Alex Videos

M6 : Lesson 5.5 Bonus: Trauma Processing Using TRE (Trauma Release Exercises)

Tension and Trauma Release Exercises were founded by Dr. David Berceli: www.traumaprevention.com

Thank you Dr. Robins for your willingness to share this practice with us! To contact Dr. Robins: www.drericrobins.com

Please see attached pdf handout below/or in the workbook with TRE instructions and to learn more about Dr. Robins.

Please see the Module 6 Workbook for Lesson 5.5 materials.

 

Looking for an online TRE practitioner? Alex Greene https://www.redbeardsomatictherapy.com/

***IF EXPERIENCING ANY DISCOMFORT DURING TRE***
PLEASE SEE NOTE BELOW FROM TRE PRACTITIONER ALEX GREENE

You may use pillows or props under your knees to support you in the open-diamond rest position so as to alleviate any strain.

From my experience – a good percentage of the population – at least 10% — would really benefit from using blocks or pillows to support their knees in this position, and that there are no downsides to this modification in terms of making it harder to access the tremor response.

There are no disadvantages to supporting the knees in this way. No positions within TRE should be painful in any way, and modifications to eliminate pain are always helpful in getting better results.

Additionally, there is an alternative way of inducing the tremors that is kind of the reverse of the standard method. It involves not doing the open-diamond position at all, but instead starting in a knees tall/feet flat position, doing the pelvic lift/bridge from that same position and then slowly OPENING the knees incrementally rather than slowly CLOSING the knees incrementally as we do in the standard protocol. This alternative method can be very good for people for whom the wide knees position is hard from a physical perspective (hip pain, muscle strain) or for due to certain trauma histories.

Alex Greene, LMT, SEP, IFS, TRE Trainer, Feldenkrais Practitioner
Founder/Practitioner
Red Beard Somatic Therapy

Transcript

Lesson 5 point 5. This is a bonus lesson for trauma processing using TRE tension and trauma release exercises. This will be guided and instructed by Doctor Eric Robbins, who has his own amazing story of using TRE to help him heal from health conditions and now he helps many others do the same. He’ll share with us a little bit about TRE, his own background with it, and then he will take me through a guided practice. Where you can feel free to follow along.
The instructions will be detailed underneath of this video. Welcome. We have a special guest to help with our regulate program. We have Doctor. Eric Robbins with us today, and He kindly offered to guide me through a TRE or trauma release exercises session.
Doctor Eric Robbins is he’s He’s become a great friend, and I’m so happy to have you involved. He is an international renowned health expert in mind and body medicine. He’s been featured in the New York times is the best selling series with the tapping solution. And also with is this a book called the Soul Medicine Awakening your inner blue print for a budget. Yeah.
Right. I was yeah. Exactly. Okay. I know that you’ve been an author to and even have written the forward to numerous books.
I’ll put those in the link below the video so that Okay. I know more about you. Doctor Robbins is a board certified urologist in private practice, and He’s affiliated with the major hospital in LA, and he sees patients regularly for chronic pain and other complex conditions. And from what I understand is that you practice both allopathic medicine and mind body medicine. I know you have a background with NLP, EFT energy healing and obviously trauma release exercises.
You’re also a certified trauma release exercise provider. And you’ve had personal mentoring with Doctor. David Purcelli. So this is a gift for us today to be able to receive some information about TRE and to have you guide me through it, which will also be something that the people listening can do alongside. So thank you.
We’re coming k. Thanks so much for having me, and I’m I’m delighted to be able to share Terry with your audience. And what I do in my office practice is kinda caught my slow safe theory approach. I work with a lot of clients that you’d kinda it would kinda be considered as the flying into the sensitive fragile category, which is probably most of the folks you have at the Primal Trust Academy. So it’s a good approach.
It’s a lot slower than most folks teach it. And so thank you for that great introduction, and we’re gonna have a lot of fun. So, Kat, I had a little intro a little introduction slideshow I wanted to show So I’m gonna share my screen here, and this is how I do teary with patients in the office. So As you said, I’m a urologist. I see chronic pelvic pain cases from Oliver Southern California.
I also see a lot of folks with other kind of chronic functional problems and chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and the hospitalists have these patients that get admitted and are in the hospital for days weeks and they can’t really sort them out or you send those to me. So and as you said, I try and combine the most of out the best of allopathic meds listen and complementary stuff. So one of the reasons I had to get good at all this is that I, myself, was very sick for a long time. I had chronic fatigue syndrome for probably close to 35 years, really severe depletion. A lot of days at the end of the office, I just have to crashed on the floral office for a couple hours, and most weekends were spent in bed.
And I really seen a brain fog. I remember seeing a bioenergetic psychologist in 1997, and the guy told me said, Eric, you’re getting by on 3%. Ed, it’s hard to really, like, realize whether that’s true or not until you’re on the other side of it. But looking back now, I can say, yeah. That’s absolutely true.
So I tried a number of things, got a little better at times, but in 2014, things really got bad. In 2014, it had, like, this 6 month period of worsening, neurologic symptoms, coronary cognitive. I just had trouble processing information. My brain was like a sieve. I had weird kind of twitches in my body.
Couldn’t fill the hot water in my hands in the shower. None of that’s good. And I remember I started having some GI symptoms. Like, if I ate after 7 at night, the food will be undigested in my stomach the next day, And then the straw that broke the camel’s back because I was in the office one day. And out of the blue, damn.
My heart started racing at 220 beats a minute. I was getting dizzy and lightheaded and got admitted to the hospital and, you know, they were able to control my heart rate with medication. But, you know, there’s a sling in that hospital bed and, I mean, almost nonfunctional. I’m thinking I was gonna just have to to go out on medical leave. I wasn’t really sure how I was getting it getting it better.
The hospitals came in and rounded on me, and he told me something. And, you know, the time And I can assure you it’s not, like, 1 10,000 of the clarity that I now understand this stuff. But he said something where I got, oh, I’m, like, I’m stuck in this fight, flight freeze stress physiology. It’s like on this autopilot. And I kinda knew that because I felt stressed for so long.
I’d come off from work sometimes on an easy day, and I my body would just feel tense and tight. And then I intuitively realize, you know, like, even though we say the body tends to heal itself, it doesn’t heal very well when we’re locked in a stress physiology, and then I desperately began looking for ways to get out of that. So, you know, some of the questions that I had in my mind at the time were Like, you know, if I’m only getting behind 3%, where did the rest of the energy go? And how did I get stuck in a fight flight free stress state to begin with? And now that I’m in it, how do I shift my physiology out of that?
And, Kat, as you know, you teach we teach a lot of the same stuff. There’s not really good treatments in the field of standard medicine for shifting folks out of this stress physiology. In fact, I don’t know if 1 in a 100, maybe 1 in 500 physicians really understands the stuff where they’re using it with themselves and with others. You know, how can I best serve my patients? So over the years, I’ve come up with some mind body healing principles.
I’ll just touch on a few of these because they’ve served me well at helping the patients. And the first principle is that when we experience events in our lives at the time feel stressful or terrifying or overwhelming, you know, a lot of times, we’ll lock those traumatic memories and emotions into our body, and they’re held in the muscles and the fascia. And that’s actually kind of a protective mechanism that keeps the traumas held in the body, so they’re not coming up to our conscious awareness and bothering us. And Of course, when we freeze like this, energy and emotions are bound up in the body. Wilhelm Reich was one of Sigman Freud’s top students, and he was a medical doctor, I think, as well.
He talked about holding these areas of mild fashion constriction in the body as armoring, it’s sometimes referred to as raking armoring. And it’s one major way that traumatic memories are repressed and held that set of conscious awareness. And as almost everyone knows these chronically ten stairs in the body can cause pain and rigidity and use up a lot of our energy and kinda just use up a lot of our bandwidth. In my opinion, these areas of mild fascial constriction are one of the biggest ways that energy pathways and meridians are blocked to begin with. And it’s fascinating, you know, because if you talk to any energy healer or acupuncture or something like that, they’ll say, well, you’re sick because the energy is blocked and not flowing.
But the higher level question to me was always, well, why is that energy blocked to begin with? And I think it’s these areas of mild fashion constriction of the body related to prior stressors and traumas that do that. So I think this mild fashion arm you know, tension arm ring was partly where 97% of my life force resided all those years. So as we start to release these areas of chronic, mild fascial contraction of the body, what may start coming up to people’s conscious awareness are some of the same uncomfortable memories, emotions, and sensations that cause us to freeze to begin with. Kinda makes sense.
And so part of what I do and I know a big part of what the primal trust academy does, you guys teach folks ways of learning to deal with these emotions and sensations in the body as they arise. I remember Peter Levine, Doctor Levine, who started somatic experiencing, had a famous quote that I felt kinda summarized All his work, he said that at the end of the day, what we’re doing is uncoupling fear from raw sensation in the body. We have these uncomfortable sensation. We can uncouple them from fear, left and be there, learn to process them, and move them. That goes a long way towards healing.
At a physical physiologic basis. Okay. The 2nd mind body healing principle I wanted to discuss. Now, I know you you’ve in your program, your awesome regulate program, you’ve already covered the a study, and as just a a very short review, ASIS stand for adverse childhood experiences. They found that the higher our A score, the more diseases and illnesses and early death we have later on in life.
And so if you understand that that’s true, and we know for sure that is, there’s been several thousand papers written above the a study. And you say, how how do these early childhood experiences do it, they essentially program how our physiology is gonna run sometimes for the rest of our lives. And In in simplistic terms, it kinda puts us into a chronic fight, flight freeze, stress physiology. Another name for this is a kind of a limbic system to function. And again, as you know so well, so many of your folks in your organization academy, almost all serious chronic illnesses that are getting better, that standard medicine can’t fix, have a substantial component of limbic system dysfunction.
And at the end of the day, Almost all effective healing modalities for this type of patient work at least partly by calming down the limbic system and shifting our physiology. I would say when I sometimes have really great, you know, cases of folks that heal from stuff they had had for years or decades and never get better than it’s not really that I’m so smart, but I do understand how the physiology works. And I know when we shift folks out of a chronic stress physiology, the body has tremendous healing abilities. So some of y’all may recognize this picture. It’s a picture of the gorgeous Polyvago model.
And, again, I know you’ve you’ve covered it extensively, Kent. I wanna just look at it with how it pertains to the tension and trauma release exercises. So here at the bottom and green, if you can see my my arrow, We’re in a ventral vagal state. That’s the parasympathetic state that we kind of refer to as the rest to just restore state. When we’re in that state, we’re actually kind of socially engaged.
We wanna be with people. We feel comfortable letting them in. And there’s certain emotions that are associated with physiology like joy and being in the present and grounded and curious and mindful. Now this arrow over here where my pointer is, it says arousal increases, and we just change that word from arousal to stress. We’ll say as the stress goes up, folks might move into a fight or flight sympathetic state, And I almost think of fighting fight as 2 slightly different things.
Like, if I’m fighting something, if I’m fighting you, I’m moving towards the threat, I feel with anger or rage, and conversely if I’m in flight mode. I’m fleeing. I’m more anxious, nervous, fearful, something like that. Now as the stress increases further and we hit you see this word overwhelm here, If we hit a place, we’re just overwhelmed, where we may you know, if something’s happened to a little kid, then they may not be able to fight or flee, we’ll freeze. This is also parasympathetic state, but it’s a dorsal vagal state.
It’s kind of a state of immobility. It’s kind of it’s kind of marked by by feelings of dissociation and numbness. Another word for that I think is like a brain fog. Depression, helplessness, hopelessness, shutdown, shame. This is clearly not a good place to be in.
I think, Kat, probably a number of your patients are either in the free state. I know when I had my chronic fatigue, I was primarily in the state. So it’s not good to be frozen. I think everyone agrees with that. Now look here, guys.
This is the most probably important take on message we get here. It’s not good to be frozen and we need to go down this curve and get to a ventral vagal state to heal. The challenge is As we do that, we don’t unfortunately, magically go from freeze to social engagement. As we unfreeze, we come into a fight or flight physiology. And as folks do that, sometimes strong emotions come up, some fear, some rage, some anger, some anxiety.
And if you don’t have perspective to know what’s happening, and realize, hey. I’m actually heading in the right direction, but these strong emotions are coming up, and it’s actually a good thing if I know how to work with those and process those That’s, in my opinion, why the poor just model is so important to understand with respect to the tension release exercises. So that gorgeous Polyvago model again is important because it provides a map for folks to know where they are now, what stages they need to go through to heal, and it’s interesting because it correlates our emotional states with our physiology. The 2 are definitely interchangeable. It’s also interesting that even when we’re in these frozen or collapsed states, there’s still a lot of energy in the body.
Doctor David Rosselli, who developed Terry says this, all the folks in somatic experiencing say, just because you’re collapsed or frozen, there’s a lot of energy there, but it’s bound up inside, and it’s not readily available for us to use it. And again, important take home message as we unfreeze and release more energy. We may get a little worse before we get better. Kat, I know you teach that a lot. It’s so important though when you’re in the middle of it and you feel like crud and these types of feelings come up that you you’ve tried your whole life to not feel when they’re they’re coming up, it is a part of for a part of you go, I’m actually heading in the right direction.
Okay. So in order to help folks heal, We need to unwind these chronic mild fascial constrictions in the body. We need to shift folks out of a chronic fight, flight free stress physiology. I know that’s kind of the gist of what everything that you do. And so I’m gonna discuss the TREs, the tension and trauma release exercises, They are what helped me to completely heal from the chronic fatigue, the neurologic symptoms, the brain fog, the GI, semi shutdown, I’ve been off beta blockers for years.
My heart just fixed itself. I was still going into rapid rapid at tachycardia for a couple years, and I fixed it. It’s done. It’s cured. So these teres work.
I’ve done them with about 2000 patients in the office. So let me share what I’ll just share with you and your listeners kind of the spiel, the pre talk that I give to patients in the office. And again, tell these to folks with chronic problems, chronic pain, chronic functional problems that haven’t responded to the standard medical paradigm. Because I’m assuming most of those folks, their physiology is off, their limbic system dysfunction. So this is how I’ll explain.
I’ll say, I’m sure you’ve seen on TV or on YouTube, you know, with the lions chases in the Gazelle. Right? And almost everyone’s seen something like that. I’ll say, the Gazelle is literally running for its life It’s in a high state of fight or flight. What’s interesting though is that the Gazelle escapes and gets to a safe place.
And by the way, it won’t do this until it feels safe. Its body will shake and shiver and tremmer a little bit. And we found out that every animal and every mammal in all of us have this built in shaking, shivering, tremoring mechanism in us that seems to do 2 things. Number 1, it seems to turn off that fight flight free stress physiology that’s running on autopilot. Like, literally, the Gazelle will get up and tremor.
It’ll go back, hang out with her, take care of a young grays, and it’s not stuck in a chronic stress state. K? The second thing that happens is this. And again, I’m gonna use kind of metaphor. But if you think about it, you know, one minute thing gazelle’s eating the grass, grazing, and then there’s that sheet of creeping up.
And then, damn. And I have a second thing because I was running pretty miles per hour zigzagging, and there’s a lot of a lot of charge, a lot of survival energy coursing through its musculature. And the analogy it gives give is like, you know, I have a can of soda. And you shake that can vigorously, and now there’s a lot of pressure in the can. Obviously, we don’t wanna just rip the lid off and spray dried soda all over our interview room here.
But what do we do? We just start cracking that lid and going, we start to slowly, safely, depressurize the can. When there’s a lot of survival energy locked in the muscular sure that tends to be why they keep contracting over and over again. And conversely, the Terry seemed to release that that that survival energy that’s locked in the musculature and it starts to unwind these chronic, myofacial tension, and bracing patterns. So this guy named Doctor David Vercelli developed a set of exercises that will literally activate this tremoring mechanism And clinically over time, I believe that it does what I’ve described it above.
It’s not a one time cure, just to be clear, I’d say a lot of folks when they do it for a relatively short period of time, they’ll notice their their body, their physiology starting to calm down. You know, with I would say with your group of folks, these kind of sensitive and fragile clients, I wanna address that specifically because I know some people look up go go to YouTube, and they do some long trimming session. They feel it makes them a little worse rather than better. So I I wanna address that briefly. And again, the body can heal itself when it’s in the correct physiology, and the teres are one of the best things I know for that.
Here’s the website of the main organization here, traumaprevention.com. Okay. Kat, I just wanna touch on my kind of sensitive and fragile cohort, and then we’ll go on and take you through a session. So Okay. So, again, most of the folks that I see in the office, and I’m teaching this to fall into this category.
Most of the folks that Private Trust Academy by nature, whether they’re fond of this. So folks with severe depression or anxiety, fond of this category, severe trauma or PTSD fall into it. I you know, if folks have kind of severe bipolar psychosis, I’m not working with them. I work with almost anyone else, but I’m cautious, you know, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, Lyme disease, multiple chemical sensitivity, dysautonomies or pots, autoimmune disorders, a lot of the complex pain that I see. All those fall into the sensitive and fragile cohort.
And again, I think that means that they’re substantially frozen in a dorsal vagal state on that gorgeous curve, and we gotta be very careful at how fast we unfreeze folks We have to do it at a rate that they can handle some of these uncomfortable emotions, feeling sensations to come up. So first off, for folks with significant psychiatric illness, I recommend you see a teary provider who’s also, you know, licensed mental health professional. When we do teary cat and in your demonstration, we’ll demonstrate all this stuff. We wanna start by bringing people into their body and notice what they’re feeling at the time. Regardless what it is.
We wanted to to be with with their feeling. We’ll we’ll we’ll coach folks into finding some areas of comfort and safety in their body. You know, some of my I say, some of my fibromyalgia folks, you know, they’re really good at fighting the pain, and I’ll say, where’s the part of your body that feels safe or comfortable or neutral and they have a very hard time finding it, then usually it turns out we like, it’s a little toe in the right foot. But I would say you have to start somewhere, so we’ll have them shift their awareness and attention to the little toe on the right foot, and then go back and shift it, notice the pain. Then back to the toe, But over time as you as you start getting movement and folks start noticing what feels different and better, we’re building new neural pathways for folks feeling different and better.
Okay. We’ll do the ground exercises. And, again, even doctor Purcelli says less and more, a little bit of TRE, can still cause a tremendous shift in physiology and elicit a powerful relaxation response. So I think with that said, Alright. We’re gonna do theory.
So I’m gonna end my screen share. And, Kat, are you ready? Yeah. Let me adjust my camera. Okay.
That was an excellent description, by the way. I think it really will help Those watching regulate why these somatic practices are huge, especially if you’re missing your energy. It’s it’s not missing. It’s there. It’s just stuff.
So Yeah. Yeah. I get yeah. Yeah. You yeah.
Absolutely. It is there. It’s just not accessible. Yeah. Okay.
So I’ve got Kat, 1st of all. Kat, before we start the series, just, again, for kind of instruction, I could just invite you just kind of drop your awareness and attention into your body and notice what you notice and it could be again, if it’s my patients with chronic pain, it could be pain. Some people have a little anxiety. And whatever’s there, I’ll just invite people, you know, since it’s there anyway, could you allow yourself to be with what’s there right now? I do like to guide folks to notice what they’re feeling as a raw physical sensation.
We’re also quick in our minds immediately sort of thinking about it, labeling it, figuring it out, trying to push it away. And so we just invite folks to kinda notice where they’re at now. Where are you at, Doctor Kat? I feel pretty relaxed. However I can feel a little tension in my hips that’s not quite letting me sink into the floor.
So Sure. You’ll let So could I invite you just for this moment? To just allow that tension in your hips to be there fully. And then is there another part of your body that feels the opposite of that? It feels really good, relaxed, calm, safe, Yeah.
The bottoms of my feet love the feeling of the rug soft and cozy. So I I can Yeah. So can I invite you to shift your awareness and attention down to the bottoms of your feet? And so, folks, what we’re doing now is pengelating. It’s literally just moving awareness and attention to a different part of the body.
Now, again, what what I’m not having here, I’m not saying, get rid of that pain We’re just literally shifting awareness and attention. Now can I let you go back to your hips and just notice whatever you notice? We’re opening in my sacrum now. We’re opening in our sacrum. Okay.
And then every 10 to 20 seconds. Now go back and shift back to your bottoms up your feet, please. Now I’ll tell you some of my folks with chronic pain. You know, it’s very difficult for them to shift their awareness and attention and almost like a part of their brain saying, well, how’s this ever gonna get better unless I’m focused on it? Mhmm.
But when you let folks realize that, you know, a lot of the reasons why we’re stuck is because we have deep neural pathways for feeling bad, if you wanna start feeling different and better, we need to start focusing on feeling different and better. Okay. Where are we at? Hipster feet. We just stay in the feet.
So back Yeah. Come on back. Come on back one more time. This is pendulation. This is a key move.
In somatic experiencing. There you go. Sometimes even even so she just actually went and shifted back to her hips, which was her tight area. But I want you guys to notice she took that deep breath even you go in an arid pain or discomfort anxiety. If folks actually just put their attention there and are able to be with it without trying to get rid of it, sometimes that just really opens things up.
And there’s a little yawn. That’s beautiful. Alright, Kat. So now we’re gonna go into the formal teary. So the first move is the resting position, and I’m gonna have you Put those bottoms of your soles together, drop your knees open as much as it’s comfortable.
Mhmm. Yeah. So her bottoms of her feet are together touching. Her knees are open as much as as comfortable for her, and the the her heels are far enough away from her buttocks. There’s about a ninety degree angle at her knees, and I’m just gonna set a stop a lot.
So we’ll be in the resting position for about a minute. Okay? And Yeah. I’m just adjusting my timer here real quick. Now if somebody’s uncomfortable with this position, what can they do to modify?
Like, if this would hurt their hips, to open up like this. Well, so folks can do I haven’t, to be honest, have all these years found people too much because we’ll just allow them to open as much as possible. Sometimes this can be a vulnerable position for people that have had trauma. You can also do this sitting up. Mhmm.
And, again, it’s just everything we do. It’s staying within people’s comfort zone. We’re not pushing through anything. Yeah. We’re literally just honoring whatever comes up.
Can they have their legs resting on, like, yoga blocks, or should it not be resting? Does it need to be attention through Well, no. I mean, it is so in this position, we are stretching those intergorn adapters for sure. Yeah. Some some folks’ hips are really open and almost the legs are lying completely on the ground.
And then oh, that’s not really the only case. I’ll have him put a pillow underneath to elevate it just a little bit. Yeah. Okay. So we’ve been doing the resting position for about a minute.
Now the the second position is the pelvic lift. So I’m gonna have you put your feet keep your knees bent, put your feet flat on the floor, Yep. And then raise your pelvis. And this is a pelvic lift, and you should feel like you’re working or engaging your glutes to your buttocks muscles. Now, by the way, when some folks do this position, Sometimes their body is very still and sometimes they’re already feeling a little jerky and either one of those would totally fine.
Yeah. Are you like, woah. I’m bobbing. Yeah. So either one of those is totally fine.
Okay. And again, if folks need to take a rest after 20 or 30 seconds, again, we want you to honor your body and your needs were not pushing through any severe pain or discomfort. How long does this position typically help? This positions for a minute as well. So we did the resting position for a minute.
This position will be for a minute, and then I’ll tell you we’re getting close to it. We’ll go back to the resting position for another minute. Okay. So whenever you’re ready, you kinda drop your bottom down, and we’ll go back to that first position these vent, these open as much as as comfortable. Kat, let me I just if I you move your heels away from your buttocks to the other inch or 2, maybe not just leave them a inch cloth there, right about there.
So we have them just roughly about a 90 degree band in the nays. That’s perfect. It is my goal to try to relax as much as I can? Your goal honestly is not really you don’t have to do any of that. It’s just literally just doing the or things.
When we get to the actual tremoring, I will send us call people’s attention to make sure that kind of their lower back and their buttocks are as relaxed as they can. But at this point, it’s just kinda doing the the exercises, to be honest. Alright. So, again, we did a minute of resting position. I’m minute of pelvic lift, and I’m minute resting.
So now Can you bring your knees about an inch and a half or 2 inches closer together? Right over there is great. That’s perfect. Hold there, please. And this is the first of 3 clamshell or butterfly moves, and you can See, she’s already got some little tremors going.
How are you doing? Okay. Yeah. So, obviously, this this move down is first clamsome of she can feel some tension in her inner groin, a doctor muscles. That’s normal.
Yeah. You get a little tired in here. Yeah. Now bring the knees another inch and a half, 2 inches closer together. Yep.
This is the second the second move. And, again, you’re gonna feel this in those coronary ductors we are working them, and there could be some mild discomfort there. Is it okay if I get a little shrubbering up above. Yes. Absolutely.
Yeah. So for each of these 3 butterfly clamshell moves, we hold the position for about a minute to minute and a half. Think we’re doing 75 seconds for you just so the students can fall longer they like. How are you doing? Okay.
Now knees are a little closer together and call right there. Again, the bottoms of her soles are still together. We’re getting a nice stretch in her ankles. It’s interesting how the trimmer shifts a little bit with the different positions. Mhmm.
Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. And what if people don’t trim her at all? What does that mean?
Almost everyone can tremor, I would say, in my experience, having taught maybe 2000 people, roughly 99 point 5% of people can tremor. The folks that can’t, sometimes we’ll do some additional stretching exercises The other thing is, you know, if if folks have ever seen teary on YouTube, you know, you see these people and their whole bodies are going. I mean, you actually have some beautiful kind of tremors movement with your body. I’m not necessarily looking for a whole body movements. It’s great when we see it.
Not gonna be wrong, but If my patients start out with just a little bit of tremoring in their inner groin muscles, that by itself is extremely powerful and will shift the physiology. Then anything beyond that is gravy. Alright. So, Kat, now I’m gonna have you invite you keep your knees bent and just put the bottoms of your feet flat down. These net feet flat, maybe separated by about 9 inches.
And this is actually now the tremor position. And so even though she’s coming to a kind of a restful state, you can see I mean, she’s got those inner groin muscles are moving, Looks like even some lower legs are moving. Now, Kat, so I wanna check-in. How are you doing? How how does this feel to you?
Well, I I I like this experience because I feel like well, I feel my body. I feel connected to the body. Yep. It feels like You know how it feels like when you yawn and it feels like a release, it’s a similar feeling for me now. You know?
Yeah. And so it’s really I’m familiar, you know, because I’ve done these sorts of things before. And it’s it’s it feels good. It feels good. The body is doing this, and it’s really cool also because it’s just doing it.
Like Yeah. It’s a cool experience to have your body do this. Yeah. So just for the purpose of troubleshooting, so a lot of the folks I see, you know because right now, as you guys can notice, Kat is in a relaxed position. We did the initial exercises.
Her body is tremoring on its own. So at this point, she’s not doing the tremors. It’s as if the tremors are doing her, really. And, you know, but for some people, these tremors feel out of control. In reality, they kind of are of control in a sense.
I’m gonna show her in a minute how to stop the tremors because we you can always stop the tremors, and I’m gonna show her in just a moment how to do that. When my patients in the office are doing this, some people after 30 or 45 seconds of tremoring, either makes them feel a little anxious or they’re feeling a little too out of control. And, again, we want to honor that. We’re not pushing through that. And I’ll I’ll show them how to stop the tremors, and we’ll do just 30 or 45 seconds of tremors.
So Canvas, we’re coming up to about the 2 minute mark. Go ahead and straighten your legs, please, flatten them out. Okay. And so when you straighten your legs, that allows the tremor to stop. Sometimes it happens right away.
Sometimes it’s like a dimmer switch. It may take a minute or 2. Can’t just tell me when they stop, please. It was, like, within about 2 seconds. Okay.
So I always say the patients in the office, you know, you straighten your legs in the tremor stop. Right? Say, yeah. Say, who’s in control? She’s in control.
Yeah. And so now just kinda scan your body and notice Notice what you notice. Well, I feel really alive right now. Like, where, you know, you just Like, I’m so much more aware of my legs and my whole, like, lower torso. Mhmm.
It just exists more than it did at the beginning. Mhmm. I feel really soft in my chest. Mhmm. My breath is deeper.
Breathe is deeper. I feel the floor, it’s it’s more tangible to me, not just in my feet, but my arms and stuff. So there’s just some some body. Yeah. I always also put out to, you know, my patients that I think that the science and literature is starting to show that a significant percentage, maybe the majority of our thoughts and emotions up here are actually coming from our body and our physiology So we do something like this to start to shift folks’ physiology, and frequently the patients start to notice kinda like you said they’re in their body more or they’re their breath and maybe their diaphragms opened up.
They might feel some relaxation in their body. A lot of times, folks, they notice their minds a lot still or their thoughts aren’t racing a million miles per minute. They just feel a little happier, more upbeat. And so that’s just from shifting the physiology. So much of our thoughts and emotions are related to the physiology.
So I’ll have folks just, again, leave their legs down for a minute or 2. Notice what you notice. We don’t wanna rush that. K? And then let’s do maybe one more session of tremoring.
So if you just kindly go back to tremor position, which is knees, back, feet flat, feet are separated by roughly. Now, Kat, I’m gonna invite you, Kat. Look here for a minute. So watch my hands. Slowly, steadily opening my hands.
Not real fast or jerky, nice human feet. Just kindly open your legs slow like that a few inches. So sometimes, activate the tremors. Now stop for a second. Sometimes activate the tremors.
We like to open the knees a little bit, and that, like, activated the tremors perhaps a little faster. This is maybe what I call another sweet spot for her, a position where her legs are open enough that the tremors have kicked in. You look very relaxed, Carol, just again, because this is also a teaching video. If you were a patient and I didn’t see quite as much beautiful movement as you have where your whole pelvis is going. I might just say, let me invite you to check-in, make sure that your pelvis and buttocks are as relaxed as they could be.
Just letting gravity naturally relax. We’re not forcing our lower back flat or anything like that. And with some of the patients that are working within the office, I’m just kind of just kind of they’re kinda holding it, being a neurologic container for them, Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. I was it’s interesting I can talk while this is happening.
First of all, it is totally out of my control. I mean, obviously, I have control. I can straighten my legs. But Sure. I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to do this naturally on camera.
You know, I do this, but but it’s it’s actually almost easier in a way having somebody guide me. There. Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Having a guided versus on your own is a different experience for people. Yeah. Absolutely. And, again, you know, I some folks just benefit from learning this, you know, especially in our fragile and and sense of heart learning this. With someone who can be that neurological container for them, can kind of hold them, there’s really I mean, so much trauma happens in relationship and the healing of trauma sometimes also needs to happen in relationship.
So, yeah, just just literally having someone kinda hold you in their container. I remember when I went to see the first went to my first advanced training with doctor David Rosselli, putted all this stuff and just he’s just got this huge container. I mean, it kinda fills the room and and Yeah. He’s he’s such a terrific person and a humanitarian. So, Kat, we’re coming up on 2 minutes to go ahead and straighten your legs again, flatten them out, please.
Again, you can everyone can stop the tremors by straightening their legs. And then, again, I just invite you to go, notice what you notice inside? It’s just it’s just a feeling of aliveness. Like, I can’t is there’s just Yeah. Feels like circuits are talking to each other more.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s nice. Yeah.
So I’ll have you again. I don’t wanna rush out of the state. You know, again, if you wanna build new neurologic pathways for feeling different and better. You have to spend a little time noticing what feels different and better. That’s a key to such a key thing.
Kat, there’s all there’s this this quote that I love that I often will say to patients because sometimes people do this. And, again, even for little short periods, and they feel different than they might have felt in their entire adult life or And I always say, you never know how stuck you’ve been until you’ve been set free. And I love that. And the teres for many of us shift our physiology, we feel different. I mean, until you feel deeply relaxed and you had the experience.
So this is what it feels like to really not be locked in that fight fight free state. This is what it feels like. And this is real. Gives you something to compare to, and then you can notice when you’re out of that. You can notice when you’re back in.
I know a lot of your own teachings, that same thing. But, yeah, all this all these ties together. So when you’re done, I’m gonna have you roll onto your side, please, and then sit on up. You did fantastic. Thank you.
One of the questions I have I mean, I can almost feel can it initiate a detox reaction in people? Like, what do you and what do they expect? I don’t I don’t you can see a detox for sure. And as you know, I mean, some people You know? I mean, a a molds for or the wind blows wrong can initiate that.
So, yeah, definitely the cohort of folks you have in your group You know, I recommend starting slowly. You may just many of your folks, if you’re if you’re comfortable doing this on your own, may just wanna tremor for 30 or 45 seconds. What I see, maybe a little more often you see, you can see the these are as you’re shifting physiology, relaxing areas of the musculature, and more energy flows through, which it is doing. You know, you’re opening up, I think, some of those iridians. Yeah.
Absolutely. There can be a little bit of a detox. So go slowly and safely. And then I see sometimes more of maybe an emotional detox because we’re unfreezing the physiology and sometimes some stronger emotions may come up, and we wanna only do this as as much and as fast as folks learn to handle those handle those uncomfortable sensations. By the way, handling them is not suppressing them and pushing them away.
You know, I say, like, people upset at their boss. You know, they usually think I have 1 or 2 options. I’m I’m pissed off. I’m either gonna punch the guy out. I’m gonna shove this stuff further down its side.
And there’s maybe that third option which is Noticing what’s there and let it be there. Notice it as a raw physical sensation, and be with it. And we’re not you don’t necessarily always have to express it. There’s so many time for that. But you don’t we don’t wanna suppress it and turn it against ourselves either.
Mhmm. Did I answer your question? Okay. Yep. Yeah.
I definitely I mean, I could even just I just started feeling more, like, salivary thing. So I know detox kinda kicked in a little bit for me even. Yeah. And so if you were patient in the office and you told me that, I might say, you know what? We might get back to do one minute of trimming.
Lower the legs, take a break, and then do just another minute. And again, a lot of my patients do 30 or 45 seconds of the tremoring, straighten the legs, may go back and do it a second time. If those tremors are feeling too out of control or making making person anxious, we do again, we do not wanna push through that. We wanna out of that, listen to it, maybe work with someone who’ll just do little short bits at a time. Okay?
And that’s there’s nothing wrong with that. So I had a little more a couple more slides. Kat, did you have any other questions before I Maybe on your slide, if you could recap, like, the the routine just as a recap. Yes. I will.
Okay. Here we go. So Alright. So folks, we’re gonna recap what we just did. So I had her do a body scan first, notice where she’s right now, how stressed relaxed, drank she was, We had her find a part of her body that felt safe, relaxed, comfortable right now.
For some folks, that’s a very little part of her body. And it takes a while to search for it. And it feels very unnatural to even shift our awareness and attention to that because, again, there’s a part of our brain saying, how’s this problem ever gonna heal and lessen focused on it? But that’s actually maybe counterintuitive In order to make new neural pathways for feeling different and better, you have to start shifting your awareness and attention to feeling something different and better. And it can be very natural in the beginning.
Then we pendulate. And pendulation means she put her awareness and attention on the raw sensations in a part of her body that felt a little uncomfortable. This case, her low tension her hips, and then she shifted her awareness and attention to the bottoms of her feet. Those felt good, safe, comfortable on the ground, that after 10 or 20 seconds shifted back to her hips, and then back to her feet, and we did that several times. That’s pendulation.
It seems simple. It is extremely, extremely powerful with pain, chronic pain folks. It’s extremely powerful. To do that. Again, we’re not trying to get rid of anything.
I was not trying to make anything positive. We weren’t trying to figure it out, label it at meaning, it’s literally just shifting awareness and tension. Okay. The the specific things that we did, you see here, I’ve I’ve highlighted them We did resting position for a minute. And again, that’s bottoms of the feet together touching.
Knee’s dropped open as much as it’s comfortable. And heels far enough away from your buttocks. So there’s about a 9 degree angle on the knees. We did resting position for a minute. And then you put your feet flat, raised your pelvis.
Now, Kat, you’re actually pretty high. You’re pretty fit. If people get their buttocks, you know, 2, 3, 4 inches off the ground, that’s fine. We just wanna feel like they’re in I they’re engaged in their glutes of the buttocks. So we did pellet lift for a minute.
If you need to divide that into 30 seconds. Take a break in 30 seconds. That’s fine. Then we went back to the resting position again. Bottoms the feet together touching.
These open as much as comfortable. We did resting for a minute. Then we did a series of 3 clamshell or butterfly moves where hedges bring your knees an inch and a half or 2 inches closer together each time for about a minute or minute and a half. Lastly, we did the tremor position where your knees were bent, feet flat, kind of same as the pelvic lift, but these met feet flat, feet about 9 to 12 inches apart and letting the tremors happen. Some people do need to sound slowly drop their knees back open a little bit, little wider, little wider to start the tremors.
And, again, The most tremoring I’ll do folks in the office is tremoring for 2 minutes at a time. It’s very commonly though 30 to 45 seconds of tremoring for several sessions until folks start feeling comfortable with that. We’re not pushing through an anxiety, feeling out of control, all the same stuff we just talked about. We take time to notice positive shifts in the body. Now the the reason I actually a cat made this made this whole slide set and why I’m presenting now there’s a ton of good really good theory practitioners out there, really good folks.
But, again, I just the cohort of patients I see are sensitive and fragile. And so oftentimes people go to tier a practitioner, maybe transfer for 10 or 20 minutes. That’s good for a lot of folks. You know, if you go teach a bunch of law enforcement guys or military guys and they’re there with all their buddies, you know, you go to some place in Sub Sahara Africa or the Middle East where David Rasselli actually was when he developed this, and there’s hundreds of thousands or millions of traumatized people and you need something that really has a lot of bang for the buck, you’re just gonna have people tremor, and most of them are gonna do great with these longer trimmering times. But the cohort that I work with and certainly that you work with, we’re gonna go slowly way more safely, and letting folks know that it’s okay to go slowly and just do a little bit of time.
And they’ll probably still feel big physiologic shift. So when I teach folks how to activate the tremor mechanism. We do the ground exercises only that activates the tremors and 99.5% of people. I want folks to feel comfortable tremoring. I want them to learn, hey.
I straighten my legs. I can start and stop the tremors. We’re teaching folks how to get in touch with body level feelings. As raw sensations. Again, you had some tremors actually throughout your body, which is fantastic, but I’m not necessarily looking for that.
Some folks see these YouTube videos where people’s whole bodies are tremorming. It looks like they’re having a grandma seizure and There’s a time and a place for that, but I’m just looking for a little bit of inner groin movement, and that is enough for most folks to get great results. I’m not as interested initially with my cohort of patients in these long tremor sessions. I don’t need to see tremors going throughout their whole body. There’s intervention sometimes will do as Terry providers where we can help the tremors move through the body.
Again, there’s a time and a place for that. We’re not pushing through uncomfortable feelings. We’re not we don’t wanna freeze too much, too fast. And I think I’ll say this last metaphor just for some other time. So Yeah.
I think that’s basically it. Oh, you wanted me to touch on how I do it. So I’ll have folks tremor, again, at the most, they’ll have mic corded patients. Tremor 4 is 2 minutes of tremoring. They’ll straighten their legs.
They’ll go back and do 2 minutes. Now I would say if you do that, if you’re doing okay with that for a couple weeks, then you can add a a couple minutes. So maybe tremor for 3 minutes, straighten your legs for a bit, go back and tremor for 3 minutes. If you’re okay for a couple weeks, then 4 minutes, 4+4, than 5+5. Normally, once folks are trimming for about 10 minutes, I mean, you’re and and you could do okay with that and you’re not having too much of a detox reaction or not having too much emotional junk come up, then you’re pretty much good to go.
So Excellent. That’s this was really great. I I think I just think it’s a perfect add on too. Where we are at in the regulate process. Those of you watching will be in module 6, the trauma processing modules.
So Again, in and through the body, we need to meet our body and find a way for the body to feel safe in expressing what it’s been holding and and shaking and tampering is is just such a beautiful way of doing that. Yeah. Thank you. Any last words? No.
I just I my last words are thank you for your school. And at Cat, as you know, I I had a younger sister who passed away, but she was really chronically ill with a lot of the same stuff you had or towards, yeah, her gut shut down. And we didn’t have the Primal Trust Academy back then and people teaching Olympic system retraining. And and I love, you know, you incorporate the top down and the bottoms up. In my particular case, it was much more of a bottoms up approach that didn’t it.
But, yeah, I I think Both are essential. And I told you before privately, I’d love to see what you teach in every medical school out there. And we’re teaching Terry tomorrow at the one of our local medical schools. So Okay. Looking forward to that too.
That is such an amazing bridge that’s happening in medicine, and I think You’re a perfect example of these western trained medical doctors understanding these, you know, nervous system from body based stuff and be able to be a bridge for your patients. It’s it’s beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, and good luck to all your students, and I hope a lot will benefit from this slower safer approach.
Yeah. Yeah. It’s awesome. Thank you. So much.
Alright. Take care.