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way to supplement? Join me in going for the goo and never looking back. Hi, Mastin. How are you? Good. How's it going? Good. I'm, excited because, you know, therapy is obviously, has its own trends and then the books that you've recommended are obviously, not mainstream. Like, I love Bessel van der Kolk and and Porges for their, working with the nervous system
as opposed to these cognitive approaches. Yes. You know, one of the things that Bessel van der Rohe mentions in his book is that hypnosis has kinda gone away for a while, and that's something I'm kind of interested in pursuing primarily because the other methods and and by the way, if I get off track, please just feel free to interrupt me. Oh, okay. No problem. In the end of his book, he recommends, like, psychodrama, psychedelics, tai chi, yoga, you know, and then hypnosis.
I guess, do you think that's a good method for regulating the nervous system? And specifically, I'm working with I'm trying to work with people like myself Mhmm. Who had, let's say, difficult childhoods where there was a lot of Sure. You know, violence. And then, when they're adults, the things that they struggle with are because they can't regulate their nervous system. Totally. So I love your question. So, great. I'm gonna I'm gonna answer it in a roundabout kind of way, but I'm
gonna bring it I'm gonna land the plane, I promise. Okay? So so if you think about the world of trauma healing that you've mentioned, right, so we talk about Bessel, maybe Peter Levine, Doctor Porges, etcetera. Right? So like like like the the the pioneers in the trauma space. Right? Well, they're pioneers because they're able to now understand what's happening in the body at, like, a very specific level. We can look
inside the brain. Right? We can look inside and see our biophysiology, our blood chemistry. We can measure, you know, DNA expression, methylation, so many different things we couldn't do before, which allows us to create these modalities, right, which is very reductionistic. Okay? Now that being said, the experience of trauma has been in the human experience since the
beginning of time. Right? And we've made it through. And so if you look back and we think about, like, what has helped people regulate in the past, right, psychedelics, breath work, all the things that you might be talking about, right, what we notice is a reason why is primary. Right? So if you think about, like, someone like a a soldier going off to war, right, to
fight for their family, there's a reason why. If you think about, for example, Viktor Frankl, who was in Auschwitz, right, and created logotherapy as a result. Right? He's sitting in Auschwitz. He's lost most of his family. He's in one of the worst situations you could possibly be as a human being, and he is mentally rehearsing, leaving, and imagining a time where where he'll be able to take what he's learned and pass it on. So there's a utility or there's a purpose in what he's
doing. Right? And there's so many different examples of people being able to get through some of the hardest of human experiences because they have a purpose. Right? And so the reason why I'm saying that is because your question is reductionistic, which is okay. But if if if we just isolate any specific modality, does it work? Well, we can look up meta analysis on some of them. We can look up sometimes observational studies depending on what we're looking at.
Ketamine, for example, has a lot more research behind it than DMP, right, because DMP hasn't been as researched as ketamine, and ketamine's already approved for other stuff. So, like, there's all these different modalities, breath work, sauna. You could talk about trauma informed yoga. You could talk about EMDR. You could talk about neurofeedback. So many different siloed modalities. Right? However, when you think about, let me start with what's most important to me. Why am I doing
this in the first place? And you actually front load that in your care, whether it's coaching therapy, I mean, functional medicine doctors, psychiatrists, whoever. If you actually stop and you don't say, what modality do I need? You say, why am I doing this in the first place? What is the what is the reason? Right? What is my purpose? Right? Well, I wanna break patterns. I wanna break generational cycles. I don't wanna pass this on to my children. I
wanna be the first person in my lineage to do this. Right? Now there's an intrinsic motivation, and what's weird is that will start to inform what we need or don't need because sometimes, some some of these things for example, when we find purpose, we'll talk about this tomorrow, like, purpose boosts your serotonin. Purpose, like, downregulates, sympathetic nervous system. Purpose upregulates oxytocin. Like, there's so many interesting
things that we start to see the biophysiology of purpose. It actually shifts our biochemistry because what we don't wanna do is we don't want to regulate a lack of purpose with a modality. So if someone's missing their purpose and they're trying to make up with it by doing breath work or psychedelics, like, you're trying to solve a problem that's not gonna
be solved by a modality. Like, you could do all the cognitive behavioral therapy in the world, but if you don't have a reason why that's compelling you forward, then you're you're probably doing the CBT to make up for a lack of purpose. Right? I'll give you another example. Right? So I cope. My one of my high level coping strategies is I intellectualize everything. Imagine that. Okay? Why do I do that? Right? Because when I was growing
up, nobody was there. My parents, my mom had a broken back, my dad was getting his PhD, I was all by myself. They said, He's a smart kid. He'll figure it out. So I had a lack of connection that I used intellectualization and imagination to cope with. Right? So when I'm going in my day to day life, if I find myself trying to intellectualize something too much, I go, woah, woah, woah. What I'm actually missing is connection. I need
connection. I'm feeling alone. Right? So there's nothing that will help me not feel alone if I'm by myself. I mean, yes, you could do parts work and connect to your inner child and stuff like that, but I'm talking about coregulation. Right? Like, there's nothing that can make up for that. Just like if you're dehydrated, there's no breath work that's gonna make up for dehydration. You need water. Right? So purpose is the first thing. Once we have purpose, why are we
doing this? Then we can start to say, hey. Hold on a second. I might even start to feel better, And now I'm I'm gonna actually change and make sure that I'm choosing things that align with my goal and where I'm going. Right? So, for example, if I'm trying to, I don't know, move forward in a business, right, and I have a hard childhood like you talked about. Right? And every time I try to move forward in my business, I get afraid.
I feel sympathetic or I feel sympathetic energy when I think about going online. Right? That's very common for certain some people. Right? Well, now I can regulate the sympathetic response to go online, but that has a larger purpose to bring a cycle breaker in my family who's never had financial agency. So my reason for breaking this pattern is fueled by something more than just, like, trying to get rid of it in the moment. And so,
like, we break those patterns with a purpose. We break those patterns with modalities that help us get there. And, also, to understand that once you start going a certain direction, yeah, your stuff's gonna come up, But it's gonna come up differently than if it's just kinda coming up randomly, right, or if you're just being triggered by life and kind of going through life kind of without
thinking about these types of things. And so we want to choose tools that are helping you regulate your system's protective responses based on where you want to go, not based on reacting to life. Does that make sense? I just said a lot. So tell me what you're doing with what I said. No. That's
that's news to me. I haven't heard, actually, I really haven't heard that idea anywhere else, because most people are trying to either, help people get out of freeze, which stops them from getting out of bed and and having functional lives, get them out of anxiety, which keeps them locked in patterns of workaholism or, you know, some other addiction, or, out of or over aggression. So, like, there there's, like, the primary threat responses that are at the root of, you
know, why people have dysfunction. And I think that, you know, for the people that have the anger issues, they don't have a problem with purpose. Their purpose is domination, control, empire building, etcetera, etcetera. Everybody else is somewhere further down. I would I would I would probably especially after tomorrow when you see how we define purpose, I would probably call that more of, like, a motivation than a purpose.
There's a little there's a little bit of a diff I mean, the literal word purpose is, like, usefulness of the the the reason why behind something. Right? But when we talk about, like, life purpose in the literature, right, like, there's a very specific use of that term. And so what I mean by that is typically something larger than yourself that
adds value to the world in some way. Right? So if you think about threat responses, fawn, freeze, appease, all the things, right, all the different ways you could, you know, become dysregulated, If you have a reason why, it can it creates context that's different. Right? The purpose of, say, a trauma response is survival. It's a reflexive purpose. Right? But
a a purpose and aim, something that's larger than yourself. Like, for example, I have lots of clients that we worked with who have been through some of the most egregious trauma in the world. And when they decide, you know what? What I went through is horrible. It's not my fault. But I'm gonna take my story and decide that I'm gonna help other people who've been through what I've been through, who don't have
to go through what I went through to recover faster. I'm gonna use my story not as being a victim, but my story becomes a place of inspiration and strength for others, when they get into freeze, it has a different context now than just freeze or just hypervigilance. So it's like, wait a minute. I'm hypervigilant because of my past, but I can break this hypervigilant pattern or this freeze pattern because my goal here is something
larger than myself. I'm not just focused on my reflexive identity, which is all which is obviously a part of somebody, but it's not who they are. So it's a larger context. Does that make sense? Yeah. I I would love to hear more stories about people who, let's say, were in either freeze or, like, hyper, you know, like, workaholism that they were able to, in the moment, focus on their purpose, and it pulls them out of that. I'm willing to
try that myself because I think it's a great idea. I just have never heard that before, so it's you know, I'm a bit I've been just chewing on it. You know, like, from doctor Van Van Der Cook's work, I thought it was more coregulation, yoga, you know, having the sending the signals to the nervous system that in the present, everything is safe. Right. And I think that, like how should I put this? Like, all that's true. Right? But it's, like, what level are we looking at? So if you think
about, like, science. Right? There's different types of science. Right? So there's, like, science generally tends to be reductionistic all the way down to, like, a specific mechanism. Right? I'll give you an analogy that has nothing to do with purpose in life. Okay? So let's say I go to the doctor, and let's say I have high LDL cholesterol compared to last time. Is that good or
bad? Probably bad. But if I tell the doctor I'm under a tremendous amount of stress, okay, because I'm doing a launch or something like that, like what I'm doing right now, right, live events, and then my LDL is higher, well, maybe I need more lipids in my blood to produce more hormones. So I have to go then again test maybe a month later where I'm not under stress and see if that LDL number is the same or not. Right? So the data is one thing. Like, the
LDL is a number. Right? So it's a snapshot. It's a moment. Right? But the context around the data matters. So when we talk about coregulation, of course. Right? We talk about these different things, of course. But when you layer in purpose, it changes the context through which we use the tools and why we use the tools and when we use the tools. And what's interesting is
it's so clear that human beings are built to have purpose in life. Because if you look at, like, blue zones, longevity zones, people want to live to be over a hundred, like, one of the core factors is community, co regulation, but also usefulness and purpose. Right? And I'd argue that that would inform all the rest because when you have purpose, you know what community to connect to with shared values. When you have purpose, you know what you need to
use to fuel yourself. When you have purpose, you're like, okay. I'm getting out of this I'm getting out of freeze, but why? Where am I going? Am I just gonna run off, or am I if I have something larger than myself I'm gonna pursue? And so it's a it's a it's a meta context, and what's really interesting is the newer work of doctor Porges, because he's like, you know, he's he's he's kind of a research ninja.
Right? He's getting more and more into purpose because what he's seeing is that there's a correlation between purpose and ventral. Right? And so it's very interesting, how the neuroscience is starting to show this. Now it's super clear, the research is so clear that, like, you know, what we're talking about here is, like, it changes the context of the
response. Because if the context is survival versus contribution of something larger than myself, then if I'm in freeze, I have a different reason to be in or out of it.