Know Thyself - E56 - Aaron Alexander: How To Align Your Body and Free Your Mind

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Movement Coach & Author Aaron Alexander reveals how to find true alignment in the physical body through simple lifestyle changes. Aaron sheds light on how our modern lifestyle has led to a profound disconnection between our physical bodies and our mental well-being. He shares insights on how we can rediscover alignment in our physical selves and, in turn, liberate our psychology.  The journey of alignment goes beyond the physical realm, Aaron also discusses the power of a meditation practice, healing sexual shame, and rewriting limiting subconscious beliefs. Tune in to this episode and unlock the secrets to becoming your most aligned self.  ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro 3:14 The Disembodiment of Modern Culture & Returning to Play 10:18 Using Our Physiology to FREE our Psychology  19:24 How Our Environment Impacts our Well-Being 24:04 The Importance of Movement and Body Positioning 32:31 Rebalancing the Body through Floor Sitting 35:20 The Power of Simple Changes 37:06 How & Why to Sit on the Ground  39:50 The Importance of Going Outside and Connecting with Nature 41:56 Embodied Cognition: Broadening Your Perspective 44:59 Rewriting Limiting Subconscious Beliefs & Healing Repressed Emotions 49:59 Finding Stillness within Yourself through Meditation 54:50 Aaron’s Micro-Moments of Awakening 56:13 Exploring Darkness Retreats 57:46 Shame and Conditioning around Sexuality 1:03:33 Finding Motivation Through Doing the Impossible  1:05:34 Returning to Our True Divine Potential 1:07:29 Seeing the Light Within Others 1:09:44 Self-Validation & Sitting Through the Internal Noise  1:12:12 Becoming Your Most Aligned Self  1:18:36 Conclusion ___________ Aaron Alexander is a pioneering manual therapist and movement coach, founder and creator of the Align Method, author of the Align Method book, and host of the Align Podcast, which has ranked #1 in Nutrition on iTunes. Aaron has worked with some of world’s greatest professional athletes, performers, celebrities, and everyone in between, to relieve pain while creating greater strength, flexibility, and ease in their mind and body.  After working with thousands of clients and spending years backpacking around the world, being immersed in various cultures, he has come to the conclusion that the healthiest people are not gym rats. Instead, they naturally integrate the foundational principles outlined in The Align Method to strengthen their bodies, balance their minds, and activate their innate systems of healing in daily life. Aaron has simplified ancient techniques for cultivating vitality and assimilated them into modernized, simplified, movement-based principles for you to easily integrate into any situation throughout the day. When you do, every moment becomes an opportunity to develop greater strength, flexibility and confidence to truly step into your physical potential and drop the baggage of pain and limitation. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alignpodcast/ Website: https://www.alignpodcast.com Join the Align Method Program: https://join.alignpodcast.com/products/align-method-program-join/ Get "The Align Method" Book: https://www.alignpodcast.com/alignbook ___________ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Download André's FREE Book Recommendation List: https://www.knowthyself.one/books Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/

Ease in the physical experience is one of the most invaluable things any human being can access on this planet. We live in a world where we're like continually contained within boxes. We're inside of a square room. We sit on these right angled chairs and we go from one chair. We go to the bus to the plane. The modern world, it's slowly becoming more and more disembodied and disassociated. We all collectively don't know how good we could feel. We evolve to heal ourselves just through our existence.

If you would just allow your body to passively move into healing positions with more regular. it will blow health care apart. Now do that outside. Now do that with people that you care about. Now learn how to express yourself so you can actually create and bridge relationships that are meaningful. When modern culture gets this and actually starts embodying it, it's going to have a nuclear effect on health care. Hello, beautiful beings. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast where every single week we get the honor and privilege to go on this journey of learning and discovering more about ourselves at deeper and deeper levels. my guest today is a dear friend, somebody who is a manual therapist and a movement coach to some of the world's most well-renowned athletes and celebrities all around the world. He is the host of

the Align podcast and author and creator of the Align Method. And he lives his message. I feel like every time I'm in his presence, he's very in his body. He's aligned. He's aware he's present. And we just did a sauna cold plunge and breathwork before this and we're charged up ready to dive in deep. So Aaron, Alexander, thank you for coming on. bro. Thanks for having me. I'm so proud of you. Oh, thanks, man. You've done such an incredible job at cultivating yourself and creating your internal imaginations and dreams, pulling them out, creating the spaciousness within yourself to make them a reality. It's very cool. Thank you, man. It's great to be amongst it. Oh, I appreciate it, bro. Very much so received. And I think it's a

big theme of the conversation that we're going to dive into today. We just share a lot of Sympatico and really on a mind-body-spirit level, finding the ways in which we can really become aligned individuals. Because when you have the taste and experience of what it feels like to be free in your body, to be uninhibited in your mind and have your soul's creative expression come aligned, it's so beautiful.

I think we've all had moments and taste of that throughout our life. Some are able to inhabit that space more than others. And I want to dive into focusing on how we can come to that realization and arrive in that place within our bodies. as more and more of a living reality on both the mind, body, and spirit. When we look at children, we see their soul shining through their face. You know, they're limber, they're moving, they're not in their preconceived notions. If they have emotions, they fully feel it and they let it go.

As we become adults, oftentimes, especially with conditioning for modern society, we build up this calcification within our mind, our body, and our spirit. And become, our physiology kind of crumbles in. and our mind becomes more dogmatic and closed, and we have these conclusions about what the world is, and therefore our soul doesn't have its full expression. And so I would love to hear from you what you feel like are the biggest contributors that you pay most attention to

of what is really making so many people so calcified in their way of being. And then we can go into the various things that can support people into finding alignment and decalcifying that and coming back into themselves. Yeah, that's the thing. So there's a couple things that come up. We can go into like personal anecdotal experience and kind of opinion of things. And then there's also science and data around the effect of play. One thing that's interesting from a data perspective, there's a guy called called Jacques Ponskep.

You've ever heard of him. It's known as like the rat tickler. Man who, Estonian man who tickles rats. Wow. What a career. He's awesome. I think he's, I think he's the late Jacques Ponskep. I think he passed recently.

but he's done a lot of most of the research that's prominent in the field of play and its effect on your neurology and your physiology a lot of that comes from him and his his team but one of the things that he did in relation to play was they measured i believe it was 1200 different genes expressed particularly brain genes or genes in relation to cognitive function brain function and they found that it was just 30 minutes of play would augment or modulate a third of the genes that they were measuring. So just going through that practice or not practice, just experience because play is kind of like the absence of practice.

If you're in practice, then you're in definition. And play is this creative, expansive, free flow, what could be. It's this openness. It causes yourself at a mental, emotional, spiritual, and genetic level to modulate and shift and change and open up to a new potential. And much of our life is very defined by schedules. It's defined by linear boxes. It's right angles.

Now, if you go, I just got back from Greece like three days ago. I'm still jet lagged. It was very cool. I went to the Hippocratic School of Medicine on the island of Koss, which is where my family is from. It was crazy. It was very interesting. I got downloads.

Yes. And I'm a person that doesn't use terms like downloads. I'm like, bro, I'm getting downloads. It's happening. Downloads, uploads, uploads. Really good downloads. But there, you know, the Greeks were much more animistic and much more mythic and much more, you know, worshipping of nature and worshiping of the gods and the weather and this like the deep embodied

connection and relationship to the world beyond just the substance. object, the self. And one of the things that's interesting with the Greeks as well is they had their hospitals actually were placed beside theaters generally in most in most towns, most city centers. And a part of that was their perception of health and dis-ease was it was a malady of the soul and of the spirit. And the way that you got into opening up into creating the space. to allow your oneself to to heal thyself and heal the soul and heal the spirit the tools the scalples that we use for that would be things like dance and things like art and things like cold plunge and things like sauna and things like massage healing with the hands things that like soften the frame of the body and the protective mechanisms that we have on the outside on the periphery and place a person into that state of awe and place that person into a state of wonderment.

And when you're in that state, then you become very plastic. You know, you become neuroplastic and, you know, all of the different versions of plasticity, which opens up for change. And, you know, that's something that we, I believe that we've shifted away from, which it's fine to move more into like a Newtonian model

or a Cartesian model or a materialistic model or a reductionist model or a scientific model, all of those things, great, because it's an amazing tool. It's just one side of it. And then there's the other side, which is representative as like the feminine side and the listening side and the nurturing side

and throwing color at the wall and creativity and expansion and all of that. If you're just dry, sterile, reductionist, scientific, objective mindset, and that's all you have, you'll start to suffocate in that. and you're too linear, and you're too structured, and you don't have that fluidity and that movement

and the potential for that plasticity. So I think that historically we've done, we've done a really great job as a culture at leveraging the arts and leveraging dance and leveraging play. And, you know, gymnasium means working out naked. Hymnos is working out exercise. And then whatever it is, nasium, nasium, nasios,

whatever it is naked. And it's just like liberating the body, you know, getting out there and just freeing yourself and connecting with nature. You know, and then we've kind of shifted away from that a little bit more. And now suddenly we live in a world where, you know, we're surrounded by boxes. We're like continually contained within boxes. We're inside of a square room. We have a square box in the form of a cell phone in front of us.

And we get in the square box in the form of the car. And then we look, stare into the square box in the form of the TV and the screens. And our minds and our bodies and our physiology starts to form. We sit on these right angled chairs, and we go from one chair, we go to the bus to the plane, to the toilet seat, which is totally dysfunctional

for having a healthy poop. You know, when you actually get into a 90 degree angle to take a poop, you are still, there's a kink in the rectum. Yeah. It's called the anorectal angle.

And so as you go into a deep squat, your rectum, your poop shoot actually starts to open up for a healthy defecation. And so we are so obsessed. We've like, we've like divorced our, ourselves of circles. We've diverse ourselves of arcs. And I know with the type of training that you're

enamored by, you're much more enamored by arcs. You find that to be quite valuable for you. It's because the body moves in arcs. And so you can see that throughout our culture. We've become a right angle. We've become a box. And a box lacks adaptability in comparison to a circle. And play is much more representative of an arc, of a circle. There's no end. we're not going anywhere. Right. Whereas the box is kind of like, okay, chapter one.

Okay, what's chapter two? Okay, down. So I think play really opens up for much greater levels of change and adaptability and imagination and potentiality with the person. And that can inform, you know,

everything, including like healing a person of dis-ease or opening up the space for a person to begin to change. In modern society, there is just, I feel like this cultural programming that if you want to have a more expanded experience of reality, you have to accumulate more things. You have to think your way into a new way, especially like in the personal development world.

It's like you've got to think different to have a different life. And there's that top-down important perspective, right? But then it's also freeing, there's that quote that, you know, it's much easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking than to think yourself into a new way of acting. And I would just love for you to share more about how we can use our physiology to free our psychology. Because a lot of times we're kind of,

just about the other narrative, but through simple breath, touch, sound movement, like these things really, I feel like, at least for me and my own personal journey, are such quick state changes. Yeah, there's another, I'll try to avoid being excessively quotatious, but there's a quote or down recently from Bessel Banderkelk. He said the first step in releasing that, or physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past, physical self-awareness, like realizing that your physical body, is the remnants of all of the imprints of your past. Like every individual, you are a book and every experience that you've had,

including just maybe like passive subconscious experiences, environmental experiences, hereditary experiences, you know, things, ancestry lineage stuff. It's all infused in the way that you breathe and the way that you move and the way that you, you know, use your facial expressions and, you know, postural patterns and all of that. that like your story informs and animates your movement and a big part of that you know like breath is like the it's like the the the bridge to the mind you could say or it's the bridge to the nervous system

that's because you know when you are afraid for example you know you're panicked like what happens to your breath because it's very shallow mouth breathing usually yeah it's probably going to go up you know it's going to all of a sudden your clavicle start to raise and your shoulder start to raise and you know the upper lobes of the lungs are quite small and conical in comparison to the lower lobes they're like much more full and robust you know and so when you get that that nasal breath and you start to bring that breath down into the the horizontal like the outside of the ribs and really expand open you're getting this really full robust uh filling of all the alveoli and all the sacks that allow you to circulate oxygen through your body but to do that your body has

to be has to feel like it has the time to do that if it doesn't have the time to breathe in such a expansive way it's going to go to the like pull the emergency cord which is super efficient you pull the emergency cord and you start mouth breathing you kind of like get you know hard and fast like up into here surviving you're surviving yeah and so you start to shunt blood away from the organs away from the viscera it's going to go out into the periphery into your limbs because you're getting ready to either run the freak out of the room or fight somebody. And then eventually if you go, if you don't have any of those options, then you'll go into freeze as well, which is like another potential path.

So your blood starts to move out of the viscera, goes into the peripheral muscles to get ready to fight or run. And you, and it's like, it's a really beautiful system. Like it's like an amazing adaptive system to put you into a temporary, survival state. The issue comes when you don't actually understand that you can regulate and modulate your own autonomic nervous system through your breath. And there's a very good chance that you've actually been chronically stuck in a fight-flight

state maybe since you were three years old. And that really scary thing happened to you where you were 12 years old. And everybody pointed at you and laughed in elementary school. And suddenly you learned that all. my God, the world's not safe at a deep core intrinsic level. This world is not safe. I'm a guest in this world and it is not safe and I am not home. How do you breathe when you walk into a home that you feel kind of like,

ooh, I think the host of the house, I don't think they really want me to be here. How do you breathe? Like if you probably breathe a little more shallow, you might kind of be like, you walk like very lightly or very like, ooh, your shoulders might raise up. You're like, ooh, I'm like not landing. But the moment that you feel love from the host, you feel love from your friends, love from the tribe, love from your family, love from yourself, suddenly you like, what does your breath do?

Oh, I thought you hated me. You don't hate me? He's like, no, I love you. I'm just avoidant. I'm like, oh. Physiologically, your body responds. It says, okay, I can take a breath. so now all of a sudden your whole physiology and your neurochemistry and all of the different things

your hormones everything starts to come into that translation of ease and like okay i'm gonna downregulate cortisol and norapinephrine and all the all the catacolamines and the things that kind of put me into this place of like ready to go i'm just oh just drop in and now suddenly i go out of this really focused myopic shark like vision and i kind of just like take in the whole room oh and now i'm taking in the whole room now i'm opening myself up for creativity you know so as opposed to having just one objective base get or done type thing like businessman sharp businessman vibe suddenly i come out and i'm like oh like what deal i don't care about the deal i just want to like i just want to love you yeah i just want to hang out this one vibe you know

and so there's there's a specific physiological translation of a person that is in the state of fight, flight, stress, focused, get or done, get in the action. There's a physiological postural expression of that. And then there's a corollary physiological postural expression of a person that feels safe. They feel like there's nothing that needs to be done. It's just time to be. It's just time to have fun. It's just time to play. Very distinctly different physiological translations of both of those states. And you can start to augment, just like you said with the quote that you had mentioned of how do you how do you say that quote again but are easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than think yourself into a new way

yeah so that's like sir william james he's known as the father of modern psychology he was big on that he's like one of the prominent thinkers in that realm like a bottom up perspective psychology and uh that would be an example of that where you're like okay interesting i feel anxious i feel unloved i feel disconnected i feel afraid and i have this physiological expression of that You can see it in the imprint of my breath. You can see it in the way I've chronic tension in my wrists and my jaw is always tight. I'm always kind of crack up my neck. So what if I'm trying to sort my thoughts out.

It's not working. It's too much. I'm trying to sort these relationships out and trying to sort my business out. I'm like, I am flailing. Like, I'm not able to get it. You're trying to figure out your life from a completely limited version of you. Yeah, you're reaching out to sort out the to pull the levers of your internal physiology and biology, and I would say even like soul and spirit. And so there is the availability and

option to actually go within and say, interesting, what if I manually adjust and I maybe I'd do a little bit of like soft tissue work on my traps, you know, and they were up here for the last while. What if I just do like some massage here? And I just kind of open up through that space. What if I maybe start to bring my hands down to my ribs, my lower ribs, and I just bring that breath horizontally out of the sides, I start filling up the lower lobes of my lungs. What if I emphasize an exhalation instead of an inhalation because I've been chronically stuck in this fight, flight, like, inhalatory kind of like shock breath pattern? And I haven't had a full exhalation in six weeks. What if I just manualized to shake it out a little? And I do all that weird new age hippie stuff.

It's like kind of annoying to be around, but it's actually kind of legit. Right. No, I mean, it's been branded as that because in a society that is the complete opposite, it looks weird or hippie-like. But what's weird or abnormal about giving your human body the expression that it wants? Like, that's, in my opinion, the most human natural aspect of what we can do. And I just think it's so strange that we're not taught from a young age that breathing in through each nostril has different effects on our sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system. Like the various things of how the manual system of how our body works is just, not share it. It's not taught. But once you have that awareness, then you can actually bring those tools into everything you do in life. And you become a more skilled navigator at this wild sea. Yeah, so learning how to drive your car. Yeah. So I want to go into a lot of the tools that can be really practical for people to be able to change their physiology, that can support them on finding alignment within themselves. And then you start to step out of that calcified, perceived notion of just your known reality. You can actually soften into the

unknown. You can feel safe. You can feel at home within yourself. And then you can stop unconsciously seeking for it and everything around you, which is a topic we can dive deeper into. But being able to find ways in which to release the tension and resistance, we are so unconsciously holding within ourselves, then gives rise to a more free version of ourselves. And then we attract what it's really meant for us in life. And we just have a better experience of life. And so let's start diving into a few of these things here where we're at the touched on breath. If you were to go and just give like a 50,000 foot bird's eye view of like the pillars of what you feel like those are, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that.

I mean, I think they would change. Like, you know, if you asked me that same question in 45 minutes, I'd be like, it would probably be a mildly different response. There's a guy, Moshe Felden Christ, from him, Felden Christ method. He's great. He's another, he's not in his body anymore. Well, his body's somewhere, but it's not animated by his spirit. but his model of the human was broken down into like three stages so there was the nervous system stage and then there's the mechanical stage and then there was the environmental stage as well so your environment informs your postural patterns like these chairs put us into a certain position these lights you know photo biomodulation like they affect our nervous system so the light choice that

you have in your house will actually affect your autonomic state. So if you have really bright, gnarly like Walmart freaking lights in your house and they've got this alternating current happening, it's like this strobe light of blue light, just blast in your eyes before you go to bed, that informs the way that you produce yourself. Like that is movement. And compared to maybe if you put yourself into like your place here where you have a panoramic view and you could see out in the canyon, that puts your autonomic nervous system into a place like that. like what does it do to you? It makes you feel safe. It makes you feel like you can look out over, you know, the world. You're kind of like on top and you're looking through. You have this like this like

panoramic, expansive view of of potentiality compared to if you were in the bottom and you're looking up. What is that doing to you at like a like a deep carnal level? You're looking up. You're saying, okay, there's all these potential threats up there. I need to be kind of like ready because they're looking down at me. So if I was a little prey animal and there's all this action up above me, there's like a subtle subconscious contraction or like readiness. But if you go to the top of the hill and you look down, suddenly you go, it flips. Okay, there's nothing really above me that could attack. I'm kind of looking down and all this. So I go, oh. And then your eyes, you know, when you go into a myopic, focused state that gears your autonomic nervous system into more of that sympathetic like get

or done state. When you go into relaxation in that panoramic view, that gears your autonomic nervous system into, oh, cool, like there's nothing to do. Like, we're, we're chilling right now. So suddenly you go more parasympathetic and suddenly blood pressure kind of chills out a little bit and your respiration kind of slows down a little bit and you might get a little longer exhalation. And so that would be the first thing. That was a very long-winded way of saying I would start off with environment. Environment. Yeah.

Yeah. Like you could do whatever you wanted to your body. You could have the most amazing braulfing session or Felden Christ session or Cairo session or plug yourself up to some $50,000 biohacking gadget and do 40 years of Zen or whatever. And then you come back to your hobble in South Paulo or whatever. And it's just like noise and stuff. and it's just this frenetic energy. Like whatever you did is not going to stick.

You need to change the environment to match your internal state. Absolutely. And so you could also change your environment to match your potential internal state that you're seeking and see how that affects you. That's what you do with this place. Yeah. And that's what I want to keep diving into here a little bit more. We for sure are going to go later in this podcast for everybody that's tuning in

to the mental, emotional, spiritual dynamics of certain top-down things as well. But while we're here in the environment, there are things that we can do within our reality that allow us to set ourselves up for success and how we move our body, what positions we go to. And so when we look at our physiology and we look at how most people are working, which is how they spend a good majority of their life, sitting in these cubicles, you know, in these chairs that are just not designed for how a human body is meant to be at for prolonged periods of time. I know something that you really speak to is how important walking is and hanging and sitting on the ground. And so if you could walk us through some of these key things that we can all start to implement more in our lives, that will then have the cascade ripple down effect of, you know, feeling more. Yes. If you look at like Dan Boutner's work in the blue zones, you know, if you go to different, you know, there's one in Italy, there's one in Southern California, there's in Japan. There's, I don't remember the other ones are at.

but they the people there they tend to have a really great community they drink wine and smoke cigarettes and you know they hang out with each other and they eat gluten bread and they do all the things we're not supposed to do and they're outside a lot and they garden a lot and they're walking up hills and downhills a lot it's just a part of the it's like baked into their lifestyle and so that just walking if a person just walked more Like they are passively massaging all of their organs. Every time you take a step and your guts, this whole system, this is a closed hydraulic system, right? So it's like pressure.

And so every time you go, you're circulating that pressure, not just through, you know, like your lungs. It's the pressure through your pelvic floor and the pressure through your whole entire body. You're like squeezing that toothpaste back and forth. And what you're doing is you're allowing the decondestion of all of that precious tissue in all of the organs that animate you and all of the connective tissue and the feet and like like every your brain, your spinal cord, cerebral spinal fluid, like everything. It's it's circulating. Like that's the way that the body is structured in such a way. Like we evolve to heal ourselves. Right.

Like that's a big deal. We evolve to heal ourselves. just through our existence. But if you augment the existence and you take away some of those key factors that actually are like tuning mechanisms or healing mechanisms for a physiology, such as just walking regularly,

such as just being outside a lot. You know, being a domesticated animal, it doesn't do good things, right? Technically, a domesticated animal will tend to live a little bit longer, but if you could do a hybrid of a domesticated animal that also has access to nature,

that's going to be the most robust organism, like by far. Like nature also is gnarly. So if you just put you and I, like, cool, we're going to do the align method. We're going to live in Tepangay Canyon. Like, we're going to die. It's not going to be good. Right. But if you just live inside your house, you're not going to die, die, but you're going to like kind of die also.

You know, you're going to like fester. Right. So the blend between the two actually is really powerful, like the safety and support and anchoring of domestication and like the nurturing and the reporting and the replenishing of domestication with the wildness of nature, that blend is very important. Kind of like the same thing, like the Greeks compared to modern day, you know, where it's like, oh, animism and circles and all of that compared to now, it's like much more right angles. Both are right. They're both valuable. It's just like masculine, feminine dynamics. So walking would be a really big one. If you want to modulate your blood sugar,

so a lot of people, you know, people are tripping out about blood sugar. It's like, you know, the present thing. It's, you know, fat or whatever it is. I think. nutritional. Dogmas. Yeah, they kind of move. It's kind of like a poo-poo platter. Like, okay, what's next? But you care about blood sugar

and you care about oxidative metabolism, you know, like burning fat and aerobic function and whatnot. You probably heard of the, maybe not, it's kind of a little obscure, but the soleus push-up thing.

You just sit at your desk and just do a little soleus. Pretend walk to your feet or something. You just pretend walk with your feet. Yeah. That'll boost your metabolism for several hours and help to regulate your blood sugar. Like it has a significant effect. Just your little bitch-ass soleus, like 1% of your whole entire body.

You're just like a little pump. Just need a little pump. Yeah. Not that much. We're not asking for a lot. The body's like, bro, I'm not asking you for that much. You're just not doing anything. Like nothing.

Give me a soleus pump. Simple. Not a big deal. Keep simple. Yeah. You know, and take, you know, take your shoes off. You know, there's 7,000 nerve endings in each of your feet. It's a lot.

It wants to process it. Like God or evolution or freaking McCundee or whatever you're into, they endowed you with all of this sensory receptive potential. And you're just squandering it probably as a modern person for the most part. Like there's something there just intuitively. It's like, well, I would I have all this potential? And like, there's probably something. there's some deep part inside of me that wants to use it.

And, you know, the modern world, it's slowly becoming more and more disembodied and disassociated from those, those 7,000 nerve endings and the feet and, you know, all of the sensory receptors through the whole system. It's just like slowly dumbing down. And all you got to do is like, pop your shoes off, you know, go stand on a warm rock, you know, look up. if you're looking down with your eyes a lot that's going to also put you in a little bit more of like a one one it makes you more tired you know so your your your eyes are neurological tissue or continuation of your brain i would say your whole body's continuation or brain um but the way that you use your eyes when you're looking up it's more stimulating it opens up to creativity right it's like creative thought that's why the suggestion is if a person looks up when they respond to you they might be lying because they're going in their their imagination or as they're looking down they're going into you know, more like implicit information, things that they already, you know, have stored inside

there. So if you want to be a creator, right, you want to have new novel ideas, look up. Like it's like, like, like turn on your physiology to activate those toggles to induce creativity. Like you can actually physically induce creativity in your body by the way that you move. you know, maybe start writing cursive, write in a journal and do this. That's also scientifically proven to boost a person's creativity. I'm just going like this compared to going like this, right? The term for it's a different term. The one's postural feedback.

You know, there's embodied cognition. But all of it's, I mean, they're kind of similar, similar. Well, those are slightly different. But it's the way that we move and also the way that our environment moves us, informs the way that we think and the way that we feel. So if you want to feel like this, you got to move like this. If you want to feel like this,

it's not wrong. Just how do you want to feel? Like write it down. How do I want to feel? And now visualize yourself in, like, how does my body move in that state that I desire to feel? Okay, cool.

All right, I kind of walk. Oh, my shoulders come back a little bit. Oh, suddenly like I get out of this. like forward head posture thing and like my head like stacks over top of my pelvis oh my breath is like full and deep and it's down in my it's like feels like oh i'm like breathing into my lower back yeah i'm like breathing into my pussy if i'm a girl i'm breathing in my cock if i'm a guy i'm like booh like feel like stacked on my feet like whoa damn all right what's that like okay now do it you know okay now what are the tools to do it okay see manual therapist okay maybe do some breath work

um maybe augment your environment so you're naturally spending more more time on the ground. Now suddenly you're mobilizing your hips and your knees and your ankles. Yeah, I wanna dive into that a little bit as well because I think it's a powerful thing. Just to be able to switch your postures and how you're standing and sitting

and moving throughout your day, why is being on the ground so important for us? Being on the ground is important for lots of reasons. One, it's like one of the best things you do for circulation. So your legs, again, closed hydraulic system, right? Like the way that you move lymphatic fluid, for example, is through muscular

contraction. So if your legs are all the way down there on the floor all day and your heart's all the way up here, that's just a lot of unnecessary work for your system. If you're walking, it's totally chill because you're activating those compressive systems and you're circulating fluid through contraction. But if you're just stagnant and you're still and you're just, oh, in that position. Yeah. Like if you're that position as an animal in the wild for an extended period, you're sick. Yeah, totally. Why would a deer be like,

that? For eight hours a day. Because it's sick. There's no other reason. Like, it's, oh, it's the animal's sick. We're practicing a sick animal in our postural patterns and our lifestyle choices because that's now the way that we hunt and gather. We hunt and gather through a posturally physiologically, like some way.

kind of like what would look to be in nature if you didn't understand the story of what we're doing as a a sick pattern you know and and so if you're going to be still which being still is great meditation is great uh resting positions are great if you look at uh like haza people for example in tanzania uh there was research where from done from the university of southern california They went and they actually measured the amount of time that Hatsa people were spending in resting positions. It's about the same as industrialized populations. They spend on average, I think it was 9.82 hours per day, if I remember correctly, in resting positions. It's like a lot of time.

It's the same as us. We're resting all the time. Like that's what the human does. Like the human, it gathers energy. It rests when it can. It's not just always doing stuff. And if it is doing stuff, it's going to rest long. It's going to catch up with that.

But the difference is the way that these more ancestral-esque-type people are tapped into that ancestral version of life rest is they rest in a kneeling position. They rest in a deep squat position. And they rest in a Sukasana position. And they lay on their back and they lay on their side and they're in their belly. And they're taking, they're passively taking their body through all of these health-inducing ranges of motion. When modern culture gets this and actually starts embodying it, it's going to have a nuclear effect on health care.

It's the lowest hanging fruit in modern culture is just if you would just allow your body to passively move into healing positions with more regularity, it will blow health care apart. Now do that outside. Now do that with people that you care about. Now learn how to express yourself so you can actually create and bridge relationships that are meaningful. do you know how to express yourself? Like, did you ever learn how to do that? Because that's a form of physical movement. And now suddenly, I'm like, oh, okay, cool.

I don't feel judged. I feel like people are like, there's like this resonance with each other because I'm not hiding. Oh, I change my breath. Oh, now I want to dance. Oh, my God. I have all these creative ideas. Oh, my God. I'm in a relationship.

Oh, my God. You love me. Oh, I want to move more. Oh, wow. It all feeds back. Yeah. Those simple changes have huge ripples. I mean, you can look at those studies right where you, the one most people are familiar

with or if you stand like Superman for a little bit, how it changes your outlook on the world. And then there's also like the one where you like pin your resting bitch face. Yeah, you like pin your golf tea in your eyebrow and yeah, you like go into resting bitch face for a short time. And then you see the world as being more annoying essentially. Proving. I mean, you don't need these studies to know that when you're frowning a lot, you have a shittier outlook on life, but it is cool to have the scientific studies to actually show, like, improve that. You put a prentrial in your mouth to like forces, mechanically forces a smile.

Suddenly, it's like, oh, yeah, cool. Like life's not so bad. You smile. So wild. So simple changes that make big, huge, huge changes. So, okay, cool. Is there anything else we want to touch on here with hanging? I feel like the more simplistic we can make this for people as well to implement and

realize that you don't need to have these crazy overnight. radical changes, but these simple things that you can implement and have reminders for yourself while you're working just to move positions and then keep working, you know, or like these things that we can slowly start to implement anything else that you want to. Yeah. So this is all out of the book, Align Method that came out like, you know, I don't know, three years ago, four years ago or something. But that's in that we break down some really basic fundamentals and like the house and wise of that. The one is just to bring it into like a cogent point, just been talking on the ground. When you're sitting on the ground, make sure that you, ground is uncomfortable for

people, especially if you're not used to it. If you become more used to it, then it's not that, but you can find almost any, which is another reason why it's pretty cool to be comfortable in the ground. Because then suddenly, you open up the potentiality, you're being comfortable almost anywhere, right? If you're a person that's just like, I only do really plush chairs. It's like, bro, you are going to be having, you're going to have so many inconvenient moments in your life if you ever want to travel or do anything cool. You know, not anything cool. But if you want to do like, you know, go do some, some diverse, have some diverse experiences in the world. Like, it would be great to have that type of adaptability. Something to do that would be very supportive if you are

starting like a hang out on the ground practice, quote unquote, maybe just like you're doing some computer work on the ground, you're eating your breakfast on the ground, you got a low coffee table, make sure that you have a really comfortable rug, that's no-brainer. The thing that's a little bit more of like a mechanical cue, make sure that your hips are up above the height of your knees. So you're sitting down, your pelvis should be above the height of your knee. So if you placed a ball on your thigh, it would roll down towards the knee. If you're doing that, then you're going to be stabilizing the lower back and the sacrum. The bottom vertebra of the spine and the sacrum, they're in the shape of a wedge with the big side of the wedge facing out towards your belly button.

So you want to have like a subtle kind of like neutral to anterior to tilt, anterior being like forward tilt of the pelvis. if you're curled in like that, very uncomfortable. So if you try to like meditate like that, if you ever walk into a yoga class or something like that and you look around, you see 30 people kind of trying to meditate at the end, there's a few people to get it, you know, where they're like, oh yeah, like use a bolster, it's not a big deal.

And they're like stacked and like, wow, and they look so spiritual. Like, wow, it is so spiritual, you know? And then there's like 80% of the class that doesn't get it. Yeah. And there's like, oh, like holding this like, constipated, flexed, curled up meditation position, like trying to just not be in pain.

Like, it's not a big deal. Yeah. Like, it's the subtlest thing. Just like, oh, just raise your ass up. Yeah. Raise it up. No big deal. Do that.

Perfect. Walk. Yeah. Walk. Hang. Yeah. Ideally outside. Like, get your ass outside.

You need it. Your hormones need it. You know, most of the modern world is vitamin D deficient. And we're all reaching out for supplements. Just go outside. It's good son. You can still use vitamin D supplement, but just like make sure,

like if you have access to potential, like nature, natural potentials to regulate your health, like do everything you can to do that first. And then it's like, okay, I'm doing everything I can. It's still not working.

Or I have some odd job that just, it's like in order for me to feed my family because that's also quite important, I just can't be outside. It's like, okay, now let's do supplements. But everything you can just be outside more. Get cold.

Get hot. Like, allow yourself to feel, allow yourself to feel nature. It's a big deal. It's crazy how much you can release of what you think you need from all these trillions of dollars that are spent on these unnatural solutions to provide you with a solution for something that nature gives you for free if you just go and explore. It feels almost like trite to talk about. I'm like, oh my God, I'm encouraging people to like breathe and like walk outside and like get their hips below 90 degrees. Like I feel like an asshole. I'm like, this is so stupid.

But it's like, this is the thing. This is what we're not doing. Common sense ain't. Like, I want to have some kind of complex, right. You know, deep, esoteric, technological, like, this is it. I'm like, no, like, you just need to do basic shit that we're just not doing.

Yeah. Now I'm angry. Slow your exhale, Darren. Take a beat. Take a beat. I'm doing my soleus push up. Yeah. Try to regulate my blood sugar.

I'm tripping. All right, beautiful. So anything else we need here? I think we, that was pretty good. Pretty good. That was pretty good. I mean, it could have been better, to be honest, Aaron. That was great.

I mean, a lot of that we can apply in our lives, you know, the stuff with the light, getting sunlight, our eyes, we have this closed myopic view of our cell phones and our computers, and it's like broaden yourself to a grander horizon and look into a far distance in the physiological cascades that has in your body is felt. Yeah, it's one to one. Yeah. Powerful.

Yeah. The brain structure is the insula that regulates interoception. And it's bridged with, you know, so the thing I mentioned before, the embodied cognition stuff. Like, have you ever heard of the research that shows or suggests that if you hold, I ask for a warm cup of tea or macho, whatever stuff before here? Shout out to Mudwater. No, you don't have a sponsor. They're actually a sponsor. Oh, cool. Shout to Mudwater.

We love you guys. Use code. He'll thyself for whatever. Know thyself. Oh, shit, that's Dr. G. Dr. G. But yeah, so in body cognition. So you holding a warm cup actually informs the way that you perceive the world around

you. So the insula, and I'm not like a, like with the neurology stuff, I'm, I've, very tacit understanding these things. But the insula regulates not just actual like physical temperature, but also interpersonal relationship. So like feeling that you have. Right. So there's like there's a bridge there of sorts. So when I feel like I'm in an environment that's like soft and I'm at Burning Man, which I've never been to, so I'm talking about my ass, but I'm in like a pillow tent thing and, you know, people are like massaging my solias or whatever. Like that, that felt tactile temperature regulated experience, it goes right into your perception of things.

Absolutely. Suddenly, I have less worries and I have less cares. And like, I love you, right? Compared to if I was like holding some ice water, you know, and I'm in the room's like too cold and I'm starting to kind of contract my traps a little bit. I'm like, and we're having a conversation. I'm like, how do I get the hell out of this conversation? Yeah.

Yeah, there's that study that I actually did that with hundreds of people where they give somebody a warm drink and then read a whole plot line of a story that's a one page. And the people who got the cold glass of water perceive the main character as more cold. Yeah. And judgmental versus the person who got the warm glass, you know, more loving and kind. So it's so crazy. All those subtle cues are everything. You just start paying it. Like everything matters. Yeah. You as you, it's a journey, right? As you go on raising your sensitivity to life, then you see when you walk in a room and the lights, you're like, what once before was just like, oh, yeah, the lights are on. Now you're like, oh, shit. like it doesn't actually feel good and you start paying attention. And so there's just so many things as you start to grow your sensitivity, you become more aware, you start applying more of these things

and you go on this kind of like ascension spiral of feeling better and better and having a better outlook on life and changing the things that you do. You probably, you and I both, we all collectively, don't know how good we could feel. That's a big deal. Like we don't know yet how good we could feel. It's important to taste as much as you can, that upper limit, right? Once you feel how good, once you feel better than you've ever felt before, then you know it's possible. It's like a reference point of like, oh. And then you got to get into like deep internal story stuff of like, do I deserve to feel good? I want to go there next.

Sure. Because, you know, we can look at a lot of the physiological tension that we have, but oftentimes there are subtle energies that are at the origin of the roots of a lot of the repressed emotions that we carry in our life that I want us to focus on now because we might look at a physiological, disease that occurs in our body and say, oh, maybe it's because the way I'm eating or, you know, different things that are happening in my physical system. No doubt those have, you know, contributions. But oftentimes there is these energetic psychological imprints that were occurred earlier on in our life that now are catching up and have the most dense realization

in an actual disease in our body or whatever manifestation it happens. And so I'm curious for you, what has been your process of allowing yourself to find expression to these repressed emotions and what becomes available on the other side of that? I think probably getting messed up in relationships have been a big thing for me. Like feeling like, you know, like your body is, you don't need to will a cut to heal. Like your body is continually seeking homeostasis. It's continually, continually seeking repair. But that cut will not heal if you keep freaking jabbing with it.

You know, or you don't put it in. the environmental conditions where it's like just super humid all the time. It's just like wet all the time. Like it's just it's not going to heal. But if you just put that cut into the basic fundamental environmental conditions that allow it to repair itself, your body is like it's trying to repair all the time. And I feel in my experience, probably most people could resonate with this, relationships like intimate relationships in particular have a very sneaky way of tapping into unhealed, unprocessed, points of pain or resistance or trauma, you know, which which that, the word trauma, I think just like define trauma. I would, I would put it, I would define it as just

unprocessed information in the body. So if we, you know, we go out for drinks and we hang out, we have a good time. There was, it was like, we processed a bunch of information. It was great. We were like, move through the body. There wasn't any point where suddenly we like, froze up. Or like, oh my God. Like, I'm, I'm terrified. I'm going to disassociate from the situation. Suddenly my consciousness drifts up into the corner of the room and I'm looking down at this really terrible experience happening. And it's like it's too much to process in that moment.

I'm going to break for just five minutes. And then okay, we're going to come back in. Now you have an imprint. Right? So that's like you did papasana as well. They call that the samsakara. So now you have this boom, this imprint inside of your consciousness.

And now you move through the world. and there's actually a cut of sorts. And it's like, oh, well, like, at some point, we're going to have to sort that out, you know, whenever you're ready. And I feel like that's been something that I've experienced, which I don't have any, like, level of expertise in, I would say. It's just something like my actual personal experience. It's been really interesting.

Having gratitude for the mess-ups that I've had in relationships and the ways that I've, like, hurt myself and hurt other people and just had very avoidant patterns or very anxious patterns or manipulative or deceptive, you know, any of that. And then it creates like the chaos comes of that. And then I'm like, oh, my God. Oh, it hurts. And now I need to do the work. That point where suddenly there was the break, buildings on fire, there's chaos. How do you address that situation? Like now suddenly that thing that was deep down inside of your subconscious somewhere, It's like, boom, here we are.

Like, that's what it's trying to do. So it'll start to pull different life events and situations. It'll place you into certain situations with certain people and induce certain expressions in order to pull that thing out, bring it to the surface. And it's going to be painful and uncomfortable. And now you have the opportunity to actually like metabolize and process that effectively. And maybe see a therapist, maybe, you know, do some journaling. Maybe just do like do the right thing. Yeah.

It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's coming back up to the surface to allow you to do the right thing. Mm. You know, and so that's something, I know that's, that's, that's not necessarily probably supportive to anybody, but that's been my experience. I think perhaps the supportive thing could be just like finding gratitude for the chaos and finding gratitude for the pain. Mm-hmm. Because within that pain, it actually truly is your deeper self attempting to heal itself. And if there's pain in, it's probably going to be pain out. But then on the other side of that is ease. It sounds like it's just such a big process of first removing what's in the way from you effectively being able to pay attention to what's happening within yourself, psychologically, physiologically, all of it. And we talked about a lot of the body. But until you're able to find stillness, the noise that we accumulate in life is going to, it's going to masquerade.

It's going to be in the way of us being able to actually listen and hear and see what's going on within ourselves, what the emotions that are trapped within ourselves, the ways we're we became a more constipated life in some form. And so I would love to touch on how meditation and how stillness, maybe for you personally, but also as you work with people and as you work with athletes and people from all walks of life, your origins are really started with the body.

But as you grown to the awareness of how multi-dimensional it is to be human, you realize these other dimensions that if you're not tapping into, you're not fully able to support somebody to the full capacity. So I think it's always a first, firsthand experience, you know, in your own journey of finding that stillness and through meditation and gaining that awareness and ability to pay attention and then supporting other people as well. I think that as you're saying, like the, the visualization that came up for me

as you're talking about stillness in the body or mind or in all the places is it's almost like those unaddressed patterns within the self are, it's like an entity of sorts. like it's like a living entity that lives inside of the body. It's like a goblin. It's kind of batting around. It's like making noises and it's like knocking dishes down and whatnot. And if you have one of those, you know, one little internal somerskara goblin that's kind of creeping around here,

you're like, okay, cool. Like I think I can manage one. You know, it's kind of knocking around a little bit. You're trying to manage it. Okay. You can come back. You know, but now you have two. Okay, now they're kind of creating like a little bit of like a,

like a ruckus. Now they're like fighting each other, you know, playing off each other. You know, and then maybe those two had a baby. Now I'm like, oh my God, I have a whole freaking family of some scara inside here,

some scara goblins. It's like, it's really hard to meditate. There's a lot of noise inside this system. You know, and so I think that if a person is experiencing that, which like I still do and probably always will to some degree, I'd imagine you do less than I do,

but you do as well. it's it also could be information it's not just god i suck in meditating oh i'm so not still it's like it's like no because that perception actually is one of the goblins so like oh interesting well i had judgment with myself interesting oh there's a gob oh okay that's information so it's starting to come more through the lens of like how can i have more compassion for freaking everything, including the part of myself that thinks I don't have enough freaking compassion. They're like, okay, how can I have compassion for the fact that I think I don't have no compassion? Oh, wow, interesting. I find more ease and grace on the outside of that. Oh, okay. Like, I think

that is the medicine. It's powerful. And we were talking a little bit about, you know, this, this fear of, you know, not feeling worthy of actually the capacity in which we have to feel good. it's almost like freedom can be kind of scary. You know, it's like... Totally. It's terrifying. Yeah, it's so interesting. Because then you're responsible.

This was a little bit of a journal entry I wrote the other day that just I want to see what comes from this. Yeah. Why is freedom such a terrifying thing? Perhaps because we still have deeply lodged programming mechanisms that tell us without this old identity, you will not be safe. convincing you that you don't actually want to feel whole and enough one day because that would jeopardize the survival of long-lasting perceptions of yourself. It would be a death of what you thought you valued relationships you thought you wanted to be in and ultimately who you thought you were. It's terrifying because we don't know what the next version of us looks like. But the reminder is

you're never actually afraid of the unknown. It's actually impossible to be afraid of the unknown. What you fear is the known, a history that was traumatic. that you know that you now project into the future. And the irony of awakening is that it will likely feel like you're going backwards before you're moving forwards. Yeah. And you're addressing those old cuts. Those old cuts, those sunsars that we build up that were happening, you know, that occurred

in an unconscious manner. That's how they happen. If we were able to consciously process them, then they wouldn't be there. Those goblins wouldn't exist if we were able to integrate them. Our capacity for allowing and receiving and integrating those in the moment. was not as it was smaller than the moment actually was you know and so is there a moment that stands out for you personally I'm curious where you had like one of the biggest releases of a trapped motion memory not one I've kind of like I'm a little envious of like the Byron Katie's and their cartolies of the

world where they like were sitting on a bench you know and son they're like oh my god I'm awakened I don't think I'm awakened either but I but I've had awakenings yeah you know moments from like, oh, this is it. A minute. But they don't, you know, last. I don't know, I don't know that enlightenment, I'm suspicious of people that, that are in like some perma enlightened state. I feel like we're all mutually enlightened and also not at the same time, you know. And so a person that's kind of like just always in like the righteous, spiritual, like they always say the right thing. I'm like, I don't know about this. Yeah, it's always on a spectrum. Right. But So I've had a, and that could just be my own projection in judgment, which is one of my goblins and scars.

But I've had lots of micro moments in various different forms. And a lot of them would be through meditation, through breathwork. Breathwork's been very impactful for me. I've experienced a lot of compassion for myself come from breathwork through psychedelics. Ayahuasca has been an impactful factor for me. Darkness. Oh yeah, I did a darkness thing. We both did darkness.

Oh, yeah, I called you for your tutelage before that. I didn't hear how it was like, Hunter, I'm going in. It was good. What did you do five days? Four days. I did four days. Got it. Cool.

And it's. For people that just don't know what we're talking about, like you basically submerge yourself and do a bunker in the earth with zero light, like complete blackness. It's weird. For four, five, six days. And yeah, it's just you and you. your consciousness bouncing around in there. Just bouncing around.

Did you jerk off in there? I think so. Nice. How was that? How was that? Generally, it's pretty pleasant. Any shame? Any shame?

Yeah. I don't know. This is awesome. This is awesome. I don't got a lot going on right now. It's an infinite black void. To think that you have literally nothing, like anything that you would typically do in your life, you know, whether it's, I mean,

you just, you have no ability to do anything outside of you. It's literally just whatever your internal processes, you have your thought, you have your emotion, you have your sexual energy, and you have a body that you're not really aware of because you can't see it. You know, it's so, so strange. It's such a weird thing to be put into. Yeah. I was pretty aware of my body. Yeah, no, I would say that too, but like you're not, I guess, you're not aware of the appearance of it, you know, you just can't see shit. So, yeah. Oh, why are we sidestepping the jerk off shame? I don't feel like I had, I had shame. I think it's just a natural part. Being able to accept that's a part of what it means to be human.

Have you experienced shame around sexuality? Totally. That's a big one. Can you imagine that? I mean, obviously, because probably most people are experiencing that. I think, I don't know. I'd be shocked to find somebody that doesn't have shame around some sort of conditioning around sexuality, especially raised in modern society.

Why do you think that is? I think it's just so deeply embedded that what it means to be a woman, for example, or what it means to be a man is, like. like there is this overly emphasized energy towards a woman in her appearance and how you can get things by using your sexual energy in a distorted way. And I just think that especially for men, like getting introduced to porn at such a young age. Oh yeah. It's a huge just of what it means to relate to the feminine in general. That it's something to conquer, that it's something, you know, to dominate. There's this aggressive kind of energy and narrative with it. And then the irony is, is, is,

many women, I don't know about all women, but many women also desire that. So there's like if a girl feels safe enough, like a lot of girls, like that's what I want. Like deep submission, deep, like almost like on the edge of, I feel like there's something that happens when there's almost like, it feels like, oh, this is the edge of dangerous, but I feel safe. I feel like that's a place where it's like the most electric for a person, but it takes a lot of safety. and support to get to that point. So I think one of the issues is like a lot of the things that we learn from that, it's like, well, a lot of people actually want to explore those things in any healthy version of that, ideally.

But what we don't get is we don't get the buildup to get to that point. So we just get sold a bunch of climax. He just got blasted with climax. It's like, oh, there's so much trust and rapport and connection and support and, you know, polarity and all of these things to like really be a safe. safe man and be a feminine woman or whatever, you know, whatever your dynamic is. To come to that point where it's like, oh, now we can really like explore some of this like, you know, dark, muddy stuff. And it's actually really cool and really healing. But if all you have

is access to the darkness without a lantern, I think that's where it gets to be a little bit more toxic. The origins of most people in relation to their sexual energy when they first start to become aware of it at 12, 13, 14, whatever is like, shamedly. jerking off and trying to delete your history in case your mom might walk in or something or for women, I think it's different. I don't know, hopefully I would have to speak to a woman to hear her experience, but typically it's also, there's a lot of, especially because women tend to mature and hip puberty earlier than guys, so they become more aware of it a little bit different. I remember the magnetism that I had around porn mags when I was like 13, 14.

Like holding it. It was like, it was almost comparable to the type of like download magnetism experience I had at the Hippocrates School of Medicine, where it's like this full body like, whoa. Same, same. Downloads in Greece. Porn mag is a 13 year old. Bro, it was like an energy. Because you're tapping into like the carnal energy of life.

Sure. Yeah. It's very beautiful. It's very powerful. It's actually legit. It's just you're playing with fire and you don't understand how to hold it. And the issue comes when you condemn the fire. Now it's like, oh,

all now we have problems. Yeah. It's like, no, you're holding something so beautiful. Like, this is legit. It's just now let's give it some structure and some, you know, like the nuance of definition. Like, okay, what is this exactly? Yeah.

But instead what you get is like, bad boy. You're like, okay, bad boy. Oh, okay, now you're going to be a freak. Like, now you're going to go, you're going to be like that freaky kinky person, which there's like freaky kinky is great. Love that. But if it's like a kind of a dark weird thing or it's going to be maybe duplicitous thing or maybe like a discreet thing or like a hiding shadow thing because at some point you're exploring one of

the most holy sacred things that humans have access to and it went bad yeah you're like okay yeah okay now here's your smasara yeah enjoy yeah the goblins are back the goblins it's just like that saying of like how you walk into a room is how you walk into life it's the same thing with our sexual energy is like how we make love or relate to our sexual energy is how we make love to the world to the world world how we, you know, how we engage with it because it's, it's why we're all here. It's how we engage. And I'm curious how for you, how has the liberation of your own sexual shame or exploration provided? And do you feel like it's translated to you effectively being able to penetrate through life in the way that you want? Man, I think I'm way in process with this.

Yeah. I don't think I'm like on the top of the hill, like looking down like, oh, I've arrived. I think I'm still working out a lot of kinks in like the masculine feminine dynamic and feeling completely pun intended into a lot of kinks exactly and feeling completely integrated as a man. Yeah. Much more than I have and perhaps that's a limiting belief system that I'll just keep on having that perspective that I'm not quite whole yet and I'll just keep on running that until you know, whatever. but something that I have learned or experienced within that is through coming into things, doing things like the darkness retreat, doing things like Vipassana, or doing things like, I would say, going through certain what felt to be like rites of passages in the form of psychedelic stuff, in a form of like work business things, like doing hard things, like having evidence and validation.

like, okay, like, I actually do things. And I think having physical expression, like actually training, you know, being able to look in the mirror and be like, it seems like there's physical evidence that I engage in things. You know, it's, I think it's really hard when you don't have evidence. Yeah. And I think that that's something that's, with a person that is just trying to like look within and do all the things, but there's not, they haven't really formed any evidence yet.

And I haven't done a hard thing. There's something incredibly rewarding and medicinal about doing something that you thought was impossible and making it through the other side. And I feel like as I'm growing in this life and I'm having more opportunities to place myself into situations that I thought were impossible. And then I made it out through the other side. And I have that evidence. Like, fuck yeah, dude. Like, I respect you. That's been a very supportive thing for me into actually like trusting my own masculinity.

And I found that to be something that's also been supportive in being a better leader within relationship and within being a business owner and just being like a man in the world. I think, you know, that's a very attractive quality when someone's a competent leader. And that opens up, I believe, within like the masculine feminine dynamic, which gets into like contentious, contentious territory, but that's fine. My personal experience, just end of one. you know a woman really values a man that is a competent leader and feels safe and feels like he can protect her and protect their family and feels like wow like this fool is a container like boof i can just sit my magic inside this man's container and i can flow and i can be safe and i can be nurturing and i can listen that i can tap into all this immense amount of wisdom that i have

as a woman and it can just come up because someone's holding like there's a vessel to hold the magic yeah i'm in process with all that but i'm like i'm like i'm like okay i'm starting to see some of this it's a continual journey and i think in the pursuit of trying to become an effective leader in the world it's really and i will say an effective leader that is kind of in within the like the divine energy of it not just like the shadow tyrant king right but like being able to actually be aligned in your leadership is finding that integrity in mind, body, and spirit and your thoughts, and your emotions, and your actions. And you can't align those. If there's all this other shit you're not willing to look at, if there's this distorted sexual energy. It's just noise.

It's all noise in the signal. Like there is a clear, divine, you know, signal within every being. And every version of disorganization or like kind of like unprocessed shape. shadowy parts within yourself, parts that just you're not able to accept, it all expresses and it kind of contorts that a little bit. And suddenly you had this perfect beam of light. It's like, whoa. That's like enlightenment, probably, I would say. And it's just like, wow.

And then every one of those little contortions goes in, it goes, thunk. And the light goes out of the side. And then they're just like, okay, cool. It's like a little bit of splatter light over there, but we still got a beam. you know and then you get another one it's just and then it fractures the light and then there's a fracture on top of the fraction on the top of the fracture

now suddenly you're experiencing like some type of maybe like psychological break I don't have a I don't have a through line here I'm just I'm fractured and so now okay how can we go back in and start to move

shift some of those contortions and start to come back to what has always been you which is that that beautiful light. Every person is that. And it's just a matter of, you know, we have, we, we grow up in a life that's filled with various different contortions of that light. But I think that's something, one path towards maybe developing the light within oneself is to be able to see each person with a greater level of compassion because ultimately you're seeing people

just in the way it's the same way that you see yourself. So if you lack compassion, if you hold righteousness and you hold judgment over someone else, you're just, holding that over yourself. It's just a projection of parts that you don't accept within yourself. And so that's that that path, a way to clean up that signal is, I think, like, compassion is like one of the most potent tools for that. And coming through is like, oh, I see your light. And that, it creates something where suddenly it can almost have like this, this effect on a person of like, oh, you see, you see a higher version? of me. You see like a sweet version of me. You see like the child within me. Wow, no one's ever

seen me now. Like I could almost cry just like just saying it. That's therapy. You know, like that's like that's what we need. I certainly have and I know so many people have been touched by somebody who in their energy alone is therapeutic to be able to be in the presence where somebody actually sees you and says, I don't just see you for your faults, for your fusion for your noise for your goblins. Fucking goblins, bro. But I see the potentiality of you and we all have that and the radiance of how we shine and that beam of light through our face when we're children, when we're just coming to this

world. But it's still in an infantile state of development. The potential is there. It's just not fully actualized. Right. And so as we come, we still have that potential, but it's reowning these parts of ourselves like we spoke to. And being in presence with people who can really see you.

And that's why I think just community is so key to be able to be around with people to have these conversations that allow you to move the energy, to release shame, to have companions and pals on the journey of realizing who we are in a true essence, which is actually that connected to that beam of light. Then it's like life becomes so much more fun when you're not in your own journey, doing it alone for your own self-gain, but you can actually cultivate energy and people around you that are all supporting and that giving energy. such a more fruitful way to live life. And you can do that.

You can develop your own confidence and autonomy and sovereignty within yourself a lot of different ways. Do meditation. You sit and just become comfortable with all of that noise and say, oh, the noise. Instead of having judgment for the noise, lean into it, explore, see what's in there. And then generally there might be some more noise behind that, behind that, behind that, behind that. But eventually you come to this gratifying, validating experience of like, oh, interesting. I found ease to the noise. Okay.

It's like exposure therapy. You know, like, okay, like I did a hard thing. I didn't think I could do that. And then I fucking sat down for 30 minutes and I just sat through the noise. You know, and then it's like, okay, interesting. Maybe I do 40 minutes. You know, and then it's like, or maybe meditation's not your thing. Maybe your thing is like, I'm going to go to a dance thing.

I'm going to go to an event and there's going to be music. And there's like a deep part of me. Like, I feel like a dancer. Like, I want to dance, but I'm too ashamed. I don't want people to judge me. I don't want to see that, like, vulnerable side of me. And then you just freaking, you like pull up your bootstraps and you just start shimmy and around a little bit and it's clunky, you know, and then, but suddenly you start to,

your song comes on, you're vibing a little bit. You're like, oh, snap. Like, I am doing it. And now somebody else dances because they wanted to the whole time. Yeah. And now somebody else is like, damn, like I started a freaking dance party. you know you get that you're like okay like i'm dance party starter guy you're like okay cool like each one of those it's like a little merit you hold it and you're like fuck yeah bro i've done things and

it's subtle things it doesn't need to be you climbed kilimanjaro or something you could be that just you chose to dance there's a part of you there's like man it would be it would feel really cool to dance right now but i'm too kind of oof about it and you did that's like that could be your kilimanjaro and you do that enough time I think it builds up a certain level of, like, trust in self and respect for yourself. Like, do you deserve respect for yourself? And like, like, what, like, I don't know. Like, do you?

Like, what do you think? Like, really ask, like, do I deserve respect? Like, do you live a respectful life? Like, what do you do? What's the evidence? Yeah, you can make your presence really demand it, you know? Or you just won't be a vibratory match to people who don't respect it. That journey of integration is something that for me and my own personal path has been such a calling to be able to find that place within myself that is one of one.

Not trying to be that saying not trying to be the best, but be the only. Like find what is your unique individuation of God and how it expresses itself. That is what is going to feel most fulfilling when you're actually living in alignment with that Dharma in life and how it expresses. And I think we touched on so, I know we touched on so many tools that help us remove what's in the way of that because it's much more of a process of subtraction than it is additional. And then we come back into ourselves. We take those daily habits. We switch those things that we talked about earlier. It's like a process of 1%.

It's not climbing Everest overnight. It's like 1% every single day. If you do that for six months a year, a decade, bro. Oh, you're gnarly. You're in a completely different universe. Yeah. Yeah. You can come back.

Like, we always have that place within ourselves. No matter how fractured we feel, we can always come back home into that place. It's always there. The more conditioning we have, the more we're going to have to go through that conditioning to get back to that place. But we can see exponential growth. And once we feel those things that we felt so few. Yeah. And if you want to do something, like I would recommend, and this is, I'm not trying to give anybody advice.

But like, because again, I'm in process with everything. But like, shift the environment of. Like you don't need to necessarily do a lot. Like you could front load some doing and say, cool. I'm going to maybe, man, this house is a fucking wreck. Like, I'm going to hire a cleaner, you know, or maybe I'm going to clean the house. And I'm like, I'm going to keep this place. Like, when I look around, I receive the signal, the feedback that like, I'm an organized person.

And I care about my home. Like, that's who I start to believe myself to be. You know, or I'm going to do 50 pushups a day. Like, it's not that big of a deal to do 50 pushups. Or I'm going to hang off of a bar for 90 seconds. I'm going to start to open up my spot. a little bit and open up connective tissue around my lungs and my intercostals and kind of just like I'm going to breathe more expansively because I just got a $35 pullup bar and I hung it in

between this hallway that I walk through 50 times a day and I'm just going to put a stupid little pullup bar there and that times a week times a month times a year suddenly I have full functional overhead flexion of my shoulders and I can do the down dog and I can man I'm starting to get into like a handstand because I just slowly passively opened up the space within my shoulder girdle to be able to do these really like amazing movements. And I just have the ability to have like balanced postural patterns. Now suddenly people start to see me as leading a little bit more confident because I'm not exhibiting this postural expression of defense. So if I'm in a like if you're a fighter and you're you're fighting, you come into here. Meteor rotation, subtle protraction of the shoulder girdle,

everything goes tight into here beautiful position but if you're stuck in that position then when you're having a conversation with somebody you're going to be sending the information to that person like oh this person i feel like they're like hiding something you know like i like i like i like i like them but they feel like a little bit like defensive in a way you know or maybe you have you have maybe you just have chronic pain in your back neck shoulders you know whatever and that causes you to, it's like a fragment of that light. So instead of this being like this, like you can have ease in your physical experience. Ease in the physical experience is one of the most invaluable things any human being can access on this planet. Period. Like if you find

ease in your physical experience, like that's, that's indivisibly tied to all of your other experiences. And so if you can find ease in the body, that's going to be a representation of ease deeper than that. So there's a guy John Sarno that you're probably familiar with his book called Mind of Her Back Pain. He calls it Tension Myocytus syndrome, which is when you have pain in your back or whatever. His suggestion, which is as contentious as well, like a lot of things. But his suggestion was if there's pretty like anger, you know, and kind of like heavier kind of contractive emotions like that, they'll create this contraction. And they manifest in certain places throughout the body.

And that contraction will start to limit the circulation of fluids and build up the metabolites and a lack of oxygen to that space. And that signals the body to create this pain signal. And it's like this chronic, unidentifiable pain. We just don't know what's going on. You just have just back pain. And if you look at a x-ray or MRI, you look, it's like, wow, that spine's perfect. but this person's experiencing chronic eight out of ten pain.

And then you have another person that it looks like their spine or their knee is like held together with popsicle sticks and it's complete wreck. And they're like, yep, no pain. We're good. What's going on? So like pain is such a slippery, nebulous concept. So a person that can live in a body free of pain that they feel stacked, they feel sovereign, they feel powerful, they feel an alignment. they feel like I trust my body. Oh, like what a rare thing.

It's like a diamond in culture. And I think it's a worthy endeavor. And if you invest yourself into that, that's one of those things that I think pays massive dividends, more than almost anything. Because of the cascade it has in the rest of your life, you feel at ease within your body,

your mind's going to feel more at ease. So I don't like the perception and how you relate to people and the compassion you can hold, completely changes. Everything. Yeah. You are the mirror.

Yeah. Start with the one. bro this this whole conversation's been so beautiful i didn't there's some nooks and crannies that that we explored that i wasn't expecting that were fun bro i knew we were you're talking about whacking it in the dark desert tree that's actually the one thing i had on my nose i just wanted to go uh is there anything else that you feel like you really want to touch on before we started to heading wrapping this up i don't think so that was a good time yeah yeah yeah i don't know I think we hit it.

Happy birthday. Oh yeah, it's my birthday coming up. Yeah. It's happening. Seven, seven. Let's go. Yeah. It's a cool day.

We're here. Let's go. We're out here. Amazing. Well, for everybody that's been tuning into this episode of the Know Myself podcast, it'd be really curious to see what resonated with you most. Let us know in the comments. Everywhere you can find Aaron will be linked down in the description as well.

Is there any else you want to point people to? Yeah. I mean, yeah, if they want to go deeper into this stuff, we don't, I don't talk a lot about whacking it in darkness retreats in the, And although the dark, actually the, the, so in the vision chapter in the line method, the last section is called moving your senses. That actually is where Aubrey got the idea for the darkness retreat. So I write about darkness retreats in this, you know, stupid book I wrote four years ago. It's not stupid.

It's not sick, dude. Well, it was stupid because I didn't really want to do a darkness retreat. Got it. And so then I like, I, like, oh, cool, this is great. I thought, like, what happens so person that they go into darkness? is and then freaking Aubrey gets a hold of it and then he goes on a darkness retreat and then it you know forced me to have to go do it myself so that was kind of an ironic thing like the the darkness thing uh I I feel Aubrey kind of catalyzed a lot of that for a lot of people and a big part

of that catalyation was writing in the book four years ago about darkness retreats and now here I am talking about darkness retreats and that's just an interesting like full circle thing yeah well this is all this is all how well this is all how well this is all how happening. Yeah. Yeah. So if you want to go deeper into more of like instructional stuff and takeaways, that's the align method book. And then we also have a digital version of that. That's Alignpodcast.com slash AMP, Align Method program. So the first week of the AMP program is free. So people can check that out. And on there, there are, we break down some fundamental mobility techniques. So teaching a person like the highest leverage things that I do with clients to get

their nervous systems to work better and joints to work better. And we go through a movement assessment in there. So you can kind of assess what's happened to my ankles, my knees, my hips, just to get like an idea where you're at. So that could be an interesting thing as well. Beautiful. Yeah. Awesome. Everything will be linked on the description below. Subscribe if you haven't. Join this family of learning more about ourselves in the world around that's at deeper and deeper levels every single week. I love this. I love you. Until next time, be well.