100% of the time you were under a state of construction and all your body knows is environmental stimuli. So you have this amazing opportunity to, through exposure therapy, you can start to make yourself be stronger or weaker. So if you don't expose your body to enough exposure in the form of heat, in the form of cold, in the form of some type of traumatic stressor, then the body will start to atrophy because it's inherently incredibly lazy. It won't be a single shot where I can put my hand in all of these, will it?
Oh, do you need to see? I thought it was just an audio thing. Well, no, because what you're doing is just thinking, you're sinking the audio with the video. Can watch it.
Oh, I thought it was just an audio blip. Yeah, you're right. God dang it. What can I say, man?
I'm not a videoographer. No, no, but that's like clapping. I just hate it. Maybe both clapping.
Oh, mama. Podcast time. We're in podcast time. Yeah, we're locked in.
I don't know exactly. What kind of show Christopher? Thank you for making this happen. It's been a guy saying pleasure getting to know you over the last two weeks.
So good, man. Yeah, the bromances happened quickly. Bromances, real. It's got serious.
Yeah, very fast. Yeah, boom, quick. How would you describe your approach to fitness? I've been very interested since I've been out here.
We trained a fair bit. We've done some sessions, barefooted on it, doing sprint training and contralateral movements and all manner of different things that there's someone that's spent a lot of time training. I've seen online, but I've not really been exposed to you very much. I'm quite interested to work out how you arrive at whatever view of health and fitness it is that you have.
Yeah. So my first thanks for doing this. I appreciate it. My background mostly was in manual therapy.
Like my main field of specialty is working with people from hands-on bodywork. And before that, it was training. But my main interest really has been helping people come into alignment with their bodies so that we can get them to a point that when they move through their lives, was they are breathing, as they're just living their lives, they can be almost self-organizing into a greater place of alignment, of balance, of homeostasis just through their existence. And that sounds a little bit maybe like meta and out there.
So specifically what that means is looking at what are the variables, the environmental conditions that are forming the body to fit into the positions that might create discomfort or disease. And so my approach to fitness isn't so much about what we're doing in a gym. It's more what we're doing for all the times that we're not in the gym. And I consider the gym to be, for me, the gym's like, my buddy Kelly start who he did the Ford for my book coming up.
He calls it like classical ballet. So when you're in the gym, you're working on these classical forms to bring your body into balance enough that you can go out and do modern dance. Modern Dance is the rest of your life. And so what I'm really interested with fitness predominantly is how do you start to integrate the concepts that you've learned in a gym, any yoga studio, in a martial arts studio, into the way that you show up in business.
And when you're out in a date with somebody, when you're just at your house watching Netflix, all of that is fitness. And your body doesn't know the difference between I'm in a yoga studio or I'm just at my house in my underpants. What would you say to someone that says fitness and my training in the gym has nothing to do with how I show up in business, fitness is for fitness and movement is for movement. Why does it matter about how I train in the gym related to how I show up for a date?
Yeah. So it's like the idea of taking 20 years to be an overnight success. No, we're cultivating, we're grooving paths, neurological paths, muscular paths, neuromuscular paths, every day throughout every moment. So your body doesn't know an off and on.
Right now as we're sitting in this position, you are generating electrical stimuli around your hips and any place that your body's coming in contact with the chair. So the term for that is mechano-transduction. You're squishing cells, you might be shearing cells, you might be twisting cells. And then there's going to be a chemical response, a chemical translation to that.
And within that pushing that's happening against your hips, there's electrical charger on that space, it's called piezo electricity. That's going to be sending a signal to the cells that would be building connective tissue or bone tissue or muscle tissue or fascia. And what you're sending within these signals, you're like the engineer of your body. You're saying, okay, we need to beef up in this space around maybe, you know, maybe have bunnions in your feet so you actually can see like a callousing of specific tissue.
That's just wear and tear and that specific range of motion. So you're sending that electricity based off of the way that you live your daily life. And then, you know, the fibro-blasts and the fibro-class, these little cells that either add tissue or take tissue away, they respond accordingly and you are obstructing yourself just by sitting in a chair. And so when you take that mindset of like, holy crap, like right now, I'm literally under a state of construction.
When you get up off of this chair, you're tuned up to perform in the shape that you've been practicing most. You know, so a thing that you might have heard is practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent. So throughout the day, you're continually practicing how to engage or inhabit your physical body. And then when it does come time to show up in a meaningful way, you got to pick up a heavy trailer or something.
You know, you've got to suddenly sprint across a parking lot or whatever it may be. Your body is tuned up and queued up to be able to perform because you spent the last day, week, month, year in more of like a ready position. And then you can be too ready, you know, where you're too queued up, you're in like a sympathetic overdrive. And that's going to be too much.
If you're having too much stiffness into the system, then the system can't rest and digest and heal and repair. You know, so this isn't what I'm saying doesn't mean you always have to have like a stick up your ass and have like axial extension, like your spine's back. You know, you look perfectly enlightened and samadhi and spiritual and stable. It's being able to relax, but being able to relax into functionality, the way that we can relax in a functionality, you know, there's specific things we can talk about.
What would you say looking at the current trends in fitness and training? What would you say are the main areas that people are missing out on? Or what are the main problems that you're seeing with most people's training programs? Well, I mean, there's a lot of things.
It depends, it really depends on what gym you're in. You know, so if you go to a most traditional, like a 24-hour fitness type space, there's a lot of disintegration or myopic focus on specific muscles without much awareness to integrating the whole, putting the whole body together to work as one integrated body. So when you're excessively focused on myopically breaking down individual, like a muscle-by-muscle approach, you just can't do it. Like you can't organize 640 odd muscles depends on the specific individual.
You know, 360 joints, it's just too much chaos. So for you to be able to go in and really think like, you know, joint-by-joint muscle-by-muscle, I'm going to be engaging these. And then it's just going to magically all come together. That can be confusing for the body.
What do you mean by confusing? It can be confusing for the body in the sense that if you don't train athleticism, you won't just self-organize and be athletic. Okay, so breaking the component parts of a musculature apart and training biceps and triceps and overhead extensions and chest breasts. Yeah, so if you're excessively aesthetically focused, it's completely fine.
There's no more realistic judgment. Juji Mufu is a good example of this, where he has done a pretty good job of integrating athleticism and calisthenics and gymnastics and powerlifting and bodybuilding. So he's a bit of an oddity in his ability to juggle a lot of variables. And it's really beautiful.
He calls himself a hybrid athlete, right? He is. So he refers to that. Yeah, that's what he is.
A polyathlete, I can't remember. Yeah. And then within that, I would say, you know, athletics goes beyond just, you know, musculoskeletal integration, but also, you know, how's your response to cold temperature? So how's your response to heat?
Why is that part of fitness? I would someone who says, I do fitness, I've got fitness plan. Do you do hot and cold exposure? No, I don't.
Okay. What would you say to someone who says? The same way that your body has a physiological adaptation, you know, a hermetic stress. We're talking on my podcast before this, hermetic stressors in our lives.
The same way that you'd have that to develop muscle cells to be able to be stronger in a specific position as a product of going through a bicep curl or dead letter, whatever you're doing. Your body has a similar physiological response to being exposed to cold temperatures, the semia-physi-physi-logic response to being exposed to heat has a similar physiological response to being exposed to altitude. You know, and so your body is continually changing. This is the thing that we started off with 100% of the time you were under a state of construction.
And all your body knows is environmental stimuli. So you have this amazing opportunity to, through exposure therapy, it just, you can start to make yourself be stronger or weaker. You know, so if you don't expose your body to enough exposure in the form of heat, in the form of cold, in the form of heat, in the form of some type of hermetic stressor, then the body will start to atrophy because it's inherently incredibly lazy. And that laziness, it's like one of the key features in our capacity is to survive.
What would you say? Let's talk about some physical practices for a bit. What are some of the physical practices that you think, I know that you're beginning to ground in this and getting hips below knees? That's one of them.
What about that? And some of the other physical practices that you think people should just play around with a little bit more when they're in the gym. The sense of play itself is also another part of what I've noticed in the sessions I've done with you is a rarity. So let's talk about that.
Yeah. So we, all human beings are riding on millennia of spending time with our hips below our knees. So any time moving along, you know, not necessarily crawling along the ground. That's a part of your developmental patterns, depending upon your belief system, evolution, that was probably a thing as well.
And you're probably swinging through trees if you believe in evolution as well, you're an arboreal creature. And then that transition to being a bipedal mammal, crucial on the land. But that's a lot of that's kind of, it could change upon what you think. So it's all hypothetical, like where exactly where we came from.
But getting down on the ground, if you just look at present day, thoughts on evolution aside, look at any child, the way that a child navigates their own physiology and their own construction of themselves is they will squat, they will sit in like a cross-legged position, maybe a straddle position. Maybe at some point they'll start to kneel. And so they're spending a lot of time in that low position. And that's what you see as well, looking at hunter-gatherer tribes specifically the Hatsa people in northern Tanzania is where there's been research about this from University of Southern California, specifically where this came out of.
Researchers went out there and measured the amount of time that Hatsa people were spending in resting positions. Because the big ideas like, you know, we're like this culture of sedenturism, it's killing us, it's causing all our issues, and the amount of relative disease and depression. But if you look at hunter-gatherer tribes, Hatsa specifically, what you'll see is they spend about 9.82 hours was the average that they gathered in resting positions. So right now we're in a resting position.
The difference is we're up on chairs. So we're forming our body into a certain way in this position. Hunter-gatherer tribes, Hatsa specifically, would be in kneeling positions for a good chunk of the day. They'll be in squatting positions for a good chunk of the day.
They'll be in essentially all the same positions you see your child in. And when you're in those positions, one, it's just helpful with circulating blood, circulating lymph. Like, kenkels are unattractive, but they're also incredibly unhealthy. It's an indication, it's like, oh, we're in trouble.
And so what that does outside of just being, making you feel energetically lighter and more attractive because you don't have big, thick ankles, you're setting yourself up to stay athletic all the way through your life. And so when you start to limit range of motion, the ankles limit range of motion in the hips, that affects your gate pattern the way that you walk with, that you move throughout the world. Also, elderly needing assisted living, the number one leading reason for that is they've fallen right, so fall risk is this massive thing that's completely specific to Westernized culture abandoning the ground. It's like unbelievable when you think about it.
Like, if you really give that a moment of the amount of sovereignty that's been lost, and the amount of time and money and energy and worry, and it's like all of that is wrapped in, is wrapped up in us literally making an unconscious move away from where we came from, which is just naturally resting in those positions throughout the day. So what would be the prescription? Let's say that someone listens and they go, okay, yeah, that sounds good. I want to get rid of my kenkels.
I don't want to be falling and hurting myself and I'm 70 years old. What's a good way that someone can integrate these practices in the day? So just changing your environment. So have you done one with Bruce Lipton?
Okay, I think we've talked about him. I did a podcast of Bruce Lipton a year and a half ago or so. He's big, has been massive in championing the concept of epigenetics and how our environment changes our genetic outcome. And one of the things that he mentioned to me was when he was studying cells in petri dishes, if he wanted to change something about the cell, he went doing anything specifically to the cell itself.
It would be changing the culture that the cell exists in. So within your own body, if you're just focusing intrinsically on what's happening inside the body itself, that's a great start. It might get you somewhere, but until you actually change the environment that's forming the body and the mind and your perception of itself and all that, to fit that mold, you're just going to keep falling back into the same position. So you can do all the calf raises or all the couch stretches or all the different therapeutic rehab exercises you want.
But what got you into that position in the first place? And so the first place that I would start is saying, okay, just create a space in your home. It could be in front of the couch, get yourself a comfortable rug. So it's inviting to get down to.
You could put self-care tools in your house, have a foam roller line around, or get one of those cusser guns or softball to kind of do some out-fashively stuff on, get some Moroccan poofs or floor cushions. So suddenly the culture that your cell isn't happening itself within is shifted to invite the cell to create change in itself, just with these really basic visual cues. So you walk into a space with a pull-up bar hanging through some doorway, just naturally and navel-y, you will have the urge to, your arms suddenly levitate over your head. You're like, I'm on the bar.
It's magic. The bar is there. Hands on the bar. I didn't have to give you any reps or sets or tell you got, and that's the element of play.
So if we can start to make the movement landscape, the environment that we inhabit ourselves in, suddenly it's like we become moved by the environment. Right? So when you walk outside, if it's kind of cold, and you say, you know what, I'm going to do a little cold thermogenesis here. I'm not going to put all of the layers on.
You go out there and you get moved by the cold. Suddenly you have this Herbalation and your hair kind of 6'7", your body activates its own insulation system by causing your hair to raise up. It's like a down-sleeping bag on top of your body. Like, whoa, it's pretty cool that we have that capacity.
We just need to place ourselves into the environmental conditions in order for our body to show up. But inherently, your body wants to show up. It's just we have done such a tremendous job at outsourcing our body's necessity to show up, to machine or to Amazon. Nothing wrong with that.
It's actually brilliant. It's freaking amazing that the human mind has been able to outsource almost everything to the point that you can lay on a couch, press buttons on your phone and have food delivered to your face, have sex delivered to your face. It's pretty freaking impressive. Like, I'm not mad at it.
I'm really just like in awe, like whoa, starting from whack and rock together to create fire. To sex in the face. To sex in the face of your blue-lit screen. Like good effort.
Good effort. And those parts that we've outsourced, not only is it work, but work is therapeutic. And so we can experience that or witness that in the physical body, in your biology. But you can also experience that just in your daily life.
And my podcast before this, we were talking about purpose. And like the pressure to have purpose. And when a person feels like they are living an hour on purpose or a day on purpose or a life on purpose, it's gratifying. And usually what that is, it's like you did work.
You were here and you moved yourself to there. You're like, I feel better. I did a thing. I did a thing.
Yeah. This is something increasingly that I've realized is an important consideration when doing any sort of practice. Especially since we've been out here meeting you have spent a lot of time at Kuyo, which is a hot and cold exposure place next door. But even training as well that if you do a training session or any sort of physical practice, the best judge of whether or not it was right for you is whether you feel good afterwards or not.
Do I feel good after I've completed this? Because if I don't, then why am I doing it? We go out of next door having done three rounds of 20 minutes hot, three minutes cold ish, something like that on average. And I feel on top of the world.
I feel phenomenal. The best post sex glow without having to find someone else to do it with. Outstanding. Like, and that's just, you haven't put anything in your body.
I haven't taken anything. This is completely internally generated from doing that. And then the same with some of the sessions of training, you know, I came up with this thing called the manual pause, right, which was the toward the end of their twenties. I saw a lot of guys myself included having trained doing like bro split lifting for decades, maybe because we want it to get big and be attractive to girls or whatever.
And then you realize I got out of breath going up and set it's theirs and I can't touch my toes anymore. And I'm pretty sure that my body is meant to do more than just buy set curls. And you start to revert back to other modes of training. So maybe you do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or Thai boxing or yoga or CrossFit or functional fitness or fucking running athletics, whatever, right?
And I found that my satisfaction after doing those sorts of sessions was so much higher. So much higher after doing that kind of a workout. And it just made me think how many people are doing training modality that they really genuinely don't enjoy and that the body is telling them that they don't enjoy, but that they just stick at it because this is probably correct that something is better than nothing. But that if the end goal of your fitness is to make you be like a happier, healthier, stronger human being, then you can just use how do I feel post workout as a pretty good judge of whether or not my training modality at the moment is working.
Yeah. Once we were talking about before, as well, it's like you don't know what you don't know. So if you have been whatever workout dogma or regimen you've subscribed to over the years, you kind of have your just like getting work in, just like getting it done. That's great.
I'd rather someone have, oh, thanks you to my gain up. I was a little bit quiet. It's fine. Damn.
I was never said that all the time. Yeah. So some work is better than no work. But you can paint yourself into a corner with your work that eventually you might have to reverse engineer to get yourself out of that corner.
So say Ronnie Coleman would be a great example of this. Have you watched any Ronnie Coleman stuff? Kind of sad to say no. Super sweet guy.
Like really like beautiful heart. I don't know him personally, but I spend enough hours watching like, yeah, exactly. He's like a sweetie. But he would be a great example.
He did it. Like goal arrived at smashed the goal. The only thing that he ever regretted in his entire bodybuilding career was not doing 800 for five. He did it for two and he was adamant that he could have back score at 800 for five instead.
I knew I had another three in me. Ronnie, your bed bound with 75 steel screws in your spine and you live on the highest dose of painkillers that is legally allowed. And your one regret is that you didn't do 800 for five instead of 800 to two. Yeah.
So for him, he won. Like it ultimately is all perception and filters and how we it's like, what are your goals? So I think the first thing for someone is to have a definitive goal of what it is that you, where do you want to arrive? And I think it would behoove people to draw beyond just where do I want to arrive aesthetically, but also come from place of feel.
So how do you want to feel in one week, one year, 30 years? What are the values that are actually in fact the most important for you? And I think people are, a lot of people are honest or really feel into that question. You probably want to feel you don't want to feel a bunch of pain.
You want to feel light in your body. You want to feel flexible in your body. You want to be adaptable. You want to feel strong.
You want to feel confident. You want to be able to play with your kids or your grandkids or be able to get down and pick up a dog. Like those things matter. So I would think about how do we start to reverse engineer a program to make sure that we have some of those staples ingrained into the system.
And what that's going to look like is you're probably going to be walking, probably maybe going to be like lunging, keeping that spaciousness open and around the ankles and around the hips, keeping flexibility and adaptability throughout the spine. And when the spine is impinged or impinged is a fine word for it or off neutral, be another way of saying, it feels unstable. It feels unsafe. It doesn't trust you to be strong.
And so if you're moving through the world and say like a forward head posture type position or your shoulders are collapsed forward or you have excessive extension in the lower back and the lower spine, that's sending the signal to your central nervous system. And it's not safe to go deliver power through the system. Just switches it off. It just switches it off.
Super amazing. Like you're like, thank you. Because I'd much rather you have some type of parent figure from the function of my nervous system. Because I'm not responsible enough for that.
The same thing with breathing, the same thing with cardiac function, the same thing with lymphatic function, you're not responsible enough to govern all of these systems. So you have to have the quality control manager that oversees it all? Yeah. So if you're wondering why maybe you feel stiff chronically or maybe you feel like, man, I've reached this plateau and I just can't go beyond it, there could be a conversation around joint balance or centration.
Centration just being a 50 cent word for balance really. Having maximum range, having joints oriented so that I have maximum capacity to move in all directions. That's athleticism. That's adaptability.
If my joints are pinned up to the edge, they're on the press of disaster. If I go any further in this one direction, but then I have excessive mobility in the other direction, then inevitably your body, because it loves you, it's going to put you into bracing and tension. Now, all of a sudden, an analogy for that would be like, it's like you left your house with the lights on. So now throughout the day, your lights are just burning, you got the air conditioner running, you got the lights on, vacuum cleaner just just vacuum in nothing.
Because your body's like, it's holding itself together. Because ultimately, it's received the message that it lets go. That would be unsafe. There's a good story that Stu McGill uses about one of the world's strongest man events from a few years ago.
And I want to say it was, it was either a, they were back squatting a car or they were over head pressing it like axle pressing a car. And he said, if you watch the event, you can see the rep before the guy is about to fail. It must have been it was back squatting. You can see the rep before he fails.
Every single person, this is true, you can go back and check it. Every single person when they reset from the penultimate set, penultimate rep before they fail, all of them take a big breath in and just shift their hips a tiny little bit. He's like, that is the spine saying, buddy, you've got nothing left in the time. So I'm going to kill the power.
And then when they go to power out of the bottom, maybe their legs have got something in it, but the spine's decided to pull the kill cord and there's just nothing left. So let's say that somebody that's listening does a lot of training and they think, right, okay, this sounds great. I need to be functional. I should move in a more holistic manner.
I like the idea of creating an environment in my house that kind of engenders a parasympathetic, very calm, self-love, self-work kind of environment. What else can I do? Give me some practices, give me some takeaways that I can do to encourage a more holistic, aligned body protocol. Yeah.
Well, so two of the things we mentioned is just making, orienting your space so that you just get your damn hips below the height of your your knees every now and again, like just get yourself down there. So that's in that sort of bright squatting position. And as you do that, you do that sometimes leaning up against the walls so someone could just get down off the couch and then just lean up against the couch with that in that bottom squat position. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. Just be and then so a part of that as well is per mentioned before, like engendering a bit more of this nature of play into your life, inviting that into conversations and not being so damn stuffy and serious. The way that we communicate to each other, if you look at, and this is going out of like, well, this is kind of practices that are in the book, or at least conversations or philosophies of the book, different cultures justiculate. They use their hand gestures or facial expressions more or less than others.
So you go to Italy, suddenly it's like, you're not here, you're not here, you're like, that's what grabs you by the shirt like pulls you in. It's like, that's just how we communicate. Like that's just expressing, you know, and you maybe go someplace else, maybe like, I don't know, you know, someplace in the United States, maybe like a Muslim culture, be different, like a Buddhist culture is going to be different than a, you know, each place has their movement signature. And there is there are replications and repercussions of each of these, you know, and it's like the, what do they call it, the French paradox?
It's like, how are these damn French people eating all these baguettes? And they're still like pretty darn healthy. How is it that they might show you all these baguettes and have them? I think there's a lot of elements in that.
I think community is the main one. I think people run on community. We run on purpose. We run on community.
We run on the sensation that I've got your back, you've got my back. You know, and I think that when we have that sensation of safety and safety, central nervous system, neutral spine, when we come into that place of feeling safe with my community, it allows me at a neuro muscular cellular like all the way down into ourselves level to be able to relax, to be able to breathe, to be able to, you know, have that. And so I think the French paradox has a lot to do with people just getting out and eating together and drinking together and smoking cigarettes and, you know, whatever brings people together. Like I would take a smoker, ideally like some organic cigarettes that are just mostly exclusively tobacco and a bunch of chemicals that gets them to go outside and take a walk and connect and like, you know, have a shoulder to lean on and get some natural sunlight exposure to their eyeballs, maybe get a little cold thermogenesis or maybe a little heat and, you know, they have their vise quotations.
I would take that person over the orthorexic person. What's that? Orthorexic person that's like has an unhealthy obsession with health. Okay.
I take that person any day for to be on my kickball team, to be on my, you know, my business. The person who's obsessed with health, but spends all of their time on their own, staring at the screen and never getting the hips below their knees and doesn't have a culture and doesn't have a community and doesn't have a sports structure. Yeah. So again, I'm not advising that people take up tobacco.
But if you look at that tobacco, what is it? The tobacco in the last conversation we were talking about, dogs, you're moved by your dog. Dog comes into the room. You don't just sit there aimlessly, you know, kind of like monk like staring forward.
You react and engage with the dog. So suddenly your facial patterns change and suddenly your voice tonality might change. You know, there's a Steven, Steven Porgis, he's a guy that came up with the concept of polyvagal theory, he calls it that your voice is prosody. So when we're communicating, we're literally tuning each other's nervous systems based off of the tone of our voices.
So there's a professor from a professor psychology in the 60s, Albert Morabian. I don't jump around a little, but it's going to maybe wind back to something came up with a thing called the 55-38-7 principle. And what that suggests is 55% of our communication comes from body language. And then 38 is coming from the tone of our voice.
And then there's the last little 7% is like the actual words that we're conveying. So if there's incongruence between what the body is saying and the words, with at least, I mean, I think it's, I mean, unless you're a complete dummy, I think it's higher than 93%, but you're going to trust the body 93% of the time. You know, so the cigarette, not condoning cigarettes, you know, but it moves the person. Say, I got the cigarette.
Okay, we can't smoke inside. I'm walking outside. Ah, dog comes into the room. You know, if you're like a, you know, an overweight person that's stuck in your house staring at TV all day long, stressing out about the computer, one of the healthiest things you could probably do for yourself is just start by getting a dog.
I fucking dog, man. Get a dog. You're doing all this stuff. You know, you're getting your protein shakes and you got your creatine, you got your glutamine, you got the trainer that you go see three times a week and, you know, none of them are going to create the difference that would manifest in your life by having that just having that accountability and that relationship with that dog.
And that's, you know, not even it's excluding all of the immune benefits of the dog bringing, we're talking about this well, bringing nature into the house. What about little bit of a pivot? What about sex? What about relationships?
With the work that you've done, have you seen a, what dysfunctions do you see with regards to people and their relationship to sex and to their own body and to the way that they judge other people's bodies as well? Well, definitely not my field of depth. But I think it's very, an interesting conversation that is a physical conversation around that, not the sex is a physical, but more like anatomical would be the way that shame manifests in the body. You know, so growing up in a culture that doesn't have maybe full ease around sex, you know, or menstruation or having a penis or having an anus or all of these things like, Oh, like, everyone gets a little uncomfortable.
If you say anus, it's like, whoa, pull it back. It was like, yeah, you got one, I got one, like, I took a shit four hours ago, you know, but it's like to talk about that or to think about that. It's like, Oh my God, it's like, what if I didn't take a shit today? It would be dramatically, what if I didn't take a shit for a week?
It would be like, my whole life would be in shambles. You know, and so I think sex is one of those things, it's like our nether regions, you know, that part of our body, it's, we're not really inculcated for the most part, at least I wasn't into a culture that has a lot of acceptance of those spaces, you know, in the way that shame manifests in the body, just look at it physically. If you're ashamed, if you're embarrassed, you know, without getting metaphysical, you know, saying like, Oh, shame, there's deep tension in the pereneum in the cells and the root chakra or any kind of just kind of random, random bits, feel in your body. What does shame feel like?
You know, like for you, if you suddenly, like it's like a subistiveness in the stomach in the head, yeah, or maybe a collapse could be a flavor, or falling forward. Yeah, right. You know, what does pride, what does strength feel like, what does sadness feel like, you know, the whole gamut of emotions. And that's Sir William James, who's he's like widely known as the father of modern psychology, was one of the preeminent leaders in the conversation of not just a top down physiology, being like the mind affects the body, you know, so we see a bear, I'm scared, I run, you know, I respond, we could just as easily flip that around and go bottom up and say, I see a bear, I have a physiological response, it moves my body into this state that we seem to be fear, and that perpetuates the feeling of the emotion.
And then that winds back and it's this ping pong, boom, feedback system back and forth, mind, body, mind, body, mind, body, it doesn't matter where it starts or where it ends, like the chicken or the egg question is like both what it doesn't matter, they're inextricably tied. So if we grow up in a culture that inherently there's a, maybe it's not overt shame, but maybe just like shadow, you know, or blank spots, like there's some pages in our physiology, in our anatomy, that aren't as well filled out, you know, so there's a term, you heard the term homunculus, no, homunculus means a little man, essentially it's like, well, just flip my, my, uh, do you think here, uh, homunculus means a little man, it's essentially like the way that it's like the neurological real estate that our body has to sensation, uh, or how different appendages experience sensation, the amount of real estate that's offered to that sensory reception in those various different parts of the body, you know, and so your fingers will have in this little man image, it's like literally, you can look it up, it's a really interesting thing to see, they've got like really big lips, you know, and they've got like really big hands and you know, pretty reasonably sized generals actually. You got to, you got to, you got to, you got to, you got to, you got to, you got to, you know, so that distribution of sensory awareness can change depending upon a person's life experience. And so there's some places in the body that for some people it might literally be like a shadow place, like you could numb that space out, you know, some people don't have a lot of sensations or parts of their body like maybe like they're back, you know, you could rub a, you know, a paper clip or a feather or something in certain parts of the body, like, I've literally shut that part down.
And then it becomes this whole process of re-engaging and reintegrating that aspect of yourself. Do you think symbolically that can happen with regards to shame around sex and our bodies, not just in terms of how we perceive them physiologically, if we can touch them and if we can get feedback, but how we see them symbolically in our minds? I think so. What do you think?
Yes, certainly man. I mean, it's definitely since being out here in Austin, fuck, like people here, I've got a very, some people here got a very liberal, very open relationship to sex and sexual practices and talking about sex. Far more, I don't know whether it's a British thing, maybe it is a little bit, but far more than I've been used to in the UK. And I'd say I'm, you know, relatively open about being happy to talk about things that have gone well or badly or that I'd like or don't like during sex, but in fact, out here's a another level.
I don't know whether that's, I don't know, just because you talk about a thing a lot doesn't mean that you have a healthy relationship with it. Oh, yeah. But I mean, this not being able to talk about it all probably isn't a sign of a good relationship with it. Also not.
Yeah. So it's been, it's been interesting being out here. It's the flexibility. Again, it comes back to adaptability and flexibility.
If you're, if something makes you uncomfortable, if I say a word, you know, any other words I said previously, you go, yeah, a little bit. Yeah. Just a little bit. Cool.
That's a place that there is, if you choose to take an opportunity, probably for you to uncover some, you know, internal impingement. You don't need to address it, but it's, it's there. If someone pisses you off, you know, if someone makes you feel away, it's probably some reflection back into some insecurity within yourself or else there wouldn't be a charge around it. What are you working on at the moment personally?
Like what's the next 2022, if you were to look back at the end of 2022 and consider it a success, what would have been a development that you would have gone through? Well, I mean, something that we've talked about previously is I have a bit of a tendency of, I don't know if I enjoy it, but I have a proclivity towards chasing, you know, and that was kind of something that we've been talking about in relation to like, two female relationships and something that I'm observing in myself, you know, when something is unavailable, it becomes highly prized. And when the availability begins there, sometimes I, not sometimes I can completely notice the opportunity to work with that for me is, is resistance around that or a disinterest, kind of like an avoidant type pattern. You know, and so for me, it's like, ah, okay, well, there's, there's the work, you know, so now it's my, the onus is on me alone to engage with it or to go to the next and repopatuate patterns.
And so that, for me, it's like looking in and really being honest with what that is. What do you think it is? Well, likely my story for that, which I think that's another thing to be cautious of is being attached to her stories. Yeah, over rationalizing her over narrative, narrative, narratizing whatever it is that you're supposed to do.
Yeah. And that's when things, things that kind of trump our stories, like maybe some type of, you know, breathwork ceremony thing or some life event that was like, right, you're outside of the narrative that you've tried to wrap around and rationalize a story with. Yeah, that's an interesting way. Whatever it may be suddenly like, Oh, okay, story out, you know, story on the side.
Yes. Now here's like God, we are the two. There's like another, there's like the higher purview comes in. It's like, okay, we don't need words right now, little Aaron, we're just on truth.
You know, I think that those moments happen when they happen. But for me, the narrative that I have that I think probably has some level of sense to it is I think that my mother was who I've done actually full like 90 minute podcast with her. And I was like, I know it was the only podcast I've ever like really properly broke down, wept in a couple times. And she had a background of some level of abuse.
I'm not sure if I shared in the podcast, I don't know if it's appropriate to share, but she learned that it's not appropriate to not be okay. You know, so kind of like good vibes only type of thing, which is incredibly dangerous, because then you lack decompression. You know, suddenly you pin it up, you know, any of those sensations that would be deemed unfavorable is just like, okay, those don't go out, they go in, and now they just sit and fester and kind of ferment. And so getting the signal that everything needs to be okay, everything needs to be like be already.
I think that there was a certain level of she was very caring, very sweet, you know, always made me sandwiches and always like had my back. But I think there was a certain emotional vulnerability that was challenging for her to access. And I think I subconsciously picked that up. And so when there is emotional vulnerability specifically with a female, it's scary to me, you know, and so I'm like, Oh, this is like a lot.
You know, and so within that, I think I've adapted, and a lot of people have done this, you know, I've adapted to be able to create rapport with with quickness. You know, so what I've, because of a general avoidance of depth, I've reintroduced that bandwidth into like superficial. And so I think you have have this as well, probably for different reasons, but an ability to connect with new people and find common ground pretty quick. And you always think there's maybe part of the defense mechanism.
Yeah, for sure. That's interesting. Yeah, definitely. Fuck that's interesting.
And then when it goes to a certain level, I'm like, Oh, yeah, too far, too far. But we're like, you know, like fast bros or fast, you know, bro and bro and sister, like real fast. And then there's a certain level because that that part's so well developed. Yeah, certain level that it's kind of like, OK, and as soon as you're outside of that safety position.
Yeah, I am probably that wasn't too much information about my. No, no, no, I think it's fucking interesting, man. Like it's really interesting to think that you could compensate for a fear of depth or a hesitation around depth by overselling on rapport or overselling on immediate connection. And that makes a lot of sense.
It doesn't resonate with me personally, but I can absolutely see how it would happen. So getting through that, trying to get yourself past the slightly more, I guess, juvenile areas of the avoidant attachment side. I mean, I have a ton of friends. And I think that this is I'd be very interested to find out how this relates to people that are whatever high agency or high achieving guys, a lot of my buddies that are high achievers also have that attachment style, which is funny because people are prepared to push their limits in so many places, you know, if we needed to do a 24 hour workout or a, you know, unbelievable sauna and cold session or whatever, like pick whatever challenge it is that you want to do.
And yet there are these sort of deep, dark holes that sometimes don't get uncovered quite so easily. Maybe they're a little bit more difficult to see what's going on. Maybe they're just an area of the territory that we can't get rid of as simply, but it is strange that it's starting to get rid of. Okay, to deal with that.
I know that you've heard yourself probably as you're saying that. Yeah. To come into healthier relations. To face on healthy.
Just means whole. That's like the original meaning of health. Yeah. Okay.
So whole coming back to the body integrated. So if I disconnect the parts, you know, I got my bicep brachialis and I got my triceps and I got the, you know, the multiple heads of the quads and I got, you know, really specifically breaking down those individual points that can potentially lead to a, a disintegration of the whole body working together. And then that creates, you know, coffee. But there's something about the fact that a lot of my friends that can push themselves in many other areas still have as their one of the final bastions of challenge is their avoidant attachment.
Oh, yeah. That's a big one. You think that's the whatever you kill you seal? It's not the members of the thing, you know, but that's, I think relationship is one of the ultimate reflections upon yourself.
You know, getting into deeper awareness or more authentic awareness with your relationship to your parents. I think a lot of it comes back to that. You're like, okay, interesting. You know, and so if you do allow, if you know, if you do play the game and you actually say like, cool, like, all right, pushing chips in, you know, and actually be there for it.
Yeah. I mean, if you really, how many people really want to look at themselves? I think we all say that we do, but I think the only reason to be afraid of a psychedelic trip or maybe a relationship or, you know, psychedelics are another really good example of that. I think a bad trip, most people I've talked to have had bad trips.
Like I've had things that I've deemed like, well, that felt pretty like bad. It was just an exposure to some aspect of myself or my orientation to the world that I was uncomfortable with. And I didn't want to look at. And I was in that time, in that moment, I was kind of almost felt like forced to be in that, that space to say like, okay, here you are.
Here's your relationship with, you know, film the blank, whatever the thing is. And then wanting to get out. But the way to get to the other side of that, and you know, finding like healing and ease and, you know, all of that wholeism health is through it. And it's you can either, you know, wrestle the relationship or wrestle the mushroom or wrestle, you know, whatever, which you will not win.
I can guarantee it with the mushroom, you will not win. The analogy that I used was it's like being sat on a firework. And as you try to steer it to the left or the right, it goes, yeah, and just makes it only makes it worse. It only gets bigger.
It's a good strategy for you. You know, it's like the, what's the, what's the, what's the, the gal with the snake heads? You chop off the snake heads. Is that one?
What's got like tons of snake heads? You chop off the one? Yeah, it's the hydra. Yeah.
Yeah, it's the hydra. You know, so ultimately, I'm trying to, you know, hopefully not getting like excessively metaphysical or esoteric, but, you know, ultimately, I think a relationship is an opportunity, you know, just like a, like, like, you know, the mushroom thing is surrender. In my experience, surrender has been the ticket to ease, you know, like, not fighting, you know, in that moment, it's like, cool, whatever the thing is, you don't need to fight. And it's interesting.
Have you had that experience with yourself at all? Wrestling, wrestling a thing. And instead of fighting the thing, I'm going to a place of just like, you know what, take me. Yeah.
I mean, my first ever mushroom trip was precisely this. And I just refused to let go. Yeah. So for whatever five hours, I just wrangled everything, right?
And just kept, kept that puppy kind of as much control as I could, which was just made for a very, very uncomfortable. So Terrence McKinney. So the only thing you can do, the only mistake you can make with with psychedelics is not taking enough. Well, that was five grams for my first ever.
And even with that, I was like, I'm a fucking wrap you up in a big, big prison and see if I can hold on. Yeah. And I'm pretty much managed to, which is just like looking back, but then you're not, you're not exactly super lucid at the time. Yeah, I didn't know, man, I certainly resonate with when you when you think about being in the body, right?
And you notice that you've been sat in a meeting or in a situation with someone and you've been tense and then you kind of check into yourself and you and everything just eases up a little bit. Oh, you open your gaze. The best cue that I've learned about this year from an embodiment coach was about just using the peripherals of your vision. So just using that open gaze.
Man, I love that cue so much. It just reminds me that there's so much more going on. You do not need to focus just that you can have all of this beautiful vision outside of you. Yeah.
There's all chapter in the line method book about that. I'm telling Andrew Huberman, who he's popularized a lot of these conversations last year, and he thankfully edited through the whole thing for me and kind of pointed me in the right direction. I owe so much to his mind and his research. But yeah, I mean, the way that you use your eyes, your eyes are continuous with your central nervous system.
So similarly, this is one of the things I was going to eventually likely get to in relation to environmental conditions. Changing the visual environment isn't just adding visual cues. It caused you to do what would look like mobility or exercise. It's also changing the visual environment in the sense of like, you know, open some windows, ideally get full spectrum light into your eyeballs.
You know, so it's not just when you're looking at light through windows, it's going to be blocking some percentage of the UVA or UVB spectrum out and being able to relax your eyes and awareness that when I am in that panoramic, like, I'm just taking it all in, that that's lens of perception. It's sending the signal into the rest of your physiology, which is probably an anchored pattern for again, millennia back like, you know, generations, generations, like forever, that when you are just taking it all in, just space it out, probably almost never in history have you just spaced it out and taken it all in and been under attack, right? And so it's a similar thing talking to them when you're mind-opically focused in, suddenly, okay, cool, we're taking it all in, we're just gathering information about the whole, or maybe not gathering information, screw that we're just basking in the moment, we're fed, you know, we've hunted, and then suddenly there is a threat, what do your eyes do? You know, it all focuses on that single point.
I'll be thinking about this to do with smartphones. Oh, of course, yeah. So much about that. You're looking down, and you're looking down into the right, you know, so you're looking down, or, you know, if you're lefty, you know, which would be more rare, but you're looking down into a specific direction.
So your eyes act like reins to your neuromuscular system. So you can do this, you know, put your fingertips back, the bottom of your skull, it's called the suboxical ridge, and just look up and down, and you'll feel those muscles, it's called suboxical muscles engaging, right? That's so funny. The same thing in chimpanzees, this has been researched there, the cochlea in their ear, will change direction with the eyes.
So when you are looking to the right, to some potential threat, whatever the thing is, literally even their auditory system, so the hearing opens up as their eyes move almost. It will orient towards that thing. No way. Which is kind of an interesting thing for people that are like, you know, into Jiu Jitsu and wrestling, have like Calflavir, I wonder how that affects things, but yeah, I mean, your visual system is so deeply tied into your sense of, either alertness or executive function getter done or relaxed, digest, rest.
So that's in the book and the alignment, the really, the intention of it isn't so much to have like a step-by-step method. It's more a philosophy to reorient the way that a person engages with their body in any situation. So even with Victor Frankel, logotherapy, man's research, meaning, one of the things that he said that I align with is that he said he's more like an optometrist than a psychologist. So he's just working with people's perception of the world, the way that they process information, their filter.
And so I think that that's a really valuable approach to one's fitness. No, it's fitness is a thing that I do, fitness is a thing that I am. So all the time throughout every day, they're all a bunch of opportunities if you have the education on how to engage with those opportunities. So you're just filled with these fun levers, all over your body.
So your eyes, they will change the way that your mental emotional state based off of the way that you use them. If you have that information, you can leverage it. Same thing with your auditory environment, same thing with your sense of touch, certain sensations or textures will make you feel one way, certain sensations of texture make you feel another way, your visual environment, an interesting thing that you have to factor this one by. I heard with real estate, if you're selling a place and you have like pointy plants out front that sends an indication to potential buyers to stay away.
No way. I mean, you got to look it up. There's a whole field of state you'd probably appreciate called embodied cognition. Body cognition essentially is the way that we think and feel based off of our physical experience.
So I'm sure you've heard of the clipboard studies. If you give somebody a resume and it's like a big thick beefcake clipboard, they're like, oh fuck yeah, like this guy's really knows. He's serious. He's stable.
He's supported. I like this guy. So that's that tactile experience of like, man, this guy feels like, oh, I can trust him. Same thing with people that tend to be taller, lower voices that something we were talking about before.
It's like, oh, there's something trustworthy about that. It feels like, feel powerful. They might just be a tall asshole. It doesn't necessarily mean anything.
But the way that we cognate that or there are embodied experience of that is like, oh, yeah, I trust it. Same thing with if we're we have a cold beverage and someone goes into a job interview or a warm beverage. Right now we had icy, you know, whatever, some lemonade or something like that. But like icy cups based off of research, we would perceive this experience as being a little bit more.
That's why I was noticing the temperature of the room. We perceive this experience as being a little bit kind of like more closed, a little bit colder. If you give me like a hot cocoa, and it's warm, and we got a fire going in the background and we can hear the crackling of the fire, suddenly that's changing my perception and say like, wow, and I just feel so safe here. There's something about you, Chris.
That makes me feel safe. It's like, is it me or is it just the environment that we're having this mutual experience? It's just crazy, man. This more holistic view of the body overall and the fitness is something that I don't know, maybe to you and maybe the people that you're speaking to, it's kind of obvious or it makes a complete amount of sense.
But to me, this is like an entire new world. That's great. A whole new world. In a sense, though.
It's simple. Well, the human system is one thing altogether. It's broken up into component parts, but working on each component part without taking into account all of the other things doesn't really seem to make sense. And some of the things that you've mentioned to me since we've been hanging out to do with, you can tell a lot about a person's personality by the way that they move, whether they walk into a sauna or a restaurant or to sit down at a date or the way that they hold themselves or the way that they gesture or whatever.
Like, why is that the case? If it wasn't that we was such a global system where our cognition and our physicality and our emotions and our social status and our confidence and our blah blah, if it wasn't the case that all of those were together, why would it be that from something I can induce how somebody is in a completely unrelated area, so to speak? It's not. It's the one-coated system.
So you've got a special revised paper-back edition of the Align Method coming out. Where can people get that? Hopefully your bookstore will be great. That would be very aligned method, ask of you to take a walk outside, ideally remove sunglasses, get full spectrum light.
There's a lot of British people listening to them. They do sound glasses. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's immune.
It tunes your neurochemistry, that light penetrating rivals. I know that that was a cue to wrap up, so don't say, don't spell more factoids. Fire away, man. Factoids, where are the factoids?
I can keep them coming. But you're a big reason that such a high percentage of people are becoming myopic, specifically like China's something like 93%. Like a really high percentage of adolescents are becoming myopic. Same thing.
You define myopic? Nearsighted. Yeah, we see near well, far, not so easy. So one potential conversation there would be that we're just practicing nearsightedness all the time.
So those silly air muscles and all the muscles that help change the shape of the lens to be able to refract that light. So it comes into clear vision. We're like, well, you're only using the close ones, so we're going to have a problem with the other ones. But a bigger part of the conversation is the impact that natural sunlight has on the structure and the shape and the chemical structural makeup of your eyeballs.
So sun, literally the exact process, I can't go through because that's not my specialty, but sun literally changes. It's a physical thing. It's like a nutrient. And when it changes the structure and the makeup of your eyes.
And so when you're going outside, it's not just like a relaxed the eyes, it's an opportunity to down regulate the nervous system, calm the freak down. It's literally, it's like you're nourishing the structure of your eyeballs through that exposure to the sunlight. So sunlight, it's so healing in so many capacities. And I know I didn't break down exactly what's happening within that system.
So maybe come back, I'll go deeper in the research of what that system is exactly. But experts pretty much unanimously align that sunlight. It changes the structure and the makeup of your eyeballs. So you need it for healthy eyes.
You need it for healthy everything. Doing a morning walk here in Austin, because the weather tends to be, it's a bit muggy sometimes on a morning, but maybe 50% of the day is sunny. A morning walk with sunshine is so good. I always do the walk anyway, but in the UK, if I was to do it at the time, I'm doing it out here, it would still be dark.
And that infrared light specifically in the morning, you're setting, I think a lot of people are saying this by now they know about this, but you're setting the circadian rhythm for the rest of the day. So when you're waking up, that light in the sun's first coming up, it's tuning your whole neurophysiology, your neurochemistry, your hormones, your integrin system to be alert to be up. It's like a bookend start of the day. I only learned recently that the reason that we get a burst of energy after the lights go out is that that would be adaptive for our ancestors to get themselves home while the sun was setting.
That's cool, I know that. So this is in Johann Hari's stolen focus, which is coming out in the new year. It'll be really good. I've read half of it.
And he mentioned that one of the reasons that we're struggling to have attention at the moment is because of lack of sleep and lack of sleep is partly due to the fact that we use blue screens at night. But what is the reason that blue screens have such an effect on energy levels and our ability to fall asleep easily? And one of the proposed reasons for this is that when we go from light to dark, our bodies get a kick of energy, why would that be useful? Well, if you're out hunting or not in your cave or not at your camp, it would be pretty good for you to just get a little extra kick.
I've had that experience many times, like camping or rock climbing or something we were out in the woods. And you're like, we got to go. Yeah. Suddenly we're running.
You know, you get that full synthetic burst. You get to remember that. What Johann's saying is that let's say that you're using your phone and watching Netflix until you get to sleep. And then precisely at the moment when you're about sleep, precisely, so interesting stats around e-readers that it doesn't seem like they have the same sort of response.
Yeah, they're not making that light. I need to speak to human about that. But I don't think that they have the same effect. The other thing that's interesting that I went up to mention in relation to eyes, I just I think it's just so cool, is that humans are one of the only mammals to have white sclerosis, the white part.
So we can see the orientation of the positioning of our eyes. It's called the I coordination hypothesis, I think is the center of where the people can see what we're looking at. Yeah, and so the potential suggestion for that, like an evolutionary adaptation would be to be able to signal to each other for hunting. And so you'll see this and the reason they would suggest is you see this with certain dogs, more like pack animals.
They also have that indication to be able to see where their eyes are oriented. And then also to be able to see the wellness of a person. And this becomes interesting in the whole, like the year of the lockdowns and everything. It's like, we have pretty good senses when someone's unwell.
Like, you know, that's body language, that's voice tonality, that's reading the sclairs of somebody's eyes, that's, you know, you go Chinese medicine route and you know, see what's the, they have like some furry stuff on their tongue or their cracks in their tongue. We have all of these millions or billions of bits of visual information and all fact, all factory information as well, the way we smell. Suggesting whether that person is healthy to be close to somebody has terrible breath. You're like, get the hell away from me terrible body.
Oh, you're like, please don't give me a hug. No, thank you. If someone's sniffling, you're like, not interested. If someone's got blood shot eyes or they have like yellow eyes, you're like, I don't know what's going on.
Is this hepatitis? Is this like, there's something going on here? I would love for you to visit a doctor. I love you, you know, but you need to go.
You got to sort this out and then come back to the tribe. And then even within yourself, if you are that guy or that girl, you're like, okay, I need to pull myself out of the tribe. I need to sort this out. And so our subconscious intuition is just so fucking cool.
We've just learned to kind of outsmart ourselves. And you will never outsmart yourself. It's the same concept of trying to put together your 640 muscles and your 360 joints. You will not be successful.
But if you allow yourself to kind of listen to that inner wisdom, you know, and the integration of the inner wisdom and the modern wisdom, ultimately, modern wisdom would be that inner wisdom. I think suddenly it's like maybe surrendering to that, which is a surrendering term. I think that's that can be kind of funny for some people. But behind that, that's I think that's where true wisdom is.
I don't know, ladies and gentlemen, a line podcast, a line method book, everything will be linked in the show notes below any other stuff that people should check out. No, I think that's it. I mean, thanks again for making this happen. I really enjoyed this.
I was really, really fun conversation. I appreciate the way that your mind operates and the way that you create space for other minds to turn the way that they do. So thank you for creating the space for this. Yeah, go check out the a line podcast with you.
I really enjoyed that conversation. Another one they could check out would be the Bruce Lipton conversation. They want to go deeper into some of these topics. And then the line method book is coming out January 11th.
And so they could get this before that and they can pre-order it. It's on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or whatever. And I think that's it, man. I appreciate you.
Awesome dude. First of many. Yeah, let's keep doing it. All right.
Over and out. Psh.