Miami Alex Breakdown is supported by Helix Sleep.
Like so many of us, we're spending a lot more time indoors as winter's in full swing.
Sleep's even more important during the colder season.
It's peak cold and flu time.
So now's the perfect time to invest in a new mattress.
I've had every sleep issue you can imagine.
Night sweats. back pain, motion transfer.
We are so excited when we heard that Helix wanted to partner with us years ago.
After all the incredible feedback we've heard about them over the years.
I've had my Helix for about gosh five years now.
And it's made a huge change in our lives.
Jonathan loves his Helix.
Our kids love their Helix.
We highly recommend taking the Helix Sleep Quiz to find your perfect mattress in under two minutes.
That's how we did it.
Everyone sleeps differently.
We're confident you'll find a Helix mattress specifically designed for your specific sleep positions and feel preferences.
When I took the quiz, I was matched with a midnight, because I like something a little firm and I sleep on my side.
Jonathan though, is a twilight person, but both of our mattresses are a huge upgrade from our last ones.
Their models with memory foam layers provide optimal pressure relief and cradle your body in the areas that need it most.
It's the perfect combination of comfort and support, and Jonathan loves the cooling features of his Helix mattress.
Go to helixsleep.com slash breakdown for 27% off site-wide.
Exclusive for listeners of MindBiolics Breakdown that's helixsleepcom slash breakdown for 27 off site-wide.
Make sure you enter our show after checkout so that they know that we sent you helixsleepcom slash breakdown.
Approximately 40 to 50% of people have experienced some sexual trauma.
What does that imply for you in terms of how humans can connect?
If you have two people that have had sexual trauma and they want try to come to meet each other to have a healing sexual relationship.
What's going to come up are not declarative memories, not explicit memories, but body memories.
All of a sudden, the relationship just disintegrates and we wind up departing ways because we're unable to find that healing connection with each other, because we're stuck with it in ourselves.
It's something that it takes time to heal, and willingness to open to another and willingness to share our feelings and our emotions with others so that we can connect at this level and let this be sexual healing.
It's Mayim Bialik's Breakdown.
She's gonna break it down for you.
Because you know she knows a thing or two.
So now she's gonna break down.
It's a breakdown.
She's gonna break it down.
Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.
I'm Jonathan Cohen.
And welcome to our Breakdown.
This is the place where we break things down so you don't have to.
Today we're getting embodied.
Today we are getting embodied.
And in case you think that trauma is what happened to you, it's not.
It's what happened to you in the absence of an empathetic, fully present witness.
You might be like, trauma, I don't have any of that.
Your body has stored memory and procedural memory which we explain, and they could be very much impacting how you think feel, behave and even how you think about how you're behaving.
We're going to talk to literally the inventor of the way that we now understand how the body holds memory and trauma.
We're talking to Peter Levine.
He is the creator of Somatic Experiencing, which is a way to help us access memories in the body of an event and not simply the story.
And the notion that you may not even have to know or fully understand things that happen to you in terms of the narrative, but that your body already has memory that you may not even realize.
This is the guy that when he said this, people were like, you're crazy.
And now people are like, this is the way that we approach the body and how it holds information.
We're going to talk to Peter Levine.
This is the guy who literally said, The body has information in it that you can access.
And people were like, what are you talking about?
It's all in our heads.
And he's like, no, it's not all in our heads.
Peter Levine is famous for writing Waking the Tiger and Trauma and Memory, Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past, Understanding and Working with Traumatic Memory, also In an Unspoken Voice, How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness.
And he has a new book which is his autobiography and memoir, with more information than you ever thought was waiting to be revealed about how somatic experiencing even came about as a practice.
Prepare yourselves to learn more about your body than you ever thought possible.
What an honor it is to welcome Peter Levine to The Breakdown.
Break it down.
Peter Levine, welcome, welcome, welcome.
It is really an honor to have you here.
Jonathan and I have been anxiously awaiting talking to you.
And in particular, we both really enjoyed an autobiography of trauma, a healing journey.
This is your book that is coming out very, very soon, has really some beautiful imagery also on the front, and the tigers to remind those of us of your tiger imagery.
That's been such an important part really of your work.
This book I mean I've dog-eared more pages than we can even get to.
This book is really.
It's an exploration into more of your personal journey and how that journey led you to the development of a modality that no one had ever presented the way you ended up presenting it.
It is now practiced all over the world.
It is known as a revolutionary approach not only to pain and to trauma, but really to our lived experience.
Why is us understanding how your journey kind of progressed?
Why is it important for people right now at this moment in history?
Yeah, well, let me kind of go around the beginning.
When I was I turned into my mid 80s and I was confronted with the fact that I was going to be living less years in the future than the years that I had lived up until then.
So what I decided to do is to kind of make a personal exploration of how I came to where I am and who I am as, not just as a teacher, but as a person, as a human being.
And so...
So anyhow, I did this just for myself.
And my partner Laura said Peter, you really need to publish this because this could help a lot of people in their own healing.
And I said, no way.
This was just for me.
So she went behind my back and sent it to a publisher that we both knew.
And he said Yeah, it's not quite there, but I think you have the potential of something that could really help a lot of people in their own healing.
This is my gift to others.
It was difficult for me.
Right now I feel relatively comfortable because there are some very intimate and also violent parts, but also some really beautiful parts, some very exciting parts in my life that I really wanted to share.
So that's the story of how I got to write it and how I now have published it and now it's coming out.
It's just mentioned pretty shortly.
Which part of this book do you think is potentially the most helpful for people who might be struggling?
Well, one of the things that's important in somatic experiencing that's the approach that I developed is that we don't go right into the trauma.
We go around, we explore the periphery, we go to some different experiences.
And so when I started to write the book, I started with this, where the this is a thing where my family was in life threat from the mafia, from Johnny Dio, for many, many years.
And and to, to keep my silence or to keep my parents from testifying against him, which was that that was required by the district attorney, Robert Kennedy at the time.
I was brutally raped in a way to send the message to my parents, but I never told them.
I really, in a way, never even told it to myself.
So I put it in the resources of my body-mind and I left it there for many years and then came to excavate it.
But I realized that would be brutal for the reader, even though it was a very deep healing.
But I knew that I needed to really explore some parts of my life that were quite a different experience, an opposite experience in a way.
And what came to me when I was kind of going in my body is that when I was probably about four years old, it was my birthday, and early in the morning or at night my parents laid the tracks for a Lionel railroad, set underneath my bed, out into the room and then back underneath the bed again in an oval.
And can you imagine what it felt like when I awoke and I saw the train going around?
I just jumped out of bed, went to the transformer, changed the speed, made the whistle go.
And in that moment, I knew that I was loved. that I was cared about.
And that body experience, the experience of that in my body, my embodied experience of that memory, is what allowed me to relatively safely go into the other traumatic memories and to heal and to again find that part which is something that we all crave in our lives, that we all need in our lives, even if it's by one person at one time, that somebody cares about it, somebody loves us, and that we can feel that and know it inside of ourselves.
For many of us who who learn about trauma, and many of us who learn about it kind of from a more like traditional medical clinical, Western perspective, the notion is you dive right into your story and you spill your guts, you know.
Yeah.
You're already rolling your eyes.
I get it.
So the, the idea, you know, with somatic experiencing, I love how you talk about it.
Like we go around it not to avoid it, but you like to talk about that.
We get at the edges of it.
You know, we find where's the, where's the limit of it.
But I have to say, first of all, learning these things about your childhood, the environment you grew up in and this very, very traumatic rape that you describe.
But mostly the healing of that rape.
So I was just going to say, what you said was you placed it in the recesses of your mind.
What is that mechanism?
What did you do?
And the most fascinating part of this story is that you yourself did not tackle this and start that specific healing until decades later, when you had already invented the system with which to do that.
So can you talk about the recesses of the mind and then how that gets compartmentalized, so much so that it took decades?
He actually said the recesses of the mind-body, which I think is fascinating.
That's a survival mechanism.
And all of us exhibit that possibility, that something happens and it's too much to experience, especially too much to experience alone.
So as I was starting to teach somatic experiencing, some of these symptoms started coming up for me.
And I was disturbed by them.
And so I asked one of my students to sit with me, to be with me to go and to explore this and to see where it would take me and take us.
What were those symptoms?
Like, can you give us an example?
For people who have no idea what it would be like to put something in the recesses of your mind-body for decades.
What did this look like for Peter?
Well, something happened and my legs felt paralyzed. almost as though I couldn't move.
I also experienced like that my throat was clogged up with some kind of a white substance.
And that continued to come up for me.
So I asked my students to now be my therapist, to be my teacher, and to sit with me.
And the first thing she noticed is there was a slight shuffling with my feet, with my legs.
And she brought that to my attention and I could feel it.
And then I could feel the movement and feel the movement increasing.
And then all of a sudden, the images started to appear from the situation, from the rape.
And she was there and she put her hands, she asked if it was okay to put her hands on my shoulders.
And I said, yes, please.
So it really helped to have that other be with me.
One of the things I write about that trauma is not just what happened to us, but instead what happens in the absence of the empathetic other, of that present empathetic other.
And she provided that for me, as well as being my guide to body sensations.
And that makes such a difference.
And one of the things that people say, well, what does it take to be a trauma therapist?
Well, first, it amounts to doing our own work.
That's pivotal.
But it's also about being present in our own being, in our own bodies.
And that's an essential ingredient.
And she was that way for me.
And even though I'd been that way for many other people, it was, in a way, a new experience for me.
MindBalance Breakdown is supported by Remy.
If you've listened to our podcast, you know that Jonathan and I both have some teeth issues at night, clenching and grinding when we're stressed.
Our jaws get tired and it's really not good for our teeth.
It's not a fun problem to deal with.
If you're like us and part of the 30 of Americans who grind their teeth, your smile needs protection in 2026.
Remy's custom nightguards are clinically tested to prevent teeth grinding, reduce jaw tension and facial muscle strain and improve sleep quality.
You get the same professional quality and comfort as a nightguard from the dentist, but Remy costs you 80 less, no joke, and is much more convenient than having to go into the dentist's office because
You get the kit right to your mailbox, right to your door, and you follow the step-by-step instructions to get a perfect impression.
Then Remy crafts and ships your custom fit night guard.
Once you receive it, that's it.
You just start protecting your teeth.
Start the new year right.
Use the code BREAK to get 50% off your purchase of a new night guard.
That's 50% off at shopremi.com slash break with code BREAK.
Thank you, Remy, for sponsoring this episode.
My MBLX Breakdown is supported by Odoo.
So much of what we talk about here on MBB is about alignment making sure the systems in your life actually support your authentic self and the life that you're trying to live.
That includes how you run your business.
Luckily, Odoo is here to help you in that journey.
Odoo is an all-in-one management software designed to help entrepreneurs and small businesses focus on what actually matters instead of getting buried in admin work.
They offer a range of applications for managing customer relations, marketing point of sales, even custom websites.
All that, plus your sales accounting, inventory and operations are fully integrated on one simple and easy to use but very intuitive platform with Odoo.
When something happens in one part of your business, everything else updates automatically.
That means fewer errors, less duplication, and way more clarity.
We also love that Odoo is scalable.
As you grow, you only add what you need.
No bloated software, no unnecessary complexity.
Invite your whole team.
Keep everyone in lockstep with notifications and chat.
And their plans include all their apps.
Odoo's also affordable.
They offer several pricing plans.
Your first app is free for life, with unlimited hosting and support included and a custom domain name for the first year.
If you're ready to build a business that actually supports your well-being, you can start a free 15-day trial with Odoo or book a meeting with one of their experts to explore your ideas by visiting the link in our show notes.
It's a really thoughtful platform designed to grow with you, not overwhelm you.
Use our links in the episode description for the best deals possible and get started with Odoo today.
Jonathan and I are huge fans of Mudwater.
I'm very into the turmeric latte.
And if you add a little agave, makes it just a little sweet.
It makes us feel energized without the jitters, which is a real problem for those of us who don't like that jittery feeling.
And I've noticed it makes a huge difference in brain fog.
It's the best tasting functional mushroom blend on the market and with the best results.
Uh also, mud water's new low-calf coffee is a great go-to for an afternoon pick-me-up.
It's made with organic arabica coffee, swiss water decaf, healthy indian and functional mushrooms like lion's mane and cordyceps.
So you still get that rich, full-bodied taste that coffee lovers crave, but with only 45 milligrams of caffeine, because research shows low doses support focused mood and reaction time, minus the crash or anxiety that comes with a full cup.
And if you want something even gentler, the original blend is still there for you.
The coffee alternative, made with cacao chai, turmeric and functional mushrooms, plus chaga and reishi to support a healthy immune system, and caffeine plus L-theanine, one of the most effective cognitive stacks known in neuroscience.
Every single ingredient in Mudwater's products are 100 USDA certified organic non-GMO gluten-free, vegan and kosher.
There's also zero sugar and no sweeteners added.
To use Mudwater.
You just drop the powder into your favorite mug, pour some water on it, give it a mix.
Some go wild and add creamer, honey, or even CBD.
There's also caffeine-free blends available.
Ready to make the switch to cleaner energy?
Head to mudwater.com and grab your starter kit today.
Right now, our listeners get an exclusive deal up to 43 off your entire order, plus free shipping and a free rechargeable frother, which I love.
When you use the code BREAK.
That's right, up to 43% off with code BREAK at mudwtr.com.
After your purchase, they'll ask you how you found them.
Please show your support for the show and let them know that we sent you.
So, okay, how did these things disappear or go into hiding?
Well, I mean first of all, the brain is a very interesting organ and it has the possibility of having all kinds of different departments.
And in some cases, these these different parts are not in communications with each other.
I mean, I think you know about that because that's some of the doctoral work you were, you know?
Yeah.
And so it's just like they don't connect.
So, you don't know, you get a little piece here, like the sensation of my leg and the image of the white gunk, but still it wasn't connecting.
But moving through the bodily experience, it did connect and it allowed me to process those difficult sensations and emotions.
And rather than intense emotions, body sensations is the key to healing trauma.
Yeah.
And I think you were talking about waking the tiger.
That's one of the things that I talk about in Waking the Tiger is is that it's not.
First of all, it's not about reliving the trauma.
That's rarely helpful.
You know one of the things about somatic experiencing?
It's not a therapy per se, but what it is.
It allows people to do what they do better, to do how they do what they do.
So we have people trained in many, many, many disciplines.
And again, it's To me this was very important that we support other people, you know, cognitive behavior therapists and so forth.
We've had a number and physical therapists and many different disciplines take the training.
And it's open for anybody really who has some kind of certification in some way.
And also some people really who were just, I guess you would call healers.
Again, it was open also to people who did these different kind of healing modalities.
So that's something I'm very proud of, that we were able to keep true to that.
The other thing is, well, it's somewhat related, is denial.
Denial.
And then a higher level of denial, which is dissociation.
And dissociation, I believe has the physiological underpinning of the shutting down in our whole body physiological systems.
And dissociation is one of the most fascinating phenomenons that protects us from the overwhelm which we did experience in the absence of that other person, that other holding presence.
So nobody really, I mean, honestly, nobody really knows what dissociation is.
That's more or less how I perceive it.
And again, we have to feel safe enough to be able to reassociate those disassociated parts.
So I had a sensation in my leg and then have an image, you know.
And so I have these different components of an experience, but not the whole experience.
And with the guidance, we were able to bring those experiences together in the greater experience, which was the violent episode that happened to me.
And again, we have to go into things like that very carefully.
I support most therapies.
The only kind of therapy that I don't really hunker to is one where they have people relive the traumas over and over again the kind of explosion yeah exposure prolonged exposure i just don't think that that's in many cases even helpful and can be harmful so again that's one of the other elements so again with that person being there with her guiding me with her hands on my shoulders i was able to do that and come to that without being overwhelmed.
It maybe seems, maybe counterintuitive, that you would not feel overwhelmed by something that was overwhelming, but that is the way it is.
That is the way the healing occurs.
I think we could slow down for a second and unpack the whole process of disassociation, because when you talked about that instance that happened to you, you said you hid it from yourself.
And I think some people are going to be listening to this saying how does he hide something like that from himself?
What does he mean?
And the reason to explore this is because I think it's a prime example of what a lot of people are going through, where they have this stored emotion in the mind body, but it is hidden from themselves.
And what we're saying is that through this work, we can actually reconnect with aspects of ourselves that we have lost, that we may not even realize we have lost because we weren't in the loving presence of someone to help us process it.
So we were overwhelmed and then created some form of disassociation.
But can you sort of explain that process for people so that they understand that this has probably happened to them at some level?
Yeah.
Well again, it's not just these horrible things, but other parts that we're supportive, that we're caring, that we're holding.
They also get lost to us.
And to find the way into the ones that are the traumatic ones, we have to go first to those parts of our self.
And when I say self, I mean self with a capital S, to our deep self, to our true self, the part of ourself that is beyond any trauma, that is the basis of who we are as a human being.
The very last part of the book I have a picture of myself when I was about 18 months old and I come to holding that child in my arms, with my loving presence, and in a way That was more important to recapture that than to work with the trauma.
Of course, both were important.
And fortunately I had a photograph of this that my mother took in her Roloflex camera when I was about 18 months old.
I think I actually had the picture up here.
Yeah, the one that's in the book.
Yeah, to remind me of that day, that deep child, that loving, caring child, and to return to his presence and his holding.
When you talk about sort of this this process by which we seek to protect ourselves.
And I think what's important to emphasize, and you talk about the significant role of creative imagination, And there's some really, really astonishing and really powerful conversations that you, that you share, that you had with Albert Einstein 20 years after he had died.
And you talk about.
This is a Jungian sort of story mechanism of creative imagination which is also used in trance therapy and in very kind of deep therapy where we use creative imagination.
But I want to make a distinction between creative imagination and the work that you are talking about.
That is accomplished with somatic experiencing.
So what we know is that this is not a manufacturer of memory.
What it is, is it's, to my understanding, and...
Full disclosure.
I actually have been receiving somatic experiencing with my craniosacral therapist for about six months.
So I'm literally living your book in so many ways.
But anyway, what we're talking about is a piecing together of an experience that does not have as its only entry point the trauma.
It has a variety of experiences, many of which we can only access, meaning the pain can sometimes only be accessed through a positive portal.
That is the entirety of who we are.
So it's not that we're creating something that didn't exist.
It's that we're coalescing things that the body's been holding, the mind has been keeping separate and that we've been protecting.
Is that accurate?
Yeah.
I mean, it is a portal and it's a portal into our being, our deepest being.
And I think that's where it's really about.
It's really about reconnecting to our essential nature.
And I think that's again one of the things where somatic experiencing really differs from a lot of the trauma therapies, in that this is really really central.
You know, the thing you were talking about, creative imagination.
You know, when I did a little bit of reading about that.
It says that this kind of imagination happens.
It only happened in the childhood.
Adults don't have that ability.
And I said, you've got to be kidding.
I mean, it's essential to really learning about who we are.
And I can give you like an example.
You know, when I was working on my doctorate in biophysics and also beginning to develop and teach the roots of somatic experiencing, There was a favorite restaurant that I had.
And at the end of a long day of work, I would often go there.
And the women who worked there, they knew me by name and they always welcomed me.
And usually I started with a nice warm bowl of soup and with some French bread croutons, crispy on the outside and soft and moist on the inside.
I mean, as I'm telling you that I am, I don't know about you, but I am feeling my salivation.
So again, that's part of that kind of implicit memory.
So anyhow, I was there one evening eating and I saw a shadow come from just off to my left.
And I looked up and I saw an image let's call it an inner image of a man who had unkept hair and a jacket, crumpled jacket that was like two or three sizes too big.
And I realized that I was being startled.
I was being visited by this image of Albert Einstein.
And so for the good part of a year, we would have conversations.
I call it conversations at the beggars banquet.
And I would ask him questions and then he would ask me questions about my questions.
That's the Socratic method of exploration.
And so this went on for some time and I was so deeply touched and I would just run to the restaurant, not just to have the wonderful food but to see if he would be visiting me that same night.
And one of the things that came up that was very important in developing somatic experiencing is that our traumas and also our wisdom doesn't just come from our parents and grandparents, but from many, many ancestors.
So I asked him about that and how he sees this happening.
So anyhow, again with like an image in the image, like as a dream image, he took me to the edge of a pond.
And he had a yardstick.
And along the yardstick he had a number of stones, small stones, and he held it over the pond and he twisted and then the stones fell to the, to the bottom, and waves came out in uh in in in in um in in, waves and waves, and in going forward but also going back backwards.
And um, he's pointed out.
He said now what happens if there has been a rupture in the fabric, in other words trauma, that these waves get stuck.
Instead of passing coherently past each other, they get stuck.
And everything after that becomes disordered, disorganized.
And then I said well Professor uh what, how to, how to work with that?
And he said, he looked at me kindly with a tear in his eye and said that peter will have to leave to you.
And that was an important again, component of developing somatic experience is that where did these things come from?
What happens, how do we uh, lose that forward movement in our lives and our ancestors?
And then it then occurred to me in a moment of clarity that the thing you just had to find the places where it was stuck and just unstick a number of them, a few of them, so that the wave gets reestablished.
And I thought, oh my goodness, of course, this is a time-space continuum.
And that was amazing.
I don't know if it was the last, but that was one of the last times that we met together.
And so then, about 35 years ago, long time after that, I was visiting my parents in the Bronx and I was going to museums.
So I came back and I walked in the door and they were sitting on the sofa.
And I noticed the bookshelf above them.
One of the books was The General Theory of Relativity by Einstein.
So that prompted me to tell my parents, especially my mother, what had happened to me and the visitations, those active imagination visitations, of Einstein.
And she said, Peter, you didn't imagine that.
That really happened.
And I said, what?
And she said and my mother, if she would have been born today?
Well, she certainly was intuitive, but she could have maybe even been a psychic.
And she said when you were in utero.
You were eight months in utero and your father and I were paddling on a canoe in this lake and all of a sudden a wind came and turned the canoe over.
And we were unable to ride it and we would surely have drowned.
But then a small sailboat came along and they pulled us to safety.
It was an old man with rumpled hair and his stepdaughter.
And they announced themselves, presented themselves as Albert Einstein and his stepdaughter.
And she reasoned that, since he had saved my life, that in that moment of life saving that, we were bonded and we're always bonded together.
And so these I guess you can call them synchronicities these things that have happened in my life have really made such an important impact in developing the work I developed but in who I am and learning to really support, not just from people in my life but also from people from generations past.
These visitations were part of a creative imagination sort of exercise.
You were not having delusions.
You were not hallucinating.
You were of sound mind and body, having experiences that you were... able to sort of be open to.
And I think that's what you know a lot of our listeners.
We want to talk to people about what it means to be open to different things.
And for some people it's being different, like being open just to the concept of therapy, the concept that someone could listen to you, or being open to trying new modalities.
If you have chronic pain, if you have trauma, trying new things.
So-
You had the kind of mind that was open to this.
And Albert Einstein was living in the United States in 1942.
So it is very possible that this actually was an interaction that your mother had.
But I do want you to talk a little bit about this notion that there is a shared experience that is not simply personal and it's not simply familial.
You talk also about intergenerational trauma in terms of, for example, the Ashkenazi Jewish community or the Jewish community.
In general.
You talk about African-Americans, you talk about indigenous people, but you also mentioned this notion that there is information in the universe that we can apparently have access to.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, this is what Jung called the collective unconscious.
And also, this is written about in what's called the Akashic Records.
These are the records of everything that has happened and will happen, which is very similar, I think, to Jung's collective unconscious.
And I believe that we can all find ourselves to that collective unconscious if we're willing to open to it and to know that we're not crazy.
Because, I mean, you were correct.
I mean, some of the thoughts that I had, if I talked about this, people would think I was crazy.
But I think that was, in a way, the depths of my sanity, not my insanity.
I think a big part is opening, is writing dreams.
For me, writing my dreams has been very important over the years.
And knowing there is a greater knowledge, a greater wisdom, that our limited knowledge is just limited.
And that when we open to these collective aspects of experience, we are privileged to learn a great amount of wisdom and knowledge and wisdom.
But really about wisdom?
I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about these ripples that you mentioned.
It's this beautiful image and for you it was part of this sort of Einstein, these creative conversations you were having.
And what struck me about that visual is obviously it's one of the most powerful images that we have as scientists is to understand wave motion and wave theory.
And so one of the most accessible images, especially as we're learning things about physics and delving into these aspects of the mechanics of the physical world, is this notion of ripples.
And I love how you talk about that.
What you were tasked with was getting those unstuck that when you have these intersections and you get them unstuck.
And I especially loved this chapter in the book where you talk about your initial mathematical and physics sort of origins.
You talk about how somatic experiencing really evolved from the notion of you have the second law of thermodynamics, which is, if you put energy into a system, it's going to tend towards disorder.
That's called entropy.
And that's just one of the laws of the universe.
But you add to that and it kind of kept adding.
You add dissipative theory and catastrophe theory as these influences.
That essentially showed you and I think this is sort of what the unsticking is, but I wonder if you can clarify it my understanding and when you talk about what an empathetic you know, present witnesses to trauma, those are the boundaries that you can place around a system that otherwise would tend towards disorder.
It would tend towards chaos.
But when you put these boundaries around it, when you put in energy that otherwise could be perceived as chaotic and negative, what you have is the system will start to right itself.
Is that the unsticking...
Yes, it is.
Or another aspect of the unsticking.
You mentioned the second law of thermodynamics, the universe is going to hell in a handbasket.
Or, more practically, if you take ice and you introduce energy in the form of heat, the ice melts and becomes water.
So water is more disordered than ice.
Ice is more, crystalline structure is more, yeah.
And then, if you continue to add more energy, the water then becomes vapor, which is much less organized, much more entropic.
Now, there's a field called dissipative structures.
And the idea is that if you have a complex system, which the brain is actually, that was one of the things that I demonstrated in my doctoral dissertation that the brain is a dissipative structure.
And so if you introduce energy in a small enough amount, it will tend to go to disorder.
But if you don't introduce too much all at once, it will then actually all of a sudden go into a higher level of ordering.
What in somatic experiencing?
One of the basic principles is about titration.
You don't put energy into the system too quickly, too rapidly, because that could rise into a entropic result.
So you do just enough for a beginning of a change.
Like you said you, you get the place where the waves have been stuck and you just Give it a little bit of a cheek.
And in other words, you titrate what you've done.
And that titration then allows a higher order than before.
And I think, again, that's one of the keys in somatic experiencing is when you do this correctly.
I mean, if you think about this, you look at a window.
If you don't, if you have an intervention that doesn't go up to the window, it's not going to mean anything.
If you have one that goes above the window, then that could wind up, and again, in disordering.
So you want to be able to find that place, the titration that just is between too much and too little, and then find that window.
And in that window is the reorganization of the mind, body, psyche, brain, nervous system.
So I wonder if you can also talk about you.
Know you, your?
I really didn't know anything about your journey as a student or a graduate student.
You know, I assumed that you came out of I don't know some Berkeley home.
You know like being in touch with the universe and like just communing with crystals and the Akashic records.
But can you talk a little bit about?
You come from a much more sort of hard science perspective and then you added also ethology, meaning the observation of animals in their natural state ended up being such a huge influence for you because we are animals in our natural state.
Can you talk about sort of what you originally started out studying and how you decided to then, you know, evolve into being the person who created somatic experiencing?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you're right.
I started with pretty hard science, you know, and for example, I took courses in quantum chemistry, quantum physics, But what was most important, most revealing to me, was the study of ethology.
And ethology is the study of wild animals in their natural environments.
And I was privileged to have contact with Nicholas Tingbergen during this time.
And Tingbergen and two other people won the Nobel Prize for ethology, the studies of animals.
And so I learned a lot from him and from observing animals.
And one of the things that became eminently clear is that prey animals in the wild are really traumatized, even though their lives might be threatened many times a day many times a day and their body does something in a way to shake off that threat.
And we have that same ability, but we've lost in many cases that capacity, and that's what we need to cultivate.
Can you talk about that response?
Can you explain it to people who may not know?
Sure.
What you'll see.
For example actually, when I'm teaching, one of the things I show is a polar bear that's been chased down by an airplane and shot with a tranquilizer.
And then the wildlife biologists gather around and you see the animal shaking and trembling and then taking spontaneous deep, spontaneous breaths.
And he says, this is not something that's frightening to the animal.
It's shaking off that um, that stress and lets the animal return to equilibrium, and so that again was a really important part how we return to equilibrium, uh and uh, what it is that we have lost.
As we are, like you said, we are animals, we are mammals, we have some special characteristics, but we are mammals all the same, and i think what happens that allows the animals to come back into equilibrium, we become frightened of those various sensations.
And so we block them.
We stop them from moving forward.
And in doing that we lose that ability to heal from our traumas, to discharge that energy that's got locked in the nervous system and locked in the body.
Again, not to do too much, but to just do enough to go into negative entropy to greater levels of ordering.
There's a statistic in the book that you share that approximately 40 to 50 of people have experienced some sexual trauma.
And this is an astounding statistic.
People trying to connect with other people, that statistic, which may also be, you know, on the lower side, because this is something that people don't talk about, people don't report.
And many people also experience sexual trauma that we've called other things.
What does that imply for you in terms of how humans can connect or are able to connect?
Well, I mean, just think of it.
If you have two people, or even one person, but two people that have had sexual trauma and they try to come to meet each other and to have a healing sexual relationship.
And, of course, what's going to come up are not declarative memories, not explicit memories, but body memories.
And so what happens is, all of a sudden, the relationship just disintegrates and we wind up departing ways because we're unable to find that healing connection with each other, because we're stuck with it in ourselves.
And, like you said, it's probably considerably more than that, probably more so with women, but it's still a lot with both.
And the other thing is also we live in a society that is largely life negative. not life positive.
And so we kind of come into this environment, this world, as a kind of societal trauma.
You were talking at the beginning of Barry Goldberg.
Well, this was a friend of mine, where our exploration together was completely squelched by my father.
And it had a lasting effect.
And a lot of it was healed in my relationships that I've had over the years with women.
And it's something that it takes time to heal and willingness to open to another and willingness to share our feelings and our emotions with others so that we can connect at this level and and let it be sexual healing.
One of my very dear friends in uh in uh in switzerland is a woman named diane richardson and she wrote a number of books on tantric sex and she she actually was one of the people who endorsed the book and uh, you know, in her teaching and my understanding is it's not about techniques.
It's not about sexual techniques.
It's really not.
It's really about being present with another person at many different levels psychological physical emotional, spiritual and to use this as a catalyst, a gift to open to these different dimensions through the sexual portal.
One of the things that I found so powerful in your discussion of sexual trauma was also this acknowledgement that this doesn't just present itself as like sex problems.
Or he wants it more than I do, or I want to try this position.
What you talk about is that in a truly intimate relationship, Sex and physicality is one part of it.
But if there's trauma of a sexual nature, it very often will come out in the emotional realms, in the connecting realms, in how we speak to each other.
Or my favorite technique like the cut and run, like oh, this doesn't feel good.
I must need to leave.
Right.
And that we don't even we sometimes can't even trace it.
We can't even get back to it.
But you know you also, you give an experience of you know you talk a lot about sexual experiences, not in a sensationalistic way.
You know, you really do.
You do, you do a great service, you know, to this discussion, because I think it is a part of so many people's experience.
But I wonder, can you speak a little bit to what it can look like, you know, when you have sexual trauma?
What does that look like emotionally?
What does it feel like spiritually?
You know, sometimes it feels like we're filled with fear, anger, grief.
And if we can open up to those feelings in ourselves with that chosen other, then we can find a deeper healing at all of those levels psychological emotional sexual, spiritual.
And I believe that is the greatest gift that we can provide for each other.
And I am so deeply moved by those who have done that for me, who have held that present for me and have let me mature as a more full human being.
I wonder if you can talk about.
You know there's a a really special place in your heart and in this book for the experience of babies and children, and you talked a bit about you know us learning to have compassion, you know, for that child within us and you know i've talked a lot on this podcast about my tremendous aversion to any conversation about the inner child.
It took me many, many years and honestly, decades in therapy before I was even able to really understand it.
But you talk about that.
There are things that happen to babies and children, in many cases pre-verbal.
Can you please explain for people who do not understand this or don't want to believe it?
How does the body and the mind hold memory like that?
Especially if it's pre-verbal, like what is it?
Where is it?
Well, let me give you an example from myself again, because that's what I know the most about.
When I was about I think I was about six months And my parents thinking that my father might be drafted into the war, they went off to have a vacation.
And so they left me with my grandparents, who were nice enough people, but I didn't know anything really about them.
I barely even met them.
And then they disappeared for two weeks.
And when I came back, It was as though I never recognized them.
You know, there's some experiments that were done.
I hate to even call them experiments, where the mother is with the child and then the mother leaves the room just for like 10 or 15 minutes.
And the baby is yelling and screaming in protest and then shuts down.
And when the mother comes back in, it's like, I mean, she's with another person there.
But when the mother comes back in, it's like that baby didn't even recognize her.
And that's an injury that's just for like 15 minutes.
And so you can imagine how that might be for many of us where we experience that kind of abandonment.
So again, working somatically, working with body memories, I had this experience of my hand, my arms going out and then holding against the door frame of the door.
And so I wouldn't be able to be put there, wouldn't be able to be left there.
And this was years later that you started having... So yeah, I just want to be clear.
You're not saying that you remember, but the report that your mother gave confirmed what your body was showing you, was your reaction to it.
So when you went to your mother to tell her this, you were an adult, right?
And you brought this up.
That's right.
Okay, so what did she say?
And she said, Peter, we're so sorry that we did this.
We really hurt you.
We're really sorry.
And she said that you would brace your hands against the door.
Whenever they went to visit my grandparents after that, I would brace against the door and yell and scream in protest so they couldn't let me in there.
So how did that play out?
Well, I think it really played out with fear of a relationship, a woman leaving me and abandoning me.
And as I worked through that, then i could much more freely have relationships with women where i wasn't afraid of being abandoned or abandoning them before they could abandon me, because they were body memories, they were procedural memories and again, it's not something you can remember cognitively at all.
It's really fundamentally a body memory, a somatic procedural memory, and we hold onto that as though it's still happening in the presence, even though it may have happened decades and decades ago.
So again, it's so pivotal to know how to work with these memories, these body memories which are not in any way at all conscious, but which really limit our whole capacity to be with others and to relate with others.
I think it's really important to explain here that these body memories are being activated and then the conscious mind is coming up with excuses or a narrative in the present that will justify them.
So it may be people are like, what are you talking about?
That person is just horrible and I got to get out of the relationship.
But what might really be happening is that they have a body memory coming up that makes them feel uncomfortable.
And instead of facing that and working through it, they're coming up with an external narrative to justify not looking at something really difficult.
Yeah, I call that premature cognition.
We try to explain to ourselves what is happening, even though that may have very little to do with what actually happened.
And again, that's one of the things that we learned to suspend that information and then to work somatically with the bodily experience.
So you said it perfectly, Jonathan, actually.
You know, it is to be able to hold in abeyance what we think happened, to find out what actually is happening to us in the present, in the here and now.
Wildly important because people are, for the most part, just these walking brains and we go for a minute and go to our yoga class or we do our breathing and we're like okay, I'm tapped in and I'm centered now, but we're not really given the tools to live from an embodied way.
Can you talk a little bit about what that means to live an embodied way and how that helps people guide through their life more effectively?
You know, Descartes, Rene Descartes said, I think therefore I am.
And he just threw everything asunder for many, many centuries.
Centuries.
And at that time, also around the time in the mid 1600s, there was a philosopher named Blaise Pascal.
And he wrote to Descartes and said Monsieur Descartes, I cannot forgive you for what you have put to our beings, that you really have made.
And he wrote, Blaise Pascal wrote, the heart has its reasons which reason cannot reason.
Sometimes interpreted is that the body has its reasons which reason cannot reason.
And we look for that reason in the body and to be more embodied.
And I think that's the task in this epoch of history to find more and more connection with our bodies, more connection with each other through sharing of our living, knowing bodies.
And, um, and yeah, I think that is the, the, uh, the, what, what this period in history is.
And, and I think about, well, okay, so this is like the, you know, 2000, 2020s.
And the when I give, when I Years ago, when I would talk about embodiment, people kind of say what is this guy talking about?
And I think people really get it now that really embodiment is what's missing in our lives.
One of the Lifetime Achievement Awards that I received was for the psychotherapy networker.
And they did an interview with me.
And they had a picture of a body and of a person.
And it was like a puzzle, one of those thousand piece puzzles.
And there's a piece that's missing.
And they wrote, the missing piece is the body.
And for a psychotherapist to say that is quite a step.
Because you know, the body has been so neglected, negated in therapy for so many, so many times that I think there's now this recognizes yes, this is where it's at.
This is now our challenge in this epoch of history and of our lives.
It's also harder now than ever before because of digital technology.
We're able to be constantly distracted all the time.
We're able to justify reasons for how we feel based on doing research and following this person or that.
How do people start to follow their bodily cues and instincts?
Like if there's a beginner's guide and I know that's an overwhelming question but like if someone's listening and they're like well, how do I begin to develop this instinct?
Okay.
Well, first of all, have times when you're not using any devices.
So when I'm done with this wonderful interview, I'm going to move, I'm going to dance.
I did an interview recently and somebody said that we've gone from the couch, that is to say Freud, to the chairs facing each other, which is the way psychotherapy is.
But if you're sitting together and you're just facing each other, you're not opening to body sensations.
So I added, so we went from the couch to the chairs to standing and moving.
And when I work with people, I work with people standing and moving together with them.
That's how my somatic experience therapist does it, just letting everybody know.
She or he is doing the right thing.
She does all the stupid things she makes me do.
That's how I describe it.
But I mean, I think we do have to take some time off from these kinds of devices.
We really need to put them on quiet for some time and then just to take a walk, you know, to walk around in the neighborhood, to walk, for me to walk on the beach here.
Uh, to yeah, to to not be constantly distracted, because when we are constantly distracted then we're really unable to connect with our bodies.
And what i see?
You know some young people together, and maybe they're a couple of dozen, and they're supposedly meeting for a time together, But all of them are on their devices.
They're not connecting with each other.
They're not connecting with themselves.
So I think we really need to take quiet time, you know, to not have our devices on.
And I think that's a really good first step to connecting with ourselves.
And I think we all desire that.
It's not something that we're necessarily comfortable with.
But it's something I think that we all really want for ourselves and for our others.
There's something you talk about also a lot in the book which, in particular, you know I resonated with because you come from the same neighborhood that my parents grew up in.
And you tell a lot of the same stories that my father would tell about all of the physical activities that you like to do as a child.
But...
I think that there is something to what many of us would dismiss as generational.
Like, oh, older people played.
They went outside.
But we have other things to do.
But, you know, you talk about, you know, going to the park.
That was something you did as a kid.
Or like you played stickball.
Like, as I said, stickball.
And when I was a kid, you know, I was born in 1975.
And we were often... allowed in the summer to just be out all day.
Like you would just like ride your bike and come home to eat.
And then you'd go out again.
And you because every time you came in, they made you do a chore or asked you to do something.
So we stayed out a lot.
There was a lot of play.
And I've noticed I have I have an 18 year old and a 15 year old and Jonathan also has a 15 year old.
In many cases, they want to like literally be playing video games or they want to scroll things on Instagram.
And I don't mean to sound like such a fuddy-duddy, but there's something to this notion of our bodies experiencing play.
Sometimes I would just have like a journal and some markers.
And that's what I would do is I would write and draw as a kid.
Can you talk about the importance of play, of creativity?
Oh my gosh.
Generally, but also specifically somatically.
Yeah, well, play actually opens to our creativity.
You know, I mean, when you were just speaking, you just took me back to my time when I was, you know, 12 years old and we would meet the whole group of us kids would meet, you know, and we would play stickball because none of us could afford, you know, mitts and bats and so forth.
And we played, and we played, and then we.
My mother, when we were, was ready for dinner, she would always whistle the Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
So we'd say, So she would put her head out the window and go and then it was time to come back.
But at the end of the meal we were allowed to go back out again and continue playing the park, across the place, across the house where I was raped.
But there was also a place where I played, and playing is so important for creativity.
You know our body needs to move.
And that's where it's not just a physical thing.
It really is a whole basis for creativity.
So play is great.
And that's, you know, I rarely see kids playing anymore.
You know, I mean they're on their devices, but I don't see them playing and doing tag, and you know games like that.
And it's, oh my God, it's tragic.
It really is.
And yeah.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
Well, thank you for bringing that memory up for me.
Yeah.
I wanted to ask about something you know in so many ways.
So many people are your children and they carry your message and they carry your teachings.
But you also specifically reference in the book that this work and the work of reparation that you've done on yourself, the healing that you did, in many cases took the place of many other things in life.
Was there a conscious decision that you made of like, this is my family, this is what I build?
Oh, wow.
Wow.
Oh, my gosh.
Okay, give me a minute here.
You know, in developing somatic experiencing over 50 years, I had to make a decision.
I don't think I was conscious at the time that I wouldn't have children of my own, because it took all of my energy to develop and to teach children and to travel around the world teaching.
But, and I was fortunate of having some, several God children.
And so being involved with their lives.
And we would play together.
We would run together, we would play tag together.
And so I got to impart that or play with my godchildren in a way that was irreplaceable in a way.
Yes, I didn't have my own family, but I had them and we shared play together and I'm still in contact with them.
One of my first godchildren.
He's now in his early 30s.
I guess I was teaching in the United Kingdom and in September
And I arranged it so he could come and he could be with me there.
And it was so great because he was then participating in the sessions that we were doing.
And he just was just full of life.
And so to all my godchildren, to Oisin, to Jacob, to Jada, They really have been an important aspect of my life.
And I'm just so grateful to having shared that time with them.
That's beautiful.
Peter, I want to ask about the first printing of your book.
Not the one we're talking about now, but the book that really articulated your philosophy of It was published in 1996.
Is that correct?
Yeah, I think so.
Can you describe a little bit about that time period?
Because you were introducing ideas that were not welcomed initially.
And in many ways, the world has caught up.
But I think maybe we're talking now about somatic experiencing and people need to be embodied.
And that language is of the vernacular now.
But at the time, it was not.
Can you talk about what was so radically different from what was believed then?
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that was when I wrote Waking the Tiger.
And when I first started to to to talk about it, I would have people who, if they were there, they would abruptly leave the room because they thought that what I was talking about was complete gibberish.
And it was and these are mostly psychiatrists and psychologists.
And then fast forward to this time, that never happens.
If I'm in a room of a thousand people, 999 people really are riveted.
They really want to know more.
They want to learn more.
So it's just completely has changed.
It's no longer fringe.
What did they believe at the time?
Like if you were to bring us back to that era, like I'm trying to help people understand what is so radically different, because I think we've lost a little bit of the perspective of where the culture was and really that you were a core part of shifting that culture.
Right.
Well, people were talking about mental illness at that time.
Yep.
They were prescribing Xanax like it was pets.
Exactly.
Right.
Xanax and all those other ones.
That it's something that you have to fix the brain because it's not working right.
And I think again, people at that time would have thought that I was talking about something that was like I said, that was in the fringe, that wasn't in the mainstream at all.
And I think the shifting the idea from mental illness to the illness of disconnection it's not really an illness.
It's really a potentiality, a new possibility in our lives.
And so yeah, I mean I don't see it as an illness but I see as a disconnection, a disconnection to self and to body.
And the antidote for that is to reconnect.
And I mean, I'm not against medications.
There are times when medications can be useful, but it's not the answer.
And the answer is to connect with ourselves and to connect with others, and to do that through the living sensing knowing, body.
That makes a lot of sense.
And if I'm just summarizing what we're saying there is they had a very almost limited view of what mental illness was.
And the notion that we could reconnect through moving towards the edges of that experience and reconnecting with ourselves wasn't in the vernacular at all.
No, no, it wasn't.
And again, mental illness is because it's mental.
Everything is about mental, but that's just not the answer.
And I think that's something that people are now accepting and acknowledging and changing in their lives and in their practices as therapists.
You know before when I would ask you know how many people or show of hands, people who had practices that they did routinely, is a group of therapists.
And, you know, very few people would raise their hands.
And then, when I asked that question Now or recently, many people, probably most people, raise their hands.
And so many people do something with their bodies.
They do yoga, they do Tai Chi, they do Qigong, they do dance.
And I think people are cultivating practices, and these practices are embodied practices.
And I think that's really the alpha and the omega from it.
It's really cultivating a relationship with our bodies and with the body self.
And when you had said something, a term like the body memory, back in 1996, what would the reaction have been to that?
Like how did you stand out there really ahead of your time and deal with something that you knew to be true yet was, you know, being?
You were getting so much pushback on it.
What was the reaction to?
The body has memory and there are these stored memories inside of our body that are affecting our cognition.
Well, they were disturbed, to put it mildly.
They were disturbed.
But one of the reasons, because I think laymen or even therapists really misunderstand the nature of memory.
And particularly memory that has the trauma.
Actually, that was the motivation for writing one of my books, more recent books Trauma and Memory, Brain and Body in the Search for the Living Past.
Because these memories, I looked at it more in terms of things that were more acceptable.
So, rather than call them body memories, I spoke about procedural memories, things that the body has learned to do to defend and protect itself.
And these are procedures that the body has done.
Like you said, you know, memory was supposedly just a mental operation.
It was never seen as something that the body remembers.
But the body does remember it and the body has its memories and has reason.
That reason cannot reason.
And you know, I think that you know some people still would be saying well, what do you mean by a body memory?
And that's why again, I attempted to describe what an implicit memory is like and a procedural memory is like.
And I think many people who couldn't, who couldn't cotton to it as a body memory, can understand it now as a procedural memory is again things that our body has learned to do to protect ourselves and to, and and also to enhance our life.
I mean, you know the expression, once you learn how to ride a bicycle, you never forget.
That's an implicit memory.
That's a procedural memory.
So they are with our parents or guardians or our older siblings, and they're together with us, and they're holding their hands to our back.
And they go with us and go with us until we can sense that they have found the balance.
And then we let them go and then they move.
You couldn't explain them.
If you wrote a book about how to ride a bicycle, it wouldn't work.
Or a book about how to ski.
You can only learn it by procedural memories.
And once these memories occur, they're there forever.
The problem is when these memories are of trauma, then they're also there forever.
And that's why you have to work with those memories, those implicit procedural memories, to resolve and to heal trauma.
I wonder if you can talk a little bit about this notion of what can we trust about our memory?
Because, you know, especially in the 80s and the 90s when we started learning about dissociation, you know, as more of a real phenomenon, you know, all of these sort of naysayers.
And you know we had all this conversation about, you know, people planting memories and that that's what's happening and all of that nourish kite.
Anyway, when.
But I wonder if you can talk a little bit, you know, from your perspective, about what does it mean to trust memory?
Ah, good question.
I think primarily it means to not jump ahead to find out what's going on at the level of sensation and feeling and to trust that and to let that guide us to where it will guide us.
And I think that then when we do have something that's more like a memory, We can more trust it, because it didn't come as a mental construct.
It came rather as an embodied experience, embodied memory of what's called a procedural memory.
So yes, we can trust our memories, but not if we jump ahead too quickly.
We really need to find the way to connect, through the body, those procedural memories, and then they will usually lead us to something which is more of an explicit memory, or sometimes called an autobiographical memory.
And I talk about those different types of memory.
So I think if we don't jump to conclusions, then we can trust.
If we jump right to conclusions then I think we maybe cannot trust.
I mean, I again talk about in the book quite a bit about people who have this whole thing about false memories, which was a crazy business.
So either all memories are false or all memories were true and neither one is close to the mark.
And, um, you know, I'll give you one example.
I think it's also in that book.
I was asked to see this, this young man who, uh, he was having memories of being raped.
And he was then involved with a group that would relive their traumas over and over again.
And they would yell and scream and so forth and uh, and that he was doing that for almost a year and he was just getting worse and worse and worse.
So then i was asked to see him i was living in colorado at the time and uh so, rather than go to those memories, i had him describe what he was noticing in his body and he felt his, his body, his lower back uh constricting, and I had him follow that movement.
And then what came is that when he was 13 years old, he had a circumcision and his mother was so put off by that that she was supposed to change the bandages, so she would literally rip them off and he was in agony and that could be experienced as a sexual abuse memory.
But by following the bodily response, it was a very different thing.
And then that allowed him to heal.
And he actually took leave of that, because he then took this woman to court about those, those things that he was made to relive over and over again.
That's fascinating.
It really is.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When we talk about sort of, you know, modalities that were previously considered fringe, right?
And even talking about body memory, let's say in 1996 was considered fringe and you had to stand up against so many detractors.
One of the very sort of I don't want to say trendy, but I guess you know trendy ways to tackle trauma and in many cases you know it can be a very somatically connecting experience is a lot of people are using hallucinogens.
And we live here in Los Angeles.
I like to say you can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone who's had an ayahuasca experience this past weekend.
But you have had some very, very significant experiences with a variety of hallucinogenic drugs.
Even quite recently, you utilized 5-MEO, am I saying all the initials right?
DMT, all the things. to really process kind of what death can look like.
By understanding dying, we can truly live, right?
If we die before we die, we'll live forever.
But one of the things that I really wanted to thank you for is that you are not afraid to speak very specifically about the incredible significance of plant medicine in particular.
And I believe your suggestion is for every hallucinogenic experience, you prescribe 10 to 15 sessions.
About that,
Meaning...
You do.
You are not like hey, let's go tripping in Joshua Tree this weekend and that's going to change your life.
And if people do that, that's fine.
But you literally talk about, and I think it does relate to this notion of being held by an empathetic presence for whatever you're processing.
Can you talk about sort of your your prescriptions surrounding the use of these very significant medicines?
Right.
Well, again, I have to be a little bit cautious because I was in Berkeley in the 1960s.
Yes.
And obviously, you know, we were crazy, Peter.
We're crazy with that.
But in the book, I really talk about the importance of preparing for one of those catalysts.
And preparing, for example, you know, wearing goggles and an earphone to just listening to the music.
Without the drug.
Without the drug.
Without the drug.
Prep.
And then just processing that.
And then, after using the drug experience, the catalyst experience, then to do several follows up where you really work specifically with what's going on in the body.
And I think both of those are absolutely essential.
Otherwise, we're, you know, we're in problematic territory, potentially dangerous territory.
And so you know, there was a wonderful program I think it was on Netflix, called The Last Shaman, about this young man who his, his parents, cared about him and so forth, but they didn't have any warmth.
They really weren't holding a holding presence.
And so he was suffering from significant depression.
So he, you know, after learning about these substances, he wanted to go and to do an ayahuasca journey.
So he he, he went to to to, I think, to Peru, and all the shamans that he met were very.
They were really self-important and he didn't feel a connection with them.
But then finally, in one mountain village in Peru, he found a shaman that he really felt connected with.
And so he wanted to do the journey, and the shaman said Okay first, for one month, you have to practice this particular practice.
And then after the month, then we can talk about doing the substance.
And so he did for that month.
But also he was with these people who were very warm, the parents and the children they were.
You know, that was in some ways equally as important as having the experience with the medicine, because he was able to really feel held by them.
And again that's.
I think that's something that we can neglect, but at our peril that we very much really need to be in that holding environment which the young man had.
And then he was clearly doing the rituals for that time and then being with the others who had kindness and generosity.
And he was able to put the two of those together.
So, I mean, I think that we really have to be cautious about how these are used.
And I think the chapter you're talking about was the last chapter living my dying, threading the eye of the needle.
And that was to really come to my final chapter in the book and my final chapter in my life.
And I use one of those substances as a way to open to that.
And again, I think, again with the right guidance, and that has to be like the last shaman, that has to be the right person, who's also psychologically minded or trauma-informed, to really do it with them.
In that way, that's most likely to be healing.
That's, I mean, it's beautiful.
I want to just circle back on the Akashic Records for a moment, because it's not psychedelics, but it is an accessing another form of consciousness.
And you described your relationship with Albert Einstein and the conversations you had.
And what I was really struck by is It sounded like you were almost working out your theory.
It sounded like you came to really understand the mechanism of how somatic experiencing would work and the science behind it through your conversations with him.
It struck me that what you were really doing was having a very deep meditation that Albert could have been a part of, or he could have been the entry point to accessing a larger universal consciousness.
That was translated by you and then disseminated, and there's a notion that like, there is all this information in the universe and, you know, the way of the artist is to become attuned to it, and so it.
I wondered if you had ever thought about yourself as this translator of this information that you, you know, almost went up into the records or into a collective conscious and said it was time to translate.
Yeah i, both are true.
I mean, it was a deep meditation, for sure, But a meditation that was brought on by that collective knowledge of that collective wisdom.
And then sharing it with others.
I mean, I think in a way that was what I was tasked to do.
And I was given guidance along the line, such as, for example, with those sessions with Einstein and with other people as well.
And I think that I was supported in this way so that I can, so that I could transmit this to others.
And the Akashic Records, I think again, is part of this collective that we all can have access to if we choose to honor it, if we choose to enter into it, to learn about it, to read about the Akashic Records and then to know that we can be privileged by entering into that realm of knowing which is not a mental knowing but which is a deep inner sensing and inner knowing.
There's kind of a running theme in the book that you sort of playfully give a nod to here and there.
But in the end of the book, you really kind of confront it, you know, sort of head on.
Many see you as a prophet, you know, in this field and in surrounding fields, you know, there's...
There's a few big hitters and you are one of them.
So, you know, you talk a lot about also the wisdom that, you know, that your mother had.
And, you know, this is something I've spoken about on my mother's side.
My grandmother was Hungarian and there was a lot of... there was a lot of mystery to certain things.
You know my mother would have somatic things when my grandmother had a stroke, even though you know she was far away from her.
There was a lot of interesting things and sort of legends in my family.
And so when you talked about that with your mom and you talk about sort of intuiting that you come from a line you know of rabbinic wisdom, like where do you sort of see yourself?
Like you know, many of us see you as you know this enormous figure, that that you know, your wisdom spans so many fields for so many of us.
And especially that somatic experiencing is something that's not the practitioner, that is not what you become a practitioner in.
That is a tool that you use as you are a practitioner of healing, right?
So I'm curious, yeah, where do you see, do you see yourself as a modern day shaman of sorts?
Are you comfortable being seen as a prophet by some people?
Oh, no.
I mean, I'm getting used to it.
One of my students interviewed me, and she's the one who said that to me.
She's an African woman who lives in Brazil and has a healing center in Brazil.
And she's the one who said, Peter, you know you are a prophet.
And I said, please, that is totally embarrassing.
But I think if we think of a prophet as somebody who's taking a body of knowledge and bringing it out into the world, I can relate to that.
And I can also relate to what I think it was Jung called the mysterium tremendum, the mystery of the universe.
And clearly Einstein was touched by this, was influenced by this.
But when you said... prophet?
Well, I mean, I think I could agree that I'm a visionary in some ways.
And I read the book by Kahil Karan called The Prophet.
And I certainly couldn't consider myself to be a prophet in that sense.
But I could consider myself as somebody who has had a vision that has entered into the tremendous mystery of life and who's been tasked to spread that knowledge to those who would be interested.
Well Peter, you're such a significant part of our life and it's really been such an honor to have you on this podcast.
And, as I said, I've personally benefited from the work that you have done, that my practitioner has trained in and continues to teach in.
So thank We're just, we're so grateful.
And thank you for this book, An Autobiography of Trauma, A Healing Journey.
It's really a wonderful introduction to the work that Peter Levine has dedicated his life to.
And also, it's a beautiful read.
It's a fun read.
It's really a lovely book.
Where else can people find out about you, Peter, if they want to know more?
Okay, they can go to somaticexperiencing.com.
And also there's information we're doing a program called Immersion.
And that's about a lot of the stuff we're talking about.
And that's, I think, from the end of February to the beginning of March.
And it's you know, usually when you do, when people have programs, you go to different breakout spaces.
So this is done differently.
It's in San Diego.
It's in a beautiful center there, a hotel center there.
And what it is, it's about every day we'll have a new theme.
And it starts with us old fogies, the older people, myself, Bessel, Van der Kolk, Gabor, Gabor Maté.
And I think- He's been our guest here.
We know all these people.
Oh, yeah.
These are really great.
So we'll start, but then we'll have the younger people continue with their vision and how they're carrying the work.
And so I think it'll be, again, you can find that information on somaticexperiencing.com.
Also, you can get a link to the trauma healing website for people who want to find therapists or want to learn about the trainings because, like you said, there are trainings all over the world.
So those are possibilities.
Anyhow, it was really a joy being with you folks.
It really is.
And now, if I'm going to live my message, I'm going to get up and take a walk and move and jump on my trampoline and have a good end of the day.
Thank you, Peter.
I'm going to give you a Bronx cheer because that's what I was taught to do.
Jonathan, I really enjoyed speaking with Peter Levine and something I didn't get to ask him about.
Like, I wonder, does he think every dream is prophetic?
Like, does he think every dream is like trying to tell you something and interpret something?
Like he talks about in his book how, like somatic, experiencing itself like there was, like a dream and it came.
It was like a Celtic vision.
And he looked up the Celtic thing and it turned out like, that's what he meant to say.
Like, I have a lot of dreams that I'm wondering what they're holding.
Maybe that'll be his next book.
I think we should do an entire podcast series on the recesses of your mind body.
Like, is it just a big container and, you know, there's just this endless slew of memory?
I think this is what people are like, oh, I'm just going to go heal.
But really it's a way of being in the world that helps you be more intuitive, more creative, more connected to other people, feel better, have a larger sense of being connected to everything around you, including if you don't believe in a God, the you know the universe is, Or just like connected to a larger purpose.
And when we talk about I don't even like to use the word diseases, but what used to be called mental illness, but also physical diseases.
What's amazing is that he talks about how there's more similarities than differences across these states.
So yeah, that's actually that was an observation by Selye, one of the sort of bigwigs that he talks about in his book, who were the early observers of what the body does in stress.
And it's often diagnosed as all these different things.
But I was actually talking with my older son about this because he's taking AP Psych.
And he was talking about like bipolar disorder and this that, and like oh, you treat this with this medicine and that with that medicine.
And what Selye, what people like Peter Levine like, what this new way of looking at things is, which you know it was not new decades ago or hundreds of years ago, but it was the beginnings of our understanding.
Which I'm hoping to impart to my child and hopefully everybody listening is that there's not necessarily a linear path between where you're at now and where you want to be.
And when we talk about these kinds of modalities, it can feel kind of amorphous.
Like, what do you mean it's not its own practice?
What do you mean you could be a Reiki healer or a craniosacral therapist or a psychologist and learn this?
What it means is that the shortest distance between two points and this is in his book is not always a straight line.
And so it is with healing.
We sometimes need to simply learn a new way of seeing, a new way of feeling that opens something up, so that you are then the container for all of the things that contribute to you getting better.
But it is not like oh, give me the pill, then I'll be better, and then we don't talk about it anymore.
We are all constantly experiencing traumatization re-traumatization, old memories, old feelings, wounds being opened up.
Things we thought we were fine with, that were not denial of things that we'd like to believe didn't hurt us.
That's the human experience.
That's it.
And these are all tools.
And if you don't need the tools, that's great.
I'm happy for you.
Some of us are on a process of searching for the tools that will continue to add so that container continues to bring more goodness than dis-ease.
And a lot of people think, I don't need these things.
Nothing ever happened to me, to which I say Maybe, but the likelihood that you have gone through childhood without experiencing some form of perceived abandonment, even if it wasn't.
Quote unquote abandoned the notion that these types of separations from our parents can feel traumatic, and the sensitive people among us go through this process and this path to uncover these stored memories that could be impacting us.
And what we realize is that there is a euphoric experience of clearing these.
What do you want to call them?
Negative associations or traumatic associations, or They're stuck places.
Or simply just things that are not ideal.
If people don't like the word trauma because they're like oh, we're overusing that word and it's like too much.
Well, even things that are just not ideal, not optimal, can leave a residue that, once we get to shift, can leave us feeling in a larger state of connection.
And I like how he talked about that.
Like we're bringing back these childhood and childlike aspects of ourselves that enjoy play and enjoy downtime and don't constantly feel like we need to distract and disassociate and disconnect.
And that we're just like out there, being able to exist in a way that many of us have a hard time when we're not constantly busy.
Jonathan, before we let all of our friends go, I wonder what's your response to if people say like This is just digging stuff up.
Everything's fine.
What would you say to people?
I would say that these things are impacting us in ways that we don't really realize.
You know, there's the matrix narrative in the world that things are happening that we may not realize are happening.
And this notion of body memory is one of those things.
I believe that it is possible for us to be more joyous, more creative, to feel more at ease in the world.
I believe that there is access to a larger intuitive information that helps guide us in life.
And that if we feel stuck in some way is because there may be a message or a shift we need to make.
And that when we get that information, our life will become easier and things will open up for us.
And doing this type of work going inward to fix things and to unstick things versus going outward is a real, just a really powerful way to start to experience life differently.
All the healers I know are like, you want to change your external state, change your internal state.
And that isn't, oh, I'm just going to be more okay with my surroundings.
It's actually your external surroundings start to change when you change your internal state.
And with regards to the Akashic Records and this notion of collective conscious, I also believe in that and believe that there is a very tangible experience of connecting outside of our limited sense of consciousness into a shared consciousness, whether it's the universe's information, whether it's a higher ascension that some people call a Christ consciousness or a God consciousness, or whether it's the Akashic Records, which has been described as a library of information, and you can go in and literally everything that's happened and everything that will happen has a resonance to it.
And like the artists speak about, we become practiced in attuning to that information.
I just think there's a lot more to this world than often meets the eye and that by practicing accessing it, we begin to have a richer, more fulfilled experience here on Earth.
I have a really hard time wrapping my head around the notion of a collective consciousness, meaning I understand it conceptually, but that is something that I personally have a really hard time accessing and understanding.
But you actually have talked to me about it, the ways that ideas spring up throughout history or that musical genres expand and all of a sudden there's like these bursts of this sort of similar type of music that's different than the mainstream music and it happens in different pockets of the world.
Like those people weren't talking at the time, and yet you know.
Now it's more interconnected and people are feeding off of each other because information travels so much faster.
But previously that happened all the time.
Well, the truth is out there.
If you want to tell us where you think it's coming from, hit us up at Bialik Breakdown.
Or if you've had an experience of being, you know, tied into a part of a larger collective consciousness.
I would love to hear about it.
So we are open.
If you like what we're doing here, give us a review on Apple Podcasts.
It matters.
It matters for us.
It matters for the greater collective consciousness.
Check out Peter Levine's books, because I think this is really a phenomenal way to start understanding your body and your mind and how they work together.
So from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.
It's my and Bialik's breakdown.
She's going to break it down for you.
She's got a neuroscience PhD or two.
And now she's going to break down.
It's a breakdown.
She's going to break it down.
