How To Achieve Healing At All Levels

 

Healing is more than just treating your wounds or feeling better. By going beyond surface-level fixes, you also address your biggest internal suffering. Joining Tim Westbrook in this insightful conversation is practitioner, speaker, and founder of Breakthrough Performance and Rehab Wesley Kress. He dispels the myth of the “inaccurate body” and the right way to deal with unresolved trauma, the most overlooked factor in every disease. Wes also emphasizes the importance of never shying away from difficult conversations, the positive benefits of meditation, and why self-love should always be one of your top priorities. If you want to learn how to live a more meaningful life, brave your storms, and find your best path to healing, this one is for you.

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How To Achieve Healing At All Levels

I’m excited to sit down with Wesley Kress, practitioner, speaker, and Founder of Breakthrough Performance and Rehab. Wes’ work is unique. He brings together genomics, functional medicine, Eastern wisdom, and somatic healing to bridge the gap between physical performance and deep inner transformation. His mission is to help people unravel chronic patterns, restore vitality, and reclaim the youth of who they are. In this conversation, we’re going to explore what drives healing beyond surface-level fixes. We’ll talk about the myth of the inaccurate body, the role of courageous conversations, the shadow side of exercise, and why unresolved trauma may be the most overlooked factor in disease. Let’s dive in.

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Wes, welcome to the show. I’m so glad that you’re here.

Thank you for having me, Tim. It’s so great to finally connect. I’ve watched your show for a while. You’ve had so many great guests. You’re incredible. I’ve followed your journey and had deep admiration for it. It’s so great to be here and have this conversation.

Wesley’s Story And Mission

For more context, I see Wes on a weekly basis. I’ve gotten to experience working with him. I’ve been seeing you for probably a couple of years. I’ve gone through lots of difficult times, and Wes is the guy I see. There was a period of time when I would go in there and cry. I want to work out with the Neufit, which is one of the modalities at your facility. I like doing the Neufit because it’s like a workout. It also works on the nervous system. We’ll talk a little bit more about Neufit. A lot of times, you would say, “Let’s do acupuncture today,” which was always what I needed.

That’s part of healing. Sometimes, the things that we need the most aren’t the things that we necessarily gravitate towards. Exercise and things like that are so therapeutic for our healing process. At the same time, someone like yourself who’s a high performer, CEO, and has so much on your plate, at times, what we need is more spaciousness in our experience. The way we do that is through resetting the entire nervous system.

Acupuncture helps with downregulating the amygdala and allowing the parasympathetic nervous system to upregulate. Life is oftentimes always coming at us, or at least that’s what it feels like when we’re stressed and contracted. It has the ability to allow the nervous system to shift back into this state of receptivity, allowing us to start to experience life coming at us in a way that is easier than if we are functioning in this resistance of fight or flight state that a lot of us experience day-to-day.

I attribute your openness and readiness to the ability to go through some of the things that we went through in the clinic. That’s a lot of the work you’ve done, your journey, your path, and your ability to stay present with the difficulties of the human experience. The human experience is quite challenging because it encompasses every part of our past in the present. You were going through periods of your life that were bringing up things in the past, as well as things that we were navigating in the present, in terms of trying to navigate so much at once. You were able to stay present with your emotions.

Crying is one of the things that helps regulate the nervous system. Oftentimes, as men, we think, “Crying is not what we’re supposed to do,” but it’s the most powerful thing to bring us back into a state of receptivity, which is the state of the parasympathetic nervous system. This allows us to restore and rejuvenate so that we can have the energy and resilience to move forward in our lives.

That’s been my experience. Let’s go back. I’ve got some questions here. You’re a licensed acupuncturist. You have your Master’s of Science in Oriental Medicine and your MBA. What does all of this mean? I’ve referred lots of people to you. A lot of times, they say, “What is he? What are his credentials?” Tell me about those credentials, and tell me what those mean.

In combination with those credentials, I’ll step back and say that my whole life path led me to where I’m at. Over 30,000 hours of direct experience through my own trauma and having a chronic illness was what led me to start to study medicine. The emotional trauma that took place from sexual trauma from 4 to 13 led me down a path of trying to understand healing at every level.

The combination of both direct experience and academia is where we get embodied intelligence. A lot of times, we’re trying to understand reality through the mind alone. Ultimately, there’s this intersection where the mind is like a map. The map is trying to guide you, but it’s not a replacement for reality. We live in a world that’s very highly intellectualized because we live in the information age. The fact that we’re doing this show and the fact that we have the internet, we are gifted with so much information and abundance. At the same time, that can be overwhelming to the nature of the nervous system.

If everything is filtered through the mind, and that mind is largely constructed through our beliefs, our conditioning, and the constructs and ideas that we were given early on and that we evolve over time, that is a piece of reality. The truth of reality lives in the body. I always say that most of medicine is in this top-down approach. We’re trying to navigate everything from the top down, which is the intellect, which is trying to understand the nature of how to control certain things. A lot of ancient wisdom was about the body, the emotions, the nervous system, and the best ways to help facilitate change.

When I was going through my school progression, I did an undergraduate degree in marketing and finance, and then I did my MBA in finance, accounting, and a specialty in investing. A lot of this was that we managed money for the state of New Mexico. We got to implement what it would be like to work in a financial firm where you did portfolio management, equity analysis, and fixed income analysis. A lot of business in terms of the way they look at the financial world is through models. These economic models and financial models are determined based on the environment.

What I realized in medicine was that those things were more accurate than the nature of reductionist medicine models that look at isolated variables, a linear progression, and a hierarchical model that happened to be a reductionist way of thinking. When I started to study Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, and a little bit of functional medicine, they were much more flexible in their application of models, the way economics and finance were.

I started to realize, “This is the most accurate way of understanding human health.” The reason is that our human health is based on complex systems. Complex systems can’t be reduced to single variables. They have to be affected through the system-wide approaches. Things like acupuncture are affecting the entire system rather than a single variable, so the leverage on that is so much higher. The impact is that you can impact entire emergent patterns.

You deal with a lot of addiction and so forth, but addiction is a result of trauma. It’s an adaptation to avoid pain, which is a survival mechanism. The idea that we should shame, blame, and guilt people who have addictions is ultimately a misunderstanding. Due to the social constructs of domestication, when we’re growing up and we do something wrong, what do we do? We shame, blame, and guilt someone to do something better. Guess where the trauma is? It’s a result of that shame, blame, and guilt. This is what we call a vicious cycle in the nature of complex systems.

Addiction is a result of trauma. It is an adaptation to avoid pain and a survival mechanism. Share on X

Vicious cycles mean that whatever the symptom or sign is, it then further creates the problem. If you’re stressed and you can’t sleep, guess what that does? It causes more stress. If you’re depressed and you can’t eat, guess what? You don’t want to eat anymore, or you eat too much. These vicious cycles perpetuate themselves. Trying to get out of them is like trying to get out of quicksand. The harder you try, the deeper you go.

Everyone can relate to being in a vicious cycle, where it feels like you’re in hell. You’re in this vicious cycle where you spiral downward. There is the same thing on the opposite side in terms of virtuous cycles. Virtuous cycles are like spirals up. Conceptual spiritual traditions have discussed this as heaven. How you shift those polarities is you have to do that from a system-wide approach.

A lot of my clinic is combining the depth of understanding of both direct experience and models that are more like network models and models that mirror complex systems. That’s like Ayurvedic medicine and Chinese medicine. That’s where my formalized training comes in. You have five years of schooling, which you get in both Western medicine and Eastern medicine. Acupuncture is just a tool within that handbag. It’s the entire theory of understanding of how you look at the body for more of an ecosystem than a machine.

Going To The Root Of The Problem With Acupuncture

When is acupuncture appropriate for somebody?

Acupuncture is appropriate for someone in almost all cases, except for the nature if they have some adverse relationship with it. I say that from the standpoint that some people don’t like needles. In that case, you might do more somatic work and body work. Acupuncture is a conduit into the nervous system. Where the needles are placed affects the network of brain regions.

In the clinic here, you use TMS, which is something that’s very effective. A lot of TMS is based on network regions. The reason Chinese medicine is so powerful is that it mapped these ecosystems within our bodies a long time ago. There’s no such thing as meridians. In the same way, there’s no such thing as longitude and latitude lines on a globe or maps. This is where people are like, “What is Qi? What is yin-yang?” All it is is a model.

If you walked into an Algebra class or Calculus and started saying, “What is Y equals MX plus B? What are the formulations?” Are those real? No. They’re pointing to something that’s real, but they themselves are not inherently real. That’s where a lot of confusion comes. People are like, “What is Qi? What is yin-yang?” Yin-yang is a model of binary code. In fact, Boolean logic was born out of Yijing, which then gave way to modern-day computing. That is all based on Chinese theory, Chinese medicine, Chinese metaphysics, and the basis of what has borne out Chinese medicine.

These models are a lot more effective because not only are they natural models, but they’re models based on complex systems and networks rather than this reductionist way of looking at isolated variables that are supposedly linear and can be isolated. We all know that is not the case. If you take medication or you take some sort of intervention, usually, it’s going to impact the whole system. A more effective way is to understand interventions that have the ability to affect the entire system with very low risk of adverse effects.

Acupuncture is one of the safest procedures. To answer what it is good for, it’s effective for many things. Pain is the primary thing that people look at when they think about it, but anything to do with chronic illness, such as inflammatory-based diseases, which are prevalent across the board. It improves in enkephalins and endorphins. It reduces the stress response. It’s great for PTSD. It’s great for any type of anxiety or depression in terms of emotional processing.

I know you’ve experienced this directly when you come into the clinic. You’re going through an intense emotional experience. What it does is allow you to metabolize the emotions and stay within the body. The body and the breath are the things that are always present. Acupuncture helps the nervous system regulate in such a way that it’s not so overwhelming. It can allow you to regulate, breathe, and metabolize those intense emotions that you’re going through.

When I do acupuncture, you’re putting the little needles all over me, right?

Yes.

Do you always put the needles in the same place, or do you place them in different spots?

What we’re doing is we’re looking at the pattern on how your nervous system is oriented and what experiences you’re having in terms of emotions and any symptoms or signs. We’re placing that pattern inappropriately where you are at that current moment. It takes a very long time to become a master because you’re ultimately trying to understand the nature of where that person is at in terms of out of balance. You’re trying to create the code, so to speak, in terms of the placement of the needles to bring them back into balance.

It would be like if you were deciding to go into a place that needed a digital code and you didn’t know the digital code. It would be that access wasn’t granted. Acupuncture can’t disrupt things, but if you happen to know the code to bring it back into balance, access granted. You can feel that shift in the nervous system.

All of these patterns are emergent from the way the body adapts. All diseases and sicknesses are an adaptation. It’s compensation. What we’re looking at is what those compensations and adaptations are that you’re having and how we can support the system to come back into a state of balance and efficiency so that it’s not having to compensate and reduce its overall energy expenditure in inefficient ways. By doing so, we move it closer to a virtuous cycle rather than a vicious cycle.

 

How often does acupuncture work? You have someone sit down, and you do the acupuncture. I’ve done it. It takes an hour, but at the end of the hour, it feels like five minutes. Does anybody ever say, “I don’t feel any different.”

Yeah. Acupuncture is similar to most skilled, expert professions in that it is somewhat contingent on the ability to apply it. That expertise could cause someone not to experience anything. There are some people who are highly in their heads, and they’re trying to analyze that. They may not even experience change or be so dissociated from their body.

A lot of the things I do differently than a lot of acupuncturists, and this is my integration of a lot of different areas, is that I’m using somatic body work. It is a form of Tui Na, which is a Chinese medical massage incorporated with acupuncture. What this does is accelerate the direction and touch. It, in particular, affects something called C-fibers. They are slow, myelinated fibers in the skin that help with emotional processing. This, combined with Tui Na and the cranial sacral work that I do, helps accentuate the vagus nerve stimulation. The needles are the direction to help balance the pattern, and then I’m taking broader approaches.

People theoretically may not notice such a difference if they’re in balance. For instance, if you’re hydrated and I give you a glass of water, you might be like, “I don’t notice anything different.” If you’re dehydrated and you’ve done a 50-mile bike ride, and you didn’t have any water, and I give you a glass of water, you’re like, “That was the best thing ever.”

That’s the difference between the different medicines. Western medicine is forcing an effect. Chinese medicine is guiding an effect. It’s communicating with the body rather than overriding it. That is why the side effects aren’t taking place. If the body and nervous system need that rebalancing, it will receive it, that communication will connect, and change will be pursued. We only experience relative change.

Water is a good analogy because if you need water and you get water, it’s like, “That’s the best thing ever.” If you don’t, you’re like, “I don’t notice anything.” That’s why it’s a little bit difficult. I always recommend that if people are stressed or going through a significant emotional experience that they go get acupuncture and then tell me if they notice it works.

I can tell you that every time I do acupuncture when I’m stressed and spinning out, I feel better.

It’s able to shift the nervous system in such a way that your entire experience of reality changes. That is narrowing down the nature of a lot of what acupuncture is. It’s very sophisticated in its ability to affect consciousness. Consciousness is where we get caught in different experiences of our perception of reality through different emotional states. A lot of those emotional states are from the past, but they impact our perception of the present.

A lot of our emotional states are from the past, but they continue to impact our perception of the present. Share on X

With acupuncture, it’s able to shift you into a state of safety, which is ventral vagal. That allows you to feel connected to yourself and others and have a sense of receptivity to reality. Stress isn’t the problem if, in fact, our nervous systems can receive. That is the nature of restoration and rejuvenation. Our nervous system now has the ability to receive things that are coming at it. If it’s maintaining a contracted stress state, anything that’s coming at it feels overwhelming.

Let’s talk about durability. If someone does acupuncture, how long should that feeling last?

The nature of these things is dependent or contingent on the patterns that the person is dealing with and the other supporting factors. If the person is in a significant amount of pathological patterns, for instance, they come in the clinic, their sleep is horrible, they’re not eating well, and maybe they’re in an addiction state where they’re constantly using, the acupuncture will help to the degree that they’re able to start to shift out of those patterns.

How long it lasts is contingent on the nature of other variables. If someone comes in and they’re healthy, they’re exercising, and they’re sleeping well, one session could last for months, if not longer. It depends on the strength of the other supporting factors. We’re coming in, recalibrating the nature of the nervous system, and taking it back to zero point, where it feels very centered. The ability to stay in that state is largely contingent on their conditioned self. It is this framework of how we experience reality based on our upbringing, our beliefs, our traumas, our ways of perceiving self in others in the world, and our thought patterns. Those things can shift us out.

Ultimately, acupuncture is going to be a lot stronger than going to a therapy session only. The therapy session might be able to give you a better story and how to reframe it. What acupuncture is doing is going to the core of the issue. What I mean by that is it’s your experience of those things. It’s not actually the thing itself. I’m sure you have something in your past. You’ve dealt with something that you’ve had a difficult time with, and then you’ve healed from that. What I mean by that is when you think about it, you don’t have that emotional pain.

 

I’m okay.

That’s quite significant in the fact that you could tell the story however you want. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was your painful nature of the emotions of the experience, which is largely located in the nervous system. We’re going to the root of why the stories matter rather than trying to reframe the stories themselves. By telling a better story, you can slightly shift someone’s perspective, but that emotional pain is still there.

What we want to do is create a body-based approach where we’re able to process the emotions, relax the body, and then regulate the nervous system. It’s like turning a dial on the radio station. It’s like, “An entirely different amount of content is coming through me because I’m entirely experiencing reality differently. I didn’t have to tell you anything. All I had to do was change the station tuning, which is the nervous system in the body and, ultimately, the emotional state.”

By doing so, that’s a lot stronger than simply someone telling your perspective, and then you’re like, “I need to go read another affirmation, get a quote, or have my therapist tell me how to reframe this.” It’s limited in its impact. It’s the same thing with exercise. You go to exercise. All of a sudden, your state changes, and you’re better able to deal with a difficult emotional conversation. They’re body-based approaches that are always going to be the longest-lasting.

Emotional integration, largely in psychiatry and psychology, is focused on reframing and trying to help you navigate within the mind rather than focusing on self-love. It is also helping you understand why the compensations you have were an adaptation, and that they’re not your fault, but they are your responsibility to navigate and rebalance.

Healing involves every layer of your mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical self. Share on X

Getting Ready To Go Down The Path Of Healing

I know you see professional athletes. You see a wide range of people at your clinic. Who is a good client for you?

To simplify, it’s people who are ready to go down the path of healing. The word healing comes from the word wholeness. Healing involves every layer. It involves the mental, the emotional, the spiritual, and the physical. A lot of that can be somewhat hesitant for the layperson. They’re like, “I have an issue. I think that my body’s broken.”

My approach is, “Your body’s not broken. Your body’s accurate. Let’s figure out why it’s experiencing itself the way it is because of something from the past, and then all of the emergent patterns in terms of how you’ve compensated and tried to navigate those imbalances.” The person who is ready to go down some of these more uncomfortable processes and be ready to navigate that is the person who comes to see me. A lot of times, it’s athletes. Sometimes, it’s everyday people who are ready to not just cope with their situation, but transform their situation.

There’s a difference between coping and transformation. Transformation is exiting the way you experience things into a completely different paradigm. That can be quite uncomfortable. It’s also much more long-lasting. Whereas coping is like, “Let me give you something to cope with the issues that are going on. It’ll help you navigate them better, but you still have those issues going on. Let’s look at why those issues are there and why they were emergent patterns from the past.”

 

We’re not taught self-love because we are wired for social survival. Anything that your parents wired in terms of their social survival is what they taught you. That’s eating, nutrition, exercise, relationships, how we communicate, how we talk, and all those things. Every part of that is our nervous system communicating with each other. Whether you feel safe around someone or you don’t feel safe is largely due to a lot of these variables.

You end up with professional athletes or elite athletes. When I started working with you, I started working with Neufit. We’re going to talk about Neufit here in a little bit. For most people, when they first come to you, do they come to you thinking that they’re going to get more fit and they’re going to work on their physical performance, and then the next thing you know, they’re talking about their emotional health, spiritual health, and fitness?

I always say that I meet everyone where they’re at. When they come to see me, it’s not like I’m taking them somewhere where they don’t want to go. I meet you and guide you. Especially when working with the Neubie, the Neubie is bringing the body into a state of electrical charge and opening that is a conduit to processing emotions if that person chooses to. It’s like when you go for a massage. You get relaxed, and you open up. All of a sudden, you start becoming conversationalists. You talk and open up. That’s the same thing. The Neubie exercises that way, too, but the Neubie is an accentuation of that.

When people come in, I give them an opportunity to do these things all simultaneously. Whereas normal medicine or traditional medicine has compartmentalized everything. That’s part of the issue. Everything is seen as separate from itself. Our whole body works together. When you come into the clinic, I’m looking at what the best levers are to pull to create the greatest transformation in the most efficient process for you. Sometimes, that is just doing the Neubie. Sometimes, that’s the Neubie with acupuncture. Sometimes, that’s acupuncture. If you’re depleted and going through a lot of stress, you need restorative practices and techniques. I meet people where they’re at.

Modern medicine sees everything in the body as separate. In reality, the whole body works together. Share on X

I always say people are sometimes more in pain or more confused than the other. A lot of the frameworks that we have in traditional society almost prey on these vicious cycles. There are misaligned incentives economically through Western medicine, not necessarily through Western science, which is based on inquiry, data, and science. It’s Western medicine that’s very motivated by certain economic incentives. That’s the issue. That distinction’s important. Western science is fine. It’s great.

Difference Between Western Science And Western Medicine

What’s the difference between Western medicine and Western science? I want to go back to the Neubie because we need to give people more context as to what the Neubie is.

Western medicine is a form of inquiry, looking at data and observation. They largely use the scientific model and look at reductionist ways of viewing things, although Western science is evolving more to look like Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine models. If you look up complex systems biology, complex systems pharmacology, those are starting to look at things in a distributed, dynamic, and interdependent way, which is the way complex systems work.

I do see this advancement in Western sciences. What we’re unlikely to see is that science translates into Western treatments. Western treatments are built around an economic and financial model. It has a relationship with Western science, but it’s not like you advance Western science, you find this out, and all of a sudden, we’re going to incorporate that into Western medicine. You know business more than anything. It’s based on incentives. Those incentives don’t necessarily have patients at the central point of care. It has it down the totem pole. It’s a byproduct of the financial incentives.

People are treated more like commodities rather than actual people who are trying to heal. This is where that distinction is an important distinction. People think that Western science is going to advance, and then all of a sudden, Western medicine is going to improve. We have not seen that, and I don’t think that that will come about if, in fact, we don’t change the incentive models.

Ultimately, they’re largely pharmaceutical-based and surgical-based. They’re good for emergency-type procedures, but not so good for healing and chronic illness, especially on the approach of the body, the emotions, and the nervous system, which is 80% of health. The other 20% is largely dictated through more physical-based medicine. Physically-based medicine are nutrition, biochemistry, genetics, and genomics. Epigenetics is like the lever in between those that are interacting with the environment, with your entire situation, and what genes get turned on and off based on the emergent pattern of your lifestyle.

Getting Rid Of The Reductionist Way Of Thinking

That was a lot. When you say reductionist, let’s go back to that. What do you mean when you say a reductionist way of thinking?

A reductionist way of thinking is a Western way of thinking where you try to zoom in on the smallest part and make sense of the whole. It’s like, “I’m going to zoom in as far as I can, and I’m going to try to make sense of the entire whole.” It would be like if I decided to study Romeo and Juliet, and I was like, “I understood all the words and the paragraphs. I’m going to just study the letters,” as if I’m going to derive more understanding.

This is where Western understanding and Eastern understanding are perfect if they married each other. Zooming in is very powerful. If you use the telescope and all you could see was this grain of sand, and you didn’t zoom out, you would miss a lot of reality. Reductionist is about looking at an isolated variable, creating a hierarchy of it, and then trying to see what its cause and effect on the system is. The problem is that it thinks it’s siloed. It doesn’t have a great ability to be flexible in understanding how, when they move this variable, it affects all the other variables. The non-reductionist view is to say that the part matters.

I have a good way to think about it. If my hip hurts, it’s like, “My hip hurts. I need to ice my hip. I need to stretch my hip,” but it’s not your hip. It’s down your ankle. That’s the same type of thing. Where you have the injury isn’t necessarily where the injury is stemming from. The injury is stemming from somewhere else in your body.

It can be.

Everything is connected.

Everything is connected, so there’s a relationship. That’s where the other model is. If you think about reductionist models, they’re looking at things from a linear standpoint. Meaning, it continues to go in a specific direction at a consistent pace. They’re isolated, and they’re hierarchical. Isolated means it tries to separate that out of the other parts.

The other models are distributed. Meaning, different nodes on a network are distributed in different parts. They are dynamic. Meaning, when one node moves, the other nodes have to change the way they’re communicating with that node. They’re interdependent, so the moment that one moves, the other ones are moving with it. That’s more accurate in terms of looking at the system.

If I were to give a simple understanding, Western medicine isolates the part to the exclusion of the whole. It’s not that it doesn’t care for the whole, but its emphasis is on the part. That’s powerful in infectious disease and emergency medicine because you’re willing to focus on that, so you can save the person’s life.

The whole is the primary focus, and the part is secondary. It’s an emphasis. You’re looking at the whole as the primary emphasis. That allows you to get closer to wholeness because healing comes from wholeness. Wholeness is the ability to account for all the variables without trying to isolate one in a reductionist way.

 

With that said, there can be tremendous insights from looking at things in a reductionist way as long as you remember to zoom out. This was a lot of my own path. I studied all forms of medicine. I spent over 30,000 hours in functional medicine and Western sciences. I didn’t study too much into the therapeutics of Western medicine except for the ones that I needed, largely because it’s not necessarily where healing, per se, is going to come from.

You’ve seen billions, if not trillions of dollars, go into cancer research or finding a cure to AIDS. It’s never coming because they’re looking at it as fundamentally flawed. It’s like if you look at something in a certain way and expect a specific outcome. Sometimes, it’s the way you’re looking at it. That is the case here. We have to look at things differently.

What this model is attempting to do is to look at it from the standpoint of a complex systems approach. That complex systems approach is the ability to see how those variables are interdependent. They’re interactive, they’re dynamic, and they’re distributed in such a way that the interventions must account for the whole primarily, first and foremost, and then, secondarily, the part. If we focus on the whole, the part will move towards the whole.

How Wesley Nurtured His Passion For Healing

What happened in your life that caused you to be so passionate about healing?

I was the direct result of the experience of the nth degree of human suffering. I was born into a cult religion called the Two By Twos. It was one of the world’s most secretive religious cults. The FBI tied 900 different pedophiles to the organization. I was sexually raped from ages 4 to 13. From age seven, I started developing a lot of extraordinary physical signs and symptoms, both in the nature of skin issues, digestive issues, depression, and anxiety.

I started experiencing even more severe issues as I started to study to try to get better. I started studying spirituality and healing because I felt like I was fractured or fragmented in a million different ways. My experience of reality at that juncture was one of tremendous suffering and tremendous pain. That is what led me down the path of this.

A lot of the way I studied things wasn’t because, “I need to take a test.” It was like, “If I don’t correct this, I should probably exit.” Ultimately, my quality of life was so horrible. If you have back pain, you’re pretty motivated to do something about the back pain. Think about that from a broad systemic layer. That’s what led me to seek the truth, because if this were the truth of reality, how horrible it would be.

What I realized and understood through healing was that it was my experience of reality. That was largely dictated by this significant amount of trauma that my nervous system and my body endured. All the symptoms and signs at their peak state were 70 different signs and symptoms for autoimmune diseases. I was bedridden at nineteen. I always joke in my own mind that I felt like I was 100 years old.

People often use age as a way, and it has a significant relationship. I experience at 36 that I have no pain. I experience liberation in terms of emotional stability. I have no suffering. Age is a relationship, but it’s not necessarily the direct reason for a lot of people’s suffering. Yet, at the same time, we often write it off as that way because most people don’t realize how important it is to go back into their childhood and to look at all of these things in terms of their conditioning, trauma, and emotions.

I assure you that every single person, regardless of whether they didn’t go through the severity that I went through, has experienced a tremendous amount of suffering. That’s a large degree of the human experience. What we’re trying to get back to is this state of liberation that we all remember but ultimately don’t experience. That’s part of why spirituality exists and so forth. It exists because there’s something not quite right in our experience.

All of these areas led me to look at every layer of healing and medicine. I didn’t have a choice. You go into a specialty in medicine. You have one thing, and you just look at that. A specialty in medicine can be very beneficial, but in healing, because of the nature of how it derives from wholeness, you need to understand how each system is impacting the other. You need to go deep into every single layer. If you don’t, it’s going to be difficult to know where to pull the lever.

My path was born out of my own direct experience. At nineteen, I had emotional triggers, physical triggers, and environmental triggers that caused me to be completely dysregulated all the time. I couldn’t even go out in public without having severe physical reactions to all my symptoms and signs. To experience the opposite of that tells me that everyone is having a slightly different experience of reality based on their past.

That’s why when they’re in the present and some of those wounds within their nervous system or unprocessed emotions that are impacting our physical state get activated, immediately, they start to go into what we say as we’re not doing so well. It’s touching on that piece. It’s not so much the piece that’s happening right now. It’s that piece that is touching on the past. If we are able to heal, process, and reconnect to all those pieces, then you don’t have triggers. I haven’t experienced a trigger in three years.

That’s amazing.

It’s incredible. If you were to ask me that at nineteen, I would’ve thought the world was hell. Now, if you asked me, I’d say the world is heaven. Was it heaven or hell? It was my experience of it. It was dictated based on my upbringing, my experience, and my conditioning. My nervous system was trying to protect me from everything and everyone.

The cult I grew up in thought that everyone who wasn’t within our cult was evil and was going to a lost eternity. They were dangerous. My nervous system was wired that way. You then have sexual trauma. I had certain genetic and epigenetic things that I later found out were further contributing to the physical disease processes that I also corrected. All of these things were playing a role, but the nervous system, the trauma, and the unprocessed emotion were playing 80% of the role.

How To Start Addressing Unresolved Trauma

How does a person start to look at their issues? How does a person know that they’ve got these issues and traumas that they need to work through? Where do they start?

The way you start is by asking yourself, “Where do I suffer?” If I were to ask one simple question, that would be the broadest way to start. Where do I suffer? Do I suffer in my romantic relationships or my career? Sometimes, it is all of it. Do I suffer in terms of my interpersonal relationship in terms of myself? What is my inner dialogue like? How am I treating myself? That is usually a reflection of our early relationship with our parents, our family members, and our society at large.

We learn to do the same things they did to us, but we do it over and over again. The reason we do that is because that’s how we survived. If you’re still alive, then it must have worked. That perpetuates this vicious cycle of self-criticism and self-abuse that leads to further suffering. That’s why, inherently, the mind is negative because we’re wired for survival. Nothing ever pleasant killed you. The negativity is inherent.

One of the things that you experience in post-liberation is that you experience the mind as completely a utility. It’s no longer this negative self-talk. There is none of that anymore. The reason is that it was never a mind issue. It was a body’s nervous system and emotional issue. That’s why trying to solve it from the mind is like you’re playing music and you decide to drown it out with another speaker of music. You’re adding conditioning on top of the conditioning rather than tuning the station back to where its default setting is. That is the authentic self, which is outside of the conditioned responses that we feel will bring us love. Unconditional love is experienced once we unwind all of the conditioning.

We all want to be happy, joyous, and free.

That’s the natural state. The reason we want to be that is that’s the natural state. I don’t have to try to be those things. I experience that intrinsically. The biggest step towards healing is meeting yourself exactly where you are. It is asking where people start. For one, understand that you have to meet the painful parts within yourself. Those are the areas that need reconnection. They need to be met with deep levels of intimacy, honesty, vulnerability, and openness because those are the things that you didn’t receive. That’s why there’s still pain there.

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There wasn’t an ability to neurologically develop, and/or there was direct pain inflicted on it because of patterns from the past that your parents survived from their parents, and so forth. That emergent pattern has to be met with self-love, compassion, grace, and understanding. That’s all of the practices that will allow that to heal.

If you try to use shame, blame, guilt, and fear, it’ll drive you back into the very thing that resulted in your need to escape it, which is distraction, addiction, or some form of dissociation or coping that helped you escape the nature of the conditioned self. That includes the mind and all of the conditions of the nervous system, like sensations and somatic, which come as a result of that. These things are very visceral, body-like.

Largely, people are operating reality from the mind. That’s why the majority of this is trying to become embodied. Meaning, we are trying to experience reality from being in our body. Once we’re in our bodies, everything makes sense. The reason exercise is so enjoyable for people is that they’re usually in their bodies. You can use exercise to dissociate and not be in the body, but ultimately, exercise is a powerful way of experiencing reality through the body through increased levels of energy. It feels enjoyable to be in the body once those endorphins and enkephalins are going.

Healing work is largely about meeting the areas that are uncomfortable. It’s going in the path of most resistance. Most people don’t heal because the nervous system that helped you survive, which is based on social survival, is the opposite of what will allow you to heal. Healing is about self-love. We’re not taught self-love. We’re not wired for self-love. Ultimately, that is what the spiritual path is. You’re loving your inner child, which is the innocence of a child, which is represented as the divine.

NeuFit: The Biggest Breakthrough In Orthopedic Medicine

Let’s talk about the Neubie. The Neubie is my favorite thing. I go in pretty much on a weekly basis. You can tell how I’m doing emotionally based on working with me and the Neubie. Tell people about the Neubie. What is it, and how does it work?

The Neubie is one of these powerful technologies that is the biggest advancement and breakthrough in orthopedic medicine, which is the body in terms of musculoskeletal, and then also in terms of performance. That’s muscle-building and the ability to access the nervous system through a stimulus. The Neubie uses a DC pulse current to mimic the same signal our nervous system sends, but it turns up the volume of that signal.

Theoretically, we’ve said that it’s about 250 times stronger than the signal we can send. You could imagine if you could turn up the volume of the signal that’s running through us. When we do rehab exercises 250 times to strengthen that signal, that’s 4 repetitions equivalent to 1,000 neurological repetitions. All of a sudden, you’re taking something and magnifying the same processes that we know to be effective in a way that allows the body and nervous system to communicate and connect in a way that allows it to improve at a much faster rate.

You can look up a lot of the literature and studies. If you go to Neufit’s website, there’s been a lot more literature and research reinforcing this. From a pure standpoint of empirical data, it reduces rehabilitation time anywhere between 50% to 70%. This is on average. This isn’t an exceptional case study. If someone comes in with an ACL injury, normally, it might take nine months. Usually, we see it for 4 to 5 months. Sometimes, it’s a little sooner. Sometimes, it’s a little later. It depends on the individual and the other variables.

Ultimately, if you have any post-op procedure, you could say that the rehabilitation time would be cut down by that magnitude. The reason is that our nervous system is wired for survival. We’ve mentioned this a number of times in this episode. The way that is impacted in an orthopedic injury, let’s say for the knee, and we talked about the ACL, the immediacy of the nervous system is to shut down communication to that area because it’s trying to survive.

It doesn’t need all its parts to survive. What happens is that a lot of neurological inhibition goes into that area. Meaning, neurological output to the muscle that would normally create strength output and stability of the knee is downregulated. That’s why immediately, you can start to see atrophy. There’s a certain neurological tone that would be normal there, which reduces. That volume of neurological tone is neurological inhibition, which is largely dictated by pain and trauma.

The Neubie is able to connect back there and help the brain and nervous system reconnect and understand that it’s no longer in the state of trauma. As it reconnects to that, it’s able to start to relax those governors of neurological inhibition and turn back the volume so that the neurological output is closer to pre-injury and then eventually, above that. That’s where performance comes.

We’re able to loosen those governors that the nervous system normally would ratchet down because it’s wired for survival. If we create a connection, we create safety. The way we create a connection is turning up communication. This is in all aspects of relationships. The Neubie happens to be more orthopedically designed in terms of the musculoskeletal system.

A lot of the things I do in the clinic are largely around connection and communication, and magnifying those signals within the nervous system to bring back online safety. Through safety, you experience healing because safety is the prerequisite for the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s the result of the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system and the vagus nerve, which is 85% of the nervous system. That turns down all of the inflammatory pathways in the body. It’s a system-wide approach.

The Neubie can be used for post-op rehabilitation, pain, injury, and also for performance. It’s one of the broadest tools of intervention for the direct interaction of the nervous system in the fastest way possible, which tilts more to that side. Acupuncture tilts more to broader systemic things in terms of emotions, anxiety, depression, digestive issues, and chronic illness. They both interact, but the difference is the direction and the magnitude of where that is on the spectrum.

Those are the two main modalities that you use at your clinic, right?

Yeah. I would say acupuncture, somatic work, which is in combination, cranial sacral work, and the ability of Tui Na, which is Chinese medical massage, and then the Neubie, both from exercise and performance. I’d use certain massage tools. Have you experienced the body buffer?

Yeah.

What I’m doing is trying to get you in the body. If I can get you in the body and we can start talking, you can start processing. That’s why I’m not the biggest fan of talk therapy, because talk therapy without integration of the body is still compartmentalized. The body is what processes the past. The mind is talking about it.

That’s why sometimes, people will go through therapy, and it’ll help a little bit, but it’s not fully integrating. It’s because we need to take it from the bottom-up approach, which is the body, the nervous system, and the emotions. I’m trying to bring it all together under one system rather than compartmentalize everything, like, “You need this.”

I’m looking at the patient and understanding these patterns of where they’re at internally and helping to shift them using these tools. Most people are like, “I should go get acupuncture.” They are looking at it from a service-based thing. They’re not understanding the nature of when to apply it and how to create transformative shifts. That’s why it’s called Breakthrough Performance and Rehab. It’s helping you break through these experiences or blocks that you have within your nervous system from the past that are preventing you from being present in your body, which will allow you to perform at your highest level.

I see you on a weekly basis. I tell people about you, and they’re like, “What is it?” I work out with the Neubie. I get a workout, but there’s way more to it. It’s emotional. It’s spiritual. It’s talk therapy. It’s all of those things. It’s much more than a workout. It’s much more than any of those things.

It’s the opposite of specialized medicine. Specialized medicine is what almost everyone experiences nowadays. They go to their primary care, and they get referred out. You get referred out again and again. It’s because no one’s looking at the whole anymore. No one’s even practicing the whole anymore. When you come into my clinic, people are always asking, “What does he do?” because they’re looking at things from the same way that we’ve been conditioned to, which is through specialization.

Specialization is only effective in surgery, acute infectious disease, or in life-saving emergency medicine. Outside of that, a lot of it needs to be integrated into the whole. Healing is derived from the word wholeness. In order to shift the system, we need to be working on all systems at once. It is so we can pull the lever that helps the breakthrough in terms of their patterns and shift them to an entirely different state.

This reductionist view of things is the challenge. Everyone’s looking at the outputs. The way my clinic largely works is with the inputs. Those inputs are pulling those levers and using those tools in whichever way to help the person start to create a sense of trust within themselves, understand self-love, and also understand why they are doing the things that they’re doing.

Most of the time, people have these adaptations that we’ve all pathologized. They think that, ultimately, they’re a bad person as a result of that. I’m sure you get this all the time. The people who are like, “I’m addicted. I’m horrible. I feel like I can’t do anything,” little do they know, a lot of these things were compensations from their early development.

They didn’t have a sense of safety and emotional attunement from their mother and father, who also didn’t have it from their mother and father. That pattern caused them to try to find safety in their own body through these compensations. Drugs are an attempt to feel connected without the pain and chaos of a dysregulated nervous system.

It’s the solution to the pain.

If anything, it should be a representation of how these people need more love, more compassion, and more care. The reason we have so much stigma and issues with it is that we are wired for social survival. Areas of addiction, drugs, and sex are things that are in the shadows that are the most impactful, but the way they’ve been dealt with in social constructs is through shame, blame, and guilt. Ultimately, these things are where all of our power lies in terms of the energy of our system.

What we need to do is bring it to the light and help us see why these things are occurring and why these strong forces are causing compensations and deviations from what would normally be healthy. If we can do that, then we can allow that release of tension to come back to the center. Otherwise, you’re creating this perpetuating cycle of, “I’m bad.” That leads you to use the solution again.

That’s the guilt and shame.

It’s the whole vicious cycle.

The Myth Of The “Inaccurate Body”

Let’s talk about the inaccurate body. You’ve talked about the myth of the inaccurate body. What does that mean?

The primary approach from Western biomedicine is that we look at the body as broken and largely look at it as a machine. You look at it, like, “How do we fix these broken parts? How do we fix these broken outputs?” In Eastern and ancient wisdom, we look at the body as accurate. It’s communicating all of these outputs because of how experience has shaped it.

Intelligently, it has learned how to survive through those compensations. We are listening to it and trying to understand why it arrived at the compensation adaptation that it did, and how we can unwind back to its original state before those things occurred. Wisdom, clarity, and discernment are a result of processed emotions. When you’re in an emotional state and you’re very confused and wounded, you’re like, “I don’t know what to do.”

If you sit with the emotions long enough, or days elapse and you process enough, you’re like, “I’m clear now.” It’s because discernment, clarity, and wisdom are a result of processing emotions. They are conduits. Not only are we taking this organism that has adapted in these stressful conditions in a very effective way, but we’re helping them integrate back into the whole. We have the wisdom, resilience, and clarity of how to navigate forward, not from a survival standpoint of hypervigilance or neuroticism, but from a place of safety because of the healing.

The biggest difference is that people think that the body is some mechanical problem. It’s this innate, intelligent organism that’s adapting to all unhealthy scenarios that kept you alive. In my situation, I realized it was super unhealthy. My body was communicating. It was telling me the truth. I thought my body was the problem. That is what shame is. Shame is an inherent ability to help you survive. The people who have the resources, which could be your parents or the people around you who raised you, have to be God to you. If your mind doesn’t perceive it that way, it may lose access to those resources.

 

How many times have you heard, “My parents are the best.” It’s not that they weren’t doing their best. They, like all of us, have compensation adaptations. They were only able to be as connected with you as they were connected with their parents and themselves. That leaves a lot of compensation because we didn’t have that emotional attunement that would allow for a super healthy and robust nervous system to develop a sense of safety within themselves. Those early years are the most impactful.

It’s looking at the body as innate and intelligent, not broken. That is why it’s a myth to think ultimately that the body is inaccurate. It’s accurate. I know that because I experienced the opposite. My genetics didn’t change, but my epigenetics and my conditioned self changed. That was because I unwound all of the conditioned self and the unprocessed emotions. I healed the trauma and rebuilt the body through biochemistry, nutrition, and all of the circadian rhythm regulation, lifestyle, and relationships.

I didn’t know how to have healthy relationships because that wasn’t mirrored to me. I thought people were threats and that people were to be avoided. Ultimately, what helps us feel healthy is connection. All of these things had to be built from the ground up. That’s part of what led me down this whole path. When you go from one extreme to another extreme and not having any of it, and the only way out is back through, you have to figure it all out. I was devoted to doing that process.

Ultimately, it was to understand the entire human experience and the full spectrum of both. What most people experience is a sense of deep suffering in hell and disconnection, all the way to the experience of safety in heaven, which is full connection and feeling a sense of expansion. Meaning, receptivity to whatever’s coming at you. It’s okay because you feel safe within your own body. That’s where home is. It is in our own body.

Life is happening for me, not to me. I also think it’s not a big deal. I shared that with you. I have a friend of mine, my old sponsor, Todd. His son had committed suicide a couple of years prior. He realized that most things that people think are a big deal are not a big deal. I adopted that mindset. I’m like, “How did that change my conditioning? How did that change the way that I was domesticated?”

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I used to think that everything was a big deal. It was like it was the end of the world. I was like, “I’m going to lose everything. I’m going to lose my business. I’m going to lose my house. I’m going to lose this relationship.” It was like the house was on fire. I realized that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter where I live. It doesn’t matter if I live in this big, beautiful house or if I live in this one-bedroom apartment. It doesn’t matter if I’m in business or if I’m not in business. All these things happen in life, and it is learning that it’s going to be okay. It’s always going to be okay. That was probably a process for me. I know it was a process for you as well.

You give great, tremendous insight from that framework of perspective. That’s ultimately something that you probably arrived at both directly experientially through the nature of life experience. You went through a lot of different eras where you felt like you needed that to feel safe. The two things we, as humans, cling to are either attachments or avoidance.

We cling to those attachments because we think they’re bringing us a sense of safety. Largely, those attachments are based on social conditioning that we’ve gravitated to as a way of feeling a sense of belonging, validation, or acknowledgement. That can happen with achievements or anything external. That gives us a transient experience of safety because we’re like, “We belong now.” Ultimately, it’s transient because it’s not coming from a place of self-love. Remember, social survival is self-love.

Ultimately, what you’re longing for is an experience of eternal safety within your own body. In order to do that, we have to practice self-love. Through that, we start to experience that things aren’t that big a deal. Anything outside of us is always going to be shape-shifting. That’s the nature of reality. It’s a constant state of change. The areas where we feel panicked and urgent are things from the past, of not feeling safe, connected, and loved. When you’re experiencing that conditioning, it can be a strong pattern to break.

I remember a little bit into my clinic early on, when I had built this entire way of living. The architecture was as aligned as possible. I could still sense that there was something so urgent within me, like I was still trying to get somewhere. Urgency is always from a state of trauma. If you have places where you feel urgent, it’s coming from within the nature of unprocessed things from the past.

That was my last thing. I built everything architecturally in my life to be exactly in alignment with me, and I was still having this sense of urgency. This was when I got to my final layers of healing. My last two years of healing were quite exponential in terms of my shift in my physiology, psychology, neurology, and biology. I saw glimpses of that along the path, but they were never consistent. I would go through these huge ups and downs and feel like I was going back into my trauma. I’d be back out above water, and then I’d go back under.

Eventually, there was a permanent shift. You have this experience of eternal safety. You realize that it was all conditioned. The condition itself was experiencing reality. As it was changing, some part of that self was experiencing either panic, urgency, or emotional elation and excitement because it thought it was getting somewhere. Ultimately, where you come down to is complete safety once the conditioned self has been completely dissolved into the authentic self. That is the true self that we all are underneath the conditioned self. That’s a state of eternal safety, love, connection, and clarity.

What you speak to on that point is a perspective shift in the mind that can help people start to get there. The next layer would be inquiring, “Where am I still experiencing that conditioning in my life?” The greatest level of performance is from a place of the flow state. The flow state is complete relaxation internally and a sense of safety. It’s the ability to let go. That sense is something that we can learn to experience all the time through the nature of this work and this healing.

Bringing Your Attention And Awareness Inward

Ninety percent of transformation is awareness. We’ve got to change in our body, and we’ve got to process whatever traumas from the past. I’m thinking about the mind. If I know it and I’m aware, is that the first place to go? Do you need to be aware of it first before you can process the trauma? What’s your opinion on that?

You always have to have awareness of this before you can go anywhere else. If you’re not aware, then ultimately, you can’t start the processing, particularly, awareness in the body. There is a distinction here that maybe would be helpful for people. If you’re driving in your vehicle and you’re going home, and all of a sudden, you realize, “How did I get home? I was dreaming in my mind about something,” but the autopilot of us drove home, that would be a representation of the dreaming mind. You had the awareness of what you were thinking in your mind, but that had no relationship to the body.

Healing is about taking that attention and awareness and directing it to the body, the sensations, the patterns, the neurological holdings, the breathing patterns, and what’s going on. It’s what we would consider scientifically as interoception or interoceptive awareness, which is awareness within the sensations of the body.

I say that spirituality is the objectivity of the internal state. It’s taking your attention and awareness that normally, you would be focused outwardly, and you focus it inwardly. The crazy part of it is that it’s pretty much like physics done internally. When you bring an observer into a physics experiment, it starts to change the experiment.

Pretty much, the whole meditative process and this attention and awareness that’s brought to the self, which creates the transformation, is a state of connection and awareness to what is already happening. The paradox of the universe is that it is what creates the transformation. It’s not you trying to reject or resist what’s going on. It’s coming closer to the body itself that’s experiencing those sensations and those experiences within itself as a result of the stimuli outside.

Meditation helps create a broader gap. Otherwise, you jump into the mind. The body is a microcosm of the entire universe. That’s why it’s so overwhelming. That’s the reason the conditioned self exists anyway. It’s too much stimulation for us to handle and process all at once, so we have a conditioned self. We filter reality all through that. That’s why people are having such vastly different experiences of reality, because they’re filtering it through their past and the present.

The body is a microcosm of the entire universe. To keep us from getting overwhelmed, we have created a conditioned self. Share on X

If you want to experience reality in a way that is what most people would consider the liberated state or healed state, we have to go in and through the body. The way to do that is to take the attention and awareness and direct it within the body. Maybe you’re aware mentally, like, “I have this addictive pattern,” or, “I have this pattern of relationship where I’m constantly arguing with my significant other. I’m aware of it.” The next thing to do is to be aware of the body when you’re in those situations.

That’s the layer of the bottom-up approach that I’m speaking to that most people are missing. They know what’s happening at the layer of the mind, but they’re not present in the body to create the transformative nature of experience. All healing is experiential. People think that healing can be intellectual. There can be portions of it that are helpful, but it’s largely experiential in the same way trauma was experiential.

The only way to experience something new is to be in the experience. That’s why you have to come back to the body. When you come back to the body, it is like, “I’m having this argument. What am I feeling in my body?” Most people aren’t aware because they’re in their minds. Especially when that intensity of argument starts to happen, it shoots you out of the body into the mind.

All of the healing is coming back to embodiment, but it’s a process. Ultimately, theoretically, it could happen at once because we’re all whole underneath, but for the body and nervous system, it’s a real physiological and neurological change. This is all very somatic. It isn’t something theoretical. It’s all directly verifiable within.

Some of the experiences that I had along the path felt like I was dying. It had nothing to do with anything in terms of biomedical parameters that would show up. They were neurological experiences as if they were happening. People can experience that in panic attacks or anything that is directly experiential. There’s nothing biomedically wrong with you, but the nervous system gives way as if you’re experiencing something as significant as if it were biomedically wrong with you.

Meditation: The Gateway To Healing At All Levels

You mentioned meditating. You’re a huge meditator. How important is it for someone to meditate?

It’s the gateway into all of what we’re talking about. If you can’t be present with your attention and awareness when there’s very little stimuli, it’s very hard to do it when you’re in the game of reality, where there’s so much coming at you at once. It gives you the foundation necessary to move further out. It’s necessary in the beginning. If you want to accelerate along your healing path, ultimately, it’s exceptionally necessary.

Meditation is a silent sitting and bringing your attention and awareness to the body and the breath. Every time it gets caught up in the mind, story, and narrative, you bring it back to the body and the breath. All of the past can only be processed in the present. The body and breath are the only things that are always present. Meditation is this practice.

It’s in the same way that if you wanted to play in the NBA, you’d have to practice before you played in the NBA. Meditation is a way to practice this process that we’re talking about before you jump into the nature of your triggers, reactions, and patterns, so that you have an opportunity to come back there. It could happen, but it’s very unlikely that most people can stay within their bodies in intense situations.

You’ll see significant events happen where people are like, “I don’t know how I did that.” They either freeze, fawn, or fight. They’re completely dissociated. The overwhelm of the primitive side has overtaken them. They’ve shot themself in the mind, and they’re completely unconscious in terms of what their behavior is. That would be like the highest level of overwhelm. Ultimately, we vary that depending on your lifestyle and patterns.

Getting Into Courageous Conversations With Emotional Honesty

Courageous conversations and emotional honesty. Why are emotionally honest conversations so central to healing?

The reason they’re so central to healing is that wherever we have a difficult time with our conversations, and particularly the person that we have a difficult time with, is where we are emotionally and neurologically blocked and underdeveloped. For instance, talking about anything is a form of expression, expansion, and processing, so it’s very helpful.

Ultimately, if you want to connect to the places that you’re disconnected from, then you have to follow the path of fear, which requires courage. You’re like, “I’m afraid to have this conversation with my mom, my dad, my brother, my sister, or the person that abused me.” Those things are the areas where you are neurologically and emotionally blocked. That’s where the greatest level of healing is. I always say everything we want and everything we avoid is in the same place. This is a very strong representation of that.

In my own healing, it took a lot of courage to bring all of my family together and discuss the sexual abuse and trauma that took place. All my other siblings were going to go to the grave with it. The nervous system and the brain are holding onto all of that. That’s a large degree of energy going towards suppression, which can be freed up for healing. That is why it’s so important.

If you talk or connect with someone that you don’t want to, it feels almost like a weight has been lifted off. You feel a little bit lighter. That’s largely because your nervous system is carrying that. You’re so normalized to it because once you carry something for a while, it’s like the shoes or the watch you wear. You don’t even notice you’re wearing it. It’s a part of your sensory experience. It normalizes into it.

Most people’s nervous systems aren’t aware of how much they’re carrying from the past. This is where I would say the ultimate level of integration is having courageous and honest conversations. If you try to process within yourself without reconnecting or having those conversations, it’s probably not going to be the complete process.

One of the reasons people will say, “I don’t want to do that,” is because it’s contingent on how the person might react, or they will completely do what created the wound to begin with, which is to discredit them. They will not acknowledge them or validate that it happened. That’s not what healing is. Healing is about the expression of your truth of what happened within you, not that someone else validates it.

 

Your ability to express that truth is the ability for you to reconnect to that part of you that became disconnected as a result of that stimulus, that person, that situation, or that circumstance. By having that courageous conversation, you’re giving your inner child the ability to experience safety. It’s like a little child gets in some sort of fight or whatever, and he doesn’t know how to get to the other child. The parent or teacher would be like, “Bring the other kid here. Let’s have a conversation.”

There’s a reason for that in the same way there’s a reason why our own inner child is screaming for us to express our truth of the experience of what happened and why it happened to the person that harmed us or to the nature of the difficulty of disconnection. Those resulted from certain agreements being broken within the relationship or things being done that were unhealthy. Fundamentally, we don’t understand that this is all connected. In healing, there is nothing separate. That is one of the most important things that gets the least amount of emphasis, and it is largely because of social constructs. For me to bring that to my family, the repercussions are that the family is going to be split apart.

Self-love is different from social survival. Most of the time, once we’re eighteen and above, we’re operating off the social conditioning of survival that no longer is needed. It’s what keeps us in this experience of feeling like we’re not free. That’s why a lot of us long for financial liberation because we think it’ll bring freedom, but we’re longing for internal freedom and freedom from suffering. That path is around these things, which deal with the past. The present has no suffering. It’s only if the past is unprocessed that the present has suffering.

As we’re talking about this, I think of how Joe Polish always mentions Dave Kekich’s credos. Life is easy if you live it the hard way and hard if you live it the easy way.

That’s very accurate.

I think about hard conversations. I’m much better now than I was years ago. I’ve continued to get better. There are still conversations that if I don’t want to have the conversation, it’s like, “Why don’t I want to have that conversation?” I always feel better on the other side of the conversation 100% of the time.

It’s exactly like the cold plunge. That’s the analogy I always use. Having a hard conversation is like the cold punch. You don’t want to go in, but if you go in, you always feel better afterwards.

100% of the time.

There are certain things that we have to learn to lean into. This is one of those things that is vastly important to our healing and wholeness, which is very underappreciated and not discussed. It was a practice I started when I was nineteen. When I became mute from the severity of the depression, I realized how important communication was and the ability to have your own voice, to speak it, and to have clarity.

The way that worked was me going to all the relationships that I experienced either pain from or that I felt like I created pain for, asking for forgiveness, and also communicating what I felt was true. Was it always true? Not necessarily, but it was true for me and my experience. That unburdened me so much that I was carrying. That is the key with all of these things. It is to let go of the things that we’re still holding onto that are keeping us in a state of suffering.

What happens when people avoid these difficult conversations? We already touched on this.

It’s largely around avoidance, depression, and the resulting nature of disconnection from the things that maybe we want to be connected with. It’s the same way that if you have a painful ankle, you don’t want to connect with the pain, but ultimately, you want to connect with the function of what that ankle does. In relationships, if you have these areas where you’re not having these conversations, the relationship doesn’t work the way it does when you’re connected. These communications are what allow that to heal and reconnect in a sense of safety to be acclimated to both sides.

Why Exercise Addiction Is Socially Rewarded

Exercise addiction as avoidance. You said exercise addiction is often socially rewarded. Can you explain that?

A lot of exercise is predominantly vocalized on the nature of the body and/or achievement, goals, records, or whatever. It’s like, “How does my body look? How does my body perform in terms of goals or things like that?” It’s largely dictated by external validation. From a social construct standpoint, you can see that. We look at things from more of this understanding of, “I have a program in front of me. I’ve got to hit the program.”

We almost do it to the exclusion of our own body’s communication, which is the opposite of what exercise is at its healthiest expression. It’d be like me looking at Google Maps, and it doesn’t show a boulder. I’m like, “There’s a boulder in front of me. I’m going to go straight to it and hit the boulder.” That’s what we do with our exercise programs. We’re like, “I’m hurting here. I’m hurting there.” That’s the direct experience. It would be like the road seeing the boulder, but then we latch on, like, “The program says this,” as if the program is superior to our direct experience.

Abdicating that power away is part of the pathology. It’s supposed to be a loose guide to help us understand the dynamic processes of connection with the body. Every time you exercise, you get an opportunity to sense in a deeper, richer way what’s going on. You’re like, “This is hurting. That’s hurting,” or, “This is feeling good. I feel great. I feel more resilient. I feel stronger.” That ability to stay connected in a highly engaged way of exercise is more of an exploratory process and an experiential process rather than one that focuses on outcomes, goals, and achievements.

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I’m someone who utilized those things in my earlier fitness years. They were greatly beneficial. It has gotten so extreme on the social validation side that this is why you have body dysmorphia. This is why you have people who are ultimately abusing their bodies instead of connecting with their bodies. I do see a lot of pathology in exercise, more so than I think is necessary. It’s largely dictated by these social aspects of our survival, which isn’t wrong. I still deadlift. I still work out. I still like progress in a way that allows me to stay at a very high level of performance.

People have this idea that the mind somehow drives greater performance. It can, in the short-term, sometimes. With a cattle prod, you can drive cows in a certain direction, but in the long-term, they can track, they avoid, and they’re fearful. Our body is the same way. You can force it in the short-term to do strong feats, but in the long-term, it’s ultimately going to be distrustful, and it’s going to start communicating in that way.

The idea is to hold that with a sense of fluidity and not rigidity. You have these goals and these parameters you want to hit, but let’s not ignore the direct experience of the body. If it’s communicating, like, “I need a rest day,” or, “I need to take off,” and it’s not in the program, take it off. That’s listening and not trying to dictate through the mind or the program that we’ve laid out. These things are not perfect. They can’t account for all the variables that are happening within the human experience.

The Systems View Of Health

Is there a single root cause of illness, or is health more like a web of influences?

Most of the conversation is about this idea that we will get to the root cause of something. Even in functional medicine, they always preach, like, “Let’s get to the root cause.” Ultimately, going back to the complex systems, it’s more of a web of effects that are happening. They’re happening at different layers. At the molecular level, cellular level, organ level, the layer of psychology, and the layer of environment, all of these layers are communicating all at once. At the layer of hormones, if your hormones are communicating, it’s affecting all those other layers.

It’s a misunderstanding. It’s going back to the nature of looking at the appropriate models. Complex systems models are far more accurate in the nature of how our biology, physiology, neurology, mental health, and emotional health all work together. It depends on what layer and what leverage point you need to pull to affect the whole system.

If you go through a breakup or you lose a loved one, that emotion and spirit can affect the entire physical realm at the cellular level. For me, I could be like, “We need to dial in your physical stuff,” but that wouldn’t be the right lever to pull. The right lever to pull right there would be getting you to be able to emotionally process the pain and wounding from experiencing separation from the loved one or the relationship, and help to reconnect to those parts of yourself that have that emotional pain. That would be the highest level to pull.

That will affect your physical health. That will affect your mental, emotional, and spiritual health. That will affect all of the systems on the cellular level, on the organ level, and so forth. It’s a web of effects. It’s not that reductionist medicine or single causative effects can’t be a model to be used. It’s not the most accurate model because it doesn’t accurately encompass the complexity of our system, which cannot be able to be reduced to a single variable.

It’s not getting to the root cause. It’s very surface-level. Usually, the approach is surface level, like, “This is the issue. Let’s try to fix it.”

It’s like a pinball machine. They’re trying to react to what is coming out in terms of the output and not understanding the dynamics of the relationship of the inner workings of what’s creating that dysfunction in terms of the output. If we understand the interdependence and the relationships that are going on within the system and how to support that for function, the output will change as a result of correcting that.

What models do you find most accurate in helping people navigate back to wholeness?

The most accurate models from an individual standpoint would be looking at Ayurvedic medicine and your constitution, and then matching that up with some of your diet, lifestyle, circadian rhythm, and emotional tendencies as a deep level of insight into the self. The nature of models such as complex systems, Chinese medicine, and functional medicine is a greater aspect of understanding how to navigate towards wholeness.

On the emotional side, there are internal family systems. That model helps us understand that there are no bad parts. It allows us to reconnect and unwind the protective parts and the parts that are in exile and connect to the deeply wounded parts. As we do, they lose their emotional charge. They come back to the nature of where they were at their original experience, but with wisdom, clarity, and discernment.

Those are probably the broadest and most common. There are other models. The most common model that I use on the emotional side, which I know you use a lot within your clinic, is the four agreements. That model is more of a functioning model of how to navigate the nature of reality in the truest form, which helps you unwind the conditioned self.

When you’re trying not to take things personally, all you’re trying to do is realize that the triggers within you are within your direct power to heal those wounds. The detonators, which are the people and the circumstances that trigger you, will eventually dissolve away. You will experience that there was nothing personal. For me, I haven’t had a trigger in 3 years, so I know that’s 100% true, even though at 19, when I was triggered by everything and everyone, I thought there was no way that’s true.

It’s true how many wounds within the nervous system of these things we’re carrying. Those are the landmines that people outside can detonate. That becomes a functioning model of always doing your best. Always doing your best is your day-to-day, based on all these factors and complexities that we’ve talked about, which can change. You’re not judging it off of some idealistic standard that you had when you were at your best functioning, and then using that criticism to judge yourself.

 

Those are two of the agreements. We won’t go into each and every one. Those are part of the encompassing model of reality that can help you navigate the emotional aspects while staying true to yourself. A lot of healing is about your expression of truth and your connection back to wholeness through self-love.

I love the four agreements. It’s feeling good about my behavior, doing the next right thing, being a good person, and not taking things personally. That took me a long time. Over the years, I’ve gotten so much better at it. It doesn’t matter what another person does. It doesn’t have anything to do with me. A person, whether it’s someone that I’m having a disagreement with, a family member, someone I had a falling out with, or someone who did something to me many years ago, doesn’t have anything to do with me.

There was a guy with whom I had a disagreement back in 2014. I remember it specifically. It took me many years. I’d see him at meetings. When I’d see him at a meeting, I used to be pretty triggered by him. As time went on and I continued my healing and my work, I finally got to a point where I saw him, and there was no energy. That’s freedom and liberation. It’s okay. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. I don’t have to agree with his decisions. It’s fine, though. It’s not a big deal.

My definition of love is accepting all things exactly as it is. What that means experientially in the body is non-resistance to all expressions and all things. That’s the only way we can be in our truth, if we allow all expressions from others to be okay. Otherwise, we’re reactive to their expression. Thus, we’re in their truth. That’s a process where we learn to relax and receive reality exactly as it is, but that is where we experience love.

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Trauma As A Hidden Driver Of Disease

I think of step one. I’m powerless over people, places, and things. I’m not in control. I’m not God. I’m not the universe. I’m not the higher power. I’m just Tim. I don’t get to play the puppet master. Do you believe unresolved trauma is the most overlooked driver of disease?

Yes, largely from direct experience, but then also clinically working with this. The reason that no one wants to deal with trauma is that it’s messy from a social construct standpoint. It’s easier to medicate away the symptoms or the signs rather than deal with the actual trauma itself. Trauma is what happens within us, not what happens to us, as Dr. Gabor Mate eloquently communicates. With that, the changes are the patterns that we are talking about, which can be better mapped through Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, and complex systems, so that we can understand how we adapt through this compensation.

Trauma is the conduit to the nature of the conditioned self that becomes the negative expressions of epigenetics. They’re negative from the standpoint that the results are quite inflammatory. They’re quite problematic. They lead to autoimmune disease and other physical symptoms, which were validated and credited in the largest study done on adverse childhood events.

Back in the ‘80s, they did the largest study that looked at what trauma did to the physical body. There was 3 times more likelihood of heart disease, 4 times more likely increase in autoimmune disease, 8 times more likely increase in depression, and 12 times more likelihood in suicide. There are all sorts of other things that I’m not mentioning. What people don’t realize is that trauma affects our biology.

Most traditional medicine doesn’t have the models or the systems to account for that. Since healing is experiential and most of Western medicine is transactional, we’re not getting there. The biggest challenge is that we have to have something that can hold experiential medicine, which allows the person to have a new experience within themselves, so that they can process the trauma.

That’s why a lot of my practice is body-based in terms of the modalities and therapies. I’m trying to help them shift the experience of not only the patterns of the past that were compensations from trauma, but also unwind patterns that may be unhealthy from the conditioned state from their parents learning from their parents and so forth. What are the healthy ways of engaging with nature, because we’re an extension of nature, that would allow us to thrive?

What does it look like when someone integrates trauma, and they start to heal?

It looks like expansion, safety, clarity, connection, and an understanding of why life is fun, enjoyable, and joyful. When we live in the mind and we have trauma in the body, it seems like there’s no point to any of this. It’s the ability to reconnect with the vitality of life, energy, and the ability to feel fully alive. We’re all longing for that experience to feel fully alive, vibrant, and connected.

When we’re able to unwind the areas of trauma and allow for that integration, not only does it create that experience within, but it also gives way to a tremendous level of discernment, wisdom, and clarity rather than reactivity,  hypervigilance, and neuroticism that most people experience from the survival mode of unprocessed trauma.

That’s why they’re constantly trying to figure out how to fix reality or the things coming at them because they’re not trying to have that touch their pain. The liberating side is to heal the pain, integrate that, and then arrive at a place of safety and experience that allows all of those qualities to be the natural state of qualities that we all enjoy and have that wisdom, clarity, and discernment.

Reconnecting With The Sensations Of Your Body

For someone who’s tuning in, what’s one small practice they can start to reconnect to their body?

The number one thing is to bring your attention and awareness into the nature of the breath or the sensations of your body in terms of your sit bones or the sensation at the bottom of your feet. That practice is something that you can do at any point and any time. It doesn’t mean you have to be in a state of meditation. Most people think that if the world were perfect, meaning it was completely what they thought from an ideological standpoint, they would experience safety within. Yet, we know that to be not the case.

If things are different than they are. If you’re different than you are.

People are always longing for world peace. We know that if we stick you in a ten-day retreat, where you’re completely safe in this locked room that’s completely dark, you would likely go crazy. The reason you would is that you would have so much conditioning coming up. This is trying to prove the point that people who are trying to fix the world don’t understand that even if the world were exactly the way they wanted, they would still suffer because the suffering isn’t coming from outside of them. It’s coming from within themselves. The ability to sit with themselves is the hardest thing to do. Not only does it bring sensations, but it creates spaciousness in their life so that they can bring their attention and awareness back to the body and the breath.

Healing is one of the simpler things, but it’s not easy. I had the most difficult time understanding that it could be so simple. That’s when I started down the deeper levels of meditation. I was doing 18 hours a week of meditation for over 2 years in order to understand the nature of this whole phenomenology that’s happening within ourselves when we start to sit without the conditions or sensations coming in from the outside.

That’s why spaciousness and stillness are necessary for healing, so that you don’t have more inputs coming in. That means you can process. Everything that comes from the external world needs to be digested and processed. We have a day and age where we have so much stimuli coming in, but no one has any space in their life to process any of it.

I experienced ADHD, ADD, and all those things. Before I ever healed, all those symptoms were the very things that I experienced day-to-day. I don’t experience them anymore. It’s largely because meditation, especially long bouts of meditation, completely rewires the brain and the nervous system. I would’ve loved to take an MRI of my brain and nervous system at nineteen and now. It’s entirely different. It would have to be because my experience of reality is completely a 180.

 

Did you meditate?

Yes.

For how long?

Thirty minutes. Usually, it depends on the day. When I had the large shift into the liberated state, it was a little bit interesting. Meditation is normally something that you come back to the body. My experience with reality is never in the dreaming mind anymore. There is no dreaming mind. All I experience is the present moment.

Meditation was always designed to practice presence. It was always something that, as we got back to the present and it became an operating system, we didn’t necessarily have to click an app. We all have to use that app until it becomes the operating system. The reason long sits are so important is that the longer you sit and the more conditioning comes up, the deeper the layers.

When you feel like you should get up, and you’re like, “I can’t sit here for a second longer,” it’s like doing the tenth rep on a set in the gym when the burn is kicking in. That’s where the adaptation is. Most people don’t realize that all meditation and these internal spiritual practices are very physiological, biological, and neurological transformatively. They’re transformational in their ability to require adaptation.

When you’re sitting with yourself in meditation, you’re ultimately creating that. When you get to that threshold where you feel like your conditioned self is trying to make you stand up to go do something or engage with your phone, that’s where the conditioning is getting released. You know when it is when you can do either-or, and it doesn’t matter. When you feel like you can sit there for three hours and you don’t have any of your conditioned self coming to pull you in a direction, or you have to go do this or do that, you’ve hit a different threshold.

You’ve made it. Are your meditations always quiet?

When you say quiet, there can be noise from the outside.

I’m talking about music, guided meditation, or anything like that.

If the audience is interested in meditation, it would be powerful to understand a framework of what meditation is from this standpoint of using a spectrum. There are 2 types of meditation on 2 different ends of the spectrum, and then everything in between lies on the spectrum. There’s contractionary meditation and expansionary meditation. This model helps you understand the different types of meditation.

 

Contractionary meditation is the ability to focus your attention on a single point. This might be your breath at some point in your body. In some practices, they’ll do a mantra. You have to be able to focus your attention to do anything. Where people start in meditation is the contractionary form of meditation. Vipassana is a form of contractionary meditation. That’s body scanning. You start at the top of your head, and you’re trying to sense the sensations, and then you go through your whole body into the bottoms of your feet. You might use 5 to 10 seconds or 15 seconds on a specific area, and then move to the next area.

Once you train your attention and awareness to be able to do that, you then are able to start to move down the spectrum of expansionary meditation. Expansionary meditation is the ability where your attention expands to awareness. Meaning, if I were to have you focus on the nature of the sound of your refrigerator, at the exclusion of everything else, you could do that, and it would be an immersive component.

It could be your work. You might focus so much on everything else, or you’re thinking about something immersive. That’s extreme focus and attention. Expansionary meditation is to relax that attention into awareness. Meaning, take everything in evenly. You can practice walking.

Sam Harris speaks about the Do Nothing Meditation. That framework of peer expansion meditation is you’re walking, and instead of focusing on any one thing, you focus on relaxing your vision by looking and taking in the peripheral. You allow all the sensations to be, even in your experience. You’re not contracted around one part of the experience. We know this increases parasympathetic tone and relaxation.

The ultimate nature of the final experience is expansion meditation. Some people will get so caught in contractionary meditation that they think there’s a separate doer of the meditator. Part of what prevents some people from moving to the final transition stage of liberation is that there’s some doer that’s still conditioned to be a good meditator. That’s a tricky phase. Ultimately, the person who arrived somewhere isn’t the person who can walk through the next door. Every stage of the internal transformative path requires you to die the way that you got there.

A lot of times, people are used to applying a lot of effort. It’s hard for them to go to effortlessness. That was the case for me. It was very tricky. In the beginning, contractionary meditation is best practiced through guided meditation. One is having someone help you guide. The mind is so distracted that it’s better to listen to someone guide you. Otherwise, you’re distracted.

The next layer would be to focus on yourself. Do Vipassana, body scanning, and things like that. The next layer would be focusing on the sensations within your body. Once you’re proficient enough in that area, you can start to incorporate Do Nothing Meditation. The point where this becomes not helpful anymore is when your mind is not as chaotic as it is in the beginning stages. You’ll get a sense of that once you’ve done a lot of meditation.

If someone were to be accelerating on this path they want, I would recommend that everyone do 1,000 to 2,000 hours of meditation, and then come report back to me how much their experience has changed. The reason I say that is that they are thresholds. Your amygdala will have shrunk a lot. Your prefrontal cortex will have grown a lot. We see this even over 6 weeks of 30 minutes. These are real brain, neurological changes that are taking place.

That’s why when you’re going through these things, they feel like a withdrawal. You can have things that come up like depression, anxiety, loneliness, boredom, or all these different shadow emotions that you didn’t know you were running from, but they’re there. Those are withdrawals of the conditioned self. If you can stay with them, be present, and metabolize them, they will process through. If you resist them or try to get rid of them, they’ll stay.

The Role Of Self-Love In True Healing

Resist persist. What role does self-love play in true healing?

Ultimately, it plays the majority of the path. The reason I say that is that in the end, you realize there was no self. I say that from the standpoint that you’re loving the conditioned self until the conditioned self dissolves into the capital S self, which is the authentic self. Most spiritual traditions capitalize the self as the big S self and then the small S self. Self-love is the loving of the conditioned self, which is all the parts of you that didn’t have the opportunity to be connected or attuned to your parents, your family, or your society, and where you were not developed neurologically.

Any part of you that has emotional pain is the part of you that you’re going to avoid naturally. That’s why self-love is a requirement for healing. We’re wired for social survival. If you were to draw a yin-yang symbol, one side of that yin-yang symbol would be the social survival wired in the nervous system, and the other side would be self-love.

Until you master self-love, you can’t have wholeness. Every part of it feels wrong because that’s not how we’re wired. That courage is what’s necessary. That’s why they say fear is the path home. In each part of the path, you have to have the courage to go into the fear. The reason there’s fear is that there’s emotional pain and a lack of neurological development.

You could say the frosting would have fear, and then each part of the cake would have one of the shadow emotions. You have to process, metabolize, and digest that in the body until it becomes integrated. Integration is a result of that process. It’s not a separate thing. If you eat food, you have to relax enough so you can allow it to process. If you get too dissociated in your mind and you get hypervigilant, and you’re maybe riding a bike or whatever, there’s no energy to digest that. It stays in your stomach.

We have this with all of our unprocessed emotions, where we’ve constantly not created enough space. The reason for the environment of mental and emotional health is not only the collective. Meaning, generational has accumulated. Each generation is passing on its own trauma, its own unprocessed emotion, and its own unhealthy compensations. On top of that, we live in a world of unlimited distractibility. We’re constantly requiring more and more input. It’s leading to this huge level of congestion of unprocessed emotions that alter our mood, nervous system, and energy.

Most people are walking around very sick, tired, and unhealthy. Emotional and mental health are the operating system of our quality of life. If your mood was fine all the time, people would be like, “I’m good. I’m fine.” That’s largely dictated by your ability to heal the past. Those unprocessed emotions are a sacred rebirth. It is dictated through self-love and the ability to love all the parts of you that didn’t get the love because of the social survival of what was required to allow you to be where you are.

How To Bravely Face Your Storm

If there’s one message you want the readers to take away from this conversation, what would it be?

It would be to face your storm. Our storm is the nature of our suffering within ourselves. A lot of us are socially taught to fix the world, achieve a lot, or make a lot of money. A lot of that is dictated by the freedom to move about the world in any way you want through financial independence. Facing your storm is about the freedom from.

The direction towards liberation is the path of most resistance, which is the experience of your storm within. That is, in fact, what we want. That’s the ultimate value. If I said, “You wouldn’t have triggers for the rest of your life. You’ll have experiences of completely feeling connected, safe, and loved,” that would be a lot more than $1 trillion in your bank account because nothing could get you there. That would be the highest order of expression of health.

Ultimately, your conditioned self is what is communicating as a conduit from your genomics to your epigenetics, nutrition, lifestyle, and diet. All those patterns are the conditioned self. What were you taught? How are you reacting neurologically in a way that’s causing changes in your genetic expression? That’s epigenetics, which is your stress response to everything.

This is the piece of facing your storm, because where you suffer is where your greatest unlocks to health and performance lie. Going in the path of most resistance until there’s no resistance is how you create and cultivate a sense of self-love. The fastest way out is in and through the body’s storm of experience. The way to get there is not to react and resist. Don’t engage at the layer of the mind. Feel, embrace, and lean into all the areas of discomfort.

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That’s easy.

It’s simple, but not easy.

Is there anything I missed? Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn’t ask you?

No. I feel like we covered a lot of different content and different areas that ultimately are things that are very intimate to the way I practice. What came about from my direct experience and my intellectual pursuits that allowed me to express myself the way I do is simply from the nature of the pain and initiation that created the transformation. I believe we are all on that path. We are all initiated into this process through social survival. The path home is self-love, and that self-love allows for transformation.

The biggest thing, which I said throughout this conversation, is that when you’re healing, it almost always feels like you’re going in the wrong direction. Oftentimes, these layers are very cyclical and happen in a spiral, so it’s very possible that even if you heal, you’ll revisit patterns. It doesn’t mean you’re taking a step back, but it can feel that way when you’re going through the process. This happens even with people who relapse.

The thing to understand is that energy is neutral. Energy that’s unlocked through healing can fall back into old patterns. The ability to continue to practice self-love, grace, compassion, and forgiveness to the self is one of the most fundamental things of importance. You will enter phases where you will go what feels like backwards or feel like you’re going back to the starting point, but you’re not. It’s an illusion. You’re in a pattern that’s much more neurologically weak than it was before. There’s less pain than there was when that pattern was initiated from the compensation away from that pain.

The patterns are usually the last thing to go, in my experience. It’s like if you injured your ankle and you’re rehabbing because you’re avoiding the pain. You can see people still compensating for that pattern afterwards. I see this very commonly in the nature of healing. In my own experience, directly, the pain will go away as if the compensation pattern is the way in which we know how to do things. It is being sure that you’re coming with a sense of grace, compassion, love, and forgiveness. If you can give that to yourself, I assure you that you’ll watch those things transform your relationships.

 

The primary takeaway is the nature of facing your storm, to bring a sense of presence, self-love, compassion, grace, and self-forgiveness, and to know that you may revisit these patterns again and again. At the same time, know that these things are non-linear. That’s one of the biggest attributes of complex systems.

My healing was super non-linear at the end. It was exponential. That potentiation phase was happening the whole time. I did experience less suffering along the way, and that’s all that matters. A year from now, you’ll experience less suffering than you did before, and then the next year and so forth. Eventually, ultimately, that’s all that matters.

Whether you get to liberation doesn’t matter. It matters that you suffer less. The key is to stay with the process and stay devoted. Meaning, coming back to where you are and not trying to be somewhere where you’re not. Be devotional by taking one step at a time. Always be present even if you re-enter patterns that have helped you survive in the past, which may be pathological or at least have created a lot of suffering for you. Give yourself grace.

Get In Touch With Wesley

Thank you so much. Where can people find you? How can they connect with you if they want to connect with you, see you, or learn more about you and your work?

Thank you. I appreciate it. It’s great having this conversation with you, and also how much time you spend helping people. I want to mention this. You are so devoted from your heart to transmuting the nature of your own experiences to help give back in service to others. I know that’s why you do this show. I know that’s why you have the clinic that you do. I want to pass that along. I have a deep appreciation and admiration for the way you’ve transmuted your own pain into love, connection, and healing for the people around you. It’s very beautiful to witness and watch.

If people want to follow me, I have an Instagram account @BreakthroughPerformance_Rehab. I put out quite a bit of content periodically about ancient wisdom and direct experiences that are helpful in terms of the transformational process. My website is BreakthroughPerformance-Rehab.com. Those are the two primary ways that people can connect with me.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you. One of my favorite things to do every single week is go and see Wes. Wes is always on my schedule. If you want to go see Wes, he’s always booked weeks in advance, so you won’t be able to book an appointment and see him this week or next week, typically. I’m all about it. Thanks again. I appreciate you.

Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to work with you. It’s been amazing to watch and witness your transformation. I am very appreciative of working with you. One of the highlights of my week is watching and witnessing how you show up. It’s beautiful.

 

Important Links

• Breakthrough Performance and Rehab
• @BreakthroughPerformance_Rehab on Instagram
• Wesley Kress on LinkedIn

 

About Wesley Kress

Wes Kress is a practitioner, speaker, and founder of Breakthrough Performance and Rehab, where he integrates genomics, functional medicine, Eastern wisdom, and somatic healing.

His work bridges the gap between physical performance and deep inner transformation helping clients unravel chronic patterns, restore vitality, and reclaim the truth of their being.