- Hey there, it's Irene
Lyon from irenelyon.com
and first of all, thank
you for being here,
and welcome to my home.
My living room, dining room, kitchen
and I'm sitting on my practice area
where I roll around and move,
and do all the stuff I do
to keep my mind and body
connected to the environment.
Anyway, I got an email
today from Robin Sharma
and Robin Sharma has
written a lot of self-help,
personal productivity books.
I hate to put him in
the self-help categories
but that's kind of what that is.
We could call it positive psychology.
You might have heard of
The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari,
that's one of his books.
Anyway, this isn't a
Robin Sharma endorsement
but I guess I just did that.
But he wrote an email today,
I'm on his mailing list
and he's actually been recently
coming back into the limelight.
I read his books well over
eight years ago actually,
so I've been going back to them.
And he wrote in the email,
the subject, I'm reading
from my iPad here,
was Why Mandela Won.
So meaning Nelson Mandela.
And I won't go into the details,
most of us know who Mandela
was and what he did.
His imprisonment, how he got out
and managed to stay positive
and fight for what he believes in.
And at the every end, I love
what he wrote at the end
because I am becoming more interested
in this topic and category.
He says, "Do the inner work first.
"Seriously look at the limiting beliefs
"that are limiting your performance.
"Seriously study the resentments
"that are draining your energy.
"Seriously look at the scarcity
"that is blocking any opportunity
"and make the changes that
will unleash your amazingness."
Now, this is just like,
it's like a ding, ding, ding moment
because in the last sort of,
six months and really
the last four months,
I have been very, very interested in
this exact topic of, he
calls it the inner work.
Inner game is another
way that people call it.
The reason why is because many of you know
I'm a nervous systems specialist.
I work with trauma,
helping people rewire
their nervous systems
via the body, mind and
environment connection,
that's what I call it.
My background is completely immersed
in this idea of inner work or inner game
and as much as I really
love Sharma's work,
and I would love to meet him one day
and talk to him about this,
a lot of this practices
and principles are,
how shall I say this?
A little outdated. Sorry Robin.
Just a little outdated.
They're all valid and they are all
part of the picture
and yet there is another
big part of this picture
that has not been talked about.
A lot of people are
talking about mindfulness,
meditation, the brain
and yet there's one piece that
we really need to understand
before we start improving the brain
and entering into mindfulness practices,
and that is the nervous system.
There's a great book that I've got here
called The Polyvagal Theory
and it's written by Dr. Stephen Porges,
that's what it looks like.
It's a pretty dense book
but here's why it's important.
In this book and what he has discovered
is there are three, three,
branches of our nervous system,
of our autonomic nervous system that
govern pretty much everything that we do.
One of them, a lot of us know about,
it's called the fight-flight
branch of the nervous system, all right?
It's the one that gets our adrenaline up.
It allows us,
it's allowing me right now to sit upright
and be alert and have
the capacity to be awake.
But there's more to it than that.
So there's one branch
of the nervous system,
that's the sympathetic nervous system.
It's our survival instinct.
It's what we have but it's
also what reptiles have,
what other animals have.
Then there's this other branch
called the parasympathetic nervous system.
And that's where Stephen really,
really dissects the differences
in the parasympathetic.
Now, a lot of us have
heard of the rest digest.
There's that sympathetic high arousal
and then there's the parasympathetic
which is low, calm, rest,
I'm having a siesta.
It's what allows you to
go to sleep at night,
it's what calms us down.
Here's the interesting piece
that is never talked about
in our self-help world,
and that are the, that's the two branches.
There's two branches
of the parasympathetic.
And these branches come
out around the brain stem,
very back of the skull here,
high, high up in the spine.
And it's governed by something called
the vagus nerve, all right?
The vagus nerve
and the vagus nerve, it's a cranial nerve.
It comes out of our cranium.
And one portion of it governs
this deep, shut down, rest
physiology.
The other branch also calms us down
but it's part of our mammalian,
our evolved social engagement physiology.
Let me explain this in another way.
When you are being calmed by a person,
by someone's voice, by
someone's facial expression,
by somebody's singing or by music
or by seeing a vista that's just gorgeous
and your whole body settles.
That is part of the
parasympathetic nervous system
that is more evolved.
It's more human.
It's mammalian, it's
what all mammals have.
That's why you can look
at your dog or your cat
and kind of make a funny face,
or they'll turn their head
and you turn your head,
they turn their head and it's
like you're communicating.
It's that part of our nervous system,
this more engaged mammalian
evolved part, the parasympathetic
that we know it's there
but we don't talk about it.
There's this other part as I mentioned
of the parasympathetic
that is responsible for deep shut down.
If I was to cut myself badly
or break a bone which I've done,
you go into shock.
You go into kind of this
immobility freeze state.
There's fight-flight which I just,
I mentioned at the beginning
and then there's freeze.
And the freeze is also a
part of this vagus nerve,
this parasympathetic nervous system.
And this freeze component is what we need
in times of intense stress,
when we cannot handle it.
It's what kind of checks us out
and dissociates us,
and we need both.
We need both, both the freeze, shut down,
we need the fight-flight.
So those are our survival energies
but then we also need this other branch
of the parasympathetic that engages
and that's what's unique to humans.
Now, the reason I'm
talking to you about this
and there's a lot more
that I could talk to you
around this topic but I
just want to keep it brief.
The reason I bring this up is
when we go into our self-help worlds
whether it's via mindfulness
or mind-body work or relationship work,
whether it's via therapy.
We want to make sure
we're not in those survival energies,
or in that deep shut down energy,
that deep freeze of the parasympathetic.
We want to make sure
we're in this engagement,
engagement with the environment,
with our body, the fact
that we can feel it,
with the person we're engaging with.
It gives us an alertness
that isn't frantic,
that isn't hectic,
that doesn't make a person feel like
they're either talking to
or that they feel like
they've got that deer
and the headlight kind of eyes look.
Where there's almost this,
as if a person looks like they're afraid
that they're gonna get hurt, right?
And you can see this in some people.
You see this in some people,
you talk to them and you can just tell
that they're afraid or they're
not really there, right?
That kind of person is living
in their survival instincts
and they may not be alert
and all hyper and anxious,
they may be very calm
and very like non-affectual.
If I go back to the Sharma email
around having to do the inner work,
this inner game work,
this self-help development.
I like to call it self-study work.
We need to go back to this stuff,
this physiology because
if we're living in those
survival instincts,
either the sympathetic fight-flight
or the parasympathetic freeze
where you're kind of flat lined,
you're not revving at the right level
for human engagement, for creativity,
for learning, for love, for relationship.
And it's unfortunate that
we haven't discussed this
and that's why I'm starting
this conversation now
because it's what I love to teach,
it's what I do in my daily practice
with my clients, with my students,
and I want you to learn about it.
I want everyone to learn about this
because we are meant to as human beings,
be living in a mammalian nervous system,
in a mammalian nervous system
where we're connecting.
Not where we're afraid
and disconnecting and being introverted,
or always being extroverted
and hyper and aroused.
We need to find this nice, medium ground
where we're in this, as I said,
mammalian nervous system
where we can connect and engage.
We're not reptiles.
We have the physiology of reptiles,
we do, we need it so that we can
protect ourselves when we
need to protect ourselves,
but we're not meant to
live in it all the time.
And by the way,
when we live in that reptilian
fight, flight, freeze energy all the time,
the thing that happens is not only
do we not create and connect
and love in the same way,
our physical body suffers.
Because a mammalian body
needs lots of oxygen.
We need lots of good oxygen,
we want the blood to be flowing
in a nice up and down, ebb and flow way.
We don't want it to just
always be constricted
or always limp and flat lined, right?
And when that happens things go off.
Immune system goes off,
digestion goes off,
we have trouble with our bladder,
with the quality of our thinking,
with the circulation in our fingers.
I could go on and on and
on, autoimmune problems.
Chronic pain.
Anyways, this has been a little longer
than I anticipated this video to be.
I mean, it started with an email
that I got this morning,
this Sunday morning from Robin Sharma
but it made me realize,
we need to have deeper conversations
about how we do our inner work.
It isn't just about sitting still
and clearing out the negative thoughts
and being all zen.
It's about getting to this
regulated nervous system state
where we are in our mammalian evolved
brain and nervous system.
Anyways, I hope this
has been useful for you.
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Anyways, thank you for being here
and listening to the end.
Take care.
(uplifting music)
