What to Do When Healing Feels Stuck with Karden Rabin

[00:00:00] The state that we're talking about is the state at being at ease, settled, and in goodness in
[00:00:04] your body. That is a dependent state. It is the outcome of other elements, like feeling safe,
[00:00:12] feeling connected with self or other. I've added this element of security, which is also
[00:00:20] agency, ability, competence, belief in self, boundaries. There's a yin and yang of actually
[00:00:28] being at ease in the body. It's not just knowing that you're safe from danger. It's also knowing
[00:00:33] that if something dangerous arises, you can fucking handle it. You can handle life. So any way that we
[00:00:40] are noticing when we're doing old patterns and errors, realizing it, interrupting it,
[00:00:44] and updating it towards the direction of safety and security. Safe from danger, but also the
[00:00:50] capacity to handle danger. In mind and body, in a felt sense, that's the game.
[00:00:55] Hey there, and welcome to the Heal With Grace podcast. I'm your host, Grace Secker, and I'm a
[00:01:01] holistic licensed therapist and nervous system coach who believes that the chronic and often unseen
[00:01:07] symptoms you're living with are a sign of something deeper going on. A sign that your nervous
[00:01:13] system needs attention. In each episode, I'll share the science behind the most common
[00:01:18] chronic health disorders, plus holistic tips using mental, physical, and spiritual practices.
[00:01:23] You'll hear what I've learned in my journey and the true stories from our trusted guests
[00:01:28] so you can feel less alone in your experience and give yourself grace no matter what you're
[00:01:32] going through. So without further ado, settle in and get cozy. It's time to heal with Grace.
[00:01:38] Cardin, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This is going to be an awesome
[00:01:42] episode already, as we just were talking about a few key points that we want to share.
[00:01:47] First and foremost, if people do not already know you, please introduce yourself. Tell us,
[00:01:52] how are you in this world? How'd you get here? I'll see. Okay. My name is Cardin Rabin,
[00:01:57] and Cardin is Garden with a K. It's not the weirdest name around. My sister's name is actually
[00:02:02] Weirder. Her name is Chopin. So imagine being tasked with that name. I am the founder of Somia
[00:02:10] International and the Heal Program, which is a comprehensive program for helping people heal
[00:02:14] from chronic symptoms, et cetera. I'm also the author of The Secret Language of the Body,
[00:02:20] along with my co-author and co-founder, Jennifer Mann. And so this is kind of what I love to do
[00:02:25] for a living. And I've been doing it in this particular way from a neuroplastic approach
[00:02:30] for almost nine years now, sounds about right. But I've been in the space of health and wellness
[00:02:37] for 20. And I, after college, this is a long story, but after college, I decided to abandon
[00:02:44] Wall Street and law school and the sort of the expected routes. And I went to, of all things,
[00:02:49] massage therapy school. And I loved massage therapy school. I loved body work. It was clearly
[00:02:55] a love and a talent of mine. And I, and I ran with it. And so for the first 12 years of my
[00:03:01] career, I was a body worker and functional movement dude who made a good living getting people out
[00:03:08] of pain. And I studied everything from craniosacral to structural integration to
[00:03:15] myofascial release and the melt method. And you name it, I loved it. And I did, I did a good
[00:03:20] enough job to have a nice reputation. But what kind of happens is one, the way I was working
[00:03:26] with people, even though they'd be very compliant with their stretches, their strengthening,
[00:03:32] coming in for good body work, we'd be cleaning up movement patterns and posture and
[00:03:36] structure, et cetera. And, you know, releasing all sorts of things. Some people got better and
[00:03:43] some people didn't. And you'd always be looking for the next, like when you're just stuck in it,
[00:03:47] you just look for the next mechanical cause, you're looking for the next reason, you can
[00:03:50] always find something to attribute it to. And also as a mechanical guy, it's your job to
[00:03:56] make mechanical sense. And you will bend yourself in all sorts of directions to, you know,
[00:04:01] well, it's because your, your left foot is a half an inch shorter than your right foot. And that's
[00:04:06] causing the torsion and a little bit of a forward hip flexion up there. And we got on twist that
[00:04:13] dilly dilly. And you got to really be careful of that. Cause you're gonna get more wear and tear
[00:04:16] on there and then the other side. And it's obviously why you pulled out your back when
[00:04:20] you pulled up your lawn mower, because that's how the body works. You're describing
[00:04:26] in many years of my life. Yes. Yeah. And the other reason why it's not working right now
[00:04:31] is because that second day where you'd only did two of the three prescribed sets is probably
[00:04:38] So that would go on. And that would motivate me, by the way, to learn more stuff
[00:04:43] because I wanted to help. We all want to help. But it was inside the same paradigm.
[00:04:47] The other secret was that with each passing year, by the way, this is the most absurd
[00:04:52] expression in the world, which is my back would go out. Like a, like, where did we get
[00:04:58] my back went out? Whatever. My back would go out. And I would be in a whole bunch of pain,
[00:05:06] barely able to move. And each year, my back, when it went out, it would be more acute in
[00:05:11] terms of how bad it was. And it would last longer. So even though I was accumulating more
[00:05:17] skills, and I had, you know, a Pilates gyro tonic torso that could stop a tank shell,
[00:05:24] that didn't seem to matter much for my low back, right? And it was in the longest period
[00:05:31] of unrelenting back pain, about a seven month horror show of not just back pain, bilateral pain,
[00:05:38] ice picks into my hips, occasional electrical storms of pain in my groin. You know, the
[00:05:44] shtick is awful. That I found the OG John Sarno's book, Healing Back Pain. It found me. I didn't
[00:05:54] find it. And the TLDR is that in two chapters, he literally decapitated all the premises of
[00:06:02] essentially orthopedic structural and functional explanations for pain. Like just decapitates
[00:06:09] it. And I think that it decapitates it even more when you're actually someone committed to
[00:06:16] understanding things. Because like, theoretically, I could have read that and be like, ah, he's an
[00:06:20] idiot. He doesn't know about the hips and the leg length discrepancy stuff. But because I
[00:06:24] understood it so much and because I'm a first principles kind of idea, like, make it make
[00:06:28] sense. Oh man, he just threw it under the bus. And then he instead pivots to the language
[00:06:34] of his time, he really goes into personality patterns that he finds to be much more correlated
[00:06:41] to these presentations of pain, which by the way, personality patterns can be substituted
[00:06:46] for nervous system patterns, right, survival response, all of it. And I read that book
[00:06:54] and for eight weeks, my pain went away. I got what's something called the book cure.
[00:07:00] And there was a lot more work to do after that, by the way, because it did come back.
[00:07:06] And there was a lot of emotional processing and brain retraining that I had to do.
[00:07:11] But once that happened, I could never go back. I actually still derogatorily,
[00:07:15] but I mostly mean this is that outside of acute trauma or injury to the to the body,
[00:07:21] I'd say that the entire world of orthopedic pain management and complimentary pain
[00:07:27] management like massage therapy that isn't nervous system informed is about as legitimate as
[00:07:33] bloodletting leeches and miasma. How was that? Yeah, that's that's where I came from, Grace.
[00:07:40] Wonderful. Amazing. Happy to hear it. I didn't realize, well, there's a few things I knew,
[00:07:44] but a few things I did not know in terms of how long you've been in this, right, and recognizing,
[00:07:49] I mean, it makes sense, like the way that's why you're here, the way that you speak about
[00:07:53] this work, it has a lot of depth that we need because a lot of people hear, okay, brain nervous
[00:08:00] system, you got to regulate to help yourself feel calm to get out of the pain and illness, which
[00:08:05] is really not right. Exactly what we're talking about the whole calm state. So I will start with
[00:08:12] where you just said an analogy before we hit record about it's not about the skills on the
[00:08:18] tools, not about hitting the ball, right, it's about the full game. And I think that notes the whole
[00:08:22] idea of is it nervous system regulation? Is it brain training? What does that actually mean? And
[00:08:27] what does it mean to actually do this work? So that was kind of a big overarching. Hey,
[00:08:32] I'm giving that all to you, but there you go. Speak to that. Let me run, let me run with
[00:08:36] that for a second. So when we come to this work, what we can all objectively say, I think,
[00:08:40] is that we have a shared desire, which is to feel better. We can all agree on that. Like,
[00:08:47] I definitely did not initiate this work to become a better complete whole integrated human being.
[00:08:53] That's what's happened, which is pretty awesome. But I started this work because
[00:08:58] my back was in terrible pain. My back was in terrible. And much of the heart of this work,
[00:09:06] the nature of the game, when you really get it, is that because of past stress, trauma,
[00:09:15] adaptations, coping patterns, etc. To whether they were real or whether they whether they were like
[00:09:21] legitimately life threatening, it doesn't matter the perception of the human being was that they
[00:09:25] were in danger. They activated protective mechanisms, whether those be emotional repression,
[00:09:32] hyper vigilance, people pleasing, completely avoiding their own inner experience, pushing,
[00:09:38] pushing, pushing, type A behavior, every single one of these things, every single one of these
[00:09:43] things is a protective pattern, a protective mode, an adaptive strategy
[00:09:48] that is predicated on the idea that you're in danger.
[00:09:53] In some way, shape or form. Usually, these adaptive strategies were invented in the past,
[00:09:57] and now they are running largely out of what we'll call them loops, but it's like habit
[00:10:03] momentum, habit momentum, habit momentum, they are just running, and they are usually
[00:10:09] in the present, no longer adapt, they are no longer accurate. They in fact are errors or
[00:10:16] mistakes or songs on loop that need to stop. So largely the game is recognizing, oh,
[00:10:23] yes, I want to get out of pain, but the goal is recognizing that much of my behavior,
[00:10:28] much of my thinking patterns, much of the way I am in the world and conceive of myself,
[00:10:33] is actually a collection of patterns built on top of some perception of not being safe.
[00:10:38] And my job is to interrupt and update these perceptions. That's how I score points.
[00:10:44] I score points in the game by recognizing when a pattern that's protective but unnecessary is at
[00:10:51] place. And that I like score extra points, maybe like not freaking out about it, realizing that
[00:10:57] what I'm supposed to do is by like, look, there's my brain, there's my body's experience
[00:11:04] doing its old tricks. I don't want to criticize it and call it dumb and stupid.
[00:11:10] I don't want to get all crazy and anxious about it. Oh my God, what am I going to do?
[00:11:15] I don't want to make it all personal and some evaluation of my worth or ability.
[00:11:20] I lose points for all of those things. Okay. That's letting the other teams score.
[00:11:27] Mm hmm. My goal is to simply remember every single time, if not with complete like,
[00:11:33] ain't no thing kind of energy, but almost excitement. There is my brain and body doing that.
[00:11:38] Sweetie. Sometimes I'll even put my hand on my head. Oh, sweetie, I'm here to just remind you
[00:11:43] that that's an error we keep repeating. We don't have to do that and remind myself that we're
[00:11:48] okay. And so part one of the game is simply interrupting and updating in any way possible
[00:11:54] with whatever skills you learn from brain retraining to somatics, to breathing, to self-talk,
[00:11:59] to emotional awareness and expression. These are all tools that we're basically using to play
[00:12:05] the same game. And I'll also say this, calm is a dependent state. What is a dependent state?
[00:12:14] My children are naturally and spontaneously, if you will, calm and maybe, you know,
[00:12:22] grace, like, I don't even, calm's like such a loaded word because it's like, I feel like it's
[00:12:26] so associated with like conditioning and obedience and being good. So I almost want to say settled,
[00:12:32] comfortable, good in their bodies, not freaking out, steady. Any one of those words, guys,
[00:12:37] if calm works for you for accommodating that, like if you can think of the Buddha,
[00:12:41] right, or like a cat, a cat half-mapping is calm, but that's the state we're talking about.
[00:12:47] Okay, the state that we're talking about is the state at being at ease, settled, and in goodness
[00:12:54] in your body. That is a dependent state. It is the outcome of other elements, like feeling safe,
[00:13:03] feeling connected with self or other. And also, I've added this element of security,
[00:13:12] which is also agency, ability, competence, belief in self, boundaries. There's a yin and yang
[00:13:22] of actually being at ease in the body. It's not just knowing that you're safe from danger.
[00:13:28] It's also knowing that if something dangerous arises, you can fucking handle it.
[00:13:33] You can handle life. So any way that we are noticing when we're doing old patterns and
[00:13:41] errors, realizing it, interrupting it and updating it towards the direction of safety and security,
[00:13:50] safe from danger, but also the capacity to handle danger in mind and body in a felt sense,
[00:13:56] that's the game. Yeah. It's that state of being that we're getting to, which all of those,
[00:14:01] all the skills and tools point us towards, right? Even in my experience, in my embodied
[00:14:06] experience and what I see a lot too is that part two is the, and I know if something does happen,
[00:14:12] I can handle it, right? Because the first is understanding even what is that settled feeling,
[00:14:17] like you were describing, how do we even understand that or get to that or help ourselves and body
[00:14:22] that? Okay. Maybe we've got that a little bit, right? But at the same time, then we're setting
[00:14:29] our life up to be in that state when that's not the long game, right? That seems to be,
[00:14:35] I don't know, you tell me, that's kind of how I see part two is, okay, the next part is
[00:14:39] knowing, oh no, we can go out into the world and chicken happen at the same time we've got it,
[00:14:45] like we've got ourselves. You're 100% right. You can part one, part two. I sometimes,
[00:14:51] since I actually feel clinically when we're working with it and even an individual, they can,
[00:14:55] I call them the yin and the yang, the yin and the yang aspects of creating a really
[00:15:00] adaptive integrated human being. Some people, like some people have too much yang, they're like,
[00:15:08] remember the overachievers are creating safety constantly through competence and control,
[00:15:13] right? Those folks need more time in a felt sense of settled safety. They need more yin.
[00:15:22] Then there's people that actually have done a lot of meditation, they've done a lot of yoga,
[00:15:27] they feel their feelings, but they're over-feelers. They have a lot of yin,
[00:15:31] but they have no yang structure, they have no fire, they have no power, they need to make it
[00:15:35] agreeable and okay, they can't be okay with shaking things up or their being friction or
[00:15:41] disconnect. Those people need more yang security, that I can handle a rupture in relationship and
[00:15:46] not die. But I do think that in general, it is a part one and part two, I hold these yin and
[00:15:51] yang at the same time. But I just, I want to say for everyone that no matter what technique
[00:15:58] you're using or for what issue you're working with, remember that your goal is to interrupt
[00:16:04] protective patterns that likely are not valid or useful anymore. Do not personalize it,
[00:16:10] do not make it, judge it, treat it like a game. And if I were to say one other thing here in
[00:16:15] terms of making it practical, if you have a loop of talking shitty to yourself, right,
[00:16:21] I call it the shit talker, people also call it the inner critic, right? One of our jobs is to
[00:16:26] notice the shit talker and using, there's all sorts of skills, it can be as simple as just
[00:16:32] interrupting it, going no, we don't talk that way to ourselves anymore, and we replace it with
[00:16:36] compassionate language. It can be that simple, that's the updating, and we need to do that
[00:16:40] a thousand times over a couple of months until it becomes automatic. That's, that's one example,
[00:16:46] but like what was I doing there? Oh, I have this protective pattern where I have one way or another
[00:16:51] dealt with my feelings or motivated myself into action by being a douche rocket to myself.
[00:16:56] I need to update and interrupt that, but that's all that is. There are other times
[00:17:02] where our pain symptoms are directly related to the immobilization or repression
[00:17:08] of an emotion. Our brain has labeled, for whatever reason from our past experience,
[00:17:15] that the expression of, let's just say, anger is not safe. That's dangerous.
[00:17:21] So its coping pattern is to repress it, to say you actually don't know it or feel it's there,
[00:17:28] but it's very hard to repress emotion without some other leak busting in the plumbing,
[00:17:34] which might be low back pain, which might be pots, which might be TMJ, which might be over,
[00:17:44] by the way, a lot of emotional energy that's repressed is rerouted through thoughts,
[00:17:48] kind of like a hamster on a wheel just running, trying to burn off the gas,
[00:17:53] but it doesn't know how. So then it's like, oh look, I've got my symptom again.
[00:17:59] That might mean that my body's doing one of its old patterns
[00:18:03] of trying to create safety by repressing a feeling. I remember what I'm supposed to do.
[00:18:07] I need to go access that feeling and learn how to actually integrate it so that I'm having
[00:18:12] my feelings in real time so that I'm tending to them, I'm expressing them, etc. And I'm retraining
[00:18:19] my brain that it doesn't have to like blow a gasket in my hip or in my heart
[00:18:25] to protect me from an emotion that was dangerous to express when I was a kid.
[00:18:29] When someone's going about this and they're listening to these podcasts, right,
[00:18:32] they're reading the books, they're understanding it, and they understand the premise of, okay,
[00:18:36] I have repressed emotion or I'm shit talking myself or I have these personality characteristics
[00:18:41] that people are telling me lead to neuroplastic symptoms. And I have a symptom that pops up,
[00:18:46] but I don't know what the hell I'm missing. I don't know what I'm repressing or
[00:18:50] I can't really track. I've been in a stressed state. Like, what do I do first? You just
[00:18:54] outlined multiple examples, right? So like, what do I, what do I get with that?
[00:19:00] Yeah, this is where we get into like neuroplastic CSI or like forensics. I love looking for patterns
[00:19:10] in my own experience. I'll give you guys one, just very concrete experience, maybe two. So when
[00:19:17] my wife was in her third trimester with our second daughter, this was well into me being
[00:19:23] on my neuroplastic brain plane journey. I'm a pretty skilled clinician at this point. I haven't had
[00:19:29] much low back pain in two years. We're in bed. We're talking about some stuff. And then as the
[00:19:35] conversation concludes, I start first getting low back stiffness. And I'm like, ah, what's this?
[00:19:42] And I move around a little bit, you know, stiffness gets worse, then it starts to
[00:19:48] become pain. And it's like, by the way, even as someone who's really good at this stuff,
[00:19:52] I say we all get amnesia. So I'm spending a little time like stretching and like moving
[00:19:57] in my bed a little bit, like the old instincts of like, let me just crack my back or so.
[00:20:03] So it's all still there, right at the go to. But then after about, you know, three to four minutes
[00:20:07] of that, my amnesia goes away, like, wait a second, wait a minute, I know what I do for a living
[00:20:11] and I know what my body does. Something initiated this pain, this tension and pain out
[00:20:16] of nowhere. And so what I did is with half my attention on my low back on my body and my
[00:20:20] pain, the other half of my attention rewound the tape of the conversation with my wife.
[00:20:25] And since we had been talking about the home birth setup, I had a fraction of a second thought
[00:20:31] about what happens if there is an emergency and Jillian dies. It happened for a fraction of a
[00:20:37] second so fast that I basically repressed and glossed right over it. But my autonomic nervous
[00:20:44] system did it and that had injected a bunch of fear into my body. It had then capped with repression.
[00:20:53] But my body, because the autonomic nervous system, the way we attune to what's going on
[00:21:00] in the autonomic nervous system, which is to say in the subconscious things below our
[00:21:04] awareness is the body is in real time always just like a stethoscope or like an EEG reading
[00:21:12] the symptoms and sensations in the body are a perfect register of what's going on autonomically.
[00:21:20] And then what I had to do was I had to then actually allow myself to feel that emotion of fear.
[00:21:26] I then put my hand on my heart. I brought in, you know, comfort. I talked about the plans that
[00:21:33] we had the reassurance for what we're going to do if there's an issue. And I said,
[00:21:38] and we'll handle that. And then the tension in the back pain went away. So that's an example
[00:21:44] of you use the appearance of a symptom to then forensically go back in time, maybe a couple
[00:21:50] minutes, couple hours, couple days to be like, what did I miss? Let's go look at the cameras again.
[00:21:56] I missed something. That's one of my go to ways of looking at this stuff. One other thing I'll
[00:22:03] say Grace is that in a completely different way it's like, wait, my low back's bothering me
[00:22:06] or my headaches are returning or I'm getting my pots. If I was honest to myself.
[00:22:13] But yeah, for the past seven days, I've been in old school go mode. I went right into
[00:22:20] full. I'm ignoring the contraction in my heart. I'm actually in a freeze straight. I'm using
[00:22:26] sympathetic overdrive to move past it. I'm right back to my old tricks, my old patterns.
[00:22:32] And then same thing applies. If I'm doing symptom when I'm in that coping pattern,
[00:22:37] it means that something is being perceived as dangerous. I have to interrupt it.
[00:22:44] I have to update. I've been in this work for about 12 years. My first introduction was 12
[00:22:48] years ago for all over pain. And that's when I found the mind body prescription book by Sarno
[00:22:55] and did a lot of healing was great within like six months and kind of moved on with life. I
[00:23:00] didn't really think about this work and do anything with it. I didn't even professionally do much with
[00:23:04] it until a little bit later, five this year's down the road, all other kinds of things happen, fatigue,
[00:23:10] histamine, migraines, food stuff, all that other set of symptoms. And since then I've been working
[00:23:18] with this and that was like my catapult of I have to do this work. Like this is insane.
[00:23:23] Everyone needs to know this. But in the past couple of years, and it's been in and out a
[00:23:28] little bit and I've done really well, but in the past couple of years, I've made one of the
[00:23:31] biggest transformations and understanding the I can't phrase that was embodied in my nervous
[00:23:38] system for a very long time. And I never understood that I didn't get it. I didn't get it until
[00:23:44] recently I've had a mentor really amazing one in the past couple of years that's helped me do that.
[00:23:49] And one of the biggest times I can or one of the most just I guess I'll say very surreal
[00:23:57] times, I went to a retreat last year and a half ago. It was a somatic feminine embodiment
[00:24:05] retreat to be honest, I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. I knew the leader
[00:24:08] and I was very interested in it. But there were a lot of nerves, I have a pattern of feeling
[00:24:15] like an imposter, imposter syndrome and another round other therapists and practitioners like
[00:24:19] I'm not good enough type of thing. I get there a day before it starts and I get a horrible
[00:24:25] fever. I mean like embed chills the whole thing. And that was not normally my symptomology pain,
[00:24:32] illness, but fever, not so much. I took all the tests, you know, I was fine in terms of flu or
[00:24:39] whatever. But I knew I was like, this is way too coincidental, like my body is shutting down
[00:24:44] before this. Right. And so I almost can't I almost backed out, but she had a really hard
[00:24:50] boundary. If you come, you come the whole time you can't come in and out. You can't, you know,
[00:24:55] like you got to be in it like really hard boundary. By the way, by the way, I just want to say like
[00:25:00] I know in our nervous system and trauma informed space that generally we actually
[00:25:07] we tend to be softer and less demanding and welcoming. I also still think there's a time
[00:25:13] in a place and appreciate like the old school hardcore like you're in and we're going through
[00:25:17] some fire together. So I'll go you. Right. I actually, I didn't like it at first, but I
[00:25:25] want to appreciate it now. I really was like, damn, seriously? Like I can't even leave for
[00:25:30] like half the day. You know, I really appreciate it. And one of the things that she said to me
[00:25:35] when I asked a question in one of the seminar type situations and I was like, you know me a
[00:25:41] little bit, you know what's going on. I was literally sitting there like shivering. I was
[00:25:44] like, I'm trying to expand my capacity to be with this and it's really hard. And she said to me,
[00:25:50] she's like, I think you need to meet your fire with fire. You've been trying so hard to like
[00:25:54] be compassionate towards yourself, take care of yourself. I know the work that you do. I understand
[00:25:58] it, but you're collapsing too much like need the fire with fire. Think about a fever. You
[00:26:06] meet it and you release it with fire. And to me, I was like, Oh my God, I hit it. I hit
[00:26:12] it. Like you got it for me. I get it. That's a long winded way of saying like that's my example
[00:26:17] of recognizing my body was so in the I can't for so long. It 100% shut me out in terms of fear
[00:26:24] to the point where I would get a fever or sick. And that recognition of I had to meet the I can't
[00:26:31] with no I can and have to push in a way that I'd never done before. Because it before it was
[00:26:36] like, I got to be soft and like kind and compassionate and which is great, right? But
[00:26:42] okay, I will then keep it lit. Give it over to you. Speak to the I can't in that.
[00:26:47] Well, so first of all, you just did a brilliant job of bringing us back to yin and yang.
[00:26:52] Uh huh. Uh huh. Okay. She recognized that you needed more yang security,
[00:26:59] more yang capacity, more healthy fire, right? I'll just say one more time, one of my last way to
[00:27:08] really let yin and yang settle in and forgive me for using gender normative descriptions here,
[00:27:13] but it's just for the example, let's say a mother and a father and a child are out walking
[00:27:17] in the wilderness. The father goes on, maybe he's half a mile ahead to scout or whatever.
[00:27:23] While he's half a mile ahead, two wolves start stalking mom and child and they get closer and
[00:27:31] closer and closer. And now they're within a couple of feet and they're going to pounce.
[00:27:35] Mom shields child with her body, right? Now the child's shielded, it's got holding and
[00:27:42] protection, but does the child feel safe? No. It knows in its bones that mom might
[00:27:48] protect me, right? But shelter and comfort is not the safety here. The only safety here
[00:27:56] is either getting away from or killing these wolves. So the yin safety of connection is there and
[00:28:03] protection. And then at the last moment, blessedly, dad runs back holding like a flaming
[00:28:11] torch or something and attacks and scares away the wolves. Now we feel safe. Now we're
[00:28:17] safe because we have yin and yang. We have connection. We have softness. We have compassion,
[00:28:21] but we also had fire and fight. And the world, right? Our nervous systems were built for the
[00:28:28] natural world, not the civilized world. And I don't mean that in terms of like computers. I mean,
[00:28:34] I don't care what your ideology is about how you think people should behave and that
[00:28:38] everyone should be safe and that no one should be triggering anyone else
[00:28:42] and that everyone should have safe places. I love that ideology and I want in every single
[00:28:48] situation I can for people to feel safe. But that's not what your nervous system evolved
[00:28:54] to be safe. It evolved to be safe in a world where there was danger and where yang was required
[00:29:00] and where fire was required and where there were moments of having to squash terror even
[00:29:06] with repression to fight. So now to come full circle to I can't versus I can't. I want you to
[00:29:13] know that most type A overachievers and perfectionists and highly competent people hold as a core
[00:29:19] belief that they can't. So at the beginning of every action that they dominate, it begins
[00:29:23] with a actual freeze response or shut down. And then they over apply fire. They over apply
[00:29:30] sympathetic. They over apply push to move past the first primordial
[00:29:38] deep terrible I can't. The true transformation to I can't is when you dissolve the I can't.
[00:29:44] Meaning your teacher in that moment instead of having you like in a sense we could use the word
[00:29:50] I don't push isn't the right word. She gave you a push, right? And then the act of taking
[00:29:57] that step past the I can't with support, with leadership, with integrity, with love,
[00:30:05] with belief in you, not grace you have to or you suck and you're not going to get our affection.
[00:30:12] Okay. Or not not grace had to as a young child while feeling broken and I can't
[00:30:20] had to repress it and get up. One can say you didn't get pushed. You got called for
[00:30:24] and the call forth was not a push past I can't with force. It was a actual
[00:30:32] dissolving of the I can't and an embracing of the I to take this to guys to make this sound
[00:30:37] less esoteric. I had to work on writing a curriculum to bring a version of this work
[00:30:43] to C suite leaders, corporate leaders in the human services and nonprofit space.
[00:30:49] When I sit down to look at the curriculum, which is a form of work, form of homework,
[00:30:56] form of the kind of stuff that since I was in middle school felt like I couldn't do because
[00:31:01] I wasn't smart and I was unsupported. And the internal experience was freeze that I then
[00:31:06] overdrove with basically anxiety and pressure that still happens today. When I look at a
[00:31:12] project, when I'm not doing the work, I just get a double espresso and crush it.
[00:31:19] Right. That's a total push tactic. That's a total sympathetic overdrive of my initial
[00:31:26] immobilization. I can't respond. But when I'm doing the work and I feel that restriction,
[00:31:34] I feel the desire to grab caffeine to crush the thing. I stop. I take a moment to feel.
[00:31:42] I notice the legacy of the I can't and the freeze to respond in my chest.
[00:31:47] Put my hand on it. I breathe. I don't know if you use resourcing in your work, Grace,
[00:31:52] but I resource the reality and the truth of my intelligence, of my talent, of my natural
[00:31:58] gifts. I think about my daughter and the complete lack of inhibition that she needs to
[00:32:03] summon no pushing at all to do like three cartwheels and a backflip. It's just she knows
[00:32:09] she can. It's this natural expression of energy. There's no push, right? I summoned that experience
[00:32:15] again. The freeze response in the heart goes away and the drawing into the work without having
[00:32:21] to push into the work happens. That's an I can. And then lastly to full circle to you
[00:32:29] where if the only option has always been yin, it's always been compassion and Grace, it's okay.
[00:32:36] It's okay to not do the thing that's slightly outside your limits. It's not too okay to do
[00:32:41] the hard thing. You don't have to reach that point. It is a balance of yin and yang and we
[00:32:46] can over yin. So it's fine line here, Grace. I don't want to go back into push culture,
[00:32:51] hustle culture. I don't want to say that like people aren't worthy if they're not
[00:32:56] hitting certain edges. But the absolute truth is that the development of an integrated competent
[00:33:02] whole nervous system requires being well held, well supported, well resourced, beautifully seen
[00:33:10] and then call to your edge and that's actual expansion. Safety is just stabilization.
[00:33:17] That, yes, everything right there. The yin and the yang of resourcing safety
[00:33:24] plus expansion I think is just the, it is the beautiful part of this work. It is the expansion
[00:33:29] I think in our lifetime in our body when we do this, right? And I've worked on my delivery of
[00:33:35] how to explain that I can't to clients because sometimes they're like, what do you mean I can't
[00:33:39] you know? And it's that yeah, I mean I can fully track back to recognizing that I was never
[00:33:47] really supported in expanding myself. So there was oftentimes a hard time in school where I
[00:33:54] was having a really difficult time and they didn't really know what to do. So it was just like,
[00:33:57] okay, well then do something different, right? I never really learned how to work through that.
[00:34:03] So my body learned to just, no. To just not, right? Well either to back off or to push,
[00:34:08] right? It was either avoid completely or hammer. Yeah, exactly. And that is the
[00:34:14] nuance, that push. We're not saying like just push through and do it, right?
[00:34:20] No, no, it's very different. If we take one more layer into this, at the end of this call,
[00:34:25] I'm going to be going to jujitsu. I was a wrestler in high school. I was peer pressured to start
[00:34:29] wrestling. I was a completely insecure loser follower and I wanted to impress the older
[00:34:34] brother of a cool kid. And then once I was in, because I had tons of neuroplastic symptoms
[00:34:38] as a kid, I had catastrophic asthma. I would not, I was not athletic. My diet was terrible.
[00:34:44] For some reason, even though the older brother quit the wrestling squad,
[00:34:47] like two months after I joined, my dignity and my shame, I refused to quit. I stuck with
[00:34:52] wrestling for four years exclusively through pushing and through being driven by burning shame.
[00:34:59] And like the, and my only victory was not quitting. That gave me, believe it or not,
[00:35:04] a certain kind of hardness, a certain kind of toughness, a certain kind of maladaptive
[00:35:10] functioning. But the butcher bill eventually came in the terms of terrible symptoms and
[00:35:15] a recipe for life that didn't work later. Wrestling, as we'd say in men's work, for me,
[00:35:20] was a rite of passage, but it was a shadow rite of passage. It was a contaminated rite of passage.
[00:35:28] It was not one where I was called forth and held up, where I was taught and trained to
[00:35:34] handle shame and fear and still be. It was more of a hazing experience. Now, one of the
[00:35:40] reasons why I'm going back to jujitsu, going to jujitsu as a 42 year old man, is I want to put
[00:35:46] my nervous system and my heart and my younger self back into that same place. Because as a kid,
[00:35:54] I loved wrestling. I loved, I loved being physical. And something that I loved was
[00:36:02] totally tainted. I go into the jujitsu studio. And although it's almost not there anymore
[00:36:08] now, for the first nine months, I'd feel the anxiety and the butterflies that accompanied every
[00:36:14] single time I went to wrestling and got my ass kicked every time. But I'm calling myself forth,
[00:36:19] and now I'm in a group of men and women that are legitimately caring, that all know what it's
[00:36:26] like to eat shit and compliment me and encourage me to keep going. I get to hear the kind
[00:36:34] advice of my sensei, but even the stern advice when I do something inappropriate or stupid,
[00:36:39] and it's like, ooh, I feel that little shock. I get that moment of shame or correction. But then
[00:36:43] it's like, I take a breath. This is okay. This person cares about me. And now I'm getting to
[00:36:50] completely reinitiate myself into something that got contaminated, but had made me functional.
[00:36:58] Now into something much more whole. That's an example of expansion, right? While also updating.
[00:37:05] Do you find that there's a difference, maybe a norm difference with men and women where men might
[00:37:11] have more of the experience of pushing themselves into this and women might have more of the,
[00:37:16] I can't, I'm not going to do it. Which even as I asked that, I'm not really sure. I want to
[00:37:20] know what you think because I've myself definitely felt both. But I'm just curious
[00:37:24] as you were saying that honestly, I think I've seen the most instinctual answer is that
[00:37:29] no, I don't think there's a big gender difference. I see is like, I think that the
[00:37:32] type A-ness in men might appear in some different flavors, but man, women type A it all the time.
[00:37:40] They push it all the time. Their householder, their mother, their professional, their public
[00:37:46] speaker, the capacity for women to push is I think equal or greater to men. I think that,
[00:37:51] but maybe with the actual difference is that most women still push with a bit more of their
[00:37:56] emotions online than men do. Another thing is that so many recluse men, men that are
[00:38:04] hiding, men that are in their basements, men playing video games, boys that are withdrawn,
[00:38:09] they hide in different ways and they also tend to not be as public. They're just invisible.
[00:38:13] So I just say that. You can speak much more to it as a woman. I just think it's
[00:38:20] maybe different costumes. Yeah, I would agree. There's probably not a huge difference because
[00:38:24] I see both. Like you said, I mean, as a gendered woman, when there's a push, there's a,
[00:38:29] I need to prove myself to be in this societal standards of pushing the succeeding and worthiness.
[00:38:36] And yeah, that shows up by doing all the things,
[00:38:39] literally. Yeah. Or in some way shape or form. So, yeah.
[00:38:43] Yeah. I do also think that women might be, maybe one other truth is that
[00:38:49] women might be actually more comfortable being in the yin, asking for help, not
[00:38:54] reaching their limits. Like it's more socially acceptable for a woman to basically ask for safety.
[00:38:59] There's no social acceptability around a man asking for safety. And besides that,
[00:39:03] besides there being no social acceptability for it, it is filled with shame and cowardice for men.
[00:39:08] So men probably, when a push comes to shove, especially in public, they will never choose
[00:39:13] the safety option. They will choose the push option because they don't want to be publicly
[00:39:19] shamed. The woman doesn't receive the same public shame for choosing the opt-out option.
[00:39:24] That might be part of it too. Yeah. And there's a praise for both minimum, but for showing that
[00:39:32] I can hold all this, I can do this, I can push, I can be, I can be this perfectionistic,
[00:39:36] you know, or something. Sure it is. Yeah, capitalism.
[00:39:40] Exactly. Okay. As we're starting to wrap up here, we've talked about the, I can't
[00:39:45] believe system that encodes and our nervous system and our bodies that
[00:39:49] shows up in many different ways, but different types of symptoms, right?
[00:39:53] And the idea of what it actually means to feel safe and the nervous system is truly
[00:40:00] safe and expansion, right? Is the work other than the skills and the tool?
[00:40:03] Yes, they help us get there, but the whole point is not to be sitting and meditating and
[00:40:07] journaling and that is going to fix everything. Let's actually say that for folks who have
[00:40:10] done all of the in, for folks who have done all the journaling, for who have like,
[00:40:15] they think they are full bright scholars of safety, take away from this talk that you need
[00:40:22] to find environments where you can be supported in hitting your edge and in the most
[00:40:27] conventional and cliche way face your fears. That's your limit. That's their breakthrough.
[00:40:32] What about the ones who might be doing the meditating and the journaling,
[00:40:37] but there's still just this low level of, well, everything needs to be perfect in a routine for
[00:40:43] me to feel safe. Like we kind of touched on that, but are they actually feeling safe then
[00:40:48] if they need all of these things? No, so the amount of control and safety or one's perception
[00:40:54] or authentic experience of safety is inversely relationship, inversely related to the amount
[00:41:00] of control they need. Period, full stop. So control is often an elusive and delicious and
[00:41:09] terrible phenomenon too that I think all self-healers eventually have to face.
[00:41:14] The reality of life is perfectly illustrated by surfing. If you are a surfer, you know
[00:41:19] that you have no control. You have choice, you have agency, you have influence,
[00:41:26] but when push comes to fucking shove, the ocean, the waves are life. And then when things go wrong,
[00:41:35] the moment a surfer gets knocked off their board in big waves, other than critical moments of
[00:41:40] getting a breath and maybe kind of paddle away from some rocks, the best thing they can do
[00:41:46] is completely go limp and just let the waves roll them around, right? Because the more you
[00:41:51] rigidify your body, if that wave plans you on the bottom of the rocks, you get hurt more.
[00:41:58] So control is a frontier and it's hard for people to see because they don't realize
[00:42:04] how many places control is actually what's happening. They're like, no, I just like to
[00:42:09] have this for breakfast every morning. Or no, this is my routine that I left. Or no, that's
[00:42:14] not me controlling our vacation. I just want to make sure everyone has a good time. That's
[00:42:18] not me controlling the meeting. I'm just trying to achieve an optimal outcome.
[00:42:24] Really? So yeah. And then it's so easy for control to co-opt neuroplastic tools.
[00:42:35] Yeah. Yeah. Control is not exactly going to, well, it's not going to get you to that safety,
[00:42:41] right? I love the surfing analogy. That makes so much sense. That's perfect.
[00:42:44] Yeah. You have choice. You have leadership, you have influence, you have agency,
[00:42:48] but you are the most deluded godlike thing a person on earth can do is actually believe
[00:42:55] they have control of any. It's a great edge. Okay. Anything else you feel is important as we wrap
[00:43:01] up here to share with the audience? We hit some bangers, Grace. I know. I know. We hit really
[00:43:09] good stuff, really good stuff. Yeah. No, I like what we ended on there with control. Maybe
[00:43:17] we'll do a part two. We'll make a note. We'll leave a cliffhanger here. Part two, oddly, very
[00:43:22] related to control and fear is belonging. So we're going to have an episode on belonging.
[00:43:27] Safety is impossible, really. We talk about connection and all these things, but we have
[00:43:32] to have a conversation about belonging and othering. As long as one is still othering
[00:43:35] themselves in all of the very clever and insidious ways we other ourselves, we protect
[00:43:41] ourselves from connection and insulate ourselves from belonging, but we'll do one on belonging.
[00:43:45] Amazing. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much, Garten, for coming on, sharing your wisdom
[00:43:52] and helping everyone understand a little bit better each time they listen.
[00:43:57] It was a blast. Thank you, Grace. Thanks for going out everywhere we went.
[00:44:02] And I will list all of the links below for how you can get in touch with Garten and his
[00:44:06] work and everything that he's doing in this world. And I will talk to you next time. Keep
[00:44:11] healing with Grace. Grazie, Grace.