The Role of Somatic Therapy in Reclaiming Equilibrium and Safety for Healing- EMDR & Brain Spotting EP6 (Somatics, Part 2) EP6

Dive into the world of somatics and therapeutic treatments, emphasizing the importance of pacing and individual tolerance. Discover the significance of recognizing the body's intuitive nature and ability to reclaim equilibrium through various modalities, including breath work, somatics, acupuncture, and yoga.

Starting with a discussion on the power of deep breathing, the conversation highlights how it can saturate the body with oxygen and alter biochemistry. Explore somatic breath and yoga as techniques to move emotional and energetic debris out of the body, promoting healing and balance.

Learn about the use of somatic therapy for individuals dealing with stress, trauma, and oversympathizing. Understand that somatics is not just for trauma but can also aid in managing stress and reclaiming equilibrium in the nervous system.

The hosts explain the modality of brain spotting, similar to EMDR, and how it can assist in processing trauma and managing the window of tolerance. Personal anecdotes illustrate the transformative effects of brain spotting in releasing emotional patterns and sensations, particularly in the throat.

Discover various somatic practices and techniques, including EMDR, brain spotting, neurodynamic breath work, small yoga ball exercises, and gentle touch unwinding techniques for singers and actors. Emphasize using gentle self-massage, breath vibration, and tapping as tension-release methods in managing stressful situations.

Highlight the significance of breath as a free and bioavailable resource for processing and healing. Understand the importance of having resources in mind and heart to cope with stress and inner work.

We offer cautionary advice, emphasizing the potential of trauma therapy and healing modalities to re-injure if not appropriately managed. And stress the importance of using these modalities for healing and repair, ensuring they contribute to the healing process rather than becoming part of the problem.

References to the work of renowned figures in the field, such as Peter Levine, underscore the role of somatic experience in helping the body recover and reclaim equilibrium.

Through personal anecdotes and expert insights, we paint a comprehensive picture of the power and importance of somatic therapy in promoting mental and physical health, highlighting the crucial mind-body connection in addressing psychosomatic issues.

Connect with Janene on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theacupuncturist_org/

Connect with Jennie on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jennie_pool/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back to Unscripted. In this episode, we continue our conversation about somatics and specifically dive a little deeper into EMDR and brain spotting. Jenny has a decade of experience applying these techniques in a clinical setting and this can really help you understand if this type of therapy is right for you. So stick around and enjoy. Welcome to Unscripted, your guide to discovering the various options available to you in the integrated and collaborative medicine space. I'm Janine Barandi and I've been treating patients with acupuncture for 10 years.

Speaker 2: 0:38

And I'm Jenny Poole. I'm a trauma specialist and somatic therapist with a passion for psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. The objective of our podcast is to explore the various care options available. Through our years of practice, we've found that different modalities can complement each other and conventional medicine.

Speaker 1: 0:55

We hope our conversations resonate and help you find the right tools and specialists for your unique needs.

Speaker 2: 1:01

We believe in an advanced care model where the doctor is not the only expert. We encourage you to embrace a mindset where your practitioners are your teammates, who ultimately empower you to take control of your health.

Speaker 1: 1:11

As with every episode, this is not intended to act as medical advice and no patient-practitioner relationship is formed from subscribing or tuning in.

Speaker 2: 1:21

Well, and here's the thing, people ask me well, what if I can't find somebody like you that does body work and that also does some of this somatic work and sometimes it's hands-on work. I said, well, there is an mdr brain spot and there is neuro dynamic breath work. There are so many different ways to mine releasing somatically. I went to a somatic conference from the embodied lab. Dr scott lyons hosts it, and his way of unwinding was using a small yoga ball and getting connected with the body and using a lot of like. I'm feeling this yoga ball in my body and now I'm unwinding it. There was another gal that got up that was talking about.

Speaker 2: 2:00

She ended up working with actors and people that were acting and singing and it was unwinding the fascia with very, very gentle touch in the abdomen so that the diaphragm could now open up and have more freedom to be able to sing louder, sing better, have clear notes it was you know, as I sat there, I was like there's a hundred different ways to do this, but if you're not, if you're not approaching, unwinding distress and I'll say, say this too it's not just trauma, because I work with a lot of people that are really just stressed out yeah, how do we reclaim equilibrium, how do we reclaim safety in the nervous system?

Speaker 2: 2:34

That sometimes has nothing to do with something traumatic that happened. Yeah, life is just so stressful and I'm so much anxiety and I just can't. I can't keep up. It's like okay, then let's reclaim safety in your nervous system. And that's what somatics are about too is, how do we help the body go we have more equilibrium and safety, so that we have more room on our bandwidth, so that, even if stressors are there, we now have the bandwidth to manage them versus our thresholds being blown.

Speaker 1: 2:59

Do you have something that you give to your patients that will allow them to, like you know, know if they find themselves in a stressful situation? Do you have something you give them that's like a time out for them, where they can just kind of sit at their desk or like leave the room from where their kids are arguing?

Speaker 2: 3:20

or you know, yes, there's, there's so many. Let me give you a few, because one that's really simple, that we also organically and sometimes naturally do, is coming up by the temples, take both hands and then and people do this already when they're like, oh, my hand's hurting, but see like how I'm just gently, in very small circles, the temple, you know, and this is connected to the temporal lobe and just relieving pressure. So you start to relieve tension and pressure in the body and you start to make space in the body for whatever can be better processed. So when people are feeling that much tension and they're overwhelmed, the body's losing room right, the thresholds are getting too full. So sometimes very small things, you can come in by the right here, by the sinuses. It's very simple.

Speaker 2: 4:09

Okay, we get a lot of tension. Surprisingly, in our face there's so many muscles and I have them. Go out here, hit the arc of the cheekbones and come down the jaw and take a deep breath, and the and and this is one thing that people get really inhibited by Loud breathing is actually the louder that you be, the more that you can release, especially if you can get the vocal cords to vibrate. So sometimes I'll tell someone. Hey, take a deep breath and let's start processing and resourcing and helping your body decompress, and they'll go.

Speaker 1: 4:40

Have you seen any of the studies they've done on OM?

Speaker 2: 4:44

Yes, OM is the universal sound right and it vibrates the vocal cords.

Speaker 2: 4:49

So you're creating, you're literally pushing energy and and what I would call emotional debris and psychic debris and energetic debris out of your body, if you can like, so those big things are, like you can, you're creating a vibration which, by the way, mimics those vibrations and the tremorings that the body, when it's looking to reclaim equilibrium, wants to shake some of this stuff off. And so, yeah, so when you create these tension releases, right, even this movement, you're, you're creating movement. Now let me tell you an un, I think sometimes an untapped resource, because most people and and sometimes it's crazy how much we care about what other people think like, well, I can't just like, do this anywhere. I'm like, well, you kind of can, it's tapping. Yeah, tapping sends a signal to the amygdala that, even though there might be a stressor here, that we can work through it and that we're safe and that we're okay and that we're safe and that we're okay.

Speaker 2: 5:46

And so I'll tell people and and if you look at the people who like do official tapping as a modality, there's a, there's a, there's a protocol of like where you know where you tap here here. But sometimes people like, oh my gosh, I'm out of order and this and that. So sometimes I just tell people, just start doing something to connect to what's happening in the emotional body, yeah, to your physical, and tapping does that. And if we tap in heart, center, right. This is where we feel and we give out, like we give out our feelings and we take in our feelings. A lot of that happens in heart center.

Speaker 1: 6:17

These are all acupuncture points too, and these are so you've got this central line that goes up the center and then you've got this line that traverses just lateral to the center of the body.

Speaker 1: 6:28

It's the kidney meridian and these are your spirit points. These are notoriously known in acupuncture as your spirit points and these are all about making your way through the fight, like going into the darkest of days and being able to reemeremerge and come out and and see the forest for the trees and so a lot of people, clinically, when they come in, you know they, I do find that they'll, they, they touch themselves here and I'm like, wow, you know where is it? Let's palpate here and let's find and see where there's tenderness and where there's reaction. And sometimes man, people will just cry and I'm like, okay, that's where we need to be.

Speaker 2: 7:13

Let's go find the spirit of that point, because that's going to speak to you right now, and that's why I tell people there are two places that you only ever tap, because you're trying to process and digest and work through any emotional debris that's coming up. It will either be heart, center, throat, because we get a lot bound in here. We're either saying what we need to say, we're not saying what we need to say.

Speaker 2: 7:34

Right, there's a lot of energy that can get congested, emotional debris that can get congested in the throat or in the eyes, because this is where we cry so if we can, just tap a little bit around the eyes and just and I always tell people add in some deep breaths because because somatic breathing is like a big broom that you can just for free Okay, Come in, it is sweet and out all of that emotional debris that you're gathering, that now you're connected to, that you're processing, because because it's about resourcing how we process and digest rather than storing and stuffing yeah, I love that you said that outlets.

Speaker 1: 8:13

they're like your breath is the most bioavailable resource that you have. It's still free, it's the freest thing we do and it's so powerful for somatics to hyper saturate your body with oxygen and breathe into your lungs like really fully. Just expand your lungs and hold it there for a minute and allow it to slowly escape, and do that just a couple of times. You don't need to tap, you don't need to do anything to give yourself a really healthy dose of medicine, just breathe. But that's why breathing Breathe big and deep. It is going to change your biochemistry, I promise.

Speaker 2: 8:52

Well, and that's why breathing has become so much more popular. You're starting to hear so much more about somatic breath. Come do my somatic breath workshop, come do yoga, and then we're going to have a special person that has learned somatic breathing to come in and because it really is now showing that it's a, it's a great way to move psychic debris, emotional emotional debris and energetic debris out of the body again, I think of it as a big room and I'll say that a lot to my clients. I want you to start taking some big, deep breaths and and at times people aren't used to breathing that way, so they'll breathe very shallowly like, so I'll breathe with them. Come on, match my breath.

Speaker 2: 9:29

You're safe in here you can be loud, you can be expressive. Let's move some of this energy out. It's like taking a little sweep to try and get. It's like taking a little sweep to try and get this stuff out, or a big sweep to try and get this stuff out. And again I will say this it's not us that's healing people. We're holding a space so that we can open the door for the vessel to heal itself.

Speaker 1: 9:50

Yes, and you'll find your medicine amongst all of the different things that are available. If it's breath work, awesome. If it's somatics, awesome. If it's acupuncture right on, there's like a thousand modalities, craniosacral, there's just so much room for everyone to play.

Speaker 2: 10:07

Well, even yoga was healing. That's when Bessel's research was around, even just how yoga helped veterans overcome PTSD. It wasn't top therapy that was really helping them. It was once they got the body doing these movements and these poses and holding and breathing. Because with yoga comes all the pranayama breathing and all that different stuff. So, yeah, it is interesting that once you get movement involved and semantics involved now you're really helping the collective yeah, so yeah heal.

Speaker 2: 10:37

I'll say a little bit about brain spotting. It's a modality that I still find emdr is really well known. If you hear someone say in vr, there may be still some people for sure that don't know about emdr I movement repro em I movement, desensitization and reprocessing.

Speaker 2: 10:55

Good job okay, yes, so brain spotting is a is similar where it utilizes the eye movement and dr grand who, david grand, who developed brain spotting did ian dar for two decades to this day that man would say ian dar is a beautiful modality. What he found is that after processing and he had clients that were with him for a while he had very like serious professional athletes that were having performance issues in their, in their athletic endeavors, and these are people that when you're in the one percent of athletic performance you don't have a whole margin of error. Yeah, or you just lose the gold or you're now no longer competitive in the field. So he's helping these really competitive athletes kind of overcome some of the performance blocks that were connected to the traumas they experienced. And so he's gotten so far with EMDR and I think it's again a beautiful modality. But he found that with brain spots that people would hold them as he was talking. Then he started to notice so while he was using the eye movement that comes with brain spotting or I mean EMDR with brain spotting or I mean EMDR With brain spotting you can get really surgical and specific.

Speaker 2: 11:57

So brain spotting, I think, becomes a more fluid.

Speaker 2: 12:00

So EMDR is great for you know, protocol one, protocol two, instead, brain spotting I'm not as bound to those steps and so I can process, sometimes very surgically, and then I can pull out so I can really manage window of tolerance well.

Speaker 2: 12:13

And again, I'm not saying saying the emdr doesn't, it's just that I love using brain spotting because I think it's so flexible, for for me, when I'm with my clients and I'm processing trauma and they sometimes need to now stop and get out, and so we just the spot that they were holding, that they were activated in, they just break and come back to being grounded and then we can really manage window of tolerance well and we can keep mining whenever it came back in that activation.

Speaker 2: 12:40

And you guys can all do this. If you ask them to add what's your favorite Christmas, or what was your favorite holiday that you can remember having, or what was one of your favorite summers where you went to the beach, or you just ask them to remember something, always, if not almost always, always you're going to see someone immediately ship their eyes and start accessing their short-term memory and their long-term memory. For memories and that is what brain spotting is is that where you look can be connected to how you feel and if something distressing happened to you, we can find that spot where the body's doing this.

Speaker 2: 13:17

The nervous system doesn't feel safe and we can very gently and carefully encapsulate that and then discharge it from the body.

Speaker 1: 13:26

I saw a therapist a number of years ago and I was kind of in a bad place with a relationship and it was the first time I had EMDR and and I remember doing the EMDR and I was like, yeah, I kind of felt a little bit better. And she did this one session. She did brain spotting with me and we just started talking about something super benign and she drew attention to the fact that I was looking at an image like a place on the picture on the wall over there, and then I would dart over to the door and then I went over here when something was like really difficult for me to talk about. She said what's over there? And she drew attention. She was like I want you to understand what I'm doing here, absolutely, that you have a safe place over here because you're always smiling and you're happy, you're remembering some delightful something when you're looking over here and over there, you're kind of thinking about something, but when you go over there you get dark. There's something over there. Yeah, let's talk about what's over there and I need you to keep looking at it.

Speaker 1: 14:40

And it was really powerful and I'll tell you what it did, because I think that a lot of us get this sense of like I'm choking or something stuck in my throat. I have this thing in my throat and I have plenty of patients that come and tell me like I have this sensation that something is in my throat or I am choking, or like I can't get it out, or like I've been to the doctor, I've had an endoscopy, I've had all the scans, nothing is wrong with me. Well, this is what we call chief limb. It's something that's just energy that gets stuck here. And because we haven't been able to say what we need to say, okay, and in this relationship true to form, I was not in a position where I could actually speak my truth anymore. It was became really kind of frightening. But in that session I walked away thinking this is crazy. I don't know what she thinks she's doing. But and it wasn't you, it wasn't you, I love that you did brain spotting. Before you found me, I did brain spotting before I found.

Speaker 1: 15:45

Jen. But the next day I woke up and and, guys, I've had this experience throughout my life. As a kid, I learned I came by this honestly, because I had to stay quiet, because it was safe for me to stay quiet in some in some places.

Speaker 1: 16:01

So this became this is a pattern for me and then it showed up in this relationship and after this brain spotting session I woke up the next day and it was 80% gone and I was like that never happens. Usually takes months for me to crawl my way out of this crisis mode and regain regulation and as much trauma training as I had done up until that point. I knew exactly what was happening. It worked. It got me out and by the next day it was completely gone me. It worked, it got me out and by the next day it was completely gone, and it was. It was so much more powerful for me than emdr and I'm not saying that emdr wasn't effective, but damn, it was fast and I felt better yeah and it speaks the power of somatic work.

Speaker 2: 16:55

Yeah, Doing some somatic work and really understanding that there was something that was connected, that the eye was picking up, connected to what was happening in the collective body.

Speaker 2: 17:04

Yeah, when people say the eyes are the window to the soul, after working on thousands of bodies and doing thousands of sessions of mental therapy, there is truth to that is that even if I never did any hands-on work ever, ever, ever, I could solely help people heal with somatic breathing and brain spawning and there's something that has to do EMDR with utilizing the eye, because you can and again, you can really manage window of tolerance and you can pull people out of it, break the gaze and can get them back to regrounded and saying, hey, we don't have to mind that anymore, we can mind that later, once you're reclaiming safety in your body. But isn't that interesting that it would take usually months, because you had a somatic experience and you're able to unearth that and discharge it. It was that now the body could recover and reclaim safety quicker. And that's what the three giants I know there are more giants out there, but I will just the ones that I have learned so much from the most and have built so much of what I do Gabor, monte Bessel, van der Kolk, peter Levine they will say that a somatic experience helps move the needle on the body, reclaiming safety and the body, reclaiming equilibrium.

Speaker 2: 18:10

And when I say body, I mean your mental body, your emotional body and your physical body, because they are all cohesive together and they want freedom and equilibrium and safety. And so it's the name of the game when you're trying to help the nervous system get out of fight or flight or freeze is I'm safe today. Yeah, I wasn't safe then, but I'm safe today and I can believe it. I can believe that I'm safe and that and that, and that the body, then the vessel, can return to equilibrium. And the body being such an intuitive vessel, if you open a door for it to heal, it is as a self-healing vessel, and I've seen it too many times it will. You just create the doorway for healing and when somebody's ready, they will then heal and they will come up with a lot of their own things that they need to mine and heal from and then work out and then let the body even to.

Speaker 2: 19:03

Even just today, it was like hey, where do you feel that in your body? So that while we're on one, like, let your body unwind, like, move that next side, the side, move those shoulders back and forward, and sometimes people don't know. Well, I just don't know. Well, let's just, I allow my body to unwind, I bring it to my conscious awareness that which can be repaired and healed and that which can unwind, and so we can mechanically start unwinding, but inevitably and I've never seen this not do it people start to unwind however they want. So you start then with even what is a mechanical process.

Speaker 2: 19:32

Well, let mechanical process. Well, let's just let your body start with winding. Yeah, move your neck side to side five to six times, take a couple deep breaths, move those shoulders up and down, start moving your and then, without me saying anything else, they start to just put their bodies on wind. Yeah, because the body wants, as an intuitive vessel, it wants to, it wants to be in a place of equilibrium, it wants to reclaim this and I think that's why people love ecstatic dance and yoga booty yoga, yes, booty yoga, just mood.

Speaker 1: 19:59

You're just shaken and you're pounding and you're like you're shouting and you're just you're doing all the things your body actually does want to do and it's so. It's such a powerful release and you're not having to do it in such a way that you know you're judging yourself and looking weird to the people around you. So those those like yoga, that's a modality, that is that's medicine dance.

Speaker 2: 20:23

Yeah, people will connect to what resonates with them, and I have a lot of people that love to do yoga. I have a lot of people that would rather go to their dance class. I have people that just kind of want to sit and shake it out, or I have I have some people that love tapping or that just kind of want to sit and shake it out. Or I have I have some people that love tapping or that just grab one of their favorite essential oils because, again, you're creating a sensory experience, right, so you're, you're recruiting and resourcing your senses to help create calm and you're just breathing, asking my body to reclaim safety, asking my body to slough off any and all emotional debris, energetic debris, and reclaim equilibrium. And you can do that in so many different ways, and that's why I think somatic therapy is the future of mental health and also physical health in the medical community too is the more that we embrace somatics, the more that you're going to see people deeply heal. And it's interesting because this is this is coming out there. So, the holistic psychologist, dr Nicole Perel she wrote a couple of great books, she has a really great platform and one of the things that she's really starting to get more vocal about, which I think is beautiful. Is that, these unknown medical issues she's like?

Speaker 2: 21:29

If you don't think that there's some kind of psychosomatic connection, that it's not just these bizarre medical abnormalities and just mysteries, is that there is something happening in the body and oftentimes it has to do with nature, nurture. What has happened to us? What are our experiences in life? How many times have we felt suffocated or unsafe or we've had trauma where we're just not happy, and we've dealt with a lot of anxiety or depression Like those things will will create.

Speaker 2: 21:58

If you look at the scales of health, yeah, it's not just what's happening to us physically that we put a lot of weight in. It's what's happening to us mentally and emotionally as well. And that's what I love about somatic therapy and somatics is that it's starting to bring in this mind-body connection where we say, hey, hey, from the bottom up, we're going to help the vessel heal, so that what's happening in the brain and the mind and the mental body can also now heal in the somatic body, because the somatic imprint oftentimes is deeper than just what's happening in the mental body. It's what's being stored in our very cells of our body, in the very fascia of our body right.

Speaker 1: 22:36

I have 10 million things that I want to say about all those things you just said. So there's one thing that I was left with in the wake of my my really powerful brain spotting session that day, and that is that my physiological phenomena had was was at bay for the moment. I was still very much aware of the pattern and the reality of my problem at the time and I had better presence of mind to assess and manage it, and and it and I was in such a better place because my body felt better and that's a little bit of the collaborative work that we do is I will say to my patients all the time like, let's get your body feeling better, because if you're feeling better in able to do some of the really difficult, deep work on the emotional things that have happened, cause now you have the bandwidth, now you have the bandwidth to do it and and you don't and you feel better inside of your vessel.

Speaker 1: 23:52

And that's really important is to make sure that that you have those resources in your mind, in your heart, because if you walk into an office and you haven't been sleeping well and you're drinking alcohol to cope, and you've got an angry boss because maybe you're not performing the way that he or she thinks you should, you've got all these confounding factors that's going to be really, really difficult for you to dive in and do the deep work and deep work it's just screaming to be done, and it's the hardest decision to make sometimes is to say I'm going to dive in, I'm going to do that deep work, but it's a beautiful reality on the other side of it yeah absolutely.

Speaker 1: 24:37

You do get to feel better long term with it a thousand percent.

Speaker 2: 24:42

I will say this too, because I want to bring this up, because I think it's important for people to understand what becomes a healing modality can also become something that's not healing, depending on the timing and the way that it's used right. So even something like mdr brain spotting or any kind of somatic therapy can also like if any kind of trauma therapy has the potential to re-injure somebody in their trauma. If you don't manage window of tolerance Because again you're trying to maintain.

Speaker 2: 25:11

You're trying to create healing and safety. So if you compromise safety, so there has to be an exposure and a threshold point that you eventually go and we're done. Because if we push that threshold now we're in injury territory rather than healing and repair territory. So it's one thing to push somebody's threshold to help create some healing, repairing and having to do sometimes things in the memory system that are distressful only to the point that they can manage that before we return to grounding and safety, so that then on another day or another time we can then continue to do that. You blow people's bandwidths, you blow people's thresholds, no matter how healing you're trying to be. You're now and what's creating the injury right? So I'm going to say this because cold therapy and cold training right now is huge like cold plunges, and as a somebody who does structural body work and somebody who's mental health therapy, I love the idea of cold therapy and cold training.

Speaker 2: 26:03

From a physiological standpoint, vascular constriction helps reduce inflammation in the body. If you have an injury, cold therapy combined at times offsetting, you know, cold therapy hop that. We're helping heal the tissues through these things. From a mental health standpoint, cold therapy you're purposely putting yourself in distress and staying in it, but there's not a bear coming trying to kill you. It's more like I'm choosing this distress. It's uncomfortable but I'm going to stay in it. I'm going to grow my thresholds.

Speaker 2: 26:30

Yeah, that's beautiful, but if you're in fight or flight and your system's distressed and you then go cold plunge or do cold showers or whatever, cold therapy now becomes something that's injuring your system, it's not creating safety in the system.

Speaker 2: 26:46

You already had blown your thresholds, so you can't grow them right now, because now you're just a part of blowing them. And I do think it's important for people to understand that. Use those modalities for what they're meant to be, which is healing and repair. And if you're trying to grow your thresholds, what you're trying to grow is resilience. If your thresholds are already blown because your life right now is super stressful and you're in a fight or flight response, you're pumping out too much cortisol, cold training is going to be the last thing your body is going to get any kind of benefit from, because it's going to be only a part of the thing that keeps it stressed out. It's the same thing with walking and running. You know some of it's like all the things in exercise, but if they're in a stress response, sometimes really hard, exercise actually just makes their cortisol stress worse.

Speaker 2: 27:32

So I'm going to just use that example as a part of blanking around a lot of modalities. Is that, if not used well and properly and there's not attunement involved, that you can actually then become now a part of the problem rather than hold a human space.

Speaker 1: 27:43

Yes, and that is one of the reasons I love my modality so much, is it actually does help to really bring the person down into a rest and digest. Response Veda, yeah, and like a reliable one. Like, hey, let's recover your physical body from some of the stress you've been in, let's. It's a practice, right. You come back week after week and you're finally like you're in the presence of an excitatory stimulus with all those little needles. They're like your body's kind of like ah we're, we're injured, we have all these stab wounds run away. But no, like you're, you're relaxed and you're warm and you're safe and the music is nice and the room is dark and you're falling asleep.

Speaker 1: 28:29

And so you're starting to train your body that a stressful stimulus doesn't have to mean you got to run away. It stressful stimulus is now like. Is now like okay, I'm training myself to manage stress and pain better. Okay, now I can do some deeper work. It's the yin and yang, it's the balance between activity and rest, and that yin time balance is so incredibly important for restoration and and being able to be present to some of the deeper work that is necessary to, you know, fulfill that, that peace and that tranquility that we aim to have in life.

Speaker 2: 29:16

Yeah, I remember being on your table one time and I remember having the needles in, really getting to these deep data states and being really frustrated because my body was um, just wasn't as healthy as I wanted it to be and I was in a stress response, as you know, because at that time in my life, like when I first met you, I I came to jean initially because a colleague had been like you have some leftover respiratory distress from covid and so go see her and get some Chinese herbs. And then, after talking to her, I was like, can you fit me in? I would like to come see you. And so, as I'm sitting on the table, it finally hit me. I was like it's like sometimes the plumber that doesn't do their own plumbing.

Speaker 2: 29:51

I'm like I am a trauma therapist with somatic therapy and I have been sitting in fight or flight and I'm actually letting my body have respite. And this is the way that I start. Healing Isn't to keep doing, it's to let my body reclaim safety and equilibrium and reduce stress. But it was because I can say that all day long for the people to help them. But it was like this visceral experience in my body where I felt just how tired it was, yeah, just how depleted it was, because I made myself be so still and I was still and I was like wow, yeah, this is need some help it's the biggest medicine, sometimes just being still and I thought, okay, I need to do more of this where I reduce the spider flight response in my body so that it actually can take advantage of the healing that I'm trying to do.

Speaker 2: 30:42

Because even exercise it, if my heart rate got higher than a certain level, like the very thing that was trying to help like be healthy for me, was now a part of my stress, like, yeah, I walked too fast, that's how depleted I was, and so finally, once I stopped being so depleted, got myself out of flight, I was able to now start absorbing the healing that comes from the modalities that we put on board, even things as simple as nutrition and exercise. So that's my thing about somatics and also any modality that you use, is that it needs to be used in a way that that helps create healing, because so many people will muscle through things like I asked, I had one no pain no gain five minutes in the cold and I'm like you're the last person right now that should be doing cold therapy.

Speaker 2: 31:27

Give us get your body out of the stress response and then do cold therapy. You're like making my job harder. So you know, I think it's. It's worth saying is that is that those things at times really need to be thoughtfully paced. At times it's not no never, but it's going.

Speaker 2: 31:41

Hey, is this? You know, I've even had a client that that had too much brain spotting before they came to me and yeah, and so the idea of brain spotting was like, because it was just too much, too fast and londo of tolerance wasn't honored, and so it was like, no, that's the thing that I don't. That didn't make me feel safe. Right to really recalibrate that so that eventually something like that will now be a safe experience. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 32:04

There's so much more to talk about, so we'll have a part two. Yeah, thank you guys for tuning in. We have a lot to share and say and we appreciate the audience that's listening, yep.

Speaker 1: 32:16

Absolutely. If you have questions about anything we've talked about this evening, please drop them below in the comments and tell us what you want to know more about with this topic or other topics. Yeah, I'd love to dive into psychedelics and how people are using psychedelics to kind of dampen the space around opening up and being vulnerable about their mental health, and I think that's actually something that might help me because I'm just like no, we're not going there.

Speaker 2: 32:51

When you look at somatics being a wave coming into the mental health field and also collective fields, so is psychedelic assistance. Back in the day it was awakened and it was shut down and there's been so much research done since then. Dr Bessel van der Kolk is one of the forerunners of all the research. There is that it's irrefutable the therapeutic benefits that it's having to help people. So now, instead of it being something that people need to shut down and be scared of in therapeutic use and therapeutic arenas, psychilic assisted therapy can be a beautiful way to help create healing. So you'd definitely be talking about that.

Speaker 1: 33:25

Totally Well. Thanks everybody for joining us and if you want to connect with me, I'm at theacupuncturist underscore org on Instagram.

Speaker 2: 33:36

And if you want to connect with me, I'm at mend, m-e-n-d, mendcounselingcentercom, and also Jenny J-E-N-N-I-E underscore P-O-O-L, and that's my Instagram.

Speaker 1: 33:50

Thanks, see you next time.

Speaker 2: 33:54

Thank you for joining us on Unscripted. I'm Jenny Poole and I'm Janine Barandi. We hope you found today's discussion as inspiring and insightful as we did. If you have any questions, comments or stories you'd like to share, we'd love to hear from you.

Speaker 1: 34:08

Connect with me on Instagram at the Acupuncturist.

Speaker 2: 34:11

And you'll find me on social media at MEND Counseling Center.

Speaker 1: 34:15

Until next time, remember that the best gift you can give to those you love is the gift of your own good health.