← Simplify
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- [00:09]
A
Welcome to Simplify. I'm Caitlin Schiller.
- [00:11]
B
And I'm Ben Schuman. Stoller. Hey, what's up?
- [00:14]
A
It's good to see you.
- [00:15]
B
It's been a bit good to see you. So we both did some traveling.
- [00:18]
A
Yeah.
- [00:18]
B
And we kept production rolling.
- [00:20]
A
It's true.
- [00:20]
B
That's what's up.
- [00:21]
A
Teamwork.
- [00:21]
B
We got interviews.
- [00:22]
A
Now we're back. Okay. I am really, really pumped about today's interview. Um, it's one I did. You'll hear a reference to a nice autumnal tree, and that's because I did this interview a little while ago. But we've been saving it for the right moment, and I think the right moment is now.
- [00:36]
B
Okay.
- [00:37]
A
Today's guest is clinical psychologist Dr. Arielle Schwartz. She is best known for her research and practice into trauma treatment. It's no exaggeration to say that her work has shaped the landscape of how trauma is treated and how people recover from trauma. But the reason I wanted to invite specifically her to Simplify is that I looked around for who is a foremost, most expert on somatic therapy. Is this a phrase you've heard?
- [01:02]
B
Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I've done some somatic work.
- [01:04]
A
Okay. I'm actually did. I know that.
- [01:06]
B
I'm sure maybe I didn't, but I did something called somatic coaching.
- [01:10]
A
Oh, okay.
- [01:11]
B
You can talk about it in the bookend.
- [01:12]
A
That sounds great. Yeah. So if you're on the Internet at all, you've probably heard Somatic Theory or Somatic Coaching or Somatic Therapy. And there's a lot of different information about it out there. It's kind of a. It's kind of like water. You're trying to cup a definition in your hands and it slides through. Because there's a lot of different things. And I wanted to get somebody with a lot of experience and, like, the full pedigree in it onto Simplify. Basically, somatic and embodied practices tap into the body and what it is telling us and how our bodies feel in the room and with other people. My body, despite being not at its best from jet lag, feels pretty good in the room with you, Ben. And the second reason that I wanted to invite her on is because I wanted to really understand what the vagus nerve and what it does. That's another thing that you hear a lot about if you're a huberman listener. You'll have heard it if you go on Instagram ever. You've probably seen it. The vagus nerve is everywhere. And I wanted to know why it's so important and why knowing how to calm it is such an essential tool for being a modern, alive person. Okay, yeah, I'd say let's just listen up for this great vagus nerve metaphor that makes it all really clear, and we'll see you in the bookend.
- [02:21]
B
Awesome. I can say here's you, Caitlyn and Ariel Schwartz.
- [02:28]
A
Dr. Ariel Schwartz, welcome to Simplify. I'm so glad to have you.
- [02:33]
C
Thank you. It is lovely to be here. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
- [02:37]
A
Me too. So there are a lot of ways that I, I could introduce you. I could say that you are an author and a speaker and a clinical psychologist, all of which are true. And you are, you've been recognized for your research in trauma treatment. You are an expert in somatic therapy. You know a lot about the vagus nerve. But how, how do you like to be introduced?
- [02:58]
C
Oh, what a fun question. I think for me, I like to actually locate myself as an embodied human with a love of nature and really a love for this world, like a deep passion and all of everything else that you named, whether it's my synthesis of different modalities and love of somatic practices, but it comes from my own humanity first.
- [03:25]
A
Beautiful. When you say you like to locate yourself as something, is that a nod to your somatic experience? It just, it's so different from what I usually hear people say.
- [03:37]
C
Yeah, that's a fun call out there. I, you know, I think that one of the reasons that I love somatic practices in general is that it does help me locate myself because I think by nature I'm rather porous as a human being, and I, I receive a lot of the world around me, whether we call that a highly sens or are, you know, highly empathic. And I think that for a long time, because I felt everything so strongly that was happening out there, I had a hard time locating myself. And somatic practices I often use the phrasing of it helps bring, they help me bring me home, whether that's on my yoga mat or through dance or walking in nature. But in some way or another, I can kind of feel where I begin and end, and then I feel more present.
- [04:24]
A
Oh, I really love that. I, I, I identify as a highly sensitive person, and to say that that is a state of being highly porous, I think is so accurate. Okay, so can you explain somatic psychology to me? Like, I'm, like I'm five, please. Yes.
- [04:44]
C
Well, in that case, I kind of like knowing that you're sitting on the floor somewhere.
- [04:49]
A
Yes, yes. I'm sitting on the floor on my extra tall meditation cushion because I am extra. Yeah. And I'm, I'm dealing with some back pain, but actually sitting on my, my extracell meditation cushion is really helping. So that's, that's where I'm located right now.
- [05:03]
C
Beautiful. Beautiful. Because I think that, you know, if, if indeed I'm communicating this to a 5 year old, there is some way in which we're going to experience embodiment rather than talk about it. And that might be the, the kind of first layer is that I think that in, in today's world, somatics is definitely a buzzword explode. And I've been in the field of somatics for 30 years, so I've definitely watched an evolution of Somatics in popularity. But the, you know, kind of the felt sense experience of being in a body is something that we can't always conceptualize but that we can kind of orient ourselves towards. And sometimes we find that felt sense through what we might call kind of mindfulness of basically resting in stillness and turning our awareness and our attention towards what am I noticing? As in your case, your seat touches the cushion as you feel perhaps some of the lingering tension in your low back and explore the subtle postural shifts that might alleviate that discomfort. Or sometimes we work with discomfort through subtle, subtle shifts in posture or breath. But that, you know, there's, there's layers of embodiment because when we really look at the science of it, we have our external senses that help us kind of get a sense of like, oh, I'm like, currently I'm looking out my window and I see this absolutely stunning autumn tree in oranges and gold tones. And even the felt sense of what I feel in me when I look at that tree is like, oh, that's got like an uplifting feeling and it's swaying just so gently in the wind. And I can kind of notice how I feel as I watch the leaves catch that little bit of the breeze and it feels calming on the inside. And so then we're going to add the next sensory layer, which is the internal felt sense. And sometimes that's a temperature and sometimes it's more like a color or a shape or it's the gurgling of your stomach. And there's a third one or, you know, a third category of sensory processing, which is where is your body in space? Are you sitting upright? We call this proprioception. And it's like a little GPS mapping of how much space you're taking up and your relationship to gravity. I might have lost a five year old by that point of the description. And spatial awareness. Right.
- [07:57]
A
Inside, outside and spatial awareness. Yeah. I mean, maybe you would have lost a five year old, maybe not, who knows? But that, that was helpful to me. So then when people think about therapeutic practices, I think that we tend to think about, you know, the classic sitting on the couch, talking to a practitioner, or sitting in a chair across from a practitioner. What is, what is an embodied therapeutic session or a somatic therapeutic session look like?
- [08:28]
C
Well, I'll start by saying that sometimes it looks just like that.
- [08:32]
A
Okay.
- [08:33]
C
It's, it's not, it's not always what I might call grandiose. Right. Like, sometimes it's super subtle. And so we're sitting across from each other in two chairs or a couch and a chair. But the main differences that at least I've been trained for many, many years about setting up your office as a somatic practitioner is that the chairs can move closer or farther away, they're not in fixed locations, and that I also don't have a particular seat in the room that is just mine. And so when someone comes into my office and they say, well, where do you sit? I say, I don't have particular spot. You can look around the room and there is a couch and there's three different chairs, all of different locations, all that move really easily. There's also cushions on the floor. There's also a yoga mat rolled up in the corner. There's a physio ball in the room. So we have a lot of options. And some people do prefer the kind of traditional comfort of sitting in two chairs or a couch in a chair. And, and I'll talk more about kind of the subtle somatic practice there. But yesterday I had a session where we did the entire session standing, which was lovely for me because I tense it a lot. And so, you know, it was kind of a nice. And her weight can shift back and forth from one foot to the other. We can kind of check in and make sure that she's not locking out through her ankles or knees or hips, so that there's kind of a fluidity and a groundedness in the body. And especially what she describes is that sometimes when she sits down, she has a harder time feeling her body in space. And so standing helps her feel herself, especially because there's a little bit of
- [10:14]
A
movement that's really interesting. Okay, so it sounds to me like a somatic practice as opposed to maybe a more traditional therapeutic approach or what someone might have in their head. As a caricature of a traditional therapeutic approach. Is that it. It taps into the wisdom of the body and what it's telling us and also doesn't have as rigid a setup.
- [10:39]
C
That's right. That's right. And maybe we can go to that first part of that, like, what the wisdom of the body and what it's telling us, which can sometimes be. Be maybe like the harder layer for some people to grasp. Like, there's an intelligence in my soma, and that there might be some guidance for me if I listen to that. And absolutely, yes. But if you are someone that has been living much more in the kind of world of thinking and processing your world through that, that channel of thought and cognition, turning towards the body can feel really foreign and sometimes can feel really uncomfortable. And it can be hard to sense that there's one wisdom or intelligence there.
- [11:29]
A
Yeah, one second. You said turning to my. My soma. What. What are my soma?
- [11:36]
C
Good question. Soma is the Greek word for body. Okay.
- [11:40]
A
That's what I thought. I just wanted to make sure that I and anyone else listening, we're all on the same page.
- [11:45]
C
Beautiful. Beautiful. And I sometimes really like to. To actually locate different words that help us move towards embodied experience. So, like, sometimes I'll use the word embody, or sometimes I'll use the word soma, or sometimes I'll use the word felt sense. Because bringing your attention towards the body, actually, sometimes someone hears the word body, and they immediately bristle or they. Or they contract because, you know, as Bessel van der Kolk says, you know, the body keeps the score, that there's ways in which our body also kind of harbors the burdens or the traumas that we've lived through. There was something I wanted to loop back around to and that as a somatic practitioner, a lot of what I feel like happens in the room is that I'm locating my center of gravity more into my felt sense. So especially if I am sitting with another person that's very intellectual or has lots and lots of thoughts and lots of narrative and story, I'm slowing down the pacing, which is a huge part of somatics, and I'm sensing how my body feels in the room as I sit with another person, and I'm using the cues that I start to feel in me, I will sometimes use that to help guide what I might be sensing is happening in the other. Right. So, like, it might be that I observe a subtle change in facial expression or that I observe that I'm breathing shallowly and Then I notice that they're breathing shallowly. And so we can use that information to help kind of draw the client's attention to what they might be experiencing, even if they're not consciously aware of it.
- [13:37]
A
Wow, that is a lot of. Of layers to be working with in one, in one setting. It makes me think of how I started as a writer and moved into audio, and I'm now going to learn how to edit video and editing. Each one of those things is a completely different layer of awareness and attunement to what's going on.
- [14:01]
C
It's a perfect metaphor, Caitlin. I. I think that a big part of what we're doing in general as humans, but then I'll kind of locate this as a skill that we develop as, as therapists and somatic therapists that we learned to switch channels. Like, I'm going to go into the channel that's tracking the mental narrative and the talk and the exchange, which is very important. Like, that verbal channel is a very important channel for our brains and our consciousness. But then when I switch channels and I switch into the felt sense channel and I notice, oh, wow, there's this kind of heaviness that I'm feeling around my heart, or I can notice that my, that I have less muscular tone, that I'm a little bit more collapsed forward, then I can really pay attention to that and I can then start to kind of travel between channels, right? Like, oh, wait, how might what's happening in that mental narrative be interacting with that shift in breath or that shift in body language? And then let's add another channel in here. Let's track emotions. Right? Ah, there was that change in that, that slight collapse in muscle tone and that curling forward and that gaze that went downward. And there was this story that you were telling about, you know, XYZ that, that, that, you know, had some hardship to it. And can we sense the layer of sadness that's with us in the room? Right. So we can kind of feel the, the intersection between those three layers of tracking.
- [15:41]
A
Yes. Okay, I think I get it. For what kind of person is this type of. Of therapeutic experience especially useful?
- [15:54]
C
I know for myself that I was very much drawn towards somatic practices and somatic therapies because as I mentioned before, I felt things really strongly where adverse experiences landed in me, was in my body. And because of that, embodied practices also helped me feel more connected to what I was carrying and then more of a sense of choice or a sense of control about how to work with my tension patterns or my emotions that really, for me, manifested in some chronic health conditions, and it actually helped me reclaim a lot of my health to work somatically. So I have a bit of a projection out there that some people that are drawn to somatics or embodied practices also feel things strongly in their body, or maybe what sometimes we call somaticized. Right. But I'll add one other hypothesis, which is that I do think that some people are very drawn to somatics because they don't feel it strongly and they feel more cut off from their body, and as a result, they feel more disconnected from life, and they see the embodied possibility out there, and they're like, I want more of that.
- [17:12]
A
Okay. The second thing was sort of where my imaginings leaned to someone who might notice that there's sort of a deficit in their life, that maybe they're not experiencing things in an embodied way as strongly as maybe others around them, or that they just have this sense that something is missing, that this might be really beneficial for them. I think I. I was definitely one of those people for a very long time. I felt a lot of pain in my body, and I mean, I still do. I. I suffer from chronic back pain, but it got much better once I started going to therapy and talking. And then I paired it with yoga, which I picked up about 12 years ago and have never looked back. And I think that through those two things working together, I was able to live a life that maybe it isn't free of back pain, but it's not a main feature in my life anymore most of the time.
- [18:06]
C
Beautiful. Beautiful. And I think that's such an important story because I think that too often we look for absolutes. And most of the time, whether it's in relationship to my own health or my own pain conditions, I suffer from chronic migraines, and I have for many, many years. And there's no question for me that there's a psychosomatic component to them and that. And that there's also a hormonal component to them and there's, you know, kind of a neurophysiological component and. But all of the practices that I do, while they don't completely take away my migraines, they reduce the intensity, they've reduced the frequency, and they make it more manageable. And so I'm grateful for that.
- [18:50]
A
Yeah. What do you do for your chronic migraines? How have you incorporated embodied practices that. That work towards alleviating them for you?
- [18:59]
C
Yeah, I would say that, you know, in the maybe 15 years that I've had Them and I get them. My, they're hormonal for me, so I get them once a month while I'm still bleeding, which I am. And, and so the journey that I have found to be most helpful is, is to some degree, it's a funny word but to kind of surrender to them, like to give myself the time and space to really just be with the internal journey that it takes me on. And the challenge that comes with the migraines is actually when I feel like I can't go inward and just deeply, deeply meditate or just deeply rest in that state. And you know, so if I have to somehow still be on or be with clients or teach or get on an airplane, like that's when, that's when there's challenges that accompany them. But if actually I have the time and space to just like cancel my day and climb in bed, it's totally tolerable. I can make it through actually medication free. And there's usually. And like, I often just use the metaphor of like it feels like I have to turn off the, you know, turn off the technology, like turn off everything and then you reboot and you come back and I always come back stronger. So when I surrender and can kind of ride through the waves, it's actually not that problematic. I just kind of call it going into my cocoon.
- [20:31]
A
So then I guess you'd count surrender as an embodied practice.
- [20:36]
C
Yeah, I suppose so.
- [20:38]
A
So, interesting, you said, you said a key word that I wanted to touch on a little bit and maybe explore. One of the other things that I know you are expert in, which is the, the regulation of and the feeling of safety and I mean namely polyvagal theory, which is another thing that you hear about a lot, especially the vagus nerve. You know, Huberman lab bros talk about it every, every psychiatrist, every psychologist, every therapist of any sort that you see on with social media presence loves to talk about the vagus nerve. But I feel like we usually get very incomplete pictures of it. It's this really sensitive sort of three pronged system and I am definitely not qualified to talk about it, but I know you are and I would love if you could speak a little bit about what polyvagal theory actually is and how it regulates our feelings of safety or unsafety.
- [21:38]
C
Beautiful. I'm going to start out with the imagining that I'm sharing this with the 5 year old and then we'll grow from there.
- [21:45]
A
Please do. Yes.
- [21:47]
C
Okay, so the five year old version of polyvagal theory, if you know, if you imagine that you have inside of you this river that is, that carries currents in it that connect all the way from your face and around your head, down through your throat, down into your chest, around your heart and around your lungs. Lungs that then travels downward all the way into your stomach and all of your digestive organs. That this river is going to sometimes have a flow that moves from the head down to the body and sometimes has a flow that moves from the body up to the brain. So we can kind of imagine that this river is capable of a bidirectional current. Right. Let's hold this, this image of this kind of bi directional current that can travel and carries now little boats, little bits of information. Okay, so we have information that is going to travel upward from your body all the way to your brain. And we have information that's going to travel from your brain back down to your body. And that's your vagus nerve. It's the 10th cranial nerve. It gets the term vagus, which means wandering because it's an extensive nerve that, that travels throughout your body. So if we go back, for example, to our digestive system and the intelligence of the digestive system sensing on our behalf what's good for us and what's, what's not good for us, that information ultimately can make its way on this river. Imagine a little boat going up to the, to the brain. And now your brain is going to go, oh, there's something that my body is saying no to. My body is saying that doesn't feel good. And I can use that information to say, maybe I don't want to eat that food or maybe I don't want to date that person. Right. Whatever the context is. And it's important to know what's good for us and what's not good for us. And that helps the, the brain do a better job taking care of us and so on and so forth. So another example would be let's have a little, let's move upward around your heart. And again, your vagus nerve travels into your heart and into your brain, specifically the brain stem or the very lowest portion of your brain. And so let's say that our heart is beating quickly. The vagus nerve is going to carry that information from heart to brainstem and basically say, hey, I'm feeling stressed or I'm feeling on guard, or I'm feeling, you know, something's going on. And maybe that's coming from your brain. Maybe your brain is saying, hey, my eyes are sensing that there's a danger out there and we need to get away from that. So I'm going to send that signal to someone, speed up the heart, which is going to send more blood flow to where it needs to go. I'm going to release glucose, it's going to go to my muscles of my arms and legs. I can protect myself from that danger. So your vagus nerve sometimes basically needs to let us speed up so that we can respond to a threat or a danger out there. And it uses our sensory experience of what we see or hear or smell or taste or touch. The to let us know if the world around us is safe or if it's not safe. And so sometimes the brain has to communicate back down the sensory information back down to the body to say, here's how we're going to protect ourselves. And sometimes we can use that sensory information and notice that the heart rate's elevated, but actually use our five senses and be like, there's actually no danger right now. So how can I calm myself down and come out of the unnecessary anxiety response that I'm having or fear or
- [25:53]
A
worry so that I can sleep?
- [25:57]
C
All right, good, good. So then where else does the vagus nerve travel into? Let's talk lungs for a moment. Okay. So your lungs and heart are so deeply interconnected, right? Just literally visualize where they are located in your body. You've got your heart nestled in inside of your lungs. And when we breathe, we are breathing in a way that is either going to elevate more of that heart rate or on guard or vigilance or anxiety. Or we might breathe in a way that calms us, that deeply restores a sense of relaxation. And of course we want to use our five senses. Is there a reason I'm on guard, I don't want to calm myself if I actually need to protect myself, you know what I mean? Like, but if indeed I'm safe and I want to be able to sleep at night, the fastest way to cue to body and brain that it's okay to let your guard down and to come into more of a relaxation is to exhale longer than your inhale. Right. Like to have a nice long exhalation, which is kind of a body based cue up to the brain that says, I'm safe enough now. So we have different breath practices that help us do that. Like you might inhale for a count of four and hold it for a little bit and then exhale for a count of eight. When we do like a four, seven, eight or even just a four, four, eight. Right. We're actually going to reset Set the state of the nervous system pretty quickly.
- [27:35]
A
Wow, that's useful, isn't it?
- [27:39]
C
Simple, useful, you know, and I'll, and I'll just say a little bit more about polyvagal theory, right. So that, like you said, there's a kind of like a three, three prong or three layers to this. And I think what I just want to clarify around that is that the vagus nerve in itself works very closely with our autonomic nervous system. And your autonomic nervous system is your built in stress response system that lives within your body and your nervous system and the in it. And there's two primary branches of your autonomic system that is your sympathetic system and your parasympathetic. Like so we have our kind of sympathetic, Go, go, go, think of a gas pedal in a car. And we, you know, can look at the parasympathetic as the brakes, right. And that which slows us down and lets us rest. And you know, I think what polyvagal theory has really helped illuminate is that sometimes when the parasympathetic comes into action, it lets us rest and digest and relax. But sometimes we can get stuck in an imbalanced expression of that parasympathetic nervous system. In those cases, we might feel more fatigued, collapsed, an urge to hide, an urge to get small, helpless, powerless, anything along those realms. Sometimes we also feel a little nauseous or brain foggy or dizzy. And so what we're seeing here is that we're getting stuck in an expression of the parasympathetic nervous system that's imbalanced.
- [29:17]
A
Interesting. Does that relate to depression at all?
- [29:20]
C
For sure. Right. Like if we look at an imbalanced, if I, if I have an imbalance in that parasympathetic system, I'm more likely to feel down, depressed, despair, maybe shame. Right. Anything in that realm. And then if we look on the opposite, like we also don't want to be stuck in the sympathetic nervous system all the time. We're going to be much more likely to feel anxious or panicky or. Right. Not sleep at night. And so what we ultimately want is to come back into some, what we'll call nervous system agility or nervous system flexibility. And that means that we can move pretty easily between the two branches of our autonomic nervous system without getting stuck in an imbalanced expression of either.
- [30:09]
A
That's so interesting. I have two questions. I want to say them both now so I don't forget. One is what causes us to get stuck in One mode or another. And the other is. Or what are some common causes of it? Because I imagine there are, there are more than one. And what can we do in order to sort of like prepare ourselves to be more agile? Are there, what specific embodied practices do you like to build nervous system agility?
- [30:41]
C
Yeah. Yeah, Beautiful. So why do we get stuck? We can get stuck when we experience something that's either a single incident trauma like, whoa, that was really, really big and scary. And my brain and nervous system and body kind of tagged that or identified that experience as life threatening at some level. And when we have a really big experience like that, it's, it's almost like the nervous system is not willing to let go of that identification of the threat. Because what if it happens again, right. How would I protect myself? And so not only do we have the external event located in the nervous system as a threat, but we have the internal experiences that we feel in our bodies linked to that event. And now that is what the nervous system continues to key into as a threat. So let's say, for example, something scary happens out there. And I tense my muscles, I hold my breath, I grip my fists, I grip my jaw, right? Like some of the common things that we do. And we're like bracing in response to something that feels really scary. And then anytime that I am clamping my jaw, gripping my fists, bracing in my muscles, holding my breath, the nervous system is now has an internal feedback loop that's like, oh, something bad's gonna happen. And it's no longer about the event out there, it's about what's happening.
- [32:19]
A
That's so interesting. So then you're like creating your self fulfilling prophecy. I don't wanna be anxious, but I'm, I'm, I'm enacting motions that mirror my anxious, I don't know, bodily stance. So then I feel more anxious.
- [32:34]
C
Bingo. Yeah, exactly. Okay, and then the second part of your question, which is, well then how do we unwind from this, right? Like how do we come out of those states of anxiety? The first step of that is to notice the tension that you're holding. Because the more that we chronically hold tension, the more likely that we actually, that tension gets relegated into background noise by the brain. Because if it's ongoing, the brain is going to prioritize what's, what's new and fresh, right? And if something is just like, it's kind of like being in a room where there's like, you know, a leaf blower going on outside, but you're trying to have a conversation. At some point, you. It's hard.
- [33:12]
A
Worst nightmare. Yeah, right.
- [33:14]
C
But at some point, you're just like, okay, well, that's happening, but I'm going to focus my attention over here, and it kind of becomes background. It's hard. Leaf blow is probably not the best example. I don't think any of us can relegate that to background, but you know what I'm saying? Like, let's say Muzak in the elevator, but there's a really good conversation going on. Okay. So, you know, so there's something. Something that. That we relegate. So we have to actually become aware of the body and how we're breathing or what tension we're holding in order to ultimately be able to. To release it. And then how we release it might be then to change how I'm breathing, change how I'm carrying my body, change how I'm moving my body. So those shifts in posture and in gaze and in breath and in and in orientation to the space around you, all of those become these subtle ways to what we call from the bottom up, from the body to the brain, be able to unwind from those chronic patterns or habits of staying in the imbalanced expression.
- [34:23]
A
So interesting.
- [34:24]
C
Like, I'll give a super brief example. I was working with someone who, at some point, as a result of the trauma, became agoraphobic, basically afraid to leave her house. And even though literally to walk out of her front door or to walk to the mailbox or to walk around the block, like all of those, cognitively, she could grasp that that was actually safe for her. Her body couldn't feel it yet. So we had to just basically say, we're gonna do it anyway. Like, what happens if you just go ahead and so she did, you know, she walked to the mailbox, then she walked around the block. A few months later, she was driving again to my office. Right. Like, she had built that capacity to actually reorganize her nervous system around the cues of safety that previously were only biased towards the cues of threat.
- [35:15]
A
That's. So. What a triumph for her. My God.
- [35:19]
C
Yeah.
- [35:21]
A
Huge. Wow. Okay. I. I always like to ask the experts I talk to if there were. If there were one thing, a demystifying thing that you wish people understood about your field, what would that thing be?
- [35:37]
C
I would say that, unfortunately, a lot of the TikTok versions of somatics that we find out there make it seem as if it's kind of one and done. Like, it's a very quick fix. And when we're working against patterning in the body that has sometimes been there for many, many years. We have to recognize that developing new embodied experiences takes time and that it's. It's, you know, a bit like that, you know, peeling of an onion, but that there's layers and that it's okay to give yourself time to heal.
- [36:08]
A
You got to do your reps. Yeah, I get it. That is. That's. That's. That's a beautiful takeaway. And one other thing, I haven't spoken with you at all about your many, many books. A lot of them are, as I understand, geared toward clinicians. But you also have some workbooks that seem like they would be amazing, amazing for people to just pick up and. And work on. You have card decks. I also noticed that you do lots, of course, online courses. So there's a lot out there to explore of your work. But what's something that you've read or watched or or learned from lately that you've loved?
- [36:48]
C
I would say that, like, one of the mentors whose work I just deeply love is the work of Janina Fisher. And, you know, if there's anyone that's curious about really learning more about how do we heal from complex trauma, she's a go to resource. Great.
- [37:06]
A
That's excellent. Okay, then. Dr. Ariel Schwartz, it's been such a pleasure to get to speak with you and thank you for explaining so much about your field and your area of expertise. I feel really lucky to have gotten to learn from you today.
- [37:21]
C
Thank you. It was really a pleasure to speak with you.
- [37:29]
B
Welcome to the bookend, where we end with Books and our Bodies.
- [37:35]
A
Books and our Bodies.
- [37:36]
B
Actually, something really funny I want to share before we get into it.
- [37:39]
A
Please do.
- [37:40]
B
I'd made, like, an automated transcript when I was editing this interview, and it kept referring to the polyvagal theory as the polybagal theory. I loved. I just can't get it out of my. In the intro. I'm really glad that you were the one who introduced it, because I would have said poly bagel theory. That's just what it.
- [38:00]
A
Okay. What are your top three bagels?
- [38:03]
B
I was thinking more like, you know, like a polyamorous bagel theory.
- [38:09]
A
Yeah. But like. So for me, it's just like, you know, choosing three bagels and having a little bite of each of them.
- [38:16]
B
Exactly.
- [38:17]
C
Which also sounds great.
- [38:20]
A
Awesome.
- [38:20]
B
Okay, so I have some questions and some stuff, but do you wanna do. How do you wanna frame this convo? Seshan?
- [38:27]
A
I don't know. I think that I'm curious to Hear what you thought. Why don't you start?
- [38:31]
B
Okay. I mean I really like her way of just saying embodied. She says she's like, you were like, how do you introduce yourself?
- [38:37]
A
How do you locate? Yeah, I locate myself.
- [38:40]
B
I'm an embodied. I'm embodied.
- [38:42]
C
Yeah.
- [38:42]
B
So did that change how you felt
- [38:45]
A
in the moment when you were listening to this for the first time? Because when I reviewed it today, it changed how I noticed what I was doing in the room.
- [38:52]
B
Yes, I think generally. So I told you I did some somatic coaching. A lot of the stuff would be like, Ben, can you feel that it is pleasurable in your body to have time and not do anything like that kind of thing? Like can you feel like can you actually access this sense or this emotion or this, you know. And it was very powerful. Yeah, very powerful. I, and I'm curious, like, do you think she mentioned something like somatic or somatic therapies or maybe you said this only some, something only some people benefit from. I think you said this. Do you believe that or do you think it's universal? Do you think everybody.
- [39:38]
A
Did I say that?
- [39:38]
B
I think so.
- [39:39]
A
Well, I think that some people are more open to it than others. That's what I think is true. Like I think that if you are naturally a person who's really tuned into your physical experience of the world, I think it could be really useful. But I think what I said was also I sought out some somatic experiences because I knew that to a certain extent I was not very connected to my body and that has to do with like blocking against back pain a lot. I like there's part of me that's just processing it constantly. So I think it's a little bit shut off in some ways. I think probably anyone who is willing to. This is going to sound so woo woo, but here we go. To trust the wisdom of their body would benefit from it. I also think that there are some people who are just not interested in doing that and they would benefit more from talk therapy or from a more classical sort of like top down experience. But I think if you are willing to recognize that there is wisdom in your body and there are important things that it's telling you and your physical tactile experience of the world can really inform the way that you think in your experience of life, I think it's really beneficial. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [40:48]
B
Cool. I mean I, I, Yes. And you know, a lot of this kind of less traditional treatment, although actually it's kind of more traditional. Less Western.
- [40:57]
A
Yeah, I think west Western Is the
- [40:59]
B
thing it, it's, it helps exactly with in these topics where western medicine has such a hard time dealing with like migraines. So I thought that was really interesting. These things, you know, something like migraines, like back pain stuff that you know, billions of people deal with. Yeah, not migraines, but back pain for sure. And there's no really great obvious pill you can just take that makes it all go away forever.
- [41:21]
A
No.
- [41:22]
B
So what do you do? And I think it's great.
- [41:25]
A
Yeah.
- [41:26]
B
Very cool that we had her on.
- [41:27]
A
It's really cool that we had her on. And I really loved the thing that really stuck with me and I was really happy to re. Experience today, as I said when I reviewed it was this idea that
- [41:39]
C
how
- [41:39]
A
we get stuck in anxiety and like bad feelings. Essentially how your, you know, your vagus nerves get stuck in this, in this setting. So when you tense your muscles. When we hold our breath, when we grit our teeth, it's in response to something that feels scary on the outside that we're like perceiving as scary. That's the response to our brains telling us something is scary out there. But it also goes in the opposite direction. So when you acclimatize yourself to when I grit my teeth, when I hold my breath, when I clench my butt cheek, something is scary. If we are doing that, then we're telling our brains that something is scary all the time. It's a feedback loop and it works in both directions. And it seems so obvious. Right. But because of western medicine's tendency to split off the brain experience from the body experience, I think that we just intellectualize it and we don't recognize that in fact this is a whole system.
- [42:29]
B
Yeah. Yeah, Very cool. Should we do books?
- [42:32]
A
Yeah, let's do books.
- [42:33]
B
Okay, I'll go first. I brought Braiding sweetgrass.
- [42:40]
A
Oh.
- [42:41]
B
By Robin Wall Kimmerer. And the reason why is because I was thinking about exactly what you were just talking about. That's why I wanted to go first like you were talking about wisdom in the body. You know, that book talks a lot about kind of wisdom in the earth, wisdom in the plants, and also that reciprocity.
- [42:59]
A
Yeah, right.
- [43:00]
B
Like there's the downstream, upstream thing in the body, in the brain and the bagel nerve. But also really touched my bagel nerve. But also with the world, world around us. So I don't know, we could definitely get more woo woo. But I think when you stop and really think about that, it's quite logical. Should I say what the book is about? Actually the book is about. I didn't actually. So Braiding Sweetgrass is a book you'll see on a lot of people's shelves these days. It came out in 2013. It's called. The full title is Braiding Sweetgrass Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Oh, and yeah, Robin Wall Kimmerer is Potawatomi and also professor and talks about like the indigenous knowledge and how it can complement sort of Western or mainstream approaches and scientific approaches and really tapping into kind of ancient wisdom. And I think that's not so dissimilar from somatic work.
- [44:04]
A
Yeah.
- [44:05]
B
What did you bring?
- [44:06]
A
Cool. Well, I brought a book and I always feel kind of bad doing this because, I mean, I know that maybe I should be recommending exclusively books I have read, but this book is really new so I can't have read it yet. But I'm so excited about it and I really hope I can get this person on Simplify because one of my favorite podcasts of all time is Ologies. I don't know if you've ever listened to it, but it's by a woman named Alie Ward, who's a science educator and she just talks to scientists about their work essentially. And she had this amazing episode with a pain psychologist called named Dr. Rachel Zoffness a number of years ago and just did an encore of that episode because Dr. Rachel Zoffness has her first book coming out.
- [44:48]
B
Oh, wow.
- [44:48]
A
And it's called Tell Me where it the New Science of Pain and how to Heal. What stuck with me from that episode and what I'm really excited to learn more about in this book is how she describes pain as being biopsychosocial. It's. There are, yeah, there are aspects of of course, your biology. They're like in your physiology. Like I genuinely have herniated discs, but so that's the bio and then psycho. It's what's going on in your brain, how your mood affects your experience of pain. And then social. So what's going on in your social environment? Do you have support? Do you have people who understand you? Do you get out and see your friends? So she leans on, I think they say in the book summary, cutting edge neuroscience, which is true, but also CBT methods and other methodologies for dealing with pain and experiencing the body to give people back agency. It's a look into what pain is actually made of and how you can unmake it or how you can address each part of your personal pain recipe is what she calls it, so that you can have a more pain free life. So I cannot wait to read this. It's out freshly and as soon as I. As we end this interview, I think I'm gonna go right to her and ask her to come be on Simplify. Like, I personally need this book, but she's also just a really cool scientist.
- [46:10]
B
That is awesome.
- [46:10]
A
Yeah.
- [46:11]
B
Cool. Two good books.
- [46:12]
A
Very good. All right, then. I guess we'll just take it home. Simplify is produced by me, Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman, Stoller Nishwa Neves in Berlin, Germany. And we are seated here in the Colo Media studio in the back of the Chapters Bookshop in Berlin. Thank you for listening, and till next time, check it out.
- [46:29]
B
Checking out.