#17 – Joe Martino – Why You’re Addicted To Doomscrolling (And How To Break Free)

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So Joe, what is one thing you wish everyone knew about the somatic or nervous system approach to healing?

Speaker 2 (00:06):
It’s a big question and I’m sure I have a perfect answer somewhere, but I’m just going to go with the first thing that comes and say that. Mostly I would say that it comes down to the fact that who we think we are right now, the perception through which we see the world, all these sorts of things are shaped so much by our nervous system, whether it’s our relationships, the way we see society, the way we see our career ourselves, our nervous system plays a huge role. And if we can kind of know that and look at that, we can become very curious about if we changed aspects of the way our nervous system is sort of seeing the world, which we can get into the nervous system healing part of it, how much would that change about what we think is possible, but the quality of our relationships, quality of our work, so on and so forth. And then when you expand out into a societal frame, how much would society change? And so really, this kind of just stems on a lot of curiosity. If we know that the nervous system plays a massive role in how we see almost everything in our life, how we filter everything that’s happening, what would change if we began to heal at that level, if we could begin to shift and change at that level.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Okay, I like that. Nice little beginning there. So we’ll get to that. I think that’s a nice little open loop. My name is John Wood, I’m the founder of Rage. I’m here with Joe Martino and obviously we’re going to hear to talk about the nervous system, somatic healing, nervous system healing, call it whatever you want. And yeah, I think we can just get straight into it. So I’m curious about that idea there, that the nervous system controls the perception of the world because seen it in myself, whereas things shift in my relative level of activation or we would say sympathetic activation if we’re going to be technical and use jargon. But my level of just baseline level of stress, and then I think I’m looking at the world and what I’m really looking through is this filter of it’s dangerous, I’m unsafe. And as that changes, I start to realize, oh, what I’ve been seeing all this time, this last 30 years of my life is not the world, it’s been my perceptual filter that was conditioned or programmed in me from childhood and life. Really? This is what you’re talking about, isn’t it?

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it’s amazing too because what often happens is we say we all have our own truth. And in a way that’s correct, but there’s a downside to that is that we may not get curious about if we’re misperceiving the moment, if we’re misperceiving objectivity. And of course that’s important because we live in a shared and co-created reality with whether it’s our partner in a relationship or whether it’s at work or whether it’s in society. We are sharing a reality and not every single one of our realities is actually fully different. It’s that it’s shaped differently by some of these factors. And this is why I think it’s just so important to get there because it will bring us closer together to perceiving what the closest thing we can say to objectivity that shared reality is the more we work on this level.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
That reminds me of a conversation I’ve had with a friend here in Peru. We’re talking about truth, what is truth? What does it mean to see what is the true nature of reality? And he put it really, I dunno where he got this from or if he came up with this or someone else did, but the idea he explained was each of us is like truth is just what is. But if you were to perceive it completely with no filter whatsoever, you would be dead. It’s like almost the defining characteristic of the human experience is that we are a filter and we all have a slightly different way of seeing things based on even just probably biologically or physiologically like our eyes. Maybe we have people who are colorblind, so we all filter the truth. And you’re saying that’s almost the downside what you’re saying, but it’s also the beauty of it.

(03:37):
We all have this different way of filtering and seeing and understanding what the truth is. But it seems like what you are saying is that, and this is probably pretty relevant now with the US election, by the time this gets published, it might be a few weeks or a month or two, but with the elections you have these people who think they’re all dealing with the same thing, but they’re all seeing at it from very, very different angles. And so we have all this division and anger and imagine, well, I dunno if that’s what you’re referring to, but that’s what comes up for me, political stuff where it’s like we’re all living in that. I see the world clearly, but no one else does. Not realizing that we all have our different filters that are skewing things in various ways.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
Yeah, it’s sort of like, and this has kind of been the essence of our work for the last 15 years or so with collective evolution, is really looking at what is shaping our perspective of the world on all the layers of being human, that shape perspective. And one of the interesting things is like you’re talking about with politics, we have our way of seeing the world through let’s say ideology and the things that we know. So we’ve been exposed to something that something has created a way that we see it and then we hear somebody say something different. And the first thing that can happen is we can hear it get upset and people will say, well, that’s just your bias coming into play. And it’s like, well, yeah, I mean there is cognitive bias at play there, but if you take it a step deeper, it’s like even if you agree that we all have cognitive bias to some extent because we do, the question is how much are we going to let that cognitive bias really run the show?

(05:04):
And for me, I go back to this concept of embodied sense making that I’ve been talking about for a long time, which is saying if we listen to the resistance in the body to an idea, to a person, to an ideology, to an event, or to an interpretation of an event, if we listen to that resistance, if we listen to where we’re getting defensive, where there’s aggression coming, where there’s shutdown coming, all these potential little aspects which relate to the nervous system, if you start listening there and you go, okay, hold on, how can I just pause for a moment, recognize that that’s there, seeing that that is the trigger that’s going to potentially make me go into a cognitive bias and now I have agency to sense my feeling, I notice the cognitive bias and then there’s a choice point. And that choice point is the ability to stay in the game and say, hold on.

(05:52):
Okay, I see all these things going on, but I want to keep listening. I want to keep exploring. I want to keep my curiosity turned on. So we’re listening to the body, we’re listening to the way the mind wants to perceive, and we’re saying, how can I stay and explore? And through that, we begin to look at the ways in which we’re filtering our reality. And if all of us have our own filter, like you were talking about in the example earlier with the essence of the human experience, my proposition is how can we make it so that filter is just kind of as clear as possible? How can we remove the distortion so that we’re sharing? We are always going to have a little different color in the lens through which we see things, but if we have a lot of fog on top of that color, that’s going to really create this division. And my sense and feeling is that the more we practice embodiment, the more we gain regulation in the nervous system and the ability to not allow so much defensiveness or aggression or wounds of our past, whatever it might be to allow the cognitive bias to color the experience, the clearer the lens that we’re going to have.

Speaker 1 (06:55):
It’s interesting, I think about there’s so many different little jumping off points, but it seems like when I’ve seen this in people as well, when the less embodied, so maybe we should define what do you mean by embodied before we go down this little rabbit hole?

Speaker 2 (07:06):
How do you define it? Yeah, for me, it’s having that awareness of being in this physical body, being able to sense to feel, to know that there’s the body, to be able to tap into that biological impulse that we have. Being able to sense when we are maybe becoming a little bit defensive or a little bit overexcited or being able to just feel the sensations, the emotional aspect that kind of emerges after sensation. So embodiment is really, for me, it’s that sense of having that good awareness and being connected to the body in that way so that information can come to our conscious mind in a coherent way.

Speaker 1 (07:44):
It reminds me of have you ever met someone and you get into some kind of disagreement or argument, and this is for the listener as well, and they get angry, you sound, you’re getting angry, and they’re like, I’m not angry. And it’s like, well, you look like you are visibly angry unless you’re just acting, which I don’t think you are angry right now, but you are so disembodied that you don’t even realize that you’re angry. So that’s almost like an example of I guess a disembodiment, someone who’s not connected, they don’t know what they’re feeling when they’re feeling it. They might realize it later and when they come down they’re like, I was a bit pissed off there. I don’t know what happened. I got a bit triggered. But you’re talking about knowing it in the moment you start to get angry and you’re like, whoa, I’m feeling kind of pissed off. I read that headline or that person said that thing and I’m feeling, and as long as that activation’s there, I’m not going to be seeing clearly. Is that what you’re saying?

Speaker 2 (08:32):
Yeah, it can. I mean, to have an activation of some sort as from this work is like it’s a signal in it. And then sometimes we want that, right? We want to have our defensiveness or aggression come on in a healthy way depending on the situation. But what we’re seeing happen is that in so many mundane aspects of life or in so many everyday aspects of life, we are getting that triggering or that something is coming on more from our survival system than it should be. There’s obviously many different reasons for that from we might be baseline agitated or we might be baseline shut down. We might be just dysregulated in other ways where we’re just quick to trigger or just something reminds us of a really big wound that we have and we come up in contact with that and boom, it comes up.

(09:20):
So it’s like there is an element of like, yes, I don’t want to make it sound as though we shouldn’t have these sort of reactions, but it’s more so let’s get curious about the ones where we’re not actually in danger, where there’s somebody not there with a knife, there’s somebody not there, or big almost car accident moment or an animal is there, or something’s going on that requires our system to come on in survival. All of the other times outside of that, we want to be able to see what is arising and then get curious about it. Why am I having that reaction when I read that headline? What’s going on here? And when we can get curious about it and kind of explore it as opposed to the guy who you were talking about where it’s like, I’m getting mad, I’m getting angry, I’m getting pissed off.

(10:05):
And then they might explode in the conversation and then later they go, yeah, what the heck happened there? That’s okay too. But a lot of times people will just say, I’m justified in that because this is important and because this is my fight and this is my thing. And the challenge with that is we end up with a lot of uncontained, anger, uncontained aggression, and we never really can come together and have meaningful conversation. So it’s really about getting curious about those points in which we’re starting to feel something and starting to discern why we’re having that reaction.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
One phrase that comes up is truth, talking about truth or cleaning the filter. So it’s not so fogged up, but the idea that truth starts in your own body before you look for it in the news or in the people around you or in the world, start by getting clear on what’s happening in here. Do you know when you are angry? Do you know when you are afraid or ashamed or guilty? If you can’t feel that, that’s almost like the barometer for what’s happening on the outside. Now I need, I’m not really aware of what’s happening in reaction to this headline or whatever it is that’s going on unless I’m really in tune with what’s happening here.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
Yeah, yeah. And that brings up the question of intuition, right? Because in the field that I’ve been in, which includes a lot of spirituality and metaphysics, the concept of intuition comes up a lot. And I mean, we could probably go on breaking down intuition as there’s this implicit sense of it where if you ask yourself a difficult question and you think about it for a few minutes and then you’re like, well, I don’t know, I don’t know the answer. And then maybe 2, 3, 4, 5 hours later, you get this spark of, oh my gosh, I got the answer. Well, part of what can be happening there is behind the scenes and in the mind it’s still working on that problem. And then when it’s time, it rushes it forward to your higher order thinking in the present part of your mind and say, oh, here’s the answer.

(11:54):
And we think, oh, that’s a spark of insight. But that’s one form of intuition which is implicit. It’s happening inside of ourselves, and it’s happening through a cognitive process. There’s other forms of intuition that are implicit, and we call it intuition, although I wish we had a little bit of a different word for it, and it’s kind of more of that trauma response wounding. So it’s that I go into a situation and I’m like, whoa, something is not really, something doesn’t feel right. And then we might make meaning of that and say, my intuition’s telling me this situation’s bad, but is it actually bad? Or did something in the room remind us of an old wound where at that time we needed a protection response? We don’t now, but that old wound is still speaking, but it feels intuitive because in a sense it is, but it’s not the intuition that we come to define as this helpful, useful thing where it’s like, Hey, I want to be able to clearly see a situation and make an objective decision in a sense.

(12:49):
So while that other one that does come from inside, the one that explained second is still technically intuition, it’s clouded by trauma, it’s clouded by something that may not be objective to the moment. However, it’s a response that comes from the nervous system, and it’s not trying to harm you, it’s doing something good for you. It perceives this is how stuff gets stuck in the body. It perceives that, Hey, there might be something about this. It was in the past. And so this is where it’s really important to discern that type of intuition, what’s going on there. And then of course, we can get into the third hype, if you will, of explicit intuition, which is it would be tapping into something out there, something that’s not coming necessarily from inside of ourselves, but more on what we call a psychic or energetic front. And that’s another type of intuition. And the key is how in order to discern between the different parts of these and what’s going on requires a great sense of being able to listen to ourselves, being curious, knowing how to sit with what feels uncomfortable sometimes, and just really attuning to the frequency of the different possibilities. And this is very not woo woo, it’s a skill that you build, right? It’s something that you gain, it’s clarity that you gain from doing this kind of work.

Speaker 1 (14:00):
I mean, it reminds me of some of the stuff I’ve gone through where exactly what you said, where it’s like that middle type, the second type of intuition where I’m like, okay, yeah, I’m picking up on something, but is this a true thing or is this just my own stuff? And it’s a real practice to feel into it, to get used to it, where sometimes, and I guess that’s the filtering, it’s like we’re calibrating because of what we’ve been through where might, for me, I can be a bit hypervigilant, bit OCDA bit on edge, but to a lot of the situations that I’m in. And so I realized that, and I’m quite aware of it now, but now what I see is because so much feels unsafe, just like it’s not intense or panic attack anxiety, it’s more like a low level, like a low hum, that’s just always there.

(14:43):
That just seems normal. It’s always been there for as long as I can remember. But because of that, in some ways, everything feels dangerous. And so then I then start readjusting probably with my mind. I go, oh, well, it thinks the tap is dangerous. I’ve got to turn the tap off and make sure the fridge is shut and all these different things. So then I start recalibrating in the other direction, go, okay, well obviously some of that stuff’s not actually dangerous, but then there’ll be something that is dangerous where I’m like, yeah, it’s probably not dangerous. I’m not sure. Is that the first type of intuition or is that my OCD? The part of me that’s just afraid of everything coming up. And it’s been such a process better at it now, but it’s still a process, still working through this where it’s trying to get those two things lined up so that when there is unsafety, I perceive unsafety. And when it’s safe, it’s safe, but it’s not a man. It’s not an overnight thing, is it?

Speaker 2 (15:29):
No, it’s not. And I would ask you, what was your pathway when you think about the skills you had to build in order to discern between those? What are they?

Speaker 1 (15:37):
I mean, a lot of, we both work with Irene, worked with Irene, and so much of it has been, I mean, yeah, that’s a really good question. So much has been obviously things like just being embodied. So feeling the ground, knowing how to look around, noticing my breath, those types of things. Working with, I think a big part of it has been for a long time I meditated twice a day, not twice a day necessarily, but 20 minutes a day for 10 years or something. And I didn’t realize even after all of that, just how shut down I was. And so because of that, I was then seeking out dangerous experiences. It would give me a feeling of adrenaline. I’d feel alive, I’d drink lots of coffee or drugs or alcohol or sex, whatever it happened to be. And so I mean, it’s really been that process of education on the nervous system, why we’ve mentioned some of these words shut down, collapse or sympathetic. So understanding what’s really happening and then learning to feel.

(16:26):
But it really has been, I mean, it’s still ongoing. There’s still stuff where it’s like I can feel it, I’m aware of it. I know sort of what’s happening emotionally. I get waves of it that come out, but it doesn’t all just come out in one go. It’s get a bit and then it’s an integration, get a bit, and then an integration. And so I wish it was just like, sometimes I’m like, man, why does this have to be such a process? Can we just get this done, have one big, or sometimes I’ll be like the emotions, because often what’s controlling a lot of this is unexpressed stuff, emotions. And I’ll be like, why can’t these emotions just be like, Hey, John, you need to take an hour today and just go sit down somewhere and have a really good cry or a really good rage or whatever it is. But instead, it’s like this game of smoke and mirrors where it’s like, it’s there, it’s not there. I try to get into it, but it doesn’t really want to go into it. It’s such a tricky game, man. I’m like, why does it have to be? Why can’t it just be like, Hey man, it’s time to cry. You go do that. You’re like, cool, thanks for that. Yep, no worries. Onwards. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
Yeah, it’s tricky stuff. So much of it has been there for so long and we’re in this modern world that demands a lot from us. And so it’s not like we can spend three, four hours a day really exploring some of this stuff. And when I say what I just said, sometimes people will go, well, that doesn’t seem like life, that we would need to spend three, four hours a day healing this, that, whatever. And it’s like, well, look, I mean, we’re where we are as a human society. We have to accept that we are in a space where we’ve kind of been neglecting our nervous system health, our humanity, what’s natural for us to thrive. We’ve been neglecting it for a really long time. And so there’s elements of, yeah, it is going to be some work at the beginning, it is going to be some work, and that’s just kind how she goes.

(18:12):
And if we were more in tune with that and that work, we probably wouldn’t be talking having this conversation because so much of our natural DNA and biology and expression would be already coming out. But we are where we are. So this is kind of what it takes. And your answers on the, you bring up self-awareness and interception, right? This ability to sense and feel and notice and discern, right? Initially, I know when I work with folks sometimes it’s like it feels impossible to them that they’re going to ever be able to navigate a panic attack, that they would have the capacity to feel the symptoms of a panic attack and be able to contain it and not go out the window. Have you ever had panic attacks before?

Speaker 1 (18:57):
Mean not before. What most people would call a panic attack, but I’ve had similar physiological things since learning to work. I’m like, which because I have the context of understanding the nervous system. It’s not a panic attack. It’s okay, some energy’s coming up, let’s just ride the wave. So similar shit, but it’s never been defined as a panic attack for me.

Speaker 2 (19:17):
Yeah. Whereas in my past, probably in and around 16, 17 years old, there were periods where it’s like I would get this really, really, really, really extreme anxiety, which becomes panic where it’s like you cannot function. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like you just become so overwhelmed with fear and everything feels like it’s all just kind of moving up into this, I don’t know what to do. And you want to move, but you don’t know where to go and you feel like it’ll never stop. And you’re basically feeling like you’re losing control of your mind. You’re losing control of your ability to be in this moment to be. And it’s like it’s really intense. And when you think of the severity of that experience and you think, wow, wow, I would be able to feel that and move through it. That seems impossible, but it does come when you do this work.

(20:06):
And then at the same time, you’ll start to realize that just doesn’t happen anymore because it is stored survival stress. It’s that energy that was stuck there and something triggers it here and there sometimes even our thoughts, and it just reminds us of that stored survival, stress, and boom, we’re off the deep end. And so as we kind of navigate that, that stuff just kind of goes away. And all of it is building that self-awareness, that capacity, that connection back with the body. And the education’s important because you just said when you said, oh, I have this energy coming up, let me just move through it because you know that there’s more ability to do it versus other people. What the hell is happening? What the hell is right? And that’s why it’s so key to have the education part. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
One thing I flagged a bit earlier was when we were talking about in the sense of, I see I don’t read the news. We spoke about this briefly I think before we started recording, but I don’t watch the news. I don’t read it, I don’t really care. Other people talk about it and I don’t get little tidbits. I’m like, oh, that’s interesting. Cool. And then I go back to my life where I focus on other things. But I think at the start of covid, I was living with someone in my family staying with them, and they were very into it, and they’d mentioned some stuff and I’d go and Google it. I’d spend three hours going down some rabbit hole. I’d be like, what was the point of that? And feel this just twisted up inside. I’m like, what is this? This is, and that’s just like some people watch the news every single day.

(21:32):
And so I dunno what it’d be like now. I don’t really care to read it. I’ve got other things I want to do with my time. But at the time it’s like, man, this is fear for one. And then there’s anger, they sort of go together. It’s like, I’m afraid, but now let’s fire off some of the outrage. Let’s shame and guilt the different groups of people. There’s that victim, prosecutor, rescuer thing going on in all these political things. And what’s been so interesting to me is to see just how easy it’s to manipulate people when they’re not connected into this stuff. If you’re not aware, when you’re angry, you’re not aware, when you’re afraid, you’re not aware of how the news, often politicians any probably group with some kind of agenda that has something to benefit or gain from controlling people. They use all this stuff.

(22:14):
And we do it in a micro level. It happens in parents and children or a romantic relationship. And how I see the news now is it’s like the same stuff, the same dynamic of control and manipulation through emotions. But now you’ve got people who have huge, huge amounts of power, power to direct a nation and just, I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s really a question there. It’s just an interesting thing that as you get into this work, you become more aware of that stuff. Or I meet someone and they say something and I’ll feel it. I’ll feel pissed off and I’ll be like, oh, that’s weird. I supposed to be projecting. And later I’ll be like, hang on, they’re messing with me. They’re like crossing a line somewhere. It’s trickier, but they’re doing stuff, they’re fiddling around and they’re doing it intuitively. And I don’t think it’s always totally conscious, but it’s just an interesting thing that as we start to feel, you call it embodied sense, making that becomes a lot more difficult for people.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
And I think being sort of connected to the news sphere of things to some extent for the last 15 years doing the work that I do, which as just a brief background, I got into doing collective evolution in 2009 because I just wanted to do something to make the world a better place. What I mean by that is I felt that humanity on a societal level was capable of thriving and capable of being better. And I’d look at all these challenges and problems like many of us do. And you’d go, wait, I don’t understand. Why can’t we feed everybody? Why can’t we house everybody? And of course, there’s a lot of why the world works and this is how it works and this is how systems are designed and this is what geopolitical advantageous actions are and why people do this and why they do that.

(23:53):
You start to learn all that as you get older especially. But when you’re young, you kind of look at it and go, what the heck? But you start to see that our world is largely just traumatized. And like you were saying on the micro level where we do these little nasty games in the household and then we see it happen on the political level, whether it be on the local or federal or the provincial or state level where it’s a little bigger or the federal level, it’s all the same stuff. It’s as above. So below, and this is one of the big challenges is you have people recognizing that we have trauma as individuals, but we are terrified to admit that the same stuff is happening at the upper levels and when it’s happening at the upper levels. Well, of course, I mean people will say things like, no, there’s no way that politician would conspire with that politician or this group of people to do something that’s advantageous for them, but it’s not really great for the people.

(24:52):
There’s no way they would do that. And it’s like, well, why not? Doesn’t one person at an office conspire with another person in an office sometimes to get a promotion over there? The other people that are competing? I mean, you see it happen all the time. Well, why wouldn’t it happen at those levels? And there’s this sense that it feels as though humans to some extent, not all humans, but a chunk of humans are having a really difficult time exploring the possibility within themselves that the people that are leaders, if you will, aren’t just kind of doing a great job. They can’t accept that there’s potentially some really bad stuff going on. And I am not saying it’s like, oh, the worst of the world, all the craziest conspiracies you’ve ever heard. But even something as simple as that allegiances are not actually to the people that they govern, that people can’t accept that sometimes.

(25:41):
And the question is what’s in the way and what stops us from doing that? And that’s one element of embodied sense making. The other quick thing I wanted to just quickly touch on that you said was this way of, we look at the news and we might feel all twisted and we might feel all triggered and we might feel these different things. And sometimes, absolutely. And what has often come up over the last 15 years for me being in this space a lot is part of our mission of our company was to redefine the way news and media was told, which was to say, how do we talk about subjects, the shadow of society, if you will. We know we have individual shadow. Why wouldn’t we have shadow as a society? But how do we talk about shadow as a society in a way that integrates it in a way that has a healthier orientation towards it versus this angry, we got to fight, we got to defeat, we got to this, we got to that, which is kind of the old way that produces a lot of the same results.

(26:31):
And what we found, and we did a big research survey on this after about 10 or so years of doing our work, we surveyed over 1500 people in our audience to see how the way we did our work was impacting the way they felt. Were they still able to make sense of the world? Were they able to have better conversations? Were they feeling less worn out and blah, blah, blah, all this kind of jazz. The answer was yes on all of those. Overwhelmingly, people were having a very different experiences to how they were taking in the world based on the way we were talking about it. And so there’s an element there where we could be doing news and media in a way that is much wiser. And we don’t though as a culture for many reasons, we can go back to trauma a little bit.

(27:15):
We can go back to just the agenda of whoever is doing and saying what they’re saying. But ultimately, we’ve always presented this idea that if we have capacity as people, if we’re pretty solid, we should actually be triggered less by what it is that we read and see in the media. It doesn’t mean that we should accept a really intense killing of a whole bunch of people in a country by another country and just not feel anything. It would be healthy to feel something, but on the more everyday scale, we shouldn’t be so worn out by taking in a bit of news and media. That’s our suggestion. And if we are, there’s something interesting to look at in either the way it’s being presented or in also the way we’re perceiving it and what’s going on within ourselves.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
I mean, the argument I’ve heard against the news, I mean there’s a few part of it is like I mentioned before we started talking where it’s like if I can’t do anything about it, I’m wasting my energy worrying about it, getting mad about it, getting upset, whatever it is. So that’s part of it. And then the second thing is I think about we spent most of our history as humans. Without the internet, without telephones, without mail, we would’ve known our small tribe of, I dunno how many people, it might’ve been a hundred people, and there were threats and bad things that would happen, but you’d only really know about the stuff that happened within that tiny little group of people, maybe the tribe over or something. This is even agricultural. And so our brains to me are why this makes sense so much sense to me.

(28:35):
They’re wired in that way. We were never developed, we didn’t evolve to be able to take in the monstrous to just the insane number of shit that happens around the world every day, whether it’s the stuff in all the war, I dunno much about it cause I don’t read the news, but the stuff in Russia and Ukraine or the stuff in Israel, it’s like if I rewind 10,000 years, that could be happening and I’d be in my jungle completely oblivious. And in some ways it’s like the only thing that’s changed is I can’t do anything about that. I can tell people about it and make them upset too, but I can’t do anything about it. And so I guess that’s sort of my philosophy is like, no, I could get upset about it, but I could also get upset about, I could put my energy into, well, I can go and exercise today. I can go and say build my own business, which is teaching people how to do exactly what we’re talking here so I can put my energy into that. And then that can actually shift the global energetic grid. Sounds a bit, but you know what I mean, right? To try and make an impact in a way that makes sense. Yeah, the field. That’s how I think about it. What do you think about that?

Speaker 2 (29:37):
I think that’s a totally reasonable way to look at it, because one of the elements that we talk about too in our work is it’s really important to know what you have control over and what you don’t. And to understand that if you take something in that you have no control over to understand that the control you have, and what I mean by control is the control. You have to end it or do something right now that will actually make the impact. Now when you realize that that control is not there and you can embody that, which is to say, now your nervous system responds to that reality, there should be a settling effect. You may not still what you’re seeing out there, and that’s okay, but there should be a settling effect. And when that’s there, you can then say, okay, this is a problem that’s going to take a long time to solve, even if I were to take it on as something that I’m passionate about wanting to change.

(30:23):
And so this is where you kind of get activism and when you have embodied activism, I just made that up as I go. I don’t know if anybody’s ever talked about that. But the idea is to say, if you have embodied activism, it would be, alright, we have this thing we’re working towards. It doesn’t serve us to be in rah rah, we got to fix this right this second and be all survival oriented constantly because burn out. So how do we stay grounded? How do we stay healthy within our nervous system and still move towards creating awareness, trying to get people engaged, whatever it might be that’s useful to that directive to move towards solving something. And there’s always going to be some people in the world that that’s what they’re passionate about and they’ll do that. And that we as individuals kind of have to go to what we’re passionate about and that that’s okay, and that it’s not like, oh, well because you’re not talking about this, you’re bad.

(31:12):
It’s like we can’t all talk about the exact same thing. And so there’s elements of, there’s wiser ways to approach. So many of these things still get them done. And this is kind of what our research survey showed is that there’s a different way of doing media. There’s a different way of informing yourself where you don’t have to be all hopped up on survival, energy and stress all the time, and yet you can still be informed and you can be informed about what it is that you feel is important. But going back to the bit about our brains being sort of evolved from more of a closer tight-knit tribal community and not this global, we have this massive computer in our pocket that can tell us about everything going on. I would agree with that. And so the question is, and this is what I always wrestle with and I don’t know the answer, but I’m going to kind of talk about it and I’d love to hear your thoughts too, but it’s like this is our moment.

(32:04):
Technology is not going away. Things like AI is not going away. Our global connection is going to be there. I think there are some opportunities down the line to sort of redesign the way societies kind of function to some extent, to be more local so that the importance of something elsewhere is not so globally tied. Meaning if somebody is having a conflict over here, it’s not like, oh my gosh, now all production around that thing is going to be problematic and now we’re going to suffer and not have the things we need. That’s kind of what globalization did is it created a reliance on each other, so in tune with each other because we are affected by each other in some way. And so I think there is an opportunity for that, but at the same time, it’s like I keep feeling like we need to grow our capacity to sort of sense into something a little larger than that smaller tribe, right?

(32:56):
I’m not saying we need to know everything all at once, the whole world all at once, but I’m like, okay, how do we sense into the fact that we’re here, we have this much connection, and how do we work with it in a healthy way? How do we orient towards it in a healthy way? How do we design subsystems that help us do that? Because we do need to steward this earth and part of stewarding the earth and stewarding our collective society is having some communication with other people because we now have technology where somebody can do something over there and it can really affect everybody. So there’s got to be a sense of being able to steward things. How much do we actually need to know? I mean, I don’t know. Again, this is an evolving conversation, but there’s a sense of something’s challenging us to grow that capacity and to become wiser about how we do it versus just bringing this kind of classic newsfeed way where it just shows us everything and we’re all just like, ah. And that’s kind of the thought that goes through my mind.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
I mean, for me it’s been like I’ve worked a lot with psychedelics and plant medicines. It’s more come. I think with that, it comes through the feeling sometimes with the somatic and the nervous system work too. But certainly being quite of a powerful sense with the plants of just seeing so much trauma to me is you have these, I guess what’s a metaphor in a computer, you’ve operating system of Mac or windows of the os, but then underneath that you’ve got say dos. It was a Windows thing. And then underneath that you’ve got the hardware. And it seems like so many people are dealing with the operating system, like the surface level stuff. And to me, the nervous system or the idea of trauma, which is not the event to clarify that, it’s just stored stress that’s been unprocessed. So tears that you haven’t cried, for example.

(34:38):
That to me is the core layer that drives so much of the world. And when I’ve had those moments, usually for me it’s when I really tap into, I mean, I don’t know if I’m just tapping into my own pain, I’m usually crying, there’s tears, maybe I’m feeling tapping into some sort of collective thing. Heard people talk about that too. But in those moments, I’m like all these people, even all the quote bad stuff that people do, alcohol, drugs and violence war, in those moments, I’m like, it’s all just because of pain. It’s because all these people are in pain and they don’t know what to do about it. And I’ve seen it with doing this work, people, my who, I guess it has been abuse of various kinds, and I got to go through those, the process, I have to get angry, furious to process the rage, the sadness, whatever it is.

(35:25):
But then at some point it’s like you start to realize, or I started to realize where it’s like, I mean it sounds trite in some ways, but it’s like they were doing the best that they could with what they had. If they had a better tool for managing that stuff. Because what they’re doing is very destructive probably most of all to themselves. As much as it’s hurt me or hurt other people, you can see it. I see it throughout your entire life. It’s like you are hurting yourself far more than you hurt anyone else. And so I see all that. And then I think to me, you’ve thought about the same thing. I’m like, okay. So to me, that’s the base layer that’s driving the hardware. You might say in the computer, whatever the first principles, the core of it,

(36:06):
We can shift that at a massive scale. Then all of a sudden you get other people because not everyone’s going to want at the moment, I want to teach this stuff and share this stuff and talk about it. That’s why we’re here. But I see other people who you could think about it as untapped potential. How many people out there have incredible ideas in them for how to solve all the, that’s why I love entrepreneurship too, just how as soon as there’s a limit, there’s an incentive, a financial incentive for someone to figure out how to fix, how to innovate basically past that limit. So it’s like how much untapped potential is there in the world if people were less concerned with all the trauma of the past, you free up all that energy, it becomes its life force. So you free that up. And then you see, I imagine there’s all kinds of solutions that are just not available right now.

(36:51):
We haven’t opened up that horsepower, you could say, in the human system, in the human bridge. So that’s how with the role I want to play right now anyways, is to help people learn how to do that, how help them get the survival stress out of the system. But then I see a lot of those people are not necessarily going to want to teach this. They’re going to have some other idea about, well, I want to do this. I want to solve this problem or that problem. And I think that creates a kind of a snowball effect. A

Speaker 2 (37:17):
Hundred percent, a hundred percent. And I think we have a saying in our work where it’s like we will see as much global change in the world as people have the capacity to actually process and integrate. Meaning I think there’s a collective intelligence to some extent, like a field that knows in a way, and I’m not saying that this is even God or anything, but just an intelligence that knows, hey, we can handle so much and that things aren’t going to go off the handle. And you can call this just my belief, and that’s totally fair, but things are not going to go off the handle that we’re always working within our collective capacity. Even as chaos grows, it’s a sense of saying we do have more capacity to hold that chaos. And why do I believe that? Because not only have I felt that on a more metaphysical level through transcendental type experiences, but also look at the way the individual body, I mean, you know this from the work and the nervous system stuff, and I know this too. Your body doesn’t throw shit at you that it’s not ready to process. It’ll keep it frozen and tight and locked away, and the more capacity that’s built, okay, we’ll let that one go and then it brings it up and then, oh, there’s more capacity. Alright, we’ll let that one go. Right? So why wouldn’t we assume, at least as a possibility, that’s exactly how we function collectively. That’s what I think. That’s what I feel like I see in the world.

(38:34):
And so going back to how do you create the collective change as you build individual capacity, that individual capacity becomes collective capacity. And that’s just how she goes. And I think to some extent, you were saying something that I wanted to touch on, even just tapping into the pain of the collective sometimes and how pain is driving the addict, let’s say, or the person who might abuse somebody and all these sorts of things, which I believe to be accurate when I understand trauma and kind of what goes on in a lot of case studies and then you think of, well, what happens when we see things in society where people are doing unsavory and bad things? It’s like, well, if somebody’s, let’s say performing destructive stuff like blowing shit up or killing people or doing things, we need to stop that. We do. But the punishment that we give creates more pain.

(39:25):
And so I’m not saying it’s an easy solution of what to do. I’m saying look at what’s happening. It creates more pain. So when we see more fanaticism, when we see more extremism arise after more pain is delivered, it’s exactly what you would expect. And so here we are looking at all these challenges in the world going, well, how are we going to fix this? Well, we got to take a different approach and there’s got to be a willingness to want to start healing these divides and healing on an individual level. I’m not saying it’s easy when you’re talking about really intense war-like situations, but I can’t help but feel that’s where we have to get and we have to normalize that type of thing so we’re not just creating more and more of that collective pain on various groups of people.

Speaker 1 (40:07):
It’s so interesting. I think I’ve thought about that before too, where yeah, someone’s in pain, so they go hurt some people and then we do all these things to that person. You lock ’em away in a prison, there’s a lot of pain in there, being away from your family, whatever it is, creating more pain, which then if that person doesn’t yet have the tools to deal with it, it’ll come out and it comes out sideways. That’s just the nature of it seems like just emotions, anger or sadness, fear. If they’re not expressed or worked with in a healthy way, they’ll come out. It’s like sexual energy. People talk about, I’ve had a lot of conversations with their friends here about this, but the church religion tries to suppress sexual energy. Not realizing or not maybe accepting that sexual energy is the reason we’re all here.

(40:47):
It is that powerful that it’s sustained humanity for millions, billions of years or life. And we think we’re just going to say no sex for the rest of your life, a priest. And it’s like, it doesn’t work like that. It’s like the life force that of the urge. It all will come out in a healthy way or it comes out sideways. And same thing with anger and fear. I’ve seen it in, you see it in people, it’s like they think they’re all good and they’re not even aware of it, and then it comes out and there’s passive aggressive statements or whatever. It’s, it finds a way out, but not in a healthy way. And so it just keeps that cycle going. So a

Speaker 2 (41:20):
Hundred percent. And people generally have what you might call a right response to some of the things that they’re seeing that are so egregious. If you witness a terrorist attack, let’s say, and you’re like, man, absolutely terrible. We need to stop that. I’m not saying that’s an incorrect response, but it’s more so, okay, if we understand human biology, if we understand the nervous system, we understand what’s going on, not just within ourselves, but those people that may have committed those things, after we’ve felt that right response, we have more wisdom to say, okay, what’s the actual solution here? People will often say, well, you want to be empathetic or attuned to these people who are doing terrible things, how dare you? And they’re saying that from that response of This is horrible what just happened, but it’s that education, it’s that wisdom. It’s that deeper essence of understanding what’s going on that creates permission space in the mind and in the being to then look at the event and say, ah, I have a better sense of what the solution actually is. And that’s the upgrading, if you will, to the human condition that I think needs to happen.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
And this, so you’ve mentioned a few times, you haven’t really said what it is, but embodied sense making, which I remember reading because I went through a couple of articles on your website after going through one of Irene’s, there was an interview with Irene that you did. So can you just explain and then we’ll wrap it up, what is embodied sense making if someone wanted to practice that as a bit of homework?

Speaker 2 (42:45):
Yeah, I would mean as a concept, the idea really is if we’re making sense of a world largely through our mind and what we see and we think about things and we analyze, that’s great. That’s part of the process. But there is also the way we feel about something, the way we integrate those thoughts, those ideas that meaning into our body, but also there’s the wisdom of the body from the sense of I may be trying to make sense of something and feel resistance. I may feel something that feels good about it. I may feel something that is triggering and embodied sense making is making sense of a situation, a relationship, a choice, a current event, whatever it might be from the level of the totality of our being, which includes our body. And so to practice is, I mean, the beginning point when I teach this is really just, you got to start building that self-awareness of the body and the more of that self-awareness you build of the body, and then the more you sort of have that awareness of I felt something, there’s space.

(43:40):
And so to practice it is just to get curious about, you may see something online and then you’re about to respond really aggressively, and it’s like, see if you can notice it and pause and go, wait, what’s going on in my body? And just get curious enough and think less about the story and more about the feeling of the body and is it a longer way of making sense of things that are happening? Yeah, absolutely. But I do think that it’s wiser, and that’s kind of the idea now. There’s more to it, but that’s the quick version.

Speaker 1 (44:06):
Fantastic. Cool. Thank you so much, Joe. We’ve got to wrap it up here. But before we go, if people want to learn more about you or embodied sensemaking or what you’re up to, where would they go? Where should they go?

Speaker 2 (44:17):
Yeah, I’m on most of the socials. If you look up Joe Martino, and there’s probably a few other ones, but you’ll see me there. And of course, collective evolution.com is one way to visit and of find everything from there. Our articles are in there and all that kind of stuff. And it’ll lead to our other channels. So yeah, it’s all there.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
Fantastic. I’ll have links to all of that on the show [email protected]. Joe, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Speaker 2 (44:44):
Yeah, thanks so much, Jon. It was a good time.