Transcript

Hi and welcome to the
Somatic Coaching Academy podcast.

We are on episode 147 today.

We’re getting there, 147 today.
Ani, how are you?

I’m good, how are you?
Doing great, super excited.

Good, good, me too.

Back at the podcasting.

Back at some podcasting.
Yeah, yeah.

What are we talking about today?

Well, today we’re talking about
whatever challenge you have in your life,

whether it’s a physical
challenge around physical, let’s say,

pain or something like that,
whether it’s a mental-emotional challenge

that you’re having, or
whether it’s a challenge you might say

a spiritual challenge you’re having,
that if you want the— really the best

place to start, let’s say,
the best place to start and optimize

for getting or improvements in any
of those levels is all the same thing.

It’s all the same place.

Well, I, I’m really appreciating, Brian,
how simple you’re making

complex issues right now.

You know, if you have any problem
in any area of your life, start here.

Um, one of the bits of feedback that I
keep getting over and over

from Manifestation for Dummies that is out
with Wiley Press in every— all the online

bookstores and all that stuff,
is how practical the information is.

So thanks so much for people who are
leaving reviews and sending

those to us and stuff.

That’s one of the things people
keep saying is how practical it is.

And, um, it sounds like this is going
to be a very practical podcast,

very practical and very kind of like,
let’s get some science cooking here.

So get out your notebooks,
your pens, your paper, your glasses,

whatever else you need to just nerd out
a little bit here on the idea

and the topic of chronic tension.

And you might say, “Wait, okay,
we’ve heard you talk about this before.

I don’t need this podcast.” But halt,
wait a second, hang in here because we’re

gonna do a deeper dive into every one
of the areas in which chronic tension

has a deleterious effect in your life.

How long are we gonna be here?
We’re gonna be here a little while.

Look at my notes.

Oh my gosh.

Is that all for this one?
Oh my gosh.

That’s a lot of notes, y’all.
Like, get comfy.

Okay.
So, get comfy.

You ready?

Let’s jump in.

I was going to make a joke,
but you better get started.

Hopefully, your tension isn’t like too tense about this.

I’m getting tense looking at your notes.

So, let’s think about chronic
tension, people.

Chronic tension, it affects you on all 3

levels of your existence,
of your human existence.

You exist on a body level
in this human plane.

Okay?

You exist on a mental,
emotional level in this human plane.

You have some connection,
whether you realize it or not,

on some spiritual level,
whether you embody spirit or whether you

think spirit’s inside you, outside you,
whether you go to church to find

spirit, like it doesn’t matter.

There’s some type of connection with you
and the spiritual realm of existence.

And so you have connection with every one
of those areas, and chronic tension

is getting in the way of you fully
experiencing health

in every one of those areas.

And we’re gonna look
at the science of that today.

Awesome.
All right, so we’re gonna dig in.

So Ani, when you think about chronic
tension and physical stuff,

what comes to mind for you?

Shoulders, neck.
Shoulders and neck.

That’s where I get—
That’s where you hold your tension.

That’s where I get, yeah.

But that’s just me, right?

Like different people hold
chronic tension different places.

And I think that chronic tension isn’t
something people recognize until it’s

knocking on their door and screaming.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You and I spend a lot of time
with preventative measures

to stay well in our tissue.

Not a lot of people do that.

You know, a lot of people don’t do
anything about their body until it’s,

um, causing them a real problem.

So it’s causing a real problem.
Mm-hmm.

Right.

And so let’s look at chronic tension
in the physical body on 3 levels,

3 primary areas,
let’s say: musculoskeletal,

nervous system,
and the endocrine and immune function.

Okay?

Because that’s all like
physical body stuff.

Now, I think the musculoskeletal level
probably makes a lot of sense for people.

How does chronic tension negatively
impact your musculoskeletal health?

Well, the first way is think about when
your muscles are chronically contracted,

and you can do this little experiment
right now, is squeeze your hand,

make a fist, make a fist,
and squeeze it as hard as you can

for just like 3, 4, 5, 6 seconds.

Now open it up and look at your palm,
and most likely your palm is white,

and then it blanches back to red.

So that white is lack of blood
flow or loss of blood flow.

So when you have a muscle squeezing,
you are squeezing out blood flow.

So no blood going in, no blood going out.

That means no or limited amounts of oxygen
going in, and you’re not getting

nutrients delivered to the tissues.

Whatever that you’re eating and digesting
isn’t getting into the muscular tissues or

whatever the muscles are
squeezing around, number one.

Number two, it can’t
get waste products out.

So all of the waste that is being built up
in the muscles— because it takes energy

to could keep a muscle contracted.

So you’re squeezing it,
you’re creating ATP, right, as a part of,

byproduct of metabolic respiration,
but you’re also creating a bunch

of metabolic waste products also that are
now getting soaked up into the tissue

and toxifying the tissue.

So two bad things happen.

You lose circulation in,
no oxygen, no nutrients, and you

lose circulation out,
which means that you’re building up waste

and toxins in the tissue
with chronic tension.

It’s like not taking out the trash.

Not taking out the trash, right?

It’s just like you’re just loading up
with trash, and that leads to soreness,

fatigue, weakness, lack of ability
to build and strengthen muscle.

You know, we’ve been talking amongst
ourselves, like when you get older,

it’s important to start, you know,
building muscle because muscle

tends to get lost as you get older.

But listen, if you’re carrying around
chronic tension, it’s really hard to build

muscle when you have chronic tension.

Just right there.

Now you also build what
we call fascial adhesions.

So the connective tissue that wraps around
the tissue, that connective tissue gets

bound up and it gets adhesed,
and then all of a sudden you

end up with joint limitations.

Can’t lift your shoulders up over your
head, your elbows are tight,

your knees are stiff.

All those kinds of things are also
byproducts of chronic, of chronic tension.

Joint compression,
that leads to joint compression.

Talking about knee,
knee replacements, hip replacements,

shoulder replacements, um,
whatever other kind of meniscal damage

in your knees or labral
injuries in your shoulders.

A lot of this stuff is byproducts of poor
biomechanics because of chronic tension

in the body just being held,
and then the joints can’t work

in the way that they’re supposed to work.

I just want to say, for listeners who are
like, this doesn’t apply to me because I

don’t have, uh,
you know, I can lift my arms over my head,

like, hang on there, because any problem
you’re having, Brian’s getting to it.

I’m getting into it, right?
So we’re— this is just a musculoskeletal—

I know some people are like taking notes
on everything you’re saying,

and other people are like,
I don’t know if this applies to me.

Yes, it does.

Keep listening.

And then finally, a decreased ability
to produce power in your muscles.

So as you age— I like— I have a little
saying that people don’t get weaker when

they get older, they get
stiffer when they get older.

Stiffness is the primary problem.

People end up getting stiff and tight, and
that’s because of chronic muscle tension.

And the stiffer and tighter people are,
you’re actually less able to

contract muscles as well for as large
ranges, which means you, you reduce your

capacity to create power as you get older.

And so the weakness is a byproduct
of stiffness,

and the stiffness is a byproduct of—
drum roll please— chronic muscle tension.

Okay, so that’s a download.

That’s just musculoskeletal stuff.

Just let’s look at nervous
system for a second.

So nervous system, we’re talking
about sensors in your body.

Now when you have chronic tension in your
body, of course there’s You have

neural sensors all through the body
and they’re invested in and through not

only the skin, but in through
the muscles and the organs as well.

So whenever you have chronic muscle
tension, what happens is you

sensitize what we call nociceptors.

Now nociceptors are not pain receptors per
definition,

but really what they are is they do bring
danger information into the

brain about tissue damage.

So the more chronic tension there is,
those threshold sensors actually go down.

So what it means is
then you need less— something, um,

uh, smaller to happen in your life
in order to activate sensors that your

brain could interpret as being pain.

So that’s kind of the technical phrase.

In layman’s terms, although layman’s terms
isn’t totally accurate,

your pain threshold lowers.

That’s what basically happens is, um,
something that if you didn’t have chronic

tension happen, twist your ankle,
versus if you did have chronic tension,

twist your ankle with chronic tension,
you’re going to say this hurts way more.

It just reminds me, if, if I’m like really
feeling tense, little things bother me.

Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, you’re just more sensitive, right?

And that’s going to kind of bridge
into the mental-emotional realm also.

But our body is full of sensors,
and whether we

are picking up or interpreting that as
a physical sensation,

that means there’s a physical problem,
or whether we’re picking up this sensory

information as being
a mental-emotional problem.

Sensors still are always filling
our brain’s capacity to determine what’s

going on in the world from either
physical, mental, emotional,

or even spiritual level, right?

We did that really cool podcast on our
sensations, the link between

all three levels of existence.

If you haven’t heard that one, go back
and listen to this, one of my favorites.

It was really, really good.

Okay, so what else we got?

Autonomic dysregulation.

So sustained, sustained chronic muscle
Tension activates

the sympathetic nervous system.

It activates the fight or flight system.

And this keeps the body
in a low-grade level of stress.

So one of the best ways to keep yourself
in low-grade levels of stress

is to have chronic tension.

And then the low-grade levels of stress
create more chronic tension,

chronic tension, more low-grade
levels of stress, okay?

And the other thing that happens
is disrupted proprioception.

So proprioception are your joint sensors,
like around your ankles

and your knees and your hips.

And they’re all the sensors in the body
that when you close your eyes,

you still know where your weight is
and what the level of the floor is

underneath you and all that kind of stuff.

So chronic tension disrupts that
information of proprioceptive information.

So now with chronic tension,
you’re sending faulty information

from the joints up into the brain,
and then your brain makes poor decisions

based on that, which means you’re more
likely to fall, trip on the stairs.

Fall basically is the big one,
sort of thing, right?

But also, also reach in ways that are not
comfortable, or appropriate

and all those kinds of things.
You’re just not getting clean information.

So that’s the nervous
system just in a nutshell.

All right, what about the immune
system and the endocrine system?

Again, chronic tension, everybody.

Elevated cortisol.

This goes back to that sympathetic
nervous system fight or flight situation.

That chronic tension is both a symptom
and a driver of what we call the HPA axis,

the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis,
which is in the brain.

A set of neurohormone gland
networks that again activate stress.

So chronic tension creates cortisol,
which creates the HPA axis stress

response, which just keeps the whole
cycle going again and again and again.

Okay?

All this also leads
to systemic inflammation.

How many times have you
heard about inflammation?

You gotta get your
inflammation down in your body.

Chronic inflammation is the root
cause of all chronic disease.

Every chronic disease is associated
with chronic inflammation.

There’s not a single disease that doesn’t
have chronic inflammation

as being a part of it.

Chronic inflammation is caused by— well,
one of its causes is by chronic tension

in the system.

So if you want chronic inflammation,
get some chronic tension, you’ll be

chronically inflamed all the time.

Okay, so, um, and then one more thing
is too what we call immune suppression.

So higher levels of cortisol,
which is associated with chronic tension,

actually dampens the immune
system responses.

So you’re more likely to get sick,
more likely to have disease diseases that

are associated with immune imbalances.

Again, all because of chronic tension.

Moral of the story: you got physical
problems, work on your chronic tension.

Yeah, basically that’s it.

So those are the 3 key areas:
musculoskeletal, nervous system,

endocrine, and immune system.

Wow, that was just one of the levels
of existence that you live on.

That’s cool.

I need a— why don’t you do a little
introduction for mental, emotional,

and while I get a drink of water here.

Holy cow, you just like
to talk about ATP and I do.

AP, HPXs, and blah blah blah.

I used to remember all those things.

All right, so let’s,
let’s tap into mental-emotional.

So if you have mental-emotional
challenges, struggles, issues, tendencies,

whatever it happens to be, guess what?
Guess what?

Chronic tension.

Check out your chronic tension,
because when you have chronic tension,

again, the muscles are tight.
They’re chronically tight.

Which happens through reflexes.

How do you know if chronic tension—
actually, is one question

that we should answer.

Okay, how do you know
it’s chronic tension?

How do you know, Brian?

Because I’m sure when you worked in, um,
when you worked in massage therapy, Annie,

I’m sure you saw this,
that people came into the clinic

with chronic tension and they’re like,
my neck hurts, my back hurts,

my whatever hurts.

And you’re like, great,
go ahead and lay down on the table.

And they lay down on the table
and the muscles are still tense even

when they’re not using them to stand up.

Like, they don’t need the muscles anymore,
they’re laying down on a table,

but the muscles are still tense.

And then you might say something like,
relax your neck, relax your back,

and they’re like,
what are you talking about?

I am, I am relaxed.

And you’re poking it and it’s like
a brick wall, and you’re like, ah.

So if you cannot consciously relax

the muscle, then it’s chronic tension.

That’s how you know.

If you’re—

if it’s activated when you don’t need it
to be activated and you can’t consciously

relax it, it’s chronic reflexive,
neuroreflexive tension.

That’s good, right?

And that’s going to result in all
these issues that you’re having here.

Okay, so when you have that chronic
tension that you’re not under control

of anymore, it’s your subconscious now
contracting your muscles below your level

of conscious awareness, you get what
we call interoceptive disruption.

So we talked a lot about interoception.

Interoception are the senses in your gut
organs that bring information up in your

brain, primarily around your emotions.

Like, how do you construct emotions is
through these interoceptive pathways,

right?

Look like you wanna say something.

Did you know that your gut brain has
as many neurons as a Yorkshire Terrier?

As a Yorkshire Terrier?

Yeah, like, like the whole thing,
the whole Yorkshire Terrier.

So you have Yorkshire Terrier
in your gut brain?

That’s how many neurons
you have in your gut brain.

Sam’s a Yorkshire Terrier.
Yeah, cool.

I pulled that out of somewhere recently.
Did you really?

I thought you would like—
like Trivial Psychic?

You got a little trivial,
trivial stuff there.

I was just thinking about how you
could be an SNL skit right now.

Chronic tension.
Chronic tension.

Chronic tension, everybody.
Okay, so back to this for a second.

When, when you have that chronic tension,
it distorts your interoceptive path—

sensors, pathways, and interpretations.

Much to your point, when you have chronic
tension, everything else irritates you.

Oh, right, right.
Oh, totally.

So the same, the same thing that happens
every single day becomes really irritating

when you have chronic tension.

And so emotionally, it becomes really
irritating when you have chronic tension.

That’s because the chronic tension is
distorting or amplifying their

interoceptive input and making it more,
make it more sensitive.

Yeah, it’s like the, you know,
you got chronic tension,

why are the kids so much louder?

Right, yeah, when I have chronic tension,
they’re so much louder,

which actually leads to the next thing
around anxiety amplification.

So what the studies and research shows is
that people, for people who have anxiety,

when they are experiencing higher
levels of chronic tension, guess what?

They have more anxiety
with more chronic tension because there’s

a loop again in the mental-emotional
and the physical interoceptive pathways

are looping, and when they get wound up,
it creates more anxiety,

which is a lot of that wound-up kind
of energy that is very difficult

or not being dissipated.

Not being dissipated.
Not being dissipated.

Exactly.
And why can’t it be dissipated?

Because it’s stuck in chronic tension.
Chronic tension.

Okay, you guys are getting it now.
You’re getting it now.

Okay, what about fatigue
and cognitive load?

Well, maintaining chronic tension is
expensive because you’re contracting,

contracting, contracting,
and by the way, just wasting, wasting it.

It’s like just flushing
money down your toilet.

The best way to just flush your money down
your toilet with your body is by holding

chronic tension
because it’s just accumulating,

squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.

It takes energy to do that.

But it’s not gaining you anything at all.

So just practice now squeezing your hand
as hard as you can for the next hour.

I’m just kidding.

But if you were to try that,
if you were to try that, like,

is that gaining anything at all?

No, but you’re wasting
a lot of energy, aren’t you?

And so that’s going to create fatigue,
cognitive overload, and it’s going

to deplete energy reserves over time.

Well,
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to be

more clear, more focused,
more productive, more energized.

So that seems like a really
Pretty simple fix.

Chronic tension.
Chronic tension.

Like, want to get—
want to stop leaking energy?

Chronic tension.
Okay, one more.

Lactic acid.

Boy, this— there’s some interesting
research around lactic acid that lactic

acid is a byproduct of, guess what?
Chronic tension.

So when you have more lactic acid in your
bloodstream, that is associated

with higher levels of anxiety.

There’s a kind of a historical research
that was done

on people with chronic anxiety,
and they found out that their blood

lactate levels were higher
than people without anxiety.

So then what they did is they injected
lactate into the blood of people without

anxiety, and they found
out that they got anxiety.

Wow.
Almost immediately from being in.

So blood lactate has some type of, um, uh,
relationship with elevating

anxiety, except guess what?

In people who exercise regularly.

Oh, right, right.

So think about exercise.

Regular exercise does— it
lowers chronic tension.

So when you’re dissipating energy, again,
we’re talking about like we talked about

with anxiety, you actually— you don’t have
as profound an impact around the lactic

acid, blood lactate levels,
and anxiety situations.

But chronically tense,
under-exercised people have a lower

lactate threshold for anxiety activation.

That’s interesting.

Wasting energy
isn’t the same as dissipating energy.

Mm-hmm.
Do tell.

Well, you’re talking about how it’s
a waste of energy to stay contracted,

but dissipating energy,
which like you might think is like

throwing it out,
is actually not a waste of energy.

No, it’s not a waste of energy because
our bodies are like batteries

and our bodies have to bring
energy in and let it go out.

Bring it in and let it go out.
Gotta keep it flowing.

Gotta keep it flowing.

It’s like being constantly
constipated, right?

So waste.
Your energy is constipated.

It’s not good for anything, right?

Yeah, I just think that right there, like,
metaphorically, is a big deal because

people have trouble letting things
in and letting things out, like, right?

Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Okay, keep going.

Okay, so we’ve tackled so far
chronic tension

and the deleterious effects in your
physical health We’ve talked about

it in your mental emotional health.

Now, that’s not even the fun part.

The fun part—
we aren’t even having fun yet.

We’re not even having fun yet.

We got to talk about the correlation—
buckle up—

with chronic tension
and your spiritual health.

Okay.

Wow.

Check this out.
This was so fun to research.

This is so great.

So, um, Edmund Jacobson— let me tell
you the story of Edmund Jacobson.

Okay.

He was the founder
of progressive muscle relaxation.

I, I hope whatever happened to him wasn’t
like the the guy with the hand washing.

No, no, different.
Yeah, much different.

If you haven’t heard that podcast about,
um, if it’s not woo, geez.

Yeah, go back and catch that one.

Sometimes it’s not untrue.

Uh, all right, so Edmund Jacobson was
the original originator

of progressive muscle relaxation.

And so if you don’t know this, um,
practice, it’s where you go section

by section through your body
and you contract, relax,

contract, relax, contract, relax.

So that, and The practice of contracting,
relaxing in sequential progressive manner

has been shown to downregulate this
reflexive chronic muscle tension.

And we do this in our
Core Centering program.

We teach people—

I start this in Core Centering and then
Level 1 and Level 2 programs and some

of our other practices as well.

So it’s pretty well-known practice.
But here’s the deal.

What he noted when he had people do this
is that people would regularly have what

they would call spiritual experiences.
Oh, interesting.

Simply from— and there was no
spiritual connotation at all.

It was contract your foot,
relax your foot,

contract your foot a little more,
relax your foot a little more,

contract your leg, relax your leg,
contract your thigh, relax your thigh,

contract, right?

It was just like going through
sequentially through

the body and relaxing it.

And people would consistently have, um,
spiritual experiences.

What he would describe it as,
as a dissolution

of the habitual sense of self and time.

Hmm.

People would have a dissolution
of the habituated sense of self and time.

And so he saw chronic tension
as the physiological substrate

of worry and mental chatter.

Oh, I like that.

He saw the chronic tension as
the physiological substrate of worry

and mental chatter,
and relaxing it quieted not just the body,

but the mind’s narration system.

So it’s like chronic tension is like
the physical manifestation of worry

and chronic chatter in your thoughts.

Yes, the ceaseless monkey mind,
people would say, right?

Yeah.

So, but it’s a two-way street because
if you want to quiet the monkey mind, what

you do is you quiet the body mind, right?

Quiet the muscle tension down,
and it has a predictable response

in quieting the mental chatter.

Which makes perfect sense for people
who are trying to calm the mental chatter

but they don’t do anything with their
body and then they sit down.

It’s super frustrating and their
tension and all of that stuff, right?

Yeah.

Whereas if you calm your body,
then you can calm the negative

chatter and the, the mind chatter.
Yeah.

And most people try to calm down their
mind chatter by thinking about

their mind chatter, right?

Which actually just makes it worse.

Chronic tension.
Chronic tension.

Okay, let’s go to Herbert Benson now.

So Herbert Benson wrote the classic book,
The Relaxation Response, in the ’70s.

And what Herbert Benson showed is
that by doing practices

such as progressive muscle relaxation
and other somatic practices,

that he was able to trigger in people a,

a self-induced altered state

of consciousness characterized by these
things: a decreased metabolic rate,

heart rate, and sympathetic activity.

Reports of self-transcendence
and felt unity.

And, uh, he also described
in ScienceDirect as the state where

the experience of self-transcendence
may help one to cope with difficulties.

But he wasn’t going
at the work trying to get that.

No, he wasn’t going at that.

He was just trying to show
how to— he was originally was studying

meditation, Transcendental Meditation.

Oh, but what he showed is that when you
actually did these formalized practices

around reducing chronic muscle tension,
people would experience predictably

transcendent states of consciousness.

So it’s kind of like the other guys,
they kind of found similar, similar stuff.

Yeah, he was building something
a bit on Jacobson’s work.

Okay, now check this out.
Let’s fast forward a little bit.

2024, not too long ago.

That was just 2 years ago.
Just 2 years ago.

There is a research study done,
and, and, um, in Mindfulness— Mindfulness

is the name of the journal— and this was
a Harvard study done, Harvard study

published in Mindfulness,
surveying 3— over 3,000 adults in U.S.

and the UK,
and 45% of them reported altered states

of consciousness from non-pharmacological

practices, including relaxation, yoga,

tai chi, qigong, breathwork, meditation.

Only 45%.

45%, but check this out.

That far exceeded the 5 to 15%
who just practiced seated meditation.

Geez, yeah.

So this just—Totally.

Talk about this again.

For people who practice seated meditation,
5 to 15% of them report

a transcendent experience.

But 45% of people who do body-centered
practices to reduce chronic tension

report a transcendent experience.

Jeez.

Let’s just kind of lock
in on that for a second, okay?

And so what were these
experiences that people reported?

Derealization, right?

Detachment from their environment.

Unitive experiences of oneness,
ecstatic thrills,

body heat or electricity,
out-of-body experiences, Perception

of non-physical lights activating.

So, um, what the lead author, uh,
Dr. Sachet, said in this Harvard study was

that rather than being extremely unusual
and rare,

altered states of consciousness are, are a
common variant of normal human experience.

Oh, I love that, right?

They’re not strange or weird.

They, they’re actually
available to everyone.

And potentially the fastest way to get
to them in a non-pharmacological way

is by reducing your chronic tension.

Okay, so you can reduce your chronic
tension instead of going

to take mushrooms or do LSD.
Exactly.

If you’re trying to save yourself a few
thousand dollars, set it all up and all

that kind of stuff,
and actually be able to reproduce it.

Yes.
So just tapping in.

Okay, one more thing I want to say about
the default mode Default Mode Network.

So, people are like salivating right now.

They’re like, “Yeah, I love brain stuff.

Like, just give it to me.”
Give me the brain stuff.

Right.

So, the Default Mode Network is
the network in the brain that’s

a self-referential system.

It’s the part of the brain that’s always
paying attention to yourself,

kind of like, and a lot of it is this
subconscious narrative self

reflective kind of state.

What I need, what I’m thinking, what I
have going on, what I have happening.

It’s all this mental chatter.

It’s all this autobiographical
information that’s happening all the time.

And so what research on meditation,
hypnosis, and psychedelics have shown

is that, um, deactivation, deactivation
of the default mode network correlates

directly with mystical
and spiritual experience.

Specifically, ego dissolution,
felt unity, and transcendence.

That makes sense.

Okay,
like, reduce default mode network

activation, and you all of a sudden you’re
not referencing yourself as

an individual egoic-driven being anymore.

Deep muscle relaxation
by downregulating the sympathetic arousal

and quieting interoceptive threat signals.

Let’s go back to what you’re talking about
in the physical thing

and mental-emotionally disinteroceptive
threat signals, removes a primary driver

of default mode network activation.

Chronic tension
keeps the default mode network in a state

of continuous low-level activation.

Wait, say that again.

Chronic tension
keeps the default mode network in a state

of chronic low-level activation.

That makes sense, because
it’s like, what about me?

What about me?
Me, me, me, me.

Exactly.

And it’s telling the body, right,
that the brain is under threat.

It’s telling it all the time
that it’s under threat.

Oh, even when it’s not.

You know, one of the things that that’s
gonna do— I’m speaking from personal

experience here— is it’s gonna,
it’s gonna keep locking in referencing,

blaming, and projecting on other people,
which is never gonna help

you to solve your problems.

Or reduce your chronic tension anymore.
Well, it’s—

yeah, it’s a cycle, right?
Right.

Because you’ll think it’s out there
and it’s a threat.

That’s—

and it’s a threat that’s
coming from outside, right?

Yeah.
That creates body activation and more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So in, in very practical terms,
I don’t know how

much clear— how much clearer we can say
this— chronic tension maintains

self-con— maintains self-consciousness.

It maintains a self,
you know, consciousness,

and releasing it can dissolve
that level of self-consciousness.

Chronic tension is just causing
all the problems, Brian.

That’s, that’s why at the top of the,
top of the podcast we said if you want

to make some fast effect anywhere,
any area of life in your body,

is reduce the chronic—
start reducing chronic tension.

It’s going to have
a positive impact somehow.

Okay.

Just sitting here hearing about it,
I got to like go release my tension.

You got to go roll on a ball or go do some
breathing exercises or go do something.

Right.
So find ways to do that.

You know, we do our Core Centering classes
weekly here at the Somatic Ocean Club.

Oh yeah.
You can do it with us, by the way.

You can do it with us in Core Centering
classes and somatic practices.

You know, I mean,
that’s what it’s all about.

Our, our at the root level of somatic
practice and work is reducing chronic

tension because every— it creates a
positive impact in everything above that.

And if you’ve been working for a really
hard time, a really long time, let’s say,

to try to get your health in order.
Yeah.

Or your mental wellness in order or better
spiritual connection,

or you’ve been working to like create
anything new in your life that just

haven’t been able to create and you
are walking around with a lot of chronic

tension, you know, you might be kind
of swimming uphill, swimming upstream.

I guess you can’t really swim uphill.

Swimming upstream, you’re
swimming against the current.

I would say swimming uphill is a perfect—
swimming uphill, because you’re actually

like looking in the wrong direction.

Chronic tension.
Yeah.

So if you want to turn it around,
swim with the current,

and let your body and let the universe
help you to create— what is it

you want to create in your life?

The best thing that you can do on a daily
basis is reduce your

levels chronic tension.

I don’t know how else we can say it—
physical, mental, emotional, spiritual.

There you go.
We got to let them go, Brian.

They’ve got stuff to do.
They’ve got tension to release.

Wow.
Hope you loved this, uh, episode.

Let us know.

We’ll see you next week.
All right, take care, everybody.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.