh doing the work to um you know unlock the armor around my my heart? And I would say I was so solid in my becoming and also in my being. You know, when there's a when there's a deficit in when you're so solid in your being and your becoming, but you're lacking in your heart or this desire to belong, a lot of the times we can use regulation as almost an armor for us to feel our heart. And there's a lot of people out there doing meditation and yoga and all of these things to over-regulate instead of letting themselves actually just the emotion just come out, right? Letting yourself actually feel the depths of your pain. And it's even if you're a teacher or like you're in a position of power, you think you have to hold it all together. But that's uh it's it's alienating you from um the humanness, right? I think we're seeing this in in the world now is we're out of the the stage of people desiring um to learn from someone who is a uh has this guru complex. We're out of that stage because we uh, you know, I think people for I think people have experienced putting people on pedestals and what happens is that you eventually realize that they're actually just a human and they might know a lot, um, but they're also a human as well. So um I've gone through stages and and we all go through stages where one of these become a focus in our life. And I think that's actually healthy. I think we go through stages of of doubling down our on our becoming, and that's necessary. And then you swing that pendulum far enough and you see these CEOs that have spent 10 years becoming something, and now they're like, holy shit, I need to take a year off. I need to, I need to go to Bali or go somewhere to do a spiritual retreat, right? So I can find myself when really it's actually just uh resting long enough, letting the the the whole system because you get tired. We get tired from focusing on becoming so much. And then there's a the and then you know, there's a period of time where I'm at right now where I've focused on becoming, and that's still going on. And I'm I'm I'm opening up my my heart in new ways. You know, I'm gonna get married, I'm gonna have a child here soon, which I didn't think that that was gonna happen so rapidly. Um and I feel very relaxed and I'm I'm deepening my own relaxation and like there's always deeper layers to go into who you are at your core. Like I felt authentic through the past few years, but I'm becoming more and more authentic because there's always more things to shed out of the way. But now I feel myself focusing on on belonging. And um, just moved to Colorado. Um uh I'm I'm I'm working on developing more community, right? We have a beautiful community online, but it's like we need that in-person connection as well. And I know that you know, having a child, you know, I I was I was talking to my friend Um who is a very famous drummer, and he's in a he's in a band that they've been touring for you know almost 30 years now as a as a traveling uh successful jam band. Um, and he's like, you know, I I just you know, my daughter's two years old, and I wanted to uh hold this incredible concert in our hometown where all of our friends and family can come and you know it can be this big event. And I want my daughter to come up on stage and so she can see what her dad does, right? Who he's become. And um he's like, you know, I asked her after the concert, like, how was that? She was like, it was okay. It was okay. And he's like, Oh my god, he's he's she's like, I just like I was just waiting for you to get done so you could come play with me. Like your kid doesn't give a shit who you become, it doesn't care at all, right? They just want to they just want you to be with them, they don't care, and so I can feel as my as you know, my child's not gonna care all this with all the wisdom that I've gained and the things that I know and the frameworks that I teach and uh you know all of these different things. They just want to know that I can be with them, and I'm excited to uh deepen my own ability to relax and just I've been having these like flashes uh come up for me as I'm teaching, whether it's in person or or online, and I'm like, I can't can't wait to get off this call and to like go take a nap with my son just laying on my belly and like how special that will be. I feel myself um, yeah, my eyes getting a little watery as I'm as I'm saying that, because I can't think of anything more productive than than that.

SPEAKER_01 27:40

Stephen, real quick, let's check a setting. It sounds like there might be an echo from my end, which I'm assuming might be coming from your end. If you click the little gear icon at the lower part of the screen, and then just make sure that your speaker is selected as your headphones.

SPEAKER_00 27:55

It's selected. Yeah, let's see here. I think we're good to go.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

Hopefully there isn't still an echo, but yeah, I'm not hearing that. We'll figure it out. Technology does not always play nicely these days, it seems.

SPEAKER_00 28:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:11

I there's so many parts that I want to dive into, into what you just said, but I I I think to rewind back to this idea of the living wholeness of like truly living in alignment with the head, heart, and body, and thinking about that in terms of relationship dynamics of like what you were just talking about, of like that skin to skin contact with your son, and like really feeling into that moment and like in that time, that's actually the most important thing that you could possibly do. Like when you tap into that, what what what is the thing that inspires you the most about being able to pass on this wisdom of being able to live from your wholeness to foster your son's ability to truly be who he is throughout the entirety of his life? Like where does that inspire you to one maybe just allow him to just show you who he is and then continue to foster that more? Or what are you the most excited about being able to entrain into this new individual that's going to be birthed here pretty soon?

SPEAKER_00 29:22

Yeah, that's such a good question. And and believe me, as a as a seeker, I've been just doing so much research and trying to learn everything because there's so many different styles of parenting out there, and everybody has a has their own way of doing it. And I was talking with a friend about um, you know, just the the current school system and no shade on the current school system because there's different school systems in every different uh yeah, I mean, there's I I have a I have a lot of I will not I will not be putting my child in um a normal school system. Um and that's just our own choice. You know, I've already had family and friends reach out to me, like, you're gonna homeschool your kid, they're gonna be so weird and they're not gonna have social skills and all these different things. And I'm like, yeah, I beg to differ. We're gonna do our we're gonna do it our own way. And and from the place of attuning to what does this this unique child need from me? I'm more I'm more excited to figure out who do I need to become. And I'm excited who what does this child bring out in me, in my own becoming, right? Uh, I think that in the beginning stages, you know, they talk about those first three years being so, so important for the shaping of this child's nervous system, for healthy just safety and co-regulation in the beginning, and then developing a healthy attachment style. And as this per as this human starts to individuate and move a little bit further from us and you know, learns to crawl, and then something scary happens and then needs to come back and and feel the belonging and be able to just be, and then they move a little bit further out in their becoming and then need to come back. And um, I think what I'm most excited about is is uh what how do I orient myself for what this child needs versus what am I gonna teach him? What am I, you know, everyone asks me, like, what's your what um what are you looking forward to instilling in your kid the most? And I'm like, well, I have to first I have to meet him. First I have to see and feel who this child's essence is to begin with. And um, I'm really excited for these first couple years of playing a part in shaping the safety and the healthy attachment of this human. And um, from there, uh I look at it as more of a stewarding process of this this living organism and how it wants to express itself. So I'm excited how he will change me more than anything.

SPEAKER_01 32:10

What I love so much about the answer that you just gave is that when we were in Phoenix, um, I asked Rachel that same question. And she answered almost verbatim in the same way. And that just speaks to the alignment that you two have in your belief system in actually allowing the child to dictate the parenting instead of the parenting dictating the child. And I think that that's such an important restructuring in our time now because that is what's going to foster a whole new wave of people coming through this world that aren't trying to become someone other than who they actually are, like to be greeted from day one of just full openness of just present to me who you are, instead of you trying to dictate who they're going to be. Like I almost feel like that's the birthing of a whole new program, like somatic parenting 101, of like, how can we actually allow this whole new generation that's coming in with very different energy, very different skills, very different mindsets to really start to showcase to us how we can actually create the world that they're trying to bring in?

SPEAKER_00 33:32

Yeah, brother. Um, I had a session or I had a question that Rachel asked me the other day that just um just like blew my heart wide open. And it was uh um it's it'll come back. It'll come back. Um it'll come back if it's important enough, but this is what we are doing as a practitioner. I think we can call it somatic parenting, but it actually is what we're doing as a in our programs right now. A sign of a good practitioner is I'm not telling them what to do. You know, a sign of a good gardener is we're not teaching these flowers how to grow. We're not tea, we're not like trying to instill them with the knowledge and wisdom that they need to grow. An acorn already knows that it's going to become an oak tree. It just needs the right environment and the right uh um uh uh nutrients and weather and soil for it to actually blossom into its own becoming, right? I think that a lot of the clients that you see, they're so focused on becoming where becoming is already happening if you focus on who you are being. Your belonging will already happen if you focus on who you are being at your core. And the process is not trying to figure out. If you're in the state of figuring out, you're stuck in your head. It's not the process of figuring out, but it's the process of stripping away all the stuff that's not me so I can find who I am at my core. And that's the sign of a good coach or a practitioner, and that's everything that we teach is we're creating a space for someone to release all the stuff that they've been holding in their body, in their mind, in their heart, that's in the way of their own becoming, that's in the way of their own unique expression in the world that's unique to them in their own being. And so I mean, I love hearing how many people go through our trainings and they're like, well, I'm excited to uh uh I'm excited to utilize this as a coach or a practitioner. But really, where the magic was is how this has changed uh the way that I am in my relationships, or specifically the way that I am in my relationships with my children. And I can feel the amount of grief that people have when they speak to, I wish I would have known this when my child was, you know, in their young years, or I wish I would have known this when my children were younger, because I would have um I would have done things a lot differently. And um, that's not a way for you to beat yourself up or put pressure on yourself. But I think that that we are stewards. We're stewards of each other, and we're stewards of each other's um hearts and heads and bodies, right? Where uh like I look at you, and when I'm co-regulating with you, the greatest thing that I could do with you is to honor the intelligence of all of your living wholeness, your soma. Like it's an absolute miracle that you are alive. It's an absolute miracle that your being has gone through everything that you've gone through that's led you up into this point in time, and all of the imbalances of you being stuck in your head and your own becoming has led you to not wanting to belong in that area, which has led you down another path of who am I and soul seeking to my own being, and then what is it like for me to become from that place? And then I find myself belonging uh with humans that are also stewards of this work together. And that's that's the greatest gift you can give anybody. It's to not try to fix or change them or tell them what they should be doing in their in their life, right? It's to it's to get really curious. Um and there's there's you know, I even map this to the meta skills that we that we teach. You know, alignment is to be in our own being and to maintain our own regulation and to be that that mountain energy for another person, that no matter if it's rain going on or wind or snow or there's fires that need to be put out, like I'm not moving. I'm here and I'm aligned, and I'll be here for you to remember, and you can co-regulate to that energy. And then from there, like from that, I'm gonna open up my heart and I'm gonna attune to you and I'm gonna be able to host your experience so you feel seen and heard, and not just seen and heard, but felt fully because I have opened up the space in my own heart to be able to hold your emotional, um, whatever emotional movement that you're going through right now. And then, you know, from the head is this ability to hold space, to listen without putting my own agenda, to sustain my own, um, to refrain my own belief. I heard Rick Rubin talk about this, who's I just I love reading his stuff, but he says listening is actually uh sustained belief, meaning that I'm like, I'm sustaining myself from thinking my own beliefs of what I think about you. I'm holding, I'm refraining my own beliefs from putting my own agenda on what I think that you need. And the opposite of that is just staying super curious with you. And just like, I wonder, I I I wonder what would happen. Like, show me, tell me. Oh, there's a little tear that's coming out. Like, that's fully welcome here. There's a there's a quiver in the lip, there's some anger that wants to come out. You want to yell fuck you at the top of your lungs, and you want to feel the full permission of to do that so you can restore your own aliveness. Like, I'm here for that and I welcome it fully. And I'm curious, is there more, right? Is there more? Or maybe I'm curious that it wants to change and you want to be held and rocked and um by me. And so um that's how I've kind of mapped our our our meta skills to these these centers as well.

SPEAKER_01 39:58

So if if we look back at at these centers, and like as you were saying that, I was kind of thinking to myself, especially when you tapped into that attunement aspect, right? Like attunement really is dedicated by the heart. And like if I think of the you know, concept of like woo-way, right? The middle way, to me, it almost seems like the the best way to find balance between these three bodies of self is to almost always live in the heart, right? Because when you're in the heart, you can drop into the body, and then you can also come up into the mind and you can kind of play this back and forth, back and forth thing. But if you're always in your head, well, then you've got to drop into your heart before you can drop into your body, or you have to bypass the heart in order to drop into the body. So I'm I'm curious on your perspective of do you see that there's one part of ourselves that we should be living into, or is it this constant flow of this back and forth, back and forth, back and forth?

SPEAKER_00 40:58

Yeah, it's such a good question. Um the the heart is the place where you want to keep your energy, right? Because you can move down into the body or you can move up to the mind. And the heart is the place that's always going to know the answer. We we think that clarity comes from our mind, but clarity comes from um our emotional fluidity, right? The the emotion that you haven't let yourself feel becomes the mood that you just can't shake, the funk that you just can't shake, right? So it's always we go to the head to try to access the heart, or we go to the body to try to access the heart. And it's it's um for me, you can do it top down or you can do it bottom up, but it's always the way back to the heart. It's and and the work that we do is focusing on creating enough safety in the body. Uh, because when the body's in fear, the mind is going to start to run rampant, right? The the when the body's in fear, and we did an episode on fear, you'll start to see the mind will start going to binary thinking. It will go to black and white thinking, like um false endings of uh the worst possible thing that's going to happen. Um but when the body starts to feel safe enough for the heart to open, then usually there's an emotion. Like the body is the enforcer of the of the defense system around the emotion that we haven't wanted ourselves to feel because the heart hasn't been safe to feel it. So there's this idea, and one of my mentors talks about this. It's called the golden algorithm, and it's basically the emotion that you're not letting yourself feel. We all have almost one emotion that we block ourselves from, probably multiple. But by us not feeling that, we're actually creating more of that emotion in our life. And this is, you know, the emotion that you're not letting yourself feel becomes the mood that you cannot shake. You know, if I'm not able to let myself feel anger, well, then I'm not going to set my boundaries, which is going to make me more angry. So the goal is to um, you know, I still believe in a bottom-up approach most of the time because that follows our evolutionary biology. It follows the way that we've developed our nervous systems. Like we have this reptilian brain that's the oldest nervous system. Um, and then we have this limbic system, which is our the mammalian side of ourselves, which is our emotions, the connective tissue of life that push and pull us together. But our mind, our prefrontal cortex, is the newest part of us, and it's the newest like brain on the planet, right? There's a lot of mammals out there that have this limbic nervous system and they have the reptilian brain, but they don't have this incessant prefrontal cortex that wants to create stories about everything. So it's the newest part of us, and it's oftentimes based on the emotions that I'm feeling. The mind will create stories based on what we were what we felt or what we didn't let ourselves feel and what state our nervous system is in. If I'm in a contracted state and I'm picking up on contracted ideas. But what's so fascinating is the movement of the emotion, the opening of the heart, is the thing that sends a signal to your nervous system that you're not in the presence of a stressor anymore. And this is where somatic breath work is so powerful because it bypasses the mind. We're utilizing state change to get you out of your head. We're almost tricking you in a way by utilizing the breath as a pump to change your state, to give your organism an opportunity to express whatever it needed to, that sends a signal to your body that I've completed the emotion. Therefore, I'm not in the presence of this tiger anymore. I'm not in the presence of this stressor anymore. And I can relax. And what that does is it creates space for us to change our story. And the story is what locks everything into place. And so you see a lot of people with um these stories that they've been telling themselves for years and years that have been locked in place because there's an emotion that they haven't been letting themselves feel. And therefore their nervous system feels like the threat has never been solved. So I hope that answers the question.

SPEAKER_01 45:55

It it does. It is that pattern that continually perpetuates over and over and over again. And all the mind's looking for is confirmation on that pattern to keep it at play because that keeps it in play. So, like, what I mean, aside, obviously, we know breath work is one of the things that's really going to help us to move through that because it's going to help us to just drop fully into the body. But for somebody that's listening to this, that's like, I now recognize how much I'm constantly stuck in my head. What's a simple practice that they could do every day to help them to drop more and more into their heart and really live from that place?

SPEAKER_00 46:55

I think that the heart is not going to feel safe to open unless the body is relaxed and you are aligned in yourself and you're speaking your truth. So a lot of us, we might have these massive open hearts, um, but they're protecting ourselves because we're not actually it it's almost like your body doesn't trust you because it doesn't trust you to actually tell the truth to the people around you. So your heart's not going to open up in a way, or you're going to tell everybody else what they want to hear. And this is where like people pleasing comes in. So to regain the trust of our own nervous system is being able to speak the truth without filtering ourselves. And so we have to work on that. It's, you know, you could say body, or I like to think of it as my spine, like my alignment in myself and my ability to tell my truth, whatever's going on, and to not hold that back for fear of triggering other people, for fear of um of being abandoned, right? So it's it is working on that beingness. It's working on the nervous system regulation. Um, whatever that means for you, breath work could be a powerful tool for you. Uh um, meditation um could be going out of the forest and yelling. It could, it could look a lot of different ways, right? It could be co-regulation with your dog or your cat, or um, but I think the the thing that I see most people need is actually the ability to speak their truth every day. And even just practicing it, like we're doing that in our mentorship right now, and it sounds a little cliche like speak your truth, right? But uh speak your truth without without curating what you're saying, and you'll gain the trust of yourself back. So many of us placate and curate what we're saying to all the people around us for fear of being abandoned, but then we'll never feel the belonging because the heart wants to belong, right? But if we're not actually be able to be in our truth, then we'll actually never feel like we're belonging. There's a quote from, I think it's Brene Brown, and she says, fitting in is the biggest threat to our belonging. It's so powerful because you know, we think of fitting in as like our friend groups, but how many uh people are trying to fit into just their romantic relationship and their partner that they have right now? Or fitting in at their job, right? Those are the people, those are the places that you spend the most amount of time with. And so the practice is, you know, not just stirring up shit to stir up shit, but to really be yourself, to really say what you feel and say what's on your heart wants the trust that you're gonna say how you feel, that you're gonna maintain alignment, that you're not gonna be enmeshed. If I open my heart, then I'm not gonna lose myself in other people, that I'm not gonna be drained by being surrounded by people who don't actually know who I am at my core. So part of it is a journey of, you know, and I've said this before, and I like I've had some people give me some backlash of for this, but it's almost that there is a certain level of, I'm not gonna say narcissistic personality disorder, because it's not that, but there's a certain level of of narcissism in a way, where it's not narcissism, but it's turning your energy back in and focusing on yourself and being selfish for a little bit. Being selfish from the place of what is it that I need? Who, like what's going on in my body, because we're all so enmeshed in so many different in so many different uh ways. So, what I would say to somebody is run an experiment for a week and speak your truth without like you know you're not speaking your truth when you continue to say more and more and more and more and more. Because the truth is usually a sentence. The truth is usually one thing. Yeah, it's like the truth is a statement. The truth is a statement, there's no explanation around it, there's no story around it, there's no reasons why. This is the it's just the truth, and we dance around it so much and it our hearts hurt because we've lost the trust of being able to hear the voice of our heart, and we've lost our our our true belonging if we're not able to just say how we feel and say what what's going on inside of you.

SPEAKER_01 52:08

What is one truth that you'd like to share, Steven?

SPEAKER_00 52:12

One truth I'd like to share is uh I am just as much on this journey as everyone else. I am working on this and I have plenty of work to do for myself, and I uh yeah, that's the truth. I could feel myself wanting to continue explaining it, but that's the truth as I'm on this journey with you all.

unknown 52:38

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:39

Thank you for dropping that statement. And I think it's important for all of us to recognize that no one's got it figured out. We all are a figuring process and we're figuring it out day by day. And sometimes we figure it out a little bit more, and then other days we figure out that we still haven't figured it out. And that I think is the joyous part of life is that we can allow ourselves to be a beginner every day, continuing to recognize that we're going to come back to parts of ourselves and be able to ask that question is this still serving me or not? Do we lean further into it, or do we allow it to just finally slough off, pass away, and allow something new to be birthed in its place?

SPEAKER_00 53:23

Yeah, the journey doesn't end until it ends, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:28

Well, at least as far as as far as we know.

SPEAKER_00 53:31

As far as we know, we'll see.

SPEAKER_01 53:33

We'll we'll we'll figure it out once we get there.

SPEAKER_00 53:36

Yeah. Well, this is a great conversation. Thank you everyone for tuning in. Hope you have a beautiful rest of your day. And with that, we are out of the way.