I think over the next 50 years you're going to see movement in manual therapy and psychology.
We're body-centered psychology, you spoke about Hukami and Peter Levine, all of those things
are going to come together in a unified field. It's going to take a while, but. Hello friends, near and far. Welcome back to the Body Awake episode 18. In this episode we have
our first returning guest of the show, Tom Myers, who is also our guest on episode 5.
And really, you know, I thought really cool episode. So if you haven't tuned into that one
and you enjoy this one, you might tune into that as well. It's not linear, per se. I don't know.
I will say, you know, in some ways we're sort of building off what we talked about last time,
but mostly I'd say that's not true. But we do cover some different territory.
This interview, which is wonderful. I sourced from a few of you, a few listeners, and I
am thrown out on Facebook that, hey, you know, I'm interviewing Tom Myers again. If anyone has any
questions you'd like to ask. And I got a handful of great questions from y'all and sort of
wove that into the fabric of what we talked about as best I could. Yeah, the interview
style I use actually took from from an interview I heard with Neil Strauss, where he says he,
you know, studies a lot and then he writes down just maybe, you know, a page or two or however many,
just a ton of questions. And then the night before the interview, he'll read over all those
questions and then right before he goes in, he'll look him over and then he'll put that away.
So that's, I've taken to that style and I really like it. Anyway, probably out of those,
you know, that page and a half of questions that I wrote about we got to like four. So hopefully,
we'll have a part three or maybe even four. I really, really like talking with Tom and really
appreciate his point of view, points of view on gosh, I think that intro quote captures it pretty
well, right? And is a very, very interesting to me about, you know, in some ways we could say the
fusion of like mind, body, emotional stuff. Or, you know, I think another way of looking at it right
is going to a place where they are not different. So a fusion to me means taking two halves, you
know, and putting them together. But this might be more analogous to like, I don't know what the
analogy is zooming out enough to where oh, there's not actually a different thing. These aren't,
these aren't actually three different things. And of course they, they are, you know, that's the
sort of whatever, you don't need me to tell you about the trip of living in duality, you know,
both the one this nature of things and the different expressions are both equally true. And that's,
you know, best game in town. So if you'd like to jump to that interview, I want to try a new feature
of the show here. And you can just jump to the interview. It starts at 22 minutes, 30 seconds.
And of course, I, you know, left that blank and then filled in that time because I'm not sure how long
along this interview, or sorry, not interview, not sure how long this intro intro will go.
But I do want to talk about, maybe a little bit more about the interview and then the lab. I just
dissected a cadaver with 50 other people. And there were eight, eight cadavers in the room. And that's
where I did this interview was, was down in Tempe, Arizona, actually in the host Tom's, host's house
went there on Tuesday morning, a Valentine's Day, and we, you know, chatted for about 45 minutes,
and then had to, had to scoot, had to get into the lab for that, for the day of work. Very profound
experience, very wonderful experience. If you are interested in tuning into, into more of my sort
of not particularly succinct debrief of each day, I think there's four videos up because one day
I didn't do one on the, on the night of the 14th. Drinking some poo air. Oh, so good. From a really great
tee shop, this is a bit of a tangent, but called New Century Tea Gallery. So I don't want anyone
crowding out the space when I come to visit Seattle because I'm often the only one in there,
but I will say it is a dope. It's such a great shop and you can go in there and drink really nice
poo airs. Um, for free, you just, these sample stuff, you know, and of course they, they sell it
and whatever, I would encourage you to just buy whatever you want, buy whatever you want. It's a great,
it's a really great tee shop. New century tea galley, tea galley, new century tea gallery in Seattle
in the international district. Anyway, that's anymore, this is from, but that's where I get a lot of my
purrs. Uh, so where was I, the lab? Um, yeah, really, really beautiful experience and I had wondered,
I will just answer one question up front. If I would feel like squeamish or how it would feel to
like cut into somebody's, you know, bodies skin and peel back the skin and then peel back the fat
layers and would be like looking at their guts and the face. I was much less sort of squeamish about
all that than I thought I would actually say zero. Um, but you know, buy in large, there were,
there were a couple like moments where I was like, woo, okay, around our cadavers genitals and some
places around her, her face that felt actually in fingers. Mostly genitals and fingers actually,
it was like, okay, it was, it was, um, or whatever reason, you know, or reasons felt like that was
different territory for me to like dissect than than everything else. And it was really, so, uh,
emotionally, a pretty powerful week, not in terms of being like cathartic or ups and downs,
but maybe in the same way I've done a few like week long meditation retreats, um, or haven't like
spent time in a monastery really, but I can imagine like a week in a monastery. It had this sort of
quiet, cool like monastic feeling. There was actually a, on the last day on Friday, I went back in
to the room during lunch. I'd actually stayed afterwards to, to read an article that Tom had
written several years ago about the intranasal, uh, work. I just started gesturing my pinky towards my
nose. It seems a little weird. I mean, it is a little weird and it seems very weird. If you haven't
done it or don't know about it, but you actually enter the nostril, but then it's really about
releasing some space laterally in the cranium, uh, at the, at the midline of the skull via the,
you know, the nasal, um, the nasal spaces. You're helping widen those as part of a structural
integration series, which is how I know Tom and his work. I went to his school Kinesis, Kinesis
Myofascial Integration, which is, um, probably a third of the clients I see, we go through KMI,
KMI series of 12 sessions, really, really powerful, uh, really powerful work based on the work of
of iteroff. Um, anyway, but somebody had sawed the face off of their cadaver that, um, on the
coronal plane, so you can envision like, so you could still see the two eyes and the nose and
everything, but like the, you know, the front inch, you know, it's, it's different because the,
the skull has obviously, you know, your eye sockets go back and all that, but the front part of the
face came off. So I was really interested in that and was looking at that and at my, you know,
help a little bit through there. So anyway, it was just reading an article and then I came back
in to get something and there were the eight cadavers on the table and it was just me and them
and I was sort of struck by at that moment how, um, the sort of not, not just piece like,
not the kind of piece where it's like, okay, everything's okay. It's fine, but the kind of piece
of like walking into a very holy place. Um, I was struck by that feeling and, and even flashed
back to, I remember running across my neighbor's yard as fast as I could going to my, my other
neighbor's house, Paul, Paul Sullivan, shout out, uh, going to Paul's house and running across
that yard as fast as I could thinking they were gonna be like these zombies, you know, popping out
of the ground and coming to do whatever. I don't know, even think I got that far in my imagination,
you know, take me into the ground with them or like just grab my feet like my, my big brother used
to chasing me upstairs. There's another shout out. Anyway, I was thinking about that in just a,
you know, flash and it was so different and so, I don't know if I'm overusing this word, but
beautiful and reverent to be in that room where it felt like a very holy place to be with these,
these eight bodies, you know, whose previous owners or however we are to think about that had given
themselves to this, um, to this project and it felt, I say the whole week, I kept tuning into that
of like, um, there was, uh, yeah, a real feeling of just like doing the more I was like really
getting into and accepting and going through my whole process and learning, like the more I did
that, the more of an honor it was to that person's life. Um, and so really, really cool to tap into
that. I didn't really see that coming, but I felt it so strongly. Um, yeah, you know, I learned a
ton about anatomy and both the like okay that's it.
that's what this is called and that's where this goes or something I had heard once or twice
before and then it was you know that was the third time hearing it and of course seeing it
and feeling it in a kinesthetic way is so different. And I'd say if that's one type of learning,
the other type usually that feels with me is I made the analogy on one of these Facebook videos.
If you want to see those videos by the way you can just google Liam Boulder Facebook or whatever
go on to Facebook and search my name you don't need to be a member or what's it called. I don't
know you don't need to be on signed up for Facebook to look at those because I have a public page
so if you just go to my page and look in the videos you can see these but in one of those I'd
made the analogy that came to me then and I think it's a it's a good once I'll repeat it here
of like knowing you know reading some facts about the Grand Canyon maybe and then you see a bunch
of pictures so you even know what it looks like but then you if you took a visit of course you
might just know quote unquote how you frame it know something differently in your body having been
there right and if you came back from that trip and somebody's like oh do you learn anything about
the Grand Canyon you know if you hadn't amassed any new facts per se you might still have a sense
of like yes I do know it in a different way but you know how to put that into words or if that
parts even important that's where gosh actually you might be better off writing a poem about it
right that's where maybe poetry speaks more directly to those kinds of experiences than
then prose does per se and something that does not does not lend itself to to summarization where
the texture of the words and the experience is is the material it's not just something encasing the
material anyway I yeah I could and I did in these Facebook videos so you can check those out
for could talk about this for for a while and I very much I'm back in Montana now have been for
about 48 hours not even actually 48 hours as of six o'clock tonight but still very much feel like
I'm sort of psychically reintegrating here landing and yeah who knows how long that experience will
continue to kind of unfold in my body I did see two clients yesterday and did hands on work and
it was really really neat to to feel very much like oh okay my hands feel different my my seeing
and knowing through my hands feels different um yeah I think I don't know how long it is maybe just
a minute or two but the first bit of this interview Tom talks about the the nature of this
cadaver lab which happens once a year and I will I don't actually don't think there's anything to
link to because if there's no sign up yet for the year but if you link up with Tom's page canisus
and you know I'm sure there's some sort of mailing list if you if you sign up for that
if this is something that you're interested in you know or or shoot me a message and I can
send you last year's link or you know lots of ways to just stay tuned just stuff like that if
if it's something you you really want uh it happens every year and yeah it's it's open so open
to the public uh so we also mr. Myers and I in this interview um we talk about just
charted down a few bullet points as I was re-listening to chunks of it on my getting prepped for this
this intro uh the nature of fascia as the biomechanical auto regulatory system
if you don't know what that is stay tuned but it's you know pretty pretty impressive words
to say at a cocktail party if you're if you want to do that like I do um and then we get into
you know this this theme of the body awake lately has been this uh sort of unwinding trauma
in the adult body hinting on how to minimize uh trauma from being stored in the body
and I love a part of this interview trauma and I get into what does that even mean do we even know
what that means storing trauma in the body um and really really enjoy that part of the conversation
but um not only you know unwinding that in the adult body but how to kind of keep that from
happening in the first place I feel like it's something we hint on um throughout these last few
conversations but anyway like you know saying whatever it was 10 minutes ago now that that uh you
know we sort of focus on a this structural aspect of it if you will maybe the facial aspect of it
but this you know it's a integration of the neurology on our sort of electrical impulses in
the body and deeply intertwined with the structure or the the facial you know interstitial
connective tissue nature of the body or that that aspect of the body those tissues um
and then whatever the sort of fluid body represents maybe and actually I've heard Tom say this
our emotional body we know we talk about swelling up with you know with pride is the is only one
that comes into my head right now I think he had a couple examples we were chatting at lunch
um but the how the fluid body might represent our um our emotions so the you know that
again intersection or just different angles of the intellectual but not just intellectual
thoughts emotions structure I'll leave it at that but we get into that and then one of my favorite
parts of this is I had a few questions for Tom just about what his life is like as a practitioner
um uh you know what it what it's like for him where the where his hands meet somebody's tissue
and where he's where he's in session with somebody so I was definitely curious about that and I had
had a couple couple people right in it and also had some other questions of what what a day in the
a day in the life is like for Tom Myers when he's not teaching or um you know we're writing or
doing interviews with with guys like me so we get into all that um yeah really great interview
those are the those are the big bullet points that came to me um I want will link to uh I'm teaching
a co-teaching rather a one day course in April and then a four day retreat at the end of August
and I'll be able to link just to that one day course because that's the only one that's live
but I just wanted to mention it here especially if you're interested um if there's not a lot
I'll describe the material in a second but I was just front low by saying I don't know of any
you know I'll say many to be safe and any because none are popping to my head right now but
people who are doing the kind of work that um that's not true there are lots of people I think um
doing doing this kind of okay no more front loading I'll say what it is it's called embodied anatomy
um co-teaching this and it's really in in my you know summarization of it about the nature of
perception and then using uh how we like tune into different systems in the body both as movers
and as teachers of movement and as manual workers so you there will be a yoga teacher in the class
and a massage therapist in the class and we have all have so much to learn not only from each other
but from each other's forms you know so massage therapists have a ton to gain from being movers
and learning more about um perceiving these tissue types in movement and you know movement teachers
or yoga teachers have so much to gain you know get a little bit of here's how to cue this and
you know pull up the hips and back and downward dog and but uh lots to be gained through how you
really palpate accurately um and through these different lenses in the body with with your with your
hands um so things like being able to feel um you know maybe the the fluid tides of the the fluid
body moving probably won't in the one day course get too much into the craniosacral rhythm because
that can be quite a nuanced thing to feel depending on how sensitive you are but only the pulses like
the the femoral artery vein nerve junction the sort of rivers running through the inside of the
legs under the inguinal ligament um some of the fascial structures like where fascia and nerve
interface I mean and not just like knowing it but being able to palpate and say oh that's where
it's happening underneath my hand and in movement oh that's how this is happening in my body
and then maybe also starting to see that in someone else's body and some different um visual
sort of uh visuals in imagery different kinds of imagery which in my experience back to poetry
and prose actually often that imagery speaks so much more directly in my experience to the type
to the quality of movement or the quality of tissue movement motion that were um that's optimal
yeah I sort of feel funny saying these like biomechanical or optimal movement patterns um yeah but
that's you know really good versus a kind of prose you know and I might say in a yoga class like
you can talk about the the muscles as you know what the muscles are doing and that can be a really
you know good gateway into helping someone through a pose but often I think it's the imagery
not just because people may or may not know the muscles but even if they did it's the imagery of like
letting you know your breath drop into an area like a like a tide I'm just you know making this
up right now depend on the class and what's happening but the metaphor metaphor can be much more
accurate
I think much more helpful to speak in a useful metaphors than it is to describe sort of what
we know of biomechanically, biomechanically that's happening, which one more thing about
the anatomy, the dissection, the dissection we just did all say is one definitely living
question for me that somebody asked me is, "Okay, you saw inside all this, you know,
preserved tissue, meaning non-formaldehyde and meaning much more liquid and hydrated.
But, you know, how different is that from a living body?"
And I do have a certain amount of understanding, certainly the work of Jean-Claude Gimbertot,
a French hand surgeon has a lot of in vivo as a video called Strolling the Skin.
You can check out, I'll link to that, I'll link to Jean-Claude Gimbertot's.
But, so I have a sense of how it's moving, you know, a body moves differently, but certainly,
and I mean very just plainly, something is different, you know, somebody dies.
And I would wonder if we can like sum that up as, "Oh, the nervous system is gone and
offline," or even just how quality tissue changes, even if somebody's been on ice from,
you know, shortly after they died.
And anyway, I think that's an example of one of these like really just cool living questions,
like where there are answers, but to be working curious about, "Yeah, how is this person
in front of me just tissue, and how are they not just tissue?"
You know, how is releasing this like a sort of biomechanical thing, and how is it not?
I think holding both of those questions is an advanced skill, and it's a very humbling,
I mean, if we can even call it a skill, maybe sort of summarized by a beginner's mind,
where there is kind of an innate curiosity, without pretending like you don't know stuff,
you know, beginner's mind doesn't mean, at least I think, right, doesn't mean you just
play dumb all the time, or like, not know anything you know, knowing that, but um, being
whatever, you already know this stuff, being receptive.
So anyway, at this point, without further ado, here is this episode's guest, Tom Meyers,
start by talking about the cadaver class, and then go all sorts of places from there.
Well, Liam, it's great to see you down here in Arizona with the section that's certainly
the most interesting and the most outrageous, of course I do all year, it is not manual therapy,
but we have lots and lots of manual and movement therapists coming to it, because it's a chance
to see into, well, I like the word autopsy, because it means to see for yourself, if you break
it down, autopsy itself, and autopsy is to see, and we do so much of our anatomy learning
in books, and even palpating the muscles, and that kind of thing, it's not the same as looking
in and seeing how we're held together.
Yeah.
You have to ask yourself, we have 500 years of anatomy, we have a really good map of the
nervous system, we have a really good map of the circulatory system, we have no map at
all of the facial system, and we have a map of the muscular system, and we think of that
as the structural system, musculoskeletal, yeah, but the word musculoskeletal leaves out
the fibrous context in which everything takes place.
If we were to cut open the liver, we would see fiber, if we were to cut open the brain,
we would see the glial cells creating fiber all over the brain, and certainly as we go into
the body with our emphasis on the musculoskeletal system, we see fascia connecting everything, yeah.
And you said yesterday, and I heard something like this before, but it's maybe a nice thing
to say in the beginning, you're saying, you know, in this lab, Todd Garcia, the other
eye sector is going to be saying fascia meaning specific structures, as opposed to other
structures, you mean the, I think you're with a biomechanical regulatory system.
Yes, and I like biomechanical auto-regulatory system because we now know that the structural
continuity goes all the way down into the cell actually to the DNA when you tug on the
tissue, you can actually change the way the DNA in nearby cells is expressing itself.
So when you're doing yoga, when you're doing bodywork, when you're doing exercise, when
you're loading the tissue in any way, you can actually change how the DNA expresses itself.
That has only in the last few years has that been evident.
And so it's beyond fascia as a strict medical sense, which is, you know, fascia is used
for very specific things, and it's an argument in the fascial research, the halls of the
fascial research, people as to what exactly constitutes fascia, because if you take a warm
and fuzzy, literally fuzzy definition like the one that I'm saying, you lose the medical
people because it's too big, it's too fuzzy, it's not specific.
So the research people are saying, no, no, no, come on, we have to be precise in what
we're saying about fascia, but the word, just let me do this one sentence, the word fascia
has escaped medical and become part of the general lexicon, stress researchers with cringe
and gnash their teeth every time we use the word stress in a way that we use the word
stress in engineers go crazy, physiologists go crazy, because we're using the word stress
in a very general way, and I think people just have to recognize that the word fascia
has escaped its narrow medical meaning, and now means this whole fibrous network that
holds us together from the bottom of the skin all the way down to the bone.
So when I hear fuzzy, I think of venturing into more speculative territory or more emotional
territory or something, I mean, is it like, is it fuzzy in your?
Is what fuzzy?
The definition?
Your definition of fascia.
Yeah, yeah, when you take, if I were to be proper, we're talking about the entire
extracellular matrix plus the cells that create it, maintain it, clean it up, and then
it gets fuzzy, it gets, sorry to use that word again, it gets difficult really fast because
that same network goes through cartilage, that same network goes through bone, but those
are considered to be hard tissues, not soft tissues.
But you can't find the only place, the open lumens of the digestive tract and the open
lumens of your lungs are the only place there isn't fascia.
When your blood has viscous stuff in it, which will turn to fascia, as soon as it hits
the air, that's what makes us get up, you build temporary fascia, fascia-like structures,
you build temporary fiber structures, I'm trying to be careful, I'm not using this word,
but you build temporary fiber structure when your blood hits the air, so that you stop
leaking, that's what hemophilia acts, don't have, is that fiber-making mechanism in their
blood, so they don't stop bleeding because it doesn't clog, yeah, and clog is a good
word because this kind of fiber-stuff makes clogs in our movement systems, restrictions
in our movement systems, and it also can too much of it in your blood, makes your blood
too thick, right, they use blood thinners when, yeah, there's the possibility of the blood
getting too thick, and so this system, I'm going to continue to use the word fascia
for it, but I'm going to understand when I say that, but I'm not talking about the scientific
word fascia, I'm talking about a global word for this whole network that holds us together,
yeah, and on that note, I'd love to pick your brain more about, I don't want to speak
to sort of overly grandiose, but this, dividing the body up for any reason, right, and maybe
something like, you know, a fascial network or the anatomy translines are a more holistic
than, I don't know if you'd use that word or not, but here's my question, you're doing
a lot of work with movement, people right now, and A, I just want to open up like, how's
that going, you know, how is what you, the anatomy translines, plus whatever else you're doing,
translating from bodywork to movement, is it a whole different ballgame, how's that going,
and then any talk about like training the fascia and the fascial system, I don't know,
like, is that how you, is that how you accurately see it, is that kind of just a way of, a way
of speaking?
Well, to answer your first question, it's going very well with the help of other people.
My colleague, James Earl's, has written a book called Born to Walk, which takes the anatomy
trans into movement, we've had a lot of people who are in movement who've been attracted
to anatomy trans, my, I'm a terrible mover, I came from bodywork and, you know, we're
not the best movers.
Historically, at least, eh?
Okay, it's getting better now, people are coming in, but as far as I'm concerned, this
all needs to be married, because as I said earlier, it's a question of giving load to
the system bodywork, gives a deep kind of bodywork that I learned as a role for, and practice
and teach now.
And that's loading tissue with a certain intent.
And exercise is loading tissue, and yoga stretching is loading tissue, and Pilates is loading
tissue.
I really, I think we talked about this last time, our regard this as part of a large project
that I don't know what it will be called in the end, but I call it spatial medicine, because
we have a medicine of chemistry, we have a medicine that talks to our time keeper in terms
of psychiatry, but the medicines of space, which are all those I've mentioned, plus osteopathy,
plus chiropractic, plus plus plus, lots and lots and lots of things, they're all living
in separate worlds, they use the same words for different things, they use different words
for the same things, they all hate each other, they don't all hate each other, do you know
what I mean?
There's all these internecine rivalries, hell, hath no fury, like one yoga teacher talking
about another yoga form, right, and we're, it's like arguing about Valencia's and Seville's
men, the world is such a need or oranges, we need all the different kinds of movement
that we can get, and slow soft yoga is great for older people, and the fundamental skills
of Tai Chi are absolutely necessary for people growing older, because that's the same skill
you use when you're stepping out of a bathtub, and that's when a lot of falls happen that
break people's hips, so we have room for that, we have room for the Wim Hof people who
are putting themselves in ice baths for five minutes, you know, you don't want to do
that with your grandmother, you might not get her back out again, but there are people
who want that kind of thing, and we are testing, yeah, it is going to be the physical education
for our kids, what is going to be the healing type of therapies for our kids, and we better
figure out what the generalized principles are that apply to all of them, and I think
we will, over the next 50 years, but right now there's all these schools, you know, the
raw things over here and yoga is over here and something else is over there, and my job,
part of my job is to bring people together and make them speak the same language, because
I regard this as all part of one big project, yeah, and in your eyes in this project where
it does, and maybe forgive me for oversimplifying, but it's just a name that I know, like Peter
Levine's work, or like deep autonomic nervous system like trauma work, where does that?
How do you think about that?
I think that's another area where we need to figure out how this works, both in education
for children, as well as the kind of repair that Peter Levine work represents, right?
Yeah.
So if we were doing some kind of education where kids were learning autonomy and how to
unwind some of these things, even in school, I don't know about you, I stood at school first
thing we did was pledge allegiance to the flag, I can still recite it, you know, 60 years
later, even though I haven't spoken it from 60 years ago, which it stands, yeah.
I believe in it much, but in my daughter's school, she went to a Montessori school and
instead of doing that, they would turn to each other to their partner, put their hands
on their partner's feet, put their hands on their partner's knees, put their hands
on their partner's hips and give a little push down each time to ground everybody and then
on the shoulders and then even on head and do a bit of breathing, that was how they started
their day in that school.
And I went, oh, thank goodness, this is much better than pledging allegiance to the flag
or playing the Lord's Prayer or whatever you might do in the morning.
Did she like it?
Not only did they like it, but you would see kids, I sat in at the school for several
days just to see how it worked and you would see the kids, if somebody started getting
hyperactive or upset about something, somebody else would come over to them, put their hands
on their feet, put their hands on their knees without being told.
Yes.
This was what the kids were doing for each other to calm the autonomic nervous system.
I love Peter Levine and Peter Levine's work.
I don't pass judgment on him or Bessel Vendorkov or that Rothschild or whoever is doing this
kind of work.
There are all kinds of approaches to balancing the autonomic system.
Yeah.
The autonomic system, if you look at us, we essentially have a musculoskeletal self,
a fight or flight, get me the hell out of here or I'm going to fight for my territory
self versus a digestive self.
In the dissection course, we see that we will be taking the organs out.
We could take the organs out a whole lot more easily than we could take the nervous system
out or anything.
Sure.
I was just watching an old Robin Williams thing where he made the joke that God said to
Adam, "I've got good news and I've got bad news.
The good news is I've given you a brain and a penis and the bad news is I didn't give
you enough blood to run them both at the same time."
And that's actually almost literal truth.
You have six liters of blood in your body and if that blood is concentrated, funding
the digestive system, you don't have as much left for your brain and you are funding
your organs.
You don't have as much left for your brain and your muscles.
If you're really using your brain and your muscles, it's going to draw blood to your
muscles and it's going to draw it away from your digestive system.
So the autonomic system, our autonomic parasympathetic and sympathetic system, is the kind of sea
saw that goes back and forth between whether our energy is in our gut system, which is
restore repair, repair, rest, digest, tend to be friend, be all of those things happen
in the parasympathetic calmside of the nervous system.
We call it calm, but the digestive system, after you've eaten Thanksgiving dinner, you don't
really want to use your muscles, you might want to go sit in front of a TV, sit and watch
grow them and throw themselves at each other, but your digestive system is very aroused,
it's very excited.
There's a lot going on in your digestive system in what we think of as us is somewhat of an
illusion because there are so many cells in there, but when you have an event that you
cannot digest, an event that is traumatic, the words overused, so I'm going to use a slightly
different thing.
If you can't digest and appropriate that experience, your fight or flight system comes kind
of permanently on because you've never completed that experience.
And that is going to rob energy from your digestive system, you're not going to restore
and repair the way you should, you're going to be always on, but at the same time you've
got both the accelerator saying, let's go, and you've got the break on saying, I can't
do anything about it.
So why couldn't you do anything about it?
Well I was being molested by a loved one or I was overpowered by somebody or this accident
happened and I could do nothing about it.
There are all kinds of reasons why you couldn't act at the time.
And the beauty of the work, like somatic experiencing, is to go back, find that experience,
bring it up, and then do your best to complete it.
It's obviously better if you can complete any experience at the time that it happens.
That's immediate.
But second best and very helpful is to complete that experience in the therapeutic context.
And in your eyes or your experience, and partially this is what I'm interested in, but the last
few episodes of this show has been a lot about healing from trauma and we had a hukomi
therapist and a somatic experiencing therapist.
But I will say one of the more ambiguous terms that's come up to me when I visualize it
is the lack of digesting an experience or completing an experience.
And there's a very overt motorway I get at if someone was lesting you on top of you like
that you didn't push them off, you sort of shut down, and we talk about that then sort
of being still in the tissues.
Do you have a more physical way of talking about it?
Certainly.
I don't know.
We don't know what regular memory is.
So when you talk about cellular memory or muscle memory, I say, well, I don't know what
you mean because I don't know what a memory is.
Well, the wilder Penfield in 1957 had little electrodes that he was going around the brain.
And you can be awake when somebody's working on your brain because you have no pain receptors
in your brain.
All you have to do is anesthetize the scalp and the skull.
And you can take a piece of the scalp off and this is what Penfield was doing in 1957.
He didn't want to take any part of the brain that was still working.
So he would put the electrodes around and see what happened.
And that's the way they mapped the surface of the cortex originally.
And he would hit memories.
He would hit the temporal lobe and people would say, well, I'm aware that I'm on the operating
table here.
But in my mind, I'm walking up the dirt road to my grandmother's house and I can smell the
fly.
You know, it's just very, very vivid memories.
So we know memory is stored in there.
And ever since Penfield did that, we've been saying, oh, memories.
are stored in Ngrams in your brain. But nobody's found an Ngram. It's now
2017. Nobody's found an Ngram yet. Nobody knows how memory works. What's an
Ngram? What's the proposal? The proposal is that the memory is carved into
your neurons somehow. Okay. And we've been looking for how that gets carved in.
What's the substrate of memory? We don't know. Carl-free Bram proposed a
holographic model of how the brain worked, but that didn't prove that that's
not proven up. And so we're sitting here still in 2017 saying we know we have
memories, but we don't know where that what that memory is. So I will go this
far. When I touch people in certain places often a place associated with that
trauma, but not always directly associated with that trauma. And the place is
very specific. Sometimes as small as a dime in the body. Either off was
amazing at being able to see that body and go directly there. Do not pass
go do not collect. I was just go directly there. I generally kind of circle
my way in. Intentionally. Intentionally. Yes. To bring it. I don't want to take
people from zero to 60 in 2.3 seconds. I'd rather have a slower ramp. So just a
paraphrase to it. But yeah, so I dropped potentially we were somebody and you'd
really see their like autonomic. And they would be in to tears and shaking and
all kinds of things in in seconds because she was absolutely good at finding the
place. Yeah, I think she was just a little less sympathetic or empathetic than
then I want to be. Yeah, especially with if you're coming up on something that is
very. The hesitation that I've had in the last few paragraphs has been that you
really want to complete the event. You don't want to just recycle the event. Yeah.
Too much trauma therapy has ended up being recycling the event. Peter doesn't do
that but some of the outer circle of that kind of thing have ended up just
re-traumatizing people by having you go through the event. So if we go back to
Feldenkrais, he said every event involves a sensation. The sensation creates a
feeling. The feeling creates a thought of action plan and then you do the action.
So the if the sensation is too much for you to deal with or the feeling is too
much for you to deal with, you don't formulate the thought that leads to an
actual action. So there is a cut in the middle of the event somewhere here or
here between between two and three or three and four. Yeah. So but in any case
the movement doesn't happen. So with every traumatic event, there is always an
undone movement. It's my goal because I'm not a psychologist. I'm not trying to
play one on TV. I'm not really interested in the story. I'm interested in the
story but I don't play with the story the way a psychologist would play with
the story. I have what I would call the neighbor rule. I'm allowed to say what a
neighbor would say. Oh, that must have hurt or oh, that's too bad. But I'm not
going to say, well, you see how that's just like what you told me about your
boyfriend last week. Right. I'm not going there because that's psychology and I'm
not a psychologist. However, I do track the autonomic signs. What's happening
with the pupils, what's happening with the skin color, what's happening with
the breathing, what's happening with the pulse. I'm tracking all those
autonomic things because this is the balance between fight or flight system and
your rest and repair system. I want to take people to the place where they are
in touch with that incident, which can be traumatic for them. Go up to this
thing because it's it's terribly frightening and they've been hiding it. Whether
they've been hiding it in the body or not, I don't know. But I do know this. If you
touch the body in the right place, up will come the memory of that incident. And
if I'm really skillful and they are willing, then we complete the movement. Yeah,
maybe it's a push, maybe it's a run, maybe it's shouting no at the top of your
voice. I don't know what it is. I and I never predict it. Tell my client what
that could be because that puts an intellectual thing on something that has to
has to has to come directly out of their body. And when they complete that
movement, that it's often followed by crying, by shaking, by this thing that
takes them from a very high state of excitement to a very deep state of
meditative relaxation. And that is the healing. That is if I can complete the
movement that was incomplete before, then this thing of having an accelerator
and a break on at the same time, which is awfully damaging to your engine,
right? Yeah, you don't want to be sitting there with one foot on the accelerator
and one foot on the break. It's your car's not going to last very long.
So this is to go back to our earlier conversation. Distressful. We call it
stressful, but it's stress stresses. You stress a person. If they successfully
meet that stress, that's you stress. That's good stress. Right. The
distress is that you are constantly not meeting the challenge. Right. When you
have a traumatic event in your past, you constantly have this challenge that
you didn't meet. So you want to, that's the accelerator, you can't. That's the
break. Yeah. And so if we can get down to that level,
but if you're talking about muscle memory or is it stored in the body, yeah,
it's a good metaphor. But we don't know enough about memory to know whether it's
actually stored in the body or you touch that part of the body that creates
associations in the brain and brings it up. I don't really, I'm not really
concerned myself with the mechanism. Somebody else will find that out and let me
know. Right. But the practicality of it is right there.
If you can see in the part of the body, that's not moving.
And you can get somebody into that part of the body in the state of excitement
where they were when that event happened. And then you can get them to complete
the action. That is the most healing that I've ever seen in those kinds of
situations. Yeah. I have two questions and I'm just
having which is first, but I think I really appreciate what you're saying. And
I keep asking you a couple questions like you as a practitioner. Yeah.
You know, in the room, and I, I certainly am. I think a lot of people listening
are really interested, you know, our massage therapists or, you know,
touch therapists of some sort and and not only interested in the sort of
awake to the emotional reality of what can be unfolding on the table. And
yeah, appreciate this question of like, how do I do that in a way that's
artful? And not just I'm covering my own ass as a massage therapist like, okay,
here's my scope of practice. You know, that's important, right? And those
were set up for good reason. But even more sort of, I don't know, textural
than that. So a couple specific questions for you. One, how
when somebody is, I mean, you didn't use the word from, I don't know where it's
from originally, but titration, titration sort of in and
not going too deep into an experience like you're maybe saying where somebody's
just lost in the in the trauma of it. And staying in the room, are you likely to
use a verbal cue of like, hey, just to remind you you're in this room or like
tune into the sound of my voice or is that something for you that's totally
coming to your hands? And then maybe likewise, how would you invite somebody to
like complete an experience of like, hey, it seems like something is stuck here.
Letter rip or just with your hands or allowing permission or, you know what I
mean? How does that actually play out? Sure. Well, first let me say that I
consider my hands and my voice. Both very important tools in my practice.
Yeah, how I use my voice is very important to the client's experience
from the get go, whether they're in one of these things or not.
But these things, meaning like a traumatic, a traumatic
resolve down. Okay. Yeah. But no, I don't generally
forewarn clients. I have asked, are you willing to go here?
This could be this could involve some crying. This could involve going into
an old thing. Are you willing to go there? If I'm unsure.
But when you pre-warn people, they put up their defenses in very subtle
ways. And so often it just comes. If they don't want to go there, they will
shut the process down. It can be frightening and they still
want to go there. So then you're, I am putting my arms around them in a
gesture. I'm not literally hugging them, but I am psychically holding that
space in my practice as I always do. But it becomes a very special thing then.
And when they go into that process, you don't need to be poking into that area
really. You can just be holding it. I tend to get myself
right down near their ear because it's hard for them to
hear that they're in their own world. So I get down to where I'm quite close
to their ear. And my yeah, go ahead, just keep breathing. You're
in great. I'm in an encouraging, gentling position relative to them.
Yeah. To just help them climb this mountain, which feels like a big mountain
as you're going into a traumatic experience like that.
The first thing that I would say is, if you haven't had this experience for
yourself, you're going to have a hard time facilitating it for others.
I was brought into this through my own golfing experience, through what was
called rebirthing in those days. It's not called holotropic breathing.
God knows what it's called now. It comes up every 20 years with a new name.
But through breath work, through deep touch, you can get to these experiences and I was
so grateful for having been brought to those experiences myself.
My mother was drugged when I was born.
I lived in a fog for most of my own life until I came across that.
My own birth trauma, but my own birth experience was one of one I was being born and two I was
drugged because if your mother was drugged, you were drugged and that that had ramifications
into how I thought, how I came into new experiences, levels of fear and all of that and I just felt
so liberated by having had that that I wanted to give that kind of experience to other people.
But I never push it, it comes, but it doesn't come.
I hate it when somebody comes in and we're going to get emotional release of you into
your drawing, probably your jaw muscles or something like that, it's like no, not going
there like that, it has to arise organically and then I'm right there with them.
But yeah, you were worth tend to be soothing and my hands tend to be soothing during that kind
of thing.
And this is a real now, but for you with that, you talked about that, having that revelation
of, oh, my mother was drugged, can you talk about that just process for a second?
There's sounds like the sort of intellectual remembrance, right?
And we just talked about, oh, this was intellectual of all, I was, I was, this guy invited me
down to New Orleans and set me up with a practice, it was very early on in my career.
We're talking about 1977 or 1978 now.
And so I was trading rebirthing sessions with him, which really should be called re-breathing,
they were deep, deep breathing sessions.
And so I was doing all this for Ralphay or whatever you did for the, for the raw thing that
I was doing.
And so we were out on his farm north of Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans.
And so he lay me down on the sped and I started breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing.
And after a while you space out.
And after a while you space out and the, so I was kind of coming back.
I was in this very dreamy place, the drugged out place, as it turned out later.
But anyway, I was just in this dreamy place realizing, oh, I'm still in this session.
I must have gone asleep for a while.
Yeah.
This is all so pleasant and so pink and like clouds and just if only they weren't doing
something awful with a pig on the next farm because I could hear this, this screaming,
like a pig being slaughtered and it must have been over on the next farm and it was bothering
my beautiful reverie that I was having in this kind of dreamy cloudy place.
And slowly I came back more into consciousness and more into consciousness and the more
into consciousness I came, the closer the screaming seemed to come.
And then suddenly my two characters fused and I realized it was me that was screaming
my bloody head off and that I was also in this dreamy place.
And so finally these two things that had been this, in your adult self was screaming at
this point or you were having this.
My body was screaming at this point.
Yeah.
Your current body.
I was a stuck pig.
Yeah.
I was screaming and yet I was dissociated.
Another part of me was dissociated my speaking mind.
I guess you'd call it my formulatory center was was thinking was off in this cloud land
and thinking oh, what a pleasant thing and I wonder if I've been asleep and I wonder
what the guy thinks is beside me because I was supposed to be paying attention.
Actually, he's sitting with me with his mouth very close to my ear saying you're doing
fine but I wasn't even hearing it because I was yeah, I was off somewhere else but when
those two came together, when suddenly my screaming body and my floating mind came together
at that moment I was thrown back to my birth and I realized here I am being born normally
virtually and at the same time I'm drugged to the girls because my mom had a spinal
yeah and that goes through to the baby and I just feel I got a clarity out of that that
I didn't have before and that I've had ever since that brought two halves of me together
that hadn't been brought together for me since I'd been born.
Yeah.
That's a situation and lots of people who were born in the 50s had that kind of situation
the mom was drugged in one way or the other to have the birth and I'm so glad that I got
that together but I wouldn't arrive there with any kind of intellectual process.
Right.
Right.
Do you just think about levels of consciousness as a practitioner or two do you have any kind
of do you try to keep your clients awake if they fall asleep I mean maybe depends on what
kind of work you're doing.
It absolutely depends on the kind of thing it's doing.
The ones that I don't like to fall asleep are the ones that need they just need a level
of stimulation all the time or they don't feel they're alive and so I'm digging into
their back so they think oh yeah well now I'm getting enough stimulation and they actually
go to sleep these are the type of business people yeah sometimes and I don't like that
no it's not my job to give you a rest simply by digging on you enough so that you're right
speaking of maybe re-experiencing some traumas right and other times going to sleep is
a representation of dropping into that parasympathetic side and I will sit very quietly and sit with
them while they're sleeping because that sleep is very very restorative sleep but generally
speaking people are so stimmed in this society that we live in overstimmed that I've got
these people coming to me saying I hear you do deep work just go ahead get right in there
I'll tell you when to stop it's not my job to break my hands on the reefs of your insensitivity
just because you need a bomb set off under you to feel something go see some young practitioner
who needs the practice I'm very skilled with my hands and I want to work on those people
who are actually ready to do some work not somebody who just needs to be beat up so
they can feel that and I do want to we started this conversation talking about the marriage
between movement and hands-on therapy and then we've ended up in this discussion which
is very much a hands-on therapy thing and I hope that the people who are doing personal
training that are doing movement are listening to this because the trauma exists in those
people and not a lot of those people have any kind of training in dealing with a traumatic
event and they don't set themselves up for that kind of healing and again I think over
the next 50 years you're going to see movement in manual therapy and psychology were body
centered psychology yeah you spoke about Hukami and and Peter Levine all of those things
are going to come together in a unified field it's gonna take a while but we're headed
towards that and as I say I call it spatial medicine but who knows what it will actually
be called yeah but it's how does the body operate in space how do you develop into space
and those kinds of traumatic events make you retract from life somehow yeah you retract
you reverse you pull back whatever words you want to use for and that retraction becomes
a permanent part of the body structure it becomes a permanent part of the psychic structure
because I don't think the body structure and the psychic structure are any different from
each other they're the same expression and getting to that and getting to that to be open
has certainly been more important to me than whether I got my leg straight or my ankle in
the right position between dorsal flexion and plantar flexion all of those things all
those biomechanical things are of interest to me but they're they don't hold a candle to this
kind of healing yeah whatever that was 15 minutes ago the other question I had
before we went off on the track that we did I'm glad we did but is I do notice or at some
point you had mentioned you know the body and then the brain as a way of speaking but of course
we don't say like the body and the arm right the arm is part of the body in your I don't know how
much for you is that a way of speaking or is there some like well this is really its own deal
in in a significant way that and where is where does consciousness reside I think consciousness
is a distributed phenomenon throughout the body that is collated by the brain collated collated
and delivered to we're only just this is the century in which we are examining this thing of
consciousness we didn't examine it because it's with subjective and science was objective so we
had to look at an object outside the observer we are now studying the observer itself so I can
imagine objective experience
experiences. Sure. Yeah, sure. John Lily was one of the first people to do that. And speaking
of John the way, I'm a child of the 60s. I took enough drugs in the 60s so that I have a sense
of a psyche separate from my body. I was brought up in mostly Christianish religions or at least
the Skyguards religions, which suggests that you have a soul separate from your body. So I was
imbued with that in my childhood education. But I don't know what it is. If I put out a theory
in my book, which is just the theories that your emotions are actually held in the fluids of your
body, that your belief systems are held in the facial system of the whole body. And that time
is measured by your nervous system, that your nervous system is your body's clock. And therefore,
in real time, your consciousness expresses itself through your nervous system. But it's actually
welling up from the whole chemistry of your circulatory system and of your blood,
your cerebral spinal fluid, your lymph, that's all your emotions are in that fluid. I mean, think
of how many emotions are fluid events, your face drains with fear or flushes with embarrassment
or you're so scared, you're going to piss yourself. There's just lots of fluids involved with emotions.
My work with the fascia and trying to change people at deep levels, that seems to be down at the
belief system level about one self. But the nervous system is collating things second by second,
well fraction of a second by fraction of a second. And a film is 24 photographs a second,
but you perceive it as movement. Television is 30 frames a second, but you perceive it as
continuous movement because your brain doesn't collate that fast. So you keep those
steps of photographs and you turn them into a smooth movement. That's the way our perception
works. I have no idea what's going to happen when I die. I actually am fairly radical. Atheist,
I think I'm just going to disintegrate when I die. And whatever consciousness I have,
we'll go back into the soup of, into the newest fear as I hard to shut down, I would call it.
But maybe not. Maybe something will survive and I get reincarnated as a bug or another person
or something. I had no idea. So it's easy to, you know, our culture postulate this thing,
well I have a mind and I have a body. But that was a deal that Descartes made with the church
back in the 1600s so that the body became a soft machine and we think of the body as a soft
machine. Oh, in the mind, oh well that's a god, that's your soul, that's something else.
And it certainly is something that we live in almost that idea. But I don't know whether it's
true or not. Yeah. Iderolf was a monist that your consciousness and your body and your soul
are all the same thing. They're just different levels of manifestation of the same thing.
That's certainly where I'd like to come out. But who knows what the research will go. Can
you put a disembodied brain in the right bath and have it operate as a consciousness? If it did,
I think it would be a very different kind of consciousness than the consciousness that we have
in an actual body that does things. I feel my consciousness in my hands a great deal. That's
because I've been using my hands on a guitar and on people's bodies for low these many years.
I just read a book called The Soul of the Octopus, which is about octopus intelligence.
And octopi have been, you know, dolphins have been separated from our intelligence from what,
30 million years or 40 million years. We've gone our separate ways to develop our intelligence
since they went back to the ocean. But octopi has been more than a billion years that they've
been developing their kind of intelligence and we've been developing our kind of intelligence.
Their tentacles are definitely part of their mind. Their tentacles will, if you cut off a tentacle,
it will go on operating intelligently for quite some time because the tentacle will,
because the sensors and the tentacles are much more independent from their central nervous system.
If you cut off our arm, it doesn't do much. Yeah. I have to you cut it off.
And so we have these images of the brain floating in a, you know, chemical soup and
living on after us or something like that. I don't think that's going to be, I think it would be
a very different kind of consciousness if it were just a brain floating somewhere.
Lots of sci-fi. Yeah, lots of sci-fi things. And I'm speculating. I love
the body for the same reason that I roughed it. I can get my hands on it. Yeah.
And the psyche is a very interesting thing. And I play with my own psyche and you know,
I engage with my wife and with other people on the level of the psyche as well as the body. But
in therapy, I'm very glad to have something that I can put my hands on that's concrete. Yeah.
And that shows itself. And it seems a good metaphor. And can we maybe just write on the likes of
that, to talk about, I had a couple of people asking, I'm definitely curious about your,
your self-care, your routine, including do you have any, what we think of as like a mindfulness
practice, what, you know, you being on the front edge of so much of, I don't know,
in maybe intelligent movement therapy. You know, how do you digest that?
I keep trying different things. Liam, I, until I was 50, I kind of had the attitude that if I
get the urge to exercise, I just lie down for a while and it goes away. And at about 50,
that stopped working. And besides at about that time, anatomy trained started getting the interest
of movement people. And I needed to know more about this simply on a professional level.
So when you say it stopped working, you mean because they were knocking at your door because
you were like, no, no, no, because I'm 50 and I was getting tired and my sort of natural,
boundless energy was not enough to keep me healthy anymore. I needed more movement.
Also, computers took over our lives when I was about 50.
About the year 2000, when I was 50, it was all of a sudden we were in front of the screens
so much of the time. And I'm no different from anybody else on that. Yeah.
So yes, I have a mindfulness practice. I have practiced Tai Chi, I practiced Iqiro, I practiced
calisthenics. I've gone into the gym, but I actually don't like gyms very much this. And then
a few years ago, I got a guy who started weight training with bits of iron. And I loved his weight
training, but it was moving at Tai Chi speeds. And it was not always moving on the same vectors.
And he was a trainer. He was a trainer for you. He was a trainer for me. And he'd been in the
business for 40 years. And I needed somebody who could talk to my intellect at the same time
that he was training my muscles. And I'm not going to go in there with Chad and do, you know, 50,
50 reps of setups or pushups or something. Godspeed Chad. Yeah, Godspeed Chad.
And Chad's great for the people that Chad's great for. But it has to engage my mind and my spirit
at the same time. And I find myself in hotels a lot. And I go down and mindlessly get on the
treadmill with my earbuds in like everybody else sometimes just to get some of my heart moving
because you don't get much of a chance when you're traveling and it's in hotels and things
like that. So I do what I can. But right now, I'm out here in Arizona. I'm doing some Plotty
sessions while I'm out here. And when I get home, I'm going to get a yoga teacher and do that.
It's a little bit like people ask me, what are the best shoes? And I say the shoes that you change.
So I change my shoes four times a day if I can just keep my feet. I can't, I live in Maine. I
can't go barefoot all the time. But by constantly changing my shoes, I'm changing the stimulus that
is coming in. And by constantly changing my exercise routine, I'm changing what's coming in.
But I'm going to have to end this now. Because I have to work. But I would say the thing that you
really love is the thing that's the best preparation for you. So I really love sailing. That is one
of the best things that I do for my body is get out there because I'm listening close. I'm listening
far away. I'm feeling the boat. I'm watching the sales. I'm watching the weather. It is the time
when I feel the most alive and I come off. I can be in a grumpy mood or I can have body aches and
pains. If I get on my boat and especially if I can find a good stiff wind and lay myself out
with that machine for dancing between the wind and the water, that restores my soul. And I'm not
saying that that's right. I'm just saying find the thing that really, really grabs you by the body
and by this all and follow that thing. Yeah. Do you have time for one more quick question?
Here we go. This is thank you. Any advice for like energetically sensitive people either doing
bodywork or movement? And this is like I took Ayahuasca and now I can't walk into a grocery store
because there's too much. I mean that would be a very extreme case. But yeah, like transference
that feeling of I work with people and then I'm drained. I'm just curious you're sort of
well going back to our earlier conversation. People who have just been through a traumatic release
shouldn't be going to a bridge party, you know. Because that's up at this level of social talk and
you're not going to be in a space to do that. And if you're going to take alkaloids like Ayahuasca, you
have to be prepared that you're going to be shaken to the roots. Some people aren't. Some people are.
Yeah. And so people get into states, I would call those half finished states because hopefully,
when you come down from these states, you might have a refractory period where you really don't want
to go to a bridge party and need to go home and have a bath and go in. But really, hopefully,
within a couple of days or a week, depending on the severity of the thing that you've gone through,
that you're back to where you can also function in normal reality and get into a grocery store
without being drawn off into other worlds. And other people's all the noises and all the
that hits you in a grocery store. Yeah. Some people are just that sensitive anyway.
They're yeah, exactly autistic or a lot of them expect to be drawn to bodywork and you know,
are doing this kind of work. Some people may be very successful. You have to manage your own life
in that kind of way. I like to be able to function in the everyday world as well as to be able
to function in some of these spiritual or psychological out there states. But I don't want to be there
all the time. And so again, if you're very sensitive that way, can you arrange your life so
somebody else does your grocery shopping for you in return for the wonderful session that you're
going to give them because you're such a sensitive body worker? And there are all kinds of ways that
people arrange their their lives and finding a fit between your life and your inner workings.
That's a job for all of us, isn't it? Yeah. And that's a good note to end on as any. Thank you so
much. Any particular projects you want people to know about just as we're on our way out. You have
so much. Well, we're here at the dissection that I will talk about for anybody worker or movement
worker. I would recommend I don't care whether you come to ours or not. There are Gilheadly
and other people do really wonderful dissection courses and just get yourself to one and see
for yourself. That's about all night. Yes, it really does invade your head. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I didn't say that yesterday, but watching your dreams is an important part. But
we at anatomy trains are trying to build a kind of trunk of what I was talking about earlier,
which is a common understanding of movement and bodywork and then we're building these branches
for people who are interested in yoga or more interested in Pilates or more interested in personal
training, exercise, extreme sports. So we're building those things. So I just hope that people will
watch what we're doing and find something that suits them. Great. And I'll link to it for sure.
Okay, on behalf of everyone listening, yeah, we really enjoyed this. Thank you so much. It's a
pleasure to talk to you, Liam. Okay, dear friends, there was episode 18 of The Body Wake with our
returning guest. Tom Myers thinks again, just publicly and on air to Tom for his time. I think he's,
I have been lucky, really lucky to have some like amazing teachers in my life who are also,
I feel like really generous with their time and just with chatting and yeah, sharing what they
have amassed over the years. So thank you. And thanks to all of you for tuning in, you can
can just head out to this head out, head up, go over to the show notes at thebodyawake.com and
click on this episode, the links in this show. Um, besides the couple I'd mentioned just to reiterate,
I will link to the, um, to the invite 16 event bright thing where you can, you know, buy the,
the course if you want in Seattle, uh, the embodied anatomy, uh, that I talked about a little bit
in the intro. So you can read a pretty thorough description there. And I can't remember if I
intro said this in the intro or not. So I'll just say it now that I'm, I'm co-teaching that class with
a really amazing guy, really great practitioner, one of the smartest people I know. So, um, we're really,
we're a really, really good team. It, I will just say that subjectively on my end, it really feels
that way. Um, like I'm really excited to be co-teaching with Michael Ham in Seattle. So that'll,
that'll be in the show notes as well. And until next time, not sure which, uh, interview will be our,
our next show, but whenever episode 19 is, look forward to it and talk to you then any point and
always it's really, I'll just say this because it's true. Even though I've said it the last few
shows, it's still true. It's so nice to hear from, from you, uh, people writing in
[email protected]
or you can, uh, use, go to the contact. It's probably just backslash contact, um, at the body,
bodywake.com fill out that form. And yeah, really, um, great to be hearing from some of you and just
some of you have questions or just sharing your, your stories and where you're at. And I don't know,
just like be sort of like a cocktail party, you know, you're in a room and just getting walking
around being like, hey, you know, I'm Liam and what's your name? What do you do? I've had a couple
of those kinds of introductions and, and those are great. Just nice to connect with our, with, um,
probably, you know, one of many, many, many, but, uh, to me, a very important, um, tribe, sort of,
whatever we would, however we would define ourselves, we'd probably rather not, but sort of mindful
movement, you know, being really into the body, but knowing that it's not just about the, the body
in a sort of dry, panantic way. Is that the right word? Anyway, whatever note we're ending on,
blood blessings from Montana. Good to be back here. Such a great state. And, uh, yeah, talk to you
soon. Adios.
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