Healing the NERVOUS SYSTEM through the Bridge Experience

One thing that I wanna know is that I brought everything I had. My number one thing is don't try to hold everything alone. One of the things they say that is fundamental and foundational to every relationship. And this is also repeated in parenting advice is repairs everything. Bridge is a opportunity for people who have done mindset work or haven't done it to break the patterns that have been blocking and stopping them from experiencing and getting the lives they want by way of their bodies. We're teaching you how to be with your nervous system so powerfully that you can go, okay, I'm in survival right now. Can I shift that mode off and go into safety using all these tools that we're learning so that I can train my system to be okay with holding more, even if it's just one percent more. Because that one percent is gonna train your system to go, "Oh, I can't." So we're kind of turning the tables here because I'm getting to interview you all around your business that I've had the pleasure of working behind for the last, what is it, like, seven years at this point? It's wild. It's so wild. And it's amazing because after all that time I finally got to go to the bridge and see it in January and I was like, "Oh, I get it now. I get it now. I have a way of describing it and I want to hear how you all describe it. But when people ask me to describe it, I'll say, if you can imagine that you're going to an escape room, except there's 60 people and then you also have a coach, 20 coaches that are watching every single move, assessing your leadership, assessing how you stand up to the challenge and giving you feedback in real time. That's the best way I have found to describe it. But, like, how would you describe this experience? Yeah, that's a really good way. I would say that bridge is an opportunity for people who have done mindset work or haven't done it to break the patterns that have been blocking and stopping them from experiencing and getting the lives they want by way of their bodies. I think the plain and simple version of this is there's multiple intelligences and one of the most important ones that we skip over and have skipped over most of our lives is the intelligence of the body. So bridge is about the body, about the nervous system, and about breaking the patterns so that people can actually, like, be who they say or dream they want to be, and also they get to feel more of life, more aliveness, more love, more juice, more sexiness, more all of the things. What would you say? Well, I love that. I think I'll simplify that a little bit and say, behind every behavior we have, every thought we think, every action we take is a command center that's working in the background. And that command center is our nervous system. And nobody taught us how to be with our bodies in a powerful way. And so anytime we find ourselves knowing all the right stuff to do or having the concepts or understanding like, "Oh, I shouldn't keep going back into this pattern, but we can't change." It's not that we're necessarily broken. It's that we have a pattern in the body that used to keep us safe, that no longer works. As a, we've got to learn how to intercept that pattern and retrain the body to know that safety looks different now as an adult, as a 35-year-old, as a 40-year-old, as a fifth-year-old, as an 80-year-old. We always can change the pattern, but we have to become intimate with the patterns first and work with it in real time. And that's what we do at bridge. Say more about how you would uncover someone's pattern. Like, what are the things that are actually going on in that room that is allowing that to surface? Hmm. Well, the cool thing about bridge and why so many people become almost evangelists of it is, no matter who you are, where you are, no matter what status you have, you're the richest person in the room, you're the poorest person in the room, you have all this personal development work or you've done none. Because it's set up in such a way that sort of like an escape room, sort of like a puzzle, the body will do what the body does no matter what. And so we have a storehouse of exercises, and one of the coolest pieces about bridge is we change it every time based on who's in the room. So if people are very heady, we will put a little more heart and body exercises. If they're, you know, super spiritual and woo, woo, and they're feeling all the fields, he might put a little more head intellectual stuff in there. But the cool part is that you are doing exercises. You are not writing things down. This is not, it's not a raw raw seminar. Not that those things are bad or wrong. Yeah. But podcasts, seminars, books, they all sort of hit the same thing, which is the intellect. Our work is about hitting the body and the intellect, but mainly the body. Yeah, and what's really cool is we've all met those people, right? That know a lot and sound really impressive. And they're saying something to you and they're like, "Oh yeah, I'm working on this thing or I'm doing this." And I realized this about myself. And in your brain and your body are like something does not compute, right? It's not adding up for me. And what we say in our work is the body never lies. And so we're constantly training ourselves, our staff, to look at the subtleties of the body. We're reading how the body's showing up in these various scenarios where we're putting you in front of intimacy. We're putting you in front of challenge. We're putting you in front of something brand new, that's like part fear, part excitement. And these are all scenarios that are replicated out in your real life, but we're doing it in a way that's in a controlled environment in a workshop room. And we're doing this so that your body has the actual practice of pushing up against these edges that you're going to meet in your real life, whether it's in your marriage and you're having a hard conversation and you're feeling the fear that comes up for you around a hard conversation based on your patterning when you were a child. And that's going to look different for everybody. And so we teach you how to start subtly reading your body's own cues to go, "Oh, my alarm system's going off." "Ah, I'm approaching the edge of where my body feels comfortable. And in that edge, all my body's going to be doing is going to get safe. Find safety right now." And safety doesn't always look like stuff we want, you know? And I think that's where a lot of people kind of get their mind blown. It's like, "Oh, safety has been chaos for me." Or safety has been creating drama. Or safety has been pushing away the love that I say I want. Or safety has been sabotaging every meaningful opportunity to make more money and have more success that has come into my life. And that's where people really get the breakthrough. It's like, "Oh, my pattern of safety in my body is actually pushing away everything I desire. And until I intercept at the body level, nothing changes." Let me just double-tack on that. It's, we've understood that the body remembers what the mind forgets. And what most people don't fully understand is that the traumas and the shame and the guilt and the things that they experienced early on, the bullying, what you name it, having a sister or a brother who's smarter than you, being the smart one and feeling the shame of leaving your friends or family behind, all of that leaves an imprint on the body. And then we try to outthink the body and the mind and the traumas and the shame and we go sit in a therapist chair and shout out to the therapist, "I'm not hating," and we talk. We talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And we never give the body the signal that it's safe again. We never say, "Hey, now you can take that exhale because you've been holding for so long, trying to save your mom, trying to save your dad, trying to keep your marriage alive." Whatever the thing is, you've been holding for so long that your body starts to break. And so what Bridge does is it gives their body the signal, "Okay, I am really safe now and I have space to create, space to love bigger, space to feel deeper." And people leave out of these rooms and they go and start careers. They take their relationships deeper than they've ever gone before. They really blow up because it's the one thing that most of the workshops, seminars, books, all these things just doesn't touch and they're actually just not trained to do it. We've been doing this for 10 years plus, all around the world for people who are, you know, execs and stay at home moms and, you know, coaches and Louis Wu people. Everybody comes in that room and gets their butt kicked. And they leave out going, "Oh, I have a renewed sense of self. I can walk around with my shoulders back and my head held high. We have this term that we teach called somatic dignity, where we teach people how to feel in their dignity. And it's such a revelation for most people because when they are feeling shame, when they're feeling sadness, they want to collapse, they want to hide. And so we repattern and retrain the body by going into the thing that is the scariest thing to go into and then opening it and breathing into it." There's a piece there I want to touch on about shame because I think when we hear shame, we think about like really awful things or really big things and it can be that. But one of the things that I think is almost profound for people after leaving the two weekends with us is they start to recognize the shame that they've held around just being human, like the basic humanity of feeling their feelings. Not from a sense of "I'm a victim and I need to stay in the space," but like actually feeling the wave of emotion that comes with a card being human. And so many of us are walking around with so much shame that's just been impacted and like stacked on each other because we haven't let ourselves be in our full humanity for so long that we are just a shell of ourselves. And we find ourselves kind of collapsed in this performative version of like, "Okay, who do I need to be in order for this person to love me in order for me to get this job in order for social media to deem me worthy or all these games?" And yet the biggest game of all is, "Can I allow myself to be fully expressed?" And so many people want a liveliness. So many people want to feel joy and happiness on all these things. Like even when they want, "I want the money, I want the car, I want the girl, I want the guy," they actually just want to feel alive, right? Aliveness comes from opening up the channel that's been calcified inside of our body for so long and going, "Ah, I can feel again." And so we teach people how to feel responsibly. And that's a big deal. Like I didn't know how to do that. Nobody taught me how to do that as a kid. And like learning how to do that for myself has been, I mean, nothing short of monumental. Because now I can feel all the feels fully. And that leads me to be able to access, like, "What are my needs?" And then when I know my needs, I can actually have a relationship with somebody where there's not resentments stacking and piling up and I'm not blaming and projecting and being a victim of my life. I can actually navigate my life through this sense of sovereignty. That's like, "I'm fully human. I'm allowed to be human and my humanity actually is the compass for my entire life." And that's where like the breakthrough happens is because people feel more, which is actually what regulation is. And so I'm calming myself down. That's what everybody thinks. It is not. Regulation people is not about being calm. It is about being responsive. Responsive means that you're able to feel the waves happening in your body and you're allowed to let the move. They are allowed to move. And those waves are informing your life and they're teaching and they're guiding you when you're actually truly being with them. This reminds me, there's a really prolific neuroscientist. His name is Dan Siegel. And he talks about the definition of trauma, which is something different than when I learned. I thought trauma was the car accident or witnessing a parent die or having some type of sexual abuse, whatever it might be. And he was like, "Trauma is anything that disrupts your natural harmonious view of life." And it was such a simple way to say it, but it made me realize that I could own the fact that something had hurt me, even if I didn't think that it was horrific on the outside. And in addition to that, there was trauma is both what happened to you and what didn't happen to you. The hug that you didn't get. The happy birthday that you didn't get from your dad. And that just created a reframe for me around trauma and how I was like, "Oh no, I'm fine. I had a really good childhood." Nothing bad happened to me, right? And yet, there's still contraction. Yeah. And that's the thing that a lot of people don't get. And I love it. You're saying this is, you don't have to have traumatic big T-trauma incidences to not feel whole as a human. And part of healing, which again, so many people don't get, this was me. I tried to do it in isolation. I tried to heal by myself, with myself, sometimes with a coach or therapist, but mostly by myself. And if the coach or therapist was really just holding like a neutral, I'm just going to witness you. But what happens when we do it in community, which is what Bridges set up to do? We heal in community. We heal in relationship, which heals the things we never got. And also the things that were done to us. Because what happens is we're wounded in relationship, whether it's what was done to us or what wasn't done for us. And we have to heal in relationship. And so it's so big because a lot of people come into bridge. And maybe they've got some traumas at the top. And I'm like, I know I'm coming in. I'm going to work with some of this stuff, right? But then throughout the course and the series of these exercises that we do, they start to realize like, oh, there was something my body was aching for. I didn't know I even needed. And it was right there, right when that person stood across from me. And I felt them impact my system. Because now, again, we're attuning them to their system. So there's so much in being with other people. And working your healing in the intimacy and the vulnerability of a community of people that you're in relationship with. And that's why the healing is exponential in bridge. Let me tap on that. What a lot of people report back and get in the room and later is they didn't realize how much they were blocking joy and celebration and really being in their bodies. And one of the gifts of bridge that we've seen and we do is we play with the profane and the profound. We play with everything in between. And it's very challenging for some people at first because they're like, wait, you went too far or this is this is this is scary for me or I don't know how to be with my anger. I don't know how to be with my sexual feelings. I don't know how to be with with like deep pleasure, especially if other people are around. And so what she's speaking to this whole piece around community, it is so huge because each person represents one person that hurt you or didn't give you the love that you wanted. And we have it set up in such a way that each person stands in and stands in proxy for the hug you didn't get for your dad. We had a German woman recently fly from Germany to Austin, Texas and she was in an exercise and something had been bubbling the whole time. And a big block for her was sort of flashy big personality men. And because of the way the exercise was set up, somehow some way I wasn't giving her the attention she needed. And our room is a yes room. We say, whatever is there, be with it. If you need to throw a tantrum, throw a tantrum, feel what you need to feel. And for a lot of people, they're like, wait, but you mean that, but like not really, right? And we're like, no, no, we need it. And she needed to go through this wave of anger. And she was screaming, fuck you. That's that the other. And she was so mad. But she she was pointing it at me. But it wasn't me. I was just standing there for all the men that had broke her heart. And we have so many stories. There was a couple in London who could not get pregnant. Yeah. And and they both knew that they had some blocks. And this particular woman, she was Brazilian. He was from the UK. And they came in knowing that there were some blocks. And they had been doing IVF and all the different things, none of it worked. They walk into bridge. By the end of day one, there's so many exercises that are just chipping away at that heart that's been thought iced that by the time we get to then the last exercises of the night, people are so blasted wide open that she looked structurally different. She just looked like a different person. Yeah. It's like our whole body just like softened and opened. Yeah. Yeah. They left bridge. I think it was maybe two months later. They sent us a message and said, we got pregnant naturally. Wow. Her body relaxed so much. She really so much stuff. He did too that it just happened. And we have so many examples of that. Examples of people, the older guy from San Francisco, who came in. He had some type of disease. And this was kind of his last ditch effort to, you know, he'd done all the traditional, you know, western thing. Yeah. He comes and we have people doing exercises and things that are very challenging and opening and all the things. And he did all of them full steam. Yeah. And there's two weekends. And so he did the first weekend. And he went back to San Francisco. And he just so happened to have a doctor's appointment. Yeah. And they went and checked his blood. And they were like, sir, I don't know what you did. But whatever you did, you shifted your number so dramatically. Yeah. That this is basically gone. And so he paid to come right back to the second weekend. Is he was like, and he told you this is the testimony. He was like, listen, that changed me so much that I have to be in this room again. And I mean, I could go on and on. But I'm going to let you talk. I'm going to just give a little science to why that happens because to hear that is kind of like, okay, that sounds really good. But why? Well, I talked about the calcification. Most of us have not been allowing ourselves to be our full human for a very long time. Now, stack on top of that some traumas that are like, oh, I need to calcify even more. It's not okay to feel my feelings, but it's certainly not okay to be expressed because bad things happen when you're expressed. It's not okay to fall in love because bad things happen when you fall in love. And we start to just collect these things in our life that calcify us even more and harden us. When we have a hard body, we're restricting life force energy, we're restricting the cheat, the natural flow, the current, we're electrical beings, that current has to flow to keep us healthy. No more, we harden the smaller that space for the current to flow, it gets so small that now we just have a little bit of life force. And that's that tangible when you kind of are walking through your life, feeling a little numb and checked out and you're like, what's the point? Groundhogs day every day, I'm doing the same thing. You just feel like numb, checked out completely like I don't feel any sense of purpose or connection to my life. It's because there's not enough life force energy moving through the body. So at bridge, we start to break open the calcified parts and start to chip away at those layers so that you actually allow the body to feel more of the waves of being alive so that energy can move. When energy moves, it heals. When energy stagnates, it kills. And so that's what we're really working with is not just the physical somatic body, but the somatic body includes the energetic field, the body of energy around and within us as well. And so it's a very complex thing and layered thing that we're doing, but we also make it fun, which is really cool because some people are like, okay, this sounds really intense. It can be, but it's also really fun. It's really loving. It's, you know, we explore these aspects of ourselves that some people never get a chance to explore. Yes. In our last couple of rooms, we've had women in their 80s in their rooms. And it's been really incredible to watch them go, I've got a second chapter to my life now that I'm excited to live at 83. And it's like, yes, that's that's why we do what we do. Because we know that every single human has that within them. They have that excitement and zest for life. That's how we were made. But unfortunately, we've been so disconnected from our true nature for so long that we think feeling numb, disconnected, checked out disillusion. We think that's normal. And it's not. This reminds me, my sister sent me this article recently. And it was someone had typed into AI. What's the secret to longevity? How would I live 140 years? And what AI came out with was actually really surprising. It had nothing to do with diet and exercise and any of that. It was talking about the blue zones. Have you two heard of the blue zones? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they talked about the blue zones and how people who live in the blue zones don't have stress. But then they went to later define stress, which I thought was one of the most beautiful definitions of stress that I heard. And it was the tension, like we know in physics, stress is tension. Yeah. Yeah. It's the tension between who we are and what we're pretending to be. And I was like, that's it. That's good. When I hear personal development programs and people are like, this saved my life, it always sets off the bullshit meter. And now because I'm like, yeah, really, how can that like save your life? How can that change your life, right? But knowing bridge, when you are closing that distance between who someone is and who they pretend to be, yeah, it actually can save their life. And that like when I heard it that way, I was like, that's why bridge works because when there's so many coaches in the room, there's no room for you to not be yourself. You can't escape it. You can't hide it. No, you can't explain more about that. Yeah. That's a really good point. So the design wise, we design bridge where you either do it all the way or you leave. It is not a place where you can be in between. Yes, you cannot hang onto the size of swimming pool and swim at the same time. You actually have to let go and swim. And either you do that or you get out. And we've had so many people come just to take notes and see how we facilitate and instantly realize that they're screwed and then go, okay, I'm going and have their entire lives blasted. Yeah. We have and I'm I'm going to fully take credit for this, but I will say we have helped so many people set up and design lives that have turned into million dollar businesses, yeah, turned into babies turned into relationships that of their dreams. We have helped so many people save their marriages. We have helped so many people reconnect with their parents with their siblings that they could not get along with. We have helped help so many people go out and help other people. And and really do it from a full cup. And one of the key factors in all of life is demonstration. When you see, because there's a big difference between reading about salsa and even watching it on YouTube, then being in the room when the salsa music is on and everybody's demonstrating what is possible. And you see them in their juice. There's something that clicks for people. When you go, oh, I'm in proximity to fullness. I either go up with this and express my fullness or I shrink and leave. And one of the the things that bridge does is it helps everybody rise together. Yeah. It's almost like, you know, veterans and people who go to war, they really love each other because of this shared experience of going super deep and past what most people feel that comfortable. Every graduation, we say the same thing. You just did some of the biggest, hardest, most beautiful work you can do in the self-development transformation space. It's like Jumbalaya. We put all the stuff in there. And no matter what angle, it's going to get you. It's going to get you. And it's gets you in the best way. We've had people leave out of those rooms so raw and like raw and full at the same time, which is a really tricky combination to be like, oh my goodness, I feel more like me than I ever be happy for. Yeah. I could see a cloud pass by and I'll start crying. And I feel so grounded and so true. And to finish this off, one of the most loving things you could do for anybody in humanity in general is to be so much of who you are that it inspires them to do the same. And bridge is absolutely the place where we see that happen the most. Even if we weren't running it, because there's other people who will lead bridges, it would still be magical because of how it's set up. Yeah, I think just to that point, I think there's a lot of people that hear about bridge and they're like, oh, I'm a little scared. I don't know if I'm ready for that. It sounds a little scary. And whoever I talk to is like, you have to go, oh, it's going to knock you off your seat. And it's true because again, like we said, you can't hide in the room and the masks don't work. So all the masks that work at your office, that work at your job, that work with your friends, that work with your family, your partners, they don't work in our room. And that can be really challenging and confronting to stick with. And think about the cost of what that is in your life, like the cost of having to wear a mask in your relationships, the cost of having to pretend like you're somebody else at work, the cost of showing up as it's like hardened right at the edge person to your kids and your children. There is such a high cost for this for people that stepping into the room, yes, it can be scary and something we always say is go at the level that you're comfortable with. Some persons, you know, is going to be at a 10 the whole time and they're going to be going out of 10 because that's what they came here for. Some people again, we've had really young people in our rooms or we've had really old people in our rooms and we've had people who just don't have the capacity at this current time in their life to go out at 10. So they'll go out at 3. But that 3 is still a massive for their nervous system because again, everybody's nervous system is different. And so what we do is we don't have a blanket approach for everybody because we're dealing with 60, 120, 40, 80 different nervous nervous systems in a room. Can I shift that mode off and go into safety using all these tools that we're learning and then titrate just a little bit more into the unknown so that I can train my system to be okay with holding more, more tension, more contrast, more energy, more intimacy, more vulnerability, more opportunity, even if it's just 1% more because that 1% is going to train your system to go, oh, I can't. Oh, I don't have to wear the mask anymore. Because I tasted this. And I think that's a really important point. Like someone who is highly intellectual who spent the majority of my first decade in personal development, which is like 15, I went to my first Tony Robbins seminar, right? 15 to 25. I had done all of landmark. I had done all the Tony Robbins stuff. I was just like in it. But it was all mental and it was all intellectual and it was awesome. And I knew so much. But it didn't actually change the pattern. I had to like willpower my way through my life, right? And it worked to some extent. It did work. But I couldn't sustain it. And that's the point. I think a lot of people have used mindset and it's worked to some extent because they will power their way through. But then they hit a point which every person who has lived off of willpower gets to, which is called burnout. Yep. And at some point you hit the stage of burnout and you're like, man, I can't go like this anymore. Like this actually is not sustainable. I'm going to burn my business down and burn my life down and burn my relationship down because I just simply can't. Yep. At that point, that's when we have to go, okay, so it's the body. And that's what happened to me. It's like, oh, where's, there's this whole terrain I haven't even explored yet. The body. Okay. Why did I learn how to open my body to actually hold it and move it so it's not getting stuck in me? But I'm becoming a vessel for life to move through me. And that's what we're training people to do at whatever level they're at. So if you hear that, you're like, oh my god, I've got to be at a level 10 or I've got to leave the room. That's not true. You just got to be in and willing to open just 1% more to find your breakthrough. You said something which is really inspiring that you thought, oh, that didn't work. I must go to the body. I feel like so many people get to a place where they have a resentment with the work itself. Yeah. They get to a place where they're like, I don't want to set another goal because I have lost trust in myself at this point. Now I'm mad at the work. Now I'm like annoyed that I've put in all that time, all that effort for nothing. Yeah. And so I feel like a lot of times when people are at this place of I've done all this work and I haven't gotten the results. They've lost so much trust with themselves. Yeah. What would you say to someone who is at that point? I'd say congratulations. Now we can begin. Yes. That's an exciting moment because when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. And in many ways, everything is the teacher. So when I start anger is often a reminder that something needs to be burned down. And so it's it's pointing. It's actually pointing to what needs to be reconfigured. And a lot of people come to us and we get so many, so many people tagging us on Instagram. I've spent $20,000, $50,000 on self-development and nothing has ever shifted me like the bridge did. Right? I've heard that more than 500 times in the last 10 years. Everybody always says the same thing. How is this so affordable? I spent 10 times more on this leadership thing and I was exactly the same. So I would say congratulations. You know, we brush our teeth every day. We take showers every day, every other day depending on who you are. There's a lot of things that just need to occur. I would challenge them to fall back in love with the process. Because a lot of times what we're unconsciously doing is we're looking for some external validation to complete us or fill us up. And a lot of people don't know that. They find it out in bridge. They find it out by way of the mirrors where it's like, "Oh, I've been trying to make this money and succeed in this business so I can finally prove that I'm better than my sister or I'm better than so-and-so or the bullies who called me fat." Like, that is an empty game. And there's a richness that money can't buy. And that's a part of the magic of the spaces that we create is we believe that there are no throwaway people and that there are no mistakes in what we call God. And, you know, spirit, God can only do for you what it can do through you. And so our work is about through. How do we open the space? How do we clear space so that God, Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Allah, Source, Divine Intelligence, can do its work through me so I can shine as bright as I'm supposed to shine. Not her, not him, not them, not they, not gender non-binary, me, my shy. I think that's the invitation. Yeah, I think to that point, like, as you were saying, and I had this visual come into my mind of there's a fire alarm going off in the house, right? What's the first thing you do when the fire alarm's going off? I would put a fan in front of the the smoke alarm. You take the dish towel, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like waving it like crazy, right? How do I get this nice to stop? It's so loud. Oh my gosh, get this nice to stop. I think most personal development is like, here's how you stop the noise from the smoke alarm. Here's how you fan the towel. Yeah. Here's how you remove the batteries, right? But what I think we do in somatic and nervous system work is we go, hey, there's a fire in your house. You might want to look at the fire. Yeah. And we teach you how to become a fire fighter. We actually teach you how to put out the fires in your body that are going, hey, sending the signal to the smoke alarm, there's something off here, which is the patterns that you keep doing, which is why you keep not fucking, you know, doing your goals that you've set in January. That's the smoke alarm. It's like, hey, there's something in your body. You're not broken. You're not failed. You're not lazy. There's nothing wrong with you. It's that your body has a pattern that is no longer serving the person you want to become. And so we're going to teach you how to stop the fire in your house from going, hey, this doesn't feel safe. You want to be in a player? Well, we've got a sea system. So anytime you step into even B level, we're going to set those fire alarms off. We're going to sabotage everything because you're a sea player. That's the story. That's the identity. And we go, no, you've always been a day player, but you're playing with sea level consciousness. You're playing with a sea level pattern in your nervous system. So let's work with that. Let's work with the source. And we call that your command center. Like there is something that is in charge of every single thing you do in your life, the command center, your nervous system. Okay. Well, if we can learn how to be the captain, the commander of the command center, that changes everything, rather than living at the result of the command center. And that's what most people do. And that's why they're frustrated. And they lose trust with themselves. It's not you. Lose trust with the pattern. Lose trust with the strategy of waving the thing over the smoke alarm. They're still a fire in your house. Trust that there's something deeper. Get to the root. I love that. Explain a little more about how such profound impacts can happen in such a short amount of time. Because you're talking about going to the source. And a lot of times people think, if I've had this problem for 10 years, it's going to take 10 years to undo it, right? Explain how the nervous system works in such a way where it's not going to take decades. Because what you to do, people come out different in two days. How is that even possible? Yeah. Well, I'll say again, from a scientific biological level, we're first teaching them how to find safety within themselves. Why most work takes a longer time is because safety is externalized on the work, right? Or the person leading it. Meaning like, if you're my therapist, I have to trust you. I have to feel safe with you. Yeah. That takes time to develop. Sure. Right. So maybe I don't feel safe with you until six months. Once I hit that six month mark, then the real work can begin because now I feel safe with you. So my body can open and relax. Okay. Now I'm available for change. I cannot change. I'm not available for transformation. If my body is rigid and tense. So the very first thing we do in bridge is we train people how to build safety within themselves and to access that safety soon, right? And to go, it's not that you're going to feel safe forever because we're human, right? This is a system that's helped us. So it's about catching ourselves on in survival mode. Okay. How do I bring myself back to safety? Boom. So we start cultivating self-trust nice and early. I'm like, Oh, I did that. I can create safety for myself despite what's happening in the environment. Okay. So I'm the source of safety. Okay. Now that I'm safe, I'm more available. I'm able to listen. I'm able to receive. I'm able to be more pliable. And I can actually like, we're in a theta state essentially when we're opened and relaxed. And that's where hypnosis happens. That's where, you know, basically zero to seven happens for kids where they're so impressionable that that's where you can really create long lasting change is because your body is open and relaxed. And that's, you know, if you're not inside our room as well, that's a hack for you if you want to learn, get into a really relaxed state and then open a book because that's when you'll actually retain. Yeah. I would add to that that success doesn't necessarily take time as much as it takes courage. And we set up and it's very intricate. I don't want to give it away. But we set it up in such a way that it becomes a permission slip very soon. By the time someone is at the table signing up, they've already had experiences. Bridge starts before it starts. They don't know that. But it starts before it starts. And so we're chipping away because we're both scientists and heat seeking missiles for the things that work just to give everybody a little backstory. The reason why we even created bridge is because her and I separately and together kept going and doing NOP and this, that and the other and all these different workshops and seminars and they all felt incomplete. They felt like pieces but not the pie. Yeah, like we even did a deep somatic training, which was amazing, but it was very rigid and didn't allow much space for like life force and feeling in a feminine box. It's craziness, craziness, it's so rigid. Alive in it. Yes. So we got together and said, what would what would mess us up? We are really hard people to break. What would break us in a quote unquote lovely, interesting, pleasurable way? And what would break us in a, hey, you're going to have to address that shame. You're going to have to address the thing that you've been hiding from. You're going to have to take the good girl, good boy mask off and actually show up and see what's there, right? And break open the pattern. Yeah. Really? Because through all the stuff we did, we could still, we could still strategize and beat the game. Yes, exactly. Right? Because you're smart. You're smart. And we've done a lot of work. Yeah. And that's the thing. We noticed we're like, what could we build? Because a lot of people in our space, we worked with a lot of coaches, we helped a lot of people like build their businesses. Like, how could we help these people? Yes. Who knows so much? And I've done so much work on themselves. How could we help them in a way where they can't strategize and beat it? And that was us. There was a woman in the room recently who had, you know, very short haircut, you know, particular type of dressing. She looked like what you would describe as a nurse or like a 40-something-year-old mom nurse/accountant. And which I love all of those things. But she had that appearance. And she was trying to hide in the middle. And we are a room. We hire coaches to watch everybody. And so we're in the room and we lock in on her. And there's this moment where we are going through this beautiful process that Alexis leading. And then I also tapped in and got a hit that she needed to run around the room, screaming and singing. I feel pretty. Oh, so pretty. And just taking up space. Just all the space in the world. And it was such a beautiful moment, not just for her. Because we get breakthroughs from other people. Yes. Right. For her to be that scene in her radiance, in her in her shine, in her confidence was a big deal. And we found out later that there was something in her family that that was the reason she had that mask on. That was the reason for the haircut. That was the reason for the particular dress people don't understand how affected they've been by what their childhoods were like. And so the permission slip is one of the biggest things that people go, "Oh my God, you're telling me that I could be this and that? I could be all of these things. I'd be rainbow sherbert in here. I've been vanilla my whole life. You're telling me that I could put sprinkles and cupcakes and chocolate and I can swirl it all over my face. Are you kidding me?" Yeah. And there's such a magic to not just writing about that or watching it, but to actually be in it, be in the aliveness and then teach the body, "Oh my goodness, I could do that again." And we're, again, the room is set up in such a way that we don't let people just do that and then disappear. That's like, now we're going to keep that up. We're going to have, you know, every 20 minutes. I want you to jump up out of your chair and scream, "I love chickens." Right? Just disrupt everything. Yeah. And they're like, "Wait, what do you mean? Like, I can't do that. Like, you guys will be talking." We're like, "Do it anyway." Yeah. Disrupt us. And they're like, "No, that doesn't make any sense." And we're like, "It does. Who else needs this?" And we'll popcorn. There's parameters because we've been doing this for so long and there's a lot of space for the unknown. And that space is what life is about in my opinion. Yeah. I think what you're speaking to is this idea of, like, actual freedom. You know, like, we talk a lot about, we're in such a freedom culture, like, freedom lifestyle. I want to be free and freedom's my top value. And yes, and we don't get freedom for money. You know, we've all known people with a lot of money who aren't really free. We don't get freedom from being able to travel and live in Bali and live in Costa Rica and whatever. Like, maybe for a little bit, you feel free. But eventually, life kicks in. And we teach that freedom is an inside game. And you're not truly free. If you're still going, what are they going to think if I do this thing that my soul wants to do? What are they going to say if I wear this outfit I really want to wear? What social media are going to, you know, bark back at me if I speak my opinion about what's going on in the world? We're not truly free if we're still censoring ourselves. And the censoring is our nervous system strategy of safety that we learn very early on. And that shows up in a lot of ways. It shows up in our voice and our ability to use it and say certain things. It shows up how we dress. It shows up in what we choose to do for work, who we choose to love. Like, it shows up in so many ways, even in how we work, right? Like, we know so many people and this used to be us before we got deep into this work, where we're working from a strategy of, I don't feel safe. And so we're hustling and we're building and we're pushing and we're proving and we're constantly trying to do this thing to find some semblance of safety so that we can finally feel free. But what if we've been starting in the wrong direction and we could start from the body and go, what if I could feel safe and free in the body? Then I don't have to build my business from survival mode. And then I don't have to choose a partner from, oh my gosh, I'm almost bored and still single. Then I don't have to, you know, parent from, oh my god, these kids are driving me crazy. I just need them to shut up for a second. We can actually be free to be sovereign and have choice in our lives, but choice comes from a safe open body. And again, that's like such a foundational skill that we should all know, but nobody was taught. And, you know, our vision is a world and we've got four kids that we're starting with our kids, but a world where kids know how to tune into their body's signals and can actually be responsive to their bodies because that then is a sovereign being. That's a being that can't be controlled by marketing. That's a being that can walk around and be fully in choice and go, ah, that trigger that just showed up in the relationship, I get that that's mine. Thank you for that. I'm going to be with this. And then I'm going to have a conversation with you that I need to have. That's sovereignty. That's freedom. And that's really what our vision is to help adults find that. But hopefully that they can continue to then teach the people in their lives, like how to be with themselves more responsibly and more powerfully. And that's really what bridge does is it creates the bridge from the brain and all the stuff we know back into the body, back into this power center that we have been so disconnected from for so long. And we go, you've had it all along. It's always been there. We've just been looking outside going, what's the answer? That's more money. Oh, it's more love. It's more power. Oh, it's more strategy. Give me more strategy. Just give me the five step program, right? Give me the blueprint, but really the blueprints your body and you're, you've got it. We all have it. That's the good news. We all have it. Now we just need the instruction manual and bridges the instruction manual. So for the listeners here, what's something that someone could do now to access that instruction manual? You know, there's a lot they could do, but the main thing is you can't intervene in a world you can't see. And so bring awareness to when you feel dysregulated, bring awareness to when you feel tight, short of breath, a little more angry than feels necessary for the scenario. Awareness comes before choice. So step one, start noticing. Oh, man, I am really dysregulated. I'm really angry. I'm really sad. I'm really X, Y and Z. Just noticing the subtle things that occur and then asking a powerful question. Okay, that's what is what would I like to experience next? That by itself sets up that I have the power and the choice to choose something different. And I would follow that up with breathing into the bottom of your belly, expanding, opening, there's something that happens when you just smile no matter how mad you are. If you just go like this and you just like something ships. And so there's a lot of little things that can occur, but one of the main ones is bringing awareness. What would you say? Yeah, just to double down on that awareness first, when you have that awareness, you kind of zoom out from the pattern and it's like you're watching the pattern. In that moment, start to really notice the rigidity of the body. So what I like to do is like a little very quick and little body scan. Okay, what's tight? It's usually my jaw. Most people are jaws are tight. We're holding them. We're clenching them because this is the last place where we try and hold energy in and suppress and stuff it down. So if I just relax my jaw, soften my shoulders, relax my belly. Most people especially women are taught to hold our bellies in. So we're constantly holding and bracing. And a body that's bracing is a body that's in survival. So anytime we can open a bracing body, it instantly signals to our system, oh, we don't need a brace. We're good. Okay, softer body. Now I've got more choice. Now I can go, okay, it's do a couple nice slow inhales, extended exhales, and then ask that question like, what kind of experience do I want to have? How do I want to respond to these next set of emails? How do I want to go back and finish this conversation with my partner? How do I want to reset with my children after I just, you know, explode it on them? Whatever it is, we now have choice to move from sovereignty and from suppleness, an open body. That's the game. We want to move from tight to open, from collapsed to dignified. How would you advise someone get rid of the shame that comes from, oh, my initial reaction was to yell at my kids or to fight with my partner? Like, yes, I'm at choice. I can, you know, make a different choice now. But how do I make peace with what's already happened? Yes, I think that's a really big one. And that's one of the things that people really get in bridge. We are sophisticated animals. And just like cats, his dogs, growl, and bark, humans have biological imperatives. We have responses that will occur no matter what in a millisecond. And so taking the shame and this idea that, oh, because I have sophisticated clothes and things of this nature, and I live in a box and I have an iPhone that I'm somehow better than the humans of a hundred years ago or 200 years ago. We're still animals. Responses occur. Those are necessary responses given where your capacity and your nervous system is. So, awareness proceeds choice. Oh, my goodness. I have about this much window of tolerance before I explode. Ah, I'd like to have this much. Cool. Where do I go for that? Well, I can work on it and get some reps myself. I can get a coach. I can go to the bridge. I can put myself in immersive scenarios and begin to bring awareness to my capacity. That would be where I'd start. Yeah. And then secondary to that is repair. You know, like in all, we've done a lot of relationship work and we've studied under the Gotmans and there, you know, the strongest relationship research done in the world, long standing over 40 years with couples. And one of the things they say that is fundamental and foundational to every relationship. And this is also repeated in parenting advice is repair is everything. And so, you're going to have human moments. But if you can repair from a really beautiful place, that can fix a lot. It doesn't mean you get to keep doing it because repair also requires responsibility of like, whoa, I look what I just did there. I was completely out of my capacity. And that's my bad. I'm so sorry. And now that I have that awareness, I can choose better next time. Repair will go so far. And that's part of reducing the shame is knowing that if I repair, if I give voice to this wave of shame that I'm feeling shame is pointing. There's such a good thing as healthy shame. Healthy shame points us to repair. It points us to have hard conversations. And when we don't have those hard conversations, the shame calcifies. And we start to say, oh, this is just who I am. I'm just a bad person. Yeah. I don't deserve love. You know, we have all these stories. And so, when we put a voice to that shame, number one, we build intimacy and connection with others. And two, we free ourselves from the story that just is who I am. And not just a behavior that I did, that was out of character for me. Let me just double tap on that real quick. A body of water without an inlet or an outlet is a swamp. And swamps create disease. So one of the best and fastest way to create the relief is to do exercises and things that that free up the capacity and the body. Oftentimes, and myself included, when I find my I'm a little more snappy than I like to be with my kids or with my lovely wife, the first thing I go to is, oh, I haven't been filling my own cup. I haven't been creating spaciousness in my body. So I'll go do a primal scream. I'll go do what we call joy alarms. I'll go play basketball or go wake surfing or do something that feels my cup up so that I know that that I have more spaciousness and there's flow happening in the river called me. I just want to double down in this real quick because it's so important. Regulation tools and nervous system work is so important to practice when you're not in the game. Right? Having a dojo, having a place where you can practice where the stakes aren't as high. It's so imperative so that your system is ready. Just like, you know, Olympic athletes, they practice all, I mean, for years before they even step on the Olympic grounds. So that they're ready when their feet touch that arena. They're like, I'm ready to go. I've been practicing where the stakes aren't as high, but creating scenarios where my body can feel into what's at stake and be ready for it. That's why immersive work is so important, whether you do it with us or someone else. It's imperative to give your body a felt experience of, I've been here. I've felt stretched before. I've felt my edge and been able to open instead of close at it. And I know how to recover faster than I used to. That's the thing that will have you enter relationships, opportunities, business stages, Zoom calls, completely different because your body goes, oh, we've been here before and we know what to do. So let's close out here. I'm curious to hear both of yours. This is my one thing that I would do to practice getting into the ring. This is my one thing that if I already just do one, it's my favorite. Obviously, there's a ton. There's so many that they can learn at the bridge or another nervous system work that you have. What would you say is the one that they could practice now and you could just give your favorites to get them ready for the ring? You have one? Yeah, I'll start with, you know, it's our belief that the fruit doesn't belong to the tree. The fruit belongs to the ecosystem. It belongs to our families, our children, our community. And what creates healthy fruit is healthy roots. And the thing that we both have found to have been in connection to why we experienced the levels of success and love and joy and playfulness that we do is that we don't try to do it by ourselves. If there's nothing else you do, just find a person, let alone, if you can find a group, if you can find a space like the bridge where you can go, hey, I can't hold all of this. Every time I'm in a really tough spot and sometimes when I'm not, today I talk to my men's group. I just share, I just take stuff off my plate and I put it on the collective plate and we all hold it. And that deepens my root system. That lessens the load. So whoever you are, wherever you are, if you can't find your way into a room like the bridge, which we highly suggest you do because one, it's affordable, two, it is, you will never be the same. But if you can't find healthy soil, people to hold it with you. Nothing. Yeah, it's so good. I think if you're somebody like I was for a long time, it's like, I don't have time to get in rooms with people. I was like such a lone wolf for so long. The biggest thing I would do is, again, it's the catch, catching yourself in the act of the pattern that's no longer serving you. Like one that I think of for myself, that I still catch myself in. But I recover so fast now is like the urgency of work, right? Because I had like very strong work of holism and it's how I felt valued and valid in the world. And so when I work, sometimes I feel this pace that kicks in, it's like an overdrive, right? And it's just like true. That lever was pulled. When I catch it, I go, I'm an overdrive right now. And I stop. I literally stop what I'm doing. I'll take two deep inhales to like a four count and then exhale to a six or eight count. And I pause and I give myself a texture or a word that represents how I'd like to move in the next half of my day or the next 30 minutes. So it might be like, take my couple breaths, I land in my body, I reset and open my body. And then I literally go surrender or softness or fun or charm. And I'll just bring a word in. And that texture will then create an intention for the next 15, 20, 30, 60 minutes of work that I can practice trying that on. What if I wrote emails from charm? What if I recorded this video for social media from levity? What if I entered this conversation with my partner of, I can't fail? Like that changes texturally how we show up to a scenario. And we have choice in that. We can bring that level of intention and that level of intention from a soft open body. The body goes, Oh, yeah, let's try it. We're available for that. But the body has to be out of survival mode. So that's why those two breaths are really important in giving your body the felt sense of opening any spaces that feel really rigid and tight. What I loved about what you two both shared is how much play there is in the deep heavy work that you do. Just like the combined tools that you offered of like, how would charm write this email, right? It's like, it's deep work, but you two both bring such a sparkle of fun to it. And that's what happens in your everyday practices. But I mean, obviously the bridge is one of the most fun experiences anyone could experience. And the fact that those two things live next to each other, deep work and play. They feel that so you too and what you're here to bring. Yeah. And it's actually deeply a part of the work. And it's why the work works as well. Because when you're in play, your brain and your body is more receptive to what's happening because you're in a state of safety. Yeah. Play and pleasure cannot live in a survival state. And so we incorporate so much play and pleasure and aliveness into our work so that your body actually gets a signal of like, oh yeah, we're here for this. And that's why we have people fly from all over the world to staff our events. It's why people come back again and again and bring their entire family because they're like, there is nothing where this person can feel so alive and so full and so fierce and so in their power. But also so in their softness and their vulnerability and like the stickier parts of being human because we love all of it. We love all of it. Love it. Yeah. I think she said it all. Yeah. That's it. Amazing. All right. I think should we should be buzz there? How do we want to do I want to say like final statements? Okay. All right. There's one thing you wanted to say to people to listening. I'm more so want to ask too. This is not an interview question. Are we saying any like coupon code? Like what do we want to do in that regard? Yeah. Podcast coupon code is podcast. If you so we can track it. I know you want to go to the bridge and you are hearing this and you're watching this somewhere. The link in the show notes. They could show notes, put the word podcast in the section and we'll take 20% off of it. Yeah. I wouldn't say what it is would say for a national discount. I'll be in the show now. Okay. All right. Okay. So for those of you who are interested in joining the bridge, we'll have that in the show notes. We'll use the coupon code podcast and then that'll take off percentage for joining the bridge and any other final comments that you want to save for someone listening to this podcast. I mean, they're 50 minutes in at this point, an hour in at this point. What do you want to leave them with? One of my favorite quotes comes from the Gospels of Thomas and it reads, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. But if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." And every time I think about that quote, I think about how we're all going to die and when I get to that moment, the one thing that I want to know is that I brought everything I had. The one thing I want to know is that I left it all out on the field and I didn't keep my gifts, my talents, my abilities. I didn't hoard whatever created us put in me and I didn't hurt my friends and family by way of keeping those things. And so if you're listening to this or watching this anywhere and you feel that part of you that knows you have more to give that part of you that feels like there's an expansion wanting to come forward, that you're erupting like a volcano, please do yourself a favor and walk into one of our rooms, whether it's in Australia or Austin or somewhere else in the world, walk into one of our rooms because you will be thanking yourself for many years to come. Awesome. Yeah, I think for me it's that you're not broken. You know, I think so many people, especially people who love self-help and personal development, we love it and we're motivated from this place of thinking there's something wrong with us or that we're not there yet as if there's some there to get to, right? And so the reminder is you're not broken. There's nowhere you need to get to other than where you are, but you have to fully get there, like fully allow yourself to be who you are and fully in the space of where you are right now. That's your access point and that requires knowing some tools that requires knowing your body that requires being in relationship to it and allowing your wave of humanity to move through you because it's a unique wave that only you have and Preston's point, it's our responsibility to let that wave move, to let that wave express, to let that wave be felt. And I think ultimately most people are really desperate to feel their own wave of aliveness and to feel themselves like, oh, there I am, there I am. And you're already there, you've just got to get to the right access point, which is the body. And so start with your body, start with building that relationship and know that you are not broken and there's nothing to fix. And we had a chill from that. That's my body speaking. Drop the word podcast in the and the coupon section and we'll hook you up. Love it. Thank you guys so much for speaking so vulnerably and just playing with me here today. It's always a pleasure to get to know your heart and to know why you're doing what you're doing. Thanks, and thanks.