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- [00:00]
Participant
Foreign.
- [00:17]
Podcast Host
You're listening to a special bonus episode of the Inside Myanmar podcast. The following discussion features Richmond Heath, an Australian physiotherapist, a longtime meditator, and a certified provider and trainer in tre, or Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises. We previously spoke with Richmond at length in episode 514 of Insight Myanmar, where he described his own remarkable introduction to involuntary movement during intensive meditation and explored the connections between meditation, trauma and the nervous system and the body's natural capacity to regulate itself. Those interested in Richman's personal background and a fuller discussion of the theory behind his work can find that conversation episode 514 tre is a body based practice that uses a series of simple exercises to activate the body's natural shaking or tremoring response. Rather than viewing this movement simply as a symptom of stress, TRE works with it as a possible means of releasing muscular tension, settling the nervous system, and helping the body move out of patterns associated with stress and trauma. The session you're about to hear was originally held as a virtual fundraiser for Better Burma from part of our continuing Mental Health series, which seeks to offer resources and conversations for people dealing with trauma in the context of Myanmar's ongoing crisis. Because this is a bonus episode drawn from a live and interactive online event, the recording conditions are not as polished as those of a regular podcast interviewer. We have also edited the event to make it easier to follow in an audio format. Includes removing video footage that Richman showed during his presentation, as well as much of the virtual demonstration and guided practice where Richman was observing participants through their cameras and giving instructions based on movements that listeners would not be able to see. Some technical exchanges and other material specific to the live event have also been shortened or removed. Finally, this event was organized as a fundraiser. Better Burma's humanitarian, educational and mental health work is possible only through through the generosity of individual donors. Contributions are urgently needed to sustain our work overall, but we are also particularly hoping to raise enough support to help train Burmese therapists and other mental health practitioners along the border in tre. The need for accessible trauma support is enormous, and training Burmese professionals who can bring these tools directly into their own communities could offer one meaningful response. We are so deeply grateful to Richmond for donating his time and his expertise, and to everyone whose support allows this work to continue. We now invite you to listen to this special session with Richmond Heath.
- [03:25]
Participant
Sam.
- [04:27]
Better Burma Representative
One Part of our mission is humanitarian and we are dedicated to supporting vulnerable communities affected by crisis and conflict in and along the borders of Myanmar. Much of our work focuses on emergency assistance, education, food supplies, hygiene kits, livelihood, medical relief. And that includes helping communities navigate the immense or programs like tonight. It exists because of individual donors who believe in what we're doing. We are not powered by any large institutions or major organizations. All of the humanitarian work we do continues only because ordinary people around the world have chosen to stand in solidarity with the people of Myanmar during an incredibly painful and difficult time. That is a trust and a solidarity that carries enormous meaning for us and we feel deep gratitude to every person who has stood by us in these past five and a half years and these communities to make this work possible. Alongside this humanity committed to bringing a deeper understanding to Myanmar through long form conversations, journalism, analysis and firsthand accounts from people living through these realities. It's through Insight Myanmar that we try to create space not only for information, but for listening, reflection and human connection across cultures and experiences that are often overlooked or misunderstood. Understood. So we, we warmly invite you to listen, subscribe, share it with others the past 540 episodes that we have. This is one of the main ways that we help people outside Myanmar to understand what's happening on a human level through the voices of those living it directly. So that connection, that connection between listening, solidarity and care is also why tonight's event feels especially meaningful to us. Trauma is not only something that we carry in our minds, it lives in our bodies, our nervous systems and our everyday lives. Many of the people we work with, both inside and outside Myanmar, continue to carry enormous stress, grief, fear and exhaustion. So creating spaces for healing, grounding and reconnection is deeply important. And with that we are very grateful to have Richmond Heath with us this evening. Richmond is a certified trauma release exercises provider and trainer based in Australia who has worked extensively helping people understand how tension and trauma are held in the body and how gentle body based practices can support regulation, release and recovery. Richmond has appeared on our podcast and so we also invite you, if you're interested after this session to Check out episode 514 which is his full length interview. For those of you that who are new to tension and trauma release exercises, tonight is simply an invitation. It's an opportunity to slow down, to listen to our bodies and to explore healing in a safe and supportive environment. So thank you again for spending your evening with us, for supporting Better Burma and for being a part of this community. And with that I would like to warmly welcome Richmond Heath.
- [07:36]
Richmond Heath
Thanks very much Joa. It's yeah, I'm very humbled to be able to be here and hello to all of you. I do Just want to acknowledge the better Burma team and especially Pol and Abby and Joa for being able to give me an opportunity to share this with everyone. So I'm based in Australia, I've never visited even nearby Myanmar or Burma. So everything I know is just from news and reading and story and that sort of thing. So I do want to acknowledge that I'm not directly impacted by the situation there, but at the same time recognizing that all of us, me included, we're all affected by everything that happens around us in our own lives to different degrees. So the focus for me today is about working and more importantly is letting you guys understand how, you know, as Joa mentioned, the body. You know, we have these unconscious stories of, you know, stress and unresolved trauma that the body carries. But the main thing I want you to take away from this session is understanding that the body also carries the muscle memory or the ability to release those patterns within us. So let me share my screen. So just to give you an overview of the way this session is going to go, we've got about another 80 minutes left or something like that. So I'm going to begin with a little PowerPoint presentation to give you some context and understanding and reframing about how the body unwinds stress and trauma on a physiological level. Then we'll move into the experiential part where those of you who would like to will be invited to partake in a guided tremor session where I'll teach you how to access your body's natural shaking tremoring response in a safe and controlled way. If you don't want to join in that you're welcome just to watch. And then we'll have a period of time where all going well, we might set up some breakout rooms where you can have a discussion about your experience with a few other participants and then I'll give you some more ongoing use advice. So the first thing as Joa mentioned, Tre and Tre, I didn't develop it. It was developed by an American guy, Dr. David Berceli, and originally it stood for trauma release exercises. But when he started teaching this outside war zones and natural disaster areas, just to people living in the western world who weren't living in extreme trauma but they were noticing that things were getting better in their bodies like their neck tension or their low back pain. And so it started to become known as tension and trauma releasing exercises. Because regardless of what the external stressor or traumatic experience or context is, if you think about to our muscular system, the muscles really can only respond the same way, regardless of what the external stressor is. And so basically, tre is where we're going to use a very simple exercise, using the muscles to deliberately invoke spontaneous involuntary shaking or trembling, or stretching or moving or softening, where the body will begin to unwind itself. And once that happens, we're going to support and allow the body to let more of the body shake itself back to life and release that stress and tension patterns. And so to give you an example, you may have seen some, but here's some examples. And you don't have to have anything like this because everybody's body will respond individually. But just to show you some of the sorts of movements that people often experience. So in that video, what you're seeing is the body spontaneously moving itself. And you can see that everybody responds in a completely different way. And sometimes people, when they do this process, you may not be able to see hardly any movement at all. But things are happening internally, like our digestive system is gurgling, or there might be gentle softening. So in the videos, if we have someone lying there that you can't see, then it doesn't make for a very good video. So keep in mind, you don't have to have bigger movements like that at all. Now the question is, why would we want to invoke this shaking response? Because most of us have always been told that shaking and tremoring is a symptom of stress or that shaking is anxiety, or it's a sign of shock or trauma or even a panic attack. So why would we want to invoke the shaking? And I'm going to explain that is because the shaking is not part of our fight or flight or freeze or fold responses. If I'm standing here shaking, it's not helping my body to fight or to flee, and it's not immobilizing. The shaking is what the body does to come out of those stress and trauma responses. And it does it in the same way, completely unconsciously and instinctually, like any other mammal, like a dog shaking in a thunderstorm. Now, to make sense of this, when we look at stress and trauma from the perspective of the muscular system and the body, stress and trauma are not things that get stuck inside us like something external to us. They are verbs, meaning that what we call unresolved stress and trauma is something that our body is automatically and instinctually and unconsciously generating in the moment. So when we say we feel stressed, our body is actively in a fight or flight response, effectively. So it's a physiological response. The body is generating Right here, right now, even if the stressor is no longer with us. The same thing with the trauma response. When we say we have unresolved trauma, what we're really saying is that our body is still creating a defensive protective response right now. Even though the original trauma may have happened in the past, or even if there's still something going on in the environment outside the room we're in, or the space we're in right here and now, my body's reacting as if it's still happening right here and now. So this is why I love this picture where if you've had a traumatic experience, say you were bitten by a black dog when you were a young child, if someone brings you in a fluffy white puppy where there's no danger from that little puppy, it could be one day old with its eyes closed. But because it's associated with the smell of a dog, it reminds us of trauma of the past. If that's not resolved in our body, our body will activate right now this response, as if the dog, this little puppy, is dangerous. And another way to think about this is if I'm traumatized but I go to hospital and they give me a general anesthetic, all of the tension in my body is going to disappear. Even when we go to sleep at night and we go into REM sleep, where the body starts to stop any involuntary movement, all of that stress and trauma patterns has kind of disappeared. So it's more like a software, a memory based state. And so why this is so important is if we can get the body to turn off that active response in the moment, then the body has a chance to calm down and relax. If we're in a space where it's safe to do so, and that switching off, that is what the shaking response is. So I'm going to show you an example video here. And in this video you will see a polar bear that has been tranquilized, effectively given a general anesthetic. And then you will see how its body naturally comes out of that immobility response through shaking and trembling. Now what's really important to understand about that video is when the man says the polar bear is going to breathe and take some deep breaths, that is not a conscious decision of the bear to consciously take deep breaths. That is something that his body is doing automatically. And us as humans, as mammals, inside our body, this genetically encoded instinct for our body to release stress and tension and trauma is still carried within us. It's just that most of us have learned to suppress it or misunderstand it. But a deep instinctual, at a deep, instinctual level, our body knows how to release those patterns. In Western culture and in many cultures, I don't know the, you know, Burmese culture that well, how shaking and trembling is understood. But in most cultures around the world, and especially in Western cultures, shaking and trembling has become stigmatized, pathologized, misunderstood, and it's now seen as a symptom of stress and trauma and mental health conditions. So if someone starts shaking and trembling, we think they're having a panic attack. Or if we're just shaking and trembling a lot, we say that's a symptom of anxiety. Or if a soldier comes back from a war and is shaking and trembling, we say the shaking is a symptom of ptsd, but it is not a symptom at all. It does let us know that, yes, this person has had anxiety, does have ptsd, but the shaking is not part of the trauma. It is the body trying to recover naturally, instinctually, in the same way that a dog shakes in a thunderstorm to calm itself down. Again, in Western culture, if our hands are shaking while we're public speaking, we think that's anxiety, but it's not helping us fight or flee. That's the body going, yes, I'm feeling anxious. That's the body trying to calm itself back down, like a homeostatic response. The same thing. If there's a shock or a trauma, like a car accident or an explosion or a conflict, that happens and we start to shake afterwards, we think that's shock, that's not shock. We don't shake in shock. Our body shakes to bring us out of shock. Many women will have experienced shaking and trembling during or after birth. The same thing, or even if you've had a general anesthetic and an anesthetic and an operation. Now, I'm not going to go into too detail here, because I'll give you some other resources. If you want more of the theory, and this is based on polyvagal theory, and there's. At the moment, there's lots of discussion about whether that's really accurate or wrong. But this is a wonderful model because we understand that the way that our body responds to stress and trauma, first of all, as humans, is to try to stay calm and engaged and from a calm, relaxed place. If that doesn't work, the body goes into fight or flight mode. And if that doesn't work, then the body goes into the fight or, sorry, the freeze or the fold, which is to shut down and immobilize and in that state, the body generates a state of low energy where we feel hopeless and helpless as a survival response, where we start to feel numb and disconnected and shut down as a survival response. But that process, how our body responds to stress and trauma, is all unconscious. We're not choosing to have tight muscles or to create low energy. It's all happening unconsciously or subcortically outside our conscious control. And as mammals, just as our stress and trauma response is unconscious and instinctual, so too the body has an unconscious, instinctual response to come back out of it. And in order to come out of the immobility state, the body needs to restore movement. And that's part of the reason why the body is shaking and trembling to bring us back out. This is not us consciously shaking our body, but the body unconsciously shaking itself. And that's how it brings us back to a more calm, relaxed physiology, all completely happening unconsciously. So we're not shaking it, the body is shaking us. What happens, though, is if we do not allow that shaking to occur, if we do not allow our body to calm down and release those responses, because we've been told that shaking is a symptom that we need to stop or control, or if we don't understand it and we feel like it's dangerous or out of control when we suppress it, largely the way the body does that is it's got to stop the body moving. So we tend to get more tense, and we start to get muscular tension and bracing that becomes chronic, not just in our muscular system, but in all the systems of our body. So that our digestive system often becomes, you know, I often shut down our breathing. We don't have a free breath. Everything gets tight and shut down. And when the body is not able to discharge and bring the nervous system back to a calm state, we then get stuck oscillating or moving between these two variables. Where at times we feel really triggered and aroused and our mind is racing and we can't switch off and we can't sleep. But at other times we feel tired and fatigued, hopeless and helpless and depressed. And that feels terrible to be in a chronic state of that immobility survival mode. And this is where substances and behaviors start to spontaneously arise to help us get even more numb. Because it feels so terrible to be living in such a pressurized, chronically activated state. So that these coping behaviors are not necessarily wrong or bad, but they're showing us that inside our body, our nervous system and our muscular system is so tense and uncomfortable, then we have to Try to do things to cope with how much pressure is inside us when we don't let that pressure out
- [24:02]
Participant
through
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Richmond Heath
the body's natural way of shaking and trembling to release the pressure in our nervous system. Now, as I say, I'm not going to go into more theory in this webinar because there are lots of free talks and presentations. If you go to the TRE, if you go to treaustralia.com you can find a whole lot of free talks that you can watch from presentations at conferences, more details about burnout, about shaking, about post traumatic stress. So those resources are there if you want more of the neuroscience and the theory. If you'd like podcasts covering this information in more detail, there are also free podcast episodes. Again, if you go to treaustralia.com or as Joa mentioned, we talked about this in, I think it was episode 514 of the Insight Myanmar, where we spoke about this more specifically relevant to the situation in Myanmar, whether you're living there or whether you're from there or whether you're affected by that situation. So again, there's more information available or you can get those links through the treaustralia.com website. The key thing to understand about what we're doing with TRE is that just about everything else we do to manage stress and trauma, we do consciously and cognitively. So if we meditate and we use mindfulness, it's not wrong or bad. We know that it has a benefit. But the limit to it is we can only calm our system down as much as we have conscious control over our system. If we use breathing and breath work, fantastic. But we can only change our system as much as we have conscious control. If we use exercise or consciously try to relax the body, we can only do that as far as we have conscious control. And if consciously directed or cognitively directed processes, if they were 100% effective, we wouldn't be having this discussion or this webinar. We would just tell everyone in the world who is stressed or traumatized to let it go and they would be healed. But we can't because the stress and trauma responses are unconscious. And this is why letting the body do its own process to resolve these responses in us is so powerful. Because when we combine the top down cognitive processes we do, even if we're focusing those processes on the body with the nervous system's innate reflex to release and relax and reorganize itself, then we have a more complete picture for being able to release the body based responses that are still being carried and active in the moment to help us start to find a place of more calm, relaxed inside us when we're not in active danger at the time. And this is where many of you will have heard the term, or maybe even read the book, the body keeps the score, or the body remembers. And in the trauma therapy world, that's been the big focus over the last 15 years, that the body remembers trauma, that the body carries trauma. But what hasn't been brought forward enough yet is that the body also remembers how to release trauma, just like that polar bear. Just like every person who finds their body shaking and trembling after a stressful or traumatic event. And it does that from the inside out. So what we're doing with Tre, Tre is not the thing. Tre is just a way of understanding this reflex in a Western scientific way, a way of using some exercises to get to this natural reflex inside our body. And around the world in different cultures, people understand and access this reflex the same way. In Japan, they have a practice called katsujun undo, which means regenerative movement, where the body generates movements which are regenerative. Seiki jutsu was practiced by ancient samurai warriors, loosely translated as life force yoga, where their body would spontaneously move itself to calm themselves back down. The Kalahari Bushmen from Africa call themselves the keepers of the shake. So tre is just one model and method to access this natural shaking response inside all of us. But it's also one of the easiest and most empowering approaches that we have. And the process I'm going to lead those of you who want to join in through in a moment is what I'm going to call quick start. Tre and what you'll do there's. You can do, Terry, in many different ways. You can access this reflex in many different exercises and positions. But one of the most simple and easiest is we're going to be lying on the floor with our legs in a D, roughly a symmetrical diamond shape or a butterfly position. We're going to lift the knees up there just a few centimeters. We're going to hold them there. And as soon as our muscles are activated at the muscle fiber level, the muscle fibers are actually contracting and relaxing so fast that we can't even feel it when we're holding our legs still. But the muscles are already, those fibers already shaking and contracting and relaxing and trembling. Then we're going to bring the knees up a few centimeters and hold them in the second butterfly position for a few minutes. Then we'll bring them up again. Most importantly is at the very beginning, we're going to slide our legs out, take those muscles offload, and what you will find is that the shaking will stop. So from the very beginning you experience that you can let the shaking happen, but you can also stop it if you need to. That's not because your body really needs a break, but more so that our conscious mind or our ego feels safe and comfortable because your body will do what it wants to do. So we're going to teach you how to self regulate this process so you feel safe and in control of how much you let go and let your body shake and tremble. And then finally we'll come into the position where we have the legs, the feet on the floor and the knees in parallel so that the body can generate the movements itself rather than using the muscle effort to make or force the body to tremor. And I'll guide you through that. Now keep in mind that I don't know any of your particular medical history or mental health history or trauma history. So it's your job when you're doing this process to make sure that you're feeling safe and controlled. Safe and in control. So if you have a particular history of major trauma or where you've experienced shaking and trembling in a really uncontrollable way that might be associated with a traumatic experience, or you've got a medical condition or a mental health condition, either just watch because you can get help and do it with the tre provider at another time. We'll provide you with information for that. Or go nice and slowly and make sure that you're feeling safe and comfortable. Because sometimes what can happen is as the body starts to come out of immobility and wake itself back up and parts of the body start to shake. Because of the way trauma works, where we get disconnected from our body, sometimes what can happen is parts of our body keep parts of our bodies keep shaking. So you might find your legs are still shaking. And if you're paying attention to that, you think, this is great. Wow, this is amazing. But at the same time, another part of the body might start to brace or hold or immobilize or contain itself. We literally become split. And those parts of the body that are protecting against the shaking and letting go because they're not moving because of what happens in that protective response, we often don't even notice them. So we might find that the breath starts to hold and we don't even notice it. Because if we've been living with that held traumatized breathing for so many years, we don't even notice when the body is holding the breath or maybe the jaw starts to clench or the shoulders get tight. And what we're wanting to do, therefore, is to regulate not just how we feel psycho emotionally so that consciously you feel okay all the time, but how your somatic system or your muscular system is responding during the session. So what we will do very early on is I'll get you to stop the tremors and I'll ask you to notice if when you stop your tremors, does any part of your body soften and relax or let go? Because if it does, when you stop the tremors, that will show you that that part of your body was bracing and holding while you were tremoring. So that becomes a little light on the dashboard or a little red flag, that if that part of the body is bracing and holding and doesn't want to let go, we do not want to force it to. We're going to stop and take a break, let it relax
- [34:28]
Participant
so that all
- [34:29]
Richmond Heath
of your body is feeling comfortable and okay. And then we'll start again. And if you're not sure, the term I will use is when in doubt, slide them out. If you're not sure if your body's bracing or holding, slide your legs out and take a break. It's never going to hurt to stop and see what happens when you do, because often what happens is when you take a break, have a little rest and let that part of the body soften and relax, it's generally the next part of the body that's going to start shaking and trembling. That's why it was creating holding against the shaking and trembling. So stopping and starting, especially if this is the first time you've ever done this process, is going to be the most valuable and effective thing you can do. Not only to stay safe and in control, but to help your body and for you to feel safe and comfortable. Comfortable to relax and let more of your body start to move and release and reconnect itself with you. So it's not the first time I'm doing tre, but the past few times I've done it, I didn't shake and I'm not shaking a lot, but I feel more comfortable the more I do it. So I have, I feel more relaxed after that, after a session. And for this time I have a tennis elbow, so a pain on my arm, the joint. And the last when we were relaxing, I felt heat on the arm. Perfect. And that heat is the release and the blood flow coming back in. So that's perfect. And for anyone else listening, this is where you don't have to shake. Like the heat coming back into the arm and the blood flow, that's not shaking, but that's just as important. And Veronica's body knows what it needs to do. And also, the more you practice this, every time you access and let your body move itself, whether it's shaking, whether it's heat, whether it's releasing, whether it's calming your mind or even moving your body in stretches like training your mind or your body, every time you do it, your system will get a little bit more relaxed and able to do this more easily and more naturally. But it takes time and practice. Thank you for sharing your. Your shaking, Veronica.
- [37:21]
Participant
While I was doing this. Yeah. When I was shaking and I feel my. Actually, I. I had. I have my sinus and migraine headache or since the middle of April and until today, the sun rise to sunset and while I was shaking, I feel tension here and the pain a little bit coming back. And when I relax this one also, I feel relaxed also. And my fingers, when I relax my fingers, I feel, how to say, the. The ants. Yeah, I feel in my finger on my fingers.
- [38:10]
Richmond Heath
Thank you so much for sharing that, Bernadine, because what we've all heard there is. It wasn't just the shaking that was important, but when she stopped and took a break, that's when that tension started to let go. So it's like breathing in and breathing out or being awake and being asleep. It's like the shaking and the resting that is critical and important. And everyone's body will unwind. For Bernardine, that pattern. For Veronica, that pattern. So we will all have our own individual responses.
- [38:49]
Participant
Yeah. First, I think I was comfortable with the position you instructed, but when it went. When it went for like a minute and it went further, I couldn't take that much longer because I felt the tension, the muscles in my thigh, it can't take any longer. So I just. I just come back to the normal position and try to do it again and again. But I failed. What I felt that time at the start of the session, beginning of the session, I. I mentally feel like a little bit light inside my. Like, mentally, I mean, you know what I mean? So the feelings are on my mind just a bit light and. But on the other side, my mind was on. My mind is not what wasn't here at all time because my mind was on the other side on the other things I've been, you know. Yeah. Yeah.
- [40:00]
Richmond Heath
So do you feel. Are you saying now that your mind is more here?
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Participant
Yeah, but I'm not that Strong. I could say yeah, my mind was like body shaking so. So the. I have to get back to my, my present time here. But yeah, it wasn't that easy. Yes.
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Richmond Heath
And now, but now you feel a bit lighter.
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Participant
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel attention just got released or something like that but not entirely. A bit of it's like the reduction reduce.
- [40:48]
Richmond Heath
Yes. So thank you for sharing that. So also we find that even though the body is moving, many of us will find that the mind starts to relax or release as well. And the important thing Kyle has said there is we're not all perfectly healed after one session of tremoring. There's still more to go. The beauty of this process is, is that you don't need to come and see me or pay me. You can all now use that on your own. And this is why David Berceli developed TRE was because when we have mass scale trauma using western therapy models, first of all it's not necessarily effective. Secondly, we often can't afford to do it and thirdly, it often doesn't even fit within the culture of the people to work that way. But when people learn to use this, everyone can now at lie down on the floor at night in bed. This process is inside us. We're just using TRE to reconnect to it, to understand it and learn how to let it unwind us a little bit each time and for the rest of our lives it will never be completed. We will always be able to find that the body is going to unwind more. So to finish off, I'm not going to go into too much detail because this webinar, I can't teach you everything you need to know to keep using this process for the rest of your life just yet. But in the online course there's a whole presentation about how to keep using trend. Okay so if you feel confident, great. But go to that online course at tre, follow the link from the BetaBurma team. So there's, there's that again. You can get it for free if you need to. Just to give you an idea, most people when they learn tre they start to practice every day or two because we want to see how your body and your mind responds to what you've done. Like when we take medicine, we don't ask you how does that taste? If you like the taste, have more taste. We take the medicine in and we see how your body responds. So we take a bit of time. Most people tremor for about 10 or 15 minutes is about average, some more, some less. We stop and start regularly throughout the practice and if we have any difficulty at all, then we get in touch with a TRE provider who can guide us more fully. But that online course will give you a lot of more information about it. If you find that shaking and trembling calms you down and puts you to sleep and relaxes you, then you can use it whenever you want to go to sleep or you want to be more relaxed. If you find that it wakes you up, you might like to practice it first thing in the morning. If you find that the shaking and tremor helps you to cry more fully, that is how the body releases grief. If you start doing the shaking and tremoring because your body is remembering and now free to start using it. If you wake up in the night and find your body shaking and trembling, or if you have a dream or a nightmare and you wake up in your body shaking and trembling, that's the perfect time to let your body do what it wants to do. If you're not comfortable, get up out of bed, walk around, take conscious control of, you know, move your body consciously and take that control. But learning to use this mechanism is like learning to brush the teeth. It's better than brushing the teeth because it's not just cleaning our teeth, it's not just cleaning our body. Our nervous system will actually help us get more relaxed, more grounded. If we then go back out into the world and our body needs to protect itself, it will not get rid of our fight or flight or freeze response. It will often help it be more strong and vital. But rather than being stuck in that, once we get through whatever that stressor is, then we can go back and let the body relax so we can try to sleep a little bit more deeply to help us cope with the ongoing stresses. It's not a magic bullet. It won't take away the external situation, but it might give us a little bit more rest which helps to build our resilience so we can keep moving on. When we do need to be in those shutdown protected states to survive, don't worry about those. As I say, there's the online course, but if you need more help or if you're someone who hasn't yet felt comfortable to tremor, totally okay, reach out through the TRE global.org to find a TRE provider or hopefully flowing on from, hopefully also flowing on from this. We are hopeful that we may have the funding and the money and the resources to start to provide some TRE training so that local people along the borders or wherever learn how to teach this and share this with other local people, which is really what TRE is about, not a therapy, but about something that anyone can learn and anyone can learn how to teach others. You do not have to be a physiotherapist. You do not have to be a psychotherapist. You could be a teacher, you could be a policeman. You could be a community leader. You could be a mum, you could be a dad.
- [47:01]
Participant
So
- [47:03]
Richmond Heath
from my heart, deep thanks to the Better Burma team and everything that you are doing. My heart goes out to all the people of Myanmar, those who are there, those who are not there, everyone who's being affected, and also deep gratitude to all of those people, all of you who are supporting the work of not just Better Burma, but all the organizations and people who are suffering around the world. I'm very humbled to have been able to share this. I'm grateful to David Bercelli for coordinating the TRE board process in the world and I, I wish you all the best.
- [47:43]
Better Burma Representative
I just want to thank you so much, Richmond, for, for, for such an incredible session. It was incredible to feel the, the control and permission mechanisms between the mind and the body in terms of what was right and wrong and what was permissible and not. And I could see the unfolding process within that. And. But what I really want to say is that your, your words during that process, well, you're before and after the process, I mean, you have, you have a real gift of, of being able to use simple language to express, you know, very complex and profound ideals that I think even, you know, second language speakers can, can understand. But your language and guiding it, as, as I was going through the permission and control dynamic, your words were this slow and steady encouragement that was opening up that permission structure that, you know, that was, you know, your words and the act of following the practice were really aligning and supporting that process. And so, you know, that was. I just want to express, you know, how powerful that was and for, you know, for many that, you know, that are on this call and then have faced conflict and trauma and difficulty, I think that permission to be able to let go and to experience this, I think that's incredibly profound. So that's my feedback, that's my thanks for you and for everyone on the call. As Richmond mentioned, we would love to be able to find funding to be able to bring this in person for a series along the border in instructing it, as well as training those from all different backgrounds to safely bring it to their communities. If there are those that would like to be involved in this effort, would like to be updated or informed have ideas of how to proceed, please contact us at Better Burma. All the contact information is. Well, you should have it by signing up. You can find it on the website, but please contact us to keep the conversation going. If we might be able to have an additional virtual session at some point. That's.
- [50:02]
Participant
That's.
- [50:02]
Better Burma Representative
That's everything I have.
- [50:17]
Podcast Host
We're glad to have had you with us for this episode of Incite Myanmar Podcast. You might know that beyond sharing stories and conversations on this platform, we also carry out humanitarian projects through our nonprofit mission, Better Burma. As we all know, the challenges these days are vast, but so too are the opportunities to provide meaningful support. Your contributions go towards supporting critical initiatives such as providing food, medical supplies, and basic necessities to internally displaced person persons in conflict zones. You can help to fund healthcare services that save lives and bring dignity to those in need. Your generosity also supports education efforts for children, helps mobile medical clinics, and provides care packages to political prisoners, just to name a few of the many programs we sponsor. You can support these impactful efforts and directly contribute to our projects which uplift and empower those more most affected by this crisis in Myanmar. Visit better burma.orgdonation to join us in this mission.