It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the F word here. Freedom. We'll share straight from the trenches. What we've learned from leaving our own addictions behind and coaching hundreds of others to do the same. And since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it.
(00:36): Okay. Folks. So I had a, a good friend of mine who I've known since college. Who's also a pretty successful singer and, uh, music artist reach out to me. He and I have gone back and forth over the years and he asked me the question about the deep tissue work that I do at the retreats. And what is it that makes it so different than a massage, uh, than a normal massage. He's like, you can go to get some deep tissue work or get a deep tissue massage, but it doesn't seem to be D delivering anywhere near the kind of results that you are getting from doing these body work sessions, uh, with your retreats and with the people that you've you've mentioned to me. So like, what's going on there? Are you doing some kind of special energy work with these people based on all of those years?
(01:23): Is there something else that's going on and what is it that makes them so powerful? And I, I think that's a really good question. And I mean, I, I, in the beginning I used to, like, I was a little bit of a drama king. I mean, you can imagine that right based on these podcasts, I was a little bit of a drama king and, and I wanted to kind of hold the mystery. I mean, I mean, I had spent years in performance arts and dancing on stage and special lighting and whatnot to create in a Ooh and an awe in the audience and kind of give a sense of magic where they don't see all the inner workings kind of thing. But the further I've gone into that, the, the more and more fed up I have become with the way that that's all over the place, um, in these circles that are trying to help people that there, even in the medical world and whatnot, there's not really a sense of, this is exactly what's happening in your system, and this is what needs to change.
(02:15): And I, I know I've gotten frustrated with some people, uh, from time to time as I've listened to them, uh, expecting an explanation and actually getting some work around explanation that doesn't actually tell me what's going on. And I found myself rising up in the defense of the innocent citizen of the world who is being taken advantage of probably not maliciously by people, but through what sounds like really highfalutin talk that doesn't actually say anything. And I have been as guilty of it as, as the next person. And I have been spending the last couple of years, really trying to get clear on it in the book that I'm writing right now, which should be available here in the next few months, I am really laying everything as bare as possible, and really trying, seeking to explain and point out what actually is going on.
(03:02): So that by the time a person finishes reading that book, their feeling of it will be like, holy cow. I never realized that this is what's going on. Now. I know what I need to do. And if obviously, if you want help from us, then you can come find that, but I don't want it to feel like you need me. Uh, nobody needs me. Like, I'm just a way that some people have found a massive acceleration in their process of figuring things out. But to say that I am the answer or that what I've created is the only answer is a, is a huge deception, both to myself and to other people. I've just found something that works really, really well. And if I, I, in my mind, if the whole world knew about it, we would have far fewer wars and domestic violence and, and emotional struggles and need for prescription medicine and, and a lot fewer diseases.
(03:46): And so many other things, because I've seen those things disappear in the over a thousand clients now that I've worked with. And so I really do want this to be as clear as possible. Please note, however that there are things that I may try to put into language that are just things that I feel and observe and see and whatnot. And so they may not, I may not have the best way of describing it, but I'm gonna do my best. Okay. What is it that makes, so in the retreats, for instance, we're doing on the daily, um, we're spending the mornings working on using your own voice and the resonance of your own system in some very particular ways to activate and balance out your central nervous system so that it's operating from a place of equanimity and from in incredible power and gathering and quieting the chatter we talked about last week in such a way that allows you to actually make conscious changes in your life.
(04:39): Just those practices alone have increased the production of endocannabinoids in the system, meaning you're high on your own supply. Uh, without using an external substance have produced BDNF, which is the plasticity of your brain to be able to make new neural connections increased the production or of neurogenesis or new nerves, and reduced obviously anxiety, depression, heart rate, and all these other things. So there's a lot that's gone on. It's increased the coherence of heart rhythms and stuff, and that's what we do in the mornings. And it's a particular mode of breathing and posture and using your voice in a way that produces it. It, it's a simple practice that we do. It's not overly complicated, but would take a long time for me to explain here, uh, because when I'm teaching you these things, I'm, I'm taking you through them so that your body experiences them and because your body has experienced it, it's not just an intellectual thing anymore.
(05:30): And so then we can build on that with ideas. So we do that in the mornings and then we go into movement work. So after a breakfast, we dive into some movement work. That's fun. That's playful that it's also stressful at times, and whatnot, to start to retrain the nervous systems response, to stresses in such a way that it produces more relaxation, uh, more ease of movement and whatnot. And so we spend a couple hours in the morning doing that with the group, uh, with the guys and the girls. They both do very, very similar activities. It's not about a, a gendered thing. This is just human life and the human nervous system. And only 2.1, 7% of your DNA really determines your gender and all the rest of that. Well, that's what we're working with. It's not that guys are more stressed than girls.
(06:13): They may express it differently, but often they don't. So when we're dealing with emotions, it's, it's not about gender at all. So then we'll have a lunch. And then we spend some time doing a different kind of breathing specifically to bring up and clear out the, the old chemistry of old emotions. So every thought you have every emotion you have, every experience you have produces a chemical trace and an electrical trace and a tension trace in your body. And if those are there over time, if tension builds in certain places, then some of those chemicals can get stuck inside the tissues, dead blood cells, old chemistry and whatnot. And so as those get cleaned out, as breathing happens, we can bring new nourishment and stuff to the system. It also pushes you, this type of breathing pushes the sympathetic nervous system a little bit and most people's trauma is caught in the sympathetic nervous system.
(07:03): Even though most healing methods are, are dealing with getting a person into their parasympathetic activation and what I've found personally. And this leads into the question around the physical work. What I've found personally is that it is much faster and more permanent though. Not it's not necess, it's not the only thing that needs to be done, cuz both sides of the nervous system are important, but it is much faster and more permanent to get rid of old traumatic responses of the body. When we're putting a person into a semi activated state, rather than having them feel like they're in a spa, I spent years doing the spa-like treatments and they are profound and they are exceptionally helpful and effective. And I am not taking anything away from those at all. And those skills that I spent years honing and, and refining and, and clarifying inside myself are skills of perception and awareness that I bring to the table when I'm doing the, the deep tissue work as well.
(07:55): But ultimately I'm working the person into a sympathetic kind of state in response to what's been going on in their life. And then after we've done that, and we've kind of talked through the experiences and there's several different ones that we do on different days. Then in the evening times, we, there there's time for people to go and get one on one coaching. There's time for people to go sit out in the natural world and just kind of be with themselves to play games, to connect with other people. And then I'm spending, you know, hours each night doing some deep tissue work one on one with people, uh, me and my team. And then in the evening time, we spent some time opening up the body and correcting postural things. And we work with retraining. The body's natural way of holding itself slowly so that the postures associated with all of these traumatic events and emotional struggles and habitual behaviors and whatnot start to be erased through training through stimulus.
(08:50): And then we also work with a final different kind of gentler breathing and mental process to help them kind of look more closely and see what's really going on with the struggles they've been dealing with and a lot of common issues that people have. And then we send 'em to sleep because sleep has been shown to improve retention right after an exercise. So just before bed, I'm having them really work their posture and really work their perception and then sending 'em straight to bed. So that by the, so that they can retain that better and wake up the next morning with it more cemented, uh, rather than they've having learned it the night before. I mean, early on the morning before or something like that. And so it's a very deliberate thing. The food we choose is very, very deliberate to, to support the processes that are going on there.
(09:33): It's very clean food. And then there's some other things that we do, uh, on the first day and the last day as well to kind of keep expanding the experience people have of wellbeing. So that's an overview of the retreats that we run. And in the middle of this is the, are these deep tissue, uh, massages and this deep tissue work? I say that because a lot of people forget about context. A lot recently I was studying some mentalism because I was curious, I was like, man, if that's a real skill that these mentalists can do and really read your mind and all these other things, no doubt, they're very attentive people. They've, they've honed a craft, but if that's a real Skillman, that could be very beneficial. If I could just sit there or look at a person and be like, wow, you're from Virginia and you used the farm and you're curious about this and this is your phone password.
(10:17): But I got really frustrated when, when I started really digging into some of the more prominent mentalists and recognizing that actually most of that is set up in very, very subtle ways. And they are definitely taking advantage of certain quirks of human behavior and are great at what they do. But the context of what they do is they're doing it on a stage. They're doing it in a predesigned production. It isn't a spontaneous happening. And because we go to the stage where we just kind of like forget the fact that we've chosen, that this is all a production, that it's not actually just a random happening in the world, but something that has been carefully and strategically designed to produce an effect inside of the watcher. And because we forget the context, we believe that the skill is real. So deep tissue work can and has many, many times, and I'm sure the massage therapists and other people who have, who are listening to this can attest to this, that on occasion, people have deep emotional releases with deep tissue work or with movement work or with energy work, uh, or, and energy healing stuff.
(11:21): Um, they've had all these kind of like really deep cathartic experiences sometimes or triggering experiences just in response to their posture being changed and challenged or being put into a certain physical exercise. I have had it happen to me and whatnot. And the problem is most of the time it's accidental, meaning it happens. And the people that are familiar with it allow it to happen. They say, yeah, that's totally normal. It's totally fine. It's totally okay. But it isn't consciously created, like we're actually going to deliberately and consciously go in and find what's going on and what your tissues are holding. And we're gonna help you release that. Even the, myself, as I've been trained in some of this stuff in a lot of different body work techniques and energy healing work techniques, and, uh, you know, anatomical studies and whatnot, years and years of gen cranial, sacro therapy, years and years of training. Even through all of that, a lot of this still ends up being accidental and they don't know, no, it doesn't seem that there's a lot of people that have really grasped the link between those things. And that's what I spent the last umpteen years really trying to understand what is the direct link between what my body is doing and what my mind is doing.
(12:35): If you, or someone, you know, is looking to drop the FBO of freedom in their life, whether that's from past trauma, depression, anxiety, addiction, or any other host of emotional and personal struggles, but they just don't know how or want some help doing it head on over to the freedom specialist.com/feel better now and check out some of the things we've got in store for you, or book a call. So we can look at your unique situation and get you the help that you're looking for.
(13:06): And even though there are books, like, you know, the body keeps the score and feelings buried alive, never die. And all these other books, uh, they, they tend to stop a often at the theoretical spot. Like I think this is what's going on and I wanted something consummating practical. And so the deep tissue work that I do, it, it, a lot of it, not all of it, but a lot of the pieces of it came from, from Russia. This was something that was part of a martial arts training or a warrior training. So it's not actually a massage. It is nervous system training to help release what's from the nervous system what's gone on as the story goes. Or as it was told to me after, after battles, these Kasak warriors and stuff would meet together in camps and they would process what had happened.
(13:50): So they would, you know, talk about the friends that they, that had died in battle. They would do training, they would do prayer. They would talk around the campfire and they would do some of this type of type of body work and body training to release from the tissues, all of the tension and fear that had built up over the course of battle. So that by the time they were done, every single soldier that was left could go home whole and complete and not, uh, a broken person, not a, not a soldier with PTSD, not somebody who's just gonna be unleashed on their family without being fully functional mentally and emotionally. And so BEC that's because they wanted warriors that they could continually rely on that weren't gonna be needlessly aggressive and so on. And so this particular deep tissue training and nervous system training is something that I grabbed from, from a Russian style of work.
(14:42): And then with that, I have, I have continued to add and explore little bits and pieces that have come from all the other bits of training that I've gone. So whether it was cranial SACL therapy training for those all those years, uh, biodynamic cranial SAC therapy training, that is, which is a different branch and, um, pretty rigorous kind of training to really tune into just the way that individual tissues and cells are moving in the body to really learn how to detect these minor subtle changes in the system. And, uh, I, you know, also some basic coaching and stuff that I developed over time. So to really read that. And so I would use spoken words sometimes, and I would use deep tissue work. And I would just say kind of, what's coming up for me as I'm doing it. And as a result, I'm targeting the areas of the body where the person is holding some of their deepest tensions, often psychological.
(15:34): Now, why is it so effective inside of these retreat spaces is because we've created a context, even with psychedelic medicines, the set and the setting, meaning the place that it's happening and the intention that has been set going into it, create a role in priming that person's psychology and physiology for what's gonna happen. And even if your intention is ends up being something totally different than what actually happens, the forming of that intention really creates something. So the effect of these things is happening in the context of a four day intensive retreat. And they've done some preparation work in advance sometimes weeks or months in advance prepping for the people that sign up early for them. But even a couple of days in advance, we have them do some basic preparatory stuff. Then they get on a bus. And during, on that bus ride, we're having them go through some experiences with each other that help really open them up to being ready to like, let go of the problems they're struggling with.
(16:34): Then we dive into all of the stuff that we're doing in the retreats. And each one builds on the last one to the point where whenever it is inside of that space, that they finally get a chance to experience this. They're in a space where they're ready to confront the deepest, darkest things in their life, because they know they're in a supportive environment that isn't isn't ill-equipped to handle it, that isn't gonna be in intimidated by it. And they know that there's a, it's a space where they no longer have to hold it. All of that pre-work is what really creates the possibility for them to have such profound experiences with these stick sessions. And then when they have it, we're going through it. And I'm just sitting there listening to their body, watching what's happening, paying attention to attention patterns and whatnot, uh, to the point where it really pulls some other things out of them.
(17:25): Now on top of that, I'm using different implements. We're using, uh, things made of wood. Uh, so I'm not just massaging with my hands. Wood makes a different, uh, impact on the system. If I happen to use some pieces with metal, metal is, has a different conductivity and it'll affect the skin differently. Um, and then if I'm using leather that also has a different type of conductivity on it. If I'm standing on the person, that's different, the fact that they're on the ground instead of up on a massage table, in a spa and changes their psychology. So there's a large psychological element to this type of nervous system training as well, because it's forcing them to confront things that their psyche isn't used to and that their, that their body might take as a stressor. And as a result, it forces up things that, that normally would easily be repressed.
(18:12): People come up with things that they never thought of before, and they don't understand why that memory came up because I was pushing in one spot on their back, or they don't understand why this emotion came up when I was standing on their calf or something like that, or just pushing on it just with lightly, even with, with my toe or something like that, because there are areas in the body. It's not that the memories or the emotions are stored in that area of the body. That's not biologically true, but the nerves that have fired there have also fired in other situations where they might have felt those emotions. And so the firing of those nerves in that way can bring up the memory because the last time or the biggest time that they felt that similar body sensation, they also had it a linked to that memory.
(18:57): And as a result, it starts to alleviate the memory from it. And so it's a very precise, very specific way of working. That is one that I have developed and brought together a number of different methods to do as well as the like perception learned from one place and the, the sort of nervous system training from another place. And some of the implements and tools kind of from my own trial and error on myself and with other people and the result is, and the context in which it happens. And then the result is that people have massive healing experiences with them. I have had people come to my, just my home office and want to experience some of these deep tissue things just on their own. And I'll just say that they're not as powerful. They are beautiful experiences. And I've still had people have tremendously powerful experiences on their own going through it just for themselves, but it's not the same thing.
(19:49): It isn't the same thing at all because there isn't the context in which it's happening there. Isn't the priming of the psychology there. Isn't all of the other stuff that allows them to fully like be comfortable in opening up and confronting some things. And so right now, the way it sits is usually I won't do, I won't offer those type of sessions outside of a retreat, unless a person has already been to one of the retreats we go to just because it's a very different experience on occasion. I still will. And those occasions usually show me, oh yeah, that's right. These are not, these are not the same beast when outside of the retreat versus inside of a retreat space. And so hopefully that gives you some insight about what's going on now. How is this relevant to you as a listener? Why do you wanna know about all the deep tissue stuff I would just consider?
(20:35): I want you to consider the possibility that everything that you think is a problem in your life right now is something that is creating tension patterns in your body. And that as you start to deliberately consciously work with opening up those tension patterns, you might have releases of an emotional kind and not just attention kind. And as you get more and more precise with it, things that you didn't even know, you were carrying struggles and problems that you have just accepted as facts of life. That aren't actually facts of life, start to dissipate and crumble just because you're working with the body. The body is the mind. Everything happening in the brain is happening in the body. It's a systemic thing. There isn't one part. That's just doing something simple and different. The whole system is working together as one cohesive unit and your body is the single greatest personal development tool you've ever been given.
(21:30): It is the key to so many experiences that you can't have any other way until you learn to treat your body well. And the irony is that when the wellbeing of the body is established, the wellbeing of the mind is a natural life product. Your thinking mind came after your functioning body. It, it came later. And so as we get the functioning body, correct the problems of the mind, the problems of the emotions, they are so much easier to handle. Yes, there are some associations to shift and change, but the bulk of the process and the bulk of the struggle is really in retraining the body. Once the body gets cleared out time, and again, this happens, the mind is able to shift and change and you can train new patterns much, much more readily. There's a lot of people that come home from retreats, like, and they just high on life for months.
(22:24): And those months are times where they get to plant new seeds, uh, and new experiences and new habits and new ways of living that aren't stressful anymore. That aren't anxious anymore. That aren't just spiraling into depression. And aren't struck, stuck holding grudges and traumas and, you know, abuse and resentments. Instead, they get to train freedom. Freedom is a skill. It's not a pill. And it's a skill that everyone can learn. There's not something special about me. It's, it's a skill everyone can learn. And it's just a question of giving yourself the best opportunities for it. And what I have found is that working with the body is the most direct route to that kind of freedom. And it's the most lasting route to that kind of freedom. It's not that we ignore the mind. It's just that we put the mind in its place as the garnish on the plate, the dessert, right?
(23:17): The little add-on, that's just the perfect add-on that makes the whole dish complete. But if you don't have the body, right, if you, if you're missing the main dish, then you'll never be satisfied and it's not gonna happen. So I would, I would highly recommend that if you're curious about this at all, that you come experience this at one of our retreats. It's four days, that's an investment of time for sure. And money. Obviously it includes room and board and whatnot, but it is definitely an investment of time. But what I've seen from what I've seen those four days are the equivalent of years and years of therapy, uh, of various different kinds, not just, not just talk therapy, but physical therapies and other types of stuff, just because of the way that I've taken to really stack each experience upon the last one, to give people a chance to, to recognize and discover their own freedom and discover that they're not victims and discover that it's what they're trying to accomplish.
(24:13): Isn't impossible at all. And discover that really they do have the ability to just put things down and walk away from them without ever returning. And so I would be honored if you listening would be interested in coming to a retreat and, and really, you know, giving yourself that opportunity in life. Because what I've seen is that it radically has the op opportu the ability to change people's lives. And then I see families change as a result of it. I see kids suddenly getting parents who are now happy and free of their own stresses and worries. I see spouses come, men and women struggling with minor things, to major things and finding a new way to live with much more ease and much more joy and much more freedom. And, uh, that's why I focus so much time on these retreats. And that's why this physical work as much as the world is moving online. I move the opposite direction because it's, it's the very neglect or ignorance of the body that has become the imprisonment of mankind.
(25:15): And that's it for today's alive and free podcast. If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your earbuds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcast from. And while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you. Plus, it's just nice to be nice.
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