Welcome back to another episode of Inside personal growth, and joining me from well, actually, he's in one of the best parts of the world. Costa Rica is Simon Emery. And for my listeners, that's spelled s, I, a m o n, e m e r y, and his pod, or I should say, his platform or website is the same, s, I, A, M, O, N, E, M, E, R y, you can learn more about him. Hey, good day to you, Simon. How are you doing?

Hey, Greg, I'm doing amazing. Thank you. As we just quickly noted before we started this recording, the weather's about 75 a light, lovely breeze and not a cloud in the sky. So, you know, the days are certainly helping to keep a really good outlook on life. Sometimes in these places, it's great. Well,

and tell our listeners, you obviously have a bit of an accent. Where are you originally from? And, yeah, I think we ought to get that out right away. Not

a problem. So I am from the from the the amazing land of Down Under, from Sydney. I was born in Sydney, Sydney, specifically, and then we moved to Southern Queensland, which is the town of the Gold Coast, which is where I grew up.

Awesome. Well. And I want to let my listeners know that Simon's website. When you go there, you'll see home about somatic regression. His way is somatic experiencing, which is different, he says, and we're going to differentiate that between somatic breathing. He says, where individuals ability to thrive is often rooted in understanding the body's response to stress and trauma trauma, and Simon stands as a beacon of both professional experience and personal triumph. From this which we'll get into he had a harrowing childhood and an adolescence marred by profound adversity and so but I'm going to let him kind of tell his story, because that's what this podcast is about. So could you share your personal story and let and really kind of what led you down this path of what you call on your website, mental strength coach. And I think that, you know, look, there's a lot of people out there that put themselves out as coaches. I'm not certain. Some of them call themselves high performance coaches, and you call yourself a mental strength so differentiate that and differentiate the somatic experience and speak with us about this adverse childhood experience. Fantastic.

Well, that's where I'll start, Greg. Thank you, and thank you for the introduction and my opportunity to actually share with your listeners here too. So 1976 product of the 70s, probably, as you can see by the A in my name certainly was a different time to be alive. And I both of my parents, my mother and my father, my mother being 19, my father being 24 my mother was second generation immigrant family, and my father was sort of, you know, whilst he was that indigenous had some indigenous Australian heritage in his lineage as well. So we had some, some, some, there was some generational trauma that was already starting to appear in within them, my mother falls pregnant to me at the age of 19, and my father, at that stage, had just started to find alcohol and drugs through the party scene. So we had a he was we lived in a surfing town called Cronulla in Sydney, and my father would often be in those drinking and alcohol scenes and party scenes of a weekend, and through just that scene there, and it being just a new drug on the scene, as as it were, back in that day, everybody was trying it back then. And unfortunately, from my father's point of view and his disposition, he became hooked fairly quickly. And so through that period, he was using pretty heavily as I was just about to be born. And from that point on, my I was born clean. Actually, I wasn't born with an addiction, so I wasn't an opioid baby, as you were. But not long after I was born, my mother started using as well, so that we we moved to the city in Sydney, and we were basically living in destitute housing by the time I was one year old. So based, you know, so what would you call it? It's like squatting, but we would call squatting there, so we in an inner city space is squatting with no real resources, just, you know, fires in a fireplace, no electricity, no running water for a lot of it, as a young, you know, little boy and and really, just a life revolving around my parents, using and searching and looking for drugs,

and what kind of drugs were each of them, what kind of drugs.

They were intravenous drugs. They were opioids. Yes. So it was, it was the first of the return when, when the return services come back from from Vietnam into Australia, they brought a lot of opium from Vietnam into Australia. It was just this thing that was happening at the time, and so nobody had any experience with it before in our country, because it was so far away from everything,

pretty much absent for you as a child, meaning they were either strung out most of the time, or, Yes, you know, you had a very difficult childhood, and so did You see a lot of fighting and anger and all that going on and abuse. There

was, yes, there was, there was a lot of fighting, there was a lot of dysregulation. So there was a lot of inability for people to sit still at any one time. We were either looking for looking for money to get drugs, going to get drugs or using drugs. That was it. That was my existence for that point in time. Not much about my needs were being met at all, if any at all, outside of probably being fed and somewhat clothed. I had, luckily for me that time, I had a very, very, uh, extended family as well. So I would spend periods of time at my grandmother's. And I had, my mother had six sisters and three uncle three brothers. So I had a very large extent, fortunately, fortunate, yes, yes. So that was about, was the stability place that I would go to often. But obviously, you know, them being my my parents, they didn't necessarily want to leave me anywhere else and take me with them. And also, at the time, and you got to imagine, remember, too, you know, you know, they were also getting benefits for having me, for being a child, and my mother was claiming, you know, there was just they were organizing a system where they were getting money from the government for having me. So they didn't really want to let go of me that often, because I would like if they, because they, you know, doing welfare checks and like that, they would lose their benefits. So they were really conscious about that. But I was, I was still a vessel for their, you know, for their finances,

yes. So, so at some point, did all of this turmoil in your life result in you being influenced by drugs that other adolescent, or did you just stay completely clean

having a first hand experience? Yeah, yes, having a first hand experience of the effects of that drug and parentifying both of my parents. So watching, you know, my parents stick needles in their arms and having to hold them and basically take care of them while they were using that was the last thing I ever wanted to experience. It was like, I don't I have a very clear fundamental understanding that this is not anywhere that I'm going going in my life in that way.

Well, you know, the the you know, sometimes good, sometimes bad. Who knows. And I think the who knows, here is the part for you, Simon, where you could either look at this as bad, which you you you said, sometimes good, sometimes bad, the experience that you had with those parents really formed you into who you are today, and and it's been quite a blessing, and that's really around somatic regression. And I think our listeners would really your coach, and coaching focuses on somatic regression. And I obviously the pain body that you carried as a result of this experience was just huge. So could you explain what this entails and how it differs from other coaching methods? Because I know it focuses on the pain body, okay, so as you imagine, so

we'll just just carry on just a little bit from that last conversation. So you know, by the time I was five, my mother realized that that that life for her wasn't going to end anything and end in anything other than complete another, you know, disarray and destruction. So she managed to pull herself out and clean and so from that point on, then we were just carted around the whole, you know, the whole countryside, all the way through to and then she left to go to India for a year, and left me in the care of my parents anyway, just more and more chaos and turmoil and intercede and, you know, and inconsistency and love and connection throughout the whole experience, right through all the way, I'd say there was never, there ever, you know, sometimes I look at my life and go, maybe when I was 17, and my uncle actually come and physically got me and moved me back into his house, and I stayed there for three years. That was some consistency as well. No, at some point I had to leave there as well. So it was like it was, it was a life mud with all the way up until my early 20s, with just complete and utter chaos and not any stability within each with any shape or form. That was, that was that could be even regarded as something that was healthy. So obviously, you know, we get to our mid 20s, I've decided to do, you know, I realized that I wasn't going to be a surfing professional, much to my disarray, because all I wanted to do was go surfing, and I had to get a job. So I looked around what all my contemporaries were doing in the surfing, especially everybody's work. We're becoming contractors, yeah, getting trades. And so I decided to get a get a carpentry trade and then move into the construction business, because it was quite easy at that stage, and it paid quite well in Australia, and still does to this day. And so obviously, from that space, I was able to get resources and then fund myself into a space where I started to realize that, that a couple of failed relationships, a couple of, you know, really finding it hard to maintain jobs and hard to maintain stability just in any space. I was like, Okay, it's maybe something about my childhood is really starting to affect me into my adult life. So then that looked like, first of all, going through some initiation process with men, with men's groups, you know, and hanging out with more men, thinking that this is the space that I needed, that progressed into psychotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. That also sucked. It spoke, you know, went into psychology, and psycho made psychology, you know, pathologizing my experience as well, and just trying to get a fundamental understanding of actually, what was really going on with me. Because even though all of those events were finished and I had made it to an adult, and I was, for all intents and purposes, fairly whole, I didn't mind a beer every now and again. And sometimes, you know, that was kind of took over my life at some but it was never something that was out of control or that I didn't have full you know, sometimes I would use it to suppress but then I would just realize I'm like, What am I doing? No, this is something. And so, you know, getting through and what was really the fundamental shift for me was the consistency in not a no ability to maintain a loving relationship or a decent connection to a job. And so every time that I would go into these spaces, they would just go off, you know, I would just rest into these, these things and just and they would just disintegrate in front of me through no understanding of my own. And so I was then obviously seeing, okay, so I did, you know, with the common denominator in this process of me, what is going on within my internal state that's actually creating all of these instances of of disconnection, of not loved. And so this is where it began. And then I realized, after all of those therapies, EMDR, you know, EFT, so tapping, you know, the tapping, the emotional freedom technique, you know, moving, going to India and studying, doing a degree in yogic sciences, and living as basically a monk, an ascetic, in an ashram in the North of India, in the capital, the murder capital of India, in mongia, which is in Bihar state, right at the base of the of the Himalayas, and doing all of these, what I consider the time to be proactive. And really, you know, everything that was considered in that, in my experience of what i These were all really proactive. These were all things that, actually, I could see tangible benefits coming from. And okay, I'm getting a little bit more information here, but little bit more information here, but the moment I went back into a space that was really triggering, say a relationship. So say a space where I was, you know, feeling unsafe or not connected because of the, you know, my childhood, all of my old coping mechanisms just dropped straight back in. And so that was the push away, that was the suppress, that was the deny myself, that was push push everybody away in my existence, also, so all self sabotage behavior, and it was so it was so, so debilitating for me, because all, as you can imagine, it's a child of someone who's had such dysregulation, disconnection. All I really wanted was connection, yeah. All I was searching for was really deep connection. And I searched through it, through through therapy. I searched through it through yoga. You know, the literal meaning of yoga is, is union, yeah? Union myself. And so I was there trying to meditate and trying to, you know, I went to different seminars, you know, go to Spencer seminars. I went to, like, three of those. Followed Tony Robbins. I followed a few more, you know, thought leaders in that space. And then finally, I was at work, and I was able to have air fans in at the time, because I was running my own company, I really just started to look around myself and who was having the similar experiences in the way that they were expressing themselves in a therapy space. So, like, YouTube was a beautiful resource for me in in, you know, my late 30s, and just looking at all the different videos, and then I came across Dr Gabel Marte, and then him talking about the effects of drug use, because obviously I was trying to rationalize, or at least try and understand what was going on for my parents at the time, and then witnessing that, I was actually paralleling their lives as well, and actually understanding, as I was listening to him, that I had actually inherited, not only, you know, the genes of my parents, but I'd inherited their, for the most part, their central nervous system, their nervous system, so their fight or flight spawn response, and so that was integral to the understanding of what how I would move forward with that. So then Dr Gabel Marte led through into Dr Peter Levine, which Dr Peter Levine, if you're not aware, Dr Peter has studied somatic expression and somatic resourcing since the 70s. I think he started doing this. So he's written numerous books on the ability for people to actually use a body health help situation or experience as a way to bring a hyper vigilant state or a hyper dysregulated state into CNS in a central nervous system. And so looking at his experiences, then also extending that then. So, you know, kind of as I opened up one door, this next door that were relevant for each of these spaces started to open, right? And the beauty of and the beauty of the algorithm for me, you know, could we talk about how bad the algorithm can be in some of these, these social media platforms, right? But if you keep So, did

you study under him, Simon? Is that? In other words, did he offer a course or

No, no, I just No.

You just hold this on your own.

Yeah. So I took all I left, I actively went in, because I planned it. I feel still to this day. I find it very hard to read books. I find it very hard to sit still and read books. And not only I can sit still, not a problem, but it's the actually taking information from it, from off a page. And so for me, what was, what was the bet of most benefit was actually just watching the videos and then replicating what they were saying, because I was taking it in very quickly and replicating it. So I absorbed everything I could of both of those people's resources that they had online resources on, on and also, you know, YouTube videos and any any other resources that they had vanilla to, yes. Sorry.

So explain to the listeners, now that you've gotten us this far in the story, somatic regression versus somatic breathing, because I, you know, I think there's so many places people can go to actually do somatic breathing. I'm not certain there's a lot of places people can go to do somatic regression. Maybe you're going to prove that wrong. But if somebody became a client of yours, what would they experience? Well,

then, so if you, if we think about it from a somatic experience in space. So, so in my studies, and in my understanding and witnessing what was happening as I learned more and more my ability to actually regulate, automatically, self regulate my nervous system was going to be a bottom up approach. Was I have to, I have to actually feel and create capacity in my nervous system, in my body, to actually start to feel all of these orphaned off experiences, all of these suppressed experiences that I'd suppressed for so long. You know, my childhood, that I suppressed the consistent relationship breakdowns, that I suppress all of these emotions that I just had had the capacity to deal with, because I wasn't given the actual, you know, the framework of a how to actually sit with all of these really uncomfortable feelings. And so, so this is the, you know, as I said, this is the thing. I went and did breath work, and I did some somatic experiencing. And so what was happening for me was, as I was identifying in my body, how it was starting to calm me in different spaces. It wasn't anything that really stuck, okay, so it wasn't relevant. So when we were talking, so we talk about this in in a in a space of we're not, you know, if we say, we say when we even in meditative state after we do breath work in a meditative state. So go to your, you know, to your happy place, go to your beach, go to the forest, go to to somewhere where you feel safe here. And so whilst, whilst I could do that in a moment, that wasn't something that I was able to actually automatically bring on board when I was starting to rise up into a to a dysregulated state. Again, if I was treated in any one, simple, in any in any separate space,

might ask, because you use this term three times, and I'm wondering, just from a deeper element, the why behind the suppression must have been the pain. So you said, suppress, and you used your hands, suppress, suppress, suppress, right? And when I think of the word suppression, the word to explain what it is that you did, it's like you pushed it away. So you pushed away relationships that you thought you wanted to have in your life. You made it so that people couldn't have relationships with you. Let's put it that way. Or they didn't work out, or they ended up in disaster. What have you done? Because now, when you reverse the word suppression and you look at the word kind of how I'm going to say, the opposite of it would be acceptance. Acceptance, yes, yes, acceptance of so what kind of turned you from suppression to acceptance, and how did somatic regression get you in touch with the feeling such that acceptance was what you could do? In other words, oh, I'll accept this woman now, oh, I'll accept this person now, oh, I'll accept this situation in my life. Because, look, you ran off to an ashram. You had plenty of time to sit there and think in the ashram about not what I want to say, suppressing, but loving what was and loving yourself. And so what was it that you didn't love about yourself, that you had to suppress so much of this other stuff,

everything, everything, yeah, I mean, and that's, I mean, that's a grand, you know, that's a broad statement, but if you think about it, there was nothing about like, there was nothing about me as a child that that said to me, if I'm a narcissistic point of view of my childhood. There's nothing about my childhood that said to me that I was important for anything. I was just part of the story for them. So that's why, that's why, when we talk about suppression, I was like every time I'd get close to a connection with with a person, with a friend or a woman, didn't matter with a male or a female, I felt really unsteady in that after a period of time, because, like my authentic self, who I am authentically is not wanted. It's not it's not valid here. It's not wanted. Because soon as I tried to express myself authentically by my needs, like, Hey, I'm scared, hey, I'm lonely. Hey, you living like this and you doing these things is really making me feel not safe at all. My emotions and my story wasn't valid at all. My wasn't my my primary caregivers would look at me and go, you'll be right. Don't worry about it. It's a very strange clock. You're saying you'll be right. It'll be, you know, you'll you'll be fine. Don't worry about you'll be okay. You'll be okay. Exactly. You'll be okay. So this is what this. This what I was so, this is what I grew up with. It's like, okay. So my emotions, my feelings, my perception of my world, is not true, right? Okay. So, so, so. So, when I go into relationships or into friendships, and then I see something that I necessarily want to, you know, put a boundary in for or want to say, hey, this doesn't feel right or feel good, I would suppress that down because of the fear of the the fear of losing the connection to that person. So that's another thing

you've referenced this doctor who talked about the nervous system, we understand the you said, You emphasized the importance of self regulating the nervous system. So for people are listening out there, what are some of the practical techniques individuals can use to achieve this self regulation? Because, like, if somebody's add ADHD as anxiety, all of these various things, PTSD, in a sense, you sound like a bit of a victim of adverse childhood experiences, Ace and units through the war zone, and you literally also are PTSD. So if you look at the PTSD and you look at the ACE, if you took an ace test right now, you'd probably rank pretty high. You had alcohol and all this kind of stuff. It's off the wall. One of my best friends is Dr Brian Allman, who has the only app that helps people diagnose ace and deal with ace. Okay, and so many people have ace, and you know what it does is you're aware, and I'm glad you're aware of this. It shortens your lifespan, so somebody with high registration on ACE has a far greater risk of dying earlier than somebody who doesn't. So I'm glad you found something to self regulate the nervous system. But could you integrate a story in as to a client you worked with, how you helped them and then really kind of how you helped yourself? Because I think that's how these listeners learn,

sure. So we'll start with the client first. So, well maybe actually we should start with the self first, because I think that's what leads in. Because this is where the where it starts at, and then this is said that I can branch it out from there. Okay, so for me, I understood, you know, obviously going and being in India and doing doing meditation a lot, and understanding that in that meditative state, I was actually quite calm and regulated. But as soon as I would walk out of that meditative state. It all of life just come back in. Yeah? It just started to and I've studied under, under a guru who who really specialized in yoga, Nidra. So yoga nidra is body meditation, yeah. So it's really just about a body awareness meditation where we call it psychic sleep, where we just where the body sleeps and the mind is free to do whatever it needs to do. So it's just the ability to actually calm my body down. So every time I would have a yoga nidra, I would have this amazing experience of like, oh gosh, I feel so calm, so connected. But then this old experience would come back in and now taking from all of these other experiences I've been taking from all of these other thought leaders, you know, Peter Levine, Dai Bucha, Marte, Siamon, Porges, vessel, bandicol, the body kicks the score, learning all of these processes. You know, having a degree in zero gig sciences, and also currently studying neuroscience at Penn you, realizing that that I had to, there had to be some relevancy to me for my experience to feel safe and connected into my body. And so as I was as when I started to do this process and understand that, you know that what, what those thought leaders are basically saying is like, okay, so we have to connect into a part of ourselves, or an aspect of ourselves that feels safe, right? So, where does, where did I first feel safe and so, but I also realized that listening to to understanding this process, and listening, reading and listening to these other thought leaders, I'm like, Okay, if I try and access those memories of safety, I'm not going to be able to access them, because I actually have a fear conditioned amygdala. And so that amygdala is at the head of the limbic system. And so that limbic system has always been in control in my life, except when I did a yoga nidra. So I was able to come out of that heightened state, and it was into that meditation and realized, and so, and then, obviously, through further study, realizing that once we down regulated that amygdala, we actually upregulated the prefrontal cortex and the and the hippocampus, of the hippocampus being the seat of memories, and the prefrontal cortex the seat of memories, I mean, where we access long term memories, and the prefrontal cortex being the ability to actually have rational thought. And so through these two I combined all of these processes into into a meditative process where through zoom or through the camera, on, on, on the on the computer, where we are now, I'd take these clients through the process of feeling into their body. Because if I asked somebody, before we actually start the process of the actual Somatic Experiencing to remember a time that they were safe, they're probably not going to able to recall one, because they still haven't had the ability to down regulate that they're still in that fight or flight. And so we have been able to go and when we're in a dysregulated state, we only ever go from fight or flight to foreign most of the time we don't go to rest and digest if we've had some, some severe, either acute trauma or generational trauma, like myself, unless we've been given a skills to understand how to bring that to completion. We only ever go from fight or flight to form. And so phone looks like, say, you're out at a at, you know, at an event, and you're around a bunch of people, and it gets over stimulating, and you don't know actually, how to control that state. People will usually just disappear and go home, you know. And then I can't deal with people. I have to say, you know, we call them what's that type of person? We call them a I guess what I'm talking about, not a recluse. We call them introvert. Sorry, that's what I'm looking for. So if we Yes, if we look at these introvert people, and these peoples, these these experiences, this is an inability to actually regulate your nervous system in the moment. And you're actually as you're starting to be in spaces where it's starting to to to dysregulate you. You become more and more dysregulated, and you go into a foreign state, which means you can't actually connect in with those spaces anymore. So understanding all of those processes, I developed a situation where I want to know from now on when we work together, when it was amazing to be you. So if I reference it to my experience, I did it with myself, and I just went and the first prompt I said after I did the rotation of myself, and I in internal speak, I did my meditation process, and then I like and then I sat there completely still, and just asked myself at a deep level, when was the first time I can remember feeling safe? And then within that moment, I had an instant memory coming of when I was about four years old, four or five years old, and I was on my grandmother, like I said, I had this wonderful extended family. I was on my grandmother's couch in the lounge room. On a Saturday morning, she brought me the biggest bowl of brown Cocoa Pops you could imagine with the big with the biggest mound of white sugar. Any four year old boy would love a chocolate exactly, Coco puffs, a glass of chocolate milk, massive, big glass, which also had sugar in it that she dissolved because, you know, she was German, so that sugar was all about sugar wrapped me in this wonderful duvet, in this blanket, and put the Saturday morning cartoons on for me. And then in that moment, I realized that I was so safe, and I watched my felt my shoulders drop, I felt my heart rate sink, and I felt myself connect to that really deep state of safe and for the first time in my life. And so as I got out of, as I come out of that meditation, and realized that actually that's a relevant experience that I can call on at any time. Now, that's not something that that I have to manufacture or make up in my mind, that's actually happened to me that's relevant. I actually know what it likes to feel safe, and so from that point on, as I got got safer into that body, whereas I calmed that experience in my body, down all of these amazing other memories started popping in that I've completely forgotten about, that I hadn't thought about since I was a child. And in that moment, I went to bed. After that, that that time, I went to bed for about five to seven days, and I didn't get out of bed. So, because what we call, yeah, so what we call, so with that such a dysregulated nervous system for so long, and it was basically right up to when I was 40, I had such a high what we call allostatic load. So allostatic load is your body's ability to process all of the adrenaline and cortisol and hormones are stress going through your body. And so if you're always pumping those adrenal those those systems, those those you know, that that process, then your body has zero chance to actually, you know, actually match, sort of bring you out of that state. And by and by, the only way that it can do that a lot of time is to put you into a foreign state, a free state, where you just fawn and freeze and go and go back into reclusive place where you just don't want to engage anymore. That's your only way of your body. Of your body's

fight or flight or place, right? So, yeah, and you know, I I totally get your story, and I think the story is is fantastic, because it gives the listeners an idea to understand what it was like to be in this constant state of anxiety, and then to move from that into a space, space of feeling safe, I think what they might want to know. You know, fear, discomfort. How did you I think the cocoa puffs and the chocolate milk helped, right? But how can you tell individuals or inform them or work with them to reframe their mindset, to embrace discomfort and uncertainty. We're living in a world with tons of uncertainty, tons of discomfort, right now, right so this whole nervous system is being agitated in everyone, and it's causing upset. What would Simon's advice be to actually help people deal with that right now? Because it's everywhere. Yeah,

it is quite chaotic. I agree with you. You know, I guess just what's happening in the moment is, and what I'm witnessing is that people are much more identifying with a world that's not safe than they are with a world that is safe, I say. So that's actually a survival drive that's happening right there. So if we think about it from from a core, like from an evolutionary standpoint of view, if our environment's not safe, we engage those safe, unsafe mechanisms, you know, we engage that fight or flight, that that limbic system comes right on board then, and we're we're basically coming from a we've down regulated that, that prefrontal cortex, we don't really have access to a rational thought. We don't have. We don't we're not using memories of safety because they're not relevant. So all we're looking for is we're looking for people in our community who can help us to feel safe, because right in that moment, we don't have relevancy of safety well. And so then usually the people who can say the right things in that moment will actually gain our trust. You know, whoever that may be. So for me, in this moment, we have to remind ourselves, and I had to do this constantly. And I know it's almost counter intuitive sometimes, yeah, to say this, but I'm going to say we were never not safe. We were never not wanted. We were always safe. We were always loved. We were always loved, and we were just given versions of not being loved from people who didn't know how to be any better themselves. So they were doing the best with what they could at that time. And so I depersonalized the experience. Then I chose to say to myself in my life, my, my, my life means that I get to choose now. Because, you know what, I have an experience where I can reframe it. So if I'm going to reframe it, if I'm going to sit in here and say, okay, my life's been traumatic as all hell and and there's nothing in this space, the trajectory for someone with my type of childhood was using jail, dead, those three, you know, an addict, jail or dead, that's it. That's, you know, not many people make it out of a childhood like mine, right?

So inner resources, I mean, like you've built a resources with inside yourself, you talk about building inner resources, that's correct, and that it's crucial, right? This isn't optional. It's crucial for anybody faced with this issue, whether they believe that they're calm and collected or not having these resources available is important. So somatic regression, what? What can I learn from what my body is telling me? And how do I learn it? And when I do learn it. How do I reverse the pattern that I've gotten into as a result of allowing the mind to take over those neuro pathways that got me there? Because they're firing and wired in their like, hard wired and hard fire. It's like, Look, you were a contractor. Hey, you got, you got a positive and a negative, you put in a electrical plate, and the only way you can constantly have electricity coming through there is if you've got a positive or a negative, right and a neutral. That's supposed to be grounding things. And I think the challenge is, and maybe this is a weird example, but I think a lot of people forgot about the ground, okay? And what they got to realize is it's a B ground. If you don't have the ground, the fucking thing's not going to work. You're

all up here. You're all up here. You got your old neck up, that's

right, and it's going to burn up, just like it would do if you put the socket in without the ground frequently, you would burn the wires up, right? I know, because I just experience on electric car that I charge in my driveway.

Oh, geez. Oh, wow.

So my point here is like, positive, negative, good things, bad things. Who knows? But the reality is, what we do know is, if we don't ground ourselves with these inner resources, as we're charged throughout the day with this electrical current to run our bodies and to go we've got to realize there's got to go someplace safe, just like you said, and to me, the ground is safe. So how would you kind of put that to the listeners out there?

All right? So, so in my experience, what I was creating, in my life, was some form of safety, right? So I was constantly creating, going, Okay, I need to get ABC. So I need to get a good job. I need to get a wife. I need to get a car, I need to get a house, I need to get all of these external things. And I've got to keep going. I've got to keep going. This is going to create safety in my life. This is going to create a foundation of safety I can control, right? If I can get it, I'm going to control it. Let's go.

Let's go. You already had safety. You just didn't know you had it. No,

exactly. And this is the point that we come to. Was like I was pushing my body to the side as a contractor and working 10 hour days and running companies and doing all of these things, and just disconnected, completely, yeah, from that space, yeah. Completely disconnected. And this is what happens if we continue to do that over time, our body's going to say, hey, hey, hey. And then all of a sudden, one day, one day, yes, chronic fatigue, cancer, you know, some form of other sort of autoimmune disease. You know, it's going to put and say, Okay, I sit us on our ass now, because we I can't work anymore, like this. And so

the quarter, just for a second, I know, look, any sports psychologist will tell you this, you're going to release cortisol in your body from all those negatives or you're going to release oxytocin. The oxytocins, as we know, are the feel good drugs that we generate, and the cortisol is the one that it actually does much internal damage. Can do a lot of internal damage if you're constantly releasing it. You my friend, were releasing cortisol all day long, every day as a result of this, and it didn't do you any good until you really figured out internally, what is it that I'm telling myself that tells me I've got to keep going to get this to be somebody I already am, somebody I don't need to go prove to anybody else that I'm not so that comes down to your ego, your self esteem, negative self talk, all of these things that happen. But we got lots of listeners that are still dealing with that. Even me, after how many years I'm 70 years old. The reality is, and I've been doing this show for almost 18 years with 1200 podcasts, I still fall into it, of course. Yeah,

right. But the thing, the thing about it is we no longer draw an identity from it, right? We no longer we no longer use it like I no longer use it as a motivating factor in my life. If that starts to show up, I look, start to stop and look around me and go, Okay, what is making me feel really dysregulated, disconnected in this moment. What am I not looking at? What am I not acknowledging in my life right now that needs to be acknowledged. So I could, I could. I can pull it out. I can pull it apart much more easier, rather than fully identify with it and go, Okay, this who I am. This is what I have to do. I can actually pull it out now and go, Okay, there's something happening that's really relevant. Because what am I doing? I'm now using that nervous system as I as the way it was always designed to be right, and that way it was designed as, like, Okay, so we've got to find right. So there's something happening in my life right now that's not correct. So I've got to now do some some inquiry about what's happening. Where do I feel this? What's going on? Because something's triggering me in here. Yeah. And because I've done so much understanding about where I'm at, I'm in a safe place, I can really use it for what it was designed for, not just as a way to actually operate from a baseline anymore. I'm actually my baseline is oxytocin and serotonin and connected, you know, and safe. This is where I where I lean into every day. It's like I don't even need and as we get up, you know, as we do this process, as I did this process, and as I do it with my clients, more and more, so we actually don't need the memories of safety anymore. We could just just drop into those resources in our body. We feel them. We go and it's like, Oh, where do I feel? And this is what with how I work is like when we find that space first, then I ask you to and bring that experience, that memory of experience of safety, I said, then I start to ask you to identify it in the body. Where did you feel that? Oh, I feel it in my chest. How does it feel to sit in that chest of safety? My God, it feels so safe. What's the sensation? Can we give it a you know, out of 10, how safe do you feel? Can we give it a color? Can you feel that color start to expand right through your body? So we give it a relevancy the experience. We give a relevancy to our body experience. Then it calms us out of that state. And then when we go back up into that state after a period of time of actually being able to to regulate ourselves automatically when we get up, back up in that state, then we can really take a good look around us and go, oh yeah, this is really relevant for this point in time, absolutely. Oh my god yes. You know, I've got bills coming up the end of this month that I'm not sure how I'm going to pay. Okay, let's pay attention to that, rather than stick and we have the capacity then to sit with that nervous system state because we've calmed it down. We have zero, you know, our esthetic load is really low. We don't have a fear of actually calling in those really dysregulating places, right? Because we never had an experience. We were never for me anyway, I wasn't, you know, my experience of unsafe wasn't or dysregulation wasn't validated. So as an adult now, as me, as the adult, I'm the adult to those virgins of myself who was a little boy who didn't feel safe, and so he comes. So that little boy still comes to me, going, I'm really unsafe. I'm not sure about what you're doing here. It doesn't look good. And then I have to hold him in my chest or in my heart or in in part of my body, and go, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. And so that. And then it's

remembering, you know, it's the cocoa puffs and chocolate milk. Yes, absolutely give you that feeling. And you know you have spoken about at your website, helping people become unbreakable. Now, that's an interesting term, because, you know, are we unbreakable, or are we? Do we have the ability to bend and flux? Okay, wow, so, and I think what you teach people to do this, my personal opinion, is to allow them to be bent, but to re go back to whatever it is. So can I can I be flexible? Can I maneuver? Can I move around this? And can I do it with grace and ease and acceptance, such that I'm not stressing my body by what it is that's making me bend. Okay? So I know people speak about yoga and yoga moves and doing your careers, and you know all the things that you've done right to bring in a higher power, which that higher power helps us through. Hey, there's nothing wrong with gratefulness. Every morning a good yoga practice, all of that stuff. Because when you add that to what Simon you teach, it really brings somebody to go and be flexed, right, absolutely, and then to and then to come back and be resilient. Because you're a super resilient guy. I can say that already. I mean, I can see it in you. You've been bent every which way from loose. And the reality is, is that you've survived.

Oh, I'm thriving. I would say I'm striving. Greg, yeah. So, yeah, you've

you are so in kind of wrapping this up for all the listeners that are out there right now, looking at somatic regression or looking at your website, which I really believe look for everybody who's out there, it's really easy. You can make appointment with him. You can get mentoring. There's an FQ, a there's a contact. He's approved training provider for International Institute for complimentary therapist. He has a yoga certification. This is the guy you want to go to. This is the guy when you're being bent and you can't get back to where you'd like to be. Let Simon help you with somatic regression to get there. You can learn all about it. You can just book a consultation right there. He's even got a free consultation, by the way, so he's willing to do a free consultation with you. The website does a fantastic job, by the way, Simon, letting people know what this is all about. So if you were to leave my listeners were just one big point here that they could take away and either contact you or say, hey, great, I get it. I'm going to go watch some videos, right? Like you did. I'm going to go to YouTube and watch this Joe or that Joe or this guy or whatever. What would you tell them?

I tell them, and this is how I end up all of these talks, and I will continue for the rest of the time. I do this is healing, wholeness and fullness of life is available to all of us regardless of any experience that we've had, whether it acute, whether it be an acute trauma, where we have some PTSD, whether it be generational, whether it be childhood, all of us have the experience, have the available experience of feeling whole, being whole, and being loved and seen by the most important person in the world, by yourself. And when we have that love and connection, we require nothing else. Well,

I just did an interview not that long ago with Ken Wilber on finding radical wholeness, and you know, he had a Satori experience at the age of 16. Not many people have those that young, and then a lot of people never have them. But the reality is, when you're one with everything, and you listen to Simon, or you listen to one of my other podcasts with Ken Wilber about finding radical wholeness, you'll get what Simon's talking about. And I would encourage all of my listeners definitely go to this website. It says, make change our greatest ally and become unbreakable. That's the heading at the website? So I want to thank you for being on the podcast and sharing your personal story. Man, what a what did I mean that, in itself, is a teaching lesson for anybody out there listening to a podcast, and also how you overcame that. I think for me, the big turning point is at four years old, when your grandmother gave you the cocoa puffs and the milk so you could find safety. And I think for most of our people today that are out there, Simon, they're looking for a way in this uncertain world to feel safe. And if you have to go get a bowl of cocoa puffs and a glass of chocolate milk to make you feel safe. Go, do it. Fuck the diet. Go, go, go get it right. Get yourself a candy bar. You'll you'll still be okay tomorrow. There you go. Exactly just

relive that experience from your childhood that brought you so much joy. Have a look at there. What do you use to bring you joy? Yeah, was it going out riding on your BMX bike, or was it, you know, playing catch with your buddies, like, why don't go and re experience that and maybe give yourself a little bit of respite? And this is going to be okay? Yes,

respite is right. Respite is the word. That's where you feel safe. Simon, thanks for being on the show. Namaste to you, my friend.