Latest / Radiant Voices / Why you’re anxious when speaking, and how to make your body feel safe

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Why you’re anxious when speaking, and how to make your body feel safe · Radiant Voices

• speaker-0: This is, in my opinion, the ultimate practice for in training flow states where we're not cognitively doing it. This is the key thing. You can't force yourself into flow. You can't think yourself into flow. You can't effort yourself into flow because it's not about the cognitive mind doing it from that ego. It's about just softening and relaxing and letting the body take over. So, TRE is just, it's this process of invoking spontaneous involuntary movement. ⁓ people can then experience in the whole spectrum of what it is for them in the moment. speaker-1: Welcome everybody. I am really excited to have a very special guest that I met quite some time ago. Today we have Richmond Heath with us. He is an extraordinary body worker, TRE trainer. and a leader in the TRE community. He has got wonderful stuff to say about body-based healing. On top of that, he's also been a physiotherapist and a Bowen Technique practitioner and Pilates instructor and worked with the indigenous community deeply in Australia. And I'd love to chat about some of that. so a huge welcome to to Richmond who also trains people to become TRE practitioners. So he's a real leader in our field. Over to you Richmond. Hello, how are you today? speaker-0: Thank you, Jeremy. I'm very happy to see you. I think it was about 2012. I think that we met at a ⁓ global TRE summit in Stellenbosch in South Africa. So we're certainly aged a little bit since then over the last 15 years. speaker-1: That's right. Yeah, I think I trained originally in TRE 2.11, 2.12, and then there was the 2.10 and 2.11, and then there was the 2.12 summit when we were all gathering, those of us who were in deep, right? speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. And look, and I have to say, like, always, I often talk about South Africa in relation to TRE, because in Australia, we have, in my experience, the most heavily regulated westernized medicine evidence-based barriers to sharing TRE of any country in the world. And so often share the story of I'm saying, you know, it's almost so hard to get TRE opened up because there's just not the research that the Western medical model can refer to and they need. But then I always refer back saying, you know, in South Africa, the vice speaker of parliament or whatever was, you know, trained to be a TRE provider and was teaching parliamentarians. So one of the, you know, I always think about South Africa is such a wonderful example of how TRE can spread when it's able to move by word of mouth at the grassroots level. Unfortunately, in Australia, where We're really at the other end of the scale. And part of me wanting to bring TRE into a mainstream ⁓ audience, because my background is as a physiotherapist, is TRE at the moment is very much complementary alternative therapies. And it's attractive to the hippie sort of 10 % of the community. But for me, my real dream and vision is to get it into the mainstream Western medical model so that eventually, ⁓ hopefully, you know, sometime in my lifetime, it just becomes routine, routine knowledge. Like David Berselli always talked about it being birthright knowledge to understand this in the last, ⁓ year or two, I started a clinical training program, which is a shorter online abbreviated training program for people who have diplomas or above. know, physiotherapist, osteo's diploma. ⁓ Basically body work, movement, somatic, exercise based people who've already got a diploma of, you know, got anatomy so that they can ⁓ learn how to integrate it in their practice in a much shorter timeframe. So that's kind of my, my passion and my dream at the moment, but it's still a long way in realizing it. speaker-1: Great. I think we failed to define what TRE is for folks that will be listening to this acronym flying without a feeling for what it is. Let's talk and share about what is TRE. I'll hand over to you and let's flow backwards and forwards about this magical thing. speaker-0: Originally, TRE stood for Trauma Release Exercises because the founder David Berselli was seeing spontaneous shaking and tremoring only in the context of stress and trauma, you war zones, natural disasters. When he then brought it back to the US and people were using the tremoring and they were saying, look, I haven't got sort of capital T life and death trauma, but I've got neck tension and my tension's falling away. It started to become tension and trauma release exercises. then you know people started to get stressed out because they're like ⁓ but it's stress release but it doesn't start with a T and then I remember actually in South Africa where people are going but the word word for trauma in our language doesn't start with a T what are we all going to do like it was this big you know hullabaloo these days what I tend to say is that TRE is like an acronym or a brand just like DNA like people don't know what DNA stands for but we kind of know what it is so for me it's like TRE is this process where we're deliberately invoking spontaneous involuntary movements, shaking, trembling, pandiculation, stretching, energetic releases, softenings, and we're doing that through just using muscle fatigue, and it's largely through a trauma-informed lens. Whereas a big part of what I'm looking to do is to move it outside that trauma-informed lens because we shake and tremor in utero. for nine months, our body organically does it. with, and in that situation, very little to do with trauma. So it's actually a foundational organizational, you know, movement impulse in our body. So I'm, I'm always trying to keep it really broad and not let it be, you know, limited to if we only look at it through the trauma eye, the trauma lens, ⁓ then every time our body's trembling, we think, ⁓ this is trauma releasing. I'll never forget. someone at a workshop one day, know, one was saying, Oh, you know, I've been making love to my partner. And then after I was shaking and vibrating and trembling, cause she'd had an orgasm, she's thinking, Oh, I wonder what the trauma was. And I'm just thinking, Oh my God, we've lost the plot here. Um, you know, it's not just about releasing trauma. can be as we know, but it's also an organizational thing. that's, you know, for me, Terry, it's just, uh, anything to do with accessing it's a, Terry's a model and a pathway and a technique. to access this spontaneous involuntary movement impulse, whether in different cultures might call it Prana or Kundalini or life force energy or nyam, I can't say the Kalahari Bushman language word. But there's something in there and you know, it's not what we're doing is not theory. Theory is just the lens and the set of exercises or a way of accessing this innate reorganisational impulse in the body. That's my best. It's probably a long winded one. You might sum it up in. 20 words or less really clearly. What, do you know? speaker-1: Well, I'll jump in and say that when people start with TRE, usually they're on their backs, their knees might be up and with their feet on the ground and their legs will probably start shaking. And at first it'll feel like a muscle fatigue tremor, like you might get from doing a bunch of squats or yoga or so on. But then it becomes, as Richmond said, involuntary. It starts to happen and it develops a complete life of its own. And then given space and time, it can move through the whole body. The movements can move well beyond shaking. They can move into expressing all sorts of things. often when it first happens, it feels really weird because it'll feel... on one hand, kind of familiar, and on the other hand, will be completely weird. Like, your body is doing things all by itself. Your mind hasn't told your arm to go and pick up the cup. Now your legs and arms are moving, and there is this life force and intelligence that, an agency in the body that you haven't even necessarily expressed or felt before, and it's kind of shocking and beautiful and exciting. and deeply comforting, and it's kind of weird. I mean, it's sort of remarkable and weird. How did that land for you? speaker-0: Look, again, it is weird in cultures that stigmatize and pathologize shaking. in Western cultures, absolutely, this is weird. It's only a sign of we think it's shock. So we try and stop it or we think it's anxiety or PTSD or it's panic attack. But in other cultures where it's understood and used, there's no weirdness about it at all. So it's important to keep that sense that it's very much a cultural overlay. What it also leads me into, I love the way you describe that sense of, your body's doing it it's moving. Because this is one of the key elements for me, Jeremy, is when I started working with TRE, it was all about trauma release. It was all about the past. It was all about letting go. Whereas these days, you know, I like to talk a lot more about flow states. And especially when we talk about performance and just performance in any area of life, not just music, it could be work, it could be sports, is that the... ultimate experience of flow, know, peak performance states, not just the once off, but those little micro moments of flow that we all hit throughout the day. Ultimately are those times where our conscious mind, our ego is surrendered. It's, it's aware, it's noticing what's happening, but the body is leading the process. ⁓ and so this is where, for me, how we frame the tremoring often helps. It often, ⁓ formulates how people are going to interpret it and experience it. So when we talk about, ⁓ you're to lie down, we're to do trauma release, instantly people start to associate everything with trauma. And I've got to regulate my trauma and I've got to regulate the nervous system and talk about it. Whereas if we frame it and say, okay, your body shook and tremored for nine months in utero, this has got nothing to do with trauma potentially. It's just the system's going to reorganize itself. If you need to have a particular memory, cognitively it will arise. But when we frame it as saying, what we're going to do is lie down, let your body move. As soon as it starts to move, we stop it so you can control it. It's like, I can let this happen, but I can stop it whenever I want to. People instantly break that association with shaking and trembling is about out of control and trauma. And in my experience, when we present it with that open way, very few people go down the sort of over, no, I haven't had anyone be overwhelmed in a workshop or anyone I've taught for years. ⁓ and people go into that with that state of right. This is, in my opinion, the, you know, the ultimate practice for in training flow states where we're not cognitively doing it. This is the key thing. You can't force yourself into flow. You can't think yourself into flow. You can't effort yourself into flow because it's not about the cognitive mind doing it from that ego. It's about just softening and relaxing and letting the body take over. ⁓ yeah, so that's why for me, I'm much more about like... TRE is just, it's this process of invoking spontaneous involuntary movement so people can then experience in the whole spectrum of what it is for them in the moment. speaker-1: I love that. think that's such a beautiful and really, really, really important framing around flow and essentially harmony in ourselves rather than like digging into the past and going into kind of deep traumatic release. Yeah, because I also want to say just to share, know, as you know, I work with voices and I would say that I work with a lot of highly anxious voices and people who do. do public speaking in high stakes environments. And one of the highest outcomes I have for my clients is to bring awareness and focus into their bodies while they communicate, speak and listen from their bodies. I'll even say speak from your body and then it's like take your hands off the wheel and let the words come out as if you're speaking from the body. And it's just. It just comes out and it's an absolute miracle. There's no clue where the words come from and yet you'll be the most aligned, most clear that you could possibly be. And it's again, it's this state of flow, but this idea which is not necessarily ⁓ prevalent out there that one of the most artful, deep forms of flow originates from and within the body. speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. 100%. And it's impossible to go into a flow state if you like, this is the thing is we think about flow as a psychological experience. But flow is actually a physiological experience. It's something that is organized and happens at the level of our physiology. And so if we have a level of stress or anxiety, if we're in a hot in an over heightened aroused state of fight or flight, or even you when you talk about that sense of feeling the body. when we go into numbness, which is part of our sort of protective defensive responses, we cannot be in flow. This is the, ⁓ you know, this is where the tremor mechanism is so valuable because none of us are cognitively choosing to go into a fight or flight response or to freeze or to go numb or to go into our heads and intellectualize or to, you know, start to disconnect and our senses. I know for me, in my background experiences, you know, the my peripheral vision will disappear and I can just focus in on one person like this or you you lose sense of sound or like you say you lose sense of in touch with the body so all of those responses are happening unconsciously and there things we can cognitively do to try and calm our system down but the limit of all our cognitive techniques is we can only ever control what we've got conscious control of which is you know estimates vary but somewhere like five percent of our movement system we have conscious access to the other 95 percent completely involuntary. these stress and trauma responses are happening subcortically or, you know, subconsciously. And this is where the sort of tremor mechanism is originating. So it's, it's accessing the organisms, our physiologies own innate process to unwind those responses. And part of the, you know, again, the key element around embodiment and sensing the body, can't speak or sing from the body if we're not connected to it. And we're not in the body that we're disconnected. And that disconnection is the, you know, one of the overlooked parts of our, talk about fight and flight and freeze, which is about the movement responses, but in those states, inherently they involve disconnection from the body. You know, as soon as we go into sympathetic arousal, the blood flow from our hands and feet starts to withdraw theoretically so that, you know, we pay for fighting for our life or running across the Savannah. If we cut the feet, they're not going to bleed to death. But with that loss of blood flow, we lose sensation in the hands. So even at any level of stress, we start to lose connection. And my personal story, Jeremy, which I never knew, so as a child, I learned piano. And my piano skills when I'd play at home, my mother, very biased, but what my mother always used to love was like, your sensitivity, Richmond, ⁓ the sensitivity, and it was beautiful. And that was my skill, right? But I can still remember many things. One was, you know, playing at one of the concerts and my hands are just like frozen rocks and I'm doing everything I can just not to make a mistake. It's the most wooden performance you've ever had. And then at other times doing exams and my sister, who was older than me and was a pianist, putting my hands in these boiling hot sinks full of water to loosen my hands up before the exams. Just because she said, it'll help your hands feel loose. But you know, as a young child, I had no idea of going, Oh, okay. This was just the classic freeze response. is anxiety. At that point, it was just like, Oh, you know, you get tied under pressure or so that's where understanding these patterns is so valuable because if we can down regulate the nervous system through the tremor mechanism, so we've got a deeper level of groundedness embodiment, then all of a sudden the quality and the tone, the timber and the quality of their hands and our voice and our body movement and our, like you say, our words, our speech, that sort of flow state creativity where things are flowing out. If we're not in a calm, grounded, embodied state, then we can never perform. We can never perform naturally like that. And ultimately, isn't it? That's that's what people resonate with the performance. That's what moves people. It's not how technically correct it was. It's not whether I hit the right pitch. but it's the softness and the, you know, the emotionality or the vibration that's in our body. And we can't have that if we're in any level of sort of stress or trauma states while we're performing. speaker-1: Yes. Look, I I launched a piano album in 2012. I'd never done any piano lessons before it. And I wrote it. You there were piano pieces floating around the TRE community that I'd written. And when I launched that album, I've never been more scared. before a performance in my life. yeah, I said my hands were like ice blocks. It was like trying to play with these absolutely rigid fingers. I mean, I was awful, but that's how it went. It was interesting. speaker-0: Let me just say you weren't awful because if anyone's out there and you can get access to the... what was the name of that album? speaker-1: Piano Nocturne is volume one. speaker-0: It's brilliant. you know, you're very, you're a very, I know the feeling you're extremely harsh judge and you might've noticed how it might've felt a bit wouldn't, but if there's anyone out there, if you haven't heard it, they are really, they are really, really beautiful. ⁓ speaker-1: Thank you. I always forget about that album. It was actually the live launch that was dreadful. The recordings themselves were okay. I played okay. I even did TRE on the night of that performance just beforehand and still went into this kind of rigid freeze response. It raises an interesting question which I'd love for us to explore. It is this relationship between mind and body. Now we know that Western society especially is very top-down, head-first, possessed by the cognitive and by things that entranced the eyes, i.e. media, ⁓ but mostly obsessed with our minds. And a lot of healing has been cognitively biased, let us say. And of course the last 25 years have led to a rise in body-based healing. know, in Bessel-Fendel-Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score, it's almost been the kind of flagship manual of this. Let's just talk a little bit about top down bottom up. What are your feelings and thoughts around that? speaker-0: So for me, I mean, there's the reality that we have a conscious mind or an ego or a thinking mind or whatever, you know, so that influences it. So for my angle, it's about combining both, you know, combining both directions. As you say, pretty much everything we do is cognitively driven, even like, you know, we use the term embodiment, which means I'm going to use my mind to connect to my body. Whereas, you know, I like to suggest to people that we really should be thinking about in mind and mind. That's a silly word, but what I mean by that is that the disconnection that happens in the body, we can consciously ignore our body, but in a stress and trauma response, that disconnection is happening at a completely subconscious level. And I always remember David Berceli, you know, saying one day he's going, look, all of those trauma responses, all of that disembodiment, It's all happening unconsciously. Wouldn't it make sense that the mammal, you know, the mammalian organism, the human body would have evolved with similar unconscious pathways to come back out of it. Like that's just, that's the basis of homeostasis. And so in the West, even a lot of what we call, you know, bottom up approaches, like I'm doing yoga or Pilates, they're actually still top down because we're using our cognition to move the body. So they're top-down approaches working on the body or the bottom-up process. But again, this is where for me, the only real true bottom-up process is spontaneous neurogenic movement where, you know, or trying to biohack the system, you know, so if you jump in on ice bath and your body's generating warmth, that generation of warmth, you know, that is a physiological response. We're not controlling it. And so this is the beauty of adding in the neurogenic movement is it's the, you know, for want of a better word, the nervous system. I don't like it because it's not exactly that, but it's more than that. that's when we're truly letting that system, that unconscious part of ourselves to re-regulate itself. That's a true bottom-up process. ⁓ And so this is why for me, it's not about getting rid of everything else, but as you said, the last 20 years, we're starting to recognise, you know, the body in trauma, Bessel van der Kolk, as you spoke. But what happens... is we're all going, ⁓ yeah, we're all having these unconscious defensive responses in the body. Now what we've got to do is come and do cognitive therapy to fix them rather than going, hey, the body's got this unconscious process to protect itself, to disconnect us, to disconnect, push the mind away for want of a better word. And then the shaking and the trembling, like if the body's not moving, we don't feel the body. And so because we pathologize shaking and trembling, we're trying to stop it and override it rather than going... The shaking is effectively that, you know, your soul, for want of a better word, but that part of your body calling our mind back into connection, truly bottom up. The, you know, the body's calling us down. I always like to point out if when we're a child, if we tie your right arm behind your back and it doesn't move, the part of your brain that feels that goes offline because the system only knows that it's alive and can sense itself because it moves. not just movement of the body through space, but the pulsation in the tissues and the blood flow and the energetics and the vibration. So for me, it's about, again, it's not about not using all of those techniques, those top down, because, the classic example is if you're about to perform and you can't go, hey, everyone, I'm just going to let my body shake for five minutes on stage, knowing how to use, you know, cognitive tactical box breathing or four, six breathing to calm your system in that moment. is incredibly valuable, but what we miss is then going, if that's the case, that calming, this has been my experience, is a cognitive override. So the system is responding one way, we are effectively controlling, and it's, in my opinion, it's not necessarily quite true healing or groundedness, but useful in the moment, but then if we let that system down, regulate itself and disconnect the association with that experience, and the trauma response, then the nervous system gets back to a state of groundedness and calm and light. That happened, that finished, and that's what builds resilience and capacity to then perform under that pressure in the future. speaker-1: There's so much in there. mean, I just want to share. I love the description that I use is that one of things I found with TRE is it would be for me, the experience was it was a little bit like the body was meditating the mind. It was like dragging the mind back down. And when people start embodiment, when I start to work with them and they haven't worked with embodiment, it is this it's kind of like looking down from a junk like a like the treetop castle and peering down at the body and even when I ask them to feel their body, they are generally picturing it actually. They're experiencing images of the body rather than actually experiencing felt sensation. I'll often actually ask them once they've spent time, like if we were to focus on our feet right now and the sensation on our feet simultaneously, I'll ask them to also, once they've gotten used to just breathing and relaxing and making contact with a part of their body to then notice that their mind is creating what I'll call like a black and white imaging of the body. Like for example, if we aim to feel our toes, felt sensation of our feet and our toes is generally much more blob-like rather than actual toes. And there's of course this mental imaging. So to even let go of that so that we really drop into inhabiting the body where we're no longer looking down towards it at all, but rather we start to experience it. Yeah, let's just say bottom up. Does that make sense? Does that sound a little crazy? speaker-0: Yeah, it absolutely makes sense. It's exactly what, you know, we're on the same page here. And a few things that come to mind. The first one is that my first experience of this, Jeremy, was not through TRE was through the passion of meditation. And I'll never forget one of my old elders, shamanic teachers, David De Reacher, talking to me about for passion and saying, you know, in his opinion, you know, more people have been, you know, partially enlightened for one of a better word through the passion of meditation than almost anything else that's been done on the planet. And the experience of that was simply just observing through the sensations in the body. These days in Western we research it as body scanning. But you just sit there and you meditate 14 hours a day, you just keep sensing and feeling into the body. And the critical point for me was at some point there was a shift where my conscious mind stopped projecting outwards and instead started to soften and receive. And that's when my body was then free to move because it wasn't being inhibited, not that I was consciously doing it. So one of my favorite exercises, and again, I think language can be incredibly important because in the meditative community, you know, what all I ever heard about was this state of the witness state or the observer. What I like to talk about is the difference between the witness state, where there's a sense of, I'm watching outwards, or I'm observing, I'm doing it, and we all know that, and you can go into massively deep states of focus and meditation with clarity and precision, but that sense of what you're saying is there's an image downwards and you're looking out towards the body, versus what I like to call the receiver state, which is then when we start to experience the body and the sensations are coming back up to us in that conscious mind. Again, this ties into performance, especially music and sound. What I often like to do with people is when they're tremoring, is I'll get them to pay attention to the sounds that are around them because our nervous system in that very deep protective state is constantly scanning everything around us and it's projecting outwards and making a map. Where is that sound? Is it safe? So there's an outwards experience. And so what I'll do is guide people to just use their ears to listen and let their mind map out where are those sounds. And then I'll invite them to pick one of the sounds, might be a car or an air conditioner. And all I will generally say to them is now know that you can only hear that sound because the sound waves are traveling from that object towards your ears. So now that you know that you're safe, stop trying to listen and just sense your ears and relax and let the sound waves come to us. Generally, just about everyone will feel this instantaneous shift, the difference between listening and hearing. know, of sages talk about it, the difference between looking and seeing, it's all sort of semantics. And what it is, is this subtle shift between that outwards projection versus just being open and letting our senses be open and receive. And that's the exact same thing. I don't know the language like we have looking versus seeing, we have listening versus hearing, but we don't have one that would say, you know, feeling the body, perhaps I'd say the difference between feeling the body and sensing the body, where in feeling, there is this sense that I am looking down, I am connecting, I am looking outwards to feel what's there. And my experience at the passion when my body first started to move was when somehow that flipped. And then what was happening was I was in the center of the storm in that calm and my but I was experiencing the sensations coming to me and with that became the spontaneous movement. So this is where on this level that the spontaneous movement practice instantly, I love the term you use, use the movements meditate the mind. It's something very different from when I'm using my mind to try and calm my mind or to try and calm my body when this life force, which is far more wise and powerful and you organically and natally wise than I'm ever going to be. This is what we start to tap into and in the Western world, we've just completely sort of missed the boat. We're starting to study flow states and different stuff, but this is the opportunity that the tremoring and using the TRE lens to connect into it is offering us. speaker-1: Such rich stuff there. There are about 5,000 side quests that emerge while you were talking. I'm trying to rein myself in a little bit. have this thread that I've written, but I also want to release the thread and just follow the inspiration. I'm going to just indulge myself and follow the inspiration for a moment. I've done an enormous amount of meditation. speaker-0: You too. speaker-1: kind of the, I'm going to say the more top-down meditation as well as the body-based stuff. And of course the promise from these deep witness states is eventually a dissolution of the witness to kind of become all consciousness or all perception. But there's something else when you, when you inhabit the body and you be the body, that there's a similar kind of potential dissolving. I'm just checking if this makes any sense to you where. You're no longer positioned up here in HQ at all. There's actually no positionality really. And then even the edges of you dissolve. speaker-0: 100%. I'm going to say it really clearly. You can't be the body if you're witnessing the body. It's that simple. And the irony is that when people say to you, you've got to focus and witness and do that. This is what I experienced. I wasn't trying to let go. It just kind of happened. And this is why, you know, if you meditate and you think I have to be here witnessing the body, even if I'm looking through the body and trying to sense the body that prevents the actual experience that we're all looking for. And this is where if you say, hey, just lie down on the floor, let your body start to shake and move. And then what? Just let your mind do whatever it wants. And the movements start to generate themselves and there's this flow towards the mind. So again, this is why in my, know, if we have the right language, this is the thing is we're in a witness or observer state, we're observing the other. we can't be the calm within the storm. still that opera and that's, oh, I'm getting all, I'm getting all excited because again, this is why, you know, I think about the years that I meditated with that in mind and people were saying, we'll observe and do that. And as long as you're doing that, it's like, I'm saying you can't witness yourself into a flow state. It's like, witness yourself to sleep. It's about falling. That's something completely different. Now, if you meditate and focus for long enough, then at some point, That happens. But the beauty of using the spontaneous neurogenic movement is we go instantly into that state where something other than ourselves is moving us. so automatically that starts to fracture that sense of I'm here looking down and we're experiencing it as, as new parts of the body start to move. know, lots of people describe it like thawing out a frozen chicken in the microwave as parts of the body start to come back online. they come back to our awareness. Now again, we think, ⁓ here I am feeling more of my body. Whereas it's more like the body's lying there going, dude, can you feel me? Here I am. I'm trying. Hello, we're here trying to bring us back. So that's another reason why in my workshops, Jeremy, I love showing videos of mammals coming out of hibernation where the shaking is reawakening. the body. So rather than thinking about it's releasing the trauma, I mean, it is, it's releasing the tension and the survival response. But then when we go into the process of say, Hey, wow, this is waking my body up. This is real weight, the organic wisdom. What's the fear? There's no fear. The body's coming back online. And so it opens us up into this, wow, look at the life force, the vitality that's moving. And effectively the experience becomes, how do I get my ego and my conscious mind out of the way? And again, then we want to try and what can I do with my ego to get my ego out of the way? you're going, stop, just keep tremoring. And so what I tend to say to people like when TRE was started and you know, this is a big picture sort of thing. In my experience, we had David Berselli was teaching it and then very much TRE got taken over by the psychotherapeutic community. And it all became about, you've got to regulate, you've got to co-regulate, you've got to do all this, became really vigilant and really over-focused and framed through this trauma lens. you know, only this trauma lens work, rather than getting to the people saying, you know what, if you trust this innate life force in your body, there's nothing to be afraid of. And that framing itself has a massive impact on how people experience it. Because if they go, ⁓ my God, the tremors are building up, this is big trauma releasing, then people are going to have a response to that. If they're like, ⁓ my God, I'm coming back to life, the vitality is flowing through me, there's no fear, then there's just a completely different experience in the moment and ultimately, and know, David Berceli would just say, just lie down and just let your body tremor. And so these days, again, in the early days, I'd like, ⁓ you've got to stay present. You've to make sure you don't drift off. These days, I say to people, let your body move and let your mind go. If you go off drifting back into the past and visions and memories and stresses and traumas, just let it happen. If you drift off into anxieties or dreams of the future, if you drift off into spirit dreaming, Just let it happen. It's all okay. And what happens is that as the body moves and generates and organizes itself, our thinking does the same thing. Whereas we've all been trained, I've got to control the mind. That's like saying, lie down and control your body. You say, just lie down, let the body organize itself, let the mind organize itself. My favorite term at the moment, Jeremy Mabaza, I just get on the bus. You just get on the bus, take a seat, look out the window. You don't have to drive the bus. If it feels too much, press the bottom, you know, press the button, press the stop button. That's what we do in TRE. Slide your legs out, take conscious control, but otherwise just let go. And when I first started learning TRE, that was the biggest impact for me is I would, I would come home with a racing mind. I was teaching Pilates full time. I was juggling like five or six different people with different exercise at the same time. I would dream about exercises, I would wake up and my mind was thinking about exercises and then all of sudden, you know, I would start doing tremoring and it was just like instant sartory or instant zen state. It was just like bang. Now these days what tends to happen is I noticed that as soon as I start tremoring, my mind is instantly, it's grinding and chewing the bones of stuff that's unresolved and stuff I'm stressed ⁓ about in the future. But over the period there'll be, you know, there'll just... I'll just keep watching it and then all of sudden there'll be this moment, there'll be a little gap in the thoughts or there'll be something happy will come into my mind and it'll reach a still point and then from there we start to go into creativity. So ultimately, the reason I'm saying this, it's about just getting out of the way, not trying to manage the mind, not trying to calm it down. That'd be like saying, manage the physical tremors, you know, control them, stop them, do this, direct them. Just go, no, just get out of the way. let the body move, let the mind move and let's see how we go. And as you know, and anyone who's experienced TRE will work with Terry, what happens is we seem to just get more relaxed, more embodied, more authentic, more alive, more calm, more grounded, more relational, because it's a mammalian response. It's not a technique. It's not a modality. It's just, this is the way our systems or our organisms, you know, reorganize themselves, relate back to ourselves. So from that place, we can relate. to and with and receive the world around us. speaker-1: Most people when I came to TRE have never or seldom truly given up control and surrendered and just let life and let the, and most have never let their body do anything of its own accord. And there's this extraordinary opportunity. of and a dialogue that happens when TRE begins, know, am I doing this or is this happening? Okay, it's happening. Do I feel okay? Do I feel safe to let this happen? And there's a process that happens and then a, I'm just going to let my body do this and maybe even trust it and start to love my body and be grateful for what it's capable of. And, you know, when I look at speaking and anxious speaking and anxious ⁓ interactions, social interactions and engagement, there will invariably be anxiety in the body, a whole kind of hypervigilant, controlling, fearful, ⁓ trying to manage the situation, set of conditioning operating. And if you get up on a stage to do public speaking, all of that controlling, fearful conditioning is exactly what's going to keep you from being able to speak. and a real flow state as we're saying is this ability to let go and let trust the system. And the system is incredible. It's miraculous. Whether it's breathing or being or public speaking, it's this extraordinary ability that organizes itself when we let go. And I'll give the example where someone can rehearse their speech, but if they know how to enter into a flow state, into deep trust, The amazing thing is if they're in their body and they're just regulating and allowing the words to come out, is somehow the brain too, responsible for lining up the words and memory and all that stuff, just moves into harmony with it. it almost just, there's pure alignment from top to bottom. The whole being is in flow. Anyway, and it's ironically from a lack of control. It's from a surrendering and letting the system operate. speaker-0: that that idea of letting go of control is almost instantly tainted with negativity or a lack of control. And to be fair, that's, you know, that's, that's real for our ego and our conscious mind that it's greatest gift is the ability to have control. But I find it fascinating that I don't even just have the word and say, okay, so there's when we've got a lack of control, let's call that trauma. But when we've got a release of control, there's a better word. speaker-1: Yeah speaker-0: Leasing control, we're almost we've got the ability to allow it. We're choosing to allow it or I think one of the biggest areas that we bypass is that as little children in my culture, at least is we don't actually let people move through those responses in a way that they get scared and then. you know, we actually let the body do its thing, we let it shake and tremble, then we get calm and we stay in that place and have an experience of grounded calmness in that environment. Generally what we do is we train ourselves to inhibit any of that and to override it. And we even try and override the freeze response. try and rather than creating these little incremental ⁓ steps and what comes to mind is that one of my workshops, I, after I had this great vision, I created what I call the no drama drama game. So in this game, what I basically designed was you have a group of kids sitting in a circle and then everyone closes their eyes. So no one can see you and one person goes and stands in the center of the circle. You imagine a little kid at kindergarten and then that child can go around and they can tap on the head, whoever they want to open their eyes and to witness them. And so, you know, they might tap one, they might tap nobody. And in that case, you're like, just stand there and have it, let your body do so to have that experience. And then you might, if you're comfortable, you tap one person, it might be a friend and they have the experience of being witnessed calmly in their system. And then if they're okay, they might tap the second person. And so what we actually do is we train at an incremental level so that their system experiences, I can be witnessed. I can be calm, I can be relaxed. Whereas what we do is we go, we're having a performance at the end of the year, you're all going to get up and read your lines, play your music, do your thing. And just about all of us, apart from the just born natural performers, we're way outside our nervous system's capacity. But because as adults and teachers, we're so numb and disconnected from that anxiety and we just ignore it and we just push through it. that we just sort of project that onto the kids and we're like, oh, it's good for you, you just got to learn, you know, you'll get through it. And for some kids they do and they break through and they become performers. And for the rest of us, we're like, trying to unwind this for the rest of our lives. So there's just, we're missing this whole element in, again, this is only Western culture, but where we're just pushing way beyond the body stuff because we weren't taught about it, we didn't learn about it. So as teachers, we can't pass that onto the kids because we weren't ever taught about it. we were just taught stiff up a lift, you've got to do it, push through, you've got to, you know, man up, you're to do whatever. And that's what's going to be the solution. But it comes at the cost of us being authentically embodied and alive and pulsating with that creativity and flow states. Like you say, so it's, ⁓ know, we miss out on so much enjoyment where it becomes a performance rather than someone just being themselves, sharing themselves. And there happens to be other people around experiencing that it becomes I'm up here performing for you and there's this whole disconnect as well. speaker-1: Essentially, even our social selves become performative too, potentially in the process. So we've got this kind of frozen over permanently overriding social self and big groups of people and And of course, everyone's looking to find their authentic self. And the only real, well, I think not the only way, but one of the most special ways to do that is this process, like you say, of unwinding and bringing safety into the body. And when we're at home inside ourselves and we operate from within a sense of safety and then take that slowly out into the world, build a sense of safety. Then courage and flow and inspiration and humor and looseness and the willingness to not be perfect. All of those things can be there. But while we're frozen in this kind of performative, have to be perfect, self-critical kind of conditioning, just a bunch of conditioning, it's really hard to escape, especially if one's trying to escape through cognitive lenses. speaker-0: Absolutely. And I want to follow on what we talking about there with safety, because again, in the early days of TRE, was like, we have to create safety. We have to create the conditions of safety. I taught that because that's what I was told. You know, we have to co-regulate. These days, what I like to express to people is say, what do you think is actually moving you? Safety, the tremors are an expression of safety. It's safety that's actually moving you because the body won't tremor and come back to life if it's not safe to. This is why we say, you know, if a cat's got a mouse, the mouse plays dead, not consciously, the organism plays dead. And if it runs, that stimulates the predator. So deeply built in is the body's neuro-ceptive or deeply unconscious knowing in the nervous system of when it is safe to reawaken. And again, this becomes a, even understanding that, that if your body is shaking, that is safety expressing itself. When we come at tremoring from that, It completely shifts. it's not just, you know, often it's an intellectual thing that we've got to, ⁓ right. I've got to let go of the idea of the tremors are dangerous. I've got to create safety. like all of that stuff, first thing is, but if we don't have that understanding that it's impossible to experience the tremors of safety, we think I have to cognitively create safety. I have to resource, find something out there. Safety becomes something that my ego does. Whereas when we truly drop into it and it becomes deeply grounded and embodied in our system, the tremor is the safety. The tremor is the expression of the safety and the more that it moves, the more safety is moving. And then the whole story and narrative about getting overwhelmed and it being dangerous, it all falls away. speaker-1: Yeah, I want to take this one step further, which is, and in both of our languaging, you we've talked about safety, calm, grounding, et cetera. And there can be in nervous system work and embodiment work, a pathologizing of mobilized states. In other words, anger, anxiety, and freeze as if there's something wrong with me. speaker-0: Yes. speaker-1: when I'm going into activated states. And I think this is one of the things about flow states is that they include mobilization. we want to learn how to balance, have almost this anchor, call it safety, this home, this foundation of safety grounding. I don't know what else to call it. while being mobilized. It's appropriate to be able to find anger when we need it and it's appropriate to be excited and nervous in front of a thousand people. That's okay and it can propel us into an extraordinary performance. speaker-0: The key word is ecstasy. talk about in the West, we talk about mobilization with safety. We're still ready looking for it. Whereas what we're talking about now, and this is what, you know, David Berceli talks about all the time, he uses the word pulsation. Or we could use the word rhythm. And again, in the TRE world, it's all about, ⁓ we've got to calm down. We've got to release the tension rather than saying, Yeah, yeah, we want the body to release tension, but we also want the body to generate tension. That's a word for power. That same thing. We all want to calm down because we're stressed and going, we need to calm up. What's that mean? That means we need to be able to allow our organism to come to life, to express with ecstatic expression, you know, to be able to sing with massive rhythm and power and nuances and strength and, you know, volume. You know, one of the great books, Bradford Keeney's book on shaking medicine. He talks about this where he says the West, what we've done is we've gone across the Eastern cultures and we brought down the calming reflex because we're all stressed. Slow down, be quiet. You've got to be mindful and everything's going to be dead still and stationary. But of course, all of the great traditions will talk about the stillness in the movement or the movement in the stillness. And the thing is, until you experience it doesn't make sense. But the moment when you're lying there and your body's shaking and you're kind of having this experience of, I'm not doing that, I'm not moving, I'm not creating the movement, you have that experience and all of a sudden it makes sense at an in-body level. And, you know, again, this is what's exciting is when people lie on the floor, rallying, oh, let's try and release the trauma and, you know, just calm down. It's like, no, let's let the organism wake itself up. And this is what, know, Bradford Keeney sort of says is the full cycle, the full rhythm is about huge high capacity for arousal, not in an ungrounded disconnected, but in a deeply embodied expressive state. And then that's where the rhythm that then from that place, we go into deeper peace and stillness and relaxation. And from there, we come back out in the pulsation, like the breath in, the breath out. speaker-1: When I think about speaking as well, it's this ability to move between states, but to persuade and to be passionate about the subject you're speaking about, or with friends, to passionately speak and to move into humor, it requires excitement and looseness and the willingness to play. These are beautiful states, but if they're really going to be relational and connected and heart-centered, the body's got to be there. speaker-0: That's right. The body's got to be there. And when you say that, again, this is something I've heard and I really like this, was someone explained to me once again with the English language. They said the word passion and the origins from, you know, Latin or whatever is around suffering. And so often I will feel when like even in this talk, I feel myself getting more animated and bigger, but I can feel it as an element of frustration. You know, it's like, ⁓ why isn't everyone listening? Why isn't everyone doing this? What's fascinating for me and people often say, ⁓ you're so passionate. These days when I hear the term passion, I'm like, ⁓ okay, right. I've got a little bit in my bonnet. Something's happening. And the reason I say this is because there's a little level of charge in the system. Whereas the word enthusiasm actually comes from the origins of N is in and Theo is God for, you know, in that language. So it's like being filled with the spirit. And again, the reason I'm saying this, is this subtle difference between when I'm passionate, it's me and my ego and I'm pushing. And when I'm full of enthusiasm, it's that flow state where what is being shared and expressed, it's like, not me, I'm like a conduit. I'm like the pipe. I'm like a didgeridoo. And there's something else that's flowing through us, know, life force or expression or music or creativity. Everyone who's had, we all have these creative moments where we're going, we're not, we're not doing it. Yeah, it's flowing from somewhere else. So even, even they're like those words of passion and enthusiasm, they're pointing back to this point. And this is again, the tremor. We can lie on the floor or we can stand up and we can shake our body with massive passion and it's going to have great benefits. But there's something different when we're able to somehow open ourselves or be opened and something else moves us and something else... flows through us. And I think that's, you know, I think ultimately when we move beyond the little ego benefit of I want to feel better, that's what really gets me enthusiastic about TRE and what it's doing on the planet is it's reconnecting us with this something else that's other than our conscious mind and our ego and bringing us and that to life as a way of, you know, life force flowing and expressing through us. speaker-1: think folks will be really interested to know how they can do more or learn more about TRE. I'd like to refer them to your courses. What have you got online? We'll link in the show notes. speaker-0: Yeah, so during COVID, I always say one of the positives to come out of COVID was that up until that point, the theory was, you have to learn TRE with a provider to keep you safe. And then because we couldn't work face to face, there sort of was the next step was, we might be able to do it on Zoom, but I have to be able to see your body. have to be able to. So there was all this underlying lack of real embodied knowing of the safety of the tremor mechanism. I was lucky enough in that. point in time when I couldn't work that the Australian government, we had like a, you know, welfare sort of scheme. So I was being paid to survive. And so I made an online course and it was the first of its type in the world. And at that point people like, you can't do it. It's going to be, everyone's going to get stressed. Everyone's going be, if it's not safe, blah, blah, blah. was like, I know this is going to be safe. And so that course, which is just at www.trecourse.com and we'll put a link in the, in the show notes. ⁓ So you can go to it. you know, very basic filmed on my phone. You know, there's a bit of theory presentation. There's three guided sessions, but there's the instructions. So people learn how to activate the tremors, regulate them. So they're always in control and integrate them. And the first couple of years it was free because I wanted to just make it ⁓ free for people in COVID. And there was something like 13,000 people went through that course, Jeremy, with not one single complaint about safety, not one. And to be fair, at the start, there's a little screening tool. So if you've got a major medical condition or a major trauma history or a major mental health condition, you know, you'll do the screening tool. And it says, if you get less than seven out of 10, go and learn with the provider. And there's a small percentage of people who are going to go, I'm going to feel better. I'm going to feel safe. I need the guidance. So that's absolutely appropriate. And in more than 80 countries around the world, there are TRE providers who can help you with that. You can find them at treglobal.com, but for the other 95 % of the population. for the cost of less than a single therapy session, you can get these three guided sessions. And by the end of that, you will know the basics and everything you need to know to keep using this process on your own for the rest of your life. By the time this webinar comes out, this is what I'm really excited about, is I've just created an advanced online course, which has got 12 guided sessions and 12 different techniques and things to try and play with to help deepen the process. I'm really excited about that because once you get sort of, wow, I can just lie down and my body does this and I get all these benefits and it's amazing. Once you're experienced, I can say, okay, great. Have you thought about getting off lying on your back and rolling on your side or going on your hands and knees or standing in a doorway or pushing here? There is so much we can do to sort of help support and create the conditions for the body to open up even more. speaker-1: Beautiful, beautiful. Yeah, it's such a gift to the world, this technique or rather the neurogenic tremors and having access back to them. it absolutely changed my life. It changed my relationship, I could say with my body, it came with my relationship with life. And I definitely was much more running my life from my head and it introduced this. natural ability or just a shift in focus or a shift in awareness or a shift in state of being to operate more for my body. And I found for my clients this training to move down, call it to be low slung, to just be down here and operate from here with a heavy set of hips and, you know, big feet on the ground, like hobbit feet with lots of hair on them, kind of planted. It's incredible that we can have in our in the same being just up here. If we're inhabiting up here, we can be hyper vigilant and scanning and working out what other people want us to do and trying to think of what we're going to say next and stressing about stuff. And I like to call it a giant pattern interrupt to be able to just move down into our full selves. We can quite quickly, although it's not that easy to learn or rather it takes time to learn to inhabit. We move into another part of us that flows with life and it feels so much better. It's so much less stressful to live down in here. Our minds are biased towards what's the next problem I need to solve. As the Stanford research said, a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. And we don't want to pathologize the mind, but just the more we bring focus into a body that just sort of is. I, for me, better life feels. speaker-0: No, I totally agree. The way I think I'd say it is, you know, a wandering mind is a protected nervous system. That's kind of, know, the, the, wandering mind, like as children, the mind is designed to engage and that's what I'd say. But what, I know we have to wrap up because you know, people we've got to move on the life of time, but there's one element I really want to talk about. This is a really key element for me. And especially when it comes back to talking about performance. speaker-1: Please. speaker-0: And performance is not quite the right word. Let's just say being seen in life, whether we are performing on stage or whether we're just being in relationship. And this is the primary, what's the word, the primariness of our face. And the reason I say this is what I've seen over the last 15 years is someone can be sitting there and they're almost crying and their face is scrunched up and people say, where do you feel that in the body? And what we all do is we look from the neck down. and we try and feel it somewhere in our torso because we've all been told that we're in our heads too much. So we've all been taught, you've got to get out of your head. And what I like to point out for people, a couple of things, the first muscles, the first part of our body that we get conscious control over and that we get embodied in is the facial muscles. speaker-1: Well... speaker-0: And so what happens is when we focus on the body, you just think about it, we all tend to go, oh, where is it down here? So someone can have their face all scrunched up. They're just about crying. And the therapist like, where do you feel that in the body? Rather than going, duh, it's all over my face. And this is right. And so I always find this fascinating. This has been something I really focus on in the last five or 10 years, probably five years. Is you look at all the videos of people tremoring on just, just about all the videos of people tramming your fine. They can have their body going crazy like fireworks, their body's rolling up, every part of their entire system is body, is moving, nothing is happening in their face. It's the weirdest thing because the primary part of the body that we disconnect from is the face. This is the mask, long before we had body and face. And so this is why I want to, this is what I want to say this is because from the earliest speaker-1: This was speaker-0: experience of being seen in terms of that consciousness that evolves in a baby is to do around our eyes and our face. Slightly different with the same thing is happening with touch but for most of us it's occurring not when we're being physically touched it's just when we're being witnessed or seen or seeing others. So if there's one thing I could give to the listeners would be this, the face is the body. Start looking at the face, embody the face, When you're tremoring, scrunch your face up and do little muscle activations like we do with the legs. Squeeze that face, hold it for 30 seconds, then relax. Couple of minutes later, open the jaw up, open the eyes out, stick the tongue out, activate those muscles, then relax. See if they want to get involved. Put your hands on your face. The face is the missing link when we talk about the body, but it's the primary area. For most of us, again, so generalization, because if you've been hit in the shoulder, well, that's where your trauma is going to be. But for most of us, the amount of disconnection through the facial muscles is far and beyond. if, you know, I always like to say, if you were lying down tremoring and every part of your body was moving like crazy, apart from one arm, you'd think, how weird is this? But people lie down and every muscle in the body is going crazy, but nothing in their face. I'm like, This is ludicrous. And all too often, just because we've inherited this model of like we're two in our heads and we've got to focus on the body, that's true. I'm not saying don't get focused in the body, but start with include the face, include the head, include the scalp, include the full height of you, you know, and then you get into your energy. Anyway, I'm on a rant again, but that's what I want say. That's the face. Hopefully it's brought some laughter to some people, some war, it's brought some warmth and reawakening to mind. That is going to help us be more embodied when we're performing, whether we go back to music or giving speeches or that sense of letting our face be free so that it can move and it can be seen in all the, know, the glory and the glory of our humanity. speaker-1: That's Richmond. That's an absolute mic drop moment. I have not worked with a face like that. I'm totally lit up by what you're saying. I'm really buying it. I'm really intrigued by it. You know, I work, as you know, with communication and speaking and when people freeze and they develop freezes, freezes responses in what I'll call their communication system. Of course they develop a facial freeze and the whole face becomes this wooden mask that will not move. And I hadn't considered that one could TRE the face. So I'll be looking at your advanced course and I recommend everyone does too. Start with the beginner one and look at the advanced one. speaker-0: happened to me during this interview and the energy that's moving and the freedom that's coming. Like this for me is, I always like to say to people, get up off the floor people in terms of TRE. Let the experience that we have when we lie on the floor, which is we surrender and we let the body move and express, let that happen in daily life. Bring that forwards. If we're frozen, let the face freeze. If we can, generally it's going to be a cry. There's going to be something. And that we are, you know, my vision is that people stop thinking of our theories and a little practice that I lie down. They're going, no, does your organism stop living and pulsating and animating you while you're, we get back up off the floor and we go back into that control rather than just going, just let this stuff flow. And somehow in amongst the bumps and the highs and the lows and all the things where you go, ⁓ my God, I got really angry and people were, know, we seem to survive and we have a little bit more freedom and a bit more humanity. speaker-1: Is this the art of all of this is to bring it into the world, as you say. And I think for my work is really about being a human around other human beings. And it's this question of. I think humans often develop a fear or we carry even as a species, a fear of each other. And what would it be like to work through that fear, to be fully in ourselves safe, but mobilized, or maybe there's a different word enthused. And what happens if we interact with each other and work through the kind of freezes and defenses that we just naturally carry as conditioning when we are seen, when we stand up to be powerful and visible in front of people, or just when we sit down to have a difficult conversation with a loved one? What happens if we are fully here as opposed to our kind of shut down conditioned self? And it's potentially also a movement from a kind of a very narrow me into a real sense of we. into us as a collective and a deep, deep care for us and an enjoyment of being us. This has been absolute magic. I feel we could have gone on for another hour and a half without blinking, but it's just been such a treat to share this time together. Thank you so much. speaker-0: It's a pleasure, Jeremy. It's so awesome to reconnect. been too long. You know, I can also hear David Berceli, you know, tapping me on the shoulder going, yeah, this is good Richmond, but you know, just shut up, stop talking and do some tremoring for a while.