142: A Deep Dive into Somatic Experiencing w/ Karden Rabin

00:00:00 Chazmith: Welcome to Our Power Is Within podcast. I'm your host, Chazmith, and my mission for this podcast is to inspire you to take your power back and realize that you are the healer that you have been looking for all along. We are all capable of healing in mind, in body, and in soul. And before I introduce today's guest, I was excited to share with you that this episode is brought to you by CFS School, founded by Jen Mann and Karden Rabin. If you're not familiar with Jen and Karden, check out recent episode 119 where I pick their brains, hear about their personal healing journeys, and discover how CFS Schools birthed. So CFS School, for those of you who aren't familiar yet, is a nervous system healing program including an integrative brain retraining approach, polyvagal therapeutics trauma resolution techniques such as somatic, experiencing tools, inner child work, and parts work. It's designed to help guide support empower you on your self healing journey to heal from a variety of mind body disorders. And some of these disorders include CFS, Fibromyalgia, POTS, Autoimmune Disorder, sensitivities and more. There is a wonderful self study option that is perfect for people who love to go at their own pace. While the program is set up in twelve modules, I personally found it super supportive for me to spend more time on certain weeks and modules where I really wanted the extra practice. However, if you're someone who likes the guidance and the additional live support, you can also sign up for a free discovery call and be ready to sign up for the next live cohorts. Links in the show notes.

00:01:44 Chazmith: So, as I already mentioned, Karden is our guest today. He is back for round two and we have such a wonderful conversation to share with you. I am truly excited. So after having my own experience with CFS School and working with Karden one on one, I realize that there are such a vast array of definitions of andor experiences of what we call somatics. I spent years in this healing community and I've heard so many people talk about somatics and I've also tried various forms of somatics. But it wasn't until I worked with the somatic experiencing that I truly understood how incredibly disconnected I actually really was from my body wisdom or somatic intelligence.

00:02:32 Chazmith: I think many of us hear this word somatics and we write it off because we think, oh, I've tried that, and maybe we tried some variation of it. But now I realize that there are so many different ways this word is used, and there's so many different tools and modalities known as somatics that it can be a little convoluted. So I felt like if I was confused and if I didn't understand the depth of what was possible in terms of accessing our somatic intelligence in the body, then I knew there's probably other people out there that are feeling the same way. So I asked Karden to come back on the podcast so that we could do a deep dive together into somatic experiencing and how it can support our healing journeys. So today he's going to break down a lot of different ways that you might hear the word somatics in the healing community and how they can be supportive and when it's ideal to use these exercises and then what makes SE different. And stay tuned to the very end for a very special treat. Karden guides us through a somatic experiencing session that includes a mixture of a somatic experiencing, exercise called sibam, as well as pendulation. And I closed my eyes during his guided session and I had such an amazing experience. So I'm really excited for you guys to get to have an experience of what we're talking about here with Se versus other forms of somatics that you may have tried. So that will be at the end. With that said, let's welcome Karden and please enjoy.

00:04:17 Chazmith: Karden. Thank you so much for being here with me today for round two. 

Hi, Chasmith. Always a pleasure. Very excited.

00:04:20 Karden: Hi, Chazmith. Always a pleasure. Very excited.

00:04:25 Chazmith: So for those listening and just for you to know yourself, the reason that I'm having you come back on for round two and anyone listening, I had Karden on with Jen. They're co founders of the CFS school, which if you regularly listen to my podcast, you know this by now because I'm always talking about it. But we had them come on and do a deep dive into their own journeys and all things their healing and how CFS school was birthed. But since I had them come on, I really had this amazing opportunity to actually go through a CFS school myself and then work with Karden one on one. And what I experienced through this process has been so profound and eye opening for me that I had no doubt that I needed to bring Karden back on so that we could do this deeper dive into somatic experiencing. And just really breaking down this term and idea of somatics because as I've come to learn, it's kind of convoluted in the healing community. Not to say that's a bad thing, it's just that the word has so many meanings and so there's so many interpretations of it and so many ways that it can be practiced, all with different results. And I know that when I first had you talking about it, Karden, and like many other people kind of just like, oh yeah, I've done somatics well, what kind of somatics? Right? And then I do this deep dive into CFS school and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is totally different than anything I'd ever encountered.

00:05:53 Chazmith: Which then I assume that other people likely have had that same experience where maybe they had one experience of something that somebody called somatics, but not this in depth level of somatic experiencing that you teach and that we learn in CFS school. So I wanted to give the floor to you to really just help us understand it from this different perspective? 

00:06:17 Karden: Well, I think you just set it up really beautiful. Chazmith and it is true, unlike the medical community, that really has a profound and well defined vocabulary that allows them to communicate consistently with one another in the mind body space. We don't have that just from the pain perspective. We've got TMS. We've got MBS. We've got PPD, right? So tension myoneural syndrome, mind body syndrome, psychophysiologic disorders. There's just so many names for this emerging field where everyone who's independently interacting with it is trying to label it. So somatics is kind of rolling along through that same process. The term somatics really has been around since the fathers of it is a guy named Thomas Hannah and somatics itself. Soma is Greek for body, right? Of the body. So in a literal sense, anything that involves your body is somatics, right? And so that's one level. 

00:06:17 Karden: And like you said, a lot of people have done somatic practices, but that in somatic experiencing, which is the clinical trauma therapy developed by Peter Levine and trained in by his institute, it gets much deeper, much more profound, much more nuanced, and as you know, much more powerful. So hopefully we'll try to put that all together today. 

00:07:39 Chazmith: Yeah, that's the goal. But what I want to do to start is, as you're mentioning, there's all these different kind of ways that you can implement or practice or experience, quote unquote 'somatics', could we kind of break down some of the traditional ways that we hear this term floating around in the community and some of the foundational somatic practices and just create a context? Like maybe you could explain what the difference is between these different terms somatics, like, somatic tracking, somatic breathing, somatic exercise. And then once we lay that foundation, then we can get into the deeper dive into somatic experience. 

00:08:19 Karden: Yeah. So I'm going to give you my kind of generous spin and my somewhat more cynical spin. So, the generous spin is that anyone who's utilizing the term somatics for their work in their teaching somatic breathwork, somatic yoga, right? Somatic meditation should be implying that they're trying to help a person or people expand their awareness of the sensations, feelings and information flowing from the body up to cognitive awareness. That's what it should imply, and I think that it often does. And somatics has become a very trendy and therefore profitable word. And so if I want to slap the word somatic on body work or somatic on breath work, I've just hopped on a language trend and I might be teaching the exact same breath work I've always taught, which, by the way, is somatic because it's of the body. But now I'm adding the word somatic. And like, somatic body work is actually a wicked dumb term because it means body body work.

00:09:40 Chazmith: Of the body, body work.

00:09:41 Karden: Of the body, body work. Oh, you do of the body body work? How awesome. I'd love some of the body body work, please. But really some of the progenitors Thomas Hannah, Moshé Feldenkrais , and there are others that I'm not coming up with the name of and there's been like international somatics associations for a long time and those spaces often were very influential and present in movement communities like dancers. And it's only recently that those ideas from 50 years ago have started to move themselves into the mind body space, move themselves into the trauma space, move themselves into the breath work space and yoga space. And it's really a union of embodied ideas and awareness that have been developing for decades or centuries with a lot of contemporary terminology. 

00:10:35 Karden: I have this little chart here that I've always loved and let me pull this up real quick just so I can get it perfectly accurate. Dr. Albert Mehribians, I always get that name wrong. He did studies on communication and some of your listeners have probably heard this, but when he did elements of communication between one person and another, he found that 7% of communication comes through the actual spoken words. 38% is communicated through the voice and tone of those words and 55% comes from body language. Have you heard that before, Chazmith?

00:10:35 Chazmith: Oh yeah.

00:11:20 Karden: It's exceptional. I'm going to say that. So another way of saying that is more than half of communication. 55% is literally body language and posture and then the next 38% is not what you're saying, but how you're saying it. And then 7% less than 10% are the actual words you're using. 

00:10:39 Chazmith: Well, this explains why texting is such a fabulous form of communication.

00:11:43 Karden: Are you lying? 

00:11:45 Chazmith: I am being completely sarcastic. 

00:11:46 Karden: Exactly. But it also explains, Chazmith why emojis are a godsend. No one takes this seriously, but if you say thank you with a period that's intense, you say thank you with an exclamation point. You can think of symbols as body language. Right? And then thank you with an exclamation point. Oh, that's really good. Thank you with an emoji. So the emojis, despite being extraordinarily simple pictograms of body language and tone, they allow our brains to actually accurately interpret text communication. And the absence of an emoji in a text communication usually leaves you somewhat unsure and often leads you into negativity bias. So for those of you who think emojis are immature, you're wrong. Emojis are the key to accurate communication because your brain is only getting 7% of the information it needs from text. Similarly, my friends, the reason why somatics is so dope, whether you're doing it in a really, let's say, introductory way or in a really advanced way like somatic experiencing, is that the body is where that other 93% of communication, of awareness, of consciousness, of your existence is.

00:13:15 Karden: Your body is where that other 93% is. And so if you're a brain retrainer or someone doing CBT or talk therapy, you're literally operating, you're trying to change your mind and body with 7% of what's actually available and going on. And somatics is the way that we are skillfully reengaging with that other 93%. But in this case it's not between us and other, it's between us and ourselves. Chazmith, I'm going to put you on the spot here. Can you share a little bit about how maybe some of our sessions have changed the amount of information that you're understanding or receiving from your body? Like do you feel you've moved beyond that 7%? And can you give a micro example? 

00:14:07 Chazmith: Yeah, I mean it's crazy because up until the first time I really worked with you, I thought that I had this relationship with my body. I thought that I understood my body or what it was communicating. And then I realized that I actually had no idea what that relationship even had potential to be. And I know that I'm still only barely scratching the surface, but I can think how we're doing a session and all of a sudden, I just get this download of information as I'm checking in with the sensations in my body. And all of a sudden I have this awareness of an emotion or feeling that was driving this sensation that I was completely unaware of. Like mind blowing, just this huge AHA moment. And so this is how I know there's days I still do struggle independently to even connect to that intelligence and hear what it's actually trying to communicate beyond the sensation. So that's why I'm saying I'm just scratching the surface but I know that there's so much potential there and it's pretty eye opening. It's way easier than trying to use my mind to get to that information. 

00:15:25 Karden: Wonderful. So actually I think that might be a decent setup to sort of compare simple somatic exercises with maybe more I'm not going to use the word complex, I'm just going to use deeper. 

00:15:38 Chazmith: Deeper is the word I would use, yeah.

00:15:38 Karden: Yeah, right.

00:15:39 Chazmith: More depth. 

00:15:41 Karden: So polyvagal exercises are somatic practices. And so you might do some neck massage to stimulate that vagus nerve. There's the butterfly tap, there's ear work, there's a lot and you do those practices and often you will notice a shift. And that shift might be as simple as I feel more calm, I'm 20% less tense, my mind has slowed down a bit. And so those are somatic practices. We stimulated the vagus nerve via the body and we got a change in nervous system state. But that practice was the application of a practice really without understanding and without getting into that communication. That language coming from the body. It's doing something to your body to affect your nervous system to get a change. But it's really without context. We don't know why the body was activated the way it was. We may not have tracked the trigger. We're not getting into a lot more nuance of sensation, emotion, maybe memory from childhood. There's so much richness that can be accessed but in that moment, we're not doing that.

00:16:56 Karden: We're just doing something to our body to make ourselves feel better. And the truth is that the majority of somatic practices, I have this very derogatory term for them. I call them holistic Xanax. Meaning I don't feel good. I'm not going to pop a pill to change my state, but I am going to do this practice to change my state. And just like the pill, it's going to temporarily make me feel better until I don't feel good again. And then because I either don't know why it's really happening, I don't know how to change my internal reaction to it, or I'm not changing my external circumstances. I just have to keep coming back to my holistic Xanax, I have to come back to my somatic practices to regulate myself. Which by the way, guys, I'm just going to be blunt, isn't true regulation. It's actually coercion. It's my body keeps going this way, I want to make it go that way. 

00:17:51 Chazmith: It's like there's no endpoint with that. It's kind of like management, quote unquote stress management. So we're state changing but without actually understanding what's causing the original state to begin with, which isn't true healing, but it serves a purpose. And maybe at some point as you continue on, you'll also share. When is this type of practice, this state change practice, most ideal because I'm sure there's a time and place for all of them. 

00:18:16 Karden: Well, that's why I was about to backpedal, right? I just got took it to the limit. The backpedaling is they definitely have a use. I much rather someone be using somatic regulatory practices than medication that may have a lot of side effects or alcohol or drugs. So that's the first backpedal. The second backpedal is that those somatic practices, whether you're being really supported in feeling and understanding, they're still setting up a framework, a foundation for being able to feel and understand. At least you're connecting with the body. You might not be understanding all that's there, but at least you're connecting to the body. And then the third thing is there is evidence that practicing polyvagal techniques tones the ventral vagal nerve, which actually will lead to some sustained improvement in nervous system function. But that's just part of it. And I think doing somatic exercises without depth is only going to get you so far. 

00:19:23 Karden: A framework that I used to use, we actually don't use this in CFS school anymore, but I use it personally is I say there's three stages. There's somatic awareness, there's somatic fluency and somatic agency. What does this mean? First is actually becoming aware of all the types of information your embodied nervous system has. Because by the way, through repression and disassociation and simple lack of connection, there's not even awareness. Like as I've brought up before, it's like if you've never heard music before, you're just hearing noise when you finally hear it or nothing and it takes time to hear a guitar and to hear a drum and to hear a keyboard. It takes time to hear the different elements of the music. Similarly with the somatic information coming up, so somatic awareness that there's even anything there. Somatic fluency is understanding what's there. And then somatic agency is being able to interact and influence what's there in a sustainable way to change your nervous system. And most somatic practices lack all three of those or have one of them, but not the other two.

00:20:31 Karden: So somatic experiencing, which we do together, does all three and more. In somatic experiencing, they have a wonderful acronym called sibam S-I-B-A-M. And sibam stands for sensation, image, behavior, affect and meaning. Sensation literally is sensations like feeling tension or heat or buzzing. Any sensation you can possibly think of.

00:21:00 Karden: Image is any kind of visual image, but also sense memory, right? Whether it's a smell, a sound, a taste, an actual memory from your past, or let's say you're feeling tension in your neck and shoulders, but you also get this kind of image of, wow, it feels like I'm being pulled apart, right? That's more information. Tension is one thing, but someone can have tension from feeling crushed. Someone can have tension from being pulled apart, or someone can feel twisted. These are really important pieces of information that enrich our understanding of what our nervous system is actually going through. Then beyond image is behavior. Behavior is posture. It's whether you're moving or not moving, right? How you're moving behavior can even be oh, I get anxious and I reach for potato chips, right?

00:21:58 Karden:  Behavior is habits as well. Affect is the fancy psychological term for emotion and feeling, right? Distinct from sensation. Like sad, right? Happy, angry.

So someone can have tension in their neck, which they do have. And as you know, Chazmith from our work, we slow things down. We're like, okay. I know you. I hear that you get a sense of tension. Do you have any image or further concept? And then it might be like, I had a client the other day saying my neck feels like the Golden Gate Bridge and all of those cables. And I was like, wow, that's really impressive, right? And then I had her pause it a little bit longer and I'm like, I know this sounds OD, but if that tension, if that Golden Gate Bridge could move, is it stuck or does it want to do something? And she was quiet for about 30 seconds. She's like, this sounds insane, Karden, but my neck, it wants to throw a punch. I just want a punch. And I'm like, wow. And then lastly, I was like, does that punch feel like a happy punch? Or she's like, It's fucking angry, Karden.

00:23:00 Karden: And I was like, it was one of those like, now we're into the true blue richness. Now we're way past 7%, right? We're in that 93%. You've got a part of your nervous system that's fucking angry. You're extremely immobilized feels like it's holding on to a whole bridge and it wants to fight that's access to immobilization response as opposed to the frozen anxiety response that she's been stuck in. That's true blue somatics my friends, that's when we're getting into the vast richness of information that our body holds about the rest of our brain. Because most of our brain is subcortical, friends, most of our brain has been developing over hundreds of millions of years and it's only recently sprouted the capacity to talk and drive a car and visit the moon, right? For millions of years before that. Just like if you have a dog or a cat or a turtle, our consciousness, human consciousness, was embodied not the 7% of words. And part of why we're all so sick is that we live in that 7% and abandon the other 93% until we get sick and we have no choice but to be like, what the hell is going on? 

00:24:23 Chazmith: Wow. Okay, so this is cool, right? We go into this somatic experiencing session, we get these downloads, this insight, this information from our body that's beyond anything we had come to understand before. In the example you just gave us, this person has this desire to punch, like this angry, rageful punching, mobilization need. It's beautiful information, but what do we do with it? Where do we go from there? What's next? 

00:25:03 Karden: You're going to have to talk to my secretary and give me a credit card before I answer that kind of question. Not true. Not true at all. We're here to help. So what do we do next? Such a big question. Okay, I think I want to put this in the context of a trigger or a symptom example in order to help this really come alive. 

00:25:31 Chazmith: Yeah, well, that's good because my next question was about triggers.

00:25:03 Karden: And we're going to return to this client of mine. We'll see if she listens to this podcast. So this particular client has enormous amounts of tension in her muscular system and pain. She also has a rapid heart rate, okay, and kind of dysonomia sort of symptoms. By the way, folks, your heart is a muscle, all right? So don't forget that. Yes, it's your primary cardiovascular organ, but it's also just a muscle. And so it's often afflicted as a muscle by repressed tension and mobilization response. We'll get to that. And then this person also suffers from a lot of fatigue at times. So this person, because of whatever happened in their past, has very little access to healthy mobilization of the affect, the emotion of anger and rage, and specifically the behavioral use of it, right? To use anger in some way to either establish a boundary how did this happen? Most likely, like so many of us, there were moments where our parents hurt us or neglected us or treated us inappropriately and we tried to fight back.

00:26:53 Karden: Maybe in those toddler years we actually mobilized our rage, but it was unsuccessful. And unsuccessful can look like anything, guys. It can look like your parents got so angry that they terrified you and shut you down, or they just ignored you and you shut yourself down. In this case, this natural expression of rage, right? If our body is a band of multiple emotions and maybe rage are the drums, all of a sudden the drummer just got kicked out of the band, all right? Or more like he or she's still there, but no one can hear the drummer anymore. But the thing that goes on, guys, is just because you've disassociated and inhibited your rage, the drummer is still smashing the drums often in your life. But because it was repressed or disassociated. This particular client, she can't feel her rage when she's supposed to or when it's triggered. Instead, her animal muscular system cranks down hard with the energy of the rage, both primarily to immobilize it.

00:28:02 Karden: But then other things happen. It takes a lot of energy to do that, okay? So that's using up energy in the system. And then the rage is going to find ways to try to discharge, maybe through highly accelerated heart rate, maybe through huge amounts of ruminating and overthinking, maybe through random explosions of anger and impatience, misdirected at someone or something else. And so the brain is in a pattern where old, if something from the present triggers the rage response that wanted to happen in the past, it's disassociated, it's repressed, it's not being tracked by awareness of the person, but we see signs of it all over the body if we know how to notice what's going on somatically. 

00:28:53 Karden: And then what we need to do, folks, is two or three things. One, we need to gently and slowly help the brain reestablish the expressive pathways for the anger to run through instead of it gathering in this person's muscular system and the muscle of their heart. We need to establish what we call discharge routes. Whether it be through the movement of the body, through vocalizations anger, is not meant to stay inside. Secondly, it's not just about discharge. It shouldn't be chaotic and explosive. It needs to be held, contained, shaped after discharge. Someone reminded me recently, we have to harvest that energy back. Our energy can go to rage or joy. We want to reclaim some of that energy back into our system in a more useful way. But then what we also have to do, and this is why we do inner child work and we try to associate present triggers with past injuries, is that we have to start catching our brain's early response to things that make it angry, because its default response to, oh, my boyfriend just said they'd be home late. They don't notice the anger. They notice the tension in the shoulders. Oh my God, my tension in my shoulders just happened. Pause. What am I feeling. Sigh. Bam. Oh, wow. I'm so surprised.

00:30:21 Karden:  There's anger in my shoulders because he just said he'd be late. Oh, this takes me right back to when I was seven because mom was always late. She never picked me up from school on time. She never got home to make me dinner on time. I was sad and angry every time and it didn't matter. And that's when that little boy or girl started accumulating tension. We have to uncouple that habit association. We have to help using somatics, inner child work, brain retraining, renegotiation all the skills of our work, Chazmith, to interrupt that habitual nervous system response, facilitate some quick discharge, but then bringing maybe some comfort, some safety, some love to the inner child. And hey, being like, our boyfriend isn't our mother, he's rarely late.

00:31:11 Karden: And we don't have to be triggered by our mom from the past because we're not in the past anymore. Chazmith you know, I'm paraphrasing so much here right now, but once we have the awareness and we discharge a lot of the backlog emotion, then we have to work on uncoupling the old habit association and inserting a new one from then forth. People will be amazed. I've discharged so much of my anger. My shoulders aren't tense anymore, my heart's not beating like crazy. And instead of letting it fill up to such an unmanageable extent, I am catching the early signals of my old patterns deploying and using my skills, I'm discharging it and getting actually to a much more comfortable, safe, empowered state. And I feel good. That, in a long nutshell is how it's done. Can you say anything? Can you back me up on that? Chazmith, what's your experience been like there?

00:32:01 Chazmith: I'm not sure. I actually want to ask some questions. I have like, a few follow up questions. So first one, you mentioned how a person has that experience with their boyfriend being late. They can instantly correlate it to mom. What if somebody can't really correlate that intense emotion they're having now, or the intense emotion that they discover through sibam? What if they can't correlate it to some childhood memory or some time in their past that maybe was the onset of the trigger? 

00:32:27 Karden: We can still work with it. 

00:32:29 Chazmith:You can't, okay.

00:32:29 Karden: Work with it really well. Yeah. It's not necessary to know the origin literally in real time. You can still be like, whoa, there's a part of me having a really, really intense response to what seems like another part of me can see as a relatively normal, not big deal, right? And then the part that's seeing this is not a big deal, which we can develop in our work into true self, it becomes the self regulating mechanism. Can see the part that's like, really activated. And even without knowing the origins of why it's responding that way, we can still bring comfort to that part in real time. We can still be like, hey. I don't know why, but I hear from you that this is really hurtful to us and really angry. Well, we got big emotions around that. We can validate what we're experiencing in real time. We can help discharge some of the energy that we're having in real time.

00:33:25 Chazmith: How might we do that? 

00:33:27 Karden: Discharge almost is always some form of mobilization. 

00:33:33 Chazmith: Okay, so in that situation, what might somebody choose to do to support their system, to let that energy go? 

00:33:39 Karden: So I have an expression. I think you got to get up to get down, which sounds like some shredding of a James Brown lyric. Most people, when they're getting activated, want to use a calming technique to bring them back down. 

00:33:55 Chazmith: Yeah, shut down. 

00:33:57 Karden: Not even shut down. It's just like, oh, I'm getting really angry. I'm going to take some deep breaths. But we also know people are like, oh, I'm getting really angry. I got to go blow off some steam. Right? Well, I actually think both work much better together. Right. So if I see myself getting really activated, I might not even be able to step out of the situation. But you might see me rolling my wrists like this underneath the table and really feeling some of the tension of my arms because our arms are a great discharge route. So I feel myself getting really activated, and instead of doing something mental or breathy, I just go, right. I also can do that with my ankles and my feet. Great discharge routes.

00:34:40 Karden: It's how our animal was designed to discharge energy. Run or fight. Vocalizations, I'm not going to do something too loud, but like, there's also more skillful ones like oohs and aahs, but I often really like animalistic ones. So I might give myself just 30 seconds of discharge because our nervous system is designed to go like this. If I let myself go up a little higher, it will naturally go. And then once it goes, ah, then I might be able to do a little polyvagal ish thing, a little like, we're okay. But often we need to go up to go down. So that would be a simple somatic skill. That's not really part of the big picture we've been talking about, but a useful somatic skill in that moment to help regulate.

00:35:30 Chazmith: And you're, like, validating that emotion, which is so different from what I used to do, which, when I first kind of started in this healing community, this personal growth, I learned to do almost the exact opposite, which is all about, like and yes, we do need to shift our perspective, but something I've been catching myself lately, and being able to shift is not validating. That there could be two parts of me with different feelings and not validating the one that's considered negative, like noticing that something happened and there's an instant trigger. But instead of acknowledging or validating it, I'm like, I try to just talk myself out of it to try to shift my perspective to like, oh, it's not that big of a deal. Like downplay. So what I'm noticing I'm doing is downplaying and discrediting or not validating this feeling to be okay, which then actually, as I'm learning, is sending a message that that feeling, it's resolidifying to my brain. That feeling is not safe and not okay, and we have to repress it even more. 

00:36:33 Chazmith: I had it happen yesterday in the car. Something happened and it really bothered me. And I started noticing that I was just trying to be like, oh, it's okay, things happen, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I was like, wait a minute, no, I'm not going to do this. I actually feel really freaking pissed off right now. And I was in my car by myself, so I was like, no, I just want to scream and tell this person FU out loud in my car. And then afterwards that's when I could just be like, okay, I know that, yeah, there's this part of me that still feels this way. I'm still getting triggered when X, Y, and Z happens. And there's this other part of me that knows at the end of the day, it's not the biggest deal and I can work with it.

00:37:11 Karden:  That's beautiful workshop. 

00:37:13 Chazmith: It's just something I'm really noticing a lot now and catching that I think I spent a lifetime of accumulated downplaying and disregarding. So it's been interesting to--

00:37:25 Karden: I think everyone listening just raised their hands. They're like, right? And there's the corny expression of what we resist, persists.

00:37:34 Chazmith: Yeah. 

00:37:35 Karden: And Nicole Sachs, I've always loved her expression that what we're feeling in that moment is not the truth. It is a truth. Right. And we should always be able to hold space for our a truths. Don't resist them. Notice them. Channel them. Notice them, honor them. Channel them. And then after you've noticed, honored and channeled, then there's an opportunity to have a conversation and modify and come to an agreement or work towards the way that overall you'd prefer to feel or see things in this world. But just like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, apartheid, like it was called Truth and Reconciliation, Repair and Connection and Change was premised on honesty. expression and reconciliation. Works the same thing inside your internal nation of self, folks. 

00:38:34 Chazmith: Yeah. When you have somebody who does have a situation, like the example you gave with the boyfriend being late, or yesterday, me realizing this huge epiphany moment where I realized that this is really common X, Y and Z is a really common trigger for me, what do you do with that next? Like, oh, okay, I'm trying to think like, oh, I get really triggered when somebody is going to be late. Like that situation you gave. Okay, cool. You're saying it's as simple as literally talking to the inner child and comforting the inner child and reminding us that we're not in our past and kind of having that other true self come in and remind us like, hey, we can have this emotion and we can also realize this doesn't have to be this giant deal. Is that how we heal the trigger or do we ever really heal the trigger? Do we mostly just learn how to manage it and reduce our reaction to it? Does that make sense? 

00:39:29 Karden: You're really tossing me small, easy to answer questions, Chazmith. I love that. Thanks. Karden, how do we heal everything? Can you answer that for me? And is it possible? And can you condense that to about three minutes for me? Because that'd be really nice. I'm going to answer it from the end of the beginning. In my experience, nothing is ever deleted unless people remove parts of your brain or electrocute you or some shit. And so in that sense, I find that old triggers are always there. But this work will take a trigger and turn it into an echo or a faint shadow or a puff of smoke. And that's remarkable. Whereas something that used to ruin your whole day, whether it just be like mentally ruining your day or symptom wise ruining your day, literally was a one to three minute agitation that was then completely shifted without much effort to ease and grace. That's healing, guys. That's this work.

00:40:45 Karden: If you are holding on to black and white concepts of healing, you're going to stay sick and dissatisfied for your whole fucking life, people. Let it go now. Say that again. If you are holding on to a black and white perception of healing in this work, you are going to be sick and unhappy for your whole life. Let it go.

00:41:04 Karden: That's not how we work. So that's the first thing. And I'll give a little example. If I go home after a long days of work and my wife, for whatever reason, and by the way, it doesn't happen often, but if I come home and she's like upset or irritated or angry, any of the above, let's start with 99 out of 100 times. It doesn't have to do with me, but 100 out of 100 times my brain and nervous system responds as if it has everything to do to me. There's the first habit, the overcoupling the trigger from the past, right? Because whether you can remember it or not, guys, when I came home, for me as a child, if a little child perceives that mom or dad is dysregulated, angry, upset because there's such a co regulative relationship, they become dysregulated. It becomes extremely uncomfortable for the child to be in the presence of mom or dad who is dysregulated or angry or whatever. Then what follows, guys, this is what happens with my wife, right? What follows is all of a sudden I feel deeply uncomfortable.

00:42:12 Karden: Most of us are actually repressed and disassociated from that radical discomfort. Instead, what happens because we're repressed from that there's still the behavior that wants to do anything possible to get out of feeling bad and uncomfortable, even though you're not tracking it. Your behavior has enacted. And that behavior comes from childhood. And that behavior in this instance often takes three forms. The first form might be trying to help. The kid is going to try to make mommy happy. The husband is going to try to make the wife happy. Right? Because the kid had no capacity to do that for the mother. And in this case, we can't fix others, right? Whatever. Jilly whatever my wife's going through in that moment is nothing to do with me. So my efforts, especially since they are coming from making myself feel better, not her, because it's my discomfort that's driving my behavior, trying to help is almost never going to work. We've all been there.

00:43:13 Karden: We try to help, honey. And then I get a little more angry. So the moment that the social support strategy fails, as it did when kids, then the next one is probably going to be a fight. Now you don't want my help? Fuck you. Or like, whatever, it's your shit, right? Now we go into the fight response again because now we even feel worse. On top of the initial discomfort and dysregulation, now we've been rejected because our solicitous work didn't work. And so now an extra behavior goes up. Now I'm hurt. Anger is always a response to injury. It's a boundary setter. It's a defender. Now I'm going to go into an offensive mode, and then we're going to then isolate. We're going to abandon one another because that's all that's left. Raise your hand where you're listening if you recognize that pattern in your relationship.

00:44:09 Chazmith: You just explained everything. In a nutshell explained why 99.9% of divorces happen. 

00:44:21 Karden: Correct. And so somatic our entire field of mind body work, but especially the fusion of true self work, inner child work. Somatic experiencing, to the extent that it brings that awareness agency and fluency in allows me to first and foremost, this is remarkable to see that pattern. Because when you don't see the pattern, when you have none of that somatic information or memory information, then you do endless brain shit like, well, my wife's an asshole, or she should be better at regulating herself, or I was right and she was wrong. If you don't have the data set of what's going on in the body or from the past, your brain is going to try to manufacture explanations, but they can't possibly be right because they're based on the wrong information. But then you talk to all your cousins and your best friends, and they don't have the right information either because they're disassociated and repressed and they're on board. And then some of them reinforce your viewpoint and some of them don't, and it's all a gigantic miasma of bullshit that never helps.

00:45:37 Karden: And then you go to talk couple therapy together, and because you're only dealing with the 7% and ignoring the other 93%. That doesn't fucking work either. So our work allows you to actually get to the accurate information from the embodied nervous system. And then as I kind of alluded to earlier, the work is in and we go through all of this in CFS school and good se work does this is in creating time and space and comfort around the discomfort that drives the habitual response. Then all of a sudden we have space to start making choices, picking new states instead of going down the old rabbit hole endlessly. It's just too long to explain how to do that right now. But that is what we do. We create time and space and practice. This is big, guys.

00:46:34 Karden: No matter how much you mentally want to accomplish this, if you're not doing embodied somatic simulation and practice of triggering situations when you're outside of them, when you're just like laying in bed, you can think of it like practicing for a sport. If you're not doing that, you got zero fucking shot of actually choosing a different path in the heat of the moment. But as you somatically practice, your brain and body learn about space and time and because you've teed up comfort, compassion and different forms of behavior or action in your practice, they are there for you. Though it's still bloody hard when you need them. And that's how we do it.

00:47:23 Chazmith: I love that. It's like now you can walk home or walk in the door and have this experience and you might initially have a moment of reaction. But over time, through practice, you're going to have a quicker capacity to actually notice and observe what pattern you're going into and step back, take that space and then choose something new. 

00:47:44 Karden: That's right. And then over time because your autonomic nervous system is supposed to work automatically, guys, our work is not about perpetual self regulation. Our work is about supporting our body in autonomically self regulating and your body's not dumb. Meaning as you develop the new, more functional, more effective, more compassionate, more comfortable state and behavior set, it will most of the time get you there faster. It will prefer it and usually the only time it regresses to the old less helpful patterns is under cumulative stressors such as not enough sleep, a lot of bad things happening at once, catching an actual disease like a cold or an infection. When the load on the nervous system gets really high and intense for a period of time, then it tends to regress to the older patterns and the newer ones are less available. But that's just part and parcel of being alive, folks. 

00:48:46 Chazmith: When that happens, if you've gotten yourself to automatic regulation, I feel like even if you have these quote unquote setbacks, we're going to be able to use our toolbox to get ourselves out of that and back into that regulated state faster. 

00:49:00 Karden: That's right. You're not starting from square one. You're not. You're so much further and actually, Chazmith. Our self healers usually find one of the hardest but most transformative and empowering moments is so they heal phenomenally in our program, and at some point they have a really brutal dip, right? And it's pulling themselves out of that dip that truly feels like they've earned their Cub Scout badge. And they're like, I got this. I am not who I was. 

00:49:35 Chazmith: Ninja moments is what I call them. 

00:49:37 Karden: Ninja. 

00:49:38 Chazmith: I got that from somebody else. She told me that. She says those moments are your ninja moments. They're your opportunities to be a ninja in how you respond to it. 

00:49:45 Karden: Holla. 

00:49:46 Chazmith: Okay, so Karden, I know we're going to go through this like a somatic experiencing practice guide. People who are listening. I have two questions that I think will be lot simpler, easier answers before we get into that. Is that cool? 

00:49:57 Karden: Yeah. This one isn't going to be how we heal everything in two minutes.

00:49:59 Chazmith: No. Okay, so this one is for everybody who's out there listening. We're talking about somatic experiencing sibam, going into the sensations, and then seeing just through witnessing what could be underneath the sensations, what emotion or like you said, imagery or memory is under these sensations? Now, when we talk about these sensations, are we talking about only musculoskeletal, or can people utilize this tool for anything? Like whether it's a rash or they have an itchy rash on their body or they are dealing with some kind of infection or sinus stuff?

00:50:37 Chazmith: Because a lot of people have muscular skeletal sensations, tightness, tension, achiness. But then a lot of people in this community have all these other sensations and symptoms. So does it work for everything? 

00:50:51 Karden: Anything and everything. 

00:50537 Chazmith: Cool.

00:50:53 Karden: We're not going to do it today. But one of my favorite things for people who have allergies and sinus issues is we can do sibam beautifully on what I call the snout. And it's a whole world. I mean, nose, eyes, mouth, sinuses, throat. There's a whole structure here that could be related to although I don't specialize in this, some clients who have very strong hormonal and menstrual cycles and uterine issues, you can do this work with those biological structures and hormones. The nervous system is everywhere, guys. 

00:51:29 Chazmith: And then kind of like a two part question. Say we have somebody who's out there and they're learning about this and they try to do the sibam and they're just not connecting. Like, they're like, okay, I hear you, Karden. I really want to have this relationship with my body. I got the sensation dialed in. I can describe the sensation. I have the image of the sensation, but nothing else. Like, I'm not getting any emotion behind the sensation. Like I'm not connecting to it. What advice do you have for somebody in that situation? 

00:52:00 Karden: The advice I'd give you, if you don't have support, like if you're not working with a clinician of any kind or teacher is to guess being like, okay, so I know I have tension here. I can feel it. I can feel that tension. I really got it. And then you can kind of probe like you're connected to the tension in your mind and you can even ask like, I have this visual sometimes that my body is this really, really deep wishing well. Like it goes down a thousand feet, it's lined with old stone, all right? And I can go, Is this anger? And I wait as if the sound and the message is traveling all the way down to the bottom of the well. And then something comes back. It usually isn't a yes, it's anger. It's usually a flash of heat across my body, right? I'm talking millisecond. Was that some heat or did I just feel the slightest hint of maybe snarl? Or did I just actually feel my body flinch? Well, that kind of flinching. Why would it flinch? Well, I don't feel this in my body, but I know that creatures flinch when they're afraid. Guess, experiment, ask and wait. And really the radar of awareness should be looking for so much more than just words. That would be my advice if you're doing it on your own.

00:53:33 Chazmith: I love that. And something that I've been noticing too, because I like that rather than just having this open ended waiting for it to say, to show you in some capacity that it's anger or sadness or fear, you ask specifically and let it give you feedback. And something I noticed for me when I'm struggling some days to connect is I watch my head movement. There's always usually like a really subtle nod of some sort. Like if I'm like, is this anger, I'll notice a nod. So that's something that I do. 

00:54:02 Karden: Yeah. And that's really good. So in sidebam, you just got a behavioral answer, right? A movement. 

00:54:08 Chazmith: It's subtle, but I notice it. 

00:54:11 Karden: That's great.

00:54:12 Chazmith: And then second part to that is you had mentioned at some point during this discussion how maybe initially we just feel massive tension, right? But the goal is start to notice when there's just like that twinge. Do you have any advice or insights for anyone who is still at a place where maybe they've done sibam and maybe they know that the neck tension, like your other client, is from this rage? Or I don't know what you guys discovered was actually under the rage or the reason that the rage shows up, but what advice would you give somebody like her to start to notice the subtle nuances before it's full on? Because I know for myself included, sometimes I'm like, I feel great, I feel great, I feel great. And then bam, I feel like all a ten at once. Obviously, I didn't feel great leading up to that ten. There was probably some subtlety in shifts that I wasn't yet acutely aware of. 

00:55:10 Karden: Practice. 

00:55:11 Chazmith: Just practice. 

00:55:12 Karden: Just practice, but practice and contrast. So contrast is how awareness of anything or any kind of learning is actually acquired. What do I mean? If you grew up drinking Bud Light, you like Bud Light and there's a time and a place for Bud Light, don't get me wrong. But then all of a sudden your buddy takes you to your first time at a microbrewery, right, and they bring you like a craft ale and you're like, whoa, beer can taste like this. Through contrast, an enormous amount of learning just happened and some unfortunate consequences. One, your beer budget just got a lot more expensive. That's number one, right?

00:55:59 Karden: Number two, you don't like Bud Light anymore unless you are really hot and on a boat, right, and you just basically want soda water. That's what just happened. That's what contrasts us, right? So welcome to the Holistic Mind body quarter of the Internet with your host Chazmith and Karden. All right, so in this instance with attention, you have to start noticing. It gives me a subjective scale. Like checking in now and then is my tension a one, a three, a five? Or you might find that, wow, after the yoga class, my tension went from a four to a two. That feels really good. You need to start this is what I mean by practice. You got to start tuning in, but also feeling when it's in different states. Because if you're like, oh, it's a two, it's a two, then you're going to start being like, oh, wait, interestingly. It's the end of the day. I don't think I had any huge triggers, but I'm definitely at a three and a half or a four. And then that's an opportunity to go in and do some sibam and be curious and be like, oh, you know, this four accumulated over the course of the day, essentially. There was this part of me that was really kind of doing a lot of pressure to answer all my emails all day. And underneath that pressure, there was a part that was really annoyed and it's angry and it wants to discharge. 

00:57:32 Chazmith: Good stuff. Okay, so we're going to go through a guided experience with you. For everyone listening, what would you want to preface? Anybody who's listening who this type of practice might be new for. Is there anybody that might be better off to turn the episode off here? Or is there like somebody who this would not be ideal for? Or is it ideal for everybody? Just anything you want to preface before we go into it?

00:57:59 Karden: Everyone here has a mind and a body. So this exercise is for anybody. The preface would be that if at any point you feel a level of activation, for some reason that's not comfortable, stop. Just like stop it. Open your eyes slowly. Look around the space that you're in. Feel your feet. We're not about to go into anything too intense, guys. It really is a pretty foundational sensation. I mean, sibam exercise to feel things. But still, that being said, you can stop and get present to your environment, go have some potato chips and drink some water if for any reason it's not feeling safe or comfortable for you. But we're not going to go find some big trigger. We're going to deal with some things that are kind of very rather benign to help you start tuning into some of more of this other 93% that's going on inside your own self. 

00:58:53 Chazmith: Super. Let's do it.

00:58:55 Karden: All right, so I think a really simple but pretty profound way to begin really getting into a deeper level of somatic awareness, somatic fluency, somatic agency. Some of the concepts inside somatic experiencing is to we're going to use this idea of sibam, again, as sort of the framework for feeling a bit more in our body. And then we're going to use another se concept called pendulation, which is to while noticing sibam. And don't worry, you don't have to try to catch it all. You're just going to try to notice any kind of new information from your body that's there. And I'll be helping. We're then going to pendulate, which is to guide the mind towards recollecting a very mildly unpleasant experience and seeing what happens in the body in that somatic space inside. And then we're going to go elsewhere to something more positive and see how that works. And so what I would like everyone who's listening to do is to take a moment to think of a mildly irritating thing. I want you to write it down or make a note of it.

01:00:08 Karden: So mildly irritating means like stuck in traffic or forgetting your keys, that kind of thing. Now, low level, right, folks, do not pick your family. Do not pick a car accident. Very clear, low level. So take a moment to consider that picking up the box of cereal and not having enough cereal for a whole bowl, right? That's what I'm talking about here. Or vice versa. Not having enough milk. Oh, God. Worse than not having enough cereal in a certain way. And then I also want you to think of on the positive side, I would like you to think of a person, but preferably like a friend or a colleague or like a barista, someone who is a positive presence in your life, but again, isn't family, isn't a loved one. I don't want you to pick a heavy hitter, right? It could be your mailman. Just a positive presence, but not very intimate.

01:01:31 Karden: Super. All right, so having those two on deck, I'm going to invite you to close your eyes and tune into yourself, which does not mean to relax. This is not a relaxation exercise. This is not a calming exercise. This is a somatic awareness and experience exercise. We are noticing how we are and to direct your attention to how you are. You could start, for example, with your chest, sternum, heart, breath at very center of your chest, evaluating levels of tension, evaluating if it feels open or closed. Breath is easy or hard, heartbeat is slow or fast, loud or quiet.

01:03:05 Karden: And after noticing that region of your body, in contrast and expanding awareness, you can tune into your upper back, shoulders, neck. First, you might what are the differences in tension, sensation, alignment between my chest and my upper back? You don't have to have labels or names for everything, but even if you're just like, they're different. I don't know how, but they're different. Or wow, I can't feel anything in either spot, whatever. And are your shoulders, are you wearing them like earrings or are they dropped and at ease? And you can slowly turn your head from left to right. And does the neck and the base of the skull move with relative liquidity suppleness? Or is it like leather and cables?

01:04:44 Karden: And then the one other place we'll tune into is almost everyone says, like, this is the place I store my stress. Now, we might have already touched on that with shoulders or chest, but I want you to tune into where you feel like you store most of your stress most of the time, or just in this moment where your attention is drawn to in terms of an area of tension or discomfort or maybe even pain. And now that you've tuned into that, it's like we've taken a polaroid of how you are now in these various areas and keep that sort of in reference. Did a lot of sensations there. The last thing I want you to let's consider affect, right? The A of sibam feeling, emotion. What's the overall attitude or vibe of your mind body right now? Neutral, annoyed, anxious, excited, happy, sad.

01:06:15 Karden:  Maybe a blend. Yeah. And noting that, keeping 90% of your attention on what you are aware of in your body. I want you to use 10% of your attention to recollect the mildly irritating incident and notice how your body responds, however subtle. Does anything change in the chest? Does anything shift in the upper back, shoulders and neck in that third area that was unique to you? Has anything happened there? If your body was playing a certain song before when we were just checking in, how has that song changed in the subtlest or significant ways? Do you get the sense that your body is constricting or freezing? Or do you get the sense that it's ready to pounce and wants to move? Does it want to curse or growl or scream?

01:08:31 Karden:  And has the vibe or attitude, the affect, the emotion, has that shifted and in what way? And we're just observing. We're not judging or interpreting. We're watching what our body, what our subcortical brain functions, what our nervous system automatically does when exposed to a trigger. And now that I've gotten you all riled up, I would. Like to experiment with something else. First of all, give yourself a little wiggle, a little movement, whether it's shoulders, ankles, wrists, just a moment of movement and letting your attention let go of the recollection, pausing to notice what happens in your body after 30 seconds of movement and softening your attention. Has anything changed? Are there yawns?

01:10:08 Karden: And now that we've gotten here, 90% of your attention noticing any particular thing in your body and 10% of your attention is going to recollect the face of the person you selected at the beginning of the exercise. Being curious, fascinated by what's happening in your body as you recollect the face of this person. Like I said, it could be a mailman or a barista feeling the chest and upper back, neck and shoulders. And also you can notice your face and your mouth. Often when we see faces that are kind or that we like, our face feels a little different. Your particular area of stress that's unique to you, how's that area responding to the recollection? The image of this friend or colleague back to affect and emotion, attitude, vibe, what's shifted? Congratulations on following us through a very fundamental but really important somatic exercise and one that is the beginnings of actual understanding and intelligence rather than just sort of a procedural or kind of monkey see, monkey do style exercise which creates a shift but doesn't necessarily bring meaning.

01:13:24 Karden: And even though there's a lot more that can be done on top of or with an exercise like this, know that you can come back to this exercise to expand your awareness and to create a shift. And know that you can improvise with it a little bit and play with maybe some other mildly impactful negative ideas or some more positive concepts. And I suppose the last thing I'd like to say for the traditional brain retrainers out there that haven't done somatics yet, this was a state shift but not done primarily with the mind. This was a state shift that was initiated by mental intention but really experienced in the body in the majority of your brain, in the subcortical aspects. And a lot can be expanded when this style of work is incorporated to your other healing modalities.

01:14:35 Chazmith: So cool. Thank you so much for doing that for everybody who's listening.

01:14:40 Karden: You're most welcome. 

01:14:41 Chazmith: Hopefully they had an experience that I had like their own experience that I had, but I felt like that was really powerful. 

01:14:48 Karden:Fantastic. Yeah, the best work is often quite simple.

01:14:53 Chazmith: Yeah, thanks for doing that. Thanks for taking a deep dive with me today and just hopefully helping clarify some of the nuances and differences between this word somatics being utilized in this community. Hopefully it will really help somebody out there listening to understand these differences and know whether or not it's something they've already pursued or have not yet pursued or maybe didn't even understand the depths and the capacity that they were capable of pursuing through the use of this tool. So, I appreciate you. I always love our chats.

01:15:26 Karden: Oh, Chaz, same. I appreciate you so much and I'm very grateful to extending your platform to me to share and for being a voice in our world. As I always say, I only get to do what I do because folks like you are sharing it. So thank you indeed. 

01:15:44 Chazmith: Wow, that's a wrap. What are your thoughts? I feel like this practice is honestly changing my life. I really thought I had this strong connection with my body and these past few months have been so eye opening for me and I'm barely scratching the surface. I'm excited to continue to experience this relationship that I am developing and watch it unfold. If you loved the session and you want to get to use that session again the guided session that Karden took us through, I will have that clip available on YouTube as a mini video so that you can reference it anytime you want. If you have more questions about somatic experiencing and how it can support you, check out the CFS School links in the show notes. And if you would like to support this podcasts, you can find a link in the show notes and support this podcast future episodes for as little as ninety nine cents a month. Remember to listen to this guided session anytime you want. And until next time, as always, make this week great.