[00:00:01] Luke: Irene, let's start out with how you first got into the field of somatic therapy.

[00:00:08] Irene: Goodness, Luke, it's a long-winded question. My background is in science and medicine. Both my parents are veterinarians, small animal practice. So I grew up literally in an animal hospital. No joke. It was in our house when I was really young, and then I was there until I could go to school.

[00:00:37] So that world of healing and medicine has always been in my blood. And then I decided to not go down that path, but to work with humans. So my background is in exercise physiology, biomedical science, working with human function. Loved it.

[00:00:56] Still am obsessed with making the system healthy and well. But, or, and I had some really bad injuries. So this is the start of how I got into deeper mind body work. I was an absolute adrenaline junkie in my teens and 20s. Downhill ski racing, ice skating, paragliding. I was about to start racing cars in my 20s.

[00:01:24] Had an agent and everything, seriously. So I was like, go, go, go, which we might get into. I was like that because I was also living in a real deep functional freeze due to some early childhood trauma patterns. Not through abuse, but other things. And so I kept injuring myself because I didn't have a radar for stop or slow down, or maybe don't do that today. Take a rest. And I just pushed and pushed and pushed my body. I don't know if you have any experience with that, but when you're in that--

[00:01:59] Luke: Oh, no, not at all.

[00:02:00] Irene: Not at all? I'm in good company?

[00:02:03] Luke: As you're talking, I'm like, "She's describing my life over the past couple of months, actually."

[00:02:08] Irene: Okay, good.

[00:02:09] Luke: Not adrenaline, but just not stopping a lot.

[00:02:12] Irene: Yeah. So I had a lot of injuries to my knee joints, which led to quite a few surgeries, reconstructive one. The worst was a patella, a kneecap fracture. Long story. Don't need to go into it. Needless to say, that really skewed my function because even though I was trained in fitness and rehab, everything I was doing to rehab wasn't making it better.

[00:02:38] And I was doing everything. I was physical therapy, massage, chiro. This was the time when acupuncture and craniosacral and myofascial really wasn't a thing yet. So I was not sure what to do. I was fit, but in a lot of physical pain. And that led me to something called the Feldenkrais Method, which is highly misunderstood.

[00:03:02] But it is a amazing art and science of teaching humans how to relearn. Typically, people go to it when they have pain in the body, which was me. But you can also work with high performance. You can work with musical capacity, how you sit, how you emote. All can be worked with with the Feldenkrais principles.

[00:03:25] So that I got into. Loved it. It changed my body within a matter of weeks, like four weeks. I was in my mid-20s too, so I was also a lot younger than I am now. And that was like, holy, this is it. I need to study this. So I studied that for four years. It's not a quick training.

[00:03:44] Absolutely changed everything in how I see sport, rehab, recovery from pain, back pain, all these things. Was practicing it. Loved it. I was in a ski town of Whistler at the time here in British Columbia, doing really good work with people. But then in the summer, this is where the somatic part comes in. Even though that is technically somatic, this is where the trauma part comes in.

[00:04:10] I was working in my private studio, and I had three people that really stood out, Luke, who came in because of pain, back pain, shoulder problems, frozen shoulder, concussion, injuries that aren't getting better. And nothing looked wrong. They hadn't broken bones. The doctors were like, we don't know why you're in so much pain.

[00:04:32] And so everybody would send me these tough cases to do Feldenkrais with them. I did Feldenkrais with these people, and it didn't work. It didn't help. They liked it. I think that being with another person-- part of the Feldenkrais work is touch-- really gentle, beautiful movement. So it was a nice experience, and they would get a little bit more loose, feel themselves a bit more relaxed, a bit more easy.

[00:05:01] But then in a week everything just popped back like an elastic band, boop. And so because I was still young and very open, not that I'm not open now, but like I had energy. And I had still support from my parents. I wasn't with children or a mortgage or anything like that. I'm like, "I need to study this."

[00:05:24] So I was told about Peter Levine's work. And his work, somatic experiencing, he really was the person in the west at least that put trauma healing at the somatic level on the map back in the early '70s. He was dabbling with this at UC, Berkeley at Cal with problem cases. And as anybody in this work, one thing leads to another, and before you know it, you have people wanting to train with you.

[00:05:56] This would be now the '90s. So I got into this work in '08. I found Peter's work. I read-- I think at the time just Waking the Tiger was available. Maybe in an unspoken voice, which was his magnum opus of what his work really is. And I just was hooked. I'm like "This. I need to learn this now."

[00:06:18] So exercise, rehab, science, biomedical science, Feldenkrais, and then somatic experiencing. I did a deep dive, Luke, into that in '08 till about 2012, '13. You never stop learning. But that's when I was really intensely in the trainings. And then there's one more piece to the story from a practical professional point of view.

[00:06:43] What I then discovered and what a lot of my predecessors discovered, because a lot of people will say, "Oh, I tried somatic experiencing. It didn't help me." Just like people will say, "Oh, I tried Feldenkrais. It didn't help me." And the thing with these methodologies is that everyone is at a different level of their healing journey, where their nervous system is.

[00:07:04] And if someone knows they have a lot of, say, early developmental in utero trauma, which many of us do, SE's model was not developed for that. It was more for shock trauma-- accidents that we can remember, that we can put a memory to cognitively. And so the next step after that was learning with two of Peter's high-level colleagues namely Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell.

[00:07:33] They're still alive and teaching, as is Peter. And that was where I then learned, this would've been 2014, '15, '16, '17, the inner workings of working with pre-verbal trauma, working with touch in a very intentional way, with humans that have had all sorts of horrific things happen to them, but also things that are lifesaving.

[00:08:00] A lot of things that happen to us, maybe when we're infants, like a surgery, being born premature, being in an incubator, devoid of human touch for the first weeks of your life, these things really impact us. So a lot of times when people think, ah, I don't need to listen to this. I don't have any trauma. We have to then really unpack what that is because it's often these insidious little things that we don't even think are impacting us at age 45, 50, 60, etc.

[00:08:30] So that's a long-winded way of saying, I got into this work by following breadcrumbs, and when I didn't have what I didn't need for working with my clients, I went to the next thing and the next thing. The one thing that, of course, they don't tell you when you sign up for these trainings is watch out. You might uncover stuff that you didn't realize you had in your system.

[00:08:53] And that is probably a massive part of my story that I've been unpacking for the last 15 years of this somatic healing world journey. So it's been incredibly tough, rewarding, challenging, and healing. I'm on the other side, and I'm still alive and breathing and enjoy talking about this. So that is a quick version of how I got into somatic trauma healing.

[00:09:26] Luke: Awesome. It sounds like we have a lot in common in terms of following breadcrumbs.

[00:09:34] Irene: Sure.

[00:09:36] Luke: Human life, man. I always say incarnation is not for the faint at heart.

[00:09:42] Irene: No.

[00:09:43] Luke: Because as you said, even people that haven't had overt trauma and came from a loving family, there's so many things that go on, as you said, before we're even born. Or things that just exist outside of our awareness, but still have an impact. And I think sometimes it's like the things that are more obvious are almost, I won't say easier to treat or overcome, but--

[00:10:10] Irene: Oh, they are.

[00:10:11] Luke: But at least you know what the target is. You know what I mean? Whereas, as you described, and I'd love to hear more about that, you're going along and you think like, "Oh, the target's over here. These are the things that I need to heal. This is where the trauma showed up in an injury or whatever." And then you start digging and you're like, "Oh shit. There's layers."

[00:10:32] Irene: You are correct in saying, I can attest that the overt traumas, having worked with as many people as I have-- I was in private practice for so long, and I've stopped at the current time to do more online stuff and mentor others. But the people who get over these states of dysregulation, chronic illnesses, mental illnesses, addictions, all the things that we know are connected with unhealed early trauma and dysregulation of the nervous system, they will say, "Yeah, I know that I was beat up by my parent, what was tough."

[00:11:10] And actually Alec-- and I know I can share this because we talked about this on his talk that he and I did, and he's openly talks about this. He had physical abuse from his father and more emotional from his mom. And he's like, "as hard as that stuff was with my dad, the toxicity of the emotional stuff from mom was a lot trickier to unpack because it just becomes what you're used to."

[00:11:39] And then you don't realize that that's not how it should be. One of my favorite metaphors, if you will, here I live in British Columbia where we have bears, lots of bears. They're just down the street. They're breaking into people's cars all the time here. And I'm so used to them, and I'm so used to seeing cubs, and they're so cute.

[00:12:03] And then, of course, you would have bears, not where you are, but in Montana and the Dakotas and all that. And mama bear in the States and mama bear here in Canada, and mama bear in, say, Russia, polar bears in the arctic, they treat and raise their cubs exactly the same.

[00:12:26] I think you would agree with that. Just like puppies and kittens are treated by mama dog and mama cat fairly equally. And it's in them genetically to take care of them, protection, safety, play, food, shelter. Whereas humans, like we're mammals as well. But because of culture, soul-- not that animals don't have that, but ours are trickier, the off world world. And I believe in that. In intergalactic, everything makes it even more complex in past lives. So with humans, we've got this culture stuff.

[00:13:08] We have this domestication of our world, very different than 1,000 years ago. Here on earth we have a religion that can really mess up things. We have school systems. And I know I'm in good company because you know about this stuff that condition us and program us. And then our bodily impulses, going to the bathroom, hunger, shelter, comfort, learning how to hunt, protect, build shelter, that just gets pushed to the side.

[00:13:44] Whereas those bears, those bear cubs, I think that's all that they get, is love for mom, protection, feeding, and then learning how to survive in the world. And then what we do with kids, with humans is so varied. And this is where if I was to do a general Master's thesis on this, that's one of the things we really need to look at, because we actually do have an operating system like mammals that needs that safety, that protection, that attunement, that secure attachment.

[00:14:17] And we throw out these worlds in the zeitgeist of trauma healing. But I always like to bring it back to that very primitive animal mammal level because that's what we're working with. And when we get that on board and we really understand this importance of safety, connection to self, being embodied, having good impulses, the higher brain stuff and the consciousness stuff, it just falls into place.

[00:14:43] And I've really seen that in my students who have tried all these very fancy techniques to get more enlightened. And then they just learn how to listen to when they have to take a poop or go to the bathroom, or when they need to rest, or when they need to dance, or when they need to scream, or when they need to cry.

[00:15:01] And I'm really simplifying this, but when they get those things on board, it brings us into more humanity biologically. We need that in check before we go to these higher levels. Otherwise, we go to those higher levels and then we have an uh-oh moment where I'm like, "I don't know how to ground myself back to earth. And I'll stop talking because I went on a bit of a tangent there.

[00:15:25] Luke: Oh, that's amazing. There are so many threads in that tapestry that I want to pull, but I'll pull the most recent of them. The quest for enlightenment and higher states of consciousness is obviously well intentioned. There's something within us that's like, ah, we want to get back to Source and back to that connection. It's like as convincing as duality is, there's a part, I think, within every person that knows that there's a realm beyond separation. And so it's like we're trying to get there.

[00:16:06] But to your point, the Atlantian, Sumerian, 5D astral circus of new ageism seems to sometimes lure people in and trick them/us into skipping some of the steps that you just described. It's like a denial of the primal self seems like the answer to get to the eternal soul-based self.

[00:16:42] Irene: Look what happened to the Atlantians. Not so in the end.

[00:16:45] Luke: I don't know what happened to them.

[00:16:48] Irene: This is more my husband's specialty, but from what I know, they fucked themselves. They went too fast, too quick, too technological, and I don't know the details. I'm not an expert. But yeah, it didn't end well from what I know. And if we're talking about it, the intergalactic species I really connect with are the Arcturians.

[00:17:16] I don't know if you have any experience with their lineage and their planet, but in some ways that is my bible, is reading their texts and their channeled stuff. And for many people they know this. My students, my deep mentees know this. And those who think I'm just a science girl are going to be like, what is she talking about right now? But I'll go there. They, from what I've learned, are very much about incremental healing.

[00:17:45] And you have to have a step-by-step initiation because you can't just dive in to the non-duality immediately. And when you have this 3D meat suit, which we have-- we're not just light beings-- that is the part that, for a lot of people, is difficult. Because when you have so much bloody pain, whether it's emotional, physical, chronic, and mental anguish, you just want to get out of that.

[00:18:14] And so I understand the allure. Now, I'm not saying that higher dimensional consciousness and prayer and all these things that are more electric and godlike aren't important. They're very important. They save a lot of people. But there's this point where it's like, okay, I got this vessel that I really have to take care of, and it has organs that are maybe failing me or not digesting food.

[00:18:40] If someone has a real strong consciousness practice, great. But if they can't eat solid foods and digest, that really needs to be looked at because then your system is frayed. And it's the same with the immune system, hormones, all the things. But no, I agree. There's this desire to go higher.

[00:19:03] And I think it's because-- I don't think. I personally feel and have felt this. We're hybrids and we're a bit of both. And we need to really take care of the human vessel, the mammalian vessel. It was Peter Levine who once said in a training of mine-- I don't think he wrote this down anywhere. I wrote it down. He said, "Human enlightenment will happen when every single human on the planet has a regulated nervous system." That's a big job.

[00:19:37] Luke: It's a really big job.

[00:19:39] Irene: It's a bloody big job. And I see how hard it is because people will go into this work with full intention of wanting to heal. And man, the roadblocks that come in front of them, you can't predict. Because when you do add in the soul lineage and the contracts that we've made and other lifetimes, it's hard to describe to someone, well, this might happen, but then this might happen.

[00:20:06] But then that might happen. But then you might have to just stop for a year or two and just exercise every day. And that's your only practice. And then they go, "What? Shouldn't I meditate?" I'm like, "No, you're walking every day without listening to a podcast, is your meditation." And it's so simple that it's hard for people to grasp that because, as you know, we're in this online world where there's so much fun stuff to try. So much stuff.

[00:20:34] Luke: Well, I encourage everyone don't stop listening to podcasts. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm totally kidding. Going back to what you were saying about bears and mammals, that just have a more simplified set of needs and they're trained by their bear and wolf and coyote parents to learn how to fulfill those needs.

[00:20:59] Irene: Yeah.

[00:21:00] Luke: It's interesting because we have the same needs, but we also have all of this karmic baggage that shows up in psychological programming and propensities and--

[00:21:15] Irene: Family systems.

[00:21:16] Luke: Yeah, our tendency. In my life at least, it's been such a process at least. Well, not anymore so much, but in the years where I was very lost, it's like I would recreate all of those early childhood dynamics and probably all kinds of unseen and unknown contracts with people that would over time force me to face the things that were standing in the way of my soul's evolution.

[00:21:43] So it's this interesting circle of your soul's here to evolve. And so you take on a body. And when you start to tap into the reality that you are just a soul in a body, then it's really tempting to just go, "Okay, cool. I'm just going to work on the soul part."

[00:22:01] But meanwhile, the way this game board is set up, all this shit in your physical experience, in the ways that you relate with other people is set up to magnetize the things that are still left unhealed. And they seem to work themselves out through the body. It's tricky.

[00:22:22] Irene: It is tricky. I would also add that, yeah, the soul comes with these old things. We'll just call it simple things. But the body also can get inserts into it that are old contracts. This, again, not my expertise. I have a mentor that I've learned this from. His name is Andrew Bartzis. Wonderful guy for understanding this.

[00:22:48] He reads Akashic Records and all that kind of stuff. And when I was-- I don't know if I ever shared this actually. When I was really trying to figure out-- I technically would be classified as someone who has an autoimmune condition. But I've never labeled it that way. I've never had a diagnosis.

[00:23:08] I could tell you if I hadn't started unpacking my trauma back in '08, when I started the somatic experiencing training, I probably would be bedridden with lupus, fibromyalgia, I would even say rheumatoid arthritis, and a few other things. I just know that, but I'm not, because I got under the hood and got these toxins that were really bothering me out of my system, and of course, healing the early stuff.

[00:23:36] But when I had a session with him years ago, he said, "This was put into you--" it's very cryptic-- "right when you were conceived because they--" and I can't define who they are, like not good people, energies-- "saw your potential. And so this was inserted into your DNA to hold you back."

[00:24:01] And he said-- and I can just cry almost thinking about this-- "Imagine if that had not have been your world growing up with skin problems and allergies and blah, blah, blah, and all these injuries?" But he also says-- and this is the important thing for those who do this work, "It's very hard to teach at a high level and work at a high level when you haven't healed your own pain and your own troubles."

[00:24:29] You don't have a understanding of what another person might be going through. Now you don't have to have horrific stuff happen to you. Everybody's got their own story. But that always really stuck to me because it was like, I can't say to someone, "Yeah, you've got this autoimmune thing because it's just trauma."

[00:24:50] We need to work on that and all the other things that go with that. But it's really also important to see a bigger picture if you're open to that because it might be, as shitty as this is, this was the card that you were given, to figure out, to heal something that you might not even understand until you die.

[00:25:11] And for many, in this world of quick fix-- I want it yesterday. As one of my great students says, you can't Amazon Prime your healing. I just love that. And it's like, yes, you're totally right. You can't Amazon Prime this. If anything, you need to go back to the stone ages and really simplify, simplify, and then add in slowly as you heal things. So yeah, the soul piece is really fascinating.

[00:25:41] Luke: Yeah, it certainly is. I think because we're driven by so many things, that we'll likely never become aware of until we die, as you said. We'll back and go, "Aha, I found it." Or I didn't, and you have to come back again. Talk to me about how trauma gets stored in the body.

[00:26:06] Irene: Sure. Yeah. So I like to define it first, Luke, just because it can get confusing. So a lot of people will say, oh, trauma-- if you go to a hospital, the trauma wing is where you're dealing with crush injuries and emergencies. And I'm okay with that. That's a trauma. You had an accident. You go to the trauma surgeon. You get fixed.

[00:26:30] In the world of Peter Levine and my mentors and the people that I study with, we would call trauma, not in the event, but in the nervous system. So one person can have an accident-- and this is my basic level example. It's simple, but it works. So you have someone that gets into a minor fender bender. Have you ever been in a fender bender with your car with another person?

[00:26:58] Luke: Plenty.

[00:26:59] Irene: Okay. So there are minor ones where you just, oops. And then there's ones where it's like cars are written off. It's terrible. But let's just imagine a very minor one, like five-- here we have kilometers an hour. Nothing. You exchange information. You're like, "Okay, we should probably submit this, whatever, blah, blah, blah."

[00:27:22] I have two people. So person A gets into that accident and they're fine. They really are fine. But person B has this minor fender bender and it then precedes this domino effect of panic. I can't sleep. I don't want to get into my car again. I don't even want to leave the house.

[00:27:46] My bowels aren't working anymore, and I'm snapping at my partner and my dog. Where did that come from? It was this minor little fender bender. And this is where some fancier words come in, like window of tolerance and autonomic dysregulation. But what essentially is occurring-- and these are real stories. I'm simplifying it, but I saw this in practice.

[00:28:12] Someone who is a mess, Luke, and going to all the specialists from this tiny little accident. What you see in these people is that they had existing dysregulation probably from when they were really young. And as they went through life, they had no clue that they were dysregulated.

[00:28:34] They either lived in a functional freeze. They either were the type A, or maybe they were the introvert, always protecting their space to control it. I need to eat at this time. I go to this thing at this time. I get my groceries. Everything is super controlled. But they don't realize that that's not living. That's control or that's out of control.

[00:28:58] Trauma, again, in our world is that person B, they are now traumatized by that accident, but it's in the actual nervous system physiology and in the organ systems that connect with that autonomic nervous system physiology. So this is why they might have their bowels go off. They can't sleep. Their circadian rhythm just gets messed up, even if they're doing all the right things at night.

[00:29:27] And I'm sure you know of folks who, no light at night, no blue light, no Wi-Fi, everything is peaceful. They lay down in bed and they're just zinged, still awake. They have no caffeine, all the things, and yet they can't sleep. It's like, what is that? We would say that that is a system that has some kind of trauma. And then I'm going to define it a bit more specifically as stored survival stress.

[00:29:57] So before that little fender bender car accident, that person B had a ton of stored survival stress in their system. They just thought that was normal life, but it isn't. They then have this little event that is like the straw that breaks the camel's back and then everything just goes poof.

[00:30:18] And so we would say, "Whoa, that person really got traumatized from that car accident." That's weird. It's like, well, actually, there was already existing dysregulation in the system. And so that is one complex way to define what trauma is. Does that make sense?

[00:30:38] Luke: 100%. Yeah.

[00:30:44] Irene: And another classic example-- I like to use examples because it paints a good picture. People are used to hear the word, say, PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. And that came out of the Vietnam War, World War. Not good with my history, but I think it's World War I was shell shock.

[00:31:01] And so as people come back from these non-humane, gruesome things that aren't normal, they're not normal animal warfare because of the way we're doing them, the system can't cope with what they saw, with what they experienced.

[00:31:19] And so that event of, say, being in a war zone, seeing all these terrible things, having to and watch people be killed, that is a traumatic event. But the interesting thing is not everyone sees things like that and gets disturbed. And we know, again, this comes back to how were they raised?

[00:31:44] I don't quote studies, but I know one of my teachers had said-- it's Kathy Kain-- that there's a high level of recruitment into the US military of people that have high ACE scores, which is adverse childhood experiences. So the military brings in people who come from broken homes because they're looking for routine.

[00:32:11] They're looking for a safe place to be. And they know they'll get three square meals a day. They'll get education. Oh, and by the way, you might get deployed and have to do this stuff. They don't think about that. But it's bringing in people who are already, in some ways, we can say dysregulated.

[00:32:29] You then put them in a war zone and they do not have the internal capacity to process what is being seen, what is being felt. But then some things, Luke, are just so heinous that no matter how well adjusted you are, they're going to impact you. So it really comes down to a few things. The person's existing regulation or dysregulation, their actual window of tolerance, which can appear very high.

[00:33:00] So some people can appear very put together and appear to have a lot of capacity, but we would call it a fake or a false window of capacity. And that is what I was living in before I got into this work. From what you've said, a little bit, you were in that boat. Most of us are. Most of us are.

[00:33:23] Whereas you go to other countries where they're not as stringent with rules and societal norms. Babies are held by their mothers. They're sleeping in the same rooms and beds as their-- family systems. It's like that cub, those cubs with mama bear. And when you hear of really-- there's a point to this, I promise. I'm going on a bit of tangent.

[00:33:48] When you hear about places that have horrific devastation, like natural disasters, and it really is terrible, and there is stress, but then these folks bounce back. Often in second-world countries. And you go, "How are they so resilient?" A lot of that resilience, it isn't just because of their religion.

[00:34:08] Maybe that is it, but it's also because they had a much stronger early upbringing with secure attachment, breastfeeding, with parents, not being dosed out weird mind games that is super common in the West. They just have stronger nervous system health. So to go back to your original question, what is trauma?

[00:34:30] It is by pure definition in the physical system, in the nervous system, all the things that that touches. It's not in the event, but in some cases it can be if that event is so extreme and we can't make sense of it.

[00:34:47] Luke: That's awesome. I love getting clarity on this. I can think of few other areas of research or understanding that are more important for people than this. You know what I mean? It's like imagine--

[00:35:03] Irene: [Inaudible] important.

[00:35:04] Luke: Imagine if the indoctrination centers, AKA schools, taught kids about this from day one. It's like there's a little scuffle in the class. Someone like you is the teacher. "Come here, Jimmy. Let me explain to you what just happened psychologically. Here's why, and here's how we're going to learn how to become more resilient."

[00:35:24] I wanted to go back to the idea of PTSD. It was something I was just writing about in my book as someone who's had it but is just trying to learn how to understand it. And I think where that points to me as I've looked at my own life in early trauma is that it wasn't necessarily the event, but really highlighting the post and the level of support or ability to heal or contextualize the single event afterward.

[00:35:59] When I think about things that I went through as a little kid, there's no way to know if I'd have to go relive it and have a different family system around. But thinking back, it's like if there had been an environment where I knew how to ask for help and support to process any feelings around it to help me to understand something that was far too complex for a five-year-old to understand, I have a feeling that it would've had much less of the post-traumatic effect than it did.

[00:36:34] It could have even been contextualized as like, this is just something that happens, and here's why people do this to little kids and so on. But it's like part of the real impact is in the isolation around holding an experience. And there's a cascade of behavioral issues and adaptations, like addiction in my case. It came way after the fact, but it wasn't necessarily solely due to that thing happening. But just like, what do you do with it afterward?

[00:37:11] Irene: It was another strategy to make yourself feel okay.

[00:37:15] Luke: Right. So to your point of two people can have the exact same objective stress or trauma or shock or event, one person had a regulated nervous system, and so they interpret that and it has a different impact on them than someone that was already dysregulated.

[00:37:35] What about taking two people that had the exact same capacity for self-regulation, but the support that they received after the fact was much different? How does that change the game?

[00:37:50] Irene: It's like a math equation you're asking me to solve there.

[00:37:55] Luke: It's nuanced. Do you--

[00:37:57] Irene: It is very nuanced. No. So I think this is where it gets really interesting, and I'm going to start with an example. And then from that example, you tell me the next question you have in relationship to the idea you have, if that sense. We'll play this game.

[00:38:16] So one of the things I often teach is-- so you've got this five-year-old. Usually when you're five, you're learning how to ride a bike, if you're lucky. And I grew up in a world where there were no training wheels. And so you're going to fall. You're going to scrape your knee.

[00:38:34] So you do that, and chances are you're with a parent because they're with you in the driveway or whatever, and you fall. It hurts. When you hurt something and you feel it, it stings. I don't know if you've scraped your knees, an adult. It actually really hurts. It stings. It's hot.

[00:38:58] It's not just like a simple cut from the cutting board when you're making dinner. It's a different kind of hurt. So kid cries, and how that parent reacts to that event makes all the difference in the world

[00:39:14] Luke: Yes.

[00:39:15] Irene: One way, and there's not just-- I'm going to give a couple of examples. One way is, "You are fine. Get up. Get on that bike. Let's do it again." Another way might be, "You're fine. Just get up. Come on. Don't be a pussy." That's usually what you get from a dad.

[00:39:37] Luke: Yeah, I'm familiar with that.

[00:39:41] Irene: Sorry, moms. Typically it's not the mother doing this. But let's say the mom's there. I'm being very--

[00:39:47] Luke: The well-intentioned, macho dad is trying to toughen the kid up with the best of intentions, because dad doesn't know that there's another way to handle it.

[00:39:56] Irene: Exactly.

[00:39:57] Luke: Because his dad never handled it that way with him.

[00:39:59] Irene: Probably not. Probably had it worse. And we know this. My dad is of the Baby Boomer generation. His dad was World War II. It's like when you hear the physical abuse stories of kids who grew up in the '50s and '40s and '60s, it is horrendous and amazing that any of us survived and kept procreating.

[00:40:27] Luke: Can I totally derail your answer? Because this is something I've been tripping on, is, okay, the evolution of the human in a metaphysical and emotional sense, going back to that generational thing, when I look back at my family line, which I've been doing a lot because I'm writing about these things, my great, great grandparents were way more fucked up, mentally ill, alcoholic, abusive in all the ways than my grandparents.

[00:41:04] My grandparents, still pretty fucked up. Hurt my parents, and so on and so on. It seems like though, and this is what gives me hope, and this is just my family-- I don't know how it works with others-- in my family, every generation that's follow has gotten a little bit healthier.

[00:41:21] My parents went through some shit. They weren't the best parents, even though they really loved me when I was young. And they both got on their various healing journeys and became much more enlightened. And I don't yet have kids, but my younger brother has kids, and he's light years ahead in parenting from our dad. Right?

[00:41:46] Irene: Definitely.

[00:41:47] Luke: And so you think, okay, his kid's going to grow up in-- he's doing all work that you do and similar things like that, but applied to parenting. He reads all the books and does all the things and homeschooling and wild birth, no interventions. It's like as perfect as you could hope. Chances are his kids are going to grow up and be even more awesome and integrated and healthy parents than he was.

[00:42:09] So that's one thing that gives me hope for humanity. But I don't know if my situation is unique. Do you see that as a general trend, that generation over generation, we do tend to get better?

[00:42:22] Irene: We tend to. So your story is very common. I've heard it through the stories from just working with people. And then there's some family systems that just don't do that.

[00:42:34] Luke: I figured as much.

[00:42:36] Irene: And again, this comes back, one could say, to soul contract, dharma, however you want to call it. This, one could say, your family system is older soul age. Whereas, man, I find it hard to see some of the things I see online where parents are pimping out their children on social media accounts.

[00:43:05] So you also see it not improving in some families, and that is really hard to watch, when you know how damaging some of the things are that you're seeing. So I think that everyone's got a different line, family line of where that line is going. I also would say that given what you said about your history of intense abuse, that is so intense that it has to heal. And that's obviously what has occurred. And now what are you doing?

[00:43:40] You're helping millions by teaching and all these things and having people on like myself. So it's very cool that your brother is a completely different specimen to say what your father or his father were doing. The one thing I would say that I'm seeing, which could be a problem, and I think we're over this hump, is there hasn't been enough discipline and enough challenge in kids' lives.

[00:44:13] There's been a little too much-- here in Canada, we would say laissez-faire. Oh, just let them be feral and don't wash and no routine. They can have screens as much as they want, and we're not going to control any of that. I'm actually seeing the byproduct of that not be very good.

[00:44:31] And so we are mammals, but we also are human, and we do have to learn how to live by the current rules. And I've seen-- I don't know the generations anymore, but those in their early 20s are really struggling, really struggling. And my husband is in that boat with his son. Hippie parents.

[00:44:57] Kid is strong like an ox, but didn't learn basic chores, didn't learn how to clean the house, didn't learn how to time manage because everything was just too, in the trauma we would call it under-coupled. Everything's just floating out there in space, and we'll get to it if we get to it. And then the opposite, which sounds like your upbringing in your lineage is more over-coupled, strict.

[00:45:20] We're hard workers. We're not going to complain. We'll make a penny go a mile, and all these things. And that oddly loop, from what I've seen, is easier to recover from because the armor is there, and we're peeling it off. The other one, which is more common now because there has been this swing-- I had such abusive parents. I'm not going to do anything to discipline my kid.

[00:45:48] No bedtime, no chores, no, you got to do that. I know you don't want to, but you've got to do it. You got to clean your room, all these things. When that wasn't there, everything, if you can imagine, is floating in space. Trying to put together a system when things are so all over the place is harder than here's the rock and we have to chisel out the goodness that's inside.

[00:46:15] So I think your story is really interesting because I would say that's easier than what some of the newer generations are going to have to deal with when mom and dad are gone and they don't have help paying their cell phone bill.

[00:46:32] Luke: Yeah. What's funny, as you described the polarity there, I actually had both.

[00:46:39] Irene: Oh, okay. Interesting.

[00:46:40] Luke: On one side it was like you get all the freedom you want and need, because I was given too much of it. And on the other side it was more of that harsh discipline and control, which I think is, in a warped way, a masculine-feminine expression. And my dad was the one who expressed the more masculine energy side of it, and my mom the more feminine.

[00:47:05] And I think there was some challenges to overcome, obviously, as a result. I think by and large, having both of those extremes did create some balance and complexity that if it's channeled in the right way, in my case, is largely positive. Because I can see the value in tradition and discipline and structure, but I also see the value in dreaming.

[00:47:33] Irene: Definitely.

[00:47:34] Luke: Creativity and expression.

[00:47:37] Irene: Definitely. If I can go back to my falling off the bike example.

[00:47:41] Luke: Yeah, yeah. You're good actually, because I was like, "I'm going to remember this shit." The bike, how the two parents respond to the accidents. I'm glad you remember it too.

[00:47:50] Irene: Yeah. It's sitting up there in my mind. So my third example was like, let's say mom is there and kid falls and is bleeding, but it's not life threatening. So that's a very important thing. If it's not life threatening, you can play with that. If it's like they're passed out and they're not moving or their bone is like compound fracture, you get that kid and you get them to emergency medical help.

[00:48:14] I got to be very clear with that. But let's say little Johnny is just there wailing because it hurts. And I'm being very stereotypical here with the mom and the dads, but she sees it and she's like, "Oh my God. Oh my goodness." She goes into a panic. That is also not good because then they're like, "Oh my God, I must be dying."

[00:48:40] And then it gets worse. So if I were to give an example of what you would want to do, in that case, you obviously want to acknowledge, "Oh, ouch. You fell." Like, damn. Yeah. Okay. And then you wait. You don't go to pick them up. You don't try to stop their tears because they know, just like little cub knows, I need to cry. I need to do all these things.

[00:49:10] What a little human will do if you give them the space-- and you're there. You're not just, "I'm going to go for a walk. Just take care of yourself." But you're there within a distance. And parents will know this if they try to help their children too fast.

[00:49:26] I don't know if you've ever seen this or had this with any of your nieces or nephews. If you try to help too fast, they'll push you away. Get off of me. They know I need to feel this. And so you make that normal. Like feel it. Cry. And if you don't meddle with this stress response, I'm using my hand right now.

[00:49:46] There's a stress that came in their sympathetic nervous system. Fight-flight is like, "Ah, I'm going to die. It hurts." But eventually they'll calm down. Again, granted it's not a broken bone that's sticking out of their legs. And then they'll look for the parent, and then they'll reach. They come out of that. They get held. They get hugged.

[00:50:09] And it's like, "Oh yeah, that stupid bike. It just shouldn't have done that. Hey, it's okay." You do a little of that. And then that is often, Luke, when the sobs, the real emotional, like, I was scared and now I feel protected. And then you will feel it. Their breath will come back to normal. They don't need to do breath work.

[00:50:32] They will go through a natural stress response, and then they start to look around. They orient. And then that's where, of course, you make the judgment call. You want to get back on? And some of them are like, "Yeah." And if they say no, it's like, "Okay, we'll do it again tomorrow. Let's go fix up that booboo and get a Band-Aid on it."

[00:50:53] And then that attunement connection makes that bike little accident, not a traumatic event. But if you do all the other things that we talked about in the first few examples, while that isn't like a shock trauma per se, if you consider a parent that does that, they will do that again in a different way.

[00:51:16] It might be school homework, not getting good grades, breaking a glass in the kitchen, spilling something. Kids make mistakes. They're learning. And so these are the things that layer safety or non-safety. Can I feel this discomfort? Can I get-- the milk has spilled. What should I do?

[00:51:40] I've actually got a really good story around spilt milk. So this isn't my story. One of my best friends is a retired military marine. And I wasn't there for this, but when it happened, he texted me and is like, "Oh my god, Irene. You can't believe what just happened." His kid was, at the time, 10. He's now a college student, and he spilled the milk and his dad's like-- and the kid froze. He went into a survival mode, a literal freeze.

[00:52:11] And his dad was like, "What are you doing? Come on. Clean up. We got to clean it up, da da da da." And he went into action military mode. And his son, bless his heart, and that's where I'm like, "He's going to be just fine." He looked at his dad, he said, "Dad, I'm not a Marine. I don't always know what to do." So he had a little good attitude in there that was old enough to actually challenge his father.

[00:52:36] That wouldn't have happened at age five. At age five, you're not going to be able to compute that. But he was just old enough to foot-- and then his dad softened because he is a good guy, and he wouldn't want to harm his kid. He's like, "Damn it. You're right. You're not military. You don't know how to go into action when the milk spills on the ground immediately."

[00:52:59] And so I love that story because, yeah, kids don't know what to do. And how they're taught, how to take care of that from an attuned, not overly calm-- you don't want to be, "Just a second little one. I'm going to go and do some deep breathing while I calm myself and then I'm going to help you." You have to go in right away.

[00:53:24] And then you need to be humane, but also caring. And depending on the situation, you have to attune and shift, we would call it prosody, the way your voice is, to match that situation. But when we have our own dysregulation on board, Luke, we often don't have variants in how we can inflect and say things. You've probably met folks who are just super monotone, and they have no dial. And then others are really high or really low. I'm thinking of a [Inaudible] episode right now.

[00:54:03] Luke: No, that's so funny. You just reminded me of something. There was a phase in my marriage with our communication where-- I am a really good space holder and really good listener, I think, least. I listen for a living. Maybe sometimes I talk too much, as listeners have shared with me. But when it comes to my relationship I really cherish her and I really honor-- how she feels is really important to me.

[00:54:35] Irene: As you should.

[00:54:36] Luke: And helping her to feel as safe and great as she possibly can brings me a lot of joy.

[00:54:41] Irene: Mm-hmm.

[00:54:42] Luke: But there was a phase wherein she would come to me with some heightened emotion. Not even about me, just whatever, life.

[00:54:51] Irene: Yeah.

[00:54:51] Luke: And I am pretty damn self-regulated. I can stay calm through some serious drama.

[00:54:59] Irene: Of course.

[00:55:00] Luke: And so my reflex was just to be super chill and just present and calm and just say soothing things to her. And she would get so pissed off.

[00:55:17] Irene: Yeah.

[00:55:18] Luke: And I'm thinking, dude, I've worked on healing codependency for--

[00:55:24] Irene: Being zen.

[00:55:24] Luke: And also healing codependency, where I don't have to jump into the hole with you. I can hold my hand out and hold you out if you want to get out. If you want to stay in there, that's on you kind of thing. But there was some finessing there, some fine tuning that I had learn.

[00:55:39] Whereas, because I wasn't meeting her at all in the heightened emotion where she was, what it felt like to her, and I'm putting words in her mouth, but what I surmised was that she didn't actually feel present and that I cared. She felt like I was minimizing her experience and not acknowledging it because I wasn't in the same state. You know what I mean?

[00:56:06] Irene: Yeah,

[00:56:07] Luke: So it was an interesting thing to learn, to learn how to-- as you just described the parent and the bike-- build awareness around how to titrate the response where like, I'm here with you. Damn, I get it. And I'm not like placating, or at least what sounds like placating, but really being there for you. But at the same time, knowing where my boundary is of not getting sucked into the experience myself.

[00:56:31] Irene: Of course.

[00:56:32] Luke: It's a really fine line there. But there was definitely a phase there where she's like, "You're doing that thing again."

[00:56:38] Irene: Good. She's a good wife for saying that. Kudos to her.

[00:56:42] Luke: I go, "Damn, I really thought I was nailing it. I'm being calm and saying really sweet things." She's like, "You're patronizing me." I'm like, "I'm being compassionate."

[00:56:53] Irene: An example, a thought comes in into my mind when you say that too, but the first one is, when I was in private practice, someone sitting there telling you how their uncle raped them repeatedly-- this happens-- and you can see they're in protection mode, deflecting like it wasn't a big deal because now I'm here healing.

[00:57:17] When we're healing that kind of abuse, there is-- this is why Peter's first book was Waking the Tiger. There is a tiger in us that is hidden because we had to hide it because we couldn't fight back when we were like eight, for example. Even worse is when you have, it's horrific, but infants who are abused in that way, even harder because there's no memory of this happening.

[00:57:42] But for the sake of this example, let's say you remember the abuse happening and you wanted to tear this person's head off and punch them and tell everyone, but then you didn't because you didn't want to brock the boat in the family. This is a very common story. You're threatened. Don't say anything or else, blah, blah, blah.

[00:58:01] And in those instances, I look at the woman-- and it's also happened with men who have been abused often by babysitters, interestingly enough. I am like, "Holy shit. You should be mad." There's a moment where there's that rapport. I don't do this on the first session. I wouldn't do this.

[00:58:21] But after we've had enough trust and build and this person knows I'm cool and I know my stuff, I will get out the cheerleading pom-poms and that tiger energy and help them find that because it's so buried inside. And this is where, sadly what I've seen-- this goes with what you've said about being calm for your wife-- when we haven't seen enough experiences or really understand the physiologies need to fight and annihilate, not literally, but energetically and physically, we might be just like, yeah, let's just make peace with this.

[00:59:06] Let's be calm. Uh-uh. You've got to have that a little bit to get through some things. But when you're doing actual somatic experiencing trauma work, you need to hit that threshold of activation to release that tiger or herds of tigers, depending on how often you were harmed, to get that out.

[00:59:31] And when you don't get that out-- this is the premise of say Gabor Mate's book-- when the body says no, if you keep those tigers inside, this is what leads to chronic illness. This is what leads to psychosis. This is what leads to your gut not working. It's all connected. So there's this need for practitioners to have this ability to really modulate and have, not fake but real energy.

[00:59:57] But then also, when you have someone who's in their baby mode and terrified because they're feeling that energy that nobody got to them when they were crying-- this whole cry it out lunacy that we've taught so many parents and still teach-- then you have to go into total nurture. You have to soften. You have to pretend that you're in that energy.

[01:00:24] You're not merging with that person, but they need to feel, oh, I'm safe now. So a really good somatic practitioner trained highly has this ability to have variation that is real, and that comes from their own regulation and doing their own work. So yeah, I wanted to just share that because it can really backfire. And I just love the fact that your wife was like, "Stop doing that." Because that's the kind of relationship I have with my husband. Super good.

[01:00:56] Luke: It's great. She's such a wonderful teacher in terms of modeling how to advocate for yourself. She's really good at that. And that's, I would say, a bit of a learning curve for me.

[01:01:11] Irene: Yeah. It's great.

[01:01:13] Luke: Going back to the kid falling off the bike and the parent's capacity to modulate their response in a way that's most helpful, it seems like if a parent does that closer to right, that that's also going to build trust in that safety that the kid feels, so that if something happens to them when the parent's not around, they know that there's a safe place to take that.

[01:01:46] Irene: You got it.

[01:01:47] Luke: Can you speak to that a little bit? Because a lot of the trauma kids experienced, as you said, with babysitters, which was the case for me, parents had no idea for decades.

[01:01:57] Irene: Yeah. I think it's about little things like that that are occurring all the time. So as I mentioned, if the caretaker is really doing that right, if there is a right, but good enough, and allowing that person, the little human to feel and know that it's okay, Luke-- that's the big part, is it's okay. It's okay that you're confused and you're not sure if you should cry or be-- because we look, again, the parent.

[01:02:30] This is why the mother that's fanatical isn't probably the worst scenario in that. Because it's like, oh, I should be much worse than I already feel. And then it kindles that. It overs sensitizes that little person. So, no, I do agree that-- and here's the thing that's so difficult with the story of, you mentioned, the babysitter.

[01:02:53] A, that shouldn't have happened, but it did. And then we look at what creates the situation where we have to be with a babysitter that much, which again, is societal in many ways. You would hope that if you were being cared for with the family system, you would be safe. But trust me, that's not always the case.

[01:03:16] It's often not the parents. It's the family that abuses the child. So that's like a whole other can of worms that is very difficult to figure out, because not only are you trying to heal your stuff, but then you're looking at the lineage of why would this even happen in the first place? And really, I don't have a great answer for this because you have to trust that your children will be safe with who you put them with.

[01:03:48] But I will say this-- this goes on to the parent. I know of someone, I'm going to keep it quite anonymous, who went through one of my courses, and she sensed something wasn't right in her 3-year-old. She didn't know what it was, but something switched one day, and one thing led to another, and it turned out that the father was molesting their three-year-old. Sucks. It happens.

[01:04:25] But here's what she said to me. She said-- this goes back to what you said about nervous system work being so important-- "If I hadn't learned to really listen to my own impulse and my interception--" which is the internal perception of our guts, and here she is, the mother connected with her little one physically, energetically, viscerally.

[01:04:50] Because she was more attuned to herself, she could tell something was off, really off. And then the daughter would start telling her stories that didn't make any sense. And turned out, yes, he was doing this. They had to take it to court. Kid's fine. Kid's healthy. Kid's thriving little person. But in that moment, it was the mother's work, healing work. You see where I'm going with this?

[01:05:19] Luke: Yeah, totally.

[01:05:23] Irene: And I always have said to this friend, I said, "You are a good mom. And never ever doubt that. The fact that you did that, you have no idea how many adult females I've worked with who told their parents that something happened and they wouldn't believe them. You didn't even have to wait for that to happen. You just knew something was off."

[01:05:49] So when you know the kid comes back from band practice or soccer practice or school and one day they're fine and the next day something's not right, investigate that. Something is going on. And typically children, when they're quite young, they'll tell you if you let the space be open. Of course if the perpetrator threatened them, which often is the case, then you got to deal with that.

[01:06:18] But it comes back to parents really being able to listen and feel that energy. Another interesting side story, where we live here in the rural areas of Vancouver, there's a lot of kennels that take in dogs and cats when their owners go away for holiday. It's a common thing.

[01:06:42] And my parents were veterinarians retired, and I remember when we moved here, I think it was my dad, he said, "Ah, I know that kennel. I remember when people brought their animals to that kennel. The animals were never the same when they came back." I'm just like, "Oh, that's so gross." But you hear things over and over and you go, "Something's not right about that kennel."

[01:07:10] And it doesn't mean that they're necessarily beating the animals, but if they're doing something slightly bad that's controlling, that animal is going to respond, and then they're going to be a different animal when they come out. The difference is that animal can't talk and tell you what happened. They just then have behavioral issues that don't make sense. And often kids will show these behavioral issues, and that is a sign that something is off.

[01:07:43] Luke: Yeah.

[01:07:44] Irene: Does that answer that question? I went--

[01:07:46] Luke: It's great. And I feel like this conversation, it's going to be useful to a lot of people, but especially so parents.

[01:07:53] Irene: Yeah. I have my--

[01:07:57] Luke: As I said, watching my brother and his wife, the way they're raising their young kids, it's so inspiring to me just to see the cycles be broken and rebuilt in a different way. It's really cool.

[01:08:13] Going back to earlier about how I was talking about just seeing the general trend of the family line becoming healthier and more conscious, and you said, "Yeah, some aren't like that." I wonder how much of that is-- and you alluded to this, but the karmic side of that, where you either chose the family that you were jumping into because they might have been fucked up, but they were at least on an upper trajectory.

[01:08:50] Or it might've been chosen for you. I'm sure it's some sort of collaboration with the creator, however that goes. And then the idea that you said of a family of older souls that have all opted into this stream of consciousness where there's going to be some bumps, but at least we're going in the right direction. And someone else may have chosen or been more karmically destined toward a family that's even in a regressive pattern that's actually getting worse.

[01:09:18] It's really interesting to me. I feel so blessed that I happened to have been born into one that had some challenges, but at least was in the former pattern of things getting slowly--

[01:09:33] Irene: Yeah. Oh yeah, it's slow.

[01:09:35] Luke: Very slowly, but still improving. What do you think that is that that might cause someone to come into a family that is going backwards in a sense?

[01:09:46] Irene: I can speak to that from stories that I've heard, because some people get really pissed off when you say you chose to be born into that family that nearly killed you with abuse.

[01:10:06] Luke: They could take it as victim shaming or something like that.

[01:10:09] Irene: It can. And I know people who have worked through that in ways that you can't even imagine they're still alive. And they are. So I'll say this in two ways. Those that were dealt these terrible hands, it's almost essential to not only do the nervous system work, but you have to have a deeper spiritual connection to bigger things. And not everybody has that. It doesn't mean that it's not there, but not everybody has it.

[01:10:42] And there's also those who all that they do is spiritual work and light work that they don't have the biology. This goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning. Both are, from what I've seen, essential. Now, the interesting thing when someone is not able to push through and their family system is just not helping-- this is going to sound terrible-- but it just be that this lifetime is not for them to figure this out.

[01:11:17] Luke: Right, right.

[01:11:19] Irene: And this could be, again, where suicide comes in, addiction to the point of suicide, reckless behavior that leads you to die in a car accident. But then there's the situations where it's like that person keeps getting into plane accidents. What is that? You hear these stories and it's like-- recently my hairdresser out of all people was telling me about the guy that owns her salon.

[01:11:52] She's like, "Anywhere that man goes, drowning is involved." Like, what? And so she's telling me this story, and I'm like, yeah, that's something that he's got to figure out. And so let's say you have this person who, no matter what they do, there's people falling off boats, falling into the lakes from kayaking, floods in the homes.

[01:12:14] Luke: Hillary Clinton comes to mind.

[01:12:16] Irene: Oh really?

[01:12:17] Luke: I'm joking.

[01:12:19] Irene: Okay. I don't know her flooding history. So anyway, you got this example. And people who have these lives, they'll go, "Oh yeah, there's always electrical problems. Or there's always these things happening. Or I move to a new house, and it always has a problem. It burns down. It floods."

[01:12:41] These stories are real. And then you go, "Okay, whether you want to call it God, the force, Source, Buddha, it doesn't matter. You are being knocked on the head to wake up to something." And this is where free will comes in. You can choose to ignore these signs, and it just keeps happening. It keeps happening.

[01:13:09] You keep getting into worse accidents, worse relationships, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or you have something that knocks you on the head and goes, this is not a coincidence that you keep flooding your home, that you almost choked on that glass of water again.

[01:13:27] And so to go back to that question of why do some people not get better or always end up in shitty circumstances, and it seems like the family system isn't progressing, like, say mine is, I think you also have to look at they may have had signs and messages to make a shift, but they haven't been given yet the tools to go, "Oh, I should pay attention to that."

[01:13:55] Because a lot of people will write it off as, "Oh, this is just--" I no longer have atheist friends, but I used to. It was hard to be around them. They were all about science. And I'm a science girl by the way. I'm totally trained in science and medicine, but it's like, there's also this other thing that is there that we need to pay attention to.

[01:14:19] But this one friend I'm thinking of is like, "Oh, my back is just like this because this is how it is. I'm like, "Hmm, no. You could do something about it. You don't have to suffer." But that was their choice, was to stay in that suffering. And I have no control over this. I'm like, "Oh, you do."

[01:14:38] You have a best friend that can help you, and you don't want any of it. I can't help you. I don't say that, but I just extricate myself from these relationships. It's really fascinating because you see people going into spirals and you got to be okay with them spiraling.

[01:15:00] And you can give little hints, and they have to pick up those hints and digest them. And then sometimes they don't and then their lives end, and then you hope that they've learned. And the next time they do something different.

[01:15:14] Luke: Yeah. The free will piece is huge.

[01:15:16] Irene: So important.

[01:15:17] Luke: It is hard to understand because when you look at someone else's circumstances and they're on that merry-go-round, it's difficult to not transpose yourself into that. God, all they got to do is X, Y, and Z. If I was them, I would just go X, Y, and Z.

[01:15:35] Irene: I'd be doing it.

[01:15:36] Luke: Yeah. But I used to really trip on this in recovery. I checked into rehab. Never had a drink ever again, almost 30 years later. Not that it just happened magically. I've had to work at it for a while before it became automatic. But I watched, I don't know, probably, I don't want to exaggerate, but safe to say, dozens of people that had every opportunity that I had, and they ended up on the streets, in prison, dead.

[01:16:12] Irene: Mm-hmm.

[01:16:13] Luke: And I'd be looking at them going, "Dude, I just don't get it. Why can't they fucking do the thing?" And with some humility, I think eventually I started to realize, or guess that who knows how many lifetimes, how many incarnations I was that guy, who wouldn't listen, couldn't listen? All the tools are available. The help's there. And they're just like, "Fuck you. I'm going to die." You know what I mean? It's like I probably did that enough times to finally be willing to listen.

[01:16:47] Irene: Yeah, yeah.

[01:16:48] Luke: It's not like I ever had an ego about it. It would just be more sad than anything. Just like, I just don't get it. I'd have sponsors and stuff to say, "Man, some of us die." They were kind of cold about it. Like, yeah, some of us don't make it. Whatever. Keep it moving.

[01:17:03] And I'd be like, "God, that's harsh." But then eventually I started to see after just witnessing that so many times over and over again. It's just like, yeah, it wasn't their turn. And it seems like such a tragedy because you only know that person, and you care about them, or maybe you don't even really know them, but you see their potential.

[01:17:23] But it's like, it's difficult for us to see this is just a blink in the eye of probably an infinite number of lifetimes. So it's like, "Hey, you choked out on this one." It's like a sports game. Eh, we lost this one. There'll be another game. But it's difficult for us to see that they're going to have another opportunity, and also to see our past opportunities that we squandered.

[01:17:46] It's been a good lesson for me in learning how to have empathy, but also not be attached to the outcome of someone else's progress. And also to identify, as you said, to admit to myself and be willing to accept that I might need a boundary, or I might not be able to have a relationship with someone who's exercising their free will to go in a different direction than I am. And to be okay with that too.

[01:18:16] Irene: This is probably one of my hardest edges, is seeing potential and knowing what a person might have to do and then seeing them go in a totally different direction. And this is happening a bit more as I start to mentor others because I am just the vessel there when they're ready for that learning, just like my teachers were. And I left some and went to others.

[01:18:47] It's a tough one because we're human. We feel, and we can think into the future. And we can feel and think and sense into the past. And each person has to figure that out. And some will, and some won't. I think some of the harder stories are when parents lose children. And that's tough because one could say that is occurring because of some karmic debt.

[01:19:16] And it sucks to say that, but I've read enough through, say, Brian Weiss's material. I don't know if you've studied his work. Really good books. He was a psychiatrist who stumbled across past lives in a patient of his doing psychiatric work. The book is called Many Lives, Many Masters.

[01:19:38] Luke: Oh, I've heard of that book. Yeah.

[01:19:40] Irene: So good. Really easy reads too. I think he's got three books. Man, the stories in those books. But then he talks about, in that book-- there's a spoiler alert-- they lost a child very young, like an infant. And nobody knew about this. And the patient he was working with at one point when they were working together started channeling source-- true story-- because her voice changed.

[01:20:08] She's like, "Something's different here." She wasn't just in regression to her old lives. It's like the channel switched and there's a message that he has to hear, and the message was telling him why his son died. It was from his life, another time. He did something really awful, and this was his karmic debt. And it just made him go white in the face.

[01:20:30] No one, no people, no patients knew about his private history. There were no pictures in his office. And that story, I always think about because I think, oh, that's terrible. I don't have my own biological children, but I've heard that is the worst thing, to lose a child. And that takes a lot of guts to swallow that information and go, "Man, this is my punishment from something that happened in another lifetime? That's harsh."

[01:21:01] But then you can play victim to it or go, "Okay, I've learned. Since he had had other children that were healthy, so it's not like they weren't able to fulfill the family system. But when it comes to people healing in their nervous system sense, I also think that people can change their paths.

[01:21:22] This comes back to multiple realities, and we're playing out many in one moment. And because of our will and our higher consciousness, and we can control and help this body, we can do so much, I think, to shift those patterns. But man, Luke, people need to really want-- this is it. They need to want it really bad.

[01:21:48] Luke: Yeah.

[01:21:49] Irene: And what I've seen, unfortunately-- I think I've just come to terms with this in the last couple of months, to be honest, over the summer-- is that people have to hit rock bottom often. I wish that weren't the case. And this actually comes to the parent piece because we have taught so many parents basic level information, but the parents who go through my work, who heal, they're not there for their children.

[01:22:23] They know their kids have behavioral problems. They know they mess them up with whatever, not overt abuse. But, oh yeah, let them cry it out. They were in a jolly jumper for too long, all the things. But it seems to me that the parents I work with only do the work until their own system breaks down.

[01:22:44] Once their own biology is in enough pain and suffering, then they do the work. But then they see how that translates to their children. So if I could convince any parent right now, or any not yet parent, but you want to be a parent, gosh, do this work now. And I know this because I now have enough students who have had their second babies.

[01:23:10] So they had their first baby before they were regulated in their nervous system. And I've been doing this work long enough that now they're having their second and third babies, and I'm getting stories. Birth process is easier. It's happening at home. Yeah, it's painful, but there's no complications.

[01:23:27] Latching is easy. It's not that it's easy, but it's not difficult because now they're seeing their infant from a nervous system point of view and this little cub. They're not trying to make it this perfect human. It's like this is a very undeveloped little mammal. Yes, has the soul, all the things, but we need to do basic stuff with this little one for the first three years of their life.

[01:23:57] And then we see what develops from that. That's the thing that breaks my heart a little bit, when parents know that they need to do this work, but their personal system is not rock bottom enough to do it for the sake of prevention for them, but then that impacts their kids. I hope that makes sense.

[01:24:19] Luke: Yeah, totally.

[01:24:20] Irene: Cool.

[01:24:21] Luke: I'm very familiar with the process of hitting bottom. I've hit many of them.

[01:24:28] Irene: It hurts.

[01:24:29] Luke: Yeah. As much as I might like to pat myself on the back for the progress I've made, I know I wouldn't have made any progress if it wasn't for those bottoms, where you just paint yourself into a corner and there's literally nowhere to turn except in here. And I don't take credit for having done that. It's just for some of us, at least, when there's nowhere left to go but up, we choose it.

[01:24:54] Irene: I think you can take a little credit.

[01:24:56] Luke: I've put in some of that equity. Going back to the idea of karma, you sparked something to me. I think forgiveness is just such a monumental principle and one, thankfully, I think just because of the way, I don't know, just how I'm wired, it's not been that difficult for me comparatively.

[01:25:22] Some people I see really, really struggle with it. That line between condoning someone's bad behavior versus zooming out to see that as bad as they or their behavior might be, that they can literally not do any different because that's how they're built.

[01:25:44] Irene: Yeah. That's how it is.

[01:25:45] Luke: It's like you can't do better until better kind of thing. But how that ties into karma, something that's been really helpful to me, and this also teeters on the victim shaming thing, so anyone listening know that's not what I'm trying to do.

[01:25:58] But looking at situations in my life where I was legitimately victimized, not situations that my own selfishness and stupidity got me into that got me hurt, which is the majority of them, but when I was really young, there were things that happened that I just had no part in. Right?

[01:26:16] Irene: Yeah.

[01:26:17] Luke: And those, I think, have been the most important for me to get to an authentic forgiveness and a compassion for the perpetrator and so on. At the same time, obviously not excusing whatever they did.

[01:26:31] But something that's been really helpful, just opening my mind to the possibility-- I had it coming is not the right way to say it, so I won't say it that way. But that's the way I say it in my head. But that's going to sound really crass to someone who has been victimized.

[01:26:51] But it's that looking at it more as an opportunity, I had to undo some fucking karma. And that it's like, I have no idea what I've done in the past, before I was Luke Storey. I could have done atrocious things to other people, things that I did that I don't have the opportunity to repair in this lifetime, because I'm unaware of it and I was another person when I did it. Literally.

[01:27:23] So it's like, wow, maybe within it, there's actually some value in cleaning that up, whatever it was, because why else would terrible things happen to really good people who don't deserve it and who didn't do anything to bring that circumstance about in their life? And I've found that that's been really supportive to my forgiveness process. And also the most important forgiveness for me always goes back to myself.

[01:27:52] Irene: Mm-hmm.

[01:27:53] Luke: And so it's like, okay, I don't know what I did, if I put some negative karma points on the board, but there was probably something, and in order for me to forgive myself, whatever that was, I've got to forgive the repercussions of that also. So it's been a really helpful tool for me to just, again, go 30,000 feet out and go, "Hey, I don't know for sure, but there is a possibility that these dynamics and this kind of cause and effect goes back further than I know."

[01:28:26] And that maybe one of the reasons I'm one of those people that has chosen life and chosen growth is because there's a part of me on one level that knows the value in being victimized. And that I was able to catalyze that suffering into evolution.

[01:28:46] Irene: Yeah.

[01:28:46] Luke: And also stop being that way myself and not continue to perpetuate that harm on people because I know what it feels like. So I have a deep level of empathy and a very refined conscience of what's right and what's wrong based on having experienced what's wrong. So it's like, wow.

[01:29:07] I guess what I'm getting at is there's so much beauty and value in being able to transmute experiences in our life wherein we may have legitimately been harmed. There's forgiveness in that. There's empathy in that. There's a deep level of unconditional love if you can get to the point of forgiveness, where you really can have love for those that have harmed you and still have a boundary that makes them not part of your life.

[01:29:38] But it's like to erect a boundary to forgive, but also to honor oneself enough where you're not willing to put yourself in a position to be harmed anymore. But you can forgive someone and have them out of your life without having any animosity or anger or resentment toward them whatsoever. You can actually set yourself free by setting yourself free from being victimized.

[01:30:02] Irene: Exactly. That is one of the key tenets that we've seen, that I've seen, my colleagues have seen-- I learned it originally from Peter, is-- the stuff that people survive as humans is monumental, off worldly in some ways. And the people that get better, this is across the board, no longer identify as a victim.

[01:30:32] They really see that was bad. That was really bad. And this is the thing. This gets people a little bit uppity when you say that. It's like, yeah, you were definitely harmed. I'm not saying that that didn't occur, but you're no longer in that state, and you aren't the victim anymore.

[01:30:52] And it's super important to not just have that mindset shift, but from what I've seen, Luke, again-- and you've done so much work in your own healing, which is very clear, is working at this somatic level to get out that venom. And one of the words that we use a lot now, or I use more than empathy is attunement.

[01:31:17] This attuning to, this is why this X person did this to me. And this is where, again, I think having this idea of soul and past life is very important. Because then you can see, yes, this person should not have done that in this lifetime, but they did not have the tools to not not do it. And so they did it.

[01:31:40] And who am I to then keep anger and venom and rage against that person? Because then that's not going to help me in my current life and how I raise my kids and all of this. So there's a lot of soul searching, a lot of, as we might call it, shadow work, which is just working with those really deep pieces. And there's so many words to describe it.

[01:32:06] But some of the more powerful work with people that I've done when they've had horrific abuse is getting into, we would call it, annihilation work. This is more advanced. It's not just getting angry and crying. And this is really advanced, I need to say this. But for you, I know you can take this, is, you are seeing in your mind. You're not doing, but you're seeing in your mind. You might even act out the movements of annihilating the perpetrator.

[01:32:39] But you have to separate that from their soul. Like, it was what they did. It was a program. It wasn't goodness. It was bad. Bad. So we need to fight that. We need to annihilate. For some people, it's chopping someone's head off. Again, imagination. It's putting them into a burning lava flow. It's seeing them--

[01:33:05] Luke: That's a good one.

[01:33:06] Irene: It's seeing them scream as they get jetted out into an atmosphere with no oxygen and they suffocate. I'm just making these up as I go along.

[01:33:16] Luke: Pretty good. I like those.

[01:33:17] Irene: Yeah, the person has to find what that is, and so much healing and getting out of that victim mode happens when you can really go into that annihilation and almost very sadistic imaginations. It seems extreme. It seems very non-enlightened. But again, animal.

[01:33:41] If someone was harming your children, you would protect. You would fight. And so we also have to look at those biological impulses and needs. And from what I've seen, I'm sharing this, when people can get to that, when they've built enough somatic capacity, they're really planted here on earth.

[01:34:03] Because you can also go into that world and get hijacked. But if you're really grounded, you really know how to come back to the present moment, it's November 2nd. It's dah, dah, dah, dah. And then you can do it. You can really heal a lot of that deep, deep victim pain. That's just by my experience. And it can be fun too. It's like it gives you your life force back. And when you're living in victim mode, you don't have clean life force energy.

[01:34:35] Luke: Yeah. There's a lot of wisdom in that. And also I think in the earlier stages of looking at forgiveness in the ways that I just described, without going to the places that you just highlighted, I couldn't fully forgive because I didn't even know how dark what I was trying to forgive was.

[01:35:09] Irene: Yeah.

[01:35:10] Luke: It's not spiritual bypassing per se. It's like I would've looked at it and faced it and felt it if I knew how, or knew what to look for. You know what I mean?

[01:35:18] Irene: Mm-hmm.

[01:35:19] Luke: I remember in one of my first ayahuasca journeys, I was, of course, taken down this fucking shadowy path, and I'm like, "Cool, I got this. I've been in therapy about this. You know what I mean? It's like I'm no stranger to at looking at this trauma. But seeing it with more reality, more clarity, I was fucking pissed.

[01:35:47] Irene: Mm-hmm.

[01:35:49] Luke: Which I should have been.

[01:35:51] Irene: Of course.

[01:35:51] Luke: But I didn't know because it is easy for me to get to a place of, like, that person was just a victim of their own trauma or the darkness that overtook them or whatever it was. It's really easy for me on a spiritual level, emotional, psychological level to put the pieces together. But to your work, the somatic experience of going, "Holy shit, that five-year-old is still right here."

[01:36:20] Irene: Yes.

[01:36:21] Luke: Some different cells and stuff, but this is the same vessel.

[01:36:25] Irene: The essence. Yes.

[01:36:26] Luke: And that vessel needed to express that. And probably still does to some degree that I'm not aware of, where it's like, whoa, shit. Going to those levels and realizing, holy shit, I had no idea. You know things you go through in life screw you up. You become an addict and you put the pieces together. But, man, the severity of some of the things we experienced, I think, is hard for us to grasp as adults, man. Because it's just like you can't go back there without the body going with you.

[01:37:01] Irene: Yeah. And I want to be clear that annihilation example I gave, that is not classically taught in somatic experiencing. I've gained that by working with mentors who have deeply trained with Peter, and then they've done other work with other high-level mentors. So this is the other thing, is this work is so new. It's embryonic.

[01:37:28] I'm third generation in a sense. The pieces are vast, and my comfortableness talking about karma and past lives and soul contracts and intergalactic species, this is not typical in the somatic trauma healing world. I'm going to say that very clearly.

[01:37:51] And it makes it hard when you want to get some really good somatic work done and the person you're working with, if they want that level of detail, which I think maybe those who follow you want, you're going to have to piecemeal how you find the helpers. Because it's very rare that someone has all those pieces in one toolkit, if you will.

[01:38:20] Luke: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:38:21] Irene: But yeah, do not go annihilating people, those listening. Don't do that. Please don't do that until you know you can do basics and really stay in your body when the dishwasher breaks, whatever.

[01:38:39] That is a very high-level practice, which is fun when you get there. But it's like they talk about these cathartic practices where you go and you get the baseball bat and you hit things very cathartic. Yeah, that's nice, but it's not connecting to the internal story and the essence of why you need to hit.

[01:39:04] It's funny because the World Series just finished. I'm not a baseball person, but it did. Very rarely in your trauma history do you want a baseball bat to hurt something. You have to also give the person what they naturally would've wanted. And typically it is using limbs, voice, kicking, running, scratching, choking, all these very primal human things.

[01:39:34] And so when we get the baseball bat or we get these-- it's just not the same. So this ability to also have imagination is super important. And to trust it. Someone is not ready to do that level of deep, deep annihilation work if when they hear me talk about this, they go, "No." Or they recoil. So I wanted to just put that in there from ethical point of view.

[01:40:02] Luke: I think that's responsible. I really like the throwing them in hot lava.

[01:40:06] Irene: Yeah.

[01:40:07] Luke: That's a good one.

[01:40:10] Irene: And then I'll add the other thing for those who maybe are ready for that level. And it's possible you are, Luke. You have to also see their eyes and the screams that come out of them. And you have to be awake and seeing. And this is another thing, a lot of the practices that are like, close your eyes and take a deep breath and imagine these things.

[01:40:35] That's nice, but in the real animal world, you aren't fighting your opponent with your eyes closed. So if it's too scary to have your eyes open and see that taking place, then that's the indication that you're not ready to do that level of high-level anger annihilation work.

[01:40:56] Luke: Fair, fair. I want to mention to people listening and watching that all of the show notes, because I'm sure there's going to be a lot of links to drop in here, for this episode can be found at lukestorey.com/getregulated.

[01:41:09] And in there you'll find some other links like lukestorey.com/tuneup, where you've got a 21-day Nervous System Tune-up course. There's 100 bucks off for Black Friday, which is around the time this'll come out. There's a couple of other offerings in there. The SmartBody SmartMind course, the Healing Trauma free video series. Because I just have that in my notes. Can you tell us a little bit about what those three things are? And then we'll just put all of the links for people, again, at lukestorey.com/getregulated.

[01:41:43] Irene: So the two courses, the 21 Day Nervous System Tune-up and SmartBody SmartMind, that is how I work with people. Now it's online. I don't do private work at this point anymore. Reason being, people, I have learned in my experience need foundations. So some people might need someone one-on-one immediately depending on where your system is.

[01:42:08] But I'll say this: if you've gotten to this-- where are we? Almost two hours out of this. If you're listening, you're nodding your head. You're going, "Wow, this makes sense." Maybe you're feeling a little activation. That's normal. Maybe you're feeling a little shut down. That's normal. But if you're tracking all this and you're still here, then your system is ready in prime to do the deeper, not just practice, but education.

[01:42:35] So all those courses have a lot of practical but also deep, deep education. We need the education. We didn't even touch education today, which is great. I like that we just went story-based. But it is very important that people understand the complexity of their many nervous systems, because there's more than one, how they work, how they get stuck, how they create illness.

[01:43:00] Because what happens, Luke, and everyone here, obviously, I can give exercises and techniques, but everyone is going to experience them differently because our histories are different. Our trainings are different. And so when you have the theory, it gives you an upper hand to go, "Oh, this is that thing Irene was talking about. I'm going to stop this exercise even though I'm only five minutes in-- and it's say, a 30-minute exercise-- because she said this might happen. And I'm going to just go for a walk. Or I'm going to watch a funny movie or resource to something."

[01:43:40] So the courses that I present, they're not simple. They're very complex, but they get to the foundations, and they're built around growing capacity. Nowhere in any of the trainings do we put you on the spot in a forum or with writing and say, what are your traumas? List them. We don't do that because they will come up as they need to come up as you grow the capacity and you get the education on board.

[01:44:08] So those are the two courses, 21-day. A person can start at any time at this time. SBSM runs in kind of semesters. So while we're recording this, there's a semester happening. It's live. It's intense, but good. We'll do another one in late Feb. We usually run twice a year. And then the Healing Trauma series is a video training that has beginning theory in it. It's me talking when I'm a lot younger, so I'll look a little different in those videos.

[01:44:39] But it's still solid information. There is a practical exercise in that. So there's a 20-minute neurosensory exercise in that free training, if someone wants to just push play and experience me guiding them through the basics of nervous system health. I will say, know that that is not everything. I think you guys cook, right? You cook in your home.

[01:45:05] Luke: A little bit.

[01:45:05] Irene: Little bit.

[01:45:06] Luke: My wife does.

[01:45:07] Irene: Okay. So you know with cooking, there's basics. You always have your celery, onion, and carrots. That's the base of soups and stews, for example. The neurosensory basics, it's like the carrots, onions, and celery. It's the base, but it's not the full meal. And so the full meal is in SmartBody SmartMind.

[01:45:30] Those lessons go into working with early trauma, preverbal trauma, toxic shame, healthy aggression, the actual layers of the body. We didn't talk about that really, but the skin, the fascia, the muscle, the bone, the spine, the movements. Everyone's throwing out the word somatic, but it's more than just a bunch of movements. It's how we sense our internal physiology and how we self-correct. So that is all in SmartBody SmartMind.

[01:46:03] Luke: I feel like I need to take all of your courses.

[01:46:07] Irene: You should. You should try.

[01:46:09] Luke: Seriously. Out of the different training that you do, are any of them more or less geared toward people that want to become practitioners or people that just want to work on themselves?

[01:46:21] Irene: Yeah. So everything that is available is for personal use.

[01:46:25] Luke: Okay.

[01:46:26] Irene: I will say this though. We have had many people go through  SmartBody SmartMind who are already helpers, healers, practitioners medical doctors, nurses, school teachers. If you want to keep your current scope of practice, like you enjoy what you do, but you want to be trauma-informed-- because again, that's another-- I rolled my eyes when I say that.

[01:46:50] Trauma-informed is not typically what you get when you go online and look for trauma-informed. Trauma-informed means working on your own trauma, working on your own nervous system at this somatic level. And so a lot of people will do, say,  SmartBody SmartMind, and then they get these really good tools to keep themselves in good capacity or have better insight when they are working with the person they're working with.

[01:47:17] Luke: That's what I was thinking. Yeah.

[01:47:19] Irene: It's pretty cool. Some of my favorite stories are teachers, elementary school teachers. They don't want to become a trauma therapist. They like their job. But then they do this, and then they see the children in a completely different light. Like the story about my friend whose little one was molested as a--

[01:47:40] Luke: Yeah.

[01:47:40] Irene: She could see something was wrong. And then for practitioner, I just started. Probably going to be a four year level training. I just finished one level with 31 students worldwide. Those students started with  SmartBody SmartMind.

[01:48:00] So if, when, I hope, I do another professional cohort, it is essential that people have moved through  SmartBody SmartMind, and that they really like it and they feel it and they want to do it. One thing that's occurring right now, Luke, everybody wants to become a trauma therapist, it seems, and a somatic  practitioner.

[01:48:23] Luke: I've noticed that on Instagram. Yeah.

[01:48:26] Irene: And it is the Wild West right now. You live in Texas, so you've got history there. It's scary, actually, because what's happening is people are going through online trainings only that are maybe three months long, and they're not-- this is my opinion, but I know this professionally from being with and hearing people who've gone through some of these things.

[01:48:53] They're not getting a true apprenticeship the way I and, say, my colleagues have, where you are in trainings, physical. Watching demonstrations, getting mucky with your own stuff and working with people and studying the terms. And what's occurred is that because of the influencer world and the quick TikToks and social media, people are being entertained, but they're not actually scholastically learning what it takes to be a true professional in this field.

[01:49:26] And buyer beware. I'm going to be really honest. You have to be very careful. And I've been very stringent with my mentees. Like, you guys aren't trained yet. You've got the first level. You know more than most people, yes. But we still have to add all these other layers to the picture. It's like medicine. A lot of people don't realize it, but you certainly won't want a surgeon to operate on you when you've only done pre-med.

[01:49:57] And so a lot of people think that they have enough to work at the somatic trauma level because they've attended a Peter Levine online workshop or gone to Bessel van der Kolk, something somewhere at some retreat center. Those are all great. If you want to go and learn from the big names or even from me, great.

[01:50:19] But to do this as a practice is a completely different-- it's a profession. And we don't have standards yet in this profession. So that's the other thing. There's no testing. Nobody gave me a test. Nobody tested my competency.

[01:50:35] Luke: I'm glad we got to touch on this because, to me, it falls in the same category of psychedelic facilitation.

[01:50:47] Irene: Oh, we can talk for five hours on one.

[01:50:50] Luke: There's a lot of, I'm sure, very earnest, well-meaning people that are on a healing journey and have some gifts and want to help other people and make a career out of it. And we need all the healers we can get. But I know for myself-- I think I've talked about this before because I find it funny. I've had so many journeys where I am convinced on the medicine that I'm supposed to walk out of there and serve that medicine.

[01:51:20] I'm like, "I'm going to Peru." I'm like, "I'm all in." And then the next day I'm like, "Dude, you don't have six to 10 years to be someone's apprentice, to like really learn how to do it right." And then my, I don't know, sense of responsibility and integrity kicks in. I go, "Oh man, I know I experienced something really special, and maybe that was it." Every once in a while I get--

[01:51:42] Irene: Good for you.

[01:51:43] Luke: I get to have someone hold space for me while I go through a process that might be really beautiful, but as powerful as it might be or whatever insights I might have had, and I've had some incredible insights and supernatural shit that is unexplainable, That doesn't necessarily mean that it's my path to go facilitate other people in that experience.

[01:52:04] Irene: It's quiet dangerous. Yeah.

[01:52:06] Luke: I think work like this, I'm fairly well-versed at being open and vulnerable, and I can have a conversation about some sticky stuff with you on a podcast that thousands of people are going to hear I'm cool. But if I was really going to do some deep work in the realm that you are, or with psychedelics, man, I'm going to vet the shit out of someone before I start opening myself up in ways that could actually cause irreparable harm.

[01:52:33] So I think it's really important, the point that you raised, whether it's with psychedelics or somatic work, dealing with trauma. It's another thing you just go on Yelp to find. You know what I mean?

[01:52:47] Irene: No.

[01:52:49] Luke: We're very delicate, especially people carrying around trauma, man. It's something to take, for me, very seriously and have a lot of discernment because it can be really gnarly. I've been fortunate enough not to have really any negative experiences, but I've heard and seen from other people that walked into something and it didn't go well. And now they have to undo that trauma, which what they were trying to do in the first place is to heal their trauma and they get more traumatized, whether it was just through negligence or lack of experience, or whatever it was.

[01:53:27] So that's my PSA to people that we might talk about these things on a podcast and it sounds like fun and games, but when you start getting into the nitty gritty, it can get hairball.

[01:53:38] Irene: Definitely. And it goes the other way too, which I want to add, is if someone is like, "Oh, I want to be a healer. I want to help." Great. If that's really what you want to do, great. But you also are at risk for things going wrong. It isn't just the person you're working with. We've been talking for two hours.

[01:54:03] I have stamina to do this because I've experienced so many podcasts and I can talk, and this is my jam. If someone is new to this work and they're trying to practice, if you don't know how to keep recycling your energy, even in a 20-minute session, you then-- there's a million things that can go wrong, Luke, but you can get a meshed with that person.

[01:54:31] You then start having projections. They then project on you. There's a reason why psychologists-- as much as psychology has its downfalls in terms of it doesn't always help this-- well, it doesn't help the somatic stuff, but it can be good if you need to talk to someone, talk therapy. There's a reason why they learn about transference and counter transference.

[01:54:52] There is also somatic transference and counter transference. The same man that taught me the annihilation work, his name is Ian McNaughton. He has a book called Somatic Anthology, and that book really should be mandatory reading for anyone doing somatic therapy, because one of the chapters is ethics.

[01:55:14] And if you cannot hold your own in normal life and all the variations, watch out when you start handling someone in all of their dysregulation. And man, the amount of times I've heard students say that they went to a practitioner and their practitioner got triggered by their trauma story.

[01:55:37] Luke: Oh, wow.

[01:55:38] Irene: Huge.

[01:55:40] Luke: I didn't even think about that side of it.

[01:55:42] Irene: Oh, it's huge. If someone is squeamish when we say child molestation, satanic abuse, all the things that are horrible, war, limbs being blown off, you shouldn't be doing this work-- if you get triggered by hearing these things. Because you will hear things, and if that person's senses you get scared or you dissociate, or you get defensive as a practitioner, it's game over. And then you wonder why you come out of that session and you feel terrible.

[01:56:16] So that the cleaning of your own energy is important, but also the stomaching of all sorts of varieties of trauma and being able to embody it but not have it stick to you. These are the things that don't get talked about in the influencer world, but they're real, and they happen. And I've seen the fallout of it.

[01:56:39] So it's not to scare people, really. It's just to say, this is a great profession. It's so rewarding, and you also have to treat it like you are becoming a medical doctor. But there's no school yet, and so you have to be very diligent at who you work with, how you study, how you take care of yourself, when to take a break, when to push. All these are things that I'm trying to teach my mentees right now. It's fun, but it's tricky.

[01:57:10] Luke: Awesome.

[01:57:11] Irene: It's tricky, but it's fun.

[01:57:13] Luke: You just reminded me of a funny story. In one of those experiences where I was like, "I'm definitely supposed to serve medicine, I was on some mushrooms with a small group of people and one of the people was an old friend of mine who I used to mentor. So everyone takes a bunch of mushrooms. We're out in the Texas country, and everyone just goes off and finds their own little plot.

[01:57:40] And they were, as is often the case, much stronger than I anticipated them to be. And I am just laid out in the grass, and we're just rolling around, going, "What is happening?" Tripping so hard. There wasn't a playlist. There wasn't a shaman. It was just me. So I was flailing a little out there trying to find my center.

[01:58:02] Irene: Mm-hmm.

[01:58:03] Luke: Which I'm pretty decent at doing. But I was like, "Okay, I'm not sure if I totally got this, but I'm hanging on by a thread." Anyway, a third party comes up and is like, "Hey, your homie is really struggling. He went dark. He's tripping. And he asked me if he could have your support. Could you hold space for him?" And I'm like, "I think."

[01:58:27] Irene: I'm in my process right now.

[01:58:28] Luke: Yeah. But I said yes because I'm just like-- couldn't even talk. And so he comes over anyway and he's in a shame spiral. And it was such a great learning experience. And I did pretty well. I did pretty well, I think, because I knew him and we had that kind of relationship.

[01:58:48] But I was like, "Dude." And part of it was because I was on a bunch of medicine, but I saw that I was ill-equipped to hold the space that's been held for me in those experiences, where sitting with someone who's been drinking Wachuma for 20 years, five times a week.

[01:59:08] And I'm looking at them going, "Dude, how can you play the guitar right now?" And they're just totally normal. It's the repetition and the experience and knowing how to hold the grid and work with the energies and all those trippy things that happen with psychedelics.

[01:59:21] But he's having this meltdown and I'm like, "I'm trying to use the old way that I would've talked him down off the ledge, but I can't really talk." It was so humbling, because I realized like, "Yeah, dude. If you want to do this, you got a long way to go in that space."

[01:59:39] Irene: Yes.

[01:59:40] Luke: Yeah, so it reminds me of that. But to your point of the practitioners need to be mindful of this too, it colored my experience, needless to say. I was just trying to find my sea legs out there and all of a sudden, like, I'm trying to hold space from someone else. It definitely was a bad trip for me.

[02:00:01] Irene: Yeah.

[02:00:01] Luke: Even though I stuck with it and hung in there and eventually we pulled him out of it and went our separate ways and everything was fine. But it could have gotten really crunchy, especially if I didn't know him as well as I did, where he could lean into that trust once I got things calmed down a bit.

[02:00:18] But man, in these kind of spaces, it can get super sketchy. And I'm glad you brought up that for both parties, not just the person who's seeking help, but also the one who's doing the helping.

[02:00:29] Irene: Yes. Absolutely.

[02:00:32] Luke: Yeah. I wish someone had been videotaping that [Inaudible].

[02:00:37] Irene: Yeah, fly on the wall would've been good for that one.

[02:00:40] Luke: It's so funny actually, because when he first walked up, we were all wearing camo because it was on a hunting trip. And it was like the desert camo, not like--

[02:00:49] Irene: You guys had firearms while you were doing this?

[02:00:52] Luke: Not in that moment, but earlier in the day, we had been using firearms.

[02:00:56] Irene: Got it.

[02:00:57] Luke: So he walks up in full camo, and I like roll over. I'm just like dirt all over my face, stickers in my hair and everything. I roll over, and all I could do was laugh, which was not what was needed in the moment. But because he was in camo, he totally melted into the environment. He had like a cloak of invisibility, and I could barely see face poking out of the wilderness in the background. It was off to a rough start to begin with because he comes over in a shame spiral and I just start laughing at him.

[02:01:31] Irene: Yeah.

[02:01:32] Luke: Anyway, I digress.

[02:01:33] Irene: No, it's all good.

[02:01:34] Luke: There are many more things I want to talk to you about, but I know we've been going for now two hours and four minutes.

[02:01:46] But I did want to touch on a couple of things that are just personal curiosities. One is, many people are like familiar with the generality of fight, flight, or freeze. I am of the nervous system temperate under stress, pressure, freak out. I'm going to just completely freeze and turn into a statue.

[02:02:05] Irene: Yeah.

[02:02:06] Luke: My little brother who was traumatized in the same way, at least on dad's side of the family, is the complete opposite. And we've both worked on that, where I've learned how to be more assertive and actually show up. And he's learned how to not punch people in the face.

[02:02:23] But his innate reaction is to just literally try and kill someone when he feels the same thing that I feel. And I've always wondered. It's like, why did either of us develop that propensity when we had objectively the same flavor of trauma?

[02:02:41] Irene: I have a hunch.

[02:02:43] Luke: Are we just like born that way?

[02:02:45] Irene: No.

[02:02:45] Luke: You're either a fighter or a freezer?

[02:02:47] Irene: No, no, no. Well, maybe. If we take the soul thing out of it for a moment, and just for biology-- he's younger than you?

[02:02:53] Luke: Yeah.

[02:02:54] Irene: By how old?

[02:02:55] Luke: 12 years.

[02:02:56] Irene: Oh, wow.

[02:02:57] Luke: Yeah.

[02:02:58] Irene: Okay.

[02:02:58] Luke: Half-brother. Different mom, but same tyrannical dad.

[02:03:02] Irene: He was around. Yeah. So typically what I see, and this is not always, but this is a trend, is when there's an older sibling in a not great home environment, they will be the protector, and they will hold it all together.

[02:03:20] And then that allows the younger sibling-- and 12 years difference is huge. You wouldn't see this as much if it was just a year or two. But you still do. It allows then the younger siblings to get more energy out. Here's a question. Did he struggle with addiction like you?

[02:03:40] Luke: Yes.

[02:03:40] Irene: Okay. So that's interesting to me. If I were to have bet, I would've said maybe he wasn't in the same way because he was able to get that out.

[02:03:51] Luke: Here's an interesting one for you. Middle brother, who-- they're full brothers, and I'm a half with both of them. Middle brother is eight years younger, and so he's four years older than the one I was just talking about, and he's a freezer like me.

[02:04:10] Irene: Yeah.

[02:04:11] Luke: So the model that you just-- and didn't become an addict, but they grew up with the same mom and same dad. So their situation is more comparable than mine, but--

[02:04:19] Irene: So that mimics there too.

[02:04:21] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[02:04:23] Irene: He was with his younger sibling in that environment with mom. He had to freeze, more of the stoic. This is where being stoic comes in. That makes sense.

[02:04:36] Luke: So [Inaudible].

[02:04:37] Irene: Yeah, no, and you hear this. The eldest will often-- back in the day, I come from a lineage where my grandmother had like-- I'm bad at numbers-- but eight siblings, and she was the eldest. My mom was the youngest of, I think, eight, and her older brother was 20 years older than her. And so the older sibling often takes on the figure of mother or father when things are chaotic. Right?

[02:05:11] Luke: Yeah.

[02:05:12] Irene: But then they often also, at the detriment of that, gets sick later on because they weren't able to express and find their true, authentic self, because they had to fit the personality of caregiver.

[02:05:27] Luke: Right, right. So interesting. I'm going to send this podcast to my two brothers. I should ask them like what their boundaries are. I don't think they care, but I always talk about things like that and then afterward I go, "I don't know if they necessarily wanted me to talk about them on a podcast." But I will say they would both love this conversation already.

[02:05:48] But if they don't, I'll be like, "Fast forward to the end just because it's for you guys." Andy and Cody, I'm talking to you, my boys. But I guess I'm just so fascinated by the human experience and what makes us unique and why some of us react differently. There's a template, and we're all somewhere in the spectrum. But it's just interesting to me when someone is at the opposite end of a spectrum, when they had externally, a very similar life.

[02:06:19] Irene: The other thing to remember is what's going on in the universe, the world, the events make a big difference. So you might have siblings that are born over a 10-year period, but if you think about a sibling that was born, I'll just go really historical, during, say, the second World War-- not famine necessarily, but food shortages, bombs.

[02:06:47] I'm talking about people who would be in Europe, Britain, or in, say, Asia. Because my mother was one of those people in the Philippines during the second World War. It was not good. Then you have a sibling or a child five years later, and it's the heyday of the war's over. We have tons of food. Everybody's having sex, having babies. Very different. So you might have the same family system, but what's going on in the current zeitgeist is going to really impact the sense of safety of the parents.

[02:07:24] Luke: No doubt. Think about all the kids that were forced to wear masks and all this stuff in the plandemic. It's like the fallout of that is going to be insane.

[02:07:37] Irene: I've already been hearing stories

[02:07:39] Luke: Yeah, I can imagine.

[02:07:40] Irene: Early trauma babies being born, not seeing faces, having horrific nightmares of faceless creatures trying to get them at night.

[02:07:50] Luke: Having nightmares of Fauci breaking their door down.

[02:07:54] Irene: They wouldn't know him. But no, it's--

[02:07:58] Luke: I shouldn't laugh.

[02:07:58] Irene: Definitely it's there. And then those who didn't know and then they knew, and then the shame and the guilt of-- these things started being studied after the Holocaust with survivors and how they're-- again, I don't quote research, but I know that the research was there. Cortisol levels higher. Gabor Mate talks about that a lot.

[02:08:22] And then there was research post 9/11, and man, it's going to be a heyday for epidemiologists studying the after effects of what occurred during COVID. That will be interesting to see what occurs. We already know that the learning capacities of kids who were isolated, not able to be with friends, playing, if we just look at that, right? -- school, yes, we could say indoctrinates.

[02:08:52] You're still learning how to be with others. Hopefully you get to play in the monkey bars and play ball and all the things that socialize you as a child. And hear these poor kids were just glued to their screens, learning. I had enough trouble in the normal school system learning with a teacher there to help me. I could not imagine learning just through the digital world as a 6-year-old.

[02:09:24] Luke: Nuts. A lot of people talk about practices like breathwork, sauna, cold plunge as having benefits in terms of regulating the nervous system. Do you think there's any truth to that? And if yes or not, what role could those play?

[02:09:41] Irene: Mm-hmm. It depends on the person. So it goes back to what we talked about earlier, about what is trauma and if your system is regulated or not. So I have a cold plunge. I have a sauna. I got the red lights and all the things. I do all those things. But we need to look at those as therapeutics.

[02:10:05] So I like to call breathwork, sauna-- it is creating a physiological shift through the heat shot proteins and the constriction of vessels and all those things. So that is really important and good for therapeutics. But if one is really in dysregulation and they know that that's because they need to deal with old stuff, those things are not going to fix or regulate the nervous system.

[02:10:32] It might help create a state shift. Your muscles are tense. Oh, I need a hot bath, Epsom salts, bath or a sauna. And you feel more relaxed afterwards. This is true. But it's not getting to those deeply held tigers that are stored in the system. Breath work is an interesting one because-- I go back to the baby, Luke.

[02:10:58] So you have a newborn baby. It's crying. It's upset. You can't ask that little baby to take a deep breath and hold for five, exhale for five, and repeat that five times. Common box breathing. You might do that as a parent, but they need attunement. They need to be held. They need to be listened to.

[02:11:21] What is it that they need? Are they hungry? Are they scared? Are they tired? So when it comes to understanding regulation, we have to ask, is the person dysregulated because they never got it to begin with at the beginning, through early trauma adversity. That's the case? Then you'll not restore full regulation with breath work. But you can use it as a therapeutic to learn your capacity of your lungs.

[02:11:53] Was it James Nestor who wrote Breath? I think. Yellow cover. He talks about people who can't handle excess CO2 leads them to panic. I think learning to feel the excess CO2, to hold the breath, to control the breath, all very important. But I would say 9.9 times out of 10, when I was in private practice and someone was trying to control their breath, often it sounds like this--[Breathing Out]-- Breathing out, controlling.

[02:12:29] Yes, that's helping their system come out of activation, but if we look at it from a trauma imprint perspective, what that person might need to actually feel is the opposite of downregulating. They might need to feel activation, back to the annihilation. They might need to feel crazy energy come out, but they don't have the capacity yet to explode. So they [Breathing Out]. So I would never say to someone who is not able to contain the big tiger yet and let it out, "Just go scream a bit."

[02:13:06] Because that actually can flip the system, if you have autoimmune, into a flare. It could put you into psychosis. So in that case, it's like, okay, this person is really trying to regulate their breathing. We're not going to totally change it, but we're going to be like, what would it be to actually not do that so much and just wait for the breath to come normally?

[02:13:27] One of my senior students is trained in breath work, and she's struggling right now because she's seeing there needs to be more of an organic back and forth with her clients rather than just teaching this thing. But I said to her, I said, "Hey, go to the breathwork class. It's social for you. You like it. Don't not go." Just like I wouldn't say to someone, don't go to a yoga class if you know yoga isn't giving you enlightenment and healing your trauma, but the social aspect and the movement is good, go to it. But from what I've learned, from what I've seen, I can pretty much say this with certainty. Those things will not heal your trauma. They can supplement the physiology as you move through those things.

[02:14:16] But I often hear people say, oh, I did some breath work to regulate my nervous system. And I would say, "Well, you are shifting your system, and you might be more calm now, but if you need it the next day and the next day and the next day, then you're not actually getting true regulation. You're using it as a coping strategy. Which by the way, I say to people, if doing that keeps you from hitting your kids or being destructive, then do the breath work. Have the sauna. So that's my spiel for that one.

[02:14:52] Luke: Cool. That makes sense. I think--

[02:14:56] Irene: Oh, can I add one more thing?

[02:14:58] Luke: You can add as many things as you want.

[02:15:00] Irene: Because I was doing a bit more strategic breath work, because I got what I think was COVID, who knows? I don't know. Didn't test. Doesn't matter. But my lungs were really on fire a couple years ago, maybe five years ago now.

[02:15:15] And I remember sitting up in bed thinking to myself, wow, if I didn't have the tools that I have to feel my lungs and expand into my pelvis and into my back and into my kidneys, and if I was just focused on the constriction that I'm feeling in my upper airways, I now understand why someone would have a panic attack and call the ambulance.

[02:15:42] And so I use the breathwork that I do know how to do because I've dabbled in a little bit to help myself in that moment come down and not panic. So that's a very specific therapeutic example where knowing these skills are actually really important. But in that moment, it was acute. My airways were inflamed, and I needed to work with myself to calm my cortisol and adrenaline, and it helped. So again, these things are important, but not to regulate the nervous system.

[02:16:19] Luke: Yeah, that makes sense. I don't know that I've ever done cold plunges and had any sort of correlation to trauma at all.

[02:16:30] Irene: Yeah, yeah.

[02:16:31] Luke: But I've been doing that for a long, long time. And one thing that I have noticed that I think I can pretty much tie causation to, maybe a little correlation, but there's a pretty direct tracking of this, is that over the years I've conditioned myself to get in that really cold water and just be completely calm the entire time.

[02:17:02] Whereas at the beginning, or if I watch people that are first doing it, they get in cold water, and they start hyperventilating. And for a while I thought I was really cool because I didn't do that. And then I spotted that ego trying to sneak in. God dammit, get out of here. But in all seriousness, one of the things I enjoy about that practice is getting better at that and just like, wow, how quickly can I just dip into just normal, relaxed breathing and just override the biological system that wants to freak out.

[02:17:40] And I feel like that's been one thing that has helped me have equanimity and be less reactive with other things in life, of the car cutting you off, the letter from the IRS, whatever. Shit that normally would've gotten me triggered, I feel like, ah. I'm impervious to a lot of things that would bother some people and that definitely would've bothered me.

[02:18:02] And I think part of that is like training myself to just be chill and tell my body that you're safe, even though you don't feel like it because-- your physiology is only remembering the human animal meat suit, and throughout all of our history, if you were in water that cold, it would mean you were about to die because you fell through some ice.

[02:18:22] So it's like, I get you, body. I know why you're freaking out. But there's an adult in the room. Let's just be chill with this. This feels good. Do you think there's any validity to that in building resilience?

[02:18:35] Irene: It depends on the person. So here's a question for you. Have you ever had a history of autoimmune stuff?

[02:18:43] Luke: No. Nothing like that.

[02:18:44] Irene: So that's my fail-safe question. The reason I ask that, for whatever reason, it feels like you have a hearty system. Yeah, you had addiction, all the things, but my sense is your body had, we would call it heartiness strength.

[02:19:04] And so you are able to handle that. If someone were to come to me with lupus or rheumatoid arthritis or autoimmune or fibromyalgia, a, they probably wouldn't be able to bear it because their system is super over sensitized to pain. And if they did push through, what will happen most likely, because they're dysregulated to begin with, is their system will go into what's called-- it happens naturally.

[02:19:36] It's called a dive reflex. And it's the reflex that the big mammals in the ocean and the polar bears, when they go into that, it's like, how can they do that? It's because they have a very strong capacity to go into shut down.

[02:19:51] Luke: Oh, interesting.

[02:19:52] Irene: So their parasympathetic nervous system is really good at this dive reflex. And it's like what bears do when they hibernate. Heart rate slows down. The blood pressure slows down. The circulation slows down. It also allows them to dive deep and be underwater without oxygen for long periods of time. Humans, though, we're Terrans. We're earthlings. We're meant to be on ground breathing oxygen and warm.

[02:20:24] If you were to put a new-- and of course do not do this. If you were to put a newborn baby into a cold plunge and they're crying, it will be quiet because it's going to go into its dive reflex. Of course, the risk of it dying of hypothermia is way higher because their system is way more delicate. So for you, Luke, I would say, I actually believe you.

[02:20:50] My sense is you're not putting yourself into shutdown. You are consciously there with it. Another person though, might not be so lucky, and they'll numb out. Because there's this moment, for me it's about 30 seconds, 45 seconds-- we have a full cold plunge-- I start to feel the tingles. At that point, I'll wait a few more seconds and then I'll get out.

[02:21:17] Females are different, obviously. Our hormones are different. The uterine area is different. I have really bad orthopedic injuries, so I don't want to push them too much. I prefer going hot, cold, hot, cold to pump the circulation.

[02:21:33] Luke: The best ever.

[02:21:36] Irene: It really breaks my heart when I see, usually it's dads with 8-year-old boys, put them in a cold plunge, and they're panicking, and they're crying. I'm like, why don't you just drop them off in a war zone? Because their physiology doesn't know any different and then they're being told, "Calm your breath." They're overriding their fear. But if you can go in there, like if someone is going in and they're like, "Ah." They're screaming. Don't do it.

[02:22:03] Or get into a hot bath first. Not hot, hot, but warm, and then go in, so the shock isn't as much. But then you still get that therapeutic dilation, constriction of the blood vessels. The baby example is really important because, again, if that person didn't have a good start from the beginning, they never learned proper self-regulation.

[02:22:27] And so to use a therapeutic as strong as a cold plunge that's shifting the system into what's called high tone, dorsal of the parasympathetic, they won't know how to counteract that internally because the organs will get affected. That's why I asked you if you have a history of say, autoimmune or anything. Does that make sense? This is where the nuance has to come in.

[02:22:48] Luke: Yeah, totally. It's useful because I think that-- well, I don't think. I know.

[02:22:54] Irene: Yeah.

[02:22:55] Luke: There's trends in the wellness space, and if there's some data to support their benefits, then I think many people think, well, if it's good for that person, it's good for me.

[02:23:07] Irene: Mm-hmm.

[02:23:08] Luke: And it might not be, in some cases. My wife hates the cold plunge. It just stresses her out. I'm like, "Oh my God. To me, that's like my medicine." It's just like the thing that always calms me down.

[02:23:19] Irene: Mm-hmm.

[02:23:20] Luke: So I think it's important for each person listening or watching to podcasts like this, that there could be something that's really good for most people, and it might not mean that it's good for you. And that attunement to your own experience and knowing what's a psychological resistance or barrier that would be healthy to overcome? Mind over matter.

[02:23:44] Like, okay, I'm scared of this ice, but I want to overcome that fear-- is one thing. Versus overriding your nervous system if you have autoimmune or something where it could be a really bad idea.

[02:23:55] Irene: Exactly. And this comes back to knowing your internal environment. If a person can't feel their legs going tingly and they're just shutting it off, not because they're consciously shutting it off. You would be amazed how many people I will work with, they know they've got legs, obviously, because they've walked in, but they have no sensory awareness of them.

[02:24:20] So to take someone like that and put them into an extreme temperature shift can be very detrimental because they might not even realize that they're hitting hypothermia. And hypothermia is a real thing. I've lost friends to hypothermia when I was in my sporting days. It's a real thing. Just like too much heat, heat stroke can also kill you.

[02:24:47] And so this is where this whole world of wearables-- I just talked about this with someone the other day who loved running and then decided to train for a marathon. He got this wearable, and rather than feeling his body and what his body needed, he was looking at the stats and he injured himself.

[02:25:10] Luke: Oh wow.

[02:25:12] Irene: And so people are like, "What do you think about wearables, Irene?" I'm like, "First of all, I don't know if you want that radiation on your wrist." But that's a whole other story. But the second is like, are you learning without it? Because if you're constantly relying on it to tell you if you slept well or didn't, or I'm stressed or not, and it doesn't match up, you're then going to get mixed messages. And then you get confused and then you don't know. It's like, oh, it said I had a really calm sleep, and I feel so tired. Why is that?

[02:25:44] Luke: Yeah, yeah. Totally. Yeah, it's funny. I haven't been tracking my sleep in a while now. I don't know. I just fell out of the habit after a few years. But something that used to trip me out about it was on nights where I got a really bad score, but I felt really good and had tons of energy, and then nights where I felt like I slept like a bear and then was tired. You know what I mean?

[02:26:08] I'm just like, "How much nocebo is going on?" Because if I woke up, I'm, "Oh, I feel pretty good." And I look at the score and I go, "Dude, I got a 65?" It's like, I'm going to send a message to myself that I should be tired, even if I'm actually not.

[02:26:24] Irene: So there could be a physiological reason for that. So this is actually for those that have autoimmune and fatigue problems. People will often say, you just said it, I slept like a log. Deep out. The trouble with that is that it could be that the sleep is so deep that it's not rest, digest, parasympathetic sleep.

[02:26:47] It's, I'm dead to the world because I'm exhausted, and I'm passing out sleep. So people that sleep in that state of what we call, again, high tone, dorsal, it's the same physiology as being underwater and being in cold. You won't be able to be woken up. Someone will say, you had this really solid sleep, but it wasn't restorative.

[02:27:10] Luke: Right, right.

[02:27:11] Irene: You're not fixing the immune system and the gut lining. The tissues aren't being rejuvenated. We want to sleep deep, but we don't want to sleep so deep that if there was a fire running through our house, that we wouldn't wake up.

[02:27:26] Luke: Yeah. That happened to someone I know, actually.

[02:27:29] Irene: Oh.

[02:27:30] Luke: Thankfully they did get out of the house, but their wife tried to wake them up and they were just--

[02:27:35] Irene: Was that Rick Rubin?

[02:27:37] Luke: I don't know if I'm at liberty to say who it was. I don't know that it's--

[02:27:41] Irene: Because that was shared on-- you know who Rick Rubin is, right?

[02:27:46] Luke: Yes.

[02:27:46] Irene: There was a podcast episode where he talked about how there was a fire in his house and his wife tried to wake him up and he--

[02:27:53] Luke: Okay. Well, it was Rick. If he talked about it, then--

[02:27:55] Irene: Yeah, it was on Rogan. And I sat there listening to this, going, "Dude, you were in high tone dorsal. If you were parasympathetic, you should have gotten up. You had a child in the house. And he was like, "My wife will take care of it." I'm like, "Ah." So that was--

[02:28:11] Luke: You know what's even trippier about that was he had another home in LA that burned down when they weren't home. And then this house that that happened in was in Marfa, Texas. And it was right after I'd moved to Texas. He had this really rad house in Malibu, and I don't know how it caught fire, but it burned down, and they weren't there.

[02:28:31] It was a bummer. And back when that happened, I was just imagining like, I don't know, how attached I am to some of my shit-- family photo albums, my guitars, whatever. And after a few days, I texted him a condolence. I was like, "God, I'm really sorry to hear about your house."

[02:28:46] And he just sent me a text that said, "Wild nature, man." That was it. I was like, "Cool, your meditation is clearly working. Whatever you're doing, keep at it." But then shortly after was the other one where he got really sick from the smoke inhalation and stuff. But I was like, "What are the chances?" That's like getting hit by lightning twice.

[02:29:07] Irene: We were just talking about that, things cycling through, right?

[02:29:11] Luke: Yeah. Okay. Last question for you. Famous last words from your host, Luke. I've done a lot of neurofeedback training. Went to a place called Holon out in Nevada City, California, last year for a weeklong training. I did another one years ago at Biocybernaut in Sedona.

[02:29:29] I have a device sitting right here called the Sensai that my friend Dr. Drew Pierson helped develop. So I use that on a pretty regular basis. I feel certain that neurofeedback has been really helpful to me in a number of different ways that I don't have time to explain. Do you see any correlation between trauma, somatic stuff, and the brain, the neurofeedback training?

[02:29:52] Irene: Oh, for sure. I'm not experienced in it. I did a little bit of neurofeedback when I was dealing with some really severe skin reactions due to chemical trauma. That's a whole other story. It didn't help. But I liked it because I actually felt myself fall asleep and get calm in those moments. But it didn't help the actual underlying chemical trauma that I was needing to release from my fluids, essentially. But I remember it gave me some peace for an hour.

[02:30:27] Luke: Got it. Okay. I think the correlation I'm trying to draw here is like, what we're talking about is nervous system body. And something like neurofeedback-- there's a neuro acoustic brain training I do called NuCalm that-- I literally do it every day, many times day. It's been so helpful. But with the brain training stuff, it's brainwaves and neurochemistry, which I guess your brain's part of your nervous system, obviously. But I don't know. I don't like to compartmentalize the human entity.

[02:31:02] But it seems like the brain part is a really important piece, speaking to meditation. I know, after many years of meditating, I realized, wow, I'm able to adapt to stress a lot better. I'm just more chill. I'm happier. I'm not in this rumination and circular thinking as much as I used to be. So it seems like they would be complimentary. If you're getting the brainwaves dialed in doing that brain training and also addressing the trauma that still lives in the body.

[02:31:32] Irene: So I'll answer this this way. The brain and the spinal cord are the central nervous system. Then the peripheral nervous system are all the cranial nerves that come out of the brain, like the vagus nerve, olfactory, etc. But then out of the spinal cord are all of the sensory motor nerves. Let's us do this with our hands. But then it also goes to all the organs, these peripheral nerves.

[02:31:55] And it's also what is responsible for the fight-flight-freeze shutdown. So the brain and the spinal cord are interesting to me because I don't teach brain retraining work in my courses, and I don't work with spinal reflexes. There's a field for that. I have seen people heal incredible cognitive problems, ADHD, ADD, trouble focusing.

[02:32:27] One woman just graduated from university at age 56 when she could not even do a college application up until a couple of years ago. So she worked primarily with this peripheral-- actually, all my work is peripheral nervous system. So it's autonomic nervous system, visceral, but then sensory motor.

[02:32:53] I have seen, and this is where the Feldenkrais stuff comes in, there's something happening, and I-- can we study this? I don't know. This might be beyond the instruments we have here on planet Earth. But there's some kind of reverse engineering happening when you work with the peripheral nervous system and movement and sensation and visceral attunement, that then offers a shift to the brainwaves.

[02:33:23] And I know this because people finally sleep. They can think clear. They have creative energy. They can read people better. And if we think of babies-- I always go back to babies. When you treat that baby with good movement, play, connection, safety, good food, love, all the things-- again, mama bear-- their brain develops naturally. They don't need that stuff.

[02:33:50] But just like the cold plunge and the breath work, if someone can use something as a therapeutic, this comes into the biohacking pieces, but then know that there might be other things that have to occur to get the specific traumas out, biofeedback is another beautiful one.

[02:34:08] And what I've seen in my students is they're learning biofeedback on their own by listening to their sensations, shifting how they move. Shifting how they see. They don't need EMDR because we're going backwards into the system by naturally giving them what they would do as a baby, looking around, closing your eyes when you're tired, all these different things that just naturally occur to us. So I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to that. And I also know that sometimes it's fun to have gadgets. I have all sorts of gadgets.

[02:34:44] Luke: Cool. Cool. Awesome. Great insight. All right, last one for you, for real. And you've probably already mentioned them, so you might have to get creative, because you've cited your influences already. But who have been three teachers or teachings that have impacted your life and made you who you are?

[02:35:01] Irene: The first one, I never mentioned, she was my professor in university. She was my geriatric and nutrition teacher. Her name is Sue Crawford. I have no idea if she's still alive. I still remember where I was standing in a fourth level class. I had just done a presentation on biochemistry. And I don't do that anymore.

[02:35:23] But she's like, "You have got a knack for teaching high level stuff." I could cry. I'll never forget that. So Sue Crawford, professor. Simon Fraser. Definitely her. And then after that, I would say the work that Dr. Feldenkrais did. He doesn't get enough credit, I don't think. I know he doesn't. But I also feel his work is very high level.

[02:35:52] It's very cognitively, high-level, consciousness-level, and body-level. So for people who maybe have tried Feldenkrais and they're like, eh, it doesn't work, that means your system either wasn't ready for that higher level differentiated work or you didn't have a good teacher.

[02:36:10] So my main teacher was Jeff Haller. He's still alive. He taught me all that I know in terms of making the work very broad. So himself. The third one, let's just say it's the posse of all the teachers that studied from Peter. Because he was the vessel. And then from him, some really great teachers came out of that. And the three people that really helped me were trained by him.

[02:36:43] So there's like a lineage there that's important to honor and give respect to, because it's not just one person when it comes to that somatic work. And this is something that maybe I end on. We were talking about the dangers of people doing this work too quickly and not seeing how it's a true art that you have to study.

[02:37:08] Think about it this way. I know medicine isn't perfect, but if we take like orthopedics, very important. Fixing broken bones. Orthopedics isn't one person. It's countless doctors and researchers and nurses, and it's an art and a science that's been born through thousands of years through medical science.

[02:37:37] And so I really look at these predecessors of mine, my mentors, the people that are gone, who taught my mentors. Let's not forget Freud and Jung, and Wilhelm Reich, and Lowen, and all these people that taught them. What's happening is people are getting very culty with the trauma healing world. And we can't do that if we want it to become a true profession, like say, orthopedics.

[02:38:04] And so I'm seeing right now the importance of reminding people that this is a lineage that's going to continue, and we're just at the beginning of it. So it's so important to not see it as a fad or a quick fix. It's like we are meant to be practitioners to help people, and we need many, many teachers, and some people are going to distill the work a bit better than others, just like some doctors are good and some doctors aren't good.

[02:38:31] Luke: Beautiful.

[02:38:31] Irene: Yeah.

[02:38:32] Luke: That's a great point. Well, thank you so much. It's been enlightening.

[02:38:35] Irene: Oh, you're so welcome.

[02:38:36] Luke: I think this might be the longest virtual recording I've ever done. I had a page of notes that I'm like, I didn't even get to. So this has been really enlightening, and I appreciate your level of passion and that you've veered in on this one aspect of the human experience and of putting so much love and time and devotion into it. I've learned a lot, so I'm sure many people listening will have had the same experience. So, thank you.

[02:39:10] Irene: Oh, you're so welcome. It was fun. Went by fast.