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Seth Lyon – Destroy Them First To Feel Compassion For Them Later, When Meditation/Breathwork/Energy Work/Yoga Fail, The Dangers of Psychedelics, Who Are You Really And More (#3)

John Wood, Founder of Rageheart

by John Wood

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Seth Lyon from IreneLyon.com and SmartBodySmartMind.com

Seth Lyon is the first person I met in the nervous system healing world.

I discovered him after punching “TRE vs somatic experiencing” into Google. That led me to an article that he’d written and after reading that, I was sold. Something told me… this is it. This is what I’ve been searching for. I don’t know how I knew but I just knew.

Immediately after reading the article, I clicked over to his wife’s website and signed up for one of her nervous system healing programs. 1 month later, I signed up to her big 3 month course. Then 6 months after that, I started working with Seth 1-on-1.

It has been one of the most thrilling, most challenging and most rewarding journeys of my entire life. 

These days, I compare everything else to the nervous system approach I first heard about from Seth. It has become the standard or benchmark by which I measure everything else. The nervous system stuff… and psychedelics. In my experience, nothing else comes close to the transformative power of these 2 modalities… and when you put them to together 🤯

In this episode, I talk to Seth about both of these things and much more. The world of nervous system healing. Psychedelics like magic mushrooms, ayahuasca and DMT. Cannabis too. Why common techniques like meditation, yoga, breathwork and energy work often fail to scratch the surface when it comes to trauma and nervous system dysregulation. Past lives and meditation retreats. Living in Hawaii to escape from society and then one day moving back to live in the city.

It was a blast to record this podcast episode with Seth Lyon and also to edit it up for Rageheart. I hope it’s a blast for you to listen to as well 💪

Enjoy!

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Rageheart Podcast with Somatic Experiencing Practitioner Seth Lyon! Join the free daily newsletter and unleash the beast in 7.3 minutes a day.

In This Episode Of The Rageheart Podcast With Seth Lyon, You’ll Discover:

  • What is trauma? (hint: it’s not the event or what happened to you)
  • How to heal from trauma without focusing on the story (good news! There’s no need to analyse or figure out what happened in the past. You just need to ____ in the present.)
  • How and why meditation, psychedelics, breathwork and energy work sometimes fail (and the missing ingredient that unlocks or activates all these different practices)
  • How to realize that your “mind” is a lot more than your brain (a common response when getting into nervous system work: “I don’t know who I am anymore”)
  • How to destroy someone without actually hurting them (and why sometimes this is a CRUCIAL part of nervous system healing)
  • A blow-by-blow example from Seth’s life of what to expect with nervous system healing (how something traumatic came up, how he worked with it and how he “renegotiated” his automatic response to heal)

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Transcription:

John Mcintyre (00:10.242)
All right, it’s John Wood here, the founder of Rageheart. I’m here with Seth Lyon. Now, Seth is, I don’t even know where to begin. I worked with Seth. So what I’ve been doing with Rageheart is teaching people how to work with the nervous system in Seth and his Wi-Fi arena, the two people I’ve learned most of it from. And so I worked with Seth one-on-one for most of last year. I think we had a couple sessions this year as well, one or two.

John Mcintyre (00:35.978)
And he was instrumental in helping me understand some of this stuff, getting out of my own way, getting off the habit of meditating too much. I should probably want me to put it. Doing too much plant medicine even, I think was a thing as well for a little while. And so it’s been a really fantastic journey. He’s helped me just massively. So has his Wi-Fi ring. And I wanted to get him on just to hear a bit more about his story and what he’s been through. Cause he’s been on.

Seth (00:46.760)
Yeah.

John Mcintyre (01:01.958)
his own journey with his stuff and meditation, a whole bunch of different things, and he’s got a lot of wisdom to share. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Seth, what’s going on, man?

Seth (01:10.234)
Oh man, not much. Just living the life up in Vancouver, British Columbia right now. It’s a lovely late fall day. And yeah, things are going well.

John Mcintyre (01:24.126)
Well, let’s just get right into it. I’d love to hear, or I reckon people like to hear, where, you know, we’ve got the before and the after. Let’s start at the before of like, what was life like before you found all the nervous system stuff? Where were you? What was happening?

Seth (01:41.774)
Gotcha. So yeah, it is a really good, interesting arc that I went through because I think I explored things that many people are exploring nowadays in their quest for healing. So I can really resonate with a lot of people’s paths these days. And it seems like some of the biggest things that people are getting into are meditation and plant medicines, which I fully got into in my 20s. So…

For me, it started with essentially having a desire to unplug from the mainstream. Even though I didn’t know anything about trauma, I didn’t really understand at a nervous system level, in a detailed level, how the world can be really problematic, our industrialized world, but I could feel how I didn’t like it. You know, it was more, I didn’t understand exactly why it was impacting me in the way that it was, but I knew I didn’t like it, I wanted to get out of it.

I had this trend of going towards the counterculture after college. And I started working at this Hot Springs Resort that was off grid in the middle of the woods and met all these hippies, you know, and I was one of them and getting into, you know, of course all sorts of different plant medicines, because cannabis was a big one, of course, but then mushrooms and LSD, psychedelics. DMT was an amazing one that I did.

which is also gaining popularity recently. And like all of that was great. Sort of opened up my consciousness, right? Got me interested in other things and that got me interested in meditation. I went and did a 10 day Vipassana set and that really just like, just like full spiritual awakening, like remembering past lives being downloaded, having like visions.

just like this full sort of spirit, classic spiritual awakening experience in meditation during that 10, those 10 days. And that really propelled me even further off the beaten path. So I was like, okay, I’m just gonna buy a one-way ticket to Hawaii and I’m gonna, you know, let go of money. I’m gonna let go of possessions. I’m just gonna be in nature and meditate and see what God provides, essentially. So I bought a one-way ticket to Hawaii with 300 bucks in my pocket.

John Mcintyre (03:40.195)
Mm-hmm.

John Mcintyre (04:02.699)
Mm-hmm.

Seth (04:04.698)
and that’s what I did. I just bummed around, I hitchhiked, I camped on the beaches and the jungles, I meditated, I didn’t work really for about three years. And still, through all of this, this has been, you know, it was cumulative probably about 13 years that I spent off-grid, you know, meditating intensely, doing energy work, doing breath work, rebirthing, yeah, peyote ceremony, mushrooms.

John Mcintyre (04:16.342)
Mm-hmm.

Seth (04:33.986)
different shamanic journeys, like everything, right? And even after 13 years, I still couldn’t really deal with the world. I had to stay in my bubble, in the counterculture, off-grid nature bubble in order to feel good. And in that bubble, I felt great. Like I felt like, yeah, I’m whole, I’m healed, I’m great. But if I go into town, I’d have…

John Mcintyre (04:55.316)
Run.

Seth (05:01.430)
basically a panic attack after a couple hours. And so what I thought was that, oh, at the time, you know, I’m just, I’m too sensitive. I’m too conscious, you know, I’m too spiritual for this mainstream Babylon world, you know? So I just have to stay in the woods for the rest of my life. And that’s my lifestyle. And that’s fine, right? I didn’t really question that. That was all good. And then I met Irene. She was a guest.

John Mcintyre (05:05.053)
Right.

John Mcintyre (05:13.976)
Ha ha ha ha!

Seth (05:30.142)
at the Hot Springs Resort where I was living and working. And she had just finished her somatic experiencing training. So we started talking about that stuff. And through the course of our early relationship, when we’re first getting to know each other, for your listeners, Irene is my wife now, I basically came to the understanding that it wasn’t that I was too evolved or too conscious.

for the mainstream world, it’s that I was still completely traumatized. Even though I had done 13 years in the, you know, off-grid and nature meditating, plant medicine, extravaganza, all the stuff, all the things, I hadn’t really touched the trauma in my system. So that is, you know, can be upsetting for one, because like, what did I do all this work for, right?

And the thing is, all the work that I did prepared me really well for actually doing the trauma work. Because some of the things that are essential are like being able to track sensation, feel your body at a fine level, be with emotions that come up, allow them to express. And I had gotten into like emotional expression and making sounds and primal movement and Vipassana. Excuse me, I just inhaled a piece of my breakfast there.

John Mcintyre (06:58.031)
An old beat porridge, it’ll get you.

Seth (06:58.546)
flying out on me for yeah so the Vipassana had really trained that ability to fence to sense at a fine level so I had that I had all these tools but I didn’t know how to apply them in a way that would actually lead to healing that that deep nervous system level so that’s what the other work brought

John Mcintyre (07:25.922)
curious because I think other people are gonna be curious about this too if you know we’ve got all these other techniques for passing a meditation and breath work and rebirth thing and you know they’re all there why do you think these things don’t work like it’s obviously you saying the skills are useful they do help people but why don’t why do some people do them why were you doing yeah what did you do 13 years of them but they weren’t really doing I guess what they were intended to do or what you wanted them to do until you found this the nervous system stuff what was missing

Seth (07:33.834)
Yep.

Seth (07:42.104)
Yes.

Seth (07:54.934)
Well, sorry, man. I really got something stuck in my throat. Let’s pause for a sec. Yeah, let’s pause for a sec.

John Mcintyre (08:00.500)
All good. You want to have a drink of water? Yeah dude. Yeah.

Seth (08:07.094)
Wish I had it this bit out. Ah! I had a piece of meat just like flew from in between my teeth right into the old trachea.

John Mcintyre (08:09.300)
Yeah.

Seth (08:22.638)
That’s what I get for eating right before. Yeah. You can edit this, right?

John Mcintyre (08:23.399)
It happens. I hate that. Yeah, I’ll be able to edit it. I just put a marker in so I can see it. But yeah, it’s like something gets stuck. I get it when it’s right at the bottom here and I can’t… It takes ages to clear it out of there and I can’t talk when it’s still in there. Yeah. Are you ready to roll or do you want some more time? Okay.

Seth (08:33.770)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think I got it, just a sec. Nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom.

Seth (08:49.838)
Good thing this isn’t live. I have to like…

John Mcintyre (08:53.509)
Well, no, I forgot to tell you we’re actually in front of 100,000 people right now.

Seth (08:57.090)
Hello everybody. Okay, yeah, should be good to go. Should be good to go.

John Mcintyre (09:02.456)
All right, so remember the question or you want me to repeat it? Okay

Seth (09:05.206)
Yeah, yeah, I remember. So yeah, the thing is all those tools are great. The thing is none of them are really made for healing trauma. They’re really, those tools are meant for expanding consciousness. Meditation, plant ceremonies, energy work, all of these practices are meant for expanding and deepening our consciousness, our connection to self, our connection to the universe. And they’re not

so good on their own for working at the nervous system level, because what isn’t taught in any of these practices is one, it’s not just about connection to the inner world. It’s about connection to the inner world in the context of the environment. That’s one of the huge pieces that is missing from all of these practices. You know, pretty much all of these practices, you’ll have your eyes closed, right? You’ll be very inner.

John Mcintyre (09:53.614)
Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe

Seth (10:03.342)
you’re tracking, you’re doing stuff on the inside, but trauma doesn’t just happen on the inside. Trauma happens in connection to the environment. So if you can bring this, you can have this very deep practice, but if you’re not connected to the environment, it’s like you’re in a vacuum. So that’s one of the biggest pieces that when it comes to working at the nervous system level, you have to, it’s about the body, mind, environment, connection, all of those things working together.

in our awareness. Another thing that they don’t… Let’s go ahead.

John Mcintyre (10:38.894)
I was going to say this has been something that’s coming up for me lately, as you know, my own practice with this, but it’s this Irene talks about it all the time, probably has forever but it only really like, oh, okay, that makes sense now. This idea of feeling what’s going on on the inside while seeing what’s going on in the environment, while hearing it, sort of having this external, internal thing at the same time. This is what you’re talking about, right? Instead of just being purely internal or purely external, it’s learning to connect and integrate them together.

Seth (11:07.490)
That’s exactly it, man. It’s having that internal awareness at the same time that you feel your butt being supported by the chair or you feel the ground under your feet and you see the environment around you as you’re feeling internally.

John Mcintyre (11:27.502)
Still here just shutting that window, there’s a bit of wind coming in.

Seth (11:30.562)
Right on. So yeah, that’s a huge piece, a huge piece that is missing from most of these practices that people are exploring. It’s not just about going in, it’s about being aware of what’s happening inside in the overall context of what’s happening around you. So another really important…

John Mcintyre (11:51.251)
Right, right. It seems like…

John Mcintyre (11:56.298)
Sorry to cut you off again. I mean, it seems like when I practice with this stuff, it’s like the energy integrates or locks in more in a healthier way when it’s balanced with the external. If I shut my eyes, there’s this tendency to, it’s like I’m zipping off. I’m sort of there, but I’m not fully there. It’s very easy to disconnect without even realizing that I’m disconnecting with my eyes open. It’s, I don’t know, it’s like I can’t do that. I’m somehow connected or anchored or locked into the body, much more solidly.

Seth (12:22.114)
That’s right. That’s a really, yeah, I’m really glad you brought that up actually, because what happens is, and this is a bit of a rabbit hole, but to understand why just going internal doesn’t touch trauma a lot of the time, we have to understand the nature of the most of people’s trauma in the Western industrialized world is early developmental trauma. And there is plenty of other horrible things that happen later on to many people.

But for most of us, the majority, it’s like your childhood was kind of okay as far as you knew. You know, there may not have been outright abuse or neglect. Like for me, I was from suburbia. Like I had everything I materially needed. But what I didn’t have was a tuned connection from my caregivers, supportive educational environment, support in learning to understand myself.

I didn’t have the proper sort of stimulus to my nervous system for it to develop in a good way. And I had all the stressors and the toxicity of industrialized life that really have an impact as well over time. And what happens when you have these more subtle traumas? They’re things that aren’t commonly recognized as trauma, but which are. What happens with the nervous system at the

Seth (13:49.838)
to recruit freeze as a go-to. So when we think about the survival responses, we have our fight-flight response, and then our freeze response comes on if fight and flight aren’t successful. So let’s take a normal example from everyday life. This is thankfully getting less common, but it’s still really common that parents are told, you know, when your baby, you’re trying to get your baby to sleep and they’re crying,

John Mcintyre (13:54.306)
Mm-hmm.

Seth (14:18.518)
You just leave them alone and let them cry it out, and then they’ll just go to sleep. And then they’ll learn how to be comfortable with their emotions, essentially is the lens of that. Which is absolute bullshit. That’s not at all what’s happening. What’s happening is a baby doesn’t have, first off, a baby doesn’t really have emotions. Emotions are learned. A baby has sensations. It has this direct physiological experience without context.

because there’s no knowledge yet. What happens through the process of attunement with a caregiver is a baby starts to learn, oh, these sensations mean this, or these sensations mean this, right? They start to understand that certain constellations of experience represent emotional states. It’s learned. So when a young baby is in distress,

crying it’s not because they’re emotionally, excuse me, it’s not because they’re emotionally upset. They’re not like having an emotion they need to get out. It’s because they need something physiologically that they’re not getting. They’re in real distress. So if you leave a baby in that state they will go into sympathetic activation. They will go into fight-flight mode. But as a baby you can’t do those things. You can’t fight or flee.

All you can do is cry more and more intensely. You can contract around the abdomen. That’s about it in terms of what you can do with that energy. So what happens, the system goes into freeze. The baby shuts down and that’s, they go to sleep, right? But essentially they pass out. They go into shutdown. So there’s this perception that, oh, baby’s crying itself to sleep and isn’t that great? No.

your baby is going into intense distress and then passing it out due to the shutdown response. So when that happens over and over and over and over, the system eventually says, I’m, you know, screw this fight flight thing. This is way too much energy. I’m just gonna go directly to freeze because I’m not getting what I need. I’m not gonna waste the energy of going into all this distress. And then you have that good quiet baby who doesn’t cry, but they’re in shutdown. So this kind of thing,

This is just one example. This can happen from early surgical experiences. It can happen from traumatic births. It can happen from chronic stress in the environment if mom and dad are chronically stressed. There’s many ways in which a young developing system will learn to go to shut down automatically. And when that gets refined over time, it’s called functional freeze. And what the practice of closing your eyes and going internal and getting very quiet.

that for so many people, they will be going into freeze without knowing that that’s what’s happening. And when it’s functional freeze, it can feel like Zen. It can feel like I’m just so calm and I’m so at peace. But yeah, that’s because your system is shut down. You’re in freeze. So that’s one of the biggest reasons, like you say, when you just go internal, you can kind of like, you can…

you can kind of disappear into yourself. And that’s because our systems are very often entrained to go into freeze. So that’s just a major point as to why it’s so important to have this ability to be connected to the environment at the same time.

John Mcintyre (17:55.198)
And it’s, I mean, one thing that’s been surprising to me is, you know, you hear about freeze and it’s like, oh, it’s this big shutdown shock thing. It’s going to be really obvious. But it seems in my experience is it’s very subtle. Like I can shut my eyes and I’ll be thinking about something or I’m daydreaming. Like that’s all part of it. It’s like I’m, I’m no longer connected to my sensations. I’m no longer feeling what’s really happening. I’m lost in some story. I’m thinking about something. That’s a form of what you’re talking about, isn’t it?

Seth (18:21.598)
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. What happens is those survival responses developed in mammals that didn’t have a neocortex. So at the pure survival level, they are very big and obvious. Like if a gazelle is being chased by a tiger, it’s obviously going to go into fight flight mode. It’ll kick. It’ll run. Right. And then if it gets tackled and it goes to the ground.

Boom, it’ll just go limp, totally limp, like totally, total shutdown, right? Like possum, people say, plain possum, a possum goes, it looks like it’s dead. That’s a survival response going into freeze, right? It’s obvious. But the thing is, we have a neocortex and we have this ability to use these survival responses in these tricky, subtle, refined ways because of the complexity of our higher brain.

John Mcintyre (19:01.222)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Seth (19:17.074)
So yeah, it can look a lot more just like spacing out, daydreaming. There’s a place for that, for sure. But if that’s what you’re doing when you’re actually intending to be like engaging with yourself, which I think happens a lot, people are actually end up just sort of spacing out or dissociating, you’re not gonna be getting anything done. And so that certainly was my experience, right? I mean, I thought I had this great, deep, amazing meditation practice.

John Mcintyre (19:40.671)
Yeah.

Seth (19:46.814)
Right? But it was just reinforcing my freeze response. That’s all I was doing. And it felt very spiritual. Right? So.

John Mcintyre (19:50.538)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think at this point, one thing that came up as you’ve been talking, you’ve used trauma a few times and I obviously know what it is because I’ve been through all this with you and Irene, but I think a lot of people trauma to them means for a lot of people, it means the event, some crazy big thing that happened, but in this whole nervous system, what it means something different. So can you explain a bit more about what, when you say trauma, what are you actually talking about?

Seth (20:08.402)
That’s right.

Seth (20:15.746)
You bet. Yeah, when we talk about trauma, we aren’t talking about the event per se. We’re talking about what happens inside the person as a response to an event. Because the thing is, the same event can have vastly different impact on two different people based off of their wiring, their history, everything that they’ve been through, their capacity, their personality. Two people could get into the same car accident in the same car, and one of them could be absolutely fine.

and the other could end up completely traumatized. So it’s not the event, it’s what happens inside the person as a response to the event. And specifically what we say trauma is, is when your survival responses become activated, your fight, flight or freeze responses become activated, and then they do not deactivate, they stay on, they stay stuck in the system, and that’s trauma. So.

A classic example, if you think at a very obvious level of say PTSD is the tick. Like, you know, someone who just can’t stop doing that. It’s an automatic tick. That’s a very classic, something like that, or in the eyes, right? Something like that is a classic PTSD response. What you’re seeing there is the moment of sympathetic activation where the body was trying to get out of the way.

John Mcintyre (21:28.279)
Mm-hmm.

Seth (21:37.706)
It’s called a stuck, an incomplete procedural memory where it’s like there was an explosion and the body would have tried to get away, but before the body could carry out those instructions to get away, it was blown up. Like you were concussed or knocked unconscious by the blast. So those instructions to flee, get out of the way, get stuck in the system. And then you have these instructions playing out, get out of the way, get out of the way, get out of the way, right? And that’s what the tick is. So that’s a very obvious example.

but it can happen in much, much, much subtler ways as well. So if you say grow up in a home where mom and dad are always stressed, chronically stressed, you’re gonna be developing in this soup of just like tension and that can lead to much subtler forms of coping, like using the freeze response. It’s easier just to numb out, right? I’m just gonna disappear into my book and just read, right? There can be many ways that we learn to cope.

John Mcintyre (22:28.802)
Mm-hmm.

Seth (22:35.630)
through subtler adaptations when the stressors are themselves more subtle, not big explosions, right? So a surgery as a baby, that’s incredibly traumatic and it’s completely necessary to save the baby’s life, right? But a surgery is incredibly stressful. And a baby again has no higher brain online yet. They can’t understand. You can’t explain, oh, you need this because all they know is they’re being

put in conscious and their body is being opened up. And right, so it’s this incredibly brutal experience and yet it’s necessary, but has huge ramifications down the line. So there’s so many things that can happen from big to small, tiny insidious little chronic stuff day to day to outright abuse. But all of it, if it generates a survival response, like, you know, I just got to get out of here.

in some way, or I just gotta numb out, and then that doesn’t complete, it just stays in the system, that’s trauma. So the work of trauma healing is to allow those survival responses to come out of the system.

John Mcintyre (23:50.186)
Right. Right. So is it accurate to say, because the way I’ve been thinking about it is it’s all just energy, right? There’s a threat appears, a parent, a tiger.

John Mcintyre (23:59.262)
and the body’s gonna automatically mount to survival response, which is really about energy, a fear might be driving, if we’re gonna run away, we’ll feel afraid, if we’re gonna attack, we’ll feel anger. So our different energies, emotions, sensations, they’re all just energy. And the energy wants to kind of come up, and then it wants to be expended through running away or through fighting back or through doing something or through doing that procedural memory, moving the head. And what happens is when those things don’t happen, because it’s not safe, we’re not able to, that energy doesn’t just magically vanish, it just sort of sits there and it…

Seth (24:20.086)
Hmm.

Seth (24:24.193)
Mm-hmm.

John Mcintyre (24:27.910)
if it’s too much for the system at the time, it’s like it goes and hides in the muscles and the organs and just all around the whole body. And then we’re 30, 40, 50 years old and then we start realizing, oh, I’ve got all this stuff. We gotta start cleaning it out. That’s sort of the thing you’re talking about, isn’t it?

Seth (24:34.614)
Yeah.

Seth (24:44.938)
That’s exactly it. Yeah, it’s a great way to look at it is just energy. And it’s like, yeah, it’s supposed to be time limited. These intense survival responses use a ton of energy. They’re supposed to come on and then you successfully flee and you get away and you get to safety and then the body will sort of, sort of tremble and shake. Like if you see a mammal who gets away from a predator and then it finds safety, all its limbs will be twitching. That’s the energy discharging, right? For a human,

there may be emotions involved, right? So say for example, as a young boy, I injure myself, I’m skateboarding and I injure myself badly, but I’m surrounded by a group of peers and boys don’t cry, right? We’re not supposed to cry or show distress. So then what do I do? I’ve just injured myself and my natural response would be to like, oh, curl up and like cry and moan and like, ah, and like.

John Mcintyre (25:31.508)
Exactly.

Seth (25:41.930)
My body would want to do all sorts of things and the emotions would be involved. But instantly because of societal norms, I’m like, oh, got a clamp down on all that stuff. Got to stop that energy from moving. Well, the only mechanism that will work to do that is the freeze response. That’s the only way that we can really repress that much energy is by recruiting that freeze response. So yeah, that’s it’s stopping the energy and then that energy is it.

plays havoc with the body. It’s not, we’re not supposed to be in survival mode underneath the surface all the time. So that’s what leads to all the different manifestations and symptomology of trauma that we see.

John Mcintyre (26:22.838)
And so I find this perspective so useful because it changes all the things of like, you know, everything I’ve felt like I’ve got all these different problems. I’ve got, you know, a problem over here and a procrastination thing and a money thing and all these different supposedly issues, a digestive problem, skin, skin things, whatever. And then this perspective goes, well, what if it’s one problem? And the one problem is you’ve just got all this gunk.

you know, old energy, it’s a bit stale and it’s just cluttering things up. Focus on that, you get rid of that, all the other stuff is just sort of symptoms of this one core issue of stored trauma, stored energy.

Seth (26:58.094)
That’s exactly right. And the reason that it can manifest in so many ways is because of the autonomic nervous system, right? So the autonomic nervous system is one part of our nervous system. The central nervous system is the other main part, which is your central nervous system is your brain and your spinal cord. Your autonomic nervous system is most everything else. So there’s the parts that are responsible for movement.

but then there’s the autonomic responses. So talking about digestion, breath, heart rate variability, endocrine function, all digestion, all of the automatic processes of our body that happen without us thinking about them are governed by the autonomic system. And so are the survival responses. The survival responses are part of the autonomic nervous system. So…

when you have those fight, flight, freeze responses on underneath the surface, they are, there’s only so much energy we have, right? So it’s like they are recruiting a certain amount of energy all the time and our autonomic nervous system doesn’t have the energy it needs to successfully do all the other things it’s supposed to be doing. You know, barrier keeping in the gut, cell repair, detoxification processes, proper digestion, all of these things.

we don’t have the energy for to do successfully if we’re in survival mode. And those survival signals are also sending messages at cross purposes. So for example, the fight flight response tells the system empty your bowels right now, like, so we can run, right? Right, and you go, it’s an autonomic thing that happens when you go into fight flight or can.

Seth (28:52.982)
The freeze response says stop all digestion, stop all unnecessary processes, bring all the blood to the core, protect the organs. So if you have fight, flight, and freeze on, one message is going to your gut saying eliminate, eliminate. Another message is going to your gut saying stop, hold on to everything. And then you get things like irritable bowel and Crohn’s and.

Seth (29:19.630)
all these digestive issues, alternating between diarrhea and constipation, all because you have this cross messaging going on. Same thing can happen with heart rate variability. That’s why you have things like POTS, where someone stands up and then they pass out because that little sympathetic spike trips the freeze response because these things are on already. So all of these various symptomologies that we can see.

Autonomic disorders, you know skin problems fibromyalgia As well as the emotional things anxiety depression I know there’s so many ramifications that at first may seem like different separate things and in Western medicine Tries to address them that way. It’s like playing whack-a-mole, you know It’s like you hit the thing here and then it pops up over there because you’re not addressing what’s actually happening in the system at a root Level which is that unresolved trauma that’s wreaking havoc on the autonomic

processes.

John Mcintyre (30:18.750)
I think it’s interesting because, you know, like bringing it back to meditation, a lot of people get into that because they just want to clear their head. But then getting into this, I remember I think saying to you a few weeks or months into working together and kind of going, I think this thing, what we’re doing here, it can take the place of meditation. And then like the more I’ve done it, I feel like I’ve been chatting to Ellie, Ellie’s over here with me in Peru and we keep talking about, I’ll find like a course or a conference or self-help kind of, you know, something that’s meant to change my life kind of a thing.

Seth (30:34.958)
Mm-hmm.

John Mcintyre (30:46.578)
And pretty much every time now I’ll be looking at it and be like, well, it sounds kind of good, but like it’s not the semantics. And for me, it’s plant medicine too, both of those two things. So for those, if it’s not those two things together, I’m like, I’ve kind of feel like I’ve got ticked all my boxes. I’ve got everything I need to deal with whatever’s going on inside me. I don’t need breath work and a million different other different techniques. It’s all right here. And so it’s like, you know, we can deal with the mind, we can deal with the digestive system, the skin. It’s really cool that it’s so it just simplifies everything.

Seth (31:15.330)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, and it’s not to say that sometimes there may be other protocols that are necessary addition to somatic trauma healing work like detox protocols can be part of it dietary change exercise You know activity of different kinds Maybe naturopathic support of some kind different teas or herbs dietary changes like they’re

Yeah, there may be other interventions that are part of the process of healing, but if they don’t have this piece at their core of working directly with the physiology and the nervous system, getting those survival energies discharged, none of them will really work, right? So yeah, you gotta have that foundational piece of working with the nervous system directly, working with the physiology directly and understanding yourself at that level. And that’s another really important thing is

when you understand why you are the way you are, it just can be so helpful, right? It’s like, oh, of course I do this thing, because that’s right, I have this survival adaptation that I learned, and so now that’s playing out an adult life this way, right? So.

John Mcintyre (32:29.871)
Yeah, it takes the like the shame out of it. I’ve been noticing like procrastination is a very common thing with really some of the people I’ve been talking to about this stuff and

Seth (32:33.687)
Yeah.

John Mcintyre (32:40.846)
There’s a lot of shame around that. Why can’t I focus? Why can’t I be more disciplined? Why am I so like, you know, lazy or this kind of stuff? People get really in their head about the whole thing. And then, but this model, this way of looking at the nervous system is, well, if you don’t feel safe or if you’re not doing what you truly want to do because you don’t really know how to feel and follow that impulse of what you want to do.

Of course you’re going to be procrastinating. It’s like your system’s way of taking care of you. It’s a perfect, beautiful, wonderful thing. So it reframes the whole thing and it’s not going to change until someone starts working with the survival stuff. Until then, it’s just going to keep doing what it’s doing because that’s what it’s designed to do.

Seth (33:15.758)
That’s right.

Seth (33:19.074)
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, we get very good at learning different strategies early on when we were growing up in a context of trauma, chronic stress, lack of attunement, industrialized toxins, toxic societal norms, you know, all the different subtle stressors that are on most of us. We get very good at learning to adapt.

John Mcintyre (33:33.311)
Ahem.

Seth (33:46.806)
We’re creative, adaptive, resilient beings. It’s just that those adaptations aren’t good for us long-term most of the time. When people go through this work, one of the things that can happen is that they realize that their whole personality, essentially, their entire sense of self was formed in adaptation to trauma. And as they start to heal,

there often comes a time where people will be like, man, I don’t even feel, I don’t feel like I know who I am anymore. Right? Like, I don’t recognize myself. I believe you’ve had some of those moments. Ha ha ha.

John Mcintyre (34:27.498)
That’s why I’m laughing. Yeah. I mean, it’s an ongoing process. You think, Oh, I think I kind of figure it out now. Like, but then another pattern will come up for I realize another thing that I thought was really me was really just a trauma response or a pattern or a survival thing that’s been happening. And so, but there’s another part to this where it’s like even the sense of being in the body, we, you know, I think most Westerners go through their lives thinking that they’re the, this mind, this thing in their head that’s always thinking and doing this, especially with them, when you bring the movement in the Feldenkrais stuff, it’s like,

Seth (34:42.986)
Yeah.

Seth (34:52.084)
Yeah.

John Mcintyre (34:57.558)
Whatever we are is something very different to what most of us think, and it can’t be pinned down with words. And it’s quite bizarre, the more that starts to open up, it’s like, oh, I don’t really know who I am. I can’t pin myself down. I know I exist, but beyond that, it’s really hard to box it in the more you do this work, because even with the follow your impulse thing, right, which is a big part of this learning to follow that.

Seth (34:57.867)
Mmm.

John Mcintyre (35:24.786)
It’s not a verbal intellectual thing. It’s learning to feel, you know, inside the body, what that wants to do. And you never know where that’s going to go.

Seth (35:25.163)
Mm-hmm.

Seth (35:34.670)
Totally. Yeah, there’s so much spontaneity that can emerge from really learning to listen to the body. And so many of us were just so supported in thinking that, yeah, I am this thing up here that just somehow gets carried around by this stuff down here. You know, like, I am my eyes and my taste buds.

and my ears and my sense of smell and my thoughts. And that’s me. And then that’s transported around conveniently by this body that somehow is down here that I don’t pay attention to. It’s very much how we’re encouraged to live. And when you start really being able to feel your entire being, one thing that you start to understand is that mind, your mind is a lot more than your brain.

Seth (36:31.986)
It’s a lot more than your brain. So the gut is one, that’s the first brain. Some people call it the second brain, but it’s actually the first. It’s what senses often the environment before this brain up here. There’s the nerves that travel between the gut and the brain. I believe it’s 80% of them are afferent. I mean, they’re traveling signals from the gut.

to the brain. So 80% of that communication highway is going from the gut to the brain. The gut is giving the brain information about the world around it. So how powerful when you learn to listen to that intelligence directly. And that’s a lot of what the following the impulse is about. The impulses tend to come from the gut. They tend to come from that first sort of

John Mcintyre (37:06.371)
Hmm.

Seth (37:30.786)
consciousness, intelligence that we’re just starting to understand. It really is its own form of nervous system, the fascia system. It’s fascinating and it has its own perception of the environment. So you know, you know when you’re a kid and say you walk into a room and all of a sudden your gut is just oh because there’s people in that room who are like they hate each other but they’re not saying anything or you know there’s all this hostility on the surface or maybe it’s just a bad vibe.

And when you’re a kid, I think a lot of us experience that, like your stomach starts hurting. Well, that’s the fascia constricting. It’s sending a danger signal saying, this is not a safe place. So there’s so many forms of intelligence and consciousness that we have access to that are so much more than what’s in our brain. So all of that richness of information comes when you start learning to listen to all of these wonderful

organs and tissues that we have in the rest of our body.

John Mcintyre (38:34.574)
And then, I mean, people talk about following your gut. Like this is the classic.

John Mcintyre (38:39.326)
Everyone says this. I don’t know how many people either do it or know how to do it. But what I found great about this way of working with the nervous system is it’s like, finally, like people say, like, get out of your head or like, follow your gut, trust your gut, trust your intuition, like these kinds of things. But no one ever really explains how to do it. Well, they didn’t in my experience until, you know, I discovered you and Irene in this whole nervous system world, where it’s like, well, okay, he’s exactly how to do it. He’s the step by step technical manual for how to actually feel your body, feel, you know, tuning to the fascia and the gut.

Seth (38:56.101)
Yeah.

John Mcintyre (39:09.280)
actually happens, which is really fucking cool.

Seth (39:11.223)
Yeah.

Seth (39:14.074)
Yes, yeah. No, we have to learn how to do these things. I think, you know, as we evolved over millions of years, it wasn’t, it was, these were things that we were innately connected to because our development was proper, right? We were in a tribal society. We were, you know, skin on, lots of them were born. We’re probably skin on skin contact with our mom a lot. You know, the mom would wear the babies most of the time for a long time.

Seth (39:44.074)
There was proper attunement development. The threats were much simpler. You didn’t have the sort of chronic existential kind of stressors and industrialized stressors and societal norms and repressive ideologies and all the different things that we deal with today. It’s like get food, fight tiger. The life was much simpler.

This is how we evolved over millions of years in this much more sort of simple holistic context. And in that context, you don’t have to teach someone how to do this. They learn how to listen to their gut because if they don’t, they die. Like that’s how the early hunter knows the tiger is nearby is the gut tells them, right? And all of those things develop naturally in the right context.

But because we’ve become so far removed from that natural context, now we have to learn. Like take any random person, pretty much from our Western industrialized world, and drop them in the middle of the jungle, and say, here you go, here’s like, you know, a sharp stick. They’re not gonna survive. They’re not gonna make it. Like, so, because we don’t.

We don’t know, like, I mean, there’s all sorts of practical stuff we don’t know as well, right? Of course, survival skills. But, but if you don’t know first and foremost how to listen to your body and it’s innate wisdom, you’re not going to make it. So we have to teach people how to relearn how to learn, how to relearn how to listen, how to relearn how to be in interface with the world and themselves. And you can, yeah. It’s not.

John Mcintyre (41:18.889)
Mm-hmm.

Seth (41:33.354)
rocket science, I mean, it can totally be done. It’s not that complex. It just means putting in the work and understanding that along the way, as you are going into your system and discovering all these wonderful things, you’re gonna encounter some scary things. And that’s part of the reality of healing trauma is it is not comfortable. There’s a reason that these things get packed away in the first place. So when we come along and are…

developing our intuition and developing our gut impulse, developing our ability to listen to our body, we’re also at the same time encountering scary, painful, difficult things that we have to then process.

John Mcintyre (42:16.942)
What are some examples of that? I mentioned someone might be listening and thinking, okay, well that sounds interesting. Do you have an example? Something hard or something, maybe not too hard, just something to give people an idea of what they can expect.

Seth (42:23.698)
Mm.

Seth (42:31.043)
Oh man, gosh, there’s so many things. Sure, one that comes to mind immediately. So for the longest time, I had a chronic pain and chronic tension all across the right side of my shoulder, neck, head, upper back. And, you know, just the way it was.

And as I started doing this work and feeling into stuff and going inside and connecting to the environment and just doing the work, I started to, there was one day when I was like really feeling into that. And as I connected into that, it’s like, okay, well, what happens if I really, if I, if I follow that, like, what’s, what’s the tension trying to do? It’s like, oh, I’m, I’m trying, I’m trying to get away.

Like I’m trying to turn away from something. And then as I sort of slowed that down and felt into that, I started, my heart started going really fast. And I started feeling panic. I was like, oh, like I started feeling terrified, just terror. And I realized I was, and then I got an image. I got this image of just my dad with just, you know, ferocious, angry, red face right here. And I remembered in that moment, the way that

my desk was in my room as a kid, my dad would come in through the door and yell at me while I was like trying to do my homework or something. He’d be screaming at me right there. Right? And so all of that just over the years just trying to get away and all the fear and tension, like that was all locked up in those tissues and in those instructions to get away. And so as I

felt into it and started to explore the movements and slowed it all down and stay connected to the environment and worked with the image, all of these elements that are part of this process, the terror absolutely flooded through my system. And yeah, it was really scary. Yeah, and that’s just one little example. There can be so many.

John Mcintyre (44:41.166)
Was this one event or did this unfold over many days or weeks, months?

Seth (44:45.342)
Oh, there was one big session. It was mostly all in one big session. And then there was some follow-up. Like later I then started like figuring out what we call renegotiation. So what did the body want to do in that experience? Take away the personality, take away the fact that he’s much bigger than me and I’m a kid at an animal level, what did my body, what would it have wanted to do? Well, it would have wanted to fucking turn and attack.

And so then that was further work where we work with what’s called healthy aggression, annihilation work, allowing yourself to destroy, eviscerate, chop off heads in your imagination, and really feel that, you know, feel the, yeah, feel the, it’s called sadistic glee of just destroying somebody who has been torturing you essentially.

John Mcintyre (45:30.434)
Gotta clarify that.

Seth (45:43.946)
which is what, that’s what the body wants to do. It has nothing to do with compassion and forgiveness. You can, you get there naturally through allowing yourself to completely fucking destroy the person at a physiological level with your imagination, with your movements, with your energy, obviously not in real life, but yeah.

John Mcintyre (45:58.024)
Uh-huh.

John Mcintyre (46:06.634)
You know, like if we were having this conversation a few years ago, I never would have, I would have just laughed at something like that, like, especially when you talk about like this sadistically, but like I had all the same thing come up. It was two years ago, it was with you. I was in a van in the country somewhere. It was the same kind of a thing, different way, I’m sure, but like the same kind of energy. And it’s come up a bunch of times since then in various ways. And it’s like, it’s incredible. And when I think about that, you know, it’s come up for me in, in plant medicine ceremonies.

And I’ll be thinking like, I can feel it when it’s moving through the body. And I’ll be thinking like, I mean, I don’t know how people do this plant medicine, or even like trying to work on this stuff without the nervous system model, because I would be absolutely terrified of what was going on in my body right now if I didn’t, if I had no context or framework for it, it’d be like, what the f**k?

John Mcintyre (46:54.214)
What is this? Like it would be terrifying, but having the framework, it’s not always easy, but at least I can go, okay, I know roughly what’s happening. It’s uncomfortable. The sensations are, I don’t really want to feel them, but I’m not losing my mind. I’m not going crazy. This is a natural process. So, yeah. So how did you… Oh, go on.

Seth (47:12.110)
Well, that’s, and that’s a really.

Seth (47:16.546)
Well, that’s just a really important point about plant medicine ceremonies because it’s become so trendy and it can be really dangerous. I know that lots of people have been helped by them too. So this is the problem is we’re not being given nuance in terms of who is the plant medicine for, is the context correct? Do they have the right education? What kind of work have they done going into it? Are they informed?

because what plant medicines do, I believe all of them in one way or another, is open doors within the physiology and psyche. And a lot of those doors have been closed for a reason. And you do a big ayahuasca ceremony with no understanding of this stuff, and all of these doors get opened, and you get flooded with what the system has been holding for say decades, it can be absolutely terrifying. And there have been many people who have, yeah, have been…

had real psychotic breaks, terrible experiences, lasting harm from plant medicines because they got opened up without any context, without any knowledge, without any preparation. So yeah, it’s so important to have, I believe, at least a basic foundation understanding of trauma, physiology, survival responses, and to have done some of that work before going into any sort of plant medicine work ideally.

John Mcintyre (48:44.530)
It’s funny you mentioned that because I’m in Peru. Some people might listen in this might know that. But I’m, you know, where Oscar is from here, you know, you’ve got everything’s available, the ceremonies and retreat centers and all kinds of stuff. And I thought coming over here, oh, everyone here is going to get it. They’re all going to know about all this emotional stuff, how to work with the nervous system. And to be fair, there is some really, you know, really professional people here who know exactly what they’re doing. But there’s still a real, at the same time, there’s still quite a lack.

John Mcintyre (49:14.838)
of this kind of education of what we’re talking about people going into these ceremonies with they’re doing good work, but there’s, I can just see the potential of if you could give

Because I, you know, plant medicines have helped me massively. Um, probably more so since I’ve gotten into this nervous system stuff, and I can just see there’s this incredible opportunity to bring these tools, you know, orienting and following your impulse and all those, how to get out of the head. You give that to people who were working with plant medicine. I think you’ll unlock so much of the potential growth for people, but it’s a process. That’s what really, that’s, that’s what’s inspired rage hard is me going, we’re going to give this to people. We need these other people, you know? So.

Seth (49:46.238)
Absolutely. Yeah, I did. Yeah.

John Mcintyre (49:53.771)
Yeah.

Seth (49:57.050)
Yeah, yeah, man. Yeah, no, I mean, being able to understand what’s happening inside you is, I mean, it takes the fear away, essentially. And you can, because in the context of healing trauma, you’re gonna feel fear. Like, you’re gonna, you’re gonna feel terror. You’re gonna feel these things that were too much at the time. And if you’re prepared for that, and you have tools for knowing how to work with that, it’s, yeah, it’s healing.

and something like ayahuasca or mushrooms or other forms of psychedelics, they may show you your fear. You know, that happens a lot. That’s a common thing, is that what you’ve been afraid of will be in your face. And if you’re prepared for that, that’s so powerful, right? Like it’s, that’s the doorway into just really deep healing. If you’re not prepared for it, that’s potentially the doorway into psychosis and really, really bad things.

So yeah, it’s an important discussion that I hope starts getting talked about more. This seems to be what happens with the West is they discover something from some other culture and it becomes commodified very quickly. It happened with yoga, right? In the 80s, 90s, where, and now it’s like, yeah, everyone and their cat is doing yoga. And it gets the same kind of, it can have a similar effect actually.

without understanding trauma and survival physiology, you can go into a yoga class where everyone in the class, there’s this expectation of, let’s we’re all being very yoga zen, there’s the normal sort of emotional repression maybe, I don’t know how many people let them cry, let themselves cry in a yoga class. And then like you’re doing these poses that like massively open up the body. So like,

You know, so you do a deep hip opener and you’ve got sexual abuse. Like, wow, all of a sudden you’re flooded with terror in the middle of a yoga class. And then the only thing you can think, you know, you have to pack it back up. And so then you’re re-traumatizing yourself. Right. So, and so this is what happens when a deep practice that’s very powerful gets industrialized. It’s like fast food, you know, and it seems like the same thing is happening with ayahuasca.

to some extent where it’s just become commodified. And yeah, like you say, there’s some people who are amazing, who really get it and are true shamans and who know how to support, and there’s a lot who don’t. So it’s just buyer beware kind of, you know, like be really, if you’re gonna go into some of this work, maybe consider doing some nervous system work first and really be aware of who you’re working with.

John Mcintyre (52:49.710)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, even down here, I’ve been lucky to find some amazing people here. You know, the story of where I had some really terrible experience in Thailand. So I’ve kind of seen both ends of it. And there’s some, yeah, some terrible people. And that from what I’m gathering, even being over here, that’s more common than the really, really solid people. But the solid people are out there. It’s just takes time to find them. What are you? I’m wondering, because we’re almost out of time. What?

Seth (52:58.689)
Mm-hmm.

Seth (53:09.174)
Yeah.

John Mcintyre (53:18.054)
What’s changed for you? What are some of the benefits that you’ve seen as a result of this that you didn’t see from everything else, meditation and breath work and all of that? What’s really changed in the positive way? Specifics.

Seth (53:29.108)
Oh boy. Okay. Um, well, so I like, I like to tell this story as a good example of where my nervous system used to be at. So when I first moved to, I moved to Canada to be with Irene, um, I mean, this is when I was leaving about 13 years in the woods, um, and so I first moved to Whistler.

which is actually, it was a nice transition. That’s a smaller town, like ski resort town. Lots of nature around there, which is nice. But it was maybe a month or two after I had moved there and Irene was hosting a guest who was coming to just speak at her house about somatic experiencing. So there was like 20 or 30 people from her neighborhood that she knew who were coming, really informal thing. And so I was, you know, sitting there.

people started arriving. And, you know, for my adaptation, one of the things that I did as a kid is always being hyper aware of everyone around me, what they’re sensing, what like feeling what their state is, so that I know how to respond to them so that I stay safe. This is a classic sort of hyper sensitive adaptation to trauma, where we’re always feeling everything too much. So,

People started arriving and saying hi. I was like, oh, here’s one person. Okay, okay, how do I respond to this person? Okay, good, okay. Oh, here’s another person. Okay, uh-oh. Okay, how do I need to be for this person? Okay, three, four, five. How do I need to be for these people? Eventually, by the time the seventh person arrived, I was so overwhelmed because I couldn’t figure out how I needed to shape myself for each individual person that I just fricking fled, left the house.

like went and bought some beer and like went and drank in the up in the suburbs somewhere like you know I just so I was just flooded because I couldn’t handle like I had no idea how to just Be myself and I don’t have to change who I am for anybody I can just be me like that was I didn’t know how to do that So there’s a huge one is that now?

I just am myself. I don’t need to change how I am in response to anybody. That’s called connection to self, connection to authenticity, connection to feeling comfortable in my own skin and just to be who I am no matter of context. That’s a huge one. I mean being able to live in the city. I’ve been living in Vancouver close to downtown now for almost 10 years.

This is not something I could have ever done before. I just did not have the capacity to deal with just the stressors of urban life, the noise, right? The sirens, cars, wifi signals, electricity, density of people. Like all of that would have sent me into overwhelm and running for the hills, right? So I used to want to be really isolated and be alone most of the time.

And now most of my, a lot of my time is spent in connection with clients, in teaching classes, doing interviews, working with people in the online programs that we run. So I’m just, I’m a lot more social. Digestion, used to have chronic digestion problems, which are pretty much all gone. Used to have chronic back pain, which is all gone. Anything else?

I mean, yeah, debilitating social anxiety, which is kind of the first thing I mentioned, is all gone. So yeah, those are all very concrete things. Just feeling safe, feeling like a baseline level of wellness and safety, no matter where I am or what situation I’m in, I’m still feeling basically good and like myself. All right, so those are all, yeah.

John Mcintyre (57:36.142)
Thanks for watching!

Seth (57:36.446)
examples of things that have changed.

John Mcintyre (57:39.338)
fantastic and how long I imagine people are gonna be thinking well how long does this take is this like a eight weeks and you’re done thing or are we talking a little bit longer than that

Seth (57:47.706)
No. No. It’s different for everyone. I had really complex, layered, early developmental trauma and then a lot of big traumas on top of that after all growing up. So I had a lot of layers and complexity. For me, it took about seven years of consistent work to get to this place. It was about, yeah, it was about after seven years of work that there

day where I was taking a nap, I used to be hyper sensitive to that’s another thing I used to be hyper sensitive to sound. There’s any sound in the environment, I couldn’t sleep, I would go into a rage. I’d be just completely pissed. And there’s this one day where like I just fell asleep for in a nap for the middle of the day, there’s construction outside, Irene was working walking around upstairs footsteps, you know, walking around, just fell asleep. No problem.

I woke up and I was like, holy shit, yeah, okay, I feel safe. My physiology feels safe, no matter the stimulus that’s going on. And yeah, that was about seven years. So it depends on your history. It’s not unusual for it to take many years. It’s not a matter of weeks, definitely for anybody. Say someone had really good, attuned…

caring, present parents that totally supported their authenticity and were there enough such that they had good early wiring and were like really resilient, healthy, regulated people. There are some of those, not very many, but there’s a few, but then say that healthy, regulated person got into a bad car accident or was attacked, got experienced some kind of big trauma later in life. If they had a really solid early foundation, then

know, a couple months of work might do it. I’ve had one client like that. I’ve had hundreds and hundreds of clients at this point. Of all of my clients, one has been like that, where they had a healthy upbringing and they had a shock trauma later in life and it took maybe six sessions and they were all better. But that’s just one. The rest you’re looking at at least a couple years, maybe five years, somewhere in there. It takes time.

John Mcintyre (01:00:10.166)
But it’s worth it, in your opinion.

Seth (01:00:11.678)
Absolutely. And I don’t want people to think that it’s like, it takes that time to feel any better at all. Like, there’s changes all along the way. Like, I started having significant changes just after, you know, within the first year of work, in terms of like understanding myself and feeling better and not so afraid. So, you know, there’s good improvements that can happen all along that trajectory. But when we were talking about fully restoring regulation, that’s what it comes down to is…

Your nervous system is working properly, the way it’s supposed to inflow, you don’t have to do anything to make that happen. It’s just that way. You don’t have to do anything to regulate yourself. You’re autonomically regulated. That takes time. Yeah.

Seth (01:01:00.010)
But it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s really only.

John Mcintyre (01:01:00.638)
I’ve been going for three years and I feel like I’m still going so…

Seth (01:01:05.130)
Yeah, yeah. No, it’s the only work that’s really worth doing. I mean, in my opinion, everything else is secondary at this point for humans. It’s like, we’re not going to get to the next stage of human evolution until humanity discharges its survival energy. The current system depends on everyone being in survival mode. It would not function if people were not in survival mode. People wouldn’t do it. So the paradigm shift starts in here.

John Mcintyre (01:01:07.681)
Yeah.

Seth (01:01:34.546)
It starts inside each human coming out of survival and realizing, you know what? I don’t wanna participate with that toxic system anymore. I’m gonna do this thing, which is actually why I’m here. That’s another thing that happens is, as you do this work, you very often will discover what you’re here to do, your true purpose, what your calling is, what are you really supposed to do for work, who are you supposed to be in relationship with? There can be a disintegration of the old life because like I said,

our likes, our dislikes, what we think we should do for work, who we think we should be married to, our friends, all of these things for most of us were developed in the context of adaptation to trauma. So there can be a disintegration that happens and then of the sort of blossoming from a different place where you realize, oh, I actually wanna do this. And what’s really interesting is how magically those things then kind of seem to unfold.

Seth (01:02:30.914)
It’s like the universe, I think, inherently supports wholeness and health and healing. And as you get on that train, it will support you because it’s what organically wants to happen in each human and in the universe, I believe.

John Mcintyre (01:02:48.930)
fantastic. I mean, it’s magic. Like I see it and I’ve seen it in my own life. My sister’s into this as well. My cousin, everyone who seems to get into this way of working, whoever they happen to learn it from, it can take some time, but things just start to shift. Often I’ve had things start shifting without even really trying that hard. It’s just ideas start to flow, opportunities start to come in. The whole life starts unfolding in a totally different way without really trying so hard to make it, make it different.

It’s like the whole trajectory just shifts on its own. So.

Seth (01:03:24.418)
That’s right. You get into more of a flow state. Maybe you start learning to listen, right? You listen to your intuition instead of listening to your survival energies. It’s like, it’s a whole, it’s just everything changes. Everything changes.

John Mcintyre (01:03:25.310)
Well…

John Mcintyre (01:03:39.618)
That’s a fantastic note to end on, I think. So let’s wrap it up here. But before we go, people are probably be wondering what to do next or where to find you, where to learn more about you. So where would you, if people do want to learn more, where would you want to send them? Where should they go?

Seth (01:03:50.574)
Yeah.

Seth (01:03:57.486)
So if they want to learn more about me, just go to my website, SethLion.com. Pretty simple. There’s, I don’t, I don’t have availability to work with people one on one anymore. My practice is too full and I’m also shifting away from private practice and starting to teach more. So I can’t work with people one on one anymore, but what I, I have a lot of articles that people might like my blog. I’ve got a link to, I’m also a musician, composer.

I’ve made this album of sound healing music that supports nervous system health. That’s on my website. There’s a little sound healing tab. So that’s me. If people really want to get into this work, I actually think they need to check out Irene. So my wife, she’s created this in-depth suite of online offerings for people to learn about and do this work. So I would say start with her YouTube channel.

Irene Lyon on YouTube. She’s got hundreds and hundreds of videos. Just browse, see what interests you, watch some of her videos. If you want to start doing the work, go to her website, irenelyon.com. Go to the free resources section. There’s a little side menu where you can see free resources. Download some of her neurosensory exercises, some of the audio books. Start doing some of those practices that you can do for free.

If you resonate with that, if you feel like, oh, this work is speaking to me, I like the way Irene teaches, I understand, I’m excited about this work, then the next step would be to do her 21 Day Nervous System Tune Up program. That’s a program that’s available all the time. It’s 21 days, although of course, you don’t have to do it in 21 days. You have access to the material forever. You can do it at your own pace. Yours, professional support in our own private website, where you can ask questions from, there’s a team of

somatic experience practitioners like myself who answer questions. And that program, the 21 Day Nervous System Tune Up, is a really good baseline for getting the full nervous system physiology education and your foundational starting practices to start working with your system. And actually this is interesting timing. I’m not sure when this will go out, but this weekend is a Black Friday, Cyber Monday kind of sale deal. So it’ll be on sale the next four days or so.

Seth (01:06:24.380)
That’s just a really good way to start.

John Mcintyre (01:06:28.526)
Awesome. I mean, I’ve read tons of your articles. They’re fantastic. That’s actually how I found all this stuff originally. We’re searching Google for T.I.R.E. and Somatic Experiencing and then led me to you, which led me to Irene. So amazing articles, amazing music too, actually. I’ve listened to that album a bunch of times now. So I definitely recommend people check that out. Irene’s fantastic. So is Seth. So I’ll have links to all of that in the show notes at rageheart.co. So, yeah, thank you, Seth, for coming on.

Seth (01:06:54.112)
else.

Seth (01:06:56.554)
Yeah, man, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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