Healing with Attachment Therapy, Somatic Techniques and CBT with Gillian O'Shea Brown (Part 2)

The more that we help ourselves in our own way, become more able to feel those little shifts in our physiology, and the more that we have some resources and tools to help regain that vagal control of our physiology, then the more efficient we can get back to compassion. That's the point, and that's the same point like in a performance or as a surgeon. It's not that we're going to stop these bodily reactions to threat and challenge from occurring.

It's not that. It's that we're going to change how we relate to ourselves and others and the world when those threat reactions occur because we notice them. We recognize them, and then we can meet our body where it is and come back into our own sense of connection.

Hi, welcome to another episode of the Healing Podcast. This is the place where you learn and get inspired to heal in, to achieve higher levels of satisfaction in every area of your life. I am Karen, milling your host, and I believe that what we resist, persist, and that we cannot change what we don't face.

And it was finally when I accepted this reality and invested time, energies, and money into myself in professional support that my life was completely transformed. And now I'm on a mission to demystify this process for you to inspire you to do this work yourself. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and thank you so much for listening.

Today I am super excited to be talking to you about healing or improving our behavior, our personal connections to our friends, family, co-workers, our children, or increasing or improving our performance at work, whether it's presenting public speaking or operating with polyvagal theory, we are going to understand what it is, how it works, why it works. And I am super excited to bring to you an expert in this field, Michael Allison, is a performance coach who trained and got certified in polyvagal theory by the very creators of polyvagal theory, Dr. Stephen Forges at the Polyvagal Institute.

Michael started his career coaching one-on-one, all kinds of performers, athletes, artistic performers, executives, public speakers. And now he's training all kinds of coaches, therapists, psychologists, on polyvagal theory with his unique and one-of-the-kind approach and adaptation of the polyvagal theory, two resilience and performance called the play song. As I mentioned, he's still an instructor at the Polyvagal Institute and he's also launching his on the ground, polyvagal wellness and performance center in Santa Barbara, California, two host life and life-streamed workshops, retreats, conferences, all polyvagal theory to provide experiential training, lifestyle and certification programs, two coaches, therapists, leaders, indicators and organizations around the world.

You can find Michael Allison on his website at www. playsong. com and the Polyvagal Institute.

And if you're a coach or a therapist, you can train with him, through his approach or the Polyvagal Institute. And ask my audience, you can get inspired to do this work with a polyvagal informed coach. Welcome to the Healing Podcast, Michael.

Thank you for having me and for sharing all of that. Yes, I met Michael when I reached out to the Polyvagal Institute in search for a speaker and he came extremely highly recommended as an expert, as an instructor, and as a very eloquent speaker. And then we did assume we connected and it was such a nice connection when we were sharing our struggles, racing our two teenage daughters and how difficult it is.

And I was really excited about this recording and talking about how we can be more aware of our nervous system and how we react as we connect and perform in every area of our life. But before we get deep and heavy on Polyvagal theory, would you mind sharing with my audience a bit of your background in becoming a performance coach and especially working with Polyvagal theory? Yeah, so thank you for having me on here too and giving the audience an opportunity to learn a little bit about Polyvagal theory and specifically applying it to managing their own physiology in ways that help align with their intentions, align with how they really want to show up for those they care about most, which is really what it's all about.

So I have owned a health center, a personal training facility since 1999 here in Santa Barbara, California. And doing a lot of one-on-one training and coaching with all different ages, as you've mentioned, and different athletic backgrounds and general population or injury recovery, all kinds of different things. But as I was doing more and more of that, what it really came down to was helping people make changes in their habits, changes in their behaviors that supported whatever their goals were, whether it was to be more capable of playing with their children or whether it was to perform better in their sport.

And so that worked up to a certain extent, like the typical behavior science and habit change and all of those things about how do you reinforce a new habit, how do you interrupt an old habit and all these things? So that's what I started studying more than 10 years ago was habit science. And like I said, it didn't really work for those really entrenched patterns or the patterns that really now that I understand polyvagal theory were really ways that you were trying to help soothe your body or calm your physiology to bring yourself back into a sense of safety and ease and connection.

And so creating habits and breaking and interrupting patterns just through reward and punishment, all that none of that, that doesn't work for that. And so I stumbled upon polyvagal theory and it just made sense of everything. And it made sense of my own bodily reactions to very challenging events in my own life.

And then it made sense really of how I was intuitively searching for a path back to feeling safe, back to feeling at ease in my body, back to feeling like it was okay to connect with the world and with others and to really be accessible in this world. And so I began just sort of peppering polyvagal theory and the core principles into training with the people I was working with. And then I had an opportunity to work with a professional athlete.

And I needed to sort of really create it into a paradigm and into a methodology that was really applicable specifically for performance. And that's what led me to polyvagal institute. I'd put together this sort of program and methodology shared it with the institute, shared it with Dr.

Porgis. And it aligned really, really well. And they weren't in that realm.

That wasn't one of their pathways that they even sort of recognized how this was applicable to performance and how it was applicable to wellness and maintaining health and resilience, not necessarily just healing. Even though to me they're all the same. The body that's able to heal is a body that also is healthy and is a body that is resilient and is a body that can perform.

So that's sort of how I came to you is through that path. It's amazing. So most of my episodes are on top down approaches.

So some of them you mentioned sort of having creation, but a lot of what I focus on are sort of evidence-based top-down approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy and EMDR or somebody experiencing when is proven everything's based to work 70% of the time where this are my thoughts. We suffer because of our thoughts. We create anxiety because of our thoughts.

And so let's challenge and tackle them and how true are they? And let's see where they came from and sort of heal those negative beliefs that we have about ourselves. So when I was reading about Holy Vagal Theory and I was hearing that it does not start with our thoughts.

It is not in your head and you have that on your website like this is not in your head. I thought that was fascinating because I had never heard that before. I'd been trained and certified on cognitive behavioral therapy and that's one of the main tools I help my clients.

But when he said what do you mean he's not in your head? And then I deeper what do you mean he's not in your head? Yeah well let's be clear thoughts do impact your physiology right.

So specific thoughts top-down mechanisms can certainly change your heart rate, change your breathing, change what we term anxiety right. But what I'm saying is it's not all in your head is that often what starts in the body then emerges. In two thoughts.

The biology is actually a neural platform for different thoughts, different emotions. And my methodology is when the thoughts really get spinning in a negative circle or a self-survival circle. And then the body is in that same loop wherever it started.

My approach is let's let's go into the body and see if we can do some more what you would call bottom-up strategies. Along with top-down strategies I'm not negating top-down strategies at all. I'm just saying when the body gets going let's let's apply some body strategies.

And then let's see what thoughts might emerge. Let's sort of put the attention away from changing a thought. Take the attention away from repressing or masking or making up a new thought.

And let's just bring the attention into what can I do in my body or what can I do in a relationship right. Where can I put my attention to receive more warmth and welcome from another and then see what happens to the quote anxiety. Would you know that you know both approaches and are heavy on the polyvagal side.

Would you start with a body because it starts with a sensation right it starts that's what I meant that it doesn't start with a thought. It starts with a bodily reaction. It's stored trauma or a stored negative event that we can recall what happened but we feel that tension that trigger that stress.

So start with a body. Yeah my big line that I say over and over again is meet the body where it is. Meet the body where it is.

And so yes I would say we start there. And yet at the same time for those who have been sort of chronically disrupted and are more in a threat oriented physiology. The way to kind of deal with that is to often detach from the body.

So the capacity to meet the body or to even key into how the body is feeling is a challenge. Could be very difficult right. Well I would start by something that we're never aware of.

I mean we have never in all of our studies. How are you feeling in your body? I mean that it's so unheard of right.

And so you probably been hearing what was really cool to me about polyvagal theory is it's saying that that bodily feeling, how you're feeling in your body. It's more than just oh it feels good or it feels oh I feel I feel restless. It's more than that.

It's actually a reflection of how your autonomic nervous system is regulating your internal bodily systems, your organs. Whether or not it's putting resources toward recovery and health and relating to others or it's feeling under threat. Danger and it's mobilizing resources to protect or to defend or to fight or to escape or if it's feeling really overwhelmed or there's no more metabolic resource left.

It's conserving what's left. It's slowing down everything and it's essentially feigning death or wanting to hide. And that that so that bodily feeling not only is also reflecting what's going on internally at the same time it's biasing how you move through the world.

It's influencing every aspect of the information you're taking in. It's influencing how you're broadcasting where how you feel to the world which then is a feedback loop. Now you're getting different cues back from others.

So that connecting with your bodily feeling, meeting your body where it is, that awareness is the beginning to noticing am I in a physiology that is supporting my own health and how I'm relating to others in the world or is it interrupting that and it's changing not only my health, it's changing what I'm broadcasting to the world and it's influencing how I'm receiving everything in the world which changes everything. It's huge. So it's increasing and understanding that awareness of where we are at a specific time.

So what is Holy Vagal Theory? Most of my audience have no idea of what they're talking about. We could go for a few hours on what it is.

So it was developed by Dr. Stephen Porgis. It's important to give him the recognition because he was studying the nervous system for about 38 years or more.

But the usable pieces of it from what we're talking about today are that what we just sort of talked about. How our physiology is being regulated moment to moment to moment, by our autonomic nervous system biases how we experience the world. It also influences what thoughts arise, what emotions emerge, what beliefs are mood, our attitude.

It's sort of the ground floor. How our physiology is in this moment and not only that but we're always subconsciously scanning. And what are those three areas of nervous system state?

Like the. Yeah. So there's three primary areas.

There's three primary neural platforms. And the first is the oldest, most ancient, and that was called the dorsal vagal system. I don't usually use the words when I teach it because it's a new language.

But the dorsal vagal system is when we're in a state of ease, it's regulating the organs below our diaphragm. So it's the second it's the second branch of the Vegas. It's the most ancient branch of the Vegas.

But when we're in an okay state, it's doing its job. It's it's regulating the organs below the diaphragm. But when we're in a state of defense or overwhelmed, it's our last stitch effort to survive.

That's that shutting down response. So it also has fibers that go to the heart and it can start to shut the heart down. Start shutting things down, turning off and really conserving what energy we have left to hunker down.

Is it associated with the fawn or the freeze response? Like if you're under attack, some people fight and some people just like freeze. Yeah.

So let's go back. So let's say when there's a challenge, the first line of defense is the second neural platform, which is the sympathetic nervous system and that gets a bad rap because we think of it as fight or flight. Like we think of it in it sort of a defensive reactive.

But but sympathetic when contained with this ventral branch is play. It's dance. It's engagement.

Like what we're having. We have some sympathetic activation, but we feel basically safe with each other. So we we contain that sympathetic activation and its play.

It's engagement. It's curiosity. It's exploration.

Okay. So but we'll go back. And these performance do, right?

And it's for athletes use. They need or surgeons there. They need that activation.

I got to perform. Okay. Yes.

While maintaining ventral vagal control, while they still feel basically grounded, connected, safe within their comfort zone, but alert engaged. Absolutely. That's a combination of this ventral vagal with this sympathetic.

Okay. But now say we're say there's more challenge coming at us. There's more cues.

So I'm a surgeon. I'm in there and all of a sudden the patient's heart rate decels. That's a giant cue of threat.

Risk. All of a sudden something breaks or a nurse really reacts to that. Somebody else reacts to that.

Another cue of danger. So all of a sudden now you've got more of these cues of risk and uncertainty. Danger coming at you.

And if that becomes enough, now you get highly mobilized. And you start losing a little bit of that ventral vagal control. And now you might experience that as I'm trembling or my heart's racing.

I'm losing control. My breathing. All of a sudden I have a lot of muscle tension.

Maybe their jaw is extremely tight. And then cognitively they lose the ability to know exactly what they want to do or they they aren't able to control what they know they can do. And they've done a million times.

All of a sudden it's just not working. That isn't a conscious thinking brain decision. That is the nervous system responding to those cues of uncertainty and risk.

And the body is feeling under threat. Now let's just keep going. So I notice I'm not able to do what I'm normally to do.

The patient's heart rate keeps desaling. All of a sudden I can't even move. That's that freeze response.

I'm stuck. So what that really technically is, is that still some activation. But now the dorsal branch has come in.

And so now you have this hybrid of sympathetic and dorsal. You've lost this ventral connection of safety and you've got this. And now you're in this sympathetic and dorsal blended state of freeze.

That's really what freeze is. And now maybe somebody comes and puts their hand on your shoulder. Or you sort of notice somebody look at you and through the eyes you get a sense of connection.

You're not alone. And now maybe there's enough safety and connection that you start to mobilize again. And you get through it.

Right. You start to be able to breathe again. You start to be able to connect to the ground.

And you can come back into enough. I'm okay. Which is really technically the ventral vagal fibers again slowing down the heart.

Changing your breathing, changing your internal systems to hopefully support you successfully doing what you know how to do. Okay. So the three organizing principles of polyvegal theory, the first core regulation.

That's what you do when you're freaking out. Or you freeze. You try to correlate with another human being and find that connection.

Or am I mixing this up? Yeah, it's not typically described as the first principle, but it is one of the co-regulation. We'll just stick with that since we're there.

So co-regulation is that the cues that we're sending back and forth are really, really powerful. Okay. And those cues specifically are right here in our interaction.

It's the facial expressions. It's our tone of voice and the modulations and intonation in our voice. It's the movements of our head.

Like you're nodding. Not sending me cues that yeah, we're with each other. Right.

So it's the movements of our head. It's our posture, gestures. It's also the way we're breathing.

All of that we're picking up on. And co-regulation is that we're both sort of in a safe place together. And we're helping each other feel more safe and connected.

That we're actually okay. Like a mother holding a baby. Right.

And this would help that surgeon when he's in that state. It absolutely could. Yes.

It could. And his co-workers to know that okay, if someone is in a freeze response, connect, touch him. Yeah.

So just being alongside them. Just to keep parenting now. Yeah.

And then exactly. So again, there's a couple things to point out there in parenting or in that. It's not a conscious thinking brain decision to go into a freeze response or to go into a highly mobilized, aggressive response.

That's not we're not choosing to do that consciously. It's not aligning with our intention. We want to be calm.

We want to be connecting. We want to perform our surgery. But for whatever reason or reasons, many we won't even know all of the cues.

But what we can recognize is when we begin to shift into those different threat-oriented physiological states. That's really what we're trying to get to us. So and then when we see our children and we see them throwing a temper tantrum or completely like just not even listening to something we're saying.

And they're just completely shutting down. Again, that is information and that behavior. And it's not easy to do, but especially as parents.

But if we can in that moment, if we can sort of peel away and look beneath the behavior and see their little body as feeling overwhelmed or feeling this is really uncertain and dangerous. Right. Then we can get away from the labels.

We can get away from the evaluation of the behavior. And then we can come alongside. No way.

In my approach is what else could be true, right? Like they are asking a temper tantrum. And there being this respectful and crazy label.

We could have that compassion in us to be like what else is happening? They must have had a really hard day. They must feel that rejection from that friend.

They must. And what you're saying too is like also look at what's happening to their nervous system. What's happening to their physiology?

They're having a fight response or a freeze response or a and connect with them. If you can look at them. You're saying you're bringing up a point because you said the word compassion.

You said the word compassion. Okay. So here's here's how I break down compassion.

And I think it's really important as parents. The more that we are in touch with and really care for someone, the more that the way they are reacting to the world, to whatever is going on, the more that they feel under threat, the more that they're struggling and suffering and hurting. So when we look there and we see that they're under threat, they're hurting, the more empathy we have in that moment, the more that connected we are to them.

So now what that means is now we feel what they're feeling. Like that's what happens. And when we feel what they're feeling physiologically, we've shifted.

We're not actually in our safe space. We're actually now hurting along with them. We're suffering with them.

Okay. So before we can get to compassion, we actually have to get ourselves back to safety, get ourselves back in that ventral vagal place of I'm okay. And now I can be with you as you're hurting.

Otherwise, if I stay locked in my own threat response, which is my empathy, I'm suffering with you. And now you are picking up on my suffering. And now we're going to get away with murder.

And you're going to keep hurting them more indirectly. Again, I'm giving them what they say they want because you're feeling their pain, but not what they need as a parent. I think that happens to me.

I could happen too. So we have to actually move from empathy and that physiology to compassion, which is a different physiology. And it's not static.

It moves back and forth. But why that empathy is really important is we have to understand what they're feeling. We just can't get locked there.

So that's that movement. Also, they if we don't have that initial empathic feeling, their physiology doesn't really trust that we get them. You kind of see what's happening.

So like they're hurting, they're overreacting. That initial trigger, now we feel that same empathic response. But if we can then come back into compassion, they trust that we got what they were experiencing, but yet we're now with them.

We're not going to we're with them. We're a teammate. We're alongside them.

And again, that's not easy. But that's sort of that's sort of the goal. No.

And in one of the examples that I'm coming with as we talked, my team is they want to have unlimited social media and scrolling through their their phone. And I'm like eight hours on Snapchat. It's not you're not you're in college.

You should be studying. You should be doing all this things. Same with my high schooler.

And they'll like you don't understand. That's how we communicate with our friends. And so I'm like, you know, with all my friends around the world, that's where I live.

If I'm not connected and they cry, they have said, I extremely empathetic. Then I feel their pain. I'm like, okay, that's fine.

Let's just have them maybe. My husband's like, no, we got to cut it down to two hours. And that's our that's how I need to step out of that empathy and go to confession where I'm like, I know it's hard.

And it's not healthy for you. Right. And that that amount of time to get back to that compassion, it might take you hours.

It might take you but but the more that the more that we help ourselves in our own way become more able to feel those little shifts in our physiology and the more that we have some resources and tools to help regain that vagal control of our physiology, then the more efficient we can get back to compassion. That's the point. And that's the same point like in a performance or as a surgeon, it's not that we're going to stop these bodily reactions to threat and challenge from occurring.

It's not that. It's that we're going to change how we relate to ourselves and others and the world when those threat reactions occur because we we notice them. We recognize them and then we can meet our body where it is and come back into our own sense of connection such that we can keep navigating the world.

It's not that we're going to stop getting reactions. That's we're wired for that. That's that's part of being human.

Okay. No, I love I love when you say that that it's not feeling bad or guilty or whole here, I'm freaking out. No, except that acknowledge it, increase awareness and start to calm down.

So when someone's working with you or a polyvegling form coach, what happens? Do we learn all the techniques on how to regulate our name, our vagus nerve and how to regulate our nervous system? Yeah, so it's yes and so to me the first key piece is that we just recognize what you and I talked about that we have these reactions that are happening all of time, moment to moment to moment and how that biases how we're experiencing the world in each other.

That's really foundational, right? And then second to that, it's that how do I relate to that in myself and others? And then it's building some resources and strategies and so there's a number of those one, you know, as awareness is first just becoming really aware of those subtle and drastic changes in your physiology.

I feel like I'm fighting. I feel like I'm free. I feel like I'm collapsed.

Yeah, that and then also what are the bodily attributes that tell you that? So is it the way my heart is racing? Is it is it the way I'm breathing?

Is it some different muscle tension in different places? Is it I feel it in my jaw? Is it I feel changes in my eyes?

So it's becoming not only aware broadly of like I feel really angry. It's like, okay, I feel really angry, but what is it that in my physiology that is kind of underneath that? It's such a rare concept that it needs to be brought like it needs to be broadcast.

Yeah, because then what happens there is then you have so like let's just say I noticed when I'm angry that my jaw is really really tight my eyes are clenched. So what I can actually do in that moment is soften my jaw. Kind of deliberately relax my eyes.

I also noticed that my heart is racing and my breathing is shallow so I slow down my breath. So I do some things in my physiology in that moment which then gives me an opportunity because it slows things down just enough. It gives me an opportunity to either step out of what's escalating.

Right? Before I do something or say something I will regret. Yes.

Again, I do this all the time and I do this all the time and I still blow it because I'm human. That's the other part of this is like look we are all human and we're all we are all being triggered by safety and threat and it's back and forth and there's all these changes and that takes away that shame and the blame and the guilt. It doesn't make excuses.

That's not what I'm saying but it means okay that happened. How am I going to help my body come back into a enough connection that now I can repair. Repair with myself, repair with the other whatever it is and it also it also takes away that sort of catastrophizing that like just snowballing it into into everything.

Right? Because that superhuman too is it's like things start going you start feeling challenged and you start getting into a physiology that's more threat oriented. It biases what you see here and feel from everything.

So next thing you know it starts spiraling and knowing and sort of helping yourself with this sort of approach. It can it can it can interrupt that. That's really helpful.

And what other techniques are out there so it's a weariness. Yeah so why? Yeah so it's a weariness.

It's attentional control which isn't thinking. Attentional control is like so I'm sitting right here with you and if I started feeling a little unsafe, a little bit too mobilized out my window I can see this oak tree and the leaves just sort of fluttering and the sun kind of fring coming through the clouds. That's really soothing to me so I can put my attention there just for a second or I can see a bird over here and I can start putting my attention on the features around me.

To stay in the person moment. Yeah or that are nurturing to me or that slow things down for me or that calm me. Not I can that way.

Or I could put my attention on you. Right? And I could put my attention on the features that you're sending to me that are warm and welcoming.

Right? Or I could put my attention into my body and just feel myself sitting in my chair feeling those contact points because those are the sort of those are the sort of sensory cues that speak to the nervous system more than the mind because I'm trying again I'm trying to do body-based tools here. Right?

So attentional control which then ties into breathing. Like breathing is really powerful because our breathing immediately changes as we move through those different physiological states. And at the same time we can actually regain control by breathing.

It can be conscious and deliberate and so there are just basic principles as we're breathing in that vagal ventral vagal component that's attached to the sinusoidal atrial note of the heart. Okay? So the pacemaker of the heart.

The that's their cardio inhibitory fibers but they they sort of let go and they allow the heart rate to speed up as we're breathing in. So if we're starting to feel too low of energy or we're starting to kind of go into that freeze response or that shutting down we could deliberately take a more powerful inhale a longer and more powerful than help because that will allow the heart rate to come up. Okay?

Whereas if I'm starting to get really really angry agitated super mobilized or even if I'm playing or engaging but I'm starting to get too loud and too right to like you to get then I could do the opposite and take a long exhale because on the exhale is when the vagal break those cardio inhibitory fibers actually slow the heart down. So if you want to... Okay, so if we want more energy because we are going to perform or we need to we are understanding that we're getting a little down and freeze.

You always have a long inhale but then you do more exhale or break them down more just to get more energy and more... Yes, so so as we breathe in our heart rate goes up and as we breathe out our heart rate slows down. Okay?

So if we want to speed things up and get a little more energy we would make a long in breath with a shorter exhale longer in breath shorter exhale. So it's like we're climbing the mountain. So you're climbing on the end and maybe a little descent and then climbing and so that's going to elevate.

Whereas if I'm too mobilized or I'm aggressive and I want to slow things down I'm going to take a long exhale and just a shorter inhale longer exhale so I'm descending descending the mountain. That makes a lot of sense. I was in a Tony Robbins thing and they're like okay inhale and go...

It's like to get hyper and I'm like why are we doing that? So it's to get hyper to to to get fire up to get excited. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. Yeah and for some of us we some of us sometimes we do, right? Some of us have we move into that sort of shutting down in the face of retin challenge more quickly.

Others of us in the face of challenge we get more mobilized and some of us attack and some of us are really anxious and flea, right? Or some of us do both and then we have moments of that and then we find ourselves every few weeks collapsed in the bedroom, right? That's that physiology that is toggling between highly being sympathetically mobilized but under threat and dorsally shutting down, conserving what's left and it's just we're toggling back and forth and that's a pretty common pattern in our culture that's very demanding, right?

If you look at our culture and the environments we're living in, there's a lot of uncertainty and chaos being thrown at us and in our children and because we're tied into them empathically like we talked about we're getting a lot of that too, right? So there's a lot of there's a lot of those cues that make it tough not to be either mobilized in a threat response or checking out numbing to what's going on. So we have to help ourselves and then we have to help each other.

That's that's what we're getting at is like let's recognize the facts. The facts are there's a lot of there's a lot of chaos and uncertainty and unpredictability and competition and evaluation. All of those are cues of risk to our physiology torner of system.

That's a fact. At the same time there are a lot of warmth and welcome and safe cues in nature and there's a lot of that too. And so that's where that attentional control comes into.

So where am I going to help my own attention go because when I'm paying attention to you, I'm not paying attention to what else is coming in. My nervous system's still picking up on that but not it's more of my resources are directed to you. It's like mental mastery like let's just focus on the things that are going to calm us down and make us feel better.

So great performers and I'm thinking of trauma surgeons who operate at very calm levels in tremendous amounts of stress and surgeons and great moms and CEOs and presenters. They have really mastered nervous system control and activation and ventral vagal control. Yes.

Probably by working with someone like you or genetically predisposed to dealing with understanding their anxiety and the the the excitement but then having their own techniques to have awareness and calm down through various techniques and that's what someone would get. If I work in with someone like you. So that's where you are.

So so now you have a couple of choices. You can practice purposely disrupting your physiology and seeing what you can execute. That's one approach.

That's good. It's good to do. And then you can also practice how do you get vagal control of your physiology efficiently quickly as it's being disrupted.

Right. How do you simulate game day? On that some of the work you do.

That's right. So tell me a bit about play zone. What's the program about?

How does it work? Yeah. So the play zone is more specifically how do you do what we just said?

How do you take all of that uncertainty? The competition, the evaluation and how do you contain that with enough of your own inner resource enough of your interaction with your teammates or your coach or your like in who else is with you so that you can contain that mobilized energy that we're all going to have what we call nerves, right? Oh, I'm nervous or I'm really, really anxious.

Okay. All of that means to me is that your physiology mobilizing resources. It's interrupted homeostasis.

And right now it's mobilizing resources. And so now if we can contain that with what's safe or who's safe, what's comfortable, what's in my control, I can turn that into play. That's the play zone.

So that's the goal. And sometimes you can get there not all the time. And what you do outside of your craft builds the platform for how efficiently you can get into your play zone.

So it's not just having resources and strategies in that competition or in that surgery or in that interaction. It's what are you doing outside of that to prepare your physiology to come into that with a larger threshold before it gets disrupted and with more efficient and effective vagal control. So like that could span out to taking a cold shower every day.

And learning how to be comfortable after that initial reaction. How quick can you regain comfort? That could be doing high intensity interval workout while not losing control of your breathing.

Only nasal breathing the whole time. So there's different sort of things that you don't think of that actually help retrain the physiology to be able to mobilize in calm and mobilize in calm or to get really pretty mobilized without losing control. So it sounds like it's something very customized and specific to each client in each circumstance.

That's right. Amazing. I just think of the core.

The core principles are the same. Basically trying to help you really feel and understand what is homeostasis for you? What is truly a body being in a physiological state that's optimizing your health and your recovery and you're being okay?

What is that actually like for you? That's step one. Then step two is okay.

Now let's deliberately challenge your physiology within your threshold so that we build this resilience, this capacity to be disrupted and regain control, be disrupted and regain control because that is a flexible nervous system. And that's what we need in life. Really, that's what we need.

But we need to first know how we actually feel and what is actual homeostasis feel like and how do we get there? So Michael, if one of my listeners is interested in working with you or one of your coaches, what does it look like? Is it a 30-day program?

Is it a one-year program? It seems like it's a lot of... Yeah, so I have...

I have a coaching program that is specifically for coaches. And that's executive coaches, health coaches, I've had surgeons go through that. I have psychologists go through that.

I mean, it's somatic practitioners. It's very, again, it's because it's learning the core principles. And then it's how do you then apply it in your discipline?

Okay, so that is a... that is an eight-week sort of deep dive. And it's a hybrid of online modules with videos and some written materials.

And then we meet every other week for eight weeks for an hour and a half as a group all on Zoom. And there have been about 125 coaches all over the world that have already gone through that. And then some of those coaches are mentors throughout the program for the new coach is coming in.

So that is the best option because that is not only are you learning from me, but Dr. Porgis and I have done a number of things in there as well. So you're getting and you're getting a deep understanding of polyvagal theory, not just my application of it, but a deep understanding of polyvagal theory.

Plus, I bring in guests every other week of various disciplines. And we talk about how they're applying this specifically in their discipline. And then I keep framing it into the play zone methodology into polyvagal theory.

And this is for a coach like myself that would like to get certified to help my clients with this approach. Or if it's someone that wants to, let's call it heal or improve their anxiety, during performance, it does both. I can work up my own face a lot.

Yes, yeah, it's both. There are people that are not coaches that come through. It's because well, first let me say it's not quote certified.

Polyvagal Institute is not a certifying body. It's a polyvagal informed certificate. But it means that you get this enough that I would hand someone to you personally.

I would say here you go, you have to submit case studies to me. You have to you have to take an exam. It's in depth.

It's a it's a 30 hour course plus more than that. And it's ongoing. And so, but individuals who are not coaches absolutely because in the process, what I'm really doing is I'm helping the coach embody these principles.

Because you can't you can't be the coach you aspire to be. Absolutely. You're not in your safe space.

Or if you don't get your play zone with your people. Yes. And you can do to others what you have been done to yourself.

And when I got certified, I had to be coach. I had to coach 100 times on Zoom 30 people in front of others. And I had to get coached.

So every day, say, Jennifer's coaching Karen, I'm like, Oh God, what are my daughter? You know, you have to experience it yourself a lot so that you really understand. I hear you.

You don't think. I have that. Yeah, I have that.

And then I have a shorter introductory on demand course. It's a five hour course. And it teaches you the core principles of what we talked about today.

When that too is it's either an introductory course for someone who's not sure. Or it's it's enough to give you the practical skills for yourself. But it's not a deep dive.

It's but it's a five hour on demand of course also. I love it, Michael. Thank you for doing what you do.

Thank you for your time today. I ask, Oh my guess, what is healing for you? Okay.

Yeah. So healing. First off, healing doesn't end.

It doesn't have a stopping point. It's an ongoing process. And it's actually healing to me really physiologically is a body that knows how to find homeostasis.

It's a body that knows what it feels like to be at ease, to be still, to be present, to be connected. And ultimately that that feeling isn't a trigger of threat. Meaning when we get into that feeling of being connected, with each other or being still in our body, that feeling we actually trust in our body is safe to be that way.

So we learn to trust that it's safe to be safe. We learn to trust that it's safe to be safe in connection with another. That we learn to trust that it's safe to feel a sense of belong.

And that is that is to me what healing is. And it's in the physiology. And it also means that through that process we're not afraid to tap into feelings that are uncomfortable or relationships that are challenging because we trust that we can come back to homeostasis.

We trust that we can actually come back to feeling safe in connection. And it's a beautiful feeling. And well said, Michael, and one of the purposes of this process is to inspire people to do this work.

Why should people do this work? If we can get to that place where we feel authentically accessible, not all the time, but if that can become sort of our ground. As I've been saying throughout this, it changes how you see and feel and hear the world.

It changes everything. And that then gives you this platform from which to help others. Right?

It allows you to actually then be a helping hand to another. It allows you to be the mother or the father to your child that you would like to be. It allows you to be the friend that you want to be or the colleague or the surgeon, the performer.

So that's why. So to really, truly get to optimizing the human experience, to have the joys and the loves and also the hurts and the sorrows, we have to help ourselves here. Beautiful said.

Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise. Thank you to my listeners for listening.

If you love this episode, please share it with as many people as possible to help us spread the news that there is hope, there is change, so that we can feel better, do better and be better. Thank you so much. Welcome.

Thanks for the opportunity.