Ep. 4 I'd Rather Be A Smarta$$ Than A Dumb@ss

Today's episode gets a little heavy and real with some of my own experiences as a kid. I also share a lot about my work and how CranioSacral Therapy and SomatoEmotional Release work can benefit someone who has undergone heavy life stuff. I talk more about the specifics of the work I do an how it helps on a deep level for not just physical but emotional pain as well. (More on this later)

I mentioned the work of Dr. Gabor Maté - https://drgabormate.com 

Book Mentioned "The Body Keeps the Score" Bessel van der Kolk

CST & SER information: https://www.upledger.com

My practice information (How to work with me) - FieldsMindBody.com

For more information on my practice or how to work with me 1:1 - Visit FieldsMindBody.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello. Welcome back. It is the fourth episode of Wizard of Wonder Podcast. I'm so glad you guys are joining in. Yeah, we've we've kicked this off. I've I've finally finally decided that it's time to start sharing this instead of getting a whole bunch and then share it. So here we are. We're rolling it through. Welcome guys. My name is Joel Fields. I am a mind-body integration therapist, a somatic alchemist, if you would. And I help people feel better in their bodies, feel better in their minds. I've been practicing massage therapy for over 10 years, and I've been practicing the work that I do now for a little over eight. And I absolutely love it. Every session is a new opportunity for somebody to feel more alive, for a client to start feeling better. I just finished with an amazing client. He's been running through a few different sessions. We've this is our second session now, and he it was awesome. He has a lot of deep releases. So today I want to talk a little bit more about the work that I do because I want to reach a larger audience. So now that people are listening to this, people are paying more attention, people are even aware of it. Now I can actually talk about it. Okay. It's lovely stuff. Okay. So craniosyncle therapy was developed by an osteopathic physician, Dr. John Upledger, around like 1975 at the University of Michigan. And it started when he was doing research or he was he was helping out during the surgery. And he held this one part of the brain and he could feel it vibrating in his hands. And he made the realization that this wasn't the heart rate. It wasn't the lungs breathing. It was something else, a different type of rhythm that he had not known before. So he went through a lot of literature and basically found an earlier doctor, William Sutherland, around like the 1920s, he did a lot of studies on original cranial osteopathy. So he took a lot of these old concepts, created some of his new concepts, new theories, put them all together, and he's an osteopathic physician. So in the realm of osteopathy, some of the core tenets that they believe in healing the body and treating the body is that the body can heal itself, okay, first and foremost, and structure and function are interrelated. What this means is how our body is put together, okay? Nothing is nothing is on accident within our body. Okay. Everything has a purpose, everything has a function, everything moves and grooves together. So Dr. John took these concepts and formulated this work with the fossil systems and soft tissue work to allow the effective change within the body. Okay. So he worked with other physicians and he put a lot of this stuff together. And so that's the groundwork for cranial synchral therapy. And then he built upon that with the work of a gentleman named Dr. Carney, and he took nonverbal autistic kids and he helped them start to process some of the deep emotions that they carry through something that he then coined somato-emotional release. And that's where you start to dialogue with parts of the body, you start to really talk to the non-conscious parts of the body, you know, the things that we do not remember. And we can really start to open up in within our body what happened in our lifetime. Okay. As they say with the book uh by Bessel Vanderkoek, the body keeps the score. Okay, it really becomes applicable in the work of cranial sacral therapy because you know you're you're working through the fossil systems of the body, the fascia remembers. Your fascia is your consciousness that holds your memories, right? Tissue memory. And when you're working for the fascia, the nerve and craniosacral therapy, the nervous system becomes super relaxed. Okay. It is no longer, you know, you have two different nervous systems, right? You have your sympathetic nervous system and then you have your parasympathetic nervous system. Okay, somebody might come in all stressed out and crazy in chaos, and then after a little while, they start to drift off, right? A lot of people, probably 70 to 80 percent of my clients who come in here fall asleep during a session. Okay. I work with kids, I work with kids six and up, but primarily I work with adults. But generally everybody falls asleep. Kids are a little different because they're just, you know, little wired, little wired children, right? As they are, right? Little dreamers, little adventurers, right? We all have little stories playing. I I I was a little random imaginative kid in my day. And yeah, anyway, so most people fall asleep because your parasynthetic surf nervous system is in high, like we we flip them, right? So most people are in more of a stressed out state. Okay. Just going around their life, right? You have, you know, somebody honks at you with traffic. Uh, that's that's a hit, right? You maybe wake up on the wrong side of the bed and ooh, you're already, you know, already a little little heated, right? Maybe you spill your coffee on you in the morning, or maybe you you go to the coffee shop and there's a big line there. You're just like, oh, why? I just want my go juice, right? Or maybe, maybe things aren't going your way, right? So we all have these nervous systems that are just kind of on fight or flight right now.

unknown 5:53

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:55

And in the state of the crazy little world that we're living in, everyone's a little bit on edge anyway. You know, if you even in texting, right? Let's let's run it down a little simplistic here. So let's say you're texting somebody, all of a sudden, maybe you're in a funny little mood, and then you get a text from somebody, and you're like, oh, Barbara, what do you mean by that? You know, like why are you being so rude, Barbara? You know, I don't know. And but that's a hit, right? As small as that is, that's a hit on our nervous system. And as children, right, when we're growing up, oftentimes we're we're not really listened to, you know, and we have this concept like, oh, well, you know, you're just a child, you don't know well, you don't know best, right? Well, yeah, yes and no, all right. Like, like maybe the child's just kind of doing what they're doing, and maybe maybe they're going against what their parent wants them to do at the time. Sure, you'll have that. But sometimes there are things that happen to us when we're children that might overwhelm our nervous system, right? We have this energy, energetic exchange that comes into us and maybe leaves us feeling a little weird. Well, because we're little little ones and we're not processing, right? We don't have the emotional capacity, we don't have the intelligence of a lifetime behind us, right? Our brains are not even fully developed until we're 25, right? So from the ages of zero to about seven or eight years old, right? That's when we're really developing. Our personality is developing, our consciousness is developing, you know, we learn about the world, we can put the world together based upon the past experiences that we've had. Okay. So we learn right from wrong and good from bad and so on and so forth. Well, in a lot of the work that I get into, I look at some small tea trauma and big T trauma. Okay. A lot of the small tea trauma are things that happen on a regular basis, you know? Like you go out to a restaurant and you're just, you know, as a kid, maybe you're just so full of life and so energy, energetic, and like you're just like, right? You're on a little tangent, you're on a little roll, and your parent looks over at you and they're like, shut up. Stop talking. Don't be so bothersome. Why are you doing that? You're you're making me look bad. You know, when that happens, you know, a c a child sometimes goes inside themselves and they start to shame themselves, but they don't know what shame actually is because they're children, right? So they'll feel a weird way, they'll process that in a different way. Okay, that's a small T trauma. If an adult tells you something that makes you feel like you cannot be or belong, it might have an adverse effect on you. Okay, and these happen all the time. All the time. Okay. I'll give you another example that I heard from a doctor, a doctor that I really enjoy. His name is Dr. Gabor Matte. And he is an awesome, awesome physician. He's worked in the realms of addictions, he's worked in the realms of palliative medicine, he did traditional medicine for a little while. Now he's on to more trauma work and a lot more esoteric stuff. You know, he works in the realms of psychedelics, and yeah, it's it's beautiful what's happening right now in the realm of psychedelics. And I will talk about that within this podcast. I love the field of psychedelic science. When I was obtaining my bachelor's of science, I studied a lot of stuff about psychedelic medicine because I really want to be in that, not so much the culture, well, maybe a little bit of the culture, you know, but I really want to work within that space. And that's something for the last 10 years I've been trying to figure out how to do to the best of my ability. And it's it's a weird place just because I live in Northwest Ohio and they're having in Ohio, they're having problems understanding cannabis. But that's that's another podcast. We will get into that. But bringing it back into the work that I do, and I'll also do a part two of the religion episode. I realized after listening to that that I didn't really get into a lot of the more like terrible things that actually happened rather than just being forced and like have not having control, right? Small t's, big t's, whatever. Anyway, getting back into it, the dirt the work of Dr. Gabor Mate, he talks about, you know, and this really stood out to me because this was applicable in my life. Okay, this is a real story. So my my grandpa was from the south. He was from Kentucky, a really neat little down in the holler, right? He was from a place called Rock House, which is like in Kentucky, and it's in Martin County, near Inez, geographic region of Kentucky. Anyway, back in the holler, right? So he came from from that mindset, right? And when he moved up here, he got a job at the local cement plant at the time. And anyway, he was just kind of like a like a tough guy, you know. He he served in the war, and so he's a vet and just kind of a tough guy, right? Tough hillbilly man. And you know, I I really care for my grandpa. Like, I I love visiting with my grandpa. He would tell all these crazy stories of the South. Some of them they're like borderline, believable, you know what I mean? You're like, is this a big, big tall tale or what? And anyway, when I was a kid, you know, I spoke about how I was a little bit of a Hellion, a little bit of a rascal, a little bit of a wild man. Well, oftentimes I would just annoy the heck out of my elders. And I would annoy my grandpa, I would probably get in trouble, I would probably talk back. I was a little smart aleck back then, as they called me, you know. Now, looking back, I would rather be a smart ass than a dumbass. So I will own that. But yeah. So anyway, there have been many occasions where you know I would receive a punishment from my grandpa. You know, and maybe I'd just be goofing off, maybe I'd be, I don't even know what I'd be doing. Usually slacking. He was he was a really hard worker, and I did not like to work very hard. I liked to hang out with my imagination, I like to play video games, I like to play with Legos, I like to, you know, do other things. You know, I didn't believe that a child should always be working. He had this little joke that, you know, for fun, he would always like to dig a ditch. I don't know. He like I said, he was a very hard working man. You know, he was a foreman in a quarry, like tough guy, right? And there would be occasional times where he would punish me, right? For whatever I did. I was probably being a smart mouth. And I remember he would take like like a tree branch, right? And he would like he would call it a switch. And I don't know if it's a Kentucky thing or what, but he would take like a like a tree branch and he would like smack me with it, or a fleece wire. He would hit me with a flice wire. And I think maybe on occasion, like a paddle or maybe a belt. Usually not a belt. Usually that that would be a little extreme. And I mean, I I haven't received punishments like this before. But watch about Dr. Gabor Mate talks about how that's a little tea trauma. Is you know, a lot of parents punish their kids, you know, back in the day, that's what they did anyway. We've moved away from that a little bit as a society, which is good because I don't think we should be going around doing this because of what I'm about to tell you. Because as a little tea trauma, right, and having somebody that I loved hit me and hurt me, you know, even though I was probably doing something I shouldn't have been doing, right? There has to be a reason. He didn't, he wasn't just like a mean man who just went around doing that, believe me. But, you know, there was probably something that I did that made him upset at me. So he took that out as a punishment. So he would hit me and hurt me, and I would feel sad about that. But I loved him, right? It was my grandfather, you know? And maybe this could be applicable to you. Maybe this was like a parent or like a grandparent or a stepparent or whatever, right? But I'm saying this is just a great example of a small tea trauma that I heard once from Dr. Kapor Mate on an interview that he did. And when I heard this, like I felt that. I'm like, oh my gosh, that that happened to me, you know. And I don't remember how old I was, you know, or whatever age, you know, maybe 10 is what I'm thinking about right now, as I'm thinking about this. And it was a 10-year-old, you don't have the emotional capacity to process that. You don't have the emotional capacity to be like, oh, cause and effect, I smarted off. You hit me with a tree limb. It was a small tree limb, right? It wasn't anything crazy. It wasn't taking like a whole branch to me or anything nuts, right? And I, you know, I probably deserve it. But looking back, you know, how that affected me as a kid was that that made me not trust someone I love, right? So it creates this little idea inside my head that people who who love me will hurt me. Okay. Do you see where I'm going here with this? And that creates a change in how your nervous system reacts to either those you trust, those you care about, or those you love. Okay. And sometimes if we're in a situation where maybe that's our norm, right? Maybe we're used to being put down. Maybe we're used to people like talking down to us, maybe because they were never seen or felt as children themselves, right? Or maybe they grew up in a hyper-critical household and somebody always held them to such a high standard that they don't even realize that they hold others, maybe their own children, maybe their grandchildren, even to a such a high standard because they were never seen as adults, right? Or or people, just people, right? People, people, and you know, and that gets heavy. That gets heavy. And a lot of the work that I do on a higher level within somatoemotional release can work to address some of these things. Okay. Now I'm not saying that my specific example is like the golden rule for everybody, but I'm saying that this work can unravel some of that stuff because we have unconscious parts of ourselves, non-conscious parts that remember how that felt to feel isolated or to feel alone or to feel like betrayed, even right? Betrayal trauma is a whole thing. Okay. Now I don't want to minimize anyone's experience. I don't want anybody to be like, oh, you know, but I I want to bring this up because it's very important, because all these things happen and we are just kind of running on, you know, uh programming, right? It's all programming. Okay, and we're running all those programs. But if if somebody doesn't step forward and bring those to our awareness, then we're just gonna keep on doing it, you know? So the work that I do here in Northwest Ohio allows people to feel more at ease within their body, it allows their fascia of the body to relax, and the fascia is your saran wrap that goes everywhere. And they have found out that your fascia contains a network of connection, right, within our body. So now that we know that our fascia is a network of connection and memory within our body, and now that we know that that can be relaxed with somatoemotional release and craniosacral therapy, and then when I start bringing somatic dialogue to the body and we start inquiring about what's going on deep within the surface of our body, that's when these beautiful things start to turn on and move and shape into you know more of a conscious reality, and we become aware of those again, right? Often within this work that I do, memories come forward. And it's not a memory that I'm like you within this work, there's two different types of memories, right? A solicited image and an unsolicited image. Okay. A solicited image is when the therapist, you know, kind of encourages something to be pulled forward, right? There's a little bit of an encouragement there, which is helpful, right? If you're wanting to get beyond something, it's helpful if the therapist does that. But I like working with the unsolicited images a little bit more because those are completely random. So that is when your body feels super safe and super relaxed. And then your tissue memory could start coming forward. We don't even know what it is, right? You might not know what it is, I might not know what it is. Even while it's happening, you might not know what it is. Okay. And that's what's interesting about this work, is because you know, I help a lot of people get through things that they're not aware of, they're holding them back in life. And my work is all about transformation. So I want people to move through some of these things because on the other side of that, once you have an emotional release, once that is pulled from your body, okay, it's not going to hang out there anymore. And then you can start accomplishing the goals that you want to. Then you can start having the life that you want. Okay. You know what I mean? This is big, phenomenal stuff. And I love doing this, and I love teaching this work. One day I hope to be like certified enough in this work to be able to teach it. I would love to be able to either be in a retreat space and work with people, you know, after maybe even after a psychedelic experience. You know, ideally that would be lovely to help them reintegrate that into their body, into their experience, open up the awareness of what's going on. Okay. Help them to remember themselves. And psychedelics does a marvelous job of opening something up and changing your default mode network. Okay, that's the normal way how we operate. Now I see this amazing instance within the realm of craniosacral therapy and somatoemotion release, where that happens, but I'm not directly opening up your brain, right? Within psychedelics, it's more of a chemical reaction. And then within my realm of bodywork, it's more of in like an outward experience that affects the internal experience that changes the outward experience, if that makes sense. Where psychedelics is more of like just a pow, you know, like pow. I don't even know how to describe it. Anyway, that's probably another topic for another time. So we will get into that most definitely. But I I wanted to talk about this today because it's it's important, right? And I help people with this on a regular daily basis, and I want to help more people with this, you know. A lot of people tell me, I didn't even know you had a business in Paulding, you know, in town in Northwest Ohio, right? I don't just specifically serve people at Northwest area in Paulding. I have people who come from Northeast Indiana. I do online work now, I do uh remote Reiki sessions for people, and I'm gonna be working on even doing maybe remote cranial work, right? It's a little different and it's a different type of system, but I love having a comprehensive knowledge of this stuff so I can help more people, right? That's my lot in life. That's that's how I show up in the world is being a service in service for others, right? And using my knowledge that I've obtained over the last 10 years, and I want to put that together in a beautiful little bumble for people. So, yeah, this is a little bit about what that podcast is kind of helping with. You know, it's also my creative outlet as well. But today I just wanted to talk about the work that I do because I had some awesome sessions today, and I really wanted to talk about this profound work with you guys. So, anyway, that's the podcast. I hope you enjoyed it and join us next week and take care of yourselves. Drink some water, get into your community, go smile at a friend, go out to lunch with somebody, go out to board. With somebody, right? Maybe there's a friend that you haven't seen in a while. Maybe you've got a homie and you're like, where have you been all my life, Bub? You know? Or maybe you just want to go eat pizza with some pals. Like, just go do it, right? Go do it because time is short. It's limited, right? We're not here forever, right? So go spend time with your friends while you can. Go do the fun things we can while you can and celebrate life. Okay? That's that's the advice I'll give to you today as we close this out. Anyway, take care, guys, and I hope you have an amazing, amazing weekend. Later.