Somatic Healing Is Being Hijacked by “Safety”

Safety has become the highest virtue. That can actually get somebody stuck in chronic survival mode. And if people are trying to placate or soften those edges, you may never encourage that person to move out of that space. The problem is, if we're not careful, safety itself becomes an idol. And when safety becomes your idol, all of your growth absolutely stops. Your brain is wired for deception. But here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen? You've probably heard the word soma or somatic. And surely somatic healing is having a big moment. And depending on who you're listening to, it's either the missing key to all trauma recovery, or it's a bunch of incense, vague metaphors, and of course our Instagram therapy. You're probably hearing things like the body keeps score, your trauma is stored in your tissues, or the issues are in your tissues, and your nervous system just needs safety. But rarely do you hear how, through what mechanism, what exactly is the soma, how does this connect to neuroscience, science to memory encoding and even to biblical renewal. I'm a deeply spiritual person, but I also try not to ever be vague. I also try never to reduce the body to simply chemistry or float it off into mysticism as a whole. I try to integrate the two, show the bridge between the spiritual world and the scientific world. So if we're going to talk about somatic healing, I would love to understand the nature and the architecture of it as a human being. So not from an anti-science perspective, but also not from an anti-spiritual perspective. I do see somatic healing as a sacred science. The word soma in Greek means the body living in its wholeness. Not just muscle, not just nerves, not just symptoms, but the body as a felt or lived experience. To be is to experience. and you can't experience anything without embodiment. Every second, three domains of perception are running simultaneously. Exteroception is when we're taking in cues from our outside world. Interoception is when we're listening to cues that are happening inside of our body. And proprioception is where you are in time and space. Your brain is constantly integrating these three domains. And reality is not simply something that is observed. It's also constructed. And you know extensively from episodes on this podcast that the brain acts as a filter or a lens. Stimulus comes in. The brain then categorizes it or defines it. The nervous system then is going to signal the body. Emotion is generated. Meaning is assigned. Your somatic experience is not passive. It is actively participating in your perception of reality, which means that your body is not reacting to objective reality. It's actively interpreting it. And that distinction changes everything you know about memory encoding, nervous system regulation, and somatic healing. If you go deeper on the topic of memory, it's important to remember that it's not just simply narrative recall. Memory is actually neuronal reactivation. activation. When an experience happens, clusters of neurons inside of your body are firing. And if it happens repeatedly, these connections strengthen. Neurons that fire together wire together. But here's the missing piece that many people are skipping. Not all experiences wire equally. Emotion absolutely determines priority of memory. This is something that we call emotional tagging hypothesis in the scientific world. Emotionally intense experiences get tagged by the brain as important. Think fear, shame, rejection, even exhilaration, and of course, humiliation. When emotional arousal is high, the amygdala activates. Stress hormones increase, and the hippocampus prioritizes memory encoding. Emotion acts as a highlighter. It tells the brain, store this, tie this to a very specific childhood memory. Think emotionally charged experiences, times when things felt unpredictable or unstable, conditional love that felt transactional, volatility, inconsistency. Each one of these moments become tagged and therefore prioritized. And when they get tagged repeatedly, the brain starts to predict them. And don't get it twisted, the brain's primary job actually is prediction. So when the brain predicts something, the body actually gets in line and starts preparing for it. And this is before your conscious mind is even able to intervene. Your heart rate gets elevated. Your muscles start to brace. Your breathing gets shallow. Maybe you start to notice some symptoms in your gut. Maybe you clench your jaw. The soma is what encodes the rule, not just the singular event. The rule might be conflict equals abandonment. If I'm in the spotlight, I'm in danger. Love is only available to me if I perform. being at peace isn't safe and boy can i align with that one the body organizes these emotionally tagged rules and it isn't happening on a purely mystical or spiritual level it's happening in a very real neurochemical predictive data-driven level interoception is your body's awareness of its internal state so think heart rate temperature breath tension your brain is taking in low level interoceptive input and it's converting it into meaning. A great way to look at this would be if you are running on a treadmill and you're increasing the speed on your treadmill, right? You're going to like 7.5. Because you know you're putting up the speed, you are expecting your heart rate to raise. So as you're starting to become aware interoceptively of your heart rate going up, you're also simultaneously defining that as rational. I know I'm putting the speed up, so my heart rate should go up. But for those of you that may ever have smoked weed, and this happened to me when I was a teenager, I smoked weed. I think I already had heightened interoception. All I could do was fixate on the sound of my heartbeat. And guess what? The more I thought about it, the higher it went up. And then I'm like, but I'm just sitting here. Oh my god, I'm in danger. Am I having a heart attack? No, I'm not having a heart attack. What's happened is I'm fixating on an enteroceptive input. And because to my mind, it seems out of place for the context in which I find myself in, I'm now deciding I'm in grave danger and I have to panic. But on the treadmill, you completely brush past it because it makes sense to you. So this is where the same actions or the same sort of enteroceptive awareness can split into either I'm safe or I'm in danger when really nothing is different. The only thing that is different is how you interpreted it. When we're looking at early experiences that are tagged for threat, activation of that threat response will always trigger you to feel unsafe. And I bring this up for a very specific reason because I think the word safety gets very much weaponized in our world today. Everything is about safety and cultivating safety. I'm a firm believer that safety is an inside job. And when we think about how many things our brain is going to tag with that threat response, it's very common that you may feel unsafe in a situation that is objectively totally safe. While in a situation that if we actually look at the math, you might be more statistically likely to die, if you've convinced yourself that this is not a threat, even if statistically you're more likely to die in that scenario, you will feel safe. What's the truth? The truth is that safety has everything to do with perception, and it's not always going to be tied to objective reality. So I want everyone to keep this in mind because we're going to pull this thread a little bit later in the episode because I think, to me, one of the most dangerous pieces of somatic healing and how it's pitched online in particular and Instagram is just this conversation around safety leading us to, I think, not step into pattern opposition and true healing, which ultimately could create real safety, and instead we're outsourcing it to something externalized. It's also important for us to think about the connection of fascia in the somatic healing experience. So fascia is our interconnected web of tissue that runs through your entire body. It's richly innervated, so there's lots of nerve endings in it, and it responds to mechanical stress. And it will remodel based on repeated tension states. Repeated contraction patterns are going to actually influence how your collagen is formed. Mechanical forces are then going to influence your structure. So a great way of looking at this would be if your body went into a specific position when you experienced a trauma, you can have two things happen. Let's say that happened when you were 16. When you're now, let's say arbitrarily 32 years old, and you experience a repeat of that trauma, your body may actually return to that position because that's where the memory is stored. So even without thinking about it, you might be holding yourself in a specific position that is exactly where your body and fascia and soma experienced that trauma as a 16-year-old. But now you're 32 and your body just naturally went back to that state. That's one way that this can happen. What's also interesting about tensional memory is as a 32 year old you may not be activated in the same trauma but let's say that you just so happen to get yourself into the same body position the body may also then trigger the trauma because of the position you just navigated into So it important for us to understand that interconnected relationship between what our body and brain are encoding from memory and what sort of tensional position we were in at the time And that that can go both ways. One can trigger the trauma or the trigger of the trauma can put the body into its sort of tensional memory state. So when you experience memory, often it does change your body position, right? You might brace. You might all of a sudden clench your jaw. This absolutely is coming from our connection to our fascia system. So to be really precise here, repeated stress signals changes in your tissue behavior. Your fascia is very much shaped by how you breathe, how you brace, how you respond, how you think. For those of you that have ever done my somatic movement practitioner training, one of the series that we teach is called Respond React, which helps you actually map how your protective response, either fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop, exists in your tensional memory. And it shows you some very powerful ways to move in opposition to those patterns as you're retraining your brain to think differently. So I want to keep in mind when we're talking about words like that fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop, we're very much talking about how tensional memory and our somatic experience maps in with our fashion, our memory encoding. So I want you to keep this in mind. Everyone has very specific ways that their body will respond to stress. This is something that took me honestly way too long to notice. But if I look back, many of you know that I struggled with really intense panic attacks from roughly 9 to 19. And it took me years to realize that actually when I would start cracking my neck, that was probably a good sign I was trending toward a panic attack, right? Because the first thing that would happen is that I'd clench my jaw and then all of my neck muscles would start to tighten. And that sort of tension would then compress my C-spine and then I'd feel the urge to crack my neck as everything was like pulling down. Now, obviously, I know those physical signs, so I know to oppose them long before my nervous system and fascia ever get to that place. So let's talk about dysregulation. I think this is another one of those terms that people kind of float around and not everybody knows exactly what dysregulation is. I used to work in a clinical environment with teens who were struggling with mental health issues of all kinds. And they would throw around this. I'm just dysregulated. I'm just dysregulated. And it was kind of like a get out of jail free card. If they said they were dysregulated, they kind of got a pass from whatever it was that they didn't want to do. And to me, this kind of parallels this idea of weaponizing the word safety in the somatic healing space. These words have truth in this conversation, but if you can use them as a get-out-of-jail-free card or to not step into the pattern opposition that would be required to heal, then they actually hold you back rather than help you. So dysregulation is real, but it's not actually a root cause. It's actually a downstream effect of a root cause. The cause is actually how your memory encoded in the first place, which is why I always tell people in break method, you are only chemically imprinted with what you perceive happened to you. So like what your mom says happened or what your dad says happened, doesn't matter at all. In fact, sadly, objective reality doesn't matter at all. Even if what you experienced and then in turn encoded into your memory is completely wildly untrue, you are still imprinted with it. So it feels true to you. And if we are going to do the somatic healing work that is required to unwind those patterns, we have to know what you imprinted rather than the objective truth, right? And I just put air quotes for those of you that are listening to the audio episode. when we build an entire healing philosophy around avoiding things that feel unsafe or being able to just use the word i'm dysregulated and get out of having to step into the discomfort we're actually reinforcing the original encoding we're letting the brain body soma connection actually get away with it what feels safe is almost always simply what feels familiar and what feels familiar comes absolutely from your childhood adaptations. So in a way, we have to remember that true healing is not eliminating activation. It's increasing resilience when faced with activation and learning how to navigate through that activation to build new patterns, right? To learn how to self-regulate. The nervous system recalibrates when it experiences something. Activation without collapse with a new outcome, this actually reconsolidates memory. So this is actually how we update our neural networks. You have to go through it and reorganize and redefine with that resilience piece so that you can reconsolidate because that is part of the process of healing. And again, if you're allowed to use words like, I feel unsafe or I'm dysregulated without having to be encouraged to move into and through that, you're going to hold yourself stuck in sort of this familiar safety net. I want to talk a little bit about movement neuroplasticity because I think this is really important and especially right now it seems like I don't know the nitty-gritty of it but I see a lot of posts right now about polyvagal theory and there are a lot of people that are like you can't take that study seriously like polyvagal theory has so much, like there's so much impact on my clients. So they've got the people that are kind of like proponents of polyvagal theory and many of the people right now that are very harshly criticizing polyvagal theory on Instagram because supposedly there was a scientific study that came out that basically debunked the evidence-based validity of polyvagal theory. I think you guys know how I feel about scientific studies. And one thing I will say is looking, because we've done some of this with break method, the clinical study environment, in a lot of ways, I know that the whole goal is to kind of make it systematic and incorruptible and blah, blah, blah. But what ends up happening is then you take away the ability to mimic real life, right? In crafting the study, you're taking really someone out of their real life environment. And I understand why, but to create this sort of uniform experience to really air quotes test, sometimes you're going to alter the experience because you're putting people into an unnatural sort of structure. So it does seem that, you know, while the people that are, you know, science is a god are saying polyvagal theory is debunked, I would say, obviously I'm not an expert in polyvagal theory, But there seem to be years and years of stories of profound healing and awareness that have come from polyvagal theory. So this is just a great example of when a scientific study comes out and kind of, you know, debunks something, does that mean that it's no longer valid? I personally lean on how many people's lives has it helped how how has it helped clinicians inform their practice because I think there's a lot of there's a lot of goodness that can come from something even if people go out of their way to try to attack it and debunk it through clinical studies so one of the things that we want to look at is that when we're looking at things like movement right and I know somatic my somatic movement practitioner program very much is movement-based, you're integrating proprioception, right? Like where your body is in space, what you're aware of internally as your body's moving through space. And you're also getting vagal tone, synaptic plasticity. You're also being able to think about your thinking. So you're simultaneously, as you're doing all these things, you're shifting yourself out of that amygdala activation and you're moving into prefrontal cortex and you've got tools to kind of merge all of these things in an interconnected way. As you know, if you've been following along with my podcast, I did not get into the peptide space for human optimization. I got into them because my body was completely broken down. I was having autoimmune flares, hormonal weight gain that was not responding to any of my strong willpower or time spent in the gym. The only thing that actually made a change was adding peptides to my daily routine. As you know, I am partnered with LEMD so that you don't have to guess where your products are coming from, whether they're black market from China. You can find all of my recommended stacks at LEMD forward slash busygold and LEMD is E-L-L-I-E-M-D dot com forward slash busygold. And I go deeper into all of my protocols and offer support on my telegram group, which is also going to be linked in the show notes. Now back to the show. This is a really profound, very whole experience for somebody to come out of a trauma response. Is it possible that doing all of these things in a clinical study environment didn't quite translate because a clinical study environment is not necessarily conducive to things that are a little bit more natural and organic and multifaceted? Possibly. So I think it's important for us to remember that if you've gotten caught in some of that sort of like great divide on polyvagal theory, don't be so quick to get caught into the divisive narrative. Even if that clinical study somewhat invalidates the evidence base of it and what it was built on, that doesn't mean that there aren't still some amazing nuggets to grab from it and that you should kind of turn your nose up at I think everything is worth looking into with a fresh set of eyes. And while, again, I'm not an expert in polyvagal theory, I think it very much kind of parallels or comes alongside a lot of the work that we naturally do in our somatic movement practitioner training, which ultimately we have to integrate all these systems as we are recoding the memory or reconsolidating the memory. And ultimately when we do this correctly that is neuroplasticity We are able to change both the physical patterns but more how the physical patterns are tied to the fascia patterns how the fascia patterns are tied to the way the memory is being encoded. And when you can get the body to a place where it can actually release the physical energetic spiritual pattern while you're helping them cognitively through metacognition reorganize intellectually what that memory is, the type of profound healing you experience. I've never seen anything like it. And it's so fast because what ends up happening is if you kind of get to the right cluster with all of these systems integrated at the right time, there can be such an intense ripple quite literally through time space that I've seen a client in literally one session completely change so much about their life, what their lived experience is in their body, their choices. So don't be so quick to jump on that bandwagon and be like, this is all hogwash. Like there are lots of things on Instagram about this that to me are more on that hogwash side, but that doesn't mean throw it all out. There's so much here that I think is critically important for us in the healing experience. And I think there does need to be this bridge, you know, like the work that I do in break method is very heady and academic and very like mental health cognitive focused. But the somatic movement piece is really important for a lot of people because, and I think, for example, this is the reason that booty, which has always been a somatic practice, has helped so many people heal. The way that you are organizing your body and you're retraining your thoughts and your movement patterns as you are experiencing this sort of like healing, uplifting experience, it can move people out of profound trauma without ever stepping foot in a therapist's office, right? So there's a time and a place and an application for so many different things and I hate to see certain things divided or overgeneralized, right? Like somatic being like overly woo-woo and weird and kind of forgetting about the real grounded science involved in it or again this sort of like it's anti-scientific and now it's not evidence-based, just read my paper, right? I think there's so much more to it than that. But I do want to call really clear attention to what I think is the biggest current issue in the somatic space right now, which I mentioned earlier, which is that safety has become the highest virtue and virtually everything gets filtered through this word safety. Does your body feel safe? Only move toward what feels safe. Don't activate yourself. Honor your nervous system. And I'm certainly not saying that there isn't a time and a place for these things, but that can actually get somebody stuck in chronic survival mode. And if people are trying to placate or or soften those edges, you may never encourage that person to move out of that space. And I think this is largely one of my biggest criticisms of many trauma-informed practices is that you often end up allowing a client to stay stuck on repeat far longer than they actually needed to stay stuck there. And again, I'm not saying that there isn't a time and a place. Example, if somebody just experienced some sort of brutal sexual trauma, I'm certainly not saying that like three days later is the time like, all right, buck up, buttercup, time to pull out of this. That's not what I'm saying. But I think far too often in this space, we've allowed people to kind of align with their victim story and unfortunately put up these bumpers and safeguards and we don't encourage them out of there at a specific time. So the problem is if we're not careful, safety itself becomes an idol. And I've absolutely seen this word safety become an idol in the somatic space, but kind of just like in mental health, honestly, as a whole. And when safety becomes your idol, all of your growth absolutely stops. Because as I mentioned, what feels safe is really often just familiar. And what feels familiar means that it is directly tied to the original pattern. If you grew up in chaos, calm feels unsafe. If you grew up performing love, rest feels safe. If you grew up constantly bracing for impact, well, vulnerability is surely not on the table for you. So if we teach people only to move toward what feels safe, you're usually reinforcing the exact emotional tag that's actually begging for you to dismantle it. Safety, if you outsource it externally, becomes another form of control. Control over your environment, control over people, control over your triggers, control over tone, control over exposure, control, control, control. But that isn't actually regulation at all. Emotional regulation and self-regulation and emotional resiliency, those all actually are supposed to go together. And when you're trying to control and put up buffers, you're not actually doing that. You're usually creating a system that's far more dependent because true regulation is not fragile and it does not require the world to cooperate with you. You go out into the world. In break method, I always remind people you cannot rewire a trigger if you refuse to be exposed to it. It's literally not possible. In your head, you might really like nail the landing, but that's all hypothetical. What happens when you actually go do it? It's probably not going to happen the way you imagined in your head. You have to do it and you have to do it some more and you have to do it some more. When you embrace those triggers and you embrace opportunities to step into fear, you're able to not only rewire, but you're able to build a whole lot of confidence and capability around those skills. I use the term with my husband all the time, fear dates, and he started using it back to me the other day. He's like, I'm going out to breakfast with this guy this morning. Like, yeah, I'm just really trying to challenge myself to go on some fear dates. And I'm like, yes, it's working. For those of you that are aware of places that you actively try to avoid or in your mind justify as not being important, I encourage you spend a week, pick three things that typically you would avoid or justify or minimize and challenge yourself to go do precisely those things and watch what happens. Because when you're stepping out of those comfort zones into something in break method that we call rebellion zones, you do rewire and you do realize there's a whole lot more out there that actually could wildly change your life if you could stop falling victim to your self-deception that keeps you in this little loop. True regulation is coming from your internal authority. And if you're outsourcing it to something else, well, you're making me feel unsafe, you're not realizing that, again, safety is an inside job. I can learn to feel safe even around people who are objectively not safe. So in a way, regulation is our capacity to experience activation without collapsing into your old childhood rules. And this is why it is so important that we embrace strategic pattern opposition. You will not heal a pattern by feeding it with comfort and safety. You heal a pattern by very carefully and strategically confronting it. I'm not encouraging you to be reckless, but incredibly intentional. If your body learns something like conflict equals abandonment, then healing means that you cannot avoid conflict. You have to go into it equipped with a very clear strategy. It's experiencing the conflict and knowing on the other side not only are you going to survive it, but you're going to learn new skills to navigate conflict. If your body learned that visibility is going to equal danger for you, then healing is not actually being a wallflower staying in the background. It's expanding. It's working on your self-regulation skills so that you can step boldly out front and center and learn that on the other side, you're going to be just fine. Even if you navigate a little bit of embarrassment, every time you repeat it, you're going to get better at it. Then healing is releasing control in measured ways and watching how your nervous system is able to recalibrate. Things that once made my nervous system react, they don't happen to me anymore. I'm able to stay calm and regulated in situations where as a 20-something, I never would have been able to stay calm and regulated. And in fact, this is an interesting little tidbit, I threw my back out for a few days just from being on so many planes and walking around in heels. My back went into like a full-blown spasm. And I was in so much pain and it put me on so much edge that I remembered what it was like to basically be old me because my emotional regulation skills were severely lacking. My husband made like a little jab at me and typically this would not bother me at all. And actually it wasn't even a little jab. Never mind. I remember what it was. I went out of my way to try making this really special dinner. And I went on Pinterest and I figured out how to make these soy sauce cured egg yolks that you could put on a crispy rice cake. It's like a Japanese delicacy. And it's like a two day long procedure. And I was so excited to have Gordon taste my egg yolk. And he said something like, cause I'm like holding it out to him. He's like, no, babe, I'm not eating that off your fingers or something. And I typically I would have been like, whatever, and eaten it myself and not cared. But because I was in so much back pain and I wasn't operating in the way that I am typically, my eyes started to well up with tears. But thankfully, I started to laugh at myself. And I'm like, oh, my God, I am in so much pain that this is like what it feels like to be a regular human. Because I'm usually so far beyond these sort of emotional reactions that this is like it brought me right back to my mid-20s where I was actually sensitive and easily triggered. So it just goes to show when you're doing this work and you can get yourself out of these things. Resilience, ultimately, resilience and peace, right? Like a resilience and peace sandwich is what you're able to achieve on the other side of this work. But it's never going to come from not doing the work, right? Putting up bumpers or telling people like, that offends me or I don't like it when you act that way. Sometimes we have to figure out why am I reacting to what you just did and is what you doing objectively wrong Or do I also have to kind of learn to like toughen up or maybe advocate for myself in a way that more productive If we able to just kind of get out of having to face some of these hardships and we don have to move through the emotional reactivity, we don't ever really learn how to get to the other side in a more corrected, integrated experience. So I'm just sharing that because it was kind of an interesting one for me to kind of remember what it was like. And the good news is when you get to the other side of a lot of this work, resilience and peace really pay dividends in today's world because our world is hard, especially if you have a social media presence. Things are challenging. People are always kind of like coming for you and trying to start drama. Being able to maintain that sort of internal peace and regulation is such a gift, and I would love all of you to have access to it. And going in line with a program that I know you guys know I launched a few weeks ago, my Renew Your Mind program, which is on, you can get to it on either my show notes or on my Instagram URL. a lot of what we're talking about there's what the biblical principles are of neuroscience and how in the Bible pretty much everything we know about neuroscience and rewiring was already written in the Bible long before we could prove it with imaging and scientific studies. And I think in tandem with this, it's important for us to remember faith, right? Faith is a key component of renewal and going back to this idea of somatic experience and kind of I think this hijacking or corruption around safety is faith is being able to trust that God has something for you even if the situation that it looks like you're in feels scarier, unsafe, right? So in a way, I think to truly activate faith and to step into that place of renewal, you have to be able to build skills that allow you to willingly put yourself into situations that might not feel safe to you, but might be an absolute gift for you in the long run. So this is something that I think about a lot because it does make me sad how many people have kind of bought into this like cut out toxic people safety narrative. And they miss all these opportunities, I think, to heal in a really profound way, but more importantly, from a spiritual level to learn how to access faith. One example I was thinking about the other day was, and I think this is just, it's an interesting dichotomy. As a child, you guys know that I had really bad panic attacks, right? I was having panic attacks largely because I didn't trust my parents. I didn't trust their decision making in my day-to-day environment. But then when I would be completely on my own and separated, somehow magically then I was fine. It was really only being subject to my parents' emotions and decision-making. That activated my panic disorder. But then when I was totally by myself, I'd like magically have these moments of being fine because there are these things that don't really align. Like, why would you be like that and then also be out at raves Friday and Saturday night traveling all over the place, right? One, that feels unsafe, right? So this just goes to show when I was, I was thinking about this, when I was probably like 15, 16 years old, I was often at raves every Friday and Saturday night. I grew up on the East Coast, so I was either at raves in New York City or like, I mean, one of the places that we used to go all the time was in Camden, New Jersey, which is so dangerous, you guys. But like New Jersey, Boston, Worcester, like just going all over, always at a rave. But very frequently, I was going out late in the night in New York City. And I would take the last train home, which typically I think the last train home is at like three in the morning or something, or maybe even slightly later. It's been a long time. I'm turning 41. But there would be so many times that I would take the last train home by myself. So like little 15-year-old busy by myself. And what I made a point of doing almost every time is I would stay outside of Grand Central Station and I would get Dunkin' Donuts and cash to homeless people and drug addicts that were on the street, and I would literally talk to them about God. And I would get there early so that I could have like a solid one hour at least conversation. I had some really deep conversations with people on the street. I'd have my, you know, I think back then I was like a light and sweet like iced coffee that was like this big. I don't even want to know how many calories was in that thing. But I would have these deep conversations. Now, objectively, was that an unsafe situation? Like if I really looked at the crime statistics and data, was that unsafe? Yes. But I didn't feel at all unsafe in that situation. I was in full surrender. I'm like, God's got me. I'm having these conversations. In those ways, I was able to access faith and not fall victim to what the circumstance might appear like and was able to just kind of trust the process. Then in a stupid situation at home, I'd be like completely panicking because I just, for me, what made me feel most unsafe was being around my parents. So this just shows this whole point of our desire to stay safe and controlled is completely antagonistic to faith. So if accessing faith and surrender, which largely I think are required for you to eventually get to a place of full renewal and peace, are not available to you right now, this sort of conversation around somatic work I think is incredibly important. and this is why obviously I built the somatic movement practitioner training and I actually this summer have a version of somatic movement practitioner training that is launching. It'll launch right after Renew Your Mind is done and it's called Embodied Renewal and it'll be kind of a piggybacking of Renew Your Mind and the biblical principles specifically with the somatic movement practitioner training. If you've already taken the somatic movement practitioner training, you will have access to embodied renewal completely for free. If this is your first time engaging in this work, I'm going to be putting together a whole landing page that gives you a ton of information about embodied renewal. But I think it's really important that we understand biblically that God wants to redeem our time. And the desire of God biblically is for us to be fully restored and set free with a completely renewed mind. And in doing so, you should be able to actually let all of those old narratives and stories go, but more importantly, let them go from your somatic experience and from your physical body. So this is a great training for people who are wanting to focus on where the physical meets the spiritual, because as I mentioned with tensional memory, this is a real thing, and this is often the root cause of repetitive injuries, chronic disease, autoimmune disease. Even for me, like throughout my life, the amount of times I've rolled my right foot and then eventually like broke my right foot from rolling my right foot. It's like my body has, everyone's body has a specific way that they go out of balance. And in all of these training modalities, we're really focusing on what the physically manifested pattern is and what memories are associated with that physical pattern so that you're restoring the physical pattern as you're recoding and renewing that memory. Because I really do believe from a biblical perspective, when God says that we are called to become a new creation, we really are meant to become completely brand new, where the stuff that happened to you or that you did feels so separate of who you are that you feel completely freed from it. And a large part of I think that work has to do with addressing the somatic experience in a way that is not about putting up bumpers and keeping yourself safe, but instead actually generating safety from the inside, building your internal authority and remembering that this is a really sacred science, right? Like our body is part of our temple and we have to learn how to bring about that full restoration because I mean, that's the work that I think people need the absolute most. So I hope this episode helps you understand that the somatic is not just this sort of mystical woo piece, but it's also not just the mechanical pieces. It's to me evidence of an intentional creator, an intentional designer that built us to have this profound holistic experience, but also the tools to get in there and make sure that we can become truly restored and renewed. And that is the work that I love doing. And there will certainly be more coming out about embodied renewal. and if you have not yet joined us for renew your mind access is open forever we'd love for you to join us we are i think at this point on lecture four of 20 so you're it's not too late to jump in all of the lectures are recorded and go up about 24 hours after we go live so if you are curious about the bible and maybe you're not yet a believer but you're at least curious what the bible says about mental health and neuroscience this is a great opportunity for you to step in if you are a believer but you've been struggling to move past shame, fear, self-worth issues, anxiety, depression, this is a great opportunity for you to learn very biblically rooted neuroscience tools to move past those things. And if you're also like me and you're just a geek for all things mental health, social, spiritual, you know, my style is to always go deep in everything that we do. So we're going all the way from the practical foundational all the way through to what's happening in the spirit realm connected to mental illness. So we're going all the way. I hope that you will join me. If you go to stan.store slash busygold, you'll see all of my offerings there, and I will see you all next week. Your brain isn't broken. It's running an old code. Break Method is a system that maps your neurological patterns, decodes your emotional distortions, and rewires your behavior fast. No talk therapy spiral, no getting stuck in your feelings, just logic-based rewiring in 20 weeks or less. Head to breakmethod.com and see what your brain is really up to.