Ani
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast.
Brian
Hey, Brian. Hello, Ani.
Ani
Hi. Hey, how are you? I’m good. I’m excited to hear all the things you have to say this week because I know we’re talking. I know what we’re talking about this week.
Brian
Yes, that’s right. I’m just going to sit back and let you just talk. Yeah. So a few weeks ago, we did an episode on occupational therapists. Is it a match? Is it a match? The physical therapists got a little like, Hey, what about us?
Ani
The OTs were really excited about it. They were really excited.
Brian
They were really excited.
Ani
They were really happy to deliver that podcast to the OTs in the community and be like, ‘Look what we did for you’, because oftentimes the occupational therapists are outshined by the physical therapists. All right. It’s your turn.
Brian
This week, we’re talking about physical therapists and somatic coaching. Is it a match? All right, so let’s talk about this. What do you want to know?
Ani
What would you like to say? Actually, we should just back up here for a second because not everybody who’s listening has heard us talk before. Hi there. I’m Ani, and I’m an occupational therapist by training. I have my bachelor’s and master’s degree in occupational therapy, and I worked in the Western medical system for about five years before I said, ‘Hell no, get me out of here’. You have your degree in physical therapy. Tell us a little bit about your background, Brian, so people who don’t know you can understand where you’re coming from.
Brian
Sure. I graduated with a bachelor’s in PT, so I’m an old man.
Ani
You’re that old.
Brian
I’m that old.
Ani
You didn’t have to get a doctorate.
Brian
I was one of the last classes that was nationally recognized as a bachelor’s. I think I was the second to last class. I have a bachelor’s. I’ve been a PT for 31 years now at this point, I think. Going on 32 years. I’ve had that that long. I’ve worked in the Western medical system. I was trying to think of what you said for about 16 years. It’s actually cool. I have now worked professionally as long outside of the Western medical system that I did inside it. Congratulations. It feels like a real thing now. When you leave working for internally as an employee, and you start your own job, what I felt like was, ‘Is this real? Can I really pull this off? Can I really do it? Is it really happening?’ Now I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. I’m actually almost as long not in the Western system as I have.’ I’ve had my own business for as long as I worked internally. It’s interesting to think about that and like, wow, I think I maybe did it. You still have to work at it and all that stuff.
Ani
I get it. I’ve been an entrepreneur for longer than you, but there’s still… I think I’m finally to the place where I don’t feel like I’m constantly flying by the seat of my pants, and I feel like a big girl now. Exactly. Yeah. You worked as a physical therapist in some really cool places, too. Yeah.
Brian
My very, very, very first job, I worked at the Buffalo General Hospital, in acute care and outpatient orthopedics. I wasn’t there for even a year because I got a job offer to go back to Craig Hospital, where I did an internship. I worked at Craig for just around eight years, a little over eight years. That’s a world-class. Yeah, world-class hospital on neurological rehabilitation. I worked primarily with people recovering from traumatic brain injury. I had the great honor of working with some of the Columbine survivors, the Columbine shooting survivors at the time when I was there. There’s a lot going on at Craig when I was there. I went back, not recently. This is pre-pandemic, so maybe like 2019. I went back and I taught a workshop at Craig, and it was completely different and just amazing. They’re just doing incredible things there. I learned so much about being there. One of the things I learned about being there was the whole idea of interdisciplinary care and how to work with other disciplines and learn from other disciplines and not really be siloed as a physical therapist. A lot of that, I really informed my thinking, my feeling, my becoming more of a holistic practitioner.
Ani
Yeah. I’m listening and thinking, I’m actually interested to hear what you have to say about somatic coaching and physical therapy is it a match, because I think one of the reasons it’s been a match for you is because of your experience working interdisciplinary and because you’ve been a closet OT, too, in the way that you think and the way that you treat and the way that you approach clients and stuff like that. I’m really interested to see what you guys are saying.
Brian
Well, yeah, but I think I became more of a closet OT after I worked at Craig. Certainly, when I went into that role, I wasn’t at all. I was pretty hardcore PT, evidence-based, following the science, all the things that PTs like to say. You got to prove that to me.
Ani
I was going to say, Yeah, you got to prove it to me. What are you trying to insinuate? But yeah, PTs can really get like that.
Brian
Yeah, pretty hardcore in terms of that ‘show it to me’. I still feel that way in a lot of ways.
Ani
I was going to say, you still are Mr…
Brian
But I’ve broadened my… But here’s the change. Here’s the change now. Where it used to be, I used to use that as a defense to kick out things that I didn’t want to believe were true. Okay. I’m evidence-based, which means I would kick out things that I didn’t want to believe were true. Now I use it as a way to be inclusive to basically rule out things that aren’t true at all.
Ani
What?
Brian
Think about this. Now I seek evidence. I seek evidence not to confirm what I already believe. I seek evidence to prove things outside of my current knowledge state. Okay, that makes sense. Maybe hopefully that makes sense. I’m actually using that same idea now to broaden my perspective rather than narrow my perspective because you can use that argument for either way. Sure.
Ani
Science is always changing.
Brian
It’s always changing. It’s always evolving. If you look back over time, this is a whole other podcast, too. That as science has changed, in the early 1900s, we didn’t even know that the heart was electrical.
Ani
We didn’t know we had a body.
Brian
We didn’t know the heart was electrical. Until Eindhoven created the EKG and he proved it that we go, Oh, maybe the heart’s electrical. Now think about all the medical technologies that’s been created just based on that one discovery alone. But before that, it was like the world was flat and nobody would even touch it with a 10-foot pole because they thought you were crazy if you were even thinking about those things. Science continues to evolve, and that’s what I’m saying by using the evidence to broaden perspective rather than to narrow perspective.
Ani
Well, to broaden perspective versus narrowing perspective, I think from a physical therapy point of view is potentially interesting because the physical therapist can be very hyper-focused on body, body, body.
Brian
Well, think about we’re physical therapists. Just the name alone tells you where we’re going to focus and where we’re being taught to focus and where we’re being trained to focus is on the physical reality of someone.
Ani
Okay, so it super makes sense. Let’s just acknowledge the fact, of course, that the mind is the body and that emotions have something to do with how we feel, and that pain is primarily perceptual. What about all that stuff? I think when we talk to physical therapists, actually, you do a lot of training still with physical therapists. When you bring up some of those concepts, their minds are blown Wait, what?
Brian
I think here’s the really cool thing that I’ve noticed, Ani, is that in almost all those trainings when I travel and teach, it’s people, physical therapists, they actually genuinely want to believe and want to be able to work with people holistically, but they don’t have the evidence to do so. That’s really what I see. I don’t see people being resistant to it. I see people actually looking for a reason they can grab onto that allows them to say, yes, now I can do it. I’ve been given permission to do it. That’s really what I see. One of the very first things I start every talk I travel with is I ask people in the room, I say, okay, raise your hand if you have a body. Some people raise their hands, some people don’t because not everybody’s engaging. But for the most part, they’re like, yeah, we have a body. Then I say, okay, so who here has a mind? And people are like, oh. Well, I don’t know. Maybe sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I always ask them, I say, If you raise your hand, you have a mind, how do you know?
Brian
Tell me. Describe to me how you know you have a mind. Prove it to me. I said, It doesn’t matter what the answer is. People just will give me all kinds of things. I think, I feel, I have emotions, whatever it is, and they’re all great. Then I say, Okay, so who in this room here or has some relationship with spirit. Not everybody, but most people raise their hands. Do they? I say, How do you know? They’re like, I don’t know. I just feel it. I just know. I’m like, Those are great answers. I get all kinds of answers, which is really fun. You get all kinds of different answers. I say, Okay, here’s the point, gang. If you raised your hand and said, Yes, I have a body. Yes, I have a mind. And yes, I have a spirit. Do you realize you’re living on three planes of experience right now? You’re living on a mind plane, a body plane, a spirit plane, right now. I challenge you to let your body walk out the door and leave your mind and spirit here. Of course, people are like, Oh, my God, you’re right that we can’t actually do that.
Brian
So your patients are just the same way. Your patients are living on three planes of existence just like you are. Everyone is. If as physical medicine professionals, we’re focusing solely on just the body, we’re only paying attention to one-third of a person’s whole life experience. We expect their body part to heal if we’re disregarding two-thirds of them? I said, it actually doesn’t make sense that that would happen. Then we walk them through a whole discussion and training around bioenergetics and our fascial tissue, really interconnected between the physical world and a person’s energetic mental, emotional world, and it clicks for people.
Ani
So I think what I’m hearing you say is physical therapists can have a tendency to be in-the-box thinkers, in the box that they’re in. It’s not necessarily that they don’t want to think out of the box, but they need to have an awareness that makes sense to them and is to some degree supported.
Brian
Exactly, because that’s our tendency. To be able to. I need to be shown some level of validity that what you’re telling me has some level of truth. Sure. Because the other interesting thing I mentioned to people is when we’re talking about energetic vibration between two people and between how tuning forks work, and we do this little lesson around tuning forks. It’s like, have you ever seen you hit one, it starts vibrating, another one next to it starts vibrating without touching one another, and it looks like magic. It’s not really magic because there’s a medium between the two that you can’t see, which are molecules, invisible molecules in space. If the molecules are vibrating and the other tuning fork comes into that vibrational environment, then it’s going to start vibrating. You’re seeing the cause and the effect, but you’re not seeing the medium in which it occurs. Does that make sense? I say, who here believes that there’s invisible oxygen molecules floating around right now? Nobody raises their hand. I said, Isn’t it interesting that oftentimes some things we don’t see, we do believe in, and some things we don’t see, we don’t believe in?
Ani
Yeah, it’s funny.
Brian
Why are we believing in oxygen molecules? I don’t see them. Do you see them? But other things you don’t… All of our beliefs we’ve been taught, we’ve been trained what to believe. Some things we’ve been told to take on faith because it’s something we don’t see, but we’re supposed to believe in. Other things we’ve been told is quackery, but we still can’t see that and we don’t believe in it.
Ani
It can be really confronting, especially when a person is going through their own personal process, because one of the conditioning things is about being seen as a quacker, about believing in something that you can’t see. And it can be very confronting to confront that belief system. I’m just reminded that we have a graduate who’s a scientist. And when she was going through one of her deepest and most profound transformations for herself, one of the beliefs that just popped up for her was like, this stuff can’t be real, and here I am buying into it. And it was so fabulous to work with her in this moment because she’s wearing one of those, the Oura rings, right?
Brian
Yeah, one of the metabolism rings. It measures your bio feels.
Ani
Yeah. She came to her own conclusion while having this almost panic come over her about, “oh, my gosh, what am I doing believing in this crazy stuff?” She looked down and she saw her ring, and she’s like, “it’s not crazy, this ring tells me that it works, and I see it.”
Brian
She’s been tracking it.
Ani
Data, and I’ve been tracking it, and I’ve seen the data. It was just this amazing confluence of her transformation being met with the data to allow her to continue forward with that transformation. She’s never gone back from it. It’s been really phenomenal to watch her. It’s just reminding me of that.
Brian
Yeah, I love her. She’s amazing because she does such amazing job of bringing together the idea of the things we can’t see and then measuring them in some way. She’s actually on our team, too, to help us measure stuff. We just love her. It’s awesome. Let’s keep coming back to PTs because I could ramble the evidence-based stuff all day. When we work with PTs, what is the transition point for them? The transition point for me to start stepping into more a holistic way of thinking was a lot of that interdisciplinary care. But other transition thing for me was I remember working with clients with traumatic brain injury, and I remember the doctors looking at MRIs and saying, ‘Okay, so based on this person’s MRI, this is the outcome they’re going to have.’ They’re making prognosis. Like, based on this MRI, this is the prognosis for this person, that person, that person, that person. I noticed a lot of the time we were wrong. I thought, if I see that brain there… One of the most profound things, I remember I had a patient, one of my long-term patients when I was at Craig, he was actually there when I was a student, too.
Brian
I came back and he became my patient, which was cool. But I remember looking at his MRI for the first time, I was going to do a case study presentation for the staff on him. I looked at his MRI and one of the hemispheres of his brain looked like it had been smudged off. It literally looked like the radiologist spilled coffee on it or something and smudged it. I said, Oh, let me get another MRI and look at it. It was the same thing, and the same thing, and the same thing. Literally half of his brain was gone.
Ani
Wow.
Brian
I was like, Oh, my God. This is what’s going to happen based on his brain. This is what we’re going to see. Over the years of working with him, he got to the place where he was volunteering on a regular basis. He could get himself in and out and transfer and walk with a cane. I remember the day he walked with the cane, walked actually in the parallel bar for the first time, and the whole gym got up and applauded him as a young kid. It was an amazing journey arc of his recovery and where he’s gone in his life. I realized, wait, so there’s something more. One of the things was his family had a very strong connection. They were all really a big family. They were five kids. They were all really connected, all super supportive. They gathered around him. They had a lot of faith in that family. They actually had a faith community that they were a part of. His mom held this space for him that, I’m getting a little emotional about it, that he was going to be able to walk again and return to his life at the church and what they were doing at the time.
Brian
She was like, I remember her being in meetings with the team and the doctors trying to break it to her. She was like, No, that’s not what’s going to happen. She was such a beautiful person, too, so she wasn’t mean about it. But so I realized there’s something more here. There’s something else going on beyond just your brain controls your body. It broke a spell for me that I had to know more. I had to know more. What was healing really about? It put me on this whole journey. It was the other tipping point for me that made me want to go into the whole idea of body-mind medicine and starting to understand those things. What I didn’t really realize at the time was I was going into that in that coaching direction. One thing I want to talk about, Ani, is actually I was doing some research. You? Yeah. When I travel and teach and try to bring the idea to physical therapists that we can be more than we are, that we can get ourselves out of that box, came across a study on nonspecific low back pain. It was a systemic review of nonspecific low back pain research.
Brian
Here’s one of the findings. I’m going to read it verbatim from the study on back pain. In health, interdisciplinary approaches describe the coordination of different health disciplines working together to optimize care delivery. Interdisciplinary means like PT working with OT, working with speech therapist, working with neuropsychology, all working together, interdisciplinary. Intra-disciplinary approaches describe single health disciplines, blending skills within their own scope of practice with concepts, methods, or techniques borrowed from other disciplines.
Ani
I had not thought of that before.
Brian
Intradisciplinary. That’s interesting. The amount of evidence is growing, suggesting that in line with a psychologically informed practice, exercise providers, mainly physical therapists, have the capacity to successfully incorporate psychological strategies into treatment for patients with musculoskeletal pain conditions.
Ani
I love this so much because so many people who find us say, I found you all, but I’m considering going back for a psychology degree because there’s something about the psychology.
Brian
Yes, exactly. I think PTs are finding. I can’t help this person get all the way to the finish line. Honestly, most of the people who’ve… Most of the PTs have found the way to us, I think have come through either the chronic disease or chronic pain pathways. Those seem to be the primary avenues. I think, honestly, that’s where somatic coaching could probably have the biggest impact. Physical therapy care is around chronic issues. That makes sense. Not that you can’t have it, not have some type of coaching impact act around sports or health or something like that, but chronic issues, chronic behavioral issues.
Ani
We’re talking about rewiring the subconscious mind.
Brian
Exactly.
Ani
Behavior patterns. Exactly. Of course, that has something to do with chronic issues. Of course, with chronic issues, we need to look at our subconscious programming. Exactly. It actually makes no sense to me that we wouldn’t be looking at subconscious programming when we’re talking about chronic issues.
Brian
Totally. Pain has really been the one that broke this open because all the research in the last decade around chronic pain has really helped us to demystify the idea that it’s, number one, solely a physical problem at all, because it’s never solely physical. It’s always mental, emotionally, psychologically, energetically, behaviorally overlaid. That’s very clear in the research now. We talk about biopsychosocial medicine. As a physical therapist, working especially in chronic conditions or chronic pain who do not have some biopsychosocial skill background are going to be ineffective.
Ani
Because you don’t in your education, right? That’s one of the things we were talking about with OT is we do have that in our educational curriculum as an occupational therapist, but PTs don’t.
Brian
As far as I understand to this point in time, there’s still no formal part other than maybe a two-credit course somewhere that specifically dives into the interconnections between biopsychosocial functionality in the body and the biopsychosocial interventions that can actually be useful to help people eliminate chronic pain.
Ani
That’s wild. Of course, it makes sense that a physical therapist would want to self-educate when they graduate in these things because it’s basically there’s no way you’re going to really make a powerful effect, especially with chronic conditions, unless you do.
Brian
Yeah, totally. We have a student in our level 2 training program right now, the Somatic Transformation Class, who’s a PT who developed a pain clinic. When he joined, I’m like, Gitty. I’m like, Oh, my God. He’s got such great questions during every class and office hours, really pointed, meaningful questions. One of the best things he’s already using it in the clinic. Immediately, he takes it and uses it immediately.
Ani
It’s on really good stuff, too.
Brian
It’s incredible. He comes back, he’s like, Well, this happened. He’s like, That was amazing. I’m doing emotional cross mapping for someone with physical pain, and they ended up having less pain after we did it. How did that happen? Sort of thing. Yeah, so he’s actually integrating it. That’s super exciting. It seems to be chronic disease and chronic pain as being the hallmark effectiveness for what we do with somatic coaching for physical therapists is like, Is that a match? Heck, yeah. I mean, gong. Let’s not just bing that one. Let’s gong that one. That’s totally for sure. Another just interesting way to think about body-mind medicine for a moment. This is another thing I like to talk about. We’re in a time and space in medicine where a lot of disciplines are trying to find a way to blend the physical and mental-emotional. Body, mind. We’re trying to put the body-mind back together. Not that it was ever split or separate.
Ani
It’s fun to watch how people are trying to do that, too.
Brian
It’s interesting that in the ’70s, probably somewhere in the ’70s, that psychology professionals began to put body-focused methods into their treatments. More somatic methods into their treatments. Because they noticed that when they added somatic practices into their psychological treatments, people got better, faster. Their nervous systems became more stabilized. They had better emotional management. They had better self-efficacy. They had less depression. They slept better. All the things that a lot of mental health professionals want to achieve with their clients was aided by adding somatic practices in. No, psychology professionals, which primarily are working with, let’s say, “the mind”, we’ll put that in air quotes, added in practices with the body. It brought them to the middle of using body-mind.
Ani
I think that’s interesting because nobody’s going to be like, Well, hang on a second. You can’t do that. But in physical therapy, what’s it for them?
Brian
Exactly, right?
Ani
People are like, Hang on a second. You’re not a psychologist.
Brian
Exactly. Isn’t it interesting? It’s okay for psychology professionals to add body practices? Okay.
Ani
Hang on a second because this goes right back to the body-mind split, Brian, doesn’t it? Where we just decided, I’m going to take this part, and the church is like, We’re going to take the spirit, and the doctors are going to take the body, and don’t mess with my part, and I won’t mess with your part.
Brian
Yeah, totally. Somebody broke that deal somewhere along the way.
Ani
The psychologist could totally be like, “We’re not doing physical therapy. We’re just doing some movement strategy.
Brian
We’re breathwork. We’re doing some breathing. We’re doing some mindful movement. We’re doing something like that”. There’s some great people out there that’s done amazing things, right? Like all the MSBR and those kinds of things bring stuff to the middle. The mindfulness practice has had a lot to do with that also. That’s what happened in the ’70s when a lot of Harvard psychology students went to India to study mindfulness, then brought that back to Harvard. That had its own bumps in the road, too, by the I’m sure. Like, psychology schools did not want any of that foofy-foofy stuff happening.
Ani
That happens every time with a new discipline. I’m thinking about when the woman who wrote the Emotions book that we love so much.
Brian
Candice Bert?
Ani
Lisa Barrett.
Brian
Oh, Lisa Philman-Barrett?
Ani
Lisa Philman-Barrett. And she talks about all of the pushback she got from her professional community, and she’s a psychologist. She got such a tremendous amount of pushback from the community because it’s like, “you’re thinking in a new way”.
Brian
You’re going to break a hundred years of framework or something.”
Ani
“Just sit down and stop talking about that stuff.” And so people don’t have a defense for it when it makes sense and the research supports it. So what other defense do you have besides saying, Well, you’re just woo-woo.
Brian
Yeah, exactly. And just like- Like shaming. Shaming it and judging it from somewhere. The psychology professionals, mental health professionals, have been integrating body practices in for some time now. But physical medicine professionals, much to your point, Ani, have been really reticent to do so. It was outside of our scope. We can’t do it. It’s not appropriate.
Ani
Breakers.
Brian
But listen what I just read from a meta-analysis. There is growing evidence suggesting that in line with psychologically informed practice, somatic coaching, exercise providers, mainly physical therapists, have the capacity successfully incorporate psychological strategies, somatic coaching, into treatment for patients with musculoskeletal pain conditions.
Ani
Okay, so the point of this is to say, is physical therapy a match with somatic coaching?
Brian
Yes, obviously.
Ani
I think you and I both know that in order to actually move forward with that, it’s going to take enough of us professionals to awake ourselves to these facts and to say, hey, I’m going to do something different in the system or out of the system. I’m going to start to utilize these things. And when we do, we may get some flack. I got tremendous amount of flack. I don’t know if you did.
Brian
got flacked.
Ani
okay, so are you willing to take a stand? Because it’s not just because it matters and not just because of the patients. It’s like, this is what’s really happening. It’s going to take enough of us. It reminds me of that Pixar movie that you probably didn’t see about the bugs where all of the ants were like, This is a thing. We’re tired of the grasshoppers and all of the ants needed to bind together. It’s going to take all of us rehab professionals to link arms and say, This is real.
Brian
Yeah, you’re 100% right. Absolutely. Here’s the other thing. For whatever flak that you receive, again, one of the things we love to just lean on here at the Somatic Coaching Academy is that we give people a tremendous amount of resources to be able to be successful with this. Oh, my gosh. That’s what we do. We want to have your back. We want to have your back so you can create the things that you want to be creating in the world. We’ve had some physical therapy graduates do some amazing things.
Ani
We’ve helped a lot of people leave the system and start their own practices. That’s just what happens. You might want to stay in the system. People do. We actually have people who have stayed in the system, too, but are so happy because they’re getting better results in their system job that’s totally fine. There’s not a day in my life I’m not happy that I left the system, for me personally, but that’s not everybody.
Brian
For some people who want to leave the system and haven’t figured out a way to do it. Because as a PT leaving the system, you have to have a way to differentiate yourself from the work that’s being done inside of the system. Because otherwise, honestly, it’s too competitive as a individual provider of physical therapy services to compete with larger health care systems if you’re going copay for copay. Totally. Or insurance for insurance. It’s not going to work. So PTs have to have a way to differentiate themselves. One of the things that we excel at is helping PTs create cash-based practices because they’re incorporating somatic coaching into what they’re doing. It’s amazing. We love doing that so much.
Ani
They can do the PT and they can do the coaching. You differentiate yourself. Also, a lot of people leaving the system don’t know how to be business owners, and we know how to help you do that.
Brian
We do. Totally, 100%. For all the programs. Whether you are a PT who brings somatic coaching in and you start your own practice or you stay inside of a healthcare system, either way, no judgment on that. One of the things you’ll need to recognize as a PT, and you’ve probably recognize this, is have you ever had someone come to you because something happened? You do your physical therapy, your rehab with them, you do really great rehab, and then you send them home for the week to do their exercise program. They come back the next week, and they’re right in the same place they were the week previously. Because why? They did not change their behavior. They did not change their behavior. You get so frustrated because you’re like, “If you would just change your behavior, your knee would get better, your hip would get better, you’d have less pain, you’d have less inflammation, you’d sleep better. If you just would change your behavior, I’m doing all I can do on my side, but you’re not changing behavior on your side, so you’re putting yourself back in the same place every single time. It’s so frustrating.”
Brian
How frustrating is that as a rehab professional? As a practitioner, it’s so frustrating.
Ani
It also shows up when people come back with different stuff or the same issue It’s like they get a little bit better, but then they come back. The repeat customers.
Brian
Yeah, exactly. Why is somatic coaching a match for physical therapists because you’re not just doing the rehab, you’re actually helping people change their behavior. When they change their behavior, then all of a sudden, they get better. Then you’re like, Oh, my God, we did it. We did that together. That’s one of the most why isn’t it a match? Bing. That’s one. Because I think as a PT, if you’re really interested in helping people move beyond where they are. One of my mantras as a PT, I would be very honest with this when people come in to see me, I’d say, “Hey, listen, you’re coming in for a back pain or neck issue or whatever it is. I ask what their goals were, they tell me their goals. I say, My goals for you is that you never have to come back and see me for this problem again. That’s my goal. You come back to me for another problem, and if this does occur again, that’s fine. But my goal is that we’re going to eliminate the root cause of whatever it is that is going on”. Most people are like, Wow, okay, that’s aspirational.
Brian
But I tell you what, I actually achieve that more often than most people would have thought that we did. Absolutely. Because that was our goal, and we did through behavior change. The behavior change was the function of the coaching.
Ani
Similarly for me, when people would come in, I would say, “This is a partnership, and you’re going to actually change your behavior. If you’re not willing to meet me in partnership, you’re not my ideal client. You can go see somebody else who’s going to rub you or something. But we are going to partner together, which is what coaches do, to support your growth and evolution beyond where you’ve been before”, which is a coaching thing.
Brian
Yeah, totally. Let’s just run back down through this thing. Why is it a match as a physical therapist and somatic coaching? Here’s the run down. I’m so excited. This is great. Number one, because if you want to start your own cash-based practice, it’s a differentiator for you outside of the medical system, and people do pay for that. Number two, whether you’re insideor outside the system, it doesn’t matter. If you’re interested in being the PT that gets people past where most people think they can go, do behavior change with people and move people to a more empowered place in a partnership way, like check, bing, that’s definitely a yes, too, in terms of helping someone to behavior change. The last match that I would just talk about really quickly also is circling all the way back to what we circled at, we were talking about the beginning of this one today, where we’re on the evidence base, especially around energy medicine. There’s just a growing evidence base. If you use evidence to widen your perspective rather than narrow it, then you’ll widen your perspective as a rehab professional and see that our bodies are in fact energy.
Brian
Subatomic particles, spinning, worrying, our DNA vibrates. There’s all really good science to show that. But big deal. Big deal. Now, somatic coaches, really well-trained somatic coaches know how to use that knowledge to apply it to programs, to client and patient programs. When you understand how to actually apply energy medicine techniques and also stress management techniques, because we know stress is one of the primary… Actually, talk to Dr. Ellen Langer, who’s done mind-body studies for over 45 years now or something. I was just listening to a podcast from her. She says that stress, after 45 years, 45 years of doing research, a career of mind-body medicine. She says that stress is by far the number one single most prevalent indicator of chronic disease illness issues.
Ani
There you go.
Brian
Unbound stress, which is another reason why I got into this whole thing in my own story. But here’s the thing. As a PT, that checks two more boxes for you. If you wanted to go to the root cause of chronic disease, chronic illness, if you’re not addressing a person’s unmanaged autonomic nervous system issues, aka stress, you’re going to be very difficult to make a big change in their life or any change in their life at all. Autonomic nervous system is the body. It’s the body, exactly. Hopefully, that makes sense in checking all the boxes, our physical therapist and somatic coaching, a match.
Ani
Check. Bing. Bing. Yes. I love that, Brian. You always bring some great research and stuff. I love the research you found on this, and it caused me to think differently about myself and this different interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary. Really, really cool. Really cool podcast. Thank you.
Brian
Yeah, you got it.
Ani
So much.
Brian
Thanks for just letting me run and ramble.
Ani
Yeah, you weren’t rambling. You were right on it on this. Thank you so much. If you’re listening and this is interesting to you, we’re so excited because obviously we’re really passionate about the fact that the body mind is not broken. It’s actually just fine. We just aren’t really aware of it. So thanks for listening in, and we’ll see you next time.