#20 – What If You’ve Been Numb So Long You Thought It Was Normal? (Mitch Webb)

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Alright, it’s John Wood here, the founder of Rage Out. I’m here with Mitch Webb, another male, somatic practitioner. Somatic therapist, I guess. And rather than doing the long-winded intros, I thought we would just start off on a topic that I think is pretty interesting, which is that men should be, well, let’s leave the shoulds, get rid of the shoulds. But men would benefit from this work just as much as women. So what do you think about that, Mitch?

Speaker 2 (00:30):
No, man. Men should not be in this work. We need to cut off all ties to men and we just heal the women and hopefully they’ll our asses along. Right. Nah man. Amen to that. Yeah, it’s funny finding this work as a man. I think we’re less likely to be the sex that goes first. And that became obvious for me. We were kind of chatting beforehand when I was in a men’s group I was reading. I started the group with two other, my other buddy started that brought me into it. I was really in my health coaching at the time. It’s probably two and a half, three years ago. I’m reading the book, the Body Keeps the Score. I remember specifically getting to the early developmental trauma stuff and flipping right past that. That’s not me.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
That’s not you. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
I had no idea. And I’m sharing some things in this group and I made a comment that was just emotionally immature. I thought I was being like a bro and or being cool, maybe Tough, tough. There you go. Yeah. And one of the guys pulls me aside at the end he’s like, Hey, you’re reading that book. The body keeps the score talking about trauma. And I’m like, yeah, yeah. He’s like, that’s you. And I’m like, what do you mean? And he’s like, dude, especially with your story and chronic illness, it just makes so much sense. He’s like, you’re the guy in the story. And he’s like, I know because I’ve been there. And he’s like, I’ve got a therapist for you to check out. And that started my journey of unpacking trauma and seeing the connection between trauma and chronic illness and started my journey of unpacking all that shit.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
I mean, I think it’s such a great place to start because most people, especially most guys I think, but most people, I’ve got people in my family where I’m like, you are so traumatized, but they don’t think there’s any trauma at all. And so there’s this almost this education gap right now where most people, in most places it seems certainly in the western world are traumatized to some degree, but no one really knows. And if trauma is a big car accident or rape or war or some big thing, if you don’t have that, there’s no trauma. So what’s trauma to you? How do you explain trauma?

Speaker 2 (02:53):
How do I explain trauma? I mean, gosh, I could take a couple different routes to that, but I think it’s the word I’m trying to say. It’s this word I just had it in my mind. It’s an adaptation to a stressor. A moment that was overwhelming that we couldn’t respond to. And so we ended up shutting down and that as we would say, implicit memory, the memory, the traumatic memory, the stressor gets stuck in the body and it’s taking up space. And eventually for someone like me, it’s going to start pressing on different systems like your immune system, autoimmunity, your digestive system. I couldn’t digest food, your energy system. You’re going to be either come to this work not feeling anything, and that’s the person that’s going to say, I don’t have any trauma because they’re in a freeze or a functional freeze. And then there’s my hair’s on fire and I think I got lucky enough to feel that hair, to feel myself on fire to want to, you got to hit a turning point of, and I exhausted everything and it’s like I’m either going to go with this or keep avoiding it.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
So it’s men’s group. What’s that?

Speaker 2 (04:19):
How would you define trauma?

Speaker 1 (04:22):
I mean, I’d probably paraphrase Peter Levine are one of those guys where it’s like, man, some bad shit happened. There was distress response. You wanted to run away, you wanted to attack, you wanted to do something that produced, well that was basically emotion, but it wasn’t resolved at the time. So it gets stuck and it fucks everything up. The metaphor I use in Y course where I teach people how to do this is blocked pipes. So kind of the energy wants to move through the pipe, but when there’s trauma, it’s like all that, that shit gets stuck and the pipe gets blocked. Or you could think about a toilet gets blocked and it’s a mess, man. And you want to fix the toilet, you have to unblock the toilet. It’s not about saying affirmations or thinking about how grateful you are to have a toilet. You need to get a plunger and get in there and get all that shit out from the past in the toilet or in the pipe. So to me, the trauma is that it’s that stuck energy from the past, the leftover, the residue that is unprocessed, which keeps the system in an elevated activated state.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
And that’s what we call dysregulation.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
So I’m stuck. I’m using my window here as my window of tolerance. I’m sympathetic, I’m out of the window, I’m up here or I’m shut down. And I’m really cycling between those I think is an easy way to talk about dysregulation.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
So you mean for people who are just listening to it, you’ve got a pen and you’re drawing a wave, like a sound wave. When we’re talking about at the bottom is maybe somewhere in the middle, maybe is relaxation baseline. And then if you go up, you go fight flight, you’re starting to get stressed, starting to want to attack or destroy runaway at the top, you hit freeze, right? If it’s too much. But then you’re flipping all the way down to the very bottom of that sound wave. It’s not really a sound wave, but that wave, that’s what you mean. And then when you’re dysregulated, you’re actually flipping between this high activation of destroy attack, run away and total shutdown down.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, I think it presents for me it was when I started this work, it was, I feel so much and I have no idea what’s going on. And then there’s also, so that’s the high activation that’s at the top end of the wave there. And at the bottom there’s this functional freeze where we’ve learned that we have to shut down, make ourselves small, push away or avoid certain parts of ourselves. And then we learned that if I shut down and I stay small, I can stay in this false window of tolerance that is functional freeze, and I can be seen, I can get love because I’m not too much or I’m not enough. So it’s like this new carved out false window of tolerance that is functional freeze where we just don’t have access to ourself. We’re kind of in our bubble, living in our own bubble, and we’re living underwater almost is what it feels like. We don’t have access to emotions and life.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
So we’re throwing out some lingo here. Which do you and me makes sense because we’ve been doing this for a while, but what is, for example, functional freeze? What’s that?

Speaker 2 (07:34):
What is that? Well, it’s high tone, dorsal if we want to get super using the dictionary there. But what is freeze? Freeze is shut down. Freeze is, gosh, a couple symptoms that come to mind would be like fatigue, some autoimmune, some sluggishness. You add that.

Speaker 1 (07:59):
I mean to me, freeze is the video that Irene shows, right where the gazelle gets chased by the cheetah, gazelle catches the cheetah wraps its jaws around. The gazelle does not catch the cheetah. The cheetah catches the gazelle, the cheetah rap, his jaws around the gazelle’s neck, the gazelle freezes. And so I guess in an extreme level where it’s meant to be is that’s numb, paralyzed, can’t move, blood goes to the core, the organs, all that sort of stuff to stem the bleeding. So it’s a low like a pause, you’re about to die, maybe you get to run away after that. And a functional freeze is that, but you’re not so frozen, numb or paralyzed that you can’t move. There’s enough of that online. So your ability to feel is muted quite a bit. But you can still walk around, you can still go to work, you just don’t really feel like you’re are half alive maybe is one way to think about it. It’s like a functional version of that nonfunctional state

Speaker 2 (08:56):
And it’s like the functional freeze. For me it was so much harder to recognize. It took a lot more work. The activation was the high sympathetic tone that’s easy to feel and to see and to know when that’s happening. The functional freaks, I don’t know about you, but it was super slippery, difficult to see. Was it like that for you at all?

Speaker 1 (09:26):
I mean I haven’t honestly used that raise, functional freak. I mean to be honest, I think that’s totally where I was at. For me it was being, looking back, it was probably more, I describe life before the somatic stuff was it’s gray, it’s black and white. Now I feel like I’m living in more in color. That’s one way of putting it. How did it manifest for you when you say it was slippery, what was life like when you were in functional freeze?

Speaker 2 (09:52):
Well, I mean we went and did our first SPT, our first intensive with Irene Lyon eight months ago. And at that time I thought I only had a bunch of activation. I thought, oh, there’s no freezing here. And these, I was blaming on different things. It was always me trying to figure out what’s wrong with me and fix it. And black or white or gray is a really good way of describing it. Another one is like I gave this analogy of it’s like being held underwater for your entire life and then finally coming up for air. And I feel like that being held underwater is just, if you think about you’re underwater, you’re moving slow, you just don’t have a lot of access. That life force to the beauty of life, one thing that really shifted for me was my eyesight started going like, God damn, the world is beautiful. And you hear a lot of people, especially with politics and just different political and global events that are going on, it’s like, man, it’s a terrible time to live and the world sucks. And I’m like, yeah, but have you ever come out of survival mode? Dude, good god. Everything’s pretty dope. Unless I insert myself into the chaos, life is beautiful.

Speaker 1 (11:24):
So when you are in more in that functional freeze mode, it’s almost like life felt flat, like flat, dull gray, black and white, underwater muted. The underwater I think is, I’m a musician so I can hear if you’re underwater, all the high frequency sounds are muted out. It’s just can’t really. So it’s like you’re not really getting the full spectrum. Is that kind of what you mean? That you’re not really getting the full spectrum of life?

Speaker 2 (11:49):
I dunno if your car, my car, radio, I can be on a regular station and it sounds good. But then if it goes into HD radio, I mean it’s incredible sound. And it’s like you don’t notice it until you hear it. Until you’ve heard it,

Speaker 1 (12:08):
Right? I mean this has been one of the, when I’ve been trying to explain this nervous system approach to people, it’s like, man, I mean this is almost a difference. This is almost a tangent, but it’s like man, most self-help systems seem to be, they’re still working on the same issue. They’re still all working on functional freeze, but they don’t call it that. They don’t have the language for it. So it’s like we’re working at standard definition and then you get this nervous system model and it’s super ultra high definition max or something. So there’s that. But then also just in your experience going from that, okay, radio or standard definition radio to high definition radio, HD radio or H HD audio or something like that. It’s a bit like that. Where the challenge with it is you don’t know. That’s why it’s slippery. You don’t know that you’re in that functional freeze that you’re underwater. You don’t know you’ve been in that for your whole life in most cases for most people. So then it’s only when you come out of it you’re like, oh, is this how healthy, how it feels to be healthy? This is pretty fantastic, but is this just normal? Is this just what healthy people feel all the time?

Speaker 2 (13:15):
Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. Man. It’s like these, we start to identify with our protective patterns that have kept us, allowed us to survive. So maybe that’s people pleasing perfectionism, black or white thinking intellectualize, right? I’m anxious. So our identity becomes these protective patterns that are the freeze, that are the trauma. And until you can really take a step back and build the capacity to, it’s all awareness. So it’s just build the capacity to be able to see these things. And it’s like once you can see it, you don’t have to be it. But going back to what you said earlier too about all these other programs that feels like a distraction. It feels like busy work. So I’m just going to go and I’m going to because there is no connection to self and that’s the best, the glue, the following, my own impulse and listening to my body instead of relying on the external to get a result. So if I’m going to use breath work, let’s say, which hey, I did, I’m going to get into a holotropic breath work class for 45 to 60 minutes, completely starve myself of oxygen to get a feeling that then calms me. But what happens the next day or the next day after that? Is that what your system needed? Do your system need to hyperventilate or is that just distracting you from this feeling that’s uncomfortable that we don’t have the capacity to sit with at the time?

Speaker 1 (14:56):
Alright, so you’re saying breath work more as a, because breath work is a rage right now. This is an interesting topic. Breath work, meditation, all of it, breath work. I see these ads come up on Instagram and there’s ninth dimensional breath work, whatever the fuck it is. And I’m really skeptical of this stuff. I’ve done enough of it now where I’m like, ah man, nothing comes close to this shit we’re talking about here, this nervous system work. But it sounds like you’re talking about breath work being, a lot of people seem to see it as a way to go into stuff, into feelings. They can have a big emotional release, but you are talking about more as a bypass way to avoid something.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
It’s like mental gymnastics and there is no things are black and white. Totally. I think it’s a good tool for the right person that’s getting started that can’t sit still. That’s got a lot of sympathetic energy. That’s where I think of things like a movement practice like Qigong, maybe not quite Feldenkrais yet. Maybe a little bit of yoga or just nature walking with a little bit more presence. And because I know for me it was so easy with breath work with yoga to push past my capacity because I was so used to abandoning my body and going past my capacity thinking if I just beat myself up, that’s what my body needs. That’s the conditioning instead of, well what does my body need? And it’s a whisper. You can react from the trauma, the anxiety, and feel like you got to do it right now or I got to go do the most. And that voice can be really loud. It’s slowing down to listen to the whisper of this is too much. So it’s not to knock breath work, it’s more about just context.

Speaker 1 (16:58):
This is the tricky thing about it. This is the tricky thing I have trying to explain this to people is there’s so much nuance here. It’s not just, oh, are you feeling stressed? Do you want to open up emotionally? Go and do a breath work class. It’s like, well maybe spend a year or two years learning about your nervous system. No one wants to hear that and they just want to go do their breath work class, pay their 50 bucks, whatever it is, drink some cacao and have a release. And what you’re talking about is this, and this is what I mean. I’ve done that stuff too. I’ve done plan medicine ceremonies, I still do. But there’s a certain, it seems like I notice people are different. Some people, their challenge is just getting enough motivation to do any of this work. And for some people you might be the same as me.

(17:42):
By the sound of it, it’s like chasing intensity. Give me the intense experience, give me the ayahuasca, the magic mushrooms, the crazy breath work experience that has me sobbing by the end of it. And it’s really been a practice. I dunno if man are more like that in general or what, but there’s certainly been a practice of learning the subtleties of being like, now it’s been more like, oh, now the practice is how relaxed and safe can I feel? How much of that can I cultivate? And then it’s just these tiny little, yesterday we were on a call with our teacher Irene, and there was a twitch in my back. Sometimes it’s that simple. It’s like just this little muscle twitch and that can be all what’s needed in that moment. And it’s less about let’s dig something up, let’s go blast the system open and more about cultivating a platform of safety. And then things just come up when they’re ready to come up, we don’t go looking for it. That’s that whisper.

Speaker 2 (18:37):
Yeah, dude, that’s God, I’ve gotten that lesson, this safety instead of chasing the big, because I saw my actual window of tolerance after our first event. I saw how small my window of tolerance was that I was blowing past. And dude, I was tired for months. We used to talk about this a lot and I thought wanted this, I wanted to get it out. I wanted to fix it and completely ignoring my own capacity. And what I learned over time is what you just mentioned is I wanted self trust, trust, I wanted safety. And the only way we can do that is through is self-trust,

Speaker 1 (19:24):
Trust. What’s a window of tolerance?

Speaker 2 (19:28):
I’d say that’s where we feel good. We’re not too activated. We’re not shut down, we’re present, we’re creative. Stress feels easy, effort feels good. It’s the sun’s shining. I’m noticing nature, I’m present. But it also feels like that’s not coming up for water after being held underwater and seeing the beauty of life. And it feels like I have full access to myself. I’m not 80% Mitch, I’m not 75% Mitch. It’s full me. But I don’t think you even know what that means until you experience it. And I think what I’m kind of describing too, as I’m saying window of tolerance is also that coming out of survival

Speaker 1 (20:19):
Energy. Well it sounds like too, I mean even though the language, the phrasing of that, you’re talking about doing a big release, whether it’s a breathwork thing or something else where you’re going way outside your window of tolerance. So what do you mean by that that you can be inside and an outsider? What do you mean? What does it mean to be outside your window of tolerance? What are some signs of that?

Speaker 2 (20:38):
For me, the first one I’m going to notice is probably overthinking something. So what that’s telling me is I’m avoiding some of feeling that’s uncomfortable or I don’t have the capacity to be with at the moment. And so I’m going into my head to think my way to safety instead of trusting myself, trusting my body. And that can come from just full send. I call it hold my beer. And that’s going into the intensity of the experience just for the intensity just to get this outcome that our brain is creating or saying that we need. But that may not be what we need right now. So again, we’ve abandoned our body and so that’s when, that’s our symptoms, that’s when we’re in a contraction. I don’t feel like myself, I feel like I’m underwater. My symptoms are popping up. And the one that I’ve been noticing more is just like, oh, here comes my thoughts, trying to figure out what’s wrong and intellectualize my safety instead of actually feeling safe.

Speaker 1 (21:46):
So it’s kind of like the user metaphor, which might make it easier for people to understand is your window of tolerance is like, man, maybe I can do five reps of a back squat at a hundred kilos, 220 pounds and next workout I can do 2.5 kilos or maybe a hundred, 225 pounds. If I was to go and put 300 kilos on that bow, I’d be well outside my window of tolerance. I would not be able to lift that much. I’d get hurt. My nervous system would not have the capacity to output that amount of force. It’s a little bit like that. That’s how I’ve been explaining nervous system and capacity to people is that if we are going to use that window of tolerance thing, it’s like, man, if there’s an experience, you are not doing deadlifts or back squats with weight, but you’re doing a kind of emotional deadlifts if you’re going to be feeling some fear, some terror, some rage, some shame from 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, that’s an energetic deadlift, like an emotional deadlift. And if you haven’t been doing much emotional stuff for decades, a lot of people, you may be well outside, you may have no business at all lifting that weight right now. It’d be much better off, do a few minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes and then go and watch Netflix and I mean this is a pain in the ass. I hated still get frustrated with this aspect. I want to do it all right fucking now.

(23:16):
And this is where the breath work. This is the challenge with breath work or Aya Oscar and things like that. These things are great. I love psychedelics. I live in Peru. I do ceremonies regularly, but there’s a certain level of, okay, if something comes up, I know exactly how to work with it, how to stay with it, how to stay within that window of tolerance. Whereas you take someone who doesn’t know this, they don’t have the theory, they don’t have the techniques, they get hit with something, they could just blow them completely out of the water. They’re no longer in their body. They don’t know how to stay with their sensations. Maybe they think, I think thinking overthinking is probably one of my, that’s how I disconnect is be in my head. Some people, they just float off. They’re not even here. They’re like space cadets. They may not be thinking, but they’re just floaty. I see that a lot. So yeah, that’s usually how I explain it. That window of tolerance is like, it’s like lifting weights, man. Emotional deadlifts.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
Yeah, I love that. And that actually leads into one of the concepts that Irene shared with us that really helped me when it comes to knowing where my capacity is and when to keep going. When the pause rest is that traffic light. So there’s a green light, everything’s good, we’re moving through stuff. There’s the yellow light where it’s like, Ooh, maybe I need to pause here. And then there’s the stop. And I remember the first time my therapist, we were in therapy and I was terrified after because I was just, it’s like watching you lift this heavy weight. And I’m like, oh damn, John lifts 300 kilo. I want to do that. And so I go into that with the same intensity I’ve done my whole life of I’m going to do this perfect. I’m going to do this right now, I’m going to do the most and then just, I’m just wide open. But what I learned is that I said, I think I’ve got enough. And she was like, oh, awesome. Hell yeah. We were just starting the session too. And she’s like, how do you know? And it’s exactly what you said. It’s like, it feels like I can’t do another rep.

(25:16):
And that was such a huge turning point because now I’m feeling it, I’m listening to my capacity and I’m honoring that. And it’s kind of like I think about in the gym, like Pavel Tini, he’s a Russian kettlebell guy. He talks about greasing the groove. And that’s kind of how we have to approach this work. We have to unlearn this hold my beer approach where we go 120, if we can do 10 reps, we do seven. And that means that’s going to let me recover, integrate, and be ready to do it again. And that doesn’t mean every day, it means the next week or the next other week or whatever that is. But that was a big concept for me that actually built that safety and that self-trust because now I can listen instead of just blowing past the yellow and flying past the red light and end up in jail every time.

Speaker 1 (26:11):
I mean for me, this is one thing that I think it deserves better explanations when I’ve learned from different teachers, different people in this space. But for me, it’s how I notice, I guess it’s different for everyone, but my ways of how I can see, okay, I need to take a break, is if I’m feeling something, like I’m feeling the ground staying with my sensations in my body and something’s coming up. Often if I start to feel myself getting distracted, I start checking my phone, start going on the computer, I start fiddling. I can’t sit still anymore. I’m like, okay, time I take a break. That’s one thing. Or another thing is yawns. I start yawning heaps and I’m like, oh, okay. I think my system’s trying to put the brakes on.

Speaker 2 (26:52):
And that can also, and that’s a sticky one too. That’s a slippery one to use.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
It’s a tricky one. Sometimes the yawn can be a release. I know.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
Do you remember when we were at SPT last, and I dunno if you saw me doing this, but every afternoon we’d get into the walking through stuff, A lot of parasympathetic, well not necessarily just parasympathetic, but it was like a lot of social engagement we can bring on my appearance. Sympathetic, I was just yawning uncontrollably. And so yeah, that can mean, hey, that break is coming on. We’re going to that high to dorsal that freeze or it can mean we’re coming out of sympathetic energy as well. Activation.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
I dunno, that was a recent one where because I’ve been working with this pattern, this stuff in my back and last year, some of the stuff that’s been going on for me, and I think I said to Seth or Irene, like, man, I just yawn heaps and I’d be like yawning. I’d go for a walk and just yawn for half an hour straight, like yawn, yawn, yawn. And I think one or both of them were like, man, try not yawning. It could be that that’s your management strategy, the sympathetic, your systems trying to go into sympathetic, trying to go into a survival response, a fight or flight response. And because the systems, it’s just learn a defensive management strategy of slowing it down, don’t go there. So the yawn is a way to put the brakes on prematurely. So I was like all, let’s try that. Let’s see what happens if I don’t yawn. What happened? I mean dude, it’s been a pretty fucking wild. 12 months, eight months.

Speaker 2 (28:32):
Do you remember a moment when you got that? I think it’s a really good tip because when Seth and I were working together at SPT, I had one of my first freezes in an actual session. I’ve experienced that in psychedelic work, which I’d be interested to hear what you’d say about that. But I used to always process freeze in psychedelics. But that’s the thing is I had this tightness coming up my throat and I could feel it. And it’s almost like I grabbed it. I didn’t want, how can I say that? I prevented it from coming out and what he had me do was relax it and these waves of activation deactivation are going on. I wanted to take a deep breath and he told me the same thing. And it kind of ties into the conversation that we’re having because we learn these things through experience.

(29:23):
I find that when I learn something new, it’s like, oh, I have more capacity, I have more options. It’s like until that moment I have one way of dealing with different sensations, emotions, symptoms, as they’re coming up and you learn that you got to have a million tools and it is just awareness. And the more we learn, and it goes back to the nuance thing. It is so nuanced. But if you learn through those reps, putting the reps in, seeing, oh, you know what, I didn’t fucking die. That’s good information. Okay, so next time I don’t have to be as afraid of this. I can bring on more trust. And the more we see that, yeah, we trust our body. My body knows exactly what it’s doing. I don’t have to show up and dump everything out of my brain to get it right, to get the outcome I’m looking for. I just show up and go, Hey, my body, this is go, let’s just go. But that takes a long time for me to do,

Speaker 1 (30:29):
Dude. Yes. This is the funny thing. This is not a quick fix, overnight magic ball or anything. This is like a deep shit. One thing I wanted to say though is I mean when I asked Seth and Irene, I was like, man, you guys tell people to yawn, that might happen. He was like, yeah, it’s a bit of an advanced thing. This is in some ways what a lot of these tools are is how do you get yourself out of the way so everything can just come up and there’s the obvious things we do to manage our emotions and then there’s the not so obvious ones and part of the practice seems to be about seeing those things and then knowing when I’m going to open things up right now, have some space, some time I’m going to open things up, I’m going to get out of the way and we’re going to see what comes up. And then sometimes it’s like, yeah, I need to take a break. I need to fucking do some shit, get some work done, sleep, whatever it

Speaker 2 (31:20):
Is. It’s almost like I need to sit with this for a minute because how often have we had those things come up? It’s like that little younger us knocking at the door and the freezing rain and it’s like, please let me in, give me some attention. We’re just wha slam the door. No, let me biohack this.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
But then it’s like, I get that. But then I think for me it was like I’m just going to go into it all the time. I’m going to go hang out with that dude all the fucking time. And it’s been a real practice to be like, look, I’ll hang out with you for half an hour, an hour, whatever it is, and then fuck off. I’m going to go back and watch Netflix or whatever it is. I’m going to go forget about you. Huh?

Speaker 2 (32:00):
That would be pendulation, right?

Speaker 1 (32:02):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
Doing intensity and then saying, I’m going to go chill. That’s good. Talk more about that man, because I am realizing that’s something I’ve done because for so long we didn’t pay attention to our body and we had all this shit going on and once we started paying attention, it’s like, oh shit, this guy’s listening now here’s the whole truckload. So if we got, so number one, your body’s feeling safe if that’s happening, let’s celebrate that, but talk about that all the time thing

Speaker 1 (32:37):
For me, I remember when I first got into this work, I was flying back from Thailand to Australia and I had this weird feeling in my stomach, really unsettled stomach gut somewhere. And I just thought, oh, I’ll just sit here on this plane, this eight hour plane ride and feel it the entire time. I won’t watch any movies. I just thought that was what you’re meant to do. And then it’s been a process of learning, oh, this actually things get a bit constipated when I do that, if I feel it for a bit. And then once I feel like I’ve had enough, I go do something else, which for me can be anything. Guitar, tv, music, gym, music, music, jujitsu, just basically taking the attention into it and then taking the attention out of it that, and that can be on a micro level, like, oh, I’m feeling this pain in my visceral on my gut.

(33:29):
Let me go from my big tofa a bit and then let’s go back to the viscera. I can do it on just within the body or I can also do it from my body to my environment to pain in my chest. Oh look, something neutral, the light bulb over there. Or it becomes a more macro level like, oh, I’m feeling just gross and guilty or anxious or something right now. Okay, let’s feel that for a bit. Alright, did that been 20 minutes? Alright, now let’s go watch the last kingdom on Netflix. And that makes things that everything works better when I do that.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
Do you ever have the experience of like, it’s hard to shut that off. Do you have any suggestions or tips for that? Yeah, do I mean, I imagine myself being like, how do I get this volume to come down?

Speaker 1 (34:17):
Absolutely. I mean right now what I’ve been working through is I’ve had this OCD fairly mild, but enough that it just grates on me and often it feels like there’s no escape from it. I’ll be working, I can be feeling something, but I’ll be like, oh, lemme go chill out and read a book on the couch, 10 minutes in. It’s like, Hey man, you probably left the stove on, you should check the stove. And I’m like, bro, let me fucking relax. This is probably what I need more than anything else is just to chill the fuck out, leave me so I get pissed off with it and stuff like that. Or I wake up in the middle of the night and he’s certain voices in my head. This is a pretty drawn out long process. So yeah, for me, I guess I’ve had to find things that are so engaging that I do forget about that voice or those thoughts or the trauma, whatever you want to call it. So not every show is going to do that. Not every book is going to do that, but if it’s interesting enough, if it’s a thriller that has me on the edge of my seat, I will forget about whatever I was worried about. If I’m with certain people, when you’re with people, you laugh and you’re having a good time, same thing. You go into a flow state. I do forget about what’s bothering me, but not everything is like that. If I’m not super into whatever I’m doing, I won’t get that effect.

Speaker 2 (35:37):
I’m still in it. When I describe it as I’m thinking about this is like we go into that observer mode and say, it is just more observing it, not letting myself add additional fear to it. Okay, yeah, this is present. Hey, I see you, I’m with you. You’re not doing this alone, but I’m noticing that I’m having a thought about whatever and I’m noticing this activation, noticing this fatigue. Right now for me it’s been, I understand how to work with the, I’m more familiar working with the activation. Lately it’s been the fatigue and it’s like, fuck, what do I do? Because apathetic, I don’t feel like I want to do anything. I feel like I have no energy to do anything. And so it’s like, so what do I do? But I love what you’re talking about. Find something really interesting to immerse yourself into.

(36:29):
For me, that would probably be nature, exercise size, love, music. And I’m really, really loving Qigong. Me and Ely are going to do a little podcast on Wednesday and record a little movement thing. And I think that works so good. Last night I was even preparing for the podcast last night, I had all this imposter syndrome stuff come up and it’s like, who do you think you all that? I’m just doing this movement. And I’m like, holy shit, I’m just kind of watching it In the past. I would go into that and that would become the experience, but sometimes just watching it a little bit and naming it and naming it as a thought instead of, this is not me, this is just a part and we’re going to give it a little attention and then we’re going to give it a little space. Create a little

Speaker 1 (37:22):
Absolutely, man. Yeah. Space.

Speaker 2 (37:24):
Yeah,

Speaker 1 (37:25):
Space. One thing I really love to do is I notice this when I do a San Pedro ceremony like this, I dunno what it is, man, it’s like a fucking lizard underneath my skin. It feels like it’s alive. It feels like it has consciousness of its own. It is bizarre. It is a very weird sensation. And for a while I spent a lot of time feeling the sensation directly. I was like, if I could just feel this enough, then it will dissolve, go away. Never worked, just seemed to agitate it, if anything. And so one thing that became a really powerful thing was just going to the edge of it being, I think a friend of mine here said, I was like, this is jiujitsu for my fucking mind or my emotions go to the very edge of the sensation and I’m just peering in and then go to a different edge and just always stay in the gaps. And then it’s trying to get my attention. It wants me to focus on it, but I’m just sort of finding all the space to use that word space, find the space where it’s neutral or okay it, it was a game changer, man.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
Now I’m wondering what was at the edge, because I’ve done this around anger and I’ll imagine how big it is and get to that edge and then boom, there’s a bunch of grief. Is there anything at the edge or what happens at the edge?

Speaker 1 (38:45):
Nothing really happened at the edge of this thing. There’s no real emotion. I spend a lot of time at that edge. What seems to have happened or what seems to be unfolding right now is I’ve gotten better at, there’s a certain bracing or control structure within my system and I’ve gotten my own. It’s unconscious management strategies for holding stuff in. And then as that’s been relaxing, then the emotional stuff comes up. And I think that deeper stuff that’s probably more stored down in the gut and the chest, maybe the torso is what’s behind this thing in my face. That’s been the latest sort of iteration where I’m like, oh, this is really interesting. Is this facial tension changes? I feel my gut change and my gut changes this stuff and the face changes. So I wonder if this is just a symptom of what’s going on down here.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
It feels like it’s all connected, right? There’s like a string that connects these things. Like you and I were doing an exercise yesterday that was being on the spot in front of everyone. And man, I freaking had this band of stuff show up and that used to be scary. And it’s like the body gives us more, but it’s now when this stuff happens, I’m cheering on. I’m like, hell yeah, dude, we got a new layer and it’s cool how this thing can connect to this thing and this. And then there’s all of a sudden there’s this moment where maybe you’re in a one-on-one session and it’s like you just, what is complex trauma? It’s just this mess. And if you just pull that one cord out, other cords come with it, how much? And in that process, we’re kind of titrating it. We’re getting to know it until it’s ready. And again, I think that goes back to trusting the body and letting it do its thing. It can be excruciatingly slow, but the body seems to always know. And if we can get out of the way, we’re more successful with this stuff. We want to control it.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yeah, I mean this is what I’ve gotten to with my own shit right now is these tools are great. I want to feel this emotion. What color is it and shape and all this somatic stuff. But then what I’ve gotten to with some of my own things I’m working on right now is any attempt to do anything with it just makes it, hold on, keeps it there. It’s like any attempt to affect it in any way seems to reinforce the same pattern that something’s wrong, something’s not okay. And so it’s been a practice of,

Speaker 2 (41:19):
So how do you work with that then? That’s good. So I’m now, I’m on the edge of my seat. I’m like, how do you work with that? The last five or six sessions that I’ve had over the last two months, let’s say? No, it’s got to be more than that. Yeah, I guess two months I’ve started moving stuff out, mostly sympathetic, some freeze. And now that I see that I can move it out, I’m like, let’s move it out every time. And if I don’t move it out every time it feels like I’m kind of grasping at something and we know that a balloon, if it’s filled up with air and we’re just grasping at it, what’s it do? It just floats away. So what do you do then?

Speaker 1 (42:06):
I mean, dude, part of it has been loading to let go of the idea that I’m in control, which is whoa, neck,

(42:18):
Which is, I mean, it’s hard. I mean a guy I’ve been working with here, we’ve been talking about in the releasing, you get to the point you try everything to deal with a thing, to deal with the problem. And I feel like I haven’t tried everything, but I’ve tried a lot of shit and I’m like, it’s still there, whatever. This thing is still there. And so part of it is just giving it to God or source or whatever your relationship is with that, which is a practice. I’m not perfect at that by any means. I’m not perfectly available. And even part of that’s been part the lessons going, I’m not perfectly available or perfectly present or perfectly surrendered. This is me right now. And just being okay with that. The other part from a technique perspective, since doing the touch work with Seth, is really just been learning to relax deeper and deeper layers of the bracing in the pelvic floor and the gut and the kidneys and the shoulder blades and the neck and the head, the eyes, the jaw. And that’s not really, it’s tricky because all I’m doing is softening and relaxing and then whatever happens from there is just what happens from there. If I try and do something, tension comes into the system. So it’s like, okay, so from a conceptual perspective, it’s just accept that you don’t have control. And then from a technical technique perspective, it’s like just soften and relax, but then it still just happens when it happens. No, I can’t force it. It just gets in the way, which is fucking frustrating, man. Most of the time,

Speaker 2 (43:50):
Well, think about what we’re talking about. Going back to this, hold my beer. I’ve used these force my whole life. That was my only gear, dude. And what you’re talking about is this passive healing process, which is so counterintuitive to the I got, I don’t care. Tell me what to do, dude, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told that to different mentors and people I’ve worked with. Tell me what to do. I’ll do it. There’s nothing I won’t do. And you try everything. That’s what I did with this past year with hormone replacement being on testosterone replacement. That just gave me an excuse to blame the shutdown, the activation on that. And the more I hired a really good doctor and we did it piece by piece and I’m finally got everything balanced and I’m still shutting down and have activation. So it’s like I had to empty all that out, empty out every single way of what could be wrong and what could I be doing here? And it’s like, oh, this is the dysregulation, this is the nervous system, and I have to go with this passive thing. I have to accept that this is where I’m at right now. Like you just said, I have to allow the sensation, I have to soften into it. And it’s this lady, I think this is what we call brain retraining. I’m starting to understand I got this book from this lady in the fifties.

(45:23):
I’m not seeing it, but that’s her thing is accept it, allow it, and pass through it with as much ease as you can. I think you can even add that approach to orienting and following your impulse that Irene teaches. And now you’ve just got this. It’s surrender, dude. It’s surrender, it’s trust, and it’s allowing. And that’s really hard if we’ve never had safety. That’s what it’s all about.

Speaker 1 (45:49):
Yeah, it’s almost like the path at some point becomes just that, just being. And then to be fair, if something does come up, if there’s some regression or rage, I never know exactly what to do with it. I’ve got all the techniques and the theory. If the big thing does come up, I know how to address it. But if there’s nothing there obvious to work with, it’s really just that’s what the past seems to be like now. It’s just feeling, I love standing in the wind, feeling the wind on my face. That’s probably become just a good nervous system resort. It’s just the way the wind feels that it’s fucking magic, man. That’s a lot of what I do now. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (46:36):
Filling your hands as you’re going through God or since SPT, just lay on the fucking ground. Do you know they’re, I think being in Whistler at this event and not having a TV at nighttime is the first time I’ve done that in forever. And the first time time we were there, I was like, what the fuck? I’m going crazy. I need to watch the show or something. And the second I was just like, now that I came back, I’m like, I think I’m ready to throw the TV out unless there’s a good sports on, man. It’s so nice to just lay it on the ground or just not do shit.

Speaker 1 (47:22):
One thing I wanted to cover before we finish this type of thing is I imagine for you would’ve noticed this too, right? We do a training with Irene Lyon or teacher of ours, and whether it’s the teacher training thing we’re doing now or SBSM, which I guess you’ve done the 21 day thing, it’s like 80, 90, 90 5% women. So you have a handful of dudes in there. That’s why I was surprised to see you in there. And then we’ve got another guy in this SPT training right now. What’s the point of this? When I try and explain this to a lot of guys, women usually get it, but I think a lot of men are like, sounds pretty gay, man. It’s like that kind of, that’s the attitude. And I’m like, you have no idea. This is the most legit thing you will ever do, is the most rewarding, best thing you will ever do,

Speaker 2 (48:09):
The most gay thing you can do.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
I swear I’ve heard that. You see it on Instagram, man. There’s some guy having an emotional release and the comments are like, gay

Speaker 2 (48:22):
Dude, that was me, man. So I felt like I came from a different world than a lot of the people in the group. And maybe that’s just my experience with this emotional stuff and not having safety in my family, God admitting you have or need help or have a problem or not even that. Yeah, you’re dealing with some shit. We all do. That means you’re weak. So the point, what level do you want it at? I think at a very big deep ass level. We’re healing the planet. We’re healing consciousness. We’re healing like good and evil. We’re evolving. We’re experiencing more life from someone who’s dealt with chronic disease. And for the last 20 years been sick. I now know the reason why. And it’s not just, I thought it was the Lyme disease, the heavy metals, the traumatic brain injuries, the long haul. It is all that.

(49:32):
No, it’s everything. And you can look at your family system and say it’s early developmental trauma. It’s generational trauma, bro. Everything that we do is traumatic to our system. And as a human collective, we’ve been locked in trauma and unable to see ourselves for so long. And I’m really learning that by looking at Seth’s book that he shared about the multiverse, and it’s just cracking my dome open and I’m scraping my brains off the ceiling. But that’s big. That’s the big thing. And then at a smaller thing, I think something that’s helpful for men is it affects everyone around you. We want to be the protectors and we want to be there for our family and our loved ones, and we can’t be there if we’re checked out that we’re not feeling, we’re not allowing ourselves to feel emotion, to express ourself, to be the whole human experience that we are.

(50:26):
We put ourself in this box that says, I am masculine and I can use anger and I can use rage and everything else is being a pussy. Everything else is cutting you off from what it is to be human. And you’re really doing a disservice to those people that you think you’re showing up for and protecting. And your lack of attunement and emotional intelligence and ability to be in the moment is doing them a disservice. And you don’t even know that until you get into this work. And so I think a lot of guys do really good at saying, I’m going to do this for other people. And so at first, if it’s not for you, do it for your family. Because when you do it for your family, it affects everyone and it ripples out into the community, into your home life, your loved ones, and everyone’s going to be affected by that. And it’s for the greater good of the planet. Are you in service of others or are you in service of self?

Speaker 1 (51:24):
That’s interesting, man. Yeah. You see on Instagram, most guys kind of get it, be strong, be fit, be able to protect your family, make, I don’t know, whatever it is, guys value these things. It’s not really about the fitness of the money or whatever. It’s about being a strong, reliable man with integrity, who provides value to the people in his community around him, his family. And I guess, yeah, if you link it to that, you say, man, it’s good to be strong. It’s good to be fit, a good healthy male. And one of the best, healthiest things you could do for your family, for the people around you is to be this, to regulate your nervous system. Maybe that is the way in to get the dudes interested. It’s like, man, don’t do it. If you’re not ready to do it for yourself, cool. Do it for your family, do it for your friends, do it for your kids, do it for your parents.

Speaker 2 (52:19):
Yeah, man, that’s a hard thing to see. I remember that because one of the first guys I worked with in this work, I remember being like, Hey, have you ever been to therapy? You want to go to therapy? This sounds like something that would be a good to talk to your therapist about. And I was still just health coaching. And he’s like, no fucking way. And he’s like, I’ll talk to you. But then we looked at like, how is this affecting your, I love it. Can I tell this story? Do we have enough time in five minutes? Sure,

Speaker 1 (52:53):
Yeah, yeah. We can wrap it up with this, but yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
Yeah. This is a great story. So I have this guy, he’s not open to this work. He is a hedge fund guy, made a land developer, made a lot of money. Good old boy, really good guy. Came from nothing, right? Made a shit ton of money. And so he had these people around him, these blood suckers if you will, that wanted his money. They didn’t want his friendship, they didn’t want his business or they didn’t want to enrich his business. They wanted something from him. They wanted their pound of flesh and he had this physical, first day he comes over, we’ll do a workout or something and he can’t do a dumbbell above his, he can’t get his shoulder in the air. And I’m like, how long has that been going on? He’s like, five years or something like that. I’m what? So I’m like, all right, let’s go to the chiropractor, let’s get to the massage person.

(53:43):
Let’s get this thing worked out. And six months goes by and nothing gets better. And we’re talking about it one day and he’s like, man, I’ve been going for six months. I can’t go this chiropractor. It hurts worse. He goes, I’m just going to live with this. I’m like, tell me more about it. And he’s like, man, I get home from work and his shoulders get hiked up to his ears. He’s like, I’m just carrying all this stress and I’m so tired. I can’t do these walks at nighttime that you want me to do. And I was like, did you see what you just did? Did you see how your shoulders went up to your ears? How often are you doing that? He’s like, I don’t know. I think I do it when I’m stressed. So I was like, all right, we’re not going to therapy.

(54:17):
We’re not doing any of that. I was like, can you just orient? Can you just pay attention to this and let me know when that happens and how often it happens? And if you’re doing it now, can you let that relax? Can that be the practice this week? Tell me everything you can about this tension and then work with it, relax it. And whenever you’re noticing it, it comes back. He’s like, yeah, man. When I remember I’m in these long meetings with these asphalts and I’m doing it the whole time and I don’t want to be there. I’m just kind of putting my head down and I’m going through the day and it’s exactly where it hurts on my neck. And he was able to release that and it felt better. And so the next week I’m like, okay, so now what I want you to do is when you’re in these meetings, I really want you to just be aware.

(54:59):
Let’s get as much awareness as you can. So I taught ’em how to orient feet on the ground, notice the four walls, notice the sound that people are making, really focus on the words while you notice your breath and your seat, you’re back in your chair. We’re just bringing you into the present moment instead of you being somewhere else. And I don’t know how this is going to go down. I just started learning about Irene’s work, and he came back two weeks later and I’m like, so how did it go? Expecting to hear nothing. And I was expecting crickets. And he’s like, well, I fired these two assholes that were wanting my money. These people are no longer my friend because they weren’t actually my friends. They wanted my money and I’m completely redoing the business. And I was like, holy shit. And he’s like, you were right, man.

(55:44):
He’s like, and you know what? My neck doesn’t hurt as much anymore. My neck’s getting better. And I’m like, holy crap. So that’s just an example. We use trauma, and it can be assumed that, like you said, when we were starting, it has to be this somebody that went to war mean. But if you’re going to war every day with yourself and you’re dragging yourself through the day that you don’t like, and you’re around people that don’t enrich you, that are pulling you down, that are sucking the blood out of you, well then that’s trauma. And the more awareness we can bring in, the more we can follow our impulse, listen to our body, we can start to say no to that stuff and do different things. And that’s what trauma work is man is seeing the patterns, doing something different and just continually listening to your body.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
Good shit, man. That’s a good note to end on. So with all of that being, I’d love to comment on that story, but we’ll just keep going man, for hours here. If people want to learn more about you, what you’re up to work with, you, ask you questions, where is the best place or places for them to do that?

Speaker 2 (56:50):
Yeah, I appreciate that, John. My website, mitch webb.com. K Mitch Webb on Instagram, I’m on Facebook and LinkedIn as well. And since we’re going to be sharing this on my platform as well, will you also do the same and let us know where we can find you at?

Speaker 1 (57:08):
Sure, yeah, I mean the best place for me is just go to rage heart.co. It’s like braveheart rage heart.co. There’s an email newsletter that’s the best entry point. I’m a little bit on Instagram but I’m not really posting right now. A bit on YouTube. But yeah, the best entry point, the best place to get sort of in on the inside is Rage Heart co co.

Speaker 2 (57:31):
And I’ll say as we sign off, John’s got some great social media posts, actually was following him before we met in person and I was like, oh shit, you’re right. Tar.

Speaker 1 (57:43):
That’s right. I remember that. I’ve kind of gone a bit off Instagram, man. Just the grind a bit. I’ve been enjoying. That’s why I’m trying to do more podcasts and YouTube videos. The longer form, more personal. I know. I enjoy this shit more

Speaker 2 (57:58):
Shit. Yeah man. I think with that you got to do a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Follow your impulse, man.

Speaker 1 (58:03):
Cool. Good shit man. I’ll have links to all [email protected]. I’ll send you the recording too. And yeah, thanks again.

Speaker 2 (58:11):
Yeah, man, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure.